Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674)

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  Among the reasons that red flags had been raised in the intelligence community about Kushner’s security clearance were his business connections in Israel, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates. But Kelly and McGahn’s crackdown was met with an escalation from Jared’s camp. On February 16, within hours of the new policy being put in place, Kushner released a statement through his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, acknowledging the holdups with his clearance but misleadingly stating that the issues were merely routine. Lowell said that he had been in touch with officials dealing with the security clearance at the White House and that they “again have confirmed that there are a dozen or more people at Mr. Kushner’s level whose process is delayed” and “that it is not uncommon for this process to take this long in a new administration.”

  Lowell added that “the current backlogs are being addressed, and no concerns were raised about Mr. Kushner’s application,” and he said that Kelly’s announcement that day of the new clearance policy would have no impact on “the very important work he has been assigned by the President.”

  That evening, as I sat at my desk at the Times, I got a message from a source who said he had new information on Kushner’s security clearance. The source said that Kushner had a “high-level law enforcement problem.”

  I had never heard that term before. In the media, we had obsessed about who in the administration was and was not under investigation. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was sort of a cute way of saying that Kushner was under investigation.

  “It’s something significant,” the source said. “Jared has a significant problem.”

  The source said that the Justice Department, through Rosenstein, had warned Kelly that week that the authorities had some sort of “derogatory information” on Kushner. Rosenstein told Kelly that while he had to refrain from discussing an ongoing investigation, the issue was unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

  The source said Kelly had relayed this anecdote to the president’s personal lawyer John Dowd, who often had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Dowd had told others, and word had gotten around town. “Dowd said Jared has a high-level law enforcement problem; nobody will tell Kelly what it is,” the source said.

  “Kelly tried to figure it out,” the source added.

  But the source said he did not know any more about how much progress Kelly had made other than learning that Kushner had a “high-level law enforcement problem.”

  The source told me that this development had further complicated Kushner’s already-troubled security clearance. And Kelly’s investigation would make coming up with a determination about what to do with Kushner’s clearance even more fraught.

  All I could find on my desk to write on was a paper plate left over from another dinner eaten at my desk, so I scribbled on it as the source talked.

  This new information provided the clearest proof yet that reassurances from Kushner’s side that “Jared was fine” and had nothing to worry about regarding the Mueller investigation or any other Justice Department inquiry might be false. Dowd was known to be indiscreet, but he was also known to be accurate. All the same, this seemed dangerous. I kept the plate with my scribbled notes as a reminder and picked at it with sources over the next several months.

  I would later confirm while working on this book that the information I had was true: Kelly had in fact been briefed on the Justice Department investigation into Kushner. Under the new procedures created by Kelly and McGahn, those aides who had their background checks languish unresolved would have their clearances downgraded within a week. Of course, Kushner’s clearance created a distinctive problem because he was the president’s son-in-law, his clearance had already attracted a lot of unwelcome attention, and any decisions made about his access to classified documents would be highly scrutinized by the media and Congress. A year into the presidency, McGahn had learned many measures he could take to protect himself when faced with a difficult situation: Either Annie Donaldson would take contemporaneous notes, or he would write memos to the file himself. For the Kushner problem, McGahn needed to create a record, just in case. The issue was already receiving tons of media scrutiny. Kelly had been briefed on highly sensitive national security information about Kushner. And Kushner’s lawyer had put out a misleading statement to the media about how the clearance was being dealt with. Someday, McGahn knew, he might have to explain this.

  So on February 23, McGahn sent a two-page memo to Kelly that laid out why he believed Kushner’s clearance should be downgraded. The memo was marked “Sensitive, unclassified, privileged and confidential.” McGahn began by memorializing the new policies that had been put in place in the aftermath of the Porter debacle. He said that among those whose clearances remained unresolved were some of the highest-ranking officials in the West Wing, including an assistant to the president and two special assistants to the president.

  McGahn then tackled the biggest issue at hand.

  “There remains the question of one assistant to the president, however, whose daily functions will be considerably impacted by the implementation of today’s roll off,” McGahn wrote, referring to Kushner. “As you’re aware, there have been multiple reports in the media regarding this particular assistant to the president that have raised questions about the individual’s fitness to receive the most sensitive national security information.”

  The White House counsel then laid out a sanitized version of what I had been told the previous Friday night by a source: Kelly had recently received a classified briefing about Kushner and had briefed McGahn about what he had learned.

  “The information you were briefed on one week ago and subsequently relayed to me, raises serious additional concerns about whether this individual ought to retain a top security clearance until such issues can be investigated and resolved,” McGahn said.

  McGahn said he had been unable to receive the briefing or “access this highly compartmented information directly” about Kushner.

  Given all these factors—the unresolved background check and the derogatory information Kelly had been briefed on—McGahn made his recommendation, saying his clearance should be downgraded.

  “According, in my judgement, the roll off of this individual for interim access to TS and TSSCI information, including the PDB (presidential daily briefing), is only appropriate at this time,” McGahn said.

  “Interim secret is the highest clearance that I can concur until further information is received,” McGahn concluded, referring to the level of classified information Kushner would be able to access.

  By reducing Kushner’s clearance from top secret to secret, McGahn and Kelly had restricted Kushner’s access to the PDB, the closely held rundown provided by the intelligence community six days a week for the president and his top aides, and other highly sensitive intelligence that exposed sources and methods.

  McGahn did note that there was a possibility that when the background check was complete, it could be resolved in Kushner’s favor, or there could be a recommendation that he not receive a clearance.

  And then McGahn conceded that Trump could if he chose simply disregard any security concerns and circumvent any standard procedures and grant Kushner the security clearance himself.

  “As you know,” he wrote to Kelly, “the executive power vested in the president by the Constitution allows him to determine ultimately which individuals may have access to national security information. The president may unilaterally grant security clearance to an individual regardless of a BI [background investigation] or any staff’s recommendation. Should the president of the United States wish to bypass the established process of which to evaluate whether a member of his staff should have access to national security information by being evaluated for and grant a security clearance, he personally is the one who needs to make the determination if desired.”

  It was in 1883 that Congress had first implemented a standard proces
s for examining a government employee’s “fitness” for a job, and since then a system of culling government officials’ backgrounds had been created and refined. What it had evolved to was far from perfect. But it had a track record of ensuring that state secrets remained secret and that foreign countries had to overcome great obstacles to infiltrate the president’s inner circle and influence American domestic and foreign policy. Now that system faced a test—a test probably greater than any that has ever been publicly known. And that test came from the two people closest to the president. Kelly and McGahn believed that when pushed whether to side with the children or the country, Trump would pick the children. But they were not going to let Trump do that without a fight.

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  MARCH 8, 2018

  ONE YEAR, ONE MONTH, AND TEN DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT

  SPECIAL COUNSEL’S OFFICE—McGahn and Burck returned to the windowless conference room in Mueller’s office exactly a month after Trump pressured McGahn to change his account of his attempt to fire Mueller. For hours, McGahn recounted how Trump had argued with him over what he had told Mueller about the firing attempt and asked him to create a White House document to refute what he had told investigators. Burck helped fill in gaps in the story, describing his conversations with Dowd and providing the prosecutors with text messages Dowd had sent him about how McGahn could not resign no matter how hard Trump pressured him.

  Quarles and Goldstein were operating in a remarkable investigative space. They essentially had a member of Trump’s legal team helping the government build a case against Trump. With investigations into previous presidents—most recently Bill Clinton—White House counsels had stymied every effort to gain information, access, and insight of any kind. But with Cobb paying little attention, Quarles and Goldstein seized the moment and exploited the opportunity, turning McGahn into their main channel of information. This access to McGahn allowed the special counsel’s office to operate at lightning speed. In a little more than a month, Trump had taken an action that raised questions about whether he had obstructed justice; the prosecutors learned about it almost as soon as it happened and had secured statements from McGahn to document the incident. Quarles and Goldstein essentially had a real-time cooperating witness against the president inside the White House who could be there to collect evidence on how Trump continued to obstruct the investigation.

  Now Quarles and Goldstein wanted more.

  The prosecutors could see a new and disturbing trend in Trump’s behavior; he not only wanted to obstruct the Mueller investigation and make it more difficult for investigators to uncover damning facts but also wanted to use his power to destroy and prosecute his rivals, like Comey and the deputy FBI director, Andrew McCabe. In addition to the publicly available evidence—the president’s Twitter feed was a living, breathing evidentiary record—to make a stronger case, prosecutors would need to secure statements from those around the president to show that behind his bluster was a real effort to use the power of the Justice Department to target his enemies.

  With McGahn’s lavish cooperation, what Trump was saying behind closed doors was potentially just a phone call away, and the prosecutors wanted to try to use that lever to collect more evidence on the president. One of the first issues Quarles and Goldstein pushed on related to McCabe. Eight days after Mueller’s team interviewed McGahn in March about Trump’s attempts at witness tampering, Sessions, working with Rosenstein, fired McCabe. The stated reason was that McCabe had misled internal watchdogs at the bureau about his role in providing an investigative journalist with details for a story.

  The firing came with an extra punitive twist. After twenty-one years in the FBI, McCabe was fired just one day away from retiring and collecting his full government pension. The move by Rosenstein and Sessions made it appear as if they were doing Trump’s bidding, because the president had publicly broadcast his views on the issue several times.

  “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!” Trump had tweeted in December.

  The prosecutors knew that Trump had pressured Sessions to reassert his control over the Russia investigation to essentially stop it from ensnaring him. And Trump had leaned on Sessions by holding his job over his head. They now wanted to know whether that pressure had manifested itself in the firing of McCabe. In the days after the firing, Quarles and Goldstein reached out to Burck to ask whether Trump had played a role in the firing.

  Burck knew that he had to answer their questions. If he refused to answer, it would raise questions about whether he was covering something up. So he checked with McGahn, who had continued to fall out of favor with Trump and was spending little time with the president. McGahn told Burck he didn’t know anything about what Trump might have done to force the McCabe firing but said he might have discussed the prospect of firing McCabe with Sessions and Rosenstein.

  Burck relayed that information—sketchy as it was—to Mueller’s office.

  The ask by Mueller’s team angered McGahn, because it served as a stark example of the consequences of the decision by Trump, Cobb, and Dowd to allow Mueller unfettered access to McGahn. He could now see the investigators trying to use him to dish on Trump in real time.

  How can I do my job? They might as well send an FBI agent around with me to take notes, McGahn thought.

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  APRIL 9, 2018

  ONE YEAR AND NINE DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT

  OVAL OFFICE—Hours after FBI agents in New York raided the offices of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, Rosenstein—who had signed off on the search warrant—walked into the Oval Office to meet with Trump and McGahn. Rosenstein was there for a meeting to assuage the president’s concerns about the Justice Department’s delay in releasing documents from the Clinton email investigation. Trump wanted the FBI producing more and more documents to show Clinton in a negative light and demonstrate how Comey had made the wrong call in refusing to recommend her prosecution. To put Trump at ease, Rosenstein had brought someone the president had come to like and trust: Dana Boente, the FBI’s general counsel, who had overseen the Russia investigation at the Justice Department the previous year. But as often happened with the president, events in the news had distracted him.

  Trump, furious, wanted to talk about the Cohen raid.

  When pressed by Trump for details on the raid, Rosenstein told the president the investigation involved Cohen’s business dealings unrelated to Trump. While it was true that the agents in New York were investigating Cohen’s taxi medallion business, they were also examining his role in arranging payments to silence a porn star about her relationship with Trump in the month before the 2016 election. Rosenstein had been briefed extensively on that part of the investigation, but he portrayed it to Trump as if it had nothing to do with him.

  As the investigation intensified in the coming months, Trump would repeatedly tell his personal lawyers that Rosenstein had assured him that the investigation of Cohen had nothing to do with him.

  Less than a week after the Cohen raid, excerpts of Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, began appearing in the media. The book chronicled Comey’s career and included several chapters on his relationship with Trump. Comey described Trump as an unethical and untruthful leader, comparing him to the mob bosses he used to investigate as a federal prosecutor in New York. Comey poked fun at Trump’s tanning regimen and the size of his hands.

  ABC News aired an hour-long interview with Comey, conducted by the network’s top political anchor, George Stephanopoulos, reigniting negative coverage about Trump’s decision to fire Comey, whether the president had obstructed justice, and the dossier. Comey had never been briefed about the dossier’s central source casting doubt on the entire document, and in the interview lent credence to the dossier, telling Stephanopoulos that at its core it “was consistent with the other informa
tion we’d gathered during the intelligence investigation.” Comey described Steele as “a credible source, someone with a track record, someone who was a credible and respected member of an allied intelligence service during his career.” He continued: “And so it was important that we try to understand it, and see what could we verify, what could we rule in or out?…There’s no doubt that he had a network of sources and sub-sources in a position to report on these kinds of things.”

  Comey described how he informed Trump of the raw intelligence in the dossier about the supposed incident from 2013 in which Russian intelligence filmed him in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow in the company of prostitutes.

  “He interrupted very defensively,” Comey said, “and started talking about it: ‘You know, do I look like a guy who needs hookers?’ ”

  Stephanopoulos asked Comey how graphic he got with Trump.

  “I think as graphic as I needed to be. I did not go into the business about—people peeing on each other. I just thought it was a weird enough experience for me to be talking to the incoming president of the United States about prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow.”

  Comey then left open the possibility that the allegation was true.

  “I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” Comey said. “It’s possible, but I don’t know.”

  The coverage sent Trump into a rage. In his four decades as a businessman in New York, Trump had followed a familiar routine when he felt he had been wronged by rivals: He would claim they broke the law and threaten to sue them. Occasionally, he actually filed a complaint against them in court. Now, as president, even though he controlled the executive branch of the U.S. government, his preferred medium to settle scores was Twitter.