★ ★ ★
JULY 24, 2019
ONE YEAR, THREE MONTHS, AND TEN DAYS UNTIL THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
HEARING ROOM 2141, RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, CAPITOL HILL—Mueller’s press conference failed to satisfy Democrats, and they continued to publicly pressure him to come up to the Hill and offer his testimony—hoping that he could lay out in detail all of the most damaging scenes for the president. Despite being asked, however, Mueller had resisted. It wasn’t until June 25, when both the House Intelligence and the House Judiciary Committees subpoenaed him, that Mueller finally agreed to testify.
Scheduled to appear the following month, Mueller had the opportunity to reassert control over the messaging around his investigation, which had been subverted by the attorney general. He could add more legal analysis on the events within the report, offering the public a fresh understanding of the president’s actions. He could change the public narrative, and direct Congress or the American people to take the next step.
In preparation, Zebley, the deputy special counsel, Goldstein, and Quarles sat down with Mueller to prepare him for the questions he was bound to face. Their sessions went badly. Mueller struggled to remember basic facts or articulate the central findings and conclusions of his report. Congressional staffers, who had heard rumors similar to the ones I had about Mueller’s deteriorating condition, asked Goldstein if Mueller was doing all right. Goldstein told them that Mueller was fine.
In the days before his appearance, there were signs that Mueller was looking for some help with his testimony. Mueller’s representatives asked House Democrats if Zebley could sit next to Mueller when he testified so he could assist and answer questions if needed. The committees pushed back but ultimately allowed Zebley to attend in a largely advisory role.
On July 24, Mueller sat down next to Zebley and took questions first from Judiciary and then from the Intelligence Committee members. Within seconds of his beginning to speak, it was clear that something about him was off.
Throughout the day he struggled to answer questions, including about the president who had appointed him as U.S. attorney in Massachusetts. More than a dozen times he asked lawmakers to repeat their questions. There were small difficulties, like when Mueller had a hard time coming up with the word “conspiracy.” But there were larger ones, like when he gave the wrong answer to one of the central questions of his investigation.
“I’d like to ask you the reason, again, that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?” Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat from California, asked Mueller.
“That is correct,” Mueller answered.
Mueller failed to realize that he gave a contradictory answer to what was in the report during his testimony and only cleaned up his remarks after a break in the hearing.
At one point in the proceedings, the Republican congressman Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, not known for his empathy, turned to a member of his staff sitting nearby and said, “I feel bad for the guy.”
EPILOGUE
PRESIDENT TRUMP FINDS HIS ROY COHN
JULY 25, 2019
ONE YEAR, THREE MONTHS, AND NINE DAYS UNTIL THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
WHITE HOUSE RESIDENCE—Mueller’s testimony left Trump feeling and acting triumphal, vicious, and emboldened. The Mueller report had two volumes: volume 1 on Russian election interference and whether the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians; and volume 2 on whether Trump obstructed justice and used his power as president inappropriately. A mere eighteen hours after Mueller finished answering lawmakers’ questions, Trump combined the worst accusations of volumes 1 and 2 into a single act.
On July 25, 2019, on a call shortly after 9:00 a.m., Trump, from the White House residence, asked the newly elected leader of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to interfere in the 2020 American election on his behalf by having his country use its law enforcement powers to conduct investigations that Trump wanted. Trump said the Ukrainians should look into the business dealings of the son of the former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., his most likely challenger in the election, and into whether the Ukrainians had interfered in the 2016 election to help the Democrats. Trump said he wanted the Ukrainian president to help his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was investigating the matters for Trump, and his own attorney general, Bill Barr, whom Trump wanted to prosecute the Bidens and the Democrats.
“I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call. Thank you,” Trump told the Ukrainian president, according to a White House document created at the time to memorialize the call.
On the call, Trump appeared to combine his request for investigations with the conditional offer of a White House meeting with the new Ukrainian president. Zelensky very much wanted the meeting, to demonstrate the strong bond between Ukraine and the United States, especially as his country was fending off Russian-backed separatists.
“Whenever you would like to come to the White House feel free to call,” Trump said. “Give us a date and we’ll work that out. I look forward to seeing you.”
As they typically do for calls with top foreign leaders, many administration and National Security Council officials listened in, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In reaction to what Trump said, Pompeo did nothing, actually believing the call had gone well compared with Trump’s other ones with leaders—particularly Europeans—which often turned into Trump screaming at them. But the call alarmed several officials on the National Security Council for two reasons. First, Trump was using his power as the head of the country’s foreign policy to solicit assistance from another country for his domestic political campaign. Second, Trump had for weeks been curiously withholding $391 million in military aid—which Congress had already appropriated—from the Ukrainians that they desperately needed. Now Trump appeared to be using that aid as leverage as he asked the Ukrainians for a major favor. Later that day, two Army lieutenant colonels on the National Security Council—the twins Alexander and Yevgeny Vindman, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as children—went to John Eisenberg, the top lawyer on the NSC. Eisenberg, who in the early days of the administration oversaw the White House’s response to the concerns raised about Michael Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, had seen several actions that concerned him over the two and a half years of Trump’s presidency. He had become skilled at taming the fallout, having survived longer than McGahn. He told the Vindman twins he would look into the matter, and in the aftermath of the meeting he restricted access to the White House document memorializing the call.
The NSC typically “back briefs” analysts and officials at agencies like the CIA after the president has calls with foreign leaders. In the course of back briefing, NSC officials spoke with a CIA analyst in his early thirties who covered Ukraine. The officials were alarmed by what the president had done.
The analyst was already on alert for the obvious intertwining of American foreign policy with Trump’s personal political desires. As an expert on Ukraine, he studied the country—its news, its leaders, its scandals, and its trajectory. If an action or event was poised to shift the dynamic between the United States and Ukraine, it was the analyst’s job to track it and understand how the Ukrainians would likely react and how it could impact American interests.
Throughout the spring, the analyst had watched as Giuliani had set out on a campaign to upend American-Ukrainian relations as the president’s personal lawyer pursued his own foreign policy to Ukraine. The analyst saw how Giuliani used media appearances to publicly push all sorts of conspiracy theories about Ukraine, its role in the 2016 election, and Biden’s son. Giuliani spoke dramatically about how Trump had been wronged by the Mueller investigation and needed to strike back against his potential opponent. In repeated television appearances and interviews with
print journalists, Giuliani attacked Biden, a clear indication that Trump saw Biden as the Democratic candidate who could beat him in the election. The analyst noted how Giuliani used his position as Trump’s personal lawyer to open doors with Ukrainian officials to lobby them directly to conduct the investigations he wanted. Giuliani had discussed plans to travel to Ukraine in May but canceled the trip amid a public outcry that he was seeking to get the Ukrainians to meddle in the election. By May 2019, the analyst learned there were deep concerns throughout the American government that Giuliani was working outside normal diplomatic channels to pursue Trump’s personal political errands in Ukraine.
Giuliani’s foray into Ukrainian relations had been largely overshadowed by the Mueller investigation and report. But in Ukraine, the story had left an indelible mark and created some suspense as to whether satisfying Giuliani would unlock better relations with the United States and the military aid needed to defend the country against Russia. The analyst had heard about Trump’s call and could only think that it constituted the next step in a pressure campaign.
The request floored the analyst who thought to himself, What the fuck? Trump’s behavior on the call had been highly problematic and potentially illegal, he believed. The analyst had been dealing in foreign affairs his entire career. How was it that Trump could withhold the aid from Ukraine at the same time he was pressuring the country’s president to investigate his political rival? Wasn’t that illegal?
But what could he do? He was a mid-career analyst at the CIA—just one of roughly twenty thousand agency employees and tens of thousands in the entire intelligence community. The president was the head of the executive branch—the most powerful person in the world. Trump had survived more embarrassing disclosures than any other American president, and he’d survived the Mueller investigation. Nothing could stop him. The analyst believed it was his duty—both as someone seeking to keep American-Ukrainian relations intact and as a public servant who swore an oath to the Constitution—to do something. Like Comey and McGahn before him, he wondered, Whom do you call when the president of the United States is the one undermining American interests?
Through the analyst’s training, he knew that he should report any potential wrongdoing to the CIA general counsel’s office. In the days after the call, he met with a CIA lawyer. The analyst explained how he had been informed about the details of Trump’s conversation with Zelensky by multiple White House officials who had either been listening to the call or read a summary of the call in the days following.
The lawyer agreed with the analyst that what he was reporting was troubling and said that the CIA’s general counsel, Courtney Simmons Elwood, would work with the White House to figure out what to do. Soon after, Elwood called Eisenberg and told him what she had learned. Within days, however, the CIA’s counsel’s office told the analyst that it seemed as if the White House was not going to be taking this seriously.
The idea that the White House was looking the other way bothered the analyst even more. He was convinced something troubling had occurred, and he felt as though he’d taken the proper and necessary steps. But now the White House was smothering it. A sense of dread began to set in. He was one of only a handful of people who knew both about the president’s call and how it fit into the larger story of Giuliani’s pressure campaign and the risk that withholding the money created for Ukraine and its ability to hold back the Russian-backed separatists. But there was no one else up the chain of command who could overrule the White House. The analyst figured his only option was Congress.
The analyst contacted a friend and former NSC colleague who now worked as a staffer for the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who had been determined to expose Trump since the early days of the presidency. The analyst gave his friend a rough idea of what had occurred. The friend told him that what he had uncovered was extremely serious. But in order for the committee to investigate it, the analyst would need to do something through official channels, like filing a whistleblower complaint. To do that, the analyst would need a lawyer to guide him through the process.
But finding a lawyer was complicated. He needed someone who understood whistleblower complaints. Few lawyers practiced that type of law and had experience dealing with the complexities that came with it. The analyst searched through his network of contacts, including the dozens of officials from the intelligence community and the Obama administration who had left government and were now lawyers in private practice. Through searching, he saw that one former official who had worked on the Obama National Security Council might have some expertise in this area, and the analyst reached out to him.
They met at a coffee shop just blocks from Capitol Hill.
To the lawyer, the analyst did not seem nervous or frantic. Instead, he appeared solemn, as if he were carrying a great burden and trying to do the right thing and navigate a part of Washington that he knew little about.
“I want to be very cautious. I don’t want you to tell me anything classified or privileged,” the lawyer said.
“If I’m understanding what I believe happened, I think people need to look at it,” the analyst said.
The analyst laid out a skeleton of what he knew, very elliptically. He said he had not witnessed the incident but had been told about it. He intimated that it involved a senior administration official. He said he believed the law might have been broken. And he said that he thought becoming a whistleblower was likely his only pathway forward, but he wanted to know what that entailed.
The lawyer believed that he was referring to something that President Trump had done. But the lawyer was not completely sure, and the lawyer declined to press on that issue. Instead, the lawyer gave him his counsel.
“I think I’ve heard enough to give you some guidance,” the lawyer said.
While the lawyer said he had experience dealing with whistleblowers, this type of case was different and required a high level of expertise. It almost certainly involved classified information, issues of executive privilege, the president’s conduct, and navigating the intelligence community and the political winds of Capitol Hill.
“I think I have the person for you,” the lawyer said.
After they had parted, the lawyer deleted the calendar event he had created in his phone for the meeting. He was unsure where the entire matter was headed but believed that to ensure the analyst’s identity remained secret—and that none of the people who worked for him learned who the analyst was—it was safest to delete the event. Within a day, he introduced the analyst to a lawyer named Andrew Bakaj.
Eight days after Trump made the call to the Ukrainian president, the analyst called Bakaj, who had just returned home from vacation with his wife’s family and was in the parking lot of a golf course in northern Virginia preparing to play nine holes. Bakaj had worked as a lawyer in the office of the inspector general at the CIA earlier in his career and had become a whistleblower himself after he reported wrongdoing in his office. He was retaliated against and then left the government to work as a lawyer representing whistleblowers and intelligence community personnel who had problems with their security clearances. Bakaj knew that whistleblowers came in all forms. Some were paranoid and conspiratorial. Others were extreme rule followers who saw the world in black and white and wanted to call attention to the smallest of infractions. The remaining few were people who truly had stumbled across some wrongdoing and were simply trying to do the right thing. After he spoke with the analyst, Bakaj’s initial reaction was that the analyst fell into the third category.
Over a long conversation, the analyst laid out what he found so alarming about Trump’s call, how access to the transcript had been limited, and concerns he had about the broader campaign by Trump and Giuliani to mix Trump’s political desires with foreign policy.
Bakaj told the analyst he essentially had two options: file a whistleblower complaint through the i
nspector general for the intelligence community or do nothing. The analyst said he had no interest in doing nothing. Bakaj backed up that notion, saying that government employees had a duty to report wrongdoing when they saw it. He explained to the analyst how President George H. W. Bush had issued an executive order in 1989 establishing the “principles of ethical conduct” for federal workers, which required all government employees to “disclose waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption to appropriate authorities.”
Over the next week and a half, Bakaj and the analyst went back and forth about putting together a complaint. Bakaj told the whistleblower that he had to write the complaint on his own because it involved classified information. On classified computers at the CIA, the analyst put together a nine-page complaint that began with Giuliani’s earliest efforts to lobby the Ukrainians and walked through the events up to Trump’s saying he was planning on inviting Zelensky to the White House.
“Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests,” the complaint read. “Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President’s 2020 reelection bid.”
On August 3, Bakaj and the whistleblower met at Bakaj’s office on Connecticut Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. The analyst had finished the complaint and was prepared to transmit it. The two discussed how, once the analyst filed it, the entire matter would be outside their control.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 43