The possibilities of how it could go wrong were endless. Whistleblowers’ identities are supposed to be protected. But given how the Trump administration functioned and the potential damage the complaint could do, the analyst’s name could be revealed, subjecting him to harassment ranging from nasty social media posts to professional retaliation to death threats.
While both the analyst and Bakaj felt a sense of dread of what could come, Bakaj told the analyst it was unlikely the complaint would lead to much. After all, Bakaj thought, Mueller’s report had done nothing to move Democrats. And then Trump had promptly done something similar with yet another country. Why would more of the same move the needle?
That afternoon, the whistleblower emailed the complaint on the classified networks to the inspector general of the intelligence community, known as the ICIG, which was led by a career Justice Department official named Michael Atkinson.
The following day the inspector general’s office reached out to the whistleblower to tell him the complaint had been received, and the office began an investigation to determine whether it was credible and urgent—the standards required to transmit it to Congress. As part of that investigation, the inspector general’s office secretly interviewed the whistleblower and several NSC staffers without telling the White House. Within two weeks the inspector general’s office determined that it was indeed credible and urgent, and Atkinson prepared to report it to Congress.
But then, on September 5, the whistleblower’s quest looked doomed. The inspector general’s office told the whistleblower that the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, had decided against sending his complaint on to Congress. It was made clear to the whistleblower that Atkinson was not happy about Maguire’s decision. What the whistleblower did not know was that Trump had been told about the complaint in August and that the White House and Justice Department had instructed Maguire not to send it to Congress.
Bakaj had never before heard of a complaint that an inspector general deemed urgent and credible being stopped from transmitting to Congress—he didn’t even think that Maguire had the power to stop it from being sent to Congress. To Bakaj, it reeked of the way officials tried to cover up wrongdoing during Watergate—the exact event that caused the formation of the inspectors general offices in the first place. Concerned now both for his client and for the sanctity of the entire whistleblower system that formed the backbone of government transparency and accountability, Bakaj decided to take matters into his own hands. Over the weekend he drafted a letter to the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, saying that his client’s complaint had been deemed urgent and credible by the inspector general but, in an apparent violation of the law, had been blocked from being sent to Congress.
On the afternoon of September 9, Bakaj decided to hand deliver the letter to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. He first went to the Senate, where the staff of the Republican chairman, Richard Burr, showed no interest in speaking with him. But when he arrived at the office of Schiff, his staffers were intrigued.
Bakaj sat down with three of the committee’s top attorneys in the office’s library. The group talked for about thirty minutes, building an overview of the complaint Bakaj was bringing to the lawyers’ attention. Bakaj made sure not to say too much in an effort to avoid any future allegations of leaking, but he also wanted to say enough to pique the lawyers’ interest in the hopes they would put pressure on Maguire for the complaint.
The lawyers seemed to have some understanding of what the whistleblower knew and began ticking off the topics. They mentioned Ukraine, and Bakaj cut them off.
“It may have something to do with that,” Bakaj said.
The lawyers started peppering Bakaj with questions.
Was it about a presidential communication?
It was, Bakaj said.
Did it involve the president of Ukraine?
Bakaj said he couldn’t tell them either way on that, but he essentially gave it away with a hint.
“You’re warm on that one,” Bakaj said.
Just as the lawyers were asking their last questions and wrapping up the meeting, someone knocked on the library’s door. One of the lawyers answered the knock and briefly left the room while Bakaj and the other two attorneys continued chatting.
When the staff lawyer returned, he looked ashen.
“Andrew, we just received a letter from the ICIG,” the staff lawyer said. “It matches up exactly with what you came in here with today.”
It was one thing to have the lawyer of a whistleblower come into the House committee to say that his client had filed a complaint that they might be interested in. That did not happen every day, but it was not an infrequent occurrence. But the letter from the inspector general was a game changer. In Atkinson’s two-year tenure, he had never deemed a complaint both “credible” and “urgent.” On top of that, Atkinson was saying that he was being stopped from sending it to Congress. In the letter, he was alleging that Maguire had violated the law by failing to pass along the complaint.
Maguire’s decision to withhold the complaint from Congress “does not appear to be consistent with past practice,” the letter said.
The lawyers wouldn’t show Bakaj the letter, but he knew exactly what it was about. He was more shocked than anything. Just a week earlier he was not expecting there to be too much news or drama coming out of the complaint. And he definitely was not expecting the complaint to be blocked from reaching the Hill. But now, at basically the same exact time, both he and the inspector general were running to the House Intelligence Committee to highlight what they saw as a massive cover-up.
As he drove home that afternoon, it dawned on him that the complaint might have a far greater impact than he originally believed. He was one of the few people in the world who knew what was in it. And when it came out, it could transform Washington. But Congress still did not have the complaint, and it was unclear how that would happen.
Four days later, Congressman Schiff sent a subpoena to Maguire asking for the complaint. Given the investigation fatigue in the wake of the Mueller report and the fact that it was unclear whom the complaint was related to, it received little attention in the media. But that changed days later when the media reported that the complaint had been filed against the president.
The story created another massive scandal for Trump. As the allegations made in the complaint came into focus, and the gravity of the charges became clear, Congress and the country were tempest tossed yet again. During the Russia investigation and after the Mueller report, as several members of her caucus agitated to impeach the president, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stood firmly against the idea. Let the election sort it out. Any impeachment that could be seen as political would not be good for the country, she thought. But then the whistleblower complaint exploded into the news, and like a dam bursting, the Ukraine scandal inundated Washington. And soon the Speaker, who had been so resolved against putting the country through an impeachment, realized that the House of Representatives would likely have no choice, whatever the political consequences may be. Regardless of the politics. Either the Constitution meant something and was worth defending, or it wasn’t, Pelosi contended. The Senate would almost certainly not convict, but that wasn’t the point. This was for the record and for history.
The whistleblower had accomplished what everyone before him had failed to do: He had stopped President Trump in his tracks and had him on the path to being impeached.
Two months later, on a Saturday afternoon in mid-November, as Democrats moved toward their impeachment vote, Trump made an unexpected visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House played off the trip as part of the president’s annual physical but provided no other details about the examination, raising questions about the president’s health. In reporting for this book, I learned that in the hours leading up to Trump’s tri
p to the hospital, word went out in the West Wing for the vice president to be on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized. Pence never assumed the powers of the presidency, and the reason for Trump’s trip to the doctor remains a mystery.
★ ★ ★
JANUARY 23, 2020
285 DAYS UNTIL THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
NEW YORK TIMES WASHINGTON BUREAU—Three months later there was no question that the whistleblower’s account was correct. Democrats in the House had already voted to impeach Trump. The remaining question was whether there would be enough pressure applied to Senate Republicans—who held a fifty-three to forty-seven majority—to persuade twenty of them to convict the president and have him removed.
Even before the Senate received the impeachment referral from the House, Republicans were signaling their intention to vote on the articles and close the case as soon as possible; that meant no new witnesses. Now, with the clock ticking down, we in the media saw it as our role to get as many facts out as possible before the final vote was taken.
One of the few gold mines of information left largely untouched was Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. He had served in the Trump White House for seventeen months and left as most others had—disaffected and changed by the experience, transformed from Trump champion into Trump critic—a Trump enabler who could now be an impediment. Bolton left in early September 2019, just as the Ukraine scandal was building. During the House investigation, he had not testified. Unlike many of the witnesses whom the Democrats had called, Bolton had a particularly high standing with Republicans because he had been a leading national security hawk for decades, spending countless hours on Fox News.
In a normal situation, it would be difficult to know what Bolton would testify to. He had left the White House on the day before Trump released the aid to the Ukrainians and was said to have become disillusioned with the president. We could talk to his friends, colleagues, and aides to get a sense of what he knew and how he viewed Trump, but that reporting could take us only so far. And Bolton had created a highly unusual situation. He had signaled he had something damaging to say about Trump, but refused to testify before House impeachment investigators. That made it look like he was hoarding his damaging information about Trump for a book he planned to publish. Democrats and some Republicans said they wanted to hear what he had to say. At the Times, we felt that, given the high stakes, we had to find out what was in the book. It would put us in a ridiculous race against time, scouring for leads and even receiving a tip from a private eye.
In December, I attended a meeting with top editors in New York about our impeachment coverage. I mentioned what I thought was our best chance to move the impeachment story forward.
“If we could figure out what’s in Bolton’s book, it would allow us to write what he would testify about,” I said.
A masthead editor in the room laughed at the notion, saying there was no chance we could get that. In journalism, like sports, you sometimes need motivation and sometimes have to find it in weird places. I was upset that the editor had scoffed at the notion. Why not help me brainstorm ideas on how to go after it? But I tried to channel those feelings toward motivation. A top editor thought we couldn’t do it?
The best I could come up with was talking to Bolton’s lawyer, Chuck Cooper. Throughout the Trump administration, I had met a range of lawyers who represented clients caught up in the investigations of Trump’s presidency. Out of all of them, Cooper was probably the most compelling character. When Jeff Sessions got into trouble for misleading Congress about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Cooper swooped in to represent his old friend, helping guide him through the congressional investigations and serving as an outside adviser as Sessions sought to maintain his job. It ate Cooper alive to watch his friend get taken apart and humiliated by Trump, someone Cooper believed was uncouth, unprincipled, and a threat to the country. It was in his representation of Sessions that I met Cooper. He was a younger, better-looking version of Sessions and had his strong Alabama accent. But different from Sessions, Cooper understood the law and the complexities of the Trump administration better than anyone involved in the story.
Cooper had started representing another close friend who had attracted Trump’s ire, Bolton, in connection with the impeachment investigation. I knew that Cooper had decamped to his house in Florida for December. I considered flying down and inviting him to dinner in the hopes of figuring out Bolton’s potential testimony. I thought I might be able to glean a few small pieces of information that would enable us to read the Bolton tea leaves. Instead, we just talked over the phone. In our conversations, I tried to lightly bring up the issue. But every time, Cooper refused to talk to me about it. Despite the media’s clamoring for information throughout the Trump story, Cooper had shown himself to be loyal to his clients and their interests. He knew Bolton did not want him to say anything, so he was unhelpful.
“Not talking about it,” Cooper would tell me every time I asked about Bolton.
I listened for what I was not hearing, and the silence seemed to signal something ominous. But I knew nothing more than that. At that point, I sort of gave up. I had no other ideas.
In January, as the Senate held the impeachment trial for Trump, Elisabeth Bumiller called me late on a Thursday afternoon as I worked on this book in the Manhattan offices of a friend. “What do you know about Bolton and what he would testify about?” she asked.
Republicans were still signaling that they wanted no new witnesses to testify at trial, and Democrats were saying that there was no way they could vote on whether to convict without hearing from him.
I said I did not know much, other than that it would probably be bad for Trump and that he was writing a book.
“We should really be talking to Maggie because she knows all about this,” I said.
Eight days earlier, Maggie had written a short article about Bolton buried at the bottom of a live briefing online about impeachment. It said that Bolton was close to finishing his book. Maggie reported that Bolton planned on detailing his view of the Ukraine matter, including Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainians to announce an investigation into Joe Biden’s son. Given the question about Bolton’s testimony, it should have received great attention. Maggie had broken nearly every major story in the Trump era. But for some reason, it slipped through the cracks and no one seemed to notice.
I called Maggie. “I talked to Bumiller,” I said. “We gotta figure out what’s in the Bolton book.”
Maggie reminded me that she had already written about this.
Like children talking about their parents, I said to Maggie: “They never know what they’re talking about, just ignore them. Let’s take a shot at this.”
She repeated what she had written, saying that “Bolton’s book is going to be bad for Trump on Ukraine.”
“We gotta figure out how to write that,” I said.
“I already wrote that,” she said.
“We gotta find a way to write it again,” I said.
That Friday, I put out calls to my sources and spent hours in a car riding with someone I wanted to talk to for this book. By that evening, I learned that the White House had obtained a copy of Bolton’s book and was reviewing it as part of the prepublication process to ensure it did not contain classified information. In Washington, that’s as incremental a development as there could be. But in Bolton’s case it was highly important. If the White House had the book, and the book dealt with Ukraine, then the White House knew what Bolton would testify to. Now it made more sense why the White House had recently begun pressuring congressional Republicans not to call Bolton as a witness.
That development gave us something to go back to our sources with. By that Sunday, we learned Bolton wrote in his book that Trump wanted to hold off
on releasing the aid to Ukraine until they committed to pursuing the investigations he was seeking. It moved the story forward because no one who had testified had been in the room with Trump when he tied the aid and the investigations together.
The story jolted Republican senators on Capitol Hill who were trying to put an end to the impeachment trial as soon as possible and without witnesses. The new revelations changed the minds of some Republicans, who, at least momentarily, appeared newly open to the idea of calling witnesses.
“I think it’s increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton,” Mitt Romney said soon after the story was published.
A day later we published a second story that said Bolton and Barr had confided in each other about their concerns over Trump’s dealings with the authoritarian leaders of China and Turkey. Bolton had written about how Barr was worried that Trump had suggested to the foreign leaders that he had the authority to alter independent Justice Department investigations. The story showed that Barr, the administration official most seen as willing to do Trump’s bidding, actually had concerns about how Trump had meddled in the work of the Justice Department.
The story had no impact on the Republicans. There was likely more in the book that was newsworthy, but by this point it felt as if we had tapped as much information as we could.
That evening, though, I learned of another possible way we could find out what was in the book. I received a call from a man I had never heard of. He said that several years earlier he had sat next to my father on a train and he had followed my work. The man said that he worked as a private investigator of sorts in the Washington area and had been trying to figure out what Bolton had written in his book. A friend had told him at a Rotary Club meeting that Bolton was taking sections of his book and sending them out to friends to review and comment on. The friends were then mailing them back to him, and he was throwing them in his trash. Bolton had apparently done this because he did not want to create an electronic record of his correspondences. The man said that he had been scouting Bolton’s wife’s office and their house on the nights he put his trash out. After Bolton moved the trash onto the street, he went through it. On a recent night he had found a large envelope that he said looked big enough to hold a manuscript. But there was nothing in the envelope. The envelope showed that it had been sent by a woman who worked for a top American ambassador who was abroad at the time and whom Bolton had been close with. It seemed as if the ambassador might have sent the package to her home, where the employee redirected it to Bolton.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 44