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

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  I was willing to entertain wild ideas at this point to find out what else might be in the book. In that vein, I thought the name of the employee gave us a lead. The chances were low, but the stakes were high. Why not send one of our reporters to take a cold shot at her? Maybe the woman was less schooled with the media than the ambassador. And if we sent one of our reporters who specialized in getting people to talk to her house, maybe she would talk. I asked Bumiller for authority to arrange this, and she gave me the go-ahead. But in a subsequent conversation with the private eye, he said that that Thursday morning was trash pickup day in Bolton’s neighborhood. I made sure not to tell him whether he should go through the trash again. I knew that what he wanted to do was likely legal, but the idea of the Times aligning ourselves with a private eye was potentially troublesome. So I shelved the idea.

  That Wednesday, I received a message through a cutout from someone in Bolton’s world: Bolton was convinced we did not have the book because despite our two stories we had missed the best parts.

  I called Maggie and told her what I heard.

  “What?” she said, sounding exasperated.

  “I don’t know, we missed stuff,” I said.

  “What, that doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

  We had one job—to inform the public record. There was information that was apparently important to the public that we did not have, and we had to race to get it.

  We had to move quickly. The Senate was scheduled to vote on whether to remove Trump from office at 5:00 that afternoon. At noon we reported that Bolton had first been told to assist Trump with his Ukraine pressure campaign in early May, during an Oval Office meeting with other top White House officials. According to Bolton, Trump asked him to call the president of Ukraine and get him to meet with Giuliani, who was planning on traveling to Ukraine to push for the investigations Trump was after. It was yet another example of Trump’s mixing his official duties with his personal political desires.

  But again, Republicans remained unmoved. On Wednesday, the Senate voted to acquit Trump on both articles of impeachment. Mitt Romney, seven years after starting the ball rolling on the Benghazi attacks, would be the only Republican to vote to convict Trump—on the first article, for abuse of power.

  The Senate acquittal came at the end of a lengthy cycle of public investigations and damaging revelations. But the president had won again. The impeachment of Donald John Trump had been the last stand for the institutions. Inevitable once all the facts were known, equally inevitable that it would end in failure.

  Trump had defeated everyone who had tried to contain him. All of the role players, big and small, who had found themselves facing the realization that…feeling strongly that…having a gnawing sense that…something was not right in the Trump presidency. All who sought to stop him or slow him failed. The FBI director. The acting FBI director. The White House counsel. The deputy attorney general. The Speaker of the House. The intelligence community. All positions of tremendous power and consequence failed.

  Now, to come out on top against the next obvious challenge that stood in front of him, the 2020 election, Trump was going to have to convince voters that his transgressions were nowhere near as bad as Democrats made them out to be.

  Or maybe yet, given the president’s penchant for calling things “fake,” perhaps he’d even be so brash as to assert that his transgressions weren’t transgressions at all. I did nothing wrong. He was no transgressor; the other side, they were the transgressors. And look what they had put him through. Hoax! They would have to pay. “No president should ever be put through that again” became a more or less constant refrain.

  It was as if all the people who had crossed him had been cogs on a giant gear, turning inside a giant machine, and in the months after impeachment was done, the giant gear stopped and then slowly lurched into motion again, only this time in the opposite direction. To undo everything.

  Luckily for the president, his attorney general, William Barr, had already begun planting the seeds to delegitimize the Russia investigation, and all the investigations undertaken to assert the primacy of the law, reaffirm Madison’s separation of powers, and contain the power of a heedless president. And now, the institutional prerogatives having run their course, Barr set out to use the power of the Justice Department to counterattack. The giant machine, now in reverse.

  Here’s how it would go.

  Prior to taking over as Trump’s attorney general, and in the opening months of the job, Barr began to drop hints about his view of the Russia investigation.

  In the fall of 2017, he told the Times that he saw more reason for the Justice Department to investigate Hillary Clinton for her alleged involvement in a uranium deal that was approved during her tenure in the State Department—a conspiracy pushed by the author Peter Schweizer of Clinton Cash fame—than there was reason to investigate alleged collusion between Trump and Russia.

  As attorney general, after he cleared Trump of the wrongdoing found in the Mueller report, Barr told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in April 2019 that he believed the FBI had engaged in “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016—providing institutional credibility to Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community, FBI, and Obama administration.

  “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Barr said. “I am going to be reviewing both the genesis and the conduct of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign during 2016.”

  The next month, we reported that Barr had called on John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut who Sessions had asked back in 2017 to investigate Comey for leaking, to investigate the early days of the Russia probe and determine whether the FBI and intelligence community had overstepped their authority during the Russia investigation.

  Two months later, the president thought so much of Barr’s willingness to help him that he asked the Ukrainian president to coordinate the investigations Trump wanted with Barr.

  By October, Barr himself was traveling the globe and looking into the origins of the Russia investigation. He traveled to Italy twice to talk to officials about a meeting that happened there between George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign aide, and a Maltese professor who Trump’s allies believe is an intelligence asset.

  In January, the Times reported that Comey was under investigation for a years-old leak of classified information.

  Then, in February, Barr took his most audacious act as attorney general up to that point. Prosecutors who had won a conviction against Roger Stone for lying to Congress and witness tampering were preparing to sentence him. The prosecutors—including one left over from Mueller’s office—recommended Stone receive a seven- to nine-year sentence. Around 2:00 on the morning after the sentencing, Trump tweeted that the original recommendation was “very unfair” and a “miscarriage of justice.” Hours later, Barr overruled the prosecutors and, with the special counsel’s office gone, went to court to have the sentencing recommendation significantly lowered. The prosecutors who had worked on the case quit in protest.

  Stone was ultimately sentenced to just over three years in prison, leaving only one major Mueller case pending: Flynn. Flynn had pleaded guilty in December 2017. But he had still not been sentenced. He had switched lawyers and then told the court he wanted to renege on his guilty plea. Members of Mueller’s team who watched this unfold thought that Flynn was trying to make a case for Trump to pardon him.

  In April, Trump fired Michael Atkinson—the inspector general who had kicked off impeachment by sending the whistleblower complaint to Congress.

  But then in May, Barr did Flynn something even better than a pardon. He decided the Justice Department would ask the judge to drop the Flynn prosecution altogether. In response to the move—but before it was publicly announced—the lead prosecutor against Flynn, who had been a member of the Mueller team, withdrew from the case in protest.

  “
People sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes,” Barr said after the Justice Department asked for the case to be dropped, arguing his move was a step to “restore confidence in the system.”

  By asking the judge to drop the Flynn case, Barr was finally accomplishing what Trump had asked Comey to do on the twenty-sixth day of his presidency. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump had said back in February 2017. Now Barr had.

  Several years ago, when I wrote the story of Trump’s appeal to his FBI director, a sense of emergency had come over the capital, and a special counsel had been summoned. Three years later, Trump’s new attorney general had granted his request.

  The president had bent Washington to his will.

  In memory of my cousin Marine Corps Lance Cpl. John Taylor Schmidt III. He was born nineteen days before me. Like far too many of my generation, he paid the ultimate price on the battlefield in the years after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TO COMPLETE THIS PROJECT, I had to stand on the shoulders of many colleagues, friends, and family. Without them, I’m unsure I would have finished the book.

  First, I want to single out my researcher and co-pilot for the past two years, Matt Cullen. Every step of the way, Matt kept this project on track. Matt learned the subject matter we covered in this book as well as anyone else. He developed a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of what documents contained, what our reporting showed, and what we had written in drafts. He looked at every angle of the story with incredible thoughtfulness and perspective. Matt is a promising young journalist, and I can’t wait to see what he does in the years to come.

  I want to thank my dear friend Wyatt Lipman for the countless hours he put in with me, talking through what this era meant, what it said about politics and human nature, and how to turn that into a story. His incredible depth of knowledge and sense of story helped me figure out how to tell this tale in a way that gave it a larger meaning. Working this through with him made for some of the most enjoyable moments of writing the book. Wyatt is a great, loyal friend, and I’ll forever be indebted to him for his help.

  I’m incredibly grateful to my cousin Aaron Cohen, who helped me try to think like a book author and turn my reporting into something larger. He told me to keep writing and everything else would fall into place. It sounds like simple advice, but it was essential and helped get me home.

  One of the great cheerleaders of this project was my friend and Times colleague Jason Stallman. Even when my drafts made little sense, he read them, gave me great feedback, and told me that what I had was great. He’s an incredible editor, and I hope I get to work for him in the years to come.

  I’m especially appreciative to my agent, Gail Ross, who reached out to me, told me that I needed to write a book, gave me guidance on how to do it, and made sure that it got done. Gail was a calming presence who made sure the project stayed on track, pushed me when needed, and listened when I was lost. Working with her was a highlight of this experience. I also want to thank her partner, Howard Yoon, who played a big role in helping me come up with what this book could look like. His early guidance put this on the right path.

  I am incredibly grateful for the relationship I’ve developed with my publisher, Random House. Andy Ward, Tom Perry, and Mark Warren are three of the great pros and mensches of the world. Mark’s editing of the book elevated and streamlined it in ways I never could have imagined. He made me a better reporter and storyteller, and forced me out of my comfort zone to find new ways to see this story. I’ll forever be indebted to him for that and his time and patience. And speaking of professionalism and patience, I am also very grateful to our copy editor, Ingrid Sterner, for improving this book when it mattered most. I am deeply grateful for Random House legal counsel Matthew Martin for the care and insights that he brought to this book. An enormous thank-you as well to Carlos Beltrán for designing the powerful and arresting cover. Our publicist, Greg Kubie, and our marketer, Ayelet Gruenspecht, were all-in on this book, and complete this amazing team.

  Working as a reporter at The New York Times has been the highlight of a lifetime. The Sulzberger family, led by A.G., is one of the great treasures of the United States. Unlike nearly every other paper in the country, the Times is more robust today than it’s ever been—and that is directly a result of the family’s decision to protect the newsroom. Dean Baquet, our executive editor, is one of the great lions of journalism. He’s the most inspiring journalist I’ve ever worked with. His deputy, Matt Purdy, is one of the most thoughtful and gracious editors around, and above all he’s a great person. He’s guided me through my career, always keeping me focused and in line.

  My home base for the past eight years has been the Times Washington bureau. The bureau exists because of an extraordinary group of people. Our bureau chief, Elisabeth Bumiller, has led us fearlessly in the Trump era, as we’ve expanded as a bureau to produce more stories a day than anyone ever could have imagined. Elisabeth has kept us on mission and done it with charm. Her husband and longtime Times reporter, Steve Weisman, is a great friend. My editor in the bureau, Amy Fiscus, has been the steady hand that has guided us through covering the Mueller investigation and all the other craziness that came after it. She made us better reporters and writers, and is a great friend and someone you want in the foxhole with you. My editors early in my tenure in the bureau—David Leonhardt, Carolyn Ryan, Bill Hamilton, and Rebecca Corbett—should be rewarded for the patience they had with me. They were great tutors and allies to have. The backbone of the bureau is formed by Tahirah Burley, our senior operations manager, and our technology specialists, Cliff Meadows and Jeff Burgess. The laptop Cliff arranged for me to have to write the book is one of the greatest electronics I’ve ever had. Without it, I never would have finished on time. I’m also thankful to work for and alongside: Dick Stevenson, Thom Shanker, Carl Hulse, Julie Davis, Helene Cooper, Matt Apuzzo, Katie Benner, Matt Rosenberg, Nick Fandos, Peter Baker, Sharon LaFraniere, Eileen Sullivan, Julian Barnes, Charlie Savage, Michael Shear, Ken Vogel, Michael Crowley, Noah Weiland, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Annie Karni, Scott Shane, Mark Landler, Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt, and many others.

  There are four people I’m closest to at the Times who are some of the greatest friends I’ve ever had. Mark Mazzetti selflessly became the editor of our Russia coverage after the election. It was as daunting an assignment as anyone could take on. He did it with grace. He’s as good a journalist as he is a person. I still want to be like Mark when I grow up. Maggie Haberman is far and away the greatest reporter of her generation. She covered the Trump campaign better than anyone else. And after Trump won, she selflessly threw herself at the story, taking on the most important political story of our time with a singular goal of just covering it. No one did it better—and no one has given more to the paper than her. No one can do the improbable in journalism better than Adam Goldman. He has more raw reporting power than anyone else I’ve worked with. If Adam wants the story, he will get it. It’s quite something to watch. Adam is as loyal a friend as there is. Emily Steel and I spent countless days in a small conference room at the Times in 2016 and 2017 reporting out the story of Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment settlements. It was an incredibly difficult assignment. But there is no one else I would have rather worked with it on and I’m incredibly grateful for the friendship we have.

  Mom, Dad, Molly, J.J., Tim, Nicolle, and Liam, you are what sustains me. Words cannot express what you all mean to me.

  NOTES

  For this book, I examined over a thousand pages of documents from across the federal government that had never been previously made public. I spent hundreds of hours with current and former senior government officials, and others outside the government intimately involved in the story, often speaking to them on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing sensitive, privileged, or classified info
rmation.

  ACT ONE

  I. RULE OF LAW, RULE OF TRUMP

  By the end of the second year: Barry J. McMillion, “Judicial Nomination Statistics and Analysis: U.S. District and Circuit Court, 1977–2018,” Congressional Research Service, March 21, 2019.

  Indeed, in 2008: Jason Szep and Caren Bohan, “McCain and Obama Call Political Cease-Fire for 9/11,” Reuters, September 11, 2008.

  But on September 11: “American Killed in US Consulate Attack in Benghazi: Official,” Agence France-Presse, September 11, 2012.

  In Cairo, reports indicated: Tamim Elyan, “Egyptians Angry at Film Scale U.S. Embassy Walls,” Reuters, September 11, 2012.

  The embassy in Cairo: “U.S. Embassy Condemns Religious Incitement,” U.S. embassy in Cairo, September 11, 2012, web.archive.org/​web/​20120912144752/​http://egypt.usembassy.gov/​pr091112.html.

  At the far end of the party: Michael Cooper, “Palin, on Offensive, Attacks Obama’s Ties to ’60s Radical,” New York Times, October 4, 2008.