by Jim Acosta
In that vacuum was the press, one of the only major institutions of public life that Trump couldn’t control. Those were the terms for our reporting from now on. And just because he couldn’t control us, it didn’t mean he would stop trying.
For his part, Stephen Miller seemed to revel in exacerbating these concerns about the Trump administration’s undemocratic, autocratic instincts when he declared on the CBS Sunday morning news program Face the Nation that the president should not be challenged on such matters as the travel ban.
“Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned,” Miller said.
This was the kind of declaration you’d expect from an authoritarian government. An administration that had started lying from the very beginning, about something as trivial as an inaugural crowd size, had taken its war on the truth to a disturbing new level, now claiming that it was beyond scrutiny. A couple of years from being an obscure staffer with no name recognition, suddenly Miller was on national television telling the American people that the Trump team wouldn’t be questioned.
Watching the interview left me speechless, and I was wondering the same thing that a lot of people across Washington were wondering: who the hell does this guy think he is?
Trump had attacked the judiciary, Spicer had lied about the inauguration crowd size, Kellyanne Conway had pulled a nonexistent Bowling Green Massacre out of thin air, and Stephen Miller had said we couldn’t question the president? It wasn’t just this reporter, folks. Many of us in the press areas of the White House were looking at one another wide-eyed, jaws agape, dumbfounded. Sometimes it was just a knowing glance as we left the Briefing Room, but more often, we were all talking about it over drinks after work. (We certainly needed a few of those back in the early weeks of the Trump White House.) And we were all saying the same thing to one another, to our loved ones, to our family members, to our bosses, to anybody who would listen. It all boiled down to the same damn question: who the hell do these people think they are?
3
The Enemy
Reporting on those first few weeks of the Trump administration was like running through an ever-expanding hall of mirrors. One minute you’re covering the travel ban. Then it’s the Russia investigation. And all along the way, Trump is tweeting stuff that needs to be fact-checked in real time. Add in all the alleged falsehoods that challenged fact-checkers on a daily basis and you get a ridiculously exhausting exercise. Sources inside and outside the White House were all too eager at that time to dish the dirt about this official or that aide to the president inside the West Wing. In those days, two key rival factions inside the White House were constantly knifing one another. It was the people who had worked for the Trump campaign, such as Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, versus the staffers who had come to the White House via the Republican National Committee, such as Sean Spicer, Raj Shah, and Reince Priebus. And, as you might expect, there was plenty of backbiting going on inside each faction. They’d talk about each other, sure, but getting them to talk about the important stuff, such as policy, was something else.
With this much backstabbing came a higher level of paranoia than I had ever seen before, which led to a major shift from my days reporting on the Obama White House. In the Obama years, officials would talk to you via email, text, or over the phone. Under Trump, who was lashing out at leaks among his staffers, top officials were fearful of getting caught speaking to the press. So, many of us in the news media had to move our conversations with sources over to encrypted apps, as a way to maximize privacy and secrecy. Some sources were adamant: they would talk on Signal or WhatsApp or they wouldn’t talk at all.
Even with the encrypted apps, there was one subject that it was next to impossible to get anybody to talk about: the Russia investigation. Whether it was on the record, off the record, or on background (that is, anonymously), people were worried they would be ensnared in the investigation. One source in particular told me he would talk about anything as long as it wasn’t Russia.
People inside Trumpworld fully understood why we in the press wanted to talk about Russia. By the time Trump got into office, the Russia story clearly had legs, as the FBI had already launched a high-stakes investigation into Moscow’s interference with our 2016 presidential election. It didn’t take long for the press corps to realize that this probe was into events not only that took place during the campaign, but also that were unfolding in real time. As such, it would be the first real test of how the new administration would respond to an actual scandal. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that it failed spectacularly, raising more suspicions that seemed to keep the story going.
On the heels of Trump’s rumble with the press over the travel ban in early February, another festering problem blew up in the president’s face. On February 13, his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was pushed out after admitting he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Much of this did not come as a surprise to the White House. That’s because the Justice Department had already warned the president’s team in January—yes, right around when they came into office—that Flynn had been lying to federal agents (a crime in itself) about his contacts with the Russian ambassador regarding sanctions on Russia imposed during the presidential transition period by the Obama administration to punish Moscow for its meddling.
Before and after Flynn’s removal, the White House displayed the lack of a coordinated response that had become something of a norm for the Trump team during the campaign. (They had been all over the place then, and that pattern continued as they came in to power.) Their original statement on Flynn’s contact with Kislyak now looks laughably false. Here’s how Spicer initially explained that contact to reporters on January 13, 2016, one week before Trump was sworn into office:
“On Christmas Day, General Flynn reached out to the ambassador, sent him a text, and it said, you know, I want to wish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, I look forward to touching base with you and working with you. And I wish you all the best. The ambassador texted him back, wishing him a Merry Christmas as well, and then subsequently, on the twenty-eighth of December, texted him and said, I’d like to give you a call, may I? He then took that call on the twenty-eighth, and the call centered around the logistics of setting up a call with the president of Russia and the president-elect after he was sworn in. And they exchanged logistical information on how to initiate and to schedule that call. That was it. Plain and simple.”
Plain and simple, it was not. It hasn’t been ever since, and that raised more legitimate questions.
On February 9, 2017, the Washington Post first exposed Flynn’s improper conversations with Kislyak, immediately setting off a scramble inside the West Wing to determine exactly what the new national security advisor had discussed with the ambassador. A well-placed senior White House official said that Vice President Mike Pence had summoned Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to discuss the matter immediately. Both Pence and Priebus obtained the Justice Department’s transcripts of Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak and reviewed them inside the White House Situation Room. Pence was alarmed over the Post story as Flynn had contradicted statements made by the vice president on the Sunday talk show circuit.
“They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia,” Pence said the previous month on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Priebus then called Flynn to his office, where the chief of staff grilled the national security advisor in front of other West Wing aides, the senior White House official told me. Angered over Flynn’s lies to the vice president and others on the Trump team about his conversations with Kislyak, Priebus wanted to make sure other staffers were in the room.
Flynn was immediately in trouble with the new president, the offic
ial told me. “The president was already tired of Flynn before the inauguration.”
It’s not like Trump wasn’t warned about Flynn. Something extraordinary had occurred just after the election, when Trump met with Obama in the Oval Office: Obama warned him not to hire Flynn.
“Given the importance of the job, the president thought there were better people for it, and that Flynn wasn’t up for the job,” a former Obama administration official said.
But, as we reported for CNN a few months after Flynn was fired, one former Obama administration official in the national security realm told me that during the transition, there was one big reason that the outgoing White House team was worried about Flynn: Russia.
“Flynn’s name kept popping up,” said one senior Obama administration source about the Russia investigation.
Spicer later confirmed that Obama had raised concerns about Flynn to Trump during their meeting. “It’s true President Obama made it known he wasn’t exactly a fan of Gen. Flynn’s,” Spicer said.
The messaging around Flynn’s departure was equally as muddled as the decision to hire him in the first place. Just hours before he was fired, Flynn was all of a sudden in a “gray area,” a senior Trump administration official told me. That was just hours after White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said that Flynn had the “full confidence” of the president. Sean Spicer, in a bit of messaging disarray, told reporters that Conway was wrong and that Flynn’s situation was being evaluated.
From the outside, the whole thing looked messy, and it was even messier on the inside. I remember standing for hours outside Spicer’s office with other reporters as we all awaited Flynn’s fate. About fifteen of us were crammed in the tiny hallway linking the “Lower Press” area of the West Wing, where the deputy spokespeople have their offices and the site of Spicer’s lair. Officials were flying in and out of the press secretary’s office, refusing to talk to reporters. It was a madhouse. I snapped a photo of all of us hanging out, waiting for Sean, to capture the moment.
By midnight, Flynn was gone. His departure was initially spun as a resignation, but he was shown the door. The next day, Spicer conceded that Trump had asked Flynn to resign over an “eroding level of trust” and pointed specifically to the former national security advisor’s lies to the vice president about his contacts with Kislyak. Three weeks into the new administration, the president’s first national security advisor was already forced out, and the reason could be summed up in one haunting word for Trump: Russia.
Naturally, just because Flynn was gone it didn’t mean the problem had been solved. Far from it. If anything, Flynn’s actions during the transition had actually bolstered the case for FBI director James Comey to expand the Bureau’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in 2016. It would have been law enforcement malpractice to shut down the probe at that point, despite Trump’s cries of fake news. As for Trump’s complaints about our reporting on Russia, how in the world could we have avoided the irony of Flynn’s fall from grace? After all, it was Flynn who had been leading chants of “lock her up” at Trump campaign events, including at the Republican National Convention. To me, Flynn’s performances had been some of the most shocking sights during the 2016 campaign. I had attended rally after rally where Flynn, a retired general, had advocated the jailing of Hillary Clinton. People can blow this off as just harmless campaign rhetoric, but I disagree. It’s unacceptable. We just don’t do that in America. We don’t lock up our political opponents. We settle our differences at the ballot box. The sight of Flynn, who had worn the uniform of a member of the U.S. Army, a retired lieutenant general no less, leading these cheers was nothing short of astounding, like something out of a banana republic.
In the end, neither Trump nor anyone else in the administration could effectively control the fallout from the Flynn debacle. General “Lock Her Up” Flynn faced the prospect of being locked up himself. In a sign of how future scandals would be mismanaged, no one from the administration was able to control or message the situation effectively, least of all the president.
That same week, on February 16, we all gathered in the East Room for Trump’s first full news conference as president. We were told that he was holding the press conference to announce the nomination of Alexander Acosta (no relation) to be Labor Department secretary. But the Acosta nomination was just the setup. The real purpose of the news conference was for Trump to confront nagging questions from the Russia investigation and the departure of Flynn.
I was in a good mood that day, so I was having some fun with the Acosta news in my live shot before the president came out to the microphone. This, I suppose, is where some of the accusations against me for “showboating” come into play. I like to think of it as not being so damn stiff.
“I hope this is not fake news,” I joked to Wolf Blitzer. “‘Secretary Acosta’ sounds pretty good,” I added. The reporters gathered in the room laughed. So did a few White House staffers. Other West Wing aides, who basically hated my guts, scowled, as they always do.
Trump was asked about Flynn right off the top. And the president launched right into what was becoming his go-to talking point, labeling the Russia investigation as “fake news.” But there were real questions to ask. It was simply not in the cards to take his word for it.
The next question, posed by Jon Karl of ABC News, was (surprise!) the question I had tried to ask at the January 11 news conference.
KARL: I just want to get you to clarify this very important point. Can you say definitively that nobody on your campaign had any contacts with the Russians during the campaign? And on the leaks, is it fake news or are these real leaks?
TRUMP: Well, the leaks are real. You’re the one that wrote about them and reported them, I mean the leaks are real. You know what they said, you saw it and the leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.
The leaks are real, but the news is fake. Did you get that? Let that wash over you for a second. It’s a bit of a mind-bender. This was when, listening to Trump, I would feel my eyes glaze over. My thought at that moment was, What the hell is he talking about?
Trump shouldn’t have been so hard on the press over leaks. I can speak for myself when I say that I held back on a number of stories based on leaks from the rival factions inside the West Wing. As I mentioned earlier, aides from the campaign days were constantly leaking damaging information about the staffers who had joined the Trump team from the Republican National Committee. Likewise, the RNC clan was willing to dish the dirt about the campaign veterans and about more visible Trump associates such as Kellyanne Conway, Boris Epshteyn, and Omarosa Manigault, one of the past contestants on The Apprentice.
Another staffer who made waves was Cliff Sims; he once bragged to me about how he had helped bring down a former Alabama governor who became embroiled in a sex scandal. Cliff cashed in and went public on the infighting with a tell-all book called Team of Vipers that, frankly, people inside the White House should have seen coming from a mile away. Several aides said Cliff went as far as to record Trump without his knowledge, a stunning breach of White House security. Sims has publicly denied the allegation.
When it came to Trump’s complaints about real leaks and fake news, though, the stories weren’t bogus. You couldn’t believe the leaks, Trump was saying, because you can’t trust the news. Then, a few moments later, he was back on the attack, of the press and CNN and . . . me.
TRUMP: I don’t mind bad stories. I can handle a bad story better than anybody as long as it’s true and, you know, over a course of time, I’ll make mistakes and you’ll write badly and I’m OK with that. But I’m not OK when it is fake. I mean, I watch CNN, it’s so much anger and hatred and just the hatred.
There he goes again, I thought. We’re not going to do this again, I told myself, and I put my hand up to interrupt him. Trump noticed me.
TRUMP: I don’t watch it anymore because it’s very good—he’s saying no. It’s OK, Jim (ph). It’s OK, Jim (ph), you’ll
have your chance.
He’s spoiling for a fight, I thought to myself. As I was preparing to ask the question, I noticed that there was great interest in what was about to unfold. For some reason, people kept handing me microphones. It was like the kids in the playground gathering around the two guys about to have a fight. By the time I started speaking, I was holding three different microphones. My exchange with Trump would last a good seven or eight minutes. But first, I tried to lighten the mood.
ACOSTA: Thank you very much, and just for the record, we don’t hate you. I don’t hate you.
TRUMP: OK.
ACOSTA: So, pass that along—
TRUMP: Ask—ask [CNN president] Jeff Zucker how he got his job. OK?
ACOSTA: If I may follow up on some of the questions that have taken place so far here, sir—
TRUMP: Well, that’s—well, you know, we do have other people. You do have other people and your ratings aren’t as good as some of the other people that are waiting.
ACOSTA: It’s pretty good right now, actually.
TRUMP: OK, go ahead, John [sic].
ACOSTA: If I may ask, sir, you said earlier that WikiLeaks was revealing information about the Hillary Clinton campaign during the election cycle. You welcomed that. At one time—
TRUMP: I was OK with it.
ACOSTA: —you said—you said that you loved WikiLeaks. At another campaign press conference, you called on the Russians to find the missing thirty thousand emails. I’m wondering, sir, if you—