The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  “Why do I have to get involved with Putin for? I have nothing to do with Putin,” Trump replied. “I don’t know anything about him other than that he will respect me.”

  Then as he went on to do right into his presidency, Trump expressed doubts about the likelihood that Moscow was behind the hack. Keep in mind, even back during the campaign, the intelligence community was fairly certain Russia was responsible for the infiltration at the DNC. Trump was not having it.

  “If it is Russia which it’s probably not . . . nobody knows who it is,” he went on to say. Then a few seconds later, continuing his response to my question, Trump said something that floored all of us in the room and, I suspect, federal investigators who were tuning in as well.

  “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference on July 27, 2016. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That will be next.”

  “They probably have them. I’d like to have them released,” he continued. “Now, if Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I’d love to see them.”

  He then turned to another question. But that was that. All that the reporters in the room had to do was to glance down at their phones and see the notifications blowing up on their lock screens. Trump had, once again, broken the internet. Nearly every headline for the next twenty-four hours was Trump’s invitation to the Russians to hack into Clinton’s email server. The Clinton campaign went ballistic, accusing Trump of putting American national security at stake.

  As would become increasingly clear over the first two years of the Trump administration, the Russia story had legs, and plenty of plot twists (many of them quite real), and it was on us to cover them all in the face of increasing hostility from Trump and his team. What began with Michael Flynn quickly spread to other areas of the administration and stretched back to the campaign, as former aides and associates of the president were swept up in the probe.

  It wasn’t long before we would see Attorney General Jeff Sessions become the next piece of collateral damage in the probe. Sessions had come to the Trump administration by way of the Senate. In the early days of the campaign, then–Alabama senator Sessions surprised a lot of people in Washington when he endorsed Trump’s candidacy in February 2016. This was way before the rest of the GOP had hopped aboard the Trump train.

  Wearing a red MAGA hat, Sessions threw his support behind Trump at an August 2015 rally in Alabama. “I told Donald Trump this isn’t a campaign, this is a movement,” Sessions said.

  Trump noted that he and Sessions were simpatico in their hard-right stance on immigration. “He’s really the expert as far as I’m concerned on borders, on so many things,” Trump said.

  The Trump-Sessions marriage was a match made in heaven for supporters who vehemently opposed illegal immigration. Before the campaign, I had come across Sessions from time to time up on Capitol Hill. He almost always made himself available for an interview if the topic was immigration—that’s how I first came to know Stephen Miller. During the campaign, Sessions led Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, and Miller became Trump’s top speechwriter. Given what we saw during the campaign, it was hardly a surprise when Trump tapped Sessions to become attorney general.

  Though Sessions was confirmed as Trump’s attorney general with relative ease, by the end of February the ground beneath him had started shifting, largely because of statements he had made under oath during his confirmation hearing.

  In the run-up to Sessions’s confirmation hearing on January 10, reasonable questions had already been raised about possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia because of reporting from CNN, BuzzFeed, and many others. It was on this point that Minnesota Democratic senator Al Franken pressed Sessions:

  FRANKEN: . . . If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?

  SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have—did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.

  Only, Sessions’s response wasn’t the whole truth. Reporting that unfolded in late February and early March (in the aftermath of Flynn’s departure) would demonstrate that Sessions’s words were not entirely accurate.

  Sessions, as it turned out, had had interactions with the Russians himself, something he didn’t disclose to Franken at the confirmation hearing. In April 2016, Trump gave a foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington; I was there for that one. During the speech, Trump talked about his “America First” policy, took potshots at the Obama and Bush administrations for letting U.S. prestige run adrift, and vowed to crack down on illegal immigration along the border with Mexico. Consider where that prestige stands now. But more to the point, Trump’s future attorney general and top GOP supporter in the Senate, Jeff Sessions, was there. And unbeknownst to just about everybody at the time, so was the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. Sessions, CNN and other news outlets later reported, met with Kislyak at a private reception prior to the foreign policy speech. The future attorney general, during his confirmation hearing before the Senate, did not fully disclose his contacts with Kislyak and neglected to mention this encounter at the Mayflower Hotel.

  It still pains me to remember that I interviewed Sessions, live on CNN, following that Trump speech at the Mayflower, with absolutely no idea at the time that the Alabama senator had just met with the Russian ambassador at the event.

  It was a brief interview, on Wolf Blitzer’s 1:00 p.m. program on CNN. Sessions, of course, praised Trump’s speech.

  “He laid out a vision and, in many ways, [it] was electrifying,” Sessions said, beaming.

  In addition to that encounter at the Mayflower Hotel, Sessions had other brushes with Kislyak, meeting with the ambassador on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, along with J. D. Gordon, a longtime GOP operative in Washington. Sessions also met with Kislyak in his Senate office in September 2016. But Sessions, his spokeswoman argued to reporters, had not lied to Congress because the senator had met with Kislyak as a legislator, not as an adviser to the Trump campaign.

  Still, the damage had been done. Once it became clear that Sessions had not been forthright about this and other contacts with the Russians, he decided he could not legitimately oversee the Justice Department’s probe into Kremlin interference. On March 2, 2017, nearly two months after that flawed testimony about events of one year earlier, Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, against the wishes of the new president.

  “I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” Sessions told reporters at a news conference announcing his recusal. He would later say about his meetings with Kislyak, “In retrospect, I should have slowed down and said I did meet one Russian official a couple times, and that would be the ambassador.”

  But there was good reason to believe Sessions was meeting with Kislyak as more than just a legislator. Roughly one month prior to the Mayflower hotel speech, Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee held a meeting to discuss a range of foreign policy subjects, including Russia. The gathering on March 31, 2016, was captured in a now-infamous photo that had been released by the Trump campaign during the GOP primary season.

  Seated around the table are individuals who now figure prominently, and tangentially, in the Russia investigation. At one end of the table is Trump. At the other is Jeff Sessions. To the left of Sessions are two people who would later be questioned as part of the Russia probe, J. D. Gordon and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser who went on to plead guilty to lying to federal agents in the investigation, prompting more valid questions about the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia.


  Gordon, who had also worked for the Herman Cain campaign, in 2012, has gained some notoriety for his cameo appearance in the Russia investigation. J.D. and I have known each other ever since he worked for Cain. He’s one of the few Republican officials in Washington who is bilingual in both English and Spanish, and he has often appeared on CNN to speak with the network’s sister outlet, CNN en Español. He’s one of those creatures in Washington you don’t hear enough about these days, a good guy who, as far I have ever been able to tell, just wants to serve his country.

  As for Papadopoulos, he may have been later written off as the “coffee boy” by Trump’s defenders, but according to J.D., George played something of a pivotal role in that National Security Advisory Committee meeting. Gordon says that it was Papadopoulos who raised the idea of Trump meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin during the campaign. In a story with my CNN colleague Manu Raju, we reported that Trump was intrigued by the idea. Trump “heard him out,” Gordon told us. Sessions, according to J.D., opposed the notion of a Trump-Putin campaign summit.

  Regardless of whether Sessions opposed the idea, this account raised doubts about what Sessions said during his confirmation hearing: that he was unaware of any communications between the Russians and the Trump campaign. The very idea of communicating with the Russian government was discussed at the meeting.

  As an aside, Gordon told me that Papadopoulos wanted to be much more than the “coffee boy” for the campaign. He had pushed to be a surrogate on the Sunday talk show circuit, once noting that his last name rhymed with that of the host of ABC’s This Week.

  “Papadopoulos Stephanopoulos,” George Papadopoulos told J.D. with a smile. Gordon thought Papadopoulos was out of his depth.

  But that wasn’t all that went down at that March 31, 2016, meeting. As I reported on CNN, Gordon said that Trump had told his advisers at the gathering that he “didn’t want to go to World War III over Ukraine.” Ponder that for a moment. Trump wasn’t even the GOP nominee yet. He had zero foreign policy experience. And yet he was putting forward what was essentially a policy reversal for the United States. He was telling his budding foreign policy team that he wanted to dial back America’s stance on Russian aggression. Nearly four months later, at the GOP convention in Cleveland, the Trump campaign argued against arming the Ukrainians in their conflict with the Russians, counter to what many foreign policy hawks back in Washington, such as Senator John McCain and others, were advocating. Gordon told me, and this is a critical point, that the party platform on Russia at the 2016 convention was a reflection of Trump’s marching orders at that crucial March 2016 meeting.

  Gordon later said he was irritated by some of the stories written about his comments to me about that meeting. J.D. insisted that he and his fellow campaign officials at the convention were not seeking to water down or soften the platform on the Ukraine question. They merely wanted to keep things from becoming more hawkish, he maintained. But Trump had other ideas. In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump said that the Russia platform had indeed been “softened.” Either way, the signal had been sent from the GOP convention that Trump was seeking a new, closer relationship with Russia. And Trump would punctuate that message time and again from the campaign trail, where he repeatedly proposed better relations with the Kremlin. The hawks inside the Republican Party, including McCain, took note of this.

  I trust J.D.’s recollection of events, but I also know that he is not happy with the way he was treated by the campaign. He told me he was never paid for his work for Trump. He also got a bad taste in his mouth working for Jared Kushner, once telling me a story about compiling reams of information on various foreign leaders whom Trump’s son-in-law wished to meet, only to have Kushner disregard what he had prepared for him.

  Like so many people who have given their lives to Trump over the years, J.D. got burned. Despite all his Washington experience in politics and government, not to mention his loyalty to Trump, Gordon ended up involuntarily giving away his expertise for free to a businessman with a reputation for stiffing his contractors. He was hardly the first Trump associate to feel cheated. CNN and other outlets have detailed the countless times Trump has refused to pay the contractors who helped the Manhattan tycoon build his hotels and casinos. J.D. and his fellow foreign policy advisers were simply the latest in a long line of victims.

  To my amazement, Gordon would go on to appear on conservative news outlets to blast the Russia probe. In spite of how the Trump campaign had treated him, he had remained somewhat loyal to the president. That’s hard for me to understand. But J.D. told me he was never convinced that there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. He always saw what occurred as a kind of conspiracy of dunces, like something out of the Coen brothers’ screwball comedy Burn After Reading, in which two numbskull gym employees discover a disk containing CIA information that they then try to peddle to Russian operatives. Trump aides repeatedly told me they were too dumb to run an organized campaign—how could they conspire with Russia? they joked.

  But there was a very serious side of this for Gordon. As an eventual subject of the investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia, J.D. spent hours talking with the special counsel’s investigators. They read back to him emails and texts he had sent to other people, communications the team of investigators had collected to spring on J.D. during his interrogations. He amassed legal fees in the five figures, he told me.

  Nevertheless, that infamous National Security Advisory Committee meeting for Trump’s campaign was a critical early sign of potential contacts between the GOP contender and the Kremlin.

  * * *

  THE FALLOUT FROM SESSIONS’S RECUSAL WAS SWIFT AND MESSY. Not to sound like Forrest Gump, repeatedly appearing at famous events, but I was with Trump the day Sessions recused himself, serving as the TV pool reporter for the networks. (Because it would be too much of a circus to have all the networks at every presidential photo op, one TV reporter and one cameraman, and typically a sound technician, are given the responsibility of covering these brief on-camera events on behalf of all the major TV networks. The same deal goes for the newspaper outlets and wire services. They, too, send in a few representatives from the print world to fill out the pool.) On March 2, 2017, I was in the pool, covering the president during a visit to Norfolk, Virginia, where he was touring an aircraft carrier. As we moved around the bowels of the ship, the other reporters in the pool and I peppered Trump with questions about Sessions, who, at that point, had not pulled the trigger on recusal.

  “I don’t think so,” Trump said when I asked him whether Sessions should recuse himself. The president was also asked if he believed Sessions had told the truth during his confirmation hearing. “I think he probably did,” Trump replied.

  Anybody who covered Trump extensively knew full well that he was back on his heels. His four- or five-word responses to questions about the Russia investigation were a pretty clear indicator that he was in no mood to talk. Sure, he would love to answer questions from reporters, just not on the Russia probe. Trump could certainly be abrupt when he didn’t want to speak with reporters, but this was not one of those times. I had the sense that he wanted his trip to Norfolk to be a commander-in-chief moment. He was wearing an olive-green bomber-style jacket and a blue baseball cap, the stuff a president wears when touring an aircraft carrier. And we were ruining all that by annoying him with Sessions questions. Capturing it all to tweet it out to the millions of Trump’s followers was the president’s social media director, Dan Scavino. Later, before hopping aboard the Ospreys that flew the press back to Air Force One, I gave Dan a pat on the back. At that point, I still had pretty good relationships with some of the folks on Trump’s team. Scavino was one of the “originals” from the campaign, the staffers I had befriended out on the trail, before Trump’s war on the media.

  When we landed back at Joint Base Andrews, just outside Washington, we waited on Air Force One, as was customary, for Trump t
o disembark and hop on Marine One for the chopper ride back to the White House. After close to an hour, and still on the plane waiting, we wondered what on earth was going on. It turns out, Trump had been sitting on the plane watching Sessions deliver his statement to the press, recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Though we were mere yards away from him, we had no idea the president was stewing over Sessions’s recusal.

  We all watched the coverage on our phones. Trump’s aides had gone silent. It would become clear only in the days ahead that Trump was supremely pissed off at Sessions. Still, though he would later turn Sessions into a punching bag for nearly the duration of the former Alabama senator’s tenure as attorney general, at least that night, Trump stood by his man.

  In a statement released that day, he said, “Jeff Sessions is an honest man. He did not say anything wrong [in his confirmation hearing]. He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional,” Trump added. “This whole narrative is a way of saving face for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win. The Democrats are overplaying their hand. They lost the election and now, they have lost their grip on reality. The real story is all of the illegal leaks of classified and other information. It is a total witch hunt!”

  Still, that statement contained the seeds of many hyperbolic Trump tweets to come—from “illegal leaks of classified and other information” to “witch hunt!” Even if Trump was being more gracious to Sessions for the moment, the offensive against the Russia probe was under way.

  Not that Trump hadn’t tried to stop Sessions from recusing himself. He had made his own overtures to the attorney general to prevent it from happening. Others in the White House had also chimed in. White House counsel Don McGahn had reached out to Sessions in an effort to discourage the attorney general from walling himself off from the investigation. So did the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and press secretary Sean Spicer.