The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  “I think it’s fair to call it pressure,” a senior administration official later told me about those phone calls to Sessions.

  I reported this information on CNN on a Friday night—ah yes, the glamour of being a White House reporter—in early January 2018. Just before we went on the air with the story, I received a phone call from Spicer. At this point, Sean was no longer working for the White House; he had resigned the previous summer. Suffice it to say, we never really stayed in touch, but he called to deny that he had placed any pressure on Sessions to give up on the idea of recusing himself.

  “For eight months the narrative was that I was out of the loop and now I’m part of it?” Spicer told me over the phone. “I don’t think so.” He added that he had called Sessions and his team only to talk about setting up a news conference.

  But Spicer being Spicer, he couldn’t resist becoming confrontational. He threatened that if I didn’t kill the story, he would go after me on Twitter. Did I want to be called “fake news”? he asked. I politely told him that I wouldn’t kill the story, and I said good-bye.

  As for Priebus, who had also tried to stop Sessions’s recusal, he declined to comment.

  Despite the pressure on Sessions from the White House, he listened to the counsel of DOJ officials instead, who thought that, given the circumstances, he should recuse himself. The implications of his recusal were huge both for the Russia probe itself and for Sessions’s tenure as attorney general. As Trump would make known repeatedly over the next year and half, he viewed Sessions’s decision as a betrayal, perhaps the worst of his presidency. Demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the job of leading the U.S. Department of Justice, Trump wanted the attorney general to behave as his own personal attorney. Sessions’s recusal left Trump exposed, and now on his own, the president would use the bully pulpit of the office to shape public opinion and demonize those asking questions. His Twitter account would be the primary weapon in his arsenal.

  * * *

  BY LATE APRIL, ROD ROSENSTEIN HAD BEEN CONFIRMED AS THE deputy attorney general, becoming the DOJ official who would oversee the Russia investigation with Sessions on the sidelines. It did not take long for his independence to be tested.

  Without Sessions to protect him, Trump would go on to rip into the Russia investigation at every twist and turn in the probe. For months the investigation had been an obsession for him, but the coming weeks would show him operating with a singular focus on it. Unable to keep Sessions from recusing himself, Trump found what he thought was another way to control the investigation: through the head of the FBI, James Comey.

  Less than four months after taking office, Trump fired Comey. The president, in one of his more outward expressions of dishonesty, hung his decision to do so on Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation—yes, the same probe that had arguably handed him the keys to the Oval Office. Trump pointed to a report completed by the new deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, that sharply criticized Comey’s performance in the Clinton email saga. Then, in a letter to Comey, Trump inserted what he believed to be something of an exculpatory side note, claiming out of nowhere that the FBI director had assured him he had nothing to worry about in the Russia probe.

  “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau,” Trump wrote in the letter to the ousted FBI director.

  In something of a coup for CNN, one of our White House producers, Noah Gray, received a tip that Trump’s personal security aide, Keith Schiller, was about to hand-deliver the letter to FBI headquarters, just down the street from the White House. It was mind-boggling to watch. There was one of Trump’s main security officials, whom we had all come to know during the campaign and who had gone on to assume the government equivalent of that position inside the White House, basically showing up at the FBI to fire James Comey on behalf of Trump. Typically, the firing of an FBI director would not go down like this. Usually, the director would be summoned to the White House to hear the bad news in person. But Trump didn’t want to do the dirty work directly, so he sent Schiller. Who does that?

  Serious legal commentators raised questions whether the Comey firing amounted to obstruction of justice, a possible impeachable offense. Trump fueled that speculation by revealing his true motivations in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.

  Trump told Holt that the Russia probe had, in fact, been part of his rationale for firing Comey. It was a stunning admission. As dishonest as Trump can be sometimes, he can also be remarkably candid. This was definitely one of those occasions.

  “And in fact, when I decided to just do it,” Trump told Holt, “I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”

  Bannon warned Trump and other top White House officials that the president was making a serious mistake. Bannon was “pretty adamant about it,” a former senior White House official told me, explaining that Comey’s Russia investigation, at the time, was not driving the news coverage.

  The day after Trump fired Comey, in another “you can’t make this shit up” episode at the White House, the president invited the Russians over for a visit. Not just Kislyak, but Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, was also welcomed into the Oval Office for a meeting.

  In a bit of diplomatic trolling, the Russians posted photos of the encounter on one of the state media outlets. The new White House, filled with inexperienced staffers who simply lacked any kind of understanding of how calculating their Kremlin counterparts could be, had no idea the Russians would release the pictures.

  “They tricked us,” an angry White House official said to me. “That’s the problem with the Russians—they lie,” the official added. My story made a pretty big splash that morning, as it was dripping with the irony that officials inside the Trump administration could be so naïve about the intentions of the Kremlin.

  A further case for independent oversight in the Russia probe came via Comey himself, in the form of both his testimony before Congress and reports of contemporaneous notes he had taken following meetings and phone calls with Trump. Comey memorialized their interactions in a now-infamous memo that detailed some of Trump’s aggressive behavior aimed at terminating the Russia investigation.

  In his prepared testimony to Congress about his conversations with the president, the former FBI director stated that on January 27, just one week into the administration, Trump asked him for a pledge of loyalty over dinner.

  “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” Comey recounted the president saying.

  According to Comey, Trump tried to intervene in the Flynn case in a February 14 meeting in the Oval Office. This was one day after Flynn was fired over his false statements about his conversations with Kislyak.

  “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go,” Comey recalled Trump as saying.

  On March 30, Trump asked Comey to lift the “cloud” of the Russia investigation, again according to the former FBI director’s sworn testimony. Trump tried once more on April 11, asking Comey to “get out” that the president was not a target of the investigation.

  The night that Comey’s prepared testimony was published, I got a tip that the attorney Trump had initially hired to handle the Russia investigation, Marc Kasowitz, was seen celebrating at the Trump Hotel in Washington, a popular hangout for administration insiders and friends of the president. Kasowitz was handing out cigars and loudly bragging that Comey hadn’t laid a finger on Trump in his testimony.

  “We won. It’s clear Trump didn’t do anything wrong,” Kasowitz was overheard saying, according to sources who heard the comments.

  Kasowitz, who had just been hired by Trump in late May, didn’t last long in t
hat position. He left the president’s outside legal team in July, after it was revealed by ProPublica that he had sent threatening emails to a man who suggested that he resign.

  The trials and tribulations on Trump’s legal team alone were enough to keep us busy in those early days of the Russia investigation. In the days that followed Comey’s testimony, Trump tapped two high-profile DC attorneys to come to the rescue, John Dowd and Ty Cobb. Dowd wasn’t particularly difficult to find. He had me in stitches from the moment he picked up the phone.

  “Oh, I’m not supposed to talk to you. You’re a bad guy,” he said, laughing.

  In the aftermath of Comey’s revelations to Congress, with public pressure rising to dramatic levels, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made some changes of his own, deciding to appoint a special prosecutor, a man with seemingly unimpeachable credentials: former head of the FBI Robert Mueller, a registered Republican.

  For me and much of the DC press corps, the appointment of Mueller was the culmination of an astonishing eight-day stretch that had begun with the firing of Comey. While the events of that week in May 2017 would shape much of the news and its coverage for the rest of Trump’s presidency, they also changed the larger calculus for Trump’s media strategy on the Russia investigation. With the investigation in Mueller’s hands and one more layer removed from Trump’s oversight, his options for interference were even more limited. Seemingly backed into a corner, he would begin to do what he does best: go on the offensive against Mueller, the investigation, and the reporting around them, despite valid questions that needed answering. This would come in the form of not just tweets criticizing Robert Mueller but also broadside attacks on news outlets, leaks, and all manner of reporting on the Russia probe.

  Spicer was getting more desperate at the podium, with reports coming in that Trump was considering pulling the plug on him and even the press briefings altogether. Just as Mueller was opening up shop in the special counsel’s probe, Trump was attempting to clamp down on the press. On May 30, 2017, Spicer told reporters in the Briefing Room that Trump was frustrated with “fake news.”

  It was one of those moments when I felt it was important to poke the bear. What fake news? I asked Spicer.

  SPICER: I think that he is frustrated, like I am and like so many others, to see stories come out that are patently false, to see narratives that are wrong, to see “fake news.” When you see stories get perpetrated that are absolutely false, that are not based in fact, that is troubling. And he’s rightly concerned.

  ACOSTA: Can you give an example of fake news, Sean? Could you give us an example?

  Spicer went on to complain about a mistake a BBC reporter had made about Trump’s behavior at a G-7 summit, which had been retweeted by a reporter in the U.S. press corps. In answering my question, Sean had the chance to go off on some aspect of the Russia investigation, but he didn’t. All he was able to come up with was a tweet he didn’t like.

  When he was asked to come up with other examples of “fake news,” he couldn’t.

  “What I’m telling you is, is that the reason that the president is frustrated is because there’s a perpetuation of false narratives, a use of unnamed sources over and over again about things that are happening that don’t ultimately happen, and I think that is troubling. Thank you, guys, very much,” he said as he abruptly left the Briefing Room.

  Until this point in the Trump presidency, Trump’s war on the media had felt more like an extension of his campaign: largely rhetorical, designed to elicit the most favorable coverage possible or at least to give pause to some reporters’ negative coverage. As we would learn in the months ahead, all these things would continue to hold true, but there were new stakes, new battle lines that had hardened in the wake of Robert Mueller’s appointment. From then on, all the reporting around the Russia probe and the White House took on larger significance to both the White House and the country at large. The same held true for Trump’s attacks on the media. No longer just applause lines, they grew more sinister, and seemed designed to undermine the credibility of our reporting on this specific story.

  A former senior White House official said that Trump remained glued to the news coverage of the unfolding Russia investigation, a viewing habit made clear by his tweets slamming the probe. “Trump watches you guys nonstop,” the official said of the president’s secret preference for watching CNN. “He watches Fox to make himself feel better,” he added.

  Publicly, the president would never admit that, as he made painfully clear in July 2017, when he tweeted out a video showing an image of him body-slamming a man with a CNN logo superimposed over his face, a depiction of violence that included the hashtag #FraudNewsCNN.

  A former high-ranking FBI official reminded me that, unlike Comey’s decision to inform the public that he was reexamining Clinton’s email practices eleven days before the election, the bureau’s director kept the investigation into possible Trump campaign ties to Russia under wraps.

  If that had been revealed the last two weeks of the campaign, it “would have been game over for Trump,” the ex-official said.

  5

  Spicy Time

  It was against the backdrop of the Russia investigation that we also had our day jobs to do—the grind of attending the daily press briefings, deciphering myriad leaks from the White House, trying to get stories confirmed or commented on. All these typical operations of reporters covering the White House made it impossible for us to ignore the sheer scale of the dysfunction there. Through the first six months of the administration, the White House communications shop had shown a startling array of weaknesses. For all their bluster and confrontation with reporters, they were a disorganized mess.

  Even after his disastrous performance on that Saturday following the inauguration, when he spoke in defense of the Trump inauguration crowd size, Sean Spicer would continue to fail in spectacular fashion. Not only did he mislead the American people from the podium in the White House Briefing Room, but he also berated reporters in an almost uncontrollable manner. To make matters worse, he routinely garbled his explanations of administration policy, occasionally turning the focus of the news cycle on himself with inexplicable word salads and tone-deaf language. The most infamous of these was when he referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” On top of that, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to clamp down on press freedom with his ill-fated decision to turn off the cameras during the White House briefings, a move that only ended up calling more attention to the chaos of his news conferences. Each new day, it seemed, brought another setback for Spicer. And slowly but surely, the press corps’ confidence in the White House press secretary dropped to levels I had never witnessed in my days covering Obama’s second term. In the press areas of the White House, reporters whispered to one another, wondering how much worse it could get.

  We weren’t the only ones asking this question. In Trump’s eyes, performance on television is a defining qualification. Either you can perform on TV—as he did for many years hiring and firing contestants and celebrities on The Apprentice—or you can’t. Trump was coming to the conclusion that Spicer was not ready for prime time. How bad was the criticism? Right down to Spicer’s wardrobe: Trump didn’t like the ill-fitting suits Sean was wearing on TV.

  The real problem for Sean, though, was that he was not cut out for the job of press secretary. As I had come to find out all too well, he sometimes had a quick temper and a nasty vindictive streak. I had never experienced this in my pre-Trump interactions with him. Back then, if I had questions about what was going on inside the RNC, he would call me back. He might take a good-natured jab, but he would still be helpful. Yet, as folks around Washington were starting to express in the early days of the Trump White House, Sean Spicer was changing.

  “I don’t know this Sean Spicer” was a common refrain around Washington in early 2017.

  Journalists, GOP operatives, staffers on the Hill—we all wondered what the hell had happened to him. The change in him
dawned on me prior to the inauguration-crowd-size fiasco, particularly at that January 11 news conference. But “Spicy,” as we had started calling him, a reference to Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live, was getting worse.

  On January 31, eleven days after the inauguration, Spicer and I had another run-in, this time at an event hosted by George Washington University. Frank Sesno, a former CNN White House correspondent and current GWU professor, had invited Sean and me to appear on a panel to discuss news coverage of the Trump presidency. Spicer again brought up the Trump Tower press conference of January 11, when I had my heated exchange with Trump. In Sean’s version of events, I had told viewers that he had threatened to remove me from the news conference if I asked another “tough” question. I’d done nothing of the sort.

  Spicer did warn me that I would be tossed out if I interrupted the president again, a remark I had passed along to viewers. But he had kept repeating his false version of the story, and did so again that night at George Washington.

  “He misled viewers tremendously,” Spicer told Sesno.

  I was in the audience, listening in and, to be honest, trying to keep myself from laughing at this nonsense. So, I did what you would expect me to do. I interrupted him and the program to yell out, “That’s not true.”

  Spicer also defended the inauguration-crowd-size claim he made at that first White House briefing on January 21. Though he would later refer to his comments at that briefing as a mistake, initially, at this event at GWU, he had only one self-critique. “We created a strategy on how to deal with the current media cycle going on, and I implemented it,” he said in defense of his crowd-size remarks, and then conceded, “I probably should have taken questions.”

  Then it was my turn to get up onstage. Sean had left—he either didn’t want to appear onstage with me or had had to leave.