by Jim Acosta
While there was much about the Russia investigation that remained unclear, there were many things the public did know about what had transpired between the Trump campaign and Russia. For one thing, the Michael Flynn investigation had resulted in Flynn cooperating with the special counsel’s office, but there had been also been indictments against several other fixtures in the Trump campaign’s orbit. George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, was indicted for lying to the FBI. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, was indicted on a variety of charges related to financial crimes and work he’d done for Ukraine. He was later convicted and sentenced to more than seven years in prison in two separate federal cases. Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy, was indicted on similar charges and was cooperating. A handful of other individuals had been indicted for lying to the FBI. And, of course, there was Roger Stone, the lifelong GOP dirty trickster who’d worked for Nixon and had managed to resurface in the Russia investigation, accused by Special Counsel Robert Mueller of being a key conduit, prosecutors allege, between the WikiLeaks effort to dump damaging emails about Clinton and officials with the Trump campaign. Federal prosecutors had also indicted thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies on charges of conspiracy related to the Russian propaganda effort to influence the 2016 election.
There was, of course, the meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 in which Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had all met with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had ties to the Kremlin. The White House had initially lied to the public about the meeting’s true purpose, saying in its earliest statement on the issue that it was about Russian adoptions, only to have Don Jr.’s emails reveal the meeting was aimed at obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton. A more ethical, experienced campaign would have gone straight to the FBI to report the Russian overtures. Not only was that statement regarding the purpose of the meeting false, but so was Sarah Sanders’s claim that Trump had not dictated the statement.
This became all too clear in June 2018, when Sanders was confronted with her own false narrative. The New York Times reported that the president’s outside legal team had delivered a letter to the special counsel’s office earlier in the year, laying out some explanations to questions from Mueller’s team. One of the responses from Trump’s lawyers was that, yes, in fact the president had dictated the letter on the Don Jr. meeting. Suddenly there was proof that Sanders’s previous statement was wrong. On June 5, 2018, Jordan Fabian of the website the Hill and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post both asked Sarah to explain herself. At this point, Sanders was beginning to use a new strategy in the briefings, referring questions to the president’s lawyers.
FABIAN: What’s the reason for that discrepancy?
SANDERS: Like you said, this is from a letter from the outside counsel, and I direct you to them to answer that question.
DAWSEY: Sarah, the words are literally—you said he did not dictate. The lawyer said he did. What is it? It’s either one or the other.
SANDERS: I’m not going to respond to a letter from the President’s outside counsel. We’ve purposefully walled off, and I would refer you to them for comment.
Like so much with the Trump White House, this whole episode—both the Trump Tower meeting during the campaign and then the White House’s factually inaccurate response to the news of this meeting breaking—raised a fundamental question of why. Simply put, why was there so much lying going on? Lying about Trump authoring the statement. Lying about the actual purpose of the meeting. The misstatements and stonewalling, it seemed to many reporters covering the Trump presidency, fit into a larger pattern of behavior. If they didn’t have anything to hide, why were there so many lies? Once again, serious questions were being raised. Inside the Trump team, multiple aides told me, they were just fine with misleading the press. That was not the same as lying to federal investigators, they figured. Not everybody got that memo, so to speak. People involved in the Russia investigation had been indicted for lying to the FBI. The longer the investigation had gone on, the more examples there were of people in Trump’s orbit lying about Russia. And as the lies mounted, it seemed too hard to write them off as coincidence. A key question, of course, was how high did the lies go?
These lies looked all the more concerning when Trump’s lawyers, led by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, began making the case that a sitting U.S. president could not be indicted. Giuliani’s arrival came after a rather stunning shakeup of Trump’s legal team. The president’s lead outside attorney, John Dowd, had abandoned ship, as had White House attorney Ty Cobb, who, I reported at the time, had tired of Trump’s tweets about the Russia investigation. Cobb, a former federal prosecutor, simply couldn’t go along with Trump’s strategy to demonize Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a source close to Ty told me.
A source inside Trump’s legal team all but confirmed that the president’s attacks on Mueller’s investigation, along with Giuliani’s wild interviews with the press, were very much part of a strategy to undermine the public’s confidence in the probe. The strategy was born out by a variety of polls that periodically found opposition to the Russia investigation climbing.
“Assume nothing was done without a strategy,” the source said.
Dowd and Cobb believed in a strategy of cooperation with Mueller’s office in order to wrap up the probe as quickly as possible. Cobb fought with Trump over his tweets about Mueller and the probe, thinking they were damaging to the president’s case. Ty was one of the good guys at the White House, someone who actually enjoyed working with the press. He was often seen around DC at various White House watering holes, downing drinks with reporters, sometimes late into the night. (One night, a group of us met Ty at the Exchange, a bar near the White House that’s popular with college students from George Washington University. As they often do on Thursdays after a night of kickball, the students were playing “flip cup.” One group of these Millennials invited Ty and me over to play. “No no,” we said. Thanks for the invite, we said. They wouldn’t take no for an answer. Flip cup is basically a game where you race others to pound a cup of beer before flipping it over. There are videos on YouTube if you need further explanation. Ty nailed it on the first try. I regret to say it took me a few more attempts.)
For his part, Rudy Giuliani was less collegial. Giuliani came on the scene with a new strategy. Cooperation was out; combat was in, both in the media and with Mueller, as the ex–New York City mayor was suddenly offering himself for countless TV interviews that only seemed to add more fog to the Russia conversation. A former prosecutor who had sent mobsters to jail during his heyday, Giuliani was making some remarkable legal arguments, such as a sitting president of the United States can’t be indicted and sent to jail, no matter the crime. It was an incredible thing to say. Was Giuliani telegraphing that Trump was in legal jeopardy? More likely he was just injecting some nonsense into the news cycle to change the narrative, a hallmark of Trump’s masterful manipulation of the media.
“In no case can he be subpoenaed or indicted. I don’t know how you can indict while he’s in office. No matter what it is. If he shot James Comey, he’d be impeached the next day,” Giuliani had told the Huffington Post.
At the same briefing in which Fabian and Dawsey called her out, Sarah was asked about Trump having dictated the letter. I asked her if she could defend a comment from Giuliani that Trump could not be indicted even if he shot James Comey.
ACOSTA: Is that appropriate language coming from the President’s outside lawyer to be talking about the President shooting Jim Comey in that fashion?
SANDERS: You would have to ask Rudy Giuliani about his specific comments. But thankfully, the President hasn’t done anything wrong, and so we feel very comfortable in that.
As if that weren’t enough of a hypothetical, one day earlier, Trump had tweeted that he could pardon himself.
@realDonaldTrump
As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but
why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong? In the meantime, the never ending Witch Hunt, led by 13 very Angry and Conflicted Democrats (& others) continues into the mid-terms!
7:35 AM—Jun 4, 2018
All of this was hanging in the balance as the press corps prepared for Trump’s trip to Helsinki. This extraordinary meeting between the two leaders was shrouded in questions and doubt: what was really going on between them? I couldn’t forget that even some members of Trump’s own national security team weren’t totally comfortable with the president’s bizarre behavior around Putin. It raised questions for them, too.
* * *
AS COMPELLING AS ALL THE DIFFERENT THREADS OF THE RUSSIA investigation were, they hadn’t yet been publicly woven together into a durable case of conspiracy with Moscow. Stepping back and following the massive web of lies spun over years by the most powerful man in the world, one could see it start to make sense, but there were plenty of question marks as well. As I often told people at events where I had been invited to speak, proving that Trump had actually colluded with the Russians in some kind of criminal conspiracy would be enormously difficult. Considering Mueller’s reputation as the ultimate straight shooter in Washington, it’s impossible to imagine the special counsel bringing anything less than an airtight criminal case against the president. Anything short of that would be devastating to Bob Mueller’s legacy.
Despite some of the indictments that resulted from the Mueller investigation and the headlines it produced, arguably the most glaring and damning element of the Trump-Russia story came not from a court filing or a cooperating witness, but from the president’s complete capitulation to Putin during their summit in Helsinki. Traveling with Trump in the days leading up to Helsinki, I began to get the sense that the United States was about to have a profoundly humbling moment on the world stage.
Before the fiasco in Finland, Trump stopped in Brussels, where he once again bashed members of NATO for falling short in their defense spending obligations to the alliance. He added insult to injury by conflating trade and defense issues, complaining about tariffs on U.S. products by countries in the European Union. In an interview with CBS, Trump called the “E.U.” a “foe” because of its trade practices. One German official responded by saying, “We can no longer completely rely on the White House.”
Predictably, there was a clash behind the scenes at the summit between Trump and his foreign counterparts over all these issues. As I reported at the time, a Western diplomatic source at the NATO summit described a “heated” exchange aimed at addressing some of Trump’s grievances. Trump left the meetings in Brussels with America’s most important military alliance once again bruised and battered, another gift to Putin.
At a hastily called news conference that was announced as members of the White House press corps, including me, were headed to London for Trump’s next stop, the president unloaded again on NATO, saying that he believed he had the authority to pull the United States out of the alliance without congressional approval. It was a pretty irresponsible statement for a president to make. Sure, Congress would almost certainly block Trump from pulling us out of NATO, but the mere mention of that possibility sent a clear signal to Moscow that the alliance was on thin ice—a curious message to send as Trump was about to meet Putin face-to-face. A Western diplomat later told me that much of the discussion behind the scenes during Trump’s time in Europe before Helsinki had centered on convincing the president of the importance of NATO. No wonder U.S. allies were beginning to doubt his commitment to the alliance that had kept Russia in check for generations. That kind of conversation with an American president shouldn’t ever be necessary, the diplomat argued.
Trump’s destabilizing behavior didn’t stop there. As the president and the press moved on to Britain, Trump and I had another confrontation, this time at a joint news conference with Theresa May, at Chequers, the British prime minister’s official retreat outside London. Now, I didn’t think Trump would call on me at the news conference; he preferred to call on Fox News in these settings. Plus, he had made it pretty clear on numerous occasions what he thought of CNN and yours truly. But as a reporter, you have to be ready, nevertheless. With Helsinki fast approaching, my goal was to ask Trump if he planned to tell Putin at their upcoming summit to stay out of America’s elections. I felt as though he had wavered and waffled enough on the question of Russian interference. I thought it would advance the Trump-Putin story line to find out if he was planning to tell the Russian leader to stop interfering in our democracy.
It was kind of a crazy ride out to Chequers. Our press buses barely made it through the narrow roads leading to the site of the news conference. With wooded land on both sides, we could feel the tree branches scrape across the top of the bus and break as the bus meandered its way to a beautiful apple orchard where press tents had been set up for our arrival. A few of my colleagues were teasing me, as I was reading a book about Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, penned by the American historian Jon Meacham. (I had developed a brief obsession with Churchill earlier in the year, after the movie Darkest Hour hit theaters.)
Prime Minister May opened the press conference with the usual pleasantries. She thanked Trump for expelling dozens of Russians from the United States after the Kremlin’s alleged poison attack on an ex-KGB agent on British soil. (The Trump administration points to such actions as proof that there is nothing untoward between Trump and Putin, conveniently overlooking years of baffling comments from the president about the Russian leader.) She then announced that she and Trump would take four questions from both the American and British press. May called on a reporter from the BBC, and Trump later called on Kristen Welker, from NBC News. Welker asked the right question, which was whether Trump’s criticisms of NATO and May were playing into Putin’s hands. Trump didn’t like the question and went on the attack.
“See, that’s such dishonest reporting because—of course, it happens to be NBC, which is possibly worse than CNN,” he said.
There he goes again. Unprovoked, Trump was once again attacking CNN at a news conference that was being aired around the world. If he was going to attack us by name, I thought, we should be able to ask a question, just as had happened at Trump Tower all the way back in January 2017. For me, it was simple: you attack us, we get a question. A few minutes later, Trump called on John Roberts, with Fox News.
That’s when I jumped in. Trump was ready to rumble.
ACOSTA: Mr. President, since you attacked CNN, can I ask you a question—
TRUMP: John Roberts, go ahead. Go ahead, John.
ACOSTA: Can I ask you a question? (Inaudible.)
TRUMP: No. No. John Roberts, go ahead. CNN is fake news. I don’t take questions—I don’t take questions from CNN. CNN is fake news. I don’t take questions from CNN. John Roberts of Fox. Let’s go to a real network. John, let’s go.
ACOSTA: Well, we’re a real network, too, sir.
Trump had the gall to call Fox News a “real network.” There are some good people at Fox—Shepard Smith, in particular, has been willing to hold Trump’s feet to the fire—but other Fox anchors, such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, have essentially served as propagandists for Trump. In early 2019, The New Yorker published an extensive profile detailing the cozy relationship between the Trump White House and Fox News. I had seen all of this firsthand. The White House had carried out a sustained campaign of intimidation against CNN while giving Fox exclusive access to Trump on a regular basis. With the exception of a few stars at Fox, the network had become Trump state TV. I liked to describe it as “state-supported” TV, as Trump provided plenty of support to Fox. As a loyal viewer of the conservative outlet’s morning program Fox and Friends, Trump frequently tweeted about the show’s GOP-friendly segments, the kind of advertising money can’t buy. He steered clear of Fox’s straight shooters, Shepard Smith and Bret Baier. But he was happy to sit down with the TV outlet’s sycophants, like Hannity, who was close with White House communications di
rector Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive who left the network to work for Trump. As part of his severance deal with the network, Shine was still being paid by Fox while working at the White House, an astounding conflict of interest. On the campaign trail, Shine could be seen orchestrating live interviews with Trump for Fox personalities. The White House and Fox were working together hand in glove.
As for my interrupting at the press conference at Chequers, I had made my point; I had registered my complaint. And Roberts proceeded with his question.
As Trump answered John’s question after calling me “fake news,” my eyes turned to Theresa May, who was staring back at me as if to say, “I can’t believe that just happened.” A British diplomat later told me that they, too, were disgusted by Trump’s attacks on the press. But what exactly are they supposed to do about it? I thought. This is our battle to fight, not theirs. As Trump and May left the news conference, I tried one last time and shouted a question.
“Will you ask Putin to stay out of U.S. elections?” I asked.
“Yes,” Trump answered.
Even after our confrontation, he had answered my question.
As a quick aside, I must say I don’t believe the Russia question was the most newsworthy moment from the press conference. That moment came when Trump offered perhaps his most candid comments to date on the subject of immigration. (As I’ve said before, as dishonest as Trump can be at times, he can also be remarkably candid.)