Stunned by Trump’s tirade, Stoltenberg tried to calm the room, but the president snapped. “No, we are not playing this game,” Trump said. “Other presidents have done this, but I’m not going to.” The entire Western alliance scrambled for an hour to keep itself together in the face of the possibility that the United States could withdraw from NATO, which it helped found in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union.
Just ten minutes later, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s aides began getting urgent texts on their phones. They were desperately needed in the U.S. holding room. As Dana White, Mattis’s press secretary, rushed downstairs, she saw Hogan Gidley, a deputy White House press secretary, and shared what she considered a terrifying development. “I’m getting messages that we’re pulling out of NATO,” she said. Gidley, who had a self-effacing, aw-shucks manner, counseled in his southern drawl that nobody rush to judgment. He’d been here before. Some of Trump’s ideas sound ominous, he explained, but may not end the world. “Eh, you know the president likes to float things,” Gidley said. “But it’s just a floater.”
Katie Wheelbarger, a former aide to Vice President Cheney who was acting assistant secretary of defense for international affairs and who didn’t rattle easily, had a panicky look on her face after witnessing the president harangue his fellow NATO partners. “It feels like we just pulled out of NATO,” Wheelbarger said. Stoltenberg himself called an emergency session for allies only so they could discuss Trump’s demands on expenditures and construct a response on their burden-sharing agreements.
Mattis, a steadfast NATO supporter, had had to miss the emergency session to attend a prearranged meeting with a battlefield commander who had flown from the Middle East to Brussels strictly to brief him. The fact that the defense secretary wasn’t attached to Trump’s shoulder at this particular moment made Pentagon officials nervous. Who then could prevent Trump from doing something catastrophic?
Kelly soon located and retrieved Mattis for a huddle about what they should do. The defense secretary suggested he, Kelly, Bolton, and Pompeo meet privately with Trump in a secure holding room. Aides said they heard Trump wanted to hold an immediate press conference, but Mattis wanted to talk to the boss first. After Mattis and the others spoke with Trump, the president emerged first from their private conference. Miller, a fellow NATO skeptic, was busy drafting some talking points for the impromptu news conference. Mattis and Kelly hung back, continuing their private discussion. The Pentagon reporters who traveled with Mattis, and had already been screened by security officials, were waiting on the secretary’s plane to depart Brussels with him; now they were furious upon finding out they would be missing a major Trump news conference that Mattis was attending.
Before heading to the airport to depart Brussels, Trump addressed throngs of journalists from around the world at a lectern at NATO headquarters. The American president made claims that some of his international counterparts contested. For instance, Macron and other foreign leaders disputed Trump’s announcement that countries had agreed to eventually increase their spending “quite a bit higher” than 2 percent of their gross domestic product. However, the U.S. officials traveling with Trump breathed a major sigh of relief when Trump stated, “I believe in NATO.” He called the alliance “a fine-tuned machine” and praised its “great unity, great spirit, great esprit de corps.”
At his news conference, Trump revealed he had been disappointed with the media’s lack of coverage of him scolding the Europeans to pay more. “I was surprised that you didn’t pick it up; it took until today,” he said, as if his morning threat were a stunt orchestrated to generate headlines. Xavier Bettel, the prime minister of Luxembourg, had reminded reporters that Trump had wireless internet on Air Force One and could reverse his support for NATO in a single tweet once he left Brussels. When a reporter asked Trump if he might attack NATO on Twitter after departing, just as he had maligned Trudeau following the G7 in Quebec, the president replied, “No, that’s other people that do that. I don’t. I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius.”
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Four days later, Trump warmly embraced Russia, NATO’s greatest direct threat. The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki was long in the making. Trump was under intense pressure to confront Putin over his broad subterfuge operation in the 2016 election, as well as to counter Russia’s intervention in Syria and Ukraine.
Trump knew before he clasped Putin’s hand that U.S. investigators had built an airtight case proving the Russian government had interfered in the election. When Trump had announced at the end of June his scheduled Helsinki summit for mid-July, Mueller’s prosecutors had been getting their ducks in a row to indict a dozen GRU military officers for the email hacks. They faced a diplomatic quandary. They had to give Trump a heads-up and offer to let him decide whether he wanted the indictment to occur before or after he met with Putin. Trump’s choice surprised the prosecutors. He wanted the announcement of the indictment to take place prior to the Helsinki summit.
Before leaving Washington, Trump sat down with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to preview the Justice Department’s charges against twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic emails. The indictment, which Rosenstein publicly announced on July 13, was a major development in Robert Mueller’s investigation. “When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans,” Rosenstein said, announcing the indictment. “The blame for election interference belongs to the criminals who committed election interference. We need to work together to hold the perpetrators accountable.”
Trump, however, was not interested in holding the Russians accountable. He was focused on forging a better friendship with Putin during their tête-à-tête in Helsinki. “He’s not my enemy, and hopefully, someday, maybe he’ll be a friend. It could happen,” Trump said. When a Washington Post reporter asked him if he intended to confront Putin on election interference, Trump mocked the very suggestion—“your favorite question about meddling”—and said he expected Putin to deny it yet again. Earlier, when the CBS anchor Jeff Glor asked Trump during a one-on-one interview whether he would ask Putin to extradite the twelve indicted Russian agents, Trump replied that he “hadn’t thought” of doing so.
On July 16, Trump and Putin spent two hours meeting alone, joined only by their interpreters, inside Finland’s neoclassical Presidential Palace along Helsinki’s glistening waterfront. Unlike in most foreign leader meetings, there was no note taker to compile an official record of what was said or what promises were made. What came next was historically unprecedented. As he held forth with Putin for a forty-six-minute joint news conference, Trump refused to endorse the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that the Russian government had tried to sabotage the U.S. election to help him win. In fact, he said he took the word of Putin over the collective assessment of his own intelligence agencies. Trump demurred when Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press asked, “Would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016? And would you warn him to never do it again?”
“All I can do is ask the question,” Trump replied. Referring to his director of national intelligence, the president continued, “My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Trump then raised a series of questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails before adding, “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
Inside Mueller’s office, the prosecutors investigating Russian election interference watched the televised coverage with a mixture of concern and grim resignation. Intelligence operators had determined Putin had ordered the interference. The prosecutors also knew Tru
mp had repeatedly been provided evidence of it.
Trump’s performance in Helsinki sparked horror among the national security establishment in Washington. He thought he had come across as strong, but an hour into his flight home Trump’s mood darkened as he watched cable news on a satellite feed and was shown printouts of statements from fellow Republicans condemning his comments. Even for some of the president’s Republican allies, Helsinki was an out-of-body experience. Coats effectively rebuked his boss, saying that the intelligence assessment of Russia’s “ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy” was clear and had been presented to Trump in an unvarnished fashion.
Senator John McCain did not mince words in his statement: “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.” The Arizona Republican senator added, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”
Suddenly the word “treason” became part of the public debate about Trump. The former CIA director John Brennan called Trump’s comments “nothing short of treasonous.” A dam had broken.
After consulting with Sanders and other aides in his private cabin aboard Air Force One, Trump issued a tweet trying to seal the leak in the dam: “I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people.” But the uproar continued. Even such reliable boosters as the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—whose wife, Callista, served as Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican—and Brian Kilmeade, a Fox & Friends host, said Trump made an error and should correct his statement. Back at the White House, Trump confided in friends that he did not understand what the big fuss was about. He thought the summit had been an undeniable success. But for the president’s aides, a haphazard scramble was under way to blunt the global fallout from Helsinki. This would be a week of corrections and clarifications.
At about 8:30 in the morning on July 17, Trump called counselor Kellyanne Conway, who was at her West Wing desk, and told her to meet him in the private dining room off the Oval Office. The president was upset. He had been watching brutal cable television analysis about his “I don’t see any reason why it would be” comment.
“That isn’t what I said,” Trump told Conway.
“It is what you said,” Conway told him.
“I didn’t say that,” the president insisted. “Why would I say that?”
“That’s a great question,” Conway said. “Why did you say that?”
Trump had written down what he meant to say in Helsinki: “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” He handed Conway the piece of paper. “I meant to say this,” he told her. “Here, go out and tell everybody that this is what I meant to say.”
“No,” Conway said. “I think you should do that. . . .
“You need to clear that up right away,” she added. “That’s not just a difference of three letters. That’s a difference of intent.”
Vice President Pence, newly installed communications chief Bill Shine, Kelly, Bolton, Miller, and Sanders soon came into the room to huddle around and help Trump draft a statement to deliver that afternoon clarifying his Helsinki remarks and addressing the concerns of his intelligence chiefs. Speaking from the Cabinet Room, a day after facing Putin, Trump claimed that when he said “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia, he meant to say, “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” This, the president explained, was “sort of a double negative.”
But on July 18, at a cabinet meeting, Cecilia Vega of ABC News asked Trump whether he believed the Russians were still targeting the United States. The president responded with just one word, “No,” once again contradicting his own intelligence chiefs and his own correction. Sanders later told reporters Trump was not answering Vega’s question. “He was saying, ‘No,’ he’s not taking questions.” But it was too late.
The next day, July 19, Trump gave Bolton an order: schedule a second summit with Putin and invite the Russian president to visit him in Washington. Bolton sprang into action to make an overture to the Kremlin, and by afternoon the White House announced that planning was under way for a fall visit. The Putin trip would not end up happening. At this very moment, Coats, the director of national intelligence, was speaking at the Aspen Security Forum. The intelligence chief acknowledged that he wished Trump had made a different statement in Helsinki and that he ought not to have met with Putin alone. Coats also spoke forcefully about the continuing and “undeniable” threat of Russia’s interference in America’s elections.
When Andrea Mitchell of NBC News asked Coats what he tells intelligence personnel risking their lives in the field when the president disavows their work, as he did in Helsinki, Coats said he tells them, “We are professionals. We are here to provide professional service to our government. We need to keep our heads down. We need to go forward with the wonderful technological capabilities that we have to produce intelligence. There’s a lot of swirl, political swirl, going around. Just do your jobs.”
Coats’s candor was remarkable, considering some colleagues in national security circles gave him the nickname “Marcel Marceau,” after the French mime, because he was typically so tight-lipped and rarely opined freely. Before opening the floor for audience questions, Mitchell made an announcement: “We have some breaking news. The White House has announced on Twitter that Vladimir Putin is coming to the White House in the fall.”
“Say that again?” Coats said, leaning forward in his chair.
“Vladimir Putin coming to—” Mitchell replied.
“I hear you,” Coats said, cupping his hand to his ear playfully. They both laughed uncomfortably. It was obvious that this was the first Coats had heard of the Putin invitation. He took a deep breath.
“Okaaaaay,” Coats said, chuckling. With a wry smile, he added, “That’s going to be special.”
Eighteen
THE RESISTANCE WITHIN
On the sidelines of the NATO meetings on July 11, 2018, Trump believed he had struck a bargain with Recep Tayyip Erdogan. News cameras captured Trump and the Turkish president bumping fists and smiling. What the public did not know at the time was Trump thought he had a deal for a straightforward prisoner trade. The United States would win the freedom and return of Andrew Brunson, an evangelical American pastor imprisoned in Turkey for the previous two years on what U.S. officials considered bogus terrorism charges. Brunson was a cause célèbre for Trump’s conservative base. Trump would then leverage his close relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to negotiate the release of a Turkish prisoner jailed in Israel on exaggerated claims of terrorist activity. In Trump’s mind, he had brokered the deal during a man-to-man meeting with Erdogan. Erdogan had mentioned the Turkish prisoner Ebru Özkan, a twenty-seven-year-old woman accused of acting as a smuggler for Hamas. Trump was intrigued. He, too, had a prisoner in Turkey he wanted released.
On July 27 the deal fell apart. Erdogan had tried to flatter Trump by telling him that surely he could get Özkan released. The American president said he could and then mentioned Brunson. But U.S. officials would later learn that Erdogan never thought this was a tit for tat. “Trump left the meeting believing he had personally negotiated it. He had not,” said one person familiar with the talks. On top of that, something went wrong in the conversation. “Somehow, Trump left Erdogan with the impression he could get more for his dollar.”
The exchange was complicated for many reasons. First and foremost, delicate negotiations about Brunson’s release had been going on for weeks between lower-level deputies in both the U.S. and the Turkish governments. Turkish officials originally said Erdogan would be willing to give up Brunson in exchange for the United States’ deporting or extraditing Fethullah Gulen, a reviled political opponent of Erdogan’s who had been living in exile in Pennsylvania. U.S. officials s
hot down that idea. No way. That would be a decision for the Justice Department, and attorneys there had already made clear that an extradition of that nature would break U.S. legal norms. It was obvious to anyone following the situation that Erdogan’s unstated goal almost certainly was to have Gulen killed as soon as he left the United States and landed in another country. So the Americans came up with a three-step approach that the Turks liked. The first step, agreed to in June and conveyed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was that the Justice Department and the FBI would more closely investigate whether Gulenist groups in the United States were engaged in illegal activities, such as tax violations. The second step would be helping secure the release of Özkan from Israel. The third step had the feel of a prisoner exchange: After Turkey released Brunson back to the United States, the U.S. government would extradite a Turkish banker and Erdogan ally who was being detained in the United States in a federal case. The banker, who had incriminating information about Erdogan’s role in a bribery and money-laundering scheme to avoid U.S. sanctions against Iran, would then be allowed to serve the rest of his short sentence in his home country. Trump had little familiarity with the details of those talks. There was no official transcript of his discussion with Erdogan, no direct proof of his apparent “deal” for U.S. intelligence or diplomatic officials to hold the Turkish government to account.
On July 14, while Trump spent the weekend at his golf resort in Scotland, he decided in the middle of playing a round to call Netanyahu. His aides brought a secure phone out to the front nine. Trump leaned into the Israeli prime minister and asked him to release Özkan. Netanyahu confessed that he knew nothing about the woman. Her name did not register with him. But he agreed to look into it and to help speed her release, barring some other issue.
The next day, July 15, Özkan was released. She flew from Israel to Istanbul, where she was met by reporters and professed gratitude for Erdogan, who she said “was kind enough to be very interested in my case.” Over the next several days, Trump asked his aides for updates on Brunson. The first sign was not encouraging. On July 18, a Turkish court rejected appeals to release Brunson and set another court date for October. At the White House, where the president had just returned from his European trip, officials were taken aback. Trump tweeted that the Turkish court’s decision was a “total disgrace.”
A Very Stable Genius Page 30