The FRONTLINE Interviews
Jeh Johnson
Secretary of Homeland Security, 2013-17
Jeh Johnson is an attorney and former Secretary of Homeland Security from 2013 to 2017.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’S Michael Kirk conducted on June 12, 2018. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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It’s 2017, and the IC [intelligence community] has come to visit the president-elect.What do you think … [CIA Director John] Brennan, [NSA Director Adm. Michael] Rogers, [FBI Director James] Comey and [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper were hoping to do?What was the mission when they went in?
I have to give some context, some background.In 1988, when I was a young lawyer, I was hired by Rudy Giuliani, the then-United States attorney in Manhattan, to be an assistant United States attorney, a federal prosecutor.I walked in to a truly august group of young up-and-coming prosecutors.Mr. Giuliani was the U.S. attorney.My colleagues were Jim Comey, future director of the FBI, Patrick Fitzgerald, future U.S. attorney in Chicago, Dave Kelly, future U.S. attorney in New York, number of judges and so forth.
So Jim Comey and I had been friends for 30 years, over 30 years now.Jan. 5, 2017, [Trump Tower].The intelligence community and I are briefing the president on the report that we are about to issue about Russian hacking into our 2016 election.In the course of the discussion, Mr. Clapper, Mr. Brennan and Jim, Director Comey, informed the president that there's going to be a stay-behind, a one-on-one between Director Comey and the president-elect, Mr. Trump, where in so many words, Jim was going to brief Mr. Trump about this dossier, which I knew little about at that point, so my ears kind of perked up.
When I heard the plan, I became very concerned.I had met Donald Trump.I had met Donald Trump on Sept. 11, 2016, at the World Trade Center for the ceremony, the 15th anniversary, and I met him in December 2016 during the transition when he invited me when I was secretary of homeland security and he was president-elect to come to Trump Tower.I took the opportunity to brief him on a number of different security matters.
But after that, I felt like though I didn't know Donald Trump that well, I felt like I knew his type, so to speak, from the rough-and-tumble legal world of New York.Growing up as a New York litigator, I felt like I knew Donald Trump as a litigation adversary or as a client.Jan. 5, 2017, we hear this plan about this one-on-one, and I have to say I became very concerned about what Jim was about to subject himself to, and I called him before his meeting with Mr. Trump.
Got him on the phone, conversation went just like this—I'll never forget it.I said, “Jim, have you ever met Donald Trump before?,” because at this point I had.And he said, “No,” which surprised me a little bit, that he had never met Donald Trump before.I said, “Jim, I'm very worried about what you're about to do to brief Mr. Trump on this very sensitive dossier with this very, very sensitive, unverified information contained within it."
Jim and I had actually talked about the history of the FBI.Jim likes to talk about how he kept in his desk drawer the document that authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King by the FBI.He gave me a copy, which I still keep in my desk drawer.I said to Jim: “Jim, you know the history of the FBI as well as I do, and better.I'm very concerned that you're going to say to him, ‘Just telling you about this document so you know,’ but what he’s going to hear is, ‘Just telling you about this document so you know, and don’t f--- with me,’ because this was right at a time when the president-elect in his tweets was attacking the intelligence community, and I was concerned that what the president-elect was going to hear from this stay-behind was, “Just telling this so you know, and don’t f--- with me."
From his statements, from his own statements, that's exactly the way Mr. Trump heard it.And I said, “Jim, do you have to be the one to do this?,” because everybody else in that [Trump Tower] meeting that day, the day before, was leaving in two weeks, except for him.He was going to have to work with the president-elect.And he said something like, “I got the short straw,” and the rest, as they say, is history.
It’s fascinating when you're us and you've learned as much as you possibly can about Trump and you've had the benefit of Comey’s book to realize the extent to which this moment, if ever there was a crystallizing moment for what's going to follow, there it is, these two men from completely different places.
Yeah.Donald Trump is the first president in the history of this country to be elected president without having served a single day prior on the public payroll in a civilian job or in the military.He comes from the rough-and-tumble New York state real estate market.I come from the rough-and-tumble New York legal market, so in addition to having met Mr. Trump, I felt like I knew him as a litigation adversary, as a client.I want to go back over the conversation because I didn't say it exactly right [in previous answer].
I called Jim.I got him on the phone.I said, “Jim, have you ever met Donald Trump before?"A little to my surprise, he said, “No, I have not."I said: “Jim, you're in a very awkward spot here.You're going to brief him about that dossier one-on-one?"And I said to him, “Jim, you know the history of the FBI better than I do."He and I had talked about that.We talked about the document he kept in his desk drawer which was the authorization to wiretap Martin Luther King.We talked about the fact that my own grandfather, who was a sociologist in the ’40s and ’50s, had an FBI file.
I said, “Jim, you know the history of the FBI better than I do."We were talking about the Hoover era, and I said something, and he literally finished my sentence.I said, “Jim, there's a fine distinction between ‘Just telling you this so you know’ versus ‘Just telling this so you know, and don’t f--- with me.’” And Jim literally finished my sentence when I said that to him.That's apparently how Mr. Trump heard it.And I said, “I'm concerned that he’s going to hear the latter and not the former."
He heard it as a shakedown.
A shakedown, yes.
Leverage, he said.
I was concerned that that's how he would perceive what he was hearing from the FBI director on the first occasion of their meeting to talk about a very awkward, sensitive topic.
Mr. Comey goes to his car, and there's something that happens there that lights Comey up, I think.He goes to his car and writes down contemporaneous notes and what his reaction was to Trump.What was it?Did you ever talk to him about why he did that?
No, I did not.Obviously, he walked away from the conversation uneasy enough that he felt he had to make a contemporaneous note.
Then Trump, there’s a sort of two-pronged response … from Trump, always, and the second thing he does is, of course, call a press conference and immediately point to CNN and say fake news; immediately take on the press in Washington and New York, the big press, not the tabloid press he’s used to dealing with on Page Six.Were you surprised when that happened?
I was surprised and unsettled that we have a new president who is attacking institutions of his own government.The president is the custodian of the various institutions of his government.Part of his obligation as the CEO of the federal government is to uphold the dignity and the effectiveness of the institutions and organs of government that report and work for him.So I was surprised to see our president attacking his own intelligence community, his own law enforcement community.These are people who work for him and are sworn to uphold the constitution of the United States.This was an unprecedented historic situation.
Going backward just for a little while, the first part of our film will be back in New York when Trump is 27 or 28.He does an EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] [lawsuit]; he gets Roy Cohn to represent him in that battle.We've talked to the young Justice Department lawyer [Elyse Goldweber], the young woman who was 27 years old at the time and realizes her first case is against Roy Cohn.What do you figure the lessons from the mentor Roy Cohn might have been to Donald Trump in those days?
My sense of President Trump, given his life experience, is that he views lawyers literally as hired guns and mouthpieces, representatives who work for him, whose obligation is solely to him and his interest.It’s obvious that he’s never before been acquainted with a situation where someone he appoints has a semi-independent role as the chief law enforcement officer of the country or the chief intelligence official of the country or the director of the NSA. In Mr. Trump's world up until Jan. 20, 2017, a lawyer on his payroll works for him and the sole obligation is to him, and the sole loyalty was to him.
He’s now in a new situation that's more complicated, more sensitive and more difficult to navigate, so he sets out in a very unprecedented way to assert himself and say, “The Department of Justice is mine, and I can do with it what I want,” which is an extraordinary statement coming from a president of the United States.
It looks to me, when I watch it as closely as we can, that there's a number of moments where Trump is testing that and testing Comey as his lead, especially before [Jeff] Sessions gets in as AG [attorney general].The first one is a couple of days after the inauguration, that moment where Jim Comey is trying to blend into the curtains, as he says, and you watch that footage as they come across the room.Take me there.What is—
It’s plain what's going on.There was some kind of ceremony after the inauguration—
Inauguration for the law enforcement people.
Because the director of the Secret Service was there, who had worked for me, and so it’s plain he’s having some sort of recognition ceremony, because the inauguration itself is a very, very large security operation.I know because I planned it before I left office that day.
What's he doing when he's calling Jim Comey out across that room and they do that kind of forced man-hug thing?
My take is that he’s sizing him up, both physically, literally and figuratively.He’s sizing him up.“OK, I've heard a lot about this Comey guy.I spoke to him on the phone.Everybody listens to him.Is he too big to swim in my pond?"I think that's literally what's going through the president’s head.
Yeah, he says, “You may even be more famous—” this is Jim Comey—“You may be even more famous than me."
Exactly.President Trump has a habit in many contexts, whether it’s Twitter or in an open mic situation like that, of saying exactly what's on his mind.He’s obviously sizing up Comey at that moment and trying to take his measure, which leads to the subsequent encounters where he’s asking about loyalty.
Let's go there, to the loyalty moment.So that's the 22nd, when he says he’s more famous than me.By the 27th, which is Friday, Attorney General, Acting Attorney General [Sally] Yates has been up to the White House to sit with [White House Counsel] Don McGahn and say: “You've got trouble with your NSA. We know something about Mike Flynn, Gen. Flynn."McGahn says to her: “What do you want me to do with this?What am I supposed to do with this information?"She tells him, and it’s that night at 6:00 that Comey is invited over to the White House for dinner for two.What do you make of that?
I don't know if I'd read too much into the confluence of those two events.I don't know that they are related.But clearly, what the acting attorney general was saying to the White House counsel [was], “You have someone working in this building, in this West Wing, who is compromised in some way."Now, most lawyers and most national security officials would understand immediately what they're being told and the import and the weight of what they're being told, that you have someone working for you in this building, in this place where there is highly sensitive information who is compromised in some way, and subject to some form of blackmail from somewhere.I don't know whether the event that evening is at all related.
Let's make it not related.Let’s just say Trump is, what, continuing to size him up?
Right.And that's exactly what he’s doing.He's inviting Jim to dinner to size him up, to see whether he is going to, in the way Mr. Trump is accustomed to in his private life, is going to be loyal to him.“You're going to be working for me.I need to have your loyalty."And through private citizen Trump's eyes, that's the way it had worked up until then at that point.“Everyone who works for me is working for me because they are loyal to me and I know it."
It doesn't take President Trump very long to fire Sally Yates.That's the very same day that the executive order of the travel ban has been rolled out.It takes just four or five days before she's let go.What signal does that send?
The signal it sent was: “I'm not going to hesitate to fire somebody.I'm not going to spend a lot of time deliberating over whether to fire somebody.I'm just going to do it."And that was a message he obviously sent very intentionally and purposefully early on in his administration.
And the effect at an institution like the Justice Department when that happens?
Demoralizing.Sends a signal that: “Hey, I know you've thought that up until now, you had a certain degree of independence to do what's right, to do what you think the law is required.It's going to be different now.New sheriff in town."
You know Comey well enough to know the answer to this.Is it the kind of thing that would have bothered him, or does he figure he’s got a ten-year deal, he’s good?
You know, I believe that Jim rightly thought that, though as a matter of law the FBI director can be fired anytime, anywhere for just about any reason, and Jim said that himself, he expected some degree of tenure, because it’s in the law that there's a defined term for the FBI director, and Congress did that because they wanted to create the expectation that the FBI director would serve through multiple administrations, irrespective of which political party the president came from compared to who appointed him.So I suspect Jim was planning to serve his full term through several administrations.
OK, so what you can help us with is a sense of what that feels like, what that building tension must feel like.
First of all—and I've had to fire people.When I was in public office, when I was a Cabinet-level official, I had to fire people, I had to let them go, very senior people, because it just wasn't working out.I think there's a certain expectation about how you let somebody go.My personal practice was, if I was going to let somebody go, it would be a face-to-face conversation, and I would give them the dignity of informing them in private first before they see it or hear about it on the news.
Apparently that didn't happen in Jim’s case.All of a sudden it’s on TV. He’s in California at a field office, and that's how he finds out.I just believe that if somebody’s in office to serve their country and do what's right for their country and it doesn't work out, and as we get higher up in government, the more senior we get, we all kind of know that we dance on the head of a pin and we don’t have a lot of job security, and if it’s not working out for whatever reason, we're told to move on.We kind of all get that, especially in the Cabinet.But at least you expect to be told in a certain way by the president, by his chief of staff in a private conversation, and you don’t read about it or see it on TV.
<v MICHAEL KIRK> But of course in those early days, he’s got an investigation he’s doing.He's the director of the FBI; it’s a brand-new president.He’s got a lot of irons in the fire.He’s got to feel like I've got things I have to do.Of course.And he was fired effective immediately, yeah.If you're running a large government agency and you're asked to leave, you’ve got to close certain things out.There are matters left open sitting on your desk, especially if you're out of the office, you just have to take care of, obviously.
Let’s go back to another moment.Flynn has been fired, Trump is very angry, blames The Washington Post, blames the press.… They're having a meeting in the Oval Office, and there's [Jared] Kushner, and there's Sessions, and there's Jim Comey, and he tells Kushner to leave.He shoos Sessions out, sits alone with Comey now and says: “Mike Flynn’s a good guy.Maybe you can give him a break."What about that moment?
That was obviously Donald Trump doing what he thought was a good idea without regard to the protocols for having such a conversation with the senior federal law enforcement official of our country, and he obviously thought that he could have that kind of conversation with the director of the FBI and expect that they would keep it to themselves.It’s just now how it works.
Barack Obama, for example, knew that you couldn’t have that kind of conversation with any federal law enforcement officer about a pending investigation.Donald Trump has said that Barack Obama had Eric Holder to protect him when he was attorney general and Barack Obama was president.Barack Obama didn't need protecting because he had the instincts of a lawyer and an honest public servant to know that the president does not have a conversation with the attorney general or the director of the FBI about an open criminal investigation.Barack Obama knew that you don’t suggest to the intelligence officials who are working for you that they shade their conclusions in some way or suggest what their answers ought to be.He would listen, he would take it in, he would ask questions.He might suggest, “Maybe you ought to be focused over here; maybe we ought to work on gathering intelligence in this particular area where we're weak."But President Obama would never suggest to law enforcement officers how an investigation should come out or inquire about it, or suggest to intelligence officers what their bottom line conclusion should be in their assessments.He just knew that in office going in.
After that meeting, Comey goes back to the office and then he goes over to the Justice Department.He sits with new attorney general, Jeff Sessions.There's a great moment in the book where Comey says Sessions is looking at the table, and his eyes are darting back and forth, and he says to Sessions: “Don’t leave.You can never leave me alone in the room with the president of the United States.You just can't do that."
Obviously, Jim felt that that was necessary with this president.He was not comfortable being left alone one-on-one.Hence the contemporaneous notes, the records of what was said.… And which I tend to believe.I tend to believe Jim’s recollections in his book, because that much of the conversation he and I had on Jan. 6 is accurate.That which is stated is accurate.
So you really think he’s keeping a record.Is it for a legal thing?Why is he doing that?
I think his lawyer’s instincts were telling him to keep a contemporaneous, accurate record of conversations he had with President Donald Trump.
Give me your sense of who Jeff Sessions is.
I became acquainted with Jeff Sessions from being grilled by him in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, and we’d also have off-the-record discussions in his office.Occasionally I'd even drop by and see him.So I've been beat up by Jeff Sessions in Senate Judiciary hearings and he’s a rock-ribbed conservative and very pro-law enforcement.And you know, what you see with Jeff Sessions is what you get: very predictable, hard-line conservative, and that's exactly the role he has assumed as attorney general.
Former U.S. attorney, must understand probably the separation you and I have been talking about, in norms and values at least, if not in law, between the attorney general and the president.
Right.But it’s plain that when Attorney General Sessions recused himself that citizen Trump just could not get his head around that.“Wait a minute.I hired you to be my lawyer, and now you're telling me that you're going to continue to be my lawyer, but you're not really going to look out for my interests."To Donald Trump, the real estate developer, the businessman, the private citizen, that's not a concept he’s going to be able to get his head around.To this day, you still see him venting about it.
Well, you're a lawyer, and you also know how the government works, and you know what the institutional ideas are.And when the president asks him to un-recuse himself—“Is there a way for you to go back and just take it back?"—what did you think?
Well, if the underlying conflict that led to your recusal still exists, there's little room for you to un-recuse yourself.In the private world, in which citizen Trump and I come from, if you hire a lawyer and the lawyer says, “I'm sorry; I can't do the job that you hired me to do, or I can't do 50 percent of the job you hired me to do,” then say, “Fine, you're fired; I'll go find somebody else."Apparently he feels like he’s stuck with his current attorney general because the Senate has a say in this, too.
Exactly.[Sen. Chuck] Grassley (R-Iowa) steps up and says, “We may not find time on our busy schedule to re-interview another set of candidates."
Right.But the situation that President Trump, who has never before been in government, walked into was OK, you get to hire and [appoint] all these lawyers who are political appointees: your attorney general, your solicitor general, your U.S. attorneys, your White House counsel.And there's a degree of independence that your chief law enforcement officer must have to do this job, and for legal and political reasons there's a degree of separation that you must maintain with your chief law enforcement so that you don’t put yourself, and him, in any kind of legal or political peril.
That's historically how the job has been.I saw that firsthand in the Obama administration.President Obama understood that acutely.So you have President Trump walking into that situation, who’s never before been in government, never before had to deal with anything like this, who simply believes from his private-sector perspective that “Every lawyer I hire works for me, and they're there to look out for my interests and protect my interests and watch my back and protect my ass,” basically.He obviously cannot get his head around a situation where he’s hiring a law to, in his eyes, protect him who says, “I can't protect you."
You think anybody explained this to Trump and he understood it from the get-go?
Probably not. Probably not.
Because you think about the cascading events that we've been talking about here…
It's obvious to me that Donald Trump looked at Jim Comey, all 6’7” of him, and says: “This guy is like Kevin Costner, Mr. Untouchable, and I’ve got to take his measure.Is he too big a fish to swim in my pond?Is my pond big enough for the two of us?"In President Trump's mind, he wants to know, “Does this guy realize I'm boss, and is he willing to pledge loyalty to me?"That's what Donald Trump was looking for and in his own very heavy-handed way tried to obtain.
… It seems to be dominating his presidency through the first 100 days, the first 105 days, 110 days.He’s sitting there, and he asks, he actually asks Comey a couple times, “Could you just say out loud that I'm not the focus of the investigation?"
Love him or hate him, Jim Comey is a remarkable communicator.He has a way of communicating a message that is very vivid, very colorful, very graphic, very straightforward, very simple.The press hangs on every word coming from Jim Comey, and I don't think it’s coincidence that he was fired not long after he had testified before Congress in very vivid terms.I'm sure that Mr. Trump watched a lot of that testimony, if not all of it, and was probably seething that he has somebody working for him who is as telegenic and an able communicator as he is.
It is after the next time he testifies—we're coming right up to where he gets fired—that he talks a lot about Hillary Clinton, and … this is what he said: “Nauseated.I was nauseated at the idea that I might have caused the election to go the way it [did]."To your point, Trump people tell us Trump sat there and TiVo’d it and went back and forth and back and forth.To what effect, what do you think?You think it’s like stoking him up?Why is Trump doing that, do you think?
I think President Trump simply could not stand having someone in his pond who’s a fish almost as big as he is, who is as high a profile as he is.And he expects that everyone who works in his administration works for him and is subservient to him.
When he decides to fire him, he’s been at Bedminster, [N.J., at Trump National Golf Club], with his—
Hence the phrase “showboat,” right?
What do you mean?
Well, after President Trump fired Jim Comey, I think he said, “He's a showboat."Wasn’t that the phrase?
Yeah.
A showboat.
Yes.
In President Trump's administration, there's room for only one showboat.
… As he’s getting ready to fire him, he has Sessions and Rosenstein come over, and they write up a thing about—what did you make of that?
I thought that was extraordinarily interesting.Coming from the Cabinet, I have a good sense for how these things work, though this was obviously a very different context.Obviously the president, the attorney general, the deputy attorney general reach a decision that Director Comey is going to go, so the AG and the deputy AG say, “OK, we're going to work up this paper record that he’s being fired for the following reasons,” and they generate that record, and basically President Trump blows it up by saying, “Here are the reasons why I fired him, and I fired him."So his lawyers at the Department of Justice had tried to create some distance between him and the firing, which is what you would customarily expect … Then as soon as Donald Trump gave the interview to Lester Holt [on NBC], he basically blew all that up and said, “No, it was me, and here's why."I could appreciate the frustration of those who had generated this record, which basically the president ripped to shreds.
…Where were you when you heard that Comey had been fired?
I remember it vividly.I was on the Acela coming from Washington to New York.I frequently travel between Washington and New York.It was late afternoon, early evening.I was just getting into Penn Station.I was gathering my stuff to get up and leave.As the train was coming out of the tunnel and working its way into Penn Station, I glanced at my iPhone; I saw an alert that I thought said, “Comey fired."And I said, “Wait a minute."And I had to pick it up again and reread it because I didn't believe what my eyes were seeing when I saw the word “Comey” and “fired” in the same sentence.
What did you think?
I wasn't surprised.I was not surprised.I was surprised at how tenacious an act it was, but I was not surprised because it was becoming clear to me that Jim was just too big a fish in President Trump's pond. So I was not surprised. …
Rod Rosenstein appoints a special prosecutor, and the special prosecutor is Robert Mueller III. Who is Robert Mueller III?
Robert Mueller III is about the straightest straight arrow in Washington.He’s been in private law practice at various points in his career, but in his heart, he’s a public servant.I think he had actually been U.S. attorney in California, came to Washington, was in private law practice, and then applied for a job as a line federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., after having been U.S. attorney, I think, in San Francisco.
Correct.
So this is a guy who, in his heart of hearts, through and through, is a public servant and a law enforcement official.
When he was a prosecutor, who did he work for?Maybe Eric Holder?Is it possible that he worked for Holder here?
Well, he was appointed first in the Bush years, and then he worked for Attorney General Holder, yeah.
And he used to like to answer his phone, “Mueller, Homicide."
I can believe it.I can believe it.Yes, “Mueller, Homicide”—that sounds like Bob Mueller, yes.And by the way, extraordinarily disciplined.I can't remember what the subject was; he was in my office when I was secretary of homeland security.He was no longer FBI director.He was there to talk to me about something; I can't remember what it was.My chief of staff was in the meeting with us, and my chief of staff wanted to ask him about some tidbit of information, some juicy tidbit of information that he knew Mueller had.So he just came right out and asked him, and Bob Mueller, stone-faced, just refused to answer.He wasn’t nibbling.He wasn't gossiping in the least to anybody.Straight arrow.
We interviewed an FBI agent who had been real close to Mueller and worked with him, and I asked for a description of what you would think if you were going to describe Bob Mueller as special prosecutor.He said, “Be afraid; be very afraid,” that this is a guy who’s going to come right at it, right?
Well, my sense of Special Counsel Mueller is that he will not be afraid to decline to indict somebody.The rap on the special counsel concept is that when you have a prosecutor who’s dedicated to one investigation, as opposed to dozens and hundreds of investigations, they feel obliged, since they’ve spent all this taxpayer money, to come up with something.My sense of Director Mueller is that if at the end of the day and a thorough investigation—it’s obvious he’s conducting a very thorough investigation—he does not reach the ultimate conclusion that initially got us on this trail, he will say so.He will say so in a very thorough, thoughtful document of some sort.
From what you could tell from outside, what do you think of the composition of his team?
It’s hard to know.They're so tight, they're so buttoned down that it’s hard to know what they're doing.There have been, as far as I could see, no leaks coming out of that organization.It’s the most disciplined group of people in Washington, D.C., in terms of what they're doing.It’s hard to know who’s doing what.The only time you ever get any insights is when one of the private lawyers, who accompanies a witness in, decides to gossip to the press, because as far as I can see, they're not saying a word inside Mueller's office.
As they're forming and the composition is there's like a Supreme Court specialist, money-laundering guys, white-collar-crime people, it really looks like they're the kind of people you would worry about if you were Donald Trump—
Of course.
—and you had a business life prior to being president of the United States [that] may or may not have connected you to Russia.
Yeah.It's obvious they're doing a very, very thorough job.They're looking at many, many aspects of his official life and of his private life from the campaign, so, if at the end of the day they determine there was no collusion, Donald Trump will have legitimate bragging rights.“I've been the subject of the most thorough investigation ever conducted in the history of this country, and they came up with a verdict of innocent."He’ll have legitimate bragging rights at that point if that happens.
When he's talking about firing Mueller last summer, you can imagine why his lawyer came in and said, “No, no, no, no."Explain why and how Donald Trump can think he could fire Mueller and Sessions in one fell swoop.
Well, I like to say those who know history learn from it.Those who don’t know the mistakes of history are bound to repeat them.I heard somebody say the other day … the mistakes of history tell us those who fire special counsel are on the path to impeachment, and I think he’s been told that a number of times.
He hires [John] Dowd and [Ty] Cobb to be … like a concession to the Washington establishment to at least get a couple of bona fide old pros to come in and start a conversation with Mueller, to do what you would do, or anybody would do, as an attorney, which is meet the other side and say—
By the way, the letter from January that was leaked somehow to the press that stakes out the most aggressive view of presidential power, it’s obvious to me that's all posturing.It’s all posturing to get to a place where there's an interview by the special counsel on terms that are acceptable to the president and his lawyers.So the special counsel has the ultimate, if you will, trump card, which is a subpoena.To try to level that playing field, Donald Trump's lawyers have obviously staked out this very, very aggressive view of presidential power—“I can pardon myself”; “I committed no crime”; “They all work for me”—to say, “Well, here's my leverage to counteract your subpoena power leverage."It’s all posturing; it's all negotiation.That letter stakes out a view of presidential power even more aggressive than Nixon to [David] Frost in 1977.If the president does it, it is not illegal.It's even more aggressive than that, but my sense of it, again, coming from that rough-and-tumble New York business world, it’s all posturing; it’s all negotiation.
He's just pushing the edge just to see where the edge is.
Well, he’s creating negotiation space.That's what they're doing.They're creating negotiation space.It’s just like trying to reach a deal around money where my client says, “I will pay no more than 10,” and the adversary says, “Well, if you are only offering 10, I want a billion,” and try to create a middle point that is somewhere up here instead of down there.I've seen that movie before multiple times in my private lawyer life, and I suspect Mr. Trump has, too.
It then all takes a kind of funky turn when Mueller's team, through Rosenstein, sends it up to the Southern District of New York, sends some of the case up to—the Michael Cohen parts of the case.What did you think when you heard about that gambit?
Oh, by the way, the lawyer President Trump hired for that proceeding was also an alumnus of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.
Who’s that?
Joanna Hendon.So we all kind of know each other.
That's nice.So when it gets kicked up to SDNY, what did you think?What was the meaning of that?How does that make sense?
It was going to be a separate proceeding involving a search warrant on a search that occurred in New York involving a New York lawyer.So that was not a surprise.And of course the U.S. attorney recused himself in about five minutes.
Because?
For reasons I'm not fully privy to.
OK. So the way it seems is it’s a pretty aggressive warrant for an attorney.It goes inside all of his paper records, his devices at home, in the office, at the hotel.That attorney happens to be the attorney of the president of the United States.
Well, here's what I can't get my head around.There is a legal proceeding in United States district court where the president of the United States in his personal capacity is adverse to the United States government.That's what I can't get my head around.
Explain what that means.
The lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his client were adverse to the United States government, the Department of Justice that had executed the search warrant on the president’s lawyer.So you had lawyers for the target of the search, the lawyer, and you had lawyers for the lawyer’s client basically on the same side, adverse to the United States government, this president’s own government.That's what I have trouble getting my head around.
Now Rudy Giuliani enters the game.You know Mr. Giuliani well.
Yes.Rudy Giuliani actually introduced me to Donald Trump on Sept. 11, 2016.I remember the moment.He was actually very proud.“I hired him; I hired him in 1988."
And what is Rudy doing for the president of the United States at this moment in our saga?
Well, so far as I can tell, he’s effectively his public spokesperson, his public spokesperson in the investigation.Far as I can tell.I have no sense of what goes on internally behind closed doors in terms of legal strategy and who leads that discussion.As far as I can tell, Rudy is the face of the legal team.And 30 years ago, Rudy hired me.He was then sort of the face of the new type of very visible U.S. attorney in this country, going after bad guys, Mr. Untouchable, taking down a lot of organized crime figures, public corruption—sort of the model for the modern-day U.S. attorney.
We all wanted to work for Rudy Giuliani back then, and it was considered probably just about the best legal job you could have in Manhattan in the Southern District of New York, also known as the “Sovereign District of New York,” to work for Rudy Giuliani.
Fast-forward to 13 years later —Sept. 11, 2001, I thought Mayor Giuliani set another really fine example in the way he led we New Yorkers through that crisis in the days after 9/11.And I've told him this.He set the model for how to be the visible leader to reassure the public after a crisis.And I told Rudy that: “I have tried to follow your example as secretary of homeland security.During a crisis, it’s important to show up.During a crisis, it’s important to be visible, to communicate to the people what's happening in plain, straightforward terms.They want to hear from their leaders in a time of crisis, fear, anxiety and doubt."
What happened to him?
Couldn’t say.After I became secretary of homeland security, I called him up, and I—9/11/2014 was approaching, and I said, “Mr. Mayor, I'm going to be in New York on 9/11, and I'd like to spend 9/11 with you, and I'd like you to take me around to the less obvious places that you think I ought to see."So we spent the day at Ground Zero, at the World Trade Center, but we also spent the day in various different police precincts and firehouses in Lower Manhattan that he knew had made a special contribution on 9/11.I was really pleased to do that.Walking the streets of New York, far more people recognized him than recognized me. …
So now let’s talk about the effect of the president’s actions.Through this last 18-month saga, you’ve sworn to uphold the rule of law.You served your country in Washington.What's at risk now as it looks like he’s on an affirmative plan: Diminish the Justice Department; diminish the Federal Bureau of Investigation.… Forget what he’s doing with the press in America and the truth.Now he’s [taking aim] at an institution you once took an oath for, the Justice Department, the idea of it, the rule of law.He doesn't seem to understand it.We've talked to people who are desperately worried about the impact of this.
It depresses me to watch our president denigrate institutions of his own government, whether it’s the law enforcement community or the intelligence community.I'll give you a very specific example.Federal criminal prosecution of a really bad guy that the FBI investigated, and the judge has to conduct a voir dire, an examination of the jurors, and they very often will ask: “Do you know so-and-so of the FBI?Do you know this person of the FBI?"If the most visible person in America is denigrating the FBI, then you might face a situation where members of the public randomly drawn for a jury pool are going to have a bad impression of the FBI in a case where the FBI is trying to bring a really bad guy to justice.
That's not in our interest, and that's not in the interest of our public safety, frankly.So I'm worried that the continued attacks on our law enforcement community, on the FBI, will have a long-term impact on the image that Americans, including Americans who are picked for juries in cases where they have to assess the credibility of an FBI agent, and it’s going to suffer.I'm very worried about the impact that's going to have day to day on the ability of the FBI to do its law enforcement job to catch really bad guys in this country.
How do you think the people who work at the Justice Department in Washington and the Federal Bureau of Investigation feel about what they're doing now?How’s their security?How’s their sense of mission?
Well, I'll strike an optimistic tone.I know from running an organization of 230,000 people, 22 departments, that most of what goes on in Washington, the folks out in the field don't pay that much attention to.They're doing their job at the border, in the field offices, at the ports, at the airports, in the field offices of the FBI.They're doing their job day to day, and lots of times they just tune out the political noise coming out of Washington.
I think we should be reassured that for the most part, the rank and file of the FBI, the Department of Justice, or some of the components that worked in DHS for me, for the most part, out in the field they tend to tune all of this out.It’s the political leadership of these organizations in Washington that I think suffer from these type of attacks.… You could see the impact in attitudes jurors have in cases where the FBI is trying to get a conviction.We see opinion polls where the public’s impression of the FBI has declined just since the rhetoric over the last several months.
Just a couple of things I think would be good to clean up.The June 2016 Don Jr. meeting with the Russian lawyers and stuff at Trump Tower: When you heard about it, or when you think about it, [what is] the significance that you place on that?You said in the past that it’s a pretty shocking event.Take us a little bit into how perhaps Mueller would view that issue.Why is that meeting important to understand?
Here's the one thing I have to offer on that.If I'm in a campaign and I've been in one or two presidential campaigns, and I received an email like the one that came to the folks in the Trump campaign from someone purporting to be acting on behalf of the Russian government, and I don't remember exactly what the email said, I would run the other way.Because the email was so brazen, I would think either I'm about to walk into something really dumb, or I'm being set up in some way.My recollection of the email is that it was so brazen that I would have to think that I was being set up somehow.It was not subtle.
So the fact that Don Jr. answered when offered dirt on Hillary Clinton—“I love it; we can find it really useful in the fall”—and then invites [former campaign chair Paul] Manafort and his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, into a meeting at Trump Tower with this Russian attorney, what does that tell you?
Tells me that the people running that campaign didn’t have a good compass for trouble, didn't have a good metal detector for trouble, instances where they're about to be manipulated or possibly set up.By the way, my bottom line on this entire discussion: I believe our democracy, our system of government, is strong enough, it's durable enough, to survive any potential constitutional crisis that we could see coming out of this whole episode.I think the framers in their wisdom—though there's a lot about what the framers did that is dated.Our framers countenanced slavery.
There's a lot of language in the framers’ documents that is, frankly, dated and sterile.But they had the wisdom to create a system of checks and balances between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary that to this day still work just about right.When one branch of government overexerts itself, the other two branches push back.We've seen that time and again, whether it’s the Nixon era, whether it was even the Roosevelt era with the court-packing plan, whether it was during the Civil War.When one branch of government, particularly the executive branch of government, overexerts itself, becomes too aggressive, you see the other branches, the legislative and/or the judicial branch, push back to the equilibrium that the framers originally intended.
And in that respect, I think our system of government and our constitution works beautifully to this day.
There's no doubt about it, and I think most of the constitutional scholars you talk to say it’s not really a constitutional matter that we really have to worry very much about in this, at least the ones we talk to.They're more concerned about norms and values, things like independence of the director of the FBI.
You make a good point.People in the press, commentators, overuse the phrase “constitutional crisis."… A constitutional crisis occurs when, let’s say, the judiciary orders the president to do something like turn over tapes and the president refuses to do it.That's a constitutional crisis.The president says, “I refuse to do it, and I have the army."That's a constitutional crisis.
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