The FRONTLINE Interviews
Matt Apuzzo
The New York Times
Matt Apuzzo is a reporter for The New York Times, where he covers law enforcement and security matters.
This is the transcript of a two-part interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on May 8 and May 31, 2018. It has been edited for clarity and length. An asterisk indicates the start of a new interview.
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It’s Jan. 6, 2017.The four intelligence chiefs are on their way into Trump Tower.Tell me the story, will you?What are they going there to do?What's the impact, import of it all at that particular moment in this story?
They went there with essentially two goals.The first is they were going to brief the president-elect, Donald Trump, on what is now known as the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), basically, their findings on the Russian government’s meddling and hacking during the 2016 campaign.It’s a big moment because Donald Trump is just about to get sworn in, and now the intelligence chiefs are going to come to him and say, “We think there was foreign interference in the election you won."This is a fraught moment for them.
Then separately, Jim Comey, the FBI director, has a second agenda item.And all the intelligence chiefs got together and agreed that this one was going to be just Comey, because they were all going to leave, but Comey was sticking around, and Comey needed to have a private conversation with the president-elect after the intelligence brief.
So Comey pulls the president aside.The president asks everyone else to clear the room.And he tells him: “Hey, listen, I need you to know that there's this…” —what we now call the dossier—“this collection of intelligence reports that have been put together by a retired MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, that makes a number of allegations about connections between your campaign and, Mr. President-Elect, and you personally and the Russian government.And these are in the hands of the media.They also have been obtained by the FBI, and I need you to know that that might break at any moment."
This is a really perilous decision, and Comey has talked about how he felt like, with the wrong tone, this could be a real J. Edgar Hoover moment, right?He could go in there and be like, “Hi, I'm from the FBI here with this salacious stuff to let you know that for the next eight years, I'll be lording this over you."
We know from Comey’s contemporaneous memos that he went in with a tone very much of: “The FBI's here to protect you.We are here to help you.We are not here to let this get out, and let's try to figure out a way to keep this information from going public, because we know it would be damaging."That's a real key moment, both in the relationship between the FBI and the president, but also in the president and his understanding of what was out there in the media and in the intelligence world about him and his campaign.
Do you think he knew about the dossier?
We don’t have any evidence that he knew.We can tell from Comey’s memos that the president-elect was surprised, and surprised, frankly, that the stories hadn't come out.Comey talks about how President-Elect Trump says, “I'm really surprised they haven’t run with this."And Comey says: “Well, this is pretty salacious stuff, and if they just published the raw reports, they’d get fairly well beat up for running it.Let’s not do anything, Mr. President-Elect, that's going to give anybody a news hook to write about it."
The irony here, of course, is that CNN, which, like many news organizations, had the Steele documents, used the briefing itself as the news hook to start reporting on what is now known as the dossier.
What are the stakes for [CIA Director John] Brennan, [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, [NSA Director Adm. Michael] Rogers and Comey going into that room that day?
In what I guess we would call a normal situation, because so much of this is not normal, but in a normal situation, I think you can imagine the three [sic] intelligence chiefs going in and briefing the president-elect and telling him, “We have real concerns about foreign meddling,” and having some kind of a conversation about how to respond, “OK, what's being done?,” and having the president-elect at least buy into the conclusion, the unanimous conclusion, of the American intelligence agencies.
But what happened here was even before the briefing, even before the briefing, Donald Trump was talking about how this was a witch hunt and the Russia stuff was fake news.This was not a normal briefing, because they were pushing on a closed door.They were pushing on a locked door.The president-elect was not buying the premise that Russia had, in any way, interfered with the election.
So they're coming in there to sell him so that something will happen, whatever that is?
Well, I don't know that they saw it as a sales job.I think normally, a briefing is a sort of an exchange of information.But if it was a sales job, the president-elect wasn’t buying.He made it clear.… He had a phone interview that day with The New York Times where he said, “This is a political witch hunt."That's really the first time that he rolls out that phrase in connection with the Russia.And, of course, that's really a harbinger of things to come.The president has insisted for the first essentially two years of his administration that everything about Russia is a political witch hunt.
All right.So [Comey] goes downstairs; he gets in the black car.
He gets into his FBI car and starts just typing on an FBI laptop and types up his recollections because he thinks this is really important, because the president’s reaction to that second private briefing was significant enough that the FBI director thought that that needed to be memorialized.You can see that there's some confusion.You can see in the memos that this is something that's coming together very quickly.He's like: “Look, I don't know what classification this needs to be at.I'm coding this as secret.If it needs to be elevated, elevate it."
It's obviously something that he hadn’t planned to do.This was something that came together very quickly and really became the first of what we now know as the Comey memos.
It doesn't take long for CNN to report the existence of a meeting and to use the word “dossier” in the reporting.And then BuzzFeed runs all of the dossier.How does that happen, do you think?How do they know what they know enough for CNN first to do it, and then BuzzFeed to push the button?
Well, the dossier, which isn't really a dossier—it’s just this sort of collection of intelligence reports and memos—had been making its way around Washington for a while.And the author, Chris Steele, and Fusion GPS, the investigative firm that hired him, have talked about publicly how they were meeting with journalists because they wanted that information to get out.And as Comey said, there was no hook to run this.A lot of it was uncorroborated, and journalists, I think, were working to corroborate it.
Frankly, it took BuzzFeed to say: “We're going to rip the Band-Aid off.We're going to publish these things raw and unredacted, and we don’t even know if they're true."That is a really controversial decision in politics and in journalism, and particularly among national security reporters.Do you run stuff you don’t know to be true and just throw it out there against the wall and say, “Hey, this is out there; let’s find out if it’s true”?
… You can understand why President Trump thinks he just walked into a buzz saw, right?Here, he’s having his intelligence briefing with a bunch of Obama administration holdovers who are telling him: “Hey, there's been some problems with the election.We think that there's foreign interference."To him, that sounds an awful lot like you're making an excuse for why your candidate lost.
And then Comey pulls him aside and drops a bunch of things and says, “By the way, this is in the media and could come out."And then within hours, it’s out, and it’s all of this uncorroborated stuff that makes the president-elect look really bad.You can see why Donald Trump would think: “I just was set up.This was an ambush."
… The moment where Comey is trying to hide in the curtains and the new president is calling him across the room for a man hug—take me there. …<V MATT APUZZO> The president has gathered all of these dignitaries and officials together to thank them, and then Comey, who can't really hide very well because he’s so tall, it’s kind of—you're trying to blend into the curtains, and the president calls him out, says, “No, no, no, come here, come here,” and he awkwardly shakes his hand, and Comey looks very uncomfortable, and he’s walking across the room.Who’s Comey?Give me the 25-cent version of Jim Comey, the man who arrives at that moment.Who is this guy?
Comey’s a fascinating character.He’s a Republican FBI director.He’s the former deputy attorney general under George W. Bush, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, and he is known for being a very smart, charismatic, media-savvy and supremely confident lawyer.His real claim to fame is this moment during the Bush administration where the attorney general, John Ashcroft, is in the hospital, and the attorney general has said that he won't support a provision of President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program.The White House is incensed by this, and Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card from the White House race to the hospital to try to change John Ashcroft’s mind while he is medicated and recovering in the hospital.… There's this standoff where Comey and [FBI Director Robert] Mueller are saying: “No, the attorney general is not well.He has turned over his authority to Jim Comey at this moment because he’s in the hospital, and we are going to stand our ground.We are not reauthorizing this program.We believe it’s totally unconstitutional."
It’s basically a Mexican standoff, because if the White House is going to push forward with this, it’s obvious that Comey and Mueller are going to quit.And ultimately, the White House blinks, and this aspect of the warrantless wiretapping program is rescinded.That's really the moment for Jim Comey.If you're writing a Jim Comey origin story in Washington, for this chapter, you can place it pretty clearly at that moment.
What does it tell you about him?
Well, I think it tells me something about both Comey and about Mueller, and it’s this: Here are two men who both stood up for a principle and both were willing to walk away from their careers at this crucial moment because of a principle.They were willing to stand up for that principle.
But then what happened next tells you a lot about Comey and a lot about Mueller, is, I think, Mueller was probably willing to take that one to his grave.These two men had been through this crucible.They had been through this moment, and they had both viewed this as perhaps the greatest intrusion of White House politics into the Justice Department that they’d ever seen.Bob Mueller was probably going to take that one to his grave, and it was Jim Comey who ultimately testified in a major way for Congress about what had happened.We know about that largely because of Comey’s testimony.
That has been the Comey story in a lot of ways, is that he’s a man who feels very strongly about his principles, and he’s also somebody who understands how Washington works and understands how the media works and is supremely confident in his ability to pull those levers to get the outcome that he feels is just and appropriate.
And knows how to find the spotlight and use it.
He's very comfortable in interviews.He’s very comfortable on television.He commands a room, whether that's giving a speech or in a small conference room.He’s charismatic; he’s confident.And he says that he really wants to hear dissent among his team.He wants a vigorous debate.He wants to hear people argue with him.But if there's a knock on him inside the FBI, it’s that he can be so confident and charismatic and he’s so smart that the people don’t always … come with their criticism; that it isn't always an environment that fosters dissent.
If I was going to try to imagine a formidable opponent for Donald Trump, Donald Trump's bigger-than-life presence, persona, as the newly elected president of the United States, I wanted to fashion a representative of the rule of law who could probably stand up to the guy and grab the microphone, it would be Jim Comey.
Yeah.Obviously, we now know that President Trump has a view of what federal law enforcement should be, right?I mean, he wants an attorney general and FBI director who are his guys, and Comey was never going to be Trump's guy.I remember being in the Times newsroom and saying, “Well, he’s never going to fire the FBI director, because FBI directors just don’t get fired."But looking back, the tension was really inevitable, right, because President Trump wants an attorney general and an FBI director who are loyal to him and who protect him, and those are his priorities.And anybody who knew Jim Comey knew that that was never going to work out.
Comey’s sitting there in that first week of the presidency, has before him on his desk something involving the national security adviser, Gen. [Michael] Flynn.The FBI has had an open file on the guy for a while.Just give me the broad overview of what that file contained right at the beginning stages of this, of the Flynn story.
I'll answer that, but I want to do a little preamble on that.… The very inauguration of President Trump poses challenges to the FBI because in the fall of 2016, they open investigations on Michael Flynn, the future national security adviser; Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman of the Trump campaign; Carter Page, foreign policy adviser to the president’s campaign; and George Papadopoulos, foreign policy adviser to the campaign.
These are four people in the national security space who are all under FBI investigation in the fall of 2016.And now President Trump is taking office and the first person he puts around him is Michael Flynn, this retired general who, again, has been under investigation as part of the broader Russian collusion question.He’s also popped up on the FBI's radar screen because in late December of 2016, during the transition, he has phone calls with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, and they're having a conversation.The Obama administration has just issued new sanctions against Russia for their election meddling.
And in the conversation, Flynn says: “Hey, don’t overreact to this.Keep whatever your reaction is, keep it proportional.Don’t escalate this situation."He’s really trying to tamp down these new tensions.And when the news broke that that call had happened, the Trump team said: “No, he didn't talk about sanctions.Sanctions didn't come up."
At the FBI, at the Justice Department, CIA, NSA, they all knew that wasn't true, because Kislyak’s phones were being monitored, because he’s the Russian ambassador, and that's what American intelligence agencies do.So for a lot of intelligence officials, this was a problem, because Flynn had discussed something on the phone with the Russians.
Then it appeared that he had lied to the White House about what those conversations were about, and then the White House had lied to the American people about what those conversations were about.So in the eyes of American intelligence, the Russians now had leverage over Michael Flynn.The Russian government now knew something that they could use against Michael Flynn.They said, “Well, we know you lied to the president, and we know that that meant that the American people got lied to."
In the counterintelligence world, that's blackmail material, so there's this big debate about, well, what do we do?Do we tell the White House, “Hey, your guy is not telling you the truth”?Comey is of the mindset of, “Well, if we tell him, then he’ll know there's an investigation, and we're not exactly sure what's going on."Career intelligence officials were saying, “You have to mitigate the blackmail risk."
… So Sally Yates is the acting attorney general at the time, and she's saying, “We need to tell the White House."And Comey is saying, “Let’s just wait."And ultimately, what they do is a pair of FBI agents actually go to the White House and interview Michael Flynn.… We're not even a month into the administration, and the FBI is interviewing the national security adviser as part of an investigation.
In that interview, Flynn says: “We never talked about sanctions.Kislyak and I never talked about sanctions."And it’s this weird moment, because Flynn is a career intelligence guy.He knows that the Americans listen to those calls, so even Comey is confused as to, “Well, why would he lie about that?He knows we have the tapes."So it was a really perplexing moment.
But with that interview out of the way, it then freed up Sally Yates to then say: “OK, listen, we've got to tell the White House, because you have a potential compromise situation on his hands.He’s lied to the vice president; the White House has lied to the American public; Flynn has lied to the FBI; and the Russians know that those are lies.We need to mitigate the risk."
In this really remarkable moment, Sally Yates and a career official from the national security division actually go to the White House, and they sit down with Don McGahn, the White House counsel, and he said, “We've got a problem."They walk through this timeline, and they say, “We think this is serious, and the national security adviser could be compromised by the Russians."
Do they tell McGahn that they knew he lied?
Yeah.I don't think they talk about the FBI interview.They say, “The vice president has made representations that this is not how it went, and Sean Spicer, the press secretary, has made representations, and those are false."So McGahn says, “Well, what does it matter to you if one person at the White House lies to another person at the White House?"And Yates says, “Well, when that lie, it has the potential to give leverage to a foreign government against the national security adviser, then it becomes a counterintelligence problem, and that's why we're involved."McGahn says, “We’ll take it under advisement."
Sally Yates goes back to work, and then there's a follow-up conversation the next day, and it’s more of the same, the back-and-forth.And the White House wants to hear the tapes.The transcript is an easy production.They want to hear the tapes of Flynn and Kislyak to decide for themselves.That takes a little bit to arrange.“If you want to hear the tapes, here's how you do it, yada, yada, yada."
Then a really remarkable thing happens.Nothing.The White House basically takes it under advisement.Sally Yates finds herself crosswise with the White House over the travel ban and her refusal to enforce the travel ban.She is shown the door, and once Sally Yates is fired, it doesn't appear that any move is made at the White House to address her concerns about Michael Flynn.
… [On Jan. 27], this is all going on.You've got her meeting with McGahn about the lie by the national security adviser.You've got the travel ban, which she's reading on her iPad from The New York Times website, and guess what?There's a dinner at the White House that night, dinner for two.
Dinner for two.Unexpected dinner for two.… Jim Comey gets this unexpected dinner invitation to come to the White House, and he hadn’t obviously planned on that.But when the president asks you to dinner, you come.He shows up at the White House, and they have this ornate table, and it’s just Jim Comey and President Trump having dinner.
According to Comey’s memos, they have a little chitchat at the beginning, which Comey says is almost all the president just talking, and then [he] kind of opens it up with, “Well, what do you want to do?You know, what are you planning on doing now in this new administration?,” which is a little bit weird, because FBI directors don’t typically go out with outgoing administrations; they have 10-year terms.The whole idea is that they are not tied to the administration.And Trump says: “Oh, so what are you planning on doing?I hope you consider staying on.And I know it was tough.It was a tough year with the Hillary Clinton investigation."And Comey’s like, “Yeah, I plan to stay on."And Comey says the president had very nice words for him, so it’s just pleasant conversation.
And then the president says, “Can I expect loyalty from you?"Comey … kind of punts on that: “Well, you know, you'll always get honesty from me; I promise that.So if that's what you mean by loyalty, yeah."Then they go off and they talk about other things.
And then Trump comes back on loyalty and says, “I need loyalty."And he says, “Well, you'll always get honesty."And Trump says, “Yeah, that's what I mean, honest loyalty."And I think Comey says, “Yeah, yeah, honest loyalty, that's what you'll get."And he writes in his memos, “Well, look, we may have had different views as to what exactly I was agreeing to, but I didn't think there was any value in pressing that one further."Clearly, this is an FBI director who’s being made very uncomfortable.
And frankly, this is an FBI director who wanted to keep his job.I think that's looming over all of this, is the president starts the conversation with, “What do you want to do?Talk to me about your plans,” and, “Do you like your job?,” and then says, “I need loyalty."I think Comey would say he took the path of least resistance.
Trump has been schooled by Roy Cohn and others.His own dad has loyalty from Abe Beame, [mayor of New York City, 1974–1977], loyalty from city council presidents.Is that what he means by loyalty, do you think?Is that all in the psychology of Donald Trump at this moment?
I think it matters less what Trump means than how it comes across to Comey, right, because Comey’s the one doing the investigation.And if Comey feels like this is the president applying subtle pressure, then it’s sending a message, intended or not, that the president needs you to be his guy.We later find out—I mean, we now know that the president absolutely believes that federal law enforcement should be his guys, and he has railed against Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, for not being loyal enough: “Where's my Bobby Kennedy?Where's my Eric Holder?I want an attorney general who’s close to me."
But he also wants a Roy Cohn figure.He also wants somebody who’s just unfailingly loyal and protective.That's what he's seeking out.So … really, you start to see the seeds of that idea beginning to grow in that Comey dinner.
And if there was ever a demonstration project, firing Sally Yates a couple of days later, that certainly demonstrates loyalty or the door.
Sure.I mean, look, when Sally Yates sent that email saying, “I'm not going to enforce this,” she was on the clock, and it was pretty clear that she was going to be fired.There was no question there.I think everybody knew that.It was just a question of who would he find to get in there, to put in there.Who had the authority to sign the FISAs [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] and keep the Justice Department running?But firing Sally Yates certainly sent a message, but I also don’t think that there was any other outcome.
The story breaks about the Flynn intercepts.
Yeah, it was in The [Washington] Post, and I'm sure you're going to talk to somebody from the Post, and you should, because they did amazing work on the Flynn stuff.Yeah, the Post had reported in January, early January, that there had been these calls, and then they reported that there had been the calls, but there was nothing bad said on them.But then they broke the news that no, there had been.So the news broke that Flynn and Kislyak had discussed sanctions and that the White House had been lying about Flynn’s conversations.
And then we then learn the details about Sally Yates’ briefing for the White House.It’s like they're two weeks into office, three weeks into office, and look at how much has happened.You’ve got an FBI interview of your national security adviser; you've had two very tense meetings with the acting attorney general about whether the national security adviser is compromised as far as the Russian government is concerned; you've had a standoff between the attorney general and the president over whether his travel ban is unconstitutional.She's been fired.He’s asked the FBI director to have a loyalty oath.It’s a remarkably busy start to the Trump administration.
It’s in the wake of this that he clears the room after a meeting and asks Comey to stay behind.
The fact that they didn't fire Flynn for 18 days after getting the warnings from Sally Yates has never been fully explained.It’s very hard to see any other explanation besides the fact that the stories had become public and that really, it wasn’t the lie that did in Michael Flynn; it was the fact that journalists had uncovered the lie that did in Michael Flynn.
We've looked to see if there were any other explanations.At first they said: “Oh, you know, it just took us a while to figure it out.We didn't understand the seriousness."
I think in the end, it wasn't the fact that he had lied that did him in, because they knew he had lied as soon as Sally Yates walked in.It was the fact that reporters revealed to the world that he had lied and that the White House had known about it for 18 days and had done nothing.I think that ultimately is what did Michael Flynn in.
So it’s not about illegality or ethics or anything else.It’s a marketing problem; it’s a public relations problem, political problem?
I don't know if the Flynn calls in and of themselves actually violated any laws.There's this whole question about the Logan Act, which says private citizens can't interfere with U.S. policies.But look, I think a lot of people would say, many people would say, that Flynn’s message to Kislyak was probably the exact right message an incoming administration would want to have, which made it probably more peculiar that he wouldn't just come clean about what he had said, because if he had said, “Yeah, I told the ambassador, ‘Please let's not escalate tensions between our two countries as we are taking office,’” I don't think anybody would have said, “Well, that's terrible."So it wasn’t the lie.It was the fact that the world had learned about the lie.I think there's probably a part of Donald Trump that would have preferred to keep Michael Flynn on even after those stories.
When he’s sitting with Comey in the office alone, what does he say?What's that about?What's he doing that for?What's the reaction of Comey to that?
There's this meeting in the Oval Office, and the president actually clears the room and tells all of his advisers, and the attorney general is there, and he’s asked to leave, so it’s just Comey and the president one-on-one in the Oval Office.Again, we know in great detail about this meeting because Comey’s notes are so detailed.He talks about how the president says that he fired Flynn for lying to the vice president, and he says, “Flynn’s a good guy,” and Comey actually just agrees.He says: “You know what?Yeah, Michael Flynn’s a good guy."And then he says, “I hope you can see your way clear to just letting this go, to letting Flynn go."
… That is a startling moment in the relationship between the FBI and the White House, because whether or not the president has the authority to make such a request, presidents just are not making those requests.The president does not pick up the phone and say, “I want you to shut down this criminal investigation."On matters of criminal law, there's always been this understood wall between the White House and the president, and the president doesn't interfere with the day-to-day enforcement of criminal law, and the president doesn't get briefed on the daily investigations that the FBI conducts.This isn't a terrorist plot that the president needs to get briefed on.He’s asking the FBI to shut down an investigation into his national security adviser.
He just doesn't understand, or it’s an obstruction?
“Obstruction” is a legal term, right?And I think you have to get to a lot of hops to get there.You have to get over the hop of does this amount to obstruction or attempted obstruction?And then can the president even be charged with obstruction?For me, that doesn't matter.As a reporter, it doesn't matter.I've been covering federal law enforcement and national security in this city for 13 years, and this is a moment unlike any I've ever covered, because you have a president who is disregarding the norms, is disregarding the normal boundaries of the relationship between the White House and the FBI.
I think that moment really set in motion a lot of the problems between the president and the FBI that we've seen over the past year, year and a half.
Comey goes back [to] the moment in his book that—I listened to the book.…
Does he read his own book?
Yeah, he reads it. He tells the story of coming to Sessions and saying, “Please never leave me alone again with the president."He said, “His eyes looked down at the desk, and his eyes darted."The way he tells the story, the eyes darted.
Yeah, we broke that story.Comey’s at the Justice Department for a regular briefing.The regular briefing kind of winds down, and Comey pulls the attorney general aside and says: “You can't leave me alone with the president like that.You're supposed to be the guy who interacts with the president.The president is not supposed to pull me aside alone.You were in the room; you're supposed to say, ‘Mr. President, I need to stick around for this,’ or, ‘No, Mr. President, I have to advise that somebody else should be here.’ You’ve got to back me up.” …
Who is Jeff Sessions?Tell me, what's the 25-cent description of Jeff Sessions?
Sessions is a really interesting character.He’s a former federal prosecutor.He was a United States attorney in Mobile, Ala., during the bad days of the crack epidemic, and his views were formed and forged by the drug war.This was a moment where there was bipartisan consensus around the idea that we needed to be tough on crime and we needed long, mandatory minimum sentences, and that only aggressive policing and aggressive law enforcement would clean up the streets.And while most of the country's views on that have softened a bit, as crime has come down to record lows, Jeff Sessions has never wavered from that view.
The other thing that Sessions brings with him is a real hard-line view on immigration.Sessions has told stories about growing up in rural Alabama surrounded by extreme poverty, and he looked to the chicken-processing plants in Alabama.This is brutal work.You're on your feet; it’s backbreaking; it's hard; it’s dangerous work to process these chickens.
For years, this was a way for uneducated, poor, oftentimes minority and poor white workers to bring themselves up a bit in the class strata, to work toward a middle-class existence and to make money and to feed their family, and that those jobs had all essentially gone now to immigrants.He says: “You know, we're displacing the poor workers, and we're displacing African-American workers, and we're bringing in immigrants.They're taking away these working-class jobs from people who have no other options, and nobody’s talking about this, and nobody’s talking about worker displacement, and nobody’s standing up for these jobs and these workers, and they don’t have a voice.They’ve been left out of the discussion, and Washington has become too politically correct."
He actually wrote this—it's almost like a manifesto.It was a letter to his Republican colleagues, and he said, “As we start the campaign, we need to remember that if we stand up for these workers, if we talk about immigration and we tie it to the rural poor and we tie it to working-class Americans, there's an audience for that.There is no audience for the immigration, sort of compassionate”—what they would say pathway to citizenship, or what Sessions would call asylum.Sessions said, “There's no audience for that.Our audience has got to be these workers."
It was a real populist agenda.Look, some people would say it was nativist; some people would say it was xenophobic.But he always cast that view as for Americans whose voices were not being heard.Working-class Americans were not being heard.
He actually sent out a questionnaire to all of the Republican candidates, kind of like, “Who’s going to get my vote?,” and Donald Trump was the only candidate who sent back that questionnaire.He took Jeff Sessions seriously, and he took that view that Sessions had seriously at a time when almost nobody else was.Sessions was on the fringe of his own party.Republican leadership was furious that he had basically sabotaged immigration, … and here's Donald Trump saying, “I like what you've got to say."And then Donald Trump goes and takes a lot of what Jeff Sessions is telling him, and he’s putting into action at these rallies.So in a lot of ways, Donald Trump is bringing to life in a showman, charismatic way, the views of Jeff Sessions.
Helped along by Breitbart [News] and [Steve] Bannon as well.That's the pathway in for the loyalists, I suppose?
Exactly.So now Trump is giving voice to this fringe aspect of the party.I mean, Sessions was not considered mainstream in his own party.He was passed over for … leaderships in his own party.So when Jeff Sessions endorsed Trump, the first senator to do that, I think Trump saw that as a very brave and loyal thing to do, and he rewarded Jeff Sessions with the attorney general’s job, which is something that he had long coveted.
… It's around this time … where Comey testifies about the Russia investigation. …
… So Comey goes up to the Hill, and he’s testifying before Congress, and they have all sorts of questions for him about Hillary Clinton.The Republicans want to know: “Why the heck didn't you charge Hillary Clinton with a crime?You came out and said: ‘She was extremely careless in her handling of classified information.Extremely careless sounds an awful lot like negligence.You had the facts; why didn't you charge?
Didn't you just roll over for Hillary Clinton?’” And the Democrats are saying: “You had no case, but yet you went off and ran your mouth off and made judgment calls about her activities.That's not what the FBI does.And then you came back around in October and announced you were reopening the investigation.That's not what the FBI does.Didn’t you actually have it out for Hillary Clinton?Weren't you actually out to get her and damage her?And aren’t you the reason that we have President Trump and not President Clinton?"
So Comey’s getting it from both sides, and he is totally standing by his decisions across the board.He’s not giving an inch.And then he gets asked about the Trump campaign.
… In that hearing, he on the record beats back the president’s assertion, which he made on Twitter, that the FBI had tapped his wires at Trump Tower and that Obama had eavesdropped on him.Comey says, “That's not true."Then he gets asked about the Trump campaign investigation, and he opens up his answer and says, “Well, you know, it’s DOJ policy not to confirm or deny ongoing investigations, but—” and he says, “I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm”—and kind of all heads turned to the television in every newsroom in America, and we're saying, “Is Comey going to confirm on the record that they're investigating the Trump campaign?"
And he does.He says, “That as part of our counterintelligence mission, we're investigating Russian efforts to interfere with the election and whether any members of the Trump campaign were involved."And it was this remarkable—I keep saying “remarkable,” but you run out of words, right?It was a key moment in this story.
I think it got everybody's attention.I think it got the White House’s attention.It got President Trump's attention, because President Trump had campaigned on “Lock her up,” so he didn't love the answers on Hillary Clinton.And now he had gone out and said, “Yeah, we're investigating the Trump campaign,” and he didn't say, “But we're not investigating the president,” which is what President Trump wanted him to say all along.
This was not a great performance for Jim Comey as far as the president was concerned.And it really started the ball rolling, I think, in terms of sealing Comey’s fate.
Then CNN and others, maybe the Times for sure, reveals [Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared] Kushner and Sergei Gorkov, the banker [and head of the Russian state investment bank Vnesheconombank], have met; that there are other meetings that happened; that Kushner himself is now suddenly in play.
… We learn that Kushner had had this meeting with Sergei Gorkov and that it had been intended to set up some sort of direct line of communication between the White House and Putin outside the normal diplomatic channels, and we learn that Flynn had met with Kislyak and we learned that, it just seems like there's more and more meetings.They just keep coming out, and we don’t know what they mean, right?This is just not normal. …
Trump is pushing Comey for a public statement.“Let us get out from under the cloud,” … and Comey won't do it.
Comey won't do it, and there are people in the FBI who say, “Look, I don't think it’s a good idea for you to go and even privately say that you're not under investigation, and certainly not a good idea to go and publicly say the president is not under investigation, because what happens if that changes?Then are we obligated to say, ‘Hey, we told you this other thing before, but it's actually no longer true.’” And they didn't want that obligation.
The other thing is, when you're investigating the Trump campaign, you're inherently looking at the candidate’s activities, because it’s his campaign.So I think there were some people at the FBI who thought, “Look, that's slicing it pretty thin to say we're not investigating you, like yeah, you're not the target of our investigation, but we're looking, of course, at your activities."Comey, I think, was trying to mollify the president a little bit—“Hey, you are not under investigation.We are not coming after you”—but at the same time was not giving the president what he wanted, which is a public exoneration.
And then he testifies.This is the May 3 testimony, and it seems like this lights a candle?
If it was a long fuse after the March testimony, by May Comey’s just about out of fuse.That testimony was mostly about Hillary Clinton, and again, Comey’s not giving an inch in that testimony.He says he would do it again.He supports that.He's not asking for a do-over; he’s not asking for forgiveness; he's not apologizing for how he handled the Clinton investigation.And again, he has the national audience.He can clear Donald Trump if he wants to.And of course, he doesn't.He doesn't do that.
So you’ve been around all this a long time.What did you figure at that moment the consequences would be for Trump [of firing Comey]?
… I think we were trying to figure out why.And the White House was very smart on this one.They released memos from the Justice Department justifying the firing, and they said: “Look, the president acted on the advice of his attorney general and deputy attorney general, and here are the memos.This is why he was fired."And you read the memos, and, I mean, they read like almost Democratic talking points.They say: “You were really unfair to Hillary Clinton.You totally spoke out of school….You broke with Justice Department policy when you criticized her actions as careless.You revealed the existence of this investigation when you shouldn’t have."
And it’s all Clinton, Clinton, Clinton, Clinton.“And your recent testimony has shown you have no interest in reconsidering that.And because of that, we're not confident that you can continue to be an effective FBI director."
This was sort of a mind-bending situation, right, because they're in the middle of the Trump Russia investigation, and the president, who campaigned on “Lock her up” and who thinks that Hillary Clinton should have been charged, is firing the FBI director and then pointing to these memos that say, “Well, you were unfair to Hillary Clinton; you mishandled that case,” but not at all in the way that Trump thinks they mishandled the case.So we were just trying to figure out what actually—what is going on here?
That was their line.They really stuck to that line, the White House did.“The president did this because the Justice Department advised him to and for the reasons stated in the memos."And the White House put people out on television with those talking points.
And then when the president goes on NBC, he completely pulls the rug out from under the White House and says, “No, I fired him because I was thinking about how that Russia thing is a made-up story, and I was going to do it anyway, even before I got the recommendation from the Justice Department."It was one of the first big moments, maybe the first big moment, where the White House had a rollout plan.The White House officials went out and had talking points, and they said what they were going to say, and then the president completely undercut them and said something diametrically opposite the next day.
Why?
Because I think the president was being honest on television.I mean, I take the president at his word.Again, the president’s frustration had been building with Comey.He wouldn’t clear him; he wouldn't clear his name on Russia.He told him privately that you're not under investigation, but he wouldn't say it publicly.He thinks this Russia story is a witch hunt.He thinks Russia's fake news.And then he's having these hearings, and he won't say it publicly.
The bigger question for me is why go through the rigmarole of having the Justice Department write these memos and spend 24 hours or so pointing to these memos and say, “You're fired over Hillary Clinton”?
Comey is standing in Los Angeles on a tour of the FBI, looks up, the way the story goes, and?
Yeah, so Comey’s in Los Angeles touring the Los Angeles field office and looks up and sees on the news a story about how he’s been fired.Comey thinks this is actually like a gag.He thinks the field office is pranking him, right, and they’ve somehow made this footage; that he’s just been punked.He thinks that they’ve made this footage that he’s been fired, and he’s like, “Good one."And his handler actually has to kind of [say], “Sir, actually, we think you've been fired."
It’s a very confusing moment here.Back in Washington, Keith Schiller, the president’s body man, hand-delivers this firing note to the FBI, but our understanding is he can't get into the FBI.The FBI is not a place you can just walk and be like, “I have a note for Comey; I'm from the White House."“Great, you're from the White House, super.You can't come in here."And so getting the information—getting the firing letter to Comey didn’t happen.
I actually called the FBI, and I called the assistant director, Mike Kortan, who was in a meeting, and I said, “Hey, did the director just get fired?"And there was this pause: “Not that we know of."And I was like, “No, I think he just got fired."And they were like, “We're going to have to call you back."
So I hung up the phone, and it became clear that the White House had not told the FBI that this had happened, much less that this was happening.Comey ends up taking the FBI plane back from California, and there's this big question of, can he even take the FBI plane back?He’s not the FBI director anymore, and does he have to go buy a ticket?Is he stranded in L.A.?
This really, really shocked the FBI, because Comey—look, other than J. Edgar Hoover, there has not been an FBI director who has had the shadow and the profile that Jim Comey did.He was a big force of nature at the FBI and had really assembled a young team, a young leadership team that was very loyal to him and I think was building for the future.This was a seismic shakeup at the FBI.This was not something that they had braced for.
… Shortly after Comey gets fired, my colleague Mike Schmidt hears that there had been this dinner at the White House between Comey and the president where the president asked Comey for his loyalty.When Mike wrote that story, it was the first moment we had kind of peered behind the curtain as to maybe the true motives of the Comey firing.It was a big deal, it was a big story, and Trump immediately responded, and he said, “Jim Comey better hope there are no tapes of our conversations."It was kind of like a veiled threat, basically saying, “Comey, if you're the one behind the scenes putting this stuff out here, be careful; maybe I have tapes."
Comey has since said, “Lordy, I hope there were tapes."But in the aftermath of that story, Mike Schmidt began to hear like, “Oh, no, there's more stuff, and there are memos that Comey kept, contemporaneous memos of his interactions, and this isn't the only one."He was trying for days to get the memos, find out what was in the memos, really digging at them.
When the president tweeted, “I hope there are tapes,” Comey has since said that inspired him to basically say—he called up a friend and said: “We know Schmidt’s been asking about the memos.Just go ahead and confirm the memo."What was in the memo that Mike wrote about was this White House conversation between Comey and Trump where Trump says, “I hope you can see your way clear of letting Flynn go."
Being able to report that and being able to cite these memos was a huge story.I remember watching that story come together, and it just felt like, oh, my God, this is the FBI director keeping contemporaneous notes about his conversations with the president and being asked to shut down a criminal investigation.Just as a journalist, it was a crazy thing to watch.
And it had the effect of sparking the creation of special counsel, what some people would consider that [U.S. Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein, who had been blamed in lots of ways for firing Comey, the way that Comey was fired and lots of other things, this may have been his revenge in some way. …
Yeah, and Comey had testified that one of the reasons that he ultimately told his friend to confirm the existence of the memos was that he hoped it would get him special counsel, and it did.Of course that special counsel is Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who is known as a tenacious investigator and a hard-charging manager and is probably one of the more revered figures in American law enforcement history because of his work transforming the FBI after 9/11.
Suddenly this thing that Trump has been calling a witch hunt now is being run by somebody who is definitely not loyal to Trump, and who has bipartisan support and is known to be fiercely independent.
* * *
When Trump comes back from Bedminster, [N.J., and the Trump National Golf Club], determined to fire Comey, what are the first steps he takes with Sessions and Rosenstein? …
Donald Trump writes a firing letter, like his own firing letter.It’s several pages.… Our understanding is that Don McGahn, the White House counsel, reads that and says, “Yeah, you don’t want to send that."McGahn had separately learned that Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, also had concerns with Jim Comey.And McGahn kind of manufactured—he brokers this deal.He basically says to the president: “Mr. President, you don’t need to send that.You should really talk to Rod Rosenstein."Rosenstein meets with the president, and the president talks to him and says he’s planning to fire the FBI director, and Rosenstein says, “Let me give you my analysis on the Jim Comey situation."So he goes, and he writes a memo. …
Try to now, with hindsight, try to square for me why Rosenstein makes the decision to go the special counsel route, and why Bob Mueller.Is this a revenge moment?
I don’t think there was [an] “Oh, my gosh, what have I done?" moment.Rosenstein’s been pretty adamant that he wrote that memo; he stands by the memo; he believes what he wrote.I do think that after the Comey firing, and after stories started to come out about Comey’s interactions with the president, where the president asked for his loyalty, where the president asked him to let Flynn go, as that stuff starts to come out, and there are many new questions about the Comey firing, and there are many new questions about how the Russia investigation fits into all of this, the call for a special counsel just gets louder.And I think inside the FBI, inside the Justice Department, I think there was a growing sense that this is where it was headed, and Rosenstein obviously was going to have to be the one to do it.
In many ways, Mueller is the perfect, most logical choice, right?I mean, he’s a Republican.He is the longest-serving FBI director post-Hoover.He served President Bush, and he served President Obama, and then his term was extended under President Obama by Congress.So he enjoyed bipartisan support.He’s one of the most respected law enforcement officials of a generation.So if you're looking for somebody who was going to assure the public that this was going to be done right, Mueller would have been on anybody’s short list.
You know the Justice Department pretty well, and the ways and mores of that institution.When Mueller decides to begin his job, who does he hire?Who does he bring together?What's different about what he does than many special prosecutors?Just give me kind of process, please, about what they're doing from the very beginning.
The Mueller investigation is different from anything we’ve seen before.This is not the Ken Starr model.Ken Starr was an independent counsel.That law is gone.That doesn’t exist anymore.And it’s even different from Pat Fitzgerald, when he was the special counsel.It’s just set up differently.What Mueller did is he went and hired, I would say, two groups of people.He hired people who were experts, who were subject-matter experts.So he needed counterintelligence experts, and he needed a cyber expert.He needed somebody who was an expert on, thinking law, right, appellate law, somebody who could do the nuts and bolts of making sure that whatever they did was going to hold up five years from now, when it [would be] inevitably appealed up and down.They needed people who knew the investigation to date.Then there's that group.
Then there's the group of people who I would say Mueller brought on, who he just trusts, people he worked with at the FBI, people who he’s worked with in private practice, experienced career law enforcement people, people that he could trust, people he knew, [who] he wanted to be in the trenches with.
Names?
I think the one that gets the most attention is Andrew Weissmann, who was the former FBI general counsel.Mueller obviously knows him very well.Weismann is a very intense, driven prosecutor.He was head of the Enron task force.He has a reputation for being a scorched-earth prosecutor.And he’s also a Democrat.
I could say one of the bumps in the road for Mueller was when President Trump’s lawyers started backgrounding the team that Mueller had assembled and found that over the years, many of them had given money to Democrats.That became like a real talking point.It became a real talking point for Republicans.“Look, this is a team of Democrats you guys have assembled."Never mind that Bob Mueller is a Republican.But the fact that he assembled this team that had a bunch of Democrats on it became a real, a real talking point.And frankly, that stung over at the Office of Special Counsel.That resonated with them.They knew that was a bad look.
The problem is, is that it’s illegal to start hiring people and searching their campaign finance filings while you're in the hiring process.Nobody wants a Justice Department that says: “Oh, we’d love to hire you.Let me see who have you given money to."That’s no good.But this was a total unforced error.It played right into the president’s hands, and it’s a talking point that continues.You hear Rudy Giuliani say, “This is a lynching mob."
[Trump] decides to bring down a New York attorney, Marc Kasowitz, who was one of his lawyers up in New York, when he was playing by New York rules.… He’s the guy that says: “We’re going to go from the political to the personal.We’re going to go right at”—with Trump’s, certainly, encouragement—“We’re going to go right at, as you suggest, Mueller and everyone else."
I mean, Donald Trump was furious with the appointment of a special counsel.He was furious with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from the Russia investigation.He was furious that Rosenstein had appointed a special counsel.This thing was spiraling out of control.And Donald Trump was looking for a way to try to wrest control back.Going after Mueller, for somebody like Donald Trump, who loves a good fight, and somebody like Kasowitz, who loves to mix it up, it seemed at the moment that we were, as a country, destined for months and months of a pretty brutal fuselage from the White House directed at the special counsel.
It doesn’t take long, we now know—we learned a while ago—for Trump to say: “I’ve got to fire Mueller.I want to fire Mueller."And Chris Ruddy [of Newsmax] and McGahn get involved, and McGahn—well, you’ll tell me what happens.
Well, everybody’s spinning up this idea of, “You’ve got to fire Mueller.You’ve got to fire Mueller."Tensions early on were great between the Office of the Special Counsel and the White House.It actually, as I said earlier, it looked like they were on a real collision course, and it became clear that what the president needed was a lawyer inside the White House to kind of manage the investigation, a white-collar lawyer who had done this stuff before, and they settled on a veteran Washington attorney named Ty Cobb.
… Ty Cobb comes in and makes the phone call, calls over to Mueller’s office: “Hi, I'm the new guy."And Ty Cobb and Bob Mueller, they know each other.They’ve served in the Justice Department together.Ty Cobb is openly saying, “I have great respect for Bob Mueller; I think he’s a patriot."He says to Mueller, “I'm here, and we want to be cooperative."But at this point, things hadn't been going great.There had been some document requests from the Office of Special Counsel that hadn't been filled, and it looked like the White House was on track to get subpoenaed, which is a real terrible place to start, if you're the White House.
So Ty Cobb makes a decision that, “We are going to move to full cooperation mode,” and he actually is able to persuade the president that: “If we cooperate, if we turn everything over, and we make everybody available for interviews, we can get this thing over by Thanksgiving.We’ve got nothing to hide.The president says he’s done nothing wrong.Everybody else says they’ve done nothing wrong.Let’s just give them everything they want, make everybody available for interviews, and we can get this thing over really quickly, and the president can get on with the business of governing."
The investigation moves apace.We really do learn about Manafort, Papadopoulos.We know they're after Page.We know that, I think, Flynn … pled guilty.And it is in this vicinity where Trump really says the witch hunt thing, writes it, says it.Fox is full blast as a megaphone.It’s just coming.The war is still on.
It’s funny on that term, “witch hunt."… The first time that we’re able to find that he uses that term to describe the Russia investigation is the morning before he is about to get briefed by Jim Comey and Clapper about Russian interference in the 2016 election .They are prepared to come to Trump Tower.They're going to show him all the intelligence about Russian hacking and Russian propaganda and the efforts to tip the election.
Before that even happens, he has a conversation with The New York Times, and he says, “This whole Russia thing is just a witch hunt."So he has made up his mind, even before he gets his first briefing about Russian interference, that it’s a witch hunt.And as the investigation intensifies, and his own people start to get drawn in, and suddenly Bob Mueller is looking at the president for obstruction, that “witch hunt” line is one he comes back to again and again and again.
And he drives it home on Twitter.He drives it home at the White House in person.He has his press secretary drive it home.That is maybe the most important talking point, the go-to talking point for the president: This investigation is a witch hunt.
He’s a brander.
He’s a brander.“Fake news."“No collusion."“Witch hunt."“Sad."He’s a brander.
Let’s talk about a thing you had a little bit of a role in, the Don Jr. meeting in his office.… The president is in Germany for the G-20 summit, and he’s asked Putin, “Did you do it?,” and Putin says, “No."You, personally, have asked for a statement.
Friday, July 7, my colleagues and I had been doing some reporting on this, the idea that there was another Russian meeting that we didn’t totally understand, that had been undisclosed during the campaign.And of course you have to remember that the campaign has consistently said, “No foreign contacts."So any foreign contacts, specifically with a Russian, undercuts what they had said before.By definition, [this] is news, because it is something we did not know.
We are very interested in pulling string on what was this meeting.So on Friday, July 7, we decided to break glass with the administration and say: “Here is what we know.Here is what we’re working on."We went to members of the administration, and we said: “We know that Jared Kushner, a top adviser to the president and obviously his son-in-law, had a previously undisclosed meeting with a Russian lawyer….And separately, we know that Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager, has told Congress that he attended a meeting at Trump Tower at the behest of Donald Trump Jr."
Those three things we kind of figured, that seems like one meeting.“We’re going to report on this meeting, and we want to know why."And the White House says: “Hey, we’re traveling.We want to be helpful.We want to engage on this.Just give us some time.It’s Friday."It was Friday morning.“Can you give us until Saturday morning?We’ll do a call first thing Saturday morning, and we’ll tell you.We’ve got nothing to hide [from] you."
So our editors are thinking, “Well, hey, if they're going to participate, and they're going to be honest with us, we’re not going to rush this thing, and we want to be fair to everybody, so we’ll wait."So we waited, and we were supposed to have a call at 8:00 in the morning on Saturday.I had actually just flown to the West Coast for my vacation with my wife, so it was 5:00 in the morning call, as I remember.And the call didn’t happen.“Oh, we’re having problems getting people on the line, just getting everybody together, a lot of moving parts because of the summit and the travel.Just give us more time, more time."And it became clear we were not going to get that call.
So we sent a list of more than a dozen questions to everybody, you know, Jared Kushner’s people, Don Jr.’s people, Paul Manafort’s people, everybody, saying: “What was this meeting about?Why did you have it?What was discussed?Why did you schedule it in the first place?Did this come up?Did that come up?,” all these on-the-record questions.And we end up getting a statement from Donald Trump Jr. that says: “I had this brief meeting.It was primarily about Russian adoption.It wasn’t campaign-related,” and, you know, “The end."Essentially, after all of this, we’re going to participate.We’re going to help answer all your questions.We got this statement.
And we went with the story.We said: “OK, here is this undisclosed meeting.This is a Kremlin-connected lawyer.In the end, her big issue is Russian sanctions.She met with members of the Trump inner circle, in an undisclosed meeting, and they're saying it’s about Russian adoption."It didn’t totally make sense.I remember we had a lot of meetings late into that night, where our editor just said, “Just keep pulling on this, because it doesn’t make sense."We knew there was more there.We had a sense there was more there.
And then, I think the next day, we reported that what had actually happened is that Don Jr. had been promised dirt on Hillary Clinton by this Russian lawyer.And then the next day, it was that in the email setting up the meeting, Don Jr. was told that this meeting was part of the Russian government’s efforts to support now-President Trump.That, at that moment, was like, oh, my God.I mean, I remember saying: “Oh, my God.It says it.It says it in an email.This is part of the Russian government’s efforts to support Donald Trump."And Donald Trump Jr.’s response is, “I love it."And that’s how the meeting gets started.
Frankly, it was a crazy four days of reporting.But it was a perfect example of how not to manage a story from the White House’s standpoint, because this story just rolled out over four days, whereas, frankly, I think if we had had that conference call at 8:00 a.m.on that Saturday, it probably would have been one story, and they probably could have maybe gotten their story straight.But the story kept changing.And finally, ultimately, we got the emails, and we called Donald Trump Jr. for a comment, and instead of giving us his comment, he started tweeting his comments and tweeting all of the emails.
We had written our story already, so as soon as he starts tweeting the emails, we just, you know, we popped our story.But it was a crazy four days, because it felt like we were constantly just pulling on a thread, and frankly—and their story just didn’t make sense in the beginning.
… The piece that happens, that’s probably most interesting to Mueller, I suppose, is that President Trump, on Air Force One, with [then-White House Communications Director] Hope Hicks, is massaging, if not actually writing, the adoption piece.
Right. And we don’t know that [at the time] …
You don’t know what?
I mean I don’t know who’s writing the statements [at the time].All I know is I'm getting phone calls from Air Force One, and my colleagues are getting phone calls from Air Force One, and it’s, “We’re working on it; we’re trying."… The White House inner circle knows we are working on this story, and they are telling us they want to be helpful and that they want to engage.
From Air Force One.
From Air Force One.… So I'm on vacation, and I'm writing these stories and sending these emails from coffee shops, and my phone rings, and it’s the Air Force One operator.“Can you please hold?"And it’s: “I know we were supposed to have a call.I know we’re late.Can you just give us a little more time?We’re working on this."And of course we now know that, at the front of Air Force One, Hope Hicks and President Trump are working on this statement, and Hope Hicks is talking with Donald Trump Jr., who’s not on Air Force One.And then they're—you know, Donald Trump Jr. has got a lawyer who we’re talking to, and Kushner has got a lawyer who we’re asking questions of.It’s everybody’s texting each other and emailing each other, and we have no visibility into what's going on.But what's going on is the president himself has a hand in crafting a statement that says: “This meeting was nothing.It was primarily about Russian adoption."It made no mention of the fact that the entire purpose of the meeting was to obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton from Russia as part of the Russian government’s efforts to support Donald Trump.
When you think about this, why do you think Trump had a hand in it at all?Why didn’t he just stay about as far away from this as possible and send it to Kasowitz or somebody, some other lawyers?
You know, I'm always reluctant to get in the president’s head.
Sure.
I think this is a president who feels like he is his own best messenger, and this was a story that was going right to the heart of his campaign and to the heart of his family, and I don’t think there was any chance that he wasn’t going to be involved.
… [On Mueller] he initiates a new—another approach.It happens as a result of something I'm going to ask you to explain to us….He moves in that direction with Rudy Giuliani and others.After the Mueller team sends some of the case up to the Southern District of New York, the Michael Cohen piece, explain why they did that and what is happening up there.
When Mueller gets into this investigation, investigations can take on a lot of meandering side streets, right?These investigations can go in a lot of different directions, but Mueller has a pretty defined mandate.On the one hand, it’s very broad.It’s Russian interference, potential collusion, and whatever else comes from the investigation.But on the other hand, it’s pretty narrowly defined.This is a special counsel investigation, and there's a recognition that Washington and the public don’t love a permanent special counsel who just investigates for years and years and whatever strikes his fancy.
So Mueller talks to Rod Rosenstein, and actually gets a rules-of-the-road kind of memo, where Rosenstein says, “You can investigate these things here,” Paul Manafort being one of them, who—Manafort was investigated for money laundering and tax stuff that wasn’t actually directly related to the campaign.“But you can't do these other things over here."We don’t know everything that he thought he might want to investigate and was told not to, but one of those things clearly was an investigation into Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime lawyer-fixer in New York.And Mueller referred a criminal investigation into Michael Cohen to the Southern District of New York, federal prosecutors in Manhattan, handed it to them.And public corruption prosecutors in Manhattan took it and ran with it.
Help me know who those guys are.What's the reputation of the Southern District of New York?
Well, the Southern District of New York has this reputation of being the “Sovereign District of New York,” meaning, yeah, they're a U.S. Attorney’s Office, like all the other U.S. Attorney’s Office[s], but they're kind of like the main Justice Department annex, right?They answer in maybe more dotted lines than other U.S. Attorney’s Office[s].They're fiercely independent.They're incredibly aggressive.This is one of the premier U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the country.
Famous for gangsters, counterterrorism.
John Gotti, white-collar crime, counterterrorism, you know, major, major trials.You look at some of the people who have been U.S. attorney in Southern District of New York, obviously most recently Preet Bharara.But go back, it’s Mary Jo White; it’s Jim Comey; it’s Rudy Giuliani—I mean, people who become names in the legal world.Farming that part out to the Southern District of New York, it was obvious this was not a place that was going to sit on this investigation.
So what do they do?
They investigated for months, and then one morning, the FBI showed up at Michael Cohen’s office and his hotel room, where he was staying while his apartment was being renovated, his home.They searched his safety deposit boxes.They got warrants to search all of his electronics, his phones, his computers.And this was a total surprise, both to Cohen and to everyone else, who had kind of said, “Well, Cohen’s got a bunch of weird things in his past, but not related to Mueller and not related to Russia, per se, so it’s not clear how significantly he’s going to play in the Mueller world."
So these raids take us totally by surprise.
Unprecedented, actually, to go after all of that information for an attorney, much less the president’s attorney.
Well, one of the rules in the Justice Department is, you don’t go after lawyers except in extremely rare circumstances, and you need to get all levels of approval, and you have to take steps to make sure you're not getting into attorney-client privilege information.And then yeah, the president’s lawyer.The review on that had to have been extraordinary, because getting a search warrant is tough enough.You get a search warrant, and it says, “I have evidence that a crime has been committed, and that if we search these places, there’s probable cause we’re going to find evidence of that crime."You have to go and clear a whole bunch of other hurdles when you're saying it’s going to be a lawyer’s office.This is one of the most invasive things that the federal government can do, and they got a judge to sign off on it.
And what does that tell you?
It tells you they had serious evidence of wrongdoing on behalf of Michael Cohen.
And is this Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal?Or is this, you know, National Enquirer?Or is this something else?
It’s all of that.It’s like a grab bag.We know the contours of the investigation, because we know what was in the search warrant, and the search warrant tells us this is a grab bag investigation into all aspects of Michael Cohen’s life, and so much of Michael Cohen’s life is at the right hand of Donald Trump.
He brings onboard Rudy Giuliani, and he ratchets up what's already been rolling, which is this undermining of the Justice Department, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Now it’s a full frontal assault.
With John Dowd out of the way, and with Ty Cobb gone, there are fewer people there sort of pumping the brakes at the White House.And the result is that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani just take it to Mueller in a public way that just had never been done before.There had been this agreement between Mueller and the White House that all of their conversations will be confidential, that everything would be done in good faith.There would be total cooperation.Neither side would try to play this out in the media.That’s why you didn’t see John Dowd going out and talking about his conversations with Mueller.You didn’t go out and see Ty Cobb saying, “Well, I've heard this from Mueller."
All of that went out the window, and Rudy Giuliani brought forward a strategy that said, “I'm going to tell you what Mueller is telling me, and I'm going to use that to put pressure on Mueller to make good on it."So he says, “Mueller is going to be done by Sept. 1."The only explanation for why you’d do that is because when Sept. 1 comes, if the investigation is not over, it allows you to say: “We were promised.The American people were promised this investigation would be over, and it’s not over."So you see an effort by the president and by Rudy Giuliani to turn the discussion around and focus everything on Mueller, to do exactly what, for the first year of the administration, the White House agreed they wouldn’t do.You see Rudy Giuliani going on TV saying: “This is a lynch mob.It’s a witch hunt,” and essentially like, “Bring it on.We will attack you."
And he’s open about his tactics.He says: “I am trying to call into question the very existence of this investigation. I'm trying to undermine confidence in this investigation, because if they can't indict the president, then ultimately this is all about whether or not there's going to be a political outcome here, and I'm playing for the political outcome."
[Going back in time], I'm not sure you remember this, but the day after [Trump] fires Comey, the Russian ambassador—
I remember.(Laughs.)
<v MICHAEL KIRK> —and the foreign minister arrive, [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov and Kislyak. No American pool is there, no—Terrible optics, terrible optics that just—you couldn’t have scripted it worse than firing the FBI director in the middle of an investigation into Russian interference in the election, and then the very first thing you do after that is have a closed meeting with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office.Nobody at the White House thought that that had really unfolded the way they would have liked.
And what did he say?He talked about it.
Well, he said: “I just fired the FBI director.He was a real nut job.I faced great pressure because of Russia, and that’s been taken off."That didn’t come out when we broke that story, like a week later.It took a while.But there was an official not transcript, but summary of what everybody said, an official White House document that’s kicked that around .And when we got that read to us, your jaw drops when you hear that, because it—for me and for my colleagues at the Times as we were writing that story, at that moment, it was still really, really hard to believe that the president would say that, like: “I faced great pressure from Russia.That’s been taken off."It just felt like it was an extraordinary thing to say.
Now, the White House has characterized this statement as, “Well, he’s dealmaking now,” right?So he is saying: “You owe me one now, right, because look, when you guys messed around in the election, or whatever happened there, that came down on me.I had to fire my FBI Director because of it."And what he’s doing is just angling to, you know, “All right, now you're into me for one."But boy, that statement: “I faced great pressure because of Russia; that’s been taken off."
One of the things that’s funny, that in a lot of ways, that meeting sums up so much about the news in the Trump world.That meeting, in a lot of ways, embodies the difficulty in covering Donald Trump right now as a journalist, because he said two things.He said: “Jim Comey was a nut job.I faced great pressure because of Russia.That’s been taken off."And the thing that everybody remembers is, “Jim Comey was a nut job."It just becomes like the shiny, shiny object.
… Lost in that is the important thing that he said about his intentions on firing Jim Comey.And that’s covering Trump in a nutshell, right?There's really important stuff there.But there's also loud, screaming, crazy things, chaos, shiny objects, distractions, that make it hard to get anybody to focus on what's actually happening.
So when it comes down to Rudy Giuliani, New York guy, Donald Trump, New York guy, not living with the norms and rules of Washington by any stretch of the imagination, sullying, attacking, undermining the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, when Republicans in Congress start to join in the fray, when—[Rep.Devin] Nunes (R-Calif.) has been there all along, but now you’ve got senators who are playing in the game.We’ve talked to lots of people who say this is beyond unprecedented; this is threatening the mores, the rules of the road, the rule of law, the whatever in America, diminishing it; that that’s the big threat, maybe the most important threat in generations.What do you think?
I think it’s not a constitutional crisis until you get to a situation that the Constitution doesn’t contemplate.Political instability and scandal and controversy, and people getting fired, and the president making outlandish statements, and the president’s lawyer on television, none of that really touches on whether the system ultimately works.
So it’s not a constitutional crisis, because the Constitution contemplates this.There is still a Justice Department.There is still an ongoing investigation.There will still be an election in November.The political checks at the ballot box exist, and elections have consequences.The president was elected.A Republican majority in the House and Senate were elected.And the people of the United States ultimately are the final arbiters of the makeup of our government.
The question at the Justice Department right now is, is the way the president acting going to set a standard for the way presidents act going forward, where they can just sort of go in and start monkeying around inside the Justice Department?Or is it more of an elastic situation, where everybody thinks this maybe wasn’t a great idea that the president has this kind of hands-on approach to the Justice Department, and maybe the next person handles it differently, and this becomes an example of how not to do things?Or maybe it becomes an example of, you know what?In the end, the Justice Department is just another Cabinet agency, and the president can have his guy in there as attorney general just like he can have his guy in there as secretary of energy.
So in that regard, I do think it’s a moment.It’s a moment for the government and for people to decide what is DOJ in the Cabinet, which is it’s always kind of had a special place.The attorney general is part of the Cabinet but not really part of the Cabinet.He’s not on the team.
But I don’t think we’re at constitutional crisis levels.I think many, many people are very happy with how Donald Trump is governing.This is a man who promised to come to Washington and upend the way business was being done.He promised to not be politically correct, and he promised to speak his mind and fight the entrenched ways of Washington, and he has made good on that.If you are a Trump voter who sent him to Washington to disrupt those norms, you don’t see a crisis.You see your mission being accomplished, especially when they can point to a conservative Supreme Court justice and a tax bill and getting rid of the individual mandate in Obamacare, and maybe negotiating a deal with North Korea and canceling the Iran deal, and pulling out of the Paris Accords.If you're a Trump voter, this doesn’t look like chaos at all.
I think that’s one of the real problems of people who see chaos and assume that the entire country shares their view.I think it’s important to remember that voters sent him to Washington to do essentially what he’s doing.
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