The FRONTLINE Interviews
Philip Rucker
The Washington Post
Philip Rucker is the White House bureau chief at The Washington Post and a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on June 1, 2018. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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The film will start with the [intelligence community] members going to Trump Tower on Jan. 6, [then-FBI Director James] Comey doing the [Steele] dossier alone with the newly elected president.Just to the extent that you can, ... place me in there.What’s the tension in the air?What’s happening in there?
It’s Jan. 6, 2017.President-elect Trump is at home, at Trump Tower, in New York, on Fifth Avenue, and the nation’s intelligence chiefs fly up to New York early that morning for a briefing.They know it’s going to be a high-stakes briefing.They have decided among themselves, beforehand, that together they would share the U.S. intelligence community’s report about Russian interference in the election, but that James Comey, the FBI director, would break off and, one-on-one, talk to President-elect Trump about the most salacious part of that report, which is the infamous dossier, which alleged that Donald Trump—then private citizen mogul [who] was owner of Miss Universe, and was in Moscow in 2013 for that pageant—had engaged with prostitutes, Russian prostitutes, in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel room in Moscow.That’s the allegation in the dossier.
They decided that Comey would brief Trump on it.So they get to Trump Tower.It’s Comey; it’s [then-CIA Director John] Brennan; it’s [then-Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper .They head up to a private room on the 14th floor, a conference room, where the Trump transition offices were, where they were planning the new administration.And President-elect Trump came in, as did Vice-President-elect [Mike] Pence; Reince Priebus, the incoming chief of staff, was there; Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary; and a number of other aides, as part of the transition, sitting around the conference table for this presentation.
Comey writes about this in his book that came out this year.He says that they were sort of methodically going through the intelligence community’s assessment about Russian interference, going through a lot of the details, and there was not much curiosity on the part of the president-elect.Donald Trump just did not ask very many questions, did not seem very interested in this finding, and seemed particularly focused on the political impact of it.How would they spin the report to the public, to convince the public that Russia had not gotten Trump elected?It was very important to him that the public understand that he got elected on his own merit, on his own charisma, on his own message, and frankly, on his own ability to outperform Hillary Clinton as a candidate, at least for pure candidate skills.That was important to Trump.
That all comes through in the meeting.By the end of the session, Comey said, “You know, I need some alone time with you, Mr. President-elect,” and Donald Trump agreed.They cleared the room, and it was just Comey and Trump.And that’s when Comey said, “Sir, we’ve got some very sensitive material here as part of the intelligence that we've gathered in this investigation."This was the dossier that was prepared by Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence agent.
We learned later on that it was actually funded in part by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, but nobody talked about that at the time.So Comey is presenting the information from the dossier, and Trump reacted poorly to that.He was very defensive immediately, according to Comey’s account.He told Comey, “I'm not the kind of guy that needs prostitutes."He insisted that this was not true; that it was all fake.He talked about—volunteered information about the various allegations that had been made during the campaign about Trump harassing, assaulting women, claiming they were not true.He just really wanted to prove his innocence from this claim.
In the days that followed, it became very interesting.Comey and Clapper and Brennan left New York.The briefing had been done.This intelligence community report was shared with the public.President Obama was weighing in about it.There was a great deal of alarm among leaders on Capitol Hill about what this report found about Russian interference.But Trump did not believe the intelligence.He was having these private meetings in the days that followed with Reince Priebus; with Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and adviser; with Steve Bannon, his incoming chief strategist and others who would form the sort of inner circle of the government when he became president.
And he was saying: “Look, I don’t believe this intelligence.It’s not right.It’s not true that the Russians interfered in this election.How do we know that it was the Russians who hacked all of those Democratic emails?It could have been the Chinese.It could have been the 400-pound guy on the couch."He was making up all sorts of excuses why this intelligence could not be believed, and his advisers, Kushner and Priebus, were urging the president-elect to affirm the IC report, tell the public that you believe in what the CIA, the FBI, all these other intelligence agencies have concluded about Russian interference. ...
Comey leaves the room and goes down to the car and starts to type contemporaneous, verbatim to the extent that he could remember them, words.Tell me about that.
Yeah.So the meeting is over, and Comey leaves, heads downstairs to Fifth Avenue, gets in his SUV, which was waiting for him, and decided to type notes, to create his own sort of memorandum of what happened in that briefing.He could not believe it, frankly.He could not believe that the incoming president of the United States was not more concerned about the U.S. national security threat from Russian interference.He could not believe what President-elect Trump was saying about the dossier regarding his experiences in Moscow, alleged experiences in that hotel room.So he wrote down an account, sort of word for word, ...what he remembered Trump saying, what he remembered Clapper and Brennan saying, in their parts of the briefing, so that he would have an account of what happened there, in part, I think—and Comey later says this in his book—because he didn’t trust Donald Trump to tell the truth in the future, and he knew there needed to be some concrete account of what had happened.
So when they're up there, do you all in the press know they're up there, know what that’s all about.or is this a secret meeting?
We certainly knew that the intelligence chiefs were going to Trump Tower.We knew that that briefing was taking place.They briefed President Obama in the Oval Office of the White House the day before.This was sort of a preplanned rollout of the intelligence community’s report, and they thought it was important that Obama, that the incoming President Trump, and that the intelligence committee chairs on Capitol Hill—the Gang of Eight, as it’s called—were all aware of these facts before the report was released publicly.
And of all ...the people in the rollout, it is, as reported to us, only Donald Trump who says: “This seems like a shakedown to me.This is what Comey was doing, was shaking me down.This was leverage that he was trying to get on me as the head of the FBI."
Yeah.You know, Trump reacted very differently to this intelligence finding.He didn’t believe it.He was skeptical of it.And furthermore, he thought that this was an effort by the intelligence community, which he would come to call the “deep state”—to undermine his legitimacy as president before he was even sworn into office.He thought this was grossly unfair and that this was a plot to show that his election was not worthy, that he was not credible as the president, and that potentially it could be undone.He really did view this as a conspiracy, and it’s one of the reasons he took so long to state affirmatively to the public that Russia, in fact, interfered with the election, despite the conclusive findings of the intelligence agencies.
The story breaks, first on CNN, on Jake Tapper’s program, and then BuzzFeed hits print, and the whole dossier rolls out....
Within about a week timetable, yeah.
OK. And despite the fact that it’s been out and around in Washington, not the dossier itself, but the information in the dossier for a while, he calls Comey—this is in advance of his press conference—and complains to Comey, at least according to Comey’s book, that Comey had leaked this information, not exactly starting their relationship off on a positive note.
That’s right.Trump accused Comey of leaking information about the dossier.He was very bothered, President-elect Trump, at the time, that the details of this dossier had leaked out to the public.Comey had actually told Trump in that June 6 meeting that CNN had been asking about the dossier to indicate to Trump that this is something that could become public through the media at some point in the future.But Trump really saw a conspiracy, and he saw Comey rather as the leading player there, as somebody who was purposefully putting this information out there in the public to discredit him, to embarrass him and to delegitimize him as the president.
So when he comes out before you all in the press—I don’t know if you were there or not in the press conference.
I was there.
OK. So take me there.What happens?
Well, it was a pretty extraordinary scene, this press conference.It was actually not a press conference about Russia at all.It was sort of one of these big events that Trump would have in the lobby of Trump Tower.You know, they clear out all the tourists, they assembled all the cameras and chairs and workspaces on that old-fashioned, pink, 1980s marble floor.And before Trump came out from the elevator, there were just stacks of papers, really, really high, on a table, and what that was was supposed to be a prop, [as] it were.Those were supposed to be the documents showing that he had disentangled himself from all of his businesses and that this ethics lawyer that he’d hired had approved him going in to becoming president, that he wouldn’t have these ethical complications.So that was the main purpose of that press conference.
It was him.I believe his adult children were there as well.Certainly, the incoming leaders of his government were there: Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, others like that.And Trump, it was a free-for-all with the reporters.He loves this give-and-take.He called on all of us for questions.It must have gone on for an hour.And a few of the questions were, in fact, about that dossier that had come out the day before on BuzzFeed.There were questions about the intelligence community’s assessment about Russian interference in the election.There were questions about who had hacked those emails.
Trump reacted very negatively to some of those questions.He attacked BuzzFeed’s credibility as a news organization.He speculated that perhaps Russia did not hack those emails, although he did say, affirmatively, for the first time in that news conference, “Yeah, I think it was Russia."And his advisers really underscored that with me and other reporters, to say: “Look, he’s admitting it was Russia.That was a big deal."
But I learned through my reporting after the fact that Trump privately told his advisers he regretted having ever said that, because he does not believe the intelligence reports, the intelligence community’s finding.He did not believe that Russia had interfered in the election in the way that the intelligence community had determined.
[At the press conference], when he’s pointing at [CNN’s] Jim Acosta, he’s talking about “fake news”; he really spins up at that moment.You’d probably seen him spin up before, but many of us who hadn't really paid that close attention or thought there would be a pivot, this really seemed like an important signal that the “carnage in America” Donald Trump was still in play.
That’s right.This news conference was a reminder that his use of the media as a foil, his attacks on the mainstream media that he used to such great effect during the campaign, that that was going to be a pattern that continued into the White House.He saw it as politically advantageous for him.He became very aggressive in this news conference with reporters, with CNN and BuzzFeed in particular, but with other news organizations as well.That really set the tone for his presidency.You know, the inauguration was about 10 days from then.He was about to be sworn in, about to move to Washington, and he was really establishing a combative posture with the news media.
Let’s move to Jan. 22, two days after the inauguration.He has an event for the law enforcement people and others who have helped with the inauguration.It’s the Blue Room.Comey famously is trying to hide in the drapes.He calls Comey across the room.Take me there.
Yeah.Comey gets invited to this reception in the Blue Room of the White House.It was the first big reception that now sworn-in President Trump would have.He had invited law enforcement chiefs, and Comey, as the FBI director, was invited to attend.He writes that he felt uncomfortable attending.He did not want to attend, but felt it was his duty to attend.This was a new president; he was the FBI director.It was to thank them for the work of their organizations in putting together the inauguration and managing the security of such a big crowd on the National Mall and in Washington.
So Comey’s in the room at the reception, and he sees the cameras there.He didn’t know that this was going to be on camera, a made-for-television event.He thought this would be, perhaps, a private reception, but indeed, the press pool showed up.All the cameras are recording live, and he did not want to have an encounter with the president on camera.He thought that would be inappropriate.So he tried to hide into the drapes.He was wearing a blue suit and felt like, if he stood against the drapes, his suit would blend in with the curtains.But he was so tall and President Trump knew him from that briefing, but certainly knew him from television, because he remembered watching Comey give that news conference the previous July about Hillary Clinton’s emails.
He saw Comey and called him forward, sort of started walking across the room to reach out to hug him.And Comey writes vividly in his book that, as Trump went in for a hug, Comey was doing everything he could to not hug the president, but instead to extend his arm to shake his hand.I believe there was a pat on the back.At one point, Trump leaned in to whisper something into Comey’s ear, but because of the camera angle, it looked like Trump was leaning in to kiss him on the cheek or something like that.The whole experience made Comey very uncomfortable.He thought that was a real breach of the sort of independence that the FBI is supposed to have from the president.But, you know, it was one of those Trumpian moments where the norms and sort of traditional protocols and rigors of Washington are thrown out the window, because we have a new kind of president who wants to govern in a different kind of way.
Five days later is an amazing day, Jan. 27 .It’s the day of the rollout of the executive order of the travel ban over at the Pentagon.It’s also a day that Sally Yates and Mary McCloud, the acting attorney general, assistant, drive over to the White House to meet with [White House Counsel] Don McGahn and tell him they’ve got compromising information, it looks like, on NSA [National Security Adviser] Michael Flynn.McGahn says: “What do you want me to do with this?What are you telling me?” On the very same day, ...there's dinner for two, the “loyalty” dinner, the president and Comey.Help me understand, and take me inside, if you can, the dinner between the president of the United States, one-on-one with the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It was an extraordinary dinner.You know, Comey got an invitation earlier that day to come have dinner with the new president.He wanted to get to know Comey better.You have to remember, Trump had this fascination with Jim Comey throughout the campaign because of the Hillary email investigation.Trump was always thinking about that investigation, using it to his political advantage on the campaign trail, in his stump speeches and rallies, and he would watch Comey on TV. He was always interested in what Comey was doing, what Comey’s judgment might be about Hillary Clinton’s emails.This is a figure who he felt like, “Well, now I'm president, and this man works for me, so I need to get to know him,” not fully understanding the kind of independence that the FBI is supposed to have from the office of the president.
So the president invites Comey to dinner.Comey accepts the invitation.He’s not clear that it’s going to be the two of them.In fact, Comey assumes it’s going to be more of a group dinner with a number of other administration officials who would be a part of that conversation and make it a little less personal.But Comey shows up at the White House, in the residence, and the table is set for two.It’s just the two of them.
He sits down to dinner.He’s very uncomfortable about it, but feels like he needs to do this and survive the dinner and see how it goes.From the outset, Trump was trying to win Comey’s loyalty and also trying to assess whether Comey is somebody who was going to protect him, protect the president, or be the kind of independent FBI director that FBI directors historically have been and are supposed to be.
I don’t remember what was served or things like that.
But what is Trump like in those situations? ...But Comey is a big physical presence and imposing, I would imagine.Just probity must be rolling off of the guy.These two together, what's that like?
So when you're one-on-one with Donald Trump, there are two things that Trump wants to convey.First, he wants to convey strength and control; and secondly, he wants you to like him.That’s very important to him.I've interviewed Trump one-on-one a few times.I've been in the room with him a lot.He uses his size.He’s, you know, 6’2"He’s a tall man.He’s also a fairly large man, and he tries to use that size to assert control.He has a strong handshake.He likes to shake—slap you on the back.He likes to make it clear that you're in his space, that he’s the boss, and that you're subservient to him.That’s sort of the atmosphere that he sets in these one-on-one meetings.
He also really wants you to like him.He can be very charming.He can ask you questions that are very flattering to you.He will find ways to win you over.And that’s what he was trying to do with Comey.But immediately, Comey is taller than Trump.Comey writes in his book that he thinks he has larger hands than Trump, which is besides the point, but, you know, Comey in some ways is threatening to Donald Trump.He’s not going there to seek information.In fact, Trump had invited him, seeking something from him, which was loyalty.
So they have this conversation where Trump would, again and again, come back to loyalty, wanting to know if he was going to be loyal to him as president.Comey would find ways to basically not answer that question.He would say: “I’ll be loyal to the Constitution.I’ll be loyal to the FBI, the men and women of the FBI.I’ll be loyal to the law, to justice."Would never say he’d be loyal to Trump personally.
But there were other things that Comey writes in his book about that dinner that I think are really striking.Trump would repeatedly assert his innocence, not only about that Russia-Moscow prostitutes allegation in the dossier but about all sorts of other things.He claimed he never attacked the disabled New York Times reporter, Serge Kovaleski, at that campaign rally, when in fact he did.He claimed that he never improperly harassed or assaulted women who had accused him of doing just that during the campaign.He claimed again and again and again that the most controversial things he was accused of doing during the campaign were simply not true; that he was the victim; that he had been persecuted unfairly.And he was trying to do that, I think, to win Comey over, to make Comey feel sympathetic to his cause, sympathetic to the president and therefore willing to be loyal to the president and act out his wishes.
... Comey had a lump in his throat because I think he felt compromised, according to the book.
Comey explains in the book that he felt compromised.He felt that was inappropriate.He felt very uncomfortable with it.He felt like that was something the president should not have done.And I think, importantly, [he] felt that that was something the president’s advisers, the people who were running the government and the White House, should have prevented him from doing; that somebody like Reince Priebus, the chief of staff at the White House, should have said, “Mr. President, you simply can't have dinner with the FBI director."Comey just felt that the new administration didn’t understand the rules, the norms, the traditions, the ways in which the FBI needed to be independent from the presidency, and [he] describes in his book that, over the next couple of months, he had a number of conversations with people at the White House about the importance of ensuring that independence of keeping his command at the FBI separate from the whims and wishes of the president.
Let’s go to the next interaction between the two men.Now, Flynn has been fired.Quite a dust-up around all of that.And The Washington Post, despite the fact that the White House knows for 18 days that Flynn has lied to FBI agents, it’s the Post reporting of the intercept, I think, that really seals the deal and finishes Flynn off.We’ve talked to Karen DeYoung about her role in that.He then has a meeting, the president, in the Oval Office, with Jared Kushner and Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, Sessions, and Comey in the room.He asks Kushner to leave him alone.He shoos Sessions out of the room, who seems reluctant, but then does leave, and then is one-on-one with Comey.Take me inside there.
... Comey goes to the White House for some meetings and gets called into the Oval Office with President Trump there; Attorney General Sessions is there; Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and senior adviser is there.They're talking, and Trump asks for the room to be cleared.He wanted some alone time with Comey, which Comey was very uncomfortable with.But indeed, Kushner backed away, Sessions backed away, and it’s just Trump and Comey alone in the Oval Office, right at the Resolute desk.
Trump brings up the Flynn situation, Michael Flynn, the national security adviser who had been fired, and says to Comey: “I’d like you to back off of this investigation.Flynn’s a good guy.He’s a good man.I hope you can see to it that you back away, that you kind of alleviate some of the pressure on Flynn."Comey found that very inappropriate, was largely nonresponsive to that request from the president, and then, after the fact, was very angry with Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, and said: “You cannot leave me in a room alone with the president again.That’s inappropriate.You're the attorney general.You should have been there to protect me, to make sure that we weren’t alone in that room.You should have stood up and said: ‘Mr. President, you can't be alone with the FBI director.Let me be a part of this, too, and hear what you have to say."But of course, Sessions didn’t do that.And Comey made it clear to Sessions that he thought that was wrong.
Does Trump always, or most of the time, work from behind the Resolute desk?Many presidents get up and walk over and sit near the couch, and meetings are held over there....
Trump works from his desk.In fact, I think the ultimate trophy for him, the ultimate sign that he beat all the odds and beat the establishment to become the president of the United States is that Resolute desk.He loves it.He loves to show it off, and he sits behind it when he has visitors.I've been in the Oval Office as a visitor of his, and you sort of stand around the desk, or you know, he has a few armchairs right in front of and on the side of the desk, where you sit to talk to him.He doesn’t like to sit on the couch.
When a foreign leader comes to visit, they’ll both sit in the armchairs, the wingback chairs over by the fireplace, of course.But otherwise he’s behind that desk.He has a high-back leather swivel chair that he’s very comfortable sitting in.He usually has the desk cleared.He has a little red button that he can order a Diet Coke from, from the White House butler on.But that’s where he spends time for more ceremonial visits and meetings.
But when it’s just him and his staff, he actually likes to hang out in a study next door, which is a lot messier.It’s much more like his office at Trump Tower—stacks of papers, newspapers, magazines, printouts, all sorts of papers everywhere that he’s looking at.He’ll lean back there and watch television.He has a 60-inch TV on the wall there where he can watch cable news, which he loves to do.He can snack on food, have lunch, whatever he wants to do in that study.But that’s more of his kind of lair, his man cave.
The Resolute desk is important because?Who had the Resolute desk?
Well, the Resolute desk was used by John F. Kennedy, President Kennedy back in the ’60s, and there was actually a little peep door on the bottom where John Jr., Jack and Caroline Kennedy would play as kids.It’s a desk that’s been in the White House for many, many generations and is a real piece of history.I think Donald Trump prizes the fact that it is now his.
We’ve had the two critical moments; that is, the loyalty dinner [and] “go easy on Flynn” moment.Let’s talk just a little bit about the way the president begins to deal with the public about what feels to him like a mounting investigation.… It’s on the TV; it’s in the press all the time.There are investigations of various things.Revelations are coming out.Comey is coming after him.It feels like … inevitably it’s coming his direction.His counterattack, one particular set of tweets, press conference, … Feb. 16.He’s been president not even yet a month, and this is where he really goes at it….Can you take me there? …
Yeah.So in the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, the FBI was deep into its investigation of potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians.And really, the broader piece is an investigation of what exactly Russia did to interfere with the 2016 election and to influence the outcome in favor of Donald Trump, which is, of course, what the intelligence community has concluded in its findings.
The investigation is ongoing, and Trump is really feeling the heat.He’s bothered by it.It’s a cloud that hangs over his presidency, that really infects everything he’s doing.He brings it up spontaneously in private meetings with his advisers.He lashes out on Twitter about it.He lashes out in news conferences about it.And he’s bothered, most of all, that the media keep covering this “Russia thing,” as he termed it in an interview.He felt like it struck at the heart of his legitimacy as president; that this was an attempt by the media, by Democrats, by intelligence officials who disapprove of his presidency, to discredit his election, to say he didn’t earn the right to be president; he did not earn this election on his own; that he was aided by a foreign adversary.That’s very troubling for Donald Trump.
So he’s lashing out.There were a few news conferences where he erupted at reporters over it.In fact, it was the last time Donald Trump did a full formal news conference.It was in February of 2017.You know, he’s in the residence of the White House with the gold curtains behind him and took questions for probably an hour or so.A lot of the questions were about Russia, the hacked emails, the investigation into collusion with the Trump campaign, and he proclaimed his innocence.
Trump, at this point, he’s incredibly divisive.He appears to be, at times, unhinged.His attacks do not seem to be scripted or prepared or planned by his advisers, but rather sort of impulsive outbursts of how he’s feeling, which is, in some ways, an incredible insight we have into this president.He tweets early in the morning exactly what he’s thinking and feeling, which is not something we've ever had before in the presidency.Usually, every word that comes out of a president’s mouth has been debated and scripted and planned by his strategists and advisers.But not so with Donald Trump.
So we see a real explosion of grievances about the Russia case.There was one tweet in particular that stands out.It might have been a series of tweets, actually.It was a weekend, a quiet weekend, and he just accused Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower during the campaign.He didn’t cite any evidence.In fact, he misspelled “wiretap” in one instance.But it was a really explosive claim to say that his predecessor had done that.Trump likened it to Nixon and Watergate, said it was a scandal of that magnitude and offered no evidence for it.In the days that followed, his White House refused to offer any evidence as well.And in fact, there to this day is no evidence that Trump Tower was actually wiretapped by the Obama administration.
Certainly the FBI, during the campaign, was investigating the Russian interference in the election and investigating whether there were any connections to the Trump campaign, but that is certainly not the same thing as wiretapping the building, the campaign headquarters at Trump Tower.
When he makes a claim like that, either at the White House or at The Washington Post, how amazing does it seem?How different is it by degree than anything you’ve ever experienced before as a reporter?
I remember that day.It was amazing.I was the duty reporter on the White House.We have a rotation.That happened to be my weekend on duty, which meant, you know, he tweets; I sit down and write.That’s my job.So he tweeted this wiretap claim, and I could not believe it.I tried to figure out what he was talking about.I immediately called my sources in the White House to say, “Is there some new information you have about this wiretap?” Nobody could really provide any information.
What we’re left to do, then, is tell the readers what we know, which is not a whole lot.We just know that he’s made this accusation.We know that the accusation is extraordinary, and we know that there's no evidence to support the accusation.This became a story for several days, and I [and] my colleagues pressed the spokespeople repeatedly to explain what was the president of the United States talking about, and they could not explain it.
I don’t know how long it takes, and I don’t even know if it’s actually true, but the thing I remember is, there had been a piece in Breitbart.There had been something on Fox, maybe the Judge [Jeanine] Pirro show.Somehow he got it in his mind … as an information source from them.Do you remember whether that’s true or not?
I don’t remember the details there.But I could say, Donald Trump, for years—this predates the presidency—has been somewhat conspiratorial.He latches onto conspiracy theories.He takes things that he hears and repeats them.He doesn’t really pay much attention to the source of information, so whether it’s a piece of intelligence from the government that’s real and raw, or some gossip that he heard from a friend, or something that he picked up on a not very credible news source, like Infowars, the radio host Alex Jones, he repeats it.It could be false; he repeats it.It could be a conspiracy theory; he repeats it.He’s done it again and again and again for decades, really.This is who he is.This is how he consumes and dispenses information.
But when he’s president of the United States, everything he says, every theory he advances, is a statement from the leader of this country, so it carries real weight, considerable weight.
Can I ask what it’s like to be around the press office, around first Sean Spicer and then Sarah Sanders?When the president does these things, is it an embattled environment?Just kind of describe—are they harried?
To be around Trump’s aides in the press office at the White House in these early days was a sort of 24/7 harried environment.They have the Twitter alerts on their phones, just like we do.The first they hear of a lot of this stuff is when we hear it, which is when the tweet lands, when the phones start buzzing, and they don’t know what to make of it all the time.
I remember early on, Sean Spicer would be kind of racing around; doors would be slamming.Reince Priebus would be running in and out of his office.There was sort of a mad scramble all the time to put out the brushfires and clean up after President Trump.That atmosphere has changed a little bit now.Now that Sarah Sanders is the press secretary, she’s a lot calmer in some ways than Sean Spicer was.But I think also, the people working in the White House have just become more numb, more attuned to the sort of chaos by which Donald Trump governs as president.They're more used to it.It’s not that Trump has changed his behavior or way of conducting business; it’s just that those around him have become more used to what he does.
We hear from lots of people we talk to about his anger, especially around the investigation and Comey.The most obvious one is the Jeff Sessions recusal.From almost the get-go, Trump realizes, this is a huge problem for him, and he’s pissed about it.When did you guys start to pick up the fact that he was not at all happy about the recusal?
Well, I think there were signs very early on that Trump was not happy about the recusal.I remember the day Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.I was traveling down to Virginia.Trump was visiting a huge new aircraft carrier in Newport News, Va., at the harbor there.It was a big military event, and Sessions made his announcement that morning, as Trump was traveling down to Virginia.He was on Air Force One when it was happening, and he seemed pretty bothered by it.He didn’t speak out about it immediately, but it was very clear, looking at the body language and based on what some of Trump’s advisers were privately telling us, that the president was not happy his attorney general had recused.
I think it’s important to keep in mind, by the way, why Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.This was not a choice.It wasn’t a matter of convenience.It wasn’t something he did simply because he didn’t want to do anything with the Russia investigation.It was because he had a conflict of interest.He was compromised.Jeff Sessions, as Trump’s surrogate, as a senator from Alabama and an official on the campaign, had a meeting with the Russian ambassador in 2016.He misled the Senate during his confirmation hearing about that.He had lied about whether he had that meeting.He later had to correct the record.
Because of that, he felt it was his duty to recuse himself from this investigation.And in fact, those are the rules at the Justice Department.If he’s compromised in some way with this investigation, he cannot lead it.That would not be appropriate.So that’s why he recused himself.He thought it would be fine for his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, who did not have these complications, was not a Trump campaign official, to be leading the investigation into Russian interference and the Trump campaign’s role.That’s why he recused.
And the president—you say body language and whatever.Anything more than body language?How long does it take for you guys to know?
I don’t remember when he first said something.
OK, we can check.
You guys would have to review the pool reports and tapes and all that.
Yeah, we can.
I just remember it was pretty obvious immediately that he was not happy.He was asked a question about Sessions that day, I think, in the pool, and you could tell from the way he handled the question.But then I think sources in the White House were telling us later that day that he was upset.I just don’t remember the exact ticktock there.
We always hear about him yelling and really losing it at people.Any of that ever apparent to you guys when it actually happens?
We don’t see it, but we hear about it.
What do you mean?
Well, you know, Trump has a short temper, a short fuse, and will get angry with his advisers a lot, will yell at them a lot.In the Oval Office, he’s very good about not erupting with his staff in public view when he’s in front of reporters or when he’s on camera.But we have sources inside the building, and they tell us when those sorts of eruptions take place.They are reported on with great frequency.
And on the Richter scale, how are they?
They go from like, on a scale of 1 to 10, they go from 10 to 15.I mean, they're big eruptions.He gets angry.He uses a lot of four-letter words.He’s a very emotive person.I mean, he’s not one to conceal his feelings.You can see that on Twitter.In fact, some mornings when he tweets, you know just by the tone of what he pecked off on his phone how he’s feeling that day….
We’re now in the territory just before Comey gets fired.Comey has testified in early March that there is an investigation.He’s authorized to talk about it.It’s coming for the people on the campaign.Trump has also asked him, “Please say something about this."In response to a senator’s question, he does not let Trump off the hook.I think the question is, “Is the president a target of the investigation?,” or something.He won't do it.That sends Trump into some kind of a spin.… Could you feel, around that building and around those players, that Comey’s days were numbered during March, April and early May of 2017?
You know, you could feel that the president had lost faith in the FBI director.You knew he didn’t like James Comey.You knew that Comey was really pushing it with his testimony on Capitol Hill.But few people actually believed that Trump would fire him, in part because it was sort of assumed that Comey had this 10-year term, you know.That’s not a job that you replace with the changing of an administration.It’s highly unusual for an FBI director not to serve the full 10-year term.
In the building, I don’t think people thought firing Comey was necessarily something the president would do.It was clear he was mad at the FBI and mad at Comey, did not like Comey, did not view the FBI as loyal to him and was very bothered by the investigation.But I did not think he would actually fire Comey.But he did.
Were you with him at Bedminster, [N.J., at the Trump National Golf Club]?
I was not with him at Bedminster that weekend, but I did a lot of reporting about the ticktock of that weekend, and Trump spent the weekend at Bedminster, gaming out how he would fire Comey.He wanted to do it.He thought that the time had come.He thought Comey had been disloyal to him.He was very bothered by the Russia investigation.And some of his advisers, including Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, who was with him at Bedminster that weekend, were arguing that he should fire Comey, and in fact were arguing that it would be politically fine because the Democrats also hate Comey because of how he had handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation.So if he fired Comey, a lot of Democrats in the Senate and in the House would be cheering that decision.
… Whatever you know about the circumstances up there, why is he in Bedminster?What are they doing?Why isn't it staffed?Why is it [adviser] Stephen Miller basically—why is he there?Well, you tell me.
This was a weekend when Trump was getting away to his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., in the rolling hills, horse country.It’s a beautiful place.And for a lot of the staff, it was a chance to have a break.Most of the staff did not go with him.They stayed behind in Washington, were able to cool down, be with their families.Trump took a very skeletal crew up to Bedminster, including Stephen Miller.He had some family around.And this was where he really decided he was determined to fire Comey.… So Trump returns to the White House, to Washington, on that Sunday night from Bedminster, determined to fire Comey.Then they have to create a process, a rationale for firing Comey.That’s when Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, enter the picture.They come over to the White House to have lunch with the president.The president lets them know he wants to fire James Comey—that’s clear—and the directive for Sessions and Rosenstein is to draw up the rationale, to write memos explaining why they believe Comey had made mistakes on the job, and deserved to be fired.The rationale they came up with was that Comey had improperly conducted himself during the Hillary Clinton email investigation; that he had shared too much information publicly about that investigation; that he had violated sort of the norms and protocols of the FBI in how he conducted that investigation and spelled this out in a lengthy memo.
The first memo by Rod Rosenstein, which went up to Jeff Sessions, the attorney general—then Jeff Sessions wrote a letter concurring with the memo by Rosenstein and sent that along to the president, and then the president wrote his letter firing Comey.All of these three documents were presented publicly, on May 9, 2017, and that was how Comey got fired.
When Trump writes his thing, he says something about, “Three times you assured me in private that I was not a target of the investigation."It seems to be really foremost in his mind, at this moment.
Trump was very bothered.There were a lot of things that James Comey did that bothered Trump, but he was especially bothered by Comey’s unwillingness to state, definitively in public, that Trump was not under investigation by the FBI, that he was not personally a target of the investigation.So in his firing letter of Comey, Trump stated, in a very strange paragraph in that letter, that Comey had assured him three times in private that he was not under investigation.It was Trump’s way of finally getting that out to the public.He had been asking Comey to tell the public that he was not a target of the investigation.And Comey wouldn’t do it.He just thought that was not an appropriate thing to announce publicly.And frankly, it wasn’t entirely true.
While Trump wasn’t a target of the investigation, certainly his campaign and some of his actions as a candidate were under scrutiny and under review by the investigators.But Trump wanted to establish affirmatively for the public that he was not a target of this Russia probe, and said so in the letter.The letter, by the way, was hand-delivered to the FBI Headquarters in Washington, by Keith Schiller, who is a former New York City police officer; and, more importantly, the longtime personal bodyguard and head of security for Donald Trump up in New York.
Trump brought him with him to the White House, where he was the director of Oval Office Operations.But for all intents and purposes, [he] was sort of Trump’s right-hand fixer, the person who would enforce what the president wanted, and he hand-delivered that letter to the FBI.Comey happened to be in Los Angeles visiting an FBI field office at the time so did not get the letter in person.He found out he was fired, actually, by looking up and seeing the news reports about it on television.
When do you all see the Rosenstein, Sessions and Trump letters?They sort of roll it out, right?This is the justification.
Yeah.The very first word we got that Comey had been fired was Sean Spicer, the press secretary, came into the press room at the White House and read out loud, from the podium, a very brief statement that Trump had fired Comey.Very soon thereafter, the White House blasted out PDF copies of both the president’s letter, the letter memo from Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, as well as the Rosenstein memo, laying out the rationale for firing Comey.That was all sort of packaged and put out to the media late in the afternoon on May 9.
… Suddenly you're sitting in the White House, and this comes forward at the office.The White House comes to you, or the White House comes out, and Spicer says this.… How do you make sense of it?Was it a head-scratching moment, or did you think, oh, OK, I see what's happening here?
It was, by any measure, that was an astonishing moment.But we’d already been four months into an astonishing presidency filled with astonishing moments.So it wasn’t completely surprising that the president would fire the FBI director who’s currently overseeing the investigation into the president’s possible collusion with Russia, a foreign government.And yet that’s what happened.
So our job was twofold.We had to immediately report the news that Comey had been fired and explain what the White House rationale was, but then we set about trying to figure out how, why, when.What influenced the president?We—my colleagues and I—did sort of a narrative reconstruction of that weekend at Bedminster and what went through the president’s mind, why he had determined he had to let go of Comey, the reasons for it.Which advisers were urging him to do it, and which ones were urging caution?We were hearing different things from different sources.Everyone was sort of trying to cover themselves in some way.
But the truth ended up coming out.I think it took a little bit of time, but eventually it became clear that this was a really key moment in a possible obstruction of justice charge against the president; that it was a moment where President Trump tried to use his power, use his office, use his ability to fire the FBI director to redirect the Russia investigation and to change the outcome.
When Ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak and [Russian Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov show up at the White House, I think the next day, there's no press pool in the room.TASS, I think, is there.There are some note takers.There are photographs that get released.Trump reportedly says that the FBI director was—“I got rid of this guy; he was nutty,” or whatever he called him, and said it was a huge relief to get rid of it.Talk to me a little bit about what that was like, for those of you trying to cover Trump, in the immediate aftermath of firing Comey, for him to sit with Russians, with no press around, and have a hail-fellows-well-met—by all appearances anyway—meeting.
Yeah.It was extraordinary for President Trump to invite in the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador to the Oval Office for a private audience, for a number of reasons.First of all, it’s unusual for a visiting foreign minister to get an audience with the president.Usually, the president will only meet with the visiting head of state.Sergey Lavrov, while very important in the Russian government, is not the head of state.That would be Vladimir Putin.
So for starters, that was an unusual audience for the president to grant.It was also unusual that there was no press coverage allowed.The Russians came in with a photographer from their state media agency, TASS, who took photos of this event, photos that were used, to some effect, in Russia, as propaganda, to show the kind of access that the Russian visitors had received by the U.S. president.But there was no American press pool that was allowed into this meeting, which was highly unusual.
The other thing that we learned for our reporting was that President Trump shared classified information, classified intelligence, with the Russians that had compromised our intelligence partners in the Middle East.This was sensitive information about intelligence operations there that could have potentially endangered lives if it fell into the wrong hands, and Trump shared it willingly, almost nonchalantly, with the Russian officials.That was highly unusual.
Another thing that was highly unusual and really important, I think, for Robert Mueller’s investigation, was that Trump commented in that meeting about Comey, about firing Comey, that he felt a real relief that he had fired Comey, and he talked about what a bad guy Comey was, and how untrustworthy he was.It felt like this was the kind of thing Trump was probably telling a lot of people around this time, and because he doesn’t always have a filter, and he doesn’t always control and think about what he’s saying, he’s not a disciplined individual, he said it to the Russian Foreign Minister.It’s the same kind of chitchat he might have with Kellyanne Conway or one of his other advisers, but he shared it with the visiting diplomats. …
It then becomes clear from the Lester Holt interview that whatever justification was being ascribed, attributed to Rod Rosenstein’s memo and Jeff Sessions’ memo or letter, it was really the president’s intent all along to shut down the Russia investigation.
Yeah.President Trump made it very clear in his interview with Lester Holt that the whole time he was thinking of firing Comey, he was also thinking about Russia, the probe, the “cloud” that hangs over his presidency.He wants to extinguish this investigation, and I think he saw getting rid of Comey as one way to do it.But it only made matters worse.
And when you all hear it, given how hard you were working to justify what actually happened, what was the ticktock?What does [the] Rosenstein memo mean?Why are they writing the things they're writing?Why is Trump writing the memo he’s writing?And then it all becomes kind of clear, I think 24 to 48 hours later.How amazing is that?
Yeah.You know, the thing with Donald Trump is, he often says what he believes, and if you just wait long enough, he’ll tell you the truth.I mean, he’ll say it.And he did in that interview with Lester Holt.He made it very clear that firing Comey had to do with Russia and ending that Russia investigation, which had bothered him.We knew it bothered him.Sources were telling us it bothered him, that he wanted nothing more than to get out from under that cloud of doubt about his legitimacy and the credibility of his election, and he saw getting rid of the FBI director as the way to do it.
Are you all certain by then that there's going to be a special prosecutor, a special counsel, that’s going to be named or inevitably named?
We’re not certain what form it would take, but we were fairly confident that there would be some long-term investigation into Russia that would continue with or without Comey.So whether that was going to be a special counsel or a special prosecutor or, frankly, a new FBI director continuing the FBI investigation, it was very clear that getting rid of Comey as the head of the FBI was not going to be enough to get rid of the Russia investigation.This was, remember, an investigation into interference by a foreign country in our U.S. elections.That’s a big deal, and I don’t think the institutions of this country, of this nation, were going to not investigate that.
Trump and the people around him just were naïve or something.
I think Trump was naïve at the time to think that just removing one person from a top institution would change the way that institution does its work.
I take you now to a meeting in the Oval Office: the president, Jeff Sessions, Don McGahn.McGahn’s phone rings.It’s Rosenstein saying, “I've decided to name a special counsel, and I've decided it’s Robert Mueller."McGahn reports it to the president, who, by all accounts, loses it at Sessions and says, “If you hadn't recused yourself… you're an idiot,” whatever he said.… Sessions resigns that day, I think.… It must feel at that moment like all hell is breaking loose over at the White House.
Yeah.Sessions offered to resign at that moment.He actually wrote a resignation letter that he handed to the president.We didn’t know this at the time.But it was one of those truly surreal and chaotic moments behind the scenes at the White House.Sessions submits his resignation letter to the president, heads out to the driveway to get into his car to head back to the Department of Justice, and Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, finds out that this had all happened, and is literally physically racing after Sessions to get him to stop, to get Sessions to change his mind, to get him to go back into the Oval Office, get that letter back, rescind your offer of resignation, and stay in your job as attorney general.It was that important to the rule of law, to the stability of this administration, and, frankly, to the president’s own potential legal standing, that the attorney general not resign over this Russia investigation, but that he continue in his job.
I think there were some discussions over the next several days actually.But eventually, Sessions got the letter back.The resignation was rescinded.Sessions stayed in his job.But all was not well, because Trump forever since has viewed his attorney general as a disloyal and, in some ways, dishonest individual, and is very upset with him, does not view him as somebody worthy of that job, and has publicly mused that he regrets ever nominating him for the position.
When Mueller swings into action, by the way, does Trump know Mueller?… Does Trump understand the implications of Mueller and who Mueller is and what Mueller represents?
I don’t know.I don’t think Trump had a full appreciation for Mueller’s background and experience in law enforcement, and for his reputation of the highest ethical conduct.In many ways, selecting Mueller to be the special counsel prosecutor was an extremely interesting choice.In so many respects, he’s different than Trump.He’s an institutional man.He’s somebody who lives his life by the honors and norms and customs of this nation’s institutions.He follows the rules.He is not a showboat.He’s very much someone who keeps his head down and does his work and conducts his investigation.In that way, he’s Trump’s opposite, his polar opposite, and that’s very threatening to Trump.It took a while, I think, for Trump to fully appreciate all of that.
The one thing I will say that’s been the most difficult for Trump in this period, since the Mueller investigation has been launched, in this full year, is how little Trump knows about what Mueller is doing.Mueller is not on TV doing interviews all the time, telling the public what he’s learning.He’s not issuing reports.He speaks publicly, largely through his court filings, through his indictments, through the guilty pleas he secures.And to Trump and to the people around Trump, that’s very frightening.They don’t know where Mueller is headed.They don’t know what he knows.They don’t know what he doesn’t know.They don’t know, for example, does he have Trump’s tax returns?How deep is he looking into Trump’s personal finances?How much does he know about situations like the Stormy Daniels payment?What have Trump’s aides and associates been telling him [in] these interviews?The president of the United States, as powerful as he is, does not know the answer to a lot of those questions.
And he doesn’t really have personal counsel.McGahn’s not a specialist in any of this.… He seems to understand that he doesn’t work for Donald Trump the man; he works for the president, and he works for the institution, the presidency, in some ways.So the idea of McGahn going on CNN or someplace to wage war on behalf of the president doesn’t actually happen.But he does finally bring Marc Kasowitz to the table, down from New York.And Kasowitz’s acts are not legal maneuvers; they are to assail Mueller.They talk about the Democrats who Mueller has hired from the Justice Department to go after the president.
Yeah, Trump wants an attack dog as his defender.He views the Mueller threat the same way he viewed threats in New York when he was a real estate and reality television mogul.It was a public relations threat.It was something he had to fight in public, and he wanted somebody to defend him, and that was Marc Kasowitz, sort of a street-brawler lawyer from New York, who had worked with Donald Trump over the years and who could get in the ring with Mueller.
Trump envisioned Kasowitz doing press conferences and attacking Mueller’s credibility and planting negative stories in the press, and waging … this war in public as opposed to a very sort of surgical legal operation, which Kasowitz was not exactly doing at the time.But that only lasted so long.Kasowitz was in Trump’s good graces for the first few months.
But by summer of 2017, Trump decided he wanted a different legal approach, and he brought in Ty Cobb as a White House lawyer, who would oversee the document production and the sort of interview process with the Mueller team.And he had John Dowd, a veteran Washington attorney, as his personal lawyer, who was dealing with him directly and helping advise him on the legal strategy.They were taking a much more conciliatory approach than Kasowitz had.They were not attacking Mueller.They were urging the president not to invoke Mueller by name.They were urging the president to show some restraint in his public attacks, that it was OK to criticize the Russia investigation broadly, but do not, under any circumstances, attack Robert Mueller personally or make any of the sort of personal accusations that they knew Trump really wanted to make.
For a while, Trump went along with that strategy, in part because he thought it would work.Ty Cobb and John Dowd were telling him: “You know what, sir?If you are conciliatory, if you give Mueller the information he wants, if you provide those documents, if you let your staff go sit in for the interviews, he will clear your name.This investigation will be over in a matter of months.It could be over by Thanksgiving, by Christmas, by January, by February."They were promising all of these end dates and calming down the president and making him feel comfortable with the direction of the investigation.
The problem is, we would reach Thanksgiving, we would reach Christmas, we would reach January and February, and the investigation was still going on.There was no end point, and Trump was getting increasingly frustrated and impatient.
Did you ever see Trump with Cobb or Dowd?
No.
Were they ever together?
No.Cobb and Dowd were actually very careful not to appear in public very often.If you notice, there's no television footage of them.They were never present for presidential events in public.When reporters were brought into the Oval Office, they made sure they weren’t there.They very much wanted to be behind-the-scenes figures, which made that lunchtime discussion that they had at a steakhouse in Washington, not far from the White House, out on the patio, with the reporters sitting at one table over, it was extraordinary, because they were just freely talking in public about the president’s legal strategy.
… Were they leakers?
Cobb and Dowd spoke to reporters from time to time.They both occasionally did interviews, answered questions.A lot of the legal questions about the Russia case that came from reporters to the White House were directed to Ty Cobb.Cobb sometimes would answer, and sometimes would not, but tried to be forthcoming.And in every interview he gave, for the most part, he was pretty conciliatory and hands-off with Mueller, and again and again and again would stress the extent to which the White House and the president personally were cooperating with the special counsel.It was very important to Cobb and to Dowd to show that Trump was cooperating.
When this happens, that is, that they come to the table, … he’s playing a kinder, gentler strategy.It’s in response to an event, or it happens after an event where Kasowitz is ineffective, Kushner’s [lawyers] are ineffective, and Don Jr.’s lawyers are ineffective.Are you with him, the president, at the G-20 summit in Germany, where he sees Putin?
I wasn’t at the summit, but I've done a lot of reporting on that Air Force One [incident].
OK. So now we’re at the moment where they're on Air Force One.… The Don Jr. meeting, the president had [been] asked for a statement about what happened.I think the Times doesn’t know the details yet, but they know some of them when they ask for the thing.What do you know about what happened on Air Force One?
President Trump is in Hamburg, Germany, for the Group of 20 summit.This is the leaders of the 20 biggest Western economies in the world.Vladimir Putin is there, among others.And on the sidelines of this summit, Trump’s aides are getting an inquiry from The New York Times.They're about to report that Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and namesake, had a meeting with the Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in the summer of 2016, during the campaign.Jared Kushner also was in that meeting, as was Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time.
This is a big distraction on the sidelines of the summit, as the White House officials try to figure out how to respond to this inquiry from The New York Times.They sort of decide among themselves that it would be wise to respond to the story with transparency, not to lie, but to be very upfront about what happened, that there could become potential legal troubles for people if they were not truthful in their response.
They all get aboard Air Force One that afternoon to head home to Washington.During the flight, President Trump decides to play strategist.He always views himself as having the best instincts, the smartest counsel, when it comes to how to handle a publicity problem, which he thought this was, a P.R. problem for this son.So he intervened and decided, you know what?We should put out a statement.Don Jr. should put out a statement saying this was a meeting about adoption with the Russian lawyer.
And President Trump dictates this statement.Hope Hicks, his communications director, was with him in the cabin of Air Force One, helping with the logistics of preparing that statement.There were lawyers on the phone.There were messages back and forth to Donald Trump Jr. and his lawyer, and the statement was put together.
Turns out the statement was false.It was not true.This was not a meeting about adoption; it was a meeting—as we later learned from Don Jr.’s emails—where this Russian lawyer was promising dirt, political dirt, opposition research as it were, about Hillary Clinton, offering that to the Trump campaign.So the meeting took place, but President Trump’s involvement in creating that misleading statement, creating that sort of cover-up, if it were [a cover-up], for what the meeting actually was, became a real subject of interest for Mueller and the investigation.It was yet another example of President Trump personally intervening, to try to direct the outcome of a complicated issue with Russia.It was a potential piece of the obstruction investigation.
Hope Hicks is not a lawyer.She’s there with him, working on it.Do you know who else was in the room?
No.
Yeah.So there they are, the president and Hope Hicks.They have an interesting relationship, but she’s certainly—
Hope Hicks is not a lawyer, but she certainly is a crisis communicator.She’s been at Donald Trump’s side since before the campaign even began, and by this point, she had really emerged as, arguably, the president’s most trusted confidante and adviser on all things.She was much more than your typical communications aide or spokesperson.But she was really somebody who understood the president, knew how to execute his orders and knew how to kind of manage him and manage his moods.And, you know, she was with him at this time.
It was Donald Trump who settled on what the substance of that statement would be, but Hope Hicks was involved in helping execute it, literally, like helping get it onto a screen and into emails and so forth so that it could be distributed to the right people, which is her job.And that’s what she did for him.She did that every day for years, in helping him sort of manage these crises.
When the case moves, when Mueller hands some of the case off to the Southern District of New York, how does that wash around the White House?How does the president react to the information?
This is the Cohen [case]?
Yeah.
Yeah.So when word reaches President Trump that the FBI had raided the home and office and hotel room of Michael Cohen, his personal attorney, Trump erupted.He was very upset.He was consumed by this news all day.It was very troubling for him and scary for him.Michael Cohen was much more than just a lawyer, but he was his fixer.He was the vault.He [Michael Cohen] knew everything.He knew he had cleaned up Trump’s messes over the years.He knew a lot about Trump’s finances.As we later learned, he’s the one who secured that payment for the porn star Stormy Daniels over her alleged affair with President Trump, back in 2006.Cohen was in the middle of a lot of messy stuff that I think Trump wants to keep private.
So the fact that the FBI had raided his personal space, had obtained his records, had obtained things that could be claimed attorney-client privilege involving Donald Trump was deeply unsettling and troubling for Trump.He didn’t know what was picked up.He was trying to find out what the FBI had.And he just felt powerless at that moment.I mean, this is the commander in chief, the president of the United States, and the FBI, which he does not control, just raided the private records of his attorney.
When something like this happens, is he in the Oval Office?Does he go to that study?Does he go up to the residence and watch six television sets?Do you know where he was that day?
… I can say generally.Trump follows these news developments on television like the rest of us do.He spends a lot of time in his residence, in his private chambers, in the mornings.He usually doesn’t come down to the Oval Office until 10:30 or 11:00 in the morning, when he begins his schedule of events as president.These early-morning developments, he’s taking it in from his private residence.He’s oftentimes alone up there, although he spends a lot of time on the telephone with friends and various aides.Sometimes some key advisers will come into the private residence to brief him on certain issues, but that’s where he consumes a lot of these developments.
So he’s sitting there watching television, more or less alone, and whatever the intelligence he’s gleaning is intelligence delivered by news anchors.
Yeah.
He brings Rudy Giuliani to the table.Why do you think?
There are a couple of reasons Trump was drawn to Rudy Giuliani.He views Giuliani as a very credible individual, as someone who was mayor of New York City at an incredibly difficult moment after 9/11—America’s mayor.He thinks Rudy Giuliani is viewed as a hero in a lot of quarters of this country.He also has known Rudy Giuliani for decades.Rudy Giuliani used to be the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, and Trump knew him, as a prominent businessman and real estate developer in the city.They had a relationship.
Giuliani was a supporter of Trump’s campaign, a sort of informal adviser on the campaign trail, somebody who helped him prepare for his debates with Hillary Clinton.But I think most importantly to Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani is a pitbull.He’s a fighter.He showed, during the 2016 campaign, he was willing to go out in public on TV or at campaign rallies and say just about anything to eviscerate Hillary Clinton and promote and defend Donald Trump.
And this is a moment when Trump is under siege, and he wants somebody to defend him on TV. He felt like his lawyers were not doing the television defense.He thought Rudy Giuliani could, so that’s why he brought Rudy Giuliani in.There was an almost overnight change in the public posture of the president and his legal team.They immediately started attacking Mueller, calling for the investigation to end, calling it a witch hunt, calling it unfair, and not just calling it all those things once, but again and again and again.Giuliani is doing five, six, seven, eight, 10 interviews a day.He’s a constant presence on television defending Trump, and Trump feels like that is doing a great service, because he’s driving the news cycle; he’s shaping the way people view the investigation, and the results so far, they believe, are positive, because people are viewing the investigation more and more through a partisan lens.
Can you feel the energy surge, a change in the climate at the White House?
Absolutely.There's a much more offensive posture at the White House when it comes to the Russia investigation.They’ve seized on not only the length of the investigation going on now for more than a year, but also on the revelations that the FBI had a secret intelligence source who had been feeding information about the campaign and Russia in the early stages of the investigation, which was in the later part of 2016 during the campaign.
Those two things, together, have given Trump some momentum in the PR wars with Mueller.Remember, Mueller is silent.We don’t hear from him.So when Rudy Giuliani is on TV making Trump’s case, there's nobody out there making the special counsel’s case.What that has done is, if you're a Trump voter, if you're somebody who is inclined to support President Trump, a hardcore Republican per se, I think you're more and more inclined, now, to view the investigation as somehow unfair, or somehow partisan, or somehow not legitimate, gone on too long.And that’s the strategy.That’s what Rudy Giuliani openly admits he’s trying to do, and Trump thinks he’s doing it quite successfully.
It’s an anti-impeachment strategy now, as they feel the midterms coming.
That’s right.That’s right.You know, this is all laying the groundwork for the possibility that Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives.If they do, there very well could be impeachment charges brought by the House of Representatives, which would be very damaging for President Trump.I think Giuliani is helping Trump prepare for that, to create a very partisan, political frame around this Russia investigation, so that if there's an attempt to impeach the president, it will be viewed as solely partisan, or, for example, if Mueller issues a report detailing examples in which the president has obstructed justice, that report will be viewed as a partisan-slanted study and not an unimpeachable, ethical pursuit of justice. …
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