Fear: Trump in the White House

“No,” Mueller said.

“Am I right that you want good, reliable answers?”

“Yes.”

“Get me the questions,” Dowd said, “and I will take them and tell you whether we can answer them.” He would provide the answers—a line or two to each question. “Fair swap,” he continued. “You give me the questions so I know what’s on your mind.”

General Kelly could get Mueller, his team and a court reporter into the White House without anyone knowing. “We’ll have a script.” The president would be under oath. “We’ll get it just the way we want it. But we’re telling you that’s the truth as we know it. The president’s saying that’s the truth as he knows it, with the assistance of counsel. So either that or you sit there while we interrupt him for six hours or he plays, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

Mueller’s team were shaking their heads and made it clear that had never been done before. No way. It was unheard of.

“Let me think about whether to give you some questions,” Mueller said.

Dowd reminded Mueller that in July or August, when Trump had attacked Mueller and Sessions, Mueller had contacted Dowd to say, “I got a problem, can you come by? You said, I got people refusing to testify that don’t need to refuse to testify. They don’t have any culpability at all. But I’m afraid that the atmosphere, they feel like they’re disloyal if they testify.”

And Dowd had told him, “Well, I’ll go public and say we want everyone to cooperate. The president’s cooperating. We’re cooperating 100 percent. And we encourage everyone to do that.” Dowd and Cobb had been quoted in the press saying Trump and the White House would “continue to fully cooperate.”

As he had at each meeting, Dowd said, “What’s at stake is the country.” The president needed to do his job, and did not have time for this investigation. There were serious, even dramatic tensions in the world—North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, Russia, China.

“I’m very sensitive to that,” Mueller replied. “I’m doing the best I can.”

“Why don’t you just give us the questions?” Dowd pressed.

Mueller didn’t like it.

Dowd knew he was gambling and daring Mueller by threatening to fight a grand jury subpoena. That was his design, sending a message that if Mueller wanted to go the grand jury route, this was what it would look like. He would fill his motions with exhibits. And the district judge would spend two weeks reading them.

Dowd had laid it out as strongly as he could to Mueller. “And you’re going to have to stand in the well of the court and tell the judge why you want to put the president of the United States in the grand jury. Bob, as you know, I have handled cases like this. And I wouldn’t go near the grand jury with the president of the United States.”

He had a final argument. The perjury trap was what Mueller’s team did, he charged. “You did it to Flynn, you did it to Gates, you did it to [George] Papadopoulos,” a former campaign aide. “You guys, that’s the games you played.” Rick Gates, a Manafort business associate and Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, had one of the best lawyers sitting next to him and had still lied. “You guys gave him no time to prepare. And now he’s got a felony. Bob, that’s exactly what I told the president: that’s what they’re going to do to you in an interview.”

Dowd thought it possible, even likely, that there was something he didn’t know. “Bob, you guys are all wound up about something. There must be something here.” Maybe you disapprove of the president’s behavior. “But you don’t have a case.” Whatever they had, Dowd said, “Go tell it to the mountain and go tell it to the Hill. I don’t care.”

Mueller sat stone-faced—marble, nonresponsive. Such control. The meeting was over.

At 5 p.m. Dowd and Sekulow went to see the president in the dining room off the Oval Office.

“How’d it go?” Trump asked.

“Mr. President,” Dowd said, “this is ridiculous.”

“Oh, my God,” Trump said. Dowd’s reaction to the Mueller meeting seemed so negative that Trump looked worried that he was now really in trouble.

“No,” Dowd said. “You’ve never truly respected Mueller. You’ve got really good instincts, but I’ve never bought into it. But I’ve got to tell you, I think your instincts might be right. He really wasn’t prepared. Why are we coming back here with nothing?”

A week later, March 12, Dowd and his team went again to see Mueller and his team. He hoped against hope that Mueller was going to say he was inclined to decline prosecution and say he needed the president’s testimony just to write a report to Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general.

Mueller’s team, Quarles and three others, dictated 49 questions and Jay Sekulow took notes. Nearly all concerned Trump’s attitude, opinions, decision making or conclusions about major players such as Flynn, Comey and Sessions. Some inquired about Donald Jr. and the famous meeting at Trump Tower, and the offer from a Russian lawyer to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton. Others concerned real estate development in Russia.