Fear: Trump in the White House

Porter saw the issue as an exquisite way to kick the can down the road for several more weeks, if not more. Mattis was helpful in drawing it out, later telling Ross he needed an analysis before he could give his opinion.

Later analysis by the Defense Department for Mattis, however, showed that “U.S military steel usage represents less than one-half percent of the total U.S steel demand” and Defense would be able “to acquire the steel necessary to meet national defense requirements.”

CHAPTER

20

Trump said he wished he had fired Comey at the beginning of the administration but now he wanted Comey out.

Bannon disagreed and offered this argument to Trump alone in the Oval Office: “Seventy-five percent of the agents do hate Comey. No doubt. The moment you fire him he’s J. fucking Edgar Hoover. The day you fire him, he’s the greatest martyr in American history. A weapon to come and get you. They’re going to name a special fucking counsel. You can fire Comey. You can’t fire the FBI. The minute you fire him, the FBI as an institution, they have to destroy you and they will destroy you.”

Bannon thought Trump did not understand the power of the permanent institutions—the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon and the broader military establishment. He also did not understand the sweeping powers of a special counsel who could be appointed to investigate everything a president touched.

“Don’t try to talk me out of it,” Trump told McGahn and Priebus, “because I’ve made my decision, so don’t even try.” Comey is a grandstander and out of control.

By early May, Trump felt that Comey was vulnerable because of his recent testimony in the convoluted investigation of Clinton’s private emails. He dictated a letter listing the reasons to fire Comey.

McGahn told him that the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, was coming in for a meeting. One thing Rosenstein wanted to discuss was Comey, and apparently Rosenstein also wanted to get rid of Comey, McGahn said.

McGahn explained that there was a process here—the deputy attorney general was the person who oversaw the FBI. Let’s hear Rosenstein out. This was a stall tactic that the White House staff was using more and more. Let’s cool this off, let’s talk to Rod and we’ll get back to you with a plan.

Rosenstein told Trump that he thought Comey should be fired. He had no problem writing a memo outlining his reasoning. He brought a three-page memo to the White House. The subject: RESTORING PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN THE FBI. It stated that on July 5, Comey “announced his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation,” which was Hillary Clinton’s emails, preempting the decision of the prosecutor and offering “derogatory information” by calling Clinton’s conduct “extremely careless.” Then, 11 days before the election, he announced he was reopening the Clinton investigation because he believed it was a question of “speak” or “conceal.” This misstated the issue, Rosenstein said. He quoted five former attorneys general or deputy attorneys general agreeing that Comey had violated the rules.

Done, said the president. He could not have said it better himself. He sent a brief letter to Comey informing him that he was “terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”

The plan to stall the firing had backfired. It had sped up the process. The Rosenstein memo had nothing to do with the decision, Priebus knew. The president already had made up his mind.

Bannon believed, “100 percent,” that the reason for firing Comey was because the FBI was seeking financial records from Jared. It was pure speculation. Ivanka had complained to her father about the FBI.

As the months ground on, Priebus saw that if Trump was planning to or said he was going to fire someone, it did not mean it would happen. One of his favorite sayings became, “Nothing is dead until it’s buried around here.”

It appeared, for the moment, that Comey was at least dead, but he and his story were not buried.

Trump was watching lots of cable news coverage of his May 9 firing of FBI Director Comey. It was not going well. He had muddied the waters and contradicted himself on May 11 when he told NBC’s Lester Holt that he was going to fire Comey no matter what recommendations he had received from Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Attorney General Sessions. In a long rambling response to Holt, Trump stated, apparently giving some of his reasoning, “I said to myself, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”

This answer seemed very much at odds with his letter to Comey saying he was being fired because of Rosenstein’s memo severely criticizing Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.