Fear: Trump in the White House

The evening of Tuesday, May 16, Michael Schmidt of The New York Times published a blockbuster story. Comey had written contemporaneous memos of his conversations with Trump. In an Oval Office meeting February 14, while Comey was still FBI director, he wrote that the president had asked him about the investigation of Flynn and said: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Trump hovered around the TV, glued to coverage. On CNN that evening, David Gergen, a voice of experience and reason who had served as a White House adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton during their impeachment investigations, sounded an alarm.

“I think we’re in impeachment territory,” Gergen said. “What we see is a presidency that’s starting to come apart.”

Porter could see that Trump was about to lose it at the mention of impeachment. The president voiced outrage that Comey seemed to have turned the tables on him.

The next day, Wednesday, May 17, Trump was in the Oval Office when he learned that Rosenstein had appointed Robert Mueller, who had run the FBI for 12 years, of all people, as special counsel to look into Russian election meddling and any connection to the Trump presidential campaign.

Trump’s mood deteriorated overnight and the next day, May 18, was the worst. The president erupted into uncontrollable anger, visibly agitated to a degree that no one in his inner circle had witnessed before. It was a harrowing experience. “We barely got by,” Porter said to an associate.

Normally Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk or in his private dining room. But this day he mostly stayed on his feet as he stormed between the two rooms.

The president turned to his lifeline—cable news. He watched a two-hour block of Fox News, and then most of the two-hour-long blocks of MSNBC and CNN that he had TiVo’d.

He raged at the coverage as top aides came in and out—Priebus, Bannon, Kushner, McGahn, Cohn, Hicks and Porter. Why was Mueller picked? Trump asked. “He was just in here and I didn’t hire him for the FBI,” Trump raged. “Of course he’s got an axe to grind with me.”

“Everybody’s trying to get me,” the president said. “It’s unfair. Now everybody’s saying I’m going to be impeached.” What are the powers of a special counsel? he asked.

A special counsel had virtually unlimited power to investigate any possible crime, Porter said. It was Watergate, Iran-contra and Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“Now I have this person,” Trump said bitterly, “who has no accountability who can look into anything, however unrelated it is? They’re going to spend years digging through my whole life and finances.”

Trump could not focus on much of anything else. Meetings were canceled and parts of the day eventually scrapped.

Porter had never seen Trump so visibly disturbed. He knew Trump was a narcissist who saw everything in terms of its impact on him. But the hours of raging reminded Porter of what he had read about Nixon’s final days in office—praying, pounding the carpet, talking to the pictures of past presidents on the walls. Trump’s behavior was now in the paranoid territory.

“They’re out to get me,” Trump said. “This is an injustice. This is unfair. How could this have happened? It’s all Jeff Sessions’ fault. This is all politically motivated. Rod Rosenstein doesn’t know what the hell he is doing. He’s a Democrat. He’s from Maryland.”

As he paced the floor, Trump said, “Rosenstein was one of the people who said to fire Comey and wrote me this letter. How could he possibly be supervising this investigation?”

Bob Mueller had all these conflicts that ought to bar him from being special counsel investigating him. “He was a member of one of my golf courses”—Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia—and there was a dispute over fees and Mueller resigned. Mueller’s law firm had previously represented Trump’s son-in-law.

“I’m getting punched,” Trump said. “I have to punch back. In order for it to be a fair fight, I have to be fighting.”

Back and forth most of the day, the president rotated to watch TV in the dining room and then come out to the Oval Office in a frenzy, asking questions and voicing his anger that he had lost control of the investigation.

“I am the president,” Trump said. “I can fire anybody that I want. They can’t be investigating me for firing Comey. And Comey deserved to be fired! Everybody hated him. He was awful.”

CHAPTER

21

Marc Kasowitz, the seasoned, gray-haired litigator who had represented Trump for decades in divorces and bankruptcies, asked John Dowd, 76, one of the most experienced attorneys in white-collar criminal defense, to his office in New York at 4:00 p.m. on May 25, 2017.