I was in my happy place on a golf course thirty minutes away from Washington, DC. The golf course gave me the same sensation some people experience looking at the ocean. There was something about peering out over the fairways, over the rolling hills, and seeing the sharp emerald trees cutting into the brightening morning sky. I needed the outdoor time, feeling the fresh air on my face, rather than the recycled air in the studio. This was where my personal life began.

The morning was freakishly warm for December. It was almost eight thirty, and I didn't have to be at work until about eleven. I had taken my time practicing my strokes, walking from hole to hole. The task helped me process.

The network was gearing up for a tough stretch. We were incredibly busy, dealing with mass shootings, terrorist incidents, and then the Russia story. We were entering an even more uncertain phase. The Trump administration was spinning from controversy to controversy. It was an unprecedented time, both because of the intensity of the news cycle and the pressure we were under to get the story right. That morning was a nice break from the often twelve-to-fourteen-hour workdays.

This phase we were entering also changed journalism. I am not talking about having to contend with the negativity: President Trump's consistent tweets and statements accusing the media of being purveyors of fake news. There was much more at stake, so a higher level of journalism emerged. The New York Times might break one story, and the Washington Post will break the next, and then a network may come out with yet another item of news. We're getting bits and pieces of the story without always figuring out how to fit them together or even if they do fit together. There are the pieces of this Russia influence puzzle coming together from different sources speaking to different news organizations as the FBI probed whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians during the 2016 election. My daily existence sometimes made me feel as though I were living in someone else's Hollywood screenplay. It's still hard to imagine being in this place and time where in 2018 a president is being accused of obstruction of justice and where an investigation is triggered in 2017 by the president suddenly firing FBI director James Comey, who was leading the Russia investigation at the time. And the country is in a place where Trump campaign representatives stand accused of seeking “dirt” from the Russians on Hillary Clinton and then potentially accepted assistance from the Kremlin in derailing the Clinton machine. President Trump has called all of the allegations a “hoax.”1

I practiced my putting stroke a few times, and then my cell phone rang. I jumped. I took my phone out of my pocket and saw Linda's name on the screen. I pushed the green button and walked over to a tree.

“Hello, my friend,” I answered, and after some brief small talk, I asked, “What's going on?”

Putin still hadn't responded after President Obama expelled the Russian operatives. Typically, he would have responded by this time. Throughout the transition of power we would hear Obama administration officials and the president himself saying that there is only one president at a time. Intelligence sources were echoing that phrase. I didn't want to try to imagine what was going on at the White House.

Retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, who had agreed to accept Trump's offer to become his national security advisor, was found to have made false statements to the FBI regarding his contacts with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak over the pending US sanctions for interfering in our election. His contacts would later be the subject of the warning from acting attorney general Sally Yates to President Trump's White House counsel. Yates relayed to the White House official that US intelligence and the FBI believed that Flynn was susceptible to blackmail because of his contact with the Russians and had likely been compromised by the Russian ambassador. The Russians knew Flynn was lying about his contacts with their ambassador and that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence. Flynn was not fired by the White House until February 14, eighteen days after Yates had warned the administration.2

“They're liars,” Linda blurted out. At the time, many in the government who were privy to some of the intelligence knew that Flynn had been lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.³

Linda was angered by the deception. We ended the call, and I went back to focusing on golf for the moment.

We were moving into unprecedented territory. The country had never been down this road before. There were growing questions about the new president's entanglements with Russia. But it wasn't just him. Michael Flynn had been paid by Russian companies, had been reported to be working on corrupt side deals even while he was being considered for national security advisor and then while he was in the White House. And there was that photograph of Flynn and Putin sitting next to each other in Moscow in 2015.⁴ There was something odd about how frequently our digging into the new administration kept turning up ties to the Kremlin.