The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.
—Proverbs 12:22
Two days after the election, two elected officials of special note separately warned President-elect Donald J. Trump against bringing Lieutenant General Michael Flynn into the new administration. The lesser of them was New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the head of Trump’s transition team, who assumed he was in line for a plum position. Christie had been suspicious of Flynn’s emotionally charged behavior during the campaign. When he met with Trump for ninety minutes on November 10 at Trump Tower, he had committed the cardinal sin of telling Trump what Trump didn’t want to hear. “If I were president-elect of the United States, I wouldn’t let General Flynn into the White House, let alone give him a job,” Christie said.1
Flynn and Christie had a history of conflict. In August, both men had attended one of the first intelligence briefings held for Trump after he was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. NBC News reported, citing six sources, that after Flynn repeatedly interrupted the intelligence briefers, Christie told him to shut up and “calm down.” Publicly, Christie and Flynn denied that had ever happened, but Christie said he made it clear that “General Flynn and I didn’t see eye to eye. I didn’t think that he was someone who would bring benefit to the president or to the administration.”2
The other government official who warned the president-elect about Flynn was President Barack Obama, who had been shocked by Trump’s victory but who sought, in his last weeks in office, to respond to foreign intervention in the election. On November 10, Obama warned President-elect Trump against bringing Flynn into the administration, citing, among other things, his divisive performance as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Unlike Trump, Obama actually read his daily intelligence briefs and would have had additional information about Flynn, his work on behalf of the Turkish government, and his contact with Russia. Mike Pence also should have seen intelligence reports about Flynn’s activities. There is no record, however, that he expressed any concern about Flynn to Trump or anyone else.
Pence’s attitude had been consistent from the moment Trump had chosen him as his running mate. “He was all in.” This attitude shone during the transition and in the early days of the Trump administration as Trump veered from lie to lie and crisis to crisis and Pence remained loyal. Pence seemed willing to do anything to maintain his position and stay in the good graces of this new president, Donald J. Trump. But he also maneuvered himself out of the line of fire at key moments. Was it good fortune that he happened to be in Indiana or traveling abroad when controversy arose? Or was he trying to avoid getting dirtied by Trump so he could assume the role of president if necessary? Was this God’s plan? Had he been chosen to serve as president-in-waiting?
In the matter of Michael Flynn, Trump heard both Obama and Christie and disregarded their advice. Trump loved having top military men around him and had admired Flynn ever since they met in 2015. Flynn had been advising several other Republican candidates during the primary season but settled happily with Trump. “I think his view of the world and his view of where America was and where it needed to be,” Flynn said in recalling his first meeting with Trump. “I got the impression this was not a guy who was worried about Donald Trump but a guy worried about the country. I don’t think people can BS me that easily, and I was sort of looking for that. I found him to be in line with what I believed.”3
Within a day of the warnings, on Armistice Day, Christie was fired from the transition team. With no prospects for the future, all that was left was to return to New Jersey for the last few weeks of his term as governor. Most galling of all for Christie, who had such high hopes for himself after the election, was that he was replaced by Mike Pence. Trump announced Pence was taking over the role of transition chairman with Flynn remaining as one of the transition deputies. Trump’s choice was an early sign of Pence’s future status in the administration. He was now tasked with putting together a cabinet and recommending other top officials in the new government.
In Washington, as well as New Jersey, Christie’s departure was blamed, in part, on his other mighty antagonist in the incoming administration: Jared Kushner. Neither Christie nor Pence ever talked about how the transfer of responsibilities was handled. However, reporters would learn that the new transition team erased almost everything Christie had done. They disposed of his files on potential job candidates and, in a foreshadowing of White House chaos to come, summarily fired Christie’s top transition aides. Their departure meant that no one could pass along certain concerns about Flynn. If Christie had warned Pence about Flynn during the campaign or on his way out the door at the transition office, Pence gave no sign that he was concerned. At this stage in their relationship, he was not going to challenge Trump.
On November 17, one week after he heard Obama’s warning about Flynn, Trump appointed him national security advisor. Flynn, said Trump, “is one of the country’s foremost experts on military and intelligence matters.” With Flynn “by my side,” Trump pledged they would “work to defeat radical Islamic terrorism, navigate geopolitical challenges, and keep Americans safe at home and abroad.”
Despite Trump’s praise of Flynn, the general’s record during the campaign had been mixed at best. Flynn had been charged with anti-Semitism, criticized as an Islamophobe, outed as having hidden ties to Russia and Turkey, to name a few, and he had a penchant for espousing and retweeting wing-nut conspiracy theories. Unless he had been sequestered by his staff throughout the campaign and transition, Pence must have noticed the controversies. However he did not appear to care much about the danger Flynn posed to the new administration. This attitude aligned with Pence’s behavior throughout the campaign, when he serenely looked past one controversy after another. If Trump issued an offensive tweet or off-the-cuff slur, Pence responded with a shrug, said his boss was joking, or insisted that Trump had not made the statement in the first place. For example, he flatly denied that Trump had called for shutting down the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (he had) and argued that Trump had not said more nations should obtain nuclear weapons (he did). Pence was either playing to an audience of one (Trump himself) or had drunk the same Kool-Aid that gave him the temerity to deny the very Trump statements that had been broadcast around the world and were easily available on the internet. Both declarations had shocked many Republicans, let alone Democrats and foreign allies, who were not yet accustomed to Trump’s unhinged tweet storms.4
* * *
A day after Flynn’s designation as national security advisor, Congressman Elijah Cummings, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote to Pence as head of the Trump transition about an obvious conflict of interest for Flynn, whose attorney had acknowledged by now that Flynn was a paid lobbyist for the Turkish government. Cummings wrote:
Recent reports have revealed that Lt. Gen. Flynn was receiving classified briefings during the presidential campaign while his consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, Inc. was being paid to lobby the U.S. Government on behalf of a foreign government’s interests.
Flynn had not registered as a foreign agent as required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and could be subject to criminal charges. Responding to the reported breach, Flynn’s attorney, Robert Kelley, had a concise answer when asked whether Flynn’s work for Turkey was based on his close connection to Trump. “I hope so.”
In his letter, Cummings cited information related to Michael Isikoff’s interview with Flynn at the Republican National Convention about his 2015 speech in Moscow and Flynn’s attendance at the celebratory dinner seated next to Vladimir Putin. During the visit, Cummings wrote to Pence, “Lt. Gen. Flynn gave a speech that was highly critical of the United States.” Pence would say later that he didn’t remember the letter from Cummings and maintained he had no knowledge of Flynn’s connections to Russia or Turkey. Yet the warning had been received at his office. Cummings made public a reply from the transition office that said, “We will review your letter carefully.”
Days later, Pence could not avoid dealing with another Flynn-related problem. The controversy began when Michael G. Flynn, Flynn’s son, reiterated his interest in a conspiracy theory that apparently originated within a white supremacy organization. The conspiracy nuts believed that Hillary Clinton, her campaign manager, John Podesta, and other Democrats were running a Satanic child abduction, pedophilia, and sex ring, based on the nonexistent basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in northwest Washington. Although fringe media figures like Alex Jones of InfoWars spread the conspiracy theory around the world, reporters at The New York Times and other media outlets debunked the story as a baseless hoax. The debunking did not stop Flynn Jr. when working with his father on the Trump transition effort from promoting the fakery, which was now dubbed “Pizzagate.” Remarkably, the senior Flynn helped spread the bizarre conspiracy theory by tweeting inferences about Hillary Clinton and the other unfounded claims linking her to the sexual abuse of children. Flynn wrote:
U decide - NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails:
Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc … MUST READ!
The Flynns’ actions came as sober men and women of all political stripes were calling for restraint when it came to online commentary and inflammatory rhetoric. But here were key members of the Trump team—the future national security advisor and his son—transmitting unhinged, divisive, and libelous stories. Viewed by some as merely provocative speech, this rumormongering led to threats against the pizza restaurant and its owner, James Alefantis, who had been besieged by threatening messages and web postings. Finally, on December 4, Edgar Maddison Welch, a deluded twenty-eight-year-old man from North Carolina, drove to the Comet Ping Pong restaurant on what he considered a divine mission to “rescue” the reported sex slaves. He entered the restaurant and fired three shots with an automatic rifle. No one was injured; Welch surrendered to police and was arrested. Eventually, he pleaded guilty, apologized for being reckless—and gullible—and was sentenced to four years in prison. Alefantis was relieved that no one was hurt, but the nightmare was not over. “This guy’s going to jail,” he said, but “InfoWars [Alex Jones’s online radio outlet] continues to push this conspiracy, as do many others.”5
Two days after the shooting incident at Comet Ping Pong, the vice president elect appeared on the MSNBC television program Morning Joe and was questioned about the younger Flynn’s relationship to the transition. All he would say was that the young man was no longer employed by the Trump transition team. “Well, General Flynn’s son has no involvement in the transition whatsoever,” he said. For emphasis, he repeated himself: “He has no involvement in the transition whatsoever.”
Later in the day on CNN, Pence struggled to respond to new information about previous efforts to obtain a security clearance for the younger Flynn, which would have authorized his access to classified information. CNN’s Jake Tapper asked whether Pence knew that the Trump team had sought the clearance. Pence did not answer directly and tried again to minimize the younger Flynn’s role in the transition, saying he had only pitched in with some scheduling and administrative work for his father. Pence’s exchange with Tapper was one more case of a Pence promise to be clear, followed by a fog of words.
PENCE: Look, all—all of our families want to be helpful. And four weeks to the day from Election Day, there’s been an awful lot of work to do. But—but—but Mike Flynn Jr. is no longer associated with General Flynn’s efforts or with the transition team.
TAPPER: You’re downplaying his role, but you must be aware that the transition team put in for a security clearance. For Michael G. Flynn, the son …
PENCE: I think that’s the appropriate decision for us to move forward, avoid any further distraction and I’m very confident as we continue to build this team …
Instead of rejecting the conspiracy-mongering of Flynn and his son, Pence brushed off the entire matter and took up the age-old practice of media-bashing. However, he made one telling admission. He said he worked “very closely” with General Flynn as one would have imagined, since they were directing the transition together. If this were true, however, why had Pence not condemned the conspiracy hoax or replied fully to the questions sent by Cummings on November 18 about Flynn’s lobbying contract with Turkey and Russia contacts? Weeks later, once Flynn had been outed for further contacts with Russians, Pence changed his characterization of his relationship with Flynn. His staff said Flynn and Pence had only occasional contact during the campaign and transition and did not work closely.
The Comet Ping Pong story was only one of the controversies that contributed to the growing sense that social media and the internet had played an outsized role in the presidential campaign. By early December, it was clear that Russia had meddled in the election, though not yet clear how much and with whom. Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, raised an early alarm. “Stories also have circulated about Russian and other foreign actors involved in the production of fake news, as well as collaboration between Russian (and other foreign) and American leaders and movements regarding common political agendas,” he wrote. “What was the full scope of these activities? Did any of these actions influence the election outcome? I don’t know, but we need to know.”6 News outlets reported, meanwhile, that RT had more viewers on YouTube than did CNN’s YouTube channel. A Washington Post report, among others, reminded that Flynn was paid by Russia’s RT network a year earlier and had compared the Russian government broadcaster to CNN.
* * *
Pence showed no concern or anxiety about such matters. As Christmas 2016 approached, he prepared for a two-week vacation back home in Indiana. From the outside, the break appeared to be ill-timed. By all accounts, the transition—which essentially started over after Christie left—was far behind schedule in naming the hundreds of men and women who would be needed to staff the top echelon of the incoming Trump administration. The inauguration was less than a month away. Concern about Russian interference was growing. Yet Mike Pence opted to leave town; he and Karen went home with their family to Indiana. Flynn, meanwhile, also left town for a Caribbean vacation.
Happy to be back, Pence returned to his duties as governor of Indiana. On December 21, he went to the Wheeler Mission Ministries, a shelter for the homeless in Indianapolis. With cameras recording the action, he donned an apron and a blue Wheeler baseball cap and stepped behind the steel table where workers filled trays with holiday foods. Pence put trays into the hands of the men and patted shoulders. When one addressed him as “Mr. Vice President,” Pence replied, “It’s Mike to you.”
After the meal was served, Pence walked along on the periphery of the lunch tables as Secret Service agents, aides, and even a chef looked on. Pence shook hands and spoke with a few of the men who men stood up. He then approached the camera. “I thought it was important to continue the tradition I’ve had throughout my life of stopping by and giving encouragement to ministries like this,” Pence said. “I know that Hoosiers in big cities and small towns are taking time to reach out this week to the less fortunate.”
As for the larger task ahead of him, Pence said there was much work to do. “I’m very humbled by the opportunity we’ve been presented to serve our nation.”
* * *
The Pences sent out a general Christmas message on social media that said he planned a “tender Indiana Christmas. We’ll be with Karen’s family on Christmas Eve; we’ll be sitting around the Christmas tree at the governor’s residence on Christmas Day; and then, the really special event is that our son, Michael, who is a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps will be getting married at the governor’s residence … we’ll have a small, little intimate ceremony just for immediate families. So it’s going to be a very special time as it is for every Hoosier family.”
As the Pences celebrated, the transition team in Washington labored to fill six hundred executive positions at the White House, about half of which needed Senate confirmation. That confirmation process could have begun anytime after the November 8 election, but the task of matching people to jobs was proceeding very slowly. As 2016 came to an end, the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan Washington group, said that the incoming administration would be lucky to have a cabinet selected by the time Trump and Pence were sworn in. Prior administrations had averaged one hundred key jobs confirmed by the Senate on Inauguration Day.7
The difficulties Trump confronted staffing his administration were not evident in Pence’s schedule. True to the laid-back style of his first days as governor, he took time to relax and hardly seemed focused on the job at hand. Then, in the last days of the year, events unfolding in Washington would draw him into a controversy that would plague the new administration every day for the foreseeable future.
* * *
On December 29, President Barack Obama issued an executive order from his Christmas retreat in Kailua, outside Honolulu, where he was spending his final vacation as president. It read:
Today, I have ordered a number of actions in response to the Russian government’s aggressive harassment of U.S. officials and cyber operations aimed at the U.S. election. These actions follow repeated private and public warnings that we have issued to the Russian government, and are a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior.
All Americans should be alarmed by Russia’s actions. In October, my Administration publicized our assessment that Russia took actions intended to interfere with the U.S. election process. These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government. Moreover, our diplomats have experienced an unacceptable level of harassment in Moscow by Russian security services and police over the last year. Such activities have consequences. Today, I have ordered a number of actions in response.8
Some of the actions Obama ordered were classified and, no doubt, were taken in the murky realm of cyber defense. The visible actions included the expulsion of thirty-five Russian diplomats and the closure of two Russian annexes in the United States. Obama said that other actions would be taken, some of which could be clandestine. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress generally supported the sanctions, although, predictably, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, among other Republicans, said the measures were overdue and said Obama was showing weakness.
Trump, spending the holiday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, had learned of Obama’s impending action a day ahead of time. On that day, Pence and his family had celebrated as planned the wedding of his son, Michael, to Sarah Whiteside at the governor’s mansion. The couple had met while attending Purdue University. The bride was a mental health coordinator with the Indiana State Division of Mental Health and Addiction and was said to be a former aide to the Indiana Democratic Party.
The next day, as Obama’s actions were revealed, Trump practically yawned in response. “I think we ought to get on with our lives,” he said. “I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind, the security we need.” This passive and incomprehensible statement tracked with the larger point he had expressed many times before. He doubted reports of Russian hacking, insisting despite ample evidence to the contrary that he wasn’t helped in the election by their interference.
Whether by design or good fortune, Mike Pence was out of view as Trump offered his very unpresidential response to the sanctions. Mary Matalin, a popular conservative pundit and former aide to former vice president Dick Cheney, noted sarcastically that Pence always managed to be away from Trump at moments when it was better to be at a remove. “He is always in the right place at the right time, discreet, dedicated, and freakishly absent from tumultuous events,” she said.9
Members of the transition team, including people who should have been very close to Pence, reacted quickly to President Obama’s announcement of Russian sanctions. Within hours, General Flynn’s deputy, K. T. McFarland, wrote a series of emails that included warnings that Obama’s actions could be a problem for relations between Trump and Russia, “which has just thrown the U.S.A. election to him.” When it became known, McFarland would say that rather than indicating she knew such a thing had taken place, she was simply repeating the language used by Democrats. This may or may not have been true. What was incontestable, though, was the fact that rather than demonstrating concern about the sanctity of U.S. elections, the transition officials worried that a focus on Russian hacking would be a tool to delegitimize Trump’s victory.10
The concern held by intelligence officials, however, went to the heart of American democracy. By now, wrote then FBI director James Comey, the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence had reached a clear consensus:
Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an extensive effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. That effort, which came through cyber activity, social media, and Russian state media, had a variety of goals: undermining public faith in the American democratic process, denigrating Hillary Clinton and harming her electability and potential presidency, and helping Donald Trump get elected.11
In her emails, McFarland said that her boss, Flynn, was scheduled to speak with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Flynn already had a relationship with Kislyak, and, in fact, some transition aides had warned Flynn previously about such contacts because they were almost certain to be intercepted by U.S. intelligence. Pence did not publicly say whether he was in touch with Flynn or anyone else during the Christmas holiday, nor whether he was aware of McFarland’s message or the subsequent chain of emails. However, they were so widely distributed that any claim that Pence was bypassed is hard to believe. He was the top transition official and the president’s second. If incoming presidential advisors Reince Priebus, Stephen Bannon, and Sean Spicer were informed—and they were—then Pence almost surely received notice.
As the Trump team digested Obama’s sanctions, Thomas P. Bossert, another transition official, distributed an email to top officials in the transition and said their task should be to “defend election legitimacy now.” He sent copies of his message—and one from McFarland—to a host of top Trump players, including Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and Flynn. The only key transition player—other than Trump—not mentioned as a recipient was Mike Pence.
On December 30, McFarland spoke with Flynn, who was on vacation in the Dominican Republic. Soon afterward, Flynn phoned Kislyak. It was later reported that Flynn called the Russian ambassador on orders from a “very senior transition official.”
Following the chain of command, Pence was Flynn’s superior and in charge of the transition. If Pence had not issued the order to call Kislyak and that report is true, the chain of command would have extra links. Trump himself, of course, would be the ultimate “senior transition official.” Others could have included Kushner or Bannon. Flynn eventually testified to the FBI that his chat with Kislyak was a social call. He said he wished Kislyak happy holidays and may have expressed condolences for the plane crash that killed the members of the Russian Army Choir en route to entertain troops in Syria.
One of the most confounding elements of Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak was that, as an intelligence officer, he should have known that telephone communications with Russian officials in the United States would be monitored by security officials. It would be equally odd that these contacts on a matter so concerning to the president-elect would have been kept secret from Pence, who was both the incoming vice president and the head of the transition.
On the day Flynn and Kislyak spoke, December 30, Russian president Vladimir Putin offered a mild response to Obama’s sanctions. “We regard the recent unfriendly steps taken by the outgoing U.S. administration as provocative and aimed at further weakening the Russia-U.S. relationship. This runs contrary to the fundamental interests of both the Russian and American people,” he said. “Although we have the right to retaliate, we will not resort to irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy but will plan our further steps to restore Russian-U.S. relations based on the policies of the Trump Administration.”12
Delighted by Putin’s reaction, Trump took to Twitter, which would become his main mode for communicating with the world: “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) - I always knew he was very smart!”
While Trump tweeted, Pence left Indianapolis to headline a $2,700-per-ticket Illinois fund-raiser at the venerable Chicago Club. With the help of a security cordon, he was able to bypass about 150 protesters who had gathered to draw attention to the Russia hacking controversy. No mention was made of the demonstration at the private event. Pence “was very upbeat,” said Jim Dirken, Republican leader in the Illinois House. “We raised a lot of money for the Republican National Committee.”
Pence returned to Washington after the new year, where he finally did react to the warning about Russian hacking by saying that, as always, he agreed with Trump. The president-elect had often responded to the issue by casting doubt on the American intelligence community, charging that President Bush had gone to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence. (In fact, U.S. intelligence got the facts right: Saddam Hussein was not building a bomb. But Bush acted on cooked-up raw intelligence with pressure from his vice president, Dick Cheney.)13
Although this claim was not the view shared by most Republicans, Trump’s argument made for a nice sound bite. Pence echoed it, saying, “Given some of the intelligence failures of recent years, the President-elect made it clear to the American people that he’s skeptical about conclusions from the bureaucracy,” Pence said. “I think the American people hear him loud and clear.”14
Perhaps Trump had been loud and clear, but Pence recently had heard evidence that the intelligence community had gathered on Russian influence in the election. The information had been provided by the directors of the top four U.S. intelligence agencies, including James Clapper, the director of national intelligence; Admiral Mike Rogers of the National Security Agency; John Brennan of the CIA; and James Comey, the FBI director. At a meeting that Pence attended at Trump Tower in New York, they presented classified and categorical evidence that Russia had hacked into the U.S. election and that Vladimir Putin was personally responsible for authorizing this activity.
In addition to Pence, the Trump briefing was attended by the president-elect, Michael Flynn, and K. T. McFarland, Flynn’s designated deputy as the new national security advisor. Long after the meeting, Clapper made two observations about the ninety-minute Trump Tower meeting: “Pence very astutely prompted us to clarify points on several occasions; I was impressed by the way he actively consumed the intelligence we were providing.” He said that Trump also asked questions, and when they were done, he went on to say, “I believe everyone in the room realized that the evidence—particularly from signals intelligence and cyber forensics—to attribute the influence operation to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government was overwhelming.”15
Clapper told Trump and the others that the intelligence community “had neither the authority nor capabilities to assess what impact—if any—the Russian operation had” on the outcome of the election.16 Despite Clapper’s clear position, Trump would continue to call the Russian investigation a witch hunt, and Pence would claim falsely, despite Clapper’s denial and analysis of Pence’s astuteness, that the intelligence community had determined that the Russian activity did not affect the election outcome. Pence could have seen himself merely as supporting the president, not as evading the truth, which in fact he was doing. Clapper later concluded that Russian interference did affect the presidential election. He wrote in his 2018 memoir, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence, that “of course the Russian efforts affected the outcome. Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense, and credulity to the breaking point.” Whether or not Pence thought or understood this was true at any point, neither he nor Trump pushed for an investigation or promoted efforts to prevent the Russian government from continuing to interfere in future U.S. elections.
After a few days of meetings, Pence made one more trip to Indianapolis, on January 9, for the inauguration of his successor as governor. Eric Holcomb had been a congressional and United States Senate staffer but had not held office until Pence picked him to replace the retiring lieutenant governor, Sue Ellspermann. Once in office, Holcomb would move quickly to reverse some of his predecessor’s decisions and to take action where Pence had done nothing. Citing his belief that Keith Cooper had been wrongfully convicted, Holcomb would grant the pardon Cooper requested. The new governor visited East Chicago and declared the state of emergency that Pence had rejected. And he opened up the limited needle exchange program so that local officials across the state could fight the spread of HIV among intravenous drug users. In the same time period, the Republican-dominated legislature would overturn a series of vetoes Pence had issued in the final months of his governorship. The lawmakers didn’t explain themselves, but Scott Pelath, the Democratic House minority leader, said, “The Mike Pence legacy came to a very quick end today, probably the shortest one in Indiana gubernatorial history.”17 Legislatively, Pence was disappeared by his own party.
In private, many Republicans said that Pence had been a middling governor who accomplished little. That would hardly matter to a man who had been lucky enough to be selected by Donald Trump, who then, in turn, was lucky enough to win the presidential election. However, in the moment, Indiana was in a swoon over its new favorite son, so there was nothing to be gained by criticizing him. Pence was, himself, so busy he would have been hard-pressed to focus on what folks in Indiana thought of him. By the time Pence returned to Washington once more, his close associate Michael Flynn had told Donald F. McGahn II, attorney for the transition organization (and eventually White House counsel), that he was being investigated by the FBI. (They were probing, at the very least, his lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government without properly notifying American authorities.)
On January 12, the truth of Flynn’s contacts with Russian authorities emerged as David Ignatius of The Washington Post reported that Flynn had spoken to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on December 29, the day when he supposedly extended a single holiday greeting from the Dominican Republic. Noting the time line in connection to Obama’s sanctions announcement, Ignatius, a veteran analyst on intelligence matters, had a basic question: “What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions?”
Ignatius noted that the Logan Act of 1799 bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Though two people had been indicted under the act in the nineteenth century, no one had ever been prosecuted under its provisions. However, in this case, Ignatius raised the possibility that the spirit of the law had been violated. He had contacted the Trump transition team but had not received an answer to his request for comment.18
Future White House press secretary Sean Spicer, already serving as spokesman for Trump, confirmed that Kislyak and Flynn had spoken but said that it was an innocuous phone call. “They exchanged logistical information,” Spicer said. “That was all.” Abandoning the holiday greetings scenario, Spicer indicated that the chats might have centered on a proposed conversation between Trump and Putin. He did not indicate who had been his source for this notion or who else knew about the communications between Flynn and Kislyak.
Only after Spicer’s declarations did Mike Pence emerge as the Trump team’s pinch hitter. With this mission in mind, he agreed to appear on the January 15, 2017, edition of CBS’s Face the Nation with John Dickerson. Pence marked the occasion by dressing in a white shirt, blue suit, and plain red tie. Not content to let the colors signal his patriotism, he fixed a little American flag pin, the ubiquitous accessory of politicians nationwide, to his lapel.
With his motorcade gliding toward the CBS News studio on M Street in northwest Washington, Pence could reflect on the fact that members of the incoming Trump administration—and almost certainly Trump himself—would be watching and evaluating his performance. Face the Nation, first aired in 1954, had helped to set the American political agenda ever since. It might have lost some of its power in an era when cable channels and the internet gave people hundreds if not thousands of news options. However, it was the kind of program Donald Trump had grown up watching, and as the most media-savvy presidential candidate in history, he surely cared about Pence’s performance.
As Pence waited in a chair across the table from Dickerson, CBS aired a video of Trump talking about the Russia issue. On tape, Trump said, “I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake out. I think it is a disgrace. And that is something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.”
Dickerson turned to Pence and welcomed him to the program. Pence flashed a smile. The crow’s-feet that framed his eyes added extra twinkle to his face. The host then noted that the Republican senator who chaired the foreign relations committee was going to conduct an investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Pence, as he had when he became governor, hailed the peaceful transition of power that was about to take place and then declared that authorities had discovered “no evidence of any impact on voting machines” from the Russian effort. Pence’s comment was not particularly relevant; voting machines are decentralized, and hacking would be difficult to effect a difference in the outcome of the U.S. election. Pence knew, however, that the U.S. intelligence community had reported a week earlier that Russian intelligence did hack into state and local electoral systems and that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”19
Dickerson then asked whether, given the Senate inquiry that had been announced by a member of the president’s own party, Trump still considered the concern over the issue a “witch hunt.” Here was Pence’s chance to agree that a legitimate controversy existed. He looked down at the table in front of him and then offered, along with some sighs and shakes of his head, a condemnation of the president’s favorite enemy, the news media.
“I think that”—sigh—“there frankly has just been an effort by many in the national media, present company excepted, since this election to essentially demean and question the legitimacy of this incoming administration. And talk of that—sources within the intelligence community have been attributed with sharing that information, public officials—I think has been a real disservice to our democracy.” Pence went on to say that Trump, who fell 2.9 million votes short in the popular balloting and gained office through the quirks of the electoral college, had won the election by a “landslide.”
It was, in its clumsy syntax as well as its argument, the kind of statement Trump would have made himself: Reporters and the intelligence officials who were warning of trouble were bad actors. They didn’t respect the president-elect’s sweeping victory. These were the people, and not the Russians, who bombarded the country with propaganda and constituted the real threat to democracy. For good measure, Pence even threw in a comment about how soon he and Trump would start to “make America great again”: very soon.
Not satisfied, Dickerson asked, “Did any advisor or anyone in the Trump campaign have any contact with the Russians, who were trying to meddle in the election?”
“No, of course not, and I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors trafficked in a memo produced as opposition research.” He was referring of course to files handed to U.S. intelligence officials by Christopher Steele, a former British MI6 officer who specialized in Russia and who had been commissioned first during the 2016 GOP presidential primaries by Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire and “Never Trump” Republican. Singer dropped the research effort after Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, and Steele then began to work on behalf of the Democrats. Steele’s dossier, which included startling raw material indicating that Russians had information about Trump that could be used to blackmail him, had been leaked to the press. Steele was well known and respected by U.S. intelligence officials, and his reporting was a valuable addition to ongoing U.S. investigations of Russian attacks on the election campaign. President Obama had authorized briefing Trump about Steele’s dossier.
Trump, who told lie after lie during the campaign, had refused to acknowledge charges of Russian meddling and denigrated the intelligence community for even raising such suspicions. Defending Trump before this national audience, Pence insisted that Trump’s mere presence in the White House would improve America’s standing in the world. The vice president elect glowed with admiration as he spoke about how happy he was “to literally be sitting side by side with him. He’s done hundreds of interviews and attracted men and women of extraordinary caliber to this cabinet.”
As for General Flynn and the Russian ambassador, Pence said, “What I can confirm, having spoken to him about it, is that those conversations that happened to occur around the time that the United States took action to expel diplomats had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.”
“But that still leaves open the possibility that there might have been other conversations about the sanctions,” said Dickinson.
“I don’t believe there were more conversations,” replied Pence.20
With his practiced calm demeanor and steady voice, Pence had followed Trump’s lead and would keep going in this direction for more than a year. As far as the Trump team and Russia were concerned, there was nothing to worry about.
Pence repeated these claims later in the day in a Fox News interview, in which reporter Chris Wallace asked if anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with Russians. “Of course not,” said Pence. “Why would there be any contacts between the campaign and Russia?”
“Did members of the Trump campaign meet with Russian officials?” asked Wallace.
“All the contacts by the Trump campaign and associates were with the American people,” Pence said. “We were fully engaged with taking his message to ‘Make America Great Again’ all across the country.”
* * *
A day before the inauguration, Pence called a news conference to praise and take credit for the transition process of the incoming Trump administration. “Seventy-one days ago, Donald Trump set an ambitious schedule prior to this inauguration, and he asked me to chair the transition effort,” Pence said. And as usual, he added, “I was grateful and honored to be given the opportunity to do just that.”
While he said that hundreds of “beachhead” officials would be “reporting for duty” the following day, the Trump administration—and the transition under Pence—was running far behind previous administrations in filling key posts. Pence’s other main claim about the transition effort was false. He said that $1.2 million of $6 million allocated in the federal budget for the presidential transition would be returned to the U.S. Treasury. The General Services Administration told the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity that in addition to the $6 million provided from taxpayer funds, the Trump transition raised private money as well. Any amount left over went to rental costs for the Trump transition offices, according to the GSA.21
Late on the morning of Friday, January 20, 2017, Mike Pence was sworn in as the forty-eighth vice president of the United States. The ceremony took place on the West Front of the Capitol, which was not his favorite side—he preferred the natural lighting cast on the East Front of the Capitol. But then again, were he to become president one day, he might have another shot, in which he could change the venue. At noon, Donald Trump took the oath of office, with now former president Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter looking on. Trump’s inaugural address included ominous notes about “American carnage,” and a bleak assessment of recent history that provoked George W. Bush’s purported reaction: “Weird shit.” Trump would spend subsequent days arguing that the crowd in attendance was far bigger than the photographic evidence clearly showed.
Retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn was also on the inauguration stand and was seen sending text messages from his phone during the ceremony. A confidential source told House Intelligence investigators that one message went to a colleague, saying that Russia sanctions were about to be dropped, and a private business deal he was promoting on a Middle East nuclear power project was “good to go.” Two days after the inauguration Flynn was sworn in as Trump’s national security advisor. That same day, a news report said that U.S. intelligence had reported more substantial contact between Flynn and Kislyak than Mike Pence had claimed. Faced with questioning from reporters at his first regular White House news briefing two days after the inauguration, Sean Spicer repeated what Pence had said a week earlier: whatever Flynn and the Russian ambassador had discussed, they did not talk about the sanctions.
Officials in the Justice Department and at U.S. intelligence agencies heard the White House denial with considerable distress. They had been debating what they should tell Trump and officials of his incoming administration about intercepted communications between Flynn and Kislyak. These proved that Flynn was lying. FBI director James Comey had argued before the inauguration that the briefing could wait. Now that Trump was president, Comey relented, and a plan of action developed.
First, on Tuesday, January 24, FBI agents went to the White House to question Flynn, who repeated that he had not discussed the Obama sanctions with Kislyak. Flynn should have realized the Justice Department already had a recording, captured by surveillance technology, of their conversation.
The next day, January 25, the FBI agents reported their interview findings to Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general who was running the Justice Department following the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
On Thursday, January 26, 2017, Yates took a ride up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Department of Justice to the White House, where she provided White House counsel Donald McGahn with information about Flynn’s FBI interview and the available facts from intelligence intercepts. Yates said that this was a matter of national security—Flynn could be blackmailed by the Russians because of the discrepancy between his answers to FBI queries and the actual content of his talks with Kislyak. McGahn immediately told Trump about the proof of Flynn’s lies and of a specific warning from the highest law enforcement officer in the land that the United States was in danger of a security breach. Trump did nothing. Flynn remained at the job with full access to U.S. intelligence.
Although vice presidents routinely receive the highest-level briefings on security issues, no one in the White House—neither Trump aides nor people close to Pence—reported what Pence had or had not heard. Leaks were rampant and regular from the people closest to Trump, but Pence’s staff prided itself on maintaining a unified front and avoiding leaks to the news media. Even this early in the administration, the argument was that Pence needed to be protected and isolated from information that could be damaging to the Trump presidency. Should Trump be impeached or resign, Pence would be well served by having the ability to plausibly deny knowledge of problems like Michael Flynn.
For his part, Flynn continued to deny that he ever had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador. Finally, on February 9, an official told reporters that Flynn was changing his story. Flynn, the spokesman said, “indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”
On February 10, Pence and Flynn were seen chatting and shaking hands at the White House. Flynn was amiable and looking straight ahead; Pence was serious and looked away from Flynn, but there was no hint of acrimony. Later on the same day, Trump fielded questions during an Air Force One flight to Florida, where he would spend the weekend at Mar-a-Lago. The New York Times and Washington Post were reporting that Flynn had lied about his contacts with Kislyak.
“I don’t know about that,” Trump told reporters. “I haven’t seen it. What report is that? I haven’t seen that. I’ll look into that.”
After the weekend, Trump came back to Washington. On the night of February 12, Flynn resigned, which, in Washingtonspeak, meant he was fired. His letter of resignation revealed for the first time that the vice president had been involved in the whole Kislyak mess from the start. The letter read:
Unfortunately, because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the vice president-elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian ambassador. I have sincerely apologized to the president and the vice president, and they have accepted my apology.
For a general who had tried to build a ramrod reputation for toughness and competence, Flynn’s resignation letter was notable for its excuses and shading. Deceptions were painted as “incomplete information,” and the “fast pace of events” was blamed for Flynn’s decision to pass off these deceptions as truth. He closed his letter in Trumpian fashion, praising himself. “I am tendering my resignation,” he wrote, “honored to have served our nation and the American people in such a distinguished way.” Trump let him get away with it all, saying that Flynn had to depart because news of his Kislyak contacts had leaked out to the public.
Eighteen days had passed from Sally Yates’s warning to the White House and Michael Flynn’s firing as national security advisor. His letter absolved the vice president of any responsibility. “I was disappointed to learn that the facts that had been conveyed to me by General Flynn were inaccurate,” Pence said a few days later. “But we honor General Flynn’s long service to the United States of America, and I fully support the president’s decision to ask for his resignation. It was the proper decision. It was handled properly and in a timely way.”
Chris Christie was back in New Jersey, a former governor fulminating about the mistakes made by the Trump administration, but still holding out for a job and calling Donald Trump his friend. If Christie felt vindicated on the day Michael Flynn was fired or when he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, he mostly kept it to himself. Months later, after Flynn admitted to breaking the law, Christie would say he had “no need to feel vindicated.” Christie added, “Suffice to say, I had serious misgivings, which I think have been confirmed by the fact that he pled guilty to a felony in federal court.”
* * *
For Mike Pence, the Flynn scandal was a burden on top of what was already an overstuffed portfolio. Traditionally, vice presidents are asked to oversee a few policy areas at most, and they may be expected to work closely with members of Congress. But presidents typically come to office knowing what they want to do, whom they want to hire, and how they will proceed. Donald Trump was not typical in this way or any other way, which meant that Pence would be asked to do much more. This fact had been noted by the president’s son Donald Jr., who had declared that Trump’s vice president (when he offered the job to John Kasich) would be “the most powerful vice president in history.” That was coming to be true. Indeed, while Trump chose Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state and rewarded Senator Jeff Sessions with the top post at the Department of Justice, he looked to Pence to recommend people to fill many top posts. The list was comprised of Pence supporters and cronies over the years, and a distinct number of them were Pence’s very own Hoosiers:
• Seema Verma, who had worked in Indiana state government for Pence, became administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which together account for more than $1 trillion, or more than 25 percent of the government budget. Verma was a designer of the state Healthy Indiana medical program under Pence and his predecessor as governor, Mitch Daniels. Two other former Indiana staff members joined Verma at the CMS office. Brady Brooks became deputy chief of staff. Matt Lloyd, Pence’s former spokesman and close aide, was placed in charge of public affairs for Verma. Lloyd had returned to the government after a stint working as director of communications at Koch Industries.
• Dr. Jerome Adams, his former Indiana state health commissioner, became United States surgeon general. Adams, an anesthesiologist, had defended Pence against complaints about his slow response to the HIV outbreak among drug users in Indiana.
• Tom Price, who was Pence’s friend when they served together in Congress, became secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. A conservative antiabortion, anti-Medicare physician from Georgia, Price would be forced to resign for having spent at least $400,000 on excess travel.
• Alex Azar, the president of Eli Lilly, based in Indianapolis, would be named to replace Price. Lilly was one of Pence’s major corporate campaign contributors.
• Sonny Perdue, the former governor of Georgia, who became Trump’s secretary of agriculture, was related to the wife of Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers.
• Dan Coats, Pence’s friend and former United States senator from Indiana, was named director of national intelligence.
• Betsy DeVos of Michigan, the Amway billionaire and Pence’s longtime political benefactor (DeVos and her family gave thousands of dollars to Pence’s earlier political campaigns and more than $1 million to the Trump-Pence presidential campaign) became secretary of education.
Health care policy and the billions of dollars involved could easily fall to Pence’s sphere of influence by default. Donald Trump was not interested in the details of governance and here Pence could coordinate his long-standing ideas on privatization of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, much in line with his former Republican colleagues in Congress.
“The Trump people really didn’t have much to say about how we deal with Medicare or Medicaid or people who have no medical help,” said former senator Richard Lugar, a conservative stalwart who left the Senate in 2013. “So Pence had an opportunity here to come into the void and set up a program (similar to the Healthy Indiana program when he was governor) in Indiana that worked pretty well,” Lugar said. “It’s an area where the president really didn’t have strong views. He didn’t say: ‘Mike stay out of that.’ He may be indebted to Mike for getting into it, to offer at least a Republican solution or an alternative to what otherwise was a vacant part of public policy.”
The same was the case with the choice of DeVos as education secretary.
DeVos and her family were well known to Republicans in Congress. Among the GOP senators who would be required to vote on her nomination were twenty who had received a total of more than $800,000 in campaign contributions from DeVos and members of her family. However, she had no previous experience running a large bureaucracy, and her involvement with education had been limited to her advocacy for vouchers and other policies that would steer tax dollars away from public schools and into private ones.
During DeVos’s confirmation hearing, Senator Bernie Sanders asked her how much she and her family had donated to Republican campaigns over time. Devos said she didn’t know. “I have heard the number was $200 million. Does that sound in the ballpark?” the senator asked. “Collectively.” “My entire family? That’s possible,” she answered with a bemused expression, not blinking an eye. This would be a fantastic sum in the eyes of some ordinary Americans, but as major benefactors for the GOP, the DeVoses could have easily contributed more.
DeVos’s comments on education were troubling to many of the senators. She did not seem to understand questions about determining student proficiency (measuring performance based on standardized tests) versus growth (the progress of a student over the course of a year). She also had no knowledge of the federal civil rights law that protects students with disabilities. Most memorable was her answer to a question from Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy about whether she supported the presence of guns in schools. She said it depended on specifics, referring to a Wyoming school surrounded by a fence to keep bears out. “I would imagine there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies,” she said.22
On the night before they voted on DeVos, the Democrats in the Senate kept the chamber open so they could air their objections to her nomination. “Betsy DeVos doesn’t believe in public schools,” said Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts during the all-night proceedings. “Her only knowledge of student loans seems to come from her own financial investments connected to debt collectors who hound people struggling with student loans, and despite being a billionaire, she wants the chance to keep making money on shady investments while she runs the Department of Education.”
All forty-eight Senate Democrats voted against DeVos. They were joined by two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, who agreed that DeVos had no qualifications and was just a lobbyist for charter schools and right-wing causes. Republicans, regardless of what they said privately, were not going to buck the president. Neither would Mike Pence. In fact, as vice president, he possessed the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, and he would use it for the first time to help his friend.
Pence was ushered to the Senate rostrum as the votes were being cast. He received a quick primer on procedures required to preside over the Senate, then spoke from a script held before him by an aide. Some Senate members stood by, others were streaming out of the chamber, already having voted.
“On this vote,” Pence read, “the yeas are fifty, the nays are fifty. The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative, and the nomination is confirmed.”
Pence’s vote was the first tiebreaker of any kind in the Senate since Vice President Richard B. Cheney had broken a tie in 2008. It marked the first time in the 227-year history of the U.S. Senate that a vice president cast the deciding vote for a cabinet appointment. Some hours later, Pence administered the oath of office to DeVos, who stood alongside family members, and praised his longtime friend and benefactor. The tie-breaking vote, he said, “was also casting a vote for America’s children. And I can tell you, my vote for Betsy DeVos was the easiest vote I ever cast.”
Pence would handle the ceremonial swearing in for most of the Trump cabinet members, not unprecedented for vice presidents in history. Vice presidents, in their positions as president of the Senate, also typically preside in swearing in new senators in their roles. Trump, who could if he chose, but did not, administer the oath himself, sometimes stood by as Pence administered the oath—he was there for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson but not in the case of DeVos. In each ceremony, Pence followed the same process. He welcomed each of the newcomers warmly and greeted their spouses and children. Family values were paramount for Pence, and it was on this basis that he regularly defended Trump after he said something outrageous. Trump and his family embraced Pence for such loyalty.
“I bring greetings from the president,” he would say at many of his early public appearances as vice president. “This is a good man—a man with values, who loves his family.”
In the spring of 2017, such reminders were often needed. Trump faced frequent charges of racial and ethnic insensitivity, and the issue of sexual harassment, raised frequently during the campaign, still hung over him. Pence stood by as the calm, moral voice, reminding Trump’s more religious supporters that Trump was a good man at heart and they could trust him. When he was with Trump, Pence flattered him, but this effort couldn’t always soothe the president’s temper. As the months passed and the FBI as well as committees investigated the Russia controversy, Trump seethed.
* * *
In May, President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., traveled to Indianapolis to deliver the keynote address at the annual dinner of the Indiana Republican Party. About a year earlier, Indiana had voted solidly for his father and made the improbable a reality as Trump captured the GOP presidential nomination. In his remarks, he said the Indiana primary had been his family’s introduction to Mike Pence. Since then, the families had become very close, both politically and on a personal level. Pence, he said, genuinely “cares about what’s going on.”
To illustrate the Trump family’s connection to Pence, Donald Trump Jr. told a story about his younger brother Eric, who had called him a month earlier. Eric and his wife, Lara, were having their first child. “He goes, ‘Don, you know who the first call was?’ I go, ‘Dad?’ He goes, ‘Nope … It was Mike Pence.’”
“It’s not only a testament to the man,” Trump Jr. said of Pence, but also “to the type of people I got to know, have become friends with, and will continue to spend a lot of time with from this great state.” Trump Jr. did not mention, however, whether Trump Sr. eventually called as well.
Trump Jr.’s political message included a warning to Republicans about the future. The 2018 congressional elections were looming. Holding on to the GOP’s majorities in the House and Senate would be essential to the fulfillment of the Trump agenda. Unsaid, but also true, was the danger that Trump could face if the other party won control of either body. Committee chairmanships, which would empower them to investigate the administration and subpoena both documents and witnesses. A Democratic Congress could also start impeachment proceedings.
The reality of the danger to the presidency was palpable in Washington. The Russia scandal had not let up since the inauguration. President Trump was angry about the investigation into Michael Flynn and with news media attention being given to the eighteen-day gap between Sally Yates’s visit to the White House and Flynn’s departure. The FBI investigation was in the hands of Director James Comey, who had won Trump’s admiration in the waning days of the presidential campaign by announcing he was investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Trump and Clinton might have agreed on only one thing in life—that Comey’s announcement in October had tipped the scales toward Trump. But now Comey was pursuing all Russia leads. Trump had called in Comey in January for a private dinner and asked him to go easy on Flynn. “He’s a good guy,” said Trump. Comey was noncommittal. Trump repeatedly asked Comey to state publicly what he had implied strongly in private to the president: that Trump was not a target of the Russia investigation. Comey did not comply.
Days before Donald Jr.’s appearance in Indiana, Comey had testified in an open hearing before Congress about Flynn and the Russia investigation. He said he was concerned that his announcement about the Hillary Clinton investigation had affected the election. “Look, this is terrible. It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election.” When asked if he was concerned that Trump, as he had hinted, possessed tape recordings of their conversations, Comey said, “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”
Trump spent the weekend of May 6 and 7 at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. He was enraged by Comey’s testimony, especially the parts that seemed to impugn the legitimacy of the election. Comey had to go, he insisted, and he directed his aide Stephen Miller to write a draft letter that outlined why Comey should be fired. Back in Washington on Monday, Trump summoned Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and White House counsel Donald McGahn to tell them he was ready to fire Comey. He showed them copies of the letter Miller had written for him.
For once, Pence was in Washington for a major development and could not say later that he did not attend the meeting. He did claim, however, that he had arrived late. Perhaps he hoped tardiness would serve as an excuse should trouble arise. None of those present—certainly not Pence himself—reported what, if anything, the vice president had said during the Comey meeting. However, McGahn urged Trump not to send the letter Miller had written.
On that same day, the question of what Pence knew about Michael Flynn—and when—was raised on Capitol Hill as Sally Yates was questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yates said she had gone to warn Donald McGahn on January 26 about Flynn, partly because Flynn had apparently lied to Pence about his contacts with Russian ambassador Kislyak. “We felt like the vice president was entitled to know that the information he had been given and he was relaying to the American public wasn’t true.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, asked a follow-up question. “So what you’re saying is that General Flynn lied to the vice president?”
Yates replied, “That’s certainly how it appeared, yes, because the vice president went out and made statements about General Flynn’s conduct, which he said were based on what General Flynn had told him. And we knew that [what Pence said] just flat wasn’t true.”
As Washington buzzed with talk of the Trump team and Russia, the president summoned Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, who had been placed in charge of the Russia investigation after Sessions recused himself. (His recusal was based on his previous service to the Trump presidential campaign.) The president ordered that they produce a document that would outline reasons for firing Comey. The document was produced, under Rosenstein’s signature, as a memo to Sessions.
Rosenstein’s memo criticized not Comey’s work on the Russia scandal, which preoccupied Trump, but instead focused improbably on Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation. He wrote that because of it, Comey had lost the trust of Congress and the American people.
The current FBI Director is an articulate and persuasive speaker about leadership and the immutable principles of the Department of Justice. He deserves our appreciation for his public service. As you and I have discussed, however, I cannot defend the Director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken. Almost everyone agrees that the Director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.
Rosenstein suggested that Comey’s departure was the only viable option for the president, but he did not explicitly recommend the FBI director’s dismissal. “Although the President has the power to remove an FBI director,” he cautioned, “the decision should not be taken lightly.”
Rather than calling Comey himself, the president sent the FBI director notice he was fired in the form of a terse letter, which was delivered to the Justice Department by Trump’s security chief, Keith Schiller. “I have accepted their recommendation,” said Trump in reference to Rosenstein and Sessions, “and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”
White House strategists developed talking points to answer anticipated questions. Their main argument was that the president’s decision to fire Comey had come in response to Rosenstein, who was a man of great integrity. Pence was quick to use those talking points on the morning of Wednesday, May 10, at the Capitol as he emerged from a gathering of jittery Republican leaders.
“President Trump made the right decision at the right time to accept the recommendation of the deputy attorney general.… Let me be perfectly clear … the president has been told repeatedly he’s not under investigation, there is no evidence of collusion between the campaign and any Russians … let me be clear, that’s not what this is about … the president took strong and decisive leadership here to restore the confidence of the American people … strong and decisive leadership. Director Comey had lost the confidence of the American people … [Trump] took decisive action … I am grateful.”
Pence offered a bit of misdirection when asked if Trump had asked Rosenstein to write the memo.
“The new deputy attorney general,” Pence said with a chuckle, “he came to work two weeks ago; he is a man of extraordinary independence and integrity and a reputation in both political parties came to work … sat down and made the recommendation. I personally am grateful that we have a president who is willing to provide the kind of decisive leadership to take the recommendation” of Rosenstein, he added, finding his way back to the talking points.
It was not a surprise that Pence said repeatedly that he wanted to be “clear.” Of course, this was his unintended signal, like a bad poker player’s tell, that he was about to obfuscate. His performance did nothing to clear up any point about the real reasons behind Comey’s firing. In time, it would be revealed that Rosenstein was furious about how his memo was used as a pretext for firing Comey. This experience may well have motivated his choice of Robert Mueller, Comey’s mentor and predecessor at the FBI, to serve as the counsel who would take up the investigation.
Shortly after Pence spoke to reporters at the Capitol on May 10, the president welcomed Sergey Kislyak and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to the White House. Earlier in the morning, an American reporter had called out to Lavrov at the State Department, arriving for a scheduled meeting with Rex Tillerson. Had the firing of Comey “cast a shadow” on the Washington visit? he asked. Lavrov responded with mock surprise. “Was he fired?” he asked. “You are kidding. You are kidding.”
At the White House, in an unprecedented act, American journalists were barred from the Oval Office for the Kislyak-Lavrov-Trump tête-à-tête, but the Russian government news agency, TASS, was allowed in to film the encounter. A White House summary of the meeting, issued afterward, included quotes from the president’s remarks to the Russians. “I just fired the head of the FBI,” said Trump. “He was crazy, a real nut job, I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” So much for Mike Pence’s statement about the reason for Comey’s dismissal.
Trump further undermined Pence’s false narrative in an interview on May 11 with Lester Holt on NBC. Comey, Trump said, “is a showboat, he’s a grandstander, the FBI has been in turmoil, you know that, I know that, everybody knows that.”
HOLT: Monday you met with the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
TRUMP: Right.
HOLT: Did you ask for a recommendation?
TRUMP: What I did is I was going to fire Comey. My decision. It was not …
HOLT: You had made the decision before they came into your office [to make their recommendation].
TRUMP: I—I was going to fire Comey. I—there’s no good time to do it, by the way. They …
HOLT: Because in your letter, you said …
TRUMP: They—they were …
HOLT: I—I accepted—accepted their recommendations.
TRUMP: Yeah, well, they also …
HOLT: So you had already made the decision.
TRUMP: Oh, I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.
HOLT: So there was …
TRUMP: They—he made a recommendation. He’s highly respected. Very good guy, very smart guy. And the Democrats like him. The Republicans like him. He had made a recommendation. But regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself—I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.
Mike Pence said nothing about how he was contradicted by the president. In the months to come, he would maintain his status as the most loyal member of the president’s inner circle, supporting virtually everything Trump said and did.