When Attorney General Jeff Sessions told President Donald Trump that his deputy Rod Rosenstein had appointed Robert S. Mueller III to be special counsel to investigate the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election campaign, Trump slumped back in his chair and said, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.” More upset than he’d been since the release of the Access Hollywood tape, Trump berated Sessions, who had recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his own work as a campaign surrogate and his own contacts with the Russians. “How could you let this happen, Jeff?” the president said angrily. “You were supposed to protect me.” Sessions offered to resign.1
Trump had already excoriated Sessions for recusing himself, and brought up his lawyer from a long time ago, Roy Cohn, saying he wished Cohn was his attorney. “I don’t have a lawyer,” Trump said, to Sessions. He told other White House staffers that Cohn would win cases for him when they didn’t have a chance, and that Cohn had done incredible things. Cohn, Trump said at the White House, had been “a winner and a fixer, someone who got things done.”2
After Mueller’s appointment, Sessions handed Trump a resignation letter, which he took. When other presidential staffers learned this, they were alarmed, and tried to retrieve the letter, fearing that Trump could use it as a “shock collar” to hold “DOJ by the throat.” The next day, Trump left for the Middle East, where, on the flight from Saudi Arabia to Tel Aviv, he took the letter from his pocket and showed it to a group of senior advisors. Two weeks after he’d received the letter, he finally returned it to Sessions, with a notation that said, “not accepted.”
His anger did not let up.
Two weeks later, the Washington Post published a story saying that Mueller’s office was investigating whether the president had tried to obstruct justice. This was stunning news at the time—the first public report that Trump, himself, was under investigation. Trump called Don McGahn, the White House Counsel, at 10:31 the night the story broke.
McGahn had been one of Trump’s earlier appointments after he was elected, a loyal Republican who was raised by Democrats, including his uncle, Paddy McGahn, the Atlantic City fixer who Trump had hired thirty-five years prior to navigate a thicket of political and mob relations in Atlantic City. Paddy McGahn and Donald Trump had a falling out after about a decade, when Trump stopped paying his bills. Paddy’s nephew Don joined the Federalist Society, an organization set up in the Reagan era to groom and elevate conservative justices, and had a series of jobs in Republican Washington, including FEC chairman, where he buried the campaign finance complaint against Trump and Cohen.
On a June weekend in 2017, three days after the Post story, Trump asked McGahn to bury another investigation. McGahn refused. Trump, at Camp David, called McGahn, at home. “You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod,” Trump said, fixating, as, McGahn described to investigators, on “silly” conflicts, including a dispute Mueller had had about membership fees at one of Trump’s golf courses. McGahn said he did not want to interfere, that he had grown up admiring conservative judge Robert Bork and did not want to be “Saturday Night Massacre Bork,” who, as acting attorney general, had fired the special prosecutor investigating Richard Nixon after the Watergate investigation heated up.
Later, Trump called again, and said, “Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the Special Counsel,” adding “Mueller has to go,” and “Call me back when you do it.” McGahn left Trump with the impression he would do it, “to get off the phone,” he said. He did not do it. He felt trapped. He did not know what he would say the next time Trump called. So he drove to his office to pack his belongings and submit his resignation letter. He called the then–chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and then–senior advisor Steve Bannon, who talked him out of it.
It was Chris Christie, apparently, who talked Trump down from his tree. Christie, still the New Jersey governor, told Trump that there was no substantive basis for firing Mueller, and that if he did so, he would lose the support of Republicans in Congress.3 Trump did not continue to press the issue, and McGahn acted like it hadn’t happened.
Until January 2018, when the New York Times published a story about the incident that said, “after receiving the president’s order to fire Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel . . . refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit, instead.” Trump called the story, “Fake news, folks. Fake news. A typical New York Times fake story.” The next day, according to the Mueller report, “the President’s personal counsel called McGahn’s attorney and said that the President wanted McGahn to put out a statement denying that he had been asked to fire the Special Counsel and that he had threatened to quit in protest.” McGahn refused, saying the report was mostly accurate.
This did not sit well with President Trump. He told another White House staffer, Rob Porter, that McGahn had leaked to the media to make himself look good. Then he told Porter to tell McGahn to create a record—a false one—saying that the president had never directed McGahn to fire the Special Counsel. This was going to be a letter “for our records.” McGahn, Trump told Porter, was a “lying bastard.” There is usually only one reason to create such a record, and that is to deflect investigators—that is, to obstruct justice.
McGahn wouldn’t do it. He told Porter that it was true Trump had wanted him to get Mueller fired. Porter said that McGahn might now be fired, if he didn’t write the fake memo. McGahn said the optics would be terrible if Trump followed through. Then Trump summoned McGahn, telling him he needed to correct the story. “I never said to fire Mueller,” Trump said. “I never said ‘fire.’ This story doesn’t look good. You need to correct this. You’re the White House counsel.” McGahn replied: “What you said is, ‘Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the Special Counsel.’ ” Trump denied this. He asked McGahn if he would “do a correction.” McGahn said no.
Trump asked: “What about these notes? Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.” McGahn responded he took notes because he was a “real lawyer,” and that notes create a record.
To which Trump responded, “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.”4 In the White House, Trump asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”5
In April 2018, an FBI agent filed a sheaf of paperwork under seal with federal magistrate judge Henry Pitman, 269 pages in all, outlining a years-long scheme by Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen to defraud banks, violate campaign finance laws, and lie repeatedly about his cash flows and net worth to various financial institutions, his accountant, and business partners.6 Cohen, the papers noted, had been promoting himself “as the personal attorney for President Donald Trump” and had “previously served for over a decade as an executive in the Trump Organization.” In early 2017, the papers said, he began accepting millions of dollars in payments from a company controlled by the Ukrainian-Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, a South Korean aerospace company, the Swiss drug company Novartis, AT&T, and BTA bank, the Kazakh bank embroiled in a massive money-laundering scandal that had once been behind the potential funding for Cohen’s Trump project in Georgia. In total, the search warrant showed Cohen receiving over three million dollars in the account of the shell company he’d set up, Essential Consultants LLC, which was not a consulting company at all, but merely a way to take in funds from individuals and companies who believed Cohen could give them access to President Trump.
Cohen had hidden the Essential Consulting assets from a bank he owed money to, Sterling National Bank, while at the same time claiming he’d lost so much money on his taxi medallion investments he needed Sterling to write off some of his debt. Cohen also hid sixty thousand dollars a month he was receiving from a private loan he’d issued and several million dollars held in some dozen bank accounts. The search warrant request revealed that the FBI had scoured Cohen’s emails on three prior occasions, beginning in July 2017; but law-enforcement agents concluded destruction of evidence was a very real possibility, and asked for judicial permission to search Cohen’s office on the twenty-third floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza; his apartment, then undergoing renovations, at 502 Park Avenue (the same Trump building where Jared and Ivanka maintained an address); room 1728 at the Loews Regency hotel, where Cohen was temporarily staying; his safety deposit box; a MacBook Pro, an iPad Mini, and various phones, which they were allowed to unlock, if necessary, using Cohen’s fingers or face.
The raid was executed on April 9, 2018.
In the White House, seated between Vice President Mike Pence and his third national security advisor, John Bolton, at a meeting with military leaders, Trump’s anger ran hot. “So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys. Good man. And it’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch hunt, I’ve been saying it for a long time.” The law for Trump was a subjective thing—righteous when wielded against his enemies, but a conspiracy when wielded against his friends and associates.
There was, also, the fact that the evidence the FBI found was extremely dangerous to Trump. For a decade, Cohen had kept Trump’s financial secrets. At first, Trump’s lawyers fought alongside Cohen’s to keep the US attorney from reviewing the documents. Trump’s lawyers claimed attorney-client privilege. They promised to “take care of” Cohen, and to pay his legal fees. Trump kept urging Cohen to “hang in there,” and to “stay strong.”7 A friend of Trump’s reached out to say he was with “the Boss,” in Mar-a-Lago, and to convey that the president had said “he loves you,” not to worry. A lawyer who was close with President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani emailed Cohen, “You are ‘loved.’ ” He added: “Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.”8
Trump retained Giuliani, by now almost bald, rounder in face, and heftier in girth, to represent him in negotiations with Mueller, but his main job, as Giuliani saw it, was to win in the court of public opinion. He did this by sewing confusion, attacking prosecutors’ motives, and dangling the idea of pardons to key witnesses.
Cohen also spoke to the president’s personal counsel, who told him to stay on message, that everything was going to be fine, which, Cohen understood, meant Trump would either shut down the investigation, or Cohen would be pardoned. The message came from inside the Trump Organization, too. “The boss loves you,” one intermediary told him. Another: “Everyone knows the boss has your back.”9
The boss did not have his back. The president’s team stopped paying the bills for Cohen’s legal team. Trump began to talk about Cohen in the past tense, telling reporters he’d “liked” Michael Cohen.
At the end of June, Cohen, who had once said he’d take a bullet for Donald Trump, who had once embraced the nickname “Tom,” after Tom Hagen, Don Corleone’s attorney in The Godfather, told ABC, “My wife, my daughter, and my son have my first loyalty and always will. I put family and country first.”10 The president started attacking Cohen, accusing him of making up “stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ ”
That July, Ivanka Trump said she’d shut down her clothing and accessory business. The next month, the Kushner Companies, unable to find bank financing, gave up control of 666 Fifth Avenue to Brookfield Asset Management, which said it would renovate the building. Though the Kushners kept their offices, and retained ownership of the land underneath the building, they leased it to Brookfield for ninety-nine years. “Kushner Companies remains a very strong real estate business,” Charles Kushner said in an emailed statement. “The future of Kushner Companies is indeed very bright.”
On July, 13, 2018, the US Department of Justice issued a press release. It “announced that a grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment presented by the Special Counsel’s Office. The indictment charges twelve Russian nationals for committing federal crimes that were intended to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. All twelve defendants are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency within the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian military.”11 Though US intelligence agencies had fingered Russian military intelligence two years earlier, Robert Mueller’s indictment laid out a highly specific criminal plot, directed by the Kremlin.12
The indictment was stunning in its detail. The more so, because President Trump was about to board a plane to hold his first official summit with Vladimir Putin, who, Mueller said, had directed the attack.
Three days later, Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin stood together, casually tossing a soccer ball (it was the day after the final of the Men’s World Cup, in Moscow) at twin podiums at the press conference following their summit meeting in Helsinki, Finland.
“Just now,” Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press asked of Trump, “President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did. What—who—my first question for you, sir, is, who do you believe? My second question is, would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016? And would you warn him to never do it again?”
Trump did not immediately answer the questions; instead, he slipped into an old trope, discussing Hillary Clinton’s email server. As for Russian interference, his answer verged in incoherence. “My people came to me—[Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats came to me and some others—they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have—I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? Thirty-three thousand emails gone—just gone. I think, in Russia, they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails.”
“So I have great confidence in my intelligence people,” Trump continued. “But I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
Putin, for his part, brought up Bill Browder, the American-born financier whose former lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, had died in a Russian prison while investigating the theft of corporate seals belonging to Browder’s companies. Putin was making the same argument Natalia Veselnitskaya had made two years prior to Donald Trump Jr. in Trump Tower. “Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over one and a half billion dollars in Russia,” Putin said. “They never paid any taxes, neither in Russia nor in the United States, and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent a huge amount of money—four hundred million—as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.”
“President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election?” Jeff Mason of Reuters asked, “And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?”
“Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”
This entire exchange was left out of the Kremlin transcript of the event. So was, initially, the first part of Mason’s question, about wanting Trump to win, left out of the official White House transcript. After an outcry, that part was restored.13
The event showed the two presidents on remarkably parallel tracks: both bending the truth, fanning the flames of conspiracy theories, assaulting the rule of law, betraying a twin shared obsession with Hillary Clinton. And showing the world that their power lay in being able to get away with all of this.
Two weeks after Trump returned from Helsinki, his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, went on trial for bank fraud and tax fraud in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia. Manafort, along with his deputy, Rick Gates, had been indicted in Washington, DC, in the fall for money laundering and conspiracy against the United States; new charges were later added in the Eastern District of Virginia for bank fraud and tax fraud. Rick Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States. Manafort held firm.
Manafort initially had been out on bail, monitored by two electronic bracelets, but he had violated a gag order by ghostwriting an English-language op-ed in a Ukrainian newspaper. (Manafort denied he’d really had input, but Mueller’s team was monitoring his email traffic and produced Manafort’s extensive track changes as part of the record.)
And then, in the District of Columbia, where he faced the charges for money laundering and conspiracy against the United States, Manafort committed another crime: witness tampering. Working with Konstantin Kilimnik, the former colleague with “ties to Russian intelligence” whom he’d met at the Grand Havana Room in August 2016 to discuss Manafort’s “biggest black caviar jar,” Manafort had reached out to witnesses, trying to shape their testimony. This latter infraction was too much for Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the federal judge in Washington; she revoked Manafort’s bail and sent him to jail.
Manafort arrived in the courtroom in Alexandria for jury selection on a steamy July day, changing from his green prison jumpsuit with a white undershirt underneath to a black suit with a white shirt. His reddish-brown hair was showing some white, but Manafort still had a fashion statement; from the front row of the courtroom I could see his nice loafers, worn with no socks.
The trial was memorable for the verbal ejaculations of Judge TS Ellis, a seventy-eight-year-old Virginian known for setting his own rules in the courtroom. Ellis repeatedly excoriated prosecutors and rushed them through their case, infuriated that they were presenting evidence of Manafort’s ill-gotten wealth, which included a $15,000 ostrich-leather jacket, the brownstone in Brooklyn and the apartment in SoHo, a Land Rover, stereo systems, high-end rugs, an outdoor kitchen for his daughter, and landscaping. “It isn’t a crime to have a lot of money,” Ellis said.
But the case was notable for another reason: Manafort’s political work in Ukraine was a glimpse over the political horizon, of a system where the rules of democracy were so bent by the transactional desires of the wealthy that democracy itself became unrecognizable.
“Beginning in 2005,” Assistant United States Attorney Uzo Asonye explained in his opening statement, “Paul Manafort worked for politicians in Ukraine. He represented the government of Ukraine; Viktor Yanukovych, who would become the president of Ukraine, and two Ukrainian political parties.”
“For that work for these foreign officials,” Asonye said, “Paul Manafort was paid handsomely. During this trial, you will learn that for his political work in Ukraine, Manafort was paid by Ukrainian oligarchs, some of the country’s most powerful and wealthy men. Men who, as oligarchs, controlled entire industries with the aid and comfort of the Ukraine government.”14
Worse, the entire payment scheme was hidden. “In order for Paul Manafort to receive his consulting fees,” Osonye told the Virginia jury, “he set up his own shell companies,” so the money went “from the oligarchs’ foreign shell companies to Manafort’s foreign shell companies.” Then, hidden from the IRS, Manafort moved tens of millions of dollars from the oligarchs into real estate in Brooklyn and Manhattan and the Hamptons and Virginia, into cars and clothes and rugs and a myriad of physical manifestations of the proceeds of a scheme to subvert democracy.
The second day of the trial, Judge Ellis shut down any further talk of oligarchs. “An oligarchy,” Ellis said from the bench, “is just despotic power exercised by a privileged few, autocratic control of any government. And so people involved in that are commonly referred to as oligarchs.”15 Ellis wanted to avoid the use of “the term ‘oligarch’ to mean that [Manafort] was consorting and being paid by people who are criminals.” Ellis asserted, “There will be no evidence about those people, about their activities. The only thing we really will know about them is if they had a lot of money.”
The prosecutor, Greg Andres, pushed back: “Ukraine businessmen are referred to as oligarchs by the witnesses. Those are the facts of this case, and that’s how they refer to them because—”
“No, they’re not the facts of this case,” Ellis interjected. “That’s an opinion by a witness, and I don’t expect witnesses to offer opinions about that. Find another term to use.”16
While the Manafort jury was deliberating, the president of the United States spoke about the trial to reporters. “I think the whole Manafort trial is very sad, when you look at what’s going on there. I think it’s a very sad day for our country,” Trump said. “He worked for me for a very short period of time. But you know what? He happens to be a very good person. And I think it’s very sad what they’ve done to Paul Manafort.”17
Manafort was found guilty on eight counts, and the jury deadlocked on ten others, with eleven of the twelve voting to convict.18 Juror Paula Duncan, a self-described Trump supporter, told Fox News, “I did not want Paul Manafort to be guilty, he was, and no one’s above the law.”
I wasn’t in the courtroom when the jury read eight counts of “guilty” against Paul Manafort. I was in another courtroom, 200 miles north-east, when Michael Cohen, his hair graying, his tie yellow, walked through a side door. He nodded with a short, New York bob of the head, to some of the reporters in the room. Thomas McKay, a tall and lanky assistant US attorney from the public corruption bureau of the Southern District, in his early thirties, walked over to Cohen and had him sign legal papers, there in the courtroom. Cohen’s own copy of the paperwork looked crumpled. The whole thing had a hasty air.
“You can change your mind right now,” Judge William Pauley told Cohen, as he stood before him. Just four days shy of his fifty-second birthday, Cohen faltered. “Yes, your honor,” he said. Then the judge listed the charges: tax fraud, making false statements to a bank, campaign finance violations. Eight in all.
Did Cohen understand, Pauley asked, that he faced a maximum sixty-five years of imprisonment? Cohen inhaled, his voice catching a bit as he said, “Yes, sir.” And then he admitted his crimes: filling out false tax returns, hiding information from his accountant, knowingly falsifying his financial condition. But all of that was the prologue. “I jotted down some notes so that I can keep my focus,” Cohen told the courtroom.
“As to count number seven: on or about the summer of 2016, in coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office, I and the CEO of a media company at the request of the candidate worked together to keep an individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign from publicly disclosing this information.”
Count eight was similar: “In coordination with, and at the direction of, the same candidate, I arranged to make a payment to a second individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign to keep the individual from disclosing the information. . . . I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”
On that afternoon, Michael Cohen was not only admitting guilt, he was, under oath and penalty of perjury and an even longer sentence, implicating President Donald Trump, “a candidate for federal office,” in the crimes. For years, it had been Cohen’s job to make sure trouble never found its way to Trump. Now Michael Cohen said: I committed a crime, because the man who is now the president of the United States told me to do it.19
That fall, legal developments moved rapidly. In Washington, DC, Manafort, broke, already facing years in jail, pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States—including conspiring to launder money—and conspiracy to tamper with a witness. He agreed to cooperate with the Special Counsel. But then—he didn’t cooperate. He continued to communicate with the White House. He intentionally lied to prosecutors at least three times. He continued, apparently, to audition for a presidential pardon. And because he stopped talking to prosecutors, they were never able to get him to say, truthfully, what exactly had happened in the black caviar meeting, and to what purpose Konstantin Kilimnik, the man with “ties to Russian intelligence,” had put the polling data Manafort had passed him on Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, three states Trump won by the thinnest of margins. Manafort was ultimately sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
Roger Stone, Manfort’s long-ago business partner, a proud dirty trickster since the days of Richard Nixon, was also indicted, for lying to Congress. He’d told a congressional committee plainly that he hadn’t retained his communications about WikiLeaks; his emails and phone records plainly showed that he had.20 The day of his indictment, Stone held his arms out in a wide “V,” his fingers also in V for “peace” or “victory,” the same gesture Richard Nixon gave when he boarded a military helicopter, departing the White House after resigning.
Stone denied all the charges.
Unexpectedly, Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in November to yet another crime: lying to Congress about Trump Tower Moscow, saying the deal died before the Iowa caucuses (it did not); saying that he had never spoken with the Kremlin (he had); and saying that he barely briefed Trump and his family, when he was in frequent touch with Donald Trump and briefed Don Jr. and Ivanka on at least ten occasions.
At his sentencing hearing, Cohen’s lawyer pleaded with the judge. “He came forward to offer evidence against the most powerful person in our country,” Guy Petrillo said. “It is important that others in Mr. Cohen’s position who provide assistance to this historic inquiry take renewed courage.” Cohen, Petrillo said, had fallen victim to Donald Trump’s persuasive charm. “Mr. Cohen had a client whose extraordinary power of persuasion got him elected to the highest office in the land,” Petrillo read, from a letter written on Cohen’s behalf.
In the courtroom that day, I had unexpectedly been placed by the bailiffs in a seat in front of the low wooden barrier that normally separates the parties—the prosecution and the defense, judge and jury—from everyone else. Cohen’s daughter Samantha, hobbling in on a sheepskin-lined crutch, chastised the bailiff for the seating arrangements, until he placed her in front of the partition, behind the defense table, about three feet from where I was sitting. As she sat, her father turned and gave her a wide and warm, loving smile, a glimpse into the Michael Cohen that his family saw: not the huckster on the make, the liar, and the bully protector of Donald Trump, just the adoring father of a daughter who had recently finished college.
As Cohen took the podium, tears started to slip down Samantha’s cheeks. “I take full responsibility for each act,” Cohen said of his crimes. “The personal ones to me and those involving the President of the United States.” He continued: “It was my own weakness, and a blind loyalty to this man that led me to choose a path of darkness over light.
“Recently, the President tweeted a statement calling me weak, and he was correct, but for a much different reason than he was implying. It was because time and time again I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my moral compass.” When Cohen said, “there is no sentence that could supersede the suffering that I live with on a daily basis, knowing my actions have brought undeserved pain and shame upon my family,” Samantha started to quietly sob.
“I’m sorry,” Cohen said, pausing, hearing Samantha’s sobs, his own voice choking. Tears were now pouring in rivulets down Samantha’s face, sitting alone as her father confessed his crimes. I looked at her, about the age of my own daughter, and reached into my purse for a scuffed-up pack of tissues, leaning across the few feet that separated us to hand them to her. She looked at the crumpled package, took it, wiped her eyes, and looked back at her father.
“I am committed to proving my integrity and ensuring that history will not remember me as the villain of his story,”21 Cohen said, his voice recovering a little.
After he was sentenced to three years in prison, he turned and walked to the defense table, handing Samantha a brand-new package of fluffy white tissues.
In a tweet, Trump called Cohen “a ‘Rat’.”
The Cohen and Manafort legal actions were an accounting: an edifying look at what happens when the rule of law is finally brought to bear on individuals who have worked the system as if the laws did not apply. But under Trump, the rule of law itself was under assault: the Special Counsel found ten instances where his office could not exonerate the president of obstruction of justice. “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Special Counsel Robert Mueller said in his report, a redacted version of which was released to the public on April 18, 2018.22 But Mueller determined Justice Department rules did not allow him to indict a sitting president, citing an opinion from 2000 from the department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Donald Trump escaped this time, as he had for five decades, with no legal consequences.
“TOTAL EXONERATION,” the president said on Twitter.
As with so much else, the reverse was true.
After the release of the Mueller report, the new attorney general, William Barr, pushed a line of argument that seemed positively Putinesque: it was the investigation that was corrupt, not the deeds. Weeks after the Mueller report, Barr named the US Attorney for Connecticut, John H. Durham, to investigate the origins of the Mueller probe. Barr had already signaled his own thinking. “I think spying did occur,” he said before a US Senate committee, about the FBI’s 2016 counterintelligence investigation into Trump associates. Over the months that followed, Barr personally travelled to Italy and Britain to secure help from those countries’ governments in his counter investigation.
On July 24, Special Counsel Mueller testified before Congress. The testimony was a letdown to proponents of the rule of law. Mueller refused to answer basic questions more than two hundred times, and instead repeatedly told lawmakers—and the television-watching public—to read the report. The last chance for Trump to be held accountable for his actions related to Russian interference in the 2016 campaign seemed to be slipping away.
On Twitter, Giuliani said, “Let’s now find out how many are guilty of real conspiracy to bring false charges and illegally unseat the President.” He was, actually, already working on this. According to a whistle-blower report later turned over to Congress,23 Giuliani was, in late 2018 and early 2019, talking and meeting in Warsaw, New York, and Paris with a series of corrupt current and former Ukrainian prosecutors. While Mueller was wrapping up his investigation, Giuliani, the erstwhile corruption buster, was engaged in a two-pronged effort. His first aim was to gather evidence for a counter-narrative to the Mueller report: that it wasn’t Russia that had interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump, but rather Russia’s enemy Ukraine that had colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign. This had happened, this line of thinking went, when Trump opponents cooked up a secret “black ledger”—the document showing that Paul Manafort had accepted $12.7 million in off-the-books payments from the political party of Victor Yanukovych. Bringing this document to light—the work of Ukrainian anti-corruption activists—had precipitated Manafort’s departure from the Trump campaign and stimulated the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election that summer.
To promulgate his counter-narrative, Giuliani had gone so far as to contact Manafort in prison, via his lawyer, to gain support for this theory. There was no evidence to support the idea that the black ledger was a fake, and the information it contained had been widely corroborated. But Giuliani plowed forward, pushing for an investigation into whether Ukraine, rather than Russia, had interfered in the 2016 election. Besides exculpating Trump and his campaign, this narrative would allow Russia’s leader to argue that there had been no Russian interference—that it was all a hoax. It would allow Russia to argue that its invasion of Ukraine, its years-long war, was legitimate, and that economic sanctions should be lifted.
There was a second promise Giuliani sought from the Ukrainians: an investigation into a potential Trump 2020 rival, the former vice president, Joe Biden. Biden’s son, Hunter, had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, being paid at least fifty thousand dollars a month, while his father was in the White House. According to a theory Giuliani was advancing, Ukrainian prosecutors had dropped a valid investigation of Burisma and Hunter Biden because of untoward interference by the then–vice president.
Giuliani was fed information on both these alleged plots by three widely discredited, high-level Ukrainian prosecutors, all of whom had been accused by anti-corruption activists of abuses including slow-walking authentic corruption investigations and targeting opponents of Ukraine’s moneyed class on trumped-up corruption charges. The officials dispute this. But Ukrainian prosecutors in general are notoriously corrupt. As British journalist Oliver Bullough wrote in his book Moneyland, “Ukraine had 18,500 prosecutors, who operated like foot soldiers for a mafia don. If they decided to take you to court, the judge did what they asked. With the entire legal system on their side, the insiders’ opportunities to make money were limited only by their imagination.”24
“To say that he was an anti-corruption fighter,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project journalist Aubrey Belford said of one of the prosecutors who fed information to Giuliani, “is kind of like saying that Danny DeVito won the silver medal for rhythmic gymnastics. It’s absurd on its face. This guy was fired for being massively corrupt and for protecting corrupt people.” The second man Giuliani spoke with had become prosecutor general despite having no legal education.25 The third had been taped slipping advice to witnesses and tipping off suspects in anti-corruption cases, for which he was roundly criticized by Marie Yovanovitch, then the US ambassador to Ukraine. “Nobody who has been recorded coaching suspects on how to avoid corruption charges can be trusted to prosecute those very same cases,” Yovanovitch said. Yovanovitch, a state department employee officially criticizing Ukrainian corruption, became the target of a smear campaign by the President, Giuliani, his associates, and the Ukrainians she’d called out.
The corrupt prosecutors were the men from whom Giuliani kept gathering information, widely discredited though it was, that he passed along to Trump. In April, Ukraine elected a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a television actor with a hit show, Servant of the People, in which he played a history professor who accidentally becomes president after his rant about corruption goes viral. “Good morning, Mr. President!” a civil servant tells Zelensky’s stunned character in the first episode, which aired in 2015. Three years later Zelensky ran for president and won, as leader of a party named after his television show, Servant of the People.
In May 2019, Kurt Volker, then the US special representative for Ukraine negotiations, became concerned about Giuliani’s back-channel efforts in Ukraine. He warned Giuliani that one of his sources, the prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, was not credible. Giuliani continued his conversations with the Ukrainians. Toward the end of the month—this was now five weeks after the Mueller report had been released—Volker and a group of diplomats met with President Trump. As Volker later testified to Congress, Trump told them that Ukraine was “a corrupt country, full of ‘terrible people.’ He said they ‘tried to take me down.’ In the course of that conversation, Trump referenced conversations with Mayor Giuliani,” Volker said.26
Two months later, on July 18, Volker learned of an unexplained hold on hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine. This aid was intended to support the US ally, still in a hot war with Russian separatists that had begun after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. A day after he learned of the hold, Volker sat down to breakfast with Giuliani and a man named Lev Parnas, a Soviet émigré with a history of US business disputes who, along with an associate, Igor Fruman, had abruptly became major donors to US political causes, coinciding with Trump’s presidency. (The two were arrested in October of 2019, one-way tickets to Europe in hand, for allegedly funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into the US campaign finance system, through a shell company, in order to gain influence for a Ukrainian government official who wanted Yovanovitch fired. They pleaded not guilty.)
During the breakfast with Parnas and Volker, Giuliani raised the topic of the Bidens. The same day, Volker initiated a text message exchange connecting Giuliani with Andrey Yermak, an aide to Zelensky. Giuliani and Yermak soon agreed to meet in Madrid, in early August.
At the White House, a call between the American president and his Ukrainian counterpart was set for July 25. Early that morning, US time, Volker arrived in Kyiv for a long-planned series of diplomatic meetings. Shortly before Trump’s call, Volker texted Yermak: “Heard from White House-assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate/‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington.”27
Then Trump got on the phone with Zelensky. “I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time,” Trump said during the call, according to a rough transcript later released by the White House. “I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily.”
“Yes, you are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 1000%,” Zelensky said, correctly deducing that flattery was the way to Trump’s heart. “I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps. specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”
To this, Trump responded, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”28
Trump was saying, I will give you something you want, but you must do something for me. This was the Trump that people close to him knew, the man who repeatedly demanded that those around him compromise themselves for some benefit to him. He had something they badly needed or wanted. To get it, they had to agree to do Trump a favor, corrupt as it might be.
As he had done during his summit with Putin in Helsinki a year earlier, Trump abruptly raised Hillary Clinton’s email server in his call with Zelensky. “The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump said. “I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people, and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.” Trump asked Zelensky to cooperate with Giuliani. Then he added, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it . . . It sounds horrible to me.”
At the end of the call, Trump returned to his earlier theme. “I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call.” He added of the former ambassador, Yovanovitch, “She’s going to go through some things.” A week later, Giuliani, who had previously said he was undertaking his foreign trips as “a private citizen,” quietly met in Madrid with Yermak, the Zelensky aide. As described in the whistle-blower report, this rendezvous was “a ‘direct follow-up’ to the President’s call with Mr Zelenskyy about the ‘cases’ they had discussed.”29 Volker got involved, too, as did two other US diplomats. All three officials were representing the State Department of the United States of America while working with the president’s unpaid private attorney. One of them was William “Bill” B. Taylor, who became the acting US ambassador to Ukraine when the White House recalled Yovanovitch. The other diplomat was Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, who had donated more than a million dollars through various LLCs to Trump’s inaugural committee and who had become involved in the Ukraine matter, though Ukraine is not part of the European Union. The diplomats began messaging each other, not through official State Department emails or accounts, but on WhatsApp. On August 9, Sondland texted Volker that there was an effort to set up a meeting with Trump and Zelensky, something the Ukrainian president had coveted. “Excellent!!” Volker responded. “How did you sway him? :)”
“Not sure i did,” Sondland responded. “I think potus really wants the deliverable.” The deliverable, the messages suggest, was an announcement of the investigations. For the month of August, the texts continued, outlining a series of negotiations about a statement Zelensky could make to the press about proceeding with the probes, with the implied understanding among the diplomats that this would unfreeze the military aid and pave the way for a White House meeting. Earlier on August 9, Volker had texted Giuliani and Sondland asking, “Can we all get on the phone to make sure I advise Z correctly as to what he should be saying?” Giuliani said he could take the call, but it would have to be before he left for a fundraiser that afternoon.30 This fundraiser was in the Hamptons, on Long Island, New York, hosted by Donald Trump Jr. and attended by his father, the president.
The next day, Yermak and Volker texted back and forth. Though Volker later denied he understood that an investigation into the Bidens was being discussed, Yermak told him, specifically, that a press briefing would include “among other things Burisma”—the firm on whose board Hunter Biden had served—“and election meddling.” On August 13, Volker texted Sondland a proposed statement that was even more specific: “We intend to initiate and complete a transparent and unbiased investigation of all available facts and episodes,” the American diplomat’s proposed statement for the Ukrainian president read, “including those involving Burisma and the 2016 elections, which in turn will prevent the recurrence of this problem in the future.”31
The day before this exchange, unbeknownst to Volker, Sondland, or Taylor, a whistle-blower—an intelligence officer temporarily posted at the White House—filed a complaint with the intelligence community inspector general. The complaint laid out the untoward interference of the president’s personal attorney in foreign affairs and his attempts to damage the political chances of the person Giuliani and Trump thought was their most formidable foe: Joe Biden. The complaint centered on the Trump-Zelensky “do me a favor” phone call, and its subsequent cover-up: according to the report, people with knowledge of the call had told the whistle-blower that “senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced—as is customary—by the White House situation room,” and that they had been, “ ‘directed’ by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored.”
Volker, Sondland, and Taylor kept communicating. Yermak shared a new draft of Zelensky’s anticipated statement, a more general one about corruption fighting that did not make specific reference to Burisma or the 2016 elections. Giuliani rejected this. The Ukrainians wouldn’t budge. Volker said in his testimony that he had agreed with the Ukrainians’ position, and “further said that I believe it is essential that Ukraine do nothing that could be seen as interfering in 2020 elections. It is bad enough that accusations have been made about 2016—it is essential that Ukraine not be involved in anything relating to 2020.” After this, “the idea of putting out a statement was shelved.”32
At the end of August, Politico ran a story about the delayed military aid.33 “Need to talk with you,” Yermak texted Volker, with a link to the story. The day after the story came out, Trump canceled a trip to Poland, where he was to meet with Zelensky. Vice President Mike Pence went instead. There was still no White House visit set up for the newly elected Ukrainian president, the leader of a country long allied with the United States. “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Taylor texted to Sondland. “Call me,” Sondland replied. As late as September 8, the diplomats were still trying to arrange what they now called “an interview.” Taylor texted Volker and Sondland, “The nightmare is they give the interview and don’t get the security assistance. The Russians love it. (And I quit.)” Twelve hours later, past midnight Washington, DC, time, Taylor texted Sondland again. “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” he wrote. After this message, Sondland spoke to Trump. Early the next morning, Sondland texted Taylor in a far more formal tone. “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions.” Taylor had it wrong, Sondland said: “The president has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind.”34
The prosecution of Paul Manafort, stemming from Manafort’s long association with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs and the corrupt politicians they supported, had been tested in federal courts in two jurisdictions. Manafort had been tried and convicted by a jury that included Trump supporters. But Giuliani and Trump were making an all-out effort to discredit the prosecution, by, among other things, declaring the black ledger records a fake. Along the way they deployed the full force of the US government—the White House, the State Department, the US diplomatic corps, the Office of Management and Budget, the Defense Department, and the Justice Department—to achieve a political aim: legitimize Trump’s 2016 election and tarnish a 2020 opponent. Up until Trump became president, it had been long-standing US policy, along with that of the European Union, to work to bend Ukraine’s political system toward the West’s—to end corrupt prosecutions and install the rule of law. Instead, Trump and Giuliani led the effort to bend the United States’ system of government toward Ukraine’s: toward an oligarchy where prosecutions—especially corruption prosecutions—are used as cudgels to dominate opponents and consolidate one’s own power.
In early September, word of the whistle-blower report reached Congress. Representative Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, subpoenaed it. The Washington Post began to circle, publishing reports saying the whistle-blower report involved an invitation from Trump to a foreign country to involve itself in the 2020 presidential election campaign; then that the country was Ukraine; and then that Trump had pushed Zelensky to investigate the Bidens. The White House initially refused to turn over the rough transcript of the call or allow the whistle-blower report to be released. Democrats in swing districts, the representatives who’d won by the narrowest of margins in 2018, began to come out in favor of an impeachment inquiry. Then, on September 24, 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did, too. At five in the afternoon, she made a televised announcement: “The actions of the Trump presidency revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office,” Pelosi said in front of a backdrop of American flags. “Therefore, today I am announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.” That week, the White House released the rough transcript of the call, and the whistle-blower report itself.
It was still unclear if there would be a consequence for the president. But after five decades, there would be, finally, a public reckoning for Donald J. Trump.
He had more cards to play.
Trump’s second year in office, unlike the first, contained few legislative battles. There had been no massive bill like the tax cut bill that served to reshape the social order. But there had been another, less remarked upon but equally far-reaching change. By December 2018, according to a Brookings Institution study, Trump had appointed twenty-nine new appellate judges to the courts just one level down from the US Supreme Court, “the highest number of any president at this point in his tenure.”35 The entire judicial selection process was overseen by the White House Counsel Don McGahn, a member of the Federalist Society, who favored more members of the society on the bench.
Trump inherited one Supreme Court opening after Antonin Scalia died and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell defied the Constitution to keep Scalia’s seat empty for the final year of Obama’s term. That seat went to Neil Gorsuch. The second opening was created when Anthony Kennedy resigned, after what the New York Times called a “quiet campaign to create a Supreme Court opening” by Donald and Ivanka Trump.36
Kennedy had been the swing vote who had helped keep Roe v. Wade alive. He had written, just days after Trump rode down the escalator to announce his campaign for president, a decision granting same-sex couples the constitutional right to marry. Kennedy was, on many social issues, the opposite of what Don McGahn and the Federalist Society wanted, yet almost immediately upon taking office, Trump showered positive attention on the justice.
As Trump made his way out of the House of Representatives chamber after his first address to Congress, in February 2017, he shook hands with Elena Kagan, then Sonia Sotomayor, then paused to focus his charm and personality on Kennedy, who praised him for his speech.37 “That’s very nice, thank you, coming from you,” Trump said, adding “Say hello to your boy.”
Kennedy’s “boy”—Justin Kennedy—had been a banker on Trump’s early Deutsche Bank loan for his Chicago Tower and had been on the team that restructured the debt on the Kushners’ 666 Fifth Avenue in 2011.
“Your kids have been very nice to him,” Kennedy told the president. “Well,” Trump said, “they love him, and they love him in New York. Great guy.”
A week before Trump’s address to Congress, Ivanka Trump had paid a call on Justice Kennedy at the Supreme Court with her daughter Arabella. As the New York Times reported, the President “used the first opening to help create the second one,” showering praise on Kennedy at Neil Gorsuch’s swearing in. White House officials had already started mentioning two judges as candidates for a possible next opening: both, like Gorsuch, were former Kennedy clerks. One was Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s eventual nominee.
Before the infamous congressional hearings, there was a long and sustained fight against Kavanaugh, who would be in a position not only to rule on laws, but to define the rule of law itself.
A year and a half into the Mueller investigation, a point when the entire effort of bringing the law to bear on Trump and his associates felt as delicate as a glass thread, Kavanaugh came before the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, where the Democrats tried, futilely, to get traction on Kavanaugh’s views on Roe v. Wade, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, voter suppression, voting rights, gerrymandering, and all the threats to democracy that had recently reasserted themselves.
In the middle of all of this, California US Senator Kamala Harris, her face stern, her eyebrows arched in what looked like disgust but was more likely a permanent expression of skepticism, grilled Kavanaugh on something else, a seemingly small thing.
“Judge,” she asked, “have you ever discussed Special Counsel Mueller or his investigation with anyone?”
“Well, um,” Kavanaugh replied, “It’s in the news every day.”
“Have you discussed Mueller or his investigation with anyone at the law firm Kasowitz, Benson, and Torres, founded by Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal lawyer?”
“I’m not remembering,” Kavanaugh said.
“Are you certain you’ve not had a conversation with anyone at that law firm?”
“Kasowitz, Benson?” he said quizzically. “I’m just trying to think do I know anyone who works at that firm,” Kavanaugh said.
This went on for five minutes, and produced no answers.38
Within a day, it emerged that Kavanaugh was a friend of Ed McNally, a Kasowitz, Benson partner, from when they had both worked in the George W. Bush administration. Both said they had not discussed the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. But Kavanaugh had created a small but indelible tear in the fabric of truth that was perceived to surround Supreme Court justices: the sense that whatever their ideological predilection, they were committed, first and foremost, to a finding of fact. Kavanaugh, in this moment of questioning, displayed the opposite tendency: to ask not, What’s the truth? but instead, What’s the angle?
After all of this came the part of the Kavanaugh hearings that was watched live by twenty million viewers, at least:39 when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward to testify, in gripping and credible detail, about the day she said Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in the upstairs bedroom of a friend’s house, holding his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream, laughing afterwards. Even Fox News thought it was over for Kavanaugh. Then, he came out, in a rage. “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups,” Kavanagh said, his face contorting in anger, his cheeks pinkening, his mouth pulling down in a sneer.40
His world view was Trump’s world view: if you weren’t for him, you were an enemy; if you disagreed with him, your sole motive was to get power through any means necessary, because that is what Trump or Kavanaugh would have done if they were in their opponent’s shoes.
Trump undermined the press by calling it “the enemy of the people” in a way that caused many Americans to doubt that any journalist represented truths, and to believe that all are merely out to pursue a political agenda. He viciously attacked and undermined prosecutors and investigators, and extended the opprobrium to anyone who disagreed with him. He refused to respond to oversight in Congress, as outlined by the Constitution; simply not budging. He arguably violated the Constitution every day he was in office, by taking payments from foreign countries to a company he still profited from.
And now, here was a US Supreme Court justice who would tip the balance of power, with a world view shared with Trump.
After Kavanaugh said the thing about a “political hit,” and “revenge,” he said something that was arguably true, for everyone. “The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades.”