On February 9, 2017, Andrew Jackson, the first disrupter-president, peered over the shoulders of two of his ideological descendants—Donald J. Trump and Jefferson B. Sessions—from inside a golden frame in the Oval Office. Trump, standing behind a blue podium beside the Resolute desk, was introducing Sessions as the country’s new top cop.
“It is with great pride—very great pride—that I say these words to you right now,” Trump said, beaming. “Attorney General Jeff Sessions, welcome to the White House.”
The crowd of about thirty of us assembled in the Oval—Sessions’s family members, former staffers, and friends—broke into wild applause, with someone whistling like we were at a college football game back home in Alabama. Trump leaned over and grabbed Sessions by his left shoulder, like Dumbledore gazing proudly at Harry for being sorted into Gryffindor. The new AG gave his President a swift pat on the back in response, then looked down at the floor smiling, embarrassed by the attention.
Steve Bannon was standing beside me, watching, with a contented grin crossing his face.
“Hell, yeah,” he said to no one in particular. At one point, long before the 2016 election cycle got under way, Bannon had tried to coax Sessions into running for President. He sensed the growing power of illegal immigration and trade as issues that would energize a new, working-class Republican coalition. On this point, Bannon’s foresight cannot be denied. Almost no one else saw it coming. Sessions, for his part, had for decades been the leading voice—albeit a lonely one—on those issues in the Senate. He was flattered by Bannon’s overtures, but told him he thought a better vessel would come along to carry those issues to the forefront of the national debate. They had both been proven correct.
As Trump continued speaking, extolling his new AG’s record of public service, Sessions glanced around the room, locking eyes with friendly faces, then smiling and nodding in acknowledgment that they were there at the proudest moment of his professional life. He had been a U.S. Attorney and Alabama Attorney General before serving in the U.S. Senate for twenty years—but Attorney General of the United States had always been his dream job.
“He’s a man of integrity, a man of principle, and a man of total, utter resolve,” Trump continued. “Jeff understands that the job of the Attorney General is to serve and protect the people of the United States, and that is exactly what he will do, and do better than anyone else can.”
Sessions placed his hand on a Bible held by Mrs. Mary, his college sweetheart and wife of forty-seven years, as the Vice President administered the oath of office.
“So help me God,” Sessions concluded with extra emphasis. As we applauded again, I looked to my left and saw tears welling up in the eyes of Deputy Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn. He’d been Sessions’s Chief of Staff in the Senate for over a decade.
Bannon’s joy was unbridled. “We got another patriot,” he said, grabbing my hand and shaking it feverishly. “It’s a win for the good guys, a win for the workingman. We’re going to wreak total f—ing havoc on the elites, man—shock and awe. Can you believe this s—? It’s f—ing Christmas.”
As the event broke up, Mrs. Sessions saw me across the room and called out, “C’mere, sweet friend!” I wrapped her up in a bear hug as she got the President to sign the Bible that had been used for the swearing-in ceremony. It had been her father’s, and as it continued to be passed down through generations to come, it would now take on even greater historical significance.
“Well, how’re we doing so far?” a voice said from behind me. I could recognize that old Southern accent anywhere. I turned around, grabbed Sessions’s hand, and told him, “We’re doing great, Mr. Attorney General. This is a proud, proud day for all of us.”
Just a week before, The Washington Post had labeled Sessions the “intellectual godfather” of Trumpism. “Sessions has installed close allies throughout the administration,” wrote the Post’s Phil Rucker and Robert Costa. They listed me and Dearborn, along with top White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller, who had been Sessions’s communications director in the Senate. All of us were now at Trump’s side on a daily basis. And because he helped install Dearborn as director of the transition, Sessions alumni were placed in jobs all throughout various agencies and departments. The Post went on to note that Jared Kushner “considers Sessions a savant.” Newt Gingrich was quoted praising Trump for recognizing “how genuinely smart Sessions is.” Everyone in Trump World paid deference to the man whose populist brand of conservatism had foreshadowed the rise of Trump before anyone even took him seriously as a presidential candidate.
On that crisp, cold Friday afternoon, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, from tiny Hybart, Alabama, began his twenty-one days on top of the world.
Late on the afternoon of February 14, 2017—Valentine’s Day—I stood outside the Cabinet Room chatting with Attorney General Sessions, who was waiting for his first in-person meeting with the President since his confirmation. Standing off to the side was Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. He was an imposing four-star Marine general with deep wrinkles curving around his mouth and chin. His natural expression was a grimace, and when he smiled he looked like he was in pain. Ever the military guy, he wore a business suit like a dress uniform and walked through the place as if he were commanding a raid. I imagined him prepared at any moment to shout out, “You can’t handle the truth!” if he was ever challenged.
“What do you think of him?” I asked Sessions quietly, nodding toward Kelly, who was chatting in the background and flashing that in-pain smile at everyone again.
“Well, I think he agrees with us on the border,” he replied. “So that’s good; that’s what we needed.”
Sessions and Kelly were waiting to meet with the President about coordinating the administration’s immigration policies. Two weeks before, Trump had signed a controversial “travel ban” on individuals from seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. The stated reasoning behind this order was that the U.S. government did not have confidence in our ability to properly vet travelers from those countries. Critics pointed out that the countries affected were all predominantly Muslim, a fair point considering Trump’s campaign rhetoric, which at one point included a call to block all Muslims from entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” The haphazard implementation of the order—coordinated by Stephen Miller, who had gone from firing off quixotic emails from his desk in the Russell Senate Office Building to now activating sweeping policy for the federal leviathan—sparked intense backlash. Newly banned travelers were detained at airports because they were already en route to the United States when the surprise order went into effect. Protests swept the nation and dominated media coverage. Trump, Sessions, and Kelly were undeterred.
Two weeks later, Sessions sat in the front row of the House chamber as Trump delivered his first address to a Joint Session of Congress. The words were Trump’s, but the ideas behind them had long been Sessions’s. He railed against “drugs pouring into the country.” He pledged to “restore integrity and the rule of law at our borders.” And he called on the Department of Justice to crack down on violent crime and “criminal cartels.”
It was like watching a midday C-SPAN broadcast of Sessions speaking on the Senate floor to an empty chamber, as he had done so many times, but now the entire world was paying attention.
During the speech, when Trump recognized the widow of Navy SEAL Ryan Owens—the first American warrior to give his life under Trump’s command—the entire chamber stood for two minutes and eleven seconds of thunderous, sustained applause. I even stood up at my desk alone to feel like I was a part of it. For those of us sitting in the West Wing watching late into the night, it felt like we were living the real-life version of a film, just without the musical score swelling behind us.
Owens had been killed during a raid on al-Qaeda in Yemen that was personally ordered by the President. This event affected him deeply. When I heard that plans were quietly being made for him to partake in Owens’s dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base, I casually mentioned to him after a meeting in the Roosevelt Room how emotional an experience I thought that would be. Trump, who was wearing a silk tie in a lighter shade of blue than I was used to seeing, looked down. I immediately felt embarrassed for bringing it up. My entire body felt hot, and I’m quite certain my face turned bright red. Who was I to be bringing this kind of stuff up to the commander in chief? Stupid, stupid, stupid. The brief silence left me racking my brain for a way to change the subject, but as it turned out, Trump wasn’t at all miffed that I’d brought it up. To the contrary, he felt inclined to say something about it. “I made the call and the next thing I hear he had died,” he said softly. And that was it. I felt a lump in my throat and for the briefest moment grasped the incredible loneliness that must accompany the presidency’s most difficult decisions—those of life and death.
This wasn’t the only time I felt that way. Around that same time, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, Chief of Staff of the National Security Council, assembled a group of approximately two dozen newly minted special ops soldiers in the Roosevelt Room. The young men, who all appeared to be in their early twenties, sat around the large conference table and in chairs around the walls typically filled by ambitious political aides. They were just days or weeks away from deploying to the darkest corners of the earth. They were going to be the very tip of the spear. As I looked around the room, they were all physical specimens, their jaws chiseled out of granite and their uniforms barely concealing the fast-twitch muscle fibers underneath. Some were bulky and tall, others were trim and of average height or below. They were of every race. Some of them spoke with a familiar Southern twang that made me miss Alabama and reminded me of the World War II Victory Medal I’d seen sitting in a box at my grandfather’s house in Mississippi. Others sounded like New Englanders, or California beach bros whose friends were probably back home enjoying the surf while they were enduring no telling what while preparing to defend their country. This was all of America in a single room.
As I looked at their faces—young, fearless, full of hope and vigor—I couldn’t help but think that some of them would leave home one day and never return. Or if they did it would be to Dover in a flag-draped casket. I asked the man who, I think, had led their training what separated them from the rest of the pack. “I’d say a couple of things to that,” he began. “These boys have a nearly inhuman ability to handle stress. Put them in the air, or under the water, or in the cold, or any place you want, really, and they’re able to keep their emotions in check and focus. There are a lot of stoic philosophers in this room,” he laughed, only half joking. “They suffer in silence. And then I’d say this is the most competitive bunch you’ll ever meet. They don’t like losing, and they won’t.” He paused and looked down, further considering his answer. “You know, so much of life is mental. Secretary Mattis said once that ‘the most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears.’ These boys know that. They live it.”
Just then, the door swung open, bringing the room to its feet and silencing the ongoing conversations.
“At ease, boys, at ease,” the President said with a smile, stopping in the doorway with his arms open. “What are we, getting ready to shoot an action movie, or what? Look at all of you, straight out of central casting.” The group laughed loudly and Trump worked his way around the room shaking hands with everyone before asking them to sit down so they could “have a little chat.”
“Who’s the toughest guy in here?” he asked. They looked around at one another for a few seconds and then seemed to simultaneously agree on one of their compatriots, who happened to be seated at the table right next to the President. “It’s you, huh?” Trump said. “That’s really saying something coming from this crowd. Good job, good job.” They shook hands, with Trump adding his left hand for a couple of additional pats.
“They say the hardest decision a president makes is war and peace,” Trump told the group. “I prefer peace, right? We prefer peace. But sometimes you have to be tough. We had to be tough just recently. I said, ‘I wish I could wait, I just got here,’ you know? But you can’t wait. You’ve got to be tough, and I know you all understand that. You signed up for the hard job. Your President knows that. The whole country knows that. They may not know your names, but they know you’re out there and you’re protecting them. So I respect you and I respect what you do.”
For the next twenty minutes, Trump talked and answered questions. He laughed with them and gave them serious advice. He seemed genuinely humbled by the weight of the presidency, but in a way more self-assured than ever that he was up to the task. He told them they’d never have to wonder, no matter to what murky corner of the earth they were deployed, whether their commander in chief had their back. “I’m with you,” he said.
Thinking about it still gives me chills.
After Trump’s speech to Congress, about twenty of us gathered in the Diplomatic Reception Room to surprise him when his motorcade returned to the White House. We cheered as he walked in. “We did all right, didn’t we?” he said, adrenaline still coursing through his veins. Then he invited some of the staff upstairs to celebrate his triumph.
For once, the media coverage was almost universally laudatory. “Did you see what Van Jones said?” Trump beamed. “Every Democrat is worried sick—they can’t believe it—they’re not going to be able to get out of bed for a month! Zucker’s going to close down CNN, he’s going to have to close it down. Everyone’s calling in sick!”
Jones, Obama’s former green jobs czar, who was now a CNN commentator, called it “one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period.… For people who have been hoping that maybe he would remain a divisive cartoon … they should begin to become a little bit worried tonight, because that thing you just saw him do, if he finds a way to do that over and over again, he’s going to be there for eight years.”
The coverage was so positive that it was jarring. We had never experienced anything quite like this before. This must be what it feels like to be a Democrat. “No tweeting,” everyone kept telling the President, dead serious, of course, but in a lighthearted tone. Trump begrudgingly agreed. Even he couldn’t deny the benefit of being quiet in this moment. It would all be short-lived.
About thirty-six hours later I was bopping along Suitland Parkway in a column of blacked-out government vans on the way to Joint Base Andrews, where Air Force One was idling. The President was set to deliver remarks that afternoon to sailors aboard the soon-to-be commissioned USS Gerald R. Ford.
Staff boards Air Force One through a door near the tail of the plane, then climbs up two flights of stairs to the main deck. Stewards place quarter-page-size pieces of paper with names printed at the top—MR. SIMS, MS. HICKS, MR. BANNON—to mark where each passenger is seated. The entire inside of the plane is decked out in various shades of gray and brown. In the staff cabin, large leather seats face each other with a table between them. When the President leaves the White House on Marine One, an intercom message alerts the staff waiting on the plane to his ETA. As soon as he boards and sits down, the plane starts rolling. Every single movement is choreographed to ensure the President never waits for anything.
Traveling with the President was perhaps the most eye-opening experience of my early days in the White House. I had never considered the logistical achievement required to safely move him and his staff around the world. Every potential threat must be taken into account. Giant military cargo planes transported the presidential limousine—“The Beast”—everywhere we went. The well-dressed Secret Service agents wearing their shades were ever present at his side, but rarely seen were the counterassault teams decked out in tactical gear. The press had to be accounted for, too. They had a dedicated cabin aboard Air Force One at the back of the plane, and vans were provided to them as part of the presidential motorcade.
On this particular trip, we took off from Joint Base Andrews and made the half-hour flight to Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia. There, the President boarded Marine One, while the rest of us ran up the open bay doors of an Osprey, a hybrid helicopter-airplane. Once buckled in, we choppered five minutes to the shipyard and landed on the deck of the world’s largest aircraft carrier. After assembling our group on the flight deck, a basketball court–size elevator—typically used for aircraft—lowered us down into the hangar bay. As soon as the President was visible, the thousands of sailors waiting below erupted in deafening applause as we descended. Once he finished his remarks, we reversed the process—up the giant elevator, Osprey to Langley, Air Force One to Andrews. Everyone was in good spirits, especially the President. He could be kind of a homebody and sometimes bristled at traveling during the week. But once in front of a crowd, he fed off their energy; it recharged his batteries. And on return flights he would often express a desire to “do this more often.”
But the mood changed as the plane approached Andrews; cable news chyrons started teasing an upcoming press conference by Attorney General Sessions.
The day before, Sessions had come under fire over revelations that he had twice interacted with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign. This led to accusations that he had made false statements during his confirmation hearings.
During the hearings, Sessions had been asked by Senator Al Franken (D-MN) about whether “there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”
Sessions replied, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I … did not have communications with the Russians.”
Sessions had, in fact, shaken hands with the Russian Ambassador—and dozens of other foreign officials—during a widely attended event at the Republican National Committee, and later met with him in his Senate office—along with his staff—in his official capacity on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Such a meeting was so routine that countless Democratic senators had met with him, too, including Senators Mary Landrieu (LA), Maria Cantwell (WA), Bob Casey (PA), Amy Klobuchar (MN), Jack Reed (RI), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), and Claire McCaskill (MO). But none of that stopped Democrats from acting like they had caught Sessions inside the Kremlin with Putin himself, crafting a master plan to overthrow the United States government.
Jeff Sessions is a Boy Scout—figuratively and literally. The Scouts’ motto, “Be Prepared,” sat on his desk for decades. The Senators with whom he had served for years—including the Democrats—knew the kind of person he was. They had dined with him, traveled the world with him on congressional-delegation trips, saw the way he loved his wife, children, and grandchildren, and knew him to be a man of impeccable honor and integrity. And yet they still sought to destroy him. And members of the press—many of whom would scoff off the record about the absurdity of accusing Sessions of conspiring to rig an election—were complicit in the entire charade. I remain disgusted by it all.
But I also cannot deny how bad the optics were, especially in a political environment where nuance didn’t exist.
“What’s this about?” Johnny McEntee, the President’s body man, said aboard Air Force One. My heart rate quickened. Members of the press had just asked Trump aboard the aircraft carrier if he thought Sessions should have to recuse himself from any investigations related to the campaign. He replied that he had “total” confidence in Sessions and saw no reason why he should have to recuse himself from that or any other potential investigation. Now, it appeared, we were going to see if Sessions agreed with the President. To my knowledge, he had not discussed this with anyone on staff, or with Trump himself.
As Sessions approached the podium, all of us in the staff cabin stopped talking and focused on the small TV nestled into the gray plastic wall paneling.
“I have been here just three weeks today,” Sessions said with a smile and his patented aw-shucks demeanor. After his cordial introduction, it quickly became clear what he had come to discuss. He laid out a process by which he had solicited feedback from career DOJ officials about whether he should recuse himself from any investigations related to the campaign. He went on to explain that earlier that day, after considering the rules, his staff had “recommended recusal. They said since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigations.”
Oh, no.
And then he said the words that would change everything.
“I have recused myself in the matters that deal with the Trump campaign.”
When a reporter asked about his interactions with the Russian Ambassador, he dismissed the first one as trivial and said the second was done in his official capacity and alongside his senior staff. Neither, he said, was about the campaign, which was what he had been specifically asked about during his confirmation hearings.
Air Force One was now sitting idle on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. I’m not sure any of us fully appreciated the significance of what had just happened, but it didn’t take a juris doctorate to know that it wasn’t good. Most members of the staff stood in silence. A couple of others blurted out expletives directed at no one in particular. “The Obama people never would have done this,” McEntee said.
He was right about that, we all agreed. After Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch held a clandestine meeting with Bill Clinton at the Phoenix airport, she never appeared to come remotely close to recusing herself from investigations related to Hillary. And not a single Democrat called for her to. Most conservatives viewed the Obama DOJ as a political operation. I knew Sessions. There was no question in my mind that he was trying to do the right thing—to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. He loved the Justice Department, its people, and its mission. He had devoted his entire life to the law. But I knew the President, too. And I figured he would view this as a personal betrayal—as if his friend had left him hanging.
Everything was personal to Trump—everything. In international affairs, he believed his personal relationship with foreign leaders was more important than shared interests or geopolitics. With his staff, having a personal rapport was more important to him than whether they shared his worldview, or whether they were even good at their jobs. In Sessions’s case, I knew Trump wouldn’t view this as the AG sending a message to the country that everything was going to be done aboveboard; he’d view it as the AG sending a message to him that he was being thrown to the wolves.
Normally, when traveling with the President, everything moved fast. You had to hustle from the plane to the motorcade unless you wanted to get left behind. This time no one was moving. The President was still holed up in his office, and as we waited, I decided to move toward the front of the plane to see what was going on. As I walked nonchalantly down the hallway connecting the staff cabin to the President’s suite, I could hear muffled conversations. And then Trump’s voice rising above the rest: “If he had told me he was going to do this,” Trump exploded, “I never would have appointed him in the first place!”
I immediately turned around and made my way back to my seat. Press were beginning to make note of how long we were taking to disembark. When we finally made our way into the motorcade, it was an unusually quiet ride back to the White House. I put my earbuds in but didn’t turn on any music; I just didn’t feel like talking. I thought back to hugging Sessions and his wife sometime after 2 A.M. on Election Night, when we ran into each other at the Trump victory party and still could not entirely believe what was happening. I remembered sitting with him in Trump Tower during the transition, when famous politicians were coming out of the woodwork trying to land plum posts in the new administration, but Sessions refused to force himself on the President-Elect. He had been there for Trump when no one else was, and he believed Trump would do right by him, and he did. And I recalled his swearing-in ceremony, just twenty-one days before, when the entire scene felt like proof that sometimes the good guys actually do win.
Then I thought about Trump’s anger. I heard his voice screaming in my head—“I never would have appointed him in the first place!” How did we get here so quickly? Later that night the President tweeted, “Jeff Sessions is an honest man. He did not say anything wrong. He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional.”
The following day, I was standing in the Outer Oval when Jared Kushner walked in to see the President. “I’ve got someone on the phone who wants to talk to you,” he said. It was Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who had served with Sessions for many years in the Senate. Jared put him on speakerphone.
“He had to do it, Mr. President,” Graham argued of Sessions’s decision to recuse. “The American people weren’t going to allow him to oversee the investigation of a campaign in which he was involved. It just wasn’t going to work. He had no choice.”
The President calmly but vehemently disagreed.
“Lindsey, if Jeff couldn’t handle this, he should have chosen a different job,” he said. “I told him he could do some other things. We could have put him at Homeland and let him handle the border. General Kelly is doing a great job—I’ve got no complaints—but we could have put Sessions at the border.”
I grabbed my overcoat, walked down the West Colonnade, and sat on a cast-iron bench beside the Rose Garden. I knew Sessions’s relationship with Trump would never be the same.
“Get me the House and Senate leaders,” the President called out from the Oval, “the Democrats and the Republicans.”
It was the afternoon of May 9, 2017. I was sitting inside a small, almost closetlike office in the Outer Oval shared by Johnny McEntee and Keith Schiller. Johnny was popping in and out, as he usually did throughout the day. Keith wasn’t around, but at the time I didn’t really think anything of his absence. I was leaned back in a black mesh office chair, watching the television news coverage and waiting to talk to Hope.
Madeleine Westerhout, the President’s executive assistant, jumped into action, queuing up the calls Trump had requested. There was nothing particularly abnormal or interesting about any of this. Trump worked the phones this way all day, every day. Tucked into the closet office, I couldn’t really hear what he was saying, and I wasn’t trying to. Just another day in the office.
After a few minutes, Hope came in, but she was in no mood to talk. Before I even broached the subject I wanted to discuss with her—which was so trivial that I can’t even recall what it was—she told me, “Not now. We’ll have to do this later.”
“No worries,” I said. “Nothing urgent.” I got up and started to head back to my desk just in time to hear Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tell Trump on the phone, “This is a mistake.” I walked out before the President responded and once again didn’t think much of the exchange. Chuck Schumer’s against something we’re doing? Must be good.
Once back at my desk around the corner, I went back to whatever I had been working on before.
Every TV network has audio cues that alert viewers to breaking news. I can’t remember what network was on the TV in the press office, playing quietly in the background as I typed away, but the breaking news audio alert grabbed my attention: “Trump Fires FBI Director Comey.”
Oh man, he did it. He really did it.
News had just emerged earlier in the day that the FBI had to correct the record regarding Comey’s inaccurate congressional testimony the week before. As a result, Spicer had been asked during that afternoon’s press briefing if the President still had “full confidence” in Comey. “I have no reason to believe—I haven’t asked him, so I don’t, I have not asked the President since the last time we spoke about this,” Spicer said in his typical halting fashion. I don’t know if he had been kept out of the loop, or if he was just buying time for the announcement to come.
The vast majority of the White House staff often learned about “breaking news” at the same time as the rest of the country. This is one of the main reasons why breathless reports about “the mood” in the White House should always be taken with a grain of salt; the experience is dramatically different for various aides. For instance, deliberations surrounding the Comey decision were a closely held secret in the West Wing. I learned about the firing at the same time as suburban moms picking up their kids from soccer practice. I was so clueless that I had been sitting thirty feet from Trump’s desk and still had no idea what was going on. So you can imagine how the staff across the street in the EEOB experienced most breaking news events. Normal work continued on, with an eye on the TV screen, much like a typical corporate office.
I would learn in the coming hours—again, along with the rest of the country—that Attorney General Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had both written letters to the President recommending Comey’s dismissal. And Keith Schiller’s unexplained absence earlier that afternoon? Turns out he had been dispatched to deliver the termination letter to FBI headquarters. Unfortunately, James Comey wasn’t there. In fact, like so many of the rest of us, he learned about his dismissal through the television.
When I was trying to gauge the fallout from dramatic stories, my former campaign war room colleague Steven Cheung was always my first call. He monitored everything 24/7 as the White House Director of Strategic Response. “How’s this Comey thing playing—it’s getting pretty hot, isn’t it?” I asked him. He chuckled. “Man, I haven’t seen something consume the news like this since Access Hollywood,” he said. “People are losing their minds—I mean, totally freaking out.”
It’s rare for all of Washington to be consumed by a single story line. The White House and Capitol Hill are often on different tracks. Every backbench congressman is firing off press releases touting their pet projects. House and Senate leadership push their agendas. There’s nonstop prognosticating over certain bills making their way through the legislative process. Trump himself is usually pushing a few different things on any given day. But every now and then there’s a story so all-consuming that nothing else has any chance of breaking through. TV networks bump all their scheduled guests and go for wall-to-wall coverage on the big story. Sometimes it’s a tragedy—a national disaster, terrorist attack, or mass shooting. On the evening of May 9, 2017, the firing of James Comey took over everything. Even ABC, NBC, and CBS broke into their regular evening programming with special news alerts from the White House.
I stayed in my office and just watched it all unfold. Apparently Trump was doing the same thing I was, and he didn’t like what he was seeing.
At some point, an exasperated Hope Hicks burst into the hallway between the press office and the Roosevelt Room, stumbling into a casual conversation between Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Kellyanne Conway.
“He’s in there watching TV and getting killed, and none of you are doing anything to defend him,” Hicks said. “Where’s the plan to line up surrogates and get people out there to back him up?”
She was right, of course. But while I’d normally be among the first to point out Spicer’s inept leadership, in this particular instance, it’s hard to plan for something you didn’t know was coming. I was in charge of the messaging operation and even I had no idea how we were messaging this. On the flip side, once the story broke, there hadn’t been a sense of urgency to jump into action, either. It was like we all started just watching the television show, forgetting that we were actually supposed to be supporting actors.
Sean, Sarah, and Kellyanne figured out who to send out on TV and I worked out a brief talking points document that could be sent out across the administration, to our allies on Capitol Hill, and to outside surrogates who needed to know how to defend the President on TV.
Two hours after the Comey firing hit the news, I sent out an email blast with the all-caps subject line: COMMUNICATIONS BRIEFING—COMEY EDITION.
The email included copies of three letters: the termination recommendations from both Sessions and Rosenstein, and the actual termination letter from Trump to Comey. And I added the following bullet points:
• Director Comey had lost the confidence and respect of the FBI rank and file; a large, bipartisan contingent of House and Senate members; and the American people.
• Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who also served as a U.S. Attorney under the previous administration, recommended Director Comey’s termination.
° The FBI Director reports directly to Deputy AG Rosenstein.
° He is a career Justice Department official who was confirmed by the Senate 94–6.
° He assumed his new role just two weeks ago.
° Upon his confirmation, Mr. Rosenstein assessed the situation and concluded he did not have confidence in the FBI Director.
• After receiving recommendations from Mr. Rosenstein and Attorney General Sessions, President Trump concluded that the only way to restore confidence in the FBI—the crown jewel of American law enforcement—was to end Director Comey’s tenure atop the Bureau, effective immediately.
• The great men and women of the FBI deserve a leader in whom they have confidence—it is time for a fresh start. The search for a new director will begin immediately.
As we were walking over to the residence later that week, the President asked me what I thought about his decision, which had been met with outrage or distress, even among some Republicans. Democrats were nearly unanimous in calling for, as Senator Elizabeth Warren described it, “a real, independent prosecutor who Trump can’t fire, Sessions can’t intimidate, and Congress can’t muzzle.” Senator Schumer called for a “special prosecutor.” Even Republican Senator John McCain, a frequent Trump critic, tweeted that Comey’s removal confirmed the need for a select committee to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
“Was it the right move?” the President asked me. “What do you think?”
I had considered in advance that this question might come up at some point. First of all, I’m not an attorney and I couldn’t even begin to fathom the legal ramifications of the decision. Secondly, I believed that accusations of so called “collusion” between Trump and Russia were farcical. I didn’t doubt for a second that Russia sowed division and sought to influence the election through various disinformation campaigns. But we couldn’t collude with ourselves, working in offices right next to each other, much less with a foreign government. So I understood Trump’s frustration with what he viewed as an attempt to delegitimize his electoral victory. Third, Comey had made a series of high-profile mistakes in key moments. Even Democrats were furious with him over his handling of the Clinton email investigation. So, although I thought the optics were bad, I could also see legitimate cause to remove him. I also happened to agree with Trump’s assessment of Comey as a “showboater.” Finally, the decision was already made; Comey had been fired. What good would it do for me to raise doubts after the fact?
So I told the President, “I feel the same way about this decision that I did about most decisions during the campaign—trust your instincts. If your gut said he had to go, then you did the right thing.”
I knew that Trump took great pride in his political instincts, so he would appreciate the sentiment. As we boarded the elevator on the ground floor of the residence, Johnny McEntee was more explicit.
“It was the right thing to do,” he said emphatically. “Comey’s a piece of s—.”
The President looked at me with a grin, nodded at McEntee, and concluded, “He’s right about that, believe me. I did the country a favor by getting rid of this guy.”