As he settled into the White House, Donald Trump actually had good reason to be outraged by what was being reported about his administration.
The biggest issue wasn’t the relentlessly negative tone of the news coverage, although it was certainly relentlessly negative. And the central problem wasn’t media bias, although there was plenty of that. The real issue was closer to home: Private details of the inner workings of his White House were all over the news. Every president complains about leaks, but the leaks coming from the Trump administration were truly out of control and beyond anything previous presidents had faced.
In his businesses and in his campaign, Donald Trump prized secrecy, requiring his employees to sign nondisclosure agreements that forbade them from talking about anything to do with him. Now, in his early days as president, nothing seemed to be confidential. The president had forced some of his senior advisors to sign new nondisclosure agreements when they started working at the White House, but White House Counsel Don McGahn quietly told them the agreements were meant to mollify the president and would be unenforceable as a matter of law. After all, while White House staff work at the pleasure of the president, they are actually employees of the United States government, not Donald Trump.
One major factor causing the constant flow of unauthorized information coming out of the West Wing was the remarkable ineffectiveness of the White House press office. This wasn’t because Press Secretary Sean Spicer or his deputies were leaking. In fact, it was just the opposite. Spicer habitually failed to answer emails and phone calls from reporters. And I found when I could get through to him, he would be just as likely to yell at me for some perceived slight as he would be to answer my questions.
Faced with a situation where an official spokesperson was hostile and not a reliable source of information, reporters naturally looked elsewhere. And, in the Trump White House, there was never a shortage of senior administration officials willing to talk about what was going on—or to trash other senior administration officials.
However, the most alarming leaks coming from the White House were not the many stories about staff infighting or internal deliberations. The most damaging leaks were of the president’s conversations with foreign leaders.
At the end of his first full week in office, President Trump had a lengthy telephone conversation with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, one of dozens of calls with foreign leaders he had during his first weeks in office. The call lasted about an hour, and after it was over, the White House issued a bland 150-word statement summarizing the conversation as “a productive and constructive call regarding the bilateral relationship between the two countries.”
This is standard operating procedure for the White House—any White House. After the president has a conversation with a foreign leader, the press office routinely releases an announcement that the call took place and offers some vague diplomatic language on what was discussed. These statements are called readouts. The readout of the Peña Nieto call included one sentence on the thorny issues they’d both tried to avoid during Trump’s visit to Mexico City during the campaign: Trump’s campaign promise that Mexico would pay for his border wall.
“With respect to payment for the border wall,” the statement read, “both presidents recognize their clear and very public differences of positions on this issue but have agreed to work these differences out as part of a comprehensive discussion on all aspects of the bilateral relationship.”
It turned out that was hardly an accurate description of the call, and before long, the world was able to see exactly what was discussed in intricate detail, the kind of detail that had never before been revealed about a sitting president’s private conversation with a foreign leader.
The Associated Press struck first. Five days after the call, it ran a story it says was based on an excerpt from a transcript of the conversation obtained by the AP, which, the article said, was provided “on condition of anonymity because the administration did not make the details of the call public.”
Eventually The Washington Post obtained and published the complete and entirely unedited transcript of the president’s call with Peña Nieto. It’s a fascinating read. It was also a profound and unprecedented violation of the president’s trust by whoever leaked it.
“On the wall,” Trump told Peña Nieto, “you and I have a political problem.”
He acknowledged they had both said opposite things. Trump, of course, had promised countless times that Mexico would pay for the wall and Peña Nieto had said countless times that Mexico would never pay for the wall.
“But the fact is, we are both in a little bit of a political bind because I have to have Mexico pay for the wall—I have to. I have been talking about it for a two-year period,” Trump said, telling Peña Nieto to stop saying Mexico would not pay and instead say that the two of them would work it out.
“If you are going to say that Mexico is not going to pay for the wall,” Trump said, “then I do not want to meet with you guys anymore because I cannot live with that.”
In case Peña Nieto did not understand that this was a threat, Trump added another threat he would use again two years later with the next Mexican president:
“I think the most popular thing for me would be just to put a tariff on the border.”
“You have a very big mark on our back, Mr. President, regarding who pays for the wall. This is what I suggest, Mr. President—let us stop talking about the wall,” Peña Nieto said. “But my position has been and will continue to be very firm saying that Mexico cannot pay for that wall.”
“But you cannot say that to the press,” Trump shot back. “I cannot live with that. You cannot say that to the press because I cannot negotiate under those circumstances.”
Peña Nieto deftly turned the conversation to other areas where there was agreement between the two leaders, getting Trump at one point to say, “It is you and I against the world, Enrique, do not forget.”
But it wouldn’t matter what Peña Nieto did or didn’t say to the press after the call, because the whole conversation would end up on the pages of The Washington Post.
The same thing happened with another contentious call the president had the very next day with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. The official White House readout of the call was even more terse and bland than the readout of the call with Peña Nieto. Here it is, in its entirety:
STATEMENTS & RELEASES
Readout of the President’s Call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull
Issued on: January 28, 2017
President Donald J. Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull spoke by phone for twenty-five minutes today. Both leaders emphasized the enduring strength and closeness of the U.S.-Australia relationship that is critical for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region and globally.
What the readout does not mention is that the call was scheduled to last for an hour but abruptly ended after twenty-five minutes when President Trump hung up on the Australian prime minister.
Like the Mexican call, the transcript of this conversation was eventually leaked to and published in its entirety by The Washington Post. The transcript shows something that had never been seen before: the president of the United States losing his temper during a supposedly private conversation with a close American ally.
The conversation started off lightly—Trump began by asking about the great Australian golfer Greg Norman—but it quickly got tense when Turnbull brought up an agreement he had worked out with the Obama administration for the United States to take in 1,250 refugees who had fled South Asia and the Middle East and were being held on two islands off the coast of Australia. Just twenty-four hours earlier, Turnbull told Trump, Vice President Pence had assured him the Trump administration would honor the agreement despite its hard-line position on refugees.
“I am asking you as a very good friend,” Turnbull said to Trump. “This is a big deal. It is really, really important to us that we maintain it.”
“Malcolm, why is this so important? I do not understand. This is going to kill me.”
As the conversation went on, Trump said several times the agreement required the United States to accept 2,000 refugees, and Turnbull kept correcting him by telling him it was 1,250, at one point prompting Trump to say, “I have also heard like five thousand as well.”
Turnbull assured him over and over that it was only 1,250 and the United States would not have to take a single refugee who did not pass a background check.
“We are not taking anybody,” Trump said. “Those days are over.”
After trying, fruitlessly, to convince Trump that the refugees would be fully vetted and not a threat to the United States, he reminded Trump he had a binding agreement with President Obama.
“There is nothing more important in business or politics than a deal is a deal.”
That prompted a lecture from Trump about his election victory. He said the Democrats had lost because they had made stupid deals—like the one Turnbull was asking Trump to honor.
“This is a stupid deal. This deal will make me look terrible.”
“Mr. President,” Turnbull responded, “I think this will make you look like a man who stands by the commitments of the United States.”
“I think it is a horrible deal, a disgusting deal that I would never have made,” Trump said, getting ready to end the call. “I have had it. I have been making these calls all day and this is the most unpleasant call all day. Putin was a pleasant call. This is ridiculous.”
Turnbull tried to steer the conversation to other topics—attempting to bring up the crises in Syria and North Korea. But Trump brought the call to an end.
Turnbull and Trump went on to have much friendlier conversations and developed a seemingly warm relationship. One of those who helped bring the two together was their mutual friend Greg Norman. And the refugees from those Australian detention centers did, by the way, eventually start coming into the United States in late 2017.
But the leaks of the transcripts of these two conversations had ramifications far beyond the immediate political embarrassment and challenges posed to America’s relationships with Mexico and Australia. The leaks sparked paranoia throughout the West Wing and an effort to hunt down the leakers.
The concern was shared outside the White House. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee and a frequent Trump critic, called the leaks “disgraceful” and warned they could impair the administration’s ability to conduct foreign policy.
The president’s top aides believed the culprits were nonpartisan career officials who had also worked in the Obama administration. The majority of employees who work on the National Security Council and at federal agencies like the State Department are career professionals who work under Democratic and Republican administrations. Some of them, likely a very few of them, would have had access to the transcripts.
The leaking put enormous pressure on Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who not only had to answer questions about what was leaked but also had to bear the brunt of the president’s outrage over his inability to prevent negative press coverage of his administration.
The truly sensitive and important leaks, such as the transcripts of the calls with foreign leaders, almost certainly did not come from anywhere near the White House press office, but Spicer was fighting his own battles over much more trivial leaks about the inner workings of his press operation. He was outraged, for example, when news got out that Mike Dubke had been hired as the new White House communications director before Spicer was ready to announce it. It was hardly a state secret, but Spicer berated his staff over the leak.
One day in late February, Spicer got word that something said at a press office staff meeting had been leaked to a reporter. This time, Spicer took what he believed was decisive action.
He convened an “emergency meeting” of his staff. As they walked into his office, he demanded everyone put their cell phones—both their work and personal phones—onto the table for what he said would be a phone check.
And right then and there, in the presence of White House lawyers, the phones were all searched to see if any of them had leaked information from the previous meeting via text message. As the search of the phones went on, Spicer warned ominously that there would be more phone checks and that leakers would be caught and punished.
But this phone check came up empty.
And then, a couple of hours later, another leak, this time about what had just happened.
The headline in Politico read: “Sean Spicer Targets Own Staff in Leak Crackdown.”*