“The big story is the ‘unmasking and surveillance’ of people that took place during the Obama Administration.”
—@realDonaldTrump, June 1, 2017
ON THE SURFACE, TRUMP and Mueller had much in common. They shared German and Scottish ancestry. Each had four siblings and affluent parents. Both excelled at sports in their youth. As much as they had in common, even more separated them.
While Trump learned the art of selling from his father, sometimes straying from the strict truth in the process, this was not the Mueller family way.
Robert Mueller (FBI)
“A lie was the worst sin,” Mueller said. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.”
Unlike Trump, Mueller continued his athletic pursuits in college—a decision that changed his life. At Princeton, where the motto was “In the nation’s service and in the service of all nations,” Mueller played varsity lacrosse with a student who was later killed by a sniper’s bullet in Vietnam.
Inspired by his teammate’s sacrifice, Mueller enlisted for service weeks after he graduated. A knee injury prevented him from qualifying for service right away. As Mueller healed, he earned his master’s degree in international relations at New York University. After he finally passed the military’s physical examination in August 1967, Mueller headed to Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia. Then came an elite, eight-week Ranger training program in which he learned skills that would be essential to his survival in Vietnam.
In 1968, Mueller arrived at the Dong Ha combat base near the dividing line between North and South Vietnam. That was a tumultuous year for Americans. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and the war in Vietnam was beginning to look like an insatiable sinkhole filled with the blood of thousands of young men—a stalemate at best. It was also the deadliest year of the war to date.
It was also the deadliest year of the war to date.
Mueller led twenty Marines in a regiment known as the “Magnificent Bastards.” His men had neither his wealth nor his elite education, but he rapidly won their respect with his laser-sharp focus on their mission and his knowledge of the myriad details they’d need to master to survive.
That December, a team of highly skilled North Vietnamese soldiers packing machine guns, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades ambushed Mueller and his men. In the devastating eight-hour conflict that followed, Mueller braved gunfire to rescue injured men, including one who would die from his wounds. He won a Bronze Star for his courage.
Around that same time, Trump graduated from Penn. He’d been declared medically unfit for service except “in time of national emergency” in October 1968.
As Trump would later tell the radio personality Howard Stern, his heroics during that era—his “personal Vietnam”—were of a different sort: avoiding STDs.
Vaginas are “potential landmines,” he told Stern. “There’s some real danger there.”
Just a few months after Mueller won a Bronze Star, as Trump and his father settled a Swifton Village housing discrimination claim, Mueller took a bullet through the thigh from a Russian-designed AK-47. Afterward, he received a Navy Commendation Medal for courage, leadership, and devotion “in the face of great personal danger.” In all, Mueller brought home thirteen awards from the war, including a Purple Heart, two Bronze Stars, badges for marksmanship, and ribbons for combat and valor.
After Vietnam, Mueller attended law school at the University of Virginia. He worked briefly in the private sector before securing government jobs in California and Massachusetts, focusing on major financial fraud, drug conspiracies, international money laundering, and public corruption. As an assistant attorney general, Mueller oversaw the investigations of the mob boss John Gotti, the Lockerbie airplane bombers, and the Panamanian military dictator Manuel Noriega. In 2001, after George W. Bush was elected president, he picked Mueller to lead the FBI.
Before he was selected, Mueller had disclosed he had cancer. He underwent surgery to remove a cancerous prostate gland on August 2, 2001, the day the Senate unanimously confirmed him to the position. Four days later, Mueller was back at his desk—much faster than a typical patient—and his doctors were confident he’d been cured.
On September 11 of that year, hijackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and—after passengers fought back—a Pennsylvania field. The attack did not come out of the blue. In July and August, the Federal Aviation Administration had warned airlines twice that terrorists planned to hijack planes. By then the nation’s various intelligence agencies had also received urgent word from the CIA. And the day before the attack, the National Security Agency picked up a pair of messages sent between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
One said, “Tomorrow is zero hour.”
The other said, “The match begins tomorrow.”
Translators got to the messages on September 12.
The nation’s intelligence agencies, including the FBI, needed a radical overhaul. During his term, Mueller updated the bureau’s data operations systems and broadened its focus to fight crime globally instead of just nationally. His tenure as FBI director was criticized by some subordinates, who said he was gruff and didn’t like to admit errors. In one case, his investigation of a man wrongly suspected of sending poisonous anthrax through the mail led to a $5.8 million suit against the government.
In 2013, when Mueller retired from public service, a guest at his retirement party joked that the event meant Mueller would “depart Justice for the last time, hopefully.”
Fate had something else in store.
In 2017, three years after Mueller had joined a private law firm, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called on Mueller to serve again. The appointment of Mueller as special counsel delighted prominent Republicans; Democrats praised the move as well.
The letter appointing Robert Mueller as special counsel “to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election and related matters.” (Department of Justice)
But Trump’s initial calm quickly frothed into rage. At a speech at the Coast Guard Academy on May 17, he told the new graduates, “Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media. No politician in history—and I say this with great surety—has been treated worse or more unfairly. You can’t let them get you down. You can’t let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams.”
Trump couldn’t sleep off his anger either. At 4:52 A.M. the next day, he tweeted, “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”
In June, Trump resolved to fire Mueller, even though firing James Comey from the FBI had led to the appointment of the special counsel in the first place. Trump listed three reasons why this was fair: Mueller had once quit Trump National Golf Club in an alleged dispute over fees while he was FBI director, Mueller had worked for a law firm that represented Jared Kushner, and Mueller had interviewed to lead the FBI again the day before his appointment as special counsel.
Trump ordered his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to make the Justice Department fire Mueller. McGahn wouldn’t, and instead threatened to quit himself in protest. Firing Mueller would be ruinous for Trump’s presidency, McGahn said.
It was a tough spot for Trump.
Mueller had brought down foreign leaders, mobsters, and terrorists. Mueller could end Trump’s presidency if Trump didn’t fire him.
Meanwhile, Mueller quickly assembled a team of seventeen experts in a breadth of areas: fraud, criminal law, organized crime, cybersecurity, Ponzi schemes, foreign bribes, terrorism, money laundering, corruption, asset forfeiture, national security, and espionage. The makeup of his team gave some indication to the range of issues Mueller was investigating—far beyond obstruction of justice in the firing of James Comey.
Trump’s Twitter feed reflected his obsessions and frustrations. For the next month, Trump frequently defended his travel ban, which continued to take hits in the courts. He underscored the importance of his tax and health-care legislation, which he’d promised on the campaign trail.
The Mueller investigation threatened everything Trump wanted to accomplish. It also cast a shadow over his legitimacy as president, particularly since Clinton had beaten him so soundly in the popular vote. That fact bothered Trump enough that his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity requested massive amounts of voter data from states: names, birth dates, voting histories, and party identifications. He gave state election commissioners sixteen days to comply. Many refused outright, some because state laws prohibited it, and others because the commission was founded on a baseless premise that many people voted illegally.
On July 7, the New York Times turned up the heat on the Russia controversy. Reporters there had learned of the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, where Don Jr. expected help from the Russian government for the campaign. For weeks, Jared Kushner had known this meeting could be a problem. Congressional investigators had asked him for information about any meetings he’d had with Russians, and he’d given his lawyers the e-mail chain setting up this particular one.
The team of lawyers and communication specialists in charge of figuring out how to explain the meeting agreed that the best strategy was to tell the truth about what happened with a conservative website, Circa. This was the plan until the plane ride home from an international financial summit on July 8. Then Trump changed his mind about the strategy. Instead of telling the truth, he dictated a misleading statement for his son to release:
“It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up. I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”
The statement did not include the discussion of the Magnitsky Act. What’s more, adoption was not the primary focus of the meeting. The initial promise of the meeting had been to receive information from the Russian government that would help Trump defeat Clinton.
Meanwhile, Trump continued to act with unusual deference toward Putin. During a dinner at the financial summit, Trump had an hour-long private conversation with the Russian president. Because Trump’s interpreter did not speak Russian, the two leaders depended on Putin’s. No American was part of the discussion, nor were notes taken. It was a departure from normal diplomatic procedures, worrying some experts. Leaders of other nations also thought it strange that Trump singled out Putin for such extended attention, especially in the presence of traditional US allies. Meanwhile, just such a meeting was good strategy for Putin.
Afterward, Trump again cast doubt over the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had engaged in cyberwarfare against the United States in order to help Trump win the presidency.
“I said to [Putin], were you involved in meddling with the election? He said, absolutely not. I was not involved. He was very strong on it.”
Trump was also intrigued by a curious notion: that proof of Russian hacking was actually proof there had been no hacking. “Somebody said later to me … let me tell you, if they were involved, you wouldn’t have found out about it. Okay, which is a very interesting point.”
The private dinner conversation and aftermath renewed the impression that Trump trusted the Russian president more than his own intelligence agencies.
Trump kept fighting the Mueller investigation. In an interview on July 19 with the New York Times, Trump said it would be a “violation” for the special counsel to look into his finances. Even so, Trump tried to convey the notion that his mind was fully focused on the presidency, and that he wasn’t at all worried about what Mueller might find if he reviewed past business deals.
“So I think if he wants to go, my finances are extremely good, my company is an unbelievably successful company,” Trump said. “And actually, when I do my filings, people say, ‘Man.’ People have no idea how successful this is… … But I don’t even think about the company anymore. I think about this. ‘Cause one thing, when you do this, companies seem very trivial. Okay? I really mean that… … But I have no income from Russia. I don’t do business with Russia.”
Trump was secretive about his finances. He’d refused to release his tax returns, the only presidential candidate in forty years to do so. He’d claimed that he couldn’t release them because he was being audited. He promised to release them if he won. Then he said he wouldn’t release them, because no one cared but journalists.
Although his lawyers were trying to figure out how to contain the scope of Mueller’s inquiry on behalf of their client, drawing red lines for Mueller was wishful thinking on Trump’s part. He probably knew it on some level, which is why he also asked his lawyers for more information about his power to pardon his aides, relatives, and even himself.
Trump was still hopeful he could fire Mueller, and his lawyers hunted for potential conflicts of interest the special counsel might have, because those could be a legitimate grounds for dismissal.
Meanwhile, Trump’s behavior and claims had posed challenges for his staff to handle.
Trump press secretary Sean Spicer—who’d had to defend his boss’s meeting with Putin as “pleasantries and small talk”—had become a punchline. Spicer had defended Trump’s claims about the size of crowds at inauguration. He’d claimed Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad was worse than Hitler because Assad had used chemical weapons, when Hitler had used deadly gas on millions. Spicer performed so badly that the movie star Melissa McCarthy lampooned him repeatedly on Saturday Night Live, portraying him as a gum-chewing “Spicy” who liked to chase the press with a motorized lectern.
When Trump hired a new boss for Spicer on July 21, a former hedge fund manager named Anthony Scaramucci, Spicer quit. So did Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, though he expected to take a few weeks and make a dignified exit.
Paul Manafort (Shutterstock)
High turnover of key staff like Spicer and Priebus defined much of Trump’s first months as president. Trump lost six times as many senior West Wing staff as Obama, and nine times as many as George W. Bush had in the same time period.
In the midst of this chaos, Mueller’s Russia investigation barreled ahead. Before dawn on July 26, the FBI raided Paul Manafort’s $2.7 million brick condominium unit in Alexandria, Virginia.
So vital was the secrecy of the raid that agents didn’t even knock on Manafort’s door. They entered bearing a search warrant giving them license to collect tax, banking, and other finance-related records Manafort might have on hand. Agents could have obtained the search warrant only if they’d proved to a judge they had reason to believe a crime had been committed.
The raid slung an ominous shadow over the Trump campaign, which Manafort had worked on and eventually run, for months.
The raid wasn’t yet public knowledge, but that same morning, Trump tweeted something that seemed to come from nowhere:
“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow… … …”
“…. Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming….”
“…. victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you”
It reversed a decision Obama made in 2016 permitting transgender military members to serve. Conservatives had objected to Obama’s policy, and Trump’s sudden announcement on Twitter left his team scrambling to explain its implications, which would affect an estimated 15,500 transgender people on active duty or in the reserves and potentially an additional 149,800 veterans.
Meanwhile, legislation vital to Trump—the partial repeal of Obama’s Affordable Care Act—was up for a vote that night. At around 1:30 A.M. on July 27, it failed in a 49–51 vote. Trump had promised to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. This meant he’d failed.
It was a huge political blow for Trump.
THE SAME DAY, THE NEW YORKER RAN A FOUL-MOUTHED interview with Trump’s new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, who was in a lather about a small dinner party that had been leaked to the media. Such a leak was “a major catastrophe for American citizens,” he said.
Scaramucci also called Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, a “paranoid schizophrenic,” and said that senior adviser Steve Bannon’s desire for media attention was like “trying to suck [his] own cock.”
The astonishing interview revealed the intensity of turmoil inside Trump’s West Wing. Scaramucci made yet more headlines that day when he told CNN, “The fish stinks from the head down. I can tell you two fish that don’t stink, and that’s me and the president.”
The astonishing interview revealed the intensity of turmoil inside Trump’s West Wing.
That night brought more drama.
At 7:00 P.M., a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, arrived at Dulles Airport near Washington, DC. Before Papadopoulos could even get through customs, FBI agents intercepted him.
By 1:45 A.M. on July 28, Papadopoulos was booked into a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia. Authorities charged him with lying to FBI agents during an interview in January about contacts he’d had with Russian advocates during the campaign. Papadopoulos was also charged with obstruction of justice for deleting his Facebook account the day after another FBI interview in February. The account had contained some of the exchanges he’d lied about.
That afternoon, Trump shook up his inner circle, ousting his chief of staff Reince Priebus and introducing his replacement, John Kelly, who had been serving as the secretary of homeland security. Trump revealed the change on Twitter.
Behind the scenes, danger loomed for Trump.
Behind the scenes, danger loomed for Trump. With the raid on Manafort’s home on July 26 and the arrest of Papadopoulos on July 27, Mueller’s team was moving swiftly. Many special counsel investigations took more than a year before charges were filed; these came in just a few months.
And Papadopoulos, detained by authorities, had a significant decision to make: cooperate with Mueller’s investigation, or resist on behalf of the president. Either choice would change the course of history.