The 2016 presidential election was two years out, but the posturing and preparation were well underway. The Republican Party settled on Cleveland as the location for its national convention, and around the time of Ginsberg and McGahn’s arrival, Jones Day agreed to be a leading sponsor, pledging $1.5 million to bankroll the event.1 The firm’s top partner in Cleveland would cochair the convention’s host committee.
The next step for Jones Day was to figure out which presidential candidates to work with. There was no shortage of choices—about twenty prominent Republicans were toying with running. In the early stages of the race, the firm didn’t need to commit to just one candidate. Ginsberg and McGahn were well-known throughout the Republican establishment, and quite a few wannabe presidents came to them seeking counsel. Soon, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Chris Christie would become clients.
These were hardly the only customers the new Jones Day partners were working for. McGahn’s roster read like a who’s who of GOP power players. He was defending the National Rifle Association, which had been accused of campaign finance violations.2 He represented a group affiliated with the Koch brothers.3 He worked for the RNC.
There was at least one other key client: Citizens United.4 The group, famous for its successful Supreme Court challenge of campaign spending restrictions, was run by Dave Bossie, an influential right-wing activist. Within hours of McGahn’s departure from the FEC, Bossie had called him and become his first client upon his return to Patton Boggs.5 (“Everyone in Washington knows that if you have a problem, Don McGahn is the person to call,” Bossie would say.)6 One day in late 2014, Bossie and McGahn were on the phone, batting around ideas about which presidential campaigns the Jones Day lawyers should work for. “What about Trump?” Bossie asked.
“What about Trump?” McGahn replied, skeptical.
“No, he’s really thinking about running.”
“He says this every four years. Isn’t he a Democrat from New York?”
“He’s gotten older, he’s conservative,” Bossie answered. “I think you guys would hit it off.” McGahn trusted Bossie, and the next time he was in New York, McGahn met Donald Trump at his Fifth Avenue skyscraper.7 At the end of their talk, Trump signed a book for McGahn’s son: “You have a wonderful father,” he wrote. McGahn thought to himself, This guy’s got a pretty good instinct for how to handle people.8
Long before that first visit, Trump had worked with the McGahn family. In the 1980s, McGahn’s uncle, Paddy McGahn, had been Trump’s lawyer as he sought to become an Atlantic City casino impresario. Paddy—a power broker in New Jersey’s Democratic Party9—handled jobs large and small, at one point representing Trump in a fight with a guy hawking hot dogs outside his casino. When Trump bought property from two Mafia-linked brothers, he put it in the name of Paddy’s secretary. The Taj Mahal’s cocktail lounge, Paddy’s Saloon, was named for him. “He gets things done in this town,” Trump once remarked. The relationship ultimately disintegrated in typical Trump fashion: He stopped paying Paddy’s legal bills and then sued his former lawyer.10
At one of his initial meetings with Don McGahn, Trump brought up the work Paddy had done for him decades earlier. He heaped praise on the man.11 To the extent that McGahn harbored any bitterness on behalf of his long-dead uncle, he was able to subordinate those feelings to the allure of Candidate Trump, who was attacking immigrants and free trade and the establishment. Much of what Trump was saying resonated with McGahn,12 who was frustrated that Republicans had done so little to stem the growth of the loathsome administrative state. “He and I shared the same view about what was going to matter in 2016,” McGahn told me, “and it wasn’t what the D.C. consultants thought was going to matter.”
In February 2015, McGahn returned to Trump Tower. He took a golden elevator up to the twenty-sixth floor and was led into Trump’s office. Trump was sitting behind his cluttered desk. After what seemed like an hour of small talk, Trump got to the point. What do you charge? he asked. “My hourly rate is $800,” McGahn replied.
“No shit,” Trump exclaimed. “Good for you.”13
Later that month, Trump began taking steps to show that his easy-to-dismiss candidacy was for real. To underscore his seriousness, he mentioned that he had hired McGahn.14 “I’m not doing this for enjoyment,” Trump said. “I’m doing this because the country is in serious trouble.” (In perhaps a more telling sign of his seriousness, Trump also noted that he was holding off on another season of Celebrity Apprentice, his NBC reality show.)
Years later, McGahn would insist that he’d guessed early on that Trump might win. The reality, several of McGahn’s colleagues told me, was that he and Ginsberg didn’t think much of representing the bare-bones Trump campaign. They reckoned he was flirting with a White House bid for publicity’s sake and that he’d quickly move on. Most likely, he’d create a super-PAC to throw his money around like any sensible rich guy. By signing on with Trump now, the lawyers would position Jones Day to eventually represent his super-PAC, an easy assignment that paid perfectly good money.
One day in the spring of 2015, McGahn took a Jones Day associate over to Trump Tower. The associate was eager to soak up campaign experience, and McGahn figured the fledgling Trump campaign would be an interesting experience for the young lawyer. The associate would get a firsthand glimpse of how some no-frills campaigns functioned. Also, unlike those with professionally run outfits, the Trump folks wouldn’t mind a random lawyer showing up. “I can’t take you to Rick Perry’s campaign, because they’re serious,” McGahn told his colleague.
The meeting was with Cory Lewandowski, who was the campaign’s manager, and Alan Garten, a longtime Trump Organization executive. After sandwiches at the Trump Grill in the building’s lobby, the men moved upstairs to the nerve center of the Trump Organization. They sat in Lewandowski’s little office, down the hall from Trump’s large one. The meeting was completely unstructured. Lewandowski showed off the campaign’s new letterhead, and he asked for the lawyers’ input on their talking points on issues like abortion (Trump had previously been pro-choice). Toward the end of the meeting, Lewandowski asked about how to account for the campaign’s use of Trump’s private jet. The campaign would have to reimburse Trump for flights; was it okay if they just guessed how much each trip cost? McGahn patiently informed them that, no, they could not just guess, there were rules about this, and they needed to be followed.
“These guys are morons,” McGahn told the associate afterward.*
On April 23, 2015, a check for $6,451.38 arrived at Jones Day. It was the first payment from the Trump campaign.15
McGahn and his colleagues hadn’t done much work for Trump yet, but it was time for him to start paying. Trump’s reputation for shortchanging his lawyers (and banks and contractors and customers) was well-known. It wasn’t just Uncle Paddy. Trump had tried to wriggle out of what he owed one attorney after another, ranging from solo practitioners to partners at big firms. Back in the 1990s, a lawyer at a white-shoe firm had done some work for Trump. The bill came to about $2 million, and Trump refused to pay. After a while, the lawyer lost patience, and he showed up, unannounced, at Trump Tower. Someone sent him up to Trump’s office. Trump was initially pleased to see him—he didn’t betray any sense of sheepishness—but the lawyer was steaming. “I’m incredibly disappointed,” he scolded Trump. “There’s no reason you haven’t paid us.”
Trump made some apologetic noises. Then he said: “I’m not going to pay your bill. I’m going to give you something more valuable.” What on earth is he talking about? the lawyer wondered. “I have a stallion,” Trump continued. “It’s worth $5 million.” Trump rummaged around in a filing cabinet and pulled out what he said was a deed to a horse. He handed it to the lawyer.
“This isn’t the 1800s,” the lawyer stammered once he regained the capacity for speech. “You can’t pay me with a horse.” After the lawyer threatened to sue, Trump eventually coughed up at least a portion of what he owed.
Jones Day, too, wanted to be paid with money. So a decision was made that Trump would pay a regular retainer. In addition, there would be a strict schedule for disbursing any other fees or reimbursements.* Even after that timetable was established, Jones Day lawyers—including some working for the Trump campaign—doubted it would hold. “We figured he wouldn’t pay, and that would be the end of it,” one told me. But against all odds, Trump paid and paid again. Within a few months, he’d forked over tens of thousands of dollars—including more than $29,000 on June 16.16
That same day, McGahn was back at Trump Tower. He stood on the mezzanine level of the lobby as Donald and Melania Trump descended on an escalator to a makeshift, flag-studded stage, where Trump formally launched his candidacy.17 McGahn watched the small crowd go nuts. Then he listened as his client laced into immigrants and the Beltway establishment. Outside, storm clouds gathered, and a light rain began to fall.
In the years to come, as the firm came under fire for its Trump work, Jones Day would proudly declare that it stuck with clients, no matter how unpopular they might be. This was how good lawyers operated. It was the ethical—the American—thing to do.
That argument was not nearly as bulletproof as Jones Day liked to make it sound. The principle made sense in a criminal context where a defendant couldn’t afford or wouldn’t be able to find alternate legal services. But those were rarely the circumstances in which the loyalty obligation was invoked—more often these were civil, not criminal, situations, and the rich clients had many other options at their disposal.
But even if the principle were universal and inviolable, the logic didn’t apply to a brand-new client. That was the point of the “Independence Principle” that Frank Ginn—Jones Day’s first managing partner—had articulated a century earlier when he turned down a lucrative but problematic assignment working on a corporate transaction. It was the reason Jones Day still liked to boast about its refusal to take on Nixon as a client, even though Chappie Rose had already been advising him informally. Nothing had obligated Jones Day to accept Donald Trump’s money. This was not an instance of a law firm feeling an ethical or moral duty to defend a client under assault by the government or other powerful interests. This was a political and financial choice. And by making the decision to accept Trump as a client, and then to stand by him and to help him, Jones Day would bear some responsibility for what he wrought.
As with the choice to represent RJR thirty years earlier, not a whole lot of thought went into this fateful decision. The Trump campaign was run through Jones Day’s standard client-onboarding process, which was primarily focused on business considerations. Were there conflicts of interest between the Trump campaign and other clients? None were apparent. “It looked like it was a fairly anodyne political engagement,” one partner recalled.
There had been some internal grumbling about the firm’s hiring of Ginsberg and McGahn—here was final confirmation, as if any more were needed, that Jones Day was a Republican law firm—and now there was more grumbling about working for Trump. Jones Day prided itself on its devotion to the rule of law. How could a firm like that get in bed with a client like Trump? “It was culturally weird,” another partner told me.
But many Jones Day lawyers weren’t yet aware that the firm was representing Trump, and the complaining was mild, even among liberals. “To be a partner, you need to accept that you’re not going to love every client,” one said. In any case, Brogan was supportive, and that was all that mattered.
As it became clear that Trump was a viable candidate—polls showed him at the front of the Republican pack—it also became clear that Jones Day’s workload would grow. In the fall of 2015, McGahn beat back an effort to keep Trump off New Hampshire’s primary ballot.18 Similar attempts had to be defeated in other states. Jones Day had to set up Trump campaign committees that adhered to FEC rules. The firm would be handling the selection and wrangling of delegates to the 2016 convention.19 And it had to fend off lawsuits. In one case, someone at the campaign had grabbed a photo of a bald eagle from a search engine and then plastered it on Trump merchandise. When the two wildlife photographers who’d snapped the photo sued for copyright infringement, Jones Day arranged for a swift settlement.
By the time the first Republican primaries rolled around in early 2016, the Trump campaign had paid Jones Day nearly $600,000.20 Millions more would soon pour in.