THIRTY-THREE
Barr called Mike Balsamo, the Associated Press Justice reporter, over for lunch on December 1. Trump’s rhetoric was veering into overdrive. The president was listening to lawyers who were feeding him conspiracies.
“To date,” Barr told him, “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election.” Balsamo filed the story soon after, with Barr’s comments going global.
Later that day, when he was at the White House for a 3 p.m. meeting on the administration’s agenda for the next month, Barr got a message that the president wanted to see him in his private dining room. Barr went and found the president sitting at his standard seat at the head of the table.
Cipollone and his deputy, Pat Philbin, and Meadows were sitting three abreast on one side of the table. Eric Herschmann, another White House lawyer, stood at the side, as did Will Levi, Barr’s chief of staff.
Barr did not sit down. He put his hands on the back of the chair facing the three from the White House. The large TV on the wall, off to Barr’s right, was tuned into some hearing or discussion of election fraud on OAN, the far-right, pro-Trump network One America News.
“Did you say this?” the president asked, holding a report of Barr’s remarks on finding no election fraud.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s true. We haven’t seen it, Mr. President.”
“You didn’t have to say that. You could have just said no comment.”
“During the weekend you were there saying that the Justice Department was ‘missing in action’ and that you know the election was stolen. And I think the reporter asked me what we’d found, and I told him what we found, which is, so far, nothing.”
Trump said to Barr, “You must have said that because you hate Trump, you must really hate Trump.”
“No, Mr. President, I don’t hate you. I think you know that at some significant personal sacrifice to myself, I came in to help this administration and I’ve tried to serve it honorably. Let me tell you why you are where you are right now. There are only five or six weeks after an election to resolve any of these issues because the Electoral College is a hard-and-fast date.
“What you needed was a team of crackerjack lawyers ready to go who could quickly formulate a strategy that would actually be able to say, ‘We’re going for these votes here, these votes here, and here’s our argument here,’ and execute. Instead, you have wheeled out a clown car.
“Every self-respecting lawyer in the country has run for the hills. Your team is a bunch of clowns.
“They are unconscionable in the firmness and detail they present as if it is unquestionable fact. It is not. You have wasted four weeks on the one theory that is demonstrably crazy, which is these machines.”
“Well, what do you mean?”
“Mr. President, these machines are like adding machines. They’re tabulators. If you take a stack of 20-dollar bills and you run them through a machine that counts them, it comes up and then it puts a band around every thousand dollars.
“Now, guess what? The law requires that the actual ballots be saved, just like the banded money would be saved. So, if you say the machine hasn’t counted right, you just go to the money and see if that’s a thousand dollars. And if it’s a thousand dollars and the machine says it’s a thousand dollars, I don’t want to hear all this stuff about, you know, how this functionality was this and this.
“Show me where there’s been a miscount. And so far, every place has shown no discrepancy. This is crazy.”
“How about the votes that came in in Detroit?” Trump asked. “You know, I’m ahead by so many thousand. And then all these votes come out at four o’clock in the morning or whenever it was.” His lead was wiped out.
“Mr. President, did you go and check that against what happened last time in 2016? You actually ran stronger this year than you did in Detroit last time. The margins were the same, except you ran better and Biden ran a little worse in Detroit.”
“Well, there were boxes,” Trump said. “People saw the boxes,” flooding in hours after the polls closed.
“Mr. President, there are 503 precincts in Detroit. In Michigan, it is the only county where the votes are not counted in the precincts. Every other county, they’re counted in the precincts. In Detroit, however, they go to a central counting station. And so, all night these boxes are being moved in. And so, the fact that boxes are going into the counting station in the early morning hours is not suspicious. That’s what they do. The votes always come in at that time and the ratio of votes is the same as it was last time. There’s no indication of a sudden surge of extra Biden votes.”
What about Fulton County, Georgia?
“We’re looking into that. But so far, the word is, you know, that those were legitimate ballots. Mr. President, we’re looking into this stuff, but these things aren’t panning out.”
Trump shifted to other deficiencies. “When is Durham going to come to a conclusion?” Trump could not let go of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the FBI’s conduct during the Russian probe.
“I don’t know, Mr. President. You know, this is not the kind of thing that you can just say, deliver the product.” Barr snapped his fingers. “It has its own pace depending on what the evidence is. So, I can’t say. But I would imagine it would be in the first part of the Biden administration, hopefully maybe in the first six months.”
Trump shouted, “First part of the Biden administration!”
Oh, shit, Barr thought. Trump was steaming. Barr had never seen Trump in such a fury. If a human being can have flames come out of his ears, this was it. Barr imagined the flames. He had never seen Trump madder. But Trump was obviously trying to control himself. Tamping himself down and then flaming.
At another point, Trump said, “Bill, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have not been calling.” Trump said it as if Barr was really missing out not getting regular calls. Thank God, Barr thought. He could not help but think of the character in the 1964 dark comedy Dr. Strangelove who ruminates about withholding his “essence” from women.
“Comey! You didn’t indict Comey when you could have,” Trump shouted. “You declined.”
“I told you a hundred times, Mr. President, there was no case there.”
But the Justice Department’s inspector general, Trump said, sent a referral about Comey giving two memos to his New York lawyer that contained classified information. The memos were then given to the media.
Comey had gone through the memos and taken out the classified material, Barr reminded the president. There was a dispute. A few sentences that were arguably confidential.
“That’s classified information,” the president said.
“I’m sorry, Mr. President, I’m not going to prosecute. We’re not going to prosecute that case.”
“The inspector general recommended he be prosecuted, and you overruled it,” Trump said.
“No,” Barr replied, “that’s not what happens. The IG doesn’t recommend prosecution.” He sends his investigative findings over to the criminal division to see what they want to do, and as attorney general, Barr had the final say.
“Is there anything that the criminal people want to do?” Trump asked.
No, Barr said. He then said he had to leave. He had a dinner with Pompeo.
“I think we can see a way through this,” Meadows said in a call with Barr after the December 1 blowup with Trump.
“Oh, yeah?” Barr replied skeptically.
“You know, he doesn’t like people quitting on him,” Meadows said. “He’ll do a preemptive strike. He’s worried, people are worried you might just pull out unexpectedly between now and January 20th. So, will you stay? Will you commit to stay?”
Barr faced a choice: Commit or likely be fired. He told Meadows, “Number one, I wouldn’t blindside anybody. I would not leave without telling you in advance. And number two, I’ll stay as long as I’m needed.”
Barr, ever the lawyer, felt he gave himself a little wiggle room because he didn’t say exactly who would judge the need.
“Okay, okay,” Meadows said seeming to accept the terms. There would be no surprise resignation.
Barr immediately regretted saying he would stay. Nothing changed. Trump was not listening to him, and the attorney general was now a figurehead at best.
Barr had complicated feelings about his role in the Trump presidency. On the one hand, he strongly supported conservative principles—a strong executive, lower taxes, less regulation, and an aversion to the progressives. He also believed Trump’s critics had transformed and hardened Trump. The Democrats, the media and the Mueller investigation had “pulled a Clarence Thomas on Trump,” referring to the belief among many conservatives like Barr that the searing 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings had pushed Thomas to the hard right.
In this view, shared by Thomas’s close friends and family, Thomas was more moderate before Anita Hill lodged her sexual harassment charges, forever hardening Thomas.
“When the left was done with Thomas, he moved,” Barr said. He believed Trump would also have been more pragmatic except for the relentless attacks. The same might be said of Barr, who had left his first tour as attorney general with a strong reputation but had come under blistering attacks for protecting Trump and dug in as a staunch ally for the president.
Barr continued to be fiercely criticized for protecting Trump. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Barr actively supported and amplified Trump’s push against mail-in ballots. Republicans did not like mail-ins and neither did Barr. And he said so publicly, claiming that the fraud potential was “obvious” and “common sense,” but neither he nor anyone else provided any proof.
When Chairman Milley heard Barr might resign, he quickly called.
“Man, you can’t leave,” Milley told him. “You know you can’t leave. We need you.”
“You know what?” Trump asked his aides on Air Force One on the ride back to Washington on December 5 from a campaign rally in Valdosta, Georgia. “That was perfect. I don’t think we need to go back.”
Trump was bored by the two runoff Senate elections that would be held in Georgia on January 5. He told aides that Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were business Republicans, not tough enough. He would campaign for them, but not go overboard. He had other things to do.
His legal team was falling apart. He was losing cases. And on December 6, Giuliani was hospitalized at Georgetown University Hospital with the coronavirus.
The next day, Trump stewed alone in the Oval Office as a White House holiday party was about to begin down the hall. Few attendees wore masks as they mingled by a huge Fraser fir Christmas tree in the Blue Room, even though cases were spiking, including at the White House.
“Amazing time,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on an Instagram post, posing with his girlfriend, former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle. Both were unmasked.
Conservative commentator Steve Cortes, a Chicago investor who had become a constant presence in Trump’s election fight effort, was invited to visit the president. Cortes’s Twitter profile described himself as a “Voice of the Deplorables. Hispanic. Born for a storm.” The “deplorables” was a phrase Hillary Clinton used when describing some Trump supporters in 2016.
No one else was around. Cortes later told others he was struck by the emptiness of the West Wing as he walked up to the Oval Office to find Trump alone.
When Cortes walked in, Trump was screaming at Rudy Giuliani on a video call. He was heated, yelling again about the election being stolen and his campaign’s legal challenges.
“Ah. Cortes is here. I’ve got to go.” He shut off the video.
“You can still resurrect it,” Cortes said, reassuringly. He had come to keep Trump from backing off. “But it’s going to take a lot of allies. It’s going to take a lot of fighting and money raising.”
Trump agreed. This seemed to be what he wanted to hear. Someone who saw hope.
Cortes said Trump needed to hit the road.
“You’ve been dark since the election,” Cortes said.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yes, you have.”
Trump grew loud. He was furious.
“I’ve been tweeting a lot!”
“Tweeting doesn’t count. Tweeting from the residence is not being the public president of the United States.”
Cortes kept at it. He wanted to get under Trump’s skin. The deplorables were yearning for Trump to go wild on the establishment.
“Go do CNN, do Brian Williams” on MSNBC, Cortes said. “The facts are on our side. Let’s have Lester Holt in here. Stand up and make your case.”
Trump dismissed the idea. They were fake news, he said. Never. He turned to Fox News and started yelling again. They had called Arizona for Biden. They were in on the rigging as much as anyone. They were terrible, he said.
“We have to fight,” Cortes said. “We need to pressure the legislatures publicly. We need to put them on the hot seat.”
Trump talked about Giuliani, the court cases.
“No judge in the country wants to rule on this stuff, least of all the Supreme Court,” Cortes said. “It’s the court of public opinion that matters.”