While Trump, his family, and many of his supporters were watching the Inauguration Day parade from the reviewing stand along Pennsylvania Avenue, I stood ever so briefly in the Oval Office, alone.
I had credentials that allowed me access just about anywhere that day. We had planned some events in the White House for the family, and for some donors, and I was checking to make sure that everything would be ready. I had walked in through the main entrance on the north side, through the entrance hall, and then over to the West Wing. I passed by the White House press briefing room (where Franklin Roosevelt’s indoor pool used to be located before they filled it in), as the White House staff scrambled to change out the furniture, the beds, and the carpets, and hang the gold-colored drapes that the Trumps had specifically chosen.
The Obamas officially moved out at noon. The Trumps were scheduled to arrive around four. The entire changeover of the White House happened in that tiny window of time. It was astonishing to watch the exchange unfold in a buzz of activity all around me, and then to stand in that office, by myself, realizing the magnitude of what had happened and what was going to happen in a matter of hours.
For me, it was a pretty solemn and impactful moment.
Lots of people take tours of the White House. But to be able to experience the Oval Office in this in-between state, after Obama had vacated but before any of Trump’s personal effects arrived—to take it in for what the office stood for, instead of who held the office for a moment in time—was humbling.
America had a new president, and I wondered if Trump was ready for what he was about to face in Washington.
He had personally wanted to turn the inaugural parade into a full military spectacle, but the plan was nixed, and there was nothing he could do to change it. Our military liaisons loved the idea that the president-elect wanted to honor them on Inauguration Day. They broke into huge smiles when I first presented the idea to them. But Trump’s vision of rolling tanks through the streets of Washington to show American strength was thwarted by the Department of the Interior, who insisted the equipment would tear up and destroy the pavement of the city’s streets (including Pennsylvania Avenue). Then his plan for a military flyover, with a single F-16 fighter scheduled to sail over the Mall at precisely the moment he was sworn in, was thwarted too. We’d spent weeks negotiating with the air force and the FAA until they finally agreed to briefly lift the permanent no-fly zone over the Capitol and the White House, for just a few seconds, just for him. But on Inauguration Day, the weather wouldn’t allow it. The visibility that day was just too poor for jets to fly safely.
The setbacks that day were just the beginning of the frustrations Trump would face in Washington over the next several years.
We spent countless hours discussing schedules and routes based on the idea that Trump was going to sign his very first executive order while he was in the presidential limo (known as “The Beast”) on the way from the parade route to the White House. No president had ever done such a thing. It was aggressive. It was different. It would show the world he was wasting no time following through on his campaign promises.
His very first act, in addition to signing an executive order declaring January 20 a National Day of Patriotic Devotion, would be to order a systematic dismantling of President Obama’s crowning achievement, the Affordable Care Act. After attacking it at every rally and in nearly every interview for the last year and a half, and on Twitter long before that, he was finally going to kill Obamacare.
It was, without a doubt, an opening salvo. A shot which would aggravate Democrats and get pushback from more than a few Republicans who believed in many provisions of the ACA too. Whether he fully understood the implications or not, he was starting a Washington war.
After all the work and coordination between teams, the limo idea was scrapped. It was ultimately decided it would be more powerful to sign that executive order in front of cameras, in the room in which I had just stood. And he did.
The very next day, he signed an executive order to push through the controversial Keystone Pipeline, fulfilling another campaign promise but setting up new fights far from Washington in an already tense situation between the energy industry and Native Americans. In Trump’s view, it was part of his promise to achieve energy independence for our country. To others, it was akin to firing shots at our own people.
On the twenty-fifth he signed two more executive orders: one to begin construction on the wall, which would trigger the president of Mexico to cancel a planned visit in February, taking his fight to the international community already; and another cutting federal funding to so-called “sanctuary cities,” which harbored undocumented immigrants from federal immigration laws. On the same day, he also called for an investigation into voter fraud, to get to the bottom of why Hillary Clinton won more popular votes than he did—a fact that bothered him as much as the criticism and speculative rumors that were being fired at him over charges of collusion with Russia.
And on the twenty-seventh, he signed an executive order on immigration that was drafted largely at the direction of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, restricting refugee admissions and immigrant and nonimmigrant travel from seven specific countries, primarily in the Middle East.
On paper, it looked as if Trump was accomplishing everything he wanted to in his first week in office.
In reality? He was on government turf now. And the opening days, weeks, and months of Trump’s White House were a conflagration of chaos.
His first order, on the ACA, was immediately upended and mired by pushback from Congress, from the courts, and to an extent in the court of public opinion. A week after his Keystone Pipeline act, his staff let him know that it hadn’t been implemented. The order had to be approved by FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, they explained, which by law has to sign off on new policy initiatives.
“So get FERC to approve it!” Trump shouted.
His staff explained that they couldn’t. FERC needed to reach a quorum first, and that quorum required Trump to fill two board positions, which would then need to get confirmed by the Senate.
Tom Barrack was present for that meeting and said he could see Trump boiling. He expected to see the pipe in the ground by now, and it hadn’t gotten out of the starting gate. Trump couldn’t believe that he had to appoint commissioners to confirm something he already signed.
Tom and I were in and out of the White House regularly through March, wrapping up tail-end details on the Inaugural Committee’s work and other projects that Tom was involved in. So we both witnessed the frustration that came pouring out of the new administration’s offices into the narrow hallways.
Trump ran into wall after wall, on everything he tried to do—including the wall. All of his stances on immigration were quickly dismissed by various courts and government agencies as unenforceable, in addition to renewing and hardening the media’s racist and xenophobic accusations against Trump. It didn’t take long before the immigration order he signed, which Bannon and Miller structured for him, was found to be largely illegal on its face because they never notified key agencies about the changes they wanted in the policy. They tried to change U.S. immigration law without including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice in the initial policy draft.
The signing of that executive order caused major rifts within the administration as well, because Bannon used the Shabbat strategy again. He got Trump to sign it on a Friday evening when Jared and Ivanka were honoring their religious practices and unreachable; and he used similar tactics again with Trump’s declaration to withdraw from the Paris Climate accord down the road.
Jared and Ivanka were not happy, and the skullduggery on the inside was just the beginning. Bannon would eventually be cast aside, and Trump would realize that in almost any White House, the lust for power within the administration sometimes caused staffers and cabinet members to go at each other—sometimes hurting the president’s agenda more than the opposing party ever could.
Trump thought he was doing what he does best: meeting all of the fight, scrutiny, and rejection of Washington head on. That’s what he does. But maybe for the first time in his adult life, his old strategies weren’t working. He found himself unable to accomplish some of his goals.
He had come to Washington with the notion, supported by millions of voters, that the entire government was going to be run through the White House. His White House. But as soon as he and his staff arrived, they were confronted with barriers they didn’t even know existed.
Trump could have found and hired an expert on U.S. government bureaucracy to guide him, the way Paul had guided the campaign through the convention, an expert or two who knew the technical ins and outs of how the bureaucracy works, someone who could lead them around all of the bureaucratic obstacles to the victory they sought.
Instead, they hired people like Wilbur Ross, Linda McMahon, Steve Mnuchin, and Rex Tillerson. They’re all very smart, accomplished people, but none of them really understood the process of how government works. They all faced a massive learning curve, just like Trump, but even more so, because they were trying to enact the directives that Trump had given them, which propelled them into an abyss of bureaucracy.
Trump’s campaign promises were important to him. He felt he had made a promise to do something for the American people, and especially for his supporters. Reflecting back, Trump had said on numerous occasions that politicians “never keep their word.”
The bureaucracy in Washington was suddenly making him look like one of those politicians.
What the bureaucracy didn’t understand about Trump is that he would not roll over or give up the way so many presidents had done in the past, even on some of their biggest campaign promises. Trump would fight, find loopholes, push boundaries, and break every protocol and accepted behavior on earth before he would be defeated. It’s what he’s done in business and in his public life full of tabloid scrutiny, and it is what he would do in Washington: he would fight to the end to do things his way, no matter what the fallout and consequences might be.
His fight began before he stepped into office, and it will not stop until he leaves Washington behind—whether of his own accord or through the will of the people.
During all of my back-and-forth trips to the White House during Trump’s first three months, I was given a new task that took me by surprise.
The day after he was sworn in, Trump announced the start of his reelection campaign. People thought he was crazy. Most presidents don’t even think of doing that until two years into their term of office. Why do it so soon?
Here’s why: it allowed him and Pence to start fundraising right away. To get a jump on the competition. And it was a bold and successful decision. Fast forward two years, and he had already raised nearly $500 million before a single Democrat threw a hat in the ring for the 2020 election.
Trump wasn’t allowed to fundraise directly for his reelection while he was president. No president is. It is a conflict for a government official (even the president) to cross the line into campaign politics, which is why super PACs were invented. (A super PAC is an independent political action committee that may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, and individuals but is not permitted to contribute to or coordinate directly with parties or candidates.) There are strict lines between campaigning and governance. Those lines are never to be crossed, and they can’t be, because the media is always watching.
Brad Parscale approached me just after the inauguration and asked me to help run a new super PAC for Trump. Along with Nick Ayers, one of Mike Pence’s closest staffers, we established and co-chaired America First Policies.
It was a role with implications and responsibilities that would impact Trump’s (and Pence’s) future as a candidate.
Nick and I hired a small staff initially and worked out of the Trump Hotel until we could find office space of our own. We started planning a few dinners and fundraisers at the VP’s residence at the Naval Observatory.
Meanwhile, the Russia collusion story continued to gain momentum in the media; and the Democrats’ plan to ensnare Paul Manafort as one of several architects that allegedly used Russia to help Trump win had begun to take effect.
I was no longer working for Manafort. I hadn’t been on his payroll since mid-2016. After leaving the Trump campaign, Paul shifted his work away from Ukraine and began working in several new countries. And in addition to working with the super PAC, I took a role with Tom Barrack at his company, Colony Capital, Inc.
I was still working behind the scenes, not in any official public role.
But in mid-March, a Buzzfeed story made note of the fact that I was making frequent visits to the White House. It was all aboveboard, for work I was doing with Tom related to the Inaugural Committee. But the Buzzfeed story implied otherwise.
On March 22, an AP story linked Paul Manafort to Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire who allegedly had extensive ties to Putin. Paul had worked with Deripaska in the mid-2000s, but in no way was the work he did related to anything involving Putin or the Russian government. In fact, it was in direct opposition to Putin’s goals in the region.
It didn’t matter. There was little room for nuance in this narrative. And given most Americans’ slim understanding of foreign relations, let alone the complicated inner workings of oligarchs, business entities, and government agencies in Ukraine, the simple connect-the-dots story linking Putin and Deripaska to Trump’s former campaign manager raised eyebrows all over Washington.
That same day, the Washington Post put the two and two of those stories together, under the headline: “Manafort Is Gone, but His Business Associate Remains a Key Part of Trump’s Operation.”
I gave a brief interview to the reporter on that story and tried to correct the AP’s interpretation, which wrongly implied that working for Deripaska meant we were doing Putin’s bidding. I told the paper that our work was focused on “supporting the private equity fund started by [Deripaska’s] firm, and democracy and party building in Ukraine.”
I was glad they used my quote. It was the absolute truth.
The truth did not matter.
Earlier that week, FBI Director James Comey announced that his office was investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. In the media’s eyes, Paul and I were easy suspects because of our work in Ukraine. So was General Mike Flynn, because of his consulting work in Russia and lunch with Putin. So was George Papadopoulos, a minor figure in the campaign whom I had never met, because of his efforts and meetings with those attempting to arrange a meeting between Putin and Trump. So was Jared, who had loans through Deutsche Bank, which had Russian investors.
To those who bought into the theory that Russia and Trump had colluded to interfere in the election, the various unconnected dots seemed far too coincidental to ignore.
The fact is, if the same storyline had been applied to the Democrats and the Clinton campaign, all kinds of similar dots could have been found there as well: Bill Clinton giving a speech in Moscow in 2010 for $500,000; nine separate donors from Uranium One (a Russian/Canadian conglomerate) contributing almost $150 million to the Clinton Foundation; and John Podesta holding shares in Russian companies. Hillary Clinton had the most Russian connections of anyone through her work with the Clinton Foundation, and the much-reported-on (and some might say suspicious) large donations from Russian oligarchs that flowed into the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state.
If you applied this same logic to investigating certain Independent candidates, the media would have found the same. There were photographs of Green Party candidate Jill Stein sitting at the very same table as Vladimir Putin and Michael Flynn in 2015. Interactions with Russians, and Russian media, are not a crime. People like Flynn were highly sought-after public speakers on the international stage, just like Bill Clinton.
If the media or the FBI wanted to investigate Russia collusion on all fronts, they easily could have investigated the day the Clinton Foundation received a $2 million donation from Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
In September 2013, Hillary Clinton gave a keynote speech at the Yalta Economic Summit; that day she had planned on speaking out about the persecution of former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, as detailed in the advance copies of Clinton’s speech; the very same day she decided to drop at Pinchuk’s request that potentially damaging portion of her speech at the last minute.
Pinchuk was the biggest donor to the Clinton Foundation that year, donating $23 million in total.
Later, in 2018, I gave details of these events to the Special Counsel, and to my knowledge no investigation was ever carried out and it was omitted from their final report.
At the time, any narrative of who else may have helped Putin’s interests or played any role in Russia’s interference in our elections never played out. The media wasn’t interested. Neither was the American public. Unfortunately, as accusations flew against Trump, he brushed them off. In some cases, he encouraged the story and toyed with the media throughout his campaign, and even after he became president because it fired up his base and he found it humorous how it set the media off.
Still, word got back to me that Trump and Jared were both concerned about the stories, and how my visiting the White House might be perceived in light of the current media tales.
When the story refused to die a week later, Nick Ayers raised the concern about me continuing on at the super PAC. So did Reince Priebus. And in a matter of days, I felt I had no choice but to remove myself from my co-chair role and involvement with the super PAC. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt Trump, or Pence, by my continued association with the White House or the reelection fundraising efforts that were just getting underway.
I was still employed by Tom Barrack, and I had his full support. He knew all of the various players involved. He had known Stone, and Paul, and Trump himself for many years, and he knew the Russia collusion story was an empty one.
The Russia collusion narrative only accelerated in the media through April, but I was never contacted by the FBI about any investigation. So I wasn’t worried about it. If Comey and his investigators came calling, I would happily tell them what I knew: that neither I nor anyone I worked with on the campaign, nor Trump himself, had any contact with Russians who could have influenced the election. There was no collusion. It was a made-up storyline. It was malicious, and it was absurd.
As the narrative continued to spin, I received a letter in May 2017 from the House Intelligence Committee, informing me that they were undertaking an investigation of their own. The House was still under Republican control then. This was supposed to be an investigation on Russia’s interference in the election, which had nothing to do with “collusion,” and it was extremely confusing to me. The letter was a general letter sent out to dozens of people, plus an attachment covering the things the committee wanted to talk to me about—and the attachment was two pages about Paul’s work in Ukraine between 2010 and 2014. All of that work preceded the Trump campaign by more than two years. There were only two bullet points tacked on to the end, asking if I was aware of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
I called Paul, and he had received the same letter with essentially the same attachment. He said it was nothing to worry about. I was low on the list, he said. They wanted to talk to Steve Bannon, Don Jr., and himself more than they did anyone who worked under them. But he did think I should hire a lawyer, just in case.
Tom Barrack later received the same letter and generously stepped up and offered to support me and help pay my legal bills, since I wasn’t independently wealthy and any lawyer capable of handling a government investigation would charge me exorbitantly. Tom knew Trump better than any of us and had no concerns about Trump or our campaign having worked with the Russians to sway the election. He saw this as a full-throttle partisan attack, but he knew the implications of it as well. He naturally wanted to protect us and himself, since he was so closely tied with a lot of us who had worked on the campaign, and he had just served as the Inaugural Committee chairman himself.
With everything else that was going on in the world, and in Washington, I found it hard to believe that this Russia story kept building and circulating. But it did.
Jeff Sessions, who had been with the Trump campaign since nearly the beginning and whom Trump had appointed attorney general, recused himself early on from anything having to do with the investigation of Trump and Russia. Personally, it was a disappointing decision. Sessions had not informed Trump of his intentions, which would have been the honorable and professional approach. Instead, he made the decision, announced it publicly, and then informed Trump of what he had done. With Trump, loyalty is paramount, which Sessions knew well. Trump went ballistic. He publicly derided Sessions for his decision and is still denouncing him to this day. (In July 2020, it cost Sessions a return to his U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. His primary loss was a direct result of Trump campaigning against him.)
Whether Sessions truly understood what he had done or not, his recusal allowed for many of those individuals inside the DOJ and FBI who were upset with Trump’s election to activate the legal system against the president. Sessions’s poor judgment paved the way for everything that happened next.
On May 9, Donald Trump had dinner with FBI Director Comey. The next day, he fired him—and the media speculation immediately turned to the Russia collusion investigation as the cause for the firing. Trump told people privately that he thought Comey was “a nutjob” and had considered removing Comey well before the FBI launched its Russia probe. While he appreciated what he’d done to derail Hillary Clinton ten days prior to the election, he didn’t think Comey was loyal or capable. He was part of the Washington establishment that Trump was trying to fix. Regardless of the reason, Trump had a right to fire him if he wanted, with no questions asked. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who stepped in for Sessions in this case, did the actual firing, and he said the decision had been handed down by Trump, while the White House said Trump had fired him based on the recommendation of Rosenstein. Regardless, Rosenstein put Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe into Comey’s job on an acting basis that day, until Trump could fill the role.
On May 16, Trump met with Robert Mueller to interview Mueller as the leading candidate to take over Comey’s role as the new head of the FBI.
And on May 17, the very next day, Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Even from afar, it all seemed questionable. The timing was just too strange. The decision to appoint a Special Counsel, and to appoint Mueller in that role, was not made in the span of twenty-four hours. There had to have been time and thought put into that decision, and Mueller likely would have known about the prospect of it ahead of time. Did he meet with Donald Trump under false pretenses? What was going on behind the scenes? No one could explain these actions, and it is clear today that Trump was unaware of them at the time too.
As this was unfolding, former Obama-era staff, including former attorney general Sally Yates and CIA director John Brennan, were testifying about Russian interference in the election before Congress on Capitol Hill. At the same time, Trump kept questioning whether Russia interfered at all—mainly because of his distrust of the U.S. Intelligence community—which only made things look worse for Trump.
In his appointment letter, Rod Rosenstein gave Mueller the ability not only to investigate any links between Trump’s campaign and Russia but to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,” and prosecute “any other matters within the scope.”
Essentially, Rosenstein gave the Special Counsel the sweeping authority to investigate anyone and everything they deemed a part of their investigation, on any charges they could create—whether or not those charges were related to actual Russia collusion or Russian election interference in any way. The power granted to the Special Counsel extended well beyond the purpose of the Russia investigation and I firmly believe it was an abuse of power within our legal system—one of many which I would encounter over the next two and a half years.
At the time, it didn’t worry me. I didn’t think it worried any of us who had worked on the campaign. Many of us from the campaign still spoke to each other, and we all believed we were fine. Russia collusion simply didn’t exist, and none of us imagined in the moment how that sweeping authority might be used against us, or how charges might be manufactured and manipulated.
In mid-May I received another letter, this time from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying the Senate was launching its own separate investigation—but in the end, neither the House nor the Senate ever called me in for formal testimony.
On July 25, 2017, Paul called me late in the afternoon and told me he had just met with staff from the Senate Intel Committee. Both of us were asked to submit documents and participate in an interview.
At this stage, the Russia collusion issue had become a central focus of Congress and many Democrat members were already making strong claims that Trump’s team colluded with the government of Russia to win the election. However, since they had no evidence, they claimed that these investigations would get to the bottom of it.
Initially, I did not fully understand just how politically unhinged congressional members were becoming, but I was about to find out. It was a shining example of the wicked game in action. Paul said his meeting with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence lasted fewer than thirty minutes, and that only staff were present.
He said the questions were not thorough and seemed more of an exercise to check a box. However, the Senate Intel Committee publicly made the meeting with Paul seem urgent and monumental.
The most disturbing facet to come from the meeting occurred later that day when U.S. Senator Mark Warner, from Virginia, angrily demanded that Paul must come back to the committee because he did not answer all of the committee’s questions. Keep in mind that Senator Warner did not even attend the meeting. I wonder what questions he forgot to ask if he was not there. It was a disturbing example of politics influencing Warner’s deceptive narrative.
There were three other small bits of information that Warner forgot to mention. First, he was back-channeling with Adam Waldman, a lobbyist for Oleg Deripaska, who is the same Russian businessman that Manafort worked with. Second, Warner was communicating with Waldman to have him set up a meeting with Chris Steele, the now-debunked source used by the FBI to peddle uncorroborated reports and evidence it was collecting. Finally, Warner actually knew Paul fairly well. He and his partner, Rick Davis, shared an office suite with Warner in his Old Town Alexandria building for several years. During one of Warner’s reelection campaigns, he asked Paul to serve as his Republicans for Warner chair. Paul declined the offer.
In August 2017, the FBI had closed their case. They found no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Two years later we learned that the FBI report was shared with the Special Counsel, and with the House and Senate, as soon as it was finished. But neither the Special Counsel nor either body of Congress put a stop to their own investigations. By fall, the narrative was still active. The media kept regurgitating the issue. They could not let it go.
At the time, I did not believe I was high enough in the hierarchy to have anything substantial to offer to the House or Senate, or they would have called me in to testify. Which meant I certainly didn’t have to worry about facing any sort of action from the Special Counsel, either.
When Greg Andres, a prosecutor in the Special Counsel’s office, sent me a subpoena asking for some documents, I voluntarily provided copies of those documents in September. At that time, he gave my lawyer the clear impression that I was not a target of the investigation.
I took him at his word.