Porter saw the issue as an exquisite way to kick the can down the road for several more weeks, if not more. Mattis was helpful in drawing it out, later telling Ross he needed an analysis before he could give his opinion.
Later analysis by the Defense Department for Mattis, however, showed that “U.S military steel usage represents less than one-half percent of the total U.S steel demand” and Defense would be able “to acquire the steel necessary to meet national defense requirements.”
CHAPTER
20
Trump said he wished he had fired Comey at the beginning of the administration but now he wanted Comey out.
Bannon disagreed and offered this argument to Trump alone in the Oval Office: “Seventy-five percent of the agents do hate Comey. No doubt. The moment you fire him he’s J. fucking Edgar Hoover. The day you fire him, he’s the greatest martyr in American history. A weapon to come and get you. They’re going to name a special fucking counsel. You can fire Comey. You can’t fire the FBI. The minute you fire him, the FBI as an institution, they have to destroy you and they will destroy you.”
Bannon thought Trump did not understand the power of the permanent institutions—the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon and the broader military establishment. He also did not understand the sweeping powers of a special counsel who could be appointed to investigate everything a president touched.
“Don’t try to talk me out of it,” Trump told McGahn and Priebus, “because I’ve made my decision, so don’t even try.” Comey is a grandstander and out of control.
By early May, Trump felt that Comey was vulnerable because of his recent testimony in the convoluted investigation of Clinton’s private emails. He dictated a letter listing the reasons to fire Comey.
McGahn told him that the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, was coming in for a meeting. One thing Rosenstein wanted to discuss was Comey, and apparently Rosenstein also wanted to get rid of Comey, McGahn said.
McGahn explained that there was a process here—the deputy attorney general was the person who oversaw the FBI. Let’s hear Rosenstein out. This was a stall tactic that the White House staff was using more and more. Let’s cool this off, let’s talk to Rod and we’ll get back to you with a plan.
Rosenstein told Trump that he thought Comey should be fired. He had no problem writing a memo outlining his reasoning. He brought a three-page memo to the White House. The subject: RESTORING PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN THE FBI. It stated that on July 5, Comey “announced his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation,” which was Hillary Clinton’s emails, preempting the decision of the prosecutor and offering “derogatory information” by calling Clinton’s conduct “extremely careless.” Then, 11 days before the election, he announced he was reopening the Clinton investigation because he believed it was a question of “speak” or “conceal.” This misstated the issue, Rosenstein said. He quoted five former attorneys general or deputy attorneys general agreeing that Comey had violated the rules.
Done, said the president. He could not have said it better himself. He sent a brief letter to Comey informing him that he was “terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”
The plan to stall the firing had backfired. It had sped up the process. The Rosenstein memo had nothing to do with the decision, Priebus knew. The president already had made up his mind.
Bannon believed, “100 percent,” that the reason for firing Comey was because the FBI was seeking financial records from Jared. It was pure speculation. Ivanka had complained to her father about the FBI.
As the months ground on, Priebus saw that if Trump was planning to or said he was going to fire someone, it did not mean it would happen. One of his favorite sayings became, “Nothing is dead until it’s buried around here.”
It appeared, for the moment, that Comey was at least dead, but he and his story were not buried.
* * *
Trump was watching lots of cable news coverage of his May 9 firing of FBI Director Comey. It was not going well. He had muddied the waters and contradicted himself on May 11 when he told NBC’s Lester Holt that he was going to fire Comey no matter what recommendations he had received from Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Attorney General Sessions. In a long rambling response to Holt, Trump stated, apparently giving some of his reasoning, “I said to myself, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”
This answer seemed very much at odds with his letter to Comey saying he was being fired because of Rosenstein’s memo severely criticizing Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The evening of Tuesday, May 16, Michael Schmidt of The New York Times published a blockbuster story. Comey had written contemporaneous memos of his conversations with Trump. In an Oval Office meeting February 14, while Comey was still FBI director, he wrote that the president had asked him about the investigation of Flynn and said: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
Trump hovered around the TV, glued to coverage. On CNN that evening, David Gergen, a voice of experience and reason who had served as a White House adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton during their impeachment investigations, sounded an alarm.
“I think we’re in impeachment territory,” Gergen said. “What we see is a presidency that’s starting to come apart.”
Porter could see that Trump was about to lose it at the mention of impeachment. The president voiced outrage that Comey seemed to have turned the tables on him.
The next day, Wednesday, May 17, Trump was in the Oval Office when he learned that Rosenstein had appointed Robert Mueller, who had run the FBI for 12 years, of all people, as special counsel to look into Russian election meddling and any connection to the Trump presidential campaign.
Trump’s mood deteriorated overnight and the next day, May 18, was the worst. The president erupted into uncontrollable anger, visibly agitated to a degree that no one in his inner circle had witnessed before. It was a harrowing experience. “We barely got by,” Porter said to an associate.
Normally Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk or in his private dining room. But this day he mostly stayed on his feet as he stormed between the two rooms.
The president turned to his lifeline—cable news. He watched a two-hour block of Fox News, and then most of the two-hour-long blocks of MSNBC and CNN that he had TiVo’d.
He raged at the coverage as top aides came in and out—Priebus, Bannon, Kushner, McGahn, Cohn, Hicks and Porter. Why was Mueller picked? Trump asked. “He was just in here and I didn’t hire him for the FBI,” Trump raged. “Of course he’s got an axe to grind with me.”
“Everybody’s trying to get me,” the president said. “It’s unfair. Now everybody’s saying I’m going to be impeached.” What are the powers of a special counsel? he asked.
A special counsel had virtually unlimited power to investigate any possible crime, Porter said. It was Watergate, Iran-contra and Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.
“Now I have this person,” Trump said bitterly, “who has no accountability who can look into anything, however unrelated it is? They’re going to spend years digging through my whole life and finances.”
Trump could not focus on much of anything else. Meetings were canceled and parts of the day eventually scrapped.
Porter had never seen Trump so visibly disturbed. He knew Trump was a narcissist who saw everything in terms of its impact on him. But the hours of raging reminded Porter of what he had read about Nixon’s final days in office—praying, pounding the carpet, talking to the pictures of past presidents on the walls. Trump’s behavior was now in the paranoid territory.