“Mr. President, it’s horseshit,” Dowd told him. And so what? Getting dirt on people was commonplace in campaigns and the nation’s capital. It even had a name—“opposition research” or “investigative reporting.” That’s what half of Washington seemed to be paid for. Is there something wrong with that? No. Dowd knew that opposition research teams and investigative reporters would take dirt from anyone, even foreign governments. All the media posturing was disgusting. They were treating it like the crime of the century. The New York Times and The Washington Post thought they were the special counsel and the law of the land. The stories were a big nothing burger, Dowd concluded.
On July 17 Trump tweeted: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!”
Dowd was determined not to be distracted by the daily drip from the media. He wanted hard evidence. McGahn religiously dictated all significant meetings or discussions with the president to his executive assistant, Annie Donaldson. She had 17 hours of notes relating to matters being investigated by Mueller and his team.
Dowd gave Mueller these notes and those of seven other lawyers. Nothing was held back. He told Mueller, “Bob, read Annie Donaldson’s notes if you want to know what was in the head of the president.”
All this was done with the president’s blessing. Dowd would talk to him and say, look, here’s the categories of documents. We’re going to give him this. We’re going to give him that. “Constitutionally he has no right” to the documents and testimony, “but just out of respect for law enforcement, since you’re the chief, let’s just let him do it. Not get in the fight.” Dowd concluded that the president seemed fearless. He never said no.
Dowd told Mueller, “This is what I told the president, so don’t make me look like an idiot, okay? And we’re going to make you look good. You make us look good. But you’ve got to get it done.”
Mueller received 1.4 million pages of documents from the Trump campaign and 20,000 pages from the White House. Dowd believed no documents had been destroyed. In all, 37 witnesses gave interviews to Mueller’s team voluntarily.
McGahn, Priebus and the vice president’s staff had put together a six-page White House summary of the entire Flynn matter from contemporaneous recollections. Dowd considered it the Bible on Flynn and delivered it to Mueller. He believed that no one, other than Flynn, had lied to investigators, and Mueller had not needed to pressure or jam anyone.
When Dowd was sending the campaign records to the congressional investigating committee, he told Mueller’s deputy Quarles, “We’re sending copies to the Hill. How about if I just deliver a copy to you?”
Quarles accepted. Dowd thought he and Quarles worked well together. They could meet and talk, whereas Mueller was so rigid, he sometimes seemed like marble.
* * *
On July 20 Bloomberg dropped an apparent bombshell: Mueller was investigating Trump’s finances including “Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings . . . the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008.”
Dowd called Quarles to ask about the story.
“Well,” Quarles said, “Bob never comments.”
“Give me a break, pal,” Dowd replied angrily. “I’m taking care of you, now you take care of me.” As they both knew, “a denial from the White House doesn’t get anywhere.” Dowd continued, “The deal was, with you guys, if you guys added to the investigation, we’d get a heads-up first.”
“That’s right.”
“Because you gave us the subjects to cover,” Dowd said. “And every once in a while you guys add things and we put it on a list. I didn’t hear about condos in Florida or selling this estate.” Dowd said he was aware of some matters under investigation in New York about Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, who tried to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow. “You know, Jimmy,” Dowd added, “when you ask me a question, I give it all to you. So I need a better explanation.”
“John, let me put it this way,” Quarles said. “I’m 99 percent sure that it’s not us.”
“I got it,” Dowd said. He immediately called the president, knowing when that kind of story broke Trump could not focus on anything else. Trump was apoplectic.
“They’re not investigating that stuff,” Dowd said, trying to reassure him. But Trump was not trusting at all and sounded like he could find no comfort.
Four days later Dowd met Quarles on a stone bench outside the Patriot Plaza where Mueller had his offices.
“Bob and I owe you one,” Quarles said. “Bob says don’t believe what you read in the papers.”
“I got it,” Dowd replied.
“We are really embarrassed,” Quarles said.
“Why?”
“You’ve delivered more than you promised, and we’re so pleased. We’re moving along. We’re getting it done. And there’s a lot of stuff here to organize, but it came very well organized. We didn’t have to go hunt and peck. You didn’t drown us.”
Dowd knew about a target of a tax investigation who had once told the FBI that the answer to their request was somewhere in two warehouses. The agents spent years searching.
“But let’s agree going forward,” Dowd said. “I don’t want to play cat-and-mouse. You’re not on my end of the stick. I got a guy that wants to know yesterday,” and Trump’s “instincts are it’s bullshit.” Dowd added that he had checked with the Trump Organization, and they had denied they were being separately investigated. They’d received no requests for documents or interviews—standard preliminary steps. “And they said, as far as we know, it’s bullshit.” All the organization’s projects were eight or nine years old. There were no issues. Whatever Mueller wanted to see was out there in the public record someplace.
Dowd had told this to the president. “I know that, goddamn it!” Trump had said.
Dowd continued with Quarles. “Sometimes I’ve got to do this by phone and you’ve got to give me some direction. I’m not asking you to give away the store or reveal your hand. Just tell me are we going to get hit or not going to get hit. Or you have a request or you don’t. It’s not on your radar.”
“I agree,” Quarles said.
Dowd was careful not to stray, to ask about possible investigations of Jared’s finances. Trump was his client, and it was key to be client-focused.
* * *
In July, the Freedom Caucus, a bloc of 30 strong conservatives in the House, threatened not to vote for the budget unless President Trump instituted some prohibition on paying for gender reassignment surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender people serving in the military.
Under Obama, transgender troops had no longer been banned from openly serving, although new recruits would not be allowed to join until July 1, 2017. On June 30, the day before the deadline, Mattis signed a memo delaying implementation by six months to review “the readiness and lethality of the force.”
During the campaign, Trump had proclaimed himself a supporter of LGBT rights. Now he told Bannon, “What the fuck? They’re coming in here, they’re getting clipped”—a crude reference to gender reassignment surgery. Someone had told him that each surgery cost $250,000, an inflated number. “Not going to happen,” he said.
Gender reassignment surgery can be expensive but also is infrequent. In a Pentagon-commissioned study, the RAND Corporation “found that only a few hundred of the estimated 6,600 transgender troops would seek medical treatment in any year. RAND found those costs would total no more than $8 million per year.”
The interagency process had gone to work on the question. The general counsels of the departments and agencies had weighed in. The Deputies Committee had met, and there were several Principals Committee meetings. There was no agreement, but four options were developed.
On the morning of July 26, Priebus, Bannon and several lawyers reached the president on the speakerphone in the residence. He was not expected in the Oval Office for at least an hour.