McMaster broke his silence and raged at the secretary of state.
“You don’t work with the White House,” McMaster said. “You never consult me or anybody on the NSC staff. You blow us off constantly.” He cited examples when he tried to set up calls or meetings or breakfasts with Tillerson. “You are off doing your own thing” and communicate directly with the president, Mattis, Priebus or Porter. “But it’s never with the National Security Council,” and “that’s what we’re here to do.” Then he issued his most dramatic charge. “You’re affirmatively seeking to undermine the national security process.”
“That’s not true,” Tillerson replied. “I’m available anytime. I talk to you all the time. We just had a conference call yesterday. We do these morning calls three times a week. What are you talking about, H.R.? I’ve worked with you. I’ll work with anybody.”
Tillerson continued, “I’ve also got to be secretary of state. Sometimes I’m traveling. Sometimes I’m in a different time zone. I can’t always take your calls.”
McMaster said he consulted with the relevant assistant secretaries of state if the positions were filled.
“I don’t have assistant secretaries,” Tillerson said, coldly, “because I haven’t picked them, or the ones that I have, I don’t like and I don’t trust and I don’t work with. So you can check with whoever you want. That has no bearing on me.” The rest of the State Department didn’t matter; if you didn’t go through him, it didn’t count.
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After the meeting, Tillerson, still steaming, came down to Porter’s office. “The White House is such a disaster,” he said. “So many of those guys upstairs, they just don’t have a clue what’s going on.”
Tillerson said that Johnny DeStefano, the 39-year-old director of personnel, couldn’t pick someone for a key State Department post if they hit him in the nose. DeStefano had worked as a Hill staffer and knew nothing about foreign policy. “You wouldn’t believe this guy he sent over for me to interview” to be an assistant secretary of state.
“It was a joke. I don’t know in what possible universe anybody could have thought that he could possibly be qualified for this job.”
Priebus later said to Porter, “Oh wow, fireworks! It seems like Rex is really upset about a lot of stuff right now. He’s just sort of ill-tempered.”
Porter believed that McMaster absolutely had a point, though his meetings and calls could be tedious and not always necessary. But the breakdown between Tillerson and McMaster proved the general dysfunction.
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On Wednesday, July 19, 2017, Trump granted an unusual interview to The New York Times and launched a head-spinning attack on Jeff Sessions.
He said he would never have appointed Sessions if he had known he would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair—and that’s a mild word—to the president.”
Trump was still stewing about Sessions three days later, Saturday morning, July 22, when he boarded Marine One to head to Norfolk, Virginia. He was speaking at the commissioning ceremony of the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), a $13 billion warship.
Trump and Priebus were chatting. Trump said he had always admired Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder. Though he disagreed with their policies, of course, Holder had stuck with Obama no matter what came up or whatever the controversy for eight years. There had been no recusals and no dodging the political crossfire. Holder had been willing to take the hit for his president.
“Jeff isn’t a guy that, through thick and thin, is willing to stick with me,” he said.
Sessions, Trump said, could have declined to recuse himself in the Russia investigation by saying he had nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the Trump campaign. He had been on the campaign plane and gone to rallies but he had nothing to do with strategy—the ground game, the persuasion mail or the digital operations.
He was also unhappy with Sessions’s testimony before various congressional committees about meetings or discussions with Russians.
“Get his resignation,” Trump ordered Priebus.
Stephen Miller, who was a former Sessions staffer and big supporter, later told Priebus, “We’re in real trouble. Because if you don’t get the resignation, he’s going to think you’re weak. If you get it, you’re going to be part of a downward-spiral calamity.”
Priebus spoke to Sessions several times. The attorney general did not want to resign. If the president doesn’t want you to serve, Priebus said, then you ought not to serve.
No, he wouldn’t go.
Eventually, Trump agreed to hold off. He did not want an immediate resignation because he said he wanted them to get through the Sunday talk shows the next day.
Two days later Trump continued the barrage on Sessions, calling him “our beleaguered A.G.” on Twitter.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he dismissed Sessions’s endorsement during the presidential campaign. “When they say he endorsed me, I went to Alabama. I had 40,000 people. He was a senator from Alabama. I won the state by a lot, massive numbers. A lot of states I won by massive numbers. But he was a senator, he looks at 40,000 people and he probably says, ‘What do I have to lose?’ And he endorsed me. So it’s not like a great loyal thing about the endorsement.”
Bannon asked Sessions to come to the White House. Sessions took a chair in what Bannon called his war room, the walls lined with whiteboards listing Trump’s campaign promises. The attorney general, small in stature, was nervous but pleasant.
“Look,” Bannon said, “you were there through the whole time” of the campaign. “You knew this thing was a shit show, totally disorganized.”
Sessions could not dispute that.
Bannon turned to what was perhaps the fondest memory of their political lives—when Trump had won the presidency on November 9. Victory was as sweet as it got.
“Is there any doubt in your mind on the 9th, when it was called, that it was the hand?” Bannon asked, dipping into a shared religious belief system. “That divine providence that worked through Trump to win this?”
“No,” Sessions said.
“You mean that?”
Sessions said he did.
“It was the hand of God, right? You and I were there. We know there’s no other way it could’ve happened than the hand of God.”
“Yes.”
“Fine,” Bannon said. “You’re never going to quit, are you?”
“I’m never quitting.” Trump would have to fire him.
“You promise me you’ll never quit?”
“Yeah.”
“Because it’s going to get worse.”
“What do you mean?” Sessions asked.
“It’s all a diversion.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jared’s testifying.” Trump’s son-in-law was appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday and the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. “They didn’t think they had enough cover.”
“He wouldn’t do that to me,” Sessions said.
“He’d fucking do that to you in a second. He’s doing it to you! You watch! When Jared finishes testifying, if they think it’s good testimony, he’ll stop tweeting.”
On July 24 Kushner released a long, carefully lawyered statement ahead of his congressional appearance. “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government. I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.”
The Trump attacks on Sessions subsided for a while. It was a sideshow, a diversion. He did believe Sessions had failed him, though, so it was a diversion with conviction.
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