Before leaving Hanoi, Trump delivered a stunning defense of Kim’s brutality. Early in his presidency, Trump made Otto Warmbier the heart of his maximum-pressure campaign on North Korea. He spotlighted the twenty-two-year-old University of Virginia student’s death upon being released by the North Koreans in a coma following seventeen months in captivity, and invited Warmbier’s grieving parents as his guests to his first address to a joint session of Congress. Yet when The Washington Post’s David Nakamura asked Trump in Hanoi whether he had confronted Kim about Warmbier’s death, the president said Kim was not to blame. “I don’t believe that he would’ve allowed that to happen,” Trump said. “Just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen. Those prisons are rough. They’re rough places. And bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he was—I don’t believe he knew about it.”
Here again Trump accepted the words of a foreign autocrat, just as he had believed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman did not order the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and as he had believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Trump said that Kim “felt very badly,” but claimed to only know about Warmbier’s case after the fact. “He tells me that he didn’t know about it,” Trump said, “and I take him at his word.”
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Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and Kirstjen Nielsen had once all been wary of Trump’s October 2018 decision to deploy troops to the southern border, realizing they provided useful support but uneasy about service members being used as political props. By February 2019, however, Nielsen realized she desperately needed those troops—and even more of them—at the U.S.-Mexico border to support the overwhelmed customs and immigration officials in Texas and Arizona. Scores of migrant families, as well as some traffickers using children as decoys, were rushing the border claiming asylum. The number of migrants detained in February, seventy-six thousand, marked a twelve-year high for illegal border crossings. The arrivals deluged U.S. border agents.
Now that the midterms were over, Trump and his political advisers cared little about the humanitarian crisis of immigrants. “They said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you have a bunch of kids to take care of,’” a senior national security official recalled. “They [just] want the illegals to stop coming in.”
Nielsen asked for a meeting with Trump and finally got one in early March. The homeland security secretary hoped that if they met face-to-face she could get the president to focus on this one topic. Trump veered toward discussing the overall immigrant “invasion” but would not acknowledge Nielsen’s consistent argument that the only real solution to immigrants seeking asylum was thoughtful legislation to close legal loopholes. But Trump was angry and believed Nielsen and her team should be doing much more. As Nielsen tried to refocus the meeting on the impossibility of her agency’s shouldering the crush of migrants entering the country in the last two months, Stephen Miller, who was also in attendance, brought up a side project. He suggested to Trump and Nielsen that they start imposing visa sanctions for countries that had a high number of residents overstay their visas. Miller’s visa idea was diverting the president’s attention from the crisis at the border and would do nothing to address the current problem.
Nielsen left the meeting cursing under her breath. She couldn’t get through to Trump and felt the aides around him were suggesting she could pull some mythical solution out of her hat that she was stubbornly refusing to do. After their meeting, the crisis got worse. That spring, Department of Homeland Security officials counted fourteen hundred immigrant children under their care in a single day.
Fresh from her frustrating meeting with Trump, Nielsen began urging White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to convene a cabinet meeting to create a crisis action plan. The border problem was crying out for health-care workers and supplies, food stocks, and emergency response teams—resources that involved other federal departments. Nielsen hounded Mulvaney for two weeks, telling him she urgently needed help from the Pentagon to transport families, and she needed the Department of Health and Human Services to speed up the conveyor belt to take kids into its care.
The Department of Homeland Security wasn’t supposed to keep children in its custody longer than seventy-two hours. The border patrol stations—concrete slabs with little jail cells that resembled the inside of a small-town sheriff’s department—were never designed to detain kids, but they had crammed four times as many people as the fire code allowed in ten border stations. The department’s border effort was on the cusp of disaster: Nielsen had a backlog of a thousand kids who were overdue to get into Health and Human Services facilities, but the agency was moving too slowly to take them in.
“I urgently need a cabinet meeting,” Nielsen told Mulvaney. “I’m going to explain to you how bad this is. I’m going to show you photos and [then] you tell me you aren’t going to help me.” Mulvaney agreed, but when Nielsen arrived, she was shocked to see there were no other cabinet secretaries present. “Well, look, I thought we would talk about it a little more,” Mulvaney told her.
Nielsen told Mulvaney what she thought this emergency demanded: a White House czar to coordinate border security steps among agencies. Mulvaney suggested she work through this with the other agencies. She said she had tried that already. The Pentagon, HHS, and other agencies weren’t treating the situation like the emergency it was. They needed the boss to tell them this was a priority. Children were in danger. Border stations were in violation of their fire codes. There was no more time for more discussion, she said. They needed an action plan.
Nielsen was used to her close partnership with Kelly, but Mulvaney seemed more interested in managing up—talking to Trump—than in managing down, more like a chief staffer than a chief of staff. After she returned from the White House, Nielsen told her senior leadership team, “Forget it. We’re going to pull down our own cabinet meeting.” She convened other agency heads on a conference call, and they made a plan to address the emergency together. It was what a normal White House would have taken the lead in doing.
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In late February, a week or so after Bill Barr was sworn in as attorney general, he was briefed on the state of the Mueller investigation by Rod Rosenstein and Ed O’Callaghan. As Rosenstein’s principal deputy, O’Callaghan had been the point man consulting regularly with the special counsel team. He reported back to Barr that Mueller was nearing the end but needed more time. The special counsel’s deputies still had some loose investigative ends to tie up, most of them related to documents and other materials from Roger Stone, whose Florida home the FBI had raided on January 25.
What Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan did not know was that Mueller and his team were hard at work wrestling over the best way to conclude and summarize their nearly two-year investigation. Prosecutors had been actively drafting their final report in two volumes. The first volume was complicated, with a series of shadowy figures with strange-sounding names, but fairly straightforward to write. It documented the Russian government’s effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The second volume was far more controversial and caused internal angst. It documented the evidence the team had gathered on ten episodes when Trump appeared to be seeking to thwart or shutter a criminal investigation of his campaign and himself.