“This is supposed to be confidential,” Barr told Mueller.
Barr said the department was moving quickly to prepare the report for public release, but explained that there would be an unwanted gap of time as a consequence of the report’s being 448 pages and not containing the necessary redactions.
“To be clear, we’re not trying to summarize the work; we’re just giving the principal conclusions,” Barr told Mueller. “We offered you the opportunity to look at the letter and you said no. We’re flabbergasted here.”
“Your summary letter fails to put into context the decisions we made,” Mueller said.
At this point, Zebley jumped in. He had no problems with Barr’s description of their Russian interference work and said nothing about it. “It’s all about obstruction. Your letter doesn’t give enough context as to our thinking about the OLC opinion and the media coverage is misleading about that.”
Barr again defended his letter. “We weren’t trying to summarize. We weren’t trying to put in context. We were just trying to state your conclusions,” he told Mueller and Zebley.
The temperature started to come down. Mueller asked how long it would be until the report was released in full, and Barr said they were aiming for mid-April. Mueller then made another pitch for issuing the executive summaries. “We’ve had a really good relationship with you so far, and we’re asking you to do this, and we’d like it to happen sooner rather than later,” Mueller said.
Barr replied, “I’d prefer to push forward and get it all done. I don’t think putting it out piecemeal is good.” The attorney general said he thought issuing the summaries would cause even more confusion than was already in the body politic.
“Thanks for entertaining the request,” Mueller said. “I appreciate it. We really just want full disclosure.”
The call ended on an uplifting note.
“At the end of the day, you’re part of the Department of Justice,” Barr said.
“I agree,” Mueller replied.
“We’re all in the department together,” Barr said. “We’ll get back to you.”
That night, Mueller’s team considered putting out a press statement of their own explaining their objections to Barr’s four-page letter but decided against it.
For the rest of the day and into the next morning, Barr, together with Rosenstein, O’Callaghan, and Rabbitt, debated Mueller’s request. They nearly decided to release the executive summaries but opted against it for the reasons Barr articulated on the call with Mueller. The report was lengthy, nuanced, and confusing, and Barr worried that people would pick apart the summaries and draw misleading conclusions.
Barr and his team regretted having used the word “summarize” in the March 24 letter. They also lamented that Trump was claiming that Mueller had “totally exonerated” him. That was false, but Barr decided not to publicly correct his boss. The president’s lawyers understood the truth, too: a lot of iceberg remained under the water, but they could do little to wean their client off his talking points.
On March 29, Barr decided to write another letter to congressional leaders to clear up his intentions. “My March 24 letter was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the Special Counsel’s investigation or report.” He added, “Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own. I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion.”
Barr intended this letter to be a warning shot—to Congress and the media, but also to Mueller’s angry prosecutors—to calm down, stop jumping to conclusions, and be patient. There was a lot more still to see.
Twenty-five
THE SHOW GOES ON
On Sunday, March 31, 2019, Kirstjen Nielsen was fast asleep in a London hotel when a call came through from the White House. It was the middle of the night London time. A military aide traveling with the homeland security secretary answered, and the White House operator said President Trump wanted to speak to the secretary. “Is it an emergency?” the aide asked. “The secretary is asleep. Do you want to wake her up?” They decided no, the call was not urgent and could wait.
When Nielsen woke up Monday morning, she learned of Trump’s call and called him back later when it was morning on the East Coast. The president was peeved.
“Why the hell are you out of the country?” he asked Nielsen. “What are you doing over there?”
Nielsen reminded Trump that she was meeting with her counterparts in the United Kingdom to discuss a series of threats they were partnering to thwart, including cyberattacks and child trafficking. It was a trip she had previously mentioned to him and White House officials. She had been planning to head from London to meetings in Sweden later that week with security ministers from the Group of Seven, the elite club of the world’s most powerful industrial nations.
On the call, Trump asked her questions about border enforcement. Nielsen could tell he was angry she hadn’t taken his call the night before. The president didn’t seem to understand the obstacles the time difference presented. He kept homing in on Nielsen’s being out of the country at a critical time for security at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Department of Homeland Security was set to announce that apprehensions at the southern border had soared to nearly 100,000 arrests in March, many of them Central American families seeking asylum. Trump had again been threatening to close off the border, although he would stop short of doing so because of stark warnings of economic ruin from the business community.
As the president and his White House aides scrambled to come up with actions to take to stem the flow of migrants, Nielsen was across the Atlantic. She was adamant that Trump’s obsession with the border not distract her and her team from other areas of her department’s mission, especially global cybersecurity, considering the attacks from Russia, China, and other countries. Still, the president did not seem to comprehend that her job entailed more than border security and enforcement.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she told him over the phone.
By the time they hung up, Nielsen had the sense that something was up back home. She began to suspect her own job security hung in the balance. In the back of her mind, she was thinking about all the complaints Stephen Miller had lobbed behind her back. He hated when she focused on other missions of her department, whose central reason for being was to prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11. “Why is she doing this?” Miller would ask. “All the president cares about is the border.”
Later on Monday, April 1, Nielsen called Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, to check in.
“I don’t know why you’re away,” Mulvaney told Nielsen as he mentioned the high volume of migrant crossings, a reaction that only exacerbated her concern. When she told him there were many things the Department of Homeland Security did besides border enforcement, Mulvaney replied, “Right now, all we’re doing here at the White House is the border.”