Mulvaney called Nielsen later that evening, after getting her letter. “Why are you resigning today?” he asked.
Nielsen was surprised by the question. “I’m not the one who changed the date,” she said.
Mulvaney explained they weren’t trying to force her to leave immediately. But the president was in a rush, wanting to announce that he was the one making the decision for her to leave and trying to control the story. Mulvaney invoked Jim Mattis, reminding her of the umbrage the president had taken at the defense secretary’s resignation letter. It turned out Trump feared Nielsen might criticize him or reveal damaging information about him on her way out the door, but the president thought if he made the first announcement, he could dismiss anything she might say later as sour grapes from a disgruntled former employee.
Mulvaney asked her to stay on until April 10 to ensure a smooth transition and explained that Trump intended to keep McAleenan as an acting secretary instead of nominating him for Senate confirmation. “You know the president,” Mulvaney said. “He likes actings.”
Nielsen would soon learn that the White House had one main goal for her three days of transition: to get her to sign off on changing the legal succession plan so the White House could install the people they wanted in the department’s top jobs without following the civil service regulations that would place Nielsen’s deputy in charge.
In her sixteen months as homeland security secretary, Nielsen had become the face of Trump’s immigration policies, arguably the most controversial aspect of his presidency. As such, she had received threats against her life, including on the day she resigned. Nielsen had a heavy security detail as secretary. Packages that were delivered to her home were first scanned and searched at a secure facility. But she was told that once she left the administration, she would be losing her protection.
Some other high-profile national security officials maintained protective details for a period of time after leaving the government, but only if requested by the White House chief of staff and authorized by the president. No such accommodation had been prearranged for Nielsen. As she left government service, Nielsen’s security team was preparing to remove the alarms and cameras from her home. If she wanted protection, she would have to hire it herself, and unlike her über-wealthy colleagues in Trump’s cabinet she did not necessarily have those kinds of resources.
When some of her international counterparts visited Washington, they offered to hire personal security for Nielsen to protect her, but she declined. “That would look horrible,” Nielsen told them. “Can you imagine the story? Foreign governments provide security because the U.S. won’t.”
Nielsen called Trump. She appealed to him to keep her security detail for another few weeks until she had time to install her own system. “Just say I say it’s fine,” Trump told her.
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The evening of April 3, amid the border crisis and Nielsen’s scramble to save her job, Trump gathered his most senior military brass for an annual White House tradition: a dinner hosted by the commander in chief. It was partly a gesture of gratitude, partly an informal session to share ideas.
The atmosphere inside the Pentagon was rather unsteady, with officials still adjusting to the sudden exit of Mattis and the interim leadership of Patrick Shanahan, who had been the acting secretary for three months but still not nominated for the permanent post. Administration officials read Trump’s unwillingness so far to formally nominate Shanahan for what it was: a clever ploy to try to turn Shanahan into a yes-man and to keep him on his toes. By June, however, he would withdraw from consideration to be the permanent secretary amid reports of domestic troubles.
Several of the generals and admirals gathered for dinner at the White House had grave concerns about whether Shanahan, a former Boeing executive with little experience on the global stage, had the knowledge, experience, and gravitas to lead the department, with a budget of roughly $700 billion a year. Some of them had been quietly grousing to one another that Shanahan didn’t seem able to stand up to Trump, and noted that he had acquiesced earlier that year to the president’s demands to claim a national “emergency” and tap Pentagon funds for construction of the border wall.
At dinner in the State Dining Room, many of the faces gathered around the room would be retiring or moving to other posts in the coming months. One chose to use this opportunity to stand up to the president’s casual disregard for boundaries and the sacred rules of military justice.
Trump had been obsessed with the prosecution of the Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, forty, a special forces operator accused of the savage murder of an Iraqi teen. Military prosecutors said Gallagher stabbed to death a seriously wounded Islamic State prisoner of war in May 2017 in a SEALs compound near Mosul and posed for pictures with the corpse. Trump had been watching the case closely, in part because of the sympathetic, pro-Gallagher coverage by the Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, a Trump booster and informal adviser to the president on veterans’ issues.
In addition, one of Trump’s biggest defenders throughout the Russia investigation, Congressman Devin Nunes, had been appealing to the president for leniency in Gallagher’s case. Trump had announced March 30 that he had intervened to have Gallagher moved to “less restrictive confinement” while he awaited trial, tweeting that he did so “in honor of his past service to our Country.”
Now at dinner with the nation’s senior military leaders, Trump asked whether they believed Gallagher had been unfairly persecuted. Wasn’t it pretty awful, the president asked, for a Navy SEAL to be accused of the crime of just doing his job, killing the enemy?
Trump turned to the army general Richard Clarke, who had just taken over as commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, leading the elite teams whose members included Gallagher and others under investigation for misconduct on the battlefield. “What about Gallagher?” Trump asked.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice required Gallagher’s peers to serve as his judge and jury, with impartiality and without fear of pressure from above. It was improper for the commander in chief to talk about any case in a way that could appear to apply pressure to the military judge far lower down in the military’s chain of command. For a president to attempt to tilt the result of the proceedings would be like a Supreme Court justice discussing how he or she would decide a case to the lower-level judge presiding over the trial.
Clarke stammered a bit, looking for the right words to answer. Then Admiral John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, stepped in. He decided to be the one to take a bullet because he was just four months away from ending his four-year term. He didn’t have to worry about the president’s wrath, at least not as much as Shanahan or some of the others around the table.
“Sir, this is not the appropriate forum to talk about that,” Richardson told the president.
Trump was visibly annoyed and folded his arms across his chest.