“Roy wouldn’t have handled it this way,” Trump said, directing his ire at McGahn. “He would have told them all to go to hell.”
McGahn, Priebus, and Bannon explained to Trump that Sessions had no choice. But Trump wouldn’t listen. To him, everything was personal, and he saw Sessions’s recusal as a betrayal. The attorney general is the top federal law enforcement official in the country, serving the American people and leading a quasi-independent institution, the Justice Department. In Trump’s mind, however, the attorney general’s job was to protect the president, and by that measure Sessions had failed.
“Sessions should be fired,” he said.
“I never would have appointed Sessions if I knew that he would have recused himself,” the president said at another point.
“Where is my Bobby Kennedy? Where’s my Eric Holder? Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump bellowed to his advisers.
Trump held up Holder as a model attorney general because of what he perceived as his unwavering loyalty to Obama and his political savvy. He believed Holder acted as Obama’s protector, much the way Robert F. Kennedy had protected his older brother President John F. Kennedy as attorney general. Trump cited yet another example: J. Edgar Hoover, the politically cunning FBI director who served under eight presidents and was later found to have abused his powers.
Trump’s advisers tried to explain that the attorney general is not the president’s personal attorney. Independence was expected at the Justice Department, and the attorney general could not be seen as the president’s fixer. Bannon told Trump that times had changed. “There’s something that happened between those days of having Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover bringing over the files,” he said. “It’s called Watergate. It just doesn’t work like that anymore.”
Trump believed Sessions should have protected him and his family at all costs. Now oversight of the probe was transferring to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whom Trump hardly knew and therefore did not trust. Trump accused McGahn of not fighting hard enough to defend his oversight of the probe and told him to persuade Sessions to unrecuse himself. That was not legally or ethically possible, and McGahn told him it would look as if the president were interfering with an investigation if anyone at the White House tried to pressure the attorney general. Trump pushed back on McGahn, saying it was a stupid rule.
“You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations?” Trump said, throwing up his hands in disgust. “Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?”
Once the yelling subsided, Trump gathered a couple of his grandchildren to walk across the South Lawn to board Marine One. They were headed to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. Bannon and Priebus were planning to accompany the president for the trip to Florida, but they stayed at the White House. “Figure this out,” Trump told them.
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In Trump World, people’s fortunes can rise and fall based on the president’s changing moods, but the speed with which Sessions went from confidant to persona non grata was breathtaking. Trump and Sessions had known each other for twelve years, first meeting over a shared interest in a New York real estate project. A backbench, ultraconservative senator from the Gulf Coast of Alabama, Sessions led the crusade in Congress against building a new headquarters for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York. He discovered an unexpected ally when he read an article in The New York Sun. The headline: “Trump Scoffs at U.N.’s Plan for New H.Q.”
Sessions invited Trump to testify before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on July 21, 2005, and Sessions was spellbound. He told the other senators on the subcommittee, “Mr. Trump is a breath of fresh air for this Senate,” and praised the star witness for his construction know-how. Sessions then invited Trump to his office to have lunch. Sitting at a conference table in the Russell Senate Office Building, the two men—one practiced discipline as a Sunday school teacher at his family’s Methodist church and kept the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” engraved on a stone on his office desk, the other was a bombastic braggart from Queens who broadcast his sexual exploits on Howard Stern’s radio show and survived life by winging it—bonded over Subway sandwiches.
In Sessions, Trump saw a man who shared his worldview and instincts and could help him establish credibility with conservative base voters. In August 2015, Trump, a newly minted presidential candidate, swooped into Sessions’s hometown of Mobile for what was his biggest mega-rally to date. It was something between a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and the Daytona 500. Just before sunset, the sweaty masses in Ladd-Peebles Stadium heard the roar of a jet engine and snapped their heads toward the sky. Gliding toward them was a gleaming Boeing 757 with “T-R-U-M-P” stretched across its navy blue fuselage, dipping its wing toward the sloped stadium bleachers as if to say hello. The flamboyant candidate soon strode onstage to “Sweet Home Alabama” and ticked through all the polls where he was leading Jeb Bush and the other Republican candidates.
Sessions was blown away. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he told one of his political advisers. “Something is happening here.” After Trump finished speaking that August in Mobile, he invited Sessions and his wife, Mary, into his motorcade of Cadillac Escalades to ride to the airport, where Trump took the couple onto his plane to show it off—the white leather, the gold trim, the big-screen TV, everything.
In February 2016, Sessions became the first U.S. senator to publicly back Trump, and helped craft the candidate’s first major foreign policy speech in April 2016. He also lent some of his top staffers to the campaign, including Stephen Miller. Trump bragged about how smart Sessions was. Whenever he saw the senator, he would point at him and say, “So respected!” or “Totally gets it!” In his mind, there was perhaps no greater attribute than toughness, and Trump would tell aides about Sessions, “That guy is tough.”
Trump had signaled that Sessions could have whatever job he wanted. Initially, Kushner, Bannon, and others in Trump’s inner circle favored Rudy Giuliani for attorney general. During the campaign, Giuliani had contorted himself every which way to defend Trump, including after the release of the devastating Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. They thought the former federal prosecutor and longtime Trump friend was the closest thing to a modern-day Cohn. The trouble is, Giuliani was not interested.
“I don’t have the energy,” Giuliani told Bannon one Saturday afternoon in November, talking through a possible cabinet role. “You don’t understand how tough a job that is.”
Bannon replied, “You’ve gotta do this. We need you. It will only be for a year, but we have to have you.”
“Steve, you’re not a lawyer,” Giuliani said. “You don’t understand. It’s the worst job. . . . I’m too old. I’m not going to do it.”