Sessions returned to the Oval, his face white as a piece of paper. He sat down in one of the armchairs forming a semicircle in front of the president’s Resolute Desk. He turned sideways to look at McGahn, his gallows expression revealing his fear of what was to come. McGahn cut short the interview, telling Trump and the candidate that their allotted time had come to an end. After the door closed behind the candidate, McGahn said, “I think the attorney general needs to tell you something.”
“What is it, Jeff?” Trump said.
“Well, uh, Mr. President,” Sessions said, lifting a finger up, then pausing and looking down at the floor. “Well, uh, we have a special counsel.” He explained Rosenstein had appointed Mueller.
Trump looked at McGahn, genuinely confused.
“What he’s trying to say is Rod just appointed a special counsel and has picked Bob Mueller to investigate the Russia stuff,” McGahn told him.
“What did you just say?” Trump asked, aghast.
“Jeff, is this true?”
Sessions nodded, looking down to avoid the president’s gaze.
“You’re serious?” Trump asked.
“Serious as a heart attack,” McGahn replied.
There was a palpable pause in the room, unlike anything any of them had experienced from the voluble Trump, who could fill any airtime. The president slumped in his chair and sighed deeply, like someone making room in his lungs to take in more oxygen for a powerful scream.
“Oh, my God,” Trump exclaimed. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked!”
He went on.
“It doesn’t matter what the truth is,” the president said. “They just fuck you up the whole time. They never find anything. They just put a bunch of people who never talked to you through the ringer.”
Then Trump turned his full venom on Sessions.
“It’s your fucking fault,” he said. “You’re weak. This is all your fault.”
Sessions said blaming him was not fair. “If you feel that’s wrong, then I’ll resign,” the attorney general said.
“You know what, Jeff?” Trump said. “You’re fucking right. You should fucking resign!”
Sessions’s eyes welled up. He was holding back tears with everything he had. By this point, McGahn, Pence, and Hunt were watching the president break the attorney general in front of their eyes. The vice president interjected. “Do you mind giving us a minute, gentlemen?” Pence asked, looking at Hunt and McGahn. McGahn told Pence that was a good idea and got up to leave. He and Hunt didn’t need to see this.
Once safely outside the Oval Office, Hunt turned to McGahn, his mouth wide open. “Oh, my Gawd . . .” Hunt said in his southern drawl. The two men could hear the presidential tirade coming from the historic room they had just left. Tearing into Sessions, Trump said, “You were supposed to protect me” but “let me down.”
A few minutes after his private session with Trump and Pence, Sessions emerged from the Oval Office, and McGahn put his arm on his back. “Don’t resign,” McGahn told him. “We need you. This will blow over. I’ll call you tonight. Don’t resign.”
As Sessions headed toward the West Wing exit, McGahn charged down the hallway to Reince Priebus’s office and stuck his head in the door. “I’ve got some bad news,” McGahn said hurriedly, his face red and in a huff. “Sessions just resigned, and we’ve got a special counsel.”
“No!” Priebus said, looking horrified. “Where’s Sessions?”
The chief of staff rushed past McGahn in his doorway and took off in a trot for the Oval, where he saw Pence. “Where’s Jeff?” Priebus asked the vice president. Pence confirmed for him that Sessions had resigned and was leaving the building. Priebus then raced out to the parking lot to try to catch the attorney general before he drove off. Priebus climbed into the backseat of Sessions’s black vehicle and asked him, “What’s going on?”
Humiliated, Sessions said, “He doesn’t want me around. I’m done. I’m tired of this.”
“You can’t resign,” Priebus said. “We cannot have the attorney general, a special counsel, and the FBI director fiasco all at the same time.”
Priebus brought Sessions back up to his office, where he, along with Pence and others, persuaded the attorney general not to resign immediately but rather to take some time to consider his actions.
* * *
—
Trump was genuinely frightened. In Mueller, Trump found a tenacious and unblemished antagonist. Stern, secretive, and straitlaced, Mueller was a registered Republican and in private conversations would espouse the old GOP principle of individual responsibility over government action. But he was perceived as apolitical and above reproach because of his well-regarded service in both the Obama and the George W. Bush administrations.
Mueller’s longtime friend Tom Wilner described the life lessons Mueller learned at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, which were similar to those ingrained in students at other elite prep schools at the time, including at St. Albans School in Washington, Wilner’s alma mater. “You always take the path of the hard right against the easy wrong,” he said. “You never compromise your principles. You do what is right no matter what is the cost. What matters is honesty, integrity, loyalty to your family and to your principles. That’s Bob. I kid because he’s so straight he’s a pain in the ass. He will never cross the line in doing something he thinks is improper or looks partisan. Never. Never. He is just so straight.”
Mueller had spent two decades prosecuting mob bosses, murderous gangsters, and drug lords in Boston, San Francisco, and Washington before becoming FBI director on September 4, 2001, exactly one week before Osama bin Laden’s hijackers orchestrated the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. He then led a wholesale reorganization of the nation’s premier investigative agency to hunt down terrorists around the globe and thwart future plots before they could be executed.
A gruff and often humorless boss, Mueller had high demands for his subordinates at the FBI—and a temper that occasionally flared. He would grill his investigators on every inch of the evidence they had gathered in their cases, often exposing holes in their work. He also had a lifelong habit of getting to work around 6:00 a.m. By the time FBI agents and detectives arrived at 7:30 or 8:00 a.m., they would find yellow sticky notes Mueller had left on their chairs:
“I came by and you weren’t here. Where are you?”
“Come find me when you get in, Bob.”
Yet Mueller, a square-jawed “Joe Friday,” inspired deep loyalty from his colleagues. “I would walk on hot coals for Bob Mueller, that’s how much I admire and respect him,” said Chuck Rosenberg, his former counsel. “And there have been times in my career working for Bob that it felt like I was.”