It was a sunny afternoon in New York, and Conway left the office a little early to head home to New Jersey. He drove north on the Henry Hudson Parkway, and as he turned the car in to the cloverleaf curve to get onto the George Washington Bridge, he heard CBS News radio break in with a bulletin: Rosenstein had appointed a special counsel to take over the Russia investigation.
Conway thought to himself, “This will never work.” How could he serve in the senior ranks of the Justice Department when his wife’s boss was going to be at war with that same department? In the time it took to cross the bridge, he had made up his mind. He would not join the Trump administration. Within a few days, George called Kellyanne. George agreed to let his wife help shape his explanation to preserve her relationship with Trump—as long as it was factual.
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At the same time, another Justice Department figure was preparing an exit. After being torn to shreds by Trump, Sessions huddled in his office with his advisers to draft a resignation letter. He was angry about how the president had treated him. The next morning, May 18, he hand delivered a signed copy to Trump. “Pursuant to our conversation of yesterday, and at your request, I hereby offer my resignation,” the letter read. Trump put it in his pocket and asked Sessions whether he wanted to continue serving. Sessions told him he wanted to stay, and Trump agreed that he would remain as attorney general. They shook hands, but Sessions did not take the letter back.
Leaving the signed resignation letter with Trump was a mistake. When Sessions told Priebus about the letter, the White House chief of staff said, “Jeff, hang on a second. The DOJ has to be independent of the president. Do you understand what you just did? You basically gave the president a shock collar and put it right around your neck. You can’t do that. We’ve got to get the letter back.”
All day, Trump was in a defiant mood, beginning with a 6:39 a.m. Twitter post in which he made a baseless allegation against Democrats. “With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel [sic] appointed!” the president wrote, adding in a second tweet that the Russia investigation was “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”
Trump continued his claim of victimhood in an afternoon news conference where, standing beside Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, he insisted, “There is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can only speak for myself and the Russians. Zero.”
Around this time, Trump told Chris Christie, “Can you believe fucking Rosenstein? He appoints Mueller. Why couldn’t he just handle it himself? There’s nothing here. I didn’t do anything.”
Christie warned Trump about how a special counsel probe could spiral and create new dangers. “Your problem is that this thing will expand and grow because they’re going to find other crimes,” he said. “You give a prosecutor and an FBI agent enough time, they’ll find a crime. That’s what I used to do for a living. They’ll find it.”
On May 19, Trump departed for his maiden foreign trip, a nine-day, five-city tour that would take him from Saudi Arabia to Israel to the Vatican to NATO Headquarters and to Italy for a global leaders summit. The stakes were high, especially for a temperamental president whose knowledge of foreign affairs was relatively scant. But, consumed as he was by the Mueller development, Trump was entirely unprepared. As the president and his team took off from Joint Base Andrews for the twelve-plus hour flight to Riyadh, The New York Times reported for the first time what Trump had told the top Russian diplomats during their May 10 Oval Office meeting: Comey was “a real nut job,” and by firing him, he had relieved the “great pressure because of Russia.”
Trump lit up. Although the Times story bore no direct connection to the special counsel, Trump read it as a signal that he was now at war with his own Justice Department and that mysterious leakers inside the government were trying to help investigators. The president sat in the forward cabin of the plane grousing. Aides strode in and out to try to calm him down. They tried to shift his focus to his meetings in Saudi Arabia and the landmark speech he was planning to deliver before dozens of Arab leaders. There was much preparation left to do, but Trump’s furor did not subside. He stayed awake for the red-eye flight across the Atlantic.
“This is a witch hunt!” Trump screamed. “There shouldn’t be a special counsel!”
“How did they get this?” Trump said of the Times. Then he illogically complained they had gotten some details wrong, when he knew they had not. “This is made-up. There’s no sources.”
The next day came another blockbuster story that further stoked Trump’s rage and paranoia. The Washington Post reported on May 20 that the Russia investigation had identified a senior White House adviser, who would later be identified as Kushner, as “a significant person of interest,” the first sign that the probe had reached the top echelons of Trump’s administration.
On the ground in Riyadh, Trump stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, a massive, lavish palace of a hotel that to mark the occasion lit its facade in the evenings with a huge image of Trump’s portrait. In the president’s suite, the television was set to CNN International—which, like CNN’s domestic channel, was heavy with coverage of Trump. He simmered with anger as he watched with some of his advisers. Despite the distractions, however, Trump managed to make it through his first few days abroad as president without incident. In fact, his speech imploring the Muslim world to confront “Islamic extremism” and eliminate “fanatical violence” was well received. Miraculously, he refrained from tweeting about the Russia investigation, even as he nursed his feelings of persecution with every cable television panel he watched.
On May 22, Trump carried on with the next stop on his trip, meetings in Jerusalem and Bethlehem with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, without his top two advisers, Bannon and Priebus, who had caught a ride to Washington on the government jet of Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and returned to the White House. They had a president to protect from the fast-expanding investigation. They had a war room to build.
PART TWO
Six
SUITING UP FOR BATTLE
Landing in Tel Aviv on May 22, 2017, Trump strode down a red carpet to the triumphal sound of a military band and vowed to bring peace to the Middle East. He toured Jerusalem’s Old City, visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to honor Christians and placing a prayer in the Western Wall, where he put his palm on the ancient stones while wearing a yarmulke in solidarity with Jews. Over dinner with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump sketched the broad outlines of a peace plan between Israelis and Palestinians and declared newfound resolve to confront Iran. The hastily rehearsed words coming out of his mouth all day were about the unending conflict in the Middle East, but Trump’s mind was focused on the mushrooming special counsel investigation into his campaign.