White House advisers thought Kasowitz looked foolish and ill-prepared. As one seasoned white-collar lawyer who had been asked to help recruit attorneys for Trump put it, “That was terrible. I was watching that thinking, ‘How does it advance his client’s interests for him to be saying these stupid things?’ He wasn’t prepared. His answers were not good.”
* * *
—
As they settled into a work pattern with the president, the lawyers increasingly saw Kushner and Ivanka Trump as problems. The kids wandered in and out of strategy sessions about the investigation, without so much as a knock on the door, asking what was going on. Ivanka would walk in, say, “Hi, Dad,” and the lawyers would stop talking about substance and simply smile at her awkwardly, waiting for her to leave. She and Kushner talked openly about details of the investigation with other staffers, as well as with the president, and privately offered him their own advice.
“The kids are always there,” Corallo later explained. “The discomfort is with the kids always being there and talking about the case with other people in the White House, which makes everybody a witness.” The dynamic, he added, “makes it impossible for the White House to function in a normal way.”
Bannon and Priebus had warned Kasowitz and Bowe back in May about the problems created by having the president’s daughter and son-in-law working in the White House in the midst of a special counsel investigation. McGahn shared their concerns. But the kids wanted to be part of the action, and they wanted the lawyers on their side. They worked to charm Dowd, who was immediately taken by Ivanka as she profusely thanked him for joining the legal team and remarked about how valuable he would be to her father.
Others who interacted with Ivanka found her to be a spoiled princess who had absorbed her father’s worst narcissistic, superficial, and self-promoting qualities. “As a twelve-year-old, she was put on the phone with CEOs, and her father told her she was the most amazing thing in the world and her opinion was valued,” one administration official explained. “She is a product of her environment.”
As the lawyers for Trump, his family members, and his business began poring over Trump campaign records in mid-June, they were finding no evidence that linked the president to any coordination or collaboration with Russians. But they did find issues with Kushner. The presidential son-in-law had failed to disclose all of his meetings with foreign officials, and specifically Russians, in his required government forms. He had had more than a hundred in-person meetings or phone calls with representatives of more than twenty countries, many of them between Trump’s election and inauguration. A failure to include every foreign contact the first time that a senior White House official applied for a security clearance was serious and might nix someone’s chances at a job, but it could be excused if there were mitigating circumstances. A failure to fully correct the mistake by disclosing all additional contacts a second time, as was the case with Kushner, would likely disqualify an official from public service in normal circumstances.
Kushner retained a renowned white-collar defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, to represent him. Lowell had defended many high-profile clients, including Senators Robert Menendez, on charges of public corruption, and John Edwards, on charges of campaign finance fraud, and had been chief counsel to the House Democrats during impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Although Lowell was a Democrat, he had just the kind of résumé Trump would have liked leading his own legal defense.
On June 13, Bowe, Dowd, Sekulow, and Corallo gathered at the Washington offices of Kasowitz’s firm just two blocks from the White House to discuss the kids. Sekulow broached the subject the team was wrestling over: “Should Jared and Ivanka be in the White House?” Some of the lawyers were wary of staking out a position. They wanted to maintain their standing with the president, and they figured that whatever they advised Trump to do about the kids, he would share with Kushner and Ivanka, and then they would be “roadkill,” as one of the advisers put it.
Still, in the confines of Kasowitz’s law office, they were frank with one another about the challenges created by the presidential family members. Corallo said he worried that Kushner could make other staffers witnesses in the investigation and that he would not be able to assert privilege to protect conversations he had with them. Corallo also argued that Kushner’s security clearance problems alone made it impossible for him to remain a true adviser in the White House. “The politics are really bad,” he said. Bowe said the legal team should at least prepare for the possibility that their departure might be necessary. And Sekulow agreed they needed to be ready to discuss the pros and cons with Trump. “Prepare some talking points if it comes to pass that we need to recommend it,” Sekulow said. But Dowd defended Kushner and Ivanka, stressing that Trump relied on them and the lawyers shouldn’t get involved.
“We’re not going to get between family,” Dowd said.
Seven
IMPEDING JUSTICE
Monday, June 12, was a day of ritual, which masked the president’s agita. Trump convened his first full cabinet meeting, a now infamous session in which U.S. government officials took turns pledging fealty to their master. “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda and the American people,” Reince Priebus crowed. But no one was loyal to anyone in the orbit of Donald Trump.
The groveling of Priebus and others did little to distract Trump from his aspiration to end the special counsel investigation. Priebus and Steve Bannon met that same Monday with Christopher Ruddy, telling him the president had seriously been considering abruptly firing Robert Mueller. That evening, Ruddy said in an appearance on the PBS NewsHour that Trump was weighing whether to terminate the special counsel, a revelation that transfixed Washington.
Trump was motivated by his conviction, fueled partially by the analysis of his lawyers, that Mueller had conflicts of interest. Mueller was rapidly building his team, hiring experienced litigators from top firms and hard-charging federal prosecutors. By mid-June, he had hired thirteen lawyers. The team included Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s former FBI chief of staff; James Quarles, a former Watergate assistant special prosecutor; Jeannie Rhee, a former prosecutor and partner with Mueller at WilmerHale; Michael Dreeben, a deputy solicitor general known as one of the country’s foremost legal thinkers; and Andrew Weissmann, a famed Enron prosecutor and a former chief of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section. Many additional lawyers were itching to be a part of this historic investigation, and Mueller was preparing to hire some of them.
Trump’s lawyers closely studied the backgrounds of Mueller’s hires and saw a pattern. Though Mueller was registered as a Republican and appointed FBI director by Bush, many of the lawyers joining his team were Democrats, and some had given money to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Trump’s lawyers also thought there was a decent legal argument that Mueller was conflicted out of being special counsel because he had met with Trump the day before his appointment for what the president claimed was a job interview. Mueller could have learned Trump’s thinking about the probe and whether Trump implied he required loyalty in his next FBI director. Either way, he could be a witness who had an improper window into the mind of the investigation’s key subject.