“What are you talking about?” Priebus asked. “Why are you done? What happened?”
“I’m tired of the president asking me to do crazy shit,” McGahn said, declining to elaborate further.
“You’re not resigning,” Priebus told him. “You can’t resign. You’re going to relax for today and we’re going to talk tomorrow, but you’re not resigning. You can’t do that to the staff. You cannot instantly resign from your position at a time when we need you.”
McGahn then spoke with Bannon, who tried to talk him out of resigning by underscoring how valuable he was to the president by taking stands like the one he was taking now.
“It’s already Saturday night,” Bannon told McGahn. “You can’t do anything now.”
Trump did not call back that night, so the urgency McGahn had felt that afternoon passed as the night wore on. McGahn reluctantly agreed to stay on but told Bannon things had to change.
“We gotta get a real lawyer in here because I can’t keep being put in the middle of this shit,” McGahn said. “This is all fucked-up.”
Trump would later claim that he never asked McGahn to help him “fire” Mueller, which technically was true. He hadn’t used the word “fire.” But it was clear to McGahn what Trump wanted him to do.
* * *
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On Friday, June 16, as Trump was preoccupied with trying to remove Mueller, his lawyers had their first meeting with the special counsel. This was the meeting Trump had been pushing them to have since he had officially hired Kasowitz in May. In Mueller’s temporary offices near Union Station, Kasowitz, Bowe, and Dowd introduced themselves. Accompanying Mueller were Quarles and Zebley. The Trump team soon broached the elephant in the room: the news reports that Mueller was now investigating the president himself.
“You know, Bob, I don’t know if you are investigating the president,” Dowd said. “Maybe you’re doing a preliminary inquiry. But we have several views about why you can’t have a president obstructing justice.”
Bowe walked through the law, point by point, that gave the president broad constitutional powers to fire any appointee and take action on investigations. Mueller listened carefully. His stone-faced expression never changed. The lawyers said they had two more concerns, about Comey’s credibility as a witness and the conflicts they felt Mueller had in serving as special counsel. They asked if the prosecutors would like their legal arguments spelled out in memo form. Polite but revealing nothing, Mueller said, “We’re happy to take any presentation you have.”
Dowd said a lengthy investigation could hurt Trump.
“We’ve got a president who’s got to govern. We’ll get you whatever you need. In exchange, I want a decision. We’ll move it, you move it.” Mueller replied, “You know me, John. I don’t let any grass grow under my feet.”
Mueller had been in the job only a month at this point and made clear to Trump’s lawyers that his team had a lot of work to do. The week before, Mueller’s deputies had interviewed Andrew Goldstein, who would become a key investigator into whether the president obstructed justice. In the days just before and after their meeting with Trump’s lawyers, Mueller’s team held strategy sessions about getting a legal agreement with Cypriot authorities to obtain evidence they might be able to seize inside a storage locker belonging to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman.
While Trump’s legal team presented a united front with Mueller, some were suspicious about a mysterious enemy slinging arrows their way, targeting those who had raised concerns about Jared Kushner. On June 19, Corallo alerted his bosses, Kasowitz and Bowe, that he had been contacted by The New York Times that day for comment on a story about tweets he sent in 2016 criticizing Trump’s candidacy and disparaging Ivanka Trump and Kushner by suggesting their hiring raised doubts about Trump’s commitment to “draining the swamp.” Corallo had actually flagged the tweets to Trump senior advisers before his hiring on the legal team and found it odd and unsettling they were being reported as news.
The next day, June 20, a client contacted a lawyer at the Kasowitz firm to alert him that a ProPublica reporter had been asking him about allegations that Kasowitz had been absent from the firm for lengthy periods in the recent past. ProPublica had received a humiliating trove of secrets, which had been known to only a tiny handful of firm insiders, including allegations that Kasowitz struggled with alcohol abuse. Kasowitz assumed someone inside his firm had betrayed him, but he did not know who.
On June 21, Kasowitz and Bowe briefed Trump on several pressing topics, which others would learn included their review of possibly problematic campaign emails they might have to turn over to Congress, and highlights of their first meeting with Mueller on June 16, a subject Trump was eager to hear about. The two lawyers told the president they had conveyed his message, that the probe created a cloud over the president and was unfair. They reported Dowd’s request that this not drag on, and Mueller’s assurances he would “not let any grass grow under my feet.”
Not long after, the president said, “I gotta meet this guy Dowd.”
In mid-June, Kasowitz and Bowe still believed they could recruit someone else as lead attorney, with Dowd playing a supporting role. But they didn’t have one yet. Bowe agreed to bring Dowd over one afternoon for a late lunch with the president. Bowe liked and respected Dowd but also never expected to put him in charge of representing the president. For his meeting with the president, Dowd entered the president’s offices seeming to be in awe. Inside were Trump, Bowe, Corallo, and Jay Sekulow. The men exchanged some pleasantries and took seats in the dining room to enjoy steak, fries, and Diet Coke, one of Trump’s frequent lunch menus. The president asked Dowd, “So, do you have a relationship with this guy, Mueller?”
“He’s a marine like me,” Dowd said. “I can relate to him, Mr. President. I can talk to him.”
“What do you think he’s doing, John?” Trump asked.
Dowd told the president he felt this could be wrapped up quickly. “I think I can talk to Bob Mueller and get this done in a matter of weeks,” he said.
Attendees remembered Dowd’s comment differently. Some thought he told the president he could get it resolved in a matter of months. Dowd disputed giving a time frame. Bowe was stunned and looked over at Corallo, then stared at Dowd. He told associates later, “He was working the president.”
At first, Trump sounded skeptical.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Trump said. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir,” Dowd said.
“That’s great; that’s just great,” the president replied.
Corallo sensed in Dowd that day a “satisfaction that, ‘Hey, this is what I’ve worked for my whole life.’ It’s like a crowning achievement. ‘I’m in the Oval Office and the president is my client now.’ That’s a big deal. It went to John’s head and he decided to take over.”