Neither the Trump Organization nor Trump junior knew how quickly the world was about to come crashing down on their heads. Word of Brown’s notification to Congress soon reached The New York Times, where on July 7 reporters called White House officials and Trump family lawyers saying the paper planned to write about a mysterious meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 with a Russian lawyer. Trump was four thousand miles away from his lawyers in Washington and New York, and his aides scrambled to buy more time. Hicks proposed a conference call with the Times reporters the next morning. But the morning of July 8 came and went with no call from the White House. And by this time, Trump and his entourage had boarded Air Force One in Hamburg to fly home to Washington. The Times reporters had put together a list of questions and emailed them to White House aides, who discussed them on the plane. They immediately realized they had a crisis on their hands.
The lawyers had been dreading this looming public relations nightmare but did not expect it to burst wide open this soon and were caught flat-footed. The president’s own lawyers, Marc Kasowitz and Mike Bowe, hadn’t yet fully briefed Trump on the digital trail. They had been working with a friendly conservative outlet, Circa, which also knew a little bit about a meeting with Russians. Bowe and communications strategist Mark Corallo hoped to cast the story in a very different light than Lowell had envisioned. They told the Circa reporter that the Russian lawyer had ties to a Democratic opposition research firm and appeared to be trying to set up the Trump campaign to look stupid. But they hadn’t been able to settle on a media plan with the other lawyers by that Saturday.
Lowell, Kushner’s attorney, was playing tennis when he was dragged off the court by an urgent call. The Times was about to publish details of the Trump Tower meeting. This was the very story Lowell had persuaded the broader legal team to carefully shape and communicate on their own terms, but now the dam was about to break and none of them had control.
When the Times inquired about the Trump Tower meeting, the person with the most firsthand knowledge of it, Trump junior, could not easily be reached. An avid outdoorsman, the president’s namesake son, then thirty-nine, was on a fishing boat on a lake in upstate New York. He had spotty cell service, and people struggled to reach him, but Hicks got to Trump junior with a series of texts.
Trump junior had already carefully reviewed the emails with his lawyer the previous week, primarily to prepare a press strategy, because the emails would likely have to be released to Congress. Trump junior had explained that although he had been eager to take the meeting with Veselnitskaya and hoped to learn something incriminating about Clinton, he came to consider the meeting a dud. He remembered being mildly annoyed that Veselnitskaya offered no actual evidence linking Clinton to a scandal. Instead, the brunette lawyer spent most of the meeting talking about a proposed deal: the Russian government would lift a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children if the U.S. government revoked a law sanctioning prominent Russian billionaires. This was a personal priority of Putin’s, and Veselnitskaya had for years lobbied against the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on a so-called black list of accused human rights abusers. As Trump junior later recalled, it was a “wasted 20 minutes.” He and his lawyers had crafted a few versions of statements for him to explain the meeting when the time came, and Trump junior’s preference was a detailed account: a page-long description of how he came to hold the meeting and everything that happened.
Kushner, too, had reviewed his emails and texts with his lawyer before the Times call. He had remembered the meeting with Veselnitskaya as being fairly odd and unimportant. When Trump junior had gone fishing, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were traveling home from Germany with the president and conferred with Hicks and Kushner’s communications aide Josh Raffel to strategize about Kushner’s response to the inquiry.
Those in Germany knew the disclosure of the meeting carried political and potentially legal peril and quickly agreed on a strategy. Trump junior would release a statement to the Times to contain the fallout. His account would be truthful—including the fact, which they considered helpful, that Veselnitskaya’s offer of damaging information on Clinton never materialized—so it could not be repudiated later if the full details emerged or, as the family’s lawyers knew would eventually happen, copies of the emails surfaced.
“It’s all going to come out eventually,” Futerfas told some of those discussing what to do. He advocated for Trump junior’s position: don’t try to hide that the Russians had offered unflattering information about Clinton.
A statement was drafted in Trump junior’s name stating, truthfully, that he was asked by an acquaintance to meet “with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.”
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Once Trump boarded Air Force One, however, the president changed course. Retrofitted for presidential travel, the military’s iconic Boeing 747 is segmented by cabins. The president’s personal cabin is at the front of the fuselage, near the nose, and separate cabins flow back from there, with passengers assigned to seats in descending order of seniority: top advisers, then other staff, then Secret Service agents, then guests such as friends or members of Congress, and finally, in the rear, a traveling pool of thirteen journalists. For the first few hours of the flight, Trump worked furiously in the front cabin with Hicks to strategize about the brewing story about the Kremlin lawyer. Other aides, including White House press secretary Sean Spicer and his deputy, Sarah Sanders, were seated in the main staff cabin, feeling excluded from the action up front.
By nature a micromanager, Trump sought to minimize what he considered a public relations disaster—for his son, but primarily for himself. As was often the case with Trump, he didn’t know all the details, and yet he also knew what he planned to say wasn’t entirely true. He was just trying to wrest control of that day’s headline and survive.
“You all think that he has some master strategy, but really he’s just trying to get past the crisis of that moment,” said one top adviser. “He thought to himself, ‘Those emails aren’t going to see the light of day until the fall,’ and we’re talking about this story right now. That was an eternity to him.”
So Trump took charge to cover up the truth. Hicks sent Trump junior a series of text messages from the plane explaining that the president was proposing a different tack. They would emphasize that the meeting with Veselnitskaya was about Russian adoption policy and say nothing about the campaign. In conferring with Kushner and Hicks, Trump insisted that the statement not touch upon his campaign but rather focus on the obscure policy connections between the ban on Russian adoptions and the U.S. Magnitsky Act. Trump junior conveyed his irritation that his father was crafting a statement that sidestepped the Clinton element, a glaring and problematic omission.
Because the president and his aides were on a plane an ocean away, there was little chance for a thoughtful, strategic conference call with all the parties. Hicks continued to confer with Trump junior over text, while Trump junior discussed options with his lawyers, Futerfas and the Trump Organization’s general counsel, Alan Garten. Lowell was conferring with Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Other White House aides were messaging with Garten. The president was adamant, however. In the front cabin of Air Force One, Hicks took Trump’s dictation, typing up a draft she kept trying to perfect.