Hicks then told Corallo, “You guys really screwed this up. We had this all planned out. It was going to go away.”
“The meeting was about adoption,” Trump said, defending the statement he had dictated for his son.
Corallo felt a lump in his throat. He resented that Hicks was seeming to berate him in front of Trump, and he thought she was displaying a level of foolishness and arrogance that suggested she was not up to the job if she couldn’t see the danger of providing a partial account. Hicks, meanwhile, was exasperated from several stressful days urging transparency and truthfulness in managing the crisis despite the president’s insistence otherwise. And she believed the statement to Circa represented an egregious lapse in judgment. Rather than containing the fire, Hicks believed, Corallo and Kasowitz had poured gasoline on it. Corallo reiterated that it was unwise for them to continue the conversation without lawyers on the line, and everyone hung up.
At the same time, reporters from every news organization were pressing their sources to learn what prompted the June 2016 meeting. For the Trump team, the pressure to provide answers was intense. By midday on July 9, several reporters were hearing from their sources that the original purpose of the meeting was not Russian adoptions but an offer of incriminating information about Clinton. The Times had enough sources diming out Trump junior that Garten and Futerfas agreed it was best for their client to lay out the truthful account that they had unsuccessfully argued for the day before. So Trump junior issued a statement to the Times explaining that he had met with Veselnitskaya at the request of a mutual acquaintance from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which his father had hosted in Moscow.
“After pleasantries were exchanged,” Trump junior said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
Trump junior went on to say that Veselnitskaya redirected the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act. “It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Trump junior’s statement said.
Revoking the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a little-known law, was actually one of Putin’s biggest priorities. The U.S. legislation had infuriated Putin because it froze the assets and limited the travel of a circle of powerful Russian businessmen he relied upon as extensions of his own power. In retaliation, Putin had halted American adoptions of Russian children. Whenever Putin raised the issue of Russian adoptions, it was really code for his jihad to revoke the meddlesome U.S. sanctions. But when Veselnitskaya raised the “adoptions” code word with Trump junior at Trump Tower in June 2016, it sailed right over his head.
Inside the West Wing, tempers flared as aides realized the magnitude of the cover-up. The story only got worse. The morning of July 11, the White House learned the Times now had a copy of Trump junior’s original email exchange with Goldstone proposing the meeting with Veselnitskaya, just as Hicks had warned the president would happen. Trump junior was normally a cool customer, but now his emotions were running high, alternating between fury at the media and misery. He and his father had faced three straight days of withering news coverage because of a meeting he agreed to take and were now about to take another hit for the fourth day in a row. Reporters and lawyers would later joke that the way the president and his aides mishandled the Trump Tower story could be the case study of a graduate seminar on how not to manage crisis communications. After long existing in the shadow of his superstar younger sister whom their father openly favored, Trump junior had enjoyed playing a valued role in the campaign, but revelations about the Trump Tower meeting made him a liability to his dad.
Trump junior and his lawyers, all in New York, agreed to hurriedly get on a conference call with the president, who was in his private chambers in the White House residence, and several other lawyers and aides. It was a quick conversation. The son had to explain to Trump the bombshell about to hit about the embarrassing emails. The president listened intently, interrupting once in a while with a groan. “I’m really sorry about this, Dad,” Trump junior said.
Trump made clear he wasn’t happy, but did not acknowledge that he had caused much of the problem himself by dictating the misleading statement. “It’s a fucking mess,” Trump said. “It’s interfering with my agenda. This is screwing up what I’m trying to do.”
Then the president, his son, and their advisers debated whether to release all the emails or only a portion. Trump junior and his lawyers recommended all of them.
“The rest of them are going to leak anyway,” Trump junior said. Trump agreed.
“Fuck it,” the president declared. “Publish them all.”
After he hung up, at a little after 10:00 a.m., Trump tweeted a defense of his son for the world to see: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!”
Trump junior, meanwhile, uploaded images of all sixteen emails among him and Goldstone, Kushner, and Manafort about the June 2016 meeting with Veselnitskaya. At 11:00 a.m., Trump junior published them on Twitter. He had scooped the Times.
Trump was furious about the mess that had transpired over the past four days. At a White House meeting with some advisers, according to Corallo, Trump tore into Corallo again, now blaming him for leaking details of the emails to the Times, which Corallo denied.
“Are you one of these Never Trumpers?” the president asked his legal communications adviser.
“Mr. President, I voted for you. I supported you,” Corallo replied. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with everything you do, but I serve at your pleasure. You can dismiss me at any point.”
Corallo was crushed. Somehow, he had become the fall guy. He was looking for an out, and he found one a week later. On July 19, Trump ripped into Attorney General Jeff Sessions, questioned the loyalty of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and disparaged Mueller’s probe during an interview with Peter Baker, Michael Schmidt, and Maggie Haberman of the Times. The interview was a turning point in how Corallo viewed Trump. He considered Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller honest public servants who did not deserve to be trashed. Trump had made his job untenable. Corallo called Bowe.
“I’m done,” he said.
“Yeah,” Bowe replied. “I totally get it.”
Corallo resigned from the legal team without so much as a presidential tweet thanking him for his service.
* * *
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Behind the scenes, a quiet internal Justice Department investigation about the handling of the Clinton email investigation was learning about some soap-opera-style impropriety between a pair of FBI officials, a discovery that would forever tarnish the Mueller probe. Though the two officials’ extramarital affair and careless texts long predated Mueller’s appointment, their seeming political bias against Trump while launching an investigation of his campaign was used to smear the entire probe. On July 27, Inspector General Michael Horowitz convened a group of senior Justice and FBI officials to alert them to the texts he had uncovered between the senior counterintelligence supervisor Peter Strzok and the FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Their exchanges had made it appear that some in the FBI hoped to stop Trump from becoming president. Strzok was then working on Mueller’s team; the FBI immediately yanked him off based on the embarrassing texts.