“He asked a lot of hard questions, and the one thing he does is question some fundamental assumptions that we make as military leaders—and he will come in and question those,” Dunford told Mitchell on July 22. “It’s a pretty energetic and an interactive dialogue.”
One victim of the Tank meeting was Trump’s relationship with Tillerson, which forever after was strained. The secretary of state came to see it as the beginning of the end. It would only worsen when news that Tillerson had called Trump a “moron” was reported in October by NBC News.
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The following weekend, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was back in the president’s crosshairs. He was under scrutiny anew for his two 2016 conversations with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. On July 21, The Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had intercepted Kislyak’s accounts of the conversations to his superiors in Moscow, telling them that he and Sessions had discussed matters related to the Trump campaign. This was important because Sessions had denied discussing the campaign with Kislyak.
Again, the news coverage triggered a spasm of fury from Trump, who in conversations with advisers had called the attorney general “fucking worthless,” a “fucking idiot,” a “fucking jerk off,” a “fucking moron,” and a “fuck head.” Trump had been openly imitating Sessions’s Alabama drawl and mocking him for being portrayed by a woman, Kate McKinnon, on Saturday Night Live.
On July 22, Trump traveled to Newport News, Virginia, to attend the commissioning ceremony for the USS Gerald R. Ford, the navy’s newest battleship. Aboard Marine One, as they choppered onto the ship, Trump gave Reince Priebus an order. “We gotta get rid of Jeff,” Trump told his chief of staff. “You have to get his resignation, and don’t give me any of this slow-me-down Reince bullshit, either. You’ve got to get it.”
Trump told Priebus to write down his reason for forcing the attorney general’s resignation: “The American people cannot withstand any more of this,” referring to negative publicity. Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, the former Sessions protégé, both were on board the helicopter and said nothing to try to talk the president out of the rash action. At one point, Trump asked Mnuchin what he thought of removing Sessions, and Mnuchin told the president he agreed. Priebus was alone in trying to stop the president.
On board the battleship, Priebus hovered backstage calling White House counsel Don McGahn to figure out what he should do. He knew it would be disastrous to follow Trump’s orders. Regardless, Jody Hunt, the attorney general’s chief of staff, had already told Priebus that Sessions would not quit and would have to be fired. So Priebus and McGahn decided to slow walk Trump. After the ceremony, Trump followed up with Priebus about the resignation letter. “Did you get it?” the president asked. Priebus persuaded Trump to hold off. The next day was Sunday, and he said the president would not want the ouster to dominate the Sunday political talk shows. “Let’s deal with this tomorrow,” Priebus told him. Trump relented. Over the next few days, Trump’s complaints to other advisers about Priebus being too “weak” would reach a fever pitch. “If we heard it once, we heard it 20 times [that] week, this erosion of confidence,” recalled a senior White House official. “The word was ‘weak’—‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘weak.’ Can’t get it done.”
On Monday, July 24, with no action taken against Sessions, Trump took to Twitter to vent. In a 7:49 a.m. missive, the president admonished “our beleaguered A.G.” For Sessions and his aides, the tweet was devastating. Over the next twenty-four hours, the media were on Sessions’s death watch. The next afternoon, shortly after 3:00, Trump strode out to the Rose Garden for a news conference. The Justice Department’s senior leadership gathered in the attorney general’s office to watch on television. Sessions and his deputies thought he would use the occasion to announce his firing. The president called on Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News, who stood up to ask her question: “Your, kind of, catch-phrase or motto before the White House was, ‘You’re fired.’ So I’m wondering if you would talk to us a little bit about whether you’ve lost confidence in Jeff Sessions, whether you want him to resign on his own, whether you’re prepared to fire him if he doesn’t, and why you’re sort of letting him twist in the wind rather than just making the call for him.”
Watching on television, Sessions was calm. He leaned back in his desk chair as if he were watching a football game. Hunt had his hand over his mouth. Rachel Brand, the department’s No. 3 who was considered a possible successor, focused intently. Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, held his hand to his head. And the attorney general’s spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, and legislative affairs chief, Stephen Boyd, both leaned forward in anticipation of what the president would say.
“Well, I don’t think I am doing that, but I am disappointed in the attorney general,” Trump said. “He should not have recused himself almost immediately after he took office. And if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me prior to taking office, and I would have, quite simply, picked somebody else. So I think that’s a bad thing not for the president, but for the presidency. I think it’s unfair to the presidency. And that’s the way I feel.”
Sessions had survived to live another day. But in the days that followed, he and his aides made plans for a “Saturday Night Massacre,” a reference to the series of Justice Department resignations triggered by President Nixon’s 1973 order that his attorney general fire the Watergate independent special prosecutor. They prepared for several scenarios: if Trump fired Sessions, if Trump fired Rosenstein, and if Trump ordered the firing of Mueller. Senior officials considered whether they would resign, too, and some had even drafted resignation letters. For instance, Hunt later told the special counsel that Sessions prepared a resignation letter during this period and for the rest of the year carried it in his pocket every time he visited the White House. At times, aides joked that the planning for a Saturday Night Massacre resembled 1950s nuclear drills: Get under your desk! Duck! Cover!
Rosenstein warned the White House that the Justice Department building would effectively clear out within an hour of any such move by Trump. His objective was to instill fear of a mass exodus that could be politically crippling for the president. Secretly, however, Rosenstein and the team developed a different plan. Whether to stay or quit was dependent on each person’s conscience, of course, but it was important to Rosenstein that enough senior people remain in their jobs to protect the Justice Department and the integrity of the special counsel investigation. He and his team warned Brand to constantly be ready to assume control at a moment’s notice. If Trump named her acting attorney general, the plan was for Brand to hold a news conference within forty-five minutes to reassure public confidence in the probe.
Rosenstein told Brand around this time that there was a good chance he would get fired, and if she took over the Russia investigation, the most important thing to do would be to buy herself time and to not act immediately on any White House orders. He said she should consult right away with the three officials under him who were up to speed on the probe. “It’s under control,” he told Brand. “It’s not a witch hunt. It’s not a fishing expedition. We’re monitoring it closely. We’re meeting with Mueller’s team every other week. If I get fired, my advice to you is, whatever they tell you, tell them, ‘I need time to sort this all out.’”