Ten
UNHINGED
The morning of Monday, July 31, John Kelly was sworn in as chief of staff in a small, private ceremony in the Oval Office. Kelly had just run homeland security, a bureaucratic behemoth overseeing a number of competitive agencies, each with its own individual culture. A former combat veteran whose valor on the battlefield had been chronicled in books, Kelly won at first the respect of Trump’s staff, including even Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. “This is the eleventh time I’ve taken this oath to defend the Constitution and I want everybody here to know I’m here to defend the Constitution and to defend the rule of law,” Kelly told the other officials in attendance. When he later addressed the larger staff, in the soaring lobby of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, he pointed out that the oath “doesn’t say anything in there about being loyal to the president. It doesn’t say anything in there about the GOP being more important than your integrity.”
Kelly’s first chore was deciding what to do with communications director Anthony Scaramucci, fifty-three. The flashy Manhattan financier, who called himself the Mooch, was friends with the president and had been recruited as communications director by Ivanka and Kushner in part to help oust Reince Priebus. Scaramucci unloaded on Priebus and Steve Bannon in an expletive-filled interview with The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that was conducted on July 26 and published the next day.
Minutes before Kelly’s July 31 swearing-in ceremony, Scaramucci approached the defense secretary in the West Wing lobby. “Hey, General Mattis,” he said. “I know you’re close to Kelly. Can you get me a meeting with him? He won’t see me.”
Startled, Mattis replied, “Maybe you ought to talk to his scheduler.”
“Oh, no,” Scaramucci said. “They’re blowing me off. General, you don’t understand.”
Mattis tap-danced away from the request. Later that day, Kelly fired Scaramucci. He lasted just eleven days on the job.
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July 31 also was Ty Cobb’s first day in the White House as special counsel for the Russia investigation. Cobb was not personally representing Trump, but was brought in to oversee the White House’s involvement in the probe, in part because Don McGahn had recused himself and most of the lawyers in his shop from the investigation because some of them were now witnesses.
On his first day, Cobb came to learn that such distinctions were rather blurry in Trump’s world. Cobb was filling out administrative paperwork and preparing to move into his new office when two senior officials raised the same request. McGahn and Bannon both asked for Cobb’s help removing Kushner and Ivanka from the White House staff. Each of them tried to convince Cobb that this was the most important way to protect the president.
McGahn, who was already on bad terms with the president because of his refusal to comply with some of his demands, including to ask Rosenstein about having Robert Mueller removed as special counsel, told Cobb he needed to persuade Trump about the problems his daughter and son-in-law created. Bannon was more forceful, stressing the many obstacles they presented. “You need to shoot them in the fucking head,” Bannon jokingly told Cobb.
Cobb was wary of making any snap decisions this early. But Cobb’s view was also partly shaped by a careful reading of the palace intrigue. Priebus had just been fired, and Bannon might be the next to go, while McGahn had an especially prickly relationship with the president and the kids. Cobb reasoned that he could not get his job done without the support of Kushner and Ivanka, and he came to like and trust them.
Cobb had his own instant tensions with McGahn, who had lobbied Trump to appoint other lawyers for Cobb’s job. Cobb’s first big task was reviewing documents and submitting them to Mueller’s team. But he did not initially have a staff, and McGahn initially would not lend him lawyers to help. Cobb learned on his first day that McGahn had been trying to deny Cobb the premium West Wing office Trump had promised him. By September, however, Cobb would have as a deputy Steven Groves, an able lawyer and skilled strategist who had been U.S. ambassador Nikki Haley’s chief of staff at the United Nations.
On August 1, his second day at work, Cobb called James Quarles, Mueller’s deputy who was in charge of the special counsel’s interactions with the White House, to try to introduce himself. Cobb got a phone call back from Quarles and Michael Dreeben, a soft-spoken and well-known appellate lawyer on the Mueller team. Dreeben explained that Mueller’s team was a bit frustrated. They had made a series of requests of the White House and thus far had not received a satisfactory reply. In particular, they wanted White House permission to review a key document, one of the draft statements Trump wrote in May in Bedminster as he prepared to fire Comey. Mueller’s team felt they were getting stonewalled. They had a general idea about the contents but had been waiting for the White House to decide if they wanted to hold the document back due to executive privilege concerns.
Dreeben laid out for Cobb one way the White House could cooperate. He cited a 2008 opinion under Attorney General Michael Mukasey that found the White House could share sensitive internal documents with another executive branch office, such as the Justice Department, for the purposes of an investigation. As Dreeben explained, the White House wouldn’t have to deal with the question of whether these records should be shielded by executive privilege because under the Mukasey memo the executive branch would agree not to divulge any of the records without White House permission. Cobb consulted with a career attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who confirmed Dreeben’s interpretation: the White House would not waive executive privilege or risk anything by sharing internal notes or the recollections of staff with the special counsel.
A veteran of previous independent counsel fights, Cobb felt cooperation was the right path for several reasons. Trump had been emphatic with Cobb that he had done nothing wrong and that he wanted to get the investigation over with as quickly as possible. As Cobb saw it, that could be achieved by cooperating fully with the investigators, turning over every document they needed, helping to provide staff witnesses for interviews, and reaching a resolution without subpoenas and court fights. Cobb laid out this cooperative approach to John Dowd and fellow attorney Jay Sekulow, who then explained its virtues to Trump. The Mukasey memo meant no potentially sensitive or embarrassing material would automatically become public without White House agreement, and sharing broadly with Mueller would speed up the investigation. Trump immediately embraced what lawyers on the team dubbed an “open kimono” strategy.
On August 1, Cobb authorized the Justice Department to give Mueller’s team the draft of Trump’s letter to fire Comey. Trump lawyers had reviewed four drafts of the termination letter, including the final version that Keith Schiller—“the Manila Killa,” as one adviser called him—carried in a manila envelope to FBI headquarters. They felt that the letter exonerated Trump of obstructing justice because they believed it showed he was firing Comey for declining to state publicly that the president was not under investigation, not because of corrupt intent to end the Russia probe.