Over the next several days, Cobb further consulted the Office of Legal Counsel, reviewed the law, and became even more convinced. He was familiar with a ruling in an independent counsel investigation of Mike Espy, an agriculture secretary under President Clinton, which set a very high bar that investigators had to meet in order to question a president and force his or her testimony. Investigators had to show they couldn’t get the information any other way. Under the Espy precedent, the more the White House cooperated by providing detailed records and responsive witnesses, the more difficult it would be for Mueller to subpoena the president himself.
“You can build a record of cooperation every day that you’re cooperating, and every time you’re making a production and every time people are testifying voluntarily, that builds a big mountain,” Cobb told Trump and his advisers. Cobb argued that this mountain of cooperation could therefore shield the president from having to answer investigators’ questions, which Trump’s personal lawyers wanted to avoid in part out of fear that he might perjure himself, given his tendency to embellish or fabricate.
Dowd, who had been meeting with Mueller’s team, told Cobb he thought he could see light at the end of the tunnel and a speedy end to the probe, at least as it related to concluding the Trump campaign had engaged in no collusion. Dowd believed that Mueller had assured him he would make a rather quick decision on this and would alert Dowd in the near term. Dowd was cheered by Mueller’s insistence that he would move speedily. Cobb liked the sound of that because he felt he could use Mueller’s promise of a swift investigation to apply pressure in public by telling reporters that the White House could turn over all its records and witnesses by Thanksgiving or the end of the year, and so the probe could be completed then as well. Dowd shared a rosy outlook with the president.
“This could be over by the end of January,” Dowd told Trump.
Cobb, sixty-seven, noticed right away that he and Trump had different styles. Cobb liked to think before he spoke, while Trump liked to talk off the cuff, as part of his process of testing ideas and gathering information. Cobb watched Trump throw up in the air theories and proposals to get reactions, but recognized the president as nobody’s fool. Cobb was intrigued by Trump’s habit of keeping a running score on his senior aides’ popularity and “performance ratings.”
Others noticed that the president was obsessed with knocking down as inferior what his predecessors had built. “His whole DNA is, whatever anybody else has done is stupid, I’m smarter, and therefore that’s why he goes around breaking glass all the time,” one senior Republican senator recalled. “He’s torn a lot of things up. He likes to break things. But what has he put together yet?”
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In August, the West Wing underwent a renovation for two weeks, so Trump had a change of scenery. The staff was displaced, just as Kelly was settling into his new post, and Trump decamped to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump was hypersensitive to any suggestion that he was on vacation, even though he effectively was, and he ordered aides to plan public events each day: a briefing on health care or a roundtable session on opioids, for instance. But they occupied only an hour or so of his time, and he spent the rest of each day playing a round of golf, chatting with friends in the clubhouse, and hanging out in his private cottage.
Trump was accompanied by a small coterie of aides, including Kelly, communications director Hope Hicks, and staff secretary Rob Porter. But he spent hours each day alone in the cottage watching cable news and reading newspapers. Aides carted up from Washington boxes that contained back issues of The New York Times and The Washington Post that the president had not had a chance to fully peruse in the White House. The extensive news coverage about Mueller’s investigation—“pure hate,” as Bannon would refer to it—put Trump in a foul mood.
“Can you believe how obsessed they are with this?” Trump fumed to aides. “It’s so overblown. That’s all they want to talk about. This is so ridiculous. We didn’t do anything.”
Trump was not only bothered by the Russia investigation. He was confounded over what to do about North Korea. Ever since Obama had told him, back in November 2016, that North Korea would be the greatest challenge he would confront as president, Trump had been vexed by the security threat posed by Kim Jong Un. A series of missile tests in the spring and summer of 2017 rattled him, and as he vacationed at Bedminster, he was getting regular updates from National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and other officials about the rogue regime. On August 8, Trump issued a fresh warning to Kim after North Korea vowed to develop a nuclear arsenal capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.
“They will be met with fire and fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” Trump said, folding his arms and staring straight into the cameras.
The bellicose threat was interpreted as yet another unscripted presidential eruption, but one with the consequence of escalating the war of words between the two countries and their unpredictable leaders. Trump’s advisers rushed to reassure suddenly jittery world leaders that Trump’s statement was part of an agreed policy of pressure on Pyongyang. But Trump’s intimates recognized that there was no grand strategy at play and that the president was unsettled.
During his stay in Bedminster, Trump invited Chris Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, over for dinner one night. The three of them ate in private on the patio. Melania was away (and in fact had visited the White House only occasionally in the winter and spring, living instead in New York so that their son, Barron, could finish the school year there). Trump was usually punctual to dinner, but he got to the table about fifteen minutes late and seemed preoccupied, even rattled. Trump had known the Christies for nearly two decades, and he and Mary Pat always hugged and kissed when they saw each other. But this time, the president extended his hand for a more formal shake.
Once Trump sat down, he didn’t say much. The Christies were used to dinners in which they listened to Trump gab for two hours straight, but this time the president was mostly silent. Trump eventually explained the reason for his delay: he had just been on calls with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean president Moon Jae-in, discussing the nuclear brinkmanship with North Korea.
“It’s really complicated,” Trump told the Christies, adding that he needed the New Jersey governor to give him regular advice on what to do. It was immediately clear to his guests that the North Korea quandary simply overwhelmed Trump.
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The Mueller investigation kept needling Trump at every turn. On August 9, while he was still in Bedminster, the president watched the jarring news reports that FBI agents had raided the home of Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman. Using a search warrant, agents had entered Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia, home in the early-morning hours of July 26 and seized a trove of documents and other materials related to the Russia probe. This was Mueller’s first shock-and-awe move, and it signaled a newly aggressive phase of the investigation.