Trump replied that Dowd and Cobb had assured him that cooperating was the best strategy.
“They tell me I’m going to get a letter of exoneration,” Trump told Bannon. It was going to be over any day now. Trump was sure of it.
Bannon shook his head at the notion that Mueller was about to give Trump a clean bill of health.
On the morning of December 2, Trump was upset that none of his lawyers were speaking up for him in the media and pushing back against speculation that the reason Flynn lied to the FBI might have been to avoid implicating the president. At 12:14 p.m., about twenty-four hours after Flynn’s plea agreement was entered in federal court, Trump took to Twitter to defend himself, as he often did, and in so doing offered a striking new view on Flynn’s criminal acts.
“I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI,” Trump tweeted. “He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”
The tweet surprised and frustrated Cobb. This was explicitly what he thought he and Dowd had persuaded Trump not to do. Plus, the substance of the message created a whole new firestorm, indicating that Trump had long known Flynn had lied about his contacts with Kislyak, something the president had never before acknowledged. It covered the cable news stations all Saturday morning, and reporters were barraging the White House press shop for comment on this new development.
Cobb confronted Dowd about the tweet.
“Where did that come from?” Cobb asked his colleague. “This is contrary to everything we agreed to.”
“The old man asked me to,” Dowd said, referring to the president. Dowd later challenged this account, claiming that Cobb had advance notice of the tweet language.
Dowd then issued a statement asserting that he had drafted the language for Trump’s tweet.
Meanwhile, Dowd and Sekulow were preparing for a meeting they had scheduled with Mueller in the third week of December. They were hopeful it would lead toward some closure, at least in terms of concluding the president and his campaign had not colluded. The president had been telling friends that the probe would be largely complete within weeks, and when that was reported in The Washington Post, his lawyers felt even greater pressure to somehow bring the investigation to an end.
On December 6, Bowe flew to Washington to see Dowd. They met at Shelly’s Back Room, a cigar bar two blocks from the White House. Bowe was worried enough by what he was hearing to make a special trip. He wanted to make sure Dowd didn’t agree to a presidential interview as a means of making good on his promise to Trump, in part because there was no guarantee that putting the president in front of Mueller would necessarily end the probe.
“I’m sure this will be over soon,” Dowd told Bowe. “I’m confident we can get a letter.” Bowe feared Dowd would agree to an interview to try to end the probe; Dowd later said he had no intention of considering an interview.
“It would just be malpractice, John,” Bowe replied, waving the red flag that he knew lawyers would pay attention to. “And there’s no need. In order to try to get it done quickly, we shouldn’t make a bad mistake.”
The lawyers were in a bind, with no clean bill of health on the horizon. Meanwhile, Trump continued to deny the conclusive evidence gathered by his own intelligence agencies that Russia waged an assault on American democracy by interfering in the 2016 election in support of his candidacy. Even as he proclaimed total innocence of conspiring with the Russians, Trump still couldn’t bring himself to state definitively that the Russians interfered in the election.
“What the president has to say is, ‘We know the Russians did it, they know they did it, I know they did it, and we will not rest until we learn everything there is to know about how and do everything possible to prevent it from happening again,’” Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director under President George W. Bush, told Greg Miller of The Washington Post. Trump “has never said anything close to that and will never say anything close to that.”
As the year came to a close, Trump and his administration did little to hold Russia to account for its illegal actions or to deter future Kremlin attacks and safeguard U.S. elections. The only punishment for Russia came from Congress, which voted in August to impose additional penalties against Moscow despite fierce resistance from Trump. As Trump pursued an alliance with President Vladimir Putin, he never convened a cabinet-level meeting on Russian election interference in 2017.
* * *
—
In December, Trump had gathered his generals and top diplomats for a meeting as part of the administration’s ongoing strategy talks about troop deployments in Afghanistan in the Situation Room, a secure meeting room on the ground floor of the West Wing. Trump didn’t like the Situation Room, because he didn’t think it had enough gravitas. It just wasn’t impressive.
But there Trump was, struggling to come up with a new Afghanistan policy and frustrated that so many U.S. forces were deployed in so many places around the world. The conversation began to tilt in the same direction as it had when Trump met with top military and national security officials in the Pentagon’s Tank back in July.
“All these countries need to start paying us for the troops we are sending to their countries. We need to be making a profit,” Trump said. “We could turn a profit on this.”
General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to explain to the president once again, gently, that troops deployed in these regions provided stability there, which helped make America safer. Another officer chimed in that charging other countries for U.S. soldiers would be against the law.
“But it just wasn’t working,” one former Trump aide recalled. “Nothing worked.”
After the Tank meeting in July, Tillerson had told his aides that he would never silently tolerate such demeaning talk from Trump about making money off the deployments of U.S. soldiers. Tillerson’s father, at the age of seventeen, had committed to enlist in the navy on his next birthday, wanting so much to serve his country in World War II. His great-uncle was a career officer in the navy as well. Both men had been on his mind, Tillerson told aides, when Trump unleashed his tirade in the Tank and again when he repeated those points in the Situation Room in December.
“We need to get our money back,” Trump told the room.
That was it. Tillerson stood up. But when he did so, he turned his back to the president and faced the flag officers and the rest of the aides in the room. He didn’t want a repeat of the scene in the Tank.
“I’ve never put on a uniform, but I know this,” Tillerson said. “Every person who has put on a uniform, the people in this room, they don’t do it to make a buck. They did it for their country, to protect us. I want everyone to be clear about how much we as a country value their service.”