In the February 21 meeting, Trump and Lewandowski had spent about fifteen or twenty minutes alone, catching up and talking politics, when the president called for Kelly to join them. The conversation was acrimonious and interrupted by an urgent phone call for Trump. Kelly and Lewandowski stepped out of the Oval Office to leave Trump to take the call. As they stood just outside the Oval, Kelly and Lewandowski argued. Kelly told other people to “throw him out of my fucking house.”
That’s when the shouting match began, with Lewandowski standing close to Kelly’s face. They were so loud their voices could be heard in the front lobby of the West Wing, where an aide rushed to shut a door to try to muffle the noise.
“This isn’t your house,” Lewandowski yelled back at Kelly. “This is the people’s house. Fuck you. I don’t work for you.”
The two men argued so loudly their faces turned red. Kelly grabbed Lewandowski by his collar and tried to push him against a wall. The chief of staff was a Secret Service protectee, so agents rushed in to ensure he would be safe.
“If you put your hands on me, you’ll spend the rest of your career in Siberia,” Lewandowski told one of the agents. “I don’t work here. I’m a friend of the president. Do not touch me.”
The two men quickly cooled down and agreed to a truce. But before going their separate ways, Lewandowski told Kelly, “The day you are walking off the campus is the day I will walk back on because I’m not leaving, ever.”
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On February 27, Kelly spelled out the administration’s new security clearance policy in more detail. All those operating on an interim top secret clearance or the more specialized TS/SCI clearance for a year or more would have their access downgraded to secret. That was a far lower level of access, one that literally millions of government employees had in their jobs and would normally hamper a senior White House adviser’s ability to do his or her work. Kelly’s policy effectively downgraded Kushner’s clearance, a severe limitation on the Trump family member’s access to intelligence and other classified information.
Kushner was the classic profile of a person who would be rejected for a national security clearance, and Kelly’s move to downgrade his clearance level provided comfort to the CIA. Agency officials had been wary of allowing Kushner to see highly sensitive information about sources and methods, based on his pattern of talking to foreign leaders in the Middle East—including Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince—without State Department diplomats or other government experts guiding him.
The intelligence agencies were on guard in part because, as the Post reported on February 27, they had intercepted private conversations of leaders in China, Israel, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates talking about the ease with which they could manipulate Kushner. Some of these foreign leaders described Kushner as naive and easily pushed; others said his financial debts and search for refinancing for an underwater Manhattan skyscraper were one route that made him vulnerable to pressure.
Immediately after Kelly’s order, national security staff at the White House got new standing orders for how to deal with Kushner. They could no longer provide particularly sensitive intelligence products to him and tailored his reports to ensure he had necessary information on subjects on which he worked. Kushner and Ivanka Trump wanted Kelly to restore his clearance, telling him this was a problem. When they couldn’t move him, Ivanka lobbied her father, complaining at least twice to the president that Kelly was taking away her access as well. She said that she and Kushner would be marginalized and unable to do their jobs without higher-level clearances and pleaded with him to fix it. When Kelly soon learned what Ivanka was telling Trump, he became incensed—because it wasn’t true. Ivanka had joined the White House staff in April 2017, meaning she had had an interim security clearance for less than one year and therefore was not affected by the new policy.
“Ivanka lied to her father’s face, saying her security clearance had been downgraded as well,” a White House adviser recalled. “She told her father that Kelly had taken her clearance. It was a complete lie.”
Publicly, Trump had sought to distance himself from the security clearances dilemma. When reporters asked him about Kushner’s access earlier in February, the president said, “I will let General Kelly make that decision, and he’s going to do what’s right for the country. And I have no doubt that he will make the right decision.”
Privately, however, Trump intervened and applied pressure on Kelly. He asked his chief of staff, wasn’t there a way to get the kids permanent top secret clearances? Trump never gave a direct order, but left a strong suggestion that Kelly should prioritize this problem and fix it for him.
“I wish we could make this go away. This is a problem,” Trump told Kelly, stressing that this was making him and his family look bad.
Kushner and Ivanka disputed to associates that they had sought to apply improper pressure, and Kushner later denied publicly that he had ever talked about his clearance status with the president. “I have not discussed it with him,” Kushner told Axios.
But others in the administration felt unrelenting pressure from Kushner and Ivanka. The president’s daughter tried to prod McGahn to intervene, something she later denied to associates, but when the White House counsel didn’t deliver what she wanted, Ivanka whispered to her father and to other White House aides that McGahn was a “leaker” and not to be trusted. “Leaker” was about the worst red-flag name you could give someone in the presence of the bull named Donald Trump.
There was no love lost between McGahn and Ivanka. The lawyer was already highly wary of the first daughter, and they had had a number of run-ins the year prior. But the security clearances issue ultimately ruined Kelly’s relationship with the kids. He was furious that Ivanka was using her standing as first daughter to cajole her father to intervene on an issue of national security importance. Kelly would never trust her or Kushner again.
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A pair of departures threatened to wreak more havoc on the White House. On February 28, Hope Hicks, the communications director who had become the president’s de facto therapist and could be counted upon to manage his moods and talk him out of hazardous ideas, announced that she would soon depart. The timing of her exit seemed significant; a day earlier, she had spent more than eight hours testifying before the House Intelligence Committee as part of its Russia investigation and admitted to telling white lies on behalf of the president. But her departure had been in the works for several weeks and had nothing to do with the various probes. After more than three tumultuous years at Trump’s beck and call, Hicks was burned out and eager for a fresh start outside Trump’s orbit. Months later, she would settle far away in Los Angeles as an executive at New Fox, the Murdoch family media empire.
A week later, Gary Cohn resigned as National Economic Council director amid a fierce internal clash over trade policies. A former president of Goldman Sachs, Cohn had served as a free-market counterweight to Trump’s protectionist impulses and as an interlocutor with the business community. When the president decided to proceed with tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which threatened to touch off a global trade war, Cohn called it quits.