“They’re trying to delegitimize your presidency right now,” Bannon told the president.
Trump was piqued that the Obama administration was sticking his incoming team with an aggressive slap at Russia—a significant foreign policy move—without so much as consulting him.
The day before in Washington, Obama had signed the sanctions order with plans to announce it the next day, but a few news outlets reported on the evening of December 28 that some retaliation against Russia was expected soon. Also that evening, Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak was given a heads-up on the sanctions by the State Department. Flustered and upset, he reached out to the Trump team. Kislyak texted Flynn on December 28, “Can you kindly call me back at your convenience?”
Flynn was spending the holiday week with his wife at a resort in the Dominican Republic. Reception there was spotty, so he did not see the ambassador’s text until the next day, around the time the Obama administration had announced the sanctions. Before Flynn called Kislyak back, he wanted to check with the transition team in Mar-a-Lago. He talked for about twenty minutes with his deputy, K. T. McFarland, who was at Trump’s Palm Beach club with the president-elect. Flynn and McFarland went over the Obama administration’s punitive shot and agreed it could hurt Trump’s intended goals of cultivating a better relationship with Putin. McFarland shared with Flynn the consensus among the team at Mar-a-Lago: they hoped Russia would not ratchet up the aggression in responding to Obama’s move.
Immediately after hanging up with McFarland, Flynn dialed Kislyak and asked that the Kremlin not get into a “tit for tat.” Flynn assured the ambassador that the incoming administration would likely revisit sanctions and possibly rescind them. He raised the possibility that he could arrange a meeting with Trump later on, once they were all in the White House.
By communicating about U.S. policy with Kislyak before Trump took office, Flynn was undermining the current administration and breaking the standards of diplomacy. His communications were instantly picked up and stored by the massive listening apparatus of the National Security Agency, which routinely surveils prominent government officials and helps the FBI monitor suspected spies who work for hostile foreign powers.
Despite the high drama of the Russian compounds’ being evacuated, Putin’s reaction the next day, December 30, was unexpectedly calm. “We will not create any problems for U.S. diplomats,” Putin said. “It is regrettable that the Obama Administration is ending its term in this manner. Nevertheless, I offer my New Year greetings to President Obama and his family,” he said. “My season’s greetings also to President-elect Donald Trump and the American people.”
Putin’s tone surprised CIA director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper. At that time neither of them knew about Flynn’s secret assurances to and request of Kislyak. Some U.S. officials wondered if Putin was just toying with the Americans. Yet he never pounced. That same afternoon, Trump startled the outgoing Obama team with this tweet: “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!”
On January 6, Brennan, Clapper, FBI director James Comey, and National Security Agency director Michael Rogers traveled to New York to brief Trump, Pence, and their top advisers about the extensive Russian campaign to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor and sow discord through cyberattacks and social media infiltration. During this infamous briefing at Trump Tower, the president-elect rejected what did not confirm his view. This was not how an incoming commander in chief was meant to act.
As the ninety-minute meeting wrapped up, Comey and Trump cleared the room to speak alone. The FBI director brought up a salacious dossier, a widely circulated collection of intelligence reports written by the former British spy Christopher Steele. Comey noted that it alleged that Russians had filmed Trump interacting with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013. Trump immediately denied the allegations, snorting, “There were no prostitutes,” and arguing that he wasn’t the kind of man who needed to “go there.” Trump had praised Comey for having reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation in the final stretch of the 2016 campaign but now wondered whose team Comey was really on. Trump’s distrust of the intelligence community only grew when, shortly after the Trump Tower meeting, the agencies published their report detailing Russia’s election interference campaign. This infuriated Trump. He concluded that the national security establishment would never respect him and was determined to sabotage his presidency.
There were three core questions facing U.S. intelligence officials about Russia’s role in the 2016 election. First, did the Russian government itself interfere? The overwhelming evidence said yes. Next, did Russia try to help Trump win? Much of the evidence suggested yes. Finally, did Russia’s efforts change the election result? Intelligence leaders argued they lacked the ability to say definitively. But Trump believed that acknowledging Russian intervention effectively tainted his victory.
In the days following the January 6 intelligence briefing, Priebus, Kushner, and other advisers pleaded with Trump to publicly acknowledge the unanimous conclusion the spy chiefs had presented to him. They held impromptu interventions in his twenty-sixth-floor office in which they tried to convince him that he could affirm the validity of the intelligence without invalidating or even diminishing his win. “This was part of the normalization process,” one adviser explained. “There was a big effort to get him to be a standard president.”
But Trump dug in. Each time his advisers pushed him to accept the intelligence, he grew more agitated. He railed that the intelligence community’s leaders were deceitful and could not be trusted. “I can’t trust anybody,” the president-elect said. On that point, he was seconded by Bannon, who said of the Russia report, “It’s all gobbledygook.” The president-elect said he believed admitting that the Kremlin had hacked Democratic emails would be a “trap.”
On January 11, just nine days before the inauguration, Trump held a news conference in the pink-marbled lobby of Trump Tower. His advisers pleaded with him once more to accept the intelligence community’s assessment, and he begrudgingly complied. “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia,” Trump told reporters. “But I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people.” Yet Trump also accused the intelligence agencies, without evidence, of leaking the Steele dossier to BuzzFeed, which had published the salacious material on January 10. “That’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do,” he said. “I think it’s a disgrace that information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public.”
Soon after the news conference ended, however, Trump told his aides that he regretted accepting the findings about Russian hacking. “It’s not me,” he told his aides. “It wasn’t right.”
Two
PARANOIA AND PANDEMONIUM
Before his inauguration, President-elect Trump did not know that the FBI was secretly conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Michael Flynn, but once he did, it would plant seeds of paranoia that would germinate and take root during his presidency. Investigators were examining whether Flynn had betrayed the United States by acting as an agent of the Russian government. Intelligence officials learned from an intercepted communication that Flynn had made a secret call to Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 29, 2016, to consult with him about the Obama sanctions, one he would later lie about.