The omission angered Trump, who was quick to see personal slights in the words of his subordinates.
A few days later, the White House delivered yet another demeaning insult to Tillerson, this time a blunder by Kelly, his friend. The chief of staff convened an off-the-record session with a couple dozen reporters and shared his account of Tillerson’s firing. Kelly said that when he reached Tillerson in Nairobi to let him know he may soon be fired, the secretary of state was suffering from traveler’s diarrhea.
“He had Montezuma’s revenge, or whatever you call it over there,” Kelly said. “He was talking to me from the toilet.”
The journalists and White House aides in the room grimaced. Kelly later regretted that his off-the-record remark was reported in the media, another humiliation for Tillerson. It hadn’t even been true. Tillerson and his staff had all caught a bug that caused violent vomiting and dehydration. He had a mild case compared with some of his senior staff and had canceled some of his appearances to let them rest. When Kelly called Tillerson with the bad news, his very ill chief of staff and another aide had dutifully come to the secretary’s room to wake him from a deep sleep. He took the call in his bedroom suite.
Tillerson would stay on the job until March 31, to help ensure an orderly transition, but he never went to the White House to take his picture with the president. Nearly a year would pass before he and Kelly spoke again.
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As Trump disposed of his secretary of state, he was also browbeating Dowd to take to television and Twitter to bludgeon Mueller—precisely the sorts of attacks that the president’s initial legal team steered away from—and spotlight what the president saw as the partisan motivations of the special counsel and other investigators. Trump believed Congressman Devin Nunes’s theory that the probe was tainted from the start, and on Friday, March 16, he seized an opportunity to exact revenge.
For his role in steering the initial investigation into Russia’s election interference and possible conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, Andrew McCabe was a frequent target of Trump’s ire. McCabe had already stepped down as the FBI’s deputy director under pressure after the Justice Department’s inspector general found he had authorized the disclosure of sensitive information to the media about the Hillary Clinton email case, but technically he remained an FBI employee.
As a twenty-year veteran of the bureau, McCabe was set to retire as soon as he turned fifty on March 18 and would be eligible for his full retirement benefits. But Trump, with the help of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, sought to punish a foe. Just before ten o’clock on the evening of March 16, Sessions fired McCabe effective immediately, saying that he was acting on the recommendations of the inspector general and the FBI office that handles discipline. The swift termination threatened to cost McCabe a portion of his retirement benefits.
Though technically the firing was executed by Sessions, the loudest celebrations came from the White House residence, where the president pecked out his reaction on Twitter at 12:08 a.m.: “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI—A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!”
On March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, Trump began a weekend of public and private brooding over the Russia investigation. He tweeted that the Mueller probe was a “WITCH HUNT” that “should never have been started” and claimed it was “based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier.” Trump spent the weekend in Washington and complained to friends and advisers that his lawyers were doing a lousy job protecting him. He said the situation was particularly painful because he believed Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the probe, was up to no good and shielding a corrupt investigation from scrutiny by Nunes and other Trump allies in Congress. Dowd succumbed to Trump’s wishes to publicly assail Mueller when he emailed reporters a statement calling on Rosenstein to immediately end the probe.
“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier,” Dowd said in the statement.
Dowd got twisted in knots trying to explain his statement. He first told The Daily Beast that he was speaking on behalf of the president. A few hours later, he backtracked, telling The Washington Post that he was speaking for himself and not on Trump’s behalf.
Regardless, Senate minority leader Charles Schumer warned of “severe consequences” if Trump and his legal team took action to interfere with or end the Russia investigation. Robert Bauer, a former Obama White House counsel, said facetiously, “That is certainly an unconventional way of mounting a legal defense.” Dowd increasingly felt sapped by Trump’s heaping blame on him for the probe not wrapping up quickly. But on that point, the president was in the right. It was Dowd who had given him an all-too-rosy forecast.
Dowd confided that weekend in another Trump adviser: “He’s beating the shit out of me. He’s abusive.”
Trump, meanwhile, was working to undermine Dowd. Just as Trump had found the counsel of his national security professionals tiresome, he grew frustrated with the people on his legal team. He wanted to shake things up. Without initially confiding in Dowd or his White House counsel, Trump started working to add muscle to his legal defense. He asked to interview Emmet Flood, an expert in impeachment and presidential power, who had been wary of representing Trump if he wasn’t going to be the final decision maker.
The final straw for Dowd came on March 19, when Trump announced he was hiring Joseph diGenova, a fiery former prosecutor and longtime critic of the Clintons, who had been alleging, in frequent appearances on Fox News, that Trump was being framed by FBI and Justice Department officials. DiGenova had the advantage of being a vocal, persuasive critic of the Mueller probe in the media. Trump wanted a television warrior as his lawyer, and he admired how diGenova savaged Mueller. He figured diGenova was primed to go on television night after night as his Mueller attack dog, just as the midterm election season was ramping up, with Republican control of the House on the line. But Dowd told colleagues that he saw the new hire as a grievous insult. He congratulated diGenova and publicly supported the appointment. Privately, however, he told a White House adviser that it was too much for him to bear. “DiGenova hasn’t tried a case in forty years,” Dowd said. “I’m not going to try a case with him.”
The morning of March 22, Dowd quit. He alerted the lawyers on the joint defense that he was resigning. Sekulow and Cobb knew Dowd was unhappy and that things were souring between Dowd and Trump; the two had been cursing at each other a lot. And they knew that Trump had been talking about adding more lawyers to his team, a potential demotion for Dowd. Still, they were caught off guard by Dowd’s rash decision.