Rosenstein, meanwhile, was growing exasperated by the aggression and gamesmanship of Nunes, who he believed was clearly overstepping his oversight authority. On May 4, Rosenstein marked Law Day in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland, by delivering a speech about the separation of powers and the “incredibly complex” interplay among the three branches of government. “Congressional oversight is important,” he said. “Congress must be able to hold hearings, conduct inquiries, and require reports so that it knows the laws are being faithfully executed and the money it appropriates is being properly spent. But oversight is not intended to eliminate the line between executive branch authority and legislative branch authority.”
What Rosenstein did not say is that congressional oversight into his own actions was endangering his family. On May 8, a whirlwind day of travel that took the deputy attorney general from Washington to Philadelphia back to Washington and on to New York, he received notification from the U.S. Marshals Service about a death threat against his wife, Lisa. The marshals deemed it sufficiently credible to require protection for Rosenstein’s family. Suddenly Lisa and their daughters were being driven around in an SUV with a 24-7 security detail.
Around noon on May 10, Stephen Boyd, Rosenstein’s deputy for congressional relations, arranged a meeting for the principals to clear the air in the Justice Department’s sixth-floor Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Attending were Sue Gordon, the deputy director of national intelligence, along with Rosenstein, Wray, O’Callaghan, Boyd, Nunes, Gowdy, and FBI deputy director David Bowdich. Rosenstein and Wray explained their fear about turning over any information that might be compromised and said their reluctance had nothing to do with hiding any funny business.
“The FBI, DOJ are all run by Republican political appointees who were not here during the Clinton investigation. Nobody here has a motive to conceal anything. We are not your enemy,” Rosenstein said. “We have a duty to protect classified information.”
At first, Nunes denied writing any letter to the White House with sensitive intelligence. Then one of Rosenstein’s deputies showed him the letter with his signature. Nunes said nothing. The Justice Department team members found that puzzling. They wondered if Nunes’s staff had written it and not told him. For a short portion of the meeting, the conversation turned testy. In three decades of public service, Rosenstein had rarely raised his voice in a meeting, and he had almost never yelled. This was one of the exceptions. Things had gotten personal. Nunes and his Republican colleagues had been rattling their sabers on social media and in Fox News appearances accusing Rosenstein’s Justice Department of trying to hold back evidence proving the department’s corrupt investigative tactics.
“You’ve got to stop this,” Rosenstein told Nunes. “This is ridiculous. You’re ginning up all these ludicrous conspiracy theories. You’re accusing me of being part of some vast left-wing conspiracy. I’m a lifelong Republican. My wife is a Republican. She’s getting death threats from these nuts.”
Rosenstein also knew Nunes was raising money among conservative voters by claiming donations could help expose the secrets Rosenstein was trying to keep hidden from the public. Rosenstein’s mother, who lived in Florida, about as far away as one could get from Nunes’s central California congressional district, had received some of the congressman’s fund-raising letters.
“You’re making money off this,” an angry Rosenstein bellowed, leaning over the conference table and looking at Nunes and Gowdy. “We’re suffering the consequences of your fund-raising. My wife is getting death threats based on what you’re doing.”
* * *
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The entire special counsel office, located next to train tracks and the newly opened Museum of the Bible, was a SCIF. Everyone—including investigators, agents, staffers, and visitors—surrendered their phones each day upon entry to avoid any minuscule chance of improper breach or mishandling of classified information. Mueller’s team had become experts in the vast and unsettling power of criminals to steal and spy on private email communications, and not surprisingly they often eschewed the typical workplace habit of casually chatting by email with colleagues a few desks away. Instead, when they had updates to share, they often yelled down the hallway.
One day in late May 2018, Rush Atkinson, one of the youngest members of the team and considered a phenom for his diligence and stamina, hollered to Rhee, “You gotta come over here, Jeannie!” Atkinson had been reviewing the attempted intrusions by the Russian GRU’s Unit 26165 and had found an amazing coincidence—one he knew couldn’t be a coincidence. It showed exactly what the Russian hackers had been up to on July 27, 2016, within just five hours of Trump’s making his infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” comment at a news conference in Florida, saying he hoped they could find Hillary Clinton’s missing thirty thousand emails. In that bizarre moment, Trump had actively encouraged a foreign government to illegally hack his political opponent. Just days earlier, WikiLeaks had published nearly twenty thousand documents that appeared to have been stolen from Democratic National Committee servers, and U.S. intelligence agencies concluded Russia was the thief, in a hit ordered by Putin himself.
At the time the press was reporting Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” comment, it was dinnertime in Moscow. Most Russian government offices were closed. But, as Atkinson discovered more than a year later, some Russian military intelligence operators in Unit 26165 were busy late that July night sending outbound pushes to Clinton’s private domain and sending malicious links targeting fifteen email accounts on her server. This was a stunning find, one that U.S. intelligence agencies had not tracked earlier. The digital pushes did not show that Trump or anyone in his campaign had committed a crime, but they established that Russians were doing his bidding in real time, literally working the graveyard shift at his request from half a world away.
PART FOUR
Seventeen
HAND GRENADE DIPLOMACY
On June 9, 2018, President Trump was at his second day of meetings at the Group of Seven summit, hosted in Quebec by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. This was an annual gathering of leaders from seven of the world’s industrial powers: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It had been an unusually acrimonious summit. European allies, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Emmanuel Macron, and British prime minister Theresa May, were pressing Trump to sign a joint statement committing to “a rules-based international order.” The president had resisted, believing his counterparts were ganging up on him, before eventually relenting. Then Trump put his hand in his suit pocket, took two Starburst candies out, threw them on the table in front of Merkel, and said, “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything,” according to Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group.
Traditionally, the G7 has been a forum for the United States and its allies to express common democratic principles and fortify economic partnerships and aspirations. In the recent past, the annual summits had amounted to carefully scripted shows of unity against authoritarian adversaries, including Russia, which had been a member (it was then the Group of Eight) until it was kicked out in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea. But over two days in Quebec, Trump effectively blew up the G7. He abruptly withdrew the U.S. endorsement of a joint declaration of unity, which his own representatives had already agreed to, and upbraided Trudeau on Twitter as “very dishonest & weak” because the prime minister objected to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and other nations. Then he stormed out of Quebec.