FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe alerted acting assistant attorney general Mary McCord to the call on January 3, 2017. He stressed the obvious: Flynn’s conversations were especially disturbing given his role on the incoming White House team. “Trump’s about to become the president, and this is his announced national security adviser,” McCabe said. Now their bosses, James Comey and acting attorney general Sally Yates, had to consider how much to share with the president-to-be about Flynn’s secret outreach, but as they debated, intervening events got the jump on them.
On January 12, the fact that Flynn had secretly called Kislyak on December 29 appeared in a Washington Post column by David Ignatius, though Ignatius did not report the topic of the conversation. One top U.S. official described the stunned reaction inside the Justice Department: “Everybody is like, ‘What the fuck? How has this already leaked?’”
Hours later, the Trump team—clueless still about the intercept in the FBI’s hands—repeated Flynn’s lie. On the evening of January 12, the transition’s spokesman Sean Spicer insisted Flynn didn’t talk with Kislyak about sanctions. “The call centered around the logistics of setting up a call with the president of Russia and the president-elect after he was sworn in,” Spicer said. Then, on January 15, Vice President-elect Pence flatly denied that Flynn and Kislyak discussed sanctions. “It was strictly coincidental that they had a conversation,” Pence said in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation. “They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”
Yates was alarmed. If Pence was telling what he thought was the truth, she knew that meant the vice president-elect had been lied to—and that the Russians knew, too. Flynn’s lying led to a tug-of-war between Yates and Comey. She wanted to alert Trump that his national security adviser was compromised, but Comey said he didn’t want to reveal concern about Flynn until they had more facts. In keeping with how he had handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation, Comey would ultimately decide he knew best.
Yates believed it was well past time to alert Trump to Flynn’s lie, but Comey was trying to convince intelligence leaders that doing so would jeopardize the investigation. On January 19, the evening before Trump’s swearing in, the clock had run out. “They’re in their tuxedos by now,” one of Yates’s deputies complained as the Trump team gathered to celebrate at Washington’s iconic train station. “I just don’t see how you drop this turd on him tonight. It’s not like one more day is going to change anything.”
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On January 20, Trump was sworn in to office and uneasily tried to settle into his new life as president. He was apprehensive about moving to Washington, a city in which he had many adversaries, far fewer allies, and no true friends. Despite his extroverted personality, Trump was a homebody and a creature of comfort. Having campaigned on the idea that the nation had been betrayed by its political class, Trump, now the most powerful man in Washington, did not know whom he could trust. He and his advisers feared from the moment they seized power that the capital’s entrenched interests would scheme to undermine the administration. The night of January 23, the first Monday of his presidency, Trump came face-to-face with House and Senate leaders from both parties at a White House reception with his top administration officials. At a long table in the State Dining Room, Steve Bannon, one of the inspirations of Trump’s “American carnage” address, could not stop looking at Nancy Pelosi. In the Democratic House leader, he saw Katharine Hepburn from The Lion in Winter—who looks up and down the table and thinks to herself, “These men are all clowns,” and plots her return to power.
Pelosi assumed Trump would open the conversation on a unifying note, such as by quoting the Founding Fathers or the Bible. Instead, the new president began with a lie: “You know, I won the popular vote.” He claimed that there had been widespread fraud, with three to five million illegal votes for Clinton. Pelosi interjected. “Well, Mr. President, that’s not true,” she said. “There’s no evidence to support what you just said, and if we’re going to work together, we have to stipulate to a certain set of facts.” Watching Pelosi challenge Trump, Bannon whispered to colleagues, “She’s going to get us. Total assassin. She’s an assassin.”
On January 24, as Yates debated with her staff who best to contact at the White House about Flynn, she got a call from Comey, who delivered an annoying surprise: FBI agents were at the White House to interview Flynn. Yates was furious. Comey, who had repeatedly insisted he needed to keep this probe under wraps, had neglected to notify the Justice Department. Yates said something to the effect of “How could you make this decision unilaterally?” Comey told her it was just a normal investigative step.
At the Justice Department, one senior official recalled, “The reaction that we all had is they’re going to try to get a false statement . . . and we’re going to look terrible, like we set him up,” the official said. “Like we’ve known about this for a week, haven’t told anybody, and now it looks like a setup of the national security adviser, like we backed him into a corner.”
Finally, on January 26, Yates asked Don McGahn if she could meet with him in his West Wing office that day. She laid out the intercept and explained that Flynn had lied to Pence and that FBI agents had interviewed him about his Kislyak communications. McGahn listened, then asked some questions. Mostly he wanted to know why one person lying to another in the White House worried the Justice Department. Yates explained that Flynn was compromised because the Russians knew the truth and could use the fact of the national security adviser’s lie to manipulate him.
When Yates departed, McGahn went to Reince Priebus’s office and found the chief of staff and Bannon there. “Did Flynn tell you guys that the FBI was here talking to him earlier in the week?” he asked.
Priebus and Bannon looked at each other with surprise, then back at McGahn.
“What are you fucking talking about?” Bannon said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Priebus said. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“Well, the FBI was here in that office on Tuesday,” McGahn said, referring to the national security adviser’s suite down the hall.
“We haven’t even been here a week,” Bannon said.
McGahn then went to the Oval Office to alert Trump. The president was largely nonplussed. Flynn hadn’t told the senior Trump leadership team that he had been interviewed by the FBI about his calls with the Russian ambassador, but Trump expressed no concern about Flynn’s lying to Pence. Rather, he was bothered that Yates was questioning Flynn’s motives—and by extension Trump’s personnel decisions. The president said something to the effect of “We’ve only been here for four days, and they’re already questioning our guy?”