In early August, Raskin summed up the team’s views on this and made what the team considered their closing argument: the Mueller team had failed to make a compelling case for an interview. The line went dead. The Trump team got no response throughout the remainder of the month. The silence was mildly nerve-racking. Trump’s lawyers suspected these lulls were caused by a third party: the Department of Justice, specifically Rod Rosenstein, who was supervising Mueller’s work. It felt to Trump’s counselors that the special counsel’s office was checking with the boss about how strenuously it could threaten the president or what it could claim before it did so. Trump’s lawyers figured Rosenstein had been recommending an incremental approach.
“It was like when Princess Diana said there are three people in this marriage,” one Trump adviser recalled, a reference to the late Princess of Wales’s infamous quip about her husband, Prince Charles, and his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. “The Mueller folks felt they were fighting a battle on two sides—against us and against DOJ. My sense is, DOJ was telling them to do certain things.”
Raskin and her husband, Martin, went on a long-scheduled vacation over Labor Day weekend to Flathead Lake, a breathtaking part of Montana just south of Glacier National Park. On the first full day of their trip, a family celebration, Jane Raskin was on the main drag in quiet Missoula when she got a call on her cell phone from Quarles. He was providing her with a heads-up that he was sending a new letter to the Trump team.
The Raskins braced for bad news. But as they read the letter together the first week of September, they quickly realized everything had broken Trump’s way. Mueller had effectively capitulated. The special counsel would accept written answers from the president, for now, on a limited set of questions. Trump’s lawyers were ecstatic. The nuclear missile they had always feared Mueller was just a few keystrokes away from launching—a subpoena—would never come.
“Everything was about the grand jury subpoena,” a member of Trump’s legal team said. “Until it became obvious there wasn’t going to be one. We had won.”
Nineteen
SCARE-A-THON
Labor Day marked the unofficial kickoff for the campaign sprint to the November midterm elections. The Democrats were trying to reclaim majorities in the House and perhaps even the Senate. Trump was not on the ballot, but the elections were a referendum on his presidency. For Trump, the very survival of his presidency was at stake. He and his advisers feared that if Democrats seized control of the House, they could bring impeachment charges against the president.
The night of September 6, Trump took the stage at the MetraPark arena in Billings, Montana, which was home to a marquee Senate race, and declared, “There is no place like a Trump rally.” Trump defended himself against “all these losers that say horrible things,” including against those questioning his mental fitness. “I stand up here giving speeches for an hour and a half, many times without notes, and they say, ‘He’s lost it.’ And yet we have twenty-five thousand people showing up to speeches,” the president said. He then extolled his political conquests—“I beat seventeen great Republicans!” “I beat the Bush dynasty!” “I beat Crooked Hillary!”—and lamented that media commentators still ask, “Is he competent?”
Then Trump told his cheering supporters the real reason the Democrats had to be thwarted in November: “They like to use the impeach word. ‘Impeach Trump.’ . . . But I say, ‘How do you impeach somebody that’s doing a great job that hasn’t done anything wrong? Our economy is good. How do you do it? How do you do it? How do you do it?’” By the time he finished speaking, the president had made thirty-eight false statements, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.
Throughout the fall campaign season, Trump spoke regularly by phone, sometimes twice a day, with a handful of Republican loyalists in Congress, including Mark Meadows, the North Carolina representative who led the Freedom Caucus. Among all the Republicans in Washington, Meadows was one of those whose advice the president truly valued and sought out most consistently. Meadows provided Trump with regular updates on the so-called investigation of the investigators—the Republican quest to find wrongdoing in the FBI’s handling of its initial investigation, Crossfire Hurricane.
Trump’s displeasure with Jeff Sessions had simmered for more than a year now. In his fall conversations with Meadows, Trump periodically expressed interest in firing the attorney general. Meadows urged patience, as did other voices in Trump’s ear. You can fire Sessions, he told the president, but just wait until after the midterms, when Trump would have the backing he needed from most if not all congressional Republicans. Meadows and his colleagues on Capitol Hill agreed that the president had every right to have an attorney general he trusted, but firing Sessions before the election risked sparking a political backlash that could hurt the GOP’s prospects. If Trump acted like an authoritarian, there was a danger that voters might take it out on Republican candidates, Meadows warned. Trump complained about feeling boxed in, but he agreed to give Meadows his word.
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On September 21, Sessions was in his home state of Alabama touring Auburn University to spotlight scientific research to combat the opioid epidemic. As Auburn’s president, Steven Leath, showed him around campus, Sarah Isgur Flores’s phone was melting down. The Justice Department communications chief was trying furiously to stop the New York Times reporters Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt from publishing what seemed like an explosive scoop: Rod Rosenstein, in his first disorienting weeks as deputy attorney general and in the immediate aftermath of James Comey’s firing, had suggested to other Justice Department and FBI officials that he secretly record Trump and had discussed recruiting cabinet members to remove him from office for being unfit by invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment. If true, it would have been a huge departure from any normal investigative protocol. The supervisor of a high-profile investigation—especially a special counsel probe—would not normally jump into the investigative work or assume a secret undercover role. The Times reporters were confident in their reporting. Isgur Flores argued it was preposterous and also feared the report would unfairly spur Trump to fire Rosenstein.
“You’re going to cause a constitutional crisis,” Isgur Flores yelled into the phone at one of the Times reporters. “Go fuck yourself!”
Sessions and Leath were listening to Isgur Flores’s end of the conversation. “She’s spirited,” Sessions told Leath in his thick drawl.
Later that day, a Friday, the Times published the story. It landed like a bomb. Rosenstein disputed the account, calling it “inaccurate and factually incorrect.” He added, “Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.” But the damage was done. Rosenstein assumed he would be fired. A scramble was under way to protect the Russia investigation and ensure stability at the Justice Department. Those practice drills Sessions, Rosenstein, and their deputies had gone over so many times in their heads were suddenly real.