The Paris trip proved to be the final straw for Kelly. He would last in the job for less than a month after that. Trump’s advisers could not tell how angry the president truly was at Kelly over the Paris debacle. One posited that he was just looking for an excuse to “cut the cord.” It felt like a wise time to change course. Fueling the president’s feelings throughout the fall was a lobbying campaign from Kelly’s internal enemies, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, to ditch him for a more politically minded chief of staff. The pressures were converging on Trump. He felt vulnerable. Robert Mueller’s investigation was nearing an uncertain end. Nancy Pelosi intended to bring investigative heat on the president, if not eventually impeachment charges. More than two dozen Democrats were gearing up to run to unseat him as president. And many of his longest-serving and most trusted staffers were gone or eyeing the exits.
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Ever since the gruesome murder on October 2 of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist who was a contributing columnist to The Washington Post, Trump and his administration had been on the defensive. Audio and video recordings obtained by the Turkish government showed that Khashoggi had walked into the consulate to obtain documents for his upcoming wedding but was detained inside by a Saudi security team, then interrogated, tortured, killed, and dismembered with a bone saw. The operation was likely ordered by Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia whose government Khashoggi had criticized in his writings, according to U.S. intelligence analysis.
Throughout October and early November, a mountain of evidence surfaced, but Trump and Kushner, who both had close personal relationships with MBS, still refused to hold the Saudis responsible for the murder, with the president even repeating MBS’s denials. On November 16, the case against the Saudis became even more definitive when the Post’s Shane Harris, Greg Miller, and Josh Dawsey reported that the CIA had concluded with high confidence that MBS had ordered Khashoggi’s assassination. The CIA had also determined that Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the United States and the crown prince’s brother, had called Khashoggi at MBS’s direction to instruct him to go to the consulate in Istanbul to retrieve his wedding documents and to assure him he would be safe doing so.
In response, the Trump administration imposed small economic sanctions on seventeen Saudis who U.S. intelligence operatives believed were responsible for the act, but did not implicate MBS. Many U.S. lawmakers said the sanctions were woefully insufficient punishment for the crime. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican ally of Trump’s, tweeted in response, “We are pretending to do something and doing NOTHING.” Meanwhile, Trump cast doubt on the CIA’s assessment by telling reporters it was “very premature” and boasting about Saudi Arabia as “a truly spectacular ally.”
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Throughout the fall, the president’s lawyers had had reason to feel they were in the catbird seat. With Mueller’s capitulation to take some answers from Trump in writing, they were confident their client wasn’t going to be subpoenaed to testify. The agreement—to provide answers only about Russian interference, the central reason for Mueller’s appointment, and only pertaining to the time until the November 2016 election—was favorable. However, even within these narrow confines, the possible questions were numerous. Did Trump receive regular briefings from Michael Cohen as he pursued the Moscow Trump Tower deal? When did he first learn about WikiLeaks’ having damaging Democratic emails? Did he know anything about Donald Trump Jr.’s being offered a meeting about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton?
Through September and October, Trump’s lawyers kept telling the public that they were working with the president to complete the written answers to Mueller, but the reality is they were having significant trouble getting time with their client, even though he spent many hours a day watching television. As his lawyer Rudy Giuliani often told reporters, their client was the president, and he was pretty busy.
On October 24, Trump’s lawyers planned to sit down with their client to go over the written answers. They were only about twenty-five minutes into the meeting when their session came to an abrupt end. Trump’s national security and federal law enforcement teams needed to give him a briefing about pipe bombs that had been mailed to several prominent Democrats, including former president Obama and Hillary Clinton. Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, along with Jane and Martin Raskin, were drafting Trump’s answers on his behalf based on a rolling series of meetings with him to go over his recollections. They had most of them drafted by Halloween and considered the answers so far pretty uncontroversial.
On the morning of November 1, Sekulow went to the White House for another sit-down with Trump to finalize answers, but the president was interrupted by calls from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Chinese president Xi Jinping. “There goes my meeting,” Sekulow said with a sigh.
As eager as Trump’s lawyers were to complete the answers, they had not wanted to submit them before the November 6 midterm elections. But after the GOP’s crushing loss of its House majority, the lawyers faced a new challenge. Trump was in a sour mood, especially after he returned from Paris on November 12, and seemed to get testy when they brought up the subject of the Mueller questions. Then two things happened the week before Thanksgiving—one right after the other—which spooked them. First, sometime around November 15, Sekulow received a strange email from what looked like a fictitious account. It contained a short note that said something along the lines of “This is very important. You may want to see it.” Attached were several documents. Sekulow was afraid to open the attachments, suspicious that it might be a setup. “You’re the criminal lawyer, so tell us what to do,” he said to Giuliani.
Together with the Raskins, they decided to open the documents. “They were shocking,” Giuliani recalled. “Everything we expected.” One of the attachments was a copy of a draft plea agreement that Mueller’s office had written as part of its ongoing negotiations with Jerome Corsi. Corsi was a longtime Clinton critic and ally of Roger Stone, an off-and-on political adviser to Trump for the previous decade.
Prosecutors wanted to know how Stone correctly predicted that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange would leak damaging emails about Clinton in 2016, and they suspected Corsi might provide the missing link. An email from August 2, 2016, showed that Corsi, who was traveling in Europe at the time, alerted Stone to the planned release by their “friend in embassy”—an apparent reference to Assange, who since 2012 had been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi had written. “One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”
What surprised Sekulow and the president’s other lawyers was that Mueller’s draft plea agreement—which Corsi was refusing to sign—specifically referred to Trump. Mueller wanted Corsi to acknowledge that Stone had asked him during the campaign to reach out to WikiLeaks—referred to as “Organization 1” in the document—to find out what material they still had to release. The agreement said Corsi understood that Stone was asking because he was “in regular contact with senior members of the Trump Campaign, including with then-candidate Donald J. Trump.” Corsi complained, through his lawyer, that he felt railroaded into signing this agreement and that Mueller’s investigators told him that they planned to indict him if he didn’t admit the truth. Trump’s lawyers thought that was playing hardball but also found the reference to Trump in the plea agreement draft worrisome. They told their client, and the president instructed them, “Make sure you give it to the FBI right away.”