The second event happened late on the night of November 15. It started with chatter on Twitter that some mysterious documents showed federal prosecutors had indicted Assange under seal, possibly earlier that year. Due to the mistaken filing, the sealed charges had been mentioned in a court document on a public website. In the document, prosecutors wrote that the unexplained charges “would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.”
Trump’s legal team found these developments unsettling, and they wondered whether Mueller was plotting to expand or extend his investigation into a new untapped vein. They groused about documents being mishandled and concerns about prosecutors leaking damaging material, but their central fear was that Mueller’s probe might be ramping up rather than closing down. The lawyers demanded a meeting with Mueller’s team and with his supervisor, Rod Rosenstein, to discuss their concerns about the Trump reference in the Corsi document and the inadvertent Assange filing. Giuliani, Sekulow, and Jane Raskin all felt strongly that Mueller should be there, so Giuliani specifically requested Mueller personally explain his office’s actions. They also wanted the special counsel’s Justice Department overseers to be present. “Somebody had to know how they were behaving,” Giuliani said.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Trump’s lawyers arrived at Rosenstein’s conference room at the Justice Department. In walked James Quarles, Aaron Zebley, and Andrew Goldstein of the special counsel’s office. Rosenstein was out of town and was represented by Ed O’Callaghan. But Mueller was a no-show. His deputies said he couldn’t attend, but provided no reason. The Trump lawyers were flabbergasted that their concern didn’t rate as important enough to command Mueller’s presence. They later wondered if Mueller was ill, presuming it was the only reason he would skip an important meeting with opposing counsel.
“We weren’t repping some minor player; we were representing the president of the United States,” recalled one of Trump’s lawyers. “We are meeting with the deputy in his conference room. . . . [Mueller] wouldn’t even talk with us.”
The meeting got off to a hostile start. “You’re not conducting an investigation,” Giuliani told the special counsel trio. “You’re conducting a complete frame-up focused on one person, Donald Trump. This is an outrage and the Justice Department will be disgraced by this.”
At one point, Sekulow said something along the lines of “You’re trying to squeeze this old guy to flip another guy against my client.”
Quarles led the defense. “You’re mischaracterizing it,” he responded to Giuliani.
O’Callaghan tried to calm Trump’s lawyers. “Rudy, I’ve been briefed on this,” he said. “I know where this is going. It’s not about flipping Corsi to open up another avenue of the investigation. It’s just not.”
Despite Mueller’s absence, the meeting ultimately helped to smooth over anxieties. The special counsel lawyers insisted they had nothing to do with the Assange leak and that it had been an electronic filing mistake by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia. They said they couldn’t get into a lot of details about the Corsi agreement but that there was nothing untoward about making clear this related to the Trump campaign and Trump’s candidacy.
As the meeting wrapped up, Giuliani told the special counsel team that they would take “a little interruption right now in deciding on submitting the answers.” But on November 20, Trump’s lawyers submitted the president’s answers to Mueller’s questions. They had successfully persuaded Trump to repeatedly use a phrase he had ardently resisted uttering over the years: “I do not recall.” In his written submission, drafted by his lawyers but approved by Trump, the president provided twenty-two answers to Mueller questions on four main subjects: the Trump Organization’s proposed tower in Moscow; Russia’s interference in the 2016 election; the Trump campaign; and contacts by Trump allies with Russians during the campaign. In nineteen of his twenty-two answers, Trump said he couldn’t remember enough to answer some or all of the questions.
Regarding the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump junior, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a Russian lawyer, Trump said in his answers to Mueller that he didn’t recall whether he learned about it before or after it happened; whether he knew about Trump junior’s work to set it up; or whether he spoke with Trump junior, Kushner, or Manafort on the day of the meeting. Asked if he was told by anyone during the campaign that Putin supported his candidacy, Trump replied, “I have no recollection of being told.”
But in July 2018, Trump had reacted to news reports about the meeting by denying any knowledge of it. He tweeted, “I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr.” One thing Trump told Mueller he could remember from that time was that he was “aware of reports indicating that Putin had made complimentary statements” about him.
Had Mueller secured a face-to-face interview with Trump, he or others on his team might have been able to press the president with follow-up questions or bring evidence to his attention to rejigger his memory and better get the truth out of him. But that was not to be. As Mueller would later write in his report on the investigation, “We viewed the written answers to be inadequate.”
Twenty-one
GUT OVER BRAINS
On December 6, 2018, Rex Tillerson made his first extensive public remarks since being ousted as secretary of state that spring. He was remarkably candid. Fielding questions from Bob Schieffer of CBS News at a Houston event, Tillerson described the difference between transitioning from the highly disciplined, process-oriented Exxon Mobil Corporation to the Trump White House. He described Trump as “a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of said, ‘Look, this is what I believe and you can try to convince me otherwise, but most of the time you’re not going to do that.’”
When Schieffer asked how his relationship with Trump went off the rails, Tillerson said, “We are starkly different in our styles. We did not have a common value system. I’ll just be blunt about that and so often the president would say, ‘Well, here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it.’ And I had to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law. It violates the treaty.’”
Never one to let a slight go unaddressed, Trump slammed Tillerson. He cast the man who rose from civil engineer to chief executive at one of the world’s largest companies and who considered himself a student of history as, of all things, unintelligent. Trump tweeted that Tillerson “didn’t have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell.”