The insult was a reminder to all who served in the administration that loyalty was a one-way street. An honest reflection like the one Tillerson gave Schieffer after more than a year of service in government could easily be interpreted by the president as a personal betrayal, from which there could be no complete recovery. Tillerson was entirely unbothered, confiding to friends there was nothing to learn or gain by taking Trump’s bait. “Don’t ask me,” he would say to associates with a chuckle months later. “I’m dumb as a rock!”
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The first week of December, Trump was focused on selecting a new attorney general. Finally, he could have a loyal foot soldier helming the Justice Department. He considered a range of candidates but kept gravitating toward Bill Barr, sixty-eight, a well-respected Republican lawyer who held the job a quarter century earlier, during the George H. W. Bush administration. Barr was a favorite of Trump’s legal team and close to Pat Cipollone, the new White House counsel. Emmet Flood, the White House lawyer dealing with Robert Mueller’s investigation, helped sell Barr to the president as “the gold standard.” Trump did not really know Barr, but Flood argued that he could be trusted to be a grown-up and, importantly, had the pedigree to make him “totally unimpeachable” on Capitol Hill. Barr at first resisted entreaties to become attorney general again but eventually warmed to the idea.
Trump also considered Chris Christie for the job and had a much greater level of comfort with the former New Jersey governor, who was a ruthless political brawler and had proven his loyalty as Trump’s campaign-trail sidekick. As he angled to be attorney general, Christie played up their long relationship and sowed doubts about Barr. “I cannot believe you’re going into a reelect with an attorney general you don’t know,” he told Trump.
Christie assumed that Barr, a fixture in Washington’s legal community, would be more loyal to the American Bar Association than to the president. “If he has to choose between the ABA crowd and you in terms of who he’s going to make happy, he’s picking the ABA crowd every day of the week,” Christie told Trump. “It’s just who he is. It’s where he’s from, and it’s who he’s going back to.”
But Barr had already signaled his loyalty to Trump in a nineteen-page unsolicited private memo to the Justice Department on June 8, 2018. He had originally intended to share his thoughts on the Mueller investigation in an opinion column, but Barr was so verbose he figured the better vehicle would be a memo, which he addressed to Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the Russia probe, and Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, who ran the Office of Legal Counsel. Barr sent Flood a courtesy copy. Barr authored the memo as a “former official deeply concerned with the institutions of the Presidency and the Department of Justice” and said he hoped that his views “may be useful.”
In the memo, Barr denounced Mueller’s obstruction of justice inquiry by arguing that in most of the publicly known episodes the president had acted within his broad executive authority and that probing his actions in those cases as possible obstruction was “grossly irresponsible.” A student of constitutional law who had once overseen the OLC, the government’s premier legal office, Barr believed prosecutors could not question any president’s unfettered power to remove his subordinates. Any inquiry into the president’s firing of Comey and wish to remove Sessions struck Barr as ridiculous.
“Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the President submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction,” Barr wrote. “Apart from whether Mueller [has] a strong enough factual basis for doing so, Mueller’s obstruction theory is fatally misconceived. As I understand it, his theory is premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law.”
Barr went on to warn about the special counsel’s indulging in “the fancies by overly-zealous prosecutors” and wrote that investigating the president’s “discretionary actions” would have “potentially disastrous implications” for the executive branch as a whole. “I know you will agree that, if a DOJ investigation is going to take down a democratically-elected President, it is imperative to the health of our system and to our national cohesion that any claim of wrongdoing is solidly based on evidence of a real crime—not a debatable one,” Barr wrote.
On December 7, Trump called Barr to say he was ready to nominate him as attorney general. Barr’s youngest daughter was getting married the next day, so he was preoccupied, but Trump wanted to share the news right away. “I’m going to go out to the helicopter and announce it,” Trump told Barr. Shortly thereafter, Trump strode onto the South Lawn and announced his intention to nominate Barr. “He was my first choice since day one,” Trump told reporters. Later that day, at a Justice Department event in Kansas City, Trump praised Barr for having “demonstrated an unwavering adherence to the rule of law, which the people in this room like to hear. There is no one more capable or more qualified for this role. He deserves overwhelming bipartisan support.”
At the wedding reception the night of December 8, at the Willard hotel, a couple of blocks from the White House, Barr’s daughter Meg said in her remarks, “Pop, you’re the only guy I know who would upstage his daughter’s wedding.” When it came time for him to deliver the father-of-the-bride toast, Barr said, “Meg, look at it this way. Just before the name Barr is being dragged through the mud, you are changing yours to McGaughey.”
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At the same time that Trump was heralding Barr, he was cutting ties with John Kelly. Trump complained more and more to friends about Kelly, arguing the retired Marine Corps general sometimes acted as if he had been elected president. “He didn’t have the guts to work for the job like I did,” Trump vented to at least one confidant. This kind of mockery by the headstrong president signaled an aide’s end was near. Trump also started telling other aides not to bother keeping Kelly abreast of important developments, effectively cutting the chief of staff out of decisions in the White House that he had once commanded with military precision.
This frustrated Kelly, who after his decades of service in the U.S. Marines had little tolerance for being disrespected or marginalized. More dangerous, however, was the fact that Trump was no longer heeding Kelly’s advice on matters of national security. In the week after returning from Paris in mid-November, Trump agitated to withdraw U.S. forces from the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, as well as bases in South Korea. He talked openly about pulling out of NATO.
Meanwhile, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, as well as a pair of ambitious aides who were eyeing Kelly’s job—Nick Ayers, chief of staff to Vice President Pence, and Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget—were telling Trump that he needed to change chiefs. Ayers had been open with Kelly, telling him he wanted to succeed him when Kelly decided it was time to go; Mulvaney was less so. They reinforced their own selling points: Kelly had his strengths, but Trump needed a more politically savvy chief of staff as he prepared to run for reelection and deal with a divided Congress.