11
WIRETAP
With three screens in his White House bedroom, the president was his own best cable curator.
But for print he depended on Hope Hicks. Hicks, who had been his junior aide for most of the
campaign and his spokesperson (although, as he would point out, he was really his own
spokesperson), had been, many thought, pushed to the sidelines in the West Wing by the
Bannonites, the Goldman wing, and the Priebus-RNC professionals. To the senior staff, she
seemed not only too young and too inexperienced—she was famous among campaign reporters
for her hard-to-maneuver-in short skirts—but a way-too-overeager yes woman, always in fear of
making a mistake, ever tremulously second-guessing herself and looking for Trump’s approval.
But the president kept rescuing her—“Where’s Hope?”—from any oblivion others tried to assign
her to. Baffling to almost everyone, Hicks remained his closest and most trusted aide, with,
perhaps, the single most important job in this White House: interpreting the media for him in the
most positive way it could be interpreted, and buffering him from the media that could not be
positively spun.
The day after his “reset” speech before the joint session of Congress presented a certain conundrum for Hicks. Here were the first generally good notices for the administration. But in the Post, the Times, and the New Yorker that day, there was also an ugly bouquet of very bad news. Fortunately the three different stories had not quite sunk into cable, so there was yet a brief respite. And at least for the better part of the day, March 1, Hicks herself did not entirely seem to grasp how bad the news actually was.
The Washington Post’s story was built around a leak from a Justice Department source (characterized as a “former senior American official”—hence, most likely someone from the Obama White House) saying that the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had, on two occasions, met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
When the president was shown the story, he didn’t see its significance. “So what?” he said.
Well, during his confirmation, it was explained to the president, Sessions had said he didn’t.
Facing Sessions at the January 10 hearing, Al Franken, the former comedian and Democratic senator from Minnesota, appeared to be casting blindly for an elusive fish in his efforts to find a question. Stopping and starting, slogging through his sentence construction, Franken, who had been handed a question based on the just-revealed Steele dossier, got to this end:
These documents also allegedly say, quote, “There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”
Now, again, I’m telling you this as it’s coming out, so you know. But if it’s true, it’s obviously extremely serious and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?
Instead of answering Franken’s circuitous question—“What will you do?”—with an easy “We will of course investigate and pursue any and all illegal actions,” a confused Sessions answered a question he wasn’t asked.
Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have—did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.
The president’s immediate focus was on the question of why anyone believed that
communicating with the Russians was bad. There is nothing wrong with that, Trump insisted. As
in the past, it was hard to move him off this point and to the issue at hand: a possible lie to
Congress. The Post story, to the extent that it registered at all, didn’t worry him. Supported by
Hicks, he saw it a way-long-shot effort to pin something on Sessions. And anyway, Sessions was
saying he didn’t meet with the Russians as a campaign surrogate. So? He didn’t. Case closed.
“Fake news,” said the president, using his now all-purpose rejoinder.
As for the bad Times story, as Hicks related it to the president, it appeared to him to be good news. Briefed by anonymous sources in the Obama administration (more anonymous Obama sources), the story revealed a new dimension to the ever growing suggestion of a connection between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to influence the U.S. election:
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing
meetings in European cities between Russian officials—and others close to Russia’s
president, Vladimir V. Putin—and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three
former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.
And:
Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.
The story went on:
Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.
And then the real point:
At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that
intelligence could be covered up or destroyed—or its sources exposed—once power
changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the
deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.
Here was more confirmation of a central Trump thesis: The previous administration, its own
candidate defeated, was not just disregarding the democratic custom of smoothing the way for
the winner of the election; rather, in the Trump White House view, Obama’s people had plotted
with the intelligence community to put land mines in the new administration’s way. Secret
intelligence was, the story suggested, being widely distributed across intelligence agencies so as
to make it easier to leak, and at the same time to protect the leakers. This intelligence, it was
rumored, consisted of spreadsheets kept by Susan Rice that listed the Trump team’s Russian
contacts; borrowing a technique from WikiLeaks, the documents were secreted on a dozen
servers in different places. Before this broad distribution, when the information was held tightly,
it would have been easy to identify the small pool of leakers. But the Obama administration had
significantly expanded that pool.
So this was good news, right? Wasn’t this proof, the president asked, that Obama and his people were out to get him? The Times story was a leak about a plan to leak—and it provided clear evidence of the deep state.
Hope Hicks, as always, supported Trump’s view. The crime was leaking and the culprit was the Obama administration. The Justice Department, the president was confident, was now going to investigate the former president and his people. Finally.
* * *
Hope Hicks also brought to the president a big piece in the New Yorker. The magazine had just
published an article by three authors—Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa—
attributing Russian aggressiveness to a new cold war. Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker,
had, since the Trump election, propounded an absolutist view that Trump’s election imperiled
Democratic norms.
This 13,500-word story—handily connecting the dots of Russia’s geopolitical mortification,
Putin’s ambition, the country’s cyber talents, Trump’s own nascent authoritarianism, and the
U.S. intelligence community’s suspicions about Putin and Russia—codified a new narrative as
coherent and as apocalyptic as the one about the old cold war. The difference was that in this
one, the ultimate result was Donald Trump—he was the nuclear bomb. One of the frequently
quoted sources in the article was Ben Rhodes, the Obama aide who, Trump’s camp believed, was
a key leaker, if not one of the architects of the Obama administration’s continued effort to
connect Trump and his team to Putin and Russia. Rhodes, many in the White House believed,
was the deep state. They also believed that every time a leak was credited to “former and current
officials,” Rhodes was the former official who was in close touch with current officials.
While the article was largely just a dire recapitulation of fears about Putin and Trump, it did,
in a parenthesis toward the end of the article—quite burying the lead—connect Jared Kushner to
Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, in a meeting in Trump Tower with Michael Flynn in
December.
Hicks missed this point; later, it had to be highlighted for the president by Bannon.
Three people in the Trump administration—the former National Security Advisor, the current attorney general, and the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law—had now been directly connected to the Russian diplomat.
To Kushner and his wife, this was less than innocent: they would, with a sense of deepening
threat, suspect Bannon of leaking the information about Kushner’s meeting with Kislyak.
* * *
Few jobs in the Trump administration seemed so right, fitting, and even destined to their holder as Jeff Sessions’s appointment as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. As he viewed his work as AG, it was his mandate to curb, circumscribe, and undo the interpretation of federal law that had for three generations undermined American culture and offended his own place in it. “This is his life’s work,” said Steve Bannon.
And Sessions was certainly not going to risk his job over the silly Russia business, with its growing collection of slapstick Trump figures. God knows what those characters were up to— nothing good, everybody assumed. Best to have nothing to do with it.
Without consulting the president or, ostensibly, anyone in the White House, Sessions decided to move as far as possible out of harm’s way. On March 2, the day after the Post story, he recused himself from anything having to do with the Russia investigation.
The news of the attorney general’s recusal exploded like an IED in the White House. Sessions
was Trump’s protection against an overly aggressive Russian investigation. The president just
could not grasp the logic here. He railed to friends: Why would Sessions not want to protect
him? What would Sessions gain? Did he think this stuff was real? Sessions needed to do his job!
In fact, Trump already had good reason to worry about the DOJ. The president had a private
source, one of his frequent callers, who, he believed, was keeping him abreast of what was going
on in the Justice Department—and, the president noted, doing a much better job of it than
Sessions himself.
The Trump administration, as a consequence of the Russia story, was involved in a high-stakes
bureaucratic push-pull, with the president going outside government to find out what was
happening in his own government. The source, a longtime friend with his own DOJ sources—
many of the president’s rich and powerful friends had their own reasons to keep close tabs on
what was happening at the Justice Department—fed the president a bleak picture of a Justice
Department and an FBI run amok in its efforts to get him. “Treason” was a word that was being
used, the president was told.
“The DOJ,” the president’s source told him, “was filled with women who hated him.” It was
an army of lawyers and investigators taking instructions from the former administration. “They
want to make Watergate look like Pissgate,” the president was told. This comparison confused
Trump; he thought his friend was making a reference to the Steele dossier and its tale of the
golden showers.