Fear: Trump in the White House(56)
He raged at the coverage as top aides came in and out—Priebus, Bannon, Kushner, McGahn, Cohn, Hicks and Porter. Why was Mueller picked? Trump asked. “He was just in here and I didn’t hire him for the FBI,” Trump raged. “Of course he’s got an axe to grind with me.”
“Everybody’s trying to get me,” the president said. “It’s unfair. Now everybody’s saying I’m going to be impeached.” What are the powers of a special counsel? he asked.
A special counsel had virtually unlimited power to investigate any possible crime, Porter said. It was Watergate, Iran-contra and Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.
“Now I have this person,” Trump said bitterly, “who has no accountability who can look into anything, however unrelated it is? They’re going to spend years digging through my whole life and finances.”
Trump could not focus on much of anything else. Meetings were canceled and parts of the day eventually scrapped.
Porter had never seen Trump so visibly disturbed. He knew Trump was a narcissist who saw everything in terms of its impact on him. But the hours of raging reminded Porter of what he had read about Nixon’s final days in office—praying, pounding the carpet, talking to the pictures of past presidents on the walls. Trump’s behavior was now in the paranoid territory.
“They’re out to get me,” Trump said. “This is an injustice. This is unfair. How could this have happened? It’s all Jeff Sessions’ fault. This is all politically motivated. Rod Rosenstein doesn’t know what the hell he is doing. He’s a Democrat. He’s from Maryland.”
As he paced the floor, Trump said, “Rosenstein was one of the people who said to fire Comey and wrote me this letter. How could he possibly be supervising this investigation?”
Bob Mueller had all these conflicts that ought to bar him from being special counsel investigating him. “He was a member of one of my golf courses”—Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia—and there was a dispute over fees and Mueller resigned. Mueller’s law firm had previously represented Trump’s son-in-law.
“I’m getting punched,” Trump said. “I have to punch back. In order for it to be a fair fight, I have to be fighting.”
Back and forth most of the day, the president rotated to watch TV in the dining room and then come out to the Oval Office in a frenzy, asking questions and voicing his anger that he had lost control of the investigation.
“I am the president,” Trump said. “I can fire anybody that I want. They can’t be investigating me for firing Comey. And Comey deserved to be fired! Everybody hated him. He was awful.”
CHAPTER
21
Marc Kasowitz, the seasoned, gray-haired litigator who had represented Trump for decades in divorces and bankruptcies, asked John Dowd, 76, one of the most experienced attorneys in white-collar criminal defense, to his office in New York at 4:00 p.m. on May 25, 2017.
“We need you in Washington to represent the president,” to defend Trump in the Russia investigation being launched by special counsel Robert Mueller, Kasowitz said. Several high-profile attorneys had already turned down the job, citing conflicts or the difficulty in managing Trump. But Dowd, a former prosecutor with a long list of prominent clients, jumped at the chance to round out a 47-year legal career with the highest-profile case in the country.
“Oh my God,” he replied. “That’s incredible. I’d be happy to represent the president.”
“It’s no day at the beach.”
“I think I’ve figured that out,” Dowd said.
Dowd was both good-old-boy figure and hard-nosed investigator. He had been a Marine Corps lawyer in the 1960s and a mob prosecutor as chief of the Justice Department Organized Crime Strike Force in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he was special counsel to the commissioner of baseball. He ran several investigations, the most prominent leading to the banning of Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds for betting on baseball games. After that, as a defense attorney, Dowd represented Wall Street and political figures, including Senator John McCain in the Keating Five ethics investigation. He had been a partner in the prominent law firm Akin Gump and was now retired.
Dowd had a conference call with Trump and Kasowitz, and then several conversations with the president. The Mueller investigation, Trump told him, was consuming him and his presidency. He had done nothing wrong. “John, this thing is an enormous burden. It interferes particularly with foreign affairs. It’s embarrassing to be in the middle of a deal and the guy, the premier or the prime minister on the other side says, ‘Hey Donald, are you going to be around?’ It’s like a kick in the nuts.”
Dowd said he would not charge by the hour. He would set a fee. They agreed on $100,000 a month, which was about half his normal rate. Trump instructed him to send the invoice to his office in New York and he would be paid the next day. (He was.)
The president was outraged by the Mueller investigation. He listed his complaints to Dowd.
First, he had been blindsided by Attorney General Sessions’s March 2 decision recusing himself from any investigation of Russian election meddling. He had expected political protection from his attorney general and was now left unprotected.
Second, Trump related how he learned on May 17 that Mueller had been appointed special counsel by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. It was absolutely outrageous. He had been in the Oval Office with Sessions when one of the White House lawyers brought the news. Sessions said, “I didn’t know about this.” He had turned to Sessions, “Well, doesn’t he work for you?” Sessions’s recusal left Rosenstein in charge of any Russia inquiry.