ith 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-tooovereager
yes woman, always in fear of making a mistake, ever tremulously secondguessing
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.
After the attorney general’s recusal, the president, whose instinctive reaction to every
problem was to fire someone, right away, thought he should just get rid of Sessions. At the
same time, there was little doubt in his mind about what was happening here. He knew
where this Russia stuff was coming from, and if these Obama people thought they were
going to get away with it they had another think coming. He would expose them all!
One of Jared Kushner’s many new patrons was Tony Blair, the former —British prime
minister, whom Kushner had gotten to know when, on the banks of the River Jordan in
2010, they both attended the baptism of Grace and Chloe Murdoch, the young daughters
of Rupert Murdoch and his then wife, Wendi. Jared and Ivanka had also lived in the same
Trump building on Park Avenue where the Murdochs lived (for the Murdochs it was a
temporary rental apartment while their grand triplex on Fifth Avenue was —renovated, but
the renovation had lasted for four years), and during that period Ivanka Trump had
become one of Wendi Murdoch’s closest friends. Blair, godfather to Grace, would later be
accused by Murdoch of having an affair with his wife, and of being the cause of their
breakup (something Blair has categorically denied). In the divorce, Wendi got the Trumps.
But once in the White House, the president’s daughter and son-in-law became the
target of a renewed and eager cultivation by, with quite some irony, both Blair and
Murdoch. Lacking a circle of influence in almost all of the many areas of government with
which he was now involved, Kushner was both susceptible to cultivation and more than a
little desperate for the advice his cultivators had to offer. Blair, now with philanthropic,
private diplomatic, and varied business interests in the Middle East, was particularly intent
on helping shepherd some of Jared’s Middle East initiatives.
In February, Blair visited Kushner in the White House.
On this trip, the now freelance diplomat, perhaps seeking to prove his usefulness to this
new White House, mentioned a juicy rumor: the possibility that the British had had the
Trump campaign staff under surveillance, monitoring its telephone calls and other
communications and possibly even Trump himself. This was, as Kushner might
understand, the Sabbath goy theory of intelligence. On the Sabbath, observant Jews could
not turn on the lights, nor ask someone else to turn on the lights. But if they expressed the
view that it would be much easier to see with light, and if a non-Jew then happened to turn
them on, that would be fine. So although the Obama administration would not have asked
the British to spy on the Trump campaign, the Brits would have been led to understand
how helpful it might be if they did.
It was unclear whether the information was rumor, informed conjecture, speculation, or
solid stuff. But, as it churned and festered in the president’s mind, Kushner and Bannon
went out to CIA headquarters in Langley to meet with Mike Pompeo and his deputy
director Gina Haspel to check it out. A few days later, the CIA opaquely reported back that
the information was not correct; it was a “miscommunication.”
