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SIEGE
Trump Under Fire
MfCEEATEL
WOLFF
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
Contents
AUTHOR'S NOTE XI
1. BULLSEYE 1
2. THE DO-OVER 21
3. LAWYERS 38
4. HOME ALONE 50
5. ROBERT MUELLER 6o
6. MICHAEL COHEN 75
7. THE WOMEN 88
8. MICHAEL FLYNN 99
9. MIDTERMS 113
10. KUSHNER 125
11. HANNITY 143
12. TRUMP ABROAD 156
13. TRUMP AND PUTIN 169
CONTENTS
14. 100 DAYS 185
15. MANAFORT 196
16. PECKER, COHEN, WEISSELBERG 209
17. MCCAIN, WOODWARD, ANONYMOUS 223
18. ICAVANAUGH 234
19. KHASHOGGI 246
20. OCTOBER SURPRISES 257
21. NOVEMBER 6 268
22. SHUTDOWN 282
23. THE WALL 295
EPILOGUE: THE REPORT 309
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 317
INDEX 319
Author's Note
Shortly after Donald Trump's inauguration as the forty-fifth president of
the United States, I was allowed into the West Wing as a sideline observer.
My book Fire and Fury was the resulting account of the organizational
chaos and constant drama—more psychodrama than political drama—of
Trump's first seven months in office. Here was a volatile and uncertain
president, releasing, almost on a daily basis, his strange furies on the world,
and, at the same time, on his own staff. This first phase of the most abnor-
mal White House in American history ended in August 2017, with the
departure of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and the appointment of
retired general John Kelly as chief of staff
This new account begins in February 2018 at the outset of Trump's
second year in office, with the situation now profoundly altered. The pres-
ident's capricious furies have been met by an increasingly organized and
methodical institutional response. The wheels of justice are inexorably
turning against him. In many ways, his own government, even his own
White House, has begun to turn on him. Virtually every power center left
of the far-right wing has deemed him unfit. Even some among his own
base find him undependable, hopelessly distracted, and in over his head.
Never before has a president been under such concerted attack with such
a limited capacity to defend himself.
His enemies surround him, dedicated to bringing him down.
XII
AUTHOR'S NOTE
AUTHOR'S NOTE
XI!!
* * *
I am joined in my train-wreck fascination with Trump—that certain
knowledge that in the end he will destroy himself—by, I believe, almost
everyone who has encountered him since he was elected president.
To have worked anywhere near him is to be confronted with the most
extreme and disorienting behavior possible. That is hardly an overstate-
ment. Not only is Trump not like other presidents, he is not like anyone
most of us have ever known. Hence, everyone who has been close to him
feels compelled to try to explain him and to dine out on his head-smacking
peculiarities. It is yet one more of his handicaps: all the people around
him, however much they are bound by promises of confidentiality or
nondisclosure agreements or even friendship, cannot stop talking about
their experience with him. In this sense, he is more exposed than any
president in history.
Many of the people in the White House who helped me during the
writing of Fire and Fury are now outside of the administration, yet they are
as engaged as ever by the Trump saga. I am grateful to be part of this sub-
stantial network. Many of Trump's pre-White House cronies continue to
both listen to him and support him; at the same time, as an expression both
of their concern and of their incredulity, they report among one another,
and to others as well, on his temper, mood, and impulses. In general, I
have found that the closer people are to him, the more alarmed they have
found themselves at various points about his mental state. They all spec-
ulate about how this will end—badly for him, they almost all conclude.
Indeed, Trump is probably a much better subject for writers interested in
human capacities and failings than for most of the reporters and writers
who regularly cover Washington and who are primarily interested in the
pursuit of success and power.
My primary goal in Siege is to create a readable and intuitive narrative—
that is its nature. Another goal is to write the near equivalent of a real-time
history of this extraordinary moment, since understanding it well after
the fact might be too late. A final goal is pure portraiture: Donald Trump
as an extreme, almost hallucinatory, and certainly cautionary, Amer-
ican character. To accomplish this, to gain the perspective and to find
the voices necessary to tell the larger story, I provided anonymity to any
source who requested it. In cases where I have been told—on the prom-
ise of no attribution—about an unreported event or private conversation
or remark, I have made every effort to confirm it with other sources or
documents. In some cases, I have witnessed the events or conversations
described herein. With regard to the Mueller investigation, the narrative
I provide is based on internal documents given to me by sources close to
the Office of the Special Counsel.
Dealing with sources in the Trump White House has continued to
offer its own set of unique issues. A basic requirement of working there
is, surely, the willingness to infinitely rationalize or delegitimize the truth,
and, when necessary, to outright lie. In fact, I believe this has caused some
of the same people who have undermined the public trust to become pri-
vate truth-tellers. This is their devil's bargain. But for the writer, interview-
ing such Janus-faced sources creates a dilemma, for it requires depending
on people who lie to also tell the truth—and who might later disavow the
truth they have told. Indeed, the extraordinary nature of much of what
has happened in the Trump White House is often baldly denied by its
spokespeople, as well as by the president himself. Yet in each successive
account of this administration, the level of its preposterousness—even as
that bar has been consistently raised—has almost invariably been con-
firmed.
In an atmosphere that promotes, and frequently demands, hyperbole,
tone itself becomes a key part of accuracy. For instance, most crucially,
the president, by a wide range of the people in close contact with him, is
often described in maximal terms of mental instability. "I have never met
anyone crazier than Donald Trump" is the wording of one staff member
who has spent almost countless hours with the president. Something like
this has been expressed to me by a dozen others with firsthand experience.
How do you translate that into a responsible evaluation of this singular
White House? My strategy is to try to show and not tell, to describe the
broadest context, to communicate the experience, to make it real enough
for a reader to evaluate for him- or herself where Donald Trump falls on a
vertiginous sliding scale of human behavior. It is that condition, an emo-
tional state rather than a political state, that is at the heart of this book.
1
BULLSEYE
The president made his familiar stink-in-the-room face, then way
his hands as though to ward off a bug.
"Don't tell me this," he said. "Why are you telling me this?"
His personal lawyer John Dowd, in late February 2018, little mo
than a year into Trump's tenure, was trying to explain that prosecutc
were likely to issue a subpoena for some of the Trump Organizatio:
business records.
Trump seemed to respond less to the implications of such a deep di
into his affairs than to having to hear about it at all. His annoyance set (
a small rant. It was not so much about people out to get him—and pe
pie were surely out to get him—but that nobody was defending him. T
problem was his own people. Especially his lawyers.
Trump wanted his lawyers to "fix" things. "Don't bring me problen
bring me solutions:' was a favorite CEO bromide that he often repeat€
He judged his lawyers by their under-the-table or sleight-of-hand ski
and held them accountable when they could not make problems disa
pear. His problems became their fault. "Make it go away" was one of I-
frequent orders. It was often said in triplicate: "Make it go away, make
go away, make it go away."
The White House counsel Don McGahn—representing the Whi
2 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE
House rather than, in a distinction Trump could never firmly grasp, the
president himself—demonstrated little ability to make problems disap-
pear and became a constant brunt of Trump's rages and invective. His legal
interpretation of proper executive branch function too often thwarted his
boss's wishes.
Dowd and his colleagues, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow—the trio of law-
yers charged with navigating the president through his personal legal
problems—had, on the other hand, become highly skilled in avoiding
their client's bad humor, which was often accompanied by menacing,
barely controlled personal attacks. All three men understood that to-be a
successful lawyer for Donald Trump was to tell the client what he wanted
to hear.
Trump harbored a myth about the ideal lawyer that had almost noth-
ing to do with the practice of law. He invariably cited Roy Cohn, his old
New York friend, attorney, and tough-guy mentor, and Robert Kennedy,
John F. Kennedy's brother. "He was always on my ass about Roy Cohn
and Bobby Kennedy," said Steve Bannon, the political strategist who,
perhaps more than anyone else, was responsible for Trump's victory.
"'Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy,' he would say. 'Where's my Roy Cohn
and Bobby Kennedy?" Cohn, to his own benefit and legend, built the
myth that Trump continued to embrace: with enough juice and mus-
cle, the legal system could always be gamed. Bobby Kennedy had been
his brother's attorney general and hatchet man; he protected JFK and
worked the back channels of power for the benefit of the family.
This was the constant Trump theme: beating the system. "I'm the guy
who gets away with it:' he had often bragged to friends in New York.
At the same time, he did not want to know details. He merely wanted
his lawyers to assure him that he was winning. "We're killing it, right?
That's what I want to know. That's all I want to know. If we're not killing
it, you screwed up," he shouted one afternoon at members of his ad hoc
legal staff.
From the start, it had become a particular challenge to find top law-
yers to take on what, in the past, had always been one of the most vaunted
of legal assignments: representing the president of the United States. One
high-profile Washington white-collar litigator gave Trump a list of twenty
issues that would immediately need to be addressed if he were to ta
on the case. Trump refused to consider any of them. More than a doz
major firms had turned down his business. In the end, Trump was left wi
a ragtag group of solo practitioners without the heft and resources oft
firms. Now, thirteen months after his inauguration, he was facing p(
sonal legal trouble at least as great as that faced by Richard Nixon and I
Clinton, and doing so with what seemed like, at best, a Court Street lei
team. But Trump appeared to be oblivious to this exposed flank. Ratchi
ing up his level of denial about the legal threats around him, he breez
rationalized: "If I had good lawyers, I'd look guilty"
Dowd, at seventy-seven, had had a long, successful legal career, bc
in government and in Washington law firms. But that was in the past.
was on his own now, eager to postpone retirement. He knew the imp(
tance, certainly to his own position in Trump's legal circle, of und(
standing his client's needs. He was forced to agree with the presider
assessment of the investigation into his campaign's contact with Russi
state interests: it would not reach him. To that end, Dowd, and the otk
members of Trump's legal team, recommended that the president coo
erate with the Mueller investigation.
"I'm not a target, right?" Trump constantly prodded them.
This wasn't a rhetorical question. He insisted on an answer, and
affirmative one: "Mr. President, you're not a target:' Early in his tenu
Trump had pushed FBI director James Comey to provide precisely ti
reassurance. In one of the signature moves of his presidency, he had fir
Comey in May 2017 in part because he wasn't satisfied with the enth
siasm of the affirmation and therefore assumed Comey was plotti
against him.
Whether the president was indeed a target—and it would surely ha
taken a through-the-looking-glass exercise not to see him as the bulls€
of the Mueller investigation—seemed to occupy a separate reality fn
Trump's need to be reassured that he was not a target.
"Trump's trained me:' Ty Cobb told Steve Bannon. "Even if it's tx
it's great:'
Trump imagined—indeed, with a preternatural confidence, nothi
appeared to dissuade him—that sometime in the very near future he ww.
4
MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE
hear directly from the special counsel, who would send him a compre-
hensive and even apologetic letter of exoneration.
"Where," he kept demanding to know, "is my fucking letter?"
* * *
The grand jury empanelled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller met on
Thursdays and Fridays in federal district court in Washington. Its busi-
ness was conducted on the fifth floor of an unremarkable building at 333
Constitution Avenue. The grand jurors gathered in a nondescript space
that looked less like a courtroom than a classroom, with prosecutors at a
podium and witnesses sitting at a desk in the front of the room. The Mueller
grand jurors were more female than male, more white than black, older
rather than younger; they were distinguished most of all by their focus
and intensity. They listened to the proceedings with "a scary sort of atten-
tion, as though they already know everything," said one witness.
In a grand jury inquiry, you fall into one of three categories. You are
a "witness of fact:' meaning the prosecutor believes you have information
about an investigation at hand. Or you are a "subject:' meaning you are
regarded as having personal involvement with the crime under investiga-
tion. Or, most worrisome, you are a "target:' meaning the prosecutor is
seeking to have the grand jury indict you. Witnesses often became sub-
jects, and subjects often became targets.
In early 2018, with the Mueller investigation and its grand jury main-
taining a historic level of secrecy, no one in the White House could be sure
who was what. Or who was saying what to whom. Anyone and everyone
working for the president or one of his senior aides could be talking to the
special counsel. The investigation's code of silence extended into the West
Wing. Nobody knew, and nobody was saying, who was spilling the beans.
Almost every White House senior staffer—the collection of advisers
who had firsthand dealings with the president—had retained a lawyer.
Indeed, from the president's first days in the White House, Trump's tangled
legal past and evident lack of legal concern had cast a shadow on those
who worked for him. Senior people were looking for lawyers even as they
were still learning how to navigate the rabbit warren that is the West Wing.
In February 2017, mere weeks after the inauguration, and not long
after the FBI had first raised questions about National Security AdN
Michael Flynn, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus had walked into Steve I
non's office and said, "I'm going to do you a big favor. Give me your ci
card. Don't ask me why, just give it to me. You'll be thanking me fol
rest of your life:'
Bannon opened his wallet and gave Priebus his American Exr
card. Priebus shortly returned, handed the card back, and said, "You
have legal insurance'
Over the next year, Bannon—a witness of fact—spent hundrec
hours with his lawyers preparing for his testimony before the spi
counsel and before Congress. His lawyers in turn spent ever moun
hours talking to Mueller's team and to congressional committee coun
Bannon's legal costs at the end of the year came to $2 million.
Every lawyer's first piece of advice to his or her client was blunt
unequivocal: talk to no one, lest it become necessary to testify aboutI
you said. Before long, a constant preoccupation of senior staffers in
Trump White House was to know as little as possible. It was a wr(
side-up world: where being "in the room" was traditionally the
sought-after status, now you wanted to stay out of meetings. You wa:
to avoid being a witness to conversations; you wanted to avoid b
witnessed being a witness to conversations, at least if you were sn
Certainly, nobody was your friend. It was impossible to know wilt
colleague stood in the investigation; hence, you had no way of knoN
how likely it was that they might need to offer testimony about som(
else—you, perhaps—as the bargaining chip to save themselves by a
erating with the special counsel, a.k.a. flipping.
The White House, it rapidly dawned on almost everyone who wol
there—even as it became one more reason not to work there—was
scene of an ongoing criminal investigation, one that could potent
ensnare anyone who was anywhere near it.
* * *
The ultimate keeper of the secrets from the campaign, the transition,
through the first year in the White House was Hope Hicks, the AN
House communications director. She had witnessed most everyth
6 MICHAEL WOLFF SIEGE 7
She saw what the president saw: she knew what the president, a man
unable to control his own running monologue, knew.
On February 27, 2018, testifying before the House Intelligence
Committee—she had already appeared before the special counsel—she
was pressed about whether she had ever lied for the president. Perhaps a
more accomplished communications professional could have escaped the
corner here, but Hicks, who had scant experience other than working as
Donald Trump's spokesperson, which, as often as not, meant dealing with
his disregard of empirical truth, found herself as though in a sudden and
unexpected moral void trying to publicly parse the relative importance
of her boss's lies. She admitted to telling "white lies:' as in, somehow, less
than the biggest lies. This was enough of a forward admission to require
a nearly twenty-minute mid-testimony conference with her lawyers, dis-
tressed by what she might be admitting and by where any deconstruction
of the president's constant inversions might lead.
Not long after she testified, another witness before the Mueller grand
jury was asked how far Hicks might go to lie for the president. The witness
answered: "I think when it comes to doing anything as a 'yes man' for
Trump, she'll do it—but she won't take a bullet for him?' The statement
could be taken as both a backhanded compliment and an estimate of how
far loyalty in the Trump White House might extend—probably not too far.
Almost no one in Trump's administration, it could be argued, was con-
ventionally suited to his or her job. But with the possible exception of the
president himself, no one provided a better illustration of this unprepared
and uninformed presidency than Hicks. She did not have substantial media
or political experience, nor did she have a temperament annealed by years
of high-pressure work. Always dressed in the short skirts that Trump
favored, she seemed invariably caught in the headlights. Trump admired
her not because she had the political skills to protect him, but for her pliant
dutifulness. Her job was to devote herself to his care and feeding.
"When you speak to him, open with positive feedback:' counseled
Hicks, understanding Trump's need for constant affirmation and his
almost complete inability to talk about anything but himself. Her atten-
tiveness to Trump and tractable nature had elevated her, at age twenty-nine,
to the top White House communications job. And practically speaking,
she acted as his de facto chief of staff. Trump did not want his administra-
tion to be staffed by professionals; he wanted it to be staffed by people who
attended and catered to him.
Hicks—"Hope-y," to Trump—was both the president's gatekeeper
and his comfort blanket. She was also a frequent subject of his pruri-
ent interest: Trump preferred business, even in the White House, to be
personal. "Who's fucking Hope?" he would demand to know. The topic
also interested his son Don Jr., who often professed his intention to "fuck
Hope The president's daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner,
both White House senior advisers, expressed a gentler type of concern for
Hicks; sometimes they would even try to suggest eligible men.
But Hicks, seeming to understand the insular nature of Trumpworld,
dated exclusively inside the bubble, picking the baddest boys in it: cam-
paign manager Corey Lewandowslci during the campaign and presiden-
tial aide Rob Porter in the White House. As the relationship between
Hicks and Porter unfolded in the fall of 2017, knowing about the affair
became an emblem of Trump insiderness, with special care taken to keep
this development from the proprietary president. Or not: other people,
assuming that Porter's involvement with Hicks would not at all please
Trump, were less than discreet about it.
* * *
In the heightened enmity of the Trump White House, Rob Porter may have
succeeded in becoming the most disliked person by everyone except per-
haps the president himself A square-jawed, 1950s-looking guy who could
have been a model for Brylcreem, he was almost a laughable figure of
betrayal and perfidy: if he hadn't stabbed you in the back, you would be
forced to acknowledge how unworthy he considered you to be. A sitcom
sort of suck-up—"Eddie Haskell," cracked Bannon, citing the early televi-
sion icon of insincerity and brownnosing featured in Leave It to Beaver—he
embraced Chief of Staff John Kelly, while at the same time poisoning him
with the president. Porter's estimation of his own high responsibilities in
the White House, together with the senior-most jobs that the president,
he let it be known, was promising him, seemed to put the administration
and the nation squarely on his shoulders.
8 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE
Porter had, before the age of forty, two bitter ex-wives, at least one
of whom he had beaten, and both of whom he had cheated on at talk-
of-the-town levels. During a stint as a Senate staffer, the married Porter
had an affair with an intern, costing him his job. His girlfriend Samantha
Dravis had moved in with Porter in the summer of 2017, while, quite
unbeknownst to her, he was seeing Hicks. "I cheated on you because you're
not attractive enough:' he later told Dravis.
In a potentially criminal break of protocol, Porter had gained access
to his raw FBI clearance reports and seen the statements of his ex-wives.
His most recent ex-wife had also written a blog about his alleged abuse,
which, while it did not name him, clearly fingered him. Concerned about
the damaging impact his former wives could have on his security review,
he recruited Dravis to help him smooth his relationship with both women.
Lewandowski, Hicks's former boyfriend, caught wind of the Hicks-
Porter relationship and began working to expose it; by some reports,
he got paparazzi to follow Hicks. Though Porter's history of abuse was
slowly making its way to the surface as a result of the FBI investigation,
the Lewandowski campaign against Hicks cut through many other efforts
to cover up Porter's transgressions.
Dravis, in the autumn of 2017, heard the Lewandowski-pushed
rumors of the Hicks-Porter relationship. After finding Hicks's number
listed under a man's name in Porter's contacts, Dravis confronted Porter,
who promptly threw her out. Moving back in with her parents, she began
her own revenge campaign, openly talking about Porter's security clear-
ance issues, including to people inside the White House counsel's office,
saying he had protection at the highest levels in the White House. Then,
along with Lewandowski, Dravis helped leak the details of the Hicks-
Porter romance to the Daily Mail, which published a story about it on
February 1.
But Dravis, joined by Porter's former wives, decided that, outra-
geously, he had come out looking good in the Daily Mail account—he
was part of a glam power couple! Porter called Dravis to taunt her: "You
thought you could get me!" Dravis and his former wives all then publicly
revealed their abuse at his hand. His first wife said he kicked and punched
her; she even produced a photograph of her black eye. His second wife
informed the media that she had filed an emergency protective orC
against him.
The White House, or at least Kelly—and likely Hicks—had been am
of many of these claims and, effectively, covered them up. ("You usua
have enough competent people for White House positions to weed out
wife beaters, but you couldn't be so choosy in the Trump White House,"
one Republican acquaintance of Porter's.) The furor that erupted arou
Porter and his troubling gross-guy history not only annoyed Trump
"He stinks of bad press"—it further weakened Kelly. On February 7, af
both of his former wives gave interviews to CNN, Porter resigned.
A publicity-shy Hicks—Donald Trump put a high value on associa
who did not steal his press opportunities—suddenly found her love 1
in the glare of intense international press scrutiny. Her affair with the d
credited Porter highlighted her own odd relationship with the presid(
and his family, as well as the haphazard management, interpersonal •:1
functions, and general lack of political savvy in the Trump court.
* * *
The affair was, curiously, among the least of Hicks's problems. Indeed, i
Hicks the Porter scandal became perhaps a better cloud under which
leave the administration than what almost everybody in the West Wi
assumed was the real cloud.
On February 27, a reporter at the Washington insider newsletter Axi
Jonathan Swan, a favorite conduit for White House leaks, reported ti
Josh Raffel was leaving the White House. In a novel arrangement, Rai
had come into the White House in April 2017 as the exclusive spokespers
for the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his wife, Ivanka, bypa
ing the White House communications team. Raffel, who, like Kushn
was a Democrat, had worked for Hiltzik Strategies, the New York pub
relations firm that represented Ivanka's clothing line.
Hope Hicks, who had also worked for the Hiltzik firm—perhaps 1),
known for having long represented the film producer Harvey Weinste
caught, in the fall of 2017, in an epochal harassment and abuse scan(
and cover-up—had originally had the same role as Raffel but at a hie
level: she was the personal spokesperson for the president. In Septemb
10 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE
Hicks had been elevated to White House communications director, with
Raffel as her number two.
The trouble had arisen the previous summer. Both Hicks and Raffel
had been on Air Force One in July 2017 as the news broke about Donald
Trump Jr.'s meeting in Trump Tower during the campaign with Russian
government go-betweens offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. During the
flight back to the United States after the G20 summit in Germany, Hicks
and Raffel aided the president in his efforts to issue a largely false story
about the Trump Tower meeting, thus becoming part of the cover-up.
Even though Raffel had been at the White House for a little more than
nine months, the Axios report said that his departure had been under dis-
cussion for several months. That was untrue. It was an abrupt exit.
The next day, just as abruptly, Hope Hicks—the person in the White
House closest to the president—resigned as well.
The one person who perhaps knew more than anyone else about the
workings of the Trump campaign and the Trump White House was sud-
denly out the door. The profound concern inside the White House was
the reasonable supposition that Hicks and Raffel, both witnesses to and
participants in the president's efforts to cover up the details of his son and
son-in-law's meeting with the Russians, were subjects or targets of the
Mueller investigation—or, worse, had already cut a deal.
The president, effusive in his public praise for Hicks, did not try to
talk her out of leaving. In the weeks to come he would mope about her
absence—"Where's my Hope-y?"—but, in fact, as soon as he got wind
that she might be talking, he wanted to cut her loose and began, in a
significant rewrite, downgrading her status and importance on the cam-
paign and in the White House.
Yet here, from Trump's point of view, was a hopeful point about Hicks:
as central as she was to his presidency, her duties really only consisted of
pleasing him. She was an unlikely agent of grand strategy and great con-
spiracies. Trump's team was made up of only bit players.
* * *
John Dowd may have been reluctant to give his client bad news, but
he well understood the danger of a thorough prosecutor with virtually
unlimited resources. The more a determined team of G-men sifts, strir
and inspects, the greater the chance that both methodical and cast
crimes will be revealed. The more comprehensive the search, the mc
inevitable the outcome. The case of Donald Trump—with his history
bankruptcies, financial legerdemain, dubious associations, and gene]
sense of impunity—certainly seemed to offer prosecutors something
an embarrassment of riches.
For his part, however, Donald Trump yet seemed to believe that I
skills and instincts were at least a match for all the thoroughness a]
resources of the United States Department of Justice. He even believ
their exhaustive approach would work in his favor. "Boring. Confusi
for everybody:' he said, dismissing the reports of the investigation pi
vided by Dowd and others. "You can't follow any of this. No hook:'
One of the many odd aspects of Trump's presidency was that
did not see being president, either the responsibilities or the exposu
as being all that different from his pre-presidential life. He had endur
almost countless investigations in his long career. He had been involv
in various kinds of litigation for the better part of forty-five years. He
a fighter who, with brazenness and aggression, got out of fixes that wot
have ruined a weaker, less wily player. That was his essential busint
strategy: what doesn't kill me strengthens me. Though he was wound
again and again, he never bled out.
"It's playing the game," he explained in one of his frequent mor
logues about his own superiority and everyone else's stupidity. "I'm go
at the game. Maybe I'm the best. Really, I could be the best. I think I
the best. I'm very good. Very cool. Most people are afraid that the wo
might happen. But it doesn't, unless you're stupid. And I'm not stupid:
In the weeks after his first anniversary in office, with the Mudl
investigation in its eighth month, Trump continued to regard the si
cial counsel's inquiry as a contest of wills. He did not see it as a war
attrition—a gradual reduction of the strength and credibility of the t
get through sustained scrutiny and increasing pressure. Instead, he saN
situation to confront, a spurious government undertaking that was v
nerable to his attacks. He was confident he could jawbone this "wii
hunt"—often tweeted in all-caps—to at least a partisan draw.
12 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE 12
He remained irritated by efforts to persuade him to play the game in
the usual Washington way—mounting a disciplined legal defense, negoti-
ating, trying to cut his losses—rather than his way. This was disconcerting
to many of the people closest to him, but it alarmed them more to see that
as Trump's indignation and sense of personal insult rose, so did his belief
in his own innocence.
* * *
By the end of February, in addition to the Mueller grand jury indictments
of a group of Russian nationals for illegal activities involved with efforts
by the Russian government to influence the U.S. election, Mueller had
reached several levels into the Trump circle. Among those who were
indicted or who had pled guilty to felonies were his former campaign man-
ager Paul Manafort, his former national security advisor Michael Flynn,
the eager-beaver junior adviser George Papadopoulos, and Manafort's
business partner and campaign official Rick Gates. This series of legal
moves could be classically read as a methodical, step-by-step approach to
the president's door. Or, from the Trump camp's point of view, it could be
seen as a roundup of the sorts of opportunists and hangers-on who had
always trailed Trump.
The doubts about the usefulness of Trump's hangers-on was an implicit
part of their usefulness: they could be shrugged off and disavowed at any
time, which is what promptly happened at the least sign of trouble. The
Trumpers swept up by Mueller were all declared wannabe and marginal
players. The president had never met them, could not remember them, or
had a limited acquaintance with them. "I know Mr. Manafort—I haven't
spoken to him in a long time, but I know him:' declared a dismissive
Trump, pulling a line from the "who dat?" page of his playbook.
The difficulty in proving a conspiracy is proving intent. Many of the
president's inner circle believed that Trump, and the Trump Organiza-
tion, and by extension the Trump campaign, operated in such a diffuse,
haphazard, gang-that-couldn't-shoot-straight manner that intent would
be very difficult to establish. What's more, the Trump hangers-on were
so demonstrably subpar players that stupidity could well be a reasonable
defense against intent.
Many in the Trump circle agreed with their boss: they believed tha
whatever idiotic moves had been made by idiotic Trump hands, the Rus.
sia investigation was too abstruse and nickel-and-dime to ultimately stick
At the same time, many, and perhaps all, were privately convinced tha
a deep dive—or, for that matter, even a cursory inspection—of Trump'
financial past would yield a trove of overt offenses, and likely a pattern o
career corruption.
It was hardly surprising, then, that ever since the beginning of th
special counsel's investigation, Trump had tried to draw a line in the sani
between Mueller and Trump family finances, openly threatening Muelle
if he went there. Trump's operating assumption remained that the speck
counsel was afraid of him, conscious of where and how his toleranc
might end. Trump was confident that the Mueller team could be made t
understand its limits, by either wink-wink or unsubtle threat.
"They know they can't get me," he told one member of his circl
of after-dinner callers, "because I was never involved. I'm not a targe
There's nothing. I'm not a target. They've told me, I'm not a target. An
they know what would happen if they made me a target. Everybod
understands everybody:'
* * *
Books and newspaper stories about Trump's forty-five years in busine;
were full of his shady dealings, and his arrival in the White House on:
helped to highlight them and surface even juicier ones. Real estate 3,4g
the world's favorite money-laundering currency, and Trump's B-level re
estate business—relentlessly marketed by Trump as triple A—was qui
explicitly designed to appeal to money launderers. What's more, Trumi
own financial woes, and desperate efforts to maintain his billionaire lif
style, cachet, and market viability, forced him into constant and unsubt
schemes. In the high irony department, Jared Kushner, when he was:
law school, and before he met Ivanka, identified, in a paper he wrot
possible claims of fraud against the Trump Organization in a particul
real estate deal he was studying—a subject now of quite some amuseme
among his acquaintances at the time. Practically speaking, Trump hid
plain sight, as the prosecutors appeared to be finding.
14 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE 15
In November 2004, for instance, Jeffrey Epstein, the financier later
caught in a scandal involving underage prostitutes, agreed to purchase
from bankruptcy a house in Palm Beach, Florida, for $36 million, a prop-
erty that had been on the market for two years. Epstein and Trump had
been close friends—playboys in arms, as it were—for more than a decade,
with Trump often seeking Epstein's help with his chaotic financial affairs.
Soon after negotiating the deal for the house in Palm Beach, Epstein took
Trump to see it, looking for advice on construction issues involved with
moving the swimming pool. But as he prepared to finalize his purchase
for the house, Epstein discovered that Trump, who was severely cash-
constrained at the time, had bid $41 million for the property and bought
it out from under Epstein through an entity called Trump Properties
LLC, entirely financed by Deutsche Bank, which was already carrying a
substantial number of troubled loans to the Trump Organization and to
Trump personally.
Trump, Epstein knew, had been loaning out his name in real estate
deals—that is, for an ample fee, Trump would serve as a front man to
disguise the actual ownership in a real estate transaction. (This was, in
a sense, another variation of Trump's basic business model of licensing
his name for commercial properties owned by someone else.) A furi-
ous Epstein, certain that Trump was merely fronting for the real owners,
threatened to expose the deal, which was getting extensive coverage in
Florida papers. The fight became all the more bitter when, not long after
the purchase, Trump put the house on the market for $125 million.
But if Epstein knew some of Trump's secrets, Trump knew some of
Epstein's. Trump often saw the financier at Epstein's current Palm Beach
house, and Trump knew that Epstein was visited almost every day, and
had been for many years, by girls he'd hired to give him massages that
often had happy endings—girls recruited from local restaurants, strip clubs,
and, also, Trump's own Mar-a-Lago. Just as the enmity between the two
friends increased over the house purchase, Epstein found himself under
investigation by the Palm Beach police. And as Epstein's legal prob-
lems escalated, the house, with only minor improvements, was acquired
for $96 million by Dmitry Rybolovlev, an oligarch who was part of the
close Putin circle of government-aligned industrialists in Russia, and who,
in fact, never moved into the house. Trump had, miraculously, earned
$55 million without putting up a dime. Or, more likely, Trump merely
earned a fee for hiding the real owner—a shadow owner quite possibly
being funneled cash by Rybolovlev for other reasons beyond the value
of the house. Or, possibly, the real owner and real buyer were one and
the same. Rybolovlev might have, in effect, paid himself for the house,
thereby cleansing the additional $55 million for the second purchase
of the house.
This was Donald Trump's world of real estate.
* * *
As though using mind-control tricks, Jared Kushner had become highly
skilled at containing his deep frustration with his father-in-law. He stayed
expressionless—sometimes he seemed almost immobile—when Trump
went off the rails, unleashing tantrums or proposing dopey political or
policy moves. Kushner, a courtier in a crazy court, was possessed of an
eerie calmness and composure. He was also very worried. It seemed
astounding and ludicrous that this fig-leaf technicality—"You're not a
target, Mr. President"—could offer his father-in-law such comfort.
Kushner understood that Trump was surrounded by a set of mortal
arrows, any of which might kill him: the case for obstruction; the case
for collusion; any close look at his long, dubious financial history; the
always-lurking issues with women; the prospects of a midterm rout and
the impeachment threat if the midterm elections went against them; the
fickleness of the Republicans, who might at any time turn on him; and the
senior staffers who had been pushed out of the administration (Kushner
had urged the ouster of many of them), any of whom might testify against
him. In March alone, Gary Cohn, the president's chief economic adviser,
Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, and Andrew McCabe, the deputy
director of the FBI—each man bearing the president deep contempt—
were pushed from the administration.
But the president was in no mood to hear Kushner's counsel. Never
entirely trusted by his father-in-law—in truth, Trump trusted no one
except, arguably, his daughter Ivanka, Kushner's wife—Kushner now found
himself decidedly on the wrong side of Trump's red line of loyalty.
16 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE
As a family insider, Kushner, in a game of court politics so vicious
that, in another time, it might have yielded murder plots, had appeared to
triumph over his early White House rivals. But Trump invariably soured
on the people who worked for him, just as they soured on him, not least
because he nearly always came to believe that his staff was profiting at his
expense. He was convinced that everyone was greedy, and that sooner or
later they would try to take what was more rightfully his. Increasingly, it
seemed that Kushner, too, might be just another staff member trying to
take advantage of Donald Trump.
Trump had recently learned that a prominent New York investment
fund, Apollo Global Management, led by the financier Leon Black, had
provided the Kushner Companies—the family real estate group that had
been managed by Kushner himself while his father, Charlie, was in federal
prison—with $184 million in financing.
This was troubling on many levels, and it left a vulnerable Kushner
open to more questions about the conflicts between his business and his
position in the White House. During the transition, Kushner had offered
Apollo's cofounder Marc Rowan, the job of director of the Office of Man-
agement and Budget. Rowan initially accepted the job, declining it only
after Apollo chairman Leon Black objected to what would have to be dis-
closed about Rowan's and the firm's investments.
But the president-elect's concerns were elsewhere: he was more keenly
and furiously focused on the fact that, in the constant search for financings
that occur in mid-tier real estate companies like Trump's, Apollo had never
extended itself for the Trump Organization. Now, it seemed baldly appar-
ent, Apollo was backing the Kushners solely because of the family's con-
nection to the administration. The constant accounting in Trump's head
of who was profiting from whom, and his sense of what he was therefore
owed for creating the circumstances by which everyone could profit, was
one of the things that reliably kept him up at night.
"You think I don't know what's going on?" Trump sneered at his
daughter, one of the few people he usually went out of his way to try to
mollify. "You think I don't know what's going on?"
The Kushners had gained. He had not.
The president's daughter pleaded her husband's case. She spoke of the
incredible sacrifice the couple had made by coming to Washington. Al
for what? "Our lives have been destroyed," she said melodramatically
and yet with some considerable truth. The former New York socialii
had been reduced to potential criminal defendants and media laughir
stocks.
After a year of friends and advisers whispering that his daughter a
son-in-law were at the root of the disarray in the White House, Trur
once again was thinking they should never have come. Revising histo
he told various of his late-night callers that he had always thought tl-
never should have come. Over his daughter's bitter protests, he declin
to intercede in his son-in-law's security clearance issues. The FBI ii
continued to hold up Kushner's clearance—which the president, at
discretion, could approve, his daughter reminded him. But Trump (
nothing, letting his son-in-law dangle in the wind.
Kushner, with superhuman patience and resolve, waited for his opp
tunity. The trick among Trump whisperers was how to focus Trun
attention, since Trump could never be counted on to participate in ai
thing like a normal conversation with reasonable back-and-forth. Spc
and women were reliable subjects; both would immediately engage h:
Disloyalty also got Trump's attention. So did conspiracies. And mone,.
always money.
* * *
Kushner's own lawyer was Abbe Lowell, a well-known showboat of
D.C. criminal bar who prided himself on, and managed his clients' exp
tations and attention with, an up-to-the-minute menu of rumors
insights about what gambit or strategy prosecutors were about to dish
The true edge provided by a high-profile litigator was perhaps not col
room skill but backroom intelligence.
Lowell, adding to the reports Dowd had received, told Kushner I
prosecutors were about to substantially deepen the president's—and
Trump family's—jeopardy. Dowd had continued to try to mollify the ix
dent, but Kushner, with intel supplied by Lowell, went to his father-in-law v
reports about this new front in the legal war against him. Sure enough.
March 15 the news broke that the special counsel had issued a subpo
yvki.urr
SIEGE 19
for the Trump Organization records: it was a deep and encompassing order,
reaching many years back.
Kushner also warned his father-in-law that the investigation was about
to spill over from the Mueller team, with its narrow focus on Russian collu-
sion, to the Southern District of New York—that is, the federal prosecutor's
office in Manhattan—which would not be restricted to the Russia probe. This
was a work-around intended to circumvent the special counsel's restriction
to Russia-related matters, but also an effort by the Mueller team to short-
circuit any attempt by the president to disband or curtail its investiga-
tion. By moving parts of the investigation to the Southern District, Mueller,
as Kushner explained to Trump, was ensuring that the investigation of the
president would continue even without the special counsel. Mueller was
playing a canny, or ass-protecting, game, while also following precise pro-
cedures: even as he focused on the limited area of his investigation, he was
divvying up evidence of other possible crimes and sending it out to other
jurisdictions, all of which were eager to be part of the hunt.
It gets worse, Kushner told Trump.
The Southern District was once run by Trump's friend Rudy Giuliani,
the former mayor of New York. In the 1980s, when Giuliani was the federal
prosecutor—and when, curiously, James Comey had worked for him—
the Southern District became the premier prosecutor of the Mafia and of
Wall Street. Giuliani had pioneered using a draconian, and many believed
unconstitutional, interpretation of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and
Corrupt Organizations) Act against the Mob. He used the same interpre-
tation against big finance, and in 1990 the threat of a RICO indictment,
under which the government could almost indiscriminately seize assets,
brought down the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert.
The Southern District had long been worrisome to Trump. After his
election, he had an unseemly meeting with Preet Bharara, the federal pros-
ecutor there, a move whose optics were alarming to all of his advisers,
including Don McGahn and the incoming attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
(The meeting foreshadowed the one Trump would shortly have with
Comey, during which he sought a pledge of loyalty in return for job secu-
rity.) His meeting with Bharara was unsatisfactory: Bharara was unwill-
ing to humor him—or, shortly, even to return his calls. In March 2017,
Trump fired him.
Now, said Kushner, even without Bharara, the Southern District was
looking to treat the Trump Organization as a Mob-like enterprise; its law-
yers would use the RICO laws against it and go after the president as if he
were a drug lord or Mob don. Kushner pointed out that corporations had
no Fifth Amendment privilege, and that you couldn't pardon a corpora-
tion. As well, assets used in or derived from the commission of a crime
could be seized by the government.
In other words, of the more than five hundred companies and separate
entities in which Donald Trump had been an officer, up until he became
president, many might be subject to forfeiture. One potential casualty of
a successful forfeiture action was the president's signature piece of real
estate: the government could seize Trump Tower.
* * *
In mid-March, a witness with considerable knowledge of the Trump
Organization's operations traveled by train to Washington to appear before
the Mueller grand jury. Picked up at Union Station by the FBI, the wit-
ness was driven to the federal district court. From 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.,
two prosecutors on the Mueller team, Aaron Zelinsky and Jeannie
Rhee, reviewed with the witness, among other issues, the structure of the
Trump Organization.
The prosecutors asked the witness about the people who regularly
talked to Trump, how often they met with him, and for what purposes.
They also asked how meetings with Trump were arranged and where they
took place. The witness's testimony yielded, among other useful pieces of
information, a signal fact: all checks issued by the Trump Organization
were personally signed by Donald Trump himself.
The Trump Organization's activities in Atlantic City were a particular
subject of interest that day. The witness was asked about Trump's rela-
tionship with known Mafia members—not if he had such relationships,
but the nature of the relationships prosecutors already knew existed. The
prosecutors also wanted to know about Trump Tower Moscow, a project
20 MICHAEL WOLFF
pursued by Trump for many years—pursued, in fact, well into the 2016
campaign—albeit never brought to fruition.
Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer and a Trump Organization
officer, was another significant topic. The prosecutors asked questions
about the level of Cohen's disappointment at not being included in the
president's White House team. They seemed to be trying to gauge how
much resentment Cohen felt, which led the witness to infer that they
wanted to estimate how much leverage they might have if they attempted
to flip Michael Cohen against the president.
Zelinsky and Rhee wanted to know about Jared Kushner. And they
wanted to know about Hope Hicks.
The two prosecutors also delved into the president's personal life. How
often did he cheat on his wife? With whom? How were trysts arranged?
What were the president's sexual interests? The Mueller investigation, and
its grand jury, was becoming a clearing house for the details of Trump's
long history of professional and personal perfidiousness.
When the long day was finally over, the witness left the grand jury
room shocked—not so much by what the prosecutors wanted to know
but by what they already knew.
* * *
By the third week of March, Trump's son-in-law had the president's full
attention. "They can not only impeach you, they can bankrupt you" was
Kushner's message.
Agitated and angry, Trump pressed Dowd for more reassurances,
holding him accountable for the prior reassurances Trump had frequently
demanded he be given. Dowd held firm: he yet believed that the fight was
in its early stages and that Mueller was still on a fishing expedition.
But Trump's patience was finally at an end. He decided that Dowd was
a fool and should go back into the retirement from which, Trump kept
repeating, he had rescued him. Indeed, resisting that retirement, Dowd
pleaded his own case, assuring the president that he could continue to
provide him with valuable help. To no avail: on March 22, Dowd reluc-
tantly resigned, sending another bitter former Trumper into the world.
2
THE DO-OVER
The day John Dowd was fired, Steve Bannon was sitting at his dining
room table trying to forestall another threat to the Trump pres
dency. This one wasn't about a relentless prosecutor but rather a betray(
base. It was about the Wall that wasn't.
The town houses on Capitol Hill, middle-class remnants of the nin
teenth century, are cramped up-and-down affairs of modest parlor floc('
nook-y sitting rooms, and small bedrooms. Many serve as headquarte
for causes and organizations that can't afford Washington's vast amou
of standard-issue office real estate. Some double as housing for th(
organization's leaders. Many represent amateur efforts or eccentric pt
suits, often a kind of shrine to hopes and dreams and revolutions yet
occur. The "Embassy" on A Street—a house built in 1890 and the forrr
location of Bannon's Breitbart News—was where Bannon had lived a
worked since his exile from the White House in August 2017. It was p
frat house, part man cave, and part pseudo-military redoubt; conspin
literature was scattered about. Various grave and underemployed you
men, would-be militia members, loitered on the steps.
The Embassy's creepiness and dark heart were in quite stark contr
to Bannon's expansive and merry countenance. He might be in exile fr.
the Trump White House, but it was an ebullient banishment, coffee-fue
or otherwise.
22 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE 23
In the last few weeks, he had helped install his allies—and first-draft
choices during the presidential transition—in central posts in the Trump
administration. Mike Pompeo had recently been named secretary of state,
John Bolton would soon become the national security advisor, and Larry
Kudlow had been appointed director of the National Economic Council.
The president's chief political aides were Corey Lewandowski and David
Bossie, both Bannon allies, if not acolytes; both operated outside the
White House and were frequent visitors at the Embassy. Many of the daily
stream of White House defenders on cable television—the surrogates—
were Bannon people carrying Bannon's message as well as the president's.
What's more, his enemies in the White House were moving out, includ-
ing Hope Hicks, H. R. McMaster, the former national security advisor,
and the ever shrinking circle of allies supporting the president's son-in-
law and daughter.
Bannon was often on the road. He was in Europe meeting with the
rising populist right-wing groups, and in the U.S. meeting with hedge
funders desperate to understand the Trump variable. He was also looking
for every opportunity to try to convince liberals that the populist way
ought to be their way, too. Early in the year, Bannon went to Cambridge
to see Larry Summers, who had been Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary,
Barack Obama's director of the National Economic Council, and, for a
time, president of Harvard. Summers's wife refused to allow Bannon into
their home, so the meeting happened at Harvard instead. Summers was
mis-shaven and wearing a shirt that was missing a button or two, while
Bannon was sporting his double-shirt getup, cargo pants, and a hunting
jacket. "Both of them looked like Asperger guys," said one of the people
at the meeting.
"Do you fucking realize what your fucking friend is doing?" yelled
Summers about Trump and his administration. "You're fucking the
country!"
"You elite Democrats—you only care about the margins, people who
are rich or people who are poor," returned Bannon.
"Your trade mumbo jumbo will sink the world into a depression:'
thundered Summers.
"And you've exported U.S. jobs to China!" declared a delighted Ban-
non, always enjoying the opportunity to joust with a member of thc
establishment.
Bannon was—or at least saw himself to be—a fixer, power broker
and kingmaker without portfolio. He was a cockeyed sort of Clad
Clifford, that political eminence and influence peddler of the 1960s an(
'70s. Or a wise man of the political fringe, if that was not an ultimate kin(
of contradiction. Or the head of an auxiliary government. Or, perhaps
something truly sui generis: no one quite like Bannon had ever playe(
such a central role in America's national political life, or been such a thorr
in the side of it. As for Trump, with friends like Bannon, who neede(
enemies?
The two men might be essential to each other, but they reviled an(
ridiculed each other, too. Bannon's constant public analysis of Trump
confounding nature—both its comic and harrowing components, thi
behavior of a crazy uncle—not to mention his indiscreet diatribes or
the inanities of Trump's family, continued to further alienate him from thi
president. And yet, though the two men no longer spoke, they hung or
each other's words—each desperate to know what one was saying abou
the other.
Whatever current feeling Bannon might have for Trump—his moo(
ranged from exasperation to fury to disgust to incredulity—he contin
ued to believe that nobody in American politics could match Trump'
midway-style showmanship. Yes, Donald Trump had restored showman
ship to American politics—he had taken the wonk out of politics. In sum
he knew his audience. At the same time, he couldn't walk a straight firm
Every step forward was threatened by his next lurch. Like many grea
actors, his innate self-destructiveness was always in conflict with his keel
survival instincts. Some around the president merely trusted that th.
latter would win over the former. Others, no matter the frustration o
the effort, understood how much he needed to be led by unseen hands—
unseen being the key attribute.
With no one to tell him otherwise, Bannon continued, unseen, t(
conduct the president's business from his dining-room table on A Streei
* * *
24 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE 25
That afternoon, a bipartisan Congress with surprising ease had passed the
$1.3 trillion 2018 appropriations bill. "McConnell, Ryan, Schumer, and
Pelosi," said Bannon about the Republican and Democratic congressional
leadership, "in their singular moment of bipartisan magnanimity, put one
over on Trump:'
This legislative milestone was a result of Trump's disengagement and
everybody else's attentive efforts. Most presidents are eager to get down into
the weeds of the budget process. Trump took little or no interest. Hence the
Republican and Democratic leadership—here supported by the budget
and legislative teams in the White House—were able to pass an enormous
spending bill that failed to fund Trump's must-must item, the holy grail
Wall, that prospective two-thousand-mile monument meant to run the
entire length of the border between the United States and Mexico. Instead,
the bill provided only $1.6 billion for border security. The current bill was in
effect the same budget bill that had been pushed forward at the end of the
previous September, when the Wall had once again not been funded. In the
fall, Trump had agreed to have the Republican-controlled Congress vote to
extend the September budget bill. The next time it came up, the Wall would
be funded or, he threatened, the government would be shut down.
Even the hardest-core Trumpers in Congress seemed content not to
have to die on the actual battlefield of funding the Wall, since that would
mean embracing or at least enduring an always politically risky shutdown.
Trump, too, in his way, seemed to understand that the Wall was more
myth than reality, more slogan than actual plan. The Wall was ever for
another day.
On the other hand, it was unclear what the president understood.
"We've gotten the budget," he privately told his son-in-law at the end of
the March budget negotiations. "We've gotten the Wall, totally!'
* * *
On Wednesday, March 21, the day before the final vote, Paul Ryan, the
Speaker of the House, had come to the White House to receive the presi-
dent's blessings on the budget bill.
"Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forth-
coming:' the president shortly tweeted.
The White House had originally asked for $25 billion for the Wall,
although high-end estimates of the Wall's ultimate cost came in at $70
billion. Even then, the $1.6 billion in the appropriations bill was not so
much for the Wall as for better security measures.
As the final vote neared, a gentlemen's agreement appeared to have
been reached, one that extended to every corner of the government—
with, it even seemed, Trump's own tacit support, or at least his conve-
nient distraction. The understanding was straightforward: whatever their
stripe, members of Congress would not blow up the appropriations pro-
cess for the Wall.
There were, too, Republicans like Ryan—with the backing of Repub-
lican donors such as Paul Singer and Charles Koch—who were eager to
walk back, by whatever increment possible, Trump's hard-line immigra-
tion policies and rhetoric. Ryan and others had devised a simple method
for accomplishing this kind of objective: you agreed with him and then
ignored him. There was happy talk, which Trump bathed in, followed by
practical steps, which bored him.
That Wednesday, Trump made a series of calls to praise everyone's
work on the bill. The next morning, Ryan, in a televised news conference
to seal the deal, said, "The president supports this bill, there's no two ways
about it:'
Here were the twin realities. The Wall was the most concrete manifesta-
tion of Trumpian policy, attitude, belief, and personality. At the same time,
the Wall forced every Republican politician to come to terms with his or
her own common sense, fiscal prudence, and political flexibility.
It was not just the expense and impracticality of the Wall, it was hav-
ing to engage in a battle for it. A government shutdown would mean a
high-stakes face-off between the Trump world and the non-Trump world
Should this come to pass, it would potentially be as dramatic a moment a;
any that had occurred since the election of 2016.
If the Democrats wanted to harden the partisan division and wen
eager to find yet another example—perhaps the mother of all exam.
ples—of Trump at his most extreme, a shutdown over the Wall woulc
hand them one. If the Republicans wanted to shift the focus from a full
barbarian Trump to, say, the tax bill the Congress had recently passed
26 MICHAEL WOLFF SIEGE 27
shutting down the government would sweep that approach right off the
table.
The White House, quite behind Trump's back, was aggressively work-
ing to pass the appropriations bill and avoid a shutdown. The vice presi-
dent gave Trump the same assurance he had been given previously when
a budget had been passed without full funding for the Wall: Pence said the
bill provided a "down payment" for the Wall, a phrase whose debt-finance
implications seemed to amply satisfy the president and which he repeated
with great enthusiasm. Marc Short, the White House director of legisla-
tive affairs, and Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Manage-
ment and Budget, in a joint appearance in the White House briefing room
that Thursday, shifted the debate from the Wall to the military. "This bill
will provide the largest year-over-year increase in defense spending since
World War IL" said Mulvaney. "It'll be the largest increase for our men
and women in uniform in salary in the last ten years!'
The attempt to distract the Trumpian base with these bromides utterly
failed. The hard-core cadre insisted on forcing the issue, and Bannon was
delighted to serve as their general.
Within minutes of the budget bill's passage on March 22, Bannon,
in the Embassy, began working the phones. Calling Trump's most ardent
supporters, his goal was to "light him up." The effect was nearly imme-
diate: an unsuspecting Trump started to hear from many of those on his
noisy back bench, who were suddenly furious.
Bannon understood what moved Trump. Details did not. Facts did not.
But a sense that something valuable might be taken from him immediately
brought him up on his hind legs. If you confronted him with losing, he
would turn on a dime. Indeed, turning on a dime was his only play. "It's
not that he needs to win the week, or day, or even the hour," reflected
Bannon. "He needs to win the second. After that, he drifts."
For the hard-core Trumpers, it was back to a fundamental through
line of Trumpism: you had to constantly remind Trump which side he
was on. As Bannon organized a howling protest from the president's base,
he took stock of the Trump reality: "There simply is not going to be a Wall,
ever, if he doesn't have to pay a political price for there not being a Wall."
If the Wall was not under way by the midterm elections in Novem-
ber, it would show Trump to be false and, worse, weak. The Wall needed
to be real. The absence of the Wall in the spending bill was just what it
seemed to be: Trump out to lunch. Trump's most effective message, the
forward front of the Trump narrative—maximal aggression toward ille-
gal immigrants—had been muted. And this had happened without him
knowing it.
* * *
The night of the twenty-second, the Fox News lineup—Tucker Carlson,
Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity—hammered the message: betrayal.
The battle was on. The Republican leadership on the Hill, along with
the donor class, stood sober and pragmatic in the face of both political
realities and the prospect of unlimited billions in government spending—
with, certainly, no illusions that Mexico was going to pay for the Wall.
Opposing them were the Fox pundits, righteous and unyielding in their
appeal to the true emotion of Trumpism.
The personal transformation of Trump over the course of the evening
was convulsive. All three Fox pundits delivered a set of electric shocks:
each rising in current. Trump had sold out the movement. Or, worse:
Trump had been outsmarted and outwitted. Trump, on the phone, roared
in pain and fury. He was the victim. He had no one in his corner. He could
trust no one. The congressional leadership: against him. The White Housc
itself: against him. Betrayal? Almost everyone in the White House ha
betrayed him.
The next morning it got worse. Pete Hegseth, the most obsequious o:
the Fox Trump lovers, seemed, on Fox & Friends, nearly brought to tear:
by Trump's treachery.
Then, almost simultaneously with Hegseth's wailing, Trump abruptly—
confoundingly—shifted position and tweeted that he was considering vetoini
the appropriations bill. The same bill that, twenty-four hours before, h(
had embraced.
28
MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE
29
That Friday morning, he came down from the residence into the
Oval Office in a full-on rage so violent that, for a moment, his hair came
undone. To the shock of the people with him, there stood an almost
entirely bald Donald Trump.
The president's sudden change of heart sent the entire Republican
Party into a panic. If Trump carried out his threat not to sign the bill, he
would bring on what they most feared: a shutdown. And he might well
blame the shutdown on his own party.
Mark Meadows, the head of the House Freedom Caucus and a
staunch Trump ally in Congress, called the president from Europe to say
that after the vote on Thursday afternoon most members had left town for
the congressional recess. Congress wouldn't be able to undo the previous
day's vote, and the shutdown was due to commence in mere hours.
Mitch McConnell rushed Defense Secretary Jim Mattis into action to
tell the president that American soldiers would not be paid the next day if
he didn't sign the bill. This was a repeat performance: Mattis had issued a
similar warning during a threatened shutdown in January.
"Never . . . never . . . never . . . again," Trump shouted, pounding the
desk after each "never:'
Once again he caved and agreed to sign the bill. But he vowed that
next time there would be billions upon billions for the Wall or there really
would be a shutdown. Really. Really.
* * *
Bannon had been here before, so many times.
"Dude, he's Donald fucking Trump," said Bannon, holding his head
and sitting at his table in the Embassy the day after the president signed
the bill.
Bannon was not confused: he had a clear understanding of how great
a liability Trump could be to Bannon's own vision and career. To the ner-
vous titters of the people around him, Bannon believed he was the man of
populist destiny and not Donald Trump.
The urgency here was real. Bannon believed he represented the
workingman against the corporate-governmental-technocratic machine
whose constituency was the college-educated. In Bannon's romantic view,
the workingman smelled of cigarettes, crushed your hand in his, and ww
hard as brick—and not from working out in a gym. This remembrand(
of things past, of (if it ever existed) a leveled world where a workingmar
was proud of his work and identity, was inspiring, Bannon believed, ;
global anger. It was a revolution—this worldwide unease and fear an
day-by-day upending of liberal assumptions—and it was his. The globa
hegemon was in his sights. He was the man behind the curtain—and h,
might as well be in front of it, too—trying to snatch the world back fron
its postmodern anomie and restore something like the homogenized an.
neighborly embrace of 1962.
And China! And the coming Gotterclammerung! To Bannon, thi
was way-of-life stuff. China was the Russia of 1962—but smarter, mor
tenacious, and more threatening. American hedge funders, in their secr(
support of China against the interests of the American middle class, wei
the new fifth column.
How much of this did Trump understand? How much was Trum
committed to the ideas that moved Bannon and, by some emotion
osmosis, the base? Trump was more than a year in, and not a shovelful .
dirt had yet been dug for the Wall, nor a penny allocated. The Wall ar
so much else that was part of Bannon's populist revolution—the detai
of which he had once listed on whiteboards in his White House offic
expecting to check each one off—were entirely captive to Trump's inatte
tion and wild mood swings. Trump, Bannon had long ago learned, "does]
give a fuck about the agenda—he doesn't know what the agenda is!'
* * *
In late March, after the gloom of the budget bill disaster had lifted, thc
was a brief, optimistic moment for the faithful in Trump's inner circle.
Chief of Staff John Kelly, fed up with Trump—just as Trump was f
up with him—seemed surely on the way out. Kelly had joined the Wh
House, replacing Reince Priebus, Trump's first chief of staff, in Augi
2017, charged with bringing management discipline to a chaotic W
Wing. But by mid-fall, Trump was circumventing Kelly's new pro.
dures. Jared and Ivanka—with many of the new rules designed to cl
tail their open access to the president—were going over his head.
MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE
31
the end of the year, Trump was casually mocking his chief of staff and
his penchant for efficiency and strict procedures. Indeed, both men were
openly trashing each other, quite unmindful of the large audience for
their slurs. For Trump, Kelly was a "twitcher" and "feeble" and ready to
"stroke out:' For Kelly, Trump was "deranged" and "mad" and "stupid."
The drama just got weirder.
In February, Kelly, a retired four-star general, grabbed Trump adviser
Corey Lewandowski outside the Oval Office and pushed him up against a
wall. "Don't look him in the eye," whispered Trump about Kelly after the
incident, circling his finger next to his head in the crazy sign. The con-
frontation left everybody shaken, with Trump asking Lewandowski not
to tell anyone, and Lewandowski, when talking to the people he did tell,
saying that he had almost wet himself.
By March, Trump and Kelly were hardly speaking. Trump ignored
him; Kelly sulked. Or Trump would drop pointed hints that Kelly should
resign, and Kelly would ignore him. Everyone assumed the countdown
had begun.
Various Republicans, from Ryan to McConnell to their right-wing
adversary Mark Meadows, along with Bannon, had gotten behind a plan
to push House majority leader Kevin McCarthy for chief of staff. Even
Meadows, who hated McCarthy, was all for it. Here finally was a strat-
egy: McCarthy, a top tactician, would refocus an unfocused White House
on one mission—the midterms. Every tweet, every speech, every action
would be directed toward salvaging the Republican majority.
Alas, Trump didn't want a chief of staff who would focus him. Trump,
it was clear, didn't want a chief of staff who would tell him anything.
Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to
satisfy his desires. Someone happened to mention that John F. Kennedy
didn't have a chief of staff, and now Trump regularly repeated this presi-
dential factoid.
* * *
The Mueller team, as it pursued the Russia investigation, continued to
bump up against Trump's unholy financial history, exactly the rabbit hole
Trump had warned them not to go down. Mueller, careful to protect his
own flank, took pains to reassure the president's lawyers that he wasn't
pursuing the president's business interests; at the same time, he was pass-
ing the evidence his investigation had gathered about Trump's business
and personal affairs to other federal prosecutors.
On April 9, the FBI, on instructions from federal prosecutors in New
York, raided the home and office of Michael Cohen, as well as a room he
was using in the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. Cohen, who billed him-
self as Trump's personal lawyer, sat handcuffed for hours in his kitchen
while the FBI conducted its search, itemizing and hauling away every
electronic device its agents could find.
Bannon, coincidentally, also stayed at the Regency on his frequent
trips to New York, and he would sometimes bump into Cohen in the
hotel's lobby. Bannon had known Cohen during the campaign, and the
lawyer's mysterious involvement in campaign issues often worried him.
Now, in Washington, seeing the Cohen news, Bannon knew that another
crucial domino had fallen.
"While we don't know where the end is," said Bannon, "we can guess
where it might begin: with Brother Cohen."
* * *
On April 11, three weeks after the president signed the budget bill, Paul
Ryan—one of the government's most powerful figures given the Repub-
lican lock on Washington—announced his plan to leave the Speakership
and depart Congress.
"Listen to what Paul Ryan is saying:' said Bannon, sitting at his table
in the Embassy early that morning. "It's over. Done. Done. And Paul Ryan
wants the fuck off the Trump train today."
Ryan had been telling almost anyone who would listen that as many
as fifty or sixty House seats would be lost seven months hence in the mid-
term elections. A Ryan lieutenant, Steve Stivers, chairman of the National
Republican Congressional Committee, was estimating a loss of ninety to
one hundred seats. At this gloomy hour, it seemed more than possible
that the Democrats would eliminate their twenty-three-seat deficit and
32 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE 3:
gain a majority greater than the one the Republicans held now. Except,
unlike the Republicans, theirs would be a unified party—or at least one
that was unified against Donald Trump.
Ryan and Stivers were hardly the only ones seeing such a result. Mitch
McConnell was telling donors not to even bother contributing to House
races. The money should go to the Senate campaign, where prospects for
holding the Republican majority were significantly brighter.
This was, for Donald Trump, in Bannon's view, the most desperate
moment in his political career, arguably even worse than the revelation
of the Access Hollywood grab-them-by-the-pussy tape. He was already on
the ropes legally, with Mueller and the Southern District bearing down;
now, looking at a likely wipeout in the midterm elections, he was in seri-
ous political jeopardy as well.
But Bannon's usual ebullience quickly returned. As he talked his
way out of his funk, he became nearly joyful. If the establishment—
Democrats, Republicans, moderate thinkers of every sort—believed that
Donald Trump needed to be run out of town, then Bannon relished the
prospect of defending him. For Bannon, this was the mission, but it was
also sport. Bannon thrived on the possibility of upset. His own leap to
the world stage had come because the Trump campaign was so deep
in hopelessness that he was allowed to take it over. Then, on Novem-
ber 9, 2016, against all odds and expectations, Trump, riding Bannon's
campaign—with Bannon's primacy soon one of the bitterest pills for
Trump to swallow—won the presidency. Now, even with almost every
indicator for the November elections looking bleak, Bannon believed he
could yet see how Republican losses could be held to under the twenty-
three seats needed to save the House majority. Still, it was going to be a
grinding fight.
"When Trump calls his New York friends after dinner and whines that
he doesn't have a friend in the world, he's kind of right," said a mordant
Bannon.
Bannon viewed the case against Donald Trump as both inherently
political—his enemies willing to do whatever it took to bring him down—
and essentially true. He had little doubt that Trump was guilty of most of
what he was accused of "How did he get the dough for the primary and
then for the general with his 'liquidity' issues?" asked Bannon with hi:
hands out and his eyebrows up. "Let's not dwell."
But for Bannon there were two sides in American politics—not s(
much right and left, but right brain and left brain. The left brain wa
represented by the legal system, which was empirical, evidentiary, an
methodical; given the chance, it would inevitably and correctly convic
Donald Trump. The right side was represented by politics, and therefor
by voters who were emotional, volatile, febrile, and always eager to thros
the dice. "Get the deplorables fired up"—he slapped his hands in thunder
clap effect—"and we'll save our man:'
Almost a year and a half on, all of the issues of 2016 remained a
powerful and raw as ever: immigration, white man's resentment, and th
liberal contempt for the working—or out-of-work—white man. The yea
2018 was, for Bannon, the real 2016: the deplorable base had become th
deplorable nation. "It's civil war:' Bannon said, a happy judgment he ofte
repeated.
The most resonant issue was Donald Trump himself: the people wh
elected him would be galvanized by the effort to take him from then
Bannon was horrified by mainstream Republican efforts to run the corn
ing election on the strength of the recent Republican tax cut. ".Are yo
kidding? Oh my fucking god, are you kidding?" This election was abot
the fate of Donald Trump.
"Let's have a do-over election. That's what the libs want. They ca
have it. Let's do it. Up or down, Trump or no Trump."
Impeachment was not to be feared, it was to be embraced. "That
what you're voting for: to impeach Donald Trump or to save him froi
impeachment:'
The legal threat, however, might be moving faster than the electioi
And to Bannon—who knew more about the president's hankerings, moo
swings, and impulse-control issues than almost anyone—you could n(
have produced a needier or more hapless defendant.
* * *
Since coming aboard in the summer of 2017, the president's legal team-
Dow& Cobb, and Selculow—had delivered the message their client insist(
34 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE 35
upon hearing, that he was not a target and would shortly be exonerated.
But the lawyers went even further with their feel-good strategy.
Presidents, faced with hostile investigations by the other coequal
branches of government, Congress and the judiciary invariably cite exec-
utive privilege both as a legitimate principle and as a dilatory tactic. It's a
built-in bargaining chip. But Trump's lawyers, hoisted by how often they
had to assure the president that he had nothing to fear, supported their
confident assessment, to Trump's delight, by dispensing with any claim
of executive privilege and willingly satisfying all the special counsel's
requests. Trump, in all his dodginess, had become an open book. What's
more, Trump himself, ever believing in the force and charm of his own
personality, was, with his attorneys' apparent assent, eager to testify.
And yet, Bannon knew, it was still much worse. The president's law-
yers had sent more than 1.1 million documents to the special counsel,
aided by only a scant document production team. It was just Dowd,
Cobb, and two inexperienced assistants. In major litigations, docu-
ments are meticulously logged and cross-referenced into elaborate and
efficient database systems. Here, they shipped over much of the material
merely as attachments, and kept minimal or no records of what exactly
had been sent. Few in the White House knew what they had given up and
thus what the special counsel had. And the haphazard approach didn't
stop there. Dowd and Cobb neither prepared many of the witnesses who
had worked for the White House in advance of their testimony to Mueller's
team nor debriefed them after they testified.
Bannon was overcome by the hilarity and stupidity of this what-me-
worry approach to federal prosecutors whose very reputations depended
on nailing the president. Trump needed a plan—which, of course, Ban-
non had.
Bannon swore that he did not want to go back into the White House.
He wouldn't ever, he said. The humiliations of working in Trump's admin-
istration had almost destroyed Bannon's satisfaction at having risen so
miraculously to the top of the world.
Some, however, were not convinced by his protestations. They
believed that Bannon actively fantasized that he would be brought back
into the West Wing to save Trump—and that, not incidentally, this would
be his ultimate revenge on Trump, saving him yet again. Bannon certainly
believed that he was the only one who could pull off this difficult rescue, a
reflection of his conviction that he was the most gifted political strategist
of his time, and of his view that Trump was surrounded by only greater
and lesser lummoxes.
Trump, Bannon believed, needed a wartime consigliere. And if, he
mused, Jared and Ivanka were finally sent packing. . . But no, he insisted,
not even then.
Moreover, Trump would not be able to tolerate it. Bannon under-
stood that only Trump could save the day, or at least that Trump believed
only he could save the day. No other scenario was possible. He would
rather lose, would rather even go to jail, than have to share victory with
someone else. He was psychologically incapable of not being the focus of
all attention.
In the end, it was easier and more productive to give Trump advice at
a distance than up close. It was a safer play to do what needed to be done
without Trump himself actually being involved with, or even aware of,
what was being done.
The morning Ryan announced his retirement from the House, Ban-
non was particularly eager to send some advice Trump's way. Setting up
a deft bank shot, he invited Robert Costa, a reporter for the Washington
Post, to visit him at the Embassy.
Bannon spent a good part of every day talking to reporters. On some
days, perhaps most days, his blind-quote voice—hidden behind a famil-
iar attribution such as "this account is drawn from interviews with cur-
rent and former officials"—crowded out most other voices on the subject
of whatever new crisis was engulfing the Trump administration. These
quotes functioned as something like a stage whisper that Trump could
pretend he didn't hear. Trump, in fact, was always desperately seeking
Bannon's advice, though only if there was the slightest pretext for believ-
ing that it came from some place other than Bannon. Indeed, Trump was
quite willing to hear Bannon say something in this or that interview and
then claim he had thought of it himself.
Costa sat at Bannon's dining-room table for two hours, taking down
Bannon's prescription for how to save Trump from himself.
36 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE 37
Trump's stupidity, said Bannon, could sometimes be made into a vir-
tue. Here was Bannon's idea: the president should make a retroactive claim
of executive privilege. I didn't know. Nobody told me. I was ill-advised.
It was hard not to see Bannon's satisfaction in a prostrate Trump
admitting to his own lack of guile and artfulness.
Bannon understood that this claim of retroactive executive privilege
would have no chance of success—nor should it. But the sheer audacity
of it could buy them four or five months of legal delay. Delay was their
friend, possibly their only friend. They could work this claim of retroac-
tive executive privilege, no matter how loopy, all the way to the Supreme
Court.
For this plan to work, the president would have to get rid of his inept
lawyers. Oh, and he would also have to fire Rod Rosenstein, the deputy
attorney general who was overseeing the Mueller investigation. Bannon
had been against the firing of Comey, and in the months after the appoint-
ment of the special counsel, he had fought the president's almost daily
impulse to fire Mueller and Rosenstein, seeing this as the surest invitation
to impeachment. ("Just don't pay attention to his crazy shit," he had urged
everyone around the president.) But now they had run out of options.
"Firing Rosenstein is our only way out of here Bannon told Costa.
"I don't come to this lightly. As soon as they went to Cohen—that's what
they do in Mob prosecutions to get a response from the true target. So
you can sit there and get bled out—get indicted, go to grand juries—or
you can fight it politically. Get it out of the law-and-order system where
we are losing and are going to lose. A new DAG will review where we
stand on this thing, which could take a couple of months. Delay, delay,
delay—and shift it politically. Can we win? I have no fucking idea. But I
know on that other path I'm going to lose. It's not perfect. . . but we live
in a world of imperfect:'
* * *
Costa's story, which was posted online later that day, described Bannon as
"pitching a plan to West Wing aides and congressional allies to cripple the
federal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according
to four people familiar with the discussions." But however many people
Costa had spoken to about the background machinations of Steve Ban-
non, what mattered was that he had spoken directly and at length to
Bannon himself, who was using the Washington Post to pitch a plan to
the president.
Bannon's three-part plan for Trump instantly made its way to the
Oval Office. And the next morning, the president offered Kushner his
view that he should fire Rosenstein, reinstate a claim of executive privi-
lege, and get a tough-guy lawyer.
Kushner, pressing his own strategies, urged his father-in-law to move
cautiously when it came to Rosenstein.
"Jared is spooked:' said a scornful Trump later that day while on the
phone to a confidant. "What a girl!"
SIEGE 39
3
LAWYERS
There was a running sweepstakes or office pool for the unhappiest
person in the White House. Many had held the title, but one of the
most frequent winners was White House counsel Don McGahn. He was
a constant target for his boss's belittling, mocking, falsetto-voice mimicry,
and, as well, sweeping disparagements of his purpose and usefulness.
"This is why we can't have nice things," McGahn uttered almost obses-
sively under his breath, quoting the Taylor Swift song to comment on
whatever egregious act Trump had just committed (". . . because you break
them," the song continues).
McGahn's background was largely as a federal election lawyer. Mostly
he was on the more-money, less-transparency side—he was against, rather
than for, aggressive enforcement of election laws. He served as the counsel
to the Trump campaign, arguably among the most careless about election
law compliance in recent history. Before joining the Trump administra-
tion, McGahn had no White House or executive branch experience. He
had never worked in the Justice Department or, in fact, anywhere in gov-
ernment. Formerly an attorney for a nonprofit affiliated with the Koch
brothers, he was known as a hyperpartisan: when Obama's White House
counsel, Kathy Ruemmler, the previous occupant of McGahn's office,
reached out to congratulate him and to offer to be a resource on past prac-
tices, McGahn did not respond to her email.
One of McGahn's jobs was to navigate what was possibly the most
complicated relationship in modern government: he was the effective
point person between the White House and the Department of Justice.
Part of his portfolio, then, was to endure the president's constant rage and
bewilderment about why the DOJ was personally hounding him, and his
incomprehension that he could do nothing about it.
"It's my Justice Department:' Trump would tell McGahn, often repeat-
ing this more than dubious declaration in his signature triad.
Nobody could quite be certain of the number of times McGahn had
had to threaten, with greater or lesser intention, to quit if Trump made
good on his threat to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney gen-
eral, or the special counsel. Curiously, one defense against the charge that
the president had tried to fire Mueller in June 2017 in an effort to end the
special counsel's investigation—as the New York Times claimed in a Jan-
uary 2018 scoop—was the fact that Trump was almost constantly trying
to fire Mueller or other DOJ figures, doing so often multiple times a day.
McGahn's steadying hand had so far helped avert an ultimate crisis.
But he had missed or let slip by or simply ignored a number of intemper-
ate, unwise, and interfering actions by the president that might, McGahn
feared, comprise the basis of obstruction charges. Deeply involved with the
conservative Federalist Society and its campaign for "textualist" judges:
McGahn had long dreamed himself of becoming a federal judge him-
self, but given the no-man's-land he occupied between Trump and the
Justice Department—not to mention Trump's sometimes daily attacks or
the DOrs independence, which McGahn had to accept or condone—he
knew his future as a jurist was dead.
* * *
Fifteen months into Trump's tenure, the tensions between the administra-
tion and the Department of Justice had erupted into open conflict. Now ii
was war—the White House against its own DOJ.
Here was a modern, post-Watergate paradox: the independence o:
the Justice Department. The DOJ might be, from every organizationa
and statutory view, an instrument of the White House, and, as much a;
any other agency, its mission might appear to be driven by whoever hele
40 MICHAEL WOLFF
SIEGE 41
the presidency. That's what it looked like on paper. But the opposite was
true, too. There was a permanent-government class in the Justice Depart-
ment that believed an election ought to have no role at all in how the
DOJ conducted itself. The department was outside politics and ought
to be as blind as the courts. In this view, the Justice Department, as the
nation's preeminent investigator and prosecutor, was as much a check on
the White House, and ought to be as independent of the White House,
as the other branches of government. (And within the Justice Department,
the FBI claimed its own level of independence from its DOJ masters, as
well as from the White House itself.)
Even among those at Justice and the FBI who had a more nuanced
view, and who recognized the symbiotic nature of the department's rela-
tionship with the White House, there was yet a strong sense of the lines
that cannot be crossed. The Justice Department and the FBI had, since
Watergate, found themselves accountable to Congress and the courts. Any
top-down effort to influence an investigation, or any evidence of having
bowed to influence—memorialized in a memo or email—might derail a
career.
In February 2018, Rachel Brand, the associate attorney general, a for-
mer Bush lawyer who had been nominated for the number three DOJ
job by Obama, resigned to take a job as a Walmart lawyer. If Trump had
fired Rosenstein during Brand's tenure, she would have become acting
attorney general overseeing the Mueller investigation. She told col-
leagues she wanted to get out before Trump fired Rosenstein and then
demanded that she fire Mueller. She would take Bentonville, Arkansas,
where Walmart had its headquarters, over Washington, D.C.
For a generation or more, the arm's-length relationship between the
White House and the Department of Justice often seemed more like a
never-ending conflict between armed camps. Bill Clinton could hardly
stomach his attorney general, Janet Reno, having to weather the blowback
from her decisions regarding Ruby Ridge, a standoff and deadly overre-
action between survivalists and the FBI; Waco, another botched standoff
with a Christian cult; and the investigation of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, with the
DOJ chastised for its reckless pursuit of a suspected spy. Clinton came
very close to firing Louis Freeh, his FBI director, who openly criticized
him, but managed to swallow his rage. Top people from the Bush White
House, the FBI, and the Justice Department almost came to literal blows
at the bedside of the ailing AG John Ashcroft—James Comey himself
standing in the way of the White House representatives trying to get Ash-
croft to renew a domestic surveillance program—with the White House
finally having to back down. Under Obama, Comey, who by then was the
FBI director, made a further grab for the FBI's independence from the
Justice Department when he unilaterally decided to end and later reopen
the Hillary Clinton email investigation—and, by doing so, arguably toss-
ing the election to her opponent.
Enter Donald Trump, who had neither political nor bureaucratic
experience. His entire working life was spent at the head of what was in
essence a small family operation, one designed to do what he wanted and
to bow to his style of doing business. At the time of his election, he was
absent even any theoretical knowledge of modern government and its
operating rules and customs.
Trump was constantly being lectured about the importance of "cus-
tom and tradition" at the Justice Department. As reliably, he would
respond, "I don't want to hear this bullshit!"
He needed, one aide observed, "a hard, black line. Without a hard,
black line that he can't cross, he's crossing it:'
Trump believed what to him seemed obvious: the DOJ and FBI
worked for him. They were under his direction and control. They must do
exactly what he demanded of them; they must jump through his hoops.
"He reports to me!" an irate and uncomprehending Trump repeated early
in his tenure about both his attorney general Jeff Sessions and his FBI
director James Comey. "I am the boss!"
"I could have made my brother the attorney general," Trump insisted,
although in fact he did not even speak to his brother (Robert, a seventy-
one-year-old retired businessman). "Like Kennedy." (Six years after John
F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert attorney general, Congress
passed the Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute, called the "Bobby Kennedy
law," to prevent exactly this sort of thing in the future—although that
did not stop Trump from hiring his daughter and son-in-law as senior
advisers.)