Copyright � 2020 by Michael S. Schmidt

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Hardback ISBN 9781984854667

Ebook ISBN 9781984854674

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Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Carlos Beltr�n

Cover photograph: iStock/Getty Images

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Prologue

Act One

Chapter I: Rule of Law, Rule of Trump

Act Two

Chapter II: The Institutionalist

Chapter III: The Point of No Return

Chapter IV: �Oh, God�

Act Three

Chapter V: The Road to Mueller

Act Four

Chapter VI: �He�s Saying Some Crazy Shit�

Chapter VII: Norms of Presidential Conduct 101

Epilogue: President Trump Finds His Roy Cohn

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Think�st thou that duty shall have dread to speak when power to flattery bows? To plainness honor�s bound when majesty falls to folly.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR

PROLOGUE

I

RULE OF LAW, RULE OF TRUMP

AUGUST 1, 2018

ONE YEAR, SIX MONTHS, AND TWELVE DAYS INTO THE PRESIDENCY

WASHINGTON, D.C.�Just before 9:30 on a brutally humid summer night in Washington, I was in a dead sprint down Connecticut Avenue toward the White House, chasing after a man who had no idea I was trying to catch him.

The math, I figured, was simple: I had to cover three city blocks in about thirty seconds before the man reached the northwest gate of the White House grounds and passed through security screening into the eighteen-acre headquarters of the United States� executive branch, safely out of reach. I had a fifty-fifty shot of getting to him.

It definitely occurred to me that it was ridiculous that I was running down the street like a cop chasing after a robber while wearing black dress shoes, jeans, and a sport jacket. But we�d long moved beyond normal in the year and a half since Donald J. Trump had been sworn in as president of the United States and we began confronting the daily bewilderment and furor that came with him running the country. What was unfolding before us was more a rolling series of crises than a traditional presidency, and with every twist and turn it became clearer that the Trump era in America would be the story of our lives.

And so I ran in the dark after this man. Since I�d started at The New York Times two months out of college as a clerk in the sports department, I had probably done stranger things in pursuit of a story. For one of my first big assignments, I tracked George Steinbrenner, the combustible owner of the New York Yankees, as he left the stadium and headed to the parking lot after games, aiming to capture a complaint about his club that would make a headline the next day. From there, I eventually took on a beat no one else wanted�performance-enhancing drugs�and had been hired as a full-time reporter. After four years, I left sports to spend a year in the Times� Baghdad bureau, before being moved to the Washington bureau in 2012. I covered the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Defense Department. But now, having joined a team investigating the Trump White House following the 2016 election, none of my experiences prepared me for the sheer velocity and disorientation of covering this president.

A few months earlier, it had become clear there was an emerging existential threat to Trump�s presidency. A team of investigators from a special counsel�s office was bearing down on the White House, the president wasn�t taking it well, and his volatility itself had become a matter of grave national importance. A president in trouble, whose conduct was so unpredictable, required good sourcing to understand. It pushed us to get better at cultivating and protecting our sources, so I had recently found myself chauffeuring a key witness to the chaos around the Washington metro area. At all hours of the day, I would pick the source up at airports and train stations in my mother�s fourteen-year-old Volvo station wagon for secret meetings in the only place where I could have the source�s undivided attention and guarantee him that, as we snaked aimlessly through Washington�s leafy neighborhoods and talked, no one would see us together or hear what we were saying.

Now, as for the man I was chasing down the street, he had never been a source, but I wanted badly to know everything he knew about President Trump and the inside dynamics of his administration. The man had been in the room for many of the events being investigated by the special counsel, though his significance in the unfolding saga went far beyond just passively witnessing extraordinary, possibly historic, or even criminal events in real time. Based on my reporting, the man two blocks in front of me striding back to the Executive Mansion, Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, was more important to the success and survival of Trump�s presidency than anyone else in the West Wing.

McGahn was only really known to those who closely watched the administration and monitored the rising and falling cachet of the people around the mercurial president. From McGahn�s perspective, he was there to serve as the most senior lawyer responsible for counseling the president behind closed doors and helping him work the levers of power to achieve his policy goals. But because that president was Trump, this was complicated, and what McGahn actually spent his days doing amounted to trying to fit the square peg of what Trump wanted to do as he worked the levers of power through the round hole of what was legal and ethical. Trump had a profound insensitivity to how his actions would be perceived and was often indifferent to the law and precedent. He routinely staked out positions on issues that violated the law and that ran counter to what career law enforcement, intelligence, military, and economic officials believed was right. Even more mysteriously, at times Trump appeared to favor policies that benefited America�s geopolitical adversaries, like Russia, more than the United States.

McGahn was one of the few Trump advisers�or members of the Republican establishment, for that matter�who regularly stood up to the president, telling him when his ideas were harebrained and screaming back at him when he unloaded nasty digs at the senior staff. Their clashes were primal, I had been told, and when they got really bad, Trump would go for what was the ultimate insult in his book, telling McGahn that he �used to be a great lawyer.� All of this left McGahn sufficiently scarred, and he had started calling Trump �Kong,� �King Kong,� or �fucking Kong� behind his back, in honor of the oversized gorilla from film lore who would destroy anything in his way. Despite their penchant for clashes and fireworks, McGahn had actually approved a number of Trump�s decisions that ultimately boomeranged devastatingly on the president�including some that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate ties between Trump and Russia and Russian interference in the 2016 election. More important, McGahn had been a rare guardrail on the president�standing in the way when he sought to fire Mueller. And as much as his attempts to rein Trump in infuriated the president, McGahn was almost singularly responsible for the two greatest political accomplishments of the Trump presidency: stacking the courts with conservative judges and slashing government regulations.

McGahn wasn�t just the rare senior Trump staffer with the spine to stand up to him�there was more. I had been told there was a secret about McGahn that had the potential to drive Trump from office. A trusted source had told me that as the special counsel had accelerated the investigation of the president the previous year, McGahn had become convinced that with Trump�s fleeting sense of loyalty the president was going to make him a scapegoat. Fearing his own legal exposure, McGahn had begun cooperating with Mueller�s investigators far more extensively than the White House and Trump knew. He�d even arranged for nearly a thousand pages of handwritten White House notes to be given to investigators without the president�s lawyers or anyone else in the White House knowing�notes that provided a road map for how the president had potentially obstructed justice. By giving Mueller�s team such an unfiltered and sweeping view of the inside of Trump�s West Wing, McGahn was putting his boss�s entire presidency in peril.

Sources told me that in a windowless conference room inside the special counsel�s offices on the other side of Washington from the White House, McGahn had spent hours laying out what the president did and said behind closed doors as he sought to maintain control over the Russia investigation. McGahn told the prosecutors about how the president insisted on having a loyalist oversee the investigation. He had told them the true reasons the president had for firing the FBI director, James Comey. He had told them that Trump wanted Mueller out. I had discovered that the cooperation had become so chummy that Mueller�s team had begun trying to run McGahn��run� being a term used to describe how investigators use informants to infiltrate the mob or drug gangs�and tap him for real-time information about what was going on inside the White House.

Despite essentially turning state�s evidence against the president, McGahn stayed in his job as White House counsel, advising on everything from trade policy to national security. A source told me that McGahn believed he needed to try to stop the president from inflicting damage to the office of the president and the country. The source said that McGahn also worried that if he quit, Trump would install one of his crony lawyers from New York who would rubber-stamp whatever the president wanted�lawyers in the mold of Michael Cohen, who functioned more like fixers.

McGahn�s own personal and political ambitions complicated his calculations about whether to stay. He was an ardent libertarian who had become convinced that under both Democratic and Republican presidents the government had overreached in nearly every regard�from health care to education to the wars in the Middle East. With a broken Congress, the most effective way to reverse this trend was to stack the federal courts with hard-line judges in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. In fact, McGahn had accepted the White House job on the condition that he essentially serve as a committee of one to determine whom Trump would nominate to the federal bench, including district, appeals, and Supreme Court vacancies. Unlike previous administrations that relied on teams of White House and Justice Department officials who spent months if not years carefully deliberating on candidates for judicial nominations, McGahn streamlined the process and ran it out of his office. When he settled on candidates, he would present them to Trump, who would approve the nominations without raising many questions�simple as that. This hastened the pace at which the administration could get nominations to one of McGahn�s closest allies in Washington, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who would then ram them through the Senate. By the end of the second year in Trump�s presidency, this judicial conveyor belt had nominated more judges than any other modern administration had at the same point. McGahn knew that he would never have this power again. The longer he stayed in his position�even if doing so imperiled him legally and politically if he ended up on the wrong side of Kong�the more he would change the courts, cement his legacy, and, perhaps, have the chance to fill another Supreme Court vacancy.

Trump�s success at confirming conservative judges had become his political umbilical cord to the base�no matter how unseemly his personal conduct or how bombastic his tweets, the judges were his insurance policy against the growing threats to his presidency. Social conservatives, the largest and most enthusiastic faction of the Republican base, had increasingly seen the courts as their best avenue to enact policies they supported on issues like abortion and gun rights. Trump�s transformation of the courts allowed many of these Republicans, who otherwise found Trump revolting, to hold their noses and continue to support him, arguing that a president who wanted to champion their values was more important than one who actually lived by them. The bond between Trump and his voters over judges was vital to his survival�Democrats would need to peel off Republicans in Congress if they ever wanted to drive the president from office.

But could this dynamic really explain why McGahn stayed in the West Wing despite misgivings about the president�s conduct? Or was McGahn so alarmed by Trump�s behavior that he stayed to do whatever he could to protect the country? By advising Trump while at the same time talking to Mueller�s prosecutors, was he ethically compromised? I needed to find out, and the only source who was in a position to answer these things was almost at the northwest gate of the White House.

I had been alerted to McGahn�s whereabouts ninety seconds earlier by my editor, Amy Fiscus, who�d called me at my desk as she made her way out of the bureau. Until that point, it had been a typical day in the Trump era. Typical in the sense that it had been upended that afternoon by yet another astonishing development that alone would have been a remarkable moment in any other presidency but would soon be overwritten in our collective consciousness by the next outlandish thing the president did. That day, my colleague Maggie Haberman and I had reported that Trump claimed he still wanted to sit for an interview with the special counsel�s office, even though his personal lawyers had told him not to, because they believed he would lie.

We�d filed our story on the development late, around 6:00 p.m., and it would be 8:00 p.m. by the time it was edited and sent up to the Times� headquarters in New York, going online and making the first edition of the next day�s paper. At that hour, the bureau was finally quiet. The rest of the evening looked to be time to finally catch up on everything that had fallen by the wayside�going through my notebook and emails to take inventory of all the leads for stories I had to follow up on. My high school baseball coach had taught us that we should run out every ground ball because you never knew whether there was a scout in the stands clocking times on how quickly you made it to first base. I had adapted this to work, setting out to run down every lead because you never knew which one would turn out to be the big one. And while a call that Don McGahn had just left a nearby restaurant didn�t exactly qualify as a standard lead per se, it was an opportunity to talk to the key source in the biggest story in the world.

�He�s headed back to the White House,� Amy relayed to me, watching him head down the street.

As soon as I�d received Amy�s message that McGahn was on the move, I threw on my sport coat and raced to the elevator and out of our building, just three blocks north of the White House. About three hundred feet from the White House, in the middle of Lafayette Park, I could see Secret Service officers, straggling tourists, and protesters scattered on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the spiked fence. I was running on land that supposedly used to be an actual swamp, and even though it wasn�t raining, the humidity and heavy air made it feel as if I were running through water.

A hundred feet away, I saw what looked vaguely like the back of McGahn�s head as he took his final steps toward the northwest gate. As I got closer, I had to slow down�the last thing I needed was for the Secret Service officers to think I was a fence jumper or that I meant to assault the White House counsel and apprehend me. About forty feet from the entrance, I reached him.

�Don,� I said, out of breath.

He turned around.

He did not look happy to see me, and for a second I tried to see myself through his eyes�winded, sweaty, and frantically chasing him toward the most fortified office building in the world at a full sprint. How had it come to this?

II

THE INSTITUTIONALIST

JULY 10, 2015

ONE YEAR, SIX MONTHS, AND TEN DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

THE SEVENTH FLOOR OF THE FBI�S HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C.�On summer Fridays in the mid-2010s, I tried to work from home in my sweats. There was no indication anything would get in the way of that plan on Friday, July 10, 2015, or that the day would be at all eventful, much less consequential. But on that day, as most of the capital was enjoying a long break the week after Independence Day, two things occurred at the FBI�s headquarters that would have a profound bearing on the following year�s presidential election.

The call from my regular contact at the FBI came in early that morning.

�Just get over here,� the voice said in the slightly irritated tone of most FBI agents.

This made no sense.

Just a day earlier, the FBI director, James B. Comey, had held one of his quarterly sit-downs with all the reporters who covered him and the agency to answer our questions about the bureau.

Now he wanted to see us again?

I threw on a sport jacket and hightailed it from my small one-bedroom basement apartment in northwest Washington over to the bureau�s headquarters six blocks east of the White House. After passing through the security screening, I was brought up to the same plain room where all of us on the FBI beat sat with Comey around a table at the same time the previous day.

Reporters don�t like being kept in the dark. As we waited for Comey to arrive, speculation filled the void.

Maybe the FBI had nabbed a major terrorist? No, we would have definitely heard something about that. Had the bureau discovered that one of its top agents was a spy? Was Comey sick?

Just then, Comey walked in, a grave expression on his face, quickly sat down in front of us, and studied a single sheet of paper.

Over his two years as FBI director, everything had seemed to go right for Comey. His predecessor, Robert S. Mueller III, rarely spoke to the press or connected with agents in the FBI�s fifty-six field offices spread out across the country. Instead, Mueller managed the bureau from behind closed doors in Washington, with a reserve that had distinguished his long career in federal law enforcement. As he remade the agency into a counterterrorism fighting force in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Mueller�s rigid style left many of the agents, analysts, and other personnel in the bureau feeling chastened and alienated. Members of Congress, tasked with oversight of the bureau, felt similarly miffed by Mueller. Comey had recognized this problem before he became director and brought to the job a personal charisma and communication skills that set him apart, not only from his predecessors at the agency, but from nearly every politician in Washington.

In his first year as director, Comey had gone on a �listening tour.� He visited all the field offices, giving a press conference at each stop, and spent hours getting lunch and coffee with lawmakers. Could anyone remember Mueller convening a single press conference, much less fifty-six of them? And since when did the director of the FBI owe anyone public utterances, on any subject, for any reason? Mueller�s model had been a posture of complete probity. But although Comey meant to imply no criticism of his predecessor, he was transforming the position of director from that of a sphinx�opaque and silent�into a veritable public figure. In his second year, Comey had begun using the directorship as a bully pulpit of sorts, speaking out about issues that went beyond the day-to-day churn of the bureau�s investigations. He had an ease about him in the role, an air that communicated the utter conviction that principle was on his side. For any flaws that Comey might have possessed, he did not seem to suffer much from self-doubt, at least not publicly. In February 2015, he had given an unusually candid speech at Georgetown University about race and policing in which he quoted the Broadway show Avenue Q, saying, �Everyone�s a bit racist.� Comey was widely praised for the speech, including by police commissioners and officers. That reaction stood in stark contrast to how many responded several years earlier when, as attorney general, Eric Holder said that the United States �has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot� but had been �a nation of cowards� on race.

But in the conference room on the seventh floor of FBI headquarters, Comey sat in front of a group of puzzled reporters, clearly disturbed. Normally comfortable speaking off the cuff, on that day he instead studied that piece of paper in front of him and then read some of it aloud.

�I believe the job of the FBI director is to be as transparent as possible with the American people, because we work for them,� Comey said. �As you know, I try hard to explain our work to them, and I am also committed to explaining to them when we make a mistake and what I intend to do about it. I�m here today to talk to you about a mistake, in a matter of heartbreaking importance to all of us.�

The mistake, Comey said, related to Dylann Roof, the twenty-one-year-old man who, the previous month, had joined an evening prayer service at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and then proceeded to execute nine Black parishioners with a Glock .45 handgun. Roof had said he committed the massacre in the hopes of starting a race war and that he believed Blacks were violent and had lower IQs than whites.

That morning, Comey said that because of what he described as a terrible breakdown in the FBI�s background check system, involving a cascading series of mistakes and bureaucratic miscommunications, Roof had been allowed to purchase the weapon despite an earlier drug arrest that should have disqualified him from gun ownership.

By 2015, mass shootings had become the norm in America. But the murders at Mother Emanuel, as the church is affectionately known, shocked a country that had grown numb to gun violence. Roof had targeted people at their house of worship, hunting them because of their race. The intensity of the grief was a powerful reminder of America�s deep and seemingly eternal racial wound. The nine victims were still being mourned in the Charleston community and beyond. In the days following the murders, the immediate survivors of the dead�in an act of grace that stunned the country�had forgiven Roof. And grace was the theme of President Obama�s eulogy as he led the country in mourning at the memorial service nine days after the shooting. As he finished speaking, the president broke into song, leading the congregation in �Amazing Grace,� a soaring moment of pain and promise that banished cynicism and enshrined the moment in history.

And now, as I sat in FBI headquarters, watching a stricken director and trying to understand the nuances of federal gun laws, I could see something remarkable unfolding before me. The bureau had spent two decades and tens of millions of dollars developing computer systems and training personnel to prevent guns from getting into the hands of murderers. Those efforts had failed monumentally and tragically, and here was the FBI director admitting to the country that it was his agency that had let it happen.

�We are all sick this happened,� Comey said. �We wish we could turn back time. From this vantage point, everything seems obvious.�

The FBI makes roughly twenty thousand arrests a year, a significant portion of which result in convictions and prison sentences and receive no public attention. But mistakes in cases can leave a lasting stain on the bureau. In the early 1990s, following lengthy standoffs at Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho and Waco, Texas�during which a combined eighty-nine people were killed�the bureau was heavily criticized by the public and its actions were eventually investigated by government officials. After 9/11, government investigators placed significant blame on the FBI for failing to effectively utilize well-placed informants and for neglecting to share intelligence with other agencies that could have thwarted the attacks.

While it was very unusual for the director to make any pronouncement about an ongoing investigation, much less offer a heartbreaking mea culpa, Comey calculated that keeping the details about Roof�s gun sale secret could lead to similar negative consequences for himself and for the bureau. Unlike many of his predecessors, Comey believed in getting bad news out early and explaining it thoroughly. Transparency was the greatest disinfectant. Congress and the media became most agitated, and curious, when an official played �hide the ball,� seeking to withhold information from the public. If you leveled with them, Comey believed, those charged with oversight typically moved on to another target to scrutinize.

This approach had been hugely beneficial to Comey in his career. In 2004, shortly after he became deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush, he confronted the case of an accused terrorist named Jose Padilla who had been arrested on suspicions that he was plotting a �dirty bomb� attack on American soil. Although he was an American citizen and had been arrested in the United States, Padilla had been treated as an enemy combatant, and the Department of Justice had been holding him under extreme conditions in a military facility for two years, despite having not charged him with a crime. The Padilla case raised all sorts of questions about how long the government can detain an American citizen without affording him his constitutional rights to due process and a speedy trial.

In June 2004, Comey decided to air out those questions, holding a press conference to lay out the facts of the Padilla case. It worked. Questions about the prisoner�s detention leveled off in the weeks that followed.

Now, in the case of Dylann Roof, Comey was running the same play. Would it work again?

I rushed out of the briefing and back home, where I quickly pounded out a story that the Times posted online. The following day, the Times ran the story on the front page under the headline �Background Check Missed Charleston Suspect.� There was plenty of reason to be critical of the bureau�s grave error, and virtually no media outlet passed on the opportunity to assign blame for the mistakes that had proven catastrophic. But because Comey admitted to the FBI�s failure, it was only a one-day story. There would be no high-profile congressional hearings or investigations.

In my decade as a reporter for the Times, I had seen my fair share of savvy operators navigate media scrutiny, whether it was Yankees manager Joe Torre or the generals and colonels I had dealt with when in Iraq to cover the last year of the American occupation. But Comey had done something far more extraordinary than bring the media along to his point of view. He had resolved a serious political problem without resorting to classic moves in the Washington PR game�shifting blame, calling names, or diverting attention. Instead, he had simply traded on his reputation for principle and relied on exposing the facts to sunlight. Comey had tamed the political winds of Washington at a time when, unbeknownst to even its shrewdest players and observers, the rules of engagement were beginning to shift.

Comey could not have realized it at the time, but that moment would be the last high point of his professional career. From that point forward, a man who had appeared infallible, with an uncanny ability to steer through political storms, would face the greatest professional test of his life, which would humble him in ways that he could never have imagined as he commanded this impromptu press briefing.

On that same day, July 10, 2015, the seeds of his future and the colossal challenge he would face were being planted just down the hall from him. And it wasn�t just Jim Comey�s fate that was sealed that day; in a very real sense, the future of the country changed course that day as well. In the FBI�s counterintelligence division, which protects the United States against espionage and also leads the bureau�s investigations into the mishandling of national security secrets, agents and their supervisors initiated a classified FD-1057; that is, they began a highly sensitive investigation.

Title: Opening of Full Investigation on a Sensitive Investigative Matter (SIM)

Synopsis: FBIHQ, Counterespionage Section, is opening a full investigation based on specific articulated facts provided by an 811 referral from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, dated July 6, 2015 regarding the potential compromise of classified information.

This investigation is also designated a Sensitive Investigative Matter (SIM) due to a connection to a current public official, political appointee or candidate.

With this short and cryptic communication, the FBI had opened a criminal investigation into whether the leading Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, had mishandled classified information during her tenure as secretary of state through her use of a private email account. The investigation would be code-named Midyear Exam.

Hillary Clinton was a singular figure in American politics who just one month earlier had announced her campaign for the presidency. A partisan lightning rod, she was a longtime foil for conservatives, dating back to her husband Bill Clinton�s first national campaign in 1992, and ever since then Republicans had made it a mission to demonize Clinton, routinely accusing her of corruption. Those attacks, going back decades, had only hardened the view of Democrats that relentless investigations of Clinton were baseless and purely political.

Comey�s deputy director, Mark Giuliano, briefed him on the decision.

�You know you are totally screwed, right?� Giuliano said to Comey, suggesting that regardless of what the investigation revealed, half the country would be enraged.

Dating back to his days as a prosecutor, Comey knew the Clintons well enough to have a realistic view of them. In his view, they were neither the cartoon villains the Republicans made them out to be nor the innocent victims of right-wing conspiracies the Democrats would have you believe. But because those were the only two characterizations on offer in the political culture, Comey also knew that his deputy was right: The alternate realities from which Republicans and Democrats regarded the Clintons meant that no matter how the investigation ended, he and the FBI would come out damaged.

�Yup,� Comey said. �Nobody gets out alive.�

III

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

JULY 5, 2016

199 DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

BONAPARTE AUDITORIUM, FBI HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.�Comey picked up the phone in his office that morning and called his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. He told her he was going to hold a press conference. But he refused to say what it was about. She could have ordered him to tell her what he was up to, but she didn�t.

Around that time, the FBI alerted the media that the director planned to make a statement at headquarters later that morning, also declining to elaborate on what Comey might be saying. Reporters and photographers rushed over to a small auditorium on the bureau�s ground floor.

At home, Patrice had the television on as she anxiously waited.

Early that morning, as Jim was getting ready for the day, she had walked into his closet, examining his ties. �What tie�,� she said, deliberating what would look best on television.

They agreed on gold�not red or blue. Best to avoid the gang colors.

At 11:00 a.m., Jim walked out into the small auditorium and began his presentation.

�Get to the point, Jim,� Patrice said to herself. �Get to the point.�

But he didn�t get to the point. In anticipation of the criticism that he was in for, Comey�s speech first detailed all the ways in which Clinton had been reckless. Fact upon fact, his presentation was creating the unmistakable impression that the FBI director was building an argument for why the Democratic nominee should be charged with a crime.

�There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton�s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation,� Comey said about Clinton�s use of her personal email system.

Patrice�s friends who were also watching at home started sending her text messages.

Is he going to indict her? Oh my god?

�There is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,� Comey said.

After thirteen minutes, his tone abruptly shifted as he at last got to his point.

�No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,� Comey said. �No charges are appropriate in this case.�

Patrice said to herself, Jeez, Jim, why did you take so long to say that?

�If I had led with the exoneration,� Comey would say, �nobody would have listened to anything else.�

In reaction to the press conference, the Clinton campaign made a strategic decision to embrace the director�s conclusions. Although they saw Comey as arrogant and out of line for holding the press conference and criticizing Clinton, they ultimately decided that there was no good reason to pick a fight with the head of the FBI in the middle of a presidential campaign. Instead of litigating that in the media and attacking Jim, they moved on. The rest of the Democratic Party fell into line behind the Clintons.

In fact, many top Democratic leaders praised Jim for how he handled the Clinton investigation.

�This is a great man,� the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, said about Comey shortly after the press conference. �We are very privileged in our country to have him be the director of the FBI.�

Tim Kaine, the Virginia senator Clinton would choose as her running mate, would say on the campaign trail that Comey displayed the �highest standards of integrity.�

One of the few Democrats who went public to criticize Jim was a former Department of Justice spokesman who was known only to Washington insiders. The former spokesman, Matt Miller, took to cable news to say Jim had broken Justice Department rules. Miller said that it was not the department�s practice to use the fruits of an investigation to go out and tarnish the reputation of someone who has no ability to defend herself in court. If the department found wrongdoing, it should bring charges; otherwise, it should say nothing. Miller wrote a Washington Post op-ed titled �James Comey�s Abuse of Power� that claimed that by going public, Comey had set a dangerous precedent.

�Generations of prosecutors and agents have learned to make the right call without holding a self-congratulatory news conference to talk about it,� Miller wrote. �Comey just taught them a different lesson.�

Fellow Democrats told Miller that they wished they could also speak out, but that they feared doing so because they had their own relationships with the FBI to maintain.

But while Democrats�save for Miller�moved to put the investigation behind them, Republicans�who had been Jim�s main concern�dug in. For Republicans to understand Jim�s press conference, they needed a bit of intellectual dexterity, but not much. It asked Republicans to understand and appreciate two concepts at the same time: that Clinton might have done something improper related to national security but that she should not be charged with a crime. But that was a level of nuance that much of Washington lately could not accommodate. Because the finding was disagreeable to them, congressional Republicans assumed it was dishonest and called it suspicious. Given Comey�s harsh criticism of Clinton, they were enraged at his recommendation that she not be charged. His statements were useful to undermine Clinton, but became a target, too.

What is the difference, they argued, between Comey�s �extremely careless� and the �gross negligence� from the criminal statute? His language was proof enough that Clinton was a criminal and that Jim�apparently a Clinton lackey�was covering up her crime.

Two days after the press conference, Jim went up to Capitol Hill to testify before the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee�a panel dominated by members who had made their bones on Benghazi, often appearing on Fox News to push their latest theory of how Democrats were corrupt. The committee�s Republican chairman, Jason Chaffetz, lambasted Jim for deciding there would be �no consequence� for the handling of Clinton�s emails.

�I�m here because we�re mystified and confused by the fact pattern you laid out and the conclusions that you reached,� Chaffetz said. �It seems there are two standards, and there�s no consequence for these types of activities and dealing in a careless way with classified information.�

Jim tried to explain the nuances of federal prosecutions to the audience of angry Republicans, who were unmoved.

�We did not find evidence sufficient to establish that she knew she was sending classified information beyond a reasonable doubt, to meet the intent standard,� Jim said. �I understand why people are confused by the whole discussion. I get that, but you know what would be a double standard? If she were prosecuted for gross negligence.�

In explaining his conclusions, Comey also provided even more sound bites of him criticizing Clinton, which in Washington�s vicious cycle made his conclusions that much more assailable.

�She should have known not to send classified information,� he said. �That�s the definition of negligent. I think she was extremely careless. I think she was negligent. That I could establish. What we can�t establish is that she acted with the necessary criminal intent.�

Despite the backlash from Republicans, Comey headed into July believing the press conference had been a success. Getting knocked by partisans was far better than if the Department of Justice had sought to end the investigation silently and unaccountably. And any involvement by Loretta Lynch or other top political appointees would have given the chattering class more ammunition to push more mainstream Republicans to go after the Justice Department. So, while it would live on in the conservative media echo chamber, Comey was convinced that it would have only so much appeal and little of the criticism would stick.

�By doing the announcement alone, I was spending some of my credibility and the FBI�s to protect both the bureau and all of DOJ,� Jim would later say. �I actually think that the goal was achieved, in large part, because the attackers were forced to come through me and focus on the FBI�s decision making. There was very little of the �Loretta Lynch is corrupt� stuff that summer. Instead, they had to say I was wrong and the bureau was wrong, which was harder for them. It meant that I had to spend a lot of time testifying and fighting their bullshit, but it shifted the ground of the battle from political to tactical.�

So as July wore on, Jim thought the Clinton matter was behind him and that he could return to regular FBI work, like looking for funding for a new headquarters to replace the collapsing one. On the tactical side, he knew the bureau and the country still had major challenges. The FBI�s top priority was thwarting attacks from Islamic-linked terrorists and homegrown violent extremists. A horrific example of that type of violence was still fresh in his mind. Three weeks before the press conference, a twenty-nine-year-old man who had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State had killed forty-nine people at the Pulse nightclub in Florida, marking the deadliest attack on Americans since 9/11. Such mass violence had become sickeningly routine in the United States, and federal law enforcement had been impotent in the face of it. This was the important work that the FBI could now focus on. Comey was confident that he and the FBI could now leave the politics to the politicians, and do just that.

But whatever punches he had taken from the Far Right would be nothing compared with what was awaiting him.

IV

�OH, GOD�

NOVEMBER 8, 2016

SEVENTY-THREE DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

MCLEAN, VIRGINIA�On Election Day, Jim would not vote. Long before the issues with Clinton arose, he had decided he would not vote as FBI director. It was important, he thought, not to take sides but rather to simply live with equanimity in the world that the voters chose.

Patrice, on the other hand, was excited to vote. She had waited decades to vote for a woman presidential candidate, and her eyes brimmed with tears as she selected Clinton.

She remembered a lifetime of conversations with other women about how they never thought they would see a woman president. A book club she had been part of had read Susan Faludi�s Backlash, published in 1991, about ways in which popular media narratives stunted the feminist movement. When her club met, Patrice remembered saying to the group that �every kind of man� would be president before a woman got elected.

She had voted for Clinton eight years earlier, during the 2008 primary, but Clinton failed to reach the general election. By 2016, another eight years after her prediction, it seemed as if she might finally be proved wrong. She couldn�t wait for that to happen.

Patrice returned home nervous but excited for the results to come in. She kept a close eye on The New York Times online app containing a presidential forecasting needle that started the day predicting Clinton had an 82 percent chance of winning. That evening, she watched the coverage with their youngest daughter. She texted their other children to see what they were thinking. Jim puttered about the house, watching little. He assumed that Clinton would win, and he found punditry and cable news off-putting. He had also been making a concerted effort for the months leading up to the election to stay as uninformed as possible about the presidential horse race.

After the Associated Press called Florida for Trump at 10:50�p.m., Jim went to bed, still thinking Clinton would win. At 2:30�a.m., when the AP called the race for Donald Trump, Patrice cried on the phone with her daughters, not giving voice to what she feared: that their father might be blamed for Trump�s election.

Patrice finally went upstairs to their dark bedroom and woke up her husband to tell him the news. Jim sat right up.

�Oh, God,� he said.

Oh, God, Oh God, Jim thought to himself. Did we contribute to this? Is this something I did?

He immediately started convincing himself that this was not his or the FBI�s fault. To reduce the pain that came with that notion, he tried to convince himself of things he knew were likely untrue.

Maybe the office will change him, Jim told himself.

He also couldn�t help but think about what his next four-plus years were going to be like. He had no idea what was in store for him or the FBI. It did not cross his mind that his job might be in jeopardy.

To cope, the brain is wired to rationalize the irrational. Comey knew that was exactly what he was doing. Telling himself that the majesty of the office of the presidency would sand down Trump�s crass edges was more of a silent prayer than a prediction. But it was one he clung to that early morning as he lay in his bed contemplating the reality of a Trump presidency, next to a distraught Patrice. He was also convinced of his own power to be one of the people who could, at least in law enforcement matters, lead the president away from the darkness of his sometimes xenophobic and uninformed campaign persona and toward the light of something resembling more traditional presidential conduct. Comey didn�t yet know that Trump would wield some of his darkest visions of vengeance and retribution and character assassination against him. But even if he had known, he might have been sanguine about it. He had stared down political ruin during the Bush years. But after the Bush administration he had faced the very real prospect of leaving Patrice a widow. And that experience had led him to become FBI director. If he could survive looking death directly in the eye, why couldn�t he survive Trump?

V

THE ROAD TO MUELLER

JANUARY 20, 2017

INAUGURATION DAY

THE OVAL OFFICE�Five hours after being sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump bounded into the Oval Office for the first time as commander in chief. With the solemn and historic transfer of power completed, a signature of America�s constitutional democracy, Trump now crossed the threshold of the most storied office in the world, as its occupant for the next four years. The energy from his inaugural address, and from the validation of his dramatic electoral victory, brought a certain buoyancy to Trump in his first moments behind the Resolute desk. Some of his children and many of his former campaign aides, now thrust into high-level positions within the new administration, surrounded him. This array of confidants and officials was a diverse and poorly organized group who brought to the White House little government experience and a dizzying collection of political viewpoints and agendas. Now, tasked with translating the slogans from the rollicking campaign into a coherent governing agenda, they faced the daunting challenge of coordinating the launch of a new administration.

The Trump campaign had indeed been unlike any other in American political history. Every element of the effort to win the White House had been unconventional: It featured a meager and constantly shifting organizational structure, embraced messaging that frequently pushed into taboo territory, and took on a tone seemingly antithetical to the serious and sober nature of serving in the highest office in the country. In the end, the Trump campaign, in its road-show quality, had reflected the character of the candidate.

But this was the moment�Trump�s first time walking into the Oval Office as president�when everything was supposed to change. Few things hold such a place in the collective American imagination as the power of the presidency. Runners-up fade with time, but presidents assume a sort of immortality. Surely the weight of history and the sense of majesty the office conjures would be the antidote to the lack of discipline and seriousness reflected in the Trump campaign and in the candidate himself. Or so went the story that Jim and Patrice Comey, establishment Republicans, the Washington elite, and many voters told themselves. The accuracy of this theory would be tested when Trump and his team first assembled in the space from which every U.S. president since John Adams had wielded power.

Throughout his life, Trump had been a man whose identity was uniquely tied to buildings. He measured success in the size of the skyscrapers that bore his name. Through the scale of these buildings, Trump had built his personal brand and public persona. He projected an image of himself as a master builder, and in the reflection of his projects Trump saw himself as the rich and powerful figure he constantly strove to become. Now, a question hung over the moment:

Would the man make the office, or would the office remake the man?

As it turned out, Trump had already begun redecorating the Oval Office in his signature style before he ever set foot inside as president. Obama�s crimson drapes had been replaced with golden ones the new president had picked, adding an immediate Trumpian touch. Photos of Trump�s parents were arranged on a desk in the back of the room. And the desk that Obama had occupied just hours before was completely bare, except for two landline phones, a coaster, and a small box with a red button atop that Trump could hit when he wanted a Diet Coke brought to him.

What else could Trump ask for?

Entering into the Oval Office for the first time as president, Trump could have focused on the history that had been made in that illustrious space, or on the possibilities for what his own administration might now achieve there. Instead, he immediately fixated on one thing: the lighting.

In all of the buildings Trump had erected�in New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and overseas�he always paid special attention to the lighting. He knew that a dim and shadowy setting would never make a good impression. And now he could tell that the Oval Office lights�which project up toward the ceiling and, just as important, are indirect and remain concealed, almost magically producing exceptional brightness�would create optimal conditions for the cameras taking pictures of him, making a dramatic backdrop to document his new life as the most powerful person in the world. For a man who had never served in government, and for whom so much of existence was being seen through the lens of a camera, Trump now sought to create in the Oval Office a stage set reminiscent of the famous, stark, and imposing boardroom of The Apprentice. Except here, the power was not a fantasy.

This attention to the aesthetics of the Oval Office above all else began to answer the question of whether the grandeur and gravity of the presidency would transform Trump. Because rather than investing him with a newfound sense of sobriety and seriousness of purpose, stepping into the West Wing for the first time as president had in fact magnified Trump�s constant focus on the superficial. It appeared to those who knew him that entering the White House hadn�t so much changed Trump as it had supercharged his innate attraction to the shiny trappings of wealth and power.

What Trump needed to grasp in that moment was that the city that surrounded this new set in Washington was far different from New York. For his entire life in New York City, Trump had lied and arm-twisted his way through everything, operating in worlds dominated by tabloid coverage and businessmen a lot like himself who were brash, uncompromising, and ethically unbridled. The worst consequences he faced there for his misdeeds were bad press stories in the tabloids and civil lawsuits. But in Washington, the actors were more skilled, and the consequences were exponentially greater. Partisans, media, and officials from the law enforcement, military, and intelligence communities, and even foreign adversaries, played a sophisticated game of shivving at a far higher level, constantly calling fouls on each other for breaking a group of written and unwritten rules. In Washington, things like conflicts of interest, keeping a distance between politics and law enforcement, and even the appearance of improprieties that Trump had never given a moment�s thought were all serious matters.

At the most basic level, because Trump now headed the executive branch, he found himself closer to the law than any other person in the country. He had never shown great care or appreciation for nuance. Now everything he did�whether it was tweet, privately complain, or sign an executive order�would be seen through the prism of the law. If he made a real mistake, he would be labeled a criminal.

A friend who spoke with Trump the day after his inauguration said that Trump not only had failed to grasp the new realities and sensibilities of Washington but also had entered into �another dimension of reality.� The toys of the White House, the friend said, had turned Trump into a child who sounded as if he had just opened his birthday presents.

�I have the best toys, you won�t believe the toys, and I have the best Secret Service, they will kill anybody and follow you around everywhere�there�s nothing like them,� Trump told the friend.

�I got the sense,� the friend said, �that he came into this place and was completely oblivious to what he was walking into and was completely mesmerized by this new world he was in, and for the first time realized just how powerful he was going to be.�

For Trump�s entire life he had wanted to create his own reality, the friend said. But often, he ran up against others�people on the street, other businessmen, and the media�who reminded him of his standing as an outsider from Queens. But as he had skated along in the business world, he always had the ability to put things into perspective.

�He was in on the joke,� the friend said. �He was P. T. Barnum and he let you know from time to time he was in on the joke.�

Now, behind the walls of the White House, the friend sensed that Trump believed he could finally live in his version of reality and that no one was going to get in his way. With the symbols of ultimate power at his disposal, people would finally have to take him seriously.

�Behind the White House wall and gates he was completely protected,� the friend said. �Now he was surrounded by sycophants, and nobody around him would be honest with him. On January 20 he finally walked into a building where he could say whatever he wanted to say, and believe whatever he wanted to believe, and live in this alternate reality.�

Even after he had taken over his father�s real estate business, Trump still felt like a kid from the outer boroughs who was looked down upon by those he saw as members of the elite class. Even when he expanded his business and created a worldwide brand, the titans of New York real estate still thought of him as an act without real substance. But now, just months before he turned seventy-one, Trump had reached the pinnacle of American life. He was the president of the United States; no one, not even his doubters, had a more powerful job.

But Trump�s expectations for how the world would now see him were setting him up for a huge disappointment.

After first walking into the Oval Office and noticing the light, Trump posed for photos with his children behind the Resolute desk. His aides congregated behind him for what would be his first event at the White House: the signing of a largely symbolic executive order to signal his intentions to attempt a rollback of Obamacare and eliminate federal regulations generally.

Standing behind Trump in the room were the people who were supposed to be guiding his presidency. One of them was a family member, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Presidents had long been expected to turn to the best and the brightest in any given field and bring them into the executive branch, shunning nepotism and favoring experts. Trump, however, had no such compunction regarding the practice and eagerly installed members of his family in positions of great power like his daughter Ivanka and Kushner, who had ill-defined roles. On the organizational chart, the two highest-ranking White House officials were supposed to be the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and the chief strategist, Steve Bannon. None of them had worked in government before, let alone the White House.

While the title of chief of staff belonged to Priebus, many of those who worked directly for him believed Kushner was the true chief of staff. Priebus acted as if he had little power, especially to say no to bad ideas. He seemed more comfortable in a glorified communications director role. He had his office set up with so many televisions hung on the wall that White House staffers joked that it looked like a Buffalo Wild Wings sports bar. Bannon, the chief strategist, came to the White House with all sorts of self-confidence and gusto and a slew of executive orders of questionable legality that he wanted to rush in to have Trump sign. But he had no idea how the government functioned.

However, two aides in the room did have extensive experience working in the executive branch. One was Flynn. The other was a longtime Washington lawyer named Don McGahn.

McGahn had been the lawyer for Trump�s campaign and had maintained a far lower profile than the Bannons and Kushners of Trump�s world. Throughout the race, he was more of a voice on the other end of the phone from Trump than someone who traveled with him; McGahn would update him on the nitty-gritty matters of a campaign, like fundraising numbers, and it was McGahn who would see to it that Trump would be on the ballot in all fifty states. Even during the transition, the two had spent little time together. McGahn largely stayed in Washington. He fought recount efforts in the few states where Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein supporters had challenged the vote. He hired lawyers to work under him at the White House, and he closed up his private law practice.

Although Trump and McGahn had known each other for only a year and a half, the two had developed a decent relationship. They found each other funny. Now that they were both in the White House, McGahn would see Trump just about every day. White House counsels are typically charged with attending meetings with the president and other top aides to offer advice on the legal restrictions that may arise in the process of everyday governing. They have a hand in questions of ethics, pardons, executive orders, and a slew of different topics. But more than any other White House counsel in recent history, McGahn�whose high-level experience was largely in the realm of campaign law�had a more defined role. Sure, he would have to commit time to many of the same things past White House lawyers had done. But he was given additional responsibility. Taking advantage of Trump�s lack of core political beliefs, McGahn�in the process of signing on as the White House�s chief lawyer�had the president grant him extraordinary latitude in the appointment of judges. As a staunch libertarian, McGahn had long dreamed of a judiciary that worked to limit the reach of government. (�I enjoy liberty,� McGahn once said in an interview. �I don�t like the government.�) With the okay from Trump, he could nominate scores of judges to lifetime appointments who were all far more conservative than the judges who had been appointed during the Obama and Bush administrations, changing the courts for decades. In fact, McGahn was so singularly focused on the appointment and confirmation of judges that he had a memo drawn up that had a day-by-day and even hour-by-hour schedule of the plan to announce and confirm Trump�s first Supreme Court pick.

McGahn knew he was receiving a once-in-a-never-again opportunity. In another Republican administration he would have been passed up for the job in favor of someone who had an Ivy League degree and perhaps even prior experience in a White House or the Justice Department. But now McGahn would have the sole power to present judicial options to Trump. No other White House had operated in a similar manner. And with a Republican Senate and an open seat on the Supreme Court, the arrangement gave McGahn an extraordinary power.

In the Oval Office on Inauguration Day, McGahn could tell that little work had been done during the transition to establish an agenda and that no one on the leadership team had any real idea what their roles were or, for that matter, what the administration�s plans were for its first several days. To McGahn, the assembled group of staff and family felt like a group of people who had decided on a whim to run the country, without putting any time or planning into learning what that actually entailed.

�It was a pickup game of basketball with some people who maybe you think are smart or have talent or whatever but they had never played on a court before, had never played as a team, weren�t going to work as a team, and have a coach who has never coached before and had no real interest in coaching,� said one aide.

And something seemed off about the president. Aides noticed that amid the feeling of joy and disbelief that suffused the White House, a darkness had quickly set in with Trump himself.

Trump said nothing about how he was feeling. It was Trump, after all; we may never know what he was feeling. The aides thought there could be two reasons for why the president acted upset. One sense was that Trump, now the most powerful man in the world, was finally feeling the weight of the office. He had been taken with the idea of being president, but now what?

Presidential historians have written for generations about how �the office� had changed presidents once they�d actually assumed the job and confronted the realities, responsibilities, and limitations of their position on the world stage, where the implications of any action they took could alter history. Maybe this scared Trump.

But maybe his emotions were shallower than that. After all, among the reasons Trump had looked forward to his inauguration was that he thought being the forty-fifth president of the United States meant at last he would be accorded the respect from the media he felt he deserved. Yet within hours of taking the oath of office on the Capitol steps, he was seeing media reports highlighting how many more people had attended Obama�s first inaugural than his.

On the campaign trail, Trump had flung vicious attacks at the other Republicans seeking the nomination and Clinton. They hit him back with damaging disclosure after damaging disclosure. But Trump survived them all. The rhythms and pace of campaigning had been perfect for him. He jumped from city to city on his own plane. At each stop he fed off the crowd. He lived in the spotlight and thrived on the constant motion and media attention and constant sense of embattlement. Even when the polls had been heading south, aides had rarely seen Trump lash out angrily or grow depressed. While he was someone who struggled to take criticism, running against Clinton not only gave him a foil, it also gave him an outlet for his insecurities.

�On the campaign, he was the one hurting others,� said one aide. �He had an enemy. As long as he�s hurting them more, he can take the incoming.�

But now Clinton was gone, and all the attention would be cast directly on him. By achieving the presidency, he would now breathe the rarefied air of a historic figure, and would now be measured against the likes of Washington and Lincoln. Bluster is fine in real estate and reality TV, but now it would be much harder to trash-talk his way out of his problems. Along with being upset with the media�s coverage of crowd sizes, Trump grew angry that Obama had received such a warm send-off that afternoon from television commentators when he departed the Capitol in a helicopter after the inaugural ceremony. To Trump it was as if the media were mourning Obama�s leaving and dreading his own ascendancy.

�All of a sudden he�s president, and he took it pretty hard,� said one aide. �All sorts of people who couldn�t believe he was elected were saying horrible things about him.�

His ego aside, Trump�s ignorance of how government worked could be a profound liability. To McGahn, a best-case scenario would be for Trump to emulate Ronald Reagan. Enjoy the trappings and ceremonial roles of the presidency and let aides like him ruthlessly execute his agenda. McGahn had seen the reporting that the FBI was investigating links between the campaign and Russia. He thought it was all bullshit. Whatever it was, the campaign and its lawyers could handle any questions that came up. It wouldn�t be anything serious that the White House would have to handle. He could focus on just the judges.

What McGahn did not realize was that a freight train was steaming toward the White House. Jim Comey and the FBI were closely watching Trump�s public behavior and the chaos that enveloped him. They were prepared to act in a way that would spark a series of events that would drastically change the trajectory of the presidency and McGahn�s life. For any White House, facing off with an adversarial FBI would be a complex, and even crippling, challenge. But for a White House that had little idea how to govern, dealing with the investigation in an organized, effective way would be virtually impossible. It would all happen so quickly that by the twenty-sixth day of the presidency, Trump would have done enough to create an existential threat to his presidency that would potentially define his term in office. More than that, the impending clash would create an unprecedented level of chaos at the highest levels of the American government, a chaos that in many ways would redefine Washington.

It would put Trump on a collision course with himself, the establishment, the FBI, and the Justice Department. Standing between Trump and the abyss would be Comey and McGahn. As the presidency got under way, McGahn thought everything would be fine.

But he might have known better. His own family�s history should have taught him that being Donald Trump�s lawyer was never that simple.

VI

�HE�S SAYING SOME CRAZY SHIT�

MAY 23, 2017

ONE YEAR, TEN MONTHS, AND TWENTY-SIX DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT

MCGAHN�S OFFICE ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF THE WEST WING��I�m not your man,� McGahn told the president over the phone.

Six days had passed since Mueller had been appointed as special counsel. Now the president was on the phone from Air Force One, on his first trip to the Middle East, and he had just told McGahn that he wanted him to call the Justice Department and have Mueller removed. Fired.

Trump already had a fairly elaborate three-pronged argument for why Mueller needed to go, including a frivolous contention that the two had once had a dispute about membership fees at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, and so he couldn�t possibly investigate the president fairly.

The president�s near-immediate impulse to fire yet another figure who was leading an investigation into his conduct and that of his administration was obviously reckless and an extraordinarily bad idea. If the uproar over Comey�s firing had rocked the White House, this would raze it. McGahn tried to reason with the president, telling him why he believed he shouldn�t try to do it and why the White House counsel wouldn�t be going off that particular cliff with Trump if he decided to fire Mueller anyway.

�We�ll look like we�re still trying to meddle in the investigation,� McGahn told the president. �I�m not the right lawyer to do that.�

McGahn said that if the president believed the conflicts were such a problem, then Trump�s personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz�who was handling everything ranging from defending the president in sexual misconduct lawsuits to the new Mueller investigation�should send a letter to the Department of Justice laying out the conflicts.

�You need your own lawyer. I�m in-house counsel to the White House,� McGahn said, explaining the difference between serving as Trump�s personal lawyer and being the top lawyer for the executive branch.

Trump did not say what prompted the call. But he had closely watched the media coverage back home during his trip, and earlier that day new signs emerged that Mueller was moving forward with the investigation when the media reported that the Justice Department�s ethics officials had cleared Mueller to oversee it.

For McGahn, the Trump presidency had been a string of public embarrassments dominated by Russia, Flynn, Sessions, Comey, Mueller, and Trump�s anger about them all. Instead of allowing accomplishments like the judges to stand alone and building on them, Trump spent his private and public time stewing and complaining, creating endless distractions.

Two days after Mueller�s appointment, Trump had boarded Air Force One and flown to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to begin a nine-day trip through the Middle East and Europe. It was his first time traveling abroad as president, and coming as it did on the heels of a disastrous week, to Trump�s aides and the media it seemed inevitable that the trip, too, would be a disaster. But to their surprise, Trump became captivated by the pageantry with which he was greeted, and the gifts lavished on him, and found his footing, carrying out the trip largely in line with the norms set out by his predecessors. In Saudi Arabia, the royal family appealed almost perfectly to Trump�s desire to be flattered and treated like a king. They projected Trump�s face across five stories of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where the president was staying. They danced with him at an opulent welcoming ceremony. And they gave him at least eighty-three different gifts before he departed, including a robe lined with cheetah fur and a portrait of himself.

Trump�s aides considered the trip a success, largely because he simply had made no major gaffes.

But privately throughout the trip, when Trump was in his plane�s cabin, his limousine, or his hotel room, he continued to rage about Mueller. And unknown to McGahn, who had remained back in Washington, Trump had taken Sessions�s resignation letter with him on the trip. On the flight from Riyadh to Tel Aviv, Trump had decided to take it out of his pocket while meeting with advisers in his cabin. The president passed it around and asked whether he should accept the attorney general�s resignation.

Although he was reluctant to say anything to Trump about it, Priebus thought it was unseemly that the president was being so indelicate with Sessions�s resignation letter. Moreover, he was gravely concerned that by advertising his deliberations about whether to fire Sessions so indiscreetly, the president would use the precariousness of Sessions�s position to grab the �DOJ by the throat,� in order to get whatever he wanted out of Sessions. In a rare attempt by the chief of staff to contain the president, Priebus raised the issue with Trump, inquiring about the letter, in the hopes Trump would give it to him so it could be sent back to Sessions. In response, Trump lied to Priebus. Inexplicably, even though he had passed the letter around moments earlier, he said he had left it in the residence at the White House.

Until this point, McGahn had been willing to go along with Trump�s haphazard presidency, largely because he now had more power than he ever could have imagined. There were dozens of open spots in the federal judiciary, and he had the power to influence Trump to make the kinds of appointments that would reshape the country for decades. It was real power, not the showy displays of power that transfixed Trump.

And while Trump had done a lot to inflict damage on his own presidency, McGahn viewed much of the disapproval of Trump�s early weeks in office as elites hyperventilating. He was president and had been exceptionally clear about his priorities before the election. And so in McGahn�s view, the president had the legal authority to execute actions like the Muslim ban, even while conceding that its rollout had been a disaster. So what if Democrats and the Washington establishment hated it? They were never going to like Trump.

But Trump�s desire to fire Mueller as if he were just another political appointee unnerved McGahn. Why was Trump continuing to behave this way? Did he have something to hide? Why did he insist on undermining himself? Why couldn�t he just play president?

Trump seemed to think that the appointment of a special counsel�and not just any special counsel, but Mueller�could be tweeted away, avoided, or ignored. It was the worst nonlethal threat a presidency could face. To survive, the conventional wisdom held that he would need to change his behavior. Similar prosecutors who looked into past administrations�Lawrence Walsh, Ken Starr, and Pat Fitzgerald�had turned those White Houses�which were far more capable and professional than Trump�s�upside down. Those investigations had flipped aides on each other, and on the president. The investigators got their hands on internal notes, memos, and phone records, wreaking havoc on administrations for years. For McGahn, Trump�s move to fire Mueller, combined with the chaotic White House being run by Priebus and Bannon, had brought the presidency to a breaking point. If McGahn had Mueller removed, the investigation of the president would almost certainly widen, and McGahn would be seen as a potential co-conspirator in the president�s obstruction. Representing the president had become a hazard for McGahn, and he needed to start thinking about what else he needed to do to protect himself.

He studied the actions of past White House counsels, how they acted in crises and where they had gotten themselves into trouble. He saw that on multiple occasions White House lawyers had jeopardized themselves and their careers by sticking by and enabling their presidents when instead they had a legal and ethical obligation to push back. Two former lawyers�Clinton�s first White House counsel, Bernard Nussbaum, and Nixon�s third White House counsel, John Dean�were prime examples of people who got caught up in protecting their bosses. Nussbaum found himself in the crossfire of partisan fights on Capitol Hill when House Republicans attacked him as a way of undermining Clinton. He was never criminally charged, but the Republicans accused him of obstructing justice by hiding documents from the FBI. Dean faced something far more significant: criminal problems. In an effort to shield Nixon from the Watergate scandal, Dean paid off the arrested burglars and limited the scope of the government�s investigation, and later pleaded guilty to obstructing justice. Now, right before his eyes, McGahn saw himself getting pulled into the same trap. The president wanted to fire the independent investigator who was looking into serious questions about the president�s own potentially illegal behavior. By doing so, Trump would certainly be increasing his criminal exposure. And if he followed Trump�s directives, it might not be long before McGahn found himself in the same place as Nussbaum (smeared) or Dean (convicted). Over and over again, McGahn told himself he would not turn out like them. No one could afford to be accused of breaking the law. But McGahn, at forty-eight, was not some old Washington hand who could recede into retirement if he got into trouble. He had a reputation to defend and the rest of his career ahead of him, and he needed to be able to make money for at least the next two decades to support his wife and two young children. Abetting criminal activity, destroying his good name, maybe losing his law license�that would be catastrophic.

To avoid that fate, he needed help. Holding back Trump on his own was proving far too difficult and dangerous. Trump�s aides were bunched and balkanized, and so he had few allies and was unsure of whom he could trust. He was one of the few on the inside who knew exactly what had gone on and how it would look from the perspective of an investigator like Mueller and his team of prosecutors. Someone had to look over his shoulder, counsel him, and, above all else, keep him out of legal trouble.

The president�s lawyer needed his own lawyer.

Two days after Mueller was appointed to take over the investigation of the president, McGahn had met in his office with one of the top white-collar defense lawyers in Washington. The lawyer, Bill Burck, represented prominent clients in dicey circumstances, like FIFA�the international soccer organization that the Justice Department had investigated for corruption�and he checked another two critical boxes for McGahn: He was a Republican, and he had experience working in a White House under siege, because he had also been a top lawyer in the last years of the George W. Bush administration.

McGahn had asked Burck to come into the White House to be the lawyer dedicated to dealing with the Mueller investigation, but Burck had brushed him off. He loved being a private lawyer, traveling the world, and dealing directly with big-time clients�Middle Eastern oil moguls, Fortune 500 companies, and NFL teams�facing complex, serious problems. He made millions of dollars a year, and he and his wife, who had three young kids, lived in a nice neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland, and had just spent a fortune buying the house next door, knocking it down, and building a beautiful extension onto their home. Burck now had a huge mortgage and couldn�t work for government pay. Besides, he had joined the country club down the street and wanted to spend his free time becoming a respectable golfer. A White House job doesn�t really allow for that.

�No, never, not a chance,� Burck said. �I�m not anywhere close to leaving the private sector and coming in the government. I just can�t do it.�

What the two men did not discuss was that while they were both Republicans, they essentially had diametrically opposed allegiances and views. Burck�s mother was Jamaican, and he had seen enough of Trump�s behavior to believe that he was a racist. And he thought that the president could even be a danger to the country. Burck was a Bush Republican and wanted nothing to do with Trump. As a private lawyer, he still maintained a close relationship with George�W. Bush and represented him and his presidential library on issues related to the papers from his administration. Burck had been an early supporter of Jeb Bush�s presidential bid, donating $2,700�the maximum an individual could give�to his campaign, and an additional $25,000 to a political action committee supporting Bush�s candidacy. Whereas McGahn had strong ideological beliefs, Burck was more pragmatic. He thought Trump was destroying the Republican Party, but he declined to publicly become a never-Trumper�why piss off potential paying clients?

McGahn had been appointed to the Federal Election Commission in 2008 by Bush. But he had come to believe that the Bush-era policies of intervention abroad, excessive government spending, and overzealous surveillance had infringed on individual liberties and set the country on a downward trajectory. The middle class was in trouble, and McGahn thought the idea that a so-called establishment Republican like Jeb Bush could beat Clinton was preposterous. For the Republicans to win, they would always need to draw sharp contrasts, and that meant the conservative party had to be conservative and run to the far right. And so while during the Republican primaries McGahn actually thought Trump could win, he�d also decided to represent Trump during the campaign because he thought Trump could help knock Bush out of the race.

In the days after Burck rejected McGahn�s offer, McGahn kept on calling him for advice, asking questions about how a White House should position itself to deal with dueling congressional and special counsel investigations. Burck loved being a resource and came to like McGahn. More and more, McGahn would open up to him: The president is behaving erratically, he would say, and you�ll never believe what is going on here. But because they had no professional relationship, McGahn didn�t confide too deeply in Burck about what Trump was doing or saying.

Now, as McGahn was facing Trump�s attempts to fire Mueller, he came back to Burck with an idea. What if McGahn hired Burck to represent him and the other lawyers in the counsel�s office? McGahn told Burck that the lawyers might need someone to represent them if someday they had to answer questions about the Comey firing.

Bingo. That was an arrangement that would work for Burck. It gave him a piece of the action without having to deal with, or defend, Trump himself. Burck dived right in. To fully understand what had occurred around the Comey firing, McGahn and Burck agreed that it would make sense for Burck to come in and conduct an internal investigation of sorts, interviewing McGahn and the handful of other White House lawyers who had knowledge of the firing.

In late May, Burck spent a day in the West Wing and Eisenhower Executive Office Building interviewing the lawyers�without anyone else in the White House knowing. And what he discovered was of great comfort to McGahn. Burck learned that shortly before Trump fired Comey, he�d been warned by McGahn and Dhillon that there could be dire consequences for removing the FBI director.

�If you fire Comey,� the lawyers had told Trump, �you�re buying yourself a special counsel.�

In Burck�s view, that statement alone would make building an obstruction of justice case around Comey�s dismissal much more difficult. Criminal obstruction of justice hinges on proving that someone had corrupt intent. If Trump knew that firing Comey would only make the investigation worse, how was that obstruction? And best of all to Burck, his clients in the White House counsel�s office had done the right thing and dispensed sound legal advice to their client the president, whether he had chosen to follow it or not.

Burck thought that Mueller must instead be training his sights on Flynn�s firing, the allegations of collusion with the Russians, or even Trump�s finances�none of which concerned McGahn�s criminal exposure.

There were other promising signs for McGahn and the White House, Burck reported. During McGahn�s discussions with Rosenstein after Mueller�s appointment, McGahn had asked the deputy attorney general whether he�McGahn�might need to recuse himself from dealing with the investigation due to his role in the Comey firing. Rosenstein had replied that neither of them had done anything wrong in the firing of Comey, and so no, there would be no need for McGahn to recuse himself. McGahn had also told Burck that Rosenstein�s phrasing had left him with the impression that Mueller wouldn�t really be focusing his investigation on obstruction of justice.

All good signs, Burck said. If McGahn himself were vulnerable in any way, Rosenstein would almost certainly have told him to take no role in representing the White House on matters regarding the investigation. And in any case, it was Rosenstein who had written the memo that Trump had used as the legal rationale to dismiss the FBI director, and he had also appointed Mueller, and he wasn�t recusing himself from overseeing the investigation. If there was a serious obstruction investigation, Rosenstein would at the very least be a witness and would almost certainly not be able to continue in that role.

As the fifth month of the Trump presidency began, in his first official act representing the White House counsel and his staff, Burck had come to believe it was likely that the president and his aides were safe on the obstruction issue. But then, a legal opinion is only as good as the information available to the lawyer producing it. What Burck didn�t know is that there was a lot McGahn hadn�t told him, particularly that the president had begun a vigorous campaign to fire Mueller and potentially end his investigation. It was not a minor omission. When Burck did learn about Trump�s push to fire Mueller, it would utterly change his previously sunny appraisal of the danger his client might face. In fact, the detail that McGahn had neglected to tell Burck would shape the rest of their relationship and bind them together for the next twenty-three months in a way that neither man could have foreseen.

VII

NORMS OF PRESIDENTIAL CONDUCT 101

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

ONE YEAR, TWO MONTHS, AND TWO DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT

MCGAHN�S OFFICE ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF THE WEST WING�Dating back to the transition, the intelligence community, the FBI, and senior members of the Obama administration knew of evidence that foreign countries wanted to gain access and leverage over the incoming administration by exploiting Trump�s adult children.

Trump had made a show of ceding control of his real estate business�which had properties all over the world�to his sons after the election to demonstrate that he would try to keep the operation of his businesses separate from governing the country. Before he was inaugurated, though, intercepted communications by the intelligence community revealed evidence of foreign officials from more than one country discussing how they wanted to do business deals with the kids in order to gain closer access to the administration. A wiretap picked up the United Arab Emirates� ambassador to the United States, Yousef Otaiba, discussing how he wanted to help Jared and Ivanka find a home in Washington, where they planned to move from New York before the president took office. Perhaps it was just a friendly gesture. Or perhaps it was a way to burrow in closer to the Trump children. It was difficult to say, because in the modern era there had not been a president who remained vested in any business interests while in the White House.

Counterintelligence officials had concerns about the attempts by foreign countries to buy influence with Trump�s children, but they only went so far. Sure, these countries could seek to exploit the children to gain access to Trump. That was bad. But foreign countries routinely had their officials and spies cozy up to the family members of elected leaders. Next on the ladder of concerns for American counterintelligence officials is ensuring that potentially vulnerable or compromised people are restricted from having access to classified information. The good news was that none of the children were going to be able to know the country�s most sensitive secrets. The president�s sons Don Jr. and Eric were going to remain out of government to run the family business. And while Trump�s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka planned to join the administration, they had said that reports during the transition that they would seek security clearances when they joined the White House staff were false.

But as the inauguration drew near, Kushner and Ivanka quietly began completing the background forms and extensive paperwork needed to get a top-secret-level clearance. Improbably, given his paucity of experience in the area of foreign policy or international relations, Kushner planned to take the lead on negotiating Middle East peace; of course, having a security clearance would be essential to that role. From the start, there were problems. In a section of his application in which he was required to disclose all of his foreign contacts, Kushner failed to list multiple meetings with Russians during the campaign and transition. The omission suggested that he may have broken the federal law that says those filling out the forms must be forthcoming and truthful.

�I have never seen that level of mistakes,� said Charles Phalen, the top Trump administration official dealing with background checks for security clearances.

To fix the paperwork issue, which was becoming a public relations problem that Kushner had his press aides spend an inordinate amount of time spinning, Kushner hired a high-profile former Justice Department official. After at least four revisions to Kushner�s background check document�in which more than a hundred names were added to his list of contacts with foreigners�the issue largely receded from the headlines, and Kushner was issued a temporary clearance, pending his background check, which entailed a proper vetting by the FBI.

A year into Trump�s presidency, Kushner still hadn�t received a clearance, and this remained a source of real concern among senior White House staff. Then, in mid-February 2018, after Rob Porter was fired following spousal abuse accusations about him in the media, it was revealed that he, like Kushner, had been working since the beginning of the administration with only an interim security clearance. Porter had been the staff secretary, a position not widely known outside the White House but one of the more consequential jobs in the West Wing. As staff secretary, Porter was in charge of all the paper that is supposed to go in front of the president, including the most sensitive national security documents that were routinely sent for the president�s review and approval by the intelligence community and the Pentagon.

Some officials operate with an interim clearance at the beginning of an administration while the FBI conducts a background check, and the White House�s personnel office can then make a determination about whether they should be granted a clearance. But when an official continues to work under an interim clearance for a year, it means that something has been uncovered in the background check that has raised questions about whether the official should have access to classified information. In Porter�s case, former top national security experts from Democratic and Republican administrations were appalled, saying that no person should be able to hold such a high position without a permanent clearance. By delaying a decision about Porter�s clearance, the experts contended, the White House had effectively allowed Porter to skirt the process that had been set up to ensure that compromised people were never given access to sensitive materials.

The White House came under intense scrutiny for not adhering to the norms of previous administrations in dispensing security clearances. In response to the outcry, John Kelly and Don McGahn worked together to put into effect a new policy: White House officials who had had interim security clearances for more than six months would have their clearances downgraded or revoked. The new policy directed attention squarely on Kushner and his security clearance. As was the case with Porter, there were problems in Kushner�s background. Along with the omissions and revisions, intelligence officials had concerns about Kushner�s business dealings and personal relations with foreign leaders. At the time, Kushner�s family owed more than $1 billion for their mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue�a boxy commercial skyscraper in midtown Manhattan�and the Kushners were seeking funding from countries like China and Qatar. Among the concerns was that foreign leaders would seek to do personal business with Kushner to gain access to the White House.

Trump�s indifference to norms�like protecting state secrets�had created a problem that hit very close to home and was now very public. But in a balkanized West Wing, concern over adhering to some vestige of White House norms had long since split the staff down the middle.

On one side were Kelly and McGahn, who believed that, given Trump�s carelessness with several of the most important elements of the presidency, they had to act in the best interests of both the government and the country and serve as presidential guardrails. Kelly and McGahn felt as though they tolerated more petulant and self-destructive behavior from the president than anyone to have ever held the positions of White House chief of staff and White House counsel. Between policing Trump�s ignorance of presidential traditions and norms of conduct and his obsession with settling scores and fighting with the media, both men felt as if they had time for little else. They were forces for good, they believed, and they resented having to serve as the �bad cops� for the whims and ethical lapses of �the family.� Both men thought that �the kids� were caricatures of entitlement, but they knew the president had no appetite for putting any limits on their power.

On the other side were Kushner, Ivanka, and their allies, who resented any checks on their power, believing Kelly and McGahn were using this issue as a way to limit their power because they saw them as rivals. Trump liked the conflict between his children, on the one hand, and Kelly and McGahn, on the other, because it meant that they were distracted by undercutting each other and less focused on containing him. And with the president disengaged from the issue, the battle over security clearances would be a fight for survival pitting the chief of staff and the counsel against the president�s family, with Kelly and McGahn fighting for the traditional process that ensured the security of sensitive material and Kushner fighting to maintain his dominance over the senior appointees in the West Wing.

Among the reasons that red flags had been raised in the intelligence community about Kushner�s security clearance were his business connections in Israel, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates. But Kelly and McGahn�s crackdown was met with an escalation from Jared�s camp. On February 16, within hours of the new policy being put in place, Kushner released a statement through his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, acknowledging the holdups with his clearance but misleadingly stating that the issues were merely routine. Lowell said that he had been in touch with officials dealing with the security clearance at the White House and that they �again have confirmed that there are a dozen or more people at Mr. Kushner�s level whose process is delayed� and �that it is not uncommon for this process to take this long in a new administration.�

Lowell added that �the current backlogs are being addressed, and no concerns were raised about Mr. Kushner�s application,� and he said that Kelly�s announcement that day of the new clearance policy would have no impact on �the very important work he has been assigned by the President.�

That evening, as I sat at my desk at the Times, I got a message from a source who said he had new information on Kushner�s security clearance. The source said that Kushner had a �high-level law enforcement problem.�

I had never heard that term before. In the media, we had obsessed about who in the administration was and was not under investigation. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was sort of a cute way of saying that Kushner was under investigation.

�It�s something significant,� the source said. �Jared has a significant problem.�

The source said that the Justice Department, through Rosenstein, had warned Kelly that week that the authorities had some sort of �derogatory information� on Kushner. Rosenstein told Kelly that while he had to refrain from discussing an ongoing investigation, the issue was unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

The source said Kelly had relayed this anecdote to the president�s personal lawyer John Dowd, who often had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Dowd had told others, and word had gotten around town. �Dowd said Jared has a high-level law enforcement problem; nobody will tell Kelly what it is,� the source said.

�Kelly tried to figure it out,� the source added.

But the source said he did not know any more about how much progress Kelly had made other than learning that Kushner had a �high-level law enforcement problem.�

The source told me that this development had further complicated Kushner�s already-troubled security clearance. And Kelly�s investigation would make coming up with a determination about what to do with Kushner�s clearance even more fraught.

All I could find on my desk to write on was a paper plate left over from another dinner eaten at my desk, so I scribbled on it as the source talked.

This new information provided the clearest proof yet that reassurances from Kushner�s side that �Jared was fine� and had nothing to worry about regarding the Mueller investigation or any other Justice Department inquiry might be false. Dowd was known to be indiscreet, but he was also known to be accurate. All the same, this seemed dangerous. I kept the plate with my scribbled notes as a reminder and picked at it with sources over the next several months.

I would later confirm while working on this book that the information I had was true: Kelly had in fact been briefed on the Justice Department investigation into Kushner. Under the new procedures created by Kelly and McGahn, those aides who had their background checks languish unresolved would have their clearances downgraded within a week. Of course, Kushner�s clearance created a distinctive problem because he was the president�s son-in-law, his clearance had already attracted a lot of unwelcome attention, and any decisions made about his access to classified documents would be highly scrutinized by the media and Congress. A year into the presidency, McGahn had learned many measures he could take to protect himself when faced with a difficult situation: Either Annie Donaldson would take contemporaneous notes, or he would write memos to the file himself. For the Kushner problem, McGahn needed to create a record, just in case. The issue was already receiving tons of media scrutiny. Kelly had been briefed on highly sensitive national security information about Kushner. And Kushner�s lawyer had put out a misleading statement to the media about how the clearance was being dealt with. Someday, McGahn knew, he might have to explain this.

So on February 23, McGahn sent a two-page memo to Kelly that laid out why he believed Kushner�s clearance should be downgraded. The memo was marked �Sensitive, unclassified, privileged and confidential.� McGahn began by memorializing the new policies that had been put in place in the aftermath of the Porter debacle. He said that among those whose clearances remained unresolved were some of the highest-ranking officials in the West Wing, including an assistant to the president and two special assistants to the president.

McGahn then tackled the biggest issue at hand.

�There remains the question of one assistant to the president, however, whose daily functions will be considerably impacted by the implementation of today�s roll off,� McGahn wrote, referring to Kushner. �As you�re aware, there have been multiple reports in the media regarding this particular assistant to the president that have raised questions about the individual�s fitness to receive the most sensitive national security information.�

The White House counsel then laid out a sanitized version of what I had been told the previous Friday night by a source: Kelly had recently received a classified briefing about Kushner and had briefed McGahn about what he had learned.

�The information you were briefed on one week ago and subsequently relayed to me, raises serious additional concerns about whether this individual ought to retain a top security clearance until such issues can be investigated and resolved,� McGahn said.

McGahn said he had been unable to receive the briefing or �access this highly compartmented information directly� about Kushner.

Given all these factors�the unresolved background check and the derogatory information Kelly had been briefed on�McGahn made his recommendation, saying his clearance should be downgraded.

�According, in my judgement, the roll off of this individual for interim access to TS and TSSCI information, including the PDB (presidential daily briefing), is only appropriate at this time,� McGahn said.

�Interim secret is the highest clearance that I can concur until further information is received,� McGahn concluded, referring to the level of classified information Kushner would be able to access.

By reducing Kushner�s clearance from top secret to secret, McGahn and Kelly had restricted Kushner�s access to the PDB, the closely held rundown provided by the intelligence community six days a week for the president and his top aides, and other highly sensitive intelligence that exposed sources and methods.

McGahn did note that there was a possibility that when the background check was complete, it could be resolved in Kushner�s favor, or there could be a recommendation that he not receive a clearance.

And then McGahn conceded that Trump could if he chose simply disregard any security concerns and circumvent any standard procedures and grant Kushner the security clearance himself.

�As you know,� he wrote to Kelly, �the executive power vested in the president by the Constitution allows him to determine ultimately which individuals may have access to national security information. The president may unilaterally grant security clearance to an individual regardless of a BI [background investigation] or any staff�s recommendation. Should the president of the United States wish to bypass the established process of which to evaluate whether a member of his staff should have access to national security information by being evaluated for and grant a security clearance, he personally is the one who needs to make the determination if desired.�

It was in 1883 that Congress had first implemented a standard process for examining a government employee�s �fitness� for a job, and since then a system of culling government officials� backgrounds had been created and refined. What it had evolved to was far from perfect. But it had a track record of ensuring that state secrets remained secret and that foreign countries had to overcome great obstacles to infiltrate the president�s inner circle and influence American domestic and foreign policy. Now that system faced a test�a test probably greater than any that has ever been publicly known. And that test came from the two people closest to the president. Kelly and McGahn believed that when pushed whether to side with the children or the country, Trump would pick the children. But they were not going to let Trump do that without a fight.

EPILOGUE

PRESIDENT TRUMP FINDS HIS ROY COHN

JULY 25, 2019

ONE YEAR, THREE MONTHS, AND NINE DAYS UNTIL THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

WHITE HOUSE RESIDENCE�Mueller�s testimony left Trump feeling and acting triumphal, vicious, and emboldened. The Mueller report had two volumes: volume 1 on Russian election interference and whether the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians; and volume 2 on whether Trump obstructed justice and used his power as president inappropriately. A mere eighteen hours after Mueller finished answering lawmakers� questions, Trump combined the worst accusations of volumes 1 and 2 into a single act.

On July 25, 2019, on a call shortly after 9:00 a.m., Trump, from the White House residence, asked the newly elected leader of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to interfere in the 2020 American election on his behalf by having his country use its law enforcement powers to conduct investigations that Trump wanted. Trump said the Ukrainians should look into the business dealings of the son of the former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., his most likely challenger in the election, and into whether the Ukrainians had interfered in the 2016 election to help the Democrats. Trump said he wanted the Ukrainian president to help his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was investigating the matters for Trump, and his own attorney general, Bill Barr, whom Trump wanted to prosecute the Bidens and the Democrats.

�I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call. Thank you,� Trump told the Ukrainian president, according to a White House document created at the time to memorialize the call.

On the call, Trump appeared to combine his request for investigations with the conditional offer of a White House meeting with the new Ukrainian president. Zelensky very much wanted the meeting, to demonstrate the strong bond between Ukraine and the United States, especially as his country was fending off Russian-backed separatists.

�Whenever you would like to come to the White House feel free to call,� Trump said. �Give us a date and we�ll work that out. I look forward to seeing you.�

As they typically do for calls with top foreign leaders, many administration and National Security Council officials listened in, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In reaction to what Trump said, Pompeo did nothing, actually believing the call had gone well compared with Trump�s other ones with leaders�particularly Europeans�which often turned into Trump screaming at them. But the call alarmed several officials on the National Security Council for two reasons. First, Trump was using his power as the head of the country�s foreign policy to solicit assistance from another country for his domestic political campaign. Second, Trump had for weeks been curiously withholding $391 million in military aid�which Congress had already appropriated�from the Ukrainians that they desperately needed. Now Trump appeared to be using that aid as leverage as he asked the Ukrainians for a major favor. Later that day, two Army lieutenant colonels on the National Security Council�the twins Alexander and Yevgeny Vindman, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as children�went to John Eisenberg, the top lawyer on the NSC. Eisenberg, who in the early days of the administration oversaw the White House�s response to the concerns raised about Michael Flynn�s contacts with the Russian ambassador, had seen several actions that concerned him over the two and a half years of Trump�s presidency. He had become skilled at taming the fallout, having survived longer than McGahn. He told the Vindman twins he would look into the matter, and in the aftermath of the meeting he restricted access to the White House document memorializing the call.

The NSC typically �back briefs� analysts and officials at agencies like the CIA after the president has calls with foreign leaders. In the course of back briefing, NSC officials spoke with a CIA analyst in his early thirties who covered Ukraine. The officials were alarmed by what the president had done.

The analyst was already on alert for the obvious intertwining of American foreign policy with Trump�s personal political desires. As an expert on Ukraine, he studied the country�its news, its leaders, its scandals, and its trajectory. If an action or event was poised to shift the dynamic between the United States and Ukraine, it was the analyst�s job to track it and understand how the Ukrainians would likely react and how it could impact American interests.

Throughout the spring, the analyst had watched as Giuliani had set out on a campaign to upend American-Ukrainian relations as the president�s personal lawyer pursued his own foreign policy to Ukraine. The analyst saw how Giuliani used media appearances to publicly push all sorts of conspiracy theories about Ukraine, its role in the 2016 election, and Biden�s son. Giuliani spoke dramatically about how Trump had been wronged by the Mueller investigation and needed to strike back against his potential opponent. In repeated television appearances and interviews with print journalists, Giuliani attacked Biden, a clear indication that Trump saw Biden as the Democratic candidate who could beat him in the election. The analyst noted how Giuliani used his position as Trump�s personal lawyer to open doors with Ukrainian officials to lobby them directly to conduct the investigations he wanted. Giuliani had discussed plans to travel to Ukraine in May but canceled the trip amid a public outcry that he was seeking to get the Ukrainians to meddle in the election. By May 2019, the analyst learned there were deep concerns throughout the American government that Giuliani was working outside normal diplomatic channels to pursue Trump�s personal political errands in Ukraine.

Giuliani�s foray into Ukrainian relations had been largely overshadowed by the Mueller investigation and report. But in Ukraine, the story had left an indelible mark and created some suspense as to whether satisfying Giuliani would unlock better relations with the United States and the military aid needed to defend the country against Russia. The analyst had heard about Trump�s call and could only think that it constituted the next step in a pressure campaign.

The request floored the analyst who thought to himself, What the fuck? Trump�s behavior on the call had been highly problematic and potentially illegal, he believed. The analyst had been dealing in foreign affairs his entire career. How was it that Trump could withhold the aid from Ukraine at the same time he was pressuring the country�s president to investigate his political rival? Wasn�t that illegal?

But what could he do? He was a mid-career analyst at the CIA�just one of roughly twenty thousand agency employees and tens of thousands in the entire intelligence community. The president was the head of the executive branch�the most powerful person in the world. Trump had survived more embarrassing disclosures than any other American president, and he�d survived the Mueller investigation. Nothing could stop him. The analyst believed it was his duty�both as someone seeking to keep American-Ukrainian relations intact and as a public servant who swore an oath to the Constitution�to do something. Like Comey and McGahn before him, he wondered, Whom do you call when the president of the United States is the one undermining American interests?

Through the analyst�s training, he knew that he should report any potential wrongdoing to the CIA general counsel�s office. In the days after the call, he met with a CIA lawyer. The analyst explained how he had been informed about the details of Trump�s conversation with Zelensky by multiple White House officials who had either been listening to the call or read a summary of the call in the days following.

The lawyer agreed with the analyst that what he was reporting was troubling and said that the CIA�s general counsel, Courtney Simmons Elwood, would work with the White House to figure out what to do. Soon after, Elwood called Eisenberg and told him what she had learned. Within days, however, the CIA�s counsel�s office told the analyst that it seemed as if the White House was not going to be taking this seriously.

The idea that the White House was looking the other way bothered the analyst even more. He was convinced something troubling had occurred, and he felt as though he�d taken the proper and necessary steps. But now the White House was smothering it. A sense of dread began to set in. He was one of only a handful of people who knew both about the president�s call and how it fit into the larger story of Giuliani�s pressure campaign and the risk that withholding the money created for Ukraine and its ability to hold back the Russian-backed separatists. But there was no one else up the chain of command who could overrule the White House. The analyst figured his only option was Congress.

The analyst contacted a friend and former NSC colleague who now worked as a staffer for the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who had been determined to expose Trump since the early days of the presidency. The analyst gave his friend a rough idea of what had occurred. The friend told him that what he had uncovered was extremely serious. But in order for the committee to investigate it, the analyst would need to do something through official channels, like filing a whistleblower complaint. To do that, the analyst would need a lawyer to guide him through the process.

But finding a lawyer was complicated. He needed someone who understood whistleblower complaints. Few lawyers practiced that type of law and had experience dealing with the complexities that came with it. The analyst searched through his network of contacts, including the dozens of officials from the intelligence community and the Obama administration who had left government and were now lawyers in private practice. Through searching, he saw that one former official who had worked on the Obama National Security Council might have some expertise in this area, and the analyst reached out to him.

They met at a coffee shop just blocks from Capitol Hill.

To the lawyer, the analyst did not seem nervous or frantic. Instead, he appeared solemn, as if he were carrying a great burden and trying to do the right thing and navigate a part of Washington that he knew little about.

�I want to be very cautious. I don�t want you to tell me anything classified or privileged,� the lawyer said.

�If I�m understanding what I believe happened, I think people need to look at it,� the analyst said.

The analyst laid out a skeleton of what he knew, very elliptically. He said he had not witnessed the incident but had been told about it. He intimated that it involved a senior administration official. He said he believed the law might have been broken. And he said that he thought becoming a whistleblower was likely his only pathway forward, but he wanted to know what that entailed.

The lawyer believed that he was referring to something that President Trump had done. But the lawyer was not completely sure, and the lawyer declined to press on that issue. Instead, the lawyer gave him his counsel.

�I think I�ve heard enough to give you some guidance,� the lawyer said.

While the lawyer said he had experience dealing with whistleblowers, this type of case was different and required a high level of expertise. It almost certainly involved classified information, issues of executive privilege, the president�s conduct, and navigating the intelligence community and the political winds of Capitol Hill.

�I think I have the person for you,� the lawyer said.

After they had parted, the lawyer deleted the calendar event he had created in his phone for the meeting. He was unsure where the entire matter was headed but believed that to ensure the analyst�s identity remained secret�and that none of the people who worked for him learned who the analyst was�it was safest to delete the event. Within a day, he introduced the analyst to a lawyer named Andrew Bakaj.

Eight days after Trump made the call to the Ukrainian president, the analyst called Bakaj, who had just returned home from vacation with his wife�s family and was in the parking lot of a golf course in northern Virginia preparing to play nine holes. Bakaj had worked as a lawyer in the office of the inspector general at the CIA earlier in his career and had become a whistleblower himself after he reported wrongdoing in his office. He was retaliated against and then left the government to work as a lawyer representing whistleblowers and intelligence community personnel who had problems with their security clearances. Bakaj knew that whistleblowers came in all forms. Some were paranoid and conspiratorial. Others were extreme rule followers who saw the world in black and white and wanted to call attention to the smallest of infractions. The remaining few were people who truly had stumbled across some wrongdoing and were simply trying to do the right thing. After he spoke with the analyst, Bakaj�s initial reaction was that the analyst fell into the third category.

Over a long conversation, the analyst laid out what he found so alarming about Trump�s call, how access to the transcript had been limited, and concerns he had about the broader campaign by Trump and Giuliani to mix Trump�s political desires with foreign policy.

Bakaj told the analyst he essentially had two options: file a whistleblower complaint through the inspector general for the intelligence community or do nothing. The analyst said he had no interest in doing nothing. Bakaj backed up that notion, saying that government employees had a duty to report wrongdoing when they saw it. He explained to the analyst how President George H. W. Bush had issued an executive order in 1989 establishing the �principles of ethical conduct� for federal workers, which required all government employees to �disclose waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption to appropriate authorities.�

Over the next week and a half, Bakaj and the analyst went back and forth about putting together a complaint. Bakaj told the whistleblower that he had to write the complaint on his own because it involved classified information. On classified computers at the CIA, the analyst put together a nine-page complaint that began with Giuliani�s earliest efforts to lobby the Ukrainians and walked through the events up to Trump�s saying he was planning on inviting Zelensky to the White House.

�Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests,� the complaint read. �Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President�s 2020 reelection bid.�

On August 3, Bakaj and the whistleblower met at Bakaj�s office on Connecticut Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. The analyst had finished the complaint and was prepared to transmit it. The two discussed how, once the analyst filed it, the entire matter would be outside their control.

The possibilities of how it could go wrong were endless. Whistleblowers� identities are supposed to be protected. But given how the Trump administration functioned and the potential damage the complaint could do, the analyst�s name could be revealed, subjecting him to harassment ranging from nasty social media posts to professional retaliation to death threats.

While both the analyst and Bakaj felt a sense of dread of what could come, Bakaj told the analyst it was unlikely the complaint would lead to much. After all, Bakaj thought, Mueller�s report had done nothing to move Democrats. And then Trump had promptly done something similar with yet another country. Why would more of the same move the needle?

That afternoon, the whistleblower emailed the complaint on the classified networks to the inspector general of the intelligence community, known as the ICIG, which was led by a career Justice Department official named Michael Atkinson.

The following day the inspector general�s office reached out to the whistleblower to tell him the complaint had been received, and the office began an investigation to determine whether it was credible and urgent�the standards required to transmit it to Congress. As part of that investigation, the inspector general�s office secretly interviewed the whistleblower and several NSC staffers without telling the White House. Within two weeks the inspector general�s office determined that it was indeed credible and urgent, and Atkinson prepared to report it to Congress.

But then, on September 5, the whistleblower�s quest looked doomed. The inspector general�s office told the whistleblower that the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, had decided against sending his complaint on to Congress. It was made clear to the whistleblower that Atkinson was not happy about Maguire�s decision. What the whistleblower did not know was that Trump had been told about the complaint in August and that the White House and Justice Department had instructed Maguire not to send it to Congress.

Bakaj had never before heard of a complaint that an inspector general deemed urgent and credible being stopped from transmitting to Congress�he didn�t even think that Maguire had the power to stop it from being sent to Congress. To Bakaj, it reeked of the way officials tried to cover up wrongdoing during Watergate�the exact event that caused the formation of the inspectors general offices in the first place. Concerned now both for his client and for the sanctity of the entire whistleblower system that formed the backbone of government transparency and accountability, Bakaj decided to take matters into his own hands. Over the weekend he drafted a letter to the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, saying that his client�s complaint had been deemed urgent and credible by the inspector general but, in an apparent violation of the law, had been blocked from being sent to Congress.

On the afternoon of September 9, Bakaj decided to hand deliver the letter to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. He first went to the Senate, where the staff of the Republican chairman, Richard Burr, showed no interest in speaking with him. But when he arrived at the office of Schiff, his staffers were intrigued.

Bakaj sat down with three of the committee�s top attorneys in the office�s library. The group talked for about thirty minutes, building an overview of the complaint Bakaj was bringing to the lawyers� attention. Bakaj made sure not to say too much in an effort to avoid any future allegations of leaking, but he also wanted to say enough to pique the lawyers� interest in the hopes they would put pressure on Maguire for the complaint.

The lawyers seemed to have some understanding of what the whistleblower knew and began ticking off the topics. They mentioned Ukraine, and Bakaj cut them off.

�It may have something to do with that,� Bakaj said.

The lawyers started peppering Bakaj with questions.

Was it about a presidential communication?

It was, Bakaj said.

Did it involve the president of Ukraine?

Bakaj said he couldn�t tell them either way on that, but he essentially gave it away with a hint.

�You�re warm on that one,� Bakaj said.

Just as the lawyers were asking their last questions and wrapping up the meeting, someone knocked on the library�s door. One of the lawyers answered the knock and briefly left the room while Bakaj and the other two attorneys continued chatting.

When the staff lawyer returned, he looked ashen.

�Andrew, we just received a letter from the ICIG,� the staff lawyer said. �It matches up exactly with what you came in here with today.�

It was one thing to have the lawyer of a whistleblower come into the House committee to say that his client had filed a complaint that they might be interested in. That did not happen every day, but it was not an infrequent occurrence. But the letter from the inspector general was a game changer. In Atkinson�s two-year tenure, he had never deemed a complaint both �credible� and �urgent.� On top of that, Atkinson was saying that he was being stopped from sending it to Congress. In the letter, he was alleging that Maguire had violated the law by failing to pass along the complaint.

Maguire�s decision to withhold the complaint from Congress �does not appear to be consistent with past practice,� the letter said.

The lawyers wouldn�t show Bakaj the letter, but he knew exactly what it was about. He was more shocked than anything. Just a week earlier he was not expecting there to be too much news or drama coming out of the complaint. And he definitely was not expecting the complaint to be blocked from reaching the Hill. But now, at basically the same exact time, both he and the inspector general were running to the House Intelligence Committee to highlight what they saw as a massive cover-up.

As he drove home that afternoon, it dawned on him that the complaint might have a far greater impact than he originally believed. He was one of the few people in the world who knew what was in it. And when it came out, it could transform Washington. But Congress still did not have the complaint, and it was unclear how that would happen.

Four days later, Congressman Schiff sent a subpoena to Maguire asking for the complaint. Given the investigation fatigue in the wake of the Mueller report and the fact that it was unclear whom the complaint was related to, it received little attention in the media. But that changed days later when the media reported that the complaint had been filed against the president.

The story created another massive scandal for Trump. As the allegations made in the complaint came into focus, and the gravity of the charges became clear, Congress and the country were tempest tossed yet again. During the Russia investigation and after the Mueller report, as several members of her caucus agitated to impeach the president, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stood firmly against the idea. Let the election sort it out. Any impeachment that could be seen as political would not be good for the country, she thought. But then the whistleblower complaint exploded into the news, and like a dam bursting, the Ukraine scandal inundated Washington. And soon the Speaker, who had been so resolved against putting the country through an impeachment, realized that the House of Representatives would likely have no choice, whatever the political consequences may be. Regardless of the politics. Either the Constitution meant something and was worth defending, or it wasn�t, Pelosi contended. The Senate would almost certainly not convict, but that wasn�t the point. This was for the record and for history.

The whistleblower had accomplished what everyone before him had failed to do: He had stopped President Trump in his tracks and had him on the path to being impeached.

Two months later, on a Saturday afternoon in mid-November, as Democrats moved toward their impeachment vote, Trump made an unexpected visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House played off the trip as part of the president�s annual physical but provided no other details about the examination, raising questions about the president�s health. In reporting for this book, I learned that in the hours leading up to Trump�s trip to the hospital, word went out in the West Wing for the vice president to be on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized. Pence never assumed the powers of the presidency, and the reason for Trump�s trip to the doctor remains a mystery.

In memory of my cousin Marine Corps Lance Cpl. John Taylor Schmidt III. He was born nineteen days before me. Like far too many of my generation, he paid the ultimate price on the battlefield in the years after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT is a two-time Pulitzer Prize�winning Washington correspondent for The New York Times. Over his fifteen years at the Times, he has covered the investigations of the Trump presidency, the Pentagon, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the war in Iraq. He started his career at the Times as a clerk answering the phones on the foreign desk before becoming a sports reporter covering performance-enhancing drugs and legal issues. He is a graduate of Lafayette College.

great read!

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