Byron York’s new book, Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump, will be published Sept. 8. An account of the long effort to remove President Trump from office, from the roots of the Mueller investigation through the impeachment acquittal, the book includes interviews, documents, and accounts that have never been seen before. This excerpt focuses on the days after the president was stunned by the appointment of Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller. He quickly assembled a legal team — veteran litigators John Dowd, Jay Sekulow, Ty Cobb, Michael Bowe, and communications adviser Mark Corallo — and considered the most basic question: Should he attack Mueller or cooperate with him? Or both? “I would say to him, ‘Mr. President, just don’t attack Bob Mueller by name,'” recalled Corallo. “‘Don’t attack him. … It doesn’t help you.'” But Trump could not resist taking shots at Mueller, who was personally disturbed by them. “Bob was annoyed by the president’s teeing off,” recalled Dowd. “I explained to him that it’s political. He’s got a political role. And Bob seemed to understand that. But he said, ‘What I’m worried about is that it will discourage cooperation.’ And I said, ‘Hell, we’ll fix that. We’ve told everyone to cooperate, and we’ll do it again.’ … Bob appreciated that.” For most of the investigation’s early months, Trump held back. And what the public did not see was that the president and the special counsel made an extraordinary deal to cooperate. The basic structure of the deal was that Trump would provide unprecedented access to White House staff and papers — remember, he allowed the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to testify for dozens of hours — in exchange for Mueller promising to speed the investigation. It started out with high hopes. From Obsession:
Trump and his team began the Mueller investigation by believing that 1) they could build a good working relationship with Mueller and 2) it would be all over by the end of 2017, just six months away.
“The president wanted it over yesterday,” recalled Michael Bowe. “I believe he felt like any client wrongly accused: he thought he had nothing to hide and could end it by just walking down there, looking Mueller in the eye, and saying ‘I didn’t do anything. Tell me what you think I did.’ Or by finding the right person who Mueller trusted to say the same thing.” Trump was particularly upset by the effect the investigation — a topic of intense interest around the globe — was having on his ability to deal with foreign leaders. Presidents and prime ministers wanted to know what was going on in the United States and whether President Trump would remain in office and have the same influence as a president not under investigation. Trump told his team continually that the investigation was interfering with his ability to deal with foreign governments. He wanted it done with.
To do that, Trump sought to open up communications with Mueller almost instantly. “We were sort of being pushed to go talk to Mueller before Mueller ever wanted to talk to us,” Bowe said. “Our first conversation occurred before he had his first office.” It was an unusual start to that kind of investigation. Normally, the new prosecutor would open up, begin work, and months would go by before he would get in touch with the subject of his investigation. But Trump wanted his team talking to Mueller right away because he believed he did nothing wrong and wanted to confront and resolve any uncertainty immediately. “We were the ones banging on their door,” Bowe recalled.
As always, Trump believed differences could be talked out, adversaries could be charmed, and a deal could be made. But, as he soon discovered, that approach worked neither in Washington’s deeply partisan political culture nor in its highly politicized legal culture. As a businessman, Trump had been involved in many, many lawsuits. But he had never been under criminal investigation before. And he had certainly never been involved in a criminal investigation like the Mueller probe.
A meeting with Mueller was set for June 16, roughly a month after the special counsel was appointed. The idea was that Dowd, the former Marine, would have a good eye-to-eye talk with Mueller, the former Marine. “I kept making the point that Bob knows John,” said Mark Corallo, recalling a White House strategy session. “They’re not best friends or anything, but he knows him and respects him as a lawyer, and that’s important for Mueller.”
Trump was happy. “He is all about relationships,” Corallo said. Trump gave his blessing to a cooperative start. If the Mueller relationship could get off to a good beginning, maybe it could all be over sooner rather than later.
The meeting was held at Mueller’s temporary offices. The Trump team came with an offer: the president wanted the investigation completed quickly. Mueller wanted a lot of evidence from the White House. Trump would offer virtually unlimited cooperation in the production of evidence in order to get things over quickly. Doing so might avoid the long, grinding fights over access and privilege that often marked special counsel investigations.
“We made a bargain,” Dowd said, recalling the meeting. “Bob said to me, ‘I have no bias at all,’ and we accepted that. I told him that we had a lot of issues with Rosenstein and where this had come from, and the fact that the president was blindsided by his appointment. And we had problems with conflicts that they had. But we were putting that aside, we were not going to object. The president wants to get you the facts, but we’ll only do that if you’ll get it done.”
“And he said to me, ‘John, I don’t let any grass grow under me.’ We reached across the table, we shook hands, and I said, ‘Bob, we’re going to get you everything.’”
“They said they were going to move expeditiously,” Jay Sekulow recalled. “They had no desire to drag this out and put the country through a long process.”
Mueller said the sort of things that one says in get-started meetings. He said his door would always be open, and that he understood how the investigation was affecting the country and the president. With that, it was over.
The team then reported back to Trump. The lawyers told Trump they had confidence in Mueller, that they made their concerns known to him, that he understood them, and that he sought to reassure them about the partisan appearance of his lawyers. “I’m in charge,” Mueller told them. He, and not some headstrong Democratic partisan prosecutor, would be making decisions. “We all said we trusted Bob to ride herd on his staff,” Corallo recalled.
In the next few weeks, the two sides hammered out how, precisely, the cooperation agreement would work. (It was never written down — just a handshake deal.) Certainly, many documents that Mueller would want to see would be covered by executive privilege, or some other privilege. Why would Trump just turn them over? On the other hand, Mueller would not want to fight hand-to-hand over each document, which would take years.
Seeking to balance both sides’ interests, Trump and Mueller reached an informal understanding by which the White House would give documents to the special counsel without claiming privilege, but Mueller would limit the ways he used the material. The thinking was this: Mueller was in the executive branch. The White House was in the executive branch. The White House would hand over the material, one executive branch entity to another, without claiming any privilege — provided Mueller would agree that, if he intended to use the material outside the executive branch, say, to give it to Congress — he would first consult the White House.
The Trump team based its idea on a July 15, 2008, memo written by Michael Mukasey, at the time attorney general under George W. Bush. In 2008, Democrats had taken control of the House and were demanding that the administration turn over documents from the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation that bedeviled the Bush White House from 2003 to 2007. The administration did, in fact, turn over a lot, but drew the line at interviews with the president and vice president. (House Democrats had made a particular villain of Vice President Dick Cheney and were hot to have information on him.) In the memo, Mukasey noted the long tradition of White Houses cooperating with criminal investigations — but not with Congress, a separate branch of government. Mukasey warned that while White House cooperation with the criminal investigation — the Patrick Fitzgerald probe — was good, submitting to Congress’s demands would be a bad idea.
“Were future presidents, vice presidents or White House staff to perceive that such voluntary cooperation [with a criminal investigation] would likely be made available to Congress (and then possibly disclosed publicly outside of judicial proceedings such as a trial),” Mukasey wrote, “there would be an unacceptable risk that such knowledge could adversely impact their willingness to cooperate fully and candidly in a voluntary interview.”
The Trump response to Mueller ran along similar lines. “The key was Mueller was within the executive branch and could be within privilege,” Dowd added. “So we had our protected pipeline to speed information to the office of the special counsel.”
Under Trump’s proposal, the White House would not have to go through each document page by page looking for privileged material — provided Mueller agreed to the White House’s conditions. “You can imagine what a nightmare it would be to take document by document and assert the privilege, because most of it was within [executive] privilege, and indeed the White House communications privilege,” said Dowd. “I thought it was a great idea. Ty Cobb got Bob’s and [top deputy James] Quarles’s promise that if they needed to use any of it publicly, they would come back to the White House.”
The deal led to an extraordinary transfer of documents and information to the special counsel’s office. For example, a White House official named Annie Donaldson, who was White House counsel Don McGahn’s chief of staff, took detailed, extensive notes on meetings that involved the president and the counsel’s office. Donaldson’s notes were a vivid, real-time look at what the president and his advisers said in key meetings that touched on the subject matter of Mueller’s investigation. They were voluminous — it would have taken hours to read them all — and they most certainly covered areas over which a president might legitimately claim privilege. Trump turned them over to Mueller. McGahn himself sat for more than thirty hours of interviews with the Mueller team. That’s a lot for investigators to demand from a high-ranking White House official, but McGahn did it because Trump did not object to the interviews going forward. Reince Priebus, Hope Hicks, Steve Bannon, K. T. McFarland, Jared Kushner, and others talked to the Mueller prosecutors at great length.
“Bob said on several occasions that he had never seen such cooperation,” Dowd recalled. “But that was the idea. We’re all pros. We all know each other. And the president, every time we gave them something, he blessed it. This wasn’t just one shot. We reported to him regularly, and he said, ‘Give it to them, we’ve got nothing to hide.’ We knew we were within the executive privilege pipeline.”
The president made sure that Mueller’s prosecutors never forgot that they should hold up their end of the deal. In the meetings between teams, the Trump side would often bring a message from the president, and each time, it went something like this: I respect what you are doing, but it is imposing on my ability to govern, particularly in foreign relations. They would recount an anecdote, sometimes containing sensitive information, of the investigation causing the president problems in dealing with foreign leaders. The conclusion was always the same: this needs to end as quickly as possible.
The arrangement represented Trump and his team placing an enormous amount of trust in Mueller and his prosecutors. After all, it was a fundamentally adversarial relationship. Mueller’s prosecutors might use the material to subpoena the president or even to indict him — that was, of course, against Justice Department policy, but it was publicly discussed at the time — or to create a road map for Congress to impeach him. Trump’s willingness to hand over evidence was a leap of faith.
“There was more trust in our relationship than in any in my entire career,” said Dowd.
The question of trust — that is, could Mueller and his team of prosecutors be trusted — was perhaps the most discussed issue on the Trump side in the early days. Not everyone agreed on Mueller’s worthiness of such trust. One of the skeptical ones was Jay Sekulow. “It wasn’t a personal thing,” he recalled. “I didn’t have the relationship with Mueller. I had met him probably three times in my life. This was John’s call. John had the experience and the relationship with him.”
On the other hand, Corallo, a Mueller fan from the Bush years, strongly supported the trust strategy. He even staked his position on it. “When I took this job, I said, ‘I won’t be a part of any personal attacks on Bob Mueller,’” Corallo recalled telling his colleagues on the legal team. “He’s a friend. I’m loyal. And I believe he’s going to do the right thing.”
Corallo paused a moment. “Now, in hindsight,” he continued, “maybe I was wrong.” Others would come to think that, too, as the investigation wore on…
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