I remember one day vividly. A top intelligence leader went up to testify on Capitol Hill. An official rang me at home late that evening.
“The president’s red hot,” she told me. “It sounds like he wants someone fired by morning.”
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
She explained that the agency head offered an assessment about one of America’s foreign adversaries. The conclusion was at odds with what Trump had been saying publicly. The intelligence was accurate; Trump just didn’t like it. Someone in Congress must have asked the president about the discrepancy, tipping him off.
We scrambled to make sure Trump didn’t take to Twitter to announce a new firing. Doing so, we argued, would make him look like he was trying to manipulate the intelligence process at a time when that would be very bad for him, especially with the Mueller investigation unfinished. Thankfully, he kept his powder dry, but only temporarily.
In January 2019, the president went ballistic after the heads of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), CIA, FBI, and DIA testified in the Senate. They offered a number of blunt warnings that conflicted with the president’s views, including that North Korea was unlikely to give up nuclear weapons and that ISIS was not defeated. The president went into a rage. An NFL linebacker couldn’t have stopped him from getting on Twitter that day. “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” he tweeted, blasting the “passive and naive” conclusions of his spy chiefs.
He wanted to fire them so badly, but he knew he couldn’t. Instead, Trump summoned them to the Oval Office for a meeting, released a photo of the CIA and DNI heads seated around his desk, and declared they’d been “misquoted” on Capitol Hill. Their words were “taken out of context,” he said. Trump tried to make it seem the spy chiefs came to repent, as if the information they’d testified about was wrong. It wasn’t. And that’s not at all what they told the president when the cameras were out of the room.
Meanwhile, back at the headquarters of those agencies, employees were dispirited to watch Trump (yet again) attack their work product. What’s more, he was humiliating their bosses and using them as props to show that he was in charge and that he could control their findings. You’d think this would have been a weeks-long controversy in the intelligence community, but it wasn’t. By that point, our intelligence professionals were so beaten down by the president’s antics that they’d given up being outraged, though that didn’t mean they’d lost a willingness to call out his misconduct. History has a way of restoring balance, and later in the year, it would be an intelligence community employee who would call out Trump for political double-dealing with his position and the subsequent White House cover-up.
The Oval Office meeting with the spy chiefs was one of the few occasions the president waited patiently to do what he really wanted to do in the heat of the moment. He sat on his hands. Then, several months later, he couldn’t wait any longer and axed Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and his deputy, Sue Gordon, pushing them out because they’d been too forthright about their analysis and too unwilling to become political mouthpieces. Trump wanted spy leaders who were more loyal, he told staff. He wouldn’t hide his feelings, either. “We need somebody strong that can rein it in,” the president told the media. “Because, as I think you’ve all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok. They have run amok.”
Trump decided to turn the tables. After enduring months of presidential pressure, the Justice Department began investigating the intelligence community and its findings about Russia and the 2016 election, which Trump had long disputed. The probe was described as “broad.” The president could barely contain his glee. “This was treason. This was high crimes,” Trump said of the work done by intelligence professionals. He wanted to do more than fire these Deep State traitors. He wanted to see them go to prison.
Tipping the Scales
The American judicial system was designed to straddle two branches. The executive branch investigates and prosecutes crimes, and the judicial branch determines guilt and innocence in the courts. The distinction is irrelevant to Trump. The president tries to browbeat the lawyers defending him, seeks to influence investigators investigating him, and attacks the judges judging him. As a result, he has undermined all aspects of the justice system in an effort to “tip the scales” in his favor.
When it comes to manipulating the system, Trump’s first instinct is to force the answers he wants from his lawyers. He pressures them daily, and they feel the heat. He will berate them to their faces for not seeing the law the way he sees the law, and he cannot stand it when they tell him “No,” which they incidentally have to do all the time. He presses them to get to “Yes” on issues where doing so would appear wholly inappropriate, even to the most uneducated listener. Trump tells agency heads to fire their lawyers and get new ones if they aren’t getting the right results. If the American Bar Association could see it from the inside, they’d have a field day.
The president’s former White House counsel, Don McGahn, had the backbone to stand up to Trump, which cannot be said of everyone. That’s what is so concerning about his handling of government lawyers. Trump drives them to the edge of what’s reasonable or legal and then badgers them until they take the plunge, bringing the administration along for the fall. It’s an attitude that would be unworthy of a small-town mayor, and which is remarkably unbecoming for an American president.
We can tell when Trump is preparing to ask his lawyers to do something unethical or foolish because that’s when he starts scanning the room for note takers.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted at an aide who was scribbling in a notebook during a meeting. It’s not uncommon for advisors to write down reminders during conversations with the president. How else are they supposed to record all of his marching orders?
The room went silent. The aide seemed confused about what was wrong.
“Are you fucking taking notes?” Trump continued, glaring.
“Uhh… sorry,” the aide said, quietly closing the notebook and sitting up straighter in the chair.
His paranoia is the best evidence of a guilty conscience. After a particularly bad series of leaks from the White House, President Trump inquired about the possibility of surreptitiously monitoring the phones of White House staff. To avoid veering into “illegal” territory, staff interpreted this as the president asking for better “insider-threat detection” systems, a common practice in businesses or agencies working to prevent unauthorized disclosures. Here was a man who was apoplectic at the (completely false) theory that Barack Obama had his “wires tapped” at Trump Tower, but who was more than happy to tap those of the people around him.
The president won’t let the cautiousness of government lawyers stop him from doing what he wants. If he really can’t get the answers he demands, he seeks outside counsel, scouring the legal community for its unseemly members. He’s found them in people such as longtime fixer Michael Cohen, whose loyalty to the president eventually faded when deeds on behalf of Trump landed him in legal hot water, and Rudy Giuliani, the disgraced former mayor of New York City. Few of us who interacted with Rudy over the years would have imagined that he would self-immolate so completely, but that is the inevitable consequence of traveling the globe (and the television networks) in defense of presidential corruption.