Schmidt S. - Donald Trump V. the United States - Inside the Struggle to Stop a President

She repeated what she had written, saying that “Bolton’s book is going to be bad for Trump on Ukraine.”

“We gotta figure out how to write that,” I said.

“I already wrote that,” she said.

“We gotta find a way to write it again,” I said.

That Friday, I put out calls to my sources and spent hours in a car riding with someone I wanted to talk to for this book. By that evening, I learned that the White House had obtained a copy of Bolton’s book and was reviewing it as part of the prepublication process to ensure it did not contain classified information. In Washington, that’s as incremental a development as there could be. But in Bolton’s case it was highly important. If the White House had the book, and the book dealt with Ukraine, then the White House knew what Bolton would testify to. Now it made more sense why the White House had recently begun pressuring congressional Republicans not to call Bolton as a witness.

That development gave us something to go back to our sources with. By that Sunday, we learned Bolton wrote in his book that Trump wanted to hold off on releasing the aid to Ukraine until they committed to pursuing the investigations he was seeking. It moved the story forward because no one who had testified had been in the room with Trump when he tied the aid and the investigations together.

The story jolted Republican senators on Capitol Hill who were trying to put an end to the impeachment trial as soon as possible and without witnesses. The new revelations changed the minds of some Republicans, who, at least momentarily, appeared newly open to the idea of calling witnesses.

“I think it’s increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton,” Mitt Romney said soon after the story was published.

A day later we published a second story that said Bolton and Barr had confided in each other about their concerns over Trump’s dealings with the authoritarian leaders of China and Turkey. Bolton had written about how Barr was worried that Trump had suggested to the foreign leaders that he had the authority to alter independent Justice Department investigations. The story showed that Barr, the administration official most seen as willing to do Trump’s bidding, actually had concerns about how Trump had meddled in the work of the Justice Department.

The story had no impact on the Republicans. There was likely more in the book that was newsworthy, but by this point it felt as if we had tapped as much information as we could.

That evening, though, I learned of another possible way we could find out what was in the book. I received a call from a man I had never heard of. He said that several years earlier he had sat next to my father on a train and he had followed my work. The man said that he worked as a private investigator of sorts in the Washington area and had been trying to figure out what Bolton had written in his book. A friend had told him at a Rotary Club meeting that Bolton was taking sections of his book and sending them out to friends to review and comment on. The friends were then mailing them back to him, and he was throwing them in his trash. Bolton had apparently done this because he did not want to create an electronic record of his correspondences. The man said that he had been scouting Bolton’s wife’s office and their house on the nights he put his trash out. After Bolton moved the trash onto the street, he went through it. On a recent night he had found a large envelope that he said looked big enough to hold a manuscript. But there was nothing in the envelope. The envelope showed that it had been sent by a woman who worked for a top American ambassador who was abroad at the time and whom Bolton had been close with. It seemed as if the ambassador might have sent the package to her home, where the employee redirected it to Bolton.

I was willing to entertain wild ideas at this point to find out what else might be in the book. In that vein, I thought the name of the employee gave us a lead. The chances were low, but the stakes were high. Why not send one of our reporters to take a cold shot at her? Maybe the woman was less schooled with the media than the ambassador. And if we sent one of our reporters who specialized in getting people to talk to her house, maybe she would talk. I asked Bumiller for authority to arrange this, and she gave me the go-ahead. But in a subsequent conversation with the private eye, he said that that Thursday morning was trash pickup day in Bolton’s neighborhood. I made sure not to tell him whether he should go through the trash again. I knew that what he wanted to do was likely legal, but the idea of the Times aligning ourselves with a private eye was potentially troublesome. So I shelved the idea.

That Wednesday, I received a message through a cutout from someone in Bolton’s world: Bolton was convinced we did not have the book because despite our two stories we had missed the best parts.

I called Maggie and told her what I heard.

“What?” she said, sounding exasperated.

“I don’t know, we missed stuff,” I said.

“What, that doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

We had one job—to inform the public record. There was information that was apparently important to the public that we did not have, and we had to race to get it.

We had to move quickly. The Senate was scheduled to vote on whether to remove Trump from office at 5:00 that afternoon. At noon we reported that Bolton had first been told to assist Trump with his Ukraine pressure campaign in early May, during an Oval Office meeting with other top White House officials. According to Bolton, Trump asked him to call the president of Ukraine and get him to meet with Giuliani, who was planning on traveling to Ukraine to push for the investigations Trump was after. It was yet another example of Trump’s mixing his official duties with his personal political desires.

But again, Republicans remained unmoved. On Wednesday, the Senate voted to acquit Trump on both articles of impeachment. Mitt Romney, seven years after starting the ball rolling on the Benghazi attacks, would be the only Republican to vote to convict Trump—on the first article, for abuse of power.

The Senate acquittal came at the end of a lengthy cycle of public investigations and damaging revelations. But the president had won again. The impeachment of Donald John Trump had been the last stand for the institutions. Inevitable once all the facts were known, equally inevitable that it would end in failure.

Trump had defeated everyone who had tried to contain him. All of the role players, big and small, who had found themselves facing the realization that…feeling strongly that…having a gnawing sense that…something was not right in the Trump presidency. All who sought to stop him or slow him failed. The FBI director. The acting FBI director. The White House counsel. The deputy attorney general. The Speaker of the House. The intelligence community. All positions of tremendous power and consequence failed.

Now, to come out on top against the next obvious challenge that stood in front of him, the 2020 election, Trump was going to have to convince voters that his transgressions were nowhere near as bad as Democrats made them out to be.

Or maybe yet, given the president’s penchant for calling things “fake,” perhaps he’d even be so brash as to assert that his transgressions weren’t transgressions at all. I did nothing wrong. He was no transgressor; the other side, they were the transgressors. And look what they had put him through. Hoax! They would have to pay. “No president should ever be put through that again” became a more or less constant refrain.

It was as if all the people who had crossed him had been cogs on a giant gear, turning inside a giant machine, and in the months after impeachment was done, the giant gear stopped and then slowly lurched into motion again, only this time in the opposite direction. To undo everything.