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

Around 9:00 a.m., Chen received a call from John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, who immediately began berating him.

“You guys have got your heads up your asses,” McCain told Chen. “What kind of irresponsible operation are you guys running?”

McCain, seventy-six at the time, was a war hero, had run for president twice, and was considered one of the elder statesmen of Washington. He knew when to put politics aside, and in his view this was just such a time. McCain was so concerned by how partisan Romney’s initial response had been that he feared it could hurt his chances of winning, and he was desperate to see Obama defeated.

McCain told Chen that Romney had crossed a line, having acted far too hastily and failing to consider the implications of going after a sitting president in the middle of an international crisis. The gambit, McCain said, made Romney appear undisciplined and un-presidential on such an important day.

“Why put out a statement when you don’t have all the facts?” McCain asked Chen. “Why talk about this in this sort of way without recognizing there was a whole bunch going on you don’t know about?”

Well, in terms of the politics and the norms, McCain was right. The way in which Romney had responded to the attack in Benghazi had damaged his faltering campaign. He would go on to lose to Obama less than two months later. His embrace of the most sinister narrative about the Benghazi attacks wasn’t solely to blame, but his legitimization of it would put in motion events that would contribute to the defeat of another establishment politician from a famous political family: Hillary Clinton.

To the Republican base, long suspicious that Obama was not ardent in defense of the country against the threat of radical Islam, Romney’s line of attack took root and allowed some middle-of-the-road Republicans to question whether the White House’s shifting explanations amounted to fog-of-war confusion or a cover-up. For a year and a half, those suspicions deepened, mixed in with half-truths and elements of dark-web conspiracies, as various Republican-controlled committees investigated the attacks. The pressure from the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party to continue digging became so great that in May 2014, the Speaker of the House, Republican John A. Boehner, appointed a select committee to look into the attacks. Boehner named South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy as head of the committee. Gowdy, who had been a death penalty prosecutor, knew the strongest cases were built on documents, so that’s where he started his work.

He wanted to have a baseline understanding of what the State Department had handed over to the four other committees that had already investigated the Benghazi attacks.

Gowdy would learn that, indeed, the State Department had a tranche of fifteen thousand documents that had never been handed over to Congress because there were thorny questions about whether they contained sensitive information, such as classified materials. In a meeting between State officials and Gowdy’s investigators, the investigators said they wanted those documents as soon as possible.

At State, now led by Secretary John F. Kerry, lawyers and document specialists worked furiously to go through the documents so they could be quickly produced to the House, celebrating with whiskey as they were pushed out the door in boxes to Gowdy’s committee.

The committee, up and running for two months, had only a few investigators on staff and little work space, so the boxes were taken to a windowless room inside the House visitor’s center. One of the investigators parked himself on the floor, opened up one of the boxes, and began going through the papers inside. As they thumbed through the emails, giant stacks of documents began to build up on the floor. The investigators saw that some of the most senior officials, including Clinton’s top advisers, had sent messages to someone whose name came up only as “H.” Given what was written in the text of the emails, the investigators believed it was likely Clinton herself. Other messages were sent to or from another email: hdr22@clintonmail.com.

The investigators determined that there was little to do about the emails. They assumed that Clinton also had a State Department email account, and that they would soon be receiving documents from that account as well. Maybe, the investigators thought, sometime down the road they could make an issue out of the fact that along with using her government email account she had used a personal one too. It would be a decent political poke in the eye for a potential presidential candidate, they thought. But in the meantime, it would only be a distraction from all the other work they had to do on the investigation, and so the issue was tabled.

Several months later, a source told me that Gowdy’s committee had received several emails Clinton had sent from a personal account. I thought this was interesting, and planned to run it down, but like the committee investigators, I assumed she had a government email account as well and had used both. I went about my reporting duties without any urgency on the Clinton lead. I traveled to Afghanistan and Kuwait with the secretary of defense and took on an assignment covering a wedding for the New York Times Style section for extra cash. When I did start calling around about Clinton’s emails, the reaction from my sources revealed that I had hit on something highly consequential. On March 2, I broke the story that Clinton had relied exclusively on a personal email account when she was secretary of state.

For most politicians, the use of a personal email account wouldn’t be a big deal. But the revelation reignited familiar unease about the Clintons among Democrats and fit into the narrative—pushed mercilessly by Clinton’s critics—that she and her husband felt they could play by their own rules without consequence.

In the Senate, Republicans asked the inspectors general in the national security world to look into whether she’d sent or received any classified information on her personal account. The lead inspector general, a former FBI agent named I. Charles McCullough, found classified material in Clinton’s emails and tried to alert the State Department to the issue. A top State official, Patrick Kennedy, pushed back, and in a move of last resort, McCullough referred the matter to the FBI, which opened an investigation into whether Clinton had mishandled classified information.

On the Right, the matter ignited a feeding frenzy—many Republicans had been obsessed with investigating the Clintons since before the couple left Little Rock.

Additionally, a populist strain had been building in the Republican Party, fueled by anti-immigration, anti-free-trade, and isolationist sentiments. And Trump, a New York real estate developer and reality television star who figured he had little chance of getting elected but could run to remain relevant as a public figure, had actually been weighing in on those issues for many years. Unlike the sixteen other candidates running for the Republican nomination, he had a keen instinct for the building populist wave and intuitively exploited it. As a candidate, Trump was unprincipled—vicious and vulgar, with a proclivity to outdo himself that made him a car wreck the country could not stop watching. He was thin-skinned, but somehow impervious to things that would—and did—destroy more normal candidates. He couldn’t take a punch, yet he could survive a beating better than anyone else. Despite making racist and sexist comments that created media firestorms, as well as a steady stream of humiliating disclosures about his personal life and business failures that would have ended the candidacies of traditional politicians, Trump trudged on and won his party’s nomination. Around that time, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who despised Clinton, accelerated a clandestine effort to meddle in the American presidential election, with the objective of undermining Clinton and weakening her before she took office, as she appeared to be skating to an inevitable victory over Trump. Then, twelve days before the election, the FBI director, Comey—who had held an unusual press conference three months earlier to pronounce that the FBI had failed to find enough evidence to prosecute her but had taken the moment to criticize her conduct—publicly announced that the bureau had to examine new evidence about Clinton’s email account. The polls were thrown into disarray, and on Election Day, a total of fewer than eighty thousand votes in three states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—swung the Electoral College in Trump’s favor, even though Clinton would win the popular vote by a substantial margin.