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

At the age of seventy, as Trump assumed the presidency, he had no interest in changing the behavior that had shaped and defined his public career over four decades as a Manhattan celebrity. In New York, Trump had lied, cheated, and twisted arms, operating in a world dominated by tabloid coverage and among other similarly ethically unbridled businessmen. The worst consequences he had faced in those circles had been bad press, multiple bankruptcies, and hundreds of civil lawsuits. But in Washington, Trump quickly ran up against forces far more powerful: the Justice Department, the FBI, the national media, the laws of the United States, the politics of Capitol Hill, and foreign adversaries. Instead of adapting, he tried to bend the law and reality in ways no president had ever done before, in effect running the federal government just like the private fiefdom he had operated from the twenty-eighth floor of Trump Tower.

A mere four months into Trump’s presidency, his antipathy for rules and his belligerence toward his opponents caught up with him. After the FBI director had publicly announced that the bureau was investigating whether Trump’s campaign had worked with Russia to sway the election, Trump fired Comey. It was what his New York playbook called for. But in the objective reality of Washington, it seemed as if the president were brazenly shutting down an investigation that he was the subject of, in plain sight, and the move forced Trump’s own political appointees at the Justice Department to appoint Mueller, a former Marine officer and FBI director considered one of the last few public officials trusted by both parties, as a special counsel to take over the investigation. The turn of events cast a suffocating cloud over his presidency just as it began.

Trump had never faced an adversary like Mueller, who quickly assembled a team of the best prosecutors and FBI agents and analysts in the country. Many of them left high-paying law firm jobs or top Justice Department posts to join the investigation for what they regarded as a once-in-a-career opportunity. In New York, Trump had always been able to bluff and bluster his way through all manner of difficulties, but Mueller and his team had immense powers to examine Trump’s life in ways that had never been done before.

To anyone paying attention, Trump looked like he was in trouble. But he still didn’t seem to get it. Instead of taking a disciplined approach led by experienced Washington white-collar defense lawyers, as Bill Clinton had done when he was under investigation, Trump had initially put together a hodgepodge legal team of undisciplined lawyers and television pundits. In the same way that he’d used the tabloids in New York, he thought he could use his Twitter account to undercut Mueller. Even as he intuitively sensed the danger Mueller posed to him, he still coped with that danger with bravado and arrogance—the same way he’d managed banks, creditors, civil lawsuits, and divorce lawyers throughout his public life. Trump obsessed about the investigation publicly and privately. He vented to friends on the phone, ranted to aides in the West Wing, and tweeted about the “Highly conflicted Bob Mueller & the 17 Angry Democrats.” At one point, as the investigation seemed to be intensifying, Trump told McGahn that there was nothing to worry about because if it was zeroing in on him, he would simply settle with Mueller. He would settle the case, as if he were negotiating terms in a lawsuit.

Fast-forward a year later, to the summer of 2018, and Trump was still president, still showing his remarkable ability to survive political maelstroms that would have ended the career of nearly any other public official. But Mueller, his team, and now prosecutors in New York who’d started their own additional investigations looked like they were operating like surgeons, slowly dismantling the world around Trump. Mueller and the prosecutors charged the people closest to the president—his confidants, advisers, campaign officials, and even his national security adviser and his personal lawyer—with crimes and moreover negotiated with a good number of them to turn on Trump. Armed with that cooperation, Mueller and the prosecutors were moving to build a series of cases against the president.

Mueller apparently knew a great deal about what had gone on inside the White House as Trump had tried to control, frustrate, and end the Russia investigation. I thought—but was not entirely sure—that one of the main reasons Mueller knew so much was McGahn.

I had actually met the White House counsel once before—in a similar circumstance, in fact—the previous fall. I’d been leaving work one evening when a colleague of mine alerted me that McGahn was eating dinner at BLT Steak, the semi-fancy restaurant next to our office. It seemed like a good opportunity to meet him, so I persuaded the colleague to sit at the restaurant’s bar with me and try to snag him for a chat. We sat at the bar for about forty-five minutes until he was done eating—with a friend from his hometown, as it turned out. As they walked out the door, we stopped them and chatted for about twenty minutes. McGahn was relaxed and funny—a talker.

Talkers make promising sources. In the back of my mind ever since, I’d wondered if that encounter could be a precursor to something more. When I wasn’t in a rush, I would frequently poke my head into the restaurant on my way home from work or walk through the dining area to see if McGahn was there. But I never caught him after that first encounter, and despite all my interest in talking to him, I’d never made a real effort to reach out to him beyond that. My calculation was that he was far too busy trying to make sure the administration followed the law to talk to reporters on the phone. Plus, McGahn was a longtime Washington elections lawyer who knew dozens of reporters. If he was going to engage with the media, he was likely going to do it with someone he’d known from before he entered the White House—someone he was already comfortable with.

There was another factor, too: McGahn was represented by one of the most sought-after lawyers in Washington, William A. Burck. Along with McGahn, Burck represented a dozen other witnesses in the Mueller investigation, including the president’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon; the former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus; and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Burck no doubt wanted to shield McGahn from Trump and by extension the media. If I called McGahn, he’d likely tell Burck, who would then get irritated with me for trying to engage McGahn directly, and I didn’t really need that.

But now we were standing on the street in front of the White House, in what could at least be later justified to Burck as a chance encounter. Catching my breath from my three-block sprint, and unsure whether McGahn remembered me, I introduced myself.

“Mike Schmidt with The New York Times, ” I said, extending my hand. “I had to run to catch you.”

He shook my hand.

“Did you see who I was eating with?” he asked in a way that made me believe it was someone I’d be interested in.

I told him that I hadn’t.

Typically, when I would go to meet someone like McGahn, I’d want to make a plan in advance, or talk it through with an editor or fellow reporter, about how best to direct the conversation. But because I had had no idea I would encounter him, none of that preparation had been done. So I fell back on a lesson I was taught early in my career at the Times from a veteran reporter: When you’re in front of someone who has information, just keep the person talking; you may never get another shot. Plus, by getting out of the way and letting him talk, I could allow myself to think and map out where I wanted to take the conversation.