Author’s Note

Shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president of the United States, I was allowed into the West Wing as a sideline observer. My book Fire and Fury was the resulting account of the organizational chaos and constant drama—more psychodrama than political drama—of Trump’s first seven months in office. Here was a volatile and uncertain president, releasing, almost on a daily basis, his strange furies on the world, and, at the same time, on his own staff. This first phase of the most abnormal White House in American history ended in August 2017, with the departure of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and the appointment of retired general John Kelly as chief of staff.

This new account begins in February 2018 at the outset of Trump’s second year in office, with the situation now profoundly altered. The president’s capricious furies have been met by an increasingly organized and methodical institutional response. The wheels of justice are inexorably turning against him. In many ways, his own government, even his own White House, has begun to turn on him. Virtually every power center left of the far-right wing has deemed him unfit. Even some among his own base find him undependable, hopelessly distracted, and in over his head. Never before has a president been under such concerted attack with such a limited capacity to defend himself.

His enemies surround him, dedicated to bringing him down.

I am joined in my train-wreck fascination with Trump—that certain knowledge that in the end he will destroy himself—by, I believe, almost everyone who has encountered him since he was elected president. To have worked anywhere near him is to be confronted with the most extreme and disorienting behavior possible. That is hardly an overstatement. Not only is Trump not like other presidents, he is not like anyone most of us have ever known. Hence, everyone who has been close to him feels compelled to try to explain him and to dine out on his head-smacking peculiarities. It is yet one more of his handicaps: all the people around him, however much they are bound by promises of confidentiality or nondisclosure agreements or even friendship, cannot stop talking about their experience with him. In this sense, he is more exposed than any president in history.

Many of the people in the White House who helped me during the writing of Fire and Fury are now outside of the administration, yet they are as engaged as ever by the Trump saga. I am grateful to be part of this substantial network. Many of Trump’s pre–White House cronies continue to both listen to him and support him; at the same time, as an expression both of their concern and of their incredulity, they report among one another, and to others as well, on his temper, mood, and impulses. In general, I have found that the closer people are to him, the more alarmed they have found themselves at various points about his mental state. They all speculate about how this will end—badly for him, they almost all conclude. Indeed, Trump is probably a much better subject for writers interested in human capacities and failings than for most of the reporters and writers who regularly cover Washington and who are primarily interested in the pursuit of success and power.

My primary goal in Siege is to create a readable and intuitive narrative— that is its nature. Another goal is to write the near equivalent of a real-time history of this extraordinary moment, since understanding it well after the fact might be too late. A final goal is pure portraiture: Donald Trump as an extreme, almost hallucinatory, and certainly cautionary, American character. To accomplish this, to gain the perspective and to find the voices necessary to tell the larger story, I provided anonymity to any source who requested it. In cases where I have been told—on the promise of no attribution—about an unreported event or private conversation or remark, I have made every effort to confirm it with other sources or documents. In some cases, I have witnessed the events or conversations described herein. With regard to the Mueller investigation, the narrative I provide is based on internal documents given to me by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel.

Dealing with sources in the Trump White House has continued to offer its own set of unique issues. A basic requirement of working there is, surely, the willingness to infinitely rationalize or delegitimize the truth, and, when necessary, to outright lie. In fact, I believe this has caused some of the same people who have undermined the public trust to become private truth-tellers. This is their devil’s bargain. But for the writer, interviewing such Janus-faced sources creates a dilemma, for it requires depending on people who lie to also tell the truth—and who might later disavow the truth they have told. Indeed, the extraordinary nature of much of what has happened in the Trump White House is often baldly denied by its spokespeople, as well as by the president himself. Yet in each successive account of this administration, the level of its preposterousness—even as that bar has been consistently raised—has almost invariably been confirmed.

In an atmosphere that promotes, and frequently demands, hyperbole, tone itself becomes a key part of accuracy. For instance, most crucially, the president, by a wide range of the people in close contact with him, is often described in maximal terms of mental instability. “I have never met anyone crazier than Donald Trump” is the wording of one staff member who has spent almost countless hours with the president. Something like this has been expressed to me by a dozen others with firsthand experience. How do you translate that into a responsible evaluation of this singular White House? My strategy is to try to show and not tell, to describe the broadest context, to communicate the experience, to make it real enough for a reader to evaluate for him- or herself where Donald Trump falls on a vertiginous sliding scale of human behavior. It is that condition, an emotional state rather than a political state, that is at the heart of this book.

1

BULLSEYE

The president made his familiar stink-in-the-room face, then waved his hands as though to ward off a bug.

“Don’t tell me this,” he said. “Why are you telling me this?”

His personal lawyer John Dowd, in late February 2018, little more than a year into Trump’s tenure, was trying to explain that prosecutors were likely to issue a subpoena for some of the Trump Organization’s business records.

Trump seemed to respond less to the implications of such a deep dive into his affairs than to having to hear about it at all. His annoyance set off a small rant. It was not so much about people out to get him—and people were surely out to get him—but that nobody was defending him. The problem was his own people. Especially his lawyers.

Trump wanted his lawyers to “fix” things. “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions,” was a favorite CEO bromide that he often repeated. He judged his lawyers by their under-the-table or sleight-of-hand skills and held them accountable when they could not make problems disappear. His problems became their fault. “Make it go away” was one of his frequent orders. It was often said in triplicate: “Make it go away, make it go away, make it go away.”

The White House counsel Don McGahn—representing the White House rather than, in a distinction Trump could never firmly grasp, the president himself—demonstrated little ability to make problems disappear and became a constant brunt of Trump’s rages and invective. His legal interpretation of proper executive branch function too often thwarted his boss’s wishes.

Dowd and his colleagues, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow—the trio of lawyers charged with navigating the president through his personal legal problems—had, on the other hand, become highly skilled in avoiding their client’s bad humor, which was often accompanied by menacing, barely controlled personal attacks. All three men understood that to be a successful lawyer for Donald Trump was to tell the client what he wanted to hear.

Trump harbored a myth about the ideal lawyer that had almost nothing to do with the practice of law. He invariably cited Roy Cohn, his old New York friend, attorney, and tough-guy mentor, and Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s brother. “He was always on my ass about Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy,” said Steve Bannon, the political strategist who, perhaps more than anyone else, was responsible for Trump’s victory. “‘Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy,’ he would say. ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy?’” Cohn, to his own benefit and legend, built the myth that Trump continued to embrace: with enough juice and muscle, the legal system could always be gamed. Bobby Kennedy had been his brother’s attorney general and hatchet man; he protected JFK and worked the back channels of power for the benefit of the family.

This was the constant Trump theme: beating the system. “I’m the guy who gets away with it,” he had often bragged to friends in New York.

At the same time, he did not want to know details. He merely wanted his lawyers to assure him that he was winning. “We’re killing it, right? That’s what I want to know. That’s all I want to know. If we’re not killing it, you screwed up,” he shouted one afternoon at members of his ad hoc legal staff.

From the start, it had become a particular challenge to find top lawyers to take on what, in the past, had always been one of the most vaunted of legal assignments: representing the president of the United States. One high-profile Washington white-collar litigator gave Trump a list of twenty issues that would immediately need to be addressed if he were to take on the case. Trump refused to consider any of them. More than a dozen major firms had turned down his business. In the end, Trump was left with a ragtag group of solo practitioners without the heft and resources of big firms. Now, thirteen months after his inauguration, he was facing personal legal trouble at least as great as that faced by Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, and doing so with what seemed like, at best, a Court Street legal team. But Trump appeared to be oblivious to this exposed flank. Ratcheting up his level of denial about the legal threats around him, he breezily rationalized: “If I had good lawyers, I’d look guilty.”

Dowd, at seventy-seven, had had a long, successful legal career, both in government and in Washington law firms. But that was in the past. He was on his own now, eager to postpone retirement. He knew the importance, certainly to his own position in Trump’s legal circle, of understanding his client’s needs. He was forced to agree with the president’s assessment of the investigation into his campaign’s contact with Russian state interests: it would not reach him. To that end, Dowd, and the other members of Trump’s legal team, recommended that the president cooperate with the Mueller investigation.

“I’m not a target, right?” Trump constantly prodded them.

This wasn’t a rhetorical question. He insisted on an answer, and an affirmative one: “Mr. President, you’re not a target.” Early in his tenure, Trump had pushed FBI director James Comey to provide precisely this reassurance. In one of the signature moves of his presidency, he had fired Comey in May 2017 in part because he wasn’t satisfied with the enthusiasm of the affirmation and therefore assumed Comey was plotting against him.

Whether the president was indeed a target—and it would surely have taken a through-the-looking-glass exercise not to see him as the bullseye of the Mueller investigation—seemed to occupy a separate reality from Trump’s need to be reassured that he was not a target.

“Trump’s trained me,” Ty Cobb told Steve Bannon. “Even if it’s bad, it’s great.”

Trump imagined—indeed, with a preternatural confidence, nothing appeared to dissuade him—that sometime in the very near future he would hear directly from the special counsel, who would send him a comprehensive and even apologetic letter of exoneration.

“Where,” he kept demanding to know, “is my fucking letter?”

The grand jury empanelled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller met on Thursdays and Fridays in federal district court in Washington. Its business was conducted on the fifth floor of an unremarkable building at 333 Constitution Avenue. The grand jurors gathered in a nondescript space that looked less like a courtroom than a classroom, with prosecutors at a podium and witnesses sitting at a desk in the front of the room. The Mueller grand jurors were more female than male, more white than black, older rather than younger; they were distinguished most of all by their focus and intensity. They listened to the proceedings with “a scary sort of attention, as though they already know everything,” said one witness.

In a grand jury inquiry, you fall into one of three categories. You are a “witness of fact,” meaning the prosecutor believes you have information about an investigation at hand. Or you are a “subject,” meaning you are regarded as having personal involvement with the crime under investigation. Or, most worrisome, you are a “target,” meaning the prosecutor is seeking to have the grand jury indict you. Witnesses often became subjects, and subjects often became targets.

In early 2018, with the Mueller investigation and its grand jury maintaining a historic level of secrecy, no one in the White House could be sure who was what. Or who was saying what to whom. Anyone and everyone working for the president or one of his senior aides could be talking to the special counsel. The investigation’s code of silence extended into the West Wing. Nobody knew, and nobody was saying, who was spilling the beans.

Almost every White House senior staffer—the collection of advisers who had firsthand dealings with the president—had retained a lawyer. Indeed, from the president’s first days in the White House, Trump’s tangled legal past and evident lack of legal concern had cast a shadow on those who worked for him. Senior people were looking for lawyers even as they were still learning how to navigate the rabbit warren that is the West Wing.

In February 2017, mere weeks after the inauguration, and not long after the FBI had first raised questions about National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus had walked into Steve Bannon’s office and said, “I’m going to do you a big favor. Give me your credit card. Don’t ask me why, just give it to me. You’ll be thanking me for the rest of your life.”

Bannon opened his wallet and gave Priebus his American Express card. Priebus shortly returned, handed the card back, and said, “You now have legal insurance.”

Over the next year, Bannon—a witness of fact—spent hundreds of hours with his lawyers preparing for his testimony before the special counsel and before Congress. His lawyers in turn spent ever mounting hours talking to Mueller’s team and to congressional committee counsels. Bannon’s legal costs at the end of the year came to $2 million.

Every lawyer’s first piece of advice to his or her client was blunt and unequivocal: talk to no one, lest it become necessary to testify about what you said. Before long, a constant preoccupation of senior staffers in the Trump White House was to know as little as possible. It was a wrong-side-up world: where being “in the room” was traditionally the most sought-after status, now you wanted to stay out of meetings. You wanted to avoid being a witness to conversations; you wanted to avoid being witnessed being a witness to conversations, at least if you were smart. Certainly, nobody was your friend. It was impossible to know where a colleague stood in the investigation; hence, you had no way of knowing how likely it was that they might need to offer testimony about someone else—you, perhaps—as the bargaining chip to save themselves by cooperating with the special counsel, a.k.a. flipping.

The White House, it rapidly dawned on almost everyone who worked there—even as it became one more reason not to work there—was the scene of an ongoing criminal investigation, one that could potentially ensnare anyone who was anywhere near it.

The ultimate keeper of the secrets from the campaign, the transition, and through the first year in the White House was Hope Hicks, the White House communications director. She had witnessed most everything. She saw what the president saw: she knew what the president, a man unable to control his own running monologue, knew.

On February 27, 2018, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee—she had already appeared before the special counsel—she was pressed about whether she had ever lied for the president. Perhaps a more accomplished communications professional could have escaped the corner here, but Hicks, who had scant experience other than working as Donald Trump’s spokesperson, which, as often as not, meant dealing with his disregard of empirical truth, found herself as though in a sudden and unexpected moral void trying to publicly parse the relative importance of her boss’s lies. She admitted to telling “white lies,” as in, somehow, less than the biggest lies. This was enough of a forward admission to require a nearly twenty-minute mid-testimony conference with her lawyers, distressed by what she might be admitting and by where any deconstruction of the president’s constant inversions might lead.

Not long after she testified, another witness before the Mueller grand jury was asked how far Hicks might go to lie for the president. The witness answered: “I think when it comes to doing anything as a ‘yes man’ for Trump, she’ll do it—but she won’t take a bullet for him.” The statement could be taken as both a backhanded compliment and an estimate of how far loyalty in the Trump White House might extend—probably not too far.

Almost no one in Trump’s administration, it could be argued, was conventionally suited to his or her job. But with the possible exception of the president himself, no one provided a better illustration of this unprepared and uninformed presidency than Hicks. She did not have substantial media or political experience, nor did she have a temperament annealed by years of high-pressure work. Always dressed in the short skirts that Trump favored, she seemed invariably caught in the headlights. Trump admired her not because she had the political skills to protect him, but for her pliant dutifulness. Her job was to devote herself to his care and feeding.

“When you speak to him, open with positive feedback,” counseled Hicks, understanding Trump’s need for constant affirmation and his almost complete inability to talk about anything but himself. Her attentiveness to Trump and tractable nature had elevated her, at age twenty-nine, to the top White House communications job. And practically speaking, she acted as his de facto chief of staff. Trump did not want his administration to be staffed by professionals; he wanted it to be staffed by people who attended and catered to him.

Hicks—“Hope-y,” to Trump—was both the president’s gatekeeper and his comfort blanket. She was also a frequent subject of his prurient interest: Trump preferred business, even in the White House, to be personal. “Who’s fucking Hope?” he would demand to know. The topic also interested his son Don Jr., who often professed his intention to “fuck Hope.” The president’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, both White House senior advisers, expressed a gentler type of concern for Hicks; sometimes they would even try to suggest eligible men.

But Hicks, seeming to understand the insular nature of Trumpworld, dated exclusively inside the bubble, picking the baddest boys in it: campaign manager Corey Lewandowski during the campaign and presidential aide Rob Porter in the White House. As the relationship between Hicks and Porter unfolded in the fall of 2017, knowing about the affair became an emblem of Trump insiderness, with special care taken to keep this development from the proprietary president. Or not: other people, assuming that Porter’s involvement with Hicks would not at all please Trump, were less than discreet about it.

In the heightened enmity of the Trump White House, Rob Porter may have succeeded in becoming the most disliked person by everyone except perhaps the president himself. A square-jawed, 1950s-looking guy who could have been a model for Brylcreem, he was almost a laughable figure of betrayal and perfidy: if he hadn’t stabbed you in the back, you would be forced to acknowledge how unworthy he considered you to be. A sitcom sort of suck-up—“Eddie Haskell,” cracked Bannon, citing the early television icon of insincerity and brownnosing featured in Leave It to Beaver—he embraced Chief of Staff John Kelly, while at the same time poisoning him with the president. Porter’s estimation of his own high responsibilities in the White House, together with the senior-most jobs that the president, he let it be known, was promising him, seemed to put the administration and the nation squarely on his shoulders.

Porter had, before the age of forty, two bitter ex-wives, at least one of whom he had beaten, and both of whom he had cheated on at talk-of-the-town levels. During a stint as a Senate staffer, the married Porter had an affair with an intern, costing him his job. His girlfriend Samantha Dravis had moved in with Porter in the summer of 2017, while, quite unbeknownst to her, he was seeing Hicks. “I cheated on you because you’re not attractive enough,” he later told Dravis.

In a potentially criminal break of protocol, Porter had gained access to his raw FBI clearance reports and seen the statements of his ex-wives. His most recent ex-wife had also written a blog about his alleged abuse, which, while it did not name him, clearly fingered him. Concerned about the damaging impact his former wives could have on his security review, he recruited Dravis to help him smooth his relationship with both women.

Lewandowski, Hicks’s former boyfriend, caught wind of the Hicks-Porter relationship and began working to expose it; by some reports, he got paparazzi to follow Hicks. Though Porter’s history of abuse was slowly making its way to the surface as a result of the FBI investigation, the Lewandowski campaign against Hicks cut through many other efforts to cover up Porter’s transgressions.

Dravis, in the autumn of 2017, heard the Lewandowski-pushed rumors of the Hicks-Porter relationship. After finding Hicks’s number listed under a man’s name in Porter’s contacts, Dravis confronted Porter, who promptly threw her out. Moving back in with her parents, she began her own revenge campaign, openly talking about Porter’s security clearance issues, including to people inside the White House counsel’s office, saying he had protection at the highest levels in the White House. Then, along with Lewandowski, Dravis helped leak the details of the Hicks-Porter romance to the Daily Mail, which published a story about it on February 1.

But Dravis, joined by Porter’s former wives, decided that, outrageously, he had come out looking good in the Daily Mail account—he was part of a glam power couple! Porter called Dravis to taunt her: “You thought you could get me!” Dravis and his former wives all then publicly revealed their abuse at his hand. His first wife said he kicked and punched her; she even produced a photograph of her black eye. His second wife informed the media that she had filed an emergency protective order against him.

The White House, or at least Kelly—and likely Hicks—had been aware of many of these claims and, effectively, covered them up. (“You usually have enough competent people for White House positions to weed out the wife beaters, but you couldn’t be so choosy in the Trump White House,” said one Republican acquaintance of Porter’s.) The furor that erupted around Porter and his troubling gross-guy history not only annoyed Trump—“He stinks of bad press”—it further weakened Kelly. On February 7, after both of his former wives gave interviews to CNN, Porter resigned.

A publicity-shy Hicks—Donald Trump put a high value on associates who did not steal his press opportunities—suddenly found her love life in the glare of intense international press scrutiny. Her affair with the discredited Porter highlighted her own odd relationship with the president and his family, as well as the haphazard management, interpersonal dysfunctions, and general lack of political savvy in the Trump court.

The affair was, curiously, among the least of Hicks’s problems. Indeed, for Hicks the Porter scandal became perhaps a better cloud under which to leave the administration than what almost everybody in the West Wing assumed was the real cloud.

On February 27, a reporter at the Washington insider newsletter Axios, Jonathan Swan, a favorite conduit for White House leaks, reported that Josh Raffel was leaving the White House. In a novel arrangement, Raffel had come into the White House in April 2017 as the exclusive spokesperson for the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his wife, Ivanka, bypassing the White House communications team. Raffel, who, like Kushner, was a Democrat, had worked for Hiltzik Strategies, the New York public relations firm that represented Ivanka’s clothing line.

Hope Hicks, who had also worked for the Hiltzik firm—perhaps best known for having long represented the film producer Harvey Weinstein, caught, in the fall of 2017, in an epochal harassment and abuse scandal and cover-up—had originally had the same role as Raffel but at a higher level: she was the personal spokesperson for the president. In September, Hicks had been elevated to White House communications director, with Raffel as her number two.

The trouble had arisen the previous summer. Both Hicks and Raffel had been on Air Force One in July 2017 as the news broke about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting in Trump Tower during the campaign with Russian government go-betweens offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. During the flight back to the United States after the G20 summit in Germany, Hicks and Raffel aided the president in his efforts to issue a largely false story about the Trump Tower meeting, thus becoming part of the cover-up.

Even though Raffel had been at the White House for a little more than nine months, the Axios report said that his departure had been under discussion for several months. That was untrue. It was an abrupt exit.

The next day, just as abruptly, Hope Hicks—the person in the White House closest to the president—resigned as well.

The one person who perhaps knew more than anyone else about the workings of the Trump campaign and the Trump White House was suddenly out the door. The profound concern inside the White House was the reasonable supposition that Hicks and Raffel, both witnesses to and participants in the president’s efforts to cover up the details of his son and son-in-law’s meeting with the Russians, were subjects or targets of the Mueller investigation—or, worse, had already cut a deal.

The president, effusive in his public praise for Hicks, did not try to talk her out of leaving. In the weeks to come he would mope about her absence—“Where’s my Hope-y?”—but, in fact, as soon as he got wind that she might be talking, he wanted to cut her loose and began, in a significant rewrite, downgrading her status and importance on the campaign and in the White House.

Yet here, from Trump’s point of view, was a hopeful point about Hicks: as central as she was to his presidency, her duties really only consisted of pleasing him. She was an unlikely agent of grand strategy and great conspiracies. Trump’s team was made up of only bit players.

John Dowd may have been reluctant to give his client bad news, but he well understood the danger of a thorough prosecutor with virtually unlimited resources. The more a determined team of G-men sifts, strips, and inspects, the greater the chance that both methodical and casual crimes will be revealed. The more comprehensive the search, the more inevitable the outcome. The case of Donald Trump—with his history of bankruptcies, financial legerdemain, dubious associations, and general sense of impunity—certainly seemed to offer prosecutors something of an embarrassment of riches.

For his part, however, Donald Trump yet seemed to believe that his skills and instincts were at least a match for all the thoroughness and resources of the United States Department of Justice. He even believed their exhaustive approach would work in his favor. “Boring. Confusing for everybody,” he said, dismissing the reports of the investigation provided by Dowd and others. “You can’t follow any of this. No hook.”

One of the many odd aspects of Trump’s presidency was that he did not see being president, either the responsibilities or the exposure, as being all that different from his pre-presidential life. He had endured almost countless investigations in his long career. He had been involved in various kinds of litigation for the better part of forty-five years. He was a fighter who, with brazenness and aggression, got out of fixes that would have ruined a weaker, less wily player. That was his essential business strategy: what doesn’t kill me strengthens me. Though he was wounded again and again, he never bled out.

“It’s playing the game,” he explained in one of his frequent monologues about his own superiority and everyone else’s stupidity. “I’m good at the game. Maybe I’m the best. Really, I could be the best. I think I am the best. I’m very good. Very cool. Most people are afraid that the worst might happen. But it doesn’t, unless you’re stupid. And I’m not stupid.”

In the weeks after his first anniversary in office, with the Mueller investigation in its eighth month, Trump continued to regard the special counsel’s inquiry as a contest of wills. He did not see it as a war of attrition—a gradual reduction of the strength and credibility of the target through sustained scrutiny and increasing pressure. Instead, he saw a situation to confront, a spurious government undertaking that was vulnerable to his attacks. He was confident he could jawbone this “witch hunt”—often tweeted in all-caps—to at least a partisan draw.

He remained irritated by efforts to persuade him to play the game in the usual Washington way—mounting a disciplined legal defense, negotiating, trying to cut his losses—rather than his way. This was disconcerting to many of the people closest to him, but it alarmed them more to see that as Trump’s indignation and sense of personal insult rose, so did his belief in his own innocence.

By the end of February, in addition to the Mueller grand jury indictments of a group of Russian nationals for illegal activities involved with efforts by the Russian government to influence the U.S. election, Mueller had reached several levels into the Trump circle. Among those who were indicted or who had pled guilty to felonies were his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, the eager-beaver junior adviser George Papadopoulos, and Manafort’s business partner and campaign official Rick Gates. This series of legal moves could be classically read as a methodical, step-by-step approach to the president’s door. Or, from the Trump camp’s point of view, it could be seen as a roundup of the sorts of opportunists and hangers-on who had always trailed Trump.

The doubts about the usefulness of Trump’s hangers-on was an implicit part of their usefulness: they could be shrugged off and disavowed at any time, which is what promptly happened at the least sign of trouble. The Trumpers swept up by Mueller were all declared wannabe and marginal players. The president had never met them, could not remember them, or had a limited acquaintance with them. “I know Mr. Manafort—I haven’t spoken to him in a long time, but I know him,” declared a dismissive Trump, pulling a line from the “who dat?” page of his playbook.

The difficulty in proving a conspiracy is proving intent. Many of the president’s inner circle believed that Trump, and the Trump Organization, and by extension the Trump campaign, operated in such a diffuse, haphazard, gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight manner that intent would be very difficult to establish. What’s more, the Trump hangers-on were so demonstrably subpar players that stupidity could well be a reasonable defense against intent.

Many in the Trump circle agreed with their boss: they believed that whatever idiotic moves had been made by idiotic Trump hands, the Russia investigation was too abstruse and nickel-and-dime to ultimately stick. At the same time, many, and perhaps all, were privately convinced that a deep dive—or, for that matter, even a cursory inspection—of Trump’s financial past would yield a trove of overt offenses, and likely a pattern of career corruption.

It was hardly surprising, then, that ever since the beginning of the special counsel’s investigation, Trump had tried to draw a line in the sand between Mueller and Trump family finances, openly threatening Mueller if he went there. Trump’s operating assumption remained that the special counsel was afraid of him, conscious of where and how his tolerance might end. Trump was confident that the Mueller team could be made to understand its limits, by either wink-wink or unsubtle threat.

“They know they can’t get me,” he told one member of his circle of after-dinner callers, “because I was never involved. I’m not a target. There’s nothing. I’m not a target. They’ve told me, I’m not a target. And they know what would happen if they made me a target. Everybody understands everybody.”

Books and newspaper stories about Trump’s forty-five years in business were full of his shady dealings, and his arrival in the White House only helped to highlight them and surface even juicier ones. Real estate was the world’s favorite money-laundering currency, and Trump’s B-level real estate business—relentlessly marketed by Trump as triple A—was quite explicitly designed to appeal to money launderers. What’s more, Trump’s own financial woes, and desperate efforts to maintain his billionaire lifestyle, cachet, and market viability, forced him into constant and unsubtle schemes. In the high irony department, Jared Kushner, when he was in law school, and before he met Ivanka, identified, in a paper he wrote, possible claims of fraud against the Trump Organization in a particular real estate deal he was studying—a subject now of quite some amusement among his acquaintances at the time. Practically speaking, Trump hid in plain sight, as the prosecutors appeared to be finding.

In November 2004, for instance, Jeffrey Epstein, the financier later caught in a scandal involving underage prostitutes, agreed to purchase from bankruptcy a house in Palm Beach, Florida, for $36 million, a property that had been on the market for two years. Epstein and Trump had been close friends—playboys in arms, as it were—for more than a decade, with Trump often seeking Epstein’s help with his chaotic financial affairs. Soon after negotiating the deal for the house in Palm Beach, Epstein took Trump to see it, looking for advice on construction issues involved with moving the swimming pool. But as he prepared to finalize his purchase for the house, Epstein discovered that Trump, who was severely cash-constrained at the time, had bid $41 million for the property and bought it out from under Epstein through an entity called Trump Properties LLC, entirely financed by Deutsche Bank, which was already carrying a substantial number of troubled loans to the Trump Organization and to Trump personally.

Trump, Epstein knew, had been loaning out his name in real estate deals—that is, for an ample fee, Trump would serve as a front man to disguise the actual ownership in a real estate transaction. (This was, in a sense, another variation of Trump’s basic business model of licensing his name for commercial properties owned by someone else.) A furious Epstein, certain that Trump was merely fronting for the real owners, threatened to expose the deal, which was getting extensive coverage in Florida papers. The fight became all the more bitter when, not long after the purchase, Trump put the house on the market for $125 million.

But if Epstein knew some of Trump’s secrets, Trump knew some of Epstein’s. Trump often saw the financier at Epstein’s current Palm Beach house, and Trump knew that Epstein was visited almost every day, and had been for many years, by girls he’d hired to give him massages that often had happy endings—girls recruited from local restaurants, strip clubs, and, also, Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago. Just as the enmity between the two friends increased over the house purchase, Epstein found himself under investigation by the Palm Beach police. And as Epstein’s legal problems escalated, the house, with only minor improvements, was acquired for $96 million by Dmitry Rybolovlev, an oligarch who was part of the close Putin circle of government-aligned industrialists in Russia, and who, in fact, never moved into the house. Trump had, miraculously, earned $55 million without putting up a dime. Or, more likely, Trump merely earned a fee for hiding the real owner—a shadow owner quite possibly being funneled cash by Rybolovlev for other reasons beyond the value of the house. Or, possibly, the real owner and real buyer were one and the same. Rybolovlev might have, in effect, paid himself for the house, thereby cleansing the additional $55 million for the second purchase of the house.

This was Donald Trump’s world of real estate.

As though using mind-control tricks, Jared Kushner had become highly skilled at containing his deep frustration with his father-in-law. He stayed expressionless—sometimes he seemed almost immobile—when Trump went off the rails, unleashing tantrums or proposing dopey political or policy moves. Kushner, a courtier in a crazy court, was possessed of an eerie calmness and composure. He was also very worried. It seemed astounding and ludicrous that this fig-leaf technicality—“You’re not a target, Mr. President”—could offer his father-in-law such comfort.

Kushner understood that Trump was surrounded by a set of mortal arrows, any of which might kill him: the case for obstruction; the case for collusion; any close look at his long, dubious financial history; the always-lurking issues with women; the prospects of a midterm rout and the impeachment threat if the midterm elections went against them; the fickleness of the Republicans, who might at any time turn on him; and the senior staffers who had been pushed out of the administration (Kushner had urged the ouster of many of them), any of whom might testify against him. In March alone, Gary Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, and Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI—each man bearing the president deep contempt—were pushed from the administration.

But the president was in no mood to hear Kushner’s counsel. Never entirely trusted by his father-in-law—in truth, Trump trusted no one except, arguably, his daughter Ivanka, Kushner’s wife—Kushner now found himself decidedly on the wrong side of Trump’s red line of loyalty.

As a family insider, Kushner, in a game of court politics so vicious that, in another time, it might have yielded murder plots, had appeared to triumph over his early White House rivals. But Trump invariably soured on the people who worked for him, just as they soured on him, not least because he nearly always came to believe that his staff was profiting at his expense. He was convinced that everyone was greedy, and that sooner or later they would try to take what was more rightfully his. Increasingly, it seemed that Kushner, too, might be just another staff member trying to take advantage of Donald Trump.

Trump had recently learned that a prominent New York investment fund, Apollo Global Management, led by the financier Leon Black, had provided the Kushner Companies—the family real estate group that had been managed by Kushner himself while his father, Charlie, was in federal prison—with $184 million in financing.

This was troubling on many levels, and it left a vulnerable Kushner open to more questions about the conflicts between his business and his position in the White House. During the transition, Kushner had offered Apollo’s cofounder Marc Rowan, the job of director of the Office of Management and Budget. Rowan initially accepted the job, declining it only after Apollo chairman Leon Black objected to what would have to be disclosed about Rowan’s and the firm’s investments.

But the president-elect’s concerns were elsewhere: he was more keenly and furiously focused on the fact that, in the constant search for financings that occur in mid-tier real estate companies like Trump’s, Apollo had never extended itself for the Trump Organization. Now, it seemed baldly apparent, Apollo was backing the Kushners solely because of the family’s connection to the administration. The constant accounting in Trump’s head of who was profiting from whom, and his sense of what he was therefore owed for creating the circumstances by which everyone could profit, was one of the things that reliably kept him up at night.

“You think I don’t know what’s going on?” Trump sneered at his daughter, one of the few people he usually went out of his way to try to mollify. “You think I don’t know what’s going on?”

The Kushners had gained. He had not.

The president’s daughter pleaded her husband’s case. She spoke of the incredible sacrifice the couple had made by coming to Washington. And for what? “Our lives have been destroyed,” she said melodramatically—and yet with some considerable truth. The former New York socialites had been reduced to potential criminal defendants and media laughingstocks.

After a year of friends and advisers whispering that his daughter and son-in-law were at the root of the disarray in the White House, Trump once again was thinking they should never have come. Revising history, he told various of his late-night callers that he had always thought they never should have come. Over his daughter’s bitter protests, he declined to intercede in his son-in-law’s security clearance issues. The FBI had continued to hold up Kushner’s clearance—which the president, at his discretion, could approve, his daughter reminded him. But Trump did nothing, letting his son-in-law dangle in the wind.

Kushner, with superhuman patience and resolve, waited for his opportunity. The trick among Trump whisperers was how to focus Trump’s attention, since Trump could never be counted on to participate in anything like a normal conversation with reasonable back-and-forth. Sports and women were reliable subjects; both would immediately engage him. Disloyalty also got Trump’s attention. So did conspiracies. And money—always money.

Kushner’s own lawyer was Abbe Lowell, a well-known showboat of the D.C. criminal bar who prided himself on, and managed his clients’ expectations and attention with, an up-to-the-minute menu of rumors and insights about what gambit or strategy prosecutors were about to dish up. The true edge provided by a high-profile litigator was perhaps not courtroom skill but backroom intelligence.

Lowell, adding to the reports Dowd had received, told Kushner that prosecutors were about to substantially deepen the president’s—and the Trump family’s—jeopardy. Dowd had continued to try to mollify the president, but Kushner, with intel supplied by Lowell, went to his father-in-law with reports about this new front in the legal war against him. Sure enough, on March 15 the news broke that the special counsel had issued a subpoena for the Trump Organization records: it was a deep and encompassing order, reaching many years back.

Kushner also warned his father-in-law that the investigation was about to spill over from the Mueller team, with its narrow focus on Russian collusion, to the Southern District of New York—that is, the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan—which would not be restricted to the Russia probe. This was a work-around intended to circumvent the special counsel’s restriction to Russia-related matters, but also an effort by the Mueller team to short-circuit any attempt by the president to disband or curtail its investigation. By moving parts of the investigation to the Southern District, Mueller, as Kushner explained to Trump, was ensuring that the investigation of the president would continue even without the special counsel. Mueller was playing a canny, or ass-protecting, game, while also following precise procedures: even as he focused on the limited area of his investigation, he was divvying up evidence of other possible crimes and sending it out to other jurisdictions, all of which were eager to be part of the hunt.

It gets worse, Kushner told Trump.

The Southern District was once run by Trump’s friend Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York. In the 1980s, when Giuliani was the federal prosecutor—and when, curiously, James Comey had worked for him—the Southern District became the premier prosecutor of the Mafia and of Wall Street. Giuliani had pioneered using a draconian, and many believed unconstitutional, interpretation of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act against the Mob. He used the same interpretation against big finance, and in 1990 the threat of a RICO indictment, under which the government could almost indiscriminately seize assets, brought down the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert.

The Southern District had long been worrisome to Trump. After his election, he had an unseemly meeting with Preet Bharara, the federal prosecutor there, a move whose optics were alarming to all of his advisers, including Don McGahn and the incoming attorney general, Jeff Sessions. (The meeting foreshadowed the one Trump would shortly have with Comey, during which he sought a pledge of loyalty in return for job security.) His meeting with Bharara was unsatisfactory: Bharara was unwilling to humor him—or, shortly, even to return his calls. In March 2017, Trump fired him.

Now, said Kushner, even without Bharara, the Southern District was looking to treat the Trump Organization as a Mob-like enterprise; its lawyers would use the RICO laws against it and go after the president as if he were a drug lord or Mob don. Kushner pointed out that corporations had no Fifth Amendment privilege, and that you couldn’t pardon a corporation. As well, assets used in or derived from the commission of a crime could be seized by the government.

In other words, of the more than five hundred companies and separate entities in which Donald Trump had been an officer, up until he became president, many might be subject to forfeiture. One potential casualty of a successful forfeiture action was the president’s signature piece of real estate: the government could seize Trump Tower.

In mid-March, a witness with considerable knowledge of the Trump Organization’s operations traveled by train to Washington to appear before the Mueller grand jury. Picked up at Union Station by the FBI, the witness was driven to the federal district court. From 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., two prosecutors on the Mueller team, Aaron Zelinsky and Jeannie Rhee, reviewed with the witness, among other issues, the structure of the Trump Organization.

The prosecutors asked the witness about the people who regularly talked to Trump, how often they met with him, and for what purposes. They also asked how meetings with Trump were arranged and where they took place. The witness’s testimony yielded, among other useful pieces of information, a signal fact: all checks issued by the Trump Organization were personally signed by Donald Trump himself.

The Trump Organization’s activities in Atlantic City were a particular subject of interest that day. The witness was asked about Trump’s relationship with known Mafia members—not if he had such relationships, but the nature of the relationships prosecutors already knew existed. The prosecutors also wanted to know about Trump Tower Moscow, a project pursued by Trump for many years—pursued, in fact, well into the 2016 campaign—albeit never brought to fruition.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and a Trump Organization officer, was another significant topic. The prosecutors asked questions about the level of Cohen’s disappointment at not being included in the president’s White House team. They seemed to be trying to gauge how much resentment Cohen felt, which led the witness to infer that they wanted to estimate how much leverage they might have if they attempted to flip Michael Cohen against the president.

Zelinsky and Rhee wanted to know about Jared Kushner. And they wanted to know about Hope Hicks.

The two prosecutors also delved into the president’s personal life. How often did he cheat on his wife? With whom? How were trysts arranged? What were the president’s sexual interests? The Mueller investigation, and its grand jury, was becoming a clearing house for the details of Trump’s long history of professional and personal perfidiousness.

When the long day was finally over, the witness left the grand jury room shocked—not so much by what the prosecutors wanted to know but by what they already knew.

By the third week of March, Trump’s son-in-law had the president’s full attention. “They can not only impeach you, they can bankrupt you” was Kushner’s message.

Agitated and angry, Trump pressed Dowd for more reassurances, holding him accountable for the prior reassurances Trump had frequently demanded he be given. Dowd held firm: he yet believed that the fight was in its early stages and that Mueller was still on a fishing expedition.

But Trump’s patience was finally at an end. He decided that Dowd was a fool and should go back into the retirement from which, Trump kept repeating, he had rescued him. Indeed, resisting that retirement, Dowd pleaded his own case, assuring the president that he could continue to provide him with valuable help. To no avail: on March 22, Dowd reluctantly resigned, sending another bitter former Trumper into the world.