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LAWYERS

There was a running sweepstakes or office pool for the unhappiest person in the White House. Many had held the title, but one of the most frequent winners was White House counsel Don McGahn. He was a constant target for his boss’s belittling, mocking, falsetto-voice mimicry, and, as well, sweeping disparagements of his purpose and usefulness.

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” McGahn uttered almost obsessively under his breath, quoting the Taylor Swift song to comment on whatever egregious act Trump had just committed (“… because you break them,” the song continues).

McGahn’s background was largely as a federal election lawyer. Mostly he was on the more-money, less-transparency side—he was against, rather than for, aggressive enforcement of election laws. He served as the counsel to the Trump campaign, arguably among the most careless about election law compliance in recent history. Before joining the Trump administration, McGahn had no White House or executive branch experience. He had never worked in the Justice Department or, in fact, anywhere in government. Formerly an attorney for a nonprofit affiliated with the Koch brothers, he was known as a hyperpartisan: when Obama’s White House counsel, Kathy Ruemmler, the previous occupant of McGahn’s office, reached out to congratulate him and to offer to be a resource on past practices, McGahn did not respond to her email.

One of McGahn’s jobs was to navigate what was possibly the most complicated relationship in modern government: he was the effective point person between the White House and the Department of Justice. Part of his portfolio, then, was to endure the president’s constant rage and bewilderment about why the DOJ was personally hounding him, and his incomprehension that he could do nothing about it.

“It’s my Justice Department,” Trump would tell McGahn, often repeating this more than dubious declaration in his signature triad.

Nobody could quite be certain of the number of times McGahn had had to threaten, with greater or lesser intention, to quit if Trump made good on his threat to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, or the special counsel. Curiously, one defense against the charge that the president had tried to fire Mueller in June 2017 in an effort to end the special counsel’s investigation—as the New York Times claimed in a January 2018 scoop—was the fact that Trump was almost constantly trying to fire Mueller or other DOJ figures, doing so often multiple times a day.

McGahn’s steadying hand had so far helped avert an ultimate crisis. But he had missed or let slip by or simply ignored a number of intemperate, unwise, and interfering actions by the president that might, McGahn feared, comprise the basis of obstruction charges. Deeply involved with the conservative Federalist Society and its campaign for “textualist” judges, McGahn had long dreamed himself of becoming a federal judge himself, but given the no-man’s-land he occupied between Trump and the Justice Department—not to mention Trump’s sometimes daily attacks on the DOJ’s independence, which McGahn had to accept or condone—he knew his future as a jurist was dead.

Fifteen months into Trump’s tenure, the tensions between the administration and the Department of Justice had erupted into open conflict. Now it was war—the White House against its own DOJ.

Here was a modern, post-Watergate paradox: the independence of the Justice Department. The DOJ might be, from every organizational and statutory view, an instrument of the White House, and, as much as any other agency, its mission might appear to be driven by whoever held the presidency. That’s what it looked like on paper. But the opposite was true, too. There was a permanent-government class in the Justice Department that believed an election ought to have no role at all in how the DOJ conducted itself. The department was outside politics and ought to be as blind as the courts. In this view, the Justice Department, as the nation’s preeminent investigator and prosecutor, was as much a check on the White House, and ought to be as independent of the White House, as the other branches of government. (And within the Justice Department, the FBI claimed its own level of independence from its DOJ masters, as well as from the White House itself.)

Even among those at Justice and the FBI who had a more nuanced view, and who recognized the symbiotic nature of the department’s relationship with the White House, there was yet a strong sense of the lines that cannot be crossed. The Justice Department and the FBI had, since Watergate, found themselves accountable to Congress and the courts. Any top-down effort to influence an investigation, or any evidence of having bowed to influence—memorialized in a memo or email—might derail a career.

In February 2018, Rachel Brand, the associate attorney general, a former Bush lawyer who had been nominated for the number three DOJ job by Obama, resigned to take a job as a Walmart lawyer. If Trump had fired Rosenstein during Brand’s tenure, she would have become acting attorney general overseeing the Mueller investigation. She told colleagues she wanted to get out before Trump fired Rosenstein and then demanded that she fire Mueller. She would take Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart had its headquarters, over Washington, D.C.

For a generation or more, the arm’s-length relationship between the White House and the Department of Justice often seemed more like a never-ending conflict between armed camps. Bill Clinton could hardly stomach his attorney general, Janet Reno, having to weather the blowback from her decisions regarding Ruby Ridge, a standoff and deadly overreaction between survivalists and the FBI; Waco, another botched standoff with a Christian cult; and the investigation of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, with the DOJ chastised for its reckless pursuit of a suspected spy. Clinton came very close to firing Louis Freeh, his FBI director, who openly criticized him, but managed to swallow his rage. Top people from the Bush White House, the FBI, and the Justice Department almost came to literal blows at the bedside of the ailing AG John Ashcroft—James Comey himself standing in the way of the White House representatives trying to get Ashcroft to renew a domestic surveillance program—with the White House finally having to back down. Under Obama, Comey, who by then was the FBI director, made a further grab for the FBI’s independence from the Justice Department when he unilaterally decided to end and later reopen the Hillary Clinton email investigation—and, by doing so, arguably tossing the election to her opponent.

Enter Donald Trump, who had neither political nor bureaucratic experience. His entire working life was spent at the head of what was in essence a small family operation, one designed to do what he wanted and to bow to his style of doing business. At the time of his election, he was absent even any theoretical knowledge of modern government and its operating rules and customs.

Trump was constantly being lectured about the importance of “custom and tradition” at the Justice Department. As reliably, he would respond, “I don’t want to hear this bullshit!”

He needed, one aide observed, “a hard, black line. Without a hard, black line that he can’t cross, he’s crossing it.”

Trump believed what to him seemed obvious: the DOJ and FBI worked for him. They were under his direction and control. They must do exactly what he demanded of them; they must jump through his hoops. “He reports to me!” an irate and uncomprehending Trump repeated early in his tenure about both his attorney general Jeff Sessions and his FBI director James Comey. “I am the boss!”

“I could have made my brother the attorney general,” Trump insisted, although in fact he did not even speak to his brother (Robert, a seventy-one-year-old retired businessman). “Like Kennedy.” (Six years after John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert attorney general, Congress passed the Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute, called the “Bobby Kennedy law,” to prevent exactly this sort of thing in the future—although that did not stop Trump from hiring his daughter and son-in-law as senior advisers.)

Efforts by anyone to explain the fine points of the relationship among various branches of government frustrated Trump and caused him to double down on his sense of righteousness and entitlement. He often felt that people were ganging up on him, which infuriated him even more. As had happened so many times before in his life, lawyers were out to get him. He couldn’t get it out of his head: Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, and McCabe were part of a club he did not belong to. “They talk to each other all the time,” Trump would say. “They’re totally in it together.”

If the typical relationship between the president of the United States and his attorney general was necessarily cool, if not always strained, Trump had made it immeasurably worse. His public humiliation of Jeff Sessions—one of his first supporters in Congress—had turned Sessions into the Trump hater-in-chief. Trump was not only taunting Sessions, but threatening him, or, at least, as pointedly as possible, pressuring him to quit or to reverse his recusal. On several occasions the president directed McGahn to pressure Sessions to unrecuse himself. Trump urged many, if not all, of his aides to join this effort. Not long after Sessions had recused himself on Russia-related matters, the president directed Cliff Sims, a young West Wing staffer who had ingratiated himself with the president (“a weasel, who had weaseled his way in,” in Bannon’s description), and who, like Sessions, was from Alabama, to go to the attorney general’s house on a Saturday morning and demand that he unrecuse himself. Bannon, in this instance, countermanded the president’s directive to Sims.

If there was a world in which the attorney general, appointed by the president, might use his authority to take the tension between a president and the DOJ’s prosecutors down a level or two, Jeff Sessions, swallowing almost daily abuse from the president, wasn’t part of it. During one especially tense period, Sessions sent word back to the president that if he persisted with his badgering and threats, he would resign and recommend the president’s impeachment.

In the days after the April 9 raid on Michael Cohen’s office and home, the president was seething. Not only was the Justice Department against him, the DOJ was conspiring to strike him at his most vulnerable point—his lawyer. Little matter that sometimes when Michael Cohen had, in the past, represented himself as Trump’s “personal lawyer,” Trump had meanly corrected, “He does PR for me.”

And how had the Justice Department gotten its warrant to go after Cohen? On the one hand, Trump insisted the raid had nothing to do with him. It was all about Cohen’s taxi business—and besides, the president declared, Cohen was mobbed up. On the other hand, he believed that the raid proved that the Justice Department had used any pretext to spread a net of wiretaps among people through whom the “deep state” might capture Trump’s own conversations. In the Trump-centric view of the world, his own government—a permanent substructure of like-minded souls, somehow loyal to both Barack Obama and George Bush—was after him.

In a kind of curious and profound role reversal, many conservatives, in the past reflexively supportive of law enforcement, had become suspicious, if not paranoid, about government oversight and policing. As the Mueller investigation progressed, the conviction that the deep state existed and that it was out to get Trump had become embedded in right-wing culture; this conviction had been adopted, albeit begrudgingly, even by many standard-issue Republicans. It had become one of Fox News star Sean Hannity’s main talking points, both on television and in private phone calls. “Sean’s in crank land,” observed Bannon, “but these are good bedtime stories for the president.”

Likewise, many liberals, in the past antagonistic to the FBI, prosecutors, and the intelligence community, were now counting on government investigators to pursue Trump and his family relentlessly and, by so doing, protect democracy from ruin. On MSNBC, FBI agents had become gods. In the new liberal view of the world, figures in law enforcement, once deeply disdained, were enthusiastically embraced. People like James Comey, whose investigation of Hillary Clinton helped pave the way for Donald Trump’s presidency, had become heroes of the Trump resistance.

On April 17, James Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, was published. Comey and Stephen Colbert, the late-night comedian, clinked wineglasses (in fact, paper cups) on national television.

Among the book’s other revelations, there were perhaps two notes that should have been especially worrisome for Donald Trump: its underlying theme of Trump’s Mafia-like behavior, and the fact that Comey said nothing at all about the Trump Organization. If the former head of the FBI says you act like you’re a Mafia don, that’s a neon sign. And if he doesn’t mention the organization at the center of your business and family life, then that’s a tell: the organization is an FBI target.

Though the White House knew the book was coming, it was yet woefully unprepared for it—and unprepared for Trump’s outsize reaction to it. Kellyanne Conway was quickly sent out to dispute the book, but instead focused on Comey’s handling of the Clinton emails, quite implying that Comey had tipped the election to Trump—something you never wanted to say in the Trump White House, since the election could never be anything other than a decisive Donald Trump win.

An overriding characteristic of the Trump presidency was the fact that almost all conflicts became personalized. In this way, Comey, consumed by his own blood score after having been fired in such spiteful fashion, was a worthy adversary.

“Comey thinks I am stupid. I will show him how stupid I am if he thinks I’m stupid. I am so stupid I will screw all of them, that’s how stupid I am,” declared an oddly satisfied Trump in one late-night call to a New York friend. Comey’s book, filled with his personal justifications, rather happily conformed to Trump’s view that all feds were out of control and quite specifically after him. “I get these guys,” Trump went on, seeing his enemies motivated by the same rapacity that motivated him. “I get it. Same old, same old. You go for the biggest name you can. I get that.”

In some sense, Trump also saw the feds not in his role as president, an upholder of the nation’s laws, but as a businessman who at any moment might catch their attention and run afoul of them. Throughout his long career in real estate, the feds had always been a danger to him and people like him. Federal prosecutors “are like cancer—colon cancer,” Trump once told a friend who was having problems with the Justice Department.

But this did not mean, he pointed out, that he was, like many people he knew, afraid of the DOJ. There was a game here, one he believed he excelled at. He would simply be more intimidating than they were. “If they think they can get you, they will. If they think you might fuck them, they won’t,” he said, summing up his legal theory.

One of his most acute disappointments was the discovery that as president he could not control federal law enforcement. It was nearly beyond his comprehension that because he was president the feds were now a greater nuisance and threat.

The fault, however, was not his own. Nor was it the fault of the system or the structure of government. Trump placed the blame squarely on Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, repeatedly saying he should have given the AG job to Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie, Trump’s only two real pals in politics, “because they know how to play this game.”

For good measure, Trump blamed the appointment of Sessions on Bannon, Sessions’s longtime ally and supporter. “Fucked by him again. Fucked, fucked, fucked—so many times, so many times, so many times.”

After John Dowd’s departure, Trump turned his ire on Ty Cobb, the second of the over-the-hill lawyers the Trump White House had recruited in the summer of 2017, after failing to find top litigation teams. Trump heaped vast abuse on the sixty-eight-year-old attorney, not least because Cobb had a mustache. All mustaches annoyed Trump, but this one, with waxed ends, seemed particularly obnoxious to him. (In some not entirely clear logic of mockery, or possibly just a senior moment, Trump called Cobb—who bears the same name as a baseball great—Cy Young, the name of another baseball great.) And, to boot, the president was certain that Cobb was no match for the Mueller squad.

By early April, Trump had begun a daily series of call-and-response conversations about firing Cobb. “What should I do? I think I should fire Cobb. Do you think I should fire Cobb? I think I should.”

He needed a killer lawyer. He asked this question of everyone: “Where’s my killer lawyer?” Suddenly there was another push to find a major law firm with the resources to stand up to the United States government. But big firms have executive committees that carefully weigh the upside and downside of taking on difficult clients like Donald Trump. In this case, the downside—the likelihood of being publicly fired by Trump and then being stiffed for the bill—was just too great.

No matter. Trump didn’t want a lawyer from a major law firm anyway. He wanted a killer lawyer. “You know,” he would say, as though with precise specificity, “a killer.”

In this, the law was not the law to him, but a battlefield, a theatrical one. And he knew just the type of killer-actor he wanted.

For several months now, Stormy Daniels, a porn star with whom he’d had a relationship, and whom Michael Cohen had theoretically handled with a payoff, had been in the news. Trump had little interest in Daniels, baldly lying to everyone, all of whom understood that he was lying to them, that his affair with Daniels had never happened.

But what he could not get enough of was Stormy Daniels’s new lawyer, Michael Avenatti. The man was a killer. As important, he was terrific on television. Avenatti looked the part; he looked like he could play a lawyer on television. This was the kind of lawyer he wanted.

“He’s a star,” Trump said. That’s what he needed if he was going to face this kind of pressure and these kinds of attacks. “Get me a star.”

The corollary was that all of his little problems grew into big problems because he didn’t have a lawyer like Avenatti—a lawyer who will do anything it takes. This line of thinking quickly turned into a dark self-pity: he became convinced that somehow all the killer lawyers were being kept from him.

“Dershowitz,” Trump kept announcing, was “the most famous lawyer in the country.” Then he would add, “Let’s get Dershowitz.”

Although Alan Dershowitz had long held a teaching position at Harvard Law School, retiring in 2014, he was regarded by many in his profession less as a legal scholar or even conscientious practitioner than as a gadfly and wise guy. He had inserted himself into a variety of public debates and high-profile cases, including those involving Patty Hearst, Mike Tyson, and O. J. Simpson. But if the books he wrote and the attention he garnered—from TV appearances and movie portrayals—did not enhance his reputation as a scholar, they created a type of celebrity that provided other value to him. His aggression, erudition, showmanship, and grandiosity had indeed turned him into one of the most famous lawyers in the nation. None of that necessarily made him a good lawyer, of course. “Whatever he advises, do the opposite,” said one well-known, unsatisfied former Dershowitz client. But certainly Dershowitz was among the most brilliant and successful television lawyers in the country—and Trump, most of all, wanted someone who could play a lawyer on television. Acting, in his view, was the greater and more important legal skill.

Recently Dershowitz had gotten Trump’s attention by arguing in a series of television appearances that the president of the United States was above the law, or anyway that he occupied a special, kingly sort of status. In early April, Dershowitz was invited to dinner at the White House to discuss representing the president. He was just the kind of lawyer the president thought he needed: an aggressive advocate who could argue his case on television.

Over dinner, Dershowitz asked for a retainer of a million dollars.

Trump, ever believing that part of the legal game was not paying your lawyers, told Dershowitz he would get back to him. But the conversation was over. Never in a million years would he pay a lawyer a million bucks up front!

Rudy Giuliani, the man once called “America’s Mayor,” had been out of office for seventeen years. In that time, he had been a failed presidential candidate, peripatetic speaker, toastmaster, rainmaker, consultant, and anything-for-a-six-figure-fee man. He was desperate, according to his client and longtime friend the former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, to get back to center stage.

Giuliani’s first two marriages had been bad, but his third was far worse. To Giuliani’s friends it was a topic that provoked constant incredulity and guffaws. Judy Giuliani relentlessly needled and belittled the former mayor.

“Poor Rudy, I never saw such a mess,” said no less than his friend Donald Trump. Trump particularly disliked Judy Giuliani, ordering that she be kept away from him.

The desperation of the marriage had led, in Ailes’s astounded view, to Giuliani’s willingness to debase himself in hours of television appearances after the release of Trump’s infamous grab-them-by-the-pussy tape.

“He will do anything to get out of the house,” said Ailes.

But his loyalty to Trump was also real. Giuliani believed—with a sincerity that might not be felt by anyone else about Trump—that he owed Trump a debt of the heart. After Giuliani’s second marriage imploded in 2000, a particularly awful public breakdown, Giuliani’s children rejected him. His son Andrew’s feud with him seemed unrelenting. But Andrew was a passionate teenage golfer; he even hoped to be a pro someday. Trump, hardly known for his empathy but nevertheless returning the many favors Giuliani had extended him as mayor of the city in which Trump was an active real estate developer, went out of his way to invite Andrew to play with him on Trump golf courses. Trump made the father’s case to the son, with some positive results. Much later, Trump brought Andrew into the White House with the title of associate director for the Office of Public Liaison, granting him, along with a dozen or so other people, unescorted access to the Oval Office.

Giuliani’s loyalty, together with his willingness to defy credulity and logic in the defense of Trump, incurred a debt that inclined Trump to give Giuliani a senior position in the new administration. During the transition, this inclination became an acute problem for everyone around the president-elect. Rudy was, in almost everyone’s estimation—including, sometimes, Trump’s—off. “Dementia,” declared Bannon. “Plus he drinks too much,” said Trump, who more than once during the campaign had told Giuliani to his face that he was “losing it.”

This sense of Giuliani’s offness was curiously ironic, since it bore an almost eerie similarity to Trump’s own hysteria, grandiosity, and tendency to say almost anything that came into his head.

For many of the senior aides who worked on the transition team, excluding the seventy-four-year-old Giuliani from a top administration job was viewed as one of their singular accomplishments. “That was at least one bullet that we missed,” said Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

Giuliani—reportedly urged on by his wife, who had once imagined herself as the nation’s First Lady—cooperated in the effort to deny him a role in the administration by insisting that the only job he would take was secretary of state. Even Trump appreciated the possibility that Giuliani might not be diplomatic enough for the position; instead, he urged him to take the attorney general spot. “I’m too old to go back to practicing law,” a disappointed Giuliani told Bannon, who had brought him the news that the job of secretary of state was out.

But now a new opportunity had arisen, and on April 19, Giuliani, while far from the first choice, became, to the horror and astonishment of almost everyone around Trump, a cockeyed version of the killer lawyer the president had been searching for. This was a headline-grabbing entry in the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up annals: Giuliani, the former boss of James Comey, would star in a comeback role in which he would take on both Comey and Mueller.

And the price was right: of course he would work for free, Giuliani told Trump.

In a series of rambling calls, Trump—whom Giuliani described to friends as “crying into the phone,” while Trump described Giuliani as “begging for the job”—sought to persuade Giuliani that he needed to “get up there with Avenatti.”

Once Giuliani arrived in the White House, the plan was for him to assemble a group of associates at his firm, Greenberg Traurig, which, together with his litigation partner Marc Mukasey (son of former Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey), would act as the president’s legal team. Giuliani would be the public face of the president’s defense, while the Greenberg Traurig group would be hard at work on the president’s legal moves back at the office.

Greenberg Traurig, where Giuliani was less a working litigator than a procurer of business opportunities, thought otherwise. As with other law firms, the Greenberg Traurig management committee believed that defending Trump would be deeply unpopular in the firm, and, too, the firm’s partners doubted that their bill would ever get paid.

Giuliani—determined if not desperate to take the job—decided to step down from his firm and defend the president on his own.