Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump
Excerpts of the author's latest book, Obsession
by Byron York
In early December 2019, a reporter asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi why she was rushing to pass articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. “One of the biggest criticisms of the process has been the speed at which the House Democrats are moving,” the reporter noted.
“The speed?” Pelosi replied, with a touch of indignation. “It’s been going on for 22 months, okay? Two and a half years, actually. This was two and a half years ago they initiated the Mueller investigation. It’s not about speed. It’s about urgency.”
Pelosi’s words attracted little attention among Democrats, but they were a bolt of lightning for Republicans. In one brief moment, the Speaker confirmed what Trump’s defenders had always believed about the Democratic campaign to impeach the president and remove him from office: it had been going on for a long time. It didn’t start with Ukraine. It didn’t start with a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky. It didn’t start with a hold on U.S. aid to Zelensky’s country. No, the drive to remove the president from office was underway well before that. It reached back into the 2016 campaign and then, just a few months into the Trump presidency, to the appointment of Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller. It was going full-bore, in the form of the Trump-Russia investigation, until it morphed, nearly seamlessly, into an investigation over alleged improprieties with President Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president, and then, finally, into impeachment. There were different battles, but they were all part of one long campaign.
And now Pelosi seemed to concede the point.
“She is finally recognizing that what we’ve been saying for the last two years is true,” Republican Congressman Chris Stewart of Utah wrote in his journal that evening. (Stewart, a member of the Intelligence Committee, kept a diary—non-classified—during the most intense battles over Trump.) “She’s always known it was true,” Stewart continued. “And she’s going to regret expressing it, honestly. But it is true. They’ve been trying to impeach and remove him literally from the day before he was inaugurated.”
“It was vindication for those of us who said the whole thing started with tears in Brooklyn,” recalled Georgia Congressman Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. “Tears in Brooklyn” was Collins’s way of saying the Democratic effort to remove Trump actually began on a weepy election night at Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn on November 8, 2016. “For me, it was vindication,” Collins repeated. “It was: ‘See, we’ve been saying this all along, you’ve been lying about it all along, at least now you’re admitting it.’ ”
Pelosi’s statement was so important to Republicans because it confirmed that the investigations that inundated the Trump administration—the Russia-focused FBI investigation called Crossfire Hurricane; the investigation by the House Intelligence Committee; the investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee; the Mueller investigation; the House Intelligence Committee Trump-Ukraine impeachment investigation; then the House Judiciary Committee investigation; and finally the Senate impeachment trial—were really all about impeachment. The fact that the investigating had been going on so long, and in so many iterations, suggested to Republicans that the real goal was to get Trump rather than get to the bottom of whatever controversy dominated the news of the day.
Now, with the perspective of time, the Democratic effort to remove Trump, and the president’s struggle to defend himself, appear less a rushed impeachment than a long and agonizing political civil war: The presidential campaign and transition were a prelude, a time of growing tension; 2017 saw the formal start of the war, with the appointment of a special counsel, and a sense of hope—at least on the president’s side—that hostilities might be wrapped up quickly; 2018 was a stalemate, as each side, optimism gone, dug in for a long battle; 2019 saw what at first appeared to be the end of action—Mueller’s last stand—only to see the conflict flare up again in one more desperate Democratic attack as the 2020 elections approached.
This is the story of that long campaign, from the first shot—the appointment of Mueller—to the final gasp in the Senate impeachment trial.
James Comey, Russia, and the Road to Mueller
“His instincts were that Comey was no good”—“Six ways from Sunday”—Pulling a J. Edgar Hoover—“It’s bullshit”—The Comey Campaign—The Last Straw—“You are not able to effectively lead the Bureau”—Eight Days in May—A Glimpse of a Terrible Future
If any single day marked the official kickoff of the Democratic campaign to remove President Trump, it was May 17, 2017. On that day, Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, was appointed special counsel to investigate the Trump-Russia affair. But also on that day—less noted—came the first formal call for Trump’s impeachment in the House of Representatives, when Democratic Representative Al Green of Texas announced, “This is where I stand. I will not be moved. The president must be impeached.”
From that point on, the two processes—investigation and impeachment, a legal battle and a political one—were intertwined.
The two were always dependent on each other. Mueller had the power to investigate and prosecute anyone associated with the Trump campaign, but it was widely understood that he could not indict the president himself. The House had limited authority to investigate—nothing like the full law enforcement powers Mueller had—but it had the sole constitutional authority to impeach the president. So, if any action against the president were to result from Mueller’s work, it would have to be undertaken by the House.
What that meant was that Mueller’s team, as well as being prosecutors, also served as the de facto investigative arm of the House of Representatives. Democratic lawmakers, then in the minority, could not impeach the president, but they could crack the door open and wait to see what Mueller found. If the special prosecutor turned over material that could be used against Trump, Democrats could apply pressure for impeachment. If they could win a majority in the House, they could initiate impeachment themselves. But in any scenario, their strategy depended on the prosecutor.
The symbiotic relationship between investigator and lawmaker had been noted back in the 1980s, when the old independent counsel law was in effect. That law—a post-Watergate reform intended to check the power of the presidency—required an independent counsel, upon completion of his investigation, to write a report to Congress presenting his findings. Congress could then decide whether to use those findings to impeach the president. In Morrison v. Olson, a case challenging the constitutionality of the law (in which the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality by a 7–1 vote), the lone dissenter was Justice Antonin Scalia, who observed that appointing an independent counsel was, in actual practice, a step toward removing the president; as he put it, the law was “acrid with the smell of threatened impeachment.”
The independent counsel law survived that Supreme Court challenge, but it did not survive the fallout from the impeachment of Bill Clinton, in which the law functioned precisely as Scalia predicted. And before the law bit Democrats on the backside during Clinton’s presidency, it wounded Republicans during the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal. Unappy lawmakers from both parties allowed it to expire in 1999.
But official Washington still believed there had to be some mechanism to investigate a president and other top officials accused of wrongdoing. So that same year, 1999, the Justice Department adopted regulations for what became known as special counsels, who would have many of the same powers as the old independent counsels, but who were not required to present a report to Congress. The idea was that if Congress did not receive a report that could serve as a roadmap to impeachment, the opposition party would be less tempted and less able to impeach the president. But what the drafters of the regulations did not contemplate was that, in the white-hot political atmosphere of an investigation—say, the Trump-Russia probe—there might not be much practical difference between an independent counsel and a special counsel. In such a high-profile case, the special counsel could not present a brief summary of his investigation to the Justice Department, decline to charge anyone, and be done with it. The opposition party in Congress would inevitably want to get involved, see the special counsel’s findings, and keep open the option of impeachment. So, starting in May 2017, Mueller was effectively the investigator for the House, just as Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton, had been before him.
Trump was not prepared for what lay in store. Perhaps no president could have been. But the special counsel process could leave the target—in this case, the president—remarkably in the dark about the most basic things. In the days after the appointment of Mueller, for example, Trump’s lawyers could not be sure whether the president himself was formally under investigation. It is hard to believe in retrospect, but at the time they didn’t know.
In addition, Trump did not understand the central role a single person—FBI Director James Comey—played in his worsening predicament. It was clear, of course, that Trump’s decision to fire Comey on May 9, 2017, led to the appointment of Mueller. What Trump could not know at the time was that Comey, in ways hidden from the public and from many others in government, had orchestrated the events that led to the special counsel probe, and to the greatest crisis of Trump’s presidency. And Trump did not have the perspective to see that perhaps the most consequential decision of his first year was the decision not to fire the FBI director immediately upon taking office. Trump kept Comey on the job for a variety of reasons: perhaps naiveté, perhaps a belief that he could win Comey over, perhaps something else. But when Comey was allowed to stay at the FBI past the Trump inauguration, his behind-the-scenes machinations set in motion a conflict that would blow up Trump’s presidency. The story of the beginning of the Mueller investigation—the formal effort to remove the president from office—is the story of the relationship between Donald Trump and James Comey.
“His instincts were that Comey was no good”
Trump was never entirely comfortable with the FBI director. “His instincts were that Comey was no good,” said John Dowd, who was Trump’s lawyer in 2017 and 2018. “And he hung that initially on the way Comey handled Hillary Clinton.” Even though Trump was running against Clinton in 2016, and even though he benefited from Comey’s mishandling of the Clinton email case—prematurely exonerating her in July 2016 and then re-opening the investigation just eleven days before the presidential election—Trump was wary of Comey. “His gut and instincts were, there’s something wrong with this guy,” Dowd recalled.
That was precisely what Trump’s friend and adviser Rudy Giuliani was telling the candidate during the campaign and transition. “I advised him to fire Comey,” Giuliani recalled. “Every time we talked about Comey, I said the guy’s gonna turn on you. There’s something wrong with him.”
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