What’s in it for me? Get a revealing look into the many controversies surrounding the Trump administration.
These blinks take you through the tumultuous 2016 US presidential campaign and the first couple years of the chaotic Trump administration.
Your guides through this rough terrain are two central figures in the story: FBI director James Comey and White House Counsel Don McGahn.
You’ll see how the apolitical Comey went from foiling the Clinton campaign to challenging President Trump.
You’ll also find out how McGahn quickly became a star witness for the Mueller investigation, sharing an unprecedented amount of insight into the Trump administration.
It’s quite the story, so let’s dive in!
The FBI’s involvement in the 2016 election was related to events that had happened years earlier.
In these blinks, you’ll learn how uncomfortable a dinner invitation from the President can get; why McGahn felt compelled to cooperate with the Mueller team; and how the Justice Department limited the scope of Mueller’s investigation.
In many ways, the 2016 US presidential election was unprecedented.
No elected president had ever run a campaign quite like Donald Trump.
For most candidates, having no real political experience, filing for bankruptcy six different times, and bragging – on tape – about grabbing women would all lead to defeat.
But not for Donald Trump.
Trump not only survived the kind of gaffes that would bring most campaigns to a screeching halt, he went on to beat a presidential candidate that many analysts considered the most qualified person alive.
There are many theories as to how and why this happened, but there’s little doubt that the FBI played an unusually significant role in the run-up to the election.
The key message here is: The FBI’s involvement in the 2016 election was related to events that had happened years earlier.
The FBI’s influence on the election was primarily centered around Hillary Clinton’s work emails during her time as Secretary of State – more specifically, emails associated with the September 11, 2012 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya.
At that time, there was also a presidential election going on.
And Republican candidate Mitt Romney was quick to use the incident to his advantage by issuing a statement that criticized the Obama administration for being soft on terrorists.
Now, prior to this event, it was widely accepted that the date September 11 was off-limits for partisan political jabs.
Many Republicans, including senior ranking senator John McCain, expressed their displeasure with Romney breaking this tradition – especially since the full picture of what had happened at Benghazi was far from clear.
As the author sees it, Romney’s aggressive tactics following the Benghazi attack marked a turning point in American politics.
It emboldened those who questioned Obama’s patriotism and suspected he was terrorist-friendly.
This was especially true of the Tea Party members and right-wing politicians who, in 2014, eventually pressured Republicans into launching an investigation into Benghazi.
It was during this investigation that Hillary Clinton’s emails were combed through; it was discovered that she’d been using a private email address.
At the time, the investigators thought little of this detail.
But it wasn’t going to go away.
Despite his desire to be apolitical, the FBI director felt compelled to speak up.
In March of 2015, word got out that Hillary Clinton wasn’t just using a private email account while at work – she was using it as her primary email account for work.
When this came to light, it reignited the Republican efforts to go after Clinton.
Spurred on by senate Republicans, the matter was referred to the FBI in July of 2015 and given the code name Midyear Exam.
The key message here is: Despite his desire to be apolitical, the FBI director felt compelled to speak up.
Since becoming director of the FBI in 2013, James Comey had been riding high.
Unlike the previous director, Robert S.
Mueller III, Comey was charismatic; he loved meeting and talking to his agents, and he wasn’t afraid to issue a press conference in order to put a controversial issue to rest.
Comey was determined to be apolitical.
After all, it was what the FBI was supposed to be.
He’d even gone so far as to stop voting.
So when Comey was informed about the Clinton investigation, he wasn’t exactly thrilled.
No matter the outcome, he knew that one side or the other would use the investigation as political ammo.
To make matters more complicated, there was still a heated presidential campaign going on between Clinton and Trump when it came time to close the investigation.
The normal procedure would have been to simply close the case, announce the finding, and call it a day.
The FBI is not generally required to elaborate or explain the finding – and certainly not at a press conference.
But Comey believed that in this case, the normal procedure wouldn’t be enough.
If they didn’t elaborate, they’d only be opening the door for Congress to request a hearing.
In this hearing, the FBI would have to testify and explain it all anyway.
Comey thought, Let’s not draw this out.
Let’s get in front of it.
Let’s explain what we’ve found and put it to rest once and for all.
So, on July 6, 2015, Comey gave a 15-minute press conference that began with 13 minutes explaining all the reasons the FBI believed Clinton and her aides had been careless with the emailing of sensitive information.
It then ended with their ultimate finding – that “no charges are appropriate in this case.
” In a way, the press conference made no one happy.
Democrats felt that Comey had abused his power and set a dangerous precedent with the press conference.
Meanwhile, Republicans wondered aloud about the difference between “extremely careless” and the “gross negligence” that would have led to charges.
Despite these complaints from both sides of the aisle, after July, it seemed the case was closed on Hillary’s emails – as far as the FBI went.
But nothing could have been further from the truth.
Comey tried to stay apolitical and transparent, but his actions had unintended consequences.
In October, just weeks before election day, the matter was brought back to life.
It all hinged on a case involving former Congressman Anthony Weiner, who was married to high-ranking Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
The Weiner investigation involved the former Congressman’s correspondence with a 15-year-old girl from North Carolina.
It turned out that Weiner had used Abedin’s laptop for some of this correspondence, which in turn led the FBI to finding a new batch of emails from Clinton.
Once again, Comey found himself in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation.
The key message here is: Comey tried to stay apolitical and transparent, but his actions had unintended consequences.
While Comey may have stressed the importance of being apolitical, his wife Patrice was excited at the prospect of voting for the country’s first female president.
In both July and October, Comey sought his wife’s advice when making his decisions about how to handle the sensitive matter.
Patrice didn’t necessarily agree with her husband’s decisions, but she did sympathize with the unenviable position he was in.
As Patrice put it, “This is going to be bad for you.
” On October 28, 2016, with election day right around the corner, Comey made the decision to send a letter to Congress about the discovery of more emails.
In his opinion, the FBI had to be open and transparent about it.
He knew that if it looked like they were trying to cover this up, it could be even worse for everyone.
On November 6, Comey released a statement saying the FBI had reviewed all the new emails and wouldn’t change their previous conclusions.
But many, including the Clinton campaign, felt the damage had already been done.
The 2016 election result would come down to fewer than 80,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
These votes tipped the electoral college and handed victory to Trump, even though Clinton won the popular vote by a wide margin.
Now Comey was going to be leading the FBI under the Trump administration.
Given that the FBI had opened an investigation into the Trump campaign and their possible dealings with Russian agents back in July of 2016, things were destined to get complicated.
The FBI found many troubling ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign was code-named Crossfire Hurricane.
Its main concerns were: Had the Russians purposefully targeted the 2016 election in an effort to get Trump elected, and was the Trump administration directly involved?
Since many within the Trump campaign had ties to Russia, there were some interesting leads.
For starters, campaign chairman Paul Manafort had previously worked as a paid political consultant for Russian oligarchs such as Oleg Deripaska.
According to Deripaska, their relationship ended with Manafort owing him $19 million.
Manafort had also worked alongside Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukranian the FBI would eventually link to Russian intelligence.
The key message here is: The FBI found many troubling ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
It soon became clear that Russia had indeed targeted the election.
For example, they had hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee.
This discovery led the Obama administration to levy sanctions against Russia.
But the odd thing was, Russia didn’t retaliate or react as the White House had expected.
Why not?
The answer may lie with another main figure in the FBI investigation: Michael Flynn, the man who’d been picked to be Trump’s national security advisor.
Flynn had five phone conversations with the Russian ambassador to the US on the same day the sanctions against Russia were announced.
US intelligence had listened in on these calls, so they knew that Flynn had assured the ambassador not to overreact – that the incoming Trump administration would be friendlier.
This was mind-boggling to Comey.
Russia had just orchestrated an unprecedented attack on US democracy, and here Flynn was extending them a friendly hand.
The Steele Dossier further complicated matters.
Around the same time Comey gave his July 2016 press conference, the FBI received intel from a trustworthy source.
The intel suggested that the Russians had compromising information on Trump – perhaps even a scandalous video of Trump in a Moscow hotel room.
Also under investigation was George Papadopoulos, Trump’s foreign policy advisor.
In March 2016 he met with people in London who told him they could help establish connections between the campaign and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Later, the FBI would find out that Papadopoulos had talked to an Australian ambassador about the Russians offering to supply the Trump campaign with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
At first, Trump himself wasn’t specifically under investigation.
But it was well-known that many of Trump’s business dealings, especially in regard to his golf courses, relied heavily on Russian investors.
It’s fair to say that the FBI had a lot to consider.
Trump wanted loyalty from Comey – and got upset when he didn’t get it.
The FBI investigation was still ongoing when Trump took office in early 2017.
During the transition, Comey had the awkward responsibility of briefing Trump on the most pressing issues at hand.
This included telling him about Russia’s cyber attacks – as well as informing him, in private, of the Steele Dossier and the possibility that Russia had compromising information on him.
But things got even more awkward for Comey once Trump moved into the White House and invited him over for a one-on-one dinner.
This was not something Comey was comfortable with.
During the Obama administration, Comey didn’t have dinner with the President or even take part in his regular basketball game.
He wanted to make sure everyone saw the FBI and its director as not being in the President’s pocket.
But that wasn’t how Trump saw things.
The key message here is: Trump wanted loyalty from Comey – and got upset when he didn’t get it.
At the White House dinner, Comey was treated to one of Trump’s trademark wide-ranging, free-association monologues.
Comey struggled to keep track, but he wanted to remember every word; he had every intention of documenting the conversation in a memo.
Then things turned from weird to troubling when Trump told him, “I need loyalty.
” When Comey didn’t respond to the first mention of loyalty, Trump came back around a second time.
In an effort to end the discussion, Comey responded, “You will always get honesty from me,” to which Trump replied, “That’s what I want, honest loyalty.
” Comey did create a memo of that conversation – and of every other conversation he had with Trump.
Those meetings didn’t get any less troubling, especially around the subject of Michael Flynn.
When the FBI questioned Flynn about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, he lied – despite guessing that intelligence agents were listening in on the calls.
Nevertheless, Trump wanted the Flynn case dropped.
He went so far as to tell Comey: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.
He is a good guy.
I hope you can let this go.
” In saying this, Trump was, at the very least, toeing the line of obstruction of justice.
Comey couldn’t believe it.
Later, Trump asked Comey to publicly state that the President himself wasn’t under investigation.
But, despite these requests, Comey didn’t bend.
At this point, Trump was becoming convinced that Comey had to go.
As White House Counsel, McGahn found himself faced with a combative president.
One of the few people in the Trump administration with some political experience was White House Counsel Don McGahn.
As part of the Trump White House, McGahn was taking on the task of stacking the federal courts with as many conservative-friendly judges as possible.
Essentially, McGahn was given free rein in this pursuit – but he quickly found it difficult to not be distracted.
The key message here is: As White House Counsel, McGahn found himself faced with a combative president.
From the first days of the Trump administration, McGahn found himself left out of important legal decisions.
When Trump tried to issue a ban on Muslim travelers coming into the US, McGahn wasn’t consulted – even though he could have advised about why it wouldn’t be considered legal.
As McGahn saw it, by issuing orders like this that were sure to get shot down, the new administration was setting itself up to appear misguided.
And then came the Comey firing.
Before it happened, McGahn knew that Trump wasn’t happy with the Justice Department.
Trump’s pick for Attorney General, or AG, was Jeff Sessions.
But Sessions had to recuse himself from anything related to the FBI investigation due to his own meeting with the Russian ambassador.
Trump was livid about this and berated Sessions in front of other White House staff.
Trump ordered McGahn to get Sessions to unrecuse himself because he needed a loyalist as his AG.
McGahn quickly discovered that Trump’s requests were often unreasonable and impossible.
So he began a practice of deflecting them in the hope that Trump would soon get distracted by something else.
But Trump’s ire for Comey couldn’t be contained.
Trump’s plan to fire Comey began to gain speed once Sessions backed it.
Things quickly progressed, despite the fact that McGahn didn’t like the idea at all.
The Deputy AG from the Justice Department, Rod Rosenstein, was brought in to approve a letter confirming the firing, which was then passed on to Congress.
Comey was visiting a field office in Los Angeles when he found out he’d been fired.
It was surreal.
But, as McGahn had expected, firing Comey only made things worse.
With the appointment of a special counsel, new lawyers came on board.
The day after Trump fired Comey, he had an Oval Office meeting with the Russian ambassador and the Russian foreign minister.
The President was in a celebratory mood; he wanted them to know that the firing would put an end to the investigation that had been plaguing the administration since day one.
However, as McGahn had predicted, the firing only complicated things further.
Now, it looked to the FBI like Trump was taking active steps to derail the investigation.
And with Comey gone, it fell to FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe to make sure the investigation continued.
The key message here is: With the appointment of a special counsel, new lawyers came on board.
Rod Rosenstein tried to explain to McCabe that firing Comey hadn’t been his idea, even though he’d been in the room when the letter was finalized.
Rosenstein even went so far as to volunteer to wear a wire in order to get evidence against Trump.
He added, “You can’t believe what it’s like over there.
” Rosenstein seemed unstable to McCabe, who deflected the proposal to wear a wire and instead pressed Rosenstein to bring in an outside special counsel to finish the investigation.
Rosenstein picked Robert Mueller, Comey’s predecessor, who was perfectly qualified for the job.
Unbeknownst to McCabe, Rosenstein also laid down some specific guidelines for Mueller.
At this point, Rosenstein had decided that it should no longer be considered a counterintelligence investigation.
This meant that Mueller would not be looking into connections between the Trump administration and Russia.
From now on, it was only about whether or not any laws had been broken.
With the announcement of the new Mueller-led investigation, Trump was not happy.
He felt betrayed by Rosenstein.
He renewed his meetings with Jeff Sessions, screaming at him to unrecuse himself and demand that McGahn fix things.
Trump repeatedly said he needed what Bobby Kennedy had been to JFK, or what Eric Holder had been to Barack Obama – a loyal AG who would protect him and go after his enemies.
As Mueller and his team began interviewing White House staff, including the President’s inner circle, Trump brought two more people on board: John Dowd, a retired lawyer tasked to assist the President, and Ty Cobb, a lawyer hired to coordinate the response to the Mueller investigation.
The odd thing was, Cobb’s plan was to openly cooperate with the investigators.
He believed that Mueller’s team just needed to ask some questions, tick some boxes, and it would all be over with.
McGahn was dumbfounded.
With guidance from his own lawyer, McGahn became a prime witness.
For the Mueller investigation, McGahn also sought advice from his own lawyer, William A.
Burck.
Burck was also essential in helping McGahn respond to Trump’s demands – which included ordering him to fire Mueller.
Burck was one of the most sought-after lawyers in Washington.
He, too, found it hard to believe that Cobb was just allowing White House staff to go into interviews without any internal review or briefings beforehand.
But that’s exactly what was happening.
The key message here is: With guidance from his own lawyer, McGahn became a prime witness.
Burck and McGahn conferred with Cobb to make sure the official plan was simply allowing Mueller’s team unfettered access to White House staff.
Cobb reiterated that they had nothing to hide – that it was best to just cooperate and get it over with quickly.
But it didn’t make sense.
McGahn had been in numerous situations where Trump had tried to exert his influence on the investigation.
He was in the room when the President had tried to get Sessions to regain control of the investigation.
Trump had barked orders at McGahn to fire Mueller.
Any of these incidents could be read as obstruction of justice, so why on earth was Cobb going to hand over McGahn to Mueller’s team?
At this point, McGahn and Burck became suspicious.
The only logical conclusion seemed to be that Cobb and the President were throwing McGahn under the bus.
It seemed all too likely that Trump, when faced with charges of obstruction, would say that he was only listening to McGahn’s advice.
It would be the President’s word against McGahn’s.
In fact, another New York Times reporter overheard a conversation between Cobb and Dowd in which they referred to a White House lawyer as a “McGahn spy.
” Cobb also spoke of wanting to gain access to McGahn’s safe in order to retrieve certain documents.
When this story was published, it only confirmed Burck’s fears that McGahn was being set up to take the fall.
With this in mind, Burck counseled McGahn to go into his interviews with Mueller’s team and to answer every question honestly.
This meant that McGahn told the Mueller team how Trump had ordered him to fire Mueller – and how the President had tasked him with getting Sessions to unrecuse himself so that he could regain control of the Russia investigation.
It also meant that McGahn had been “turned.
” The Mueller team essentially had an inside source into the Trump administration.
As McGahn cooperated with Mueller’s team, Trump continued to test the limits of his role.
Just days after McGahn’s interrogation with the Mueller team in March 2018, Andrew McCabe – the acting director of the FBI – was fired.
The firing of McCabe, just like the firing of Comey, became a point of interest for the Mueller team – but Trump continued to act as though he had every right to use the executive branch of the government to go after his enemies.
This time, he wanted McGahn to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey.
The key message here is: As McGahn cooperated with Mueller’s team, Trump continued to test the limits of his role.
Even though the Mueller investigation was ongoing, Trump couldn’t understand why the President of the United States couldn’t use his power to attack his personal enemies.
So, McGahn took the step of trying to teach Trump how the government worked.
With the help of White House lawyers, he wrote a 10,000-word memo to explain the Constitution, presidential history, and why Trump couldn’t just prosecute his enemies because he felt like it.
There’s no evidence that Trump ever read this memo.
But McGahn told the Mueller team about the memo.
And when investigators asked if Trump was actively trying to put Comey in jail, he told the truth.
He told them about Trump’s request to prosecute Clinton and Comey.
Around this time, in April of 2018, Trump was tweeting that he believed Comey should be in jail.
Since Comey was a main witness in the matter involving Michael Flynn, Trump’s threats were of interest to the Mueller team.
Meanwhile, McGahn was providing contemporaneous information about the goings-on inside the White House.
And he would continue doing so – even though it put him in a deeply uncomfortable situation.
He didn’t want to hurt the President, but he wasn’t going to lie to federal investigators either.
To make matters worse, Trump was completely ignoring McGahn’s advice when it came to presidential pardons.
The pardon had quickly become Trump’s favorite political weapon.
One of his first pardons was Joe Arpaio, a former Arizona sheriff who was accused of several crimes and ultimately convicted of criminal contempt of court.
But he was also a vocal proponent of anti-immigrant laws – and so, defying McGahn’s advice, Trump pardoned Arpaio.
More pardons soon followed.
Then, McGahan began hearing rumors that he was actively blocking the pardon of Paul Manafort, who’d been convicted of fraud as a result of the Mueller investigation.
As McGahn exited the White House, the Mueller investigation ended amid more controversy.
By the summer of 2018, McGahn and Trump were barely on speaking terms.
And as far as McGahn could determine, the rumors about him blocking a Manafort pardon had been planted by others in the White House.
They were part of a disinformation campaign designed to further put him at odds with the President.
Since McGahn had been vocal in his doubts that the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, should have top-level security clearance, he believed Kushner and Ivanka Trump were behind this disinformation.
Indeed, it looked as though McGahn’s days in the White House were numbered.
The key message here is: As McGahn exited the White House, the Mueller investigation ended amid more controversy.
All McGahn had ever wanted to do was appoint judges – so why did he stay in a White House with a president that was so combative and unwilling to take his advice?
The reason likely comes down to the unprecedented amount of power he had in creating a more conservative judicial system.
In late 2018, McGahn was in the position of ushering in Brett Kavanaugh, his second Supreme Court Justice.
But, as he told friend William J.
Hughes Jr.
, “I’m getting out soon.
I can’t handle it.
” Yes, he was going to see the Supreme Court nomination through, but McGahn let Trump know that he was resigning once it was over.
Ironically enough, Trump soon tweeted this news, making it sound as though it was the President’s decision for McGahn to leave.
Not long after McGahn resigned, the Mueller investigation wrapped up and issued its report.
Frustratingly, the controversy didn’t end, and few questions were answered.
Trump wasn’t charged with a crime like obstruction of justice – but he wasn’t exonerated either.
Despite the fact that the investigators had written 13 pages of executive summaries intended to be public statements, William Barr – Trump’s newest pick for Attorney General – decided to write his own summary of the findings.
The Justice Department, not Mueller, was going to frame the investigation for the public.
Ultimately, a number of Trump associates and campaign members were charged with crimes, including George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn.
Trump would go on to use the presidential pardon on some of these convictions, and the new Barr-led Justice Department would find ways of letting others go.
In Barr, Trump finally found his loyal man.
By the end of the investigation, McGahn had provided the Mueller team with close to 1,000 pages of handwritten notes.
The investigation wouldn’t have been the same without McGahn’s cooperation.
What’s remarkable is that the White House had no idea of his involvement until it was too late.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: The 2016 US presidential campaign included the unprecedented involvement of Russian efforts to sway the vote toward Donald Trump.
The campaign also featured the influence of FBI director James Comey, who made the decision to have a press conference and release public statements about the progress of an investigation into work emails of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
His decisions, along with the Russian efforts, could very well have helped Donald Trump get elected.
Comey then refused to pledge loyalty to Trump and continued a separate investigation into his campaign’s involvement with the Russians.
After Comey’s firing, the investigation continued under Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The Mueller investigation included a surprising level of cooperation from White House Counsel Don McGahn, who felt he was being set up as a scapegoat for the President’s efforts in obstructing the investigation.
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What to read next: A Very Stable Genius, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig If you’re looking for more investigative journalism into the Trump administration, we recommend our blinks to A Very Stable Genius: Donald Trump’s Testing of America, where you’ll discover a dissection of Trump’s first three years in office, as seen by two top Washington Post reporters.
President Trump has repeatedly tested the limits of the executive office.
A Very Stable Genius offers a vivid account of how his efforts to push those boundaries have led to conflicts within his own administration – including clashes with some of his most senior cabinet members, like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.