Trump became unhinged when Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department’s number two, made the decision on May 19 to launch an independent investigation into Russian interference. Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Bob Mueller as “special counsel” to lead the probe. We all watched with a sense of doom as Trump soon began searching for ways to get rid of Mueller. Within days of Comey’s firing, he argued that the special counsel needed to go because he was “conflicted,” contending that Mueller was a Never-Trumper, wanted to be named FBI director again, and had a Trump golf course membership. But aides told President Trump the “conflicts” were imagined, and they feared his demand was meant to impede the investigation.
One day in June, I got a message from an administration colleague who was watching an outside Trump surrogate make the media rounds suggesting the president might be getting ready to fire Mueller. The surrogate wouldn’t have said this if Trump hadn’t spoken to him.
“Man oh man, what the fuck is he doing?” my colleague lamented.
“You got me,” I responded. If firing Comey hadn’t toppled the administration, firing Bob Mueller absolutely would. How was this not obvious to Trump? I assumed his white-hot anger was blinding him to the fact that he was putting his presidency on the line.
Trump privately told White House counsel Don McGahn that he needed to have Rod Rosenstein get rid of the special counsel. No way, McGahn warned. “Knocking out Mueller,” he said, would be “another fact used to claim” that Trump had committed obstruction of justice, according to the investigation’s final report. The president tried again on June 17, 2017, phoning McGahn from Camp David. “You gotta do this,” he insisted. “You gotta call Rod.” Trump reiterated the order the next day. McGahn ignored both requests and threatened to resign. When the story broke, the president told Don to dispute it and to “create a record stating he had not been ordered to have the special counsel removed.” McGahn refused to lie, and the president called him into the Oval Office to pressure him, an entreaty his chief lawyer again rebuffed.
After the Mueller Report dropped, hundreds of former federal prosecutors signed a letter stating that Trump’s efforts to derail the investigation constituted obstruction of justice. He would have faced “multiple felony charges” if he weren’t president of the United States, they said. Some of these signers were left-wing pundits as you’d expect, but others served in Republican administrations, including Jeffrey Harris, a former Justice Department attorney under Ronald Reagan and a friend of Rudy Giuliani. “Whether to prosecute this kind of conduct was not a close prosecutorial call,” Harris told one newspaper when asked about signing the statement. “This was a no-brainer.” I’ll leave that conclusion to others, but at a bare minimum, episodes like the one with McGahn are entirely inexcusable for a US leader.
One of the biggest casualties of the Mueller saga was the FBI. The agents that work in the Hoover Building, its headquarters, have no other motive than to serve their country and root out the truth. I’ve seen their work up close. Yet they’ve received a merciless, ongoing beating from the president. Many of these investigators quietly cheered for candidate Donald Trump outside of work, and now they can’t believe the man who tells law enforcement he’ll “have their backs” is stabbing them in theirs, regularly. The FBI director has tried to stand up for his workforce, saying in response to presidential criticism, “The opinions I care about are the opinions of the people who actually know us through our work.” It’s not enough to counter Trump’s megaphone.
The president claims the bureau is an untrustworthy breeding ground of Deep-State conspirators. Over and over again, he calls the FBI “crooked” and disparages its employees. “Tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels,” “a tool of anti-Trump political actors,” “politicized the sacred investigative process,” “tainted,” “very dishonest,” “worst in history,” “its reputation in tatters.” Never has an American president taken aim so often, at so many people, for such terrible reasons. Not enough folks around Trump have pushed back and told him to cut the crap, so the president continues pummeling another democratic institution unabated.
The result is that millions of Americans now have an excuse to doubt the conclusions of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Trump’s broadsides against the FBI are inspiring commentators to politicize the bureau’s activities and invent conspiracy theories, as Fox News host Tucker Carlson did not long ago when he ridiculed the FBI’s warnings about the rise of white nationalist violence as “a hoax.” Tell that to the families who’ve lost loved ones to racially motivated mass shootings.
Oversight in the Dark
Donald Trump’s attacks on the executive branch and the judicial branch leave one other institution to check his power—the United States Congress. The authorities of the legislative branch are enumerated in the Constitution in Article I, before all others. The ordering was intentional. The Founders believed Congress was the closest to the people. It was the body of their representatives, who were chosen more frequently than any other branch of government, and although all three were meant to be co-equal, if any branch had primacy, it was meant to be the legislative.
The US Congress has been a persistent irritant to our nation’s chief executive, even when both chambers—the House and Senate—were controlled by Republicans. It’s clear to anyone who’s ever had a serious discussion with the president about the legislative process that he has no idea how it works, or is supposed to work. Senate traditions, such as the filibuster, mean nothing to him, and he finds it farcical that congressional committees have authority to oversee his agencies. He is forced to re-learn daily that it’s necessary to build bipartisan consensus to get anything substantial accomplished, and then he promptly forgets.
Now more than ever is an appropriate time for Congress to play its watchdog role. The president knows this, too, which is why he has sought to further diminish public support for the body by deflecting criticism onto US representatives and senators for his own failings, sneering at the dictates of the legislative branch, and actively obstructing congressional oversight of his administration.
The president is grateful to have other politicians to blame. When he didn’t get the first budget deal he wanted? The fault went to the Republican-controlled Congress. When he didn’t get the second budget deal he wanted? The still-Republican-controlled Congress. The third time around? Congress, this time run by the Democrats. Factories closing in America? “Get smart Congress!” Immigration? “Congress, fund the WALL!” Caring for our nation’s veterans? “Congress must fix.” The failure to reform health care? “Congress must pass a STRONG law.” Children dying in homeland security’s custody? “Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats.” You get the picture.
Congress is an easy target because it doesn’t move very fast. This is partly by constitutional design. The architects of our nation wanted all sides to come together when there were shared interests, and they wanted to avoid a thin majority being able to steamroll everyone else. That’s why Trump told us to hire him, right? He said he could cut good deals; he was better at it than anyone in the world. Yet for a man who built a reputation on negotiating, Trump turned out to be a pretty terrible dealmaker. His record of bringing everyone together on Capitol Hill is dismal. That’s why he’s forced to declare emergencies, on matters ranging from the border to foreign policy, which allows him to take actions which he knows would never be supported by bipartisan majorities. He spends more time posting snarky messages about members of Congress than trying to build support for his agenda, preferring a good schoolyard spat over the hard work of legislating. Consequently, his congressional-relations aides are in a perpetual state of consternation.