Francis understood the challenges posed by Mar-a-Lago, but he also understood that the president needed time away from the demands of serving as president and his mounting legal problems. As a result, the chief of staff did little to control Trump’s time at Mar-a-Lago beyond encouraging him to avoid the dining room. In retrospect, the chief of staff’s hands-off approach at Mar-a-Lago appears to have made it all the more attractive to the president as a home-away-from-home.
On the afternoon of Friday, March 20, Trump arrived at Mar-a-Lago alone. First Lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, were in New York, at Trump Tower.
When Trump spoke briefly with Francis at 5:06 PM, the chief of staff encouraged the president to skip the dining room and take dinner in his room.
Francis was looking forward to a relatively uneventful Saturday. As usual during the president’s trips to Mar-a-Lago, no formal intelligence briefing was slated for March 21. The only item on Trump’s schedule was a round of golf with his old friend Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots.
The crash of an airliner in South Korea had been reported in the American press shortly after the loss of Flight 411 at 11:28 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Friday. But it was not public knowledge that the aircraft had been shot down until the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the official news outlet of Kim Jong Un’s government, issued its statement more than an hour later, at 1:11 PM on Saturday in Seoul—just after midnight in Palm Beach.
After the North Korean announcement, Francis conferred with Kellogg about whether they should inform the president. It was unclear if Trump was still awake. They briefly discussed calling the residence at Mar-a-Lago. “I remember Jack looked at me and then looked down at his phone,” Kellogg recalled to this commission’s investigators, “and then he said, ‘We’ll know pretty shortly if he’s still awake.’” They both checked Twitter, but saw no new updates to Trump’s Twitter feed. The newest tweet was still an angry lambasting of John Bolton’s new memoir.
If Trump had gone to bed, Francis concluded, it would be a mistake to wake him. The president would need to be well rested and alert for the coming day of intense discussions with the South Koreans, Japanese, and other world leaders as they attempted to contain the crisis in East Asia.
Kellogg looked at the schedule and suggested that they let Kraft know that the president might be unable to keep their tee time. Francis disagreed. “We’re going to have to be very careful not to disrupt his normal routine,” the chief of staff recalled telling Kellogg. “This is dangerous business, and we need to keep him calm and focused.” They worried about the appearance of Trump playing golf during the crisis, but in the end they decided it would be easier to manage the fallout from the press than the fallout from the president.
Kellogg asked Francis what time they should inform President Trump of the North Korean attack. Francis said that they should allow him to continue with his normal routine, as he would on any normal day—that is, to awake around 5:30, turn on the news, and start making telephone calls. Invariably, his first call would be to Francis, who could then ask the president to come down into the SCIF for a briefing. The plan was simply to let the president sleep and try to treat the day as normally as possible, not interfering with his routine. “We saw it on foreign trips all the time,” Francis told investigators later. “When you disrupted his schedule, he got really cranky.”
In the meantime, Francis and Kellogg decided to move to the SCIF at Mar-a-Lago and begin a long, sleepless night of attempting to get ahead of the emerging crisis. Kellogg went there immediately so as to place a call to his South Korea counterpart, Chung Eui-yong. Chung’s office said that he was in a meeting and would call Kellogg back.
Francis, on the other hand, did not go immediately down into the SCIF with Kellogg. Instead, he first stopped by the rooms of the military aides traveling with the president. Among their other duties, these five mid-ranking officers took turns carrying the president’s Emergency Satchel—the bag, also known as the “football,” that contained the communications information that would allow the president to order a nuclear strike.
Francis spoke with each of the aides in turn. Later, he would insist that he was careful not to say anything that might be seen as disloyal or questioning the president’s competence. Instead, he simply informed the officers that the next few days were going to be stressful and that, if the president should ask any of them to do anything unusual, they should check with the chief of staff first.
While President Trump slept and Francis and Kellogg readied for the day ahead, the staff of the State Department Operations Center—the hub that maintains around-the-clock communications for American diplomats—was busy with preparations of its own. Soon, one of the country’s top ambassadors would be working feverishly as well.
The “Ops Center” contacted Nikki Haley, at the time the US ambassador to the United Nations, at 11:22 PM on March 20 to inform her that a South Korean airliner had crashed and later to inform her that North Korea had taken credit for shooting it down. This call began an intense, nightlong period of diplomatic maneuvering by Ambassador Haley. Her diplomatic efforts, conducted in isolation from those of the White House, have come under scrutiny from critics who believe that the chaotic and uncoordinated response by the Trump administration may have allowed the crisis to careen out of control.
When the Ops Center called, Haley had been asleep in her apartment at United Nations Plaza, a residence leased by the Department of State. Haley rarely worked late. Instead, she had made a special effort to maintain a semblance of a normal family life, keeping regular hours, attending her son’s basketball games, and making time to see family.
Haley’s political ambitions, however, had often interrupted her family’s peace. Her campaign adviser when she ran for governor of South Carolina, Will Folks, later alleged that he’d had an affair with Haley during the campaign. She denied the rumors, but many people both in and outside of the US government believed Folks, particularly after he published text messages and phone logs between himself and Ms. Haley. Of particular interest was a list of late-night phone calls, including one that began at 2:24 AM and ended 146 minutes later. Haley was adamant that the lengthy calls were work-related. Folks was, after all, her campaign manager.
Once in office, even uglier rumors about Haley began to spread, owing in no small part to a thinly veiled allegation in a 2018 book, Fire and Fury by journalist Michael Wolff, that Haley was the object of the “special attention” of President Trump. The rumors were not true, and Haley found them disgusting and sexist. Even Folks had said he found them impossible to believe. And yet Haley felt compelled to deny them publicly.
“The worst part,” according to a foreign service officer who worked in Haley’s office, “is that she had to know Trump was the one telling people.” Trump had famously posed as his own publicist to spread rumors to gossip columnists about supposed affairs he’d had with a number of well-known women—including Carla Bruni, the first lady of France, who had been compelled to come forward to deny Trump’s boasts. Aides thought that Haley would have been a fool not to realize that it was Trump himself who was boasting to his friends about what she had done to stay in his good graces, both to boost his fragile ego and to diminish her standing.
As a result of this backbiting, Haley was careful not to do anything that would breathe life into the rumors about the nature of her relationship with President Trump. “Short of a nuclear war,” the foreign service officer explained, “Nikki Haley was not calling Donald Trump after hours.”