By Byron York, Washington Examiner April 3, 2019
What was President Trump up to when he publicly attacked the work of Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller? What was going on behind the scenes between the White House and Mueller’s office? Was there cooperation? A fight over privilege? And just how mad was Trump at Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy Rod Rosenstein when the special counsel was appointed?
Veteran attorney John Dowd was President Trump’s lawyer for a critical period of the Trump-Russia investigation, from June 2017 until March 2018. In a new podcast, Dowd offered an unusually frank inside look at what was going on between the president and the prosecutor. (The new podcast follows another, equally revealing, session with Dowd last week.) Taken together, Dowd’s insights show a relationship between Trump and the special counsel that was quite different from what appeared in many media accounts. A look at some of what Dowd had to say:
Trump’s attacks on Mueller
In our earlier talk, Dowd stressed that the Trump White House fully cooperated with Mueller’s investigation, and that on more than one occasion Trump instructed Dowd to inform Mueller that the president respected the prosecutor’s work. But how could one say Trump fully cooperated when the president was, at the same time, loudly denouncing the probe as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax,” and bashing Mueller’s prosecutors as “17 angry Democrats”?
The answer lay in Trump’s longtime habit of operating on two levels. On the surface, Trump sets off controversies, often using Twitter to say something outrageous that sets the media agenda and leaves some commentators with their hair on fire. At the same time, below the surface, Trump is actually taking steps to get a particular job done.
That was true with the Russia probe. For public consumption, Trump was denouncing Mueller and trashing his team. Behind the scenes, Trump was cooperating and making sure his staff did the same. The Trump White House offered everyone (except, of course, the president himself) to be interviewed, and reams and reams of documents that other White Houses might have withheld on the grounds of executive or other privilege. So Trump simultaneously attacked and cooperated.
Asked about the attacks, Dowd said Mueller understood that Trump had to mount a political defense on the Russia issue. “Bob understood this, it was political,” Dowd said. ” [Trump] had to handle the political side, and that was his way of doing it with his tweets and his comments … Bob was a big boy about the political side of it. He understood the president had to address the politics of it. He couldn’t just say nothing. People were pounding him about this thing every day, both privately and publicly, and he had to take [Mueller] on.”
Mueller’s only real concern about the president’s rhetoric, Dowd said, was the worry that it might send a message to Trump’s side not to cooperate.
“Early on, when the president started teeing off on Mueller, Mueller indicated to me that he was worried that some people might not cooperate,” Dowd said. “I said, well we’ve encouraged everyone to cooperate, and if you want me to say something publicly about that, and the president, we’re happy to do it. And we did. We encouraged everyone who was asked to cooperate … Bob was satisfied with that. It never came up again.”
In the end, Dowd said, Mueller “acknowledged that all the witnesses told the truth, all the documents were there, there was nothing missing, no documents destroyed.” The level of cooperation, Dowd said, was “truly remarkable,” all while the president distracted the world with his tweets.
The privilege agreement In both conversations, Dowd described some of the materials Trump handed over to Mueller. For example, he pointed to the notes of Annie Donaldson, who was White House counsel Don McGahn’s chief of staff. The notes memorialized many White House meetings in which the president discussed the Russia matter with top advisers. They were extensive. Dowd said it took many hours to read through them. Even though Trump could have claimed executive or other privilege to withhold them from Mueller, he instead turned them over to the special counsel’s office.
Why? Dowd explained that fellow Trump lawyer Ty Cobb came up with an idea for the White House to turn over the documents under the terms of an informal understanding with Mueller. The idea was this: Mueller was in the executive branch. The White House was in the executive branch. The White House would hand over the material, one executive branch entity to another, without claiming any privilege, provided Mueller would agree that, if he intended to use the material in any public way, he would first consult the White House.
“It was the idea of Ty Cobb to fashion this so that we could expedite the production of documents and testimony,” Dowd said. “You can imagine what a nightmare it would be to take document by document and assert the privilege, because most of it was within [executive] privilege, and indeed the White House communications privilege. I thought it was a great idea. Ty got Bob’s and [top deputy James] Quarles’ promise that if they needed to use any of it publicly, they would come back to the White House.”
I asked how that might work in an adversarial relationship. After all, Mueller’s staff were prosecutors. They might want to use the material to indict the president (against Justice Department policy but discussed publicly at the time), or to create a road map for Congress to impeach him. How could Trump go along with that? Was that evidence of an extraordinary level of trust?
“It was,” Dowd said. “I would not call it adversarial. That comes when you charge. This was more inquisitorial. Bob was simply investigating, inquiring into certain matters that had been brought to his attention … and there was indeed more trust in our relationship than in any in my entire career.”
Jeff Sessions and the Mueller appointment
Although Dowd consistently described an atmosphere of professionalism and cooperation between the Trump team and the Mueller investigation, he nonetheless remained unhappy that there was a Mueller investigation in the first place. And he said he has many unanswered questions about the role of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
“How the hell did that happen?” Dowd asked, referring to the May 17, 2017, appointment of Mueller. “On that day, that’s the day after the president interviewed Mueller for FBI director and didn’t want him, and they discussed the conflict they had with the Trump golf club. The next day, Sessions and Jody Hunt, who was Sessions’ chief of staff, were in the Oval Office talking, when I think Don McGahn or someone walked in and said Rosenstein has just appointed Bob Mueller special counsel.”
Sessions, of course, had recused himself from the Russia investigation, an action that made Trump angry to this day. Now, in the Oval Office, the attorney general was blindsided by the Mueller news. “Sessions was just horrified,” Dowd said. “He was so embarrassed. And the president said [to Sessions] how could you not know? And Jody Hunt, who was the chief of staff for the attorney general, did not know, and he was horrified. And poor Sessions resigned right then and there. They started drafting a resignation letter. He was so embarrassed and humiliated.”
“And then afterwards Hunt went back to the Department,” Dowd continued. “He walked in Rosenstein’s office and said [Rosenstein] was hunkered down behind his desk and asked Hunt, are they going to fire me? Think about that for a minute. I mean, no one knows how Rosenstein and Mueller ever got together, why Mueller was picked. No one has ever answered any questions about that. And then the order he issued doesn’t have a crime in it … It’s a counterintelligence investigation … And Jody Hunt wrote in his notes that he told Rosenstein that what he had done was despicable and unprofessional. And that’s all I know about it. I don’t know any more.”
The Sessions explosion
It’s well known that the president was angry at Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia probe. Trump did not feel the recusal was necessary, and even if Sessions was going to do it, Trump was unhappy that the attorney general did not give him some prior notice. Now, many, many people have heard Trump go off on Sessions, both publicly and privately.
“For good reason,” Dowd said. “It’s just like what Rosenstein did. They ambushed their president. I’ll never understand what Sessions did … I don’t understand one, why Sessions recused himself for shaking hands with a guy at a reception, but worse, after he was confirmed as attorney general, he decided that he couldn’t perform overseeing a departmental probe, he didn’t call the president and say look, I’ve decided I can’t do this.”
“The president was completely blindsided, and it was wrong,” Dowd continued. “Of course, poor Sessions is the victim. But shame on him.”
But didn’t Sessions have a legitimate reason? After all, the investigation was into the Trump campaign, and Sessions played a role in the campaign. “No, that’s nonsense,” Dowd countered. “That’s not a conflict. Bob Mueller had a business dispute with the president. He didn’t step aside.” Dowd attributed talk of a Sessions conflict to “blowhards” in the Senate.
Dowd wasn’t finished. “[Sessions] was just a miserable failure as an attorney general, I don’t feel sorry for him at all. [Trump] had good reasons to be upset with Sessions’ performance.” Beyond that, Dowd said, “The guy [Sessions] hurt him. He hurt him. He did tremendous injury to the president, and shame on him for doing it. And I agree with the president. I’d have fired the son of a bitch right away.”
Those guns-drawn Manafort and Stone raids
Dowd has long maintained that he thinks former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was treated unfairly. We didn’t delve into the entire Manafort case, but I asked him about the July 26, 2017, raid in which FBI agents, with guns drawn, executed a search warrant at Manafort’s home.
“I didn’t like that at all,” Dowd said. “From all I knew, Manafort and his lawyers had been cooperating forever … But I also knew [Mueller prosecutor] Andrew Weissmann’s reputation as really over the top. … It was just unnecessary … I learned that all they got were the files of [law firm] Wilmer Hale, who were preparing Manafort for his testimony before some committee of the Senate.”
“[Manafort’s] wife was in bed,” Dowd continued. “I still think it’s outrageous … Shame on them … I just don’t understand Bob Mueller and his people doing something like that … It was a terrible abuse of power … It was unnecessary … To pull this stunt in the morning, with an army, and then they did it again to Roger Stone … ”
When I asked about the Stone arrest, another guns-drawn affair, Dowd said, “It was an amphibious landing. I used to be in the Marines. I’ve done an amphibious landing. I couldn’t believe they were doing one at Stone’s house! It’s muscular, it’s over the top, it’s designed to scare … I’ve never gotten anything, and I did organized crime cases for six or seven years, corruption cases, I never got anything by fear … I don’t think it’s a great legacy for the Mueller probe. I’d be embarrassed to be associated with it.”
Bad press
It’s safe to say the Mueller investigation was the most intensely covered political investigation in American history. A not-insignificant number of stories about the investigation contained errors. Some were completely wrong. Mueller almost never commented on them. But Dowd described a tacit arrangement in which Mueller’s office signaled to Trump’s lawyers when a major press report was wrong.
On July 20, 2017, Bloomberg News published a story headlined, “Mueller Expands Probe to Trump Business Transactions.” The story was false, Dowd said, because he had checked with sources inside the Trump Organization, and had also checked the requests Mueller had made for information.
“We had an understanding with Bob and [deputy James Quarles] that if the list that they had originally given us changed, we would get a heads-up first that they were adding to their list,” Dowd said.
“I knew from other sources that [the Bloomberg story] wasn’t true. I knew from the Trump side of things that it was nonsense. There was nobody out investigating those other transactions. I also told the Bloomberg reporter, who refused to accept it, that I had not heard and it was not on our list of items from the special counsel, and that they would tell us first.”
Bloomberg published anyway. “I think I let a day or two pass and I called Quarles,” Dowd said. “The hard part about it is they don’t like to be in a position to make a public statement. So I had to go by his office to drop something off, and we met outside. And he said, in code, don’t believe everything you read in the papers. I said, I got it, OK, and I could then say [to the president] I talked to the special counsel and there was no basis for it. But I already knew, because I knew their word was good. But I couldn’t get the press to accept it. They were off on their own toot.”
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