As President Trump met with advisers in the Oval Office in May 2017 to discuss replacements for the F.B.I. director he had just fired, Attorney General Jeff Sessions slipped out of the room to take a call.
When he came back, he gave Mr. Trump bad news: Robert S. Mueller III had just been appointed as a special counsel to take over the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and any actions by the president to impede it.
Mr. Trump slumped in his chair. “Oh, my God,” he said. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
It has not been the end of his presidency, but it has come to consume it. Although the resulting two-year investigation ended without charges against Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller’s report painted a damning portrait of a White House dominated by a president desperate to thwart the inquiry only to be restrained by aides equally desperate to thwart his orders.
The White House that emerges from more than 400 pages of Mr. Mueller’s report is a hotbed of conflict infused by a culture of dishonesty — defined by a president who lies to the public and his own staff, then tries to get his aides to lie for him. Mr. Trump repeatedly threatened to fire lieutenants who did not carry out his wishes while they repeatedly threatened to resign rather than cross lines of propriety or law.
At one juncture after another, Mr. Trump made his troubles worse, giving in to anger and grievance and lashing out in ways that turned advisers into witnesses against him. He was saved from an accusation of obstruction of justice, the report makes clear, in part because aides saw danger and stopped him from following his own instincts. Based on contemporaneous notes, emails, texts and F.B.I. interviews, the report draws out scene after scene of a White House on the edge.
At one point, Reince Priebus, then the White House chief of staff, said the president’s attacks on his own attorney general meant that he had “D.O.J. by the throat.” At another, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, complained to Mr. Priebus that the president was trying to get him to “do crazy shit.” Mr. Trump was equally unhappy with Mr. McGahn, calling him a “lying bastard.”
‘We’ll Take Care of You’
From its first days, Mr. Trump’s presidency struggled to contain the threat stemming from Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and suspicions about his team’s contacts with Moscow.
Just weeks after taking office, Mr. Trump pushed out his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who lied to the F.B.I. about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador.
But Mr. Trump hugged Mr. Flynn, telling him: “We’ll give you a good recommendation. You’re a good guy. We’ll take care of you.”
Mr. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, mistakenly assumed that getting rid of Mr. Flynn would derail the investigation then being led by James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director. During lunch with Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, Mr. Flynn called and Mr. Kushner spoke with him.
“The president cares about you,” Mr. Kushner told Mr. Flynn. “I’ll get the president to send out a positive tweet about you later.”
Mr. Trump was worried about Mr. Comey, too. During the lunch, he asked Mr. Christie to call his friend Mr. Comey. “Tell him he’s part of the team,” Mr. Trump instructed.
Mr. Christie thought the president’s request was “nonsensical” and never followed through.
Other advisers feared Mr. Trump was not telling the truth to the public. After a news conference at which he denied any business dealings in Russia, Michael D. Cohen, then the president’s personal lawyer who had been trying to arrange a Trump Tower in Moscow, expressed concern.
Mr. Trump said that the project had not yet been finalized. “Why mention it if it is not a deal?” he said.
‘You Left Me on an Island’
With the investigation bearing down on him, Mr. Trump wanted to make sure Mr. Sessions remained in charge at the Justice Department, and he asked Mr. McGahn to tell the attorney general not to recuse himself because of his work on the Trump campaign. Mr. McGahn tried to head off a recusal by calling the attorney general three times, but Mr. Sessions announced his recusal that afternoon.
Mr. Trump was furious. Summoning Mr. McGahn to the Oval Office the next day, he said, “I don’t have a lawyer,” and added that he wished Roy Cohn, the famed bare-knuckled attorney who once worked for him in New York, was still his lawyer. Mr. Trump said that Robert F. Kennedy protected John F. Kennedy, and Eric H. Holder Jr. protected Barack Obama.
“You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations?” he demanded. “Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?”
Mr. Trump screamed at Mr. McGahn about how weak Mr. Sessions was, and Stephen K. Bannon, then the president’s chief strategist, thought he was as mad as he had ever seen him.
The president asked Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, if he could do anything to rebut news stories on the Russia matter. The admiral’s deputy, Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, considered it the most unusual experience of his 40 years in government and prepared a memo describing the call that he and Admiral Rogers signed and put in a safe.
Mr. Trump groused about the Russia investigation with his intelligence chiefs on multiple other occasions. At one point, Admiral Rogers recalled a private conversation in which the president said something like the “Russia thing has got to go away.” But the intelligence chiefs said they did not feel pressured to take specific actions.
Mr. Trump increasingly focused his ire on Mr. Comey, who during testimony on Capitol Hill on May 3, 2017, refused to answer questions about whether the president himself was under investigation.
Read the Mueller Report: Searchable Document and Index
The findings from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, are now available to the public. The redacted report details his two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Mueller Report Is Released
We dig into the highly anticipated findings of the special counsel’s two-year investigation.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Mueller Report Is Released
Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Rachel Quester, Theo Balcomb and Paige Cowett, and edited by Lisa Tobin
We dig into the highly anticipated findings of the special counsel’s two-year investigation.
Speaker
It’s up. All right. It’s up. The report’s up. Sorry.
[Interposing Voices]
[Music]
Michael Barbaro
From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”
Speaker
O.K. Mike?
Mike
Yeah.
Speaker
I want you to start on page 215 — “factual results of the obstruction investigation.”
Michael Barbaro
Today —
Speaker
Sharon, here’s what I want you to excerpt. I want you to start on page four. Nick, I want you to start at the bottom of page eight.
Michael Barbaro
448 pages, two years in the making.
Speaker
That’s new. We didn’t know that.
Michael Barbaro
What we learned from the Mueller report.
Speaker 1
That quote is new.
Speaker 2
It’s a pretty good quote.
Michael Barbaro
It’s Friday, April 19.
Michael Schmidt
Michael, can you hear us?
Mark Mazzetti
Hey, Michael.
Michael Barbaro
Yeah. Hey, guys.
Michael Schmidt
Hey.
Mark Mazzetti
Hey.
Michael Barbaro
All right. Mike Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, it’s 9:15 on Thursday night. You’ve both now spent about 10 hours reading the Mueller report. Tell me about this thing.
Michael Schmidt
It’s a breathtaking document. It’s over 400 pages of detailed insights and accounts of enormous issues we’ve been focused on over the past two years. It’s divided into, essentially, two halves — one for Russia, one for the president’s actions in office.
Michael Barbaro
In other words, collusion and obstruction. Those are the two buckets.
Mark Mazzetti
Right. The first half detailing the contact between Russians and Trump advisers isn’t enormously revealing, in the sense that we had already heard some weeks ago that there had not been a, quote, “criminal conspiracy” found by Mueller. At the same time, there’s an enormous amount of detail concluding that in the midst of this really historic effort by the Russians to sabotage the election — hacking and leaking of emails, social media manipulation, fake news — it says that the Trump campaign welcomed this. They saw a real benefit of what the Russians were doing, even if at the end of the day there wasn’t an active conspiracy.
Michael Schmidt
He’s essentially saying that they were interested, they sought out information about emails, they wanted to know more about how they could get their hands on these messages. They welcomed all this, but they never crossed the line into breaking the law. Just because they sought out the fruits of the Russian hack doesn’t mean that they were part of the crime.
Michael Barbaro
And just to be very clear, how is what you’re describing, collectively, not collusion?
Mark Mazzetti
Well, I think we need to be careful, because the attorney general said that there was no collusion. And the president said there was no collusion. But the Mueller report is more nuanced. And the Mueller report says, you know, this “collusion” word doesn’t really mean anything to us. There’s no legal standard of collusion. So what we’re going to look at is what is a crime, and that is conspiracy. And that’s what we have to judge all of this voluminous evidence against. And they said that a conspiracy is two parties acting together in concert to break the law. And what Mueller is very clear about is that there is, quote, “insufficient evidence” of a conspiracy. He is not saying there was nothing. He is not saying full exoneration. But he’s saying there is insufficient evidence to meet the standard that he had established of a criminal conspiracy breaking the law.
Michael Barbaro
And what would Mueller have needed to see for this to add up to conspiracy?
Michael Schmidt
That would have looked like a conversation between the Trump campaign and the Russians where the Trump campaign was saying, hey guys, can you go break into the D.N.C. and steal some emails so we can then get them out and embarrass the Democrats and help us politically during the campaign? That would have gotten you down the conspiracy path. And they did not find that.
Michael Barbaro
O.K. So let’s talk about obstruction. Mike, last time we talked, a couple weeks back, Mueller had sent his report to Barr. And Barr had sent a summary of that report to Congress in advance of this full report. And the most confusing thing about that summary was that Mueller had not made a call on whether the evidence added up to obstruction of justice.
Michael Schmidt
And today, we get to see what Mueller’s explanation is for why he didn’t make a determination on whether the president broke the law. And it’s not clear-cut. What it essentially is is that the president, under Justice Department policy, cannot be indicted. And because the president cannot be indicted, it’s unfair to accuse him while he’s in office of breaking the law, because there’s no way for him to go to court to defend himself. So, dear American public, Mueller essentially says, I am not going to make a determination on that issue. That could be made after the president leaves office. But for now, that would be unfair. So what I will do is I will lay out for you what I found, what the potential obstruction was, why it may be illegal. And after the president leaves office, the Justice Department could make a determination that he indeed broke the law and bring a case. And at the end of explaining why a determination was not made, Mueller says, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. So Mueller is basically saying, if we felt comfortable that the president had done nothing wrong, we would tell you. And we are not telling you that.
Michael Barbaro
Well, Mike, you mentioned the incidents that he was not going to use as a basis for charging the president, because he felt he couldn’t charge the president. What were those that he laid out in the report?
Michael Schmidt
Well, there’s about a dozen. And they follow in chronological order how Trump misled the public about his relationship with Russia, misled the public about his knowledge that Russia was behind the hacks. And as the presidency goes on and Mueller is appointed in May of 2017, right after he takes office, the president starts to sort of lose his grip as he tries to maintain control of the investigation. He was intent on using his power as the head of the executive branch to protect himself and use the tools at his disposal — the people running the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the intelligence community — to help protect him from this investigation.
Michael Barbaro
And what are some examples of that — specifics?
Michael Schmidt
Well, a lot of them are ones that we know well. The firing of James Comey. His efforts to get his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to un-recuse himself from the Russia investigation, essentially reassert his control over something that he has stepped aside from because he has a conflict of interest. And when the president can’t get that done, he basically tries to get rid of Sessions and install a loyalist atop the Justice Department. These are things that had been reported in the press. We get a fuller, richer picture of them. And we really see what the president was saying behind closed doors and the immense pressure he was putting on people to try and use the system to protect himself from the system. But then we learn about incidents that we knew little about, like how the president went completely outside of his administration in government to Corey Lewandowski, his first campaign manager.
Michael Barbaro
Mm-hmm.
Michael Schmidt
And he leaned on Corey in the summer of 2017 to try and pressure Sessions, his attorney general. So here’s the president of the United States using someone who doesn’t even work for him to get to Sessions and try and get Sessions out there publicly to help clear Trump’s name. It’s just a remarkable way of using presidential power.
Michael Barbaro
Which suggests that the president was meeting resistance within his own administration, and therefore reached out to somebody who didn’t even work for the government to try to get him to achieve this end.
Michael Schmidt
I don’t think many in the public will want to hold up the president’s aides as heroes, and a lot of them are probably not. But there is a picture here of folks that stopped the president time and time again and thwarted him from doing things that may have actually gotten him into trouble, that may have crossed that line, that may have made a stronger argument for Mueller about why the president did obstruct justice. One of the most detailed ones is on Trump’s efforts to get rid of Mueller and how his White House counsel would not do that. He would not call the Justice Department on the president’s behalf and say Mueller has to be removed for what the White House counsel, Don McGahn, thought were some bogus reasons Trump had cooked up about why he didn’t like Mueller. And in the document, as Mueller is recounting what happened in this incident, there are Nixonian echoes. It says, on June 17, 2017, the president called McGahn at home and directed him to call the acting attorney general and say that the special counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed. McGahn did not carry out the direction, however, deciding that he would resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential “Saturday Night Massacre” — a reference to when Richard Nixon fired the special counsel who was investigating him.
Michael Barbaro
I recognize that this question is a little bit meta, but if getting rid of Mueller had meant that the report was never completed, wouldn’t that have finally been obstruction of justice? Because, literally, an investigation was obstructed.
Mark Mazzetti
There does seem to be a determination here about the success of the president’s efforts, or lack of success — that the fact that the Mueller investigation continued and finished means there is less of a case that the president obstructed justice. If there had been more of a Nixonian moment, where there was an 18-minute gap in tapes that were deliberately erased, that there was some tangible thing that had happened that had meant that prosecutors couldn’t get to the truth, there might possibly have been a different judgment and a different outcome.
Michael Barbaro
Right. I keep thinking of that 18-minute deletion when I think about Don McGahn. It’s as if nobody had ever said to Nixon what Don McGahn had said to President Trump — no, I’m not going to delete that tape. Sorry. But that’s what Don McGahn did to the president. That’s what happened with Trump over and over again.
Mark Mazzetti
Because everyone has seen “All the President’s Men,” and they know what happens. And, you know, you don’t want to be the guy who carries out the “Saturday Night Massacre.”
Michael Barbaro
So the president really has these people around him to thank, in a lot of ways.
Michael Schmidt
At the end of the day, there were these folks that were not going to go that extra inch and go over the line for him. And it looks like those measures probably saved him.
Mark Mazzetti
I mean, Mueller lays this point out explicitly. This is a quote from the report. “The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful. But that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or cede to his requests. Comey did not end the investigation of Flynn, which ultimately resulted in Flynn’s prosecution and conviction for lying to the F.B.I. McGahn did not tell the acting attorney general that the special counsel must be removed, but was instead prepared to resign over the president’s order. Lewandowski and Dearborn did not deliver the president’s message to Sessions that he should confine the Russian investigation to future election meddling only. And McGahn refused to recede from his recollections about events surrounding the president’s direction to have the special counsel removed, despite the president’s multiple demands to do so.”
Michael Barbaro
Hmm. And Mike, before seeing this report, our understanding of why Mueller may not have reached a conclusion on obstruction of justice was that obstruction has a lot to do with intent. Why did the president take the actions that he took? What did we learn from the report about how Mueller might have been thinking about that?
Michael Schmidt
We learn that the president was intent on ending the investigation into himself, but it’s less clear about what was truly motivating him.
Michael Barbaro
I guess I don’t quite understand that. If his intent is to end the investigation, how is that not obstruction of justice?
Mark Mazzetti
This is the heart of this dispute right now.
Michael Schmidt
Yeah.
Mark Mazzetti
It’s a clash of two theories. I mean, Mueller’s team clearly indicated that the actions come up to the line of obstruction of justice — that the intent to end the investigation to preserve his presidency does, in fact, approach something that is criminal obstruction of justice, even if they did not make that determination. The rub here is that it is at odds with the theory of Robert Mueller’s boss, Attorney General Barr. He got the job of attorney general, some say, based on his theory that the president can’t really obstruct justice. Barr says, today, in his press conference —
Archived Recording (William Barr)
President Trump faced an unprecedented situation. As he entered into office and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office.
Mark Mazzetti
At the heart of a obstruction of justice investigation is whether that person has corrupt intent. And his determination is that the president didn’t. And in a way, this big debate over the intent of the president — Barr kind of goes out of his way today to fill in the blanks, to sort of say, well, let’s look at the president’s intent.
Archived Recording (William Barr)
At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the president’s personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was, in fact, no collusion.
Mark Mazzetti
The president felt that this was consuming his presidency.
Archived Recording (William Barr)
There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks. Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation.
Mark Mazzetti
Yeah. He wanted this thing over. So in a way, what was one of the things that was so extraordinary about Barr’s press conference was that he explains the president’s reasoning in a way that the president hasn’t himself.
Michael Barbaro
So Barr would say that trying to end the investigation to protect the presidency is not corrupt motive. In fact, in his telling, it’s arguably even important, maybe even a little bit noble. It’s in the best interest of the American people.
Michael Schmidt
Perhaps patriotic.
Michael Barbaro
Hmm.
Mark Mazzetti
So there’s this totally compelling moment in the middle of the report that paints a scene of the president being told that a special counsel had just been appointed. And I’ll quote directly from the report. “The president slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh, my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.’ The president became angry and lambasted the attorney general for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, ‘How could you let this happen, Jeff?’ The president said the position of attorney general was his most important appointment, and that Sessions had, quote, ‘let him down,’ contrasting him with Eric Holder and Robert Kennedy. Sessions recalled that the president said to him, ‘You were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect. The president returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, ‘Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels, it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years, and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.’” The way this passage reads is the president’s anger about the appointment of a special counsel comes mostly from the recognition that it’s going to imperil his presidency. It means nothing will get done. It means that he’s going to spend the rest of his term fighting it. It’s not because he’s worried that Robert Mueller might find something that will one day land Donald Trump in jail. That’s one reading of this passage that would bolster the argument made by the attorney general that the president faced this extraordinary situation.
Michael Schmidt
I don’t think that makes any sense. Or at least I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how the attorney general can say there’s no issue of an underlying crime here when Donald Trump is sitting there acknowledging the potential threat from the depth and breadth of a special counsel’s investigation. He knew at that point, in May of 2017, that he had had his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, make hush money payments to women. Donald Trump was smart enough to know that a special counsel — like in Bill Clinton or any other presidency — rummages around on one issue and ends up on another. And what happens? Mueller finds these weird transactions. He refers it to another U.S. attorney’s office. And the president is ultimately in a completely separate investigation, named as an unindicted co-conspirator.
Michael Barbaro
Hmm.
Michael Schmidt
How is there not an underlying crime that Donald Trump was afraid about? In July of 2017, myself and two colleagues go into the Oval Office to interview the president. He says, if Mueller looks at my finances, it’s crossing a red line. So what were Trump’s motivations for getting rid of Mueller? Was he really worried about Russia? Or was he worried that, hey, if this guy rummages around on Russia, he’s going to find something else? Indeed, he did.
Michael Barbaro
So Mike, you’re saying that Barr’s argument — that the president is just protecting the presidency — doesn’t really hold up. Because we know for a fact that the president understood, at this point, that when he says, I’m effed, that he has these payments made in coordination with Michael Cohen to these women as hush money, which have nothing to do with the Russia investigation, but which obviously could be incredibly damaging to him, and maybe even criminal.
Michael Schmidt
Look, no one has questioned the president about this in a law enforcement setting. I don’t know exactly what the president’s intentions were, but the idea that there was no underlying criminality in Donald Trump’s life in May of 2017, when Mueller got appointed, is bogus. Because there was. Further, in December of 2017, there is a report out there that Mueller has subpoenaed the president’s bank records.
Michael Barbaro
Mm-hmm.
Michael Schmidt
Before the president’s lawyers are able to get the message to him that the report is wrong, he starts telling White House aides that Mueller has to go.
Michael Barbaro
Hmm.
Michael Schmidt
I do think there’s a decent case to be made that there were underlying issues of criminality within his life. The Justice Department has said that itself.
Michael Barbaro
O.K. So regardless of the president’s intent, is it important whether or not he was successful in impeding this investigation, in thinking about the question of obstruction of justice?
Michael Schmidt
Well, I think for the folks at the Justice Department who had to make the call about whether the president broke the law, one of the factors that played into their declination decision was the fact that when you looked at the investigation, the efforts that the president took did not significantly damage the inquiry.
Michael Barbaro
Right.
Michael Schmidt
Despite the president’s best efforts, he was not very good at obstructing justice.
Michael Barbaro
Right. The existence of the Mueller report today suggests that the investigation did not get obstructed.
Michael Schmidt
Despite all of Donald Trump’s huffing and puffing and trying to get this person to do this and this person to do that, Bob Mueller moved ahead unimpeded for two years, finished his investigation, and the entire country got to see the fruits of it. Show us where the obstruction is, is what the president’s defenders would say.
[Music]
Michael Barbaro
We’ll be right back. So finally, I want to talk about Bill Barr’s role in all this. Because the position of many Democrats today was that Barr — in reaching a decision on obstruction of justice where Mueller did not, in holding a press conference ahead of the report’s release seeming to defend the president, all taken together — has undermined any credibility that he had, and that Democrats and the country need to see for themselves what Mueller had found. How are you thinking about Barr in this moment, having now spent time with the Mueller report?
Mark Mazzetti
I mean, the one thing is clear is that this has been a lot of red meat for Democrats in Congress to keep investigating. And one of the things that they’re going to keep investigating is Barr’s role in this entire process. They are going to try to get him up to testify. They are going to try to get more underlying documents in the Mueller investigation. They now see Barr as a clear target for them. I think a lot of people, because of all these actions, have a much different picture of the attorney general than they did a month or two ago.
Michael Barbaro
And they’re going to try to understand the differences between what Bob Mueller thinks about all this — the supposedly nonpartisan figure — and what Bill Barr thinks about this — the presidential appointee whose allegiances are clearly closer to the president.
Michael Schmidt
There’s one answer to this. And that is that after this entire investigation in which Bob Mueller has said nothing publicly, including today, when there was a press conference held to talk about his report, we need to hear from Bob Mueller. We need for him to explain to us more how they came to this determination that they couldn’t say whether the president violated the law or not. Does Mueller think that Barr has misrepresented some of his findings? What was his relationship with the Justice Department? Did he believe that Congress should deal with this issue and that Barr shouldn’t have made a call on whether the president violated the law? We need to hear from Mueller. We have never heard his voice in the past two years.
Michael Barbaro
So inadvertently, in seeming to protect the president and not be representing Mueller, Bill Barr may be extending Democrats’ interest in this investigation and the trouble for the president.
Mark Mazzetti
Absolutely. If you look back at what Barr has done in the last month, this could have turned out differently for him — if he had put out the report immediately after the letter or as soon after the letter as he could have, if he had characterized the report differently in that four-page letter, and if he hadn’t had a press conference on the day of the release before anyone had seen the report that had this appearance of trying to spin it for the president and protect the president. That seems to have created more problems both for Barr and the president than if they had just released the report.
Michael Barbaro
Mark, thank you very much. Mike, thank you very much.
Mark Mazzetti
Thank you.
Michael Schmidt
Thanks for having us.
[Music]
Michael Barbaro
“The Daily” is made by Theo Balcomb, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Alexandra Leigh Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke and Marc Georges. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Stella Tan, Julia Simon and Samantha Henig. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.
Angry, Mr. Trump wheeled on Mr. Sessions. “This is terrible, Jeff,” he said. “It’s all because you recused.” He added: “You left me on an island. I can’t do anything.”
Mr. Sessions said he had no choice, but said that a new start at the F.B.I. would be appropriate and that the president should consider replacing Mr. Comey.
Mr. Trump was fixated on the F.B.I. director. Mr. Bannon recalled that he brought up Mr. Comey at least eight times on May 3 and May 4. “He told me three times I’m not under investigation,” the president said. “He’s a showboater. He’s a grandstander. I don’t know any Russians. There was no collusion.”
Mr. Bannon told Mr. Trump that he could not fire Mr. Comey because “that ship has sailed” and that it would not stop the investigation.
‘The Beginning of the End?’
Mr. Trump ignored the advice and fired Mr. Comey on May 9, justifying it on criticism of his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email the year before. Overruling objections by Mr. McGahn and Mr. Priebus, Mr. Trump insisted that the letter firing the F.B.I. director state that Mr. Comey told him three times the president was not under investigation.
Aides were alarmed. “Is this the beginning of the end?” Annie Donaldson, Mr. McGahn’s chief of staff, wrote in her notes.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then the president’s deputy press secretary, told reporters that the White House had talked to “countless members of the F.B.I.” who supported the decision to fire the director — but she later admitted to investigators that it was not true. Her comment, she said, was “a slip of the tongue” made “in the heat of the moment” and not founded on anything.
Mr. Comey’s dismissal led the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to appoint Mr. Mueller, a former F.B.I. director, to take over the investigation. Fearing it would mean the end of his presidency, Mr. Trump lashed out again at Mr. Sessions.
“How could you let this happen, Jeff?” he demanded. He told Mr. Sessions, “You were supposed to protect me,” or words to that effect.
“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels, it ruins your presidency,” he added. “It takes years and years, and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
Mr. Trump demanded that his attorney general resign. Mr. Sessions said he would, and he returned to the Oval Office the next day with a resignation letter he handed to Mr. Trump.
The president put the letter in his pocket and repeatedly asked Mr. Sessions whether he wanted to continue serving as attorney general. When Mr. Sessions finally said he did, the president said he wanted him to stay. The two shook hands, but Mr. Trump kept the letter.
When they learned about the letter, Mr. Priebus and Mr. Bannon worried that if he kept it, Mr. Trump could use it to improperly influence Mr. Sessions; it would, said Mr. Priebus, serve as a “shock collar” keeping the attorney general on a leash.
The next day, May 19, Mr. Trump left the White House for the Middle East. On Air Force One flying from Saudi Arabia to Israel three days later, the president took the letter from his pocket and showed it off to aides. Later on the trip, when Mr. Priebus asked Mr. Trump for the letter, the president claimed he did not have it and it was actually back at the White House.
Three days after the president returned to Washington, he finally returned the letter to Mr. Sessions with a note: “Not accepted.”
But he did not give up trying to regain control of the investigation, calling Mr. Sessions at home to ask if he would “unrecuse” himself and direct the Justice Department to prosecute Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Sessions refused.
‘Mueller Has to Go’
If the attorney general would not rein in the special counsel, Mr. Trump resolved to find someone who would. On June 17, Mr. Trump called Mr. McGahn from Camp David and told him to have Mr. Rosenstein fire Mr. Mueller because of conflicts of interest.
During a 23-minute conversation, Mr. Trump said something along the lines of: “You got to do this. You got to call Rod.” Mr. McGahn, who along with other advisers believed that the supposed conflicts were “silly” and “not real,” was perturbed by the call.
The president then called again. “Mueller has to go,” he told Mr. McGahn. “Call me back when you do it.”
Mr. McGahn decided he would resign, determined not to repeat the experience of Robert H. Bork, who complied with President Richard M. Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate prosecutor during the Saturday Night Massacre before going on to serve as an appeals court judge.
Mr. McGahn, saying that he wanted to be more like Judge Bork and not “Saturday Night Massacre Bork,” drove to the office to pack his possessions and submit his resignation. When Mr. McGahn told Mr. Priebus and Mr. Bannon, they urged him not to resign and he backed off.
Undeterred, Mr. Trump summoned his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to the White House two days later and dictated a message for him to deliver to Mr. Sessions that would have effectively limited the scope of the investigation to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In the message, Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Sessions to give a speech declaring that Mr. Trump was “being treated very unfairly” by the investigation.
“He shouldn’t have a Special Prosecutor/Counsel b/c he hasn’t done anything wrong,” Mr. Sessions was to say. “I was on the campaign w/him for nine months, there were no Russians involved with him. I know it for a fact b/c I was there. He didn’t do anything wrong except he ran the greatest campaign in American history.”
A scheduling conflict scotched the meeting, but Mr. Trump raised it again a month later, saying that if Mr. Sessions did not meet, Mr. Lewandowski should tell him he was fired. Mr. Lewandowski assured him that the message would be delivered.
Hours later, the president criticized the attorney general in an interview with The New York Times. While the meeting with Mr. Lewandowski was never held, Mr. Sessions understood his tenuous position and carried a letter of resignation in his pocket every time he visited the White House.
‘Boss Man Worried’
In late June, presidential advisers and lawyers learned about a Trump Tower meeting with Russians during the campaign hosted by Donald Trump Jr., along with Mr. Kushner and Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman. But the president said he did not want to hear about it.
A few days later, at the office of Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Hope Hicks, the president’s communications adviser, saw emails about setting up the meeting and offering “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton on behalf of the Russian government. In a meeting, Mr. Kushner played down the encounter with the Russians, telling the president it was about adoption.
Ms. Hicks suggested getting ahead of the story by having Donald Trump Jr. release the emails as part of an interview with “softball questions.” She warned that the emails were “really bad” and the story would be “massive” when it broke, but the president again said he did not want to hear about it.
On July 7, while the president was at the G-20 summit meeting in Germany, Ms. Hicks learned that The Times was preparing a story about the Trump Tower meeting. Ms. Hicks, on the flight home from Germany, recommended disclosing the entire story, but the president rebuffed her, saying a draft statement said too much.
Instead, Mr. Trump suggested the statement say that his eldest son had attended a meeting about Russian adoptions.
Ms. Hicks then texted Donald Trump Jr. a statement asking if that was all right. The president’s son wanted to insert that they “primarily” discussed Russian adoption because, as he texted to Ms. Hicks, they “started with some Hillary thing which was bs and some other nonsense which we shot down fast.”
Ms. Hicks responded: “I think that’s right too but boss man worried it invites a lot of questions.” The younger Mr. Trump, who urged releasing the emails themselves, finally did once the White House learned that The Times was about to publish them.
‘I’ll Have to Get Rid of Him’
Mr. Trump did not stop pressing Mr. Sessions to take back control of the investigation. On Oct. 16, the president met privately with Mr. Sessions and said he should look again at Mrs. Clinton’s emails. Mr. Sessions made no promises.
Two days later, the president posted the first of several tweets in the coming weeks complaining that the Justice Department was not investigating Mrs. Clinton. One of the tweets concluded: “DO SOMETHING!”
The pressure on the president rose in November when Mr. Flynn’s lawyers told Mr. Trump’s team that he would be accepting a plea deal. One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers left a voice mail message for one of Mr. Flynn’s: “[R]emember what we’ve always said about the president and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains.”
On Dec. 6, five days after Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying about contacts with the Russian government, Mr. Trump pulled Mr. Sessions aside after a cabinet meeting and again suggested he “unrecuse” himself. “You’d be a hero,” he said, while saying he was not going to “direct you to do anything.”
In January 2018, The Times reported about the president’s June 2017 effort to have Mr. Mueller fired. A livid Mr. Trump pressed Mr. McGahn to publicly rebut the story, but he would not because the article accurately reported the president’s desires.
Mr. Trump insisted that Mr. McGahn deny it. “If he doesn’t write a letter, then maybe I’ll have to get rid of him,” the president said, or something to that effect.
John F. Kelly, who had replaced Mr. Priebus as chief of staff, then arranged a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. McGahn.
“I never said to fire Mueller,” Mr. Trump said. “I never said ‘fire.’ This story doesn’t look good. You need to correct this. You’re the White House counsel.”
“Did I say the word ‘fire’?” he asked.
“What you said is, ‘Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the special counsel,’” Mr. McGahn replied. He refused the president’s request that he “do a correction.”
Mr. Trump then complained about Mr. McGahn writing things down. “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.”
Mr. McGahn maintained he took notes because he was a “real lawyer” and they create a record.
“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” Mr. Trump said. “He did not take notes.”
But Mr. McGahn did. And so did plenty of others.
By Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated who Annie Donaldson served as chief of staff for. It was Donald F. McGahn II, not Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Emily Cochrane, Michael D. Shear and Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.
Follow Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman on Twitter: @peterbakernyt and @maggienyt.
