EFTA00316512

32 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
3: 
gain a majority greater than the one the Republicans held now. Except, 
unlike the Republicans, theirs would be a unified party—or at least one 
that was unified against Donald Trump. 
Ryan and Stivers were hardly the only ones seeing such a result. Mitch 
McConnell was telling donors not to even bother contributing to House 
races. The money should go to the Senate campaign, where prospects for 
holding the Republican majority were significantly brighter. 
This was, for Donald Trump, in Bannon's view, the most desperate 
moment in his political career, arguably even worse than the revelation 
of the Access Hollywood grab-them-by-the-pussy tape. He was already on 
the ropes legally, with Mueller and the Southern District bearing down; 
now, looking at a likely wipeout in the midterm elections, he was in seri-
ous political jeopardy as well. 
But Bannon's usual ebullience quickly returned. As he talked his 
way out of his funk, he became nearly joyful. If the establishment—
Democrats, Republicans, moderate thinkers of every sort—believed that 
Donald Trump needed to be run out of town, then Bannon relished the 
prospect of defending him. For Bannon, this was the mission, but it was 
also sport. Bannon thrived on the possibility of upset. His own leap to 
the world stage had come because the Trump campaign was so deep 
in hopelessness that he was allowed to take it over. Then, on Novem-
ber 9, 2016, against all odds and expectations, Trump, riding Bannon's 
campaign—with Bannon's primacy soon one of the bitterest pills for 
Trump to swallow—won the presidency. Now, even with almost every 
indicator for the November elections looking bleak, Bannon believed he 
could yet see how Republican losses could be held to under the twenty-
three seats needed to save the House majority. Still, it was going to be a 
grinding fight. 
'When Trump calls his New York friends after dinner and whines that 
he doesn't have a friend in the world, he's kind of right," said a mordant 
Bannon. 
Bannon viewed the case against Donald Trump as both inherently 
political—his enemies willing to do whatever it took to bring him down—
and essentially true. He had little doubt that Trump was guilty of most of 
what he was accused of. "How did he get the dough for the primary and 
then for the general with his 'liquidity' issues?" asked Bannon with hi 
hands out and his eyebrows up. "Let's not dwelt" 
But for Bannon there were two sides in American politics—not s' 
much right and left, but right brain and left brain. The left brain wa 
represented by the legal system, which was empirical, evidentiary, am 
methodical; given the chance, it would inevitably and correctly convic 
Donald Trump. The right side was represented by politics, and therefor 
by voters who were emotional, volatile, febrile, and always eager to throt 
the dice. "Get the deplorables fired up"—he slapped his hands in thunder 
clap effect—"and we'll save our man:" 
Almost a year and a half on, all of the issues of 2016 remained a 
powerful and raw as ever: immigration, white man's resentment, and th 
liberal contempt for the working—or out-of-work—white man. The yea 
2018 was, for Bannon, the real 2016: the deplorable base had become th 
deplorable nation. "It's civil war," Bannon said, a happy judgment he ofte 
repeated. 
The most resonant issue was Donald Trump himself: the people wh 
elected him would be galvanized by the effort to take him from then 
Bannon was horrified by mainstream Republican efforts to run the corn 
ing election on the strength of the recent Republican tax cut. Are yo 
kidding? Oh my fucking god, are you kidding?" This election was abot 
the fate of Donald Trump. 
"Let's have a do-over election. That's what the libs want. They ca 
have it. Let's do it. Up or down, Trump or no Trump:' 
Impeachment was not to be feared, it was to be embraced. "That 
what you're voting for: to impeach Donald Trump or to save him fro; 
impeachment:' 
The legal threat, however, might be moving faster than the electioi 
And to Bannon—who knew more about the president's hankerings, moo 
swings, and impulse-control issues than almost anyone—you could m 
have produced a needier or more hapless defendant. 
* ♦ * 
Since coming aboard in the summer of 2017, the president's legal team-
Dowd, Cobb, and Sekulow—had delivered the message their client insistc 
EFTA00316532

34 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
35 
upon hearing, that he was not a target and would shortly be exonerated. 
But the lawyers went even further with their feel-good strategy. 
Presidents, faced with hostile investigations by the other coequal 
branches of government, Congress and the judiciary, invariably cite exec-
utive privilege both as a legitimate principle and as a dilatory tactic. It's a 
built-in bargaining chip. But Trump's lawyers, hoisted by how often they 
had to assure the president that he had nothing to fear, supported their 
confident assessment, to Trump's delight, by dispensing with any claim 
of executive privilege and willingly satisfying all the special counsel's 
requests. Trump, in all his dodginess, had become an open book. What's 
more, Trump himself, ever believing in the force and charm of his own 
personality, was, with his attorneys' apparent assent, eager to testify. 
And yet, Bannon knew, it was still much worse. The president's law-
yers had sent more than 1.1 million documents to the special counsel, 
aided by only a scant document production team. It was just Dowd, 
Cobb, and two inexperienced assistants. In major litigations, docu-
ments are meticulously logged and cross-referenced into elaborate and 
efficient database systems. Here, they shipped over much of the material 
merely as attachments, and kept minimal or no records of what exactly 
had been sent. Few in the White House knew what they had given up and 
thus what the special counsel had. And the haphazard approach didn't 
stop there. Dowd and Cobb neither prepared many of the witnesses who 
had worked for the White House in advance of their testimony to Mueller's 
team nor debriefed them after they testified. 
Bannon was overcome by the hilarity and stupidity of this what-me-
worry approach to federal prosecutors whose very reputations depended 
on nailing the president. Trump needed a plan—which, of course, Ban-
non had. 
Bannon swore that he did not want to go back into the White House. 
He wouldn't ever, he said. The humiliations of working in Trump's admin-
istration had almost destroyed Bannon's satisfaction at having risen so 
miraculously to the top of the world. 
Some, however, were not convinced by his protestations. They 
believed that Bannon actively fantasized that he would be brought back 
into the West Wing to save Trump—and that, not incidentally, this would 
be his ultimate revenge on Trump, saving him yet again. Bannon certainly 
believed that he was the only one who could pull off this difficult rescue, a 
reflection of his conviction that he was the most gifted political strategist 
of his time, and of his view that Trump was surrounded by only greater 
and lesser lummoxes. 
Trump, Bannon believed, needed a wartime consigliere. And if, he 
mused, Jared and Ivanka were finally sent packing ... But no, he insisted, 
not even then. 
Moreover, Trump would not be able to tolerate it. Bannon under-
stood that only Trump could save the day, or at least that Trump believed 
only he could save the day. No other scenario was possible. He would 
rather lose, would rather even go to jail, than have to share victory with 
someone else. He was psychologically incapable of not being the focus of 
all attention. 
In the end, it was easier and more productive to give Trump advice at 
a distance than up close. It was a safer play to do what needed to be done 
without Trump himself actually being involved with, or even aware of, 
what was being done. 
The morning Ryan announced his retirement from the House, Ban-
non was particularly eager to send some advice Trump's way. Setting up 
a deft bank shot, he invited Robert Costa, a reporter for the Washington 
Post, to visit him at the Embassy. 
Bannon spent a good part of every day talking to reporters. On some 
days, perhaps most days, his blind-quote voice—hidden behind a famil-
iar attribution such as "this account is drawn from interviews with cur-
rent and former officials"—crowded out most other voices on the subject 
of whatever new crisis was engulfing the Trump administration. These 
quotes functioned as something like a stage whisper that Trump could 
pretend he didn't hear. Trump, in fact, was always desperately seeking 
Bannon's advice, though only if there was the slightest pretext for believ-
ing that it came from some place other than Bannon. Indeed, Trump was 
quite willing to hear Bannon say something in this or that interview and 
then claim he had thought of it himself. 
Costa sat at Bannon's dining-room table for two hours, taking down 
Bannon's prescription for how to save Trump from himself. 
EFTA00316533

36 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
37 
Trump's stupidity, said Bannon, could sometimes be made into a vir-
tue. Here was Bannon's idea: the president should make a retroactive claim 
of executive privilege. I didn't know. Nobody told me. I was ill-advised. 
It was hard not to see Bannon's satisfaction in a prostrate Trump 
admitting to his own lack of guile and artfulness. 
Bannon understood that this claim of retroactive executive privilege 
would have no chance of success—nor should it. But the sheer audacity 
of it could buy them four or five months of legal delay. Delay was their 
friend, possibly their only friend. They could work this claim of retroac-
tive executive privilege, no matter how loopy, all the way to the Supreme 
Court. 
For this plan to work, the president would have to get rid of his inept 
lawyers. Oh, and he would also have to fire Rod Rosenstein, the deputy 
attorney general who was overseeing the Mueller investigation. Bannon 
had been against the firing of Comey, and in the months after the appoint-
ment of the special counsel, he had fought the president's almost daily 
impulse to fire Mueller and Rosenstein, seeing this as the surest invitation 
to impeachment. ("Just don't pay attention to his crazy shit," he had urged 
everyone around the president.) But now they had run out of options. 
'iring Rosenstein is our only way out of here," Bannon told Costa. 
1 don't come to this lightly. As soon as they went to Cohen—that's what 
they do in Mob prosecutions to get a response from the true target. So 
you can sit there and get bled out—get indicted, go to grand juries—or 
you can fight it politically. Get it out of the law-and-order system where 
we are losing and are going to lose. A new DAG will review where we 
stand on this thing, which could take a couple of months. Delay, delay, 
delay—and shift it politically. Can we win? I have no fucking idea. But I 
know on that other paths going to lose. It's not perfect ... but we live 
in a world of imperfect." 
* * * 
Costa's story, which was posted online later that day, described Bannon as 
"pitching a plan to West Wing aides and congressional allies to cripple the 
federal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according 
to four people familiar with the discussions." But however many people 
Costa had spoken to about the background machinations of Steve Ban-
non, what mattered was that he had spoken directly and at length to 
Bannon himself, who was using the Washington Post to pitch a plan to 
the president. 
Bannon's three-part plan for Trump instantly made its way to the 
Oval Office. And the next morning, the president offered Kushner his 
view that he should fire Rosenstein, reinstate a claim of executive privi-
lege, and get a tough-guy lawyer. 
Kushner, pressing his own strategies, urged his father-in-law to move 
cautiously when it came to Rosenstein. 
"Jared is spooked," said a scornful Trump later that day while on the 
phone to a confidant. "What a girl!" 
EFTA00316534

SIEGE 
39 
3 
LAWYERS 
T
here was a running sweepstakes or office pool for the unhappiest 
person in the White House. Many had held the title, but one of the 
most frequent winners was White House counsel Don McGahn. He was 
a constant target for his boss's belittling, mocking, falsetto-voice mimicry, 
and, as well, sweeping disparagements of his purpose and usefulness. 
"This is why we can't have nice things," McGahn uttered almost obses-
sively under his breath, quoting the Taylor Swift song to comment on 
whatever egregious act Trump had just committed C... because you break 
them," the song continues). 
McGahn's background was largely as a federal election lawyer. Mostly 
he was on the more-money, less-transparency side—he was against, rather 
than for, aggressive enforcement of election laws. He served as the counsel 
to the Trump campaign, arguably among the most careless about election 
law compliance in recent history. Before joining the Trump administra-
tion, McGahn had no White House or executive branch experience. He 
had never worked in the Justice Department or, in fact, anywhere in gov-
ernment. Formerly an attorney for a nonprofit affiliated with the Koch 
brothers, he was known as a hyperpartisan: when Obama's White House 
counsel, Kathy Ruemmler, the previous occupant of McGahn's office, 
reached out to congratulate him and to offer to be a resource on past prac-
tices, McGahn did not respond to her email. 
One of McGahn's jobs was to navigate what was possibly the most 
complicated relationship in modern government: he was the effective 
point person between the White House and the Department of Justice. 
Part of his portfolio, then, was to endure the president's constant rage and 
bewilderment about why the DOJ was personally hounding him, and his 
incomprehension that he could do nothing about it. 
"It's my Justice Department," Trump would tell McGahn, often repeat-
ing this more than dubious declaration in his signature triad. 
Nobody could quite be certain of the number of times McGahn had 
had to threaten, with greater or lesser intention, to quit if Trump made 
good on his threat to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney gen-
eral, or the special counsel. Curiously, one defense against the charge that 
the president had tried to fire Mueller in June 2017 in an effort to end the 
special counsel's investigation—as the New York Times claimed in a Jan-
uary 2018 scoop—was the fact that Trump was almost constantly trying 
to fire Mueller or other DOJ figures, doing so often multiple times a day. 
McGahn's steadying hand had so far helped avert an ultimate crisis 
But he had missed or let slip by or simply ignored a number of intemper-
ate, unwise, and interfering actions by the president that might, McGahn 
feared, comprise the basis of obstruction charges. Deeply involved with the 
conservative Federalist Society and its campaign for "textualist" judges 
McGahn had long dreamed himself of becoming a federal judge him-
self, but given the no-man's-land he occupied between Trump and the 
Justice Department—not to mention Trump's sometimes daily attacks or 
the DOJ's independence, which McGahn had to accept or condone—he 
knew his future as a jurist was dead. 
* • 
* 
Fifteen months into Trump's tenure, the tensions between the administra. 
tion and the Department of Justice had erupted into open conflict. Now 
was war—the White House against its own DOJ. 
Here was a modern, post-Watergate paradox: the independence o 
the Justice Department. The DOJ might be, from every organizationa 
and statutory view, an instrument of the White House, and, as much a! 
any other agency, its mission might appear to be driven by whoever hele 
EFTA00316535

40 
MICHAEL WOLPF 
SIEGE 
41
the presidency. That's what it looked like on paper. But the opposite was 
true, too. There was a permanent-government class in the Justice Depart-
ment that believed an election ought to have no role at all in how the 
DOJ conducted itself. The department was outside politics and ought 
to be as blind as the courts. In this view, the Justice Department, as the 
nation's preeminent investigator and prosecutor, was as much a check on 
the White House, and ought to be as independent of the White House, 
as the other branches of government. (And within the Justice Department, 
the FBI claimed its own level of independence from its DOJ masters, as 
well as from the White House itself.) 
Even among those at Justice and the FBI who had a more nuanced 
view, and who recognized the symbiotic nature of the department's rela-
tionship with the White House, there was yet a strong sense of the lines 
that cannot be crossed- The Justice Department and the FBI had, since 
Watergate, found themselves accountable to Congress and the courts. Any 
top-down effort to influence an investigation, or any evidence of having 
bowed to influence—memorialized in a memo or email—might derail a 
career. 
In February 2018, Rachel Brand, the associate attorney general, a for-
mer Bush lawyer who had been nominated for the number three DOJ 
job by Obama, resigned to take a job as a Walmart lawyer. If Trump had 
fired Rosenstein during Brand's tenure, she would have become acting 
attorney general overseeing the Mueller investigation. She told col-
leagues she wanted to get out before Trump fired Rosenstein and then 
demanded that she fire Mueller. She would take Bentonville, Arkansas, 
where Walmart had its headquarters, over Washington, D.C. 
For a generation or more, the arm's-length relationship between the 
White House and the Department of Justice often seemed more like a 
never-ending conflict between armed camps. Bill Clinton could hardly 
stomach his attorney general, Janet Reno, having to weather the blowback 
from her decisions regarding Ruby Ridge, a standoff and deadly overre-
action between survivalists and the FBI; Waco, another botched standoff 
with a Christian cult; and the investigation of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, with the 
DOJ chastised for its reckless pursuit of a suspected spy. Clinton came 
very close to firing Louis Freeh, his FBI director, who openly criticized 
him, but managed to swallow his rage. Top people from the Bush White 
House, the FBI, and the Justice Department almost came to literal blows 
at the bedside of the ailing AG John Ashcroft—James Comey himself 
standing in the way of the White House representatives trying to get Ash-
croft to renew a domestic surveillance program—with the White House 
finally having to back down. Under Obama, Comey, who by then was the 
FBI director, made a further grab for the FBI's independence from the 
Justice Department when he unilaterally decided to end and later reopen 
the Hillary Clinton email investigation—and, by doing so. arguably toss-
ing the election to her opponent. 
Enter Donald Trump, who had neither political nor bureaucratic 
experience. His entire working life was spent at the head of what was in 
essence a small family operation, one designed to do what he wanted and 
to bow to his style of doing business. At the time of his election, he was 
absent even any theoretical knowledge of modern government and its 
operating rules and customs. 
Trump was constantly being lectured about the importance of cus-
tom and tradition" at the Justice Department. As reliably, he would 
respond, "I don't want to hear this bullshit!" 
He needed, one aide observed, "a hard, black line. Without a hard, 
black line that he can't cross, he's crossing it." 
Trump believed what to him seemed obvious: the DOJ and FBI 
worked for him. They were under his direction and control. They must do 
exactly what he demanded of them; they must jump through his hoops. 
"He reports to me!" an irate and uncomprehending Trump repeated early 
in his tenure about both his attorney general Jeff Sessions and his FBI 
director James Comey. "I am the boss!" 
"I could have made my brother the attorney general; Trump insisted, 
although in fact he did not even speak to his brother (Robert, a seventy-
one-year-old retired businessman). "Like Kennedy" (Six years after John 
F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert attorney general, Congress 
passed the Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute, called the "Bobby Kennedy 
law; to prevent exactly this sort of thing in the future—although that 
did not stop Trump from hiring his daughter and son-in-law as senior 
advisers.) 
EFTA00316536