One damn thing after ano.., p.63
One Damn Thing After Another, page 63
On December 14 I went over to tell the President that I would like to leave before Christmas. I had prepared my resignation letter over the weekend. Meadows was initially in the Oval Office with the President and me. Before I could tell the President why I was there, he launched into a monologue. He said he now had definitive evidence that there had been major election fraud using the Dominion voting machines. He lifted up a study done by a group called Allied Security Operations Group, which described itself as a cybersecurity firm in Texas, and said, “This is absolute proof that the Dominion machines were rigged. This report means I won the election and will have a second term.” He handed a copy to me across the desk. It was a little over twenty pages. I took it and leafed through it as he continued to talk. “This is a very reputable company,” he asserted, “and they caught the Dominion machines cheating red-handed.”
I saw the report was focused exclusively on an error that occurred in Antrim County, Michigan, a heavily Republican county. I had already received a detailed briefing on the incident from the DHS and FBI experts. What had happened in Antrim was well understood. A longtime Republican election clerk had properly updated data storage devices used in certain precincts where the ballots had to be changed to reflect the addition of new local candidates. She failed to update the devices for the rest of Antrim County’s precincts. This resulted in an inaccurate preliminary tabulation. The problem had been quickly found and corrected. Trump handily won the county. The initial mis-tabulation was unquestionably due to human error by a county official and had nothing to do with the reliability of the Dominion machines. Moreover, the problem was restricted to Trump-friendly Antrim County, where there is no urban Democratic machine exploiting the rules for its own benefit, and did not appear in any other Michigan county.
As the President continued to extol the definitive nature of the report, I skimmed portions of it. It was signed by a businessman who had unsuccessfully run for Congress in Texas. The report did not indicate the identity or credentials of those involved in its preparation. As a senior executive at Verizon, I had reviewed many consultant reports on cybersecurity matters. This one looked amateurish to me. Portions of it revealed a lack of understanding of how the machines operated, as well as the election procedures used in Antrim County. The report made the sensational claim that the Dominion machines were “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.” But, as far as I could tell, this conclusion was stated as an ipse dixit, a bald claim without even the pretense of supporting evidence.
As the President talked assuredly about a second term, I was saddened. If he actually believed this stuff he had become significantly detached from reality.
“I’d like you to look into this and tell me what you think,” the President said.
“I will, Mr. President. But there are a couple of things,” I responded. “My understanding is that our experts have looked at the Antrim situation and are sure it was a human error that did not occur anywhere else. And, in any event, Antrim is doing a hand recount of the paper ballots, so we should know in a couple of days whether there is any real problem with the machines.”
I then moved quickly to my reason for being there. I told the President I’d like to talk to him privately, and Mark Meadows withdrew. I told him I’d worked hard to ensure his administration’s success, but that it was clear he was dissatisfied with me. I said I would like us to part while we still could in a dignified way.
I gave him my resignation letter. He read it carefully and said, “Whew, that’s the best summary of our accomplishments I’ve seen.” I thought to myself, Maybe if you had talked about these things, instead of your grievances, things would have worked out differently.
He asked when I wanted to leave, and I said by December 23. The President said I was very honorable, and he, too, would like to part amicably. He asked me whom I would recommend to replace me. I said I would recommend my Deputy, Jeff Rosen, as Acting Attorney General, and Rich Donoghue as acting Deputy Attorney General. The President called Meadows back into the Oval Office and explained what we had decided. He said he would tweet something out shortly. We shook hands, and that was the last I spoke with him.
Within the hour, the President tweeted:
Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job! As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.
Back at my office, I felt a great sense of relief and liberation. My staff and a number of senior officials held the usual impromptu unwinding session that evening—it was bittersweet. The next day, I met with Jeff Rosen and Rich Donoghue, who appeared already a little shell-shocked by their initial encounter with Trump. But they were steadfast in their determination to protect the department from improper political machinations. We all agreed that Trump was in for a rude awakening if he thought there was any daylight between us or that he could push Rosen or Donoghue around.
I got back to Meadows and Cipollone on the “Allied Security Operations Group” report. I’d known it was nonsense from the moment I looked at it in the Oval Office. I told them that the report had over a dozen major mistakes and gave them a few examples. One of its major claims was that vote “adjudication” data files were missing. When there is a ballot that is not marked clearly, an adjudication is made. A jurisdiction has the option of having human beings make this judgment by examining the ballots, in which case the paper ballots themselves are available after the election to verify the adjudication process. Alternatively, the Dominion machines have an option that permits them to make the adjudication electronically, in which case the pertinent data is sent into the machine’s adjudication files. The reason Antrim County’s machines did not preserve adjudication files is that Antrim Country did not use machine adjudication—it used real people to do it. Another major miss: The report was based on a newer generation of equipment. But some of the features the report criticized weren’t even present in the older machines used by Antrim.
On December 21 I held my last press conference to announce the terrorism charges against the Libyan we were accusing of making the bomb used to bring down Pan Am 103 in 1988. There was, for me, a deeply strange feeling about it all. The Pan Am bombing had loomed large in my first term as AG almost thirty years before, and I was disappointed then that we had not delivered to the victims’ families the justice they were due. But now, concluding my second stint in the post, I was determined to do all I could to complete this mission.
Naturally, the press also wanted to talk about the election. Somebody asked if I still maintained there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. I said I stood by my previous statement that we still had not found any so far that would have affected the outcome of the election. I was also asked if I thought a Special Counsel should be appointed to investigate election fraud. Apparently, there had been talk of naming Sidney Powell as a Special Counsel at the White House. I answered that, if I thought a Special Counsel was needed, I would appoint one, and I wasn’t planning to do so.
I was asked, finally, whether I would consider appointing a Special Counsel to handle the reported investigation of Hunter Biden. To the extent there was any pending investigation, I said, I was confident that it was being handled responsibly by the department’s lawyers, and I saw no reason to appoint a Special Counsel.
I did not hear about the great brouhaha on January 3 involving an effort by the President to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, acting head of the Civil Division, who was far more sympathetic to claims of nationwide fraud than either Rosen or I had been. As I later heard it, Rosen, Donoghue, and Steve Engel stood their ground admirably, as did Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann, and persuaded the President to abandon the plan. They did the country a great service.
I was saddened and disgusted to witness, as an outsider, the President’s despicable treatment of Vice President Pence. The Vice President had the highest integrity and always took care to act well within the bounds of legality and propriety. No one could have been more loyal or worked harder for the President than the Vice President. Yet Trump seized on a harebrained legal theory holding that instead of counting electoral votes as cast by the states, as the Constitution required, the Vice President could unilaterally send electoral votes back to state legislatures for further proceedings. He demanded that the Vice President do this when the electoral votes were counted in front of the House and Senate on January 6. After obtaining legal advice from a range of constitutional scholars—including my friend and colleague from the George H. W. Bush administration, Judge Mike Luttig—Vice President Pence rightly concluded that his constitutional responsibility was faithfully to count the Electoral College votes as they had been cast. The President nonetheless scapegoated the Vice President and castigated him for supposed disloyalty. After January 6, I told Pence how much I respected him for what he had done. He is a patriot, loyal to the Constitution, and he did his duty regardless of any political cost to himself.
On January 6 I was working in my library at home when I got a call from Kerri Kupec asking me if I was watching what was happening on Capitol Hill. I quickly turned on the TV and was disgusted by the spectacle of thugs marauding through the Capitol. I could not understand the lack of law enforcement response and asked her to put out a statement right away from me—old habits die hard. The statement said: “The violence at the Capitol Building is outrageous and despicable. Federal agencies should move immediately to disperse it.” I was shocked that my statement went out before anyone in the administration said anything.
The next day, angry at what had happened, I put out another statement: “Orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress is inexcusable. The President’s conduct yesterday was a betrayal of his office and supporters.” I did not think, from what I heard, that Trump “incited” violence in the legal sense. Incitement has a legal definition, and Trump’s statements would not fit that definition in any American court. But it is wrong, all the same, for one branch of government in any way to encourage a mob to pressure another branch of government while it performs its constitutional duties, and here the Vice President was acting in his capacity as President of the Senate.
As I watched the Trump administration’s demise, I felt a complex mixture of emotions. As I had said in my resignation letter, I appreciated the many successes the President delivered for the American people. Among other things, his administration’s tax reform and deregulatory efforts generated the strongest and most resilient economy in American history—one that brought unprecedented progress to many marginalized Americans. He had begun to restore US military strength. He correctly identified the economic, technological, and military threats to the United States posed by China’s aggressive policies and moved to address them. By brokering historic peace deals in the Mideast, he achieved what most thought impossible. He had the courage to pull us out of ill-advised and detrimental agreements with Iran and Russia, and he fulfilled the US government’s promise to move its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. He curbed illegal immigration and enhanced the security of our nation’s borders. And he kept his promise of advancing the rule of law by appointing a record number of judges committed to constitutional principles. And I was proud of the Department of Justice’s contributions to the administration’s achievements.
I also admired the fact that the President forged forward with this positive agenda in the face of bitter, implacable attacks. Yes, he contributed to some of the venom—he was sometimes his own worst enemy. But most of the attacks against him were grossly unfair. Few leaders could have weathered the battering he took and kept pushing forward.
There was something else I credited Trump for. In the past, a dismaying number of Republicans would stick to their stated principles and support their colleagues—except when doing so put them in disfavor with the mainstream press and the chattering class. They were conservatives except when the political and media elite judged their position outré—whereupon they would abandon it. Trump exposed the media and cultural elites as the outright partisans they have long been—mere extensions of the Democratic Party. Instead of seeking their approval and kowtowing to them, Trump showed Republicans they must stick to their guns and ignore them. Their hackneyed attacks are just background noise.
Despite all that—and also because of it—I felt mostly frustration, sadness, and anger. Trump, through his self-indulgence and lack of self-control, had blown the election. It was the most important election in my lifetime—so much was riding on it—and it was eminently winnable. Yes, the media, Big Tech, and the coastal elites did all they could to help the Democrats. That was unfair and wrong, but Trump had it within his power to surmount these forces. I found it impossible to believe, thinking back to the singularly unimpressive roster of Democrats who had run for the nomination, that any one of them could have beaten Trump. Only Trump could have beaten Trump, and he did. Even with confusion and unease brought about by the pandemic, if President Trump had just exercised a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness, he would have won.
The election was not “stolen.” Trump lost it. He was repeatedly warned by his advisers—and the data showed it clearly—that a significant segment of voters who supported him in 2016 had grown tired of him. They liked his policies, they liked the results of his policies, but they hated his obnoxious behavior. He did not have to win back all these defectors, just a few. He could have done this without diminishing the enthusiasm of his base, but he made no effort—none. His conduct in the first presidential debate was abysmal and mortifying for the people who supported and worked for him. It crystalized the overall tone of his campaign: Don’t win back doubters. Don’t highlight accomplishments. Just offend everybody.
During his stand-up-comic routine at rallies, the President referred to the advice he was getting to act “more presidential.” He claimed that “acting presidential” was easy and, if he did it, he would be the most presidential of any President. But, he said, standing up and doing what he was doing at his rallies was much harder. That, of course, was nonsense. It is not hard to get up in front of an adoring crowd of convinced supporters and say whatever thrills them. What is challenging—and requires sustained attention and work—is persuading skeptics that, despite their misgivings, they should support you; or at least not vote for your opponent.
He took the easy path, and he lost. The fact that his margin of defeat was so slim underscores just how small was the adjustment he needed to make. He wouldn’t make it.
I was also frustrated over the President’s reckless claims of fraud and the ugly way he brought his presidency to a close. It was a disservice to the nation, and a disservice to the people who had labored and sacrificed to make his administration a success.
Voter fraud has a specific meaning. It involves knowingly nullifying legal votes; or knowingly casting or counting the votes of persons who are ineligible, nonexistent, or whose votes were procured by improper inducements. The President repeatedly claimed he had “won by a lot” and that the election was “stolen” through “major fraud,” but he never substantiated this claim.
Our country would descend into chaos if an incumbent administration could ignore election results based solely on bald assertions of fraud. To justify setting aside an election, you have to produce solid evidence. No such evidence has emerged.
I was angered, too, by the President’s spiteful conduct concerning the Georgia Senate runoff elections, which was inexcusable and a sellout of his supporters and their interests. He actively sabotaged Republican chances by provoking a civil war inside the state party and encouraging his supporters not to vote. He gave control of the Senate—you could almost say he deliberately gave control of the Senate—to the Democrats. A Republican Senate would have decisively limited the damage the Biden administration could do with its radical agenda. But for Trump, an irremediable personal grievance was more important.
The best that can be said for him on that score is that he acted in pique, motivated by the same self-pitying egotism that led Achilles in the Iliad to pout in his tent while the Trojans slaughtered his comrades, including his best friend. Any idea that Trump could rise above his self-indulgence was shattered. In the final months of his administration, Trump cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.
My frustration deepened after the election when I saw that Trump would continue his egoistic and fratricidal tactics going forward. He made clear that he planned to purge the Republican Party of those he considers insufficiently orthodox or lacking in “loyalty,” and he has since embarked on this effort. That Trump, of all people, should consider himself an arbiter of ideological purity—a man whose political allegiances oscillated randomly over the decades—is comical. In reality, he has no concern with ideology or political principle. His motive is revenge, and is entirely personal. His objective is to purge those who did not actively support his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and to seed the party with more compliant members personally loyal to him.
