What Donald Trump Needs to Know About Bob Mueller and Jim Comey
The two men who could bring down the president have been preparing their entire lives for this moment.
.. Cheney’s office had told Comey in no uncertain terms that if the program wasn’t OK’d, Americans would die—and their blood would be on Comey’s hands.
.. Comey realized that Mueller wouldn’t make it before the White House officials, so he asked for help: Don’t let them remove me, he asked Mueller.
.. Comey knew that Card would have Secret Service protection with him, and he was worried about being forcibly ejected by agents from Ashcroft’s hospital room. Ashcroft, weakened from gallbladder problems, was in no condition to sign off on STELLAR WIND—he’d legally turned the reins over to Comey while he was incapacitated—but, Comey feared, if the White House could isolate Ashcroft, who knew what it would do? Comey thought fast: Ashcroft had his own FBI security detail, and so he asked Mueller to call ahead and tell them not to allow the attorney general to be left alone.
.. the single most extraordinary moment of the tumultuous Bush years: The FBI director ordering his agents to resist the Secret Service if they tried to remove the deputy attorney general from the attorney general’s bedside.
.. what it says about the motivations and the moral compass of the two men now at the heart of a new Washington showdown—should deeply worry the Trump White House.
.. Donald Trump, as it turns out, has stumbled into taking on two experienced Washington players on their home turf
.. companies and organizations recruit to lead investigations when they need to tell shareholders or the public that they’ve hired the most seasoned and respected person they can find
.. he finds himself facing not just one esteemed former FBI director but two: the first a wronged martyr for the bureau, and the second a legendary investigator without a hint of politics
.. Comey told me he’d enlisted Mueller’s help because of his reputation for integrity and also because of the political power and righteousness inherent in the nonpartisan position Mueller held. “I knew that no one cared about losing a deputy attorney general,” he said, “but no president could weather losing an FBI director.”
.. “Your mind comes to be dominated by the horrific consequences of low-probability events.”
.. Ultimately, though, it wasn’t Comey’s arguments, legal or political, that stopped the Bush White House in its tracks on STELLAR WIND.
It was Bob Mueller.
.. as more than a dozen FBI and Justice Department officials readied letters of resignation—a potential political catastrophe amid that spring’s presidential reelection campaign that would have made the Saturday Night Massacre look like a minor D.C. tremor—Comey met privately with President Bush
.. ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’” They spoke at length, before Comey played the trump card, “I think you should know that Director Mueller is going to resign today.”
.. “The rule of law, civil liberties and civil rights—these are not our burdens. They are what makes all of us safer and stronger.” If the president didn’t change course, Mueller had no choice, he said. He hadn’t sworn to serve George W. Bush. He had sworn to protect the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
.. “I was afraid that if the story got out of what Jim was going to say, the Bush administration would figure out a way to prevent him from testifying,” Bharara recalled later. “We needed to preserve the element of surprise.”
.. he is not one who sprawls and grasps for every thread, as is also evident from his NFL investigation, in which he stayed clear of larger questions about the the league’s handling of domestic violence generally. He doesn’t see it as his job to answer policy questions—just to execute the law and the investigation.
.. “We live in dangerous times, but we are not the first generation of Americans to face threats to our security,”
.. Mueller overall sees little gray in the world; he’s a black-or-white guy, right or wrong.
.. Mueller burned through chiefs of staff almost every year. “He drives at such speed that he can burn up people around him,” Comey told me of Mueller. “Some people burn people up because they’re assholes. Bob burns them up by sheer exertion.”