Rage

by Bob Woodward

Mattis said the one exception he had witnessed to State-Defense combat occurred when he was a colonel and military assistant to Secretaries of Defense William Perry and William Cohen during the later Bill Clinton years from 1996 to 1998. At the time, Madeleine Albright was secretary of state and Sandy Berger was national security adviser. The trio of Albright, Cohen and Berger had regular lunches and meetings. “Every week they settled things,” Mattis said.

foreign and defense policy received little presidential attention. If the three—Cohen, Albright and Berger—presented a united front with a recommended course of action, Clinton would approve.

Mattis had a startling proposal for Tillerson. “I want you in the lead on foreign policy. I’ll tell you what we can do, what I can’t do. I’ll tell you the risks. But when we get done, I don’t want the White House sorting it out between the two of us. You and I will sort it all out. And so let’s meet weekly. Let’s talk as often as necessary.

“You’re going to be in the driver’s seat for foreign policy,” Mattis said. “The bus would be driven by State Department diplomats.” Mattis would enhance the power of the diplomats by pressuring the military side, being tough. “Any country dealing with us would listen to their diplomats, because they didn’t want to deal with me”—Mattis and the powerful U.S. military.

Tillerson saw they had quickly closed on a working agreement. State and Defense would never go into a National Security Council meeting without having worked out a common position.

Mattis was surprised how simpatico he felt with Tillerson. He just knew he could work with him. Sometimes you sit down with someone and you know you can trust them.

Both men left Plume confident they would make it work between State and Defense.

Mattis received his waiver and the Senate confirmed him, 98 to 1.

Later Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate 56 to 43, winning four votes from the Democratic Caucus.

Trump also agreed to give Tillerson an hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays when the two of them would meet alone. Also, on Fridays, Trump would have lunch with both Tillerson and Mattis when all were in town.

Bradley Byers, 38, a former Marine F-18 fighter pilot who had flown combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, joined Mattis’s office as a civilian liaison to the White House. He was part of a so-called “Beachhead Team” of three dozen Trump appointees at the Pentagon who did not have to be confirmed by the Senate. They were supposed to work in Mattis’s suite of offices at the Pentagon and give the White House leverage in Mattis’s operation.

Mattis made it clear he did not want any daylight in public between himself and President Trump on any issue. That way Mattis could have influence. Any public daylight could be fatal.

Cohn offered one more argument against steel tariffs. “We’re not a steel-producing nation. We’re a goods-producing nation. If we increase the price of steel, our goods become overpriced and we can’t compete.”

“Peter,” Trump said, “I need you to take charge of negotiations on steel.” Trump said that U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross were weak negotiators and that Navarro needed to be tough, hard-line. Trump added, “Not to mention my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”

Once Byers returned to the Pentagon, he asked Mattis for a private meeting. They met alone the next day. “What’s on your mind?” Mattis asked. There was an interchange in the Oval Office involving the president that I should tell you about, and it’s very uncomfortable, Byers said. “Brad, don’t you worry at all,” Mattis said. “Just tell me what happened.” Byers explained the president had mentioned that generals weren’t tough enough on steel and aluminum tariffs and were more worried about alliances. “Tell me exactly what he said.” The president said, Byers recounted, “my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”

“Brad,” Mattis said, “I really appreciate your telling me that. Would you mind putting that in an email for me?” Byers followed Mattis’s order and wrote an email to document what had occurred.

Pottinger thought the Obama administration policy toward North Korea of “strategic patience” had been a disaster. As he saw it, the strategy had broadly been to hope the regime fell apart on its own and crawled to the negotiating table.

On March 17, two months after his inauguration, Trump decided on a policy of maximum pressure—ratcheting up economic, rhetorical, military, diplomatic pressure and, if necessary, covert action. The campaign was designed to show Kim he was in greater danger and would pay a bigger price with nuclear weapons than he would without them. The overall goal was denuclearization.

Like Pottinger with Trump, Andy Kim told Pompeo that Obama’s policy of strategic patience had not worked. In practice it had meant not engaging with North Korea, handicapping the CIA and the U.S. government. Not engaging meant not understanding.

Will you come back to create a North Korea mission center with control over all collection, analysis and covert action to engage? Pompeo finally asked. Kim said he would need new resources. Covert action, especially if it was going to be planned and undertaken, would require lots of new money. But it was too late—the budget was set for the year. Pompeo said he could get him the money he needed. Kim said a fully enabled North Korea mission center would involve hundreds of people—some already there and some that would be new. Pompeo promised. “I will support you.” After an hour, Kim accepted the job. He would return.

Mattis planned military operations for North Korea, and Tillerson made the diplomatic efforts. Kim, in turn, planned for covert action to overthrow the North Korean leader in the event President Trump signed a formal order, called a finding, authorizing an operation.

The topper came when Rosenstein learned that McCabe—on his own—had made President Trump himself a subject of the investigation. A subject is someone whose conduct is within the scope of a grand jury’s investigation, but who is neither a target of the criminal investigation nor simply a witness. Rosenstein was shocked and asked his deputies if McCabe had this power. The answer was yes. What extraordinary power resided with the FBI.

Tillerson thought Kushner relied too much on economic development and ignored all the hard issues between Israel and Palestine. “If you make the economic benefits big enough,” Kushner argued, “people will say yes.” Money was the key, just pump money. Trump talked that way also.

Tillerson told Kushner he did not understand the history. “These people are not going to care about your money,” he said. “Or they’ll take your money and five years from now, you’ll be right back where you are today. That’s not going to buy you peace.”

Trump eventually ordered the closure of the Palestinian Liberation Organization office in Washington, D.C. in September 2018 and canceled nearly all U.S. aid to the West Bank and Gaza, as well as $360 million in annual aid previously given to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.

“The president has no moral compass,” Mattis replied. The bluntness should have shocked Coats, but he’d arrived at his own hard truths about the most powerful man in the world. “True,” Coats agreed. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

With approval from Mattis, General Vincent Brooks, the commander of the U.S. and South Korean alliance, ordered a U.S. Army tactical missile fired as a demonstration and warning. The missile was launched from the beach along a path running parallel to the North-South border and traveled 186 miles into the East Sea. That was the exact distance between the launching point of the U.S. missile and the North Korean missile test site, as well as a tent where satellite photos showed Kim Jong Un was watching the missile launch. The meaning was meant to be clear: Kim Jong Un needed to worry about his personal safety. But no intelligence was picked up that indicated the North Koreans realized the U.S. missile could have easily been aimed north at the test site or at Kim. Western news coverage of the U.S. and South Korean demonstration was sparse.

Three weeks later, on July 28, North Korea fired a more powerful ICBM. It could have traveled 6,200 miles and hit much of the continental United States. General Brooks ordered more demonstration missiles. In case anyone missed the message, he said in a statement that the alliance tactical missile test “provides deep-strike precision capability, enabling the Republic of Korea/United States alliance to engage a full array of time-critical targets under all weather conditions.”

Again, there was no evidence in public or in the intelligence that North Korea understood. This demonstrated the limitations of trying to send messages with missile tests.

“Mr. President, there’s only one thing that would turn me against you, and that is if you actually worked with the Russians.” “I didn’t,” Trump said. “I believe you,” Graham replied. “Because you can’t work with your own government. Why should you be working with the Russian government?” Trump laughed. “Yeah, that’s true,” he said.

A first meeting was nearly scuttled after Trump was quoted suggesting in a May 17, 2018, meeting that if Kim didn’t make a deal with Trump, he could meet a fate similar to slain Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, who was overthrown in 2011. “The model, if you look at that model with Qaddafi, that was a total decimation,” Trump said publicly. “We went in there to beat him. Now that model would take place if we don’t make a deal, most likely. But if we make a deal, I think Kim Jong Un is going to be very, very happy.” North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, responded: “Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at a nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States.” On May 24, Trump wrote Kim a letter canceling the summit.

But the dispute was short-lived. South Korean president Moon Jae In helped arrange talks between American and North Korean diplomats on the North Korean side of the border on May 27, and the summit was back on schedule just days after Trump had canceled it.

On June 12, 2018, Trump and Kim finally met at the Capella Hotel in Singapore, beginning their summit at 9:05 a.m. local time.

By end of the meeting, Trump and Kim signed a short, four-point agreement. The most consequential part of the agreement said that North Korea, reaffirming its earlier agreement with South Korea, “commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Kim did not return from the summit empty-handed. Trump said he would guarantee North Korea’s security.

Trump made a surprise announcement: The United States would be ending joint military exercises with South Korea. The North Korean regime had lo...

Trump wrote in a tweet the morning of June 13. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

The agreement was less specific regarding denuclearization than prior agreements Kim’s predecessors had signed in 1992 and 2005 during the Clinton and Bush administrations.

A week after releasing the strategy, Coats gave his Worldwide Threat Assessment publicly before the Senate Intelligence Committee on January 29. He identified climate change as a security threat. Russia’s relationship with China was “closer than it has been in many decades.” North Korea was “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities.”

Coats said intelligence officials didn’t believe Iran was developing a nuclear weapon—a direct contradiction of one of Trump’s core national security arguments.

Fred Fleitz, president of the Center for Security Policy, a right-leaning Washington think tank, appeared on Fox Business and suggested that Coats ought to be fired, saying the intelligence service “has simply evolved into a monster that is basically second-guessing the president all the time.”

The next day the White House canceled the daily intelligence briefing, the PDB. Trump tweeted: “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!” He added, “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”

Coats went to the Oval Office to see Trump alone and handed the president his resignation letter.

I’m not going to go through this, Coats said. It could be a thousand cuts. Most of the published reports come from anonymous sources only cited as senior White House officials or Trump friends. He had seen this before. When Trump was unhappy with someone, out came the endless undermining and criticism. Trump dismissed this. The White House sources were fake, he said. “I didn’t say that.” Coats did not believe the president’s denials for a minute.

At some point in the future, Coats said, he would want to step down. Don’t you want to do it the right way? Trump asked, apparently implying there was a way to resign so it would not appear that Trump had fired him. Don’t you want to leave in a more positive way? Let’s work it out. Coats finally agreed. After about ten minutes he left with his unaccepted resignation letter in hand.

After a long internal debate, Mueller decided not to issue a formal subpoena to Trump to compel his testimony. There was a belief that if they asked for the subpoena, the legal battle in the courts would take months, even a year. Or Trump could fire Mueller in response.

The central flaw in the Mueller investigation was that the prosecutors never found an inside witness who could tell a story of corrupt, illegal conduct. There was no comparable figure to John Dean,

Rosenstein felt that on the Mueller investigation he had made Trump bulletproof for the election and had done him a favor.

The president was not guilty of obstruction of justice in Rosenstein’s view. “I knew there was no basis to indict the president,” Rosenstein told an associate. “I knew months before.”

“Look,” Coats said, “others have tried and it’s had no impact whatsoever. They get tarred and feathered.” “What would make a difference?” Mattis asked. “If the Senate stood up,” Coats said. He knew the Senate intimately, especially the Republicans. He had served 16 years as a Republican senator. And he kept in touch with half a dozen Republican senators who were friends. None were bailing on Trump—not out of conviction, but for political survival. “The Senate’s not going to stand up.”