Yates believed it was well past time to alert Trump to Flynn’s lie, but Comey was trying to convince intelligence leaders that doing so would jeopardize the investigation. On January 19, the evening before Trump’s swearing in, the clock had run out. “They’re in their tuxedos by now,” one of Yates’s deputies complained as the Trump team gathered to celebrate at Washington’s iconic train station. “I just don’t see how you drop this turd on him tonight. It’s not like one more day is going to change anything.”
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On January 20, Trump was sworn in to office and uneasily tried to settle into his new life as president. He was apprehensive about moving to Washington, a city in which he had many adversaries, far fewer allies, and no true friends. Despite his extroverted personality, Trump was a homebody and a creature of comfort. Having campaigned on the idea that the nation had been betrayed by its political class, Trump, now the most powerful man in Washington, did not know whom he could trust. He and his advisers feared from the moment they seized power that the capital’s entrenched interests would scheme to undermine the administration. The night of January 23, the first Monday of his presidency, Trump came face-to-face with House and Senate leaders from both parties at a White House reception with his top administration officials. At a long table in the State Dining Room, Steve Bannon, one of the inspirations of Trump’s “American carnage” address, could not stop looking at Nancy Pelosi. In the Democratic House leader, he saw Katharine Hepburn from The Lion in Winter—who looks up and down the table and thinks to herself, “These men are all clowns,” and plots her return to power.
Pelosi assumed Trump would open the conversation on a unifying note, such as by quoting the Founding Fathers or the Bible. Instead, the new president began with a lie: “You know, I won the popular vote.” He claimed that there had been widespread fraud, with three to five million illegal votes for Clinton. Pelosi interjected. “Well, Mr. President, that’s not true,” she said. “There’s no evidence to support what you just said, and if we’re going to work together, we have to stipulate to a certain set of facts.” Watching Pelosi challenge Trump, Bannon whispered to colleagues, “She’s going to get us. Total assassin. She’s an assassin.”
On January 24, as Yates debated with her staff who best to contact at the White House about Flynn, she got a call from Comey, who delivered an annoying surprise: FBI agents were at the White House to interview Flynn. Yates was furious. Comey, who had repeatedly insisted he needed to keep this probe under wraps, had neglected to notify the Justice Department. Yates said something to the effect of “How could you make this decision unilaterally?” Comey told her it was just a normal investigative step.
At the Justice Department, one senior official recalled, “The reaction that we all had is they’re going to try to get a false statement . . . and we’re going to look terrible, like we set him up,” the official said. “Like we’ve known about this for a week, haven’t told anybody, and now it looks like a setup of the national security adviser, like we backed him into a corner.”
Finally, on January 26, Yates asked Don McGahn if she could meet with him in his West Wing office that day. She laid out the intercept and explained that Flynn had lied to Pence and that FBI agents had interviewed him about his Kislyak communications. McGahn listened, then asked some questions. Mostly he wanted to know why one person lying to another in the White House worried the Justice Department. Yates explained that Flynn was compromised because the Russians knew the truth and could use the fact of the national security adviser’s lie to manipulate him.
When Yates departed, McGahn went to Reince Priebus’s office and found the chief of staff and Bannon there. “Did Flynn tell you guys that the FBI was here talking to him earlier in the week?” he asked.
Priebus and Bannon looked at each other with surprise, then back at McGahn.
“What are you fucking talking about?” Bannon said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Priebus said. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“Well, the FBI was here in that office on Tuesday,” McGahn said, referring to the national security adviser’s suite down the hall.
“We haven’t even been here a week,” Bannon said.
McGahn then went to the Oval Office to alert Trump. The president was largely nonplussed. Flynn hadn’t told the senior Trump leadership team that he had been interviewed by the FBI about his calls with the Russian ambassador, but Trump expressed no concern about Flynn’s lying to Pence. Rather, he was bothered that Yates was questioning Flynn’s motives—and by extension Trump’s personnel decisions. The president said something to the effect of “We’ve only been here for four days, and they’re already questioning our guy?”
On January 27, without consulting his Justice Department or fully briefing his homeland security secretary, Trump issued a travel ban barring citizens and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Chaos reigned at large international airports, and immigration lawyers filed emergency petitions asking federal courts to intervene to halt enforcement of the ban, arguing that it was unconstitutional.
The ban was drafted in secret by Bannon and Stephen Miller, Trump’s thirty-one-year-old senior policy adviser and a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration. They didn’t consult McGahn or Yates about its legal framework. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, whose department had to enforce the ban, never got to see the final version until after Trump delivered his executive order. Kelly was on a plane when the ban went into effect, which meant his deputy had to arrange an emergency conference call to explain to top department officials how it would be enforced, and didn’t have a copy of the document itself. Customs and Border Protection agents, wholly confused by the order’s language, inconsistently enforced a part of the ban that was later found to be illegal: barring people who had green cards from returning to their homes in the United States. Even Trump’s allies acknowledged the unmitigated disaster.
At the White House, staffers working through the weekend were shocked by the footage of dark-skinned people being rounded up in foreign airports and escorted away from the boarding line for planes bound for the United States. The saga played out on television screens hanging throughout the building. “It was like running a meeting in a Buffalo Wild Wings. There are TV screens everywhere,” one senior administration official recalled. “Nobody really seemed to realize that the government roundup was being done by people who are in the administration, this administration. People are rubbing their heads and going, ‘Huh? Why is this happening?’”
Trump’s aides blamed each other for the chaos. Some argued that Priebus and his deputies should have better coordinated with various departments and taken charge more robustly of public relations. Others placed the responsibility squarely on Miller.
Amid the mayhem, some of Trump’s new appointees donned black tie and evening gowns to attend the Alfalfa Club dinner, an annual gathering of business and political elites. It was a Saturday night, January 28, and the Trumpers mixed with the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos, to name a few. As French ambassador Gérard Araud watched the masters of the universe line up to shake hands with Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s omnipresent campaign manager turned White House counselor, he whispered to her, “That’s the sweet fragrance of power.”