Epstein Secrets

HT_020046 As it happened, the Justice Department—Attorney General Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—were,

on about Kushner’s meeting with Kislyak. OOK Ok Few jobs in the Trump administration seemed so right, fitting, and even destined to their holder as Jeff Sessions’s appointment as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. As he viewed his work as AG, it was his mandate to curb, circumscribe, and undo the interpre

president was shown the story, he didn’t see its significance. “So what?” he said. Well, during his confirmation, it was explained to the president, Sessions had said he HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019996 didn’t. Facing Sessions at the January 10 hearing, Al Franken, the former comedian and Democratic senator from

invariably incurred Trump’s annoyance.) Kushner enlisted Scarborough and Brzezinski in something of a regular morning television Bannon slag-a-thon. H. R. McMaster, the three-star general who had replaced Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor, had secured the president’s pledge that he could veto members of

a, the federal pros- ecutor there, a move whose optics were alarming to all of his advisers, including Don McGahn and the incoming attorney general, Jeff Sessions. (The meeting foreshadowed the one Trump would shortly have with Comey, during which he sought a pledge of loyalty in return for job secu- rity.) H

on McGahn and the incoming attorney general, Jeff Sessions. (The meeting foreshadowed the one Trump would s

on people carrying Bannon's message as well as the president's. What's more, his enemies in the White House were moving out, includ- ing Hope Hicks, H. R. McMaster, the former national security advisor, and the ever shrinking circle of allies supporting the president's son-in- law and daughter. Bannon was ofte

focusing the blame for the Comey-Mueller mess on Sessions, even more forcefully belittling and threatening

going to do? Am I going to go in and save him? He’s Donald Trump. He’s always gonna do things. He wants an unrecused attorney general. I told him if Jeff Sessions goes, Rod Rosenstein goes, and then Rachel Brand’—the associate attorney general, next in line after Rosenstein—“goes, we’ll be digging down into Oba

was “not taking a pencil to anything.” Nearby, in a small conference room watching the movie Fargo, were Dina Powell, Gary Cohn, Stephen Miller, and H. R. McMaster, all of whom would later insist that they were, however physically close to the unfolding crisis, removed from it. And, indeed, anyone “in the room”

he EO envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s EOs. During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had earlier joined the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and researcher, assembled a list of more than two hundred

id Walsh. Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO. Miller, a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to the Trump campaign for his political experience. Except, other than being a dedicated far- right conservative, it was unclear w

sidestep the people in your organization and to dominate them. It was just one irony of his courtship of admired military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles. 7 OK Ok Almost from