One Damn Thing After Another Read online

  Dedication

  To my wife, Christine

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part I Early Years

  Chapter 1 Planning Ahead

  Chapter 2 A Shift in Plans

  Part II Bush Years

  Chapter 3 Top Egghead

  Chapter 4 Second in Command

  Chapter 5 Leading the Department

  Chapter 6 A Whirlwind Year

  Part III Interlude

  Chapter 7 Return to Civilian Life

  Part IV Trump Years

  Introduction

  Chapter 8 Foreign Schemes and Domestic Lies

  Chapter 9 Into the Storm

  Chapter 10 One Thing Done, Another Begun

  Chapter 11 Eating Grenades

  Chapter 12 “I Believe You’ll Be Impeached”

  Chapter 13 Upholding Fairness, Even for Rascals

  Chapter 14 Bringing Justice to Violent Predators

  Chapter 15 Fighting the Drug Cartels

  Chapter 16 Securing Religious Liberty

  Chapter 17 Protecting National Security

  Chapter 18 Taking on Big Tech

  Chapter 19 Facing the Covid Pandemic

  Chapter 20 Cops, Race, and the Big Lie

  Chapter 21 Protest and Mayhem

  Chapter 22 Trump vs. Trump

  Chapter 23 Election and Aftermath

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  For forty years, successive Attorneys General have heard the story. After President Ronald Reagan nominated him in late 1980 to serve as Attorney General of the United States, William French Smith, preparing for his new duties, talked to Ed Levi, who, four years earlier, had served as Attorney General under President Gerald Ford and, before that, had been Dean of the University of Chicago Law School, and then president of that university. With his pipe-smoking, bow ties, and intellectual demeanor, Levi seemed the quintessential academic. When Smith asked Levi to describe the job of Attorney General, he was expecting him to launch into a philosophical discourse about the Founding Fathers, the rule of law, and the principles of democracy. Levi, taking a leisurely puff on his pipe, paused a moment, and said: “It’s just one damn thing after another.”

  Having held the post twice, I can say—and I know all my fellow former Attorneys General will agree—that description perfectly captures the essence of the job.

  Prologue

  The first day of December 2020, almost a month after the presidential election, was gray and rainy. That afternoon, the President, struggling to come to terms with the election result, had heard I was at the White House for another meeting and sent word that I was to come see him immediately. I knew what was coming. I soon found myself standing in the President’s small dining room off of the Oval Office. The President was as angry as I had ever seen him.

  More than two hours earlier, when I had left the Justice Department for the White House, I told my personal assistant, Theresa Watson, that there was a good chance the President would fire me. If he does, I said, he will probably direct me not to return to the office, so she might have to pack up for me. “Oh, POTUS always says that,” Theresa responded, using the government acronym referring to the President of the United States. “But everyone ignores it, and if it happens, you just come back,” she said. As I walked out the door, Theresa called after me, “But anyway, he’s not going to fire you.”

  My chief of staff, Will Levi, was with me. “You know,” Will said with a worried look, “he just might.”

  “I know,” I said. “As the President likes to say, ‘We’ll see.’”

  Over the preceding weeks, I had been increasingly concerned about claims by the President and the team of outside lawyers advising him that the election had been “stolen” through widespread voting “fraud.” I had no doubt there was some fraud in the 2020 presidential elections. There’s always some fraud in an election that large. There may have been more than usual in 2020. But the department had been looking into the claims of fraud made by the President’s team, and we had yet to see evidence of it on the scale necessary to change the outcome of the election.

  The data suggested to me that the Democrats had taken advantage of rule changes—especially extended voting periods and voting by mail—to marshal the turnout they needed in their strongholds in key states. I had been a vocal critic of these rule changes precisely because they would increase the opportunity for fraud and thus undercut public confidence in the election results. There was also no question that, in some areas, state rules meant to guard against fraud—for example, the requirement that voters file applications for mail-in ballots—were not followed. This also increased the opportunity for fraud.

  Still, the opportunity for fraud isn’t evidence of fraud.

  Under our system, the states have responsibility for running elections. Claims that the election rules are not being followed fall under the state’s jurisdiction, and the burden is on the complaining party to raise the matter with state officials and courts to have it addressed. This often requires pressing the states to conduct in-depth audits of relevant districts needed to resolve alleged irregularities. The Justice Department does not have the authority or the tools to perform that function. Instead, its role is to investigate specific and credible allegations of voting fraud for the purpose of criminal prosecution. A complaint just saying the rules were not followed is not enough. There must be some indication of actual fraud.

  When I looked at the voting patterns, it also appeared to me that President Trump had underperformed among certain Republican and independent voters in some key suburban areas in the swing states. He ran weaker in these areas than he had in 2016. It seemed this shortfall could explain the outcome. The fact that, in many key areas, Trump ran behind Republican candidates below him on the ballot suggested this conclusion and appeared inconsistent with the fraud narrative.

  As I had said in my confirmation hearing two years earlier, our country is deeply divided, but our saving grace is the ability to carry out the peaceful transfer of power through elections. If the American people lose confidence in the integrity of their elections, and the legitimacy of an elected administration, we are headed toward a very dark place. That is why I was so disgusted by efforts in 2016 to delegitimize President Trump and “resist” his duly elected administration. But now the situation was completely reversed. It is one thing to say that the rules were unfairly skewed; it is another to say that the election’s outcome was the result of fraud. President Trump’s legal team was feeding his supporters a steady diet of sensational fraud claims, without anything resembling substantiation. But if election results are going to be set aside on the grounds of fraud, it must be based on clear evidence, and it should be fraud of such magnitude as to be material to the outcome of the election. Proving fraud after the fact is exceptionally difficult, which makes it all the more important to have safeguards in place that prevent it from happening in the first instance.

  In the weeks after the election, accusations of major fraud centered on several claims: allegations that counting machines from the Dominion Voting Systems Corporation had been rigged; that video footage from Fulton County, Georgia, showed a box of bogus ballots being insinuated into the vote count while poll watchers were absent; that massive numbers of ballots for Joe Biden had been inexplicitly dumped in the early morning hours in Detroit and Milwaukee; that thousands of votes in Nevada had been cast by nonresidents; that more absentee ballo
ts than had been requested were cast in Pennsylvania; and that a truck driver had delivered many thousands of filled-out ballots from Bethpage, Long Island, to Pennsylvania. I had asked all the Department of Justice (DOJ) office heads around the country, working with the FBI, to look into these and a number of similar claims. Some turned out to be patently frivolous; others just were not supported by the available evidence.

  I had repeatedly informed the President through his staff that the department was looking at substantial claims of fraud but so far hadn’t found them to have merit. For more than a week, I had been getting calls from Republican senators and members of Congress deeply concerned about the direction of things, especially the President’s expanding his challenge from the courts to the state legislatures. They were concerned that, if President Trump continued claiming he won the election, without hard evidence, the country could be headed for a constitutional crisis. They wanted to know my thoughts on the fraud claims and asked if I could do something to inject more caution into the President’s rhetoric about a stolen election. It was not lost on me that, with two Georgia runoff elections for senator coming up the first week in January, Republican senators still hoped for the President’s help and could ill afford picking a public fight with him. On the other hand, as Attorney General, I uniquely had the ability to counteract the speculation and misinformation by arming myself with the facts from the relevant US attorneys.

  On November 29 the President, appearing on Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures program, hosted by Maria Bartiromo, had claimed the election was rigged and stolen and attacked the Department of Justice as “missing in action.” Based on my previous discussions with the President and his staff, he knew that the department was playing its proper role: when we received specific, credible allegations of substantial fraud, we investigated them. But President Trump appeared to think we were missing in action unless we worked with his legal team to reverse the results of the election.

  At noon on December 1 I sat down for lunch in the Attorney General’s private dining room with Mike Balsamo, the Associated Press reporter who covers the department. I was joined by Will Levi and Kerri Kupec, the head of the Office of Public Affairs. Mike asked me about the President’s criticisms over the weekend. I told him that, contrary to the President’s comments, we had been looking into substantial claims of fraud. “What have you been finding?” Mike asked.

  My response: “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

  Moments later, news was blasting out across media outlets that the Attorney General had contradicted the President by declaring that the department had yet to find evidence of widespread voter fraud sufficient to change the election’s result. Will and I then left for my previously scheduled meeting in the West Wing with the President’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel.

  As I had expected, once the President heard I was in Pat’s office, he hailed both of us down to meet with him. While Pat headed down to the Oval, I took a few minutes to check how the media were covering my AP interview. I then proceeded to the Oval for what I knew would be an unpleasant meeting. As I walked into the outer office, the President’s confidential assistant, Molly Michael, pointed to the back.

  “He’s all the way in the back,” she said, “and he’s waiting for you.”

  Will and I walked through the Oval and along the narrow hallway that leads to a small rectangular dining room that President Trump also used as a work area. POTUS was sitting as usual to my left at the head of the dining table. The opposing head of the table to the right was unoccupied, but looming on the wall behind it was a large-screen TV. It was tuned to the One America News (OAN) channel covering a Michigan legislative hearing on voter fraud allegations. Facing me on the far side of the table sat Meadows, Cipollone, and Deputy Counsel Pat Philbin. Standing to my right was a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, who had been on the first impeachment defense team before being pressed into service on the White House staff. The side of the table closest to me was empty. I walked over to the chair on my side of the table close to the President, rested my hands on the top of the backrest, and remained standing. The President, holding the remote, turned down the volume a bit but kept it audible in the background.

  I looked at POTUS and greeted him. “Hello, Mr. President.”

  There was an awkward silence. He put down the remote control, at first not looking at me. I could tell he was enraged, struggling to keep his temper under control. He shuffled through some papers on the table, looking for something, his breathing a little heavier than usual, his nostrils flaring slightly. Finding what he wanted, he thrust a news clipping at me. “Did you say this?” he snapped.

  It was the Balsamo article. “Yes, I did, Mr. President,” I responded.

  “Why would you say that?” he demanded, his voice rising.

  “Because it is true, Mr. President,” I replied. “The reporter asked me what the department had found to date, and I told him.”

  “But you did not have to say that!” he barked. “You could have just said, ‘No comment.’ This is killing me—killing me. This is pulling the rug out from under me.” He stopped for a moment and then said, “You must hate Trump. You would only do this if you hate Trump.”

  I had no problem arguing with the President one-on-one, but I had learned that when you fight with him in front of an audience, things can get out of control very quickly. I was determined to stay calm.

  “No, Mr. President, I don’t hate you,” I said. “You know I sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged.” The President nodded, almost involuntarily conceding the point. “But over the weekend, you started blaming the department for the inability of your legal team to come up with evidence of fraud. The department is not an extension of your legal team. Our mission is to investigate and prosecute actual fraud. The fact is, we have looked at the major claims your people are making, and they are bullshit.” The President looked defiant. I continued, “I’ve told you that the fraud claims are not supported.” I gestured to some others in the room. “And others have also told you this. But your legal team continues to shovel this shit out to the American people. And it is wrong.”

  The President motioned toward the TV. “Have you listened to any of these hearings?” he asked.

  “No, I haven’t, Mr. President,” I said, “but I am familiar with the allegations.”

  The President leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, rocking a little from side to side, staring at me, his face getting redder. He was seething, but appeared willing to let me continue. Normally, when Trump is being told something he doesn’t want to hear, he filibusters—he just keeps talking, so no one else can get a word in edgewise. There was nothing he wanted to hear less than what I was telling him, but he was letting me talk.

  I explained quietly that it is very difficult to challenge the results of a presidential election because there is only a five- or six-week window to make a case before the Electoral College acts. The responsibility for mounting a challenge lies with the lawyers of the campaign and each state’s GOP. They have the burden of persuading the state authorities or the courts to conduct the kind of deep-dive review needed to assess the validity of the election results. The Department of Justice does not play a role in this. We don’t have the legal authority or the tools to do that kind of audit-style review.

  The President shook his head in disgust.

  “Mr. President, when we get credible claims of fraud, we are looking into them,” I said.

  Pat Cipollone jumped in. “DOJ has been following up on fraud claims, Mr. President,” he said supportively.

  I continued, “Your legal team keeps publicly saying ‘fraud,’ but their arguments in courts don’t claim fraud. They’re really saying the state didn’t follow the rules—like excluding Republican monitors. That might create an opportunity for fraud. Bu
t that is not the same as evidence of fraud.”

  “There is a mountain of evidence,” Trump protested, gesturing to the hearing on TV.

  “Mr. President,” I said, “the reason you are in this position is that, instead of having a crackerjack legal team that had its shit together from day one, you wheeled out a clown show, and no quality lawyers who would otherwise be willing to help will get anywhere near it.”

  “Maybe,” he said, almost pensively, “maybe.” But he was not assuaged.

  “Look, Mr. President, they wasted a whole month with this idiotic claim about Dominion machines,” I continued. “First, there is no evidence they were compromised. Your team picked the one theory that can be easily disproven.” I explained that the machines are simply tabulation machines that count the paper ballots fed into them. Because the paper ballots are retained, it is easy to verify the machine’s accuracy by comparing the machine’s tally with the retained stack of ballots. As far as I knew, I said, wherever this had been done, there had been no material discrepancy, and no one had yet pointed to one.

  “Have you seen the thousands of Biden ballots dumped in the early morning in Detroit?” he asked. “People saw boxes of ballots being carried into the building in the early morning.”

  “We have looked into that also,” I replied. “Detroit has over six hundred precincts, and, unlike other places, all the ballots are transported to a separate processing center for counting. It’s not surprising that boxes of ballots would arrive through the night. Detroit’s votes usually come in late, and this time the vote totals were comparable to previous elections,” I assured him. “In Detroit, you actually did slightly better than in 2016, and Biden did slightly worse than Hillary Clinton.”

  The President seemed a bit taken aback that I seemed to know what I was talking about. I had been looking into things, but he seemed just as angry as when we’d started.

  “Have you bothered to ask the people who are feeding you this shit how the votes compared to the last election?” I pressed.