What happened when Trump came to Britain
Meeting the Queen How a terrorist drill at Sandhurst wowed the US president Defence row When he kissed and made up with Merkel over Nato, but was outfoxed by Putin
In his explosive new memoir, serialised exclusively y in The Sunday Telegraph, former US national security y adviser John Bolton reveals how the president was s wowed by a Sandhurst terror drill, kissed the German chancellor after almost quitting Nato and was outfoxed by the Russian leader
Coming a month after June’s Singapore encounter with Kim Jong-un were three back-to-back July summits: a long-scheduled Nato meeting in Brussels with our partners in America’s most important alliance; Trump and Theresa May in London, a “special relationship” bilateral; and Trump and Putin in Helsinki, neutral ground to meet with our once and current adversary Russia. As I realised during this busy July, if I hadn’t seen it earlier, Trump was not following any international grand strategy, or even a consistent trajectory. His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern – or create – policy. That had its pros and cons.
After Singapore, I travelled to various European capitals to prepare for the summits. One of my planned trips was to Moscow. That stop had its complications. When I told Trump about going there to lay the groundwork for his trip, he asked, “Do you have to go to Russia? Can’t you do this in a telephone call?” Ultimately, he didn’t object when I explained why reviewing the issues in advance would help in our preparations. Shortly thereafter, I asked [John F] Kelly why Trump was complaining, and Kelly said, “That’s easy. He’s worried you’re going to upstage him.” This would sound preposterous for any president other than Trump, and while it was flattering, if true, it was also dangerous. What exactly was I supposed to do now to overcome the problem? I obviously did not come up with a good answer.
Trump really wanted Putin to visit Washington, which the Russians had no intention of doing, and we had been skirmishing over Helsinki and Vienna as possible meeting venues. Russia pushed Vienna, and we pushed Helsinki, but it turned out Trump didn’t favour Helsinki. “Isn’t Finland kind of a satellite of Russia?” he asked. (Later that same morning, Trump asked Kelly if Finland was part of Russia.) I tried to explain the history but didn’t get very far before Trump said he, too, wanted Vienna. “Whatever they [the Russians] want. Tell them we’ll do whatever they want.” After considerable further jockeying, however, we agreed on Helsinki.
Off to Brussels
In years gone by, Nato summits were important events in the life of the alliance. Over the past two decades, however, the gatherings became almost annual, and therefore less than exciting. Until the 2017 Nato summit in Brussels, that is. Trump livened things up by not referring to the North Atlantic Treaty’s iconic Article 5, which stated that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”. This provision is actually less binding than its reputation, since each alliance member will merely take “such action as it deems necessary”. It had been invoked only once, after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Nonetheless, Nato had been a successful deterrence structure, for decades blocking the Red Army from knifing through Germany’s Fulda Gap and deep into the heart of Western Europe.
Of course, the United States was always the overwhelmingly greatest force contributor. It was our alliance, and it was primarily for our benefit, not because we were renting ourselves out to defend Europe, but because defending “the West” was in America’s strategic interest. As a Cold War bulwark against Soviet expansionism, Nato represented history’s most successful politico-military coalition.
Trump, at his first Nato summit in 2017, complained that too many allies were not meeting their 2014 commitment, collectively made at Cardiff, Wales, to spend 2 per cent of GDP for defence by 2024. Germany was one of the worst offenders, spending about 1.2 per cent of GDP on defence, and always under pressure from Social Democrats and other Leftists to spend less. Trump, despite, or perhaps because of, his father’s German ancestry, was relentlessly critical. During consultations on the strike against Syria in April, Trump asked Macron why Germany would not join in the military retaliation against the Assad regime.
It was a good question, without an answer other than domestic German politics, but Trump rolled on, criticising Germany as a terrible Nato partner and again attacking the Nord Stream II pipeline, which would see Germany paying Russia, Nato’s adversary, substantial revenues. Trump called Nato “obsolete” during the 2016 campaign but argued in April 2017 that the problem had been “fixed” in his presidency. His noteworthy failure in 2017 to mention Article 5 allegedly surprised even his top advisers because he personally deleted any reference to it from a draft speech. True or not, the 2017 summit set the stage for the potential crisis we faced in 2018.
This storm had been brewing well before I arrived in the West Wing, but it was now directly ahead. Trump was correct on the burden-sharing point. The problem, from the perspective of US credibility, steadfastness and alliance management, was the vitriol with which Trump so often expressed his displeasure with allies not achieving the objective, or in some cases not even seeming to be interested in trying. If this were merely a critique of Trump’s style, it would be a triviality. Personally, I’ve never shied away from being direct, even with our closest friends internationally, and I can tell you they are never shy about telling us what they think, especially about America’s deficiencies. In fact, it was not Trump’s directness but the veiled hostility to the alliance itself that unnerved other Nato members and his own advisers.
Trump asked to call Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at 9am on Friday June 29, just a couple of weeks before the upcoming summit. As we met in the Oval [Office] beforehand, Trump said he would tell Stoltenberg the US was going to lower its “contribution” to Nato to Germany’s level and ask him to inform the other members before the July 11–12 summit. (Here, we face a persistent problem with nomenclature. The Cardiff commitment is not about “contributions” to Nato, but about aggregate defence spending. Whether Trump ever understood this, and simply misused the word “contribution”, I could never tell. But saying he would reduce the US “contribution” to Germany’s level implied the US would drop its defence expenditures from over 4 per cent of GDP by some 75 per cent, which I don’t think he meant. Adding to the confusion, Nato has a Common Fund to pay for its headquarters’ operating expenses and the like, roughly $2.5billion annually. Members do make “contributions” to the fund, but the fund’s spending is not what Trump was referring to. Pursuant to my later suggestion, I did persuade Germany to increase its Common Fund contribution, and the US to reduce its correspondingly, although this didn’t become final until December 2019.)
With [Jens] Stoltenberg on the line, Trump said he had inherited a mess economically and that Nato was egregious, complaining that Spain (he had just met the King) spent only 0.9 per cent of its GDP on defence. Trump rolled on, saying that the US paid 80 to 90 per cent of the cost of Nato, a number the source of which none of us ever knew. Aggregate US defence expenses (worldwide) amounted to slightly more than 70 per cent of all military spending by all Nato members, but of course, much US spending was for global programs or other specific regions. Trump would later come to say he thought that, in truth, the US paid 100 per cent of the cost of Nato. The source of that figure is also unknown. He told Stoltenberg that from then on, because this disparity in Nato payments was so unfair, America would pay only what Germany paid.
Trump conceded that Stoltenberg regularly gave him credit for his efforts to increase Nato spending by the European allies, but argued that the only reason expenditures had increased was because the allies thought Trump would otherwise withdraw the United States from Nato. Stoltenberg said he totally agreed with Trump that the situation was unfair, but he protested that after many years of declining Nato expenditure, we were now seeing an increase. Trump responded by urging Stoltenberg to tell that to the media, and asked him to speak with me to discuss the means by which the US would no longer “contribute” in the current, unjustified way to pay Nato’s costs, which was not justified, and which didn’t help the United States. Heretofore, said Trump, the US had been run by idiots, but no more. The Europeans didn’t appreciate us, screwed us on trade, and we would no longer pay for the privilege, but pay only what Germany paid. On and on it went in that vein. Trump said at the end he was officially protesting.
Stoltenberg called me at about 10am, and I asked all NSC staff and Sit Room personnel to get off the call so I could be as straight as possible with Stoltenberg. I gave him my assessment that the now largely departed “axis of adults”, worshipped by the US media, had so frustrated Trump he was now determined to do what he wanted to do on several key issues no matter what his current advisers told him. I said we had clear notice of what might happen at the Nato summit. There should be no thinking that small, palliative measures might head it off. This was clearly something Trump had thought about doing and wanted to do his way, which he had now done. Our Ambassador to Nato, Kay Bailey Hutchison, called me about noon, and I gave her a brief description of the Trump-Stoltenberg call. I said we would all be doing ourselves a disservice if we pretended the call hadn’t happened and resumed business as usual.
Later that day, I briefed [Mike] Pompeo. Rather than taking the issue of Nato on directly, he suggested we persuade Trump that, with so many other battles under way (notably the campaign to confirm [Brett] Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court), we couldn’t overload Republicans with other contentious issues. There were only 51 Republican senators, and we didn’t want to lose any of them because of threats to Nato. Pompeo and I agreed the two of us alone should present this case to Trump, with no generals present, so Trump didn’t think the “axis of adults” was ganging up on him again.
Work cut out
We met with Trump on Monday July 2, and it turned out to be easier and shorter than I expected. We explained the logic of not taking on more battles than we could handle, given the importance of Kavanaugh’s nomination, and urged that we simply continue pushing for other Nato members to get their defence spending to the two-per-cent-of-GDP level. Trump agreed without really debating. However, over the next several days, he asked me again why we just didn’t withdraw from Nato entirely, precisely what we had tried to prevent. Clearly, our work was still cut out for us.
We departed on Marine One for Andrews early Tuesday morning, with Trump exuberant about the Kavanaugh nomination the day before. The family was right from “central casting”, said Trump. In many conversations with Trump during the flight, however, I could see he was unhappy for some reason. We landed, and he rode with the three US ambassadors in Brussels (one to Belgium, one to the EU and one to Nato) in the Beast to the residence of our bilateral ambassador to Belgium, where he was staying. In the car, he blasted Hutchison for her Sunday talk show interviews on Nato, saying she sounded like an ambassador from the Obama administration. He then rolled on to inadequate spending by US Nato allies and unfair trade deficits with the EU. I wasn’t in the Beast, but I could recite the script from memory. It was not an auspicious start.
On Wednesday morning, I went to pre-brief Trump before breakfast with Stoltenberg and his advisers. Trump entered a small dining room on the residence’s second floor, where [James] Mattis, Pompeo, Kelly, Hutchison and I waited, and said, “I know I don’t have much support in this room.” He then proceeded to rip Nato. It wasn’t much of a briefing. Stoltenberg arrived, the press entered the breakfast room, and Trump riffed away: “Many [Nato allies] owe us a tremendous amount of money. This has gone on for decades.” Trump rolled on: “It’s very sad when Germany makes a massive oil-and-gas deal with Russia. We’re protecting all of these countries, and they make a pipeline deal. We’re supposed to protect you, and yet you’re paying all this money to Russia … Germany is totally controlled by Russia. Germany pays a little over one per cent, we pay over four per cent. This has been going on for decades … We’re going to have to do something, because we’re not going to put up with it. Germany is captured by Russia.”
Stoltenberg tried to start over after the press left by saying he was glad Trump was in Brussels. Trump was unappeased, saying that even the increases in Nato member defence spending that had been achieved were a joke. He was very unhappy about Nato and very unhappy with the European Union. He complained, yet again, about the new Nato headquarters building, the funds for which could have been spent on tanks – a fair point, like many points Trump made, important but often overwhelmed by the tsunami of words. He later asked why Nato hadn’t built a $500million bunker rather than the headquarters, which he called a target rather than a headquarters, which one tank could destroy. He was 100 per cent for Nato, but America paid more than was fair.
Nor was the EU spared, as Trump criticised Jean-Claude Juncker [President of the European Commission] as a vicious man who hated the United States desperately. Juncker, said Trump, sets the Nato budget, although he did not describe how that was accomplished. Trump stressed again that he wanted to decrease rather than increase US payments to the same level as Germany’s.
On Trump rolled, asking why we should enter World War III on behalf of some country not paying its dues, like Macedonia, which he then acknowledged didn’t bother him as much as Germany, a wealthy country not paying enough. He complained about his own advisers, saying we didn’t understand the problem, even though he told us the truth. Trump clearly believed that the only way the allies would spend more is if they thought the United States was leaving, which didn’t bother him, because he didn’t think Nato was good for America.
He reassured Stoltenberg that he was with him 100 per cent, noting that he had supported extending Stoltenberg’s term as Nato secretary general. Still, the other allies had to pay up now, not over a 30-year period, and in any case our spending was going down to Germany’s level. By this point, Mattis had turned to me and said quietly, “this is getting pretty silly”, shortly after which Trump said he was telling General Mattis not to spend more on Nato. Stoltenberg said in conclusion that we agreed on the fundamental message.
Quite the breakfast. Could the day get worse? Yes. We motorcaded to Nato headquarters, my first visit. It certainly was architecturally flamboyant, probably reflected in its cost. The summit’s opening ceremony came first, and, due to the vagaries of seating assignments, I was next to Jeremy Hunt, in his second day on the job as UK foreign secretary. Watching the leaders mix and mingle for the de rigueur “family photo”, he said, “Some leaders have small talk, and some don’t; you can tell in a minute who they are”, an interesting insight.
Trump’s first bilateral was with Merkel, who said lightly, “We are not yet completely controlled by Russia.” She asked about Putin, but Trump ducked, saying he had no agenda. Instead, he wanted to talk yet again about the higher tariffs he was considering applying to US imports of cars and trucks, which would hit Germany hard, complaining, as he did frequently, that Germany’s existing tariffs on US cars were four times higher than our tariffs on theirs. Then it was Macron, whom Trump accused of always leaking their conversations, which Macron denied, smiling broadly. With that, we motorcaded back to downtown Brussels. I gave my seat at the leaders’ dinner to Hutchison that night, as a gesture for what she had been through. Besides, I had had enough, and things seemed to be settling down.
Wrong. I left the hotel at 7:45 Thursday morning to meet with Trump, but he called me in the car first to ask, “Are you ready to play in the big leagues today? This is what I want to say”, and he proceeded to dictate the following: “We have great respect for Nato, but we’re being treated unfairly. By January 1, all nations must commit to two per cent, and we will forgive arrears, or we will walk out, and not defend those who have not. So long as we are not getting along with Russia, we will not go into a Nato where Nato countries are paying billions to Russia. We’re out if they make the pipeline deal.” This was not finely polished, but the direction was clear. As I wondered whether I would be resigning by the end of the day, the call cut off. I thought to myself, I had ten minutes until I saw Trump to figure out what to do. I called Kelly, explained the situation, and told him that, contrary to his plans, he had to come out to Nato headquarters. All hands on deck. When I arrived at the embassy residence, I located the president’s military aide (who carries the famous “football” which contains the nuclear launch codes) and asked him to find Mattis, whom I had been unable to raise (good thing we weren’t at war) immediately. Pompeo was waiting at the residence, and I explained Trump’s mood: “He’s going to threaten to withdraw today.” Fortunately, Trump was typically late, so we considered what to do, concluding that the Kavanaugh play was still our best argument. We also thought about reducing the US contribution to Nato’s operating budget, the Common Fund, to equal Germany’s, reducing the current US share from 22 per cent to 15 per cent.
The showdown
Trump entered at 8.30am; asked, “Do you want to do something historic?”; and then repeated what he had said earlier: “We’re out. We’re not going to fight someone they’re paying.”
With Trump, we made our Kavanaugh pitch as forcefully as possible and then departed for our respective vehicles in the motorcade. When we arrived, Trump went to his seat between Stoltenberg and Theresa May (leaders were seated around the huge North Atlantic Council table in alphabetical order by country). Trump motioned me up and asked, “Are we going to do it?” I urged him not to, saying he should slam delinquent members for not spending adequately on defence but not threaten withdrawal or cutting US funding. “So, go up to the line, but don’t cross it,” was how I finished. Trump nodded but didn’t say anything. I returned to my seat not knowing what he was going to do. It felt like the whole room was looking at us. Trump spoke at about 9:25 for 15 minutes, starting off by commenting he wanted to register something of a complaint. He observed that it was difficult, because many people in the United States felt European countries were not paying their fair share, which should be four per cent (as opposed to the 2014 Cardiff agreement of two per cent).
For years, Trump said, US presidents would come and complain, but then leave and nothing would happen, even though we paid 90 per cent. We were being slow-walked, and nothing much was really being done. The US considered Nato important, said Trump, but it was more important for Europe, which was far away. He had great respect for Chancellor Merkel, noting that his father was German, and his mother Scottish. Germany, he complained, was paying only 1.2 per cent of GDP, and rising only to 1.5 per cent by 2025. Only five of 29 Nato members currently paid two per cent. If countries were not rich, Trump acknowledged that he could understand it, but these are rich countries. The US wanted to continue to protect Europe, he said, but he then veered into an extended riff on trade and the EU, which he thought
should be tied together with Nato for analysis purposes. Trump disagreed with the Europeans on some things, like immigration and the EU’s lack of control over its borders. Europe was letting people into its countries who could be enemy combatants, especially since most were young men coming in.
On it went. Trump said again that he had great respect for Nato and for Stoltenberg. He complained that Nato members wanted to sanction Russia, but Germany would pay Russia billions of dollars for Nord Stream II, thereby feeding the beast, which was a big story in the United States. The US wanted to be good partners with Europe, but the allies had to pay their share; Germany, for example, could meet the two per cent target right now, not waiting until 2030, he said, calling Merkel by name across the huge chamber. Trump said he didn’t want to see press reports coming from this Nato summit that said everyone was happy. He wasn’t happy, because the United States was being played. Then there was more, and then more.
Then, coming to a close, Trump said he was with Nato 100 per cent, a thousand million per cent. But allies had to pay the two per cent by January 1, or the United States was just going to do its own thing. Then he was back on why he didn’t like the headquarters building where we were all sitting, repeating that a single tank shell could destroy it. Trump ended by saying he was very committed to Nato, but he was not committed to the current situation. He wanted members to pay what they could, and not in four or six years, because the current situation was not acceptable to the United States. He wanted that registered.
Trump had done what I hoped, although his toe was over that line several times. Still, despite the stunned reaction in the vast NAC chamber, Trump had said he supported Nato, making it hard to construe his remarks as an outright threat to leave. Perhaps the fever had broken. When people ask why I stayed in the job as long as I did, this was one of the reasons.
A few minutes later, Merkel came over to speak with Trump at his seat, suggesting that Stoltenberg convene an informal “roundtable” where everyone would have a chance to react to what Trump had said. At the meeting, various governments described their domestic political woes, as if we should feel sorry for them or didn’t have any domestic political woes ourselves. Trump was bargaining in real time with the other leaders, trapped in a room without their prepared scripts. It was something to see. Some leaders said they couldn’t accept what Trump asked for on defence expenditures because it contradicted the earlier-adopted communiqué, which I communicated to Stoltenberg would be a real mistake.
He agreed and helped head off that problem, but it was clear things were in dire straits. Canada’s Trudeau asked, “Well, John, is this one going to blow up too?” I answered, “Plenty of time left, what could go wrong?” and we both laughed. I gave Trump a note about reducing US Common Fund spending, which he passed to Stoltenberg, who blanched when he saw it. But at least that was now also on the table.
With a few more comments from the crowd, the meeting ended, and we went off to prepare for Trump’s closing press conference, which was restful compared to Singapore. Trump gave a positive spin to the day’s events. The outcome was unmistakable: the United States expected its Nato allies to live up to the commitments they had made on defence spending. How unremarkable that should have been, but how much effort it had taken to get to something so banal. Indeed, this was definitely not the Obama presidency.
As we left, Merkel was speaking. Trump went up to her to say goodbye, and she rose to shake hands. Instead, he kissed her on both cheeks, saying, “I love Angela”. The room broke into applause, and we left to a standing ovation. That night, Trump tweeted: “Great success today at Nato! Billions of additional dollars paid by members since my election. Great spirit!”
It was a wild ride, but Nato had sent Trump off to meet Putin in Helsinki with a publicly united alliance behind him, rather than exacerbating our already incredibly difficult position involving the very future of Nato itself.
Brexit Britain
Air Force One flew to London’s Stansted Airport, where we took Marine One to Winfield House, our ambassador’s residence. We then motorcaded to our hotel to change into formal wear, raced back to Winfield House, and helicoptered to Blenheim Palace, where prime minister May was hosting dinner. The arrival ceremony with red-coated troops and military band at sundown was most impressive, as was the interior of the huge palace. Sedwill and I sat at the head table with the leaders and their spouses, the current Duke of Marlborough, and the UK and US ambassadors and their spouses. I could have hung around for a while, but bad weather was closing in. We either choppered back to London at 10.30pm, or there was no telling when we would get back. Time to go! Ta-ta!
The next day, Friday the 13th, opened with press stories about an interview Trump gave in Brussels to
The Sun newspaper, basically trashing May’s Brexit strategy. I thought the strategy was in freefall anyway, but it was, as they say in London, a spot of bother for this to happen as the leaders met, supposedly to demonstrate the special relationship at work.
Brexit was an existential issue for the UK, but it was also critically important to the US. Brexit’s fundamental impetus was the accelerating loss of citizen control over the Brussels-based mechanisms of the European Union. Bureaucracies were making rules that national parliaments had to accept as binding, and the loss of democratic sovereignty was increasingly palpable.
For the Brits, ironically, Brussels was the new George III: a remote (politically if not physically), unaccountable, oppressive machine that a majority of British voters rejected in 2016, reversing 43 years of EU membership. Yet implementing the vote had been disastrously mishandled, thereby threatening political stability in Britain itself. We should have been doing far more to help the Brexiteers, and I certainly tried. Unfortunately, apart from Trump and myself, almost no one in the administration seemed to care. What a potential tragedy.
The US delegation helicoptered to Sandhurst, Britain’s military academy, where the Ministry of Defence held a joint exercise for US and UK special forces to take down a terrorist camp. Trump apologised as he greeted May, and she brushed the press incident away. The exercise was loud and impressive, clearly getting Trump’s attention. I kicked myself over the fact that someone in the last 18 months hadn’t taken Trump to a US exercise. Had he seen such things before, perhaps we could have saved the war games on the Korean Peninsula. From Sandhurst, we helicoptered to Chequers, the British prime minister’s weekend retreat, for the main business meetings of the visit.
Hunt and others joined May and [Sir Mark] Sedwill, and we began the meeting in front of a fireplace in the two-storey central living room. After starting with Yemen, a British obsession, May turned to Syria, particularly how to deal with Russia’s presence there, stressing that Putin only valued strength, obviously hoping Trump would pay attention. I explained what Putin had told me a few weeks before on working to get Iran out of Syria, about which the Brits were rightly sceptical. I said, “I’m not vouching for Putin’s credibility,” to which May replied, “Well, we especially didn’t expect it from you, John!” to general laughter.
That led to Russia’s hit job on the Skripals (a defecting former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter), described by Sedwill as a chemicalweapons attack on a nuclear power. Trump asked, “Oh, are you a nuclear power?” which I knew was not intended as a joke.
I asked May why the Russians did it, and Trump said he had asked the same question the night before at Blenheim, thinking it might be intended as a message. May thought the attack was intended to prove Russia could act with impunity against dissidents and defectors, to intimidate them and like-minded others.
She stressed to Trump that, in Helsinki, he should go into the meeting from a position of strength, and Trump agreed, claiming that Putin asked for the meeting (the opposite of the truth), and assured her he would not give anything away. (I had learnt earlier that the Justice Department was making public [Robert] Mueller’s indictments against 12 Russian GRU officers for election interference, which I thought better announced before the summit, for Putin to contemplate.)
Over the working lunch that followed, we discussed the travails of Brexit, Trump’s view of the North Korea negotiations, and then China and Trump’s November 2017 visit. In the concluding press conference, Trump went out of his way to tamp down the firestorm caused by his Sun interview, leading the UK press to label it “a complete reversal”, which it certainly seemed to be. Trump called the US-UK relationship “the highest level of special”, a new category.
After taking Marine One back to Winfield House, we helicoptered out to Windsor Castle for the Trumps to meet Queen Elizabeth, which brought another display of pageantry, and lots more red coats and military bands. Trump and the Queen reviewed the honour guard, and they (and FLOTUS) met for almost an hour. The rest of us had tea and finger sandwiches with members of the royal household, which was very elegant but hard on some of us ill-schooled colonials. Then it was back on Marine One, heading to Stansted and boarding Air Force One for Scotland, to stay at the Trump Turnberry golf resort.
The resort, on the Firth of Clyde, was huge, and many of us gathered outside to enjoy the view, until someone flying an ultralight vehicle, more like a bicycle with wings attached to it (a Greenpeace demonstrator, as we learned later), came pedalling by flying a banner calling Trump “below par”. The Secret Service hustled Trump inside, along with everyone else except Kelly and me, who for some reason stayed outside to watch as this ungainly contraption flew ever closer. The Service finally decided Kelly and I should go inside as well. It was quite a breach of security, but fortunately only entertainment.
Air Force One left Prestwick Airport midafternoon on Sunday July 15, for Helsinki. Trump was watching a World Cup soccer match in Moscow as I tried to brief him on the arms-control issues we might discuss with Putin. Trump and I also discussed how to handle the issue of election meddling with Putin, especially now that Mueller’s indictments of the GRU agents were public. Since we had no extradition treaty with Russia, and Russia’s “constitution” prohibited extraditions anyway, the odds these defendants would be handed over were infinitesimal.
Accordingly, I advised against demanding that the Russians do so, as many Democrats and Republicans were suggesting. Asking for something we knew we couldn’t get made us look impotent. Instead, I suggested Trump say, “I’d love to have them come to the United States to prove their innocence,” which he seemed to like. “You should get credit for this,” said Trump. He wanted to say that if Russian hacking in 2016 was so serious, Obama should have done more about it, which was entirely true.
Helsinki summit
We landed in Helsinki and drove to the Kalastajatorppa Hotel (go ahead, try pronouncing it). On Monday morning, I walked through the tunnel to the hotel’s guesthouse to brief Trump for his breakfast with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto. I had first walked through this tunnel in September 1990 with Jim Baker, to help prepare George HW Bush for his meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, after Saddam Hussein’s August invasion of Kuwait. During the day, Finnish television ran endless footage of the BushGorbachev summit, probably the last time US and Soviet/Russian leaders met in Helsinki. I was one of the few people in Trump’s entourage who even remembered that summit, let alone had attended it.
Back at the Kalastajatorppa after breakfast, we had word that Putin’s plane was late departing Moscow, following his pattern of making his guests wait. I hoped Trump would be irritated enough by this that he would be tougher on Putin than otherwise. We did consider cancelling the meeting entirely if Putin were late enough, and we decided that in any event, we would make Putin wait for a while in Finland’s presidential palace (where the summit was to be held, as in 1990) once he did arrive.
We sweated out a stunningly long, just-under-twohour one-on-one meeting. Trump emerged at about 4.15 and briefed Kelly, Pompeo, [Jon] Huntsman and me. Most of the conversation was on Syria, with particular emphasis on humanitarian assistance and reconstruction (which Russia wanted us and the West generally to fund), and getting Iran out.
Trump said Putin spent a lot of time talking, and he listened, which was a switch. It was clear, said Trump, that Putin “wants out” of Syria, and that he liked Netanyahu. Trump also said Putin didn’t seem to care much one way or the other about our leaving the Iran nuclear deal, although he did say Russia would stay in.
On China trade issues, Putin commented on the tough US stance, and Trump had replied that he had no choice. Putin wanted the US to do more business in Russia, noting that the EU did 20 times more than America. The key point was there were no agreements on anything, no concessions, no real change in substantive foreign policy. I was delighted. And relieved. No successes, but that didn’t trouble me at all, since I had long seen this entire summit as one massive exercise in damage control.
Then we came to election meddling, which Trump said he raised first. Unfortunately, Putin had a curveball ready, offering to try in Russia the justindicted GRU agents (how thoughtful), under an unspecified treaty, saying further he would let Mueller’s investigators come in to do their work, so long as there was reciprocity with respect to Bill Browder, a businessman whose lawyer in Russia, Sergei Magnitsky, had been arrested and killed by the Putin regime. This seemed like a trap if there ever was one. We then headed to the working lunch, now more like an early dinner.
Trump asked Putin to describe the one-on-one, and Putin said Trump had first raised the electioninterference issue, and then said he hoped we could provide a common explanation of the matter (whatever that meant). Putin said we should all promise no more cyberattacks. Sure, that’ll work. He followed with what they had said on Ukraine, Syria, Iran and North Korea, with a few comments by Trump, and it all seemed uneventful, much like Trump had described it earlier. They also touched on arms control, but only superficially. I decided to let that last issue lie, worried it was simply risking problems to reopen it. What both of them really wanted to discuss was increasing US trade and investment in Russia, a conversation that lasted a surprisingly long time given there was so little to say, with so few US businesses really eager to dive into the Russian political and economic morass.
After the lunch broke, we walked to the TrumpPutin press conference, which started about 6pm. Putin read a prepared statement, written well before the meeting, but he did say publicly that Trump had raised the election-meddling issue first, answering “the Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere into internal American affairs, including the election process”, as he had in my earlier meeting with him. Trump read his anodyne statement, and the press questions started. Putin at one point mentioned that Trump had stood by the well-known US position that the annexation of Crimea was illegal, but that got lost in the shuffle.
I thought we might actually be OK, for a while. A US reporter asked Putin why Americans should believe his denials of interference in our 2016 election, and Putin answered, “Where do you get this idea that President Trump trusts me or I trust him? He defends the interests of the United States of America, and I do defend the interests of the Russian Federation … Can you name a single fact that would definitively prove the collusion? This is utter nonsense.”
Then, Putin raised the 1999 Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. Putin misnamed it (or it was mistranslated) during the press conference, although we had concluded by then this must have been what he had raised in his one-on-one with Trump. Putin said Mueller could take advantage of the treaty, and Russia should also be able to take advantage of it to pursue Bill Browder for his alleged crimes, as he had related to Trump during their encounter. Putin’s description of what might be possible under the treaty was a long way from what it actually provided, but by the time we explained it to the press, Putin had scored his propaganda point.
Worryingly, however, Putin also said he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election “because he talked about bringing the US-Russian relationship back to normal,” a significant deviation from the standard public line that countries don’t interfere in others’ internal politics and would work with whomever was elected.
Self-inflicted wound
That in turn paled before the Trump response near the end of the press conference, when Trump said, “My people came to me – Dan Coats came to me and some others – they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have – I have confidence in both parties … So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
Kelly and I, sitting next to each other in the audience, were almost frozen to our seats by Trump’s answer. It was obvious that major corrective action would be needed because of this self-inflicted wound, but what exactly that would be was far from evident. The immediate media coverage was catastrophic.
After Trump’s individual interviews finished, we raced to the airport to board Air Force One, which took off at 8pm local time. Dan Coats had been trying to reach me, and I called him immediately after we were airborne. He was, to say the least, upset. “Shock waves are rolling across Washington,” he said, and the intelligence community wanted a statement from him to prevent the community from being totally undermined. Coats had prepared something that in his view was necessary to defend the community, and I asked him to hold off issuing it for just a few minutes until I could talk to Kelly.
I did not detect any hint that he was thinking of resigning, but his sense of urgency was palpable. I hung up and found Kelly, who thought a statement might be helpful if Coats talked about Trump administration anti-meddling efforts, which were far greater than what Obama had done. Coats didn’t want to make any changes to the statement, which he read to me over the phone.
I didn’t think, ceteris paribus, it was that bad, or unexpected. I still didn’t see any indication Coats might resign, so I told him to go ahead and release the statement.
Coats’s comments, issued moments later, added fuel to the fire but were minor compared to what the press was already doing. We were hard at work researching the MLAT, confirming the initial view that Putin had totally distorted the treaty, both how it applied to Bill Browder and what Mueller’s team might be able to obtain. It was pure propaganda, Soviet-style. We landed at Andrews at 9.15pm Washington time, and I headed home.
The next day, the entire senior White House communications team conferred with Trump in the Oval. Still surprised at the negative reaction, he had reviewed the press-conference transcript and decided he had misspoken. In the line where he said “I don’t see any reason why it would be,” meaning, “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,” he had meant to say “would not be [Russia]”, thereby reversing the sentence’s meaning. Of course, that change alone did not eliminate the problem of his other statements accepting moral equivalence between Putin’s view and our own intelligence community’s view. But for the press office people, Trump’s making any kind of corrective statement was progress. Stephen Miller drafted prepared remarks, which Trump delivered in the early afternoon.
This was hardly the way to do relations with Russia, and Putin had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with in Helsinki. Condi Rice called to tell me she was not going to make any public comment on Helsinki, but she said, “You know, John, that Putin only knows two ways to deal with people, to humiliate them or dominate them, and you can’t let him get away with it.”
I agreed. Lots of people were calling on various senior officials to resign, including Kelly,
Pompeo, Coats and myself.
I had been in the job only a little over three months. Things sure moved fast in the Trump administration!
‘We should have been doing far more to help the Brexiteers, and I certainly tried’