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developing a story that had far more details about the meeting—dquite possibly supplied by the Kushner side—which it would publish on Saturday, July 8. Advance knowledge of this article was kept from the president’s legal team for the ostensible reason that it didn’t involve the president. In Hamburg, Ivanka, knowing the news would shortly get out, was presenting her signature effort: a World Bank fund to aid women entrepreneurs in developing countries. This was another instance of what White House staffers saw as the couple’s extraordinarily off-message direction. Nowhere in the Trump campaign, nowhere on Bannon’s white boards, nowhere in the heart of this president was there an interest in women entrepreneurs in developing countries. The daughter’s agenda was singularly at odds with the father’s—or at least the agenda that had elected him. Ivanka, in the view of almost every White House staffer, profoundly misunderstood the nature of her job and had converted traditional First Lady noblesse oblige efforts into White House staff work. Shortly before boarding Air Force One for the return trip home, Ivanka—with what by now was starting to seem like an almost anarchic tone deafness—sat in for her father between Chinese president Xi Jinping and British prime minister Theresa May at the main G20 conference table. But this was mere distraction: as the president and his team huddled on the plane, the central subject was not the conference, it was how to respond to the Times story about Don Jr.’s and Jared’s Trump Tower meeting, now only hours away from breaking. En route to Washington, Sean Spicer and everybody else from the communications office was relegated to the back of the plane and excluded from the panicky discussions. Hope Hicks became the senior communications strategist, with the president, as always, her singular client. In the days following, that highest political state of being “in the room” was turned on its head. Not being in the room—in this case, the forward cabin on Air Force One—became an exalted status and get-out-of-jail-free card. “It used to hurt my feelings when I saw them running around doing things that were my job,” said Spicer. “Now I’m glad to be out of the loop.” Included in the discussion on the plane were the president, Hicks, Jared and Ivanka, and their spokesperson, Josh Raffel. Ivanka, according to the later recollection of her team, would shortly leave the meeting, take a pill, and go to sleep. Jared, in the telling of his team, might have been there, but he 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” was caught in a moment that would shortly receive the special counsel’s close scrutiny, with the relevant question being whether one or more federal employees had induced other federal employees to lie. An aggrieved, unyielding, and threatening president dominated the discussion, pushing HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020079