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10 MICHAEL WOLFF Hicks had been elevated to White House communications director, with Raffel as her number two. The trouble had arisen the previous summer. Both Hicks and Raffel had been on Air Force One in July 2017 as the news broke about Donald Trump Jr-s meeting in Trump Tower during the campaign with Russian government go-betweens offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. During the flight back to the United States after the G20 summit in Germany, Hicks and Raffel aided the president in his efforts to issue a largely false story about the Trump Tower meeting, thus becoming part of the cover-up. Even though Raffel had been at the White House for a little more than nine months, the Axios report said that his departure had been under dis- cussion for several months. That was untrue. It was an abrupt exit. The next day, just as abruptly, Hope Hicks—the person in the White House closest to the president—resigned as well. The one person who perhaps knew more than anyone else about the workings of the Trump campaign and the Trump White House was sud- denly out the door. The profound concern inside the White House was the reasonable supposition that Hicks and Raffel, both witnesses to and participants in the president's efforts to cover up the details of his son and son-in-law’s meeting with the Russians, were subjects or targets of the Mueller investigation—or, worse, had already cut a deal. The president, effusive in his public praise for Hicks, did not try to talk her out of leaving. In the weeks to come he would mope about her absence—“Wheres my Hope-y?”—but, in fact, as soon as he got wind that she might be talking, he wanted to cut her loose and began, in a significant rewrite, downgrading her status and importance on the cam- paign and in the White House. Yet here, from Trump's point of view, was a hopeful point about Hicks: as central as she was to his presidency, her duties really only consisted of pleasing him. She was an unlikely agent of grand strategy and great con- spiracies. Trumps team was made up of only bit players. + John Dowd may have been reluctant to give his client bad news, but he well understood the danger of a thorough prosecutor with virtually SIEGE unlimited resources. The more a determined team of G-men sifts, strit and inspects, the greater the chance that both methodical and cast crimes will be revealed. The more comprehensive the search, the mc inevitable the outcome. The case of Donald Trump—with his history bankruptcies, financial legerdemain, dubious associations, and gene: sense of impunity—certainly seemed to offer prosecutors something an embarrassment of riches. For his part, however, Donald Trump yet seemed to believe that | skills and instincts were at least a match for all the thoroughness a1 resources of the United States Department of Justice. He even believ their exhaustive approach would work in his favor. “Boring. Confusi for everybody,’ he said, dismissing the reports of the investigation pr vided by Dowd and others. “You can't follow any of this. No hook? One of the many odd aspects of Trump's presidency was that did not see being president, either the responsibilities or the exposu as being all that different from his pre-presidential life. He had endur almost countless investigations in his long career. He had been involv in various kinds of litigation for the better part of forty-five years. He w a fighter who, with brazenness and aggression, got out of fixes that wot have ruined a weaker, less wily player. That was his essential busin: strategy: what doesn’t kill me strengthens me. Though he was wound again and again, he never bled out. “It's playing the game,” he explained in one of his frequent mor logues about his own superiority and everyone else's stupidity. “I’m go at the game. Maybe I’m the best. Really, I could be the best. I think I< the best. I’m very good. Very cool. Most people are afraid that the wo might happen. But it doesn’t, unless you're stupid. And I’m not stupid? In the weeks after his first anniversary in office, with the Muel investigation in its eighth month, Trump continued to regard the s cial counsel's inquiry as a contest of wills. He did not see it as a war attrition—a gradual reduction of the strength and credibility of the t get through sustained scrutiny and increasing pressure. Instead, he sav situation to confront, a spurious government undertaking that was v nerable to his attacks. He was confident he could jawbone this “wit hunt”—often tweeted in all-caps—to at least a partisan draw. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021129