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36 ‘ MICHAEL WOLFF Trump's stupidity, said Bannon, could sometimes be made into a vir- tue. Here was Bannon's idea: the president should make a retroactive claim of executive privilege. I didn’t know. Nobody told me. I was ill-advised. It was hard not to see Bannon’s satisfaction in a prostrate Trump admitting to his own lack of guile and artfulness. Bannon understood that this claim of retroactive executive privilege would have no chance of success—nor should it. But the sheer audacity of it could buy them four or five months of legal delay. Delay was their friend, possibly their only friend. They could work this claim of retroac- tive executive privilege, no matter how loopy, all the way to the Supreme Court. For this plan to work, the president would have to get rid of his inept lawyers. Oh, and he would also have to fire Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who was overseeing the Mueller investigation. Bannon had been against the firing of Comey, and in the months after the appoint- ment of the special counsel, he had fought the president's almost daily impulse to fire Mueller and Rosenstein, seeing this as the surest invitation to impeachment. (“Just don’t pay attention to his crazy shit,’ he had urged everyone around the president.) But now they had run out of options. “Firing Rosenstein is our only way out of here? Bannon told Costa. “I don't come to this lightly. As soon as they went to Cohen—that’s what they do in Mob prosecutions to get a response from the true target. So you can sit there and get bled out—get indicted, go to grand juries—or you can fight it politically. Get it out of the law-and-order system where we are losing and are going to lose. A new DAG will review where we stand on this thing, which could take a couple of months. Delay, delay, delay—and shift it politically. Can we win? I have no fucking idea. But I know on that other path I’m going to lose. It’s not perfect . . . but we live in a world of imperfect” + Costa’s story, which was posted online later that day, described Bannon as “pitching a plan to West Wing aides and congressional allies to cripple the federal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to four people familiar with the discussions.” But however many people SIEGE 37 Costa had spoken to about the background machinations of Steve Ban- non, what mattered was that he had spoken directly and at length to Bannon himself, who was using the Washington Post to pitch a plan to the president. Bannons three-part plan for Trump instantly made its way to the Oval Office. And the next morning, the president offered Kushner his view that he should fire Rosenstein, reinstate a claim of executive privi- lege, and get a tough-guy lawyer. Kushner, pressing his own strategies, urged his father-in-law to move cautiously when it came to Rosenstein. “Jared is spooked,” said a scornful Trump later that day while on the phone to a confidant. “What a girl!” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021142