Necessity Read online

  “When he said he could shoot someone on a public street in front of a crowd of witnesses and people would vote for him anyway, did he, so far as you know, really intend to see if he could do it?”

  “No, he would never have—”

  “And when he said, after the Supreme Court ruled against him on an issue he had staked his reputation on, that the best thing that could happen is if half the justice were carried out on stretchers, did he mean he thought half the member of the court should be shot dead?”

  “Absolutely not. He meant that half the court were too old, that they ought to be replaced with justices young enough to do the job.”

  “In other words, the only threats that were real were the ones made against the president, threats that no one but you seem ever to have heard!”

  He grabbed both arms of the witness chair and started to shout back. I did not give him the chance.

  “Why were you on Air Force One? Why did you make the trip out here? Why didn’t you stay at your office in the White House? Why did you come to San Francisco?”

  The questions came in such rapid fire succession that Donahue had to wait a moment to make sure I was through.

  “It’s what I said earlier: we were here to meet with the best people in technology there are.”

  “‘We were here.’ You keep saying that. There seems to be no difference, at least in your mind, between you and the president. And that hasn’t changed, has it? You’re still in the White House, only now, instead of a senior policy advisor, you’re chief of staff; which means, I imagine, that you can speak of ‘we’ with even greater confidence than you could before.”

  I shook my head at the arrogance of it, the exaggerated sense of his own importance. He believed everything that had been written about him. He was smarter, far better read, than the president he worked for; better, more able, than anyone else on the White House staff. He had a reason for his belief. No one could match his intellect, no one, that is to say, who was in any position to rival him for power. Fitzgerald thought him overrated, the books he had read in college, the assigned reading in courses he had to take, the books from which he had learned only what he needed to pass exams, the only things he had ever read. The degrees he held were impressive, but mainly to those, like Walter Bridges, who did not have them.

  “And that was because, as I believe you just testified, the president was concerned with what had happened in the last election and wanted to do everything possible to make certain it never happened again, is that correct?”

  “Yes, the president was very insistent. You see,” he went on, turning to the jury, “no one had been affected more by what happened, by the Russian attempt to interfere. They weren’t successful, but that did not stop the president’s opponents—people like Senator Fitzgerald—from making all sorts of allegations, suggesting that the president not only won because of what the Russians had done, but that people in the campaign, even the president himself, had been working with the Russians, that there had been coordination, collusion, and that nothing the president wanted done should be allowed to pass until everything had been investigated. So, yes, the president was concerned. His presidency was being held hostage to these vicious, unproven because unprovable, allegations of criminal wrongdoing.”

  “Criminal wrongdoing—is that what you call treason?”

  “I object to that remark, I—”

  “The president did not want to meet with Senator Fitzgerald, did he?”

  “I…not particularly. Fitzgerald had several times asked for a meeting with the president, but we—I mean, the president—did not see any reason, not after what Fitzgerald had been saying.”

  “But he met with him on Air Force One when it landed here, in San Francisco?”

  “The senator was part of the greeting party. Wherever the president goes, he is met by the most important local public officials. Obviously, Senator Fitzgerald was included in that group.”

  “He met with him on the plane, not the tarmac.”

  “We had landed early. It was decided that this would be a good time to let Senator Fitzgerald have a few minutes. It was a way to end his complaint that the president would not see him.”

  “So it was decided at the last minute, so to speak, after the plane landed, when you realized there was time?”

  “Yes.”

  “A last-minute decision. Are you sure of that?”

  Curious, he tried not to show it.

  “Yes, a last-minute decision.”

  “You’re under oath,” I reminded him in such a quiet voice it got everyone’s attention.

  “Under…? I’m aware of that.”

  “Then stop lying. It was not a last-minute decision. It was a decision you had argued about almost from the moment you took off from Washington, an argument that became heated, an argument in which the president told you—and this is a direct quote—‘I’m not going to see the son of a bitch.’ It was an argument in which he told you that Fitzgerald wanted to run against him, but that—and this is another direct quote—‘it isn’t going to happen, that he’ll never get the chance.’ Are you starting to remember now? The argument in which you told the president that he had to meet with Fitzgerald because, ‘We have to do everything we can to keep him in the dark.’ In the dark about what, Mr. Donahue? That you were going to be meeting with people who could help make sure no one ever interfered with our elections again?”

  Donahue was adamant. It had never happened. He had never argued with the president. It was possible someone might have overheard part of the conversation he had with Bridges on the plane; there had, as he remembered it, been some discussion of Fitzgerald, the way he was always playing to the cameras, hinting at things that the Intelligence Committee might be looking at. There was no doubt that they had spoken, if only briefly, about what to do with Fitzgerald at the airport. There were going to be cameras and reporters everywhere, and you could never be sure, with someone as eager for attention as Fitzgerald, what he might pull. It was, as best he could now recall, only when they landed early that they decided to give Fitzgerald a few minutes on the plane. It would solve two problems at once: stop Fitzgerald from complaining that the president would not meet with him, and keep him out of view so he could not try to upstage the president on his arrival.

  “And I’m sure we all believe you,” I remarked dryly when he finished. “Just as I’m sure we’ll all believe all the rest of your testimony.”

  “Your Honor?” objected St. John.

  “You know better, Mr. Antonelli.” Patterson would have gone much further, giving me no end of a scolding, but she had taken such an intense dislike for the witness that she made it seem she thought me guilty of only a minor indiscretion.

  “The president wanted to meet with people who could help protect our elections from electronic attack?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What we’re really talking about is cyber warfare, isn’t it? The kind of thing the military knows how to do. Correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “The people you were meeting with, though not in the military themselves, were, I take it, experts in the technology used for that purpose—cyber warfare. Would that be correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’ve met with people like that before, haven’t you? Cyber warfare specialists?”

  “In Washington, part of the intelligence community. Yes.”

  “Not just in Washington, Mr. Donahue, but other places, other countries, as well. As a matter of fact, Mr. Donahue, you’ve met with some of who I think it fair to say are some of the world’s leading experts in this field. And you did this even before Walter Bridges was elected president. Because it is true, isn’t it, that you met with the very man in charge of the Russian attempt to interfere with the election, Sergei Rostov, a general in the Russian army!”

  Donahue’s face turned red. He pounded his hands on the arms of the witness chair.

  “That’s a
damn lie! Nothing like that ever happened!”

  “You never met Rostov, you never talked to Rostov?”

  “No, never!”

  Three quick steps and I was back at the counsel table, drawing from out of my briefcase three photographs. As I started back to him, his eyes went cold and his face went rigid. His fingers squeezed hard the wooden arms of the chair.

  “Here, tell us, who is sitting across the table from you in this photograph—the large, balding man in the dark, three-piece suit? You don’t remember having dinner with General Rostov in a Paris restaurant in June, five months before the election? If you have any questions about the date and time, you will find them recorded on the top left corner.”

  I waited in the awkward, endless silence for a response.

  “Don’t remember? Here, this second photograph, perhaps it might help. It shows you entering the restaurant, walking next to Rostov. Or this last one, which shows you standing on the sidewalk, shaking hands with him when he left. It’s odd you can’t remember,” I taunted him as I returned to the counsel table, where I opened a file folder. “Odd, given the conversation you had, the plan, the detailed plan, by which the Russians agreed to release information damaging to the other side, and to do it whenever you told them the time was right. Do you remember this now? Is your memory starting to come back? Let me help you. General Rostov said, ‘We have people at Wikileaks. They use what we give them the way we tell them to.’ And you said, ‘Just so long as none of this can ever be traced back to me.’ And Rostov asked, ‘Does Bridges know what you are doing, because if he doesn’t, as you’ll understand, we lose some of our incentive?’ And you reply, ‘He knows what you want. He doesn’t see any problem with it.’ Really, Mr. Donahue? He did not see any problem with what the Russians were asking for?”

  “I had dinner in Paris. I was there early that summer. I stayed for four days. It was my chance to get away for a while, before the convention, before the campaign really got started. I was invited to dinner by a Russian businessman, someone the president had known for years. At the last minute, he had to cancel and he sent this Rostov instead. I did not know he had any connection with the Russian government, much less the Russian military. He told me he was a partner of the president’s friend. He told me—you’re right about this—that he had friends—that was how he put it—who had some damaging information that might be helpful to the Bridges campaign. They wanted to help him. They had a way to take it public, but they would rather know from us the best time to do it. I knew this was treacherous ground. So instead of making some kind of definite commitment, I put him off with a promise to let him know. And as for the question about whether Bridges knew what I was doing, I was not doing anything except the vague promise to get back to them.”

  “And what Bridges was willing to do in exchange for Russian help? That didn’t mean anything, either?” I asked, wondering if there was any lie he would not tell.

  “I had no idea what the Russians might have wanted. As I say, I kept everything vague. Let me be completely honest with you,” he went on, turning again to the jury. “If the Russians, if anyone, knew something damaging to the other side, or damaging, for that matter, to Walter Bridges, the one thing certain is that they were going to use it. When I heard what Rostov—that was not the name he used with me—had to say, I thought the best thing was to string him along, play for time, until we found out what was really going on.”

  It was outrageous, without precedent, Donahue’s utter disregard for the truth. The worst part was that I had the sense he did not think he was lying at all. The truth for him was however you decided to interpret what you saw happening all around you. He did not doubt for a moment that he had played the Russians, taken what they could give, without even a promise, a real promise, that they would get something in return. It was the great discovery of the century that there was no order in the universe, only chaos on which you could, if you had sufficient wit and daring, create an order of your own invention. Alternative facts was not some misspoken phrase, it was the working hypothesis of the new reality.”

  “You didn’t know what the Russians wanted, so you decided to remain noncommittal, play for time. Is that what you want us to believe?”

  He did not answer, he just looked at me with a blank expression, as if, having answered the question once, he did not have to answer it again.

  “You did not, in other words, reject out of hand this offer of Russian help from a Russian general you claim you did not know was a general, much less what he did for the Russian government?

  “As I just finished testifying, I didn’t know what—”

  “Yes, we remember,” I said, cutting him off with a dismissive wave of my hand.

  Unbuttoning my jacket, and with my hands on my hips, I peered down at the floor. The silence in the courtroom was so complete I could hear my own breath. Everyone—the jury, the crowd, the swarm of reporters—was waiting for the next question. They had followed every word the way a concert audience listened to every note in a well-played symphony, caught up in the music, not a thought for the complications of the orchestration. It was only when it ended that anyone would start to remark on the flaws in the performance; only when the witness left the stand, only when that day’s proceedings came to a close, that anyone would begin to ask how much the witness had said was the truth and how much were the fabrications of a liar and a cheat. That judgment was always informed, at least to some extent, by their reputation, what we knew, or thought we knew about them outside their time as a witness in a courtroom. If someone like Mother Theresa were to testify that the world was flat, you might think her mistaken, but you would never think she was telling you something she did not honestly believe. What I had to do was make the jury believe that if Michael Donahue testified the world was round, it would be enough to make them doubt the evidence of their own senses.

  “You hated Kevin Fitzgerald, didn’t you?” I asked, my eyes still on the floor.

  “No, I wouldn’t say that I hated him.”

  “He was leading the opposition, standing in the way of what you wanted to do.”

  “That doesn’t mean I hated him.”

  “You testified that, in that meeting you had with him in his office, he threatened to kill the president.”

  “What is your question? Whether I hated him?”

  “No,” I said, lifting my head and staring hard at him. “My question is, who did you report it to?”

  “Report…?”

  “Someone has threatened the life of the president. That is a crime. Who did you report it to—the Secret Service, the Capitol police?”

  “I didn’t report it. I didn’t think it was necessary.”

  “Not necessary to report a crime? Is that because it never happened, Senator Fitzgerald never threatened the president, or because you had more important questions to deal with?”

  He glared at me, and then, remembering where he was, sat straight up and with a show of formality raised his chin.

  “I didn’t report what the senator said because I hoped he would come to his senses. And as to your reference to ‘more important questions,’ you’ll have to be more specific.”

  “Yes, let’s be more specific. You studied history in college, and history, as you understand it, follows a certain path, correct? It isn’t just a series of disconnected events. History has a purpose. Isn’t that what you have said, what you have written?”

  “Do I believe that history has a purpose, that it is moving in a direction, that it is possible to anticipate what will happen in the future? Yes, in a general sort of way. It isn’t like trying to predict who is going to win the next election, or what might happen in the Middle East, but in terms of the broad movements in the world, the fundamental changes that may take place over long periods of time, then, yes, in that sense I believe that history can be understood.”

  “The history of the future determined by the history of the past?” I asked, as if I were just trying to be sure
I fully grasped his meaning.

  “That is a fair statement.”

  “You have a theory about this, don’t you?”

  “A theory? I—”

  “A theory that starts from the premise that conflicts keep getting bigger. The American Revolution, for all its importance, was a smaller conflict than the Civil War, and the Civil War was smaller, in terms of numbers, than the First World War, and the Second World War was larger still, the biggest conflict the world had ever seen. This leads to the question that seems to have been at the center of all your thought: if conflicts keep getting bigger, what great conflict is coming next? And you had an answer to your question, didn’t you?”

  I asked this with an even temper and a steady gaze, the way it would have been asked by someone in an audience to which he just lectured on history and what it means. The difference was that this was a courtroom jammed to capacity with people who had come to watch a murder trial, and millions more watching on television. He was supposed to be a brilliant strategist, with a clear vision of how America’s place in the world had to change. He now had to prove it. He leaned forward.

  “The biggest conflict, the one that is taking place world-wide, the one we have to win, is the conflict between Islam and the West. There are terrorist attacks everywhere—Europe, Africa, Asia—all from the same cause, the same belief that Islam is the one true religion, the Koran the word of God and that anyone who doesn’t believe is an infidel and deserves to die. It is the biggest threat we have ever faced and most of the people in government refuse to acknowledge it. They think that all we have to do is practice tolerance, treat everyone the same, and worry more about offending someone’s religion than how many might die the next time we get attacked at home.”

  “And that is the reason—the failure of government to appreciate the danger we face—that you, and Walter Bridges, spoke so often of what you and others call the ‘Deep State,’ the permanent government, the officials who stay in power regardless who is elected to Congress or the presidency, correct?”