Among the other episodes, Mr. Trump described the Russia investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated” in a letter that he intended to send to the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, but that White House aides stopped him from sending. Mr. Mueller has also substantiated claims that Mr. Comey made in a series of memos describing troubling interactions with the president before he was fired in May.
Photo
Legal experts said that of the two primary issues that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, appears to be investigating — whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice while in office and whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — there is currently a larger body of public evidence tying the president to a possible crime of obstruction. Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times
The special counsel has received handwritten notes from Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, showing that Mr. Trump talked to Mr. Priebus about how he had called Mr. Comey to urge him to say publicly that he was not under investigation. The president’s determination to fire Mr. Comey even led one White House lawyer to take the extraordinary step of misleading Mr. Trump about whether he had the authority to remove him.
The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this episode.
Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president reportedly dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.
Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with the special counsel’s investigation, declined to comment.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers have said the president has fully cooperated with the investigation, and they have expressed confidence that the inquiry will soon be coming to a close. They said that they believed the president would be exonerated, and that they hoped to have that conclusion made public.
Legal experts said that of the two primary issues Mr. Mueller appears to be investigating — whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice while in office and whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — there is currently a larger body of public evidence tying the president to a possible crime of obstruction.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
But the experts are divided about whether the accumulated evidence is enough for Mr. Mueller to bring an obstruction case. They said it could be difficult to prove that the president, who has broad authority over the executive branch, including the hiring and firing of officials, had corrupt intentions when he took actions like ousting the F.B.I. director. Some experts said the case would be stronger if there was evidence that the president had told witnesses to lie under oath.
Photo
Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, argued to Mr. Sessions that he did not need to recuse himself from the Russia investigation until it was further along. Credit
Al Drago/The New York Times
The accounts of the episodes are based on documents reviewed by The Times, as well as interviews with White House officials and others briefed on the investigation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.
Regardless of whether Mr. Mueller believes there is enough evidence to make a case against the president, Mr. Trump’s belief that his attorney general should protect him provides an important window into how he governs. Presidents have had close relationships with their attorneys general, but Mr. Trump’s obsession with loyalty is particularly unusual, especially given the Justice Department’s investigation into him and his associates.
A Lawyer’s Gambit
It was late February when Mr. Sessions decided to take the advice of career Justice Department lawyers and recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
The pressure to make that decision public grew days later when The Washington Post reported that Mr. Sessions had met during the presidential campaign with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. The disclosure raised questions about whether Mr. Sessions had misled Congress weeks earlier during his confirmation hearing, when he told lawmakers he had not met with Russians during the campaign.
Unaware that Mr. Sessions had already decided to step aside from the inquiry, Democrats began calling for Mr. Sessions to recuse himself — and Mr. Trump told Mr. McGahn to begin a lobbying campaign to stop him.
Mr. McGahn’s argument to Mr. Sessions that day was twofold: that he did not need to step aside from the inquiry until it was further along, and that recusing himself would not stop Democrats from saying he had lied. After Mr. Sessions told Mr. McGahn that career Justice Department officials had said he should step aside, Mr. McGahn said he understood and backed down.
Mr. Trump’s frustrations with the inquiry erupted again about three weeks later, when Mr. Comey said publicly for the first time that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. were conducting an investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia. Mr. Comey had told Mr. Trump in private that he was not personally under investigation, yet Mr. Comey infuriated Mr. Trump by refusing to answer a question about that at the hearing where he spoke publicly.
Photo
James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, refused to answer questions from lawmakers about whether Mr. Trump was under investigation during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May. Credit
Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
After that hearing, Mr. Trump began to discuss openly with White House officials his desire to fire Mr. Comey. This unnerved some inside the White House counsel’s office, and even led one of Mr. McGahn’s deputies to mislead the president about his authority to fire the F.B.I. director.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The lawyer, Uttam Dhillon, was convinced that if Mr. Comey was fired, the Trump presidency could be imperiled, because it would force the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether Mr. Trump was trying to derail the Russia investigation.
Longstanding analysis of presidential power says that the president, as the head of the executive branch, does not need grounds to fire the F.B.I. director. Mr. Dhillon, a veteran Justice Department lawyer before joining the Trump White House, assigned a junior lawyer to examine this issue. That lawyer determined that the F.B.I. director was no different than any other employee in the executive branch, and that there was nothing prohibiting the president from firing him.
But Mr. Dhillon, who had earlier told Mr. Trump that he needed cause to fire Mr. Comey, never corrected the record, withholding the conclusions of his research.
Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, called the episode “extraordinary,” adding that he could not think of a similar one that occurred in past administrations.
“This shows that the president’s lawyers don’t trust giving him all the facts because they fear he will make a decision that is not best suited for him,” Mr. Vladeck said.
Searching for Dirt
The attempts to stop Mr. Trump from firing Mr. Comey were successful until May 3, when the F.B.I. director once again testified on Capitol Hill. He spent much of the time describing a series of decisions he had made during the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal email account.
Photo
Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation and questioned his loyalty. Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Once again, Mr. Comey refused to answer questions from lawmakers about whether Mr. Trump was under investigation.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
White House aides gave updates to Mr. Trump throughout, informing him of Mr. Comey’s refusal to publicly clear him. Mr. Trump unloaded on Mr. Sessions, who was at the White House that day. He criticized him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, questioned his loyalty, and said he wanted to get rid of Mr. Comey. He repeated the refrain that the attorneys general for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Obama had protected the White House.
In an interview with The Times last month, Mr. Trump said he believed that Mr. Holder had protected Mr. Obama.
“When you look at the I.R.S. scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, aah, real problems they had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems,” Mr. Trump said. “When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”
Two days after Mr. Comey’s testimony, an aide to Mr. Sessions approached a Capitol Hill staff member asking whether the staffer had any derogatory information about the F.B.I. director. The attorney general wanted one negative article a day in the news media about Mr. Comey, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said the episode did not occur. “This did not happen and would not happen,” said the spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores. “Plain and simple.”
Earlier that day, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, had pulled one of Mr. McGahn’s deputies aside after a meeting at the Justice Department. Mr. Rosenstein told the aide that top White House and Justice Department lawyers needed to discuss Mr. Comey’s future. It is unclear whether this conversation was related to the effort to dig up dirt on Mr. Comey.
Mr. Trump spent the next weekend at his country club in Bedminster, N.J., where he watched a recording of Mr. Comey’s testimony, stewed about the F.B.I. director and discussed the possibility of dismissing him with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller. He had decided he would fire Mr. Comey, and asked Mr. Miller to help put together a letter the president intended to send to Mr. Comey.
In interviews with The Times, White House officials have said the letter contained no references to Russia or the F.B.I.’s investigation. According to two people who have read it, however, the letter’s first sentence said the Russia investigation had been “fabricated and politically motivated.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
On Monday, May 8, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein to discuss firing Mr. Comey, and Mr. Rosenstein agreed to write his own memo outlining why Mr. Comey should be fired. Before writing it, he took a copy of the letter that Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller had drafted during the weekend in Bedminster.
The president fired Mr. Comey the following day.
A week later, The Times reported that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey in February to shut down the federal investigation into Michael T. Flynn, who at the time was the national security adviser. The following day, Mr. Rosenstein announced that he had appointed Mr. Mueller as special counsel.
Once again, Mr. Trump erupted at Mr. Sessions upon hearing the news. In an Oval Office meeting, the president said the attorney general had been disloyal for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, and he told Mr. Sessions to resign.
Mr. Sessions sent his resignation letter to the president the following day. But Mr. Trump rejected it, sending it back with a handwritten note at the top.
Former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon’s hopes of leading a revolt in the Republican Party this year suffered a severe blow Thursday as his allies rebuked and abandoned him following a nasty public break with President Trump.
Candidates who once embraced Bannon distanced themselves from his efforts, groups aligned with his views sought separation, and his most important financial backer, the billionaire Mercer family, which has championed him for years, announced that it was severing ties.
Even his position as chairman of Breitbart News, a website he has referred to as one of his most effective “weapons,” was being reviewed by the company’s leadership, according to people familiar with the talks — a move that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders publicly encouraged at Thursday’s White House news briefing.
But it was the rare statement from Rebekah Mercer, daughter of investor Robert Mercer, that hit hardest and, combined with Trump’s fury, has left Bannon isolated from the two power centers that elevated him from a fringe commentator to an office in the White House.
“My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements,” Rebekah Mercer said in a statement to The Washington Post.
Breitbart executives, along with Mercer, who holds a minority stake, discussed pushing Bannon out of the company he helped make famous, according to four people familiar with the discussions. Among their concerns in doing so is the reaction of hard-line conservatives, who make up much of the site’s readership, and also of Bannon, who would be unlikely to leave quietly, the sources said.
Friends of the Mercers working at the White House privately shared their view that Bannon’s ouster from Breitbart would be well-received by the president, who has been irritated for months with Bannon’s rising profile even as the two continued to talk by phone. A Bannon representative declined to comment.
“I certainly think that it’s something they should look at and consider,” Sanders told reporters Thursday.
One person close to Trump said, “The president’s take is that everyone has to now make a choice: ‘It’s me or it’s Steve.’ ”
Lawyers for Trump have accused Bannon of breaking a confidentiality agreement by making critical comments about Trump and his family in a forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff. The president said in a statement Wednesday that Bannon has “lost his mind” since leaving his perch at the White House in August.
Those remarks have effectively undermined Bannon’s standing as leader in the motley movement that swept Trump into office, while giving ammunition to his foes in the Republican Party who have long warned that he will be an electoral liability.
“The base is owned and operated by Donald Trump,” said Christopher Ruddy, a friend of Trump’s who is chief executive of Newsmax Media. “Bannon was an interloper who didn’t have as much control as people say he did and whose image was inflated by the media. His power came from riding the coattails of Trump, and the base will side with the president.”
After leaving the West Wing, Bannon has tried to straddle a fine line as a hard-charging Trump advocate while cultivating his national stature as the master of his own political operation with distinct personal and ideological goals. People who work with Bannon acknowledged that it will be difficult for him to keep rallying the president’s base in the current environment.
Bannon’s foes were more blunt. “His only hook to Republican Party politics was his relationship with the president,” said Josh Holmes, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “You saw how quickly everything dissolved after the president’s statement.”
The fallout extended to political groups that have worked with Bannon to boost anti-establishment Republican candidates across the country this year, such as U.S. Senate candidate Kelli Ward of Arizona.
Eric Beach, an adviser to both Ward and the Bannon-allied Great America PAC, said Thursday that Bannon and Ward’s relationship was limited and not central to her campaign, even though Bannon has hosted her in Washington and spoke at a raucous rally for her in Arizona. Bannon, who has worked closely with Great America Alliance, a partner of the PAC, has no formal role with either group.
“I don’t think there is any room for the palace intrigue,” Beach said, saying the entire episode “hurts” the group’s cause.
There were signs that other donors were cooling on Bannon’s post-White House role as a fundraiser and gatherer of Republican money. Steven Law, the president of the Senate Leadership Fund, which opposes Bannon’s projects, said several of his own donors who had previously been willing to entertain pitches from Bannon had decided to stop those conversations.
The unease extended to individual races. Michael Grimm, a former New York congressman running for his old seat after a felony conviction, had eagerly courted and received Bannon’s support, posing for photos at the “Breitbart Embassy,” Bannon’s townhouse on Capitol Hill.
But Grimm quickly distanced himself from Bannon amid the uproar over the Wolff book and issued a statement denouncing the comments in the publication as “baseless” and “beyond disturbing.” His advisers said his swift response was a necessary political move.
“Grimm turned to Steve not just for strategic advice but the imprimatur of the president, and the disagreement suddenly makes that far less legible” as voters evaluate candidates, said Michael Caputo, a Grimm adviser who previously worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign. “Some candidates fear that the president will look unfavorably on them if they stay close to Steve.”
In other quarters of the Republican Party, where the Breitbart website serves as a commons and Trump controversies are called “fake news,” the unraveling of the Trump-Bannon relationship has not yet sparked wide aversion to Bannon.
Danny Tarkanian, a perennial candidate in Nevada and Trump booster challenging Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), said Thursday, “If Mr. Bannon is willing to support me through his comments, his financial resources, or to come out and appear at a rally, I would welcome that support.”
Tarkanian remains friendly with Bannon’s circle and noted that he has conferred with Bannon adviser Andy Surabian “on numerous occasions,” although Bannon has not formally endorsed Tarkanian and has courted others to run against Heller. Tarkanian maintained that he is a fervent Trump supporter and dismissed the suggestion that he may have to eventually choose a side.
“I don’t disown people for political expediency, and I’m not going to get in the middle of that issue,” Tarkanian said.
Bannon’s influence on Capitol Hill is also under scrutiny. On Thursday, Bannon’s allies said they were uncertain whether he would continue to be someone they sought out to help rally against illegal immigration and expel “dreamers” — young undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country as children and who were granted federal permits under an Obama-era program.
“Yesterday morning, he was key. Today, I’m not sure,” said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a hard-liner on immigration. “I’d like to see how it plays out over the next few days and see if he’s willing to walk some of this stuff back. How he responds will determine his role.”
As speculation about Bannon’s fate gripped Breitbart, Bannon told several employees and outside supporters that he was intent on staying on as chairman and asked them to go about their work, people familiar with the discussions said. He made plans to host Breitbart’s radio program on Sirius XM’s Patriot Channel, according to two people familiar with those discussions.
Bannon called Trump “a great man” late Wednesday night on that show and said he supported him “day in and day out.” Bannon’s role as a radio broadcaster, which appealed to Sirius when the broadcaster brokered a significant programming deal with Breitbart last year, is a factor inside Breitbart as executives mull whether to ask Bannon to step down as chairman. Breitbart wrote last month that “Bannon’s commitment to the Sirius XM radio platform . . . ensures that the conservative populist icon will have a significant presence.”
After his dismissal from the White House in August, Bannon thrust himself forward on the national stage as the lead general in a war to destroy what he saw as a weakened Republican establishment in the House and Senate — a bloc he called a “globalist clique” that had “total contempt” for Trump’s supporters.
He immediately took back control of Breitbart, launched fierce rhetorical attacks on Republican leaders, and last fall helped lead the charge to elect former Alabama state judge Roy Moore to the U.S. Senate, even after allegations surfaced of Moore having had improper sexual contact with teenage girls.
His ambitions have been extensive, mixing trips abroad to connect with global leaders and promote nationalist ideas with daily huddles with a stream of candidates and supporters at the “Breitbart Embassy.” In October, Bannon went as far as announcing on Fox News that there should be primary campaigns against every Republican Senate incumbent except for Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).
Bannon’s allies point to the decision of three incumbents — Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) — to retire instead of standing for reelection this year as evidence of his power to inject fear of the base into the Republican Party’s national leadership.
But Bannon’s plans for disruption have not quite come to fruition. Candidates to challenge Republican incumbents in Nebraska and Wyoming have yet to materialize, and there is no candidate yet recruited to take on former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who is expected to announce his Senate candidacy in Utah. A Bannon-backed candidate in Mississippi, Chris McDaniel, has slowed his preparations for a campaign against Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), according to people who have spoken with him.
Bannon in recent weeks had also met with leaders of the National Republican Congressional Committee and agreed to resist primary challenges in seats at risk for Democratic pickups next year.
Bannon allies say that he now sees the most opportunity for like-minded Republicans in Democratic-held Senate contests, including Indiana, Missouri, Montana and West Virginia. And he has groused to friends that it would be difficult to win in Nevada and Arizona against well-financed Democratic challengers this year — many of whom expect the left, not the right, to be energized in November.
“Days like this hit hard,” said Sam Nunberg, a friend of Bannon’s and a former Trump campaign adviser. “Steve has an emotional connection to the president and to the Mercers, and I’m sure this is hitting home.”
But, he added, “It could still work out with the Mercers. The reality is, how can you really kick Steve Bannon out of Breitbart?”
Staff writers Josh Dawsey and Sean Sullivan contributed to this report.
