“The Greatest Political Hoax of all time!” President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday morning. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images mueller investigation Mueller report shatters Trump aides’ claims of harmonious White House On Thursday, the special counsel backed up the plentiful anonymous accounts of turmoil in the White House — only he got it all on the record.

When ousted FBI Director James Comey delivered damaging testimony to Congress in 2017, attracting nationwide attention, White House aides insisted that President Donald Trump’s mood was “light.”

Shortly after news broke that Donald Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Russian nationals promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, Trump reported that the vibe in the White House was “ fantastic .”


And after Republicans lost the House in last year’s midterm elections, Trump’s advisers countered that the president was feeling “buoyant.” In a subsequent cable news interview, Trump added that he was “extremely upbeat.”

For more than two years, the president and his team have been dutifully forking over questionable anecdotes about the president’s persistent good spirits in the face of a constant stream of stories about the dismal morale in the West Wing and Trump’s propensity for lashing out.

On Thursday, special counsel Robert Mueller backed up the plentiful anonymous accounts of turmoil in the White House — only he got it all on the record.

Across 488 pages, Mueller’s team recounted scores of interviews in which Trump’s advisers described a president obsessed over the investigations encircling him, often expressing frustration — and even despair — when things weren’t going his way.

“Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked,” Trump said when he found out that the Justice Department would be appointing a special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, according to notes taken by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff.

And repeatedly, the report shows Trump pressuring his aides to refute accurate news accounts or deceive the public about what actually happened behind the scenes.

Last year, Trump fumed after The New York Times broke the news that the president urged White House counsel Don McGahn to oust Mueller, an order McGahn refused to carry out. Trump complained to an aide that the story was “bullshit” and called McGahn a “lying bastard.” He later met with McGahn at the White House to urge him to deny the story.

“The President asked McGahn whether he would ‘do a correction,’ and McGahn said no. McGahn thought the President was testing his mettle to see how committed McGahn was to what happened,” the report says. Then-White House chief of staff John Kelly called the meeting “a little tense.”

The president also appeared to be deeply bothered by Comey’s May 2017 testimony before Congress in which he declined to say whether the president was under investigation.

“The President became very upset and directed his anger at Sessions,” the report said, adding that Trump allegedly told Sessions, “This is terrible Jeff. It’s all because you recused. AG is supposed to be most important appointment. Kennedy appointed his brother. Obama appointed Holder. I appointed you and you recused yourself. You left me on an island. I can’t do anything.”

The accounts are notable because they are on the record. If the officials had lied to Mueller’s team, they could face criminal prosecution — unlike White House aides who regularly spin their own version of events to reporters.

Yet even before Mueller’s detailed accounting of the pivotal moments of Trump’s presidency was made public, White House aides’ assurances that the president is taking everything in stride often seemed suspect. The president regularly unleashes on Twitter, sometimes just hours after his staff casts him as calm and collected, dismissing the probe as a “witch hunt” and portraying himself as an unfairly targeted victim.

“The Greatest Political Hoax of all time!” Trump tweeted Thursday morning.

One former Trump administration official told POLITICO that the president is often in a sour mood, but isn’t the angry tyrant he’s sometimes described as, noting that he sometimes shies away from direct confrontation. But the former official said the notion that he’s always even-keeled is laughable, adding that he is frequently focused on his ever-growing list of grievances.

Still, White House aides remain deeply frustrated with the constant focus on Trump’s state of mind, a form of palace intrigue reporting that has come under criticism from some in the media, as well. They say the caricature of the president stalking around the West Wing yelling is simply overblown.

True to form, Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to the president and one of his most steadfast defenders, disputed on Thursday the assertion in the report that Trump feared his presidency was over when Mueller was appointed.

“I was very surprised to see that because that was not the reaction of the president that day when I was there and he has never — there are words where the president’s quoted throughout the report where he doesn’t use those words,” said Conway, who was not in the meeting where the outburst allegedly took place.

As for how Trump is reacting to Thursday’s report?

“The president’s in a great mood,” Conway said.

