36 : MICHAEL WOLFF a SIEGE 37 Trump’ stupidity, said Bannon, could sometimes be made into a vir- Costa had spoken to about the background machinations of Steve Ban- tue. Here was Bannon’ idea: the president should make a retroactive claim non, what mattered was that he had spoken directly and at length to of executive privilege. I didn’t know. Nobody told me. I was ill-advised. Bannon himself, who was using the Washington Post to pitch a plan to It was hard not to see Bannon’s satisfaction in a prostrate Trump ; the president. admitting to his own lack of guile and artfulness. Bannons three-part plan for Trump instantly made its way to the Bannon understood that this claim of retroactive executive privilege . Oval Office. And the next morning, the president offered Kushner his would have no chance of success—nor should it. But the sheer audacity : view that he should fire Rosenstein, reinstate a claim of executive privi- of it could buy them four or five months of legal delay. Delay was their lege, and get a tough-guy lawyer. friend, possibly their only friend. They could work this claim of retroac- : Kushner, pressing his own strategies, urged his father-in-law to move tive executive privilege, no matter how loopy, all the way to the Supreme cautiously when it came to Rosenstein. Court. ; “Jared is spooked,” said a scornful Trump later that day while on the For this plan to work, the president would have to get rid of his inept phone to a confidant. “What a girl!” 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 opt