At some point early on, maybe by the time the navy stewards brought us the shrimp scampi, Trump asked bluntly, “So what do you want to do?” It was an odd question that I didn’t entirely understand at first, but without waiting for an answer, he launched into a monologue that made it crystal clear what he was referring to: whether I wanted to keep my job.
He said lots of people wanted to be director of the FBI, but that he thought very highly of me. He said he had heard great things about me and knew the people of the FBI thought very highly of me as well. He said despite that, he would understand if I wanted to “walk away” given all I had been through, although then he noted that that would be bad for me personally because it would look like I had done something wrong. He finished by saying that he knew he could “make a change at FBI” if he wanted to, but that he wanted to know what I thought.
Now it was pretty clear to me what was happening. The setup of the dinner, both the physical layout of a private meal and Trump’s pretense that he had not already asked me to stay on multiple occasions, convinced me this was an effort to establish a patronage relationship. Somebody probably had told him, or maybe it just occurred to him at random, that he’d “given” me the job for “free” and that he needed to get something in return. This only added to the strangeness of the experience. The president of the United States had invited me to dinner and decided my job security was on the menu.
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