Last February, Michael Flynn, who was then the national-security adviser, huddled
with top aides in his White House office. Flynn had been under fire for
days, since press reports revealed that he had misled the Vice-President
and other officials regarding his contacts with Russia’s Ambassador to
the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Flynn’s deputy, K. T. McFarland,
spoke for the group when she appealed to her boss to try to save his job by talking with President
Trump directly, according to people in the room.
She argued that it would be a mistake for Flynn to surrender to his
opponents so quickly. Flynn chose not to follow McFarland’s advice,
telling aides that he would leave the decision to the President. That
night, he handed in his resignation letter.

A year later, McFarland faced her own choice. At the end of 2017, the Senate sent her nomination to serve as Trump’s
Ambassador to Singapore back to the White House, after Democrats accused
her of misleading lawmakers regarding her own knowledge of Flynn’s
contacts with Kislyak. Instead of heeding congressional warnings about
her dim prospects for Senate confirmation, Trump re-nominated her for
the Singapore post, earlier this month. Even though most White House
officials consider it hopeless, McFarland recently told friends that she
is preparing for another round of meetings with senators, hoping to
somehow pull through. “She still thinks she has a shot,” one friend
said. A senior congressional aide said of McFarland’s unwillingness to
concede defeat, “I feel sorry for her.”

McFarland’s tenure in the Trump White House began auspiciously. After
Trump’s Inauguration, she moved into “the Suite,” a cluster of offices
on the first floor of the West Wing reserved for close aides. McFarland ’s office was the size of a closet, but she
made room for a two-person couch and a pair of dining-room-style chairs
so that members of her team could meet more informally there, instead of
downstairs in the Situation Room.

To give the space a more personal touch, McFarland put on display one of
her most cherished family heirlooms: an American flag salvaged from her
father-in-law’s warship during the Second World War. She added
photographs, news clippings, and other mementos from her time working as
a member of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff, in the
nineteen-seventies, and later as a speechwriter to Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger, under President Ronald Reagan.

Some N.S.C. veterans thought that McFarland, a Fox News commentator who
hadn’t served in government in three decades, was ill-suited for the
job of deputy national-security adviser, a position that typically
entails working longer hours than anyone else in the West Wing and
helping oversee high-stakes government programs and covert action. But her
organizational skills—compared to those of other senior officials in a chaotic
White House—and her welcoming, open-door approach won over many junior
staffers, some of whom came to see her as “the N.S.C.’s mom.” During her
brief tenure at the N.S.C. under Trump, McFarland was known to cut off her intelligence and counterterrorism briefers mid-sentence to ask,
“Did I offer you coffee or tea?” McFarland also played a hands-on role
in steering early policy debates, including a “soup-to-nuts” review of
options to counter North Korea’s nuclear program, officials said. (One
of those options, which was quickly rejected, called for accepting North
Korea as a nuclear state.)

It was McFarland’s mentor, Kissinger, who had personally recommended her
to Trump for the job. Trump, who admired McFarland’s work on Fox, called
her on Thanksgiving Day to offer her the position.

During the transition, McFarland forged a close working relationship
with Flynn. When they weren’t in meetings together in Trump Tower, Flynn
and McFarland communicated frequently by phone and e-mail. In December,
2016, Kislyak contacted Flynn to discuss sanctions imposed by the Obama
Administration to punish the Kremlin for interfering in the U.S.
Presidential election. Flynn consulted McFarland about what, if
anything, he should convey to the Russian Ambassador. For reasons that
remain unclear, Flynn falsely told Vice-President Mike Pence and F.B.I.
agents that he had never discussed sanctions with Kislyak. Those errors
led to Flynn’s resignation and, later, to his guilty plea for making
false statements to the F.B.I.

After Flynn’s departure, McFarland held the Suite together, aides
said. Members of her staff credited her with running an efficient operation. Then,
on February 20th, Trump appointed H. R. McMaster as Flynn’s replacement.
When McMaster made it clear that he wanted to appoint
his own deputy, McFarland was presented with other opportunities in the
Administration, including possible ambassadorships. One of the few
important diplomatic postings in Asia that had not already been filled
was Ambassador to Singapore. McFarland told an N.S.C. official that
going abroad could help her escape the political firestorm over Russia.
If things went well in Singapore, she could possibly return to
Washington in two years to assume a higher-level position.

Officials said that Trump was conflicted about McFarland’s departure
from the N.S.C. He was fond of her and told her on several occasions
that he liked having her as the deputy national-security adviser. “What
would you rather do, go to Singapore or stay here? Are you sure you want
to go?” Trump asked her, according to one official. McFarland chose Singapore, and Trump submitted her nomination, though he continued to
ask her if she was certain she wanted to go.

In May, lawyers representing Trump’s transition requested that the
General Services Administration, the organization that housed the
servers used by the transition, provide them with copies of transition
e-mails and calendars, including McFarland’s. The lawyers agreed to
share whatever they received from the G.S.A. with McFarland and her
staff, to help her prepare for her confirmation hearings. But,
when McFarland’s team later asked the lawyers for her transition
documents, the lawyers said that the G.S.A. had yet to release them,
presumably because they were of interest to the special counsel Robert
Mueller. Transition lawyers wouldn’t get a full set of McFarland’s
e-mails until November. (The G.S.A. didn’t respond to requests for
comment.)

McFarland’s interview with Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff members went ahead, as planned, on July 19th, even though she couldn’t
review her e-mails or calendars beforehand. During the closed-door
session, staffers asked McFarland if she took part in any phone calls
with Russian officials during the transition. According to officials,
McFarland answered that she served as a note-taker during transition
phone calls with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian
foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. After the interview, committee staff
members checked and found only one call, in November, between Trump and
Putin, which was before McFarland joined the transition, and no call
with Lavrov. Aides said that McFarland had botched her answers. She was
forced to send a clarification letter to the committee, acknowledging
that her recollections of the calls were mistaken.

On July 20th, McFarland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee for her confirmation hearing. That same month, Senator Cory
Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, had given McFarland a series of
written questions, including one about whether she had ever discussed
“contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak directly with General
Flynn?” McFarland’s curt written response read, “I am not aware of any
of the issues or events as described above.”

With support from Republicans and a single Democrat, McFarland cleared
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 19th, but the
nomination languished for months, never advancing to the Senate floor
for a vote. Then, on December 1st, Flynn pleaded guilty to a single
count of lying to the F.B.I. about the contents of his communications
with Kislyak. In court papers accompanying his plea agreement, federal
investigators disclosed that Flynn had coördinated his contacts with
Kislyak with an unnamed senior transition official, who was later
identified as McFarland.

The disclosures prompted Booker to accuse McFarland of giving false
testimony. He called her answers “another example of a pattern of
deception on the part of Trump’s closest associates regarding their
connections and communications to Russian government
officials.” Veterans of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee say that
the surest way for a nomination to be withdrawn is for a nominee to be
accused of lying to senators. One of the Administration’s lawyers said
that McFarland should have been able to recall at least some of her
telephone and e-mail exchanges with Flynn regarding Kislyak, even if she
couldn’t get access to her e-mails and calendars.

One of McFarland’s advisers acknowledged that her brief written response
to Booker’s question was poorly worded but said that her answer was
taken out of context by Booker and journalists, accusing them of wanting
“another scalp.” When McFarland wrote that she wasn’t “aware of any of
the issues or events as described above,” she was referring to Booker’s
earlier assertions, not his question about Kislyak, the adviser said.
One of McFarland’s friends said that she couldn’t answer questions from
senators more thoroughly because lawyers wouldn’t let her. “It set her
up to look like she was lying,” one aide said.

The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee placed a
“hold” on McFarland’s nomination on December 8th. On December
20th, Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Foreign Relations
Committee, called McFarland to explain that the prospects of her winning
confirmation in 2017 were all but dead, and that her prospects in 2018
would be uncertain if she decided to give it another try.

Earlier this month, Trump re-nominated McFarland for the Singapore
job. She told friends that she welcomed the decision as a show of
support from the President. One congressional staffer said that the
situation reminded him of the movie “Groundhog Day,” in which Bill
Murray’s character gets stuck in a time loop, reliving the same day,
over and over again. Senator Ben Cardin, of Maryland, the ranking
Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, was more blunt; aides
said that he made clear that McFarland’s nomination won’t advance anytime
soon and another candidate should be put forward. Cardin’s message,
according to one staffer, amounted to “Please make this go away.”