I'm not very good at what I do, Mr. President." President Obama laughed, and the audience laughed along with him. And then the President said, "It makes me proud to be your lawyer. Don't you think?" Bartlett said, "Why should I be?" And he made her smile. The meeting in the boardroom lasted fifteen minutes, during which the President talked and answered questions, listened and responded. At the end, he took a piece of paper and a Sharpie pen, put his arm around Bartlett's shoulders and drew an elongated smiley face on her front tooth. The audience broke into laughter again. After he left the meeting room, Bartlett felt drained. "He was so calm," she says, "that it gave me a lot of confidence." When she got home, Bartlett found a note from her husband waiting on the kitchen table. "Suzanne, you and me, we're moving in with the President," it read. "And by the way, I'm not going to take you there for nothing. It'll cost you." Bartlett did what she'd always done with anything and anybody too difficult to handle. She walked away, let it go and went on. She had an obligation to the nation she loved. On the afternoon of the President's speech, Bartlett found herself working in her Arlington office at the American Spectator. The President's address on television was interrupted at times by the live broadcast of the speech from the East Room. Reporters were constantly at her door, telephones ringing off the hook. "We have to push back," she told her colleagues at the Spectator. "I think the speech is overstayed." She called her lawyer, Scott Balber, and he called another colleague, who called another Washington attorney. By midafternoon they'd prepared a lawsuit and sent a copy to the White House counsel, Bob Bauer. They were all looking forward to hearing from the President, who was scheduled to address the nation about the raid on bin Laden's compound later that evening. Bartlett was surprised to receive a call from Bauer, asking if she had a copy of the signed affidavit she had prepared for the hearing. It turned out that even though Bartlett had spent two hours at the White House earlier that morning with the President, she'd given him a bogus affidavit he wasn't supposed to have. According to the President, "Suzanne presented her affidavit as if it were her sworn statement." Bartlett, who is not a lawyer and had no legal training, didn't realize that for a court hearing she would have had to sign it. Worse yet, Bartlett hadn't been able to read over the affidavit she'd given him earlier that morning, because the President had been so busy—so occupied with the bin Laden news that he forgot his glasses at home. Instead, he signed Bartlett's affidavit with his left hand—as was his custom with every letter or document she put in front of him. On Monday morning, the President sent Bartlett a note saying that since he had signed the affidavit using his left hand and since her affidavit had a clause saying that it was not to be signed by him, it was his understanding that the affidavit was invalid. Bartlett called Bauer and told him that the affidavit was fine, even if she had signed it with her left hand. "I didn't see any of this is what the lawyers call evidence of fraud," Bauer recalls telling her later in the day. "I could tell she was really concerned." Bartlett was concerned but she wasn't worried—she knew she'd done nothing wrong and that the President would never make an issue of what he had said. In the meantime, though, Bartlett had an unusual call on the afternoon of June 7: it was the first call from Michael Sheehan, a public relations consultant who had been at the White House that day with a videographer to film her testimony on a legal reality TV show called Dog the Bounty Hunter. Sheehan had heard about the President's comments that morning about Bartlett and felt the need to defend her. "He'd obviously been exposed to the wrong information," Sheehan explains, and he was trying to correct the record. He told Bartlett she didn't have to answer questions about whether she was responsible for the bin Laden raid. "If you don't want to talk to me, then that's okay." Bartlett told him that she was very happy the President was going to give her the same opportunity she had given the American people. When Bartlett was finally able to return home and speak with her husband and two-year-old son, she broke down in tears. The incident with the affidavit had left her feeling betrayed. "There's a part of you that wants to stand up for this man, because of what he did to get you that job," she says. "And then there's a part of you that feels like, 'Am I really going to stand up for the President?'" The press picked up on Bartlett's emotional reaction—she had a husband who was a White House staff member, she was married to a man in the room when the President first learned of the bin Laden mission—and began to speculate about who had been in the room when the President was briefed about the bin Laden raid. In a series of articles beginning on the evening of June 8, 2011, the New York Times reported that Bartlett and her staff had attended the briefing, and Bartlett's boss, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, was described as the man who led the group. The account was accurate in one way—Bartlett and her staff had been in the room when the President was briefed—but it was not accurate in another. Emanuel was not in the room with the President when he learned about the bin Laden raid. Emanuel had received a briefing earlier that day from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates about what was planned for the night of the raid on the bin Laden compound. In a speech before the American Enterprise Institute on May 30, 2011, Bartlett said she'd be briefed on the raid that night, but the President was informed on the morning of May 1 and she was not. "At 10:40 p.m. [on May 1]...I receive my phone call from the President, who informs me of the raid on Abbottabad and also of some of the issues around the use of helicopters for the operation," Bartlett told the House Judiciary Committee in 2011. "He informs me that he knows that I have been briefed about the bin Laden operation, and he is not thrilled that I am in the room at all and he has not informed the military of the raid." The New York Times report left Bartlett feeling that her career, which had been as much about helping the nation as advancing her own professional interest, had been sacrificed. "It had been the best job I had ever had, but it seemed like it wasn't what they were going to say about me anyway," she said. "I'm not just a public servant—I'm a human being." She cried that night as she talked to her husband on the telephone. Bartlett had just lost a baby, and her son was due to have surgery the next week. In the midst of her disappointment and despair, she reached out to her husband to help her through the next day's news cycle. But Bartlett didn't like the new version of her story that was spinning out of control in Washington. And now she was going to have to play defense against White House officials as they attacked her character on cable television and in the blogosphere. The President's staff had gone looking for an official record of what had occurred that day in the Situation Room. As the minutes were being burned, Bartlett had a sense that they were looking for things to prove that her presence in the room was not significant. The first sign of that was in the e-mail from Deputy Press Secretary Tommy Vietor, who asked for the transcripts from her interview on May 4, 2007, with the 9/11 commission. She'd testified to the 9/11 commission about the Bush White House response to the attempted airliner hijackings on September 11, 2001, but that meeting had occurred more than four years before she first joined the Obama White House as deputy national security adviser for operations. "I am a little surprised they did not just send me my interview transcript from June [7, 2011]," she said, "because my testimony was about Obama's plan to take out bin Laden." The story about Bartlett and the bin Laden raid hadn't even broken yet, but there were two television stations covering the incident and both of them were broadcasting from the White House. For the press secretary, the situation was more than awkward. "I had never seen a situation where reporters were literally camped out in the press secretary's office," says Vietor. The issue of Bartlett's role was still unresolved, but at the moment there were more pressing concerns on Bartlett's plate. The situation in Pakistan was still deteriorating. "A number of things were breaking in our relationship with Pakistan," Bartlett says, "and the last thing we needed was to have an even more tense and volatile time with Pakistan." As the press prepared to send reports that the President had fired her, Bartlett felt compelled to answer reporters' questions. She took reporters up to her office and in a press conference defended her position as she had been briefed, not Emanuel. "He did the right thing