It seems Donald Trump should be thanking his former White House counsel. If not for Don McGahn’s refusal to carry out Trump’s order to fire Robert Mueller, the President could be facing a more perilous fate.
But no, the knives are out for McGahn because of his many hours of testimony to the special counsel which resulted in being mentioned on 66 pages of Mueller’s 448 page report. From Axios:
“Anger at McGahn after the report came out was shared among a number of Trump allies, both inside the White House and close to the president.
- Defenders of the former counsel said he just did what he had to do: Answer questions under oath.
- “Don had an unenviable job of trying to school the first outsider president in the legal ways of Washington,” a source close to McGahn told Jonathan Swan.
Trump had long been suspicious of McGahn.
“McGahn, as the N.Y. Times foreshadowed in great detail last summer, plays a starring role in the Mueller report.
- Going by the details McGahn provided to the special counsel’s team, the president badly wanted to obstruct justice.
- And it may have only been because McGahn refused to obey presidential orders that Trump wasn’t charged with obstructing justice.”
In one scene from the Mueller report, Trump compared McGahn to his late friend and mafia attorney Roy Cohn.
- “In one scene that McGahn recounted to the Mueller team, Trump takes issue with McGahn’s note-taking: “The President then asked, ‘What-about these notes? Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.’”
- “McGahn responded that he keeps notes because he is a ‘real lawyer’ and explained that notes create a record and are not a bad thing.”
- “The President said, ‘I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.’”