Trump attacks report on attorney

BERKELEY HEIGHTS, N.J. — President Donald Trump attacked The New York Times on Sunday in a series of tweets in which he denounced a report describing the extensive cooperation between the White House counsel, Don McGahn, and the special counsel’s investigators.

In the Twitter posts, the president confirmed he had made the unusual decision to allow McGahn and other officials to cooperate fully with the inquiry, saying he had “nothing to hide.” But Trump said the Times article falsely had insinuated that McGahn had “turned” on him.

“The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type ‘RAT,’” Trump said, referring to the Nixon White House counsel who cooperated with investigators in the Watergate investigation.

In a statement, The Times’ communications department said the paper stood by the report and the reporters who wrote it, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman. In one of his tweets, Trump called them “two Fake reporters.”

The article detailed how McGahn, fearing he could be made a scapegoat by the president, has described Trump’s actions and anger toward the Russia inquiry in at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled about 30 hours. In those interviews, McGahn gave the investigators information they might not otherwise have gotten, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others.