Trump knocks report on McGahn

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump insisted Sunday that he’s unconcerned by reports that the White House counsel, Don McGahn, has cooperated extensively with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Trump, in a series of tweets, denounced a New York Times story detailing McGahn’s cooperation with the special counsel’s team, accusing the newspaper of falsely insinuating that McGahn had “turned” on him.

Trump’s lawyers said Sunday that they were confident that McGahn had said nothing harmful to the president’s case during the 30 hours of interviews with Mueller’s team. But McGahn’s lawyer has offered only a limited accounting of what McGahn told the investigators, according to two people close to the president.

That has prompted concern among Trump’s advisers that McGahn’s statements could help serve as a key component for a damning report by Mueller, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Trump on Sunday expressed confidence that McGahn would not play a

role similar to that of John Dean, the Watergate-era White House lawyer whose testimony helped bring down President Richard Nixon.

“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 wrote, misspelling the word “counsel.”

“But I allowed him and all others to testify - I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide,” Trump said.

On Sunday, Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, appeared to acknowledge that he had only a partial understanding of what McGahn had revealed to investigators. Giuliani said his knowledge was secondhand, given to him by a former Trump lawyer, John Dowd.

“I’ll use his words rather than mine, that McGahn was a strong witness for the president, so I don’t need to know much more about that,” Giuliani said of Dowd on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Giuliani said Trump didn’t raise executive privilege or attorney-client privilege during those interviews because his team believed that fully participating would be the fastest way to bring the investigation to a close.

“The president encouraged him to testify, is happy that he did, is quite secure that there is nothing in the testimony that will hurt the president,” Giuliani said.

But McGahn, who as White House counsel is not the president’s personal lawyer, has repeatedly made clear to Trump that his role is as a protector of the presidency, not of Trump personally, sources have said.

After McGahn was initially interviewed by the special counsel’s office in November, Trump’s lawyers never asked for a complete description of what McGahn had said, according to a person close to the president.

McGahn’s lawyer, William Burck, gave the president’s lawyers a short overview of the interview but few details, and he did not inform them of what McGahn said in subsequent interactions with investigators, according to a person close to Trump. McGahn and Burck feared that Trump was setting up McGahn to take the blame for any possible wrongdoing, so they embraced the opening to cooperate fully with Mueller in an effort to demonstrate that McGahn had done nothing wrong, according to The Times report Saturday.

In a statement, Burck said that “President Trump, through counsel, declined to assert any privilege over Mr. McGahn’s testimony, so Mr. McGahn answered the Special Counsel team’s questions fulsomely and honestly, as any person interviewed by federal investigators must.”

IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION

Legal experts and former White House counsels said the president’s lawyers had been careless in not asking McGahn what he had planned to tell Mueller’s prosecutors. The experts said Trump’s lawyers had the right to know the full extent of what McGahn was going to say.

Robert F. Bauer, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama, said McGahn’s lawyer may have taken the most prudent course for his client by not addressing “each and every detail about the questions that were specifically asked and the specific answers given.”

In its article, The Times said McGahn had shared detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice in the Russia inquiry. Some of the episodes — like Trump’s attempt to fire Mueller last summer — would not have been revealed to investigators without McGahn’s help.

The report by The Times also reignited a debate about whether Trump had been given bad advice by two of his former lawyers, Dowd and Ty Cobb, to allow full cooperation with Mueller’s team, including by waiving attorney-client privilege. Dowd and Cobb believed that the cooperation would help prove that the president had done nothing wrong and bring a swifter end to the investigation.

But the strategy “put Don McGahn in an impossible situation, because once you waive that privilege and you turn over all those documents, Don McGahn has no choice then but to go in and answer everything, every question they could ask him,” Chris Christie, a former U.S. attorney and a close ally of Trump, said Sunday on ABC’s This Week.

The Times reported that McGahn, over at least three interviews, laid out how Trump had tried to ensure control of the special counsel investigation. McGahn gave a mix of damaging and favorable information about the president, but he said Trump did not go beyond his legal authorities as president.

Although Trump’s lawyers have little idea what McGahn told investigators, they said Saturday and Sunday that McGahn had helped the president.

In an email to members of Trump’s legal team and other associates, which was obtained by The Times, Dowd said he had made the right choice in urging cooperation.

“We protected President by not asserting attorney-client privilege,” Dowd wrote. He added that, had the lawyers forced the Mueller team to subpoena witnesses, they would have lost the ability to exert privilege over witnesses and documents.

Still, Trump was rattled by The Times report, according to people familiar with his thinking. The president, who is said to be obsessed with the role that Dean played as an informant during Watergate, was jolted by the notion that he did not know what McGahn had shared.

Dean, a frequent critic of Trump, tweeted Saturday night in response to The Times’ story: “Trump, a total incompetent, is bungling and botching his handling of Russiagate. Fate is never kind to bunglers and/or botchers! Unlike Nixon, however, Trump won’t leave willingly or graciously.”

In response to Trump’s tweets Sunday, Dean added that he doubts the president has “ANY IDEA what McGahn has told Mueller. Also, Nixon knew I was meeting with prosecutors, b/c I told him. However, he didn’t think I would tell them the truth!”

Trump on Sunday also continued his efforts to discredit the Mueller investigation, which he has labeled a “witch hunt.”

“So many lives have been ruined over nothing - McCarthyism at its WORST!” Trump tweeted, referencing to the indiscriminate and damaging allegations made by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s in an attempt to expose communists.

“Study the late Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged Witch Hunt!” he later wrote.

As Trump’s lawyers have shifted to a more antagonistic approach toward Mueller, it has seemed increasingly unlikely that Trump will sit for a voluntary interview. But Giuliani on Sunday repeated his fear that such an interview would be a “perjury trap” set by Mueller’s team.

“It’s somebody’s version of the truth, not the truth,” Giuliani said, citing the he said, she said nature of witnesses’ recollections.

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