Trump lawyer gives Mueller details
WASHINGTON — The White House counsel, Don McGahn, has cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, sharing detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others briefed on the matter.
In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours during the past nine months, McGahn described the president’s furor toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged McGahn to respond to it. He provided the investigators examining whether Trump obstructed justice a clear view of the president’s most intimate moments with his lawyer.
Among them were Trump’s comments and actions during the firing of former FBI Director James Comey and Trump’s obsession with putting a loyalist in charge of the inquiry, including his repeated urging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to claim oversight of it. McGahn was also centrally involved in Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel, Robert Mueller, which investigators might not have discovered without him.
For a lawyer to share so much with investigators scrutinizing his client is unusual. Lawyers are rarely so open with investigators, not only because they are advocating on behalf of their clients but also because their conversations with clients are potentially shielded by attorneyclient privilege, and in the case of presidents, executive privilege.
“A prosecutor would kill for that,” said Solomon Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation, which did not have the same level of cooperation from President Bill Clinton’s lawyers. “Oh my God, it would have been phenomenally helpful to us. It would have been like having the keys to the kingdom.”
McGahn’s cooperation began in part as a result of a decision by Trump’s first team of criminal lawyers to collaborate fully with Mueller. The president’s lawyers have explained that they believed their client had nothing to hide and that they could bring the investigation to an end quickly.
McGahn and his lawyer, William Burck, could not understand why Trump was so willing to allow McGahn to speak freely to the special counsel and feared Trump was setting up McGahn to take the blame for any possible illegal acts of obstruction, according to people close to him. So he and Burck devised their own strategy to do as much as possible to cooperate with Mueller to demonstrate that McGahn did nothing wrong.