Mueller report mined memos of McGahn deputy
Report mined the memos of McGahn deputy on turmoil
WASHINGTON — The notes, scribbled rapidly on a legal pad, captured the fear inside the White House when President Donald Trump raged over the Russia investigation and decreed he was firing the FBI director who led it: “Is this the beginning of the end?”
The angst-filled entry is part of a shorthand diary that chronicled the chaotic days in Trump’s West Wing, a trove that the special counsel report cited more than 65 times as part of the evidence that the president sought to blunt a criminal investigation bearing down on him.
The public airing of the notes — which document then-White House counsel Donald McGahn’s contemporaneous account of events and his fear that the president was engaged in legally risky conduct — has infuriated Trump.
“Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” Trump tweeted a day after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
The scribe keeping track of the president’s actions was Annie Donaldson, McGahn’s chief of staff, a loyal and low-profile conservative lawyer who figures in the Mueller report as one of the most important narrators of internal White House turmoil.
Her daily habit of documenting conversations and meetings provided the special counsel’s office with a running account of the president’s actions, albeit in sentence fragments and concise descriptions.
Among the episodes memorialized in Donaldson’s notes and memos: the president’s outrage when FBI Director James Comey confirmed the existence of the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump’s efforts to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from overseeing the probe and his push to get Mueller disqualified and removed as the special counsel.
The Harvard Law School graduate’s unflinching words — “Just in the middle of another Russia Fiasco,” she wrote on March 2, 2017 — have cast the die-hard Republican in an unfamiliar role: as a truth teller heralded by Trump’s foes for providing what they view as proof he is unfit for office.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., has already signaled that he intends to subpoena Donaldson as a critical witness.
Donaldson, who lives in Montgomery, Ala., did not respond to requests for comment. She left the White House in December, both proud of her service and also somewhat stung by her experience in Washington, friends said.
As McGahn’s chief of staff, Donaldson was charged with managing 30 to 40 lawyers in the counsel’s office, getting White House policies legally vetted, as well as working with McGahn on Trump’s top priorities.
Along the way, she kept a record of decisions, disputes, and tasks left to do. Nearly every day, when McGahn emerged from the Oval Office or other meetings, she would take notes as he recalled significant discussions with the president and his team, according to people familiar with her role.
Donaldson’s notes depict McGahn and others as worried that the president could be accused of criminal obstruction — and as seeking to protect him from his impulses.
In an entry on March 21, 2017, Donaldson recounts how Trump told McGahn he was furious with the testimony Comey gave to Congress about the Russia probe the day before, sounding as if he might fire him on the spot. The president felt betrayed that Comey had failed to tell the public that Trump was not personally under investigation.
“beside himself,” she wrote of the president. “getting hotter and hotter, get rid?”
McGahn was so concerned that Comey’s firing was imminent that the counsel’s office drafted a memo analyzing the president’s legal authority to do so, according to the report.
White House aides who know Donaldson are confident her notes are an accurate account of events in Trump’s White House.
At the White House, Donaldson played a significant role in helping push forward Trump’s judicial nominations; a record 30 were seated on federal appellate courts in his first two years, double the amount of any previous administration.
But one nomination burned Donaldson and her husband Brett Talley. Trump nominated Talley for a federal-district court seat in Alabama, but Talley, who had never tried a case in court, ended up withdrawing. He did so amid questions that he failed to disclose he was married to a White House lawyer. Donaldson had recused herself from his nomination.
Trump reacted angrily when he learned from a news report in February 2018 that McGahn kept a written record of their encounters, according to Mueller’s report.
“What about these notes? Why do you take notes?” Trump asked McGahn during a tense Oval Office confrontation. “Lawyers don’t take notes.” (McGahn told investigators Trump was referring to Donaldson’s notes, which the president thought of as McGahn’s.)
McGahn responded to the president that he keeps notes because he is a “real lawyer” and explained that notes create a record and are not a bad thing, according to the report.