Sunday, August 19, 2018

It's Mueller Time, Con't

I do remember saying back last September that White House counsel Don McGahn should cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller regarding his investigation:

And given Trump's long, long history of screwing his employees whenever it becomes slightly inconvenient for him personally, if I were Don McGahn I'd strongly consider rolling over on Trump before I ended up with a very long federal prison sentence.

Guess what we just found out over the weekend?

The White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, has cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, sharing detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President 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 over the past nine months, Mr. McGahn described the president’s furor toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged Mr. McGahn to respond to it. He provided the investigators examining whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice a clear view of the president’s most intimate moments with his lawyer.

Among them were Mr. Trump’s comments and actions during the firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and Mr. 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. Mr. McGahn was also centrally involved in Mr. Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, 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 attorney-client privilege, and in the case of presidents, executive privilege.

“A prosecutor would kill for that,” said Solomon L. 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.”

Mr. McGahn’s cooperation began in part as a result of a decision by Mr. Trump’s first team of criminal lawyers to collaborate fully with Mr. 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.

Mr. McGahn and his lawyer, William A. Burck, could not understand why Mr. Trump was so willing to allow Mr. McGahn to speak freely to the special counsel and feared Mr. Trump was setting up Mr. McGahn to take the blame for any possible illegal acts of obstruction, according to people close to him. So he and Mr. Burck devised their own strategy to do as much as possible to cooperate with Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that Mr. McGahn did nothing wrong.

It is not clear that Mr. Trump appreciates the extent to which Mr. McGahn has cooperated with the special counsel. The president wrongly believed that Mr. McGahn would act as a personal lawyer would for clients and solely defend his interests to investigators, according to a person with knowledge of his thinking.

In fact, Mr. McGahn laid out how Mr. Trump tried to ensure control of the investigation, giving investigators a mix of information both potentially damaging and favorable to the president. Mr. McGahn cautioned to investigators that he never saw Mr. Trump go beyond his legal authorities, though the limits of executive power are murky.

I'm not sure who leaked this, but it's pellucid clear that McGahn has been in the process of saving his own ass for the last nine months. The phrases "including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise" and "investigators might not have discovered without him" should be giving Trump a heart attack right now, because it seems to me this is the biggest rollover yet on Trump himself.

Remember, McGahn threatening to quit as WH counsel was the reason why Trump was stopped from firing Mueller 14 months ago. Bloomberg's Tim O'Brien said as much eight months ago that McGahn not only leaked the NY Times story in January about Trump attempting to fire Mueller, but that McGahn's cooperation with Mueller was a distinct possibility.

If McGahn is now in Mueller's crosshairs, he might have decided that the simplest solution is to cooperate with the probe and turn over information in exchange for gentler treatment. In that scenario, McGahn becomes the source, directly or indirectly, of all kinds of interesting stuff for investigators and the media to ponder.

The timeframe of the NY Times story this weekend matches up with McGahn being the leaker then.  It makes a lot of sense that he would also be the leaker now, especially if McGahn felt Mueller was in trouble again.

Of course, there's the very real possibility that McGahn is cooperating to not only protect himself from the obstruction investigation, but to insulate himself from the Russia conspiracy investigation as well. As Marcy Wheeler reminds us, McGahn's days prior to being WH counsel at the FEC meant McGahn was the deciding vote to kill a 2011 investigation into Trump's 2012 campaign PAC run by Michael Cohen, with help from Roger Stone.

There's a reason why McGahn is Trump's White House counsel, in other words.

Stay tuned.

No comments:

Related Posts with Thumbnails