White House lawyer a key witness in probe

White House counsel Don McGahn listens during a Cabinet meeting Thursday. Fearing President Donald Trump was setting him up for blame, people close to him say, McGahn has been cooperating with the special counsel’s investigation to show he did nothing wrong.
White House counsel Don McGahn listens during a Cabinet meeting Thursday. Fearing President Donald Trump was setting him up for blame, people close to him say, McGahn has been cooperating with the special counsel’s investigation to show he did nothing wrong.

WASHINGTON -- White House counsel Don McGahn has cooperated extensively in the special counsel's Russia investigation, sharing detailed accounts about episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others briefed on the matter.

In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators, totaling 30 hours over 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 a clear view of the president's most intimate moments with his lawyer.

Among them were Trump's comments and actions regarding the firing of former FBI Director James Comey and Trump's interest in 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 attorney-client 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 said 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.

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

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

This account is based on interviews with current and former White House officials and others who have spoken to both men, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation.

Through Burck, McGahn declined to comment. A spokesman for the special counsel's office also declined to comment for this article.

Asked for comment, the White House sought to quell the sense of tension.

"The president and Don have a great relationship," the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in a statement. "He appreciates all the hard work he's done, particularly his help and expertise with the judges, and the Supreme Court" nominees.

On Saturday evening, Trump tweeted: "I allowed White House Counsel Don McGahn, and all other requested members of the White House Staff, to fully cooperate with the Special Counsel. In addition we readily gave over one million pages of documents. Most transparent in history. No Collusion, No Obstruction. Witch Hunt!"

FROM LAWYER TO WITNESS

McGahn's route from top White House lawyer to a central witness in the obstruction investigation of the president began around the time Mueller took over the investigation into whether any Trump associates conspired with Russia in its interference in the 2016 presidential election.

When Mueller was appointed in May 2017, the lawyers surrounding the president realigned themselves. McGahn and other White House lawyers stopped dealing on a day-to-day basis with the investigation, as they realized they were potential witnesses in an obstruction case.

In the following weeks, Trump assembled a personal legal team to defend him. He wanted to take on Mueller directly, attacking his credibility. But two of his lawyers at the time, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, said they took Trump at his word that he did nothing wrong and sold him on an open-book strategy. As long as Trump and the White House cooperated with Mueller, they told him, they could bring an end to the investigation within months.

McGahn, who had objected to Cobb's hiring, was dubious, according to people he spoke to around that time. As White House counsel, not a personal lawyer, he viewed his role as protector of the presidency, not of Trump. Allowing a special counsel to root around the West Wing could set a precedent harmful to future administrations.

Though McGahn was a senior campaign aide, it is not clear whether Mueller's investigators have questioned him about whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia's effort to influence the election.

McGahn's decision to cooperate with the special counsel grew out of Dowd and Cobb's game plan, now seen as misguided by some close to the president.

In fall 2017, Mueller's office asked to interview McGahn. To the surprise of the White House counsel's office, Trump and his lawyers signaled that they had no objection, without knowing the extent of what McGahn was going to tell investigators.

McGahn was stunned, as was Burck, whom he had recently hired out of concern that he needed help to stay out of legal jeopardy, according to people close to McGahn. Burck has said to others that he told White House advisers that they did not appreciate the president's legal exposure and that it was "insane" that Trump did not fight a McGahn interview in court.

Even if the president did nothing wrong, Burck told White House lawyers, the White House has to understand that a client like Trump probably made politically damaging statements to McGahn as he weighed whether to intervene in the Russia investigation.

In the counsel's office, lawyers feared that on the recommendation of Dowd and Cobb, the White House was handing Mueller detailed instructions to take down the president and setting a troubling precedent for future administrations by giving up executive privilege.

LAWYERS' CONCERNS

At the same time Trump was encouraging McGahn to speak to investigators, he and his lawyer were growing suspicious of the president. They began telling associates that they had concluded that the president had decided to let McGahn take the fall for decisions that could be construed as obstruction of justice, like Comey's firing, by telling the special counsel that he was only following shoddy legal advice from McGahn.

Worried that Trump would ultimately blame him in the inquiry, McGahn told people that he was determined to avoid the fate of the White House counsel for President Richard Nixon, John Dean, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Watergate scandal.

McGahn decided to fully cooperate with Mueller. It was, he believed, the only choice he had to protect himself.

Burck and McGahn met the special counsel team in November for the first time and shared all that McGahn knew.

To investigators, McGahn was a fruitful witness, people familiar with the investigation said. He had been directly involved in nearly every episode they are scrutinizing to determine whether the president obstructed justice. To make an obstruction case, prosecutors who lack a piece of slam-dunk evidence generally point to a variety of actions that prove that the suspect tried to interfere with the inquiry.

The people said McGahn gave Mueller's investigators: a sense of the president's mindset in the days leading to the firing of Comey; information on how the White House handled the firing of former national security adviser Michael Flynn; and information on how Trump repeatedly berated Sessions, tried to get him to assert control over the investigation and threatened to fire him.

Despite the insistence of Trump's lawyers that cooperation would help end the inquiry, the investigation only intensified as 2017 came to a close. Mueller had brought charges against Trump's former campaign chairman and his deputy and won guilty pleas and cooperation agreements from Flynn and a campaign adviser.

As the months passed, it became apparent that McGahn and Burck had misjudged the president's legal strategy. Rather than placing the blame on McGahn for possible acts of obstruction, Trump has yet to even meet with the special counsel, with his lawyers resisting an invitation for an interview. McGahn is still the White House counsel, shepherding the president's second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, through the confirmation process.


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A Section on 08/19/2018

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