House Judiciary Committee Releases Testimony of Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn
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The House Judiciary Committee finally heard testimony from Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn, and the transcript of that full testimony was released on Wednesday.
His recent testimony was the culmination of a two-year legal battle after the report from special counsel Robert Mueller was released in 2019. The second volume of his report, dealing with obstruction, puts McGahn at the center of numerous key moments.
“This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.” The Mueller report said that quote was Trump’s reaction to being told by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that a special counsel had been appointed.
In his testimony, McGahn said “what you’ve read in the report is accurate” and he said he did recall the exchange where Trump told Sessions he should resign.
“It’s not the sort of thing one would anticipate happening,” he continued. “It’s one of these things that what went through my mind was this is a rather historic potential moment here, where the President is having a showdown with his Attorney General. That doesn’t happen every day. They don’t teach you this in law school.”
One thing Trump said both privately and publicly was that Mueller had conflicts of interest, and when pressed on what his reaction to that was, McGahn said, “My reaction was some I think the Department had already addressed, and others I didn’t — it wasn’t convincing to me at the time that that was something that would require some sort of ethical recusal or the like for Director Mueller.”
McGahn also elaborated on this portion of the Mueller report in particular:
On Saturday, June 17, 2017, the President called McGahn and directed him to have th Special Counsel removed. McGahn was at home and the President was at Camp David. In interviews with this Office, McGahn recalled that the President called him at home twice and on both occasions directed him to call [Rod] Rosenstein and say that Mueller had conflicts that precluded him from serving as Special Counsel.
On the first call, McGahn recalled that the President said something like, “You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod.” Mcgahn said he told the President that he would see what he could do. Mcgahn was perturbed by the call and did not intend to act on the request.
The Mueller report said McGahn believed that to be an “inflection point.”
McGahn explained in his testimony that he saw it that way because “if the Acting Attorney General received what he thought was a direction from the counsel to the President to remove a special counsel, he would either have to remove the special counsel or resign.”
He recalled the infamous Saturday Night Massacre and said, “It was time to hit the brakes and not make a phone call to Rod to raise this issue that the President had continued to raise with me. It seemed to me that it’d be easier for me to not make the call and take whatever heat or fallout there would be than to cause, potentially, a chain reaction that I think would not be in the best interest of the President.”
You can read the full report here.
