Once upon a time, President Richard Nixon had a White House counsel named John Dean. When Watergate went down, Dean was set up by the president’s men as the fall guy of the operation. The lawyer decided to come clean with the special counsel, even admitting to the pieces where he was guilty, and took down a presidency.
Enter Donald Trump and Don McGahn.
On Saturday, The New York Times wrote about McGahn’s cooperation in the Trump/Russia probe with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
‘In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours over the past nine months, Mr. McGahn described the president’s fury 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.’
Trump has since written multiple tantrum tweets, insisting that the NYT leaves out the fact that Trump himself told McGahn to answer Mueller’s questions. He missed a couple of paragraphs in the article that his feckless supporters will never read.
‘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…
‘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.’
The article does very much compare McGahn to John Dean since, like Nixon’s White House counsel, he worried that he was being set up to take the fall since Trump kept insisting that he only acted to fire Comey and pressure Jeff Sessions on recommendation of his attorney, Don McGahn.
Trump’s recklessness and dishonesty will catch up to him in time, but will it be in time before someone gets hurt over Trump’s “enemy of the people” nonsense?
Twitter responded to Trump’s Twitter rant in force. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
