W.H. Lawyer Smart To Cooperate With Mueller Because Trump ‘Throws Everyone Under The Bus,’ Nixon Lawyer Says
White House lawyer Don McGahn is smart to be cooperating with Robert Mueller in the Russia probe because Donald Trump “throws everyone under the bus,” said the lawyer who turned on Richard Nixon during the Watergate proceedings.
This weekend, the New York Times reported that McGahn has sat with Mueller’s team for extensive interviews that have lasted more than 30 hours over the last several months. The report noted that McGahn gave “detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice,” giving Mueller’s investigators information they otherwise would not have been able to find elsewhere.
John Dean, the former administrative attorney for Richard Nixon, who ultimately worked with prosecutors against the president during Watergate, think it’s a smart strategy. Dean said in an interview with Slate that McGahn is doing the right thing to protect both himself and the client he is paid to protect — which is not Donald Trump.
“His client is the office of the president,” Dean said.
Dean added that there are some more practical reasons to cooperate with Mueller’s team, namely Trump’s tendency to put himself first.
“I think there is good reason for McGahn to believe that Trump would throw him under the bus, since Trump throws almost everyone under the bus,” Dean said. “Self preservation is a real motive.”
The New York Times report noted that McGahn began cooperating with Mueller’s team as part of a concerted strategy by Trump’s lawyers, hoping that their full cooperation would help move the investigation along quicker and ultimately bring it to an end. McGahn then upped his cooperation with Mueller’s team when he came to believe that Donald Trump may have been setting him up to take the fall for him. Wanting to prove he had no involvement in wrongdoing, McGahn reportedly met with Mueller’s investigators for more than 30 hours in total.
The report noted that Trump went along with the strategy at first because he did not understand that McGahn was not his personal attorney, but instead worked for the office of the presidency.
McGahn was leery of becoming Trump’s John Dean. So, after Cobb and Dowd encouraged cooperation with Mueller, McGahn – fearful he was being set up for blame on obstruction issues – talked and talked. @nytmike and me https://t.co/g0rA69t8ak
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 18, 2018
John Dean is not the only one who has noted Donald Trump’s tendency to think only of himself and throw others under the bus. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin noted that Trump has done the same with others close to him, including leaving current lawyer and top media surrogate Rudy Giuliani out to dry by claiming that Giuliani’s statements on the Stormy Daniels case, made in defense of Trump, were incorrect.
