Trump Denies Ordering Don McGahn To Fire Mueller, But Anyone Who Believes That Is ‘Stupid,’ McGahn Pal Says


In the report by special counsel Robert Mueller on his investigation into possible obstruction of justice by Donald Trump, Mueller cites former White House Counsel Don McGahn, who said that Trump directed him to “have the Special Counsel removed,” according to the report, which is accessible online via The New York Times. But in an interview broadcast on Friday, Trump accused McGahn of lying to Mueller.

“The story on that very simply, number one, I was never going to fire Mueller. I never suggested firing Mueller,” Trump told ABC News‘ George Stephanopoulos.

Asked by Stephanopoulos why McGahn would risk lying to a grand jury under oath, Trump appeared to accuse McGahn of simply attempting to inflate his own image, saying in the interview posted to YouTube that McGahn wanted “to show everyone what a good counsel he was.”

“I don’t care what he says, it doesn’t matter,” Trump told Stephanopoulos. “He wanted to make himself look like a good lawyer.”

But according to a source close to McGahn, it is not the former White House counsel who is lying, but Trump himself. The source told the political site Axios that to believe Trump’s versions of events would be tantamount to believing in the “the tooth fairy.”

Former White House Counsel Don McGahn.

“Anyone who believes Trump wasn’t telling Don to get rid of Mueller using these conflicts is just stupid or believes in the tooth fairy,” the source told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, who reported the quote via Twitter.

The source’s reference to “conflicts” may have been a reference to Trump’s claim, first made in a July, 2018, Twitter post, that Mueller is “conflicted.”

The supposed “conflict” stemmed from what Trump described as a dispute over Mueller’s membership in the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, according to CNN. Mueller, in 2011, resigned his membership in the club.

As The Inquisitr reported, Mueller responded to Trump’s claim — but only in an obscure footnote buried deep within the Mueller report. In that footnote, Mueller explained that he was not able to use the membership because his family resided in Washington, D.C., making it inconvenient to travel to Virginia for golf outings. But when Mueller asked for a refund on his remaining pro-rated dues, Trump’s golf club never responded.

The Mueller report in Volume 2, Page 77 says that McGahn refused Trump’s order to fire Mueller in June of 2017, less than one month after Mueller’s appointment, and he “prepared to resign” rather than carry out the order. But McGahn did not resign until October of 2018, and Trump did not repeat his order to fire Mueller, according to the report.

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