Trump's White House lawyer has reportedly spent 30 hours voluntarily talking to Robert Mueller

Don McGahn
(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

White House counsel Don McGahn has cooperated extensively with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling and alleged Trump campaign collusion, The New York Times reported Saturday.

Citing a dozen unnamed sources, the Times reports McGahn has shared "detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise." He has voluntarily given about 30 hours of interviews to the Mueller team spread across at least three sessions since December, offering information including Trump's directions for how McGahn should respond to Mueller's moves.

It is unclear, the Times notes, whether Trump has fully realized McGahn has taken this approach, which is extremely unusual for a defense attorney. "A prosecutor would kill for that," Solomon L. Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation into former President Bill Clinton, told the Times. "Oh my God, it would have been phenomenally helpful to us. It would have been like having the keys to the kingdom."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

McGahn originally began sharing information with Mueller in this manner, the report says, because he was concerned Trump intended to use him as a fall guy to escape any obstruction of justice charges. His cooperation was intended to demonstrate his own innocence.

To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.