All that fruit and Mueller still didn't do right by the American people.In the book Schmidt, who originally broke the news that [ex-White House counsel Don] McGahn had cooperated extensively with special counsel Robert Mueller in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s Russia ties, deepens the picture of that cooperation. “McGahn had turned into the Mueller team’s personal Forrest Gump,” Schmidt writes, “the guy with the front-row seat to all the awful history of the Trump administration he had never wanted to witness.”
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McGahn endured screaming matches with Donald Trump, badgering phone calls at home on his birthday and the president saying “some crazy shit” in order to advance the project closest to McGahn’s heart: packing the federal judiciary with activist conservative judges.
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Schmidt’s book focuses on the roles McGahn and former FBI director James Comey played in attempting to contain a president both men recognized as mercurial and potentially threatening to the country.
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While not seeming to share Comey’s anguished concern for the independence of the judiciary and the balance of powers under Trump, McGahn – a campaign law expert – had plenty of personal frustration with Trump, whom he referred to as “Kong” or “King Kong” or “fucking Kong”, after the hostile movie gorilla, Schmidt reports.
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McGahn left the White House in October 2018, after the successful confirmation of the man McGahn personally picked as Trump’s second supreme court justice, Brett Kavanaugh.
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One of the key descriptions of potential obstruction of justice by Trump in the [Mueller] report describes Trump calling McGahn at home and instructing McGahn to put in motion Mueller’s firing, an instruction McGahn ignored apart from relaying it to his personal lawyer.
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But Schmidt reveals the previously unknown extent to which McGahn cooperated with Mueller, turning over “nearly a thousand pages of handwritten White House notes” to the special counsel. The cooperation was so fruitful, Schmidt writes, that Mueller’s team tried to “run” McGahn, or recruit him to gather information in real time about what was happening inside the White House. No such arrangement was explicitly made.
The Guardian
Just another power-hungry member of the Trump team.“Nominating judges was why [McGahn] had taken the job,” Schmidt writes. “He was told this was going to be his turf, entirely.”
Later, after Trump called him at home on his birthday – twice – and told him to tell Rosenstein to fire Mueller, McGahn went so far as to clean out his office at the White House and prepare [a resignation] letter.
“I have a real fucking problem,” McGahn told his personal lawyer about Trump, according to Schmidt. “I don’t want to speak out of school, but he’s saying some crazy shit.”
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[T]he resignation letter was never sent. The greater project, for McGahn, of appointing judges, as well as slashing government regulations, held precedence.
Schmidt writes: “McGahn knew that he would never have this power again.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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