Don McGahn, the former White House counsel to Donald Trump, “shed new light” on the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections, two years after House Democrats originally sought his testimony.
McGahn, who served as Trump’s presidential lawyer for nearly two years before resigning in October 2018, testified in a day-long, closed-door session before the US House of Representatives judiciary committee.
The long-awaited interview was the result of an agreement reached last month in federal court. House Democrats then investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct the justice department’s inquiries into his presidential campaign’s ties to Russia originally sued after McGahn defied an April 2019 subpoena on Trump’s orders.
That month, the justice department released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the matter. In the report, Mueller pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice but also did not recommend prosecuting him, citing justice department policy against indicting a sitting president. Mueller’s report quoted extensively from interviews with McGahn, who described numerous instances of the Republican president’s efforts to stifle the investigation.
While the panel eventually won its fight for McGahn’s testimony, the court agreement almost guarantees its members will not learn anything new. The two sides agreed that McGahn will be questioned only about information attributed to him in publicly available portions of Mueller’s report.
Still, House Democrats kept the case going, even past Trump’s presidency, and are moving forward with the interview to make an example of the former White House counsel. Panel chair Jerry Nadler said the agreement for McGahn’s testimony is a good-faith compromise that “satisfies our subpoena, protects the committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight in the future, and safeguards sensitive executive branch prerogatives”.
A transcript of McGahn’s testimony is due to be made public in coming days.
“Mr McGahn was clearly distressed by President Trump’s refusal to follow his legal advice, again and again, and he shed new light on several troubling events today,” Nadler said in a statement.
It is unclear what House Democrats will do with the testimony, which they sought before twice impeaching Trump, the first time over the Ukraine scandal and the second following the 6 January insurrection. The Senate acquitted Trump of impeachment charges both times.
As White House counsel, McGahn had an insider’s view of many of the episodes Mueller and his team examined for potential obstruction of justice during the Russia investigation. McGahn proved a pivotal and damning witness against Trump, with his name mentioned hundreds of times in the text of the Mueller report and its footnotes.
McGahn described to investigators the president’s repeated efforts to choke off the investigation and directives he said he received from the president that unnerved him.
He recounted how Trump had demanded that he contact Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, to order him to unrecuse himself from the Russia investigation. McGahn also said Trump had implored him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, to remove Mueller from his position because of perceived conflicts of interest and, after that episode was reported in the media, to publicly and falsely deny that demand had ever been made.
Trump’s justice department fought efforts to have McGahn testify, but US district judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2019 rejected Trump’s arguments that his close advisers were immune from congressional subpoena.
Joe Biden has nominated Jackson to the appeals court in Washington.
