MCGAHN: TRUMP EFFORT TO FIRE MUELLER WAS ‘POINT OF NO RETURN’

Former White House counsel Don McGahn told lawmakers in a closed-door interview last week that he regarded President Donald Trump’s effort to have special counsel Robert Mueller fired as “a point of no return” for the administration if carried out, Eric Tucker and Mary Clare Jalonick reported for the Associated Press (AP).

McGahn, who resisted Trump’s directive that he contact then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to press for Mueller’s removal from the Russia investigation, said the demand seemed “an inflection point” that would have prompted Rosenstein either to fire Mueller or resign himself, according to a transcript released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee.

“We are still talking about the Saturday Night Massacre decades and decades later,” McGahn said, referring to when two senior Justice Department officials resigned in 1973 rather than follow President Richard Nixon’s orders to fire the special prosecutor leading the Watergate probe.

“And, looking back, you always, as a student of history, wonder, could things have gone differently if different people made different decisions? And here my thought was, fast-forwarding, you know, what this is going to look like down the road,” he said.

McGahn’s hours-long appearance before the committee last Friday, two years in the making and the product of a prolonged court fight, covered many of the episodes at the center of Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump had obstructed justice, the 241-page transcript shows.

In the interview, he detailed the president’s agitation at the special counsel’s investigation and various pleas to have McGahn intervene in an effort to control the course of it.

Even if McGahn’s recollections were already well-documented in the Mueller report, and even if he was unlikely to break new ground before the House, Democrats had continued pushing for the lawyer’s testimony to set a clear precedent that executive branch officials must comply with congressional subpoenas.

McGahn was one of many Trump administration officials who ignored Congress through the Russia investigations and two impeachments.

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