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WASHINGTON – Former White House counsel Don McGahn told a House panel that former President Donald Trump’s conduct toward former special counsel Robert Mueller s investigation threatened to “spiral out of control” to a “point of no return,” according to a transcript released Wednesday.
McGahn was a key figure in Mueller’s report about Russian interference in the 2016 election. McGahn described several episodes of potential obstruction by Trump trying to remove or curb Mueller’s probe, whMcGahn defied Trump’s demands.
“(W)hat I was not going to do is cause any sort of chain reaction that would cause this to spiral out of control in a way that wasn’t in the best interests” of Trump, McGahn said.
The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the nomination of Judge Kentaji Brown Jackson to replace Attorney General Merrick Garland on U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a bench that's considered the second-highest court in the land and a frequent stop for future Supreme Court justices.
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WASHINGTON – The House Judiciary Committee reached an agreement with Don McGahn, former White House counsel for President Donald Trump, to testify before lawmakers – a resolution in the long-running legal case that represented a constitutional clash between the legislative and executive branches.
The committee sought McGahn’s testimony in May 2019 because he was a key figure in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. McGahn described several episodes of possible obstruction by Trump as he sought to remove Mueller or curb his probe.
But McGahn defied the subpoena. The head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Engel, told then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone that McGahn and other advisers to the president cannot be compelled to testify.
February 17, 2021 5:10 p.m.
At a press conference Saturday after the Senate acquitted former President Donald Trump of inciting an insurrection, the House impeachment manager Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) was asked why the prosecution against Trump hadn’t fought harder to include witness testimony during the impeachment trial.
Plaskett argued that the team had established the facts of the case without witnesses and besides, she said, the process of dragging witnesses before Congress could cost “months of litigation.”
“They are still litigating McGahn in Impeachment One, a year later,” she said, referring to former White House Counsel Don McGahn.
That name, McGahn, has become a short-hand for a particularly Trumpian legal strategy that proved remarkably effective at stymying oversight during the Trump years: Delay, delay, delay.