"THEY'RE SQUEEZING DON JR. RIGHT NOW": MUELLER SIEGE TIGHTENS
“THEY’RE SQUEEZING DON JR. RIGHT NOW”: AS THE MUELLER SIEGE TIGHTENS, TRUMP’S TWITTER RAGE CRESTS
White House counsel Don McGahn’s interviews with Mueller have rattled Trump to his core. “Total meltdown,” one outside adviser said of his mood, while a Republican ally described him as “extremely frustrated.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/donald-trump-don-mcgahn-robert-mueller-twitter-rage
In recent weeks, Donald Trump has privately expressed doubts about White House lawyer Don McGahn’s loyalty. Trump has vented to aides that McGahn doesn’t support the House Freedom Caucus’s quixotic campaign to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—a bank shot that would leave Robert Mueller unprotected. McGahn has also clashed with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, whom one Republican said McGahn “hates with the intensity of 1,000 burning suns.” There has been talk of Trump replacing McGahn with his outside lawyer Emmet Flood.
But The New York Times’ revelation that McGahn had spoken for more than 30 hours with Mueller’s investigators has rattled Trump and the West Wing to the core, according to three of Trump’s outside advisers, causing Trump to ratchet up his Twitter war on Mueller to new heights. Over the weekend, Jared Kushner described Trump’s mood as “rip-shit,” according to one of the advisers. “Total meltdown” was how another adviser put it. “He’s extremely frustrated,” a Republican close to the White House said.
The biggest fear rippling through the West Wing is that no one knows what McGahn told Mueller during his multiple interviews. “Trump didn’t know how many hours it was,” one Republican briefed on Trump’s thinking said. Last night, The Washington Post reported that McGahn’s lawyer, Bill Burck, has been doing damage control, telling the White House that McGahn did not “incriminate” Trump. That’s provided little solace to Trump and West Wing aides. “You have to understand McGahn kept notes on every single meeting with Trump,” one former West Wing official said. “There’s no way this guy is going to protect him.” (A person close to McGahn disputed that McGahn took extensive notes of his meetings with Trump, but added that McGahn has only provided Trump’s lawyers a “high-level summary” of his comments to Mueller.) Trump also views McGahn as a “[Reince] Priebus guy,” shorthand for being a member of the Republican establishment of which Trump remains suspicious.
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A lot of what’s driving Trump’s ire, White House advisers said, is Trump’s growing realization that his previous legal team, Ty Cobb and John Dowd, made a strategic error in waiving executive privilege to cooperate fully with Mueller. But Trump being Trump, he won’t admit to making this mistake, so he directs blame onto others. Another theory for what’s motivating Trump’s increasingly unhinged tweets is that Mueller may be closing in on his son Don Jr. “A lot of what Trump is doing is based on the fact [that] Mueller is going after Don Jr.,” a person close to the Trump family told me. “They’re squeezing Don Jr. right now.”
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