LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
While President Trump’s been attacking special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump’s White House counsel has reportedly been talking extensively with him. Let’s begin this hour with that and security clearances with Mara Liasson. She’s NPR national political correspondent, and she joins us now. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So that first item about President Trump’s White House lawyer Don McGahn comes to us via The New York Times. And the president has been responding to that story this morning.
LIASSON: That’s right. The president has tweeted that he allowed McGahn to cooperate with the special counsel. Now, of course, that was under the first White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, who believed in cooperating with the special counsel. The White House’s approach has changed since they got a new lawyer Emmet Flood, who’s taking a more aggressive approach to the Mueller investigation. But the White House counsel is the lawyer for the office of the presidency. He’s not the president’s personal lawyer. And The New York Times says that he talked to the Mueller investigators three times over a period of nine months for 30 hours – sounds like a lot. And he described the president’s state of mind about the Russia investigation. All of this goes to Mueller’s investigation of whether Trump obstructed justice when, among other things, he told McGahn at one point to try to fire Mueller, which McGahn didn’t do.
But the most extraordinary thing about The New York Times story is that it suggests that McGahn talked to Mueller to show Mueller that he did nothing wrong. He wanted to protect himself. He was concerned that Trump would throw him under the bus, blame him for any illegal actions – kind of like Richard Nixon blamed John Dean. And today,…
