Don McGahn is a few hours from spilling the beans on Donald Trump
Last week Donald Trump stated on Fox News that he might not allow former White House Counsel Don McGahn to testify about the Mueller report before the House Judiciary Committee. This was unintentional comedy, as Trump has no ability whatsoever to stop a former employee from appearing before Congress. Even as we await McGahn’s scheduled testimony on May 21st, we’re actually just a few hours from McGahn seriously spilling the beans on Trump in an equally important way.
Don McGahn has until 10am eastern time tomorrow morning to turn over a dump truck’s worth of documents to the House Judiciary Committee. As laid out by Rachel Maddow during her show this evening, the requested documents appear to go well beyond what Robert Mueller focused on in his probe.
Don McGahn fully and eagerly cooperated with Mueller, so it stands to reason that he’ll do the same with this material subpoenaed by Congress. He’s also shown that he’s very careful about protecting himself, so if he were planning to miss the deadline, he’d surely have said as much by now, and laid out a legal reason. So unless Trump tries something first thing tomorrow morning, House Democrats are about to obtain a treasure trove of documents and notes exposing Trump’s various improprieties while inside the White House.
Donald Trump has never had attorney-client privilege with Mcgahn (White House Counsel is the White House’s lawyer, not the president’s lawyer), and Trump waived any executive privilege with McGahn a long time ago. That said, Donald Trump can still make a frivolous last minute court filing in the hope of slowing McGahn down a little bit. But he’s just about out of time for that, and no, a pre-dawn Twitter rant about McGahn tomorrow morning won’t count for anything under the law.
So we’ll see what happens. If Donald Trump can’t find a last minute way to intervene, and Don McGahn forks over all this evidence as expected, it’ll take the House Judiciary Committee some time to sort through it all and find the most incriminating parts. That’s why his testimony is set for two weeks after tomorrow’s deadline. But you can expect the Democrats on the committee to start letting out some of the secrets before McGahn’s testimony, if only to ensure that a large television audience tunes in for it.
