What the hell is Don McGahn doing?

| 12:11 pm EDT May 7, 2019
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Last night we brought you the story of how former White House Counsel Don McGahn was facing a 10am subpoena deadline today to turn over a treasure trove of evidence documenting Donald Trump’s crimes. This morning Trump’s White House announced that it had instructed McGahn not to turn over said documents. That’s weird, considering McGahn doesn’t work for the White House anymore, doesn’t take orders from Trump, and has already sold Trump out to Robert Mueller. So what’s going on?

The key here is that, according to reports from Politico and others this morning, Don McGahn is still planning to testify as scheduled before the House Judiciary Committee on May 21st. That’s not surprising, considering that Trump’s White House can’t even try to make a legal argument that McGahn isn’t allowed to testify. So if he’s complying with that part of the subpoena, why wouldn’t he comply with the part of the subpoena that requires him to turn over the documents?

Trump’s White House is arguing that the documents in McGahn’s possession are actually the legal property of the White House, and that McGahn thus has no legal standing to give them to Congress. The one thing we’ve seen from McGahn is that he’s very much a rule follower. When Trump asked him to commit obstruction crimes, he refused to do it, and documented Trump’s crimes in writing instead. When Mueller asked him to testify about Trump’s crimes, he did. McGahn clearly doesn’t want any legal trouble of any kind for himself.

Now that the White House is claiming that Don McGahn doesn’t have the legal right to turn over the documents in question, McGahn is informing the House Judiciary Committee that there’s a legal dispute over the documents, and he’s leaving it up to Congress and the White House to sort out the legal battle. In other words, McGahn is going to let a judge tell him whether the law requires him to turn over the documents, or whether the law forbids him from turning over the documents.

In the meantime, Don McGahn is still scheduled to publicly testify two weeks from today. Even without the documents in question, he can tell the world about everything that’s already in the redacted Mueller report, which would make a powerful case to the American people that Donald Trump is a criminal. Our guess is the House will have McGahn testify as scheduled on May 21st, and then once it eventually wins the legal battle for the documents, it’ll have him come back and testify again – but we’ll see. These decisions may not be made until after Robert Mueller’s crucial testimony, tentatively set for May 15th.