Former Trump lawyer admits Robert Mueller has “snookered” Donald Trump

| 6:04 pm EDT August 19, 2018
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Even though yesterday’s New York Times “bombshell news” about Don McGahn cooperating with Robert Mueller was neither a bombshell nor anything new, the reactions of Donald Trump’s attorneys may be the one part of the story that tells us quite a bit. Yes, there were the parts where Trump’s lawyers managed to get multiple lies printed, unchallenged. But then there’s the part near the bottom where Trump’s former lawyer actually told the truth about something.

All the way down in the forty-second paragraph of the NY Times article in question, former Donald Trump attorney John Dowd admitted that Robert Mueller “snookered” him and Donald Trump when it came to Don McGahn’s cooperation. Considering that Dowd was Trump’s lead attorney at the time, and this happened right under Dowd’s nose, this is a surprisingly frank admission. He’s flat out admitting that Mueller managed to outsmart them all.

Of course the word “snookered” has a connotation of dishonesty in the eyes of some people, so Dowd is also trying to cast Mueller as having done something underhanded here. This is presumably Dowd’s way of trying to save face. However, the White House Counsel represents the legal interests of the White House, and not the legal interests of Donald Trump himself. There is no attorney-client privilege between McGahn and Trump. There is executive privilege, but only to the extent that laws weren’t broken. Trump and Dowd never bothered to try to invoke executive privilege, either because they were negligent, or because they mistakenly trusted McGahn, or because they didn’t think it would succeed anyway.

In any case, we’re already reaching the “blame game” stage of Donald Trump’s legal defense. That tells you a lot about where people like John Dowd, who have spent significant time on the inside of this battle, think it’s headed.