Palmer Report told you ten months ago that Don McGahn flipped on Donald Trump. Here’s how we knew.
Today the mainstream media is reporting the “breaking” story that White House Counsel Don McGahn has been extensively cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller behind Donald Trump’s back for the past ten months. If you’re a longtime Palmer Report reader, you’ll recall that we wrote this same story ten months ago. It’s important that we explain how we knew back then, and why it matters going forward.
To be clear, Palmer Report was not working with any inside information when it came to the Don McGahn story. That’s not how we operate. We were able to put this together based entirely on pieces of publicly available information. Here’s how we gradually put it together. Back on September 11th of last year, when McGahn and former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus hired the same attorney, we pointed out that this was only allowable if they were mounting the same legal defense, and that the most logical explanation was that “they’re planning to jointly flip on Donald Trump together.” Then things got more serious a month later.
On October 13th of last year, Robert Mueller interviewed Reince Priebus. We wrote that Priebus was “too far up the food chain for Mueller to be interviewing this early – unless it was because Priebus was ready to flip on Trump” and that “even if Priebus volunteered to testify early, Mueller would likely turn him down unless Priebus was looking to make a deal.” We pointed out again that, logically speaking, this meant McGahn also had to be eagerly cooperating with Mueller. Along the way we learned that Sean Spicer had hired the same attorney as well, meaning the he was also cooperating.
From there, the pieces gradually came together. Throughout December and January, the mainstream media would report in bits and pieces that Robert Mueller had obtained documents that only could have come from McGahn, that Mueller had Priebus’ personal notes from his time in the White House, and that Mueller had Spicer’s diary. The pattern was clear: Mueller was quickly and easily obtaining key evidence from these three guys. By late January, there was no longer any question that all three of them had flipped on Trump.
There’s another aspect of this story that needs addressing, even though it’s fuzzier. Right around the time Donald Trump and Steve Bannon began feuding, Bannon hired the same attorney. By definition, that means Bannon began seriously cooperating with Robert Mueller as well – as Palmer Report also pointed out at the time. In the months since, Bannon has begun making quite a bit of pro-Trump noise, in the form of speeches and even a Super PAC. It’s not clear if Bannon has since parted ways with this attorney and ceased cooperating, or if this is all some sort of smokescreen as he continues to cooperate with Mueller.
To this day we still don’t know if Don McGahn, Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer have cut formal plea deals on obstruction with Robert Mueller, or if they’ve simply been informally cooperating in the hope they won’t get charged. But either way, publicly available information made clear a long time ago that they all flipped on Donald Trump. We don’t know if the mainstream media simply wasn’t able to put the pieces together properly, or if they sat on this story for ten months for fear of facing the kind of criticism that Palmer Report faces every time we point out what’s really happening with these storylines.
In any case Palmer Report has been vindicated yet again, as per usual. We only point this out because no one in the mainstream media will ever credit us for always being early and accurate about these things, and in various instances, the mainstream media (on the left and right) has dishonestly attacked Palmer Report for being early and accurate about these things. We had today’s big “breaking” news ten months ago, not from any inside sourcing, but simply from being able to put the pieces together correctly. This happens all the time. Keep that in mind the next time someone says “But how can X be true if Palmer Report is the only one saying it?”
