Here Are All the Times Trump Tried to Get Rid of Robert Mueller. No Obstruction!
In a press conference Thursday morning, Attorney General William Barr insisted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation didn't yield evidence to suggest Trump might be guilty of illegally attempting to interfere in the FBI investigation of his campaign’s interactions with Russia. But the Special Counsel's own report shows that the President made multiple attempts to fire Mueller.
According to the just-released report, Trump phoned up then-White House counsel Don McGahn in 2017 and asked him to get rid of Mueller:
On June 17, 2017 the president called McGahn at home and directed him to call the acting attorney general and say that the special counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed… McGahn was perturbed by the call and did not intend to act on the request. He and other advisors believed the asserted conflicts were “silly” and “not real” and they had previously communicated that view to the President.
Trump didn't give up, and called McGahn a second time, asking less nicely.
When the President called McGahn a second time to follow up on the order to call the Department of Justice, McGahn recalled that the President was more direct, saying something like, “Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the Special Counsel.” McGahn recalled the President telling him “Mueller has to go” and “Call me back when you do it”… McGahn recalled that he had already said no to the President’s request and he was worn down, so he just wanted to get off the phone.
According to the report, McGahn was prepared to resign rather than fire Mueller and instigate what he feared might have been a Trump administration version of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre. He apparently let then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Preibus and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon know that he was going to quit because the President kept asking him to do “crazy shit,” but the two talked the White House Counsel into staying on.
Trump didn’t ask McGahn to get rid of Mueller again, perhaps because Chris Christie urged caution:
Around the same time, Chris Christie recalled a telephone call with the President in which the President asked what Christie thought about the President firing the Special Counsel. Christie advised against doing so because there was no substantive basis for the President to fire the Special Counsel, and because the President would lose support from Republicans in Congress if he did so.
In his analysis, Mueller declared McGahn a credible witness, and directly linked Trump's desire to fire him to the obstruction investigation, writing that "news that an obstruction investigation had been opened is what led the President to call McGahn to have the Special Counsel terminated."
“Instead of relying on his personal counsel to submit the conflicts claims, the President sought to use his official powers to remove the Special Counsel,” reads the report. “And after the media reported on the President’s actions, he denied that he ever ordered McGahn to have the Special Counsel terminated and made repeated efforts to have McGahn deny the story…Those denials are contrary to the evidence and suggest the President’s awareness that the direction to McGahn could be seen as improper.”
That all sounds a hell of a lot like an attempt to meddle in the investigation, so why did the Mueller report decline to level a finding as to whether or not the president committed obstruction? One reason, according to the report, is that some of Trump’s most obviously obstructionist actions, like firing James Comey, were legal maneuvers open to any president, which would apparently present a challenge in building a case against Trump.
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