Do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing
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Isaac Chotiner: What did you think when you read the Times story today?
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My second reaction is that Don McGahn is doing exactly the right thing, not merely to protect himself, but to protect his client. And his client is not Donald Trump; his client is the office of the president. That is one of the things that was cleared up as a result of Watergate. The American Bar Association reissued a code of ethics and dealt directly with representation of an organization, and who the client is. And the client, in this instance, would not be the man who holds the office, but the office. And that is a huge difference.
When you started your job as White House counsel, who did you think you were representing, and how did you conceive of it by the end of your tenure?
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Throughout my tenure, it was totally confused as to who the client was. Nixon thought I was his personal lawyer
By the time I go in to tell the president that there is a cancer on the presidency, I am worried not just about the man, but the office. This was as fuzzy for all organizations as it was for the White House. It was one of the lasting reforms that came out of Watergate.
So did that ever switch in your mind?
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By the time I go in to tell the president that there is a cancer on the presidency, I am worried not just about the man, but the office.
The Times story posits the idea that McGahn was cooperating, in part, because he was worried that Trump would try to blame him for any obstruction Mueller might find.
I think there is good reason for McGahn to believe that Trump would throw him under the bus, since Trump throws almost everyone under the bus. So, I don’t think it is a reach to have that in your consciousness.
Self-preservation is a real motive. At times, I felt it. When I first tried to go in and blow up the Watergate cover-up, I was really worried about the president and the office. When it got back through the grapevine that they were planning to have [former Attorney General] John Mitchell take the rap for the break-in, and me take the rap for the cover-up, I wasn’t very keen on the idea.
The first time I ever talked to the press during my tenure in government was when I dictated a couple sentences for my secretary and had her read it to the AP, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, to communicate to my superiors—who were not sharing this with me—that I would not be the scapegoat, and they were making a mistake if they were suiting me up for that.
When you read stories like this that display aspects of the president’s relationship to the investigation swirling around him, what similarities and differences do you see between Trump and Nixon?
The similarities I see, and this is a little bit counterintuitive, because everybody thinks Nixon was extremely competent. There is no question he was. He understood the presidency very well.
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But, having said that, I see a lot of similarity in the bungling. Watergate was not a carefully planned crime and cover-up. It was one bungled event after another. I see the same thing happening with Trump.