Donald Trump’s White House Counsel Has One Main Job—And He’s Failing At It – Mother Jones

Donald McGan, like all the advice of the White House that served before him, has a wide portfolio, but one fundamental charge: To keep his boss, the President of the United States, not also. To say that McGan did not very well deal with this department is a diminishment. President Donald Trump and his administration were besieged by the scandal from the very beginning. And the lawyers who worked in past administrations, democratic and the Republicans wondered whether Mcgan has this decision or influence with his client in order to do the work.

Four months, despite the fact that they have not yet encountered a crisis that is not their own creation, the Trump administration is faced with a growing list of disputes, legal and others. The FBI is reported that the retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who within 22 days of serviced as adviser to Trump on national security, for Its lobbying on behalf of Turkish interests and for His conversations With the Russian ambassador to the United States before Trump took office. Eat Two probes of the Congress studying the actions of Flynn and Two more Looking at whether anyone is connected with the campaign of Trump to interact with the regime of Vladimir Putin when he interfered with the 2016 presidential race. And the Ministry of Justice recently appointed A special lawyer to monitor the investigation of the FBI in the intervention of Moscow and communication with Trump-Russia. Jared KushnerTrump's son -in -law and close adviser; Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort; and Trump's personal lawyer, Michael CohenFBI person or Congress control.

“You can understand that Mr. Trump is talking to him, but he also does not accept their advice, does not ask for their advice or followed their advice.”

All presidents, democratic and republicans, experience their share of scandals. But the pace and the size of the contradictions covering the White House of Trump are at a different level and pace. (Recall that the massacre of Richard Nixon on Saturday night – when he dismissed A special prosecutor investigating Waterga-did not happen to almost five years in his presidency.) And every leak and a drop of new information raised more questions about McGan, a person whose work is to keep Trump from potential land mines before they explode into new bombs.

Election lawyer, who served five disputed years In the Federal Election Commission, McGan first met Trump at the end of 2014 and was one of the first Magnat employees when he began his presidential race. He admired Trump, abandoning attempts to remove Trump from primary voting in New Hampshire and coordinate the timely release of the campaign in the list of potential candidates to the Supreme Court, which helped attract ambivalent evangelical and conservative voters.

Soon after the victory in the presidency of Trump rewarded the loyalty of Mcgan Choosing him be a White House lawyer.

After about six weeks, January 4, according to V New York TimesMcGan talked with Michael Flynn, a retired general, whom Trump chose as his national security adviser a week before he hired McGan, about a delicate matter. In August 2016, the consulting company Flynn, Flynn Intel Group, signed a contract for $ 600,000 for lobbying on behalf of Turkish interests; The Client of Flynn was the Dutch company, which was ruled by the Turkish businessman, who is an ally of Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At that time, however, Flynn was not registered in accordance with the Law on Registration of Foreign Agents, which requires lobbyists and lawyers working for foreign governments to disclose their work.

Now that the inauguration of Trump is almost two weeks, Flynn, according to reports, told McGan that he was under federal investigation for not revealing his lobbying on behalf of foreign interests.

What McGan did with this information is unclear, but, nevertheless, he reveals the former White House lawyers, that Flynn continued to receive the top post in the White House, perhaps the most sensitive work in the White House. (Mcgan, through a representative of the White House, refused to comment on this story.) Graduates of a lawyer in previous white houses say that it was unimaginably hired by a national security consultant who was faced with legal issues regarding foreign lobbying, not to mention who was under federal investigation. “In the office of the White House’s lawyer in which I worked, the idea that someone was under investigation was a large red flag, and there would be doubts that we would continue with this person,” says Bill Marshall, former deputy lawyer Clinton. “This does not even say that this is enough.”

Flynn remained at work and during the transition, as reported, said The outgoing administration of Obama that she should postpone a joint military strike of the American Kurdian plant in the Syrian city of Raqqa, -Shag, which corresponded to the desires of the Turkish government.

At a short ceremony in the White House on January 22, Flynn was hung out as an adviser to national security and Mcgan as the main lawyer. Four days later, Sally Yates, the acting General Prosecutor General and a high -ranking official in the national security department of the Ministry of Justice, met with McGan in the White House. Yates told McGan about anxious development: the United States had a deserful information that suggested that Flynn did not tell the truth when he denied that he was discussing sanctions during conversations with Sergey Kisliak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Yates added that Flynn gave an interview to the FBI.

Flynn lied. Moreover, his mention of sanctions was potentially unlawful in accordance with the obscure law, known as the Logan Law. (Since the creation of the law in 1799, Not a single person He was convicted in accordance with the Logan law.) Yates warned Mcgan that the inconsistency between Flynn’s public statements and the fact that he said to the Russian ambassador left him with a vulnerable blackmail for Russians.

“If Sally Yates came to me with this information, I would run along the corridor, as if my hair was on fire,” Rob Weiner, another former lawyer in the White House of Clinton, told me. Weiner added that since the messenger in this case was a deduction from the Obama administration, Trump’s White House “might not have trusted Yates at that moment. Even in this case, this was supposed to lead to the fact that the alarming bells would work. ” Jack Goldsmith, former senior lawyer of the Ministry of Justice during the administration of George Bush, repeated Winner's observation. Writing c Site lawGoldsmith weighed: “Especially against the backdrop of knowledge (and, according to, not doing anything) about Flynn’s inability to report his foreign work, the information that Jates transmitted was supposed to cause loud anxieties.”

Flynn, with two federal investigations hanging over his head, remained at work for another 18 days. He joined Trump in an oval office for calls with foreign dignitaries, including the leaders of Australia and Russia. Presumably, he was engaged in daily intelligence briefings and had unhindered access to secret information. It was only after Washington Post February 13 reported On the warning of Yates McGan about Flynn's susceptibility to blackmail that Trump dismissed Flynn.

The question hanging throughout the defeat was: how was Flynn allowed to stay at work? At the media briefing, the day after the dismissal of Flynn, Sean Spicer, the press secretary, turned to the role of Mcgan in Flinn's dispute. McGan held his own review after meeting with Yates, Spicer ExplainedAnd “determined that there is no legal problem, but rather the problem of trust.”

It was a mystifying answer, especially given the facts that later appeared: Flynn was supposedly the goal of active investigations. “It is very difficult to understand how Mcgan could draw these conclusions,” wrote Goldsmith, a former lawyer of the Bush administration. Mcgan, Goldsmith noted, could not know all the details of investigations aimed at Flynn. (Indeed, Jets later showed that McGan did not seem to know that the FBI interviewed Flynn about his calls with the Russian ambassador.) “It is just as important that the last word about the legality of Flynn’s actions was not Mcgan,” Goldsmith continued. “This call is primarily in the FBI and especially the General Prosecutor.”

A steady stream of revelations about the White House of Trump and his various legal dramas only shed a sharper light on the McGan and the office of the lawyer. After Mail reported The fact that the White House officials put pressure on the director of National Intelligence and the Head of the National Security Agency in order to undertake the FBI investigation in Russia, Goldsmith Twisted“Having asked again: is the consultant who) incompetent or 2) ineffective, because the client is crazy, and he does not have enough access/influence?”

Lawyers who represented the Democrats and Republicans agree that Trump is as difficult as possible as possible. “Someone understands that Mr. Trump is talking to him, but he also does not accept their advice, does not ask their advice or followed their advice,” says Karen Hult, a professor of political science of Virginia, who studied the White House lawyer's office. K. Boyden Gray, a White House lawyer for President George Bush, said that few, if any, had more financial and ethical confusing than Trump. “I did not have any difficulties that Don Mcgan had,” he told me earlier this year. Bob Bauer, former lawyer in the White House of Obama, recently Interrogated Can any lawyer curb Trump: “Conference by the White House to work to represent this president? We can find that no one is. ” There are some signs that Trump trusts McGan. When Trump wanted to issue statements about the support of Flynn and Kushner after the name of a special lawyer to observe the investigation of Trump-Russia, that was According to reports, McGan Who convinced Trump not to do this.

But part of the work, according to former lawyers in the office of a lawyer, gives the president an unwanted council and insists that the Soviets should be. “It is always very difficult to say“ no ”to the president and not to do what the President of the United States wants,” says Bill Marshall, a former White House lawyer Clinton. “But the long -term interests of the President of the United States may often not do what he may want to do, and if you do this, it can return and hit you from the direction that you never expected.”