{"id":57465,"date":"2018-01-27T05:25:14","date_gmt":"2018-01-27T05:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=57465"},"modified":"2018-01-27T05:25:14","modified_gmt":"2018-01-27T05:25:14","slug":"counsel-quietly-trying-to-corral-trump-while-pushing-g-o-p-s-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/world-news\/counsel-quietly-trying-to-corral-trump-while-pushing-g-o-p-s-agenda.html","title":{"rendered":"Counsel Quietly Trying to Corral Trump While Pushing G.O.P.\u2019s Agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"

Counsel Quietly Trying to Corral Trump While Pushing G.O.P.\u2019s Agenda<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

When Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, moved into his corner office on the West Wing\u2019s second floor last January, he chose not to decorate its walls or fill its glass-paneled shelving with personal items. He told colleagues that he travels light because he never knows when he might be asked to leave.<\/span><\/p>\n

But even as a series of firings and resignations roiled the first year of the Trump administration, Mr. McGahn maintained a low profile. Toiling away on judicial appointments and efforts to dismantle regulations, he has rarely accompanied Mr. Trump on trips, and beyond delivering a speech at the annual conference of the conservative Federalist Society in November, has seldom appeared in public.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, Mr. McGahn has been thrust squarely into the public eye by the disclosure that in June he threatened to resign in order to stop President Trump from firing Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel leading the investigation into Russia\u2019s interference in the 2016 election and into whether Mr. Trump committed obstruction of justice. And it is increasingly clear that Mr. McGahn has been at the center of nearly everything Mr. Mueller\u2019s obstruction investigation is scrutinizing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. McGahn was the first White House official to hear the Justice Department\u2019s concerns that Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump\u2019s first national security adviser, was vulnerable to blackmail by Russia. On Mr. Trump\u2019s orders, he tried to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. He also took part in Mr. Trump\u2019s dismissal of the F.B.I. director James B. Comey.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a participant to those events, Mr. McGahn has been interviewed at length by Mr. Mueller\u2019s team as it has sought to understand the president\u2019s motivations and thinking. The investigators have also obtained memos, notes and emails about how Mr. McGahn tried to carry out Mr. Trump\u2019s decisions in legally appropriate ways \u2014 such as objecting to a first draft of Mr. Trump\u2019s letter firing Mr. Comey that mentioned the Russia investigation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. McGahn\u2019s threat to resign is an example of how he has tried to both help and constrain an idiosyncratic client who hates to be managed and defies the norms of the presidency. Not everyone believes he has been successful.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former top Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, wrote last year on the Lawfare blog that Mr. McGahn was either incompetent or ineffective \u2014 giving bad advice, or advice that his client ignored. Mr. Goldsmith said on Friday that there were too many unanswered questions about what happened in June to judge what it means for Mr. McGahn.<\/span><\/p>\n

He might \u201chave acted to protect the president, or himself, or both, from legal trouble,\u201d Mr. Goldsmith said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to know, but the fact that McGahn has stayed in office during the subsequent seven months implies that there has not been a fundamental breach between the two men, unless perhaps this report signals one.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. McGahn, 49, did not respond to an interview request. Several people who know him say he is intensely focused on his mission while maintaining a wry sense of humor and ironic detachment. The stresses can be enough that he will cancel his afternoon meetings and leave the White House.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. McGahn has spent most of his professional career in Washington, unusual in an administration that has largely kept out Beltway insiders. His wife, Shannon McGahn, is the staff director of the House Financial Services Committee.<\/span><\/p>\n

But over the years he developed an unusual image for a conservative, growing his hair long and playing guitar for a rock band that specialized in 1980s cover songs until he had to focus on working for Mr. Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

That background dovetails with a policy record that is more libertarian than classically conservative. His specialty is election law, and at the Patton Boggs law firm, he worked under Benjamin Ginsburg, a veteran Republican campaign lawyer, defending clients against Federal Election Commission investigations into coordination between Republican campaign committees and outside groups.<\/span><\/p>\n

Later, President George W. Bush appointed Mr. McGahn to serve as a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, where he developed a reputation for unabashedly trying to stop what he believed were its regulatory excesses. But others saw his actions as preventing any regulations on campaign spending. After leaving the agency, he and Mr. Ginsburg left Patton Boggs for another firm, Jones Day.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHis outlook has always been on the fecklessness of overregulation by big government,\u201d Mr. Ginsburg said, adding that the two \u201cwould spend countless hours\u201d talking about what they saw as the foolishness of Federal Election Commission actions to \u201cregulate the unregulatable\u201d \u2014 that is, political campaign speech.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since last summer, Mr. McGahn has played little role in dealing with the Russia investigation because the White House brought in outside lawyers \u2014 first Marc E. Kasowitz, and now Ty Cobb \u2014 to handle it. But in his more conventional work, which has been overshadowed by the attention given the legal sparring with Mr. Mueller, he has had a major effect on public policy through his support of efforts to dismantle regulations and his role in the administration\u2019s aggressive attempt to fill vacancies in the upper reaches of the federal judiciary with deeply conservative judges.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone thinks about him in terms of the president\u2019s ethics and all of that, but quietly, he has really tried to move the needle on things that conservatives care about a lot, which is the courts and the administrative state,\u201d said Reginald Brown, a former associate White House counsel in the Bush administration. \u201cThat\u2019s not as sexy, but it is far more consequential.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As the chief architect of the administration\u2019s judicial selection process, Mr. McGahn was the driving force behind Mr. Trump\u2019s success in appointing not only Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, but 12 appeals court judges in his first year \u2014 more than any president in modern history. That pace has not let up: Three more of Mr. Trump\u2019s appellate nominees are pending on the Senate floor.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the Federalist Society convention in November, Mr. McGahn joked that during the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump\u2019s team had drawn up two lists of potential nominees \u2014 one of easily confirmable \u201cmainstream\u201d and \u201cpragmatic\u201d picks, and one of picks who held views that would \u201cmake some people nervous\u201d and who were \u201ctoo hot\u201d for easy confirmation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI said the first list we\u2019ll throw in the trash and the second list \u2014 that\u2019s who we\u2019re going to put before the U.S. Senate because I know Leader McConnell will get it done,\u201d he said, referring to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader.<\/span><\/p>\n

Several people said Mr. McGahn has told some friends and colleagues that he has considered resigning over the past six months, but that Mr. McConnell has repeatedly urged him to stay. Mr. McConnell declined to discuss his private conversations with Mr. McGahn, but said through a spokesman that \u201cPresident Trump picked the finest White House counsel I\u2019ve ever worked with.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

With many more judicial vacancies yet to fill and Republicans still narrowly in control of the Senate \u2014 a window that might close if there is a Democratic wave in the midterm election this year \u2014 several other associates scoffed at the idea that Mr. McGahn would want to step down soon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. McGahn is experiencing \u201ca once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that in his wildest dreams when he was going to law school he would never have imagined that he would have been in this position to have a direct effect on the courts for years to come,\u201d said Michael Dubke, who served as White House communications director for Mr. Trump in the first half of last year.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI am sure he\u2019s thought about quitting \u2014 I doubt there is a person in any West Wing that hasn\u2019t thought about it \u2014 but this is very important to him,\u201d Mr. Dubke said. \u201cHe views this as this is going to be his ultimate imprint on American government.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/01\/26\/us\/politics\/trump-white-house-counsel-mcgahn.html<\/span><\/p>\n

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