Ah ?…Trump lawyers’ don’t know what Don McGahn told Mueller’s team

President Donald Trump’s lawyers do not know just how much the White House counsel, Don McGahn, told the special counsel’s investigators during months of interviews, a lapse that has contributed to a growing recognition that an early strategy of full cooperation with the inquiry was a potentially damaging mistake.

The president’s lawyers said Sunday that they were confident that McGahn had said nothing injurious to the president during the 30 hours of interviews. But McGahn’s lawyer has offered only a limited accounting of what McGahn told the investigators, according to two people close to the president.

That has prompted concern among Trump’s advisers that McGahn’s statements could help serve as a key component for a damning report by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, which the Justice Department could send to Congress, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Trump’s lawyers realized Saturday that they had not been provided a full accounting after The New York Times published an article describing McGahn’s extensive cooperation with Mueller’s office. After McGahn was initially interviewed by the special counsel’s office in November, Trump’s lawyers never asked for a complete description of what McGahn had said, according to a person close to the president.

McGahn’s lawyer, William A. Burck, gave the president’s lawyers a short overview of the interview but few details, and he did not inform them of what McGahn said in subsequent interactions with the investigators, according to a person close to Trump. McGahn and Burck feared that Trump was setting up McGahn to take the blame for any possible wrongdoing, so they embraced the opening to cooperate fully with Mueller in an effort to demonstrate that McGahn had done nothing wrong.

On Sunday, Trump’s lead lawyer dealing with the special counsel, Rudy Giuliani, appeared to acknowledge that he had only a partial understanding of what McGahn had revealed…

More…