McGahn Illustrates Why You Don’t Hire from the Swamp

RUSH: The other big news over the weekend was or is that one of the early members of Trump’s White House legal team, Don McGahn, has spoken for 30 hours to the special counsel. Thirty hours. And ostensibly the White House doesn’t know what McGahn said. And, of course, what is going on here? It’s a big, long New York Times story, and what they’re trying to do is get Trump on obstruction.

The point of the story is they want us to believe that Trump was trying to fire Mueller, but that McGahn was heroically stepping in at each moment Trump wanted to do this and stopping him from doing it. And they’re trying to then say that Trump wanting to fire Mueller is the same thing as Trump firing Mueller. And that then equals obstruction. The problem is, Trump has not fired Mueller, Trump has not obstructed, and he probably couldn’t be guilty of obstructing anyway because he would be doing nothing more than carrying out presidential prerogatives.

But the point of that story in the New York Times, when you strip it all away, they want you to believe that Trump was trying — There is no trying! You run the executive branch. You’re president, how do you try? How do you try to fire Mueller? Somebody explain this to me. How do I try to do show prep every day? I don’t try. I do it! It’s not like I come in here, “Yeah. I was trying to do show prep, but the phone kept ringing. Yeah, I was trying to do show prep, but Snerdley came in and heroically prevented me from doing it.” What is this? You either do it or you don’t. There’s no presidential trying to fire anybody.

But the New York Times is desperate to try to use McGahn to suggest that Trump wanted to fire Mueller, even though he hasn’t.

You know, you’ve heard me say, you have heard me say many times on this program that I have been very puzzled by some of the early staffing choices the president made. And I think, without naming a whole lot of names, I think Trump made the mistake of choosing people from inside the Beltway, thinking that might be a way of taming all the opposition to him there. And it was a mistake because there is no taming it.

And by hiring people from the swamp … And McGahn is a swamp rat. That’s where he’s grown up, that’s where his career is.

The New York Times is trying to make you think that Trump has a Judas on the team who went in and spilled the beans on Trump obstruction, and that is not what happened. Trump waived executive privilege. Well, his legal team did. The legal team, John Dowd and those guys, waived privilege so that McGahn could go talk. And wait.

So the McGahn story in the New York Times is all about how, well, Trump was trying — there is no trying — to fire. You either do it or you don’t. But the spin is that Trump really, really wanted to, and McGahn heroically interceded every time and talked sense into Trump and made sure that he didn’t do it. But the timeline for a lot of this would suggest that Mueller does not have a case because Trump’s actions so far have been lawful and within his constitutional prerogatives.

And that’s what McGahn told Mueller. McGahn told Mueller that he’d not seen any obstruction, that he’d not seen any lawbreaking. What McGahn’s ticked off about is they let him go down there and talk, that he waived privilege for it. I say ticked. Well, he was.

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