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Trump attacks New York Times report on Don McGahn's cooperation with Mueller

BERKELEY HEIGHTS, N.J. — President Donald Trump attacked The New York Times on Sunday in a series of tweets in which he denounced a report describing the extensive cooperation between the White House counsel, Don McGahn, and the special counsel’s investigators.

But Trump said the Times article had falsely insinuated that McGahn had “turned” on him.

“The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type ‘RAT,'” Trump said, referring to the Nixon White House counsel who cooperated with investigators in the Watergate investigation.

In a statement, The Times’ communications department said the paper stood by the report and the reporters who wrote it, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman. In one of his tweets, Trump called them “two Fake reporters.”

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The article detailed how McGahn, fearing that he could be made a scapegoat by the president, has described Trump’s actions and anger toward the Russia inquiry in at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled about 30 hours. In those interviews, McGahn gave the investigators information that they might not otherwise have gotten, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others.

The report said the president had wrongly believed that McGahn would act as his personal lawyer and solely defend his interests to investigators. But McGahn has viewed his role as a protector of the presidency, not of Trump, and people close to the president now believe it was a mistake to have cooperated so fully with the special counsel.

McGahn, the article said, gave investigators a mix of information both potentially damaging and favorable to the president, and he cautioned to investigators that he never saw Trump go beyond what he viewed as the president’s legal authorities.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Emily Cochrane © 2018 The New York Times

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