Targets scapegoats

Trump targets Mueller report scapegoats

A day after celebrating the Mueller report as a vindication, the president seems to be souring on its conclusions.

By NANCY COOK, ANDREW RESTUCCIA and CAITLIN

A day after claiming that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report had vindicated him, President Donald Trump was in a foul mood about Mueller’s detailed findings, lashing out at the Russia investigator and fuming about aides who cooperated with him.

Close White House advisers said they expect Trump’s hottest rage in the coming days will be directed at former White House counsel Don McGahn, a source of some of the report’s most embarrassing findings about the president. Trump angrily tweeted on Thursday that the report contained “total bullshit” from people trying to make themselves look good and harm the president.

Trump’s obvious frustration was a sign that the White House’s victory lap on the Mueller report was premature. Although Trump celebrated the fact that the report did not find a conspiracy between his 2016 campaign and the Kremlin or that he obstructed justice, Trump seemed to be blaming scapegoats for the scathing media coverage that followed the report’s release — including McGahn.

The president and his former top White House lawyer had a tenuous relationship even before Mueller’s report detonated over Washington on Thursday. McGahn, who left his job in October 2018 after nearly two years, sat for roughly 30 hours of interviews with Mueller’s team and he plays a starring role in the report for his efforts to stop Trump from crossing the line into obstructing justice. One Friday morning headline capturing the capital’s post-Mueller consensus declared that McGahn had “saved Trump from himself” — a conclusion bound to irk a news-obsessed president who resents suggestions that his aides control him.

“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue. Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” Trump wrote in a string of tweets from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

The report made clear that a handful of staffers took notes of their interactions with the president including McGahn, former staff secretary Rob Porter, former chief of staff John Kelly and former deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland.

That revelation came as a shock to some of those who spoke to the special counsel’s team, some of whom told POLITICO they did not realize their interviews would be recounted in such detail in the report for public consumption. The president's reaction also frustrated Trump associates who privately noted that they had little choice but to comply with Mueller's requests for information — and who they stressed that the White House gave them permission to participate.

Trump complained that he was unable to push back on the claims made by his aides in Mueller’s report because of his decision not to sit down with Mueller in person. He also suggested he was unfairly thrown under the bus by those who had spoken freely to investigators.

“Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the 'Report' about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad),” he continued in another tweet.

He finished, with, "This was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened, a big, fat, waste of time, energy and money - $30,000,000 to be exact. It is now finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason. This should never happen again!"

Trump’s missives, sent as he kicked off Easter weekend at Mar-A-Lago, are signs that he will brood over the weekend over the report’s many damaging revelations. They also suggest that concerns among his current and former aides that the report might prompt him to seek retribution were well-founded.

Joining Trump in Florida this weekend are both his acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, neither of whom is known to have spoken to Mueller.

The anecdotes of White House staffers who worked in close proximity with Trump are littered throughout Mueller’s report, describing in detail the chaos of Trump’s presidency while undercutting his claim of “total exoneration” by Mueller.

Trump advisers who spoke to Mueller’s team counter that they were bound to comply with the special counsel’s interview requests — and they note the White House signed off on their participation.

“It’s not like somebody has a choice to cooperate,” said one of the people who sat for an interview

Even before he lashed out on Twitter Friday, Trump signaled privately to his aides that he was frustrated by their note-taking.

In one instance cited in the redacted report, which was released Thursday, the president apparently criticized McGahn for telling Mueller's investigators that Trump sought to have Mueller removed.

"Why do you take notes? Lawyers don't take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes," Trump is quoted as saying, to which McGahn responded that a "real lawyer" does.

Trump countered that he'd had "a lot of great lawyers" like Roy Cohn, who he argued "did not take notes."

A person close to the president said Trump was particularly annoyed by notes taken by Jeff Sessions’ then-chief of staff, Jody Hunt. Hunt captured Trump’s reaction to learning about the special counsel investigation in vivid detail.

“Oh my God,” the president told Sessions, according to Hunt’s notes. “This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”

Since the report was released Thursday morning, several of Trump’s current aides have pushed back about how their comments were portrayed, appearing to engage in public damage control – even though their interviews with special investigators were under oath.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday suggested the report put words in her mouth.

In an interview on “CBS This Morning,” Sanders was grilled over the revelation in Mueller’s report that she falsely told reporters in a press briefing that “countless” FBI agents had reached out to her to express their gratitude over Trump’s 2017 firing of Director James Comey. Sanders told Mueller’s office that the use of that word was a “slip of the tongue” despite her repeated assertion she’d received such messages.

She also told Mueller’s team that when she said during a White House press briefing that “countless” rank-and-file FBI agents had told her they’d lost confidence in Comey, she erred “in the heat of the moment.” The report concludes that the comment “was not founded on anything.”

Sanders said on Friday that “those were Mueller’s words,” adding: “I said that it was in the heat of the moment, meaning it wasn’t a scripted thing, it was something that I said and which is why that one word has become a big deal. But the big takeaway here is that the sentiment is 100% accurate.”