The president, long suspicious of paper trails, seethed that contemporaneous memos by aides became primary source material for the special counsel’s report.
President Trump seethed Friday over the special counsel’s damning portrayal of his protracted campaign to thwart the Russia investigation and directed much of his ire at former White House counsel Donald McGahn, whose ubiquity in the report’s footnotes laid bare his extensive cooperation in chronicling the president’s actions.
Some of the report’s most derogatory scenes were attributed not only to the recollections of McGahn and other witnesses but also to the contemporaneous notes kept by several senior administration officials — the kind of paper trail that Trump has long sought to avoid leaving.
Many White House aides use pen and paper both as a defensive mechanism — such as when then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly documented Trump’s move to grant security clearances to his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — and as a means of creating the first draft of a page-turning presidency.
But the fact that some of those notes became primary source material for Mueller to paint a vivid portrait of Trump’s efforts to derail the investigation angered the president, who was stewing over the media coverage as he decamped to Florida for the holiday weekend, according to people familiar with his thinking.
“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,” the president tweeted Friday morning from his Mar-a-Lago Club. “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed.”
Trump went on to claim that some of the statements made about him in the Mueller report were “total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad).”
[Trump asked his lawyer to cross legal lines. The Mueller report shows how he pushed back.]
Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said that since obstruction-of-justice charges were not brought against Trump, Mueller should not have so thoroughly detailed the acts that were under examination, such as the president’s attempts to remove the special counsel and curtail the probe.
“The narrative is written as if it’s all true and somebody proved it. Nobody proved it,” Giuliani said in an interview Friday. “I’m frustrated by the report because in some ways I’d love to have a trial and prove that it’s not true.”
Giuliani singled out McGahn, noting that Trump waived executive privilege to allow him to describe episodes to Mueller.
“If McGahn thought any of those things were crimes, why did he stay there?” Giuliani asked. “They’re trying to make it out as if there’s something illegal about what happened with McGahn. The guy is a very good lawyer. If he believed that there was something illegal, he wouldn’t have stayed in his job.
