"what the exchanges reveal about Trumps corrupting influence on the institution of the presidency"
I seldom see anything actually written about the profound negative effects that Trump is having on the Office of the Presidency!!
"#More profound, however, is what the exchanges reveal about Trump’s corrupting influence on the institution of the presidency. "
“Blurred Lines”: How the Trump-Russia Mess Could Nuke the White House Counsel
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/donald-trump-robert-mueller-donald-mcgahn?mbid=social_twitter
Inside the West Wing battle that may force Don McGahn to resign.
by Abigail Tracy
March 8, 2018 3:49 pm
From left, by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images, by Michael Reynolds/Pool/Bloomberg, by William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire/Getty Images, by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images (background).
“What [Donald] Trump has done here is what every defense lawyer warns their client not to do, which is talk to witnesses,” Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama, told me Thursday morning. The night before, The New York Times had reported that Robert Mueller is aware of episodes in which Trump discussed the Russia investigation with two key witnesses, White House general counsel Donald McGahn and former chief of staff Reince Priebus. “It always looks suspicious, like you are coaching them, coordinating, inducing them—particularly if you are their boss and you wield a certain amount of power,” Katyal continued. “Obviously nobody wields more power than Donald Trump.”
The revelation incited a flurry of speculation in Washington’s legal community as to whether the president had inadvertently strengthened Mueller’s obstruction of justice case, yet again, or even engaged in witness tampering. “You’ve got the president looking much more like an ordinary criminal than somebody who is acting like the president of the United States,” Katyal lamented. But it also highlights the mounting tensions between Trump and McGahn, whose job as White House counsel has grown increasingly untenable as the Russia investigation has snowballed.
As the Times reports, McGahn previously threatened to quit in June 2017, after Trump asked him to fire Mueller. When the incident was made public, Trump reportedly instructed then-White House staff secretary Rob Porter to inform McGahn that he should issue a statement denying the account, which McGahn also refused. A subsequent confrontation between McGahn and Trump, witnessed by Chief of Staff John Kelly was also leaked to the Times:
The president said he had never ordered Mr. McGahn to fire the special counsel. Mr. McGahn replied that the president was wrong and that he had in fact asked Mr. McGahn in June to call the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to tell him that the special counsel had a series of conflicts that disqualified him for overseeing the investigation and that he had to be dismissed. The president told Mr. McGahn that he did not remember the discussion that way.
Mr. Trump moved on, pointing out that Mr. McGahn had never told him that he was going to resign over the order to fire the special counsel. Mr. McGahn acknowledged that that was true but said that he had told senior White House officials at the time that he was going to quit.
The series of exchanges—which were made known to Mueller and to the Times—mark an unprecedented breakdown in the relationship between the president and the White House counsel. “That [Trump] uses an intermediary to convey a request to the White House Counsel and to suggest that if the request isn’t satisfied the counsel will be fired, indicates something about how Mr. Trump is managing his relationship with his lawyer that is profoundly disturbing and dysfunctional,” Robert Bauer, who served as general counsel to President Obama, told me.
More profound, however, is what the exchanges reveal about Trump’s corrupting influence on the institution of the presidency. The White House counsel has always walked a fine line in prioritizing the protection of the Oval Office over the person that occupies it. “White House counsels are not the president’s personal lawyer. They represent the president as president and so in that sense, [McGahn’s] obligation is to the institution,” Bauer explained........................