President Trump needs to understand the legal exposure he faces after White House counsel Don McGahn provided special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of federal prosecutors with 30 hours of testimony, lawyer Alan Dershowitz said Wednesday.
“I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t be worried. If he’s not worried, he should be worried,” Dershowitz said during an interview with CNN.
“Whenever somebody on the inside spends 30 hours with somebody who’s trying to get you, you’ve got to start worrying,” Dershowitz continued. “And you should have started worrying even before that happened and thought seriously about what your options were to reduce the amount of worrying that you’ve going to have after the fact.”
Professor @AlanDersh says President Trump ought to be very worried about WH counsel Don McGahn’s 30-hour testimony to special counsel investigators: “I cant imagine he wouldn’t be worried. If he’s not worried he should be worried.” https://t.co/QE5388jnIF pic.twitter.com/ZeKKqvB6P7
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) August 30, 2018
Trump insisted he allowed McGahn to “fully cooperate” with Mueller’s office following a New York Times report on Aug. 18 that detailed how the White House’s top lawyer sat down with investigators in three lengthy interviews conducted during the past nine months. He reportedly answered their questions on a range of issues, including Trump’s dismissal of former FBI Director James Comey and the president’s push to install someone loyal to him to oversee the federal Russia probe.
McGahn’s attorney Bill Burck, however, has tried to assure Trump’s personal legal team his client did not implicate the president in any wrongdoing over the course of his conversations with prosecutors working with Mueller.
Dershowitz suggested Wednesday that Trump and his outside attorneys’ choice to waive executive privilege over McGahn’s interviews may haunt them in the future.
“I think maybe they may be regretting that decision because they don’t know exactly what McGahn said to Mueller,” he added. “And that creates the problem of having a White House counsel who may end up testifying against you while advising you as the president, as the incumbent of the presidency in the White House.”
