Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein said Monday the recent revelations about White House counsel Don McGahn’s 30 hours of interviews with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is “very important” in making an obstruction case against President Trump.
During an appearance Monday evening on CNN, Bernstein said he’s spoken with people in the White House over the past few days who say Trump is “unhinged” and “totally obsessed by the Mueller investigation.”
Over the weekend, Trump lashed out at the New York Times for a report that detailed how McGahn has cooperated with Mueller’s investigation since November at the behest of former members of Trump’s legal team. Though he called the report a “fake,” Trump also said he personally “allowed” McGahn “and all other requested members of the White House Staff” to cooperate with Mueller’s outfit.
A follow-up report from the Times said Trump’s legal team was scrambling as they may not have known everything McGahn told Mueller’s investigators over the course of three interviews. But, according to an email detailed to the Washington Post, McGahn’s attorney Bill Burck stressed to Trump’s legal team that his client “did not incriminate” the president and stressed that he was just one of many witnesses the Mueller operation has interviewed.
Bernstein said this doesn’t mean McGahn’s testimony won’t come back to haunt Trump.
“There is a cumulative effect of everything we are seeing including the McGahn story is very important,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Because what the McGahn story is, as his lawyer said tonight it’s not that McGahn incriminated the president, but rather he contributed to the matrix of showing the president’s obstruction of justice in a very, very definitive way as well as showing the collusion.”
Cooper cut in to say that the public still is unaware what McGahn said to Mueller, but Bernstein wasn’t deterred.
“I think we do know some of it, and some of it has been reported,’ he replied. “Part of that is indeed about what happened. I’ll give you one example. And I think we can reliably say that McGahn talked about attempts to fire Attorney General Sessions, by [former chief of staff] Reince Priebus was asked by the president to fire Attorney General Sessions. Or obtain his resignation. And Priebus refused, and of course a few days later, Priebus was out.”
Trump has repeatedly berated his attorney general for recusing himself from the Mueller investigation, which he calls a “witch hunt,” even going as far to say he wouldn’t have picked Sessions if he knew the former senator was going to do it.
After Bernstein said he was referring to a “skeletal” report by Vanity fair earlier this year, Bernstein said this clue and others help build an obstruction case against Trump.
What McGahnn said, Bernstein declared, is “part of a matrix, it’s part of a damning matrix. It’s not incriminating by itself as his lawyer said tonight, perhaps. Because his lawyer said tonight, to clarify things, he did not incriminate the president, but did he contribute to that matrix — that damning matrix? He absolutely did.”
