Then there is the provocative point that Mr. Trump’s efforts were parried by the threat to resign of his own White House counsel, Mr. McGahn. White House counsels are not in the habit of bucking their bosses that way; it’s an extraordinarily rare event. Mr. McGahn obviously feared at least a political firestorm; yet if that was all he feared, one would expect him to have saluted and carried out the president’s orders. Concerns about politics aren’t a hallmark of Mr. McGahn’s tenure, to say the least. The threat to resign carries with it the possible implication that he saw more: a crime, even a continuing conspiracy, that he wanted to distance both Mr. Trump and himself from.
That sort of intervention is consistent with more principled motives, and a desire to save Mr. Trump not only from himself but from despoiling the presidency (which the White House counsel in fact represents). It’s also consistent with the Washington tradition of self-serving conduct with an eye toward ensuring that you don’t go down with the ship. Perhaps in this case it was both.
In any event, Mr. McGahn’s pushback starts to look like a John Dean moment in the Trump administration: the juncture when actors in the White House, including the White House counsel, began to realize that there is, in Mr. Dean’s famous phrase, “a cancer on the presidency.” Reports have been rife of a dispirited and paranoid White House, with as many internecine battles as there are combinations of officials. NEW YORK Times Opinion
Trump’s Efforts to Oust Mueller Show the ‘Cancer’ on This Presidency