Schmidt S. - Donald Trump V. the United States - Inside the Struggle to Stop a President

As we made small talk about West Wing gossip and stories in the news that day, the first questions that came to my mind cut directly to the heart of the story. How much did you really cooperate with Mueller? Why have you continued to work for Trump? Is the power of your job so great that you’ll endure working for someone whom I know you despise in order to get your political goals accomplished? Are you Mueller’s secret mole in the White House? Those might have been the right questions, but they were far too aggressive and intrusive. Instead, it occurred to me that the safest place to let him go was his greatest accomplishment to date in the White House: his unrelenting drive to stack the courts.

In some ways, McGahn was the typical Washington insider. He had come to Washington in 1995 after law school and built a practice as a Republican elections lawyer, soon becoming a partner at a top-tier firm. In 2008, George W. Bush nominated McGahn to be the chairman of the Federal Election Commission, the agency created in the wake of Watergate to police money in politics. You might think that someone who was at the top of such an agency would use his power to rain down enforcement. But ideologically, McGahn was almost militantly libertarian, and it was at the FEC that his libertarianism found its full expression. He had come to believe that regulatory agencies had accumulated too much power, and so when he joined the commission, he set out to shut it down. In his five years on the commission, he gutted its ability to enforce election law.

Bob Bauer, who served as Barack Obama’s White House counsel and a top Democratic elections lawyer, told me that McGahn was the most consequential commissioner in the history of the FEC. “He brought a discipline to the Republican side and a sort of relentlessness, if you will, to that effort that was unparalleled in the history of the commission,” Bauer said.

Even though he was part of the establishment and made more than $1 million a year in his private sector jobs, he still thought of himself as a blue-collar kid from New Jersey and still had nothing good to say about the “elites.” He had a penchant for the hair bands of the 1980s, played in a 1980s-style rock band, and even hung out with actual rock stars from the 1980s. He often sported long hair that he had to pull behind his ears, even when he was head of the FEC. While leading the agency, he fought openly with the other commissioners, undoing much of its ability to regulate voting and campaign finance. This won him the deep affection of the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell.

During the primaries, as Trump’s improbable candidacy continued to defy gravity, McGahn became the Trump campaign’s lawyer, making sure he followed campaign finance laws and serving as a bridge between the neophyte candidate and the Republican establishment in Washington. The first time he met his client, Trump asked him how much money he made. When McGahn told him that his going rate was $800 an hour, Trump was impressed, and the deal was done. After Trump won, he had agreed to be White House counsel so that he could transform the federal judiciary for a generation or more. How many times had Trump reminded his adoring supporters that he had given them Neil Gorsuch? And McGahn had also just overseen Trump’s nomination of the D.C. Circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace the Supreme Court associate justice Anthony M. Kennedy and was preparing for his confirmation hearings.

I knew McGahn was fond of Kennedy, whose retirement after thirty years on the Court had opened up the spot for Kavanaugh. So I brought up Kennedy, asking him where he’d first come to know him. McGahn said he had met Kennedy at a cocktail party in Washington a couple of years earlier and that they had hit it off. McGahn noted to me that Kennedy always wore a suit, a tie, and a handkerchief in his breast pocket and was a nice combination of classy, charming, and thoughtful. The two had grown so close that McGahn often consulted with Kennedy about different judicial picks, McGahn said.

For all the stress McGahn was presumably under, he seemed at ease. The suit he was wearing was nicer than what most government employees wear, and his tie was still fully done and neatly positioned in the middle of his spread-collar shirt, which looked as if it had just been pressed. His hair was short.

“I heard you got a haircut when Kelly came in,” I said.

There had been a rumor that when John Kelly, a four-star general, had become White House chief of staff a year earlier, McGahn had cut his hair in a show of deference to Kelly’s military style.

“Not true,” McGahn said.

He didn’t seem to be in a rush to stop talking to me, so I wasn’t in a rush to start turning this into some sort of inquisition. I turned the conversation to show that I knew something about his life. The previous Labor Day, I’d been to McGahn’s hometown of Brigantine, New Jersey, a small town on the Jersey shore right outside Atlantic City. Even though you can see the casinos of Atlantic City from there, Brigantine has a small-town feel, with modestly sized houses, many of which are rented throughout the summer to vacationers.

The McGahn family had lived on a street where everyone basically had the same amount of money. The kids whose fathers were doctors or lawyers had lived in houses that were only slightly bigger than the others, and there was a sense there that everyone was on the same level. McGahn told me he really liked Brigantine because there wasn’t a rigid class system that was ruled by elites.

“Now, life in Washington—there are elites,” he said.

I asked what his parents did. He said that his mother was a nurse and his father was a Treasury agent who did IRS investigations and was also, not for nothing, a well-regarded shot. His father would come home from the practice range with the paper target, one hole in dead center. He had fired six times, hitting the same spot each time. The family claim to fame was that his father had once protected Gerald R. Ford on a postpresidential visit to Cape May, New Jersey.

By now I’d delayed his entrance into the White House for at least half an hour. The sky was a reddish purple, the shade that appears at night when a thunderstorm is about to roll in. My time was short.

“I’ve probably written more stories about you than anyone else,” I said. “I realize we aren’t perfect. We don’t have badges and guns and the power of subpoena. We don’t bat a thousand. But what percent do you think I’ve gotten right? Have I gotten anything big wrong?”

Until then, the conversation had been cordial and about nothing of consequence. “I never saw anything that was really off,” he said. “The biggest thing is that you make things more dramatic.”

“That’s fair,” I said. “People sometimes say that about us, that we overdramatize things; sometimes things can feel more dramatic reading them than living through them. I get it.”

It began to drizzle. It was now or never. I had to find out if the information I had received was true. Had McGahn turned on the president? And if so, why?

“You’ve done a lot of damage to the president and nobody knows it,” I said.

McGahn tried to sidestep.

“I told them what happened—don’t know if that’s damage,” he said.

To be perfectly clear, I repeated myself.

“You did a lot of damage to the president. I understand that,” I said. I then pointed at McGahn. “You understand that.”

I paused. Then I pointed at the West Wing.

“But he doesn’t understand that,” I said. “You did a lot of damage to the president and only you and I realize it.”

“I damaged the office of the president; I damaged the office, ” he said, in recognition that a White House counsel speaking so freely with investigators was highly unusual. His point was that such a precedent would likely make it harder for future presidents to stop investigators from speaking with White House lawyers. But I thought he was still understating the gravity of what he had done.