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    How a Corporate Law Firm Led a Political Revolution

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    On a balmy Saturday night in June, Traci Lovitt hosted a 50th birthday party for her husband, Ara, at their 9,800-square-foot Westchester mansion overlooking Long Island Sound. The couple met while clerking for Supreme Court justices: Traci for Sandra Day O’Connor, Ara for Antonin Scalia. These days, Ara worked in finance. Traci was a top partner at — and a contender to one day run — the international law firm of Jones Day, best known for representing Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. To serve as M.C. for the event, the Lovitts flew in Richard Blade, the veteran disc jockey Ara listened to while growing up in Southern California. But Blade wasn’t the party’s biggest star. That distinction belonged to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.One day earlier, Barrett and four of her colleagues on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion. Now she was wearing a pink dress and sitting at a flower-bedecked table under a tent on the Lovitts’ lush lawn. Barrett clerked for Scalia in the same session as Ara, in 1998 and 1999, and also became friends with Traci, jogging together around the National Mall after work. (When Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court in 2020, Traci wrote to senators, praising the judge’s fair-mindedness and commitment to the rule of law.) But the connection to the court ran deeper than that. Scalia had spent years at Jones Day in the 1960s. And Traci ran an elite practice inside the firm that was focused in part on arguing cases before Barrett and her colleagues. Guests at the Lovitts’ estate danced to Blade’s beats until 1 a.m. At one point, an attendee spotted Barrett chatting with Noel Francisco, another Jones Day partner, who had himself clerked for Scalia the year before Lovitt and Barrett. Francisco left the firm in 2017 to become Trump’s solicitor general, responsible for representing the government before the Supreme Court, and returned in 2020, eventually taking over Jones Day’s enormous Washington office. Now his and Lovitt’s underlings were appearing regularly before the court. In one recent case brought by Jones Day, the court killed the Biden administration’s moratorium on home evictions during the pandemic. Less than a week after the Lovitts’ party, in another case Jones Day worked on, the court would severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of power-plant emissions.For much of its history, Jones Day was a juggernaut in the field of corporate litigation. A global goliath with more than 40 offices and about 2,500 lawyers, it raked in billions a year in fees from tobacco, opioid, gun and oil companies, among many other giant corporations in need of a state-of-the-art defense. More than most of its competitors, the firm had an army of litigators who had perfected the art of exploiting tiny legal wrinkles, of burying outmatched opponents in paperwork and venue changes and procedural minutiae. But over the past two decades, Jones Day has been building a different kind of legal practice, one dedicated not just to helping Republicans win elections but to helping them achieve their political aims once in office. Chief among those aims was dismantling what Don McGahn — the Jones Day partner who helped run Trump’s campaign and then became his White House counsel — disparagingly referred to as the “administrative state.” To do that, the firm was bringing all the ruthless energy and creativity of corporate law to the political realm.Jones Day lured dozens of young Supreme Court clerks, mostly from conservative justices, with six-figure signing bonuses and the opportunity to work on favored causes, including legal challenges to gun control and Obamacare. The firm allotted countless pro bono hours to aiding the needy — and also to assisting deep-pocketed right-wing groups as they fought against early voting and a federal corporate-oversight body.Representing Trump’s 2016 campaign, Jones Day helped him solidify Republican support by pledging to pick federal judges from a list that was vetted in advance by the law firm and the Federalist Society. When Trump won, a large fleet of Jones Day lawyers sailed into his White House, the Justice Department and other parts of his administration. But the biggest impact was on the judiciary. Trump delegated the task of selecting federal judges to McGahn, who — working closely with Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader — placed well over 100 conservatives on the federal courts, including several who had recently worked at Jones Day. Even after rejoining Jones Day in 2019, McGahn continued to advise Senate Republicans on judicial strategy.It is not uncommon for partners at corporate law firms to dabble in politics. Nor is it rare for a firm itself to throw its weight behind causes on the left or the right. One of the country’s richest firms, Paul, Weiss, for example, has long staked out liberal stances on the public issues of the day (even as it rakes in fees from companies that undercut those ideals). What sets Jones Day apart is the degree to which it penetrated the federal government under Trump and is now taking advantage of a judicial revolution that it helped set in motion.The power of that revolution, which is spreading to courtrooms and statehouses around the country, is now on vivid display. Even with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the Supreme Court has been on a rightward tear. In its most recent term, Trump’s three appointees — the first two handpicked by McGahn and the third, Barrett, plucked by him out of academia for the federal bench — helped erase the constitutional right to abortion, erode the separation of church and state, undermine states’ power to control guns and constrain the authority of federal regulators. Jones Day had a hand in some of those cases, and the firm has telegraphed that it is eyeing additional legal challenges in line with its leaders’ ideology.Jones Day’s influence seems poised to grow. This year, it has been collecting fees from a remarkable assortment of prominent Republican players: a Trump political-action committee; moderates like Senator Susan Collins; Trump allies like Dr. Mehmet Oz; hard-liners like Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — not to mention an assortment of super PACs supporting fringe candidates like Herschel Walker, the former N.F.L. star who is running for a Senate seat in Georgia. Francisco recently represented former Attorney General Bill Barr before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. McGahn recently began representing Senator Lindsey Graham as he fights a grand jury subpoena to testify about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The chief of staff to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is a recent Jones Day alum. The next Republican presidential administration — whether it belongs to Trump, DeSantis or someone else — will most likely be stocked with Jones Day lawyers.Founded in Cleveland in 1893, Jones Day was at the vanguard of an era of breakneck expansion in the legal industry. In the 1970s and ’80s, it was one of the first law firms to open multiple offices in the United States and then overseas. It was a tireless, and extremely successful, defender of some of America’s worst corporate actors. The firm helped R.J. Reynolds sow doubts about the dangers of cigarettes. It helped Charles Keating’s fraud-infested savings-and-loan association fend off regulators. It helped Purdue Pharma protect its patents for OxyContin. But it didn’t become a conservative machine until Stephen Brogan took over as managing partner in 2003.Brogan, the son of a New York City police officer, joined Jones Day straight out of the University of Notre Dame’s law school in 1977 and, aside from a two-year stint in the Reagan Justice Department, has worked there ever since. A number of Brogan’s allies said the key to understanding him and his politics was through his faith. “Brogan is extremely conservative, hard-core Catholic, and that is the bedrock of who he is,” one of his Jones Day confidants told me. Brogan brought on a series of high-profile devotees of the Federalist Society — including leading Reagan and Bush administration lawyers like Michael Carvin and Noel Francisco — to work in the firm’s issues-and-appeals practice, which became a sort of in-house conservative think tank. Even as most of the firm’s lawyers remained focused on bread-and-butter work for big companies, Jones Day took on a growing list of ideologically charged cases and causes, including efforts by the ultraconservative Buckeye Institute to prevent the expansion of early voting in Ohio and challenge the legitimacy of the Obama administration’s newly inaugurated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. By 2014, when a trio of Republican lawyers at Patton Boggs, a Washington law firm that was in financial trouble, began looking for a new home, Jones Day was a natural fit. It was huge, it had a thriving Washington office and its leaders were conservative. Plus, the Patton Boggs crew — McGahn, Ben Ginsberg and William McGinley — would fill a void. While Jones Day had built up a formidable practice advising companies on how to navigate the federal bureaucracy, the firm didn’t have a practice advising politicians on how to navigate election and campaign-finance laws. And without the relationships that came from helping people win office, it was harder for Jones Day to wield influence on Capitol Hill and in the White House. It helped that Ginsberg, who had been the top lawyer on presidential campaigns by George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, had known Francisco and Carvin for years. During the interview process, Ginsberg told Francisco that he recognized that Jones Day, despite its conservative reputation, probably employed a lot of Democrats. Would it be a problem to bring in a team that would represent polarizing Republicans? It would not, Francisco assured him. Indeed, promoting conservative principles was becoming part of the firm’s marketing pitch. “The government’s tentacles invade virtually every aspect of what our clients do,” Francisco said in a Jones Day promotional video in 2015. “The job of a lawyer and the job of courts is to ensure that the federal government lives within the limits that our Constitution sets, and I love making sure that those lines are enforced.” Ginsberg and McGahn were well known throughout the Republican establishment, and several would-be presidents soon came to them seeking counsel; Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Perry of Texas and Chris Christie of New Jersey would become clients. McGahn — who had recently served on the Federal Election Commission, watering down campaign-finance rules and slowing the agency’s decision-making in what he said was an effort to make it more responsive to the people and groups it regulated — also represented a who’s who of other G.O.P. power players: the Republican National Committee, the National Rifle Association, the billionaire Koch brothers.There was at least one other key client: Citizens United. The group, famous for its successful Supreme Court challenge of campaign spending restrictions, was run by Dave Bossie, an influential right-wing activist. One day in late 2014, Bossie and McGahn were on the phone, batting around ideas about which presidential campaigns the Jones Day lawyers should work for.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6The Trump InvestigationsNumerous inquiries. More

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      Lindsey Graham Resists Testifying in Trump Investigation in Georgia

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      ATLANTA — Six days after major news organizations declared Donald J. Trump the loser of the 2020 presidential election, his allies were applying a desperate full-court press in an effort to turn his defeat around, particularly in Georgia.The pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell went on television claiming that there was abundant evidence of foreign election meddling that never ultimately materialized. Another lawyer, L. Lin Wood, filed a lawsuit seeking to block the certification of Georgia’s election results.That same day, Nov. 13, 2020, Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and one of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters, made a phone call that left Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, immediately alarmed. Mr. Graham, he said, had asked if there was a legal way, using the state courts, to toss out all mail-in votes from counties with high rates of questionable signatures.The call would eventually trigger an ethics complaint, demands from the left for Mr. Graham’s resignation and a legal drama that is culminating only now, nearly two years later, as the veteran lawmaker fights to avoid testifying before an Atlanta special grand jury that is investigating election interference by Mr. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Graham has put together a high-powered legal team, which includes Don F. McGahn II, a White House counsel under Mr. Trump. While Mr. Graham’s lawyers say that they have been told that he is only a witness — not a target of the investigation — that could change as new evidence arises in the case, which is being led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga. Her efforts to compel Mr. Graham to testify have been aided by legal filings from a number of high-profile, outside attorneys, including William F. Weld, a Trump critic and former Republican governor of Massachusetts.Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, center, during a hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesUnderscoring the risks for Mr. Graham, lawyers for 11 people who have been designated as targets who could face charges in the case have said that they were previously told that their clients were only “witnesses, not subjects or targets,” according to court filings.On Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit temporarily blocked Mr. Graham from testifying and directed a lower court to determine whether he was entitled to a modification of the subpoena based on constitutional protections afforded to members of Congress. After that, the appeals court said, it will take up the issue “for further consideration.” The matter is now back before Leigh Martin May, a Federal District Court judge who already rejected Mr. Graham’s attempt to entirely avoid testifying; she asked the sides to wrap up their latest round of legal filings by next Wednesday. It seems increasingly likely that Mr. Graham will testify next month.Ms. Willis has said that she is weighing a broad array of criminal charges in her investigation, including racketeering and conspiracy. She has already informed at least 18 people that they are targets, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer. Mr. Giuliani fought to avoid testifying in person but was forced to appear before the grand jury last week.Regarding Mr. Graham, Ms. Willis’s office is seeking to learn more about his role in Mr. Trump’s post-election strategy, and who he spoke to on the Trump campaign team before or after he called Mr. Raffensperger. While Mr. Trump assailed Mr. Raffensperger on Twitter as a “so-called Republican” on the same day as that call, Mr. Graham told CNN that the former president did not encourage him to place the call.Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationCard 1 of 5Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationAn immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Apple Says It Turned Over Data on Donald McGahn in 2018

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      The company notified Donald F. McGahn II last month that it had been subpoenaed for his account information three years ago.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department subpoenaed Apple for information in February 2018 about an account that belonged to Donald F. McGahn II, President Donald J. Trump’s White House counsel at the time, and barred the company from telling him about it, according to two people briefed on the matter.Apple told Mr. McGahn about the subpoena last month, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Mr. McGahn’s wife also received a similar notice from Apple, the person said.It is not clear what F.B.I. agents were investigating, whether Mr. McGahn was their specific focus or whether he was swept up in a larger net because he had communicated with someone who was under scrutiny. As the top lawyer for the 2016 Trump campaign and then the White House counsel, Mr. McGahn was in contact with numerous people who may have drawn attention either as part of the Russia investigation or a later leak inquiry.Still, the disclosure that agents had collected data of a sitting White House counsel, which they kept secret for years, is extraordinary.And it comes amid a political backlash after revelations that the Trump administration secretly seized the personal data of reporters and Democrats in Congress from phone and tech companies while investigating leaks.Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill on Sunday ratcheted up pressure on the Justice Department and former officials to provide a fuller accounting of events. They called on the head of the Justice Department’s national security division, John C. Demers, and the former deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to testify before Congress along with the former attorneys general Jeff Sessions and William P. Barr.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. McGahn. An Apple representative did not respond to a request for comment.Apple told Mr. McGahn that it had complied with the subpoena in a timely fashion but declined to tell him what it had provided the government, according to a person briefed on the matter. Under Justice Department policy, gag orders for subpoenas may be renewed for up to a year at a time, suggesting that prosecutors went to court several times to prevent Apple from notifying the McGahns earlier.In investigations, agents sometimes compile a large list of phone numbers and email addresses that were in contact with a subject, and seek to identify all those people by using subpoenas to communications companies for any account information like names, computer addresses and credit card numbers associated with them.Apple told the McGahns that it had received the subpoena on Feb. 23, 2018, according to a person briefed on the matter.Under federal law, prosecutors generally need to obtain permission from a federal judge in order to compel a company like Apple to delay notifying people that their personal information has been subpoenaed, said Paul M. Rosen, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at Crowell and Moring.“There is a lot here we don’t know, including the facts and circumstances surrounding the request for the delay and what was presented to the judge,” Mr. Rosen said. But, he added, prosecutors typically need to prove that either notifying the person “would endanger someone’s safety, risk the destruction of evidence or intimidation of witnesses, or seriously jeopardize an investigation.”The subpoena was issued by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, the other person familiar with the matter said.It is not clear why prosecutors obtained the subpoena. But several notable developments were unfolding around that time.The federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia was the center of one part of the Russia inquiry led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that focused on Paul Manafort, a former chairman of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.Because Mr. McGahn had been the top lawyer for the Trump campaign in 2016, it is possible that at some earlier point he had been among those in contact with someone whose account the Mueller team was scrutinizing in early 2018.Notably, Mr. Manafort had been hit with new fraud charges unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia the day before the subpoena. Subsequent developments revealed that Mr. Mueller’s investigators were closely scrutinizing some of his communications accounts in the following days.On the other hand, the Manafort case was largely handled in the District of Columbia, where he faced separate charges. Still, the Mueller team was also working with federal prosecutors in Virginia during that period on an unregistered foreign agent case related to Turkey and a business partner of Michael T. Flynn’s, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser who had also advised him during the 2016 campaign.It was also around that time that Mr. McGahn was involved in another matter related to the Russia investigation, one that included a leak.In late January 2018, The New York Times reported, based on confidential sourcing, that Mr. Trump had ordered Mr. McGahn the previous June to have the Justice Department remove Mr. Mueller, but Mr. McGahn had refused to do so and threatened to resign. The Washington Post confirmed that account soon after in a follow-up article.The Mueller report — and Mr. McGahn in private testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this month — described Mr. Trump’s anger at Mr. McGahn after the Times article and how he had tried to persuade Mr. McGahn to make a statement falsely denying it. Mr. Trump told aides that Mr. McGahn was a “liar” and a “leaker,” according to former Trump administration officials. In his testimony, Mr. McGahn said that he had been a source for The Post’s follow-up to clarify a nuance — to whom he had conveyed his intentions to resign — but he had not been a source for the original Times article.There are reasons to doubt that Mr. McGahn was the target of any Justice Department leak investigation stemming from that episode, however. Information about Mr. Trump’s orders to dismiss Mr. Mueller, for example, would not appear to be a classified national-security secret of the sort that it can be a crime to disclose.Yet another roughly concurrent event was a Justice Department investigation into unauthorized disclosures of information about the Russia inquiry. As part of that investigation, prosecutors sent Apple a subpoena on Feb. 6, 2018, for data on congressional staff members, their families and at least two members of Congress. Apple only recently informed those targeted because it had been prohibited from disclosing the subpoena at the time.Among those whose data was seized were two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Representatives Eric Swalwell and Adam B. Schiff, both of California. Mr. Schiff, a sharp political adversary of Mr. Trump, is now the panel’s chairman. The Times first reported on that subpoena last week.Many questions remain unanswered about the events leading up to the subpoenas, including how high they were authorized in the Trump Justice Department and whether investigators anticipated or hoped that they were going to sweep in data on the politically prominent lawmakers. The subpoena sought data on 109 email addresses and phone numbers.In that case, the leak investigation appeared to have been primarily focused on Michael Bahar, then a staff member on the House Intelligence Committee. People close to Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein, the top two Justice Department officials at the time, have said that neither knew that prosecutors had sought data about the accounts of lawmakers for that investigation.It remains unclear whether agents were pursuing a theory that Mr. Bahar had leaked on his own or whether they suspected him of talking to reporters with the approval of lawmakers. Either way, it appears they were unable to prove their suspicions that he was the source of any unauthorized disclosures; the case has been closed, and no charges were brought.Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday called for Mr. Barr, Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein to testify before Congress about the subpoenas. She said that what the Justice Department did under Mr. Trump went “even beyond Richard Nixon” but declined to say whether a congressional committee would compel their testimony.“Let’s hope they will want to honor the rule of law,” she said. “The Justice Department has been rogue under President Trump.”Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, called for anyone potentially involved in the subpoenas, including Mr. Demers, to testify before Congress. “The sins of the Trump administration just continue to pile up,” he said at a news conference in New York.“This was nothing less than a gross abuse of power, an assault on the separation of powers,” Mr. Schumer said, warning that if the men would not testify, lawmakers would subpoena them.He also called on Senate Republicans to join Democrats in voting for congressional subpoenas to compel testimony.On CBS, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, called the allegations “serious” but said only that she was backing an investigation into the matter by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general that was announced on Friday.Katie Benner More

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      McGahn Affirmed That Trump Tried to Oust Mueller

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      The former White House counsel testified behind closed doors last week about the former president’s attempts to interfere with the Russia investigation.WASHINGTON — Donald F. McGahn II, who served as White House counsel to former President Donald J. Trump, has told lawmakers that episodes involving him in the Russia report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, were accurate — including one Mr. Trump has denied in which the president pressed him to get the Justice Department to remove Mr. Mueller.A 241-page transcript of Mr. McGahn’s closed-door testimony from last week, released on Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee, contained no major revelations. But it opened a window on Mr. McGahn’s struggles to serve as the top lawyer in a chaotic White House, under a president who often pushed the limits of appropriate behavior.“They don’t teach you this in law school,” Mr. McGahn said of one episode he witnessed in which Mr. Trump was trying to get his attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, to resign because he had recused himself from the Russia investigation.Mr. McGahn was a major witness to many of the episodes outlined in the second volume of the Mueller report, which focused on actions Mr. Trump took to obstruct the investigation. After then-Attorney General William P. Barr — who said none of those episodes amounted to a chargeable crime — released most of the report in 2019, Democrats subpoenaed Mr. McGahn, hoping for a dramatic televised hearing.But the Trump Justice Department fought to block the subpoena, leading to a protracted and complex court battle. It came to an end when the Biden Justice Department struck a deal with House Democrats to permit Mr. McGahn to testify, but under strict limits: It would take place in private, and he could only be asked about information in the public portions of the Mueller report.While the testimony was belated and limited, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, portrayed it as important.“Mr. McGahn provided the committee with substantial new information,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement accompanying the transcript release. He added, “All told, Mr. McGahn’s testimony gives us a fresh look at how dangerously close President Trump brought us to, in Mr. McGahn’s words, the ‘point of no return.’”Mr. McGahn used that phrase when a staff lawyer for House Democrats grilled him at length about Mr. Trump’s efforts to get him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod J. Rosenstein, to remove Mr. Mueller over a dubious claim that the special counsel had a conflict of interest — which Mr. McGahn refused to do, believing it could “cause this to spiral out of control.”After Mr. Trump called him at home on a Saturday in 2017 to pressure him again to tell Mr. Rosenstein to oust Mr. Mueller, for example, Mr. McGahn testified, he was deeply concerned.“After I got off the phone with the president, how did I feel?” he said. “Oof. Frustrated, perturbed, trapped. Many emotions.”Fearing that conveying the directive might instead prompt Mr. Rosenstein to resign and touch off a crisis akin to President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal, Mr. McGahn instead prepared to resign if Mr. Trump did not relent. He told several colleagues at the White House about his intention, although not Mr. Trump himself. But the crisis instead blew over for a time.In his testimony, Mr. McGahn acknowledged that he was afraid that if Mr. Trump removed Mr. Mueller or otherwise interfered with the investigation, the action would be used to accuse the president of obstruction of justice. But he was also careful to frame his concerns as being about public relations, without acknowledging that any legal lines were ever crossed.“It didn’t mean the president was meddling, but certainly it would be easily made to look that way,” Mr. McGahn said.The internal furor over Mr. Trump’s previous attempt to oust Mr. Mueller reignited in January 2018, when The New York Times and then The Washington Post reported on the encounter.Mr. Trump was enraged and pushed Mr. McGahn to make a statement denying that the episode had happened, but he refused to do so — because, he said, The Times story was substantially accurate. (Mr. McGahn said that The Post’s follow-up to The Times story was clearer on one issue — whether he had conveyed his threat directly to Mr. Trump — because Mr. McGahn had been a source for The Post in order to explain that nuance.)Mr. McGahn had by then also already told Mr. Mueller’s team about the event — Mr. Trump had ordered him to cooperate with the special counsel — and he feared that Mr. Mueller would consider charging him with making a false statement to law enforcement officials if he contradicted his account.Mr. McGahn also called Mr. Trump’s claim that he never even suggested firing Mr. Mueller “disappointing,” because Mr. Trump “certainly entertained the idea. Certainly seemed to ask a number of people about it. Certainly had a number of conversations with me about something along those lines.”The fight over whether Mr. McGahn would falsely say that Mr. Trump had never asked him to have the special counsel removed by Mr. Rosenstein also led to a vivid moment in the Mueller report where Mr. Trump chastised Mr. McGahn for keeping notes of their conversations, saying it was not something that Roy M. Cohn — a notorious lawyer who was disbarred for unethical conduct, but who Mr. Trump admired — would have done. Cohn died in 1986.“I didn’t really respond,” Mr. McGahn said. “I’ve made my point. And this was not the first time that Roy Cohn has sort of — the ghost of Roy had come into the Oval Office, so it didn’t seem to be a point worth responding to and, you know, he’s the president, he gets the last word.” More

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      McGahn Breaks Little New Ground in Closed-Door Testimony

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      A transcript of the former White House counsel’s appearance, which ended a two-year dispute between the Justice Department and Congress over a subpoena, will be made public next week.WASHINGTON — Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel, answered detailed questions from Congress behind closed doors on Friday about President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to impede the Russia investigation. But Mr. McGahn provided few new revelations, according to people familiar with his testimony.The fact that Mr. McGahn spoke to Congress at all was significant after a multiyear legal battle by the Trump Justice Department to block an April 2019 subpoena for his testimony. That dispute ended last month, when President Biden’s Justice Department, House Democrats and a lawyer for Mr. McGahn reached a compromise under which he finally showed up.Still, the interview by the House Judiciary Committee, attended by only a half dozen or so lawmakers on a summer Friday when Congress was on recess, was an anticlimactic conclusion to a saga that once dominated Capitol Hill. When Democrats first subpoenaed Mr. McGahn, they believed his testimony under oath and on live television could help build public support for impeaching Mr. Trump for obstruction of justice and other matters.Instead, in the time it took to sort out a tangled legal battle, questions about the events Mr. McGahn witnessed have largely faded into the background or been carefully detailed by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Trump’s presidency turned up newer issues for which the House impeached him twice — and the Senate acquitted him both times.“I believe we have been vindicated in terms of the intimacy of his involvement and the ultimate conclusions of the Mueller report,” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, told reporters as she exited the session. “The Congress has to be respected with its subpoena and oversight responsibilities.“Today, we asserted that right,” she added.But under the strict limits imposed by the terms of the deal, Mr. McGahn’s appearance broke little new ground, according to those familiar with it, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. The agreement limited questioning to matters that were described in the publicly available portions of Mr. Mueller’s report.Mr. McGahn will have up to a week to review a transcript for accuracy before it is made public. But the people said that he hewed closely to the account he had already given the special counsel, often telling committee lawyers that his recollections of events from four years ago were no longer sharp.Republicans were pleased to declare the interview a waste of time as they left the session after more than five hours of questioning.“Today, we have the House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee relitigating the Mueller report,” said Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “Don McGahn hasn’t been White House counsel for three years.”Mr. McGahn was a witness to many episodes described in the second volume of the Mueller report, which centered on potential obstruction of justice issues; his name appears there more than 500 times.In June 2017, for example, Mr. Trump called Mr. McGahn at home and ordered him to tell Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, to fire Mr. Mueller over a dubious claim that the special counsel had a conflict of interest. Mr. McGahn refused and was prepared to resign before Mr. Trump backed off, according to the Mueller report.After the report became public, Mr. Trump claimed on Twitter that he had never told Mr. McGahn to fire Mr. Mueller. Two people familiar with the hearing on Friday said that the session had spent a lengthy period going over that episode, and that Mr. McGahn had testified under oath that the account in Mr. Mueller’s report was accurate.The report also described a related episode that followed a January 2018 report by The New York Times that first brought to public light Mr. Trump’s failed attempt to have Mr. Mueller fired. Mr. Trump tried to bully Mr. McGahn into creating “a record stating he had not been ordered to have the special counsel removed” while also shaming the lawyer for taking notes about their conversations. But Mr. McGahn refused to write the memo.Mr. McGahn was also a major witness to several other episodes recounted in the obstruction volume of Mr. Mueller’s report, including the White House’s handling of the Justice Department’s concerns that Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, was vulnerable to blackmail by Russia over false statements he had made about his conversations with the country’s ambassador. Mr. McGahn was also part of deliberations leading to Mr. Trump’s firing of James B. Comey Jr., the F.B.I. director.Mr. Trump had directed Mr. McGahn to speak with Mr. Mueller’s investigators in 2017. In 2019, as it became clear that Mr. McGahn had become a chief witness to many of Mr. Trump’s actions that raised obstruction of justice concerns, the president’s allies — like his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — began attacking him.The attacks left Mr. McGahn in a delicate position. He is a hero to the conservative legal movement because he was the chief architect of the Trump administration’s judicial selection process, which filled the federal bench with Federalist Society-style appointees. But Mr. McGahn’s law firm, Jones Day, has many Republican-oriented clients; if Mr. Trump were to order the party faithful to shun the firm as punishment, it could be financially devastating.Democrats were eager to claim Mr. McGahn’s testimony on Friday as a victory despite the lack of new disclosures, saying it upheld the principle that a White House could not prevent a key administration official from testifying before Congress. It added a second precedent to one created in 2009, when the new administration of President Barack Obama struck a deal to end litigation he had inherited over whether President George W. Bush’s former White House counsel, Harriet Miers, would testify about firings of United States attorneys.But because the compromise agreement to permit Mr. McGahn to testify effectively cut short the litigation, a federal appeals court never issued any binding precedent to resolve the long-running ambiguity over whether Congress can sue the executive branch in a subpoena dispute. That means the next time such a clash arises, Mr. Biden or a future president can again stonewall Congress and litigate the same issue all over again.Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Mr. McGahn “shed new light on several troubling events today.” But the congressman also described the belated nature of the testimony as a mixed bag.“In one sense, today is a great victory for congressional oversight. By securing Mr. McGahn’s testimony, we have made clear that the executive branch must respect our subpoenas,” he said. “On the other hand, two years is clearly too long to wait to enforce a valid subpoena, and the Trump era has taught us that Congress can no longer depend on good-faith cooperation with our committees.”Mr. Nadler said he planned to advance legislation that would resolve legal disputes over subpoenas to executive branch officials more quickly. More

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      McGahn to Testify About Trump’s Efforts to Obstruct Russia Inquiry

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      President Donald J. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, is set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Friday about whether Mr. Trump obstructed the Russia investigation, bringing to a close a long legal and political battle.The fact that Mr. McGahn is talking to Congress at all is significant after a multiyear legal battle by the Trump Justice Department to block a subpoena for his testimony. That dispute ended last month when the Biden Justice Department, House Democrats and a lawyer for Mr. McGahn reached a compromise.Under that deal, Mr. McGahn’s appearance may yield little in terms of new revelations. He will testify behind closed doors and will have up to a week to review a transcript for accuracy before it is made public. He also may be questioned only about his involvement in matters that are described in the publicly available portions of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.Still, Mr. McGahn is likely to be asked to respond under oath to Mr. Trump’s public denial of events that were described in the report based in part on what Mr. McGahn told Mr. Mueller’s investigators, including that Mr. Trump had ordered him to have Mr. Mueller fired — a step Mr. McGahn said he refused to take.Congress is out of session this week, and members must be physically present to participate, so the full committee is not expected to attend. While those who do will have the right to ask questions, Mr. McGahn is expected to be questioned primarily by committee staffers. He will be accompanied by his lawyer, William A. Burck. More

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      McGahn Likely to Testify on Trump's Efforts to Obstruct Russia Inquiry

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      A delay is said to have stemmed from an initial threat by former President Donald J. Trump to intervene, but he apparently reversed course.WASHINGTON — President Donald J. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, has agreed to testify behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee sometime next week about Mr. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter.Lawyers for House Democrats, the Justice Department and Mr. McGahn had tentatively struck a deal to provide the testimony earlier in May. But the scheduling was delayed for weeks while they waited to see what Mr. Trump, who was not a party to the agreement, would do.Mr. McGahn’s agreement to testify — with President Biden’s permission — was contingent upon there being no active legal challenge to his participation in the matter, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal and political sensitivity of the matter.Immediately after the deal was announced this month in a court filing, a lawyer for Mr. Trump had conveyed that the former president intended to intervene. Former presidents can invoke executive privilege, although courts weigh that against the view of the incumbent president, and Mr. Trump could have sought a court order blocking Mr. McGahn’s testimony.But late last week, the people said, the lawyer for Mr. Trump — Patrick Philbin, a former deputy White House counsel in the Trump administration who is continuing to help handle his post-presidential legal affairs — said that Mr. Trump would not be intervening after all.Mr. Philbin, who did not respond to a request for comment, is said to have provided no reason for the about-face.While he was president, Mr. Trump vowed to stonewall “all” congressional subpoenas, and taxpayer-funded lawyers with the Justice Department fought lengthy court battles and appeals that succeeded in running out the clock on the possibility that House Democrats would obtain the information they were seeking before the 2020 election.Now that Mr. Trump is no longer president, however, there is at least one major difference: To keep litigating over the matter, Mr. Trump would have to pay the legal costs himself.The McGahn case stems from the House Judiciary Committee’s desire in 2019 to question him about matters related to his role as a key witness in the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, about efforts by Mr. Trump to impede the Russia investigation.But after the panel subpoenaed Mr. McGahn to testify, he refused to appear, on Mr. Trump’s instructions. The committee sued, and the case went through several rounds of legal fights over various constitutional issues that lacked definitive precedents because previous such disputes had generally been resolved with a negotiated compromise.Currently, the case is pending before the Court of Appeals for the full District of Columbia Circuit on the question of whether Congress has a “cause of action” that permits it to sue the executive branch. Under presidents of both parties, the executive branch has argued that Congress does not, and the Biden Justice Department had signaled that it was prepared to keep arguing that position if no accommodation could be reached.The deal averts the uncertain outcome of further such litigation — but also means that the next time a fight emerges over a subpoena from the House to the executive branch, the Justice Department will be able to start fresh in prolonged litigation over that unresolved issue.Under the deal, according to a court filing, there will be strict limits on the testimony Mr. McGahn will provide. He will testify behind closed doors for a transcribed interview, rather than in public.Only lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee may attend. And they may ask Mr. McGahn only about information attributed to him, or events involving him, in the publicly available portions of the Mueller report.The deal also says that the parties will get up to seven days to review the transcript for accuracy before it is made public, suggesting that it would be disclosed sometime in the second week of June. More

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      House, Biden Administration Reach Deal Over McGahn Testimony

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      A terse announcement signaled a possible end to a long-running constitutional lawsuit. But former President Donald J. Trump is not a party to the arrangement.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration and House Democrats have reached a tentative deal to allow President Donald J. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to testify before Congress about Mr. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia inquiry, according to a court filing late Tuesday.The deal appears likely to avert a definitive court precedent that would draw a clear line in an ambiguous areas: the scope and limits of Congress’s constitutional power to compel testimony for its oversight responsibilities, and a president’s constitutional power to keep secret conversations with a White House lawyer.An appeals court had been set to hear arguments on the case next week, but lawyers for the Justice Department, which has been defending Mr. McGahn since 2019 against a House subpoena seeking to compel his testimony, and for the House of Representatives asked the court in a joint letter to drop that plan as mooted by the deal.“The Committee on the Judiciary and the executive branch have reached an agreement in principle on an accommodation and anticipate filing, as soon as possible, a joint motion asking the court to remove this case from the May 19, 2021, oral argument calendar in order to allow the parties to implement the accommodation,” the letter said.What to do about the subpoena case, which President Biden inherited from the Trump administration, has been a rare locus of institutional disagreement among Democrats in the two branches.Lawyers in the Biden White House have been hesitant about establishing a precedent that Republicans might someday use to force them to testify about their own internal matters. House Democrats under Speaker Nancy Pelosi have been determined to push forward after frustration that the Trump administration’s uncompromising approach and litigation strategy ran out the clock, preventing any testimony by Mr. McGahn before the 2020 presidential election.The two sides had been negotiating for several months, leading to delays in the appeals court case. The filing was terse and offered no details about the deal, including what limits, if any, there would be — like whether Mr. McGahn would testify in public and the scope of what lawmakers could ask him to disclose.But the filing also flagged a potential wild card: “Former President Trump, who is not a party to this case, is not a party to the agreement in principle regarding an accommodation,” it said.That absence leaves open the question of whether Mr. Trump could try to intervene to block Mr. McGahn from testifying by asserting executive privilege. An attempt to invoke it by Mr. Trump would raise novel questions about the extent to which a former president may assert the privilege when the incumbent president declines to do so.Should Mr. Trump try to intervene, a rare but limited precedent is a 1977 case, Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Richard M. Nixon could assert executive privilege claims over official records from his White House even though he was no longer the president — but it also weighed that assertion against the contrary view of Jimmy Carter, the president at the time.That dispute, however, centered on control of Nixon-era White House documents, not a subpoena for a former White House lawyer’s testimony.The present dispute centers on the House Judiciary Committee’s desire to question Mr. McGahn about matters related to his role as a key witness in the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, about efforts by Mr. Trump to obstruct the Russia investigation.After the Justice Department made most of the report public, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Mr. McGahn to testify. After he refused to appear, on Mr. Trump’s instructions, the committee sued.The case has gone through several rounds of convoluted legal fights over constitutional issues that have lacked definitive precedents because previous disputes had generally been resolved with a negotiated compromise, averting a need for a court ruling.But the lawsuit over the McGahn subpoena is one of an unprecedented number of cases pitting the two branches against each other in court that arose after Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterm elections and Mr. Trump vowed to stonewall “all” subpoenas.First, the Justice Department under Mr. Trump had argued that Mr. McGahn was “absolutely immune” from any compelled appearance before Congress to testify about his work duties. Last year, the full District of Columbia Circuit rejected that theory.The Justice Department then continued to fight the subpoena on other legal grounds, arguing that Congress had no “cause of action” that authorized it to sue the executive branch. (The executive branch has taken that position under administrations of both parties, and the Biden administration had signaled that it was prepared to keep arguing it.)The apparent resolution of the McGahn subpoena case — unless Mr. Trump disrupts it — is similar to a dispute in 2009, when President Barack Obama took office and inherited a House lawsuit over a subpoena for testimony by President George W. Bush’s former White House counsel Harriet Miers related to the firings of United States attorneys.The Obama administration, a lawyer for the House and a legal representative of Mr. Bush worked out a deal under which Democrats were able to confidentially interview Ms. Miers about the topic, with limits. That accommodation mooted the case, so the District of Columbia Circuit never issued a binding ruling, leaving the legal questions it raised unresolved. More

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      House Reviews Mariannette Miller-Meeks's Narrow Election Victory in Iowa

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      After one of the closest contests in American history, the House must now decide whether to unseat Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican.Three months after its count of the presidential election results set off a riot at the Capitol, Congress has plunged once again into a red-hot dispute over the 2020 balloting, this time weighing whether to overturn the results of a House race in Iowa that could tilt the chamber’s narrow balance of power.At issue is the outcome of November’s election in a southeastern Iowa district, where state officials declared Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican, the winner in one of the closest contests in American history. Ms. Miller-Meeks prevailed by only six votes out of nearly 400,000 cast in the state’s Second Congressional District; in January, she took the oath of office in Washington.But her Democratic opponent, Rita Hart, has refused to concede the race, pointing to 22 discarded ballots she says would have made her the winner if counted. Now Democrats, who hold the majority in the House and spent months pushing back on President Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about a stolen election — including his claim that Congress had the power to unilaterally overturn the results — are thrust into the uncomfortable role of arbiters of a contested race.Ms. Hart has appealed to the House, including in a new filing on Monday, to step in to overrule the state and seat her instead, sending Ms. Miller-Meeks back to Iowa.“This was not something I sought, believe me,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the panel looking into the race.Ms. Lofgren and other Democrats say they have little choice but to take the appeal seriously under a 1960s law Ms. Hart has invoked. In recent weeks, Ms. Lofgren’s panel, the House Administration Committee, has opened a full-scale review into the contest that lawmakers say could lead to impounding ballots, conducting their own hand recount and ultimately a vote by the full House to determine who should rightfully represent the Iowa district.Reversing the result would give Democrats a crucial additional vote to pad one of the sparest majorities in decades. The House is currently divided 219 to 211, with five vacancies.That prospect has rapidly reignited tensions in a chamber that has scarcely begun to heal from the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob trying to stop Congress from formalizing President Biden’s victory. House Republicans — more than half of whom voted that day to discard state certifications and overturn Mr. Biden’s win — are accusing Democrats who ostracized them of a screeching, 180-degree turn now that flipping an election result would be to their advantage.“One hundred percent, pure partisan politics,” said Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, the top Republican on the Administration Committee. “It wasn’t too long ago that many of my Democratic colleagues were saying a certificate of election by state officials were sacrosanct.”Mr. Davis moved unsuccessfully this month to dismiss the challenge, and his party’s political operatives are using it to assail Democrats and galvanize their own core supporters. Republicans, by accusing Democrats of trying to “steal” a seat to bolster their exceedingly narrow majority, believe they can stoke the anger of a base that believed Mr. Trump’s false claims that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election. They hope to drive a wedge between Democratic leaders who have agreed to consider Ms. Hart’s challenge and rank-and-file members from conservative-leaning districts who fear it could undermine their credibility with voters.Democrats insist the charges are preposterous. The Administration Committee has merely agreed to hear the case, they argue, and Ms. Lofgren said in an interview that she had no idea what the panel might recommend. She called Republicans’ characterizations of her motivations “insulting,” but acknowledged she had a political headache on her hands — one that has made some of her own Democratic colleagues squirm.Rita Hart, the Democratic challenger, has refused to concede a race she says was wrongly decided.Rebecca F. Miller/The Gazette, via Associated Press“The comments made by some of the Republicans — whether they are ignorant or malicious I can’t say, but they have nothing to do with the obligation the committee has,” she said.The Constitution gives each house of Congress, not the states, the final say over the “elections, returns and qualifications of its own members,” and over the past century, the House has considered more than 100 contested elections. In 1969, Congress passed the Federal Contested Elections Act to set up a clear process governing how it should hear and decide the cases.Actually overturning the results, though, has been exceedingly rare, happening in only a handful of cases. Lawmakers in both parties have shown a general preference to defer to state election laws and determinations wherever possible.The contest between Ms. Miller-Meeks and Ms. Hart, both 65, appears likely to test whether Democrats want the body to wade into Iowa state election law and second-guess the state’s bipartisan certification.Unlike Mr. Trump and many other officials who have made election appeals to the House, Ms. Hart is not claiming there was fraud at play in the result. Instead, her campaign has identified 22 ballots that they believe were legally cast but “wrongfully” uncounted by state election officials during a districtwide recount in the fall. Among them are ballots that were cast curbside by disabled people but not accepted by voting machines, one that was discarded because it was sealed with tape, another that was signed in the wrong place, and a few that simply were not included in the tallying because of clerical errors.If they had been, Ms. Hart says that she, not Ms. Miller-Meeks, would have won the election by nine votes.“Congress has an obligation to ensure not just that people have a right to vote, but a right to have their vote counted,” Marc E. Elias, Ms. Hart’s lawyer, told reporters on Tuesday. “Right now, at its core, we have 22 voters who have had their right to have their vote counted denied.”Lawyers for Ms. Miller-Meeks say Ms. Hart’s complaint amounts to a disagreement with the judgment of bipartisan state election officials who decided which ballots to count. That, they argue, is simply not a good enough reason for the House to intervene, particularly after Ms. Hart declined to first press her case in Iowa state court last year before the contest was certified.“The idea that the House would intervene is an extraordinary step,” said Alan R. Ostergren, a lawyer for Ms. Miller-Meeks, who has quickly earned a reputation as a rare moderate in her party. “Normally, a contestant would have to show fraud or irregularities. They would have to do more than she has done here, which is pointing out ordinary decisions about handling ballots and ordinary application of Iowa law.”The fight could become costly. Democrats on the committee have already retained outside counsel from Jenner & Block, a firm based in Chicago, and Republicans have tapped Donald F. McGahn II, a former White House counsel and Republican elections lawyer, to advise them. The committee may also have to reimburse both candidates’ legal fees, which are currently being covered by each of their party’s campaign committees.Mr. Davis and Republicans on the Administration Committee have also accused Democrats of a “serious conflict of interest” because Mr. Elias also represents several Democrats sitting in judgment of her case. Mr. Elias called it “nonsense.”Speaker Nancy Pelosi has defended the House’s inquiry into the matter as routine business. But some Democrats, especially moderates from swing districts, appear increasingly uneasy and could shape the path ahead.Representative David E. Price of North Carolina, a former political science professor, predicted on Sunday that there was not the “slightest chance” the House would follow through and overrule the state. Representative Chris Pappas, Democrat of New Hampshire, said it was “time to move on.” Others have warned their leaders not to try.“Losing a House election by six votes is painful for Democrats,” Representative Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota, wrote on Twitter. “But overturning it in the House would be even more painful for America. Just because a majority can does not mean a majority should.” More