August 29, 2018

Don McGahn Is Leaving the White House

The announcement follows a recent report that the White House counsel has cooperated extensively with Robert Mueller.

Tom Williams/ZUMA

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White House counsel Don McGahn will leave his position following the likely confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh this fall.

President Donald Trump announced the news in a tweet Wednesday morning, shortly after Axios first reported that McGahn was planning to leave and hoping that Emmet Flood, who advised President Bill Clinton during his impeachment proceedings, would succeed him.

News of McGahn’s upcoming departure follows a report that McGahn has cooperated extensively with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, answering nearly 30 hours of questions about whether Trump has obstructed justice. Subsequent reports indicated that Trump’s legal team has yet to receive a full accounting of what McGahn told the special counsel. With his lawyers reportedly rattled, Trump quickly claimed that he had instructed McGahn to sit down with investigators because he had nothing to conceal.

Though the two men are said to have openly clashed, McGahn has also proved uniquely well positioned to carry out Trump’s deregulatory mission while holding a lax outlook on the president’s many ethical issues.

McGahn has plenty of experience dismantling the bureaucracy from within: That was precisely the program he pursued for five years while serving on the Federal Election Commission. “He didn’t care about the institution, and he seemed mostly interested in grinding its work to a halt,” says David Kolker, a former associate general counsel at the FEC who worked alongside McGahn. “Don had a blow-it-up mentality.”

Read our in-depth look at McGahn’s role in putting out the fires at the Trump White House.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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