UPDATE: CNN reports President Trump is rattled, as expected, by the reports of McGahn's cooperation.
The President was unsettled by the notion that he didn't know everything McGahn said to the special counsel during their interviews, the sources said. And while he had approved the cooperation, Trump did not know the conversations stretched for 30 hours or that his legal team didn't conduct a full debriefing with McGahn after the fact.
Trump remained agitated for the rest of the weekend, the people said, believing the revelation made him look weak. Between conversations with his lawyers and a round of golf with Sen. Rand Paul, Trump lashed out on Twitter, decrying the suggestion he was caught off guard.
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Trump and McGahn went weeks without speaking at the beginning of this year, and months without meeting one-on-one, people familiar with the matter said. During this period, along with telling people McGahn was "a leaker," Trump complained about McGahn's good relationship with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the special counsel investigation.
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With details of McGahn's participation with the special counsel made public, experts say it's only a matter of time before other Trump aides seek out Mueller for interviews.
"Nobody wants to be the last one standing," said Jack Quinn, who served as White House counsel under President Bill Clinton and is now a CNN legal analyst. "Nobody wants to watch one's colleagues go in, spill the beans and be the one who is last in line to cooperate ..."
At the same time, The Washington Post says McGahn's attorney has told the president McGahn did not accuse him of breaking the law.
McGahn’s attorney, Bill Burck, told Trump’s lawyers this past weekend that McGahn did not assert that Trump engaged in any wrongdoing when he spoke to Mueller’s investigators in three lengthy interviews since last November, according people with knowledge of the discussions.
“He did not incriminate him,” Burck wrote in one email, which was described by multiple people.
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Burck has assured Trump’s lawyers that McGahn did not witness Trump engaged in any crime and would have resigned from his White House post if he had, according to people familiar with the conversations.
At the same time, Burck has cautioned them that McGahn is only one witness and that he does not know all the evidence Mueller has gathered that could pose problems for Trump, or how the information McGahn has provided could fit into the broader case.
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McGahn is far from the only member of Trump’s inner circle who has been interviewed extensively by Mueller’s team. Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has sat for about 20 hours of questioning and provided extensive contemporaneous notes he took during his time in the White House. Former senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon agreed to voluntary interviews that lasted 20 hours. Former press secretary Sean Spicer also sat for multiple days of interviews.
Sources: Trump unsettled by McGahn's 30 hours with the special counsel (CNN)
According to The New York Times, White House Counsel Don McGahn has been cooperating extensively with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours over the past nine months, Mr. McGahn described the president’s fury toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged Mr. McGahn to respond to it. He provided the investigators examining whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice a clear view of the president’s most intimate moments with his lawyer.
Among them were Mr. Trump’s comments and actions during the firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and Mr. Trump’s obsession with putting a loyalist in charge of the inquiry, including his repeated urging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to claim oversight of it. Mr. McGahn was also centrally involved in Mr. Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which investigators might not have discovered without him.
For a lawyer to share so much with investigators scrutinizing his client is unusual.
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Mr. McGahn’s cooperation began in part as a result of a decision by Mr. Trump’s first team of criminal lawyers to collaborate fully with Mr. Mueller ...
Mr. McGahn and his lawyer, William A. Burck, could not understand why Mr. Trump was so willing to allow Mr. McGahn to speak freely to the special counsel and feared Mr. Trump was setting up Mr. McGahn to take the blame for any possible illegal acts of obstruction ... So he and Mr. Burck devised their own strategy to do as much as possible to cooperate with Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that Mr. McGahn did nothing wrong.
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Mr. McGahn’s role as a cooperating witness further strains his already complicated relationship with the president ...
... [T]he two rarely speak one on one — the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and other advisers are usually present for their meetings — and Mr. Trump has questioned Mr. McGahn’s loyalty. In turn, Mr. Trump’s behavior has so exasperated Mr. McGahn that he has called the president “King Kong” behind his back, to connote his volcanic anger, people close to Mr. McGahn said.
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Mr. Burck said that Mr. McGahn had been obliged to cooperate with the special counsel. “President Trump, through counsel, declined to assert any privilege over Mr. McGahn’s testimony, so Mr. McGahn answered the special counsel team’s questions fulsomely and honestly, as any person interviewed by federal investigators must,” he said.
In response to the New York Times' McGahn revelation, President Trump claimed he was fully in control of the situation.
“I allowed White House Counsel Don McGahn, and all other requested members of the White House Staff, to fully cooperate with the Special Counsel,” Trump tweeted Saturday evening. “In addition we readily gave over one million pages of documents. Most transparent in history. No Collusion, No Obstruction. Witch Hunt!”
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On Sunday, Trump circled back to the topic with another string of tweets. “The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type ‘RAT.’ But I allowed him and all others to testify — I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide,” he wrote in the first one, twice spelling “counsel” wrong.
Returning to a regular theme, he added: “No Collusion and No Obstruction, except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats.”
McGahn’s lawyer, William Burck, said in a statement that the president had freed the White House counsel to speak openly to Mueller’s team.
The LA Times' Russia investigation reporter:
McGahn on three occasions has met voluntarily with the special counsel. In one meeting with Mueller earlier this year, the White House counsel described an encounter with an angry Trump badgering him to publicly dispute a January 2018 New York Times story that said the president ordered him to fire Mueller.
McGahn also told Mueller how the president tried without success to get his then-staff secretary, Rob Porter, to warn McGahn that he could be fired if he didn’t deny that Times article. The president and McGahn had a rough spring and summer working together throughout the defining moments of the Russia probe in 2017.
McGahn threatened to quit that June 2017 after Trump pushed the idea of firing Mueller and backed down only when the president did, too. And the White House counsel ultimately recused himself from the Russia probe that same month because too many people working with him were being questioned about the roles they played in the Comey and Flynn firings.
All of the president’s Russia matters since McGahn stepped back — to focus on regulations and judicial nominations — have been handled by a still-evolving list of personal and official White House lawyers: Marc Kasowitz, John Dowd, Jay Sekulow, Ty Cobb, Jane and Marty Raskin, Emmet Flood and Rudy Giuliani.
NYT:
After Mr. McGahn was initially interviewed by the special counsel’s office in November, Mr. Trump’s lawyers never asked for a complete description of what Mr. McGahn had said, according to a person close to the president.
Mr. McGahn’s lawyer, William A. Burck, gave the president’s lawyers a short overview of the interview but few details, and he did not inform them of what Mr. McGahn said in subsequent interactions with the investigators, according to a person close to Mr. Trump. Mr. McGahn and Mr. Burck feared that Mr. Trump was setting up Mr. McGahn to take the blame for any possible wrongdoing, so they embraced the opening to cooperate fully with Mr. Mueller in an effort to demonstrate that Mr. McGahn had done nothing wrong.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer dealing with the special counsel, Rudolph W. Giuliani, appeared to acknowledge that he had only a partial understanding of what Mr. McGahn had revealed. Mr. Giuliani said his knowledge was secondhand, given to him by a former Trump lawyer, John Dowd, who was one of the primary forces behind the initial strategy of full cooperation.
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Mr. McGahn, who as White House counsel is not the president’s personal lawyer, has repeatedly made clear to the president that his role is as a protector of the presidency, not of Mr. Trump personally.
White House Counsel, Don McGahn, Has Cooperated Extensively in Mueller Inquiry (NYT)
Trump claims he allowed White House counsel McGahn to 'fully cooperate' with Mueller probe (Politico)
Trump Lawyers’ Sudden Realization: They Don’t Know What Don McGahn Told Mueller’s Team (NYT)