Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report said President Donald Trump asked former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, an order the lawyer reportedly refused to follow. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images white house Trump: 'Nobody disobeys my orders'

President Donald Trump on Monday insisted that “nobody disobeys my orders,” apparently disputing that his former White House counsel twice refused to follow through on the president’s order to dismiss special counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump issued the declaration about his staff’s willingness to follow through on his commands during a brief exchange with reporters at the White House Easter egg roll. It was the first time the president has answered reporters’ questions since Mueller released his report last week.


Mueller’s 22-month probe found no evidence of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin, but did not reach a conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice. The redacted version of Mueller’s report revealed damaging information about Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel — efforts Mueller suggested were halted by top aides who refused to carry out the president’s most drastic orders.

Notably, the report said Trump twice asked former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, an order the lawyer refused to follow and was prepared to resign over. The president was enraged when news of his request, which had been previously reported by The New York Times, became public, and he privately berated McGahn, who refused to carry out his order, according to the Mueller report.

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In the days since the report's release, the president has gone after his aides who met with the special counsel, blaming them for the scathing media coverage that followed the publication. Later Monday, the president claimed Mueller never asked the people “closest“ to him to testify.

“Isn’t it amazing that the people who were closest to me, by far, and knew the Campaign better than anyone, were never even called to testify before Mueller,“ Trump said in a tweet. “The reason is that the 18 Angry Democrats knew they would all say ‘NO COLLUSION’ and only very good things!“

A number of people in the president‘s inner circle, however, did appear before the special counsel‘s team, including former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, former communications director Hope Hicks, senior aide Stephen Miller, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Jared Kushner, the president‘s son-in-law and senior adviser.

Mueller asked Trump himself to submit to questioning in person, but the president’s legal team rebuffed the special counsel and instead agreed to provide written responses on a limited number of subjects. Mueller, who chose not to subpoena the president, noted in his report that the answers were of limited use because they didn’t cover “obstruction topics or questions on events during the transition.”

The special counsel report says the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., “declined to be voluntarily interviewed,” while his daughter Ivanka provided an attorney proffer to investigators through her lawyers.

Though Trump has been known to lash out at aides he perceives as disloyal, the president's ire expressed publicly thus far has been concentrated on a few, including McGahn.

Those who refused to be interviewed by the special counsel — who, in some cases, had to testify in front of a grand jury instead — received greater protection in the report due in the form of redactions.

Another section of the report that described the decision-making process behind the firing of FBI Director James Comey recounted an instance in which Trump asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to take credit for Comey’s dismissal. Rosenstein refused, “because if the press asked him, he would tell the truth that Comey’s firing was not his idea,” the report said.

These instances, and others in the 448-page report, have raised questions about potential acts of obstruction of justice by the president that Democrats have pledged to continue investigating. Opponents of the president have insisted that the Mueller report falls well short of offering the president the “complete and total exoneration” that he has claimed in recent weeks.

Mueller left open the possibility that Trump could be prosecuted for crimes once he leaves office but said making a decision about charges would have gone too far because of longstanding Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

“Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought,” Mueller’s team wrote in its report, adding that charging a president would leave him without legal recourse to clear his name or protections normally afforded to criminal defendants.

Despite the revelations, Trump has publicly declared the investigation’s results to be a victory. Asked by a reporter on the White House lawn Monday, he said he was “not even a little bit” worried about impeachment, a possibility that some House Democrats have said remains on the table.