23:08

Here’s my colleague Tom McCarthy on what the McGahn subpoena could portend:

The subpoena of Don McGahn by the House Judiciary Committee could have the effect of bringing the Mueller report to life, in the sense that multiple key scenes from the report star McGahn. The former White House counsel could give a firsthand account of how Donald Trump allegedly broke the law in an effort to keep the Mueller investigation at bay.

If McGahn testifies in an open hearing about what Trump told him to do – namely, pressure deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to fire Robert Mueller, then publicly deny any such order had ever been given – that could make Trump look bad in a new way.

The request for documents in the subpoena is broad, and McGahn could be asked to testify about numerous other matters. That’s if it goes as well as it could for Democrats and others concerned about the special counsel’s findings.

On the other hand, McGahn could resist the subpoena. But he did sit for at least three voluntary interviews with Mueller’s team totaling 30 hours. His pattern of conduct to this point has been compliance.

There’s a scene in the Mueller report from a Saturday in June 2017. Trump is at Camp David and McGahn is at home in Virginia. The lawyer gets two calls from the president, which he later described to Mueller, whose report reads:

‘You gotta do this’,” McGahn recalls the president saying. “‘You gotta call Rod.’” But McGahn did not call Rod. McGahn considered the president’s request to be an inflection point and he wanted to hit the brakes.

Democratic members of the judiciary committee might want to hear more about that phone call and other interactions McGahn had with the president.