Several hundred pages into the Mueller report comes an illuminating exchange between Donald Trump and former White House counsel Don McGahn. Angry with McGahn for telling the Special Counsel’s Office investigators that the president had tried to have Robert Mueller removed, Trump yelled, “What about these notes? Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes, I never had a lawyer who took notes.” To which McGahn responded, in fact, a “real lawyer” keeps notes to create a record, and those are not a bad thing. “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” Trump snapped. “He did not take notes.”

The incident, of course, demonstrated Trump’s aversion to any type of record, however informal, that could prevent him from lying about something he said or did down the road. If you‘re a pathological liar, that makes sense, and per The New York Times, McGahn wasn’t the only one who got an earful about note-taking—former national security adviser H.R. McMaster was apparently upbraided for “always writing in that book,” despite having a job where attention to detail mattered. But while Trump’s hostility for his words being saved for posterity obviously involves some kind of paranoia about his aides looking to stab him in the back, the Times reports that it’s actually about ensuring the president doesn’t try and screw them:

Time and again, Mr. Trump’s advisers took notes of their interactions with the president or drafted memos immediately afterward to maintain real-time records, in some cases simply to have an accurate understanding to do their jobs better, but in other cases for self-preservation. While aides in past administrations recognized that notes could become public and shied away from recording sensitive information in writing to protect the president, many of Mr. Trump’s aides took pen to paper to protect themselves from the president.

While aides in previous administrations sometimes avoided taking notes so they didn’t end up in the public record—White House documents, including phone messages, meeting notes, and emails must be preserved for archiving—this White House is obviously different. “I do think there’s . . . a pervasive sense in this White House that at some point you’re going to have to set the record straight or give your perspective on events that took place, or actions you took—or didn’t take—as the case may be,” Cliff Sims, a former communications aide to Trump, told the Times. “I didn’t take notes when I worked with either president,” W. Neil Eggleston, who served in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, told reporters Peter Baker and Annie Karni. “But I thought that was protecting the president, not protecting me. This notion of people taking notes to make sure they’re not part of a criminal conspiracy, that’s something I had never considered. That’s the reason they took these notes. They took these notes to protect themselves.”

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