If Robert Mueller’s investigation is at all synonymous with the Watergate scandal, then Donald Trump unquestionably plays the part of Tricky Dick. Other roles, however, are still unfilled—for instance, it remains an open question who will play Trump’s John Dean, the White House counsel who so famously turned on his boss. For weeks, Michael Cohen, the president’s former attorney and longtime confidant, has been seen as the likely front-runner. But on the heels of back-to-back reports from The New York Times over the weekend, Trump’s own White House counsel, Donald McGahn, has arguably supplanted Cohen at the top of the list. According to the Times, over the past nine months McGahn has conducted at least three voluntary interviews for a total of more than 30 hours of testimony with Mueller—and the White House remains in the dark as to what, exactly, its top lawyer told the special counsel. “Shades of 1974? The week started with an enemies list, then came secret White House tapes and it finishes with a White House counsel spilling to a special prosecutor,” Times reporter Peter Baker tweeted Saturday night, following the first of the two reports.

That McGahn has spoken with Mueller is not surprising. Under the leadership of Trump’s former attorneys John Dowd and Ty Cobb, the president’s legal team opted to fully cooperate with the special counsel, hoping to hasten the investigation’s conclusion. Nor did he have much of a choice: a court ruling in the Bill Clinton–era Whitewater investigation established that the president doesn’t have traditional attorney-client privilege with the White House counsel, whose job is to protect the office—not the person in it. That waiver, of course, carries certain risks. “People talk to lawyers freely, express themselves in ways that they wouldn’t do publicly or if they were speaking before a Grand Jury or an investigator,” William Jeffress, who represented Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame leak case, told me. “There are all sorts of dangers in just opening up these private conversations to investigators. . . . In an ordinary case—no way. No way would you ever waive attorney-client privilege and allow someone’s lawyer to be a witness in a criminal investigation without careful thought and knowing exactly what it is that the lawyer would say. But the matter is complicated here . . . If the president’s lawyers had decided to assert privilege as to McGahn’s testimony, they likely would have encountered a lengthy legal proceeding in which Mueller’s team would challenge that assertion. And that may well have been worse than simply allowing McGahn to cooperate.”

Even so, the lengths to which Dowd and Cobb elected to give up privilege reportedly struck McGahn and his lawyer, William Burck, as remarkable. They could have negotiated “a scope and focus for the interview that allows for the relevant questions to be asked without unnecessary and inappropriate excursions into other areas that, as an institutional matter, the president should be able to keep confidential,” Bob Bauer, who served as counsel to Barack Obama, told me, stipulating that he is simplifying the complicated role of White House general counsel. But they didn’t, which prompted McGahn and Burck to worry that the interview was a trap. To evade it, the two reportedly decided that McGahn would be as transparent as possible. This could put the president in an awkward spot: McGahn has witnessed several controversial episodes that Mueller is scrutinizing as he seeks to determine whether Trump obstructed justice. As the Times notes, this list includes the ouster of former F.B.I. Director James Comey, Trump’s preoccupation with putting a loyalist in charge of the Justice Department’s Russia probe, the president’s public castigations of Jeff Sessions over the attorney general’s decision to recuse himself from the inquiry, and Trump’s failed attempts to fire Mueller. (In an email to the president’s legal team, which was described by multiple people to The Washington Post, Burck asserted that McGahn “did not incriminate” Trump.)

According to a follow-up report from the Times, Trump’s lawyers don’t know the extent of what McGahn told Mueller behind closed doors. On Sunday, Rudy Giuliani, who replaced Dowd as the president’s personal lawyer in the Russia probe, signaled that his knowledge of what McGahn may have said was limited and provided by his predecessor. “I’ll use his words rather than mine, that McGahn was a strong witness for the president, so I don’t need to know much more about that,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press, quoting Dowd. And according to two sources familiar with the situation that spoke with the Times, Burck only gave a limited accounting of what McGahn told investigators.