President Donald Trump has said he did not ask White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, as his report states, but McGahn confirmed the account to NBC News over the weekend. | Alex Wong/Getty Images White House 'He needs to let it go': Trump's allies urge him to shut up about Mueller

When Ken Starr released his famous report on Bill Clinton in 1998, the embattled president couldn’t move on fast enough. An estimated 20 million Americans tore through the independent counsel’s findings, laid out in a 445-page document that contained sordid, voyeuristic details about Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and argued forcefully for his impeachment.

Two days later, Clinton offered a tearful apology and claimed he had been “on quite a journey to get to the end of this.” He rarely discussed the report’s findings after that.


Enter Donald Trump.

In the days since special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference was made public, the 45th president has shown no inclination to adopt Clinton’s strategy. His Twitter feed has lit up each morning with angry posts about Mueller’s conclusions (“total bullshit,” he said of the report a day after its release) — more than 50 tweets on the subject since the findings went public, along with scores of retweets. He’s ripped into congressional Democrats for subpoenaing an unredacted version of the report and its underlying investigatory materials.

And on Thursday Trump intimated that Don McGahn had lied to Mueller’s team, claiming he never instructed the then-White House counsel to fire Mueller in 2017.

POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

“As has been incorrectly reported by the Fake News Media, I never told then White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, even though I had the legal right to do so,” Trump tweeted. “If I wanted to fire Mueller, I didn’t need McGahn to do it, I could have done it myself.”

He continued, “Nevertheless, Mueller was NOT fired and was respectfully allowed to finish his work on what I, and many others, say was an illegal investigation (there was no crime), headed by a Trump hater who was highly conflicted, and a group of 18 VERY ANGRY Democrats. DRAIN THE SWAMP!”

White House allies are starting to worry that Trump’s inability to move on to other subjects, or at the very least stick to playing up Mueller’s conclusion that his campaign did not engage in a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government, is doing more harm than good. One former Trump campaign official described the president’s post-Mueller volley as “a complete and utter disaster,” suggesting that Trump is likely to generate another negative news cycle for himself when he sits down for an interview with longtime pal and Fox News host Sean Hannity Thursday night.

“Obviously it’s not a smart strategy,” said a former White House official, who noted that there are “very few” West Wing staffers left who are likely to tell the president to move on. “He needs to let it go. It’s especially not helpful to him, but he just can’t help himself."

Even some House Democrats would prefer to be responding to non-Mueller related questions, knowing that their constituents are paying close attention and want them focused on important policy matters as opposed to what is currently gripping Washington.

White House counsel Don McGahn. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

“In the big spectrum of everything, people are still deeply concerned about prescription drug prices.. They’re wanting to see Washington focused on immigration reform,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (Va.), told POLITICO in an interview. Spanberger, like many of her colleagues who have tried to steer the conversation elsewhere in recent days, hails from a swing district where she is likely to face an uphill battle to re-election in 2020.

Clinton was able to ride out the scandal and even turn it back against the Republican-led Congress, ending his presidency with an approval rating in the 60s.

“The basic strategy post-Starr was to turn the page, and after a year of talking about Monica Lewinsky people were done. No one, Democrat or Republican, wanted to talk about it ever again,” said former Clinton adviser Mark Penn, the chief architect of the move-on approach.

“This is more difficult today because the Democratic committee chairs aren’t stopping and President Trump takes the bait, but I think the public, outside of the bases, is largely tuning out of all the chatter at this point,” Penn added.

Trump’s barrage at McGahn is also at odds with the special counsel’s report, which methodically assessed whether Trump’s former top lawyer might have misinterpreted his boss’s instructions -- and concluded that he hadn’t.

“The president’s assertion in the Oval Office meeting that he had never directed McGahn to have the special counsel removed thus runs counter to the evidence,” Mueller wrote.

According to Mueller, McGahn told the special counsel’s team that in June 2017, days after it was reported that Trump was the target of an obstruction investigation, the president directed him to inform Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that Mueller must be removed.

McGahn then contemplated resigning in protest, but the president ultimately backed down, and he remained the White House counsel until October 2018.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have seized upon McGahn’s prominent place in Mueller’s findings on whether or not the president obstructed justice, and the House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed McGahn to testify.

Trump dismissed that move as “ridiculous” in remarks to reporters on Wednesday, blasting the Democrats’ demands as political. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” he said.

McGahn, meanwhile, has pushed back against the president, asserting in a statement issued through his lawyer Bill Burck that his conversations with Trump had been “accurately described” in Mueller’s report.

“Don, nonetheless, appreciates that the president gave him the opportunity to serve as White House Counsel,” Burck’s statement concluded, “and assist him with his signature accomplishments.”

Garrett Ross contributed.