President Trump on Friday denied ordering former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller - instead insisting that if he wanted to fire the special counsel he would have done it himself.

"I never told Don McGahn to fire Mueller," said Trump. "If I wanted to fire Mueller I would’ve done it myself. It’s very simple. I had the right to. And frankly, whether I did or [McGahn] did, we had the absolute right to fire Mueller."

Speaking with reporters as he departed for the White House National Rifle Association (NRA) conference in Indianapolis, Trump said he's a "student of history," adding "I see what you get when you fire people, and it’s not good."

President Trump: "I’m a student of history. I see what you get when you fire people and it's not good. But there would have been nothing wrong with firing him. Legally I had absolute right to fire him, but I never told Don McGahn to fire Mueller." pic.twitter.com/BdFUrwg7pe — CSPAN (@cspan) April 26, 2019

Trump first denied on Thursday that he directed McGahn to fire the special counsel. His defense contradicted McGahn's testimony to Mueller's team of investigators. The former White House counsel sat for hours of interviews and provided contemporaneous notes, which produced some of the most damaging aspects of the special counsel's report on the Russia investigation. McGahn testified under penalty of law that Trump called him at home in June 2017 and directed him to tell Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that Mueller “had conflicts of interest and must be removed,” according to the report. The White House lawyer refused to carry out the order. When news of the president’s order was reported last year in The New York Times, Trump met with McGahn in the Oval Office and pressured him to deny it but the lawyer also refused to do so, according to the Mueller report. -The Hill