By Matt Zapotosky and Tom Hamburger
June 13, 2021 at 3:19 p.m. EDT
The tech company Apple recently notified former White House counsel Donald McGahn and his wife that the Justice Department had secretly requested their information in 2018, an individual familiar with the request said Sunday.
The notification to McGahn came last month, and the notification to his wife came before that, the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the politically sensitive case.
It was not immediately clear what was being investigated that prompted the Justice Department to seek the data. The move was first reported Sunday by the New York Times.
Seizing a White House counsel’s data is striking. The latest development comes amid widespread criticism of Trump-era leak investigations involving members of Congress and journalists. Meanwhile, Republicans have questioned the pursuit of records of Rudolph W. Giuliani, former president Donald Trump’s personal attorney.
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McGahn, who had also been a lawyer representing the Trump campaign, was a key figure in former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, and it is possible that his data could have been swept up as prosecutors probed those with whom he might have been in contact. McGahn himself cooperated extensively with Mueller and recently testified behind closed doors to the House Judiciary Committee.
Apple told McGahn that the subpoena for his data was issued in February 2018, the person familiar with the matter said. The month before, the New York Times and The Washington Post had reported on a conversation in which then-President Donald Trump sought the firing of Mueller in a conversation with McGahn. McGahn, according to The Post’s report, contemplated resigning over the matter, though he did not convey his threat to do so directly to the president.
According to Mueller’s report, Trump complained about the reporting and called McGahn’s attorney seeking to have McGahn dispute it. While it is possible that Trump would have wanted to investigate how the episode made its way into press reports, the disclosure did not appear to involve classified information, which is normally what is needed to trigger a Justice Department leak probe.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-justice-department-congress-data/2021/06/13/ee2fb784-cc50-11eb-a7f1-52b8870bef7c_story.html
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