Trump urged White House lawyer Donald McGahn to oust Mueller on June 17, according to the Mueller report.
Trump, calling McGahn twice on a Saturday from Camp David, told McGahn that he should call Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and say that Mueller had conflicts of interest and could not serve.
McGahn declined to do so, viewing the conflicts as “silly” and “not real.”
“You gotta call Rod,” Trump said, according to McGahn’s account.
Trump later told his lawyer to deny an account in the New York Times that he sought to fire special counsel Mueller, even though McGahn recounted that the president did want to fire the special counsel, according to the Mueller report.
“Each time he was approached, McGahn responded that he would not refute the press accounts because they were accurate,” the report says.
The president met with McGahn, with former chief of staff John Kelly present, and ordered him to deny the report.
“In that same meeting, the president challenged McGahn for taking notes of his discussions with the president and asked why he had told Special Counsel investigators that he had been directed to have the Special Counsel removed,” the report says.
The president later told then-aide Rob Porter that McGahn “leaked to the media to make himself look good” and called him a “lying bastard.” He wanted McGahn to write a letter denying the story or said he might fire McGahn, and told Porter to deliver the message.
McGahn declined to write the letter, saying the “optics would be terrible if the President followed through with firing him on that basis.”
Trump again met with McGahn again to pressure him to reject the story, and the president and McGahn argued about what Trump said.
“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” Trump said. “He did not take notes.”