WASHINGTON \u2014 Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel, answered detailed questions from Congress behind closed doors on Friday about President Donald J. Trump\u2019s efforts to impede the Russia investigation. But Mr. McGahn provided few new revelations, according to people familiar with his testimony.<\/p>\n
The fact that Mr. McGahn spoke to Congress at all was significant after a multiyear legal battle by the Trump Justice Department to block an April 2019 subpoena for his testimony. That dispute ended last month, when President Biden\u2019s Justice Department, House Democrats and a lawyer for Mr. McGahn reached a compromise under which he finally showed up.<\/p>\n
Still, the interview by the House Judiciary Committee, attended by only a half dozen or so lawmakers on a summer Friday when Congress was on recess, was an anticlimactic conclusion to a saga that once dominated Capitol Hill. When Democrats first subpoenaed Mr. McGahn, they believed his testimony under oath and on live television could help build public support for impeaching Mr. Trump for obstruction of justice and other matters.<\/p>\n
Instead, in the time it took to sort out a tangled legal battle, questions about the events Mr. McGahn witnessed have largely faded into the background or been carefully detailed by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Trump\u2019s presidency turned up newer issues for which the House impeached him twice \u2014 and the Senate acquitted him both times.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe we have been vindicated in terms of the intimacy of his involvement and the ultimate conclusions of the Mueller report,\u201d Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, told reporters as she exited the session. \u201cThe Congress has to be respected with its subpoena and oversight responsibilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, we asserted that right,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
But under the strict limits imposed by the terms of the deal, Mr. McGahn\u2019s appearance broke little new ground, according to those familiar with it, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. The agreement limited questioning to matters that were described in the publicly available portions of Mr. Mueller\u2019s report.<\/p>\n
Mr. McGahn will have up to a week to review a transcript for accuracy before it is made public. But the people said that he hewed closely to the account he had already given the special counsel, often telling committee lawyers that his recollections of events from four years ago were no longer sharp.<\/p>\n
Republicans were pleased to declare the interview a waste of time as they left the session after more than five hours of questioning.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, we have the House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee relitigating the Mueller report,\u201d said Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. \u201cDon McGahn hasn\u2019t been White House counsel for three years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. McGahn was a witness to many episodes described in the second volume of the Mueller report, which centered on potential obstruction of justice issues; his name appears there more than 500 times.<\/p>\n
In June 2017, for example, Mr. Trump called Mr. McGahn at home and ordered him to tell Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, to fire Mr. Mueller over a dubious claim that the special counsel had a conflict of interest. Mr. McGahn refused and was prepared to resign before Mr. Trump backed off, according to the Mueller report.<\/p>\n
After the report became public, Mr. Trump claimed on Twitter that he had never told Mr. McGahn to fire Mr. Mueller. Two people familiar with the hearing on Friday said that the session had spent a lengthy period going over that episode, and that Mr. McGahn had testified under oath that the account in Mr. Mueller\u2019s report was accurate.<\/p>\n
The report also described a related episode that followed a January 2018 report by The New York Times that first brought to public light Mr. Trump\u2019s failed attempt to have Mr. Mueller fired. Mr. Trump tried to bully Mr. McGahn into creating \u201ca record stating he had not been ordered to have the special counsel removed\u201d while also shaming the lawyer for taking notes about their conversations. But Mr. McGahn refused to write the memo.<\/p>\n
Mr. McGahn was also a major witness to several other episodes recounted in the obstruction volume of Mr. Mueller\u2019s report, including the White House\u2019s handling of the Justice Department\u2019s concerns that Mr. Trump\u2019s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, was vulnerable to blackmail by Russia over false statements he had made about his conversations with the country\u2019s ambassador. Mr. McGahn was also part of deliberations leading to Mr. Trump\u2019s firing of James B. Comey Jr., the F.B.I. director.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump had directed Mr. McGahn to speak with Mr. Mueller\u2019s investigators in 2017. In 2019, as it became clear that Mr. McGahn had become a chief witness to many of Mr. Trump\u2019s actions that raised obstruction of justice concerns, the president\u2019s allies \u2014 like his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani \u2014 began attacking him.<\/p>\n
The attacks left Mr. McGahn in a delicate position. He is a hero to the conservative legal movement because he was the chief architect of the Trump administration\u2019s judicial selection process, which filled the federal bench with Federalist Society-style appointees. But Mr. McGahn\u2019s law firm, Jones Day, has many Republican-oriented clients; if Mr. Trump were to order the party faithful to shun the firm as punishment, it could be financially devastating.<\/p>\n
Democrats were eager to claim Mr. McGahn\u2019s testimony on Friday as a victory despite the lack of new disclosures, saying it upheld the principle that a White House could not prevent a key administration official from testifying before Congress. It added a second precedent to one created in 2009, when the new administration of President Barack Obama struck a deal to end litigation he had inherited over whether President George W. Bush\u2019s former White House counsel, Harriet Miers, would testify about firings of United States attorneys.<\/p>\n
But because the compromise agreement to permit Mr. McGahn to testify effectively cut short the litigation, a federal appeals court never issued any binding precedent to resolve the long-running ambiguity over whether Congress can sue the executive branch in a subpoena dispute. That means the next time such a clash arises, Mr. Biden or a future president can again stonewall Congress and litigate the same issue all over again.<\/p>\n
Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Mr. McGahn \u201cshed new light on several troubling events today.\u201d But the congressman also described the belated nature of the testimony as a mixed bag.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn one sense, today is a great victory for congressional oversight. By securing Mr. McGahn\u2019s testimony, we have made clear that the executive branch must respect our subpoenas,\u201d he said. \u201cOn the other hand, two years is clearly too long to wait to enforce a valid subpoena, and the Trump era has taught us that Congress can no longer depend on good-faith cooperation with our committees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Nadler said he planned to advance legislation that would resolve legal disputes over subpoenas to executive branch officials more quickly.<\/p>\n