Some privately worry she could become a target of the president, despite having worked hard to help implement his agenda. Those close to Donaldson fear she will be thrust in the middle of the building war between congressional Democrats and the White House.
She left the White House in December, both proud of her service and also somewhat stung by her experience in Washington, friends said. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., has already signaled that he intends to subpoena Donaldson as a critical witness.ĭonaldson - who lives in Montgomery, Alabama, where her husband recently got a job as a federal prosecutor - did not respond to requests for comment. The Harvard Law School graduate's unflinching words - "Just in the middle of another Russia Fiasco," she wrote on Mahave cast the die-hard Republican in an unfamiliar role: as a truth teller heralded by Trump's foes for providing what they view as proof he is unfit for office. Her daily habit of documenting conversations and meetings provided the special counsel's office with its version of the Nixon White House tapes: a running account of the president's actions, albeit in sentence fragments and concise descriptions.Īmong the episodes memorialized in Donaldson's notes and memos: the president's outrage when FBI Director James Comey confirmed the existence of the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump's efforts to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from overseeing the probe and his push to get Mueller disqualified and removed as the special counsel. The scribe keeping track of the president’s actions was Annie Donaldson, McGahn’s chief of staff, a loyal and low-profile conservative lawyer who figures in the Mueller report as one of the most important narrators of internal White House turmoil. "Watch out for people that take so-called 'notes,' when the notes never existed until needed," Trump tweeted a day after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's report. The public airing of the notes - which document then-White House counsel Donald McGahn's contemporaneous account of events and his fear that the president was engaged in legally risky conduct - has infuriated Trump. The angst-filled entry is part of a shorthand diary that chronicled the chaotic days in Trump's West Wing, a trove that the special counsel report cited more than 65 times as part of the evidence that the president sought to blunt a criminal investigation bearing down on him. WASHINGTON - The notes, scribbled rapidly on a legal pad, captured the fear inside the White House when President Donald Trump raged over the Russia investigation and decreed he was firing the FBI director who led it: “Is this the beginning of the end?” (Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford)
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