The White House Mess:President Trump ordered White House lawyer Don McGahn to cooperate with the Special Counsel investigation and he has, sharing information about incidents and episodes involving potential obstruction of justice that investigators might otherwise never have known, according to a story in The NY Times.

The paper says according to multiple sources that McGahn has voluntarily submitted to as many as 30 hours of interviews, revealing an unusual amount of information for a lawyer representing a client.

The paper says Trump’s personal lawyers took him at his word that he did nothing wrong and advised him to fully cooperate to bring the investigation to a quick end. As White House Counsel though, McGahn chose not to protect only the president, but the presidency itself.

The story says, “Mr. McGahn described the president’s furor toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged Mr. McGahn to respond to it. He provided the investigators examining whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice a clear view of the president’s most intimate moments with his lawyer.”

The Times describes McGahn’s strategy as follows: “Mr. McGahn and his lawyer, William A. Burck, could not understand why Mr. Trump was so willing to allow Mr. McGahn to speak freely to the special counsel and feared Mr. Trump was setting up Mr. McGahn to take the blame for any possible illegal acts of obstruction, according to people close to him. So he and Mr. Burck devised their own strategy to do as much as possible to cooperate with Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that Mr. McGahn did nothing wrong.”

Trump was up tweeting first thing this morning, “The failing @nytimeswrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type ‘RAT.’ But I allowed him and all others to testify – I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide……….and have demanded transparency so that this Rigged and Disgusting Witch Hunt can come to a close. So many lives have been ruined over nothing – McCarthyism at its WORST! Yet Mueller & his gang of Dems refuse to look at the real crimes on the other side – Media is even worse!”

It’s still spelled “counsel.”

College Prep:In the continuing drip of revelations about sexual impropriety and abuse at elite New England boarding schools, the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., reveals in a report that seven now-former staff members engaged in abuse between 1969 and 1992. Founded as a boys school, Hotchkiss went co-ed in 1974.

The report names teachers, an athletic director, medical director and a choral director. Three of them have since died. The investigation singles out one classics teacher it says had sex with multiple kids and married two of his former students.

The Roundup:About 800,000 people have been displaced and over 350 have died in the worst flooding in a century in southern India’s Kerala state. — Phones have been ringing off the hook at a clergy abuse hotline in Pennsylvania after the release of a report on sexual abuse in six Roman Catholic dioceses. — The batch of K2 synthetic marijuana that caused  more than 100 overdoses in New Haven, Conn. was contaminated with another synthetic drug, fubinaca, that sometimes causes users to have “zombielike behavior,” according to authorities. Synthetic marijuana is dried leaves treated with chemicals.

The Obit Page:David Rothenberg, an artist who gained a sad fame after his father tried to burn him to death when he was just 6 years old, has died in Las Vegas at age 42. The cause of death is being investigated.

Rothenberg was the subject of a custody battle in a nasty divorce between his parents. In 1983 his father drugged him in a motel room near Disneyland, doused his bed with kerosene, and set him on fire. The boy was burned over 90 percent of his body and his face was melted.

His father, Charles, spent just seven years in prison for attempted murder, but is now doing 25-to-life for other crimes.

As he grew up, Rothenberg became a friend of the pop star Michael Jackson, who encouraged Rothenberg to become an artist. He called himself DaveDave and had a bright style like the pop art of the 1960s.

Rothenberg told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2016,“There is a lot that happens in people’s lives, but that doesn’t define them as a human being, it makes them stronger.”

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