Trump picks Bill McGinley to serve as his White House counsel

(CNN) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that veteran Republican lawyer Bill McGinley will serve as his White House counsel.

“Bill is a smart and tenacious lawyer who will help me advance our America First agenda while fighting for election integrity and against the weaponization of law enforcement,” Trump said in a statement.

The lawyer in the powerful post would become one of the chief advisers who acts as a guardrail for the president. Yet Trump’s style has caused his past White House counsels to become top witnesses in multiple federal investigations – including McGinley’s longtime colleague and Trump’s first White House Counsel Don McGahn.

CNN has reached out to McGinley for comment.

McGinley has long had connections to Trump world. McGinley previously served as White House Cabinet secretary in the first half of Trump’s first term in office and was the Republican National Committee’s outside counsel for “election integrity” during the 2024 election.

He is well-known in Washington, DC, as a political lawyer, having previously been a partner at two of the city’s most powerful law firms: the former lobbying powerhouse Patton Boggs and the conservative-leaning behemoth Jones Day. McGinley also worked as a lawyer for the Republican Party for years, and his current firm has a smaller but well-respected stable of political lawyers.

In private practice in recent years, he’s helped campaigns with compliance, according to political lawyers who know his work.

McGinley also has experience counseling political figures who needed lawyers for ethics and grand jury investigations — the types of quagmires that Trump has repeatedly faced.

For instance, McGinley and McGahn both served as defense attorneys for the former Illinois congressman Aaron Schock, who spent lavishly on curtains in his congressional office, travel and sporting events.

“He’s not a publicity hound,” Jan Baran, a longtime conservative-leaning political attorney in Washington who has known McGinley for more than two decades. They currently are both partners at the mid-size law firm Holtzman Vogel.

“I really don’t know anyone who dislikes him or has a complaint about him. He’s a very genial guy. I’ve never seen friction in his dealings with other clients or with other lawyers.”

Jessica Furst Johnson, a fellow partner at Holtzman Vogel who has worked with McGinley for over a decade, said she thinks his “skillset sets him up really well to be a great part of (the) administration.”

“Bill worked in the first Trump administration, so he knows what he is getting into … he is well suited for the role. He has experience working with President-elect Trump and he has subject matter expertise that he honed in private practice,” she said.

Johnson worked with McGinley early in her career and recalled that “he was the attorney I called when I had a precarious situation. He was really good at righting the ship.”

Prior White House counsels have had to carefully balance Trump’s freewheeling demands while seeking to protect the office of the presidency from legal complications.

Personal legal trouble for Trump may not be able to play out again while he is in office, given the immunity protections now around the presidency, from both the court system and the acquiescence of his own Justice Department.

In the earlier years of Trump’s first term, McGahn tried to contain Trump’s furor toward the special counsel investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, by seeking to avoid the president’s demands at times.

But those interactions ended up fueling an obstruction of justice inquiry into Trump that resulted in no criminal charges, because of Trump’s role in the presidency.

McGahn recalled that the then-president, speaking with intensity, would tell him as White House counsel to push the Justice Department to stifle special counsel Robert Mueller.

“I think I pushed back and said it’s not really a good idea,” McGahn said in a transcribed closed-door interview he did on Capitol Hill after the investigation ended. McGahn said he “really wanted to get off the phone because I didn’t want to continue having what had been the same conversation on more than one occasion on something that, as counsel, I wasn’t really comfortable doing.”

McGahn remembered, according to the transcript, that he let down his guard to take one of Trump’s calls on the Saturday following the investiture of a new Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch — an achievement for the counsel’s office in any presidency.

“I thought we were going to take a little pause over the weekend and smile for once. But we did not smile; we continued wanting to talk about conflicts of interest and Bob Mueller,” McGahn said.

McGahn separately spoke to Mueller’s team of investigators twice during the Russia investigation, according to federal records obtained by CNN.

In the January 6, 2021, federal criminal case against the president-elect, Trump’s latter White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy Patrick Philbin testified to a grand jury about urging Trump to direct rioters at the Capitol that day to leave the building, according to court filings. Cipollone also told Trump he would resign, along with several leaders in the Justice Department, if the president didn’t back off a plan he had to replace the attorney general and fan unfounded election fraud theories after the 2020 vote.

Cipollone and Philbin were later cut out of the case against Trump by the Justice Department, following a Supreme Court ruling this summer giving some immunity in criminal proceedings around the presidency. That case is now paused with Trump coming into the presidency.

This story has been updated with additional details.

CNN’s Paula Reid contributed to this report.

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