bombshell in this report and that the president will then be able to run with that, be able to run on the idea that this entire mueller investigation was nothing but an instance of government overreach, this witch hunt he has been railing against. and he s going to hope that the allies in congress can help him to do that. however, you re going to have democrats on the hill continuing with their investigation saying look, the mueller report was only investigating this one sliver of trump s conduct, looking specifically at russian election interference. we have all of these other avenues that we are looking into. trump s other foreign dealings, issues like money laundering, looking into security clearances. all of these other things where the president is going to need republicans to have his back. we walked our viewers up to the edge in the first 17 minutes of this broadcast, and with it our thanks to jill colvin, our thanks and added happy birthday wishes to our friend phil rucker as
picture of just how much influence jared and ivanka have in this trump white house and just how entangled they are in the russia investigation writ large. in fact, it was jared kushner who pushed the president to make the decision that ultimately led to mueller s naming. the author, vicky ward, joins us in a moment. she writes, kushner was exposed by the media as someone who would almost certainly have an increasingly prominent role in the russian collusion investigation. not only had he met with russian government officials, or connected officials, but he had left those meetings off his security clearance forms. steve bannon and others noticed that kushner became gung ho about firing james comey. interesting point. we ll stop there. with us tonight, the aforementioned vicky ward, veteran journalist and author, editor at large at the huffington post, author of this new book, kushner inc.: greed, ambition, corruption, the extraordinary story of jared kushner and ivanka trump. thank
it can be a short report. it can be of interimmediate yacht size. it can be tomorrow. it can be in a month. it can be in two months. he is required to provide a court that is supposed to be confidential and provides an explanation for decisions made to prosecute individuals and also decisions made not to prosecute individuals, otherwise known as declinations. and that s it. i think one of the questions that i have is how long will the report be? will it be sparse or will it be full and detailed? the more full and detailed it is i think the more pressure there is upon the attorney general and the more fight there will be with respect to congress as to how much becomes public. there are feelings among people who have been following the organic granular details in this story. it causes some folks anxiety to hear us say mueller s wrapping up, mueller s done, mueller s about ready to hand in his work, because they look at the story and say how can it be done? we keep hearing of all these
investigations and handing off of other investigations, maybe bob mueller can make short work of whatever is left. that does not mean that all sorts of people won t remain in jeopardy. but i don t know. all right. that was a firm maybe on one part and an i don t know on another. phil rucker, let me ask you about the politics of this. if we indeed are about to go into a kind of dark side of the moon phase where the report will reside with the attorney general who takes his time, he s under no time constraint to move quickly, the democrats on the hill i m presuming are going to make their presence known to this west wing each and every day of the president s life. i think that s right, brian. and they re going to do so in a couple of ways. one is i think as soon as we get word that the report has been transmitted to the attorney general you re going to hear a drumbeat from the democrats in congress about releasing the report in full to the congress, which is effectively releasing it
saying he didn t think he was a war hero because he d been captured. that was one of those moments early on in the campaign. i remember covering it. where you heard a lot of chatter of everyone saying this is it, this is it, he s gone, no candidate can possibly recover from this kind of thing. and we saw that that didn t happen. trump didn t really feel any consequences from it. so he has learned that these kinds of attacks are effective in distracting the media, in creating a firestorm when he wants to distract, and don t really have any personal consequences for him. and counselor, here we are on a wednesday night. you can go back and find media reports that always say it s coming next week for weeks into the holiday season. am i correct that there s no real rules of the road here? mueller s free to send in a five-page outline with exhibits, a 500-page binder, 5,000 pages if he wants, the only rule is that the a.g. has to say it s here, i ve received it, it s with us? yeah, essen