barbara, some surrogates for the president appearing on cable news channels tonight were expressing relief over the direction the mueller talks are apparently headed. do you believe any of it regarding leaks out of the white house on the mueller talks? it certainly wouldn t be his first choice. written answers are certainly not preferable because you can t follow up with follow-up questions. you can t look at someone s tone or inflection or body language to determine whether they re telling the truth. it dud be robert mueller has reached a point where he s decided that donald trump is not going to sit for an interview and robert mueller is not willing perhaps to litigate this matter and risk an adverse decision in the courts, though i think he would win that battle. maybe he perceives trump sit for an interview as his opportunity to tell his side of the story. if he wants to do that through written questions, maybe robert mueller takes those answers and moves on and believes he has
national security professionals to prevent the president from doing grave harm to america s interests. so, jeremy, you have to limit the opportunities where he is able to do such a thing? i think you have to box him in, take documents off his desk, not tell him things, basically ignore his orders. we ve seen that down the line. one of the things that chris wray, the fbi director, said over the summer at a conference that i attended, essentially we re ignoring the president when he says we should stop investigating the russia matter. barbara, some surrogates for the president appearing on cable news channels tonight were expressing relief over the direction the mueller talks are apparently headed. do you believe any of it regarding leaks out of the white house on the mueller talks? it certainly wouldn t be his first choice. written answers are certainly not preferable because you can t follow up with follow-up questions. you can t look at someone s tone or inflection or body lai
the evidence he needs already to do whatever he plans to do. barbara, let s speak english, written answers are not donald trump at a typewriter or at a legal pad, they re written by committees of well-comp saided attorneys. absolutely. i m sure the person who would take a first draft wouldn t even be the president, it would be a lawyer. he would look to verify their accuracy and they would be fined tuned. that s why i think robert mueller would be less inclined to take those kinds of answers than sit face-to-face, look him in the eye and ask him questions and take verbal answers. phil rucker, to underscore what you have already underscored, a person close to woodward called me tonight to remind me of the express purpose that the fine print says that bob woodward has recordings of so many of the conversations that he engaged in for this book. as you put it, the president s kind of engaging in a high wire act.
likely there is additional factual allegations to support that probable cause and the fact that it is renewed as you suggest indicates that they did get some fruitful information from that surveillance. and so to rely solely on the bias of the dossier to say to discredit the fisa application seems very misleading. and in fact, all of the all they allege is bias. they don t allege the allegations themselves are false n. a typical criminal case, you would have to suppress the fruits of a warrant. you would have to show the information was false. that it was knowingly or recklessly false and if you removed it from the application, they would no no longer be probable cause. i haven t seen any suggestion even in this memo that that standard could be met. i think that is why possibly the fbi and the department of justice and the democrats on the committee were saying without context you can t make sense of things like this very effectively. thanks a lot. good to see you. barbara mccade
university of michigan law school and an msnbc contributor. barbara, when you listen to everything that we ve just heard, what does it make you think? you know, any one of those facts standing alone might have an innocent explanation. maybe the wilbur ross connection has an innocent explanation. maybe other contacts has an innocent explanation. but when you begin to pile them up, it does start to create a picture that there was an effort and a desire to have relationships with russia. which, you know, the last time i checked was our greatest adversary in the world. and so it does paint a picture of an administration looking to do business with russia. i think there s a question of why. what were the motives? and was there some desire to fix or rig the election? i mean, those are 11 contacts. now, what if, for example, we re looking at these papers that were leaked over the weekend and