veteran former federal prosecutor and former u.s. attorney barbara mcquaid. it s always a pleasure having you on. thank you so much for tonight. coming up for us, foreign policy. it has a funny way of sneaking in and redirecting a presidential race. in fact, are we now watching the start of that process? in a moment we ll talk to the senior most self-described defrocked republican strategist in the business when we come back.
director. we have a new national security adviser. the fourth national security adviser. we had a breakdown in process. and we have incredible distraction. when you have senior people having to deal with things like they ve been dealing with this week, which takes all their time, they re not engaged in the focused work of protecting the country and i can tell you over the course now of 18 years since 9/11 it is not an accident that this country has been better protected. it s not an accident that the professionals have the focus, the processes in place that have protected this country. so this instability at the top, lawrence, and i think you d agree the great distraction created here in all this chaos i think is really dangerous to the country. yeah, i want to go to the possibility of the ways this might come out. it seems like if the director wants to just continue to block this it doesn t look like the law provides a way around that. it says that any action taken by the director o
even more emphatically. the president cannot be liable to arrest, prison, or detention while he is in the dirs charsch his office nor can he be investigated, indicted or otherwise subjected to criminal process. nor can he be investigate ? wait a second. now, d ? wait a second. now, again, the case, they re making this claim specifically in the context of this subpoena to the mazars accounting official to get president trump s tax returns and tie this argument specifically to that one subpoena. because the mazars subpoena attempts to criminally investigate a sitting president, it is unconstitutional, but, again, the basic and broader point they re making here, you can t investigate a president. ma no doubt about it, there s a reason this is on the front page of the nooim foo the new york t now. the president is now claiming you can t investigate a sitting president.
that, though, what really ended up being the big news in that story today is the filing that the president s lawyers made on his behalf defending him against the threat of his tax returns being released by this subpoena. in this case, the legal case made by the president s lawyers was so radical, and, indeed, so potentially historic, it is literally on the front page of the new york times right now. trump lawyers argue he cannot be criminally investigated. and that is actually what the president claimed today in federal court in new york. the president cannot be subject to the criminal process while in office. that is from page 3 of their filing today. here it is on page 4. even more emphatically. the president cannot be liable to arrest, prison, or detention while he is in the discharge of his office nor can he be investigated, indicted or otherwise subjected to criminal
that subpoena was not served on donald trump. it was served on the accounting firm mazars, which is prepared those tax returns and has copies of them. the manhattan district attorney is conducting an investigation into potential criminal wrongdoing by donald trump and his company in the hush money payments to stormy daniels in the last month of the presidential campaign, which federal prosecutors in new york called a criminal conspiracy against the united states, which was designed to affect the election. the president s lawyers don t point to a single line in the constitution to support their position because there is no line in the constitution that says the president is not subject to criminal process. in fact, the supreme court ruled that president richard nixon was subject to criminal process when they voted unanimously to enforce a criminal subpoena issued by a special prosecutor who was conducting a criminal investigation of president nixon. president nixon then complied with th