americans living on tips has become unlivable. a collaboration with the fuller project, a non-profit woman-led team of journalists reporting on issues impacting women. also joining us, vice president and director of governance studies at the brookings institute, darryl west. he s the author of divided politics, divided nation. as you were going on, alex said to me, if only we had three people who could talk about this issue, and i think we do. i ve always been a deficit scold. yes, you are. that s why i first ran for congress in 94 and it s only gotten much, much worse, from 4 trillion to 22 trillion. henry, let s start with you, with a question that is basically gripping washington as well as wall street right now, and that has to do with how the economy s going to get over the next year or two. wall street is concerned just like donald trump is because three out of four economists are
counsel. as i said, i think things are even more confused now. greg, why wouldn t bill barr have simply told robert mueller, you left out your last chapter, time for a conclusion? well he s his boss. great point. i ve said all along that if i was the ag or his chief of staff, and the special counsel came to me and said, we really just can t decide this obstruction of justice issue, i think my advice would have been, you need to go back and decide it because as the ag, i m the president s appointee, and by the way, i m the guy who wrote that 18-page memo about obstruction, so i m not going to get involved in making this decision, your job is to make the decision, tell me what you think should happen. if it s indict, we ll talk about whether the ofc opinion allows for that. if it s not indict, fine, i ll accept that, but you make the decision. darryl, is bill barr helping the president s case here, in confusing the american people,
then take appropriate action as necessary. but this politically charged investigation, again, based upon what apparently the president would like, is unprecedented in my experience. yeah, but what if the president wants this just like he wanted a voter fraud commission and if there s no wrongdoing, like the voter fraud commission, the president will have to take it off the table. well, that s what s so troublesome about the way this seems to be proceeding. it s just not the way fbi and doj operations are generally reviewed. again, there s a process for that. it s the office of inspector general. and so this, unfortunately for the ag and for the department, to do it this way looks political and that s a very bad thing for the department. very bad thing for the department. darryl says from a political standpoint, it s time for congress to act. greg brower, darryl west, thank you both so much. the question of the justice department policy of not
assess the facts. listen to this. we analyzed the law and the facts and a group of us spent a lot of time doing that, and determined that both as a matter of law, many of the instances would not amount to obstruction. as a matter of law? smaas a matter of law. in other words, we didn t agree with a lot of the legal analysis in the report. it did not reflect the views of the department, it was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers. and so we applied what we thought was the right law. joining the conversation, former u.s. attorney brett brower. he also served as the fbi s assistant director for the office of congressional affairs. you guessed it, his boss was jim comey. darryl west joins us, vice president and director of government studies at the brookings institution, also the author of divided politics,
kennedy pretty well, later in the 1980s. even when he would have people over to the house for dinner, it was to talk about some issue or to get to know some of the other members or some staffers or so forth, it was his life. it really was. reporter: as we now know, for patrick, home wasn t always a refuge. he had a mother with a very severe alcohol problem. his brother had cancer and had a leg removed. that s very stressful. the parents divorced, his father s difficulties. it s a lot to deal with. his father traveled a lot. his mother was an alcoholic. he was lonely a lot. political signs professor darryl west wrote the book on patrick kennedy. he says that patrick s troubles got worse once he went off to boarding school. he experienced his first issues with substance abuse as a high school student and actually as a senior had to check into a substance abuse clinic. reporter: it was cocaine, and patrick was just 17 years old. how are you? good morning, thanks very much.