during the transition we didn t work on it. in the springtime we started hearing news stories that they were going to that people were going to be exploring legal defense funds. i told the staff, you ve really got to get back working on this. i need the general counsel to issue something new so people don t mistakenly rely on an opinion that oge has considered invalid. they kragd their feet and it wasn t getting done. by late april, early may i said we ve got to put a note on the thing saying this opinion is not valid, not consistent with our practice. i did that. this weekend i saw that the opinion had never been issued. the general counsel told me he had been trying to get the white house to agree to the things he was writing. i was appalled. oge s supposed to be independent, but he s working with the white house behind my back. anyways, they ve now not issued an opinion and they changed the
circles, feel like they re just starting to get their sea legs under the kelly rule. but mueller is really sort of speeding up and accelerating his irn interaction with this west wing. it should come as no surprise we re seeing reports like hope hicks and rinse priebus now on the outside, don mcgahn getting their own lawyers. it would be remarkable if they weren t. one thing we re starting to see is we re going to start seeing legal fees putting an enormous burden on a lot of these people. $1,000 is fine if you re jared kushner. it s not necessarily fine if you are a midlevel staffer. and i suspect, based on what i m hearing, we re going to start seeing outside legal defense funds popping up. but directionally, this investigation is pretty clear. they are burrowing down on the obstruction of justice and that plane trip where they wrote the misleading statement about the
first of all, in all the people that donald trump has thrown overboard and ridiculed and disdained and dispensed with, why is he so defensive of michael flynn? he s not a family member. he wasn t there at the very, very, very beginning. so what is it about michael flynn that has donald trump so concerned about his fate? so concerned about the reputation? i think that is one big link, one big weak link in the defense around the presidency. and you re right. i don t even think trump s relatives are going to go to jail for him. is jared kushner really going to go to jail for his father-in-law? i don t think so. we ll see. we ll see, yes. we have a prosecutor here. let me ask him that. paul butler, you tell me because you re the prosecutor, is that the risk that you have people with a lot to lose that may not have the money that donald trump has and he doesn t seem to be offering legal defense funds for
defense funds for anyone, who nen wind up cooperating with the mueller investigation out of their own need? and is that what the prosecutors are looking for right now. yeah. so michael flynn will be one star witness. miami thinking paul manafort might be another star witness. he s got all this shady real estate transactions with trump. we can be sure that special counsel mueller has all of the bank records from trump, manafort, from everyone who is involved. so he probably is looking to flip manafort. manafort was at this weird meeting with the russian operative with donald junior. he knows exactly what happened there. he doesn t have the same kind of loyalty that trump junior might have. so it s going to be really interesting to see what happens at this meeting on wednesday. don junior testifies for the first time on under oath. he s got to tell the truth. going to be asked very specific questions about russia. it seems really difficult for folks involved in the trump administration
there. but there s a regulation that says if the railing is 42 inches high, you will be fined as per osha regulation 1910.23e. how do you avoid that but still have safe coal mines? that s where you have come to my proposal which is to say that you have a way to find back and i put it in terms of legal defense funds. and these are not legal defense funds that just defend the innocent. they defend people who are technically guilty of violating a pointless regulation and, again, this is a fund for ordinary people. it s not for big corporations. so what happens is you are being harassed by a bureaucrat for silly reasons. the defense fund says the bureaucrat, we are taking this person s case. it will not cost them a penny. we will litigate it to the max. we re going to make as much work for you as we can, and when you finally find that he was in violation and fine him we re going to reimburse the fine and i want this done not with one or