about what happened and hits on the underlying notion that when the president of the united states talks about using the justice department or using his powers to go after his rivals, disclosures about investigations will be negatively impacted by that regardless of what went into those decisions. and here we are, frank figliuzzi, four years of covering a president who all four of us have been here in this time period talking about the latest attack against rod rosenstein or against don mcgahn or his interview where he says to a fox news anchor, i hate flippers after michael cohen cooperated with the government. everything out in the public. and to mike schmidt s point and to the reporting that we ve cited, there are certainly explanations, but none that tie all this together. even an inadvertent collection of a sitting white house counsel who s the chief witness in the obstruction probe against donald trump, who is the single conduit between the justice department
be tested in the courts. it may have to be the justice department that, under what s left of the voting rights act and other federal legislation, has to take these states to court and see if they can get some favorable court rulings against what is clearly an assault on our democracy. because i m not as optimistic as i would like to be that the senate is going to move on either s 1 or s-4 or any of these voting rights bills that need to be passed. i m just not very optimistic about that right now. so, claire, we re left to understand that joe manchin and others, you ve made clear, it s not just him, care more about the filibuster than our democracy. what happens next? well, i m not sure i d put it that way. i don t think they care more
investigation that has been referred, but at the same time, no explanation from the justice department about how this happened. mike schmidt, if you could just take us under the hood in terms of how this works, i mean and i understand the responsibility of giving the most generous explanation to our viewers, so we ll do that. inadvertently, a sweep of seized data that you subpoena apple for collects the sitting white house counsel. that job is supposed to be the only human being who talks to the united states justice department during a four-year presidential term. surely someone at the united states justice department became aware of it at some point, if not around the original subpoena, which had to have been signed by someone at the justice department, then around the three or four gag orders that were renewed based on your reporting. what kind of people what
the times is reporting that the gag orders have to be renewed every year. so, who would have approved the renewal of a gag order? to your point about the renewals of the gag order, that s something that would have been known by the career prosecutors that would be applying for those renewals and the hope is they would send that up the chain to the head of the national security division. again, inside of the justice department, this is an organization that s extremely careful, people don t want to be holding the bag if a mistake happens. so, oftentimes what you see is people getting approvals higher and higher and higher so they can always say somebody above me said it was all right. it s really difficult to imagine it didn t happen in this case, especially given the fact that one of the subjects of the investigation was a member of the house intelligence committee. so, again the fact that there seems to have been, if nothing else, a real oversight in this
kinds of roles are involved in that? well, i think what you re hitting on is the notion that if this was a mistake, then you think that the justice department would have reached out to mcgahn to say, hey, look, we were looking at something else, your stuff got soaked up in this thing, you re obviously a very important person that was in the government at the time, you were the justice department s chief witness against the president and an existential threat to the presidency, to donald trump s presidency, at the time. we just wanted to give you a heads up on this. instead, the mcgahns learning of this through notification from their providers or from apple or such. so, you would think that someone this may have come across someone s desk earlier if it was inadvertent. in terms of perception, one of the unfortunate things here is that here we are a few weeks into this story. we know that the justice department subpoenaed or tried to subpoena records from five