to exercise the subpoena powers because of the necessity of expediting the end of the investigation. you did go with written questions after nine months, sir, right? and the president responded to those. and you have some hard language for what you thought of those responses. what did you think of the president s written responses, mr. mueller. it was certainly not as useful as the interview would be. and of course we recall he told congresswoman demings that he agreed generally they were untruthful in those answers. at least not always being truthful. so back with me in the panel. david preece let me start with you why didn t mueller pursue that further when he wanted one, felt it would have been vital, made that clear to the president that it would have been vital. he said that again and again. president want wouldn t do it statute. this is one of the areas he explained well in the hearing and paralleled what was in the report. yeah. when he talked about the balance here.
thing that thing that i as a journalist would look for, the absolute nut i m not going to do the perry mason thing because you never get a perry mason perry mason para docks. there you go. the question is why didn t mueller indict him. was it because the president didn t commit a crime? or because there was the jurisdiction, the office of legal counsel guidelines from the justice department saying, you can t indict a sitting president? that would be the one question i would want to have clarity on. and the problem is that he s probably just going to say what s exactly in the report which he said in that brief press conference. you say he ll never answer that. never. you dealt with the team, take a look at how he s ducked in the past. yeah. i hesitate to speculate because i have just a piece of the puzzle also. i would have to check to make certain. in every investigation, particularly a fast-moving investigation, there are steps taken that may or may not workout.
horowitz is looking into that and you have john durham now who is very talent and going to work hard at trying to expose what happened in our intelligence community interaction on the campaign and the use of fisa. but, when you are investigating russian conspiracy by members of the trump campaign, how do you not look at whether or not there was a basis to begin with and who knew what when they presented the case to the fisk. the fisa court judge is supposed to receive vetted material and supposed to have confidence that that material has been verified and is accurate. and here we don t see those badges occurring. and why didn t mueller look into those issues? jedediah: brett, i have to shift you over because you were the prosecutor on the elizabeth smart kidnapping case. you have this other case i want to ask you about. you have this missing university of utah student mackenzie luack. police have released new
who may be getting advances from foreign contacts like the trump campaign did to report that. we saw more than a hundred contacts laid out in the mueller report and in some of the reporting around the mueller report between the trump campaign and russian officials that were never reported to the fbi. even if they don t get these witnesses immediately, the strategy by house leadership is to go ahead and still hold these hearings highlighting the wrongdoing. there are hearings under way about obstruction of justice including john dean and joyce vance. what do you think the goal of those hearings are and what should we be expecting as they continue through today and tomorrow? i think those hearings are going to be very important. i think that the american people will get more of an understanding of what is obstruction of justice, why is it important, how does it impact an investigation, why possibly didn t mueller not get everything he needed was because the obstruction was successful
are they changing strategy? they are not changing strategy? what they re doing is finding a way to hold hearings at the same time that they come up with creative ways to compel witnesses, to compel testimony, and to get the documents that they need to hold those hearings. right now they don t have any of those things. hopefully this is a big breakthrough in terms of their getting this information in their hands and being able to review this within the committee. however, they re very much lacking on those other fronts in terms of getting all of these witnesses like don mcgahn, hope hicks, to come before the committee. what they re doing now is saying, okay, if we can t get the witnesses, we can still hold the hearings. my reporting is that the way they plan to do that is by crafting legislation that highlights some of the worst wrongdoing in the mueller report. you flagged it at the beginning of the segment, introducing legislation called duty to report which would require the campai