extraordinary move that the justice department almost made to issue a subpoena for the president. well, ana, we knew that for the better part of a year, there were negotiations between trump s legal team and the special counsel s office, because the special counsel wanted a wide-ranging interview. they wanted to sit down with him to assess, obviously, his state of mind, his intent on a whole host of issues related to this investigation. but we re learning tonight how there were actually internal discussions, sensitive deliberations between the justice department and the special counsel s office raising the specter of a formal subpoena for the president. now, ultimately, that never came to pass. but the fact that it was raised at all is a significant move, and it shows just how critical this time period was and how they were really going to the limit to try to see what exactly they could find out here. now, it s interesting in bill barr s four-page letter to congress today, he finds t
certainly been surprised at the amount of information that the attorney general has put forward. this letter that he wrote to congress and then certainly today a lot more information than many of us expected. and laura, we know all democrats are not satisfied with this report, especially on the issue of obstruction. we all remember, barr sent a memo to senior justice officials before he was nominated and confirmed as attorney general. and he was critical of mueller s obstruction probe specifically. remind us about that, and its significance. he was. it was a 19-page missive that he came up with apparently unsolicited back in june of 2018 before he was attorney general. he was just a private citizen musing around about obstruction of justice theories based solely on what he had read and seen on tv, apparently. and it s interesting. several months ago when this issue first rose and we learned that he wrote it, i can remember being at a press conference where the deputy attorney
general was asked about it, and rob rosenstein said bill barr doesn t know the whole story. it turns out the two of them have decided between themselves that the president did not obstruct justice. and you see a little bit of the shades of that in this four-page memo from bill barr, where he talks about the fact that the the fact that the president did not also collude with the russians. that was the underlying crime. the fact that there was no evidence that established that the president was involved in that speaks then to the fact there wasn t obstruction of justice in that underlying crime. and he says that alone, while not determinetive does come down to corrupt intend. he thinks there isn t any here and as far as it goes with corrupt intent on obstruction of justice and the fact it has no nexus to any criminal or other ongoing proceedings. so it would be one thing if the president is just musing in the wind about different gripes, things that bother him, things that may look lik
pursue the laundry list of investigations here on capitol hill, including into russian interference. chairman adam schiff wanted to continue looking into the russia investigation, potential russian ties, financial ties for the trump campaign. trump officials, the president himself, how they plan to pursue that. how jerry nadler wants to go forward with his own investigation into obstruction of justice. but democrats say it all begins with getting the full mueller report. they want to see the underlying evidence, exactly what he found. and then pursue their investigations going forward. but tonight, ana, republicans are saying that it s all just a fishing expedition to retrace steps from robert mueller, who did not find conspiracy or coordination with the trump campaign. saw no reason to prosecute the the justice department saw no reason to prosecute the president for obstruction of justice. they re saying it s time to drop it. so the partisanship continues, if not worsens. manu, i
outlying theory, and doj has a more mainstream theory that one of the things you re going to look at is what underlying criminal conduct is there that the president may have endeavored to obstruct. i think that s the exact reason why we didn t have an interview of the president, because mueller couldn t satisfy the standard of need for this evidence and no other way of getting it. because there was no evidence that they needed with respect to an underlying crime. so it was just going to be what was the president thinking. and you just don t get that in the ordinary criminal case. so i think here what you have is a difference of opinion between doj and the special counsel s office, and to bob mueller s credit, he said, look, i m going to be an institutionalist. i m going to let you guys at the doj apply standard obstruction of justice analysis rather than my further-reaching standard of obstruction theory, and that s how we ended up. and so mueller is a little bit