the new white house counsel, swan has been told, hired 17 lawyers for the counsel s office. some are very experienced from the george w. bush years but didn t experience with what the clinton administration did with impeachment and republicans controlling the house. the person who experienced that, emmitt flood, the whoite house lawyer, the president s impeachment lawyer tried to pass on lessons learned, talking to the come shop and other cabinet agencies what happens and how to deal with it. he s the only person inside with life experience to convince them of the magnitude of what s coming. live in washington, d.c., thank you. we will be reading axios in just a bit. sign up for the newsletter at axios.com. thank you for joining us.
white house counsel but certainly not a surprise when you consider all of the legal expectations that are here. emmitt flood has a lot of expertise in dealing with tissues of presidential power when it comes to appearing before congress. issues of executive privilege. the issues of can a president be indicted. all of those sorts of legal things which could ensnare the trump white house and there is so much that has to take place between the white house and capitol hill when they are not of the same party. you need a staff who can respond to letters from individual senators and members of congress and committees which happen all the time on a range of issues not just these hot button ones that draw our attention. somebody has to respond to that or sometimes they don t respond at all. they need morrow bust legal team and they need people with expertise on these kinds of issues. that has been what s been happening under this new leadership. in some ways it sort of just,
office. which is the first time he ll do that and make this an urgent issue of national security as he was headed for a retreat camp david yesterday. president laid out the case that a border barrier is a matter of national security we re looking at a national emergency because we have a national emergency. just read the papers. we have a crises at the border of drugs, of human beings being trafficked all over the world. they are coming through. we have crises.crises and criminals and gang members coming through. it is national security. it s a national emergency. reporter: at that briefing, the vice president said that the president is considering a declaration of national emergency. he has not made that decision whether to declare it or not. the white house counsel emmitt flood said the president is looking what national emergency might look like. the president did get backup from congressman adam smith on the idea that he may be able to
obstruction of justice, even if he s doing it with a corrupt purpose and fired the fbi director to hinder a probe. he said he did. he has the right to do that. that s a very aggressive view of his executive power. however, there are constitutional scholars who hold that view. those views of themselves aren t disqualifying. the problem is the fact that he sent these views to the department of justice and talked to the president about them before he was appointed. there s some questions about whether he shared this memo with the white house, the first version of the wall street journal story. he had a line he shared it with the white house lawyers over the summer. that line was removed from the story later on. people are doing more reporting now trying to figure out when the white house who would he have shown it to, emet flood? i presume it was shared with emmitt flood. and if he knew about this memo and recommended him anyway, could that be construed as an attempt to obst
of problems. dana, to you, going back to giuliani, the other bits and pieces that he said, that trump would sit down for a mueller interview, rudy giuliani s words, over my dead body. cnn has learned that mueller, indeed, is still interested in speaking with the president. how does this resolve itself? we know, as you were alluding to, those written answers were just the first step in the investigation. it s an unknown question. we don t know how it s going to resolve itself. pam brown has this excellent reporting that mueller team does still want to sit down with the president and what giuliani said, over my dead body is what, to a person, for the past year plus that this has been going on, people who are close to the president have said to me and other reporters. they won t allow it to happen. at least to the best of their ability. and that is why since emmitt