volleyball investigation to a point. where is the line? the line is a political one in the first instance. in watergate you ll remember there was a firestorm of adverse reaction to richard nixon firing the man who demanded evidence concerning the tapes. here nobody considered, as you well know, nobody considered an indictment surely, but an impeachment of nixon on firing archibald cox. actually they did. it s not recorded well. that s part of the first article impeachment by the house committee, that nixon interfered with the investigation by firing archibald cox. it s quite clear when you look at the tapes, he always intended to do that, and he found a pretext to do it in the tapes fight. so yes, all of these cumulative
this is an american issue. and i am hoping that they will come around. but we don t even know who the chairman of our committee is going to be. look what happened with nunes. i mean, that was a fiasco. running around, hiding documents, claiming he got them from somewhere else. this is a major investigation. and so coming back to comey, he was the one independent person who i thought would lead an investigation that might lead us to the kinds of facts we re looking for. congressman, you ve called for immediate emergency hearings to hear testimony from him, from now former fbi director james comey and from the attorney general and from the deputy attorney general. do you think there s any chance that you ll get that? i think there s a possibility. i think basically, but rachel, come on now. the only way we get that is people like the speaker of the
michael beschloss phone dialing hands start acting on its own. for me, obviously, the i m trying to find historical context that helps me understand the magnitude of what this means. we only have one previous example of an fbi director being fired. under very different circumstances, sessions is fired by president clinton over minor abuse of office claims. the more salient precedent to me seems like, because of the active counterintelligence investigation into this president, seems to me like archibald cox who was the special prosecutor at watergate. is that how you are thinking about it? does that seem apt to you? yes. if you and i were talking back in october of 1973 at the on the evening that nixon fired archibald cox, i would have said what i would say tonight that one of the cardinal principles of american democracy is no american is above the law, and that principle has been jeopardized tonight.
and then you have it going up to the white house and the guy being formally fired by a president who he has said he is investigating. and, of course, don mcgann was the center of the hearing yesterday and white house counsel is probably involved. so it s hard to know until we see where this began. but certainly the passion of rosenstein s memo suggests there was an enormous amount of pent-up frustration and emotion about what comey had done that basically exploded across the pages of that memoranda. can i ask you about that, though? if this is about what rosenstein s memo is about, which is concerns about comey s behavior around the clinton investigation, that s the subject of the department of justice inspector general inquiry right now. it s also something where the deputy attorney general who is running presumably a lot of the work the department of justice given the recusal, he needs to have confidence in his fbi director, and he could have said, looking at all of that, having
house say that i m going to put country before party and be a true leader. that the folks at mcconnell, over there in the senate do the same thing. we have to have their cooperation. rachel, you know this. when we are not in power, that is democrats are not in power, we don t call for we can t call for we don t have the power to do it, call for these hearings. we can t make them happen. but if the republicans would stop circling the wagon around this president and circle the wagon around the united states of america, so that we can preserve our democracy, so that generations yet unborn might experience what i experienced as a young man coming up, that is a true democracy, then that will happen. but until then, until they move off of tt ateau that they seem to be on, not wanting to look into this and kind of backing off, whenever we seem to be getting close and new