what your retirement what about the drafting of questions? do you think it s real? i do. i think we re near the end of any possible investigation. as you know, the president made virtually his entire staff available, waived many of the privileges, including attorney/client privilege to allow them to testify and provided more than a million documents. so this last part, interrogatories as they are usually called, where they ask specific questions. they may have of the president and he is free to answer them or claim a privilege or partially answer them. that s typical and i suspect that rudy giuliani, a skilled u.s. attorney, is preparing to answer the questions that can be answered to bring this to a conclusion. bill: so giuliani would only be doing this, you believe, to
president is battling a subpoena from mueller s office, not true. here is a statement. the report in politico , no subpoena issued and no litigation. we know that the president was willing to answer questions by robert mueller. this is nothing new. and now they prepare their answers. yes, and i think the way this has been playing out is there has been a lot of dancing back and forth between mueller and the white house. that s the nature of how the president will testify. if the president s team can satisfy mueller with written answers there is no way to characterize that other than a significant victory for the white house. bill: go back last hour. darrell issa addressed it the following way. in a very specific question. here is issa from last hour. this last part interrogatories as they are usually called, where they ask specific questions they may have of the president and he is free to answer them, or claim a
answer, over time in both civil and criminal cases, and like i said, they re never used in the criminal context, there s no cub constitution for raising your hand, taking an oath and giving testimony. or in the alternative sitting down with federal investigators under the penalty of false statements to get the true statements out of people. the reality is written interrogatories are not effective ways to get answers. however, they re very good for the president because he avoids that potential perjury trap and they may be good for mueller because at least he will get some questions answered and get a thread at which to pull and find more answer. something is better than nothing. i want to play a little bit of what trump said about this very top skp topic and then get your reflection. let s listen. are you preparing written answers for the special counsel team? i don t talk about that. i ll just say this and everybody knows it. no collusion. there never was.
happened with the rest of the trump administration. but jeff sessions has been a driver of this hard line on immigration and it is to be seen whether or not that will continue after he leaves. i want to shift just slightly here and move to the very issue of russia since we re talking about the justice department for a second. danny, to you on this, you did some writing on this. this based on potentially written answers, right? coming from the house at the moment, what might be in those answers and will it be of any value? in criminal case, it s almost unheard of to deal with what these are which are basically written interrogatories and where they are used in the civil context in case, they ve fallen largely out of disfavor. they really are of limited value. if you had the opportunity to think about a question, to object to the ambiguity of the question, call it vague and say to the extent i understand this question, here is my limited
interrogatories. questions that are formally propounded to a party in civil litigation than like the way the criminal investigative process works. i ve never used written questions to a subject or a target in a criminal case simply because they never balk at talking to the fbi, and if they do, you send them a subpoena, and they show up in front of the grand jury. so this procedure just really has no feet in criminal practice. i would be very surprised if the president has played a serious role in formulating the responses. i think that that would not be his skill set. you made me laugh when you re being serious, joyce, i m sorry. i go back to that tape you played at the state, which i have heard several at the start, which i heard several times which the president is saying everybody is saying that there is no co collusion, and he doesn t seem to realize that it is not everybody who is going to make the call here. it is going to be bob mueller and a federal grand jury. so his res