in just a couple of weeks. the executive privilege fight that they say they are gearing up for, that they are expecting, that is not a good sign for the president s defense. previous major presidential scandals show that the white house usually looses those types of fights when there are very high stakes and using executive privilege to fend off scrutiny for intense national concern. that s not legal analysis by me. i m not a lawyer. that s my observation how presidential scandals settle out and what fights presidents tend to lose in the middle of the ska scandals but after reagan lost the executive privilege fights that he waged in iran contra, the bad ending of that scandal thereafter also brings us right to the door of the trump white house today because on tuesday, tuesday next week, there will be confirmation hearings from
consequential job in and of itself. the nomination and potential confirmation of william barr to that job, it s doubly dramatic right now because deputy attorney general rod rosenstein, who has been overseeing the mueller investigation, he says he will resign and leave the justice department if and when william barr is confirmed. that s an important transition ahead for the justice department. william barr is also yet another trump would-be appointee who has an extensive and aggressive record of criticizing the mueller investigation, and you can expect that to be a big focus of his confirmation hearings next week, but william barr is also something very, very specific in the history of presidents and presidential scandals and the bad ways that they can end. because on christmas eve 1992 when george h.w. bush shocked the country by pardoning everyone still in trouble in iran-contra and effectively ending the prosecution of that scandal while he himself was edging into its crosshairs, he
some other people that trump might choose he does have the sort of establishment legal background and he s obviously qualified. he s had the job before, but he does you know, trump is choosing him because he thinks he is going to be his point man in trying to shut down this investigation. one of the things that i think is most troubling about his history is the role he had in pushing ultimately successfully pushing for several pardons in the wake of the iran contrascandal, given that there are a lot of people who are angling for pardons in this scandal. do you think barkr has taken that loyal tripledge? my understanding is that trump has asked for assurances that he s not going to recuse himself. that he would not nominate somebody that would have to recuse themselves. the difficult thing here is that almost anybody that trump nominates to this job is going to be wildly inappropriate because he s essentially
ins gait the appointments a independent counsel for a scandal in the late period of the bush administration. one of the areas of your expertise, executive power, something expanding in the white house for some time, obviously the attorney general is key to that idea, that the president can do things particularly that congress doesn t want him to do now the president is facing a democratically controlled congress. do we know what barr thinks about that? barr is a long-standing proposant of an extremely sweeping vision of unfettered executive power. when he was brought into the george h. w. bush administration in 1989 he initially led the office of legal counsel which decides what the law means for the executive branch. and he wrote memos in that capacity, calling for much more pushback against what he saw as congressional encroachment on executive power after watergate and after the iran contrascandal. he is clearly skeptical of
warm glow around the funeral and the pageantry and remember iing the former president, probably bodes well for his confirmation, but he was involved in some c controversial pardons involving the iran contra scandal back then, and the comments that kristen allow uded to modern da scandals, and talked about the allegati allegations that hillary clinton was somehow allowing uranium to be sold to a russian president, and it was onot a problem for donald trump to be investigated by the justice directed to hillary clinton. and also, some comments that robert mueller had made to democrats, and so he may have said some things that made donald trump happy about the mueller investigation and the clinton scandals, but give n gi