the president said we re not going to cooperate, we re going to stone wall on every front whether that s witness testimony, underlying evidence of the mueller report or the president s tax returns. they will say no to everything democrats want. as luck would have it, we have a really good lawyer that gets the next question. is any of this legally sustainable in your view and if the not, why not? the short answer is no. it doesn t mean there aren t arguments that are valid arguments that can be made in certain circumstances including you can imagine the statute on tax returns is very explicit that says shall. that doesn t mean there aren t constitutional arguments about people s ability to say but i m not. it s just that they don t necessarily apply here i think. you can certainly make arguments. i think where it really gets complicated is trump doesn t
i think where it really gets complicated is trump doesn t have any good arguments on this. most of this is communications rather than constitution and that is the primary point here. you know, we ve had previous administrations that have said we are not going to give you congress these things you ve asked for in the context of the obama administration and the gun walking case of fast and furious where atf, you know, did a gun walking exercise to try to track guns into mexico. turned out they got used to kill a border patrol agent. the republican congress very aggressively started investigating the department of justice atf and ended up in a contempt vote against eric holder. but the point is, in this instance, eric holder and the department of justice had actually turned over a large amount of information and documents to congress.
that doesn t mean there aren t constitutional arguments about people s ability to say but i m not. it s just that they don t necessarily apply here i think. you can certainly make arguments. i think where it really gets complicated is trump doesn t have any good arguments on this. most of this is communications rather than constitution and that is the primary point here. you know, we ve had previous administrations that have said we are not going to give you congress these things you ve asked for in the context of the obama administration and the gun walking case of fast and furious to track guns into mexico and turned out they got used to kill a border patrol agent. the republican congress very aggressively started investigating the department of justice atf and ended up in a contempt vote against eric holder.