hearings and said i told the president there was a cancer on the presidency. i told the president that hush money was being paid to the burglars. partners were being offered to the burglars, and the president said where i know the money can be gotten, and he didn t have any objection to the panders. and the president said, i never said that. when the special prosecutor so you had the president on one hand, dean on the other hand. when the special prosecutor was trying to get the tapes, everybody in the country understood what the significance of the tapes was. they were going to prove whether dean or the president was telling the truth. here we don t have that educational background and that s what s vital. i do think the special counsel prosecutor, while he plays an important role, doesn t preclude congress from acting now. we don t have to wait for the special prosecutor. congress needs to look immediately into whether the president has engaged in various kinds of misdeeds, includi
special prosecutor at the same time that the house judiciary committee was conducting its own impeachment investigation. which eventually led to the committee passing three articles of impeachment against richard nixon. the evidence to impeach richard nixon was developed as a result of the committee s investigation. the judiciary committee and the special prosecutor investigating president nixon both subpoenaed the white house tapes that ultimately led to president nixon s resignation when the supreme court ordered the president to turn over to the committee and the special prosecutor the tapes that turned out to include the so-called smoking gun of richard nixon s own voice participating in the watergate conspiracy in the oval office. the article in the atlantic makes the argument, congress can t outsource its responsibilities to federal prosecutors.
yeah. and eventually deciding he had to say something. well, i think in a sense, rarely saying anything and then coming out and disputing part of the story but not definitively knocking the story down. i think the most difficult line to maintain in washington right now is the line, we need to wait and see what robert mueller does before we exercise our own independent oversight authority. the house of representatives has every right, and in a sense a duty, to allow the public to understand what s happening here. they have to respect what s going on in robert mueller s investigation. of course, they don t want to ruin or, you know, harm the investigation. but there is no there s no logical reason why hearings couldn t be held. and under the constitution, that is what impeachment is. it isn t throwing donald trump out of office. it s allowing hearings where the public can start to understand the narrative of what was done, potentially to our election, to elect donald trump and
we had none of the things that go on now. so you have that many more people reporting. in watergate, there weren t that many on the story. so i think exponentially the odds on somebody getting something wrong at some point are all the greater. but keep in mind the big picture. david was right. the big picture is something happened here. we ll find out what it was. but a lot of other things happened, too. even if this story didn t exist. there is still a very, very big story. and we all need patience and we all need to remember the phrase, if true. elizabeth drew, david corn, thank you for joining us on that part of our discussion. and when we come back, tomorrow s breaking news. tomorrow s breaking news. we re going to cover it tonight. president trump has announced that he is going to make an important announcement about the shutdown tomorrow from the white house at 3:00 p.m. joy reid will be covering that announcement live for msnbc right here. and she will join us to discuss the b
that s the way it worked in the nixon situation. congress was moving at the same speed, basically, as the special prosecutor. mimi, some fascinating elapsed times here in this case. yesterday buzzfeed reports that five hours went by five hours of silence from the white house after they disclosed their reporting to the white house, and they re asking for comment from the white house. and the white house does not say a word. donald trump had knew what buzzfeed was going to write for five hours. he didn t issue or offer one word of denial. and then we have the 24 hours the 24 hours that robert mueller watched this story. now, given the size of his team, does that elapsed time make sense to you? because one of the first things he s going to want to do is make sure this leak did not come from my shop. that presumably would take some portion of the day to be sure of that. absolutely. i mean, look, i think you hit