and to what end? well, that s the thing. is it a legal strategy? is it a pr strategy? what we ve seen in the past few months is a ratcheting up in the tension from the trump legal and public relations teams. we ve seen the president use witch hunt. far more than at any other point in his presidency. and we ve seen giuliani throw all sorts of things at the special counsel. publicly. different allegations, seizing on the ig report about comey and fbi investigators, saying that mueller is out to get the president. and pushing different theories, at times would say conspiracy theories about the investigation. this has been a different change of posture from what we saw previously. which was a, a an idea of let s not attack mueller. let s cooperate with him. and the sooner that we do that. the sooner the investigation will be over and the cloud will be lifted from the administration. michael, how much veracity is
pretty strongly that he has the right to subpoena cooperation from president trump. okay. bloomberg s reporting that mueller has expanded the team to include more career prosecutors. also fbi agents, what does that say to you? how do you interpret all that? well if he were actually hiring more people on his staff, that would suggest that perhaps this investigation was going to be taking a lot longer to wind up and maybe they ve really found new developments. but as i understand it, he s just drawing on existing resources of staff within the department of justice. and u.s. attorneys offices, which is actually par for the course. sort of standard procedure. i think the mueller team has been attacked on a number of different fronts legally. they have aggressive opposition to some of their investigations that they have to deal with. and so naturally, being overtaxed with their resources, they re drawing on existing staff resources at doj to help them out. they actually i think are
decide this is a public relations campaign, alex. i mean this is consistent with what the president s team has been doing for a long time now. trying to discredit comey, and the mueller investigation itself. as part of a public relations campaign. it s interesting to note that some of the things that the letter talks about, that are sort of indictments against comey, aside from his leaking memos about his conversations about president trump, the other things, the way he handled the clinton email probe, going outside the chain of command. and some other things, actually sort of suggest if anything, that he was comey was being too harsh on clinton. the indictment against him that he briefed trump on the steele dossier, interestingly, is something that sort of suggests that he was actually trying to help trump. so it s sort of a a mixture of things. some things like the leaking of
the memos, trying to paint comey as being biased against trump. other things that they mentioned don t quite add up to that same thesis. so by setting these very challenging conditions, giuliani wants to know what mueller has in his arsenal against the president. is this just a smart legal strategy? is it something he even can do? they talked about it being discovery and trying to put together some sort of a defense. but it seems as if you re getting answers to things in an untimely fashion. right. well, this has been drug out for a long time now. these negotiations over whether president trump would actually sit down for an interview with the mueller team. have been going on for months and months, and it doesn t seem in light of this new development that it s ever going to be really resolved. short of mueller just issuing a subpoena. which appears under the law that he does have the right to do. applicable supreme court precedent seems to suggest