investigation proceed unimpeded. at the influential legal blog there s a great treatment how the confirmation hearings went for bill saxby and elliot richardson before him. richardson and saxby were confirmed in the midst of not only major presidential scandal, they were confirmed in the midst of an ongoing justice department investigation that was chasing the current president like his own tail was on fire. and so what is the precedent there? what could we learn from the way those two men were confirmed to ag? we ve posted a link to our own blog, maddow blog.com. la fair has posted the transcripts of the hearings so you can read them. you can see what the senators did in the early 70s in the midst of water gate to try to make sure the investigation would be protected from nixon, that the justice department would let the watergate investigation proceed unimpeded despite whatever pressure was
i m joined now by ben wittis, editor in chief of la fair. also a friend of former fbi director james comey and has had his share of memorialized memos to deal with back in the day. let s go back to this period. how aware were you at the time of this, i guess the picture painted by the new york times is of a chaotic, unclear picture, rosenstein, mcgabe, going what the heck just happened to comey? how chaotic was it? well, so, obviously comey wasn t there anymore. right. but, look, there was clearly a period of significant chaos, and the times has reported on that before. and it culminated in the appointment of mueller, but it didn t go away because there was no fbi director. there was an fbi acting director whom the president clearly hated, right? oh, had character assassinated via twitter for
similar documents, many people in government called him a traitor and he is on the run from the u.s. government ever since. that is how highly sensitive many people believe the sources and methods are to this memo that was used to make this memo. joining me is ben whitis, editor of la fair and an msnbc legal analyst. ben, i know you ve been following this as closely as anybody. and frankly the last half hour we ve been reading excerpts of what is a just released transcript of the house intel committee essentially debating amongst themselves this memo questioning devin nun he es and of the revelations is that he claims he s been investigating the d.o.j. and fbi for months. how news-y is that. we knew that nunes was concerned about the so-called unmasking issue months and months ago. and that is what led to his