counsel. and again today the committee staff was over at the doj, an initial show of good faith looking at some initial documents. and over the next several days proelt calls would be established for the members to go there and begin our review. and is the justice department deciding on a case by case document basis what you guys are going to see, or are you guys getting all the 302s, all the whole categories of information? it is my understanding all those documents will be provided. obviously we re going to have a vote tomorrow on the civil contempt citation, so that if there is a disagreement about documents not being furnished we ll have the mechanism to go to court and compel them. but save for the grand jury testimony which tomorrow we will authorize the committee chair to initiate civil proceedings to obtain the grand jury proceedings as well. i want to make sure i understand, i was trying to put that into context in the
been going a bit haywire in recent days. we may find out why that is, what exactly is happening at what appears to be the end of mike flynn s criminal case. as flynn s attorneys and prosecutors both go back to the judge at the end of this week. so that is going to be fascinating to see. this past week mike flynn just fired his old attorneys. we still don t know why. just today the president s lawyers argued to the d.c. circuit court of appeals the accounting firm should not have to respond to a subpoena to hand over the president s financial information. their argument is that congress is never, ever allowed to investigate a president ever for committing any crimes. the argument is exactly as blunt as it sounds. and it is an amazing argument, but that is what they are going with. trying to block the president s accounting firm from responding to a congressional subpoena to hand over his financial information. i mean, their argument is literally when presidents commit crimes, presidents
committed this conduct that person would be charged with crimes. the hearing was called, lessons from the mueller report, presidential obstruction and other crimes. for over four hours the judiciary committee today heard testimony from president nixon s former white house counsel john did he know who knows a thing or two about obstruction of justice as well as u.s. attorneys and msnbc contributors joyce vance and barbara mcquade. the special counsel s team wasn t able to find collusion between the trump campaign and russia, but apparently you did. so mueller in his report is careful to clarify he s not making any decision about collusion. that is a far cry from saying there s no evidence of collusion. there s abundant evidence of collusion in this record. you said i think this case is far worse than watergate. obviously you were wrong that there was conspiracy or collusion with russia. do you admit to that?
committing crimes. see how far they takes you. in addition this week the bizarre and disturbing case of george nadir who is frequent presence in the trump white house for the first year of the trump presidency, who had taken multiple high level meetings with senior campaign officials throughout the campaign, george nadir today moved one step closer to facing trial on serious child pornography charges as the federal judge in virginia ruled it does have probably cause to move forward with its prosecution charge against him, nadir has denied bail and in custody in a federal detention facility in virginia while he s awaiting the start of that trial. also late on friday night we learned about important new developments in the mystery case. do you remember that? a foreign owned entity, which a lot of people think is a bank which has been fighting a subpoena for months. that subpoena required them to hand over documents to mueller s inquiry.
i know people have said all i ve heard is no collusion, no obstruction. well, today was an opportunity to walk through all of the episodes of obstruction of justice and help the public understand just how serious it was. was there anything you were hoping to get to say today or misconses you were hoping to rebut or something else you were either expecting or hoping for today you didn t get to say? i thought i did get a chance to say most of the things i wanted to say. a couple of things that came up in the hearing that i would have loved to have the opportunity to correct, one was some of their republicans began their questions to other witnesses by talking about the steele dossier as if that was what started this whole investigation, and in fact the report says that s not what started it at all. it was actually the comments from george papadopoulos to an australian diplomat that they had e-mails from hillary clinton that would be used in a disparaging way during the election. that