significant problem for president trump. chris, i was reminded tonight, you came to washington to cover this investigation, and i m curious where you put the balance of power right about now because to a lot of us, it seems right now, advantage feds like this is something less than a fair fight. i would say absolutely. i mean, right now, president trump faces more legal exposure than any other time in these investigations. federal prosecutors in manhattan have directly implicated him in a felony. i mean, there are questions on, you know, whether or not there could be, you know, even more trouble for trump because of that it s difficult to prosecute these campaign finance crimes as we saw in the john edwards case in 2012. i point to the sentencing memo for michael cohen in the mueller probe. you see more evidence of more russian contacts and also in the mo memo it says trump directed michael cohen to reach out to
be a mistake for the president to fire mueller. what about rod rosenstein? rod rosenstein should be recused. he cannot be both a witness and a prosecutor in the same case. he s a witness because he was involved in the comey firing? involved he wrote the m o memo. if you are trump s lawyer, the first person you call as a witness is rod rosenstein. you wrote the memo. did you obstruct justice? did you think this was an obstruction of justice? would it be a mistake for the president to replace him with somebody who is going to try to basically get rid of mueller? well, that s a tactical decision. i don t think rosenstein, whoever replaced him, would try to get rid of mueller, but i think roadssenstein s status ine case raises very deep questions. say he doesn t get recused and hech t he testifies. if he s now recused, we have to go back and see if he tainted anything else early on in the case. it s a mistake for the government to keep rod ro rosenstein on the case. i want to t
that we speak fact about paul ryan, the speaker of the house. his legacy, his career, his reputation, that it was once was a year, year and a half ago, two years ago, that is over, that is over. he is married the nonfacts of this story. and frank berluzzi, one of the things that stands out to a lot of people is the rhetoric surrounding the release of this memo from the chairman of the committee, define nunes. if you track the rhetoric and match it to the definition of obstruction of justice, which includes the word intent wouldn t you be sort of on the right track to get to devin nunes, wondering about if is he now obstructing justice? i m particularly zeroed in on the transcript of the testimony that was released by congressman schiff where they asked congressman nunes, did anyone
to be humiliated that badly so he s frantically doing everything he can to avoid testifying, despite the fact that that the overwhelming majority of americans believe that donald trump should agree to an interview with robert mueller. but, again, donald trump knows that robert mueller is just a lot smarter than him, a lot shrewder than him, and so he s doing all of these things, americans just need to keep in context, our viewers need to keep in context, if it s not robert mueller getting all these people for committing crimes it will be somebody else. if the president wasn t worried about what robert mueller had on him, he wouldn t be pushing out this memo that he believes implicates bob mueller and corrupts the investigation. steve schmidt, thank you as always. always good to see you, my friend. joyce vance, you as well, thank you. still ahead on morning joe, president trump has picked a fight with the fbi and eugene robinson says the president will be sorry. gene joins us next
look at 2017, look at the special elections, look at this election we just had in wisconsin it will be a very sizable tsunami and the american people will set the correction here so that there be some oversight over this administration. jonathan lemire joins us, he covers the white house for the associated press. there s reporting this morning that the president made up his mind from the moment he heard about this memo that it would be made public during the shut down a couple weeks ago. they ve sort of had this public argument that there s been deliberation whether or not he d do it. he made it clear as he walked off the stage and out of the chamber after the state of the union where he said yes, 100%, to a republican congressman who leaned in and suggested he release the memo. what happens from here? does the white house release it itself? you re right. this is something the president has wanted for days if not weeks, well before he read the memo. our reporting with the a.p. sugg