but first, we ll talk with a harvard professor who he has a forthcoming book, to end a presidency, the power of impeachment. thanks for joining me on a significant news night. your view as a legal matter of what this new information about this attempt to order the firing of bob mueller means to this investigation. thanks for having me, ari. i think this means a great deal. before we learned that in june, the president had actually ordered the firing of the special prosecutor, robert mueller, we knew a great deal already. we knew that he had fired comey, he had tried to make it look like he was firing him because he didn t like the way he handled hillary clinton s emails. but he told lester holt on national tv that it had to do with the russia thing.
purpose, a corrupt purpose means to hide the truth to protect yourself or your inner circle or your family. when he fired comey, it was at least conceivable that he was doing it for one of the other reasons he gave, though not the reason he gave lester holt. maybe he was doing it because he thought comey had not conducted himself well across the board. comey after all was the head of the whole fbi. mueller was appointed because comey was fired and mueller s whole mandate was to look into the role of russia, hostile foreign power, in interfering with the central act of american democracy, our presidential election. so donald trump can t plead ignorance, he can t i neve today. that would have been a crime, a
today s news doesn t always happen today. the story rocking the trump white house and bordering an illegal attempt to fire bob mueller began in on2017. it was the time when trump was thinking about muzzling comey ahead of pending testimony. is the white house going to evoke executive privilege to prevent james comey from testifying before the house intelligence committee next week? i don t know how they re going to respond. four days later, trump was ti still getting pressed about it. what do you want to say to jim comey ahead of his testimony? i wish him luck. on june 8, comey dramatically
whatsoever in the white house. are you going to fire robert mueller? no, i m not. what else? what are you surprised? for the 1,000th time, we have no intentions of firing bob mueller. the most high ranking federal official in that series of clips is the one that we know is lying on this. just to follow up, what both of the guests have said tonight, there is a very strong motive here and that motive all relates to michael flynn. if you follow the timeline in this, why was it that he fired comey? because comey didn t drop the investigation into michael flynn. michael flynn back in december of 2016 was involved in a conversation with a russian ambassador that he later lied about in january. the evidence is pretty clear that donald trump knew that flynn lied at the time. he didn t know before hand because flynn didn t know what he was going to be questioned