you into the genesis of this weird conspiracy. it suggests that it was promoted by paul manafort, his campaign chairman. one of paul manafort s long-time associates, constantin kilimnik, who the fbi believed has ties to russian intelligence services are it seems this conspiracy was cooked up in the summer of 2016, right as the campaign is heating up, as the first documents begin to come out. you see manafort, kilimnik, and general mike flynn, begin to tell the president, we don t believe this is russia, we believe this is probably ukraine. do they care if it s true? hard to tell. our documents are reporting doesn t bear that out at the moment. it does seem they are acting in bad faith. there is quite a lot of evidence, at least some of like michael flynn, the intelligence services of the united states believe this is a russian hack. it s clear to us that he is attempting to shape that narrative to fit something that the trump campaign can use. why would it help them that much d
bluff. i mean, every day that the senate trial is going on is a bad day for donald trump. i think the interest of the republicans is in getting it over as quickly as possible. and actually i think the interest of the democrats is stretching it out. there may be individual candidates who on any given day that will hate having to be in washington and would rather be in iowa. but overall in terms of any day you are running that headline, impeachment today and impeachment, it is bad news for the president. that s a thing that hasn t changed from watergate. right. really appreciate you kicking off our special here. interesting stuff. we have a lot more ahead. we ll examine adam schiff s unique role as both investigator and prosecutor. did you know that he actually prosecuted the last impeachment case in the u.s. senate? senator on that tonight. plus, morphed into a threat to his entire presidency. and how the defiance of the impeachment probe could actually
out by the ukrainians. that s what manafort was saying, according to testimony from long-time deputy and friend in fbi interviews. eventually donald trump latching on to the same idea, even though his own senior staff told him it was not true. now what the president is referring to is a debunked conspiracy theory that some who ukraine, not russia, hacked the democratic emails in 2016 and ukraine might have the dnc server or hillary s emails. the details are both convoluted and false. during your time in the white house you explained that to the president, right? i did. it s not only a conspiracy theory, it is completely debunked. debunked conspiracy theory. that s trump s guy. even though this push got trump into the impeachment mess, some of his advisers are still pushing it. giuliani meeting with a former ukrainian diplomat who says the same stuff. ukrainians conspired with the
he s basically said nobody can investigate him. that, it seems to me, when it s manifested not just in words but in orders to his subordinates, some of whom as patriots have denied the president, that amounts to laying down the gauntlet and saying, essentially, i am king. nobody can control me. i am above the law and if acting in that way does not constitute a reason for removing a president, then nothing does. wow. and saying we can just wait until the next election when what the president is doing is manipulating the next election is an impossible position. if we want to preserve our democracy, we must remove this president. yeah. that seems to be the key line that s come up and that has started to get a little more widespread understanding. my final question to you is about what we were discussing in the previous segment. is there any reason for congress
could enforce its subpoenas, but he argued that private litigants shouldn t be able to sue the president for matters that occurred before he even came into office, and he lost that narrower claim in the paula jones civil suit. nixon also agreed on cooperating with some investigations. he, too, made a narrower claim that his only presidential conversations should be secret under executive privilege. again, narrow we aer in its presidential view. and that nixon view it was famously rejected by the supreme court unanimously. president nixon has not yet responded to the sledge hammer decision of the supreme court today, which ruled that he must immediately turnover tapes of 64 presidential conversations. the court rejected 8-0 mr. nixon s claim of absolute privilege on those tapes. that was the turning point. nixon was out of the white house 16 days later. his privilege claim was also weaker because he was facing a