you know, heft. that said, i do wonder why they didn t push this one issue. in any case, establishing the intent of the defendant is always the hardest thing to do, particularly in sort of a white-collarish sort of case. what did you intend to do? help us drive the decision of whether or not we charge you. so you need to talk to the person, you need to talk to the subject. who is the subject here? the president of the united states. written answers are always a bad substitute. and, oh, by the way, the president even refused to answer questions on the obstruction issue. all those imprecise and unhelpful answers were all on the russia interference side of the investigation. there was nothing in writing on the obstruction question. so, do you push the issue? the mueller team decided, a that, they had enough and, b that, it would take too long. but there was no sort of requirement that it d end on a certain way. they could have pushed the issue, easy for me to
look at the evidence that mueller presented as you pointed out earlier in the show? it s very clear in volume one on the basic investigative issue, was there is coordination, was there some sort of conspiracy. they didn t find it. that was a big deal. that shocked lots of people. probably shocked you, didn t it? you re being a journalist in asking me. it 150e78d to me to take your question seriously, that at least by the ninth inning of the probe, a lot of the investigative focus was on roger stone. and not the type of people that would have pulled off a true conspiracy. but they didn t find it. and that s very significant. on the obstruction issue, it is has not got that kind of tape recorded intron tro investigatorable evidence that
two unsatisfying answer with the criminal conspiracy and second, on trying to get mueller to come hit on the obstruction issue, which i just don t think he ll commit on. i think they have to limit the opening statements and get to there is a rich story here about the extent to which the trump campaign communicated and encouraged and benefitted from a legal russian intelligence interference here and there is a rich story to tell and a rich story on some of the elements. the question is, you know, are they going to be able to persuade anyone. when john dean testified before the house judiciary committee or the senate watergate committee in 1973, 80 million people watched. my guess is 15 million people will be watching on wednesday. only 21% of the public right now supports impeachment of the democratic caucuses divided. the question is will the democrats be able to get into a rich bounty of material on collusion, which was short of conspiracy, on obstruction, even
blasting out testimony excerpts. they re using #retweetthereport and doing mock sessions which underscores how high stakes these hearings are. and the judiciary committee will deal with the obstruction issue. the intelligence committee will deal with the russia meddling, which includes the trump tower meeting and donald trump jr. s playing footsie with wikileaks. the president says, maybe i ll watch. no, i m not going to be watching. probably. maybe i ll see some. i m not going to be watching mueller because you can t take all those bites out of the apple. is there anybody alive that believes the president will not be watching mueller? no. one of the things that s interesting to me is there s a lot of attention focused on the democrats and the democrats questioning of mueller. i m going to be interested in watching to what the way mueller
press conference was to give ammunition to democrats. chris: mo, it will be interesting to see. the democratic staff seems to be this could be like pulling teeth to get him to say things. he s not a particularly forthcoming or cooperative witness, couldn t this be to coin a phrase, a dud? it could be. but i think you will see democrats focus on three lines of questioning. one will be drilling down on the contact the campaign had with the russians. two, the obstruction issue which i think will be interesting. again, mueller said in the report, at least it s intimated from the report that the only reason he didn t go further was because his hand are tied. democrats trying to pin him down