joining me now, paul rosen, former senior counsel to ken starr and stuart green, former adviser to president george h.w. bush, both members of the group checks and balances. thank you for joining us. i want to begin with that letter and quoting from that. you write, in recent months, we have become concerned by the conduct of attorney general william barr. barr rewrote history with the unsupported claim his view of presidential power was shared by the founders. barr s view of history, including his claim that founders shared in any respect his vision of an unchecked president and his assertion that this view was dominant until it came under attack from courts and congress a few decades ago, has no factual basis. paul, let me begin with you. why do you believe that it has no factual basis? well, because it doesn t. the very first congress conducted oversight investigations of president george washington, one of the very first courts ruled that it had authority as a judicial
the house democrats, they want to see the grand jury information in the mueller probe as part of their oversight investigations that are ongoing along with this impeachment probe. the house lawyer basically told the judges today that it needs to see that under lying information from the grand jury. it believes that there s reason to believe that the president lied. this is what the council said. did the president lie, was the president not truthful in his responses to the mueller investigation. there are questions in this in the wake of the roger stone trial. as you know, rick gates testified he was there when the president got off the phone with roger stone and said more wiki leaks information would be coming. in the mueller report it 11said that manafort was giving information about president trump and where he believed the
benghazi. there s lots of pushback from every administration to the congress on all oversight investigations. this is no different. well, but, you know, the white house at some point and the president said it today, anderson. you pointed it out at the beginning of the show. the president said today, you know, i really want you guys to get into the details here and stop talking about process and start defending me on the phone call because it was a beautiful phone call. he also said he wanted to talk to mueller, and he wanted to be interviewed. exactly. what one said publicly is not necessarily what one actually wants. exactly. now the republicans have a conflict here because the president, at least he says, wants him to talk about the phone call and how it was perfect and how it was fine for a president to ask another president of another country to do a political favor for him in exchange for military aid. and the republicans are still screaming about the process even thou
benghazi, lots of push back from every administration to the congress on all oversight investigations. this is no different. well, but the white house at some point and the president said it today, anderson, you pointed out at the beginning of the show, the president said today, you know, i really want you guys to get into the details here and stop talking about process and start defending me on the phone call because it was a beautiful phone call. he said he wanted to talk to mueller and he wanted to be interviewed. exactly. what one says publicly is not what one wants. exactly. now the republicans have a conflict here, because the president, at least he says, wants them to talk about the phone call and how it was perfect and it was fine for the president to ask another president a political favor. and the republicans are still screaming about the process even though nancy pelosi has said, okay, fine, here it is.
take this full action is about controlling the process and about trying to force democrats to sort of not go in the order of things that they want to go. this is the kind of thing we ve seen consistently from the trump administration to try to put as many dilatory hurdles in front of these oversight investigations or requests as possible. whether it is rejecting subpoenas or being slow to respond or not responding at all. so this is tactical at this point and it is one of the things in looking at what options they may have, one they seem to be wanting to pursue, the president saying it will be up to the lawyers. but we know that ultimately he tends to make these decisions. but he did not seem to land on a final decision for this yet, katy. how long can the white house or republicans or mike pompeo delay? i they fairly protracted period of time. the question is what they get out of a delay. this is a lose/lose situation