could become a subject and need a lawyer himself, joyce? so, i don t think that we can rule that out. the timing of his departure on the heels of the news that he had dangled those pardons is certainly one piece of evidence from which you could conclude he had been told that there were problems coming down the road. the origin of that problem is that the pardon process is something and, nicolle, i m sure you know this. you expect to see that process initiated someplace along the spectrum between the justice department and the counsel s office issuing pardons. you don t expect to see that happening with a lawyer in private practice who represents the president. it looks like the quintessential bribe. and i m sure that mueller s team will take a good hard look at dowd, whether or not he becomes a subject in the investigation, it s really not even possible to speculate. frank figliuzzi, our viewers can t see you nodding, but i can. go ahead. there is some irony developing here whi
the words are significant, but what we do know with this president is that he makes decisions off the cuff with his gut, and he may suddenly decide to move forward with the pardon process. remember, typically when you go through the pardon process, there s some sort of justice department review. the justice department goes through this, and this is a very serious matter that happens throughout the government. but when you look what he did with the last pardon, joe arpaio, there was no real justice department review. it was the president s ultimate decision to move forward here. presumably if john dowd did move forward with this, there was some decision by the president to green light this in some way, and he may not have looped in the people necessary the mention of the arpaio pardon is interesting because it was around the time allegedly of this meeting and at the time there were a number of people who said they felt perhaps the arpaio pardon was a public way of president trump se
white house lawyer who is responsible for the pardon process. so that sort of puts this in a whole different category when you are looking at it from the criminal perspective. and the one other point i would say that does make it remarkable, regardless of whether it could be part of a technical obstruction of justice charge, it goes to the whole consciousness of guilt that we keep coming back to of what are they trying to hide and why. what were they so afraid of it? i know you asked that and many people have weighed in on that and but it is certainly making it clear that they are afraid of what flynn and manafort and likely gates are talking about. so nice to speak with you. thank you. miriam rocca here in new york. and turning back to another major story, focuses on north korea and the president tweeted he he is looking forward to meeting with kim jong-un and spoke with xi jinping and saying
president s side at this time. so it is there is a sort of unbelievability to it that he wouldn t have known. but that is yet to be determined. what about the pardons? the reporting from both the times and confirmed by the washington post said that john dowd up until last week had been talking to manaforts and flynn s lawyer in the time that the investigation was closing in on them and said, hey, listen, we could have a presidential pardon. how big of a deal is that? i think the most important part about that reporting is that it was dowd and not mcgahn talking about pardons. don mcgahn is the white house counsel. that is who is responsible for assisting the president in the pardon process. not his personal attorney. so that puts it in a very different light. it shows that to the extent if it was being considered, it was being considered by his personal attorney in his own criminal
chair, orrin hatch and myself, ranking democrat, agreeing to set in motion a process to obtain the tax return, have the finance committee look it over if get them to go along, yes would be a policy for making them public. i say respectfully, not been able to get republican support. it s a concrete action they can take if concerned where this is headed. also about the president s power to pardon federal crimes is well nigh absolute, if he were to do it and many think that s manafort s angle here, what could congress or people do? i feel this pardon issue is not unlike firing bob mueller. if you re even looking at that, thinking about the pardon process at this point, i think you re going to be triggering a