incidentally, i m obsessed with this. who s the attorney general of the united states right now? a political hack who s not been confirmed by the senate, who shouldn t be in that job and who does have some ability now, conceivably some ability to curb this investigation. i think the pardons are for real. i think donald trump will pardon paul manafort and others. he s laying the groundwork for this. he s panicking a little bit and he s tweeting and all this. he s normalizing gradually the notion the president has this pardon power and it s witch hunt. look, he can try to normalize that. i think any clear-thinking american is going to say what
mcconnell has no excuse to have a very strong reaction but of course i said that in the past. i m shocked they re sustaining that. in in light of the last two, three weeks. we don t need to protect mueller because sessions and rosenstein is here. after whitaker as acting attorney general and the assault on the investigation and what we learned about manafort not cooperating, it s shocking jeff flake to his credit tried to bring it up again with chris coons. there are constitutional questions about it. for the republican senate this is why it s so important for republicans to pass this. he said again yesterday, we don t need it.
special counsel s investigation is similar to it s appalling. bob mueller, robert mueller is no joseph mccarthy. he s straight-up, straight-shooting person of deep honor, who s pursuing an investigation very well. it ties into the whole russia thing, too. here you have manafort, stone and maybe corsi being investigated for perhaps conspiring with the russians over the question of hacking into the democratic e-mails and then knowing when they re going to release and putin certainly knows all about what happened and the president refuses to even cancel a meeting with putin. i mean, this just doesn t smell this is so weird that he would call this mccarthyism. i mean, what s happening now is a president who is kowtowing to a russian leader and floating the idea of pardoning people who may have conspired with russian
orrer these things that really are a central part of the investigation about contacts between the campaign and russia? what was really going on there? and we ll have to wait and see. and the thing that we i keep on coming back to on this is that the president thinks, the president has been told that this was about trying to get manafort to give up stuff on him. so we need to see tomorrow how far is it that mueller is willing to go on that issue. so we re learning now more, much more about why the plea deal between robert mueller and the special counsel s office effectively was ripped up by the special counsel. mueller slams manafort, says he violated his plea agreement by repeatedly lying to investigators. and according to the wall street journal, those lies may include comments about manafort s personal business dealings and contacts with a former associate in ukraine. people familiar with the matter tell the journal in interviews with mueller s team, man if a fort allegedly mad
table in thin that interview, h claimed that manafort, roger stone and stone associate jerome corsi were all asked to lie. he said this, if you told the truth, you go to jail, trump said. you know this flipping stuff is terrible. the president went on to say, quote, but i had three people, manafort, corsi, i don t know corsi, but he refuses to say what they demanded. manafort, corsi and roger stone. he went on, it s actually very brave, the president said, of the trio. i m telling you, this is mccarthy-ism. we are in the mccarthy era. this is no better than mccarthy says the president of the united states talking about the special counsel s investigation. joyce, let s talk about the president floating the idea of a pardon when asked. he says it s not off the table. that has to be music for manafort who is now without his cooperation deal. i think that s probably true,