Coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. Robert mueller is not. See you in a bit. Here onset for another day, dan goldman, an msnbc legal analyst along with our pal nbc News Reporter carol lee. It is less hot than it has been all week. You picked a good day to be here. Dan, let me start with you, if you look at what each side wants, they are both looking for leverage. And the sticking point, one of them seems to be this idea much an in person interview. What is the framing behind that . The trump team wants questions on collusion only and special counsel wants to hear about it all. I think Rudy Giuliani is trying to figure out a way to drum up some leverage because ordinarily the witness of the defendant or target or subject does not have the leverage, the prosecutor does. And but because bob mueller is not talking and Rudy Giuliani is, hes able he has the whole Public Domain to make all of his arguments, even though as
a prosecutor, none of them make se
nobody knows about yet. and mueller is going to have a lot to answer for. seems kind of easy to send warning shots to somebody you know isn t going to fire back. absolutely. this is a pr o fenffensivoffens been negotiating on this interview for eight months now. it s it s an exceptionally long time and in that time, you ve seen the president s legal team while it s undergone different changes and various phases, they just launch an increasingly aggressive assault on the investigation and so in many ways, you know, you can see how there s a whole school of thought that the president was never going to do an interview, even if he wants to, that was never going to happen and there s been a lot of stalling and that s part of the tactic here. you can see even if he if he does decide ultimately that there is no interview, that he s mounted this whole defense about why that is and he s made it so normally in a political sphere,