impeach a sitting justice for what he may or may not have done when he was 17 years old and a private citizen. it would also be a pretext to say oh, no, we re not going after him for what he did when he was 17, we re going after to him because of what he said he did when he was being confirmed in the senate and he was then a sitting judge. it would be a disgrace to the constitution if the democrats, if they were to gain control, were to engage in that kind of petty score settling. look, i m a democrat. i want to see the democrats regain control of the house but i don t want to see them flitter away their power to serve as a check and balance by trying to pretend they re the avenging angel and can t look to the future and has to just look to even the score, looking back. the american public does not want that. shannon: professor, with the impeachment aside, what about this issue of perjury. there are a number of people stepping forward saying at the very least they think there should be
who wrote this e-mail. i ve been getting contacts from white house officials ever since the thing published, and every single one of them has floated the name of the person who they already had a grudge against, okay, and they re all different, okay? so, just based on what i m hearing from many white house officials, they re all pointing fingers at each other and in different directions. they don t know anything, okay? so, wait, josh, you re saying this is coming down to people pointing fingers at each other because there are grudges against them, not because there is evidence that they wrote this piece? exactly. it s score settling and throwing enemies under the bus and trying to get reporters to float names of people who they want to smear for their own personal political grudges and retribution. that s going on all day every day. you know what else is going on all day every day? senior administration officials telling reporters that the president is immoral and unfit for office.
elite. donald trump does so many things in opposition to what he doesn t like. so much of his presidency to date has been what did barack obama do? we re doing the opposite. doesn t matter what that is. it s relationship driven and it s score settling. don t underestimate what a big deal this is. it s a huge deal to pardon people. remember mark rich in the bill clinton days. this is a big deal. kirsten is right. we should not overlook it. just do it and don t say you re not doing it for that reason. stick around. so much more coming. so much for roseanne s promise to leave twitter and why the president still hasn t condemned
jonathan swan had this terrific item over the weekend about why this white house leaks. one of the reasons this hit is always so much fun and cable has so much to work with trump is there s more leaking in one week of the trump white house than you might see in a year of a presidency. and so swan had the clever idea to call up some of the most p prolific leakers. so many said it was about score settling. making sure they re killing ideas or tamping down people who might be on the rise because they don t like the ideas or don t like those people. i think part of that tone is set at the top of the trump white house. the other thing is they do worry sometimes about ideas that are making it up to the boss that might get out. so there s a lot of leaking that s done to try to terminate those ideas before they become a reality. that s one of the defining qualities of this presidency because you have this lens into a white house that s very unusual. if you look back at previous presidencies,
why do they leak absolutely everything? your viewers, especially who s been watching this show for a long time, you learn more in a week in this presidency than you have in a year. so jonathan swann asked the prolific leakers why they leaked and they leaked why they leaked. a lot was about score settling, about going after people internally who didn t share their views, a lot was killing ideas they don t like. some of it was let s shape the narrative in a way that s positive for the administration but so much of it was inward looking. so much of it about life in the bunker. and i think that s why you don t get an apology. why you can rationalize comments and behavior you can otherwise in any atmosphere not rationalize. i ll tell you something else going on here, they know they re on the wrong side of history. as jon meacham said, they know this president is is going to fall at some point. we don t know whether it s six months or a year, a year and a