they ll release the report, there s a precedent. and the reason for the hearings is the american people need be brought along to understand what happened. i remember my father talking about watching john dean testifying on television every day, slowly revealing the criminal activity of the president. that s where they moved from place where there was hyperpartisanship to a place where they understood what understooded to happen. i agree with it in good time. what s happened here is we ve gotten over our skis. and i think we need to just slow down and make sure. we had all day this buzzfeed article which may very well be true. they ve been right a lot of the time. but ewwe didn t have corroboratn from any of the other places. i would agree we have to bring the american people along, i would agree we need have hearings and there s a lot at
the kind of i understand the politics of it, but for the legal good of the country, this stuff has to start happening in public. or we let robert mueller finish on his own time. those are two views. they re two contrasting views presented. i personally i think as a journalist, as a member of the fourth estate and citizen, i always err towards the public. when you talk to former prosecutors, they re all, like, no, this is the way it has to be. but i do think the terrain is extremely treacherous. day 27 or 28 of this shutdown. there s sort of a seeping sense of unease that has only deepened, particularly in the wake of the revelations we ve gotten this week. ultimately, presentations of public fact will have to be how this is sorted out. i put myself on the side of the public or at least the public presentation of fact. the other thing is the question of the time line. when you say wait for mueller, it s one thing if that s two weeks.
seize it because it has dangerous information. but that s why this is so significant if the buzzfeed story has legs. and it may not but if it does, even barr agrees that is squarely a crime by the president of the united states. and what s the significance of that in the scheme of things? because the president has already been names essentially individual one in a federal court filing in which he is nomed named as the person who directsed michael con to commit a felony. so that s already hanging out above us all. what s the significance of this? it s big and different and about the president directly. you ve got arguments, well, the president s motives might be different. maybe he was doing it because a family reasons, he wasn t doing it for campaign reasons.
the one that lept out at everyone in that piece which is basically that they learned of cohen being instructed to do this after gathering this evidence, the documents text, emails, testimony, the special counsel s reference is to that paragraph in the statement? i think so. i said this on the air today. that seemed surprise the notion they would be eemailing andtectsing and discussing a directive to lie to congress. it doesn t seem like the kind of thing you would put in writing and where we re left is the idea of wondering whether there is corroboration in any form for michael cohen s story that donald trump directed him to lie. it s a completely plausible story. it s what he was saying he was directed to make illegal campaign finance but the question is it corroborated? because the house is not going to impeach donald trump on the word of a convicted liar.
this has happened before. the parallel to congressional inquiries. the point of it, it is public. it s still the case, if i may, that if the issue is someone who lied to congress, then congress ought to be a little motivated to get to the bet tm of it. i thought i saw a turn in the initial response of the the story on precisely those grounds. members of congress all say, and i think this is a consensus to you. everyone has said this, even william barr. it is a black and white impeachable offense. if you say to someone, go lie for me in front of congress. so let s bring hope hicks down. let s see what she has to say in front of congress. there are so many tendrils that we re constantly grasping. we don t really know what s going on. empty wheel makes this really good point about whether or not the corroboration that buzz feed has is coming from sdny as opposed these are all closed black box investigations and it needs to be out in public. congress really no longer has