so i always think it would be an incredibly politically dangerous thing for president trump to do, certainly there s a question of what are the legal ramifications of it. does he have the power to do it? probably. but you know, like any power of the president, if it is done for a corrupt purpose, then that could be more evidence of obstruction of justice. so i can understand why his white house carrie leed him against it even going so far according to the story as threatening to quit. extraordinary. one of the things interesting here it appears that the timeline that this is when it starts being made public that the white house, that, mueller is interested not just in russia and the possibility of collusion with an adversary who obviously commit add crime to interfere in an american election but also with oobstruction in the wake of the comey firing. they were actively attempting to obstruct justice in terms of how they handled that. and there s a kind of i don t know, again, self-re
about it for quite some time. partly because he s consuming this stuff. that s right. it s like the snake is eating its tail here. the president watches this on his television. he then tweets about it and the cycle repeats itself. talk about some of the ramifications of this. you mentioned the judicial watch guy proposing that the u.s. marshals raid the fbi. now, we hear a lot particularly during this life span of this story about the deep state, that this is some sort of conspiracy by the security agencies to go after trump to undo you the results of the 2016 election and you get coup talk thrown in from people like alex jones. what a deep state actually is a rogue security apparatus pursuing its own highly politicize the agenda and particularly is prone as we see in countries like egypt and turkey to attacking the unfavored security agents. exactly. the irony is ultimately you
the president is running around saying publicly on twitter he s being railroaded but the fact it came as close as it did and it was as serious as it was and took mcgahn, who is not necessarily stuck his neck out a ton so far, he didn t do this, for instance, over comey, right? that he went as far as he did in threatening to quit over it. what do you make of that? you know, i don t know that it s that surprising. to me, what is most interesting, why do we know this? how do we know this now? who interest is it for us to know this story? that s usually what i m most wondering about when we hear leaking coming out of the trump administration. clearly, this does not benefit donald trump. and if i m don mcgahn, i m maybe i want it on the record as we move forward. because look, we re getting towards the end. there was a report today. let me be clear, i literally
stay up at night about where we are institutionally in this country at this moment, where are you at? i m very concerned. i don t know how this is going to turn out. the president not only in the russian investigation but in all sorts of other ways is breaking every norm and seeking to denigrate every institution we depend on to protect our liberty and to protect our constitutional form of government. whether it s trashing the press or trashing the judiciary or trashing the law enforcement agencies, it s all of the piece. we ll find out if our institutions are viable enough still to handle this. i certainly hope so. it s not a guarantee. the glass half full wave interpreting the story we just got and if you just happened to be joining us, the new york times publishing a report that the president in june ordered mueller to be fired. he backed off when his white house counsel in the cross hairs of all this from the beginning threatened to quit over it.
one of the reporters that broke the story the new york times, a remarkable bit of reporting, michael. well, if you look back at june, it s a month after mueller has been appointed and the white house has experienced the firing of comey and seen the enormous impact that that will. and mcgahn was deeply concerned about it and was willing to put his job on the line to try and stop it. you have four different people telling this. what was the context or the trigger for the president wanting to fire mueller? well, the president thought that mueller had conflict of interest issues. the president thought that mueller who obviously had been a member of his golf club in northern virginia, had had a dispute about membership fees. that was one of the reasons he will to go. the other reason being that mueller had worked at a law firm that represented jared kushner and mueller had interviewed to be the fbi director the day before he was made special