two days after election day in 2020 before the results of the presidential election have even beenio called. president donald trump s chief of staff received a text message laying out a veryte detailed scheme. for keeping donald trump in power. the text was from donald trump s son, don jr. and described in detail the plot to use republican legislatures to keep trump in office regardless of the actual vote count. if that failed, republicans in congress could keep dump in keep trump in power. it matches up with the scheme that trump and his allies tried to carry out by replacing biden electors with fake trump electors in states that joe biden won. today the committee investigating the deadly january 6th attack released the transcriptsse of the interview with donald trump jr. and he told the committee he doesn t remember where the idea came from. quote, question. is that something you wrote, or did you cut and paste that from somebody else? junior,me i imagine i cut and paste
set by one donald trump during his standoff with house democrats during the first two years of his administration. so we wonder if this is a preview of the kind of standoffs would he can expect to see over the next two years. to answer that question for us, joining us now is politico correspondent who broke the story. heidi, take us through your reporting. the white house is really concerned that given the volume of letters and requests that they ve already gotten from expected incoming gop chairmen, that they re really setting the stage here to fire off a subpoena cannon, basically, a spray of subpoenas, early in the new year, which they told me would really break with historical precedent, had there been a process for oversight, whereby you exchange information, you talk about what you re able to share, and negotiate, really, and that hasn t taken place here. this has just been a couple of members of, who are coming in, they re going to be the
of state mike pompeo said for the first time he was indeed on that phone call with ukraine s president that is now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry. also today, after the state department s office of inspector general put out an urgent request, this afternoon they will brief congressional committee staff about documents related to state department and ukraine. so let s go right to washington where both sides are digging in their heels over the impeachment inquiry. joining me from capitol hill is nbc correspondent heidi przybilla on the north lawn. white house correspondent peter alexander. heidi, what do we know about the new subpoenas that will be issued we think on friday? reporter: that is the understanding, that if the white house does not comply by friday, chris, this subpoena cannon is loaded to go. these committees, chris, trying to show they mean business, taking no breaks and issuing rapid-fire subpoenas for pompeo,
to the lawyer here, do you need an underlying crime? because justin amash, republican congressman, he made the point that courts have found in fact that obstruction by itself is enough because the presumption is law enforcement, if you re obstructing, they can t establish there was an underlying crime because you re obstructing the investigation. what does the law say? you re asking me now? yeah. because you re a lawyer. sure. i must say, sorry to disappoint, but i think i agreed with most or all of what david set out for you there because each of these responses to each of these subpoenas is very different. a subpoena cannon that we were expecting since the november elections, and for example, the ruling by the judge in the trump accounting firm disclosures yesterday, i think that was very well reasoned, but that s a very different issue. that s his own separate non-presidential business dealings. here we re dealing with the testimony of a former aide. the attorney general s tes
collect all of this evidence, they fire their subpoena cannon at the white house. but the second they cross that line, where impeachment hearings begin, if they don t have serious evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor, it s going to be viewed as a political stunt and trump will get the advantage. how do you define that, though, right? like, every one person sits here and says, boy, what he did with fox is an impeachable offense, ordering the justice department to try to get involved in this cnn merger, for instance. but that may not rise to the bar that matthew s talking about that gets you the 15 or 10 republicans that you need. right. i mean, we don t have a standard for what high crimes and misdemeanors are. and this is a political process. which is different than the legal process, which is what mueller is doing. but at the same time, you have the house, and we re talking about the house bringing articles in this. forget about the senate momentarily. you have the house, whi