that comey would eventually put him under investigation that led to the firing of comey, we believe, or at least his concern about what comey said in public in the testimony. now, we ve read in the past couple of days that he has also mulled and been viesed against trying to fire mueller. if the post reporting is correct, and as we all agreed, all of the testimony we ve heard so far would lead you to believe that mueller has to be investigating this, it s got to raise in the president s mind again whether he should be tempted to go do that. i m sure now he ll have a lot of people surrounding him saying than wouldn t be a good idea to fire many in the midst of a hearing. yeah. that s right. i think to david s point, this has the quality of this d.c. morrow henry story what the
feltd it inappropriate and he wanted to memorialize themselves extensively. do you have any reason why this other memo? ledggett, i take he wanted t document a phone call from the president of the united states to the head of the nsa asking him to say publicly that there was no evidence of collusion between trump and the russians. one more question. sure. we know the president of the united states had asked repeatedly to assure the american people he s not under investigation. you re reporting tonight, the president of the united states is under fernl investigation. do you know if he s aware of,000 or is he also finding out from your report tonight? well, we called the white house and the white house was not aware of it. we called his laush. it does not appear that he was aware of it until we got in
touch with white house officials and his lawyer. all right. thank you very much. i appreciate your time. of course, this is a major turning point, this report from the washington post. john avelon joins you can, gloria borger and jeffrey toobin. david sanger also here. gloria, let me start with you. this will be a major turning point. this. was not under personal investigation, that is, until he fired the fbi director and he now is under personal investigation, the washington post reports. yeah. you know, it s the first real sign that the question of obstruction is being investigated by the special counsel. don t forget. this is an investigation that started out about russian medaling into the american election process and now according to the washington post reporting, the special counsel mueller has broadened his investigation as often occurs
with these special counsel investigations and has broadened it to look into this question of obstruction and whether the president was involved in that. so i do think, erin, that it is quite significant. john? no question significant. what i think it does is it cod fiez the firing of comey seems to have triggered a broader investigation. the president had not been a target but the firing of comey seems to have expanded the investigation, refrigerators the fbi and now from the washington post. it s a great group of reporters knitting together a pattern of the president, requesting people to back off an ongoing investigation. it s the crime as much as the coverup more than the crime and this is a significant step to codify the fact that this is ongoing. it forces the white house s hand with all the drum breathe beating and flag waving about
hire people who were specialists in obstruction of justice. then you move on to what you showed the clip of. we have the oddity which we all focused in on at the time. he had two officials who were refusing to discuss what they said with the president. but also admitted that there would be no invocation of executive privilege. just wanted him to leave the room in case he wanted to declare executive privilege later. this is not going to work with bob mueller. this is jeffrey s area rather than mine but you can t invoke executive privilege in order to stop a criminal investigation? is that true, jeffrey? in days they ll have to answer the questions, right? even in office interviews with the fbi or in the grand jury and what s quite clear under the law is that they on their own cannot invoke