for any period of time also understands. i want to ask you about the mueller report. the white house, i think, probably feels that they ve done a lot of spadework to sully mueller s reputation, but it s probably a known unknown what will actually be in it. jim comey adding his voice in an op-ped to the chorus of people saying that some transparency in the mueller probe is a good thing. you re laughing already. give me a second. republicans are wrong now, they claim justice department rules forbid transparency about the completed work of the special counsel. it s difficult to imagine a case of greater public interest than one focused on the efforts of a foreign adversary to damage our democracy, an image the president of the united states is a subject. don t listen to those who tell you transparency is impossible. every american should want a justice department guided always by the public interest. sometimes transparency is not a hard call. his complicated standing, if you will, asi
mueller says or includes or chooses not to, is going to impact the public s perception of what congress is doing, and whether congress should or should not be pursuing something, and trump is going to use it in that fashion and try to drive a wedge and say, so, for example, no collusion found, congress should stop what they re doing. even though the two are not linked. right? crimes, russia, conspiracy. but that s got to be carefully calculated as well. jim comey s right. we need more details rather than less. it s an unprecedented time in our history. applying criminal standards to how we shape this mueller report will not work for us. alyssa, there s something about watching this white house brace for a real crisis. they don t pull off the easy days. they don t pull off trips to cemeteries on foreign trips to honor veterans. they don t pull off low-hanging fruit. they don t they don t utter, you know, platitudes about members of congress with cancer. i mean, they don t pull off t
you see a tttacks against jim comey, attacks against mccake to a lesser extent, lesser attacks lesser extent? he called it bs at cpac. the attack against miller i think the president has been relatively more restrained in attacking mueller personally. you were speaking of hanoi during cpac. that is true. i think generally, i mean, look, this president and this operation, what we ve seen rudy giuliani doing for months, they ve trieded to do a lot of spadework to prejudice, inoculate themselves and prejudice the public against whatever findings come out and yet there is some concern, i mean, at the white house, and around the president, you know, he has long told himself, as long as i m in office, i m not getting indicted. well, now that s a legal question that may be less than certain. and i think, you know, just this week, some of the letters and the subpoenas the president is describing, 81 letters as he said, they re surprised by that. they ve been bracing for this.
i mean, jim comey and andrew mccabe didn t call him the mobster but made the same point. it s striking how similar the conduct is. i want to ask you about something chris christie said in that chair last week. he said trump didn t tell him to lie. it would seem under the statute he wouldn t have to, that the criminality was implicit and explicit and if you look at sort of the recent reporting about the latest efforts at on struktstrukt obstruction, it wasn t trying to obstruct the mueller probe. the president is on the record, has been reported and hasn t refuted that he tried to interfere and obstruct the investigations out of sdny. yeah, what michael cohen said that i thought was so interesting if his testimony was the president didn t actually tell me to lie, he didn t have to. that s not how he works. if you ve been with him long enough, everyone else knows with what he means. if you listen to what jim comey said in his testimony back until now two years ago, he knew what the p
asked about a pardon. what s interesting is both giuliani and trump were out there talking about pardons. it was coming from the other direction. i actually asked him, i said michael michael, i heard behind closed doors this came up. michael is like, nothing i can talk about, really shut it down. so it s obviously something that s being investigated. let me put up how trump has used pardons before. you know, we probably just don t know what we don t know about what he s being asked about and how it s being pursued. but we know that donald trump s lawyer raised the prospect of pardons for flynn and manafort at the same point in their legal process. we know matt miller, that john dowd talked you know, the pattern would be the same. talked to lawyers for manafort or flynn either right before they were charged or sort of in the process where it was clear they were targets about pardons. the person with the consistent pattern of talking about pardons is the president and his legal team.