couldn t be indicted and mueller didn t make a finding as to the president s criminality, necessarily the body that would have to adjudicate that would be congress, right? because assuming that barr accepts the validity of the guidance that his own department put out. it s confusing. but he create add bit of a muddle here. and he should have just sent it to congress. that s the body that can adjudicate whether the president engaged in wrongdoing. and i think he probably you know in in his desire to have the buck stop with him, as mueller s boss and head the justice department made that determination. and i don t think he had to go arthro. eric tucker, take to us the flynn case. when was the last time as someone who covered this line of work you remember the feds saying straight up, no to a federal judge s make public order? it was a fascinating court filing because there wasn t actually that much of a reason that was given for why the justice department was not going to comply
you looked at the evidence. and you did. i mean, what s the fundamental difference between your view and his. we analyzed the law and the facts. and a group of us spent a lot of time doing that. and determined that both as a matter of law many of the instances would not amount to obstruction. we didn t agree with the legal analysis a lot of the legal analysis in the report. it did not reflect the views of the department. it was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers. and so we applied what we thought was theright law. the attorney general is now conducting what he describes as a review of the origins of the russia investigation and trump has granted his request for wide authority to declassify information. barr has testified he believes the trump campaign was spied upon. something most legal
administration and quickly here we ll update this at the bottom of the hour. we have 12 dead now in virginia beach after a mass shooting by a longtime coworker. four people hospitalized including a police officer. the gunman is also dead. first off, let s begin our broadcast here tonight with those new developments that are still on this friday evening emerging from the mueller investigation. this week we heard robert mueller say he closed down his office, but his investigation launched several others which are still ongoing, including the one involving mike flynn who was briefly trump s first national security adviser. you ll recall he took a plea and copped to lying to investigators about his conversations with a former russian ambassador to the u.s., sergei kizlyak. those conversations took place december 2016 during the transition. earlier this month, a frarj ordered the justice department to make public various materials related to that case. that including transcripts of
that he expects the parties before him to listen to him and abide by his orders. but by the flipside it s actually not that surprising the justice department took this position, because they have never confirmed the existence of the flynn wire tap to begin with. so the idea that they were put onto the public docket a full transcript of the wire tap seems unusual. hey, elliott, there was a song in the time of our parents and grandparents called is that all there is? for people on the left side of the docket who are looking at the mueller effort in the rear view mirror, wondering, is that all there is, remind us as a percentage of what is known, as a percentage of this case, of the yugt growth cases, the spinoffs still out there, what do you reckon percentage we don t know yet. well then i ll quote someone on the right side of the ledger be donald rumsfield which is that there are there probably known unknowns.
standing by in president who appointed him. one of the ironies today is that people are saying that it s president trump that is shredding our institutions. i really see no evidence of that. from my perspective the idea of resisting a exactically elected president and throwing frgt at him, and, you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that s where the shredding of our norms and institutions is occurring. my experience with the president is we have a good professional working relationship. i don t look to tweets i don t look at them as directives or official communications with the department. it was just days ago when mueller broke silence. barr was asked about the outgoing special counsel s comments about not being able to clear the president. he said that he couldn t exonerate the president.