nadler. he will be persistent. we will go after whitaker, even if he is not in the news for some simple answers as to what happened. where do you think this is heading? you are now on the house oversight committee. you have a lot of investigations of the trump administration. where is it heading? it s not personal to the president. the president keeps making it as if someone is out to get him. this is about basic conflicts of interest. it goes back to the 1920s when there was the tea pot dome scandal and handing had the administration and an official was accused of bribery. the congress said, we need to know. do they have financial conflict of interest? we want to know, does the president and administration officials, do they have financial conflicts of interest overseas? this is what the president tweeted today. the dems and their committees are going nuts. the republicans never did this to president obama. there would be no time left to run government. how do you respond? the
president. our correspondents and analysts are standing by. first, let s go to laura jared. did the judiciary committee chairman back down? reporter: i want to read to you the statement that was issued a few minutes ago. if you appear before the committee tomorrow morning, and you are prepare totd respond to questions from our members, then i assure you there will be no need for the committee to issue a subpoena on or before february 8. to the extent you believe you are unable to respond to any question, we are prepared to handle your concerns on a case by case basis, during and after tomorrow s hearing. they wanted to grill whitaker
we re back with breaking news on a battle between house democrats and the acting attorney general. matthew whitaker appears on track to testify before the judiciary committee tomorrow after the chairman eased up on his threat of the subpoena. joining us now are former u.s. attorney preet bharara. thanks for joining us. you know a lot about these battles between the justice department, congress. is there any precedent for this current battle underway, this current situation? i don t know if there s precedent for it. there s some precedent for this kind of brinksmanship, when a house committee or senate committee is trying to conduct oversight and the white house thinks there s overreaching going on. this story has been changing hour by hour. i think that some of your earlier guests were talking about whether or not jerry nadler overreached, overplayed his hand. i think his heart and mind were in the right place. frankly, i think he may have. from the congressional democrats, they want
concerning mueller s probe, how he got the job and cnn s reporting about how the president unloaded on whitaker in terms of how the southern district of new york has been going after the president s former lawyer, michael cohen. they wanted to question him given whitaker s performance just last week when he unexpectedly blurted out some news about how the special counsel s probe is winding down. take a listen to how that went down. i have been fully briefed on the investigation. i look forward to director mueller delivering the final report. the investigation is, i think, close to being completed. i hope that we can get the report from director mueller as soon as possible. reporter: now the real question is, if whitaker does not show tomorrow, how far are democrats willing to press this point to try to get him in there before bill barr is likely confirmed as attorney general next week? probably a week from today. what happens if whitaker doesn t
see it? i think it s important to point out what this is about. they want to ask him about his contacted with the white house. did the white house want interference or knowledge of the mueller investigation? that s, i think, what this fight is really about. the question is, will whitaker answer questions about issues like that, or will he cite executive privilege. if he cites executive privilege, what happens then? will he be subpoenaed? will there be a legal fight? this is really about asking him about the mueller investigation. what nadler is try doing is pre-empt some of the arguments in advance so tomorrow they can have an actual confrontation and maybe even vote tomorrow if there s a refusal to answer. at this moment, it looks like whitaker is coming. as far as i can tell, it s not clear that he will show up.