Group kill the bill . Well talk to one of the lead republican negotiators. And in the wake of the larry nassar trial, Congress Takes aim at the olympics and usa gymnastics. This is mtp daily and it starts right now. Good evening. Im chuck todd here in washington. Welcome to mtp daily. By the way, did you know that monday was the Government Shutdown . Any way, Republican Leaders made it seem impossible. They could not believe it because it would end the Trump Presidency so they didnt have to do anything about it. I cannot imagine a serious conversation taking place in the white house about firing mueller. That would be a major mistake. I cant believe they would think of such a thing. Tell me what hes done that would in any way intimate that this guy is not the one one of the most trustworthy people in america. Anyef tort effort to go after mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump Presidency unless mueller did something wrong. If there was without a reason, there would be holy hell to play. Do you think congress has any role in the special counsel. I dont think. So i dont have much pressure to pass anything. If vin scully were watching, he might tell them that in a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened. The president gave the order to fire mueller. So now what do they do . The New York Times and Washington Post and nbc news and a lot of other News Organizations are all reporting that President Trump did move to fire bob mueller last june but the White House Counsel Don Mcgahn refused to follow through. He threatened to quit if forced to do it. And the president then ultimately backed down. The president s lawyer ty cob did not have a comment but the president had a fairly predictable reaction earlier today. Did you want to fire Robert Mueller. Fake news, folks, fake news. Typical New York Times fake stories. And then of course he decided to attack the president while speaking on the world stage. It wasnt until i became a politician that i realized how nasty and how mean, how vicious and how fake the press can be. As the cameras start going off in the back. As you saw, around the same time President Trump gave the order to fire mueller, Republican Leaders were warning the president that a warning would blow up his presidency. But since then the fbi and the cia have been the subject of countless attacks by the president and his allies are saying they are setting a perjury trap by interviewing him and they are blasting out allegations that mueller is part of a deep state to overthrow the president. Last year when there was speculation that he might fire mueller, republicans said dont do. It we know the president actually gave that order and the republican reaction so far has been muted to say the least. Folks, if all of this was a coordinated leak which is what it looks like when all of the News Organizations could independently confirm the same story so quickly, you have to wonder if someone wanted to send a warning to President Trump or about President Trump. If that is the case, were the republicans warning him . Because it is a friday or because he is overseas or so few people were surprised by this news. But folks, to put it bluntly, if the gop remains silent on the news, why would we think they would speak up the next time he decides to do this. Carol lee is a reporter from nbc news. And bill crystal, the Weekly Standard editor at large. Carol, i will start with you. Because last june all of us were pursuing this story. It was Christopher Ruddy the president s personal friend who is a publishing of a News Organization openly said the president is contemplating doing this. Very candidly, yeah. The white house kept denying, no he didnt order it. And now the same people who said no are saying yes. What happened. It is unclear exactly what happened but you hit on a very important point which is this investigation is just getting tighter and tighter and tighter and the president is in the white house and sieging and continuing to sieeethe and now there is questioning about his sitting down with the special Counsel Office and so it is very possible that people are nervous that he mie may try to do this again and he is impulsive and lashes out and people in the white house say this is a disaster for him and you could see how they want to move to cut that off. Bill crystal, you saw this as a leak meant to be the warning. He may have learned how much mueller knows and he soon has to agree to be interviewed and thinks firing him is refusing to talk or taking the fifth. Yeah, i think there is too much there is two things. When the story broke when they said this might be happening, the white house denied it. Trump denied it. People believed it. That is a mistake it turns ow. You shouldnt believe what donald trump said. But there are a lot of the people at the white house that reporters have learned they are trained to be suspicious and skeptical but not to deal with this level of flat out lying about things people know about, staffers or they may not know but then they go out and deny something when they dont know either way and now it is clear we know from many sources that trump gave the order, you might say don mcgahn threatened to quit, the white House Counsel so it was a real story. But the main thing i would say it it is a political fire storm. But compared to what . It is not because trump is irritable. He is scared of Robert Mueller. He is scared about what he will find and he will not testify and he wants this investigation to be stop order slowed down or impeded or made more difficult or discredit it as much as possible. So put yourself in his mind and say is it irrational to think he could do anything he can to disrupt this investigation . Gene, and before you weigh in, i want to just put a button on this point here of how the president has been so openly mislead being this. Here he is in ogdenying any of this. Mr. President , you have thought about or considered leading the dismissal of the special counsel or anything that Robert Mueller could do that would send you in that direction. I havent begin it any thought. I read about it from you people. You say im going to dismiss him. Im not dismissing anybody. I want them to get on the with the task but i want the senate an the house to come out with the findings. That is his way of denying it. But when he hear him and say it, it reads like a denial but had you hear him saying you realize he is fudging it. That did not sound like donald trump trying to be serious or be honest, frankly. And look, at this point his credibility is in the negative numbers. You cant believe especially on this issue. On this issue in particular. Well on many issues. But on this issue especially. You cant take what he says at face value. These kinds of leaks and obviously there was a leak somewhere, are the way that people in the Trump White House often communicate to each other and to him to him. Especially to him. And this looks to me the way it looked to bill, like a message to him. A brush back. The reaction from capitol hill today has been somewhat muted, Orrin Hatch Office retweeted, i headline from a comment he made in october, that said that it was that offered his support for mueller. James langford said the following, the white house and the president have said repeatedly yesterday that they will comply with the special counsel investigation so i think we should take the white house at their word. It was interesting he said white house and not the president. And Chuck Grassley said, i just dont think the president as unpredictable as he is would fire mueller and i take the view directly to the president , just let this work its course. I would say they hope that he wont fire bob mueller. But the republicans, all of those clips you played, they have been on the record about what they think about this. And i think there is this what you have seen is just they dont want to poke him at all on this. So theyve been playing games with their words on this. It has changed from six months ago when what has he done in the six month ins between. In his own whacky impulsive way, he is not stupid. He managed to get republicans on hill in the house to attack the inquiry. And even credible republicans like ron johnson. And what we call the normal republicans who are not on the fringes to be talking about conspiracy in the fbi and the conservative echo chambers who put at the beginning, echoing the notion that the deep state is out to get trump in a way that would be incredible if you told me six or seven or eight months ago saying that routinely day after a day so hes laid ground work for firing mueller. And i want to pick up on what was implied, donald trump and we might think firing mueller, but donald trump has lived his whole life on one way of conducting business. Buying time. Right. He files a lawsuit you file a lawsuit he files a counter. Why . Buy time. He knows that doing this would be terrible for him but what would it do . It would set the investigation back at least a few weeks. A few months. It buys more time. He is the king of buying time. Well maybe that is what hes after. This is this could be a peeric purchase if there is such a thing. You know, you read this in biographies, one of the jobs of Bob Holderman was to listen to the crazy things that nixon said and then not do them. Pay no attention to them. And look right past them. Maybe somebody is afraid that kelly is going to actually take him seriously. Well let me pause the political side of this conversation. Because i have some legal questions here and as smart as all of you, you are not as smart as my next guest. Ann milligram from the state of new jersey and assistant District Attorney in manhattan. Thanks for coming on the program. Thank you. Let me start with a legal question. If you order a hit, and the order is rejected, you still ordered the hit, does that make it an obstruction does it feed the obstruction of justice case in this scenario. So i think the answer here is absolutely yes. The way it would work, even though the president ordered that mueller be fired and even though that wasnt carried out you could till have a claim for attempted obstruction of justice equal in the eyes of the law under punishment and when you look at this with the other evidence we have related to the president firing comey, the comments that he made, it certainly strengthens that part of the case as well. And so i think it is important when we think about obstruction to think about all of these individual acts as one piece of an obstruction of justice potential claim. Well let me button inthat up. He asked comey for loyalty and asked him to drop the flynn probe and pressures to fire mccabe and pressured the members of the Intel Community to lean on comey to lay off of flynn. Now we know the failed attempt to fire mueller. So what you are saying is you put all of this together, no individual piece, you might be able to explain away, there is only one conclusion. Yes. And in addition to the fact you put it altogether and also remember that you have trumps specific words asking comey to see past flynn. To stop the investigation into flynn explicitly but now a pattern. And i think what that means and why this is so problematic for the president and his Legal Defense team is that if there is one instance of it, and again you just went through a lot of the comments and conversations, so there isnt just one piece, but if there were just one or two pieces, it is a lot easier to defend against or explain. Here we now you have another really strong piece of evidence showing that the president was trying to stop the investigation by eliminating the chief prosecutors, bob mueller. So you are bob mueller and you found out the guy you are investigating wants was trying to fire you. Now, your a professional, but you have to pros that information is going to have an impact. It is going to have an impact and saying boy he doesnt want me to finish this investigation. Boy, i was suspicious of x over here and now im more suspicious of x. As an investigators what does this mean to him. Bob mueller is one of the best prosecutors in the country and one of the best investigators in the country and he is as cool as can be and would take this in stride. And so i know someone like bob mueller wouldnt take it personally but i think what he would take it as, he would want that evidence from the people who have come forward to understand what was said and who said who did what and again it goes to the question of what was the president s intent when he fired comey, when he tried to stop sessions from recusing, all of those pieces. So i think mueller is hes extraordinarily good at what he does. He will take this in stride. And i almost believe that he probably expected this or Something Like this. But yes, it is obviously strange to be the lead prosecutor and find out that the president of the United States has been trying to fire you. Given that maybe it is possible this is a a warning flare from somebody inside of the white house, if you are bob mueller and you want to have this interview with the president , do you speed up that process and basically say, lets just subpoena him now and get this over with . I wonder. I think that all of the theories that have been offered tonight are very plausible as to why this come out and i wonder if the president is about to be interviewed soon and it will come out as part of that interview. So people have told that to mueller, they understand that that information will become known to the president as soon as the president walked into an interview because this is clearly something bob mueller would ask be. There does seem to be it was a very quick number of large number of sources that came out saying it. If i were bob mueller, i would want the president tomorrow. Because there is so much information and i would want to be able to sit and go through it all really methodically. That being said, the one caveat is that we dont know what else bob mueller is doing so what you want before you go in with the president , who is the subject of this question of did he obstruct justice and potentially also will be questioned on the the campaign and russian interference in the election, you want to have all of your ducks in a row. I was going to ask. You want one interview and you want to do it all at once and not split it and do obstruction now and campaign and Trump Organization later . I see a lot of reasons why you want to split it and do multiple interviews so if you were talking about the garden variety case the short answer is you might do that. I think it is more complicated when it is the president of the United States and you already have his lawyers pushing back on having him come in. So if i were mueller, i would assume i would get one bite at the apple and try to do everything i need to do during or and particularly prioritize the things i know i need to touch on. An, milligram, i appreciate your perspective. And to the panel. I think the president wont give him one bite at the apple. I believe he will give him zero bites at the apple. It is not the president s choice. It is. He could they could drag out the investigation and they could appeal if they wish to try, if the president should be compelled to testify and third they could subpoena him before a grand jury. Then he might have to take the fifth and if and we could say could you imagine the president taking the fifth. That is not what he think. S. It is safer to take the fifth than to testify. It would be a lot so hell conditioned republicans on the hill saying this is an unsavory investigation. What about the fbi agents. He laid the groundwork for saying Something Like that. It is clearly politically motivated, look at the bias, why would i sit and the only thing about that is trumps ego and he might see it as humiliating and to take the fifth. He belittled the Hillary Clinton staffer that took the fifth. And by the way, he thinks he could talk his way out of anything. An important point. Ann, you got to do the legal stuff and my panel had fun with the politics. We have to let you go. You guys get to come back. Up ahead, we are on the brink of a bipartisan daca deal. Maybe not. The white house though thinks so. The democrats not so much. Well break it down just ahead. Why make something this intelligent. engine starting up . When it can get by on looks alone . Why create something that stands out, when everyone expects you to fit in . Its simple. You can build a car, or you can build a cadillac. Come in now for this exceptional offer on the cadillac cts. Get this lowmileage lease on this 2018 cadillac cts from around 469 per month. 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