Administration, and we have some of the most revealing reporting yet on special counsel Robert Muellers investigation. What its like behind the scenes on the inside and especially the toll its taking on the president as this inquiry moves into its second year. This comes to us from the team at the Washington Post. One of the writers, ashley parker, standing by to join us. She and her colleagues conducted interviews, and this is important, with 22 white house and Justice Department officials, witnesses, trump confidants, attorneys connected to the investigation. The post reporters write, quote, the Mueller Operation like the former marine corps platoon commander who leads it is secretive and methodical. Ten blocks west in the white house, President Trump combats the probe with bluster, disarray and defiance as he scrambles for survival. On the president s mood, they report this. Quote, the president vents to associates about the fbi raids on his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, as often as 20 times a day in the estimation of one confidant, and they frequently listen in silence knowing little they say will soothe him. Trump gripes that he needs better tv lawyers to defend him on cable news and is impatient to halt the witch hunt that he says undermines his legitimacy as president. And he plots his battle plans with former new york mayor rudolph w. Giuliani, his new legal consigliere. Quote, were on the same wavelength, giuliani said. Weve gone from defense to offense. And this is what the reporters write about the grand jury proceedings. Quote, mueller, the 73yearold former fbi director with a hangdog visage and rigid bearing, looms over the investigation but is an intermittent presence in the windowless room in the e. Barrett prettyman courthouse. Grand jury witnesses arrive one by one at the windowless room at the courthouse on constitution avenue in downtown washington. They are struck first by how commonplace the setting feels, more classroom than courtroom, two witnesses said. One of special counsel Robert Muellers prosecutors stands at a lectern. The jurors, diverse by age and ethnicity, are attentive and take notes. The questioning is polite yet aggressive, surprising witnesses with its precision and often accompanied by evidence including Text Messages and emails displayed on a large oldfashioned overhead projector. Great detail there. With that, lets bring in our leadoff panel for a monday night. The aforementioned ashley parker, Pulitzer Prize winner at the Washington Post, as well as White House ReporterJonathan Lemire, White House Reporter for the associated press, and mimi rocah, former u. S. Assistant attorney for the Southern District of new york. Now a distinguished fellow in criminal justice at the Pace University school of law. Welcome to you all. Again, ashley, fantastic detail by you and the members of your team. What struck you most . And allow me to call it about the trump method and the mueller method. What struck us most was just how different they were. Both sort of in temperament and goal. You have mueller, who is methodical and disciplined and leakfree, and you have the president , who is loud and blustery and defiant. And as we started doing these interviews and reporting, we also realized that they are making two very different cases. Muellers team is building, again, methodically a legal case. And the president , while he has a team of lawyers and he may need a legal defense, is building a political case and a p. R. Case that hes taking to the public. And it is sort of an open question of which one of these will win out and rule the day and which one will be more important or if in some ways a good p. R. Case in the court of Public Opinion can help combat what is going to be a very airtight legal case, whatever he finds, by robert mueller. Im going to ask you again to react to your own work in part. Heres another quote from this piece you contributed to. Many trump aides and Associates Say they are confident the president will be exonerated, but they privately express worries that the probe may yet ensnare more figures in trumps orbit, including family members. There is particular worry about trumps eldest son, donald trump jr. , and Jared Kushner, his soninlaw and a senior adviser. And, ashley, mr. Kushner signaled just how serious it might be by his choice of lawyers in washington, abbe lowell among the very best, especially for officials who find themselves in trouble. But the first part was so important. Those close to the president believing at this late date in his eventual exoneration. They absolutely believe that. Nearly everyone we talked to believes, especially when it comes to collusion, they believe that the president says hes done nothing wrong. They believe him when he says that, and they also sort of say, look, bob mueller is so thorough that if there was a there there, it would have turned up by now. Theres a little more question on the obstruction of justice bucket just because no one sort of quite knows what the bar is and what they may not know. They sort of describe saying we believe the president will be exonerated but they are sort of psychologically steeling themselves for a long slog because they dont know if and when it will happen. They also recognize in the process and again, i should be clear this is their speculation, but they talk about this going to the top. When they say the top, they dont necessarily mean the president. They mean the president s soninlaw, Jared Kushner, and his oldest son, don junior. And one thing we mentioned in there, its a tiny detail, and its a quite obvious detail. But one of the people who was called was Jared Kushners 29yearold personal assistant. On the one hand, that makes perfect sense. Its not particularly alarming on its own. But this is the person who was helping with jareds schedule, planning his travel, knows who hes talking to, which foreign governments hes had contact with. So there is a sense that mueller is looking into the president s family as well. Thats whats so unnerving for all these witnesses. You dont know fully what they know when you sit down for questioning or whats been said in the room prior to your arrival. Jonathan lemire, youve been in touch, shall we say, with the former mayor of new york quite a bit of late. How does Rudy Giulianis current world view of this investigation square with what we know of reality . Well, it is different. Ashley makes a great point, sort of how the president and his team are sort of fighting this on two different fronts. Yes, there is a legal defense. But right now Rudy Giulianis focus seems to be the more outward facing, the Public Relations case, the one that hes making on fox news and other Cable Networks many hours of the day. Now, the president was frustrated for a long time before he hired giuliani. He heard that, you know, he couldnt he wanted an attack dog to be on television. He was tired of the criticism that he couldnt find a bigname lawyer to come on the team. He hired rudy giuliani. In fact, he told one confidant that we quoted in one of our stories that, look, look at this. I finally have him. I have americas bleepin mayor now, like hes on board. He was very fired up about that. He likes the role hes out there, taking the fight to the press, making the case. He does not like, however, everything giuliani has done. Hes made some notable missteps talking about the Stormy Daniels payments or the Michael Cohen situation or most recently the merger with at t and time warner. But giuliani is emblematic of a more aggressive tack this white house is trying to take with the mueller probe. Were seeing more and more signals from the white house itself, like Vice President mike pence last week and trump allies, suggesting this needs to wrap up, this has gone on too long, that its becoming a distraction and impeding the president from doing the nations business. And while theyre making that case, theyre also engaging in some stall tactics in terms of whether the trump interview is going to happen. Remember, giuliani originally said he wanted to make a decision on whether the president would sit down for that interview by the oneyear anniversary of muellers appointment, which is just in a few days. Instead he told me on friday that theyre pushing that back. Theyre not going to have any sort of interview before the north korea summit, which is june 12th, and most likely wouldnt even make a decision as to whether there would be an interview until after that date. He also acknowledged theyve done next to no preparations for what would be arguably the most important day of President Trumps term in office. Thats for sure. Mimi rocah, counselor, we were awfully eager to have you on the air tonight mostly because of my favorite detail in this Washington Post piece, and that is the overhead projector because it speaks to the kind of civics lesson that is buried in this piece of journalism about how modest in a Federal Building in washington our grand jury process is, really by design. Its the antithesis of trump tower just as mueller is the antithesis of donald trump. So shed some light on what this piece gets right about the interior spaces of the Federal Buildings you occupied for a living for so many years. Well, it really did strike me when i read it, and im sure every prosecutor or fbi agent who read it said, yeah, thats kind of what its like. You know, the Southern District of new york, for example, you cannot get a more decrepit building, quite honestly. But its a badge of honor, and heres why. Because the people who work in those buildings, they dont care what the building looks like. They dont care that theres an inch of dust and its falling apart. What they care about is the work theyre doing because theres so dedicated to it, and its sort of this feeling of, i love this job. Im dedicated to this job even though im working in a place that looks like this. And thats kind of the spirit, and im sure thats whats going on with mueller and his team. Theyre not paying attention to the room. And the other thing that struck me is about the grand jury, you know, the detail about them taking notes and listening attentively. This is what goes on in grand juries and in courtrooms all over the country. These are our fellow citizens. Hundreds of times a day. I mean these are ordinary american citizens. So when you hear trump and his team talk about, you know, the witch hunt by the prosecutors who are out to get him, who all donated to hillary, well, guess what . The people who are really, you know, ultimately the ones who if there were an indictment of anyone would vote on that indictment and who get to ask questions and help direct the investigation, sure, its the prosecutors. But grand jurors can ask for evidence. They can ask questions of the prosecutors, ask them. Those are ordinary american citizens. So it really shows sort of the lie of them calling this a witch hunt. Ashley parker, so illuminating to hear that further description of what you started in the newspaper, and a friend of mine familiar with the president s thinking keeps making the point over and over. Some version of that mindset is so foreign to donald trump, the person who would want to be a modest public servant, especially in a line of work where you could make much more, you could be more famous, you could have more trappings in life. But i think mimi gets it right when she describes the Public Servants working in and around the Barrett PrettymanFederal Building. I think thats exactly right. It was striking to hear these descriptions from witness after witness, and someone i was talking to, who speaks to the president , sort of said that in their own way they were trying to make this point to him. They were trying to say that and trying to get him not to make any rash moves at the Justice Department, not to send any tweets. They were saying bob mueller is a consummate professional, and he is just doing his job and that you do not like the scope of that, but thats not his fault. This was the mandate he was given, and theyve tried to counsel the president that the good news about this is, you know, you say youre going to be exonerated. If that is in fact true, when bob mueller clears you, if he clears you, that his word means the world. It will not be viewed as partisan. It will be viewed as the actual truth. So please let this investigation run its course. Its unclear how much the president has internalized that message, but it is worth mentioning there are people in the president s orbit who do understand what goes on in those windowless Federal Buildings and have tried to communicate that to trump himself. A really important point. Jonathan lemire, lets talk about another player in this. The wall street journals depiction of one Michael Cohen, someone youre familiar with as well. Quote, people close to the white house say there was little contact between the two, cohen and trump, unlike other longstanding advisers to the president who wandered in and out of the white house in the early weeks. As 2017 passed, mr. Cohen grew frustrated with his lack of access to the administration. In march, mr. Cohen confided in friends he felt undervalued by mr. Trump and questioned whether he should continue his work as a lawyer for the president , said a person familiar with the matter. Whats the ring of truth to you, knowing the players here as you do, from this piece of journalism . I do think its clear Michael Cohen felt left behind. This is someone who played an important but unofficial role in the campaign, had designs on a significant white house job. Even told people around him he thought he could be chief of staff. Instead hes blocked from the white house by Reince Priebus and steve bannon, ends up on the outside. Then proceeds to try to make some money off his association with the president with his lobbying in all but name efforts that dominated the news in recent weeks. But theres no question that he was sort of he felt undervalued to use that word and upset by sort of not being not just not on the white house staff, but not being one of those outside advisers that the president would call all the time. The president s evenings in the white house residence are spent frequently on the phone talking to advisers, past and present, asking what they think he should do, what he thinks of that days news coverage. Cohen wasnt always getting those calls. If you are someone in Donald Trumps orbit, Michael Cohen being frustrated at the president is probably not a good sign if hes being offered some sort of deal at some point, were that to happen, from prosecutors for his cooperation. Also one more point on cohen here that underscores how different the trump approach has been to the mueller approach. The lobbying, the attempts for cohen to sell his insights to these corporations, that was on muellers radar screen last fall. Right. And were just hearing about this the general public is just hearing about this last week. The submarine theory that he surfaces briefly for indictments but then goes back under the water. Mimi, it strikes me that the attention of the federal government, the legal arm of the federal government, is kind of like a prison yard spotlight. It goes over our heads most of the time. Were vaguely aware of it. When its on you, its beyond blinding. And most white collar, wouldbe criminals who are caught up in it, dont like it very much. They dont have the capacity to push back. They dont have a public megaphone or the ability to erode at the very institutions of the federal bureau of investigation, the department of justice thats coming after them. Right. I mean can you imagine if everyone you know, being investigated by the federal government is not a pleasant thing. It takes over your life. You hear you know, there are people who want the investigation to end before christmas so they can spend christmas with their family. They want to have a nice, you know, summertime, or their work is demanding and they need to get back to their job. This happens all of the time, and they dont get to say most americans under investigation dont get to say, you know what . I dont think my prosecutor is really being open minded, so i dont think im going to go to the grand jury, or im not going to sit for this interview. They dont get to sort of make those grandiose decisions in that way. I understand hes the president. This is different, and there should be a respect for the office, which i think is being honored here. But on the other hand, hes taking power that he has solely because of that office and using it in a way to try to mess up, if you will i mean i wont even use the word obstruction. Lets just say mess up or kind of mess with the investigation, and that is a real, i think, abuse of power. What a terrific conversation to start us off on a monday night, starting with a member of the team at the Washington Post whose journalism set the bar today, ashley parker. Mimi rocah, Jonathan Lemire, our thanks to all three of you for joining us. Coming up for us, in the absence of an apology to john mccain, the white house says it has a leaking problem. But the president says the real problem is the Fake News Media. And la