this is really a collision between order and rule of law and increasing anarchy, which we see evidenced with this piece that you just mentioned, but also, mika, you know, david said a moment ago the attorney general s special position. i ll give you two others, secretary of defense and the head of the cia. those three positions are so central to these institutions, and when we have to worry about whether an inspector general is going to be overridden in one of those three positions, you start to feel that needle moving from the federalist papers toward the isla isla island in the lord of the flies. take a look at this, this is the president last night calling the fbi scum. the fbi also sent multiple undercover human spies to surveil and record people associated with our campaign.
sat down with pete williams to do a breathtaking interview where he undermined every piece of that i.g. report, again, from his own justice department, and david ignatius if that s not bad faith, i don t know what is. he knows better than to say a fisa approved surveillance program is spying. he knows better than all of this, but again, he views his first job now as defending the president of the united states. like you and joe, i felt that attorney general barr really crossed a line in his comments yesterday for all his partisanship, seeming partisanship before, this was different, and the reason it was different was that he was attacking not enemies in congress, not even really the press, he was attacking his own justice department inspector general s report, and publicly disagreeing with it, and making wild allegations of bad faith,
that. and then secondly, just back to lavrov in elise s excellent comments, just the juxtaposition of a president being impeached and then what happens? the foreign minister of russia has a private closed door meeting with him with conflicting reports about what they discussed. really? in the middle of investigations with russia, ukraine, that false narrative, those two are storm warnings we would say in the u.s. navy. well, storm warnings that david ignatius, if we re in the middle of this storm, our constitution constitutional republic is in the middle of this storm, i suspect if we were able to fly at 30,000 feet above it, and look down like the planes that look down at hurricanes as they re moving toward the shore, we would see there is a recurring pattern, and nancy pelosi revealed it a few weeks
the senate to select and remove somebody. we just can t have any prosecest having an attorney general who will protect them from criminal actions that they ve taken. we re no better than some, you know, banana republic right now, and was and that s exactly what donald trump and william barr are moving us towards. there has to be a higher threshold for somebody becoming attorney general of the united states. that is the one area of reform that i think a lot of people are going to be looking at when donald trump leaves office. so let s look at the conflicting legal narratives that david ignatius brought up and what we are moving toward, which is what you re moving toward, joe, but admiral, 20,000 feet, what does it look like? no order of importance here, the white house and the president reportedly devaluing the truth, alternative facts in the ukraine
nato supreme allied commander, james defree tus joins us, he is chief international security and diplomacy analyst for nbc news and msnbc, really important day to have you on along with columnist and associate editor for the washington post david ignati ignatius, and u.s. national editor at the financial times ed luce joining us from washington. basically if you blink, you might miss it. look at yesterday, house democrats announced this was the big story we thought, articles of impeachment against the president. shortly after 9:00 a.m., after we went off the air, an hour later they were announcing a bipartisan trade deal at noon. attorney general william barr was back at it putting politics above the fbi. next, it was the trump administration giving russia a bull horn to lie about its meddling in american democracy.