Brian Williams examines the days top political stories and current politicalcampaign news. This presidency, we will ask a celebrated historian if there is anything to celebrate in the history that we are witnessing. The 11th hour on a friday night begins now. Good evening once again from our nbc news headquarters. Day 561 of the Trump Administration and the end of another week brings a new sign of Robert Muellers increasing interest in one of Donald Trumps veteran advisers. His friend of 40 years, roger stone. Nbc news reports that according to a source with direct knowledge, a member of muellers stone met with a stone associate named kristin davis. She first came to prominence when the tab lights nicknamed her the manhattan madam after she said she provided prostitutes to the rich and powerful including a governor of new york. Davis said in july that the mueller representative who
contacted her lawyer asked if she would accept a subpoena or if the fbi needed to serb it to her. She sai
all on his payment structure. and this raises a lot of questions, because as you pointed out, in the clinton impeachment, which is really the only prior example of this, because there were new ethical a new landscape of ethical regulations that came up after watergate so clinton is all we can compare this to. they went to the office of government ethics for consultation on their saidup. jay sec ow low told me, i don t deal with that, i m not a government employee. he didn t get this consultation. and so we don t have any of the safeguards the clinton team put in place. it raises a lot of questions for legal experts because the worry here is that in giving free legal services to the president, which rudy guiliani says he s doing, you could potentially be giving him a valuable gift. that exposes him to undue influence. then in the case of jay sekulow where we don t understand his income streams, other people,
going to assist the counsel. it makes the case this isn t a formal impeachment process but illegitimate. they are bringing in outside counsel, including trey gowdy, the former republican congressman from south carolina. he was at the white house today and met with chief of staff mick mulvaney i and my colleague are told that he is expected to help president trump in a private capacity as counsel. he is expected to work with jay sec low other outside lawyers as well. if you look back what he said in the past it s interesting, because you ll recall in 2012 during the house oversight hearing with eric holder when doj didn t turn over documents, trey gowdy criticized doj saying they should hand over documents in the proceeding. here is what he said. the notion that you can withhold documents and information from congress no matter whether the party in
policy mandates in protecting election security is one of those. there s no reason to believe you will hear a change of heart at the top from the president when he s been moving in sort of the other direction messaging wise to try to, you know, protect his own like legacy and talk about the legitimacy of his own election. one interesting development, jay sec ka lo, one of the president s lawyers telling axios, there are no plans at this point for a war room in terms of the white house. we ll see whether that changes. at this point the white house is not mobilized yet for what is i don t see how you turn the trains around at this point. appears very likely to be an impeachment battle at least in terms of a how vote. there are these efforts by people close to the president or in the president s orbit to turn the attention to giuliani, turn the attention to mick mulvaney. is giuliani failing him messaging wise, is mick mulvaney failing him strategy wise. it is the president who has made
investigate you hire jay sec to investigate a democratic president, do you get huge pushback assigned to that legal team so here s but robert mueller says it shouldn t matter in the legal i never asked people their political affiliation. what s the truth? they were giving money to hillary clinton campaign and other democratic campaigns here s irony of this is bob was trying he says right to avoid even the appearance of bias or inpropriety yet they doapght ask that question and one that can t being mothered peter strzok s e-mails were bads enough the text messaging bad enough right. horrible. but yet bob mueller and his team allowed the phone that contain the information to be wiped clean. in other words, destruction of evidence. that s what was going on here so time inverts to be investigated wii tboipg to get to the bottom of this.