flashback friday, if you will to july 20th, 2017. here is senator lindsey graham, a member of the judiciary committee at that time. this effort to basically marginalize and humiliate the attorney general is not going over well in the senate. if jeff sessions is fired, there will be holy hell to pay. there will be holy hell to pay. that was lindsey graham then. here s lindsey graham yesterday. clearly attorney general sessions doesn t have the confidence of the president. after the election, i think there will be some serious discussions about a new attorney general. ooh, snap. graham is not the only republican coming out this week to voice doubts about jeff sessions. senator bob corker said last night, quote, moves are being made to oust sessions after the midterm elections, while senator richard shelby who was once sessions co-senator from
inappropriate, he or she may consult directly with the attorney general. so if robert mueller feels the state of the russia investigation rises to the level of extraordinary circumstances, he could in theory at least, ask deputy attorney general rod rosenstein for a hall pass to ignore that olc memo about not indicting a sitting president and by the way, that s not the only trap door. there s another one snack dab on the office of legal counsel s homepage. by delegation from the attorney general, the assistant attorney general in charge of the office of legal counsel provides legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies. that s important. provides legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies. guess who s not part of the executive branch? stout attorney generals like new york s attorney general barbara
and stuff he did before he got into the office is for the criminal system. it s not for impeachment. but when you look back at the founding documents at the debates in the constitutional convention, it turns out they cared deeply this middle zone of someone who ob tanz the office corruptly, in particular they said let s assume the president bribes a member of the electoral college, surely we re not going to let that person keep his office. and similarly, this kind of conduct we re hearing about now if true is in that zone. this is alleged to be an effort by the president to keep citizens from knowing information that they might well want to know in voting for the president by corrupt means so it s just the kind of thing the founders cared about quite a lot. so there s some legal scholars who think this is relevant. barbara, others say every dollar spent in a campaign is meant to influence the election, some is legal, some not. but in this particular case the
responsibilities, he handled the ins and outs of the money. if i was to pick one person besides donald trump sr. that was integral to the operation of the trump organization it would be allen weisselberg, it wouldn t be don or eric, it would be allen weisselberg. interesting. we re trying to get to the bottom of how valuable weisselberg is to investigators. given what you know about how the trump organization works and it s a little unorthodox, not like a lot of corporations. some of it feels like a corporation, some of it feels like something else what s your sense of how the reimbursement to michael cohen would have worked? obviously as you say weisselberg would have been involved but would he have had to get approval from someone else? would there have been more people involved? at this time, january and february 2017 there were only three people who had authority over the trust that donald trump put his business into. remember, donald trump still owns his business but the a
there if you know where to look. joining us now is matt axelrod, a former justice department prosecutor and senior department of justice official under president obama. matt, thanks for joining us. you have been looking into this. you have been thinking about this and the provocative argument here is that even if we assume robert mueller s hands are fully tied by the olc opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted in 1973 and in 2000, there might be other people who can step in, namely state and local prosecutors. can you think of any precedent for this? no, there s no precedent. this is truly uncharted territory. the one caution i would say, ali, is the olc opinion is as you said binding on the executive branch which includes the special counsel. it s not binding on state attorneys general. but the underlying analysis in the olc opinion concludes that indictment of a sitting president is unconstitutional. if that analysis is correct, in