interrogation. bill: okay. might be easier said than done. the reason i suggest that is that alan dershowitz is on our air all the time arguing the special counsel law is a bad law and too broad. you started with a land deal on white water in arkansas and ended up with monica lewinsky in a blue dress in a closet. do you agree the special counsel law is republican/democrat, doesn t matter. is the law bad? is the idea not well? it can be too broad. and you never know what is going to come in the door. we had, of course, no idea when we began the investigation that resulted in 14 criminal convictions in the state of arkansas including the sitting governor of the state that we would eventually be investigating perjury on the part of the president in the sexual harassment case brought by paula jones. you don t know what will come in the door. i agree with alan there are
hopscotch however they like. that s the way criminal law normally operates in america. the special counsel law is a little different. the special counsel s authority is defined by the document that appoints him and federal law, and if he goes outside that authority, then he may be outside of his power. but you re absolutely right, that notion runs contra to the way american law and american criminal investigations typically work. criminal defense attorneys like me know that if someone, if a police officer or a prosecutor s lawfully at a point and they get a sniff, literally a whiff of burnt marijuana or some other, you know, some evidence of some crime, they will move on to the next step, and they usually can move on to the next step legally. all right, daniel hoffman, danny cevallos, thank you both for joining me. appreciate it. happy new year to you both, by the way. thank you guys. stable genius or mentally ill? the president and his allies defend his sanity following controvers
the fbi of bias more broadly. then you have trump s transition lawyer questioning whether bob mueller got thousands of e-mails from the trump campaign legally and then jim jordan and rand paul and other house republicans saying stuff like this. they are not denying there was a coordinated effort and it s all coming as the russia investigation is giving signs it s heating up. how do you see it? it s interesting that you have seen an effort by republicans to undermine the mueller investigation. there is nothing that unusual about it. the interview with congresswoman spear is what democrats did regarding ken star in the investigation into president bill clinton. the difference was we had a special counsel law at the time and the president couldn t fire the special investigator on a whim even though this this case president trump would have to go through a couple of attorneys
the team that robert mueller is hiring? and you have an appointment of a special counsel, that has no date to date supervision from a constitutional law. there s no leland: you cannot have an it counsel as people want to pretend. you have to have one that is answerable to an officer, and is not here in a practical way. what other investigation into the department of justice of recently or currently, has 12 lawyers working on a question mark leland: i m trying to understand her issue. the issue with the special counsel law? is your issue with how many lawyers know that mr. robert mueller has? is it with robert mueller? all of the above. too many lawyers are looking for a crime there s not. ethical issue as to how robert mueller is appointed, and then you have the first order issue of whether the special counsel, the way it is set up under the
deputy would have made. and i should say one other thing here, chris. when rod rosenstein talks about doing this in the public interest, that s exactly what the special counsel law says. it says the attorney general, 0 when he s recused as jeff sessions is, the deputy attorney general can appoint a special counsel when he thinks it would be a conflict for the justice department to handle the case and it would be in the public interest, and that s what rosenstein says. now, the normal sort of criminal procedure would apply here, right? so if, for instance, investigators wanted to subpoena anything from any relevant party, they would have to impanel a grand jury and go through all those steps, correct? no, not impanel a grand jury. typically prosecutors don t impanel grand juries. those are special grand juries. they use standing grand juries. that s already happened in this case. we know that a grand jury here in alexandria, virginia, just across the river has already issued some su