That we find ourselves in. And i thought the threat to our nation was wellarticulated earlier today by professor feldman. When you said if we cannot impeach a president who abuses his office for personal advantage, we no longer live in a democracy. We live in a monarchy or we live under a dictatorship. My view is that if people cannot depend on the fairness of our elections, then what people are calling divisive today will be absolutely nothing compared to the shredding of our democracy. After the events of ukraine unfolded, the president claimed that the reason he requested an investigation into his political opponents and withheld desperately needed military aid for ukraine was supposedly because he was worried about corruption. However, contrary to the president s statements, various witnesses, including Vice President pences special advisor Jennifer Williams,
testified that the president s request was political. Take a listen. I found the july 25th phone call unusual because in con
and you could make an argument, certainly you and rachel talked about this. there is no good legal argument that donald trump can assert executive privilege with steve bannon who was not working in the government at the time. but there is it is not clear cut that donald trump has no involvement in an assertion of executive privilege over materials related to him during his presidency. and that s why this particularry referral is so important. bannon is not being referred because he s not producing documents subject to executive privilege. bannon is being referred because he didn t show up to testify and there is recent case law in the don mcgahn case that took years to litigate and donald trump was able to delay don mcgahn s testimony because of that but what came out of that is that every witness who subpoenaed by congress must appear to testify. if they want to assert executive
where people have been held in contempt, they all involved scandals and controversies, but nothing even remotely approaching january th w6th wite future of democracy itself. it is such an excellent point. i want to get your take on what we re seeing now with executive privilege. the white house formerly rejecting the request from former president trump. he could file a lawsuit, right, to try to continue to block that disclosure. right now he has 30 days to turn over those for the release of those documents. how long realistically could he drag this out? you hit on the key issue there, delay. he s very, very likely to lose this argument. it is almost certain. it is near certain that the current president controls executive privilege, not the prior president. but this could be all about delay. look, we have sort of some fence posts here. the don mcgahn subpoena dispute took two years. that s utterly inscexplicable a inexcusable. they have to prioritize and if you re a federal judge
in. january 3rd of 2023 we could have a new house. the don mcgahn subpoena dispute took almost two years. that was unacceptable. this was a long time ago. just for historical perspective, richard nixon from subpoena to supreme court took three months. our judges need to do better and act more quickly here. while this is all going on, we learned jeffrey clark received a subpoena and jeffrey rosen actually testified yesterday to the committee. yeah. this is really important. doj is an inextricable part of the picture here. rosen was the one who stood up and said we re not going for this bogus election fraud stuff. jeffrey clark, remember, tried to get doj to send a letter to the state of georgia saying, quote, we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including georgia.
contempt proceedings and could result in the witnesses going to jail. this is serious and akin to violating a grand jury subpoena than what we have seen in the past and real briefly the reason to wait for that is that there was a recent opinion in the don mcgahn case which basically said there s no such thing as complete immunity and no basis not for the witnesses to show up to congress. they can try to invoke executive privilege there but they cannot just defy the subpoena at all. it s a much more straightforward and simple case than dealing with these documents. we ll return to this subject after we ask kim about politics and capitol hill. and donald trump. this guy has been out of office for nine months. he is able to command loyalty from elected republicans and apparently from former