passed in a long time and nobody was talking about it. entirely overshadowed by the entire spectacle and i will question oversight is important but i question the degree to which the investigations are going to learn anything that bob mueller doesn t already know. he s had all access to the people for all of this time. he could do everything that these folks can do in the committees an he is far better equipped to find the answers with the tools, resources or experience he has. the committee is not a substitute for law enforcement. to the extent that governing and politics is a television show now and i don t say that in a glib manner. to an extent. this is fascinating because bob mueller has this behind the scenes and cummings and nadler and the commit tee chairs doing it on television in realtime. other thing is bob mueller won t release the president s tax returns and it was interesting that in a way ocasio-cortez actually possibly made the strongest argument for
was talking about it. entirely overshadowed by the entire spectacle and i will question oversight is important but i question the degree to which the investigations are going to learn anything that bob mueller doesn t already know. he s had all access to the people for all of this time. he could do everything that these folks can do in the committees an he is far better equipped to find the answers with the tools, resources or experience he has. the committee is not a substitute for law enforcement. to the extent that governing and politics is a television show now and i don t say that in a glib manner. to an extent. this is fascinating because bob mueller has this behind the scenes and cummings and nadler and the commit tee chairs doing it on television in realtime. other thing is bob mueller won t release the president s tax returns and it was interesting that in a way ocasio-cortez actually possibly made the strongest argument for getting hold of those saying
getting hold of those saying take the financial disclosures of michael cohen and only way to prove committing insurance fraud is the tax returns. impeachment is political exercise and what i think house democrats are doing is oversight is popular. impeachment is not. they ll call it oversight as long as possible while laying out a factual basis to lead to articles passing the house. they are buying insurance on the mueller report. if it doesn t provide the smoking gun that they need they need to play a predicate for the next step. the train is on the tracks now. this is happening whether they call it impeachment or not. do the republicans accept that the president is in big trouble or not? i think they know he s in trouble but their fortunes are tied to his how much trouble he is in ultimately and i don t
remember, paul manafort has been indicted for witness tampering as part of all of this. you know, for activities after he was originally indicted. and i think this speaks to a larger question that is worth taking this step back and thinking about the state of the mueller investigation, which is, you know, we ve been sort of all geared up over last week, waiting for this big, final report to drop, but what you can lose sight of is just how much activity bob mueller has already uncovered. that even if bob mueller doesn t file a single additional indictment, his investigation will have proven to be one of the most informative and interesting and large-scale counterintelligence investigations in american history. and that the trump campaign will have already been the most corrupt and criminal presidential campaign in american history. and i think that that s a really important fact to settle on and
right. perhaps on a narrow issue, a more discreet issue, but to the sort of overall conspiracy, chris, i went back and i pulled out the indictment of those 12 russian military officers from july, and i keyed in on one particular one particular passage. it s on page 16, paragraph 44, for those of you scoring at home. and it talks about how the russian coconspirators indicted in that case also communicated with u.s. persons about the release of stolen documents, including a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the president campaign of donald trump. right. you can see the conspiracy forming right. when you read all of these indictments together. bob mueller doesn t put those in there on a whim. there is a purpose, and the purpose is to prove the conspiracy. i want to ask you a question, ian, about the sort of public nature or the lack of sort of public establishment of the facts i was talking to congressman ted liu about. so we had this situation