combined with two converging currents, the mueller investigation looking for that obstruction of justice charge, and then alabama. roy moore coming to the senate possibly in a week, and he becomes the face of the republican party for the next year when we re already in danger of losing the house. it s likely we ll do that without him. lose the house. trump gets impeached. we re closer to impeachment now i think than we think. welcome back to hardball that was alex castellanos with a warning for his fellow republicans and new questions about whether or not the president obstructed justice in the russia probe. as axios points out, trump s legal team points out the president cannot obstruct justice. but notes the one thing that everyone agrees on is the house of representatives with its impeachment power alone decides what is cause for removal from office. for now at least the house is run by republicans. well, that s consoling. the first article of impeachment against richard nixon f
to, he s got a point here. reporter: it s a little bit of both. it s not credible to argue that the president simply can t obstruct justice no matter what the facts are. but he may have a point that just the firing of james comey alone wouldn t be obstruction of justice, because that s within the purview of the president. i think it s fair to say they re going to need more than what we know today to file an obstruction charge. but dan, a lot of people are going to be scratching their heads tonight, because we know presidents who have faced impeachment have faced obstruction of justice charges. the articles of impeachment against richard nixon mention obstruction of justice. the articles against bill clinton did so, as well. but you heard the president s lawyer in the last 24 hours saying that a president cannot obstruct justice. reporter: well, this hasn t been addressed in the criminal context at all. but as you point out, with nixon, it never even made its way to the congress.
lawyers on the obstruction question. the one lawyer ty cobb saying, we are not arguing the president obstructed justice. john dowd is making an argument. what do you think of that? it is a political and public relations disaster to make this argument. now that the president cannot obstruct justice. one, you re making an argument that the president is like a king above the law. that doesn t sound great for the white house. but more importantly, you only make that argue when you re seeding the fact that based on the president s behavior he did obstruct justice. yes, his actions may seem like he obstructed justice, but that looks like a political statement. i don t read into ty cobb s argument. you watch closely, if the special counsel does move against him at some point in obstruction of justice, they are back in the legal argument that he s the chief law enforcement officer. his actions can t constitute. one of the friends of the show was out on axios this morning with an interestin
about whether or not justice was truly blind in the investigation into hillary clinton. well, jake, sources we have learned from tell us that the electronic records show that peter struck changed former fbi director james comey earlier draft language describing clinton s actions in handling classified materials from, quote, grossly negligent to extremely careless. now this entire drafting process was a team effort at the fbi, we re told. as we reported last month, after the news surfaced that the language had, in fact, been softened, that comey and his colleagues had been playing with the language for some time. but the identity of the person who actually made the change had not been known until now. take a listen to what comey said clearing the former secretary of state back in 2016. although we did not find clear evidence that secretary clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely c
and republicans, believe he s the right person to basically go through this process and come out with a conclusion and justice will be done. listen to this sound from president trump on saturday after flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the fbi. yeah. what has been shown is no collusion. no collusion. there s been absolutely there s been absolutely no collusion so we re very happy. so we ve been focused today on obstruction of justice, but you re on the intelligence committee. have you seen any concrete evidence of collusion? i think they re going through that, jake, line by line right now, finding out if there are connecting dots where dots can be connected. i don t think anything is there is not any set premise of what this investigation s about except getting to the facts and getting to the truth. what we do know, russia was definitely involved. their intend was to do as much damage as possible. how far it goes up the chain, if there was collusion to where people were wor