mueller would accept those answers. whoever and whatever comes out of the report expect a white house rebuttal. the white house has said they ve prepared a counter report, and what they mean by that is all the ways in which they can attack the mueller investigation, the alleged conflicts of interests, the texts between that fbi aegent, peter struck and the other fbi agent they were having an affair with. they want to summarize all that and argue that this investigation was illegitimate, and that plays right to their base. donald trump has done a great job creating an atmosphere. arguably the most significant investigation in the country s history has indicted 34 individuals. there have been convictions of high level trump associates and
and it s curious why robert mueller would accept that. and one reason would be he can pin trump down to his story. if then robert mueller could disprove with evidence and have donald trump on perjury. whoever and whatever coming out ot report. expect a white house rebutle. they prepared a counter report. what they mean is all the ways in which they can attack the investigation. the text between the fbi agent and the the agent he was having affair. where they showed bias. they want to summarize it and argue the investigation is illegitimate. that plays to their base. he creates an atmosphere where a third of the country is not going to believe anything mueller says. the mueller probe. arguably the most significant investigation in the country history. indicted 34 individuals. there have been convictions of
also their counter report would include their interpretation of the law. what is the president s constitutional authority to fire the fbi director, for example? so that s what could be in there, but that s really sort of one of the pieces of their response to all this. and that only is at the very end when and if mueller s report actually gets made public. i think tom laid this out very well, that under the special counsel regulation tz, this is supposed to be a confidential report given to the attorney general full stop, some people would interpret it. the attorney general does not have to turn this over and the only disclosure requirement to congress is if there s recommendations in there that aren t followed. but that does presiden t mean t attorney general couldn t turn it over anyway and they would subpoena it to make it public. there is going to be a really big battle i see that goes on before anything gets made public. when this hits the desk, maybe the attorney general will put
you re going to see that if there isn t specific criminal activity, that violates a u.s. statute, the u.s. criminal code, we might not see that information wlorhether or not w think that behavior is unseemly, whether or not we think it s immoral. whatever we think it is, it may not violate a crime and we may not see that detailed a report. all right, shannon, i believe it was rudy giuliani i think told usa today they are working on a counter report. yes. how do you put together a counter report when you haven t seen the initial report? well, they ve actually been working on this for months and months. jane raskin, one of the attorneys in florida has been the lead person working on this. they have seen the president s side of this. they ve seen the documents that he has handed over to mueller. they have worked with a lot of the witnesses, a lot of people in the white house who have gone and testified. so they think they have an idea of some of the things that will be in muelle
joining me now, nbc news white house correspondent, kelly o donnell, nbc news senior investigatives producer, anna schecter. washington post national security reporter, matt z zaptowski, ben willis, also an nbc legal analyst. and former trump campaign adviser, sam nunberg. we ve got a lot of folks and a lot of news. we ll tripe to get to all of it. kelly, first to you. with news that the special counsel s office is wrapping things up, it has now been reported widely by multiple news outlets, what is the white house doing in preparation for it? well, we can imagine a couple of things. that when you talk about the president s outside legal counsel, so not directly the white house, they have long said that they are preparing a counter report to argue the evidence as they see it, to be able to respond. that kind of thing. to be ready with their own sort of counterpunch. within the white house, there is, of course, a department within the white house council s