has nominated a potential justice who will cast the swing vote on issues relating to his possible criminal culpability. in fact, whether he is required to obey a subpoena to appear before a grand jury, whether he is required to testify in a prosecution of his friends or associates or other officials in his administration and whether, in fact, he is required to stand trial if he is indicted while he is president of the united states. there is a basic principle of our constitution and it was articulated by the founders, no one can select a judge in his own case. that s what the president is potentially doing here, selecting a justice on the supreme court who potentially
justice, who will cast the swing vote on issues relating to his possible criminal culpability. and whether he is requi required to the obey a subpoena to appear before the grand jury and wh he is required to testify in the prosecution of friends, associates or other official s in the administration, and whether in fact he is required to stand trial if he is indicted as president of the united states. there is a basic principle of our constitution, and it was a articulated by the founders. no one can select a judge in his own case. that is what the president is potentially doing here. selecting a justice on the supreme court who potentially will cast a decisive vote in his
it s very important to differentiate between that and cooperation, it sounds like from the reporting that weisselberg and pecker were compelled to testify by the prosecutors giving them immunity. that is very different than what we would normally call cooperating or being voluntarily a cooperating witness. the difference being if you are called in to testify and you say i m not going to say a word, i m going to plead the fifth, if the prosecutors then say no, we grant you immunity for everything you say you ve got to talk. you have to talk under penalty of perjury. it s your legal duty to do so. but you can be dragged in there kicking and screaming and you will say whatever you need to say in order not to lie. so that s a crucial distinction. granted immunity as a sort of compelled matter versus affirmatively cooperating. right. what is interesting about this what i was getting at, i think most likely that weisselberg probably doesn t have the same criminal culpability that c
we would normally call cooperating or being voluntarily a cooperating witness. the difference being if you are called in to testify and you say i m not going to say a word, i m going to plead the fifth, if the prosecutors then say no, we grant you immunity for everything you say you ve got to talk. you have to talk under penalty of perjury. it s your legal duty to do so. but you can be dragged in there kicking and screaming and you will say whatever you need to say in order not to lie. so that s a crucial distinction. granted immunity as a sort of compelled matter versus affirmatively cooperating. right. what is interesting about this what i was getting at, i think most likely that weisselberg probably doesn t have the same criminal culpability that cohen and perhaps the president do in connection to the campaign finance fraud and pecker has this whole press exception dicey area that the prosecutors may just want to avoid. so to the extent that he was more involved in this th
was encouraged to ask this, you re saying that mueller may be investigating whether someone who knew more, and thus would have more criminal culpability, basically intimated to donald trump he could get more out of russia if it he would just open these flood gates on july 27th? right. that s one possibility. i think we, like, a lot of times in these sorts of stories, covering the mueller investigation, there s just a lot more questions than there are answers. that s definitely one possibility that they were trying to figure out if there was some effort to use then-candidate trump as a vessel in some way. whether, you know, it was asking him to advising him to say something publicly that somebody wanted him to say, and then there s a question of did he know something? we just don t know the answer to that question. the other thing we reported in our story in february is in that same news conference, president trump talked about lifting sanctions against russia and also suggested, yo