commit crimes. trying to have a president unconstitutionally retain power, trying to undermine the free and fair election of the incoming president. at the end of the day, i do think any lingering executive privilege would yield to the crime, fraud exception. but these are probably legal issues that we will have to await to play out in the future. this idea, carol, of holding on to power, your book details chaotic scenes from inside the trump presidency and how he was determined to do that. what do you make of the protecting the presidency argument? put it in the context of the man you covered for so many years. i think it s pretty clear that former president trump s efforts are to stall, run out the clock, keep the records from being seen. remember, in my reporting for
thumbing the nose, people s nose at congress s subpoena power and saying, listen, we re not even going to work something out. that s why we are in this moment, but the criminal statute does exist. it s the biggest weight of the three. there could have been a civil action filed, congress has inherent power to call the sergeant-at-arms to get people to appear. the criminal action is the big one. it carries up to a year in prison. that would be channing phillips, the acting attorney u.s. attorney for the district of columbia that would make that call, although, of course, it would be done in conjunction with merrick garland and i should also add, listen, it s unclear if executive privilege has this crime/fraud exception attached to it that does attach to attorney-client privilege but if there are acts in here or information relating to potential crimes, and you know, inciting an insurrection is a crime, interfering with the counting of electoral college votes is a crime, then that all
companies all the time. so it likely froze any sort of active-business opportunities they had. made it very difficult for them to do their work. rudy giuliani wants to restrict the southern district of new york s access to evidence. claiming that there is sensitive material on the devices the fbi seized from his home, from his office. what are the chances this argument will succeed in shielding him and shielding trump? well, the argument s not not going to succeed at all. what will ultimately happen is, i think, there will be sp federal judges who will be taskwood looking at this material. the only conceivable basis for withholding it from federal prosecutors is that it s privilege. attorney-client privileged information. but there is some defenses to that particularly in rudy s case. there is fraud exception. you can t use a lawyer to commit a crime so i suspect prosecutors in the southern district, who are very good, will use those sort of arguments to get access to this. i thi
argument for attorney/client privilege, but, again, i would say that one of the problems is that everyone has in this case is whether or not there was a waiver of that privilege. mmm-hmm. based on any number of issues, including the crime/fraud exception. meaning if you re having discussions with an attorney to commit a crime, you don t get to assert attorney/client privilege. and finally, what does the financial piece of this tell you, that are digging into the business dealings, the financial records, this account that rudy says in fairness he claims was a completely domestic payment. well, it says that they re looking at whether or not he should have registered as a foreign agent, number one. because if he had been hired by a remember, that these two the two indicted people are americans, if but if the money is coming to them from russia or other foreign sources, that means he should have registered. there are also questions about the campaign finance violations
that he shouldn t be in violation of the agreement at that point with the government. the question really is did trump know what dowd was doing? and it s hard to imagine just in the common sense level that he didn t and that, in fact, he was involved in it and directed it. mueller decided not to go there and not to press dowd on this because of the attorney/client privilege. frankly, i think that is something that other prosecutors would have treated differently and been more aggressive about. that s one area where mueller didn t go. i think a lot of prosecutors would have gone there because of the crime/fraud exception. i think it s part of this bigger pattern that we see with trump, with his lawyers that now is clearly laid out in the mueller report of trump trying to get witnesses not to cooperate against him by using this power of the pardon in a corrupt way. and that is still the shocking