and i think they ought to apologize to start with, michael cohen. that was the president early last year giving buzz feed the type of endorsement he usually saves for amazon and the new york times. the president s pe a s personal attorney, michael cohen, threatened to sue buzz feed after it publish the steele dossier. but with other issues on his place, cohen announced he is dropping his suit against buzz feed. i m willie geist. joe and mika are back on monday. john heilemann and donny deutsch. susan delpercio. david ignatius. and this hour, former press secretary to president obama, nbc news political analyst, josh earnest. and the editor in chief of buzz feed himself, ben smith. this is like an old new york one reunion. let s talk about the lawsuit
special counsel doesn t that slow things down in this? it does seem clear to me, i follow this very closely, degenova is really ty cobb is not the president s personal lawyer, he works in the white house. so the president s legal team i think the very much up in the air at this point, and you re right. without someone for the mueller to negotiate with, that certainly is going to slow things down, but also i think the odds are, it s becoming more likely that the president won t talk to mueller at all and i think the chance that the president fires mueller has certainly gone up. i m not saying it s going to happen, but the chances have increased with dowd s departure. is. let s game out the not talking, the way that works is
if he s is one who s leaving, what does that tell you? it is not unrelated to the mcmaster departure, the john bolton arrival. you know, president trump has clearly decided he is going to be the donald trump that he wants to be. he is going to be as confrontational as he wants. the so-called grown-ups in the room, that approach to the presidency is ending in several different areas, and john dowd, ty cobb who is part of the white arguing, give mueller the documents, let s negotiate a time for you to talk for the two of you to talk. they re being marginalized for people like joe degenova, the new arrival. the timing here is fascinating. it was one week ago cnn reported that the president s legal team
nothing coming out of that investigation. there are no leaks. it s extraordinary. but what we do know is that mueller sent over a number of questions to the white house that he wanted to ask trump and we are told, maggie haberman is told that that s what set trump off on this latest titirade. it wasn t mueller asking for russia documents from the trump organization, although that was not good, but the president is extremely unsettled, bob is right. and there s somewhere between two and 100 questions mueller sent over to the white house. it will be interesting to see what joe digenova wants h time ta him to talk to mueller. and he wants people around him as aggressive as he is and who fight tooth and nail the way he s seen joe digenova do on fox
respond more forcefully. why do you think ceos have been reluctant to answer questions? why won t they sit in front of the judiciary committee and answer questions from senator klobuchar, for example. one thing i ve been hearing is they don t want to have their big tobacco moment where mark zuckerberg is up there with his hand up and testifying and it is a sensitive topic. they want the lawyer they sent the lawyers in the fall to answer these questions very carefully, to not say too much, to not give away too much and but i think that isn t going suffice. they can have a tactical decision, though. it s almost like the nra. will they agree to a degree of regulation or run the risk that senator klobuchar and her colleagues are not just going to regulate them lightly but heavily? they have a big decision to make. thank you very much. we ll send it back to mika and senator klobuchar. and given what we heard from izzy and you know this is sort of a reckoning for these tech c