a dirty book of business? that would save him some trouble. a lot of it is manafort. it s the manafort trial. there have been some small fish mueller has bng able to grab and flip. cohen and manafort are the beginning of trump being exposed. he can t hide from these men because they worked with him very closely. he can t claim he didn t know them when cohen says i ve got tapes. that s where a lot of this anger comes from and it s going to ratchet up not just because the investigation continues, but as we look at the possibility of democrats retaking the house and all of this turning into an impeachment proceeding maybe in the fall of 2019, that is what this president truly fears. he s afraid that the political consequence. you can tell from giuliani they apparently don t think they re going to be in any legal trouble. they come up with a new explanation every five minutes. politically he s concerned about th this. phil rucker, if you can tway tie this for us, if he were comforted the
up this defensive with mueller and sort of survive to the next week, the week after that and the week after that. he s more of a short-term thinker when it comes to this strategy here. phil rucker, your piece made me think of the fact that the president only looks at this in terms of his own exposure. do you think he has any awareness that he may smear mueller to the point that he could survive impeachment, but not his staff, not his family. if they re indicted and charged, they ll be prosecuted. well, i think he s concerned very much so about his family. it s one of the reasons why he s been worried to some friends about donald trump, jr. i think when you get outside the family circle he s a little less concerned. bannon is on his own. bannon is on his own, i think. omarosa is on her own. look, he s not so much worried about paul manafort s fate as he is about this trial playing out and what it means for him personally for trump, the sort of reputation, the image, the
unfairly targeted by mueller, to be unfairly attacked by the media, and so forth. i feel like he and arpaio have a road show coming. let me ask you, harry litman, to ask you what you hear and weigh in on that. it seems short on paternal courage to say, to the best of my knowledge, nothing happened. phil is dead-on. have you ever heard trump in all his career have that kind of caveat? it clearly was lawyered and it s intriguing because we don t exactly know to date about the supposed aftermath of the meeting. all we ve heard is that it fizzled, but obviously people on team trump think that there is something concrete that s going to emerge about dirt having been possibly produced. that s the reason that one assumes that trump himself is trying to distance himself. and you re certainly right, it s not a great you know,
letting flynn go. he is a good guy. i hope you can let this go. now, those are his exact words. is that correct? correct. and you them here and you put them in quotes. so why the hell marry the comey meeting? why lie? he doesn t plan to be interviewed face to face, and, well, it might be all they ve got. joining me phil rucker, harry litman former us attorney deputy assistant attorney general, frank figliuzzi former fbi assistant director for counter intelligence, betsy woodruff, politics editor for the daily beast. at the table jason johnson politics editor at the root. i have to start with you, frank. the idea now that the obstruction of justice defense lies in rudy saying, that didn t constitute obstruction of justice because a president can t obstruct justice. that was one of the original incarnations of that defense, is now that meeting never happened.