Well see. Thank to you phillip, zerlina, john. Thank you for being with us. All in with chris hayes starts right now. Tonight on all in. I dont want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet. A New York Times bombshell. Can you say unequivocally no one here has discussed pardons in this case . The president s lawyer reportedly floated pardons for flynn and plfrt before they were charged. Ive always found Paul Manafort to be a very decent man. Tonight it the reporter who broke the story and what this means for the Obstruction Case against the president. Then, did the Special Counsel just file evidence of Trump Campaign collusion with russia . Thats what he said. Thats what i said. Thats obviously what our position is. Plus, the president announces the firing of the v. A. Secretary on twitter. And apple ceo tim cook on Mark Zuckerbergs current
predicament. I wouldnt be in this situation. Okay. More from kara swisher and my exclusive interview when all in starts right now. Good evening from new york. Im chris hayes. At every turn, the president has tried to Underminor Hinder TheSpecial CounselRussia Investigation. Now it turns out his legal team explored taking an extraordinary step to shield two of muellers key targets. A president ial pardon. New york times Reporting Today The President s personal attorney john dowd raise theed the idea of manafort and Flynn As Mueller was building cases against those two men. John dowd who resigned just last week reportedly discussed potential pardons with the lawyers last summer. Since then, of course, flynn pleaded guilty to lying to investigators and is now crucially cooperating with muellers probe. While manafort faces two
separate criminal trials on dozens of charges including Money Laundering and other financial fraud. Dowd denies the times story which was reported by five of the papers top journalists and attributed to two unnamed sources. Jay sekulow The Last Man Standing also claims pardons have not been discussed and ty cobb who represents the white house, hes a taxpayer funded employee, in the russia probe released a very carefulfully worded statement. I have only been asked about pardons by the press and have routinely responded On The Recorded that no pardons are under discussion or under consideration at the white house. Asked about the report today, the Press Secretary repeatedly just referred back to cobbs statement claiming to have no firsthand knowledge of any pardon discussions. Did the president direct john dodd to talk to the attorney of manafort and flynn about potential pardons. Im not were of any conversations at all. Did the president have a reaction to these revelations . Did you ask him specifically . I did not talk to him about it specifically. Again, ive been in a number of conversations. Its never come up. Now as we know this white house does not have the best track record on things like facts or accuracy or denials that you can take to the bank. This is not the first indication the president has considered pardoning key witnesses or targets in the investigation. Last summer, around the same period that was cited today by the times, the Washington Post reported that trump, and i quote here, asked his advisers about his power to pardon aids, Family Members and even himself according to one of those people. One day after that report was published, the president tweeted while ill agree the u. S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is leaks against us. Fake news. Months later after Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to a federal crime, signed on as a cooperating witness, the
president did not rule out the possibility of granting him a pardon. Once and for all. Would you consider a pardon for Michael Flynn . I dont want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet. Well see what happens. Lets see the. Msnbc National Security contributor Michael Schmidt is one of the reporter whos broke the story for the New York Times. First, lets talk about the timing and the context under which these discussions happened. So this happened last summer. This was at a time that mueller was building his cases against manafort and flynn. This was when they were trying to figure out what evidence the government had. And there was concern within the president s circle about what cooperation from these two would look like. Particularly by flynn who had been around for the entire campaign and obviously for the first three weeks in the white house before he was fired. Okay. But so the context is that the cases are building. Theres a worry i guess that
theyre going to talk. And dowd is talking to flynns lawyers and manaforts lawyers individually and sort of floating the idea what if the president were to pardon you . Dowd had the lead in dealing with both of these lawyers. They had non they had basically agreements to Work Together to strategize and share information together. And it was in the course of those discussions that he raised that. Now, the question is, is that was dowd doing this on his own . Was he out simply freelancing raising this with them, or was he doing it at the president s behest. People that know dowd find it hard to believe that he would go out and do Something Like that without talking to his client. And theres precedent here dowd once claiming that he wrote a tweet the president sent out saying that flynn was fired for lying to the fbi even though that wasnt that plausible. Dowd is denying this report. Hes saying its not true. Is he lying . Well, look, we got to a point we felt very comfortable with the information that we had. We did a lot of work on this. As youve seen some folks have gotten this confirmed, as well. When i talked to dowd today, he said i dont know what we would have pardoned flynn for. He said i dont know what flynn did wrong. He said comey and salliates had said that flynn didnt do anything wrong. I dont know he would pardon him for. This mirrored some of the reporting we had done that showed that dowd was telling people close to the investigation that he and the president thought the case against flynn was flimsy and that there was nothing there. So that added up in terms of what dowd was telling us On The Record today. So he raises this according to your reporting with both lawyers while theyre being investigated by mueller. Theyre ultimately indicted. What if the president were to pardon you. What happens after that is floated according to your reporting . Well, thats the thing. It looks like manafort was not interested in it. Manafort has long pain maintained his innocence. He said hes done nothing wrong and thinks this Government Overreach and says he wants to fight it. Flynn went and accepted a Plea Agreement from mueller. He did not count on a pardon from trump. Now, why did he do that . We dont know. Its probably a safer path maybe to go with mueller. Maybe flynns lawyers were concerned that taking a pardon would be obstruction. We dont know. But in the end, flynn does accept a Plea Agreement last november and has been working with mueller since then. Michael schmidt, great reporting. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Richard blumenthal is a member of the Senate Judiciary committee calling on the justice you department to protect the investigation. Your reaction to the reporting the president s own personal attorney floats the possibility of a president ial pardon as both men are being targeted for possible indictment ultimately indicted by the special prosecutor. Its powerful damning evidence of Obstruction Of Justice particularly corrupt
intent. It has to be investigated by the Special Counsel. He has to talk to dowd and under oath. And if the Attorney Client privilege is an obstacle, he may be able to pierce it because of the crime fraud exception. And a complete investigation of this aspect of possible Obstruction Of Justice is absolutely necessary by the Special Counsel. Michael schmidt in the times raising the possibility of obstruction, i want to read this. Mr. Muellers team could investigate the prospect mr. Dowd played offers to thwart the inquiry. The legal experts are divided whether such offers might constitute Obstruction Of Justice. Do you have an opinion on that . The conventional wisdom is that the pardon power is very broad. Virtually limitless discretion. But its not so broad it can be used to commit a crime to stymie or thwart ar investigation, that is for a corrupt purpose. And so what we have here is
potential use of that power to commit a crime to save himself to stop or stymie an investigation. The second point is that those cases about the broad and limitless discretion of the president are very old. They date from 1867 and 1871 and i think a Court Viewing what the president s done here would be absolutely furious at his contempt for the rule of law, not to say he Hasnt Demonstrated Contempt for the rule of law continuously as president but in this instance, his misconduct goes to the core of the integrity of the criminal justice system. And i think that they could well make an exception or in effect rewrite the rule so as to apply and restrict his unbridled supposedly discretion. So theres a lag here. Its a little hard sometimes to
keep track of the chronology right . We know the president tried to get don mcgahn to fire the Special Counsel last year. We only find out about it months later. This reporting about last summer, this being floated were finding out about it now. The reason i raise that, you and a bunch of your colleagues had a lot to say yesterday about protecting mueller. It seemed to me out of nowhere. Chris coons and thom tillis statement about protecting mueller. A letter from Senate Democrats and you say trump tweets becoming more extreme requiring Saturday Night Massacre now looming larger. Was there is something that set you off yesterday . Really a combination of factors here as the pressure on the president grows greater. The erratic and extreme tweets that he has been sending. The prospect of three witnesses cooperating, three very potentially powerful witnesses
with evidence against him. And his perhaps growing fear and bob all perhaps these kinds of threats from his surrogates and others in congress that they would stop the investigation. What ive asked the top officials of the Department Of Justice to do who may be in the line of succession, rod rosenstein, if hes fired, that they commit that they will not fire Robert Mueller that they will in no way restrict his authority and that they will continue the investigation without any interference. Thats very important to avoid the kind of Constitutional Con Fla Ration that we saw with the Saturday Night Massacre which occurred because ruckelshaus and richardson made the same kind of pledge and raised the countrys conscience about the nixonian excess of power. I want to be clear though. Did you not get some side effect behind the scenes can intelligence or warning or something passed to you
finger at me for committing a crime, i have the corrupt intent to impede, influence and undermine the investigation and i would be guilty of Obstruction Of Justice for doing an innocent act which would normally be an innocent act of advising a client because whats in my head my intent is corrupt. Right. Thats really crucial thing to keep in mind here. Tuck take legal actioning that because of the intent of legal action is actually illegal and Obstruction Of Justice. Thats exactly right. Thats why using the pardon power to obstruct this investigation it doesnt make any difference if its the pardon power or any other legal if your intent is to impede. Paul, youre nodding your head. Yeah. So timing and context is everything here, chris. So remember, flynn is the target of a grand jury investigation. Manafort is about to be indicted. Their lawyer, trumps lawyer
knows that theyre going to be pressured to snitch on trump. So trumps lawyer goes to their lawyers and says, lets see if we can work out a Little Something something. My client happens to have there extraordinary power to pardon anybody. You know what im saying . The legal term for that is Obstruction Of Justice. The fact that the president does have there pardon power doesnt mean that if he uses it to thwart an investigation against himself that its not Obstruction Of Justice. So again, its the same as when he fired comey. He has the constitutional power, the Legal Authority to fire comey. But its still evidence of his corrupt intent. This brings to us this tricky issue that is were moving forward which is the case for obstruction seems to me very strong just on the face. If this Werent The President , if were talking about someone else, all the actions hes taken. But the question of what does
that amount to in the absence of him having some sort of underlying thing that he did or what mueller could even do with it. You could do it by itself. All of the watergate figures were convicted for Obstruction Of Justice. There wasnt any. Not the president. Youre saying the people around him. Around nixon, all people around nixon were convicted for Obstruction Of Justice. There was no proof john mitchell, the attorney general broke into the watergate or was involved in that. It could be brought as a separate crime. However, i think here youre going to see an underlying crime that the obstruction is going to be the motive for. And that i think is going to be critical to this prosecution. Paul. I always agree with my man, nick. Hes right. I dont think mueller would bring an Obstruction Case without collusion. Heres the thing. Trump is sure acting like Michael Flynn has the dirt on him and trump is acting like he will do anything to prevent that dirt from coming out. The good news from our democracy is that Special Counsel mueller already knows so flynn has pled guilty. Hes cooperating with mueller. So mr. President , a pardon at this point wont do you any good. Thats the other question. I mean the idea there was this period where it seemed like pardon entered the discussion. Thats when we got are you going to pardon flynn on the white house lawn. We got the tweet and reporting. Were now getting reporting later it was on the table. You wonder if that will resurfaces at some point. Look, even if he does pardon him, you still have the State Attorney General in new york who canning come in and fill the vacuum. There are crimes under the new york penal code that are better than some of the crimes that can be used under the federal criminal code. Spoken like a real prosecutor. If you had a choice between Rikers Island and club fed, what would you take . What about the idea . I mean, what is the metastory
here with dowd . Its a strange thing for us to be learning this right now. I dont know who the sources are. But its interesting to me that dowd leaves and now were getting this presumably not from the dowd himself. What do you make of that, paul . You know, the president doesnt so much like lawyers as fixers. So he gets these people to do things that i think are questionably in terms of ethics but they do it. At some point they start to have regrets. Dowd has now resigned. His posture publicly was he wanted the president to cooperate with the investigation, but he did not want the president to go into an interview with mueller because he knows that mueller would eat the president alive. So i think i can imagine i cant imagine a more difficult job than being a lawyer for donald trump. My sympathy goes out to these guys. Nick and paul, great to have you both. Next, how Robert Mueller may have just drawn the most direct line yet between the trump
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