When all in starts right now. Good evening from new york. Im chris hayes. Tonight for the very first time a federal judge has ruled on a key question in the escalating battle between the president and a congress that is attempting to investigate him. The ruling is not good for donald trump at all. You might remember earlier this month the president challenged a House OversightCommittee Subpoena to his Accounting Firm for financial records relating to the president. His lawyers tried the fairly audacious argument before the judge that congress basically almost has no power to investigate the president. Well, today in an expedited ruling, a federal judge laughed their argument out of court, saying, quote, it is simply not fathomable that a constitution that grants congress the power to remove a president for reasons including criminal behavior would deny congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct, past or present, even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry. In other words, no, too bad, you have to comply with the subpoenas, congress has the power to do this. Thats one thing thats happening in the battles between the white house and congress. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is so utterly desperate to prevent former White House Counsel Don Mcgahn from testifying before congress tomorrow, which is on the schedule as far as we know, they have now issued a legal argument from the department of justice saying congress cannot compel him to testify. Tonight mcgahns attorney told the house he will defer to trump until an agreement is reached with the white house. Now, don mcgahn matters quite a bit here because he spent, as you might remember, 30 full hours detailing to Robert Mueller trumps repeated attempts to shut down and subvert the investigation. Trump does not want mcgahn to come before the committee and say everything thats in the Mueller Report that almost nobody has read. If don mcgahn does that and says what he told mueller, it will look terrible because the president pretty clearly and did obstruct justice. Mcgahn is a credible witness with no motivation to lie. He decided to quit because he did not participate in events that he thought was akin to the saturday night office. He packed up his office, prepared to submit a rez lags letter. Said the president had asked him to do crazy expletive and told priebus and bannon he was leaving. All of this comes with the House Committee intelligence testimony voting tonight to release Michael Cohens testimony from earlier this week. As the Washington Post first reported, cohen told the committee that jay sekulow, the president s personal attorney, instructed him to lie to congress about trumps negotiations to build a trump tower in moscow. Lawyers for sec low said that this or any committee would rely on the word of Michael Cohen much less try to pierce the Attorney Client privilege and discover Confidential Communications of four respected lawyers defies logic, well established law and common sense. It is pushing democrats to a tougher position. You can watch it happen in realtime. Here is congressman david cicilline, whos a member of the democratic leadership, just a little while ago. Now theyre making this really broad claim that essentially says the president and his team are immune from ever coming before congress. Thats legally incorrect and certainly a court will ultimately have to decide that. But i think let me be clear, if don mcgahn doesnt testify, it is time to open an impeachment inquiry. Let me make sure i heard you correctly there. If mcgahn does not show up tomorrow before your committee, you say it is time for democrats to begin an impeachment proceeding . An impeachment inquiry, absolutely. We are really left with no other choice. More on that escalating showdown, im joined by chuck rosenberg, a former u. S. Attorney and served as chief of staff under then director james comey. He has a new podcast out called the oath. Im also joined by harry litman, former u. S. Attorney and assistant attorney general. Weve got 30 channels of news on this as we get the showdown between the president and congress. I want to start on the first and in some way the biggest, the judges 41page opinion saying to the president s argument that congress cant investigate you, no way, that this doesnt work. Im not a lawyer, but it felt like a fairly scathing argument opinion. What did you think . Yeah. So its a complete slapdown, and its not just this is the argument trump made to cummings but its been made across the board. Its the same argument, for example, that mnuchin has made in resisting the tax subpoena. No legislative purpose. And of course its the exact opposite argument that the administration has made in other litigation where they said you have to defer to us, you have to trust us. What the District Court said is same thing for congress. Im not going to try to psych analyze them, there is a valid oversight purpose here, thats all we need to know, end of story, and forget any kind of second guessing, the subpoena stands. Chuck, this federal court decision, its the first of what i think were going to see a lot of things, a lot of battles being waged that are ultimately going to work towards appeals courts and prove to be an extremely highstakes question before the court about what congress can and cannot do here. Thats absolutely right. And harry is right in his analysis. What the court said is i, the judge, am not going to second guess whether or not congress has a legislative purpose. Now, to your point, chris, it aint over. Its going to be appealed. An Appellate Court will have to weigh in. In fact we may have several different courts in several different places weighing in on this as more and more people try to fight subpoenas, resist production. But in the end were going to get an answer. Thats what the courts are for, to give us an answer. Whatever that answer is, folks on either side have to abide by it. So weve got this opinion from a federal judge, the first of i think several. This is going to continue to fight it out. Now weve got don mcgahn. Don mcgahn is supposed to come tomorrow. He no longer works at the white house. Hes essentially now a private citizen. He has been called to testify. Today the department of justice puts out a 15page document basically saying no, he has to listen to the president. The president says he cant do it. How broad, how aggressive is this move by the white house, harry . So its very aggressive, although its not that much more aggressive than other white houses have done. But the real big move here is to say that it applies in the case of former officials. They cite no Legal Authority because no court has decided it with one exception. A District Court previously ruled against basically the identical argument in the Harriet Meyers case. That was then settled out on appeal. But this is a tough one. I think the previous argument is going to prevail across the board at the d. C. Circuit. This is one whether or not theres a testimonial privilege that applies to former close advisers that likely will go all the way to the supreme court. Yeah, so this is a closer issue, it seems, chuck, thats harrys point here. Its always been the case that the white house says, for instance, you cant call my current white House Counsel before congress. Thats fairly established. This question here, theres both procedural but to me the bigger thing is mcgahn. Mcgahn is a key figure because of what we know he told mueller and what he saw and the desire not to have this guy basically saying what he knows in front of everyone. Theres an irony here, chris, and you touched on it in your opening. Almost everything we need to know about what mcgahn knows is in the report. Right. But so few people have read it, which i think is a shame that we now sort of feel like we need to hear from him. I get that. But im frustrated by it too because we already have access to this stuff. Now, whether or not mcgahn actually ends up testifying once again will be decided by the courts. I think harry is right again. This is an aggressive posture, but its not different than the posture, the position taken by almost every president in every white house for the last 50 years. The difference, of course, is that mcgahn is now former, not current, and thats an issue that will have to be resolved by the courts. And part of why i think mcgahn is so crucial here, harry, even from a narrative perspective, is we have reporting that he refused to counter to come out and support the president in statements after he left. We know that he essentially threatened to quit when the president tried to fire mueller. He essentially saved trumps presidency i think when he did that. He is very different than Michael Cohen in terms of a credibility standpoint. Yeah. I mean especially from a narrative perspective. Chuck is right, of course, we do know this stuff. And in fact the white house opinion acknowledges that its waived the actual material in the Mueller Report as opposed to other material, but theres just no substitute in the last few weeks and the apparent sort of shrugging shoulders shows it of having the guy in the lights actually saying those words. Thats what the democrats so dearly wanting and what the white house so crucially opposes. Chuck rosenberg and harry litman, thank you both. Check out chucks new podcast, the oath. And the other podcast. Democratic congressman roger morchi joins me now, hes a member of the committee that subpoenaed trumps financial records and interviewed Michael Cohen. The latest appears to show that don mcgahn has said that he cannot appear because hes going to respect the president s claim to prevent him from testifying. What does that mean . Well, it means that we have to enforce the subpoena. I think that its clear that the president is obviously trying to obstruct this testimony just as hes trying to obstruct the presentation of financial records and i think in court we are probably going to win again because i think courts routinely uphold our constitutional system of checks and balances and the rights of congress to conduct oversight. Yeah, you won a very big victory today pertaining to your committee and its subpoenas in which the judge said basically this is Congress Constitutional prerogative. Im not going to second guess unless theyre doing something wildly out of bounds and they have not done that. Are you happy with that decision . Yes. The fact that nobody is above the law, not even the president of the United States. The president actually sought to stay the order and the judge refused the stay. And so i think that at this point the committee intends to under the leadership of chairman cummings enforce the order once it becomes final in a few days and hopefully well have some financial records. I want to ask you about this new reporting about Michael Cohens testimony before the House Intelligence Committee and what would it mean. Before i get to that, a broader question here. Heres my read on whats happening. Democrats dont want to impeach the president generally or dont want to be seen getting out ahead of the facts. Theres reticence there. The president is obstructing at every step and that is leading to more and more democrats growing frustrated with the current posture and moving towards starting an impeachment inquiry. Is that a correct read of the vector of movement right now . Possibly. But theres been a difference of opinion on this impeachment issue for some time. However, one thing that i want to make very clear, chris, is the caucus is entirely unified on this issue of whether or not there should be checks and balances with regard to the president , whether we should be able to enforce the subpoena with regard to don mcgahn, whether or not we should be able to see the full unredraktd Mueller Report, whether we should see trumps tax records and the Money Laundering records from deutsche bank. All of these issues are ones where democrats are 100 united that we cannot allow the president to obstruct the peoples oversight of the executive branch. There is reporting tonight that one of the items contained in the transcript that i think is about to be released, i dont know if its out yet in its entirety, from the House Intelligence Committees testimony they took from Michael Cohen, that cohen says that jay sekulow told him to lie before congress. How big a deal is that . If thats true, thats a big deal. Obviously, you know, mr. Sekulow is a lawyer himself, and he has certain ethical constraints that he would obviously have violated if he counseled someone else to lie. But on top of that, he would potentially be suborning perjury and thats very serious. Do you feel like you understand the entirety of the facts before us . And i ask this because you just mentioned a whole bunch of things the caucus is unified about not letting them obscure, obstruct, deny things. Just the public facts as they already exist in daylight, do you, congressman, feel like you have a synthesized version and you could sit down with a skpit constituent and give them a 60second version . I might give them the cliff notes but there are a lot of unanswered questions. One very broad area of inquiry that none of us have answers on, which is there are 14 ongoing matters that were referred by special counsel mueller to other jurisdictions. I think 11 of them were completely redacted within the Mueller Report. And so there might be all kinds of other wrongdoing that is being investigated currently. Right. That we have no knowledge of. We dont know the subject matter nor do we know the targets. This is very important. And from an oversight standpoint, we must know what those matters are about. One other issue which is the subject of great inquiry around here is the counterintelligence information contained within the special counsels investigation. We still havent received those findings, despite the fact that chairman schiff and Ranking Member nunes in a joint bipartisan manner requested this information. We must have that information so that we can protect our national security. All right, congressman, thank you very much. Thank you. The congressional call to impeach donald trump is now officially bipartisan. The president and his allies are flipping out and trying to fight back. The new phase of that battle, next. danny let me get this straight. After a long day of hard work. You have to do more work . Every day youre nearly fried to a crisp, professionally can someone turn on the ac . no . Oh right. cause there isnt any. Here vo automatically sort your expenses and save over 40 hours a month. Without you, we wouldnt have electricity. Our hobby would be going to bed early. vo you earned it, were here to make sure you get it. danny its time to get yours vo quickbooks. Backing you. Listen to your mom, knuckleheads. Hand em over. Hand what over . Video games, whatever you got. Lets go. You can watch videos of people playing video games in the morning. Is that everything . I can see whos online. Im gonna sweep the sofa fort. Well, look what i found. Take control of your wifi with xfinity xfi. Lets roll now thats simple, easy, awesome. Xfinity xfi gives you the speed, coverage and control you need. Manage your wifi network from anywhere when you download the xfi app today. Let me be clear. If don mcgahn doesnt testify, it is time to open an impeachment inquiry. The president has engaged in an ongoing effort to impede our ability to find the truth. Congressman david cicilline, a member of democratic leadership, raising the stakes of the showdown between the president and congress, threatening to open impeachment proceedings, an inquiry formally, if former White House Counsel Don Mcgahn defies a subpoena to testify tomorrow, which it now looks like hes going to do. Now, that comes as call for impeachment has officially gone bipartisan over the weekend. Congressman justin amash of michigan became the first republican to join in after completing his own review of the Mueller Report. He explained his thinking in a long twitter thread over the weekend and it is worth taking the time to read through that whole thing. Amashs principal conclusions were that one, attorney general barr has deliberately misrepresented the report. Two, President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct. Three, partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances and, four, few members of congress have read the report. He said contrary to barrs portrayal, muellers report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment. Now, he is a libertarian thats broken from his party and the president before but he still has a 100 from a tea party group. Hes not doing any interviews and isnt trying to get anything out of his new public stance. Amash appears to have simply read the report and come to a conclusion reached by a former 1,000 prosecutors who also read it, that the president of United States obstructed justice and violated his oath of office. For more on amashs call for impeachment, im joined by a resident scholar from the American Enterprise institute, author of one nation after trump. Norm, the reaction here is notable to me. You can make the argument that amash has been an independent thinker, broken with the party in the past. The reaction from Kevin Mccarthy and the president on down is they seem pretty freaked out by it. No question theyre freaked out and trying to portray him as some kind of kook and not one of them. And its right, chris, that he has been an o