Crista anderson and author of the death of expertise tom nichols and author of power up jacqueline alemani. Joe and mika are off this morning. Joe is tending to the funeral of his mother as you heard here. Key people, who along with don jr. Signed off on a check reimbursing Michael Cohen for paying off Stormy Daniels. The General Services committee holds the lease for the building that houses the trump hotel in washington. The nra received a document request, as well as the National Enquirer. Committee chairman jerry nadler said the initial request for documents are limited to those that already have been submitted to the special counsel, the Southern District of new york or or congressional committees. The chairman explained what sets his investigation apart. Our job is very different from other Law Enforcement agencies. The special prosecutor has a specific manndate to investigat only the russian interference in the election or possible collusion or interference and to look at crimes. The Southern District of new york only looks at crimes. Our job is to protect the rule of law in this country and that means we have to look at the three major threats to the rule of law that we have seen and that is corruption, personal enrichment and violation of the emoluments law, abuse of power, attacks on the press, attacks on the judiciary, attacks on Law Enforcement agencies and obstruction of justice. Are you going to cooperate with mr. Nadler . I cooperate all the time with everybody. Up know the beautiful thing . No collusion, its all a hoax. Youre going to learn about that as you grow older. Its a political hokax. Both the white house and the Trump Campaign released statements in response to the House Judiciary Committees new investigation into potential abuses. Last night Sarah Huckabee sanders released a statement that reads in part chairman nadler and his fellow democrats have embarked on this fishing expedition because theyre terrified that their twoyear false narrative of russia collusion is tumbling. Their intimidation and abuse of american citizens is shameful. Democrats are harassing the president to distract from their radical agenda of making america a socialist country. She went on to say the democrats are more interested in pathetic political games and catering to a radical leftist base than on producing results for our citizens. The democrats are not after the truth, they are after the president. And the Trump Campaign released a similar statement. The white house conference acknowledges that they need legitimate reasons. Some may produce clashes with the administration over executive privileges. You have over 80 letters. Sweeping doesnt begin to cover what nadler and the other Committee Heads are preparing to do here. Some say and critics say this is too much, that its overreach, that its not the mandate of the Judiciary Committee, its not the mandate of these committees and all theyre trying to do is gum up this presidency and to tie up the president and to hurt his chances to become elected in 2020. The number is staggering, 80, 81 submissions, even if it were half that. You would think from the outside looking in that this means the end really of the daytoday operation of the Trump Administration. They are going to be so tied up in responding and reacting to these requests internally in the white house that you cant see given staff that does not get exactly high marks to begin with and the thinness of the staff, so many people have departed, how do they function, jonathan, on a daytoday basis with all of this hanging over their heads . They have hired some new attorneys and staffed up to some degree. Elections have consequences. This is the moment the white house has started to prepare for since that day in november when the democrats took control of the house. The cohen hearing was the hoping act and sort of laid out a road map of whats coming. Up toed on all t touched on all the different aspects of the president s life, his business and with the subpoena go after the trump orbit, not just the presidency and the administration but everything thats become prior to this. The president was relatively relaxed in that response. According to our reporting, its a very different picture behind closed doors. He is deeply frustrating with whats coming, the failure of the hanoi summit to reach an agreement and this is going to bog down the daytoday operations of this white house. Were seeing some of that frustration come out through twitter but this is a west wing now that is going to be under siege. Tom, this is as jonathan said precisely what democrats promised, if they won, were going to investigate. Jerry nadler said this is exactly our mandate, which is oversight of the republicans, oversight of the government. This is something raspberepus should have been doing over the last two years. Weve simply gotten overwhelmed. If this is a fishing expedition we have to take a line from jaws, youre going to need a bigger boat because theres going to be a lot of fish and theres a lot to look at here. Any one of these could have been a major congressional investigation but the republicans managed to stiff arm these, elections have consequences, this is something the democrats said they would do and theyre doing it as they promised. What does this mean for the daytoday operations for the United States government . This is going to be a fulltime job for this white house to produce the documents, to manage the pushback on it. This is going to take us through and into the campaign. I would suggest this is very different in some ways than the message that Many Democrats ran on and won on in many of these swng distri swing districts. We disagree with the president , we want to work with him and hold him accountable, which is very different from we want to stop this administration from doing anything. Republicans were telling voters if you want your government to function, leave us in power, at least there will be a minimal level of functioning. To the, tent this gives trump the ability to say, hey, if you dont like what the government is doing, its because im dealing with all of these requests. It further makes him the victim. It went wrong because we cant possibly deal with crisis a, b and c because 81plus requests have come our way. In some ways that may have been a strategic misfire on the part of nadler. Alexander knicks, former head of cambridge and lit ka, very interested to hear what who knows, what his role was with the campaign, any role he may have had in any potential alleged collusion. About there are others on that list are just about making the president look bad. To kristens point, we put up a tweet from david axelrod. He wrote maybe im missing something but the hazard of an omnibus document demand by house judiciary versus discrete, serial ones is that however will the the areas of inquiry, the wideranging nature of it is too easily plays into the witch hunt meme. The president would do this either way regardless of how valid this inquiry is. First of all, this number 80 pales in comparison to the Senate Whitewater investigation during the Clinton Administration in which the republicans issued 1,285 subpoenas to the Clinton White house. So comparing 80 documents to 1,200, you know, that speaks for itself. But then also i think we need to look at this as an insurance policy. This is, you know, the mueller scope investigation has been pretty limited and as alexandria ocasiocortez said yesterday, this is really about the president s tax returns and his potential ties to foreign governments and whether or not they have leverage over the Trump Administration. And then, you know, i think lastly this, you know, this should be viewed as, again, an insurance policy and every single one of these people who nadler has requested documents from is already involved in the federal probe of the Southern District of new york or the Mueller Probe and has already been reached out to. These are people who are already it a connected. The heads of the house intelligence, Foreign Affairs and oversight committees have sent letters to white house chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and secretary of state mike pompeo requesting a trove of documents and asking the translators present for the meetings and calls be made available for interviews with their committees. It cites media reports that the president has taken steps to seize control over the meetings and what the two men discussed. On february 21, 2019 we wrote a joint letter to you requesting basic information about whether the president in fact destroyed records relating to his conversations with president putin in violation of the president ial records act or if he did not, where are those records located . This is a coordinated effort by six or seven committees led by democrats. They wanted the information about these meetings since when this happened. We still dont know what happened in the meeting between trump and putin in helsinki when they met for two hours. This is going to be the back drop for the next two years. This is the back drop of the campaign, of his reelection bid. On the one hand theyre going to be under siege, that is going to be tough to sort of mount any sort of positive message from this white house when this is happening, but at the same time, this allows him to claim, as we have seen, president ial harassment. Thats his new twitter trope. Hes going to say were under attack and the idea of government overreach, democratic overreach, is going to be the theme day to day. Im the victim here and if you want the government to work, you know, come back to me, doesnt give them this power. Woo haven we havent mentioned it this morning and not a lot of Media Attention has been focussed on it but one of the most important investigations is going on and its going over the president s tax returns and if they get the tax returns, that opens up a whole, whole new area of investigation which would truly interest large portions of the American Public, without regard to ideology. Thats one of the holy grails of democrats, if we get in we can subpoena the tax returns. Were talking about tax returns like its completely abnormal for president s to put forward their tax returns, which president has have been doing fa long time. Hes ggt oing to call this a wi hunt no matter what you do. All of these things together are just going to overwhelm the white house because they dont have a process for dealing with any of this stuff. I think one of the things thats interesting here is the call to bring in the translators, which i think really shows that the Foreign Affairs committee in particular has said, you know, weve really had enough of this, this is now going to be hard ball to start calling in people that normally are like kind of a privileged relationship because people need to know these things. Im a fan of secrecy in foreign policy, but somebody in congress, somewhere in the oversight committee, someone needs to know what happened with the president , with the russians, with helsinki, with his finances. This is the normal business of government that has to get done now and the white house just isnt ready for it. Kristen, i think some people who look at this but Many Americans will say my gosh, weve got the Mueller Investigation, the house intel, the senate intel, the Southern District of new york is looking into the business side of this. Do we really need another two years of investigation of donald trump to overlay whats already there . To the point that you made, tom, and that jackie made, donald trump is going to say this is a witch hunt no matter what, but i think the breadth of what is being investigated and the number of investigations means that your median swing voers are likely to believe donald trump when he says it rather than just his base. By giving him ale will more room to mack that argument and be credible to more people, i think it is helping the chance he gets reelected, that its harming the chances of any real findings of this investigation to be viewed as this was just the Legal Process taking its course, this is just oversight at work, which i think in some ways it makes it harder for someone like a bob mueller. Lets say he finds something pretty serious. If it is one of a panoply of different investigations and trump has more credibility with voters when he says this is a witch hunt, i think that would be really unfortunate. If bob mueller finds something serious and trump is able to wave it away and enhanced by his ability to do so by the fact you had 81 different people trying to dig into every deal trump ever made, it gives him more credibility when he says hes the victim. I dont disagree with what you said but you get back to a basic question, the reason for all these investigations donald trump j. Trumps family criminality over the scope of decades. You could start here in new york with rentals and buildings. Now it builds up hes president of the United States. The scope of potential criminality in this thing is unheard of in a sitting president of the United States. To your other point, i absolutely agree with you. By him doing this every day, witch hunt, no collusion, every day, multiple times a day, the public out there is just exhausted from all of this and is too busy and too consumed with enough is enough to focus on the criminality. But the public will. And it speaks to the bind democrats are in. Already we know theyre trying to tamp down the idea of impeachment because they feel like that would be overreach. Suddenly if investigation becomes too much weve got a lot ahead on morning joe. Well sort through the new reporting linking donald trump with fox news again. Plus, did the president personally interview to get the department of justice to stop a merger involving cnns Parent Company . And jim vandehei of axios joins us with the answer to the question of what is americas least Favorite Company . Youre watching morning joe. Well be right back. Theres a tease. Our everyday diet is very acidic. It can cause damage to the enamel. 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And it was reported fox news knew about the subsequent payment to Stormy Daniels to buy her silence before the election and that they killed the story to protect trump, telling the fox reporter who uncovered the details, quote, good reporter, k kiddo but rupert wants trump to win so let it go. He denies killing the story saying it did not hold up to Network Standards at the time. The new piece devils into at t warner which was upheld by a federal appeals court. Thencandidate donald trump spoke out against the merger which included cnn stating, quote, that is a deal we will not