Martin luther king jr. s friend, john lewis, gets tonights last word. Up next, new reporting white house chief of staff john kelly warned epa director skon pruitt the scandals had to end. Thats on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams and that starts now. Tonight, the president may feel relief, but hes not off the hook in the Russia Investigation. As new questions emerge about him being a subject. And legal advice for donald trump is offered up this evening on fox news. Plus what happens when Robert Mueller delivers his report . Well ask a powerful member of the Senate Judiciary committee. And reality check. Donald trump on day 440. Learning that enacting policy as president is a lot harder than delivering an Applause Line on the stump. The 11th hour on a wednesday night begins now. Although he is a subject . There was no collusion between the president and russia, so nothing has changed. We know what we did and what we didnt do. So none of this comes as much of a surprise. The Washington Post says the revelation about the president being a subject of the investigation came in early march. During negotiations over a possible interview between donald trump and bob mueller. And it was in early march that we learned about the first signs of problems on trumps legal team. On march 10th, the New York Times reported that trump had approached bill clintons impeachment lawyer, emmitt flood. The president responded to that news account with a tweet slamming the paper and praising his own attorneys, john dowd, thai bob, and jay sekulow. Dowd, the main counsel handling the Mueller Investigation, left the legal team later in march. A friend of donald trump told the Washington Post that dowd was frustrated when the president ignored his advice to refuse an interview with the Special Counsel. The president has repeatedly expressed his willingness to
talk to mueller. Mr. President , will you testify to Special CounselRobert Mueller, sir . I would like to. Are you going to talk to mueller . Im looking forward to it, actually. But i would do it under noeth would you be willing to speak under oath, to give your version of events . 100 . And tonight former u. S. Attorney joe digenova, who agreed to join trumps team then had to drop out due to conflicts, had this to say about muellers efforts to interview the president and about the Deputy Attorney general supervising the investigation. Lets say this, first of all, about Rod Rosenstein. His conduct from the beginning of this has been a disgrace. Legally and every other way. He is an embarrassment to the administration. It is truly too bad that he cannot be fired. Now we are told that mueller wants to interview the president of the United States, who knows nothing, who has been a witness to nothing, who is not a target
of the investigation. The president should not agree to an interview. The president should at the most answer written questions in a very limited area, and he should never, ever be interviewed. Too bad about those conflicts, those two seem like a match made in heaven. Carol leonnig, political investigations reporter for the Washington Post. Jeremy bash, former chief of staff for the cia and pentagon, former counsel to the house intelligence committee. Chuck rosenberg, former u. S. Attorney and former senior fbi official. All three msnbc contributors. Let me start with you, chuck. Because you and i havent spoken since carols Bombshell Report with her colleague robert costa, dropped a little more than 24 hours ago. But i want to ask you about this notion that people aligned with the president are saying publicly and privately, john dowd who was the president s lawyer reportedly left in part over a disagreement about this, that no one even on the
president s side thinks that the president can be trusted to survive an interview with bob mueller. Well, nicole, he can be he can survive it if he tells the truth. I mean, at least i guess the point is nobody thinks hes capable of telling the truth. Well he seems to have struggled with that in the past. This is not a place where you walk in and make stuff up. For a whole bunch of reasons. Including the fact that if you happen to be under oath, it can be perjury. And even if youre not under oath, nicole, you could be guilty of a different felony, Making False Statements to the fbi in the course of their investigation. So i could understand why some people wouldnt want their client going in under those circumstances, and frankly, this is a hard call for good attorneys when they have clients who are cooperative and listening. And that does not seem to be the case here. Chuck, let me ask you about something you and i have talked about off of television. Let me put you on the spot on television. Just because somebody is a subject at one hour doesnt mean
that their Status Couldnt Change and they couldnt become a target at another hour. Is there some concern that theres something that could transspire in the course of an interview that could change the president s status . Well, sure. So he could admit truthfully, which seems unlikely, his role in certain events, including an Obstruction Of Justice. Or you can just become a target having been a subject because the prosecutors and investigators learn more about you as time rolls on. These are all categories in which and in which people do and can shift. The fact that youre a subject one day, noik coal, certainly doesnt mean you cant be a target the next. That can come out of your own mouth or it can come out of the mouth of other witnesses. Jeremy bash, let me read you something a former federal prosecutor told me today. He said, muellers report, which in legal circles seemed to be in carol lease piece which was chock full of bombshells, seemed to be the one that more former
doj officials, former prosecutors, were talking about today. The revolution that bob mueller will deliver a report about the president s conduct in office, potentially about Obstruction Of Justice. This former federal prosecutor said to me, Muellers Report Doesnt Preclude Mueller from indicting literally everyone else around the president , but trump will be dealt with just like ken starr celt with president clinton. The report puts the Impeachment Process in motion. Do you agree with that assessment . Absolutely, nicole. I think a report from a Special Counsel is, in effect, a roadmap for impeachment and removal from office. And that does not in any way prohibit the Special Counsel from bringing criminal charges against an array of other individuals close to the president. I think, you know, for several months now weve sort of been thinking about a report as potentially a private report, that maybe only Rod Rosenstein would see. I think the reality is if the president is a subject of a criminal investigation, if his
conduct is booeg investigated by bob mueller, and bob mueller comes out with a comprehensive, narrative report, then i think Rod Rosenstein is going to come under a tremendous amount of pressure to not only share it with congress but share it with the american people. Carol leonnig, congratulations on this report. I want to ask you about, you had very Detailed Analysis from what seemed like people in the know. Former u. S. Attorneys with very nuanced analysis of what the decision to interview witnesses, not in front of the grand jury, might mean and about whether it was bob muellers intention to present the Obstruction Of Justice case in the form of a report where it pertained to the president all along. Can you flesh out that legal theory for us a little bit tonight . So weve talked to a lot of people over the last several months, really, about the issue of a report. And i have to say, nicole, its
been one of these vexing qualities of reporting where you have not enough to report, you think youre on to something, you keep hearing the word report, and you just dont know whether or not its real or not, or if its gossip or scattershot. In this instance, we felt that we had enough people who were hearing it from muellers own lips or from the lips of people on his team that there was a plan to write a report about specifically the president s actions and alleged Obstruction Of Justice. And back to your question about the legal sort of standards here, most of the legal experts weve spoken to, including u. S. Attorneys, strongly doubt that mueller will charge a sitting president with a crime, if he ever were to have evidence of such a crime. That he will be guided instead by Justice Department office of Legal Counsel opinions, body in 1973 and in 2000, which say that a sitting president is immune
from prosecution, criminal prosecution, and that mueller, if he finds evidence that rises to the level of criminal prosecution, or even is just incredibly worrisome, will put all of that in a report and will ultimately kick this to the political process. The other branch of government to handle. Because the Justice Department, again, under this legal finding, is not able to prosecute a sitting president. Chuck rosenberg, let me ask you about that sound that we played at the top of the show. That was joe digenova. He was a candidate to be added to the president s legal team about the time that if you sort of wind back the clock based on carol and robert acostas reporting, it would be about the time john dowd would have informed the president he learned from the Special Counsel that he was a subject, not simply a witness, in the investigation. Could we unpack some of the reasons that we now become pretty clear why mr. Digenova,
and his wife, who represents mark corallo, a onetime spokesperson for the president s legal team, who walked out the door, said he would have nothing to do with the team after he thought there was a directive from hope hicks and perhaps higher up to lie, to craft a statement aboard Air Force One that amounted to a lie about don jr. s meetings with russians. And i ask you this because carols reporting brings the Obstruction Of Justice case back into the spotlight. We talk alternatively about the Collusion Case and the Obstruction Of Justice case. Watching that clip with joe dejenna voe, we know what kind of approach he would have taken. If you could speak to the president being a subject and the president not able to be represented by someone who represents potentially a witness in the investigation of the president perhaps obstructing justice. Right, it seems to be a classic conflict, nicole. A single lawyer cant represent two people who might have
opposing interests or opposing views in the same matter. If theyre representing mark corallo, and they appear to be and mark turns out to be a witness against the president , then digenova should not also be representing the president. Hes getting information from two people that would be contradictory and conflicting. And so clear conflict. I think it makes good sense that mr. Digenova is not in the case anymore based on what i heard him say in that clip. It seems like the type of attorney that the president might like to have on his side. That said, he cant. Its a conflict, and he has to just represent one person. And jeremy, it he seems to be working his own way around those conflicts by giving the president advice where he knows hell have the president s undivided attention, on fox news. But i traveled back in time because another thing that happened during this period where we know thanks to carols reporting he was learning that he was a subject of the investigation was that they
reached out to ted olson. Ted olson, a highly regarded figure not just in conservative legal circles but across the ideological spectrum. Ted olson its my understanding said he would have nothing to do with representing donald trump. Hes since appeared on this network saying theres too much chaos for this to be good for anyone. But it just illustrates the schizophrenia to have talked to joe digenova one day and ted olson the next, and to be incapable of recruiting either man onto his team, speaks to the ongoing problem of the president really having a oneman legal operation. Yeah, and the president s going to need some legal heft here. If he tries to oppose bob muellers request for an interview, bob mueller could go to the grand jury and get a subpoena for the president to testify. I think what would ensue would be essentially a legal battle between the department of justice and the Special Counsel and the president s legal team over when and where the president will be required to give testimony. Of course in the Clinton Ken Starr investigation, they ended up doing it in the white house, there was closed circuit television. I think this would be a running gun battle, a legal battle between the jay sekulows of the world and bob mueller. I put my money on bob mueller. I think the trump team may have thought they might have had to take this all the way to the supreme court, which is why they might need to find an appellate lawyer like ted olson, but of course ted olson said no. We heard from sally yates tonight, interviewed by our friend matt apuzzo at georgetown law school. I think it would be a huge problem for our kcountry if he fired director mueller. Were not talking about some tangential issue here. Were talking about the issue as to a foreign adversarys attack on our democracy. And who was involved in that, if anyone, in the Trump Campaign or the president himself. You know, those are issues we need to get to the bottom of. Do you have any sense, carol leonnig, from your reporting and really taking our knowledge as a Viewing Public to the next level and understanding that the president is not merely a witness in the Russia Investigation, or the Obstruction Of Justice probe, he is a subject, which is not as bad as being a target, but he is a subject. Do you have any sense of the president s State Of Mind or the people closest to him when it comes to bob muellers status . We heard joe digenova say basically theyre stuck with rosenstein, they cant fire him, but they do call him a disgrace, and the president himself has attacked bob mueller on twitter, an uptick of outcries since your reporting or perhaps since they became aware of it. Whats your sense of sort of the State Of Mind of the president
and his legal team visavis rosenstein and mueller . So the president s frustration level has been, you know, kind of like a Roller Coaster for the last 14 months. Up very high, spiking, taking a break, spiking again. His frustration according to the people close to him and even some of his advisers, legal advisers, is that how can i be president when every single headline every week is about whether or not i am legitimately the president . Whether or not the russians essentially inserted me into the white house because of their efforts to interfere in this election . I dont think im overstating his level of anger at the idea that hes an illegitimate candidate. He hates that notion and finds it infuriating. Because he doesnt believe he did collude with the russians. Whether or not any of his campaign allies did, they
clearly had a lot of contact with some interesting russians. Whether or not they were engaged in a conspiracy to defraud our government, well see. But what we have reported over the last several months makes clear that the president still views this investigation itself as illegitimate and has said privately to his aides that he wishes he could fire rosenstein, that he wishes he could fire mueller, he wishes this would end. I think it was in february, you must forgive me on my memory of the dates, last night feels like last year. Its been a blur for you, im sure. But if my memory serves, in february the president was speaking about maybe it was january the nunes memo. Again, if anyone remembers that. He was discussing the nunes memo as something that would soften the ground and make it possible to have people realize that rosenstein was doing a terrible job managing the justice
department and the fbi and probably needed to go. So again, is he obstructing justice . Or has he just lost his composure about an investigation he thinks is unfair . Were over time. Im going to break some rules just to fill in, let Check Rosenberg try to answer that question real question, youve got 60 seconds. Hard question to answer, im not sure im going to need all of that time. Look, as carols reporting has been great, i think were seeing the president s concerns bubbling to the surface. Whether or not that constitutes obstruction, gives us some evidence of his State Of Mind. Perhaps, but i think it really remains to be determined. Im as curious as anyone else to see where it goes from here, nicole. Thank you for that. Im going to give jeremy bash your last 30 seconds, go. I think there is a conspiracy to meet with russians, to talk to them, and to plan to get dirt
on hillary clinton. Thats been established in multiple ways. I think the only real question is, did the president know about it . And i think