That idea and today it wasnt something just being floated. We learned about this as a fate accompli. When you heard it, admit it, when you heard the the president named his doctor head of the faa, you thought of this guy. He submitted a Health Report that was like a cross between refrigerator poetry and the north korean leaders poem on dear birthday. His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary. If elected, i can state unequivocally he will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency. That was a very strange iteration of the traditional doctors note of a president ials candidates health. But then trump did get elected and that history meant with his private doctor meant there was a little more intrigue than usual around the president s physician. This is the president s unbiased 100 Accurate Health assessment. At the time of examination, the president of 71 years, 7 months young, his resting heart rate was a cool 68 bpm, his weight a very svelt 239 pounds. He has a gorgeous 44 inch coke bottle waist and his legs go on forever, size 12 shoes and you can fill in the blanks there. Its my professional opinion that the president has a rockin bod, with the perfect cushion for the pushin. That was the saturday night live version of the white house physician because there had to be one. After the actual white house physician gave his press briefing on the president and his health and it was so excitedly positive, it left reporters who was also doctors like cnns sanjay gupta, feeling like they had to retranslate for the American Public the information that admiral jackson was providing because maybe somebody should take the hearts off the eyes. How would you characterize the president s house today, average 71yearold american male . Id say based on his cardiac assessment hands down theres no question that he is he is in the excellent range from a cardiac standpoint. Thats not me speaking, thats objective data. Can you look at the Data Collected and he will definitely fall into that category. Overall he has very, very good health. Excellent health. Dr. Gupta. Just to be clear, he is taking cholesterol lowering medication, has evidence of Heart Disease and hes borderline obese. Can you characterize that as Excellent Health . His heart is very healthy. Those are all things youre looking at with regard youre a neurosurgeon, theres stroke issues there, too, but you know President Trump has Just Announced that white house physician admiral Ronnie Jackson will be his nominee to head the department of Veterans Affairs. Department of Veterans Affairs is the second Largest Agency in the government. Its one of the largest organizations of any kind on earth. It serves 20 million veterans, serves Health Care Needs of 9 million veterans. Dr. Jackson is beloved as a white house physician, not just by the trump administration, but by Previous White House occupants as well. He was white house physician for george w. Bush and barack obama as well. People loved him in that role. He has never run any Large Organization of any kind before. Honestly, though, i want to stress, people do really like him. People say hes a great white house doctor and hes really nice. We know for sure he definitely likes the president. So theres that. Well have excellent advice as to whether or not this new appointment seems like a good idea. For now it seems we have to add another name to the departure board. The first cabinet secretary to go was tom price at health and human services. Then it was Rex Tillerson at the state department. Now we can add i dont even know which way to look. This way . This way . Three, two, one there it is, secretary of state of Veterans Affairs, David Shulkin. Like lots of trump cabinet secretaries, including tom price and ben carson and ryan zinke and, and, and, David Shulkin, the now fired secretary of Veterans Affairs, he had lots of embarrassing troubles like taxpayer spending, for example, what looked like a long taxpayerpaid vacation for he and his wife. But there are lots of people who had that particular problem, even worse than he does but now hes the one whos out. Part of this may be just another instance of the president seeming to enjoy doing his shopping on tv. It may be that when everybody else saw over the top, hyper on s hyperobsequiousness, the president saw, hey, i like the way that guy talks on tv. We do know from weeks of reporting and multiple outlets that the president really wanted to hire for this job one of the hosts of fox and friends. There was a guy at fox named pete hegseth who the president wanted to put in the v. A. Job. Theres a number of reasons why that couldnt and didnt work out. Well have that in a few minutes. But the president isnt hiding his light under a bushel for his preference for hiring people off tv. He likes the way they talk about those jobs on tv. Larry kudlow, just hired to be white house chief economic adviser, whether or not you liked gary cohn, he at least had been president of goldman sachs. Mr. Kudlow comes from a tv show. Right after he hired gary kudlow, we learned about the National Security adviser whom he liked watching on tv. There may be trouble ahead for that National Security adviser appointment. It does not require senate confirmation, but we learned from trumps first National Security adviser mike flynn that there still can be trouble if you try to keep somebody in that job whos caught up in active fbi investigations, technically if theyre active Counter Intelligence investigations. So stay tuned for that. We have that story coming up. Shopping off your tv set isnt always a great way to vet candidates for Senior Administration positions. It can also be trouble for the president s efforts to put together a legal team to represent him in the russia scandal, in the mueller investigation. One of the more remarkable things that happened just in the last week, god, it feels like years ago now, but just in the last week, the president s lead lawyer on the russia scandal quit, when it emerged that the president had picked out two new russia lawyers whom he liked the look of on tv. Joe digenova and victoria teonsing from fox tv. So john dowd took himself out. That all happened, though, before the president had actually met these two new lawyers anywhere other than through his tv screen. And when they finally arrived at the white house on thursday night, turns out the president didnt like them as much as he had on tv. A white house official described them as dishevelled in their appearances when they arrived at the white house. The president was not as impressed with them in person as he had been when they had the tv makeup on and the underlighting and you cant see their pants. Anyway, that is how we have arrived at the president not really having a legal team on the russia scandal anymore. Jay sekulow is his one outside attorney now. Hes also a fox news guy. He has spent this week trying to calm everybody down by saying its not just him, hes got other people working with him from his conservative, activist legal group. That includes, we learned today, the author of this book byzantine rome and the greek popes. He has a ph. D in medieval history, which he pursued, quote, following a midlife crisis. He wrote his book on the greek popes and eventually went back to practicing law, mostly working as a contract prosecutor for local d. A. S in georgia. Back in the 80s, he was involved in a jews for jesus case with jay sekulow, the fox news guy. But thats pretty much it. In terms of big cases. Its great for this guy, right . Look at the headline in reuters today spurned by top lawyers, trumps defense elevates washington outsider. Youre burned out in georgia, having a midlife crisis, you end up trying to get your monograph published on the byzantine era of popes and the next day youre representing the president and you have no experience whatsoever in anything like this. I mean, well done for him. But for the presidency, its a weird situation, right . Especially since things do seem to be taking a bit of a serious turn in this big National Security investigation that is swirling around the president. Lawyers for the special counsels office and for attorney alex van der zwaan have now exchanged Court Filings in advance of whats expected to be mr. Van der zwaans sentencing next week for lying to investigators. His lawyers in this filing today literally argue, im quoting here, his days are empty and lonely. They provided testimonial from his mother, including the allcaps statement, alex is the only support and joy of my life. Testimony from his mother saying how much she loves him. Theres a lot of detail from his pregnant wife and how much she loves him as well. Her soul mate. Hes said to be very sorry, quote, alex has learned his lesson, and there is no risk that he will reoffend. Those are the kinds of arguments that alex van der zwaans lawyers were making to the court. In response to those arguments, the special counsel filed their own document with the court, in which they tore mr. Van der zwaans head off. The fact that your wife is having a baby isnt reason for you to get leniency from the court. The fact that you stopped lying and pled guilty after we caught you isnt cause for leniency either. He does not deserve credit for adhering to the law. The special counsels filing literally ends, the last sentence with suggesting that if he really wants to get home for the birth of his first child, maybe he should hurry up and get to prison to start his time. The special counsels office is not messing around. Its important to remember that even though alex van der zwaan has pled guilty, hes not cooperating. He has not agreed to cooperate with the mueller investigation. He pled, and he wants them to be lenient, because he pled, but hes not cooperating with them. So presumably, this very hardball effort is to get him to change his mind about cooperating. This is important, while they are ripping van der zwaans head off in in filing, they also make explicit something that i think ought to be unnerving to this white house, even if the president doesnt necessarily have lawyers anymore who can explain this to him. Quote, among the topics about which the defendant lied were his communications with Trump Deputy Campaign chair rick gates, his communications with a ukrainian business associate of manafort and gates, person a, and his failure to produce an email between himself and the ukrainian business associate. All important matters in the investigation. Hmm. The lies and withholding of documents were material to the special Counsel Offices investigation that gates and person a were directly communicating in september and october of 2016 was pertinent to the investigation, special agents assess that person a has ties to a Russian Intelligence Service and had such ties in 2016. Quote, during his first interview with the special counsels office, he admitted he knew of that connection, stating that rick gates told him person a was a former russian Intelligence Officer with the gru. Thats all in the alex van der zwaan sentencing stuff thats going back and forth. Part of the story is van der zwaan pleading for leniency and the special counsel not at all indicating that they are down with that. But the other part of it is the special counsels office showing their hand as to something theyve got. Dear mr. President with no legal team. These filings from the special counsels office now spell out explicitly that during your president ial campaign, your Campaign Manager and your Deputy Campaign manager were in frequent contact with, whats the phrase . With a person the fbi assesses to have had current ties to a Russian Intelligence Service. And they couldnt have been unwittingly duped into doing this, because your Deputy Campaign manager is on record, telling other people at the time, hey, call this guy. Hes gru. Hes Russian Military intelligence. And thats not us guessing at what the special Counsel Office is looking at, thats them telling us what theyve got in Court Filings, where they are also going super aggressively at a guy theyve already got to plead guilty. Theyre still trying to get the court to throw him in prison even after his guilty plea. So the president likes turnover. He likes watching tv. He likes maybe hiring people from tv. He likes firing really senior people all the time and keeping everybody on their toes. The president not having a russia legal team anymore doesnt even make this list. But the investigation is getting explicit and aggressive. And it seems like it very well may be about collusion with russia, directly. Weve also now got the first report that the president may have been offering pardons to at least two of the people who ultimately got charged. Theres chaos in this young administration, sure, and that is interesting for all sorts of reasons. I dont think, though, that you can separate that from the fact that there is also now a legal hurricane swirling around a basically unreinforced, undefended president. Directv now gives you more for your thing. Your letting go thing. Your sorry not sorry thing. Your out with the old in with the new, onto bigger and better thing. Get the live tv you love. No bulky hardware. No satellite. No annual contract. Try directv now for 10 mo for 3 months. More for your thing. Thats our thing. Visit directvnow dot com aww thanks for loading, sweet. Oops. Oh burnton gravy . Gotta rinse that. Nope. No way. Nada. Really . Dish issues . Throw it all in. Cascade platinum powers through even burnton gravy. Nice. Cascade. He gets the best deal on the Perfect Hotel by using. Tripadvisor thats because tripadvisor lets you start your trip on the right foot. By comparing prices from over 200 booking sites to find the right hotel for you at the lowest price. 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Quote, the discussions came at special counsel was building cases against both men, and they raise questions about whether the lawyer, john dowd, was offering pardons to influence manafort and flynns decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the investigation. Of course manafort and flynn made very different decisions on that score. Manafort pled not guilty and is fighting more than 20 felony counts from the special counsel, looking at life in prison if convicted. Flynn pled guilty, and hes now cooperating. If the president s lawyer was talking pardons with them last year before they made those decisions, then why did neither of them end up with a pardon . And is the president or his lawyer potentially in trouble for doing this . If the pardons were offered as a way to try to dissuade these guys from cooperating with muellers investigators, is that a big deal . And is that potentially criminal . Obviously, the president has the power to pardon, its in the constitution, but if he offered it that way, to try to dissuade someone for cooperating or testifying in an investigation, might that be looked at as potential obstruction of justice. Joining us is bob bauer. Am i asking the right questions here . It seems as a matter of strategy that its interesting if these conversations happened that neither flynn nor manafort got a pardon. And also are those proper conversations to be had . Did those seem to be the right questions to be asking . I think its very clear they were improper conversations to be had. Theres no way that the president of the united statess lawyer, acting on his behalf should be exploring a pardon with individuals who have testimony that touch directly on his personal legal affairs. That either was, a, an exceptionally foolish thing thing for mr. Dowd to do, as reported or, b, it was part and parcel of an ongoing plan the president had to try to dissuade them that giving testimony. When a president lawfully and normally exercises the pardon power, are there sort of firewalls set up, communication firewalls, or is the president isolated in the amount of communication hes able to receive and from the right people in terms of respectfully and legally considering somebodys pardon in the right way . Very much so. Over time, pardons have been prepared in the first instance in the particular office of the department of justice, and theres a real attempt for the white house to articulate the standards for granting pardons and for the department of justice to use those standards to prepare recommendations for the president of potential beneficiaries of pardons. All of this is coordinated, and is meant precisely to lend the appropriate sobriety and regularity to