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Similarly with threats to potentially use inherent contempt power to jail people. i think politically the visual of that is probably not politically good. i think part of the difficulty is that what the white house counsel office is now arguing is that the president cannot be overseen on certain things that are his executive authority, that congress literally does not have the authority to conduct oversight of his exercise of executive power. and this is where the real crux of what they actually are going to end up arguing about, when they get down to the facts of the president's obstructive b...

Ongoing. so what they reached the point where they felt they had no option when he didn't show up to issue a subpoena, and request not only his presence but later his documents. so the negotiations fell down. this congress is well aware that the courts will send them back to negotiate if they haven't done so. clearly they'll go in with a record of having negotiated in this instance. >> the idea that the judiciary committee is fining people that don't cooperate with subpoenas, any reason to believe that's actually going to rattle anyone in the trump administration? trump offered to pay legal fe...

About normal department priorities, et cetera. the dems will try to question him in a sort of open ended way, get him a little bit talking on certain key issues and tease it out but it's clear on two things, it's going to be contentious and frustrating. any conversations with trump and then his opening statement makes clear that he follows the party line on the southern border and how much drugs are coming in through there. of course they're flying over. it's nothing that's been interdicted that the wall would help. that will be the second bone of contention at the hearing. >> kim, he knows wh...

Although congress has the contempt power to enforce its subpoenas they never use it. that usually falls on the executive branch to enforce contempt with regard to federal subpoenas. if michael cohen decided to say i'm not showing up and maybe even i'm concerned enough about my family that i won't show up even with a subpoena, the real body who would be likely to enforce that is the executive branch. and our president donald trump heads the executive branch. that's an interesting loop of legality. >> another interesting aspect of our commander-in-chief and president he's been tweeting at michae...

He appointed them all with the exception of mueller. mueller is supervised by all of them. he is attacking them. it's not surprising that nunberg is following that lead. and thing saul about ultimately laying the groundwork for when trump refuses to comply with subpoenas. and then it looks like, well, other people have failed to comply too. so it's just part of that whole thing. >> yeah, but i think the lesson learned, that's going to be learned here is that if you don't comply, you're going wind up in prison. that's exactly what's going to happen to him. the only power that our federal courts...