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got a ceiling. there s an exhaustion factor and, you know, if you look at the recent polls about how people feel about mueller, this includes republicans, about the investigation, about trump, it swung i think about 12 points in the last couple months. in mueller s favor. i think there s deaf ears at this point. i think frank brings up a brilliant point that if trump merely asks for it and doesn t get it, it s a win for him because he can stand and go, well, all i want is transparency. having said that, though, i still think the big issue here is none of it is working anymore. the american people, you know, it all starts to add up. when you start to add up, you know, the bob woodward book and the op-ped in the times, even people who are not inside baseball people, this starts to seep out there. that s what the polls are starting to reflect. they show most people believe, as bob woodward reported extensively, that the president s a liar. he called him a bleeping liar. they h ....
Doing? well, i m not sure how much he did consult with them, but what this is is just yet another thing as he tries to sort of muddy the water here. the president s calculation on all of this is that it s all about public opinion and it s all about the house of representatives. the only place he can get into trouble, that s where he could get impeached if that went forward, in the democrats won. so his strategy is push the public dialogue as much as possible. that s why he has rudy giuliani out there and this plays right into muddying the waters and making things very confusing and hard to understand. who is bruce ohr, what type of conspiracy is this? they re trying to plant that seed. jeremy bash, what all of the individuals have in common is that they have all either investigated or prosecuted people with ties to russia. do you think that s a coincidence? no, i don t. and obviously the president is scared of what the investigators might find about ties between the trump organiz ....
Supposedly works for him. frank, i saw your eyes light up. go ahead. well, here s the interesting thing about this strategy, if the president has one, and that is that so cliche, be careful what you ask for. you might get it. he might get nfrinvest rinforma release d publicly that might hurt him. it might serve him better if the doj and fbi prolong and protract the process of declassifying and fight back and push back publicly because it feeds into the president s base that thinks there s a deep space and there s no transparency and there s a conspiracy to get the president. so either way, the president may win here. quite frankly, it may be to his benefit if there s a prolonged pushing back and the process takes forever and the president and gop just claim there s a lack of transparency, it s all part of the conspiracy and a deep state. mike schmidt, that seems to ....
History repeating itself. we ve seen that before when devin nunes released his memo which was about this underlying fisa application. that s what happened. when the redacted version of the fisa application was released in the summer, that s what happened. i m sure that s likely that that s what would happen now, but the cost of that, of course, even if it might, you know, kind of expose the president expose more of the ties between the president s campaign and russia, the cost simply isn t worth that in terms of a tradeoff. i think i want to go back to one of the points jeremy made about people inside the justice department, intelligence community, pushing back. i think they will. i think the problem is, you know, there s been this theory for a while that people inside the government might try to constrain the president. i think they re trying very hard to. but the president is figuring out how to work around them. i think what s you saw him doing with this order. i think he does i ....
all right. seung, we re happy you have now officially become a regular on the 4:00. it s one good thing to come from this very disturbing story. michael steele, it s always great to see you, my friend. h thank you. all right, guys. after the break, donald trump obliterates another norm by declassifying national security secrets. it s a move that could further implicate him in the russia probe. also ahead, a set up for a bad joke, how many lawyers does it take to defend donald trump? brand-new reporting reveals among the dozen lawyers representing the president, none of them can control donald trump and none of them knows for sure if he s committed any crimes. stay with us. ....