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Town and that was dan rosstankowski, a guy i knew from chicago, probably one of the two or three most powerful people in washington. at the end of this discussion you became deputy attorney general, and there was an episode at the very end of that administration, you were in charge of signing off on pardons from the justice department, and there was a fellow named mark rich, a very wealthy guy who had flouted the embargo of iran and he fled and left the country and then waged a very long and expensive campaign including political donations and hiring president clinton's former white house coun...

Puts your overall to 14. that is a very different ball game. >> she has a real sense of not only the human factor but also the impact on the rule of law and respect for the law, which i think she has demonstrated again and again which is very different in terms of mindset than judge ellis has evidenced. judge jackson clearly regards his witness tampering, his lying, his contempt for the law, feeling that the rules don't apply to him, and frankly, that is the mindset of, many feel, this administration generally. i'll say one more point, and that is a pardon here would be absolutely reprehensibl...

Obviously in considering who they give pardons to and followed more of a process. but i think because donald trump clearly doesn't do that and he sent the message very clearly from the beginning he wasn't going to do that, it opens up these kinds of situations where you have somebody angling for a pardon the way manafort is. in such an ovaert way that i jut don't think in the past you would have been able to do that. >> jeff toobin, you've had plenty of sleazy people trying to get pardons from the president in the night after leaving the white house when their term is just about up. >> bill cl...

Up. >> that's right. bill clinton really shamed himself by pardoning mark rich, a fugitive. his brother. the end of the clinton administration was really a very bad low point. if i could go back to the lawyers for a second, i don't think there's anything necessarily improper about lawyers talking to each other when they're all being investigated. i think what's really bizarre about all this is that manafort's lawyers are telling all this stuff to the trump lawyers and everyone else even though they're supposedly cooperating with the mueller investigation. i think that just shows how much manaf...

He sort of lied his way out of his cooperation agreement? >> i think it would be a clear case of obstruction of justice. look, the president has untraveled power under the constitution to grant pardons. but if he does it for a corrupt purpose, it can without -- i think, you know, there are some constitutional scholars that would disagree with this. i think most would say it is a crime and i think it's a relevant precedent that bill clinton when he granted pardons to mark rich at the last days of his term was investigated as part of a criminal investigation by the southern district of new york,...