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faster. see, in the past especially when trump was in the white house and the doj more or less answered to him, what congress would do when they were trying to enforce the subpoena is first go to court, try to get a court order and then require the person to appear. and then if they didn't appear try to get the court to hold them in contempt. there's a way to bypass that. congress can go directly to the department of justice and say, look, this person was lawfully served with a subpoena. they either didn't show up or they showed up and didn't answer questions, so you need to consider criminal prosecution. now, those witnesses will have a defense. they can say, look, we didn't have to testify, executive privilege applies, but that would be played out in court and i think that would be a lot faster and a way to really move the investigation forward other than taking that longer step through the court process. >> so hypothetically these aides could wind up sitting in jail.
disbarred. he doesn't even have lawyers right now. i don't think he has real lawyers. maybe he has somebody, but most people aren't going to want to sign, you know, his legal claims because if you go into court and make these frivolous, ridiculous claims, your bar license is threatened. that's why people like bill bar and pat cipollone who i expect will testify in congress to talk about those clowns and what they suggested, but they'll not have good lawyers to be able to pull off -- i trust in the american people i think probably more than bill marr does. >> real quick, you think pat cipollone and bill barr will be talking to the january 6th committee? >> they'll be subpoenaed to talk. >> you think they will. >> and they'll tell the truth and it will not be flattering for donald trump. >> okay. i want to ask you, paul, i'm going to bring you in on this conversation. there's question about whether democrats should be doing more to sound the alarm.
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executive privilege protects the office of the president, not the individual who may be holding it. >> so can trump stop witnesses from speaking to investigators? >> not if the witness wants to speak to the investigator regardless. trump can say, look, i want to assert executive privilege here, i don't want you to talk to the investigator, but ultimately the vej who's been subpoenaed has to make that decision for themselves. and what i think will happen here if congress is going to be aggressive about it, if they mean what they say when they issue these subpoenas is they will refer these individuals for criminal prosecution to the department of justice. and that's, i think, the first time we'll actually see these witnesses facing real serious consequences for refusing to testify. >> but that is a process if they do that could take a long time. i mean democrats could run out the clock, right? i mean if this goes to court, this could take a long time. >> well, it could. but there's a way to do it
future attempt to overturn an election? what can be done legally to prevent those efforts in the future, to protect future elections? >> well, pamela, i think that's really the ultimate question here. what can we do to make sure this doesn't happen again? it's not going to be issuing another report. that's not going to ensure it doesn't happen again. if you look to what people do in criminal cases, what prosecutors do. we look for deterrents. what is going to deter someone from acting on behalf of a president who wants to stay in office when those actions are unlawful? it's prosecution. so i think if congress goes ahead and is very aggressive as they've said they're going to be in enforcing these subpoenas, that's a good first step. let's send a message that we mean what we say, we're taking this seriously and people are going to beheld accountable. >> so i see your point but do you think that the committee waited too long to get going given the mid-terms and the
>> it begins with what barbara is saying. she did give me a flashback. she used to fire subpoenas over at me. i was from the white house, she say over on the hill. i think she probably didn't like the democrats who ran the white house, i didn't like the republicans who ran congress. every time the subpoenas came, i honored, i complied. it was constitutional. it was legal. so i do hope they punish any law breakers. there's no insurrectionist privilege as barbara points out. mr. bannon had been out of the white house three years when the insurrection happened. here's the big difference between those other investigations. when democrats were looking into the ukraine scandal or even the 1/6 scandal trump was largely in control of the executive branch so he could hold back a lot of information. even if he keeps mr. bannon or three and four others from testifying illegally there's a lot of information democrats
in goods hit a record high of $891 billion. the same day that auto maker general motors announced plans to close yet another assembly plant and cutting nearly 1,700 jobs. and because you tried to go after china alone instead of banding together with our allies, american farmers are bearing the brunt of your bad decisions. farmers across the midwest are filing for bankruptcy at alarming rates, not seen in a decade. during the campaign you promised that eliminating our national debt would be a piece of cake. what happened? not only do we have a historic trade deficit, but you and republicans who ran congress for the past two years spent real big and passed tax cut packages that still hasn't been paid for.
what the point of all this is or what the point of the mueller investigation was and why we had to protect it so fiercely which i was on board for if, in fact, they think they already have all the goods on this and they are going to do a different investigation if the answer from mueller, it seems, might not be the one they wanted. that is what that reads like, not the other stuff, that could be a separate issue, but on the issue of collusion, yes, that is what that looks like, it looks like goal post moving. >> but if the mueller report doesn't come out and we don't know what mueller -- >> then why did we pay for that sucker? >> well, that's a good question. but you can hardly blame the democrats if bob barr refuses to let the mueller report see the light of day. >> i don't think we've seen a ton of indication of that. >> we will see. >> we don't have an indication that he's going to send it all to congress in the public interest. the truth is that democrats don't know. if we look at it a slightly different way, when we have revelations, alisyn, to your point whether it's security clearances or other aspects that may or may not be part of
the same time. this can be really broad, this can be the result of elections that put democrats in power who now are trying to play catch up on congressional oversight, and the investigation itself can be the thing. you know, democrats could say, look, there's a lot to investigate here, and there is, there's a lot of questions, and maybe they never get to impeachment. maybe the point is to have a michael cohen show over and over and over again to raise questions about what the president has done, what the president is hiding and see if in a public airing there's some truth that is arrive at. >> mary katherine ham, it's not as if republicans when they controlled the house and there was a democrat in the white house, it's not as if they didn't launch many investigations and used their oversight power, you know, with gust stowe. >> yeah, elections have consequences and oversight is within their purview. some of this stuff can be totally legit, but with all eras of congress and investigations and on slauts of investigations there is a political calculation