The FRONTLINE Interviews

Matthew Miller

Department of Justice, 2009-11

Matthew Miller was the director of the office of public affairs at the Department of Justice from 2009 to 2011. He is currently an analyst on MSNBC.

This is the transcript of a two-part interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on May 30, 2018 and August 10, 2018. It has been edited for clarity and length. An asterisk indicates the start of a new interview.

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Give me the [FBI Director] Jim Comey back story, please. …

Jim Comey had been a career prosecutor from the Southern District of New York who moved up, became the deputy attorney general in the Bush administration, became famous in his time there for standing up to what he saw as unethical and potentially illegal behavior by the White House, and then left government and went into private practice.Around 2011, when Bob Mueller's term was first expiring and we at the Justice Department and in the White House were looking for a successor, Jim Comey was at the top of everyone’s list.He wasn't ready then to come back into public service, and we had such a hard time finding someone else who could, with the stature of Mueller, that the president convinced Congress to change the law and let Mueller stay for a couple more years.By that time, when the job came back open again, Comey was ready to come back into public service.

So [he] came to the FBI as this revered figure, someone who is a respected prosecutor, had run the department as the deputy attorney general, had shown that he was willing to be independent and stand up to what he saw as wrongdoing by political appointees inside the government, and was seen by everyone at the Justice Department as really a perfect fit to lead the FBI.

Any particular unique quality or characteristic that stands out that you think just says it all about him?

… There's a through line in Jim Comey’s career that starts at his time as assistant U.S. attorney, continues through his time as deputy attorney general, and then really shows up as the FBI director, and that is this intense conviction that he is sometimes the only righteous person in any organization.

I think he’s a man of great ethics or great conviction, but sometimes he thinks he’s so right about his ethics and so right about his conviction that no one else can be pure, and it leads him to make mistakes, leads him to have blind spots.That showed up certainly when he was FBI director in his handling of the [Hillary] Clinton case.I know the Trump people think that it showed up when he delivered that dossier briefing to the president.… If there is one characteristic of Comey’s that is both his strongest characteristic and his weakness, it's this self-regard that can cross into self-righteousness.

You know him well enough.Can you imagine riding that elevator up in Trump Tower armed with that dossier, … knowing that he was going to have to face the president-elect Donald Trump, of all people, with this information?Take me there.

It’s hard to think of two people who are more different than Jim Comey and Donald Trump.Whatever else you may think of the way Jim Comey handled his job, he is a man of morals, of character, a by-the-book person, and Donald Trump is almost the opposite in every way.I think going up to brief Donald Trump, who he watched during the campaign attack law enforcement, attack institutions, attack the media, to be coming up and briefing him not just about anything, but about these very salacious charges, … he had to be going into that with some bit of trepidation, and it had to be a little bit surreal as well.

This is someone who worked for several presidents before, briefed George W. Bush about some of the most serious counterterrorism programs in a time right after 9/11; someone who’s in the room with Barack Obama briefing him on a constant basis—two men with great political differences, but who took the job seriously and were committed to protecting the country and committed to the rule of law.And here he is going to brief someone, and in their very first interaction, he’s going to have to raise with him this question of whether he’s been compromised by a foreign power.

He takes to writing on his computer … contemporaneous notes, as close to verbatim as he can remember.[Does it] surprise you that he takes this step?

Not at all.… When I was at the Justice Department, The New York Times had discovered documents related to the department’s torture program , and when they were getting ready to write the story, Jim Comey had left the department several years ago, but some of the documents implicated Comey having some awareness of it.

Before they published the story, they managed to get their hands on this memo that Jim Comey, then deputy attorney general, had written to his chief of staff saying, basically: “I just met with the attorney general.He told me we plan to pursue these programs.I told him it was a mistake; I told him it was wrong."Comey not only had the presence of mind to write that kind of CYA memo in advance, but he had the presence of mind to take it with him when he left the department so if his actions were ever questioned by the press or anyone else, he had a memo to show that he had raised objections at the time.

So it didn't surprise me at all that after having this meeting with the president-elect and later meetings with the president, where he really thought the president was doing something inappropriate or might do something inappropriate, that he immediately memorialized it so he had it as a record if he ever needed it.

… There's the moment that everybody likes to talk about, which is where [Comey’s] trying to blend into the curtains and he’s pulled across the Blue Room by Trump, and that awkward sort of … thing that happens.Can you imagine Comey at that moment and what he’s feeling when Trump beckons him across the room?

I'm sure that what was going through his mind at that time was: “Here I am getting blamed by half the country for this man being elected.There are a lot of people that think but for my letter to Congress 11 days before the election, Donald Trump would not be president right now, and he’s singling me out in front of the cameras, calling me across and hugging me?There's not a worse thing that could happen for me right now in terms of the reputation I need to rebuild after what happened during the election."

I know that's not how he wrote it in the book, but I'm pretty sure that's what was going through his mind.

… It makes sense.Also, the thing is, he has a secret during this time, and that is this massive investigation.But specifically, he has [National Security Adviser] Michael Flynn in the crosshairs of an investigation, and presumably the new president of the United States doesn’t yet know about it.

Yeah, the president doesn't know about the seriousness of the investigation yet, but he certainly knows about the investigation.It was reported even before the election, and of course he’d been briefed in that Trump Tower meeting, somewhat.But he doesn't know that his national security adviser is in the crosshairs, that his national security adviser has been caught on tape talking to the Russians.At least we don’t know that he knows that yet.

So at that time, I think what he’s doing is trying to butter Comey up.Look, for all his weaknesses, the president, one thing he has gotten from the beginning, he wants people in law enforcement to be loyal to him.He has a very twisted definition of what loyalty means, but he understood right away he wanted an attorney general who would be loyal to him; he wanted an FBI director that would be loyal to him.And I think you saw him from the beginning trying to cultivate that loyalty with Comey.

… Within a couple of days, a couple of FBI agents go up to the White House and interview Flynn; he perjures himself.I guess it’s perjury.

False statements.

Yeah, false statements.

Different, but same.

He doesn't tell the truth.

He's not under oath, so, yeah, it's not perjury.

Comey meets with [then-Acting Attorney General] Sally Yates and I guess [then-Acting Assistant Attorney General] Mary McCord.Mary and Sally go up to see [White House Counsel] Don McGahn on the 27th of January to tell him that he’s got a problem with the national security adviser.In your experience, how unusual is that journey by those two women?

It’s incredibly unusual, and it’s a very tough choice they had to make about whether to brief the White House on this or not, because there are two conflicting equities here.On the one hand, Michael Flynn is now the subject of a criminal investigation and possibly has just talked himself to being a target of a criminal investigation.Under normal circumstances, you wouldn't tell the people with whom that person works that this person has criminal jeopardy.

On the other hand, this person is in a serious position of responsibility, in charge of protecting the national security of the United States.If he’s compromised, the White House needs to know that so they can take action.So I suspect what happened is Sally and Mary and the FBI director got together and talked about whether it was appropriate at this point to brief the White House and decided that on the balance of interests, it was important that the White House know that Michael Flynn was a security risk so they can take action.

Now, of course, what happened is they went and briefed the White House counsel, and no action happened.Nothing happened until The Washington Post reported several weeks later—

Eighteen days later.

—about this entire event, right, 18 days later.

In fact, McGahn says, “Why are you telling me this?"

Yeah, [he] says to Sally Yates, “What interest is it to DOJ if he lied to the vice president?"Another breathtaking response from the White House counsel, because not only is it important that he lied to the vice president, but the vice president had gone out and lied to the American people, which meant the national security adviser of the United States is now a blackmail target, or a potential blackmail target.I think it showed that the White House counsel either was in over his head or just didn't want to get it at that time. …

You know McGahn?

No.

Reputation?

By reputation, he is a serious, respected member of the D.C. Bar, but always someone who has been a kind of hardcore partisan.On the Federal Election Commission [he] was seen as trying to tear that commission apart, trying to keep from enforcing federal election laws, not someone who you would think of as kind of the top-tier lawyers for serious matters that the White House counsel would have to deal with.

Now, that said, a lot of the top-tier legal talent wasn’t available to Donald Trump at that time, just as it’s never been available to Donald Trump throughout the administration.

The 27th is an amazing day because, of course, that evening it’s dinner for two, President Trump and Director Comey.Comey—much to his surprise, according to his book—is invited over thinking he’s going to be at a table with a bunch of people, and all of a sudden it’s just the two of them, and of course the president mentions loyalty a couple of times.Take me inside that from what you know and what you can intuit based on knowing at least one of the parties.

Yeah.Well, first of all, it’s clearly not a coincidence that the president suddenly invited Comey over for dinner that night right after McGahn was briefed about Michael Flynn’s criminal jeopardy.It seems obvious that the president knew there was a problem and knew right away he had to increase his cultivation of Jim Comey, we eventually found out, to try to get him to back off the Flynn investigation .

So if you're Comey, you walk into this room, and immediately you find out it’s just you, one-on-one, with the president.First of all, generally, that's a problem.The president typically doesn’t meet one-on-one with the FBI director unless it’s something very serious and which there's a good reason for there to be no one else in the room.There wouldn't be any good reason for no one else to be in the room in this instance.

And then more specifically, this president’s campaign is a subject of an investigation that the FBI director is conducting, so when he walks into this room, he has to be concerned immediately that there's something inappropriate going on here.Then that concern obviously increases dramatically when the president repeatedly asks for his loyalty, a completely inappropriate request for the president to make of anyone inside law enforcement, certainly the FBI director.He does it over and over again in that dinner, and we know Comey is really worried about it, worried enough to come out, write another memo to the file …

Now, there are those who are close to the president who say, “He’s a New York guy, and loyalty to him is—it's not a legal term to him, not a compromising term."It's just a “You work for me. It's the FBI.I'd like to have my own police force, whatever it is."This guy is so naïve that he crosses a norm almost automatically .

Yeah, the problem with that theory is the timing of this dinner.The president didn't just set up a dinner in a couple of weeks with Jim Comey because, “Look, I'm new to him; he’s new to me; he’s going to be an important member of my team.He’s a serious counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States, and I want to know that he’s going to be loyal to me."

He does it right after he gets this information about Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, being in criminal jeopardy.For all the talk about the president being naïve, it's very clear he knows exactly what he’s doing in this dinner.

Within days, Sally [Yates] is fired.I know she was short-term, I know she might have resigned over the travel ban disagreement, but she's fired.And my question to you, as a veteran of the Justice Department, knowing what you know [about] how the vibe works there, to fire Ms. Yates that quickly, that way, I gather was not a nice way to fire her.It wasn’t warm and fuzzy.

No, it wasn't.Look, the White House could have handled that in a number of different ways.First of all, they could have briefed the acting attorney general when they were planning to impose this travel ban so she could advise him on any legal concerns she has.After all, she is the one that has to defend the travel ban in court.Justice Department lawyers were all over the country defending it in court and having to report back to her on how that was going.

Once she raised concerns, once she had concerns with the travel ban and whether it was lawful or not, they could have come to her and worked with her about those concerns.Now, they also could have fired her, and they are well within their rights to fire her for refusing an enforcement order that they believed was lawful. …

Before long, the Post runs the story about the intercepts.They now, I guess, feel like they have to fire Flynn.

If I recall correctly, it wasn’t the first story about the intercepts that got him fired; it was the second story that they had been warned about it and done nothing that got him fired. (Laughs.)

Why does it matter to them?

It matters because suddenly it’s clear that it’s not just Flynn that's acted inappropriately.It’s everyone that got the warning about him and did nothing about it that's acted inappropriately .It was one thing for the intercepts themselves to be reported.That's a massive scandal for the White House.When it comes out that they were warned that he was compromised and that he might have lied to the FBI, and they did nothing about it, that suddenly becomes a scandal that implicates not just Mike Flynn but the White House chief of staff, the president, and anyone who knew about this warning and failed to take action.

… The president is mostly blaming the media for firing Flynn, and then he starts attacking the FBI in tweets that same week.

Yeah, that's right. …

So this is the Genesis Wave against the FBI, anyway, and others.

So this is an astonishing moment for the Justice Department, because you remember, only a small number of the people at the Justice Department are political appointees that come and go.We're the tourists that come in and out.The residents live there and don’t change from administration to administration.They're used to working for presidents of both parties and being loyal to presidents of both parties and being asked by presidents of both parties to just execute the law faithfully, to not put your thumb on the scale one way or the other.

So when you suddenly have a president who is actively attacking law enforcement and blaming them for his political problems, it is a huge red flag to everyone in that building that this is going to be a very different relationship.This is going to be a president that asks us to do troubling things.

One of the things that's always true in the Justice Department, one of the things that's in the culture of the Justice Department, is that while the Justice Department is a Cabinet agency like any other Cabinet agency and executes policy that the president asks for and can advise the president on policy, when it comes to law enforcement matters, there is this bright line; there is a wall that is not supposed to be breached between the Justice Department and the White House.And everyone that works at the Justice Department, the thing you know when you sign up there, on day one, is if you're ever asked to breach that wall, if you're ever asked by the White House to do something inappropriate that relates to a criminal investigation, you say no.You say no, or you leave your job.And it’s clear right away that this is going to be a White House that repeatedly wants the Justice Department to do inappropriate things.

It’s at that time that the meeting occurs [with Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared] Kushner and Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions and Comey where Trump asks Kushner to leave, asks Sessions to leave, his attorney general, and keeps the FBI director there and says, “Look, Mike’s a good guy,” whatever he says.

“Let it go."

Yeah.“Let it go."

“Can you let it go?"

I'd ask you to try to describe what it probably felt like in there.What were the details of how that probably went down?

For Jim Comey, this is now his third one-on-one interaction with the president, and this one you see the president actually ask people to leave the room.And if you're Comey, you're sitting there thinking, “What is it the president needs to say to me that he can't say in front of the attorney general; that he can't say in front of his own chief of staff [sic]?"Jim Comey’s a longtime prosecutor and right away, I suspect his antennae were going up and saying, “This is evidence of a guilty mind right here, what he’s about to ask me to do."

… It's one of those moments that I think Comey had to look at and say, “Is this the moment where I switch from briefing the president and being a witness to this, to actually gathering evidence for an investigation into the president himself?" …

According to [Comey’s] book, his breath has been taken away.He sits down with Sessions and says: “Don’t leave me.You cannot leave me…" Well, what does he say?

He says, “You can't ever leave me in a room alone with the president again,” and Sessions’ response is just basically kind of to shrug and offer nothing.It’s a striking moment for the attorney general and one that I think foreshadows his tenure as AG, where you have the president constantly asking the Justice Department to do inappropriate things , constantly putting pressure on the career men and women at the Justice Department, constantly attacking them.

An attorney general who won't do what an attorney general’s supposed to do and be that shield for the Justice Department, be the person who stands up to the president when the president’s doing something wrong and say, “You know, Mr. President, you need to cut it out; this is inappropriate”—Jeff Sessions made pretty clear to Jim Comey from day one he wasn't going to serve that role, at least with protecting Jim Comey.And he’s made it clear, really, in the time since then that he’s not going to serve that role for anyone else at the Justice Department, either.

So Sessions has a kind of special relationship with Donald Trump that gets him in that job.Give me his back story, will you?

Jeff Sessions, long before he was a senator from Alabama, was an assistant United States attorney in Alabama, was a career Justice Department prosecutor that then was appointed to be a U.S. attorney.Served as U.S. attorney for a long time, for 12 years, and someone who really ought to have the culture of the Justice Department in his blood, both from serving as a career person and as a political person.

Goes on to become a United States senator, and as a senator, sat on the Judiciary Committee and would constantly badger Justice Department witnesses about their need to be independent from the president.I can't tell you how many hearings I sat through in my time at the Justice Department where Jeff Sessions would be asking the attorney general or the deputy attorney general or other appointees of the Justice Department, “You do know that your obligation as a senior Justice Department official is to the people of the United States, not to any president, right?And if you're ever asked to do anything wrong, you'll say no, right?"

So he’s someone who should know the culture of the Justice Department.Then in the campaign, [he] is the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, becomes a senior campaign adviser, advises him on immigration, advises him on national security, and is really one of Trump's closest advisers when he takes office.

And of course it matters to a president who his attorney general is in a kind of inordinate way.It’s more than the secretary of commerce or EPA. We know about the Kennedy brothers, and we know about some that were more distant from a president than others. …

… Look, the trick for every president with attorney generals, you want someone who will be both independent—not be a stooge who will be so subservient that they won't fairly enforce the law, but someone who can also be a trusted member of your Cabinet, can advise you on all the really important issues that the attorney general faces from counterterrorism to civil rights to basic enforcement of law and legal policy.

And presidents have struggled to get that right.You know, Janet Reno was a very independent attorney general but angered the president [Bill Clinton] so much that she wasn’t an effective advocate for the Justice Department inside the Cabinet.On the other hand, you have people like Bobby Kennedy, who’s so close to the president that it’s hard to imagine the Justice Department being really independent.

Jeff Sessions in some ways should have been the model attorney general.He was both close to the president, and so would have the president’s ear and be able to speak up for the Justice Department’s issues when it comes to fights with other agencies, but at the same time, [he] had grown up in the Justice Department, had spent so much time there as a career employee that [he] would be respectful of the independence that the Justice Department needed to have. …

Do we know how [Trump] reacted when he heard about it, [Sessions’] recusal?

Yeah, he was angry.He exploded.He was on a trip when he was briefed and exploded and, from all reports, wanted Jeff Sessions gone immediately and eventually did try to push him out. …

...From Comey’s perspective, do you feel like he would have known that it’s even inside the realm of possibility that he might get the hook from Donald Trump?

I think he had to know in some sense that it was always possible, but I doubt he ever actually expected it would happen, for the very reasons that it made no sense as a decision.Firing Jim Comey couldn’t make the investigation go away, and it would, in any sense, almost implode Donald Trump's presidency.

… But you have to sit back and think, if I was in his shoes, would I take the step of firing me?Well, no, because it’s going to plunge my presidency into chaos and into crisis.What I think Jim Comey couldn’t understand, and no one really outside the White House could understand, is that the president was surrounded at that time by people who had such a lack of understanding of how the government works that they didn't understand the consequences of firing Jim Comey.

You have people in the White House—[Chief of Staff] Reince Priebus, who’s never worked in federal government before; Don McGahn, the White House counsel whose experience is with federal election law; Jared Kushner, who’s never worked in the government before—all of these people who don’t really understand how it’s likely to play, and in some cases, in Jared Kushner's case, are giving the president very bad advice : that Democrats are going to somehow support this firing because they were mad at how Comey handled the Clinton email investigation.So I think you see a president who is acting out of anger and with no understanding of the consequences of what he’s doing.

You, in describing Jim Comey, described this kind of character with a real righteous streak.He’s testified a couple of times.The Russia cloud is all over this presidency.Trump has asked him, “Just tell me I'm not under investigation,” and maybe he’s assured him privately.But is there anything about the personality that you describe that's driving his behavior before Congress in early March and in May, right before he gets fired, that kind of lights the candle for Trump?

You know, I think Jim Comey always enjoys the spotlight, … and I think he enjoyed being the center of attention at those congressional hearings where he’s testifying about the Russian investigation.But at the same time, his testimony in those cases was appropriate.Unlike the Clinton investigation, he had gotten approval from his supervisor, the deputy attorney general, to confirm that investigation publicly, and he confirmed it and then really didn't say much else about what they were doing, and apparently even told members of Congress in a private session that the president wasn't at that time the target of the investigation.

So while I know that that angered the president, in that sense, Jim Comey really was acting appropriately in that public testimony. …

There's the story of [the president] watching Comey in the second testimony where he’s talking a lot about Clinton and he’s using a TiVo and he’s going back and forth, back and forth, like stoking himself up in some way. …

… One of the things that should have been a red flag for Comey is when they had that moment where the president called him over for a hug early on in the first few days of the administration, and the president said to him, “You're almost as famous as me."If there's anything that Donald Trump doesn’t like, it’s someone getting more attention than him.And Jim Comey, it was clear in that congressional testimony, was going to continue to command the spotlight with respect to the Russia investigation.So here you have someone not only outshining the president, but outshining him on a subject that the president found deeply threatening.

The president goes to Bedminster, [N.J., to his Trump National Golf Club], for the weekend, kind of writes these talking points, dictating them to [senior policy adviser] Stephen Miller.… They go back to the White House.… They pull over [U.S. Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions.Explain to me what it is that Rosenstein does or is asked to do and what happens with that memo.

The president, the day before he fires Jim Comey, meets with Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein and talks with them about his desire to fire Comey.We still don’t know exactly what happened in that meeting.We don’t know whether the president said, as he said to Lester Holt [on NBC] several days later, “I fired him because I had this Russia investigation on my mind."But we know he tells Sessions and Rosenstein he wants to fire him, and Sessions and Rosenstein go back to the department, and Rosenstein works on this memo to justify the Comey firing.

He writes this memo, and it is entirely based on Comey’s handling of the Clinton case.And it is an unusual memo for a lot of reasons.For one thing, the inspector general is investigating at that time this exact subject.Very strange for the deputy attorney general to prejudge the IG investigation while it’s ongoing and just reach his own conclusions.

The second thing that's very weird about this memo, it doesn't read like a typical Department of Justice memo.It reads like a campaign opposition research document.It has quotes from op-eds, quotes that former Justice Department officials have written about Comey’s handling of the Clinton case.It doesn’t cite the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual, which is the governing document for Department of Justice matters.It doesn't cite any legal analysis.It looks very much like a kind of slapdash memo that Rosenstein and his staff put together overnight to justify a preordained conclusion.

He gives that memo to the attorney general, the attorney general who is recused from the Russia investigation, slaps his own very short letter endorsing the memo, and sends it over to the president.The president uses that, then, to justify his decision to fire Jim Comey.

Tell me who Rod Rosenstein is.

Rod Rosenstein is a longtime prosecutor at the Justice Department, someone who comes out of conservative legal circles.He’s a lifelong Republican.He was a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal movement, while he was in college, but early on in his career joined the Justice Department as a career prosecutor and spent years as an assistant U.S. attorney before being nominated by President Bush to be the U.S. attorney for the state of Maryland.

When we come into the Justice Department, the Obama team in early 2009, and we're looking to appoint new U.S. attorneys all around the country, the senior Democratic senator from Maryland, Barbara Mikulski, says: “You know what?Rod Rosenstein’s a Republican, but he’s an honorable, decent, loyal law enforcement officer.He would be a great U.S. attorney.I think you should keep him on."And President Obama and [then-Attorney General] Eric Holder decided to keep Rosenstein on despite the fact he was a Bush appointee.

He serves all eight years of the Obama administration as a Republican U.S. attorney.But you know what?Partisanship really isn't important in those jobs.You're supposed to call balls and strikes and enforce the law fairly. …

... The president used [Rosenstein’s memo] as an excuse to fire Comey, who’s in L.A. at the FBI.The TV sets are on; he thinks it’s a prank, and then he’s fired.What does it mean to a guy like Comey to get blown out of the saddle in such an unbelievably historic way?

It must have been deeply wounding.One of the things about the FBI director is it’s a term job, so when you accept that job, you mentally prepare to do it for 10 years, because that's how long the term is.So if you're Jim Comey, you're just three years into the job.You have a lot more that you want to do.You have plans for this job; you have plans for where you want to take the bureau.You have ideas that you've just started to put into place, and you find yourself fired in the most kind of irresponsible way possible.The president doesn’t have the honor to pick up the phone to call you.The attorney general doesn't pick up the phone and call you.You find out from television.

The president has his personal bodyguard walk a letter down to the FBI bureau, where Jim Comey isn't even in residence.He’s across the country in Los Angeles.It had to be deeply jarring, and at the same time to Comey deeply concerning.Jim Comey would have understood instantly what the president was trying to accomplish by firing him.It wasn’t just getting rid of an irritant; it wasn't just getting rid of someone he didn't like.But it was trying to end the Russia investigation while it was still in an early stage. …

The very next day, I think, into the Oval Office walk [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov and [then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey] Kislyak.There's no American pool in there; there's no reporters in there.… And you have photos.Instead of being in chairs in the Oval Office with the fireplace and everybody’s very formal, you've got Trump with his arm around Lavrov, and they're laughing, and he calls Comey a “nut job,” according to the reports.… What do you think the meaning of that scene is at that moment?

It had to make them deeply suspicious of the president’s motives.If you're an investigator, you go into this investigation thinking: “You know, we don’t know what we're going to find.We may find illegal activity or inappropriate activity by low-level people inside the campaign.But it’s hard to believe that any president of the United States, any candidate for president of the United States, is actually going to want to jeopardize U.S. national security; he’s actually going to work with a hostile foreign power."That's just a foreign concept to people who have worked their entire career inside the government.

Then when you see that the president met inside the Oval Office in this chummy meeting with the people who attacked our democracy and he tells them that, “Firing Jim Comey took a lot of pressure off of me.Maybe now I can make more deals with the Russians.Jim Comey was a nut job,” it has to make people inside the FBI and inside the Justice Department really question the president’s motives and wonder if there is something deeper, something darker at the bottom of this investigation that they really have to get to. …

What does the president say to NBC anchor Lester Holt?

The president does this interview after his entire White House had been telling the American public and telling the media that the reason the president fired Jim Comey was only because he got this memo from Rod Rosenstein finding that Comey had acted inappropriately.That was the public rationale for why Comey was fired.

The president then does this interview with Lester Holt and basically confesses the entire case and tells Lester Holt that, “No, I was going to fire him anyway, even before I got the memo from Rod Rosenstein,” and, “I essentially did it because I had Russia on my mind.I didn't like the way he was handling this Russia investigation."It is a dramatic moment to see the president come out and not only completely undermine the case that his White House had been making.As spurious a case and as transparent a case it was, it still had been the official line.The president comes out and demolishes that case immediately and gives a real motive to an obstruction of justice case against him.

Now [Rosenstein], who probably didn't miss NBC News that night, just had his own legs cut out from under him by the president of the United States.… Help me understand what might have been his thought process that led him to [appointing a special prosecutor].

I think two things happened between the time that Jim Comey was fired and the time that Rosenstein appointed Bob Mueller that led him to that decision.The first thing is the emergence of Jim Comey’s memos which Rosenstein had not seen before—clear evidence that before he fired Jim Comey, President Trump had been trying to impact this case and how it was investigated; that had to be deeply concerning to Rosenstein—and then evidence to him that the president was trying to interfere with the Justice Department’s investigation.

The second thing that happened was Rod Rosenstein watched his reputation get dragged through the mud for an entire week by people who he really respected.Veterans of the Justice Department of both parties looked at this and said: “You know, we expected Donald Trump to do inappropriate things.We could have even seen Jeff Sessions doing it.He was a senator for a long time after he left the Justice Department.But you, Rod Rosenstein, you were the person who was supposed to protect this department.You were the person who understands what this department stands for, who understands the need for it to be independent.And when you had your first moment to stand up to a president asking you to do something inappropriate, not only did you not stand up to him, you caved."

I think Rod Rosenstein saw that criticism.He knew it was going to ruin his reputation and destroy the way his career was viewed for the rest of his life, and he found there was only one way to undo the damage, and that was to appoint a special prosecutor. …

Who is Bob Mueller, and what are the implications of choosing him?

Bob Mueller is really one of the most talented and respected prosecutors of his generation, someone who came up through the Justice Department who at every stage of his career had the chance to choose lucrative time in the private sector, and time and time again would come back to the Justice Department to take a public service job because he was so drawn to the mission of the Justice Department.

For Rosenstein to select him as the special counsel I think was a way of signaling, “I am going to choose not only the most respected prosecutor I could find, but someone whose fairness and integrity and independence are beyond question."

Any sense of how that played inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation, inside the Justice Department?

It was such a shot in the arm to the people that work there.That time period between when the president fired Comey and when Mueller was appointed was a real time of uncertainty for people that work there.… You'd seen a president take direct assault on the Justice Department, and an investigation into him.You'd seen an attorney general and a deputy attorney general who had gone along with the president’s attempts to dismantle the Justice Department’s investigation.

And you had people there who were really concerned that the Justice Department they had known for years was going to no longer exist, and the appointment of Bob Mueller was a sign that: “You know what?We can continue to execute our mission.There's someone here who’s going to get to the bottom of this, no matter what it means, no matter where the investigation takes us, and it’s someone who can't be bullied by anyone."

I got a little choked up there.I remember, there was that week there I remember talking to people that were like, frightened, absolutely frightened, about what—

Frightened?

Yeah, absolutely frightened.

Why?

Because the Justice Department has to be independent of the president for everything else in this democracy to work.If the president can end investigations into himself and his associates, if he can order up investigations and prosecutions into his political opponents, then there's not much to keep us from slipping into a banana republic.That is … the most effective way to erode democracy.And a lot of people in the Justice Department were really concerned that not only did we have the president with the motives to do that, but the leaders of the Justice Department who were supposed to keep it from happening weren't willing to do so.

The firewall was down.

The firewall had been breached.

There's a meeting at the White House—President Trump, Attorney General Sessions; Don McGahn is there.His phone rings; it’s Rod Rosenstein who says, “I've decided to select a special counsel, and it’s Robert Mueller."He hangs up, announces to the president and Sessions that Robert Mueller is the special prosecutor.Can you imagine what Trump’s response was?

I imagine he was incensed.Here he thought he had solved his biggest problem.He had made the Russian investigation go away, and he thought he was on cloud nine.And he finds out that not only is the investigation not over, not only is it going to carry on, but it’s going to carry on by someone who’s independent, who I, Donald Trump, have no ability to influence, no ability to pressure, no ability to steer in any way.It must have been a very concerning moment for him.

And he must know that Rosenstein has gone the other way, declared his own independence. …

Yeah.Look, there are a lot of ways Rosenstein could have handled this.He could have just asked the National Security Division at the Justice Department to continue to investigate.He could have appointed a U.S. attorney or assistant U.S. attorney to lead the investigation.He didn't do any of those things.He picked the most independent, most respected, most fearless prosecutor and investigator in the entire country to lead this investigation.It was a declaration by Rosenstein that the Justice Department is still here; it’s still going to be faithful to its mission, and whatever mistake I may have made in writing this Comey memo and allowing the president to reach into the Justice Department, we're still going to pursue this investigation to the full extent possible.

Unfortunately for him, Jeff Sessions is in the Oval Office at this moment, and the president of the United States lets it fly.… Apparently, it’s just unbelievable enough that Sessions cries and goes to his car and all kinds of things happen.Tell me the story, will you, as much as you know of it?

… The president gets told by Don McGahn that Rosenstein has taken the step to appoint a special counsel, and he just unloads on Jeff Sessions and bullies him and yells at him and tells him he wants him gone from the administration.And Jeff Sessions kind of leaves the Oval Office, leaves the West Wing distraught, has to be chased out to his car by the White House chief of staff, who begs him not to resign.I think Priebus is realizing at this time that this administration could collapse in very short order if we have the president firing an FBI director one week, the appointment of a special counsel the next week, and then the attorney general either resigning or being forced out.

This starts to look like Saturday Night Massacre territory and Watergate territory very quickly, and we're only four or five months into the administration at this point. …

… Let’s talk a little bit about the Mueller team.You said you know some of the people.It’s like an all-star team.

Yeah.This is like this moment at the beginning of the Avengers movies where all the superheroes are kind of spread across the globe, and Bob Mueller calls them all, and they all reassemble together in Washington to take on this new mission.That's kind of what this is like.He goes and pulls in some of the best prosecutors from inside the Justice Department, from various branches from the Justice Department, some that are in private practice, some that he’s worked with before, and puts them all together and assembles a team that has expertise in money laundering, has expertise in espionage, has expertise in counterintelligence.These are some of the most experienced and brightest prosecutors that the Justice Department has seen in the last 20 years.

Bob Mueller puts them all together, and you see over a few weeks this team kind of being rolled out publicly.And people that know the Justice Department and know federal law enforcement well are watching and looking at the team he’s putting together and saying to themselves: “You know, there must be a lot more here than we know about for him to put together a team of this caliber.This isn't the type of investigative team you put together for a little investigation into [campaign chair] Paul Manafort and [deputy campaign chair] Rick Gates that will produce some charges, but basically be done in six months.This is an investigation that is looking at a broad pattern of criminal activity that will span not just in the United States, but across the globe to Russia and maybe to other countries and try to track it all down and tell the American people what it was that happened.

Are there a handful of names we should know?

Yeah.Aaron Zebley, who is an FBI agent before becoming a prosecutor, worked with Mueller at the bureau and was his chief of staff; someone who gets the full picture of federal law enforcement, understands counterterrorism cases, understands very well how the bureau works and how to integrate bureau investigations with Justice Department prosecutors.

Andrew Weissmann, who had been in a very senior job in the criminal division and earlier in his career has led the Enron task force, which had really been a model for how you work your way up inside a white-collar criminal organization, going to one potential subject, putting them in criminal jeopardy, flipping them and moving your way up the ladder.He had kind of pioneered taking techniques that were used against the mafia, used against classic criminal enterprises and using them in the white-collar world.

Jeannie Rhee, who was a highly respected prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.Mueller stacked this team with some of the most incredibly talented prosecutors the Justice Department had to offer.

… Mueller put Greg Andres on his team, who was an experienced mob prosecutor in New York who at one point got death threats from a mafia family he was investigating.His entire family had to be under U.S. marshals’ protection.These are people who have seen serious criminal investigations and don’t back down over anything.

Why such a powerful, stellar group other than the optics of it?

There are two things that happened here.From Bob Mueller's standpoint, when you take on an initiative of this standpoint, you immediately look at the entire landscape and figure out what you have to investigate.And he must have seen: “I need people from vast areas of expertise.I need people with lots of different overlapping skill sets here."I think for the people that joined, some of whom came from private practice where they were making millions of dollars a year, this was a chance to really serve your country.There were people that had left the Justice Department that looked at this as a serious investigation both because of the nature of the underlying crime and attack on our democracy, and because of what had just happened to the Justice Department and the fact that Jim Comey had been fired.They looked at this as a chance to go and prove that the Justice Department can still meet its mission, so there was a real draw for these people to come back and work for Bob Mueller on what is one of the most important cases the Justice Department may ever investigate.

This is why one of the FBI agents we talked to who had worked with Mueller said the phrase, “Be afraid, be very afraid” about Mueller and his team.

Yeah, that is absolutely right.One thing about Bob Mueller is he’s incredibly smart, he’s incredibly hardworking, and he’s incredibly hard-charging.He's not easy to work for.These people that went to work for him all did it voluntarily, knowing they were going to take on one of the toughest assignments, working for one of the toughest taskmasters in the Department of Justice, and they did it because this was such an important case.

The way Trump responds—who hasn't had an attorney the duration of his presidency yet—is to bring Marc Kasowitz in.… Who’s Kasowitz?

Marc Kasowitz is a New York attorney.Most of his experience is in civil litigation.He’s a little bit of an attack dog for Donald Trump and other people in the New York world.He's not a classic white-collar criminal defense attorney.This is another example of Trump really not understanding what he’s facing.He’s now being investigated by some of the most experienced criminal investigators in the country.

It was time for Donald Trump to hire a serious white-collar criminal defense attorney, and he didn't do it, partly I think because a number of them didn't want to work for him, for a variety of reasons, and partly because he was comfortable with an attack dog like Marc Kasowitz who he’d used before in civil cases and seen as effective in civil cases.He thought that same formula would work here, and it was pretty evident pretty early on that that wasn't the case.

Kasowitz does something that will become increasingly a strategy.He makes the political and the legal personal.… He assails the credentials and the political leanings of the members of [Mueller’s] team.… That seems to be the president’s response to this problem.

Yeah.Look, the president treated this problem like he treats any problem, and that's to attack.When he’s under pressure, he lashes out, he attacks back.… He responded to this threat like he’s responded to threats throughout his career, and that's to counterpunch.Marc Kasowitz is an attorney you use for that type of thing, you use for counterpunches.

What I think they didn't understand is there's a news cycle battle that you have to win as president of the United States.But Bob Mueller's not working on a news cycle timeline; Bob Mueller's working on a long timeline.And whatever attacks the president throws at the Justice Department and Bob Mueller don’t really matter to the underlying investigation.He’s going to keep plugging away and finding whatever wrongdoing he can, no matter what the president does.

At around this time, Trump goes to Germany.He sees Putin; he asks Putin; Putin denies.The New York Times calls the communications office asking for a statement about a meeting in Trump Tower between Don Jr., maybe Kushner, Manafort.Some of the details are sketchy at this moment, and they're asking for a statement from the White House about a meeting with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower in June of the election year.The president and [then-White House communications director] Hope Hicks [are] aboard Air Force One, talking to Kasowitz on the phone.… Tell me, what's up here?

The New York Times is working on a story that will prove deeply damaging, if true, to the president; that not just any members of his campaign, but his campaign chairman, his son and his son-in-law took a meeting with a Russian who was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.And the president’s reaction is to apparently dictate a statement that denies the truth of what happened in this meeting and has his son put out a statement that says, “This meeting was just about adoptions."It only takes about 24 hours for that statement to completely blow up, and it only takes a few days after that for the world to find out that the president himself had dictated this statement that was false and told the American people another lie about what happened on his campaign. …

As Mueller continues to be relentless, and I mean relentless—the [foreign policy adviser George] Papadopoulos, the Manafort subpoena— ...Trump starts to use the phrase “witch hunt."If you're working at the Justice Department, and the president of the United States is calling what you're doing a witch hunt, how alarming is that, and what in the world can Sessions or anybody else do about that?

For the people on the investigation, I think at some point they get used to it, and every tweet from the president just makes them more determined to get to the bottom of what happened.The political leadership at the department, it's really a moment where they're supposed to stand up and tell the president to cut it out, because not only is the president delegitimizing this investigation—this really important investigation into interference with the democracy—but he’s hurting the ability of the Justice Department to do its work on all kinds of cases.

If the president is able to convince 30 to 40 percent of the American people that the FBI lies all the time, that the FBI pursues cases without merit, that the FBI is biased against the Republican Party, it hurts the FBI's ability to find witnesses who will cooperate with them.It hurts the Justice Department’s ability to convince jurors to convict people.So if you're the attorney general, this is the moment to either go to the president and tell him to stop it, and if that doesn't work, stand up to the American people and say, “This just isn't true."

But what actually happens between the president and the attorney general?

The relationship between the attorney general and the president basically becomes nonexistent at this point.The president starts attacking the attorney general publicly.He at times attacks the deputy attorney general publicly.And you see the attorney general just kind of take it, you know?He comes out at one point and says, “Well, it’s really hurtful when the president says these things about me,” and he kind of personalizes it, but he never actually stands up and defends the Department of Justice.

Every time the president attacks Jeff Sessions, he just seems to grovel more and seek more kind of affection and try to re-win the approval of the president.It’s a really disturbing way for the attorney general to handle his job when the president is so clearly trying to interfere with the Department of Justice’s work.

As it gets really bad and the president’s talking about firing Sessions, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in the Senate, his friends in the Congress, step up and … offer him an extra life, like in a video game.

Yeah, right.You know, Chuck Grassley sends a very clear signal to the president that if you fire Jeff Sessions, don’t expect to get another attorney general confirmed.And that's a key moment because what it means is if you fire Jeff Sessions, you don’t get rid of Robert Mueller, because there's not going to be a new attorney general who shows up that can overrule Rod Rosenstein and either end this investigation or curtail it.It’s an important moment in the history of this case.

And, in fact, what we hear later is that that summer, he was trying to fire Mueller, too, and McGahn stepped up and basically said, “I'm out of here if you're going to fire him."

Right.… I think McGahn just has a narrow view of his job.He’s there to get as many conservative judges appointed as possible, and he just realizes Trump's never going to listen to his advice on these issues, so it doesn’t matter.I'll protect myself. …

At the moment that [Trump] finally kind of gives up for a moment and says, “OK, I'm going to hire John Dowd, and I'm going to hire Ty Cobb, and we're going to play ball,” I guess that's him trying to play by Washington rules, finally?

He's trying to play by Washington rules, but not with necessarily the team that you would put together if you really were responding to this investigation in a robust way.He looked at his legal team, he brings Ty Cobb into the White House.Ty Cobb is someone who’s a respected criminal defense attorney.But on the outside, he has John Dowd, who’s no longer with a major firm, doesn’t have a team of lawyers working for him to help manage this case.At times in the years leading up to this, he has behaved kind of irrationally publicly in some of his previous cases.

You have Jay Sekulow on the team who’s not a criminal defense attorney, who’s most known for being a talk show host and a lawyer on television, on Fox News, who at times litigates free speech cases for Christian churches.It's not the kind of serious legal team that you would expect the president of the United States to assemble facing this kind of threat.

Is it possible that he still doesn't understand the jeopardy he’s in?

I think there are a mix of things.I think he doesn't understand the jeopardy he's in, and also he’s running up against an inability to hire the top-notch team of attorneys that he needs, both because some of these people don’t want to work for him and their firms don’t want to work for him, and also because I know that some lawyers go meet with him and in those meetings understand the president just doesn't get it and is never going to listen to the kind of advice and take the kind of advice that he needs to to navigate this kind of a case.

When some parts of the case move up to the Southern District of New York, and [Michael] Cohen is basically raided, and his house, his hotel room, his offices are pulled apart, the Stormy Daniels tawdriness is back in the headlines, … it seems like the strategy that's been sort of on the side for a few months—which is we’ll trash the FBI; we’ll trash the Justice Department; we’ll trash the individuals involved in this—takes on a whole new force and dimension.… Rudy Giuliani joins the crowd, essentially as a legal megaphone on behalf of a president who just can't be everywhere shouting from the rooftops, and is a force multiplier for Trump.What do you make of Rudy’s addition and the things I've just said about what the strategy is?

Something clearly happens with the president after Michael Cohen’s office and house are raided.His level of agitation and concern over this case clearly ratchets up to a new level.We don’t know what the president knows; we don’t know what he’s concerned about.But it’s obvious when Michael Cohen comes under scrutiny from the Department of Justice, the president views that very much as a threat to him.

So you [see] him bring on Rudy Giuliani and enter this new phase of his legal response, where he isn't just going to deal with Mueller quietly behind the scenes, … but he’s going to send Rudy on the airwaves to constantly attack the Justice Department, undermine the investigation, at times say things about the Trump team’s conversations with the Mueller team that may or may not be true, but knowing that Mueller has no ability to go out and correct the record in real time.

You see the president take on this new legal strategy where he’s going to at one time try to undermine the investigationand another try to box Bob Mueller in with these statements about, “Well, we're going to wrap this thing up by Sept. 1,” or ,“Bob Mueller agrees that the president can't be indicted."So you see Giuliani out there trying to set a public bar and set public expectations in a way that he hopes will be binding on the Mueller team.

As a veteran of the Justice Department, when you see this, when you hear this, when you think about some polls that say people’s trust in the FBI and the Justice Department is going down, what do you think?

Mueller's really in a bind here.There are times at the Justice Department where in a situation like this, if you're squared off against an organization or in this case a president who’s being very loud about what the Justice Department’s doing, that you might find it in your interest to publicly correct that either in a press statement or by telling reporters quietly, “You know, what Rudy Giuliani said about what we told him just isn't true."

Mueller can't really do that in this case because his office is under so much scrutiny.The minute he strays at all from how the Justice Department typically handles these cases, he’ll be attacked.The only thing he can do is try to build his case as quickly as possible and hope that when he does bring charges, when he does write a report, that the facts are so strong that they stand up for themselves.

But there's a problem.That is, in the meantime, the president is doing everything he can to undermine the Justice Department .And again, the people at the Justice Department who ought to be defending Bob Mueller aren’t doing it.The attorney general’s not doing it.Rod Rosenstein’s not doing it.In fact, you even see Rosenstein making concessions to the president, making concessions to Republicans on the Hill who have no interest in doing anything but undermining the investigation.

So it is a real bind for Mueller that he can't go out and defend himself and the people that are supposed to do it aren’t really doing it in a forceful and effective way.

The result?

I don't think we know the answer yet.Clearly, what the president’s object is is to just convince enough people in this country that no matter what Bob Mueller produces, he can't be trusted.The president gets what the ultimate game is here, and that's impeachment.And he’s got to convince enough of the American people to hold fast with him that enough members of Congress, Republican members in the House or Senate hold firm if it ever gets to that.That seems to be his only strategy.

… The norms, the values, the things you cared about every day when you went to work, … that does seem like it’s in play and maybe in great jeopardy right now.

The president has done such great damage to the norms that have governed how the Justice Department operates and how it interacts with the White House, and it is an open question whether those norms get restored once Donald Trump is no longer president.I think one of the things that a lot of people didn't realize before Trump was president was that the Justice Department, in a lot of ways, these norms, they're not written into the Constitution; they're not written into the federal statute.There's no law or regulation that says the president can't quash an investigation into himself.There's no law that says he can't order an investigation into political opponents of his.

It's just been norms that have slowly grown up over time, and the president has no respect for those norms and has ignored them, and some the Justice Department has continued to defend, and some it really hasn’t.Whenever Donald Trump is no longer president, I think the question the American people are going to have to ask themselves is, are these norms worth defending?Are they worth codifying in some way?Are there laws we need to pass to make sure that no future president can interfere with the Justice Department the way this one has?It’s one of the hardest long-term questions to answer after the Trump presidency.

* * *

Talk to me a little bit about Mueller’s strategy in the face of the “witch hunt” onslaught.What has Mueller’s response been, and what did it mean that it yielded those indictments?

Mueller’s response to all of these attacks by the president has been pretty simple.It's been to keep his job, keep his head down, and speak in court.The results have been pretty tremendous, if you look at them.This latest result, [the] indictment of 12 Russians in incredible detail, the work of an extraordinary number of people inside the American intelligence community, not just the FBI, but others in the intelligence community, rolled out with an indictment that really is unprecedented in American law enforcement history.

Mueller has made it clear from the beginning he's not going to show up at the press conferences where he announces indictments.He'll let the deputy attorney general do that.He's going to speak only through court.If the president wants to attack him, he's going to weather those attacks.He’s going to let the American people decide what they think about those attacks.But at the end of the day, when he speaks, it will be based on facts, based on the law, and not based on public opinion.

… These indictments, and then the trip to Europe that was supposed to culminate in his greatest moment of triumph with Putin, [Trump] seems unnerved, angry, rageful as he goes through his tour of Europe.Did you see anything like that in him?You see that?

I think the president is under pressure from several different directions.… Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney, appears to be on the verge of cooperating, probably is going to be indicted if he doesn't.Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, has been indicted and has gone through this very public trial.A number of people around him appear to be cooperating with this investigation.He doesn't know what those people are saying, and he's under a great deal of pressure about it.He also seems to believe that his son is likely to be indicted, and that's got to be an enormous amount of pressure for him.

But there's a second thing going on, too, which is the president has clearly decided, from the beginning, that at the end of this process, if this has to end up in a proceeding before the House of Representatives, an impeachment, he's going to be in a political public opinion fight, and he has to undermine this investigation every step of the way.He has to call it a witch hunt; he has to say the investigators are unfair.

And when he went to Helsinki, he found the limits of that strategy.He was expected to stand up and defend the American people and defend the American democracy and say, “Vladimir Putin, I will hold you accountable for attacking our democracy."But you can't do those two things at once.You can't hold Vladimir Putin accountable for attacking democracy at the same time you say the person who is investigating that attack, is indicting Russian intelligence agents, and is trying to defend the country against attack is conducting a witch hunt.

… When he leaves that stage, he believes, by all accounts, that he's done a wonderful job.What was the reality?

The reality was, he had made excuses for someone who attacked American democracy, and he had done it standing on stage with him.He had attacked the American intelligence community and the American law enforcement community that was trying to hold Vladimir Putin responsible for those attacks.It was a shameful moment for the American president.It is a shameful moment every time he's denied the attacks on this democracy.It's shameful every time he calls the investigation a witch hunt.But to stand on soil overseas, next to the person who's responsible for those attacks, and to make excuses for him, to grovel and to attack Americans trying to hold them accountable, was really a low point in his administration.

… Mueller, I guess, on the top of his wish list is, “I'd like to sit down with the president of the United States."

Bob Mueller clearly does want to do this interview with the president.He wants to do it so much that he's let negotiations drag on for eight months, without sending a subpoena, without forcing the issue.He's acting very much in good faith in negotiating with the president's attorney.He’s doing that because some of the questions, only the president can answer.Only the president can explain if he had a corrupt intent when he fired Jim Comey, as he appeared to do based on his own admission on NBC; that he had Russia on his mind when he did it.Only the president can explain what his intent was when he asked intelligence officials to interfere with the FBI and get them to back off the Russian investigation.Only the president can explain what it was he meant when he asked Jim Comey to back off the Mike Flynn investigation.

Mueller doesn't necessarily need this interview.He's talked to everyone around the president, either through voluntary interviews or, in some cases, grand jury testimony.He could draw conclusions about what the president has done based on what the president said at the time and what the president told people afterward.But I think he wants to get this interview because he wants to give the president a chance to explain himself.He wants to say: “Mr. President, if I have this wrong, if what other witnesses are telling me about your intent at the time is wrong, here's your chance to clean it up.Here's your chance to clear it up and tell me exactly why you took these actions at the time."

But the words “perjury trap” are written all over that exercise.

The president really is in a vise.His advisers talk privately to reporters all the time.You see it show up in news coverage, about the fact that they don't believe this president can go in and do this interview without telling a lie.It's a remarkable admission for them to make.But I think there's an even bigger problem for the president.I think if he went in and told the truth, I think he'd be confessing to a crime.So he's faced with this choice, where he goes in and tells the truth about why he fired Jim Comey, why he asked Jim Comey to back off on Mike Flynn, and he probably admits to obstructing justice if he tells the truth.Of course, if he goes in and doesn't tell the truth, he can be charged with lying to federal investigators.And that tension, that problem, I think, is why you will never see him sit down with Mueller under any terms.

What are the stakes for the midterm?What are the stakes for the president in the midterm elections?

I think for the president, there are questions of whether, if Congress switches to the Democratic side, whether there will be finally really aggressive investigations, not just by the special counsel but by Congress, into what happened in the 2016 election and into how he's behaved as president.

But I really do think the stakes are even bigger than that.The stakes could be as large as whether Mueller can continue.If Democrats don't take back one of the Houses of Congress, this president will feel emboldened.[This president] may feel empowered to move finally, as we know he wants to do, to either fire Bob Mueller or fire Jeff Sessions or fire Rod Rosenstein, or find some way to shut this investigation down.

There are many legal experts who say he could do that now.

I don't think there's any debate over the fact that, if the president wanted to shut this investigation down, he could do it.He could give a direct order to the attorney general or to the deputy attorney general, and if they refused to obey those orders, he could fire those people.I think he’d have to fire his way pretty far down the Justice Department.I don't think there would be very many people who would carry out what they saw as an unethical order.But he could find someone who would do it.

The problem has always been the political consequences and whether there are any people in Congress, chiefly Republicans, who would hold him accountable for it.And so far, while there are a lot of Republicans who make excuses for him and cover up for him, the message from the leadership at least has been, that's a bridge too far.If Democrats don't take back Congress, and the president feels empowered and feels like he really needs to end this investigation, as he moves into his re-election campaign, you might see him take that dramatic step.

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