us. have a good weekend and good night from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. thank you for joining us for day four of the rule of law crisis that has been unleashed by president trump and his attorney general william barr. today, interestingly, is actually the one-year anniversary of william barr taking over as attorney general at the justice department. congratulations. how's it gone? in this current scandal this week, we are not only learning what general barr has been up to this week as it has become a gigantic scandal and has all started falling apart. we are now learning as of this part of the week, from public reporting and from sources starting to squawk about it, we're now learning what exactly attorney general william barr has been up to on the president's behalf for this

whole year that he has been on the job. happy valentine's day. the reason the news keeps getting worse and worse this week as this crisis stretches on is because this crisis over the president and the attorney general intervening in multiple criminal cases to basically fix them on the president's behalf, the reason the news keeps getting worse this week is because this ongoing crisis keeps sort of unfolding like a blooming onion, and it's just as healthy. we keep getting more and more new news about what the attorney general has been doing in his time on the job. but to really get the depth of it, particularly the depth of what came out today, you should start back in 2017 before the hiring of william barr was even a twinkle in president trump's eye. you may recall that in 2017, the president fired fbi director james comey. he had asked comey for a loyalty pledge. he had told comey that he wanted

him to let go the criminal investigation into his national security adviser mike flynn. comey had refused on both counts. the president fired james comey, and then you might remember the very next day, president trump invited the russians into the oval office. surprise. he invited the russian foreign minister and the russian ambassador into the oval and told them in that meeting that he was delighted to have gotten rid of comey and that all the pressure he had been facing about russia was now off. all that pressure was now relieved because he had fired the fbi director james comey. and the president may indeed have thought so in the moment. he certainly looked happy enough about it. but it seemed in that moment when we learned what he said to those russian government officials that he was sort of confessing to them that the reason he had fired james comey was to try to make the russia investigation go away. and trying to make federal criminal investigations go away, trying to obstruct them by firing the person leading the

investigation, well, whether or not you're ever going to get indicted for it, it's not good. and in any case, it didn't work. after an fbi director is fired, the second in command steps up and takes control. the deputy fbi director when james comey was fired was a man named andrew mccabe, and so mccabe, as deputy director, stepped up and became the acting director of the fbi once comey got fired. and in the short time that andy mccabe served as acting fbi director in the wake of comey's firing, mr. mccabe approved the opening of two investigations that we know of into the president. first -- and it is unsurprising looking back at it, but first he approved an investigation into whether the president, in fact, had fired james comey for the reason he explained to the russians. did he in fact fire comey or do anything else specifically to try to impede the government's investigation into russia messing with our election? so that's an obstruction of justice investigation into the

president. mccabe approves that. mccabe also approved expanding the existing counterintelligence investigation into the russian attack to include the potential role of the president. this terrible central counterintelligence question of whether the president at some point was compromised by a foreign power, whether that had anything to do with russia intervening in our election to try to install him in office. mccabe approved the expansion of the counterintelligence investigation to include that matter. andy mccabe was only the acting director of the fbi for a short time. it was right after comey was fired. but the fbi right after comey was fired was was a fraught time. mccabe didn't flinch. that was what he did when he was in that role. so naturally the president decided that he must be, you know, well, proverbially off with his head. the president's orientation toward andrew mccabe became one of a heat seeking missile. the president fixated on mccabe

as an enemy. public denunciation after public denunciation. long after there was a new fbi director and mccabe had returned to his previous job, the president kept training fire on andy mccabe, insisting publicly and hounding the fbi into firing him, firing him specifically a single day short of him being eligible to receive his pension as a 20-year fbi veteran. even beyond hounding the fbi into firing him, the president also demanded that mccabe should be criminally charged as well. lock him up. well, understand attorney general william barr last year, the department of justice finally started to seem amenable to that demand from the president, and they did in fact open a criminal investigation into andy mccabe just as the president had been insisting. the problem on the horizon for this criminal investigation, however, was that there really didn't seem to be adequate grounds to convict andrew mccabe of any federal crimes. there didn't even seem to be enough basis out there to charge

him with anything. we would soon learn. the way we do indictments in the criminal justice system, broadly speaking, is that prosecutors work closely with grand juries. that is essentially a no non-adversarial process. it does give prosecutors a ton of power. and that system has led to what is often referred to as the ham sandwich standard. the basic idea is that the grand jury system is set up in such a way that any capable prosecutor can get a grand jury to hand down an indictment of something as innocent as a ham sandwich if the prosecutor just puts his or her mind to it. it is that easy for a prosecutor to get an indictment out of a grand jury because the way that system is sort of stacked in the prosecutor's favor. again, like it or don't, that is the system. but even in our little banana republic in which the president is insistently demanding lock him up when it comes to andrew

mccabe, the president braying for months that the former fbi director must be indicted, he must be charged, he must be prosecuted. and even with the president's favorite attorney general william barr try his best to go along with that, it turned out the case against andrew mccabe couldn't even meet the ham sandwich standard. and we know that because last year there started emerging these intriguing reports that while the president was calling over and over again for mccabe's head, prosecutors in the u.s. attorney's office in washington apparently at least twice brought their evidence against andrew mccabe before a grand jury. and grand jury proceedings are secret, so a lot of this is just circumstantial evidence, but it appears based on circumstantial evidence that despite multiple attempts to get an indictment, for whatever reason, the grand jury wouldn't do it. and, again, i insist there is only circumstantial evidence of that. but no indictment of andrew

mccabe ever emerged even after this criminal case against him was open for months, even after the prosecutors appeared to convene the grand jury in this matter more than once. after one of those instances with the grand jury not producing an indictment, mccabe 's own lawyers made a public demand that the justice department lawyers should give it up, they should stop letting their client, mr. mccabe, twist in the wind. there was a judge overseeing this matter and the judge also started making increasingly impatient remarks in court, questioning why the justice department couldn't just bring charges already if that's what they intended to do. if you've got an open criminal investigation of this guy, that should produce charges. if not, you should close it. how long did they intend to leave this criminal case against andy mccabe technically open without actually being able to indict him on anything? well, here's the judge in july of last year lamenting in court that this investigation seemed to be going, in his words, going

on, quote, ad infinitum. prosecutors at that point last july then asked for another 60 days. he gave them 60 days. 60 days later they were back in court. he told them once again, hey, how come you haven't brought charges if you are keeping this case open? he says, quote, how long are you talking about? prosecutors at that point asked the judge for another three weeks. three weeks later they were back in court. they still didn't have any charges to present. they asked the judge at that point for another three months, and at that point the judge says no. the judge balks. he says, quote, i don't know why it is so difficult for a decision to be made. either you have a case or you don't. quote, it seems to me from the standpoint of mr. mccabe that he has the right to have the government make a decision and not hold his life in limbo pending a decision as to what is going to happen. so do you have any idea how long it's going to be before a decision is made? the prosecutor says, your honor, i would ask for a period of three months before we come back. the judge responds, no. that just seems like a long time to me.

i just don't -- i just don't get it. so the president is publicly banging the drum about this. mccabe should be prosecuted. mccabe is a criminal. this guy who was at the fbi who oversaw the opening of the russia investigation and whether i tried to shut that investigation down by firing james comey and all the other obstructive things i did, that guy is the real enemy of the state. he has committed treason according to the president. he should be fired. he should be prosecuted. he should be behind bars. the president doesn't let up. and under william barr, under attorney general william barr, the effort to prosecute mr. mccabe keeps chugging along. trying, trying mr. president. but clearly it doesn't make much sense. it's not well grounded. it is really starting to seem like they don't have a case against him. "the new york times" reports last fall that the suppose the key witnesses they were going to count on to build their case against mccabe, those witnesses actually went into the grand jury and told them, yeah,

actually everything mccabe did was fine. not only was it not illegal, it was specifically the kind of stuff he's tasked to do in the job that he held at the fbi. really seems like they don't have a case. still, though, who wants to be the one to tell president trump that the criminal case that they brought against andrew mccabe after he insisted on them opening it is now going to be dropped? who wants to tell him? you want to tell him? i'm going to be out sick for the next three weeks. meanwhile the prosecutors on the andrew mccabe case start quitting. one prosecutor pulls his name off the case, withdraws, although he stayed within the justice department. another prosecutor not only took her name off the case, she quit the justice department altogether. sound familiar? those resignations happened in the fall. but today finally, finally, after all of this, final they dropped the case against mccabe. they will no longer try to bring criminal charges against andrew mccabe. they will close this matter. now, why did they give this up

today? in the movie version of this moment in american life, somebody has had an awakening of conscience and recognized that it's really wrong and really bad for this country, quite injurious to our status as a rule of law country for a president to keep publicly demanding criminal investigations of people he's decided are his enemies. somebody realizes, somebody has a come to someone moment and decides it's even more wrong for an attorney general to listen to those demands from a president and to try to bring about those prosecutions that the president is demanding. i mean in the movie version of this crisis where america wins at the end, somebody wakes up to how wrong that is, and that is what finally causes this decision today to stop seeking criminal charges against andy mccabe. that does not appear to be what happened. what appears to have happened inside the movie that we are actually living is that these guys ran up against a court order. thanks to a freedom of information act lawsuit brought

by an oversight group in washington called crew, today was the day that previously sealed documents from the mccabe case were going to be made public, including sealed conversations between the prosecutors and the judge. the prosecutors who repeatedly couldn't explain why no charges were being brought, who couldn't explain why the grand jury wasn't producing an indictment even though they kept meeting, who couldn't explain why they kept needing more and more time to keep this investigation alive even though they apparently couldn't get the grand jury to charge him. what was unsealed today were conversations that took place ex parte, meaning under seal between those prosecutors who couldn't explain why this mccabe case was still going on, and the judge who was asking them hard questions. and so as of today -- today was the deadline. as of today, that court order has now been effectuated and those previously sealed documents have been unsealed. and so now we can see why they had to drop the case today, because now we can see that what was going to become public today

was the judge reaming out the prosecutors for what the president and, by extension, the attorney general were trying to do here. and that's why today went the way it did. i mean this morning the justice department formally drops its case against mccabe, right? they formally drop their effort to lock him up like the president has been braying about for months. just a couple of hours after that announcement, we get quietly posted on the docket in federal court in d.c. this transcript. it's judge reggie walton speaking to one of the prosecutors from the u.s. attorney's office in d.c. who had been stringing this case along, who was never quite able to produce any actual criminal charges and couldn't explain why the case was still open nonetheless. and the judge just says it. quote, the public is listening to what's going on, and i do not think people like the fact that you've got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted. i just think it's a banana republic when we go down that road, and we have those types of statements being made that are

conceivably even if not influencing the ultimate decision, i think there were a lot of people on the outside who perceived there is undue inappropriate pressure being brought to bear. and i would just hope it is -- it is just -- it is very disturbing that we are in the mess that we are in in that regard. because, he says, i think having been a part of the prosecution for a long time -- the judge is a former prosecutor. and the judge says respecting the role that prosecutors play in the system, he says, quote, i just think the integrity of the process is being unduly undermined by inappropriate comments and actions on the part of people at the top of our government. i think it is very unfortunate, and i think as a government and as a society, we are going to pay a price at some point for this. the prosecutor says to the judge, sir, i will certainly report back within the office about what was said here, and i do want you to know that i take my role -- and the judge interrupts. i'm not criticizing, he says. and the prosecutor says, no, i

completely understand. and then the judge says, quote, i'm just happy that when i was in the justice department, those type of things were not taking place that were putting either perceived or actual pressure on the office as to whether you prosecute somebody for a criminal offense. i'm happy i never had to endure that. and the prosecutor says, no, i completely understand. it's not like he defends himself and says, your honor, you're misunderstanding. there hasn't been any political pressure on us. nobody at the top of our government has been telling us to bring this prosecution. this is an independent -- he doesn't say that. he just says in this ex parte communication just unsealed today, yes, your honor, i understand. so this week, the scope of this week, i mean it has just -- it has been falling apart. you might remember there's been -- around the end of the impeachment trial, right, there's been a lot of punditry

as to how the president would respond, whether the president having survived the threat of being removed from office in the impeachment trial, there's all this punditry and speculation about whether he would overreach m some way, whether he would do something inevitably that would cause some new crisis because he would be so geared up about not having been removed from office. that punditry turned out to be half right. half right because what the president did this week was bigger than causing some new crisis. what the president did this week was that he started talking about something that has apparently been going on for a long time. he exposed something that he and attorney general william barr have been doing together for a year now. it is all tumbling out now because the president this week couldn't stop himself from bragging about it. to the extent that attorney general william barr has spent his one year in office trying to essentially fix criminal cases for the president, it turns out

it is true both in terms of prosecutions the president wants brought against his enemies and also favors the president wants done within the criminal justice system for his allies or for people who could potentially implicate him in further misbehavior, and often those people are the same. some of this has really been hiding in plain sight. some of it is brand-new, but there's a reason it is all cascading out now. that's next. stay with us. ty butchumal- cut. liberty biberty- cut. we'll dub it. liberty mutual customizes your car insurance so you only pay for what you need. only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ for the past few weeks because, fun fact, a recent study suggests crime goes down when people tune in.. and football is awesome. - win, win. to thank you for watching, we're kicking off adt's pass the protection contest. - it's your chance to win a $250,000 home makeover from adt, designed by us. - and a new adt smart home security system. - visit adt.com/passtheprotection

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in early january, on january 7th, prosecutors in the mike flynn case told the judge overseeing that case that they believed he should serve a prison sentence for his crimes. 22 days later on the 29th of january, prosecutors inexplicably reversed that recommendation. they filed a new sentencing recommendation with the judge saying actually they didn't want prison time for him at all. forget the earlier recommendation. and i remember asking at the time, i actually posted something online at the time asking what the heck was going on there. i posted this on january 29th. quote, 22 days ago, doj prosecutors in the flynn case were asking for a sentence of imprisonme imprisonment. now they say they're not. what happened in the last 22

days? i posted that on january 29th. well, now we know the answer. turns out over the course of those 22 days, attorney general william barr intervened to basically try to put the fix in on that case on behalf of president trump. nbc news today nailing this down. quote, within the past month -- today is january 14th -- excuse me. today is february 14th. federal prosecutors on the flynn case came under pressure from senior justice department officials to recommend a lighter sentence for flynn than they had proposed. in early january, prosecutors had recommended that flynn serve up to six months in jail. they were overruled three weeks later on january 29th when the government submitted a new sentencing recommendation to the judge saying probation for flynn was more appropriate instead. that was under pressure from senior justice department officials, who intervened in what the line prosecutors were otherwise pursuing in that case. this revelation from nbc news comes amid further reporting

both from nbc and "the new york times" today that attorney general barr has installed a team of people in an ongoing way in the u.s. attorney's office in d.c. specifically to, shall we say, oversee cases that are sensitive and that happen to be of interest to the president. quote, mr. barr has installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of politically sensitive national security cases in the u.s. attorney's office in washington. the team includes at least one prosecutor from the office of the u.s. attorney in st. louis, a prosecutor who is now handling the flynn case. a st. louis prosecutor? as well as prosecutors from the office of the deputy attorney general. what are they doing there? quote, over the past two weeks the outside prosecutors have begun grilling line prosecutors in the washington u.s. attorney's office about various cases, some public, some not, including investigative steps, prosecutorial actions and why

they took them. some of the cases involve president trump's friends and allies. some, his critics and adversaries. quote, the moves amount to imposing a secondary layer of monday i forring and control over what career prosecutors have been doing in the washington u.s. attorney's office. the move is, quote, highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top department officials. oh, you think? it could, could trigger those -- consider that trigger pulled. i mean this is not a warning about the possible mistaken appearance of political influence on the criminal justice system. i mean this is documentation, further documentation that we have piled up this week that in fact the criminal justice system has been breached. it's not threatened. it's hurt. prosecutorial decisions are now being made under the direct supervision of the attorney general, specifically to benefit the president and to respond to his demands, to punish his

enemies and try to free his friends. it's not that there's a threat of this. we are now living with a justice system that has been made to work this way. this crisis emerged on tuesday this week in the case of roger stone because the president couldn't keep quiet about it. but the stone case followed the exact pattern of what happened with michael flynn. just like in the flynn case, prosecutors recommended to the court a prison sentence. then there was political intervention by the attorney general on behalf of the president to reverse that prison recommendation, and instead to recommend no prison sentence, and so a revised recommendation was made to the court. the only difference between the two cases was this week while the president was partly feeling his oats, he couldn't resist making his demanding about this prosecution out loud. he couldn't resist saying out loud how he wished the stone case to be fixed, please. and that of course brought everybody's attention to it in an inescapable way. and of course the dark reality

that we are confronting -- i mean even beyond that cascade of very upsetting evidence about what trump and barr have done to break the rule of law, the very dark revelation here, i think, is that the president screwed up and set off this crisis this week by crowing about what he wanted done in this one criminal case specifically because he really doesn't want this stuff to be done quietly. he does want this stuff to be done out loud. he wants to brag about it because the threat is the point, right? i mean attorney general william barr clearly doesn't want this to be public. you know, who wants to be known as the attorney general who really is fixing criminal cases on the president's behalf? so of course attorney general barr is expressing public consternation about the president talking about these matters so much. it makes his job quite impossible for the president to keep publicly describing what it is they've been doing for the past year. but the dark truth here is that the president wants this to be broadcast as loudly as possible because he wants the effect.

first of all he's not ashamed by this. he doesn't believe he's constrained by the law. that's his recent experience. it seems to back him up on that. he believes that the criminal justice system should be there for his disposal, that he should use the criminal justice system to lock up his political opponents, to criminalize political opposition to him, to lock up anybody who stands against him whether as part of a political opposition movement or as part of law enforcement or as a whistle-blower or as somebody in the government who just obeys a subpoena and testifies truthfully as to something that they saw. he believes that anybody who does such a thing is a traitor and should be locked up. and anybody who's considering doing such a thing should fear being locked up so as to shut down all opposition to himself and to essentially, you know, render resistance futile. his idea is to create that fear that will stop people from standing up against him. and if that's what you're trying

to do, the louder you can be about the fact that you're using the criminal justice system this way, the better. and so the stone case interference happened out in the open because the president couldn't stop himself. the flynn case interference is now out in the open. the mccabe case interference is basically laid bare today. and the rest of the reporting is just pouring out. "the new york times" reporting that attorney general william barr personally inserted himself into the hush money criminal case in new york in which the president was identified by prosecutors as the person who directed the commission of the felonies, individual one, in which the president's business and its executives were reportedly under federal criminal scrutiny until william barr was sworn in as attorney general one year ago, and he immediately got himself down to new york where he went and met with federal prosecutors about that very case. that very case was quietly closed a few months later with no additional charges brought against anyone despite the fact that the federal prosecutors in that office had blocked state investigators from having anything to do with the facts of this case because they

supposedly had pending charges there. they supposedly had an ongoing criminal investigation, but it inexplicably closed several months after barr's intervention with nobody else being charged at all. barr also reportedly personally inserted himself into the lev and igor and rudy giuliani case in the southern district of new york, which resulted in charges thus far against lev and igor but not against rudy giuliani. we'll have more on that a little bit later on in the show. so it may not just be that one u.s. attorney's office in doi.c. it may be the so-called sovereign district in new york as well. just one last piece of this that i think is worth underscoring. this is the thing that kind of rattles my molars the most out of the revelations from this crisis today. and it is from "the new york times." it's about barr's installing of this team of overseers in the u.s. attorney's office in d.c. for sensitive cases that relate to the president. not only has that team inserted

itself into the stone case and into the flynn case, but "the times" today describes this team handpicked by attorney general william barr as interceding in, quote, various cases, quote, some public, some not. some not? some cases we don't know about? i mean what "the times" is reporting is that among the politically sensitive cases that, you know, and every other case we know of, the circumstance has something to do with the president. in one of these politically sensitive cases which likely has something to do with the president, some of the cases that bill barr is having his team mess with, are cases that we don't know about yet, cases that are either sealed indictments in which the alleged perpetrators haven't been arrested yet or they are open criminal cases where charges haven't yet been filed. barr's handpicked team of overseers is messing in those cases too. what are those cases?

and what's bill barr doing to them right now as we speak? and how do we get our legal system back when these guys are done with it? and how do we get those cases back if they are improperly kiboshed? because what we're leaving through as of this week is not a threat to the rule of law in the united states of america. we are emerging into a reality where we recognize that we have a lack of the rule of law. it is broken. the rule of law is no longer in effect when it comes to criminal cases that have anything to do with the president or his perceived interests. they have hijacked one u.s. attorney's office to serve the president's needs. another supposedly very independent district in new york does not appear to have been immune from this pressure either. at least there is circumstantial evidence that raises serious questions about that. given that, what do we do now? how do we get this back? how much should we be counting on people inside the justice department to help stop this, to at least squawk about it and let us know? if they do squawk about it, how are we going to respond?

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. i have questions. now that we have arrived here, now that we know the american criminal justice system is being used as a tool by the president and his attorney general to help out those in the president's favor and to go after those he decides are enemies, now that we are sort of beyond warning that that might happen and it turns out we're living it, i have questions like what can we do to

stop it. and whether it's fair to hope that people inside the justice department who are seeing this political hijacking of their cases firsthand, whether it's fair of us to hope that those people should squawk about it and let us know. whether it is fair of us to expect that the judges whose cases are being affected by these political hijackings, should the judges themselves try to make the justice department admit to and account for the political interference that is affecting these cases? i want to know whether the justice department might in fact be screwing up cases that have no interest to the president, just normal criminal cases because the attorney general is wading into some specific cases on the president's behalf to ask for lenience for specific favored defendants. won't every defendant in the country now ask for that same treatment since the attorney general is giving it to the president's friends? i want to know how to counter the message that the president is now sending that, in fact, if you oppose him, yeah, he will have the attorney general bring the legal system down on you.

i want to know how normal, everyday people can counter that by finding some way to support the people who the president is making an example of. is there some way for everyday people, for regular citizens to support the witnesses and the whistle-blowers and the law enforcement people who the president really has made examples of by destroying them? i have all of these questions. i don't know how i should get answers, but i would like to ask some of them of andrew weissmann, former fbi general counsel. former senior member of the counsel investigation. thank you for being here tonight. >> i hope you're not going to ask me all of those questions. >> just answer whatever ones you know the answers to. i've laid this out in stark terms. do you think i'm being unreasonable? >> i don't think you're being unreasonable. the one point i would make is that this is not a democrat/republican issue in terms of where we are today. i have served under democratic administrations and republican administrations at the department of justice.

i worked on the enron case, which was highly, highly political in the sense that there was enormous interest in the press about whether ken lay, the then chairman of the firm, was connected to the vice president. >> the brand-new bush/cheney administration. >> exactly. and there was not a scintilla, not any political pressure put on us at all. it was classic department of justice, which is you follow the facts. you follow the law. if it's a warranted investigation, it will be brought. and that whole investigation was led by republicans who had integrity. so this really isn't -- what we're living through now, i don't think people should be thinking this is somehow, you know, democrats are not going to be like this but republicans are. no. we're really dealing with something very, very different. >> and the way the president has portrayed this -- i mean this is interesting both psychologically and as a political strategy. he has portrayed the justice department as always having been

corrupt and political, as presidents always have attorney generals who fixed cases for them, who punished their enemies and who rewarded their friends, and why isn't he getting the justice department that he knows every other president has had. i mean he's trying to create the sense that this is not only not something he should get -- something he should get as a republican, but something that all presidents have gotten. >> yeah. well, that's simply not true. it is fair to say that there are attorney generals who have had closer relationships with the president and some that have had more distant relationships. but do you know that in 21 years, do you know how many times i have experienced or even heard of the attorney general of the united states reaching in to a single criminal case to weigh in on the sentencing submission? >> how many times? >> that would be zero. >> yeah. >> it doesn't happen. i think one of the things that was missing from attorney general barr's interview was him making it sound like, well, this is normal. this is something that happens normally. the question i would have for him is tell me one other time

other than for flynn and stone and actually for paul manafort not in connection with sentencing but in terms of where he was housed, when have you ever reached in as the attorney general to any other case? i mean it's remarkable, and it's sort of an obvious -- if you look at the facts, it's very hard not to be cynical and say it's obvious what's happening. this is the attorney general who is clearly doing this because these are three people close to the president. and they're getting disproportionate justice. >> let me ask you about some of the potential remedies here when we come right back. andrew weissmann is our guest. we'll be right back. stay with us. leftovers?

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time and then the next day, after the president tweeted, a new sentencing recommendation that says no, don't -- >> we didn't mean it. >> the judge will have to consider -- what does the judge do with those two filings, and what does she make of this? >> so i think -- so, one, the judge is excellent, and she is smart, and she is tough, and she'll be tough on either side if they're playing games, whether it's the government or the defense. i would expect her with respect to the government having a lot of pointed questions about you submitted something initially that said certain things about the facts and also made certain representations about the law, which you then retracted and said, well, we're not saying the law really requires this. i think she's going to be pointed. how could you say that? i've looked at the law. the law does seem to require that this guideline applies. >> can she require the justice department to explain what happened? >> absolutely. she can require the u.s. attorney to show up and actually

the people who signed it to come in and say what happened. >> if it turns out the truth what happened here is what it believes it was, which is political pressure on the department and the u.s. attorney and on those prosecutors to change it, all signs would seem to indicate that, public reporting, the resignation of the prosecutors. if the judge concludes that it was improper political influence that caused the change of this recommendation, can she sanction the department? is there some remedy she can impose beyond embarrassment? >> her main issue is making the right decision first with respect to the defendant. what's the appropriate sentence? so she's going to want to know what she should make of the government submission, and that is the thing that gives her leeway to ask all of these very probing questions. >> mm-hmm. >> the at the end of the day, though, i think she is going to be principally focused on what you're supposed to, doing justice for the defendant before her because unlike the department, she is going to be trying to apply equal justice. she is not going to hold a

different standard for roger stone than any other defendant. >> she may be the only prospect for accountability we've got in terms what went wrong here. >> she's famously said about the courts, it's one place in this country where facts still matter. she does have a remedy because if they're lawyers, they can be referred to the bar if she thinks something happened that is inappropriate. she can also refer them to the i.g. if she thinks there's something inappropriate. there is, you know, some sanctions. then of course if you're a lawyer, that is a terrible thing to have happen to you. >> andrew weissman, thank you so much. it's a pleasure to have you here any day that you're here, but particularly tonight. >> pleasure to be here. >> we'll be right back. stay with us. did you know you can get unlimited talk and

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pulitzer prize-winning journalist david rode is out with a new piece today at the new yorker about attorney general william barr and i encourage you to read it. i will give you the punch line, though. it's actually the opposite of a punch line. he leaves us with this chilling thought. quote, the unresolved question is how far barr will go in expanding presidential power when the president is donald trump. critics contend that by empowering trump, barr is paving the way for autocracy. i david rohde is the perfect person to raise that question. he's the author of an upcoming book called "in deep: the fbi, the cia, and the truth about

america's deep state." it comes out in april. thank you so much for being here. >> thank you for having me. >> i feel like you're a little bit of a bill barr whisperer, which is why i wanted to talk to you. >> i'm trying. >> you have been looking in depth at him as a political actor, as an attorney, and in this part of his life. do you feel like there's something about the way he approaches his job that we are misunderstanding as we confront this crisis this week? >> he does have a very different view of sort of the presidency. he sees the presidency first as the most important branch of the government, that whenever the united states has come under dire threat from a war or the great depression or some kind of natural disaster, the president has saved the country. and he really believes that the president should be stronger than congress or the judiciary, and he thinks since watergate the presidency has been weakened, weakened too much. and he's trying to restore that balance. >> in terms of the judiciary, i feel like we used the word

constitutional kries crisis a l. i've been thinking of this as a rule of law crisis is not a constitutional crisis. if barr believes that a president should be superior to the judiciary, does he believe that a president should disobey a court order if he wants to? >> yes, i think he believes that the president has that power. he thinks there's two remedies to contain a president who is out of control. one is impeachment, which we just saw fail. and the other is elections. and that's essentially it. and that the president, through article ii, has full control of the executive branch. that means he has full control of the judiciary -- sorry -- of the department of justice. >> mm-hmm. >> and as you've been talking about, he can bring criminal cases. the president himself can bring criminal cases against whoever he wants. >> what do you make of attorney general barr sort of not defending what has been exposed this week but trying to explain his own frustrations with the president making public statements about it? i mean the president is clearly

saying, i believe i have the right to interfere in any criminal case that i want to, and i'd like to crow about the fact that i'm going to. i believe he's trying to intimidate hisritics b doing that. attorney general barr isn't exactly saying the same thing. he's not conceding that president trump has the right to dictate what the sentencing recommendation should be for his pals, but does he believe that? >> that's the real question here. i don't know what barr was trying to do. i think he was -- i think he's in an extraordinarily difficult position. he's the attorney general. the president says there's this vast deep state. you know, last night lou dobbs was saying there's two dozen people who should be arrested right now in the fbi and the justice department. one of them, according to the conspiracy theory, is andy mccabe. guess what? there is no evidence against andy mccabe. how does bill barr prove the president's rhetoric about a deep state and bring people to court when there is no evidence to prove that? so i think he's still carrying out this agenda.

he believe the president has the right to influence these cases, but he's saying, please stop broadcasting it on twitter. you're making it very hard for me to give you the power i think you should have. >> you're making it very hard for me to keep doing the stuff we've been doing all year together quietly with people only suspecting it and not being able to prove it. >> yes and like one theory -- and i don't know. none of us are in bill barr's head. he had this theory throughout his career that the president can prosecute anyone he wants. but, you know, it's got to be a different experience for him to be the attorney general. he was under george h.w. bush who was very cautious and didn't believe the president should have sort of more power, versus working for president trump and believing that this single person should have this kind of power. and, you know, he's written in some legal papers about restraints and political pressure. nothing seems to restrain this president. so a best case scenario is that, you know, bill barr working for donald trump thinks maybe a president shouldn't have this much power. >> it's hard to imagine that part of him getting unwired at

this point in his life. let me ask you one last question in terms of your perspective on him and the way you've seen him evolve over the course of his career. one of the things that i think people are considering is a potential sanction against bill barr himself that might try to reel this in. this is a crisis of the rule of law. learning that the attorney general has been fixing these cases for the president is -- is a remarkable thing. it would be the biggest scandal in any presidency in the modern era. it's one scandal among many in this one, but it's a deep and dark one. how would bill barr react to himself being impeached by the house of representatives? >> he would see that as like an excessive reaction. i think he buys into the sort of dark donald trump, you know, no one is neutral. every attorney general is highly politicized, and a view that the mueller investigation was just like a political smear on the president. >> wow. >> and so, you know, he gave this speech to the federalist society saying it's the radical left that is destroying all of our norms and they're setting out to destroy this president.

so the scary thing is this sort of -- this mentality of they're besieged, they're under attack. you know, the house is abusing its powers. mueller abused his powers and we have to fight back. so, you know, he's fixing these cases and maybe in his mind he thinks it's unjust that, you know, it is too much of a sentence against roger stone. i don't know how he compares that to the facts. roger stone was convicted by a jury of his peers of seven felonies. we can debate the sentence but that's a fact and that's breaking the law. so it's a pivotal moment. bill barr is a pivotal player right now. will he continue to play along? will he push back? will more people resign? you know, it's an enormous crisis and it's very sad. >> it is an enormous crisis and it's getting deeper by the day. david rohde, author of the upcoming book in deep. thank you so much. >> thank you so much. >> we'll be right back. stay with us. (howling wind)

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it has been a dark week. these are difficult times for our country. but as always, that just means all the more reason to pay attention and all the more reason to appreciate stuff totally outside of what is going wrong when it still goes right. like, happy valentine's day. we'll see you again on monday. now it's time for "the last word." ali velshi is in for lawrence.