so karoun, to you, how does this impact the daca negotiations? you heard senator rand paul come out and saying if anyone is calling the president a racist, how can we get anything done on immigration? what does this do in your mind? >> well, it doesn't necessarily help them along. the thing that the democrats are probably trying to weigh right now is how far they think they were going to get along if they played more nicely with the president. we saw last week president trump was out there saying we want a clean daca. no, we won't. whoever was asking the questions in the long session is he held with members of congress. but if you've got an open spat, it becomes more stkeuf to reach a deal. if it was something where they would have to swallow the president's wall, maybe that wasn't the greatest place to start out with. that he wants the open question right now. where were they? were they actually the point at which this was leading in a good direction or were they at odds anyway and you're having this debate about what the president actually said

karoun, there's a lot of trump critics out there that want to believe everything in that book. >> that'save to be very careful about, you know, what is the professional credentials that you bring to making these analyses. we're reporters, not psychologists or doctors and we have not sat down and diagnosed the president in any single way that we would be able to because that's not what we're trained as. yeah, people want to see the president as being unstable and they are going to take this as fodder for continuing that impression. those that want to see that generally all reporters are making things up and trying to attack the president are going to see him in that way. it's very difficult to get people out of that zone. but, again, that's why it's the job of everybody in the middle to be reporting on these things and to be asking these questions and looking at it saying, okay, taking what he's printed for what he is but also questioning how he came about to that point and, again, it's not a cut and dry thing because i believe -- i think carl was saying earlier, sometimes people say slig

>> where does russia rank as it hangs over these issues right now, karoun?re are concerns that democrats are going to shut down the republican investigation, republicans saying things have gone too far. >> that will be the other major issue that will govern about how people feel about everything going on in 2018. you'll see further steps in the mue will ler probe, wind down of investigations on the hill and ramp up of other investigations on the hill trying to take a light and shine it on how the fbi and doj operations were functioning at the time of the clinton e-mail probe, in the dossier that's something that they've already started to look into. and depending how those progress and what sorts of new revelations those are concerning allegations against the president as we've seen that can throw everything off course in a second. so, that is going to be something that's hanging over everything for several months, frankly, into the new year. >> karoun, you have reporting on this, including devin nunez, chair of the house investigation. he, as we all remembe

karoun, have those trying to sew doubt on this investigation, have they already succeeded? have they created the reasonable doubt they're looking for within specifically the president's own supporters? >> the question has to be to what end. if the reasonable doubt is supposed to undermine support for mueller's probe, no, you still have a number of people in the gop saying mueller should be allowed to proceed with that to its end, whatever that is. he's still going. it's not like this has dismant l mantled the scrutiny about whether the president had connections with russian officials. republicans have seized on many of these particulars of ambiguity. at baseline this is questionable. mueller did let these people go from his team because of the texts being exchanged. it's not like there's no problem here. there is a problem here. the gop has seized on many different things, some of which have stuck, some of which, like the ones in the last 24 hours or so, have not stuck so well. but they're speaking to their base, if they're speaking to people who want to have reasons to try