you know, i worked for leon jaworski.nkless of times right after the saturday night massacre. and there are uncanny differences between leon jaworski and mr. barr. they were both 68 years old. they both had distinguished careers. had made a nice amount of money. so you sort of wondered why would they take this job knowing the firestorm they would inherit. and leon jaworski said he thought the job would destroy him. he took it because he told young lawyers you can't run away from challenges and he accepted it for that reason. i think the legacy that mr. barr is going to be concerned about is not congressional resolutions or polls. i think it's going to be history. and he is not going to want to be participant in a cover-up. i think he's going to follow the law. and we're going to be frustrated because there are going to be redactions. but i think an interesting thing is he's consulting with mueller on the redactions. and what i would think, a creative solution would be, whatever he redacts indicate if mueller agrees with t

that whole conflagration, we ended up getting a new watergate special prosecutor, a man named leon jaworskicourse richard nixon had to appoint a new attorney general to lead the justice department. as the new attorney general, that nominee would of course become the boss for the new watergate special prosecutor. for that job, for the ag job, nixon picked this man, sitting u.s. senator named william saxby. at william saxby's confirmation hearing with the watergate investigation hanging by a thread, as you might imagine, confirmation hearing focused on exactly that. william saxby was asked essentially the same question over and over and over again, will you interfere with the watergate investigation, will you interfere with the watergate investigation, will you, will you, will you. and william saxby over and over again said, no no, i promise. i won't. i will not interfere with the watergate investigation or with the watergate special prosecutor. and then to get right to the point, they actually dur his confirmation hearing, they brought the watergate special prosecutor himself, they brought l

supreme court alongside leon jaworski, such an important moment in watergate.lawyer, phillip lacovara is exactly right in the middle of the historical precedent when it comes to president trump. besides the white house tapes case, besides u.s. v. nixon, this thing that the justice department is trying to pull right now about how there is a notation on every painful of the mueller report which says as a generic disclaimer that it might contain grand jury material and that disclaimer and the header of every page of the mueller report has meant they're not able to release any painful of the report. this thing that that we're going through right now attorney general william barr's office has made a mess out of the statements and statements to congress about how they're handling grand jury information in mueller's report. despite barr's earlier statements to the contrary, it is not at all clear whether or not the special counsel's office itself is in fact of identifying grand jury material and barr is doing that himself, calling all the stuff that mueller cleared fo

and that is illustrated in another report in a probe into a white house when prosecutor leon jaworskid out findings against nixon including evidence of obstruction. and like starr, jaworski was operating under fairly independent rules. but in a difference from starr, his watergate report was not released immediately. nor was it released within that year. nor was it released even after nixon resigned under pressure from congress after what jaworski's report found. in fact, the famous watergate report was released just last year after staying secret under seal for a whopping 44 years. so, two reports, one went public immediately, the other did not. and that shows this can still go down in several different ways. as for whether such reports can be kept from congress entirely, meaning not just kept from the public, but from congress, well, that does involve a court precedent. it's worth noting nixon's former chief of staff tried to block that same watergate report from ever going to the house at all, and he cited grand jury secrecy rules, which can be a barrier. trump's a.g. also citing t

actually, leon jaworski, the last special counsel, watergate special prosecutor, went right over and talked to the chief of staff, al hague, and they communicated rather directly about their things. some of the watergate prosecuting staff was concerned about their relationship, but in the end it turned out jaworski was playing it straight. he didn't want to make any mistakes, and what his intentions were and wanted to understand exactly where the white house was coming from. >> jed, i find it interesting that you think that this will head to the supreme court. what does this mean for president trump and why do you think that? >> well, i think that we see with barr's behavior that he seems -- if he's willing to say that the executive summaries, he couldn't include them because they're protected by executive privilege, he seems willing or his team seems willing to invoke executive privilege for anything and everything. that suggests that the house in order to get just basic access to the report is going to have to litigate. so if you look back to how this transpired with the oval offic

leon jaworski the watergate prosecutor bundled up the evidence in a briefcase and upon the order of the court transmit that had briefcase up to the hill and the judiciary committee used that as the road map and as the evidence tri basis for its own hearings. that's what nadler's asking for here, the evidence, not just the report. let's not focus on the report, let's focus on the evidence. >> so as not to initiate an entirely new investigation. even though there are other committees that are trying to investigate based on information from -- >> the intelligence committee has clear jurisdiction here because of the russian efforts to penetrate our political system and to interfere with it and the intelligence committees have cleared statutory right to demanded to obtain counterintelligence reports from -- from the administration and i think to get the -- also the underlying evidence and separately to call mueller to testify before them. so two jurisdictional committees, judiciary and intelligence are each entitled by clear law to investigate this matter and to get this evidence. >> and the

so when i first listened that and then brought leon jaworski in to listen to it personally, that washe moment for me where i said, richard nixon cannot survive as president. he has associated himself with a conspiracy to obstruct justice, encouraged to be continued, how can he possibly survive this. >> just i just want to pause it is and say how cool it is to have three of you and the other guests we're going to have and how weird life is. could you ever have imagined back then that one day you would be sitting with yawn dean and carl bernstein kind of discussing this? >> well, actually, i kind of predicted that. >> you did. really? wow. >> in my book, written shortly after i left the office, i said, look, for the future, the lessons of watergate are wonderful in that the system worked. in this circumstance. but it almost didn't work. and for the future, does it take something more than what we have experienced in watergate with the kind of evidence, dem mon strantive incredibly powerful evidence of criminal wrongdoing for a president of the united states to be put in a position of e

this instance, it should be the united states congress that makes the decision and that's what leon jaworski did, as well. that would have been an appropriate thing to do. he's a very by the book person and he's not at all afraid to make a decision. he's a decisive person once he's gotten all of the evidence and the facts. i think what we have here is a pass that was thrown to congress by the mueller team with adequate evidence for congress to make the decision on obstruction. and there was an interception by bill barr and he ran in the exact opposite direction. i couldn't agree more with the problems on the obstruction analysis. there are serious analytical problems with the summary with respect to the findings that he suggested regarding obstruction. he has very serious analytical problems and also process problems with somebody like rod rosenstein who said he should be not involved in this. we need a special prosecutor because he was sort of an accessory after the fact if it was a crime. it's problematic to have him involved along with barr who basically telegraphed he thinks there's no s

during watergate, leon jaworski completed his report and the white house cited the same exact rule of grand jury secrecy to try to suppress the report to congress. congress took it to the court. and the d.c. court of appeals ruled for congress and said that the house judiciary committee is entitled to the full united nations redacted report. we believe that same precedent holds here and that we will eventually get the full report. >> congressman deutsch, are you the impeachment committee. you have known since the night the democrats won the election that the burden of impeachment could easily fall to your committee because you've been watching this president from the start. this is the -- we've never seen such reckless public behavior by a president. richard nixon who was, who, got in such grave trouble he had to leave the presidency did not have public behavior as out of control in any way as donald trump do you feel that you are now a big step closer to the possibility of considering impeachment? >> well, we're a big step closer to understanding what it is that the mule ter team has

leon jaworski petitioned the judge and all the grand jury material was provided to the house judiciary committee. in 1998 during the starr investigation, we received all of the grand jury material. we received witness testimony. we received videotape. we received all sorts of grand jury material. we received it in early september. we spent -- we had a team of investigators that spent a month going through it and figuring out making recommendations to the members what of the grand jury material should be made public and what should be kept secret. there is ample precedent for this. the notion that bob barr can win a legal fight here i think is very, very unlikely. what i think beryl howell would do in a case like if attorney general barr is not willing to do what previous attorney generals have done, particularly in a momentous situation like this where the situation involves the president is the house judiciary committee would go and try and compel a subpoena. it's a lengthy process, but i think the merits are all on the side of the house judiciary committee. and to the extent that the

the special counsel regulations that we wrote in 1999, were tt ned on leon jaworski. if mueller is writing this, he will say the most obous precedent is what my predecessors have done. >> from legal standpoint, ten items of potential obstruction, does the number change the ultimate conclusion, five, six, seven, eight, nine, te >> legally, i don't think it does. i think practically, it does. this is a really remarkable thing to have a sitting president have ten different ible obstruction of justice. that just shows where the bar has moved away from past presidents. >> again, the question of intent looms large. >> absolutely. under an obstructionf justice investigation, you have to prove a corrupt intent. what it oks like -- we're starting to look at this. it looks like barr decided, you have to have some sort of underlying crime in order for there to be obstruction of justice. it can't be you obstruct something, an investigion into something unrelated, that isn't a crime. l>> we should note that aot of our pages look like this. a probably notheavily redacted as many pe

here is in the way that leon jaworski did in watergate, here's a road map to congress for things that could be considered high crimes and misdemeanors. guys have at it. tonight where we are in the political realm is a democratic house of representatives that faces a giant choice of how to proceed. impeachment is now fully on table. the answer maybe the democrats decide threw want to go partway down the path and decide later on don't want to go down that path at all. that is the salient political issue. are we going down that road or not? that is a matter fully in the hands of democrats who now control the house. >> there's a couple of elements to it and the most elementary part, forget the politics, good for the democrats or bad. one of the things i find so strange coming from the democratic side is the fear that it's bad for the democrats because why? because the impeachment of bill clinton was bad for the republicans? who really thinks that? the republicans then won the how was representatives they then won the senate and the presidency. how did it hurt them? someone explain that to

think it's license, i think it's just robert mueller's recitation of the facts, very much the way leon jaworski prosecutor laid out the facts, not in a pejorative way, just fact upon fact stacked up and there is absolutely no question that this has been a vast presidential cover up and we have in mueller's report a narrative, a timeline narrative of the cover up by the president and his actions and it's also very clear that contrary to what the attorney general said that it was the intention of robert mueller that those citations in the report, those facts, should reach the congress of the united states without the kind of muddled water that the attorney general put into the process with his rather ill-formed formulations that mischaracterized mueller's report. >> carl, thanks to you, thanks to our other fine journalists across cnn we knew much of what was in these 400 pages, so what part is the cover up that you see? >> the cover up is in the ten or we see it in the ten or 11 areas that the special prosecutor laid out as possible or likely obstructions of justice, however you want to label it.

and leon jaworski was a democrat but a conservative democrat. in fact that's why the nixon white house chosen. they both concluded nixon was a crook. and the problem was how do you get that information to the house? and one of the weaknesses in the constitutional approach to impeachment is that it is not clear that a criminal president doesn't have enough power to prevent evidence that would prove him to be criminal to get to the house. so you have, in a sense the constitution rests on the assumption that either the data unique to make this judgment is available or the president will willingly handed over. and the problem here was that richard nixon was engaging in an act of cover-up and obstruction of justice. the tape they heard, they got it because nixon wanted to stave off impeachment after the saturday night massacre and he turned over the eight tapes that had been requested. but there were many, many more including the famous smoking gun conversation. so the problem for these independently minded nonpartisan people was how you get this inf

authorized the release of the watergate road map at this committee at the request of special counsel leon jaworski. it was the case in 1998 when a federal court permitted ken starr to release grand jury information along with his report to congress. it was the case in 2008 and 2009 when this committee went directly to the grand jury twice to get information relevant to our investigation of judge thomas porteous. on multiple occasions i have asked attorney general barr to work with us, to go to the court and obtain access to the materials the department deems covered by rule 6e. he has so far refused. i will give him time to change his mind. but if we cannot reach an accommodation, we will have no choice but to issue subpoenas for these materials. if the department still refuses, then it should be up to a judge, not the president, and not his political appointee, to decide whether or not is is appropriate for the committee to review the complete record. the resolution before us today authorizes subpoenas for two categories of information. authorizesresolution subpoenas for documents and testimony r

i mean in the case of richard nixon and leon jaworski report came out and bill clinton a lot there there. he lied under oath and whether that was high crime and misdemeanor he lied under oath, that is where they tried to trip him up. do you see anything there, the house, would start, wiggle room to pursue other matters? >> on the question of obstructing justice president trump in the report has made many attempts, exhibit a, with ordering don mcgahn, his white house counsel to call the doj to fire special counsel robert mueller in june of 2017. that is one example. neil: would that been obstruction of justice had he succeeded? >> that is the thing -- neil: it never happened. might have wanted it to happen. mcgahn didn't make it happen. would that have been the level which you would say this is obstruction of justice? >> well the complexities with the criminal indictment for say obstruction of justice, how do you then give the president of the united states a fair trial in which an impartial jury can basically come to a conclusion whether the president trump is guilty of obstructing justi

the special counsel regulations that we wrote in 1999, were patterned on leon jaworski.t is what my predecessors have done. >> from a legal standpoint, ten items of potential obstruction, does the number change the ultimate conclusion, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten? >> legally, i don't think it does. i think practically, it does. this is a really remarkable thing to have a sitting president have ten different episodes of possible obstruction of justice. that just shows where the bar has moved away from past presidents. >> again, the question of intent looms large. >> absolutely. under an obstruction of justice investigation, you have to prove a corrupt intent. what it looks like -- we're starting to look at this. it looks like barr decided, you have to have some sort of underlying crime in order for there to be obstruction of justice. it can't be you obstruct something, an investigation into something unrelated, that isn't a crime. >> we should note that a lot of our pages look like this. probably not as heavily redacted as many people expected. >> i think pete poin

if mueller felt it was inappropriate, he could still be following the example of leon jaworski, who decidedixon, but submitted an extensive accounting of all the facts surrounding his efforts to shut down the investigation. gentleman worse kiss's testimony simply told the story and allowed the government tasked with the oversight, do the rest. what could have been unavoided is barr would improperly declare guilt or innocence, but that doesn't mean mueller came up empty-handed. >> professor, we've had this conversation before with bob woodward who kept trying to tell us the president definitively was not guilty. i'm not exactly sure why he said that, but you look at the last two impeachment proceedings, and obstruction of justice was one of the charges against those presidents. that still is very much hanging out there up in the air, isn't it? >> it certainly is. >> so talk about -- talk about the big idea, your over-arching argument about how it's way too early to draw any conclusions from this report. >> sure. you know, none of us know what will be in the report, but i actually wrote that