from "the new york times" mike schmidt and here at the table former u.s. attorney and former senior fbi official chuck rosenberg. matt miller, former chief spokesman at the department of justice and former cia director john brennan joins us. let me start with you, chuck, we are in this sort of -- let's just fess up. we've all got our phones in front of us because we really are in this moment where anything can happen at any time. our viewers are i think growing impatient with this idea that we're all on mueller alert. but we are on mueller alert because the white house is on mueller alert because the attorney general is on mueller alert. >> that's right. we're all on mueller alert. to tamp it down just a little bit, what mueller is doing is really important. that report matters a lot but that report is not the whole ball game. by the way. when that report is transmitted to bill barr, bill barr has a tough call to make, which is what do i do with this thing? what do i do with all of the stuff in this report that's classified or protected by grand jury secre

. >> mike schmidt, on the question of the russians, i want to play for you some of comey wanting us to think about the russians a little differently and insert a different country. we'll talk about this on the other side. >> close your eyes. again, change the names. let me make one up for you. the iranians. this is totally made up. the iranians interfere in the election to help elect barack obama because they think they'll get a better nuclear deal from him. and during that election an obama aide meets with the iranians and talks about the dirt they have that will help obama get elected and the fbi finds out about that. we should not investigate that? so the hypocrisy is revealed just by changing the names. the fbi did what it absolutely had to do. >> so michael, we have that there. what's on your list of the greatest unknowns about this report none of us have yet to see? >> for me the greatest unknown is on the question of obstruction because that's where the president has the most exposure and where there is just documented a lot of things. some of the things that he did in public hi

here to break down the day's developments, some of our favorite reporters and friend, mike schmidt new york times reporter and msnbc contributor, frank figliuzzi, former assistant director for counterintelligence at the fbi. with us on set, nbc news national political reporter heidi przybyla and paul butler, georgetown law professor and former fellow prosecutor. mike schmidt, take us through what you and your colleague charlie savage are reporting about the decision or nondecision rendered on obstruction. >> well, prosecutors usually end up or almost always end up in one of who places, they think a crime has been committed or not. but in this highly unusual situation, mueller said i can't make the call on this. and we really don't know why that happened. but what that did do is took this process that mueller had protected as the special counsel, you know, you've been there, to be an independent investigator and exposed it to the politics of the justice department, the attorney general, someone put there by the president, had to make the final call on that. and at the least just creates

and then my other colleagues, mike schmidt and annie carney came in and we -- we got this thing over the edge. and as i tweeted, we live in the age of contemporaneous memos. i'm a big fan of them. i did the reporting on the 25th amendment and the wire comments that rob rosenstein made, deputy attorney general, so we knew there was something out there we needed to get a handle on. there were knowable facts in thesis memos. >> it's such a fascinating peek into your process and you're right, there was a bold-faced lie told to maggie haberman and your publish's face, and i'm sure that's like waving a red flag in front of a bull. but i want to press a little on the cia's role because when i was vetted, the fbi does the background check, they bring any concerns that come up in the vet to white house officials, the security office, and then they get quickly bounced in a normal white house to a white house counsel or chief of staff. none of those guardrails held, and it was the cia raising concerns. what kinds of contexts and questions did the cia have about jared kushner? >> we don't have f

started, when he was first named special counsel, i was listening to an episode of the "daily" with mike schmidt and he was talking about the way that mueller had been always tribed to him and his reporting surrounding the doj and the fbi, and that mueller was the kind of guy that would sit an investigator down, ask him a number of questions about whoever he was trailing that day, and ask details town to the color of the car. he was very detail oriented, sometimes throwing his investigators off, making them realize that they needed to be as thorough as possible. in this moment that we're in right now, when this report has been given to a.g. barr, we don't know how long it is or what it looks like, are you confident that whatever we end up hearing from barr and rosenstein is going to be enough? >> so there's really two different questions in your question. with regard to the stories about how far down in the weeds mueller goes investigatively, they're mostly all true, very true. i've been there myself before. and yes, he might ask the color of the car on the surveillance last night. so that gives

as mike schmidt from "the new york times" explains today. >> part of the reason the special counsel is there is to give the public the assurance that an investigator who's not politically tied to the person under investigation is doing the work and following the facts. and in this case, that person, mueller, said, i can't come to a determination on this and kicked it up to the folks above him who are the political appointees. >> and now there's reason to suspect that the mueller report could contain an obstruction case that's damning enough that even with that incredibly high bar that an obstruction case against a sitting president must pass, robert mueller for his part refused to exonerate donald trump and brand-new nbc news reporting reveals it was the obstruction investigation all along that worried the president most. "donald trump's lawyers including the ones who don't appear on television who practice federal criminal law, never worried their client would be --" for martin and jane raskin, a husband and wife duo from miami who came aboard trump's legal team last april, the real t

michael schmidt mike monaco ♪ >> allen weisselberg will be called to testify. may wonder what put the name allen weisselberg in their heads all of a sudden? >> in the office with me was allen weisselberg the chief financial officer. i was with alan weisselberg i believe is alan weisselberg. annual weisselberg. that's signed by allen weisselberg. >> there are other people that we should be meeting with. >> allen weisselberg. >> this man is the long time chief financial officer of the trump organization dating back generations to when donald trump's father ran the place. today committee chairman was asked about the committee's next moves. >> you said you were going to be following up with some people. are they people like allen weisselberg -- >> all you have to do is follow the transcript. we'll figure out who we want to talk to and we'll bring them in. >> from the trump family? >> just follow the transcript. >> in watergate it was follow the transcript. now we're following the transcript. here in new york, if you follow the transcript, how much more legal peril

mike brown now runs the defense department tech innovation unit. and google's former ceo and former chairman, eric schmidt, sits on the board of that defense innovation unit. guys, this is two words, two words around all of this, that is artificial intelligence when you speak to folks in defense and security business, they will tell you that ai and next generation technologies that are expected to help run our military and which china is also developing aggressively as well, that this is seen as something of an arms race. while google doesn't have a search engine in china, they have an ai research center and they have ties in terms of ai in that country so i think that's very much, there are papers written on this and that's very much what general dunford was trying to get at with those comments last week it is a huge issue from a military standpoint, not just a business and corporate standpoint when you talk about ai between the two countries. >> i don't get the argument that google is helping china but not the united states. that doesn't make sense to me. >> i think it is the fact that they have pulled

schmidt. taking a break from book writing to come in on this big news morning. mike barnicle joining us from new york city and former u.s. attorney and an msnbc contributor, barbara mcquaid is with us as well. we'll get right to the big news this morning. the president and his allies are celebrating robert mueller's report on russia's interference in the 2016 election. attorney general william barr writes in his four-page summary of the report that the special counsel did not find that any u.s. person or trump campaign official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated with russia in russia's efforts to influence the 2016 u.s. presidential election. barr also writes that mueller reached no conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice, barr quoting the special council's report on the issue of obstruction writes, while this does not conclude that he committed a crime it does not exonerate him. the attorney general writes that mueller provided him with the facts of the obstruction case and left it up to the ag to decide if the president obstructed justic