The Daily - Friday, Jan. 26, 2018

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

The New York Times is reporting that President Trump tried to order the firing of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, but ultimately backed down when his own lawyer threatened to quit. And Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, talks about trying to hammer out a compromise on immigration policy. He has described dealing with the White House as “like negotiating with Jell-O.” Guests: Michael S. Schmidt, who covers national security for The Times; Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily Show. Today, The Times is reporting that President Trump tried to have special counsel Robert Mueller fired until his own lawyer threatened to quit. And Senator Chuck Schumer on entering another round of negotiations with a White House that he said is like negotiating with Jell-O. It's Friday, January 26th. Hi. How's that water sipping going? You're good. You must work in audio.

How's that water sipping going? You're good. You must work in audio. You come here often? Every day. Really? Yeah. Around this time.

Mike Schmidt covers national security for The Times. So, Michael, what is the latest in the special counsel investigation? In June, as the Mueller investigation was intensifying and it was becoming increasingly clear to the president that his own conduct in office may be in question, he turned to the White House counsel, Don McGahn, and told him to fire Mueller. Wow. This is the first time that we've learned that the president actually followed through and tried to get rid of the special counsel. And when you say followed through, I'm assuming you mean followed through with what we all thought was his desire, his intention, his maybe wish to not have a special counsel. For a long time, we've heard about the president telling his friends and his advisors about how he wants to get rid of Mueller. But we never knew that he actually tried to do it. But that's what happened in June. The president claimed that Mueller had a series of conflict of

interest issues that made him unable to oversee the investigation of Russian meddling in the election and whether the president had obstructed justice. So what kinds of conflicts of interest did President Trump believe Robert Mueller had that might justify firing him at this time? Well, the most interesting one by far was the fact that Mueller had been a member of Trump's golf course in northern Virginia and had a dispute with him about membership fees, the fees that he was paying to play golf at Donald Trump's golf courses many years. That's amazing. And the president said, look, because Mueller had been a member of my golf course and had a dispute about the fees, he could not oversee this investigation.

And you mentioned multiple conflicts of interest. So beyond fees at a golf club that Mueller was objecting to, what did the president cite? There were two other reasons. The first was that Mueller had worked for a law firm that had represented Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law. that had represented Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law. The second was that Mueller had interviewed to be the FBI director the day before he was appointed to special counsel. And interviewed by Trump. Correct. In the Oval Office. Is that a legitimate conflict of interest,

legally speaking, when it comes to justifying firing somebody? Perhaps there's a question of whether there's a conflict of interest, but I'm not sure that any lawyer in Washington would tell you that the remedy should be the president telling the White House counsel to call the Justice Department to fire him. What was going on in the Russia investigation at this point in June when the president decides to try to fire Mueller that would have made that an especially unfortunate time to take that kind of action? So at that point, it had come out that the president had asked the FBI director, Jim Comey, to end the Flynn investigation, the investigation into his national security advisor. Comey to end the Flynn investigation, the investigation into his national security advisor. And that created questions about whether the president was trying to politically influence the Justice Department. That was creating questions about whether the president had

obstructed justice. And Mueller was there to look into those questions. So Mueller himself represented a potential existential threat to Mr. Trump's presidency. So by this point, the investigation is clearly becoming about President Trump. And that has to be incredibly frustrating to him. The president has long said that there was no collusion. And in terms of the president himself, that may be true. But come June, the president is now looking at an investigation into his conduct in office, whether he obstructed justice. That has nothing to do with his ties to Russia. It has to do whether he tried to get in the way of that investigation.

If you were to fire Mueller in such a situation, it would create such a firestorm. The president doesn't seem to appreciate that. But Don McGahn, his White House counsel, does. McGahn realized this would be catastrophic for the White House and for the presidency. They had already fired Comey at that point. And if they did that, they would probably even lose more support for Republicans. And there'd be even more questions about whether they were trying to obstruct the investigation. So McGahn says, I'm not calling the Justice Department.

In fact, I'm going to resign if you make me do that. Wow. So he explicitly tells the president, I will resign as your chief lawyer at the White House if you ask me to do this or if you go around me and do it. And then the president backs down. And why do we think the president backs down? I recall that plenty of people around Trump told him not to fire Comey. So what was different here? In this case, McGahn was able to essentially call the president's bluff. McGahn didn't think that the president had the guts himself to fire Mueller to do it himself. And in the end, McGahn was right because the president didn't pick up the phone and tell the Justice Department to do that. I guess what I'm curious about is would firing Mueller have been an act of obstructing justice at a moment when the president is already under investigation for obstructing justice? You're getting into a complicated legal question, which is can the president tell the Justice Department to do certain things? The Justice Department is in the executive branch and the president legally can tell them to do certain things, to carry out certain orders.

So legally, it may have been OK. Politically, it may have been untenable. But in terms of whether he had the power to do it, he certainly did. had the power to do it, he certainly did. Now, the question is, if you're Mueller, you're looking at the larger question of obstruction. Is this just another piece of evidence that you put in in a larger sort of argument that the president has done everything in his power to try and get in the way of this investigation? So on some level, Mueller is investigating, among many other things, his own narrowly averted firing as part of this broader Russia investigation. Sort of meta. Mike, thank you, as always.

Thanks for having me. we'll be right back senator schumer let's start from your now famous meeting with the president one week ago today, when the two of you met to try to negotiate. President. He said, you know, you hate these CRs. I hate these CRs. We ought to get something done quickly. I said, that would be great, Mr. President. You both hate continuing resolutions, right? at existing levels. It's not really the way government should be run. In any case, we talked for about five minutes and he said, why don't you come over in 10 minutes? I said, well, I really can. How about an hour, which I think was 12.15. And he said, well, I have this right to life thing then. Anyway, 12.45. I am trying to lose a little weight. So I have for lunch, usually a cheeseburger with no bun. And he served it. I guess they must have asked somebody. This is an intriguing weight loss program, by the way.

And he had a cheeseburger with a bun and a whole lot of French fries. I said, you're not really paying attention to your diet. He said, no. And I had suggested when he called that we just have four people in the room, myself, my chief of staff, Mike Lynch, his chief of staff, General Kelly, and the president. And I said, if you're going to have Stephen Miller there or somebody like that, it's not going to work. And he agreed. So you were explicit about that. No aides who are very opinionated on the subject, in this case, a hardline conservative on immigration.

You didn't want him there. Right. Hardline conservative would be putting it kindly when it comes to Stephen Miller. So we chatted for a few minutes about people in New York. Then we began talking. And basically, we spent, I would say, an hour and a half on the parameters of what could be a great deal for him and I think for the Dreamers? And I said, we need to help them. And he said, I agree.

And he said, but I need border security. And we spent about 15, 20 minutes negotiating about the wall. And at the end, he made a suggestion. I said, we'll take it. The headline of that meeting, based on your own description of what happened in there, The headline of that meeting, based on your own description of what happened in there, is that you offered the president funding for the border wall in exchange for protection for the Dreamers. Was it that simple? Right, but it was full protection, by the way, full protection of the Dreamers, not just the $600,000 in a narrow definition, but $1.5 million in broader definition. Well, I think the decision to make that offer from you came as a surprise to a lot of people. The border wall has been a symbol of the Trump campaign, and it has come to symbolize so much about the president's entire approach to immigration and to the world.

How would you, as the Democratic leader, explain the decision to put that symbol on one of America's borders, in this case with Mexico. I'd say three things to you. First, our passion to help these kids, the Dreamers, is very, very large. Second, the Trump administration and Republicans in general have been very anti-immigration, and we had gotten nowhere with the Dreamers for a long time, so we needed a good offer. But third, it's frankly my belief that it's going to be next to impossible for them to actually build the wall.

And I told this to the president. I said, Secretary Zinke, you know, his secretary of the interior said, I don't know where you build the wall along the Rio Grande because you can't build it on the Mexican side. They won't build it. You can't build it on the American side. It cuts us off from the river. You can't build it in the middle of the river. So my view was that they'd have a very difficult time actually getting it built. So I think, you know, the president made a promise for this wall. I think it's very bad, but the difficulty in actually getting it built will be very, very large. Right. So would you say that the wall is actually more of a symbol than it is an actual immigration policy? Look, we argued this in the room.

The president said it's very popular. I said it's very popular with your base of about 30 percent, but most Americans don't want it. So I think he feels it's a political commitment he made to his base. So what you seem to be describing is something that is more of a symbol than an actuality, the wall. And so therefore that suggests that you would agree to it, to funding it, so long as it gets you something really important that you want, whereas you wouldn't want to trade on an issue like, for example, family migration or what the president calls chain migration, because it meaningfully influences our immigration system in the country. It sounds like you don't

think the wall does that. And by the way, my job as a Democratic leader and as a senator is not to just make a stand, but to try to get something done. I like to do that as long as I'm not selling out my principles. And in this case, I thought the balance was quite positive. Even Luis Gutierrez was probably the most militant of the Hispanic congressmen said he would have made the trade. I did. So then we leave.

Nothing is agreed to. But I told both Mike Lynch, my chief, and General Kelly, write down what we've agreed to, which they did, which was the same. And an hour later, he calls me up and he says, okay, I hear we have a three-week deal. Ours was three days. I wouldn't let it hang out there for three weeks because, you know, they'd probably back off it. The right wing would beat them up. And I said, no, this is the president. This is the president. And I said, Mr. President, I haven't heard of any

three-week deal. He said, oh, I heard everyone's for it. I guess that's what Ryan and McConnell wanted. I said, well, no one's even mentioned it to me, so that's not happening. And then about two hours later, General Kelly calls up and he says, well, we need this, this, this, this, and this in addition, all things that were unpalatable. So I said, well, I think the deal's off. Senator, you leave the White House knowing in your head that the president had backed out of a deal with you back in September when you were there with Minority Leader Pelosi, and knowing that the president had just backed out of a deal with your colleagues in the Senate, Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham, just a few days earlier. Did you really think that this was going to stick in the first place? I had my doubts in the room. He seemed genuinely for it. I thought, you know, I always try to put myself in the other person's shoes. And what the president

had most asked for was, you know, the wall. Again, I didn't think it would be built, but he wanted it. So giving him that, I thought, had a decent chance of bringing him over the finish line. So does that feel like a fair characterization? No, not quite, because it's the president and the Republicans who are in charge. So they have the obligation to meet us part of the way and get the votes they need to pass. Why do you choose to link these two things, linking funding for the government with DACA? Great question. DACA faced, you know, we have these other issues, defense, non-defense, where we have some leverage. This was the one that Republicans were giving the most resistance to. And so it was the only way to get it done. And have we not done what we did? I don't think DACA would even be on the table right now. Now it's

front and center. So I think it was overall, I know there's a lot of brickbats flying here and there, but I think overall we're a lot better off today than we were a week ago. But I think many, many people may be surprised that your explanation for why Democrats would vote to reopen the government was that you'd gotten assurances from the Republicans in the Senate that they would take up an immigration debate, including DACA, before protections for the Dreamers would run out in March, but not that they would necessarily pass them. So why was it enough? There are six or seven Republicans who already support DACA. Every one of the 49 Democrats does. So you only need a few more. And it was always my feeling that if we put a reasonable bill on the floor, we'd get 60 votes. A lot of the Republicans, it's not all the rest that said no.

A lot of them were just quiet because they didn't have to vote and they were afraid to be public because they knew they'd get the right wing upset but if push came to shove they'd vote and there was one other reason Michael and that is this my caucus was pretty much united on all of this but if this hung out too long the American public broadly sympathetic to the dreamers, might turn against them. And we didn't want that to happen. But to do nothing, we would have gotten nowhere. It seems hard to imagine that a debate over DACA wouldn't happen organically, given the March deadline that's coming up so soon. So why was it enough just to have McConnell agree that the Senate would debate it? Well, he didn't just agree that he'd debate it. He agreed that there would be an open process and that a bipartisan

group, including Democrats, would get their up or down vote. You know, if you're a leader and you're afraid of the hard right, you can say we'll have a debate. You could put something on the floor that no one could vote for and say, see, we tried, blame the other side. So just getting a debate isn't good enough. But second, remember, this Republican Party is extremely anti-immigration. And Trump ran on an anti-immigrant platform. So just leaving it to their own devices, I think it's a much less likely chance we would actually ever get a vote in a debate. And in 2013, we had Democrats and Republicans come together, and we passed a great bill, and the House was just too afraid to take it up. So that's the worry. It's not easy to get them to move on immigration.

So you reject the idea that the government shutdown was for nothing. Oh, absolutely. What in your mind did it accomplish? We will get a vote, I believe. The issue is highlighted. It's much harder for Republicans to sweep it under the rug. And I think the odds are quite good that the Senate will pass a good DACA bill. Then, of course, it has to pass the House, but the pressure will increase on them. And the fact that deportations might be looming of these wonderful kids and people would see they're being ripped apart from their families and everything

else. I know the Republicans are fearful of that. So the House might be actually pressured into doing it. They've avoided it for a long time. As a result of our actions over the last few days, I think it's going to be very hard for them to avoid it now. And I doubt the president would veto a bill passed by the House and Senate. So we're having this conversation, Senator, on Thursday afternoon, and the Times just reported that the White House this coming Monday will offer you what we're describing as an excruciating choice, protection for the dreamers in exchange for not just the wall, but for strict policies against family migration, what the president calls chain migration? That will never pass. And in the process, Leader McConnell presented, we'll have our own amendment that will be much less of an excruciating choice and has a much better chance of passing.

So is that a deal you would ever make? Well, I haven't seen what they'd offer, but if it's what I hear, that won't come close to passing in the Senate or the House. So how are you going to work this out, Senator? We have a whole bunch of Democratic and Republican moderate senators right now working on a compromise position that won't be the extreme kind of stuff that you just mentioned that the White House might put out. And I think that has a very good chance of passing. As we get closer and closer to this March 5th expiration for the Dreamers, I wonder how you see it. Does it get tougher as a Democrat who desperately wants to protect these young people not to give up whatever it takes to do that? Or do you believe that as the prospect of these young people being deported becomes a reality, the Republicans, too, will feel the need to just make a deal.

I think the second is likely. Do you find it depressing that it takes the lives of 800,000 young people in the balance up until the final weeks of deadline to force policy? Yes. Thank you, Senator. I appreciate it. Nice to talk to you. Bye-bye. Bye. Here's what else you. Bye-bye. Bye. But the strategy would work only if the Senate fails to reach a bipartisan agreement on alternative legislation that would protect the Dreamers and increase border security, but reject the most hardline aspects of the White House's proposal, such as eliminating family-based migration.

The White House says it will formally announce its immigration plan on Monday. The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Shreeskandarajah, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowett, and Michael Simon-Johnson, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher, and our sound engineer is Peter Sale. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnick and Michaela Bouchard. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you Monday.