mike schmidt, thank you for spending so much time with us. joyce vance, thank you. we'll be right back. smile dad. i take medication for high blood pressure and cholesterol. but they might not be enough to protect my heart. adding bayer aspirin can further reduce the risk of another heart attack. because my second chance matters. be sure to talk to your doctor before you begin an aspirin regimen. >>> he says he may want me to investigate it to prove that it didn't happen. and then he says something that distracted me. he said even if it's a 1% chance my wife thinks that's true, that's terrible. and i remember thinking, how could your wife think there's a 1% chance you were with prostitutes peeing on each other in moscow? there is a less chance it's true. what 99% chance is it possible your wife would think it's true? >> is jim comey a psychology he can comment on someone else's marriage? >> i mean, at a deeper level that was about the character of a man. >> exactly. >> who would want another man to investigate something to prove that it wasn't true to his wife. >> r

. >> so, mike schmidt, you've done a good deal of reporting on the president's pique that his own justice department does not serve as his personal legal operation. he added a new name to his own justice department enemies list. that's the u.s. attorney for the southern district, geoff berman. he's someone i understand to be close to don mcgahn, the president's own white house counsel, somebody appointed by the president, somebody interviewed by the president and placed there as a trump appointee not yet confirmed as far as i understand. but this seems like another domino to fall in the president's ongoing war against his own appointees in the department of justice at the fbi and now in the u.s. attorney's office for the southern district. >> the president repeatedly does this with the justice department where he complains about it endlessly, just the other day complaining about the documents the justice department had not turned over to congress. i think the president sometimes forgets or maybe is afraid of the fact that he controls the justice department. he could call the justice depar

what crimes are they looking for in everything that mike schmidt just laid out? >> well, before we talk about crimes, let's not forget how this special counsel inquiry started and what's at the heart of it. it started as a russian counter intelligence investigation. so, one of the questions that mueller has to answer is not whether there are criminal violations, but rather how, when and why a foreign power may have compromised our president. that question needs to be answered and it's paramount. now, wrapped up in that, nicolle, are clearly the possibility of criminal violations and that could be violations of the emoluments clause which prohibits foreign monies being targeted into u.s. presidential campaigns or any campaigns for that matter. don't forget that there could be computer fraud and abuse in the sense that any hacking that occurred, the social media propaganda, the theft of data could be a computer -- federal computer hacking violation and conspiracy to commit that if that was part of what was in the circle of knowledge for the campaign. so, that's wha

mike schmidt, congrats on the scoop. when we come back, the president who described that raid on monday as an attack on the country woke up hopping mad. we'll show you his twitter tantrum and take you inside some of the most volatile days yet of this presidency. and is ousted fbi director jim comey gets ready for a book tour, rachel maddow says he has a high-level witness who can attest to his veracity of the interactions with the president. it is a time for choosing of the republicans. are you on the side of the rule of law or are you not? how mueller is forcing republicans to pick. this. is. lobsterfest at red lobster. with exciting new dishes like dueling lobster tails. and lobster truffle mac & cheese. classics like lobster lover's dream are here too. so enjoy these 10 lobsterlicious dishes now. because lobsterfest ends april 22nd. you know what's not awesome? gig-speed internet. when only certain people can get it. let's fix that. let's give this guy gig- really? and these kids, and these guys, him, ah. oh hello. th

mike schmidt, "new york times" washington correspondent who cou could wrote tonight's breaking report. phil rucker, white house bureau chief for "the washington post" and an msnbc political analyst. and jeremy bash, former chief of staff at the cia and the pentagon. he's also an msnbc national security analyst. mike, let's start with you and your reporting tonight. take us through this december episode and just how close the president came to firing robert mueller in december. >> there are reports out there that mueller had sent a subpoena to deutsche bank, a bank that had long been associated with trump, saying that mueller wanted documents directly related to trump and his family. obviously trump has sort of obsessed and the media has obsessed about these so-calledd line he tried to create last summer, saying if mueller was looking at his finances beyond the question of russia, that would have passed it. if you remember, trump never said what he would do about that. but when he saw this back in december, he got very angry. i know we talk a lot that the president gets angry, but he g

schmidt, peter baker and me, in the oval office last summer about the scope of mueller's inquiry, that if it went beyond russia and started tracking into the president's personal finances or his family's finances, that that would be a problem. this -- it's not clear this goes directly to that, but, you know, this is the office of his personal attorney. remember the president said last week, i believe it was when he came back on air force one, he told reporters who asked him about the stormy daniels payment, well, you know, you'll have to talk to my attorney, michael cohen, that's my attorney. he stressed that. that is because their main defense on all of this was expected to be attorney/client privilege and my understanding is the files were seized from k cohen's either office or home who both that are client files that relate to trump. >> maggie haberman, appreciate it. thanks very much. back now with the panel. in terms of if the president did decide to move against robert mueller, can you just explain how that would be done? because he wovuldn't be able to directly fire robert muell

you watched this interview, mike schmidt. how much did the president do to him snefl >> sort of a repeated pattern of behavior where he comes out hurting himself, go back to the tweet last may about comey on tapes. comey, i hope there's no tapes. prompts comey to release the memo that leads to mueller being appointed. going after sessions, criticizing the investigation. constantly undermining himself. we've seen it so many times before. why are we surprised? >> and he's still in the process of trying to recruit more and better lawyers. i know he's added rudy. he would like a ted olson and a caliber attorney representing him. this does not show him to be a particularly disciplined client. >> he had john dowd, a long-time washington lawyer, someone who had investigated pete rose, done a lot of things. john dowd concluded he could not get the president to listen to him. a very simple thing. he said, i can't continue to do this. this is a terrible place to be as a lawyer. and then the president went almost a month or so with just

. >> mike the schmidt of "the new york times," thanks for being with me. you don't get to unilaterally create red line investigations when you're not the president. everyone else who gets investigated by prosecutors finds themselves blown around in the wind. pete williams, you've been following the justice department reaction to all of there. what is it like in that building right now? >> well, you know, these are stressful jobs under the best conditions. they're difficult. they're complicated. and that's when you feel that you have your bosses at your back. so that is not the situation today. many of the senior people at the justice department come to work pre morning wondering if this day will be their last. but you know, you also -- so there's sort of a paul over the place. you also have the day to day work of the government going on. you have the environment division fining people and the fbi and the atf and the dea arresting people and charges being filed. so you know, to a large extent work goes on. >> last night, devin nunes has joe was mentioning e

mike the schmidt is one of the reporter who's broke that story as well as tonight's breaking news the president sought to fire mueller a second time in december. michael, i'm trying to get a clearer sense of what exactly happened in december as your reporting indicates? into there were several reports at the time that a -- there was a mueller subpoena that had been sent to deutsche bank for records directly related to trump. now, if you remember, trump talked last summer about a so-called red line, an area that he said mueller should not be looking at. that's finances outside of russia. so trump sees this, sees this report and he loses it. he gets very angry pop we talk a lot how angry he got but he got angry again this time and really wanted to get rid of mueller. he said it was time to end the investigation. what happened was that his lawyers who know where his bank accounts are and where his things are realized that the report was wrong that there was nothing to it. the reports were actually ultimately corrected. but this was this instance. and as we know, firing mueller is not jus

. >> mike the schmidt you've got a story running that the president tried to fire mueller in december. >> there was a story in december about a subpoena that had gone to deutsche bank that said that -- that was the initial report said it was directed at the president and his business dealings. the president did not like there idea. and this is gets at this issue of the red line, the looking into his finances and seriously considered firing mueller at that point. it didn't get to that point because they were able to figure out the president's lawyers that the story was wrong, there was some discussion with mueller's office. but it just shows how when the president thought that mueller had gone beyond that line, he was willing to do this or certainly willing to seriously consider it. now, you have to understand though, the president has talked a lot in the past year about firing mueller. and sometimes his aides have ignored him, sometimes they've slow walked him. in the. >> who does he fire first? how does he fire him. >> he has to fire rosenstein. >> does very to get rid of sessions an

no, no, no, look, it was a time when we were under a lot of scrutiny and mike schmidt, my colleague, was also under scrutiny and he was right. >> can say one more thing about jim comey. one thing i found very striking about all of this, the one thing he did last night was on the questions where he is a central witness now, on the question of did donald trump obstruct justice, he did not stray one iota from his congressional testimony. there is no, he's being very, at this point, he's like -- nothing he said last night to stephanopoulos, he provided color on a lot of things, but on his interactions with trump, the meetings, the dinners, all those things, everything he's written in the book and what he said in that interview is scrupulously consistent with what he said in congress. this is the place that bob mueller would be most concerned. this is the thing that comey's most central to in terms of an obstruction of justice case. comey right now, at least, has not been led astray or allowed to drift. he's not allowed himself to drift outside the lines. >> that said, comey has done robe

to see if they can remain unbreakable in the wake of netflix earnings, whether their name is kim my schmidt or not. back over to you >> thank you, dom chu. if you want to change netflix into earnings, how can you put the odds of success in your favor? mike is here with a very special call to action hey, mike. >> we're going to talk about how to use probabilities, but the thing i would point out is we still have to keep some of the other fundamentals we want to fay attention pay attention to in mind where is the stock going to go, up or down the second thing is, how much is it going to move, a little or a lot? and finally, how much can you make on your trade we'll take a look at netflix we can see that the stock is actually not that far off its highs and this is, i think, kind of a coin toss here which way it could go we've had some good and bad earnings results, but i don't really like how the market feels like here based on how we closed out the week specifically i'm looking at the april 310 spread i'm spending $10.93 for a trade that could go to $35 now we'll take a look at some of the pr