enator Richard Blumenthal, who is a member of the Judiciary Committee, former attorney general of the state of Connecticut – so somebody who is deeply fluent in the law of the land – said to me that he sees on the horizon a constitutional crisis. That’s his term, and he means it very specifically. He’s referring to the possibility that the Trump administration will resist the efforts of other parts of the government to obtain information.
So if they issue a subpoena in the Russia investigation, if the FBI or if the intelligence committees in the Senate and the House ask the White House for information and if the White House refuses to provide that information, that right there is exactly what a constitutional crisis is. And it’s worth remembering that that’s the moment in Richard Nixon’s presidency when things began to unravel. In October of 1973, the appellate court ordered Richard Nixon to provide secret tapes that he had made of his own conversations to the special prosecutor. And he resisted. And as a result of resisting the court’s order and of trying to fire the special prosecutor, he began the process of his own undoing.
And Richard Blumenthal, who is, after all, a very measured, careful communicator on the subject of the law – doesn’t talk about this stuff casually – said to us on the record in this story that he believes that we’re heading towards a similar scenario because the White House has already started to resist the disclosure of documents. You saw just recently that Republicans and Democrats overseeing the House Oversight Committee have said that the White House has rejected their requests for documents related to the hiring and firing of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.