"On a day a when the White House staff dynamic resembles the Montagues and the Capulets, a picture is emerging of a wounded Jared Kushner in one corner and a temporarily fortified John Kelly in the other," Wallace suggested, referencing the feuding families in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. "One White House official describes it to Axios this way, 'Javanka and Kelly are locked in a death match. Two enter, only one survives.'"
"One of the common denominators when Donald Trump erupts on Twitter at Jeff Sessions, it is his unbridled rage of being out of control when it comes to the Mueller investigation," Wallace noted. "And on that front, our colleagues at NBC News are out with a big news scoop today about what Bob Mueller wants to know about Donald Trump's situational awareness about that Democratic hack of Hillary Clinton's campaign emails."
"It is a rare peek inside the special investigation and it is the clearest indication yet that the three former Trump campaign officials who have all pleaded guilty to crimes, who are all now working for Mueller may be helping him fill in the campaign's contacts with Russia in much more detail than we've understood until today's report," the host continued.
"Unbelievable reporting and an unbelievable picture of the specificity with which Bob Mueller is piecing together the entire campaign," Wallace said to Tur.
"Here's the real significance in the reporting, it felt like the investigation was moving on to asking not whether Donald Trump coordinated or colluded with Russia, but whether or not he obstructed justice once he got into office. Those are the threads that we had been following, that's what we had been hearing about," Tur explained. "This points us back in the original direction, which is, 'did Donald Trump himself potentially work behind the scenes to coordinate the release of those e-mails?'"
"That July 27th press conference is one that I was at, and that comment, 'Russia, if you're listening,' almost came out of nowhere," Tur reminded. "He was being asked about the DNC hacks and what he thought about them and whether or not he would call on Russia not to meddle and then stopped very abruptly, looked at the cameras, and said that."
The timing of the email releases is at the heart of the collusion investigation.
"The Podesta e-mails came just hours after the Access Hollywood tape dropped," Tur reminded.
"He always had a batch of leaked e-mails whenever he was in a hole," Wallace agreed.
The host then played Tur's follow-up questions of Trump.
"He doubled down. He doubled down on it in that moment," Tur concluded. "And then we know now that this is one of the things that raised a lot of red flags for FBI investigators."
"It didn't make any sense. Why would he go there? They're trying to figure that out," Tur continued. "I talked to another witness in the Mueller investigation who sat for a pretty long interview and they told me that the atmospherics are remarkable. They know everything, they're not fishing. These investigators can tell you what room you were in, who you were sitting next to in that room, and what exactly you said while you were there."
"They're piecing together a puzzle, they have the building blocks for it, whatever metaphor you want to use," Tur explained. "As one witness put it, they are not cops going around trying to figure out a crime scene. They have it all and now they're trying to get the nail in the coffin."
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