On Monday, Deadline: White House absentee host Nicolle Wallace found a sufficiently emotive replacement in Peter Alexander, who managed to suggest within the first four minutes that President Trump’s tweets constituted obstruction of justice.
Alexander kicked off his hour with a monologue about the tweet storm that the President had launched over the weekend. In particular, he emphasized Trump’s first-ever reference to Robert Mueller by name via tweet, which appeared to have crossed some sort of imaginary red line for the MSNBC host. Turning to former U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg, he giddily inquired:
Chuck, this conversation I want to have with you, which is about this idea of obstruction of justice. It’s interesting to see the reporting that suggests that’s what a lot of the focus has been, in terms of the questions addressed to the lawyers privately so far. So does this effort to sort of undermine and discredit this investigation – we’ll get into Andrew McCabe a little bit later – does this only add to this obstruction of justice effort by Robert Mueller?
By “effort” to “undermine and discredit” the Mueller probe, Alexander was, of course, referring to the tweets in which the President had disparaged both the investigation and Mueller himself.
“Potentially, Peter,” Rosenberg replied. His reasoning for this peculiar-sounding assessment was that prosecutors involved in the case “weighed and evaluated” all of the President’s actions, evidently including even his social media activity. He went on to admit, “No one tweet is going to lead to an impeachment or put him in jail – more likely than not.” Alexander did not fact-check that particular assertion for the audience, but it’s probably safe to assume that Rosenberg was onto something.
“But,” he continued, “the accumulation of all these things becomes important and telling. What’s hard to prove in an obstruction case? Intent.”
“So that creates a pattern, right?” Alexander clarified with barely contained excitement. “One alone is not sufficient, but if you can demonstrate a pattern, you might have that intent you’re speaking about?”
Rosenberg nodded sagely, “That’s exactly right.”
It quickly became apparent that obstruction of justice was the theme of the day. Despite the bulletproof Twitter evidence, Alexander continued to fish for further bits of information that might constitute obstruction, such as the memos that media darling Andrew McCabe claimed to have written after meetings with the President. To his disappointment, Rosenberg admitted that he did not believe the memos would be admissible as evidence.
