Alysin Camerota asked panelist what they'll be looking for in Mueller's redacted report tomorrow.
"Elie, you are one of the people who will be sequestered in a room when the 400 pages are released," she said.
"I'm fascinated by your process. You have shared with us that the first thing you will do is hit the search function for five key words: collusion, dirt, Jr., McGahn, defer. Why are these, to you, the money words?"
"Collusion, a little bit of a trick there," Honig said. "I don't think Robert Mueller will use the term because it is not a legal term. There is no crime called collusion. He may quote somebody talking about collusion. I want to see what Robert Mueller makes of contacts with Russia we know about.
"That brings me to the second term -- dirt. We know the Trump Tower meeting where Junior, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner -- this happened. They met with Russians who offered dirt on Hillary Clinton in Trump Tower. I'm interested to see what Robert Mueller makes of that. Is it a security breach, an abuse of power? And then Junior. Mueller never interviewed Trump Jr., subpoenaed him. Was he a target? Typically with a target, you don't subpoena them. Targets usually get charged. Donald Trump Jr. has not been charged. What does he make of Junior's attempt to get the dirt from Russia? Did he refer Donald Trump Jr. to another office for future investigation.
"Fourth is McGahn, for Don McGahn. This gets into instruction. McGahn was inner-inner circle. He was there when internal conversations happened. One thing we know McGahn was involved in was, the president wanted to fire Robert Mueller. McGahn talked him out of it. He gave 30 hours worth of testimony to Robert Mueller. It will be interesting to see what he learned.
"Finally, the last word is defer. Who did Robert Mueller intend to make the decision on obstruction? We know Mueller said the evidence is too close to call. Did he mean to defer the decision to William Barr? I don't think so. Or did he mean to congress, which is the only entity that can do anything about it since DoJ won't indict."
"Margaret, to you. There is a key question in terms of is there going to be a difference in what the public gets to know from the Mueller report between what is released in the redacted Barr version of it tomorrow morning versus what the public may see because of the Freedom of Information Act requests. How wide do you expect the divide?" Camerota asked.
"I think we'll see it with color coding and what's blacked out. Already we have seen President Trump and his legal team push a lot of issues to the courts to decide. We have every reason to believe, to some extent, there will have to be a FOIA process and a court process and if Democrats don't get what they think they are entitled to, they're gonna push in court for it," Talev said.
