For the scene he's leaving vacant, speculation now swirling about who could permanently replace

him.

If Jeff Session is fired, there will be holy hell to pay. Any effort to go after

Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.

Now those are two different things. Sessions was fired. I don't think there is going to

be hell to pay. Matt Zappatowski of the Washington Post joins us. Matt is a highly steam

national security reporter. Welcome, sir. How are you?

Hey, thank you for having me and thanks for that nice descriptor.

Oh, yeah. You're a hell of a journalist, sir. We don't say that about many because there

are a lot of bad ones out there. You know what I mean? So listen, we try to take a reasonable

look at this sort of stuff. There's plenty of fevered coverage of the firing of Jeff Sessions

and what it might mean to the Russia probe. What are the possibilities that folks ought to be

looking for?

Well, so Jeff Sessions and I'm sorry, Donald Trump installed this guy to replace Jeff Sessions

named Matt Whitaker, who has sort of been a long time Mueller skeptic. He's a former US attorney

from Iowa, ran unsuccessfully for Senate and before he came into the Justice Department,

he was just a legal commentator and shared a lot of skeptical views about the Mueller probe.

I think what many people are worried about now is he's the acting attorney general. That means

he is nominally in charge of the Mueller probe and what could he do to impose restrictions on it?

He has a lot of authority. Mueller has to run by the attorney general's significant investigative

steps he wants to take. If he wants to indict somebody, Matt Whitaker will have to sign off on that.

His report, if he is preparing a report, would ultimately go to Matt Whitaker. Matt Whitaker

...