This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

The impeachment of Donald Trump was just six months ago. Not six years, not six decades.

Pretty much the only thing that might have made us forget the Mueller

investigation and the drama of impeachment was the worst global pandemic in a century. It hit us just

weeks after the Senate voted to acquit, and the nation just moved on to other crises. But Jeffrey

Tubin asked us to pause and consider the details and the outrages of that prolonged period in his new book, True Crimes and Misdemeanors.

It's a thorough account of this astonishing piece of political history.

Jeff Tubin is a longtime staff writer and a legal analyst for CNN, and relevant to the matter at hand, before his career in journalism,

Tubin was a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn.

Jeffrey, you start your book with a scene, the first and only meeting that we know of between

Donald Trump and Robert Mueller. Why start there and what was it like?

Well, I found that face-off, kind of irresistible both journalistically and substantively.

May 16th, 2017, the week after James Comey was fired by the president as FBI director.

And as with so much, this meeting became a subject of controversy.

Donald Trump has repeatedly said that Mueller came to the White House to lobby to become the FBI director again,

to sort of beg for his job back, as Trump tweeted.

That, of course, is a total, total lie. And that,

to me, is a good metaphor for just sort of the nature of the difference between Mueller and

Trump. But what was Mueller actually there for?

Mueller was there because Rod Rosenstein, who was the deputy attorney general, had sought him out for

advice on who the next FBI director should be and what kind of qualities the president should be

...