Welcome to the Commentary Magazine podcast today is Monday June 4th 2018.

I am John Puthore it's the editor of Commentary Magazine the 70-some-odd year-old

monthly of intellectual analysis political property and cultural criticism from

a conservative perspective we invite you to join us at Commentary Magazine.com

where we give you a few free reads and ask you to subscribe. 1995 for digital

subscription 2995 for an all-access subscription including our beautiful

monthly magazine in your mailbox 11 times a year with me as always senior editor

Abe Greenwald hi Abe hi John associate editor no Rossman hi Noah hi John and

senior writer Sorobamari suffering from allergies hi Sorob hi John hear that

it's bad it's really bad and he doesn't have enough tissues all right well we'll

see what it was who happens so the world is lit on fire again by morning

tweets from Donald Trump claiming that he has the absolute power to pardon

himself but why should he because it's a witch hunt and he's innocent and then

announcing that the appointment of the special counsel COUNC EL Robert Mueller

was unconstitutional this follows the revelation of the New York Times of a

memo written by Trump's lawyers in January to Mueller affirming or laying out

an extraordinarily expansive argument about the president's powers that acted as

as an implicit threat not to attempt to subpoena him on the grounds that he would

not have to comply with that subpoena that he could fire Mueller and that he

could pardon anybody he wanted to pardon the springingly probe to an end this

in turn comes in the wake of the best couple of weeks probably of Trump's

presidency in the sense that there's really good economic news with job

...