It just seems like there's a fundamental cultural tension between the way you do things in that environment and like being the president of the United States when you have to take care of the laws are faithfully executed and be surrounded by lawyers and you know dot eyes and cross tea.

Maybe it is the case that you know when you come up in this kind of private sector background in particular sort of this New York kind of real estate background.

You know you you view yourself as constrained maybe only by the kind of outer bounds of what you can get away with.

Welcome to why is this happening with me your host Chris A's.

So if you watch our show all in on MSMC recently you notice probably that we have a lot of lawyers in the show every night.

We have three or four different lawyers with different legal backgrounds and experiences and the reason we have so many lawyers is that.

One of the central stories right now is the law and the president.

The president versus the law the president's relationship to the law and a really deep profound almost I don't know existential question about the rule of law in America in the age of Donald Trump.

In the end who is going to win Donald Trump or the law that's how I feel a lot and this president is someone who has such a fascinating relationship to the law because at one level.

There's no one who spent more time around lawyers than Donald Trump me the guy has been sued and sued hundreds and hundreds of time he has used the law to his great advantage.

He has used the law as a kind of weapon or a tool wielded to exert his power and his leverage he understands the law as a thing that could be useful to him not as a binding constraint.

And then he took that view of the law and he became the most powerful person in the world in the American constitutional system.

Where the law really matters and he still has this kind of legrate disregard for it.

He has this aggressive lawlessness and the lawlessness cascades down throughout his entire administration in the way that he conducts policy in the way that he writes executive orders in the way he conducts himself personally and when you look around you see him.

Bumping up against the law fighting with the law the law trying to fight back exert its control this sort of wrestling match that plays out in front of us whether it's Robert Mueller or it's the court or it's the Department of Justice between this president law and there's one person who I want to talk about that topic with the most.

And this person is to me the person who best embodies everything that is great about the law it's a lawyer she's a law professor she.

She clerked for judge Richard Posner who's a legendary appellate judge in the seven certain Illinois she clerked for justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court she then was an associate White House counsel under Barack Obama for several years.

She is a law professor a Cardozo school of law here in New York she's also a consultant for ABC and a contributor where she does Supreme Court coverage analysis for them she's also my wife.

Her name's K. Cha she is my wife and my life partner and the love of my life and we met we were nineteen and I'm 39 now we've been together in our lives longer than we have not been together.

So I get basically all of my legal knowledge and fascination with the law and insights into the law all through Osmosis all basically all from Kate I completely coast off of her expertise and brilliance and all that she knows about the law.

I wanted to bring her in because she impodies all the things that Donald Trump seems to be a rejection of.

And she also has just incredible insights in two different ways about the law which is that practical experience she is worked in a White House she knows what it's like to vet people she knows what it's like to work on the Supreme Court she knows what it's like to work on a Supreme Court opinion and also theoretical she thinks about constitutional law she thinks about the way that the president's speech interacts with the law.

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