and the foreign policy front. >> and robert, you go back a bit with donald trump and this campaign. the axe i don't mean at the time in the early days was all the best people were gone. they were spoken for. they were hired. so a lot of the outer rings of the foreign policy intelligencea weren't there. is that when the kind of russian cracks and fiz urs started appearing and this started seeping into the trump circle? >> that's exactly right, brian. i remember if the spring of 2016 i went to the trump hotel, still unfinished trump hotel in washington with my colleague bob woodward at the "washington post" to interview then candidate trump and we encountered one of these foreign policy meetings. all these different figures, sam clovis and others around the table meeting with the candidate in kind of a ram shod way. it wasn't a formal meeting that you would expect out of a presidential campaign and people