elements. the president said on record in an interview with lester holt why he did it. it s over. and bob mueller is now circling, i think, his net. he s going around to everybody who may have had a hand in the effort to create a decision after the fact or to draft statements. sean spicer was interviewed. reince priebus was interviewed. he is going to get the entire paper trail of how they constructed this argument, but i suspect the end is only going to make it more obvious that what the president said the first time is what he really meant. brett stevens we ve talked about three events, and we know that they are things bob mueller is asking questions about. one of them is this cover story. this ruse of the rosenstein memo that comey was fired because he was mean to hillary clinton. the other is this cover story, a set of lies told to explain don
firing. wasn t without effort. donald trump tried to woo comey big time. a lot of gripping and grinning. a lot of one on one candlelit dinners. not sure if there were candles, but there were dinners. it wasn t without a grand effort on his part. he had him over for dinner by itself within a week of the presidency. the awkward video. comey writes about wanting to disappear into the big drapes and pulls him in for an awkward man hug. he wanted to try to enlist him as a loyalist. he wanted him to let the flynn matter go. that s right. and i think so much so that comey said i don t want to be alone with him anymore. obviously it was getting to that point. two things here. one, i think in his such a layered statement in the climate of my brain is just sorry. women were saying that at the time. the way that he was putting pressure on him, it felt like
be an impeachable defense. we worked with jim comey. loved by some, loathed by others but respected by all. it s fascinating to watch this. he s not someone lacking a pretty finely tuned moral compass. some people didn t like what comey did, but there was never any talk about the man s character. it s funny. i get the sense with donald trump that he ran into something he s never encountered which is a person with integrity. who he couldn t turn. he assumed he had power over him and he s going to flip. comey said no and trump couldn t figure it out and then decided to fire him. so i think donald trump s world, he probably encountered people like that very much. at the end of the day what sessions said today is meaningless and irrelevant. what matters is what robert mueller is going to find and
he s not communicated with or reached out to, despite his claims in the rose garden. give us a final word, final thought. everybody here has suggested that you can t get any lower than this. is that ever true? no, it s never true. it s never true. thank you colonel jacobs. when we come back, the shiny object that donald trump waved in front of us this morning on twitter. his attacks on jim comey. well, they may have backfired. his attorney general testifying on capitol hill today about comey s firing may just become a key line of questioning in that obstruction of justice inquiry. also ahead spicer and his notebooks take center stage in the mueller probe. reports the president s former press secretary spent hours with the special counsel investigators. may have the president rethinking the mooch move. the president lashes out at the nfl again today while the league tries to buy itself more time. we ll be right back.
to the president. senator feinstein, i don t think it s been fully understood the significance on the error that mr. comey made on the clinton matter. uh-oh. attorney general jeff sessions was standing by president trump s initial justification for firing the fbi director. we re like three explanations beyond that, mr. attorney general. the original one, though, was that comey mishandled the investigation into hillary clinton s e-mails and was so unfair to her when he spoke about it during the campaign. the only problem is the president s no longer standing by that explanation. within a few days of firing comey, donald trump told lester holt he wanted to get the russia investigation off his back and just today, he tweeted, quote, as it has turned out, james comey lied and leaked and totally protected hillary clinton. he was the best thing that ever happened to her. so that s the opposite of the