washington correspondent for the new york times, charlie savage. bell couple ba welcome back, it s good to see you. first, ask you about what anthony scarmucci said about what the president told him about the russian beihacking. it seems like he is blaming the media for it. are you surprised that scarmucci is holding to that narrative? are there any members of congress on board with this? no, and the intelligence community under his administration as well as the previous one has been quite clear about all this. this is probably the new guy telling the boss what he wants to hear, assuming the boss is also watching him on television and backing up the boss rather than undermining the boss on his third day on the job. certainly doesn t fill one with confidence he s going to be an independent voice who says the boss doesn t want to hear that on television. something this well established at this point. why do you think donald trump is holding to this narrative?
white house position on this was not true. and a million people responded saying, that s not true, that s not what director comey said. that tweet is still up there. and here s the problem, we saw some exact scenario played out when the unclassified assessment was published. the president then said, hey, look, the ic, the intelligence community says there was no impact on the election. that s not what the report said. that s not what the director said today. they said there was no evidence of russia beihacking i machines, affecting votes, but it s not in our purview to say whether it impacted people s decision-making. and it forced one candidate to continue to respond to leaked e-mails. we don t know whether it was decisive and what s more, it s just not the intelligence community s place to try to even figure that out. they made that clear. and for the president to say otherwise is just another falsehood labelled on falsehood. i heard from democrats today
winning strategy for the democrats, go for the jugular against trump? i think at a certain level, you ve got to go against donald trump. i think there s credence to what he said. largely, republicans years ago, back in the 90s, impeached president bill clinton because he was unfaithful to his wife. now we have a president who potentially was unfaithful to his country. during the campaign in july, i believe, he asked the russians to hack into hillary clinton s e-mails, he endorsed julian assange s wikileaks, which unveiled the beihacking by the russians at the dnc. now you have independent investigations going on in congress looking into this, but there s a potential game-changer and bombshell there that could underscore the continued relationship that donald trump has had throughout the course of the presidential campaign and now into his presidency. independent of attacking the president, i think one thing we saw tonight was a celebration of ideas. i think it was a healthy conversa