and it made me wonder as i listened to the two of them, it may be they felt a sense of propriety about what they could or couldn t say. it may have been that. it felt there was an orchestrated play that we were going to give these answers and we were not going to go beyond these answers even though their first answer begged the question. jason, as a supporter of the president, were those the right answers to give? i think rogers came across much more buttoned up. coates answer did not come across well. he should have had a tighter answer. because he acknowledged he didn t have any legal backup for what he said? yeah. the optics of that were just a bad answer. i think when he started off saying that he hadn t been pressured, that there hadn t been anything untoward, both he and admiral rogers gave slightly different answers but made it very clear they had not been pressured to do anything inappropriate. i thought that was good and i was surprised they didn t go a little bit fur
impeachment is political. there is no judicial review of impeach. you can impeach a president for jaywalking and nobody can review that. i m talking about was there an objestruction of justice. i have to tell you, and i wonder if you would agree with me, jeffrey, if we were called as expert witnesses in an impeachment trial of president trump, and we were asked the question, has president trump committed an obstruction of justice by pardoning flynn or by firing comey or by telling comey not to investigate flynn? my answer an an expert on the constitution would be absolutely not. he didn t commit an obstruction of justice. congress can impeach imif you don t like what he did, if you think it s obstructionish or if he wasn t the president but you cannot say it s a crime. it s simply not a crime for the president to exercise his constitutional authority to pardon, to direct the fbi. it wasn t a crime when thomas jefferson directed the attorney general what to do.
i think the question is not whether he acted inappropriately but whether that amounts to an obstruction of justice. on a panel sometimes it feels a lot of report eers have already come to a conclusion about that before they ve even heard him speak. i ve been in that room 150 feet from the oval office for 20 years. i m not condemning him, but i m going to tell you this, there s a lot of smoke and there are a lot of alarm bells. you just told him that s not a media oh, my goodness. comey s letter is a media creation? i m not going to take that, i m sorry. you take that one. i m not going to take that one. there is an ongoing investigation nobody can hear at home. go. april, there were sources who were saying on this network and on other networks that comey was going to testify that he did not it tell the president those sources were wrong and cnn corrected that. i will also point out the vast majority basically comey has confirmed just about everything else that w
loyal but if there s a federal investigation where facts lead in a certain direction, i ve got to follow that investigation. that conversation wasn t about loyalty. it was about do what i want to you do, and the proof of it partly is in him also asking, do you want to stay on the job? it s a ten-year term. why is the president asking if you want to stay on the job? and, second, i want you here without the attorney general, because i don t want him to hear it. so i m no lawyer, much to the chagrin of my late mother, but i will but, you know, i could see where the president s lawyers might say, look, he did not order comey to do anything. he simply vouched for a guy who was his friend and said he hoped it worked out. the thing, jason, that makes it more insidious is the fact that he was fired. if he hadn t been fired, i think you d have a much better case there. but not only fired, on twitter talking about i hope there s not a tape of this conversation. and the question now is he v
go to sessions? he did go to sessions, and he said don t leave me alone in the room with that man. he didn t raise the specter of obstruction of justice. that s not his job. he absolutely should have said that. one at a time. can t come back now and try to play the obstruction of justice game. paul, what about that? it did happen. the others have argued, well, maybe in each particular incident he didn t see it but it s more of the pattern. how do you see it? i do think that s where the hearing will go tomorrow and should go. what did you do with that? when the president said to you i hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting flynn go, that does seem like very direct obstruction of justice. he went to the man and asked him to stop the investigation. that s pretty clear after making it clear that he wanted the fbi director to feel gratitude to him for keeping his job. the question is why didn t he go with that knowledge to someone?