ongoing war of words? well, one thing the white house has to grapple with here is that some of the things comey says, the book, the tour, all the stuff that s going to come out around this, there is going to be a chunk of the country that s going to take it seriously. there are obviously people that defend director comey. he s held numerous positions of trust in the federal government. he retains credibility. although, i think he s suffered some tarnish in the ordeal from people in both parties. there s no question what he says has to be taken seriously, and it is going to have an impact on public opinion. i m going to be watching how the president s approval ratings go up and down over the next few weeks. we didn t see much impact in the president s numbers with the stormy daniels issue. i d like to see how comey s allegations affect the president s job approval. michael, i wanted to get your take on the detail that we learned from the new book. he talks about trump s posturing th
recordings of him as well. scott, what is your take on this new york times reporting that trump s con iffidants view cohen and the probe as a bigger threat to him than perhaps the mueller probe? well, i understand it. it s more opaque. we don t know exactly what is on the recordings. we don t know exact lay what was taken out of his office. we don t know how far back it goes. we know he s been under investigation for a number of months. there s a black hole of investigation. on the mueller side, you know who has been in to see the special counsel. you sort of know what buckets they re looking at. obstruction and the russia collusion stuff. on the cohen piece, there s a lot of unknowns. any time you re flying through clouds and your instrument panel is down, it s scary. i think that s how they view the cohen probe right now. we earlier played a clip of comey saying polls may have influenced his decision to go public on the clinton e-mails and the investigation that reopened i days
the 2016 election russian meddling and potential collusion or whether there was collusion with the president trump campaign. yeah. that s exactly right. and he s taken some criticism for that, and so has the fbi. but it was a very different situation. that investigation in that it was still very much active. he says they didn t really come out and talk about the clinton investigation until it was over. the russia investigation was still very much ongoing, and if you ll recall, he didn t come it wasn t made public officially that the fbi was investigating the trump campaign until he testified before congress, and then he needed permission as he said from the department of justice to do so, to go ahead and tell the american people that this investigation was ongoing. look, i think people are going to look back at this and it s going to bring back a lot of the arguments that the hillary clinton people have made. they felt it was unfair. i also know just from all our
assistance to president george w. bush, and also author of the truth about trump . michael, do you think trump thought about whether his conversations with cohen were recorded? well, i think he was glad for many, many years that michael cohen did record his conversations with viarious people around the country. he was doing the president or then business mogul trump s bidding each day, and i think that they enjoyed listening to his performances. you know, i was on the receiving end of one of those calls, and he tried to beat me up for about ten minutes. then we wound up laughing about what he wanted to get me to do. so i was certain then that i was being recorded, and that donald trump was going to hear it. i think now as he contemplates what might be in various prosecuter s possession, the president is probably quite nervous that there are
days before the 2016 election. how do you think president trump may react to the comment? well, i think this is something the president probably assumed had occurred. that comey thought that he could act as he did because perhaps he assumed the result was inevitable, and the impact would be minimal. you know, it does indicate to us that comey is as flawed as everyone else is when it comes to judging politics and predicting what s going to happen in the future. i think now the evidence in the book that he s publishing is that he regrets some of what he said and did at that time. i would like to note, too, that fbi director comey s proposal circulated in publishing circles pretty widely. and he did not intend at first to write such a scathing book. he actually sold it as a book about leadership with some