consistent with james comey public comments with his interactions with trump and expose new details about the details in the steele dossier as well as michael flynn. with us to dive into all of this, from the new york times the person who first broke the news that there were actually comey memos, michael schmidt. natasha bertrand who covers the russia investigation for the atlantic. former u.s. attorney barbara mcquade and at this table ari melber, host of the beat. hi, ari. hi. and bill crystal, founder and editor of the weekly standard. guys, it s an incredible week full of weekly news. let s start with the comey stuff. michael schmidt, i want to ask you to start things off. the president tweeting today seeming to believe the comey memos somehow exonerate him. true or false? not sure i guess it depends that beauty is in the eye of the person reading the memo. these memos in many ways, i think, are troubling for trump.
array of surrogates across the air. you had kellyanne conway and sarah huckabee sanders, you had various folks trying to discredit james comey even before his abc interview on sunday night. the white house feels the damage here could be worse. the president was certainly ramped up and upset about this book and so far, none of the woes have been absorbed in the white house estimation are irredeem be. none of the blows are stuff they didn t expect. nothing that hasn t been reported or no new episodes that have driven a frenzy of media coverage. obviously it s not good for having the fbi director on television calling the president unethical and untethered to reality, but the white house because there s not been a lot of new revelations, maybe this isn t going so badly. they also have to deal with the michael cohen fallout which could be far worse. the comey stuff is a walk in the park. lynn sweet, on james comey, comey has faced some criticism, he really has, over this book
was a bad pick as president. not good. now we know the president, seeing all this comey stuff going forward and rod rosenstein s role in that as well as the mueller investigation has all these ruminations of is the president going to fire somebody? that, says james comey, would cross a line. i would hope it would set off alarm bells that this is his most serious attack yet on the rule of law. it would be something that our entire country, again, democrats republ and republicans, that is higher than all fights. if they were able to see that higher level and protect it. a lot of republicans have gifr given that advice, don t go there. but if that advice is given by comey, might that provoke him.
which she did and the meeting turned out to be about what? brian: i agree with you. if he had said that when they asked, it would be almost no issue. well, look, it s no issue anyways and guy back to, brian, the fact that the ukrainians were attempting to intervene on behalf of hillary clinton and because these are political campaigns. these things happen. no one has pointed to me where there is a legal violation of a meeting with a russian lawyer that involved a campaign. steve: jay real quick exit question and this kind of tie into the comey stuff where he had his friend leak to the new york times. according to the new york times on this story about don jr. and the email, there were three sources who talked to the new york times. it sounds like either the sources were somehow in the department of justice or in congress. and both of that, if either of those are true, that s really bad. well, i mean, if there was leaked information by people who had authority to have that inf
so he probably wasn t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between doj, fbi and white houses. he s just new to this. congressman, you called the comey stuff the hope and feelings the hope and feelings dialogue. so speaker ryan would say that president trump is basically the young and the restless, he s new to d.c. and he s not sure exactly what he s doing so far. is that enough justification to understand how the three branches of government operate and do so in coordination, but also in a way to keep oversight of one another? well, i can kind of sympathize with that comment being an outsider myself and a lifelong business person. some things you do in business would be misconstrued perhaps in this public arena where no good deed goes unpunished. but i still haven t seen any beef here. when it comes to james comey