pathological liar when comey has absolutely corroborated each of those conversations with contemporaneous memos, calls rod rosenstein out for not getting a proper fisa warrant because using the chris teefr steele dossier had he in fact what started the whole matter was george papadopoulos a member of the trump campaign bragging to an individual who was connected with the australian government of the so this kind of attempt to manipulate the whole system, to put down the fbi, to put down the department of justice all amounts to one big obstruction. going on the issue of obstruction, though, i know that technically you can be charged with obstruction of justice even if the whatever crime you were trying to cover up isn t proven to be a crime.
inconsistent statements where it appeared he was having his own conversations with putin. we don t know what the truth is. we don t know if during the campaign, trump and putin had not communicated in some way. bill, let me ask you the legal part. obviously we understand why certain parts of this are getting a lot of attention. but the legal part that is more dry, but potentially more legally significant, is do these memos increase or decrease the credibility of james comey as a witness? oh, completely increase. these are contemporaneous memos. he wrote down everything right after it happened. and if you read through them as a totality, they re even more interesting because you can almost tell, even though he s been criticized for not saying that trump was obstructing justice, you could almost feel the obstruction when he starts just going into the detail and description of what trump is saying and how he is saying it.
was saying that you should be worried about the guy. in these contemporaneous memos, he s saying flynn has serious judgment issues. trump fired flynn for not only lying to the fbi, which he confessed to, but lying to the vice president about his contacts with russia. so this is a selective retelling of the past and it contradicts the president s own statements. he talks about loyalty a lot, but it does seem to be a one-way street. you summed it up quite nice there. so as we look at that, the other thing that really sticks out here, well, a number of things but to your point the back and forth. sometimes the president changes how he feels about things depending on the day, depending on the news of the day, depending on the tweet. that being said, it is consistent in these memos as to what the president is preoccupied with, and a lot of that has to do with this dossier. it is pointed out to him by james comey, the reason i m bringing this to you is because this has been corroborated
memos. how do you think they played? i think they tracked closely with comey s recounting in the interviews and books. you see comey s eye for detail in these contemporaneous memos. that was fascinating for me. they are fascinating. if this were to discredit comey, i m not sure that is perceived. the president is charming, aoe rat you can, impulsive and of n often. it still casts him in the same negative light. it is baked in at this point in time. everything built in is public information. things we already had contemplated with the president.
memo are political, not necessarily legal or investigatory. it was republican allies and the president who pushed for these to be released. republican chairs of committees in the house. i m just wondering if you think they regret they pushed for these memos to be released now. i agree with your point. i think the process by which they the release of these memos was forced is more revealing in terms of advancing the story than anything in the memos. the most important thing is to reconfirm the central argument that james comey made in his testimony and his book, i think, that president trump asked him if he could find a way to let go of the michael flynn thing. that is there in the contemporaneous memos. it is hard to see anything else on the ledger, on the other side that is more powerful than the revelation and the confirmation that in fact is what he recorded from the president. in that sense, i don t it is unclear what the republicans were thought this would