this is one of those days when it feels like all of washington is on egg shells and something s about to crack and fail. but in the middle of all that, i would like to pile on something new because we have a bit of a scoop tonight. this is dana bente. he first became a public official of national interest when president trump fired sally yates. she was the acting attorney general. she was fired after she told the white house she believed the muslim ban was likely unconstitutional. that s the reason she was fired. but we soon learned that while she had been acting attorney general, she had personally gone to the white house to give a warning about mike flynn and his communications with the russian government which he ehad been lying about. and this all happened at the very start of the trump aed ministration. trump got sworn in friday the
the country. we will do the work well. comey, bente, the justice department and the february february all declined to comment. by the way, bente is now the g.c. for the fbi, the general counsel for the fbi. jonathan lemire, let me just ask you, what about rachel s incredible reporting, and two, about the fact that when you go to war with the justice department and you re a chronic habitual liar and you take on people whose entire code of conduct requires them to be polygraphed to even get in the building, and their entire methodology for investigating criminals is to write you never lose the habit of writing a police report the way somebody does when we get robbed of a laptop and you call, i need a police report to put in an insurance claim. talk about how trump may have on a factual level, politically it seems we decide can he survive.
in june of last year when fired fbi director jim comey appeared before congress, one of the most scrutinized parts of his testimony had to do with a phone call he got that past march from the president. on that call, comey said trump described the russia investigation as a, quote, cloud that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. but one big question that kept coming up, how could comey prove this happened in the way he described. now we know, our colleague rachel maddow obtained internal justice departments that back up comey s account. they re handwritten notes taken by dana bente who was then the acting attorney deputy general detailing his conversation with comey right around the time the call happened. see if you recognize some of this language. quote, what can i do to relieve the cloud? quote, kept coming back to it, makes it hard to do business for
ring. and the fbi talked to him then and told him that the russians were trying to cultivate him. and so all of this is what was contained in the 50 or so pages of in of this warrant application. and so i think one of the things that i think is missing from this is that additional context. and also the renewal is a big part of this because as cara was saying there were two people that trump there were two trump appointees who were part of the renewal process. that s rod rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and dana bente, acting attorney general then the deputy attorney general and was running the national security division. these are two people who participated in the approval process during the renewal. dana bente was the person that helped enforce the travel ban after valuey yates refused to do so. we re in the weeds on this because we cover it day to day.
the 12 hour pain relieving strength of aleve. i m back. aleve pm for a better am. there are five high-ranking officials named in this memo today. james comey fired. deputy fbi director andrew mccabe pushed out and dana bente had been fired but brought him back and rod rosenstein. the white house denied tonight that rod rosenstein s job is on the line but they also denied the president ever tried to fire special counsel robert mueller which we now know he did. this is why people have been calling this moment a slow motion saturday night massacre after nixon cleared out the