they have existed at least for a year. through the fbi background check process. and the white house, the president, the chief of staff, the chief counsel at the white house, they ve decided to keep moving forward. because porter if you really want to understand the dynamic, he was a confidant of jared kush next the president s son-in-law. of hope hicks, the communications director. of so many people at the upper echelon at this white house. a confidant of jared kushner. we know jared and aye vank ka have a lot of influence. you say a con fidant of hope hicks. wouldn t other senior members of the administration knowing he was dating hope hicks and has a history with women, with abusing women, wouldn t they want to stand up and say hold on here? there was a choice inside of the white house to not believe the allegations about porter. and this is going to perhaps have sweeping consequences in the coming days and weeks as the white house s decisionmaking
are defending anybody. the memo came hours after top fbi official andrew mccabe was, quote, removed as deputy director, taking terminal leave using vacation time until he reachedes his retirement in a matter of weeks, his days at the fbi are done. the president did not play a role? the president was part of the decisionmaking process and refer you to the fbi where christopher ray served as director, last week, i will repeat again today the president has full confidence in him and put the decisions in his hands. democrats blasted both the decision to release the memo and mccabe s departure. former fbi director jim comey weighed in tweeting the, quote, small people were trying to tear down the fbi. jillian: much more to come on
that, on its face, looks to people like obstruction of the justice. now, donald trump denies doing that. one of the things robert mueller s team is going to have to do is corroborate the comey memos and comey statements and do that by speaking to the people that comey talked to at the time and also potentially to white house officials who spoke to donald trump about it. sorry, go ahead. no, i was going to ask you, ken, is that what makes don mcgahn so important to all this? i know he s not a household name but we ve come on the air before and talked about how the white house counsel don of, two days with the special counsel mueller s investigators. he is one of the people who was in the loop, if you will, in the receipt of the information from sally yates about mike flynn, perhaps, being compromised, as well as in the loop as far as we understand on the president s machinations, if not his decisionmaking process, to fire flynn and comey. that s right.
are you far of the decisionmaking process on handing over power to the vice president or whoever while he s sedated? i ll be make bing recommendations on that with the chief of staff and national security council and everybody else. i won t make that decision. i will be a part of that discussion. dr. jackson, thank you. you say that the president was the one who requested the cognitive test that it wasn t necessarily needed for someone of his age. did you did he tell you why he wanted it done? there s been a lot of speculation out there about his cognitive state. did was he upset with some of that talk? what were the discussions that you had from when he told you this is why i want to do it, why did he say he wanted to do it? he wasn t upset with it but did drive part of the process. this has been the narrative for a while. i think he saw doing the physical as an opportunity to put some of that to rest. and i think that, you know, he wasn t, you know, obviously the least bi
south korea. hallie? the story of what happened to otto warmbier has horrified so many folks and including president trump. i think what we saw before the syrian strike when it was the faces. it was seeing the faces of the foreign policy that seemed to have the most impact on the president or at least played into his decisionmaking process. do you think now that there is a sort of face and a family to this that we may see from president trump less of the i d be honored to meet with kim jong-un. seeing faces having that emotional connection. back when he made the decision about the missile strike, clearly he had been moved. and, obviously, heard from yesterday with this case, it s such he s expressing a lot of sorry about the tragedy. concern for the family. we have really have to see how this plays out now. this really does put more onus on the president and the white