there could be many other instances of this. one other thing to keep in mind about the whistle blower and his or her state right now, this is an administration that has gone to extreme lengths to silence people who from the inside will try to tell the truth. they investigate and try to rat outsources to journalists and try to with hold information from being sent to congress and try to block testimony to the oversight committees to the congress. you can expect that president trump and also his top aids in the white house are going to do everything they can to find out who this whistle blower is and punish this person or multiple people if there is another occurrence. hey, gang, we asked a lot of you tonight because we re covering this breaking news in realtime. that s all the fault of the washington post but our thanks to carol, phil rutter, jeremy bash. appreciate it. coming up tonight, a former fbi special agent weighs in on just what we re talking about tonight. what this means
may be bracing for the fact that there could be more. yeah, brian, there always could be more with this president and one of the main reasons for that frankly is his lack of discipline and his interactions with foreign leaders. this is not a president who reads from notes or who follows a script. he sort of free wills in conversations and thinks that makes him an effective leader and negotiator when he s going head-to-head, face-to-face or hand set to hand set with a counter part around the world but the problem according to people in the white house is that he will often times say things he s not exactly prepared to say or doesn t fully appreciate the ramifications of those comments. we saw it very early on in the administration with that pretty rawkus phone call and created a real diplomatic problem for administration.
said that was so worrisome. the promise that they made i m sorry, that he made allegedly to the ukraine. carol has agreed to stay with us and right now joining us by telephone is the former ci arks d cia director john brennan. director brennan, when you heard rudy say as he said tonight, if what they are saying is true, it doesn t make any difference. he just becomes the latest person i ve heard recently to say in effect some form of the president can say whatever he wants. is that your understanding? well, i think rudy s defense and donald trump s comments in the tweet are belied by the very, very rigorous effort that the administration will be taking for th taking to prevent this whistle blower s complaint.
course of a presidential campaign, and we know that because we ve seen it happen before. the 11th hour on a thursday night just getting underway now. well, good evening once again from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. day 974 of the trump administration, once again breaking news tonight centering around that explosive whistle blower complaint from inside administration that has set off this latest battle with congress. the washington post has already reported the complaint, which was filed with the intelligence community inspector general involved donald trump s private communication with a foreign leader that included some sort of promise. importantly the new york times reported the whistle blower s complaint is set to involve multiple acts by the president but now tonight a short time ago, the washington post breaking the latest on this story in a four by line piece
rudy tonight on cnn speculating this was a democrat holdover deep inside administration. used the phrase deep state again as everyone was expecting. is he allowed to talk about whistle-blowers that way? is there not some equivalent of witness intimidation in these cases? i think clearly they want to silence anybody who sees wrongdoing by the president or by somebody at the white house. they want to silence that person. they want to cover things up. but i d like to see the leadership of the national intelligence directors office have at least as much courage and bravery as this whistle blower, one of their subordinat subordinates. you want the leader to have as much bravery and courage as one of the troops command. we need to see the leadership from the community head joe mcgwire but we also need to see the justice department and the white house step aside and let the law play out. i do want to emphasize what