the president also upset that comey was not putting enough emphasis on investigating leaks. also developing, the white house closely monitoring the performance of deputy press secretary sarah huckabee sanders. she s been filling in for sean spicer, who was out for naval reserve duty, but multiple administration sources say spicer has actually been benched and could be replaced. there s intense reaction from both sides of the aisle. some criticism from republicans including congressman jason chaffetz, a trump supporter, he s calling for a full review by the justice department. chaffetz says, previously i asked inspector general history owe withes to review the fbi s actions in advance of the 2016 election, today i sent a letter urging ig horowitz to expand the scope of his review to include the decision to fire director comey. i look forward to receiving the
is i think you have confirmet this in fact, even the communication staff and a number of his top officials were e unaware that he was about to fire jim comey. anyway, what i was asking you indicated the president was angry at comey because comey refused to say four words. there are no ties between the trunk campaign and russia. i think he would ve liked to have seen comey articulate that more publicly which is why you h saw on the termination letter that the president said i appreciated the fact that you told me three separate times that i was not being investigated. i think he would have liked toha hear it more publicly. this is not going to go away. speaking of refusing to go away, the disbelief that people weren t happy about this that
welcome back. you re watching cnn, breaking news. president trump says he plans to fire fbi director james comey, no matter what, irrespective of anyone s recommendation. this is what he has just told nbc today. the president called comey a grandstander, quote, and a showboat, quote. just a short time ago, the republican chairman of the senate intelligence committee reacted to those words from the president. the president just told lester holt that he was going to fire director comey, whether or not he had that recommendation or not, and he called director comey a showboat. he called him that grandstander. do you agree with that assessment? we just heard something different from these i m not beginning to speak
narrative that he deferred to the recommendation of a non-partisan widely respected person. instead, he has confirmed, we think we all knew two days ago, which was this. i wanted to fire him, for probably a politically motivated reason, i needed a cover to make that happen and make that go down very easily. you had the cover, and now he s erased whatever little gains he would have had among people who believe that initial incredible story. on that final note, sara murray, let me bring you in, in the white house briefing room. you asked two excellent questions. and a piece of that, he decided to fire comey irrespective of any recommendation. and your question was about rosenstein and whether or not well, why did y all essentially throw him under the bus? that s right. it was interesting to see sarah huckabee sanders try to sort of address this today. she basically said, look, we didn t try to pin this decision on rod rosenstein. that s obviously a very different tone from what we
the last couple days mccabe testified there remains strong confidence among the agents at the fbi. we all had a very rare admission, i don t think we ever heard this publicly before from a senior fbi official, that after director comey made the decision not to recommend charges for hillary clinton and her team for the mishandling of classified information, there was a lot of anger and frustration among the career agents involved, maria. maria: we ll be following that. want to bring in pete hexter. mr. chairman, thank you. your reaction to this? i ll tell you, there s so many angles to come at this. i think they ve covered them all. the bottom line is we re going to have a few fbi director. the president takes responsibility for the decision to fire director comey. not a whole lot more there. the investigations are going forward. maria: the president could fire any director any time for