people are being too silly about this. there s a lot of circumstantial evidence that leads to you worry aout collusion in the campaign, whether or not that s a crime is a question and what happened once donald trump became president-elect and especially once he became president. i very much agree with neera that has to be investigated. and obstructing justice. whether a fbi director make sure it s resourced with a serious investigation i m sort of neutral on that but it has to be a serious investigation. let s take a quick break and stay with our panel. coming up democrats are threatening to bring the senate to a grinding halt until they get answers about president trump s decision to fire director comey. what can they do? that s next. at panera, a good salad is so much more than a bowl of something green. more than an obligation to be good. more than just something you have on the side. more than just one flavor, or texture, or color. a good clean salad is so much more than gr
understand investigations and i understand fundamental fairness and you have to have complete init teg right and complete confidence in those conducting an investigation especially at this level where you re talking about the presidency of the united states and protecting our system of electig the president, our democracy is at stake. okay. attorney general jeff sessions recused himself from the fbi investigation into the trump campaign after failing to disclose his two pre-election meetings during the senate confirmation hearings. congressman, did sessions violate his recusal when he wrote a letter urging the president to fire comey? it certainly looks like it. the person being fired is the investigator. and the attorney general said he was going to stay out of this process. and yet then he signs this letter that recommends the firing of the investigator. does it violate being involved in it? of course it does.
so, gentlemen, how about more of what james clapper had to say in this interview with jake tapper? let s listen. there are a lot of americans out there who are scared this week. democrats, republicans, independents. because of the behavior by the president. are you among them? i m concerned. i will say that. so, brian, should people be concerned, and do you think that there are others, including clapper, who are concerned? well, people are always concerned. and particularly when they re in an opposition party. but the fact of the matter is, as i ve said, there are two bipartisan investigations going on, and the fbi s own investigation going on. and ellis, even director comey recognized that the president can fire the fbi director for any reason or no reason. how about this? do they have reason to be concerned? reason to be concerned, no.
did provoke the firing of comey and that was the violation, that obstruction. so one republican who has been very critical of the president is senator ben sass. here s what he had to say about the impact of the president s firing of comey. i m not sure how this president makes lots of decisions, so i honestly don t know. but i do know that we are in the midst of a civilization warping crisis of public trust and we need to talk honestly about our institutions that need to be restored and need to have the ability for people in five and eight and ten years to trust these institutions. so, brian, your reaction to that? the civilization-warping crisis. well, we re in an odd time. and i think he s got a point but i don t think that s a partisan issue. i think so many americans don t trust our politicians from both sides of the aisle. and people s temperatures have turned so far up. people are just so angry to the point of like just sort of
colleague jim acosta who reached out to the former obama folks who said that the former president certainly did not tape conversations in the oval office so if, and it s a big if if the current president is recording conversations, he s not using a system that was set up by his predecessor. but that was an unusual comment that roiled things at the end of an already difficult week. remember this is a week when the president s communications team because they were left out of the loop on his decision to fire director comey was left scrambling. they were left scrambling to come up with a good way to explain the president s move to the press and more broadly to the american people. we got a lot of changing storylines and even heard the vice president go up to capitol hill and say seven times the president was acting on recommendations of the justice department. of deputy attorney general rod