investigation, and and comey tells him that he s not under investigation, but what s interesting is that later he will then ask comey having asked comey to kill an investigation on flynn, he actually asked comey or brings up the idea of starting another investigation to clear him of anything in the dossier. listen, can we knock this down? can we investigate this and comey made a point and said, listen, if do you that, that will create the impression that you re under investigation which you re not. again, to jeffrey s point, here you have a president going to the to one. senior most law enforcement officials telling him to kill one investigation that relates to up of his most senior aides, national security adviser, and pressuring him to some degree to start another one to clear his name because he s uncomfortable and somewhat fixated on this dossier. it s fascinating. evan, comey the president said comey urged him to let go of the flynn conversation. comey said he was troubled
the direct request from flynn and remarkably comey is troubled by it and without saying it would not be appropriate for a fact recital of this kind to say there was obstruction, he notes how troubled he was and documents it and addresses how to deal with this kind of an extraordinary intrusion on an investigation and that flynn conversation is another nail in trump s coffin. this constitutes, i believe now, beyond a prima fascia case of obstruction. we may still hear the negative case, but i think this is another turn of the screw for president trump on the obstruction of justice front. mr. am bass abassador, stand. jeff toobin, you heard him. i don t think it s that
campaign. i had understood the president to be requesting we drop any investigation of flynn in connection with all of this. right. and then he is describing his contemporaneous thoughts at the time immediately after he had this conversation with the president and that s why i think it s so important, because he took these notes because he considered it so concerning and at the time he says that, you know, it was concerning given our role as an independent agency and that he didn t think the president was talking about the broader russia investigation but really just the investigation into mike flynn. but that s still an investigation. of course. of course. let s just keep this in perspective. there is a criminal investigation going on of one of the president s top associates, his former national security adviser, one of the most
commonsense hats that are going to say, no, it s not political. but you can be sure that they are going to say, this is a man scorned. this is a man fired by the president and he s got an ax to grind. i am not saying that that is correct, but i m just giving you a preview of what i m getting of what the trump defense is going to be. and this is why the memos matter. because he wrote the memos before he was fired. he wrote them i m reading in the very beginning of this, january 6th, he said i began to type this on a laptop in an fbi vehicle outside trump tower the moment i walked out of the meeting. wow. and the other thing i ll point out is, in this first conversation which you haven t read yet, brooke, he does assure him on this january 6th meeting that he assures the president that there was no counterintelligence investigation. counterintelligence. that s an important distinction. why? because counterintelligence
reasons, most importantly because it would create a duty to correct, should that change. sounds familiar. yes. he goes on, the president went on to say if there were some, quote, satellite associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out but that he hadn t done anything wrong and hoped i would find a way to get it out and we weren t investigating him. in an abrupt shift, he turned the conversation to deputy director andrew mccabe saying he hadn t brought up the mccabe things because i had said that mccabe was honorable although mcauliffe was close to the clintons and i didn t understand why the president was bringing this up. i repeated that mr. mccabe was an honorable person. he finished by stressing going back to this word the cloud that was interfering with his ability to make deals for the country and said he hoped i could find a way to get out that he wasn t being investigated. i told him i would see what we could do, that we would do our