the lying about it, how they were trying to mislead and the fact that the lawyers are concerned about that means that s an issue that will come back. hold on, i ll come back to you in a second. i want to take in one second to bring in a member of the senate judiciary committee which obviously overseas the justice department and attorney general sessions, minnesota democratic senator amy klobuchar joins us from the great lakes state. thank you for being here. thank you, jake. what s your reaction to this story? well, for me it reinforces two things. the first is that a lot of the testimony, that jarring testimony we heard from james comey last year where he talked about the president first telling him he wanted to keep him on but then saying he wanted his loyalty and comey saying you have my honesty and that s what you ve got is my honesty. then you have that moment where the president kept comey in the room, kicked out jeff sessions and said basically told him to let it go
room, kicked out jeff sessions and said basically told him to let it go on flynn. so this reporting backs up that kind of testimony. and the second thing i learned from this is how important it is to allow the investigation to continue and to allow mueller to do his job. there is a large part of this about the leadup to firing fbi director comey. the new york times reports he was searching for reasons to get rid of comey. an aide to the attorney general approached a capitol hill staffer and asked if that staffer had any derogatory information on the former fbi director. had you heard about that? i had not heard about that and we ve had some testimony in the judiciary committee that s public and then we have those transcripts that we d like to release but the ones that i have seen are not related to this. how might the book fire and
depends on what the definition of is is. in a lot of ways president trump is saying it s the definition of what hope is. i hope there s no problem with flynn essentially. and trump is going to say, hope, of course, he s a good guy, part of my campaign. i m not politically correct. i use the word hope but he s going to try to use that the way clinton did with what is is. in clinton s case, it was monica lewinsky s blue dress and in watergate you have the white house tapes. we don t have that kind of smoking gun evidence at this juncture. on the hope note, michael, quickly to you, the word hope that the president has used, you better hope there are no tapes in the tweet about comey and i hope you see your way to let it go on flynn, the word hope, does that make a difference? how do you interpret that? the way comey interpreted it
was, hope was not hope like aspirational. it was i can look, here s my order. like if i m your mother and i say, i hope you brush your teeth. that s like, brush your teeth. that s right. or don carleon says to the movie producer, i hope you see it my way and then ends up with a horse head in his bed. it s interesting to me, from wearing my prosecutor s hat, when he said, better hope there are no tapes, that s a threat, as i would read it if i were still a prosecutor. and then when he picks up the same words as, i hope you will drop the investigation, i read those things, i would argue to a jury or anybody else who was trying to be persuaded, those words are not benign but they are directive and that undermines the notion that professor brinkley just said with respect to it being just a passing word of no legal consequence. here is one more headline from today.
you can see your way clear to letting this go on flynn. not i m ordering you to do that. they picked up on that. and raising questions about comey s credibility as well. to the early point of where does this go from here i think rides on the meeting between the senate intelligence committee chair and vice chair with mueller to talk about deconfliction. the magic word. try not to butt heads with the congressional investigations and the criminal probe that mueller is running. the senate intelligence committee is scheduling time to talk to jared kushner. they are fact finding. as much as mueller drives this and where the divisionlabor is split up. this is going to come back to congress. it is unlikely that mueller indicts the president. it is up to the congress if it does something. if it doesn t get to the level