go up a lot of blind alleys before we look, we got osama bin laden after missing him a number of times. it took us a long, long time to get him. we finally got him. i think if if the if the government has decided we re going to make these people pay, we ll find the people who who gave the order and make them pay. in the meantime, however, we ve got a bigger problem trying to find pockets of of of these people and destroy them before they cells of them before they do something else. it s it s a very difficult group to track down. they grew as big as they did principally as a function of using castoffs from the taliban. they were taliban soldiers who left, got fed up with the taliban and then joined isis-k. they will, at some juncture, have to assemble in various places and if we find them, we can target them. but the end of the day, it s the leadership we want to get and
democratic party yes they are supporting him and yes he is leading in the polls. i think a lot of those people in the polls feel is he inevitable. he has been hand picked by the party of course this is someone we need to support. 2016 a candidate hand picked by the establishment and voters felt fronted and like they never really had a choice that they had to go along with it. right now we are in that stage with joe biden where people are supporting him because there is that name recognition and because they feel like the party is going to inevitably pick him anyway. not necessarily because they are fired up about him or know his accomplishments. jedediah: cabot, it s deja vu. i feel like i relive this all the time. you had jeb bush he is the most electable, he is inevitable. it never works. why don t they learn on either side? i think the establishment on both sides really has this mindset of we know what s best for people and republicans, of course, got fed up with that we will have
worse than that. i think bush believed that they had turned a corner. here trump got fed up, lost interest, and it also could be that with donald trump it s not about people, it s not about policy. he used to like mattis, secretary of defense. he used to call him mad dog, my general. something about the relationship has soured. mattis may have pushed back in too many meetings. trump doesn t like mattis, he may not like the advice mattis is giving and trump wants to get out of syria. mattis wants to stay in. why are you getting rid of this? because obama put it in place. that s really the only rationale he can come up with. as i mentioned, his staff and members of his own party are furious. everybody in the white house is furious. here s senator lindsey graham. i m shocked by this. i think this is a decision that
it certainly isn t true that isis is defeated, so the pri prima facie rationale for it is just false. isis is no more defeated than it was six months ago. is this a mission accomplished moment? it s a mission accomplished moment, but it feels different than that. obama believed they had really turned a corner. here trump got fed up, lost interest, and it also could be that with donald trump it s not about people, it s not about policy. he used to like mattis, secretary of defense. he used to call him mad dog, my general. something about the relationship has soured. mattis may have pushed back in too many meetings. trump doesn t like mattis, he may not like the advice mattis is giving and trump wants to get out of syria. why are you getting rid of this? because obama put it in place.
telling that to other officials but not the president? what happened in june was the president had told mcgahn to call rod rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who is overseeing mueller, tell him that mueller had these series of conflicts and had to go. the president pushed mcgahn to do this over the span of a few days and eventually, mcgahn got fed up. he knew this was something he didn t want to do. and he told the folks around him he was going to quit. around that time, the president backed down and stopped pushing him to call rosenstein and he stayed on. mcgahn didn t want to do it or perhaps felt legally he could not do it. michael schmidt with the new york times with the big story. thank you. thanks for having me. stepping back for a moment, this reporting has two three lines. the first is the president talking to the mueller witnesses. the second is what we ve been