he won t be treated like others. last question. is there anyone in the federal government currently that is even capable of holding this administration accountable. even jeff sessions, attorney general of the united states, is part of the club. well, i was in washington two days ago speaking with some members of the house of representatives, but so far only the democrats seem to be interested in this. and this is a big tragedy for the republican party. i have been with the republican party for 30 years but i ve got to say i remember the nixon situation and he may have been a crook, but at least he was our crook. he was not in bed with the russians. we didn t have to worry about the national security of our country. amen to that. thank you all. coming up. the republicans war on the poor. stay with us.
according to this piece in the observer, encouraging the national security agency director, head of the nsa, to discredit the head of the fbi, to discredit james comey. i want to play for you what richard nixon did that almost got him impeached, got republicans to walk into the office and say mr. president, you need to resign. it was him attempting to get the cia to interfere with the fbi with the investigation of watergate. listen to his chief of staff, on june 23, 1972 in one of the nixon recorded calls. by the way to handle this now is for us to have walters call pat gray and just say stay the hell out of this, this is there s some business here we don t want you going any further on. that s not an unusual development. in a sense, level of outrage
so everything seems very situation am. but this antagonistic relationship trump has with reporters, i don t think that s going away. i think the conservative base is going to continue to have that it s been like that for quite sometime. it s just stronger. it starts at the top, jason. starts at the top. this is donald trump who took some time out of his big boy trip abroad to make comments about gianforte. take a listen. going one step below that, less listen to the various republicans who refuse to reject gianforte even after he assaulted the reporter. had the head of the national republican campaign committees, the chair, said from what i know for greg gianforte, this is totally out of character. charlie dent saying, he was charged we don t know the facts. franks from arizona, the left has intense confrontation approach. if he wins, he ll have won
violations of the logan act. very serious for this administration. it does beg the question, where are the resignations, where is the outrage on capitol hill. richard painter makes a good point. if anything close to this happened in the obama administration, republicans would have immediately begun i am impeaching the president of the united states. there is no accountability. let s be honest. president obama was very smart in that he never met directly one on one with the fbi director, mueller or comey. he always made sure to have somebody else in the room. that s because you have to preserve the integrity of both the fbi and the presidency. the president himself has not preserved the integrity when the investigations have come up. he is talking to dan coats, talking to mike rogers, has to be talking to cia director pompeo, begging them to do their job because they serve him. he fundamentally does not understand the role of the president. the president has hiring and firing power.
counsel might have been the worst thing to happen to them for them developing a spine and saying this is enough. why is that? because it now allows them to abdicate their responsibility for holding the president accountable because director mueller is so expected. it s an unintentional blowback. however, there are two things. one, republicans are kind of defending at least on the far right what happened with kushner in this. they re saying, well, henry kissinger had a back channel as well, but henry kissinger and his back channels, we re talking about cafes and coffee shops, not the russian facilities, which is a neutral spot. if we were doing who won the week, that would have been your who won the week. they would have won the year. this is a boone for lawyers. but malcolm, that is the other point because if you look at another point and compare this to kissingerian politics, you didn t have henry kissinger going into these countries where we re setting up diplomatic