intelligence even put it more sa succinctly. what did you see? it was a remarkable show in the senate yesterday and yet at the same time it was completely unsurprising. one of the odd ditties of covering the trump administration is that there is this divorce between the ground facts that the intelligence community and others are supposed to bring the president and then the decisions that they go and reach. it s not that the president can t look at the intelligence and then decide he s going to ignore it, he s going to go off in a direction somebody else hasn t done, that s his right. but what the president frequently then does is goes back and tries to argue that the underlying facts that he s being presented by the intelligence community aren t underlying facts. well here you get in the one time each year when all the intelligence chiefs have to sit in front of the senate and speak
other people have talked about trump being in this mafia culture, this is a great example of that. the second issue, though, about whether cohen is indeed afraid, i do believe this has triggered or is enhancing a fear that he probably, you know, already felt because you don t even need someone to tell you that, hey, if you re going to be a witness against the president of the united states, everyone in your family is going to be under a microscope i don t know anything about what his father-in-law has or hasn t done, but sounds like there might be some issues there but i don t think that s the only reason cohen isn t testifying so i think it s a factor, but not the only factor. i think it s complicated, what he s trying to do this dance here of cooperating with different people at one time he can get himself into more trouble. so i think it s a factor, but not the only factor. i think that isn t relevant, though, to our analysis of the fact that i think trump is, indeed, trying to tamp
meeting, didn t know about that, george hamilton, that s who i was trying to think of. look at them. he s called a comey a real nut job, said he was crazy and he also supposedly said i face great pressure because of russia, that s taken off, in other words, that may have raised the suspicions of fbi agents, that he could be in cahoots with moscow. well, when you talk about the comey firing, this had a lot more to do with hilary clinton e-mail investigation based on rod rosenstein s memo recommending that he be fired. so, you know, that s again, it s either you see it as this is a president who is sick of being accused of something he hasn t done and he s responding in ways that have drawn a lot of criticism, including, you know, some of the things he s blurted out in these interviews that make it look like, you know, is he just trying to dissuade people from investigating him for something he hasn t done, or is he colluding with the russians? you know, it depends what side
reason the united states needed to keep some presence on the ground. bolton himself said just a few weeks ago, publicly, you won t see the united states leave the ground in syria until the iranians do. what the president hasn t done is explain how this fits in with his iran strategy. there are ways to explain it, but he hasn t done so. david sanger, thank you so much. happy holidays to you. good to be with you. all right. still to come, a top democratic lawmaker sends a message to president trump saying like it or not, mueller s report on the russia investigation will become public. more on that, next.
president to do something that he really hasn t done, which is to champion a legislative achievement. look, i don t think he s going to get, you know, any sort of amnesty or whatever we want to call that, but the dreamers in exchange for a wall and other things, that s totally doable. the problem is, donald trump can t agree to it, you know, and then change his mind 24 hours later. he has to be consistent and rally around something. and he s asking for $5 billion. joe, do you think he could get that with this flexibility? he he so chooses? again, i think the wall is a myth in some ways because you re never going to build a wall, but they can put up something that he calls a wall, and everyone, you know, can go home happy. but i think matt brings up an important point. he s going to if he wants this big deal, he s going to have some republicans take a political risk and walk the plank with him. and his history is he lets the