global conspiracy to overturn an american election. that being said, the president does not do things proper. which is what is going to get them in trouble. he does not think about the propriety of talking to each of these justice department officials. he does not worry about that. and he does what he feels is his best counterpunch, which is not always in the right. so we may find out that s how he got himself in trouble and that s the obstruction of justice part of this. the other thing i think set trump off on this topic this week and gives mueller additional things to look into is once again, this wolff book in which steve bannon is quoted as describing this meeting between jared kushner, paul manafort and donald trump jr. as treasonous. that goes directly to the issue of collusion. i think one of the reasons trump is out there, you know, repeating there is no collusion is that there are stories out there in the media suggesting
collusion. we don t know. it s still under investigation. we don t know that there was. we don t know that there wasn t. but by the president still talking about this repeatedly, it, i think, makes clear that he was told by his attorneys that this would be over his role in his would be over initially thanksgiving, then the end of the year, now it s obviously still going on. i believe talking to a variety of people who talk to the president that this is the underlying cause or one of them of his frustrations so far this week in the early hours of 2018. is that he is frustrated this is still going on. but as much as he says, you know, it s simply a hoax, that s not going to end it. it is simply complicating it for everyone. mk, it certainly plays with the base and the folks who support donald trump. i mean, he has a point on the collusion part of this, which is, look, he was told by comey, even though it was reported he wasn t told by comey, that he wasn t the focus of this. and it
camp david summit setting the 2018 agenda with the midterms in mind. i ve never been more optimistic about an immigration reform proposal making it to the president s desk than i am right now. inside politics, the biggest stories sourced by the best reporters now. welcome to inside politics. i m nia-malika henderson. john king is off today. to our viewers here at home and around the world, thanks for being with us. we begin the week with the fitness for office question. in a series of truly remarkable tweets on saturday, president trump defended his competency and his mental acuity. he tweeted this early saturday from camp david, now that russian collusion after one year of intense study has proven to be a total hoax on the american public, the democrats and their lap dog, the fake news mainstream media, are taking out the old ronald reagan playbook
welcome back. president trump is defending himself, saying he s done nothing wrong regarding the russia investigation. everything that i ve done is 100% proper. that s what i do, is i do things proper. and, you know, i guess the collusion now is dead, because everyone found that after a year of study there has been absolutely no collusion. there has been no collusion between us and the russians. trump is, of course, responding to a new york times report that says he asked white house counsel don mcgahn to urge attorney general jeff sessions to stay on the russia probe. sources say that mcgahn reached out to sessions in march of 2017 and tried to dissuade him from recusing himself from the investigation but sessions, of course, stepped aside anyway. now a senior administration official is telling cnn that then chief of staff reince priebus and then press secretary
testimony, an aide to mr. sessions approached a capitol hill staff member, asking whether the staffer had any derogatory information about the fbi director. the attorney general wanted one negative article a day in the news media about mr. comey, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. josh, what do you make of that? how does that make the attorney general look? well, it makes him look bad because it looks like there was a concerted basically smear campaign being run from the justice department or the people in the administration to impugn and tarnish the reputation of fbi director james comey. reading between the lines, the effort seems to have been designed to make him look bad and kind of give trump a pretext to get rid of him, which he did. trump keeps talking about collusion, as you said. here he is again, the president, on saturday talking about collusion and essentially saying there is no collusion. there s been no collusion. there s been no crime.