fire them. now, the president has a different approach with general sessions. and we re going to see whether that approach works or it doesn t work, depending on what the president s real end is here. and i don t know that. i haven t talked to him about this. but i will tell you, jake, is that in the end, i understand the president s upset about the fact that he appointed an attorney general and even if there was going to be a special counsel, that his attorney general should manage that special counsel s investigation. because special counsel is not independent of the attorney general. they report to the attorney general. and to not have an attorney general who can oversee that, i understand why the president would be frustrated by that. but it s a situation we re in. we re going to take a quick break. stick around. we ve got a lot more to talk about. sure. coming up next, the white house s opioid commission which the governor is leading, and we ll get his side of the story of
probably heard enough of this cushion discuss. he had made his decision and he wasn t going to go through the process again. he was going to announce it and work on the back end to make sure the process put it into place. that s his style. we ve seen that over and over again. it s chaotic, though, empirically, it s chaotic. again, i think it is a result of in part, in large part the structure that existed in the white house. if you have a chief of staff who is in charge and the president trusts that chief of staff, and he is fully empowered, then all this stuff will go through the chief of staff. i think that part of it was the president wasn t appropriately briefed beforehand, before he became president about the diffuse structure being a real problem. so now we re going to see, though. that s been my theory, as you know since february. so now we re going to see if i m right. the attorney general, jeff sssions, has been having an unpleasant time i think it s fair. it s fair to
with the president publicly shaming him, humiliating him for the decision he made to recuse himself, a decision that i believe you have said was the right decision, have you not? well, i don t know. i don t think i ve ever commented on that publicly. well do, thi, do you think ie right decision? i think it depends on why he recused himself. if he recused himself because he gave confusing and inconsistent answers at his hearing regarding his contact with russia and russian officials, that then to be in charge of the russia investigation is problematic for him. but if it was because of association with the campaign, well, he could have recused himself and told the president-elect and everybody right then that that was the reason to recuse. i don t believe that was a reason to recuse. lots of people have been involved in campaigns at some level and then gone on to serve as attorney general. we ve seen that in many instances. certainly attorney holder was very involved in the obama
campaign and became attorney general. didn t recuse himself from anything. there were no investigations into the obama 2008 campaign. but jake, this investigation goes well beyond just the campaign. sure. i don t think there was a need for him to recuse himself based upon his association with the campaign. now, if he believed that once he gave answers that at best were confusing regarding his interaction with russia, at that point i think, you know, it was much more defensible to recuse. but i want to be clear about what i think needed to be done here. i don t think he needed to recuse over his involvement in the campaign. but i do think that once he gave misleading or confusing answers about russia, that that became more of a problem. what do you think about the way president trump has been treating him, really, it seems like berating him until he quits, although he has not quit. it wouldn t be my style and hasn t been my style as an executive. if i have a problem with a m