truthful testimony. he s no longer employed by the department of justice, but i want to go back to something else, which is i ve known john dowd. he and i worked in the organized crime section when i first graduated from law school, and words matter and his actions mattering and he must know better than to have tried to walk back something he told a reporter. he said he was speaking for the president, and it was wrong to have said what he said. the investigation has to follow its own natural course. i think this is really significant what s happening, and that america needs to pay attention that we don t let this get ahead of us. yeah. it s unusual to say the least for an attorney to first say on the record that they re speaking for the president, tell a reporter that. she had to get off the phone. that s why she s not with us anymore, and e-mail us back so he has evidence instead of taking it back and saying, no, no, i m speaking for myself, and yet on top of that, send it to
that rod rosenstein should drop the investigation is ridiculous. nobody believes that s going to happen. but yet it decrcreates a whole of chatter and discussion to divert everybody away from a scandal that is really start in to hurt this administration. equally ridiculous was the fact that it was breaking news that mueller subpoenaed the trump organization. because it is not breaking news. it is just the appropriate steps that a prosecutor takes. listen, you don t just call up the other lawyer and say dude, can you send me the docs, please? you have to document. it wasn t it s the appropriate steps. did the issue of the other pending lawsuit, the stormy daniels lawsuit, come up in your conversations with dowd? it did not. one thing i can tell you, that i can break on air, i ve been e-mailing with john dowd back
manufacturing james comby of manufacturing the entire russia probe based on a, quote, fraudulent trump dossier, again, reasserting the completely false assertion that the only reason the fbi was investigating donald trump was the dossier accusing the former director of the fbi of in venting an investigation against the president of the united states. to do all of that on the record has got to be the most unusual thing a lawyer has ever done. i m not a lawyer, so you tell me if i m wrong. you re absolutely not wrong. it s completely bizarre. and it s completely strange because john dowd because this isn t public couldn t have had the i.g. report, so he doesn t know any more than you or i or anyone else what s in the report to make it a fireable defense. as we said earlier, we haven t had the defense put forward yet. he was fired without the ability
managed by the department of justice. he s saying he wants to hasten that based on the mccabe firing. many people will interpret that as him wanting to stop the investigation now. that will be a common reaction to what he is saying and it may be why he is sensitive about this today. what he is saying is that the facts are now inclusive of this if report of mccabe, firing of mccabe by the attorney general, recusing himself from supervision of the mueller probe and dowd saying this is a turning point, in effect. he didn t use those word bus i think we could fairly characterize it that way. it is significant that the president s lawyer said these events should lead to the end of the investigation. he wants to be clear he is not calling for the firing of mueller. we have, time and time again, had the white house tell us that they re working cooperatively with the mueller investigation and dowd is one of a handful of lawyers who are working on the
white house. john dowd has a bit of a penchant for sometimes speaking out of school a bit. he s not always exactly on message. sometimes he says things that aren t always the most useful comments to his client, the president s legal situation. that said john, of course, is the attorney for the president. and he told me in a follow-up e-mail when he gave me that comment he was speaking on behalf of the president in his capacity as counsel for the president. so that s what he told me. and i think it s pretty clear what he said he hopes happens and the way he was saying it. did he clarify when he said he was speaking on behalf of the president that he had spoken to the president before making that statement to you? he did not tell me if he had spoken to the president about this or not. stay with me for a minute, betsy. i think we have ari melber on the phone as well, our legal eagle inside 30 rock. what do you make of this, ari, the idea that the president s personal lawyer would fo