he wanted the memo out, the classified memo. even as his fbi director, chris wray, as other doj officials, intelligence officials showed some conner sternation about th said maybe we should do we d redactions, maybe we should not release this at all. the president became increasingly convinced it should be released and this week even until he did not see the memo, our reporting shows he saw it for the first time yesterday afternoon, wednesday afternoon. the president by all accounts had heard it would be in his best interest to release it and was resolute and determined to do that. so the president was watching a lot of television, assume fox news played a decent sized role in all this. it did. anderson, we in our story tonight reported that one segment that particularly intrigued the president was actually on cnn. as the president was going to davos last week, he was watching the segment with trey gowdy, the south carolina conservative republican, who was calling for
a repudiation. josh dawsey from the washington post. thanks for much, josh. more on the president s expec expectati expectations. k cnn s jeff zeleny joins us from the white house. you have more. reporter: indeed, kaanderson. the president in recent days has been telling friends and associates he s spoken with on the phone after the state of the union address and since then that he believes the release of this report will be a vand case vindication of sorts and discredit the russia investigation largely because he believes it will expose what he sees as a prejudice deep within the top ranks of the fbi. now, this in some respects is the culmination of a months of disgruntlement really and the president believes he s been treated unfairly by the fbi. of course, it s one of the things that led to the firing of james comey last may. the appointment of the new fbi director christopher wray who s been on the job six months exactly today. now he finds himself locked in this confrontatio
memo to be released. that particularly invigorated him and drove him to tell his advisers, hey, all of these guys, you re saying it should be out there, it should be out there. it s some fox news, some cnn. there are a number of people around him on the outside, even john kelly, his chief of staff, had pushed back against doj officials who say it should be released. it s a mix of tv and his inner circle and from the president, i withstood eight, nine months of damaging stories about me and this russia investigation, as he professed time and time again, he thinks it s a witch hunt and a focus and here s information that can actually benefit me and i want to release it as soon as possible. did john kelly where was he in all this in terms of what he felt the impact of this memo would be? so our reporting indicates that on monday, rod rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who s overseeing the mueller