washington are agreeing this was a good choice. let s discuss why. cnn s law enforcement analyst and assistant director tom fuentes and we have analyst phil mudd. let s start with the man and get to the mandate. phil mudd, mueller. tell me about him. right guy for the job like this? best i ever saw. hands down. 31 years i have been around government and in government and outside. i never saw anybody like this guy. integrity, brains, drive, commitment. he also would kill me for saying this. he has a heart and sense of humor. you won t see it. he is not anti-media. he will not talk and he won t leak. when i saw this announcement, i was thinking of the variety of people i worked with in my life. secretaries and kings and fbi directors and presidents. never saw any better. if you have a kid, this is who
business. and so this is in many ways the procedures and the ethic used in a family business sort of being brought in to washington. but the other thing is they view all of these as being in large part driven bipartisan zrie zrito re du any question asked is sn as an attack on him. by the way, for a bunch of people that s completely true. they are using this to undermine the president s legitimacy. that s why they get to defensive and i think that s why they don t disclose these things so quickly. but they make it worse though. i m not arguing they make it worse. by letting it leak and having to respond to it. if you have contacts with the russian, why wouldn t you put e everything out there immediately. someone who agrees with you is the former vice president of the united states. we don t get to hear from him that often. listen to dick cheney overseas
find it jeff sessions would find it hard to remember when it just happened a few months prior to the hearings, i find that hard to believe. he makes the case that he wasn t speaking to the ambassador basically with his campaign surrogate hat on that he was talking as someone on the armed services committee. you obvious are privy to certain information as a congressman, you pursue certain relationships with foreign officials as well in that matter, but this is different to you, russia? i think so because of the office he was seeking, office he was being confirmed on and the whole context of the russian investigation, how deep it leaks into the white house, how deep it leak into the campaign at that time. he himself recognized it. he was recognized as a surrogate for the campaign.
david farenthal, we may have to cut you off if the president starts speaking, but one thing that s been going on at the white house is concern about leaks, from inside the press office. you, sir, are someone who lives off of leaks, as the rest of us do. do you see the level of concern, sean spicer bringing in his press staff, asking to see their cellphones, do you see this as more of a concern than we ve seen in the past? it certainly is. the way the trump administration could deal with this is to give government employees, their own white house employees, the sense that their opinions are being listened to internally. if you give them the idea that their concerns are being dealt with, they won t leak. we re just getting this, the president speaking to this group of governors. let s listen in. he has been so wonderful to work with, a real talent, a real guy, and he is central casting,
which is always not always, but usually very scripted, you know, a lot of phrases that are used over and over again which is winks and nods to say a certain thing, that was out the window in this conversation which i think is so fascinating. my first question is why did the administration how did this leak, why did it leak, was there an intention behind that? and i want to look back the past 12 days i think it s 12 days, what can we assess about trump s diplomacy? could he keep this tactic long term? that s the great debate, isn t it? an i ve been wrong about everything with his campaign the last 15 months. number one this is a guy who doesn t have a whole lot of experience in government or diplomacy and there are a lot of call it bumps in the road, i think that s an understatement but in the face of reality maybe