the president is maybe stalling for time here on this question of whether or not there are recordings of his conversations with the former fbi director. he did say and you did hear that exchange with john carl where he basically said, well, i ll answer that at another time. i m not sure you picked up on it because you weren t here in the rose garden with us but there was a moment where he was looking around after he answered that question the way he did. i then interjected and said, why can t you answer that question about the tapes and that is when he said, well, you re going to be disappointed when you get that answer, something along those lines. so i thought that was interesting. that was an indication, brooke, and it really is something that you can only read here in the rose garden, that he is sort of saying here that there aren t any recordings. until we have a hard and fast answer to that question, i don t think we can answer that definitively at this point although he seemed t
no, he did not. so he said those things under oath. would you be willing to speak under oath and give your version of 100%. i hardly know the man. i m not going to say i want you to pledge allegiance. what would do that. who would ask a man to pledge allegiance under oath. think of that. i hardly know the man. it doesn t make sense. i didn t say that and i didn t say the other. so if robert mueller wanted to speak to you i d be happy to tell you what i told you. and you seem to hint that there are recordings. i ll tell you about it over a short period of time. i m not hinting at anything. okay. do you have a question here? when will you tell us about the recordings? over a short period of time. are there tapes, sir? you re going to be very disappointed when you hear the answer. don t worry. john, do you have a question for the president? yes. thank you. president iohannis, you re no stranger to russian aggression. vladimir putin recently
so that s what i am focused on. that s what i have been focused on. but yesterday, no kcollusion, n obstruction. we re doing very well. that was an excuse by the democrats who feel they shouldn t have lost because it s almost impossible for the democrats to lose the electoral college, as you know. you have to win up the whole east coast as a republican and that s just what we did. so it was just an excuse but we were very, very happy and, frankly, james comey confirmed a lot of what i said. and some of the things that he said just weren t true. let s talk tapes with the chair of the presidential recording program. mark, i read your piece in the atlantic some time ago where you go through presidents in our history s past and for reasons
depends on what the definition of is is. in a lot of ways president trump is saying it s the definition of what hope is. i hope there s no problem with flynn essentially. and trump is going to say, hope, of course, he s a good guy, part of my campaign. i m not politically correct. i use the word hope but he s going to try to use that the way clinton did with what is is. in clinton s case, it was monica lewinsky s blue dress and in watergate you have the white house tapes. we don t have that kind of smoking gun evidence at this juncture. on the hope note, michael, quickly to you, the word hope that the president has used, you better hope there are no tapes in the tweet about comey and i hope you see your way to let it go on flynn, the word hope, does that make a difference? how do you interpret that? the way comey interpreted it
was, hope was not hope like aspirational. it was i can look, here s my order. like if i m your mother and i say, i hope you brush your teeth. that s like, brush your teeth. that s right. or don carleon says to the movie producer, i hope you see it my way and then ends up with a horse head in his bed. it s interesting to me, from wearing my prosecutor s hat, when he said, better hope there are no tapes, that s a threat, as i would read it if i were still a prosecutor. and then when he picks up the same words as, i hope you will drop the investigation, i read those things, i would argue to a jury or anybody else who was trying to be persuaded, those words are not benign but they are directive and that undermines the notion that professor brinkley just said with respect to it being just a passing word of no legal consequence. here is one more headline from today.