investors care so much? is it because the market rally is tied to the promise of deregulation and tax reform? because the mike flynn situation has nothing to do with whether apple is profitable. here s the interesting part about this development. and the way some traders and investors are looking at this is if we do have progress on this front, if somehow things get a lot worse with regard to this particular investigation, what exactly does it do to the agenda for president trump and the rest of the congressional republicans out there? can they push forward with a lot of these reforms they re starting to get done on the corporate side of things for taxes, on the individual side of things for taxes. you can say a lot has been on optimism, yes, that the business environment would be made better for the biggest companies in america. if this is a situation where we could see a little bit of anned a least downside for this particular agenda, that s a lot of what s driving what s happening
this. we have no indication they are, and the mike flynn situation. again, his name comes up. this operative, claimed the e-mails he had contact, he could contact michael flynn or had access to michael flynn. that s another angle. flynn was on their side. again, he s since passed away since the wall street journal interviewed him, which complicates the whole thing. we can t follow up with him and others, the lawyers he hired or the other folks he may have hired to help with this research or opposition research. we have not found independent indications anything like this went on, the hacking of her server. great to see you, shimon. thank you. let s discuss this and other things. let s go to capitol hill, jim himes joins me now. thanks for coming in. good morning, kate.
nature of this recusal over the last week or so. what i will tell you is mike, the republican who stepped in subsequent to devin nunes s recusal has been doing a terrific job and working hard under circumstance that is are challenging for everybody. you do not think devin nunes should take part? as much as that may be related to russia and it may be, no. i don t think he should. no. there s a whole other question around the activity of unmasking and how is that monitored. by the way, as an oversight committee, that s what we do. we make sure they are doing it correctly. in as much as this were purely abstract about unmasking, it s not inappropriate. if the recusal is going to mean anything, the chairman would not be in the room for that conversation. congressman, since the president isn t letting it go away today, i do want to ask
they have this pattern of, oh, yeah, i forgot i had this meeting. as many people in washington have forgot, mr. schumer, for instance in meeting with russian ambassado ambassadors. i don t know. you don t think there is a difference? do you remember every person that you met? that i get. meeting in your office is different story. you don t know senators if you re saying that. but after the mike flynn situation, do you not try to correct the record? i agree. there is no evidence, which is why we need a special prosecutor or an independent investigator. there is an awful lot of smoke here to not be a fire. the idea that i m going to forget about a meeting when russians when there are news stories coming out every day saying russia was trying to influence what happened every day in our country. i have to decide with marco rubio about this.
they drilled down very deep on the mike flynn situation. and he said again and again that mike flynn did nothing wrong. that he reached out to his russian counter parts as he should have. the problem was, he came back and told the vice president something that wasn t true and then he didn t remember, and that wasn t okay. and in some ways, brett, it begs even more questions. because if it was okay and he knew about it, why would he misrepresent to the vice president, mike flynn, what he had done? do you feel resolved about that? are there more questions? there are clearly more questions, but what this news conference did was deal with a whole bunch of issues in a way that donald trump deals with it uniquely. melissa: that s true. obviously going after the press the way he did, no other president has done that, to that extent. people can argue that that is a bad thing to delegitimatize the press. but the press has been under