part of you wished president obama at the time had come out and given a big national address to warn americans of russian interference. have you spoken with former president obama about that? i talked to him a couple of weeks ago. i haven t had a chance to sit down and talk with him, i ve been really so focused on getting the book done. but i ve talked to people from the white house. here s how i so this. first of all, when something unprecedented happens, it is hard to know what to do. he thought i was going to win. he told me that the night before in philadelphia, big hug, so proud of you, you re going to do this. he andichelle uld have been better in supporting and advising me. and i think he didn t want to look like he was in any way using the office of the presidency to partisan ends. obviously he was campaigning for me, but this is a national security issue.
voice. i started reading the book. i haven t finished it yet. and she really gives you insight as to ha swhat she was thinking. it s honest. it s real. but what i took away from this was the stark contrast you see between her and donald trump, the thoughtfulness, that showe smart, she understands, she s passionate about the constitution. she kept coming back to this idea. it wasn t the bipartisan default, sometimes in our own profession. it was more than president of both parties had a core believe in uniting the country, doing policy that s god for all citizens whereas donald trump is narrowly focussed on getting his base to applaud. for him. it s all about donald trump. and we saw that, we saw that in the transition of power from obama and donald trump.
think late august basically saying, come on, there are reports in the press, get out there and tell the american people. now, having said all that, of course i wish there had been some way given the predicament the president found himself in to alert the public. once i lost and all this ton of information started flooding out about everything that was happening, the dutch were able to prevent russian interference in their election, the french could prevent it, the germans are working to prevent it, because they all knew. and they could make the case to their electorate. you may be whatever party you are, but we cannot tolerate a foreign adversary trying to pick our next lea you ve been in public life for a long time. but the thing people knew was e-mails. what do you make of political journalists? you re tough on the media in
unprecedented and ultimately cost me the election because of the october 28th letter and what he was doing on russia. you can be critical of what he did in the e-mail investigation, but you can also be very critical of trump deciding to fire him over the russia investigation. you have to keep those two competing thoughts in your head at one time. you talk about the russian interference in the election. you were obviously during the campaign getting intelligence or word that, listen, there s hacking going on, there is an attack on the country from russia that is attempting to interfere in the election. the president knew it. presumably the trump campaign was getting the same information. at this point do you believe that the trump campaign colluded to assist russia in interfering in our election? i don t think we can reach that conclusion.
alternative universe it helped me instead of my opponent, i would have demanded we do an independent commission with all the authority needed, subpoena power to get to the bottom of this because it s not going to stop. it has been too successful for putin. now we re hearing these bragging comments from russian media persons, from russian members of parliament and their government saying, yeah, you know, we picked a president. we won an election. that should terrify every american. i don t care what party you are. maybe it was me today. it could be somebody else tomorrow. trump has this phony voter fraud commission which is not a problem that anybody besides the most rabid republicans want to pursue in order to suppress even more votes, particularly african-americans and young people so they can try to further pervert the electorate