investigation? i think it is very hard to disrupt an investigation this far progressed. what will happen next, they re trying to turn the investigation, if there is a real body of evidence there that they need uncovered, they will start to leak. pressure will build up that way. these professionals in the counter intelligence division. it is one of the really fine areas of the justice department and they won t let the be pushed around by a change at the top. i don t see that happening at this point. hear hear to your investigators. it is a point our own pete williams has made on more than one occasion. always a pleasure to have you on our air. thank you very much. another one of our colleagues is standing by to talk to us. phil, just spew whatever reporting you have for your paep
hand-fisted style that was carried out. that was very nixonian. you know, brian, a lot of people think watergate was a continuous stream of sinisterial legal activities. that really wasn t the case. it was also mixed with blunder after blunder and botched activity after another. thaet wh that s what we re seeing here. this is the sort of thing that results in the end of a presidency the way nixon s ended, and a lot of that was just because of stupid, careless, foolish undertakings that should have been thought out, and like we re seeing in this one, they were just not carefully gained out and why they were surprised at the reaction, it baffles me because they certainly could have looked at history and seen the results. the saturday night massacre came in the middle of a
of course, james comey did more than t russian inigation, but we re told who the next fbi director will be. so there are confusing messages coming out of this briefing about the timeline, what we can really take at face value when we re given assessments along the way and what the back rung was. big questions unanswered, what were the three instances in which the president claims comey exonerated him. no answers on that. kelly o donnell in the white house briefing room. our upper right-hand square is mike vacarra on capitol hill. mike, one of the senators who got a heads up, the phrase of the week, was dianne finestein of california. that s right, and she recounted a very different conversation she had with president trump. she said president trump told her the department of justice was, in his words, a mess, and that he had asked jeff sessions and the newly established deputy attorney general rob rosenstein,
can bring charges, hold people accountable if they ve broken the law. senator richard blumenthal, from connecticut. thank you for being here. we appreciate it. thank you, brian. we want to bring in john dean. counselor, i ve been anxious to have some time with you on the air, mostly because of the number of times nixon s name has been thrown around in the last 24 hours. the presidential library had some fun with it yesterday and put out a tweet with the hash tag not nixonian to point out that among his other sins, he never fired the fbi director. but please, once and for all, as one of the living, breathing experts on the subject, what was nixonian about what we witnessed yesterday, what was not? well, i think what was nixonian was the blunt, clumsy
was inappropriate that they had that type of conversation? no. charlie? how important was the fbi director s failure to stop leaks going out of the fbi of the president? how important was that? i think that was probably one of the many factors. you can t deny somebody that that wasn t a problem, and so i think that waust another one of the many reasons that he no longer had the confidence of the president or the rest of the fbi. can we expect more firings from the justice department? not that i m aware of today. going forward, does the president want the department of justice to shut down what he s called the taxpayer funded charade investigation? he wants them to do whatever they see appropriate and see fit, just as he s encouraged the house and senate committees to continue any ongoing investigations. look, the bottom line is any investigation that was happening on monday is still happening