start getting every job? within the first two weeks of president trump being in office. you may recall he fired sally yates, she was the acting attorney general she came to the white house to warn them that national security advisor michael flynn was compromised by the russians where they didn t respond for 18 days. she wrote a memo explaining the trump muslim ban was unconstitutional. he fired her. and he needed someone to come in and act as the attorney general, and he chose dana boente. he became the acting attorney general of the united states. he served in that role until jeff sessions was confirmed by the senate and sworn in ten days later on february 9th. so at that point dana boente is no longer acting attorney general. at that point he became the acting deputy attorney general. deputy attorney general is the person who run it is justice department on a day-to-day basis. he went from being acting ag to
telling him we re not going to do that. that i would see what we could do. it was a way of kind of getting off the phone, frankly, and then i turned and handed it to the acting deputy attorney general mr. boente. after that discussion, did you take phone calls from the president? yes, sir. why did you just say you need to talk why department you say i m taking that call? you need to talk to the attorney general? well, i did on the april 11th call and reported the calls, the march 30th call and april 11th call to my superior who was the acting deputy attorney general. the acting deputy attorney general at the time was dana boente who today just quit. maybe he quit because he s tired of being central to everything. he s exhausted from playing every instrument in the band. maybe that s just tiring. is it possible he had to quit because he s maybe going to have to be a witness? if somebody brings charges against the president on the obstruction of justice matter? former doj spo
maybe dana boente may end up being a witness in part of this investigation, maybe that has something to do with him stepping down today. do you have any thoughts on that matter? i don t know if it s true he ll be a witness. i talked to someone today that said they talked today dana, where he s been excited so he could retake his job in the eastern district of virginia. what that says is he did not decide two days later to resign, but he was forced out by the trump administration. we don t know the answer to that, we don t know whether it has anything to do with the mueller investigation, but the timing has been curious with his sudden leaving of the department. that was a conversation he had a couple of days ago in which he did not express any desire and, in fact, expressed enthusiasm of continuing in the
as recently as a few days ago, dana boente said to a friend he was handing off the control to get back to work. that was two days ago reportedly. but then suddenly today he quit as u.s. attorney. we don t know why that is. we are trying to figure it out. we are literally actively tryinging as i speak to figure that out. joining me again is barbara mcquaed. given your understanding of the role, not just as a u.s. attorney but the interesting roles he played in the trump administration thus far, what do you make of his resignation today? i was surprised to see it. in fact, he is like rod rosenstein, someone i take great comfort in knowing he is there, actually. he is a career prosecutor working through republican and democratic administrations and i think cares about the institution and so his departure concerns and alarms me a little bit and i don t know the reason. is he the person called on to
that is, you know, that s a lot. even just the eastern district of virginia is a big, important prosecutor s office even in normal times. at these times, though, in the addition to all of the other jobs he was dealing with at main justice, in the eastern district of virginia it was dana boente s office to see the subpoenas related to paul manafort and looking into criminal charges associated with wikileaks and dana boente s office, the eastern district of virginia, robert mueller started to use a grand jury. so this dude is like right in the middle of everything. and today he quit. now, i don t know what that s about. we re about to talk to somebody i hope who might know but here s one last really important point to what he s been involved in.