all this behavior that looks very much like a cover-up. that s just the situation and he keeps doing it. joe, as someone who covered the hillary campaign covered the campaign at all, i find it highly unlikely that donald trump didn t know that that type of interaction with law enforcement official during an active investigation was highly inappropriate given the outroar that there was over bill clinton simply talking to loretta lynch on the tarmac. another thing i want to mention, joe and looked at i don t knowf ts has been mentioned yet. i went back and looked at the timeline last night. after trump was pressuring comey in this way, it was only a week or two that you saw some of those committee chairs like chairman burr somewhat, in some people s views, inappropriately speak out and try to poo-poo the can connections between the
we have to get back to working our country properly so we can take care of the problems we have. we have plenty of problems. we ve done a fantastic job. we have a tremendous group of people, millions and millions of people that are looking at what you just said and said what are they doing? director comey was very unpopular with most people. i actually thought when made that decision, and i lot got a very, very strong recommendation, as you know, from the deputy attorney general, rod rosenstein. but when i made that decision, i actually thought i would be a bipartisan decision, because you look at all the people on the democratic side, not only the republican side, that were saying such terrible things about director comey. then he had the very poor performance on wednesday. that was a poor, poor performance. so poor, in fact, that i believe you d have to ask him because i don t like to speak for other people, but i believe that s why the deputy attorney
and that s why i fired james comey. that s not what he said yesterday. go for it. go for it is right. i love literature in high school and clenl, but i just could never understand as i lay dying because faulkner s stream of consciousness would leave my teeth hurting. i was as confused with faulkner as i was yesterday watching donald trump actually sounding far less articulate than the esiden colombia who actually seems to speak our language much better than donald trump, even when he s not speaking our language. it was bizarre, meandering, wandering group of statements. he s changing his story on rod rosenstein. there are a lot of americans out there. i know there are a lot of reporters out there that are very frustrated by the fact that the truth doesn t matter to
that s pretty interesting and very specific. then i went back and read the larger context of the quote. the larger context of the quote was in terms of the justice department telling the fbi to end investigations. so indeed comey could have said there, look, this is something we ve experienced with the white house here, but in the context of the quote, they were talking about the justice department, the attorney general and the interactions between the fbi and doj which can be these odd, difficult and tense things. the distinction was that it wasn t the president himself asking. correct. comey could have offered it at that point. if the fbi director had come out two weeks ago as he was still in office and said, yes, the president has tried to influence the flynn investigation a bombshell. i just wanted to ask you, i m carrying around the final days with me, your book about nixon s
here because i m just so bad at this. he set it up, don t call me, don t reach out to me, i m not going to tell you about the investigation. yet trump keeps doing it. right. you re right about the mismatch of personalities. trump, who values loyalty over everything else, and comey who values independence over everything else. that s not going to work. but the larger context was this investigation that was going on. and so that made it utterly impossible that they were ever going to joe, i have a question of michael about this because it s superbly reported and clearly reflects comey s view, but why does he keep going and talking to trump? why does he take the calls? you say, oh, he didn t want to go to the white house for this law enforcement meeting, but he wanted to represent the fbi. but he knows what the stakes are here. why doesn t he say no?