all right. here we are continuing on. you re watching cnn. i m brooke baldwin. two major live events happening this hour. one, live pictures there at the west wing. the president will speak from the white house for the very first time since news broke. the special counsel will now investigate whether his campaign had ties to russia. so we re watching and waiting for that. he s doing that with the colombian president. meantime, up on capitol hill, you can see the microphones set up. we re hoping to hear from some of the senators. the man who appointed robert mueller is the deputy attorney general rod rosenstein and he is briefing all 100 senators in a closed-door meeting as i speak. and he is expected to reveal what he knows about why president trump fired former fbi director james comey. but first, let s get to more breaking news because sources are telling cnn that former senator joe lieberman is the front-runner to replace comey as
because he s anxious to give wide latitude to robert mueller to determine where this investigation should go and what it should include. as a former prosecutor, i respect that decision. he did acknowledge that he learned that comey would be removed prior to him writing his memo. can you say that again? he knew that comey was going to be removed prior to comey writing his memo. i m somebody who has spent a lot of time in law enforcement and this is a moment where we need a law enforcement professional who has never campaigned for a presidential candidate, never campaigned for office, never worn a party label to head the fbi. what is your takeaway of what his recommendation was going to be? well, i think the facts speak for themselves. i m going to not comment any further because we still don t
removed. well, i want to go back and correct one thing. he did not recommend that comey be fired. in fact, this letter said very clearly that the decision to fire the fbi director should be taken with great care and study and thoughtfulness and he refrained from recommending it. but didn t he recommend new leadership in the letter. well, what he said was we need an fbi director that has the attention and command and respect of everybody. it turns out, comey had that respect. i think what rod wrote in that letter is what he really believes and i ve known him for many years, as i ve known bob mueller, they are people with deep integrity and independence. a lot of people believe comey did not handle all of the public appearances that he made traditionally with regulations. rosenstein was very careful to say this should be done thoughtfully and maybe we need new leadership and, president, that s your decision. but carl bernstein said it
leader, some sort of agreement what will be deputy attorney general rosenstein asked for, which is a single point of contact so we can coordinate and facilitate this. is other problem is, we could well just inadvertently impede an investigation and basically make it impossible for them to take the matter to court. we don t want to do that. would you be surprised to learn that the president had already decided to fire james comey and told rosenstein that before he handed him the memo? the fbi director serves at the president s pleasure. so he s not limited in terms of the rationale for it. my understanding that that was one of the rationales but not the complete rationale. initially the white house said i can t that wasn t me. i heard the same thing you heard. senator, you removed yourself from the consideration of fbi direct or the. we understand that joe lieberman has merged at the top of the list.
that james comey would be terminated? i missed the beginning of his opening statement. i can not say for sure. is it your impression based on the briefing this has cross add threshold from a counter intelligence to a criminal matter? he stressed this is an investigation. he didn t go beyond that. he said to say that it went beyond that would prejudiced people s opinion as to the nature of it. there s no predetermination that someone committed a crime. will the appointment of a special counsel negatively impact congress s ability to investigate? that was never raised. is it your understanding that rosenstein new that comey would be fired from before he wrote that memo? he did comment that the president has made such statements. the president has said that a special counsel would hurt our country terribly. do you agree? i don t think it hurts our country. what do you make of that? that the president knew he was going to fire comey before he had a conversation with