the president looks bad, but there are clearly judgment call questions that are also raised. you ve worked at the highest levels of the government including for the former vice-president of the united states. what else were the intelligence agencies supposed to do given the circumstances of the election, given the existence of the dossier, given donald trump was about to come in and they knew, as comey says, that cnn and other news outlets had the dossier and were right on the brink of publishing it, looking for an excuse to publish it. how could they have handled it better? you don t want the president to turn on his tv and find out about it five hours later. they knew russia interfered in the election. they were briefing someone on his behalf russia had interfered and that s awkward itself. i don t quarrel that comey made, in my view, errors of judgment and all that. i come back, if you get out of the trees to the forest level again look, if the president decided i don t think
of course, that is the ultimate act of alleged obstruction that is being investigated reportedly by the special counsel. so, what these memos do is they provide this window into the president s state of mind before he then took that action against james comey which of course was it was followed, that action was followed by his asking for loyalty from james comey and of course asking him to consider dropping the investigation into michael flynn. i want to read from the new york times reporting about the memos and we re going to talk about some of the specific things in the memos. i want to read this first and go to you, ari, what you think about this. the kwoetd, mr. comey s decision to brief mr. trump on the dossier was based in part on the fact that american intelligence agencies had corroborated parts of the steele dossier according to the memos. comey wrote this in february of 2017. he said, i explained that the analysts from all three agencies agree that, the dossier, was rel
briefling, if you ve ever been out to dinner, john and you go to the bathroom and come back and you can tell everyone has been talking about you, you know how that feels. that happens literally every dinner i go to. i know the feeling. in all hindsight we know who is the benefit. on hindsight having everyone sit with the president in trump tower, we re all going to leave now, one of us, james comey is going to hit you with this thing. i think a lot of presidents would have would have reaction to that. in other words, it s not only on comey. the intelligence agencies made a decision to make comey mr. pee tape in the eyes of the president. when they talk it comes back up he talks about the pee tape. it is extraordinary to discuss this on air, it s been on memos the it d.o.j. has given to congress. it s open it is what it is. it s open season on golden showers. it s matters of state at this juncture. i think that s what s so fascinating. comey comes through as honest.
depiction of how this meeting went down and it did not go well for the goals of the intelligence agency. trying to see what comey let s just say it didn t happen and trump really wants to obsess. you know what, mr. director, mr. comey, let s get the people who were with me am moscow. i ll bring them into the white house monday. we went to do it in the white house. we ll do it off grounds. you can talk to each of them. go hour through hour in my time in russia. that s what you do under a normal matter if you wanted to prove something three years ago. he s testing comey to see what he knows. he doesn t seem to be offering to help disprove this which he could. i dispute that as well. he raises another odd idea to prove the negative. maybe you could run this down and investigate it. comey said we don t want to go down that road. there is a lot that is weird. i don t want to use the legal term. you think i m pouring cold water on the story. pour away. i like it when you re defending
by other intelligence. ari, we have heard donald trump say, and every republican under the sun say now the past 15 months, this is an uncorroborated dossier, it s all garbage, it s all trash. yet at that moment when donald trump met with jim comey, jim comey came in and said, there s stuff in here that s serious and our intelligence agencies have looked at some of it and said it s real, it s fact. right. the dossier has aged well in the sense that parts of it have been publicly verified. what comes through in the memos is something that i think we have learned about james comey. good memory, bad judgment. and that s really on display throughout. and there are things in there that if you insert in a different president, one less objectionable who has done less to destroy their own credibility as donald trump clearly has, there are things in there that don t make sense. i think on hindsight the intelligence agency s decision to begin with a new rookie president who didn t have intellig