state. notes to a columbia law professor because he wasn t man enough to give the notes to give them directly to the media when he wanted them out to the media. the gop has got their villain in the russia investigation. it is the fired fbi director jim comey. joining our conversation tonight charlie savage. germane to this conversation, his piece tonight, trump calls comey a leaker. what does that mean. we are going to get to that in one seconds. and peter decidenberg is with us as well, former federal prosecutor and at the justice department, and deposit special counsel book in the scooter libby case during the bush 43 administration. gentlemen welcome to you both. charlie you saw the talking points. there s a lot more where they came from. interestingly, he is being called a leaker and his manhood is getting called out for the way he did it, through someone at columbia, putting a step between him and the material. once and for all, doe this
and you were so forceful in agreeing 100% to come talk to us, perhaps we can interview you the first of several times, you don t mind if we call you back with more questions? i think you are putting your finger on the tricky issue that bob mueller the special counsel leading this russia plus obstruction probably investigation is going to have to weigh. you don t get a lot of shots at the president when you are in that position. you are lucky to get one and to get him under oath if the president follows through on what he said. but trump may have just said some words off the cuff that he didn t really mean once his lawyers get to him and explain to him that that might not be such a good idea. i would imagine that mueller thinks he is only going to get one shot at that. and he probably wants the know everything he can learn from everybody else before he goes into the oval office and sits down with the president to bounce what he thinks he knows off of the president s recollections. a
mocrats wking on an obstruction case already as we speak tonight? and so early in president trump s term. this is really a speed record. in nixon s case, you know, watergate did not really kick in in a big way until at least four years into that term. so you know, the thing is absolutely amazing. and he has not really had a presidency that was not under the cloud of a scandal of some kind. very different for richard nixon. michael, about our last segment, the fact that our politics washes across the pond and the fact that it s all kind of interrelated. do you buy that while you and i have had conversations about what sounded like a wave with very dark echoes in europe, we have 100,000 holocaust
corroborate what jim comey has to say. well at that point it isn t really one person s testimony against another. it s one person s testimony against the other, buttressed by a lot of corroborating evidence. at that point it is a very plausible case i think for mueller to make another obstruction case if trump were to say that for instance in the grand jury. gentlemen, we thank you for joining us on a friday night after a long week. we commend you, charlie savage, on your piece in times on a very timely topic now that comey has been labeled a leaker with a certain percentage of the population. thank you both so much. when we come back, why some words from the president at the lectern today sounded so familiar to so many who have covered him. think again. this is the new new york.
reach the standard definition of leaking from your article tonight? and does he face any legal exposure? well, there is different kinds of leaks. a leak would be a surreptitious dissemination of information to the public without authorization. but that most of the time that is not illegal. in this case, that is not illegal. there is an attempt in this attempt to smear mr. comey, to conflate his dissemination of his recollections of his conversations with trump with illegal leaks, custom is a very narrow band of information that the law says cannot be disclosed without becoming a felony. that has to do with national security secrets that could hurt the country, essentially, classified information, although it s not perfectly overlapping with that phrase. this was not classified. this was not national defense information. it was not illegal. and the conflation of that is just nonsense and misleading.