that james comey has had to say since he left fbi. here he is taking aim at the idea of investigating the investigators. the idea that what bill barr is doing at the behest of the president which is to look into the origins of the investigation and decide there was a coup. one of the things comey says there was no corruption. there was no treason. there was no attempted coup. those are lies and dumb lies at that. they are just good people trying to figure out what was true under unprecedented circumstances. he s describing the beginnings of this investigation. all the things the fbi was seeing and not really getting information from the trump campaign itself. the russians were approaching people in the trump campaign or associated with the trump campaign and they never reported any of that. all the fbi was getting information from informants and so on. that s what made them much more
they show a repeated pattern, this obsession, as you pointed out, with the russia investigation. we knew a lot of the things, the big ticket items that were there there, but we learned things like the president gave comey a chronology of his time in russia in 2013, the period of time when the dossier says the russians have this tape of trump with these prostitutes. he s saying he went through a chronology at least twice with him about it. that is an entirely new thing that we didn t know anything about. we didn t know about the president s comments to comey, he said putin talked to him about prostitutes there. it s those kind of details, those new revealing things i can t imagine are helpful for the president. natasha, let me just su, there is something about these memos, you read them last night when they first came out. the first thing you were struck by is there is not a whole lot of news in them. there is some, we ll talk about some of it, but by and large they are consistent wit
what comes through the most. of course we all make mistakes and pressure does increase the margin for error. with more hindsight james comey is using this book and this moment to double down on his biggest mistakes. on the things comey did, not the things that were done to him by trump, on the decisions comey made that impact law and order and maybe the future of our republic, in this book i will tell you james comey doesn t acknowledge all those mistakes. he doesn t reckon what a lot of the legal substantive criticism. if he won t tackle the big questions in the book, i think we still can. i want to offer you my key points on the take from the book with a caveat that i have far less experience than james comey. he s one of the most seasoned prosecutors in america. i know far less about these cases at hand. i m relying on publicly
ongoing war of words? well, one thing the white house has to grapple with here is that some of the things comey says, the book, the tour, all the stuff that s going to come out around this, there is going to be a chunk of the country that s going to take it seriously. there are obviously people that defend director comey. he s held numerous positions of trust in the federal government. he retains credibility. although, i think he s suffered some tarnish in the ordeal from people in both parties. there s no question what he says has to be taken seriously, and it is going to have an impact on public opinion. i m going to be watching how the president s approval ratings go up and down over the next few weeks. we didn t see much impact in the president s numbers with the stormy daniels issue. i d like to see how comey s allegations affect the president s job approval. michael, i wanted to get your take on the detail that we learned from the new book. he talks about trump s posturing th
that. in the time we have remaining, what do you think about that? one of the things comey testified ab when he was fbi director was that just in 2016 there were thousands of devices that we couldn t crack into. imagine police forces not being able to get through a certain type of lock or into a house or car to search it? that s what s going on with these devices and encryption apps. i think the software companies in the tech industry need to step up from a national security perspective and little less worried about their bottom line and i think overconcerned ab privacy here. there s a court process in place. but the technology now is outpacing our ability to get at those devices and get to the software. that s another huge issue. dana: you also bring up the 702 reauthorization. that has to be done by the end of the year. michael waltz, thank you. one more thing on congress plate. dana: thank you very much. we are awaiting the white house briefing where we expect to hear a lot