i don t believe james kemme. they start from the premise that comey is telling the truth even if they criticize him. even if they suggest i think one of the strangest things, too, kemme should have been the one to instruct the president in how these things work. paul ryan is going to say well he s just new at this. how can we expect him to know our laws and our system of government. they are continually enabling him. i was watching you with tom ricks. i love tom ricks. and i was excited when he said he was on the missic. he made good point about checks and balances but the most important check or balance is congress. as long as you have people like paul ryan in charge who are willing to say he s just new at this, give him a chance when we are learning about obstruction of justice at minimum the system isn t working lawrence, it s just not. i guess it s a question of how patient are we, with the workings of the checks and
they are continually enabling him. i was watching you with tom ricks. i love tom ricks. and i was excited when he said he was on the missic. he made good point about checks and balances but the most importeck or balance is congress. as long as you have ople like paul ryan in charge who are willing to say he s just new at this, give him a chance when we are learning about obstruction of justice at minimum the system isn t working lawrence, it s just not. i guess it s a question of how patient are we, with the workings of the checks and balances. how slow is that duck going to be to quote are the last segment i was on. i want to actually say something about what joan said, and you pointed out, which is that they are more willing to attack comey than they are to defend trump. other people pointed this out over the past week, which is the treatment of comey he s being
comey and obstruction of justice. but underneath that there is this investigation, as ana marie cox said, the duck that is swimming along. you ve got to wonder what s out there that has trump so scared. what is it that he knows that he can t tell the american people about russia, about his financial dealings, about things that he has done in the past. i think we need probably to see his income taxes before we do anything else. it s going to be a long road to get to that. thomas ricks, thank you very much for joining us tonight. reallyppreciate it. you re welcome. coming up, when the president says 100%, how many percent does he really mean? the answer is usually zero.
being someone different from typical army generals. and i think this will simply sort of result in a lot of tongue-wagging and head shaking in the military. i think petraeus was very interested in working there, and having this sort of quick turnover is not good for them either. thomas ricks, contributing editor, foreign policy magazine. thank you so much for your time this afternoon. you re welcome. still to come, many have tried. many have failed to woo them. but in this election, the youth vote may have proved to be a key to victory. up next, though, we go inside the mind of president barack obama from one of the men who knows him really well. wrote the book on him. you re watching msnbc. don t go anywhere. i needed someone to feed, i guess you re just what i needed [ male announcer ] the way it moves.
week, that closed door meeting on the hill regarding benghazi. everything we know about this so far is that is simply the speculation. and with the touch of paranoia by people who have been flogging this benghazi issue. there is no reason to think that that has anything to do with what caused david petraeus to leave. thank you so much. john harwood, cnbc white house correspondent. thank you, thank you, thank you. we should note here, as we did our last hour as well, that the general is not under any sort of there is no criminal investigation that is under way. and they do not expect that their inquiry will result in criminal charges. i wanted to make sure we got that in there. right now i do want to bring in thomas rick, senior fellow at the center for new american security. latest book title the generals: american military command from world war ii to today. among those generals, of course,