trump administration. indeed it was a hallmark take away of the report of the investigation into russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. the president s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, mueller wrote, but that is largely because the persons surrounding the president declined to carry out orders or recede to his requests, closed quote. this included white house counsel don mcgahn fired the special counsel, a request mcgahn what he feared would be a potential saturday night massacre and lead to president trump s impeachment. it probably would have. president trump should not be shocked that wary aides and cabinet members saved his presidency. my colleagues have done so many times. he should be worried, we all should be worried that these reasonable professionals are vanishing. the president is chafed by those who dared to challenge him. he s targeted and removed many of these officials. from secretary of state rex tillerson to chief of staf
nsc staff were accustomed to producing long-winded classified memos. but if the aim was to educate this new commander in chief they couldn t submit a 50-page report entitled ent grated national strategy for endo pacific partnership and defense and expect him to read it and then discuss it. that would be like speaking aramaic to trump through a pillow. even if he tried very hard to pay attention, which he didn t, he wouldn t be able to understand what the hell he was hearing. it took a lot of trial and error for west wing stands to realize there needed to be a change. until that happened staffers would walk out of briefings frustrated. quote, he is the most distracted person i ve ever met, one of the president s security lieutenants confessed. quote, he has no effing clue what we are talking about. more changes were ordered to cater to trump s peculeilarities. documents were dramatically downsized and position papers became sound bites. as a result complex proposals were reduced to a si
zelensky. this happened september 1st, so this happened after the president trump got on the phone and told the president of ukraine he needed to do investigations for trump. we told vice president pence told the president in person, face-to-face, that, yeah, the u.s. government is holding up military aid to ukraine unless ukraine takes action on corruption. well, one of the ing thes we ve been focusing on is who else was in that meeting. you see energy secretary rick perry there and the former national security advisor john bolton. there is gordon sondland, donald trump s hand picked ambassador to the eu. just yesterday we learned he now admits after revising his testimony to the house impeachment proceedings, he now admits when pence was done with that meeting, sondland got up and did his own meeting with the ukrainian government on the side lines of this event in which he personally reinforced to them what they needed to do to get
kinds of incidents at the author writes about. and to be very specific you read the excerpt of the iran sanctions poster, for instance. i remember briefing president obama and groups of people many times having long briefing memos where president obama the next morning had read them the night before and said, well, on page 7 i have questions about the centrifuges and meanwhile president trump just went to see a sanctions poster. the iranians have now resumed their nuclear potential nuclear weapons capability including at the nuclear facility in fordo. and when president trump had been briefed he would have known that a decision he made would
i ve got one more little bit of this that i want to read you tonight where the author grapples with the question of anonymity and staying in this administration despite this view of this president. we re going to do that when we come back and also bring into the conversation somebody who has been a senior administration official who s been in the room with other presidents talking on issues this serious who can hopefully give us some, i think, context in terms of whether or not these very stark warnings from this anonymous author are as dangerous as this author makes them seem. we ll be right back. s this auth makes them seem. we ll be right back. performance comes in lots of flavors. there s the amped-up, over-tuned, feeding-frenzy-of sheet-metal-kind. and then there s performance that just leaves you feeling better as a result. that s the kind lincoln s about.