there is more breaking news tonight. special counsel robert mueller released a 2017 memo details the fbi interview of the national security adviser michael flynn. this was the one where flynn lied to fbi agents which led to charges against him and his guilty plea. general flynn is expected to be sentenced tomorrow. cnn s jim sciutto has been looking over the memo. he joins us, and jeffrey toobin, and phil mudd, jim, you have had a chance to look at this memo, what jumps out to you. big picture. this effectively buries the perjury trap argument, that he went in innocently, and the fbi agents tricked him into lying about these things. flynn, willfully lied twice about issues of importance and sensitivity. the fbi agents asked him when he spoke to the russian ambassador in december 2017 first, was he pushing them to vote a certain way on a un security council
this guy. they gave him like 12 opportunities, or ten. i lost track, to say this is what happened. every time, he said no, i didn t do that. that s why he s going to go to jail. and jeffrey, i m going to ask you the unanswerable question which is why? why is michael flynn lying here? it is really very difficult to answer. first of all, from a purely practical matter, he was the head of defense intelligence agency. he knows about american surveillance of the russians. he had to know that these conversations were monitored so the fbi agents were asking questions to which they knew the answers. it was a pure stupidity level of lying to the agents but at a larger level, the difficult question to resolve is why was he lying about coordination with russia, particularly the second answer, you know, the second thing he lied about. you know, they was trying to down play his friendship, in a way, with russia, and that, i
republicans for not standing up and raising their voice more. when you as a democrat see james comey now as a messenger for anything, is he delivering the type of message that democrats want to hear right now? look, i think he is delivering a message that americans should want to hear, leaving the partisanship aside. i think his sentiment is one that is shared by democrats, independents and, yes, some republicans. but i will say this. the one thing the irony of this is the sheer weight of these investigations, on the one hand, looks very, very ominous. on the other hand, if you are donald trump and you are trying to make the case that this is just a political beatdown on him, the sheer weight of it actually works in his favor with his base, because he can say, look, every single way i turn, they are trying to bring the hammer down on me. so he is going to use that. you see it in this flury of
you can however you can, rules, norms, law, institutions don t matter. you flout them, and do whatever you can goet away with. that s his business model. now he s president of the united states, and it has much much broader implications and everything he s involved in, including the way he governs and the way he runs his politics have been infected by that, and and the walls are closing in. so david gergen, it won t be until two weeks from now when democrats take control of the house that there would be a democratic led effort in any way to investigate the president. that will be when they first have control of the committees. what about the role of partisan and politics up until this point, the 17 different informations you noted about, how much does politics play in any of them? well, it has enormous political ramifications. and fighting back against all of
with his tweets about michael cohen over the weekend, talking about cohen being a rat and talking about lying about the fact that the fbi broke into cohen s office there. where are we in the control of the president s twitter stream? particularly with john kelly on the way out and mick mulvaney on the way in. i think most staffers have realized you cannot control the president s tweets and they have largely stopped from telling the president what he should and shouldn t tweet, and that s become pretty evident from what you have seen. he tweeted nine times alone this weekend from saturday and sunday about the russia investigation saying that jeff sessions should be ashamed of himself and whatnot but he sent rudy giuliani on to the sunday shows to essentially be his attack dog, and as you saw some of his comments there, essentially arguing that the president did not have the affairs with these women and the proof was that he did not pay them more money than what he paid them saying ess