polarizing guy. he s a hard charging reputation and there are questions about a potential domino effect if trump ultimately names ayers to the role. inside the white house there s talk of numerous staffers who are threatening to quit if he becomes white house chief of staff which add to all of the other turmoil you talked about at the open of the show. there in lies the story. as we look forward to monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday is if he does make the official announcement, who will go with him. what does that mean for other cabinet members that this chief of staff has been working with and has been the rabbi for. thank you for the very latest. let s go to jeff mason. he s a white house correspondent. jeff, i want to start with you on this. what is the domino effect? what is the tip of the iceberg here because if john kelly makes the official announcement himself or the president
one take away is it did not run like a swiss watch. jay, one of the headlines we re looking at today that s from cnbc, john kelly questioned by the mueller team. one advantage is you are getting out what happened before. we re moving onto a different phase and given that as eli and jeff has been saying this current white house was not necessarily running super efficiently. i think they have all resigned themselves to kind of just winging it. that seems to be the president s plan as rex tillerson said. this isn t a president that reads in a lot, that prepares a lot. he plays a lot by his gut. that s the way he won this election. he argues that s the winning strategy. it s always been his winning strategy and that s where he s really wanted to go since he s become president. he had people who have resisted that like john kelly who has made him better prepared and
of justice. that when he fired james comey, he did so because of the russia investigation. fie five years from now, ten years from now, i want to look back and say that i cast a vote on a critical issue that was central to american democracy. okay. thank you so much. appreciate your time. thank you. coming up, we ll dive deeper into the comey transcripts. what it ultimately means for the president and his inner circle. we have two legal experts ready to join the conversation.
we have seen him go around mattis. the thing that keeps people in these positions is a sense of responsibility, needing to stay and stick around and make sure that the pentagon continues to run and that the president doesn t do anything or direct the pentagon to do something that he can t stop if he thinks he needs to. the other thing is the fact there s so many positions that we might see changing. we mentioned the dhs secretary earlier. there s an interior secretary who is facing ethics investigations. likely to be brought before a democrat house in the new year if they don t switch him out. there s a lot of changes. i think the triage mode keeps certain people in place. there s so many fires to put out. what is good for this president and what is good for this institution of the
americans that were the initial targets under investigation in the intelligence investigation. we didn t know that before. that s kind of interesting. i suppose they will pay some attention. they may want to read the transcript but they have access to him. if they want to interview him, i m sure he would do so voluntarily. if one of those items that that you are describing here, as our political reporter was saying, there might have been an add missi admission of obstruction of justice investigation that had been ongoing, which we had not heard before from a government lawyer. right. we don t know exactly who might be behind. everybody wants to believe it s the president of the united states and it might be. we have seen instances where the president has intended to impede the progress or taken steps that even if not intended to were designed to muck up the process as well.