Surprise moved into a pr conversation about how the trump team would position this and what they could say about this that no one to my recollection asked. So whats coming next from the russians, how might we stop it, whats the future look like. Good morning and welcome to a. M. Joy. In a move that has donald trump rage tweeting all morning, former fbi director james comey is spilling all the tea with a new book and media blitz starting tonight. Telling his version of events surrounding the 2016 election in the early days of the Trump Administration. While it may be seen as an attempt to clear his name, comey is after all the man the clinton camp blames for their loss. He pulls no punches when it comes to donald trump. In his book he describes in detail trumps attempts to bring him into a mafia like political family that values loyalty to donald trump above all else. The quote, forest fire, that is the Trump Administration. Trump world and its allies in the gop are already on the attack. Comey be forever known as a disgraced partisan hack. Im disappointed in james comey. Ill be honest with you. This book should be on the fiction shelf. Youre a pommus, eag tiscal, conkrending holier than thousand. This book is salacious. He discredits himself. Have you read it . No, i havent read it. She hasnt read it. Try as they might theyll have a lot of trouble distracting from the fact of the russia probe. Honestly, i never thought these words would come out of my mouth but i dont know whether the current president of the United States moscow in 2013, its possible, but i dont know. Welcome to comey week. Joining me now tim obrien, danny is a val loss, Betsy Woodruff and natasha bertrand. Thank you all for being here. Tim, i got to go to you first. Comey writes about the january 27 dinner that he had oneonone with the then newly elected president. The setup of the dinner, both the physical layout of a private meal and trumps pretense that he had not already asked me to stay on multiple occasions convinced me that this was an effort to establish a patronage relationship, somebody probably had told him or maybe it just occurred to him at random that he had given me the job for free and he needed to get something in return. This only added to the strangest of the experience, the president of the United States had invited me to dinner and decided my job security is on the menu. Trump hadnt even given him the job. He was just supposed to stay on. What do you make of Donald Trumps apparent attempts to bring james comey in his sort of mafialike family in comeys words . Later he also asked comey to go gently on michael flynn. So clearly what was going through the president s mind was loyalty, bring him into the fold. Thats known of the trump universe forever. If youre going to be with him on his team in any capacity then you owe him personal loyalty and thats not loyalty to an institution, loyalty to the flag, its loyalty to the president and, in fact, this morning trump is emphasizing this in his tweets. No kidding. Hes going ham on comey, so to speak. Let me play for you another piece of the interview on abc that probably is what trump is so angry about this morning as hes out there and this is interesting, because its trump asking comey to investigate the infamous tape referenced in the Christopher Steele dossier. Listen. He may want me to investigate it to prove it didnt happen and then he says, something that distracted me, because even a 1 chance my wife thinks thats true, thats terrible and i remember thinking, how could you wife think theres a 1 chance you were with prostitutes peeing on each other in moscow, im a flawed human being, but this is literally zero chance my wife would think thats true, to what kind of marriage to what kind of man theres only a 99 chance you didnt do that. The reason i come to you on this, danny, is because were in a moment where Donald Trumps personal lawyer is accused of paying off a porn star who donald trump claims he didnt have a relationship with but 130,000 say maybe hes wrong, where theres accusations of ami that owns the National Enquirer was providing catch and kill money that donald trump was having relationships with. So this leads me to wonder we were talking about this with the team this morning, could this be donald trump wanting the fbi to investigate yet another potential piece of evidence of infidelity that he might want his lawyers to take care of . Its an interesting concept that if donald trump and one thing we know, he has a fundamentally misunderstanding of how Government Works and just based on comeys observations that under that interview, that he misunderstood the difference between the white house as a p. R. And the intelligence as an investigators. He may have misunderstood government enough to want comey to act as an arm of his own pr and i mean Donald Trumps pr mission which goes out acquires this information, and then the question is what would he have trump had done if comey had found evidence of this and would he have sent Michael Cohen under the theory that Michael Cohen is his fixer. Its an interesting concept. I cant stress enough that we do not yet know with the Southern District of new york was investigating when they executed that search warrant and its possible that it may be related to this pattern or practice of paying to kill stories. Thats why i think of it. You want to read one more piece here from the book and this is the direct comparison that jim comey makes between donald trump and a mob boss. Ethical leaders never ask for loyalty. He had asked for this loyalty oath. Those leading through fear, like a kosa no, sir tra boss require personal loyalty. To my mind, the demand was like sammy the bulls cosa nostra induction ceremony, with trump in the role of the family boss, asking me if i have what it takes to be a mad man, whats distressing was trump symbolically seemed to be ask leaders of the Law Enforcement and National Security agency to do, to come forward and kiss the great mans ring. Was trump directly in any way ever involved in that . Would he have gotten this thematics personally . He had partners when he first went into the Atlantic City market who were mobbed up. One of his partners was a bag man for the scarfo crime family of philadelphia and another one of his partners was a labor rack tear from new york. We know fastforward decades later, the trump soho felix seder was a career criminal. Intersectioned with organized crimes are not novel to the president. The second thing to remember about him, is, hes macho and he loves the rituals of threat and malis and menace and hes fascinated by the rituals of the mob. I want to get natasha in here on the plip side of this. James comey gets a lot of credit for some things. He gets credit for the famous going to john ashcroft, the ill attorney generals bedside to stop the white house at the time, the george w. Bush white house from trying to get him to sign off on warrant is wiretapping. He gets credit for that and some statements hes made on race and policing. What a lot of particularly democrats hold against him is the fact that he did intervene in the election in 2016 coming out 11 days before the election and announcing they were restarting the email investigation into Hillary Clinton. Heres what he writes about that in the book. Its entirely possible that because i was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president , my concern about making her a legitimate an illlegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the investigation were closer. Donald trump is included that in his tweet storm this morning in trying to make it sound like this indicates corruption on comeys part. Just based on your reporting, is this one of the things that the rnc plans to add to its thematic attacks on james comey . One of the profound ironies of trumps attacks on jim comey are comey actually did a lot to help trump during the election. He did not come out and say that trump was under investigation, that his campaign was under investigation for potential ties in the fbi and the same goes for president obama. He was very reluctant to reveal that there was substantial russian meddling in the election for fear that it would look like they were interfering just days before, months before the election was going to take place. This is something that is, again, a profound irany of all this. Comey has a few unconventional allies at this point because in the way he tried to keep the fbi above politics, actually plunged them further into the political realm. He was trying to make it seem like the attorney general that the fbi was not influenced by potential conflicts of interest by the attorney general Loretta Lynch so he came out and he gave that press conference exonerating clinton for using the email the private email server. At the same time he also had its worth noting that there were separate motivations for him to do the things he did. There was a fake russian document that was circulating in the fbi that perhaps that was written by supposedly by a democratic operative that suggested that Loretta Lynch was perhaps in some way compromised and she was doing favors for the clintons by not pursuing the email investigation as aggressively as she could have. That document is still unknown whether or not it was actually fake. The fbi doesnt know at this point. That may have been influenced james comeys thinking. And there were reports leading up to the election there were elements within the fbi that were prepared to go on a full on revolt if james comey did not reveal the existence of these emails 11 days before the election. There were external factors here and we saw that one of trumps closest allies Rudy Giuliani was saying he had something up that his sleeve wlosht that meant he was going to put james comey in a position where he himself knew the existence of these emails and the fbi was going to wait until after the election to reveal them, that would have made james comey and the fbi look like they were hiding something. So hes really between a rock and a hard place. I will reiterate that he did not reveal that trump was under investigation for potential collusion with the russians and that ultimately was the biggest gift he could have given the trump campaign. Absolutely. They describe the fbi as trump land during the campaign. First of all, i will say that the comey does include something to help himself. He talks about it in a meeting with president obama then outgoing president obama in a post election november meeting. Obama said to you, i picked you to be the fbi director because of your integrity and ability. I want you to know that nothing, nothing has happened in the last year to change my view. Comeys hanging on that for his Emotional Health probably knowing deep in his heart he did help get donald trump in. I want to play janine piero, the big defender of donald trump. Rebutting the possibility that there is indeed a pea tape. Jim, you say the president was concerned when you presented him with your fake dossier alleging the president had prostitutes peeing on him in moscow and of course, just to hit the president a little more and to get a great headline, you say this. But i dont know whether the current president of the United States had prostitutes peeing on him in 2013. Its possible but i dont know. Jim, its possible. And its possible martians were in that room peeing on the prostitutes too. Martians, martians peeing on the prostitutes too. Betsy woodruff, youve done great reporting for us. On Donald Trumps strange and evolving legal team situation, what can you tell us based on your reporting about whether or not this possibility that i raise with danny earlier might be the case, that donald trump seemed to have had an interest in maybe potentially having the fbi investigate whether or not there was indeed a tape, find it and then who knows what he might have had Michael Cohen do about that . What i can tell you might sound obvious and thats the president doesnt have a very good grasp of what the fbi is supposed to do. Over the course of his time in public life and president , the way he relates to the fbi is pretty dramatically divorced from what the fbi as an institution is actually responsible for doing, which is federal Law Enforcement. Now at the same time, of course, the president s attacks on james comey, the president isnt the only person whos attacked him. Going back to what comey talks about in that book where he refers to president obama sort of encouraging him, that moment of the book is a really important one because comey took so much heat for elected democrats and one thing i can tell you from my reporting is that something criticism of comey from democrats is something that i know for a fact is highlighted in the rnc talking points that went out friday that go after comey. I obtained a copy of those talking points and they name a number of elected democrats who in the wake of comeys announcement criticized him, they named bernie sanders, dianne feinstein, chuck schumer, all sorts of democrats going after comey. The fact that comey in this book is able to basically cite obama as telling him that he thought he had integrity and he thought he did the best he could do, that itself is important and thats something which was inconceivable of President Trump ever telling comey. Remember, though, another piece of this thats just weird in all this context is that back months and months ago when trump first fired comey, the justification that officially first came out of the White House Press job for why that firing happened was that it was because comey hadnt handled the clinton email scandal correctly which turned out to be just flatly not true. This is a white house that doesnt talk about the fbi as the fbi exists. Yeah. Then he turned around and ruined that talking point by telling our lester holt, no, it was because of russia this. Book is driving donald trump to distraction this weekend. Its going to be the talk of the town and im sure donald trump have more to say about it on the twitter. Tim obrien sticking around. Thank you all. Up next, the thing, the thing that has donald trump melting down. It might not even be this. Stay with us. Is your name Michael Cohen . Yes. And youre a lawyerish . Did you have make a payment of 130,000 to Stormy Daniels . 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I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, good man and its a disgraceful situation, its a total witch hunt. Before this jim comey tellall sent him into full meltdown modes, he was already on the edge after mondays fbi raid on the offices of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen. According to the the New York Times, trump sees the corruption investigation into cohen as a bigger threat than the mueller probe. After the cohen raid sources told cnn that trump is, quote, pissed, flailing and upset and his anger is beyond what anyone can imagination. So, one can only imagine what trump will do next. Here to help me try to imagine it is tim obrien and tara dell. Lets start with you tara. Every time i hear another story about trump beginning a new level of rage i discount it because hes also enraged. Can you both of you know the man, is this different and is it different because cohen is so close . I think this is different, and i know we say that every time but i think each time is different. Each time is different in different ways. I do think this is different because cohen, who is bragged about i dont want to be captain obvious here, hes bragged about being trumps fixer, right . What does a fixer do . He fixes situations when you would otherwise be in trouble of the so clearly cohen knows where all the bodies are buried and also what we know about cohen is cohen isnt particularly incompetent so the fact that they were able to access these tapes and all of the