to congress to echo the speech s big points. military spending is this afternoon s big theme. this morning, the economy had the president s attention. look at this tweet here. since november 8th, the stock market has posted $3.2 trillion in gains. jobs. we expect the president to be celebrating the economy. he has every right to. we can debate the reasons for that. the stock market is booming. he has every reason to celebrate it. here s my question. this is a president, and this is a traditional approach what we re seeing today. you give a big speech. very well received. lay out your agenda and hit the road and try to highlight parts of it. i m going to guess the president of the united states is not happy the conversation and news today is about his attorney general. his friend and this giant question of russia. absolutely. he wants to be focussing on the pivot he was trying to make in congress earlie this week. he wants to talk about big military spending which is a broadly support
president and it puts the president in a really difficult position because he s so close with sessions, because sessions has been so loyal to him and he does feel like he has a message to talk about that could gain more attention. and so we ve gone two days without major controversy. and we ll see what the president says. whether he addresses this. for me this is an interesting test for the president. he gave a very well received speech. you can disagree with him on policy, but he gave a very disciplined, well constructed speech about his agenda. something he hadn t done before. is he up to this challenge? passed. now we know he loves these kind of events. out with a crowd, the military. uss gerald r. ford one of the new super carriers. he loves the rally and is very persuasive at these rallies. can he use the rally atmosphere out there in america to twist arms and change votes back here in washington? that s the challenge right now. we haven t seen him try to do that ever. we ve
certainly among republicans. even a lot of democrats. although the levels are going to end up being a problem when they get down to writing these bills. he wants to highlight his agenda and doesn t want to have to have his kind of distraction and it is a real distraction at a time he s trying to go from some very controversial unilateral moves that he made in the first few weeks of his presidency to a more cooperative, dynamic congress. i m sure we re going to hear him make a lot of the same points he made in that speech where he talks about unifying the country and we ll have a big military build-up so that we re where we should have always been the last eight years. this is going to hang over it and it will create a distraction. an important time for the president. a lot of people to convince, including members of his own party. where is the money going to come from? should we do it this way or that way? last night a white house official put out a statement,
fbi director or any other intelligence director to withhold information when talking with the intelligence committee or is that normal for them? is he just following routine procedure here? you know, i would say that certainly there is a cultural, as well as a policy framework for when individual members of congress approach the department and when committees do. what the department has to look at is, is this within the scope of the committee s responsibilities and clearly it is. is this in the public interest and, clearly it is. in this case, it s the subject of a bipartisan agreement. this is not an investigation that is being undertaken by only one party or the other. it s hard to imagine something of greater public interest. and more than that i ll say and i think the chair and i are in agreement on this. these are issues that should have been brought to the gang of eight at a minimum. if we re to get quarterly counterintelligence briefings, then we need the confidence of
in this environment, if you give democrats recusal, which everyone believes is inevitable down the road if there s anything to this. which we don t know if there is anything. these are just allegations. and you are innocent until proven guilty in this environment. he could end this by getting out of the way now by saying, i recuse myself. that would be giving the democrats a victory and if they get one, i d ask for more. democrats have been calling for recusal for a while. that s not enough. he has to resign. even chuck schumer said, people talk to ambassadors all the time. what s different is he misled congress. he went wouldn t go as far to say he perjured himself. claire mccaskill didn t want to get into the perjury aspect of this. democrats are going to clamor for more. they are calling for full resignation. you heard nancy pelosi, chuck schumer do that. what leverage do they have is the question?