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that we seize it. my presidency is entering the fourth quarter. interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter. and i m looking forward to it. going into the fourth quarter, you usually get a time-out. i m now looking forward to a quiet time-out. christmas with my family. i want to wish everybody a measure wrimerry christmas, a happy hanukkah, a happy new year. i hope that all of you get time to spend with your families as well because one thing that we share is that we re away too much from them. and now, josh has given me the who s been naughty and who s been nice list and i m going to take some questions. reporter: thank you, mr. president. starting with north korea since that seems to be the biggest topic today, what does a proportional response look like to the sony hack? and did sony make the right decision in pulling the movie or does that set a dangerous precedent? let me address the second question first. sony is a corporation. it suffered significant damage. the ....
with a board and publicly available stocks. it has been, at the core, more of a family business. in later years, some would argue more of a licensing business and so we have this core relationship. a lot of people can t blame the president for saying the closest thing i have to a cabinet or board of directors is my family. we re seeing a president run his administration and effectively the entire federal government the same way he ran a small private business with no stock holders, no board no oversight at all really and this is where he s comfortable. you have to step back. all the things rachel said about ivanka trump are true. she s been very successful in the business world sort of in the same way her father has been. but you have to step back and say what is her credential tool be in the west wing effecting policy, advising the president. she s a senior a person as there is now all because she is the president s daughter. this move may mollify some of the complaints a ....
it gave no means of tracing this back to the source, but it had a lot of information in it about things that had been happening in trump tower. and it appeared to be from somebody inside the transition or inside trump tower who was concerned about what this person was seeing. and a lot of what s written or conveyed in this letter has sort of come become true over time. it s taken a while for a lot of this stuff to surface, including this detail about this discussion over a back channel or a private channel of communications with moscow. again i just want to i m trying to sort of bend over to read this as charitably as possible. so i mean is it possible that they were setting up lots of different back channels with lots of different foreign leaders? well, we don t i mean i suppose it s possible. clearly they were in communication and meeting with a lot of leaders, a lot of foreign leaders. most of them, as you point out, were coming through the front door, not the bac ....
event and they were keeping it separate. with some prodding from the press, they decided to allow a few reporters in and one camera. two hours later, they changed their minds. so there s no press inside this event right now. we have no idea what the president is saying to donors, and we likely won t find out unless one of the donors tells us. how much is the trump hotel getting paid to host this? i know you were asking some questions about that. reporter: that s a great question. we have no idea who is paying for this event tonight that the president is attending. we reached out for comment, and our requests have not been answered. so it could be the rnc. it could be the re-election campaign, and it could be that the hotel donated the space. we don t know. is it normal for a president to hold a fund raiser for rhis re-election five months after taking office? presidents obama and bush didn t unprecedented and remarkable in and of itself. put it all together and once agai ....
will they get picked out? today, no answers to that question. sarah huckabee sanders could not or would not answer questions about whether current service members will be removed. the president has a lot of support for all americans and certainly wants to protect all americans at all times. the president has expressed concerns since this obama policy came into effect. but he s also voiced that this is a very expensive and disruptive policy, and based on consultation that he s had with his national security team, came to the conclusion that it erodes military readiness and unit cohesion, and made the decision based on that. the decision is based on a military decision. it s not meant to be anything more than that. at a white house event an attempt to get clarity from the president later went ignored. people in the military? she s very rude. so all we have on this policy change that will profoundly affect thousands of service member s lives are the president s three twee ....