8, 9, 10 territory. the president is very preoccupied with the woodward book, with the anonymous op-ed, with the media coverage surround tg and of course with the russia probe. a lot of distractions this morning. he woke up on september 11, a solemn day in this country, the 17th anniversary, and the topics he tweeted about were not september 11 but about his preoccupations. and, jeremy bash, flush out what this flynn mystery might entail in mr. woodward s telling. i actually don t think it s mysterious at all, brian. i think when the white house was warned by sally yates that mike flynn might be vulnerable to blackmail, they took that to the president of the united states and he said, don t worry, i ve told mike what to do, how to handle the russians, and i ve got his back. and it was only after it had become somewhat untenable internally because flynn had lied to the vice president, and it was clear he was under a
and he did plead guilty and is a witness. no one that i ve been able to find can explain exactly what happened. there is what s called the mike flynn mystery in the investigative reporting world. so we presumably at some point will see. but i was saying, i thought at the beginning you were talking about things and you wanted something i wanted something more. you raised the prospect that the president knew when flynn was talking to the russians that he was talking to the russians and what he was talking to them about. you raise that as a suggestion yes, yeah. do you believe that happened? the president knew? i don t know the answer, but i think when you don t know the answer, you have to pull back and kind of say, okay, here s the data i ve been able to accumulate, and there is detail, chapter and verse in the book,
jeremy bash, former chief of staff at the cia and pentagon. gentlemen, welcome to you both. phil, on a 10 scale of preoccupation with events on the outside, where is this president? where is his west wing these days? i d hate to put a number on it, brian, but you re looking at 8, 9, 10 territory. the president is very preoccupied with the woodward book, with the anonymous op-ed, with the media coverage surrounding it and of course with the russia probe. a lot of distractions this morning. he woke up on september 11th, a solemn day in this country, the 17th anniversary, and the topics he tweeted about were not september 11th but about his preoccupations. and jeremy bash, flush out what this flynn mystery might entail in mr. woodward s telling. i actually don t think it s mysterious at all, brian. i think when the white house was warned by sally yates that mike flynn might be vulnerable to
was it clear to you from your reporting for the book why they waited 18 days after getting that warning about flynn from the justice department? i think some things sometimes decisions are not made, but they did fire him. ultimately. yeah. and he did plead guilty and is a witness. no one that i ve been able to find can explain exactly what happened. there is what s called the mike flynn mystery in the investigative reporting world. so we presumably at some point will see. but i was saying, i thought at the beginning you were talking about things and you wanted something i wanted something more. you raised the prospect that the president knew when flynn was talking to the russians that he was talking to the russians and what he was talking to them about. you raise that as a suggestion yes, yeah. do you believe that happened? the president knew? i don t know the answer, but
blackmail, they took that to the president of the united states and he said, don t worry, i ve told mike what to do, how to handle the russians, and i ve got his back. and it was only after it had become somewhat untenable internally because flynn had lied to the vice president, and it was clear he was under a significant fbi investigation for lying to those investigators, and it was revealed by the washington post that all of this was going down, did the president have to relieve mike flynn. i actually don t think it s mysterious at all. and jeremy, are you surprised at these stories about manafort? do you believe them? i do believe them. i think manafort s overall goal is to secure a pardon, and that basically means he does not want to appear publicly to provide information about the president. he wants to limit his exposure to potential prison time in case the president doesn t come through for him. he took a huge gamble by having two trials. normally defendants don t do that