paul: well, james comey gets set to kick off his book tour sunday. president trump is wasting no time firing back at his former fbi director tweeting on friday: james comey is a proven leaker and liar. virtually everyone in washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did until he was, in fact, fired. he leaked classified information for which he should be prosecuted, he lied to congress under oath. he is a weak and untruthful slimeball who was, as time has proven, a terrible director of the fbi. his handling of the crooked hillary clinton case and the events surrounding it will go down as one of the worst botch jobs of history. it was my great honor to fire james comey. we re back with dan henninger and bill mcgurn. so, bill, first, anything new we
broader middle east. paul: and yet chuck schumer said i support the response, this is the democratic leader in the senate. but, hey, don t get us involved in anything over there. how much support would he really have by democrats if he did do the kind of i think democrats are always looking for a campaign issue. often it s not about the broader national security interests of the united states, it s more about political power. sorry if that sounds too cynical, paul. paul: what about the republicans, dan? generally speaking, tend to be supportive. tend to be. in the congress i think it s been pretty full support other than rand paul. they re behind the president on this. the big question though is whether he has that kind of unified support out there in the trump base. i mean, there are a lot of populists, and they do have the representatives in the media who think we should not be involved, that this violates trump s america first dictum and that we should pull the troops home as
as the probe gets tighter and tighter. he s only got two or three people working for him in washington. his personal lawyer, michael cohen, is now off the table and talking to the prosecutor. i think the president is in a tough spot paul: it s a big vulnerability, isn t it, bill? briefly. dodi general v.a. was on joety general v.a. was on tv the other night, it s a big step. and unpopular clients deserve their rights too. that s one of the lessons of law. paul: all right, house speaker paul ryan announcing his retirement after 20 years in congress. karl rove on his legacy and the potential midterm election fallout next. i will be retiring in january, leaving this majority in good hands with what i believe is a very bright future. financial services right. but if that s not enough, we have more than 8000 allys looking out for one thing: you.
another republican when he retires in january. we re back with dan henninger, bill mcgurn and kate odell. so, kate, you ve been following the republican conference, what do you think ryan s retirement means for their ability to govern? i m not sure it s a positive sign. if you remember how we got into the ryan speakership in the first place, it was because kevin mccarthy who would now like to be speaker dropped out because he was not able to command a majority. and the reason for that was because the house freedom caucus was peeling off 30 or 40 votes. we wrote in a time in an editorial called the republican crack-up [laughter] that the freedom caucus might be able to deny mccarthy or anybody a majority and give the democrats more leverage. paul: so ryan was the only one willing to take the job and was able to govern for the most part. i think, bill, he leaves a big hole in the growth wing of the party. yeah. paul: he s been a real spokesman tax reform wouldn t have happene
for chemical attacks. but were you surprised that they laid back as they have? they didn t, apparently, take really active measures to try to stop the missiles or take any military response. well, look, i m convinced the russians aren t excited about getting into a military engagement with the united states. that would be with catastrophic for them, it would certainly be very painful for us. they have limited objectives in syria, and they re not ready to go to total war with us over those limited objectives. i think that s obvious. paul: so how effective though are the russian missile defense radars in syria? because they ve been delivering a lot more of those in the last couple of years. is that something that militarily if we went in in any future attack say, particularly with fighters, we d have to disable those, i assume, or we could be in trouble. well, again, it depends on if they attempt to engage our assets that are going in there.