night. final question, in terms of the fbi, double that christopher wray who watched this and didn t take a wredamage done by comey. christopher wray needs to immediately fire peter strzok and take swifter action. i believe christopher wray understands how damaging the act of the anti-trump people were to the fbi. i would like to see the documents that get to the root of this. the root is russia. they wanted to get rid of the hillary clinton investigation. they wanted to launch a phoney russia investigation. i don t have confidence in anybody until the documents are turned over. the problem with not getting rid of strzok, if he is cooperating, then no one will
better than any of the people around mueller could have done. and lester holt asked why he did it. he said i did it because i felt i had to explain to the american people the president was not the target of the investigation. but that reasoning was not what the president told lester holt in 2017. here s the response from just 48 hours after comey s firing. he s a show boat. he s a grand stander. the fbi has been in turmoil. you know that. i know that. everybody knows that. you take a look at the fbi a year ago. it was in virtual turmoil, less than a year ago. monday you met with the deputy attorney general rod rosenstein. did you ask for a recommendation? what i did is i was going to fire comey. my decision. you made the decision before. i was going to fire comey. there s no good time to do it, by the way.
of axios, jim van dehi. this is one of those weeks where i think we re going to look back as a pivotal week in the trump presidency. step back and think about the things that have happened this week. those mueller questions that leaked. more than 40 questions, 13 of which were linked to very specific dates. they weren t questions as much as topics, they showed the breadth of the investigation. and those questions didn t even include any of the michel cohen material, because those questions took place before the cohen raid by the fbi. then you have another white house lawyer, another trump lawyer, quit, in the middle of this fury, and now you have the rudy giuliani stuff on fox news last night where they re admitting they had repaid michael cohen who had paid off
or shut down the russia investigation. firing the deputy attorney general or director mueller would create a constitutional crisis. do not go down this road. joining us from washington is white house reporter for the associated press jill colvin. good to talk to you once again. so sort of rounding all this up, everything that s been going on in the last couple days or so, rudy giuliani s new revelations, the president s new lawyers and now the attacks on the doj. where do people stand in washington right now? what s the word on the street in washington this morning? right now, we re all just looking at the president just waiting and asking what he s going to do next. where he s going to draw the red line for himself. that he want s s to intervene i the doj and asking questions from that giuliani interview. exactly when did the president find out about the cohen payment, how is that money transferred, when did he know, at what point was he being untruthful with the american public.
. welcome back, everyone. it s the bottom of the the hour. we begin with those two major revelations from rudy giuliani s new interview as president trump s attorney. more on the stunning admission regarding stormy daniels in a moment. but first, a major shift in donald trump s story regarding james comey as rudy giuliani offers a new reason for why the president fired him. he fired comey because comey would not, among other things, say he wasn t a target of the investigation. he s entitled to that. hillary clinton got that. and he couldn t get that. so he fired him and he said i m free of this guy. he went on lester holt. lester holt s interview was as good as anybody could do. better than any of the people around mueller could have done. lester holt asked him why did you do it.