so true. as you pointed out, you know, he s got two different things, from some allies to sean hannity, someone he quotes a lot, an advisor that he speaks with outside of the white house, telling him not to fire him, that it is a setup. the president is listening to those conversations. he is skeptical it is coming from andrew mccabe s memos. those are reasons why the president, if he decides not to fire him, those could be the reasons. yet i m told by a source familiar with conversations that john kelly is having to try to get to the bottom of what caused this all, which is a new york times report on friday that rod rosenstein said he was going to maybe wear a wire, tape record a conversation he was going to have with the president back in 2017 and mabin voekiybe maybg the 25th amendment. the question being, was he being saar cat tick. wh sarcastic. i m told that john kelly was
back in public on another news channel from conservatives, trying to tell the president don t do this because you are being set up, that this is not something that you should be even thinking about at this meeting, firing rod rosenstein because they believe, probably understandably, that that would cause tremendous chaos. it is ironic given the fact that we ve heard so much from so many republicans on capitol hill, particularly in the house, especially in the freedom caucus, who want rod rosenstein out, impeached, you know, even worse because of the role that they say he played in the hillary clinton situation and also in the russia probe. so you have this incredible push and pull from within the president s own party, from people the president trusts, telling him very different things. you re being set up on the one
more than a staff interview is required. it has to be a full, fair fbi investigation. by the way, reopening investigations is done routinely. since june of this year ten background investigations have been reopened for judicial nominees before our committee. so it is entirely routine for the fbi to go back, do more interviews, conduct an investigation. that s what is needed here, not a staff interview. senator blumenthal, i know you got to run and vote, but thanks so much for joining us. thank you. all right. just ahead we are learning more about rod rosenstein s state of mind just ahead of his meeting with president trump and after reports that he s on the way out. we ll also talk about judge brett kavanaugh s strategy of giving an interview before the potential explosive hearing on thursday with his accuser. our political and legal experts are standing by.
that paired with the fact that his relationship with rosenstein has improved in the last few months, even though it has been really bad before and he told people before, he s not on my team, he s weak, in the last few months he laid off the public criticism and they ve been meeting a lot. those factor into why the president wasn t as angry as people thought he would be. rosenstein thought he was going to be fired so he thought he should offer his resignation to john kelly on friday and that s what he did. but now here we are, they had the phone call with the president today and they re waiting for a meeting on thursday where they re going to decide what his fate in the administration will be. as a word of caution, we know president trump doesn t like to confront people when he is one-on-one. he doesn t necessarily like to especially fire people, although he became famous by saying you re fired. but it sets the stage for drama on thursday. it certainly does. just to add on to what
the bait. why should he trust andy mccabe who the memos were based off of and the recollections with the recollections were. i think the president bought into it. he doesn t trust andy mccabe and that was the source of this information from his memos. that was a lot of the confusion there and we have seen the relationship between president trump and rod rosenstein change. it went from back in april, he was still publicly considering firing rod rosenstein. he was mentioning it with him multiple times a day to anyone who would listen. then the president stopped saying he had the conflicts of interest and a lot of people said he knew he was going to be the person making a decision about what to do with the mueller report when it came out. it changed a little bit. the president went from telling people rod rosenstein is no friend of mine. over the weekend, he was much more focussed on kavanaugh. that s not what people were