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Man who told me to fire the fbi director, witch hunt. the president appears to have been referring to rod rosenstein the deputy attorney general who wrote the memo initially used as pretext for fires jals comey. the memo stops short for calling for comeys dismissal and in an interview withlesser hot the president said he planned to fire comey with or without input from rosenstein whom he praised at the time for his integrity. >> i was going to fire regardless of recommendation. he made a recomme...

Part of the department of justice, you cant make a decision about the leadership in that agency. >> sessions also stood by the initial pretext for comeys firing outlined in a memo by deputy attorney general rod rosenstein, which faulted comeys handling of the clinton e-mail investigation. but when asked repeatedly about the presidents own suggestion that comey was fired because of the russia investigation, sessions refused over and over again to answer senators questions. >> did you ever discuss...

That memo, this is just how the president talks. could that be an explanation that you would accept? >> i wouldnt accept it and i dont think a jury would accept it either. look at the pretext that he came up with to fire comey in the first place. he had his secretary general write up all the things that he says that comey did, after he said during the campaign, he congratulated comey for doing this. youve got to look at the entire picture, you just cant take one little fastbact out of context, w...

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Initial pretext for comeys firing outlined in a memo by deputy attorney general rod rosenstein, which faulted comeys handling of the clinton e-mail investigation. but when asked repeatedly about the presidents own suggestion that comey was fired because of the russia investigation, sessions refused over and over again to answer senators questions. >> did you ever discuss director comeys fbi hand ling of the russia investigations with the president or anyone else? >> senator feinstein, that would...

He is privy to information that the memo that rod rosenstein prepared, his own letter would serve as mere pretext or window dressing to conceal the true reason for comeys firing, he cannot hide that behind a privilege. so we need to pursue this in congress. we need to litigate it if necessary. but we cant take that non-answer as the last word. >> theres been three officials who have testified before congress all sort of occupying a similar space in terms of how theyve answered committee. dan coa...

Recommendation? >> well, i think this gets to the issue of timing and motive for the president to fire the former director. and you cant look at this out of the context of some of these comey memos as theyre being called in terms of the interactions that the president had beforehand leading up to the firing. so the president can fire comey for any reasons he wants. he can ask the deputy attorney general to give his assessment of a performance but i think the question is whether the decision to d...

>> no. this is a dark day in american history, anderson. this is so far outside of the american political and legal tradition for a sitting president to fire the head of the fbi who is investigating his campaign with a completely bogus and pretext recall explanation for why he was fired. itser only happened once and that was october 20th, 1973 when richard nixon fired the special prosecutor. >> youre comparing it to that? >> absolutely. and arguably worse because jim comey is head of the whole f...

Is it? >> right. >> if its just a chronology of things, complaints about the comey press conferences and treatment of hillary clinton because of the historical record of it, fine. but as david said its not the pretext and now its really hard to understand why would you write that memo knowing that the president is going to fire director comey? it seems like it gives cover to something that didnt really need to be part of rosensteins mandate. the thing also that you touched upon in the earlier se...

Firing, when you read that memo, how did it strike you? did it seem that mr. rosenstein was initiates the firing or responding to a request that he had can um up with a pretext? >> definitely the latter. i dont think rod rosenstein had any interest in getting rid of him. he was asked to come up with a pretext, appeared he came up with a pretext that would be least damaging to the department of justice and the fbi by ascribing it entirely to things we already know about, and things that no one in...