especially with a democratic congress set to take office in january with the power of oversight that hasn t been exercised over the last two years. it s enormous pressure. but i think the larger point is this. you say how could all of these thing be going on? they all have one common element and that s donald trump. and donald trump s career has been basically marked by a certain ethos which is you take what you can, whatever you can, however you can that rules, norms, laws, institutions don t matter that you flout them and whatever you can get away with and that s been his business model but now he s president of the united states and it has much, much broader implications. and everything he s involved in including the way he governs and the way he runs his politics have been infected by that. and the walls are closing in. so david gergen, it won t be
on the washington post website. their lead, russia s disinformation team train their sights on a new target, special counsel robert mueller, they now work to neutralize the biggest threat to his staying there. so the russians are going after the same guy the president is. much more on that shortly. also breaking news on james comey, what the fired fbi director said about the president and republican lawmakers after his testimony to congress today. we begin, though, with the presidential tweet that dove tails with tonight s other russia angles, statements by the president s tv lawyer, rudy giuliani that could put him in legal and politically in a box. whether he intended to or not, giuliani s language allows his client did pursue business ties with the russians all the way to the elections and first what the
have the appearance and sound of being a bit rambling. and because he s talking about things today that he wasn t talking about, say, two months ago. so katelyn, the president, he perhaps added to all of this with his tweets about michael cohen over the weekend, talking about cohen being a rat and talking about lying about the fact the fbi broke into cohen s office there. where are we in the control of the president s twitter stream, particularly with john kelly on the way out and mick mulvaney on the way in? i think most staffers have realized you cannot control the president s tweets, and they ve largely stopped from telling the president what he should and shouldn t tweet. and that s become pretty evident. he s tweeted nine times alone about the russia investigation saying that jeff sessions should be ashamed of himself and whatnot, but he sent rudy giuliani onto the sunday shows to essentially be his attack dog and as you saw some of his comments there, essentially
but he said flynn was a foreign agent while working as national security adviser, and that was not true. it seemed like everyone s ego was getting in the way. flynn, i m guilty of lying, but maybe i was entrapped. and that made the judge made. and then the judge says maybe you re guilty of treason because he couldn t figure out when flynn was registered as a foreign agent. i would have had much more confidence in this system if the judge knew the facts at least as well as i do, because that s a pretty basic mistake. so maybe at the end of the day, this is all for the better, to give everybody a pause for three months. because i would feel better if everybody could read the full sentencing memo unredacted by the time that flynn is sentenced. i m glad the 302s came out. that gives more clarity to how that conversation went down. so maybe everybody needs more time to get the facts straight, including the judge. what did you think about when the judge asked the prosecutors, the special
tricked him into lying about these things. flynn based on these memos willfully lied twice about issues of sensitivity. and when he spoke to russian ambassador in december 2017 first, was he pushing them to vote a certain way on a u.n. security counsel resolution sponsored by the obama administration, and he says no. he said i was just counting votes to see how they vote. but in fact as we found out from the charging documents they knew he communicated and tried to get russia to vote against that resolution or block it or slow roll it. line number two, they asked him when he contacted the russia ambassador again, this is after the obama administration imposed sanctions on russia for interfering in the election including excelling diplomats. did he communicate to the russian ambassador, hey, guys, don t react, don t retaliate for this because there s a new sheriff in town, et cetera, he says no, i didn t do anything, i don t remember really when in fact they knew exactly what he