impacts of trumpism is this you know, in judicious and autocratic assault on things that are nonpartisan and nonideological. donna, he s being investigated for very spec crimes associated with this conduct. we have ashley s colleague aaron blake in the west reminds us today of the federal statute that pribs retaliate against witnesses which comey, mccabe and yates are all are. whoever knowingly with the intent to retaliate takes any action harmful to any person for serving as a witness in a federal investigation shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years or both. so he s also under investigation by someone who i m told is simply investigating crimes and deciding whether or not to charge and prosecute them. that s the mueller investigators. well, the president has actually shown no reluctance at
right. if you say nothing, just to even but the idea that, again, sean spicer is a political appointee, works for the president, but he says a heads up. it wasn t a heads up. this was a warning. in a major way her saying that some sort of action needed to be taken, they obviously didn t fire him for 18 days or accept his resignation. unclear of whether or not they did anything. did they bar him from meetings? did they bar him from briefings or anything? everyone talks sort of about loyalty and donald trump being loyal to people around him. he s also loyal to whatever set of information he has. he s not very curious in terms of finding, you know, out other information and processing that information. so this seems to be another of those instances. when president obama said listen, flynn, this might be a pr problem. i can see how he wouldn t accept that advice, although he did say we had great meetings. at that meeting he was locking arms. why did they invite her back to
important question, because trump has, ever since that day, that press conference, defended michael flynn and repeatedly suggested that he did nothing wrong, even in the face of all of this talk about the risks of blackmail. there s that problem. i think in general on the collusion question, the folks who are looking at this situation fairly need to be more comfortable with the idea that we don t know what the answer to the collusion question is. it is not as the president says that there was no collusion. the answer is unsatisfyingly that we don t know. i think that s what james clapper and sally yates put out there was that there is no definitive yes or no answer to that right at this moment and even folks on the left i think need to be a little bit more comfortable. i think the democrats have gone beyond at least the public information and smft thinome of things they say. the president himself is a politician. i understand the idea that they
blame politicians when things don t work, but as i always tell people, you get the politicians you deserve. and if you don t vote and you don t participate and you don t pay attention, then you ll get policies that don t reflect your interests. he certainly is correct to a degree as my dad used to say, if you don t vote don t i won t say the word at noontime here in the east. but from a former president, does that sound a little whiney blaming the voters? he s not over it clearly. he s clearly i mean, just rewind a little bit. i remember the weeks before the election. hearing obama talk to his supporters in some of the most frank and harsh terms that i think he d ever used in his presidency. he was really putting everything out on the line. i think he s clearly still pretty upset about it. by saying things like that, he can continue the narrative that he was not to blame at all
but that s the thing. it s sort of like reading tea leaves in a wind storm. you don t really know what s going on and what s going to come of this investigation. you had donald trump later tweet we haven t really seen him in public much, but in this hearing essentially saying this whole thing proves that this is a hoax and there s nothing there. no new information out of the yates hearing. we don t know where it leads, but there are a lot of new clues and red flags in that hearing. you re right the @tweet she s some very important new things. russia story is a new hoax. when will it end? we don t know the answers to collusion but both sally yates and james clapper made clear there s a reason to have an investigation into that question. clapper said the president keeps saying this almost didn t happen, it wasn t a big deal. listen to james clapper and the current director mike rogers,