To and and in person, how this virtual format works. Just click on the q and a happy bottom of your screen. Donald trump donald trump v. The United States inside the struggle to stop a president by Michael Schmidt. Answering phones before becoming a Sports Reporter with off the field issues going on to report on the war in iraq like the pentagon, the fbi and the department of homeland security. In recent years his work is focused on National Security and federal investigations. And Pulitzer Prize in 2018. The other for coverage of donald trump with campaign ties to russia. In his new book michael recounts trumps abuse of president ial power, two individuals who stopped to confront the president and constrain him. As what trump and his enablers did, inside of intent to stop the attempt. Michael has a reputation for meticulous reporting with access to tortoises. A revelatory portrait that led to the investigation for instructional justice, the Washington Post review, offers a powerful accounting lawlessness and chaos that is donald trump. In true collaborative spirit, and, inside knowledge of the New York Times, you may recognize him from appearances on nbc news. When it comes to Michael Schmidt im everything you dont want in a journalist. And and, you we spent a memorable new years week trap that mara largo, and a blind date with my sisters. Ive known mike as a competitor, a colleague and a friend and, and and you have, who to do this with, there is no more contemporary, given our history and the chances we have for services in a fun way, the only book i have. I am really excited. A double take at the paragraph, not particularly notable, get us started. A week passed since trump became president , the fbi is investigating the president s campaign, the National Security adviser lida the fbi, the president asked the fbi director for his loyalty, the fbi director was keeping memos on every major interaction with the president whom he did not trust. Detailed in the first 26 days of his Administration Donald Trump has done enough to completely imperil his presidency. I spent a lot of time talking about how to tell this story. At one point i thought about doing it on the first 26 days of the administration. If you understand the first 26 days of the administration, how they dealt with this problem of National Security adviser being compromised by a foreign adversary, if you understand that period of time you understand the trump presidency. By the time of the 20 sixth day, asked jim comey to end the flynn investigation, theres enough that has been created that when the memo is disclosed it would so rock the administration they will be forced to confront a true exit stencil threat of an investigation into them. Where do you start the book or end the book, the first 26 days, the question of where to end the book. As i study the administration you see the story starting to repeat itself, the president wants to do something, out of bounds, the people around him have to respond. I am sure about the calculation how she deals with the president , similar to the ones jim comey make decisions on, john kelly has to make decisions on. The interesting part, the difference is trump, being a human mri machine, it reveals them in different ways. Comey was never going to bend, and it was never going to work. They never again opportunity to remake the courts. He was going to put up with Different Things but only to a point and some people still around the president , you have to wonder what have they done to continue to be there. Two men who flesh out the book, they are deeply human, shakespearean characters up against forces much greater than them, dont even understand themselves, but tremendous influence in ways they dont understand or intend over the course of the presidency. I wanted to talk about why you chose to focus on that and more about what you learned in this process. There are several reasons i picked this, besides trump and obama, the decisions comey made had more of an impact how we live in the world today than anything. If you are a democrat you think he helped get donald trump elected, these memos, led to the appointment of mueller. Direct impact on the world today but there will be an impact for decades to come, again remade the federal court, didnt just remake them with traditional republican judges but remade them, the most conservative justices out there. The fact that trump would allow one person to nominate the judges, lighting, and living with the impact. Historically i thought there was enough there, this isnt just an aide, intimately larger impacts. And they both thought they had it figure out, they were lashed to the lash of the trump. And and if i hold this press conference, and move on. It is not a silver bullet, and move pastor more quickly, on the seventh of his presidency comey is sitting there, and covering the fbi, he said play in obamas basketball, played in the basement of the fbi, he said to me i would never play with him. It would be close to the white house, and he is asking for his loyalty. And 6 or 7 month earlier. Mcgann comes in, the campaign will deal with it. There is nothing there. Getting into the trappings of the presidency, the ceremonies and press conferences execute an agenda, the judges and white House Counsel as simple as that. Four days into the presidency sally yates, acting attorney general walked into his office, once in a generation problem, National Security adviser beating compromised by russia, began in that moment, a difficult thing to deal with and from there it is worse and worse and worse. Began pushes through it. By the time you start writing your book in earnest i assume comey is ubiquitous. Youve written about him more than anything. A memoir of his own, how did you approach, tell the readers something new about jim comey you didnt already know. It was a unique challenge. As you said, so much written about him. To understand the comey story you have to go back to october 20 eighth. You will never be the fbi director, hard thing to relate to. I can understand the logic of how he got to where he was. No one wanted to try to understand it, working on the book with him, written so much about comey, and what im going to write about comey, i thought about that. Lets try to tell the story through his life, move the camera. We are looking at comey on a 45 degree angle. Lets move the camera to different direction and see it through the eyes of someone else. The fbi director, we all know, we have loved ones to go through something brutal. In this case, her husband was being blamed for the election of donald trump. Someone she thought her husband probably peeked inside was awful and we can relate as a reader to watching a loved one in pain, and have control over the situation and we will tell the story through patrice and see comey in a different light. If we just tell the comey story no one wants to hear what he has to say. Your book opens up the first 25 pages or so, a gripping cinematic scene, and down washington trying to catch don began entering the fortress of the white house, walking outside the white house, i am curious, how do you make people who have no incentive talk to you in particular . You have to pull a string, Everyone Wants i wanted to be done accurately and everyone thinks their story has not been accurately told so a way of trying to talk to them is get out of the way, let them talk because they like to hear themselves and think someone is listening. They like to correct their record. A good comfortable way, this story said something about this, everyone thinks something is written, perception is wrong, they have been wrong that by this or this wasnt fair and that kind of thing, they were on the record. And this supersecret thing, with the public record, a baby step to take in the direction of getting people more comfortable. To follow up on that what are the different challenges to talk to you, is it easier or harder, wanting to press the record . It is easier or harder in different ways. Hours and hours, getting very little, getting nothing. You can tell, where you can really get into the nuance, you can explore thing, do a story in a way the newspapers story you just cant. The limitations of the newspaper story, i hadnt realized how much the newspaper story was coveted. It is one, 2, 3 facts in this investigation. In my journalism, coming at it one way, Different Things, i found this interesting, like don mcganns relationship with donald trump, really interesting. Is that a newspaper story, maybe not, maybe it is a paragraph in a newspaper story. And if you have a sense who donald trump is, the potential parallels foreshadowing, tell that story. Since you mentioned it, the story of patty mcgann, tell everyone a little bit about that, the two men and their experience. What i found, in many other places in the book. Donald trump shows up in Atlantic City in 1980 and he wants to get in on the burgeoning casino business and someone in town the guy, patty mcgann, knows how to do all the tricks and all the things could get him the property, knows how to work, connection between buildings, casinos and all sorts of tricks, this guy, all this stuff. Over time the relationships start to deteriorate, and it is a different relationship than most people do. Taking notes with donald trump, to bring a witness for his meetings with trump, the document trump says, billing records, all this time trump doesnt like it and one thing leads to another and all of a sudden they are in court litigating against each other and patty is explaining into position, needed to have witnesses to protect himself from someone we thought was a liar. When patty mcgann passes away, he said donald trump owes him 1 million in back legal fees. In philadelphia that year, goes of burial at Arlington National cemetery. Donald trump needs and elections lawyer and mcgann identifies with trump and trumpism, the sec, the election commission, a high profile elections lawyer but mcgann believed in the roots of trumpism, left behind by trade deals, he believed you needed not to run to the middle but to the far right of the base to do that and he began as a kind of guy who identifies with the idea of support of breaking things, hardened libertarians, counterintuitive, ice hockey goalie, probably not a loner but did his own thing, but he knows a little bit about his relationship with trump and is a different man. You can see don mcganns experience with donald trump who are different in many ways. You call russias 2016 election medley and intelligent failure, not a lot of people called it an intelligence failure, the response when there is an intelligence failure, the 9 11 commission. We do that quite deliberately and im curious why you make this distinction and why it is so important. 911 was clearly an intelligence failure, the commission was created to study what happened and provide recommendations to remake a big portion of itself to be a counterterrorism fighting force, Police Forces across the country are very different, the fbi is very different, a National Response to horrific attack on the country when many people die. I say what happens in 2016, the largest intelligence failure since 9 11. It is not gotten that treatment, not like trump came in and said i will get jim baker from the republicans in the equivalent on the democrat side, the power to do it they need to do to get to the bottom, and as you come into this election there has been little stuff the Intelligence Community has done. To deal with multidimensional press involving disinformation, and emails and all sorts of stuff. As we come into this election off of capitol hill. The Mueller Investigation looked at whether crimes were connected with the election. It does not provide recommendation. You write about two top fbi officials trying to make the case for the Justice Department during the 2016 election, the specific content of flash drive, thousands of documents the russians had. Ultimately they are not able. The Obama Administration privileged information, they can put it in broad categories that cant read the specifics. Do you think the Obama Administration made a different decision, this might have played out differently and if so how. It would not have fundamentally changed our understanding of what the russians do, responded more robustly, on the intelligence side, before understanding what went on in the social media process, the top people at the fbi had no idea this was going on at the time and on top of that the Intelligence Community and the fbi didnt think all the hacking the russians were doing weapon eyes to the information. They thought this is regular espionage, knocking around terrorism, know what is going on, they do that, we do that, normal spy on spy game. Weaponization taking these email dumping them out there the way they did, that is the game changer. That is the things that makes this different and no intelligence, no ability to know that. Meddling in the 2016 election, not sure if you knew in real time, and another theme is the question of obstruction. Doing something just as covertly or secretly and, trump directly asked come to make it go. The president was so shameless about it and out in the open in a lot of ways make it harder to name, what challenge does that pose . It is the unusualness of trump, the way he tests us in the media and the test of Law Enforcement and everything. To know how to respond. Comey would say it is pretty clear hes trying to obstruct justice. When the president is doing that it is an atypical way for the government to be functioning, one of the failures of this until after comey is fired there is a delay, they are not sure what to do. It is a monumental decision, at the Justice Department, and how i across the street, he thinks he has time, he thinks he will be there for ten years because the norm of having an fbi director with a 10 year term is something trump wouldnt be able to survive firing the fbi director, trump wouldnt do that, that would be crazy. Comey until the point he is turning to questions, i understand you consider a new title, what were we trying to do with the title and what was the ultimate title . Naming the book was hard, naming the book is particularly hard and i constantly was grasping the modernday washington equivalent of barbarians at the gate, i thought about all sorts of things, originally one of the titles was obstructing trump, i didnt like that or whatever and it eventually becomes donald trump versus the United States. And inside the struggle to stop the president , and they didnt say enough about what the book was, and i thought of you would take the unusual construction of donald trump versus the United States, it looks like a court case, needed to give the reader more guidance, what you are going to tackle and i thought inside the struggle to stop the president , i liked it and hated it and i never found that title never loved this title, after the title was done and the jacket was done, it was doing some Fact Checking at the end and i found out john kelly would refer to instances where they go, the power to do it, typical, how they container president , the struggle to stop the president , kelly would say to folks lets go french kiss the chainsaw, talking about how they were french kissing the chainsaw and that, some really stark, poetic, and very evocative. These evocative terms. The struggle to stop the president , to tell donald trump he cant do something is like french kissing a chainsaw. When you rename the book french kissing the chainsaw, a campaign to stop donald trump, some people would have been put off by it and would have had that wrenching feeling, what they cant get. I want to read the last line of your book which ends the president has bent washington to its will. Can you tell us what specifically you are referring to and more ask essentially, it can bounce back or is it a more permanent shift . I am flattered we got that far. We got that far. Interpret the legacy, what is the impact of trump, a few years of the administration, trump is an admirable politician, whoever comes in, more typical republican president , just snap back in place. Im less convinced about that today. When you see the way the machine of government or politics can be used my guess is people will want to do that and trumps abnormal use of power, theres a lot more they can get away with than they thought they could. Im less convinced they will snap back than ever before. My sense is especially based on that, we are looking at this question of what trump meant for the rest of our lives the we went through this enduring thing. If everything goes back to sort of normal it will be less interesting, a harbinger it things to come. Certainly feels highly unusual, and trying to understand it for a long time, back in 5 or 10 years, the same way i thought the first few years of washington would snap back. Trump bending his will to washington, what im trying to say, and trump asked comey to end the flynn investigation, he was never going to do that. When we learn about that, writing a story about that a couple months later, in may of 2017, and and, a real feeling of highly unusual going on. In both parties fast forward to spring of this year. In that point had not been sentenced, to end the flynn investigation. Here trump was, to end it investigation, for 3 or 4 years and he found that person in his own Cabinet Department and gone to court and asked the court to do that so comey never would have done. To me it was a great example of how trump had that. Two final questions that i will send, the first is i assume a lot of people, on msnbc, why you always wear a half zip or full zip and what you know about fashion that we dont . Ouch, ouch, ouch. Somebody wore a uniform before the trump era, into the trump era, a buttondown white shirt and at the time was a black zipper thing, got very cold pretty easily. At the desk, to wear on top of it. These b