To help grow your business. Another way we have your back. The powerful backing of american express. Dont do business without it. Welcome to kasie d. C. Im kasie hunt. We are live from washington every sunday from 7 00 to 9 00 p. M. Eastern. Tonight, publish or perish . James comey is out with a bombshell new book as the feds release a report deeply critical of Andrew Mccabe. Were joined by congressman jim himes of the House Intelligence Committee who says the president doesnt have the right to shine james comey shoes. Plus sanctions coming for russia after america strikes targets in syria. But what remains to be seen is the american strategy. Beyond declaring mission
accomplished. But first, the week begins full of questions. What do the feds have on Michael Cohen . Who is back in court in just a few hours. Stormy daniels will be there, too. How will the president react to james comey interview tonight . And how much longer will Rod Rosenstein have an office in the Department Of Justice . We only know one thing. As comey and the president trade ad hominems, Robert Mueller presses on quietly in the background. We have a lot to discuss tonight. I want to welcome in my awesome panel. With me here in Washington White House bureau chief for the Washington Post and msnbc political analyst philip rucker. Reporter for the New York Times and Msnbc National Security contributor michael schmidt. Pete williams. Anita kumar, and joining the conversation from new york, former fbi Special Agent and Msnbc National Security analyst clint watts. Thank you all for being here tonight. Michael schmidt, i want to
start with you because this book that we have been learning about the last few days, the Interview Set to air tonight, james comey in many ways this saga was touched off by your reporting in the New York Times about Hillary Clintons use of private email when she was secretary of state. What in this book that comey has put out do you feel is going to make a material difference in how events unfold with the Mueller Investigation as we go forward . Im not sure how much it really changes the equation there. The one thing is that if comey were to ever be a witness against trump, like in front of the in front of congress or even at a trial or anything, they could say, look, and you had a real motivation to go after the president. You wrote this whole book. You made all of this money. You did all of these things. Maybe your word shouldnt be taken as seriously. Maybe they could undermine him that way. In terms of details about the president , about the email investigation. Id say the newest thing is the
reaction by trump and his folks when they were briefed in January Of 2017 when they were first told about the hack. And they First Respond and say, hey, how are we going to deal with this politically . But besides ythat you had comey testify on capitol hill for many hours and covered a lot of these things. Pete williams, whats your take on that . Do you think i was Supplierp Comey would be willing to come out and say so much when he is potentially a witness in the investigation. It seems the opposite, whenever youre talking about these investigations on television, you know, we very often hear your sources cannot speak about an ongoing investigation. I think the message that comes through is mr. Comey is still upset about being fired. Probably rightly so. I think the things that we learn about are some of the explanations for his decision and surprisingly some of the reaction to it, especially on the clinton email investigation. I will say one other thing, kasie. There was a race, i think, to see which was going to come out
first, the comey book, or the Inspector Generals report on how the fbi handled the clinton email investigation which recall was started before mr. Trump actually took the oath of office. So, its been over a year now. And we learned on friday when the Mccabe Report came out in a letter to the hill, that now the Inspector General says that report will come out sometime in may. Whats interesting is comey says in his book that after all the beating he took from democrats, including in a private meeting from senator al franken, the Chuck Schumer came up to him with tears in his eyes and grabbed his arm and said, you did what you had to do. He said he had a meeting toward the end of november with President Obama who said, i chose you because i thought you were the right guy. You were full of integrity and nothing youve done since then, nothing has changed my opinion. Speaking of democrats being angry, phil rucker, i think you know as well as i do some of the people that seem to dislike comey than anyone else in washington worked for hillary clinton. We have this tweet from former Clinton Campaign advisor philip about james comey. It says, quote, a higher loyalty
to whom . Comeys twitter handle. Fbi . No, you set the bureau back by years. Doj . No, broke every rule. Usa . No, blew up a candidate. Your oath . No, didnt quit. Fired. Only one thing, not subtlety on twitter. Or off twitter. Or off twitter, yes. What is your take on kind of the way comey has set himself out here from a political perspective . Well, hes vulnerable with this book. Hes clearly got both partisans on the democratic side and on the republican side who frankly hate his guts and think he made a lot of bad judgments in his time as the fbi director. In his book he has a few chapters detailing his work on the clinton email investigation. He defends his handling of it. He says with a couple stylistic points about the speech in july he would have done differently. Substantively he would not have
done anything differently. What i found pretty striking is the message of sort of apology to hillary clinton. He says, i read in your memoir what happened, that youre angry with me, that you blame me for this loss. And its not a full apology, but he says im sorry youre so angry, im sorry you feel that way, and im sorry i couldnt have explained better to you and your supporters and the American People why i did what i did. He admits in the sound bite released today he was making that decision in the context of he believed she was going to win the election and that may have subconsciously influenced his thinking. He also makes thats true. He says it may have subconsciously impacted his thinking. He says he didnt deliberately make a decision based on the political environment and to do so would be very bad for the country. So, as weve been talking about just now, people on both sides of the 2016 campaign have questioned james comey motivations. Former new Jersey Governor Chris Christie had this to say about how comey handled reopening the Clinton Probe days before the election. It is exactly what they teach you not to do. And i think its unfortunate that jims who is a good guy, a good family man, a good person and was a very good prosecutor. But he began to believe his own Press Clippings and its the biggest danger in public life. And the hubris that he shows in that interview is extraordinary to me and not the guy that i worked with or worked for. And its sad. Want to add one more seemingly unrelated item to this. Comey concludes the book by comparing the Trump White House to a forest fire that may bring some destructive good. Quote, the next president , no matter the pat at this, will surely emphasize values, truth, integrity, respect and tolerance in ways an american leader hasnt needed to for more than 40 years. The fire will make something good grow. I wrote this book because i hope it will be useful to People Living among the flames who are thinking about what comes next. Clint watts, i want to go to you on this as somebody who
worked inside the agency. That seems like a remarkably political statement. And i think the overall picture here here of comey is someone who is a political operator. Is that the way people you know inside the bureau view it . Is that the way you look at it . I didnt serve there when comey was in charge. What i find interesting about his book, the only bad guys are mob bosses or terrorists or criminals. Its all politicians. Its the first fbi book ive ever seen where it is really aimed at other people inside the beltway. And the biggest enemy also seems to be the swamp, ironically. What i think is notable about this is how comey seems to have had to navigate a nearly impossible path. Depending on how you see his situation, he was navigating away from lynch and sort of the democrat side, leading into being cheered on by the republicans and having a 180 and reversal. And it must have been a lonely path and it also is one that
really speaks to our institutions today under trump, which is how can you actually do your job when youre between capitol hill and the white house, and you have these competing pressures going on in this polarized environment. I like his quote there at the end, but i am very skeptical that that will be the out outcome. Pete williams, whats your view . Youve covered many fbi well, a handful of fbi directors. They come and go less frequently than other officials in washington. Do you view comey as an average fbi director or is this par for the kars course of this signifi . You inevitably get sucked into this. If that sense hes forever going to have that around his neck in this legacy. Louie free got a lot of heat for the investigation whether there was anything done wrong in clinton fundraising. Not so much mueller. He will be remembered as fib fox business director for the guy who kept the fbi glued together
after 9 11 when there was a lot of effort to tear it apart into two separate things, one that would do intelligence and one that would do conventional criminal work. You know, the comey book here, i think the things that surprise me were how willing he is to constantly talk about the mafia in terms of his dealings with the president. Right. And some of the more sort of seeming details about the dossier. Im surprised he went into that detail. If you look at the book as a whole, you start at the beginning and go to the end, its jim comey explaining why he did what he did and who he is. He says at one point i think candidly that people criticize him for perhaps having too much of an ego or perhaps too much confidence in his own judgment, and that this may be a weak point for him. I think hes quite candid about that because a lot of people have said that about him. Michael schmidt, do you agree . Yeah, i think hes going to spend a lot of time for the rest of his life trying to explain
this to people, trying to make them see the world through his eyes. The funny thing to watch here in washington is that its both sides that dont like him, but they also sort of like him for other reasons. I mean, for the democrats, you know, without his firing you probably wouldnt have mueller. And they really saw his firing as a huge issue that unleashed enormous amount of things about trump. So, the thing about comey is he doesnt fit into one small thing. Its too complicated. Do you sense remorse from comey about how he handled the Clinton Investigation at all . I dont. No, none whatsoever. The one thing that he talks about, and he goes into great detail, is the decision not so much the july News Conference where they said she shouldnt be charged, but that she did bad things is the letter that he sent to congress in late october saying, woops, we found some more emails. Stand by. Well let you know whether there is anything good in there or not. Thats the one where he says sort of enlarges on what he said
at the senate at the time. I had to either conceal or reveal. There was no Good Alternative and i chose a bad one, but the other was worse. When he went out and does the Press Conference in july and people dont appreciate this, he really ratcheted up the rhetoric on it. He made it a public issue in a way that it wasnt before and really turned things up. He was essentially saying, well, im not going to prosecute but he offered his own rhetorical indictment. Made it a political thing, even bigger. We need to change gears ever so slightly. While the focus was on james comey and Robert Mueller, the fbi was raiding Michael Cohens home and offices with the approval of Rod Rosenstein. Federal prosecutors indicated he is under criminal investigation, and yet he and the president reportedly talked on friday. There are reports prosecutors are interested in his communications about stormy daniels, about the access hollywood tape, even discussions with a bank that issued loans for Taxi Medallions that he owns. Were following reporting that the Special Counsel has evidence
cohen was in prague in 2016, possibly confirming part of the infamous steele dossier. Mcclatchy reporting according to two sources familiar with the matter, there is evidence of cohens secret czech trip in late summer 2016. This could be one step in confirming a portion of Christopher Steeles dossier which accuses cohen of meeting with russian officials in prague to strategize on election meddling. At the time the dossier was published by buzzfeed, cohen tweeted a picture of his passport and wrote, quote, i have never been to prague in my life. Buzzfeed published pictures of his passport which didnt show a trip to prague but did show a trip to italy. He could have freely traveled to italy without getting a passport stamp. Since that report cohen was back on twitter writing, no matter hou how many times they write it, i was never in prague. I was with my son. Prove it. Bradie stepped down on friday when it was reported cohen represented him in a 1. 6 million sex scandal when she said he got her pregnant. The times reports trumps inner circle sees the raid as a bigger threat to trump than the Mueller Investigation. That could be because cohen was known to tape conversations he had. Although he says he never taped any conversations with trump. Okay, there is a lot there. Anita kumar, what of this the prague reporting seems quite interesting because of the broader context of this dossier. Right. I mean, totally. My colleagues had that story and as you explained, he had flatout said he had never been there. The president said it was bad reporting before. But if this could open a whole can of worms if its true. Its just in general the cohen situation is just not good for the president. First of all, this is a guy who hes been very close to for a long time. His fixer, someone who knows all
about donald trump we cant just call him a lawyer. Hes much more than that. He knows much more than that. He knows so much about donald trump. This is getting to what the president calls a red line, it gets into his businesses. He never let them go. He still retains them. Thats really going to get under his skin. What is going on with mueller and the investigation . I think we simply dont know. We know that it was something that the mueller team found that they basically handed off, this hot potato to the Southern District of new york, so that now its being handled not by muellers team, but by the regular old fbi and Justice Department, u. S. Attorney in new york. Now whether they are going to get and feed it back to mueller, i think we just dont know the answer to that. Clint watts, Michael Cohen is going to be back in Court Tomorrow to try and prevent some of this evidence from seeing the light of day to essentially block these documents, citing Attorney Client privilege. What is the fbis role in sort of through that now and does
that potentially is there a case to be made on cohens end . Yeah, cohen this is totally likely and logical that he would try and pursue this. Hes going to want to suppress all evidence thats out there. But there was really four layers that this went through. From mueller to rosenstein, Southern District of new york. From that office to the judge to do this warrant which means they have to believe that there is something there that hes hiding. They have to have probable cause for that. I think its going to be pretty tough for him to overturn. But what we should recognize is that all the way across the board, for the trump administration, this is a disaster. The biggest weakness for all of muellers investigations were other crimes discovered during the course of investigation. And so as this mushrooms, you now have more investigators in new york running in a different direction into the trump team. I think its a very damaging situation for the white house. One other Bar Czar Note i just want to mention from the Wall Street Journal report on elliott broedy. They write the broedy agreement
uses the same pseudonyms for mr. Broidy and the one he was allegedly involved. David denison, the same name used for mr. Trump and ms. Clifford. Phil rucker, before we go to break here, this seems like the issue that could potentially set the president off beyond all other issues that could potentially lead him to fire Rod Rosenstein. Would you say that chatter around that ther