In new york. Day 455 of the Trump Administration brings major developments in the russia investigation. Another wild one. A lot of them breaking just tonight over these past few hours. Chiefly we now have the 15 pages of memos that former fbi director james comey drafted about his interactions with president donald trump. Earlier tonight the Justice Department sent those memos to congress, and as things so often do, they ended up minutes later in the hands of the news media. They do confirm that on february 14, the president asked comey this with regard to the investigation of now former National Security adviser mike flynn. I hope you can see your way to letting this go, to letting flynn go. We also learned that on january 28th, remember, fewer than ten days into his presidency, donald trump told comey he had, quote, serious reservations about mike flynns judgment. Thats the National Security adviser in the west wing. And later, on february 8th, former white house chief of staff Reince Priebus asks this of james comey. Do you have a fisa order on mike flynn . The president was also concerned about the political impact of the russia investigation. Comey writes on march 30th, the president says, quote, he said he was trying to run the country and that the cloud of this russia business was making that difficult. He says he would have won the Health Care Vote but for the cloud. Well, tonight the president s legal team is making a big play. They are bringing in former new york city mayor and Onetime Republican president ial candidate Rudy Giuliani. Before he was mayor, giuliani made a name for himself as lets call it a very aggressive u. S. Attorney for the Southern District of new york, the same office that ordered the fbi raid on trumps personal attorney michael cohen. Giuliani has links to the two key people in this investigation the fired fbi director james comey. He worked under giuliani in the Southern District. And special Counsel Robert Mueller was, youll recall, director of the fbi during and after 9 11 when giuliani was new york mayor. The giuliani hire comes as the president has escalated his attacks on mueller. Tonight giuliani told the Washington Post, quote, i hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because i have high regard for the president and for bob mueller. Giuliani did not say whether a final decision has been made on a potential trump mueller sitdown interview. That may be determined by the strength of giulianis personal connection to trump. Giuliani spent a lot of time on the campaign trail with the president and was a tireless surrogate for the president. His remarks about trump during the Republican NationalConvention May encapsulate their relationship. I am sick and tired of the defamation of donald trump by the media and by the clinton campaign. I am sick and tired of it. This is a good man, and america should be sick and tired of the vicious, nasty campaign. What i did for new york, donald trump will do for america i have known donald trump for almost 30 years, and he has created and accomplished great things. In my city and all over the world. So lets put him down as protrump. In addition to giuliani, trump has hired the husband and wife legal team of jane serene raskin and marty raskin, former fortunately prosecutfederal prosecutors who run a floridabased law firm. All three of these new legal additions will be reporting working with jay sekulow and white house lawyer ty cobb. As the president settles on his legal team, there is new reporting tonight concerning Deputy Attorney general Rod Rosenstein. Bloomberg news is reporting that at a white house meeting a week ago, rosenstein told trump that he is, quote, not a target in any part of the Mueller Investigation or the one concerning his personal lawyer here in new york, michael cohen. Now, according to bloomberg, that may have, quote, helped tamp down the president s desire to remove rosenstein or mueller, something the president alluded to, youll recall, just yesterday. Have you concluded that its not worth the political fallout to remove either special counsel mueller or Deputy Attorney general rosenstein . Theyve been saying im going to get rid of them for the last three months, four months, five months, and theyre still here. So we want to get the investigation over with. Bloomberg news also reports that investigators started scrutinizing Paul Manafort because they suspected the former Trump Campaign chairman might have been serving as a back channel to russia. This revelation came out in federal court today during a hearing in which manaforts lawyers argued that mueller overstepped his authority in the russia investigation by indicting manafort for financial fraud and other charges. Bloomberg reports that a senior Justice Department prosecutor told the judge muellers team was entirely justified in investigating manafort because of his role on the campaign, saying, quote, he had longstanding ties to russiabacked politicians. Did they provide back channels to russia . Investigators will naturally look at those things. Well, thats a lot, and its the point at which we bring in our leadoff panel for this busy thursday night. Were joined once again by kimberly atkins, frank figure luzzi is back with us. Former fbi assistant director for counterintelligence, who in the past has worked for Robert Mueller. Also an msnbc National Security analyst. And mimi roker returns to the broadcast. Former assistant u. S. Attorney for the Southern District of new york, now a distinguished fellow in criminal justice at the Pace University school of law. Mimi, Home Field Advantage goes to you. Ill start with you. What stands out to you here, we all have a copy of these memos with big black marks for redactions, the stuff we really want to read and arent allowed to see. Exactly. What happened tonight when these were released . Look, what stands out to me is that this just bolsters the credibility of jim comey. I was not one to doubt it in the first place, but for those who might have been on the fence about it, i mean you dont make this up. This is not made up stuff. This reads like real life happening and him recording it. And so to the extent that this was, you know, orchestrated, released at a time that somebody thought politically it might help them, i dont think it did that, helped someone on the republican side, helped the trump backers. I dont think it did that at all. I think it really shows how jim comeys mind works, and that is to absorb information in a very detailed way and record it in a very detailed way. And that is the hallmark of a truth teller in my view. We urge people to, on your device, your laptop, find a way to read these because it does speak to the process. Those of us who are lay people and not in law or Law Enforcement cant imagine taking notes like this. But he says in here that within five minutes of leaving trump tower, within minutes of leaving the white house, he gets in a vehicle or in a corner somewhere and just dumps out everything that happened for posterity, quoting wherever he feels is accurate. And this is a guy this is his process, by the way, his lifes work. Exactly. This is what fbi agents are trained to do from day one. You know, the recording of events and statements and observing things in a way that others might not, that a layperson might not, the attention to detail. And i just think that is. Youre right. Its hugely important for people to see themselves because weve heard about the comey memos for so long now. And even in reading his book, it reads differently because, you know, thats a novel in a way. Thats, you know, literature. This is more like an fbi agent report. You know. Theyre called fbi 302s. Thats how this reads. I think it shows his training and how it comes through. Frank, im coming to you next. Before i do, i want to play james comey was a guest on Rachel Maddow in this very studio earlier tonight. And he talked about this very process. Youve explained to congress that you didnt write memos like this after other interactions with other president s. What trained you or told you or made you believe that you should write a memo like this after interactions with President Trump . Well, the first meeting in particular, i was concerned that i needed a record to show the other Intelligence Agency chiefs who had been with me but didnt stay behind for the second private meeting. And i also was worried that i was meeting alone with the president to talk about things that were relating to him and to the fbis core responsibilities. And given the nature of the person, as i understood the president elect, he might not tell the truth about those if it ever became an issue, and so i needed a written record. So, frank, lets agree on the process. Lets agree that it would be near impossible and damn unlikely for a guy like him to exit the white house and make up a fiction as if to assume where the future is going to take us and how that fiction would help out someday. So that said, as a career investigator, when you look at these comey memos, what stands out to you . So mimi is right. First, they are consistent with someone who has been in the law and around investigations for decades, and thats exactly what you do is you have this you gain this incredible ability to absorb large amounts of information, understand where people said some certain things in certain conversations, and then quickly recount all of them. And you learn that in part because you dont want to sit in front of subjects a lot and take notes or tap out on a laptop. You completely distract any interview youre doing. So its consistent with that. It adds to his credibility. Now, what i see, lets look at it from the other lens, which is what it tells us about the white house. I read the memos and i see dysfunction. I see a bunch of newbies and rookies who just dont understand how government works. I mean at one point Reince Priebus asked comey if hes an attorney. I mean theres no homework done on anybody. They leave the fbi director alone with the president. The president asks comey if he can investigate the hooker allegation in moscow just to make it kind of go away, continually asks if mccabe has a problem with him. Its odd. And, you know, you reported earlier that weve heard that the president s hired a couple of organized crime attorneys from florida. I got to tell you, from what we see in these memos, maybe thats the right way to go. I worked in the fbi in south florida. Theres a lot of russian mobsters down there, and maybe these two attorneys now how to deal with that. For the record, they were on the prosecutorial side and not the defense attorney side. But to your point, they have been in the business a long time. Hey, kim, you have the dual burden of being an attorney and a reporter. About the reporter side of you . Ill make a suggestion that maybe a president , so few days into his administration, having doubts about his National Security adviser, is a story. What else do you find . What does the journalist in you find to be the stories in this collection of documents . Yeah. I mean it gave us just a few more details of what we already saw. I agree with what was said about james comey and his consistency. It really shows that he has been consistent from his testimony before congress, through his book, and now his book tour in the story that he tells. But we do get additional nuggets about the concern that President Trump was expressing about his own National Security adviser, someone who he publicly defended even after he was fired for some time, but privately really expressed concern about. We also saw the president really backing the idea of jailing journalists who published reports based on leaks, saying how a couple days in jail and theyll start talking. Im paraphrasing. And james comey even laughing after that. I dont know if it was out of discomfort. Lets hope so because clearly thats not the way our First Amendment works here in america. But just more details about these conversations that they had that really paints the president as somebody who was concerned about people and his own team, who was consistent, who would tell james comey one thing and a few minutes later tell him the exact opposite. For example, he told him that Reince Priebus, then the chief of staff, didnt know that they were having dinner, and then later said that he did. Just a lot of inconsistency that is a stark contrast to the consistency in statement that you see coming from comey himself. Mimi rocah, some of the other news of this day, Rudy Giuliani. Does he have a magic sway over Robert Mueller . Are his charms such that mueller is going to say, you know what, youre right. Weve gone way too far on this. Im going to end it now. I really doubt that. You know, i read somewhere that giuliani is saying hes being brought in to try and negotiate an end to this, a swift end. And he even said a couple of weeks. Is that the definition of Wishful Thinking . I mean a prosecution is not a negotiation, and weve kind of heard this song before. We heard it at one point when there was a lot of news about whether the president was going to sit for an interview. And one of the conditions he was going to put on the interview was that they agreed to then wrap it up afterwards. You know, look, mueller is going to end his investigation, unless somebody else interferes and makes him end it sooner in some more forceful way hes going to end it when hes done investigating and has uncovered every stone that he needs to uncover, and not because he has some prior maybe Good Relationship with giuliani. I dont know. They certainly have a history together. But this isnt about charm, and this isnt about negotiation. So, kim, is it possible that giuliani may be coming onboard in the role of what we used to call a rainmaker, in this case a sayer of sound bites and not necessarily legal acumen . I think its definitely its that and maybe a dual role of trying to keep the president from doing something stupid that could make things only worse for him, perhaps even like firing Robert Mueller. I think giuliani and maybe other people in his some people in his orbit recognize what a bad idea that would be and that hes coming in just to sort of keep the president calm, sort of act as an intermediary, say, hey, i got this. Rudy giuliani, as you know, had a long history as a federal prosecutor and understands how this works. I dont think he believes he can bring this to a speedy end, but i think he knows that the president trusts him. Hes been a very faithful backer of donald trump for a long time, and perhaps he wants to come in to keep the president from harming himself. Frank, whats the upside of rosenstein telling the president hes not a target, and lets not forget the report includes the Mueller Investigation et al. And the cohen raid here in new york. Is that an example of hopeful or cute wording, and how can he get away saying Something Like that, which clearly will have a demonstrable effect in bringing down the temperature in the west wing . Well, its buying time, and he can get away with it because its accurate. Theyre not yet ready to charge the president apparently, so theyre being truthful. But theyre also at the same time trying to buy time so that they can stay in their position and get their job done. And if it calms the president down, if it delays firing or something hasty of either mueller or rosenstein, all the better. But lets understand that you can turn from a subject to a target in a heartbeat whenever the prosecution says theyre ready to go. And, frank, that line about manafort being a potential back channel to russia today really gets your attention, doesnt it . Yeah. Look, ive said before that muellers really like an epidemiologist, looking for the origin of a disease or virus. Where did we catch the russian infection . And its looking more and more like manafort was at least one vector of that russian infection, the conduit for it, and mueller is going to get to where it starts. Mimi, why would Reince Priebus have wanted to know if Michael Flynn was under a fisa warrant surveillance . Enough to ask the visiting fbi director. Sounds like he wanted to know what they didnt know because if flynn was under fisa surveillance, then they would know that theres a lot more that the investigators at the fbi knows that the president and his team may not know was set. So theyre trying to figure out, you know, where the ball is and how bad it is, i think. We hope everyone is keeping a whiteboard at home because sometimes thats what it takes to follow the tentacles of this story, especially on a night like tonight. Kimberly atkins, frank, figliuzzi, mimi rocah, our thanks to the three of you for starting off our broadcast in this style tonight. Coming up, the politics of what this all means for the president and this white house. And, later, President Trump learning history on the job and trying to convince all of us that were all learning this with him in realtime. The 11th hour just Getting Started on a thursday night. Nothing says spring like fresh flowers, so lets promote our spring