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Him some of these questions again. of course, it s important to underscore this one final point. based our reporting, these conversations are going on between the president s legal team and federal investigators. it s not clear that the president is engaged in this conversation at this point in any way. now, what we also saw over the weekend is how stung the president is by the fire and fury book referring to himself as a very stable genius. carol lee, you ve followed this president for a long time. this gets to the core part of that narrative where there s been a lot of the picking at errors unintentional errors or problems on copy editing in the book. but the core mayortive of a president who at times seems disengaged and. right. and having trouble with even keeping up with his brief, that really is a stinging, issue ....
For him. we ve seen the president reacting to the very kinds of personal things that are outlined in this book whether it s we saw obviously the attacks on his son and his son-in-law and his daughter and he reacted very viscerally to those. now he s reacting to this narrative he s not engaged, questions about his mental stability and whether he s fit for office. these are questions that go back to the campaign. he was dealing with them then. now he s taking them head-on, just an unusual wave engaging. he s saying i m stable and i m a genius and i went to the best college for college. and so he s getting down and engaging in this debate and this fight with this author and the things that he s saying instead of pivoting and trying to ignore it and hoping that it will go away. in fact, his overreaction if you will to the book is feeding ....
That s absolutely not true. everybody sees the president s tweets, the whole white house goes into a spasm when he tweets. but john kelly is saying like everybody says, i have to look away. i have to somehow rationalize. how do i do this? i shut my eyes. imagine being the chief of staff, reince priebus never could control the tweeting. john kelly s not trying. well, thank goodness we didn t have tweeting during president clinton s time although he fully engaged and we had a semblance of that. i think you have a couple things here. number one, president trump clearly believes the best defense is a good offense. so he s taking on michael wolff, as you noted earlier and that shifts all the attention the book as opposed to the substantive agenda and some of the major international problems we re facing. as a chief of staff, you have to let the president be the ....
Whether there s any serious consideration of another special counsel after that referral from lindsey graham and chuck grassley? we ve seen jeff sessions going in the direction of reopening old matters involving hillary clinton but so far he said he s seen no reason to appoint a second special counsel. and we should point out that whole uranium issue stemmed from a steve bannon breitbart influenced book, the clinton cash book. that s right. and has been well fact checked by glen kesler and others. it sure has. thank you so much. great to see you. and coming up, frenemies. why are the president s republican critics standing by their man? this is andrea mitchell reports only on msnbc. i don t know why i didn t get screened a long time ago. ....
Now we ve shifted to talk about this subject and his competence and so forth. talk about overreact package. if he had ignored the book and let the mainstream media point out errors or flaws in the book and done the work for him, i think it s resonating because it fits a narrative that people have had about this president, and now he s contributing to it with his tweets. i wanted to let s go through the tweet on saturday morning and then take a look at the whole question of what a chief of staff is supposed to do. this is mike wolfe on morning joe today. you ve been a chief of staff. this was michael wolff being asked about john kelly and whether he could be the hall monitor to stop the president from tweeting. there was an interesting thing that happened i think on saturday morning when all that tweeting was starting and a reporter asked kelly if he knew what do you think of the tweets. he said i didn t see them. ....