he we know the calls are being made today. we know the letters are being sent today. but in the moment when he was taking the kind of questioning, he does what he so often does. he deflected. would he have been making the calls today if peter alexander hadn t asked those questions yesterday? that is a great question. you know how this process works better than me. the way i understand this from conversation i ve had with past and present white house officials is that there is a protocol for the way that these calls and letters take place that the pentagon formally provides as described to me like a package to the white house that communicates to them the names of the fallen. then the white house military office goes through the details when it s presented to the president so the president is not put into some uncomfortable situation of reaching out to families that may have been estranged. but the bottom line is we have gotten to a very ugly place where you have former president
for doing your job. i don t know why you would want to kick your predecessor for how you think they should have done theirs. but i also just when you hear the story, take a step back. and john kelly lost his son. and now this is front and center again for john kelly? it s so unnecessary. aged, you know, this president is bringing out the worst in everyone. you re seeing martin dempsey tweeting how horrified he was. this is a geniusing words that he probably would not use publicly. but he is so offended by what he has seen. general dempsey, as the congressman just said tweeting potus 43 and 44. that s presidents bush and obama and first ladies cared deeply, worked tirelessly for the serving, the fallen and their families. not politics. sacred trust. let me trust you on this point. we are not raising general kelly s son s death. donald trump raids it in an interview. he did an interview this morning, and he said this.
of places where the president never backed down, even when it on a simple apology might have been a simple way out of it. it s just not the way he works. he will fight to the end. as one white house official privately told me, a matter of months ago, they said this guy loves the fight. he smells blood. he loves the smell of blood. this was not in the context of what we re talking about now. but that is the way the president views things. it s him against everybody else. and even in this circumstance about the responsibility of presidents to comfort the families of the fallen. it s a place where the president feels when his back is against the wall, he simply needs to fight. eli stokols, do you get the sense from talking to your sources that this is a strategy that has been green lit on the staff side as well, that they ve nodded their heads and agreed that having donald trump continue to question what his predecessors did in response to families who lost loved ones serving and prot
ro rosenstein. say how central of a figure is reince priebus to the mueller probe? he is an important witness. there is a lot of questions about was there a quid pro quo? or what has the white house given to russia for what russia did to help donald trump. so reince priebus would see the deliberations over the sanctions. he would have seen the firing of comey, the pressure that donald trump put on comey to, you know, not prosecute or go after michael flynn. he would have also been around when the russians were in the oval office, and it s alleged that the president was leaking national security secrets and also talking about the great relief that he had. he has seen a lot. hopefully he is just truthful. that s all we have. if he is not, isn t he under the danger of a perjury? it s one thing to be loyal. but if you perjure yourself to protect a president, you can t count on an arpaio-style pardon to clear things up, can you? no you can t. but reince seems like someone who has been
his augthoritarian impulses threaten the system of our democracy, the checks and balance on the executive, the courts, the legislative branch, the media has worked to undermine the media and the very notion of objective truths being something that we can actually pursue and find and agree to as a country. those are the things that this president does that are destructive beyond just the isolationist foreign policy. and i know that that is something that also weighs heavily on senator mccain. as john mccain blaze as legacy, there are real people who need his leadership style right now. yesterday i met with dreamer, joe kennedy and stephanie murphy and i. and they told us. one of them said we don t need politics right now. we need leadership. they don t care where the solution comes from. they just need leadership. really quick, what is he going to do to john mccain? is he going to send a mean tweet to john mccain? does he have any idea who john mccain is? the guy is like canned tu