The NPR Politics Podcast - James Comey Testifies

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

The former FBI Director accused the White House of telling 'lies, plain and simple." Plus a few other political stories in the news this week. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and editor/correspondent Ron Elving. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This week on Invisibilia, emotions. I felt at times that maybe my feelings were too intense for the situation. I had never felt anything like that before. We introduce a completely different way of thinking about your emotions. Listen in the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Mario Partnope, a New Hampshire native living in Peekskill, New York. This podcast is recorded at 5.10 p.m. on Thursday, June 8. Things may have changed by the time you hear it.

Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Cue that musical fanfare. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast, here to talk about fired FBI Director James Comey's testimony today, and a couple other stories in the news this week. I'm Scott Detrow, I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Carrie Johnson, the Justice Correspondent. I'm Mara Liason, National Political Correspondent. And I'm Ron Elving, Editor Correspondent.

And Mara is joining us from the White House. All right, guys, in the words of Vice President Mike Pence today, it has been a banner week for infrastructure. Excellent. Obviously, James Comey is the news of the day, the news of the week, maybe the news of the month. Who knows? We'll see. It's still early. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to recap it a little bit. We're going to talk about kind of key moments that jumped out to us. And then we are going to make our way through the high points of about three hours of super dramatic Senate testimony. Does that sound good? Absolutely. Sounds great to me.

All right. So here's where we are. The former director of the FBI testified that he believes he was fired because of the way he handled an investigation into whether President Trump's campaign colluded with Russian operatives. He says Trump pressured him in the Oval Office to drop an investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. But at the same time, Comey also said that up to the point he was fired, Trump himself was never the subject of an FBI investigation. Before Comey showed up this morning, he released seven pages of written testimony documenting five different conversations with Trump about Russia or Flynn. He confirmed a lot of what we had already seen in the news, that Trump asked Comey for loyalty, that he asked Comey to let go of the Flynn investigation. He also said that Trump repeatedly referred to the Russia investigation as a cloud. So that's the written testimony.

So when Comey began speaking today, he started by saying, yeah, Trump did have the right to fire me. And although the law required no reason at all to fire an FBI director, the administration then chose to defame me and more importantly the FBI by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader.

Those were lies, plain and simple. And I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them. And I'm so sorry that the American people were told them. Those were lies, plain and simple. Then Comey started to walk through those different conversations he had with Trump about the Russia and Flynn investigations. And he said something interesting. He said that he began to document those conversations beginning in early January because he was concerned the president would lie about their conversations. I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document.

Comey took Trump's words, I hope you can let this go, as a direction to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn. I took it as a direction. I mean, as the president of the United States, with me alone saying I hope this, I took it as this is what he wants me to do. Comey believes he was fired for his handling of the Russia investigation. I think the president had his word that I was fired because of the Russia investigation. Something about the way I was conducting it, the president felt created pressure on him that he wanted to relieve. And I think this is the big thing that's sticking with me. Every time Comey was asked whether all these conversations,

whether the fact that he was then fired was obstruction of justice, Comey said something like this. I don't think it's for me to say whether the conversation I had with the president was an effort to obstruct. I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning. But that's a conclusion I'm sure the special counsel will work towards to try and understand what the intention was there and whether that's an offense. There's a reason for that, Scott. James Comey might well be a witness in an ongoing criminal

investigation into possible obstruction of justice by members of the Trump administration. He's a really smart lawyer. He prosecuted mob cases. He prosecuted gun cases. He prosecuted terrorism cases. He's not usurping the role of the prosecutor here. He knows his testimony may be later date for the special counsel. And so he's remaining a witness. So big picture, what's sticking in your head as we sit here a little after 5 o'clock the day of this testimony? once was deputy United States attorney general under a Republican president, has accused the current president of the United States of lying and demeaning him and the FBI workforce, and essentially is pitting his own credibility against that of the president of the United States,

gambling that he, James Comey, is going to win that fight. And that is a lot. Ron, how about you? I took away, first of all, the confirmation of the seriousness of the Russian interference in the election in 2016. At one point, Comey said that there had been hundreds, possibly more than a thousand instances of the Russians hacking into the workings of various incendiary organizations, political campaigns, nonprofits. And we also know that there was an effort made to get into some of the election apparatus, not necessarily to change votes. We have no evidence of any votes being changed, and that has been widely noted, but also with the intent of fouling the process and perhaps delegitimizing it. And this, James Comey said at several different junctures in his testimony, this was a big deal. The reason this is such a big deal is we have this big, messy, wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time, but nobody tells us

what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for except other Americans. And that's wonderful and often painful, but we're talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion and lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it. It's not about Republicans or Democrats. They're coming after America, which I hope we all love equally. They want to undermine our credibility in the face of the world. They think that this great experiment of ours is a threat to them. And so they're going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as possible.

That's what this is about. And how about you, Mara? What is the big thought? I guess, what can't you let go about this hearing? I'll put it that way. Well, what I found extraordinary was how little the Republican senators tried to destroy James Comey. They accepted him as credible. They praised him. And that was completely different from the strategy of the White House, from the president's personal lawyer, who categorically denied the things that Comey said the president said, really seeming to revel in a he said, he said situation. So they seem to be operating with completely different political strategies. On the Hill, the Republicans were merely trying to say, well, if the president did that, maybe he was a bully, but he wasn't and the president of the United States, who even among his own Republicans, gets low marks for credibility.

Trump bullies his way and acts in an undisciplined, impulsive, sometimes even cruel manner. And he causes things to happen that are the exact opposite of what he wants. And that's actually something I've been thinking a lot about, because I don't think this current scandal is unique in the sense that so many high profile political scandals get much worse because of the actions that the people involved take because of the scandals. I'm thinking a lot of the Bill Clinton Whitewater scandal, which ended up being almost all about things that he did in a defensive way or things that he did once he knew the spotlight was already on him, that investigators were already looking into him. Well, the cliche is that the cover up is worse than the crime. In this case,

this is something even more than a cover up. Hey, Mara, I was trying to frame that as an original thought and not a cliche. Sorry. But I mean, it's Trump, you know, one day after his White House says we fired Comey because of how he mistreated Hillary Clinton. And then he says, nope, I was thinking about Russia as I was firing him. All right. So now we're at this point where there's the questions of what sort of collusion happened or didn't happen between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, but this equally important question that today's hearing was really all about of, was Trump taking actions or was Trump saying things intended to derail an investigation? And I think a lot of that has to come down to, and this is something Comey said, and this is something a lot of questions were about, comes down to Trump's mindset, his intent here. And

there were a couple things that Comey talked about that are key for that. One of them was this dinner that Comey and Trump had at the White House just about a week or so into Trump's presidency, excerpts of which were like, frankly, hilarious to read in Comey's written testimony about them sitting awkwardly across the table from each other alone in the room, not knowing what to say. Here's how Comey talked about it today. Well, my impression, and again, it's my impression, I could always be wrong, but my common sense told me that what was going on is either he had concluded or someone had told him that you didn't, you've already asked Comey to stay and you didn't get anything for it.

And that the dinner was an effort to build a relationship. In fact, he asked specifically of loyalty in the context of asking me to stay. And as I said, what was odd about that is we'd already talked twice about it by that point. And he'd said, I very much hope you'll stay. I hope you'll stay. In fact, I just remembered sitting here a third one. You've seen the picture of me walking across the blue room and What the president whispered in my ear was I really look forward to working with you So after those encounters and that was just a few days before you yeah

That was on the 20 the Sunday after the inauguration the next Friday I have dinner and the president begins by wanting to talk about my job And so I'm sitting there thinking wait a minute three times We already, you've already asked me to stay or talked about me staying. My common sense, again, I could be wrong, but my common sense told me what's going on here is that he's looking to get something in exchange for granting my request to stay in the job. In the way that Comey phrased this, he said that he thought that Trump wanted to make it feel like a patronage relationship. Carrie, is the director of the FBI a patronage relationship to the president? You know, not quite, Scott. In fact, the FBI director serves a 10-year term to insulate him

or her from any one presidency. James Comey, as you said earlier, acknowledged that a president could fire the FBI director at any time for any reason, but he got a sense that something else was going on here. That's why he was documenting his meetings with Trump in notes. Yes, for any reason and for no reason. And that last little addendum is rather significant in this case because Trump did not owe him any sort of explanation whatsoever. He could simply say, I want another FBI director. So another key moment then is Valentine's Day. This is just after Michael Flynn has been forced out for lying basically about the heart of the conversation he had with Russia's ambassador during the transition. So this is the moment that got so much attention when the New York Times first reported it. This is the moment where Comey and Trump and several other people are in

the Oval Office. And Comey said he got a sense that something might be up when Trump asked him to stay behind and he asked everybody else to leave the room. What was your impression of that type of action? Have you ever seen anything like that before? No. My impression was something big is about to happen. I need to remember every single word that is spoken. And, again, I could be remember every single word that is spoken. And again, I could be wrong. I'm 56 years old. I've been seeing a few things. My sense was the attorney general knew he shouldn't be leaving, which is why he was lingering. And I don't know

Mr. Kushner well, but I think he picked up on the same thing. And so I knew something was about to happen that I needed to pay very close attention to. And that something that was going to happen was the let this go conversation. Absolutely. And Comey, no dummy when it comes to building cases that would stand up in court, pointed out that the mere fact that the president ushered everybody else out of the Oval Office and invited Comey to stay on his own was evidence of the president's mindset. A really significant fact to me is, so why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office? Why would you kick the attorney general, the president, the chief of staff out to talk to me if it was about something else? And so that to me, as an investigator, is a very significant fact.

There was something going on there that was significant about Donald Trump's intent that might be useful later on in an FBI investigation. In fact, he said one of the reasons that he was taking notes was that, you know, this was an investigative avenue moving forward for the Bureau. Mara, what did you make of that?

Well, you know, what I also thought was so interesting about that scene that he painted is he's such a good storyteller. He talked about how Attorney General Sessions hesitated. And he said he seemed to know that this wasn't right. Why was I being asked to stay without my immediate superior? And then when Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, stuck his head in the door because they were all just still hanging out in the hall. They didn't go very far.

He shooed him away. So that really painted this picture. And as he even described it, as you're evaluating this, you know, these are the kinds of facts that somebody would look toward to determine if something happened that was inappropriate. So this all comes down to Trump's mindset. Comey, like we said, thought it was notable. Trump wanted to clear the room. And there was a lot of pushback from Republicans on the panel today saying, you know, so what? He wasn't saying, hey, do this or else. He wasn't saying, I'm the president of the United States and I'm ordering you to not do this investigation. He was saying, I hope you can let this go. What can we make of this word parsing and this phrasing? The exact words mean a lot if you want to build a legal

or a political case that some kind of wrongdoing was occurring here, some kind of impropriety. And so Idaho Senator James Risch really was trying to cross-examine James Comey, the former FBI director, about what exactly the president said and what it meant. He did not direct you to let it go. Not in his words, no. He did not order you to let it go. Not in his words, no. He did not order you to let it go. Again, those words are not in order. No. He said, I hope.

Now, like me, you probably did hundreds of cases, maybe thousands of cases, charging people with criminal offenses. And, of course, you have knowledge of the thousands of cases out there where people have been charged. Do you know of any case where a person has been charged for obstruction of justice, or for that matter, any other criminal offense where they said or thought they hoped for an outcome? I don't know well enough to answer. You know, I point out there, Scott, James Comey went on to say that he did view President Trump's statements to him alone in the Oval Office that day to be a directive. I took it as a direction. I mean, as the president of the United States, with me alone saying, I hope this, I took it as this is what he wants me to do.

Now, I didn't obey that, but that's the way I took it as, this is what he wants me to do. I didn't obey that, but that's the way I took it. You may have taken it as a direction, but that's not what he said. Correct. That's what I said. He said, I hope. Those are exact words. Correct. So the one other thing I want to walk through that was a big topic of conversation today was that line in the letter when Trump fired Comey, saying, you assured me three times that I was not under investigation. Comey kind of confirmed that today and kind of didn't confirm that. He did say three different times for a variety of reasons. He said something to Trump along the lines of, you are not the personal subject of an investigation. And yet we know there is an

investigation going on. What is the difference there? What is going on with what exactly Comey was telling Trump? Remember, Comey was deputized by other members of the intelligence community after Donald Trump was elected to pull aside Donald Trump after a briefing and tell Donald Trump that there was this salacious dossier about him, which was, you know, as Comey said today, not quite getting the relationship off to a good start. That real quick, I'll just say that was the hotel document. You can probably remember it from that. We'll leave it there. And we should say that a lot of those details were pretty memorable. Most of them have never been confirmed. Yeah. And so Comey felt the need in the course of that interaction because he says the president responded, the president-elect responded very

forcefully in denying anything like that ever happened to tell the president, listen, I'm not J. Edgar Hoover. I'm not holding this over your head. I didn't want him thinking that I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over him in some way. I was briefing him on it because we had been told by the media it was about to launch. We don't want to be keeping that from him. And if there was something, he needed to know this was being said. But I was very keen not to leave him with an impression that the Bureau was trying to do something to him. And so that's the context in which I said, sir, we're not personally investigating you. And that's how the issue

first came up. On a couple of other occasions, Trump asked directly the FBI director whether he was being investigated. And Comey reasoned that the Bureau may have been conducting a counterintelligence investigation that would sweep in parts of Trump's campaign, but that he himself, Donald Trump, had not yet become a subject of the investigation. So the answer to that question was no. And Comey said, as of May 9th, the day he was fired, Trump was not under FBI investigation. But he, not that it was all about what he, Donald Trump, did, but that it was about some other people who might have some relationship to him. And as head of the campaign, it was relevant. And Trump kept pressing the FBI director, according to the fired FBI director, to publicly come out and exonerate or clear Donald Trump in this matter. And Comey

said, listen, sir, I don't know that you want me to do that. Because if something changes in this investigation, I'm going to have a duty to correct the record and to do that publicly. And that is the exact thing he was doing that caused so many problems for Hillary Clinton's campaign last year. He felt the need in late October to send that note to Congress, because he had spoken before about it and the situation has changed. But Mara, for all of the time that the White House and the Republican National Committee and other high profile Republicans were trashing James Comey today, were questioning what he was saying, were disputing what he was saying, that particular thing is the thing they kept latching

onto saying, look, this proves what we've been saying all along. Right. And the interesting thing is that when Comey was fired, in the letter firing him, the president said, you told me three times I was not the subject of an investigation. And in Comey's testimony, he says he suggested to the president that if he wanted someone to step out in public and say this, the most appropriate thing to do would be to call the acting deputy attorney general. The White House counsel should contact. That's the proper way you go about this. And we don't know if Trump ever did that. All right. So let's get into the way that Republicans and the way that the White House are responding to all of this. One key thing that they're really criticizing Comey for was an interesting revelation he made today.

And let's just listen to Comey. Again, this all starts when Trump writes that tweet saying, you know, Comey better not hope there are tapes. President tweeted on Friday after I got fired that I better hope there's not tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night because it didn't dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape. And my judgment was I needed to get that out into the public square. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn't do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it. And was that Mr. Wittes? No, no. Who was that asked a close friend of mine to do it. And was that Mr. Wittes?

No, no. Who was that? A good friend of mine who's a professor at Columbia Law School. I mean, I heard that and I had two wow moments. One was the fact that Comey makes this choice to get that information out there and then straight up admits it. And the other, I thought that might lead to the appointment of a special counsel. He was right. Yeah. He was right. Yeah.

He was right. So, you know, let me just say this. As somebody who's covered Comey for a long time, many years ago, as investigations by reporters and others got underway about enhanced interrogation and what we now call torture of detainees, James Comey wrote some memos back in the day when he was in the Justice Department, the George W. Bush Justice Department, that all of a sudden found their way to the New York Times, in which he expressed some serious reservations about these techniques and this treatment of detainees. But he ultimately concluded that some of these

techniques were legal. All these years later, the New York Times published a story explaining and broadcasting his reservations at the time. So this is a strategy that James Comey has deployed with success in the past. It's not altogether a surprise. And we had a lot of people on Twitter asking whether this law professor is in some kind of trouble, jeopardy, anything like that. Comey clarified that the memo he wrote about the go easy on Flynn conversation hired to represent him personally here. That is something he disagreed with, and that was the main line of attack when he gave a statement at the press club after this hearing was over. Although Mr. Comey testified that he only leaked the memos in response to a tweet, the public record reveals that the New York Times was quoting from those memos the day before the referenced tweet, which belies Mr.

Comey's excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information and appears to be entirely retaliatory. We will leave it to the appropriate authorities to determine whether these leaks should be investigated along with all the others that are being investigated. Real quick before we move on to the broader point here, that timeline is not right. There was no story in the New York Times quoting the memos before the May 12th tweet, the memo story on the 16th. So Comey says it was unclassified. Kasowitz says privileged information. I mean, what's the reality here with a memo like this? Do we know for sure at this point? to prevent fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates from testifying. Eventually, he gave up that argument. There was some claim last week that the White House might assert executive privilege

to prevent James Comey from testifying, decided not to do that. Comey is now a private citizen, and it's hard to imagine since President Trump has been talking on Twitter and elsewhere about a lot of these conversations that the privilege remains intact. And Ron, we were talking before about how Trump has really kind of weaponized the verb leak to make it seem like it's always an illegal thing. That's clearly not the case. It depends on the information itself. Giving information to a reporter is not in itself, we should say, illegal.

Leaking implies that in some sense or another, you have cloaked your transaction with the reporter. That is not always the case. Sometimes people leak something in very highly visible forms. But the idea of it, and it goes back for decades, is that someone in a clandestine fashion passes information, good or bad information, to a reporter who hopefully checks that out, makes sure that it is actually verifiable information before using it. But there is nothing illegal about that if the information is not classified in terms of national security, if there is no legal bar to it being shared by the person who shared it. Now, we have seen cases in which material that should not have been leaked from a legal standpoint was published, and the publisher of that, the reporter, the newspaper on who's leaking, the reddest spot on that

map would be 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So there's really no point in the pot calling the kettle black or people pointing fingers about leaking. There is actually a point. It's a political point. And the whole Kazowitz statement today was vintage Trump, which is if somebody comes after him, as he says, he counterpunches 10 times harder. And he really went after Comey. And all along his strategy for this story has been to call the whole Russia investigation a hoax, fake news, and to say that the real story is the leaks. Aha, now they have Comey, a self-professed leaker. He compared Comey to others in the government who are, quote, actively attempting to undermine this administration with selective and illegal leaks.

But they're also saying we're vindicated by Comey today. I mean, can you have it both ways? No, you can't have it both ways. On the one hand, they're picking out the parts of Comey's testimony that are good for them. We're vindicated. We're not under investigation. See, the president was right. But on the other things, Comey is lying or they're saying that the president directly contradicts him. So that's going to be a hard strategy to pursue. This is why I think Senate Republicans did not pursue this and merely focused on making the case that what President Trump did or said to Comey, they didn't dispute that he said it, they just said that it didn't rise to the level of obstruction. Carrie? You know, for a president and a White House that has repeatedly branded

the Russia investigation as a witch hunt, there's one way which James Comey's testimony today was not at all helpful to the president. Comey says the president told him in a conversation, listen, I didn't do anything wrong. You should come out and say that. But if you find that any of my satellite aides might have been involved in any wrongdoing somewhere, go ahead and investigate that. Is this a witch hunt or is it not a witch hunt? And by the way, who are these satellites? And does that include Jared Kushner or is he just talking about Carter Page? Yes.

How far out does someone have to be from the planet to be a satellite as opposed to, say, a moon or a son-in-law or whatever. Well, I think we'll find out from special counsel Robert Mueller eventually. Can I ask? It is, as someone I think rather eloquently said, I think it was one of the dozens of people CNN commentating this afternoon, it's Mueller time. You didn't even say Comey don't play that yet today. No, I haven't had a chance, but somebody's got to set that up. I can't just throw it out there. Yeah, you can't. Okay. I just want to like be psychologists for a

minute. I mean, we've done it here and there before with mixed success, but in the whole Trump-Comey relationship, one thing I've thought a lot about is clearly this Russia investigation really upsets Trump. But I also wonder deep down, does Trump stew at the fact that so many observers seem to think that Trump may not be president if Jim Comey never sends that letter to Congress? That Trump, kind of a patronage relationship, Trump maybe on one level feels the patronage goes the other way? That's a pretty deep thought. I don't know we need to go that deep because there's every evidence that the president is offended by the Russia investigation on the level of you're trying to delegitimize my wonderful and stunning victory, especially in the electoral college. Have I told you how hard it is to win the electoral college? And it is legitimately an achievement of his that has been in some sense or another shadowed or clouded by this Russia investigation talk. The other possibility, of course, is that he did see there was some possibility that all of these things that happened last year, from the DNC hack to John Podesta hack to all the rest of

it, actually did help him in some way. And he doesn't particularly like that idea. What's the best way to characterize the way that Republicans outside of the White House were responding to all this today? Well, I think there were two different tracks. I think Republicans on Capitol Hill were reacting to this in a pretty measured way. I thought there was a lot of bipartisanship. And as we've said before, they were accepting Comey's testimony, but trying to argue that no crime was committed by the president. It wasn't obstruction. I would say that the surrogates and the RNC and the super PAC that ran the ad trashing Comey are really trying to go after Comey as a showboater, a grandstander, somebody

who's in it for himself. I thought Paul Ryan had a really interesting response. Let's just listen to that. Of course, there needs to be a degree of independence between DOJ, FBI, and a White House, and a line of communications established. The president's new at this. He's new to government. And so he probably wasn't steeped in the long-running protocols that established the relationships between DOJ, FBI, and White Houses. He's just new to this. I guess worth pointing out there that Trump is the first president in American history to have zero government or military experience. That is true.

That is true. And the Republican response, I think, in general from the Senate Intelligence Committee to Paul Ryan and all the various commentators and surrogates was to try to find a more benign explanation for the entire matter, for the entire matter with respect to the Russia interference. Gee, that just happened to happen. And that doesn't mean that there was any collusion with anyone on the Republican side, on the American side, or a more benign explanation for what went on between the president and Jim Comey, which now seems to have been such a national obsession. Yeah. Before we wrap this up, we've talked about it here and there in parts, but we should really just drill down for a couple of minutes on a key thing and take advantage of the fact that our excellent justice correspondent is here to explain it to us. And that is obstruction of justice and whether the president may have committed. There's so much we don't know. We don't know what we don't know in terms of this investigation.

And there's a there's a lot to happen still. But but just generally speaking, Carrie, what exactly constitutes obstruction of justice? There are a bunch of different obstruction of justice statutes on the books. Most of them talk about corruptly trying to obstruct, influence, or impede some kind of proceeding. Proceeding would be an FBI investigation, a congressional investigation, and they require prosecutors to prove that somebody intended to do that, that they had a bad state of mind, a guilty mind. A lot of lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee today seem to suggest that because Comey didn't do anything, at the words from Donald Trump to

go light on Michael Flynn, that that couldn't be obstruction. In fact, the law says you don't have to succeed. You just have to corruptly try. So not accomplishing your guilty goal does not clear you in the court of law. But that said, we're still a long way from any kind of criminal matter. As you said, there's a lot that needs to be understood. A lot of people need to be talked to and heard from. And, you know, one thing that might help clear up this back and forth that the FBI director and the president of the United States seem to be fighting about is if there are any tapes of that conversation involving Michael Flynn. You know, the FBI, fired FBI director today more or less said, bring it on. I want to hear those tapes.

They're going to make me look good here. I'm not being facetious. I hope there are, and I'll consent to the release of them. So both of you are in the same findings here. You both hope there's tapes and recordings. Well, all I can do is hope. The president surely knows whether he taped me, and if he did, my feelings aren't hurt. Release all the tapes.

I'm good with it. And when asked about this at the White House, and we've asked many, many times, are there tapes? The president said Comey had better hope they're not, quote, tapes before he starts leaking. Sarah Sanders said again she didn't know if there were tapes. And when we asked, gee, could you look into it, she said, okay, fine, I'll look under some of the couches. So they don't really take this seriously. But the Senate Intelligence Committee and probably any other investigator are going to want the tapes if they exist. But, Carrie, fair to say that whether or not there was obstruction of justice, that falls right in the purview of what Bob Mueller's team is looking at. Yeah, and James Comey was asked a bunch of times today, listen, do you think the president obstructed justice? And he said, that's a question for Bob Mueller.

You know, look at the pattern here. Look at the timeline of Trump first allegedly asking that the eye director to pledge loyalty, leaning on him allegedly to go light on Mike Flynn, calling him a bunch of times to talk about lifting the cloud of the Russia investigation. Comey sort of blows him off. And then Comey gets fired. You know, there's no investigation of Trump as of May 9th. But we don't know whether there is now or what his status is exactly after the Comey firing. And Comey did say he gave all of his memos to Mueller's team. That's very important. So believe it or not, we have even more justice news to talk about on this podcast. But this has gotten pretty dense. So let's take a quick break

and we will come back and talk about the guy tapped to replace Jim Comey and also get into some interesting developments both within and outside this hearing when it comes to Attorney Attorney General Jeff Sessions. We'll be right back. And we're back. Let's talk about one other person Trump has reportedly been in odds with. And this was kind of a surprise. It's Attorney General Jeff Sessions. According to reports this week from ABC News, The New York Times, others, Sessions recently offered to resign. And that's because his relationship with the president has grown so tense. And that owes in part because of Sessions' decision to recuse himself from any investigation into Russian election interference. Here's what Sean Spicer had to say about this on Tuesday. Last question. How would you describe the president's level of confidence in the attorney general, Jeff Sessions?

I have not had a discussion with him about that. Last time you said that, there was a development. I'm answering a question, which is I have not had that discussion with him. So you can't say he has confidence in his Attorney General? I said I have not had a discussion with him on the question. If I haven't had a discussion with him about a subject, I tend not to speak about it. Today, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president did have confidence in Sessions after having a conversation. Carrie, what's going on here?

Well, remember, Jeff Sessions was Donald Trump's earliest supporter in the United States Senate. He even put on one of those Make America Great Again hats on the campaign trail. Many of Donald Trump's close aides in the White House come from Senator Jeff Sessions' staff. So the notion there's a break between the two of them four or five months into the presidency is a big deal. The one thing I was thinking about with all of this is how many people have we read stories about where there's a big break, they're on their way out, you know, things are going terribly. Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, several other people, all of those men still work at the White House. So that was my thought, not knowing any of the key details here, but this just seems to be a White House where there's lots of geysers of venting that happen from different factions. the morning hearing with James Comey, was at a point where James Comey said, well, there

were some other reasons that I, well, the people around me expected that the attorney general was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, even though he hadn't done it yet at that point. Yeah, that was interesting. Do you want to just listen to that real quick? Yes. Our judgment, as I recall, was that he was very close to and inevitably going to recuse himself for a variety of reasons. We also were aware of facts that I can't discuss in an open setting that would make

his continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic. And so we were convinced, and in fact, I think we'd already heard that the career people were recommending that he recuse himself. Well, you know, sometimes the questions that lawmakers ask in these hearings that don't get solid answers are more important than the ones that do get answers. A couple of senators, Democrats, Ron Wyden and Kamala Harris, both asked a series of questions about Sessions, his meetings with Russians. We know that Attorney General Sessions did not report all of his contacts with Russians last year. He's since corrected those records. But there's a cloud over him, too, about whether he's disclosed everything he did as part of the Trump campaign in meeting with people from overseas. And there were lots of

pointed questions about that that Comey said today he couldn't answer in an open session. And there seemed like there were a lot of I can't answer that moments that just boiled down to that's a question that gets to the heart of the investigation and it's not proper and it was hard to read one way or another. This did not seem to be that. I mean, words like problematic, words like we were hearing. I mean, it seemed like there was more there there than a lot of the other non-answers. We'll have to see. But the notion that the FBI has disclosed it's investigating Russian interference in last year's election and whether any Donald Trump campaign aides were in problematic contacts with Russia, of course, would sweep in the attorney general,

who was a major surrogate for Donald Trump. He's going to be a witness, if not more. Of course, you've got to recuse yourself. The many reasons underlying that that James Comey hinted at today, we don't have answers to all that yet. Marc Thiessen Mara, you seem to be saying that even before this moment from Comey, this reported Sessions rift should be viewed differently than these other ones? Well, first of all, we know that the president has been angry with Jeff Sessions for a long time because he doesn't think Sessions should have recused himself from the Russia investigation because that recusal led to a series of events that ended up in the situation we have now,

which is that he has a special counsel. At some point, the tension between Sessions and Trump, and as Kerry explained, Sessions is really the keeper of the flame of Trumpism. He was one of his first supporters and is a key to his conservative base, offered to resign. And Trump said, no, you know, he didn't accept that. And I don't think Jeff Sessions is going to resign. But what was interesting is it took days and days and days for a White House spokesman to say that the president had confidence in him. Sean Spicer couldn't say it. Sarah Huckabee Sanders couldn't say it. Finally, today,

she said she did have a conversation with the president last night, and she can now report that he does have confidence in Jeff Sessions. He has confidence in all his cabinet members. Otherwise, they wouldn't be there. You know, in one way or another, I feel like working for Donald Trump might lead to a lot of kind of ego blows because it seems like a lot of times top staffers are being hung out in the wind one way or another. The Trump apparatus is not quick to have their backs. And I think of things like this. And then I think of more minor things like him not letting Sean Spicer meet the pope a couple of weeks ago. Yes, he demands loyalty, but he doesn't give a lot back. Well, speaking of people who might have new jobs working for Donald Trump, lost in all of this, President Trump announced yesterday morning, where else?

On Twitter, that he has selected a new director for the FBI, a new nominee to be FBI director, Christopher Wray. Carrie, who is Christopher Wray? He's been a criminal defense lawyer for about a dozen years now. His most famous client was, in fact, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in the Bridgegate scandal. But before that, he was a senior official in the George W. Bush Justice Department. He played a role in terrorism cases and policy after the September 11th attacks. He ran the criminal division, which is a very big job at the Justice Department. During a very active period when DOJ was prosecuting a lot of corporate fraud cases, he oversaw some of the Enron cases and worked closely with his boss at the time,

none other than Deputy Attorney General James Comey. So this is a pretty conventional pick. And I feel like the Senate from the beginning was telegraphing to Trump, we want a conventional pick, we want a career law enforcement person. And then Trump's instinct was to go the opposite direction. First, he was really interested in John Cornyn. Then he was really interested in Joe Lieberman, both of who took themselves out of the running. But in the end, we see Trump go the conventional route. He did. And I don't think it was a coincidence that Donald Trump announced this on Twitter in the early morning, the day before James Comey was set to testify. We also know that he didn't notify key members of Congress in the Senate about this choice. And I'm told a lot of the interest groups who had a chair at the table were not told until after Trump tweeted it out to the world. Mara, do things like that matter, not reaching out to allies beforehand to give them a heads up?

I think that in this case, you know, not terrible. It's not like he's a controversial nominee. But I think overall, they don't seem to have all of the mechanisms of generating goodwill firing on all cylinders, if that's a terrible metaphor. But it's important because you want to have all the members of your team working together. And it's true on legislation. We've seen this so many times. He announces, we're going to have a tax bill on Wednesday. And his aides look at each other and go, really? We don't have one ready. And it was announced in this case, Ray's case, on Wednesday morning on Twitter, a good while before anyone was really ready to put out all the paper and all of the good things that everyone was going to have to say. And there were many good things to say. But it was all

scooped by the president putting it out on Twitter at dawn on Wednesday. I can already tell you that this position, Christopher Wray's position, FBI director, which requires Senate confirmation, is not going to be as easy as it would appear. And I can already tell you what I think is going to be the first question to Christopher Wray. Please do. Did Donald Trump ask you to pledge loyalty? Yeah. Oh, that's going to be the question for every single nominee from here on in. Okay. We are wrapping up our justice hour here on the Politics Podcast. So let's just end with this. When it comes to Comey, when it comes to this Russia investigation, what the heck happens next? I think Special Counsel Mueller works mostly in silence. We

know he's assembled already a pretty crackerjack team, a former Watergate prosecutor, his former chief of staff at the FBI. Andrew Weissman, who was a general counsel of the FBI, led the Enron task force, and before that used to bust the chops of mobsters in Brooklyn. And finally, a woman named Jeannie Rhee, who was a very senior and very smart lawyer in the Obama Justice Department. These people are smart. They're going to take their time, and they don't fool around. Sounds like a Justice League. There you go. Ron, major eye roll from Ron. No, no, it was respectful

though. It was respectful. That was as if to say, yes, exactly. Okay. I'll take your word on that. That is it for this portion of the podcast. We're going to spring Carrie free. Thank you, Carrie. In a moment, Mara, Ron, and I will stick around to talk about, oh, yeah, those other things that happened in the world of politics this week.

Be right back. Okay, so one of the big themes of the first five months of the Trump administration is that the big picture legislative items, the things that all Republicans care about and want to do, have been stalled. But this week, as we've been looking elsewhere, they've been a little less unstalled, still kind of in the stalled part of the world, but there's been some interesting progress. First on health care, seems like the Senate has gotten more serious. Senate Republicans had a big meeting Tuesday. Vice President Pence was there.

And they're getting closer to being on the same page. And they're saying they want to have a vote on an Obamacare repeal by the end of June. That's right. And it was a working lunch on Tuesday, their regular meeting of the caucus of all the Republicans in the Senate. And they had had a task force that had been meeting and having staff work over the recess. And they have apparently cobbled something together that tries to address the enormous differences between the different senators. And they've already said they're not interested in passing the House bill. So now it's down to what exactly will be in the Senate and what will the vote be? Will it be 50-50, broken by Mike Pence? Or can they possibly get a couple more votes and pass something? Or, and this is

a rather novel suggestion, what if they were to have a vote in the Senate before the Fourth of July recess and the bill simply failed? The bill simply failed the way it might have in the House if they had taken a vote a little earlier than the one they finally took. And then what would happen? Well, Mitch McConnell seems to be implying they're ready to move on from health care. And if they can't get 50 votes for something, maybe they just move on without it. Yeah, there's an argument that it would be better politically for Republicans not to pass something and legislatively undo Obamacare, because then they would still have some hope of blaming Obamacare's problems on the Democrats. That's disputed. But people like Lindsey Graham have been saying all along, better to let the whole thing collapse and then, you know, blame it on

the Democrats and also then work out something with Democrats to put it together. The one thing they keep pointing to when they're saying Obamacare is failing is, you know, these big insurers pulling out of big markets. And that is a real problem. But a lot of these insurers are saying one reason they're doing that is because the uncertainty that comes along with not knowing whether Trump's going to pull the plug on subsidies and stuff like that. Right. And that's the big blame game you're going to hear. Is it Trump's fault or is it Obama's fault for the individual insurance market to have all these problems? But don't forget, the biggest chunk of Obamacare are people who get their health care through the Medicaid expansion. And that's a big question for the Senate. What are they going to do with that? One of the big reasons that 24 million fewer people were going

to get health care was because the Medicaid expansion was going to be curtailed. And then there were actually some changes they made to people who get their health care through their employers, people who up until this point thought that they were pretty much untouchable in this whole debate. So then the argument becomes who, which of the two parties is responsible for the health care system as it stands right now and all the problems you may have with it. Is it the last party that passed a bill about health care or is it the party that is currently in power and promised to do something about it? So one other thing that happened this afternoon, actually, over on the House side of the Capitol. The House actually voted to scale back big chunks of Dodd-Frank. That was the Obama-era response to the financial

crisis that put a lot of restrictions and regulations on the financial industry. Republicans have argued the regulations are onerous. Their bill would exempt some banks from rules that they have to have a certain amount of capital on hand. It would also weaken the powers of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Like all things in life, this will be harder to pass in the Senate. Yeah, and it's not going to have the benefit of the generous rules by which they plan to pass health care and maybe some tax cuts. We won't go into what reconciliation is except to say that it means you don't have to have 60 votes. With respect to this bill, I believe they will have to have 60 votes. And that means a lot of Democratic support

they're not likely to get. Democratic caucus that includes one Elizabeth Warren, who feels very strongly about this issue. All right. So this is usually the part of the podcast where we talk about the thing we just can't let go this week. I will be honest that in all the news this week, when we thought about what we were going to say, I could not think of a single thing. Ron, you could not think of a single thing. Well, let me just say that, you know, the can't let it go has been a pretty good feature for us. And maybe we could see fit to letting it go. I'm feeling a little obstructed here, Ron, is that what is your intent here?

Are you ordering me or just saying you hope we can let this go? No, no, it's just a hope. It's just a hope. And we can leave it up to Bob Mueller in the end. All right. Well, it's time to wrap this up because I need to walk out of the booth and write a very detailed contemporaneous memo on my laptop. That is a wrap for today. We'll be back next week. And again, every single morning, every single twist and turn of all of this, we are talking about it on Up First. It's out by 6 o'clock each morning, wrapping up the day's news. Of course, you can support the podcast and public radio in general by supporting your local public radio station at npr.org slash stations. You can always find that link in our episode information.

I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. Thanks, of course, to Kerry Johnson, who was with us for a while. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.