Tuesday on CNN’s “Situation Room,” while reacting to a New York Times report that in February President Donald Trump asked former FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, network chief political correspondent Dana Bash said the deep state knew “how to get back, even if you’re the president of the United States.”
Bash said, “So explosive. So incredibly serious. The Times report also says that James Comey created similar memos after the other meetings that he had with the president. So this could be just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe the most explosive, but it’s very clear that James Comey wanted to get out there that this happened, created this paper trail real time, contemporaneously rather, in order to protect himself from exactly what happened last week, him being fired, him being blamed. You know, wanting to know that he has sort of the information at his disposal if, in fact, this happened.”
She continued, “If you just take a step back, Wolf, just in the past 24 hours, right or wrong, what this president has done, his first 100 plus days, even before he came into office is pick fights with the intelligence community and now the law enforcement community. Particularly the way, never mind he fired James Comey, but the way in which he did it, not giving him the respect of actually telling him in person or at least not having him find out from cable news. So we know that they talk about the deep state—well these are communities that have a lot of loyalty within and know how to get back, even if you’re the president of the United States.”
“And the fact is that when the intelligence community found out about the conversation that the president had with the Russians, talking about classified information, we don’t know all the details,” she added. “We’re told that it wasn’t as bad as it might have seemed initially, that’s what the White House sources are saying, but still, the intelligence community leaked that out. Now we know that the FBI director was keeping notes on many things. But the fact that this is the first one that he made clear and made public and it’s so incredibly explosive, as Jeff said, is the clearest most dangerous sign yet of potential obstruction of justice. Makes you think, what else is going to happen? And it’s very hard for Republicans who have in the past 24 hours been more aggressively critical of the president begging for a crisis-free day or crisis-free hour, very hard for them not to take this incredibly seriously.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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