.. [applause] you are watching booktv on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. booktv, television for serious readers. >> good evening everybody. i'm bradley graham the co-owner of politics and prose along with my wife ãon behalf of everybody here, thank you for

coming. we are quite pleased to be hosting james stewart here this evening. anyone who has followed his journalism and his books over the past few decades his familiar with his skills as an accomplished storyteller. the insight and detail he has brought to his reporting of financial scandals, corporate goings-on political and legal affairs. jim was educated as a lawyer and worked as an attorney at a prestigious new york firm for several years before entering journalism to help launch the american lawyer magazine four years ago. in 1983 he joined the wall street journal where he won several awards including a deadline writing prize for coverage of the ãbinsider trading scandal. enter pulitzer for coverage and 1987 of the stock market crash and the downfalls investment baker markets ãbmartin

siegel. 90 to 92 he left ãband started writing for the new yorker. for the past eight years he's been a columnist for the new york times and his weekly common sense look at the world of business, the gerald pro award for distinguished commentary in 2016. in jim's spare time he is also a professor of business journalism at columbia university. jim has written nine previous books, among them the best-selling ãnearly 30 years ago. which grew out of his wall street journal coverage and delved into the insider-trading scandals of the 1980s. other claims work since then have included bloodsport 1996 about the clinton white house and whitewater affair. blind in 1999 about a doctor who was a serial killer. heard of a soldier in 2002 tracing the life of a single victim of september 11 attack and disney war in 2005 counting

the corporate entry during michael eisner's 20 year tenure at the walt disney company. his new book "deep state" examines the handling of two investigations that were going on during the 2016 campaign. we knew of the probe of the hillary clinton emails at the time and the other one, which we all learned about later, was the investigation of links between russia and the trump campaign. donald trump of course has repeatedly denigrated the russia investigation as some sort of sinister conspiracy by the deep state. nebulous network of career bureaucrats intelligence agents, military officers and law enforcement officials bent on protecting their own power. is there anything legitimate about this claim? or are trumps incessant attacks on the investigator simply acts

of obstruction meant to cloak his own illegal conduct. these are among the central questions that jim gets to in his very fine book and he performs an important service. i just hope attorney general bill barr and anyone else who continues to doubt the origins of the russia probe read "deep state". ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming jim stewart. [applause] >> thank you for coming, thank you for having me here at the legendary politics and prose. thank god we still have bookstores like this. supporting authors like me who can still in this country go out and get to the bottom of things. without fear or favor or fear of influence or at least so far, russian type threats are being put in jail. if you are going over my increasingly long biography left out a few things. there's been like three key

characters who have figured in much of my work in some ways should i say have haunted my journalistic career and they are rudy giuliani, who figured in my second book the prosecutor is very prominently, reappears in den of thieves and he's back in "deep state". hillary clinton who was a central figure in bloodsport and who, yes, it is very prominently back in "deep state". and not as well known, i had a brief period covering none other than donald trump. i was working as wall street journal reporter in about 1985 and i was covering a merger and acquisitions speed.omitted from trumps resume he went through a brief and very unsuccessful period as a corporate raider. this is when he bought the trunk shuttle airline he was making threats at taking over other airlines. i was covering it. as a routine part of my job i

called him up and said, can i meet you? can i interview you? he said definitely. come see me but it must be completely off the record. no one must know you are meeting me. i said all right. i went to trump tower i went up to the marble lobby and shown into his office. we were chatting briefly when his secretary came in and interrupted and said, mr. trump, mrs. so-and-so is here and he said schober in. i said so much for the completely secret meeting with me. she came in and he said, james, i want you to meet mrs. so-and-so from the philippines, he said, she is the richest woman in the world. i thought the queen of england was the richest woman in the world. who knew? then he turned to her and said mrs. so-and-so, this is james stewart, he's the most famous journalist in america. [laughter] at which point i knew she was not the richest woman in the world.[laughter] d he can be charming and funny

in a mean way but at the same time, remember that interview i was on my way down here to washington to do more reporting and i mentioned i had to leave to catch the plane he said, right on my trunk shuttle i will give you a free voucher i said no mr. trump i couldn't possibly do that. he said at least let my chauffeur drive to the airport i said no, a taxi is fine. world and to be in the same traffic. for weeks and months after that he was always trying to give me something, tickets to this, going to the ãbhelicopter ride to atlantic city. i had no interest in prize fighting and no interest in going to atlantic city fortunately so i said no to all of these things. which is just as well because just a few weeks later ãbhe immediately stepped forward and said, he took free tickets to the prize fight and the guys career was over. he ruined him. he's all about leverage. i sensed that from day one. anyway. "deep state", the background is

i is a journalist like to pursue mysteries. questions that do not have any obvious answer. as the run up to the 2016 election was taking place as you all know, james comey head of the fbi stepped forward and said he was not recommending charges against hillary clinton he largely exonerated her. only a few months later just days before the election to reverse himself and then days later saying, we didn't find anything. i will come back to some of those events later but that utterly mystified me. like other americans i did not know that donald trump was being investigated with the plot for the russians. when that emerged i wondered why did we know all about the hillary clinton investigation and never heard a peep about donald trump and russia. i didn't understand that. i knew call me, he had been the u.s. attorney in manhattan. i had met him. he was figured in my last book was was about perjury and

lying. i knew him, i had a lot of confidence in him but i was very mystified by this. that's the kind of thing i like to explore. in may 2016 i had been trying to see call me. the fbi by then was highly paranoid. there was already conflict with the white house. suddenly nobody was talking. nobody would take your phone calls. i would go through the press office but i could never talk to call me. everybody was acting like they thought their phones were wiretapped. out of the blue i got an invitation to give a speech to the fbi in washington on friday of the week of may 9. i said, definitely, i will come down and do that. i figured, i will drop in on call me and see if i could enlist his cooperation in this book i'm trying to do. monday i wake up, tuesday i wake up to of course the news that comey was fired, so much

for my plan to slip into the fbi and talk to him about writing a book. then i thought, am i supposed to go down there? i called up and said you want me to come talk, they said yes to come. i was there the friday after comey was fired and it was horrible. people were completely shellshocked. trump was then and they are out saying, everybody at the fbi is thrilled to get rid of him. nobody liked him there. people love me for doing this. i knew right away that was a preposterous idea. not that i had interviewed teresa coopersmith the fbi but everybody i met was completely demoralized. i don't think many people paid attention to my talk. i had a lunch with a lot of them afterwards and they were truly in a state of shock that these events had transpired. that's when i knew whoever talks to me or doesn't talk to me i got to do this a book.

it is of course there were many events that happened after that, the mueller investigation, the resolution of that, all of which is in this saga. another reason i like to write books is i love to read books. i love a good story. it's a great story because it has great characters. love trump or hate trump, he is a great character. even though he did not agree to talk to me for this book, he tweets all the time so his voice, his unfiltered voice, does emerge in the pages of the story.and the other characters i think also are both on a political level but also a human level very compelling characters. the central conflict really is between comey and trump. i can't imagine two characters

who are more congenitally different. i described trump as louche i think that might be a complementary term. [laughter] comey is sometimes criticized for being overly virtuous. they are such polar opposites that i'm amazed they even got to that first dinner without comey either quitting or trump firing him. but there are a number of very important questions that i hope this saga helps to explain in a way that americans will trust. i'm not a political reporter. i'm not a partisan person. i worked for the wall street journal, which most people consider to be a conservative paper. i happily worked at the new york times which a lot of people consider to be a liberal paper. i grew up in the rural midwest where half the people were democrats and half were republicans. it was a real two-party system.

i was always raised to believe to try to do what's best for the american people. don't look only at your own self interest. act in a way that's best for all and tell the truth. the two biggest role models for me were probably abraham lincoln, who was on the license plates in illinois and still hailed at the greatest native solemn state ever produced and across the river from where i grew up in missouri the home of mark twain one of the great storytellers of american literature. . sometimes when reading the book i sometimes get the epigraph but i wanted to read this epigraph to you because i love it so much. patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it. that's from mark twain. guess what? donald trump tweeted that saying in 2014 before he was president. now, anybody who doesn't support him as part of the deep state. he has certainly stayed,

changed his tune. some of the big questions here which i tried to address ãb should hillary have been charged in the email case? you would have thought this would have been laid to rest by now but i don't know if you noticed when trump renounced his election campaign a few months ago in northern florida he spent part of the speech talking about the accomplishments of his first administration. and the crowd showed no interest whatsoever. they are moderating looking at their cell phones wondering looking at the sky all the sudden he decided he can read a crowd very well. he pivoted to hillary clinton and it was like a jolt of electricity went to the crowd. everybody was bolt upright and within a few minutes we were all chanting "lock her up". the hillary clinton story lives on.

let me assure you, hillary clinton was surely investigated by the fbi. very thoroughly. the story of how that happened, the strange reemergence of the emails on the laptop, it's a highly dramatic story. but in the end there is no question that classified information did move on an unprotected server through hillary clinton's blackberry. it was probably negligence to have done that but in all honesty i have to tell you, i can barely cope with two or three email accounts i wouldn't have wanted another one either i believe her when she said it was just for convenience and most importantly there was never a single shred of evidence to show that hillary clinton herself knew any of this information had been transmitted. let's say for the benefit of argument that maybe she did. if you really wanted to push, there were people in the fbi who felt she could have been charged, let's say you really wanted to push it and bring charges. the precedents in this area for mishandling classified

information are many. there are almost all involving men in some cases high placement. there was an egregious example involving alberto gonzales who was the attorney general under president bush. and guess what, none of these people were ever charged under the statute. there were a handful of other cases that are misdemeanors which resulted in a plea. no prison term, slap on the wrist. but no prominent politician or appointed government official had ever been charged under the statute. what would have happened if the fbi decided to recommend charges against hillary clinton at the time that she was the first woman candidate for the presidency. there would have been incredible, and in my view, justifiable uproar at this. by the way, comey was very consistent. he never charged martha stewart with insider trading although he arguably could have.

there was no precedent for doing that in those circumstances and he did not want to be attacked for bringing novel charges against a successful woman executive. there would have been a massive uproar if he had in fact tipped the election to trump by charging hillary clinton then. i think there's really can be no serious disagreement that the right result was reached in that case. i want to say something else about hillary, i was very critical of the clinton's in my book ãso much so that they've never speaking to me since then. how did mrs. clinton respond which became the subject of a publicized fbi investigation and potentially criminal conduct? did she call it a witchhunt? no. did she call people at "deep state" per prosecuting her? no. did she attack the prosecutor and impugn their integrity? no. hillary clinton behaved the way most innocent people do when they are charged. they trust in the system, they

use whatever legal are at their disposal. they answer all the questions anyone had to ask and she turned over tens of thousands of those emails for examination. i would contrast that with the way trump responded that he became the subject of the russia investigation. in a very interesting question, it unfolds in the pages of the story, did call me cost hillary clinton the election? remember the sequence of events in july 5 he said we are not recommending charges the whole email thing seems to be dead, trump was keeping it alive but it didn't have legs. suddenly in october the weiner laptop, how bizarre is that? that hillary clinton's top aide put the emails on her husband's laptop, her husband is engaging in illegal sexual activity with minors and it all comes out and

they got the laptop. you couldn't make any of this up. through these bizarre facts suddenly they were all these new emails i had to be investigated. comey, for reasons you'll see in the book, felt he had to make an announcement he was reopening that. one reason he did that was because there was a hard-core of anti-hillary fbi agents in the new york office, the new york offices where the weiner laptop was, everyone in new york knew it had been found. i can tell you with 100% certainty if comey had not made the announcement, it would've leaked. and it would've been so much more destructive both to hillary clinton and to the fbi's repetition if it emerged through the media and leaked that this had been uncovered and the american people had not been told that if comey stepped up and did it. as he gets very hard to criticize the decision. i remember being in a board meeting in the midwest i would say probably 60% of the people in the room or what i would call moderate republicans, having a hard time coming to terms with voting for donald trump and it was like a cold

wind swept through the room. i could tell the feelings against hillary just crystallize like that and trump got a lot of votes at that moment. nate silver did a very in-depth survey of the very narrow margin of the election to show how a few key votes in states like pennsylvania, wisconsin, could have shifted it. he concluded that the comey announcement really was the determining factor. the fact is, we will never know. you can't run this like a science experiment.we can't go back and rerun the election without the variable of the thing being reopened. i think to blame it all on comey is a great over supplication. because the unfortunate fact for hillary clinton is that when it was reopened she had a decades long history of being

accused of self-serving, at times illegal behavior. there was still questions about whitewater, there were questions about the billing records that showed up in the white house, there were questions about how she covered up her husband's philandering. there were questions about the issue of ãthis narrative fell on fertile ground. that was not comey's fault. days later through healing and efforts, he was able to exonerate mrs. clinton once again stop the media showed very little interest. i demonstrate here that after the emails were first found it was reopened, that was the lead story in major network news and papers for six out of the next seven days. when he announced it was now closing and that they had not found anything on the emails, it was not the lead story in a single news outlet. the lead story that day was that a group of people had rushed trump at a rally after someone had yelled the word " gun " in the crowd and it

turned out nobody even had a gun. that overshadowed clinton's exoneration. i don't think you can blame that on comey. was comey wrong to take matters into his own hands and exonerate clinton and not leave the decision to the attorney general? that is why he had to make the announcement all over again when he did reopen it. the reasons for that are fascinating. you see it in context in the narrative. i think that's probably the most controversial thing he did and would benefit of hindsight i would've urged him not to do it. but who has benefit of hindsight? he didn't have it. at the time he was very concerned that the american people would feel a verdict rendered by the justice department was partisan and would not be fair and there was reason for that. loretta lynch had said a few things that made him suspicious. president obama had dismissed it as not a significant investigation, which he didn't like, but the thing that really put him over the edge was when

bill clinton barged onto loretta lynch is playing on the tarmac in phoenix and stayed there for 35 minutes. there was rapid speculation he had intervened to affect his wives investigation with the attorney general who'd been making the decision. i have, i believe, the most detailed account of what actually happened on the airplane. i have to say my heart goes out to loretta lynch. she's a very nice person she is a very polite lady. bill clinton is a force of nature and he barged in there and just when she thought she was going to get him off he decides to clear the bags away and sit down and spend another 15 minutes talking but it was not about his wife. unfortunately the appearances were so bad there was massive coverage of this that went on for days about how he had intervened trying to affect his wife's outcome and that really

tipped comey into feeling he could not inspire confidence in the american people unless he came forward to do it. i think you can quarrel with that decision but you can't really quarrel with the motive and i have to wonder. i've been fascinated by the clintons for so long. i'm sure bill clinton was not consciously trying to sabotage his wife's campaign but if he was trying to sabotage his wife's campaign, this is the single best thing he could've done to do it. one of the central characters in here is rod rosenstein. the deputy attorney general. rod rosenstein came to washington as the deputy, he was the longest-serving u.s. attorney in the country, he had been the u.s. attorney for maryland in baltimore. when he was first appointed somebody asked comey what he thought of him and he said, what turned out to be quite prescient, he's a survivor. rosenstein was also highly respected and considered to be

very independent, who would do the right thing. he stepped into a justice department and a white house that was so untethered from standard norms of behavior from the rule of law and ethical behavior that you see in these pages he became increasingly unnerved. you may recall sessions recused himself from russia which meant rosenstein was now in charge of it. trump decides impulsively is going to fire comey. he calls people into the white house he says, i'm going to fire comey, don't try to talk me out of it. he brings sessions and rosenstein and says what you think of me firing comey? sessions it says, it's fine with me. rosenstein said, i do think they kind of mishandled the clinton administration. trump immediately perks up and says, can you write me a memo to that effect, rosenstein dutifully goes back he writes a memo ãball of a sudden trump

who had already decided on his own to fire comey for reasons completely unrelated to the clintons grabs the memo and says, yes, this is the reason he must be fired! in the white house press corps went out and said the justice department insisted comey be fired because of the way they handled he handled the clinton investigation and then trump called up rosenstein and said, i want you to go out and do a press conference and say you are the one who insisted comey be fired because of the handling of the clinton thing. at this point rosenstein is in total shock because he knew this is completely false. it's not because of the clintons that trump wanted to fire comey and it was not his idea to fire comey and to his credit, he refused to do that. trump had to get sessions to pressure him. sessions it says no. that's a false narrative and were not going to put it out. days later rosenstein calls

andrew mccabe over. andrew mccabe has become the acting fbi director since comey was fired. i want to read a brief passage. they were talking about something relatively innocuous. i report as follows b& rosenstein's gaze shifted toward the closed door to the room somewhere off in the distance. his eyes looked brassy. his voice wavering, his eyes teared up he said he couldn't believe what was happening. the white house was trying to make it look as if it was his idea to fire comey. that wasn't true. the president had asked him to write the memo only after announcing he was firing comey. rosenstein was obviously struggling to keep his emotions in check. mccabe was shocked, rosenstein was confiding in him, essentially calling the president a liar. they barely knew each other but he wanted to be compassionate.

are you okay, mccabe asked? no. are you getting any sleep? no. is your family okay? rosenstein said they were news trucks parked outside his house, his wife and family were upset. there was a pause and then rosenstein said, there is no one here can talk to about this. there's no one i can trust. rosenstein had seemed again to be struggling to hold his emotions in check. after a pause he asked mccabe if he thought he should appoint special counsel and mccabe said yes. rosenstein he said he always considered jim comey a friend and mentor someone he looked up to. the one person i wish i could talk to is jim comey. good luck with that, mccabe thought. this is the guy he just fired. there is a sequence of events where rosenstein offers to wear a wire and secretly record the president invoked the 25th amendment, all of which is true. but by the end of the mueller investigation he is a new person. he has survived. there were two occasions where the justice department was drafting press releases saying trump was going to fire him.

he goes to the white house and needs along with trump and comes out his job is intact. as soon as the mueller report is delivered he and the new attorney general, bill bar rush to state that trump has been exonerated that there is no crime there is no obstruction of justice case to be made. this is not what the mueller report said. mueller wrote a letter to that effect as you probably know. the mueller report was far more damning than anything that bar in rosenstein was willing to say. this is a classic example of well-intentioned bureaucrats who get into the trump orbit were drawn into this web of falsehoods of irresponsible if not illegal behavior and then asked to protect the president and the president leverage being a theme, because rosenstein lied about the wire and the 25th amendment, trump

had leverage over his environment whenever he wanted. finally i just want to say, address the issue of the "deep state". trump has again just this week accuse the whistleblower of being part of the deep state. people who have helped the whistleblower being part of the deep state people in the white house who told the whistleblower it was happening as being part of the deep state not only part of the deep state, i could read the end of this book because he saying the same thing he's already said many times before. they are part of the deep state and they are traitors and he hasn't said it explicitly but he has implied that. i want to say this about the deep state. its origin is from the middle east. turkey, egypt, where entrenched military industrial your credit complexes from time to time would step in and overthrow sometimes the elected leader, more often the dictator was running a country in order to preserve their own powers and

privileges. in the united states the deep state concept has been more recently used in another variation in the military industrial complex. the deep state was traditionally considered to be primarily people on wall street the big bangs, golden stacks, the lobbyist in washington the large corporations with big technology companies which wield enormous influence. that's how it was translated to the united states context. trump has organized the concept to apply it to the federal bureaucracy and specifically the fbi and the justice department and the intelligence communities. i never thought i would see the day where republican president turned on the law enforcement communities and branded them along with journalists like me as enemies of the people but that's what has happened. comey said something very important and profound which i quote in the book and that is

that he never heard the phrase deep state until trump started using it but with what he means is the men and women of the fbi and the justice department who devoted their lives to serving the american people who have taken an oath of allegiance to uphold the united states constitution and who do not work for the president of the united states and specifically this president then thank god we have a deep state these are important checks on the powers of the executive branch. we are a nation of checks and balances in one of those checks are bureaucrats appointed people career civil servants it doesn't matter whether republicans or democrats everyone has a political view but their duty is uphold the law support the constitution and serve the people of the united states. when you have a whistleblower coming forward, when you have a james comey standing up to the president, telling him he can't do something like that, then you have the essence of what the constitutional system calls upon them to do. i think the "deep state" in this context is something we can all sleep easier knowing is

in place and i say, good for them. i welcome your questions. i hope you will enjoy the ã thank you. [applause] thank you. i think everyone who wants to ask a question can come up to this microphone. >> and a retired member of the "deep state", he worked in federal government for 20 years. did you look into the brush it ãbthe origins of the russian investigation? >> yes. >> it seems to me that the theory is that the italian professor was supposed to have been working for the cia when he gave his information to papadopoulos about the emails. why hasn't anybody noticed that the information that he gave papadopoulos was true and could only have come from russia?

>> as you may all know, the origin of the russian investigation is now the subject of another major investigation. the attorney general himself had been traveling around the world trying to gather evidence, why the attorney general is involved in a day-to-day investigation is unprecedented and completely beyond me. to me it's a massive waste of his time and a massive waste of taxpayer money. i don't mean to be plugging myself but i wish he had read the book. it's not a mystery about how this began. first of all, it was originated from the australian ambassador in the united kingdom who heard from papadopoulos thought he had this information. he gave this to the government in australia they did nothing with it. they sat on it. going to your point, it was only when it turned out that the russians really did have these emails which proved the intelligence was correct that australia then transmitted this

to the intelligence agencies in the united states who in turn handed it over to the fbi. may i remind you, australia is one of the closest allies of the united states and the intelligence community of australia, new zealand, united kingdom and america have traditionally worked very closely together. they know each other, they trust each other, this australian we are not talking about some rogue operator over there. this is a trusted intelligence source. there was nothing nefarious about the origin of the investigation. may i remind you, even when this information came in, the bia opened operation crossfire hurricane, trump was not the name subject. some people thought he should be but he was not. the fbi people he's now accusing them being out to get him didn't make him a subject of the investigation, nor did they leak the incident existence of the investigation which would surely end his campaign. he only became a subject after

he recklessly fired comey and then lied about it and then acted like he was denesha the whole thing down and fire became. you make a very good point. >> thank you. >> i can't wait to read the book. thank you for doing this. i'm really looking forward to it. i have a question about hillary clinton you might answer in the book it's hard to talk about this without sounding like your supporting one side or the other, which i'm not, but regarding the emails you make the point you think it's really justified to follow criminal charges over classification but more broadly it was troubling to me that she moved all these emails onto a private server which raises the issue that she might've been trying to hide them from open records request or outside scrutiny. it always seemed really troubling to me particularly considering that clinton foundation and all the activities going with that.

i'm not trying to do this crazy "deep state" conspiracy theory but was that element of it troubling to you. or do you think that that decision was ultimately justified and that some of the skepticism and suspicion around it is unwarranted? >> one factual thing, she didn't move it onto a private server, it was always on private server. it originated on the private server. what then happened, this grew out of endless benghazi's, they wanted to get her state department emails and that's when they discovered her emails run a private server and they were the numbers in the book. . her lawyers, she didn't personally do it, her lawyers were allowed to go to the emails and delete or segregate what were considered purely personal email. she said it like, where she can

go to class or one was she meeting her daughter for dinner. they removed that and they turned over everything else. one of the ongoing questions has been today really hide some things that should've been turned over but that was one thing interesting about the ones that showed up on the anthony weiner laptop. those were not going over by the clinton lawyers and so they had access to all of those. the number is in the book but it was maybe 30 or 50,000 it was an enormous number. it was almost all difficult things that were turned over there or maybe one or two exceptions and they didn't find anything of significance. there is no evidence yet that clinton withheld anything irrelevant to the inquiry. >> thanks. >> sure. >> i wonder if you have an opinion on the mystery of bill

barr, he had a reputation in washington if staying moderate conservative and institutionali. suddenly he is looking like rudy giuliani, maybe like roger stone, how did this transformation happen? >> that's a very good question. barr is a character in the book and a few significant things about him, he wrote an editorial after comey made his announcement about ãbpraising comey and the decision. as sessions came under repeated attack from trump and you see here there were a lot of people who thought that's when bill

barr writes this unsolicited legal memo praising trump and saying trump can't be held guilty of anything while his present. like auditioning for the job incident stat to the white house. he acknowledged as the only time he sent an unsolicited memo like that to the justice department.lo and behold he then gets the job. he said in his hearings. i don't need to be attorney general. i've already been attorney general. attorney general is a very good job. have you ever been in their offices in the justice department?it's palatial. they have their own dining room they have a whole suite of offices it's like ãbthey have their own airplane they can fly around. and they have enormous power it's an incredible job and i think he desperately wanted that back.

how do you keep a job like that? you do what trump wants. i do find ãbthe whistleblower came forward, he followed the proper channels, it was all handed to the justice department the proper course would have been for him to get it to the ãband make a decision if there was a crime committed or further action needed he never gave it to the fbi. he immediately said, there is no crime here. before we knew what the facts are. that's preposterous. frankly, i believe it has left the congress and the democratic house with no alternative but to investigate this because we can't rely anymore on the investigative agencies to do their job and when i talk about the danger you have independent agencies that have been bent to the will of the president.

i will say one heartening thing today as you may have known, numb ãbtwo associates of giuliani were arrested. if this is in operation being run by the u.s. attorney in manhattan which is traditionally independent agency has all the attorneys offices are comey yes they are appointed by the president and the answer to the attorney general but i don't think they would dare fire this u.s. attorney berman. i applaud him for being independent and doing something that i was frankly afraid barr would never do. the "deep state" strikes again. [laughter] >> i was just going to say, barr, go, did you say all you wanted to say and do talk about him in the book? >> yes. i do show the evolution of him supporting comey to auditioning for the part. his handling of the mueller report was disgraceful. he immediately said of course

he was exonerated on russia stop only really found that there was no evidence to support charges. he then said correctly that mueller had not reached a conclusion on obstruction but he then said but you can't charge obstruction unless there was also an underlying crime. that is, number one, falls, and number two, the opposite of what mueller says in the mueller report. it was so egregious that mueller, i don't even tell you, who's more tightlipped than mueller his nickname while he was head of the fbi was bob "say nothing" mueller. he is honored that tradition now and i frankly don't think he should but i think he should be ãbbut nevertheless, he wrote a letter saying that barr

had mischaracterized the mueller report and got publicity but i don't think you will realize that. i think it's worth pondering for a moment why it is obstruction of justice, which includes perjury and tampering and threatening the witnesses it cannot apply only to people who are guilty of the crime. you can't find out if someone is guilty of someone is running around intimidating everyone. it's it chicken and egg thing. the innocent and the guilty must be subject to the same obstruction of justice laws. this is so obvious to me that i can't believe barr would have had the nerve to take the opposite position. only a few extreme lawyers would agree with him but of course it conveniently fits the narrative that trump wants. >> my brother is a conservative who has forgotten that he was any communist. how do you feel the extradition of julian assange will play out? it sounds like different parts of the united states government want him here or be frightened of what he could say in

situations in this. ? >> i can't really answer to that, i'm not an expert on assange. i don't think there's any doubt this administration is going to bring all the powers they have down on him. they don't like leagues. and they want to punish leaders they want to string them up and hang them in the town square and make sure anyone else who thinks of leaking i think they will do everything they can to make an example out of him. >> why do you think rosenstein did write that memo to call me about trump? >> i think like many people who get drawn into the trump orbit is he was asked to do it. trump is his boss and so you want to please the boss or

carry out the exercise. it's hard to believe he didn't see how trump might use it. it is what many people i think had been surprised by could he have been so nacve he goes back and does his homework and raises report he brings it in why did he think trump was going to do with it. use it as bedtime reading? i don't think so. he did seem truly and genuinely stunned that trump seized upon it and then made it the sole basis for firing call me and was about to put all the blame for getting rid of comey on rosenstein. i can't reconcile that. it's hard to believe, he had been a u.s. attorney for decades, he understands what evidence is and how that document was going to be used. he also, it turned out, trump wrote a long memo while he was

at the golf club the previous weekend in which he explained the real reasons he wanted to get rid of comey and he had given a copy of that memo to rosenstein. that's why rosenstein knew he was lying. it had nothing to do with clinton. interestingly you will see in the pages here a few days after he was so shocked by all this he gave a copy of that memo to mccabe mccabe immediately took it back to the fbi and locked it in a safe there to preserve it as evidence. because that was written contemporary nurse the real reasons that trump was firing call me and it remains today documentary proof that all the statements about clinton about rosenstein ordering to fire him were all lies. i think rosenstein wanted that memo in safe hands to protect him from any future accusation he was the one behind the firing of comey.

yes? [inaudible question] >> the question is, did the resignation and timing of resignation of justice kennedy struck me as being strange in any way?i haven't done any independent reporting on that but there's a lot of theorizing and some evidence that it was orchestrated to pave the way for a particular nominee. we may never know the whole truth about that. [inaudible question] the question is what i think of

trump saying to justice kennedy at the end of his address say hello to your boy meeting his former clerk. he shouldn't have said it. that's gotta be exhibit a if there was a quid pro quo. do i need to tell you that trump says things he shouldn't say? [laughter] it's replete. let me say this about the whistleblower. somebody the other day asked me, do you wish you had waited a couple months to write the book because you could write about the whistleblower. i said not really because the whistleblower or what happened is so protectable from the events of the book, just read the last couple pages of this and you will see the whistleblower coming a mile away.and because at the end of the whole mueller thing after putting the country through years of turmoil trump seems to have learned only one thing which is he thinks he was exonerated. totally vindicated. he did nothing wrong. so he doubled down. the reason there was no crime in the russia thing is because

they didn't find evidence that trump himself either instigated or participated in any direct conspiracy with the russians to interfere with the election. he hands them the one piece from the russia case! it's astonishing anyone would do that would actually learn anything from the previous investigation. he only lives in a binary world of winners and losers.he won and then keep up the good work. do more of it. in watergate all the presidents men hal holbrook says it's about woodward robert redford. saying these people really aren't as smart as you think they are. in all but i was wondering if any of the people that presently run the world ever

bothered to even study watergate or pay any attention to watergate. because how these things keep repeating themselves is beyond me. ãb in terms of all the people who restrained trump you see them in the course of the "deep state", agree or disagree with the politics, don mcgann is probably the unsung hero of the story. trump ends up humiliating him and trump should have been done on bended knee thanking him for restraining him from his worst impulses and then he gets thrown out. sessions widely criticized for his performance of attorney general nevertheless has sense enough not to fire mueller or

engage in what could be illegal conduct. same with rosenstein. even cory lewandowski trump says, go tell session siesta fire mueller and if he doesn't i'm firing him. he slowly walked back and managed to never do it. he had enough sense not to do that. all these people are out. he has no white house counsel, the attorney general, who seem to be doing exactly what trump wants. and that is a dangerous situation and one in which something like the whistleblower was about to happen. i thought we could wait for the election but now i'm starting to worry. the whole year what could this whole guy do during the election. >> we will have to see how this unfolds. impeachment is a political process. it's not a legal proceeding. it isn't held to the standards of proof beyond reasonable doubt. the facts signing process that

will go on is absolutely essential and that's why i think it's so important that the president not be allowed to stonewall obstruct, bar anyone from providing testimony because what he's impeached or not, the american people, they need to know what happened here. all of this as voters need to be able to make up her mind about whether this indicates someone who is honors the rule of law when we come around to voting next year. that's why think this process is extremely important. >> and attainable controversy? >> i'm sorry. >> imminent is the release of the inspector general's bogart report on the fbi's role in this matter. particularly comey. as well as the doj. i strongly suspect that it will

be quite different than your own conclusions with respect to those parties. do you have any premonitions to what this report will reveal. many of the people that were sources in my book and i've interviewed have been interviewed by the inspector general understandably. some of them have refused to be interviewed because they no longer believe he is fair. they were very upset about his report on the clinton email handling the clinton email. all of them have told me that it is going to be highly critical of the fbi and of comey because they believe that's what the white house wants. the inspector general is "independent" but he works for barr now and is known to be very close grassley and the senate. i'm sorry?

[inaudible] he was an obama appointee and i think he's been highly regarded throughout his career. i don't want to prejudge this and i haven't seen the report but i know the concerns of people interviewed by him it's like so many people drawn into the trump orbit similar to rosenstein is not the person like he was running for his first appointment. he originally said he was gonna release the report in may and i was hoping to wait to finish my manuscript so i could absorb that and perhaps use the material. it became clear to me he was going back whatever he had decided somebody said, this isn't good enough. go back to the well get mortified something on these people. if he actually find something on call me i will be very surprised. but who knows. and maybe he's got something i don't know about. i will be open-minded about it. >> how much damage do you think has been done to the fbi the

cia, the state department by these relentless attacks that trump wages. >> enormous damage has already been done and it's very worrisome to me. these are cultures and institutions and traditions that have been built up over decades and they are being obliterated in a matter of a few years. i talked to a lot of fbi people. you don't work for the government for the money. the fbi in particular has been long-held. they've had their problems or have been hoover issues i'm not saying they never behaved, always behave strictly properly but by and large they been held up in society as role models as honorable people as trustworthy people as people you should tell the truth to you and will tell the truth to you. and there revered in their community.suddenly they are the enemies they are the "deep state" there being reviled and being fired in many cases. it's not enough to fire them then they are being

investigated for crimes. mccabe has a grand jury sitting on him right now. ãis under investigation, call me they lost a criminal investigation against him, he was exonerated but nevertheless had to go to that. just yesterday i see there is no criminal investigation of mueller. it's not enough to just criticize these people. it's not a good thing to have ã ãyou have to hire lawyers it's expensive. the threat of the prosecution hanging over you is terrible. so how are we to attract the best people in these agencies in the future? that's what worries me. a lot of good people are leaving. the dairy moralized, ãbthey are demoralized they are upset, how will we get really good people to come in there. i think ray is so far doing an okay job and i think the barr example is very dispiriting as we seen in recent days. >> we will make this the last question. >> where you see the role of pardons in this? do you think there's a chance

trump might try to pardon himself? or giuliani? [laughter] >> i think admirably ãbi think anything is possible with trump. what you will see in "deep state", he is constantly dangling the idea of a pardon in front of people who are in under investigation to keep them from testifying against him. it's one of the more blatant aspects of the obstruction charge and it's one that he is uniquely positioned to do because he is the president. bargaining himself, that's kind of maybe pushing it pretty far but i wouldn't put anything beyond him. >> or a deal with pence that he would pardon himself and whatever happens after that. >> that wouldn't surprise me in the least. thank you so much. i really appreciate it. [applause] >> thank you.

"deep state" will be available at the checkout desk and for signing. [inaudible] >> you are watching booktv on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. booktv, television for serious readers. >> now on booktv "after words", former obama administration national security advisor and un ambassador susan rice with her life and career and american diplomacy and foreign policy.she's interviewed by new yorker columnist robin wright. "after words" is a weekly interview program with guesthouse interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. >> welcome susan rice to "after words". >> thank you robin it's great to be with you. >> it's a fabulous book a personal tail and chronicle of your professional life and through a wide array of crisis anch