captioning sponsored by cbs >> dickerson: today on "face the nation," the president fires i. director and the whit ggles to get its story straight. for a president who made his reputation firing people on television -- >> you're fired. >> dickerson:>> dickerson: -- a messy week of pink slips starting with questions about why president trump waited 18 days before firing national security adviser michael flynn for lying about his contacts with the russians. then came tuesday night's firing of the man leading the federal investigation into russian meddling in the election. f.b.i. director james comey, which happened so fast that it caught even white house staffers off guard. why the quick action? first explanation was based on a letter from the deputy attorney general who said comey's mishandling of the investigation into hillary clinton's e-mail

server made him unfit to stay in the job. >> president trump made the right decision at the right time, and to accept the recommendation of the deputy attorney generalful. >> dickerson: meanwhile, the russians seemed amused by the whole thing inch washington, foreign minister lavrov joked with reporters. >> was he fired? you're kidding? you're kidding? >> dickerson: and then posed for pictures with the president and russian ambassador in the oval office. a warm reception not extended to american reporters. those pictures are from the russian government. a day later the president had a different reason for firing comey, one that contradicted his original reason, his vice president, and his staff. >> but regardless of recommendation, i was going to fire comey. when i decided to just do it, i said to myself, i said, you know, this russia thing with trump and russia is a made-up story. it's an excuse by the democrats for having lost an election that

they should have won. >> dickerson: and yet another reason for firing the f.b.i. director: >> he's a showboat. he's a grandstander. the f.b.i. has been in turmoil. >> dickerson: the new acting head of the f.b.i., andrew mccabe, told congress that was not true. >> director comey enjoyed broad support within the f.b.i. and still does to this day. >> dickerson: comey stayed out of the spotlight, but his associates told the press about a white house dinner during which mr. trump asked the former director for a pledge of loyalty. the president denied it and threaten comey in a tweet. "james comey better hope there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press." where do things stand now? we'll hear from the lead democrat on the house intelligence committee adam schiff, republican ben sasse, who sits on one of the senate committees investigating the russian investigation, and we'll hear from former c.i.a. director and secretary of defense robert gates. when you saw the firing of james

comey, the director of the f.b.i., how did that strike you based on your experience? >> not terribly well done. >> drew: plus plenty of analysis from our political panel and a word about mothers. it's all coming up on "face the nation." good morning and welcome to "face the nation." i'm john dickerson. once again there's a lot to cover today. we begin with the top democrat on the house intelligence committee, california congressman adam schiff. congressman, i want to start with... there's a lot happening this week. for you, what's the most important thing? >> well, the most important thing to me is that the president fired the f.b.i. director all because of the russian investigation. that first justification given, again, the white house misleading the country about a major action the administration was taking, but the fact that they had a private conversation in which the president by his own admission was discussing the future of director comey in that job and the president brings up whether he's under

investigation, highly unetethic. at a minimum unethical. if he wasn't trying -- was trying to impede the investigation, beyond unethical. deeply disturbing, a threat to our system of checks and balances. >> dickerson: you say this was all about russia. there is another player in here, the deputy attorney general in the department of justice. his argument was that director comey's handling of the e-mail investigation was terrible. you were highly critical of that, as well. you said you were deeply disturbed by it, that it had damaged the f.b.i., it was an error in judgment. so wasn't there merit to the case that the deputy attorney general had made in saying that comey couldn't do his job because of his handling of the e-mails? >> there was certainly merit to the criticism that the deputy attorney general had about how comey handled the clinton investigation, and i don't think director comey ever adequately explained why he treated the clinton investigation one way and the trump investigation another. but that was all pretext. that wasn't why comey was fired, and what disturbed me most

frankly about the rosenstein memo, and i raised this in a conversation i had with him earlier in the week, is the fact it was addressed to the attorney general. the attorney general was supposed to have recused the himself from anything involving russia, and here he is recommending the firing of the top cop in the russia investigation in clear violation to what the attorney general had committed to doing. now we have the attorney general participating in the interview of new directors of the f.b.i., underscoring i think yet again how imperative it is we have an independent counsel. >> dickerson: you say misleading from the president. do you think that deputy attorney general rosenstein and attorney general sessions are in on the misleading? >> well, certainly i think the attorney general should have played no role, so the violation there is having hand in how the investigation is going to be run. in terms of the deputy a.g., i don't know what was behind the creation of that memo. i certainly suspect, i think as many people did, it was asked to

justify a decision that was being made on other grounds. now, whether the deputy attorney general knew his memo was going to be used that way to misdirect the country i don't know. but certainly, as the president made all too clear, that was all pretext. this was all about comey and russia. >> dickerson: you say it's unethical for the president to have had dinner, the president when he talked about his reasoning for this, he mentioned the investigation into the russian meddling was on his mind. do you go all the way to thinking this is obstruction? >> well, the difficulty, and i look at this also as a former prosecutor, can you prove obstruction based on the president's own words when we don't know whether we can believe this president? we already know there are those close to comey who have a very different take, also a troubling take on that dinner conversation. so i'm not sure you could prove the case based on this, but if there are tapes, of course, that would be the best evidence of what took place. if they exist, congress needs to

get them. if they're not provided willingly, congress should subpoena them, and if they're not in existence, if this was yet another fabrication by the president, he needs to come clean about it. >> dickerson: we should remind people that the president can fire the f.b.i. director for whatever reason he wants. on those tapes, could you... would you join with the chairman of the committee to subpoena those tapes? >> absolutely. if the tapes exist and they're not willingly provided, absolutely i'd join in subpoenaing them. >> drew: there is a new f.b.i. director being... there's a series of interviews going on. what for you is the threshold question for the next f.b.i. director? >> absolute integrity and independence, and if this reason i would strongly urge the administration to pick someone who is completely apolitical, who doesn't come out of the political process, someone who is a retired judge or an acting judge willing to step down from their judgeship, someone who has prosecutorial experience, but someone who can come in and give credibility to the russia

investigation that right now is severely in jeopardy. one of the i think heightened responsibilities we're going to have in the house intelligence committee is making sure that whoever comes in, this investigation by the bureau goes on unimpeded because the f.b.i. has a reach that neither our committee nor the senate committee has. they've got agents all over the globe, they have the resources to really do things that we in congress don't, and make sure that nothing impairs that work. >> dickerson: you mentioned nobody with politics. so mike rogers who has been recommended by f.b.i. agents' association, a former colleague of yours in the house, you wouldn't want him to be in that class? >> nothing against mike rogers or either of the other house or senate candidates that have been mentioned, but i think the public would have the most confidence if someone who had no partisan background was completely apolitical, was brought in to run the bureau. >> dickerson: attorney general sessions has recused himself from the investigation into russia, but he is a part of the f.b.i. director's choice.

does that bother you at all? >> it does bother me, and i think it also underscores both why we need a special prosecutor, but also if he plays any role in the interviewing of the director, he needs to absent himself from the russia investigation. how do you interview someone for the new director without talking about how they would handle and how they would restore public confidence in that investigation. >> all right, congressman schiff, thank you so much for being with us. >> thanks, john. >> dickerson: joining us now is nebraska senator ben sasse. senator sasse is the author of "the vanishing american adult". he joins us from new york. senator, why do you think james comey was fired? >> i'm not sure how this president makes lots of decisions. so i honestly don't know. i do know that we are in the midst of a civilization warping crisis of public trust, and we need to talk honestly about our

institutions that need to be restored and need to have the ability for people in five and eight and ten years to trust these institutions. there are lots of reasonable arguments people can make about the way director comey made decisions in the midst of the unprecedented complexities of the 2016 election cycle, and lots of people can think that director comey, who is a fundamentally honorable man, but people can think that he executessed his job in all sorts of clunky and imperfect ways. that's a different question than whether or not he should have been fired the way he was last week, and i've been critical of that decision. i think it exacerbates the erosion of trust in our institutions. so i'm disappointed in the timing of the firing, but i want the preserve room that there's lots of reasonable reasons that people across the political spectrum can argue about the way the f.b.i. leadership conducted its business in the 2016 cycle. >> dickerson: help me understand a little bit more about your point about the institutions and the way in which this was handled, recognizing your point that this

is separate from the merits of comey's handling of the e-mail investigation, but his firing, explain how that challenges institutions in your view. >> well, here's one of the things that d.c. is just constantly head in the sand about, which is that we've got a bunch of different institutions that have 9% and 12% and 15% public trust and public approval. america can't work that way, because we need a shared narrative about who we are as a people, what government can and can't do, and what the beating heart of the first amendment and free press and freedom of assembly and speech and religion means to us. we need to have a shared civic understanding of america before we get to partisan and policy differences. there are important fights to be had in policy, but we first need a civic sense of what america is, and here's what comes next in things like russian interference in america and in other countries in the age of cyber war over the next decade. i'm obviously concerned about 2016, but i'm far more concerned

about 2018 and 2020, because here's what comes next. john dickerson decides to run for office in 2018, and all of a sudden your credit card records get dumped in some sort of a cyber hack leak, and 97% of those records are going to be real. and there's going to be texture to it, and you were in city x on this day and you were in city y on this other day, but 3% of the records are going to be fabricated, and they're going to be interwoven. john, you've been spending a lot of money at a women's clothing store in chattanooga, but your wife isn't in chattanooga. that's weird. there's public doubt about you. and five days later your phone records are dumped. they're 99% accurate, 1% you're calling a brothel in chattanooga when your wife's playing bring. that's what's next on cyber war. we'll have institutions we can rely on when the public has more and more doubt. right now washington isn't at all focused on the long-term challenge of rebuilding a shared narrative about america and

institutional trust in our servantses. >> dickerson: let me ask you in specific terms, in this case, another institution that's been drawn into, has been the department of justice, there's a deputy attorney general who put his reputation and the weight of the department of justice on a celt of theories that now seem not to have been the entire reason for james comey's firing. i wonder if you see that as a poe threat to the independence and the reputation of that institution. >> well, i mean, there's been a lot of politicisation going on at the department of justice over the last five to eight, nine years, as well. and so we should want the department of justice to be very, very insolated from partisan politics. three branches of government, not one, not 17. so you need to have investigative and prosecutorial functions be in the article branch of the government. they need to be in the executive branch. there should be lots of insulation from the career civil servants and the leadership of the justice department from political decision making at the

white house. and so i don't think... i'm the chairman of the oversight subcommittee of the judiciary committee in the senate, so there are a number of things i don't want the say before we have deputy attorney general rosenstein before us. but there's a lot that we need to understand better about how this happened. >> dickerson: before we leave, let me ask you about your book, "the vanishing american adult." you see a very serious problem adult for america. it's a non-political problem. >> yes. this book is 100% not about politics. it's 99% not about policy. it's about this new category of perpetual adolescents. first let's say that over the last two millennia or so, the emergence of a category called adolescence is a special gift. we believe when our kids become biological adult, when they hit puberty, they don't have to be fully formed, morally, emotionally, economically, in terms of household structure. they don't have to go off to war and they don't have to be

economically self-sufficient. that's glorious to have that protected space between childhood and adulthood, but it's only glorious if you understand it's a transitional state. "peter pan" neverland is a hell, a disopen thea. we don't want our kids caught in place where they're not learning to be adults. right now we're not tending to the habit formation aspects of a republic. >> drew: senator sasse, thank you so much for being with us. we'll be back in one minute with our political panel. at&t is working with farmers to improve irrigation techniques. remote moisture sensors use a reliable network to tell them when and where to water. so that farmers like ray can compete in big ways. china. oh ... he got there. that's the power of and.

we're still siflting through the initial white house account of the firing. that was shattered by the president himself. trump comes on television and says, no, that's not how it happened. i wanted him gone. talking this week to several prominent republicans, people who have not been sharp critics of donald trump, i heard the same thing, which is this guy scares me. and i think the reason that people were scared this week is that they saw impulsive behavior, they saw a kind of vengeful, brooding about the past. they saw a willingness to be... a willingness to lie to the country, not tell the truth.

i think one person said to me, there are no guardrails on this presidency. another person said, this is richard nixon on steroids. this is a kind of hyperactive. so i think that's where we are at the end of the week. a lot of people are scared and i wonder, how do we get out of this? >> i'm genuinely surprised that was their reaction given the president has shown himself to be so reserved up to this point. >> dickerson: but this is a different order. >> it is a different order, but i think what we see is that the president, frankly, from my perspective, had a situation where he wanted to fire comey from day one, but i don't think that he felt politically solidified enough in the early going in order to do so. and as the weeks and months went on and he saw jim comey's repead appearance, he did the same thing that a lot of people do when they get irritated on television is get irritated at them and do something. when it came the mike pence's

comments was doing the right thing at the right time, the right time was day one. if the president believed james comey was not qualified for the position, he shouldn't have gotten rid of him for day one. he didn't for political reasons and that's led to this point. >> dickerson: about a minute. >> i want to focus on this self-inflicted nature of these crises. remember, in the short presidency of donald trump, nothing terrible has happened yet externally. and so what i mean by that, and god forbid any of these things should happen, but we've had no ferguson, no san bernardinos, orlando, paris attacks. a north korean missile hasn't fallen on to south korea, israel-hezbollah war. we haven't seen anything of these things. we're dealing with a white house... look, even the best, most organized presidency, the best white house sometimes succumbs to crises, right? but we have a white house that creates chaos, to borrow from peggy, chaos for itself. if you create chaos on its own

schedule and it still messes it up, so we have a serious problem here. >> dickerson: all right. we'll talk about this some more later, but we'll have in a minute more of our conversation with former secretary of defense robert gates. stay with us. ♪ what we do every night is like something out of a strange dream. except that the next morning... it all makes sense. fedex powers global e-commerce... with networks built over 40 years... that are massive... far-reaching...

and, yes... maybe a bit magical. ♪ visit fedex.com slash dream ♪ i'm dr. kelsey mcneely and some day you might be calling me an energy farmer. ♪ energy lives here. >> dickerson: friday we travel to william & mary in williamsburg, virginia, to speak with former secretary of defense robert gates. we began by asking him about f.b.i. director comey's firing. how did that strike you, based

on your experience? >> not terribly well done. you know, i fired a lot of senior people myself, and i think the key when you feel compelled to remove a senior official is essentially to have all your ducks in a row at the beginning, have everybody understand what the rationale was, if possible to be in a position to announce who is going to step in as the interim immediately, and if possible to announce who you're going to nominate to replace that person, for that upon somebody of impeccable integrity and reputation disarms a lot of the worst criticism that it's some kind of a power play. it's a professional approach to replacing a senior official, which is always going to get a lot of attention.

it's always going to be contentious, but having a single story and line in terns of how it happened and why it happened, that everybody is on the same page and then what the next steps are, i think that helps to diminish the blowback that you get. >> dickerson: in reporting about the f.b.i. director, there was a report that the president asked him for his loyalty. help people understand the line between duty, loyalty, and personal conscience. >> i think in the context of senior government positions, i think an anecdote of what i told president-elect obama when we had our first meeting, and i said, you don't know me, can you trust me? why do you think you can trust me, and so on. in the end, i said, you can count on me to be loyal to you. ly -- i will not leak. i will keep my disagreements with you private. and if i cannot be loyal, i'll

leave. loyalty means doing what you think is in the best interest of that person as well as the country. and often that loyalty means telling them things they don't want to hear. it's not being sycophantic. it's not telling them how wonderful they are every day. it's being willing to tell them the days they are not wonderful. and when you think they're making a mistake. >> dickerson: we'll have more of our conversation with secretary gates in a moment, including what encourages him in the trump administration.

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>> dickerson: we'll be right back with a lot more "face the nation," including more of our interview with former secretary of defense robert gates and more of our panel. stay with us. >> the f.b.i. director was fired and won't be talking soon, but remember when he said this: >> americans should be deeply sceptical of government power. >> more on "60 min,,,,,,,,

>> dickerson: welcome back the "face the nation." we continue our conversation with former secretary of defense robert gates. what's your sense overall of president trump as an unpredictable leader? >> broadly philosophically, i'm in agreement with his disruptive approach, so in government, i'm a strong believer in the need for reform of government agencies and departments. they have gotten fat and sloppy and they're not user friendly. they are inefficient. they cost too much. i also think on the foreign policy side that there is a need for disruption. we've had three administrations follow a pretty consistent policy toward north korea, and it really hasn't gotten us

anywhere. so the notion of disrupting and putting the chinese on notice that it's no longer business as usual for the united states i think is a good thing. the question is, obviously, in the implementation of disruption. on the foreign policy side, there's the risk of being too spontaneous and too disruptive, where you end up doing more harm than damage. figuring out that balance is where having strong people around you matters. >> dickerson: what advice would you give the president before his first big foreign trip he's about to take? >> that's a good yes. i think the key will be to limit spontaneity to areas that are fun or that sort of say something about you as a real person. i think when it comes to the issues, i'd advise him to stick to the script.

but he is going to have some very tough conversations and he's going to be talking about some very tough and complicated issues in all of the places that he visits, but i think any time a president does things that are humanizing, i think it's good. >> dickerson: should the use of twitter stop at the water's edge? >> well, not necessarily. but i would be careful. >> dickerson: let me ask you about forkballer national security adviser michael flynn. if you got information that the national security adviser had not told the truth about contact with a russian ambassador, how serious of an issue would that be if it were brought to you? >> well, i would certainly make sure that the president knew that we had learned this. if we got that information in an intelligence report, then i would probably have sought a private meeting with the

president to share that with him. >> dickerson: the concern was that the russians would be able to blackmail the former national security adviser because they knew he had said something untrue and caused the vice president to say something untrue. is that a plausible, possible outcome and something to be worried about? >> in all honesty, i think it's a stretch. it's one thing if somebody working for the u.s. government has sold secrets to the other side. it's another if they have something in their personal life that they're hiding, for which they could be blackmailed. having evidence that they didn't tell the truth to somebody in the same building where they work, maybe it's just the old intel guy, it's a problem and it's a problem like i just said that i would tell the president about, but it's not the same as... it's hard for me. i don't know general flynn well,

but it's hard for me to believe anybody would allow themselves to be blackmailed by the russians because they didn't tell the full story or didn't tell the truth to the vice president of the united states who works 50 feet down the hall. you know, maybe he could have been blackmailed. it's thee -- theoretically possible. i think it's a different kind of situation than we would have thought of in the intelligence business. >> dickerson: the president met with the russian foreign minister and the ambassador in the oval office. there were pictures of them smiling in the oval office. what did you make of that meeting? >> for a long time, soviet foreign ministers would come in to see the president all the time, routinely, jimmy carter stopped that after the invasion. ronald reagan resumed it in 1994 i think. and so the fact of a meeting like that i think is not that big a deal. >> dickerson: the trump white house kept american

photographers and press out of the room. the photographs were released by the russians. what do you make of that? >> i thought that was all pretty odd. >> dickerson: not worth repeat. there's important business on the table with russia all over the world, but there is also the intelligence community has a consensus that the russians did medal in the last election, so people looking at smiling photographs in the oval office and they look at this effort to meddle in the election and say, is there a disconnect there? should there be sterner faces and harsher approach to russia? >> i think in the policies that have been followed since the president came into office, there really hasn't been any slack cut for the russians. and i think one of the things that has surprised people has been that the relationship between the united states and russia has, in fact, deteriorated since the election. the administration, the contrast between the way they have treated the russians and the way they have reacted to the chinese

is pretty stark. so, you know, having smiles in the oval office, i don't know, maybe i'm just getting too old, but i don't think that's that big a deal. it's in their policies and in their actions that it really matters, and in those arenas, i think they've been pretty tough minded. >> dickerson: some analysts look at russia and say, what vladimir putin really wanted by being involved in the u.s. election was just to throw the west into a kind of chaotic state, to undermine u.s. institutions. do you think that putin is getting what he wants? >> well, i think he's certainly getting a lot of publicity for what the russians are doing. and i'm not sure that's unwelcome to him. look, i think this is a guy who saw the u.s. basically come out against him and his reelection campaign in 2012. he saw the u.s. being behind all of the color revolutions in

eastern europe and in georgia and ukraine and so on, so his view is the west has been interfering in his politics for years, and i think that he has decided in a very strategic way to turn the tables and this everything in his power to, as we describe russian elections as illegitimate to, try to communicate to the rest of the world that western elections are ill jet matt, and it's not just us. we know that now. it's germany, it's france, it's a number of other countries, and it's a very broad and in the very well-disguised effort to create questions about the legitimacy of these western elections. i think this is very k.g.b. >> dickerson: in north korea the president is relying very heavily on china. is he relying too much on china so it makes it hard for him to

push back on china when it comes to the south china sea or human rights or intellectual property rights? >> i think that the disruptive nature, the tough talk on north korea, the military deployments, sending the missile defense system to south korea, i think these are all good things to have done, and i think he's gotten china's attention to a degree that his predecessors have not, that this is a very serious matter for the united states. my last visit to china as secretary, january 2011, i told president hu, just like this, the president of the united states wanted me to tell you that we now consider north korea a direct threat to the united states. and it had no effect whatsoever. i think president trump has their attention, and my one concern is that he may overestimate how much power china has in pyongyang.

they do have influence, and they do have companies, and they do have economic relationships that could make life much more difficult in the north. their balancing act is how much worse can we make it in the north without creating that which scares us more than anything, which is a collapse in the north, and then what happens to all those nuclear weapons. they're going to work very hard to avoid that. it's clear the relationship between china and north korea has hardly ever been worse. kim jong-un has never been to beijing in his leadership. president xi has never been to north korea. that's a first in that relationship. the chinese press are saying some amazingly negative things about the north and about kim jong-un. so they are weighing in, and they are bringing greater pressure.

whether it will be enough i think remains to be seen. >> dickerson: a lot of people look at this president and think he's out of the bounds of the normal presidency. your descriptions and assessment of the administration seems like you see him within the buds of a normal presidency. is that fair? >> again, i have tried to focus most of what i've talked about on the foreign policy side. that's the part i know. i didn't think this whole business with director comey was handled well, so there are sort of day-to-day aspects of the operation that i think are really troublesome, and i know that there are a lot of people in the country who have lots of issues with decisions that he's making on the domestic side. the thing that reassures me some on the foreign policy side is that he and his team seem to have worked out a relationship of trust and a lot of the extraneous or extemporaneous things that were going on early

on have largely settled. >> dickerson: mr. secretary, thank you so much. >> thank you. >> dickerson: we'll be right back with more op our panel. ♪ ♪ ♪ what we do every night is like something out of a strange dream.

except that the next morning... it all makes sense. fedex powers global e-commerce... with networks built over 40 years... that are massive... far-reaching... and, yes... maybe a bit magical. ♪ >> dickerson: and we're back with more from our political panel. peggy noonan is a column fist for the "wall street journal," and her bestselling book "the time of our lives" is out in paperback. peggy was also recently awarded the pulitzer prize for last area's campaign commentary, and we congratulate her for that.

jeffrey goldberg is the editor of the atlantic. david ignatius is a columnist for the "washington post" and ben domenech is the publisher of "the federalist." david, starting with you, coming off of what a second -- secretary gates says, he feelsry assured by the policy team the president has around him. what do you make of that? >> bob gates is a steady voice of continuity. he's been around since the reagan presidency. he has that depth and clarity. and he's right. trump chose a national security team that's first rate. a lot of them are people that gates recommended. rex tillerson was a gates' proposal at the state department. james mattis, a general widely admired. secretary kelly in homeland security was bob gates' military adviser way back when. h.r. mcmaster came up in that broad school that gates helped

trump preside over. i thought i heard secretary gates say that on domestic policy he is troubled as he looks at the comey firing. he finds elements that... the obvious point is that president trump and the senate need to respond to this week that we've had by choosing someone to run the f.b.i. who is in that category of strong, steady, reliable national security leaders that we just talked about, that bob gates in a sense represents. if they can make a nomination like that, you know, some former judges who are terrific, mike rogers, who was recommended by former f.b.i. agents, ran a bipartisan committee and made it work, but if they can choose somebody that the country will trust who is on that list, i think they can get out of this. >> dickerson: peggy, veats --

secretary gates says the president needs to limit spontaneity overseas. what are your expectations for this policy trip? >> that was a deft way for many gates to say, please don't freak us out while you're overseas. i take a simple, unlettered view of this big foreign policy trip from the president. i think he is saying essentially, i am trump and i am real. i made -- i am a real president, i'm doing with what real presidents, do i'm meeting with popes. i'm meeting with sheikhs. i think in a way most foreign policy trips involve an asking out of who you are, i think the trip essentially is meant to say i'm here and i'm normal. i hope, as gates says, he doesn't get too colorful or anything like that. i know there are serious foreign policy components to the discussion. i'm going to leave it to you guys. to you this is symbolic. i hope it's tasteful. it would be very nice if we have a little no trouble that is

unneeded. calm. >> he's going to say something in front of the pope. that causes an admission. after concern. >> dickerson: the pope is in that business. >> trips are very scripted. it's after the trip. it's when you have a crisis. i hate the keep going back to this point about crises, but these trips are scripted to avoid crises. he's not going to try to instigate in the israeli-palestinian peace process at this moment, but what i worry about is when... it's the 3:00 a.m. phone call. we haven't had the 3:00 a.m. phone call yet, and it's not clear to me that even that iron triangle of tillerson, mcmaster and mattis can stop an impulsive reaction on the part of the president that might not be easily pulled back. >> the issue here, too, to get back to comey for a moment, is

the president has a way of taking something that ought to be done and making it more chaotic than it deserves to be. it's my opinion that james comey deserved to be fired. it was clear that he deserved to be fired. his incompetence in the investigation of hill hi alone deserved that without the various points he made afterward, and he had lost and burned through a lot of bipartisan goodwill on both sides of the aisle, but that's not why the president made the decision that he did. john podesta, the morning that james comey was fired, tweeted out in reference to his testimony the previous day that the american public is getting mildly nauseous listening to james comey. that's fine. that may be true, but that isn't the reason the president ought to have made the decision he made. that led to all of the chaos this week for something that ought to have been much more organized, much more laid out, and as bob gates said, something that's planned where everybody says, this is why we did this thing we did. >> dickerson: let me ask you about that chaos. because idiosyncratic president with some disruption going on.

secretary gates suggested in someplaces that disruption was doing good things, getting nato to pay up, getting the north koreans to realize america was serious. >> sure. >> dickerson: but in this case, the president said he made it his decision for reason x. then the vice president went out and said, yes, it was because of the hillary clinton e-mail server. >> yes some the vice president is now on the the hook for an explanation the president then undermined. isn't that a cause for chaos for his vice president? >> oh, sure. trump always puts his people on the hook. he doesn't just harm himself. he harms his whole operation when he acts in this antic matter. but let me tell you quickly something i'm thinking of as we all speak here about this whole comey drama. what obsesses us in washington as we well know is not necessarily what obsesses america. what we talk about on this panel, it's in the our views are not necessarily reflected out there. i was so struck yesterday with everybody i know in conversations that was all about comey, the f.b.i., who is the next guy.

i put on the tv and i see the president wowing them at liberty university. they got that hats on. i am struck by the distance between our conversation and the national conversation. and i'm struck by the distance between democrats and republicans as they approve or disapprove of the comey thing. it's an 80/20. democrats were 80% i hate the comey firing. republicans were 80% i love the comey firing. >> on the other hand, he's not the most popular president. liberty university might be outside the norm. >> he's got his base is what i mean. he's not growing his base. >> 20% of the country thinks he's right. i heard from a republican the best argument against having a special prosecutor, which adam schiff and others have called for. you need to keep regular order. you need to stay with the 40% who voted for him. we're not creating a special committee prosecutor to get your

guy. we're not out to get you and what you voted for. keep it regular. ask the politicians who were elected to run it to, run the investigation. ask them to reject a bad f.b.i. nominee. if he sends up a creny, a bad person, the republicans have to vote against him. that's when we'll know that we're getting better here. if the republicans reject a bad nominee. >> dickerson: what's your sense of where republicans are in response to this? because of course what peggy says is right. the president knows how to use that disconnect between. but there are some things still in this day and age in which people in washington are supposed to be concerned about a few things, even if the country isn't. in some cases that's kind of what they're here for. >> what i hear mostly from the republicans is that they're concerned that this level of chaos will prevent them from furthering their agenda, an agenda they need the run on in a year and a half, that they believe is very important. i think they would be very disappointed in anyone who was not a qualified individual who was put forward for f.b.i.

director position. i think, though, the real concern they have is we need to pass a health care law. we need the pass the tax reform law in order for us to go back the our constituents and get elected in a year and a half. that's something they worry will be negatively affected by this. >> let me make one quick point about stability and truth-telling and chaos theory. at some point in the future donald trump is going to have to organize an international coalition of some sort in order to combat a serious problem. let's assume it's north korea right now. bob gates worked for a president, george h.w. bush, who organized one of the greatest coalitions in history with with james baker against samuel lebron in 1991. they did that because they had credibility. people understood them to be steady and stable and telling them the truth. our current president is spending down what little capital he had very, very quickly. so we're heading into a possibility of a situation in which he has no credibility on the international stage when he's going to need it. >> dickerson: back tondo midwestic for a moment, as ben

says, there are a lot of things that aren't getting discussed. this sense of unpredictability, if i'm a republican, how do i handle the fact that you've got a president who is going to be doing some exciting things that you might have to answer for? >> exciting things? that's a nice way to put it. what david said. a big decision will be made now about the f.b.i. it's a serious, soab, low-drama person is put forward, everybody will be reheaved and go forward: if some sleaze ball is put forward, forgive melange waj, or some towedy -- toady, republicans will stand up and say this won't do. i think that will happen, and i think it's what ought to happen. >> dickerson: i have to stop you there. we have to talk about mom. coming up, a tributes to moms.

>> dickerson: mother's day is a welcome event in partisan times. nearly everyone agrees that we should show mothers gratitude. for those of us who have lost our mother, there is a little melancholy in the day, though, but that melancholy can be put to good use, a lesson i learned from my mother and that i

recommend. when she died, mom left me her letters and journals, windows into things i would have been too young to understand when she was alive or too busy or too much of a know-it-all. what these papers show is her grit. she was a journalist, who for a decade or so was told that because she was a woman she couldn't be on television with the men. she got there eventually, but she also later got fired. in her journal, she is scared. there were times the bills couldn't be paid. at one point she typed a letter to her children on carbon paper from the office. it was to be read in case she died. she was on the road all the time working and worried something might happen to her. nothing happened, but that letter and all her letters are a lesson, a gift and a guide. they make sense now that i'm old enough to understand them, and see myself in her blemishes, too, the pride and selfishness that trips up all of us from time to time some as a tribute

to my mom, i write letters to my kids on mother's day, letters like the ones she left me, to be opened when i'm gone and they're older and the contents make more sense. if i'm around when they're my age, maybe we'll open these letters and read them together, if i'm brave enough, and we'll all thank mom. back in a moment. (laughing) left foot. right foot. left foot. stop. twitch your eyes so they think you're crazy. if you walk the walk you talk the talk. it's what you do. if you want to save fifteen percent or more on car insurance you switch to geico. hide the eyes. it's what you do. show 'em real slow.

>> dickerson: that's it for today. thanks for watching. until next week, for nation "face the nation," i'm john dickerson.,,,,,, whoa!

you're not taking these. hey, hey, hey! you're not taking those. whoa, whoa! you're not taking that. come with me. you're not taking that. you're not taking that. you're not taking that. mom, i'm taking the subaru. don't be late. even when we're not there to keep them safe, our subaru outback will be. (vo) love. it's what makes a subaru, a subaru.

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