David Gergen

I think that this White House unfortunately has fed us so many misleading statements and so many lies over time.

It seems unlikely someone would call five times unless he were on a mission that was encouraged by the president or by somebody higher up in the White House.

It's unimaginable that the White House General Counsel would sit on it and not tell anybody else in the White House. At the minimum, he would tell the chief of staff. In every White House I've ever known, it would go to the president like…

When did he know? And when did he know it? If they had a report to the legal counsel, the general counsel would have reported presumably to the president. Why then is Flynn still there?

It's not actually saying, well, the President's right, that there's a lot of killers, or that, you know, whatever the subject may be.

I cannot believe the Trump administration will say they -- will ignore this. I think they'll say tonight they're confident they're going to prevail in the end.

this is a single most important initiative that Donald Trump has put on the table since he became president.

I think if you look at the totality of that, this really weakens Rex Tillerson at the very moment. We need a strong Secretary of State.

Taking Iraq's oil is preposterous on its face and, you know, with a sovereign nation.

General Kelly. He's outstanding. Everybody has a great deal of respect for him in Washington. He's a heavyweight.

I do believe McCain and Graham have issued the first direct challenge to Donald Trump over the future conduct of his presidency and his policies starting with Putin.

I think the cabinet is going to have a larger voice than what you have seen in the Obama administration and the Bush administration in making policy.

I think this is going to complicate those -- the pursuit of those priorities and there is a danger, I must say, that I think the Trump forces will overreact in order to prove how pro-Israeli they are.

I think Peter was right on a lot of things he said, by the way.

It's a much bigger deal than anybody would have expected, Jim.

We ought to give Donald Trump more the benefit of the doubt. But that would be a lot easier to do if he spoke clearly and without ambiguity.

Absolutely. And John, please understand. It didn't start with Nixon. It goes back a long way.

You do want to make sure your friends know that you're a reliable ally. That you're not erratic.

What kind of world are we living in when the president of the United States, you know, the Russians are hacking him, we know that and everybody -- that's a given. But he seems to be trying to undercut our democracy.

The first job of the president, the responsibility of the president, is to keep us out of war. And those briefings are an essential part of being prepared by a president, in preparation by a president to make the tough calls.

I would think that Donald Trump would not only want to do that as the new incoming president, but also, if he's confident about that, the investigations will help to clear the cloud around his incoming administration.

I think he's entitled to who he wants. But when he goes out to Iowa and said, we've got the best cabinet ever, that's not a point on which Americans agree.

I think they have to figure out two or three issues on which they're willing to cooperate, infrastructures the most obvious. They don't have a plan of their own yet. They desperately need to come up with a plan of their own. But I think…

I don't think the election should be read as a triumph of obstructionism. I don't -- I think Trump was not one of the candidates who ran on that. He ran it for change, to bust the whole thing out.

I think President Obama deserved credit for helping save the automobile industry. It's one of his big accomplishments.