"You can never go wrong quoting the president," says Eric Edelman, the former ambassador to Turkey and Finland and Vice President Dick Cheney's national security advisor, "because what the president says IS policy."

Edelman, now a Miller Center senior fellow, applied that rule regularly over his decades-long diplomatic career, but how exactly does that work when the president regularly communicates through provocative Twitter posts? What do policymakers do when the president asserts that his predecessor tapped his phones, and the entire national security establishment contradicts him? What is an informed citizen to make of the hearings on Capitol Hill into the extent of Russian influence on the presidential election?

Edelman reviewed those questions in this recent Miller Center interview.