counterintelligence operation especially on the president of the united states without layers and layers of review. and that's done to protect everybody involved. there has to be -- i'm convinced there's even more. there's signals intelligence. there's intelligence from our allies, human intelligence, and more information before the fbi could take the dramatic step of opening up a counterintelligence operation against the president of the united states. and then we have to look at it, now you have these and we find something. where are we? what's ultimately the difference between if he is an agent of a foreign government or if he's an unwitting agent of the foreign government? >> this is an important point. the president is saying i was never a russian agent, if you will. but as michael schmidt points out in his piece, the fbi was looking into whether he was unwittingly being used by russia, so the president wouldn't have known about it. right? >> well, there's a big continuum from being an agent and knowing