this probe so far, this russian probe, have faced at least one count of making false statements to federal officials. arguing today that the president should only respond to written questions, like a take-home test, trump ally newt gingrich warned that the president could find himself out-matched against mueller s prosecutors if it were a face-to-face setting. i think that they should proffer that mueller can submit written questions and they ll answer his written questions. make it that easy. but i would not get involved in a free-for-all. i think the idea of putting trump in a room with five or six hardened, very, very clever lawyers, all of whom who are trying to trap him, would be a very, very bad idea. there you just heard newt gingrich s inef-able, statement that the president s not up to it mentally. negotiations over the format of a questioning over the president is ongoing right now. but if trump s lawyer team does not cooperate, mueller could subpoena the president to
the details that were released, and some of them are very significant, but that she did it against the wishes of her chairman chuck grassley. she did. it s not the first time she s released things against the wishes. even members of her own party, she released a report on torture during the obama administration and the president of her own party didn t want her to do that. in this particular case, she s trying to take the political air out of the balloon for republicans, who are using this dossier, using the genesis of it, what s in it, how it was used and kind of bounced around between political campaigns and the fbi, using it against against the president. against mueller, against democrats. that was the goal there. and the people who testified, glenn simpson himself has said please release this. he didn t feel and obviously dianne feinstein didn t feel there was anything classified in there that needed to be kept secret. so the more it was kept secret,
i don t know. the republicans did a very good job at undercutting him publicly at the end of the year. they took the text message issue where the top agent expressed anti-trump views with an fbi official. they used that to raise questions about mueller s credibility. mueller had really good standing in washington. someone on both sides of the aisles, but republican, even main stream republicans were really going after him. now, if you are a republican do you look at this and say wow, maybe mueller has really good cards? do i need to back off? i don t think so. there are so many revelations that came out about this president. republicans have continued to stand by him. i think they saw the success. if you look on fox, there is a constant drum beat against mueller and about his prosecutors being democrats and such. so i m not sure this will really change anything. all right. we ll see. michael schmidt. thank you so much. we greatly appreciate it. just one note, yeah, there are
we have to have a vote whether to allow other committee members to come into our scif and view materials. whether people on the committee that view classified information can use it for other purposes, if we re doing investigation and uncover things that concern us about performance of agencies, yes that can be considered. the problem here is not that gop members came across information of a certain ilk but rather there s been a concerted effort from the very beginning to try to build a case, any case, against mueller, the fbi and the department of justice. much of our leadership unfortunately has never stopped being a surrogate for the white house. we had that problem at beginning of the investigation when chairman went on midnight run to the white house. but that problem has continued and taken different forms after that white house incident, then had an effort to basically focus on unmasking. after that was unsuccessful,
outside of the scif, the classified space, unless specific procedures in place and taking to another classified setting and done following specific procetocols. and you can t take them from committee and share with members of the other committees. we have to have a vote whether to allow other committee members to come into our scif and view materials. whether people on the committee that view classified information can use it for other purposes, if we re doing investigation and uncover things that concern us about performance of agencies, yes that can be considered. problem here is not that gop members came across information of concern but rather there s been a concerted effort from the very beginning to try to build a case, any case, against mueller, the fbi and department of justice. much of our leadership