have been clamoring for it for awhile now. they reportedly are about to get their wish. axios.com is now reporting that president trump is about to order the declassification of a batch of documents, quote, covering the u.s. government s surveillance of trump campaign adviser carter page and the investigative activities of senior justice department lawyer bruce ohr. carter page is the trump campaign adviser who came under fbi surveillance for his repeated contacts with russian operatives. he was surveilled under fisa regulations that require the government to show that they believe the target of the surveillance is an active foreign agent. bruce ohr, on the other hand, is a justice department official whose work has made him one of the top experts in the u.s. government on russian organized crime and its ties to the kremlin, including one dramatic instance in which bruce ohr reportedly met with a russian oligarch named oleg deripaska and tried to convince him to
become a cooperator were u.s. law enforcement against the russian government. the president has been sending angry tweets about bruce ohr for weeks now. last month, house republicans summoned ohr for closed door testimony. but now we re told to expect the president to release classified information from ohr s, quote, investigative activities. joining us now is congressman jim himes who is a member of the house intelligence committee. congressman, thank you very much for being with us. hi, rachel. what is your reaction to this reporting from axios that the president is going to declassify these materials? first of all, i should mention that it s just axios reporting this. other people aren t matching this reporting. i don t know if that means that they re just ahead of the story or maybe they ve caught on to something that isn t going to happen. do you have expectations about this? well, i m certainly intrigued by it. i m intrigued by it because of course they ve declassified othe
yesterday s statements on pardons and tariffs. this is all kind of because he can. the president s frustrations with the guardrails of the presidency. that he doesn t work through the pardons office in the justice department. and we have reporting up on axios now saying the part of what he did on tariffs, what you re pointing out, so many of his allies inside think don t make sense. it was because he was frustrated that he was tired of waiting to do something big on trade. worried he wasn t going to win some of these negotiations. so clearly, mike, the attorney general jeff sessions, he is under constant assault. one way or another, from the president of the you have states. what sort of support has he been getting from his former associates in the united states senate, and what kind of vocal verbal back-up do they give jeff sessions to the president of the united states? well we re leading the witness here a bit.
they met during, in december. so it wasn t, it s not a long-term relationship. they started to you know, basically connect after that decision meeting in 2016 in new york. that after that, then they connected and then that relationship continued according to people we talked to, after the inauguration, they got more into policy matters and things like that. all right. carol lee, thank you so much. we re going to be reading your new reporting at nbc news.com. and who knew that the seychelles was such a hot destination. i ve heard it s croatia or lib lis bon. i guess during the transition, the hot place to visit was the seychelles, because certainly everybody in the trump administration seemed to go there or know somebody who was there. now let s go to co-founder of axios, mike allen. mike, axios has new reporting on
stories you are looking for, not just today, but in the weeks and month ahead? looking ahead, the president and axios right now we have a globe that s been turned into a rubik s cube. because the president has so much on his plate. he has two nuclear standoffs he s looking at, iran and north korea. and in addition to that, the early beginnings of a trade war on multiple fronts as we ve been seeing here and throw into that the distraction of an investigation, a hot summer ahead. indeed it is, mike allen live for us in washington, d.c., appreciate it as always. we ll see you back on morning joe in a few minutes and we ll be reading axios a.m. in just a little while. you, too, can sign up for the news letter by going to axios.com. i m yasmin vossoughian alongside ayman mohyeldin and louis burgdorf, morning joe starts right now. meet the man who wants to put martha stewart in jail. martha stewart is being