scott, and shelby, shelby let me start with you. what happened last week when two members of the senate judiciary committee did a refers of christoph christopher steele. what is likely happening. it is getting increasingly political and ugly. at the end of the day everyone says mueller is driving this investigation. he is doing it privately but mueller will have ultimate say over what happens with president trump s presidency and also his aides and people around him who have been charged and could be charged in the future. so there s that. you also have this really ugly partisan debate shaping up over government funding and daca and millions of other things that congress has to get done. i thought that clip you just played is telling because president trump decided will campaign for incumbent. that will help with republicans in congress which is not always a smooth relationship.
before he took the job and i would have picked somebody else. he gave you no heads up at all? zero. and meanwhile in a move sure to inflame partisan divisions, chuck grassley and lindsey graham of the judisciary refer n regard to russia meddling. they had reason to believe that a former british spy, christoph christopher steele lied about his contacts with reporters regarding information in the dossier and urged them to investigate. it is a partisan hit job because it was compiled as part of an opposition research effort for the clinton campaign. and joining me is richard blumenthal. thank you for joining us. this is your colleagues, your republican colleague gz on the committee saying to the just department there ought to be a criminal investigation of christopher steele, the author of this dossier. let me ask you first, the evidence that they say they ve encountered that justified this investigation, have you seen
was in the works before this. so bannon his 2018 project, his inter-party insurgency is in jeopard any in his future in the media, that is unresolved. we came into 2018 thinking that would be a major political story, bannon and the establishments and the primaries may not be what we re talking about this spring. thank you to all of you for joining us. and a programming note. michael wolff will join chris matthews on hardball this coming tuesday. 7:00 eastern. don t miss that. and coming up, that bombshell report from the new york times that trump had the white house counsel push jeff sessions not to recuse himself in the russia investigation. it is part of what may be an obstruction of justice case against the president and comes as two republican senators call for a criminal investigation against the author of the dossier, christopher steele. that is ahead. plus trump s quote, dishonest media awards, he promised to announce them on monday.
to proceed unimpeded and thinks there ought to be looking into this issue of russia meddling and thinks there needs to be a kind of investigation into this dossier, into the whether the fbi was relying on what he sees as opposition research work. in terms of the russia meddling piece of it, do you think he do you think the republicans on that committee are taking that seriously? there is a really indisputable fact here which is that the fbi investigation of that russian meddling and the trump campaign collaboration was triggered by information dependent from fusion gps or christopher steele and we know from excellent reporting that it results from information from within the trump campaign, george papadapoulos talking to the australian ambassador and other intelligence sources. so this seems like a distraction
and so on. nigel west knows christopher steele. he s a writer and historian whose sperkt is british intelligence. west says that steele was mi-6 s man in moscow in the early nine fiend 90s. and thereafter he ended his career as the head of the branch that trains new entry intelligence officers. and that s actually considered to be a pretty important role. after retiring, steele started a new company called or business business intelligence located in this building in london. it specialized in getting corporate executives deep targeted intel on foreign countries they were dealing with. steele s specialty was russia. i have listened to his presentations on what he calls the kleptocracy. had is the putin regime and the way it has effectively luted the former soviet union. he s the go-to guy if there was