intelligence. a lot of republicans disagree with him including gowdy and rubio. it was not peter strzok who decided to open the russia investigation. it was throughout the f.b.i. and throughout the intelligence community. they started picking up signals that something might be going on and followed up on it from a counter intelligence perspective. who gave the directive? was it president obama? you have to ask yourself who gave the directtive. we can t find evidence of collusion or obstruction, why? i disagree there is no evidence of collusion. to maria s point, the intelligence community should put more information out when they can about why this was started because in the absence of that you have a lot of assertions being made. i ve been skeptical of the collusion charge against donald trump. there is open testimony that the trump campaign wanted to collude with foreign powers. so did hillary.
second. bob baier is joining us on the phone. this news of this person confirmed to have been in the meeting, a russian-american lobbyist which, as our reporting is, he has ties to the russian government, of course. what do you say to that when you learn he is now in the meeting and no one knew before? the truth is trickling out slowly. i can tell you, from a counter intelligence perspective, this would alarm it is alarming people in the fbi and cia. the russian government, the kjb has spotters and assessors all over washington. they are not in touch with the kjb in washington, they fly back to moscow, oh, i met an interesting guy or the president or the president s son or son-in-law. they go in for assessment. this is a very informal
you think jim comey who was then fbi director would have done? i think they would have considered, you know, certainly looking at the background of this russian emmissary, this woman who is representing herls as herself as a representative of the government. looking at that from a criminal perspective, a counter intelligence perspective, digging into her background very quickly, evaluating whether they should wire one of these folks or all of these folks or the room up for consensual monitoring to capture follow-on conversations, to see if she would perfect what she was proposing, that she had some sort of russian sponsored intelligence that was going to be helpful. i think the fbi would want to collect that information and pursue that. ron hosco, former fbi assistant director. good to see you. you too. what about jared kushner, the president s son-in-law, under fire for failing to report that meeting under his security clearance forms.
the white house. to be honest i think it is gobbly goock i think there s certain types of vetting. there s certain back grounds that happen but you would hope the white house would do its own vet from a political perspective. but you have to remember on the issue of background investigation so much depends on the subject themselves of the investigation. if flynn didn t mention, as we know guys like jared kushner also left some stuff out, then that does a lot of harm in terms of the ability to investigation and to get their security clearances at the end of the day and perhaps even more important i think security clearance in the big picture is from a counter intelligence perspective is not that critical of a thing. some of the biggest damages that
was done to u.s. national security guys like alder james and those guys had great security clearance through top secret level. there s a lot more it to it than clearances and vetting, it s what these people did and that s what the fbi is doing from counter intelligence perspective. according to gordon he said once you get to the level of michael flynn he is saying, i don t want to take you out of context gordon but sounds like you said you should know the game, should know the score, should know what you have to disclose and what you don t have to disclose. is that not correct? yeah, no, look, first of all, i mean, michael flynn was the chief of the defense intelligence agency. the chief intelligence officer for the department of deaf. for the department of defense. that s no small thing. you would think someone at that level would know the rules. i think this is actually a