anxieties about this. i do think that gives some comfort. but i hope that the senators push on that in a public forum in testimony under oath. i hope that bill barr is pushed for commitments that he will not shut down the mueller investigation, he will not starve it as resources. that he he will make public a report as far as he can and the american people can hear that directly from bill barr s mouth because that s going to be very important going forward. this will be a public hearing next week, bill barr speaking to the american people and the senate as well trying to tell them that the mueller investigation is safe. phil, while we have you here, i do want to ask you again about the manafort information we received, the idea that hend d handed private polling information on to someone known to be russian intelligence. this investigation from the beginning, the mueller investigation before that when the fbi was doing it was a legal and counterintelligence investigation. from a co
embassy? most likely not, but i think it misses the broader point here, which is that mueller is looking at the counterintelligence investigation with two aspects. one is the social media one. we saw the indictment. the second is the hacking of the democratic national committee and podesta. and then as to each, whether there was collusion or coordination with respect to the first social media it s going to be cambridge analytica and the kushner analytics operation and with respect to the hacking it will be roger stone and don jr. and their conversations with wikileaks around the dnc podesta hacking. so whether or not roger stone had dinner, whether he was kidding with sam nunberg, whether nunberg misunderstood is beside the point of i think that mueller has in his sights the hacking from the counterintelligence standpoint
could be suppressing voters of color which was a clear objective. yeah, julia? the other thing i wanted to say is there s no chance in hell essentially that any of these 13 russians are going to see justice in the u.s. the u.s. and russia don t have an extradition treaty. there s no way we re ever going to see these people here, face trial here. but this is kind of a shot across the bow to the trump administration. no collusion, no collusion. we keep hearing this from the white house. and saying all of this is a witch hunt, that this is a democratic delusion. and here trump is sending this is not a message to the russians. this is a message to the president and his base saying no collusion? how about all this? well, and we should say this. we don t know what is out after this. we ll talk about this for most of the show today. but there s a bunch of things about the hacking that we still don t know. but one thing, naveed, from a counterintelligence standpoint,
extensive financial ties between russian-backed entities and the trump organization. that, in my mind, if it is true would be a relevant fact from a counterintelligence standpoint. you re the ranking member of the senate intelligence committee. which questioned donald trump jr. today behind closed doors. is donald trump jr., is he being forthcoming? listen, i m not going to comment about his testimony this morning. we don t talk about that testimony, but if you simply look at the public record, whether it is the case of the meeting where russians were offering in effect dirt on hillary clinton that he participated in, when we look at the fact that it appears donald trump jr. had some level of contact with julian assange and the head of wikileaks, which was the source of a lot of these leaked information on mrs. clinton and on john podesta, you know, there are a lot of
yeah. i think your defense of hillary clinton starts from her side. but from the russian perspective, look, they were trying to interfere with our election. once they had the contact through to tphps and s.e.a.l. and so forth, they could work it from the other end. as we saw with facebook and google, they didn t just support trump. they were around ferguson stirring things up and other activities like that. so once they had that connection, whether the dnc and the clinton campaign started out looking to connect up with the russians, ultimately they did. but a question from the counterintelligence standpoint, how did they use that contact for their advantage or attempted to be used for their advantage? much of this discussion about the 2016 election, almost all of it really so far should be