One s campaign. that s a reference to donald trump. again, the president and the republicans have said that this is not information that was sufficient to show the court that this was a dossier that was paid for by democratic by democratic donors, by the hillary clinton campaign. the democrats say not so much. all right, evan perez, thank you for unpacking all of that. and to the point you were making, evan, let s go to boris sanchez now at the white house. and despite what evan is telling us about what is in this memo, we got a statement from the white house that contradicts a bit of that. boris, what did the white house have to say? yeah, ryan. the white house putting out a statement saying this is a political document that aims to undercut the president. really reiterating some of the claims that we saw in the nunes memo, that the schiff memo attempts to dispel. the idea that salacious dossier was the basis of the russia investigation, and that a fisa judge wasn t informed abo
Have been. essentially, this boils down to the idea that is the basis for the nunes memo, that there s a deep state conspiracy that is out to delegitimize president trump and his agenda. if we take a step back, we have to accept that president trump, for the extent of his presidency, has long gone after anyone who claims that there was any form of meddling by russia in the election. he s also long stated that there s no collusion between his campaign and russia. it is not a surprise, though, that the white house was less than enthusiastic about the release of the schiff memo. the president at one point saying he would leave it to the fbi to determine whether this document should be released. something he did not do for the nunes memo. you ll recall that he was caught on a hot mike after the state of the union telling lawmakers that he was 100% behind the release of the nunes memo without ever having read a word of it.
Weekend and muffles some of the talk, and this mimo coming out at 5:00 or 4:45 on a saturday, i think does that same thing. and you know, if we re disappointed that the statement doesn t make a point by point ref uitation from the white house this afternoon, that s not their strong suit. what they are good at is essentially saying politically, these are not thedroids you re looking for, so we know that whatever we re talking about tonight, we may be talking about something else tomorrow morning. certainly by tweet time monday morning, we ll be on an entirely different topic. it s absolutely no coincidence that it came out at precisely the moment that devin nunes was addressing cpac, where donald trump just got 90-plus percentile approval rating from the crowd there. right. very good point. thank you so much for both of your perspectives. obviously, a lot more to unpack with the release of this democratic rebuttal memo to the devin nunes memo.
October of 2016, when the justice department and the fbi go to the secret court to get this surveillance warrant, they have additional information. they say that by the time there are three more renewals of that surveillance of carter page, they say that the fbi had been able to corroborate important pieces of information in the dossier that was put together by christopher steele. another important point here that devin nunes said, which was that the court was never advised that the steele dossier was paid for by democrats. according to the democratic memo that was released today, they say that the court was aware, and they cite one particular portion of the memo in which they say that the fbi speculates, again, this is a part of the application that was made to the court, it says the fbi speculates that the identified u.s. person, this is the person who had paid for the dossier, was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit candidate number
Agreement. and according to the democratic memo, they say that the court, the secret surveillance court, was informed that steele had been cut off. again, that s something that the nunes memo didn t really get into. i think it s very important for us to address here because these are claims that have been sort of bandied about over the last year or so of this investigation to try to discredit it. i think it s very important for people to understand that. very good. thank you for pointing that out, evan. let s bring ana and doug back into the conversation. i believe control room, we have the sound bite ready to go. i want to get your reaction. devin nunes we don t have the sound, but devin nunes just happened to be speaking at the cpac conference when this memo was released. and he suggested at one point, when asked to respond to the fact that the memo had been released, we actually do have the sound now. listen to what devin nunes had to say. we actually wanted this out, so this