because of their apparent ties to russian intelligence at the time this informant operation was launched? that teams to be the case. seems to be the case. they opened the investigation on july 31 it is our understanding that this informant made with george and bumped at carter page at a conference in cambridge, england. we don t know if it was a co incidence. what did he ask them to do? for papadopoulos, he met with carter page repeatedly. he didn t find the meetings out of the ordinary or unusual.
secretly infiltrate the 2016 campaign for purposes. and according to the new york times, fbi agents spent informants the informant is an american academic teaches in britain and made contact with george p and the times said they have learned the identity of this person and as a matter of policy, the new york times does not name i informants to preserve the safety. and indeed, now to a certain extent, the president himself demanding that the fbi informant be exposed of a way to try to undermine the mueller investigation. joining us now a new york
good to see you all. so david, you first. your reaction to jim scuitto s reporting. how damaging potentially could this be? well, fred, i think it just opens up another lane of inquiry we re all looking at in the mueller investigation if you go back to that photo that he showed in his report, sitting there at the meet with then candidate donald trump with future attorney general jeff sessions, with george p papadopoul papadopoulos. you look at the big picture and say some of the denials that
it was obfuscated but i don t know in the end that makes any difference. i don t think the memo was ever going to clarify for anybody whether or not they believe this investigation is credible or is a partisan witch-hunt. people have pretty much made up their minds on that and that viewpoint is informed by where they sit politically. i think all of this, really, as you said earlier, is just a lot of noise. what really matters is the investigation robert mueller is conducting and ultimately that will determine which charges are leveled against further people, whether or not they are inside or outside the white house and that s really what we should be keeping our eye on here. nick, let me run through quickly the names of the five people who pled guilty so far to federal charges. you have gates, george p,
wittingly or unwittingly, to quote former director brennan, devin nunes made clear that the entire russia investigation, far from being a hoax, was started by george papadopoulos, as the new york times has recently reported, mouthing off in a bar in london. so if the whole effort by devin nunes was to exonerate donald trump, it had the opposite effect by simply making clear that carter page was someone who had been under surveillance on and off from 2013 on, years before he ever joined the trump campaign, and that the counterintelligence investigation into trump s campaign began with another interesting character, george p papadopoul papadopoulos. so what do you think the net effect is once the smoke has cleared of the actual release of the nunes memo is? well, nicolle, again, inasmuch as facts and reality matter, and they don t matter to chairman nunes, they don t matter to the people in right-wing media who are simply trying to defend this president at all costs, here s the three