have you looked into it? i have asked some preliminary questions. i have not gotten answers yet. the fascination is with what door did he come in, who did he meet with. as opposed to what i think it should be and ironically it s not when the shoe is on the other foot. what s the substance. with be ken delaney and robert dietz, former senior counselor to the cia director and former general counsel at the nsa. ken, first to you, do you have any information, any idea who he met with, why he met there, who let him in? do you have any more information tonight? we have some suspects, greta, but nothing we re ready to report on the air tonight. what s important to understand, though, is that nunes says he went to the old the eisenhower executive office building, which is a stately old building in the white house complex to the west of the white house itself, to a secure room. now, he s sort of portraying this like he got this from a source like meeting deep throat in the parking gar
nunes? what nunes? he s the guy who was on the white house ground the other day looking at top secret information, courtesy of someone, we don t know who. they re treating him like a fence jumper. you can t jump the fence at this point. you have to be escorted in by somebody. you have to be validated by somebody to get into the white house. even a congressman can t just waltz onto the white house grounds to go to a secret place to look at secret documents. so somewhere there s a record of who it was who asked the guy who come in. the problem that nunes has is the problem that gene and i have seen and you have seen in washington forever. it s probably not whatever the original russia story was about what paul manafort or the others were doing. i don t think looking at the evidence that it s about donald trump s campaign directly coordinating with the russians. it s about what the white house and its fellow travelers do to slow down or try to stop an investigation. and you put nune
i was particularly puzzled by congressman nunes going down to the white house to kind of brief the president, i suppose. the problem, of course, is it tends to undermine the credibility and independence of a hill hearing and i think that s really unfortunate. what could be the find of information? in looking at it, you ve been inside at the cia, at the nsa, what is the universe of possibilities that this could be? well, i ve given that a little thought. i don t have any magic answers. it could be explaining how, if this is true, how people close to president trump and the campaign, how they might have been picked up had they been communicating with foreign folks. and what would be so secret about that? well, as you know, under executive order 12111, minimumization, in other words taking out u.s. person identities is standard operating procedure and it obligatory. it can be broken in two
russia. why do you think nunes did that? i really don t know. the pressure, maybe he thought he should go down why isn t he explaining? the reason we re talking is because he won t end it. the best thing for the house to do is see if they can get an agreement with their democratic colleagues to call witnesses. he canceled the hearing with the clapper, yates and brennan. well, a public hearing may have should have been canceled, but behind closed doors is probably the way to do this. the bottom line is restart the process. you think he can restart this? do you think chairman nunes can have can regain credibility? we ll see, i don t know. whaerkd do in my view is tell everybody who he met with and what he saw. he doesn t have to tell you on tv but tell his colleagues, republican and democrat. here s who i met with and here s what i saw. why wouldn t he do that? i don t know. don t you think that s odd? that is odd. so trey gowdy i think has the right approach
circumstances. one is if there s evidence of a crime and, b, for some reason you need that identity to make sense of the foreign intelligence. it could be that whatever topic was addressed by the foreign person, say a russian, that president trump was told that. ken, are people frustrated within the intelligence community on this? what s sort of the thought on this whole drama as it s unfolding? well, they re just mystified by what nunes did. you know, as bob knows better than anybody, incidental collection, particularly if it s foreigner to foreigner surveillance where that is about americans, that happens every day. i mean the nsa is listening to foreign embassies, they re communicating back to their capitals. this was during the transition so why would this be such a so why would nunes want to even hide this? you could you could mask some of the thing and just give us a little more information and call off the dogs? well, exactly. and he back tracked, don t forget. at