articulable facts that someone is or may be an agent of a foreign power. that would not be done in a vacuum. that would have gone across the street to department of justice. it would have been approved, and then of course, we know that the doj said, you know what, we need a special counsel inquiry, so now we re seeing what the real origin of this was. now, here s what it doesn t say, joy. it doesn t say that they proved it. it doesn t say that that aspect of the case is still running. and we don t know whether it was a p.i. or a full, so there s some unanswered questions, but it is really sobering to think that maybe, if this reporting is right, that donald j. trump, that name was in the header, in the subject title of a counterintelligence investigation. and frank, there have been several instances of things donald trump has done that have really raised the alarms. and put people s hair on fire about what he s doing and why.
this, oddly enough. there are a lot of ad hominems in it, but it doesn t address really what is in this story that is incredibly blockbuster. what stands out most to you as the most important thing from the standpoint of what robert mueller is now clearly looking into? the fbi does not open counterintelligence cases lightly and most certainly wouldn t open one against the president of the united states lightly whatsoever. it would have been reviewed at the highest levels and reviewed sensitively. the fact it s open is astonishing to me. you may remember that president trump repeatedly asked jim comey to make public the fact he was not under investigation. i m under a cloud. you need to say this publicly. what jim comey said is i didn t want to make that assurance because if that status changed, i would feel obligated to say so to the public. for a long time, he wasn t under investigation. that fact didn t surprise me because it would be such an extraordinary thing to name the preside
they were not going to go public with that investigation. the problem that the fbi runs into is that that is seen with a backdrop of the clinton e-mail investigation, which they handled differently. so they get accused of treating them differently when they were proceeding with the counterintelligence investigation to figure out how much was there. i think that they knew that the decision to either open an investigation into a candidate or into a president himself, trump, would have been an enormous deal. and that they needed to meet a particular threshold to do that. after the comey firing, they thought they had enough to do that, to move forward with that monumental decision, regardless of what comes out of the mueller investigation, it is a historic moment that the fbi opened an investigation into whether the president of the united states was colluding with a foreign power. just in and of itself. that is extraordinary. as is the two things that in your reporting are the things th
into what you call russia gate, the russia probe, as two parallel and distinct things. in your mind now, should we start thinking about even the obstruction of justice probe, in light of what we learned from the new york times, as part and parcel, that that too is a counterintelligence investigation? yeah, i think so. you know, i think that at least in the early stages of this, i thought president trump was seeking to protect mike flynn and maybe others in his family because the investigation was getting too close, so his goal was to stand down on that investigation. but if instead that was part of the counterintelligence, part of the tradecraft, whether he was witting or unwitting, i think, is not known. but trying to throw the fbi off the scent might have been a very part of that threat to the national security. and so i do think that they are more intertwined than we thought before. and post-9/11, the goal of the fbi is to bring down the wall between criminal investigations and
all the black and brown and tan people in this country is to treat them with violence, to refuse to give them an opportunity to participate in the american experiment. so anyone who says, well, i don t really remember what steve said or maybe it s bad now or ben shapiro coming out and saying, well, this crosses a line. you ve been letting him and people like him cross a line in the party for years and now you have to view it as a national security issue, not just a political damage issue. but i wonder, too, if once, you know, members of the republican party have opened up the door on steve king whether or not then you can then push the door back closed. you have ron desantis who ran for governor, now the governor of florida, who ran on monkey it up. you have brian kemp with extensive suppression of african-american voters. you have the newly elected senator or re-elected senator from mississippi who talked about going to a public hanging. it kind of goes on and on and ends in the whi