possible criminal activity by the trump crowd in dealing with the russians. i listened to his answer and i know there are two types of investigati investigations. one is he is peaage, the other is personal criminal wrongdoing. i heard him answer that he s doing both. this is not only a question about russia so you re not challenging take that there is an investigation. no. and new york sometimes says not every untruth deserve tobs branded with the l-word because it implies intent. but when it comes to president trump, quote, he lies in ways that no american politician ever has before. he has lied about american other things obama s birth place, john f. kennedy s assassination, september 11th and the people supposedly cheered, the iraq war, isis, nato, military veterans, mexican immigrants, muslim immigrants. all that to make them look bad.
your colleagues say that s what republicans did to hillary clinton. the goose gander thing, i understand, but it s different now that the shoe is on the other foot. what do you say? neil: the question was probably more of a political question with hillary clinton and wasn t one of indictment or not indictment. there was a corresponding or linear track that was a legal investigati investigation. my views might the different. if you tell me tomorrow the fbi is investigating certain individuals. until i know there s a legal investigation, we don t need a political witch hunt. why don t we let the law enforcement people that do real investigations, let them do the investigating. neil: do you find it odd that after we know we certainly had general flynn talking to the administration about this issue and that weeks ago it knew that more than it was saying it knew.
any investigation by the oce. do they have to do that in order to ensure due process? of course not. look, you know they said they were going to drain the swamp. they ve just they re distributing free swimming passes in the swamp by this change in the regulations. and i ll tell you one thing, my friends over at the democratic congressional campaign committee have already started to write the scripts for the ads in the 2018 mid-term election because this issue is going to haunt republicans. as asubstance, here s what s important. let s remember why we had this office in 2008. three members of congress had gone to jail. they had gone to jail by committing crimes under a system where the house ethics committee wasn t really capable of investigating and coming to a resolution. democrats in 2008 decided we need an independent, autonomous entity to take these investigations, do the investigati investigation, refer them to the ethics committee.
okay. do you want to hear the president-elect say, you guys are right, go for it? i would hope the president-elect would say, okay, dig in. the other week, he talked about fraud in voting are illegal immigrants voting, non-citizens voting. this is all part and parcel of the same thing. at the end of the day, it doesn t make any difference whether it is a russian hack or a non-citizen of the united states actually physically voting. you are influencing the u.s. election system. either way, if we re going to have an investigation, do it. let s get it on. let s really dig into it. ryan. yeah. go ahead. from what i ve seen, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. we do have the intelligence community saying publicly that the russians had an intelligence operation against not by name though, brian. but fine. if there is going to be an investigation into voter fraud, do it. but this issue is far too important to get bogged down in
washington a long time, worked in the white house and on capitol hill, washington has a this is something of a tribal ritual. they pick somebody out there. they put them under the glare, which is fine. i mean, all these nominees for anything should answer questions. that s fine. but there is sort of, you know, burn the witch at the stake aspect of this. this smacks a little bit of what that might be. with respect to the senators, if they re do you think if they re going to they want to question his relationship with vladimir putin and russia and russian influence, sure. broaden the investigation. let s see what i mean, you don t have to be a russian to hack. i mean, there could be a hacking of the american electoral system from other sources right here in this country. investigate that. that is what our intelligence ajen igencie agencies, the best of the best have been doing, and the cia concluding, and others, you know, as far back as october