a political investigation begets a political investigation begets a political investigation, and now it seemed this whole notion has kind of seeped into all of our agencies in washington, d.c. i m more worried about the future. i mean, again, the doj just had a subpoena on usa today on people who were reading articles. something is amis. we re going to have to, i think, shake this thing out a little bit and go back to the standard if you re going to do this, if you re going to open an investigation, you have to have a predicate. it needs to be reviewed. thoughtful agents and prosecutors need to look at it and say, are we going to do this. none of that has seemed to have happened. again, i m very, very concerned about the direction of this. and, john, it s not just that the trump doj was able to do this, it was that they were able do this and conceal it.
adam schiff is demanding an investigation, calling out the trump white house for what they call a terrible abuse of power. speaker nancy pelosi is saying trump s actions, quote, appear to be yet another egregious assault on our democracy waged by the former president. let s go right to cnn s laura jarrett to lay out exactly what we re talking about here, laura. yeah, john, so i was covering the justice department when all of this happened. it s important to remember how it all starts. then attorney general jeff sessions was under enormous investigation. he was recused from the investigation. trump is furious. at the same time the house is investigating the connection between trump associates and russia and it has access to all kinds of highly sensitive documents. trump sees all of this incredible reporting that s trying to flush out the russia investigation. he s tweeting non-stop. he says his administration is going to find the sources for the leaks. what does the justice department
yesterday he was asked if there was an investigation of donald trump. he said not that he knows of. right. when he was first asked by sheila jackson lee whether there was an investigation around trump and the insurrection, he said, not that i m aware of. later he said, he could neither confirm or deny an investigation into donald trump. what i can tell you is the backstory. as you know, andy t protocol is to neither confirm or deny. the fact that he s unware, that tells you something. what i m told from sources familiar is there was a discussion within the doj, fbi headquarters, the d.c. bureau, about whether to open an investigation into donald trump after the insurrection happened. they went back, looked at his words during the rally before the insurrection. they scrutinized it to see if there s enough actually open an investigation. the legal response was it didn t
meet the legal threshold. in other words, his speech was inflammatory, but it wasn t specific enough to be a directive, an order to carry out an attack at the capitol. so while the investigation wasn t open about that, i want to make it clear, this isn t a done deal. this is a wide sprawling investigation. other evidence is coming in. there s a lot of unanswered questions, but when it comes to donald trump and his speech before the insurrection, members within the fbi and doj decided there wasn t enough to open an investigation into trump specifically. really interesting. thanks so much for sharing that with us. this is such a great conversation to put in into con context, andy and pamela. i really appreciate it. what will the response be of the attorney general over this extraordinary abuse of the department of justice? it s a good question. nancy pelosi trying to calm the democratic party over comments from ilhan omar. ea.
more, and there s going to be a whole series of investigations as to what happened, how it happened, and why it happened, so it doesn t happen again. apparently according to the new york times, some of the investigators felt like they had run down the leads and the investigation had come toon end. they didn t have enough go forward and they were discussing that, but bill barr said, no, keep digging. you had william barr for some reason not listening to the investigators here. that s clearly one area where the guardrails went down. yeah. clearly. if the agents did come back and say, hey, look, we looked into what you asked, we couldn t find anything that is correct s certainly a problem. i want to put it into context though. during the russia investigation, we had an fbi agent manufacturing evidence. he changed evidence presenting to the court to make sure that that investigation went forward. he s going to go to jail for that.