terms of shows abuse of office. it would be good to know you re trying to abuse it. thank you for laying out the legality. isikoff, thank you for helping me understand. big brother as always. you helped us understand the workings of the process from someone who s been in it it. the host of declassified he has in the contract i m supposed to call him big brother rogers. i don t know how i feel about it. you can tweet him. 11:00 p.m. eastern tonight. cnn only. declassified worth the watch. all right. impeachment hearings, we have seen them. this isn t the first time they have been on tv. the time they were most impressive was without question nixon and water gate. it was so different. we have never seen a president defend himself the way this president does because there s never been twitter and this
i want to go out front now to the former assistant fbi director greg brower. gop committee counsel sophia nelson and our chief investigative correspondent for yahoo news, isikoff, and rick santorum who voted to remove clinton from office during the mock trial. president trump has repeatedly discussed firing his own pick, his own hand-picked ig for the intelligence committee michael atkinson because atkinson determined the whistle-blower s complaint was credible and urgent. the president apparently believes he s disloyal and trying to sabotage his presidency. what does this tell you? well, it concerns me greatly, erin, as a former federal inspector general myself. this inspector general like all inspector generals was doing his
tell us ways you re part of the obama deep state conspiracy designed to get rid of trump ten years ago before we knew he was going to run. there were two hearings on wednesday. the first is the judiciary committee. then they take a break. they ll wipe the chairs down and they bring in the intelligence committee which will go after the issue of trump and russia. but you think neal s questions are good. those are good for the opening. i do think and this is my bias, i wrote a book on this with isikoff, that focusing overly on the obstruction issue as opposed to trump having played foot picturesie with russia and denying the attack and making it easier for russia, that to me is the bigger deal in a lot of ways. and to the american public, if you can t be convince them of that being a big deal, whether he obstructed the investigation is not going to be i think as important. it is important to us. we care about these things. the big story is russia attacked. he helped, he benefited.
steele himself did not give this as isikoff and i report in our book, give this information to the fbi really until the fall of 2016 months into the russia investigation. so none of it holds up. yet we hear this time and time again, and you get the breitbart crowd and daily caller and everybody else out there banking on this investigation by the inspector general, but also banking on yet another investigation that bill barr, who is a little bit more politically minded here, is also trying to mount in the same way, all to prove that somehow this russian investigation was cooked up from the beginning and distracting us from the key issue, russia attacked the u.s. election, and donald trump and his campaign helped it along, encouraged it and benefitted from it. all right, david corn, thank you very much. thank you, chris. what happened inside the courtroom today is next.
face-to-face. he gets all second hand information. he takes that dossier. they help launch an investigation. and then when it wasn t moving, he shows up in america and starts giving the information to press people like corn and isikoff. and russian roulette in such detail you wonder i know they are good reporters but no one is this good this quick who knew that much information now there it s being unwound and pushing back in every way. trey gowdy new a lot when he was questioning brennan last year. listen to. this do you know who commissioned the steele dossier? i don t. did the cia rely on it? no. why not? because we didn t. it wasn t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. it was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done. we are going to find that