former director of the national intelligence agency james clapper. he s the author of facts and fears which is number three on the the new york times best seller list. thank you so much for being with us. rudy giuliani he says it s because of you, he is saying that you were the one who uses the term spying and that justifies the fact that the president and rudy and all the president s allies keep on using it. listen to what the former mayor says. i think the guy responsible for that to some extent is clapper. when the president first called it spying, everyone said it was an informant. that seemed like a semantic difference. clapper said we were spying, we were spying on russia and as part of that we ended up inside the trump campaign. what do you say? i m not sure why rudy giuliani would refer to a clown which is what he characterized me last sunday as an authority on anything and he deliberately
would call it spying. okay. hold on, so they re spying on ms-13. do you want the fbi to try to figure out when yes. somebody is doing something untoward? yes, but the reason why so why you re saying they re spying when they re trying to find out if russia had infiltrated. it was a paid informant in order to get information and here s the big difference. donald trump is not ms-13, alisyn and this is where you all make the big mistake. this is where you make the mistake, matt. ms-13 is a gang that creates havoc and crime in our society. right. donald trump was the dually nominated republican candidate. right. and what they should have done instead of trying to trap him, they should have worked with him to push back on what putin was trying to do and that is the big mistake. let me speak now, matt, because you made your point. re s the point you re missing. in thi analogy they re not trying to trap donald trump,
we call that spaghetti. you can obfuscate this all you want. we call it spying. i m not obfuscating at all. i think senator rubio is obfuscating. you think senator rubio s a liar here? i didn t call him a liar. i ll tell you what it is. i don t listen to senator rubio and i haven t for quite some time. you re always going to be able to find a republican to say what you want to say but at the end of the day, the things that we were going through at the campaign i believe were spying and i think we re going to be borne out as truthful in the end. this investigation will continue. i guess we ll find out what they develop over the course of time. i think there s a tie between the use of the language that you re using right now and the baseless attack the president is making this morning suggesting that robert mueller s team will meddle in the 2018 election, which you say you have seen no evidence of. i think it gets to what mayor giuliani was speaking about this weekend. he s
all from public reporting but if the source actually paid money and that money had some origin from the bureau and was tasked, meaning that an fbi agent probably his handler said i need you to go to these people and ask them these questions, that is a very different scenario than i m a guy that stumbles around. i hear something and i go, i pick up the phone and go, hey, guys. you need to know this. you won t believe what i just heard. it doesn t sound like a lot, but that is a significant difference. what the trump administration is trying to say here is he was tasked to go meet these people and elicit information. you call that spying? i wouldn t call it spying. i do think it raises some questions if you re tasking someone in a political campaign. that is really, really sensitive stuff. just to be clear, because they already had a notion that crimes were being committed thanks to george papadopoulos telling an australian diplomat who reported it to the fbi.
that was in charge? brian: we have these reports been confirmed, even the new york times, says that they have this they have activated this american in london to try to get the most out of carter page and papadopoulos. is it possible that brennan and comey don t know this? no, they know this. is it possible that they don t tell the president? yeah. don t call it spying. we are supposed to call it an informant, but not spying. but this is the big question. you go back to summer 2016, spring 2016, was it earlier? we need to know. when did this all begin? and wouldn t it naturally be a presidential level decision to begin spying on a u.s. political campaign? you would think. so now, maybe it wasn t. maybe it was clapper or comey and/or comey deciding on their own to do this. it seems to me that president obama might want to weigh in at this point and say i didn t authorize that. i don t know why they went