that happens every day. there s no scandal there. but what it has done is it s outraged democrats who really believe that nunes cannot lead a fair and independent investigation. a meanwhile, adam schiff, his counterpart on the house intel committee, has also been out front at certain aspects of this investigation. have both elected leaders compromised their integrity for what this investigation means going forward? well, schiff has been has started to push the envelope out of frustration. he started to talk about evidence that he s seen. but now we still have a senate intelligence committee investigation cooking along in a bipartisan fashion. there was news on this front last week. three key figures in this whole issue, paul manafort, carter page, and roger stone, all former trump associates, all accused in that infamous dossier of conspiring with russia to
reporter: general cartwright was a key member of president obama s inner circle of national security advisors but legal sources tell nbc news that cartwright has been notified he s the target of a justice department criminal investigation into a highly sensitive leak about a covert u.s. cyber attack on iran s nuclear program. my attitude has been zero tolerance for these kinds of leaks. these are criminal acts when they release information like this. reporter: the new york times last year broke the story that president obama secretly ordered a stepped up cyber weapon attack using a malicious computer virus known as stuxnet and that cartwright conceived and oversaw the special operation from the pentagon. we re trying to build a second cyber force right now. reporter: cartwright did not respond to requests for comment from nbc news. contacted today his lawyer former white house obama counsel greg said i have no comment.
i m not saying forever. i m not saying an amount of time. but let s see where these investigations lead? because to have a president under investigation appoint a lifetime appointment, that s wrong. let s bring in nbc s kelly o donnell live from the white house. kelly, the trump administration really not going to linger on this defeat about health care. what s next? reporter: well, we ear learning something about the president s style in this way, thomas, because after all the buildup, all the talk about repealing and replacing obamacare from the president and certainly from republicans more broadly over the years, he seems ready to move on. we ve got republicans trying to figure out what to do, democrats feeling very good about this and feeling confident that the law they helped make part of their party s sort of main focus to keep it going, even though it may need some changes. and really the bottom line in washington this morning is what now? this morning the president s eye is
measurement of behavior and what actually occurred, but an investigation they didn t look at e-mails and didn t look at intents and they didn t look at who was in the chain of information. there was an audit done by the inspector general, but we have not had an investigation yet. the ieg report was an a audit, not an investigation. this is just the beginning of this process. several republicans said the 30-day top down review plan for the new act aing irs commissioner is insufficient. he demanded an independent counsel investigate the irs. democrats unable to defend the agency pushed back on the idea of that. i don t see it at this point and, look, you know, even the chairman of the house oversight committee said you don t start accusing the irs until you have an independent deep dive and that, that deep dive is what the inspector general did. remember there is also now a justice department criminal investigation that was opened. that happened last week, too. i m sure somebod