with dell small businessout your technology advisors you get the one-on-one partnership you need to grow your business. the dell vostro 15 laptop. contact a dell advisor today. there is more breaking news on the russia investigation to tell you about. not about the briefings that happened today but a meeting that almost happened back in january between the president and special counsel mueller. now, tonight we re learning more about how it might have played out and why it ultimately did not. our chief political analyst gloria borger and evan perez broke the story. this is the first time we ve heard of any possible date for an interview between the president and mueller. what happened? well, there was a meeting in early to mid-january, and it was a very different time from the time dana bash was talking about just earlier. because it was a time when the president s legal team actually wanted to get this all over with
and have the president sit down. so there was a meeting with mueller. he suggested let s get the president on january 27th and laid out 16 subjects, and the president s legal team listened to it. they met among themselves later on, and they were even thinking oh, maybe we can have this at kac camp david, might be a good place, we could do this on a saturday. and then after thinking about it, and there was some disagreement among the president s lawyers. but the lead of the president s team john dowd on january 29th sent mueller a letter, a 20-page letter which one source says the president read and approved saying there s no way we are going to do this both for constitutional issues, and we believe that you have all the information that you need from the millions of documents that we ve handed over to you. and right around that time the president was actually sounding sort of enthusiastic about talking to special
supposed to be. it s a congressional investigation, and it is as dana keeps pointing out, the gang of eight, four democrats, four republicans, four from the house, four from the senate. it s a formal process that is meant to be neutral in its political orientation. and to have the president s lawyer in there is just wildly inappropriate. jeff, what impact do you think it has on chris wray of the fbi, dan coats, the fbi. for any officer of the government who s charged with running a human source their job is going to become harder to help convince someone to come to their side. you likely went into that meeting with eight members of congress who again are known to be a little loose lipped, knowing that anything you said in that meeting could make it to the air waves. that s an unusual place to be in.
and they said, look, frankly the cart was put in front of the horse from the beginning. that there were no parameters. the actual technical work had not been done to decide what were the red lines, what were the negotiations, what was the step by step process. so not enough work had been done to have a summit between two leaders, between the president of the united states and the leader of north korea. do you think that played a big role? i mean in the administration, this was usually summits are started from the bottom up. there s a lot of groundwork that s done, a lot of meetings, weeks, months, if not years in some cases and the two leaders meet and shake hands and sign something. do you think it was partly that there were a lot of details to work out? certainly. we were not prepared to have this summit just a few weeks away. but i have to say i think kim jong-un was actually not planning to cancel the meeting by this statement that was made
he s said the word spy 17 times since last friday. adam schiff who was at the second meeting said he heard no evidence of a spy in the campaign today. there is no evidence to support any allegation that the fbi or any intelligence agency placed a spy in the trump campaign or otherwise failed to follow appropriate procedures and protocols. well, cnn s chief political correspondent dana bash joins us now. she s got new reporting on rudy giuliani s takes on the briefings today. i know you talked to giuliani about emmitt flood and how he ended up in the briefings. what did he say? that s right. i talked to him a couple of times tonight before coming on. i did ask him if emmitt went to these meetings at the behest of the president or maybe under orders of the president? he says he hasn t told him the answer is yes, but rudy giuliani tells me he assumes that was the reason why flood went, because