former fbi assistant director for counter-intelligence who worked for others like robert mueller in the past.ce michael i would like to begin with you. what have you learned about this extraordinary step the fbi took, opening a counterintelligence inquiry into the president?co well, sort of our collective understanding or conscience about the mueller investigation, everything related to trump, has been about criminal obstruction. did the president obstruct justice? and the information we had tonight shows that the investigation is much broader, at least initially it was. it was looking at the president s ties to this foreign adversary, russia. what was it?y, what was that relationship all about? t why was the president doing the things that he was doing?th that was the original focus of this. now, what this does is allows us to see the world the way that the fbi agents saw it right after comey was fired. they had just had the deputy
guests are going to stay with us and continue to cover this lead story. michael schmidt, we thought it was in the interest of good journalism since you ve had, let s say a more eventful day than the rest of us, to thank y you for your work tonight, which has spurred this conversation, r thank you very much for being a part of our broadcast.u we re asking barbara mcquaid anu frank to stay with us and when we come back, more on this ta breaking news that the fbi opened an inquiry into the n president of the united states and later, as we said, we re just moments away from a new r, record. one the white house and congress has done nothing to avoid breaking.ot the 11th hour just getting started on this busy friday night.
is that the incumbent is proving the president can be as small a man as one can. whether you look at all of these different fronts and you have the sort of emergency conversation which is deeply important and complicated, but we ve really never had and if we have, it s classified and lost to history at least so far. a president of the united states who is considered to be possibly an asset of a foreign government. this is what the founders were worried about in the 1790s. the jeffersonians worried that washington and hamilton might be british agencies, washington and anderson might be a french agent but that was kind of a fevered political atmosphere. there was no fbi to investigate it, and i think the report on
attorney general provide a rationale to the president that was not the president s reason for dismissing the fbi director. the president, as you just played, comes out and says the things he said. he wanted to say things to comey about the russia investigation, the letter, which he was stoppe from.er the fbi is not sure what is going on. they know there s a massive russia investigation here. they know there s this steel dossier with accusations about trump. they know there is a long standing relationship that trump has with russia. there is all these things going on and they decide to go forward with the monumental historic decision of opening up a counterintelligence investigation into the president.at is the president tied to the t. adversary?re and frank, thank you for joining us by telephone tonight. cut through all of the other russia coverage. the stories that may make people think this is part of the daily norm and remind people how important, how notable this is, as you put i
i think it s important for the american people to understand the counterintelligence and intelligence work in the fbi is by far the most regulated part of the fbi. there are agents who don t even want to work counterintelligence because you got to keep the rule book in your top drawer. i lived as a counterintelligence agent with the attorney general guidelines in the top drawer of my desk and referred to them daily until i had memorized entire portions of them. that s how heavily regulated it is. any notion that some agent can withy nilly open a case on the president of the united states is misguided. the level of review, the department of justice review, the number of lawyers that would have to have touched this to allow this to happen is almost immeasurable. so i want to try to dispel that nation, that there would have to be multiple points of failure, multiple people in the conspiracy to even open this case and it s just wholly unrealistic to think that happened. we re so grateful