and, two, the dossier as we now know was not the animating factor for not just the original surveillance but the consistent. it is important to keep saying this. the consistent are yrenewal ove course of a year against carter paige. i just want to pick up one thing on what scott says. scott says all this riffraff was hanging around the campaign. like, is there a reason why that s not happening? or is there a reason why that riffraff, those people with the russian ties, are with trump? at some stage, it is like you have to think there is no coincidences, right. the reason why donald trump is not going after the russians and all these people, and we re not even talking about the people that mueller is getting who have all these russian ties, is that something else is going on and as we all know we re waiting, right, what does mueller have. at the very least it seems like the president wants to cast no dispersions on the legitimacy
to donald trump, the people playing to his desire to undercut mueller have convinced themselves that somehow this memo and what is in if it will raise a larger question about the legitimacy of the entire mueller investigation. that is what they hope. there is a certain amount of circular thinking and inside of the oval wishful thinking going on here. by the way, it seems at least short-term, isn t trump s strategy working? it depends on who you ask. is it a political strategy of muddying the waters on mueller, is it working for him? i think it is working in some ways because the release of the memo is such a vague thing but it is also a caught fire. everybody is talking about it. if you look on twitter or conversations, every day people are wondering what is in this memo and why is it important and they try to connect it to mueller but it is not connected to mueller. but everyone kind of thinks it is. so i think in some ways it is working. but me as a reporter, the thing i m in
that despite republican criticism, mueller would remain. have you seen good cause to fire special counsel mueller? no. he also faced tough question over the fbi agent s text messaging. and rosenstein responded by explaining in his view that political affiliations or opinions are different from bias and he said he and special counsel mueller have worked together to insure political views are not a factor in any investigation but that really hasn t satisfied republicans and they say the texts with an fbi lawyer calling trump an idiot and loathsome during the campaign well, said that must have impacted his work on the russia probe and his work on the hillary clinton email probe where she was ultimately cleared and it number one senate is calling for special counsel muler to clean house of people on his team that have been
to add is that jack barsky who was on earlier made a really good point which is, you know, don t really look at what the trump campaign was trying to, you know, do in terms of intentional collusion. look at what the russians were doing. these guys have been doing this for decades. they re really, really good at it, and they have a concept called, you know, you know, useful idiots in which they re playing these guys, naive people, maybe well-meaning or whatever, but, you know, they, you know, systematically were going after people in trump campaign, picking them off, isolating them and trying to use them to get access to the campaign, and that s what the mueller people are really looking at. you ve got to look at the russians as much as you are looking at the trump people and seeing what kind of puppet strings they were pulling. do you want to weigh in? yeah, you know one thing that josh was talking about was, you know, for example how unbelievable these i don t recalls are. and i
you ve got to look at the russians as much as you are looking at the trump people and seeing what kind of puppet strings they were pulling. do you want to weigh in? yeah, you know one thing that josh was talking about was, you know, for example how unbelievable these i don t recalls are. and i think as a lawyer, you know, if jared kushner for example is charged with something else, if he s done some other crime, you know, all of these i don t recalls, all of these inconsistent statements will be used against him if he takes the witness stand. and that s where, you know, for any of these people who are involved in the trump campaign, that s the real potential downside for them, you know, in this with all of these i don t recalls and all of these and a forth. it really can hurt your credibility in front of a jury. a jury is not going to buy anything you have to say as people in the same selective amnesia. the other question, and that s the more tricky one that i was talking about e