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
will have gale on the broadcast. appreciate you joining us on a friday night. coming up, the unprecedented position this president is in right now. under investigation, presiding over a government, unable to function. john meacham is here to talk about that.
no. it is our understanding as we report tonight that this was all taken in my mueller. you have to understand, this happens all in a short period of time. comey is fired in may of 2017, and the days of this investigation is started, several days later,o it comes out trump asked comey to end the investigation into mike flynn, security adviser, he following mueller appointed all of this stuff goes to mueller. we don t know if anything specific to the president that still exists outside of the mueller investigation except is for, of course, michael cohen. something that was born out of the mueller investigation that was sent to new york and is completely different than the russia questions. completely different about payments to adult film stars. so all we know is this went witt mueller when mueller started. did the president, is there n any evidence that he became aware in real time that he was the subject of an inquiry? no, and he wouldn t if the inquiry was going according to a
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
extraordinary, but one thing that i think is quite likely is that we have all of these public facts that we know.ve it is quite likely that the fbi had additional facts as well that caused them to make this decision to open this investigation. i can imagine that agents were extremely reluctant to open an investigation against the president of the united states and would do so only after extreme scrutiny and very high level approval. and so there s certain things that we know. the triggering event, perhaps, the firing of jim comey and statements mad, to lester holt but additional facts unknown to the public at this point. lightning round questions, some of which came up in the conversation just now. do we know for a fact that all this became slid into, morphed into what is known is the mueller inquiry or any other subsets of an fbi inquiry that may already be open?