if you are not onboard with president trump, if you right now are somebody whose job it is, who finds themselves giving trump the opposite view or urging him to take caution or restraint or something like that, you should get your resume ready because you re probably not long for this administration. donald trump wants people who are onboard, who are backing him up. he doesn t want anybody who is not on the same page. that s the first thing he said about mike pompeo today. and jeremy bash, we ve reported, we talked about it in the last block, that h.r. mcmaster is on that list of people that may not be long for, i guess, this is donald trump s white house 3.0. but what do you make of the challenges for recruiting in, one, the kind of people that can pass the now higher hurdles or, which i think are the normal hurdles for being cleared by the fbi for the highest levels of security, and the difficulty of bringing people into a situation where we have multiple news accounts that the pre
they like the idea of more guns, good guy with a gun beats bad guy with a gun. why wouldn t you want it with every teacher? why wouldn t it be in every classroom? if that s your logical continuum, more guns equals more safe, why not? it shows that they aren t even comfortable with it 100%. i think that s right. look, i think this is not just about making the nra comfortable. it s about the staff and .white house showing a president who doesn t really seem to know exactly what he wants to do that they re doing something and being able to show reporters that they are doing something and have something that you can put on tv and something that you can have written up in news accounts. beyond that i don t think it does a whole lot and again i m harking back to what i said before. i expect we ll see a tweet from the president saying fake news says i m not focused on the age minimum any more. wrong. blah, blah, blah. not yet. he just tweeted. and he s on to a different topic. secretary o
republicans say the dossier author, christopher steele, played a key role in the opening of the investigation while the dems say steele didn t start sharing information with the fbi until september of 2016, well after the july date in 2016 when the fbi opened its counter intelligence investigation into trump campaign associates. and that s a key distinction in these two memos, as well. and in all of this, of course, the big question is, how or would it impact the mueller investigation? well, we don t know how, exactly, it impacts the mueller investigation. in terms of and let me just point this out, the mueller investigators and the fbi agents and the prosecutors there read everything. they see everything. they read news accounts. they watch television reports. and sometimes investigators and prosecutors start investigations off of things they read in newspapers. so we don t know how all of this is playing out in terms of how they see it. but this in no way affects what
them by the federal government. they learned in news accounts. now they have been pulling them out learning more from the i.g. investigation. the inspector general. so i think we re going to see more of those more of that information but it does fill out the picture and it naturally leads to where this really hasn t gone to this point. there hasn t been a whole lot of discussion about whether the president signed off on whether it was the russia collusion stuff or the clinton email thing. but you go back to that comey decision where he basically throws out all the processes of the f.b.i. and at the time condemned by former officials from both democratic and republican administrations saying this is not the job of the f.b.i. director to make these decisions. and you wonder how would he have the confidence to do that? and this raises the question of maybe he wasn t a loose cannon. maybe it was coming from higher up. sandra: meanwhile we await the possible release by the president, wh
the court? we re told that it was. and what other information was there in the application to bolster it? remember, it was approved four times by the fisa court, by four different judges. some news accounts have said four republican appointed judges on the fisa court. we just never know. we never see these applications. it s hard to know exactly who signed off on what. but those are some of the questions. and i suspect some of them, we ll never know the answers to. pete williams, thank you very much. joining us from washington, d.c. today. with me now, msnbc contributor and white house correspondent for the pbs newshour, and political analyst and chief washington correspondent, peter baker. thanks to both of you. i want to start with comments we heard from republican leadership, in particular. i ll start with paul ryan, the house speaker, talking about the line that we can or can t draw between the memo released yesterday and the investigation being conducted by robert mueller. let s