rosenstein who is his supervisor. what trump has now done has taken what i would consider to be a completely evil strategy that is to go with the people, the person above him, the people below him, and try and isolate mueller. that s what he thinks is going to get him off the hook. you ve got the president fires comey. he doesn t like comey and then he fires comey. he complains about mccabe. mccabe is now out. he complains about mueller and attempts to fire mueller and was sort of beaten back by don mcgahn. we now hear a lot of reporting about rosenstein. how seriously do you take that? i take it very seriously. i think he is going to try and do everything he can to somehow fire rod rosenstein. this memo, this so-called five-page memo that is supposed to be summarizing probably a couple hundred page affidavit and paper submitted to the fisa court which was taken out of context, it all relates to the fusion gps investigation. right. by christopher steele, all of
the memo is yet another attempt to discredit the russia investigation. and one target of that effort, deputy attorney general rod rosenstein. that might sound surprising given that rosenstein is in fact a trump appointee. but rosenstein is also the person who appointed the special counsel robert mueller whose investigation is now closing in on donald trump and his inner circle. perhaps more importantly at the moment, rosenstein is also the person with the power to fire mueller. and now we know thanks to the new york times republicans could use that memo to come after rosenstein. the new york times reporting the memo reveals that, quote, rosenstein approves an application to extend surveillance of a former trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring. the times continues. saw reason to believe that the associate carter page was acting as a russian agent. washington post reported this weekend the president wanted the memo released, saying, quote, it could provid
rosalyn, msnbc justice analyst matt miller is a former chief spokesperson for the department of justice under president barack obama. rosalind, what do we know about the white house s involving? i want to set the scene here. a very weird situation in which the house saying we want to release this memo that points to some underlying classified information. the president who is the class fire in chief who can classify or declassify likes that. and the people in the middle who are the institutional guarantors over at the doj saying this is a bad idea. please don t do this. is that basically right? yeah. i think you basically got it. we know that the white house has not seen the memos. so the president does not know what s in it. wait, wait, the white house hasn t seen the memo? that is our understanding is that the president at least has not seen the memo. but he is of course an avid follower of cable news where he has been told that the memo is good for him. and so our understanding
it s none of the kind of toting that is going on now where people are lying and putting themselves at risk for being part of a coverup by participating in the way they have and remember, it was the republicans who ultimately went to the president, president nixon and said we have seen the evidence. it is clear. you will be voted and convicted if this goes to a vote. you should resign, and he did resign the next day. so i think this is a completely different thing. i cannot think of anything that comes anywhere close to what nunes is doing and how he s working clearly with the white house on this. this goes back to his first time when he released a document as if it was a big revelation to the white house when they were the ones who got it. it was a sham and fraud and that s you know, i don t know what s in this classified document.
can make a reason decision of what they are hearing and what this means. none of us knows what s in the memos. it s a risk to release them because of the classified nature of them. if you release one, you have to release both. you cannot let the american public sit and linger on what could be a totally false out of context report. so i am really frightened for the first time in this investigation. there was, you know, there it were a lot of members of congress i want to follow up, jill, with you and come back to you, charlie. a lot of members of congress during watergate, republicans that did carry water for president who backed him and ronald reagan backed and george h.w. bush and they said this watergate stuff is nonon-sense, let s wrap it up. was there anybody doing what devin nunes is doing? we reached a completely new level of insanity.