when we receive information in a classified setting we will investigate things that come up in classified settings and there will be an appropriate time to have the reveal, but when we hear things in a classified setting that s the duty i took on as vice chairman of the intelligence committee. you won t say whether this washington post story is correct washington post is correct? i won t comment about it. i want to play a sound bite by the president yesterday. take a listen. if you use your rights and you use your power, article 2, it s called obstruction, but only for trump, but nobody else. he s basically saying his firing this is about the firing of james comey, that you cannot interpret that under any way as obstruction. is that fair? well, again, i ll let lawyers make better judgments but i ll tell you this. an investigation into the
released? donald trump jr. does. yeah, i m open to whatever the attorney general decides. he should follow the law and the regulations. i tend to think these would err on the side of the transparency and i m for that all along. i want the 302s, i want that information released so we get to the bottom of it so the american people can know what happened when they launched this thing. do you believe they interfered with the 2016 election? everyone said do you believe it? of course, that s what the intelligence committee has told us, but there is do you believe they did it to try to help donald trump win? who knows why they did it? but there is zero evidence do you believe it s possible that russians for their own foreign policy reasons wanted trump not clinton? i don t know. i mean, they can do whatever they re trying to do, who knows what their motives were? what i know is there is not one bit of evidence to show any type of coordination, collusion, conspiracy wha
seen a presidential campaign from either party have this much outreach to a foreign country and a foreign country that the intelligence community and our committee has validated intervened massively in our election and intervened with an attempt to help one candidate, donald trump and to hurt another candidate it sounds like you ve made a conclusion. you re close to a conclusion. those are the facts that we ve all agreed to on a bipartisan basis. what level of cooperation, collusion, cooperation, we ve clearly got repeated efforts from the russians. we clearly have evidence from donald trump s own son saying he would welcome that information, but again, i m going to reserve my final judgement until we collect all of that information and candidly, some of the people we want to see are still caught up in the mueller criminal investigations and those criminal investigations need to conclude before we get a chance to talk to him. mark warner, the top democrat on the senate intellig
through the election. i think most voters would have liked to have known that piece of information before they voted. secondly, this allegation is that a crime, though? not necessarily a crime. i ll let lawyers make a determination on that, but it would be a relevant fact that a candidate for president was trying to negotiate with a foreign power, russia offering the leader of that foreign power, putin, a $50 million free penthouse. i think most americans would say that s a relevant piece of information. the other two pieces of information we need to know more on is mr. trump said he didn t know about the wikileaks dump of information detrimental to clinton. mr. cohen says he was in the office when trump took a call from julian assange right a day or two before the dump of the information. we need to find out if that s true or not, and then we also heard testimony that donald trump jr., at least, indicated to donald trump about the
sharing information, polling information with the russians. the earlier instance where russians were offering through one of the campaigns papadopoulos information, to me, that s all evidence. where that evidence leads in terms of a conclusion and we still have other key people to come back, i m going to reserve judgment until i m finished, but there s no one that could factually say there s not plenty of evidence of collaboration or communications between trump organization and russians. there is a report in the washington post that indicates that your committee and the house intelligence committee that one other angle to michael cohen s testimony has to do with a pardon. or pardon shopping. and what more can you tell us about the issue? are you investigating whether a pardon offer was serious or not to michael cohen? chuck, i cannot comment on what went on in the classified setting. why? i say this because at some point it s starting to become, you know, it comes across as in