analyzed and restored in the power of delhi reserving memories and helping to write new ones i m caitlin polantz at the federal courthouse in washington, and this is cnn welcome back to cns special coverage. i m wolf blitzer in washington, along with erin burnett, qizan, new york last sauer donald trump spoke over at trump tower in new york, rayleigh against the historic guilty verdict in his criminal hush money trial, and wearing i just want to point out this was at trump tower. you would have covered trump for many, many years. we used to go over there to trump tower to interview them. he obviously feels pretty comfortable over there. obviously, wolffian you he spent the night there. interestingly, we understand his wife, melania, was there as well she did not appear with him today as of course, she didn t any de in the courtroom were looking at live pictures outside wolf of the people who gathered as you pointed out, this was marked to be a news conference, which it was
doesn t steal u.s. secrets but the fbi has tracked a wide range of chinese companies stealing u.s. technology. they think sometimes people were charged by the government with violating the law when all they did was minor paperwork violations, refusing to disclose certain chinese affiliations and applying for grants and so forth. what the fbi says is that is just a tiny amount of what they re investigating, that what s going on in academia is a small part of what they re concern about, and that their real focus is on what s happening to american corporations, the stealing of american innovations. pete williams, thank you very much for that. i know you have a busy night because pete will be on nbc nightly news with lester holt with more of his interview with fbi director chris wray, on your local nbc station tonight, 6:30 eastern time. today, february 1, the first
bharara will help exonerate their behavior? no, i don t see why they would have a duty to contact the fbi after meeting where this russian came in and tried to bait and switch and wanted to talk about russian sanctions. i mean it seemed like a failed attempt by this russian lawyer who is notorious for doing things like this. so i don t know if they had a legal duty to do it. i d love to see the statute they allegedly violated. but again, the big picture is what s the underlying crime here. we re talking about all of these alleged lies that these individuals have said in paperwork violations when they filed paperwork. but where is the crime? there is no alleged underlying crime here that this really goes beyond though whether or not there was a crime. and it goes to the credibility of the people that we re now hearing these stories from. if they were in fact hearing allegations that the clinton campaign was in bed with the russians, your intuitive
i have a great deal of respect for the congresswoman but i think she s wrong. there is no fire. i mean you can say there s smoke, but these are a series of perjury traps that are being set up by democrats to try and go after trump administration officials because there s no underlying crime. there s no evidence that there s collusion between the russians and the trump campaign. not one piece of evidence has been produced. it is a fishing i do agree with president trump, there is a fishing expedition. this is a witch hunt in the sense that they re looking for evidence and they haven t found it yet. now if it does exist, more power to them, but i just don t think it s there. what we re seeing are the pursuit of all these trump administration officials going after them for paperwork violations and allegations that they committed perjury because they ve said one thing and their paperwork indicates something different. brian, you would certainly because of the intelligence community a
and the police executive research forum. i m not an outliar here. this is american policing that we ve got to do something about assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and background checks. i was frustrated because i was hearing talking points. i wasn t in a discussion. i was hearing nra talking point coming out of the mouth of a senator. background checks work. they prevented 3 million people from getting firearms illegally since the brady bill required them. 80,000 people lied on their reports and, apparently, 400 of them were being prosecuted. i m assuming that senator gram has an idea of how to fund an additional 100,000 prosecutions a year for paperwork violations. but no one has the capacity to do that and he knows it and we know it. the issue is background checks work and they prevent the wrong people from buying guns. the ludicrous notion that we ll prosecute people for lying on a piece of paper is sophistry and