the fbi, since donald trump has been president, they literally opened a formal investigation to see if they can substantiate the evidence and behaviors that suggested that the president could be acting on behalf of a foreign government as essentially a foreign government s agent here in the united states and inside the u.s. government. and not just any foreign power, but a hostile foreign power that wants to do us as much harm as possible. and none of us know what the ultimate dispensation of that counterintelligence case concerning the president has been, or what it will be if it continues under robert mueller. but we re watching all of these various threads of it still dangling, right? cohen and butina and deripaska and all the rest of it. suspend your disbelief, though, for just a second. if the premise of that counterintelligence investigation was true, if russia did get a u.s. president to act on their behalf against the united states, if you were russia, what else would you want
insisting on the shutdown, is the same president who is at the center of the most serious criminal counterintelligence investigations to ever get near a sitting president. the fbi, since donald trump has been president, they literally opened a formal investigation to see if they can substantiate the behaviors that suggested the president could be acting on behalf of a foreign government as essentially a foreign government s agent here in the united states and inside the u.s. government. and not just any foreign power, but a hostile foreign power that wants to do us as much harm as possible. and none of us know what the ultimate dispensation of that counterintelligence case concerning the president has been, or what it will be if it continues under robert mueller. but we re watching all of these various threads of it still dane dangling, right? cohen and butina and deripaska and all the rest of it. suspend your disbelief, though, for just a second. if that counterintelligence
congressman eric swalwell of california who sits on the house intelligence committee. good to see you, congressman. you, too. thank you so much. i want to know what your reaction is to cnn s new reporting that robert mueller s team is digging into trump s campaign ties to the nra. concerns that we had during our house intelligence investigation, which was you re seeing, you know, russians starting to go to the nra, starting to make contributions there. if you step back and ask, well, what would the russians have an interest in the nra for? i think it makes sense. like, go to who the republicans are beholden to. right? the nra has such great influence over them. we have evidence of trump and butina being in the same room. donald trump junior, you know, meeting alexander torshin and others. that allegation has been out there. so we just wanted to see if this was true, and go further and probe further and we re not able to every time we tried. good news is, we can now look. so you
case which is fascinating. to see the nra exposed as being so vulnerable to russian influence say fascinating twist in this story of influence in american politics. we know that maria bu teen was trying to make end roads in the nra and laura points out she has pleaded guilty to acting on behalf of the russians what the do you see? i don t see this as a critical piece of the investigation. let me give you a way to think about this, alisyn. that is if you get that information about butina, if you look at the amount of money that the nra was investing into this campaign. if you did not look into whether money going into the nra was dirty, somebody could ask the special counsel, you didn t bother to look? i m not here to suggest that the nra did anything significantly wrong. i m saying the reverse would be if you get that information on beaut tina and say it doesn t look significant i m going to leave that on the cutting room floor, that doesn t make sense to me. we don t know how f
nra, starting to make contributions there. if you step back and ask, well, what would the russians have an interest in the nra for, i think it makes sense. like go to who the republicans are beholden to, right? the nra has such great influence over them. we have evidence of trump and butina being in the same room, donald trump jr. meeting aleksandr torshin and others, you know, that allegation has been out there. so we just wanted to see if this was true and go further and probe further. and we re not able to every time we ve tried. the good news is we can now look. you were on this program and other programs complaining last year that the republicans who were in control at the time, that they were blocking investigations into the influence that the nra may have had on the trump campaign. are you going to start investigating this now? yes. part of what we re going to do is fill in the gaps where the republicans would not allow us to go last time. so we can actually subpoena records