john durham has been asked to do things like this before and as katie benner has just mentioned, has closed those investigations after several years without bringing charges. so opening a grand jury doesn t necessarily mean that someone is going to jail. but it does mean that it has certainly become more serious. and i imagine there s a lot of people very unhappy tonight to know that even if they didn t want to talk to john and to his team and they didn t do it voluntarily, now they can be compelled. let me ask you a sort of peevish question about this, and this may be obvious. you do need, as you said, a reasonable indication that a crime has occurred. you need some sort of factual basis on which to open a criminal case. it can t be a hunch. we do know that from people who have either been questioned or people who are familiar with the questioning in this inquiry thus far, people who have been sort of following what william barr has been traveling around the world asking people abou
signed on. susan collins, lisa murkowski, and mitt romney i believe. yeah, that s right. so what this means is republicans have the 50 votes they will need to get this passed. they can use mike pence to break the tie. so that resolution could be passed if indeed it s brought to the floor, you know, presumably they would try to do this as early as next week. the three republican holdouts should not be all that surprising. susan collins has been pretty resolute that she s just not going to talk about the impeachment inquiry until and unless it comes before the senate. lisa murkowski has really held the line as one of the more independent thinking among republican senators. she s regularly one of the last to jump on to these kind of things if she does at all. and then there s mitt romney who s been easily the most outspoken republican senator when it comes to the impeachment inquiry and what he sees as, you know, pretty obvious problems in behavior here by donald trump. but this does no
jury and the power to file criminal charges. we have a great attorney general. highly prestigious man. a very honorable man. and they ve been looking at it for a long time. i leave it all up to the attorney general and i leave it all up to the people that are working with the attorney general who i don t know. but i will say this, i think you ll see things that nobody would ve believed. this was the worst hoax in the history of our country. joining me now, democratic senator from wisconsin. tammy baldwin. senator, good to see you. thank you for being with us. let s just talk about this. this investigation into the origins of the of the russia inquiry. the president has always railed against it. he calls it a witch hunt and illegitimate and all these things. something has happened here. i think it s important for people to understand. this could happen at the behest of bill barr who seems to be okay with doing the president s bidding. yes. it s been quite a remarkable
attorney s office opens grand jury investigations every day. happens all the time. and so this one seems a little bit different, to put it mildly. and i imagine that whatever john is doing is being run up the flag pole. do you think that this news tonight and the prospect of criminal charges being brought against intelligence and law enforcement officials who are involved in the opening of this inquiry, what sort of impact do you think that will have, both on the people who are potential targets of this criminal investigation, potential targets of criminal charges if it gets that far, but also other people who are working right now in those kinds of jobs, in the intelligence community and in law enforcement who are working on sensitive investigations, who are working on foreign influence operations, who are working on the kinds of things that might be politically unpopular some day? right. and i always worry about that chilling effect. the political siization of the
every time i talk about the justice department. i expect lucy to hold the football and she never does, and it concerns me. i don t know exactly what s going on here, but it concerns me. chuck rosenberg, former senior official in the justice department, former u.s. attorney. thank you again for your time on short notice. i appreciate you getting to the studio for us. glad to do is it, rachel. we are following this news from the new york times. they have just broken the story the justice department is said to open a criminal inquiry into its own russia investigation. what this means in non-lawyer shorthand, is that the president and his loyalist attorney general bill barr appear to have moved on to the next phase. so they are no longer just vilifying all of the law enforcement and counter and intelligence officials who were involved in opening the initial inquiry into russia interfering in our election and the question of whether or not the trump campaign was somehow complicit in