spy christopher steele and the justice department top lawyer bruce ohr worked on an unsuccessful effort by the united states to flip russian oligarchs against vladimir putin. the paper reports the fbi tried to turn one into an informant on russian organized crime. according to officials of him, they saw information from the oligarch again, this time on possibly collusion between russia and the trump campaign. the times reports that deripaska was the subject of many of the contacts between steele and ohr between 2014 and 2016. now, trump has repeatedly claimed that the contact between ohr and steele proves there s a conspiracy against him, but even the president himself acknowledged in this tweet yesterday that the work between the two men began before he announced his candidacy. joining me onset, nbc legal
robert mueller s team as will he or won t he, will the president sit down with robert mueller for an interview? the president s lawyers have repeatedly come back with conditions underwhich they would do it. et cetera. do you think the president has any intention of sitting down with the special counsel? i have no earthly idea. he said he wants to and can t wait to and then he said he s worried about a perjury trap. this president has a lifelong habit of pathological lying. and i can understand why he would be nervous about testifying under oath before a special prosecutor. his lawyers might be nervous, too. thank you very much for joining us. my pleasure. coming up next, there s more breaking news. president trump attacks the new york times article which revealed the russia probe grew out of investigations into russian organized crime. i ll speak to the reporter who broke that story and by attacking the attorney general for ahow longing the prosecution of two republican congr
ohr repeatedly in the last couple of weeks. on wednesday the president put this up on twitter, how the hell is bruce ohr still employed at the justice department? disgraceful witch hunt. does this shine a light on why the president takes such an interest in bruce ohr? the president has attacked people who have spent years focusing on russian organized crime. i don t know whether that s the case here in terms of that s why bruce ohr has become the target of trump. but it is clear that if you discredit bruce ohr and if you discredit chris steele in the mind of donald trump, you can discredit the origins of the mueller investigation. that s why we re seeing these lines of attack being used so frequently. eric tucker with that new reporting, ken dilanian, thank you very much, we appreciate it. coming up, we re minutes away from rudy giuliani s so-called deadline for the mueller team. what happens next? when the 11th hour continues. does this map show the
now to make a fair assessment on what bruce ohr was or was not doing. he had a history of being involved and investigating russian organized crime. that s how he first met christopher steele. he was serving as that conduit, possibly for the government to provide this information. what i m frayed of if we continue to chase these lines from the president where he tries to attack people, undermine their credibility, we re going to lose the forest for the trees here. i think the main focus as we talk about christopher steele is people are trying to make him out to be this boogieman, that he is some partisan who is going to campaign to destroy the president when we stop and think about who he is, this is a former or retired officer with the british service, the secret intelligence service who was retired and investigating on behalf of a client whether or not donald trump had connection was the kremlin. and he took that information. he was so concerned with what he found that he first tookt
is very much in the focus of the special counsel robert mueller and his investigators. and it s just a matter of time, obviously, before we find out the rest of this story. as we mentioned, patten has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors as part of his plea agreement. so this could just be the beginning of patten s role in this story. evan perez, thank you very, very much. thanks. now the troubling notion that a foreign power could hold such sway over a presidential candidate that they can believe they had him, quote, over a barrel. according to a source with knowledge of the testimony, that s what a justice department lawyer told the members of the house judiciary committee this week. he, that person who testified, is bruce ohr, a 30-year veteran of the doj, and until the president of the united states made him the target of his online ire and called for his firing, he was just another career official specializing in russian organized crime. now he is the center of quite a story