name. should we the public understand the special counsel investigation looked that this scary core question whether the president was subject to influence by russia or any other foreign force? was or that the kind of counter intelligence investigation you re talking about before, which is secret which we ll never know about which might be in fact ongoing? so it s really the former. my understanding and what the mueller report describes is that they were looking for criminal activity. so they were trying to determine whether there was a criminal conspiracy to engage in crimes against the united states. they did not look at the counter intelligence sort of relationships between members of the trump campaign. because that was a different investigation? well, it was the same investigation at the fbi. i think this was a prosecutorial choice made by the special counsel s office. but while it was still at the fbi the two were essentially one in the same. we were looking at both simull
lieutenant colonel alexander vindman and others who have popped up in the impeachment investigation as fact witnesses. i wonder if that, too has sort of inflected your feeling about any of this or if you have anything you d like to say in terms of how they ve been treated? this is deeply unfair. we are all public servants. this is simply not it way eosin with wrongdoing, even if you think my text messages were a mistake, this is not how public servants should be treated. and more over, those institutions should be coming to their defense. you know, we can t control what the president says but sure as the day is long attorney general barr could say something about whether this was appropriate or not. secretary pompeo could say something about whether these people deserved the lambasting that they ve gotten. in terms of the text messages and allegations that have been made against you, you ve sort of explained yourself in putting those text messages in greater
times, he s confessed to both of them he led the effort to recall the ambassador to ukraine marie yovanovitch because she was in his way of the effort to leverage ukraine into doing these investigations into joe biden to help trump in 2020. i believe that i needed yovanovitch out of the way. there s a lot of reasons to move her. the washington post today reports on the fact the smears that giuliani and ultimately president trump himself spread about that ambassador, the literally fake made up created out of whole plot allegations against her were not just voiced by the president and mr. giuliani they were spread online by a russian disinformation network, the same network that was also active in the 2016 russian online operation to help trump and hurt clinton in that presidential election. today in federal court in new york one of the men under indictment who was working with rudy giuliani in this effort in ukraine who says he was working with giuliani as part of giuliani s represen
what i need to digress. i need to talk about something else here for a second. and it is impossible to forget in this moment this is the literal eve of president trump s impeachment for him demanding that ukraine give him ginned up material to help him in his next election against his democratic rival. while the president and the attorney general, the head of the justice department are daily ripping the fbi and ripping the justice department for having ever investigated russian interference in the last election. well, the judge who was overseeing more of the criminal cases that derive from that investigation more than any other today had her own moment in court today while she s sentencing trump s deputy campaign chair. she s sending him to prison, right, and in the midst of sending him to prison she says this and it is basically in praise of rick gates. but listen to how she says it. she says, quote, before i go further to discuss the nature
been some sort of conspiracy against president trump, that could have easily been leaked to the american people so people know about it when they website to the polls. we were careful not to do anything that would allow this information to get out before we knew what we had. you described as i mentioned the sort of self-consciousness around the clinton investigation, that everybody involved was conscience everything going to be done was going to be scrutinized. that inticipatory scrutiny seemed to drive disclosure in terms of what blow back the fbi would get. given what has happened ultimately to everyone who was involved in that russia investigation do you look back now and recognize any of the same self-consciousness about that? is it the same sense this scrutiny or blow back was going to be brought to bear on all of you? i wouldn t characterize it