president is the ultimate declassification authority. he can take any piece of secret information in the government and decide to declassify it and read it on television. so, if he would like to show us evidence of a warrant for surveillance or transcripts or anything like that, he could clear that up today. now, t white house looks like it s going the other direction with this statement this morning and saying they re not going to comment on it, which some people will read as evidence that, no, in fact, trump was just talking about media reports. i wouldn t completely rule out, though, that there s something here, some kind of surveillance or attempt at surveillance. we just don t know at this point, thomas. and as you point out about the declassification, yes, he could take a picture of it and tweet it from his phone if he wanted to back up information about this claim. and ken, that s important, too, to point out the fact that not only could this prove damning to the trump adadmin
evidence that would be used? the examples of evidence would be that we have information that, for example, there is someone who is a foreign agent, an agent of a foreign power, who is conducting espionage activities in the united states. that could be based on documentary evidence. it could be based on testimony from another witness who can implikt this person. and you take that, you often will have it in the form of an affidavit from an fbi official or another law enforcement officer, and you bring that package to the federal judge. you say, here s the evidence, here s the phone account that we want to wiretap. the judge lks a it all. sometimes the judge will say, you need to rein it in a little bit, this is too broad. there will be a negotiation process. but at the end of the day, you need that judicial approval in order to proceed. all right, so, is there any way that president trump is referring to a different type of warrant that was issued in reference to a wiretapping? it
they are taking this slowly in terms of what they understand this to be, but what have you uncovered about these claims from president trump referring back to the obama administration? hey, thomas. well, 24 hours after that remarkable tweet storm by the president of the united states, we still don t have clarity on whether he was simply repeating unsubstantiated reports in the conservative media or whether he was actually briefed on something that led him to believe there was secret surveillance in trump tower. and if the latter is true, just to remind folks, it wouldn t be as trump described it, that president obama order a wiretap. it would be that a federal judge found probable cause that somebody in trump tower was acting as an agent of a foreign power. so, that would be remarkable. it would be a scandal. it would also be remarkable if the president of the united states made that allegation without any evidence, lent the weight of his office to that allegation based on unsubstant
campaign against the trump administration and the campaign officials that have these links and connective tissue to the russian ambassador. couldn t it be helpful in terms of suspicions for them to clear this up? well, according to donald trump, it could, because in the tweets yesterday he said that nothing was found. so, you re absolutely right. if nothing was found, let s see the transcripts. please, mr. president, declassify them, declassify the fisa order. although, you know, look, there s another element of this here. a lot of people say that donald trump has a habit of doing this kind of thing on twitter to create a distraction, right? there s been a series of bad stories about jeff sessions. if that was his intent here, though it may have backfired, because it puts more focus on the ultimate question here, which is did members of the trump campaign collude with russia while russia was mounting a covert operation to interfere in the election to hurt hillary clinton and help don
if in fact the president wants an investigation, fine, get it all out there. it goes back to being transparent here. this is a very, very serious charge that the president just kind of lobbed out there yesterday. and we have to step back and just take that into consideration that when you say something like that, you really have to back this up. right. let s also be very clear about something. vladimir putin is not our friend. he has deliberately tried to destabilize the west. he is deliberately trying to destabilize nato and the eu from an economic standpoint. this is real stuff here. and what vladimir putin is doing, successfully i might add, is disrupting the west in a way that quite frankly mick ail goesh shauf wasn t able to do. we have a president who is disrupting this country and our footing on the world stage