for a political campaign. but in his interview with george stephanopoulos, the president showed no evidence that he has any understanding of the law that he will seems to be willing to violate. george stephanopoulos began his sequence of questions by asking about donald trump jr. s appearance once again today in a closed-door session of the senate intelligence committee. your son don junior is up before the senate intelligence committee again today. he was not charged with anything? not only wasn t he charged if you read it, with all of the horrible fake news, i mean i was reading that my son was going to go to jail. this is a good young man, that he was going to go to jail. in june of 2016 just months before the election, don junior received an e mail from a business associate promising dirt on hillary clinton from the russian government. don junior s response if it s what you say, i love it. the conversation led to a meeting in trump tower that incollided you the president s
wrong, i am willing to commit a crime, how should the fbi and fbi agents react to that? what should they be thinking about in terms of what this president is capable of? so first, i know that christopher wray is a respected leader in internally. i think what we ll probably hear from folks in the rank and file is he will likely send a mess and to the troops. is he might do it as soon as tomorrow. it will be a couple of paragraphs in an all employee e mail that says look, we ve got to do our job and keep our head down. here are the laws and the counter intelligence laws regarding accepting data, a thing of value from a foreign power. no matter who has a different opinion and what level that person is at, our job is to enforce the law and protect the nation from foreign adversaries and we re going to do that every single day. i think that s we ll see
their president tonight said they would all be willing to do this. do you expect them to come forward and say no, we don t do this? well, again, i haven t met a republican member of congress who privately or publicly has said anything like this. but if somebody is out there who actually does had type of thing, i would like them to step forward and tell us that they do or someone else to tell us because i would assert that this is illegal. there s a campaign finance law that says that you cannot accept anything of value from a foreign power. one of the reasons that robert mueller did not charge members of the trump campaign with this campaign finance violation is because he said that they did not know that it was wrongful or illegal to accept such information. however, now, i don t think anybody can say that they will have such ignorance of the law with regard to this campaign
in the real xwrufrs, there are bad ideas and there are incredibly bad ideas. an incredibly bad idea is to take information from a foreign national. federal law prohibits it. and i m sure frank figliuzzi will tell you, it s also a really bad idea because it is the start, it is the beginning of a foreign influence operation. and so one thing we can be sure of, mr. trump did not read the mueller report. in fact, in the mueller report, they spend a lot of pages and a whole bunch of ink discussing why this is not okay. now, in the end in the mueller report, they say we may not be able to charge the trump tower offer of information under federal criminal law. but nowhere do they say it s okay. it s not okay, lawrence. and here s the president saying he would accept it and i just read the law that makes accepting it illegal as well as it s illegal for the foreign national to offer it. i want to isolate something in
president said which is it s okay to listen. it s okay to listen if you re offered some as he called it research oppo from a foreign nation. here s what s wrong with a counter intelligence perspective. the moment you agree to sit down and listen, the moment they agree to sit down at that trump tower and listen to dirt being offered on hillary clinton, they are owned by that foreign power. that is the recruitment operation. you don t have to accept it. you don t have to receive it. yes, you ve just cited the law and those are statutory elements for a crime. on the counter investigation side the second you agree to do something shady, they own you. i m more convinced than ever over what we ve heard from the president regarding cia not being able, he ia to recruit the half-brother of kim jong-un, he doesn t believe anything s wrong with taking op pole research up to an includesing the next election i m more convinced than