explosive new opinion piece from the founders of fusion gps. that s the opposition research organization that commissioned the infamous trump dossier. the founders say that instead of investigating the evidence they have provided on russia influencing the election and ties that the trump team and camp have with russian organizations, trump s allies are instead targeting them. cnn s manu raju and evan perez join me to talk about this. a sales dossier saying to fuel a quote, investigation by republicans. they don t believe the dossier was the trigger for the investigation. break it down for us. what they re saying here, jake, is they re defending the decision to hire christopher steele, that former briltish agent that did pot together that dossier that included allegations of trump and russia connections. and when they enlisted christopher steele, they did not tell him who were the source
ultimately this is partly an exercise by this company to clear their name. they ve gotten caught up in a situation that s really difficult for them. and i think all of this, especially what s gone on the hill it s become increasingly partisan over the last several months, it s a little bit of a sideshow. the real investigation is happening in the special counsel s hands. it s a continuation of an investigation if you believe this op-ed was ongoing for quite some time, that was maybe deeper than we knew about. and if you don t believe that, we knew there was an investigation that pre-existed before the special counsel was formed and they took the ball and are running with it. so whatever is happening on the hill, whether republicans are launching a counter investigation or whether democrats are actually able to do any of their own digging, it s kind of irrelevant because clearly that has devolved into a partisan sideshow, and the mueller investigation is going
trump camp. we don t know what it means. trump allies or whatever. that s fascinating they re alleging, and i don t know the truth about this, they re alleging there was a source inside the trump camp giving the fbi information. i think we have to look at it under the lens this is democratic opposition research of trying to paint a negative narrative about a republican president. it sort of says, hey, you need to look at this records, these things. they re trying to participate a different narrative. going back to who they were talking to during the campaign, whether the fbi was involved, we had an investigation that started in the middle of a campaign, apparently. and now a here and a half later, and we had senator feinstein say several times she s seen no evidence of collusion. there s still no signs of collusion, so what woo actually investigate at this point? go ahead. senator feinstein, i would
and they said the committees had no interest in investigating what they said were serious allegations and saying it raises serious questions about efforts too cab collaborate between russians and the trump campaign during the presidential election. and jake, also they re demanding these committees release the transcripts of their 21 hours of interviews behind closed doors, but no sign that s going to happen just quite yet, jake. evan, tonight we re learning the trump legal team talked with the special counsel before christmas. do we have any idea what they discussed? we don t know exactly what was discussed, but there were talks between the president s lawyers and robert mueller s team. the meeting happened a few days before christmas. while there are been other meetings between the two sides, this had some importance for the president s lawyers. they wanted to get a sense of where mueller s inquiry is going and more importantly get some indication of how much longer this cloud of
democratic opposition research firm trying to paint a negative narrative about a republican president. it sort of says, hey, you need to look at this records, these things. they re trying to paint a different narrative. going back to who they were talking to during the campaign, whether the fbi was involved, we had an investigation that started in the middle of a campaign, apparently. and now a year and a half later, and we had senator feinstein say several times she s seen no evidence of collusion. it s not a short window of this investigation. it s been going on for a year and a half. there s still no signs of collusion, so what woo actually investigate at this point? go ahead. senator feinstein, i would guess if you asked her today she said that months ago in the op-ed today the guys that did the research say the guys who did the intelligence for