are you surprised they leaked right after the justice department gave them to congress? well no. i knew answer to this question. mass forms of communication, telegraph, telephone, television and tell a member of congress. took one hour. with karine, i leave the legalities to fbi and lawyers. i don t think it helps the president at all. seems like a guy obsessed about the russians. why? because he is obsessed about the russians. a source told cnn a special member of mueller s office consulted and they didn t object. they are redacted and no classified information is released. they have probably already taken this testimony themselves and they have it in a jar ready to go if they need it. so this is not going to be additional to that. therefore, doesn t really impact the outcome of what mueller is doing.
the average private citizen didn t have a conversation with the president of the united states asking him to drop a criminal investigation. and tweet at him after he s fired he better hope there aren t tapes. i was in a position given what i knew to do something that would be useful and important. i did it. reasonable people can disagree about it. i still think it was the right thing to do. i asked you about andrew mccabe and now peter strok and lisa page that worked at the fbi and a lot in the news about text messages back and forth and disparaged a lot of people including president trump. now, you say you had no idea an affair or a text messages. i take you at your word. put yourself in donald trump s shoes for one second. you re donald trump and you feel this is unfair, this investigation. you find out that peter strok is texting somebody disparages things about you and then you find out that he actually helped conduct the hillary clinton interview and he called you an idiot. woul
president-elect. well, yeah. we anticipated that. that was a concern we had that and especially and the bureau itself had that concern that this would be shades of j. edgar hoover and all that. and we agonized over that. i ve often wondered, you know, if we hadn t told him about it an it came out and then he learned he, the president-elect, now president trump, found out that the intelligence community knew this and didn t tell him about it, hell to pay, then, too. difficult situation. director clapper, thank you for being with us. appreciate it. thank you. more ahead with the panel in a moment. this is a story about mail and packages. and it s also a story about people.
donald trump? in other words, you didn t disclose the russia investigation to the american people. and now, there s a lot of people who think he s illegitimate. and it s something that he thinks there s a cloud over his presiden presidency. didn t you avoid doing one thing to hillary clinton you did it to trump? i don t think so. i think of the two investigations and everybody working on it in the department of justice and the fbi did, as quite different. early stage, counterintelligence investigation of americans, not donald trump, a small group trying to figure out is there a correction between those people and the russian effort. we had a discussion whether to publicize that. we weren t investigating donald trump. we had just started. there wasn t serious consideration given to it because it wouldn t be remotely appropriate under our policies. you called it very early stages in october 2016. but you disclosed it in march 2017. that s only five months later. was there really such
of justice. there s a lot of room for people to argue what it was that was at the heart of what the president was asking. so if this is the case upon which you try to bring an obstruction of justice case, i think, well, maybe you have the look for some additional evidence. paul? i m struck how often in comey s telling of it the president comes back to russia and mike flynn. he s talking to the chief investigative officer of the united states. if you were to engage from the campaign thought he would talk about, say, mexican gangs, a sort of thing on the campaign. opioid abuse. he just seems obsessed with russia and with saving mike flynn s hyde and politically problematic. it is interesting. one of the things that james comey talked about with jake tapper saying that he thought it was odd as an investigator just in his experience as an investigator that somebody would constantly come back to the