that s what s happened. although, carol, correct me if i m wrong, the whistleblower process, particularly within the intelligence community going through the intelligence communities inspector general is such that something being classified shouldn t be a barrier toward it being treated as a whistleblower matter through this process, right, at every step of the way here both with the i.g. and with the director of national intelligence and with the intelligence community intelligence committees in congress. they re supposed to be able to handle classified information no matter how classified it is, if it is still, nevertheless, a matter of concern or grave abuse. oh, absolutely. it s not something the gang of eight can t know about. remember that one of the big clues here is that someone along the way, either the justice department or the white house or both were consulted and there was some issue of privileged communications outside the intelligence community, an
promise. the president via twitter did not deny the reporting saying anytime i speak on the phone to a foreign leader, i understand that there may be many people listening from various u.s. agencies, not to mention those from the other country itself. adding knowing all of this, is anybody dumb enough to believe that i would say something inappropriate? after meeting with inspector general atkinson today behind closed doors, adam schiff seemingly threatened to withhold funding from certain initiatives supported by the current acting dni unless the whistleblower s complaint is disclosed. we will look at whatever remedies we have including when the director of national intelligence comes to the congress for authorization to reprogram funds for one purpose or another, we will look to whether he is abiding by the law in making a decision about those requests. so we will use whatever leverage we can, but at the end of the day, we are determined to valley date the whistleblower process
it was a former contractor for that agency that said the actual staff members of the agency had hillary clinton s related e-mails. we believe that to mean at the time, early may, hillary clinton had revealed that she had deleted 30,000 e-mails and we believed it meant that they had those 30,000 e-mails. by the way the time may 16 came around, i came to the conclusion that i did not want to take possession of these e-mails. i thought they might be classified documents. i urged through the intermediary that the people at the government organization do it through a proper whistle-blower process. i never revealed this conversation to anyone at the trump campaign. i was uncomfortable talking about it. i then broke off contact with that government organization representative. neil: but you knew then that someone from the outside wanted to connect with someone on the inside of the trump campaign,
the efforts to make him into a hero i think are going to fall flat. he s not a whistle blower. you don t break the law, steal documents and then make a run for the border. there is a whistle blower process. this is the whistle blower process that s on the nsa website. to go to the inspector general if you think there s been criminal activity. there was nothing inappropriate, nothing unlawful. that s the debate here. is that there was no part of the law that was violated. i want to if you can hold here quickly, i ve got somebody who does have to decide about what s a law and what s not. senator angus king, the independent senator who caucuses with the democrats from maine. good morning, sir. i want to ask you just very simply, when did you find out about these programs? you ve been a senator for about 5 1/2 months. right. when were you briefed do you feel like you were fully briefed on all of this, on all of these programs when you read