frank to stay with us, and when we come back, more on this breaking news, that the fbi opened an inquiry into the president of the united states. and later, as we said, we re just moments away from a new record. one the white house and congress has done nothing to avoid breaking. the 11th hour just getting started on this busy friday night. night. [sneezing] you don t want to cancel your plans. [sneezing] cancel your cold.
standards that are required to open a case, right, that this is not something done in a vacuum. if you re going to look into the president of the united states, you re going to the department of justice. you re showing them your evidence. they are concurring with your concerns and they re allowing you to pursue this line of inquiry. to open even a preliminary inquiry in counterintelligence, you need to have a reasonable suspicion that someone is or may be an agent of a foreign power or is being targeted by that foreign power to open a full investigation and you say, well, we don t know whether this was a preliminary or full, but let s remember that this appears to have turned into this special counsel inquiry and if that s true, it certainly looks like it turned into a full. although we can t be certain. the standard for a full inquiry is specific and arcticulable facts. that someone is or may be an
because you ve got to keep the rulebook in your top drawer. i lived as a counterintelligence agent with the attorney general guidelines in the top drawer of my desk and referred to them daily until i memorized entire portions of them. that s how heavily regulated it is. so, any notion that some agent can open some case willy nil ly against a president is misguided. the level of review, the department of justice review, the number of lawyers that would have to have touched this to allow this to happen is almost immeasurable. so i want to try to dispel that nation, that there would have to be multiple points of failure, multiple people in the conspiracy to even open this case and it s just wholly unrealistic to think that happened. we are so grateful to our guests tonight, to michael schmidt, of course, for starting us all off. barbara, chuck, frank, our thanks. and coming up for us, as our coverage continues, the night s
if you just take a moment to think about the fact that the president of the united states had a counterintelligence investigation open to determine whether he is being targeted by a foreign power or whether or not he s an agent of a foreign power, that is absolutely extraordinary. it doesn t tell us what the answer is. we don t know where this will lead. but i cannot imagine in all my years on this planet having a president of the united states being the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. frank, you heard what chuck said in the previous segment and heard what tucker carlson had to say in the previous segment. it is obvious that some of the backlash will result in the fact that they re going to come after your former colleagues. a lot of the folks you re still in touch with at the fbi. give us a reality check on morale and how you think they ll fare.
investigation. i can imagine that agents were extremely reluctant to open an investigation against the president of the united states and would do so only after extreme scrutiny and very high level approval. and so, there are certain things that we know. the event, perhaps, the firing of jim comey and statements made to lester holt. but quite possibly, there are additional facts unknown to the public at this point. mike, i have a bunch of lightning round questions for you, some of which just came up in our conversation now. do we know for a fact that all this became, slid into, morphed into what is known as the mueller inquiry, or aredly any other subsets of an fbi inquiry that may already be open? this was all taken in by mueller. you have to remember, this happen eed all in a short perio of time. comey fired in may of 2016 and in the days after, this