and what the judge actually said yesterday in his order is he said we actually don t need to take the time to look into president trump s veiled psyche in order to be able to determine his intent. instead what we have is statements made in 2015, in 2016, and even when he was president and, heck, as you just showed on the tape there we go again, there s president trump making statements last night. i watched that live sitting at this desk and it struck me in the moment having just read the judge s decision which focused specifically on presidential speech as a register of intent. for him to say i want to go back to the first one it does seem to lend your argument more credence than the first utterance. that s not going to help his case and that s one more statement that s made and he is the president. there is an attempt to draw a distinction between statements he made as a candidate which are supposedly ones we re not
that the president of the united states asked british intelligence to do the spying and sean spicer from the podium reiterated this. take a listen. last on fox news on march 14, judge andrew nolitano made the statement three ielligence statements have informed fox news that president obamaent outside the chain of command, he didn t use the nsa or the cia, he didn t use the fbi and he didn t use the department of justice, he used gchq. what is that? the initials for the british intelligence spying agency. this is gchq s response. recent allegations made by media commentator judge andrew thnapolitano are nonsense, theye utterly ridiculous and should be ignored. this seems to be a big deal that the president s own spokesperson reiterated the claim of our closest ally being used to spy on an american presidential candidate. of course it s not that significant that a political or television pundit would speculate about something if the press secretary is then
order and just the text that was in there saying this is all neutral now so let s just go along this. there is no discriminatory intent there. the judge saw otherwise. we argued that there is supreme court case law that indicates that courts ought to look at the context behind the text in order to be able to find a discriminatory intent, particularly if the intention is to mask what is that discriminatory intent. so that s what was going on here. rudy giuliani s statement was one of them. the case here as i understand it going through the filings, it does hang on this question of intent, right? essentially is the intent so rotten, so sort of deeply unconstitutional in its desire to disfavor a single religious group in violation of the establishment clause that any iteration of it, no matter how it s dressed up, would be senate to that s the case you re making. right, exactly.
essentially an illegally conspiracy that is now proving to be baseless. right. so certainly it s it seems highly unlikely or improbable at this point that these claims are, in fact, accurate. president trump himself is shifting from, oh, wiretapping or surveillance or maybe sort of incidental collection. i think at this point the most important thing is that the president ofv levied very serio allegations not just against the former president but against the fbi, potentially the intelligence community, he s accused our closest intelligence ally in britain of violating an agreement is that itself is sort of the story here. if he s making these claims, if he s not willing to back that up, what are the implications of that? i want to talk about british intelligence. there is a report judge neapolitano on fox news said he had an explosive claim, which is
repeating it, that s another matter entirely. so we have a relationship with flat is part of an intelligence agreement where we basically agree not only to share large amounts of important intelligence but not to spy on one another and so what the accusation here is of our closest ally sort of violating a really core agreement. i think you can tell from the strength of their response how sort of out of line that accusation is. susan hennessey, thanks for your time. still to come, after trump s new travel ban was blocked by a federal judge, the president is vowing to take the case to the supreme court. the hawaii attorney general whose challenge led to that temporary restraining order is my guest ahead. i can stay. i m good.