it s time now for your business of the week. one of the lucky ones. when hurricane harvey hit, he made the bold move to shut down his store. with zero foot traffic, he focused on web sales, making sure the business didn t fall victim to the storm, too. for more, watch your business weekend mornings at 7:30 on msnbc. welcome back. i m david gura. the nunes memo is putting a fresh spotlight on the 40-year-old fisa law written to prevent abuses. alleging abuses in surveillance to the one-time adviser to then candidate donald trump, carter page, trump tweeted, quote, the memo totally vindicated him and the probe is a witch hunt.
membmemo itself raises doubts about the leadership of the justice department and the fbi. so, it seems quite possible that with this memo, the white house has planted those seeds, those seeds it will later harvest if it decides to move against rod rosenstein who, of course, is the only figure in the department of justice who has oversight and say over where bob mueller goes and what he does with his investigation. the course of democrats critical of this decision has been loud. paul rosenswag i want to read from house democrats a letter they sent to president trump shortly after the release of this document. quote we write to inform you we would consider such an unwarranted action as an attempt to obstruct justice in the russia investigation. firing rod rosenstein, doj leadership or bob mueller could result in a constitutional crisis of the kind not seen since the saturday night massacre. how sound does that seem to you, paul? in terms of politics we may be getting to that point. i
an employee of the department of justice in the end. if you wanted to violate that policy, that would be a good, legitimate ground before firing him. so he won t do that. since he s not going to charge the president or indict him, that means that anything we have to do to resolve the difficulties that are happening in the trump administration, if any, are going to come through congress, through impeachment or other activity like that. ned price, my last question to you, we ve talked over the course of the hour here about what the release of this membo means for the fisa system, the legal system more generally. as somebody who has worked in the intelligence community, i want to ask you what you see, the declassification release of the document, the president s decision not to redact anything in the memo that was released yesterday. what are the effects going to be on those who work within the intelligence community? david the release of this nt is something that the fbi and law enfo
the memorandum reflects the judgments of its congression authors. here we re towing both worlds, political and legal world here. you told us some things we don t know, that we could learn more from that fisa application. what are the things going forward that we might get answers to? this democratic memo written by members of the house minority. what are the unanswered questions yet? well, there are so many, i don t even know where to begin. all of this is unsatisfying, because if there was real transparency here, we would all see the government s application of the fisa court to get these wiretaps. that s not going to happen. those things are clsied. what we re seeing is through the republican lens and then through the democratic lens what it says. and the whole thing is just so strange. i mean, the unanswered questions are how central to the fisa application was the steele dossier? how was his bias described to
the court? we re told that it was. and what other information was there in the application to bolster it? remember, it was approved four times by the fisa court, by four different judges. some news accounts have said four republican appointed judges on the fisa court. we just never know. we never see these applications. it s hard to know exactly who signed off on what. but those are some of the questions. and i suspect some of them, we ll never know the answers to. pete williams, thank you very much. joining us from washington, d.c. today. with me now, msnbc contributor and white house correspondent for the pbs newshour, and political analyst and chief washington correspondent, peter baker. thanks to both of you. i want to start with comments we heard from republican leadership, in particular. i ll start with paul ryan, the house speaker, talking about the line that we can or can t draw between the memo released yesterday and the investigation being conducted by robert mueller. let s