what a week. with us, we have pulitzer prize winning columnist and associate editor of the washington post, eugene robinson with us. and columnist and associate editor for the washington post, david ignatius, will join us in a moment. joe, just a reminder of why the justice department might be a little concerned about nuclear secrets knocking around mar-a-lago. there was the time that trump spilled highly classified information to russia s foreign minister. or when he tweeted a highly classified satellite photo of an iranian space facility. or when he sided with the kremlin over america s own intelligence agencies. my people came to me, dan coats came to me and some others, they said they think it s russia. i have president putin. he just said it s not russia. i will say this, i don t see any reason why it would be. yeah. so with that in mind, we begin with new information on the fbi s search of donald trump s home in florida. people familiar with the investigation te
Warrants . The concern grows out of the fact that all of the failures and the and The Information that shouldved been given and wasnt given. And the question being what was the intent . What what washa their intention . Their motivation there. And what we determined was we couldnt definitively say what the motivation was. Are these pretty smart people . Fairly welleducated . At least welleducated. I dont know if theyre smart. I dont know if were very smart to beow honest with you. I was b going to say they have law degrees, right . At least somehe of them do. So you think the woods review for people at this level of the organization. To be clear, the stuff that didnt happen on the woods review was basic stuff. Yeah. You didnt need to be a deeplyexperienced fbi agent to be able to do it the right way. Well, thats my point. So wouldnt you think that would almost be muscle p memory for people who are going through this process to know they had an obligation to go through that . They clear
your reporting on this and why these text messages are so important. yeah. i mean, it s really extraordinary. i mean, the career officials, the investigators in the dhs inspector general s office wanted to alert congress to the fact that the secret service text messages from january 6thhood had disappeared. they put together this memo and sent it to the chief of staff, to joe the inspector general at. once that happened, the memo died. it was never seen again. it never made it into the semiannual report to congress. all of this is a potential crime. the inspector general act of 1978 is very clear, if there is an instance of resistance, or a significant delay in turning material over to the inspector general, the inspector general has to inform congress it is not able to do its job. in this case, the inspector
investigate misconduct committed byve the attorney general of th united states.ct who is doing the bidding of the president to undermine our intelligence community. and i trust you take that duty seriously. i i do. and i d just like to add that, under the law, under the inspector general act, it carves out for my authority, the ability to look at misconduct by department lawyers from the line lawyer all the l way to the top and the attorney general. history has also shown us that the inspector general can participate in an investigation of the attorney general. and that, in fact, happened with general gonzales. do you recall that? that happened and go it s worth noting that happened after the attorney general said our office was not going to get the case. it was going to go to the office of professional responsibility. and the choice for our office was whether to join that investigation or not.or but that wasn t initiated through us. that s the important point. the law has to c
and my colleagues asked you to investigate was whether attorney general barr s handling of the mueller report was h misleading. and whether he demonstrated bias in dealing with the mueller investigation. in light of the factors that i that i m sure you consider, will you take another another look at the request that i, and my colleagues, sent you? toue see whether you are able t investigate any of them. so on that, senator, first of all, i d be happy to come up and meet with you andto talk about with you in person. let me say i i ve had conversations with some of the members of the committee about this issue. it s the the letter s asking us to look at the conduct of senior lawyers at the department.er directly implicate section 80 of the inspector general act, which prohibits me from looking at conduct of lawyers in their capacity as lawyers. senator lee has sponsored a bill that passed the house unanimously. bipartisan, full support. pending here. several members of the commit