The Daily - Thursday, Feb. 1, 2018

Episode Date: February 1, 2018

Republicans insist that their push to release a secret memo that is said to question the conduct of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department in the early stages of the Russia investigation is not an attempt to undermine the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller. But whatever their intentions, the possible fallout from the memo’s release has everything to do with Mr. Mueller. Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the Russia investigation for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, Republicans insist that the release of a secret memo calling into question the early stages of the Russia investigation is not an attempt to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation. Whether or not that's true, the possible fallout from the memo's release has everything to do with Robert Mueller. It's Thursday, February 1st. law and White House adviser Jared Kushner was questioned by. We've learned that White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller has now been interviewed as part of the special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe.

So this brings the probe into the inner circle of the White House. Two things are happening at the same time. Michael Schmidt has been covering the Russia investigation from the start. As Bob Mueller's investigation of the White House is intensifying, Republicans are increasing their efforts to undermine the FBI and the Justice Department. It is abundantly clear that the entire Mueller investigation is a lie built on a foundation of corruption. House conservatives are demanding the release of a memo, a memo that details allegations of FBI missteps during the 2016 election. Every single American citizen should have the ability to see that information to know exactly what our FBI was up to. The question is, how legitimate are the Republicans' claims about misconduct at the FBI and the Justice Department? And how related are these efforts to undermine the investigators tied to concerns that Mueller is honing in on the president. Okay, let's start with the Mueller investigation.

In what way is that investigation heating up? And what's making Republicans nervous? This all started with questions about Russia. What are the president's ties to Russia? Was he involved in any of the election meddling, etc.? But what has become clear to Republicans and to the public is that there are significant questions about the president's conduct in office, whether he tried to obstruct the Russia investigation. struck the Russia investigation? What were his true intentions about firing the former FBI director James Comey? Why has the president insisted on loyalty from those overseeing the Russia investigation? And that Mueller is spending a lot of time drilling down on them. Okay, so how does the memo that everyone is talking about right now fit into all of this?

The memo. House conservatives are demanding the release of a memo. Potentially explosive memo. Everybody wants to see the memo. four-page document that laid out how the FBI and the Justice Department improperly used the dossier to get a court-approved warrant to spy on one of Mr. Trump's campaign officials. And when you say dossier. The dossier was this document that a former British spy had created in 2016 that laid out a case for how the Russians had compromised the president, had compromising information on him, and that the campaign was in bed with the Russian efforts to influence the election. Back to the memo itself. What do we know about what it actually says in these four pages? The memo hasn't been released, so we don't

know exactly. But what it says is that the FBI misrepresented how it received information about this campaign official and did not disclose to the court, which approved the wiretap, that the information came from a former British spy who was being paid by the Clinton campaign to dig into connections between Trump and Russia. So the memo suggests that the original source of the information that led the FBI to seek a wiretap on an advisor to the Trump campaign, that it was kind of partisan and poisoned and not legitimate to begin with. that information and misrepresented or was not forthcoming about how it got this information and what motivations the person providing it may have had. Republicans will tell you that it's not tied to the Mueller investigation. This is a completely separate matter from Bob Mueller's

investigation, and his investigation should be allowed to take its course. That it's something completely separate and simply focused on oversight of the Justice Department and the FBI. It is our job to conduct oversight on behalf of the American people of the executive branch in case any powers were abused and civil liberties were abused

by the executive branch. But the Republicans' interest in push on this issue has come as Mueller's investigation has intensified and appeared to be increasingly focused on the president. OK, so who has this idea to create this memo? The Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee came up with this effort. I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is a Republican from California named Devin Nunes. He's extremely loyal to the president. I want to be clear, none of this surveillance was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team. For much of last year, he had been recused from the investigation as the House Ethics Committee looked into whether he had improperly disclosed this classified information as he tried to help the president. But he was cleared last December and has been back in charge of the investigation. OK, so he's back overseeing the House Intelligence Committee and seemingly still quite loyal to the president. Correct. He has proven himself time and time again to be one of the president's best and

most consistent allies on Capitol Hill. So help us understand the role of the House Intelligence Committee in all of this. The House Intelligence Committee will thoroughly investigate surveillance and its subsequent dissemination to determine a few things here that I want to read off. Who was aware of it? Why it was not disclosed to Congress? After the election, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees began investigations into how Russia tried to meddle in the election. And there was political pressure on Republicans to actually look into this and do something about it. But what has happened is that as those investigations have gone on, the Senate

investigation has sort of concentrated more on simply just Russia's meddling in the election. It has taken a look at the question of collusion. But the House investigation has become highly partisan. The Republicans and Democrats have fought each other at every turn about witnesses, about what they're actually looking at. And the ultimate breakdown of that has been on the memo where the Republicans cooked up this idea. The Democrats objected strongly to it, the Democrats tried to stop it, they failed, and now the Republicans are moving forward with it. What started as something that was trying to play itself off as a bipartisan investigation is now

a food fight in the most partisan sense of anything we're seeing in Washington. And I assume it's no coincidence that the direction that the House Intelligence Committee has taken is towards defending the president, given that the House is controlled by Republicans and this committee is controlled by a House member who is quite loyal to Trump. The House, more than the Senate, often seems to be more responsive

to sort of the conservative media industrial complex. This is the most explosive scandal in U.S. history, and that may be underselling it. And the idea of improper spying by the Justice Department and the FBI is something that has really been pushed on Fox News, on conservative radio. It goes to the heart of what we were scared about in America is that our

government is actually spying on us. Is this happening in America or is this the KGB? That's how alarming it is. The contents paint a disturbing picture of misdeeds and corruption inside the Obama FBI. This mantra has emerged in conservative media. Release the memo. Release the memo. It is so alarming. The American people have to see this. I invite everybody to use the hashtag,

release the memo. It was a hashtag. It trended on Twitter. It is time that you, the American people, get the truth. We are once again tonight, we're calling on you to contact Congress, let them know you want the memo released. Sean Hannity repeats it over and over again.

Because you, the American people, deserve to know about these abuses. And this has played out over the past two weeks, where there's been a campaign amongst the Republicans to release the memo. to release the memo. Is there anything inherently wrong with the fact that a congressional investigation seems to quite clearly have a political bent or agenda? It seems at odds with our expectation of what a congressional investigation would do. But should it be so at odds with our expectation? Well, it depends on what you expect from your Congress. If you believe that your Congress should be something that is run and ruled by bipartisan efforts that truly are getting to the bottom of things to follow the facts, you may be a bit disappointed here. If you are a Republican

who thinks that this is all a witch hunt and someone needs to be out there advocating for the president, then this is a good thing. And this is something that is helping to defend the president from these unfair, improper attacks that are simply trying to undermine him for his incredible victory over Hillary Clinton. The problem here is that there are legitimate questions about how the FBI handled itself during the presidential election. Eleven days to the election, the FBI director informing lawmakers he is reviewing new emails related to the Clinton email investigation. The FBI has just sent a letter to Congress informing them that they have discovered new emails. There have been some questions along the way whether FBI Director James Comey followed FBI protocol. The anti-Trump FBI texts keep coming, a lot of them.

We are getting word now from our reporters at the Justice Department that the acting FBI Director, Andrew McCabe, who of course has been the center of so much controversy and ire of the president, has told his staff that he plans to step down. The president believes McCabe was biased in Clinton's favor because McCabe's wife, a Democrat, received a large contribution from a Clinton ally when she ran for office in Virginia in 2015. But the problem is, is that the House committee is not operating in a bipartisan fashion. They're not working together. So if there are legitimate questions, they're kind of lost in the whole thing because they're being investigated and pushed in a partisan sense. It's not like they're linking arms and saying, look, we're going to come together and follow the facts and get to the bottom of this. It's more that each side looks to be using every different development as a way of undermining or supporting the president. So Republicans say that this memo has nothing to do with the Mueller investigation, but wouldn't that claim in the memo fundamentally call into question the origins of the Mueller

investigation? Correct. It gets at the heart of how this all began and whether the FBI was out to get Trump from the beginning. And that was a factor driving its investigation. At the heart of the issues the Republicans are raising is the conduct of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The president has grown frustrated with Rod Rosenstein. He's airing these frustrations. Two sources actually told us that the president at times has even spoken about wanting to fire the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. Did Rosenstein improperly

reauthorize this wiretap on the Trump campaign official? Now, Rosenstein is significant because he's the person overseeing the Mueller investigation. He's the one that okays or nays the decisions that Mueller wants to make in his investigation. The president is deeply skeptical of Rosenstein, even though he appointed Rosenstein. Correct. But Rosenstein is not a Trump loyalist. He's not someone that was part of the campaign. He's not someone the president has known for years. He's a longtime federal prosecutor that was the U.S. attorney in Baltimore. The president has been skeptical of Rosenstein. He Russia investigation. He had his White House counsel lobby the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, not to recuse himself. When Sessions recused himself, the president unloaded and said he needed an attorney general who was going to protect him. is the most important Justice Department official in the Mueller investigation. He's the one that could fire Mueller, and he's the one who okays Mueller's decisions. So if the Republicans can undermine Rosenstein, it would give the president a stronger hand if he wanted to fire him.

So not only does this memo that we've been talking about call into question the origins of the Mueller investigation, it calls into question the very legitimacy of the man currently overseeing the investigation at the Justice Department. Correct. If the memo shows that Rosenstein made improper decisions, then the president can cite that as a reason for getting rid of him. The president can say, look, Rosenstein mishandled this. He didn't do this correctly. He has to go. And then the president can put in someone as the deputy attorney general who would be more likely to do what he wants. So how has the Justice Department responded to this memo potentially being released by the House committee? The FBI director, Chris Wray, and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, went to the White House on Monday to ask that they stop the memo from being released.

The president actually can do that. The president can stop the memo from being released. Correct. Under the rules, the president could stop it and then the entire House would have to vote on whether it could be released. And why would they ask the president to intervene and stop the memo from becoming public? I think there's two main reasons. One, they feel that information in the documents is taken out of context, that it is not a full picture of what was truly going on. And secondly, wiretaps are the most sensitive,

tightly held information within the Justice Department and the FBI. Highly classified, not a lot of people know about it, and very rarely do we learn about them. Whenever any type of information about a wiretap comes out, it hurts the Bureau's ability to continue that surveillance. In this case, we're learning that the campaign official, Carter Page, had a wiretap on him as recently as the end of last year. So that means that he's going to look at his phone now and say, hmm, I'm not going to use that anymore. Right. And as somebody who covers national security, do the objections feel legitimate and meaningful? The problem with assessing that is that the perception is from the Republicans, well, oh, the FBI doesn't want this information released because it's going to make them look bad. And that's why they're citing these other reasons.

They're trying to say, hey, look, the corruption is so bad that they're even going to these lengths to try and stop the memo from coming out. There is no threat to national security for the public seeing this memo. It details abuses that need to be addressed. And this certainly is something that the public and certainly Congress need to debate. The House Republicans went on the offensive again today. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a former Trump transition official, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a former Trump transition official, unleashing his own unprecedented attack on the FBI and the Justice Department know pretty well that there were, quote, material omissions with respect to the information that they gave to Congress and the courts about these wiretaps. So he's alleging a larger cover up. So how is this memo and all the questions that it raises going to resolve itself,

whether or not the public will ever see it? The president has indicated that he wants this information out and he does not want the White House to stand in the way. So the White House is reviewing the document to make sure that it doesn't have any classified information that would truly damage national security. And then the memo will become public. out for us this situation where, as the Mueller investigation intensifies, Republicans are trying to release this memo, and that memo could potentially call into question the origins of the Mueller investigation and give the president a reason to fire Mueller's boss, Rod Rosenstein, and replace him with someone who would either be friendlier to the president or be willing to fire Mueller himself. It's hard to not see this as connected to the Mueller investigation. Well, I guess the only way we're ever going to answer that question is if they release the memo.

answer that question is if they release the memo. We've got to see the memo now to assess it and see whether this was a political play or legitimate oversight. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times is reporting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is interested in what happened on board Air Force One last July, as the president and his aides scrambled to respond to questions from the Times about a meeting between members of the Trump campaign team and Russian officials a year earlier. The Times has previously reported

that the president supervised the response to those questions, which claimed that the meeting had been about an obscure Russian adoption policy. But now, a former spokesman for the president's legal team is expected to tell the Mueller investigation that he was troubled by a conversation he overheard involving the president and White House communications director Hope Hicks. He is expected to testify that during that call, Hicks said that emails from Donald Trump Jr. spelling out the true purpose of the meeting,

which was getting dirt from the Russians on Hillary Clinton, would, quote, never get out. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.