President Trump has asked the Justice Department to look into whether the F.B.I. infiltrated his campaign in 2016 for political purposes. In response, the department granted the president’s team access to highly classified information from the special counsel’s Russia investigation. What’s behind this decision? Guest: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, who covers the White House for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
From the New York Times are Michael, but this is the real. Today President Trump is calling on the Justice Department to open an investigation into itself. Instead, the Justice Department is giving the president's team access to evidence being used in the special council investigation. Why would I do that? It's Tuesday may twenty seven,
the president, really using twitter this morning to slam the New York Times and air, his grievances and frustrations, and while the new millennium showed the times article there's a big debate raging and more followed continued from, or the president is back on, twitter he's a lashing out of the Justice Department and also at the New York Times this over a new report about a previously unreported meeting had dropped tower with a foreign country. So the times published a story over the weekend that looked at and different trump tower meeting than the one we have all become familiar with, where Donald Trump Junior met with Russians who were promising dirt on Hillary Clinton too,
Davis, covers the White House four times this time. The meeting was with officials from South
radio and the United Arab Emirates, and they are discussions with the Trump campaign officials about potentially helping out the campaign. The reason it matters is because it's the first indication that we have that Mahler is not just looking at whether the Trump campaign worked with Russians during the election season, but also whether they may have worked with other foreign governments who are either offering up or actually providing help,
two Donald Trump and whether they were also coordinating with the Russian. So it just gives a sense of an avenue that we want really aware existed in this investigation of the entire Russia meddling picture to this sort of the latest sign that the Miller investigation continues to expand its scope, and this time it's literally expanding to entire other countries. That's right- and it may well be that Malta has been looking,
this avenue for quite some time, but it's just now that we are getting wind of it and every time one of these things becomes public. The president gets another
a bit of a glance of how big this investigation really is. How much smaller and his team really Know- and you know it's just continuing to go on and on, and that makes the president extremely angry and it makes him wanna lash out
Let me read you what he has just tweeted. Things are really getting ridiculous, the failing and crooked, but not as crooked as Hillary Clinton. New York Times has done a long
and boring story indicating that the world's most expensive witch hunt has found nothing on Russia and me. So now there are looking at the rest of the world but interesting
He didn't take issue with anything in the story. He didn't call it fake news and there's a pause of a few hours, and then he tweets
Anne, and he says I hereby demand and will do so officially tomorrow- that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI, Slash, Deo, J, infiltrated, oyster veiled, the Trump campaign for political purposes, and then, if any such demands are in, question were made by P
within the Obama administration, to tell me more about this incident. The Trump is asking his department justice to look into what happened. Well for a long time now, he has been complaining about the fact that we know that several of his campaign officials were wiretapped, but the more recent factor for the president that has him talking about whether his campaign was infiltrated. Is some information
We reported on last week that the FBI actually had and inform at the New York Times in Washington, Post reporting that the
B. I had an informant go talk to a couple members of the Trump campaign. According to the report, the FBI
did indeed set an informant to talk to three tromp campaign advisers after receiving evidence that they had suspicious contacts with Russia. The informant who, according to the Washington Post, was a retired american professor interacted with Trump campaign members, George Papadopoulos quarter, page and sample
that's when this first came out. The president was really angry and talked about how inappropriate it was, and he alleged that, for the person was a spy out. It was planted in his campaign. We ve come to learn through reporting of my colleagues here in the DC bureau, that the reason that these informants were sent in was because they had uncovered contacts that term campaign officials had with Russians and they want
to look into what they were and further. There was a sort of political timing motivation here, not in the way that the president is representing it that they were out to get the campaign, but they were close enough to the election that they didn't want the spectacle of doing a big FBI interview of these people and that it would be. You know they thought a more practical way to go about it. To have an informant ask some questions.
And see was there really anything to this or were they going down the wrong path, but it's not as if they were double agents who went in applied for jobs on the trunk campaign, so they could spy on people. They were doing the work that an FBI inform and often does. Where you know you, you got a meeting with someone you go to dinner with them. You talk to them
try to get information out of them? That's and the less over way than you would face to face interview, saying hello: I am in a Julie, Davis from the FBI. Please answer these two questions and is the reason for the president to be outraged by this arrangement, given that this was happening under a democratic president and in the middle of a very heated presidential campaign. As he's running against terrorism, I think this president is very paranoid about this whole investigation. So he believes there is a very good reason to be suspicious. It happens, while Obama was president, so he then believes that it was some have directed by Democrats, but he has very typical to have an informant and a big investigation likeness or several informants. This is not necessarily considered a huge deal. It's not necessarily something that goes all the way up the chain of command and certainly not to the president himself,
so the notion that Barack Obama was sitting at his desk saying I see we're gonna help Hillary Clinton by sending a spy into the Trump campaign. It's just not the way. These things typically work, but that's clearly the way trump sees it, and that is the way whether or not it's true he is representing it to the public, and I think he's trying
undercut the whole investigation which has been doing all along, but I think he's also trying to set up this narrative where the public, and particularly his own supporters, see the Mahler investigation as a democratic, partisan, motivated witch hunt hoax just the way he does and that there are two different sides, basically to sort of boil it down into this fact. Free partisan spitting match between him and his democratic detractors would set a precedent in this treaty is asking his department of justice to look into this and determine if it was in fact a political act intended to hurt him and if the Obama,
administration was somehow involved. That's right, and you have to understand that this is not just any old matter. He's asking the Department of Justice to look into. There is an ongoing special council investigation into this issue of whether and how Russia meddled in the presidential election. So by asking for this other investigation he's,
actually intervening in an ongoing investigation he sang hold up. I want you to investigate the very basis for the special council. Probe right is asking for an investigation of the investigation of him correct Julie. Could this be construed as the latest piece of evidence that this president is trying to obstruct justice when it comes to the special council investigation? Absolutely he has basically dispensed with any idea that he is not trying to use. His power
Are you his office to try to influence the way this investigation goes? He is called for an end to it. He's fire. The FBI, director he's thought about firing. The deputy attorney general- and this is just the latest example of him- sort of throwing all the
Usual standards out the window and saying I want this
thing over. I don't think this thing has a basis, and I M gonna use my power to try to act on them.
Irony here is that the more he tries to influence the Mahler investigation, the more he tries to speed up its
completion the more he seems to be contributing to it and prolonged
in it and giving the special council more things to look into
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uncovered is upon cast from invest, go cute. You too, and t brand at the New York Times, listened today in basque or distributors ink. So how does the Justice Department respond to the president saying that he was going to issue this order and demand that it investigated itself? So there was a several our law on Sunday after the President made this demand by
tweets and wasn't hearing anything from the Justice Department. I wasn't hearing anything from the White House about how he plans to carry this out in the end,
meaning hours. I spoke to a number of people who were very concerned about how ROD Rosen Stein the deputy attorney general, who is overseeing the special council investigations. Gonna react to this. They felt that you know is pretty clear that
the Justice Department can't just say how high, when the president's has jump and then not appropriate, and that Rosen Stein being a career Justice Department person would not be willing to do that and again he made this comment recently that you know the Justice Department won't be extort.
So the question was what are his options not willing to do that will resign instead of doing that, will they say no and be fired by the president for not,
doing that and finally, on Sunday evening, Rosen Stein put out a statement and he found this kind
middle ground where he said. The justice system is going to ask its inspector general to look into the question that the president had raised, and he said you know
course, if there's somebody who has infiltrated
surveillance a campaign for political purposes. Of course we
you know about that- and act on that, but in doing that you know the sub text. That also is
while that goes on the special council. Investigation is also going on uninterrupted we're not opening and Justice Department Investigation were not devoting justice, department, resources and investigators and lawyers in two essentially carrying out what is politically,
debated, investigation into whether there is an already existing, politically motivated investigation, so he's essentially avoided either extreme and kind of came down somewhere in the middle and in the process issued a statement that in essence, legitimized what the president had asked
or without accepting it, but it's kind of like having your hr department, look into the question of do we do something wrong here. Could we improve our operations right? It's inevitably not is flashy as an outside investigation will re and in particular, because the inspector
doesn't have prosecutor moral power if he found something wrong, he could write a report and that might force action by Congress or by someone else in the administration, but it would not lead to criminal charges, and then that is clearly what the president would like to see if something was done wrong. So, given the trump knows that do we know if the present is satisfied by the compromise that roses time took her well Rosen's Dine and Christopher Ray the FBI director
At the White House on Monday talking to the president and I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall, but I was not in the meeting, but afterwards the White House did put out a statement that seem to suggest that the president, at least for now, is satisfied with his. But there was a second line of the statement that actually
was a lot more significant, and that was that they said that John Kelly, the White House Chief of staff,
we'll be convening a meeting with the FBI, the Justice Department, the intelligence community, to review all this information about the investigation and for such a long time, they ve been resisting the entreaties from the White House from the President himself from Republicans on Capital Hill to cough up some of this information, potentially including the identities of these in full,
meant that the president is concerned about, and they have said no and they pushed back and they found ways around it and now there's gonna be a process wherein at least some of this information is gonna. Be furnished to the White House saw the Justice Department is agreeing to give the White House Access to what it has the sort of evidence and the sort of information that the more investigation is
built around to at least some of it, and you know the interesting thing here will be. You know now: they're gonna have to kind of all go back to their desks figure out what they can share and agree amongst themselves. What are they gonna show to the president,
but essentially what you have? Is the Justice department pushing back and saying we're, not gonna? Let you intervene in this investigation, but we are willing to give you some degree of access to what it is working well
and why would people the departing justice? Why does rod Rothstein do them? Well, I think you have this immense pressure by the President of the United States. You have pressure from the oversight committees on capital hell. It really creates this potential confrontation between the president and zone dressed as a permanent, really untenable, and so the way these investigations work. Some of this information is highly highly classified others, not so much so they may be thinking if there are things that we can tell them. If there are ways that we can lay out what the basis was for this decision or that decision it's better to do that and to get ourselves down this road of a confrontation between the President and the Justice Department.
So they have to figure out short of resigning and leaving this to some one else when they think it's a pretty important and vital funded of the Justice Department, how they can continue to operate, how they can continue to keep this thing on its tracks. That's what they're focused on, and so they have to fear
out ways to maneuver in this new reality that the president has presented them with, and I think that's what they're trying to do is it sells like roses on is trying not to have to resign or to get fired, which perhaps helps explain. Why has been such a differ
to decipher figure on? On the one hand, we know he wrote that letter that became a justification for James CALL being fired as FBI director,
on the other. He has allowed Robert Mahler to run this investigation. Despite how infuriating it is
the president and now back on the other side he's giving the President access to Justice Department evidence right. I think that he is trying really hard not to resign.
Not to be fired, but he also has an attitude of I am going to do
my job. The way I think is appropriate- and I
not to worry about whether I'm gonna get fired or not. I'm gonna worry about whether this investigation can run its legitimate course. Even as he's doing these things, giving questions that the president raises two, the inspector general trying to have this middle ground on information at their showing the White House. He is also approving lots and lots of different requests from Mahler. You investigate this to investigate that mean he overseas. This investigation Mahler can't look into questions that Rosen Stein doesn't think. Are you know an avenue that he should be pursuing so he's kind of got a very by four created role here and I think he's trying to play bone at the same time and so that sometimes why it looks from
outside like he's website between one thing and another, I think he's got to really important jobs here and he's trying to do, but so presumably roses time would have also approved the decision to investigate that second meeting, a Trump tower, the one that so infuriated the president. When you read about it in the times, yes
definitely the case that if there were a moment where Mahler presented this to him and said hey, can I look at this. He said yes, because this is clearly now appoint of investigation from are truly. Thank you very much. I was pleasure my hears what else you need to learn D morning, everyone two weeks ago, president Drunk terminated such participation. The joy comprehensive plan of action, more commonly known as the iranian nuclear President rope withdrew from video. For some reason, it failed to guarantee the safety of the american people from the risk created by the leaders of the EU
Comic Republic of IRAN. No more in his first major speech, as Secretary of state might pump said that, despite the U S, having pulled out of the Iranian Nuclear, IRAN must end.
All its nuclear enrichment programmes and in a direct appeal to the iranian people, suggested they reject their clerical government next year marks the fortieth anniversary of Islamic Republic Revolution in IRAN
at this milestone, we have to ask what has the iranian revolution given to the iranian people,
the regime reaps a harvest of suffering and death in the Middle EAST, while Pump Hale did not directly threatened the use of military force. He hinted at it. If IRAN we starts its nuclear
it to President Ronnie into other iranian leaders understand that your current activities will be met with steely resolve and
one day after Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro declared victory in his re election. The Trump administration pleased new economic sanctions on the country, condemning it,
government as a dictatorship and calling the election undemocratic. Maduro government head bard many opposition parties from running against an used food as an incentive to get hungry Venezuelans to vote in a state that vice President MIKE and said quote. The illegitimate result of this vague process is a further blow to the proud democratic tradition
of Venezuela. That's it! I'm Michael, whereby suitable.
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Transcript generated on 2020-07-01.