she voted against, and the current inquiry into president trump, all three. maria a white house deputy chief of staff under president clinton, a former aid to george w. bush at the state department. congresswoman, i want to ask you about tonight and what i think is the magnificent leadership of your speaker, the speaker of the house. and one of these i think she was smart on and i want you to elaborate if you ll agree is focus. you have to know which hill to fight on and which is vital to fight for. she has picked national security. tell me about your thoughts on that focus. well, i think she s absolutely right. we had a report from mr. mueller was not very focused in the first volume. we never were able to get the actual backup data, and i was really not prepared to move
know that if he could have exonerated trump he would have done it. bottom line. of course barr took it upon himself to exonerate trump, less than 48 hours after receiving the 448-page report and without reviewing the backup data which objectively is not enough time to read, digest evaluate the information and make a decision as important as whether to indict a sitting president of the united states. and it s the opposite decision that more than 1,000 former doj prosecutors of both political persuasions say they would have reached. today barr was asked about why he made that decision. instead of letting the decision on whether or not to charge a president go to congress. here is barr today. you seem to suggest yesterday that there was another venue for this and that was congress. well i m not sure what he was suggesting. he is not sure what mueller was suggesting. here is what mueller said yesterday. the constitution requires a process other than the criminal
legitimately? it makes no difference. he is our president, and we ll see where it goes from here, the investigations and the rest. talk of impeachment is clearly premature. will there be additional information that would change that? we don t know. that s why we need to have the mueller report in its fullness, in all of the backup data. you can take out the issues of national secrecy and the various methods in which information was obtained, but we need that information, because we really need to make it clear to the american public as well as to the world that our elections are sound, that they are legitimate, that there s nobody interfering, no foreign power interfering with our elections. and we re just less than two years away from the next election, so we have work to do here. we do. and the american public needs to have confidence in our electoral process. congressman john garamendi, thank you, sir, as always. thank you. nice to see you. thank you. one trump adminis
staff were really trying to probe the truth and particularly looking at the corroborating evidence that he gave, particularly asking for other witnesses that could corroborate him because we are very well aware that he has lied in the past. you know, he came there not as our friend, not as someone who we were there to prop up, but really trying to find the truth of the matter with regard to his involvement with the president and allegations of criminal activity by him and others in that orbit. so you re at a point obviously he s produced checks but when he says things like there was insurance fraud, inflation of ais he, or he says it seems very possible that the president knew about the meeting at trump tore, those things, you re not trusting him on anything he didn t explicitly provide backup data for? no. and i don t think that i m a former prosecutor. and you re always looking beyond a reasonable doubt. of course that s not the standard in this instance. but i think that it s
what the president did was a very good first step, but i support the efforts of senators mccain and graham and others, to go beyond that and establish a broader deterrent. even beyond that, i think we need to look at every vector of this russian attack. we also heard at the news conference from the democrats that they want the administration to encourage the intelligence community to declassify the sources from their findings because if you read that public report, what you see is there really is not any backup data, and they feel this would make an even more convincing case to the public. jenna: thank you. you are welcome. jon: tomorrow the senate foreign relations committee takes up the nomination of rex tillerson to be secretary of state, and there could be a showdown between senators and the former exxonmobil ceo. lawmakers from both parties have questions about his ties to vladimir putin and his business dealings in russia. we re joined now by daniel