Chuck Rosenbergen News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

What it looks like happened is that in the course of the mueller special counsel investigation, they uncovered evidence that there's criminal activity that's occurring that's outside the scope. >> right. >> so this is beyond my referral. >> mueller says to the southern district of new york, hey, we've got all this information, take a look. >> yes with one step removed. to the acting attorney general, rosenstein, my mandate is if i discover evidence that people are committing crimes, i'm not going to ignore it but i'm not going to follow every other crime. i'm giving it to you to make the decis...

Prosecutors in order to get the warrant. but then there's a concept of minimaizati minimaization, which is you're not supposed to record or use against someone, comments that they may, that you pick up on a wiretap, that are not linked to the crime you're investigating. similarly, if you hear someone begin a conversation with, say, an attorney that's not linked to the crime your investigating, is turn the recorder up. then you have to report regularly to the judge, what you've been receiving is productive from the wiretap. you produce a report, and whether or not you've been able to minimize i...

Anything we could try or anything we did try won't get us the information, that we have probable cause that we believe we can get on this wiretap. it lays out a tremendous cause as far as other evidence they would have come up with, that would have allowed them to convince a judge we have real reason to believe here we have some sort of criminal violation that occurred. in addition, typically, you have to lay out -- we talked to nbc legal analyst and former federal prosecutor chuck rosenbergen in regard to this. in actual manuals for u.s. attorneys, typically it says you have to find evidence ...

Example but i think it's a good way of explaining exactly how this woe uld go down. and at the end of the day, a judge has to sign off on. judges sometimes kick these back and say no, go back, i need you to try a couple more methods. get me some more evidence that you think there's an actual crime here. this isn't something where a federal judge will just say, yes, you want to listen to somebody's phone conversation, sure, i'll sign it right now. that's not how this goes. there's a significant legal process that has to occur here. it's laid out in one document that the justice department has t...