Page 43 - Phil Mud News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Responsible for the moab, the mother of all bombs in afghanistan, the man who is the president of the united states in times of crises. that's what the white house is portraying. >> that's not unique to donald trump by the way. lots of presidents do things for political theatre, but to phil's point, you have to always remember the seminole experience of the last decade and a half of donald trump's life is as a reality tv show producer and star. so yes, the idea of 100 senators getting in buses and coming up to his house so that he could brief them, albeit he wasn't there -- >> he spent 10 or 1...

Against him during the election season. >> joining us is phil mud and steve hall. phil, the fact that the dossier was part of the justification to approval to monitor carter page, what does that say? >> it doesn't tell me much. if you want to go to a judge with a fisa package, that's one of the most intrusive. remember what we got. we have a british agent, former british agent talking presumably to a source in moscow who might be talking to a subsource. in this game of telephone, we're taking another step to get to the fbi. you have to have corroboration of some of that if you are going to use...

Level. you have to convince a judge -- it's probable cause. it's a technical matter. you can't just go in with some unconfirmed dossier like the steele report is and say how about it? you have to have more than that. there's been times in my career when i said, come on, we to get some sort of coverage on x, y or z. the judges go, not so fast. we have a threshold here. you have to get by it before we can allow this. >> phil, even if the fbi had corroborating information about some things in the dossier, that doesn't mean that all points in the dossier are also valid, correct? >> that's correct....

Unverified information? >> not some sort of. i'm saying this could at best be supporting to a fisa package that had much greater specificity about who the source of the information was and got much closer to the target than three or four steps away from moscow. you can't use that as primary evidence in a fisa package. >> do you agree the fbi would have had to have fully verified what the dossier said about page? could they have verified -- i guess they could have verified part of it and still cited it in the fisa court. >> phil is right. the bottom line is, in our government you can't just wil...

Former british intelligence officer. he has written an interesting document. one thing that's making it difficult for journalists and others is that he has written for what we call source protection. he has gone to great lengths to try to disguise who he got this information from, probably because a lot of them are in russia and stand to get into a lot of trouble or worse, end up dead, if people find out who they are. which makes it difficult for the legal system and for journalists as well. as a legal matter, you want as much as you can. this probably is not enough. there has to be more there...