 been involved in this organization for close to 15 years. And another person who has been involved in this organization for that same length of time, from the very beginning. I'm very sorry to tell you, guess the way suddenly this weekend. And it's Katie Valentine and she's the woman who was always her parent and serving the refreshments. So in honor of her, I just like you to hear me say how valuable she's been and I'm sure there will be many more chances to celebrate her life. But what we're doing, because she couldn't do it, we're not having cider. We're having water today to go with the cookies. And one thing that he said to me after every meeting, would you please tell the people that Amalia makes the cookies and loves to make the cookies and hates to be the center of attention. But stay enough for a minute. So now I will hand the official program over to Grace. I'm Grace Green. I'm on the program committee and that is my only claim to fame. I was told last week that I had to use a mic and I was so excited because nobody had ever told me that before. I'm going to make this introduction really short because I want you to have as much time with Garrett as possible. And because he is such a busy young man, he is running off to the airport right after this sort of welcome time for lingering. How many of you heard of Garrett a year ago when we had him at the Albridge? Okay, I wonder what, there is an interest in the topic today. Garrett said that we could not have planned a better date for this topic than the day after something that happened last night. So Garrett has many wonderful items on his resume including being the editor of The Washingtonian and Political Magazine. He has also written a number of talks and last year for this group he talked about Raven Rock which was about doomsday plans and now he's going back to a book that he actually wrote before that which is called The Threat Matrix, The FBI at War which is about Bob Marvin as head of the FBI. The interesting fact this morning what he was doing was he was being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air about this very topic so he rehearsed the talk he's going to give to you with Terry Gross. Thanks so much Grace and Bob for having me today. It's a pleasure to be back here. I love the chance to speak in Montpelier. I was mentioned a proud product of the Montpelier public school system and I'm happy to see a number of my former teachers here who were instrumental in helping foster my intellectual life that has grown into the journalism that I do today. So thank you all for the work that you did. So as Grace said we sort of randomly selected this date back in what like August or September and had no idea at the time sort of how particularly and specifically relevant Bob Mueller and the Russian investigation would be in this particular week amid many different weeks of high levels of interest. So I wanted to talk today a little bit about Mueller and sort of the time that I've gotten to spend with him and then talk a little bit about my high level observations about what we know about the Russia investigation right now and then my hope is to try to spend about 30 minutes freezing through that and leave as much time as I can for questions because there are as anyone in this room who has been following the story knows sort of one million different threads that we can pull on and talk about. So that's the general gist of this. I've spent the last dozen years in Washington and up here in Vermont where I moved back about two and a half years ago covering three topics, the FBI, nuclear war and Russian intelligence. And for most of those dozen years those were relatively obscure topics up until about two years ago I was about the only person in the world who had paid much attention to Bob Mueller and Jim Comey's careers. And since Bob Mueller is not a particularly introspective individual I have been joking that I've actually spent more time thinking about Bob Mueller than Bob Mueller has spent thinking about Bob Mueller. But he has become, as we sort of all know since last May, the central figure in this sort of fascinatingly classic, almost Shakespearean drama between two people who started in very much the same place. Two people born just two years apart, Bob Mueller is 73, Donald Trump is 71, both Ivy educated, both heavily influenced in their careers and their lives by their fathers. But two people who have dedicated their lives in almost diametrically opposed directions and sort of pursuing almost diametrically opposed professional goals and living their lives by a valued set and a moral compass that could not be more fundamentally different. I came to know Bob Mueller I guess actually just about ten years ago in 2008 almost by accident I was working on a piece for Washingtonian magazine where I was working then and we were looking to profile, I was literally just looking for someone to write a profile about and I was trying to find someone who I knew in 2008 of course in election year and I was trying to find someone who I knew if I was going to invest three or four months in writing a profile I wanted it to be someone who was going to remain relevant. Not sort of a Bush administration person who was on their way out and Bob Mueller was on this fixed ten year term as FBI director and I sort of began to look at it and I was like wow he's actually the last person standing in the job that they had on 9-11 which at that point was sort of a significant point of longevity if only we had no idea the person behind Bob Mueller would actually serve four more years even after that point and so I went down to Quantico, Virginia where the FBI Academy is to meet him and sort of watch him speak at one of the agent's graduations right then and he came up to me in the hallway and he said you know I just read the piece that you wrote on Tom Friedman this was sort of right after the world as flat came out and he said let me tell you what the world as flat means for the FBI and proceeded to sort of launch into this talk about sort of how globalization had reshaped the FBI and sort of what the rise of technology and the change in the way that the FBI was forced to do its job as a domestic law enforcement agency into an international intelligence agency had changed during the time that he had served as FBI director and for me it was sort of this first moment where I sort of went back on my heels and I was like wow this isn't, this is both not who I thought I was going to end up talking to and also sort of not the story that I thought I was going to end up writing which as a writer is sort of always one of the things that's fun is sort of finding where a story is going to take you and so that let me sort of over some time to write from that profile into this book which came out in 2011 which is the story on one level of Bob Mueller's time and the FBI's evolution in the fight of counter-terrorism and also now sort of turned out to be the one existing biography of Bob Mueller and I had cornered him when I decided to start writing the book at the end of 2008 I cornered him at his director's Christmas party and I told him that I knew that he didn't want me to write a biography of him because he's not very interested in such matters and it's not interested in talking about himself that much it sort of pitched him on the idea of if he gave me access to other parts of the FBI that were more interesting than he was and for the next two years that's effectively what he did and he sort of opened up a number of FBI facilities and allowed me to be interviewed sort of field agents and special agents in charge and his deputies and his staff and sort of developed this portrait of the modern FBI so let me sort of break down a little bit of his brief bio which is probably familiar to you and then I want to sort of walk through but I think it's sort of the five signal Bob Mueller moments in his career he went to St. Paul's in New Hampshire with John Kerry they played hockey together in high school he went on to Princeton and then a student this was the mid-1960s early in the 1960s so before Vietnam became sort of the cultural touch point and controversy that it did later in the 1960s his classmate a year or two ahead of him David Hackett joined the Marines and went to Vietnam and was killed and that model actually inspired Mueller and a number of his classmates to join the Marines themselves and to go to Vietnam and so in the mid-1960s Second Lieutenant Bob Mueller finds himself in the jungles of Vietnam leading a platoon December 1968 his unit is ambushed by 200 Viet Cong they take fire they take casualties Mueller sort of finds himself isolated leading this unit they set up a defensive perimeter and spend hours locked in very fierce combat Mueller himself leads a fire team of Marines out into enemy territory to retrieve a mortally wounded comrade and receives out of that battle the bronze star with valor April 1969 still in combat still a second lieutenant still with the second platoon hotel company fourth regiment the unit nicknamed the Magnificent Bastards Mueller actually shot through the thigh in 1847 gets a purple heart his wound is not bad enough that he even gets to visit a hospital ship as he laments later and just stays on recovery in a short hospital and then takes some R&R in Hawaii with his then young wife and he tries to tell her on the beach in Hawaii that he loves the Marines and wants to spend the rest of his career as a Marine and she informs him that that's not an option that's open to him and so they go to the United States at the end of his tour and he goes to law school and ends up effectively spending most of the next 50 years in the Justice Department as a prosecutor and works his way up through the 1970s and 80s as an assistant U.S. attorney in a federal prosecutor in San Francisco transfers to Boston where he actually works for Bill Weld and takes over when Bill Weld leaves as the acting U.S. attorney for Massachusetts under the Reagan administration and then comes down to Washington for the first time as the assistant attorney general for the criminal division in the George H. W. Bush administration and sees there he leads the trial and prosecution of Manuel Noriega and the prosecution of the bombing of Pan Am 103 which becomes sort of one of the most important causes of his life which I'll come back to in a minute. And so this is where at the end of the George H. W. Bush administration we come to the second of the turning points that I think are sort of worth highlighting the first of course being this time in Vietnam. At the end of the first Bush administration he goes into private practice as is sort of typical when his job in government ends and spends a very unhappy year in private practice making a tremendous amount of money at the forerunner firm Wilbur Hale and he was terrible at it and I talked to sort of the people who worked with him then and he was he just sort of couldn't stand defending people and so one of his colleagues told me about sort of walking in with a new client and they sit down with Muller and sort of the client lays out what the problem is and Muller says well if you did that you should plead guilty and go to jail. Find this the most professionally satisfying after his career and so he actually calls Eric Holder who was then the U.S. attorney and part of what is sort of so fascinating about this world as you go back is realizing just how small these circles actually are sort of the elite sort of stars of the Justice Department sort of how small that group is and how they sort of move around and intersect over the course of 25 years and so Muller calls Eric Holder who was then the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and asks to come back as a junior prosecutor in the homicide division in D.C. This is sort of roughly the equivalent of a two star general retiring and then reenlisting again as a second lieutenant and so Muller who has led the entire criminal division for the entire Department of Justice goes back to being a job that most prosecutors do in about their second or third year out of law school and he to this day considers it probably the happiest time of his career. You know this was D.C. in the 1990s it was an incredibly violent place you know record setting homicide levels and Muller was sort of on that frontline you know out with cops at night in the courtroom trying cases by day and sort of gradually rises back up through the ranks the head of the homicide team in D.C. and then eventually is actually asked by the Clinton administration to become the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California the top federal prosecutor for San Francisco. It goes out there in the late 1990s and it begins to develop sort of this thing that will be one of his fortes which is he's a computer geek. He in 1989 read the book The Cuckoo's Egg which is sort of the first book on cyber crime and hacking and was fascinated by it. And so when he was at the Justice Department started the first computer crimes unit in the late 1980s early 1990s then goes out to California builds the first sort of computer hacking prosecution teams out in San Francisco actually builds a new trial software trial case software system for his own office that becomes the software for all U.S. attorney's offices in the rest of the country and is brought back in the beginning of the Bush administration 2001 is the acting deputy attorney general which until about a year ago is one of the most important but most obscure jobs in government believe it or not there was actually a time when we didn't talk about the deputy attorney general every single day whether they had a job whether they were going to have a job at the end of the day how they were feeling whether they were cranky and that this was he sort of serves with John Ashcroft helping get the administration up and running at the Justice Department and then in the summer of 2001 becomes the nominee to head the FBI. He thought at that point his job was to fix the computer system. The FBI had this terribly antiquated and outdated computer system such that in the summer of 2001 as FBI agents were chasing the case that we now understand with what is the 9-11 plot that was they were chasing Al-Hausby and Al-Mithar the two Al-Qaeda hijackers on the West Coast trying to find them the FBI's computer system was so antiquated that the agents actually had to in order to get the file from Los Angeles to New York an agent had to save the file to a floppy disk get on the plane fly to New York City and deliver it in person and after 9-11 the FBI did not have the capability to even attach a file to an email and so the FBI field offices after 9-11 had to FedEx the photos of the hijackers out to the field offices to try to share information so when Mueller is coming in in the summer of 2001 this is what he thinks his top job is going to be is fixing this computer system he starts as FBI director as probably everyone now knows on September 4th 2001 on the morning of September 11th he is sitting in the FBI director's conference room on the 7th floor of the Hoover building sitting in his first briefing on Al-Qaeda and the bombing of the USS Cole and he is interrupted and told that the plane has hit the World Trade Center and he told me later that he looked out the window of the director's conference room at that blue sky that we all remember from that day on the East Coast and he said I wonder how a plane could have hit the World Trade Center on such a clear day and then he goes back to his briefing and of course as the minutes unfold it quickly becomes apparent what the sort of what the day has in store he is the first telephone call that President Bush makes from the Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida President Bush calls him and says Bob this is what we pay you for the next morning he is at the White House and sits there and begins to explain the tremendous progress that the FBI has made in identifying hijackers beginning to trace their financial connections and President Bush stops him and says Bob that's all well and good that's exactly what I expected the FBI to be doing and that's what the FBI has done well for 80 years I don't care about how you're doing investigating the case I want you to I want to know what are you doing to stop the next one and so it becomes this moment this message that he gets from President Bush and from Attorney General Ashcroft never again and this is in my mind sort of the third attorney in point in his career and this is where we see Mueller launch on what ultimately becomes a 12 year journey for the FBI this wrenching amazing top to bottom transformation of the FBI from an agency that was primarily a domestic law enforcement agency into something that was an international intelligence agency the book is not just on investigating a crime after the fact but I'm disrupting a plot to begin with and this the title of my eventual book comes from the document that the Bob Mueller started his day with every day after 9-11 which was an excel spreadsheet literally an excel spreadsheet that they called the threat matrix and it was a daily rundown of all of the terror plots that the US government was tracking that particular day where they were unfolding what the target was this was a document that on an average morning would stretch to dozens of pages and I think it's incredibly important to understand the way that that document affected the mindset of every government official who interacted with it that they woke up and spent their first hours of their day studying that document walking through how these plans would unfold how these plots might unfold and thinking through sort of the worst case scenarios for the country on a daily basis when I was working on the book Jim Comey was out of government he left the Department of Justice and again this was during the era when no one cared about Bob Mueller and Jim Comey so I got to spend a lot of time with Jim Comey at his office in Lockheed Barton where he was general counsel then talking about this and his time in government he told me the story that I think sort of best encapsulates this moment in government and the extent to which we as sort of people who lived through this moment just don't have any comprehension of the extent to which the threat matrix and that the terror and fear of that moment warped and twisted the decision making of our national leaders and Comey was telling me about the night when he was deputy attorney general he came home to his house in suburban Virginia all of his kids were upstairs sleeping the house was dark they had spent the day chasing sort of yet another dirty bomb plot the idea that there was going to be a nuclear laced bomb exploding in the capital somewhere and so Comey was dropped off by his driver he was walking up the walk to his house and he stopped and checked the wind direction to know if the dirty bomb went off overnight would it blow the fallout towards his children or away from them and then sort of has this moment and he stops himself and says like I can't believe this is how I'm now thinking but this is what sort of this moment in living through this crucible was like which brings us then to sort of my next turning point which is a story that probably most of you know well by this point which is the hospital showdown with John Ashcroft in March of 2004 Jim Comey comes in takes over as deputy attorney general at the end of 2003 and moves sort of one of the things that he has to do is reauthorize all of the programs that the Justice Department has to reauthorize every 90 days sort of particular surveillance programs sort of have to come up for reauthorization every 90 days and to show that they are being conducted legally and that they are bearing fruit which is actually the core of part of the question of the Nunez memo that we have unfolding right now is sort of this question around the Justice Department 90 day reauthorizations and Comey begins to look at this one particular program called Stellar Wind which was an NSA domestic surveillance program and he believes at that time that it's actually an unconstitutional program and so he goes to John Ashcroft the attorney general lays out his concerns and Ashcroft greets with him they go to the White House they meet with Vice President Cheney Cheney is a counsel David Attington and Cheney says in effect this program is too important if you don't reauthorize this program people will die this will be on you and Comey says effectively well it's unconstitutional we've got to get it back within constitutional bounds and as this conversation is unfolding over the course of several weeks and taking down to the day when the program is reauthorized John Ashcroft goes in with emergency gallbladder surgery we now understand in a way that we did not know then John Ashcroft actually comes very close to death and he signs over the power of attorney general to Jim Comey, his deputy and Jim Comey is sort of left on his own to fight this battle with Vice President Cheney this becomes a moment that will certainly forever be remembered in early March 2004 when John Ashcroft's wife calls Jim Comey as Jim Comey is driving home from work and she calls from George Washington hospital and says Jim the president just called he's sending over Andy Card to the White House chief of staff and Alberto Gonzalez to the White House council and they want to talk to John about stellar wind Jim doesn't say it quite anywhere close to that because he doesn't even know what stellar wind is but that's the message that Jim Comey hears Jim Comey turns on the lights and sirens in his motorcade begins heading towards George Washington hospital and he calls Bob Muller who is at home having dinner and he says Bob I need help I need you to come down to the hospital Muller gets in his own motorcade starts making his way to the hospital there are motorcades from across the capital beginning to descend on the hospital lights and sirens going Jim Comey realizes that Muller is not going to make it in time and he is afraid that the secret service agents who are following along with Andy Card as White House chief of staff are going to try to remove Comey from the hospital room so he calls Bob Muller back and says I need you to tell the FBI agent starting John Ashcroft not to let me be left and not to let me be removed and so what I sort of still think must be one of the most surreal telephone calls in the history of US government Bob Muller calls the agents at GW hospital who I can only imagine at that moment sort of think that they are settling in for the quietest night of their careers sitting guarding an empty hospital room an empty hospital wing with a sedated attorney general and they get a telephone call from the FBI director saying the secret service is about to be there resists with force if necessary to keep Jim Comey from being removed from the room and it sort of thankfully doesn't come to that at that moment but Andy Card and Alberta Gonzalez get to the hospital room they go to John Ashcroft's bedside ask him to sign the reauthorization he sort of rallies himself to say you know I don't think this should be reauthorized and it doesn't matter what I think anyway I'm not the attorney general he is and points over to Jim Comey Card and Gonzalez leaves and go back to the White House and Bob Muller arrives and John Ashcroft says to him you know Bob I don't understand what's going on and Muller says you know John there comes a time in everyone's life when a man is tested and tonight you pass your test they go back to the Justice Department Bob Muller and Jim Comey spend the rest of the night writing their own letters of resignation by the time the next day has rolled around there are more than a dozen high level officials across the Justice Department ready to resign if this program has to go forward including and again this is sort of where we come back to the oddity of sort of what a small world this was including Chris Ferret who was then the assistant attorney general for the criminal division who because the stellar wing doesn't need to know has no idea what's going on but he stops Jim Comey in the hallway and says Jim I don't know what's going on but if you're pulling the ripcord make sure to tell me so that I can jump with you and he knows that if Jim Comey and Bob Muller are going whatever it is he doesn't even need to know he knows that it's bad enough that he should go to Chris Ray of course becomes the successor to Bob Muller and Jim Comey as the permanent FBI director so this becomes the next day the Madrid train bombing happens and you have this sort of incredibly poignant and pointed reminder of what happens when a terror plot isn't disruptive sort of the actual carnage that one of these plots can bring and sort of in rattling around in Comey's mind now is the stick chaining line if you don't do this people will die and Jim Comey and Bob Muller go into the White House to brief the president on the Madrid train bombing and Jim Comey pulls the president aside at the end of the meeting and says effectively I'm prepared to resign if stellar wind is reauthorized and he and Bush talked for a few minutes and then he says I need you to know Mr. President that Bob Muller is going to resign as well and President Bush almost literally blinks in that moment and sends Comey out and brings Muller in and Muller and Bush talk and at the end of that conversation we see President Bush say tell Jim to make whatever changes he thinks are necessary for the program to be constitutional and when this story doesn't come out until years later when Jim Comey is testifying after his time in government with in front of the Senate and Comey and a young rising star counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee known as pre-Burrara it offers or asks Comey to sort of tell this story for the first time publicly now when I this story was sort of public when I was starting to write my biography and I was told by someone you're never going to understand Bob Muller until you figure out why he was actually in that hospital room and it was sort of a question that nagged at me as I was doing my reporting because indeed there is in fact no real reason why Bob Muller should be in the room for debate between the Attorney General and the Vice President over an NSA program the fact that there is a someone who is the head of a component within the Justice Department should have never been part of that conversation and I finally had the chance to ask Jim Comey sort of how did Bob Muller get to be in that hospital room and Comey's explanation has been rattling around in my head for the past year for sort of two reasons which will become self-evident Jim Comey said I knew that everyone would trust Bob that he wasn't into politics there was going to be no hidden agenda that if Bob Muller told the President that something was wrong the President would accept that it was wrong that there was sort of no questioning Bob Muller's motives or his moral compass the second reason that Jim Comey asked Bob Muller to be involved in that was Comey said I knew no one knows who the Deputy Attorney General is and so that person could resign and no one would notice but no President can survive the loss of an FBI Director becomes a very interesting comment for me so so Muller pleads I'm going to sort of yada yada my way through the last eight years of Bob Muller's tenure as FBI Director when he sort of led and pushed through this transformation in the spring of 2011 just as my brilliantly timed book was coming out to mark the conclusion of his ten years as FBI Director he was actually asked by President Obama to stay on for an additional two years as FBI Director which requires a special act of Congress which passes 100 to zero in the U.S. Senate making Bob Muller the longest serving FBI Director since J. Edgar Hoover himself and someone who has now been appointed and held top jobs under the last five American presidents so Bob Muller goes into private practice after his time as FBI Director and ends up back at Wilmer Hale for a new so unhappily act earlier and he ends up being asked by the NFL sort of one of his first big pieces to investigate the Ray Rice domestic violence incident do you remember that and authors what is probably the first of what we will call in history the Muller Report and the Muller Report I think is an incredibly instructive document today because of the way that if we see how tenaciously Bob Muller investigated that incident and the report spends five pages talking about how the NFL mail room accepts mail and signs for packages and I sort of have joked that like Bob Muller probably knows things about the NFL mail room that the NFL mail room employees don't know and that's really sort of the style of investigator that he is well the other thing that I think is really instructive there that's worth paying attention to is Bob Muller interprets the most narrow version of his tasks which was he was asked by the NFL how they handled the Ray Rice domestic violence incident and he did exactly that and he didn't go one step further he didn't get into any of the larger questions about the NFL's sort of how it treats domestic violence he didn't get into anything about how the teams you know handled domestic violence he didn't get into anything about sort of the larger even Ray Rice case and so I think one of the things that that teaches us about today is that Bob Muller doesn't do fishing expeditions that if he is pursuing something he sees it as core and central to the case that he's trying to build and that this is I think an incredibly important and instructive way to begin to look at his investigation so let me sort of real quickly run through a couple of points about sort of where the investigation lands today and then I do want to leave a little bit of time for questions as I said so what we see unfolding right now is sort of a quintessential classic FBI investigation that what the FBI does is it takes down corrupt organizations and it is an agency designed for going after street gangs organized crime families and drug cartels and so the way that it does that is it starts on the outside and at the bottom and then sort of you work your way in sort of concentric circles into the center of an investigation and you sort of apply pressure at the edges and work your way into the center and that's exactly what we have seen happen so far where you both have Bob Muller starting at the almost literal bottom of the campaign with George Papadopoulos and on the outside with Paul Manafort and Rick Gates's alleged money laundering scheme unrelated to the 2016 campaign sort of both of these become pressure points that Bob Muller can use to sort of get closer to the center of an investigation and this is sort of exactly what we would expect an FBI investigation to unfold the second thing that I think is really important to realize is that everything that we have seen thus far is a prosecutorial equivalent of low-hanging fruit that the Paul Manafort and Rick Gates indictment is effectively I'm vastly oversimplifying a very complex prosecution by incredibly talented people who know far more about finances than I do they sent out some subpoenas, they got some documents back they went into a room, read the documents and came out and indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates that there's sort of no testimony or witnesses involved with us this is a very black and white money laundering case secondly they've gone after what you see are the 1001 violations these are the basic federal criminal charge of lying to federal investigators which is like the one thing that you really aren't supposed to do in an FBI investigation and they take very seriously and really really get angry about it but are easily provable because you lie to them, they prove you're lying and boom, you have a 1001 violation so then the next thing that I think stands out is that at every stage of this investigation Bob Miller has demonstrated that he knows far more than we think he does and that sort of for all of the coverage and the stories about leaps from the investigation it's actually quite clear that Bob Miller's team isn't leaking at all that Miller has brought forward at each stage surprising charges you know the fact that Miller was able to arrest get the cooperation of and plead that come up with a plea deal for George Papadopoulos before anyone paid any attention to George Papadopoulos is actually a pretty significant investigative sign of where this case is going to go relatedly the fact that we only found out last week that Jim Comey had testified in front of Miller's team weeks ago is significant and sort of at every stage of this Bob Miller knows more than we think he does the investigation is sort of further along and has more detail than we think relatedly we know that there are at least two very significant pieces of evidence that we know exist that we don't know what they are yet which is that George Papadopoulos gave some very significant piece of information in order to get his plea deal at which he could have faced up to five years in federal prison he is currently going to be sentenced to something between zero and six months so sort of one way to look at it is he gave Bob Miller something that is worth four and a half years in federal prison secondly, Michael Flynn gave some significant piece of information that we don't know yet what it is but in the annals of federal prosecution you don't get credit for what is called cooperating down that is sort of providing incriminating or corroborating evidence against people lower down in the scheme than you are Michael Flynn was the national security advisor at the White House and the people above him probably can be counted on one hand depending on how you define it then the last two things that I would sort of point out about the investigation and then take some questions the first is that we sort of speak of the Mueller probe as one thing but it is at least different separate investigations you have sort of based on publicly available information we see that there is money laundering investigation that is unfolding in the midst of this we see that there is an obstruction investigation unfolding in the middle of this we see that there is a hacking investigation unfolding in the middle of this may or may not also involve WikiLeaks may or may not involve Podesta's e-mail may or may not involve the Russian hacking team's cozy bear and cancer bear then we also know that there is a social media and sort of influence operations investigation unfolding in this based on some of the the details of the subpoenas that have gone out to Facebook to Cambridge Analytica the Trump campaign's data team and then there is sort of the fifth sort of perhaps related perhaps unrelated line of question of actual Russian influence in the Trump campaign involving perhaps Carter Page the foreign policy advisor perhaps George Papadopoulos perhaps Jeff Sessions' meetings with Sergei Kislyak sort of all of these different strange and as yet unexplained moments so when we sort of speak of the Mueller probe I think it's important to delineate that there are at least five different threads of this investigation some of which are not yet public at all but we know that Mueller is pursuing and then the last thing that I would say is I think it's also important to realize that Bob Mueller has a very limited job here even if Bob Mueller only does the job in front of him the smaller job is to figure out whether there are provable federal crimes which is something that can be charged in a federal courtroom in front of a jury that can be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that criminal activity has happened Bob Mueller is not after political problems there is a whole level of behavior that we as a country and as a democracy can decide is behavior we do not want the president of the United States to be engaged in or a party to that falls short of a federal crime that can be convicted in a court of law with a jury beyond a reasonable doubt and this is a point that actually saliates the last deputy attorney general to be fired has been making over the last year which is sort of ultimately we need to remember that this is a political question not a criminal one and that we as a country sort of both have to come up with a question of what do we believe is acceptable behavior in our leaders either on the campaign trail or in the office so I'm going to leave it there I think I have talked well I definitely have talked much longer than I meant but I can take maybe about ten minutes of questions here yeah so this is Devin Nunez the chairman of the house intelligence committee who remember last year breathlessly reported that he had uncovered a secret cabal of justice department officials who were seeking to undermine the president and raced to the White House to tell the president of that cabal only to later admit that he had learned of the cabal from the White House before he raced back to tell them about it so Devin Nunez has uncovered another secret cabal of the justice inside the justice department that is he believes a wide ranging conspiracy to undermine the Trump administration oddly led by Rod Rosenstein the Trump appointee that he that they were falsely and illegally relying upon this Steele dossier controversial series of memos created by a former MI6 operative named Christopher Steele and that Devin Nunez has not only uncovered this secret plot but has managed to write it down in three and a half pages and now the House Republicans are sort of racing to try to make this memo public Adam Schiff who is the ranking Democrat on the committee has written his own memo laying out how selectively edited the memo is that Devin Nunez has written and the House Republicans will not release Adam Schiff's memo at the same time that they released Devin Nunez's memo and that at some point in the next couple of days we expect this memo to become public the Justice Department has expressed the Trump Justice Department has expressed concern that it sort of falsely represents and compromises sources and methods in the intelligence community and the FBI today objected to the memo as being outright false not complaining about the sources and methods but actually just saying that the conclusion of the memo is incorrect and this is sort of one of the things I'll give you sort of a one minute version of FISA so this is the sort of central question we believe about the Nunez memo is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act protocols for gathering intelligence on U.S. persons inside the United States so this is a law that came about in the post-watering era that outlines the one and only legal way to gather intelligence within the United States and that is to get a FISA warrant in front of the secret FISA court the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FISC and the one of the things that the congressional Republicans have been saying over the last couple of weeks is sort of making you think that the Obama White House took the Steele dossier like signed their name across the top and handed it into the FISA court to get a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page who was a campaign advisor at the time most people don't realize that actually a FISA warrant is actually even more restrictive and more difficult to get than a regular warrant having covered this area I can tell you that any agent who is able to figure out a way to get anything not by getting a FISA warrant will do that with a relatively high bar to clear in order to utilize intelligence resources to gather information on U.S. persons the FISA warrant, this is where we come back into the 90-day reauthorization the FISA warrant is only good for 90 days and needs to be renewed every 90 days with evidence that the previous 90 days have shown that the target of the FISA warrant was serving as an intelligence asset to a foreign power so that warrant on Carter Page might have started as early as 2016 it went right through the beginning of the Trump Administration sort of part of what we believe is going to come out in this memo is that Rod Grosin signed himself reauthorized that FISA warrant during one of these 90-day reauthorizations about a year ago which means actually that it was an incredibly fruitful warrant if it was continuing to bear fruit over that length of time and that Rod Grosin signed looked at it, saw evidence that there were sort of Russian ties involved in this warrant and that it went that he was willing to let it move forward so it's sort of as of 2.30 on Wednesday that's the best summary that I can give you of the Umias memo it might be incredibly different by 5pm today and we'll sort of wait and see what it says but I think it's worth pointing out that the the Republicans in Congress have a apparently very explicit goal of trying to muddy these waters as best they can to make it seem like things aren't of areas that are in fact not all right, back there charges have been brought against Michael Flynn et al where does Muller's authority end in actually bringing charges at the president or are there levels down from that? yeah, so it's a complicated legal question Bob Muller theoretically can charge any individual with a crime under justice department protocols that probably doesn't include the president there are two advisory memos one from the Watergate era one from the 1990s that hold that the president cannot be charged the president as the head of the executive branch cannot be charged by the executive branch with a crime that has never been tested in court Bob Muller evidently has access to a memo that Ken Starr's team came up with that argues the opposite but that I would guess that Bob Muller is not going to try to as someone who has spent his entire life for 50 years working inside the justice department I would find it hard to believe that Bob Muller is going to come up with at the end of his career a novel and untested theory that exceeds the existing justice department protocols what he can do is hand over evidence to the Department of Justice to then hand over to Congress yeah the Republicans are doing everything they can to try to undermine Bob Muller who has such an outstanding reputation and is a Republican is that a sign of how pressing that they're feeling to keep Trump in place yeah so I the question is in effect sort of what's the deal with smearing Bob Muller the answer to that is in some ways the simplest answer I can give is anyone who has spent any time around law enforcement in general let alone the FBI specifically or federal law enforcement who thinks that federal law enforcement is controlled by a Democratic secret society doesn't have much understanding of the culture of what is probably the most traditionally conservative institution in the United States and I think that it would be to use to Bob Muller that he is a Democratic stooch you're not going to talk about the football what's the story now is it still the same as it was two weeks before maybe I'll close with that question and I'll take one more Muller question change to a equally uplifting topic of nuclear war any final Muller question what about the Democratic memo so the Democratic memo that Adam Schiff has written sort of simply the Democrats don't have the votes to vote out their memo and so there is no process through which that can be released the one mechanism that is available would be if a member of Congress actually wanted to read the memo out loud on the floor of the House or Senate where members are protected from disclosing classified information we'll sort of see if that happens what do you think of the Elements well I don't know and I sort of say that half jokingly and half not because for the first six months that I talked about this last year my literal line was it's not like there's going to be an email from the Russians to the Trump organization saying we're the Russians and we'd like to help you thank you and then it turns out that not only does that email exist but if the president's son replied I love it and the world just kept on spinning so I have really sort of given up trying to put odds or make bets on any of this so let me all sort of close down here with the one question on my other uplifting book on the US government's plans for doomsday and the question was sort of has anything changed in the way that presidents treat nuclear war and the short answer is no like the presidential nuclear command authority remains entirely unilateral and that there have been sort of some moves inside Congress to try to change those systems going forward to perhaps insist that there be a like a declaration of a congressional declaration of war before president can launch nuclear weapons but those that have not moved forward at all and I think it's instructed that I sort of wrote about this last week that the bulletin of Thomas scientists last week announced that the doomsday clock sort of there rough marker on how close we are to global catastrophe was reset last week and it's annual resetting at two minutes to midnight which is the closest and most dire risk that the world has faced in their estimation since 1953 when Russia and the Soviet Union and the United States tested a thermonuclear bomb for the first time so on that note I mentioned if you want to hear me repeat most of the things I just told you you can listen tomorrow on Terry Gross on Fresh Air I think you have heard almost everything I said there but there might be a couple of additional details that come out there so thank you all for coming