>> fox news alert. we have now obtained the first excerpt of a house panel's reportedly reveals surveillance abuses at the highest reaches of the fbi and doj. that ♪ ♪ has not been released, but fox news has exclusive first excerpts from it. the houses approving for it to be made public and we are told that there are no reactions in this. that is big news in itself. chief intelligence correspondent catherine herridge's live in washington with the very latest. >> fox news and been able to confirm that the four-page memo has now been declassified in the letter was sent from the

white house to that effect. that means for folks at home, it will be posted on the house intelligence committee's web site in fairly short order so that everyone can read it. based on our reporting and intelligence gathering here at fox news, we understand that there are a number of significant headlines in the memo. what we understand is a senior law enforcement official testified during a close classified session to this house committee that without the dossier, the dossier that was funded by the dnc and clinton campaign and compiled by fusion gps, the opposition research firm, they would not have been able to obtain at least one surveillance warrant for them member of the trauma campaign. number two, we also understand that the fbi and justice department relied in part on media reporting to credibility of the dossier when they made applications the national security court for the fisa court for these warrants. what is key is as we've shown to our ongoing reporting here at

fox news, the fusion gps on the british spy who gathered the research were part of an active campaign to brief major american media outlets. so the thing to look for in this memo is whether you've got some of the same media organizations that were briefed on the dossier. they are reporting being used to lend credibility to the dossier. so that's what they call circular reporting in intelligence circles. we also understand that after christopher steele, the british spy, his contact was broken off at the fbi that he was able to continue to provide information to the bureau along with a company that was paying him fusion gps through groups or. this is the justice department official who was demoted after came to light that he had a number of meetings with fusion gps. >> harris: we will come back to you as the news warns that we want to write now go to the oval office for the president's

meeting with the factors of north korea. six of them live in south korea now and he's invited them to come to the white house, two of them live in the united states and among his comments now in a rather provocative action to highlight human rights violations in north korea and put pressure on north korea as you know because of the nuclear weaponry and all that they're trying to develop, in order to do that, he's invited these defectors to the white house. but the topic of this important surveillance memo has come up in his time in the oval office and that's what we want to show you. let's watch together. >> president trump: thank you. i think it's terrible. i think it's a disgrace what's going on in this country. i think it's a disgrace. the memo was sent to congress, it was declassified, congress will do whatever there going to do. i think it's a disgrace was

happening in our country. and when you look at that and you see that and so many other things what's going on, a lot of people should be ashamed of themselves and much worse than that. so i sent it over to congress. they will do what they're going to do, whatever they do is fine. it was declassified and let's see what happens. but a lot of people should be ashamed. thank you very much. thank you very much. you figure that one out. these are great people that have suffered incredibly there are many, many others like them that have suffered so much. i said let's tell your story very quickly. we have others in a different room as i told you. that are really petrified to be here. so it's tough stuff.

we are doing a lot. we've done more than -- we have many administrations that should've acted on this a long time ago. when it was in that this kind of in a position, we ran out of road. you know the expression. the road really ended. they could've done it 12 years ago, they could've done it 20 years ago, four years ago, two years ago. we have no more road left. we will see what happens. in the meantime, we will get through the olympics and maybe something good can come out of the olympics. who knows? thank you very much, everybody. thank you very much, everybody. i better not get involved. >> harris: so you see the president they're talking about relations with north korea. he says we have run out of road.

let's see where we are after the olympics. but that bombshell memo as some would term it is about to go public. fox news has obtained exclusive excerpts from that and we have been reporting that through our correspondence here. if the president saying a lot of people should be ashamed. let's go right away to chief white house correspondent john roberts who is live in front of the white house. >> just got off a conference call with intelligence officials who were walking reported to the contents of the memo and one of the real headlines here is catherine herridge talking about a high-ranking official who testified that without that dodgy dossier, compiled by fusion gps and christopher steele, there would've been no hope for a fisa memo. is that official according to the memo who provided that testimony was none other than the former deputy director of te fbi andrew mccabe. who resigned suddenly on monday after the fbi director christopher wray had a chance to read that memo on capitol hill on sunday night.

not connecting any dots here, just pointing out those are the dots. the president clearly is unhappy with what he read in the memos. he said it he things it's a disgrace. people should be ashamed of themselves but he went further in a tweet this morning expressing his displeasure with certain members of the fbi, certainly not the rank-and-file tweeting "the top leadership and investigators of the fbi and the justice department has politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of democrats and against republicans, something which would've been unthinkable just a short time ago. rank-and-file are great people." what the president has been saying about this memo and that tweet drew a sharp response from the fbi, former fbi director james comey. let's put up what comey tweeted earlier. "all should appreciate the fbi speaking up. i wish more of our leaders would. but take heart, american history shows that in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field so long as good people stand up. not a lot of schools are streets

named for joe mccarthy." so the feud between the white house, the republican leadership and the permanent select committee of intelligence in the former fbi director continues apace, getting fairly visceral there. no wonder, because james comey appears defender of the men and women of the fbi. but this memo that has been released, and we will get a chance to read through the actual text very soon, certainly illuminating that in the eyes of the people who wrote this memo, that would be devin nunes, the house chair of the intelligence committee and trey gowdy, the chairman of the government oversight committee, there were some bad actors at the fbi and the information that led to the fisa warrant against certain individuals in the trump campaign was based on information that perhaps ordinarily would not have warranted a fisa court issuing those warrants. >> melissa: this is melissa francis grade let me ask you quickly.

what happens now? when you look at these charges and what's in here, it is at least everything that everyone expected and anticipated, not nothing that we have heard others trying to deflect that it was going to come out and fall flat. what happens now? >> it's unclear. when this existence of this memo was first made public, people are suggesting that maybe it would be the undoing of the entire special counsel investigation. i'm not necessarily sure that that will happen. certainly andrew mccabe is no longer with the fbi and again, we've just hit some experts hear that were given to us. we haven't had a chance to read the full memo in context. might be a little early to make predictions about what will happen but certainly, one thing that you can be assured of will happen, this will be a topic of broad discussion and accusations flying back and forth across the partisan aisle for the next few days if not longer than that.

>> harris: i'm going to jump back in. we may talk a little bit and we have howard kurtz on the couch for us, jessica tarlov, and lisa boothe. so we make it to talk to you one-on-one in different instances but i want to ask you about this. so there are quotes from the memo, these experts that fox news is exclusively ahead of the release of this memo and one of them has christopher steele, that british spy admitting to bruce or, the employee of the doj that has come down a couple of wrongs because they have punished him for some way for having undisclosed relationships with the company that put together for that and i trumped dossier. >> is not an undisclosed relationship. his wife nellie worked for fusion gps during that time. >> harris: steele admitted to him his feelings against candid trump in september 2016 when he told him that he was desperate

that donald trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president. in the speak of his feet into the hold narrative which is the crux of this memo that he was specious information granting these memos, catherine herridge reporting that christopher steele and fusion gps briefed reporters on the contents of the dossier which she referred to as circular reporting. sources in the intelligence area have said to me that what they said is they've been a little bit more forthright about this. a little bit more strident about it. he created a fake new story in order to sell the credibility of that dossier is being seen and

very sharp terms here. it's being pretrade in this memo that this whole thing was ginned up as a way to get at the trump campaign. that's the strongest way to put it, what's coming out of the memo. people can see it different way ways. democrats are saying this was written by two republicans, of course it's going to be bad. haven't had a chance to read the full memo yet, we don't want to cast any judgments. you don't want to do that as a journalist. we can go too far beyond what we are seeing right now. basically, what i'm being told is what happened with this, the fisa court and application of the fisa court was based on false information and should never have happened. >> howard: howard kurtz here. the import of this is that it raises questions about the roots of the russian investigation which the trump administration has been trying very hard to

discredit. in the dossier was always considered by mainstream media organizations, all of them, to be uncorroborated and unverified. since there's been such a huge partisan struggle over the release of this devin nunes memo, isn't there likely to be a pretty strong counterattack from democrats whose own count on counter memo, and this is cherry picking and has a lot of omissions in it? >> the reason why the democratic memo hasn't been released is because the democrats have not asked for the memo to be released. it didn't go through the same process of the republican memo did. it's got to go through a vetting process, has to go through about process, the white house because it contains classified information. it was asked at breakfast with the speaker of the house on tuesday morning when it you just released the democratic memo at the same time? and speaker ryan made all those points that you want us to release his memo without it going for the same process but

everybody demanded of the republican memo? that just wouldn't be protocol. so if democrats want that memo out, it's a very simple process to go through and they can go through exactly the same thing that they did to get their memo out but certainly, hearing a lot from democrats that they shouldn't have come out, it's a slam the fbi. it's in violation of national security and intelligence protection protocol. but we fertile that already. what we are hoping to do right now in the immediate is to read this thing. >> harris: really quickly and we are going to kind of toggle between you but what do we know about this democratic memo? doing of the length of it or anything? >> i know nothing about it. >> harris: we will come back. thank you very much. now, let's go back to chief intelligence correspondent catherine herridge. you heard me reading that excerpt, and i hope i didn't force you to put your cup of coffee down because it's your work in your writing but john and i were just talking about it, john roberts about admitting

to that doj employee that he had some pretty strong feelings about candidate chop becoming president. >> there are two key players that really matter to this part of the memo. there was this former it is by christopher steele. he was the one who is tasked together the research for the trump dossier and then his justice department official bruce ohr, and based on our reporting, at a certain point, the fbi cut off the contact with christopher steele and after that, steele continue to provide information to the fbi through an indirect channel which was bruce ohr. we have a quote from the four-page memo that has just been declassified. what is states is steele admitted to ohr against then candidate trump in september 2016 when steele told ohr that he, steele, was desperate that trump not get

elected and was passionate about him not being president. so that information goes to the idea that steele had a political agenda when he was gathering this information and they were being mangled by the dnc and the clinton campaign. and if i could, i do know a little bit about the democrats version of the memo. i know you are asking john about that. the democrats version is ten pages. their argument all along has been that the republican drafted memo is inaccurate because key facts are left out. so what i anticipate is that it's more fulsome in its reporting to make the argument that the republican version which is about half the length is not a full picture of what actually happened. if i could just make one final point, most americans aren't

familiar with the fisa court. it's the most secret court in the entire united states and i would argue is really on a plane with the supreme court because these justices have to make decisions about whether the u.s. government is allowed to surveilled americans inside the united states read some my contacts who have had cases where there are surveillance warrants with their clients tell me that the threshold in these courts to sign off on the surveillance of an american inside this country is like this. extremely high. and even before we learn information today about the dossier, they said to me if opposition research was used in any way to obtain a surveillance warrant from this court and the court did not know who is bankrolling that information because that goes to the credibility and didn't know was also being shared with the memo, that goes to the credibility and whoever put in that application has a really big problem because

this is not the standard that the fisa court operates on. >> lisa: it's lisa boothe. as were learning about how it was obtained, how central in your estimation is the dossier in the entirety of the russian investigation itself? >> i think i kind of want to reserve my thoughts on that until i read the entire memo. but based on the information we been able to learn so far, it played a role in a part in obtaining a warrant and fbi deputy director andrew mccabe testified behind closed doors to the house intelligence committee that if they didn't have the dossier, they would not have been able to secure at least one warrant. i don't know if it applies in other situations. what also has my attention is that in the fall of 2016, fusion gps and christopher steele were busy briefing major american media organizations

about the dossier. the vast majority did not run with it. but some reports were made, but it was an effort to sort of see the story line if you will. at the same time the information was being provided to the fbi. i was reporting last hour in people and the committee tell me the fbi and justice department say they knew the dos wave was funded by the clinton campaign y can't say exactly when they knew that and that's extremely important because they knew this before the application for surveillance warrant to this national security court, then whose decision was it to withhold that information or not give the national security court the full picture before they made that kind of awesome decision to grant surveillance on american citizens inside of this country? >> melissa: this is melissa. let me ask you, you made the distinction that this was used to gain at least one fisa warrant. do we know how many there were

in total? for the democrats going to then come back and say it was only that one, they wouldn't have got it without it, and we didn't get that much from that one warrant, but they got all these other warrants based on good information, so who cares? >> that's a great line of questioning and i just don't have a good answer to that yet so i'd rather not speculate. i'll let the memo speak, more surveillance warrants and whatever the rebuttal is from the democrats because right now, we seem to have one side of the story, what's in the republican drafted memo. but we need to see how democrats respond and how they make the argument that the memo is misleading because certain information is absent. >> harris: it's hair is back again. i was taking notes on what you said about the democrat memo being the answer back to criticism that in their estimation, democrats key facts were left out in the republican memo. some curious because a lot of our reporting has pointed to the fact that democrats were taking

exception to the original g.o.p. memo not being full enough, not having enough in it. but they wanted a redaction. they wanted things taken out. can you talk to me about what the redacted process has been for this g.o.p. memo below been able to learn? >> this is the process. we never really been down this road before so it's been difficult for all parties involved to navigate not only on capitol hill, but also for reporters because no one can really point to any particular precedent. under these house rules, the intelligence committee voted in with the majority vote, they were able to make this memo that they had drafted available to everyone in the house. democrats came up with their own version which they wanted to make available to everyone in the house but according to these long-standing rules, they would need a majority to do that and they are in the minority on the committee. so they were not able to move

forward. i reporting did say the democrats did ask for an edit as did the fbi or redaction, but everything that we understand is that it was relatively minor and the reason that is is based on our reporting. this memo was drafted with the anticipation that it would ultimately be made public. so it was very deliberate in his efforts to not discuss sources and methods. so it was designed to be public with the idea that it would not be revealing sensitive information. >> harris: all right. just the last few seconds, we have learned that the memo is fully out. >> oh, good. >> harris: so now you can probably share with us everything else that you've got. >> do you have it right now? >> harris: she's going to take a quick peek. we are going to keep you on

screen but we will talk amongst ourselves. so have some interesting questions because certain things will happen when this memo comes out. >> howard: obviously, though be a democratic counterattack. this is not the whole picture but here's how it changed to our understanding. we can now say that not only. >> harris: hold on, let's cut katherine's mike. >> howard: real reporting in action. the roots of the russian investigation has reflected in this fisa warrant were one with the opposition research from fusion gps and christopher steele, not just an ex-british spy but a guy who we now know was desperate in his words to stop the election of donald trump. at the same time, just want to point out robert mueller investigation has seemingly from the reporting we have moved a bit away from the whole russian collusion questions of obstruction of justice. everything in this devin nunes memo was true, doesn't necessarily undercover that. when that's interesting. for people just joining us and they have heard us for days talking about the white house

having five business days up until would been on monday to declassify the contents of the house intelligence memo and the potential release of that, that memo just seconds ago has been released and is been made public. for lead intelligence correspondent on the job on this is catherine herridge. you saw her on the phone she was talking already. she's working on getting through. it's less than four pages, so she's working on going through and making her notes that she had made by the fox news exclusive certs that we have in the last hour side-by-side with the full release of the memo. we talked about the democratic response. we have a democrat on the couch. let's get some. jessica? >> jessica: i haven't read the memo. i have it in my email. unlike catherine was saying, there will be a democrat response. there memo is more than double the length of devon nunez is memo so there's going to be a lot more in there, i love to hear why they wanted names redacted. what exactly the omissions were and i'm also curious to see if

the fbi will release their own document because they objected to the release of this in the first place and they said it would be extremely damaging. there has been speculation that perhaps christopher wray will lease a statement of his own clarifying what's going on here. but i think everyone will be watching rob rosenstein now because that is said to be trumps target because he wants him removed because he's the only one that can fire bob mueller. so those of the moving pieces here. >> lisa: but if your president from, you have every right to be deeply concerned about all of this. a democrat opposition research piece at the heart of the russian investigation as well as likely the public narrative shaped around that. meanwhile, we also have the obama administration unmasking his team's name, making it easier for the intelligence community to share information across agencies so course, president trump is deeply concerned and then he's told they james comey three separate times is not under investigation. now it looks like it's the obstruction of justice aspect of that robert mueller is looking

at. >> jessica: and the money laundering all of that. >> lisa: he forced a special investigation after all of that, so if your president from, how do you not collectively look at all of those things and say what the heck is going on here? >> jessica: i never said that president trump doesn't have a reason to be concerned and that we shouldn't be looking at all of these moving pieces. we keep ignoring the fact that carter page, who was the person that was being surveilled, they make an argument that the fisa warrant started in 2013. it didn't start when president trump was candidate. >> harris: i'm sure you can open the memo on your phone by now. dear mr. chairman. i'm going to read a little of the. the honorable devin nunes, this was the white house memo. dear mr. chairman, on january 29th, 2018, the house permanent select committee on intelligence voted to disclose publicly a memorandum. and it just talks a little bit about that. the president understands that the protection of our national security represents its highest obligation.

reportedly, he has directed lawyers and national security staff to assess this and now it is out. so we are all clicking on this very popular pdf right now trying to get it open. but i just want to kind of get in there and get some of the language that they would've heard from the white house. go ahead, jessica. >> jessica: all finish. carter page was on their radar from 2013 grade he didn't work for now president trump in 2013 2013's of the started well before that and we know what kind of character carter page was just like paul manafort and rick gates and the likes. i never said that president trump doesn't have a reason to be concerned. i never said that any of this is rooted in invalid questions. what i am saying is there appears to be movement on the part of the g.o.p., the republicans will always build themselves at the top defenders of law enforcement to undermine the fbi and the doj because of the bob mueller investigation. >> lisa: your forgetting the fact the congress is also an investigative body and they have oversight authority here. if people at the fbi or doj

abusing their authority particularly for partisan reasons should be deeply concerning to you as well as every american who is watching the show right now. >> harris: do you want to tag team this? i'm going to go ahead. we got the unclassified memo now. and this is to majority members of the house intelligence committee. abuses at the department of justice and federal bureau of investigation is a subject matter of the memo. the purpose, this memorandum provides members an update on significant facts relating to the committee's ongoing investigation into the department of justice and federal bureau of investigation and during the 2016 presidential election. you want to go ahead and jump? >> melissa: i think we are going to go to catherine herridge. that's what they just told me. do you want us to do more of this? >> i'm through the first couple of pages of the memo, and what they indicate is that the focus

is on the fisa application for carter page. the one time for an advisor to the trump campaign and states that then fbi director james comey signed three applications on for half of the fbi as well as deputy director andrew mccabe who was removed earlier this week, deputy attorney general sally yates, she's the one who famously sounded the alarm about mike flynn. felt that was a basis for him to be blackmailed by the russians as well. then acting deputy and deputy attorney general rod rosenstein. the key finding here says our findings indicate that as described below, material and relevant information was omitted. i'm going to continue here. neither the initial application in october 2016, and this is the surveillance application, nor any of the renewals disposed to reference of the dnc, clinton

campaign, or any party or campaign and funding the efforts of the british by christopher steele. even though the political origin of the steele dossier was then known to senior fbi and justice department officials. the memo was stating that when he went to get the surveillance warrants from the fisa court, they said this is information we have from the dossier but they didn't give the national security court full disability on who is financing the dossier, who was the driving force behind this opposition research, and the memo states that this was known to the fbi and justice department but it was still not provided. that's a significant headline right there. when just one more if i could, it states that the carter page fisa application, a surveillance application extensively cited a september 23rd 2016 yahoo! news article, and it focused on pages

july 2016 trip to moscow. i want to check the british court records, but yahoo! news was definitely one of the five or six american media outlets that were briefed by fusion gps and glenn simpson about the dossier. see you potentially have a situation here where that article is used to provide credibility for the reliability of the dossier when in fact, it was the people behind the dossier who breathed isikoff that then came back to the fisa. that is called circular reporting, not credible sourcin sourcing. >> melissa: so i'm looking through these documents and what we see down around number two. they are talking about steele admitting that he gave information to yahoo! news.

in his numerous encounters violated the cardinal rules of source handling maintaining confidentiality. he was at that point terminated. senior official of the doj, and then that's when in september 2016, steele admitted to ohr his feelings against and then canada trump when steele said he was desperate that trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president. he had already been fired for doing things he wasn't allowed to do it at that point, he told back to bruce ohr and passed more information in and all of this was known and the information was used to obtain fisa warrants anyway. that's the gist of this section of it. >> harris: it brings up the one question which is why in the world will they do that?

why why? why would they lean on this if this were coming from someone that they had already determined needed to be relieved of his duty? >> that's not a question i can answer. >> harris: that's what i'm saying. >> there is important headline here. it states in section four, according to the head of the fbi's counterintelligence division, counterintelligence division is a division that is in charge of rooting out spies and espionage. assistant director, this is someone who is part of comey's inner circle said corroboration of the steele dossier was in its infancy at the time of the initial page fisa application. so what that is saying there is it was not a fully vetted document at the time it was used to get a surveillance warrant on an american citizen. >> howard: two-point that jump out at me as we go to the memo altogether.

>> melissa: that's how it goes sometimes. >> howard: has the memo says flatly, steele improperly concealed them and lied to the fbi about those contents and then as you jump ahead, january 2017, president-elect trump, hasn't taken office yet, james comey briefed him on this steele dossier even though it was salacious and unverified. some were missing pieces of how this got started and how it got brought. >> lisa: we also know the meeting at president trump had to be briefed on this unverified dossier which is a democrat propaganda piece for opposition research was leaked to the media as well. so why was it week to the media and why was he ever briefed on this in the first place if it unverified and he didn't know if any of the information was true? >> harris: i have lots of questions about yahoo! news in these organizations. catherine, you turned it this way and i took notes on what you said earlier.

everybody's taking notes. so what you said earlier wasn't it would appear from what you had seen, and now we all can see, fusion gps, the firm that put together that anti-trump dossier to this british by christopher steele was putting forth some sort of active campaign to brief media outlets. and do you think the media outlets, and this is really important, knew that they were part of a narrative or campaign? where they just getting the information? i don't know if we can get that from here, but yahoo! news has mentioned a couple of times, and i'm just wondering did they know that they were part of this circular reporting? >> we will have to seek out comment from michael isikoff and yahoo! news about whether they knew at that time. circular reporting may be sound like a complicated term, maybe i can break it down a little bit more for people. when you're acting as a journalist and you get

information, you have to understand the quality of the source. you want to understand whether this is an independent source for weather information you're getting from a second source is connected. so in its simplest terms, what you have is information about the dossier appeared to be coming from not only steele but also american media reports looked like two separate sources. but in fact, it was the same source. >> howard: we should emphasize, and you know this, the number of news organizations who have access to this dossier or the contents. cnn reported on the existence of the dossier. it was only busby that put it out there while acknowledging and going her was true or not. but i do want to remind people this is a memo founded by the republican chairman of the democrat committee. the steele dossier now that we know about his deception was

just one of the elements used to rely on the national security court in order to get those. >> melissa: i have an answer to that. if you look down at the bottom of .4, it says deputy director mccabe testified before the committee in september 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the fisa court. >> jessica: i had always understood that the use steele dossier played a role in this and also got an additional sourcing to corroborate elements of the steele dossier. >> harris: the part that catherine just pointed out from this memo was that that sourcing if you will, that circular sourcing always leads back to the same place. it was.actually two or three. >> let me just read from the section here. it states the quarter page surveillance warrant, the application for incorrectly

assesses that steele did not directly provide information to yahoo! news. steele has admitted in british court filings, pamela brand has done since. the definition grade that he met with yahoo! news and several other outlets in september 2015 at the direction of fusion gps. just one more thing. remember that senator grassley and senator graham sent a referral to the justice department on the basis that they felt that we 17 had provided and lied to federal investigators, violation of usc 2001. this republican drafted staff memo in the house lays out an argument that steele lied about his media contacts the fbi and that he was then terminated for his contact was cut off because of those media contacts.

>> howard: it's been a remarkable battle this weekend where you are in washington over whether this should be released, if devin nunes should really says no. the argument that appointing christopher where he was it would reveal or compromise classified sources and methods . after reviewing that, i wonder does your experience see anything that you could understand why this argument would've been made? >> i think we all know how and it's very basic framework, the foreign intelligence surveillance court works and how they get the 15 warrants. i think what this lays out and made people somewhat uncomfortable as it gives you a sense of what that processes, what the application, granting who is involved in that process, but i can't really .2 a source or a method that was revealed in thi.

not yet at least. >> harris: can i ask you because now we are all the way through this, we are at point five, and talking about george papadopoulos, the former trump campaign advisor. one of the people who has pleaded guilty to some charges here in the investigation not having anything to do with collusion or coordination between the trump campaign and the russia officials, the russian officials as are alleged. but i'm curious to the point that you see mentioning this, talking about peter strzok, what does this go in this section of the memo? >> this section of the memo based on my experience is trying to make the argument that once they surveyed a warrant for carter page, this became a building block for at least one other counterintelligence investigation and that was on another trip campaign, george

papadopoulos. george papadopoulos is important because he pled guilty to lying to the fbi and is now considered a cooperating witness. to this section of the memo if you will use the idea that elements of the special counsel investigation are touched in some way and maybe even tainted not obtained with a strong foundation in the quarter page warrant then led like a domino effect we had two indictments, paul manafort, the former campaign chairman, and also his business partner rick gates and we had two deals. we had mike flynn and george papadopoulos. >> harris: we are going to give you a chance to step back and continue your excellent look at this and reporting today.

>> thank you for having me. >> harris: thank you. i do want to point out because i know our team out here brought us because you and i were frantically trying to get that pdf open. >> melissa: i could do it. >> harris: we got it. the point i was going to make, we have a copy of the white house later, when you read through, it's a page and a half almost, it's a third the length of this document. it's interesting to me because it lays out with the president was kind of coming from and his counsel. and that's part of the story too. >> howard: when president trump repeatedly says that the special counsel investigation as a witch hunt and he believes like he said today that justice department has been biased in favor of democrats as republicans, a lot of people would take issue with that. you can start to see his worldview here because you look at this white house memo, and it talks about who got involved in using these warrants to spy on carter page.

jim comey, who the president has fire, deputy director andrew mccabe who was just pushed out out. >> jessica: don jr. actually tweeted that he got fired. >> howard: resigned under pressure at the very least. also, deputy attorney general rod rosenstein, the man who appointed mueller as special counsel who some are saying the president would like to see him go, so it is certainly another side to this but if you want to look at why the president is so convinced that all of the roots of this investigation are partisan, this memo discredits christopher steele, somebody who despised trump and wanted to botch his election and also several of these officials signing this warrant. maybe they didn't realize the full import of how this was compromised information from a democratic firm and from this british spy. >> lisa: i think at present it feels that way because it is becoming increasingly clear that it is. it's being poisoned by politics. maybe things change every day

around here, but it's a bigger picture that we are seeing here. >> howard: he was a republican, a republican official. >> lisa: i don't care. if there's been plenty that hate president trump as well. you made the point earlier that everyone involved that has gotten in trouble with team trump so far has nothing to do with russia collusion. you made the point earlier that the original. >> jessica: mike flynn has nothing to do with russian collusion. >> lisa: would his conversation with the russian ambassador ever have been a big deal if we hadn't been talking about russia? >> jessica: he lied to the fbi and lied to vice president mike pence. he was asked about his conversation because of the narrative around russia. he had a conversation with the russians. >> harris: he still could've told the truth. >> lisa: it has been poisoned by what it seems like partisanship or political bias. >> harris: you can see with the president is coming from. >> lisa: where can you not? looking at all this information that we've seen, how can you not share the president's concern that people were not acting in

good faith in these various investigations? >> melissa: i think rather than extrapolating out, what is more productive is to boil down to the very basics. i think it's all of just one sentence. deputy director mccabe testified before the committee in december 2017 and that no surveillance warrant would've been sought from the be 15 court without the steele dossier information. not one warrant, but no warrants would have been sought from the fisa court without the dossier. they used something they knew was fixed to get a warrant. everyone involved and that is to face consequences. >> harris: howard, i heard you this is a necessarily touched the robert mueller investigation, but do you think that this pays for maybe impugns or causes us to question other investigations?

>> melissa: i think from a legal perspective, we wouldn't know. these are the argument that you guys are having from a legal perspective, maybe people wouldn't have done what they did and maybe we would know about it. >> harris: that's what i'm asking. the bottom line. the drumbeat that you'll see on some media outlets as well, this is all about president trump writing to fire mueller. so what i'm asking is, can you shut that down or can you enlighten it? what does this do? does it do one thing or the other? >> howard: remember, mueller is not involved in any of these pretty came and we find out about the rogue agents, took them off the case and he is now looking at obstruction. i'm not saying he has a case but here's the bottom line. there's been so much fears partisanship surrounding this issue, surrounding this memo that we are going to get the democratic counterattack, a lot of people following the details of the fisa court. they are going to wonder what the bottom line is here. i think lisa has a point, you can now understand in a more complete way, way president trump feels that there were partisans within the law enforcement bureaucracy.

>> melissa: the point is that they lied to a fisa court in order to spy on people. that's horrifying. you don't have to go any further than that. >> harris: that's not partisan partisan. >> melissa: it says that they knew the dossier was fake and they used it. >> jessica: it doesn't say that they lied. >> melissa: they used it to get the warrant and they knew it was fake. how is that not lying? if i know a documents fake and i use it to get a warrant, how is that not lying? >> lisa: he was also told three separate times he wasn't under investigation and it wasn't until he fire james comey which has the legal authority to do that now he's under investigation and it seems like this shift is going to obstruction of justice. it doesn't seem like the focus is any longer on the russia investigation. >> harris: i want to bring john roberts back from the white house lawn. i know that you have a statement from one of the people who was even mentioned that this but can

you hear the conversation that's going on on the couch? i really want to get you and melissa to talk directly to each other. bring it up, melissa. >> i could hear the conversation going on on the couch. even if i didn't, there's this little electronic thing. >> harris: okay. >> so anyway, this whole thing, i'm making light with you but we are not making light of the situation here. this whole thing surrounding a fisa warrant to survey all carter page two was a sometimes foreign policy advisor to the trump campaign back in the spring of 20 team. producer pamela brown of fox news, carter page said the brave and assiduous oversight by congressional leaders in discovering this unprecedented abuse of process represents a giant historic leap in the repair of america's democracy. now that a few of the misdeeds against the trump movement have been partially revealed, i look forward to updating my pen pending legal action against the doj this week and in preparation

for monday's next small step in the long road toward helping restore law and order in our great country. carter page clearly feels like he was treated unfairly in this whole process. he was a person who had contact with folks in russia, though he denies that there was any collusion between the trump campaign and russia in terms of trying to influence the u.s. election. again, what's really interesting to me, harris and melissa and everybody else they are on the couch, is the fact that the person who testified to the intelligence committee that there would have been no fisa warrant had it been known for that unverified dossier was none other than the former deputy director of the fbi, andrew mccabe recently departed in a very hasty fashion disposition. as to what this memo has to do with that departure if anything, i'm unclear at this point. but certainly, is mentioned in a couple of places here so it might affect them and to do with it. we just don't know. >> melissa: i think that that

is the salient point that comes out of this, and now we know why they walked up to the white house, they talked about the memo, and then mccabe resigned and he said it was normal retirement they had the exact number of vacation days in the bank between that day and when he would've qualified for his pension and that's when he left at that moment. i know i think we know that's not true. >> only he knows what's true and what's not true. but it does seem to be that he was about to face a demotion and said i've got all this time piled up that will take me to retirement. let me just cashed at all in now. a couple of other interesting things i found my reading to the memo is remember george papadopoulos. he was the fellow who was on the president's foreign policy team for a short period of time. he was the one who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the fbi just recently in the robert miller investigation. the investigation into george

papadopoulos was opened by the then head of the fbi's counterintelligence peter strzok who we all know of course now was involved in this scandal of text messages with an anti-trump bias between himself and his alleged mistress, lisa page. so that's interesting. and then also, this statement that christopher steele apparently said to bruce ohr, who was the recently demoted associate deputy attorney general who is now been moved over to the hr department, apparently steele said that he was "desperate that donald trump not collected and was passionate about him not being president." so what you've got in this memo here is a case where there appeared to be a lot of anti-trump bias, and people working against the president who are trying to get memos to surveilled people in the trump organization. from a legal standpoint, i'm not sure what this means but certainly from a political standpoint, it is going to

generate lot of discussion and a lot of debate. >> harris: so from what you're saying, and at the very salient point and i want to make sure that we are clear on what it is you are saying. it's one thing to say that somebody has bias, and the big question has always been because we'll have a point of view, can you do your job and not let that bias influence you? that's also at the very bottom line, the very basic element in all of this. >> with this memo would suggest is that all of these decisions were driven by bias. >> harris: i wanted to quickly ask you about the situation going forward with rod rosenstein. howard pointed out the people who are in this memo have all left, comey, mccabe, rosenstein is one of those names. have we heard anything about him? >> other than the fact that there were a lot of people who aren't very happy with rod

rosenstein, i think his job is probably safe at least for now, and i think he's probably protected by the fact that with the president were to try to take him out, that would reflect very poorly on the president and could be seen as another building block in this case that people are talking about getting toward obstruction of justice. i think while the white house may not exactly be happy with rod rosenstein, his position is probably safer now. >> harris: grow quickly, the dnc has just issued a statement, i don't know if we can put this up but i'll read it. the american people deserve to know the truth about trump's ties to russia and whether he obstructed justice to prevent that truth from coming out. the release of this memo makes clear that trump and his henchmen on capitol hill with them everything they can to undermine this investigation even if they jeopardize our national security in the process. we can't let them undermine our justice system to serve their partisan political interest. no one is above the law. that is the democrat, the dnc

chairman tom perez. >> not a surprising statement considering the fact of where it comes from. but the bottom line here is that the investigation is continuing. the white house has provided to the special counsel tens of thousands of memos, emails schedules, what not. there have been hundreds of thousands of documents that have been handed over to the special counsel by the trump transition. robert mueller basically has all the information that he needs to carry out his investigation. the only missing piece of the puzzle may or may not be an interview with the president. so while democrats are complaining that this is undermining the mueller investigation, it is continuing and continuing with all the information that robert mueller has been seeking. so i'm not exactly sure how this undermines the legal aspect of the mueller investigation certainly from a political standpoint. it may raise suspicions about how this whole thing began but i

don't think it's going to affect the progress of the mueller investigation and i don't think it's going to affect the outcome of the mueller investigation. >> melissa: can i ask real quick. we've seen jim comay tweeting about rats and other things or whatever that tweet was. you see in item four, they say after steele was terminated, a source validation report conducted by an independent unit within the fbi assessed steele's reporting is only minimally corroborated get as early as january 2017 after that, director, improved president-elect trump on a summary of the steel dossier even though it was according to his testimony, salacious and unverified. do you think this is where that treat is coming from and the source of this tension here? >> i don't know what i don't want to spike label what is interesting and was always been interesting to me is the dossier on the contents of it in the knee that jim comay felt to

brief the president began that series of now infamous memos memorializing meetings that jim comay have at the president which ultimately led to the appointment of a special counse counsel. so i don't want to connect the dots for anybody here but these are the dots that are out there and these are the thoughts that robert mueller may ultimately be connecting. but it is interesting to me that this dossier seems to be at the center of so many different things. >> melissa: john roberts, thank you so much for your reporting grid would bring it back out here to the couch. i know you have a lot more. >> howard: have read this three times. the memo by republican chairman before team does make the case that fbi officials bungled this whole national security will warrant process. i don't see anything here about fbi officials line but it does say that they omitted material and relevant information before the national security court and what we now know is christopher

still was unreliable and had double dealings with the media but that he detested donald trump that did not want to become president. that to me is the single most salient headline here. >> melissa: i think we are parsing lying by omission. the fact that doesn't mention that he was working on behalf. by the dnc and the clinton campaign and that the fbi had separately authorized payment to steele for the same information. they didn't mention that they had paid opposition research independent people for this and then at the same time, he had admitted back in 2016 that he was desperate that donald trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president. if they knew to fire him, but they omitted all of that from their court filings. see you're saying that's not lying. i don't think it matters. >> howard: is a serious transgression. >> melissa: either way, it's a huge deal. >> jessica: democrats are certainly going to have to discuss that but like we had a talk about the fact that you

fusion gps hadn't done the proper accounting for the dossier financially, that it was missing from records. so that's all fine. there are two things that are really sticking out to me in there. in .5, there's a line that says the papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an fbi counterintelligence investigation in late july 2016 by fbi agent peter strzok who we point out is immersed in that text message scandal that seems to be just the guy texting a girl. so that makes me think that papadopoulos triggered the russian investigation or was it the steele dossier? that seems a little unclear here. to the conversation we were having earlier about how important it is to boil all this down, this memo is four pages long. from what i understand, a fisa warrant application is 50 to 60 pages long. there's a lot of information that is not here. we know devin nunes is a partisan, we know tom perez is a partisans. we are all partisans.

speech dude that's an unfair characterization of devin nunes. he was writing about unmasking. >> melissa: he testified that they wouldn't have had the surveillance for it. that is the steele dossier. >> jessica: the fbi is destined to get trump out. >> melissa: i'm not talking about republican versus democrat. i'm talking about law enforcement not following the law. space if you can look at democrats. >> melissa: it's pretty much that simple. >> jessica: there so much more information that isn't here. >> lisa: he's correct about the unmasking that the obama administration was unmasking trump officials name is. it was his work going after fusion gps that eventually lead or finding that it was the dnc and hillary. >> melissa: we have a lot of time to discuss this. in the future at length. howie, thank you so much for joining us. we really appreciate it.

we are going to be back here at noon on monday. howard kurtz, you will see this sunday of course. but right now, want to hand it over to harris. >> harris: a fox news alert, the wait is over. that controversial memo, here it is, declassified. president trump clearing the release of that memo, republican saying it shows bias at the trump campaign in russia against the trump campaign in the russia investigation. this memo released despite the objections of the fbi and the justice department. an outcry from democrats, the president is now sounding off in the white house, watch. >> i think it's a disgrace, what's going on in this country, i think it's a disgrace. the memo was sent to congress, congress will do whatever they're going to do but i think it's a disgrace, what's happening in our country. en