he co-bilined that with peter stone of mcclatchy. thanks for being here. >> thanks for having me. >> what got you going on this story? were you following this investigation and heard about this piece of it or were you following the bots and trolls part of it and heard it might be the subject of investigation. >> we've been working on the trump and russia thing for months like most media outlets in washington. and one of ourources tipped my colleague peter stone who ha done some great reporting for mcclatchy as a freelancer and we dived into it. we were absolutely -- our minds were blown by the possibilities presented here. and maybe they won't pan out but it was definitely worth delving into. >> when you say your minds were blown by the possibilities, do you mean that in terms of what the investigation might result in in terms of potential prosecutions or do you just mean in terms of the impact that these trolls and bots, that they had in terms of investigation warfare? >> i think it's partly about the impact of the trolls and bots a

but importantly, in the new york times it is a triple biline. matthew rosen berg, adam goldman and michael schmidt. michael rosen has joined us by telephone. it's your second paragraph -- he covers intelligence and national security. it's your second paragraph that talks about overseas our allies, their intelligence assets having picked up potential contacts of trump officials with russian officials. can you flesh that out for us? >> i mean, i wish i could flesh it out more. some of the stuff -- >> we do, too. >> sensitive and we're working at it. and basically they're picking up -- others are picking up talk of meetings and they're passing the stuff on. at the same time, the americans are picking up conversations between russian officials, some of them inside the kremlin talking about speaking with campaign -- trump campaign associates. in the middle of this they're giving december-january -- the americans know this much broader campaign on the election and at this moment there are a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. >> i want to -- th

joining us now, one of the reporters who broke the story tonight, it's a triple biline piece in the "times," matthew rosenberg is with us. matthew, to start with how does an administration go about spreading out and squirrelling away evidence they fear could get lost with the change of government? >> well, it's a few different things. a lot of this intel is coming in very late, they're recognizing november, december, january, the scope of the russian campaign and the suspicions about contacts, what these contacts between the trump associates and russians were and so they're rushing to take this raw intelligence, put it into finished reports and kind of do those reports at the lowest level classification that they could do so as many people in the government can read it and the idea is you don't want to be in a situation where so many people know it. it's easier to contain the information so you spread it out. then you take the raw intel, and you take the sources, names, human intelligence names and put that into the biggest compartments you could find. into places where only people wi