Chuck Rosenberg

Former U.S. attorney, Chuck Rosenberg. Here Rosenberg discusses with Rachel Maddow the FISA process and why the FBI’s hands are tied after the release of Devin Nunes’ memo stunt. When Maddow asked, “Should we expect that there would be some kind of rebuttal that the FBI would issue a public statement clarifying what are the implicit allegations against them in this memo?” Rosenberg used a hypothetical situation to explain saying, “Imagine that someone leaked a document that said that Rachel Maddow, a senior official at a foreign government, loved Nutella but would only eat it with a red plastic spoon and that becomes public and is marked top secret and everyone is wondering, ‘why in the world would that be marked top secret? That seems so innocuous.’ But it turns out only one person in the world, your Great Aunt Barbra knows you like eating Nutella with a red plastic spoon. And so we’ve now told the whole world that Great Aunt Barbra is the source for the United States government, she’s a mole, she’s a spy and something very bad is going to happen to her in the next couple of days in that foreign country. So the FBI cannot be in the business of rebutting this stuff because to rebut it they’re gonna lay out other facts that foreign governments are going to use to their advantage and our disadvantage.” This is what Donald Trump has done to the United States Federal Bureau  of Investigation in order to obstruct justice and try to get himself off the hook for conspiring with Russia to win the office of the presidency.