The Justice Department announced Monday that they will let congressional leaders review highly classified information about the ongoing Russian investigation.
This decisions came after a meeting President Trump had with FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney about possible surveillance by the FBI or DOJ on the Trump campaign. Trump had demanded the meeting with both officials on Twitter Sunday saying:
‘‘I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!’’
National Security expert Juliette Kayyem told Boston Public Radio Wednesday that Rosenstein is allowing the review of classified information in an attempt to “placate the President’s madness” and divert his attention away from special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
"If you feed the beast a little bit, can you delay it long enough that you are able to preserve the bigger issue," said Kayyem. "This is not a big issue, this is a tertiary issue. There is going to be a line that Rosenstein gets to at which he leaves or he is fired ,and we are just getting closer each time. I cannot judge him right now because I think in some ways he is trying to protect Mueller, and that in the end is the most important thing."
Kayyem says that while there may have been inadvertent infiltration or surveillance, the FBI or DOJ certainly did not undermine the Trump campaign.
“First of all, let’s just remember, we did not know about this investigation when we were voting. ... We did know about the Hillary Clinton’s,” Kayyem said. “So if the FBI did infiltrate with a spy, they did a pretty bad job because they didn’t disclose that the spy was there."
Kayyem noted that most likely any surveillance on Trump’s campaign was inadvertent and a result of informants keeping tabs on subjects the FBI was already investigating.
“It is not the FBI’s fault that the surveillance was flowing to people they suspected were Russian spies, and it is not the FBI’s fault that Trump Jr. and everyone with the last name Trump, including possibly Donald Trump himself, is meeting with these people. That’s the problem,” Kayyem said.
Juliette Kayyem is the chief executive officer of ZEMCAR, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, and a WGBH and CNN contributor.