Mike Rogers on President Trump’s Relationship with Russia

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: In your lifetime, has an American president ever even been considered to have an investigation launched on whether he might possibly have been working at Moscow’s behest by the FBI nonetheless?

MIKE ROGERS: Yes. I can’t find any time in history that would exactly parallel. Because remember, he was a sitting president. This was — this decision was made in 2017. So, this was after he was elected to president of the United States and it surrounded, I think, those conversations, according all the press reports, happened when they were talking about his firing of Comey. And so, what’s really going to be important in this, I believe, is what predicates, and the predicates are really important. So, it’s — I’m a former FBI agent. So, when you open up a case, you would have to show the — any prosecuting attorney that these are the crimes, I think, that were committed. Here’s why I think that these crimes were committed. You don’t have to have the answers to all of those questions but you have to have enough to say, “OK. Let’s investigate this.” So, the predications of which they used in this case is going to be fascinating to me. And I think all of this is going to — you know, will come out at some point.

AMANPOUR: So, you are, as you said, a former FBI agent, you also have been in Congress. So, you’ve had all sorts of access to classified information and the politics around all of that. So, when you say predicates, do you mean some of this context and some of the facts like, you know, it’s believed that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump. Trump has said he believes President Putin’s denials of interfering. Trump has had almost nothing but praise for President Putin. Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with the Russian ambassador. Paul Manafort, the campaign adviser, heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch, alleged to have shared private campaign data with someone close to Russian intelligence. On and on and on. Is that the kind of predicate that you’re talking about?

ROGERS: Well, they would be instances of kind of collaboration of a predicate, but the predicate must be, was the president committing some sort of — the possibility, that’s really important here, the possibility of some sort of criminal activity? All those things you listed in and of themselves taken separately are not criminal acts, but those could be context to say that we believe he may have been, you know, acting as a foreign agent or fill in the blank, whatever they decided that predicate. So, the predicate is actually the crime itself. All of the details of which you listed would be used in that as saying, “Here’s all the things that lead us to believe that there’s something more going on here that we should understand.