Joe Scarborough noted this morning there were "dozens of flashing red lights with the president himself bragging about firing the FBI director.
"At some point, either they're a law enforcement counterintelligence agency or they're not. I'd say it would have been a scandal if they hadn't looked into it," he said.
"Joyce, it wasn't like the people bragged to people inside the White House that he fired Comey. He bragged to the Russian foreign minister and to the Russian ambassador to the United States inside the Oval Office where no U.S. press were allowed --but Russians were allowed to come in. There is one incident like that, after another after another, and you can stack 50 of those incidents up that just don't make any sense by themselves."
"There was so much predicate here for the FBI to open the counterintelligence investigation that it's absolutely correct, it would have been irresponsible not to open it," Vance said.
"And there's an interesting nuance here, Joe. Counterintelligence investigations, that are not opened with the goal of prosecuting someone at the end of the investigation. They're opened to collect information that the intelligence community can use, in this case the FBI can use, to protect our national security. So where Trump has aggressively alleged there was a deep state that was out to get him, that's not true with the counterintelligence investigation. It's about garnering information that's critical, not about prosecutions. The fact that the president of the United States became a target of a counterintelligence operation is really something that at this point is not surprising, but we should still be stunned by."
