Katie, I think the biggest tell that this is an effort to sell a narrative as opposed to a truly legitimate law enforcement investigation or other national security kind of effort to move or improve our national security is the fact that this effort from what we know was so rushed.

These millions of documents that a team of advisors

working out of the White House collected was reviewed and declassified within three weeks. And it

appeared to be a very rushed effort to kind of grab things without them fully being, without seeing the full picture.

In fact, a White House official told me that they were still reviewing many of the things,

that they didn't have answers to some of the questions that we posed.

And so I think what we are seeing here is an effort to create confusion, but also to, you know, let the person who

believes that these elections were stolen so dearly, the president, continue to say that,

and we're seeing how he's able to use federal resources, use investigative resources,

to try and fit that narrative. And I think one of the most important things is that the very people that would be helpful in

kind of assessing some of this information, the very national security analysts who cover China,

who cover Russia, those people were fired weeks before.

So we have lost so much of the kind of intelligence infrastructure that allows us to evaluate

whether or not this is accurate information and what should be done.

So I wonder if it really was just an attempt to find people who would go with whatever the president wanted them to say,

regardless of whether the evidence was there in any form at all.

And I asked that because there's an interesting article about Bill Pulte,

Donald Trump's current acting DNI,

and the lengths he was willing to go, but then getting cold feet about it.

Here's what Pulte said.

He got really scared, according to the Politico piece, by the whole thing and pulled

back said one of the two senior officials.

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