On Wednesday evening, Tucker Carlson grilled former Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman about the FBI’s use of a paid informant to spy on the Trump campaign. Goldman rebuffed the Fox News host’s inquiries into why the FBI had employed such a tactic, at one point scolding him: “You don’t have a right to know.”
Carlson opened with a question about the Department of Justice’s practice of improperly concealing embarrassing information from Congressional oversight in order to cover themselves. “The Department of Justice withholds information from Congress claiming it's classified, and when unredacted, it turns out to be not classified. They were lying. Why would anyone defend that,” he asked.
Goldman was reluctant to concede that such a practice existed within the Justice Department. “These things can often be subject to interpretation,” he handwaved. He maintained this stance even after Carlson pointed out that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s purchase of a $70,000 conference table had been withheld from Congress under the pretense that it was classified information.
The conversation grew more heated when Goldman downplayed Congress’s “purported oversight role” in investigating why the FBI had employed an informant to spy on the Trump campaign back in 2016. Taken aback by this verbiage, Carlson replied:
There is a public interest here. So we know that the last administration had a paid informant spying on at least three members of the Trump campaign...Why wouldn't responsible people do their very best to explain why that happened as soon as they possibly can, and calm public fears that the system is corrupt? Because the public is beginning to it is, including me. Why wouldn't we have the right to know why that happened?
Rather than addressing the meat of the question, Goldman rehashed the semantic talking point that the FBI asset in question was not a “spy,” but rather, “an informant.” After a brief back-and-forth on this rhetorical dead end, Carlson continued to press his guest for an answer: “It doesn’t answer the question, which I think I have a right to know, which is why did that happen?”
“You don’t have a right to know,” Goldman shot back. He later conceded that there was “a public interest” in getting to the bottom of the FBI’s intentions, but he remained steadfast that such information ought not to be released until “the investigation” was finished. However, he failed to note that the FBI informant had been part of an investigation that had already concluded.
Goldman’s Twitter profile lists him as a legal analyst for CNN and MSNBC, and it displays recent tweets in which he has decried U.S. immigration policy and criticized the President’s performance at the Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un.
