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the gunman. president trump calls to arm nation's teachers and also slams the deputy who was on duty. >> what he did, he trained his whole life. there's an example. when it came time to get in there and do something, he didn't have the courage or something happened, but he certainly did a poor job. good day. i'm andrea mitchell in washington. a lot of news today. thanks for joining us. breaking news, another bombshell in special counsel robert mueller's russia investigation. a source familiar with the proceedings telling us that former trump campaign aide rick gates is expected to plead guilty today, an indication gates is cooperating with the special counsel. this comes a day after robert mueller filed a 32-count indictment against both gates and former trump campaign chairman paul manafort, charging both men with additional crimes,
number of counts, some limited conduct that would vastly reduce his prison exposure. we believe this plea is happening in washington, d.c. as you mentioned, there was another indictment handed down in the case yesterday in virginia that charged a raft of new bank and tax fraud charges against both gates and manafort. those could be waived under any kind of plea deal as would typically happen. the real significance of this is that robert mueller seems to be approaching this like he would prosecuting the gambino crime family. he's trying to flip people up the chain. it appears he's flipped mr. gates, who was paul manafort's right hand man and this puts enormous pressure on paul manafort, who is already facing 15 years in prison under the existing indictment under federal sentencing guidelines. he's 68 years old. the pressure on manafort now to consider a guilty plea would seem to be enormous. >> peter baker, rick gates is a central figure here. he actually was part of the campaign for a longer period than manafort.
and when we get the outlines of gates' agreement and what he might be able to contribute to this case? >> it's likely incredibly significant. there are two questions we have to know the answer to that we obviously don't but bob mueller will know at least one. the first is what can rick gates say about paul manafort and his exposure. we know paul manafort obviously has a great deal of legal exposure. we have seen it now in two indictments. he's now looking at not just a paper case but a cooperating witness, not just any cooperating witness, but a cooperating witness who is his closest aide and confidant. the second question is what does paul manafort know that he can tell bob mueller about the president and others close to the president. the white house has tried to claim as you heard peter baker say, that these charges are completely unrelated to the campaign, to the white house, to the overall russia investigation. we don't yet know if that's true. we don't know why paul manafort came and joined the campaign in early 2016, at no salary, at a time that he was massively financially leveraged, and in debt to a russian oligarch, a
russian oligarch he later promised private briefings during the campaign. we don't know that answer. it's certainly one bob mueller is trying to find out. >> ken, when we talk about paul manafort, paul manafort had no political connection since the '70s, really, when he was involved in being a delegate hunter in the '76 campaign, he had no recent political experience. all of his experience was in representing russian interests in ukraine and other arguably bad actors, regimes around the world. so one wonders whether if you are getting into all the finances of paul manafort, you are getting into russia and oligarchs. >> it's a great point. matt just made a fantastic point which is that this new indictment paints a picture that paul manafort was really in financial trouble when he joined the trump campaign. he had made tens of millions of dollars with his relationship with this russian-backed ukrainian oligarch for years consulting and according to the government, illegally lobbying the united states. by the time he got to the trump campaign, the spigot of cash had
been turned off and manafort and gates had turned to basically scamming the banks and evading taxes in a way to generate cash. it really puts a different spin on the question of why did paul manafort end up with the trump campaign, why was he offering those private briefings with that russian oligarch, what does he know about potential relationships with russians. it's a very important question. >> and as we are building this pressure, this case, chuck rosenberg, clearly it would be to try to squeeze manafort and try to get a plea agreement from him. is there the potential, this has been speculated about a lot, potential that he would resist a plea because he knows by some fashion that he might be pardoned? >> if he knows he's going to be pardoned, and we don't know whether he knows he's going to be pardoned, sure. that makes a lot of sense. if you take a step back and put the pardon aside for a minute, most defendants plead guilty. the overwhelming number plead guilty. so first we shouldn't be surprised that rick gates is
going to plead guilty. of those who don't plead guilty, the overwhelming majority are convicted at trial. so pardon aside, one way or the other, manafort is in a world of hurt. >> while we have all been reporting this out, the president spent nearly an hour, maybe more than an hour, at the conservative political action committee. it was a rally, he went off script, he barely touched on the advanced text that had been released where there was serious business he was going to be announcing sanctions against north korea. peter baker, i wanted to play some of the clips from that speech, where he went after hillary clinton, john mccain without naming him, but it will be very clear from this, barack obama, this was just some of the highlights from this speech at the conservative political action committee. >> we have a very crooked media. we had a crooked candidate, too, by the way. but we have a very, very crooked
manafort was in against a woman opponent. >> right. to say nothing that he's encouraging the crowd to chant lock her up on the day his deputy campaign manager is pleading guilty to a serious crime. irony aside, what is pretty transparent here is his polite ki stratepolite political strategy has not changed. his base are the only friends he has. that doesn't mean his friends are only in the republican party. it means he wants to have these fights not only over what he's done, but what his political opponents have done that he knows ends up charging up his crowd. that's why he invokes the names of people like barack obama and hillary clinton and john kerry. it's also why he cites the famous maverick john mccain and this is the thing that plays well for him politically in the moment. the problem really, though, is if you just think two steps ahead here, this does not play well politically necessarily for most congressional republicans and they are the people that are
on the ballot here later this year, not president trump. >> matt, as a former justice department aide, i saw you cringing when you heard the president's comments about that deputy sheriff in florida. >> i thought that was a really disgraceful comment from the president. he said it before he left the white house. he criticized him again from the speech. look, whatever mistakes this deputy sheriff made, it does seem like he made serious mistakes, it is so graceless and undignified for the president of the united states, the most powerful man in the world, to be attacking a deputy sheriff who yes, made a mistake. the president should be above the fray. should not be weighing in. josh made an important point before we came on the air. this president dodged the draft four times, he's never put himself in the line of fire, and now is criticizing someone else who was on the scene at the school. i thought it was a really undignified moment for the president. >> this from a president who said, promised during the campaign he would have the back of our men and women in law enforcement and who got a lot of political mileage out of
unfairly criticizing his political opponents, including president obama, in situations in which he felt like president obama had been insufficiently supportive of our men and women in law enforcement. but to stand in front of a bunch of reporters on the south lawn of the white house and question that deputy who obviously did make some mistakes, it's disgusting. >> we're not defending the deputy and we see the president's returning by helicopter from that speech going back to the white house, where very shortly, i think he is quite a bit behind schedule, that lengthy speech has held up or maybe it's momentarily the arrival of the australian prime minister, which is another whole interesting story because the australian prime minister had one of the most notably difficult conversations with the president of the united states shortly after president trump was elected. >> that's right. >> wosworn in, i should say. >> their disagreement was about an arrangement between the
united states and australia to try to resolve the cases of a number of refugees and so again, this is a difficult political challenge for president trump and look, australia is one of our closest allies. we rely on them particularly when it comes to our presence in asia and this is a relationship that president trump will need to work on, both for his own benefit but also more importantly for the benefit of the country. >> all hang in here because we will be back in a moment on call to arms. president trump riling up that crowd at cpac calling for more guns in the schools. this as the australian prime minister is about to arrive and australia had a very different approach after a school shooting. we will talk about that when we come back. oh! there's one. manatees in novelty ts? surprising.
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cpac convention arguing that putting guns in the hands much teachers could prevent more school shooters. he's breaking from normal practice, also slamming an armed sheriff's deputy for not going after the florida shooter. >> you had one guard, he didn't turn out to be too good, i will tell you that. he turned out to be not good. he was tested under fire and that wasn't a good result. but you know what i thought of as soon as i saw that? these teachers, and i have seen them, at a lot of schools where they had problems, these teachers love their students and the students love their teachers in many cases. these teachers love their students. and these teachers are talented with weaponry and with guns and they feel safe, and i would rather have somebody that loves their students and wants to protect their students than somebody standing outside that doesn't know anybody and doesn't know the students and frankly,
for whatever reason, decided not to go in. >> peter baker, chuck rosenberg, josh earnest still with us. peter baker, the teachers i have spoken with are not in sync with the president. neither are the ones i have seen from florida. i don't know what you are hearing but most educators do not want this responsibility or this challenge. this isn't their role. the president was suggesting yesterday giving them some sort of bonus pay for doing the training to become armed. >> yeah. most teachers have a lot on their plate already. they have to worry about textbooks and supplies, about the latest curriculum, about, you know, multiple kids and their own individual problems and how they can bring them to class and make sure they are paying attention and connect with them in a real way, and the idea that suddenly they will be part-time security guards when the full-time security guard wasn't, you know, able to handle the situation, that seems
perplexing to a lot of teachers. you're right, the ones i have talked to certainly are not eager for that responsibility. what the president is saying is i'm not talking about all teachers, talking about a select number who might have military or some other kind of experience. i don't know the statistics on that. i don't know how many teachers actually are former marines and soldiers and whether they have that kind of experience. but clearly, this is an idea that hasn't been fully explored in a real way in the white house that has no paper on it, there's no trade-offs recognized, no cost estimates, no serious analysis of whether this might be useful, whether teachers might actually be up to it or want the kind of responsibility he's talking about. >> peter, yesterday we had fred guttenberg whose daughter jamie, 14 years old, was gunned down. he said from the way he's been briefed about the hallway video, what the security cameras picked up, it was chaos. in that kind of situation you would have innocent people shot
by a teacher or anyone else who was in there with a gun, just because it was just mass panic with people running in the corridors in and out of classrooms. >> well, you can imagine what the law enforcement officers responding to the situation would think if there were suddenly more people with guns on the scene, people with guns they don't want to shoot, but they don't know who's on which side at that point. you're right, that would only in some ways, you could imagine adding to an already chaotic scene if there were -- you know, you understand the appeal. this is why the president says it, because he is in fact a supporter of the second amendment, a supporter of the nra, and so he's looking for something to combat the problem. to many of his people in that audience today at the conservative political action committee, sounds like a good solution. why not have more good guys with guns, as they say, rather than bad guys with guns. it's an appealing idea to a certain select part of his base.
again, it's not a proposal that's been thought through or analyzed in a serious way to look at how it would actually work in a reality situation. >> there were also attacks from the president and his ally, wayne lapierre, on the intelligence communities, on the fbi, on others in law enforcement. >> despicable. it's hard for me to even process that, andrea, to tell you the truth, and i don't tend to get overwrought or emotional, but when i hear folks who purport to be leaders at least of certain parts of our communities attacking law enforcement, calling them out, disparaging their work, disparaging their motives, it's despicable. >> josh earnest, from your experience in the white house, and if we can try not to be partisan in this, there does seem to be a lack of process. peter baker said these are not thought out policies. in the white houses i have covered from reagan on up, when policies were proposed, no matter what the president's
individual personal feelings were, it went through a process, a domestic policy council, then was vetted, the chief of staff would weigh in, decisions were made. obviously the president has the final say but this seems to be an emotional reaction to do something. >> it does, and i can't tell you how many meetings i sat in with lawyers from the department of justice and other agencies in the federal government, examining what kind of steps the president could take using his executive authority to try to make progress on this issue, to make it harder for people who shouldn't have guns from being able to get their hands on them, and in some ways, the challenge here is we are talking around the problem. the problem is that congress has failed in their basic responsibility to pass common sense legislation that would enhance public safety. that is the basic -- that is the basic failure here. until that changes, i don't think that's going to change until we change the composition of congress, but until that
changes, we will find an executive branch, whether democrat or republican, struggling mightily to try to address this problem. >> gentlemen, pete williams is in our newsroom with breaking news on that gates plea which we expect to be later this afternoon. pete, what are you seeing? >> 2:00 this afternoon, andrea. we now know what charges he has agreed to plead guilty to, and as i look through this 25-page document, the government basically re-alleges a lot of the violations that they say he was responsible for committing when he was working with paul manafort was a lobbyist for the government of ukraine. they say that he took a lot of that income, millions of dollars, and through a series of putting it in overseas accounts, using other financial manipulations, tried to hide it from federal regulators, to basically evade having to pay taxes on it and also to evade having to register as a foreign
lobbyist. now, the key to it is that when he was charged in late october, he and manafort together, this is just richard gates' plea now, we don't know anything about paul manafort, when he was charged in october, it was a long raft of charges. just yesterday, robert mueller's team added even more in a separate criminal case just across the river here in alexandria, virginia involving bank fraud in virginia. now, though, there are just two counts, two charges in this revised document that he's agreed to plea to, lying to federal agents and also a general conspiracy charge. the maximum penalty on both of those counts, now, chuck rosenberg is sitting right next to you and he knows this better than i do, but my quick look at the u.s. code indicates the maximum on both is five years. so at one time, on what he was originally charged with, richard gates was looking at several
decades potentially in prison. now he's looking at a maximum of five years, and more significantly, if he agrees to cooperate with robert mueller's investigators now, and talk more about what was going on during the campaign which is, after all, what the mueller investigation is really all about, that could result in an even lesser sentence. so five years is the maximum. he has no prior criminal history and if he cooperates with mueller, he could be looking at even less time than that. so this is a big -- he gets a lot out of this, it seems to me, by agreeing to plead guilty and potentially robert mueller's people do, too. they must think they do, because they have knocked so many of the charges out of this. they must think that it's important to get his cooperation. as you recall, paul manafort was briefly the campaign chairman for donald trump's campaign and manafort was his deputy campaign chairman and continued to advise
the campaign even after paul manafort left. so we will know more details here when he appears in court, rich gates, at 2:00 to actually formally enter the plea. but we now know what he will be pleading guilty to. >> pete, that's an excellent setup for chuck rosenberg, who is sitting right here. this obviously, if it were to be five years, potentially, depending on the plea when we see it at 2:00, this is a very big deal and it is a real insider, bigger fish than papadopolous and the others, carter page, even more peripheral, who is intimately knowledgeable about the campaign itself. >> if you just read the indictments and take those allegations as true, you can see that mr. gates has a ton of information on mr. manafort, at least. one thing i think is worth explaining, andrea, it looks like he's pleading guilty to two separate counts, each count carries a maximum statutory penalty of five years. >> they could be concurrent,
though. >> they could. in theory, he has ten years of exposure. but in reality, sentences are determined not by the statutory max, but by the sentencing guidelines. so what prosecutors routinely do is have someone plead to enough counts with enough statutory time that if everything goes bad and they don't cooperate and they lie and they mislead, you can still give them a large, or recommend a large sentence at the end. but if they cooperate and with no criminal history, they have a relatively small sentencing guideline exposure. that's all you need. that's all you need here. >> the carrot and stick approach. there's a very big carrot there, if you like carrots. >> there's a big carrot and a big stick, but this is a well formulated plea. it holds mr. gates' feet to the fire and mueller will be able to obtain his cooperation. >> josh, you have been intimately involved in campaigns. to have the deputy campaign manager, campaign chairman,
manafort's deputy, cooperating with the prosecutor, no matter how the white house says this does not affect donald trump, it affects the trump campaign or anything that it potentially did. >> if you are sitting in the white house right now you have to be deeply concerned by this development in the case. some of the reporting indicates that mr. gates actually traveled extensively with then candidate trump on the campaign, even after manafort had left the campaign so through the fall. this is when mr. trump himself was campaigning five, six, sometimes seven days a week. he spent a lot of time on that airplane. this is the setting in which having spent a lot of time in these kind of campaign airplanes, this is when you are having informal conversations with the candidate and with the team. he can certainly speak to mr. trump's state of mind. he can certainly speak to mr. trump's motivations at particular times. and he certainly would have been in a position where, if they were doing conference calls or engaging in other planning, he would have been looped into that as a senior official on the plane to make sure mr. trump was aware of what was happening back
in his campaign headquarters. people in those kind of positions often serve as a relay point for people who are on the ground, not traveling with the candidate. so it does put mr. gates at the nexus of a lot of communication that can be valuable to a prosecutor. >> thank you for your valuable insights, josh, chuck. pete williams, when we talk about this going forward, what is the process that we are likely to see? i know it's outside the court because it's federal court so you won't have anyone inside with a camera, but you will see the arrival presumably of rick gates, of his attorney, who is tom green, and at this point, he's going to face -- will he be facing a federal judge and explaining that he understands the charges and is pleading guilty to them? >> oh, yes. when you want to change your plea, you have to do it in person, like they say, you must be present to win. he has to be in court to actually stand up and enter the plea. and the court in the meantime
wants to get a number of guarantees from him. so if you plead guilty in federal court, you basically have to tell the judge i know what i'm doing here, i'm doing this willingly, i'm doing this knowingly. i understand what i'm doing. i understand the consequences. i know i'm giving up my rights to appeal this conviction. i know that i can't have a trial. i know that if i did have a trial, i would have the ability to confront my accusers in court. he has to tell the judge he on purpose waives all that and that's basically designed so that after a guilty plea, you can't come back and say wait a minute, i changed my mind, i didn't realize what i was doing, i was taking medications, all that stuff. so that's basically how these hearings go. they are very similar. i just sat through one earlier this week when alex van der zwaan entered his guilty plea. so i can tell you exactly how it goes and how it will be before this judge. so that's basically it.
now, the government will probably get up and say a little bit about what they are alleging here and summarize the charges. now, the other thing that's important, i think the two things that are important to note about this, one is just to be clear, this is about richard gates and paul manafort's personal finances beginning six or seven years ago when they started lobbying for the government of ukraine. it's not related to the campaign. this is a side issue to the central task that robert mueller has, which is to investigate whether anybody in the u.s. was helping the russians meddle in the election. by the way, paul manafort has a companion civil case pending in court saying you know, he never should have been able to bring these charges, these are outside of robert mueller's task and so you should throw the whole thing out. not much of a chance of success there, but nonetheless, that is a separate case. that's the first thing to think about.
the fact that this is not related directly to the campaign. the second thing is that probably in the plea agreement, when we see the actual documents later, all we have seen so far is the revised slimmed-down charges as a result of this agreement, almost certainly there will be some language in there that says that mr. gates agrees to cooperate with the mueller team and that ultimately, his sentence will depend on the degree of his cooperation. that's fairly standard, too. but we won't, for example, hear what it is he's prepared to say about paul manafort or anything else. that's down the road. >> matt miller is with us again. matt, as pete was just pointing out, this is not about the campaign. this is about their past work, manafort and gates' past work on behalf of ukraine and obviously, the russian oligarchs who were involved which could overlap with the russian oligarchs who were indicted last week by robert mueller. >> that's exactly right. this isn't exactly about his
work on the campaign. it's about their work in ukraine. but their work in ukraine was for a pro-putin government. a pro-putin despot, really, and he worked very closely with deraposhka. >> reminder of who that is? >> another wealthy russian oligarch who is very close to president putin and the kremlin, does a great deal of business with and for the kremlin at times. paul manafort had a long business relationship with him that eventually went sour and at the time manafort joined the trump campaign, he was in millions of dollars of debt to him. i want to point out one thing from this criminal information that's been filed which i have been trying to read quickly. what gates is going to apparently admit to is a false statement made to mueller's investigators on february 1st of this year. extremely odd. that would seem to be when he went in and made his proffer, he went in and had this queen for the day interview where you go
in as a defendant, tell the government everything you know. nothing you say in that interview can be used against you unless you lie. >> the allegation he was lying when he was making his -- >> making his plea deal. went in, had this interview, lied about a meeting he had with an unnamed lobbyist and an unnamed member of congress in 2013. didn't tell the truth about that meeting to bob mueller's investigators on the day he was making his first kind of -- doing his first interview with them that would lead to a plea deal. remarkable thing for gates to have done. >> does that perhaps explain why he changed attorneys? attorneys who were representing him that day are no longer with him. >> it could be. that is shrouded in mystery. everything about gates' behavior in the last few months has been strange. he had one set of attorneys, those attorneys withdrew from the case. we still don't know why. there have been long hearings behind closed doors. he has this other hearing now, there have been reports he was going to change, another attorney now, there are reports he was going to change to even a third set of attorneys.
he apparently was going in to make a plea deal, lied in the plea deal, then gets hit with other charges, then pleads guilty the next day. nothing about gates' behavior over the last month and a half has been usual in the way these cases proceed. >> pete williams, more information on this? >> well, andrea, precisely on the question you just asked, we have always been wondering why some of the gates lawyers wanted to withdraw and you have seen a lot of speculation elsewhere that perhaps it's because they disagreed about the plea. we think it can't possibly have been that, because the lawyers' job is to represent the clients' interest. one thing we always suspected is did the lawyers think at some point he said something that wasn't true, which would put them in a tough spot. we think that it may be one of the reasons in addition to perhaps what lawyers and clients disagree about generally is how much they are going to pay the lawyers, and the fee issue, we have always suspected that is a possibility for why the lawyers
wanted out. we may know more about that after the plea hearing. >> stay tuned for all of that. we will be back with a lot more, including the u.s. today stepping up sanctions against north korea at the very time ivanka trump is arriving and having dinner with the president of south korea. what is the connection there? stay tuned. today, the new new york is ready for take-off. we're invested in creating the world's first state-of-the-art drone testing facility in central new york and the mohawk valley, which marks the start of our nation's first 50-mile unmanned flight corridor. and allows us to attract the world's top drone talent. all across new york state, we're building the new new york. to grow your business with us in new york state, visit esd.ny.gov.
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and the white house today announcing new sanctions against north korea, targeting the rogue regime's shipping and trading companies. this as ivanka trump arrives in south korea today for the olympics' closing ceremony. she had dinner with south korea's president moon, whose agreement to hold direct talks with north korea after the olympics could actually be jeopardized by today's tough white house action. >> thank you for hosting us all here tonight as we reaffirm our bonds of friendship, our mission of partnership and reaffirm our commitment to our maximum pressure campaign to ensure that [ inaudible ]. >> joining me is ambassador wendy sherman, former
undersecretary of state for political affairs in kerry's state department and msnbc news global affairs contributor. ambassador, thank you very much for joining us. the actions taken today are not technically against russia or china, who are allegedly the big perpetrators here, evading the sanctions, going offshore and refueling, restocking these north korean ships. most recently this week alone, japan claims that it saw such action involving a chinese ship and north korea. >> right. china is on the list along with hong kong and panama, marshall islands, taiwan, couple of other countries, but not russia. i think this is quite significant since we have already said that they have against sanctions allowed a transfer at sea. this is a little bit like whack-a-mole. these are useful sanctions that have been put on, but there are thousands of ships flagged by
any number of countries that travel around the world and you have to have relationships with countries all over the world. ambassadors that you are working with in countries all over the world, and we don't have still 40% of our ambassadors in place around the world, to say to a country if one of these ships arrives and we can provide you with some information that says they are carrying illicit trade or they are taking oil or coal that they are not supposed to under sanctions and you ought to inspect them and stop them, you have got to build a relationship. so enforcement of this is quite tough and that russia is not in here is quite notable. >> the coincidence, if you will, of ivanka trump is arriving, she is going to take the place of the vice president, what he did at the opening ceremony, she will be at the closing ceremony so she will most likely be seated very close proximity to the north korean delegation. we now know subsequent to the vice president's trip, he was
prepared to meet with kim jong-un's sister and with another high-ranking regime leader, and that they stiffed him, stood him up at the last minute. they claim because of his tough rhetoric, because he had taken such a hard line, it's hard to say. what is your take as to whether the vice president was appropriate in calling them out for their outrageous behavior, for their violations, for their human rights abuses, for the otto warmbier treatment and death, or whether we have missed an opportunity for direct talks? >> well, look -- >> perhaps impossible to tell? >> i think it's a little hard to tell. one would have expected that this had been all well choreographed with the south koreans but it appears that it was not. of course we always call out north korea for its horrible human rights abuses, for the awful death of otto warmbier, for what they do to their own people. that's all very appropriate. it's all about sequencing, all about choreography and i actually think it was a mistake to send ivanka trump, because
they called kim jong-un's sister, the north korean ivanka trump and now we will have a direct comparison. north korea is sending the head of -- the vice-chair of their workers central party, who really was the mastermind in 2010 incident that killed 46 koreans. there's been a lot of protest in south korea. so they have a lot at stake. they have opposition in their own country. i wouldn't expect there to be any discussion between ivanka trump and kim yong choi who is representing the north koreans at these closing ceremonies. this is a very tough time. pressure is important but it should be one piece of a coordinated, very well orchestrated effort forward and we need to be shoulder to shoulder with south korea in this effort and it's not clear that we are. >> in fact, are we now in sort of a different place with south
korea, with south korea proceeding, they say, with direct talks with the north after the olympics are over, and we are now taking a harder line. those are two different messages. >> they are two different messages. one can put them together but it's not clear, as i said, that there's been choreography here with the country that should be our closest ally. we have 28,000 american troops in south korea. we have on any given day probably a couple hundred thousand other americans over either living, working or visiting south korea. so the risk for us is quite great as we take these very appears to be unscripted steps forward with our close ally. >> wendy sherman, ambassador, thank you very much. thanks as always. today is also the day that chief of staff john kelly was issuing his new rules on security clearances and they are set to go into effect today, the rules that were actually distributed last week. potentially putting him on a
collision course with the president's son-in-law, jared kushner. kushner, a diplomatic newcomer assigned to help negotiate middle east peace, is resisting kelly's efforts to restrict his access to highly classified secrets, including of course the president's daily intelligence brief, because kushner has not yet passed a complete fbi background check. in a battle between kushner and kelly, who is going to win? joining me is nbc political contributor, yamiche alcindor, msnbc contributor charlie sikes, conservative radio host and chris whipple, author of "the gate keepers, how the white house chiefs of staff define every presidency" and susan page, washington bureau chief for "usa today" . well, yamiche, first, to your reporting on this possible showdown between chief of staff kelly and jared kushner, who wins, do they both win, do they finesse this? what do you think is going on behind the scenes? >> if it comes down between jared kushner and john kelly,
the answer is simply jared kushner has the relationship with president trump. he's someone who the president really, really trusts. he's loyal to him. at the end of the day he will t going to be the person the president believes in and picks over his own chief of staff. but the sources i've been talking to tell me that the president and chief of staff john kelly want this issue to go away. john kelly does not want to be going back and worth with jared kushner and he wants him to have this clearance so he can be out of his hair. >> chris, you wrote "the gatekeepers. "we've seen what happened with reince priebus, what a bad start that was for this administration as far as them parting ways. kelly was brought in to clean house, to shut the door to the oval office so people like omarosa could not be wandering in and out. he restored order but could not control the tweets or clearly did not control or choose to control the security clearance process. >> no question about it. even by the very narrow
definition of the job, his definition of the job, which was making the trains run on time in the west wing, he's really failed in my view. the porter scandal shows that the trains are flying off the track. but more importantly, i think kelly has failed in the much larger sense. that the -- organizing the west wing is the easy part. the hard part of the job -- >> i don't want to -- let me interrupt you briefly. listen to the president with australian prime minister andrew turnbull. >> and we have a luncheon set up also, and we have all of our representatives surrounding us and a lot of good things will come out of this visit. so mr. prime minister, we very much appreciate you being here. >> thank you so much. thank you. i just say thank you and melania for your hospitality and your friendship. it's 100 years that we're celebrating this year. 100 years ago. for the first time australians
and american soldiers went into the battle together, on july the 4th, 1918. and we have been fighting side by side in freedom's cause ever since. so 100 years of mateship and 100 more years to come. >> thank you all very much. >> thank you, press. >> thank you very much. >> thank you, press. >> i would. we will be there. great place. >> -- cutting a deal with mueller? >> thank you, press. >> thank you very much. >> chris whipple, i interrupted you. now you can see why. all those questions about gates, about everything else. couldn't hear all of them. but what's interesting is the first ladies were at that photo opportunity. perhaps a defensive measure to
mitigate any questions being asked. there will be a press conference at 2:00. exactly at the time that rick gates is supposed to go into federal court. we're talking about the chief of staff and the ability of a chief of staff of any chief of staff to handle donald trump. this unusual president. >> and expectations were so high for kelly when he came in. he was going to be the grown-up in the room. the moderating force who would smooth the rough edges off of donald trump. and i think exactly the opposite has happened. i think that john kelly has reinforced all of donald trump's worst partisan instincts. i think today's appearance by trump, the red meat rally, is more evidence that john kelly's been unable to sit donald trump down and tell him hard truths, which is, among others, that governing is very different from campaigning. donald trump knows how to do one thing and one thing only. that's divide and demonize and
disrupt. it's kelly's job to show him he can actually govern. >> and susan page, you've been following this house and we've watched this president at campaign rallies. that was a campaign rally today. >> that was him in his element, right? he talked for -- we thought he was going to make a big announcement about north korea sanctions. he talk forward more than an hour before he even mentioned them. >> he never got to the text until the end. >> he talked about his core issues. talked about the wall. talked about protecting the second amendment. those were the things that got big reactions from his crowd. quite at odds with the tone he struck with that very touching meeting he had with victims of school shootings and their parents. he talked about the midterm elections, about getting voter turnout. he is very focused on the midterm election and on his re-election campaign, which he also mentioned. when we talk about all of that, you clearly were also looking at this rick gates plea deal
because that is going to be this huge shadow overhanging this white house going forward. >> and this president really wants to get the russia cloud away from his -- away from the white house. as robert mueller does this really tick by tick, really slow walk of indictments, he is showing his cards and we're learning that robert mueller is really taking his time to look at witnesses, to figure out who were the best people to essentially flip and then to figure out who should plead guilty first. this is a president that surrounded himself with people with complex financial issues and paul manafort, according to the newest dirgets had all these issues going on with his finances. so i think we're just going to see more of this and the president is not going to be able to escape it. >> charlie sikes joining us as well. the midterm elections. how is this red meat that was displayed at cpac today and the calls to arm teachers and deal with school violence that way,
how is that going to play out in the midwest. >> well, you know, again, i think this administration has been focused on the red meat for the base. they speak to the base, and i think to a certain xenextent, t are succeeding in getting republicans to rally around trump. what you saw there was not just a regular campaign rally. you really see the transformation of the conservative movement. i was at cpac two years ago. and donald trump just two years ago was afraid to show up there and was very anti-trump. and you can see that he owns the conservative movement, and he is certainly rallying the base to get that base to turn out in big numbers in the midterms. >> charlie sikes and chris whipple, susan page, yamiche, thanks to all of you for quite an extraordinary day of breaking news on all fronts. we'll be right back. it's time for "your business" of the week. rover.com has one mission. ensure your pet gets walked and
watched. and now with its acquisition of its biggest competitor, it has the largest network of dog sitters in the country. watch "your business" weekend mornings at 7:30 on msnbc to find out how they are growing the puppy love and their business. thank you so much. thank you! so we're a go? yes! we got a yes! what does that mean for purchasing? purchase. let's do this. got it. book the flights! hai! si! si! ya! ya! ya! what does that mean for us? we can get stuff. what's it mean for shipping? ship the goods. you're a go! you got the green light. that means go! oh, yeah. start saying yes to your company's best ideas. we're gonna hit our launch date! (scream) thank you! goodbye! we help all types of businesses with money, tools and know-how to get business done. american express open.
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