at every single stop now, reporters are looking, is he interacting with the crowd? is he take shaking hands, tae staying long enough? if you re advanced staff, you have to stay at least an extra 30 minutes to show, hey, he likes people. i saw tweets, what pizza is he having? is he talking to voters? do we have a timetable as to when other candidates will jump in? rumors about tim scott, mike pence and others. i think tim scott will come in. may 22nd is the date where they re circling. you ll see his super pac get bolstered. mike pence also in the next month. those are the two main candidates. national political correspondent for axios, alex thompson covering a lot of ground. thank you for being here. thank you for all of you for getting up way too early on this monday morning. morning joe starts right now. we must reject the culture of losing that has infected our party in recent year. the time for excuses is over. if we get distracted, focus the election on
Testify about Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador kislayak. At todays briefing, sean spicer pushed back hard on the allegation and at one point the briefing kind of went off the rails when russia came up. Listen. Reporter how does this Administration Try to revamp its image, 2 1 2 months in, youve got this yates story today, youve got other things going on, youve got russia, youve got wiretapping. No, we dont have that. Regarding the allegations of capitol hill. I have said it from the day that i got here until whenever, that there is no connection. Youve got russia. If the president puts russian Salad Dressing on his salad tonight, somehow thats a russian connection. But every Single Person no, sean i appreciate your agenda here, but the reality is, no, hold on, at some point, report the facts. Lets talk about the facts tonight, the facts about this
white house and those close to it and ties to russia. We want to show you a flowchart just so that everybody can follow along because it
Tries to clean up trumps tweet, saying he knew general flynn lied to the fbi when he urged thenfbi director jim comey to drop the investigation into flynn. The president s tweet raising serious questions about whether the president obstructed justice. Heres Sarah Sanders late today. Look, the president knew that he lied to the Vice President. That was the reason for his firing. The problem is, that is not at all what the president tweeted four days ago when he fired off this tweet. Quote, i had to Fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the fbi. The white house has made it very clear, President Trumps tweets are, quote, official statements by the president of the United States. No matter who might draft, tweak, or actually type them. In this case, lawyer john dowd, the first person ever to take the blame for a president ial tweet. Trumps tweet and Sarah Sanders explanation simply are not the same. They contradict each other. They also dont match cnns reporting. A s
Fbi before he fired him last february. Setting off a new round of questions about whether the president s actions amount to Obstruction Of Justice. Well, if you take the president s own statement, his tweet that he knew Michael Flynn was lying to the fbi when he fired him, which means that he knew Michael Flynn had committed a felony when he asked comey to stop the investigation. And when he fired comey when he refused to do so and when he fired sally yates and when he called Michael Flynn in april to tell him to stay strong. All of these acts are to impede and obstruct justice. A source close to the white house acknowledging the severity of the misstep to the Washington Post which writes a person close to the white house involved in the case turned the saturday tweet a screw up of historic proportions that has caused enormous consternation in
to in legal circles about whether or not a lawyer would have sent a tweet or even dictated a tweet like the one that came from the president s f
Told that National Security adviser Michael Flynn was susceptible to blackmail by russia. That warning was issued by acting Attorney General sally yates, who told White House Counsel Don Mcgahn that flynn was vulnerable because he misled the Vice President and others about the nature of his conversation with Russian Ambassador sergey kislyak. Despite her warning, President Trump chose to keep flynn on the job as top National Security post for 18 more days, according to the report. Muellers goal in part is to determine whether there was a deliberate effort to cover up the information that yates had provided the white house. As nbc reports, multiple sources say that during interviews, muellers investigators have asked witnesses, including White House Counsel Don Mcgahn himself and others who have worked in the west wing to go through each day that flynn remained as National Security adviser and describe in detail what they knew was happening inside the white house as it related to
flynn.