jill, i read the president is going to camp david for the weekend. i could suppose we could learn that there s prep sessions involved as part of the thinking behind that trip. have you lost all ability to predict what happens on a day like, oh, say, tomorrow, at the white house? as everyone has been saying, i guess things are always up in the air and we re always ready for it. tomorrow the president is expected to be speaking about north korea. there is a letter on the way from kim jong-un that will be delivered by a high-ranking member of the north korean government. we re waiting to see what that says. but the president has really i mean as sam just mentioned, kind of teased this forward as he does in his kind of reality show way of presenting things. will there be a meeting? will there not be? i m going to cancel it. oh, it s back on. at this point there are reporters that are preparing to fly to singapore very soon for this meeting, and at this point nobody is even sure wheth
whether north korea is really serious about giving up its nuclear weapons program. a lot of people in washington don t think that kim really will do this. so he wants to just see what it feels like. he s very excited about this letter tomorrow that he s going to get at the white house around 1:00 p.m. from the north korean official. he s hoping that this will lead to the summit, that they will officially declare it back on again. that would clear the way for a june 12th meeting in singapore, lasting, we think, just one day. there s only so much you can do in a number of hours according to the president s thinking. and if it feels like they re making some progress, then maybe they go into another meeting. i was just going to say on so many of the flights you and i were both on, you d get a message that the press corps was invited up to the president s office, which is kind of at mid ships in the aircraft, or the
can you describe his state of mind onboard that airplane en route to this day? well, he brian, he s in a very good mood. he feels like things are going very well with north korea. the u.s. economy is doing well. we went into this trip thinking it was going to be a nothing-burger because it was just a couple of closed fund-raisers in houston and dallas. but little did we know that we were going to get so much news out of the president. we were surprised that he brought up rod blagojevich and martha stewart as possibly getting pardons. but he is in a very good mood. you can tell he s upset with jeff sessions about the whole russia/collusion investigation, but he is moving on, and he feels like he will eventually get out of that. when, we don t know. but he did have an emotional meeting in houston with the families and those impacted by the shooting at santa fe high
know, this russia thing with trump and russia is a made-up story. the president had a big day today, went back on the attack against abc over roseanne. and prior to departing for texas and his meeting with loved ones from the latest mass school shooting there, he said, we re going to have some fun today. on the diplomacy front, the president also broke some important news on north korea. in an exclusive interview, he told reuters reporter steve holland onboard air force one that a nuclear deal may take more than one meeting with kim jong-un. and axios is reporting tonight that president trump pressured attorney general jeff sessions to reclaim control of the russia investigation on at least four separate occasions. well, with all of that, let s bring in our leadoff panel for a thursday night. we welcome to this broadcast the aforementioned steve holland, the veteran white house correspondent for reuters, sam stein returns with, politics editor for the daily beast.
there s going to be a meeting that happens when everyone lands. this is just how he does things. hey, steve, somebody said today that the power to pardon, it is such an absolute power that we grant our presidents going back to the ancient british rules of kings, that this is perhaps how trump viewed the whole presidency would be, kind of a series of awesome powers of the executive. do you get the sense, steve, that this is the first warble of something we ll be seeing a lot of? it feels like he s discovered this new talent that he has, and he s eager to use it. he s told us that when he spoke to dinesh d souza last night to tell him he was being pardoned, that da souza almost had a heart attack, which suggests da souza was a bit surprised by this. we saw the pardon last week of jack johnson, the boxer, a case that was brought to him by sylvester stallone. the kim kardashian case yesterday.