department and rex tillerson, at some point, has to be given the power or he needs to leave. i put this in same category as i put the press conference. shocking, but not surprising. joining us now from washington, a former executive director of the wmd commission regular guest here and she is a senior fellow and spent part of the weekend in germany. i did. are europeans in particular, are they more unsettled by donald trump s policies right now or by his behavior? i think both, honestly. if i could say something about the segment bill neely did on russia. i think the russians have rg severe buyer s remorse. the fact they would come out and talk about their psychological profiling and alarm about president trump tells me they
fate. like they want to drive the bus straight off the cliff! sometimes it feels, joe, that this presidency is running on two tracks. there is the white house and the senior staff and there is the cabinet. so the cabinet is out there saying, be tough on russia. follow agreements internationally. the white house senior staff is out there saying, don t worry about it and have the president of russia here. i don t get it unless there are more facts we don t know. once the subpoenas start to fly if the investigators it is very bad news for the white house when that process begins. elise jordan, you worked in the state department and with condy rice. rex tillerson is the odd man out and sources close to tillerson say i haven t talked to him but sources close to tillerson say he is not happy. he is being boxed out.
outside of where the actual event was. it seems everything is done on the fly and he is being completely shut out of these major visits with the prime minister of canada, with japan. it is not looking good for rex tillerson and i just don t see where he tolerates this very long. on top of that, john heilemann, he had his number two that would have helped him being able to play the bureaucratic game but trump wouldn t let him select his own number two. so, right now, white house insiders are telling me he s got somebody that is helping him out, but has no idea how to keep up with the fast pace of what is going on. so he s not even allowed to put his team together. right. you re talking about elliott abrams to be donald trump s number two and shown some thing that abrams wrote during the
questions. russians contacts with the trump administration. what does the secretary of state rex tillerson do? where is he in all of this. no doubt this is what insiders are talking about now the series of russian investigations with subpoena power and legislative branch that the administration has to deal with. at a minimum it s a distraction and could be a lot more. and it is you talk about tempting fate or flying too close to the sun? or however you want to put it. nick confessore, while we are having these russian investigations going on, you have trump s people talking about helping out the russians with ukrainian sanctions. you have them starting to whisper about the possibility of bringing vladimir putin to the united states for a state visit. you have all of these things happening. no, i m not joking. they are. they are talking about doing that right now. it s like they are tempting
now you have michael cohen playing secretary of state with ukraine and russia? you have jared kushner playing secretary of state in the middle east? this is a tough powerful, strong guy. at what point does he go into the oval office and say, i m either your secretary of state or your son-in-law is your secretary of state. which is it, mr. want? for all of the reasons that we were excited about rex tillerson, a commanding businessman with a really long successful track record of working in countries just globally, at the same time, he s just not going to take it that long, joe. and i think that you look at the state department right now and it s essentially a ghost town. they haven t given a press briefing in a month and no one can really speak on the record for the state department. you have tillerson going to, you know, the g-10 summit late so he had to stay at a sanatorium