kind of a terrible day, a super awkward day for the russian foreign minister to turn up for the second time in the oval office. not only given what happened the last time he was in the oval office, but also to remind everybody of president trump s involvement with russia and unresolved questions about that and how he has behaved toward that government and how his behavior toward that government has freaked out even officials in his administration and led ultimately to impeachment articles that were just brought against him today, right? i mean, from the american perspective you can t imagine that the trump white house wanted this meeting today of all days. with a senior russian official showing off that he can get into the oval office to meet with president trump. it s not even a two heads of state meeting, right? it s like a russian cabinet official effectively being able to get into the oval office and meet with the u.s. president. so from our perspective not great, not great timing,
so from our spperspective not great, not great timing, not ideal, super awkward. but maybe it wasn t the white house who decided this meeting would happen today. from the russian government s perspective today s timing was perfect. because russia is continuing to wage a war against ukraine. and russia has had a remarkable wind fall over this past few months, past couple of years. they ve succeeded in getting the u.s. to interrupt our assistance to yeah crane and to make it contingent on stuff. they ve turned the republican establishment and conservative media against what used to be our staunch ally ukraine and instead in favor of russia. they have so-called into question u.s. support for ukraine in their war against russia the day after ukraine and russia have their big critical summit talks about that war and we re not there at that summit to support ukraine, the day after those talks it s russia
really hard to believe, because why would mick mulvaney have, one, been authorizing all of these conversations privately, and then two, have gone into the white house briefing room and said the same thing publicly if this wasn t the line, if this wasn t the white house position on this? i do think that one of the things that the white house and republicans are going to have to grapple with, however much they don t want to, is this happened and it appears as though everyone was on board with this plan at high levels. they re going to have to argue that it s okay, essentially. right, that it s not impeachable. exactly. that s where we re going to gechlt they have not gotten there yet, but the republicans by the end of the week are probably going to say some bad things happened, but you re not going to impeach a president about this. again, back to the point that they went out and found a whole bunch of people who hate trump. sondland originally said he was asked you never thought
affiliated or associated with white nationalism on television to do analysis about immigration. i think the juxtaposition there is particularly disconcerting. he s who i m going to look to for compassionate perspective. donald trump is pandering to the most extreme people in his base that steve bannon represents. i think that will be a problem for them in 2018. it seems ago if, in the begins when president trump entered the white house, he did not believe in family separation when it came to separation, but steve miller got in his ears, and they earled that number jumped up and sudden they set our only option here is zero-tolerance. is this just a window into the thinking of the current white house and their policies on immigration by seeing steve bannon talking the way he is. certainly we know it wasn t
and from the associated press jill colvin. ashley, i understand that the idea of arming the teachers and making that announcement yesterday wasn t the white house plan for the day. that wasn t in the president s play book. that wasn t on the card that your paper and others have reported about. that s exactly right. this wasn t an official policy ro rollout, or the president s aides necessarily knew he was going to say. that said, in talking to a number of aides, it was also not something they were necessarily surprised that he said. this is an idea that he had been floating behind the scenes for a couple of days now, talking about this idea. it is actually an idea that i understand one or two advisors had brought up to him as this is something some states have considered. it s a possibility that s out there. he started talking about it, floating it, making it his own. and as often happens, when he s in public, he reiterates the things that are top of his mind privately and that s wha