To homes than anyone else in the country, we never forget. That your business is our business the United States postal service. Priority you welcome to kasie d. C. Im kasie hunt. We are live every sunday from washington from 7 00 to 9 00 p. M. Eastern. Tonight, National Insecurity as war breaks out over Security Clearances. Plus, breaking this evening, the white house doesnt actually know how much their own general counsel has been telling the Mueller Investigation. Inside the scramble to find out. And later, federal official claims none of the Migrant Children handled by the u. S. Government have been lost. Joined by republican senator rob portman who dispels that remarkable claim. In a moment, were going it talk about new reporting there is a sense of uncertainty throughout the Trump Legal Team over don mcgahn and what exactly hes been telling the special counsel. But we begin through the looking glass. Why is everybody so obsessed with the president of the United States they cant even begin or finish a sentence without mentioning his name five times . Its kind of weird. Thats an interesting question to answer. Part of the issue is stories keep evolving, like when the president s son met with Natalia Veselnitskaya at trump tower. The Trump Tower Meeting itself is at least evidence of you better investigate. Its not. How is it not . Well, because the meeting was originally for the purpose of getting information about, about clinton. The meeting turned into a meeting which in it tefl self was atd collusion. The meeting was intended to get dirt on clinton from a kremlin
lawyer. That was the intention of the meeting. You just said it. That was the original intention of the meeting. It turned out to be a meeting of another subject and it was not pursued at all. And even the question of whether the president played a role in drafting a statement about that meeting has changed from no to yes. Thou those specifics are damning enough. The overarching reality is this administration repeatedly insists you are entitled to your own facts. Youre saying its a falsehood and theyre giving Sean Spicer OurPress Secretary give alternative facts to that. I think its very important to point out that in a situation like this, you have over time facts develop. Fact counting is anything weve never had anybody with a level of audacity he has, not even close. Well leave it there its in the eye of the beholder. No, facts are not in the eye of the beholder. Youre always welcome to argue the case. Just remember what youre seeing is what youre reading is not whats happening. Truth is truth. I dont mean do go like no, it isnt truth. Truth isnt truth. The president of the United States says i didnt truth isnt truth, mr. Mayor, do you realize this is going to bad meme. Dont do this to me. Dont do truth isnt truth to me. Joining me on set, Chief Correspondent for the Washington Post, dan balls. Ken dilanian, former special Assistant To The President and former Press Secretary for vicepresident pence mike lauder. And White House Reporter for the Washington Post sung min kim. Thank you all for being here. I hardly know where to begin on this evening. But, dan balls, since you have spent many, many years, watched many president s do this, have you ever seen before this kind of dissembling around what is true and what is not true in your time as a reporter covering washington . No, i dont think anybody has. Weve seen president s who have dissembled occasionally. Weve seen administrations that have lied. We know that that is sometimes
part and parcel to the way they approach things, but weve never seen it on the scale and consistency of this white house and this administration. And i think what we saw with mayor giuliani today was just another example of that. I think we actually have, if i can ask my Executive Producer ben to play that clip of giuliani. Truth isnt truth. One more time. Truth isnt truth. Yeah, just so were clear, mark lauder, do you agree . What i think its a yes or no question. What i think Rudy Giuliani is talking about is that sometimes we have a lot of facts that are brought together to create an incomplete and not accurate conclusion. Weve seen this time and time again does this administration when you take an oath, you sit down in front of a jury or a judge or at a congressional committee. You say, i promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Is that a statement that can no longer apply in government . If you listen to all these things Many Administration officials have said, it sure seems that way. I can what youthink what yo though, is you can take the facts and facts are facts. But if you reach a wrong conclusion by stringing a bunch of them together, then thats still the wrong conclusion. In a way its like a brown novel. Were picking a bunch of facts to create an entertaining and fictional conclusion. I think thats what Rudy Giuliani is getting at. I dont think the argument there was anyone was trying to say there was already a conclusion, but rather that there have been several very specific events that have facts associated with them, the administration has said one thing and another thing has turned out to be true. Right . Yes, there have been, there have been times when the information has changed and the story has changed. Okay. So, i want to kind of dig into this a little bit further just because i think its really important because this level of casualness with the truth has permeated all levels of our
politics. There is texas congressman Blake Farenthold who resigned after using government money to settle Sexual Harassment claims, in a deposition and documents obtained by the huffington post, he claimed, quote, the ftards won. When the republican governor of texas asked farenthold to pay for the election to pay for his seat, he talked about deep state and being the victim of a political witch hunt. There is the case of Melissa Howard running for a State House Seat in florida. Reports said she did not actually have a college degree, more fake news. And posted to social media the truth shall set yourself free and distributed this photo of herself with a diploma. The University Of Ohio steps in and said, no, she doesnt have one, doesnt exist. Days later, she withdrew from the race. Sung min kim, you and i are on capitol hill most days
talking to lawmakers, a wide variety of whom, you know, have decent relationships with the truth. Whats your sense of how much this erosion of what we can blee believe and what we cant is setting in . I think there is clearly has been a rising distrust in the media for awhile. Lets be honest, the hasnt always had the highest Approval Ratings with the public. I think there is this rising skepticism from the public about what we are disseminating, what lawmakers are telling us, and a lot of that frankly has come from the president. This was something he did during the campaign, you know, using the media as his foil, calling us fake news. We saw in one of the clips earlier in a recent public eenlt, eenl event, you know, he sadie essentially dont believe all you hear. So i think lawmakers are seeing the president s tactics toward the media. Several of them are adopting it as their own. Ken dilanian, how much of this has a real impact on kind of the how the Mueller Investigation is going to play out . I mean, it does seem as though what this administration is trying to do in muddying the waters about the Mueller Investigation is sinking in with the public. In school i had a philosophy the truth was there were the conservatives who hated that argument. Now the conservatives have adopted it. There is no one truth. This is a pretty cynical game in my view that is all aimed at what you just described, which is discrediting the Mueller Investigation for the audience that matters, which is the Republican Base and the senators and House Members who are elected by that base who are going to eventually decide potentially on an Impeachment Motion and more importantly, a conviction in the senate which requires twothirds. Kasie, can we go back to giuliani for just a minute . Sure. When he was talking with chuck on the program this morning, he was i think trying to say that jim comey says the
president told him to layoff mike flynn and the investigation. And the president says, no, i never said that. So hes saying, well, there is no truth. But that means there are two sides to a story, but there is truth. One of those people is telling the truth and one of those people is not telling the truth. Or maybe theyre both lying and there is a third version, but there is something that actually happened. There is truth. When mayor giuliani does what he does today, it is as ken says, an effort to muddy everything, and to discredit, as opposed to what he did as a prosecutor, which was to get at the truth. And just as an aside, you know who does that and is masterful at it . The russian government and russian intelligence services. That is their whole game against the west. You cant believe what you see in the media. Theres relativism. Its what aboutism, theres no truth. They do it all the time. Now the right, the altright is adopting that in our politics. Mark lauder, one last word response or you prefer we move along . I think there is, there is some relative we have to take a look at. I think we all, we all hold a certain amount of blame in this. Ill go back in october of, of last year where and ill pull it off here. The George PapadopoulosPlea Agreement was significantly enormous. It was more problematic than the gates and manafort indictments. He had already given up four other people. Those were all things that were being talked about for 24 7 on cable news after the fact of a plea deal. Now we know this week it was all insignificant. So weve got to be careful when we get into areas of prognosticating what we think is going to happen and what things mean and we find out the facts later are wrong. Is that true . I wouldnt say its insignificant. I think he didnt cooperate. At the end of the day they couldnt trust what he said. At the end of the day we had his
email and phones. They know about his interaction with the russians and they know who in the campaign he shared information who had Hillary Clintons emails. That is an argument to wait for Robert Mueller and the team to gather the facts and present conclusions while the president s team is clearly trying to prejudice exactly what American Voters feel about those conclusions before any of us have them. We should move on now. Meanwhile, President Trump and his legal team are firing back at the New York Times after the paper reported White House Counsel Don Mcgahn has been cooperating stenson. Little with Robert Muellers inquiry. The paper reports, President Trumps lawyers do not know just how much the white House Counsel, donald mcgahn, told the special counsels investigators during months of interviews. Mr. Mcgahns lawyer has offered only a limiting limited accounting of what mr. Mcgahn told the investigators. According to two people close to the president. That has prompted concern among mr. Trumps advisors that mr. Mcgahns statements could help serve as a key component for a damning report by the
special counsel Robert Mueller. Heres Rudy Giuliani again on Meet The Press this morning. John dowd yesterday said, ill use his words rather than mine, that mcgahn was a strong witness for the president. So i dont need to know much more about that. They dont have collusion or conspiracy as brennan pointed out. And how do you know that . You say this so definitively. How do you know they dont . I know they dont because, look, this whole mcgahn thing leaked from them. If they had, if they had some kind of evidence that there was collusion or there was obstruction, dont you think it would have been leaked . I mean, they leak everything else. Ken dilanian, what in your view is the significance of what we now know about the mcgahn testimony . And while, yes, the white house had been arguing as recently as this morning that they were fine with it, there were still information down in that story the first story at the times, mcgahn thought he was
potentially being set up. That was a jawdropping story. If they were fine with it they didnt read the story carefully. It made clear don mcgahn sees himself as the white House Counselor lawyer protecting t office of the presidency and not donald trump. He thought he was trying to set him up. He made the decision to cooperate with Robert Mueller. Went in there three times, 30 hours of interviews, and the white house does not know what he said. The story suggested that he talked about those episodes where trump was pressuring him to fire mueller and he was resisting because he knew it was improper. That could be damaging. Hes the only witness that can give mueller this sort of intimate details of those exchanges. Could be very important. Dan balls, were you surprised by this, the john dean comparison in particular. Youve seen this arc play out. Thats a pretty striking historical comparison. It is. To have the white House Counsel in a sense cooperating fully, even if blessed by the white house initially with the special prosecutor, and now to recognize
as they seem to tonight or earlier today that they didnt really know everything that he had to say. Puts him in a very difficult position. I think it is a reminder the president s legal counsels throughout this, not the white House Counsel, but his personal, have not served him well. Almost from start to finish. And whether it was the original team or now mayor giuliani, things are said, things are done and they come back and they cause them problems at the end. So this, i think, this has to be very worrisome. We dont know whether he will turnout to have been a good witness for the president or whether he will have undermined the president. But if you are in the president s situation right now and you dont fully know what happened between those two, youve got a problem. Has to be nail biting to say the least. All right. We have a lot more to come tonight. Historian john meacham is going to stop by to offer his wit and wisdom. Also going to be joined by congressman Eric Swalwell and
congresswoman karen bass. First, a segment we call ken dilanian explains it all. Well talk about whats going to happen in Paul Manaforts trial. Thats up next on kasie d. C. Lets do this. Ugh were gonna be late, were gonna be late hold on, dont worry, theres another way [siri beep beepa] directions to the greek theater. Can i get a connection . Can i get can i get a connection . I can see it in my, see it in my reflection. Ohhh can i get a connection . Tryna find the old me man 1 this is my body of proof. Woman 1 proof of less joint pain. Woman 2 . And clearer skin. Woman 3 this is my body of proof. Man 2 proof that i can fight psoriatic arthritis. Woman 4 . With humira. Woman 5 humira targets and blocks a specific source of inflammation that contributes to both joint and skin symptoms. Its proven to help relieve pain,
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