Facts of life in case you missed the last episode, sean spicer resigned because of Anthony Scaramucci, who then pushed out Reince Priebus, which opened the door to john kelly, who then muched out pushed out the mooch. Welcome to morning joe. With us we have former aide to the george w. Bush white house elise jordan, steve kornacki, former Communications Director for ted cruzs campaign, rick tyler, sam stein and willies back. Good god where you have been . I was away, i was across the street. The last time i was here, Anthony Scaramucci was not even a glimmer in our eye. What you have missed and in what a short amount of time. Our top story this morning really crystallizes the challenge for the new chief of staff. Well begin with the report that says President Trump overruled his closest advisers including family members when it came to the new york city about the story about donald trump jr. And russian advisers. Its really important for everyone to really keep in mind here the Biggest Issue may be the president himself. That may be the biggest challenge. The Washington Post citing multiple sources with direct knowledge reporting that the misleading foursentence statement was personally dictating by the president flying home from the g20 summit on july 8. Think about it. He gets away from everybody, theres attorneys, theres everybody wants to talk to him, gets on a plane and overrules his inner circle, his kids. According to the post, president ial adviser and soninlaw Jared Kushners lawyers knew how damaging it could be. Hope hicks director of Strategic Communications advocated for a different approach. They say kushners team talked about sharing everything, including the contents of the emails with the mainstream news organizations. Hicks reportedly also spoke by phone with trump jr. About the transparency of the strategy, believing the complete story would eventually emerge. But as they boarded air force one, the president apparently intervened, demanded that he describe the meeting as unimportant, that it was initiated by the russian lawyer and primarily was about her the adoption of russian children. According to people with knowledge of the discussions, attorney for President Trump, john dowd called the story fakeness, incorrect and misinformed of no consequence. And another lawyer used similar language. Willie, take it to the table. It seems to me that if this is true and if this is double and triple sourced at this point, for the president to say lets just tell them this is about an adoption and it will go away, its not smart strategically. It answers the question as youre reading in great detail of the Washington Post. What raised suspicion is the campaign doesnt generally take meetings about policy issues because youre trying to run a campaign. He had secured the nomination but he was still running against hillary clinton. There was no chance he was going to take an issue. This is a fivehour plane ride coming back from the g20. The entire staff is consumed in this inconsequential, meaningless meeting. Then you have the president s lawyer, who apparently went out and lied for the president or the president is lying to his lawyer about the nature of the meeting. And on top of that, steve kornacki, there are serious questions that bob mueller might have about the president drafting this, if he did. If you lie to the press, can you certainly pay a deep political price but generally its not a crime to lie to the press. If you think back to president clinton saying i did not have sex with that woman, its when he lies under oath. In terms of whats on the record right now, theres probably not any legal jeopardy. Elise, what would you be interested in if you were looking at the president , including his team for russia and you see perhaps inconsistencies starting from the president drafting a statement . I think it just goes back to the question why is President Trump himself so involved in how the response is moving forward . Why is he so consumed with what the response is going to be when it comes to this russia investigation and what is it that is out there that he is so worried about surfacing that he has a oneonone with putins translator at the g20 . Just at the end of the day theres that big cloud of why does President Trump address putin and russia in any terms . The other day putin said hes going to ban offver 700 employe at the u. S. Embassy in moscow, not a peep from donald trump. Since when does he not respond to a slight. This for many my provide some hope, some order here, maybe people will report to somebody before they go straight to the president and maybe there will be organization inside the white house. Then you see what happens when this president gets off on his phone with his phone or with his family, things happen, sam stein. Keep in mind, this happened before general kelly or john kelly was chief of staff. I do think youre pointing out Something Interesting, though. When you unceremoniously fire and get rid of your chief of staff, there is the possibility they might come around and bite you. Im not saying theyre responsible for the Washington Post story but you have to wonder what kind of stuff they can tell the press. Im also struck by what willie said, which is theres sort of like this ham fistedness to all of this, this utter lack of discretion from the trump team about how theyre handling all of this that is just puzzling to me. The coverup is just so poorly executed that its just raising all these suspicions. Why is he in there crafting that statement . Why is he talking to putin so much in why is he firing comey . I mean, everything hes doing leads a casual observer to say whats going on here . Something must be happening. Im wondering why theyre so bad at being discrete. It raises the question again and again, to elises point, whenever it comes to russia, theres always cloud and smoke, never a clearcut answer. And if this was an innocent meeting, why do you have this meeting with the president of the United States in the cabin of air force one. Just say its about adoption. If its a nothing meeting, just say what its about. Just put it out there, say what it was about. If Nothing Happened in the meeting, just say what happened. Their current line is this is something that is so rudimentary and benign that every campaign is interested in opposition research. In thats the ca if thats the case, why even go through the first step of attaching it to adoption policy . Why conducoct some excuse of th . But in is what the president would have done when he was in charge of trump tower. They would say, we have it planned out, here it is and hed say no, no, were going to do this. Jared kushner and ivanka and his lawyers wanted to be transparent and the president just overruled it and blew it up. I also think it very interesting about the russian angle to all this because remember, President Trump had an offtherecord meeting with Vladimir Putin. It went on for a long time. Vladimir putin is now taking action for the United States for what obama did as he was leaving the administration and throwing out their diplomats. Now he has finally responded because there was a promise made somewhere to putin that we will lift these sanctions and now that the congress has embarra embarrassi embarrassingly for the president taken that away. There was no american interpreter in that meeting. Putin could come out and say heres all the things we talked about, whether theyre true or not. I think thats dangerous. I think essentially this is the big story of date and the d could unfold into more questions and more answers. The or story we have to get to is the story of yesterday afternoon, which really does Say Something about the president as well that we have to try and understand. After just ten days on the job, white house i dont even was he sworn in . Was he cleared even . He was never cleared. White house Communications DirectorAnthony Scaramucci is gone. He was pushed out the same day the new chief of staff john kelly was sworn in, the wall street journal reports that shortly after taking the oath, the retired fourstar general urged scaramucci to resign. And scaramuccis profane remarks to the new yorker disgusted and offended the president. Jared and ivanka. This says melania and ivanka trump, who actually advocated for him were a little upset at his language, like it was new information. Take a look. Tcan you describe what he found inappropriate . I said inappropriate for a person in that position. Said what . I cant really explain it any further than that. She cant explain it because this president has a hard time with whats inappropriate, right . How do you define whats inappropriate for this president . Im more wondering, though, about the inner circle who pushed for scaramucci, lets just leave that story aside for now because its kind of sad. His job was to push out priebus and spicer, mission accomplished. That leaves steve bannon to represent the establishment. Sanders also made it clear that all staff will report to general kelly. So six months later they final le get they need a chief of staff that everybody gets in line behind, which could really help, you never know. I guess its never too late to lose hope, even as late as sunday evening scaramucci told Stephanie Ruhle, he believed the fallout from his new yorker int interview would blow over, but it was soon clear that mr. Scaramucci would not be a fixture of the administration but a transitory figure. And seemingly above the fray of it all, the president tweeted a great day at the white house. Do i understand him as saying they planned this . Nobody plans a mack track driving into the white house and spewing profanity. They certainly plan that. I have tired of the jared and ivanka spin machine that is constantly trying to portray them as all powerful and powerless. They have so much control yet they have no control. And i was really disgusted by ivankas tweet today saying she looked forward to working alongside general kelly. Alongside . Respect the chain of command in the white house. Respect someone who served half a century in the military. Maybe you could learn something. If anyone can rein in President Trump, it will be john kelly. Donald trump doesnt do a chain of command. If you think ivanka and jared arent going to have a direct line to their father and fatherinlaw, youre sorely mistaken. I hope that john kelly can do the job a chief of staff has done but ill believe it when i see it. When you do have here is one thing that i think is sort of customary in a white house pup have a new chief of staff coming in saying i want my own people and i want the authority. You go back to ronald reagan, the shortest previous record for chief of communication was eight days, this was six. A new communications was installed, then a new chief of staff, howard baker, came in. The old one was pushed out because don reagan and nancy reagan didnt get along. There is somewhat of a similar dynamics playing out with had one. The so opera dynamics with this one go back much farther. But the thing at the core that we are seeing here is i think something weve seen before, which is a chief of staff asserting himself early on and does raise a question of what will his authority look like a month from now. Im surprised to see a tweet to work alongside john kelly. Theres no one working alongside him. If you want your father to stop drafting statements that will get him into legal trouble, the Washington Post breaking the story, the exact quote is prosecutors typically assume that any misleading statement is an effort to throw investigators off track. This is like putting bread crumbs out for mule aeller and come this way, heres a little trail for you of all the things im going rogue with my family and with no experience to lead this country, instead were just going to try to get out of trouble we have made. They need someone in there to get all the people away from the president so he can focus on his job, sam stein, which right now if you look at the, what is it, ten failures in a row, many of them legislatlegislative, many political, some of them just morally embarrassing. Its time for the family to get out of the way. Once again, i agree with willie. Its a shock, two times in 20 minutes. How do you make an effective chain of command when you have family under the chain of command . Theres no way that ivanka and jared can take off their family hat and report to john kelly. This is part of what people were worried about when you hire family members for that type of gig. Again, the biggest enemy for trump is himself. So long as he can stop the tweeting and erratic behavior, maybe he has a chance to succeed. Kellys already making we have sources in the white house who are really encouraging him to go for it in terms of trying to found a democratic Republican Coalition for things like tax reform. But democrats feel like the well is poisoned a little bit here, that they cant really work with trump. And the truth of matter is that their base really doesnt want them to work with trump, too. Im not entirely confident having done reporting on this that were going to see some sort of showering with blossoming of bipartisan no. Think of republicans. Next hour we have republican senator jeff flake of arizona on the show. He has a new book out. In an excerpt he writes that the Republican Party is in denial about donald trump. And he writes in part this it was we conservative who is upon obamas election stated that our number one priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making obama a oneterm president. The corollary to this binary thinking being that his failure would be our success and the fortunes of the citizenry would be presumably sorted out in the meantime. It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on obamas legitimacy were embraced. We conservatives have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued to carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a suspicion of critical faculties and tremendous powers of denial. Jeff flake will be our guest later on in the show. What do you want to say . I want to say its about time someone is speaking up but jeff has been speaking up. Hes in there and hes assuming the speaking for conservatives and i think thats good because conservatives, in my mind, conservatives who are adhering to principle and not just party label and what trump calls winning, winning, winning, my question as a conservative is if you win, what do we win . I want to know what the policy advancements are when we win . Nothing is happening. The property. We the supreme court. Well, that wouldnt have happened without mcconnell. This president and his inner circle, why in the world what would they want to accomplish by at this point trying to do anything for this administration. You look at how President Trump treats those who are most loyal to him. Its been crazy over the last couple of weeks to watch Jeff Sessions of alabama become a sympathetic figure who is suddenly this righteous arbiter of law and order to the left just because he has been so under attack by his former best friend and alltime supporter donald trump. So if thats the kind of treatment you can expect if you will not literally walk the plank for donald trump, then why make that risk and go in with him . Remember, theres a personnelmepersonnel me element on the jeff flake, front. President trump has said he has a personal layer where trump said i will primary a republican, a vote i desperately need in the senate because i dont like the guy and he hasnt been nice to me. Well have more from senator flake when he joins us and well be joined also by senator bill cassidy, who was at the white house to revive momentum for blake and well talk to the former director of the government ethics office. Youre watching morning joe. Well be right back. Whoooo. 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Joining us from washington, associate editor of the Washington Post and msnbc political analyst eugene robinson.