America the battle for our better angels, jon meacham, coeditor ignatius and former u. S. Attorney for the Northern District of alabama and msnbc contributor, joyce vance. Jon meacham, before we get to rudy tells us that the truth is not the truth and perhaps what the meaning of is or is not, i wanted to ask you where we always talk about turning points in this Trump Administration and many people believe that well never have a turning point. Trump is just going to plow through one thing after another. But you had a lot of people comparing what happened with admiral mcraven this past weekend with what happened to the mccarthy hearings when welch finally said, sir, have you no shame. How impactful do you think admiral mcravens comments were and the response to that . I think they were essential. I think they speak incredibly well of the admiral and of that Broader National Security community that i think signed a letter, bob gates among others, people who are, in fact, standing up and saying that as george h. W. Bush said in other context, this will not stand. My fear is that to link these two themes that in a world where the tag line of the administration is there are alternative facts, truth is not truth, that the great underlining democratic, lower case d crisis is have we reached a point where the party in power has so devalued the kind of statesmanship, the kind of articulation, the kind of principle, and i dont mean to be overly grand about it, but what the admiral was writing about was a principled view, take away mine, please. That would be the badge of honor. I want to be with the guys you are against. That says an enormous amount about where we are. How effective that is . Will that penetrate the 45 or so of the trump folks who seem to be enthralled to this particular man and this particular style of politics i just dont know. I hope it does. Remember it took mccarthy four years to rise and fall from lincolns birthday in 1950 until that moment with joseph welch. That was 1954. And there are a couple of people who will be able to say they were Margaret Chase smith, they were there early and there are a lot of people who are going to be trying to rewrite history. Very few, though, are going to be able to say they were Margaret Chase smith in the Republican Party. David ignatius, the Intel Community has proven itself time and time again to put america first. You look what Donald Trumps own appointees are saying, dan coats is saying, the director of National Intelligence and also what people like bob gates have been saying and people like general hayden have been saying. General hayden touched on it several months ago that its not a coincidence that donald trump is attacking the Intel Community, that hes attacking journalists, that hes attacking people in academia, that hes attacking science. He attacks factbased operations. People who make their living and who live to gather facts and to put together the reality and of course the Intel Community has facts about not only the last campaign but about Vladimir Putin that drive donald trump obviously crazy. He has his war on facts and he has his war on the Intel Community. Joe, these are people who pride themselves on being the ultimate, sometimes the last professionals in government. The people who insist on speaking truth no matter what, who will tell president s the vietnam war isnt going well, sir. Who will tell president s the Afghanistan War isnt working. Your strategy isnt going to work. This is an agency that celebrates that and has traditionally. Its also an agency that likes to get on with it. And so the very Public Comments by former Agency Officials i think are awkward for people who basically like to keep their heads down and do their jobs. You said in the beginning, joe, that maybe this was a Tipping Point. I didnt know if with that admiral mcraven statement, the statements by george tenant, bob gates, two former cia directors, people who have tended to want to be out of this fray and have been holding back decided they couldnt do it any longer, that the situation was getting so serious that they had to speak up before it was too late. There was a little bit of that sense that were really accelerating now toward dangerous outcomes, so people began to speak. To me in the end, this is going to come down to the American Public in two ways. We have a juror of 12 americans thats in recess coming back today thats going to decide the first of special counsel bob muellers cases. Its a crucial case. And if they come back as a hung jury or without a decisive conviction, donald trump will be able to say, see, i told you. This is a witch hunt. And now here the jury agrees with me. And then we have the Midterm Elections obviously coming in november. So in some ways i think this story now moves to the country at large. How are people processing this . But you certainly do see among the elite opinion, what i thought was a Tipping Point with this removal of brennans security clearances. Very interesting you talk about bob gates. Andrea mitchell, bob gates, an example of a man who really has seen more, done more than most anybody else in modern american politics. Hes worked for republicans and democrats alike. And robert gates i remember before the election was a man who did not support donald trump at all but mika and i remember having a private conversation with him and he said the same thing that general hayden said privately, which was we only have one president at a time. Exactly. And we have to do everything we can do to make donald trump a successful president. We have no other choice. And so thats why when you see bob gates finally speaking out, it carries the tremendous impact that it does. It does. And just to reenforce what that letter said, that had the signatures of bob gates and judge william webster. These are not political people. These are career people. Judge webster went from the federal judiciary to the fbi and then the cia, held in such high regard a man in his 90s who has never spoken out like this, ever, and ive known him for more than three decades. These are the people so unusual on that list, to reenforce the point that it was a breaking point. These are people who usually keep their heads down and do not enter the spray. And they said in that letter that they are not entirely comfortable with everything that has been said, with everything that john brennan said, but they felt that the plitization of the security clearance process and the threat that that could potentially pose for current officials, which would be career ending for any of them including bruce orr, the midlevel justice official who is now under threat rhetorically from the president. That is what caused them to sign this letter. Yeah. And were going to be talking at 7 00 to three of the original signees of that letter. Were looking forward to that. But for now, lets talk about President Trumps personal attorney Rudy Giuliani pushing falsehoods and the new position of the Trump Legal Team about the president s top Campaign Aides meeting with russians in june of 2016. So, here is rudy on meet the press yesterday. The meeting was originally for the purpose of getting information about clinton. The meeting turned into a meeting which in itself is attempted collusion. No, its not. You just said. It was intended to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from a kremlin lawyer. No, it wasnt. 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 about another subject and it was not pursued at all. And of course any meeting with regard to getting any information on your opponent is something any candidates staff would take. If someone said i have information about your opponent, you would take that meeting. If it happens to be from the russian government . She didnt represent the russian government. Shes a private citizen. I dont even know if they knew she was russian at the time. Okay. So, sometimes its a close call. Sometimes you can just say he was lying. Rudy was lying. Those claims are blatantly false given the emails that donald trump jr. Posted more than a year ago which he was told the woman offering dirt on clinton was, quote, the crown prosecutor of russia. The russian attorney the russian government attorney and, quote, part of russia and its Government Support for mr. Trump. Joyce vance, im not exactly sure what it gains the president of the United States to continue having his attorney go out telling one lie after another after another. Of course, after trump jr. Learned that this top prosecutor, this member of the russian government was coming to meet him and manafort and kushner and the entire gang, of course he was thrilled. So they knew this coming in. Im not exactly sure how it helps donald trump to have Rudy Giuliani lying a year later. Increasingly giuliani and the president are playing to the court of Public Opinion because they know that theyll lose in a court of law. Well watch that happen this week in alexandria where this jury, if they base their decision in the law and the evidence will return verdicts of guilty against Paul Manafort. So, giuliani is, i think, at this point simply trying to feed a false narrative to the American Public. Truth is not truth. Dont trust what your eyes and your ears tell you. Instead, trust the cult of personality thats become trump because they know bad news will come in the form of a report from mueller sooner or later whether its before or after the election. They wont be able to survive the content of that report if its anything like what were hearing publicly. And theyre only hope is to lie to the American People. And i think what we all have to do at this point is hope that the American People will demonstrate the backbone that they have over time that jon meacham talks about so many times and find the courage to go with the truth and not with the cult of personality here. Yeah, but Michael Schmidt, though, it seems that theres been the law of diminishing returns has applied to Rudy Giulianis performances on these sunday shows because there was a month or two where you could see muellers approval numbers with the American People going down and Donald Trumps going up. But basically theyve reversed and theyre exactly where they were six, nine months ago. So Robert Mueller has become a more trusted figure, donald trump has become a less trusted figure and donald trump wins or Robert Mueller wins in a landslide basically just about every question you ask the American People on polls. So im wondering whether rudys obvious lies are actually backfiring even with Trump Supporters. Im not sure if its changing things with Trump Supporters. Their calculations several months ago was the legal issues essentially dont matter because they dont think the president is going to be charged. So what can duo to try to impact the house of representatives . Thats the only exposure the president has of vote on impeachment. How can we make this confusing . How can we muddy the waters . Thats what they were trying to do when they brought giuliani on. And the president apparently is still happy with him because the president believes he needs advocates out there, giuliani is willing to do several shows a day and go out and push this message. And the president believes he actually does it better than anyone else in his team. At the same time, theres people around the president who say, look, this is not good that we have all these falsehoods coming out from the president s lawyer. Like, this is going to backfire in the end. But they still havent changed their strategy. The president had two strategies so far on the investigation. The first one through the first several months was cooperate, eventually got sick of it. Its now going to be antagonistic. Its hard to believe hell move off of that and thats where he is for now. But jon meacham, Everybody Knows, Everybody Knows that Rudy Giuliani is lying, even trump. The most hard core trump supporter knows that hes lying. And when Rudy Giuliani says Something Like the truth isnt the truth, then republicans immediately go back to bill clinton saying it depends on what the meaning of is. I just again, i dont understand even if youre a day trader how this helping donald trump. Its just were through the looking glass. Giuliani seems to be that giuliani is not doing anything that he doesnt think trump wants him to do. You can hear donald trump saying it. Particularly with all this john dean stuff this weekend, i have this image of where you have the old image of nixon talking to the portraits. I see trump talking to mirrors and rudy. You know, hes just wandering around talking to himself and creating this. And i think michael is right. I think insofar as anything is strategic about this operation, which may be a gran diezing it a good bit, it has the effect is exactly this, that theyve created an atmosphere of kind of political equivalent of climate change. Its extreme weather. The press broadly put, director mueller, the facts say x. They are going to say y. And take their chances that the right number of folks and the right number of electoral states agree with them. And to me in many ways its the most pernicious part of the entire era is the enemy of the people stuff about the media and the attempt really its not even an attempt at this point, but the assumption that you simply can fool enough of the people enough of the time to maintain this temporal hold on power. And its a cynical exercise from the very top. It starts with trump. It eradiates to a couple of these other, forgive me, new york tabloid figures. And because of an underlying anxiety in the country, it has worked nationally. Or at least deeply enough sectionally that were going to have to deal with it. Its why the midterms tell us so much. And you know, you get a certain number history is not going to reward mayor Rudy Giuliani for the way he spent his sundays in 2017 and 2018. No. It will be quite harsh. We are so far beyond remember we used to get a couple of these, like the definition of is you used a minute ago. A thirdrate burglary. Were getting these now with such repetitive that it will hard to keep up when you put these things on coffee mugs. Cant wait to look at the coffee mug cases to see all of the quotes. Maybe they can some will be in russian. The russian ones will be great. Yeah, of course. As you always say, they read best in their original russian. But the thing is that i just cant understand is it doesnt its not helping with the American People anymore. Donald trumps Approval Ratings have dropped. Hes down at about 40 . Carol lee, this has to be hurting trumps case with Robert Mueller. Its not like mueller is being persuaded by this. So if the public is not being persuaded by it and mueller is not being moved by it at all, then you basically have one of Donald Trumps lawyers lying repeatedly in public, which again has to hurt him whether its on obstruction or in some other areas. Yeah. You know, you can see that even in this instance the president is just zeroing in on that narrow base that he has, his supporters. And thats where hes kind of targeting. And those folks, you know, dont mind this. And if you look at how Rudy Giuliani kind of tied himself into knots yesterday in answering todds questions, he was making the latest argument for why the president shouldnt have to sit for an interview with Robert Mueller. And hes saying, james comey will have his facts or his truth. And hell tell one story and the president has another. And that was part of the argument that this would be a potential perjury trap for the president. And then you saw him argue that Robert Mueller has had interviews for 30plus hours as Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman reported with don mcgahn so why would he need to talk to the president. And weve seen him say hes theres bias in the investigation and so thats the reason why he doesnt need to sit and talk to the president. And so youve seen them its almost like throwing spaghetti on the wall strategy and seeing what sticks. So far at least its managed to work with again the president s narrow base of supporters. Right, very narrow base of supporters. And of course the president was tweeting all weekend about this as well. And i have so many people asking me what i think about whats going on and is this working, are people believing it . Again, you just look at political history. Hes a 40 president. President s with 40 Approval Ratings, my gosh, with reelects in the low 30s and the very states that