Ive got these calendars, these beautiful, creepy calendars. Give me a can of water. My god, it is classic saturday night live. Welcome to morning joe on this monday, october 1st. We made it to october. Donny deutsch is with us and we also have National Affairs analyst for nbc news and msnbc and cohost and executive producer of show times the circus John Heilemann, former aide to the george w. Bush white house and state departments elise jordan. Nbc news chief White House Correspondent hallie jackson, former u. S. Attorney and msnbc contributor Barbara Mcquaid and former assistant director of the fbis Counterintelligence Division frank figlusi. Mika has this morning off. John heilemann, lets start with you. Theres so much that happened this weekend. We could talk about, of course, the fbi investigation, the debate over how wide that fbi investigation is going to be. Democrats complaining the president saying you do whatever you want to do, of course, kanye wearing a make America Great again cap on saturday night live and actually my favorite moment of the weekend i kind of got moved. You know im a romantic guy. Donald trump saying we fell in love. Yeah. Not of kanye, not of kanye, but of kim jongun. Please, everybody, this morning at 6 01 a. M. , please just try to imagine what would happen if bra rack Hussein Obama had said the same thing while president of the United States. But i digress. Talk about what happened first of all on friday after we went off the air. Flake and coons they make a deal. Im curious do you see this as sort of like, you know, after world war ii began they talked about a phoney war. Is this a phoney piece that democrats and republicans find themselves in or is there a positive coming out of it . Well, theres a couple things. I mean, i think most people probably familiar with what happened in some sense, you had jeff flake who came out in the morning and said that he was going to be voting for judge kavanaugh and then over the course of that morning in the Judiciary Committee and being confronted in that elevator by two victims of sexual assault, came back and cut talked to principally to chris coons and his other colleagues and they ended up giving this accommodation to give a week of supplemental investigation by the fbi. In that moment i think there is no doubt that there were a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, in fact, who were a little queasy about the notion of fast tracking the kavanaugh nomination, having a vote today, a final vote today or tuesday. Huge test vote over the weekend. Begin the emotions and drama of thursdays hearing to kind of john, everybody that was screaming on thursday, even Lindsey Graham was using an inside voice and smiling. Everybody it seemed overnight had changed, at least in their temperament. I think a lot of people were emotionally runni emotionally wrung out. I felt there was bitterness on both sides, still a lot of acrimony on the democratic and republican side. People trying to wrecken with what happened on the previous day. I think senator flake eventually kind of crystallized this notion that something weve been saying on this show and many people have been saying for weeks which is these are irreconcilable versions of event and due process demanded at least another week and at least to look into some of these accusations that have been brought against judge kavanaugh for the sake of judge kavanaugh as well as the sake of the accuser. So you got this moment pause. I think were going to have a big debate i think on an hourly basis Going Forward over what the scope of that investigation is going to be, democrats are already unhappy with it, they think its too limited, you have Dianne Feinstein demanding that the white house put forward the parameters of the investigation, what is the fbi exactly been asked to investigate. Youve had representations of that made in the press, sometimes in public. Lindsey graham on television yesterday. I do think that thats going to be an acrimonious debate. I will say this, whether its theres this is going to be the debate, this a fig leaf thats being created here or is this a genuine factfinding inquiry. The biggest problem of it as your friend over the weekend, i was with joyce vance at the austin festival, she made the point that when an fbi does an investigation like this it has a client, there is a client for the work product. Right. And the client in this case is don mcgahn at the white house, the white house counsel. It is also the case that the white house and the White House Counsel Don Mcgahn are the chief advocates on the part of judge kavanaugh. So they are both the clients for the work product and the main sponsors of the nomination and so, therefore, you have an inherent conflict built into this process and i think that conflict is going to be played out and teased out over the days to come. Well, i mean, everybody knew, frank, that was the case from the very beginning. Everybody knew that was going to be the case because its a white house that orders it up. Right now we have a lot of complaints coming in that this is only a week, which of course i think is laughable because everybody was saying, lets just get a week, so democrats got a week and now people are rubbing their hands together going a week is not enough, this is a sham, other people are suggesting that the scope be expanded. I dont know how far you expand the scope when you only have a week to investigate, but those were the parameters that were agreed to and it seems to me that if you just take the dr. Ford incident that she alleges happens and you take the five witnesses that were there and then you take the yale incident and try to get the five, six, seven, eight people who were there, i dont know, does the fbi have more time to do a good job expanding beyond that scope . I mean, we could try to track down everybody over the next seven days, but it seems to me that the time limit and the accusations in front of the committee required that they did limit the scope and do a good job just on these two incidents. Am i wrong . So its not the time limit, its not the time limit thats troubling me the most, joe. The fbi is capable of Amazing Things because of the resources they can surge in a limited amount of time. The thing thats really bothering me two things really is the incredible constraints that are being put on the fbi by the white house. Were making certain assumptions here this morning and the assumptions are wrong. The assumption that the fbi is going to have free reign within what theyve beens tasked to do. Look at ramirez, you make an assumption youre going to interview all of the witnesses to the ramirez incident, youre going to run down every name she provides you, youre going to go to yale and find people who were living in the dorm at the time. Thats not happening. The fbi is not only dictating who you can interview, but also what investigative steps you can take within that allegation. So, for example, this morning we still dont have any word that dr. Ford is even on the list of people to be interviewed. In fact, were hearing from sources its the opposite. That her statement is always is already on record, we dont need to hear from her again. Thats a terrible mistake to be made and i want the public to understand can i ask you just for a second, frank, do you have inside information that the rest of us dont have or is this more of a question of transparency, we need the white house to be more transparent, we need don mcgahn to be more transparent because we really dont know exactly what the parameters are right now . The only thing i saw quoted overnight was this senior federal official talking about the limits. Youve got people inside the white house saying that they dont have those constraints. Do you have information that it is that limited . Joe, i am here sitting here this morning telling you they are severely limited and i know they are and i know theres frustration and i know that the bureau is going to have to come back for every request that they want to add to a very, very short list. The fbi has been handcuffed and the clock is ticking on this artificial oneweek deadline. Frank, is that based on your sourcing . Yes. Okay. So, donny, if, in fact, the fbi has been handcuffed by Donald Trumps white house and by don mcgahn, well, at the end of the day it doesnt buy them what they wanted to it doesnt get them what they wanted to get when they were all talking positively about a oneweek extension, an fbi investigation, because then the story is just going to be about what the fbi was not allowed to do. Yeah, and if kavanaugh gets pushed through we will be in the same place had we not had an fbi investigation. A place that longterm is concerning to me from it was interesting over the weekend my 15yearold daughter was telling me that a bunch of her friends told her for the first time about assaults and my 89yearold mother was telling me stories that her friends had told her never before. Youre going to have half of this country or the majority of the women in this country feeling so angry, so violated because at this point Going Forward why does a woman come forward . This is to me so beyond politics. If you listen to anybody talk this weekend it was about women and about how women feel. To me youre going to have a stained Supreme Court, you are going to have women feeling almost worse than before the me too movement. How does that play out in november . How does that play out Going Forward . And also, you know, the Supreme Court was one of the last institutions that was not stained. Weve seen whats happened with the office of presidency, weve seen whats happened with the fbi, with the media, everybody is kind of like dumped on, and now for an entire generation of women Going Forward they will not be able to look at the Supreme Court the same way, particularly post that kavanaugh performance that as a man i was embarrassed for him. It was the ultimate display of white entitlement. Theres one more point. As i talked to men over the weekend i find that the higher you go on the income curve the more men are like, you know, well, we all did this, we all did this in one form or another. Still not getting it. Women are getting it and i find the lower you go on the income curve men are getting it. But this does not move us at all any forward as far as indict ld men. I think the stakes are beyond politics, it goes way into where we stand as the genders. So elise jordan, let me follow up on what donny said. Before on thursday and friday everybody i talked to was talking about how they believed dr. Ford and kavanaugh was horrible and he should be driven out to sea and put on a tugboat and never be allowed to return to the continental United States again. I was surprised over the weekend to actually talk to men and women who i havent seen anything like this in quite a while. They would sit there and then they would question the veracity of dr. Fords story and then seamlessly they would Start Talking about how Brett Kavanaugh was a liar and then they would start attacking democrats and then they would start attacking republicans. You almost wanted to throw i couldnt figure out whether they were republicans, whether they were democrats, whether they wanted kavanaugh to go through, whether they thought dr. Ford was a, quote, fabulous, which i certainly nobody here would ever say she was, but there was just a general frustration that do you know what it reminded me of . The duke lacrosse case where there were no good guys, good girls, bad guys, good girls, women, et cetera, et cetera. It was just everybody was negative about everything. Joe, i think youre honing in on an important part of this debate, which is facts versus feelings and how its become so super charged and 20 of america took time out from their day on thursday to watch these hours and hours of searing testimony, just emotional and raw. I know that i cried during both of the testimonies. It was just one of those moments where everyone knows how they feel and theyre thinking a lot about how they feel, and we just still are not sure what the facts are. Thats why i do think it is important that they have launched this oneweek investigation, its a bipartisan agreement. The democrats forged this agreement with senator flake and republicans are going along with it. So to move the goal post too dramatically seems unfair to immediately launch into dis crediting the investigation that was a pinnacle of questioning for the democrats during judge kavanaughs testimony. And i agree. I think the democrats are making mistakes if they are every single day picking apart the fbi investigation 12 hours, 24 hours into the investigation. I think what Dianne Feinstein did was certainly more than called for, demand transparency, demand to know what the fbi can investigate, what they cannot investigate. If there are fbi agents, as drank said, that believe that theyre being handcuffed from being able to really figure out what happened, that needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed right away. Thats something hopefully that people will figure out. We can figure out early this morning as the week starts. Barbara, let me go to you, and i want to touch on something that elise, she talked about facts versus feelings. I think most of the people that we talked to as far as feelings go, almost everybody i talked to had positive, quote, feelings about dr. Ford. Some people were offended by what Brett Kavanaugh said, others were very moved by Brett Kavanaughs Opening Statement. But Rachel Mitchell wrote a letter that we all got ahold of last night talking about how dr. Ford, despite the feelings that so many feel for her testimony, but dr. Ford said that evidence does support claims against kavanaugh. Let me ask you about that because those that i did speak to this weekend that questioned dr. Fords testimony just kept going back to the same thing that probably prosecutors would go back to, which is, you know, that everybody that she mentioned at the scene said it didnt happen, and it wasnt just because they were intimidated by Brett Kavanaugh, even her longtime friend who she claims was there with her said she wasnt there with her. Thats certainly something that Rachel Mitchell seized on. Im curious what you thought about Rachel Mitchells conclusion and what you think as a prosecutor generally about dr. Fords story three, four days after the testimony. Yeah, the issue isnt so much Rachel Mitchells conclusion as it is to the question and the premise. There is either an unintentional or a deliberate effort to frame this as a criminal prosecution when, in fact, it is not. It is much more akin to a job interview. In a criminal prosecution the standard is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and a presumption of innocence. By that standard shes right, you could not prove a case here. Others have said you couldnt get a warrant because there is no probable cause here. That may be true, but thats not the issue. The issue is is this the person that you want to put on our u. S. Supreme court. If these allegations had come up earlier, before he had been nominated, i am certain he never would have been nominated because you would say, even if this isnt true, if its just a credible allegation, we dont need that distraction. Weve got this long list of potential candidates. Lets put one of them on the court. Instead were locked in this spot where regardless of what happens if hes on or if hes off theres going to be these bad feelings as you talked b but i think if hes on it could besmirch the court. You just said, though, even if this is not true, but thats what were trying to get to the bottom of. Even if this is not true. And i agree with you, i actually think that if you just look at that moment where he was with senator klobuchar and the poor temperament that he showed there, there were a couple other moments, too, where it does not seem that he was being honest and straightforward about some very simple, some very basic things about getting into yale and not having any connections there and some of the terms that he tried to tried to put different meanings to. Some real concerns are iz raed there. But the fbi is trying to get as much information about what happened and what did not happen. It does matter, doesnt it, a great deal about whether anybody can figure out whether this happened or not . Well, if we are going to persist in the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and not withdraw his name for these other reasons, including those that you mentioned, then, yes, i go he is it does matter if the senate is going to make a decision. The big part of it is millions of women are watching and saying if this is true does it matter . Figuring out whether its true is the first step in that. Its concerning that, as frank says, the fbi is feeling handcuffed in this instance. One would hope even if theyve been given an initial list of witnesses that they be permitted to go back and get permission to follow any leads that may emerge from there. If they talk to the people present at the scene and they say you know who else is present at the scene is person x that they be permitted to talk to person x. Thats a very important thing. I am hopeful that that list of four or whatever it is is only an initial list and that they be permitted to conduct any necessary followup investigation that they have to ordinarily the fbi isnt told who you get to talk to, theyre given a topic and theyre permitted to have free reign to decide who they need to talk to feel that they have fully investigated that topic. Hallie, what can you tell us about the president s attitude towards this fbi investigation . Obviously this weekend when democrats were complaining he tweeted out that he wanted the fbi to do, you know, whatever the fbi wanted to do. Right. Follow whatever leads you wanted to follow. That also sarah sanders, i believe, repeat