Investigation. As several testified to what they witnessed in the Trump Administrations dealings with ukraine. During the hearings a new book was published from inside the Trump Administration. It is entitled kate a warning. And the same person wrote an oped last year saying donald trump must not be ler reelected. The times identified the author as a Senior Trump Administration official. In the new book the author says conservatives dreaming donald trump is our savior needs to wake up. Not only is he not a conservative, he represents a longterm threat to the republican party. Those cheering him onto a secondterm with foaming at the mouth excitement that he is totally owning the left are unknowingly nailing coffins into the gop. The author admits to being wrong in 2018 when the author claimed that a quiet resistance inside the administration was keeping donald trump in check. Elected bureaucrats and cabinet appointees were never going to steer donald trump in the right direction in the long run or refine his malignant management style. If donald trump is reelected anonymous predicts the guardrails will be gone entirely and free from the threat of defeat this president will feel doubled down on his worst impulses. Heres how anonymous sees the stakes of the 2020 president ial election. We should see trumps acs as fireable offenses regardless of whether or not congress determines they are impeachable ones. If the president is reelected you can count on the fact that he will make other dishonest requests of foreign powers. No external force can ameliorate his attraction to wrongdoing. His presidency is continually jeopardized by it, and so are americas institutions. Joining our discussion now, neera tanden, president and ceo for the center for american progress. And joy reid is with us, host of am joy right here on msnbc. Thank you very much for joining us. Of course. This book its amazing it has been i wont say ignored, but it hasnt been able to get the kind of attention even the aumd piece got when it came out in the New York Times because this news landscape has been so filled with the hearings. But it certainly is an important background or for the hearings. Absolutely. And you know i think it is possible for these two things to be true. I think this person is a rank cowered for being announcement and refusing to put their name behind what theyre doing or if they still work in the administration to resign or come forward and then also right. Because the reality is the way countri countries descend into autocracy is because you have a leader who allow them to engage in rampant corruption, who participate in driving down the authority of the institutions theyre supposed to be in charge of, who cause foreign governments to get into corrupt deals with the leader of the country. Autocracy proceeds exactly the way Donald Trumps administration is proceeding. Because hes surrounded by a Political Party theres nothing to stop his autocratic impulses and got forbid he gets reelected this man will be unchecked. If he comes back in it will be vengeance and theft. Thats what he will be there for, vengeance and theft. Neera, theres more in the book about exactly this, actually. It quotes a group of high level advisers to the president talking, and they say about a third of the things the president wants us to do are flat out stupid. Another third would be impossible to implement and wouldnt even solve the problem. And a third of them would be flat out illegal, and all the heads nodded when that was said. That, by the way, accounts for 100 of the president s thoughts. Either illegal, impossible to implement or flat out stupid and maybe esome of them are all three. Yeah, and ukind of just hope for the stupid. I think actually what weve heard over the last couple of weeks with the impeachment inquiry or the investigation is a confirmation of that. You see and were learning more and more details and learned more and more details about how the president wanted to essentially engage in illegal behavior and cover it up. And so i think whats important about this book and i agree 100 with joy reid this person isnt a hero but perhaps just a little bit better of a person than the entire cot offense the republicans in the senate and house who are openly supporting the president and his illegal behavior. I do think it provides a window, an additional window into an administration in that in which some of its supporters believe this is all a show and he really does know what hes doing behind the scenes. And obviously this gives light to that. Theres a passage in the book that indicates donald trump is a very deliberate i was going to say criminal. But hes very deliberate when hes verging on criminal activities. So theres this passage saying we can tell when trump is preparing to ask his lawyers to do something unethical or foolish because thats when he starts scanning the room for note takers. What the eff are you doing at an aide who was scrimblibbling in notebook, are you taking notes, im sorry the aide said. His paranoia is the best evidence of a guilty conscience. And joy, there seems to be when you listen in the testimony in the hearings a real carefulness when hes threading the needle of illegalities with gordon sondland, for example, never saying exactly the words yes, this is i want them to do this. And then specifically according to sondland saying the words there is no quid pro quo, which he seemed to be reading off a cue card some lawyer had just given him because the whistleblower had already blown the whistle. There seems to be a real conscious instance about him. Absolutely. And Michael Cohen said the exact same thing. When he wants you to do something he and you both know is wrong he wont say do it but he makes clear to do it. Our friend has talked about Donald Trumps extensive use of the mob in terms of the buildings in new york and hes a m m m mobesque kind of person. Its as if he walks into a bank, stands up on the counter and says i am not robbing this bank but im going to need you all to go and empty everything thats in the vault into these bags, but im not robbing this bank. And he thinks because i said im not robbing this bank he isnt clear on bank robbery. Hes done this with all the transactions. Everybody knew what he wanted from zelensky. Everybody was read in. Its right there in the phone call. And then what they do is limit the access to the information what exactly was said. What they do with the real transcript is hide it. What has he said to vladimir putin, theres no read out. They hide that. What has he said to the Saudi Arabian dictator . We dont know. They hide the actual transcript and the notes and the note takers, the wheem who actually do take notes are the people who bust him. I want to read one more passage how he deals with the lawyers this from the book. Trumps first instinct is to force the answers he wants from his lawyers. He will berate them to their faces for not seeing the law the way he sees the law, and he cannot stand it when they tell him no, which they incidentally have to do all the time. Thats what is so concerning about his handling of government lawyers. Trump drives them to edge of whats reasonable or legal and then badgers them until they take the plunge, bringing the administration along for the fall. And neera, we certainly get that feeling from all the testimony weve heard in the Intelligence Committee where this was the president s idea with Rudy Giuliani probably to hold up this aid. And then he forces mulvaney to do it. He forces pompeo to go along with it. He forces everybody involved in this thing to go along. Yes. Obviously the book is confirming of what weve seen over the last several weeks, and actually obviously over the last several years. But i think whats really important about this book is it paints a picture of continual a continual desire to break the rules. And a central question before the house and eventually the senate is, you know, do we prescribe the president s behavior now or wait until the election . Republicans already are saying lets let the election decide this. Whats really crucial about this book is it shows donald trump will break the rules until hes stopped. He will engage in illegal activity until hes stopped. And if this doesnt stop him, we shouldnt just rely on him letting the election go, he will try to break the rules again. Thank you both for joining us tonight. Really appreciate it. And when we come back, president trumps lies about career officials in the government being part of some deep state scheming against him. Thats the topic of an important new book by pulitzer prizewinner james b. Stuart, he joins us next. And later itll be my honor to introduce the second woman in history to win the nobel prize in economics. She will tell us about the most important issues in the president ial campaign that we are all discussing every day and that the candidates discuss every day. Ay and that the candidates discuss every day. All the time. announcer when you have the best network, you wanna give the best network. Feliz navidad announcer this black friday weekend, you can give americas most Reliable Network and the latest iphone. Id probably give it to her grandparents so they can take tons of photos. My mom is amazing. If i got her one of these for christmas, shed be freaking out. announcer now through sunday, get up to 800 off the latest iphone when you switch. With plans starting at just 35 per line. squeals yeah, exciting. announcer happy holidays from the network that gives you more. Can you tell me the story again . Every family has their own unique story. Give your family the chance to discover theirs this holiday season, with ancestry. This holiday season, with tough food, your dentures may slip and fall. Fixodent ultramax hold gives you the strongest hold ever to lock your dentures. So now you can eat tough food without worry. Fixodent and forget it. [ dramatic music ]ing ] [screams] elliott. You came back when chuck todd asked republican senator ron johnson yesterday if he trusts the cia and the fbi now, ron johnson threw out a bunch of names of people who no longer work at the fbi. Do you trust the fbi and cia now because none of them any of the conclusions you have come to. Im just curious do you trust them now . Now who are you talking about . The cia and fbi. I dont trust Andrew Mccabe. I dont trust james chemo. I dont trust peter struck. I dont trust john brennen. That is the essence of the trump deep state Conspiracy Theory that insists what eventually became the Mueller Investigation was started by fbi officials who were deeply prejudiced against donald trump while he was running for president. Attorney general barr is now flying around the world investigating that himself, something weve never seen an attorney general do. William barr could save a lot of time by picking up a copy of deep state. It includes a thorough investigation of how the investigation of russian influence began inside the fbi. The president is on his way to impeachment tonight because of his obsession with that very question which was included in what he was pushing the president of ukraine to investigate. Deep state is his tenth book. Hes a pulitzer prizewinning reporter whos worked with the wall street journal. And he delivers a kind of bountiful harvest of important scoops that weve come to expect from his Investigative Journalism including the names of the two members of the trump cabinet who Deputy Attorney general rosenstein believed would be in favor of invoking the 25th amendment to remove from the presidency. For that and more we turn to james b. Stewart we joins us about deep state. Its very hard to land dead center into todays news and verdicts news with what we saw senator johnson doing on meet the press. Explain to the audience what senator johnson was trying to do on meet the press . Hes done what ive explored in deep state and what i think is so terribly destructive to Democratic Institutions of this country, which is to attack the Law Enforcement agency of the United States, the department of justice, the fbi, the traditionally independent investigative and judicial branches of government and accuse them essentially of being filled with traitors and spies and being part of a deep state that is trying to protect its own powers and eject a democratically elected president to preserve those powers. And that is so far from the truth. I mean there is in a sense a deep state in this country. There is a very large bureaucracy that is thrown to uphold the constitution and to protect the people of the United States. They do not work for the white house. And when the white house violates the constitution or does not act for the people of the United States its their obligation to step in. And its the obligation of the whistleblower also to come forward with information that needs to be investigated. So attorney general william barr is flying around the world trying to do what your book does. He is trying to figure out how did the investigation of russian interference start, what became the investigation of donald trump by robert mueller. How did that all start . Its all right here. He could save a lot of time in the sky. And taxpayer money. God only knows how much is this costing. Did it start was it started by fbi officials prejudiced against donald trump . Was that the animating force in starting that investigation . Absolutely not. The last thing they wanted was to have to investigate another candidate for president. They were already investigating hillary clinton, which put them in extremely awkward and an uncomfortable position. Now for the first time in history they were forced to investigate the other candidate as well, both at the same time. They didnt want to do that. And by the way, they didnt begin an investigation of donald trump himself. This is a very important point, though, i think many people dont realize. He was not the subject of the investigation until he recklessly and impulsively fired james comey and then lied about the reasons for it. That is what caused trump himself to become the subject of an obstruction investigation. Some of his Campaign Workers were subject of investigation, but trump himself was not. And by the way, it did not begin with the salacious steele dossier either. The fbi people and ive talked to many of them, they didnt put much store in it, and ive read it very carefully as well. Its a it has no what you would call actionable intelligence. It didnt say theyd be meeting next month to have further discussions of this or theyre plotting another release of fake tapes of the president so they could perhaps insiniate that, disrupt it. No, its all stuff that happened in the past. Its very odd although some of it does ring true. That wasnt the basis for it. And even the australian ambassador, trump has been trying to enlist the australians, threatening them, cajoling them. I mean the australians, theyre one of the closest allies of the United States and the intelligence community. The australians got the information that the russians had hacked emails from hillary clinton. They didnt do anything about it until it actually became demonstrably true yes these things did exist. And only then did they bring this to the attention of u. S. Intelligence agents, and it was perfectly responsible and appropriate and reluctantly the fbi plunged into this. This book is filled with movie drama, dramatic movie scenes including as you mentioned after james comey was fired. Rod rosenstein in this book is in tears with Andrew Mccabe, says some extraordinary things. I want to squeeze in a commercial break here. When we come back you can tell us who those two trump cabinet members were who Rod Rosenstein believes were ready to join him in an attempt to remove the president with the 25th amendment. Were going to be right back with james b. Stewart right after this. With james b. Stewart right after this so tmobile is giving you an iphone 11 on us for each new line of unlimited. For yourself, or up to a family of four. Keep your family connected, and hurry into tmobile today, to get up to four iphone 11s on us. Only at tmobile. My mom washes the dishes. Before she puts them in the dishwasher. So what does the dishwasher do . Cascade platinum does the work for you, prewashing and removing stuckon foods, the first time. Wow, thats clean cascade platinum. Itso chantix can help you quit slow turkey. Along with support, chantix is proven to help you quit. With chantix you can keep smoking at first and ease into quitting. Chantix reduces the urge so when the day arrives, youll be more ready to kiss cigarettes goodbye. When you try to quit smoking, with or without chantix, you may have nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Stop chantix and get help right away if you have changes in behavior or thinking, aggression, hostility, depressed mood, suicidal thoughts or actions, seizures, new or worse heart or blood vessel problems, sleepwalking, or lifethreatening allergic and skin reactions. Decrease alcohol use. Use caution driving or operating machinery. Tell your doctor if youve had Mental Health problems. The most common side effect is nausea. Quit smoking slow turkey. Talk to your doctor about chantix. We are back with james b. Stewart author of the new and important stunning new book deep state. I want to go to one of the scoops in this book and you have more than we can cover tonight. Was thrown into an emotional tizzy and hes in discussions with Andrew Mccabe in this book, hes crying. And it is in those moments where you where Rod Rosenstein says maybe i should wear a wire to record the president. And as reported in this book which you didnt know before, he said it twice. And in one of those meetings someone was taking notes. And so Rod Rosensteins public claim was that was a joke or his friends say it was a joke. And your witnesses say there was no evidence that was a joke, that was serious. Thats correct. He said it was a joke. He sort of said he didnt really say it but if he said it was a joke. And there are two akags where he said there are notes of th