Roger stones media tour, what he said about the possibility of cooperating with Robert Mueller plus, why a dozen employees at the Trump National golf course were shown the door. And open for now it is less than three weeks, though, from the next deadline to keep the government open. Whether a deal is really possible coming up, you will hear the new and curious spin from the white house. A very good day to all of you from msnbc World Headquarters here in new york. Welcome to weekends with alex witt we begin with Donald Trumps long time friend and adviser roger stone. He is now shifting his tone on whether he will cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller his indictment goes further in trying to answer muellers core question did donald trump or his campaign attempt to clued with russia quote, a Senior Campaign official was directed to contact stone about future releases from wikileaks and dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign stone said he wont testify against the president on friday. Then earlier today he said this. Any chance you will cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller if he asks you know, thats a question i would have to i would have to determine after my attorneys have some discussion if there is wrongdoing by other people in the campaign that i know about, which i know of none but if there is, i would certainly testify honestly i would also testify honestly about any other matter including any communications with the president. It is true that we spoke on the phone. But those communications are political in nature. They are benign. The chairman of the House Intel Committee reacting to the new revelations. These are very specific allegations of lies and witness intimidation they are matters that will be easily provable. These are not ambiguous statements they are very detailed and i think he is going to need a much better defense than the one you just heard. Joining me now, Barbara Mcquaid. Welcome to you on a sunday you just heard the former trump adviser changing his tone on cooperating. What do you make of that and how dangerous that could be for the president . He did. He seems very open to it he has had a chance to think about it perhaps and is not foreclosing the possibility. Yesterday what he said is that he wouldnt bear false witness against anybody. Prosecutors arent going to ask him to bear false witness. What they are going to ask him the do is tell the truth about criminal activities of others. Sometimes when people have lot baggage it makes them difficult to be witnesses because they lack credibility with someone like roger stone the only way for him to be valuable is if he can provide information to Robert Mueller that can then be independently corroborated in that way he could be valuable he could tell them about phone calls they didnt know about before, individuals involved in things they didnt know about before if they can duplicate that information by talking with other witnesses or confirm it with documents or records or surveillance or other things that could give him some value as a witness. He appears pretty confident by saying his false statements to congress werent something he intended to say. Listen to how he spun this i did forget on some occasions that i had Text Messages and emails that are entirely exculpatory i will prove in court that any failure of memory on my part was without intent. As a former prosecutor, does step tos theory hold up in court. It could in some cases. If they were relying on minute details or the word of someone else against him maybe but not in this case fwhib who actually read this indictment he may be gailt gaming on the fact that not everybody read the document i dont think it is going to hold up one thing he did is memorialized his faults states in emails and Text Messages. For example, on one of the days he denied to congress he communicated by text with someone uhl he actually communicated 30 times with that person the idea that it slipped my mind, on the very same day, 30, it doesnt hold up and the threats and other things are there this writing in email and texts. I see this as a strong case. Coit be stronger . Or is it less strong because conspiracy was not included in the charges . He described the whole thing as being thin i think you have to think about it in two different ways the charges that are here are narrow but strong. Could you then charge a broader case involving conspiracy . The answer to that is yes. Because these charges were filed do not preclude additional charges were being filed later on why not charge that now . Could be a couple of reasons joyce vance had the theory of holding back discovery so they could continue investigation also i think it gives them negotiating power to say to him you know we could charge with you a conspiracy to defraud the United States by interfering with the Fair Administration of elections which would bring some significant penalties. You can plead guilty to what you have been charged with now and corate and earn a reduced sentence or we can add these charges. Either theory makes sense to me. Barbara, dont go far, you will come back and talk to me in a bit. Lets talk now with Betsy Woodruff, and jeff mason betsy, your take on roger stone trying to change his tone now on whether or not he would cooperate with the special counsel. How do you interpret that . It is a rapid and significant tonal change that said, the comments he made certainly were not unequivocal essentially what he said has been consistent with what he has been saying the last year or so as he publicly speculated about his legal woes that is he is willing to the the truth and the truth will not be damaging to President Trump. He reiterated that message today but the change that i heard is the way he is talking about muellers investigators. A few days before he was indicted i was texting with roger on the record about how he viewed his involvement in the mueller investigation. And he told me that if he were charged with anything, he said it would be a setup. And he also said that he would use his moment to reveal wrongdoing on the part of muellers prosecutors to try to argue that he was illegally surveilled and that muellers lawyers were engaged in sort of egregious violations of Justice Department norms the fact that now a couple of days later he is leaving the door open to working with them and perhaps working with them as they build other cases or providing information that could be eggs culpatory that strikes me as an interesting change here from stone it is thatrd to say what that means long term going forward. He kind of says what he thinks it can change from day to day . I am looking at your article in the daily beast, some of the colorful things that were written in the exchange with stone and credico. How does this add to what we know about who roger stone is . The emails that we have we are the first publication to publish the full email that mueller cites as evidence that stone tried to engage in witness tacherring stones relationship with Randy Credico is a small but important component of the indictment. Credico is on the left of the political spectrum s talk radio host in new york the indictment doesnt name him of he is the radio host who interviewed Julian Assange the messages are foul mouthed. He is also threatening the dog. The emotional support dog. I cant even say i cant say any of the words in that sentence. Thats right. The dog is a very small, cute, fluffy white critter named bianca Randy Credico took bianca with him when he testified to muellers team because he was anxious. Now we see stone threatening to take the dog away. What is important, the conversation they were having i reviewed the email chain. The conversation they were having where stone threatens the dog was not a conversation about muellers testimony. He was talking about upcoming media appearances, about openly discussing his relationship with roger stone. Then stone comes in with this extremely graphic and offensive language going after credico and his dog. Yeah. Publicly, jeff, the white house is pretty quick to distance the president from stones indictment saying it had nothing to do with the president is the white house as confident privately . Thats a good question. I think we will have to see the way that that i think the best way to answer that is to watch them in the coming days as pressure mounts, perhaps, as more information comes out from roger himself as he continues to give these interviews. And as we see what other developments come from the mueller investigation. This comes at sort of a nexus for the white house having reopened the government on friday there is a focus on whether or not there will be a deal with congress the next few weeks and there is focus on the investigation of muellers and the indictment of stone. We will talk about the government reopening in a moment i know that reporters were eager to ask the president about roger stone. We were. Were you surprised he didnt take any questions what do you think is behind that. I was surprised it is hard to tell when President Trump is going to take questions and when he is not more often than not he is willing to take questions. I was in the rose garden just a few weeks before when he was in sort of a similarsituation and went around sort of down the line and took questions from all of us. Uhhuh. The stone one was definitely at the top of my list if he had called on us or called on me he didnt. He ended up walking away and not taking any questions but i know that there were certainly some people who thought that he did that appearance to sort of distract from the roger stone news that day. He wouldnt have distracted if he had taken questions on. Perhaps that was the thinking behind it. Both of you stay with me as we get to the other big headline of the day, that being the government slowly lee reopening as members of congress are trying to avoid another shutdown the National Mall and National Parks resuming normal operations today but the effects of the shutdown is still going on the white house is vowing to pay back as soon as possible those two paychecks that workers missed during the shutdown but the clock yet again ticking with just 20 days to reach a Border Security compromise and this morning, the acting white house chief of staff defending the president s decision to back down without getting any funding for a border wall. He did what he did because Many Democrats had come to us, some of them privately, many spoke out publicly that they were actually starting to agree with him on the necessity for a barrier on the southern border they had come to us and said look we agree with you, you are winning the battle on the importance of a barrier on the southern border but we cannot work with you while the government is closed thats a marked difference from where the democrat leadership was. They said they wouldnt talk with us about the wall ever. I think the president saw a chance the try to take the democrats at their word. Betsy and jeff. Jeff, you first here really do you know that democrats came to the president saying, hey, you are definitely winning on the message here, but we cant work with you unless there is an open government. Lets put our Heads Together and do some big kumbaya moment did that happen . A spoke to an Administration Officials on friday who said they had seen hesitation or Movement Among democrats who had won close races in districts that President Trump won in 2016 and that they were showing some willingness to work on the wall. So there may be some truth to what Mick Mulvaney is saying there. That said, i think it is kind of hard to sort of reconcile that with suggesting that President Trump was winning the messaging war. The democrats stayed very, very unified during this entire time. And that was, you know, in large part because of nancy pelosi saying we have to stick together, we have to stick together and they did in the end, the acting chief of staff can say that but the bottom line is on friday the president didnt get a down payment for the wall like he had said just the day before was required instead, he just backed down. Mick mulvaneys statement there, betsy three options in your answer either it was true, or it was spin, or as jeff is intimating, it may be some big exaggeration. What do you think . It sounded to me like pretty classic spin and there was probably a certain element of exaggeration incorporated as well i think jeffs point is a really important one, which is while democrats remained publicly united about opposing giving trump any money for husband wall there are a number of new freshman democrats in the house who have a tenuous hold on the seats they won they won in part because there was such a National Backlash against trumps policies for many of those members they are looking for ways to position themselves as moderate, as willing to cooperate with the administration, as willing to be bipartisan and open to working across the aisle did any of those come to mulvaney and say you guys are winning the messaging war. Color me skeptical what i think is more likely that as white house officials are reaching out to some of the freshmen democrats they are having conversations that are poe tpgsly slightly different in tone than their conversations with House Democratic leadership does that have any Significant Impact on the way that money becomes available from congress to the president for Border Security i doubt it it is important to remember that even though the Democratic Caucus is united it is not a monolith. Jeff your piece layings down what went on behind the scenes of the president s announcement and you write that the outcome of the agreement was lastminute . One of the thing that happened is the Vice President and Jared Kushner brought a series of about four options to the president. One of them included the option that he ended up choosing on friday morning the other option, one of four, was to go ahead and declare that National Emergency they said that he sort of slept on it on thursday night, and then on friday decided to go with the route of letting Congress Give it another go and that one of the key factors that ended up helping to influence that decision was seeing that Law Enforcement, including the fbi, were not able to do their jobs at full strength. So he sort of weighed do i keep pushing for this wall, which i am trying to do to help Law Enforcement and help Border Security while at the same time it is hurting Law Enforcement right now. That anyway was the story that came from one of the sources to whom i spoke and in any case he ended up deciding on friday that that was the way he wanted to go, at least for now. Jeff mason and Betsy Woodruff always love talking to you guys. Questions from the to be russia probe investigator in the house. 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We know that the russians told the Trump Campaign as early as april of 2016 that they had the stolen emails we know that they offered dirt to the president s son, don jr. , and he said he would love to have the russian government help with that. And then we know that some person directed a Senior Campaign official to reach out to roger stone to find out what wikileaks had gotten from the russians and all this taking place while donald trump is pursuing what