campuses, in part because many students feel that going to an elite undergrad institution is not going to improve their chances in the economy. eli stoeblckoles, heidi przybyla, and jason johnson. tonight on all in. i got the white supremacist, the neo-nazi, i got them all. what the president did this summer. kkk, we got kkk. i got em all. response to charlottesville. very fine people on both sides. the response in north korea. they will be met with fire and fury the response to ht hurricane. the intensifying russia investigation. my son is a wonderful young man. he took a meeting with a russian lawyer. the fights with his own disa. where america stands after its first summer of trump. i don t think anyone is interested in having a shutdown. no chance, we won t raise the debt ceiling. no chance. networ america s not going to default. we have to close down our government, we re building that wall. all in starts right now. good evening from new york, i m chris hayes. this is normally the time of year, right after the labor day weekend, when congress returns to washington, after a slow and sleepy recess, and the news cycle finally starts to crank back up again. but this year, with this president, hardly a summer day passed by without some big bombshell story. huge developments in the russia investigation, a near crisis with north korea, the infamous two sides response to the violence in charlottesville, steve bannon was fired, transgender troops were banned, sort of, and sheriff joe arpaio was pardoned. and that was just in august. most presidents head into their first september hoping the wind at their back can help drive a busy legislative agenda. this president ends the summer setting records with his dismally low approval ratings, including the lowest park ever for a president in his first year. by the end of last month, the president was at 34%. to help with the summer of trump in perspective, i m joined by harry enton, senior political writer for 358, tara dowdel, and jess mcintosh, a former adviser for the clinton campaign and current executive editor of share blue. good to have you here. let s start with a snapshot of where the president is political my. maybe i ll start with you, because you do a lot of analysis of polling. how would you characterize where the president is politically? lowest i ve ever seen. those numbers tell the story, don t they? look at the president s disapproval rating. already in the high 50s. his net approval rating, more than 20 percentage points of the country disapprove than approve of the president. we ve simply never seen that. i guess if we had polling back with warren g. harding we would, watching the president. there was literally one day of an eclipse that was the one slowdown. and i remembered watching the eclipse news cycle play out, i was like, this is what news cycles used to be like. but instead, we re all tuned into this. and of course, a small piece of his base is eroding every time he does something massively unpopular, really racist, really bigoted. every time he fails to enact some piece of his agenda that his base was excited about doing. he hasn t done anything that they wanted and he s done so much that the rest of the condition didn t want. i think the polls are more important than usual, because america has this we need to know that there are more people who don t like this than there are. but i want to ask you this as someone who worked in the clinton campaign. because i feel like i m not saying this is not true. the polling is what the polling is. he s clearly very unpopular. he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. so it s not surprising in some ways, right? but there was also this sense that people said very similar things about him during the campaign, which he ended up winning, right? yes. that his approval ratings are in the 30s, he s incredibly unpopular, ya dada yada. are you haunted in some part of your mind? like we maybe got it wrong that time. i am haunted regularly, always. but, it was a hypothetical then and now it s real. so you re saying that s the difference. the difference is between, i m going to vote for this person and what i m going to do is vote and then we ll see what he s like to this is what he s like. how many people voted for him because they thought he would drain the swamp. how many people voted for him because they thought he would keep out muslims and build a wall. that s what they thought they would do, but he s not doing that. and it s negative polarization. that is still with us. people are motivated by the people they don t want to see in the office. so the support that he retains, i think, when he has those flashpoint moments, that s when he retains it. that s when the media is ganging up on him and he can just say, it s all fake news and we re against them. but if we wipe away all the crazy headlines and the fog and the nonstop news soik here. what we re seeing with the trump administration from the get-go is the same thing that republicans and libertarians criticized obama at in his second term, which is, it s just a pen and a phone. there isn t a lot of legislation happening. which is usually not what s happening in your first hundred days, first year. particularly when you have congress, that s when you do it. and he has spent a lot of his capital burning his capital. he s going after jeff flake and dean heller. he s trying to primary people and reshape the republican party to be more trumpy. and this is making a lot of republican senators really unhappy. that s not going to get tax reform done. do you think that matters? so, there s two issues, right? there s the general sense of how popular he is. and then there s how that connects to whi s ts to what ki influence, power, and capital he has to spend on capitol hill. how do you think those two relate at this moment? i ll play devil s advocate a little bit here. i think with respect to trump s base, while maybe there are portions of it that have evoed roded, there s a lot of talk about sort of the working class people that voted for him. but a lot of very wealthy people in this country, a lot of educated people this this country voted for donald trump. the best one-word summary of who voted for donald trump is republicans. republicans voted for donald trump. like, if you re trying to figure out republicans voted for donald trump by overwhelming margins. particularly a slice of people that didn t like him in the primary and maybe aren t crazy about him now. so i think those people are eroding, but with respect to his core base, and i call them fans, he has a cult-like following in this cub. and he is putting on the greatest reality show he s ever put on. this is what he s doing. he s entertaining these people, they like the fact that some people actually like the fact that nothing s happening. because they wanted him to quote/unquote blow up washington. and that s exactly what he s doing. so some people have sort of bought into that rationale and they use it to justify continuing to support him. so i think that we shouldn t underestimate the strength of who he s performing for. he s performing for those fans and those fans still support him. i think there s an important distinction there. there are some people who support trump or support him in spite of the antics and the personality. and there are some people who support him primarily because of that. and it s the latter category that i think are the fans and the base that are the 30% or what. it s the more marginal voters who are the people that are where a lot of the political leverage is, particularly when republicans on capitol hill are thinking about it. i ll say two things. number one, trump s approval rating among republicans in the latest gallup weekly poll was below 80%. that s amazing. you would expect your republican base to be overwhelmingly support you, not just four out of five. the other thing i pointed out, the pew research center had a great question. how do you approve of the president s not just his performance, but his attitude and conduct in office? and only 14% of americans said they liked it. in fact, the plurality of republicans said they had mixed feelings. they do not necessarily like this show. there are some people who certainly do, who want to burn everything to the ground. but most people who voted for donald trump were hoping that he would actually do something. and if you look at the legislation passed so far, i think the opinion is he really hasn t. and that brings us to whether he has any sway on capitol hill. we saw he really didn t during the health care fight. he did a little bit in the house, i think they re a little more responsive to him, those are gerrymandered districts. those are districts where a primary from a trump-backed perp could spell the end of your political career. but in the senate, not only does he not have any sway, he doesn t appear to have the tools or comprehension necessary to make a policy argument to people, which actually do matter. he didn t try. like, he never tried to have policy sway. every time he gives a speech or a rally, it s about himself. he s never i mean, he tried to give a tax speech just last week and it was about himself and eventually an attack on claire mccaskill. i did not walk away from that speech knowing what his tax plan was going to be. and i think that the republicans on the hill had to have been really disappointed in that. he s just not he s not able to and he s not willing to learn how. but let s separate the legislative trump agenda and what tara is saying. the guy has control over the kpes executive branch of government. and he s doing things or trying to do things, some of which i like and the rest of you may not, in terms of reforms at the food and drug administration. he s got people who are working on regulatory reform in a lot of different places you were right the first time. i saw you catch yourself. but, so, that is happening apace and some of the only legislation that s opinion passed by kopg ththe congressio review act for the second and 14th times in history. that s different and a real thing that s happening. it s gotten way undercovered because we pay attention to flash grenades. and to me the most significant is what s happening with dhs and i.c.e. and what s happening with immigration. it s very different in terms of who s being detained and how often. and doj with jeff sessions, who hasn t done every terrible thing he wants to do, but wishes he could. but ultimately, you get judged by legislative accomplishments, both at the ballot box that s not true. you get judged by how people s lives are going. and right now the economy continues to hum along. do you if you had to make a prediction about whether he can get people onboard for any big bills passed this fall, what do you think? i think he s going to have a really tough time doing so. because trump s worst enemy is trump, right? so he he misses to your point, he misses opportunities. when he does have the bully pulpit, but he can t help himself and he has to use it to attack someone. i want to make another point, though. with trump supporters, because i think that we have to not underestimate trump, as a democrat, i think we have to be very careful that we don t underestimate. there also was a poll that came out that said a massive number of republicans think that the media is a bigger threat than white supremacists. white supremacy! yes! that is clearly trump s influence. 40% total thought the news media was more a threat than white supremacists. and for trump voters, it s 75%. look how much stronger trump is against the news media than he is against white supremacists, of course they think that. and i want to talk about that. stay with me. because in two minutes, i want to talk specifically about the president s response to charlottesville. that s right after the break. coming up later in the hour, we have a special retrospective, a look at the incredibly shrinking administration. the era of the pajama boy is over january 20th and the alpha males are back. i m milissa rehberger with your top stories. ahead of the president s expected announcement tomorrow on 800,000 young immigrants, some republicans in congress are calling for him to keep the daca program. republican lawmakers like james langford of oklahoma say it s wrong to hold children accountable for their parent s decision to bring them to this country. and aaa says average gas prices this holiday weekend are up about 12 cents a gallon after hurricane harvey knocked refineries offline. all all in with chris hayesai after this. aggressive styling, so you can break away from everyone else. the bold lexus is. experience amazing. club in new jersey, the president gave his first remarks on the attack, saying he blamed for both sides on what unfolded. the comment drew swift criticism. a day later, he gave another statement, a scripted condemnation of the hate groups involved. but then tuesday came, and in an impromptu prmess conference, donald trump reached what may have been the lowest point of his proteesidency. i ve condemned neo-nazis, i ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-nazis, believe me. not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. you had some very bad people in that group. but you also had people that were very fine people on both side sides. why that the post-charlottesville moment, more than any moment, of all we ve talked about, the news cycles of trump, seemed to hit something. it seemed to strike some core nerve in people. and there s evidence of that. there s some evidence in the polling, but also in terms of the business groups leaving and being denounced. why? he sympathized with nazis. we ve never had an american president do that before in our lifetime. i think it s that simple. those aren t american values, any can quote the secretary of state, his own secretary of state. america does not condone those values. america fights nazis. and here we have this person who is giving the exact inverse of what he said about mexicamexica that first day that he announced his candidacy for president, he said, they re sending racists and some, with i suppose are okay. he said the exact inverse about nazis. there are a lot of good people in there. some are obviously bad, but overall i think some people on the right kind of scared themselves. i think some even who identified in the alt-right scared themselves. there s a good piece in the new york magazine about the end of the nazi is over because they actually marched and actually had arm bands on there, like, oh, i ve got a tiki torch and outside a black church, what the hell am i doing? scared themselves. that s a very interesting idea. this harkens back to a speech in warsaw, it was really weirdly apocalyptic about how the west will never ever, ever fall. and he was going to defend us against this sort of imminent fall. and who were the people that were going to undermine this apparently fragile west that s been pretty successful over the last 250 years? it was obviously islamic terrorists. but it was also faceless bureau cat accurates who don t understand our value or in the language cherish our history. so they re trying to make us all this kind of one person. that kind of sense of apocalyptic clinching of a narrow view of what western civilization is, he has that in common with the protesters in charlottesville, even if that s i m not saying that, well, he s a racist or a white supremacist, but that s a common trope on the white, at this moment. and a lot of people who realize that and have, including a lot of republicans, like, oh, crap, this is where we re going with all of this. i think i m curious to get your feedback, too, on one of the things that was so revealing about it was, the initial reaction, he ad libbed both sides. he had a prepared statement. he ad libbed both sides, and then came out with the scripted statement, and then that tuesday press conference. and another breaking point was, i think in people s imaginations, like, don t believe anything anyone writes for this guy. like, don t just don t chalk it up to him. right. just only listen to what he says when he s unscripted. because that s when you re actually getting him. exactly. and here s the thing. he was so angry that he did not get a positive reception to his remake of what he had said. and that s why he came out. because he didn t want to make those scripted remarks, he didn t want to make against his will, that s right. he didn t want to make those remarks. so then he felt justified when he wasn t given it will adoration ande edand adieulatio giving those remarks. i want to show this, when he was in phoenix, like, he s the victim. what more do you want of me? i ve gone after all of them. take a listen. i hit em with neo-nazi, i hit em with everything. i got the white supremacist, the neo-nazi, i got em all in there. let s see. kkk, we have kkk. i got em all. just literally checking boxes. he s checking boxes. and it s all about him. this is the thing, right? if you look at the pre-election polling, over 50% of the american public thought that racist was a correct adjective to describe donald trump. and i think there were so many people pre-election polling? pre-election. and he was still able most of the people who voted for him didn t think that. but remember, he lost the popular vote. although, let s be clear, there were some who did. there were some. there s a non-statistically trivial percentage of voters who thought donald trump was a racist and voted for donald trump. and voted for him, anyway. not necessarily, anyway. right, both ways. right. but i ll just say, this just confirms the worst thoughts that many americans had about him. and that s why this was such a turning point. oh, my god, he s doing what we thought he might do. tara? and i also think it was hard trump couldn t use his bully pulpit and his rhetoric to get himself out of this. people saw the video foot animal of of a car driving into a crowd at top speed a young woman was murdered! and bodies flying up into the air. they saw a young woman lose her life for saying that she was standing up against hate and bigotry. they heard people marching, with torches, saying the jews will not replace us. blood and soil, blood and soil, which is a nazi chant, which they were doing on the friday night march, which is the one that he went out of his way i mean, that was to me the most mind boggling statement. that march, the tiki torch march was the one he said he said, the night before, there were some very fine people. those people, who were swarming outside the synagogue in charlottesville, i mean and no matter where you got your news from because remember, there s also this bifurcated selection news problem that we have in this country. and so, so it didn t matter where you got your news from, you couldn t miss all of that. it was just everywhere. and so that s why i think he took a real it h hit on this, deservedly. and there was no pretense. i looked through the information. the information leading to the unite the right rally, all the iconography and their posters was fascist looking. the people on record were on record saying a lot of racist things. the monument protection society wouldn t join the protest, because they were like, these people are creeping me out. thank you all so much for your time. still to come, the is intensifying russian investigation. what we ve learned. what we still don t know. where the investigation is headed this fall. plus, how many people in this picture still work at the white house? the numerous administration officials who are gone but not forgotten. i like mr. bannon. he s a friend of mine, but mr. bannon came on very late you know that. but we ll see what happens with mr. bannon. but he s a good person and i think the press treats him, frankly, very unfairly. and i m still not ready. the reason i m telling you this is that there will be moments in your life that. you ll never be ready for. your little girl getting married being one of them. the whole country booking on choice hotels.com. four words, badda book. badda boom. let it sink in. shouldn t we say we have the lowest price? nope, badda book. badda boom. have you ever stayed with choice hotels? like at a comfort inn? yep. free waffles, can t go wrong. i like it. promote that guy. get the lowest price on our rooms, guaranteed. when you book direct at choicehotels.com. book now. but he hasoke up wwork to do.in. so he took aleve. if he d taken tylenol, he d be stopping for more pills right now. only aleve has the strength to stop tough pain for up to 12 hours with just one pill. aleve. all day strong. i wanti did my ancestrydna and where i came from. and i couldn t wait to get my pie chart. the most shocking result was that i m 26% native american. i had no idea. just to know this is what i m made of, this is where my ancestors came from. and i absolutely want to know more about my native american heritage. it s opened up a whole new world for me. discover the story only your dna can tell. order your kit now at ancestrydna.com. happened this summer, when backstabbings played out in public and the ax started falling left and right. last week, somebody said was like the red wedding in game of thrones, with people coming and going and getting i m going to fire everybody. and it was really wild. before we head into the fall, here s a look back at the summer exodus. i will remember you photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the national mall. in a stunning staff shuffle tonight, a familiar face stepping down, this shake up, the sixth, just six months into this young mrnadministration. this was the alarmest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period. sarah huckabee sanders is going to be the press secretary oh, you can t hear me? i m sorry. better? better now? better now? you guys heard me in the front, though? what d i say, john? reporter: tonight, a major staff shake up in the embattled west wing. chief of staff reince priebus is out. he intuitively determined that it was time to do something different. and i think he s right. reince priebus is a believe paranoid skitz freng and what he s going to do, maybe if i leak something and see if i can [ bleep ] these people. the president certainly felt that anthony s comments were inappropriate for a person in that position. reporter: scaramucci, originally praised by the president, targeted white house staff with a profanity-laced rant. i m not steve bannon. i m not trying to suck my own [ bleep ]. and that s what the mainstream media won t report. they re absolutely dead wrong about what s going on today, because we have a team that s just grinding it through. i like mr. bannon. he s a friend of mine. reporter: the now ousted chief strategist telling bloomberg he s leaving the white house to fight for president trump. mr. bannon came on very late. you know that. reporter: bannon now becoming one of the last west wing originals to leave the picture. you know, the message i have, it s a very simple one, bumper sticker, the era of the pajama boy is over january 20 skpth ane alpha males are back. you know, you made news last week by resigning from the white house. they have a different take on how you left. so this does not prove that kirk was fired, but he s definitely not allowed back. don t test donald j. trump. it seems the era of seth gorka at the white house is over. and i will remember you sailin away on the crest of a wave, it s like magic rollin and ridin and slippin and slidin it s magic introducing the all new volkswagen tiguan. higher and higher, baby the new king of the concrete jungle. i was playing golf love golf.. i used to love golf. wait, what, what happened? 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we have just the people to talk about that, former watergate prosecutor, nick ackerman, who s been following the russia developments with all summer. rebecca trayster. maria hiddnojosa, and josh barr, senior editor at business insider. nick, let me start with you. you ve been very clued into this and you also have been around, done this rodeo before. how big are the developments of this summer? huge pip mean, the biggest development, i think the key one is the meeting that took place at trump tower, on june 9th. i mean, that is going to be the focal point of every investigation. when we learned that, i had a great moment in the snl skit of lester holt interviewing donald trump, where he like admits he was thinking about russia, with james comey. and michael shea playing lester holt was like, did i get him? like, is that it? like, you just admitted it. and that e-mail felt like just, okay, did we we have it, right? we have the evidence here? not completely. not completely. i think there s more to it. the question is the documents that were promised to be brought to that meeting. interestingly, nobody has fessed up to those documents. but we do know that two months the dirt on hillary clinton. that was the idea delivering dirt on hillary clinton? and we do know two months prior to that meeting that go z guccifer and the russians had hacked into hillary clinton s campaign office and had retri e retrieved e-mails and documents. that s a great point. we also know that two weeks after that meeting, all of a sudden, those documents appear on the internet and then appear on wikileaks, and we also know that roger stone, the president s chief kind of dirty tricks guy, was in contact with julian assange and guccifer, immediately after that meeting on june 9th. i think there s lots of questions there. rebecca, you covered the clinton campaign. and one of the things that strikes me when i go back and look at the campaign footage is how much they were talking about this, from the beginning. it is striking to go back to debates and realize, like, it was all happening in realtime and the clinton campaignrealtim. yeah, hillary clinton was talking about so many of the details. i saw a clip of her talking about joe arpaio. she was talking about so much, but especially about russia. they clearly were keeping track of this as best they could and trying to piece things together as best they could. but it wasn t sinking in. they weren t listening. i wasn t listening. as someone who was covering the campaign, i wasn t thinking about russia s role. i was listening, but i don t know, it was a claim of an opponent against another opponent. it wasn t it didn t feel real. you know, i was paying attention, but trying not to get sucked into a conspiracy theory, you know? and that was the dynamic in play, because lots of people on the left were also saying, this is crazy conspiracy theory. th this couldn t be real. and i m a little bit concerned. as someone who actually had to do the bomb shelter thing when i was a kid in grade school, i ve been hyperaware of it. and i am a political junkie, like all of us, right? so everything we re watching, every step, but i do worry, out there. kind of like when i was a kid, watching watergate, and you just heard all the names and they were just kind of flying by you and it just becomes this huge thing. that s what i m concerned about. that for everybody else, it can continue to be this thing that donald trump will say, oh, you see, it s just them coming after me. and i wonder how we as a country and as journalists kind of flip it. well, i think watergate is sort of an interesting precedent, right? it was like all these names, and eventually, it wasn t. exactly. i think the other thing we don t have yet is an indication of a specific policy action for russia in exchange for this. i think the problem with this as an issue is sort of, did we this is a disinformation campaign. if you show, yeah, russia did this, and yeah, trump knew about it and mad conversations with him about it, fundamentally the mechanism by which the election was influenced is that americans received the information and decided to vote for donald trump instead of hillary clinton. you re never going to convince people that that was the error that they hacked into american s minds and caused them to vote the wrong way. ultimately, the final decision was made by american voters. so this never ends up adding up to like russia stole the election? because it was american voters the crime, it is worthwhile to keep in mind, the crime was committed. there s a crime. criminal intrusion of e-mails is a crime. but that s not a crime committed by the trump campaign. but it s a political question. there probably will be indictments of various people. but the decision about whether this ends the trump administration says political question with congress and other actors. that s true pip also think that to me, i have had my own journey on this. that that meeting to me, that meeting the meeting e-mail was an important one for this reason. i did not think the day before that e-mail came out that that e-mail would have existed. that seemed implausible and cartoonish and conspiratorial against all imaginings. and it came out and that altered my priors about what i m expecting to come out. but you add to that e-mail exactly the explanation that donald trump wrote for his son, which is so antiseptic they lied. they lied and they put in a statement by kushner, which also dovetails with junior s statement. it s like classic investigation. you get two guys who come in, they give you a totally nonsense story. and then you ve got the opportunity to chip away at it. right. i think there is this psychological issue, though, for a lot of regular americans, and those of us political junkies who are watching this and watching these headlines and being surprised, oh, my god, did we get him? is that it? that s it? right? we now know this happened? which is, is there going to be a point where anybody can say, okay, now a mechanism is going to kick into place. and that s a question, with i don t know, did people ask that throughout watergate and suddenly there was a mechanism whereby this kicks in? a lot of people are like, we got him, right? but why isn t anything happening? and we feel paralyzed and passive, and what s going to happen next? here s what i will say. i think mueller is going to do something, at some point. that seems to me, and i m curious what you think of it, that when mueller moves, in whatever direction he moves, if he indicts someone, if he releases some report, that s going to be a forcing mechanism, i think, in terms of the public awarene awareness. maybe not. yes, but also what happened just recently is donald trump pardoned joe arpaio. so for me as a latina, as a mexican, i kind of get the message. the president is pardoning someone who specifically targeted people just like me, illegally, and the president pardoned him. and he s a political ally. right. and that s the message. for everybody else, don t worry, we re going to i m going to pardon you, and a lot of people feel like that pardon was a signal. that s what makes the news this week about mueller cooperating with new york attorney general, eric schneiderman, so important. because the president can t issue pardons for state crimes. the attorney general of new york has immense authority to prosecute financial crimes. they re doing a lot of financial investigations around at least manafort, maybe other figures. so i think that gives mueller the threat of prosecutions that the president can t interfere with. that also says how advanced that investigation is and how serious it s going to get in the fall. and i think that s when mueller starts to move in public ways is when things are really going to change, i think. republicans head back to the hill to work on the agenda of a president who spent the summer attacking them with key deadlines in the coming weeks. a preview of the major fights to come. build that wall. now, the obstructionist democrats would like us not to do it. but believe me, we have to close down our government, we re building that wall. .there s febreze fabric refresher. febreze doesn t just mask, it eliminates odors you ve. .gone noseblind to. and try febreze unstopables for fabric. with up to twice the fresh scent power, you ll want to try it. .again and again and maybe just one more time. indulge in irresistible freshness. febreze unstopables. breathe happy. ethat s the height ofs mount everest. because each day she chooses to take the stairs. at work, at home. even on the escalator. that can be hard on her lower body, so now she does it with dr. scholl s orthotics. clinically proven to relieve and prevent foot, knee or lower back pain, by reducing the shock and stress that travel up her body with every step she takes. so keep on climbing, sarah. you re killing it. dr. scholl s. born to move. tell the people of texas to expect in terms of long-term recovery efforts? and in particular, you have been feuding with some key congressional leaders. you ve also threatened a government shutdown, potentially, next month over border wall funding. are these going to hamper long-term, the funding that will be needed long-term for recovery? no, jud. ping that you re going to see very rapid action from congress, certainly from the president. and you re going to get your funding. hurricane harvey could end up being one of the most costly natural disasters in u.s. history, but when congress returns tomorrow, one of the things on the table is a $1 billion cut in disaster funding in order to fund donald trump s border wall. a wall the president is threatening to do battle with his own party over. build that wall. now, the obstructionist democrats would like us not to do it, but believe me, if we have to close down our government, we re building that wall. still with me, nick ackerman, rebec rebecca, maria hinojosa, and josh barrow. they re already basically signaling retreat on the wall fight. they re going to blame it on harvey. but there s two ways to think about the wall. it s the symbol they ll never deliver on, because all that matters is the symbol and the thing they ll never do. which do you see it as? i think that this is going to continue to we re going to talk about it, but i m not so sure it s going to get done. i just don t i was on park avenue and i saw the picture on the daily news, i had just come back from being out of the country, and it was like, build the wall, it was trump s face, on park avenue, on the daily news. build the wall or i ll kill this government. and that s a point where i think some people are just going to say, i don t this is not the way right, exactly. and they ve already indicated they don t like the politics of it. now they have the excuse, sort of, frankly, of harvey. and they re already saying, let s just kick the can on the shutdown fight. my best guess is that this is where we could see the true explosion or implosion of trump s relationship with congress, which has been a really interesting dynamic for these very long seven or eight months. because they keep supporting him, they won t, you know, the republican leadership is supporting him in these really antidine ways when he s done terrible things. you have paul ryan say things like, racism is bad, but not mentioning donald trump. and the idea is they re getting something from him. they have majorities, a republican president, this unprecedented amount of power and that they should be getting something because they re working as a team, so they re supporting this guy that most of them clearly can t stand and he s a real piece of work. he s a real piece of work. but we look weak, in fact, because we re continuing to support this guy. but his frustrations with them have been building, obviously, were building through health care. he s now pretty open about his loathing for mitch mcconnell. i mean, there s been good reporting on that, too, that they openly hate each other now. and i think that s coming through on ryan, too. and what happens when that when those bonds of, well, we all have we have these majorities because we want to get our tax cuts for the rich, if that doesn t happen, and if those bonds break down, then what happens? if trump is cut off from his party as in congress do you think that s make or break? so the setup there being that basically the last big legislative achievement and the domestic policy version of the go gorsuch appointment, which is like the thing that all of us normal conservative and republicans want to see, tax, tax, tax, if that doesn t happen i think it s different from health care in that if you don t do tax reform today, you can do it tomorrow. they had to move on from health care because the bill was so unpopular and so politically damage to even talk about that they had to move on from it to try to get to something that they thought was more plausible and a lot of them were more interested in in the first place. i think they ll continue to hold out hope they ll eventually pass something. and the other thing to keep them from breaking out into total warfare, it s a disaster in the midterm. if you have them angry with each other, normal republicans who are furious with the president and trump supporters who don t like congress not sticking them, it s a turnout disaster for republicans and they all lose. but isn t the dissent already in the open at this point? like, the fact that they re sort of in shambles, going into the midtermses, is becoming ever-manufacture evident, right? well, i don t i mean, the generic ballot polling is ugly for them, but not like total disaster range yet. i think they re complaining more openly. people are less afraid of the president. rich lowry made a really great point in the column this week, the president by going after jeff sessions and not doing anything to him demonstrated tremendous weakness. even if he was furious with someone, he would complain about them but not really do anything. that s emboldened other members of the cabinet to rebuke him and other members of congress, as well. he ll tweet about you, but that ll be it. i want to remind people, because we are talking about houston, houston is a majority/minority city. the head of the police department, the head of the fire department, it is selina country. you also had i.c.e. and border patrol keeping open their checkpoints. so it s almost like like, oh, you want to a build a wall? build the wall 60 miles from houston, actually, which is where that checkpoint is. and that, by the way, for many latinos who probably voted for trump, in this area, i think this is going to be another moment where, again, it s another test. and because it s a good point. there are he did not do a do against latino voters. and by the way, there are those in houston who supported him. what s going to happen to them. it s the chipping away if you will of the potential voters who will come back to reelect him. but this is all a situation where it s just reflective of the fact that when it comes to policy, this president doesn t know anything. right. this wall is ridiculous. the basic foretex at the heart of it all. i want to ask about his relationship to congress, more pointedly what that relationship is particularly in reference to what nicken s relationship with with congress. stay with us. we re going to talk about that after this break. if you have moderate to severe ulcerative colitis or crohn s, and your symptoms have left you with the same view, it may be time for a different perspective. if other treatments haven t worked well enough, ask your doctor about entyvio, the only biologic developed and approved just for uc and crohn s. entyvio works by focusing right in the gi-tract to help control damaging inflammation and is clinically proven to begin helping many patients achieve both symptom relief as well as remission. infusion and serious allergic reactions can happen during or after treatment. entyvio may increase risk of infection, which can be serious. while not reported with entyvio, pml, a rare, serious brain infection caused by a virus may be possible. tell your doctor if you have an infection, experience frequent infections, or have flu-like symptoms, or sores. liver problems can occur with entyvio. if your uc or crohn s medication isn t working for you, ask your gastroenterologist about entyvio. entyvio. relief and remission within reach. no need with thending thcars.com app when on the lot, scan a vin to pull up all the info you need to help get the price you want. start scanning today. choicehotels.com. badda book. that s it?. he means book direct at choicehotels.com for the lowest price on our rooms guaranteed. plus earn free nights and instant rewards at check-in. yeah. like i said. book now at choicehotels.com it s time for the biggest sale of the year with the new sleep number 360 smart bed. it senses your every move and automatically adjusts on both sides to keep you effortlessly comfortable. and snoring.. does your bed do that? the new 360 smart bed is part of our biggest sale of the year where all beds are on sale. and right now save 50% on the labor day limited edition bed, plus 36 month financing. ends monday! and think, think. we were just one vote away from victory after seven years of everybody proclaiming we peel a repeal and replace. one vote away. one vote away. i will not mention any names. very presidential, isn t it? very presidential. and nobody wants me to talk about your other senator who is weak on borders, weak on crime. so i won t talk about him. president lashing out at john mccain and jeff flake in their home state last month, two of a long list of republicans the president is publicly flooding with. nick, nick faced a democratic congress which is key. because when we talk about the times that impeachment articles have been pursued, it s always been opposition. what do you make what implication does the president s relationship with congressional republicans have with how this investigation unfolds? it s huge. nicken had a good relationship with congress in comparison to trump. really? weyes. the only reason nixon when the tapes came out, that s when they realized this guy really is a crook. and that s when barry goldwater went to the white house and read him to tea leaves and said it s time to get out of dodge and that s what happened. i think that you wrote a piece that i thought was interesting where you business cli posited that republicans in congress have been checking him more than maybe people appreciate. and i think there s i didn t necessarily agree with the column but there is something to it. yeah. the most significant piece of legislation that s come out of this congress is the rugs sanctions bill taking away what would ordinarily be a prerogative of the president saying we don t trust you to conduct foreign affairs with russian, overwhelming bipartisan margins. and then you ve head all of these hearings. and the liberals look at the hearing saying that the republicans don t ask good questions. but they don t have to hold these hearings at all. it s a remarkable thing that we re a few months into the republican administration and republican congress and the senate committees the white house committees have been embarrassing. but the senate committees have been conducting a serious damaging investigation to the president and they don t have to do that. the other part of this, rebecca, talking about the personal feud building. the president, he s not inventing it. he really doesn t like these people. yeah. and they really don t like him. and at a certain level personality does matter and it s only going to get worse. and it fuels for him the tremendous victim concept. i find this moment terrifying. the russian investigation circling in, whatever relationships he had with his own party is disintegrating fast. and he gets scary and unpredictable when he s in a corner. and right now what the setup is everybody is after me. the media is after me, fake news. my own party gets in the way of doing this thing we who is we? any and my 30% of people who like me. that s a core base and they want some really scary things. democrats are obstructionists. i m being persecuted. this is setting up a narrative in which he s the ultimate victim of the witch hunt. he s been using that phrase for months. and i think that is setting us up for whatever his view of the next chapter is going to be when it s the whole world against trump. and i think that the departures of bannon and gorka from his inner circle going into the outside supports that. the establishment is emptied of his allies. he alone is there. right. so we were talking about this in terms of like if everything is going to explode and you get really worried and i get very concerned and then i happen to be interviewing delores about an hour or so ago, a documentary coming out about her life, supported and created by carlos santana. he s 87. has been around the block a long time. right? so when i asked her, where do we go from here? how scared are you? she s just like, you know, those 20,000 people that came out in boston to bprotest againt the white supremacists, they were mostly anglo. so he says, that s an amazing organizing opportunity for latinos. i m just like i never would have thought that. so that is where i think on all of us, there is that question of what is this moment. and by the way, we re all exhausted, right? how much more can we do. all of us are exhausted and there are many saying what is the opportunity and how do we engage deeper. i m still asking the guys at the connecticut at the harbor story, so, who did you vote for? he was like, trump and i m really regretting it now. without any prompting. there s two dynamics. some set of voters who are moving away. i think rebecca s model for the fall is a really useful one. trump against the world increasingly. they re going to pretend to work together for tax reform. i guess the question is i have this line about him where it always feels like the last part of the farce where the guy is going back and forth between if two rooms putting on the mustache and he s about to get felt out. and the last part of the farce keeps going and there s never the ending. we ll see the part of the fall
what he says in private conversations. he thinks this is an unfair attack against his presidency. but that these probes have expanded, mushroomed to different veins, different associates of him. there hasn t been any wrongdoing proven, of course, so far, but it s kind of gotten hotter and hotter over the past few months and that frustrated the president. he also gets frustrated when these senators are trying to take some of his autonomy away. he wanted to determine the bill on russian sanctions and exactly what would happen. he wants to be able to fire mueller if he chooses to do so. he says he doesn t want to, but he says if i have that option, i might want to take it. and he says he doesn t like being backed in a corner. so you see him really getting frustrated by these different measures. the latter point about mueller, there s a sanctions argument, we ll get to sanctions in a moment. the latter point about mueller, the president said he s not going to fire mueller and there s a period indicating where people are trying to wave him off that. it is notable to me that he would express anger at tillis for sponsoring a piece of legislation that would bar him from firing mueller. well, i think the president sees this as by putting this legislation on the fore, by getting bipartisan votes on it, it s a bad reflection on him. it brings up the option that he may then be considering this. it limits his hand. the president fashions himself as a dealmaker, as a negotiator, and i think he likes to have all options on the table, when someone tries to say, listen, we re going to curb what you can do here, we re going to take something away, we re going to take some of your power. he tends to lash out and not take that very well. i thought your characterization, based on the reporting, of the phone call with bob corker was fascinating to me, because it seemed like the president was attempting to make a fairly substantiative target against the sanctions on the policy merits. and my sense from the reporting that we ve seen throughout his presidency is that s not something that he very often does or very often even seems capable of doing, but in this case, he did seem focused enough to apply that argument. well, senior aides at the white house briefed him extensively on this. it was something that he saw as a possible personal affront to and i think this was the tale of the whole issue. it sat there for six days. they said they kept saying it was very unclear. great reporting. thanks for having me. i m joined now by two reporters who have been closely covering the russia investigation. betsy woodruff and phillip. here s the statement that the president gave on the russian sanctions bill. despite the problems, i m signing this bill for the sake of national unity. it represents the will of the american people to see russia take steps to improve relations with the u.s. we hope there will be cooperation between our two countries on major global issues, so that these sanctions will no longer be necessary. they were dragged, kicking and screaming into this position, and the question here is, why? do you feel like you have clarity on the answer to that? we don t have full clarity on it. i think what josh said earlier is absolutely correct, based on what i m hearing from the white house, as well, which is that he viewed this as a threat to his autonomy as president. he didn t want this sanctions bill to be passed. the republicans on capitol hill defied his wishes and passed it with a veto-proof majority, anyways. and he views this russia issue more broadly as a threat to his legitimacy as president. he likes to believe that he got elected solely because he was the better candidate and defeated hillary clinton entirely on his own merits. and any suggestion that russia did something wrong to meddle in the election, even if it didn t swing the election one way or the other, he views as a threat to the legitimacy of his victory. to that end, though win just want to follow up with you, phillip, and i ll get you to weigh in here, betsy. that is what the white house projects about the president s state of mind. it is also a possibility, not a certainty at all or even a probability, it s a possibility that the president did sympathetic wrong, that he s attempting to cover up. we have to entertain that as a theoretical framework through which to interpret his actions. sure, and you know, that s exactly what robert mueller and the special counsel team is trying to figure out and look into. and i have to tell you, they re going to be looking into these phone calls, i imagine, that the president made, especially the call with senator tillis, that politico reported on tonight, because that s yet another instance of the president taking it upon himself to try to to influence something pertaining to russia. betsy, that to me is part of the tell here. we have a president, it s very hard in some ways to interpret a lot of his activities, because he seems so obviously and manifestly uninterested in the details of what s happening in the government. yet, there is selective interest, and time and tile again, intense, focused interest of the details of this one particular thing, which is the status of the russia investigation. i think one piece of that is because the president s focus always zeros in on whatever cable news is talking about. and the mueller probe, despite the best efforts of mueller and his investigators not to make any news over the course of their investigation, has constantly generated story after story after story. and the result has been that the james comey. and to the extent there s a pattern of the president here attempting to quash his own investigation, one imagines it s possible that that adds to that pile of evidence that the special counsel is evaluating. i mean, that s right, the special counsel is looking into obstruction. we know that from reporting. so we have to assume that the investigators are going to be looking at any action that the president took public or private, to influence this matter. and cast a broad net that they re going to be looking at this. they re probably going to be looking at a number of things this president has done. but he can t help himself from becoming personally involved in this stuff. some of his advisers in the white house, the legal advisers, the political advisers have been encouraging him to keep his distance, to work through lawyers on all of this, to observe and respect, frankly, a legal structure that would protect him as a client. and he doesn t always listen to that. betsy, what is your sense, as someone who reports a lot on republicans on the hill, of how they will react to phone calls like this, in terms of tillis, in terms of corker? does it make them more or less inclined to maintain this sort of distance independence from the president? it, obviously, does nothing to thaw the already very complicated relationships between the white house and capitol hill. and one thing i thought was really important detailed in josh s story is the fact that one of the folks who was treated to an angry phone call from the president was bob corker. remember, corker, at first, was very close with trump. he was considered a potential vice president contender. he was considered a potential contender for secretary of state, as recently as several weeks ago, i had a conversation with a lobbyist who works on foreign policy issues, who said, keep an eye on corker, because if tillerson decides to bow out, he s next in line. now, though, it looks like corker is no longer competing for this. first, we know, about maybe a week or so ago, corker told local reporters in his home state that he thought the president might not have the stability to be in the white house. that means this relationship is frayed, and the president s phone call to corker probably played a major role in him feeling comfortable leveling that kind of criticism. betsy woodruff, phillip rucker, many thanks. joining me now are two republicans who have had a lot to say about the president s russia obsession. evan mcmullen and republican strategist rick wilson. rick, let me start with you. the sort of non-incrippletory set of facts is that the white house believes it s bad policy, and that he feels insulted on a personal level by the russia investigation, because there s nothing there. what do you how do you evaluate that argument? absolutely nothing else in donald trump s life causes him as much anxiety and anger and such an instantly visceral response as anything having to do with russia. and you know, it s the old thing from proverbs 28:1. the guilty man flees when no one pursues him. and every time russia comes up, donald trump s reaction is so hyperbolic and so over the top, and you can see in the discussions from this article this evening that these members are thinking, why is he going so far off the rails on this particular question? and why is he, is he pretending that this is some sort of constitutional restriction on him, when it s perfectly in the purview of congress. they may assume he doesn t know that, but his reaction to it has very much marked, i think, the investigation, and helped set a certain attitude inside the senate about where trump is on this. and i think it s made them more skeptical and much more dubious of his excuses. evan, what do you think of that? i think that s right. i think this is a reflection of fundamental issues about the president, not sort of just typical back and forth between the executive and the legislative branches about legislation. donald trump is deeply vulnerable, related to russia, and issues related to russia that have to do with his activities, before the campaign and potentially obstruction of justice. so this investigation is naturally going to put him at odds with the rest of the government, that in many cases is just trying to do its job. the other thing is that donald trump comes from a background in which he was rewarded for bullying people. the problem is, is that senators are very hard to bully. it may work in the white house somewhat. it may have worked on the campaign trail, during a campaign season. but the reality is, for example, majority leader mcconnell does not like to be told how to do his job. and other senior republican leaders on the hill, have learned that in the past. and donald trump is going to learn that lesson, too. i suspect that what will happen going forward will be that you will see additional commitment among republican senators to advancing russia-related protections and investigations. but at the same time, they are in the same boat on other policy issues, whether it s funding the government or, you know, or tax reform or health care. so they will work together. that will happen. maybe they ll fail, maybe they ll succeed. but on the russia stuff, i think what donald trump has done is insured that republican senators are going to make sure what needs to be done is done. there s also, rick, it seems to me, this sense of betrayal from the president. we saw this in the comey interactions, this sort of expectation of loyalty. that essentially, you work for me. and i think it seems to me that his posture towards the senate has been that very much, that you are essentially my employees. that you work for me. and my sense from reporting on u.s. senator is they don t love being treated that way by the president, even if it s their own party. chris, just if i could say yeah, please, evan, go ahead. there s this line out there that president trump s advisers believe that because his national popularity, although extremely, you know, terribly low, is higher than that of congress as a whole, that somehow he s in a better position than they are. but that s the wrong number to be looking at. the sort of little secret about congress is that, yes, congress as a whole is unpopular. but members of congress have totally different popularity or approval ratings within their own constituency. and especially in the senate. and so, it s just an unsophisticated way of looking at the situation. go ahead, rick. and the other thing is, chris. this indicates very strongly, you know, donald trump is not a guy who understands that pesky constitution very well. and this is a government where the powers are separated between three co-equal branches. and one of those co-equal branches includes the senate, which is a body with enormous power, enormous scope of influence, and the ability of individual senators to have a bigger influence on the overall process, on the legislative side, that i think donald trump has ever grasped or understood. and he s made a lot of enemies there. and he s making a lot more enemies every day. i mean, this is a guy last night who had better things to say about kim jong-un than he did about arizona senator john mccain, who is suffering from brain cancer. this is a guy who has gone after jeff flake and dean heller and a number of other u.s. senators, in a way that it s not that he s politically competing with him, it s that he simply doesn t understand that his an actual co-call branch of government. they don t work for him. they re not his employees. he can t yell you re fired and throw them out of the boardroom. and i think he also mistakes the sort of courtesy of the senate and the sort of traditions and folk ways of the senate for weakness. and a lot of these guys will smile and look in his eye and say, mr. president and then they re going to shank him. lindsey graham and others, you know, these guys are perfectly civil. and they also hold their ground perfectly well when the time comes. all right. evan mcmullen and rick wilson, thank you for your time tonight, gentlemen. thank you. up next, president trump goes off-prompter and stays decidedly on message. the fallout from last night s angry performance by the president in phoenix in two minutes. 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represents the authentic donald trump. off-teleprompter is on-script. by now, having won both the republican primary and general election with minorities of the popular vote, the president knows the potency of divide and conquer politics. he leaned heavily into those politics last night, railing against the backlash or his handling of the white supremacist violence in charlottesville, accusing the media of failing to give him credit for condemning hate groups. i hit him with neo-nazi, i hit em with everything. i got the white supremacists, the neo-nazi, i got em all in there. let s see. kkk, we have kkk. i got em all. but the president left out the part where he blamed both sides for the violence in charlottesville and defended the, quote, fine people who marched with white nationalists. instead, he seemed to identify with their cause last night, and using the same language as white nationalists to talk about confederate monuments. it s time to expose the crooked media deceptions and to challenge the media for their role in formenting divisions. and yes, by the way, yes, by the way, they are trying to take away our history and our heritage. you see that. they are trying to take away our history and our heritage. the president also hinted, he plans to pardon joe arpaio, the infamous arizona sheriff, who s convicted of criminal contempt for defying a court order to stop racially profiling hispanics. earlier, the white house had told reporters that there would be no talk of a pardon last night. do the people in this room like sheriff joe? [ cheers and applause ] was sheriff joe convicted for doing his job? that s what i ll make a prediction. i think he s going to be just fine, okay? but i won t do it tonight, because i don t want to cause any controversy. is that okay? former homeland security secretary janet napolitano knows a thing or two about joe arpaio. she was governor of arizona from 2003 to 2009. she joins me now. governor, what did you make of that moment, the president sort of flirting with the notion of pardoning a man who s convicted of contempt of court for continuing to racially profile arizonians. well, i think he would be just wrong to pardon the sheriff. the sheriff was subject to lawful court orders to stop racially profiling. he denied and defied those court orders. he continued to do it. he was found guilty of that. you know, it takes quite a bit of evidence for the department of justice to bring a criminal contempt charge, particularly against an elected leader like sheriff joe. and so for the president to hold that out as a tease was a dis to all of the people in arizona who have been victims of that racial profiling, and a disto the court system and the legal system that we have. you were attorney general of that state, if i m not mistaken, you were governor of that state, you served as head of the department of homeland security, you are now running part of california s higher education system. as someone who has been around presidents, executives, people in power, what do you make of watching the president give a performance like he did last night? well, it was disturbing and disappointing. because it was so clearly undisciplined, it was feeding inaccurate information, incomplete information. it was a lost opportunity to help bring our country together, which our country sorely needs. and, you know, was it was sort of a shocking performance, i must say. james clapper had some really strong words. he s a man that you worked with in the united states government. i want to play you his reaction to what the president said last night and get your reaction to that. take a listen. i don t know when i ve listened and watched something like this from a president that i found more disturbing. this behavior, and this divisiveness, and the complete intellectual, moral, and ethical void that the president of the united states exhibits. and how much longer does the country have to, to borrow a phrase, endure this nightmare? what did you make of those comments? well, those are, indeed, strong words. and, you know, i i think i, uh, uh stand back and i look at the president s performance, performances, particularly over the last several weeks, and, you know, i stand with the majority of americans who wish he had spoken with moral clarity and absolute unambiguity after the events in charlottesville. i wish he were not threatening to shut down the federal government over a wall, which will not be an effective means of dealing with illegal immigration across our border and will never be totally built. i wish he were reaching out in a leadership way to even members of his own party, in an attempt to governor this country, as opposed to it being one long campaign rally. to that point, you had an op-ed about daca, which is the people who were brought here as children, in an unauthorized fashion, as immigrants, who were granted a kind of reprieve by the obama administration. and there s some talk of essentially the trump administration using them as sort of pawns in a showdown with the democrats in congress, in which they may not essentially continue to protect their legal status. what do you make of that? you know, i think these young people, these so-called dreamers, you know, really should not be used as trade bait, particularly for something as unpopular as a wall or building a wall with mexico. i think that ideally, you would have congress and the president working on immigration reform that would really give us a 21st century well, that s not going to happen. immigration system that would work. that s not going to work. so have a stand-alone dream bill. if you want to provide permanent protection to these young people. but i don t think they should be used as trade bait. all right, secretary janet napolitano, thanks for joining me tonight. you bet. ahead, as we ve been discussing, the president threatening to shut down our government, as the governor just said, if republicans won t fund the border wall. he said mexico would pay for. the insane outbreak of gop brinksmanship, next. republicans have a packed agenda when they return to congress on september 5th. among their essential tasks, passing a new spending bill and raising the debt ceiling by month s end. but last night in phoenix, president trump threw a monkey wrench into those plans. build that wall. now the obstructionist democrats would like us not to do it. but believe me, we have to close down our government, we re building that wall. the president is threatening to shut down the government if congress doesn t pass a spending bill that includes money for a border wall. the same wall the president repeatedly, repeatedly promised mexico would pay for. republican leadership immediately tried to tamp down the shutdown idea. given the time of year it is and the rest of the appropriations we have wbr id= wbr17940 /> to do, we re going to need more time to complete our appropriations process, particularly in the /b> senate. so that s something that i think we all recognize and understand, that we re going to have to have some more time to complete our appropriations process. so i wbr-id= wbr18130 /> don t think anyone s interested in having a shutdown. i don t think it s in our interest to do so. republicans, in fact, have been trying to reassure the country that they can get through their legislative deadlines in september without upending the economy. here, for example, is mitch mcconnell two days ago on that very subject. there is zero chance, no chance, we won t raise the debt ceiling. no chance. america is not going to default. and we ll get the job done in conjunction with the secretary of the treasury. we ll discuss the potential collision course between republican leaders and the white house after this praek. congress gets back in session after labor day and they won t have much time until they hit two crucial deadlines. the debt limit spending and the spending bill they have to pass by september 30th. both headlines are major tests for president trump and the republican party, with repercussions throughout the economy and the world if either of them were to fail. someone who knows all about congressional deadlines, david jolley of florida, joins me now. what do you think was going through the minds of paul ryan, mitch mcconnell, and congressional leadership last night when the president explicitly said we re going to shut down the government if we have to to get that wall funding? chris, that s a great question. what was going through their mind and who they ll say publicly is wildly different. and that is why republicans on the hill in leadership have lost a lot of credibility. you said it earlier. there are no two donald trumps. there s only one. it s the one we saw last night. wbr id= wbr21000 /> the lying, narcissistic, child of a man with no understanding of public policy, with no ability for critical thinking, someone who puts the fortunes of his own interests and his own corporations, his own family above the fortunes of the country. a man who seemingly suffers from a clinical form of idiocy and someone who should be primaried, if you want to be a good republican. but the reality is, we have republican leaderships who embrace him when he is succeeding and look the other way when he is failing. the question on the shutdown, coming at the end of september, is how far does this president sell expectations on issues like the wall? he actually folded and collapsed in a spring negotiation over a short-term budget. he really did. he folded and collapsed and so did his budget director, mick mulvaney. the question is, does he oversell expectations or does he quietly just go away? and i think we ve seen, this president really isn t up for a fight. he can t handle his own when he s in a fight. that is an interesting notion. because my sense is that democrats democrats generally don t like shutdowns, you know, /b> wbr-id= wbr21600 /> no one likes shutdowns. but democrats generally don t like shutdowns. but in terms of how the politics play out, my sense is that chuck schumer, nancy pelosi, democratic leadership thinks they have the better hand if the government is shutting down under unified republican control to pay for a wall the president promised we wouldn t have to pay for. sure. so this is groundhog day and federal budget politics. i served on the appropriations committee, i spent 20 years doing federal budget politics. at the end of the day, the math is the math. it will take democrats and probably less than $100 republicans to work with democrats to pass a compromise budget. otherwise, nothing can actually get to the president s desk. i ve lived through this. i ve got the scars from it from being one of those republicans in the governing caucus. the question for donald trump is, barack obama used to always sign those budgets. does donald trump sign that budget? that s or does he refuse to and shut down the government? that s what we don t know. that s the fascinating new variable out of here. we ve already seen the house freedom caucus basically drive john boehner into early retirement over precisely these kinds of showdowns. even while losing! conservatives are going to lose this fight. right. conservatives are going to lose this. but your point is so important. they re going lose it because of the math in congress, where you re going to get essentially democrats and some portion of the republican caucus to pass something out of that house. the question is, the president can team up with the house freedom caucus to essentially scotch it and force a shutdown himself. in the house, you have the tuesday group and a few moderates. i call it within the republican caucus in the house, you have the governing caucus and the shutdown caucus. the governing caucus will join with democrats to pass a bill. that governing caucus reflects the politics of republicans in the senate, largely, who have little appetite for a shutdown. that is the governing budget that will get to this president. and we will wait to see. i think he doesn t have the spine to veto it. i think he undersells expectations and starts talking about something totally different to distract from the fact he s going to lose this fight. and that gets to what is one of the central paradoxes of this presidency, which is, it is just obvious the president doesn t care, one way or the other, about the policy. i mean, he cares about the victories, he cares about the symbolism, clearly, but it s just clear from everyone around him what they say about him, all the reporting, that normally, the president would care. he would have a favorite outcome in a substantiative sense for what came out. this president pretty clearly doesn t have one. he doesn t understand policy. and the parts that he does understand, he lies about to his base. but, listen, let s go back to republican leaders on this. this is very important. leadership happens in public, not in private, by its definition, leadership has to happen in private. you can t be paul ryan, mitch mcconnell, and just have these backroom conversations. leaders lead movements. they lead voters. and we have seen a complete failure of leadership on capitol hill. you cannot look the other way at what happened last night. you have to be a republican that says, you know what, this president s incapable of leading and we should challenge him, either in a primary or completely constrict his powers of the oval office right now, by operating as an article i congress with the authority that we were given by the voters. the president, with of course, has already been tweeting about both shutdowns, he talked about a shutdown last night. he s been talking about changing the rules to 51%. our country, he said this back in may, our country needs a good shutdown in september to fix this mess. the final question i have to you is, even in the wake of a climbdown, let s say he is he does ultimately not have an appetite for the fight, as he did in spring, when he got rolled essentially on this negotiation. it s also way of him essentially constantly setting up the congress as the people to blame for the continuation of all the things that his base hates about washington. listen, there is no moral equivalency between this president and some of the dictators we ve seen in the dark ages of the middle east and other places around the globe. but the politics of some of those dark dictators was to always have an enemy. and that is what this president has modernized. he always have to have an enemy, even at the sacrifice of republicans. he will continue to do that, to keep his 35% with him. all right. former republican congressman, david jolly, thanks for joining me. good to be with you, chris. ahead, the republican party embracing its most extreme members, like the conspiracy theorist and the birther that could soon be elected to the u.s. senate. plus, tonight s thing one, thing two starts next. so, when the arizona republican party used these images on its people page, one of them really got people s attention. and it may, in fact, look familiar to you, and that s thing two in 60 seconds. there are 24 hours in a day. tempur-pedic helps you get the most out of every one of them. only proprietary tempur material precisely conforms to your body. you get up to twice as much pressure relieving power, so you won t toss and turn. and tempur-pedic is the best at minimizing motion transfer from your partner. you ll sleep deeply. and wake up, feeling powerful. now through september 17th, save up to $500 on select adjustable sets. find your exclusive retailer at tempurpedic.com we have one idea, just google asian american under images, there it is! the first photo. very first one, top left. possibly the path of least resistance for a web designer, just pick the first one under asian american. margaret cho responded on her facebook page, well, maybe now people will start watching. oh,. another anti-wrinkle cream in no hurry to make anything happen. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair works in just one week. with the fastest retinol formula to visibly reduce wrinkles. neutrogena®. it s time for the biggest sale of the year with the new sleep number 360 smart bed. it senses your every move and automatically adjusts on both sides to keep you effortlessly comfortable. and snoring.. does your bed do that? the new 360 smart bed is part of our biggest sale of the year where all beds are on sale. and right now save 50% on the labor day limited edition bed, plus free home delivery. ends saturday! luther strange, another mcconnell favorite, getting absolutely crushed in the race for jeff sessions old senate seat by this guy. roy moore, who as alabama chief justice defied the supreme court decision, legalizing same-sex marriage, and refused to remove a giant ten commandments statue from the state judicial building. moore also doesn t think that president obama was born in the united states. that s also true of another popular figure look the base, former maricopa county sheriff joe arpaio, who was convicted of defying a court order to stop targeting and detaining suspected undocumented immigrants and who the president of the united states last night suggested that he plans to pardon. was sheriff joe convicted for doing his job? that s what . he should have had a jury, but you know what? i ll make a prediction. i think he s going to be just fine, okay? when we come back, more signs of where the gop base is at in the age of trump, plus the republican party s unbelievable decision to greet a democratic senator with mariachi band. that s next. back on his own family s heritage calling for the removal of confederate monuments. amazingly that was arguably not the most offensive move by the party today. the national republican senatorial committee attacked senator joe donnelly. the video made up of being serenaded by a mariachi band, you know, mexico. trying to brand him as mexico joe for allegedly profiting from outsourcing. joining me, jenna johnson, and huffington post michelle bernard. jenna, you were in the rally last night. i think there is a kind of attitudal nature against somebody like kelly ward or roy moore but the kind of reveling in behavior that you shouldn t revel in seems to be something that the base really, really likes. the folks in that rally room seemed to like it. yeah. there s a lot of questions about what the republican base is right now. but for the people who showed up to the rally last night, these were donald trump s most devoted supporters. the people who were willing to wait outside, it was 107 degrees. they waited outside for hours to see him. waited inside. there wasn t that much water around. they were dehydrated by the time he got on stage. and they cheered a lot of the things that he was saying on stage. meanwhile, kelly ward was at the rally working her way through the line, working her way through the room. i think she talked to maybe everyone who was there last night, introducing herself, telling people who she is. and a lot of her supporters were there wearing these yellow t-shirts that said trump 2016, ward 2018. so she s really trying to piggyback on this trump movement, and attract these supporters who are so dedicated to him. you know, there s reporting the president had huddled with some folks that also might jump into that race in the primary against jeff flake. but it seems one of the key trends here, particularly when you look at the alabama race or in arizona, that this is a phenomena that is bigger than the president. we think of him as so singular, but what s happening in alabama suggests that a lot of the gop base is looking for figures like that. you know, i went back today, chris, and looked at an old videotape. we were asked early on, whan is the state of the republican party today. if you go back and look at an old videotape from 1964 of george wallace, the former governor of alabama, introducing orville fobbis the former governor of arkansas, that s what the republican party is today. the republican party died the day that president trump gave that speech about charlottesville and found a moral equivalency between the nazi sympathizers and protesters and reincarnated george wallace and fobbis. this is a man who is a lawyer who has defied the supreme court, defied the highest law of the land. joe arpaio has done the same thing. we ve got donald trump who has come out and basically said joe arpaio did absolutely nothing wrong because he was doing his job. well, he wasn t doing his job. the question is, why we have so many people in the nation who are supporting people who disobey the rule of law. what good is it to have a democracy and to have a constitution if you only follow the laws of the land when you like them. these are not moral immoral laws they re disobeying, these are moral laws that the supreme court found and they basically said, we don t like them. they fly in the face of what we believe america should be so we re just not going to follow them. and trump supporters and the president himself are saying, let s go for it. this is the wild, wild west. it is no longer the united states of america. one of the things that united states all those it seems to me, jenna, is the idea of having all the right enemies, talking about the president s supporters. that, you know, whatever essentially, you sort of come to your feelings about donald trump or joe arpaio or kelly ward based on who doesn t like them. and based on who they re fighting with. i wonder last night during the amazing 40-minute-long rant there s a lot of media out there. we are an easy target. i have to say this was a difficult rally. i was standing out in the crowd. this is a difficult rally to be standing out in the crowd for. people were angry. people were booing. but as he kept going, and going, and going, and basically making the same attack again and again and again, i saw a lot of people around me checking their cell phones, people sitting down, one woman came up to me and we started having a conversation. and some people just left the rally, trying to beat the traffic, get ahead of everyone else. while these points might be big rallying points when he first says them, he seems to miss what he usually is able to do is hitting that point just enough times to keep people enthusiastic without just boring everyone. michelle, were you anticipating any sort of to the extent some of the polling would suggest do you think it will play out in the primary contests? do you expect it to be reflected in them? i think this is the future of the republican party for the
john lennon was shot by an unknown at this time white male. the world has reacted with immense shock and grief to the first rock and roll assassination. it was like in one moment the 60s and the 70s got murdered. in his life he s given more love than most men and women on the face of this earth. we re here to prove that love is not dead, even though john is. you start the decade with the death of a beatle. you don t really know where you re going to go from that point. you know, culturally or musically. for a while it seemed there was nothing new on the horizon. announcing the latest achievement in home entertainment. the power of sight. the power of sound. stereo. mtv. music television. we all are so excited about this new concept in tv. we ll be doing for tv what fm did for radio. don t stand so close to me why do you think we re so popular over there? well, there s a tradition that goes back over the past 20 years from the days of the beatles and the rolling stones where british bands seem to be better at it than americans. the police have sold 4 million albums in one year. rolling stone chose them as best new band of the year. taking note of the swirling, dreamy soaring quality of the sound. giant steps are what you take walking on the moon it was incredible to see them. and i couldn t believe what i was hearing out of three people. i was shocked. i once read that you were called the pink floyd of the 80s. what do you think of that? we re not at all. we re the cure of the 80s. the holy trinity of i like what s happening at dance places now, over the last year or two. i think the music is becoming very healthy. this golden opportunity features steel titanium and carbon fiber. raw elements made exhilarating. by lexus. experience uncompromising performance at the lexus golden opportunity sales event before it ends. choose from the is turbo, es 350 or nx turbo for $299 a month for 36 months if you lease now. experience amazing at your lexus dealer. (vo) it would be great if human beings were great at being human. and if all of mankind were made up of kind women and kind men. it would be wonderful if common knowledge was knowledge commonly known. and if the light from being enlightened into every heart was shown. it would be glorious if neighbors were neighborly. and indifference a forgotten word. it would be awesome if we shared everything and being greedy was absurd. it would be spectacular if the golden rule was golden to every man. and the good things that we ever did was everything that we can. (vo 2) treating others like we d like to be treated has always been our guiding principle. hi. lookthe whole fam. hooked they sure did! guy-who-used-to-ask-if-you-could -hear-him-now-with-verizon? .or just paul. we ve been up here for ages. you should switch to sprint like i did. nowadays, every network is great! but with sprint, you re not paying a ton for unlimited or overages. thanks, paul. works for me! daddy, can we switch to sprint? i don t feel too good. don t get hooked by verizon and let a 1% difference in network reliability cost you twice as much. switch to sprint unlimited $22.50 per month per line for four lines. for people with hearing loss, visit sprintrelay.com stir up a rich creamy flavor. it can inspire you to stir up other things, too. like a new friendship. stir up commitment. with coffee-mate ice cream flavors. culture. it changed the entire dynamic of what you had to do as far as promotion was concerned. you had to be a performance artist as well as a musician. the intelligent ones recognized that it s a marriage between the visual artist and the musician at this point. monkey don t you know you re going to shock the monkey the man or the woman who finds the right combination will take it all. let s dance put on your red shoes and dance the blues when david and i decided that we were going to work together, it was pretty clear to me that david wanted to make a commercial album. now i m going to go make a pop record. but it was going to be his version of pop. my songs always tend to be impressionistic or even have a surreal quality to them. and on this album is the first time i ve really tried to adapt to a didactic kind of approach to songwriting. if you should fall into my arms tremble like a flower artists in the 80s, david bowie for that matter, realized if you wanted to make it you needed to be on mtv. but there s one group that s not happy with mtv. many black artists who have been told their music doesn t fit the format. that s what s happening. we re being sat in the back of the bus television style. and if pittman gets away with this and there are other cable shows that do it they re going to try it. mtv doesn t exclude black acts. what mtv does exclude is music that is not rock and roll. mtv came out with no consideration on how to infuse black music into their mix. i m just floored by the fact there are so few black artists featured on it. why is that? we have to try and do what we think not only new york and los angeles will appreciate but also some town in the midwest that will be scared to death by prince or a string of other black faces. interesting. okay. thank you very much. when are we going to see anybody of color on mtv, because you said music television. when are you going to start covering all genres of music? music shouldn t have color. i don t believe in that. i don t want it labeled black or white, i want it labeled music. [ cheers and applause ] [ billie jean ] 1983, motown has this big tv special, motown s 25th anniversary. at that time thriller is out and thriller is doing well. but michael jackson couldn t get billie jean on mtv. she was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene when the rest of the world was going crazy and he can t get on mtv? michael jackson? come on. when he does that moonwalk, if you were sitting on the couch by the end of it you were on the floor in front of the tv. you couldn t believe what you were seeing. i would say the moonwalk was really one of the first viral moments that affected rock history. the next week thriller started selling a million copies a week. i like michael jackson because he s bad, he knows how to dance. he s so sexy and so gorgeous. he s exciting! michael jackson is the man of the 80s. mtv starts to get pressure from cbs records, which was michael jackson s label. rock and roll in itself was really the thing that broke a lot of rules. when you re very successful, you try to make your own rules occasionally. as the story goes, cbs essentially said we will pull every other artist we have on mtv if you don t play this. they had to be essentially blackmailed into doing it. it doesn t matter who s wrong or right just beat it he was the artist that mtv really needed. they didn t know they needed him, but boy, when we started to see those michael jackson videos, it was just unbelievable. then there was the domino effect. suddenly you see prince videos from warner brothers do the same thing. tonight we re gonna party like it s 1999 prince wasn t just materializing out of nowhere. where was he before this video was done? prince was a huge star on black radio stations. i mean, people he had a underground cult following and he was a very sexy, hot performer. the sweat of your body covers me can you, my darling, can you picture this prince loved the idea that he was taking his punk funk music and turning it on to a white audience, and that wouldn t have happened if not for mtv. this is what it sounds like when doves cry when i was younger, i always said that one day i was going to play all kinds of music and not be judged for the color of my skin but the quality of my work. only want to see you only want to see you in the purple rain prince had a great androgyny. he blurred the gender line. he sings, he writes, he plays. every time i see him it s just like, really? okay, i quit. when he plays guitar, it s just part of his body in a way that i ve never really seen before. and it s not contrived. it s just it s just happening. what was his music? was it r&b? his music was just straight down the middle mainstream grab you by the throat and balls pop. we go down to the river and into the river we die at this point a lot of it is about being there, which is why we haven t done too much of the video thing. a lot of it allows too much distance. like what our band is about is about breaking down distance. at night i wake up bruce was all about credibility and intelligence and integrity. so how would he translate his music and his attitude toward the world to what seemed like this frivolous world of the music video? bruce is not going to be next to a winking model on a sailboat. you can t start a fire you can t start a fire without a spark this gun s for hire he ends up doing essentially a concert video starring a then unknown courteney cox. it s like this weird recreation of something that organically happens in a bruce springsteen concert. born in the usa if there was an artist in the 80s who transcended the music video he s the guy. he s the guy that didn t need to do great music videos to still be a great artist. he s bruce springsteen. it was great music. born in the usa hi! leaving a career to follow a calling takes courage. a personalized financial strategy can give you confidence to take the next step. hi guys! aw yeah! see how access to j.p. morgan investment expertise can help you. chase. make 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monday! it is unlikely they are going to abandon their nuclear program. you are behind a rock and a hard place if you re president trump. how do you deal with this? there are options, but it seems like the options they are pursuing now are having the alternative effect. what it seems like they have to do is just try to put more pressure on china as seems to be one of the only leverages they have now. and at that point, not to cut you off, but i want to welcome our viewers in the united states and everyone watching from around the world. you are joining us for breaking news out of north korea. speaking to ian in seoul. let s bring you up to speed with what we know now. there are reports of an earthquake in north korea not long after pyongyang claimed to have a nuclear weapon. the u.s. geological survey said it was a 6.3 magnitude explosion. it is unclear if this was actually a nuclear test. we want to be clear. we do not know this as a fact. it has not been confirmed yet. what we can tell you is that south korean officials say they believe the tremor was manmade. north korean state media said they had a hydrogen bomb and ran these images you are looking at now on screen. they put these out, purporting to show kim jong-un inspecting the device. let s go now to will ripley who joins me now on the line from tokyo. will, you are just back from north korea. as you say, you are just waking up in tokyo now. you were in north korea the last couple of days. when you were there, was there any indication that there was a nuclear test on the horizon? well, all last week when we were reporting for north korea we reiterated that it was around this time last year they conducted their fifth nuclear test. that nuclear test happened shortly before the end of the joint military drills between the u.s. and south korea which always infuriate the north korean government. this infur yated them for a long time. a week before the drills ended last week they conducted their fifth nuclear tests. the drills this year ended on thursday. while we saw that provocative launch over japan, north korea didn t give any warning of an impending nuclear test. what they have done is put out messaging over the past couple of days talking about their nuclear program and how it is increasingly advanced and urging the united states to shift the longstanding position of not acknowledging north korea as a nuclear weapons state. this is something north korea is demanding as a precondition for any kind of discussion with the united states and its allies. that the notion that north korea throw away its nuclear program, be taken off the table. north korea says it won t happen no matter what sanctions or diplomatic pressure is on them. they believe they have made too much progress and they believe these weapons are the leverage that will guarantee down the road long-term a better future, a better life for the north korean people. the north koreans will come to the diplomatic table from a position of strength as opposed to what the united states would like to see which is a crippled north korean regime becoming financially desperate enough to have discussions and perhaps throw away the nuclear program. we got in there last week. there were a number of discussions. they said time and again that s not going to happen. what the latest test demonstrates is an increase in their abilities. the earthquake that was created by last year s explosion around this time was 5.3. this is a 6.3 magnitude explosion. it is a much larger nuclear device they tested. they also put out a picture of north korea s supreme leader kim jong-un standing next to what looks like and what north korea claims is a miniaturized nuclear warhead being loaded on a ballistic missile. north korea said they have an increasing capability and they are calling on the u.s. to change their position on acknowledging north korea as a nuclear weapons state. then perhaps there could be talks on north korea s terms. i thought when i was in pyongyang a couple of days ago perhaps that meant that the situation would deescalate and this would go into a holding pattern for a while. clearly after the bomber and fighter jet fly over on the korean peninsula north korea has upped the ante in a big way. they are not concerned about sanctions or international condemnation. they are going all in on this strategy to show the world that they are becoming increasingly advanced with the nuclear arsenal. they put out a news bulletin in the past 12 hours saying these warheads are 100% home made. which means they say they have all the materials they need to build these nuclear weapon s inside north korea now. they don t need to trade with other countries to build these weapons. they say you can try cutting us off but we can build as many as we want. if you continue this policy we ll continue building more and more weapons and become more of a threat to the international community including the mainland u.s. will, the point you made about having the capabilities to build the components for the nuclear ballistic devices internally was one that struck me as i read the reporting put out by k cna, the state media. looking at a north korea that s gone past the point of any return. essentially if what they are claiming is true, if they are completely willing to ignore sanctions and the threat of more significant action, at this point you have to ask what s left on the table in terms of a means for bargaining with north korea. the united states has leverage in bargaining with north korea. north korea has long wanted normalized relations with the united states. they have wanted a more normalized relationship with much of the international community. what north korean officials have been telling me for years, this last trip was my 14th trip to north korea over the last three years. every single trip they used the same terminology. they say the united states has, in their eyes a hostile policy. they would like that to change. from the united states perspective this is difficult. what north korea has done by testing these nuclear devices and launching missiles is in flagrant violation of international law. so for a long time the united states government has said why would we reward a country that s violating international law repeatedly and flagrantly and by acknowledging them as a nuclear weapons state or being willing to have discussions, give them concessions. there are people in the united states that feel any assistance, any aid given to north korea has only gone to further strengthen their development of the nuclear arsenal. there is another viewpoint they have come so far with these weapons that if the world continues its strategy that s proven to be a failure and in fact vladimir putin just a couple of days ago said he believes putting pressure on north korea s rhetoric, sanctions he believes will make the situation more dangerous. north korea has shown the world that despite round after round, round seven of u.n. security sanctions was passed. despite all of that. despite attempts to cut them off they have found ways to get around the sanctions to continue bringing in money through any means necessary and possible. and they have continued to advance. more quickly than analysts believed they would. now you have yet another apparent nuclear test at the nuclear test site creating an explosion so powerful it could be felt across the border in china. you have north korea saying they are not worried about what china will do. they are not worried about the united states is going to do, japan or south korea. they are going to do what they see as necessary to protect their national sovereignty and more importantly for them to continue to have leverage over the rest of the world. they have essentially created a scenario where even though the united states is far more wealthy and far more powerful north korea has something that the united states is going to be hard-pressed to find a response to. military analysts would say a military option against north korea would be far too dangerous. the humanitarian consequences would be catastrophic. what option does it leave the united states? the united states needs to talk with north korea. a lot of people in washington don t like to reward them for bad, illegal behavior. if they don t others say this is going to continue to escalate and become more dangerous. north korea is not stopping nuclear development. will ripley joining us on the line with great insight. we appreciate it. stand by for us. we ll come back to you for your expertise. we want to take a minute and bring in colonel rick francona from oregon, a cnn military analyst and retired lieutenant colonel. thank you for being with us. as will just said is it time for the u.s. to speak to north korea and to come to the table without the expectation that this is a state that can be denuclearized? is it time to let go of the idea especially in light of everything we have heard in the last couple of hours? the possible nuclear test and the sense that they may have, indeed, been able to conquer hydrogen technology, hydrogen nuclear technology. if you listen to the statements made by secretary of defense mattis and secretary of state rex tillerson we are getting to that point. they have to keep up the standard u.s. position that we will not discuss things with north korea until they disavow themselves of a nuclear program. most people realize and will gave an excellent rundown. i don t think there is a chance the north koreans will give up this program. this is in their constitution. they believe it is in their strategic national interest. they believe it is the only thing that keeps them from being over taken, attacked by the united states. whether that s true or not isn t important. it is their perception. it is the perception of their people. that s what they believe. that they have to have the strategic nuclear deterrent to keep themselves in power. as long as that s the case, i don t see anything that s going to make them want to discuss giving up their nuclear weapons. what s the option? the united states has to determine how to live with a nuclear armed north korea. we have lived with others in the past russia and the chinese. we have been able to develop a deterrent posture with them. mutually assured destruction. the north koreans know any attack on the united states would be met with overwhelming military force leading to the end of the country. kim jong-un doesn t want to use a weapon. he wants to own them because he believes that gives him leverage. that s what makes him a viable world power. colonel francona, has the north korea leader backed the u.s. president into a corner? i say that in light of president trump s statements of fire and fury, if north korea continues to escalate threats and carry out provocative actions. well, what now? what now from president trump? president trump drew a line which north korea swiftly jumped over. what now for the president? if you look you go back in history. we have been dealing with this problem for years, for decades. it was always kick the can down the road. they don t have the technology. they are not ready yet. we still have time. well, we don t have time anymore. the koreans ramped up this program. they have acquired these capabilities much faster than most people thought they could. now we are faced with the end game. we have to do something. so it s not that they backed president trump into a corner. they backed the united states into a corner. they have done this successfully for each presidential administration. now there is no more road to kick the can onto. we are where the rubber meets the road. something needs to happen. we have to determine what our policy will be rather than saying we have time. we don t have time. are you surprised by how quickly they are moving with their nuclear program, how quickly the tests are ha iin ha. how are they doing it? they put their entire national resources into it. this is their number one priority. every resource they have, all of the top scientists in the country are working on these programs. we have concurrent programs. you have the nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles. they are both important. these technologies combine into a capability they want. we are almost there. in fact, if what kim jong-un demonstrated today is real, they have achieved that combination of the two technologies. and so am i surprised? you know, the north koreans are good engineers. i have seen a lot of their equipment over the years. we have gotten our hands on some of it. it s well made, well engineered. am i surprised they have the capability to do it? not really. i am surprised at the speed which they are developing. the timeline is compressing so fast. as i say, they are developing capabilities faster than we are coming up with policies to deal with it. yeah, very true. colonel, please stay with us. we want to keep your valuable insight. we are going to hit pause for a second. adam mountain joins us from washington. thank you so much for joining us. let s get your reaction to what could well be north korea s sixth nuclear test. it does look like it was a sixth nuclear test. the magnitude was higher than previous tests. earlier tonight north korea released photographs of what it said was a two-stage thermonuclear weapon, an advanced system. it said the warhead could fit in an icbm. in fact, that it was loaded into an icbm they say is capable of reaching the continental united states. we can t verify all of the details they released in the statement. this appears to have been a very large test. they have boosted the yield of their weapons. we need to take that capability seriously. take it seriously and respond how from the u.s. perspective? well, the interesting thing is a thermonuclear weapon doesn t necessarily mean deterrence is impossible. you can devastate a city with a hiroshima-style bomb like the one we dropped. we already knew the north koreans had that. this would up the yield. it would be capable of greater devastation and damage. but the facts about deterrence, what the united states and allies need to do to prevent north korea from using a nuclear weapon are roughly the same. we expect that north korea doesn t want to utilize a weapon out of the blue to attack the u.s. homeland. we think they would want to use one if it felt the regime was facing i vags. the first priority is to re-establish a strong defensive posture on the peninsula to ensure the weapons are never used. what does that look like? i mean, there is already the construction of the t.h.a.d. anti-missile system in south korea. what are you talking about? strengthening defense pacts between the u.s. and allies, japan and south korea? break it down for us. the trump administration has not mounted a firm and visible response that north korea has tested missiles at an accelerated pace throughout the spring or this icbm which was a critical time for the united states. one thing we should be looking at is what are the new military capabilities, defensive military capabilities that could help to prevent north korea from agresing. agresing against allied forces. one thing that concerned me tonight was the statement that kcna released with the photographs saying this nuclear warhead was capable of variable yield. they could dial down the yield to a lower yield which suggests that north korea is not just thinking about having a capability to retaliate against american cities in the event of invasion, but in fact they are thinking about how to use the nuclear weapons for blackmail, potentially to use them in a wider range of circumstances and situations. the priority now should be to abandon this fool ser rand to draw out of the free trade agreement announced today. stand tough with allies and make sure we have the capabilities necessary to deny north korea from any kind of aggression. at low levels of escalation and at the nuclear level. adam, let me ask you this question which people are divided on. where do you stand on this point of the u.s. saying that talks with north korea will not proceed unless north korea expresses the willingness or takes action to freeze its nuclear program and ultimately denuclearize. is that a fool s errand? i think denuclearization is an important long-term goal. is it realistic? i think we should think of it as a long-term goal, not as a short-term solution. the short-term priorities are in deterrence and defense, strengthening american alliances. if they focused too much on denuclearization they are starting to overlook the near-term imperatives. the other important thing that happened is talks could stand a reasonable chance of promoting stability on the peninsula. you have to abandon this insistence on going for broke with denuclearization in order to get there. in august the united states and north korea said they restrained themselves from taking provocative action. north korea in slowing the missile tempo, the united states in refraining from flights. unfortunately neither of these restraint messages got across. there was miscommunication. neither side was willing to take the first step in solidifying that regime of restraint. if we are going to maintain deterrence and want any hope of slowing missile tests they ve got to have the direct talks that are focused on arms control and the peninsula. before i let you go, we have to talk china. this administration has placed a great amount of faith in china s ability to rein in north korea. not just this administration. past administrations have also made the point because it is true china is the north s biggest trading partner and have significant leverage that has not led to north korea changing its actions. what is your expectation in terms of a response from beijing in light of this possible sixth nuclear test and after the sanctions passed by the u.n. that china signed on to enforce vigorously. china does sign on to a new u.n. sanction when there is a missile test, especially a nuclear test. we can expect they will reconvene the council and push for a tough new resolution. we should be skeptical of whether or not that economic pressure forces the north korean regime to behave in ways that we want. whether it has the effects we desire or whether it s just a way of looking tough for the international community and domestic audiences. what are the things we need to explore over the long run? if we can step back from denuclearization, stop manufacturing a crisis in the near term, whether china would help us deter north korea. remember the primary interest is stability on the peninsula. if they start to understand that north korea is destabilizing to the region they may be willing to coordinate with us in deterring north korea from aggressing. general dunford s veft to beijing in the north of china this month or earlier in august was a good sign that this coordination could occur. that s something we need to explore. we can t get there if we are still going for broke on denuclearization. all right. adam joining us there. we appreciate it. thank you for the insight and analysis. it s absolutely been fascinating to get your thoughts on this evening. thank you. thank you. i want to bring in ian lee who joins me now from seoul, south korea. what s the latest from where you are. are we getting any more reaction to this possible sixth nuclear test by north korea? what are you hearing? the national security council is meeting here in seoul. they will be discussing this earthquake. we heard the joint chiefs of staff are investigating whether it was, in fact, a nuclear test. all signs have been pointing to the fact that this does appear to be a nuclear test. they have increased the alert level for the military in south korea. they are also increasing the surveillance of the north to determine what exactly happened and see what s going on there. it s an interesting thing to point out that in 2016 when that nuclear test happened in north korea it was a 5.3 on the richter scale. now we are seeing this one today is a 6.3. how the richter scale works every point up is ten times for powerful. that s not to say whatever caused this earthquake is ten times more powerful than the last one. it just says according to the richter scale this earthquake is ten times more powerful than the previous one in 2016. so that s something to give the experts insight into what exactly happened. but we are also monitoring north korean state television. they usually come out fairly quickly with some celebratory statement saying they have carried out a nuclear test. so we are watching closely to see when and if they do that. but right now things are tense at least for the government here because they are monitoring, trying to figure out, scrambling the national security council meeting now. we will be waiting to hear what they have to say once they are out of the meeting. ian, want you to put something in context for me. if this was a nuclear test, again, we want to stress to the viewers who may just be joining us. there was this explosion according to the usgs it was 6.3 on the richter scale. it has not been confirmed that it was a nuclear test. but if, indeed, that s what took place in north korea the sixth one. i mean, to what degree does this change our assessment of the threat posed by north korea to those in the region and the u.s.? well, this just shows that from what the richter scale says from the magnitude of this earthquake that it appears to be a larger device if it was, in fact, a nuclear weapon. the interesting thing earlier today just in the last 24 hours north korea came out and said they have the capabilities of putting a hydrogen bomb on an intercontinental ballistic missile. that s something experts thought north korea was months if not years away from achieving. but now according to state media who showed pictures of north korean leader kim jong-un at their nuclear facility inspecting this nuclear bomb and how it would be put on an icbm, that s very significant because previously we knew north korea could strike the region and could strike the united states with a missile. but they hadn t been able to put a nuclear device on the missiles. now they say they are capable of doing that. that comes as what appears to be a test of a nuclear weapon. that s a strong show of force from the north koreans. it comes as president trump had a phone conversation with the japanese prime minister abe talking about what they could do to put pressure on north korea. they talked about diplomatic isolation. they talked about economic sanctions. as we have heard from will ripley s reporting in north korea, that doesn t seem to have an effect. in fact, it has a reverse effect where it galvanized them to achieve their goal of having an advanced nuclear program for what they say is a deterrent to what they perceive as western aggression which the united states and south korea says is laughable because they say the only thing they are doing is defensive measures. these drills we saw this last week, they say they are just defensive measures as a show of force. but they say all the drills that are conducted, all the military exercises conducted between the two countries, they are a defensive posture. that s not seen as that way in north korea. so you have a lack of understanding really with the united states just having the reverse effect. really now we re watching what china has to say about this latest development. really, they are the big player in the region that we haven t heard from. china, that s where eyes are are going to be looking at, too, to see what their response is to this latest perceived nuclear test. stand by for us. i want to bring in rick francona who s joining us there from oregon. you heard in this moment as we wait for confirmation as to whether or not this was a nuclear test, all eyes will be on china. if the moment comes and it is indeed confirmed. what are your expectations of beijing? that s the issue right now. everyone has been rely on the chinese. hoping the chinese would be the solution to this problem. it doesn t appear they re going to be. we heard this in the past. we re going to rely on china to put more pressure on north korea. as we ve heard, it just does not appear that any pressure we put on north korea, any pressure that china puts on north korea is going to have the desired effect. this is north korea s primary objective is to develop this deterrent capability and they re going to do it regardless of what it costs them, because they believe that once they do that, then they will have leverage against any kind of sanctions or pressure from the outside. so you know, they re going to be playing a long game. i don t think china will do much for us. they macon dem the test, but i don t think this is going to be a game changer. i want to be clear when it comes to the situation on china. is it your belief that it s more a case of china doesn t want to do more? at the end of the day, you know, it is well documented that north korea uses chinese banks, gets oil from china. it s an economic relationship that s so interwoven, if china really did put the pressure on north korea, they could effect change. is that wrong headed thinking? no, no. i just don t think the chinese will do it. it s not in their interest. they re looking at north korea. they think we don t like what s gong on there. but if we take action, the level of that action will cause such angst and such problems in north korea that we may see a refugee crisis, internal strife. that s something the chinese don t want to dale with. they don t like north korea and what it s doing right now, but they like a stable north korea. this administration has been accused of not speaking with one voice or being on the same page when it comes to north korea. the likes of rex tillerson have erred on statements of we re not seeking regime change. diplomacy is not off the table. do you think discordance has kind of given a message to north korea that they could proceed with this possible test and with continued testing of missiles? they hear one thing from the president and then they hear something different from the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. those three will tell you they re all on the same page, but when you re reading what they re saying and you re a north korean analyst with not all the understanding of the nuances of american politics, you may think that there s division there. and that might embolden you. now is the time for continue with the program and to achieve that goal before they get their act together. is now the time for more hash rhetoric from president trump of the fire and fury strain that we heard a couple of weeks ago, if this was indeed a sixth test. is this the moment where that kind of response is necessary. are you for one saying if there s a sixth test that needs to be dialled back and behind the scenes backdoor interaction or, i won t say negotiation because there isn t one. but at least attempts to reign in north korean need to be stepped up. i favor the backdoor approach. i don t think this public tit-for-tat really gets us anywhere. it just ratchets up the rhetoric and it destabilizes what stability is in the region. but it also destabilizes our allies around the world. i want to go back to adam for a second. he s still with us from d.c. i want to ask him, adam is a senior fellow with certain for american progress. let me give you a full introduction once again, adam. to that point, is now the time for more fierce rhetoric from this administration, do you want to see more of that? would that have any positive effect if indeed this was a sixth nuclear test? there s no evidence that american rhetoric affects north korea s propensity to test whatsoever. throughout the spring donald trump and his administration have tried to ramp up the rhetoric. you heard these fire and fury threats and a variety of others. hr mcmaster, for example, said that north korea cannot be deterred. the implication is that he would want to strike before north korea really consolidated this icbm capability. those statements are not helpful. they have not kept north korea from testing and i see no rejoon for doing so in the future. all they do is manufacture a dries sis, to try to ramp up the pressure and north korea just feeling it. adam, talk to us about the propaganda value, if you will, of such a test. within north korea itself, the value to kim jong-un. as you heard from the reporting, north korean citizens are enthralled by these nuclear tests and missile tests. each one is treated like a national triumph of. so every test does strengthen the leaders hand with his population. but also within the kabal of leaders, generals, military officers that surround him. they re important for him to maintain control. so following your line of thinking, kim jong-un needs these tests for his own internal survival and cohesion of this country. right. and that s one more reason we should be skeptical that any kind of rhetorical statement from the united states could cause him to give them up. why moving aircraft carriers into the region or b-1 bomber overflights could force north korea to fold and acquiesce to american pressure and volunteer to eliminate their nuclear arsenal. they re simply too important for the survival of the regime. they re too valuable internally. and they re useful for sending a deterrence signal to the united states and its allies. these are not capabilities that north korea is going to want to give up easily. . the south korean government tends to be a little more rapid in responding so they convened a national security council meeting there and the military has said that they do think this one looks like a nuclear test. china will responds as it sees fit. it won t be rushed into thesortf things. we can expect them to go back to the u.n. security counckoucounc
responsible for uncovering spies. i got a call when i was in los angeles. we want you to come back and run this group. when i went over to the counterespionage group i asked if i could bring an assistant with me, somebody from the fbi and john i had work would previously in laufros angeles. the first fbi agents inserted in like cover in the cia was a singular opportunity. i tend to value those more and i ve never regretted it. most of the people in the cia did not know i was there looking for a spy. did you have a cia badge or cia badge. so they didn t know you were from the fbi? within a week everybody in that building knew i was from the fbi. they didn t particularly care for me being there but they definitely knew who i was. humana medicare advantage members. no, it s this john smith. who we paired with a humana team member to help address his own specific health needs. at humana, we take a personal approach to your health, to provide care that s just as unique as you are. no matter what your name is. .has grown into an enterprise. that s why i switched to the spark cash card from capital one. now, i m earning unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase i make. everything. what s in your wallet? 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you mean after that? no, i m talking before that. do you have things you want to do before you retire? oh yeah sure. ok, like what? but i thought we were supposed to be talking about investing for retirement? we re absolutely doing that. but there s no law you can t make the most of today. what do you want to do? i d really like to run with the bulls. wow. yea. hope you re fast. i am. get a portfolio that works for you now and as your needs change. investment management services from td ameritrade. we had cases that alder james was not involved in that went bad. somebody was trying to steal secret information and give it to the russians. if there s anymore we have to find them. in the summer of 1986 the fbi team had had already widdled down their cast of possible candidates and one of those was jim nicholson. jim nicholson was working as a single dad and had custody of his three children. for jim i think the divorce prec precipitated financial strains that weren t there before, a single father having to pay alimony, together with his expensive tastes, taylored suits as opposed to off the rack. it looked like he might be interested in making more money. it s one thing to go after a spy with one course in counterintelligence. it s another thing to know you re going up with the senior varsity. he was an extremely well trained spy with a great deal of previous experience. we know if we make one mistake with this guy he s gone. certain opportunities came up. one was jim s announced vacation to singapore. so the discussion then came down with director of central intelligence do we let him go? don t we let him go? decision was made that we would inform the singapore intelligence service and jim nicholson would go to singapore. when he got off the plane in singapore he s under surveillance. and he almost immediately begins what we call dry cleaning. surveillance detection runs designed to pick up anybody trying to surveill or follow you. that s where the term dry cleaning comes from. you re cleansing yourself of all these unwanted attachments. going down a set of stairs and immediately turning around and going back up so if anyone s following you you re likely to run right into them. looking in the pane glass windows of large department stores. he s looking at the reflections in the glass. but doing surveillance detection runs is not what one usually does on a vacation. but you re still only suspecting him. you haven t made your case yet. but on the third day of surveillance, the perverbial black limo pulls up to the curb and jim hops in and our surveillance team looks down to the license plate. russian embassy. once he went in that embassy, he was a bad guy. there was no suspect kbanymore. he is a subject of an fbi investigation. so after identifying jim in singapore as our spy. the next challenge is where can we position him to do the least amount of damage? the decision was made to put him as a branch chief in the counterterrorism center. given the environment at the time, pre-9/11, that s where we could most effectively detain him. you re letting him know he can do what he wants because nobody s watching me. so it s finally in june 1996 he began his new duties as a branch chief in counterterrorism. now you have to collect the evidence and present it for an arrest warrant. we have to monitor his activities 24 hours a day. that means every time he steps foot outside his house, surveillance. anytime he s in the house, we have to know who he s talking to. we had to get a human source in his office so that we know every time he gets up from his desk, he walks out, our guy goes out with him. 1996 i get a cable in the field that says you re assigned to human resources. it was something i didn t want to do and clearly thought i had pissed my division chief off. i was in over seas and then came back. i did not want be to in human resources. because that s like the kiss of death for a case officer. so sitting in my brand new desk in h.r. and one morning i got a call from the front offices and the boss called up and said don t tell anybody where you re going, speak to nobody, get up in front of my desk right now. i said okay. sat down, chief explained to him we want to put you on a very special assignment, but we re not going to tell you what it s about. and if it s no, your career is over. that was implied. there was a long pause where i didn t say anything and neither did he. the only variable i have in the room was there was a man i didn t recognize. i said can i ask one question? he said you can ask, i don t know if i ll answer. and introduced himself as the highest ranking fbi agent assigned inside cia. my mind was racing at that point. he said you got to give me an answer now. if you say no, go back to h.r., if you say yes, we ll tell you what this is all about and i say yeah, i ll take it. i ll do it. once he accepted the assignment. i said go outside now, don t stop, don t say anything to anybody and somebody will meet you. and i said yes, sir and left the building. and they took me to a safe house in northern virginia. they said we have a spy inside the building and we want you to help us catch him. initially it was like getting kicked in the stomach. another major espionage case inside of cia. it was a devastating piece of information. we had to have someone as close up as possible to nicholson and john hopefully was going to be that candidate but you couldn t thrust john on jim or jim would be suspicious. you had to do it in a way that jim would think it s his choice, his selection that brought john in the game. the first step was get him to pick you and that job was the deputy chief of the unit run by nicholson. the interview wasn t particularly long but i got along well with him. it was clear he didn t have a lot of good things to say about the structure of the leadership in the agency. my views of h.r. were a good laughter in the interview and he understood completely that i thought i was going to die if i stayed there. whenever you have an interaction with anybody that s a planned activity. you always come back and reflect on what you did and i came away with the opinion that it went pretty good. jim did an excellent job as a manager choosing the best person for that job and ultimately he chose mcguire. unbeknownst to jim, he was a spy and probably the last person he wanted to have next to him. and ended up sitting in the next next to nicholson s and then it was game on. it s a big, big risk. now you re going outside your perimeter. this is the person close to say nicholson. you re going to lunch, going to talk about cases. so that person could do something stupid and nicholson would be alerted something s wrong here. basically you have a one-strike scenario. if you mess up or give away something, you could derail the entire investigation. but we make more than our name suggests. we re an organic tea company. a premium juice company. a coconut water company. we ve got drinks for long days. for birthdays. for turning over new leaves. and we make them for every moment in every corner of the country. we are the coca-cola company, and we re proud to offer so much more. you know win control? 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(vo) go national. go like a pro. and jumps again to over 150 after a year. noooo. and ends up costing over 3500 bucks over 2 years. you re cleaning that up. don t get caught off guard by directv. touchdown. get the best with xfinity. i was brought in as an undercover guy. my job was to catch him doing an espionage act that would directly tie him to the russians. so in the spring of 1996 i started as nicholson s deputy in the counterterrorism center. at that time radical islamic terrorism was on the rise. so there was a lot of real work stuff going on that you had to focus on. they were looking at critical players who eventually became known post 9/11. in the middle of all that you re trying to catch your boss compiling information he s going to give to the russians. to have a human source in touch with him every day is invaluable. getting to know him was part of the exercise. i spent a lot of time going to lunch with him, drinking beer with him. my goal with the investigation was to immerse myself in him but it was mentally draining every day. because i describe him as a flawed personality, a flawed man. over time that became very parent that he had a special view of himself. a ruthless narcissistic guy that didn t care about anybody. and you re with him all the time. there was no retreat from it. jim nicholson is the most formidable opponent you could possibly go up against as a counterespionage agent because he s so well trained in the craft. and mcguire provided personality assessment back to the fbi. and john was very, very good at it. and even with john, as close as john was to him, that s still not giving us the exact intell and insights to what is he doing minute by minute, second by second. that s why we knew we had to get a fiber-opticing camera in his office. you ve seen the tile ceilings with the thousands of pin holes in them. he s no bigger than one of those pin holes. at one point nicholson got up on his chair and was rooting around in the ceiling. he was reaching up into the ceiling and pushing tiles. john, move your but. he s moving tiles. so i just barged into his office and he was standing on the chair and i said what the hell are you doing in here? and he said i thought something was loose. i was just taking a look. i said okay. he didn t find anything, he didn t disrupt anything so there was no compromise and everybody breathed a huge sigh of relief. next thing we needed was to get access to his van in the parking lot. that s a big thing. he was like a northern virginia soccer mom. he was playing a role. he didn t want to attract any attention to himself. a single dad driving a mini van with three kids. invisible guy in northern virginia. we managed to manipulate him in a way he would go on a business trip, leave his van as opposed to parking in his driveway at home. then of course we didn t want to get careless or lazy. there s still eyes on the langly compound. so we did it really, really late at night. we had to pick up the van, physically pick it up, fork lift it because he may have checked the odometer reading on it and the fbi went through the whole van. some people say isn t that a little extreme putting it on a flat bed so the odometer wasn t changed? not if you were trained like he was trained. he knows all these techniques. you underestimate him at your own paeril is what we felt. they went through that van and they got significant data, intelligence data. he hadn t left his computer in there, everything. we were able to image that laptop and do a quick initial assessment as to what was on there and we found the tasking order from his russian handler and that s even before we did the really in-depth analysis we were able to do in the off site. we discovered he had given a true name and identity of the spies that went through the training program. that was a line that really frosted me at that point. because that s a mercenary activity that i don t think any other spy has ever done. the question at that point is do you have enough for resting conviction? we didn t have that at that time. i wanted to shoot him at his desk, truth be told. but i wanted to catch him. in october we had the first major break in the case. i had gone off campus and had lunch with nicholson and nicholson was driving iratically and looked like he was doing a surveillance detection run and said we re going to a post office. there s unusual stamps here and we went out to the post office, he bought them and we proceeded back to the building from there. and for me, looking at it as a case officer i thought he s going to mail something overseas. going to the post office to get a special stamp, that would be a clue that would have alerted the fbi right away that something s unusual happening. john gave us the heads up we needed to watch him like a hawk. we summoned the resources and we did just that. they bet heavy on what i told them, they covered him relentlessly and caught him mailing a post card to the russians. they processed his post card as evidence and then put the mail back in the box and sent it on its way. the post card indicating his intent to travel and meet with his russian handlers. hello old friend. i hope. it is possible you ll be my guest for a ski holiday this year on 2324 november. a bit early but it would fit my schedule nicely. hope are the same and can accept my invitation. best regards, neville r. scratchy. it could be code name for him. there s a variety of things it could mean. that s a communication between him and the russians saying i m ready for my next meet. it s a signal he s doing something. once we saw the contents of that letter, we knew we had to bring this thing down. what really put the nails in that final coffin was prior to his trip we noticed jim photographing classified documents to pass along to his russian handlers. we knew he was taking pictures of classified documents. he was storing up and getting ready for his trip. it was like cramming for an exam. we knew if he was leaving country for a meeting with the russians, he would have to take his compromising material and intelligence with him. we were confident he would have classified material in his person or bags in some fashion, we just had to find it. we ve got enough to convict him of espionage and arrest him. i m the one clocking in. when you re clocking out. sensing your every move and automatically adjusting to help you stay effortlessly comfortable. there. i can also help with this. does your bed do that? oh. i don t actually talk. though i m smart enough to. i m the new sleep number 360 smart bed. let s meet at a sleep number store. so wouldn t it be perfect if. ..there was a single site. .where you could find the. .right hotel for you at the best price? there is. because tripadvisor now compares. .prices from over 200 booking. .sites .to save you up to 30%. .on the hotel you want. trust this bird s words. tripadvisor. the latest reviews. the lowest prices. without pg&e s assistance, without their training our collaboration with pg&e is centered around public safety. we could not do our mission to keep our community safe. anytime we are responding to a structure fire, one of the first calls you make is for pg&e for gas and electric safety. it s my job to make sure that they have the training that they need to make the scene safe for themselves and for the public. it s hands-on training actually turning valves, turning systems off, looking at different wire systems all that training is crucial to keeping our community safe and our firefighters safe. together, we re building a better california. they caught jim nicholson mailing a post card to the russians. that s a communication saying i m ready for my next meet. a signal he s doing something. what really put the nails in the final coffin was we witnessed jim photographing classified documents to pass along to his russian handlers. we were very confident he would have classified material in his person or bags in some fashion. we just had to find it. we have enough to convict him of espionage and arrest him. november dulles international airport, the fbi finally brought this matter to conclusion. they placed themselves throughout the area in undercover positions surrounding the entire plane. we had agents as bag handlers. there were fbi agents everywhere. he would go through security so you were sure he had nothing on him that could be a weapon. he was also through security and committed himself to leaving the country to prove he was inroute to meet the russians. on the tarmac at dulles and let you know that his life as a spy had now ended. his entire life collapsed around him in a five second window where he realized at that moment my life is over. the look on his face is the only honest look i saw on his face the whole time i knew the man. this arrest demonstrates that te counterintelligence reforms that have been put into place in the wake of aldridge ames have taken hold and led to our success in catching the spy, nicholson. jim finally reached pleato with the prosecution. and he was at the trial table as he read his statement. we locked eye contact briefly and he turned away but his face looked ashen when he turned away and that s the last time i ever laid eyes on the guy. he was sentenced to 23 years and at his request transferred to a prison in oregon so he could be close to his children and his family. why was he spying for the russians? that s a good question but i don t know. he claims he needed the money. but i think that s just an excuse. i think he viewed himself as a master spice that could operate with impunity in our face. it s like pursuing adventure all the time in the foreign service. wherever you go you ll find something interesting to do. he asked for it. he chose poorly and he paid for it and he ll pay for it until he draws his last breath. in the summer of 2007 i got called down to the special agent in charge s office out of the blue and asked if i was interested in working on a very important case that would ultimately be very high profile and so of course the next logical question from my perspective was well, what is it? and the answer was you got to say yes before we ll tell you what the is that you re going to be working on. that was called into my supervisor s office in eugene, oregon. he said you wanted me to close or reassign every case that i had. which was very unusual and considering i had some significant cases at the time. so i drove the 110 miles to portland. we learned that jim nicholson s son was suspected of working with his father and making contact with the russians. i was familiar with james nicholson, his being the highest ranking cia officer ever convicted of espionage. he was 12 years old when his dad went to jail in 1996. at that point we needed additional information to solidly make the criminal case. even though he was in prison, he was very high up in the ranks and knew quite a bit about the innerworkings of the agency. you never know for sure what information he could still be giving them. we needed to find out what it was that was being provided by jim nicholson to the russians. so we went back and looked at the telephone calls he had made to try to gleen information that might be useful for the case. you have a prepaid call from this is daddy. an inmate i thought i d call you and see what kind of hours you re keeping these days. oh, pretty much the same i guess. yeah, i m on the road heading back now. okay. did everything go okay? yeah, everything went real well. got mail for about 5k. so business is picking up, huh? yeah, sure is. oh, excellent. i mean there was odd phone calls of him making a sale for 5k and nathan was barely treading water. he wauorked at pizza hut and lid in a small apartment near springfield. we started pealing the onion about nathan and what he might be doing for his father involving russian intelligence. nathan had been going to visit jim since he was 12 years old and he idolized his dad from those contacts. he seemed to be a very dutiful son, really cared about his family, his siblings, his religious convictions. seemed like a pretty nice person trying to make his own way since he was probably 12 years old. he got injured and his life has been a series of set backs. i think nathan was vulnerable at that point to looking for some direction and dad had a plan in mind. i do know that he used scripture to try to influence and manipulate his boy in a way that, in my view, was not positive. hey, i got a verse for you. it s isaiah 45: 3. isaiah 45: 3? yeah, it s really going to be a good one. and i will give you treasures hidden in the dark ntsz, secret riches. i will do this so you know i am the lord, the one who calls you by name. yep. wow. i like that. yeah. i like that. i claimed it for you and me. absolutely. you know basically was telling nathan he was a loyal soldier and we re doing god s work. it s a calling. i don t think jim would make father of the year. far from it. we were eager to start monitoring nathan s telephone calls, his travel in his car, all the kinds of ways that he might communicate with the russians to find out what was it that he could be giving them that might be of value. we were able to monitor his computer use and we were able to give a gps on his car. the gps was put on the fifth of december, which was a friday. but was not until the following monday until they went to test the gps for the first time that it went perfectly. but the problem was it was at portland international airport. it was a surprise, not a pleasant surprise. so immediately he was going to meet with the russians, figure out what his itinerary was in terms of when he would be returning. the decision was made to intercept him when he came back into the country. o an enterpris. that s why i switched to the spark cash card from capital one. now, i m earning unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase i make. everything. what s in your wallet? own specific health needs. at humana, we take a personal approach to your health, to provide care that s just as unique as you are. no matter what your name is. with incredible flavors, like new nashville hot shrimp- crispy, spicy, and drizzled with sweet amber honey. plus the delicious classics you love, like garlic shrimp scampi. try all the shrimp you want, however you want em. but hurry, it ends soon. interviewing nathan about the purpose of his trip, fbi agents were copying all the paperwork that nathan had brought back with him. and during that search we found a number of very inhad criminating items that really broke the case wide open. they found some money that he brought back. i think it was over 7 or $8 thousand on him. and they found a notebook that had a lot of very interesting information in it. the notebook was pretty much the jackpot. it confirmed he had addresses of the russian embassy in mexico city and in lima, peru. the russians were always interested in finding out how james nicholson got caught first go around. just like any spy agency, they re concerned with moles in their midst. he used his son as a courier to curry questions from jim and to them back to him in prison for him he received compensation and we found information about the mexican yahoo account with a password in it and they used codewards in the communication. the russians were dick and he was nancy. this had a treasure trove of information that alowed us to predict what was going to happen from that point forward. i think he waned to do such a good job that he kept detailed notes. he was not very good spy. after this all happened, they let him go on his way and went home. we had discussions back at head quarters as to where we wanted to go with this case. the evidence we got from the customs search in houston was very suspicious. but in and of itself was still circumstantial. so a decision was made we were going to let this play out because we needed to develop additional information to solidly make the criminal case. in october 2008, nathan logged on to the yahoo mexican account using the password and left a message using code names to confirm another meeting for our december 10th meeting. it was like hello, nancy, it s good to hear from you. my brother eugene is well. the russians were nancy. nathan was dick and jim was eugene. the meeting for cyprus was on. prior to his trip to cyprus, his father which when i saw it immediately jumped out at me as something that could not have been designed for nathan pfsz viewing but had to have been for the russians. it was all sorts of information about jim and his children. jim goes into his eldest son s background who was in the air force. nicholson who s already in the military. he was trying to throw a carrot to the russians like i have this other son. maybe down the road this will be of some value. i look at jim s letters and go you sob. you did this to nathan and now you re putting this out there. you could be putting your oldest son and family in jeopardy. nathan travelled to cyprus in december of 2008 for the purpose of meeting with the russians while there. he was supposed meet them at tgi fridays on the evening of wednesday, december the 8th. the russians met him at that location and he was ultimately paid $12 thousand. and he provided the russians with a letter that had been given to him by jim that had all the information about jim and his cypress. it had all the information about jim. we knew we had infer evidence to charge the father, charge the son. it was time to bring it to a close. we shouldn t vanquish you to another dimension! ok, guys, hear me out. switching to geico could save you. hundreds on car insurance. huh, he does make a point. i do like to save money. catch you on the flip, suckas! geico. because saving fifteen percent or more on car insurance is always a great answer. believe the health we aof our water sourcesany is essential to the health of our communities. which is why we re helping to replenish the mighty rio grande as well as over 30 watersheds across the country. we re also leading water projects in more than 100 communities. and for every drop we use. we re working to give one back. because our products rely on the same thing as we all do. clean water. and we care about it like our business depends on it. you know win control? 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why, next was the fbi involved in this? the agency has 35,000 employees. it s got unmatched resources and expertise. it s the fbi. why would it even consider going to a private investigator to do research on a president-elect? keep in mind, this is not the first time the fbi has outsourced a major investigation. recall that federal agents never examined the dnc servers after they were supposedly hacked by an outside party during the campaign. instead, the fbi relied on the work of a dnc contractor this assured them that russia was behind the hacking. why would the fbi do that? did anyone at the justice department consider that hiring third party actors with unclear motives to conduct a high-profile investigation might be an excellent way for say foreign intelligence operations to sow chaos and promote their agendas? at the least without claims be colored by their natural desire lot of this stuff and actually pay, use the taxpayer s money to pay this british subject for this wacky report. but to me, one of the most disturbing things about this is, you ll recall that the director of national intelligence, clapper, asked james comey supposedly to get and have a meeting with trump and tell trump that they have a dossier explaining how he likes to enjoy highly specialized prostitution services in eastern europe, and they have this dossier. and then the minute that they held the meeting, it mysteriously the news of this meeting gets leaked to the press. and i think it s a reasonable inference that clapper only and comey only actually arranged this. this meeting with trump to tell him about the specialized prostitution services this dossier has about him. this meet it s a reasonable inference this meeting took place only so that news of could be leaked to the press. that s actually extremely deeply disturbing for the intelligence community and the fbi. by the way, i agree with you. if they did this to president obama, who i did not like, i d say the same thing. you cannot have rogue agencies. thanks for that perspective. thanks, tucker. in an interview this afternoon, former clinton campaign spokesman brian fallon acknowledged that hillary herself may have known about the decision to fund the trump dossier. just to be clear, brian, you have said previously in the last 24 hours, you don t believe hillary clinton knew about this either. is that right? oh, i don t know. i haven t asked. i haven t spoken to her. thanks for clarifying. yes. shouldn t she know, shouldn t you, someone so high up in the campaign be informed of this? she may have known, but the degree of exactly what she knew is beyond my knowledge. she may have known. in other words, she knew. she kept it secret a year. brad is here with us. thanks for coming. how are you doing? i m baffled as always. living here in washington. she not only kept this from herself, but it was not disclosed publicly. so here you have a campaign paying a foreign national some of the money probably going to who knows where but other foreign nationals, maybe a foreign government and not disclosing it publicly. i don t think it s legal. first of all, i was running a super pact that part of our responsibility was to place opposition research on donald trump. i wish i had this dossier, tucker. i would have tattooed it to my butt and exposed it. but here s the thing. who cares who paid? remember, it began to be paid by a republican. a republican still anonymous. a republican began the research. wait a second. i thought the whole point that these are the russians. this is information that came in part from kremlin connected russian officials and it was used to influence a presidential campaign. that was the very charge democrats were levelling the point of the opposition it s okay when they do it? it s to identify what was happening with russian collusion with the trump campaign. it was to expose the hooker part it was to expose donald trump s connections to russian. stop. let me ask you, if this is what you re arguing. hold on. are you arguing here s what i m asking are you arguing that the russians were trying to elect hillary clinton? now donald trump can i ask you may i ask you? that s crap. may i ask you a real question? we have now confirmed and you just saw hillary clinton s spokesman confirming that the clinton campaign paid money to fusion gps which hired this former intelligence officer from britain that got information from the kremlin in effect. you re saying that s okay, hillary s campaign used information from the kremlin to beat trump because it was exposing trump? first of all, the dossier came out after the election. i have no knowledge no, no. the printed dossier came out. this is intelligence gathering operation. it comes in fits and spurts. that was the whole point. you have seen but you re saying may i ask you look, they paid for it. the information came from the kremlin. they used it in a political campaign in a presidential campaign. i thought the whole charge was trump was using information from the kremlin to win. but turns out hillary was. the charge is, is that the russians colluded possibly, that s what s under investigation with the trump campaign to elect donald trump. the russians were not cooperating with christopher steele to elect hillary clinton. it s asinine. it s more than a charge. the republicans to what end steele was working sources let me finish any sentence. everyone admits that the russians gave information to the hillary campaign for pay. they paid fusion and steele, information from the russians goes to the hillary campaign to beat trump. you don t think that is that is opposition research. oh! it s entirely different than when russians are buying ads totally makes sense. what i needed is another lesson in washington vocabulary. looked like collusion or what was last week is collusion is now opposition research. we re talking about interfering and collusion. i get it. let s get to the bottom of what this is about. this is about undermining the fbi investigation. because mueller is in hot pursuit of trump. now you have the if i can just correct you. what it s about is george orwell who wrote the textbook to 17 agencies said that russians colluded to help all right. all right. thanks for joining us. not that they were trying to elect hillary, tucker. thank you. missing hard drives, bungled time lines. the las vegas security guard that was the only eye witness of this massacre fled the country. why did investigators let him go and where did he go? 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well, let s take a step at a time here, tucker. we don t know that yet. part of the reason why we don t know that yet, we have subpoenaed fbi and justice department to give us this information. what we know so far for that s we believe to be factual from the washington post piece is that the democrats paid for the dossier. they paid fusion gps for the dossier. we believe that to be true. we have fusion gps that pled the fifth. so they refuse to testify. they re now trying to block us from getting information to get to financial records of who they paid, who could they have paid, who could they have hired, all those sorts of things. they re trying to block us on that. tucker: on what grounds, by the way? on what grounds could you say we don t have a right to know that? look, we ve subpoenaed the documents. we re waiting we have the house general counsel representing us in court. when you plead the fifth and go to court to block us from getting the information and it gets leaked to the washington post that the dnc and the hillary campaign paid for this, i think we have a problem. now i think the next focus is going to be on whether or not did the fbi use this dossier to get any warrants, did they use it to open accountser intelligence investigation and if they did, if they re using unverified information to open up inquiries into american citizens, i think we have a big problem. tucker: from a political campaign from a political campaign. tucker: which is unverified in some cases to effect the outcome an election. so it s a simple question. you re the chairman of one of the most powerful committees in the house of representatives. why can t you get an answer? you d think we would be able to. that s the problem. tucker: is that constitutional? this is why the speaker of the house came out this morning and called on doj to provide this information to the house of representatives. that s why we re in court, trying to get this information. it s been since march. it s not like this is new. we didn t just stumble into this. these subpoenas were issued 60 days ago. tucker: but the fbi is not its own country. they can t make their own decisions, right? last time i checked, the u.s. congress created the fbi. tucker: is there anything more terrifying than the prospect of an armed rogue agency? no. no. that s the challenge here. if you had an unverified dossier paid for by political opponents, in this case, the democratic party and the fbi is taking and using to open investigations into a campaign or into other americans, we are in a slippery slope. i think this is what you see in third world countries where the party in power uses the intelligence services for their political gain. you don t see that in the united states of america. tucker: there s a new fbi director. there are lots of fbi officials that go on television. has anybody from the fbi publicly explained why they re not letting the house intelligence committee know this information? no, they have not. not yet. tucker: that s really upsetting. so the uranium one scandal, we know that a democratic lobbying firm in washington, the podesta group, was engaged in lobbying on behalf of these interests. we know the clinton family foundation took millions from uranium one. is anybody going to get to whether the obvious happened? that was a quid pro quo. we get to the bottom of that. here s what i think is disturbing and what we re looking for first. the new information here, a lot of people are asking, what happened? this was seven years ago. what happened? first of all, you had republicans in 2010 wrote in opposition to the sale on this uranium one. then we now have information this is the new information. we have informants that said there was an open fbi doj investigation. we have people that have told us this. we don t know if it s true yet. if it s true, shortly after that if you have an open investigation, how do nine cabinet level secretaries approve a sale? tucker: great question. then the questions that you raised. i was the clinton foundation involved. millions of dollars tucker: where was the american interest in this? nonpresent. good luck getting that information. we ll get it one way or the other. tucker: just a few hours ago, a source provided us the document proving that jesus campos left the country days after being the only witness within the hotel to america s worst massacre in modern history. we know where he went and we will tell you next. when you say you need a heart transplant. that s a whole different ballgame. i was in shock. i am very proud of the development of drugs that can prevent the rejection and prevent the recurrence of the original disease. i never felt i was going to die. we know so much about transplantation. and we re living longer. you cannot help but be inspired by the opportunities that a transplant would offer. my donor s mom says you were meant to carry his story . tucker: we received this document from a confidential source this afternoon. it shows that jesus campos entered the united states from mexico at the border crossing in san diego county almost exactly to the hour one week after the las vegas shooting the begin of october. the document does not reveal how long campos had been in mexico. our source told us that campos entered the u.s. at the same crossing january of this year. at that time he was driving his own vehicles with nevada plates. in this document from two weeks ago, campos was driving what appears to be a rental car with california plates. this information raises a number of questions about the las vegas investigation and the crime itself. jesus campos is the only eye witness to the biggest mass shooting in modern american history. at the time he was in mexico, the press was reporting that investigators thought stephen paddock may have had an accomplice. why did authorities allow campos to leave the country just days after the shooting? the investigation was chaotic and ongoing. how did campos who had a gunshot wound to the leg manage to travel to mexico? did he fly? did he drive? was his employer aware that he left the country? was investigators away? did they facilitate the trip? what day did campos get to mexico? how did he drive back to las vegas? why did he take a rental car? the union that represents campos said they claim it was a preplanned visit. why did it take a government leak for the rest of us to find that out? why is mgm so content on cont l controlling availability to campos? why did he appear with a co-worker? why did ellen ask leading softball questions? why are so many people going so much to shape this story of jesus campos? abc spoke to campos on october 4. was he in mexico? did they know where he was when they talked to him? what do we know about jesus campos? for example, is he a licensed security guard? we checked today. it turns out he s not registered with the state of nevada. we called the sheriff to see what license is required to be a security guard at a las vegas casino. the sheriff s office refused to tell us this. jesus campos is a victim, the spokesman said. we don t speak about victim. naturally we repeated the question. he became angry and started yelling and hung up on us, which raises the question, we won t authorities answer basic questions about jesus campos? here s a few more. does he have a criminal record? not attacking him. what did he do for the hotel? did he have previous contact with stephen paddock? how was campos injured? press reports claim she was shot in the leg from an ar-15-style rifle. that round could easily destroy a man s leg and often does. given that, how could campo possibly have driven 700 miles from las vegas and back less than a week later? an then there s stephen paddock, the shooter. we still know nothing about him. even the most basic questions about his behavior remain unanswered such as how did he get access to the freight elevator? how many other guests had that access? does video from the casino show him entering the elevator alone or with others? how often did he use it and why was he using it? more broadly, had stephen paddock ever appeared on the radar of the fbi? here was a man gambling millions of dollars and stockpiling weapons and ammunition. his name was all over federal databases. nobody in law enforcement noticed him? we learned that paddock s computer is missing a hard drive. why did it take a month for investigators to tell us that? did they just find out? we don t know. what do we really know about paddock or his family? his brother was arrested on child pornography charges. was that part of a separate investigation? how many family members does he have? was he in regular contact with them? do they have any reason to believe he was planning attack? where is his girlfriend? this story gets murkier by the day. that is the opposite of what is supposed to happen. it s impossible to know what is going on with the vegas shooting. we re not going to speculate. it s obvious there s lying and incompetence at the heart of it. with us now, former secret service agent, dan bongino. dan, why would investigators allow jesus campos who again was the sole eye witness that we know of to the shooting from within the building to leave the country shortly after while the investigation is still going on? i m baffled by that. it s very strange, tucker. there s no guarantee he s ever going to return. he s not under arrest. he s not under any court order to stay in the country. they re limited legally what they can do to order him to stay but it s confusing. i was thinking about this. even the most innocent of explanations. he s a witness of one of the most horrific crimes in america. obviously traumatizing. maybe he has family down there he s visiting. he needed some team. but to go to mexico right after the crime when you re the sole eye witness to the crime of the century and as you brought up in the segment, you have a significant injury, a round to the leg is really beyond perplexing. there s no convenient explanation for it. tucker: i don t think it s possible. if you were hit with that round, i don t think you d be going anywhere. it would have destroyed your leg. i don t know anything about jesus campos. i felt sorry for him. i still do he was injured. but the behavior of the people around him is so weird and weird in a specific way. they re trying to control access to him and control the story about him. they re clamping down on information about him and his actions. why would they be doing that? is it mgm? what is going on? i m with you. neither am i. i m not trying to impugn his character. this guy was a victim of the crime as well. but the that doesn t make the questions go away. the only explanation i can think of from the beginning, the genesis of this, this kind of feud state we re in. because we have more answers against san bernardino and orlando in 24 hours. the fbi is investigating this. there s no other convenient explanation. that explains the timeline discrepancies. i think this limited and controlled access to jesus campos and a reason why the parent company may not have had a problem with him leaving the country for a couple days. tucker: they may have facilitated it. it wouldn t shock me at all. doesn t explain the behavior of the clark county sheriff. our producer called over there today to ask a simple question about licensing. this guy doesn t have a license as a security guard. what are the rules? they were so defensive. they yelled at him and hung up. spokesmen don t act that way when they re asked a simple question. what is that about? especially from a major media outlet. tucker, we have to remember we respect law enforcement. but this was a crime perpetrated on the american people. people are justifiably concerned why it happened and we have no answers. you have to expect there s profound media interest in this. yeah, answering like that doesn t help. tucker: right. i respect law enforcement. if you want respect, behave in a way that earns it. quickly, this guy, it s not implausible that he came to the attention of authorities. he was gambling, churning a lot of money through the casinos. nobody has asked how did he come to the attention of federal authorities. you think it s plausible they knew who he was? yeah. once you deposit 10,000 or more, you have to fill out a currency transaction report at a bank. he may have had suspicious activities in banks as well. i don t think he was a ghost. i think his information comes out, you ll see more. tucker: i think so. i think there s butt covering going on too. thank you, dan. yes, sir. tucker: the federal government is giving away millions of work permits to people that don t live here. a lot of them are illegally here. why would they be doing that? 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next thing you know, i m telling strangers defense wins championships. -well, it does. -right? why is the door open? are we trying to air condition the whole neighborhood? at least i bundled home and auto on an internet website, progressive.com. progressive can t save you from becoming your parents, but we can save you money when you bundle home and auto. i mean, why would i replace this? it s not broken. when you re clocking out. sensing your every move and automatically adjusting to help you stay effortlessly comfortable. there. i can also help with this. does your bed do that? oh. i don t actually talk. though i m smart enough to. i m the new sleep number 360 smart bed. let s meet at a sleep number store. when you book direct at choicehotels.com. book now. tucker: in the past year, the federal government has awarded close to 2 million work permits to asylum seeker and illegals in the u.s. without having a job lined up. why are they doing that? wendy is here with us to explain. thanks for coming up. thanks for having me. tucker: so there s tens of millions of americans out of the work force. 100 million. some don t. some do. why given that, there s an unemployment crisis that s not reflecting the numbers. why would be letting millions here illegally have work permits? it s interesting. we have these undocumented workers. they make up 5.2% of the u.s. labor work force and they get this visa. they work with it. the interesting thing here is discretionary. it can be revoked at any time. 17% of the group are individuals looking for asylum and the other are the daca employees. if you re looking at this from a business case, what you d say is the economics of it sort of makes sense here. the reason why is that, you know, when we look at the numbers, we see that if you are working and you re one of the undocumented workers, you ve made up more money and put into the social security fund, more than you re needed in the country. so it s like $300 billion. tucker: that s not actually happening. what is striking to me, when i was a kid, the left cared about workers and their condition and wages and now every liberal i talk to about immigration says, well, it s good for the bottom line. employers like it. it s good for shareholders. yeah. tucker: have you noticed that change? i have. but it s important for us not to make this a political conversation. if you look at it, you have states like texas, georgia, arizona, even north carolina. these are states that donald trump won in the election. they actually have the highest number of undocumented workers. tucker: maybe that s why he won those states. people are frustrated. as a philosophical matter, doesn t any government owe its first allegiance to its own citizens? look out for them first. if i have four kids, if i m letting my kids starve but giving food to my neighbor s kids, maybe i m shirking my duty. we re ignoring our employees and employing the rest of the world? depends how you look at it. the narrative can be flipped on its head. if you look at individuals that get an h 2 b visa, you have to advertise that job and tried to fill that job at the wage in which you re offering and only then but here s the thing. our schools are terrible. the middle of the country is dying. 60,000 people died of drug overdoses last year. what is the incentive to make our schools better and the heartland better if we can import people that are educated in india? nothing against them. why would you ever make american schools better when you can import the talent? as an educator, there s enough room for those that live abroad and those that live here. our school system is in dire straits and needs to be focused on. we don t need to look at other people and say let s strengthen our economy with other individuals tucker: wait a second. the employers really felt like they had no option but to hire americans, if i m j.p. morgan or westinghouse or johns hopkins university, i d say hey, school district, turn out some people that can work for me. capable of it. i want to invest in the schools. make them better. now it s like it doesn t matter. i ll bring in impressing workers that work for less and have impressive engineering degrees. you see where i m going? i am. but there s people that want to hire american workers and they say i won t do the job for this wage. that s where it gets muddy. tucker: damn those american workers. they want too much. they want too much. that s all. we don t want too much. wore a great country. thank you. tucker: our next guest says the west is on the brink of destruction. we face a terrifying threat. not islamic extremism. it s white nationalism. that argument is next. ( ) i ve always had that issue with the seeds getting under my denture. super poligrip free. it creates a seal of the dentures in my mouth. just a few dabs is clinically proven to seal out more food particles. try super poligrip free. tucker: welcome back. i want to give you a news update that came in. we had been reporting on uranium one deal/scandal that took place during the obama administration when a rush company took over a huge part of our uranium reserves. there was a justice department investigation into bribery, russians bribing americans to get that deal through and there was an informant at the center of that. he s not been allowed to speak to congress. he s under a gag order. that gag order ended about five minutes ago. the justice department says he will be allowed to speak congressional committees. expect more on that story. a spector is haunting the west. the spector of white nationalism in this book go back to where you came from. the biggest threat to democracy isn t mass immigration from nonwestern societies, instead of right wing hostility for new arrivals. sasha, thanks for coming on. thanks for having me, tucker. tucker: i guess the 30,000 feet question is, can you be surprised that when you change a society as old as european society or one as old as ours completely through immigration in a short period of time, that some people won t like it and there will be a backlash. does that surprise you? i m not surprised at all, tucker. i don t believe in absolute open borders and i absolutely understand why people are unsettled, why they re recentful and upset. i reported in germany and france and holland and denmark. people are angry and they have grievances and fears and the left has not listened to them for years. so i get why people are recentful. what i m concerned about and what worries me, we have a new group of politicians in far right populus parties want to take our societies back 100 years in a dangerous direction. i m acknowledging that terrorism is a huge threat to our society. but great democracies persevere and manage. look at the u.k. look at france after the attacks. look at us after 9/11. it s insides that stir resentment. we know where that has taken us in the past. and it s dangerous and divisive and we need leaders and a news channel that will come out and swiftly and forcefully condemn those ideas when they emerge. tucker: yeah. i think you re point is hysterical and silly. part of it is real. part of it is totally real. you re right. there s been a rise in nationalism doesn t it bother you that people like david duke tucker: david duke is this is the part that makes me take you less seriously. it s hard to take your seriously when you take david duke seriously. when you hold him up in some sort of harbinger of the fewer, i know you re ridiculous, a second ago people like david duke and richard spencer have emerged into the public square. we have to have a debate about immigration. you and i agree about that. by david duke shouldn t have any part of tucker: and he doesn t. you re fear mongering and shutting down that debate. what happened in charlottesville? what happened in gainsville when people fired into a crowd of protesters? doesn t that scare you? isn t that a threat to our country and democracy? tucker: what you re looking at is a completely myopic picture of what is happening. you re seeing a lot of drama because there s massive social change in this country coming from all directions. some of them are not possible to understand. it s not as simply as the rise of white nationalism. you get a volatile society when you change it overnight and you don t give people a chance to weigh-in on whether they like it or not. it s simple. people should have a chance to weigh-in, tucker. what i am talking about is politicians that exploit those fears. it s one thing to say in germany, for instance, we can t take in one million immigrants in one year. that s impossible to integrate no matter how rich and how good tucker: so what you think you re going to get? when politicians emerge in a country like germany that has a history of genocide, it causes concern. tucker: i have 10 seconds. whose fault is that? why aren t you blaming angela merkel for that? it s politicians that are stoking fears tucker: thanks. we re out of time. that was interesting. more on the breaking news from russia. there s an actual russia scandal. we have more on it next. or joi. but do you take something for your brain. with an ingredient originally found in jellyfish, prevagen is the number one selling brain-health supplement in drug stores nationwide. prevagen. the name to remember.