back at their hotels after spending another day interviewing survivors and collecting samples. they ll be coming home on saturday raising speculation that a strike might be on hold until after they re safely out of damascus. when it comes to who s with us, our major ally with us in this, british prime minister david cameron, who s facing his own resistance, but others say they won t join in the strike without u.n. support. as we suspect, that won t happen since russia holds veto power on the u.n. security council. russia is a big assad supporter. assad s other ally is iran which is vowing to strike israel. as a precaution, they re calling to issue gas masks. turkey is constructing bunkers and they re sending experts to the syrian border. because there are so many parts, we re looking at this in three sections. first, we re looking a the the pentagon, what s going on behind closed doors at the white house and finally the role of congress in all of this. they re being briefed tonight on u.s. intelligence. we start with nbc news pentagon correspondent jim mikel chef ski. how long before we strike? once the president gives the go ahead, the order to launch those missile strikes against the syrian regime and much of those chemical delivery targets, it could be a matter of hours because those targets have been put in place for some time now. they tinker with them on a daily basis when they see them move, some military forces and equipment from here to there. they have the basic target set down. to go after those delivery systems, the rocket launchers, ar till ler ris, tanks. again, they emphasize as the president and the white house
sequenc sequences, and as one official said, we d be doing the same thing. there was a little bit of mutual admiration going on there military to military in the fact that the russians would, in fact, be gathering around what looks like will be some missile strikes out of the med here in a few days. all right. it s great to see you. joining us now at the table is former white house mid east advisor, mark ginsburg. great to have you here. underneath it all is our credibility that s on the line. on one end if we don t respond we re sending a message to the world that it s okay to use chemical weapons and we are not able to follow through on our word. on the other end, if we do take action which it sounds like we will, then you re poking a much bigger hole in the hornet s nest. the next question is, what comes up next? that s what i tried to address this morning when i wrote an article for the huffington post. the morning after is the worst. was the president s goal to punish assad or to deter him or both? if it s to punish him, well, we can fire cruz missiles, he gets his punishment, takes out several control and command centers and god knows what else. if it s to deter him from using chemical weapons again, it is the imponderable that no wironen answer. how many cruz missiles does it take? how many times can we do this before the president leaves for the g-20. the key is not to just punish. it s to deter assad from using the chemical weapons again. we re not really committed here to removing assad from power so that s going to be a continued problem. we seem to be wanting to police the conflict. you can do this, you can kill hundreds of thousands of people, but you can t gas them. i understand the humanitarian problem there, but as a military
maybe 1,000, maybe 3,000 and all the other millions who are refugees. so the bottom line is the same. this is not going to solve the fund amt al problem. assad is going to remain in power. this is not an attempt to engage in regime change. if it deters him from using chemical weapons again, then for all intents and purposes the president achieved the goals of what the limited strike is about. you know, ambassador, as i ve been thinking through this conflict and what our approach should be, i keep thinking about something that lawrence wright wrote. he talks about how in 1983 hezbollah bombed our barracks in lebanon, in beirut, and killed 2841 of our marines. reagan made the decision to pull our troops out of lebanon. meanwhile, osama bin laden was watching these events unfold and essentially learned the lesson that america was cowardly, that they couldn t take a punch in the nose and that emboldened him to later on launch the attacks that we know he launched. i keep coming back to that because to me it seems like we have to figure out what type of strikes, what targets to strike. but isn t the bottom line here that the president said we have this red line of chemical weapons and if you cross that there will be enormous consequences. if we fail to deliver those enormous consequences, we lose all of our credibility in the reason gone, we lose all of our ability to act as a deterrent. iran is watching this and learning perhaps the same lessons that osama bin laden learned in 1983. krystal, the fact is international law was violated. the president s statement of crossing the red line occurred six to eight months ago. syria s used chemical weapons some months ago.
that was played out on america. the lesson was you don t go in the first place. we essentially intervened in a civil war in lebanon, the role then by intervening, the limited role that was designed expanded and it resulted in hundreds of americans being killed. the president with bipartisan support saying we ve got to bring these troops home before this gets worse. i think there s a parallel that makes people nervous. yeah, we say this is going to be limited but are we going to get sucked into something bigger here? the fact of the matter is i am so against boots on the ground, so against us involving ourselves militarily in a conflict that is beyond our control to shape anymore. i am so against having us be in a situation where we repeat the same mistakes of the past. what this white house wants to do is in effect almost a libya type conflict. sanitized conflict. the white house seems to be
also expect the president to address russia s annexation of crimea? reporter: probably so just because this dominated the discussion so much. the g-7 meeting which was held as a part of the nuclear security summit wasn t really, the move wasn t originally part of the plan. it wasn t because of the esflepevents that happened in ukraine. suspending with the biggest economies in the world. russia was supposed to host in june in sochi. it is a big step. the question, though, is, specially among critics, will this have any effect? the u.s.ed administration, other countries repeatedly said, there is still a door open to discussion, to a diplomatic solution. there is a chance for deescalation. we can change things if russia decides to change course. for everything that has been said and all the talks that have been held, not only among western countries but talks with russia, nothing has changed that course. so it remains to be seen now what could constitute escalation for additional and more damaging sanctions to be issued and what could be deescalation. we ask that question yesterday. michelle, we re going to jump out. the president has now taken the stage with the prime minister of the netherlands. the two men are addressing the congregated press there. let s listen to what they are saying. i am proud to present our summit communique to you today. building of the progress remains early in washington and seoul. this communique sets the bar even higher. we have taken major steps towards meeting all three main objectives of the nss process. i will say a few words about each. the first objective is to reduce the amount of dangerous nuclear material in the world. the less dangerous nuclear material there is and the better the nuclear security, the smaller the chance that terrorists will be able to get hold of it. it s that simple. i m pleased that the 53 countries and four international organizations here have confirmed their commitment to continue reducing stocks of dangerous nuclear material, uranium and plutonium. a number of countries have announced the intention to hand over the highly dangerous to the u.s. as xhar chair of the summit, i naturally welcome these announcements. we are also making progress on the second objective, improving the security of nuclear and radioactive material. we have confirm our ambition to improve the security of materials that can be used to make nuclear weapons and the security of radiological sources that terrorists could use to make dirty bombs. the commitment of the nsa became more complete. the fear that the dirty bomb would cause doesn t bear thinking about, not to mention the possible disruption to society. i m specially pleased that we are including this area. furthermore, the nss countries have encouraged implementation of the iaa nuclear security guidelines. a significant number of us have decided to take this commitment even further. as chair of the summit, i m delighted to announce that two thirds of the countries on the initiative of the united states, korea and the netherlands, have pledged to incorporate these important recommendations into the national legislation. this is a message and represents potential progress. i can t stress enough how important it is. fortunately, in a group of countries supporting this initiative is growing. our ultimate goal is, of course, for all nss countries to follow this league and set an example for other countries. he many pleas i am pleased with the growing awareness of nuclear material. it is important to determine the origin of the material and trace that. we are listening. michelle kosinski, i wanted to bring you in briefly before president obama speaks. the president will also probably at some point have to address a rather large domestic issue which is brewing. the white house plans to change and modify and in some ways do away with the current system of the nsa collecting telephone data. can you explain what this change will be? reporter: yes. feel free to cut me off when this starts again. there is a delay in what i can see and here. we wonder how much this issue came up in discussions with other european nations also. during this series of meetings. it has been this highly controversial, really played out in the media, irritation, of how much spying was gone on. similar, was overplayed. it came out later that we know that the u.k., germany, other european countries do this same kind of data collection as well as spying. here is what the president wants to do. he has been working with congress. soon, in the coming days, his administration says, he wants to propose a law that would change the way this is done. right now, the nsa is the one that collects this bulk data, phone records, that americans make on a day it day basis. they keep it for five years. what s been highly controversial in the past is that the nsa can essentially choose its own investigations and authorize them. the president wants the phone companies to collect the data and keep it possibly. although, that might be done by some third party. the administration didn t make that clear. the president wants it such to be such that the nsa would have to go to a judge for every search it would want to do. that judge would have to say yes or no as to whether that specific phone number could be likely tied to terrorism. there are some other changes too. keep in mind, this is a proposed piece of legislation. what it would do would take the nsa out of the business of collecting and storing the data. of core, turse, the nsa would s be able to gain access to the data when needed. the bigger question is, will congress pass this law? how long could that take? in the meantime, the president has authorized for 90 days an will continue in 90-day increments to authorize the collection and the processing of that data as it stands right now. the president is about to speak now. let s go back to the the hague to listen to president obama. i would like to say a few words about the tragedy that recently took place back in the united states. over the weekend, a massive landslide swept through a tiny town called oso in washington state. while i won t get ahead of the ongoing response and rescue operations, we know that part of this tightly knit community has been lost. first responders acted bravely despite still dangerous conditions. the american red cross has opened multiple shelters and the people of washington state have been quick to help and comfort their fellow citizens. i just spoke to governor insly who swiftly declared a state of emergency and i signed that emergency declaration to make sure he has got all the resources he needs from my administration. they are in contact with them on an on going basis, fema and the army core of engineers has been on site to offer their assistance and expertise. i would ask all americans to send their thoughts and prayers to washington state and the community, oso, and the families and friends of those who continue to be missing. we hope for the best but we recognize this is a tough situation. now, as for our work here in the hague, i want to just repeat the extraordinary work that mark has done in helping to organize this. some of the people of the netherlands, your hospitality has been remarkable. your organization has been flawless. to all the people who were involved in putting this together, including those that are putting up with what i caused, i m told there is a dutch word that captures the spirit that doesn t translate exactly into english but let me say my first visit to the netherlands has been truly kozelik. i convened the first nuclear summit in washington four years ago, because i believed we need a series and sustained global effort to deal with one of the greatest threats to international security, the specter of nuclear terrorism. we made further progress at our second summit in seoul and under your prime minister s stewardship, we have built on that progress here. keeping with the spirits of these summits, this was not about vague commitments but about taking tangible and concrete steps to secure more of the world s nuclear material so it never falls in the hands of terrorists. in particular, i want to come mend bell judge and it will i for completing the removal of their excess supplies of uranium and plutonium. japan announced it will work with the united states to eliminate hundreds of kilograms of weapons from one of their experimental reactors. that s enough for dozens of nuclear weapons. dozens of other nations have agreed to take specific steps towards improving nuclear security in their own countries and to support our global efforts. some have pledged to convert their research reactors to low enriched uranium which cannot be used to make a bomb. we have set new goals for implemented or nuclear security measures, including sharing more information to ensure we are all living up to our commitments. i have made it clear the united states will continue to do our part. our nuclear regulator will develop new guidelines to strengthen cybersecurity at our nuclear power plants. we have pledged to pursue the production of a key medical isotope used to treat illnesses like cancer without relying on weapons useable materials and we are going to work to install more radiation detection equipment at ports and transit sites to combat nuclear smuggling. all of this builds on our previous efforts. 12 countries and two dozen nuclear facilities around the world have now rid themselves entirely of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. dozens of nations have boosted security or created new centers to improve nuclear security and training. the international atomic energy agency is now sfrotronger and m countries have ratified the treaties in international partnerships at the heart of our efforts. we have seepn a fundamental shit in our approach. we still have a lot more to do to ensure the ambitious goals we set years ago. i believe this is he sengs to the security of the entire world and given the catastrophic consequences of even a single attack, we can not be complacent. i ll clothes by reminding everybody that one of the achievements of our first summit in 2010 was ukraine s decision to remove all its highly enriched uranium from its nuclear fuel sites. had that not happen, those dangerous nuclear materials would still be there now and the difficult situation we are dealing with in ukraine today would involve yet another level of concern. so it s a vivid reminder that the more of this material we can secure, the safer all of our countries will be. we made progress. we have got more to do. we are going to continue our work. i look forward to hosting the fourth nuclear security summit in the united states in two years. thank you again, mark and all your team as well as the people of the netherlands for this outstanding summit. thank you, mr. president. we will go straight to the questions now. the first question will be the associate press. thank you, mr. president. you have been criticized during this dispute with russia as not understanding president putin s motivations. you and others said you thought putin was reflecting or pausing his encouragement to crimea. did you misread his intentions and what do you think his motivations are now? when you spoke about the nsa review in january, you said you weren t sold on the option of having phone companies hold meta-da ta and you thought it raised additional privacy concerns. what has changed since that time and do you think congress will pass the legislation you are seeking? mr. prime minister, there are leaders in europe who have concerns about the sector sanctions the president has proposed on russia s economy. do you think any of those leaders have had their concerns alleviated during their talks with the president over the past few days? thank you. let me see if i can remember all of these. with respect to president putin s motivation, there has been a lot of speculation. i am less interested in motivation and more interested in the facts and the principles that not only the united states but the entire international community are looking to uphold. i don t think that any of us have been under any illusion that russia has been very interested in controlling what happens to ukraine. that s not new. that s been the case for years now. that s been the case dating back to the orange revolution. what we have said consistently throughout this process is that it is up to the ukrainian people to make their own decisions about how they organize themselves and who they interact with. it has always been our belief that ukraine is going to have a relationship to russia. there is a strong historic bond between the two countries. that does not justify russia enroaching on ukraine s territorial integrity or sovereignty. that s exactly what s happened. i said, very early on, that should russia do so, there would be consequences. working with our european partners and our international partners, we have put in place sanctions that have already had some impact on the russian economy. now, moving forward, we have said and i want to be very clear about this, we north recognizing what has happened in crimea. the notion that a referendum sloppily organized over the course of two weeks would somehow justify the breaking off of the crimea and annexation by russia, somehow that would have a valid process. the overwhelming majority of the world rejects. we are also concerned about further encroachment by russia into ukraine. so what i announced and what the european council announced was that we were consulting and putting in place the framework, the architecture for additional sanctions, additional costs should russia take this next step. we also said and will continue to say is that there is another path available to russia. the ukrainian government has said it is prepared to negotiate with russia, that it is prepared to recognize its international obligations and the international community has been supportive of a diplomatic process. that would allow a deescalation of tensions, a moving back of russian troops from ukraine s borders. and rapidly organized elections that allow the ukrainian people to choose their leadership. my expectation is that if the ukrainian people are allowed to make their own decisions, their decision will be that they want to have a relationship with europe and they want to have a relationship with russia. this is not a zero sung game. i think that prime minister and the current government have shown remarkable strength and are prepared to go down the diplomatic path. it is now up to russia to act reresponsibly and show itself to be, once again, willing to abide by international rules and international norms. if it chooses to do so, i think there can be a better outcome. if it fails to do so, there will be additional costs. those will have some disruptive effect to the global economy but they will have the greatest impact on russia. so i think that would be a bad choice for president putin to make. ultimately, he is the president of russia and he is the one that s going to be making that decision. he just has to understand there is a choice to be made here. with respect to even though this was directed at mark, i just want to address this issue of sectoral sections. so far, we have put in place sa sanctions that impact individuals, restrict visas being issued to them, freezes their assets. we have identified one bank in particular in russia that was well-known to be the bank of choice for many of the persons who support and facilitate russian officials from carrying out some of these activities. what we have held off on are more broad-based sanctions that would impact entire sectors of the russian economy. it has not just been my suggestion but the european council s suggestion that should russia go further, such sectoral sanctions would be appropriate. that would include areas potentially like energy or finance or arms sales. or trade. that exists between europe and the united states and russia. what we are doing now at a very technical level, examining the impacts of each of these sanctions. some particular sanctions would hurt some countries more than others. all of us recognize that we have to stand up for a core principle. that lies at the heart of the international order and that facilitated the european union and the incredible prosperity and peace that europe has enjoyed now for decades. so although it could cause some disruptions to each of our economies or certain industries, what i ve been encouraged by is the firmness and the willingness on the part of all countries to look at ways in which they can participate in this process. our preference throughout will be to resolve this diplomatically. i think we are prepared, as we ve already shown, to take the next step, if the situation gets worse. finally, on ukraine, i think it is very important that we spend as much effort on bolstering the economy inside of ukraine and making sure that the elections proceed in an orderly fashion. so my hope is that the imf is able to complete a package for ukraine rapidly to stabilize their finances, their economy. . osce and other international organizations are sending in observers and monitors and we are providing technical assistants to make sure the elections are free and fair. the sooner the elections take place, the sooner the economy is stabilized, the better positioned the ukrainian people will be in terms of managing what is a very challenging situation. with respect to the nsa and i will be just brief on this, i said several months ago that i was assigning our various agencies in the i.c., the intelligence community, to bring me new options with respect to the telephone database program. they have presented me now with an option that i think is workable. it addresses the two core concerns the people have. number one, the idea of government storing bulk data generally. this ensures that the government is not in possession of that bulk data. i want to emphasize once again that some of the dangers that people high pott size when it came to bulk data, there were clear safeguards against but he recognize that people were concerned about what might happen in the future with that bulk data. this proposal that s been presented to me would eliminate that concern. the second thing the people were concerned about is making sure that not only is a judge in the program overall but looking at each individual inquiry that is made into a database. in new plan that s been presented to me does that. so overall i m confident that it allows us to do what is necessary in order to deal with the dangers of a nefarious attack and addresses the dangers that people have raised. i m looking forward to working with congress to make sure we go ahead and pass the enabling legislation quickly so that we can get on with the business of effective law enforcement. let me make it absolutely clear that the european union and the u.s. and yesterday we saw alignment within the summit. we are working very closely together. i can fully support all the answers which you just gave on the question you asked. maybe i can add one thing, which is the effect of the russian economy is very much gas and oil dependant. that means that economic sanctions, if they will be necessary, and we are not there yet, if economic sanctions would be necessary, because this conflict would escalate to the next stage, if this were to happen, these sanctions would hit russia very badly and obviously, you can never guarantee that the people in europe and canada, in the u.s., would not be hurt. obviously, with he will mae wil sure we will design these sanctions in such a way they will have maximum impact on the russian economy and not the european, the japanese, the american economy. we work very closely together and seek total alignment. next question. reportedly, there are about 30,000 russian troops on the border with ukraine. what guarantees can you give to the people of eastern ukraine and to the people in the baltic states, mole da va, other countries, that they will not be next when it comes to the russian politics of annex sayings. with regard to that also, is this a done deal? is there any doubt in your mind that putin will return crimea to where it belongs according to the west or is this diplomatic show of force basically to prevent another land grant somewhere else? on the second question first, on the issue of crimea, it is not a done deal in the sense that the international community by and large is not recognizing the annexation of crimea. the facts on the ground are that the russian military controls crimea. there are a number of individuals inside of crimea that are supportive of that process. there is no expectation that they will be dislodged by force. so what we can bring to bear are the legal arguments, the diplomatic arguments, the political pressure, the economic sanctions that are already in place to try and make sure that there is a cost to that process. i think it would be dishonest to suggest that there is a simple solution to resolving what has already taken place in crimea. although, history has a funny way of moving in twists and turns and not just in a straight line. so how the situation in crimea evolves in part depends on making sure the international community stays unified, indicating this was an illegal action on part of russia. with respect to the russian troops that are along the border of ukraine at the moment, right now, they are on russian soil. if they stay on russian soil, we oppose what appears to be an effort of intimidation by russia has a right legally to have its troops on its own soil. i don t think it is a done deal. i think that russia is still making a series of calculations. again, those calculations will be impacted in part by how unified the united states and europe are and the international community is in saying to russia, this is not how in the 21st century we resolve disputes. i think it is particularly important for all of us to dismiss this notion that somehow russian speakers or national inside of ukraine are threatened and that somehow that would justify russian action. there has been no evidence that russian speakers have been in any way threatened. if anything, what we have seen are provok coutours that have created scuffles inside ukraine. when i here analogy to kosovo where you had thousands of people who were being slaughtered by their government, it s a comparison that makes absolutely no sense. i think it is important for everybody to be clear and strip away some of the possible excuses for potential russian action. with respect to the broader issue of states that are bordering russia and what assurances do they have about future land grabs, as you put it, obviously, some of those countries are nato countries and as nato allies, we believe that the cornerstone of our security is making sure that all of us, including the united states, are abiding by article 5. the notion of collective defense. what we are not doing is organizing even more intensively to make sure that we have contingency plans and that every one of our nato allies has assurances that we will act in their defense against any threats. that s what nato is all about. that s been the cornerstone of peace in the transatlantic region now for several generations. so we will uphold that and there will be a series of nato consultations. it is going to be coming up in which we further develop and deepen those plans. i have not seen any nato members who have not expressed a firm determination with respect to nato members. now, those countries, border countries, that are outside of nato, what we can do, is what we are doing with ukraine, which is trying to make sure there is sufficient international pressure and a spotlight shined on the situation in some of these countries and that we are also doing everything we can to bolster their economies, make sure that through various diplomatic and economic initiatives that they feel supported and they know we stand by them. when it comes to a potential military response, that is defined by nato membership. that is what nato is about. jon karl from abc news. mr. president, thank you. in china, syria, and egypt and now in russia, we have seen you make strong statements, issue warnings that have been ignored. are you concerned that america s influence in the world, your influence in the world, is on the decline and in the light of recent developments, do you think mitt romney had a point when he said that russia is america s biggest geopolitical faux. if not russia, who? mr. prime minister, do you think these sanctions will change vladmir putin s calculation, cause him to back down? do you see where do you see a russian red line where if they go any further, into eastern ukraine and moldova where options beyond sanctions have to be considered? thank you. well, jonathan, i think if the premise of the question is that whenever the united states objects to an action and other countries don t immediately do exactly what we want, that that has been the norm. that would pretty much erase most of 20th century history. i think there is a distinction between us being very clear about what we think is an appropriate action, what we stand for, what principles we believe in versus what is, i guess, implied in the question, that we should engage in some sort of military action to prevent something. the truth of the matter is that the world has always been messy. what the united states has been consistently able to do and continue to be able to do is mobilize the international community around a set of principles and norms and where our own self-defense may not be involved. we may not act militarily. that does not mean that we don t steadily push against those forces that would violate those principles and eye deals we care about. so, yes, you are right. syria, the syrian civil war is not solved and yesterday syria has never been more isolated. with respect to the situation in ukraine, we have not gone to war with russia. i think there is a significant precedent to that in the past. that does not mean that russia is not isolated. in fact, russia is far more isolated in this instance than it was five years ago with respect to georgia and more isolated than it was certainly during most of the 20th century when it was part of the soviet union. the point is that they are always going to be bad things that happen around the world. the united states is the most powerful nation in the world. understandably, is looked to for solutions to those problems. we have put all evidence of our power behind solutions and working with our international powers. standing up for the principles and ideals in a clear way. there are going to be moments where military action is appropriate. there are going to be sometimes where that s not in the interest of national security interest of the united states or some of our partners. that doesn t mean we are not going to continue to make the effort or speak clearly about what we think is right and wrong. that s what we have done. with respect to mr. romney s assertion that russia is our number one geopolitical faux. the truth of the matter is that america has got a whole lot of challenges. russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors. not out of strength but out of weakness. ukraine has been a country in which russia had enormous influence for decades, since the break up of the soviet union. we have considerable influence on our neighbors. we generally don t need to invade them in order to have a strong cooperative relationship with them. the fact that russia felt to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicates less influence, not more my response then continues to be what i believe today, which is, russia s actions are a problem. they don t pose the number one national security threat to the united states. i continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security when with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in manhattan, which is part of the reason why the united states showing its continued international leadership has organized a form over the last several years that has been able to help eliminate that threat in a consistent way. there is no geopolitical conflict that can be solved without the united states. therefore, i applaud the fact that president obama s administration is active in every aarenrena. the initiatives that secretary kerry was taking in the middle east. i was in the region and spoke with leaders in israel and the palestinian territories. they are extremely grateful for the fact that america is providing leadership. this is a difficult issue. it can t be solved overnight. there is no magic wand that can handle this. i spoke with the president in the economic forum in january. we have now the fact that i was label to over 30, 40 years we spoke with an iranian leader. it was possible. it seems it is holding. america provided leadership there. i applaud president obama s role in all these major issues. it is necessary, because the united states is the leader of the free world and needs to provide leadership and he is doing that. your question on president putin, it would be difficult to exactly judge what is happening in the leadership in moscow, in russia at this moment. as i said earlier, i highly undiversified economy like the russian economy, which is so much oil and gas dependant, which has not invested in infrastructure and other areas of the economy, will be worried in the financial sector or in weapons or in trade or indeed, in energy. there could be potential sanctions that will hurt them. we have to design in such a way that it will particularly hit russia and not europe, the u.s., canada or japan. that is what we are working on. we hope we won t need it. i cannot envision this conflict ending up in a military conflict. i don t think it is likely i don t think anybody wants it. i tote little agree with president obama s answers on article 5 where the conflict will be taken to the board in the nato countries. luckily, that is, at this moment, not the case. questions. you met a lot of leaders here. many were angry about the nsa story. have you fixed the relationships with these leaders and the second question is, many are shocked by the extent of which the nsa collects private data. today, we read in the new york times that you plan to end the systematic collection of data of americans but can you address the concerns of the dutch and the rest of the world about their privacy? first of all, we have had a consistent, unbreakable bond between the leaders of europe over the last several decades. it s across many dimensions, economic, military, counter terrorism, cultural. any one issue can be an irritant in the relationship between the countries but it doesn t define those relationships. that continues to be the case and that has been the case throughout the last couple of years. as i setd in a spooech i gave earlier thisser yoo, the united states is very proud of its record of working with countries around the world to prevent terrorism or nuclear proliferation or human trafficking or a whole host of issues that all of us would be concerned about. intelligence plays a critical role in that process. what we ve seen is as technology has evolved, the guidelines and structures that con train how our intelligence agencies operated have not kept pace with these advances in technology. although having examined over the last year, year and a half what s been done, i m confident that everybody in our intelligence agencies operates in the best of intentions and is not snooping into the privacy of ordinary dutch, german, french, or american citizens. what is true is that there is a danger because of these new technologies that at some point, it cob abused. that s why i initiated a broad-based review of what we could do. there are a couple of things we did that are unprecedent. in my speech, i announced that for the first time, under my direction, that we are going to treat the privacy concerns of non u.s. persons as seriously as we are the constraints that already exist by law on u.s. persons. we are doing that not because we are bound by international law but because ultimately it is the right thing to do. with respect to some of the aspects of data collection, what i ve been very clear about is that there has to be a narrow purpose to it, not a broad-based purpose but rather based on a specific concern around terrorism or counter proliferation or human trafficking or something that i think all of us would say has to be pursued. and so what i ve tried to do then is to make sure that my intelligence teams are consulting very closely at each stage with their counterparts in other nations. so that there is greater transparency in terms of what exactly we are doing, what we are not doing. so some of the reporting here in european as well as the united states, frankly, has been pretty sensationalized. i think the fears about our privacy in this age of the internet and big data are justified. i think the actual facts people would have an assurance if that if you are just ordinary citizen, in any of these countries, that your privacy, in fact, is not being invaded. i recognize that because of these revelations, that there is a process that s taking place where we have to win back the trust, not just of governments but more importantly of ordinary citizens. that s not going to happen overnight, because i think that there is a tendency to be skeptical of government and to be skeptical in particular of u.s. intelligence services. so it is going to be necessary for us, the step we took that was announced today, i think is an example of us slowly, systematically, putting in more checks, balances, legal processes. the good news is, that i m very confident it can be achieved. i m also confident that the core values that america has always believed in in terms of privacy, rule of law, individual rights, that that has guided the united states for many years and will continue to guide us in the future. thank you very much, everybody. thank you again. you have been listening to president obama in a news conference with the dutch prime minister. there is the president finishing up with the dutch prime minister. i think really some of his most expansive comments to date over the crisis in ukraine, the president is saying there is no simple solution. he is saying it would be dishonest to suggest there was a simple solution to undo what s already done. in other words, get russian troops out of crimea. he did lay down something of a marker about what the united states would do if russia acts further. he took something of a rhetorical slap at vladmir putin calling russia a regional power. the sanctions are meant to isolate russia economically and politically. also, taking a stab at a bit of a slap at his ego if you will and those kind of comments will make it back to vladmir putin. let s bring in wolf blitzer. he is nour in our d.c. bureau. we noticed the comments and the two leaders and president obama talking about the linking of arms between the remaining g-7 countries about what they are doing to isolate russia. they are pretty much united right now. i think there were some substantive disagreements on specific steps if, in fact, the russians up the ante if you will. if they do anything beyond holding on to crimea. the president basically said that s a done deal. the facts on the ground. he realizes that russia is now in control of crimea even though the u.s. and european allies, almost all of the world, still reguards russia as part of ukraine. they are in charge and the president himself even acknowledged a whole lot of people in crimea who are happy about that. he did warn if the russians do take steps going against other parts of ukraine or if they were to take steps against other countries in that part of the world, eastern europe, certainly, if any steps were taken against nato allies like poland, estonia, lithuania, latvia, charter 5 of the charter would go into effect. you attack one and you attack all. the united states would have to come to the aid of that ally. he did acknowledge for all practical purposes russia is now in control of crimea. he didn t lay out the limits. he said there would be military support if russia encroaches on nato countries. wolf blitzer, in washington, we know you will be covering much more on wolf at 1:00 p.m. we are going to take a quick bre break. when we do come back, we will take a look at the search for flight 370. would get in between my dentures and my gum and it was 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(announcer) love. it s what makes a subaru, a subaru. so when my moderate to severe chronic plaque psoriasis them. was also on display, i d had it. i finally had a serious talk with my dermatologist. this time, he prescribed humira-adalimumab. humira helps to clear the surface of my skin by actually working inside my body. in clinical trials, most adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis saw 75% skin clearance. and the majority of people were clear or almost clear in just 4 months. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal events, such as infections, lymphoma, or other types of cancer have happened. blood, liver and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure have occurred. before starting humira, your doctor should test you for tb. ask your doctor if you live in or have been to a region where certain fungal infections are common. tell your doctor if you have had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have symptoms such as fever, fatigue, cough, or sores. you should not start humira if you have any kind of infection. make the most of every moment. ask your dermatologist about humira, today. clearer skin is possible. he thought it was the endn for his dof the conversation.d. she didn t tell him that her college expenses were going up. or that she maxed out her card during spring break. when the satellite provider checked his credit, he found out his daughter didn t pay her bills. but he s not worried. now he checks his credit report and score at experian.com, allowing him to keep track of his credit and take a break of his own. experian. live credit confident. now, to what is happening at this hour with the malaysia plane airlines mystery. families of the passengers are still trying to come to grips with the devastating announcement from the malaysian government that according to the data they have, they believe the plane went down in the southern indian ocean and no one aboard survived. hundred of family and friends marched furious over what they say are lies coming from the government. obviously, you can see the crowds flashing the police. once they got to the embassy, the families gave a petition there. on the search front, australian maritime officials suspended search efforts today because of storms, high seas, gusty winds in the southern indian ocean. we are told that crews are likely to be back on task tomorrow. australian officials are cautioning the search operation is xl i kate complicated. we are not searching for a needle in a haystack but trying to determine where the haystack is. this is 3,500 meters deep, 2,500 kilometers from perth. they say they have called off search operations in the so-called northern corridor. they base that decision on the new analysis of satellite data. we are going to bring in a couple of guests to help us sort it all out. we have steven, a former ntsb airliner, a commercial and air force pilot. we have dr. bob arnot. he is with us once again as well. a pilot and veteran aviation correspondent. thank you so much for joining us. steve, i want to start with you. the problem today is a lack of search. there is no search going on. they had spotted debris of some kind, wanted to get a closer look. how much of a setback is this? it s certainly a setback. i think the safety investigation needs to be ongoing, and, of course, you ve got to identify a crash site before you can begin the investigation in earnest. so a bit of a setback, but an act of nature so we ve got to comply with that and we ll be done with in a day or so. and hopefully they ll find the wreckage and the crash site soon. we appreciate that optimism. bob, let s talk to you about this information that we saw. the malaysian government deliver to the world and to the families of the passengers. and i think the families specifically were struggling with the fact that they said this information has led to us believe that the plane went down in the south indian ocean with the absence of any wreckage. how do we accept this information as a definitive cause or result of what happened? i really think, given the malaysian government s track record, it s a little hard to take it at face value here. this is a very, very sophisticated analysis. as you know, it s based on what they call the doppler effect. when you hear a siren coming towards you, that frequency changes, that s the doppler effect. well, they re looking at the satellite versus airplanes flying away from it. first time it s of been done. none of us have seen the data. i think the chinese are right. we want to look at this data to make sure they really got it right this time, because they certainly had it wrong most of the last couple weeks. and steve, as we know, we are in a race against time. quite literally here. those black boxes, they stop pinging after 30 days or so after the plane, you know, disappeared. there will not be some of the equipment they need, the tow pinger locater won t arrive. they won t get it on the ship until april 5th and could stop pinging by april 8th. that s very difficult. they re up against it here. i agree. the pinger is important in finding the black box. but keep in mind, air france 447, it was almost two years before we found the recorders on the bottom of the ocean. so, yeah, it would be nice if we could do it via pinger, and a navy ship can find it with their equipment. but if it s not found by the end of the battery life of the recorder the pinger battery life, that is, they ll at least continue to search with all their other sophisticated equipment until they find it. want to say a big thank you to bob arnot. a real delight. thanks so much. we talk about the families and it s really important to always bring the focus back to them. they say they re not going to believe the government s version of what happened until they see proof with their own eyes. joining us to talk about the grief and frustration they are displaying right now, you know, it s very hard for all of us to see is heidi snow. heidi understands this. heidi lost her fiance in the twa 800 crash. since then, she has become a leading advocate for survivors, founding the group a.c.c.e.s.s., and she has trained care teams and aid disaster responders for major airlines. she this also the author of the book surviving sudden loss. heidi, we re all looking at these pictures and hearing just the emotion coming from the people in beijing and kuala lumpur. when you see it, you have such a unique perspective. what do you see? well, for me, it always brings me and all of us back. we had over 1,000 calls to help to a.c.c.e.s.s. over the years for different air disasters and a lot of calls from people from past air disasters, as well as a few of these families now. and for those of us who have been through it before, it brings us back to that crash site, the family assistance center. we all remember being there, just looking for answers. just holding out hope. and i feel like they re very much in that situation right now. and basically, we just kind of went back and forth, hold south hope and then going back to facing the reality that they may never come back to us and our lives are going to be forever changed. and we re going to have to live without them. and until there s some kind of confirmation through wreckage or some type of remains, i really believe that there really is no closure or any way to really get out of going back and forth with this hope that we cling on to and going back it to the reality. i think there needs to be a lot more evidence for the families to really be able to accept that their loved ones actually are gone. and i remember so well at the site, the varying personalities, we really learned at a.c.c.e.s.s. everybody goes through their grief in their own way. and a lot of the emotions that we have seen do remind me of what it was like. we had people who were very quiet, who were in shock. then we had those people who were very angry. and then we had people who were just sobbing. and so it really does resonate with all of us who have been there before. and after interviewing hundreds of people for our book, so much of what we re watching now just really is what the common reactions are for all of us. and what distinguishes air disasters from other types of losses is this waiting period. is this not having answers. and we certainly have a lot of people at a.c.c.e.s.s. who still do not have any remains or any confirmation from other air disasters that their loved ones actually were on board. so it is something that we all live with and one of the things we find most important is really being able to talk to somebody else who has been down that road. and who has had to go through this process. by pairing them according to the relationship of their loss and specific circumstances that they re facing. so we match mothers to mothers, siblings to siblings, spouses to spouses. and if remains are not found, we pair them up with somebody else who also had to wait a long time. so we really find that what has helped the most for our families is really being able to validate some of these feelings that are extremely difficult. and this is such a difficult time, and the rest of the world, i think it s hard for them to understand the hope piece. but all of us know that. because we would do anything we could to keep them alive. heidi, we want to say thank you, because we know this work that you do is ongoing. you have spoken with us before about the ongoing need after the press conferences are over. after the cameras go away. thank you so much, heidi snow. it works with providing emotional support services to survivors and family members of air aviation disasters. it thank you so much for joining us. you can read more about heidi s support group, aircraft casually emotional support services at
wall, paul. and the threats. he s been terrific. now if he ever goes against me, i won t say that, okay? when all in starts right now. good evening from new york. i m chris hayes. in 37 days donald trump will become president of these united states. we have breaking news tonight. two senior intelligence officials tell nbc news that russian president vladimir putin was involved in efforts to disrupt the u.s. presidential election. that conclusion is based on intelligence from diplomatic sources and others including spies working for america s allies. that comes on top of growing consensus in the intelligence community in the u.s. that russia was behind multiple large scale attacks on democratic institutions and operatives producing fodder for countless embarrassing and politically damaging stories at the height of the presidential election. the in the just had amazing reporting on the alleged scope of the russia cyber attacks which targeted the democratic national committee chairman podesta and also a dozen house candidates. regardless of whether russia meant to help elect trump is still among dispute among different agency, his government succeeded in influencing the outcome of the u.s. election. president obama has ordered a fuel review of the role in the election. there s now bipartisan support in the senate for some type of investigation. joining me national security reporter ken delany. and i guess my first response to this story was how could they possibly know this? so it seems, you know, explosive to say that putin was personally supervising this, but this is two intelligence officials off the record. there s some sort of grain of salt i always attach t anything, you know, anonymous from the intelligence community. how could they possibly know this? that s certainly a fair question, chris. thanks for having me, by the way. the short answer is we don t exactly know. but we know or were told that they are reviewing this information with high confidence. and we re told it s coming from liaisons, from other intelligence sources, people presumably with access to putin or the russian regime. that s all we know. so part of the story here is there s a forensic story about who did this and then there s a kind of whole chain, right, who did it, what was their connection to the russian state, how much were they how closely were they directed, there were some beginning theories that maybe this was just a rogue element or a bunch of people that got out over their skis and before you know it they re inside the dnc. this is all sort of a settling this chain is the work that the intelligence apparatus is doing right now. exactly. and we re sort of looking through an opaque glass trying to figure out through bits and pieces of reporting what exactly they know. and what you describe as the forensic case, which a private firm initially made is that, hey, the malware and the hacks that we re seeing into the democratic national committee can be traced back to these russian entities. that doesn t tell us anything about who was in the russian fairly general, but we re told that he was involved in directing how to use the leaked material, which is fairly specific. that is fascinating. ken dilanian. i m joined by ed mcmullen, a former cia operations officer. there s a crazy subtext that s happening here in terms of the intelligence agencies and the cia. donald trump s people seem to think that he s anti-donald trump and they have it out for him. what do you say to their people who say that? well, obviously, there s a natural conflict there. people at the cia understand what a threat vladimir putin are to global security and to the united states, to our security, to the integrity of our democratic system. and so they re opposed to what donald trump is trying to impose upon our country, which is a relationship with the very country that is undermining our democracy. i have to say with regard to whether putin would have directed this or not, of course he knew about it and of course it s a big, big deal in the kremlin and they re celebrating right now. are you part of the problem, right, is ascertaining the confidence that all these links in the chain are there, right? and again, this is you re shaking your head. you just think it s so obvious. it s just so look, i understand i come from this world so i understand how these things work and those of us in the intelligence community just know these things because we ve seen them play out in other situations. we know that russia does this in europe all the time. this is not a new strategy or a new playbook. this is what russia does to undermine democracies in europe. now they re doing it in the united states. it s the russian-backed trolls, it s the hacks, it s the support for the white nationalist, white supremacist movement. it s finding a country in a democratic country like ours that is sympathetic to the russian or the putin way of his authoritarianism and his white nationalism and all of this and promoting them through these other means. i mean, it s mr. playbook. and they did it here in the united states, it s clear. if this is the case, if this is what happened, what does this mean? it means that it means that, you know, our fragile democracy and it is fragile and we need to fight hard to keep it. our founders knew that would be the case. i think we re a little asleep at the wheel these days or have been as americans. it means that we as americans need to stand up and demand that our elected leaders in congress, and we must do the same, hold our system accountable, our elected representatives accountable and oppose donald trump s planned alignment with russia. there s a reason why we have opposed russia on the global stage. it s not arbitrary. russia is an adversary, the liberty, freedom and basic rights across the globe and here in the united states. and we have stood up to them with our partners, with our allies, our free allies in europe and it s important that we continue to do that for the cause of liberty here and abroad. do you think that the president of the united states should say something on the record about all this? well, he has said some things and i think certainly at a time when he judges it to be the right time, he should. we need leadership in the country especially on this issue. i imagine that he s dealing with a lot of very sensitive considerations, very classified considerations that it s hard for you and i sitting here to make a judgment about what he should say or shouldn t say. certainly, we need leadership. certainly the american people need information. i ll say that i think our electors they deserve to be briefed on what they can be briefed on with regard to what russian has done in the election and in related ways since then. so they need all the information they can get so that they can perform their constitutional duties. let me ask you this. you know, there s a statement, this sort of extraordinary statement. i don t think i ve ever seen anything like it in the time i ve been coveri politics. after the reporting had broken that basically late friday night that the cia had come to this conclusion that this was done and not just done to kind of create mischief but explicitly for this electoral outcome to beat hillary clinton and the president-elect put out a statement that says these are the people that got iraq wrong and i had this you re grimacing even at that statement. i mea you work for the cia. what is that relationship like now? the president-elect has called war on them, called them out. what is that going to be like? it s going to be a very troubled relationship. but the american people end up being the losers. i m not sure if donald trump had the information that the cia would give him or wants to give him, if that would make him make wise decisions. i m not sure it would. so i don t know. maybe it s a wash. but look, i ll tell you, americans need to understand this. the cia gives advice to senior policymakers. the president, of course, included chief among them. and does a variety of assessments every day all day long. hundreds of them. that s the reality. and they deal in an uncertain world, the world we live in. and that s why we have them. we have them to connect the dots. sometimes they re not right. most of the time they are. because they re very they re very conscientious and conservative in the assessments they make most of the time. now, people talk about mistakes that are made and times they were wrong, those are the times when things become well known, but assessments that they make every day tend to be correct. for a president to say i don t want any of that, is just reckless and just plain stupid. evan mcmullin. much more ahead on this and other stuff. knew today we also got big news from the man who will be running the security apparatus. retired general michael flynn generosity is its own form of power. get your mind out of the gutter. mornings are for coffee and contemplation. that was a really profound observation. you got a mean case of the detox blues. don t start a war you know you re going to lose. finally you can now find all of netflix in the same place as all your other entertainment. on xfinity x1. who donald trump has named as his national security adviser. that s not a position that requires senate confirmation unless trump rescinds the offer flynn will be his national security whisperer in the white house. today s news puts what flynn said on the campai trail and in the republican national convention in a different light. when he called on hillary clinton to drop out of the race because she, quote, put our nation s security at extremely high risk. lock her up. lock her up. [ crowd chanting lock her up. ] you guys are good. damn right. exactly right. there s nothing wrong with that. [ crowd chanting lock her up ] and you know why? you know why we re saying that? we re saying that because if i, a guy who knows this business, if i did a tenth, a tenth of what she did, i would be in jail today. this was, of course, the trump campaign s main attack on clinton, particularly in the campaign s final days, this idea that she belonged in jail because she used private e-mail servers as secretary of state potentially compromising classified information and putting national security at risk. didn t matter. the fbi investigated the matter, concluded no charges should be filed. trump threatened to jail her if elected. and those lock her up chants became a staple of the politics. the washington post reporting that michael flynn who again helped lead those locker up chants was the subject of a secret u.s. military information in 2010 that determined that flynn inappropriately shared classified information with foreign military officers in afghanistan. flynn was not disciplined because investigators concluded he didn t act knowingly and ultimately didn t damage national security. but of course, the fbi came to a not dissimilar determination about hillary clinton. and flynn, knowing what he knew, still called for her to be thrown in jail. we reached out today to the house oversight and government reform chair jason chaffetz to see if he would investigate flynn for risking classified information as vigorously as he did clinton. we did not hear back. this is not the first red flag for flynn that has stated his views. he tweeted about clinton s involvement in sex crimes involving children. jeanne shaheen and richard blumenthal have requested an official review of flynn s security clearance citing today s report in a separate incident in which he disclosed information to pakistan and that he, and i m quoting, had technicians secretly install an internet connection in his pentagon office even though it was forbidden. he s become the main funnel for security information to a president who you ll recall has been skipping his intelligence briefings because, as trump said, i m like a smart person. joining me now, michael steele, former chair of the republan national committee. the lock her up thing, i mean, it s amazing the parallels, right? yeah. so hillary clinton does this thing that violates protocol. she s investigating. the finding is, yeah, she violated protocol but she didn t knowingly compromise national security, she s okay. but the argument was that she knowingly violated that protocol right. and general flynn did the same thing. no. they said he did not know he had violated this protocol. and that s the difference. you think it s perfectly fine that the one-tenth rule here that he leads lock her up chants at the rnc for a woman who has been cleared by the fbi. right. who says even after being cleared by the fbi the political opponent should be put in prison despite the fact that he did this and he also had a secret internet connection installed in his pentagon office. yeah, well, look, i can t speak to all of that in terms of what he did while he was in the office, but i can speak to the politics of being at a national convention and getting in that fired-up space and using that chant. we all know that that chant was not one of the best chants out there because it doesn t speak to who we are as americans. we don t lock people up as political prisoners, per se. well, who knows, right? and we re not. and we re not. come on, stop it. but michael, let me ask you this, if you had to bet after election day that you would still hear lock her up after trump had won, at a rally in wisconsin, doesn t that surprise you? no, it doesn t. no, it doesn t. because the carryover from this election goes beyond what we ve seen in the past. the voters in this election cycle have been more fervent than we ve seen in a generation in terms of their passion to make their decision stick. and they feel and to imprison their political enemies. no, i don t think they re talking literally at this point. donald trump himself has said that s not going to happen. he s not going to do that. so i think that that is sort of rehashing some of that passion and that fervor and that spirit. now, you know, again, we re still waiting. i think a lot of people are. to see how donald trump does message that transition that he s talked about wanting to do with the american people on these subjects. and whether or not he does that at the inauguration, whether he does that between now and then or immediately afterwards remains to be seen, but that s going to be up to him whether or not that chant has any more legs beyond this moment. let me ask you about leon panetta because flynn s got obviously the guy who seems to have trump s ear on intelligence. trump saying he s not taking these intelligence briefings, he s a smart guy, doesn t want to hear the same thing every day. this is what leon panetta said. if the intelligence official had indications or information regarding that attack and the president did not want to listen to that, for whatever reason, the responsibility for that would go on the president. i think that s fair. i think donald trump needs to revisit that line of thinking. no one is questioning your smarts here, sir. no one is questioning your ability to digest the information. yes, you know what, being president is boring as hell because you got to sit down and do the hard work. i mean, it s hard. no one appreciates that unless you ve been in that space and understand what those individuals go through. those briefings are there for a reason. and i would really hope that the president-elect would take to heart the sincerity and the importance of doing that because stuff happens. minutia happens. little things happen in the spate of hours while you rest that make a difference on the decisions you make the next day. and it s important that you understand what that minutia is so that you can make the right decisions. it s funny you say this. it s almost like you re saying details matter which is something one of the presidential candidates said. michael steele. you got it, buddy. aleppo, syria, has become synonymous with war-torn misery particularly over the last several months. it was once a bustling metropolis. so much so that a travel piece in the new york times we discovered old homes transformed into small hotels or restaurants with the cuisine some of the most memorable i ve tasted in the middle east. these are images of syria s largest city with its open air markets and bustling town squares and ancient landmarks, a mix of east and west, people lived together in relative peace though under the thumb of the assad regime. one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. this is what aleppo looks like today. described by france s u.n. ambassadors a, quote, the worst humanitarian trgedy of the 21st century. those loyal to assad and militias have all but crushed anti-government rebels. the u.n. human rights office has cited accounts of women and children being burned alive and families choosing suicide over surrender. we should note independent var fick kags of these accounts is impossible at this moment. rebel fighters were due to leave aleppo as part of a cease-fire agreement. however air strikes continued trapping tens of thousands of civilians. late this afternoon several news outlets began reporting the cease-fire agreement was back on. u.s. ambassador to the united nations samantha power addressed the crisis in aleppo yesterday. to the assad regime, russia and iran, your forces and proxies are carrying out these crimes. your barrel bombs and mortars anair strikes have allowed the militia in aleppo to encircle tens of thousands of civilians in your ever-tightening noose. it is your noose. three member states of the u.n. contributing to a noose around civilians. are you truly incapable of shame? is there literally nothing that can shame you? joining me now correspondent for nbc news. everything that i ve seen out of aleppo is just horrifying in the extreme. you have civilians. it s been under siege for a long time. they re now trapped. there s fear there will be retributions that rape will be used as a tool of war they will be burned slaughtered and killed. is there anything that can be done in the microsense to ensure the safety of those individuals there? wow, that s a million dollar question. i think samantha power and others would probably be better suited to answer that question from a diplomatic perspective. anything short of an international intervention on humanitarian grounds whether it be from neighboring countries or the united nations if they can come to some kind of consensus, i don t see anything slowing down the syrian government or its russian allies or its proxy fighters through the iranians and others. they ve made very clear they re going to continue with this assault until they have, in their eyes, liberated the city from what they describe as terrorists. obviously the opposition groups and the rebel groups are saying this is going to amount to a genocide because the reports that are coming out of there based on these activists account is what you describe, nothing short of massacres, nothing short of, you know, what they re saying is genocide. and i have to say that the reporters that i trust in that part of the world who i don t think are propagandists who are closest and approximate to what s happening there, does really seem to be horrendous. they don t just put it out there very quickly. they try to verify it. i ve been in touch with a lot of people at amnesty international who through their own work on the ground are trying to verify these accounts, speaking to people, a lot are making their way out to turkey. they re getting first person accounts of what is happening and what they re seeing. the assad regime reuniting the kind of spine of the most populated cities in syria. and the war really turned around when russian intervention became more muscular. i think that s a fair thing to say. you can actually make the argument that the war turned around when the united states didn t follow its red line policy. when the united states had drawn the red line and there was that chemical attack by the syrian government on some of the rebel positions, at that point the russians, backed by hezbollah fighters on the ground, the iranians sending their cash and other resource, it changed overnight, you could see that unfolding on the ground. people are addressing them to putin, to russia. they see themselves as much under siege by russia in fact, it was russia announcing today their ambassador to the u.n. was saying that essentially we have taken back aleppo. and we ll be ceasing military operations. this war was won and lost in the air. there s only one major superpower in the air and that s the russian air force. the americans and all the other countries that fought were bombing isis held territories to the east. the russians and the syrian air force barrel bombed and attacked rebel held areas. and the russian complicity in what has been described as war crimes and massacres, huge amounts of civilian deaths, young kids are being covered in dust inned or to be presented as victims of bombings. they ve been waging this propaganda campaign that everything you see is the propaganda of anti-assad forces. if you monitor syrian state television, which i do. you ll see that they re presenting a different picture. they re showing as the syrian army moves in, they re greeted by the local as liberators. thank you, you saved us from this terror. there s no doubt that propaganda is an element of this war, but what you re seeing, even the images put out by the russian various news agencies that are working, the syrian military footage, it shows complete destruction of the eastern part of the aleppo. it is something apocalyptic. annihilation. look at that. why does russia care so much? i think for two reasons. one, they have the naval base. but i don t think that s enough for them to get involved. i think this is geopolitics, this is russia saying to the americans you cannot just run shot in the middle east. we had a country that was a very close ally to us. that is our proxy. we ll intervene and fight in there. russia has an interest in keeping the presidency of assad, particularly iran, because they want that conduit to get through hezbollah for creating that regional umbrella between them and israel if they were ever to have a confederation of military activities. that s one of the reasons why iran is invested in preserving the regime of assad. and russia wants to protect him as well. a lot of terrified, desperate, hungry, embattled people in aleppo at this moment. let me remind all of you the senate intelligence committee on which i and the chairman of the committee sit are conducting a complete review of this matter. i m joined by dick durban, democrat from illinois. let me start by asking what you want to see done. what are you calling for in response to what we now know appear to be rusan government-backed hackers interfering in the election? . let s not minimize the gravity of this charge. that a foreign government tried to influence the election in the united states of america is serious business. if we discovered that some foreign country had spent million of doors secretly in the campaign, yeed be outraged. turns out what the russians are accused of doing is even worse. trying to disclose information from e-mails and other sources and influencing the outcome of the campaign. what we need is a bipartisan select committee that takes this charge as seriously as it should. bipartisan select committee, your colleague ben cardin called for something modeled on the 9/11 committee. there s been resistance from republican colleagues who want to just go through the regular intelligence committee in the senate or the house. why is a regular committee investigation of this not sufficient? i can just tell you that that doesn t reach the level of seriousness, and i think the dedication of our government to getting to the bottom of this is critically important. let s put aside who won the election, how they won the election. let s understand what happened here. we have credible information from our top intelligence agencies that the government of russia tried to influence the outcome of the united states election. that is a serious charge. and it shouldn t be routine business in the intelligence committees of the senate and the house. do you think the intelligence committees have come to a consensus conclusion on the motivation as of now? it seems like the cia believes it was actively trying to help donald trump become elected. there s some dissension on whether that was the motivation. what is your belief? i don t know anything more than reported in the papers, and that s the reason why we need this serious inquiry. i had eight other senators join me in a letter to mr. clapper the other day asking to disclose as much as possible unclassified information before january 20th, calling on the attorney general to initiate an investigation into the department of justice as well with professional longtime employees at the department of justice. i think it s reached that level of seriousness, and i hope that the new president as well as the new leaders in congress, both republicans, will take it as seriously themselves. what is the president-elect s responsibility on this issue in your mind? you have to understand our relationship with russia. it s a mixed relationship. when it came to the iran nuclear agreement, russia played a positive role. when it comes to what they re doing in ukraine, we are resisting them and imposing sanctions. so this is a country and a leader that we have to watch very carefully. and the fact that they would try to interject themselves into an election where mr. trump during the course of the election was saying positive things about mr. putin is worrisome to everyone, at least it should be. let s get to the bottom of it. this kind of cyber warfare in the political realm is unacceptable in a democracy and the united states has to get to the bottom of it. based on the reporting that you ve read and there s that long new york times piece which is quite revealing, do you think that the current president, president obama did enough to sort of sound the alarms about this while it was happening during the election? well, you have to take care. with the exception of jim comey s statement 11 days before the election, you really tried to take care of the last month of the election not to tip the balance one way or the other. that isn t fair to the candidates who were involved in the race here. i m sure what president obama felt is they get to the bottom of this, they bring the information together and a serious information would follow. so i don t know all the moves made by this administration, but i can understand why they didn t want to try to tip the scales on this presidential race. do you think the alleged russian interference which is the consensus view that it was russia of the various intelligence agencies, there seems to be pretty good evidence of that, do you think that tips the scales, that would be decisive in the outcome of this election? i can t honestly answer that. no one can. but apparently they were selective in the e-mails they hacked into and disclosed to the public trying to put out as much bad information as they could about hillary clinton and her campaign. they knew who they wanted to elect and it wasn t hillary clinton. so there was an effort under way. how much did it influence in an election decided by 80,000 voters in three stat, who can tell out of the millions of votes cast? senator dick durbin of illinois, thank you for joining me and appreciate it. thank you. donald trump puts paul ryan on notice. the threat to the speaker in his home state. a sugar shield to protect teeth from sugar found in everyday foods. crest complete. shield your teeth from sugar. so sugar may visit, but it s not sticking around my hygienist told me to try. .a mouthwash. so i tried crest. it does so much more than give me fresh breath. crest pro-health mouthwash provides all of these benefits to help you get better dental check-ups. go pro with. .crest pro-health mouthwash. checkup? nailed it. why pause a spontaneous moment? cialis for daily use treats ed and the urinary symptoms of bph. tell your doctor about your medicines, and ask if your heart is healthy enough for sex. do not take cialis if you take nitrates for chest pain, or adempas® for pulmonary hypertension, as this may cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. do not drink alcohol in excess. to avoid long-term injury, get medical help right away for an erection lasting more than four hours. if you have a sudden decrease or loss of hearing or vision, or an allergic reaction, stop taking cialis and get medical help right away. ask your doctor about cialis. last night house speaker paul ryan was met with boos when he took the stage, a rally with donald trump in front of christmas trees. when trump himself got on stage a few minutes later and mentioned ryan, the crowd booed again. trump tried to stop it mostly. speaker paul ryan, i ve really come to a oh, no, i ve come to appreciate him. speaker paul ryan. where is the speaker? where is he? he has been i ll tell you, he s been terrific. and you know, honestly? he s like a fine wine. every day goes by, i get to appreciate his genius more and more. now, if he ever goes against me, i m not going to say that, okay? he s a great guy. and we have some amazing things in store. and we re going to work on taxes, we re going to work on obamacare. we re going to work on things, and he s going to lead the way. so thank you. we re going to work on the wall, paul. joining me now, former campaign manager for mitt romney and an msnbc contributor. that was kind of an amazing moment. it felt like a ritual humiliation. donald trump, let s just be clear who is calling the shots here. yeah, it did sort of feel like that. but make no mistake, paul ryan is very, very popular in wisconsin. he might not be particularly popular with the people that show up for a big trump rally, but he wins overwhelmingly in his district and has very high approval ratings in the state of wisconsin. just a strange dynamic that goes on there with the people that attend a trump rally. but he doesn t i totally agree with you, this is a self-selecting crowd. but the broader question is what is the political calculus for republicans if and when they go against donald trump? and this applies to a million different things. whether donald trump does something that flagrantly violates the constitution or just does something that they don t like from a policy perspective, what political price will they pay? it s a very, very high price to pay because trump and his hard core supporters tend to bring a gun to a knife fight. and a lot of politicians aren t really prepared for that kind of battle. so they re going to look at this very, very carefully. they re not going to just casually walk into a big battle with donald trump. and it can be a little bit hard to predict what the battles that he decides to wage. so there s going to be a lot of walking on egg shells come 2017. i think that s well said. interesting he said we re working on obamacare. clearly mitch mcconnell is champing at the bit for that as well as paul ryan, some sort of obamacare repeal. cut taxes, which i think mcconnell and ryan are excited about as well. then the wall, paul, we re going to work on the wall. that s where it s going to be very interesting to see how these different things get ordered and what moves through that congress first and how much it s paul ryan and how much it s donald trump. and also and what does that mean? because even donald trump in some of his officials have walked back a little bit from their comments during the campaign about a wall. there s been talk about well, maybe it s not a physical wall. maybe it s a virtual wall. what we ve seen is that there are a lot of issues where donald trump feels very comfortable kind of walking back from the really heated rhetoric of the campaign and saying, well, that s not exactly what i meant. you take me too literally. we ll see if what he ultimately proposes is a giant physical structure between the u.s. and mexico. can you imagine a scenario in which there is actually an out in the open fight? i mean, i m really curious about how long this sort of we re all on the same team is going to last, for two reasons. one is i think there are different policy preferences. different political objectives. i wonder at what point the normal rules of political gravity start to apply. donald trump is the least popular president-elect in the history of recent polling. he s defied it for the entirety of the campaign. maybe he ll continue to do that forever. maybe. i don t know. no one knows. but you wonder whether marginal house members start to worry if that continues. and the challenge that he s going to face come january is that he s used to being a ceo that just calls the shots. and he did that during the campaign. he was able to trust his gut during the campaign. but that s not how our government is set up. our government is set up to have a system of checks and balances. he s going to have to win the approval from a majority in the house and the senate. and, you know, it s not always going to be easy saing as you mention on all of these issues. the first time like you said, gun to a knife fight. the first time he doesn t get his way he ll be on twitter calling whoever blocked him out publicly and that s when, you know, that s when we ll see how this all shakes out. well, and as i know somebody that opposed trump in the primaries, his supporters can be very vitriolic and very threatening. there will be stories about that as they rise to his defense. katie packer, thanks. thanks. the agency that stood up to the trump administration and won. more on that ahead. plus inauguration planning reaches new levels of desperation. it s tonight s thing 1, thing 2. consideration this year. also, many school bands in the surrounding counties opted not to apply to participate in trump s inauguration. local universities also did not apply. and it s not just local bands. the trump inaugural committee is also reportedly having trouble finding a-list celebrities to perform at any of the inaugural events. as of today there s only one entertainer who is definitely booked to perform. that s singer jackie evancho who rose to popularity on tv. i have recently been asked by the president-elect to perform the national anthem for the swearing-in ceremony at the inauguration. and i m so excited. it s going to be awesome. incredibly exciting. that is so far jackie evancho, the only performer who is definitely playing a trump inauguration gig. with just 37 days until the inauguration to go, the committee in charge of finding more performers is reportedly getting pretty desperate. thing 2, according to the rap, president-elect donald trump s team is struggle so hard to book a-list performers, it offered ambassadorships to at least two talent bookers if they could deliver marquee names. the first insider said he was shocked at the proposal, never in a million years have i heard something so crazy, he said. that was the moment i almost dropped the phone. the second insider said he was offered a government post including an ambassadorship if he could wrangle an artist. trump s team deny the report. there is no truth to this insinuation, committee spokesman boris epstein. first class entertainers are eager to participate in the events. inauguration will be an exciting uniting celebration of democracy. also keep an eye on those ambassador announcements. the trump transition team virtually knocking on doors at the department of energy to find out who in the civil service did something they re duty-bound to do as part of their jobs, go to meetings and work on it as part of the obama administration. then something amazing happened. the bureaucrats at the department of energy said no. on the question of providing names, energy officials resolutely rejected the request while reassuring workers. and here s the most amazing thing. it looks like they won for now. the trump transition team saying in a statement, the questionnaire was not authorized or part of our standard protocol. the person who sent it has been properly counseled. this is stunning considering the only other real backtrack from the trump transition team was firing general michael flynn s son, michael g. flynn, for tweeting fake news about pizzagate on the day a man with a gun showed up to the pizzeria in question. now the transition team has backed off demanding names of energy department employees involved in climate change work. climate science is already so threatened by the incoming administration that scientists are literally copying u.s. climate data fearing it might vanish under president trump. one of those trying to protect vital data is ben houlton, director of the john muir institute. i saw this story today and it struck me. first, what exactly are you doing? it s a great question. i don t think there s any way the sugarcoat it that the climate science community is hurt and feeling rejected by the president-elect trump s moves. it s almost as if trump is cooking up this amazing thanksgiving meal and we re over at the kid table. we want to be at the adult table. why do we want to be there? we want to be there to share the good news that climate change is a job creator. responding with climate solutions gives rise to all sorts of economic opportunities for people in this country. we don t want to miss out on that. as a community we re coming together to develop new cooperative ways to get that message out to the public, to make sure that they understand that this is about them, this is about their future, and it s about the here and now. okay. i get the positive message here. but what you re doing, i understand, is copying data that you re afraid that an incoming administration would either manipulate or delete? i can t speak to that general issue since i myself am not involved in copying those data, but i am trying to make sure that we protect climate science in every way possible. being in california, we have this tremendous opportunity to work with our local government here, with governor brown and the university of california system we re seeing this ground level upswell of climate scientists coming together and basically recognizing that we need to be empowered. and this is a call to arms. this is a call to action for us to develop new ways to make sure that we re protecting climate research for people on the planet. that s what we care most about. how important is the federal government and people in the civil service to the things that we know about the climate? i mean, how much of that is coming from a federal government that will now be run by someone who has said that it s all a chinese hoax? it s true that the federal government plays a huge role especially when you look at the paris agreement but also in the sort of knowledge of climate change that s what i mean, the data. absolutely. how much are we dependent on different people in the federal government whether it s the stuff we have at noaa, whether the obseratory we have at hawaii, what nasa does, how much depends on the federal government? a tremendous amount of it does. that s under threat right now. so if you look at nasa or noaa or the u.s. geological survey. they re providing all sorts of climate data that can help us provide solutions to grow food without those crops failing because of climate change and so on and so forth. it is under threat. we do this as a superimportant message that we hope president-elect trump understands. climate science is vital to national security. how under threat it is? i guess we haven t been in these territories before. but how much could it be the case that a new administration would just say to the department of energy or the epa, yeah, we re just going to get rid of all of these parts of the government that do all these readings that produce this, what we believe is a hoax? i mean, it s certainly hard to quantify exact what that would look like and to the extent that the executive can kind of come in and determine these things, but you know, this isn t without precedent when bush two came to ourself, there was an assault on climate change at that time. we were able to get through that time period by local, state action. we re hoping we can do the same now. but this is a national treasure. i would hope everyone in your audience understands that climate science is a treasure for our kids, for our planet and for our future. you have colleagues at uc davis who are actually doing this sort of copying of data. to folks that hear that, how under the gun do the people in your community and i know a lot of climate scientists who already feel under the gun, frankly, because they spent their life working on this. how under the gun do you feel right now? look, i ve had more conversations with climate scientists. and what are climate scientists, they re lawyer, doctors, every member of ow society has a stake. we re all coming together in new ways at uc davis in particular we re developing a new initiative to connect people across all disciplines. all right. but climate change doesn t know politics. when the sea level rises, it doesn t decide to go to a democrat or republican house. right. we need to really make sure this is understood by the broader public. all right.
at today s sessions hearing. the equivalent of being made to go to the back of the bus. major holes in tillerson s sanctuary. were we lobbying before or against? i m a germaphobe, believe me. when all in starts right now. good evening from new york, i m chris hayes. there are just nine days until donald trump becomes president of the united states. today we were inundated with news, much of it disturbing, about what to expect when he takes office. in fact there was so much news today it is, frankly, impossible for us to fully cover what we saw and heard, which may well have been the point. we are going to aggressively cover the issues we have deemed most important and they are big ones. among them, the president-elect evoking nazi germany to characterize u.s. intelligence agencies, offering kind words to the russians who the intelligence community believe hacked the dnc and clinton campaign. trump s secretary of state pick exxonmobil ceo rex tillerson possibly lying under oath at his confirmation hearing about exxonmobil lobbying against russian sanctions and an impassioned and unprecedented plea from a sitting senator, cory booker, to reject trump s attorney general nominee senator jeff sessions over his record on civil rights. but we begin with the story we believe to be most important at this pivotal moment and what this day with as about. the nearly incomprehensible set of conflicts of interest that result from refusing to relinquish ownership of a multibillion dollar organizations that is engaged with businesses and countries around the world, the full scope of which we still don t know. that s because trump refuses to release his tax returns. well, i m not showing tax returns, as you know, they re under audit. reporter: every president since the 70s has had an irs. i ve never heard that. you know, the only ones who care about my tax returns are the prevented from doing so so there is no way of knowing whether they were genuine documents or just phony visual aids like the supposed trump steaks that trump showed off last march which turned out to have been purchased from a south florida meat company and still had the labels on them to prove it. to explain the steps he took, trump brought to the stage attorney sheri dillon whose lau firm won the 2016 law firm of the year. she said trump is not liquidating his assets because doing so could lead to unreasonable losses for trump and this is simply too high a burden. the approach we ve outlined today will avoid potential conflicts of interest or concerns regarding exploitation of the office of the presidency without imposing unnecessary and unreasonable losses on the president-elect and his family. that position prompted this response from the head of the office of government ethics independent trustee as oge has advised him to do. he did not deal with his emoluments clause problems, the unconstitutional flows of funds and other benefits from foreign governments and their agents. what he announced with his children is more like an ethics sieve, full of holes. so he gets f across the board. i should say that walter shaub gave a remarkable speech, we exerted some of it. he basically agreed with you, norm, this is not my area of expertise. mr. painter, what about the argument that was made explicitly by the president-elect s lawyer that forcing divestiture would essentially cost the president-elect too much money. that it would be too painful, too large, to unreasonable a financial sacrifice? well, in the bush administration as the chief ethics lawyer i worked with a lot of incoming cabinet officials who sold off assets and left money on the table, stock options and other money, and, yes, it cost them money to enter public service. i took a substantial pay cut to go work in the white house. that s what public service is all about. i am thrilled to have a president who has friends all over the world who will offer him $2 billion and so forth, that s great, but that s got to stop as of january 20. he s got to focus on being president and this is business is worth a lot to him but i m sure he could sell it off for a couple of million dollars which is plenty of money for him, but this government everyday spends more money than that business is probably worth and he is in charge of it as president of the united states. he s got to focus on his job and walter shaub s job at the office of government ethics is to advise government officials including the president on complying with a conflict of interest standard and walter is exactly right. there has been a political war against the office of government ethics this week conducted by super pacs and against walter in particular, trying to line him up for getting fired by the president or something like that and i have said this at the brookings institution this afternoon. if there s a saturday night massacre aatoge, we won t stand for that in the united states and we won t stand for a president who would tolerate that. this is an independent agency that implements ethics laws in the executive branch. walter shaub has a job to do and he is doing it and it s time for the president to focus on his job and to divest for those business enterprises instead of attacking the office of government ethics. i should note the saturday night massacre a reference to the attempted firing of key department of justice officials by richard nixon which essentially was the end of the end. well, they did fire them, they got down to robert bourque who would take care of the job for them. but that s not going to happen and we won t let that happen in this administration unless president trump wants to go the sa way nixon went. those are strong words and i want to talk about i ll let you you gentlemen referred to as a constitutional crisis, which you, ambassador, referred to. it bans emoluments for american officials. sheri dillon issued kind of fro from the bench her constitutional ruling, quite clear about what is and is not an an emolument. here s what she had to say. since president-elect trump some people want to define emoluments to cover routine business transactions like paying for hotel rooms. they prevent what the president-elect isn t aware of. these people are wrong. you re wrong ambassador is that correct? like many of her client s tweets and statements, it s tolly incorrect. the emoluments clause, it s a fancy 18th century word. all it s intended to say is that presidents of the united states cannot get cash and other benefits from foreign governments and you can understand why that would be a coern, how cane know if somebody s getting these $2 llion offers. right. let s say that came from a foreign government. we don t know if a foreign government was involved in that or not. how can we know they re doing what s in the best interest of the united states? the founders were very concerned about that. they put this in the constitution and donald trump is allowing all of that to continue. it s absolutely shocking. ambassador norm eisen and richard painter, gentlemen, you have been really, really helpful in understanding and navigating all this and i thank you for your time tonight. thank you, chris. still to come, filmmaker michael moore with his reaction to the slights, vendettas and unanswered questions from the president-elect s first press conference. as that press conference was going on, we got our first chance to hear trump s pick for secretary of state and his somewhat inconsistent views about russia. we ll dive into the rex tillerson hearing ahead. let me ask you this question is vladimir putin a war criminal? i would not use that term. well, let me describe the situation in aleppo and perhaps that will help you reach that conclusion. 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no, i didn t see anything that changed my mind. in fact, chris, i saw several things that deepened the concerns that we expressed about senator sessions, we ve been familiar with him since 1985 when lawyers at the naacp legal defense fund represented three civil rights activists, two of whom had been close friends of martin luther king who senator sessions prosecuted when he was u.s. attorney in alabama. they were acquitted but that prosecution had long-standing affects on that community in terms of intimidating black voters who were questioned by the fbi and who senator sessions allowed to be intimidated by members of his team. so we ve known him and his record for a long time. what i heard yesterday was in my view what is a very cynical effort to dismiss a record of over 40 years senator sessions has been a u.s. attorney, the attorney general of alabama for about two years and then the a united states senator and in that time we ve had an opportunity to see where he stands on a variety of civil rights issues. he was rejected, as you know, by the senate judiciary committee in 1986 when he sought to become a federal district judge because they found that the evidence of that prosecution and statements he was accused of making made him unsuited to be a federal district judge. yesterday he said he was wrongly characterized, you can find our report on our web site that starts looking not only from 1985 but up to this century and 2017, including during the campaign of president-elect trump where senator sessions was a close ally and was the first sitting senator to endorse president-elect trump. i want to talk about one specific area that i ve been following myself for a book i wrote and something you and i have spoken about, which is policing. particularly because this justice department under president obama i would say, particularly in the second term, has played a muscular role in the civil rights division in patterns and practices investigations of cities from chicago to cleveland to baltimore to ferguson and consent decrees that are federal efforts to reform policing externally for localities that have proven to be unable to do that for themselves. here s what senator sessions had to say about those consent decrees today. take a listen. it s a difficult thing for a city to be sued by the department of justice and to be told that your police department is systematically failing to serve the people of the state or the city. so that s an august responsibility of the dow jonat general and the department of justice so they often feel forced to agree to a consent decree just to remove that stigma. that was obviously yesterday. what do you make of that answer? well, i think you have to combine it with even more testimony yesterday, the fact he was endorsed by the fraternal order of police, there was a phalanx of law enforcement there to support him yesterday and the head of the fraternal order of police testified on his behalf today and they all essentially said the same thing, and what they said and what i heard out of the mouth of senator sessions is that he intends to be a champion of local police, that he does not believe the federal government through the department of justice should be intruding in local policing matters. he said specifically he thinks that too many people, including the department, are paintin entire place departments as being engaged in unconstitutional conduct when in fact it s just a few officers, a few bad apples, something we ve heard before. we he s a proponent of that view. he has been skeptical about consent decrees for many years, not just recently. but what we heard from him at this hearing makes me quite certain that senator sessions, if he is confirmed, will be taking a very different tack on policing reform. i do not expect pattern and practice investigations, i do not expect consent decree. i hope he will continue work of the cops office that works on retraining police departments but that remains to be seen. i was not encouraged by what i heard from his lips yesterday and what i heard today. as you know, local practices like in ferguson, it was the department of justice that discovered this kind of pyramid scheme that ferguson was running, it was department of justice that discovered unconstitutional policing in baltimore and we need to department of justice to be engaged in that activity. those patterns and practices report which is you can find on line are remarkable reading produced by that same department that the senator would be running, sherrilyn ifill, thank you for your time. thank you, chris. up next, nine days away from his inauguration, president-elect donald trump escalated his feud with his own intelligence agencies by and i m not making this up comparing them to nazis. that story after the short break. just thinking about it? 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[dad] alright, buddy, don t forget anything! [kid] i won t, dad. [captain rod] happy tuesday morning! captain rod here. it s pretty hairy out on the interstate.traffic is literally crawling, but there is some movement on the eastside overpass. getting word of another collision. [burke] it happened. december 14th, 2015. and we covered it. talk to farmers. we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum trump referring to an unverified dossier containing embarrassing claims about his alleged ties to russia which was prepared by a third-party individual, not members of the intelligence community, and published not by the intelligence community but by buzzfeed news. that came after the president-elect opened his press conference with a broadside against american intelligence officials whom he blames for talking to the press. i want to thank a lot of the news organizations here today because they looked at that nonsense that was released by maybe the intelligence agencies, who knows but maybe the intelligence agencies which would be a tremendous blot on their record if they, in fact, did that, a tremendous blot. and in a particularly astonishing moment, frankly, the president-elect admitted openly to setting traps for the intelligence community in an attempt to find out whether they ve been leaking about his classified briefings. i said maybe it s my office. maybe my office. and what i did is i said i won t tell anybody, i m going to have a meeting and i won t tell anybody about my meeting with intelligence, nobody knew, not even ronne, my executive assistant for years. she didn t know. i didn t tell her. the meeting was had, the meeting was over, they left and immediately the word got out that i had a meeting. now based on the reporting over the past few weeks and admittedly it s a lot of anonymous sources and hard to make sense of it s clear at least a significant portion of the american intelligence apparatus appears to believe that the incoming president of the united states, their future boss is potentially the turned asset of a foreign adversary and at the same time that same man, the president-elect, seems to think that the intelligence apparatus is out to destroy him politically by staging a kind of soft coup. it s a recipe for a major constitutional crisis in the very near future. and the urinar. tell your doctor about your medicines, and ask if your heart is healthy enough for sex. do not take cialis if you take nitrates for chest pain, or adempas® for pulmonary hypertension, as this may cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. do not drink alcohol in excess. to avoid long-term injury, get medical help right away for an erection lasting more than four hours. if you have a sudden decrease or loss of hearing or vision, or an allergic reaction, stop taking cialis and get medical help right away. ask your doctor about cialis. today for the first time. trump s response to the election hacks, the claims of ties between his inner circle and the kremlin and his general stance towards russia all make up at this point the single most controversial aspect of the president-elect s foreign policy. so it was fitting that today while trump was giving his press conference, his nominee for secretary of state, rex tillerson, was testifying in his first confirmation hearing on capitol hill. tillerson has had extensive contact with the russian government as the ceo of exxonmobil, even winning russia s order of friendship award in 2013 after making a half trillion deal with the government-owned oil company. asked about russia s role in the election, he sounded a somewhat different note than his would be boss. do you believe during the 2016 presidential campaign russia intelligence services directed a campaign of active measures involving the hacking of e-mails, the strategic leak of these e-mails, the use of internet trolls and the dissemination of fake news? i did read the interagency report released on january 6. that report clearly is troubling and indicates that all of the actions you just described were undertaken. senator bob menendez, a democrat, asked whether tillerson s responses reflect the views of the president-elect himself. i assume to some degree you ve had some discussion about what it is that that world view is going to be in order to understand whether you re willing to execute that on behalf of the person you re going to work for. in a broad construct in terms of the principles that are going to guide that, yes, sir. i would have thought russia would be at the top of that considering the actions taking place, is that did that not happen? that has not occurred yet, senator. that s pretty amazing. senator menendez asked tillerson about his company s history of opposing economic sanctions including those leveed against russia for its invasion of crimea. this was the response. first, i have never lobbied against sanctions personally. the company you directed did. to my knowledge exxon never lobbied against sanctions, not to my knowledge. new jersey senator bob menendez. shortly after that your colleague senator corker said mr. tillerson i believe you called me to lobby against sanctions. later in the committee meeting you then pulled out the lobbying disclosure forms that showed exxon had filed disclosure forms to lobby on sanctions. do you believe that mr. tillerson was being deceptive with you today? well, he was either avoiding the truth or his management style has got to be ofoncern as he seeks to head one of the biggest departments of the federal government, the state department, not only with its operations here but across the world. it s impossible to almost believe that you could spend and direct millions of dollars in bobbying activities as those reports that i submitted for the record show and not know that was happening and not know they were lobbying against sanctions. the second thing he said to me when i presented the evidence, he said to me well, it doesn t say whether we were lobbying for or against. in what world would he have lobbied for sanctions that would have hurt the bottom line of his company? so it clearly was at least not transparent and worrisome because if he really didn t know, how do you operate a large institution like the state department and what s your management style? he also exxonmobil responded saying let s be clear, we engaged with lawmakers to discuss sanction impacts, not whether or not sanctions should be opposed although that strikes me as a distinction without a difference if you come to a member s office and say this is going to hurt our bottom line you don t have to say that s why you should oppose it. absolutely. mr. tillerson said it was to seek information and guidance. well, you don t have to have a lobby disclosure form in order to seek information or guidance. you have a lobby disclosure form because you are taking a specific position for or against a specific piece of legislation or regulatory action. that thing about getting information is not tenable because you don t need to do that to file a disclosure form. they were clearly lobbying against sanctions on iran, russia and other iterations of those sanction regimes. so was this fundamentally deceptive? i asked at the beginning but he says he never personally lobbied then you have your colleague saying you called me. do you feel the answers he gave today were forthcoming and truthful? no, i have serious questions as to what he answered. on the whole sanctions regime, which is part of our limited arsenal of peaceful diplomacy tools so you don t have to go to war over disputes, he had it all over the place. he has a history of lobbying against it to exxonmobil then he says they can be powerful a powerful tool. and when i asked him today, without specifying with sanctions, do you not believe on the face of everything russia has done including trying to affect our own national presidential elections that additional sanctions should be called for and he wouldn t commit to that. so i have a real concern as to where he stands as it relates to that and other issues. all right, senator bob menendez, thank you for your time, appreciate it. thank you. still to come, today s press conference served as a stark reminder of the temperament of the incoming president. i ll talk about it with michael moore ahead. plus, a truly, truly bizarre thing 1, thing 2 that you have to see after this break. 90% of the world s largest supercomputers run on intel? that means you can take a universe of data - in your case literally - and turn it into medical discoveries, diagnostic breakthroughs. .proof that black holes collapse into one singularity. i don t know what that is. but yes. innovation runs on supercomputers. .and supercomputers run on intel. you are super smart. and super busy. ooh! ufo! false alarm, eyelash! has been a struggle. i considered all my options with my doctor, who recommended once-daily toujeo®. now i m on the path to better blood sugar control. toujeo® is a long-acting insulin from the makers of lantus®. it releases slowly, providing consistent insulin levels for a full 24 hours, proven full 24-hour blood sugar control, and significant a1c reduction. and along with toujeo®, i m eating better and moving more. toujeo® is a long-acting, man-made insulin used to control high blood sugar in adults with diabetes. it contains 3 times as much insulin in 1 milliliter as standard insulin. don t use toujeo® to treat diabetic ketoacidosis, during episodes of low blood sugar, or if you re allergic to insulin. allergic reaction may occur and may be life threatening. don t reuse needles or share insulin pens, even if the needle has been changed. the most common side effect is low blood sugar, which can be serious and life threatening. it may cause shaking, sweating, fast heartbeat, and blurred vision. check your blood sugar levels daily while using toujeo®. injection site reactions may occur. don t change your dose or type of insulin without talking to your doctor. tell your doctor if you take other medicines and about all your medical conditions. insulins, including toujeo®, in combination with tzds (thiazolidinediones) may cause serious side effects like heart failure that can lead to death, even if you ve never had heart failure before. don t dilute or mix toujeo® with other insulins or solutions as it may not work as intended and you may lose blood sugar control, which could be serious. toujeo® helps me stay on track with my blood sugar. ask your doctor about toujeo®. daddy! lets play! sorry kids. feeling dead on your feet? i ve been on my feet all day. dr. scholl s massaging gel insoles have a unique gel wave design for outrageous comfort that helps you feel more energized. dr. scholl s. feel the energy! thing 1 tonight, the ongoing saga of the capital hill art heist. for 35 years, the house has sponsored a nationwide art competition for high school students in which a winner from each district has their work displayed in the capitol for an entire year. this painting is one of hundreds of winners from 2016 done by a high schooler in missouri who lives just miles away from ferguson where michael brown was fatally shot in 2014. as you can see, the painting depicts several figures as fferenanimals, a police officer who appears to be a warthog is aiming a gun at another figure who appears to be a wolf. a second officer depicted with unspecified animal-like figures. that painting has been stolen three times in six days, leading one congressman to seek charges for theft against one of his colleagues and another to say we may just have to kick shall be s ass. we ll tell you who s behind the heist in 60 seconds. just like the people who own them, every business is different. but every one of those businesses will need legal help as they age and grow. whether it be help starting your business, vendor contracts or employment agreements. legalzoom s network of attorneys can help you every step of the way so you can focus on what you do. we ll handle the legal stuff that comes up along the way. legalzoom. legal help is here. stimulan you know how your you might be surprised. stimulant laxatives make your body go by forcefully stimulating the nerves in your colon. miralax is different. it works with the water in your body to hydrate and soften, unblocking your system naturally. miralax. a high school student s painting has been stolen from the halls of the capital three times in less than a week. who s responsible? well, four republican united states congressmen so far. last fridayepresentative duncan hunter of california was the first to snatch the painting, falsely claiming it depicts police officers as pigs and returning it to the office of missouri congressman lacey clay who represents the artist s district. yesterday morning representative clay and fellow members of the congressional black caucus returned the painting to its rightful place. clay even asked capital police to press charges against hunter but they declined. later tuesday, doug lam born was the second republican congress to just take the painting down with no authorization and, again, congressman clay had it returned to the gallery wall. before the end of the day, congressman dana or arohrabached brian ban bin removed it for a third time. as of this evening, the painting is back up but the fight continues. congressional republican staffer making it a top priority to request a review from the capital architect on whether the painting should be removed. and speaker paul ryan told members he will try to take it down to which congress a.m. black caucus chair cedric richmond responded if this is something speaker ryan thinks is one of his priorities in a new congress, to pick on an 18-year-old art student who only depict what is he sees in his community, then i just think that s sad. ritis, and you re talking to your doctor about your medication. this is humira. this is humira helping to relieve my pain and protect my joints from further damage. this is humira helping me go further. humira works for many adults. it targets and helps to block a specific source of inflammation that contributes to ra symptoms. humira has been clinically studied for over 18 years. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened, as have blood, liver and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. ready for a new chapter? talk to your rheumatologist. this is humira at work. lindsey graham. i ve been competing with him for a long time. he s going to crack that 1% barrier one day. i didn t realize lindsey graham s still at it. president-elect donald trump s performance in today s press conference served as a stark reminder he is still the same person he was during the election. as trump stands poised to become the president of the united states entering office with a 37% approval rating, he still seems most comfortable pursuing vendettas, responsing to slights and engaging to outright intimidation. while the president-elect couldn t resist a jab at former enemies like senator lindsey graham today, most of his it have vitriol was reserved for the people in the room. most of the media outlets are fake news. i could name them, but i won t bother. you have a few sitting in front of us. as far as buzzfeed which is a failing pile of garbage writing it, i think they ll suffer the consequences. they already are. i m not showing tax returns, they re under audit. reporter: every president since the 70s has had an audit. reporter: since you re attacking us, can you give us a question? mr. president-elect, since you are attacking not you. not you. reporter: can you give us a chance? your organization is terrible. i m not going to give you a question, i i can you state categorically you are fake news. that man not the man sitting down, the man standing up, is about to become the most powerful person in the world. i will ask filmmaker michael moore what that means for our democracy next. don t let the food you eat during the day haunt you at night. nexium 24hr. shuts down your stomach s active acid pumps. to stop the burn of frequent heartburn. all day and night. have we seen them before? banish the burn with nexium 24hr. we re not professional liathletes. .but that doesn t mean we re giving up. i m in this for me. for me. along with diet and exercise, farxiga helps lower blood sugar in adults with type 2 diabetes. lowering a1c by up to 1.2 points. do not take if allergic to farxiga. if you experience symptoms of a serious allergic reaction such as rash,. .swelling, difficulty breathing or swallowing,. .stop taking and seek medical help right away. do not take farxiga if you have severe kidney problems,. .are on dialysis, or have bladder cancer. tell you doctor right away if you have blood or red color in your urine,. .or pain while you urinate. farxiga can cause serious side effects including dehydration, genital yeast infections in women and men, serious urinary tract infections, low blood sugar, and kidney problems. stop taking farxiga and call your doctor right away. .if you have signs of ketoacidosis. .which is serious and may lead to death. i m in this for my family. i m in this for me. ask your doctor about farxiga. .and learn how you can get it for free. so we know how to cover almost alanything.ything, even mer-mutts. (1940s aqua music) (burke) and we covered it, february third, twenty-sixteen. talk to farmers. we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum for patients like lynn, advanced genomic testing may lead to other treatment options that can work. learn how genomic testing is changing the way we fight cancer at cancercenter.com/genomics well, first of all, i ll speak as a director, then, as a film director. it was a masterful performance, he owned the room, he owned the day, this should be very distressing to everyone. you think it was politically effective today? absolutely. especially for he and his side. as showmanship? as such i did this in my hold. take those same words you just showed you are fake news. put those words in nixon s mouth, it would have sounded like the paranoid that nixon was. put those words in george w. bush s mouth, you know, it would have sounded defensive like a little boy. this guy pulls that off and he pulls it off over and over and over again and confuses the situation with so much you don t know we don t have enough time here to deal with everything that was said and done but speaking as a director, once again, the props, the trump steaks were replaced by file folders that by the way, i don t know if this has been reported, they wouldn t let the reporters we did. one of our own reporters tried to look. yeah, because of course somebody went to staples and hour earlier. i don t know but that certainly is plausible. creatined this problem that looks like a law student s dorm room, you know? it really it s like obviously we ve thought this through and obviously we ve addressed the conflict of interest, just look at how many sheets of paper there are. just look at all this paper in an era where none of this is really on paper. so this is where now after this what happened today the threat against cnn and nbc has suffered the same sort of threat before. he attacked our reporter katy tur on multiples on occasions. absolutely. so now it s critical that the media do its job and do not be afraid, do not back down, do not try to because buzzfeed screwed up in some way because of the michael cohen thing, don t now not do your job because this clearly was something that wasn t vetted. so here s my you re referring to that dossier which circulated, published by buzzfeed that contained a bunch of unverified and possibly unverifiable, frankly, outlandish and lurid accusations. you could tell from the first moment that in a smart tactical sense they were going to attack the weakest point so that was distinct from the cnn report, right? but he conflate it had two very wisely, i thought, to attack them both and correct. and the main story, really, if you re a serious journalist, isn t the salacious prostitute stuff. it s the second point which is was there collusion between the trump campaign and any russians during the campaign? that s worthy of the investigation that apparently the fbi and others are doing right now. we should note jim acosta that was the question he was asking, can you state categorically it was dodged. acosta then said afterwards someone from abc asked that and the president-elect said no so i want to enter that in the record. here s my question to you. i have watched this play out in the transition period and what i ve noticed is this. donald trump ultimately became president-elect i think because he was able to profit off a forced choice between himself and hillary clinton and hick because of 30 years in the public eye because of different factors, he was able to say you may not like me but it s me or her. it strikes me he has replaced hillary clinton with the media. he is now running against the media. the scary part of that analogy is you have hillary who won but because of the democrats and who they are and the way they are she lost. well, she didn t win in the sense that she did not win the 270 electoral votes necessary to become president. well, let me put it a different way. if donald trump had won by three million popular votes things would have played out differently. what would be going on right now? i agree. in fact, he laid the ground work for it. correct. so play that out. so when you say the press has to be uncowed and i agree with you, my own personal perspective on this, they have to focus as much as possible which is very difficult to do, very difficult to do. yes, right because you re dealing with somebody with certain issues, we ll call it that just to who likes to pick a million fights. and says a million crazy things. he will in one moment say he believes russia did hack into the dnc and literally less than a minute later say i don t know. maybe not, maybe it was some other country. fortunately the 400 pound guy sitting on the bed has been left out of the discussion but it could be other countries. it could be other countries. so this is crazy time but it s so important. we re laughing about this but the media. they said this story has been floating around, did you hear it? i had heard word of it. i didn t read the dossier. but what i had read was david corn s piece based off this dossier. in terms of the first order of questions, i think you don t publish that dossier, that s my own personal feeling because you have to verify stuff that you publish. that s my feeling. no, that s correct. thank you. and as someone who i myself have had buzzfeed print things about me that aren t true so i now you re sounding trumpish. well, no, it s just the truth that this is where this is going to be the undoing of the press if they don t do what you just said, if that kind of serious journalism doesn t happen and and we should point out that nbc universal is an investor in buzzfeed. any time that s mentioned it should be said. yes. they are. so we should say here, though, that that the you re getting at the pay dirt here, what is the term he used? they appropriate this term, fake news. fake news is this term he s one of the founders of in the the obama era. he created the fake news of the barack obama is not a citizen. and he said that there was intelligence. that s right. he was called by a reputable source that there was intelligence. he himself was going to he was hiring investigators to support his fake news. he is the godfather of this deck ka decade s fake news. for him to say fake news well, this is a great point. as a person who launched his political career off of unverifiable and ultimately incorrect conspiratorial and frankly racist theories about the president s crypto kenyan birth and forged documents and all this stuff. and the fact that the way he deals with the sex thing is his defense is i m a germaphobe. he just admits it publicly on tv i m a germaphobe. like to him that takes care of any sex like sex is all dirty and germy. whatever. well that s what he used. this could have never happened. i won t get into the weeds. this couldn t have happened because i m a germaphobe and i know where they put the cameras in the hotel rooms, i have hotels. that was also fascinating. but the term fake news and what i found potent about that is describe this specific thing that happened during the election, you see it all the time, in your facebook feed, denzel washington endorses donald trump. that s jus not a true thing and the people that wrote that know it s not true. it s not even that important, frankly, but not true. he even tweeted i put out a movie against him called trumpland just before the election and he tweets thank you, michael moore, for putting out trumpland. and it s like i thought at the time he sees his name in the title. it s to a narcissist it s always a great thing to see you name. to be mentioned, yeah. but it s just but we re through the looking glass. he has appropriated this term to say it s a judo move where it s it s fake news. this was genius today. he pulled it off now we ll see if the press decides to back down or come back at him. and stay on the conflict story. and stay on the fact that he is a founder of fake news and that s and when he says things like over the weekend i was offered $2 billion. have you ever heard a president or president-elect ever say yeah, i just got offered $2 billion. and i have to say, i was happy for that moment because it was news, we didn t know that and it concretized precisely the conflict problem we have been trying to illustrate on this show. michael moore, thank you. and thank you and let me just
down an american movie, censor an american picture it doesn t like, wrong in not calling him first before buckling before a north korean dictator. this is obama laying it on the line in a press conference that signalled all the audacity he s packed into a week since the november election, the deal on climate change, the protective order for people who came here illegally, and including the post of an american ambassador with the communist government in cube a taking questions from all women reporters in today s press conference, where will this obama audacity take us? i m joined by david corn, and by actor, writer and director sean penn who joins me now by phone. first of all, here s the president speaking about sony s decision to pull the interview, the movie that inspired the hacking. let s watch. sony is a corporation. i would agree with the president. i think that, you know, i m not speaking as an advocate for the motion picture industry or as a critic. but we have to realize this is a genuine emergency, this is the popularization of cyber war and it requires an alternate threshold on the thinking and the language that we use. when representatives of sony deny that they pulled the film and put it on distributors, that it s not really recognizing the same responsibility a parent has to drive the show when something threatens their child. in this case, it doesn t matter whether it s an individual, a government, or a company, the response of sony should have been to say, we ll make our apologies later and we ll put it online open and free for the world to see. so i would say it s a cop-out popularized taking a weapon and shooting at civilians on the street. it shows the possibilities. once those possibilities go out into the culture, just like guns, we ve got a computer in every household, and this is not technology. this is far from the hands of anyone. let me go over to david corn. your view on this as a guy who writes all the time. it does seem to be an easy call. as sean penn just said, they could have gone other routes besides the regal theater chain. we re going to put it on a network. they could have put it out themselves on a website. they could have said we take these threats seriously to the theaters. if they feel they can t have security, we ll do it another way. at the end of the day, unless they put it out they still can put it out. they can put it out for free. or set up their own website and anyone who wants to see it pays ten bucks and that s it. if they don t do that, at some point, probably some point soon, it just sends the message, that this works. i ve heard some conservatives today criticize the president for saying what he did too late, after sony already did what it s done. and the question, though, is, is this going to set a precedent or not? that s why i think it s right for the president and for the others to say, we don t agree and try to give them some more spine, give them some support, back them up a bit. and so sony still has a chance to make this right. but they re engaged now in what looks to be and sean penn, i want to bring you in. sony is engaged with a dialogue in the north koreans. they thanked them today by saying, thank you for doing what we told you to do. if you keep doing that, don t show this picture, then we won t cause you any more trouble, we won t release any more of the information from the hacking. it seems like they re almost in league now because they re being thanked for it, and told, if you re a good boy, we won t bother you anymore. it s an engagement of relations now, it seems. yeah, i think that sony has made themselves almost irrelevant in what s going to be a much, much bigger and more dangerous story. they might have been the trigger that participated in what was a mistake here. but, again, i think that if we don t take this on, on a united nations level, if it if we aren t waking up and recognizing that what happens once, and recognize that we just got hit by a truck and we can t tell ourselves that we have a mild headache and we can go home and go to bed, because you re going to wake up with blood in the brain. that s where we are on this cyber war issue. the declaration has been set. it s not even it s not sony. it s not even north korea. north korea is the size of mississippi. that can be handled by the mean spirited in a day. and it s also that which gets into the minds of a culture with a lot of disease in it. is there any way the creative community, the directors, writers, the actors, are able to leverage this? i mean, it s always dangerous in a tricky career to make demands be on, pay me and put me to work. but is there any way actors or writers could say, you re going to green light this movie, okay, when you green light it, it stays green and no dictator is going to stop it? do you think there s any chance, or is that too far a hope, that the creative communities will say, i m not making movies to be stopped by the bad guys? i think there will be discussions and there will be attempts to put lobbies together on that basis. but i think that the very first thing that those in hollywood or wisconsin can do is stand up as a country and stand up as a united country that this be taken in a serious way. well the me show you more of the president today. i thought it was a first-rate press conference. clarity, and good guys, bad guys, it wasn t the soft line he sometimes has taken before. here talking about north korea and the sony hacking. let s watch again the president today. i think it says something interesting about north korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie starring seth rogen and james flacco. i love seth, and i love james. but the notion that that was a threat to them, i think gives you some sense of the kind of regime we re talking about here. they caused a lot of damage. and we will respond. we will respond proportionally and in a place and time and manner that we choose. i wonder, when you make a movie, you ve made some really important films, and i was thinking, part of the decision to make a movie is that you want the bad guy to hear it. it isn t just a joke by seth rogen, a satire movie, but it wouldn t bother you a bit to know that the people being satirized hear it and it hurts them and humiliates them. what did you make of the president saying, it s a seth rogen movie, it s a bit over the top to begin with, that it would scare them? well, you know, i go back to, i think it was 1997 when martin scorsese s film came out on tibbett and the chinese were in negotiations with disney, who backed down tremendously on the release of that film as a result. and whether or not it s the president framing it as a marginalized threat based on the movie, it really goes deeper than all of that to me. i think that when eisner was interviewed and said disney was not in the human rights business, they were in the entertainment business, that he really missed the mark. we are all in the human rights business today, whether in our economy, or in our homes. and i do think that sony does have an opportunity now to do something heroic, but more importantly, i think that moscow and beijing and washington have something to do that s very important. because this is something that threatens all governments, all corporations. it calls into question, you know, where we divide our capitalism and our recognition of human rights, and i think it s a really, really big historic moment. and if it s not taken by the reins by some brave people, we ll be heading into a world that we never imagined. sean, thank you for coming on and for the great work you ve done, all the greatest performances, dead man walking, every one seemed like it dealt with an important issue and you were on the right side. thank you very much and thank you to david corn. coming up, president obama in his press conference, it was kind of a press conference, not the idiotic swagger of w. it was real, it was human. this is a changed president, a confident president. you can see it in the way he s talking and acting. if you watched it today, you may have noticed that the president made some history today. he called only on women reporters. didn t mention it. i noticed it halfway through. somebody called it to my attention when we were covering it live. more on that decision in a minute. and this is hardball, the place for politics. my baby drove up in a brand new cadillac. my baby drove up in a brand new cadillac. look here, daddy, i m never coming back. discover the new spirit of cadillac and the best offers of the season. lease this 2015 standard collection ats for around $329 a month. l today sony pictures released a statement that said the studio did not cave to the threats from the hackers. the studio says that when theater owners refused to run the movie, they had no choice but to pull it. we ll decide. the statement adds that the studio is surveying other platforms in which to release the film. i ll believe it when i see it. we ll be right back after this. thank you. ordering chinese food is a very predictable experience. i order b14. i get b14. no surprises. buying business internet, on the other hand, can be a roller coaster white knuckle thrill ride. you re promised one speed. but do you consistently get it? you do with comcast business. and often even more. it s reliable. just like kung pao fish. thank you, ping. reliably fast internet starts at $89.95 a month. comcast business. built for business. hello, everybody. we really got a full house today, huh? well, all i want for christmas is to take your questions. well, since the midterm we ve seen there again a self-confident forward-leaning president. and in today s final press conference of the year that he hopes will capture the year, he commanded the room, ticking off his accomplishments. here he is. all told, over a 57-month streak, our businesses have created nearly 11 million new jobs. america s now the number one producer of oil, the number one producer of natural gas. our rescue of the auto industry is officially over. we ve now repaid taxpayers every dime and more of what my administration committed. we ve created about half a million new jobs in the auto industry alone. about ten million americans have gained health insurance just this past year. we re leading the coalition to degrade and ultimately destroy isil. and in less than two weeks, after more than 13 years, our combat mission in afghanistan will be over. there he is talking about his successes. joining me now, washington bureau chief for usa today. and from national urban radio. we ll have you on to talk about your book, april, if you d like. april, you were there today, and i want to know what the reaction was from your male colleagues to the fact that not one i could be a male and say, why did you invite us if you weren t going to let us involve ourselves in the q & a process, mr. president? your thoughts and feelings. you know for one thing for sure, in this town, it s a white, male dominated town. i know for a fact. i just walked out of the white house and the press area. many of our male colleagues have been going into the press secretary very upset that they were not called on today. but let me say this to you. as a woman, as someone who s been covering the white house, it s nice. and someone who sits in the third row, not the first row or the second row, but the third row, it s nice to see a change of pace. and from some of the white house sources that i talked to tonight, apparently there was a plan not to go this is not the first time, but not to go to the networks. this is not the first time that this has happened. they said, okay, since we see we ve got a lot of women in the audience who are really good at what they do, let s call on the women. so he didn t call on you. yes he did call on me. you demanded chris, i raised my hand like a reporter s supposed to. why don t they have the old tradition of reporters waving their hands and the reporters get the attention of the president. i raised my hand. that started during the bush years, like a good reporter is supposed to. who else raised their hand besides you? i don t know. i didn t see behind me. anyway, good for you. and how would you describe the men s attitude? we were they whining or bitchy, the fact that they didn t get called on? let me tell you something, the cameras on the front row, they ll keep cool. but behind the scenes, they re not happy. phone calls are being made. but they ll be cool. you ll always see a cool demeanor, but they are not happy with it. what do you think of that, susan? i didn t even notice for the first six or seven, then somebody pointed it out and said, it s all women. and he s going to keep this up. and he went to the end and i think clearly they had a plan to do this. what s the point? a little mischief. why not? what s the purpose of this thing? what was the quality of the questions? i have to tell you sounded pretty good to me. i have to tell you, i didn t notice anything was going on. in fact, i wouldn t have noticed they were all women. so that s a great thing. let s talk about the president today. april, you cover him all the time, and susan. there s something different about the president. i wouldn t call it swagger, because i hate it. some presidents being like w. swagger sitting down, i don t know how they do it, but they do. the french word i like is alon, a quiet self-confidence in the president. he didn t have before this election. something liberated this guy. i don t know if it was liberation, but i think it was more so what he had to present to america, an optimism. because they got a shellacking in november. and he had to come out, everything is changing, i m optimistic, we are americans, we can fix problems. that s what he said to the end, we can fix things as americans. so i think he wanted to come out with an optimistic tone, looking forward to the positive. and one thing that i took away was when he said with the democrats and the republicans, the fight, he said, yeah, there are fighting, but there are things that we also agree on. so he s looking to the positive in 2015 in closing out 2014. how did you react to him talking about the quality in fact, let s watch him respond to you. okay. i actually think it s been a healthy conversation that we ve had. these are not new phenomenon. the fact that they re now surfacing, in part because people are able to film what have just been in the past stories passed on around a kitchen table, allows people to, you know, make their own assessments and eflgdss and you re not going to solve a problem if it s not being talked about. did you buy the fact that people and race relations? i saw his optimism and his hope. you have to remember, when you talk about race in this country, the president did get it right. this is centuries old. centuries. and it stems from slavery. went to jim crow and it s moved on. it s not just a legislative issue. it s a heart issue as well. i do think people want to see a better day, but are there still vestiges and residue of the past? oh, yes. as a reporter, i did like the fact that he did kind of change his answer. because i asked him six years ago this month, in the oval office about the state of black america, and he harkens to charles dickens talk about the the best of times and the worst of times, yeah. yeah. for african americans who have a good education, it s a good time. but for those who don t, it s unemployment and lack of opportunity. when he talked about black america, as well as all america is better in the aggregate since his administration, it was interesting to hear that versus six years ago this month in the oval office from my interview that i had with him. thanks so much. you know, one thing that struck me about his answer was how much different just cell phone technology makes. that picture, the video of eric garner makes all the difference in settling the he said/he said debate. it makes all the difference for people who might have denied what had happened there. there was no denying it. i don t know anybody that thought that was a proper decision. sometimes you have to have a trial before a jury before a thank you. i raised my hand, chris. by the way, i love the weather today. did you like the weather today? it was okay. see, you have to disagree with me. [ laughter ] i proved it now. every time i say something, this reporter has to find a different conclusion. anyway, it s style. thank you very much. coming up, a new biography of john f. kennedy jr reveals new details about the relationship with his mother jacqueline kennedy. the author joins us next to talk about a little bit of glamor here in politics. and this is hardball, the place for politics. i got it. now jump off the bridge. what? in 3.2.1. are you kidding me? go. right on time. right now, over 20,000 trains are running reliably. we call that predictable. thrillingly predictable. right now, you can get a single line with 3 gigs for $65 a month. 3 gigs . is that a lot? that s about.100 app downloads, 45 hours of streaming music, and 6 hours of video playing. (singing) and five golden rings! ha, i see what you did. (singing) four calling birds.three french hens. (the guys starts to fizzle out) two. turtle. doves. i really went for it there ya you did. you really, really did now get 3 gigs of data on one line for $65 a month. switch to at&t, buy a new smartphone and get $150 credit per line. intbladder leak protection.ant new always discreet underwear for sensitive bladders from always, the experts in feminine protection new always discreet underwear absorbs heavy bladder leaks faster than the leading brand, so you can feel comfortably dry. plus always discreet has a discreet fit that hugs your curves. you barely feel it. new always discreet underwear. now bladder leaks can feel like no big deal. because, hey, pee happens. get to the terminal across town. are all the green lights you? no. it s called grid iq. the 4:51 is leaving at 4:51. they cut the power. it ll fix itself. power s back on. quick thinking traffic lights and self correcting power grids make the world predictable. thrillingly predictable. worked for president kennedy in the white house. they had a great time. people loved politics. it was a positive thing. and that s been missing. yeah, i mean, i think it s like anything else. if, you know, the trick is catching people s attention. and the only thing that people see are a bunch of men fighting on television all the time, or negative commercials on television, or acerbic editorials, they ll turn their attention somewhere else. we wanted to bring some fun, some levity, but be serious-minded at the same time. christopher anderson joins us now. he s out with a masterful biography called the good son. thank you for joining us. i ask that question, what did we miss about the upbringing of john kennedy jr? first of all, i have to say, you look much better today than you did back then. [ laughter ] and i love all your books as well. look, what we didn t get right about jfk jr is that he was more bouvier than kennedy. that was a wonderful interview. you mentioned alon and president obama and a transformation that s taken place here and that is a quality that both jfk jr and his father had in spades, but i think more so in the case of jfk jr, because he was really a natural politician in many ways. his dad was a little reluctant with the kissing-babies thing. but john could connect with people. he was self-efacing and incredibly articulate. if you look at the pictures in the relationship with his mother, and the reason i wrote this book, that was a phenomenal relationship he had with jackie. they were each other s protector from the very beginning. did he ever think of becoming a european movie star? he looks like a european movie star. he looks french. there s the bouvier. you see pictures of his grandfather on his mother s side. he looks like that side of the family. he did want to act, as you may recall, and jackie pulled him back from the brink. she did say one of the most wonderful thing was seeing him act and she did on many occasions when he was at brown university and afterwards, but she thought there were great things ahead for him. her whole attitude was hands-on. she said if you bungled raising your children, nothing else in life matters. so she kept him away from people are going to go out and buy this book right now. it looks like candy for christmas. especially for those of us who grew up with the kennedys. the pictures in this book are enough. let me ask you about his possible running for politics. i talked to kennedy jr and said his numbers were very good. my question, john f kennedy jr, did he get polling done and see if he could beat hillary clinton? indeed there was a private poll, taken just before his tragic crash, his death. and he, by all accounts, his close friends said he intended to seek the seat of daniel patrick moynihan. he had gone to the new york chairwoman of the democratic party. he was intent on beginning his political career. ed koch told me, even if she tried, she couldn t have got that seat from kennedy. i think he was right. let s talk about the horrible ending. i read along the line that jacqueline kennedy was concerned about her beautiful son s interest in aviation and wanting to be a pilot someday. absolutely. and it s so unbelievable. it s a premonition from hell, but go ahead. she shared that with maurice templeton, the last significant relationship she had in her life. look at the kennedy track record. uncle joe died in a plane crash. his aunt kathleen teddy was almost killed. alexander o nasis, the son of john s stepfather was killed in a plane crash. so there s a long and terrifying list. that was the one thing that she worried about. it was only after that she passed away that he went ahead with his plans to get his license. and we see the tragic consequences. great book. the book is called the good son, about the attractive son of kennedy. you have a great son-in-law running a good part of this network. thank you, he s a great guy. sure is. up next, the big fight on the right between rand paul and marco rubio s regarding president obama s historic shift of policy on cuba. plus stephen colbert says farewell. what a show it was last night. all that straight ahead. you re watching hardball, a place for politics, where you hear the debate. and cialis for daily useor you. helps you be ready anytime the moment is right. cialis is also the only daily ed tablet approved to treat symptoms of bph, like needing to go frequently. tell your doctor about all your medical conditions and medicines, and ask if your heart is healthy enough for sex. do not take cialis if you take nitrates for chest pain, as it may cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. do not drink alcohol in excess. side effects may include headache, upset stomach, delayed backache or muscle ache. to avoid long 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coast, but it will be a wet one. a storm system is expected to bring rain from florida to maine along with high winds. the midwest will see snow and ice. and health officials say the flu is widespread in 29 states. the strain in most cases is not covered by this year s shot. back to hardball. at a minimum, i would say this, barack obama is the worst negotiator that we ve had as president since at least jimmy carter and maybe in the modern history of this country. i intend to use every tool at our disposal in the majority to unravel as many of these changes as possible. this is all one-sided. that s what happens when you send a speech writer to negotiate a deal with a dictator. i think it sends an awful awful that the u.s. under this president is no longer a reliable ally in the feet for freedom and democracy. you saw marco rubio, jockeying for position in a crowded republican field of possibilities, launching an assault on president obama s deal to restore relations with cuba. he has a fight on his hands with senator rand paul of sdk and things are getting personal. rand paul bucked rubio by declaring his support for president obama s goal to end the cuban embargo. i mean, if the goal was regime change, it sure doesn t seem to be working. and probably it punishes the people more than the regime, because the regime can blame the embargo for hardship. if there s open trade, i think the people will see what it s like to all of the things that we produce under capitalism. so in the end, i think probably opening up cuba is a good idea. here s rubio with his lesser abilities going back at paul on fox last night. like many people that have been opining, he has no idea what he s talking about. the embargo is not what s hurting the cuban people. it s the lack of freedom, and the lack of competent leaders. today, the senator unloaded on rubio, saying, i m a proponent of peace through commerce. i believe engaging cuba can lead to positive change. seems that rubio is acting like an isolationist who wants to retreat to our borders and build a moat. i reject this isolationism. it s a shot here against rubio. he was 7 years old during camp david when jimmy carter, the guy he said wasn t a good negotiator, brought together israel with his major strategic enemy, egypt, and forced a permanent peace treaty between the two of them. match that, marco. just do something like that in your lifetime. let s talk about this interesting fight on the right. we grew up with the idea, we all did, that the republican party was the hawkish party, anti-communist, anti-everything, anti-everybody, let s go to war. and now you see an interesting intra-mural battle where you see rubio carrying the traditional baggage of the hawks. but then you see rand paul, who s got to be the most spontaneous, and i have to say scrambling arguer i ve ever seen. he doesn t say in the pocket. he s scrambling like rg3. he s always got something. you know, it s an epic battle between conservatives and libertarians it s epic, but it s new? it s fairly fresh. it s been simmering for some time, but coming out before the 2016 cycle and rand paul is playing on that and he s also playing on the fact that this is marco rubio s token cuban kid moment. hey, i m cuban american, let me get some headlines here. so this is his way to come out and say really outrageous things, whether they be right or wrong, just so he can say, i m out in front of the beipack, because he knows rand paul is playing it effectively ahead of that cycle. one thing rand paul is doing, why he s taking obama s position on this. he s saying, we do need to change up our strategy on this. he knows there s young voters who want to vacation in cuba. they know the strategy is outdated. and the cuban american vote is about 50/50 now. it s a wash. so don t assume you have to move in the direction of the red hots. the issue of cuba is no longer a defining issue for republicans. 20 years ago, the republicans came down hard. a lot of them in the house in the senate now don t care about this one way or the other. it s ancient history. they re more concerned about domestic policy and spending. it s going to be much more difficult for marco rubio to try to push rand paul to the side than maybe five or ten years ago. how does the white house sum this strange bedfellows situation up? president obama said he will continue to press this on. he had a press conference this afternoon and said he was planning to do what he wanted to do despite congress s opposition, and this is obviously one of those things. but he d rather work with congress. but this is definitely something they ve come out for and they are full throttle to do what they want to do. here he is, he fired back on critics of the cuba deal. let s watch him. what i know deep in my bones is that if you ve done the same thing for 50 years and nothing s changed, you should try something different, if you want a different outcome. and this gives us an opportunity for a different outcome. through engagement, we have a better chance of bringing about change than we would have otherwise. change is going to come to cuba. it has to. they ve got an economy that doesn t work. that sounds so millennial. the old guys didn t get it right. we ll try something new. it s a reflection of the administration trying to pivot into this kind of a mode. i think it s going to be, people want to get everything they want on this deal. republicans may be able to force their hands on things like maybe opening an embassy how do you do that? how do you stop the president who has the right to declare diplomatic relations with another country? they ll go to go to congress to approve shipping money in the state department to open up the embassy. congress will say no. they ll need that. without that, that could have an impact on some of this. but it depends on how much having a physical embassy matters. is that the house and the senate? both. obama made this announcement a week after they pass a $1.3 trillion budget. so he has the seed funding to move forward with the staff it strikes me as a little pissent. to not let the guy name an ambassador. just seems so petty, kate. it s not like debating. it s saying you can t do what you have a right to do. it s like saying we re not going to pay for the white house meals anymore, or close down the electricity in the executive branch. just seems so small-minded to use your power that way. congress will do everything they can to stop it the way they think they can. i called the man who is down there already ambassador. so there may not be an ambassador there, but there s a presence there. it s going to be very difficult for them to really the fundamental change has already happened. we are now talking about having normalized relationships with cuba. it s a fundamental shift and there s not a lot republicans are going to be able to do other than the cuban americans, jose diaz-balart, that would be hard for the republicans to shoot that down, i would think. in many ways, there are things that have ticked down over the years. the president has, you know, loosened travel restrictions. there s a pretty robust u.s. presence there, where they route things through the swiss government. so there s a presence there. really quickly, the underreported political dynamic, russia is about to build a spy base and the cuban relationship with venezuela and with people like iran, north korea, it s a very clever move by the president. and it could continue in the wrong direction for a while. i don t want to deal with the communist government. i don t want to meet with these guys. i ll go with a travel agent. their time is up, by the way. the roundtable is staying with us. coming up, stephen colbert s big send-off last night. looked like a lot of fun. alan alda, george lucas what a crowd. we ll talk about the beautiful song they sang on the way out the door last night. this is hardball. thanks. 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(mandarin) cut it out. see you tomorrow. state of the union address will take place on january 20, that s the date that house speaker john boehner chose. we ll be right back after this. but i ve managed.e crohn s disease is tough, except that managing my symptoms was all i was doing. and when i finally told my doctor, he said humira is for adults like me who have tried other medications but still experience the symptoms of moderate to severe crohn s disease. and that in clinical studies, the majority of patients on humira saw significant symptom relief. and many achieved remission. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. ask your gastroenterologist about humira. with humira, remission is possible. when electricity is generated here s awith natural gasu: instead of today s most used source, how much are co2 emissions reduced? up to 30%? 45%? 60%? the answer is. up to 60% less. and that s a big reason why the u.s. is a world leader in reducing co2 emissions. take the energy quiz round 2. energy lives here. if this is your first time tuning into the colbert report, i have some terrible news. this, in fact s your last time tuning into the colbert report, until no, no, no. folks, until ten years from now, when they reboot it directed by j.j. abrams. we re back. it s officially the end of the era. stephen colbert signed off and the satirist did it in style, leading a massive course of celebrities at his sing-along. just like you always do tell the news keep the dark clouds far away we ll meet again we ll meet again. . some sunny day just like you always do till the blue skies dry the dark clouds far away so will you please say hello to the friends that i know tell them i won t be long they ll be happy to know that as you saw me go i was singing this song we ll meet again don t know when don t know where but i know we ll meet again some sunny day we re back with our great round table. charles and katie and john. did you realize what was going on is there? the last music from dr. strangelove when the bombs are dropping, and then henry kissinger while they re singing we ll meet again. what did you think? i was supposed to be there but i had a brother-in-law party last night. i m curious to see what happens when he goes will he be a new permit? well, he has to be. he can t be himself, though. but i want to see how much of the politics he s able to bring into late night sort of basic television. i think that that will be an interesting thing because he s done such a great job of helping along with jon stewart create this new brand on cable. and i noticed kimmel is getting better. isn t he? i don t know what the competition will be. i have a feeling he s a really nice guy when you meet him but he s a regular guy. i think he has to develop a hybrid of the guy he plays because chevy chase, as i said the other night, didn t work as chevy chase. he just disappeared because when he wasn t playing that character like jerry lewis played a character, the jerk, he called him. most guys play somebody. right, right. he made political news reporting more approachable, the whole game of politics more approachable. he represents that rat pack. let s watch more from colbert s sendoff last night. he reflected on some of his major accomplishments over the last nine years. zoe all those things they said i did, save olympics, the rally to restore sanity and/or for and/or cat stevens career. none of that, none of that was really me. you, the nation, did all of that. i just got paid for it. thanks. thanks. that was really cool of you guys. nice when good things happen to good guys. thank you. when we return, let me finish with president obama today and how things are going racially in this country. i m going to let the president speak for the president. you re watching hardball, the place for politics. thanks to angie s list, now it is. we ve made hiring anyone from a handyman to a dog walker as simple as a few clicks. buy their services directly at angieslist.com no more calling around. no more hassles. start shopping from a list of top-rated providers today. angie s list is revolutionizing local service again. visit angieslist.com today. .the getaway vehicle! for all the confidence you need. td ameritrade. you got this. were. the gap between income and wealth of white and black america persists. and we ve got more work to do on that front. i ve been consistent in saying that this is a legacy of a troubled racial past of jim crow and slavery. that s not an excuse for black folks. and i think the overall majority of black people understand it s not an excuse. they re working hard. they re out there hustling and trying to get an education, trying to send their kids to college. but they re starting behind oftentimes in the race. what s true for all americans is we should be willing to provide people a hand up. not a hand up but help folks get that good, early childhood