their theories. the big question, and i think, jeff, you said this, a reward would be pennies on the dollars. exactly. why isn t there a reward posted? a reward would be pennies on the dollar for what this search is costing. thanks for joining us. good evening. it s 11:00 on the east coast. 11:00 a.m. in malaysia. we begin with several pieces of information. item one, the search zone is focusing on the southwest coast of australia. item two, investigators tell us the path it took, the path caught on radar suggests the rout was preprogrammed to hit certain navigational points. item three, the fbi is examining data from the captain s home flight simulator. we have a lot to get to. first, because these developments have been stacking up day after day, i just want to take a moment tonight to try to get everyone back on the same page with what we know so far. it begins on the morning of the 8th, flight 370 takes off from kuala lumpur bound for beijing. the final stream from the acars data reporting system is received on the ground at 1:07. then at 1:19, the first officer utters first round, leaving malaysian air space, telling controllers, good night. two minutes later, the radar transponder cuts out or is turned off. thai military radar is following it and between 1:21 and 1:28 a.m. detects that left turn back toward the west and south. at 1:30 a.m., air traffic controllers lose contact with the plane. acars transmission does not happen. this what is believed to be flight 370 is tracked way off course. from there there s no solid information. we only know according to a satellite ping received at 8:11 in the morning, investigators say the jet turned north or south and flew into those two huge arcs of territory in open ocean. investigators now are focusing closer on that southern route. we ll talk to a u.s. navy commander involved in that. a major development, one that everyone hopes will bring badly needed answers. more now from kuala lumpur. [ speaking foreign language ] reporter: a mother s grief and frustration finally boiling over. relatives of the missing passengers today storming into a normally subdued briefing room, demanding answers. after about five chaotic minutes, she and others are dragged out by malaysian officials. the malaysian government says they regret the incident, but the reality is neither they nor anyone seems much closer to solving the mystery of what happened to flight 370. could a clue be found in the pilot s home flight simulator? malaysian authorities say data from the simulator was deleted on february 3rd, more than a month before the plane went missing. the fbi today saying it has sent a copy of the simulator s hard drive to its forensics lab in quantico, virginia, hoping to recover the deleted files. the malaysian authorities also disclosed a tantalizing detail. they have new radar information about the plane s path, provided by another country. what exactly it shows the malaysians aren t saying. meanwhile, operational crews are beginning to narrow their search, believing it s more likely the missing jet traveled along the southern corridor, away from the heavily pop populated asian continent. investigators say they re focusing on an area roughly the size of new mexico, about 1600 miles off their southwest coast, using what information they know about currents and the plane s possible last position to make an educated guess on just where it might be. we are going to talk to a u.s. navy commander in that region. kyung lah joins us. you were in the room with heart-breaking pleas from relatives of the missing passengers. are they feeling that same frustration, that sense of just kind of anger? reporter: that anger and anguish, yes. that s felt across all nationalities, all the families here. and while it is a mystery for the rest of the world, for them it s very much about the loss of human life. this mystery about what s happened to fathers, sons, mothers, daughters. but as far as what that other woman said, calling the malaysian government liars, we haven t heard that from the people who are malaysian citizens. because frankly we haven t had any access to them. as far as the chinese families, they absolutely feel that across the board, we re hearing it out of beijing and here. they don t believe the malaysian government has been transparent at all. they feel they have botched this investigation. the government for its part, anderson, saying that the best way that they can help these families is to simply find the plane. kyung, appreciate the reporting from kuala lumpur. later on in the program i m going to speak to the family of paul weeks who was on the plane and was on the way to a new job in mongolia. he s an engineer. he actually gave his wedding ring and watch to his wife in case something happened. i m going to talk to his brother and sister about that. i want to bring in evan perez breaking the navigation story for us tonight. some of this can get really technical, evan. just to start with explain exactly what a way-point is and what is significant about this information we re getting. think about your gps. you can enter longitude and latitude in your gps to try to direct you, navigate you to a particular place. now in the sky for pilots, they also have to include altitude. so essentially it s a place in the sky where a pilot can direct to direct an aircraft and the computer system on board the aircraft to take the aircraft. and so the navigational systems on the plane essentially uses these five digit codes to direct where to take the aircraft, anderson. so explain the breaking news on this tonight. what is new that we now know? well, one of the things that we ve been wondering is how the investigators know that the aircraft deviated from its course. we know there is some radar. but how can they know with certainty? we know that the investigators have discovered that the aircraft went to two specific way-points away from the course thought was scheduled to go towards beijing. so what they believe this indicates is that whoever was doing this, whoever moved the aircraft off its scheduled course, specifically was directing it to these particular way-points. again, away from its scheduled course. if it was being manually flown it probably would not have headed to these way-points, is that correct? that s the understanding the investigators are looking at. now when a pilot normally turns an aircraft using the yoke, they feel if somebody was manually turning the aircraft it wouldn t specifically go to these particular way-points. so they believe this indicates perhaps that someone with some skill, someone who had some knowledge, entered these way-points for the aircraft to go to these particular places. and then of course it disappears. it doesn t answer the final question that we all have which is who did this, why and where did the aircraft go after it disappeared, anderson. and when were these entered in. evan perez, appreciate it. this seems like evidence pointing towards human intervention. the question was it pilots doing their jobs or someone up to no good? with us former cia counterintelligence expert and others. i m confused by these way-points and what the significance of the idea of having these two way-points is. can you try to explain it? a way-point really is a definition of the route in the sky. that s something that somebody would enter in. absolutely. but two particular different ones? we keep going back to there were two particular way-points. i don t see where those way-points came into play on this. i see the airplane might have been directed toward them. as a matter of fact, i looked on an en route chart to try to find the way-points that allegedly they turned toward. i still contend that the way-point they were headed for was a diversionary airport and specifically entered in by the captain. that s conjecture. i may fall on my sword on that one. but i don t see where the acars machine could actually i know through our dispatch process where they would know exactly what was put into that machine. they just don t know. that s not information they utilize or is helpful to them specifically. and jeff, the fact that this pilot deleted information from his simulator, you can look at it with a nefarious interpretation of that or he s an organized guy. he s cleaning up his files. what do you make of it? we only have part of the information on that. in order to determine whether it was nefarious or not or benign we need to know the other part. that is were there other flights on that simulator that he didn t delete. so in other words, what s left on the hard drive of that simulator and what is absent on the hard drive of that simulator. if only selective routes have been taken out of it, only a portion of his experience on the simulator has been deleted, then that makes me raise my eyebrow and says i find it difficult to find a benign explanation for that. les? i understand your point, jeff. but the way i m looking at it is from the standpoint of maybe there was a flight that pilots are organized people. and they feel that maybe the hard drive is going to take too much room and they delete a particular flight. but on a humorous note it might have been a profile he might have been practicing for his recurrent training and just a profile because this is not the kind of thing you can really do. but he may have deleted it because he was embarrassed it didn t go well or something to that effect. it s open to interpretation. mary, you ve been involved with the fbi in these investigations. are there circumstances where they couldn t retrieve the data because now the fbi and quantico willing be looking at it? yes. in circumstances where they can t retrieve the data is in instances where someone has erased it and knows how to do it effectively. you don t just erase you overwrite it or destroy certain things. you have to not just erase it but take extra pains. that too might be very interesting to show how they have overwritten it or erased it or deleted certain things. when i was inspector general we worked aviation crimes with the fbi s aviation crimes unit. and we many times had to recover computer data. they were pretty good. so i would bet on the fbi. i think they will be able to get whatever was on there. i just have to believe they re going to be able to see what those files were. unless and i would be surprised to learn this unless this erasure was so good and competent it wasn t just erased but overwritten. how complex an operation is this? might it take weeks or months? i don t think so, anderson. you re talking about hours and days rather than weeks and months. they ve got a tremendous capability. but remember just as in this case we ve had countries who have been reluctant to share with us their radar information because it shows what their true capabilities are, the united states if they have information that tells us well no good will come of it, we can t help those missing by releasing this in such a way and show our capability, they may not do so. i would hope that they would err on the side of getting that information out there. but we too have to protect our capabilities. mary, you raise an interesting point. that even if they can t find what the information that s been overwritten, the mere fact that information was intentionally overwritten can be meaningful. it depends what the erasure is. i guess i have to confess this. all of us who have flight simulators, you want to land, try to see if you can land. most of us don t do it successfully. but you want to try to see if you can land at the weirdest places on earth. you want to see if you re really good. so just flying around the earth and seeing different places might not tell us much of anything. that s what you do with like a microsoft flight simulator. where they went, what was there, what wasn t there, what s missing, the pains taken to take it away, if anyone else was on the flight simulator. all those things. i m pretty confident if it s there to be gotten that the fbi will get it. they re just so good at it. jeff, the fbi is also we re told analyzing the copilot s computer. you see a number of sort of cumulative acts, operational acts. what do you mean by that? what i mean by that, anderson, is nothing significant in the crime or terrorism world happens without some planning, casing and the act itself if you re going to be successful. those are the operational acts that lead up to a major incident or terrorism crime. rehearsals on the flight simulator might be interesting to go back and see what other routes had this chap captain flown in the months and weeks prior to this particular incident. on the simulator you mean. or in real life. what other trips has he taken. why as a senior captain did he bid the airline people will know what i m speaking about that he bid this trip. was this a good trip for a captain with his seniority or was this kind of a dog of a trip but he bid it? that could raise questions about okay, there s not a good reason for him to take this trip. there must be something else afoot. mary, do you agree with that? yeah. but there s a really important point, too. he makes a great point. because just flying on the simulator we can all fly weird places on the simulator. but you would have had to have gone there to make the contacts. because what s the point of knowing how to land someplace if once you get there you can t do anything with yourself, with the plane, with the plot. so there has to be more than that on the computer. there has to be additional contacts. by the way, since it was the copilot who spoke last and whose voice sounds normal, what we also want to know is much more information about him and is this how he spoke to air traffic controllers? other people who fly with him need to provide a lot of information about him. he s the only one we know that s living and talking when the turn is made. again, though, mechanical anomalies is still very much at play for investigators. that s something we re going to look at tonight as well. jeff beaty, good to have you on. mary schiavo as well. les abend will stick around. two of his colleagues will join us. we ll run through all the evolving scenarios investigators are looking at now, including some you ve been tweeting us about. tweet us using #ac360. follow me @andersoncooper. next intensifying focus off australia. we re going to hear from a commander in the u.s. navy s seventh fleet which has planes and vessels in the area. later we ll dig deeper into the possibility of a fire on board and parallels to the crash of swiss air flight 15 years ago. what can we learn from that flight that might be applicable to this? we ll be right back. ameriprise asked people a simple question: in retirement, will you outlive your money? 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[ meows ] the internet of everything is changing everything. cisco. tomorrow starts here. or it s pittsville, brah. it s never too late to learn a foreign language! go and smell the roses! president obama weighed in today on the search for flight 370 and america s role in the search. listen. we have put every resource we have available at the disposal of the search process. there has been close cooperation with the malaysian government. and so not just ntsb but fbi. anybody who typically deals with anything related to our aviation system is available. and so our thoughts and prayers are with the families, but i want them to be assured that we consider this a top priority and we re going to keep on working. and chief among the hardest working people on the planet tonight members of the u.s. navy s seventh fleet in that southern search area off australia on the ocean and above it using aircraft that can detect almost anything. 26 countries involved. cooperation according to the commander is mostly good. though indonesia has refused to allow a number of search planes to go through the air space. commander marks joins us now. commander marks, i know you can t comment on reports about indonesia not allowing u.s. aircraft to fly over air space today. but i want to ask you on this southern route, to you is that the most hopeful? is that the most important area to search now? i think you just have to look at the areas that have been least searched. so we first covered the gulf of thailand. we completely saturated that. we moved to the andeman sea. we completely saturated that. flying from kuala lumpur, we penetrated deeply into the bay of bengal. that s from our side because the indians were flying over there, too. i think really it s simply a matter of this southern area has been searched the least. so we re out here and australia is out here. and at this point that s all you can do. you find the areas where you haven t looked, where there may have been information that came from satellites whether that s military or governmental or commercial, and you go to those. and so that s what we re doing. if you are able to find debris, does that automatically mean that you would be able to figure out where the plane went down if in fact the plane did go down in the water? would you be able to automatically figure out based on tides and time? great question. and the currents and the wind and the sea state plays such a huge factor. being so long from that initial flight takeoff, it s such a huge variable. so what we normally do in the u.s. navy, when we come upon this situation we immediately launch a helicopter and we establish a central point where we think the last known contact was. that s called a datum. so from this datum we calculate the currents and the winds. and that is why these search areas slowly expand. and so for what we usually do for a search and rescue you look at that first 72 hours. it can grow fairly big but within your helicopter range. well, now that is completely a different scenario. and the current and the winds and the set and drift on there play a huge factor. we can track that slightly we can drop a sonar buoy and get a kind of a gps position that tracks the environmentals, but it s such a long period of time it is certainly a huge factor. and really no one can say if a piece of debris started in one area where it is ten days later. this may be a dumb question, but are you still hopeful? are you losing hope? with each day that passes by this gets more and more difficult. you know, this what is we train for. and our pilots, our air crews, even our maintainers on the ground, our mission is to fly these planes and to search. and the way i think of it personally is, each of those people on that aircraft, they have families associated with them and friends. and i know they want closure no matter what happens. and i know if it were me and my family i d want the u.s. navy out here looking and that s what we re doing. commander marks, i m glad you re out there. thank you. you re welcome. thank you. incredibly difficult task right now. digging deeper, i want to bring in a veteran of these kinds of things, david gallo co-leader of the search for air france flight 447 also retired airline pilot ron brown. david, you heard the commander there saying they re searching off the coast of australia because they ve already basically thoroughly searched the northern part of the indian ocean. do you basically just keep on expanding out until they ve searched the entire area the plane could possibly have reached given the amount of fuel it had? anderson, we need to find some clue about where that aircraft is. we can t be mapping the entire indian ocean. and if that plane impacted the water, even came down gently there s going to be some clue. and the navy is well suited to be able to find those bits of that plane. i m hoping still with the families that it s sitting on land someplace. but this is the way to exclude the ocean. david, it s interesting though what the commander said which was that given the amount of time that has gone by, even if they find some debris on the water, that doesn t guarantee that they ll be able to pinpoint where the plane entered the water if in fact it did, correct? right. well, air france 447 it was five days. i thought that was a long time after the tragedy before the first wreckage was found. but it was two years, not continuously at sea but giving mobilizations and the like, two years before we found that aircraft on the bottom. so you re right. it s no guarantee. but you know what, there s some very talented modelers out there that can look at wind currents with models and then backtrack that information to try to find the location. and even if it s not exactly right or if there s a lot of error in it it cuts down the search area. could cut it down dramatically. it s important stuff. ron i ve been getting a lot of questions on twitter about this new search area. maria asks, how busy is the flight path? did the plane have enough fuel to get that far? as far as we know it had enough fuel. hello, we have breaking news now on the search for malaysia airlines flight 370. the australian broadcasting corporation is reporting that authorities may have found objects related to the missing plane, and they are citing the prime minister tony abbott. australia has been leading the search in the far southern reaches of the plane s possible path. we re also hearing that the prime minister may in fact address parliament say thing is new and credible information. it s come to light from satellite imagery. two possible objects related to the search have been dent tide. they have deployed an aircraft to inspect these objects. three more aircraft will follow. once those extra aircraft arrive, they will conduct an extensive search. we re being told that the task of locating these objects is extremely difficult right now. australia s search operations centered in the city of perth. andrew stevens joins us from there now live. andrew, what are the details that you have on what they may or may not have found. my mistake, we do not have andrew. but he has been covering this. what we have been hearing over the last few hours is that this search area has dramatically narrowed from an area of almost 3 million square miles, now down to an area about the size of the state of colorado, about 110,000 square miles. still, a massive area, but we know that the focus has been on the southern arc, right at the extreme end of that southern arc off the coast of western australia. and apparently the officials managed to narrow down the scope of the search area, because they yielded a lot more information from the satellite pings, which the plane had been giving off every hour for about seven our eight hours or so. so what we know right now is that we re hearing from australian authorities that there is possible debris related to this plane. 13 days now or 12 days now they have been searching for this missing flight. and now we have what could be credible evidence of debris floating in the water. of course, there are still many unanswered questions, what is that debris, how far has it floated. richard quest is standing by in new york with more on this. and so richard, could this be the break that everyone has been waiting for? oh, absolutely. you have to put it in terms that it s unlikely that the australian prime minister would be holding a news conference if there wasn t a high degree no one is going to say, and i suspect he s not going to come out and specifically say because there would have they have have to retrieve the debris and ensure that there is a very high degree of certainty about it, but bearing in mind the aus t l australians in the last 48 hours took over the searching down in the south china sea sorry, the south indian ocean. enormous number of assets have been deployed, including the uss kidd which sent its planes to the western coast of australia for that very purpose, john. they said it would be easier for long-range search to search out of perth rather than being stuck on a ship in the middle of the ocean. so it s fascinating tonight that the australian prime minister is going to make this press statement, floating debris believed to be potentially from malaysian airlines flight 370. we have had this sort of news before, just a week ago with the chinese photographs, the satellite photographs. but i m supposing that there must be a fair degree of certainty or at least confidence in what they re finding. we understand that prime minister tony abbott of australia has spoken to his malaysian counterpart about this news which we are now getting to us here at cnn. that two possible objects have been found. richard, sorry to interrupt, but this does not mean that this is where the plane went down because this debris could have floated quite a distance. in the number of days since the incident happened, absolutely. but one thing i do know is that the oceanographers will not only have done the models of where debris would have floated but they would have gone further and written specific models for this area. so they will now be thinking the, we know the time, we know the water temperature, we know the winds, we know the prevailing weather during the last week. they will be factoring that in, the oceanographers, and they are extremely experienced at being able to take that information and work out roughly where the debris will be. now how far, if you re asking me how far could that debris have moved over the last ten days, i don t know. but if you look at the map that we re seeing at the moment and you interpret where the route of the aircraft was, and what could have happened in the last 10, 12 days, then you start to see why the australians believe that there is a strong level of confidence. and on one other point, in the last days or so, more and more people have come to the conclusion that it is the south china sorry, the south indian ocean, i beg your pardon, the south indian ocean which was the more realistic of the two paths, not the northern path or western path up towards india and kazakhstan. richard, what we are hearing is that the debris was detected by satellite imagery. a very similar situation to what we had with the chinese satellites about a week or so ago, detecting that debris off the coast of vietnam. that turned out to be a false start. but a lot of people were talking back then this was very large debris to be spotted by a satellite. so i know we re speculating here, but is that going to be a similar situation now, that this will be large pieces of debris because it has been seen by a satellite. the problem with the chinese pictures, almost from the moment there were many of us, myself included, that hoped it was correct. but quite quickly, experts on the 777 said because the chinese last friday the chinese put out a statement which they actually said how big the pieces of debris were. they said they were 70 x 70. quickly, experts of the 777 said there is no single piece of the aircraft that measures those dimensions. so that hugely assisted them in discounting that relatively quickly. i m assuming whoever s satellite they have used in this situation, they ve done exactly the same process. they ve locked up the debris. they measured it with a high degree of certainty. we have had debris from the moment this incident happened. we had a table drum richard, sorry if i may interrupt. we have andrew teastevens on th line now. he s covering this story for us from perth where the search on the australian end has been based from, perth is the state capital of western australia. andrew, very early stages but it is coming from the prime minister s office. they are deploying assets to try and inspect this debris from flight 370. what else can you tell us? that s right, john. at this point we have to be very cautious. what we can tell you is that the australian state-owned media operation here is saying that tony abbott, the australian prime minister is telling the house that two pieces of debris have been spotted in the southern indian ocean. he says that they could possibly be related to mh-370. certainly at this stage, not saying definitely. a plane has been diverted from its earlier search area to the destination where this debris is believed to be floating. that is due to be on the scene around about now, john. and we understand another three aircraft have already been dispatched to that same area. at the moment, what we can see is tony abbott is being reported by the australian broadcasting corporation, those two pieces of objects have been found, and the possibility is that they are from mh-370. andrew, we ve had this situation over the last 24 hours or so that there s been this new radar information coming from the pings which were given off hourly by flight 370 and with that satellite information they have managed to narrow down this search area. so describe the area that they have been looking at, which is where it appears that these objects are. yes, that s right. i mean, it has been narrowed down significantly, given the fact that the malaysians only 24 hours ago saying they are putting equal emphasis on the northern and southern corridors, which is a combined area, roughly the size of the australian land mass. the southern corridor, they have narrowed their search down to that. so within that, there is a zone of 300,000, which they are focusing on at the moment, john. we don t know why specifically they are focusing on this area. it is being reported that they have satellite intelligence from the u.s. and also from australian satellite sources, as well. obviously, satellites and radar is an important instrument. [ indiscernible ] more so there is a satellite surveillance facility in the center of australia, which is jointly operated but effectively run by the americans. we don t know what satellite information is coming from there. certainly it s been established from our u.s. sources the southern corridor has been a more likely search target based as well on the simple process of elimination, given that the northern corridor where it consists of at least 11 countries, some of which have very significant radar and technology, such as china, nothing has been seen or reported certainly from the northern corridor. so the u.s. has been deploying assets along the southern corridor and helping australia with the search. andrew, stand by. for anybody just joining us, this is the breaking new. the australian broadcasting news is quoting that the prime minister is saying two possible objects related to the search for flight 370 have been identified by satellite in the southern indian ocean and right now a royal australian air force plane is heading to excuse me is heading to that area to try and find establish exactly what this debris may be. other planes are heading there, as well. we know that the meshes are there, new zealand also has planes and assets in the region. but it is the australians who are taking the lead in all of this. i would like to go back to richard quest right now. richard, we had a very similar situation to this about a week or so ago. we were just talking about it just a short moment ago when they did find debris on the satellite image by the chinese. turned out to be nothing. this seems a lot more substantive. okay, do we have richard? okay. i m sorry, richard has gone to work the phones to try to find out more about what we re dealing with. we still have andrew stevens on the line with us right now. okay, one moment, please. so andrew, we were talking about this area. we re also looking at a situation that this is a very remote part of the world and it s also a very deep ocean. so if there is debris on the surface, there s the possibility there could be a lot of debris below the service with a lot of challenges trying to get there. absolutely, and also we need to take into account the currents and tidals, so any debris that s on the surface will have moved significant distances, perhaps hundreds of kilometers from the zone where that debris may have been found. so a lot facing the searchers, again the fact that some places in the indian ocean is 7,000 meters deep and the average depths is around 4,000 meters. so there is enormous problems and challenges still facing the searches. it s also key to note that the devices which are triggered when a plane crashes into the sea, will send out distress signals for about one month. so we re about halfway into that one month. so there is a time limit on locating this aircraft. [ indiscernible ] so huge amounts of challenges for the search parties, but we can t rule out how significant this latest news is, because we have gone from an area of 2.2 million square kilometers down to what could be a significant sighting in the southern ocean. resources are now being focused in the southern ocean, in this area of the southern ocean. so just to recap, we do know that an orion aircraft is expected to be on the scene where the satellite images picked up two pieces of debris. we don t know with any degree of certainty if they are related to the plane, but an orion is due there about now. it is 11:45 in the morning here in perth and three more planes dispatched. so we should get some better understanding of exactly what is there. we have andrew stevens on the line with us in perth. we have richard quest on the line in new york. i would like both of you to stay with us. we do have i would like to read that statement once more in case you are joining us that we have from the australian prime minister. this is what he told parliament a short time ago. new and credible information has come to light for the search of flight 370 in the southern india ocean. information based on satellite imagery of two possible objects related to the search have been identified. a royal australian aircraft has been diverted to inspect the object and due to arrive about now. the statement reads, three more aircraft will also follow and conduct a more expensive search. the task of locating these objects is extremely difficult. the prime minister has spoken to his malaysian counterpart. that is what we re being told. the prime minister has said to the house just a short time ago in the australian capital. richard quest is on the line with us right now. we know, richard, there are a lot of assets in this region, including the most advanced sub hunter that the americans have, the p-8. no doubt that will be deployed in some manner to look at this debris? oh, absolutely. they will be sending everything they ve got and a great deal more over to find this. the fact that the prime minister now, look, john, you re much more of a student of australian politics than i am. but the fact that the pm chose to make a statement in the house, new and credible information is the phrase he uses. not just we found some debris, but credible information. based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search. and listen to this, following specialist analysis of this imagery, two possible objects have been identified. now, i m guessing the phraseology there was, he doesn t say we found two objects and we re looking to identify them. he says the objects have been identified. so i m starting to come to the conclusion that the prime minister wouldn t make such a statement to the house if he didn t have a very strong view that this was not only credible, but had been interpreted and accepted. okay. so we re now at the stage where after 12 days of what has been a very frustrating search, possibly the biggest search ever for a missing civilian for a missing airliner. we now are at the position where the australian aircraft is over the area where two objects have been identified and we are awaiting official word. it is pretty much my understanding, that that plane is there and that it is due to arrive back in australia, on australian soil in about four hours from now. no doubt if there is any information to come from, this it will be radioed back. so we should find out exactly what may or may not have taken place or been found rather in that search. but at this stage, as you said, richard, this is looking to be by far the most promising lead that we have had since this began. and it is also a reflection, i think, as andrew stevens was just reporting from perth a moment ago, of the number of assets being deployed. when the royal australian air force were given the job of searching the south indian ocean, they took at it with gusto in the sense they were very honest about it. they made it quite clear that this was a huge task. adding to australia s own very sophisticated ability, remember, it was the australian air investigation that investigated the engine explosion out of singapore. they have enormous experience in their own right doing searches. you know this better than i will, john. as a maritime nation, as an island, albeit a continent, australian has exceptionally good maritime searching abilities. so what the prime minister says, look, i can t say it is and i can t say it isn t. but having done this long enough, you get a feeling of what might be happening and the pm speaking to the house in that way is very strong, credible evidence. absolutely. richard, stand by for us. i would like to go back to andrew stevens. andrew, it was just yesterday that the australians were saying that this search of this area could take up to weeks and now they have narrowed it down to what could be a matter of hours. in fact, we are expecting some kind of statement from prime minister tony abbott maybe in about 25 minutes from now. i think the key here is the information and where it s coming from. this is satellite information, so the physical search in the absence of any specific information about pin pointing areas by satellite, which have taken several weeks, even though it has been significantly refined as we now know, it still would have been several weeks to comb that area. now, though, satellite information, we don t know where that s come from, but it is very sophisticated satellite operations, operated jointly by the australians and the u.s. in central australia. so the information obviously coming from satellites, that allows them to pinpoint this area and as richard said, given the number of false starts here and the fact that the malaysian government has taken so much criticism, tony abbott is going to be very hesitant to say anything that he may have to backtrack on. so at this stage, what he s telling the house is very significant. remember that there are currents, we are 13 days into the search. so whatever debris seen there, it will have moved considerable distances from a crash site. so there s still a lot of work to do. we just need to underline we don t know whether this debris is linked. it was a false start with the chinese last week, which turned out to be nothing. s okay. if you are just joining us, the news is now coming from the australian prime minister that significant objects have been identified in the southern indian ocean. he released this information just a short time ago to the australian parliament. this is what he said. the australian maritime safety authority has received information based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search. following specialist analysis of this satellite imagery, two possible objects related to the search have been identified. we must keep this in mind, the task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult, and it may turn out that they are not related to the search for flight mh-370. nevertheless, i did want to update the house on this potentially important development. okay, that was the australian prime minister tony abbott addressing the lower house of the house of parliament just a short time ago. richard, what was notable there, and understandable is that word of caution coming from tony abbott that this may not actually turn out to be anything, but it seems at this stage that it might just be. indeed. tony abbott, now we heard a little bit more. he has given a caveat to it, that it might not be 370. so he s i don t use the word, i would never say this about a prime minister, that he s hedging his bets, but the fact that he made the statement, he didn t have to make a statement, john. he could have just simply put out a press release. the royal australian air force could have put out a statement. the maritime search authority could have just put out a statement. he says it s credible. he says it s confirmed or satellite has confirmed the objects. i m guessing and assuming having looked at this for some time that they have very they have got a very realistic view that this is what they ve been searching for. let us be clear, it would be a blessing that they have found something in the south indian ocean. but this would really just be the beginning of the next part of the whole process. so in other words, we find more debris, work out the back workout where the debris may have come from using currents and temperatures and slowly start to see if you can find the bigger debris field. what we know, john, is the debris field, and there s always something on a plane that floats. the life rafts, the seat cushions. part of the wing, part of the tail. the moment they find a sizable debris field, and there should still be something there, they are very much closer to finding the aircraft itself. and let s just look at some of the politics of how this played out. this is cnn breaking news. i m don lemon in new york. and the breaking news is that new information is coming from australia being reported by the australian broadcasting company that two objects possibly belonging to that missing flight 370, two objects have been found off the coast of australia. david suchi, who is a former faa safety investigator, this appears to be a significant development, the most significant development we ve had so far. very much so, don. the report says, credible information. how long has it been since we heard that? this is verbatim, the prime minister of australia says, new and credible information has come to light in relation to the search for malaysia airlines flight mh-370 in the southern indian ocean. the australian maritime safety authority has received information based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search. following specialist analysis of the satellite imagery, two possible objects related to the search have been identified. i can inform the house that a royal australian air force orion has been diverted to attempt to locate the objects. this orion is expected to arrive in the area about this time. three more aircraft will follow this orion. they are tasked for more intensive followup search. we re also hearing there will be a press conference coming from sho shortly. the information is coming from the prime minister. it is almost midnight here in the united states eastern time, and it s almost noon in perth, australia. i want to go now to mary schiavo. she is standing by now. again, this is a very significant development. i don t think australia would be doing this if they didn t think there was some importance to this, mary. oh, i agree. i am sure they realize how important, even if this is the wreckage, even if it s the very first piece, the clue also tumble forth, was there a fire, an explosion, do they have the pitting p pitting patterns. the evidence can finally start, and most important they can take where the pieces are, reverse the current track, find out where the currents have led over the past 12 days, and then start in earnest the search for the block boxes. australia now saying that they believe they have found two objects that are significant here that may be related to the missing malaysian airline mh-370. that plane vanished on march 8. it s been missing now for 13 days without a clue. they found two objects in the southern indian ocean. a p-3 ship has been directed to this new destination and three other aircraft are being dispatched, as well. again, it is almost midnight here in the u.s. eastern time and noon in perth, australia, where this is very close. m let s go to cnn s richard quest. australia released information saying they were going to expand their search off their coast and now we re finding this. let s remember what the prime minister of australia said in the house of parliament. he said the australian maritime safety authority has received satellite imagery of objects. now, listen to this. he says he calls this credible, tony abbott says it s credible, and he says, two possible objects have been identified? does he have stronger evidence that they are from 370? we know now that aircraft are heading over in that direction. the pm has warned that retrieving those objects will not be easy. but this, don, is you don t get a prime minister standing up in the house of commons or the houses of parliament in australia and using words like that. he caveated it by saying it may not be anything, but this is the best we ve had so far, don. this is the strongest lead. and richard quest, we want to hear from the prime minister just a short time ago. listen. the australian maritime safety authority has received information based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search. following specialist analysis of this satellite imagery, two possible objects related to the search have been identified. that s the australian prime minister speaking there at the house of representatives just a short time ago. richard quest, stand by. mary schiavo, stand by. everyone stand by.
solidify women where they are which is not in his favor. saying about this recording, this was locker room bander and a private conversation that took place many years ago. bill clinton said far worse to me on the golf course. not even close. i apologize if anyone was offended. that will do it for this hour. next we will pick up continuing coverage of hurricane matthew. welcome to our continuing breaking coverage of hurricane matthew. the sterm up the southeast coast after leaving severe damage across the caribbean. there are two confirmed deaths in florida. winds are at 110 miles per hour. as strong as you get for a category two storm. moving to the north and we will bring you over here and this is a brand-new path. the areas around savannah. if you are in the brunswick area or charleston to georgetown, you are staring at this saying this is going to be a close call. it s not a major hurricane, but even a category two with a wind of 90 to 110 miles per hour. that s what we saw during the day. the storms on the track northward by 2:00 a.m. at the closest point from savannah, georgia. we don t know if they will go through the western eyewall. if it does, you will have significant power outages and problems in the area. we will get the storm surging into the area and that will be bad in the bruniswick area. it will be worse this afternoon into this evening all the way through the coastline of georgia and through there into south carolina. if we had to pick a location with the best chance of getting landfall and maybe right in the area of charleston and the storm goes off the coastline of north carolina and saturday night, the outer banks is mostly okay, but heavy rain. i want to bring you to the other computer. the big issue is the potential for the storm surge. this happened and almost over with, but this is the area of greatest concern from hilton head to savannah down to brunswick. they could be close to ten feet of storm surge that will be life-threatening over six to 12 hours. thank you very much. while there is plenty of good news and not in the clear and for more we turn to reporters on the ground. in jacksonville as well as savannah, go ahead. what are you seeing? hey there and good afternoon. steady rain all afternoon and pounding the area in the downtown area. we have seen storm surge only about two or three feet. more serious to the east at jacksonville beach. as we have been seeing over the last few hours, a lot of storm surge and pounding the coastline over there as well as the saint august seen area. tens of thousands of people without power and the mayor of jacksonville had evacuated nearly half a million people in this city. thankfully they said since the storm tracked east, they tamped down expectations and were able to say they were expecting less wind and said they went as planned. we have been seeing steady rain and trees we see toppled at the debris. people are told to hunker down for the next few hours. the story today in the area from jacksonville beach is storm surge. we are seeing the heavy rain pounding the city. unlike anything the city has seen in a while. thank you. in georgia, go ahead. i can you that the rain just is increasing in intensity. just as you heard from florida, we have similar conditions here. steady rain and it comes in these bands and sideways. it s heavy at times and then it abates and it s heavy gain. this is the savannah river and part of what people worry about. when the storm is at high tigde all of this water will surge up and get the high tide and heavy rain and that makes for a perfect storm that will flood into the downtown area of savannah. he has always told the first responders to leave the area. they told people if they find themselves shelter and call 911, evacuations with the wind speeds and the storm surge. and some folks decided not to listen to the evacuation order and that s behind this now. my biggest sees that we can t be clear appears to be leading out. we need to get in and make sure people are getting out. it s the most important thing and we can rebuild damage in homes as painful as that will be, but lives are number one. what day of the week do you think it will bring back normalcy to your community? i know residents that evacuated will be anxious to get back in. with public safety being the pop concern, we will pursue tomorrow with the safety issues and get people back in their home. huge part of who we are. we want to make sure visitors are comfortable and we have a lot of work ahead of us and our primary concern is the safety of the people who are here and making sure it s safe for people to have a return. we have turned off the water system and we have a lot of work to do and understanding that will have a lot better idea. what are people drinking in the water is off? and people know what the checklist is. bottled water was flying out of the stores and if they have gas and they can boil water and if they chose to stay, they can do that. we will be there to help. and finish your thought and time for you. thanks for spending time with us. we will continue to have updates on the progress throughout this hour a& politic and if you the potential bombshell that dropped on donald trump s head. it is related to him and something he said in his own words. you want to hear it for yourself. a battle ground map with both preparing for the debate. all eyes on that sunday debate. donald trump said it s his last chance to hold on to very skeptical republicans in washington. that story is straight ahead. i m terrible at golf. he is. but i d like to keep being terrible at golf for as long as i can. new patented ensure enlive has hmb plus 20 grams of protein to help rebuild muscle. for the strength and energy to do what you love. new ensure enlive. direction. two shy of 270. if you fill in the states that are likely orleaning in the red, that brings trump to about 190 that means he would have to sweep every other toss upstate to win. that s not a hospitable environment for the path. if he lost any of the state, clinton wins. there is no room for error for team trump as he takes the debate stage. that looks like it got a lot more perilous after the bombshell audio on trump. we will show you and play it for you straight ahead. blan bill clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course. not even close. i apologize if anyone was offended. this is horrific. wie cannot allow this man to become president. i will bring in our panel with former white house director. vice president from the new york times. sarah, your thoughts. i don t know what to say beyond who knew furniture shopping was such a romantic gesture. there is no defending it. it is horrific. daniela. she is right. it s horrific and you department even play which is i think is the worst part. he talks about assaulting people which is okay because he s famous. wbr-id= wbr13124 /> it is not surprising given everything we know about donald trump. we will repeat the warnings the other things he said about women and other people. is this a person you want to sit in the oval office and be a role model forever your children and your family? it boggles my mind that people are undecided about this. i will ask you as part of the journalistic and political questions, does this do the things we just said by it criticized by a republican and analyst, do they reveal something else? about women or anyone else. it s just a total breech of the usual wbr-id= wbr14233 /> encasement of politics. even with donald trump we haven t earned anything like this in the rally or speech. would you want this guy in a room with your daughter or sending someone into the white house to work for president? i want to ask you. this is accurate that we haven t seen this audio about a candidate, but there are trump supporters and historians argue that there are other presidents, nixon and lbj come to mind who had recording devices in the white house who had very objectionable things on tape said about different groups of people and about women and about jews and about african-americans. sure. a range of horrors. i don t know how much politically that would help donald trump because lbj said a democrat said terrible things. i don t know who is defending that. what would you say to the argument and statement i said earlier? he said look, you take anyone s private locker room bander, you can find something objectionable. that may be true, but it doesn t make the fact that he said these things okay. of course timing is everything in politics. you are approaching the next debate. this is something a voter is going to ask him about and you have to address it on sunday night. the timing of this could not be worse for donald trump. the bigger issue here is donald trump said many things in the campaign that offended people. in that regard this is not new and i don t know that there is a wide group of voters that ultimately changes their views because of it. they suggested that. i do think that the challenge for that group of undecided voters and those people that he needs to move the hillary supporters and he needs to move off of her candidacy on to his, this becomes more of a window into the soul than any one offensive comment. i think it is just another problematic thing and he is now on defense again one more day that he needs to be talking about hillary clinton s e-mail problems or the clinton foundation challenges and where the world stands from a foreign policy perspective and her role in this. we are talking about something that is not befitting of a presidential campaign. or of anything. he has to change minds. he can t become president if he doesn t change minds. it is impossible that this will push him in the direction of winning more votes and not less. that s exactly right. his challenge may not move supporters off of him. i m sure it won t, but he doesn t have enough supporters to win the presidency. he needs to do everything he can to move independents and people who are not decided to him. these comments are not going to help and i m very curious to see how this will come into play during the debate on sunday. you mentioned that conservative reaction and potential supporters. a long time critic of trump with him over the red state conference and their dealings has a direct appeal with insighting the remarks that he never felt he asked for forgiveness on anything. he claims he never needed to ask for giveness for knowingly trying to sleep with a married woman. that s a part of this that can you get lost amid the objectionable language and the story line here. that s him seeming to brag or take a positive association from the story which is that he was pursuing this woman he viewed to be married. how would you approach that? evangelical camp is split. with folks like eric erickson who has been strong for most of the campaign. not all of it, but he is strong against trump because of the way he conducted himself. there are others that tell all of this believing that hillary clinton is so bad for america that even an imperfect donald trump means the potential for a supreme court and the conservative philosophy and they are willing to take that risk. both sides are dug in. it s going to be interesting to see if some of the evangelicals come off that. i don t think they will. what donald trump needed to do and needs to do after this assuming it s true is to come out and more forcefully apologize and say look, this is unbecoming of a president. you cannot talk about people like this. i think that would help him with a lot of people who understand that everyone has things in their past they are not proud of and things they said they are not proud of. he is basically apologizing for this, although i think it needs to be stronger. it may dove tail with what daniela is saying about the way that the culture deals with language about women and hostility towards women for being women. when barack obama was in jeremiah wright s church, days of demands and hoe had to give an entire speech about it. here you have a brief apology from donald trump and are these comments that merit a deeper reckoning from a candidate? thank you all for being with me. we will talk about the shut down and pitfalls for both candidates and as we have had the latest coverage from the ground in florida and georgia tracking matthew. stay with us. looking sharp, len. who s the lucky lady? i m going to the bank, to discuss a mortgage. ugh, see, you need a loan, you put on a suit, you go crawling to the bank. this is how i dress to get a mortgage. i just go to lenngtree. i calculate how much he i can afford. i get multiple offers to compare side by side. and the best part is. the nks come crawling to me. everything you need to get a better mortgage. clothing optional. lendingtre when banksompete, you win. ok! .awkward i ve got a nice long life ahead. big plans. so when i found out medicare doesn t pay all my medical expenses, i looked at my options. then i got a medicare supplement insurance plan. 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[ sirens blearing ] i wod bomb the [ beepout of them. i wbr-id= wbr21230 /> want to be unpredictable. i love war. the thought donald trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death. it should scareveryone. i m hillary inton and i approve this messa. damage in different jurisdictions. one of many partials giving briefings as people take them and i m going to turn to miami as we head to the national hurricane center. today they came up along the east coast and the sensor has been offshore about it looks like it the pass to savannah and charleston. it likes like savannah is at great risk. category four is very rare and it seems to be moving at its own pace. and it might be up the coast. it has been moving at 10 miles per hour and that s close to normal. this is not unusual. the good news and bad news when it s moving slowly with more time to prepare, it lingers longer. author for the storm surge and that s a big concern this time. thank you very much. we will turn now to jacob in jacksonville, florida. all day long, it has been raining consistently and raining enough that they are standing with the water like this one are popping up around the city. this by far is not the most dangerous thing around the storm. we saw the massive storm surge about 23 miles from here. and up and down the coast and up and down the middle, that s creating dangerous conditions for low-lying areas. as windy as it has been. and far away from the coast and they have to look for not only rain and wind, but the beach and the river. thank you very much. now we turn by phone to savannah looks like the place where the hurricanes can come closest and what is your view and how is it going? we had great results for people who left town. we had 75% participation and we feel good with the numbers and we are trying to make sure about the ones that are here understand we need to hunker down and get a grip and find the safest place with you can. we stopped all emergency calls because of the weather and we will wait until the storm passes between the times that are 6:00 in the morning. we have the surge based on like you were talking earlier. we are concerned because of that. that s on the earlier side and we are not sure about the surge. they moved them out of the lower areas and hopefully we will be able to take care of them tonight. you are advising them to hit hardest around 6:00 in the morning on saturday? we are looking at more of the 2:00 time. that s the same time our eyes are working in the same time period. the roughest will be from 2:00 to 4:00 and tropical stuff from 10:00 to 6:00. that s what we are an tis waiting. we have seen a lot of coordination from the local and state and federal and we saw marco rubio teaking and are you getting everything you need from the state and local authorities at this time? i have never seen a group of people cork from the emergency homeland security. every one worked to make it as easy as possible. it s something to be proud of if you are a sides. you have people in places that can do that job. it has been great. a lot of resolve. that s good to hear. thanks for joining us on a busy day. glad to be here sir. thank you for your time. we will continue to update throughout the evening and income up back to 2016 with interesting political developments. stay tuned. he has a sharp wit, a nng smile, we have been following this for a while. they publicly blamed russia for the election-related hackings that occurred here in the united states. they are confident russia is behind the hacks that include breeches from the democratic campaign committee. they said the steps and disclosures intended to interfere with the u.s. election process and we believe based on the scope and sensitivity of the efforts that only russia s senior most officials could have authorized the activities. they believe the system is essentially to decentralize them and suffer from disruptions in hacking that could affect the election in november. they came at about the same time that president obama stopped by his holding place in downtown chicago to cakaftan early vote. we ll be right back with how the presidential candidates are and may not be preparing for the crucial second debate this weekend. or put them on a rack. but the specialists at ford like to show off their strengths: 13 name brands. all backed by our low price tire guarantee. yeah, we re strong when it comes to tires. right now during the big tire event, get a $140 rebate by mail on four select tires. i had a problem with the mike. we had a guy oscillating my mike. i went there a little bit before and i said the mike is so great. unfortunately when i went to talk, they turned the mike up and down and you saw it. everybody in the room saw it. we had a real problem. he is still talking about the mike from the last debate. donald trump there last night and that is new sound in case it sounds like old sound suggesting it was sabotaged by microphone oscillation. just purr porting what he said. the practice may not be going to play. the story out today saying trump continues to push back against the notion of traditional preparation. trump resisted suggestions from advisers to practice exhaustively for the skds debate. he flat out refused to participate in mock sessions saying play acting was annoying. on the stakes for the trump campaign on sunday night are massive right now. there are republicans who are basically signaling they are looking at an off-ramp. the battleground map tilting towards clinton and so are the national and state polls and the new york times reported just this week that gop operatives telegraphing, quote, should mr. trump falter badly, republican congressional candidates may take it as a cue to flee openly from their nominee. let s bring back our panel, daniella fairman and nick confesso confessore. sarah, there are plenty of republicans who say, that s the new york times grabbing an anonymous quote here or there and trying to spin it into a bigger story. no offense, nick. you don t have to rebut that if you don t want that. and they would say, my point, about any newspaper that has a couple of quotes. is this a media narrative, or in your view as a republican in touch with a lot of people, is this a real problem for trump? i think it has a real potential to be a problem for trump. and look, the proof will be in the pudding. look, we ll certainly know how donald trump does after sunday night anwe ll see within a week to ten days after the second debate if republicans do, in fact, start running i m a check on hillary clinton, as if the presidential race is a foregone conclusion. but i think these conversations are happening. i don t think this is just the media narrative. it s a tricky situation for republicans. because, you know, by saying or telegraphing this, you think that the republican candidate isn t going to win, it can have a dampening effect on turnout, it can have a lot of factors that can be negative on one s candidacy. it s demoralizing. yeah, it can be it s not just an easy slam dunk, it can cause more damage than just, you know, running the i m a check and balance on the democratic president. no, it s a message that admits a problem, nick, put aside your msn credentials, you mainstream media establishment reporter, there s someone else that might agree with this narrative. and we ll put up on the screen in the four-way race, just since september. so just looking at the arc here, as we re now in the home stretch of october, hillary clinton, overall, up four. donald trump, up one in what he had before. and gary johnson losing seven. so in whatever sort of mood there is, the mood is third party candidates waffling. that s not necessarily good, if hillary seems to be picking up some of what they had. look, two things are happening. one is the block of voters who are considering johnson and stein, right, are now moving in some large degree towards hillary clinton, and not trump. so, yeah, it s typical to see third party candidates waver and lose steam at the very end. it is happening, it is happening to hillary clinton s benefit. second of all, you can see in polling that a lot of senate republicans are having trouble separating from donald trump. not all of them, not bob portman, you know, but most of them are finding that he drags them down. that as he suffers, trump suffers, the senate candidate suffers, and we even had a house strategist in that story, saying that even house candidates are suffering. so the top of the ticket does matter. it can drag the whole thing down. i think that goes to the question if donald trump is any good at outreach. he has had a real sort of proud attitude about any aspects of the general election, when we re accustomed to nominees trying to do bridge building. i m a little reminded of when jay-z said either love me or leave me alone. i think that s how a lot of people feel. but you can t build a 50% coalition with the feeling that people should either be in your corner or go away. and he has to have that kind of scorn for people who don t want to get behind him. absolutely. for the past year and a half, donald trump has been saying, i m the best, i am tremendous, i have the best words and the best brain. and nobody is going to tell me how to win a general election. and what worked in the primary is obviously going to work now. so i m not surprised that the new york times said he s not doing debate prep. and i wouldn t be surprised if he does poorly again on sunday, that he still rebuffs and says, you know, a mike was broken, or something else happened, and not listen to the people around him. daniella, it was not broken, fact check! it was not broken, the mike was oscillating. that s all he said. be fair. sorry, it was oscillating. it was oscillating, my bad. i don t have the best words. i mean, sunday night is a big night for him and donald trump needs to do two three things, regardless of whether he s prepping or not. he needs to not miss opportunities. he needs to be talking about hillary clinton want hillary clinton s e-mail scandal, about the way the clinton foundation has conducted its affairs, and about her performance on the world stage. he missed opportunities in that first debate. he cannot do that again. second, he needs to have strong answers on policy questions. people understand he is not a policy wonk, and to some degree, they like that about him. but he s got to have a strong, solid answers. and third, how does he interact with these voters? the human dynamic, i think, is going to be a big part of the discussion on monday, for both of these candidates. and he s going to have to do well in that regard. because you re eye to eye with real people. nick? look, prep is not just about having facts and figures at your fingertips in a debate. it s not being prepared for lines of attack and how to avoid walking into traps, how to control the tempo of the debate and talking about things you want to talk about. what happened to him last week was at almost every stage for the last two-thirds of the debate or more, he was talking about things that hillary clinton wanted to talk about. exactly. it was conducted on her internship terms. if you don t prep, it will happen to him again and she will win the next debate. and that s what makes a town hall a little trickier. because these are voters you re talking to. you can t talk down to them, you can t interrupt them. if you don t like their question, you really can t blow them off. these are the people you re trying to convince to vote for you. that raises the final question, daniella, do you think he will interrupt any voters to say wrong ? i wouldn t be surprised if it happened. i would like to think that he would not do that, that he would understand that that would be really, really bad to tell a voter that their question or their premise is wrong. well, we will find out. that s why we will be watching. sarah, daniella, nick, thanks for joining ours panel here. i m ari melber. we ll have more on 2016 and on hurricane matthew, so keep it locked right here on msnbc.
by the kremlin, an important point as well in the way donald trump painted his relationship with intelligence agencies in this country vis-a-vis how it could be taken overseas. right now is the start of the 1:00 p.m. hour here in the east. imagine the role of this man right now. this is a live picture in front of the senate foreign relations committee, and that is the ceo of exxonmobil, a multinational company so large, while it s said they can t change the weather, they can forecast it. they have their own weather bureau, a sprawling organization of 70,000 employees. rex tillerson is the nominee to be our next secretary of state, a job offer that came to him. it s been said in the public domain in part because of his relationship with russia, because of his relationship with vladimir putin. imagine all of this in light of the news conference we just witnessed, in light of what donald trump said and didn t say about russia and putin, in light of what donald trump said about u.s. intelligence agencies, here is a part of what we just witnessed this last hour. the democratic national committee was totally open to be hacked. they did a very poor job. they could have had hacking defense. president putin and russia put out a statement today that this fake news indeed fake news. they said it totally never happened. now somebody would say oh, of course he s going to say that. i respected the fact that he said that. if he did have something they would have released it and glad to release it. if putin likes donald trump, guess what, folks? that s called an asset, not a liability. do you honestly believe that hillary would be tougher on putin than me? i think it was disgraceful, disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake out. i think it s a disgrace. and i say that and i say that, and that s something that nazi germany would have done and did do. i have no deals. i have no loans, and i have no dealings. we could make deals in russia very easily if. we wanted to. i just don t want to because i think that would be a conflict. kristen welker was inside the room. she is now outside trump tower, on what can be a perilous stretch of fifth avenue in new york. andrea mitchell in the equally perilous confines of the u.s. senate in washington, standing by to talk to us. kristen, i m still going through the quotes on, what, 15 to 20 topics from that news conference. what couldn t we see from our vantage point, watching on television that perhaps would assist our understanding of what a high wire act and high tension event this was? reporter: well two things, brian. one, of course, this is the first news conference he s had in 168 days. so you had reporters, we re always trying to get our questions in. but the number of questions, the range of questions i think was so expansive because there was souclost time to make up for, and i think that that contributed to some of the tension that you saw unfold there, and then of course you had these developments overnight, this reporting on russia that the president-elect dismissed outright, and that caused him to again attack his intelligence communities right off of the top. and i guess i would make one more point, brian, there are a lot of questions that went unanswered on his intelligence community. does he trust them? does he trust his intelligence officials? i tried to pin him down on that at the very end of the news conference and he sort of dodged exchange that he had with cnn s jim acosta, when he attacked cnn for their reporting, and jim said, let me at least get a question in, and he wouldn t allow it. that s really extraordinary, brian. i ve been to a number of news conferences and you ve been to a number of presidential news conferences and never really seen that type of tension before. again i would just underscore, this is the first news conference he s had since july so there s a lot of questions we didn t get to, like isis, like israel and the middle east, so it all set the stage for fireworks. kristen welker thanks and thanks to the mta for parking a bus behind you during our conversation. andrea mitchell is one of the people who has us beat in terms of our combined attendance at presidential news conference. andrea, i just can t ask you in enough ways to sum up, if this isn t a president-elect at war with the intelligence community, such a vital arm of government when you re a president, the intelligence community which is both vendor and client, to overseas countries, to private organizations, i don t want to see what war is, but try to sum up what the impact, the concussion this is going to cause in washington. well, concussion s a great word because there are concussion bombs. this is a concussion bomb. brian, he compared the intelligence community pretty directly on twitter and at his news conference used the same analogy to nazi germany. you re talking about men and women, thousands and thousands of them here and overseas who are often covert, and even those who are not have to make considerable sacrifices in their lives, not for great amounts of money. many of them have died. their stars are on the wall at langley. they ve been expanded in the last 15 years since 9/11, big expansion perhaps too much bureaucracy, that could be addressed. lot of critics internally and externally think that that is the real focus that he should be looking at once he gets into office but to raise that question, to talk about these leaks i think a lot of people, including myself last night on thir with you, questioned why there was that addendum of what most likely is unverified information that was attached to the classified intelligence brief. so those are the kinds of questions that you can ask but to compare them to nazi, germany, that is really escalating this war. this was the first grudging acknowledgment that russia was behind the hacking but again in the next sentence he compared it to the office of personnel management hacking 22 million people by china. well that did happen two years ago, there was a lot of attention. i was on the air a lot on nightly news and msnbc on the today show, we covered that story. the difference between what russia did and what china does, what north korea does, what we do, our country to, you know, foreign countries, allies and adversaries alike, i ve covered stories of us hacking the french and the japanese over commercial contracts, and whether airbus and boeing get contracts. all these kinds of things happen every day. the difference here in the russian hacking which was the consensus agreement of 17 agencies, it was weaponized. it was drnted. drnted under order by our own exclusive reporting by vladimir putin and confirmed by the report that was released to wikileaks, whether wikileaks was winning or not winning, wikileaks distributed it and distributed this harmful information, a lot of which could have had an impact on voting and donald trump kept refers to wikileaks during the campaign. he did it again today, in fact. look at the horrible things that john podesta said from wikileaks about hillary clinton, his characterization, not mine. the point is he keeps pointing to wikileaks the conveyor of stolen information hacked by russia and leaked during the campaign and this is the offense which may even be a criminal offense in some regards. we don t know what s been investigated. there have been hints of an investigation. so it s just amazing, and he s going to have to rely, i heard chuck todd say he has to rely on the same intelligence agencies and their career people. doesn t matter who is at the head. it s a big superliner to turn around. you re going to have to rely on the analysis of those men and women. it takes a long time to train them. you re not going to have them all, you know, leaving immediately. if north korea is close to launching an icbm that can hold a nuclear weapon and reach the continental united states, he has to not only persuade the american people but our allies about the veracity of that intelligence and what he is doing now arguably is destroying the credibility of american intelligence at home and abroad. that s a serious and important point you make there at the end. the only place you re going to learn abou the moves north korea is makings the very same intelligence agencies that were in for such a drubbing today. in our studio here we have ali velshi, we have katy tur, we also have standing by a guy who has been so patient with us, steve clemmons, editor at large for the atlantic. steve, where to begin? what was your lead story from that event? i think the lead story is two things, is that as you were showing earlier the rex tillerson exchange with the members of the senate foreign relations committee, many people say the intelligence was seemingly soft on some of the issues. i was struck by how hard he was in comparison to donald trump, so the taking of crimea was a taking. he criticized the obama administration for not putting in enough defensive weapons and not putting in enough support. it was a sort of hard edged assessment, and that it was highly unlikely, he said, that the united states would become friends with russia, and that just stands out as an obvious contrast with the tilt and tone of donald trump even with the kinds of things saying maybe we won t be friends with vladimir putin and others, but donald trump continues to sort of largely publicly hug that vladimir putin and hold that out, so i ve got a divide with a press conference going on at the same time as the senate hearing between the likely secretary of state, potential secretary of state and the president-elect, and that stood out. the other thing that s gotten almost no attention was that he nominated and talked about david shulke, veterans affairs obama appointee. he will be the first obama appointee if confirmed in the trump cabinet. that may not compare to all the other news out there but that is interesting. indeed. he s an d., and you re right, he will be a holdover from adstration t administration. also a very tough job to fill among all the cabinet agencies, but steve, imagine this. what you re talking about, the way donald trump treated and handled all things russian, from putin to russia in general, this was all in the context of a news conference that was designed in part to quash and criticize what they saw as scurrilous reporting tying donald trump to russia. i think what david ignatius said before is that the hostility really between the intelligence agencies and donald trump didn t get much help from this exchange. there s an opportunity with this call that donald trump has made for the first 90 days he ll get a report from the dni, the director of national intelligence, and the cia that strengthens our hand in the hacking arena, but broadly when you look at it, donald trump thus far goes to extraordinary lengths not to put russia on the spot, and that has put him at odds with a lot, not just the intelligence community, but a lot of national, republican national security stalwarts, and if there was going to be a break between the legislative department and the executive over something big, it s over these issue, and his dedication to kind of continuing really this crisis, not between democrats and republicans, but between republicans and republicans is i don t know what to call it. it s impressive, donald trump s willingness to continue to kind of run on that edge where his own credibility is going to be held in doubt by many of the top intelligence people in the country, but also the lindsey grahams, john mccains, marco rubios and many other that will matter to him on a whole variety of key executive decisions in the world. steve, finally, as someone to whom the printed word is so important, fake news. someone spent months making fake news a thing, an entity, fairly vibrant entity and now it s a bucket into which stories one doesn t like can be thrown. reminds me of the old days the founding of the republic. bill sapphire wrote a clever his oshlg torqual novel called scandal mongers. he talked about the early pamphleteeres who invented stories that defamed leading figures and they d fight the pages out there. i m reminded of that era in american history we ve come back into that as well. it s important we in journalism maintain critical distance and objectivity in what we do and find a way to present that as the alternative to this raif of fake news that seems to be proliferating on both sides, if there is, are two wils it s there. this era may test us all. steve thank you very much. always a pleasure to hear from you and talk to you. we re going to whipsaw a bit into the hearing room that had our attention yesterday. senator jeff sessions of alabama nominated to become the nation s top law enforcement official, the next attorney general. we re going to hear some extraordinary remarks here, congressman lewis from georgia, is about to speak in opposition of senator sessions, and senator booker from new jersey. the importance of this, a senator speaking in opposition to a fellow sitting senator. there are only 100 people in that community. it is a very, very small world indeed, but this is part of the opposition lined up against senator sessions to be attorney general. we ll listen in, in the hearing room. like caucus. welcome to the committee, congressman richmond. finally we will hear from mr. william smith. mr. smith worked for senator sessions as the first african-american general counsel on the senate judiciary committee. he has known senator sessions for 20 years and we know him because that service as a staffperson here as well. welcome to all of you, and we ll start with senator booker. thank you, airmangrassley. i want to thank senator leahy as well, as well as the distinguished members of this committee. i know it is exceptional for a senator to testify against another senator nominated for a cabinet position and i appreciate the opportunity you ve given me today. i ve worked closely with many of you on this panel on both sides of the dais, on matters related to criminal squlus reform and you know just how deeply motivated i am by the many issues our next attorney general will heavily influence, especially the crisis of mass incarceration. i know that some of my many colleagues are unhappy that i am breaking with senate protradition to testify on the nomination of one of my colleagues, but i believe like perhaps all of my colleagues in the senate that, in the choice between standing with senate norms or standing up for what my conscience tells me is best for our country, i will always choose conscience and country. senator sessions and i have consistently disagreed on the issues, he and i have always exercised a collegiality and a mutual respect between us. perhaps the best example of this is the legislation we cosponsored to award the congressional gold medal to those foot soldiers who marched at selma, one of the foot soldiers is sitting next to me now. this was a blessing and an honor to me, because in 2015, a retired judge who was white told me that it was those brave marchers on the edmund pettis bridge who inspired him as a young lawyer in the 1960s to seek justice for all in new jersey and begin representing black families looking to integrate white neighborhoods, black families who were turned away and denied housing. one of the families was mine. i am literally sitting here because of people, marchers in alabama, and volunteer lawyers in new jersey, who saw it as their affirmative duty to pursue justice, to fight discrimination, to stand up for those who are marginalized. but the march for justice in our country still continues. it is still urgent. i know also though of the urgency for law and order. i imagine that no sitting senator has lived in the last 20 years in higher crime neighborhoods than i have. i have seen unimaginable violence on american streets. i know the tremendous courage of law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every single day to fight crime in america. i want an attorney general who is committed to supporting law enforcement and securing law and order, but that is not enough. america was founded heralding not law and order, but justice for all, and critical to that is equal justice under the law. law and order without justice is unobtainable. they are inextricably tied together. if there is no justice, there is no peace. the alabama state troopers on the edmund pettis bridge were seeking law and order. the marchers were seeking justice, and ultimately a greater peace. one of the victories of the modern civil rights movement was the 1957 civil rights act, which in effect made be the attorney general not only the chief law enforcement officer of the united states, but also vested in that office the responsibility to pursue civil rights and equal protection for all of america. senator sessions has not demonstrated a commitment to a central requisite of the job, to aggressively pursue the congressional mandate of civil rights, equal rights, and justice for all of our citizens. in fact, at numerous times in his career he s demonstrated a hostility towards these convictions, and has worked to frustrate attempts to advance these ideals. if confirmed senator sessions will be required to pursue justice for women but his record indicates that he won t. he will be expected to defend the ecall rights of gay, lesbian and transgender americans but his record indicates that he won t. he will be expected to defend voting rights butis recd indicates he won t. he will be expected to defend the rights of immigrants and affirm their human dignity but the record indicates that he won t. his record indicates thated aattorney general he would object to the growing national bipartisan movement towards criminal justice reform. his record indicates we cannot count on him to support state and national efforts towards bringing justice to the justice system, and people on both sides of the aisle who readily admit that the justice system as it stands now, is biased against the poor, against drug addict n addiction, against mentally ill and against people of color. his record indicates that at a time that even the fbi director is speaking out against explicit racial bias in policing and the urgent need to address it, the last two attorney generals have taken steps to fix our broken criminal justice system as a time when the justice department he would lead has uncovered systemic abuses in police departments all over the united states, including ferguson, including newark, senator sessions would not continue to lead this urgently needed change. the next attorney general must bring hope and heal iing to thi country and this demands a more courageous empathy than senator sessions record demonstrates. it demands an understanding that patriotism is love of country and love of country demands that we love all of our citizens, even the most marginalized, the most disadvantaged, the most degraded, and the most unfortunate. challenges of race in america cannot be addressed if we refuse to confront them. persistent biases cannot be defended unless we combat them. the arc of the moral universe does not just naturally curve towards justice. we must bend it. if someone to be attorney general, they must be willing to continue the hallowed tradition in our country of fighting for justice for all, for equal justice, for civil rights. america needs an attorney general who is resolute and determined to bend the arc. senator sessions record does not speak to that desire, intention or will. with all at stake in our nation now, with the need for healing and love i pray my colleagues will join me in opposing his nomination. mr. chairman i d like to submit my testimony to the record and thank you for your opportunity to testify and finally i d like to acknowledge which was not done that sitting behind me are proud members of the united states congress and the congressional black caucus. thank you, sir. and you shouldn t have had to recognize them. i should have done that, i m sorry. thank you, sir. because i knew they were here. mr. huntley? . good afternoon. you got to push the button. i see, thank you. i ll start over briefly. you might pull the mike a little closer, get as close as you can. good afternoon. that s much better. my name is willie huntley and i m an attorney located in mobile, alabama. i m a solo practitioner and i have been practicing law for over 30 years. i m a graduate of auburn university, where i attended college on a football scholarship. i graduated from auburn in 1980, and i attended cumberland law school after that. i finished cumberland law school in 1984. after i finished law school i started a federal clerkship with a federal judge in montgomery, alabama. after i completed that process, i began a tour with the,ed aan assistant district attorney in macon county, alabama. i was there from 1985 to 1987. then my life changed. i got a phone call one day and my secretary comes in the office, and she says, jeff sessions is on the phone. and i m sitting there wondering why is jeff sessions calling me? i was wellware of the allegations that had happened in his bid to become a federal judge, which made me wonder why he was calling me. i answered the phone and i find out that jeff sessions wants me to become an assistant united states attorney in the southern district of alabama. this presented an ideal situation, so i decided to take advantage of that and the first time i actually met him was at a dinner in montgomery. that dinner was supposed to last probably an hour, hour and a half. we ended up meeting for about three hours. during that time period, we discussed a number of topics, football, religion, politics, family, we talked about all those things, and during the course of that meeting with him, i got the feeling more and more and more that the allegations that had been spread through the press weren t true. i also was contemplating whether i should make this move, because i thought if i go to mobile, i don t know anybody there. i have no family there, and what if this man turns out to be exactly how he s been portrayed? fortunately, it didn t turn out like that. i was at the u.s. attorney s office from 1987 to 1991. he assigned me the general criminal trial cases. he also assigned me to civil rights cases, and i would supervise all the civil rights cases that came through the office. during this time period, i can recall where we successfully prosecuted a police officer that was charged with excessive use force. unfortunately, i made a decision to leave the.s. attorney s office in 1991. that decision wasn t based on anything that had happened to me during my time period in the u.s. attorney s office. during that time period, jeff gave me advice, counsel. he provided a great deal of support in everything that i did. one thing in particular that he did was my second child was born, and there was a knock on the door that morning and through the door walks jeff sessions. after i left the u.s. attorney s office, jeff became the attorney general of alabama. he asked me to join his staff at this time, but i declined to join his staff. however, he made me a special assistant attorney general and he put me in charge of handling defense cases for the state of alabama. also during this time period, jeff became charged with violating the state of alabama ethics act. it involved a company by the name of tyco. jeff sessions could have hired any lawyer he wanted to, to represent him in that matter. jeff decided to hire me in that particular case. we had that case and during the course of it, it was probably the longest hearing that had ever been held before the state ethics commission. at that point, jeff was fully exonerated of all the charges involving the state ethics act. one of the things that i can say about jeff is that he has always been the same person that i have known. he s always been available for me, and always been there when i needed him. at no point in the time that i ve known jeff has he demonstrated any racial insensitivity, and i see my time is rapidly winding down and i would just like to say that, in my, jeff sessions will enforce and follow the laws of the united states even-handedly, equally and with justice for all. jeff sessions will adhere to the justice department motto quid pro domina sequitor it means for the lady justice, jeff will protect and defend the rights of all people. thank you for this opportunity. thank you. now we ll hear from congressman john lewis. chairman grassley, senator leahy, and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today. millions of americans are encouraged by our country s efforts to create a more inclusive democracy during the last 50 years, what some of us call the beloved community, a community at peace with itself. they are not a minority, a clear majority of americans say they want this to be a fair, just and open nation. they are afraid that this country is headed in the wrong direction. they are concerned leaders reject decades of progress and want to return to the dark past and the power of the law will use to deny the freedoms protected by the constitution. the bill of rights and its msnbcs, these are the voices i represent today. we can pretend that the law is blind. we can pretend that it is even-handed but if we are honest ourselves we know we are called upon daily by the people we represent to help them deal with unfairness and how the law is written and enforced. those two are committed to equal justice, in our society, wonder whether senator sessions calls nor law and order will mean today what it went in alabama when i was coming up back then. the rule of use we use it violate the human and civil rights are the poor, the d dispossessed, people of color. i was born in rural alabama, not very far from where senator sessions was raised. there was no way to escape or deny the chokehold of discrimination and racial hate that surrounded us. i saw the signs that said white waiting, colored waiting. i saw the signs that said white men, colored men, white women, colored women. i tasted the bitter fruits of segregation and racial discrimination. segregation was the law of the land, the order of society in the deep south. any black person who did not cross the street when a white person was walking down the same sidewalk who did not move to the back of the bus, who drank from a whitewater fountain, who looked at a white person directly in their eyes could be arrested and taken to jail. the forces of law and order in alabama were so strong that to take a stand against this injustice we had to be willing to sacrifice our lives for our cause, often the only way we could demonstrate that a law on the books violated a higher law, was by challenging that law. by putting our bodies on the line and showing the world the unholy price we had to pay for dignity and respect. it took massive well-organized nonviolent dissent for the voting rights act to become law. it required criticism of in this great nation and its laws to move toward a greater sense of equality in america. we had to sit in. we had to stand in. we had to march. and that s why more than 50 years ago a group of unarmed citizen citizens, plaqblack and white, gather on march 7, 1965, in a peaceful nonviolent fashion to walk from selma to montgomery, alabama, to dramatize to the nation and to the world that we wanted to register to vote, wanting to become participants in a democratic process. we were beaten. tear gas, left bloody, some of us unconscious. some of us had concussions. some of u almost died on that bridge. but the congress responded, president lyndon johnson responded, and the congress passed the voting rights act and it was signed into law on august 6, 1965. we have come a distance. we ve made progress, but we re not there yet. there are forces that want to take us back to another place. we don t want to go back. we want to go forward. as the late a. randolph the dean for the march on washington in 1963 often said, maybe our forefathers and our foremothers all came to this great land in different ships. well we re all in the same boat now. it doesn t matter how senator sessions may smile, how friendly he may be, how he may speak to you. but we need someone who is going to stand up, speak up and speak out for the people that need help, for people who have been discriminated fence and gainst, doesn t matter black, white, latino american, native american, asian-american, whether they are straight or gay, muslim, christian or jews. we all live in the same house, the american house. we need someone as attorney general who is going to look out for all of us and not just for some of us. i ran out of time. thank you for giving me a chance to testify. thank you, congressman lewis. now i go to mr. sorroyer. chairman, senators of the committee it s an honor for me to be here and i thank you for your time. my namis jesse sorroyer jr. i ve been in law enforcement since 1976 to 2016. i ve served in local police departments for 11 years, served in the united states marshal service for 8 1/2 years, served in the attorney general s office for 20 1/2 years. i first met jeff sessions when he was u.s. trt he were to in the southern district of alabama. jeff was prosecuted at that time by the name of henry hayes. jeff prosecuted that person for the abduction and murder of a black teenager. following jeff s election as attorney general i had the privilege to serve with him and his administration as his chief investigator. the beginning of jeff s tenure as attorney general presented senator sessions with challenges that included budget crisis, and one-third reduction of staff. things that jeff did when we came with the budget crisis and the reduction of staff, there were several people in the office that had to seek other jobs elsewhere. there was a black investigator in the office that came and had less than a year left before he was eligible to retire. jeff sessions allowed that to take place. he didn t have to do that. he did not have to do that at all, because of the situation that we were in. jeff sessions retained me. he did not have to do that. but he did. following the election, you know, we were charged with the responsibilities of a lot of crimes and the expectations of the attorney general was charged with the responsibilities of working various cases which included white collar crimes, public disruption, voter fraud and criminal investigations. as i reflect on our work there was never a time when any of these cases was investigated with any political agenda or motive. the utmost respect and zeg sbeg rit w integrity was exercised for all individuals involved. jeff sessions decisions as attorney general earned him a reputation and respect among his colleagues in appreciation for his willingness to do what was right. when jeff sessions got to the u.s. senate, as attorney general, he had argued to uphold the conviction and sentence of klaansman henry hayes for the murder of michael donnell. when jeff sessions became u.s. senator, he helped me with an appointment for u.s. state marshal for the district of alabama. he didn t have to do that but he did. i have known jeff sessions for 20 years. he s a good and decent man. he believes in law and order for all the people, all the people in alabama, because of his colleagues and all surrounded him, the things that he s done for the law enforcement community and citizens of alabama is great. it s without any questions as to whether or not he would be fit to serve this country as the united states attorney general. now, i did not learn these things from a political press conference or any website where i read about it. i know jeff sessions as the man, the man that i know is a decent and honest and respectful man that will put all of his life into public service. he s done that. when we talk about the criminal justice system, you know, we enforce the laws, and we do it because we have a love for the laws. jeff sessi loves the people that do the enforcement side of it. he respects the citizens, deserves a good and honest person that s going to give all he has to make sure that everyone is treated equally and fairly under the law. but his decency as a man, and his honesty as a man speak for itself. he is the type of individual that i support for the united states attorney general s office, because of my reputation and his history with me as a person, and the things that i ve seen over the years in jeff sessions. it s hard being a public servant. i was in law and been in law enforcement for 40 years. it s a tough job. we don t violate the laws. we don t get out there and do things that would cause ourselves to be brought into the system, and i m not saying everybody is the same. but i believe that he ll take hold of the justice system, justice department and he ll be fair, he will be honest and he ll do the same thing for every person with honesty and respect for all of us. my time is up. and thank you for listening. thank you, mr. sorroyer. now congressman richmond. congressman richmond? wait just a minute, congressman. human beings who are innocent let me thank thechairman and ranking member for allowing me to testify. i would ask to you hold. you won t lose any time. stop torturing people! proceed, congressman. let me thank the chairman and ranking member for allowing me to testify. the senate s duty to provide advice and consent to presidential nominees is a fundamental component of american democracy. i know you do not take this responsibility lightly. before i jump into my substantive testimony i want to address two timely issues. first i want to express my concerns about being made to testify at the very end of the witness panels. to have a senator, a house member and a living civil rights legend testify at the end of all of this is the equivalent of being made to go to the back of the bus. it say petty strategy and the record should reflect my c consternation at the process that brought us here. my record on equality speaks for itself and i don t mind being last but to have a living legend like john lewis handled in such a fashion is beyond the pale and the message sent by this process is duly noted by me and the 49 members of the congressional black caucus and the 78 million americans we represent and the over 17 african-americans that we represent. further on the issue of senator sessions record of prosecuting the marion three, stemming from a complaint filed by african-americans, i say the following. history is replete with efforts by those empowered to legitimize their acts of suppression and intimidation of black voters by recruiting other blacks to assist in bringing trumped up charges against law-abiding citizens who are engaged in perfectly legitimate voter education and empowerment activities. those tactics were effectively used gns former congressmen robert smalls, and hundreds if not thousands of black office holders and landholders in our post-reconstruction era, and they were used several years ago against mr. and mrs. alfred turner who was discussed by this committee yesterday. the declaration of independence set forth the idea of universal equality that rests at the heart of our democracy, but it is the 14th amendment of our constitution and its equal protection clause that has helped bring us closer to fulfilling that foundational principle and bringing us closer to a more perfect union. all cabinet officials have a responsibility to protect the interest of all of the american people, but there s no office for which the duty to apply the law equally is greater than that of the attorney general. in my capacity as chairman of the congressional black caucus, i urge you to reject senator sessions nomination. throughout our nation s history, attorney generals have used the resources of the federal government to vindicate the right of the most vulnerable in society. after the civil war, the first attorney general to lead the doj prosecuted the kkk for its widespread use of violence aimed at suppressing the black vote. this facilitated massive black voting turnout in 187 for the first time in our nation s history, former slaves were aforred the opportunity to participate in the democratic process. simply put, senator sessions has advanced an agenda that will do great harm to african-american citizens and communities. for this reason the cbc believes senator sessions should be disqualified. he has demonstrated a total disregard for the equal application of justice and protection of the law as it applies to african-americans and false short on so many issues. jeff sessions supports a system of mass incarceration that is disproporgtately targeted of acap american sit stenographcit devastated african-american communities. he opposed common sense bipartisan criminal justice reform, and jeff sessions cannot be relied upon to enforce the voting rights act. in his decade s long career in public life, senator sessions has proven himself unfit to serve in the role as attorney general. and i would not have the opportunity to testify today if it were not for men like john lewis who was beaten within an inch of his life in his pursuit for the right to vote for african-americans. it s a shame he must sit here and he will litigate this 50 years later. we sit here as the prodigy of men and women who were bought, sold, enslaved, raped, tortured, beaten and lynched. black people were bought as chattel and considered three-fifths of a human being. we ve been able to endure and largely overcome that history thanks in part to brave men and women, both democrat and republican, who sat where you sit and cast often difficult votes for free tom and equality. these senators fought opinion and even their own party to do what was right? i come before you today asking you to do the same. now you all must face a choice. be cougeous or complicit. if you vote for session session you take possession of everything he may do or not do in office. he has no track record of fighting for justice for minorities despite the characterization you ve heard from others today. he and his supporters have told you he is a champion for civil rights and equality. characterization and revisionist histories are not the same things as facts. he is on the record on numerous issues. i have provided just a few examples today. let s think about this logically. if he were in fact a champion for civil rights, wouldn t the civil rights community support his nomination instead of speaking with one voice in near unanimous opposition? in closing, each and every senator who casts a vote to confirm senator sessions will be permanently marked as a coconspirator in an effort to move this country backwards towards a darker period in our shared history. so i ask you all, where do you stand? it is clear from senator sessions record where he stands, where you stand with him and allow history to judge you for doing so. i implore you all to weigh these questions properly as you prepare to cast what will be one of the most consequential votes in your time as a united states senator. res ipsa loquitor, a legal term which means the thing speaks for itself. senator sessions record speaks for itself and i would urge you not to confirm senator sessions as attorney general of the united states, and thank you, mr. chairman, for allowing me to go over. thank you, congressman richmond. now i call on mr. smith. chairman grassley, members of the committee, i ask my written statement be made part of the record. it will be and that s true of senator booker and anybody else that didn t get their entire statement put in the record, it will be in the record, yes. it s an honor for me to support senator sessions to be the next attorney general of the united states of america. he will do an outstanding job. the american people had an opportunity to witness yesterday through his testimony a brilliant legal mind, a man of the highest character, and great integrity. let me briefly address this legal mind. as a staffer your job is to be more prepared than the member. senator sessions made this difficult. when he didn t speak on the topic i would hand him another note on another topic. timely he decided to speak and he did as he did in his testimony yesterday, he crushed it. senator sessions was not ignoring my notes. he was systematically thinking about how to put all the notes together in one speech. a number of my colleagues i told them blank sheet of paper and told him to make me look good, and that s what he did. senator sessions spent yesterday proving to the american people that he understands the law, will disperburse it equally and made a bunch of staffers look good. lot has been said about senator session character. we ve seen people who have never met senator sessions claim to know him, know his heart. we ve seen members of this body and members of the house of representatives just now who has worked with senator sessions and praised him for his work and now turn to attack him. this should not be. the reason we did not see a lot of this yesterday, during the hearing, is because the members of this committee know senator sessions. you know he s a strong conservative but you also know he s fair and honest. if you disagree because of his political views let s have a conversation about that but let s do it on the facts, not on 30 years of old innuendos and allegations that have been disproven. there s something very consistent about praising senator sessions for for aiding african-american communities and working on crack and powder cocaine legislation and then criticizing him because it takes a different political view on another matter like immigration. enforcing immigration laws is want out of the mainstream. on the panel that testified before this one, through personal attack after personal attack after personal attack, i doubt any one of those individuals attacking senator sessions outside of yesterday has spent 30 minutes in the same room with him. that s 30 minutes in the same room, not 30 minutes talking to him. i doubt any of them have spent 30 minutes or ten minutes talking to senator sessions. this process should not be about this process should be about facts, not about political aspirations. every allegation and witness from 30 years ago has been discredited. members in the media should move on. senator sessions testified yesterday that he would enforce the laws whether he agreed with them or not. that s the role of the attorney general. not to embrace every point of view in the shifting political winds. if you come before jeff sessions, you will get equal justice and you will respect the outcome even if you lose. how do i know this? i know it because i know jeff sessions. i m not testifying as someone who just met him yesterday. i know his family. i ve dined at his house. we ve eaten johnny rockets burgers together. i ve traveled across the state of alabama with jeff sessions. i ve watched him order a heath blizzard at dairy queen, quote, heavy on the heath. i ve watched him prepare for hearings. i debated him on legislative matters. i ve written speeches for him. i ve made speeches on his behalf. i ve been in every political situation with him. senator sessions is unquestionably qualified for the job, for which he s been nominated. he s a good christian sxhan a good family man. he s a man who s dedicated his life to public service. in the course of that he s absolutely fault for disenfranchised. not only did he fight for citizen reform, he accomplished it. he fought for civil rights. he prosecuted members of the klu klux klan. and he fought for all americans, regardless of the color of their skin or beliefs. this is the way it should be. after 20 years of knowing senator sessions, i have not seen the slightest evidence of racism because it does not exist. i know a racist when i see one, and i ve seen more than one. but jeff sessions is not one. senator sessions has served with distinction throughout his career as united states attorney, as attorney general for alabama, and as a member of this body. the legal profession is better for his service. this body is better for his service. and this country at the end of his term will be better for his service. and every season, jeff sessions has been measured, courteo and kind. he has treated me and everyone respectfully and fairly. not showing favoritism at any point. this is the kind of attorney general our nation needs. a mraud his selection. i look forward to his swift confirmation. thank you, war eagle. the record will stay open until tuesday. i thank all of you for your testimony and the hearing is adjourned. there you heard it from chairman grassley after an emotional series of speakers. and it was the congressman from louisiana who asked the very basic question, and that was, why this panel was going dead last in the hearings. our justice correspondent, pete williams, has been riding this news day and yesterday along with us. pete, we ve been whip-sawed between the donald trump news conference, the rex tillerson confirmation hearings, remembering all the while that this, the confirmation of jeff sessions for attorney general goes on. how are we to fit in what we just saw against the overall records so far with the sessions hearing? well, this is day two of these hearings. they all follow the same pattern. you get the nominee on the first day and then people for and against the nominee the second day. you ve just heard a little bit of that. this morning we had speaking in favor of senator sessions, former attorney general, former deputy attorney general, member of the commission on human rights, the president of the fraternal order of police, opposing him we had the president of the naacp, advocates for rape victims, of former dreamer, someone who came here illegally under age and became an army veteran and u.s. citizen. this afternoon this somewhat unusual panel, all african-americans, all given the opportunity basically to speak without the members asking them any questions. whereas, there were questions of the panel this morning. the committee chairman, charles grassley, said this is something he and the ranking democrat dianne feinstein worked out in order to give, in essence, a platform to those folks who wanted to talk about senator sessions this afternoon, but were not in the sort of pro and con interest group area. but passionate statement from cory booker, who became the first u.s. senator. we checked with senate historian s office on this. he is the first u.s. senator to ever testimony against the nomination of a fellow senator. but what he said this morning is that he had to choose between his conscience and his country and the senate norms. basically, the message from the civil rights community here has been that senator sessions both in his time as the federal prosecutor, a state attorney general and a senator, has not shown the commitment to aggressively pursuing civil rights that they want to see in an attorney general. he has said yesterday, he spent a lot of time saying he would enforce laws, even though he disagrees with, but what you just heard from this panel of civil rights people is that they want to see an attorney general nominee, somebody who doesn t merely show a tolerance for those laws but somebody who would aggressively enforce them. nonetheless, i don t think that this passionate testimony this afternoon is going to change the outcome. it does appear that senator sessions, it comesown to a matter of simple arithmetic. the republicans have et votes. they need to get him confirmed. we have not seen any signs that opponents of senator sessions have peeled away a sufficient number to deny him the confirmation. as for timing, brian, my guess is the democrats will do what they can do in these situations. normally they could go first of all, the committee can t consider the nomination until there s a president to nominate him. so, this is all doing their homework in advance. they can t vote on the nomination until donald trump is inaugurated and formally sends it up to the senate. then the democrats have the option of asking for ten extra days. they may well do that. if that s the schedule, we may see a vote on senator sessions maybe early the first full week in february. pete williams, our justice correspondent, thanks. our viewers might have noticed our other guest standing by to talk to us. that s the former chairman of the republican party, michael steele. michael, where do you stand on the sessions nomination? i m in support of it, number one. i find i found the hearing process to be largely pretty good. i think jeff sessions has handled this very well. he articulated his failure in the past to really appreciate
so we haven t had a chance to digest it. but the attorney general in his confirmation hearings was very clear with a one-word answer when asked by a senator whether he had contact with the russians in any way, shape, or form. he said no, period. no condition, no modification. so obviously that turns out to not be accurate there is no reason to believe that jeff sessions in the confirmation hearing was trying to hide something. he may simply have forgotten. but it does mean two things. number one, it adds to the incredible weight of evidence that the administration is not credible on these issues. remember a couple of weeks ago when we heard that michael flynn was talking to the russian ambassador simply to wish him merry christmas. and of course that turns out not to be true. and michael flynn is no longer national security adviser. so this white house has a very, very significant credibility problem. and it s with respect to attorney general sessions, what this means, and again, it s too early to say that he perjured himself or that he meant to do this. but it very clearly indicates that he must now recuse himself just the way the former attorney general made is simply not true. this is of course how mike flynn went down, right? the deputy attorney general said mike flynn has said something to the vice president about his phone calls with the russian ambassador, which is simply not true. that opens the possibility that russia might therefore seek to blackmail the national security adviser. so you see people throughout the government, and leaks are a problematic thing. but they re raising their hands and saying wait a minute, what we re hearing out of the white house is simply not consistent with the facts that i know. congressman at one of your town hall meetings during the break, someone who was there wrote this about one of your answers. as an answer to a question about demagoguery, he said he studied aught theirtarians, and it starts with the erosion of the judicial system and the media, as well adds the dispelling of false information. then all it takes is a terrorist attack and he believes that s inevitable, followed by martial law. no one is linking your words here with donald trump. but my question to you, you re obviously speaking to a question as an educated man. do your thoughts go there more often these days? well, brian, i was responding to a lot of people in my town hall who made the very accurate observation that when a leader seeks to cloud the truth, when a leader seeks to make disorient you about what is true and what is not true, when a leader seeks to damage the institutions and the civic associations of a country, the media, the judiciary, i mean this goes back to de tocqueville. that is the way that that leader erodes democracy and becomes autocratic. i was also trying to dispel what i heard in town hall meetings, which we re all hearing in town hall meetings, that this administration is fascist and they re inevitably going to wind up being authoritarian. and my point was simply watch for those signs. let s just stop the inflammatory language. but let s be sensitive to the fact that a lot of what is happening here, and let me offer this as a thought. what do the cia, the media and the fbi all have in common? these are people these are institutions who imperfect as though they may be, their essential mission is to get at the truth. and of course the trump administration has gone to war with all of those institutions whose essential mission is to get at the truth. and we as americans, republicans and democrats should just be very, very concerned about that, and very careful about what happens in the future. for example, if there is some sort of terrorist event, or if there is belligerence abroad that creates the atmosphere for this administration to take additional steps to concentrate power or additional steps that might be considered autocratic. congressman jim himes, fourth termer from the district of connecticut and democrat on the telligence committee. thank you, congressman, very much for joining us tonight. thank you, brian. i appreciate it. over to andrea mitchell. you have some of the response tonight, the pushback from the trump administration on these stories we ve been talking about. especially on the sessions story. now specifically on that, a spokeswoman for attorney general sessions said there was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer. last year the senator had over 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors as a senior member of the armed services committee. she lists the country. then she says he was asked during the hearing about communications between russia and the trump campaign. not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the armed services committee. however, at the same time, adam schiff, who you know is the top democrat on house intelligence says if the reports are accurate that attorney general sessions, a prominent surrogate for donald trump, met with ambassador kislyak during the campaign and failed to disclose that fact during his confirmation, it s essential he recuse himself. this is not even a close call. it is a must. so things are moving apace. michael mcfaul, you served a mittedly the last democratic president as ambassador to russia. having heard, taken in our conversation tonight and sampled the news breaking on this front, how would you recommend with your knowledge of washington as it is, how would you recommend this get pulled apart and looked at and investigated? what s the vehicle to your mind? i believe it has to be a bipartisan independent commission, not unlike what we had after september 11th. i think it s good news that the house intelligence committee has decide move forward. and i saw the parameters they put out. that s a good sign. but at the end of the day, having it outside of partisan circles, that it can be investigated and really dig down. you know, as i read all these stories, it s fantastic stories that really people are doing incredible work to get more and more news to us all. but it s also unnamed sources. it s all people deep in the intelligence services. and we need those people to go from being leakers to witnesses. we need to know the truth. well need to know the name for instance, of who met with whom in europe. i know, you know, that was tell me a lot if i knew the names, let alone the content of those conversations. and another piece of this, lots of senior obama administration officials, some of whom are my close friends know a lot about this story. an independent investigation would give them the opportunity, the commission would give them the opportunity to also investigate and question those people about what they know and what they don t know. former ambassador michael mcfaul, thank you very much for becoming for being on our broadcast, being part of this conversation tonight, as always. chris matthews, you were talking about sourcing. the ambassador raised the same thing. these anonymous sources can only last so long. yeah, and i think it s always fascinating to try to figure out whose giving us the information. and i was taken with this, because it jumps out. the attorney general s office is basically the justice department s heavily laden with civil servants, of course. but they wouldn t know about his contacts prior to becoming attorney general. the people that would know and would actually offer this up to a report worry be people who had come to the justice department with him. and that s extraordinary. and we re hearing a lot more about political appointees as sources. andrea knows more about this. but political sources, political appointees ratting out, if you want to put it in this vernacular, their own people is pretty extraordinary at this point early in the administration. i m just going to we re going to point out that wherever kislyak went, he was being listened to by our counter intelligence officials from the fbi. right. and so those people would know whom he met with. and that would be another source of information. at the fbi. for that do you this attribution to justice department officials would cover fbi, or would it be that misleading on purpose? i think it would be an accurate description. 80 would be accurate, of course, but it would be sleading e idea is enforcement officials and counter intelligence officials are something that would give you little indication, i would think? unless the people were nervous. this sort of puts it back to his people. i do think this whole question of trying to find, and this is something the american government hasn t figured out yet. how do you find within a government that has been elected and appointed through a confirmation process someone extraneous to that who is some sort of arc angle figure that is going to come in and find justice in a better way than somebody who is part of the political process? and we ve gone to these extremes, archie cox and people like that and trying to find people, lawrence walsh. inevitably you find out later they do have political connections. archie cox was the top speech writing manager of the whole kennedy campaign. you know, you find out these people are connected politically. it s not one person, if i could. i was the executive director of the commission on the prevention of wmd proliferation and terrorism. a horrible long name. but it australia a child of the 9/11 commission to look at wmd and terrorism and how we could prevent terrorists from getting wmd. you need a bipartisan commission, republicans and democrats selected by the leadership of the house and the senate to do the work. because, honestly, even the senate, the intelligence committee, the select intelligence committee for 9/11, even they were politicized. and number one, they couldn t share everything for intelligence reasons. but number two, they were because of their positions constrained. and the president could always say to the people in his party, why are you guys doing that? if you have a truly independent commission, then paul ryan can t get those phone calls in the middle of the night from president trump saying why are you letting those investigators say that or do that. he can say that s an independent commission. the 9/11 commission is the model. tremendous burden on any one person. all right. a pause in our conversation. when we come back, we re going to concentrate more on the trump business tie, specifically what we know about them. when our conversation continues. this is the story of green mountain coffee and fair trade, to in the time it takes to brew your cup. let s take a trip to la plata, colombia. this is boris calvo. that s pepe. boris doesn t just grow good coffee, boris grows mind-blowing coffee. and because we pay him a fair price, he improves his farm to grow even better coffee and invest in his community, which makes his neighbor, gustavo, happy. that s blanca. yup, pepe and blanca got together. things happen. all this for a smoother tasting cup of coffee. green mountain coffee. packed with goodness. do 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. with not food, become food? 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[ upbeat music ] strut past that aisle for the allergy relief that starts working in as little as 30 minutes and contains the best oral decongestant. live claritin clear, with claritin-d. i do have a relationship. and i can tell you that he s very interested in what we re doing here today. i ve never spoken to him. i don t know anything about him other than he will respect me. i with us in moscow a couple months ago. you know, i own the miss universe pageant. they treated me so great. putin even sent me a president. beautifupresent with a beautiful note. i got to know him very well. we were on 60 minutes. we did 60 minutes together. by the way, not together, together. meaning he was probably shot in moscow and i was shot in new york. i spoke directly and indirectly with president putin who could not have been nicer. i don t know putin. i never met putin. this is not my best friend. just some of the questions and answers over the last few years. two weeks ago the new york times reported there are four people, trump associates who the fbi is closely examined over potential contacts with russian intelligence officials during the campaign season. all four men have strongly denied improper contact with russian officials. although they aren t telling all of them the same story. tonight our own chris hayes introduces us to those four, starting with former trump campaign adviser roger stone. i m wondering how you would characterize your relationship to the president? a friend. a friend of trump, fot. trump associate one, roger stone. long-time gop strategist and self-described dirty trickster with a tattoo of richard nixon on his back and a history of inflammatory and bigoted statements. roger stone is a close ally of conspiracy theorist alex jones and helped arrange trump s 2015 appearance on jones show. well, roger is a good guy. he is a patriot. and believes strongly in that strong nation, a lot of the things that i believe in. reporter: stone left trump s campaign last august. the campaign says he was fired. he says he wasn t. though he remains an informal adviser. after he was named as an fbi target by the times , he insisted to me he has absolutely nothing to do with russia. i have had no contacts from russians or intermediaries for russians. i have no russian clients, no russian communications. it s all a complete sham investigation. reporter: trump associate two, carter page. page spent three years in russia working as an investment banker for merrill lynch. that s him speaking at a business school in moscow last july. a few months before that speech, trump told the washington post that page was part of his foreign policy team. we heard you might be announcing your foreign policy advisory team soon. do you want i could give you some of the names? carter page, ph.d. reporter: now, however, the white house denies that page had a role in the campaign. carter page is an individual who the president-elect does not know and was put on notice months ago by the campaign. reporter: page, who maintains he was part of trump s foreign policy team last week denied covert communications with russia, saying claims to the contrary were planted by the president s enemy. yes, i know a lot of people. but i know a lot of people in china, in africa, in middle east. so you are completely innocent as not charged? this is a complete smear campaign. we cannot make russia an enemy. reporter: trump associate three, michael flynn. the now former national security adviser resigned last month after revelations he had lied to the vice president about his conversations with the russian ambassador to the united states. michael flynn, general flynn is a wonderful man. reporter: while he admits discussing sanctions with the russian ambassador during the transition, flynn, like the others denies speaking to russian intelligence during the campaign. though he was reportedly paid $40,000 for a speech in moscow in 2015 that included a dinner with vladimir putin. in honor of the russian state sponsored tv network rt, where he has made numerous appearances. i m not working for any clients right now other than mr. trump. trump associate four, paul manafort. his former campaign manager who worked as a consultant for russian-aligned former ukrainian president victorian kovacico wi yanukovych. manafort denies knowingly speaking to russian intelligence, but it s not like these people wear badges that say i m a russian intelligence officer. paul manafort was replaced long before the election took place. our friend chris hayes with that reporting to set up this next conversation. with us tonight pulitzer prize winning investigative journalist david kay johnson who has been delving into the trump campaign s financial ties with russia. david, we keep saying this is highly unusual, this is unprecedented for a president at the six-week mark to have this much interest and investigation. but how much broader in your mind should this go? oh, i think we need to thoroughly and openly investigate donald s 30-year involvement with russians and all the money he has received. to channel richard nixon, people have got to know if their president is compromised. and donald has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the russian oligarchs. he just appointed as his commerce secretary wilbur ross, who is the vice-chairman of one of the biggest banks involved in laundering russian money. the other vice-chairman was an appointee of vladimir putin. a disgraced german banker from deutsche bank right after the bank was fined $650 million for russian moneylaundering. all of that was laid out by jim henry in a report at my news service d.c. report that well ahead of everybody else s reporting on this on television. and there is a more here that we haven t look at. the icelandic bank scandal traces back. trump s soho hotel into the icelandic bank zma ii iic scand? there is a lot hey, i m sorry. there is a ring of bad weather along the east coast of the united states. this got to us last night as well. and between us and rochester, we have a band of bad weather so bad that it is interfering with our ability to talk to david cay johnston by satellite. we apologize for that. we ll take another break and see if we can reestablish. at invisalign®, we use the most advanced teeth straightening technology to help you find the next amazing version of yourself. it s time to unleash your secret weapon. it s there, ght under your nose. get to your best smile up to 50% faster. visit invisalign.com to get started today. hi, i m frank. i take movantik for oic, opioid-induced constipation. had a bad back injury, my doctor prescribed opioids which helped with the chronic pain, but backed me up big-time. tried prunes, laxatives, still constipated. had to talk to my doctor. she said, how long you been holding this in? (laughs) that was my movantik moment. my doctor told me that movantik is specifically designed for oic and can help you go more often. don t take movantik if you have a bowel blockage or a history of them. movantik may cause serious side effects, including symptoms of opioid withdrawal, severe stomach pain and/or diarrhea, and tears in the stomach or intestine. tell your doctor about any side effects and about medicines you take. movantik may interact with them causing side effects. why hold it in? have your movantik moment. talk to your doctor about opioid-induced constipation. if you can t afford your medication, astrazeneca may be able to help. introducing new depend silhouette active fit, with a thin design for complete comfort.new dd introducing new depend silhouette active fit, they say move it or lose it and at my age, i m moving more than ever. because getting older is inevitable. but feeling older? that s something i control. get a free sample at depend.com. right up to 2016,ow much of the questions you rsed before we were interrupted by mother nature would be answered? a great deal. we would know where trump is getting money, where he has borrowed money, who he has paid interest to, who his partners are, who the 500 plus business entities he is involved in, what relationships they have. we need to see trump s returns back to the 1990s. the congress can do this under a 1920s law in private. and then we need public hearings about donald s 30 years of involvement with the russians. and there is no one to blame but the american people, correct, that we didn t demand of a candidate for president which what has become the modern political standard, and that is you release your tax returns. absolutely. and here is the question to ask. why are the republicans so eager to not know what s in the tax returns, as you saw with chairman nunez and others talking about these investigations? as i said before, you know, quoting nixon, people have got to know their president is not a crook. david cay johnston, thank you very much for bearing with us, especially with the bad weather right overhead. david, thank you. thank you, brian. we ve been talking after all about donald trump and vladimir putin. trump has praised vladimir putin, but nbc s chief foreign correspondent richard engel talked to a man who says putin is not worthy of that praise. he is with us again from moscow tonight. richard? reporter: well, there is another way of looking at this entire situation, and it is coming up in the conversation that you ve been having tonight with all the guests in that it s all about the money. great fortunes have been made in this country, particularly by a small group of individuals around president vladimir putin. and they have proven time and time again they will g to great lengths to protect that money. communism fell hard in russia. and since it did, business here has been profitable, glamorous, and at times deadly. bill brouter from chicago knows that well. he made and lost a lot of money in russia and is openly accusing the russian government of crimes ranging from robbery to murder. they have the resource of a mafia organization with the resources of one of the most powerful countries in the world. reporter: to understand how and why what he calls the mafia state was born, he says you have to go back to the dying days of the soviet union when everything in russia was suddenly for sale and at a bargain. he moved to moscow and started buying. eventually i went from nothing to running the largest investment fund in the country with $4.5 billion invested in their stock market. reporter: but the age of grab all you can and carry couldn t last forever. it ended when a former secret agent, vladimir putin was appointed president. brouder thought he was the reformer who would save russia from corruption. but pretty soon he says he realized that putin was simply building a power base by enriching loyal oligarchs while crushing others. he was selectively picking off his enemies. reporter: and eventually brouder s name was add dodd the list. in 2005 he landed at a moscow airport and discovered he wasn t welcome in putin s russia anymore. they put me on a plane, deport me back to london and declare me a threat to national security. reporter: did they tell you why? no. . reporter: why do you think? because i expose corruption. reporter: he says his company was soon picked apart. i went out and hired the smartest lawyer i could find, a young man named sergei to help me investigate. reporter: but when the young lawyer started asking too many questions, he was arrested. they put him in cells with no heat, no window panes in december in moscow. so he nearly froze to death. they chained him to a bed and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat him to death. reporter: his horrible death struck a chord in washington, especially among russia hawks like senator john mccain who helped pass the magnitsky act, sanctioning russians who were involved in or profited from the lawyer s death. he showed us neighborhoods where he says russian oligarchs keep their money in high end properties. it s bricks and mortar place where bad guys keep their money. reporter: now he hopes these so-called safe deposit homes can be seized. brouder spends much of his time and money lobbying for sanctions to be placed on russian businesses. he believes the russians will kill to protect their corrupt businesses. do you have any reason to believe that you could be targeted? yeah, i ve received numerous threats. they do poisoning. they do car crashes. they do fake suicides. what they like to do is kill people and have it be plausibly deniable that there was a killing. reporter: russian investigations have concluded that the lawyer magnitsky was not murdered. and president putin said that one would think that no one died in american prisons. brian? of course there is a dichotomy here. the audience in this country and how we view that story you just aired and the audience where you are. where are the russian people on this topic? well, the russiansnow that there is a small circle of oligarchs who are very powerful, who run a lot of businesses, have influence in putin. and there is a different way of looking at this state. if you talk to critics in russia and abroad, they will say you can t think of russia as a normal state, that it is a state that is designed to make money and to protect those fortunes, that it is a state that consumes a kleptocracy has it has been called that also has a foreign policy. now that is mixed in with national interests. that is mixed in with putin s ambitions as well. so i think russians are fairly ambivalent or fairly confused about how to see their foreign policy. they know there is a powerful group of oligarchs willing to go to great means. but they don t know exactly where the oligarchs interests end and where this idea that putin wants to expand greater russia begins. a lot of history there. wish we had time to delve into it. some of it is in not trying to sell magazines, but the current remnick hart in the new yorker. richard engel, thank you as a always. we also asked marcia guesson to be part of the conversation. she is the author of several books on russia, including the man without a face: the unlikely rise of vladimir putin. masha, it was your article in the new york times that shook some of us and got our attention. the part that really got my attention was the roots of fascism, the things that half to happen, the argument that is made and made again and again and disseminated that is the kind of predicate. can you go into that a little bit? so one thing that vladimir putin and donald trump share outside of any conspiracies that may or may not exist is right out there in the open, and that s their attitude toward government, toward democracy and toward the way the countries are constituted. one thing that putin has traffick in harkens back to the 1920s and 30s, and that s the belief that the world is rotten, that everyone is acting in their craven self-interests, that there is no such thing as right and wrong, there are only winners and losers. and that s very much what we hear trump saying. and, you know, when trump responded to fox interview question about vladimir putin being a killer by saying, you know, is this country so innocent? that was such an extraordinary expression of the kind of moral equivalence and the belief that the world is rotten that we ve never seen a president of this country express. let me talk about that or ask you about it in macro term, not a moral term. it s said what putin wants is a world order like we had before world war two, when the big powers, the colonial power, the french, the british, the portuguese, the italians attempting it and the russians and the german, big powers left other big pyres lone. you grab yours, i ll grab mine. we ll let a few new people in the block grab a couple like mussolini can grab some territory. putin really wants that back again. he feels constrained because he is constrained. he would love to gobble up the baltic states again, gobble up in terms of sphere of influence ukraine. but he is constrained by the world order that puts a premium on little countries rights. little countries have right in the general assembly and the sense of right and wrong. that true? he wants to go back to preworld war ii rules of engagement, rules of power. i would disagree a little bit. i think he wants to go to a post world war ii world order. he wants russia to be one of the two great powers. and he wants russia to have the opportunity to expand. his basic instinct is not even so much to grab back everything that the soviet union has, although that would be a good start, but to be expansionist. he is an imperialist. what stands in his wanow? well, what stands in his way now is the european union. right. the new structures. the new structures. and the american commitment to nato. and she wants to see all that come apart? . he wants to see it come apart. he wants to sit down with the new american president and divvy up the world again. he has been quite explicit about that. he has offered he offered this to the obama administration. the bargain of basically helping cooperating on isis in exchange for being allowed to do what he wants to do in europe. masha gessen, on behalf of chris matthews, thank you very much for joining us tonight. that s sobering stuff you deal with. and helping us in our conversation. masha gessen. thank you. after a break here, we ll be back with two experts on national security and defense to talk about just what it is we re watching going on here. america s beverage companies have come together to bring you more ways to help reduce calories from sugar. with more great tasting beverages with less sugar or no sugar at all, smaller portion sizes, clear calorie labels, and signs reminding everyone to think balance before choosing their beverages. we know you care about reducing the sugar in your family s diet, and we re working to support your efforts. more beverage choices. smaller portions. less sugar. balanceus.org. do you think i m gonna crack under pressure or conquer the field? 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that s a position that is much harder to take. keeping secrets. so this is how it s playing out politically tonight. we also have a full front of this waiting for our discussion, and that is national security, the military. with us tonight msnbc military analyst tired four-star u.s. army general barry mccaffrey, west point class of 64, combat vietnam, three purple hearts two, silver star, two dscs. he was inducted into the army ranger hall of fame and served as drug czar in the clinton administration. here with us in new york, msnbc terrorism analyst malcolm nance, 35-year veteran of the trade, including naval intelligence, special operations and homeland security, and the author of a very timely new book called the plot to hack america: how putin s cyberspies and wikileaks tried to steal the 2016 election. gentlemen, welcome to you both. we were talking to remnick earlier. we all go back to an era of a cold war with russia. we go back to things like missiles and aircraft carriers and the kind of base fear we grew up with. this is so different now. in a way, lower ticket, lower tech. for lack of a double authentication on google, foreign power can hack into the american election and then some. so how have the tools of the battle changed? how much have they changed, barry? let me start off by saying i ve spent most of my adult life studying the russians. and it s been a good bet as the soviet union came apart in and out of moscow, kiev, mostly arms control dealings, tremendous admiration for the russian people physics, math, ballet, literature, courageous military. they ve turned into a criminal oligarchy run by this fellow putin who is a very clever politician. they are a major threat to their neighbors and to u.s. interests. they are dangerous. they re in syria. they ve participated in a modest way in murdering a half million people. crimea, they re active inside ukraine. they re a threat to the baltic states. they re actively trying to break up nato, the cornerstone of u.s. national security. and so the whole question of president trump and his relationship with them is unsettling and somewhat unexplicable. so general, is it part nomenclature? do we bear some of the blame? should we have been calling this a form of at least electronic warfare with another state? well, i listen to mr. remnick on that point there is no moral equivalence between the agency operating against these authoritarian dictatorships who are a threat to their neighbors. i don t see any moral equivalence between that and trying to destabilize western europe elections and u.s. elections. so i wouldn t start off with saying so what s the difference? the president s statement we ve got killers too you know is the most unamerican thing i ve ever heard come out of the mouth of a president. we re not like the russians. so i think that s probably the wrong way to get into the question. malcolm nance, same questions to you. well, for the most part, i think that we need to understand what russia is doing strategical strategically. i mean, they are waging a war not just, you know, cyberwar or political warfare. they re waging a war to damage liberal democracy in its entire entirety. and what they re doing is they have figured out using hybrid warfare. that s this global perception management game. which is actually didn t hack just the dnc. it hacked the psyche of the american people. in this election. but relatively low cost as weapons go. no cost as weapons go. and it st, you know, all you do is use the organs of the state which they ve done brilliantly, and now have allies within the united states government and put those allies into office. and by doing that, they now have an axis against democracy. now they can go after france and germany and the netherlands. where there happen to be elections coming up. where there just happen to be elections. they are conducting hackings. they are conducting this global perception management war. okay, allies. fill that out. they all have allies in the u.s. government. how do you know that? do you know that? i think idealogically you can just tell by president trump s statements about that s essentially the getting t ing t dissolution of nato, upending 70 years of stability being an exceptional nation and being a leader in the global democracy movement. but now aligning himself with russia. again, he can t insult he can insult everyone, but he can t insult vladimir putin. and to a certain extent it s almost like a guy who is a gambler in debt who won t talk about his bookie. so something has to be done. that has to be established. it all has to be established. which is why we need an investigation. a lot you ve given us here. absolutely. it s just a theory from the intelligence perspective. the president did defend nato last night. he did. it s really important. we should hold him to it. let me ask barry mccaffrey. barry, you fought author this country. are you still struck by the kind of new language on putin, a president who to be fair has bent over backwards to give vladimir putin the benefit of the doubt in virtually every public utterance i can remember on the subject. clearlyngaging the russians to include mr. putin in an effort to try and reduce a threat to western europe to u.s. national interests is the correct thing to do. but let me also add, this is not all electronic warfare and covert action and little green men. putin has rebuilt fairly high technology forces and is using them actively against the ukraine is self-propelled artillery, ground-to-air missiles as we saw shooting down the dutch airliner. these are active threats to the baltic republics, the poles, they are scared. not just of being on the internet and attacked, but russian military power. so, again, i see the russians as an active national security threat as a major threat to nato which has disarmed itself. the germans came apart. they had 12 divisions, a powerful conventional army in the center of europe. but it s mostly gone. so putin punching way above his weight class is actually intimidating much of western europe. electoral in der spiegel right now about the german military along the same lines. malcolm nance, same question. a lot of our guests tonight have separated these two topics. the fact that our election was hacked and the fact that alarmingly nice things are being said from the top of the government about vladimir putin. do you mush them together? i believe that there is a connection. and it s virtually no one in the intelligence community could not see this and see that there has to be an arc. there has to be something between point a and point b. it s one thing, as the general said, for you to want to reach out to your opponents. at one point russia was part of nato s partnership for peace. we were coming almost allies to a certain extent. and then once vladimir putin consolidated his power, he broke that he has a vision, a vision of european global power playing. and he has a vision for the world, which involves you him, the russia having to have allies. so by, you know, bringing on, you know, his donald trump and giving him the compliments and working him, you have to understand, this was the spy master in chief of russia. yeah. he ran human intelligence operations in west germany. he knows how to manipulate people. now he is a spymaster with atomic weapons and unlimited money. he can use his dominance to influence any weapon he wants and he has done it. malcolm nance, our thanks. barry mccaffrey, our thanks. another breck for us. our coverage continues. someone that makes it easy to find what i want. booking.com gets it. they offer free cancellation, in case i decide to go from kid-friendly to kid-free. now i can start relaxing even before the vacation begins. your vacation is very important. that s why booking.com makes finding the right hotel for the right price easy. visit booking.com now to find out why we re booking.yeah tknock out symptomsstartstoms working instantly to deliver up to 12 hours of ahhhhh get fast relief with vicks sinex. nitrites or artificial ham has preservatives.tes, now it s good for us all. like those who like. sweet those who prefer heat. sfx - a breath of air and those who just love meat. oscar mayer deli fresh. sweet! saying he was on the committee asking those questions, saying he should recuse himself. but nancy pelosi now saying he should resign. this is based on two contacts with the russians that were heretofore not disclosed. and the fact that he was asked about it not only not disclosed, he was asked about it and said he had no contact with russians. again two, newspaper stories have come out and kind of dominated our broadcast tonight. which was all going to be on the topic of things russia any. along the way, we have talked to a number of guests, all of them experts in their field. all of them among our very best correspondents and reporters, from richard engel in moscow here to new york. so our thanks to everyone for taking part in this. obviously, a story that took on new urgency and new currency while we were in the midst of discussing it tonight. and as i said, straight ahead, we will air our regular broadcast for tonight of the 11th hour dominated again by
capricious, ash tear or made sense. the supreme court in boumedin struck it down saying it was not an adequate substitute for habeas. that s correct, senator. your role was to find out a way to engage congress on the detainee treatment because it was your view that congress, being involved, would strengthen the president s hand? as a lawyer? yes. i was not a policymaker but i did advise. as a lawyer. as did many others. there were very other many fine lawyers, too, senator, who advised the administration that engaging congress would be a good idea, because we had read our youngstown and our justice jackson. any lawyer i think who understands this area of the law would suggest the president is stronger when he has congressional support. the signing statement. is it fair to say there was a conflict between the vice president s office and other parts of the bush administration about what the signing statement should say or look like? that s my recollection, and that s about all i can recall. i remember it very well because vice president cheney s signing statement was going to be we have an inherent authority to do whatever we think we need to do and there were a lot of other people saying no, you don t have the authority just to set aside a law. you have to have a reason to object to it. so i just want the public to understand that, when it comes to this man, i ve seen him in action, in very complicated emotional matters, where we had one group of people who could give a damn about the terrorist and other people who wanted to criminalize what i thought was a real world fight and we tried to find thatide ound, and in a 5-4 decision, t supreme court struck down my proposal, and we fixed it later with a huge bipartisan vote, so that every enemy combatant today has a habeas proceeding where the government has to prove you re an enemy combatant and if they reach that conclusion you can be held under the law of war as long as you re a threat to our nation. is that a fair summary of where we re at? that s my understanding, senator. along the way we, your legislation did prevail in the d.c. circuit and the supreme court. of course it was a close call, it was 5-4 as i recall. that proves that five people can be wrong. whul i disagree i certainly respect the court s decision. you re not going to get me to comment on that neither. not even going to try. the bottom line here is there will be more legislation coming regarding the role of the government and gathering information, but from sort of a civics point of view, which senator sass is going to take you through, there s a difference between the law of war and domestic criminal law. do you agree with that? yes, senator. that a common criminal, the goal of the law is to prosecute a crime that one individual or group committed against another individual or groups. that s correct? that s right. the law of war is about winning the war? well, senator, there are how you fight the war there are as you know, rules about that, too. right. laws about that. yes and we re fighting an enemy who has no rules that would do anything, and i ve been in the camp i don t want to be like them, i this i that s their weakness and the strongest thing we could do is stand up for a process that stood the test of time, which is intelligence gathering and a humane way, because they would cut our heads off doesn t make us weak because tut the heads off. it actually mak us stronger over the arc of time, so that s my commercial about that. so there will be more litigat n litigation, and there nare no bd guys or girls when it comes to challenging precedent, do you agree people have a right to do that. to challenge precedent? yes. every person is allowed to come to court to bring whatever claim they have. that s how our system works. that s how brown versus board of education came about. exactly right. let s talk about roe v. wade. what is the holding of roe v. wade, in 30 seconds? [ laughter ] the holding of roe versus wade in 30 seconds, senator, is that a woman has a right to an abortion. it developed a trimester scheme in roe that specified when the state interests and when the women s interests tend to prevail. okay. so let me just break it down. the court said that there is a right to privacy, that the government can t interfere with that right in the first trimester. beyond the first trimester, the government has more interest as the baby develops, is that fair to say? that was the scheme set forth. i think medical viability was the test that the court used. well, that s the test that the court came around and applied in casey, in 1992. okay. and viability became more of the touchstone rather than a rigid is it fair to say that medical viability 1992 may be different than it is in 2022 medically? senator, i m not a scientist or a doctor. i would suggest that medical viability may change as science progresses, so you may have people coming in and saying in light of scientific medical changes, let s look at when medical viability occurs. that s one example of litigation that may come before you. i have legislation that says that 20 weeks, the unborn child is able to feel excruciating pain and the theory of the legislation is that the state has a compelling interest to protect an unborn child from excruciating pain, which is caused by an abortion. i m not asking you to agree with my legislation. i am saying that i am developing, we re one of seven nations that allow wholesale on demand unlimited abortion at 20 weeks, the fifth month of pregnancy. i d like to get out of that club, but we re going to ha a debate in this body, in the house, about whether or not we want to change the law to give an unborn child protection against excruciating pain at 20 weeks, because you can, the standard medically is that if you operate on an unborn child at 20 weeks the medical protocols are such that you have to provide anesthesia because you don t want to hurt the child in the process of trying to save the child. so medical practice is such when you operate on an unborn child at 20 weeks, which you can do, you have to apply anesthesia and my theory is let s look at it the other way, should you allow an abortion on demand of a child that can feel excruciating pain, is that what we want to be as a nation? does that run afoul of roe v. wade. i want to make the argument there is a compelling state interest at that stage of the pregnancy to protect the child against death that is going to be excruciatingly painful. you don t have to say a word. i m just letting everybody know that if this legislation passes, it will be challenged before you, and you will have to look at a new theory of how the state could protect the unborn, and here s what i think. you will read the briefs, look at the facts and make a decision. am i fair to conclude that? senator, i can promise you no more than that and i guarantee you no less than that, in every single case that comes before me no matter what the subject matter. this is a situation that may develop over time because 70% of the american people side with me on the idea that at 0 weeks we should not be in the club of seven nations that allow abortion on demand because that s in the fifth month and that doesn t make us a better nation. there will be people on the other side saying no, that s an emotion of roe and it will go to the court, maybe if it ever passes here and the only reason i mention this is that everybody who wants to challenge whatever in court deserves a person like you. person like you, no matter what pressures are plied to you, will say over and over again, i want to hear what both sides have to say, i want to read their legal arguments, look at the facts and i will decide. that to me is reassuring and that s exactly the same answer i got from sotomayor and kagan. no more, no less, and we can talk forever about what you may or may not do. if you do anything different than that, i think you d be unworthy of the job. now, about what s going on in the country with president trump whether you like him or you don t he is president, but you have said several times that he is not above the law. is that correct? yes, senator. you told senator leahy if there was a law passed a muslim could not serve in the military you believe based on current law that would be an illegal act. senator, yes, i see that having all sorts of constitutional problems under current law. so if we have laws on the book that prevent waterboarding, do you agree with me that the detainee treatment act prevents waterboarding? yes, senator, that s my recollection of it firmly. so in case president trump is didn t agree with president obama, but i understood why he picked sotomayor and kagan, and i hope you can understand why president trump picked neil gorsuch, and hope you ll be happy with that, because i am. thank you, senator. we will recess until 12:45. all right, there you heard it, with a joke about who else president trump might have chosen, whether or not it would be a television judge or a tv figure. nonetheless, he has chosen neil gorsuch of the state of colorado, who has gotten along very well during the morning session. remember the ground rules here. every senator gets 30 minutes of questioning, so this is going to take hours more to spool out. here we are 12:12 eastern time, in what is normally andrea mitchell s dayside shift. we ll be getting to andrea, she s among our guests standing by to talk to us about what we ve witnessed. ari melber from the legal side of things has been watching along with us. ari, i think the expression in english is it s tough to lay a glove on this guy. i didn t see a single glove laid on him. he performed himself admirably, calmly at almost all times and with detail, but never much candor about his views, which many experts would say he s not supposed to. anyone who has been watching your coverage, brian, over this morning would know this was a highly substantive discussion. we ve talked a lot about what s abnormal in washington these days and the fbi unusual hearing yesterday. this was a normal and even proper vetting of a potential supreme court nominee. the issues i count that were discussed, the travel ban, guns, torture, abortion, federal power, money in politics, guantanamo, obamacare, and a broader sort of roving discussion of judicial if the senate in fact does vote on neil gorsuch and he is confirmed as mitch mcconnell pledged to do by april 7th, chuck grassley, the chairman of the committee says maybe april 3rd, then gorsuch would be on the court in time to hear the last couple of weeks of oral argument at the end of april, but he could also be there theoretically in time to hear an appeal of the president s executive order on immigration, if it gets to the supreme court. one of the hawaii cases, one of the two cases that, in which judges have said that the president s order is unconstitutional is from hawaii. the chief lawyer who argued that case is neil catchall, a former chief solicitor in the obama administration, solicitor general s office. he s also the same one who introduced and glowingly praised neil gorsuch yesterday. so it s a small town in that sense. pete williams in our washington bureau, watching all of these various backs and forths with us, the confirmation hearings of judge gorsuch. we want to bring back jennifer palmie palmieri, former communications director for hillary clinton, who has been very patient waiting to come back on the air with us. jennifer, you wanted to talk about something that is actually a very generous and magnanimous view that you hold about the campaign that you lost to, the trump presidential campaign, specifically the way they took on judicial nominations. yes, i do. early on in the hearing, it was brute up that judge gorsuch was on a list of potential nominees that the trump campaign put out over the summer, examples of who he would appoint to the supreme court and i very much remember that day, because we knew and the clinton campaign just how potent an issue the supreme court is for a conservative for evangelical voters and trump promised judge gorsuch he s never spoke within donald trump about abortion, but trump promised many times that he would only appoint somebody who would overturn roe v. wade and this issue is so important, i think it probably put him over the top and pennsylvania, wisconsin, michigan, states that clinton narrowly lost that passion is enough to put it over the top. i remember looking at polls after that letter came out, two times, with the list of judges that he would appoint and again trump promised to only appoint somebody who would overtun roe v. wade and we saw republicans come home the first time it didn t sustain and over the summer and he lost evangelical voters. in the end we saw that start to close after that third debate. we really think it was about the supreme court. i think it s more important to his base that he gets judge gorsuch confirmed because he believes he will overturn roe v. wade, a vote to do so, than it is to get health care done. that s how strongly people feel about it. jen, that s interesting. did you think that is something they owned? was there a reciprocal move you could have made, even if hindsight, or did you just think this was kind of their lane and territory they had cleared out? yes. and there was nothing you could do to match it? you know, we had the same passion on our side, right? we had the same passion of people who want to, that are concerned about appointing a justice that would do anything that would undernine roe v. wade so it s not as if you don t see the passion for us, but i think on our side it was the combination particularly in those states, michigan, wisconsin and pennsylvania to have a lot of catholic voters, a lot of evangelical voters swle. combination of that plus what happened with the comey letter, what happened with wikileaks and the emails that ate up so much of our press time, those factors combined ultimately cost us this election, but i don t think that people appreciate just how important it is to his standing that he get this confirmation through with his own supporters, and also that i take judge gorsuch at his word he didn t talk to trump about this view about his views about roe v. wade but as my twitter feed during the hearing has shown, and certainly the talking points are being sent to me by democrats on the hill, reminding everyone the heritage foundation signed off on this, on judge gorsuch as well as part of that letter. no one would do that if they didn t think they could count on his views to be where they want them to be when it comes to women s reproductive rights. so far certainly in a television era he has been centralcasting federal judge candidate for the supreme court. jennifer palmieri former xhoun ki communications director for hillary clinton thank you for your patience and joining us on the air. we ll fit a break in. we have many, many more guests waiting to share with us their opinion of how this morning session went, day two, but entering the heart of the order, where the confirmation hearing for judge neil gorsuch is concerned. right back after this. he didn t ask you to overall roe v. wade? no, sir. what would you have done if he had asked? senator, i would have walked out the door. it s not what judges do. okay, i don t do it at that end of pennsylvania avenue, and they shouldn t do it at this end either, rantfully. respectfully. ffect. they also know you need to get your annual check-up. ffect. now prepare for your check-up with one touch using the mycigna app, where you can find a doctor in your plan s network to save money, manage your health and more. need to be thorough. i just want to find a used car start at the new carfax.com show me used trucks with one owner. pretty cool. 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[kids cheering] [kids screaming] call the clown! parents aren t perfect but then they make us kraft mac & cheese and everything s good again. more doing chores for dad per roll more earning something you love per roll bounty is more absorbent, so the roll can last 50% longer than the leading ordinary brand. so you get more life per roll. bounty, the quicker picker upper hearings, and lord knows at this pace what tomorrow will bring. kasie hunt was on capitol hill for the president s comings and goings and remains there, and kasie, you mentioned appropriately before the meeting that members of the house have their problems with leakage and what leakage has come out of the president s session? we ve had a number of republicans we talked to over the course of the morning about what the president said behind closed doors. he actually did not spend the majority of his time talking about health care. he kind of ran through as he is want to do, he talked about his crowd size in louisville last night, he did tie that in to health care. if we don t get this done we re not going to have crowds like that. he ticked througthe other things and says he s done in the initial days of his administration, and he also said on health care i think somewhat critically that he thinks that many of these republicans would face primary challenges if they vote no on this legislation, that this is their historic chance to repeal and replace obamacare to follow through on that critical campaign promise. brian there s still and one of the most important things around this visit for house leadership and for republicans is about the optics. it s about feeling like the president is taking the time to actually come up from the white house to capitol hill, doesn t happen very often, usually works the other way, and to stye them yes, this is what i am behind, because the reality is a lot of these members are going to have potential political problems if they vote in favor of this bill. that s why you re seeing in particular moderate republicans who might actually be in swing districts, if the president s approval rating is down where it is he s got all of these issues with the fbi hanging over his head, what is necessarily the reason why you would walk the political plank as tom cotton put it, over in the senate, to do this on behalf of the president or on behalf of leadership. so the reality here, this is paul ryan s bill but going to be on president trump to close the deal here, and i think if they can t get this done on thursday, it goes to the floor and fails, i think that would be an incredible difficult moment for both the president and for the leadership here, even if they simply full back, because they know they don t have the votes, that would be a serious blow to his agenda so there s quite a bit at stake going into the end of this week, brian. kasie hunt up on the hill where i should specify i was talking about people leaking details of meetings. kasie, thanks. let s go to andrea mitchell who is usually on the air this hour, every day on this very network and andrea, such an interesting two-day period of hearings. yes. here we are on live coverage in our in studio inevitable game of who does he look like. we have decided gorsuch is somewhere between pete carroll and tom bergeron. yesterday we saw mr. comey playing the role of eliott ness. is a neck-snapping transition and yet as casey reminds us, we ve got real legislation coming up before this week is out in what is only the early stages still of this trump administration. exactly, and the comey testimony yesterday, brian, was so overwhelming in its impact. its political impact. it s going to affect health care. it s going to affect the thursday vote potentially. it s going to be now that we know there has been since july a counter intelligence investigation that could reach all the way to the white house. it involves the trump campaign, trump associates, whether or not there was collusion with the kremlin, and the relationship of this administration with moscow, which is another issue i want to get to in just a moment, and that can affect everything. so despite the i think ham-handed attempts by the white house to push back against it and te my reality the grownups on the hill in both parties know that this say very big deal and this will not be over any time soon. it could be a cloud over this white house for months, if not years, because these counter intelligence investigations go for a long time, as comey said it s only just getting started and at the very moment when the question of the u.s. and this administration s relationship with russia is front and center, as you first reported last night on the 11th hour, we get word that the new secretary of state is not going to go to nato. this only exacerbates the very damaging meeting with chancellor merkel on friday, and how badly that went. the fact that the president was questioning germany s commitment to nato, which is front and center. she is the strongest economic and military partner we have. the fact as you also were interviewing former ambassador from uk, peter west last night and he was talking about how awkward the relationship is with britain because of the white house pushback suggesting that false claim of a wiretap by the president against former president obama could have originated in british intelligence, not true. no apology offered or received. so therere a lot of issues here and today to return to gore sufficie, i think that this has been a slam dunk in terms of his initial q&as. you ll see some of the more intensive questioning but they have not as you put it laid a glove on him. senator feinstein and senator grassley both under some pressure, certainly the democrats under a lot of pressure because of what happened with merritt garland, and they are getting criticized by the, you know, left wing of the party for not going after him harder but they have not been able to, you know, shake this guy. he is obviously the consummate witness and a good performer in the hot seat there. what senator feinstein was particularly going after his role in the justice department in the bush white house when the torture issues were up, because she was the chairman of senate intelligence and the sponsor of that torture report, which was so controversial, which the cia so deeply resented, and he in answer to her question said that he was on the gentler side of the advisories as to how to roll back the mccain torture guidelines, so that in his writings as a lawyer in the justice department, are very much going to be examined here by feinstein, who as you know the ranking democrat on this committee, but so far, he has not been shaken. andrea mitchell in washington, stand by. i want to bring in someone you and i both know and that is know ma tottenberg of npr fame and know that tottenberg fame. hi, guys. hey. how about andrea s last comment there, that this judge is the consummate witness, and ours that he is out of central casting? he certainly looks the part and they haven t been able to get much out of him, but i would have to say that i think he s not a complete natural. he seems extremely practiced to me, and that isn t going to hurt him. what would hurt him is if he actually answered some of these questions. it s given the democrats a platform to go after republicans, not just about the garland nomination, but trump, the way trump put together his list, farming it out to two conservative organizations to help to make up the list for him instead of doing it himself essentially, and having his own justice department or his own advisers do it, so i don t think it s totally worthless for democrats but they don t have the votes. it s just really simple. they don t have the votes. nina, going back, looking at the modern era of the court, let s go as far back as say suitor or brennan or even justice white, whose name was already invoked this morning. there have been ideologs and non-ideologs, people who have changed before our eyes organically, famously, justice brennan was, eisenhower s greatest regret as president. where do you put judge gorsuch on the spectrum of ideologues, people who have a fixed north star before arriving on the court? i actually don t know. if you look at his society so to speak, his mother, his friends, how he got on this list, you d have to say he s going to be a very, very conservative judge, but he is a very well respected judge also, and it s very different to be on an appeals court where you re carrying out the law as established by the supreme court, and when you have the chance to change it. he was, as i said, a little disingenuous in some of his answers today. for example, when he was, as andrea pointed out, when he was asked about some of the, his memoranda and the torture memo thing and he said i haven t seen that. they ve been in the newspapers. clearly his aides, his handlers have that material, so it can t be that he hasn t seen that material. he also said when asked about for example campaign finance law, he said that there was a lot of room to regulate expenditures and there really, i have to say as somebody who reads these opinions, i think the supreme court has said congress cannot regulate expenditures and cannot even really define corruption, what is corruption beyond what is almost a bribe, a quit pro we could, so i think he softened what the law in fact it in order not to answer some things directly. but he did it skillfully, and i don t know the answer to your question, brian. is he an ideologue, how much, i have no idea. that s probably a good thing, know ta totenburg you have by my count no reason to think senator grassley will be wrong you have six minutes to get back downstairs from the sky box into your seat in the hearing room. thank you so much. we love havingou and you were very good patient waiting for us. thank you. nina totenberg of npr. we ll be back and rejoin the course of the hearing live in and progress right after this. i have no difficulty ruling against or for any party base other than based on what the law and the facts in the particular case require. there s no such thing as a republican judge or a democratic judge. we just have judges. in in country. i leave all the other stuff at home. and i make a decision based on the facts and the law. 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no. of course not. asked and answered as they say in courtroom law. we are back and we ll be going back in the hearing room for the confirmation hearing of judge gorsuch to the supreme court. among our guests who have been so patient and waiting for all this testimony, two commercial breaks and all of our talking is former rnc chairman michael steele. mr. chairman i d love to what you what i asked know ta totenberg. how much of an ideologue do you find judge gorsuch? not much. he doesn t wear it on his sleeve, one of the strengths going into this and why it s going to be as we ve seen so far and probably for the remainder of the hearing so difficult for democrats to lay a glove on him. he understands where that bright line test is for a judicial nominee, in answering the types of questions that would project into the future how he would decide a case or reflect back on the past what he thinks of past jurispruden jurisprudence. so he s found that sweet spot anwearing it comfortably, if you will and i think the rest of the afternoon will be interesting to see how effective the democrats can be at getting close to pushing some buttons with the judge. where real politics are concerned, michael, it would take a lot, correct? yes. to turn this man away. it would be. i mean, i ve said for some time now, brian, this is not the hill the democrats want to have this fight on. this judicial nomination by president trump changes nothing on the court. the ideological, philosophical balance, if you will, remains the same. the real test for both parties will come in a subsequent future nomination if that should ever happen but this right now is more for democrats about merritt garland than it is about judge gorsuch and that s what animates the base of the democrats politically and puts democrats in the senate on the stick trying to figure out how do we navigate this. david suitor, people change. they change organically. this is a 49-year-old father of two teenage daughters who lives in a culturally liberal part of the country in boulder, colorado. people just change. they do. if you notice the judges who changed on the court are republican nominated judges so the reality of it is, in the end of it we don t know what we re ultimately going to get with this judge, as a justice, and that we ll see probably 10, 12 years from now. michael steele, thank you very much. into the hearing room we go, senator kur bin of illinois starting the questioning. we ll be back during breaks. you weren t involved in the drafting of the mccain section of the bill on the treatment amendment. senator, that wouldn t fit quite with my recollection. please. my re-election is senator mccape and senator graham wrote the legislation with input from the department of defense and the department of justice and a whole lot of others besides. and i was one voice among a great many and that in terms of when it was struck down, handon held the detainee treatment act only applied prospectively and then several years later, gosh, i want to say it was 2008 maybe the court came back around in boumedin. what i m driving at is the mccain section relative to cruel inhuman and degrading treatment and i assume or i hope you ve had a chance to glance at the emails that senator feinstein gave you. you said in your email, you wanted a signing statement to the effect that the view is mccain is best read as essentially codifying existing interrogation policies. what interrogation policies did you think the mccain amendment was essentially codifying? senator, i haven t had a chance to look at that. sorry, i scarfed down a sandwich over the break and i d be happy to read it, but i m not sure what i can answer you here sitting off the top of my head. it s been, it was 12 years ago and i m doing the best i can with my recollection. my recollection it i m trying to get this leap from your of this email i understand over 100,000 pages of emails. exactly. i think the department of justice produced something like 200,000 pages of stuff. i will concede that point, but your lack of memory at the moment and contrast that with the mccain bill, nt that you which i supported outlawed waterboarding. waterboarding was still happening and you were saying in your email i want to essentially codify existin interrogation policy. there s an inconsistency there whh we have to wait until the second round to resolve. i okay. okay. let me read something to you and ask you for reaction is a statement that was made about eight days ago by a congressman named steve king of iowa, and here s what he said. you cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else s babies. you got to keep your birth rate up and you need to teach your children your values and doing so you can grow your population, you can strengthen your culture, you can strengthen your way of life. the reaction to that statement was overwhelming. civil rights leader congressman john lewis called it racist. the republican house speaker paul ryan said he clearly disagreed with king s comments, went on to say the speaker clearly disagrees and believes america s long history of inclusiveness is one of its great strengths. what would your reactionstateme? senator, i can talk about my record, and i can tell you that as a federal judge, when a defendant comes to court with an allegation that the sentencing judgents based on his ethnic iity, me an my colleagues, my colleagues and i have removed that judge from the case. i can tell you that, when an immigration lawyer fails to provide economy counsel time and time again, i ve sent him to the bar for discipline. i can tell you when it comes to access to justice, i ve written on this topic, i ve worked on this topic for the last six years, together with many wonderful people on the rules committee, trying to make our civil litigation system cheaper and faster, because it takes too long for people to exercise their seventh amendment liberties and i can tell you together with my colleagues, we found the level of representation of inmates on death row was unacceptable in our circuit, a whole bunch of us, i can t too much credit, tried to do something about it. i can tell you that when prisoners come to court pro se handwritten complaints and something that might be meritorious in them, a point re. can you describe your relationship with professor john fennis? sure, he was my dissertation supervisor. when did you first meet him? hmm, whenever i went to oxford, so it would have been 199 2? well, it could have been 2 or 3, somewhere in there. and what was his relationship with you or you with him? he was my dissertation supervisor, and i would describe that as a relationship between teacher and student, and he was a very generous teacher, particularly generous with his red ink on my papers. i remember sitting next to the fire in his ok fordoffice, something out of harry potter and he always had a coal fireplace burning and sometimes whether i was being raked over the coals. he did not let an argument that i was working on go unchallenged from any direction. so that was over 20 years ago that you first met him? whatever it is, it is, yes. do you still have a friendship, a relationship with him? i, last time i saw him, gosh, when he i know i saw him when he retired, and there was a party held in his honor, and i remember seeing him then and that was a couple years ago. did he know you were from it must have at some point come out in our conversations, i don t know. and do you recall saying some words of gratitude for his help in writing your book? he did not write my book, senator. he did not help write my book. i wrote my book and certainly expressed gratitude to my dissertation supervisor in a book that s basically my dissertation. i think you were quoted as saying in 2006, you thanked fennis for his kind support through draft after draft. and there were a lot of drafts, senator. i mean, golly, that was a very tough degree. that was the most rigorous academic experience of my life, and i had to pass not just him, but an internal examiner and an external examiner, and that was hard. that was hard. in 2011, when notre dame ran a symposium to celebte his work, yo recall your study under him and you said it was a time when legal giants roamed among oxford spires. oh, yeah, yeah. you called him one of the great scholars. well, and oxford has a stable and it s part of the reason why it was such a privilege. here is a kid from colorado and i got a scholarship to go to oxford. i d never been to england, to europe before and at oxford at that time, john fennis, joe razz, ronald dworkin, h.l.a. hart was still alive then. i ll read a couple of statements from professor fennis. in 2009 he wrote about england s population, he said england s population had largely given up bearing children at a rate consistent with their community s medium term survi l survival. he warned they were on a path to quote their own replacement as a people by other people s more or less regardless of the incomers acompassibility of psychology, culture, religion, political ideas or visions or the worth or viciousness of those ideas and ambition answer went on to say european states in the early 21st century move into a trajectory of demographic and cultural decay, population transfer and replacement by a kind of reversed colonization. had you ever reared that before? nope. had you heard it before? no, not to my recollection. could y distinguish with what he said and what congressman steve king said? senator i m not here to answer for mr. king or professor fennis. i m talking about your reaction to these things. do you feel that what professor fennis wrote about purity of culture and such is something that we should condemn or congratula congratulate? senator, before i expressed any view on that i d want to read it and i d want to read it from brieginning to end, not an excerpt and senator, i ve had a lot of professors. i ve been blessed with some wonderful professors, and i didn t agree with everything they said, and i wouldn t expect them to agree with everything i ve said. let me ask you this specific one. it was 1993, and you were at oxford and this is when i believe you first met this professor. professor fennis was tapped by the then colorado solicitor general timothy timkovich to help defend a 1992 state constitutional amendment that broadly restricted the state from protecting gay, lesbian and bisexual people from discrimination. during the course of the deposition, which you gave in support of that effort, fennis argued that anti-pathy toward lgbt people, specifically toward gay sex was rooted not just in religious tradition, western law, and society at large. he referred to homosexuality as beastality, in the course of this as well. were you aware of that? senator, i know he testified in the case. i can t say sitting here i recall specifics of his testimony or that he gav a deposition i guess the reason i m raising this is, this is a man who apparently had an impact on your life, certainly your academic life, and i m trying to figure out where we can parse his views from your views, what impact he had on you as a student, what impact he has on you today with his views. well i guess, senator, i think the best evidence is what i ve written. i ve written over, gosh, written or joined over 6 million words as a federal appellate judge. i ve written a couple of books. i ve been a lawyer and a judge for 25 or 30 years. that s my record, and i guess i d ask you to respectfully to look at my credentials and my record and some of the examples i ve given you are from my record about the capital habeas work, about the access to justice. i ve spoken about overcriminalization publicly. those are things i ve done, senator. and what about lgbtq individuals? well, senator, there are, what about them? the point i made is they re people. and you know of course but what you said earlier was that you have a record of speaking out, standing up for those minorities who you believe are not being treated fairly. can you point to statements or cases you ve ruled on relative to that class? senator, i ve tried to treat each case and each person as a person, not a this kind of person, not a that kind of person, a person, equal justice under law. it is a radical promise in the history of mankind. does that refer to sexual orientation as well? the supreme court of the united states has held that single sex marriage is protected by the constitution. judge, would you agree that if an employer were to ask female job applicants about their family plans, but not male applicants, that would be evidence of sex discrimination prohibited by title seven of the civil right act? i d agree with you it s highly inappropriate. you don t believe it s prohibited? senator, it sounds like a potential hypothetical case that might be a case for controversy i might have to decide and i wouldn t want to prejudge it sitting here at the confirmation table. i can tell you it would be inappropriate. inappropriate. do you believe there are ever situations where the cost to an employer of maternity leave can justify an employer asking only