in the russia scandal. and of course there s a dividing line between the editorial page of a newspaper and the news division of a newspaper, but it s hard not to notice that hard news and investigative journalists and particularly national security specialist journalists at the wall street journal have also been flying the coop in unusual numbers recently. just this week the wall street journal lost this guy, you recognize him, from national reporting that has been of intense interest, particularly on the russia scandal. this is shane harris. national security reporter at the wall street journal . he s the one who broke that bombshell story about peter smith, the republican activist who actually contacted russian hackers during the campaign to try to get dirt on hillary clinton from the hackers to help the trump campaign. you ll also remember that peter smith mysteriously committed suicide not long after talking to shane harris for that story. well, the wall street journal just lost shane harris. the journal this week also lost paul s son who s the one who broke that remarkable story
vladimir putin. a big chunk of their editorial staff we now know fled that paper in the wake of its turn towards supporting trump, and it may or may not be related but we are also watching them lose a ton of reporting fire power from the news side. now that we know that they spiked a second followup editorial piece on trump and his mafia ties after that really good first one, i m sort of desperate to know what was in that piece that they spiked, that they never ran. most mafia-related stories about the trump organization and donald trump feature some amount of involvement from this man. this was felix sater s trump organization business card, senior adviser to donald trump. in the year 2000 he was one of a dozen people arrested in a mafia high professional stock high profile stock scam. this got a lot of attention at the time because it was a gigantic swindle, about a $40 million scam that involved a lot of people. the fbi, federal prosecutors
after he pled guilty, they did not lock him up. in fact, they didn t even sentence him after his guilty plea for more than ten years. they arrested him, they secured his cooperation, they got him to plead guilty to something but then instead of sentencing him for that guilty plea, instead of putting him in prison for that guilty plea, they turned him back out into the wild. they let him go back into new york city so he could become an informant for the government about organized crime. he did that work for, again, more than ten years. he actually ended up becoming a side bar minor controversy during the confirmation hearings for attorney general loretta lynch because she had been the prosecutor in brooklyn who had brought that big mob case, and who had overseen this case, but for that decade, while prosecutors left him out there
in the wild, collecting information, and giving the government information about the workings of the mob, what he was doing during that decade was real estate deals for the trump organization. that was his day job while he was a mob informant for the government. he worked with the trump organization on a trump tower project for phoenix, arizona that never ended up getting built. he worked with the trump organization on a trump tower in ft. lauderdale that did get built but then foreclosed. and somewhat famously, felix sater, this ex-con mob informant, he also worked on putting the financing together for the trump soho city which this week dropped the name trump off the front of the building. it opened in 2008. in 2010 we know felix sater was still working for the trump organization as a senior adviser to donald trump. but thats a problem, because he s an ex-con, served time in prison before the whole stock scandal thing for which he got arrested. in the financial industry and in
the real estate business it can be legally dicey to have somebody who s a convicted felon involved in any of your business dealings. felix sater is a convicted felon and he s very much involved in the trump organization and his business dealings. in november 2013, in a deposition, donald trump played down any connections he might have with felix sater and certainly claimed not to have any knowledge of felix sater being connected to organized crime. i don t think he was connected to the mafia. he got into a bar room fight. in fact, he was supposedly very close to the government of the united states as a witness or something, but i don t think he was connected to the mafia. about how many times have you conversed with mr. sater? over the years? over the years. if you could estimate. not many. not many? if he were sitting in the room right now, i really wouldn t know what he looked like. 2013 donald trump proclaiming that his senior adviser, he
wouldn t know what he looked like. that was 2013. by 2015 donald trump apparently was refreshed because he came to know him again because we now know that in october 2015 felix sater was working with the trump organization once again, this time to put together the financing and approvals necessary to build a trump tower in moscow. donald trump insisted throughout the campaign that he had no current and no pending business deals with russia. we now know despite those denials he and the trump organization were pursuing what would have been one of the biggest real estate deals of his life. donald trump himself in october 2015 signed a letter of intent to pursue a trump tower in moscow. this is a project that was spearheaded by trump organization lawyer michael cohen and by felix sater. the new york times obtained felix sater s e-mails about the trump tower moscow project this past august and they showed that in addition to the exciting
financial prospects for this trump tower in moscow, for some reason felix sater thought it would be a big political payoff too. he believed if that project, that real estate tower in moscow, if it got off the ground it would have great political consequences for donald trump. he wrote to trump organization lawyer michael cohen, quote, our boy can become president of the usa and we can engineer it. i will get all of putin s team to buy in on this. i will manage this process. i will get putin on this program and we will get donald elected. what s the connection between trump getting elected president and some big real estate deal in moscow? i don t know, hard to say. why on earth would the president of russia be involved either in a real estate deal or in making trump president or something that connects the two? no idea. the trump organization s defense about its ties to felix sater over the years is that sometimes they deny they have any idea who he is.
he must have made that business card at the kinko s. do they still have kinko s? they either say we don t know who he is when they do have to acknowledge their dealings with him, they tend to dismiss him as somebody who brags a lot, maybe he shouldn t be believed. to that point, my favorite detail in all the felix sater mob russia trump reporting is when felix sater bragged to trump organization lawyer michael cohen that he really could get this trump tower moscow thing off the ground and that he really could get putin on board, and that he thereby could get trump connected. in making these connections and writing it out in e-mails that we can read in the new york times, he just bragged about how much juice he had to make these connections and do this kind of stuff in russia. he said, quote, michael, i arranged for ivanka to sit in putin s private chair at his desk and office in the kremlin. i know how to play it. we will get this done. so the new york times obtains
that e-mail and they contact ivanka trump to find out if what felix sater said about her was true. her response to the times was that, yes, she in fact had gone to moscow with felix sater. she said she had taken, quote, a brief tour of red square and the kremlin and took care to insist she was only there as a tourist, she said, quote, it is possible she sat in mr. putin s chair. it s possible. who among us can say whether or not for sure we ve sat in putin s chair? this could be his chair, i don t know. so if you re interested in the trump campaign and its connections to russia, if you re interested in the scandal and figuring out if there was anything done between the trump organization and russia that might have had some later connection to what happened between russia and the presidential election, if you are trying to figure that stuff out, felix sater would be a pretty good guy to talk to.
even if he is a little nutty, he s right there in the bull s eye in terms of figuring this story out. well, here s the amazing thing. two days ago, wednesday of this week, the house intelligence committee finally decided that maybe we should do an interview with felix sater while we re investigating this russia thing. they scheduled it during the house vote on the tax bill and they scheduled it not in washington d.c. that means when it came time finally to talk to this incredibly central, interesting figure with all sorts of long, lurid, fascinating criminal organized crime, russia, trump, real estate history, the republican led house intelligence committee decided that that witness should be interviewed specifically at a time and place where no member of congress could attend the interview. they had staff do the interview instead and they had it happen out of state. we know for sure that no members of congress went to the interview. not because they ll tell us but because we have the roll call
vote for the house when they were voting on the tax bill that day and you can see from the time stamp that it happened at 12:55 p.m. that s when they finalized the vote. there were seven members of the house who weren t present and didn t vote on the tax bill but none are members of the intelligence committee. all the intelligence committee members were there in person for that tax vote, so we know they weren t in new york interviewing felix sater. there was a second vote at 6:47 p.m. there were a total of 11 members of the house who didn t cast a vote. it was the seven who missed in the morning plus four more. none who missed that vote were members of the intelligence committee either. all intelligence committee members were present and voted then too. that means none of them, republican or democrat, were in new york interviewing felix sater. they were all in washington. no members of congress get to interview felix. how come he gets that privilege? why do that particular interview with that particular witness in a way that no member of congress could go to?
turns out he is not the only one and the next one s even better. that s next. stay with us. nice man cave! nacho? [ train whistle blows ] what?! -stop it! -mm-hmm. we ve been saving a lot of money ever since we switched to progressive. this bar is legit. and now we get an even bigger discount from bundling home and auto. i can get used to this. it might take a minute. -swing and a miss! -slam dunk! touchdown! together: sports! touchdown! when heartburn hits fight back fast with tums chewy bites. fast relief in every bite. crunchy outside. chewy inside. tum tum tum tum tums chewy bites. turn up your swagger game with one a day men s.
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we learned today that the republican-led house intelligence committee which is supposed to be investigating trump and russia, they interviewed a character named felix sater two days ago, a key figure linking the trump business empire to russia. he s also got interesting organized crime ties that might make him a particularly juicy target for aggressive interrogation. for some reason the house intelligence committee decided they would do their interview with felix sater in new york with no members of congress present two days ago. now we ve learned that today the house intelligence committee did another out of state interview today on the friday before christmas in new york. they interviewed a woman who has served as assistant to donald trump and a senior vice president at the trump organization for three decades. every e-mail, every phone call, every meeting, every piece of paper that has gone to or come from donald trump for 30 years has gone through the hands of
rhona graff. that s what you call a key witness if you re interested in the behavior, meetings, ties, contacts, and communications of donald trump over the years. republicans in the house intelligence committee decided that she would be interviewed today also in new york city in a way that was impossible for any actual members of congress to attend. we don t know if any members of congress made it to new york for the rhona graff interview today. we think some of them might. we re pretty sure most of them at least didn t. so the house intelligence committee is supposed to be how congress is investigating the russia scandal. it is getting a little weird over there. these last-minute, no members interviews with incredibly key sensitive central witnesses. the news this week that republicans on that committee have formed a secret republican-only working group that s using the materials obtained by the committee supposedly for its russia investigation to instead run
their own working group which is designed to indict the fbi. republicans on the committee also this week announced more plans to call yet more senior fbi officials before their committee not apparently because they want to ask them tough questions about russia but apparently because they want to make the fbi itself a scandal. the reason i say it seems like that s their intention is because of republicans increasingly strident anti-fbi criticism in public statements. but also because of their strategy of bringing in fbi officials and then selectively leaking information about these officials closed door testimony to sympathetic media outlets. that has led to some predictably sneering coverage this week designed to make these fbi officials look bad. coverage in places like the fox news channel and the washington examiner. that strategy by the republicans has also led to some unintended consequences like this today from byron york at the washington examiner.
mr. york describes the republican members of congress who are leaking this information to him as frustrated. you see that there in the headline. clearly these republicans are not getting what they want from senior fbi officials when they re hauling them in for testimony. but even though byron york is i think somewhat sympathetic to the intentions of his republican congressional sources who are leaking stuff to him, byron york is also a real reporter, an actual reporter who faithfully conveys information that he has obtained. in this case the information that his republican sources have given him is not information that is necessarily going to help their cause. from byron york s piece today, quote, the dossier portion of the interview began with fbi deputy director andrew mccabe being asked if he thought the trump/russia dossier met the standard of credibility the fbi required to open an investigation. fbi deputy director andrew mccabe said he believed it did.
ooh! later in the story, according to byron york, mccabe was asked again if he stood by the veracity of the dossier. mccabe, quote, said he did. so whatever republicans are trying to get out of these senior fbi officials, getting it on the record from them that the christopher steel dossier about russia interfering in the election to help trump and there being tons of connections between trump and russia during the campaign, getting it on the record that the fbi thinks that dossier meets the standards for opening an investigation, that is counterproductive for what the republicans are trying to do. this follows the other unintentionally damaging leak that we got from mccabe s testimony this week where cnn
was able to report something very important about the president and his criminal liability for obstruction of justice. james comey, as you remember, he says the president pressured him about the mike flynn investigation before he fired him as fbi director. james comey has said under oath that he informed other fbi officials at the time of that pressure that he was receiving from president trump. well, this week under oath in congress the fbi deputy director, andrew mccabe, confirmed that. he confirmed that, yeah, james comey told him at the time about those conversations with donald trump and what donald trump had said about the flynn investigation. so the republicans in congress are now going hammer and tongs against the fbi. if the president is going to be in trouble, potentially criminally in trouble for obstructing justice, it will be because he tried to block an fbi investigation. if him doing so is ever going to be proven in a court or laid out compellingly in articles of impeachment, it will be because of james comey s testimony against the president and the corroborating testimony of other
fbi officials who he spoke to at the time that the president was obstructing justice to document the fact that the president was obstructing justice. one of those fbi officials to whom james comey spoke at the time did document and memorialize the president s behavior was fbi director andrew mccabe who has this week been subjected to nearly 17 hours of closed-door congressional testimony. it s not just the house republicans going after him. republican senator chuck grassley of iowa says publicly he wanted fbi deputy director andrew mccabe to be fired. he s one of comey s corroborating witnesses. another one of comey s corroborating witnesses, another one of the senior fbi officials who comey told about the behavior of the president was this man, top lawyer at the fbi, james baker. today the washington post reports james baker has mysteriously been reassigned at the fbi. we don t know the circumstances of his reassignment.
we do know that shortly after this was reported in the washington post, republican members of congress leaked to politico.com that fbi counsel james baker had committed the grave sin of communicating with mother jones reporter david corn in 2016. david corn was the first reporter to describe the existence of the christopher steel trump/russia dossier. he also says that this fbi official, james baker, was not his source for the dossier story. honestly, i m not even sure republicans care about that. i think they just care that he talked to a reporter. isn t that impeachable? certainly it s corrupt or liberal or something. you step back from these individual attacks they re making against the fbi and various fbi officials against comey, mueller, mccabe and baker, what republicans are
doing is, they re starting to work their way down the list of all the fbi witnesses who could corroborate james comey on the president s alleged obstruction of justice. we know they re going after comey directly. we know there are five or six of these witnesses, senior officials at the fbi who comey told. as of right now they re trying to destroy two of them, mccabe and baker. who doesn t think they re just going to keep going down that list? everybody is focused on whether or not the president is going to fire robert mueller. what the republicans are trying to do right now is instead destroy the credibility of the evidence that robert mueller could use against the president for obstruction of justice, and they re doing it by trying to destroy the careers and reputations of the witnesses that mueller could call. if it destroys the fbi in the process, apparently they think so be it. merry christmas. more ahead. stay with us. david. what s going on? oh hey! that s it? yeah. everybody two seconds! dear sebastian, after careful consideration of your application, it is with great pleasure that we offer our congratulations on your acceptance. through the tuition assistance program, every day mcdonald s helps more people go to college. it s part of our commitment to being america s best first job. coaching means making tough choices. jim! you re in! but when you have high blood pressure and need cold medicine that works fast, the choice is simple. coricidin hbp is the #1 brand that gives powerful cold symptom relief without raising your blood pressure. coricidin hbp.
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is this a normal course of business justice department kind of thing? is there reason to worry that the republicans are looking at that list of comey s corroborating witnesses and seeing them more as a checklist of things to do rather than just as a roster of senior fbi officials. joining us now is joyce vance, former u.s. attorney for the northern district of alabama. nice to see you tonight. thanks for being with us. thanks for having me. first let me ask you, what s the job of the fbi counsel, the top lawyer at the fbi? how big a job is that and how well respected is james baker in that role? so the general counsel job at the fbi, this is the chief lawyer for the bureau, the person who s in charge of making decisions about the legality of fbi activity, also handles situations where agents get sued or where the agency has to deal with other legal issues.
jim baker, when he was selected to come in and to be jim comey s general counsel, was a widely lauded pick. people were very happy to see him coming to take this job. he had been in and out of the bureau and the department during his career and was widely respected. he s being universally described as widely respected and also somebody who s been involved in a number of very high profile national security matters at the fbi over the years which makes the circumstances around his reassignment including where he s being reassigned to a matter of intrigue. would it be unusual, absent the other intrigue around the political pressure on the fbi right now and the russia investigation, would it be intriguing when somebody like a jim baker was reassigned, or is that the sort of job that turns over when we get new fbi directors? it is the kind of job that
turns over, and in the absence of this investigation, it seems unlikely that anybody would be questioning this reassignment. when bob mueller of tleft the bu and was replaced by jim comey director comey brought in his own lawyer as his general counsel. this is not unusual. the relationship between the two is very close. the director has to be able to rely on the general counsel, so it s important that they be a good fit and have compatible working styles, much like a chief of staff position. after we learned from the washington post that mr. baker was being reassigned and again we don t know where he s being reassigned to, we then got word from politico.com tonight. apparently republican sources leaking to politico.com that mr. baker is known to have corresponded with our friend david corn who is a reporter at mother jones magazine, the long-time investigative reporter, notably for the russia
scandal, he s the person, the american reporter, who first reported before the election, on the existence of christopher steel s trump/russia dossier, which republicans are putting a lot of work into trying to turn into a scandal. i m not sure if we understand enough about these leaks, what s motivating them or what the context is for why these communications have been obtained, but would it be wrong, unethical somehow, for a general counsel at the fbi to communicate with a reporter for any reason? there are all sorts of legitimate reasons that the general counsel might have had a conversation with david corn. it could have been on another matter. it could have been a request from the office of legal affairs that he explain to mr. corn the proceedings in some case or some type of fbi process. i know we won t hear any comment from david on that other than his statement that mr. baker was not his source. it seems like that should be good enough to end the inquiry here without any other idea that
anything improper took place. this is one of those things where eventually we re going to get this story and a lot of blanks are going to get filled in and it will still be an intriguing story, but right now, with this mad libs narrative that we ve got in terms of what happened here, it s raising more questions than i feel comfortable with. joyce vance, former alabama u.s. attorney, thank you very much for being with us tonight. i really appreciate it. thanks. and i will just reiterate something that joyce vance just said there. david corn, as i said, a national treasure of an investigative reporter, he says unequivocally tonight and it s unusual for him to comment on his sources, he says tonight that in no uncertain terms, this fbi official, jim baker, was not his source for the dossier story. republicans are implying that with this leak tonight to politico.com. david corn says that s absolutely not the case. much more ahead tonight. stay with us. your insurance company won t
replace the full value of your totaled new car. the guy says, you picked the wrong insurance plan. no, i picked the wrong insurance company. with new car replacement™, we ll replace the full value of your car plus depreciation. liberty mutual insurance. baseball is a unique sport. one of my favorite movies is the rookie. and that journeyman making it to the big leagues. when we go to the locker room and tell a young man that they re called up to the big leagues, the see the emotion on their face was quite something. that s scott pruitt. head of the epa in the trump administration and he s a man serious about baseball. he went to the university of kentucky on a baseball scholarship. played second base, a switch hitter. 2003 he and a friend bought a
controlling stake in oklahoma city s minor league triple a team, the oklahoma city red hawks. that stake reportedly cost scott pruitt $6.8 million cash. where did he get the cash? a local banker from oklahoma is reportedly a good friend of scott pruitt s, such a good friend that he helped him put up all that money. then when scott pruitt got to the epa, he called that old friend from tulsa and basically reenacted that scene from the rookie, you, young man, are headed to the big leagues. that story is next. it doesn t end in a home run for the epa, i will warn you, but that story is next. , like most , i just bought a house. -oh! -very nice. now i m turning into my dad. i text in full sentences. i refer to every child as chief. this hat was free. what am i supposed to do, not wear it? next thing you know, i m telling strangers defense wins championships. -well, it does. -right? why is the door open? are we trying to air condition the whole neighborhood? at least i bundled home and auto
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in may, the trump administration announced a new special task force to improve the process of cleaning up our nation s hundreds of toxically polluted super sites, the most polluted places in america. the guy the epa tapped to lead the super fun task force was this man, his name is albert kelly. he s a banker from tulsa. he had precisely zero experience in pollution cleanup or environmental issues at all. but he was long-time friends with the head of the epa, scott pruitt. old friend of scott pruitt s from oklahoma. his banker, in fact. kelly had loaned pruitt money to buy a minor league oklahoma baseball team and then he loaned money to the people who bought the team from scott pruitt a few years later.
scott pruitt picked him to overhaul super fun sites and their cleanup in the united states. he hired his old friend at a salary of $172,000 a year. that salary really turned out to be a handy thing for albert kelly. turned out to be a good thing for him that he landed that high paying gig at the epa because not long after he was announced as the head of the super fun task force, federal banking regulators announced that mr. kelly would need to pay a $125,000 fine and he would be banned for life from ever working in the banking industry again. what happened? we don t know what albert kelly did to get himself banned for life from banking. i didn t even know that was a thing. when he agreed to pay the fine, he didn t admit or deny wrongdoing, but yeah, banned for life from banking. and then onto the epa to oversee cleanup for the country. wow.
so in july, his task force it was announced in may. they released their final report in july. the task force released thei sites. they included 42 specific and detailed recommendations for america s sites. peer immediately filed a freedom for information request. how did you come up with these recommendations? they asked for research materials, agendas from their meetings, minutes from their meetings, any notes, any drafts of the report. the routine stuff you foil when you want to find out how detailed regulations came to exist. the epa did not respond with any materials after that request was filed. so peer sued. this week, almost six months lat later, they did not get the documents they were looking for, they did get a response from the epa, and it s amazing.
associated press reporting. a lawyer for epa has written to peer to say that the task force had no agenda for its meetings. kept no minutes and used no reference materials. plan for cleaning up toxic sized was i mack u laterally conceive ed. no minutes, no notes, no drafts. that s how things are being run at the epa right now. the oklahoma banker who just got banned for life from banking is in charge of coming up with the way we re going to clean up toxic pollution in this country. he says his 107 member task force produced not a letter of paperwork in developing its plan. which by the way, scott pruett accepted every word of. he accepted all 42 detailed recommendations and said he would start implementing it
immediately. meanwhile, the actual qualified scientists and experts of the epa are leaving by the hundreds. the new york times reporting today that more than 700 people have left the epa since president trump took office, and that number sounds staggering on its own. that puts the administration a quarter of the way toward shrinking the agency. 200 are scientists, 96 are environmental protection specialists, a broad category that includes scientists and others involved in investigating pollution levels. all the qualified people are leaving. the trump administration is bringing in new people, including a disgraced former banker from tulsa. this is a feature, it s not a story of the trump administration screwing up at
the epa. it s the trump administration of doing what they intend to do at the epa. they re always talking about whole agencies that shouldn t exist, right? they threaten to cut needless departments. republicans talk about emptying out agencies. are there other times in modern history, where we see so many people, so many experts, so many top tier people leave one agency all at once? nothing like this, this is really sort of stretching the boundaries of that idea, under ronald reagan you saw a little bit of this. the epa had an administrator who got into a scandal over the super fund, like what you were talking about a moment ago. congress asked her for documents, she would not give them up, she was declared in contempt of congress and forced to resign.
her name was ann gorsuch, and her son has just been appointed by president trump to the supreme court. you made that part up, right? no, as they say in texas, it has the added advantage of being true. okay, yeah. is there a president despite the rhetoric, that s actually done it. is there a clear winner, under which president we ve seen the most departures. have presidents succeeded in shutting agencies down. they have, and this has been the republican dream especially since ronald reagan, who tried to do it at the beginning and began to lose interest. it goes back to the 19th century, congress passed all these civil service laws, they were worried the presidents would turn into dictators, because they could appoint people once they became
president from the top of an agency all the way down. andrew johnson violated one of those laws in 1867-1868. he was impeached, almost thrown out of office for that. in any case, you ve seen examples of republican presidents, especially reagan. nixon tried to shut down lyndon johnson s old war on poverty. the difference we re seeing with trump is another new trump innovation this year, that is this idea we re seeing in the epa, scaring out people with enormous expertise and experience, making them want to leave, and then not refilling these positions, so you impair what the epa is supposed to do, we re seeing the same thing at the state department, where as you have talked about a number of times. the top positions are not getting filled, and the idea presumably is, so there will not be diplomats there to make deals that donald trump doesn t want made much. it s a very good point.
materially different thing to have a hiring freeze or cut people s pay or make their environment miserable so they start to leave. another thing to make sure the people you re pushing out are the most capable i lost you for a moment, the sound. trust me, i was just telling you that you re great. i could answer whatever question i feel like, since i didn t hear what you said. i was going to ask you to opine on how great you are. thank you, i can t opine on that, i only talk about true subjects. this is a big difference no president has done this in the way we re watching donald trump do this. we have to stay tuned. he s also talking about doing it at the fbi. that having been said, happy holidays my friend. thank you, my friend.
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this first year of trump is going to mean for the republican party in the long term, for conservatives? do they have the same home that they used to, or is the party irreparably changed? i think long term, the chances are high that the republican party, it can t recover or is broken apart or this is the beginning of a breaking apart for them. the brand of what it means to be a conservative or conservative republican is kind of lost. and whether conservatives in particular can ever get back to, you know, having a party of their own is hard to know. you have a lot of people like pete wayner n david brooks out there saying i m a political refugee. sounds like you wouldn t say that donald trump is conservative. oh, he s definitively not. michael steele? no, he s not. he s not at all. i agree with jon. i think what we ve seen at the surface is something that s been going on beneath the surface since reagan left office. and certainly it came to a head during my time as national chairman with the tea party. sort of asserting itself. this brand that came out and said we adhere to the constitutional principles that have defined the party and, thus, we will not spend money we do not have. we will not grow the national debt and all these things and lo and behold in the age of trump, that s exactly what republicans in congress are now doing. to the tune of $1.5 trillion. $1.5 trillion. to listen to members of congress over the last few weeks leading up to the passage of this tax bill dismiss out of hand as irrelevant deficits and the concept of deficit spending, as well as the debt to me tells me, to john s point, we re in a brand-new era for the party and this is not your mom and daddy s republican party anymore. it s the party of trump, and you either are going to be in it or outside of it. but there is to get back to paul s point. one thing they ve done in that republicans on the hill will say, okay, this is great, is they are in the process of remaking the judiciary. in terms of the circuit courts and which has really long-term impacts. these are lifetime appointments. i was talking to one person who works close to senator mcconnell. he was like the thing i don t think that s covered enough is we ve installed a bunch of justices on the circuit court level, and they re not going to go anywhere whether trump is president or not president. now there have been some issues with some of the people the white house has sent over to capitol hill and senator grassley has had some problems getting a few of these people through. seemingly totally unqualified. seemingly unqualified in a situation where it s totally, like the wheels are greased to get as many conservative justices up there. but that is a win. and that s a conservative win. does that keep evangelicals on board? the judiciary is big for evangelicals. there s a distinction. i would agree with shawna and paul, there are things happening in the trump administration that are good for conservatives. trump, writ large, is radically nonconservative fig are and so have evangelicals proven themselves to be nonconservative in their appetite for radical change rather than the conservative ideal of slow, incremental preservative change. a little bit at a time. let s take a look. we have some polling from year s end that shows us what this landscape might look like. democrats just completely in a different position than they have been before. in our own nbc news/ wall street journal poll, 50% saying that democrats should be control congress. that s an extraordinary number heading into the midterm elections. it is. i take some exception to that since i had a hand in building the house we currently have. and you realize that you cannot sustain that when the people who are inside the house are tearing up the floor boards and knocking out the windows and putting all kinds of signage on the front lawn that is scaring the hell out of people. i think that is something that the party is going to come to grips with. mcconnell gets it, certainly, and i think you saw after the loss in alabama, what was the first thing he did? he made it clear who his target was. steve bannon. you want to come after us? we re ready. we ll come after you. so that s going to be sort of the undercard of the bigger fight that we re going to see play out. so the civil war is still going to be the civil war still going, yes. and it s being televised every day. where do the democrats in their vulnerabilities fit into this. if nancy pelosi is still running the show for house democrats is that something that drags them down or is the sentiment against the president so intense that that doesn t matter? i don t think it matters. it is true there s an argument within the democratic party about the importance of chachblgichachblg i changing a generation of leadership. nancy pelosi is still the best poster child republicans have of why you don t want to elect someone like doug jones to be your senator, but it didn t work because the republican candidate in that case was so much worse and there is an enormous amount of energy and activism in the democratic base. the question i think you have to ask is, is the sort of trump frustration and to some degree the trump dementia that s grasped the democratic grassroots enough to take back the house. whether or not nancy pelosi is leader doesn t really matter. and if they do take back the house, that brings into question a whole different discussion potentially about impeachment and the ramifications of the russia investigation which we haven t even touched on. that still seems destined to dominate the year in the conversation. potentially as the year has closed, the president has seemed at times to be at peace with where that investigation is, but i mean, i have doubts about whether that holds. i have real doubts about whether that holds depending on the next time we get an e-mail from the special prosecutor s office saying someone is going to court. you ll have a very hard time not responding to that, especially as they interview more and more people in his inner circle and as trump s team trump s outside legal team meets more and more with the special prosecutor s office. but i also think in terms of next year with women and running for congress, some of that energy, and we ve seep that there there s a long list of women considering running for congress in a way we ve not seen for a long time. that energy between the me, too, situation as well as which i think is almost in some ways a direct reaction to president trump s election, as well as how everything has gone this year. i think there s some energy that will keep on coming from women. i m curious from you, though, about, do you see the parallels to 2010 for the democrats? they re incredible. but the interesting thing is, what i did in looking at the landscape at the time was create a narrative. and so the moniker fire pelosi was all about i remember that in 2010. we the people matter. you krael this. and the only way to fire pelosi is to do what? you know, hire someone else to take the position of a democrat in congress. but that translated to state races as well. when you look at the state race. over 760-plus state house races across the country on this one theme. the key thing for me was not targeting barack obama. because barack obama was not really the root here. and i think that for the democrats, they need to understand it may not be donald trump as the root per se. maybe in some cases, but they ll have to be able to translate that down to get, as we saw in alabama, republicans to do something that goes against their nature. and that is to vote for a democrat. jon okay. good luck with that. best of luck. question, though. you have seen democrats approach this in some cases a little differently. i feel like the experimentation with the messaging is in the early phases. there are many in the liberal democratic base who are saying absolutely you will not work with trump or say a word about anything positive about him at all. but on the other hand, tim kaine in virginia will say, if you ask him, i ll work with the president where i need to. in arizona, kirsten cinema is starting to make those arguments. in some cases, i ll work with the president. where do you think that goes. how is the path to the majority potent yelly in figuring out how to embrace president trump? alabama is a tough comparison because roy moore was such a carbon copy and accelerated version in some ways of donald trump. and so that would have been a state in which doug jones would have had to talk more about economics but all he could talk about is roy moore. tim kaine got up on the stage the night ralph northum was elected governor in virginia and he talked about trump at the top but the bulk of his five, ten-minute speech was, about we ve got to be the party of jobs and the economy. and then ended with hitting trump. and they are very focused on not getting into a food fight on cultural issues with cory stewart, the guy who is running as a trumpian republican there. they want to keep their message focused on jobs message. that s the sweet spot. and some of these moderate to red states, that s definitely going to have to be the path. if i could real quick it s about trump you put your mouth into your facial expression which was pricelessless. the example i d offer up would be that special election in virginia in which a transgender woman won. how did she win? she didn t campaign winning against trump and his clear anning an ing anathema with the gay community but she wonna jobs, on fixing transportation. her opponent ran against her sexual orientation and background and story. and that, for democrats is that sweet spot. to your point, jon, where you focus that energy and messaging around something that people identify with every day. which is why it s dangerous if trump comes out with an infrastructure bill because he ll be handing the democrats something they can agree with him on and agree to work with him on and the republicans are going to be don t vote for that guy because he s a bad guy, but he agrees with the president on this. what do we do? i was saying when doug jones was talking about policy, he was not talking about president trump all that much in alabama either. yes, that race is totally weird, and i get tharkt, but he had a mission to keep it as focused on jobs in alabama while also sometimes mentioning roy moore. he stopped doing a lot of national media and very clearly batoning down the hatchs on the local bread and butter issues. i m excited to see how 2018 transitions into 2020. we re going to pause this conversation here for now. when we come back, i ll be joined by the crack nbc news capitol hill team that i work with every day to get their top five list of what to watch for in congress coming up next year. kasie d.c. s new year s eve special is back in just a moment. a lot of water. medications seem to be the number one cause for dry mouth. dry mouth can cause increased cavities, bad breath, oral irritation. i like to recommend biotene. biotene has a full array of products that replenishes the moisture in your mouth. biotene definitely works. it makes patients so much happier. [heartbeat] with liberty, we could afford a real babysitter instead of your brother. hey. oh. that s my robe. is it? you could save seven hundred eighty two dollars when liberty stands with you. liberty mutual insurance. i don t think anyone would confuse him with a well-respected health care expert. i wouldn t take advice from charlie sheen either. our folks, every now and then, sort of like a free range chicken. they just kind of move off on their own. you realize to many americans right now that looks like we re giving lindsay lohan the keys to the mini bar. obviously, you d rather have 52 votes than 51 because you can lose an extra free range chicken. even though it s not perfect, i m going to vote for it. i ll be on it like a hobo on a ham sandwich. i cannot go down to my overpriced capitol hill grocery this afternoon and choose among about six different types of mayonnaise. how come i can t do that for my kid? it makes me a little bit nervous because of those free range chickens i talked about. welcome back to kasie dc. that was the always quotable senator john kennedy. the chickens did come home for republicans and their tax plan. joining me for our new year s eve party, some of the most important people i work with every day, capitol hill producer alex moe, frank thorpe and producer on the nbc news capitol hill team, mariana sotomayor. they ve all brought their top ten things to watch in 2018. for those of us who know you frank thorpe, we ll be unsurprised to learn that you sent seven because you re an overachiever. and i want to start with your number six. you asked, does the gop tax reform bill become the republican obamacare over the course of the next year? what do you mean by that? senator mcconnell was asked this after the senate passed the bill. and this is a question republicans and democrats are looking at going into 2018. whether this bill will be able to be hung on republicans the same way that it that the affordable care act was hung on democrats. this bill, when it was passed, this bill was more unpopular than obamacare was. and democrats went on to lose several elections. correct. but republicans look at this in a different way. senator mcconnell, he thinks of this as an argument they can win. they can go out and sell this. they re going to go out and make a concerted effort to sell this thing. you guys have more money in your paychecks. this is different than the idea the government is now in charge of your health care. now you have money. this is a tangible thing you re bringing home every two weeks in your paycheck. they think they can flip this on democrats. they can look at democrats and point to them and say, sorry. they voted against taking giving you that extra money and if you put democrats in charge in 2018 if you vote them into the majority, they can vote these tax cuts away. although they do expire in 2025 and most americans are congress needs to make sure these become perminent. but this question brings me to, if we can put up alex s top five. alex covers the house for us specifically. that s what this house looks at. and i think to frank s point and, well, yes, it s going to matter a lot in the senate, this question of hough the tax bill plays gets to the heart of your question which is can democrats win back the house? republicans really needed to pass a tax reform bill to get a win on the board for them going into 2018. but democrats are saying nancy pelosi said herself before the break that, you know, let s see what happens. let the republicans think that this republican tax plan is going to be good for them because democrats are definitely going to campaign against this. they ll say you re better off having the democrats in the majority. democrats to take back the house need to flip about 24 seats. at this point they think it s doable when you look at alabama, virginia. they are seeing that people don t like donald trump very much and they re going to take that and run with it when it comes to 2018. they seem to be winning the enthusiasm gap by a large margin which tipped us off that 2010 was going to be a wave. democrats want to run against president trump in 2018 and they ll try to do that. will republicans try to run against nancy pelosi who some people, even within the caucus want to see stepped down and get a new fresh face in there. that s how republicans were able to win in 2010. able to run against pelosi. very interesting. mariana, i want to bring your list up now. you have focused quite a bit on reporting on the intelligence committee investigations. of course, on the senate side and also on the house side which, from what we can tell are continuing somewhat into perpetuity. but i want to pull out your second one is, you know, will we start to see reports from these committees. and what is your sense of what we might learn from the senate intelligence committee to start? what are they actually going to tell the american people at the end of the day? it seems like we re inching closer to getting some reports. on the senate side i was told by senator warner that very early into 2020 so january or february, we ll see at least a report on how russia intervened in the campaigns and just trying to know about election security in general. how secure is the american public? how secure is the system? who have they informed about that already and what can we do now going into the midterms which senator blunt pointed out. some people are going to start voting in march in the primaries. that s something we ll see first on the senate side later on. are we going to see a partisan food fight around how much do you put out in the public on that report do you think? on the senate side, i don t think so. both the republicans and the democrats are really wanting to put out at least this one portion about election security. i think it will be. the house looking at a complete wrap-up of their investigation soon early into 2018. that is looking like it could be a democratic report and a republican report. let s see, probably two different conclusions on both sides of the chamber but we ll see. that, of course, is the story of all of our lives. every day on capitol hill. we have barely scratched the surface of what will be coming up next year. entitlement reform which paul ryan wants to do. whether he ll even stay as speaker of the house. but we have to leave it there. thank you so much for taking the time to join us and for everything you do to support me, to support everybody at our great network on capitol hill. when we come back on this new year s eve edition, some of our big interviews from the year gone by. we re back from washington right after this. i saw the change in rich when we moved into the new house. but having his parents over was enlightening. you don t like my lasagna? no, it s good. -hmm. -oh. huh. [ both laugh ] here, blow. blow on it. you see it, right? is there a draft in here? i m telling you, it s so easy to get home insurance on progressive.com. progressive can t save you from becoming your parents. but we can save you money when you bundle home and auto. ryan told some of his closest confidantes he ll step down after the midterm elections next year though he and his team deny that. ryan has said in the past, it s a job he didn t really want in the first place. i spoke to speaker ryan in october about his thoughts on president trump and the divisions within the republican party. the president has regularly engaged in disputes with various members bob corker, ben sasse, over the first amendment. is that helpful to your agenda? it s what he does. we kind of learned to live with it. we ve had our engagements in the past, too. i don t think what i m trying to get our members to do is focus on doing our jobs. we re here elected to represent our constituents to advance our principles, pass solutions and that s what we re focused on. did you ever imagine that washington would be the way that it is now under president trump? i think the country is pretty darn polarized. i think one of the reasons why is because the economy has been pretty darn flat for a long time and there s a lot of anxiety in america. this is one of the reasons i m so focused on this agenda because it will give relief to this anxiety and give people more confidence in their future. is the president helping with that? he s criss-crossing the country helping us with tax reform. do i wish he would tweet less? of course i do. he knows that. that s something out of my control and i don t think that s something that s going to change. he s coming around and helping us sell tax reform. is he connecting with people? did this president win wisconsin for the first time since 84 and pennsylvania and did he do that by uniting or dividing? you look at where i come from, he united. he brought people into our party, voting for a republican president, voting for a hotly contested u.s. senate race, and these are democrats that felt like they were overshadowed. we used to call them reagan democrats. now they re trump democrats. he did grow and bring to the party and he put together a darn impressive coalition. he did end up unifying that front. you have said you make it known to him you don t want him to tweet. you ve defend his actions by saying he s new at this. he ll get used to it. you didn t go after him by name after charlottesville. during the campaign you said in the wake of the access hollywood tape that you would never defend donald trump, not now and in the future. i ve heard from some critics of you who they are republicans and they don t necessarily recognize the republican party under trump and they re disappointed in you. that s fine. they can view that however they want. the best thing i can do is hups improve an agenda that improves people s lives. we had unified government. it s important to make this unified government work. imagine if we decided just to have some internal food fight and get nothing done for the country. how does that help people get a job or more take-home pay? how does that help relieve the insecurity people have living paycheck to paycheck? it doesn t. if we want to play some d.c. game of fighting each other and get nothing done, maybe that would satisfy a few people. but as far as i m concerned, i m elected to defend the constitution, to represent people in wisconsin, to help run congress, to improve people s lives and you do that by getting things done and in this unified government we have, we have a tremendous opportunity to get big, good things done. that, to me, is the most important thing i can contribute to. you mentioned internal food fight and your majority which is a nice segue into my question about steve bannon who is quite frankly picking a food fight with a lot of your incumbents in the senate and the house. are you afraid of what steve bannon may do? i think we re going to be fine if we do our work and get our jobs done and pass our policies. i think it s is he helping the republican party? i don t think it s helpful to have internal fights or go after republicans? what s most helpful is if we all unify around our common goals and purposes and get an agenda passed. i don t think having these fights are helpful but at the same time, i don t think it s going to deter us from doing what we re working on right now. are the messages steve bannon is sending to the republican base helpful for the country? to be honest, i m not paying that close attention to it. i m a little busy with a day job. i don t even know what you mean when you say messages. i m making sure we get our messages passed. he works for breitbart. i have three stories in my life, death, taxes and attacks from breitbart. i m so used to that that you don t spend time thinking about or worrying about things outside of your control like that. much more to come. just ahead, my conversation with senator rand paul. we ll talk about the un-civil war that s broken out inside his party. and we continue on this new year s eve edition of kasie dc. what s ahead in 2020. there s a civil war going on inside your party. the president said bob corker could not be elected dog catcher in tennessee. is that presidential? you know, i think there is a bit of a war going on and to me it s interesting because i m sort of also at war with my party a lot of times, too. but i m at war on sort of policy differences and whether we should balance the budget, have spending cuts, and that s a fine place to be. in fact, i ve had do you think he s conducting himself i m getting there. i m getting there. but when you keep it on policy. so, for example, i m opposed the president on major policies this year. on the fake obamacare repeal, obamacare light. i ve opposed him to several bombing in syria, things like that. but we still have a very good relationship because i don t attack him personally. what i would say is going on, and it s not one-sided. it s like when you are a kid and your parents say it takes two to fight. it s a little bit on both sides. on one side there s this high mindedness that they re going to condemn the president s character. but in doing so, it s sort of like perfect people can condemn other people s character. and if i tell you, kasie, i think you re immoral and a thief and a liar, do you think we can have a conversation? we can t do that. and so the thing is, i think we should avoid sort of character assassination or condemnation. you can. you re a pundit. you can say whatever you want about a president. if we re working together, i d say it s a better thing. i m more than happy to go to war with the president on occasion and also support him many times as well on policy. but i try to refrain from making judgment about his character because when i m perfect does character not matter for the president? of course it does. but when my character is perfect is when i can start criticizing other people. so there is people who live in glass houses need to be aware of that. and i think it is a holier than thou thing and there s a lot of it going on on y all s side in the media as well but it s going on with some politicians as well. to tell you the truth, what are the american people more concerned with? they probably think, this is a people magazine saga that really we should be getting onto policy. they would rather see a debate and discussion on policy. but i would say it s both sides. it s not one side or the other. both sides are engaging in this. and i, frankly, am choosing to be in another place. i feel you still haven t answered my question. i gave a really long circuitous description of my position, haven t i? here s the would you conduct yourself this way? i think everybody is different. the president has a unique style. but people have attributes and other things people say it s not an attribute. when i look at the president and when i work with the president, i see the glass as half full. we re from the same party. many things aligned and i ve been around the president many, many hours, probably as much as anybody in the senate, and i choose to engage him on the things that i think we have common ground. so for example, bombing syria, we i disagreed with the bombing in syria. i disagree with a lot of the military intervention the president has chosen to do. but i choose not to confront him on that or other particularly things of personality difference. i choose not to engage on that but i choose to find common ground. i love his cabinet and the supreme court pick. i love the fact he s gotten rid of more regulations than any other president in recent history, including most of the republicans. is mitch mcconnell a good leader? when we look at like obamacare, i promoted that we should repeal it. and i forced votes on that. yes, or snow, no, is he a go leader? i m getting there. but on repealing obamacare, he was right there with me. as far as wanting to repeal the whole thing. he also worked with a coalition to be for a bill that i wasn t for. so once again, i oppose mitch mcconnell sometimes on policy, but i keep it on a level such that i think we have good relations and do i think he does a good job herding the cats that are up here, the disparate, different philosophies, right, left and middle? it s a difficult job. he does a good job with it. very last question and this is also a yes or no question. would the country benefit from a republican presidential primary in 2020? i think no one can stop primaries from happening and there could well be a primary that happens. before you even get to that, you need to know, is president trump running for re-election. you won t know that until his second, third year of presidency. at this point, i can t see myself supporting anyone but president trump because i think he s given us the most conservative cabinet we ve seen since reagan. maybe more conservative than reagan. we ve repealed regulations for the first time in 20 years. a great supreme court justice. i m hoping he gives us a couple more if we have retirements. i see the glass as half full. doesn t mean i agree with him on everything. if we could end the afghan war, that s who i would support. i don t think that s going to be an alternative to president trump. so i like to accentuate the positive, the things i agree with him on. still not a yes or no answer but thank you. i think we need a primer. i think it s a pretty good answer that we have no idea. you can t answer a question i asked if it would be good for the party. my interview with senator gillibrand whose insistence that al franken resign was a watershed moment among democrats in the senate. dads don t take sick days. dads take dayquil severe. the non-drowsy, coughing, aching, fever, sore throat. .stuffy head, no sick days medicine. plus depreciation. liberty mutual insurance. this year, new york s junior senator managed to anger both president trump and the inner circle of her political patrons, the clintons. earlier this month she called on president trump to resign because of longstanding allegations of sexual misconduct. he fired back by calling her a lightweight who would do anything for a campaign contribution. in november, she said bill clinton should have resigned the presidency over the monica lewinsky scandal and philippe reines called her a hypocrite after accepting the clintons money and endorsements. i asked her about her relationship with the clintons and her fight to stop sexual harassment on capitol hill. what is different about the context of congress and politics that makes people so afraid to come out and either name the people that they re talking about or show their faces in public? i ve talked to probably a dozen women in politics, even as this movement has become so public and none of them want to go on the record. why do you think that is? i think they re afraid of retaliation. why are they more afraid here than i think they re afraid everywhere. people in hollywood didn t come forward for years and years. people on wall street don t come forward for years and years. i had a girlfriend who just sent me an e-mail that she sent her old boss about all the things he did to her that he never took these claims seriously. and this is 20 years later, 30 years later. it s a moment of reckoning and what s happening in congress is i think young staffers are afraid that their careers will be ruined if they come forward. and so i am calling on my colleagues to rewrite the rules so if you are being harassed in your office, not only can you do you know where to go because nobody knows where or what the office of compliance is. what do you do when you get there? what s the process going to be? do you have to do you have to go through mandatory remediation. they should pay if there s a settlement. it should not come out of the taxpayers dime. we re in a moment that this has sort of changed, that the context has changed over the last 20 years. you ve told the new york times that bill clinton should have resigned over the lewinsky affair. my point is that the tolerance that we had 25 years ago, what was allowed 25 years ago will not be tolerated today, is not allowed today and that we have to have the kind of oversight and accountability that society needs so that we can protect people in the workplace, so people can function without having an unsafe work environment, whether it s in the military or so you re saying president trump has created an unsafe workplace in the white house? no. i m saying that the conversation we re having is very important and the behaviors tolerated a long time ago are not tolerated and, in fact, all of us need to recognize none of us are above this and all of us have to be responsible for how we create a workplace in our own office, for my office, how we do our oversight in congress with providing better oversight over the military, which is our job, with title 9 on college campuses. so we have to do our job. we are all responsible and we all have to understand that time has changed a he with he have to hold people and elective leaders should not be held to the lowest standard. they should be held to the highest standard. that s why i focus all my efforts of trying to change the rules of the game because they are not fair and not working. so you re saying if bill clinton were there today and the events were unfolding today i think it would be a very different conversation. we should have a very different conversation about president trump. should president trump resign based on the allegations? i don t want him to be president. but he is president. he got elected. agreed. so we should now have a conversation that that is not okay and we should not just ignore him. we should be having a much larger conversation about what we expect of our elected leaders and that it should never be this lowest common denominator or boys will be boys. that s an outrageous statement to be said. it s not okay. we expect much more. that s why the roy moore debate is on top of everybody s mind. his behavior is disqualifying in the same way to me that the president s behavior was disqualifying. that was my view. now my job is to try to protect other people. some people have worked for the clintons over the years that are essentially questioning your loyalty. there was a very tough tweet that says, the senate voted to keep president william jefferson clinton but that s not enough for you, senator gillibrand? interesting strategy for 2020 primaries. best of luck. what do you say about that? ridiculous and he s wrong. bill clinton did very important things for this country but my point is the conversation that we re having today and we need to have the highest standards for elected leaders and we have to change what s happening throughout society and we have to allow people to tell their stories. that is what this is all about and that is why the me, too, campaign is as powerful and is as important as it is. when we come back, our political panel on what to watch for in the year to come. [hawaiian music playing] wow, you are busy. wouldn t it be great if you had investments that worked as hard as you do? yeah. introducing essential portfolios. the automated investing solution that lets you focus on your life. welcome back to kasie dc. it s new year s eve and almost 2018. i m back with my panel. before we go, i want to get your sense, what should we be watching for in the year ahead? i think you watch for how republicans triangulate between the narrative that evolved in 2017 around trump, the me, too environment and the results of those elections and how they tried desperately to hold on to the house and keep control in the senate. paul? i set a google alert for the administrative procedure act because every regulation that the trump administration is trying to roll back, they are being sued in court for violating the administrative procedures act which requires taking a bunch of steps and proving it s a good idea. where the courts are the bull work to stop the rollback in the courts. that s what trump s opponents have to win on. if they lose on that, trump has the authority to roll back the ru rules. and these are particular changes to deal with in the day-to-day news environment. it s impossible to follow because we re following the tweet of the morning. what are you looking for, john, in 2018? politicians who are not going to give simple answers and say they are going to fight the other stide and voters who say it s complicated. i ve been disappointed that for the past decade we ve had both parties get control and ramped up through without getting the other side involved and it s bad for the country and we need to take that in hand. do you think that s possible in the new social media environment that we re consumed with? i don t know if it s possible, but of course it s possible in some way. what it is is it s necessary. i m not going tounds any of it. and i think i m watching what happens with deferred action for childhood arrivals. i think the daca question is one that is big on immigration and will come up in 2018. everyone thinks that it s going to get done but didn t get done this year. so i think we have to see how republicans and democrats actually see together on that and see if we find some type of path to legalization for those kids. a lot riding on that. i personally am watching for what happens to the democratic party. do those divisions crack open the way we saw republicans in 2010? they may have swept in to washington on a wave but it was downhill from there in some
person is going to be that we re going to run against. i look forward to it. i look forward to it. i really do. together with your help, your voice, your vote, we can achieve more than anybody. again, i really believe. i m not saying this as bragadocious. the tax bill when we got the individual mandate but we got one of the biggest fields in the world. they ve been trying to approve it for 40 years. that was a part of the tax bill. there s nothing beyond our reach. nothing. we need republicans put in office. we need senate. i think we re going to do pretty well with the senate. the numbers are looking pretty good. did you see the numbers from about two months ago? you see numbers now, it s like from a different world. people are seeing what we re doing. we re going to do things that nobody has been able to do. it s very funny. every time i go out to speak, we have these massive crowds. thousands were turned away. we let thousands in. she wrote an article about me. i went to the wharton school of finance. then you have to read how we re like is trump a good speaker. she s talking about he uses a language that, you know. remember i used to tell you how easy it is to be presidential. you d all be out of here now. you d be so bored. i m very presidential. ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here tonight. rick saccone will be great, great congressman. he will help me very much. he s a fine man and a wonderful wife. i just want to tell you on behalf of the united states of america that we appreciate your service. we appreciate your service. to all of the military out there, we respect you very much. thank you. thank you. then you go, god bless you and god bless the united states of america. thank you very much. see, that s easy. that s much easier than doing what i have to do. this is much more effective. this got us elected. if i came like a stiff, you guys wouldn t be here tonight. she s a nice woman. i like her. she doesn t like me much. she s writing like i m some kind of a neanderthal. i m really smart. they all talk about how they re telling us they said we couldn t get elected. i say we because you came from areas. some you have never voted before but you love the country. great congressman from tennessee. they vote early. the voting gets started. he was asked a speech i was making in pennsylvania, believe it or not. he was there because one of his friends and it was lou. i didn t know him. they had early voting in tennessee. he said, you know, mr. president and at that time i wasn t president but he called me that because he saw it was happening. he said in tennessee the early voting started. i d been doing this stuff for 32 years. i ve never seen anything like it in my life. those people are coming out of hills. they re coming out of valleys p th . they are coming out of everything you can come out of. these are people that love the country but they never saw anybody they wanted to vote for. now they ve got trump. trump-pence. they ve got all the stuff. usa. it has to be right. maybe it s just pure ideas. i love that guy. he said it s heart. we all have heart. i can only tell you if the rest of the country is like tennessee you re going to win this election and it s going to be easy. we got 306 to 223. remember they said, 270. remember the famous 270. he cannot win the election because he cannot get above 270. we needed 270. in fact, they couldn t get me to 270. we had 269. he cannot get remember, to to 270. we didn t. we got to 306. we got it. somebody said i ve been running for the senate six times. you ran for president. you won. what happened is pennsylvania. remember that night? if i lost ten points. there was no way you could lose. we were winning by thousands and thousands of votes. they refused to call pennsylvania. i wanted to win. i wanted to win with pennsylvania. it was so befitting bau inting y had spent ten times more in the state of pennsylvania than i did. i m sighing come on. go. one point. i win. we win easily. they wouldn t call it. then what happened? wisconsin came in. we won with wisconsin which hadn t been won in decades. we won with michigan and finally they were devastated. they were crying. she s crying. oh, my god. remember john king with the board. the red board is like red. that board was red meaning republican. popular vote you go to three or four states. i was like 19. i went to maine four times because i needed town one vote. that was going to be 269 to 270. what happened was an incredible. it was an incredible evening. one of the greatest nights in the history of television in terms of numbers of poem watching. we have done a job. let me give you the bad news. the bad news is they want to take it away from us. they re doing everything they can to take it away. that starts with the election coming up in a few months. we have to win it. we have to get out and we have to win. i love the school. i went to wharton. i love pennsylvania. how can i not love it, right? somebody else would show up here and honestly, rick, what would it be 50, 60 people in front. you wouldn t have this. you d have a little place. i ll really feel strongly about rick saccone. i know him. he s an incredible guy. number one, i don t know that this is important but to me it is. he s a very fine human being. he s a good person. he s really a good person. rick, come up here. he s a really good person. he s a good person. does that mean anything? he s a very he s a very competent person. he s a very hard worker. he knows things that many people don t know. he understands north korea may be better than anybody. i spoke to him about north korea. he was there for a long time. i spoke to him about north korea. i m telling you i learned things that all of these great generuis genuines geniuses did not tell me. we need the republicans. we immediate the vote. they will take away your tax cuts. they will take away your second amendment rights. they re going to take away in the military big military place. they ll take that away too. our military wads really depleted. i came tonight because this guy is special. remember this, the other opponent, his opponent is not voting for us. there s no way he s voting for us ever. ever. he could be nice to me. he is. there s no way he s ever voting for me. rick is going to vote for us all the time. all the time. i want to ask rick to say a few words and again, it s an honor to be with you. go out on tuesday and just vote like crazy. you got to get out there. the world is watching. i hate to put this pressure on your rick, they re all watching because i won this district like by 22 points. it s a lot. look at all those red hat, rick. look. look at all those. it s a lot of hats. we just had a poll. we re more popular now than election day. this guy should win easily. he s going to win easily. you got to know him. he s an extraordinary person. go out and vote on tuesday for rick saccone. go ahead. do we love our president here in western pennsylvania? i just is a couple of words. you already heard me speak earlier. i want to thank president trump. as i said before, president trump s in your corner, how can you lose? he s the best man to be in your corner. as any good businessman knows, you work on a deal but there comes a time to close the deal. this is the time to close the deal. we got two days left. are you going to help me on tuesday? let s close this deal. with that, we ll say good night. go out, vote for rick. he ll never, ever disappoint you. he s a winner. he s never going to disappoint you. vote with your hearts. vote with your brains. this is an extraordinary man. i m going to be home watching the returns and i hope that i have to make a call on tuesday night where i speak to you and young and i say great job, great race. the whole world remember that, they re all watching. we want to keep it going. we want to keep the agenda, the make america great going. you got to get them in. this is a very important race. very important. thank you all. god bless you. we love you all. thank you. president trump there wrapping up this campaign rally near pittsburgh for a special congressional election. one that is very, very tight between republican rick saccon and conor lamb. we did some time keeping. the president spoke about 1:10. he was on the stage there at the podium. we did mention he did mention rick saccone off the top. it was 25 minutes in when he spoke of the candidate. the reasons why he supported him and 1:10 before we saw rick saccone on stage with the president. a lot of the speech was touting his presidential win, the jobs report, economy, north korea as well. saying that we have to be very, very nice. basking or bashing the media, fake news as well. also hitting his former campaign rivals and even oprah winfrey. sharing his new 2020 slogan saying i can t say it s make america great again. let s keep america great. i want to bring in our panel. political reporter for politico. i appreciate you sticking around and listening to this. this is my question, was this about president trump or was this about rick saccone? let s start with you. it s not ma surprising if you look at past speeches that the president has given on behalf of candidates. he s talked about his own agenda, a little less about the candidate. i was keeping track of the amount of times he mentioned rick. it was about half a dozen times in that speech that lasted over an hour. fairly typical of the president. alex, what is rick thinking? is he thinking there standing going this is what the president needs to say to put me over the edge for a win. look, obviously he s probably happier than not that the president came. he needs the president to come here and sort of energize those voters that saccone needs. this is what trump rallies are like. you have seen this happen at past trump speeshs. obviously saccone is happier than not the president came in. we ll see in that translates into votes on tuesday. i want to bring in jeff bennett. you were listening as we were here. classic campaign mode trump that we saw there. i wasn t able to hear the question. i think i know where you re headed. i ll tell you what i found to be fairly striking about what we saw here. i heard you sort of tick through the greatest hits from the hour nar that the president spoke. i thought what was really particular is the way the president paved in his attacks on conor lamb in much the same way he did when he was in alabama campaigning initially for luther string. the president chose to not stick it to roy moore in the way he could have. here he says because conor lamb the democrat, because he s said things favorable to the president and also this race is neck and neck the president is saving his fire. he did make one tick that could be fairly effective in this district. he said conor is trying to present himself as a moderate but if he gets to washington, he won t be able to keep up the act. we ll have to see how many swing voters there are in this district who might have been watching the speech who would agree with the president when they turn out on tuesday. that s right. he did bring up the candidates instead of bringing up rick saccone. 25 minutes in he brings up lamb and then goes into saccone saying i like him. he s handsome. that may be a reflection of how close the race is now. polling is showing a tight race. he s trying to really drive that message home that lamb isn t what he s saying and he will support nancy pelosi. he would be independent in his party in congress. is there anything that stoo s out to you. we know this is pretty much familiar trump when it comes to these style rallies. anything in his message when it comes to tariffs he brought up in pennsylvania and not touting his own accomplishments? it was interesting he talked at one point towards the end of the speech about pennsylvania and how spornt that state is to him. one of the things to look for on tuesday should he fall short is this is going to be seen as major embarrassment for this president and this white house because trump is made pennsylvania such a key part of his political and electoral co-licoh coalition. it was a big deal that he made a big deal of it during the campaign and the state helped to really put him over the top. it s really going to be a big embarrassment for the president if conor lamb comes out on top. who will be the finger pointing there. you have the member of the gop who have bashed him to give him the safety net if he does lose saying expectations are not met or he loses, we told you so. who will the president be pointing to? that s a good question. seems like national republican strategist are putting the blame on rick saccone. it will be interesting to see if the president follows suit. conor has raised four times as much money as rick saccone in this case and they see that as major liability in terms of competing in television advertisements and things like that. we ll have to see who the president ends up blaming if he does end on losing on tuesday. looks like people are starting to blame rick. before i let you go in my last minute here, what will be the headlines on wednesday morning? well, either it s going to be republicans dodged a bullet in this race or it s going to be major black eye for the white house, for this president and the gop as they head towards november. it s really important race and no one knows exactly who s going to win at this point. polls are very tight. very quickly in the short seconds i have. well we re going to have to wait and see. people are looking at this race for national message. are democrats going to be energized going into the midterms. is that going to work? i think that s what you ll see the day after. all right. we ll see what happens in next couple of days before then. we shall all see together. we thank you for being with me for this specific coverage. back to our regular programming on msnbc. we send it now to hardball. have a great evening. hold on dad. liberty did what? yeah, liberty mutual 24-hour roadside assistance helped him to fix his flat so he could get home safely. my dad says our insurance doesn t have that. don t worry - i know what a lug wrench is, dad. is this a lug wrench? maybe? you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™. liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. flonase relieves sneezing, itchy, watery eyes and a runny nose, plus nasal congestion, which pills don t. flonase helps block 6 key inflammatory substances. most pills only block one. and 6 is greater than 1. start your day with flonase for more complete allergy relief. flonase. this changes everything. welcome back to hardball. over the past few weeks a slew of stories relating to film actor stormy daniels have continued to plague this president. today in an nbc news exclusive we learned michael cohen, donald trump s personal lawyer, used his trump organization e-mail as he made arrangements to pay that $130,000 in hush money to stormy daniels. nbc has also learned that stormy daniels earn attorney at the time address correspondence top cohn as special counsel to donald j. trump. didn t do it on his own. cohn back in february told nbc news neither the trump organization nor the trump campaign was a party to the transaction with mrs. clifford. of miss clifford rather. and neither reimbursed me for the payment. either directly or indirectly. paint to miss clifford was lawful and was not a campaign contribution or expenditure by anyone. in an opinion piece published two days ago, the government watchdog group common cause argued opposite to that. by failing to report the payment as a campaign expense, the trump campaign violated multiple federal disclosure laws and depending on the source of the $130,000 paid to daniels, the payment may also have been an illegal contribution. the president s press secretary has denied allegations of an intimate relationship between the president and daniels. for more i m joined by katie phang. i guess a lot of people watching are wondering, does this mean that robert mueller, the special counsel looking for any crime by trump involving the 2016 election certainly in that much wider orbit than that but in the target zone, was the law broken by someone paying $130,000 to this person to keep quiet about something that would hurt his campaign and the payment made a week before the actual election makes it look like a campaign related event? your thoughts about the exposure as you lawyers say, exposure of mr. trump here? well, exposure seems to be a word bandied about a little bit when it comes to daniels as a porn star. to your question, chris, anybody remember john edwards? he got indicted for doing exactly the same thing, taking campaign contributions and money to basically silence his mistress so as to influence the outcome of the presidential election that he was running for. so is that we ve got going on here? but that was a hung jury. that wasn t resolved in court. that jury couldn t decide. bunny said she just liked john edwards and did it as a favor and didn t see it as a campaign contribution. that s her point of view the. here s the thing. it begs the question. michael cohen said he took out a home equity line of credit to put it in an llc account to be able to pay off stormy daniels. why? why is he randomly paying $130,000? now you have a problem. people like the fec is interested. the house judiciary committee sent a letter to michael cohen and two other gentlemen saying you might want to explain why you gave this money and by the way, there might be tax issues because the tax treatment on this money would trigger other violations of federal law. so michael cohen s now opening a huge pandora s box because he keeps on opening his mouth and keeps on trying to give excuses that don t have legal viability in terms of being credible. just to make an argument against it, is every aid you give, every contribution to a candidate a campaign contribution? you can say i drive his kids to school or anything that helps him. i helped his wife carry account groceries home. is anything a contribution to the well-being of a candidate a campaign contribution? here s the thing. it has to be a reported in kind contribution. there s a certain valuation amount that gets triggered. $130,000 pursuant to a settlement agreement that michael cohen, the llc and this dennis son guy who we know is donald trump is implicated we know this is hush money paid to stormy daniels to keep her quiet. now we re going to go back to the litigation. we re going to figure out where had goes. here s the problem for michael cohen and for donald trump and here s the problem for the trump campaign and here is why mueller might be interested. through the course of the discovery process, you re going to have depositions. you re going to having discovery requests and bank statements turned over and you know that mueller is the key guy to follow the money. so here s the essential question, chris. where did that money come from? did it really come from a heloc? if it was think all of rules of professional conduct michael cohen is in violation of in his home state of new york where he is a licensed attorney. the attorney general of new york might be interested. this president can t pardon his own behavior in new york state. thank you. you followed it all the way. thanks so much, katie phang for being our expert. up next, president trump s go it alone approach. he s willing to rely completely on his own instincts even if it puts him at odds with everyone around him his experts, secretary of state, national security adviser. they were all ignored yesterday when he went to town on this north korean gambit. you re watching hardball. it s time for the sleep number spring clearance event on the only bed that adjusts on both sides to your ideal comfort, your sleep number setting. does your bed do that? it s the last chance for clearance savings up to $600 on our most popular beds. ends soon. visit sleepnumber.com for a store near you. but having his parents over was enlightening. you don t like my lasagna? no, it s good. -hmm. -oh. huh. [ both laugh ] here, blow. blow on it. you see it, right? is there a draft in here? i m telling you, it s so easy to get home insurance on progressive.com. progressive can t save you from becoming your parents. but we can save you money when you bundle home and auto. problems. trump put his go it alone strategy on display this week first with his move to impose new steel and aluminum tariffs then to meet with north korean leader kim jong-un. time and time again he made it clear it s his own judgment alone that matters. i m an outsider. used to be an insider to be honest with you, okay? i know the inside and i know the outside. and that s why i m the only one that can fix this mess, folks. nobody is going to be able to do the kind of things i can do. but let me tell you, the one that matters is me. i m the only one that matters because when it comes to it, that s what the policy is going to be. you ve seen that strongly. the new york times peter baker writes, whether it s middle east peace or trade agreements trump has repeatedly claimed he can achieve what has eluded every other occupant of the white hourse through the force of his personality. so far little to show it. could north korea be the exception? there s one crucial variable at play this time around. and we ll get to that next with the hardball roundtable. nough for everyday use and cleans better than regular toothpaste? try polident cleanser. it has a four in one cleaning system that kills ten times more odor causing bacteria than regular toothpaste, deep cleans where brushing may miss, helps remove tough stains, and maintains the original color of your dentures when used daily. for a cleaner, fresher, brighter denture, use polident every day. you ve got to get in i know what a bath is smile honey this thing is like. first kid ready here we go by their second kid, every parent is an expert and. .more likely to choose luvs, than first time parents. live, learn and get luvs the sanctions have been very, very strong. and very biting. and we don t want that to happen. so i really believe they are sincere. i hope they re sincere. we re going to soon find out. president trump was joking about his role in opening nuclear talks, you could say, the decision to september kim s offer was trump s alone. just a short time ago trump tweeted the deal with north korea is very much in the making and will be if completed a very good one for the world. time and place to be determined. let s bring in the roundtable. clarence page from the chicago tribune did, gibson from the rioters news service and gabe a political reporter for politico. where are we headed? not toward the apocalypse i hope. what do you think? this is something that trump really wants. he doesn t know very much how to get there, but it s going to take longer than he thinks though. he s already conceding that. and this is just an opening something kim jong-un wants. i can t help but think like a lot of people do that kim is just waiting to get into a room with trump and roll him. if little kim decides he s going to make an ass out of himself before the world, i don t see how that s a victory for him. if he pounds his shoe on the table like khrushchev, doesn t he need a resolution to look good? donald trump is learning in his time as president that negotiating as the chief executive is not the same as negotiating the price of windows whenever you re building a new hotel. it s a lot more complicated and comprehensive than that. you can t just have one meeting where you say, yeah, you re going to give me a good price? we ll let everyone else work out the details and we ll call it a day. that s what he s used to. there s a ton of variables that could make this look different or feel different. he s already seeing his own white house walk back some of the things he s said. but they were talked back themselves an hour later by the white house. already more complicated than that. the thing to watch here is not what s going to happen when the meeting happens, it s what the rhetoric out of the white house and some of our allies across the world including asia is over the next few weeks. there was a lot of consternation when it came out. chinese don t want peace in the peninsula there. forget the chinese for a second. even the members of the president s own administration don t necessarily like this. let s not forget he clashed with secretary of state tillerson over the north korea issue before. i don t care about the bureaucratic problems. are we going to end the nuclear threat from north korea and will this get us there. what s he willing to give up. he wants to travel the world and live like a normal world leader. with the draw of u.s. troops. he wants to be recognized. he wants to be guaranteed we won t invade him. what s trump willing to give up is the question. a man who railed against. that s giving it up. to recognize north korea is not going to be popular on the right. he has to find success and what success means and what s a fair trade. he controls a lot of that image and discussioning. > the reason that i bring up the bureaucratic infighting, there is real substance aligned with that. whenever two leaders meet especially in situations like this it tends to be after months and months of negotiations with their teams. very clearly ha hasn t it this time or not in the way it traditionally does. we have to watch what s happening behind the scenes and in public what some of our allies say. that will give us real hints what this will look like. if that doesn t happen, there s a chance they sit down in a room with no cameras and we have no idea what he comes out of it. obviously kim wants to be recognized on an international stage. that s not ideal for trump but we don t know what he wants out of this except for recognition he s sitting down with kim jong-un. don t they both want to avoid a war? trump wants a place in history. don t they both want to avoid nuclear conflict? i would hope so. there s interesting commentary how if she s talks fail, we go back to the default position which is already who your threatening possible strikes that or some type of combat. the danger of these talks coming apart is that it will make trump angrier and kim more unstable. the roundtable sticking with us. up next, they tell me something i don t know. you re watching hardball. no, please, please, oh! (shrieks in terror) (heavy breathing and snorting) no, no. the running of the bulldogs? surprising. what s not surprising? how much money aleia saved by switching to geico. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more. jen, i ve got questions. boots or flip-flops? boot! great. smokey or natural eye? ugh, natural. good choice. how about calling or texting? definitely calling. puppies or kitties? sorry, cats. dry eyes or artificial tears? wait, that s a trick question. because they can both get in your way. that s why it is super-important to chat with your eye doctor if you re using artificial tears a lot and your eyes still feel dry. next question. guys, it s time for some eyelove! we re back with the hardball roundtable. clarence, tell me something i don t know. and watch for lewis fair rare can to be the litmus test in this election. a chicago man. i ve been covering him since the early 80s when he was disrupting jesse jackson s campaign and later became a litmus test around barack obama s campaign. now we re seeing on the right danny davis and various other folks. where we shook hands with louis farrakhan in the past. this is something we ll see. that s not going to defeat him. depends on the district. danny davis district won t make a difference. the swing districts you never know. jinger. the fight over tariffs is not over. american lobbyists are gambling on eu retaliation methods changing the president s minds. at the end of the day, these tariffs that the president has signed off on this week could end up being something he does a lot more talking than doing. what about peanut but thor? i was amazed. peanut butter, whiskey, that s a big one. they won t buy our peanut butter or our whiskey. it will disrupt the price in america. i want to bring everyone s attention to a senate race. the one to replace jeff flake in arizona. bernie sanders is going out to arizona this weekend. he ll do a rally with two progressive congressman out there. i asked him what he thinks about the democratic standard bearer out there. she s conservative. said the party is moving too far to the left. doesn t like all of his ideas about free college. he said i don t want to talk about this. i m not talking about the senate right now. there s clear tension there. that sounds like a smart move by hip. don t get in the wave a race you can t help. thank you. when we return, let me finish tonight with trump watch. you re watching hardball. liberty mutual stood with me when this guy got a flat tire in the middle of the night. hold on dad. liberty did what? yeah, liberty mutual 24-hour roadside assistance helped him to fix his flat so he could get home safely. my dad says our insurance doesn t have that. don t worry - i know what a lug wrench is, dad. is this a lug wrench? 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obscure the larger truth. if the ideological gulf between the president and steve bannon is small. this is not a fight over ideas, it s a fight over who deserves credit for an election win. talk about missing the point. if the legacy of 2016 is not a single person, any person, it s a set of ideas, the ones that reflect the hopes and their needs and the fears and the aspirations of a badly mistreated american middle-clas middle-class. those voters came to the polls because they wanted real borders, higher wages, they were dispirited by the opioid epidemic, why wouldn t they be. they were sick of being lectured by political class of washington that despises them and holds them in contempt. they were the other country, but they had come to recognize that it is hard to make the rest of the world better and very easy to make it worse. above all, they voted for leadership that promised to put americans first above any foreign nation or domestic interest group. that is the real legacy of 2016. at that agenda. getting it done as the central duty of this administration. regardless of who staffs it. match lap is the chairman of the american conservative union and he joins us tonight, good to se. good to see you. we had a lot of different lead segments in mind because there s a lot going on. this statement sort of overtook the entire new cycle here in washington and i m still trying all these hours later to figure out exactly what this is all about. who s served by this argument and what does it represent. i think the only people that were happy today with the people on other cable news shows that are prosecuting the case against who was a legitimately elected president. resistance and all the forces that feel a little wind in their sails because of this statement from steve bannon, which is over the line, inappropriate and he really should take it back because i know that he doesn t believe what he said. tucker: which statement are you referring to? the idea that jared kushner or don jr. are traitors or acted in a treasonous way. tucker: there unpatriotic. are treasonous, way beyond the pale and he ought to take it back. that s really not what this is about, because what he said earlier is that this investigation was a canard, that there was no rush or collusion, that he saw nothing inappropriate. and i think that s where the american people, who are good-natured and fair, are going to come down on this whole set of questions and this will be a drama that we will have to deal with over the next couple days. but i think it s a very unfortunate thing. tucker: so if you get for the bottom of the president s statement i m a very colorful statement, he says this. steve doesn t represent my base, he s only in it for himself. that seems like the nub of it here, the debate over who represents trump s voters. is that the president or is it his chief strategist steve bannon? with the answer? the conservative movement is not aligned to any one person, but they are head over heels overjoyed with the first year of the trump presidency and the trump agenda. they know that we could be looking at one or two additional supreme court openings i don t think it s smart. tucker: i m not saying that, i m just saying i have confidence that that journalist, michael wolf was actually representing the clip he heard because i think is an honest journalist. i don t think he has an ideological agenda here. what i m struck by is the fact that it was set in the first place by steve bannon. exactly! tucker: that s the question, why? what s the point of this? i think the point of this is when you are a staffer at the white house, you are a staffer. by the way, he did this as a staffer. if you serve a president, i served a president, right, and you don t talk to journalist with her on the record or off the record in any way to try to harm the agenda. if you re trying to harm the agenda, who was disloyal? tucker: this is not the first time. it doesn t matter. tucker: i m just saying. in five different interviews in the past couple of months you have seen direct attacks on trump by bannon or attacks that clearly came from bannon and i m just wondering is there a point, where is this going? you are one of the leaders of the institutional conservative movement in washington. do you see steve bannon leaving part of it five years from now? i think steve bannon is an important voice but i think is greatly marginalized his voice because this looks personal, this looks petty. it s about who did the most to help donald trump win. it s about revision and it helps the left. i think activists around this country, conservative activists see this for what it is. it s a distraction on president trump and conservative republicans pushing this great agenda. anything that gets in the way of that agenda, certainly when it s about ego claiming credit as a destroyer s distraction. i think he hurts himself unless he comes out and says look i might have disagreements with jared kushner or donald trump jr., but i don t think there s anything to this investigation, because that s what all his other tucker: very quickly, there have been reports that he is considering running for president in 2020, is that true, does he have a shot do you thin think? he does not have a shot, period, and he certainly doesn t have a shot of the republican primary. no one will run to the right of donald trump. he has captured that by making his commitment to conservatives with his agenda and delivering on the agenda. it s ironclad. tucker: thank you. kate koestler has spent a lot of time thinking about steve bannon. he s the author of the book bannon, always the rebel. some would say the definitive biography. great to see you. i would say that too. tucker: you know bannon well, you wrote a book about him. what s the point of this to mike he doesn t do things presumably for no reason. i think that he was angry. i think that at the time he said that it could have been either july or right after because they said it was soon after our july story in the new york times. it didn t have to be while he was still a staffer. it might ve come in august right after he left the white house. i m not sure. either way, he was involved in these vicious struggles within the white house. i don t think there s necessarily a point to this. i think you might roll it back if he could at this point. i doubt he will. i differ a little bit on the results of this, because i think that what happened here is that the president issued a statement condemning an individual. i ve covered the white house for 20 years. i ve never seen that. maybe osama bin laden. other than that, i ve never seen an official presidential statement condemning an individual. bannon does is not going to ret well to this. he probably artie has had some trouble with trump s flirtation with daca deal, maybe even a little bit with a tax cut. the problem for trump as this, he has basically declared war on steve bannon steve bannon. steve bannon likes wars and i think is going to go for it. he may not come out in, you know, immediately against trump, but little by little he may end up picking apart trump. and the problem for trump is that bannon aces conduit to the base, his best conduit to the base. if he loses bannon he cannot afford to lose a lot of the base. he may think he won the popular vote, but he didn t. the base is what elected him and he needs manager support him. tucker: you think that trump voters trust steve bannon more than they trust donald trump? i m not saying that although bannon is a rock star among the voters that elected trump. what i m saying is that if bannon does even a little damage to trump, which he could do. let s say trump wins the war, if there is a war, against a bannon. if bannon damages and even a little bit, trump cannot afford that. breitbart news and bannon himself is the most important conduit to the base that trump has, other than from his self. let s be clear, trump is the best person for that. he won by 60,000 boats turned in the election, he loses it. if it s another type of election like that and he s got one of his premier spokesman she s also been a spokesman for bannon for many months against him, then trump can have a problem. tucker: since you know his mind, let me ask you the question i asked matt, which is clearly this is not an isolated occurrence of him attacking from. he s been doing this through in effect cut outs. he s been doing this for months. what s the point? what s he trying to get out of that? mostly he s been supportive of trump. the people that he is angry with other people around trump. ivanka trump, jared kushner, who he calls jivanka. he s been doing that without penalty for a while now. you can understand that he s upset that his son is being called treasonous. what he s trying to do is marginalize people within the white house who have a more establishment republican agenda and keep trump s ear and keep trump focused on the things that he was elected on, not trump s family over everything. he loves his family. in terms of his personality and actually help political beliefs he s actually a lot closer to steve bannon that he is to ivanka trump. tucker: it seems that way. keith, thank you. on the left, it suddenly has become acceptable to attack people on the basis of their skin color. how did that happen and what is it doing to our country? we will tell you in sad and thorough detail next. and you don t have time for a cracked windshield. that s why we show you exactly when we ll be there. saving you time, so you can keep saving the world. kids: safelite repair, safelite replace trust #1 doctor recommended dulcolax. use dulcolax tablets for gentle dependable relief. suppositories for relief in minutes. and dulcoease for comfortable relief of hard stools. dulcolax. designed for dependable relief. you can switch and save time. it pays to switch things up. 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[vacuuming sound] and when you switch to esurance, you can save time, worry, hassle and yup, money. in fact, drivers who switched from geico to esurance saved hundreds. so you might want to think about pulling the ol switcheroo. that s auto and home insurance for the modern world. esurance. an allstate company. click or call. if sleep is essential to happiness. what s essential to sleep? introducing the leesa mattress. a better place to sleep. expertly designed for support, pressure relief, cooling and bounce. read our reviews then try the leesa mattress in your own home. sleep on it for 100 nights and love it or get a full refund. order now and get $100 off. go to their race is wrong. that was the standard and for a long time almost everybody in america believe it, or claimed to believe it. not anymore. now in the left it s acceptable, even encouraged, to attack people based solely on their skin color. you are not supposed to say the thing about it but suddenly it s everywhere. online magazine owned by the media company univision. it s not some obscure hate site looking on the dark corners of the internet. it s considered a mainstream destination. it s got 8 million visitors a month supported by huge advertisers like toyota. here are some recent stories that were just published. white people need to be better people. five life x who want to make white people uncomfortable at work. we need a reset button for something for white people. if there are plenty more just like that, you can google it if you want. at the a pretty clear intent to attack and ridicule an entire race for the crime of being born with certain genes. imagine a news website that tried to rank the most useless types of fill in the blank people. would you be embarrassed to read something like that? would toyota advertise on a site that ran a piece like that? of course not. but it advertises on the root, not even close to alone. take a look at busby, one of the most popular websites in america. in 2016 that company is valued at 1.5 billion. six times what jeff bezos pay for the washington post a couple of years ago. just last week, just last week was feed published a piece entitled 37 things white people need to stop ruining in 2018. one of the items on the list, america. it is not just wrong, it s nuts. it s actually suicidal. as they are always correctly reminding us, america is a multiracial society, which is great. multiracial societies are great. but they are fragile, always. the only survive when people of different races decide to treat each other as human beings with equal dignity. when they square off into warring tribes it s over. liberals say they are poor white nationalism and they should, but at the same time they are promoting it like this. when liberals pull up the speed for the latest list of why white people are wrecking america, they are happy to last long because they are saved safe in the knowledge that it doesn t affect them. the joke looks a lot different when you were not reached. you ve lost family friends to heroin, you haven t painted your house in 20 years. everybody you know is being crushed by the rising cost of education and health care. you re fairly certain your kids are going to make even less than you do, assuming jobs will even exist when the robots get here. you are worried, and you should be. and now some smug private school kid from brooklyn is lecturing you about how you are the problem because the color of your skin and the privilege it conveys. how much of that are you going to take before you explode at the unfairness of it all? at that point, why wouldn t you embrace a racial identity? everybody else seems to be doing it. that s a disaster, and it s not theoretical, by the way. that s what s going to happen in this country unless people start deciding they re going to treat one another as individuals rather than as members of group groups. jason nichols is a professor of african-american studies at the university of maryland and he joins us now. thanks for coming on. thank you. tucker: my concern here is that visas like this, attitudes like this, which are ubiquitous on the affluent left, the privileged left are driving the country apart along racial lines to an even greater extent that than we are already divided by racial lines and you will wind up with a totally vulcanized society. i don t know why people do this and i don t know when it became okay to do this. so when we talk about what drives us apart as a society, let s talk about the fact that black people are three times more likely to be denied for a home loan. at that you have a better chance of getting employment with a high school diploma than i do with a college degree. let s talk about many other structural issues that we have. tucker: happy to, but you are not answering the question, which is why does this help? with always been divided along racial lines, it s a tragedy. one of the worst things it s the worst thing about america. and you don t want to get worse, which is why you don t attack people on the basis of their race in public. and now all of a sudden the left has decided that s okay. it s crazy to me. again, you have to enter in nuance and context here. i think that many of these articles that you brought up are actually lampooning the ridiculousness and absurdity of racism itself. they are trying to turn racism on its head and say look, white people do these things, this is absurd. and again, in a society where white people tucker: so it s a joke? it s a satire. tucker: but you know that nobody if you were at buzzfeed. i have idea for a piece, 30,000 reasons that mexicans are wrecking america. you would be canned. why is it okay to say that about another race? if we really believe it s wrong to attack people on the basis of race, why isn t it wrong to attack people on the basis of race? if you put out this article are one of those articles and black people or mexican people or whomever said that about white people. let s say 80% of the black outlets and latino outlets said these things about white people. it would not affect white people in terms of their socioeconomic status, their health outcomes, their housing, their education, or incarceration. none of that would be affected. that s the big difference. there are bigger consequences. tucker: you are living in a world that doesn t exist anymore. you re living in a world where all the which people are white and all the poor people are nonwhite. in modern america, the one group of americans whose life expectancy is declining as working-class white people. i m not whining about racial i m just saying if you are one of those people were saying why are you attacking me? i don t have any privilege, why are you doing this to me? and you are pushing stuff like this pushes people to be more racially conscious, which is bad, in my opinion, if you see what i m saying. again, i think if we want to talk about the way people experience poverty, i think first of all, it s been proven that a black person who makes $100,000 is actually owing to live in a poor neighborhood with fewer resources than a white person that makes less than $25,000. because white property and black property are not equivalent. tucker: undressing the life expectancy of working-class white people is in decline. if that s true for no other group. i m not saying that the toughest road, i m just saying it s bad. why are rich private school hipsters from brooklyn attacking them like they are all weaving at palm beach? why wouldn t that stir resentment? i looked at some of those buzzfeed articles and have looked at the root articles. for the most part they are attacking the wealthy people that move people out of brooklyn, not the working-class person in alabama. tucker: you can see where this would lead to resentment. we don t need any more resentment in america from anybody i would think. absolutely not. tucker: let s just make it super simple and say probably about a idea to make generalizations about people based on their skin color, because it s not the most important thing about people, actually. again, i think you need to look at these articles where in many cases it s not just about race. class is in there as well and again, if you re looking at it intelligently and with nuance, you will see that they are actually lampooning racism. they re trying to see dominic say how ridiculous racism is. tucker: of course they are. you can t see about any other group. there s only one group you can attack. i hate even to say this out loud because it sounds like whining, and i hate whining. i just honestly think you are pushing a whole group of people to become way more racially conscious, and i don t want to live in a country where everyone primarily identifies by race, do you? you don t. first of all, we live in a country where race and race consciousness is forced upon all of us. tucker: but you want more of it to you? i don t think his articles are doing that. i think they are trying to show how absurd racism is. that s the whole point. tucker: the only white racism, as if that s the only kind. that s the only kind that has systemic consequences on people. tucker: fat i m telling you, it s just not fair to say to someone who lives in the middle of the country whose economic prospects have been devastated who really doesn t have much of a future, you ll don t make it your part of the problem. it really? and what part of the world is that person oppressing anybody? and i honestly don t think that most of those articles are saying that about that person who s in the middle of the country who is suffering economically during tucker: it just seems like another example of the powerful marking the week in order to feel virtuous. and i hate that. first of all, i would disagree that some writer or staff writer or contract writer for buzzfeed represents the powerful. that guy is making $40,000 a year. tucker: name one who went to public school in the midwest? i bet you can t. we are out of time. congressman, thank you. congressman. i hope you will announce in the future. journalist in new york city, home of brooklyn and people who write buzzfeed, and he joins us tonight. chadwick, i know i m painting with a broad brush, but i can kind of picture the staffer in question sneering at the middle of the country and blinding an entire group based on their skin color, which i thought was not allowed. right. i don t believe your guest for one second when he thinks a former guest when he thinks these articles are meant to be satire. to make fun of racism. it s exactly i think how you painted it. the sort of liberal oberlin kids who graduated to live in brooklyn and for some reason want to believe in the sort of dismantle the wealth narrative. i think the way to do that is to attack white people. marxism, it s socialism. it has the mainstream media s ear, mainstream society s ear. when you see these people who obsess over victimhood so much, it s so fascinating because if you want to see racism everywhere, if your brain wants to see racism everywhere, or homophobia everywhere, then you will. that s the world you will live in. i was having a conversation with a woman not too long ago about this, a young upper middle-class black woman and she was talking about how badly she gets treated on the street here in new york and i said to her, what if you live for one day as a white woman and you were treated the exact same way? people were just as rude to you, what then? tucker: it doesn t make anybody happier to see everything through that lens. let me ask you about something that happened yesterday. i personally missed it but it s in the tape, maybe you saw it, cohost joy behar reacted to the ongoing protest we ve been seeing in iran by saying the u.s. is on the very brink of executing gay people in the street. it s not apples and apples, it s not equal, but we are on a very slippery slope in this country towards throwing democracy out the window. we have to defend the present civil rights. we do, but not being stoned in the streets for being gay. tucker: how close do you think we are to a country where people are stoned in the streets were being gay as joy behar suggests? i have to tell people this all the time, we can t even get funding for the wall, so the gay death camps are definitely not have until the second term. she is completely ridiculous. this narrative that they want to push is so absurd. there s no proof to it. it s such a load of bull. in that same discussion she was sort of ironically saying that the protesters in iran and the so-called women s mergers here, the resist protesters, she called them protesters, are basically fighting for the same thing. she said the details are different about what they are fighting against, but the general thing, they want democracy and freedom and ours is deeply under attack in this country. firstly, let s talk about that. in iran young women tearing off their headscarves in there for jobs and here in new york and washington you women and men putting them on as a symbol of liberation. and when she says it s so funny to see her saying our democracy is under attack. tucker: it such grotesque overstatement. i know what it s like to get him out on television, but part of your brain says pull back a little bit, don t say more than you mean, don t overstate things grotesquely, because if you do you will be called on it. you shouldn t say things that aren t true. no one ever calls anybody on the left when they say ludicrous things like gays are about to be stoned in the streets. what? exactly. it s just this hysteria and they have no evidence for it. they have absolutely no evidence for it and it s exactly they are just showing what they are, they have no arguments. tucker: childish. chadwick moore, great to see you. thank you. tucker: thanks. congressional investigators say they found evidence the fbi rigged its investigation of hillary clinton. if you don t want to believe that. a former fbi official joins us next. he has an informed view of that, stay tuned. patrick woke up with a sore back. don t stop it now, don t stop it no. don t stop it now, don t stop it. keep it comin love. keep it comin love. don t stop it now, if you keep on eating, we ll keep it comin . all you can eat riblets and tenders at applebee s. now that s eatin good in the neighborhood. and her email server. according to a report in the hill, fbi agents heather investigation micromanaged by higher level officials in contrast to ordinary practice. you know what that means. the investigators also told the hill they found evidence the fbi began drafting and exoneration of hillary clinton before it had even gathered all the relevant evidence were interviewed more than a dozen key witnesses. chris is a former assistant director of the fbi and he joins us tonight. thanks for coming on. good evening, tucker. tucker: you ve seen this report. i don t think any american wants to believe the fbi is on the level and subject to political manipulation, but that s the conclusion i m reluctantly reaching. what s your conclusion? as an experienced investigator, it doesn t take a congressional investigation to tell me that nothing about that investigation was right. those of us that have conducted federal criminal investigations no that you use the grand jury, you use search warrants, you don t hand out immunities like candy. everything investigation runs contrary to the way a real credible, thorough fbi investigation is conducted. tucker: given as you are watching this, give us the specific examples that this tipped you off that this was not unfolding as it ought to have been. first and foremost, in any complicated federal investigation, the basic tool of the trade is a grand jury. use of the grand jury to obtain records. you don t go to witnesses and say mother, may i have that computer hard drive? may i have those emails? uu subpoenas and process and grand jury and search warrants and that sort of process. that was the tip off from the beginning. so many deals were made with people not knowing what kind of information they had in the deals being made simply because they lawyered up and didn t want to talk to fbi agents. that s when you throw them in front of a grand jury. tucker: a lot of subjects, most subjects i would think lawyer up and nobody wants to talk to the fbi, of course. but the fbi doesn t normally cave to that, does it? no. when jim comey was the deputy attorney general running the corporate thought tax force and i was running the criminal division, we play hardball in those investigations. you use grand jury process. you didn t just ask for records and you didn t give them an opportunity to hand over what they wanted to hand over. and if they did lawyer up you went to the trouble of throwing them in front of the grand jury to put their statement on the record, or they can take the fifth and then you can make a decision as to whether to grant them immunity at that time. but none of that was done in this case. tucker: why? this was like driving a car with the brakes on. tucker: why wasn t it done do you think? that s what puzzles myself and all of my former colleagues, people who have retired from the fbi from executive level positions on down to the street level. the only thing i can come up with is that director comey placed the investigation in the hands of his inner circle and they had their own agenda, obviously. we ve seen that from some of the information that has since come out, the text, et cetera. tucker: so you think it was political? i think that there were people inside that inner circle in the comey inner circle that had their own predetermined opinions about trump excuse me, about hillary clinton and the president, what then was a president-elect or someone running for president. tucker: let me ask you about something that i found really striking, tell me if you had the same reaction. we now have documents that came out in a lawsuit that show, internal documents from the fbi that when the then attorney general loretta lynch had the famous meeting on the tarmac with bill clinton, whose wife was being investigated at the time, the fbi s first reaction was not to figure out how did that happen, the first reaction was to find out how the news it leaked. does that seemed like a very wed reaction to me. that s not the fbi that i know and as i ve said, my former colleagues that i compared notes with all the time, former director comey s rationale, shall we say for making this prosecutor decision that the fbi director has no business making, that she was not to be prosecuted. that was based on that tarmac meeting. if that were the case, all he had to do is hang the investigation to the attorney general s office, let her recuse herself from making that decision, knock it down to her number two level person and then if that didn t happen, then maybe raise the issue publicly. tucker: it really distressing to watch this. thank you for your perspective on that, i appreciate it. my pleasure. tucker: in order to get the federal government funded, democrats are demanding that daca recipients be given amnesty. they may try to shut down the government if they don t get it. that story next. my friends and family never thought i d be the one to quit smoking, i was such a heavy smoker. but i was able to do it with chantix. i did not know that chantix would reduce my urges so significantly. along with support, chantix (varenicline) is proven to help people quit smoking. chantix reduced my urge to smoke. when you try to quit smoking, with or without chantix, you may have nicotine withdrawal symptoms. some people had changes in behavior or thinking, aggression, hostility, agitation, depressed mood, or suicidal thoughts or actions with chantix. serious side effects may include seizures, new or worse heart or blood vessel problems, sleepwalking or allergic and skin reactions which can be life-threatening. stop chantix and get help right away if you have any of these. tell your healthcare provider if you ve had depression or other mental health problems. decrease alcohol use while taking chantix. use caution when driving or operating machinery. the most common side effect is nausea. everybody had doubts, including me, but i did it. ask your doctor if chantix is right for you. nice man cave! nacho? [ train whistle blows ] what?! -stop it! -mm-hmm. we ve been saving a lot of money ever since we switched to progressive. this bar is legit. and now we get an even bigger discount from bundling home and auto. i can get used to this. it might take a minute. -swing and a miss! -slam dunk! touchdown! together: sports! tucker: with each passing day the possibility grows that daca will force a shutdown of the federal government because, of course, legalizing people who are here illegally is the single most important thing our government could do. if president trump says amnesty for daca beneficiaries as a possibility but should be tied o long-term immigration. democrats argue there should be no concessions in return for amnesty. some are willing to shutdown the government during budget negotiations to get their way. one was willing to compromise, still a democrat though, congressman, thanks for coming on. good evening, tucker. happy new year to you. and all the rest of the world. tucker: happy new year! this is one of those where negotiations were one side has already set i m willing to compromise. at the president has said look i m willing to support legalization amnesty for these people for these people here illegally. they have to assure us they will not bring all of their relatives with them and being able to prevent people in the future for coming with them like border security like a wall. why would democrats be against that? certainly the democrats do not want the government to shut down, period. that s our position, frankly we were not responsible for the shutdowns of the past. however, going forward, what are we to do? we did we did, or the did put a 150 some alien dollar hole in the money that we need to fund all government programs for the next year. if that was the tax cut that we just passed last december. so we start off with a very, very difficult financial situation in which $150 billion that we were counting on to solve some of the financial issues, some of the funding problems disappeared and that tax cut. tucker: actually would agree with you on that. that s a kind of legitimate argument to have. do we have enough money or we get the money, but why are we having an argument about people who aren t even citizens? i feel sorry for them, but that s like number 111 on the list of priorities for most americans, why is it number one for democrats? unless you happen to be one of the 800, or 800,000 that are daca of which 160,000 have actually graduated from one or another of our universities. tucker: they are great, but there are also 325 million actual americans here and their concerns are going down the list so the concerns of illegal aliens and take the top spot, why? there s also a host of other problems that are in that funding question and keeping the government open. the military wants more money and frankly needs more money. we also need to provide money for the children s health insurance programs and on and on. if infrastructure, anybody mentioned the trillion dollar infrastructure and where s the money for that? it mostly disappeared in the tax cut. tucker: i m not disagreeing with you. can we just get past the daca thing. if we are spending an awful lot of time on other country s citizens when our citizens are waiting for congress to do something so why not just say, look, that s fine. we will build a wall, not why not build a wall? why not sneak in a bring your relatives. what? you sneak in and then your relatives get to come, why is that fair? i think that there is a reasonable solution to all of this. the dream act, which has been around five years now, it deals with most of that issue. the chain migration issue that you talked about, chain immigration issue. that needs to be addressed. it can be a serious problem. certainly these daca students, or daca individuals are more interested in their own circumstances, the issue of their parents and relatives, yes, that should be dealt with. going beyond that, a wall. it s been pretty well determined that there are far better ways to spend tens of billions of dollars than to build a wall. certainly we could use new technology. the coast guard, for example, needs money to patrol the oceans, which happened to be the major way in which drugs enter the nation. tucker: under our current system we give out, in effect, green cards, which become citizenship on the basis of a lottery, the diversity lottery. why in the world, if citizenship mattered, if we cared about our country, if we just randomly give green cards to people on the basis of chance, a bingo? why do we have that program? why can t we get rid of it? well, there certainly needs to be comprehensive immigration reform. and that needs to be one of the pieces of that. border security absolutely essential. how do you spend the money for border security? a wall, is that the best way? many of us think that is not the best way. we also need to deal with the agricultural guest worker program, which is a major problem here in california. tucker: i know your growers want cheap labor as they can get. i would like cheap labor at my house too, but can we just agree that we should stop letting people in randomly under the diversity lottery, and it s not fair to let illegal aliens bring all the relatives? and we agree on those two things? i think we can. let s write a lot. tucker: thing you should have no problem getting the government funded! good luck, thank you, congressman. i appreciate it. you got it, thank you. tucker: iran has been wracked by antigovernment protests. the american media seem weirdly unenthusiastic of them. it is that our imagination or are they trying to hide something? what is it? very confusing. mollie hemingway will sort it out next. and we covered it, july first, twenty-fifteen. talk to farmers. we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum whentrust the brand doctors trust for themselves. nexium 24hr is the number one choice of doctors and pharmacists for their own frequent heartburn. and all day all night protection. when it comes to frequent heartburn, trust nexium 24hr. would think our press would be excited to see these protests in progress. it doesn t seem so for some reason. if the past couple of days the impulse of the press has seemed to be to downplay or even criticized those protests. nbc, cbs, cnn all criticized, made in response to it rare antigovernment protest. the new york times tweeted that the protesters ignored calls for com from iran s president. are we imagining it or is there something we are going on here? mollie hemingway is the senior editor of the federalist, she joins us tonight. what is this about? i think there are good reasons why you re not seeing a lot of coverage and a lot of bad reasons. the good reasons is that iran is a very impressive regime, they kidnap foreign tourists. we don t have good lines of communication and it s very difficult to cover what s happening there. if there are a lot of bad reasons why you are seeing a lot of coverage, and that could be everything from how these waves of protests completely undercut the narrative that we heard throughout the obama administration. and i think that our media tend to want to protect and defend president obama. tucker: how do these protests undercut that story line? president president obama ae iran nuclear deal. they placed these bets with this person who they pitched is very moderate. they used people in the media to help sell this deal. when we see these protests, very different from what we were told. we were just told by the new york times very recently that iran was a very unified country. they were unified behind their regime. they were united in their opposition to donald trump. obviously that s not true when you look at these protests, however big they are, that there is at least some coalition of people who are extremely upset with their regime and the corruption of the regime and the economic consequences of that. some of the signs talk about how that they don t like that they are involved in all these foreign conflicts and how they are supporting terror in the region. that s completely different than what we ve been told and i don t think journalists like to come clean when they are shown not to be telling the truth. tucker: could also be that it s far away uncomplicated and that is much easier to write about some stupid lunch carter page whatever, or some 26-year-old fake foreign policy advisor had during the campaign. at the russian nonsense maybe is closer to the heart of most journalists? that s why it s actually so frustrating to read the new york times coverage because so many people have just dropped foreign bureaus. if they don t have good resources in these regions. it is very difficult to cover when you don t have people on the ground, but the new york times does. a lot of what they ve been publishing has been sort of very friendly to the regime and parroting the regime s lines. part of it might be that they are afraid that they are reporting resources there or vulnerable, but you shouldn t subvert journalism. tucker: pro-american are potentially pro-american and kind of reasonable. not really represented by its regime at all. that sort of weird that american journalists wouldn t be more sympathetic to the population of the country yearning for a new government. particularly a few years ago, many people in our media were so excited by arab spring, revolutions that they saw were even in some of those cases you are getting rid of bad leaders and replacing with even worse leaders. in this case there s no question that iran is completely oppressive country. doing a lot of bad in the region. there are people there who are very frustrated and should be at least you should see some sort of vocal support or coverage of what they are trying to accomplish. these are very brief people and their chances are not very good of actually achieving revolution. not just because of the military there, but the secret police and all these other resources that the regime there has. they are pretty impressive work. tucker: it does seem like a lot of the countries we saw sort of become democratic for about 20 minutes were not ready for some government. iran seems a lot closer to being ready. he seems to have a much more impressive population, if i can be blunt than some of those other countries. what a shame that we are not helping more. has more of a history and it has been a great empire. tucker: only for 3,000 years, not a big deal. mollie hemingway, thank you. californians can t ban guns, the government camps, so they are doing the next best thing. they are basically taking away ammunition to disarm the population. that grim story next. mom, i have to tell you something. dad, one second i was driving and then the next. they just didn t stop and then. i m really sorry. i wrecked the subaru. i wrecked it. you re ok. that s all that matters. (vo) a lifetime commitment to getting them home safely. love. it s what makes a subaru, a subaru. ammo as well as relatively harmless stuff like 20 gauge birdshot or 22 long rifle. all of it you ve got a permit and a background check to buy it. he also can t privately bring ammunition into the state anymore either. that is now a crime. for a day, dozens of stores were outright banned from selling any ammunition at all because california s government was behind on granting permits, surprise surprise. while this may california safer? of course not. criminals ignore the law, they always do. the real and the only, indeed, intended fact will be to disarm the law-abiding population. keep in mind, that same state has declared itself a legal sanction area for foreigners were breaking our most basic laws. so the nonthreatening activity of american citizens is criminalized and lawbreaking of foreigners is protected. the message? normal people are no longer welcome in the state of california. shouldn t surprise anybody that they are fleeing.
ex-wives and ex-girlfriend. how does the fbi fit into that. we just learned some very interesting if not completely clear information from the head of the fbi director. i want to bring in chris cillizza, who is here with me to discuss this. there is a lot to unpack here from russian meddling in the election and how that feaffects the midterms coming up. the timeline had it comes to rob porter, you know what, pause for a moment, chris, let s return to the testimony at the senate intelligence committee. they re out in the community, and i can tell you the community values what they do on the island. thank you. and an op-ed by a number of former intelligence analysts call the nunes memo and the release, quote, one of the worst cases of politization of intelligence in modern american history, unquote. you said you had concerns about that memo. i know you can t get into the sure i stay on the unclassified side. we have seen intentions to have an impact on the next election cycle here. director coats? yes, we have. anyone else? admiral rogers? yes, i think this would be a good topic to get into greater detail in this afternoon. according to news reports, there are dozens of white house staff with only interim security clearances still. to include jared kushner until last week, to include white house staff secretary rob porter, who i would assume would have regularly reviewed classified documents as part of his job. director coats, if someone is flagged by the fbi with areas of concern into white house staff with interim clearances, should those staff continue to have access to classified materials? let me first just speak in can be in a position to receive or not receive. so i think that s something that we have to do as a part of our security clearance review. the process is broken. it needs to be reformed. as senator warner has previously said, it is not evolution, it is revolution, we have 700,000 backups so we have situations where we need people and places, but they don t yet have that. your specific question, i think, i would like to take up in the classified session. chairman, i m over my time, thank you, director coats. thank you, mr. chairman. director coats, director pompeo, admiral rogers, you all talked about evidence that the russians would intend to do things that would be active in our elections. i really it seems to me two divisions of that activity. different from state to state. that s a strength, not a weakness in my view. but what are some of the things we can do to be more helpful to local election officials and encouraging them to share information when they think their systems are being attack ed getting more information to them than we have. there is a lot of criticism in the last cycle that we knew that some election systems were being attacked and didn t tell them they were being attacked and so the three of you, in any order, let s just do the order i started with, director coats, director pompeo, admiral rogers, any thoughts you have on what we can do to protect and how quickly we need to act this year. the intelligence community is aware. we want to provide a collect and provide as much information as we can so we can give the warnings and alerts so we can share information back and forth with local and state and election processes with the federal government. department of homeland security, department of the fbi, obviously were involved, given these are domestic issues. but we do look to every piece of intelligence we can gather so we can provide warnings. it is an effort that i think the government needs to put together at the state and local level and work with those individuals engaged in the election process in terms of the security of their machines, cyberplays a major role here. i think it is clearly an area where federal government, foreign collection, potential threats and interference, warnings, and then processes in terms of how to put in place security and secure that to ensure the american people that their vote is sanctioned and well, and not manipulated in any way whatsoever. director pompeo. i was referring to the former, the first part of your question, not truly to the latter, the things we have seen russia doing to date are information types of warfare, the things that senator warner was speaking out most directly earlier. with the respect to the cia s role, we have two missions, one is to identify the source of this information, make those here aware of it so they can do the things they need to do, whether that is fbi or dhs. so that they have that information, we re working diligently along many threat factors to do that. and then the second thing is we have some capabilities offensively. to raise the cost for those who would dare challenge the united states elections. and after admiral rogers, i may want to come to you and see on the same, sharing information, any impediments to sharing that information with local officials, any reason we wouldn t want to do that. admiral rogers? the only other thing i would add and this is also shaped by my experience as cybercommand where i defend networks, one thing we generally find in that role, many network and system operators do not truly understand their own structures and systems. so one thing that i think is part of this is how do we help those local, federal, state entities truly understand their network structure, what its potential eventual nrbl tvulner. it is not an intel function, but it is part of how do we work our way through this process. director wray? i think that s one area that has been a lot of discussion about whether we re doing better and this is one of the areas we are doing better. we, together, at the fbi, together with dhs, recently, for example, scheduled meetings with various election, state election officials and normally the barrier there would be classification concerns. whether somebody had clearances. we were able to put together briefings appropriately tailored and with nondisclosure agreements with those officials. so there are ways if people are creative and forward leaning to educate the state election officials which is, of course, you know, where elections are run in this country. hopefully we ll be creative and forward leaning and we ll want to keep track of awe what e doing there. thank you. senator king. thank you, mr. chairman. first statement i want to make is more in sorrow than in anger. i ll get to the anger part in a minute. the sorrow part is that director coats in response to a question from snr collins, you gave an el quantity factual statement of the activities of the russians and the fact that they re continuing around the world and that they re a continuing threat to this country. all of you have agreed to that. if only the president would say that. i understand the president s sensitivity about whether his campaign was in connection with the russians and that s a separate question, but there is no question we have got before us the entire intelligence community that the russians interfered in the election in 2016, they re continuing to do it and there are real imminent threat to our elections in a matter of eight or nine months. my problem is i talked to people in maine who say the whole thing is a witch-hunt and it is a hoax because the president told me. i just wish you all could persuade the president as a matter of national security to separate these two issues, the collusion issue is over here, unresolved, we ll get to the bottom of that, but there is no doubt as you all have testified today, and we cannot confront this threat, which is a serious one, with a whole of government response, when the leader of the government continues to deny that it exists. now, let me get to the anger part. the anger part involves cyberattacks. you have all testified that we re subject to repeated cyberattacks, cyberattacks are occurring right now in our infrastructure, all over this country. i am sick and tired of going to these areases, which i ve been going to for five years, where everybody talks about cyberattacks and our country still does not have a policy or doctrine or a strategy for dealing with them. this is not a criticism of the current administration. the prior administration didn t do it either. admiral rogers, until we have some deterrent capacity, we ll continue to be attacked. isn t that true? yes, sir. we have to change the current dynamic. we re on the wrong end of the cost equation. we re trying to fight a global battle with our hands tied behind our back. there is a stunning statement in the report, they will work to use cyberoperations to achieve strategic objectives unless they face clear repercussions for their cyberoperations. right now there are none! is that not the case? there are no repercussions. we have no doctrine of deterrence. how are we ever going to get them to stop doing this if all we do is patch our software and try to defend ourselfs? those are very relevant questions and i think everyone not only at this table, but in every agency of government understands the threat that we have here and the impact already being made through the cyberthreats. our role is to provide all the information we can as to what is happening so our policymakers can take that, including the congress. and shape policy as to how we are going to respond to this and deal with this in a whole of government way. just never seems to happen. director pompeo, you understand this issue, do you not? we re not going to be able to defend ourselves from cyberattacks by simply being defensive. we have to have a doctrine of deterrence if they strike us in cyber, they re going to be struck back in some way. may not be cyber. i would agree with you. also i would argue i can t say much in this setting, i would argue that your statement that we have done nothing is not reflect the responses that frankly some of us at this table have engaged in, in the united states government engaged in before and after this but both during and before this administration. but deterrence doesn t work unless the other side knows it. the doomsday machine in dr. strange love didn t work because the russians hadn t told us about it. it is true. it is important that the adversary is not a requirement that the whole world know it. and the adversary does know it in your view? i prefer to save that for another forum. i believe that this country needs a clear doctrine, what is a cyberattack, what is an act of war, what will be the response, what will be the consequences and right now i haven t senator, i agree with you, we it is a complicated problem given the nature of i take responsibility for not having been part of solving that too. there is a lot of work to do. we need a u.s. government strategy and clear authorities to go achieve that strategy. i appreciate it. i just don t want to go home when there is a serious cyberattack and say we never really got to it, we knew it was a problem, we had four different committees of jurisdiction and we couldn t work it out. yes, sir. that s not going to fly. yes, sir. senator, i might add that we don t want to learn this lesson the hard way. 911 took place because we were not coordinating our efforts. we re now coordinating efforts. but we didn t have the right defenses in place because the right information was not there. our job is to get that right information to the policymakers and get on with it because it is just common sense if someone is attacking you, and there is no retribution or response, it is going to incent incentivize more right now a lot of blank checks, a lot of things we need to do. thanks. i appreciate that. senator langford. thank you. you and i talked last year about the same issue that senator king was just bringing up about cyberdoctrine and point person on who that would be and a person that would give options to the president and the congress to say if a response is needed, and is warranted, this is the person, this is the entity that would make the recommendations and allow the president to make decisions on what the proper response is. has that been completed? is there a point person to bible to give recommendations on a appropriate response to a cyberattack to the president? that has not yet been completed. your understanding of these stand-up of cybercommand and the new drirector replacing admiral rogers, the decision relative to whether there would be separation between the functions that are currently now nsa and cyber has yet to be made. general mattis will is contemplating what the next best step is. and there is they have involved the intelligence community in terms of making decisions and that role. but at this particular point, we cannot point to one sort of cyber czar. but various agencies throughout the federal government taking this very, very seriously and there are individuals that we continue to meet on a regular basis. the odni has something called ctik, a coordination effort for all the cyber that comes in so we don t stove pipe like what we did before 9/11. so things are under way. but in terms in terms of putting a finalized this is how we re going to do it together still in process. with respect to responses to that, these are title ten, dod activities unless granted to another authority. there is a person responsible. sa secretary mattis has that responsibility in all theaters of conflict with adversaries. thank you. i want to bring up the issue of the rising threat of what is happening just south our border in mexico. homicide rate went up 27% last year. we had 64,000 americans that died from overdose of drugs, preponderance of those came through or from mexico. we have a very rapidly rising threat it appears to me. what i would be interested from you all is on a national security level and what you re seeing, what are we facing, what is changing right now in mexico, versus ten years ago in mexico and our relationship and threats coming from there. i would defer to you you re watching the senate intel committee there with all of the heads essentially of the intelligence community. we have learned a lot of new information about russian meddling in the election, what is planned for the upcoming midterm election in 2018 and also some breaking news when it comes to how the fbi informed the white house when it came to the rob porter scandal. we re going to take a quick break. we ll be right back with more after this. as you get older. but prevagen helps your brain with an ingredient originally discovered. in jellyfish. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown to improve short-term memory. prevagen. the name to remember. tripadvisor! that s because tripadvisor lets you start your trip on the right foot. by comparing prices from over 200 booking sites to find the right hotel for you at the lowest price. saving you up to 30%! you ll be bathing in savings! tripadvisor. check the latest reviews and lowest prices. 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able to contain yourself at our breakfast bar. morning, egg white omelet. sup lady bacon! fruit, there it is! but we can guarantee that you ll get the best price when you book with us. holiday inn express. be the readiest. we have just heard from the heads of intel agencies is going to try to interfere is already under way when it comes to the 2018 midterm elections. we have been hearing from the director of national intelligence, the head of the fbi, the head of the dia, defense intelligence agency and others. i want to bring my panel back in to talk about this. we have josh campbell, former fbi special agent, now a cnn law enforcement analyst, dana bash with us, and chris cillizza, cnn politics reporter and editor at large. there are so many places where we could start. this has been a pretty informative hearing as we were hoping it would be that we could learn more information. i want to start with the rob porter scandal. and how the fbi, we just heard from the director, christopher wray, he was asked about as we really don t know the timeline coming from the white house, about what they knew about rob porter, allegations that he had physically assaulted his two ex-wives and a girlfriend as well. and the and christopher wray said this when asked about the interactions between the fbi, which does that background check for security clearances, did one on rob porter. here is what he said. the fbi submitted a partial report on the investigation in question in march. and then a completed background investigation in late july, soon thereafter, we received requests for pollup inquiry. and we did the follow-up and provided that information in november and we administratively closed the file in january and then earlier this month we received some additional information and we passed that on as well. when you look at that, and he also said before that, because he didn t want to get into specific conversations, but he said the fbi followed established protocols. the fbi has not come under fire when it comes to this. it is the fbi, what did they know, did they just was ignorance bliss in a way in keeping rob porter in such a key role where he s privy to so many classified information, where he s so close to the president. and this makes it clear that there were multiple it does not stand to reason that the top aides at the white house were not aware of the type of allegations that were being made about rob porter. exactly. what we just heard from the trump appointed director of the fbi is that ignorance was not bliss because there was no ignorance. the white house knew at multiple stages, at least maybe he didn t say who was informed. you have it would be very difficult to think that at least the white house counsel didn t know. and then that white house chief of staff ultimately in november when this the full report was completed, and certainly by last month, in january, when he said the administration closed the case. so this completely throws the revolving, evolving white house explanations of what happened into disarray. it completely counters that. and i think at the end of the day, now the question is are we going to get answers from the white house counsel don mcgann, are we going to get answers that we have not yet gotten from the white house chief of staff, john kelly, and can they keep their jobs? and lastly this is what happens when you send a press secretary out to say something that is just flat wrong which is what sarah sanders did yesterday, when she said this isn t us, this is the fbi. well, guess what, the fbi director just happens to be in a public forum the very next day and he can completely contradict that given the facts of how the process goes, but also how this particular process goes. that seems to be a desperate process, after days this is so clearly it is so clearly an unforced error and internal error on the part of the white house to then hear sarah sanders say that about the fbi. yeah, and, look, last thursday rod shah was in a similar position. he at one point said that porter had been terminated, which was patently untrue. he, to dana s point, he said the fbi background check is ongoing. that was february 8th. if the case had been the file had been closed according to director wray in january, it seems unlikely. i think what you have is two three main principles there. don mcgann, the white house counsel, john kelly, the white house chief of staff and the president of the united states, all of whom are not first two cases, the staffers not necessarily it seems like sharing the full story at the start with the staff. and that s hugely problematic. trump is in his way different in that no one questioned that he knew about this prior to last tuesday, i believe. the issue for him is different. it is, well, people say privately he s very upset and condemns this, but publicly he seems to be sympathizing with porter. that s sort of over here. but mcgann and kelly are really making it difficult for the sarah sanders, the rod shahs and anyone else trying to plan make a cohesive story that is internally consistent. what did you think hearing christopher wray say that, he couldn t comment on specific conversations, but he made it clear the fbi was following up after the partial report, the completed report, they were asked for more information, the fbi was. they gave more information and they closed that was in november. in january, they closed the investigation, got more information in early february and passed it on. it is you would expect and maybe you can speak to this, that was substantive information that the fbi was passing on about rob porter that had to do with the allegations. it is true. i think what we saw there is the classic chris wray, even keel, provide the information, they knew what they were getting when they brought him on as the fbi director. and many in the fbi have said, he s going to provide information and go along with what the facts are. so they had to have known that the facts would get out at some point. i can t understand for the life of me why they would have come out, violated the crisis communication 101 rule, tell it all, tell it fast, and provide this narrative that they knew the fbi would come in and counter. we re going to listen in, arkansas republican senator tom cotton asking chris wray the fbi director about the steele dossier. to the threat posed by china and chinese telecom companies. senator rubio spoke earlier and i agree with what he said about the threat of a rising china and the threat of confucius center and telecom companies and unicom and telecom pose to our country. i introduced legislation with senator cornyn and senator rubio to say the u.s. government can t use ute and the u.s. government can t use companies that use them. and i m glad some companies like verizon, at&t and others have taken this threat seriously. could you explain what the risk is that we face from zte and waway being used in the united states, the risk that companies, state governments, local governments might face if they use waway or zte products and services. i think probably the simplest way to put it is deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any we re monitoring the senate intelligence committee hearing, hearing from the leaders of the senate of the intelligence community. we re going to take a quick break and continue to monitor it. be right back. if you have moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, little things can be a big deal. that s why there s otezla. otezla is not an injection or a cream. it s a pill that treats psoriasis differently. with otezla, 75% clearer skin is achievable after just 4 months, . with reduced redness, thickness, and scaliness of plaques. and the otezla prescribing information has no requirement for routine lab monitoring. don t use if you re allergic to otezla. otezla may cause severe diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting. tell your doctor if these occur. otezla is associated 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(snap) (snap) achoo! achoo! feel a cold coming on? zicam cold remedy nasal swabs shorten colds with a snap, and reduce symptom severity by 45%. shorten your cold with a snap, with zicam. one more way comcast is working to fit into your life, not the other way around. interest when the president is put if charge of declassifying information that could complicate an ongoing investigation into his own campaign. well, senator, as we have been very clear, what our view was about the disclosure and accuracy of the memo in question, but i do think it is the president s role as commander in chief under the rule that was invoked to object or not to the declassification. so i think that, you know, that is the president s responsibility. regardless of whether there is an appearance of actual conflict of interest. i leave it to others to characterize whether there is appearance or actual conflict of interest. if the president asked you tomorrow to hand over to him additional sensitive fbi information on the investigations into his campaign, would you give it to him? i m not going to discuss the investigation in question with the president, much less provide information from that investigation to him. and if he wanted if he received that information, and wanted to declassify it, would he have the ability to do that from your perspective? information from the however he received it, perhaps from members of the united states congress. i think illegally he would have that ability. and do you think the president should recuse himself from reviewing and kldeclassifyg fbi material i think recusal questions are something i would encourage the president to talk to the white house counsel. has the fbi done any legal analysis on these questions? well, happily i m no longer in the business of doing legal analysis. i now get to be a client. and blame lawyers for things instead of being the lawyer who gets blamed. have you blamed any lawyers for their analysis what s na. have you blamed any lawyers for their analysis? i have not yet, no. okay. is the fbi getting the cooperation it needs from social media companies to counter foreign adversaries on their influence on our elections? i think the cooperation has been improve iing. i think we re continuing to work with the social media companies to try to see how we can raise their awareness so that they can share information with us and vice versa. i think things are moving in the right direction. but i think there is a lot of progress to be made. what more do you need from social media companies to improve the partnership you would like to have with them to counter these attacks in. well, i think we always like to have more information shared more quickly from their end. i think from their perspective, it is a dialogue. they re looking to get information from us about that it is we see, so that they can give responsive information. so i think we re working through those issues. do you believe the social media companies have enough employees that have the appropriate security clearance to make these partnerships real? that s not an issue of value, but i would be happy to take a look at it. plaez do and follow up with the committee. one thing that makes guarding against foreign intelligence threats on social media so complex is that the threat originates overseas and so that would be within the jurisdiction of the cia and the nsa and then it comes to our shores and then it passes on to the fbi and also the social media companies themselves. i m not aware of any written ic strategy on how we would confront the threat to the social media. does such a strategy exist? in writing? i would have to get back with you on that. i would be happy to look into it from my perspective right now. a written strategy, specific strategy is not in place, but i want to check on that. please do follow up and also last year congress passed a bipartisan russia sanctions bill. however, the administration has not imposed those sanctions. what is your assessment of how russia interprets the administration s inaction? i don t have information relative to what the russian thinking is in terms of that particular specific reaction. there are other sanctions that are being imposed on russian oligarchs and others through the united nations and through other things that have been done. in reference to the jcpoa but specifically on your question, i don t have an answer for that. can you may i make a comment, i think it is i think we ought to look at that in a broader context, how the russians view all of the actions of this administration, not just a particular set of sanctions or the absence thereof. as we have watched the russians respond to this administration s decision to provide defensive weapons in ukraine, to push back against russian efforts in syria, sanctions placed on venezuela were directly in conflict with russian interests. the lists of places that the russians are feeling the pain from this administration s actions are long. but director pompeo, i m sure you would agree that in order to understand the full scope of effect it also important that we analyze each discreet component, including what is the interpretation of this administration s failure to enact the sanctions as has been passed and directed by the united states congress and a bipartisan manner. have you done that assessment? on closed session i ll tell you what we know and don t know about that discreet issue. i agree with you, it is important to look at each one in its own place. i think what we most often see in terms of russian response, it is to the cumulative activities in response to russian activities. how the united states responds to those in a cumulative way. i look forward it our conversation, thank you. yes, ma am. director coats, you alluded to the activities of trans national criminal organizations. i m thinking particularly as regards our neighbors down south. of our border. recently i heard somebody refer to the cartels, the transnational criminal organizations as xcommodity agnostic, they ll traffic in people, they ll traffic in drugs and other contraband all in pursuit of money. whatever brings in the most dollars. senator manchin and others alluded to their concern about and certainly we all share the concern about the deaths and overdoses caused by drugs in america. much of which comes across our southern borders you re watching the senate intel committee as it questions the heads of the intelligence community. and specifically we just heard california democratic senator kamala harris asking christopher wray the fbi director about perhaps conflicts with the president declassifying information that had to do with a member of his campaign. that was in the nunes memo that we saw the declassification of. chris cillizza, i want to ask you about this. it seemed to me that chris wray wasn t biting. he said this is the president s job. whether to classify or declassify, she kept she asked repeatedly even if there is a perceived conflict and he said that s for other people to decide. he s not going to get you don t you don t get to become the fbi director by being dumb about politics. you know, these jobs have a big element of politics in them. he is not going to get in the middle of litigating what remains a hypothetical situation. he won t say, if this happened, then this. senator risch said to him not too long ago, well, he said to everybody, but then he singled wray out, warned them about getting enveloped in domestic politics. the criticism, theoretically, the reason the white house originally gave for the firing of jim comey was the mishandling and this sort of the going around the chain of command as it related to his handling of the hillary clinton e-mail investigation during the 2016 campaign. now, donald trump later said, well, the russia thing to lester holt and that clouded it. the real explanation of why comey was fired, the rod rosenstein memo that trump allegedly based the firing on was this idea that comey had gotten to had inserted himself in the political process which makes chris wray more mindful not to. he might have said i m not going to get involved in the politics. but he did in a re clever, very direct way by saying more than once that he had grave concerns. which we know that he had because the fbi put out a very unusual statement before the president ended up declassifying the republican memo. but as you were saying, when we were watching, one thing to see it on pap, another thing to hear him say it repeatedly. he might not be getting involved in politics, but he s making his stance very, very clear, which is political. and choosing, josh, his moments. he walks a fine line between his boss, the president of the united states and the rank and file who want to know that someone is out there defending them. one other thing i think is really important. remember, donald trump ignored the statement from the fbi, grave concerns, what chris wray has reiterated today, ignored the recommendation of the fbi and rod rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, to not release the nunes memo for fear it presented an incomplete picture factually. donald trump cited chris wray, the fbi, rod rosenstein, the justice department, for their concerns about the democratic adam schiff memo. in one week span. so on one hand, he ignored it. on the other hand, he cited it. if you work for the fbi, that has to be you re clearly being used when it is advantageous to donald trump. they re trying to take the high road and say even though one memo was released which they disagree with, they don t look at it, well, we have to release the other one because the first one was released. they care about the protection of the information and that s going to be their theme. i want to see what you thought about something that senator susan collins, republican from maine, talked to the fbi director about, who really i was surprised has been somewhat the star of the show when it comes to this hearing. here s what she was asking him about when it came to what a really unprecedented in recent decades, clearly politically motivated attacks on the fbi, on the doj, by president trump. the president has repeatedly raised concerns about current and former fbi leaders and has alleged corruption and political bias in the performance of the fbi s law enforcement and national security missions. i want to give you the opportunity today to respond to those criticisms. what is your reaction? well, senator, i would say that my experience now six months in with the fbi has validated all my prior experiences with the fbi, which is that it is the finest group of professionals and public servants i could hope to work for. and every day, many, many, many times a day, i m confronted with unbelievable examples of integrity and professionalism and grit. there are 37,000 people in the fbi who do unbelievable things all around the world and though you would never know it, from watching the news, we actually have more than two investigations. and most of them do a lot to keep that part was actually kind of funny, dana, there s more than two investigations? they are doing a lot of work, but he seemed to seize this moment to speak to his rank and file who may be feeling bruised by these attacks. no question. and look, this was a toss over the plate, a softball from susan collins so that he could get that kind of comment out about the fbi rank and file in a way that, frankly, some people have wondered and have criticized him for not doing in a more robust way when the president has criticized the fbi. i thought that was really noteworthy. then if you kind of take a step back, bri, on the whole crux of this hearing which is supposed to be worldwide threats, her colleague from maine, angus king, reminded everybody about what this is all about, which is russia interfering in the 2016 election. and he pleaded with all of the intel heads, please convince the president of the united states that this is a real threat. i mean, can you imagine that that s where we still are, that he doesn t really take it seriously and that a united states senator on the intel committee has to plead with the whole ic to try to convince the president? he wanted them to impress the national security importance of that on the president. you wonder, of course, they ve probably already tried to do some of that, but it was so interesting to hear senator king reem fa si reemphasizing that. i do want to go to kaitlyn. kaitlyn, you talked to your sources about the rob porter allegation. what was going on at the time the scandal of his ex-wives broke? tell us what you learned. reporter: this comes out of a shift of the narrative coming from the white house about who knew what when about rob porter when these allegations of abuse first surfaced and he bankrupab resigned last week. we re learning not only did he take an important role in the white house, not only that, rob porter was in serious discussions to be promoted when he abruptly resigned last week from the white house. now, he was the staff secretary, a very crucial role in this white house because he handled all the paper flow that came to the president s desk, executive orders and whatnot. but not only that, he was being considered for several other positions, elevated policy roles across the nation, as well as the deputy chief of staff role, a position that the person who had been serving in that role for less than three months stepped down last week, as cnn reported. we now learned that not only that, rob porter was considered being elevated, considered being promoted in this west wing which just shows these white house officials who were aware of the allegations against porter were able to overlook these potential indications of trouble in his past they had been alerted to by the fbi in order to have someone who is seen as a professional, seen as someone really competent in this very chaotic west wing. and that really just goes even further with what we just saw from the fbi director, christopher wray, right there, brianna. kaitlan collins, thank you for that detail that there were discussions of a promotion for rob porter when all of this broke. now we re going back to the hearing and listen to senator jack reed ask a question here. let s listen. we essentially are relying on the investigations that are underway. so the answer both with this committee and the hpsy committee as well as the special counsel. you re not taking any specific steps based on the intelligence to disrupt russian activities that are occurring at this moment? we take all kinds of steps to disrupt russian activities in terms of what they re trying to do. i think i ll turn it over to director let me finish with this. are you finished, mr. coats? yes. thank you, sir. senator, we have a significant effort i m happy to tell you about in closed session, and it is not just our effort, it is an all of ic effort. there may be others participating as well to do our best to push back against this threat. it s not just a russian threat, it s the iranians and chinese. i understand, director, we have mutual threats. but one threat that has been central to our and you ve testified this publicly the last election there was a russian influence. this election they seemed to be more prepared. they ve learned their lessons. the simple question i pose, has the president directed the intelligence community in a coordinated effort to not merely report but actively stop this activity? and the answer seems to be, i m hearing, the reporting is going on as we re reporting about every threat coming into the united states. let me get back to, quickly do the other panelists have anything on this point? i can t say i ve been explicitly directed to, quote, blunt or actively stop. on the other hand, it s generally clear to generate knowledge and insight, help us understand that so we can generate better policy. that directive has been fairly explicit, in fairness. again, you may agree or disagree, collecting intelligence and acting on it in a coordinated fashion are two different things. yes. i also acknowledge our role as intelligence officials. we ve talked a lot about china, fifias, their involvement in trying to buy companies in the united states. what i think has to be pointed out, too, they are undertaking a significant national investment in artificial intelligence and quantum computing. that is dwarfing anything the administration is proposing or suggesting. if artificial intelligence has even half of the benefits its promoters claim, it is going to be short of disruptive. quantum computing has the capacity to undercut cryptology as we know it. the experts can correct me if i m wrong. some of the negativisms that quantum computing can generate based on infinite amounts of water which people have to be wondering. what is our program for ai and quantum computing that will match the chinese? burt decoates, you seem anxious to answer that. we re treading a very narrow line here relative to discussing this in an open meeting. i don t want to tread that line, but we do have to recognize that, again, the chinese activity to appropriate or intellectual property is obvious. they re generating they re own intellectual property at a rate that could be disruptive, and we are not matching them. again, this manhattan analogy may be a little out of date, but when we saw the potential effects of a scientific development back in the 40s, we spared no expense so that we would get it first before our opponents. the chinese seem to be making that type of commitment very publicly. billions of dollars that they said publicly they have a plan and will implement. and we will provide that information to the extent we can collect that information. but just like the manhattan project, we don t share steps taken to address it. i understand. thank you, senator. thank you, mr. reed. i hope you ll come back to the closed session this afternoon. i think you ll get some fidelity in that closed session. we re about to wrap up. everybody can look up. there are no more questions so you don t have to lose eye contact with us hoping you re not the guy they re going to ask to answer. you can tell who the newbies are you re watching all the intel chiefs testify before the senate intel committee. we have heard a number of interesting things about u.s. preparedness for russian meddling in the upcoming election. it is expected to be fierce. that is very clear from what we have heard from all of these heads of different agencies. also, when it comes to the rob porter scandal, that top aide to president trump who resigned or was pushed out after allegations by his ex-wives that he abused them made very clear by the fbi director that they kept the white house in the loop. not looking good there for the white house as we head into the rest of the day looking for more information from the white house. we ll continue to monitor this. we ll be right back. get money back hilarious. with claim-free rewards. switching to allstate is worth it.