every administration prior to the trump administration has had nda s specific for anyone that had a security clearance. then, day 11 of the manafort trial. good day in court today. and the defense doesn t call a single witness. mr. manafort just rested his case. and it s election night in america. bernie sanders is live on set. all in starts right now. good evening, from new york, i am ali velshi in for chris hayes. no one to root for in the escalating feud between president of the united states and his former aide omarosa manigault newman. a he said/she said. omarosa made an explosive allegation against the president. whether the trump campaign colluded with russia to disrupt the election. omarosa claims that then candidate trump had advanced knowledge of the hacked e-mails that were released by wikileaks. you were instructed to bring up the e-mails at any point you could. that was our talker. did donald trump know about those e-mails before they came out? absolutely. he knew about them? yes. he knew before he was released it. i am going to expose the corruption that went on in the campaign and in the white house. continue to blow the whistle on all of this. she declined to say whether she has been before the grand jury. she is not a reliable narrator. there is good reason to be skeptical of this latest claim. but she has been able to corroborate. last night, another former trump staffer katrina pearson denied having discussed a rumored tape of the president saying the n word. kdid that happen? it sounds like she is writing a script for the movie. i have been talking about this. and it is absolutely not true. yet again, omarosa brought receipts airing audio of a conversation about trump this morning on cbs news. i said well, can you think of any time this might have happened and he said no. well that is not true. he goes, how do you think i should handle it. and i said it depends on what scenario you are talking about. and he said what he said it. he said t it s embarrassed. that is according to katrina pearson. i was weary over this obsession. asked directly if there could be a recording of the president. can you guarantee the american people they will never hear donald trump uttering the n word. i can t guarantee anything. but i can tell you that the president addressed this question directly. i can tell you that i have never heard it. just to be clear, you can t guarantee it. i haven t been in every single room. i can tell you the president has addressed it directly. and i can tell you what the focus and the heart of the president is, and that is on helping all americans. now the president is going to war on omarosa. quote, when you give a crazed, crying low life a break and give her a job at the white house. i guess it just didn t work out. good work by general kelly for quickly firing that dog. the trump campaign has retained the same lawyer who. you will hear it referred to an nda. for more on the battle between the trump white house and one of its own, joined by betsry woodrow. and jeff bennett. it is very clear that omarosa, whatever evidence she has has gotten under the president s skin. without a doubt. that is not something up for debate. she has caused the week to be spoiled for white house staffers. sort of crumble underneath them, omarosa was in a lot of rooms. she attended a lot of meetings. and people in the white house tell us that even though she didn t have a large policy portfolio and even though she doesn t have that much of a record of accomplishment to roll out. many colleagues criticize her for being there. she managed to place herself in the room for a host of meetings. and having conversations. and people don t know how much of that she taped. it is the big question mark. it is the open question and that is why there is so many agitation in the white house. she may have been one of the most productive people around every meeting she was in she taped. trump staffers live in fear of omarosa s next tape. three times in a row she made an allegation. the white house or someone in the trump orbit has denied it and she has come with a recording. president trump is consumed by this. tweeting about omarosa at least ten times in the last 24 hours. white house staffers describe the psychological warfare that former hillary clinton campaign. belonging to clinton campaign chairman john podesta, so an interesting parallel. senior white house staffers say they feel relatively safer. she wasn t included in smaller high level meetings. betsy, matthew from. would in fact change minds about him. i don t know if that is true. is the issue now whether or not the president ever actually used the n word which sarah huckabee sanders was not able to deny today. the president stuck in the mid-30% approval rating despite everything we know about him. it is hard to talk about what hypothetically, what type of response this hypothetical situation would generate. what we do know is that the president has a long history of comments and actions as it relates to racial issues in the united states that many, many people find to be deeply troubling. this goes back to the 70s when he was sued for allegedly discriminating against african-americans. you have trump going after the central park five. five young men accused of being in a brutal assault. for years after that fact, trump stayed pushing the line that these men were guilty. despite dna exoneration. in the white house, we have him using obscenities. immigrants from scandinavian countries should be welcome. you don t have to think very hard what he is getting back. what kind of impact would a tape have on the president s reputation. look, i hate to say it, but a lot of this is already baked in. i think you might be right. abc news is reporting several former aides receiving roughly $15,000 per month. concept of paying people money to not talk. seems to be out there. this came up today in the white house press briefing. we know that donald trump has a long history of using nondisclosure agreements. both in business life and now in political life. paying people in some instance to keep silent. we heard sarah sanders say. and as we called former officials we learned that that is in fact the case. we talked to chris lew. ari fleischer. all men said that ndas have never been used in the white house. there are protections for highly classified sensitive information but that falls under a security clearance. ndas are used for preserving personal secrets not state secrets. thanks to both of you. for more on these ndas, i am joined by legal analyst mimi rocah. and jason johnson politics he had editor for the route. anything that governs who is allowed. we are talking about the government putting an nda in place with government employees and that is what is so controversial and why sarah sanders claims that every administration has done this can t be right. this isn t really trump a party to that he is ndas, this is the white house. the government. whenever you have government action trying to limit the speech of public employees and even private employees, there is a first amendment analysis here. and a lot of people are saying these are likely unenforceable. the move to sue, to enforce this nda, i can t believe they are going to be able to win that claim. so must be some other reason to file this. get inside omarosa s head, she has been dripping little bits of evidence out there. successfully now, three times in a row said something in her book that has been countered out there and then has recordings. she knows the trump campaign is coming for her and they appear to be fearful of what she knows. they are trying to muzzle her. might be getting a temporary restraining order to do this. where do you see this going. this goes as far as omarosa selling the book. she is a very, very smart woman. she has been doing this for years. can you name anyone else in the history of reality television who has had a 15 year career. she knows how to keep herself in the public sphere. she has been mentored by donald trump for years. she knew legally what she was going to be able to keep doing. they don t want to go go to trying with her, discovery would blow up in their faces. the white house is concerned in given the number of people of how long she was there and how close she was to the president of the united states. so mimi, ndas are signed by parties if i have some sort of secret. and i don t want you telling other people what i am up to. and we know there is classified information, but what omarosa said to katy tur is remarkable. it is remarkable. it is explosive if true and that is the big question as you and other people have said. good reason to be skeptical of her. if she has a recording of some form that corroborates that, that you would be hugely important. even if she doesn t have a recording, we don t know exactly in what form the questioning is taking place of her by mueller. but, they may want to talk to her again now. she has said she has talked to the investigation once. they are never going to take just her heard for it. they wouldn t do that with anyone witness let alone this witness who everyone has reason to be skeptical of. i didn t see the full interview but i don t believe she was asked how do you know he knew. that claim that trump knew ahead of time about the hacked e-mails, it doesn t sound crazy because of what else we know about the investigation, the facts that came out about what happened. if she can get the investigators closer to the how, jason, that becomes interesting. but you mentioned she is inoculated. i am not sure that the dirt about the fact that the president may have used the n word is needle moving, but if she gives mueller something he can use. she was five, 20 steps, she was batman on this. five, 20 steps ahead. she knew when her book was coming out and they didn t know. there is a political element to all of this and a legal and american democracy element to this. for all of the people that want to poo-poo this, no, this is drama. no. what we are hearing at its core is a close advisor to the united states regular recorded and now using it for profit. that speaks to the lack of vetting. a year and a half into the administration, speaks volumes. mueller knows that having a witness like that in the investigation, if they got in trouble for the steel dossier, imagine if he brought this up. the first trial of the robert mueller era is coming up to a close. find out why resting without calling any witnesses. not cool. freezing away fat cells with coolsculpting? now that s cool! coolsculpting safely freezes and removes fat cells with little or no downtime. and no surgery. results and patient experience may vary. some common side effects include temporary numbness, discomfort,and swelling. ask your doctor if coolsculpting is right for you and visit coolsculpting.com today for your chance to win a free treatment. and i don t add up the years. but what i do count on is boost®. delicious boost® high protein nuritional drink now has 33% more protein, along with 26 essential vitamins and minerals boost® high protein. be up for life. called into the courtroom after the noontime break for the sole purpose of hearing the attorney said they will not be calling any witnesses and they are resting. that was the defense in the first case. the first of two cases against paul manafort president trump s former campaign manager. with 27 witnesses and 367 exhibits, the prosecution appeared to put on a solid case. the jury will hear jury deliberations tomorrow. i am joined by nbc national news reporter julie ainsley. . was there any discernible action when the lawyer rested the case. more of something that we wanted to see if they had anything to put up but in some ways it wasn t that surprising. all through this case, the defense has had a strategy of in their cross examination of taking chips away. whether that is bank fraud, tax evasion. they want to cast doubt. is this really mr. manafort s signature. that was their strategy. particularly with gates who probably the most notable this this entire case. the prosecution knew he was going to be dangerous and they attacked gates character. they used that strategy all along and i think, and of course dan can get into this as well, they didn t want any defense to be just a few character witnesses and say manafort is a good guy. their best defense is to say the offense didn t go far enough. that is interesting. what are the options? a mistrial, a hung jury, an acquittal. this seems like a risky strategy on the part of the defense. what do you make of it. two times a defense does not call any witnesses for their case and one is where they really do feel like they, the government doesn t have been the evidence. and the other is where they really have no case of their own. and they have no affirmative defense. we are in the latter situation here. the government buttoned up their case with documents, e-mails, and records. and they buttressed it with witnesses like rick gates. on the flip side not much of a case for paul manafort to affirmatively make. rather than put on a few technical witnesses to try to pick away a little bit on the margins, they made a decision, which i think is a wise one not to put any on. in this situation, the defense is much better off to say and to argue that the government hasn t met its burden, the case is all about rick gates. and you saw what a liar is, you can t convict my client based on rick gates testimony. i am not sure it is an argument that is going to win, but the best they have to work on here. there are other things going on here. some discussion that may have to do with a jury, an issue about that. and then a judge who on several occasions taken issue with the prosecution and gotten into it with some of the lawyers. tell me what these two stories are about. the second, i will take that first. an awkward pause in the courtroom today. the prosecution said they wanted to include something in a jury instructions that would tell the jury more explicitly that the judge s interjections and questioning of the witness shouldn t be considered. and the judge thought he already explained that and didn t understand why the prosecution needed to go farther. he said do you think that i interjected too much and there was a long pause and they said yes, there were times where he said obviously manafort didn t pay attention every dollar because you embezzled from him. the prosecution wants to be careful that the jury doesn t read too much into the judge whiwho is supposed to be the independent voice. daniel and i were both outside the courtroom today waiting two hours. and we saw jurors go in one by one to meet with the judge. from where we sit and the press, it looks like there is at least been a conversation under seal through motions started by the defense and responded to by the government that could be over this issue of a juror. the judge over and over again saying please don t talk to anyone on the outside. come in with an independent mind. and with a case like this that is saturated in the media and we know the jury is not under sequester, that is hard to do. daniel less than a minute, but tell me about this judge, ellis, i don t know if it mellowed out during the course of the trial, but in the beginning seemed to be butting heads with the prosecution. and seemed to echo donald trump s view that this has got anything to do with the mueller investigation. or the investigation might be overreaching. he has mellowed out this week and he realized that he went too far by interjecting as much as he during the questioning. he is not wrong to limit the charges in the case. notwithstanding. he really did overstep his bounds by interjecting the questioning. and that is to be distinguished by a judge giving prosecutors a hard time and always trying to move things along. keep the prosecution moving. and that is often to the prosecutor s benefit even if they don t think it at the same time. when he is interjecting during, and questioning, that is inappropriate. and that is the one issue the prosecutors took issue with. and he seemed amenable to it. because he probably realizes in retrospect that he went too far. thanks to both of you. julia ainsley and daniel goldman. coming up, senator bernie sanders on tonight s primaries. the senator joins me right after this. we just got married. we re all under one roof now. congratulations. thank you. how many kids? my two. his three. along with two dogs and jake, our new parrot. that is quite the family. quite a lot of colleges to pay for though. a lot of colleges. you get any financial advice? yeah, but i m pretty sure it s the same plan they sold me before. well your situation s totally changed now. right, right. how bout a plan that works for 5 kids, 2 dogs and jake over here? that would be great. that would be great. that okay with you, jake? get a portfolio that works for you now and as your needs change from td ameritrade investment management. and the wolf huffed and puffed. like you do sometimes, grandpa? well, when you have copd, it can be hard to breathe. so my doctor said. symbicort can help you breathe better. starting within 5 minutes. it doesn t replace a rescue inhaler for sudden symptoms. doctor: symbicort helps provide significant improvement of your lung function. symbicort is for copd, including chronic bronchitis and emphysema. it should not be taken more than twice a day. it may increase your risk of lung infections, osteoporosis, and some eye problems. tell your doctor if you have a heart condition or high blood pressure before taking it. grandpa: symbicort could mean a day with better breathing. watch out, piggy! (giggles) get symbicort free at saveonsymbicort.com. if you can t afford your medication, astrazeneca may be able to help. they are the industry expert with utilities. whether it is a gas leak or a wire down, just having someone there that deals with this every day is pretty comforting. we each bring something to the table that is unique and that is a specialty. with all of us working together we can keep all these emergencies small. and the fact that we can bring it together and effectively work together is pretty special. they bring their knowledge, their tools and equipment and the proficiency to get the job done. and the whole time i have been in the fire service, pg&e s been there, too. whatever we need whenever we need it. i do count on pg&e to keep our firefighters safe. that s why we ask for their help. election night in america. polls have closed and we can now report that senator bernie sanders has won the democratic primary for vermont. congratulations on your victory. thank you very much. it was a nail biter. i think you got 94% of the vote. something like that. you won the democratic primary, but you don t run as a democrat. i defeated republicans. i always run as an independent. and i think people in vermont understand that. we have a good relationship with the democratic party. i suspect that this coming campaign will be putting more money into the democratic party than anybody else. so you will decline the democratic nomination. yes. and i understand that you have a good relationship with the voters of vermont. but now you have a profile nationally where a lot of democrats saying this is not a good time for bernie sanders to be separate and apart. i am not separate and apart. democrats and republicans have to understand this. there are more people now who are independents. i don t want to break the bad news to anybody. two party system is not held in wide esteem. what i am doing is bringing working people and young people who are not crazy about the party. clearly that is a far better alternative than the republican party and we are trying to reform the democratic party. ma making it a party of working people and young people. pushing an aggressive agenda. health care for all. raising the minimum wage. demanding the wealthy start pay their fair share of taxes. those ideas seem to be radical ideas supported by the majority of the american people. take a look at this tweet. in races where insurgent progressive democrats are running against party backed nomineeses. the stabment democrat is winning 80 % of the time. how much money did the establishment have. we are winning the ideological struggle. ideas that seem radical are now seeming mainstream. are we going to win every election? of course not. the truth of the matter is, if you look at races from the school board, members of congress, we are winning good races. in this instance, in this time that we are now as donald trump as president, is the winning of the longer term battle of mainstreaming some of your ideas in the democratic party better or more important than the shorter term? donald trump has got to be defeated and i intend to do everything i can making sure that happens. you will recall, though, that four years ago in the midterm elections, we had the lowest voter turnout. two-thirds of the american people didn t vote. our job, and i think we are succeeding. is get people excited, to run for office, getting people to vote. candidates who stand for working families, the democrats are going to do fine. the complaints was not dissimilar to a lot of those who support donald trump. the distrust of the political system, of wall street and the banks of trade agreements who have left them out. and they are many of the same people. how do democrats get those people back? you talk to the issue that impact. we demand the media talk about these as well. why is united states not to guarantee health care let s talk about. so you push the idea of medicare to all which is a similar system which i grew up under. is that the winning strategy? i think it is part of it. not just one thing. raising the minimum wage. whether they are working people, working class. you got one guy, jeff bezos whose wealth increases every single day by $250 million but doesn t pay his workers enough money to keep them off food stamps and medicaid. people who do not benefit from his policies. we have to do heck of a lot better. i am not going to deny that some of those supporters are racist, sexists homophobes. and that is not the majority. what trump was able to do was pick up on the failures of the democrats. people cannot afford to send their kids to college or afford child care or housing that they need. so i think the future of the democratic party has got to be the focus on the needs of working families to demand that we have a government that represents all of us. you talk to republicans and ask them how they feel about citizen united. so at this point, the democrats have got to get out there with the message. you have been crossing the country campaigning for people. who will the leaders be? a number of democratic socialist candidates who have run. and there are back to this nate silver tweet. that is that is a troublesome tweet. because i can t pre i can back 100%. the number troublesome to you? 89% of what he is calling establishment democrats. it doesn t mean anything unto itself because the truth is that all over this country we are seeing working people and young people often for the first time getting involve in politics. some of these rural more conservative constituencies, you think it is good to get in there with a consistent message, a progressive message. ones who have been winning are people who i didn t know that was the situation out here in new york. you have drawn the clearest example. or john fedderman s victory in pennsylvania. but you get the point. there are some. people are going run their own campaigns based on their own district. it is not only good policies, it is good politics to talk about issues relevance to working people. you ask people do they want medicare for all? yeah. should the rich pay their fair share of taxes. yeah. should we deal with climate change. yeah, let s do it. and yet we have used in the opposite direction. congratulations on your victory. look forward to talking to you more. still ahead, the president making drastic attempts to distract from the mueller investigation. is it working? tonight s thing one, thing two starts next. 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(vo) ask your healthcare provider if ozempic® is right for you. here s a trip tip: when you search hotels on tripadvisor. enter your destination and the dates of your stay. tripadvisor searches over 200 booking sites. to find the best deal on the right hotel for you. tripadvisor. i m all about my bed. this mattress is dangerously comfortable. when i get in, i literally say ahh. introducing the leesa mattress. a better place to sleep. this bed hugs my body. i m now a morning person. the leesa mattress is designed to provide strong support, relieve pressure and optimize air flow to keep you cool. hello bed of my dreams. order online we ll build it, box it and ship it to your door for you to enjoy. sleep on it for up to one hundred nights and love it! or you ll get a full refund. returns are free and easy. i love my leesa. today is gonna be great. read our reviews then try the leesa mattress in your own home. order now and get $150 off, and free shipping, too. go to buyleesa.com today. you need this bed. with the new chase ink business unlimited card i get unlimited 1.5% cash back. it s so simple, i don t even have to think about it. so i think about mouthfeel. introducing chase ink business unlimited with unlimited 1.5% cash back on every purchase. we are praying for the people of puerto rico. we love puerto rico. heroin overdoses are surging in nevada. great to be back in missouri and god bless the united states. that is just the record that we have. trump while studying a briefer s map of south asia with india s. and then there are the president s trouble with time zone. that is thing two in 60 seconds. [burke] at farmers, we ve seen almost everything also wobbly in time zones. issue came up on a constant basis. staffers resorted to telling the president the time is messed up. he is the president of the united states, not stopping to add up time zones. but the current president s trouble with time zones may have an unexpected benefit. it turns out to be a convenient excuse for his performance. i don t know. i will give the benefit of the doubt, maybe jet lag and time differences but holy molly i can do more to lower my a1c. because my body can still make its own insulin. i take trulicity once a week to activate my body to release its own insulin, like it s supposed to. trulicity is not insulin. it works 24/7. it comes in an easy-to-use pen. and i may even lose a little weight. trulicity is an injection to improve blood sugar in adults with type 2 diabetes when used with diet and exercise. don t use it as the first medicine to treat diabetes, or if you have type 1 diabetes or diabetic ketoacidosis. don t take trulicity if you or your family have medullary thyroid cancer, you re allergic to trulicity, or have multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. stop trulicity and call your doctor right away if you have symptoms of a serious allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck or severe stomach pain. serious side effects may include pancreatitis. taking trulicity with a sulfonylurea or insulin increases your low blood sugar risk. common side effects include nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and decreased appetite. these can lead to dehydration, which may worsen kidney problems. to help lower my a1c i choose trulicity to activate my within. ask your doctor about once-weekly trulicity. you always get the lowest price on our rooms, guaranteed? let s say it in a really low voice. carl? lowest price, guaranteed. just stick with badda book. badda boom. book now at choicehotels.com then there is this. only 37% of americans believe what trump has said publicly about the investigation is true. 56% said his comments are false, in other words that he has been lying. with all that said, is the president losing the pr war with robert mueller? we will debate the question next. ction of a cancer cell by the body s own immune system, thanks to medicine that didn t exist until now. and today can save your life. whoooo. tripadvisor makes finding your perfect hotel. relaxing. just enter your destination and dates. tripadvisor searches over 200 booking sites to find the hotel you want for the lowest price. dates. deals. done! tripadvisor. i have no idea how we re going to get through this. follow me. unitedhealthcare has the people and tools to help guide you through the confusion. well that wasn t so bad at all. that s how we like it. unitedhealthcare. are. can say it s not working or one can say how is it that 37% of people still believe him? that s the million dollar question. the answer is just a theory that i have. there is a portion of the population that is viewing facts through a very tribal basis. they are not coming at things for the first time, but who gave me this information. if you trust donald trump. or distrust the media. i think there is a lot of overlap there. that s what you are seeing. you are saying i believe whatever he says, meaning the president. there is a tribal silo now on the right that consists of fox news and talk radio and a certain cluster of right wing and post conservative blogs. they say donald trump s word is law. he can literally say we are living on mars and the sky is red and they will say of course we are living on mars. they isolate themselves into a bubble around them. it s very powerful. you bring up something. let s play something where donald trump said believe just me. just stick with us. don t believe the crap you see from these people. the fake news. just remember, what you are seeing and what you re reading is not what s happening. why does that work? i have been thinking a lot about this. i think if you bring it back to the think about, this is a president who started runging for office with a claim that barack obama, the country s first black president was not born in the united states. a kenyan born muslim myself, he was not in any of the meadings. i don t think he would believe you, but the point there to take it a step further, but if you are living in a world in which you have trouble believing or accepting the fact that there is a black president, okay, you essentially have to accept donald trump s reality instead. if you are willing to believe that lie, it s an original sin. this is just everything is an extension of that. various polling indicates 22 or 23% of people believe that story. it s not that much of a leap to get there. it is a leap. no one else who has run for the republican nomination or successfully got it was able to get this group of people. this band of extremists, experience theorists. how does the republican party fix this? they have a choice to make in the post trump era and there will be a post trump err a. are they going to be part of these experience theories like qo none and the art right boys and the scum backs. citronlea isis or they can rediscover the limited government and rule of law that are out of fashion right now with trump and still reflect the conservatism that should inform in my humble opinion where the movement should go. mara, what does the media do? there is valid criticism. some of it is experience nonsense and others is the ability to spread this nonsense on the internet. do they do anything to fix the level of distrust that s out there? that s a great question. it s important that we don t become stenographers. donald trump said the sky is green, but some people say the sky is blue. i think that not all facts are relative and i think that when they become relative if you look at russia and the way vladimir putin rules the country, it s a lot of creating chaos that there is no truth. he can say there is no truth. it s whatever i say. it s important that we stick to the facts as much as possible. the way that americans consume news even though it s changing, there has to be responsibility in schools, frankly. in terms of how to consume and what is the difference between news and continue? the difference between entertainment and hard news? americans don t know how to read newspapers. i m looking at the clock and we are awful close. i do not want to invoke the wrath of rachel maddow. thank you to both of you. what a great conversation.
bennett, betsy woodruff and also charlie savage. geoff, i ll start with you. what was going on when the president made that comment about omarosa? the president was in the middle of a photo-op there at his private estate in bedminster, new jersey. he was surrounded by trump supporters known as bikers for trump. and the voice you heard was that of maggie haberman part of the press pool and she asked if the president felt betrayed by omarosa. that is when he leveled that scorcher calling her a low life. but look, this is what the president tends to do to people whom he views as being disloyal. i think it is worth pointing out that the relationship between the president and omarosa has always really been mutually beneficial if not entirely transactional. she was able to use him to increase her public standing with that high profile white house job. and he was at times able to use her for a certain amount of political cover when it came to some testy issues involving race. you bring up a really good point about the relationship between omarosa and donald trump. i want to play something for you, this is a piece of omarosa s interview npr in which she claims she has heard the tape of the president using the n word. once on i heard it you have heard this tape? i heard this tape. you heard the president of the united states. i heard the president of the united states use not only the n word, but as bill pruitt described during that interview other horrible things during the production of the at prentis pr. you don t mention that in the book. it is mentioned. it sounds like you just heard his account of the tape. did you actually hear the tape? i did. did you you miss this whole girl, did you read my book? betsy, what do you make of Coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. with a grain of salt for the reasons we ve discussed already. that said, questions of racism have dogged donald trump since the central park supposed rapist that weren t really rapists that he went after two or three decades ago. and we knnoknow today that he l to attack prominent black people and question their intelligence and go after black celebrities. it is he fuels support for himself. and we re coming up on the one year anniversary of his notorious remark that there were good people on the both sides of the nazi and anti-nazi riots in charlottesville a year ago. so this froth and a degraded state of poll is tick itics tha such that we re all thinking about omarosa is what it is, but it does resonate with issues that are very real about the era we re living there. and betsy, omarosa also claims after she was fired, the trump campaign offered her a contract for i think it was $15,000 a month to remain silent. the offer made by the president s daughter-in-law laura trump. the book also claims the book used racial slurs around kellyanne conway s husband who is of filipino descent. he denied those allegations. does that make omarosa s memoir less credible than everything else that you ve mentioned? to be fair, george conway wouldn t necessarily be in a position himself to know about whether or not the president had made those remarks. but i think it certainly raises questions about the accuracy of what omarosa wrote in the book, the being a roaccuracy of the a. and on omarosa wasn t in the white house during the window of time when fwornlg cgeorge conwa tweeting criticism. he has a very active twitter feed where he sometimes defends the mueller probe, where he will be critical of the president, critical of policies that the president is undertaking. but that vocal approach that george conway took didn t seem to overlap with omarosa s time in the white house, so it is unlikely that the president would have been in a position to use potentially racist terms against conway, that conway would have been on his radar when omarosa was in the white house working there. that said of course as charlie pointed out, the president has a record on race that speaks for itself particularly when it comes to the way that he character lizs thriseizekrook characterizes the intelligence of african-americans. and i want to ask about the president slamming the attorney general jeff sessions and the russia investigation on twitter. he had this to say, the big story that the fake news media refuses to report is low life christopher steele s many meetings with bruce ohr and his beautiful wife nellie. it was fusion that hired steele. do you really believe nellie worked for fusion and her husband still work for the department of justice. never seen anything so rigged. our ag is scared stiff and missing in action. it is all starting to be revealed. not pretty. ig report soon? witch hunt the president said. dig into that 37. a mouthful. a lot to unpack. but look, i think the point here is that the president is trying to make the point that he does make explicitly, he says jeff sessions is missing in action. well, jeff sessions by being mia is doing his job because remember, he recused himself from the russia investigation. this is all part of the president s larger attempt to discredit the russia proefbe. again when he makes the pork that tsteele dossier is what prochltded t prompted the investigation into russia s attack on our democracy, that is not true. we know that the russia probe started after the fbi officials received word from an australian diplomat that george papadopoulous was bragging after a night of heavy drinking about an offer he received of dirt on hillary clinton s campaign. so if you peck you pick apart a those statements, what you come back to is the fact that so much of it is unsubstantiated and plainly not true. and charlie, i ll give you the last word. what do you make of the president s comments in that tweet? i think that he knows that we re nearing a climax with the manafort trial. we don t know exactly what mueller will do in terms of subpoenaing him with his charade that he maybe will talk to mueller if they can negotiate a little bit longer and what seems pretty clear he doesn t actually want to talk to mueller, which could set up a subpoena fight very soon. or there could be a report to congress at some point about obstruction of justice and/or co collusion. so he has to keep the steady drumbeat of trying to discredit that probe heading into what could be a very climatic period this fall. all right. jeff, betsy, charlie, thank you all. and this note for you, omarosa will be doing the rounds to promote her new book, you can catch her on nbc on tomorrow on meet the press. and then monday, she will be right here on msnbc on hardball at 7:00 p.m. now to new information in a bizarre and deadly plane crash in washington state. the fbi is now searching for black boxes from the wreckage of a small passenger plane stolen by an airline employee from the sea-tac international airport in seattle. that employee was airborne for more than an hour before crashing into a small island. he was killed in that crash, but not before air traffic control operators and military fighter jets trid ed to direct the employee to land safely. authorities believer the man acted alone, but haven t determined a motive. i have dozens of personnel out at the crash site right now. i had 30 to 40 folks involved overnight out interviewing co-workers and family members. and i just want everybody to understand this is going to take a little bit of time. so please be patient with the fbi. and at this point no word that anyone else was injured in that incident. still ahead, president trump is attacking attorney general jeff sessions. is it an attempt to distract the public from robert mueller s sfl? and now that chris collins has dropped his bid for re-election, republicans are scrambling to have his name removed from the ballot. i ll spell with the democratic contender. - i love my grandma. - anncr: as you grow older, your brain naturally begins to change which may cause trouble with recall. - learning from him is great. when i can keep up! - anncr: thankfully, prevagen helps your brain and improves memory. - dad s got all the answers. reaction to mr. collins dropping out of the race. i think it is good news for western new york. it is good news for america. it is good news for ny 27. i think he should take a step further and resign from congress. i m not sure why he is continuing to hold on to his position. but i think that he needs to move on. and this era needs to end for all of us. you say good news for a lot of people. is this good news for you? how has this affected your campaign? you had contributions coming in more steady you now? there is a surge of excitement for our campaign. i see the excitement in the small towns we re visiting. it has been a great time for us. i think a lot of people understand that when i was out there getting hammered for attacking this man on his record, when i was out there telling people you need to listen and look at what he has actually done for western new york, a lot of other people weren t doing that, they were saying this is all okay. they were trying to hide his record, trying to celebrate this man who did not deserve to be celebrated. you can t ignore the fact that new york s 27th had voted solidly republican in recent years. what is your strategy going to be to try to turn that trend around and to win this seat? well, i think times are changing. once upon a time just listening to the party and people would vote that way, but they are realizing the party has put forward people like mr. collins, they are realizing the party system is broken. and really i think today the divide is not between left and right. it is between power and no power. it is between people who are hard working and honest and good and those who cheat and get secret deals like 34r comr. col was engaged in. so i believe that my message is reflective of the people who live here. i m a working class guy. worked my way up. worked my way through school. and i think my message will be for fighting for the middle class and fighting for people to have access to health care and health care rights. a th and that message raez natuesona anybody regardless of party afternoon fill ya affiliation. do you know who you will face? i don t know. i think it will be difficult to get mr. collins offer the ballot. i think the maneuvers will raise a lot of eyebrow, this he will have to reach deep into the bag of tricks to get there to work. it looks like they will have to have him run for another position and that is a curse on the town or jurisdiction that will have to take on such a candidate. this is all wrong. the thing is i want to emphasize, people knew this was wrong before. this has all been in the public record. i felt like paul revere but no would be was list one was listening. we ve known that he was engaged in this type of activity. there has been ethics investigations b s bipartisan findings. i can t believe he was endorsed. and again, he was endorsed by a crooked system, a system of party bosses and people trying to get a little bit of piece of the dirty scheme. and they put forward this man. and i think that type of system needs to end and it also needs to be held accountable. let me ask you about democrats now. you are one of 51 democrats either in or trying to get into the house now who said that you would not support nancy pelosi for democratic leader. why is that? well, i think if you look at the history, we have every single branch of government now controlled by people who do not have the best interests of working americans. we need to fight back. we need new leadership across board republicans and democrats a alike. we re not that different. we both are republicans and democrats in our homes. but but right now this country needs leadership that reflects a new generation of people, a new generation of thinkers, people independent of the party system and that is what we need right now. do you think democrats have a strong enough message, a strong enough national message to win control of congress this fall? well, i am not part of those meetings where we craft those national messages. it has been hard to get their attention myself. they haven t been paying attention. hundreds of people come to our events and i say are you paying attention? i m running against this man with ethical violations and there is no support. but my message is middle class, middle class, middle class. i ll fight for families like mine, i ll fight for my neighbors, the honest and decent and good people of ny 27 and they deserve leadership that is honest and decent and good. not cheater, not party bosses, not people who kiss the ring. all right. thank you, sir. appreciate your time. and nancy pelosi will be a guest on a.m. joy tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. president trump condemning racism on twitter as we approach actually, that s super easy. my bad. that s super easy. stop fearing your alarm clock. with new ! zzzquil pure zzzs. a drug-free blend of botanicals with melatonin .that supports your natural sleep cycle. .so you can seize the morning. new! zzzquil pure zzzs. hundred roads named park in the u.s. it s america s most popular street name. but allstate agents know that s where the similarity stops. if you re on park street in reno, nevada, the high winds of the washoe zephyr could damage your siding. and that s very different than living on park ave in sheboygan, wisconsin, where ice dams could cause water damage. but no matter what park you live on, one of 10,000 local allstate agents knows yours. now that you know the truth, are you in good hands? white nationalists and counterprotests in charlottesville. today the community there is paying tribute to heather heyer, she was killed while protesting the unite the right rally last summer when a car rammed into the crowd. now, in anticipation of the anniversary, security has been beefed up and the city has denied all event permits for this weekend. virginia s governor has declared a state of emergency as a safety precaution. maya rodriguez was at the rally last year and is joining us. what clahas changed in that cit since last year? reporter: i can tell you that security is much, much tighter this weekend than it was last year. take a look behind me, this is a security checkpoint that has been set up here along a perimeter of the pedestrian mall here in charlottesville, that is a big change from last year. officers are checking bags, there is a long list of prohibited items. so far today three people have been arrested. one for bringing in some of those prohibited items, another for trespassing an another for public intoxication. and the mayor and police chief, both of whom are new, say they do not want to see a repeat of what happened last year. and folks are telling us there is an underlying tension this weekend. take a listen. if there is a rally here, if there is a rally in d.c., we still have work to do in this community. so just for me personally, there is a sense of maybe a little bit kind of a different kind of anxiety because we don t know exactly what is going to happen. we don t know how many folks might show up. i think that some of the people s actions that would be here weren tarrant a state of emergency. i m hoping nothing terrible happens like last year. i do understand the precaution so there is funding if need to protect people. reporter: now, that is a big change from last year in the sense that the city of charlottesville denied a permit to unite the right for holding another rally this year because they were trying to. and this is part of the reason why they are having a rally now in washington, d.c. tomorrow that the park across from the white house. but again, a lot of uncertainty here in charlottesville about what tomorrow might bring. and i want to ask you about this statue, the statue of the general robert e. lee that was the focal point of last year s rally. we know a judge has ruled that the statue should remain as it stands. are there any new updates on that? reporter: so there is a state law here in virginia that basically stops the removal of any confederate monuments. and the statue is still there. now, the park itself has been renamed. it used to be robert e. lee park. last year they renamed it emancipation park and since then they have renamed it again, it is now called market street park. in part because it is on market street. but again, the statue is still there. there are a lot of fencing that have been put up around the perimeter of the entire park. we can t really get close to the park at all at this point. a huge change from last year when frankly people had gathered a around the statue inside the itself. all right. maya rodriguez, thank you. unite the right organizer is marking tomorrow s anniversary with a rally in washington, d.c. s la fayette square near the white house. today the president tweeted the riots in charlottesville a year ago resulted in senseless death and division. we must come together as a nation. i condemn all types of racism and acts of violence. peace to all americans. joining me now is michael eric dyson, georgetown university professor and author of what truth sounds like. professor, appreciate your time today. thank you, my friend. a year ago the president chose not to deannounce the neo-nazis with the infamous statement we ll play for you. we re closely following the terrible events unfolding in charlottesville, virginia. we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. so many sides. as we hear that from last year and as we think about what the president tweeted today, what is your take, has anything changed that you see? not at all. there is a literary equivalent between on all sides and all sorts of racists. all sorts of racism. this is a pandering to an ambiguity that gives unplausible deniability. no, of course i said i was against racism, but i didn t speak about neo-nazi conspiracies against democracy. not speaking about anti-semitism or anti-black racism. not speaking about the vicious veirulent denunsatio nunnunciat that will fuel what we ll see tomorrow. so it is a pandering and refusal of the president to stand up and man his bully pulpit and speak the truth morally as well as politically. in our last hour, i spoke with the president of the naac. derrick johnson. he says the president has ref e refused to meet with siflg rici rights leaders. what is your reaction? well, look, if would be wants to debate what makes a racist, there are all sorts of did he nati definitions and we can t impune the integrity of the president except the fact is that this man has exemplified consistent behavior over the year hes that seems to be racist, dating back to the 70s with business with his father about real estate in regard to selling property or at least representinting property people, not wanting black people in his casino, taking out a full page ad against the central park five and even when they were exonerated, suggesting that they should still be sent to the death chamber. he made the statement about moral equivalency last year. so we have nothing to suggest that this man is not a racist. and yet he continues to engage in playing fo ining footsie wit who should be clearly renounced and the president doesn t have it in his fiber and dna to make a clear moral statement that argues against those who are racist which leads us to believe what is his investment, what is his moral complicity with racism, what is his silent endorsement of view points and visions that really don t respect the best of not only american democracy, but the diversity and the racial and ethnic composition that is the beauty of american society. so if the president were to call you and say i want to be a different person, i want to make some change, if you had an opportunity to sit with the president and advise him on changing his mind, on how to change the conversation about race in this country, what would you say to president trump? first thing i would say is that don t side with people whose viewpoints are against the best virtues of american democracy and who express hate for blacks, gay, latinos, for lesbian, you know, for people of alternative lifestyles. the point is that side with those whose backs are against the wall. embrace those who have been the victims of hate. go see a blackkklansman by spike lee, look at 13th. look at king in the wilderness. in other words, i wouldn t want to be self promoting, but if you want to take a look at what truth sounds like or between the world and me or the fire next time, you notiyou know, look at booksen about in other words, there is ample literature available for this president to engage in a self reflection about these issues. secondly, i would say look, why don t you talk to your daughter and your son-in-law who seem to have reasonable inclinations to want to embrace the better angels of our nature when it comes to criminal justice reform. they haven t gone nearly far enough, but at least speak about that. and then thirdly, why don t you overcome your animus toward barack obama and sit down with the president who has walked in your shoes who has occupied your oval office and who is more than willing to come across the other side of the aisle and meet you where you are and help you you negotiate some of these complicated matters. and then finally, if you talk about meeting with kanye west and others, why don t you meet with people like harry belafonte, malcolm jenkins or micha michael bennett or colin kaepernick. instead of beating up on nfl players, why don t you listen to them. and then make an nfrt tainvitat lebron james, a great genius who has put his money where his mouth is and his identification with those who are vulnerable. talk to people like this. talk to serena williams and ask her about her journey. invite kamala harris the senator into your chambers and speak with people who have wide intelligence aunts deep understanding and profound wisdom about the nature of race in this country. and when you do that, then you will begin to transform your perspective and then you will begin to understand the harm you ve done that is great against those who are citizens of the united states of america for whom you are their leader and for whom you should speak. if the white house is watching, definite food fory michael ire eric die son, thank you. and a reminder, sunday msnbc shares the story of a former white sue premises who has dedicated hit life to reforming others. you can watch breaking sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern. in theaters now, blackkklansman, a film directeded by spike lee about a black cop who infiltrated the clku klux klan. reverend al sharpton sat down with spike lee. he hasn t said anything yet about the one year anniversary. he has not said anything about heather hiring on who lost her life. so another example of who this guy is. i mean, it is not even for debate anymore. we know who this guy is. and we should note since that interview, president trump has tweeted about charlottesville condemning racism and violence. you can see the rest of spike lee s interview tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. on politics nation. three roger stone associates subpoenaed by a grand jury. could robert mueller s investigation be closing in on the president s long time friend? that s confident. but it s not kayak confident. kayak searches hundreds of travel and airline sites to find the best flight for me. so i m more than confident. how s your family? kayak. search one and done. new this afternoon, a new tweet from prfd once agaesident again attacking jeff sessions. in that tweet, the president says i have never seen anything so rigged in my life. our ag is scared stiff and missing in action. joining plea now, former prostitute tore and also former cia analyst. the president is alleges conflicts of interest between fusion gps hired to do the opposition research for the dnc and a justice department official. will this claim have any teeth as far as evidence for criminal charges? you know, i don t think that it will have any teeth in a court of law. i don t think that it will have any teeth as part of mueller s investigation. i mean, i think the president continues to play to the court of public opinion as do rudy giuliani and mr. sekulow. so i think all this is an attempt to quite frankly deceive the american people into believing that because the investigation is rigged, when the results are announced, whether by indictments or in a report to congress, the american people should lack confidence in the charges brought by mueller s team. i don t think that he will be successful, but i do think that the one-sided nature of earni everything that we hear come out of the tweets and defense attorneys and with robert mueller on the other side being an absolute vault without speaking to the public at all except through indictments does tend to skew the picture that the american people are getting and i think that is unfortunate. and when you look at what the president is calling a conflict of interest, do you see anything wrong with the relationships that the president is critiquing here? i think his critique is really geared toward obviously making himself look as innocent as possible, that his campaign didn t have any involvement whether the question of collusion or any type of corruption. when you look at the manafort trial, i think it is exemplary of how the campaign itself was imagined. you know, there is a question of corruption within the campaign itself and the manafort trial goes through manafort s entire history where his business model was basically based on collusion. does the president s long time adviser roger stone who is also under scrutiny, his associates subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury this week, kristin davis who is famous for running that manhattan escort service appeared under oath on friday, ale lies lies also serv. miller is refusing to testify, appealing an order that holds him in con techlts. all contempt. all of this as the president decides whether to have an interview with mueller. and donald trump says that they should turnover text messages from mccabe. he says mccabe had something to hide. should the fbi turnover the text messages that are relevant to the investigation over collusion or obstruction? i can t speak to the legal requirements of the fbi. i m sure mueller is handling that piece of it else interest the doj and sessions. but from the perspective of politicizing what could be evidence, i think that is what is hugely damaging here. it is basically saying that these institutions aren t doing their job. mccabe hasn t done his job and that they are hiding something. and that is extremely dangerous do when you are focused on attacking the institutions to try to degrade the public s trust in those institutions. i think that is just completely unacceptable. especially at that level. and roger stone says he is the unnamed official in that document, but he has nothing to hide. why do you being there is so much focus on roger stone and his associates? because he does seem to be one of the insiders who was involved in meeting with russian operatives who were offering money in exchange for dirt on hillary clinton. and then we came to learn that when roger stone appeared albeit behind closed doors an testified before the house intelligence committee, when he was asked about such meetings, he said there were none. and then he tried to backtrack and said i forgot about that. boy, you know, hard pressed to see how that is a credible claim that you forgot about that kind of a meeting. so it looks like the investigative circle continues to constrict around and bear down on roger stone. and i will say that given that even mr. stone said he is likely to be indicted, this may be one of the few unsurprising indictments when and if bob mueller chooses to return indictments against roger stone. all right. appreciate it. thank you. still ahead, first lady melania trump s trumps became u.s. citizens using family based immigration. so how is it acceptable for her parents to use a program that the president has repeatedly criticized? i believe, i really do believe that something s got a hold on me, yeah oh, it must be love oh, something s got a hold on me right now, child oh, it must be love let me tell you now, oh it must be love i ve been making blades here at gillette for 20 years. there s a lot of innovation that goes into making america s #1 shave. precision machinery and high-quality materials from around the world. nobody else even comes close. now starting at $7.99. gillette. the best a man can get. alright guys let s go! let s do this directions to the greek theater (beep) can i get a connection? can i get can i get a connection? can i get a connection? or pe blood clots from happening again. in clinical studies, almost 98% of patients on xarelto® did not experience another dvt or pe. xarelto® works differently. warfarin interferes with at least 6 of your body s natural blood-clotting factors. xarelto® is selective, targeting just one critical factor. don t stop taking xarelto® without talking to your doctor, as this may increase risk of blood clots. while taking, you may bruise more easily, or take longer for bleeding to stop. xarelto® can cause serious, and in rare cases, fatal bleeding. it may increase your risk of bleeding if you take certain medicines. get help right away for unexpected bleeding or unusual bruising. do not take xarelto® if you have an artificial heart valve or abnormal bleeding. before starting, tell your doctor about all planned medical or dental procedures and any kidney or liver problems. learn all you can. to help protect yourself from another dvt or pe. talk to your doctor about xarelto®. president trump s hard line on immigration took a hard hit this week after a federal judge threatened the attorney general with contempt. judge sullivan learned a migrant mother and child had been deported while their acai lusyle was being processed. he ordered to return the family to the u.s. threatening to charge jeff sessions with contempt of court. this as 559 children remain separated from their families under the no tolerance policy. and we re learning new information about the trump administration s plan to reunite families. reunifications will only be country in immigrant s home country, the aclu is responsible for determining if parents want to be reunified with their children. the state department charged with finding missing parents, but the plan says nothing about the ability for my grantd igran challenge their deportations if they feel coerced or deported in error. let s bring in our panel now. bazel, susan del percio, republican strategist and msnbc political analyst and victoria defrancesco. susan, we have a federal judge threatening to hold the attorney general in contempt. how do we get here? we got here because not only was it a bad policy, it was a policy that this administration was completely unprepared for. and it s incompetence that got us here. only for the hard work of reporting from msnbc and a lot of other news outlets that this became an issue of awareness and really, it really affected public opinion. that s what moves donald trump. this is government ineptitude at its worse. the fact they re abdicating what they should be doing to others should have americans worried. it could be aclu today or could be someone else in another sector of government. victoria, is the government trying to pass the buck on a crisis that it created? right. so they basically said aclu, do our work for us. we really screwed this up. we put in this zero tolerance policy with no plan so this is like a case study and public policy of what not to do and they re passing the buck to the aclu. in the meantime you have hundreds of children and parents who are suffering because they have been separated. and i want to go back for a second to what happened this week with the judge turning the plane back around. if you read the transcript, he s angry not just because the court orders were violated but because this woman, not her real name but referred to as carmen, and her daughter, had stated a credible fear of going back to their home country, yet nevertheless the country took them in the wee hours of the morning, put them on a plane, took them to where they would be in danger. so if you really look at it, the kernel of his anger is that the trump administration is violating our asylum laws. the trump administration has been running roughshod over asylum laws that are in place. people come here with credible fear and there s a justice system that goes forward. so that s another one of the issues that folds into the larger crisis of the immigration plans. and we are in the middle of an election cycle here. we have midterm elections rolling around. do you think the trump administration s border policies will have a major impact on the midterms? i absolutely do think it will. i think about it this way. democrats may not have the ability to stop a supreme court nominee in kavanaugh, but what they do see is that the only check on the president thus far, particularly around immigration, has been the judiciary. so if they want to have an impact, if the american people, if voters want to have an impact, democrats in particular, the way to do that is in the midterm elections to elect members of congress that are going to have the check on the presidency, on the executive branch that should be there. there s a reason that congress is the first branch mentioned in the constitution, because it s supposed to have a lot more power than it currently does or that they currently want to take on to be able to check the president. let s switch gears a bit here. this week fox news anchor laura ingraham made some pretty controversial comments about immigration. listen to this. because in some parts of the country, it does seem like the america that we know and love doesn t exist anymore. massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the american people. and they re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don t like. from virginia to california, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed. now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases legal immigration that of course progressives love. now, ingraham later clarified her comments saying that she made it clear her comments had, quote, nothing to do with race or ethnicity. though a now deleted tweet of support from former grand wizard of the ku klux klan, david duke, didn t help her case here. susan, if she wasn t referring to race or ethnicity, what did she mean on changing demographics foisted upon the american people. she was talking about race. there s no way of working around it. she can try to walk back anything she d like. the reason she did is because as you mentioned, david duke came out for her in support of what she said. that s the only reason she walked it back. i don t think she thinks there s a fundamentally wrong thing with what she said. she just didn t want to be linked with david duke. now i think she really should be held accountable for those statements. we saw people boycott her show for a lot over the gun control debate and david hogg. i think it s time for people to stand up because this is not a dog whistle, folks. this is yelling and screaming racist comments from the tree tops and people like her need to be reined in. is that a direct result of the make america great rhetoric we ve been hearing for the last two years? it is. regrettably it s nothing new. what laura ingraham said, we go back in our history books and the same thing was being said by the no nothings 100 years ago. our country is being changed by immigrants. yes, it is true, we are at a new record peak of foreign born population. the record was those ellis island days of the late 1800s and early 1900s. yes, our country has changed but it has been a continual change. sometimes there are pauses and what she s really referring to is the 1965 immigration act when we saw family reunification really change the face of this country. obviously she s not in favor of that face changing, but america is if anything, a mosaic. we have run out of time. thank you all for your time, appreciate it. and that wraps it up for us here at this hour on msnbc. i m aaron gilchrist. stay with us for updates and breaking news as it happens. you can reach out to me on social media. i ll be back here at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow. deadline white house is coming up next. make it a great saturday, everybody. 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i m chris jansing in for stephanie ruhle. right now, more news with hallie jacks jackson. love that one. chris jansing, thank you, my friend. hallie jackson in washington, where this morning, it is all about the power of the presidency. just how much control does donald trump really have, or really thinks he has, over our democracy? his new interview sending a shiver through the justice department. the president saying he could run the special counsel investigation if he wanted to. yes, the investigation into his campaign s interactions with moscow. we have new reporting on what don mcgahn told the special counsel and the journalist who was face-to-face with the president about all of this is here with us live. yes, the investigation, by the way, is still happening, while attacks keep coming. one of the biggest names in tech, the kremlin s latest target. we ll break down what this microsoft hack attempt means for the midterms. the target for democrats right now, brett kavanaugh. you have democratic senators, women, lining up this hour to fight his nomination to the supreme court, while he gets ready to meet, in about an hour, with the republican woman, a senator who will be critical to his confirmation. everybody knows it. what a source close to the process is tell meing me now. this is turning out to be a busy tuesday morning. i want to start out with breaking news. kristen welker is at the white house. i understand you just spoke with the president s attorney, rudy giuliani. he has been on kind of a media blitz this last 24 hours or so, trying to clean up those truth isn t truth comments to chuck todd on meet the press sunday. he s also now, kristen, talking about this idea that the president may not end up sitting down with robert mueller, right? reporter: that s right, hallie. he s essentially putting pressure on robert mueller to wrap this up. this is something that you and i have reported on extensively. he s trying to essentially move this process along. rudy giuliani again this morning saying, look, we haven t heard from robert mueller in two weeks. we haven t gotten a response to the counter-proposal that the president s legal team submitted. remember, we talked about that several days ago, when they wanted to essentially limit the scope significantly of what types of questions could be asked and what types of follow-up questions could be on the table. giuliani saying this terms of an interview, it does not look good, but it is not finally decided. he also adds, it is time to put up, and they have nothing except a bunch of irrelevant charges. he says the charges have absolutely nothing to do with president trump. that s the new talking point today, as president trump, as you indicated, hallie, in the new interview overnight, saying that he could take charge of the russia investigation. i tried to press giuliani on what the president meant by that. he doesn t seem to know. officials here at the white house don t seem to know. i d point you to some of his past statements, in which the president has indicated he believes he has therosenstein, oversees the investigation, and he has privately mused about getting rid of muehl llemueller. this idea that rudy giuliani is putting a time frame on the special counsel investigation, that s what giuliani and the legal team is saying. we don t know what mueller is saying because mueller is not talking about it. he s really the only one who knows for sure. reporter: mueller is the only one who knows for sure and, yet, all the information we ve been getting has been from the president s legal team. robert mueller, his investigators have been pretty tight lipped when it comes to this investigation. rudy giuliani several days ago saying, this all needs to be wrapped up by labor day. that was his timeframe, not robert mueller s. mueller speaks for himself. so far, we haven t heard from him. hallie? what s interesting, kristen, too, is the new interview we ve been talking about with president trump, conducted, in part, with jeff mason, who is currently sitting next to me. we ll get to him in a second. the president echoed something rudy giuliani has been saying for weeks, which is the idea that tennessan interview with r Coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. difference between what the president technically has the authority to do. the justice department is part of the executive branch. the president is at the head. the doj works for the president. that includes mueller. technically, the president would have the authority to fire him. that doesn t mean it is prudent. that doesn t mean it wouldn t dramatically undermine the way the complex institution of the executive branch is poup tosupp work. that s why the comments are galling to people in the justice department, everyone in the space. jeff, we ve been in front of the president before, asking him questions, interacting with him. it is different when you re in the room. mm-hmm. what was his demeanor like? did he seem defiant or fiery or resigned? what was the mood you got? he wasn t fiery or resigned. he was a little bit when we first walked in, he wasn t super excited or e some of the othe interviews, he s offering drinks, excited to show if he pushes his button on the desk, an aide will come in and offer a hill today. he s been accompanying brett kavanaugh to the meetings related to the supreme court nomination. jeff and betsy, you both have been reporting on this mcgahn fallout, right? the idea he spent 30 plus hours with the special counsel. the president said, i gave him my permission. it is all good. is it all good? i was told the same thing. if mcgahn had been aware that something criminal would have happened, it is unlikely he would have stayed in the position. are things all good? i wouldn t go that far. we reported months ago that mcgahn s relationship with the president had grown increasingly frayed. over the last six to nine months, they had half a dozen conversations one-on-one. these are not men with an amicable relationship. things between them are not warm. on top of that, we also know that mcgahn, over the last many months, has been making noise about potentially leaving the white house. talking about how he wants to go back to private practice. he brought in a white shoe lawyer into the counsel s office, generating speculation that he is grooming fled to take over his position as white house counsel. the fact that this is the person who talked to mueller for 30 hours. 30 hours. given that context is not something that should be comforting for the president. you can watch this show for 30 minutes. i ho hours. i hope you do. but with the special counsel, it is probably different. thank you. a top senator, democratic senator, is talking about the white house or excuse me microsoft hack, the hack attempt. we re talking about senator warrwa warn warner. leader on the intelligence committee speaking to reporters in the last couple minutes. we ll talk through what this hack is all about, what microsoft has done, and what this means for the midterms. all of it, by the way, as we are now four days and counting with the paul manafort jury still behind closed doors. is this a good sign or a bad sign for the defense? we ll take you live to alexandria later in the show. chair, new laptop, 24/7 tech support. yep, thanks guys. i think he might need some support. yes. start them off right, with the school supplies they need at low prices all summer long. like these for only $2 or less at office depot officemax. mom: okay we need to get all your school supplies today. school. grade. done. done. hit the snooze button and get low prices on school supplies all summer long. like these for only $2 or less at office depot officemax. like these for only $2 or less at priceline, to save you money.ways like mixing and matching airlines to get lower prices on flights. oh, that s how i saved on my trip! oh, for your 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simulator to see how your joint damage could be progressing. ask about enbrel. enbrel. fda approved for over 15 years. malicious foreign actors. that is a new interview with senator mark warner that we got within the last couple of minutes on capitol hill. he, of course, is the ranking democrat on the senate intelligence committee. he is talking about this midnight news drop from microsoft. overnight, the tech company is announcing it cyber hack that targeted conservative thinktanks. microsoft said it shut down six websites that have recently been created by hackers linked to russian intelligence. the sites looked like pages from the hudson institute whether or not the international republican institute. they re known for promoting human rights. they have chairs like mitt romney, john mccain, and hr mcmaster. they intercepted before attacks went down. but we are less than three months from the midterm electi n elections. joining me now, the former director of the national terror center and the national security and intelligence analyst. jeff and betsy are here, as well. the headline, russia is still at it. what i took away from the reporting overnight was two things. first, it tells us it is concrete reaffirmation of what we already knew. we knew this from the director of national intelligence, dan coats, and chris wray, who said the campaign, the effort to mess with our politipolitics, is not historical but present and continuing. it is probably focused on the 2018 elections as much as anything else. the second thing i took away from the information overnight was the fact that it came from microsoft. what it tells me is that microsoft, the private sector, is prepared to work with the government to deal with these issues. that s something that s going to be essential to devising an effective response to what the russians are doing. in the terrorism realm i was involved with for so many years, we looked to the tech sector to help us when isis, for example, was using social media to recruit and gain adherents and all of that. we need the private sector to be an aggressive, actor partner in dealing with russian influence, as well. one thing important to know is one of the groups targeted is the international republican institute. they re not a normal think tank. what they do, they help emerging democracies develop democratic institutions. they send people to cambodia, mongolia, teaching people to develop free and fair elections. iri was actually kicked out of russia. putin expelled them because he didn t want them there working on trying to help russia become more democratic. for the russians to target iri isn t just them going after sort of an egghead think tank group, which is troubling, but it is them going after an organization that is funded by congress to help promote democratic norms around the world. if you look at the similarities of the typical domain names users get to, you can see what they re trying to do here. this group of hackers, fancy bear, which is a name that should be familiar, because it is the group whose members were allegedly part of the russian interference in the 2016 election. sure. the effort to create the fake websites gives the russians a couple of opportunities. one, they can collect information from individuals who unwittingly go to the websites and provide their information, their contact information, the details of who they are, and that s useful to the russians in targeting their further work. it also gives them the opportunity over time, if they wish, to change content on the faux sites. it ll be interesting to see how president trump reacts to this. in this case, it was republican organizations that were targeted. now, the president often now, some of them though with views against president trump, right? indeed. even so, aligned with conservatives who are more inclined to be alined with wanting a republican majority in the house or republican majority in the senate. that impact on the election, potential impact on the election in the fall. let me explain how microsoft described this whole scheme here, in this report that developed, again, overnight, middle of the night, came out. we woke up to it this morning. attackers want their attacks to look as realistic as possible and, therefore, create websites and urls that look like sites targeted victims would expect to receive e-mail from or visit. somewhat standard strategy. what are your concerns ability whe about where the group might go next? two months out from the midterms. three months. you have to assume that this information, which is in the public domain, is the tip of an iceberg. my guess is, my expectation is, that the intelligence community is bringing forward a much more complicated and scary and dangerous picture forward in the intelligence briefings they re giving to senior officials at the white house. they know more than what microsoft is telling us. microsoft has one slice of this, their slice, but there are other tech companies and vectors by which the russians could be seeking to intexercise this influen influence. our intelligence community probably has a better handle on this than what they re willing to say publicly. this is part of broad activity on the part of the russians in the lead up to the midterms. nick makes an important point. there is certainly a lot more going on than we know. on a separate but related note, jeff, i want to play new audio obtained by the pennsylvania democratic party. it is of gob candidate scott wagner. this is sort of raising eyebrows. listen for a sec. by the way, the russians are going to help me with tom wolf. if i have to use paul manafort, i will. obviously a joke there from wagner. right. his campaign is out with a statement. we ll put it on the screen here. saying, scott was obviously joking. he thinks russia s interference in the 2016 election was real, and he pledges to work with the federal government to secure fair elections in pennsylvania as governor. that is the damage control statement. it is a damage control statement because it is not a joking matter. it is very serious. it was very serious in 2016. it is clearly going to be very serious in 2018. okay. betty, final thoughts? remember, he s not the only high-profile republican to joke about this. when jeff sessions gave a speech at the mayflower hotel a couple months ago, he opened up by saying, are there any russians in the audience? anyone who has been to russia? which was a question of whether it was a joke or not, the comment president trump made. it is fair. there was a sense the russia story is a source of amusement. in light of this, nick, how important is it, do you believe you signed onto the letter we talked about, condemning president trump s move to yank brennan security clearance. given this, how important do you think it is to let people like brennan, james clapper and others, have access to the clearance? to me, the important point of the security clearance issue has been the fact that this is just a process that should not be politicized. there s a lot that goes into a security clearance. one thing is your political views. it shouldn t. hasn t. i hope won t in the future. nick, thanks for coming on and talking through what can be a complicated but important story. hanging in the balance, four days behind closed doors and no word from the jury on the fate of paul manafort. what is taking so long? what does that mean for donald trump s former campaign chair? plus, the other decision we re watching for today, the man whose actions kicked off the russia investigation might be about to pull out of his plea deal. we ll explain what his wife is saying coming up. we do whatever it takes to fight cancer. these are the specialists we re proud to call our own. experts from all over the world, working closely together to deliver truly personalized cancer care. expert medicine works here. learn more at cancercenter.com if your moderate to severeor crohn s symptoms are holding you back, and your current treatment hasn t worked well enough it may be time for a change. ask your doctor about entyvio®, the only biologic developed and approved just for uc and crohn s. entyvio® works at the site of inflammation in the gi tract, and is clinically proven to help many patients achieve both symptom relief and remission. infusion and serious allergic reactions can happen during or after treatment. entyvio® may increase risk of infection, which can be serious. pml, a rare, serious, potentially fatal brain infection caused by a virus may be possible. tell your doctor if you have an infection experience frequent infections or have flu-like symptoms, or sores. liver problems can occur with entyvio®. if your uc or crohn s treatment isn t working for you, ask your gastroenterologist about entyvio®. entyvio®. relief and remission within reach. we are back with developments in north carolina overnight to start this morning s headlines. that is a look at protesters at unc chapel hill, cheering the fall of a controversial confederate statue known as silent sam. hundreds of students gathered around the statue, demanding it be removed. pulling it down later with ropes. today is the first day of class for students there, with the university saying in a tweet, the actions were, quote, dangerous, and they are investigating what the school is now calling vandalism. a former nazi guard caught by i.c.e. has been deported to germany overnight. 14 years after a judge ordered his removal. we re talking about the 95-year-old who lived in new york city for decades. he s the last known nazi living here in the u.s. the white house issuing a statement, confirming his arrival in germany early today, and congratulating i.c.e. for its work. a tribute gone rogue. did you catch the vmas? the material girl trying to show some respect to the queen of soul. madonna made fans unhappy after her tribute was, in their view, more about herself than aretha franklin. listen. i could see they did not take me seriously. belt out a song by one of the greatest soul singers that ever lived. a cappella. i said, bitch, i m madonna. madonna was talking about an audition where she sang one of franklin s songs. she thanked franklin for leading her to where she is today. politics news, the waiting game goes on in virginia. you have the jury in paul manafort s trial, now in day four of deliberations. manafort s attorney says this while he was heading into court this morning. watch. how are you feeling going into day four of deliberations? feel good. we feel good. cue up the other three days, ken dlilanian, who is outside o the courthouse. manafort s attorney has said they feel good. what do you make? reporter: any day there is no conviction is a good day for the defendant. that s fair. reporter: two possibilities here, right? one is that the jury is meticulously going through these 18 could wants. don t forget, there are 300 exhibits. more than 20 witnesses. they re doing their due diligence. that they re going through the counts. another possibility is there is serious disagreement. we have tea leaves. they haven t sent notes to the judge since friday. no notes that they re deadlocked. no questions about points of law or evidence. that ugh jesuggests that maybe isn t disagreement and they re doing their jobs. they also asked to stay late last night. they asked to stay until 6:15, which is later than at any point of the trial. some people thought they had a chunk of evidence they wanted to plow through. it is the american jury system. we re all waiting. the six anonymous men and women have so much in their hands. including potentially the future of the mueller investigation, or at least how this investigation will be viewed in the near future. ken, i hope you have a comfortable chair. you could be there for a while. really, we could hear from the jury any minute. joining me now is criminal defense attorney and former head county prosecutor in new jersey. robert, thanks for coming on. what do you make of the idea we re in day four, still no decision. lots of evidence and paperwork, as ken noted, that the jury had a chance to look through. don t make too much of it. from the prosecutor s perspective, trying most cases myself as a prosecutor, as time is going by, the more concerns you have. let s be clear, the judge did something here that was really detrimental to prosecutors, in my opinion. a lot of things, in my mind. he allowed a document dump to go into the jury. of course, the jury comes back and says, hey, can you put these documents in context with respect to the charges? the answer was no. as a prosecutor, the last thing i want the jurors to be doing is forging through documents, trying to match them up to testimony, trying to match them up to charges. it is an arduous task. i think they re doing their due diligence. former u.s. attorney barbara mcquaid has been sitting in on the manafort trial for msnbc here. she had something interesting to say, as to why she thinks this may be going on for four days. i want you to listen, and then i want your perspective on it. i think that the time they saved in the trial, they may be giving back in the deliberations, as the jury now needs to go and pull out all those documents and look at them, see how they match up. one of the questions they have asked is whether they could have some sort of key or chart, showing them which exhibits match up with which counts or which witnesses. the judge said no. they re doing that work themselves. i think in a case with more than 400 exhibits, it could take them some time. matches up with your take it seems. i think yoher opinion was brilliant, hallie. absolutely. as a prosecutor, i want to present my demonstrative evidence in front of the jury. not have them guess. i agree with ms. mcquaid, that this is exactly what it is they re doing. it is unfortunate they were put in that position. i want to ask about something else that relates to the special counsel investigation. specifically, how much of this got started in the first place. that is because of somebody named george papadopoulos. if you watch this network, you know he was somebody who was an informal adviser to the trump campaign back in 2016 before the election there. now, he is apparently he had a plea deal with robert mueller, right? he s now considering pulling out of the plea agreement all together. here is what his wife said on sean hannity s program last night. we are discussing now the possibility and the technicalities behind this possibility with lawyers. we have important meetings tomorrow. this plea agreement is, to me, difficult to uphold in the context of, you know, a trial by the judge. it is against the rule of law in many ways. there are many things that happened that are completely against. papadopoulos sends this cryptic tweet. been a hell of a year. decisions, period. we know, based on what his wife said, they are meeting with attorneys today. you heard her say that. number one, robert, can papadopoulos pull out of the plea deal, and how much of a hot mess is it, if that actually happens? let s go with point one. if he came to me and said, i want to pull out of the plea deal, when he can be charged with obstruction, my question to him in retort would be, are you insane? number one. number two, i don t think he is going to be able to pull out of the plea deal. judges just don t let you willy-nilly pull out of plea deals. they re very specific. the judge goes through great detail, making sure it is voluntary. making sure they understand all the consequences of it. just having a change of heart is never a basis to overturn a plea agreement. it is not going to happen. robert, i think last time we had you on, you were sitting next to me in somerville, new jersey, when i was covering the president s trip to bedminster. sorry you can t be with us, but glad to have you back. thanks, hallie. we want to go to new video into the newsroom. senator jeff flake, republican from arizona, talking about the russia investigation. here s what he had to say. welcome back from africa. can i ask you, the president reiterated yesterday that he felt like he could basically run the mueller investigation if he wanted to. he s wrong. he can t. ought to stop trying to undermine it, as well. it is um seam nseamly. calling people thugs, undermining it is bad enough. saying you can run it is another level. all of us are concerned. seems to be stepping it up lately. he ought to let bob mueller finish his work. all of us ought to do that. senator, what about this report from microsoft, that they ve caught russian hackers trying to infiltrate conservative websites? shouldn t be a surprise, after what they ve done already. this is another level. we ll be looking into it. what does the senate do about that? could the senate have done more to this point? i don t know to this point. i think you re going to find other avenues, as well, that they ve been trying to influence. they re bad guys. they re trying to influence our elections. they re trying to on every level. they feel they had success last time, so they ll step it up. do you think this increased rhetoric from the president about the mueller investigation is a reflection you are listening to senator jeff flake being asked questions, including by frank thorpe, our producer, welcoming flake back from africa. it is not surprising. he d a critic of donald trump. he said something i think would be incorrect. he said, i think we re all concerned about the president s lan w language. that is not true. legislation has been stuck in the committee that would keep the president from being able to easily fire mueller. mitch mcconnell, the majority leader of the senate, isn t doing anything about it. he isn t facing serious pressure from republicans in the senate to change his activity. final thoughts, jeff? worth noting that flake is not running for re-election. he has a little more freedom to be critical, which he has been for some time. this is not a shift for him. right. he s not going to be around much longer. we are going to actually head back to capitol hill right after we take a quick break. there s something else going on. brett kavanaugh having his, arguably, most important meeting on the hill. we understand that that is happening over there with senator susan collins. senator who could decide whether he gets the green light. it is what he wrote in 1998 that is also getting new attention today. the graphic questions he wanted his team to ask bill clinton during the monica lewinsky investigation, and how his views on presidential investigations seem to have evolved since then. we ll show you how. you re turning onto the street when you barely clip a passing car. minor accident - no big deal, right? wrong. your insurance company is gonna raise your rate after the other car got a scratch so 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more about why you should choose an aarp medicare supplement plan. call today for a free guide. his most important capitol hill meeting so far. he s behind closed doors with senator susan collins, the woman in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. she s from maine. a moderate republican. she s a key swing vote in the whole process. this is just one of a handful of meetings set for today. the rest, by the way, are with democrats. the meetings are happening in the wake of a now-released memo from the national archives that is resurfacing from kavanaugh s past. the president s pick to sit on the supreme court. wanted graphic questions asked of him. is that appropriate? simply smiling after being asked about a memo just released, packed with explicit questions for then-president bill clinton. at the time, brett kavanaugh was an attorney working for starr, investigating clinton s affair with monica lewinsky. kavanaugh wanted the team to take an aggressive approach. in the 1998 memo, he writes, i am strongly opposed to giving the president any break in the questioning, unless he either resigns or confessing perjury. kavanaugh adding, the president has disgraced his office, the legal system, and the american people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles. kavanaugh lays out a list of graphic questions he thinks clinton should be asked. including, if monica lewinsky says that you inserted a cigar into her while you were in the oval office area, should she be lying? if monica lewinsky says you had phone sex with her on approximately 15 occasions, would she be lying? i m troubled by some of the things that have been reported about his role in the starr investigation and the materials that he pressed for inclusion in the final report. an official close to the nomination process tells nbc news, while cakavanaugh, given years of hindsight, might change the words used, he stands by the overall approach of holding a president accountable for inappropriate conduct. quote, among all the weighty issues to be discussed at next month s hearings, we doubt this is high on the list. his position on investigating sitting presidents seems to have evolv evolved. in 2009, he wrote, lawsuits or investigations take the president s focus away from his or her responsibilities to the people. ken starr is, in fact, a hero. kavanaugh has long-time links to ken starr, working as the lead author of the controversial starr report, looking at clinton s scandals, and praising starr at an appreciation dinner in 1999. maybe i m an optimist, but one day, i, for myself, hope to be able to call him mr. justice starr. of course, now, it is brett kavanaugh who could end up being justice kavanaugh. much of this strategy that was put together by the white house and team kavanaugh was, in fact, designed and tailors to susan collins, to show that kavanaugh, in their view, is a qualified judge and not a partisan figure. collins said, that s part of it, but i want to make sure somebody has good judicial precedent and understands the importance of it. all eyes on collins today, jeff. she said it is important to uphold roh v roe verse wade. he considered it precedent. that was my judgment, as well. i was glad to hear him say that at that time. obviously, it is an issue that i m going to raise with him. so, that is clearly part of the playbook for her today. absolutely. it is part of the playbook for the people opposing his nomination, to put pressure on her and others who feel the same way. i think it is also important to remember just how powerful susan collins is. she s consistently a swing vote on a number of hot-button issues. given that republicans only have the tiniest of majorities in the senate, that gives her an extraordinary amount of power. it is interesting for someone, coming from a small state with a small population, that she can actually be this decider on an issue that s going to have consequences for all americans for decades. something that got kind of lost in the shuffle it seemed last week was the democratic threat to sue the national archives for these records related to kavanaugh. democrats are sort of putting up this fight over documents, yet this is still moving along. the timeline is ticking away, as mitch mcconnell and the president expected. i think the white house is confident it is going to end up the way they want it. democrats are fighting back, certainly very hard, as are groups that are concerned about the implications of him getting this position and really putting the supreme court in the conservative slot for a generation or two to come. the other piece of this, too, is that it is not just susan collins, right? there are others, including, for example, mccascall. she is giving the nomination, quote, the credit it deserves. you have senators manchin, for example. you talk about people opposing the knonomination. they re in the crosshairs here, too. so much money spent on the confirmation process. according to the latest estimates or calculations, the pro-kavanaugh camp is just spending way more than the anti-kavanaugh camp. what they re focusing on is running ads in these red states that have democratic senators, trying to pummel people like manchin, mccaskill, heitkamp, the vulnerable democrats, trying to make them assess the political consequences of voting against kavanaugh s confirmation. we have more to talk about after the break, including the first lady planning her first big solo trip. melania trump says she is going to africa this fall. what kind of welcome will she get after her husband called some of the countries s-hole nations reportedly earlier this year? it was here. while taking, you may bruise more easily, or take longer for bleeding to stop. xarelto® can cause serious, and in rare cases, fatal bleeding. it may increase your risk of bleeding if you take certain medicines. get help right away for unexpected bleeding or unusual bruising. do not take xarelto® if you have an artificial heart valve or abnormal bleeding. before starting, tell your doctor about all planned medical or dental procedures and any kidney or liver problems. learn all you can to help protect yourself from a stroke. talk to your doctor about xarelto®. kind of an interesting destination pick. right? might be old enough to wleb the president came under fire from around the world reportedly referring to african nations at s-hole countries. he didn t say s-hole. i m saying s-hole. bring in me, served as policy director for first lady michelle obama and senior add vidor under secretary of state hillary clinton and secretary of state john kerry. jeff and betsy here as well. thanks for coming on. inaugural appearance. you worked closely with former first lady michelle obama. what do you make of this trip now for melania trump? a good idea or a bad one? i think it s a good idea and an important, both in terms of politics and policy. the fact that she chose to go to africa, a country, you know, a continent that president has equated to a toilet, i think it is perhaps her trying to make amends for the president s potty mouth and i think as a policy matter, africa is obviously a strategically important area, why china has been building schools and investing in infrastructure. when i traveled the world with the first lady, you could tell that it was a region that was looking to america for leadership and i think it s exciting. is this trip meant to mend fences or is she trolling her husband here? maybe a little of both? yeah. i think it s a bit of both and what you re starting to see is a house divided. she s not just kind of asserting independence. you re seeing a pattern of tit for tat. lebron james criticizes her. she praises hill. these african trip, you re starting to see how she is not going to be along the lines of a, michelle obama or a nancy reagan. she s going to probably perhaps become more of a betty ford, who-dmsh 1who in 1975, went out and argued the white house arguing for first amendment rights. and can she do it? as she is rolling out the cyberbullying, we talked about yesterday on the show. tough in the sense that this trip is described as more of a listening tour. by contrast, the first lady during the obama administration, who thought to launch new initiatives. i think she s going to perhaps at least early on play more of a passive role. she has less than a dozen staff compared to that. a very small and disciplined staff when you compare to the president s staff inside the west wing when it comes to the conversations based on our reporting. when it come fos to the relationship, jump in, the new york times reported for for example, melania trump is far more relaxed outside the presence of her husband when he s around. maintain as separate bedroom and stays in separate hotel suites when there, but one of the strongest influences in his ear privately if not also publicly. also seen she had an impact on the issue of children separated from their parents at the border, and has absolutely shown that she can be an independent voice within the white house and going to africa is one way to demonstrate that, and also following in the footsteps of other first ladies who have chosen the continent of africa to showcase what they can do, the spotlight they can bring with that office or position of being first lady. africa is obviously very strategically significant. as you said. the chinese government trying to colonize this continent, step into a strategic void the united states left as we folked diplomatic and military efforts in the middle east. the fact she s going there is significant. that said, don t forget melania has a history of bungling the high-pressure moment. wore a bizarre jacket on her way to meet with people, would go on the family separation issue. a jacket that said, i really don t care. do you. probably the most important moment of her time as first lady thus far. and it s something that, you know, we ll see how well her staff does. chris, final thoughts here. post suggests perhaps the timing means mrs. trump won t be a huge presence on the campaign trail. rarely been a big presence on the campaign trail. does that fit? yeah. and where her role will be more symbolic than sububstantive. maybe she feels a stronger footing over time. wrap up the show with what you re digging into. meetings coming up between dmeen a china and the united states. a dispute between the two countries. and big terry ifs by the president on china. a source, it s president trump. said yesterday he doesn t expect much to come from these talks. a sign this dispute will last a long time. may be our first source who says the source is the president on the record. thank you. betsy, a couple moments ago a new look at brett kavanaugh meeting with susan collins here on klieg. interesting and relates to your story you re working on is the guy trailing in the background. just out of frame. see if he walks in. don mcgahn. right? there he is. that little man in the back. there s been a lot of speculation about the significance of mcgahn talking with mueller s team for 40 hours. i do not cosign the following legal analysis but a person close to the president s legal team told me one way they re thinking is as follows. what the source said, when the white house, john doud and ty cobb, the president s former lawyers waived executive privilege so many white house officials could testify to mueller, that waiver only applied to within the executive branch. so what they re saying, the president s legal team says, if mueller wanted to take some of the testimony that mcgahn provided, evidence of a crime, say, something relevant to a criminal prosecution and provide that evidence to a grand jury, which is part of the judicial branch, that the white house would be able to fight back and try to put the ka bacibosh on i. scratching heads, might not be right but thinking on the president s legal team. thank you guys all for being on the program. appreciate it. wrap up as always with today the big picture. comes from arizona. what you re about to see is a stunning moment. little london. just born. she s inside a heart made out of needles. those needles are actually her mom s ivt syringes. after more than 1,600 shots, after three miscarriages, after four years, the couple finally welcome this sweetpea. the moment shared some 60,000 times on facebook. gone totally viral captures this intense in vitro fertilization journey filled with challenges, but more importantly filled with
The day s biggest political and news stories, with interviews and reporting from around the nation. thoug a sense the timing of the conversation was while the manafort trial was under way? i m going to credit rudy giuliani in his last corrected statement in which he says to me that he believes it was quite a bit longer before the trial. now, manafort was facing a lot of charges in a pretty damning case of tax evasion and bank fraud. it was fairly, you know, high odds that he was going to be convicted based on those case based on those charges and the evidence that the government had. but, again, i m just going to let giuliani say what he wants to say, which is that now he remembers it really probably was in june rather than in august. so further along than recently. did you get a sense at all, carol, from your conversation with rudy giuliani as to why today did he mention this? he s obviously given a lot of interviews in the past. was it your reading of his intent that maybe he was trying to send a signal to paul manafort? i don t try to speculate or thing. so that outburst prompting a rare public response from sessions who says he, quote, took control of the department of justice the day he was sworn in, and that it won t be improperly influenced by political considerations. with me now, former congresswoman elizabeth holtsman, a member of the house judiciary committee, jess mcintosh, a former aide to hillary clinton, betsy woodruff of the daily beast, and john flannery. great to have all of you with us. lots to break down this hour. congressman, if i may, begin with you, trump on one hand slamming his own attorney general, jeff sessions, the man he put in there saying he did it because of his loyalty, he also went after michael cohen. but seems that at least floating the idea through various comments, either through rudy giuliani or ambiguous answers on fox news that he is considering a pardon for paul manafort. what do you make of this? well, i you know, i m going to go back to watergate, and i m going to say that part of the articles of impeachment that was voted by the house judiciary committee had to do with offers of pardons to the burglars to keep them quiet. let s just not forget that. that was part of it. the president of the united states authorized pardons for people, the burglars, to keep them quiet. are you seeing parallels? of course. what are the parallels? is it the tone? maybe back then they were more explicit. we re not having a single person from the white house coming out and saying yes, he will pardon paul manafort. you don t need to say yes, he will. that was very secret, the pardons, hush money was secret, what are the parallels, the president of the united states knows donald trump knows that manafort may have some very, very damning information about him. it could even be criminal. it could even have to do with collusion. remember, manafort was in ukraine dealing with the president of ukraine, putin was supporting that guy, and now manafort becomes the campaign manager. manafort may know a lot. definitely parallels. may know a lot. wouldn t you want to keep manafort s mouth shut? and this is not the first time, by the way, that we know that issues with regard to pardons have come out. rudy doesn t just spill out stuff that s not relevant. he s sending a message to manafort, keep your mouth shut, don t say anything. jess, i see you re kind of wanting to get in on this part of the conversation. yeah. what s your take? the congresswoman is absolutely correct about this, there are it s hard to keep track because we literally had that tuesday split screen courtroom situation, but there are actually two criminal conspiracies that were involved in putting donald trump in the white house that right now don t have much to do with each other. you have michael cohen and the hush money to the mistresses. you have paul manafort who is at the crux of the collusion conversation. and right now trump and his team seem really adamant about moving the goal posts to say that this hush money to mistresses doesn t matter, of course it does, it violates u.s. law, but there s no collusion and we don t have that, and they seem pretty sure that they can be out on a limb with that. i think that s probably because they seem pretty confident that paul manafort will keep his mouth shut, perhaps because of a possible pardon hanging out there for him. yeah, to quote the president, he says a crime is not a crime, or at least suggesting that what michael cohen did is not a crime. can donald trump really distance himself from michael cohen? if you know somebody for ten years, it gets a little hard. he was described as a fixer by no less than rudy giuliani who said that s what we do at law firms, then he lost his job the next day, which tells us that maybe law firms have a better ethical standard than rudy and the beast, if you will. i don t see how he gets away from it. if you even listen to the one tape recording we had, it sort of puts the light of this whole mess about the girlfriends, and that is that he s in a conversation, and it s all about the campaign. one is about talking to reverends in the south somewhere, another is about whether the divorce and those details will come out before the election is over. and then the third one is how do we pay off ami? how do we do that? and he says cash. that is trump says cash. and it s cohen that s coming back and says no, no, no, we ll do it by checks and we now know that that turned out not to be a good idea, for a couple reasons, including it would identify the fact that there was no journalistic behavior. we have the other example in which plainly cash is being channeled around and it s not from a campaign and it s from trump and trump is being contradicted by cohen and details and facts and all sorts of things. that s what he does. let me share with you guys some news we re gertitting here and you talked about ami and the david pecker situation. obviously he s agreed, or at least received an agreement of sorts to in the michael cohen connection about the payments. we got this wire from the ap a short while ago, the national enquire esafe held damaging trump stories. the national enquirerer kept a safe containing documents on hush money payments and other stories it killed as part of its cozy relationship with donald trump leading up to 2016 presidential election, people familiar with the arrangement have told the associated press, we have that up there on the screen. so another interesting layer in development here. betsy let me ask you quickly about cohen s plea because trump said today that cohen s plea was really about other business, it wasn t about crime. take a listen. it was in another business, totally unrelated to me where i guess there was fraud involved and loans and taxi cabs and all sorts of things, nothing to do with me. he had an outside business. he worked for me you could really say it was more or less part-time. he had other businesses, he had other clients. i m not his only client. betsy, what do you make of that, the president there trying to distance michael cohen, trying to belittle him in stature, in his role, not in stature, how does that play out as a defense strategy? there is a greater truth in what the president is saying here. some of the charges aren t directly related to the work he did on behalf of the president or on behalf of then candidate donald trump. but, of course, the most interesting part of that plea deal, the two campaign finance violations to which michael cohen did plead guilty and that cohen himself said under oath that the president of the united states directed him to engage in illegal activity to help the president s campaign. all the throat clearing in the read. meaning he s being compelled to testify, under penalty of contempt, if he lies, perjury. that s what i understand his circumstance is. he s probably a reluctant cooperator. all the documents will come to the government and what they ll identify, or not, is that there was a lot of goings on that had nothing to do with journalistic enterprise and that these organs of ami, particularly national enquirer were being used as part of the election and not being declared on any filing. on top of it we have a typical conspiracy to defraud the united states by undermining the election process. there s a whole series of things opening up. the fact that they want to give immunity to pecker means they re interested in getting others. now, who? well, we re going to have the president, perhaps, as an unindicted coconspirator, i hope somebody has the gumption to name him in the indictment. the president who s compromising the united states and using these pardons that he suggests, that s a violation of his oath of due process. that is to say he s using his oath to protect himself from an investigation. and those he would keep quiet, just as in nixon. if you can give nixon credit, as elizabeth might i wouldn t. he was not as bad as this guy, if that s possible to conceive of. when you think about the fact that michael cohen recorded his conversations with the president, omarosa recorded conversations, and national enquirer holding onto these stories it killed, it seems anybody who was in trump s orbit at least in some case was trying to keep record of some of this negativity and some of this fallout in the event that they would be in the position that they re in today. i m so glad you brought that up. i ve been really drawn to this part of the story. the number of people who are very close to him who had known him for a decade plus who were apparently either trying to cover their own actions by having a tape of him doing wrongdoing, or waiting to set him up years down the road. the man ran his business like a small time crime boss and he brought people around him, the thugs who threatened people when they tried to take his ties out of macy s, up to his fixer lawyer michael cohen, he surrounded himself with these people who played these smalltime crime syndicate roles. i guess they played them well enough that they knew to record the boss telling them to break the law because one day they might have to play that in court. and today is that day, i guess. it seems like trust was low among all those parties. congresswoman, before we go, i d like to ask your thoughts on the fact that jeff sessions today responded to the president. he s been the subject of many attacks, but to see the attorney general defend his own position and what he s been doing at the department of justice, what do you make of that, rare? well, it is rare. it s a surprise because jeff sessions has been pretty quiet about all this stuff. but i just want to go back to the point i made before about pardons. and that john flannery mentioned. it s not an issue of due process. it s called an abuse of power. that is an impeachable offense. abuse of power, to use your power, a pardon to shut people up because they could tell the truth about you when you ve violated the law. trying to get rid of sessions because he recused himself, which he had to do, under ethics rules of the justice department, because what trump wants is to shut down the russia investigation. that s an abuse of power. what we are seeing here is the president of the united states systematically, time after time, this circumstance, that circumstance, abusing the power of his office. the swamp wasn t in washington. the swamp was in trump tower. and it s now in the oval office. i wonder if he s being advised against firing people like rod rosenstein and jeff sessions in the same way we heard giuliani advising him against pardoning paul manafort. interesting to see how it plays out. fascinating conversation. congresswoman elizabeth holtsman, betsy woodruff. john flannery, stick around with me for a bit. did trump accidentally confess to a crime in his fox interview? plus this. i ll tell you what, if i ever got impeached, i think the market would crash. i think everybody would be very poor. i m going to talk live to progressive billionaire tom steyer who is leading the impeachment charge. also joining tonight the wife of the guilty trump aide who s been cooperating with the mueller probe, her first interview since the cohen news broke. and trump rebuked by the south african government over a bizarre tweet. he lifted straight from fox news. you re watching the beat on msnbc. s out into the world, full of hope. and we don t want something like meningitis b getting in their way. meningococcal group b disease, or meningitis b, is real. bexsero is a vaccine to help prevent meningitis b in 10-25 year olds. even if meningitis b is uncommon, that s not a chance we re willing to take. meningitis b is different from the meningitis most teens were probably vaccinated against when younger. we re getting the word out against meningitis b. our teens are getting bexsero. bexsero should not be given if you had a severe allergic reaction after a previous dose. most common side effects are pain, redness or hardness at the injection site; muscle pain; fatigue; headache; nausea; and joint pain. bexsero may not protect all individuals. tell your healthcare professional if you re pregnant or if you have received any other meningitis b vaccines. ask your healthcare professional about the risks and benefits of bexsero and if vaccination with bexsero is right for your teen. moms, we can t wait. brian s back? he doesn t get my room. he s only going to be here for like a week. like a month, tops. oh boy. wi-fi fast enough for the whole family is simple, easy, awesome. in many cultures, young men would stay with their families until their 40 s. paul manafort he is desperately trying to distance himself from michael cohen. well, today, trump hammering his new defense, crimes aren t crimes, and just in case you didn t hear him the first time, he made sure to hit that point a few more times. he pled to two counts that aren t a crime, which nobody understands. those two counts aren t even a crime. a lot of lawyers on television and also lawyers that i have seen that they re not even crimes. all right, let s be very clear about this. these are crimes. and michael cohen, in fact, admitted to them. i mean, generally, a judge does not let someone plead guilty to something that isn t a crime. and then trying to deny the crime isn t a crime. did the president accidentally confess to committing one in that interview? they weren t taken out of campaign finance, that s a big thing, a much bigger thing. did they come out of the campaign? they didn t come out of the campaign. they came from me. my first question when i heard about was did they come out of the campaign because that could be a little dicey. and they didn t come out of the campaign. and that s big. but they weren t that s not a it s not even a campaign violation. that could be a little dicey. joining me now is florida congressman ted deutsche of the judiciary committee. john flannery. congressman, let me get your assessment. did the president admit to committing a crime in that sound bite in that interview that you heard? of course he did. look, ayman, let s be clear, the president s understanding of campaign finance laws, he contributed tens of millions of dollars to his own campaign, and he reported it. you know what he didn t report on his campaign finance filings, the two six-figure payments he made to silence women in an attempt to win the election. so he knows what he s supposed to do. he knows what he didn t do here. and he knows why he didn t do it. he can talk all he wants about how a crime isn t a crime, just like he ends his lawyer out, he sends rudy out to say the truth isn t the truth. the fact is, the president of the united states is an unindicted co-conspirator based on what his lawyer said in court just this week. john, your reading of that interview, did the president admit to committing a crime? yes, he basically said i paid the money, and combined with prior statements by his counsel, and by himself, about how he paid the money, that doesn t protect him. in fact, what he s telling us is i m concealing the money, i put into the campaign, you don t know about it, it was staged how he did it, and the dividing line is the congressman will probably tell you is whether it was willful or not. what could be more willful than concealing these payments and discussing how he wanted to silence somebody because it would affect the election? john, really quickly, does that tape become admissible as evidence, the president in his own words in that interview? sure, absolutely, it s an admission against interest. the only time you can believe what mr. trump has to say when he s admitting to a wrongdoing, or that meeting was about an adoption of russian children. that s the only time you can believe what he has to say. congressman, can you just get around campaign finance laws but not using campaign funds? can t the president make the argument that he s paying these women or to cover this issue from his personal money to save his marriage, that it was not political in nature? well, except that that s well, he can make that argument, except that that s not what happened. he made if you look at the timing of this, if you look at the what we already know about this, he made these two six-figure payments to these women to silence them in an attempt to win the election. that s what s readily apparent to anyone who s looked at this. it shouldn t be at all surprising that he s grasping for straws looking for any other way to talk about this. but the record is clear. he s this wasn t the only time he made payments to his on behalf of his campaign. he did it over and over, tens of millions of dollars, except in this case he intentionally tried to hide it because he knew that he was violating the law. and by the way, if i can, ayman, this isn t a question of what the courts do, it s a question of what congress does. the judiciary committee has a responsibility based on this information to get together and to start holding hearings to parse this information, to figure out what we ve got and to figure out what kind of political step we can take next. very quickly, do you want to see michael cohen in front of the judiciary committee. we ought to be talking to michael cohen, talking to the president s chief financial officer of his company. we ought to be talking to the prosecutors in new york, everyone who can provide us with the information that we need to do our job to hold the president accountable in this instance. all right, congressman, ted deutch, john flannery, thank you. i m going to talk to the progressive billionaire tom steyer who s calling for donald trump s impeachment. but first, donald trump s legal strategy and the risk of adopting talking points from fox news. school. grade. done. done. hit the snooze button and get low prices on school supplies all summer long. like these for only $2 or less at office depot officemax. are you one sneeze away from being voted out of the carpool? like these for only $2 or less try zyrtec®. it s starts working hard at hour one. and works twice as hard when you take it again the next day. stick with zyrtec® and muddle no more®. the other top story tonight, donald trump in the eye of the legal storm and talking about where he s getting his legal advice. he pled to two counts that aren t a crime, which nobody understands. i watched a number of shows, sometimes you get some pretty good information by watching shows, those two counts aren t even a crime. they weren t campaign finance. a lot of lawyers on television, and also lawyers that i have seen that they re not even crimes. so trump talking about the, quote, shows, and it s pretty clear which ones he means, the shows on fox news. they wanted something, anything, they could use to get the president. cohen changed his story. i would argue, knowing him all the years i ve known him, probably forced by prosecutors. lanny davis, he had his client plead to two counts of criminality that don t exist. this is not an illegal campaign contribution. manafort, papadopoulos, others, they have just become pawns in robert mueller s effort to take down the president. the special counsel is not interested in manafort s alleged crimes. they re only interested in squeezing him in order to get him to flip. nothing to do with collusion, nothing to do with russia, nothing to do with the campaign, nothing to do with trump. all right, here s the problem with all this for president trump. copying talking points from a right wing echo chamber, it has risks. it happened just last night. when fox s tucker carlson was reporting, not on the mueller probe, but on this story. the president of south africa has begun, and you may have seen this in the press, seizing land from his own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin color. does the elite agree with that? nothing to see here, says mic pompeo s department. so you can imagine what happened next, about two hours later, president trump tweeting about that very exact story and calling on secretary of state mike pompeo to closely study the large scale killing of farmers. let s be clear about something here, there is no large scale killing of farmers in south africa. and today the south african government said that it rejects the, quote, narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation. tonight, donald trump is under historic legal pressure, and it increasingly appears that pardons and talking points aren t going to help him. indeed, they may undermine his own case when it comes to the mueller investigation. with me now is eric boller, the senior writer at share blue media, and a long time fox news critic, malcolm nance. eric, beginning with you, your reaction to president trump s interview there in that echo chamber we just outlined? the interview itself wasn t that surprising, a lot of wallowing, self- pity. it was a disaster. i can t imagine there are five republicans who saw that interview and said the white house is under control, had a plan. the important one you mentioned, we ve crossed another line in terms of fox news and in terms of the republican relationship. we are now we have trump regurgitating misinformation he hears from fox back to fox news. yeah. for decades, years, fox news created the misinformation. and then the republicans would work with them. now we have trump just regurgitating it back to them. we hit a new dimension in this closed loop echo chamber. what does it say to you that he s adopted his legal strategy from fox news? yeah. well, he s grasping to anything that sounds good, right? and particularly fox in the primetime, it s all about making trump feel better so they have alan dershowitz. sean hannity pretends he understands the law. making up charges, cohen agreed to crimes that don t exist, as if that s how it happens in state and federal court. so it s amazing. it s amazing. and, again, what s really unusual here is he is just feeding back into the same loop. it s unprecedented. malcolm, let me ask you about the south african story, that was something i saw you on twitter very empassioned about. senator bob corker said this was a thing that was a base stimulater. how do you read that tweet? well, if that s a base stimulater, then his base is the white supremacist base, that story has been bandied about for some time amongst a white south african neo-nazi group that says that there are these horrific attacks against farmers. well if anyone s ever been to south africa, and i worked there in a security environment, you know that that country is primarily an egrarian, 40% unemployment rate, 20 million people with no jobs. the crime rate there in certain places is horrific. crime out in rural areas happens. but to say that white farmers specifically are being targeted, and as this group calls it, white genocide and projecting it to the president through the secretary of state to do something about it, you have gone way back way 1994, to an argument literally made by the who, of course, invaded and took that country. and it s absolutely, you know, fantastic that the president of the united states would suddenly use that unless it was a distraction. yeah, that is a very valid point as well, malcolm. let me play you this, because you brought the issue of how alan dershowitz, that the president adopts their talking point, watch this montage. barack obama, who received $2 million in illegal campaign contributions. if you look at president obama, he had a massive campaign violation. every candidate violates the election laws when they run for president. almost everybody that runs for office has campaign violations. his close friendship also a mandatory disqualification. his close friendship with comey. when you see mueller with the conflicts, he s so conflicted. comey s his best friend. all right, so how was the right wing media here influencing the president? we put a little montage, but it goes deeper than that. they are the presidency. when we talk about the fox news presidency, there is no acting president. the west wing is vacant. it s a feedback loop. i m not sure it s work rg that well this week, you know, tuesday, the block buster revelations, reporting the white house was stunned by the michael cohen revelations. and so the strategy is always go run on fox news, we ll ride this out, we have our base. i don t see this as being contained this week. and, you know, cohen and manafort were supposed to be subplots to the big story, the mueller report. if this is how they re dealing with the cohen story, when the mueller report could be five, ten times worse, i don t think just hanging around fox news is going to get them through a major crisis. we ll see how it plays out. eric, malcolm nance, thank you for joining us. we re running out of time, guys. it s a fascinating conversation. coming up, billionaire tom steyer is here on impeaching donald trump. we ll talk to him next. before you can achieve a higher standard of craftsmanship, you need a higher standard of craftsman. see for yourself at the lexus golden opportunity sales event. get 2.9% financing on the 2018 ls 500. experience amazing at your lexus dealer. experience amazing with advil liqui-gels, what bad shoulder? what headache? advil is relief that s fast strength that lasts you ll ask. what pain? with advil liqui-gels but allstate helps you. with drivewise. feedback that helps you drive safer. and that can lower your cost now that you know the truth. are you in good hands? so you have, your headphones, chair, new laptop, 24/7 tech support. yep, thanks guys. i think he might need some support. yes. start them off right, with the school supplies they need at low prices all summer long. like these for only $2 or less at office depot officemax. who would have guessed? an energy company helping cars emit less. making cars lighter, it s a good place to start, advanced oils for those hard-working parts. fuels that go further so drivers pump less. improving efficiency is what we do best. energy lives here. not a priority on the agenda. joining me now is tom steyer. tom, great to have you with us. so as we were mentioning, some of the top leading democrats, they re warning that impeachment talk could actually backfire in the midterms, could mobilize trump s base. are they wrong in that approach? well, ayman, let me explain to you how we think about proceeding with our need to impeach campaign. we look at it with two basic questions. are we telling the truth? and is it an important truth? and are we standing up for the american democracy and the american people? and if the answer to both of those questions is yes, then we think it s absolutely important to go forward with our petition drive to enable the american people to have their voice be heard. so nancy pelosi had this to stay on the subject of impeachment. doing it, and we can t be political in not doing it. ask questions about impeachment, let s seek the truth, seek where the truth leads us. but if i were president, i d be very worried. it s not a committed answer to the topic of impeachment, it s about finding out the truth. you re trying to get signatures for the need to impeach through your campaign. have you met the threshold of the american public to go to nancy pelosi and other democrats and say the american public wants this? what is that threshold? well, let me say this, we understand that impeaching and removing an american president is a very serious undertaking. and we we know that it has always involved a very long educational process. if you look at the most recent polls, just under 50% of americans believe that this president should be impeached and removed from office. that s the kind of level that was true with regards to mr. nixon just months before he resigned from office because he knew he d be impeached and removed. but what s going on, and what we see, is that it s necessary to bring the information to the american people to make it clear that this president has more than met the criteria to be impeached. and for that we got 58 constitutional scholars to weigh in and basically we put it on the web, it s a laydown case, and then we have to ask is it urgent to get him out of office. what we re looking at here, ayman, is a question of is this the most important truth in american politics right now? and do we need to stand up for our democracy? and for the safety of the american people? and we believe strongly that the answer to both is yes. tom, before i let you go, very quickly, you spoke about the high office. have you, yourself, considered running for office, yes or no? are you going to run for president, yes or no? so ayman, i don t know if you re aware of this, but the organization that i founded almost six years ago is running the largest youth voter mobilization program in american history this year. yup. we also were running a petition drive that will end up having 6 million signatures by election day. and we re going to go to those 6 million people, which is 15,000 people per congressional district and try and make sure that they turn out and they have their votes counted. which normally, way more than half of them wouldn t. so between now and november 6th, which is election day, i am head down, working as hard as possible to make sure that as many americans are engaged in the process, and show up at the polls as possible. and we still don t have any idea what s going to happen on election day. i guess then we ll have to ask you on november 7th. we re going to do our work and make a decision when we know the facts. fair enough. tom steyer, appreciate your time and thank you very much. always a pleasure. thanks for having me. i ll talk to the wife of the first person to plead guilty in the mueller probe, the first interview since the cohen and manafort news broke. yep, thanks guys. i think he might need some support. yes. start them off right, with the school supplies they need at low prices all summer long. like these for only $2 or less at office depot officemax. are you one sneeze away from being voted out of the carpool? 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as i mentioned many times there are, first of all, george at this time cooperated for more than one year. he s the recommendation from the special counsel presents some discrepancies. and there are many events that came out, and changed the assessment and the context of these alleged lies he pled guilty to. we know today that likely to have played no role whatsoever in this interference with american actions. we. provide i m sorry to interrupt. i want to be clear to understand. tell us s there a decision? has he made a decision? has george made the decision. no. the decision hasn t been made. i was trying to lie the grounds of the fact that george is challenging the guilty plea and why i was the one suggesting him to okay to the plea agreement. so you re suggesting sorry. so you re suggesting. okay. no decision has been made, but you re recommending or suggesting to george that he should vacate the guilty plea. yes, the main reason why i did it is first of all, today we have access to new evidences that made this which is the reason for george to lie to fbi when we know it played a role in russia scheme. are you denying that george lied to the fbi or are you aware of it. i m just trying to give my legal assessment. definitely sure that george wanted to take responsibility for his conduct, assessment during his interview with mueller. i say less candid because we are talking about timing. you don t think he lied. you re just saying i m just saying it s probably considered a lie, but i would never accept the plea agreement myself under this condition. yes. and given the. george admitted to lying. yes, because it s first of all pleading guilty is very is a personal choice. my legal assessment of this lie as i said today mostly in the light of the context says it came out mostly when we look at the central figure is that a new person is the reason why i ve been interviewed by the fbi and congress. he appears to play a role. which is the motive. the state of the mind to lie. i want to try to cover the ground there s a lot to get you take on. has anyone from the trump legal team contacted you? absolutely not. absolutely not. and as i said, i m not trying to explain why george pled guilty to lying. i m just trying to explain why not the plea agreement which are the legal and logical weakens behind that. as i said, we should look at the facts today with the investigation. we don t know. we just know he s a clinton supporters. he stated in a public journal. we know he s a teacher of western intelligence officer and we know he has ties to mi 6. it was very disappointing to see that recommendation didn t show any assessment about the myths or the role. so let me ask you this just because we re talking a little bit about pardons today. do you want president trump to pardon george? i think his only he s one that deserve the pardon above any other in trump campaign adviser. first of all, he s not involved with any, any financial crimes. his responsibility is limited to dnc and timing of the meeting. we know the role in the russia interference unless the prosecutor will show otherwise. i don t see why if the president says this is a witch hunt he would allow george to be sacrificial lamb of this witch hunt. all right. thank you very much for your time. i appreciate you coming on and explaining your position. thank you very much. thank you. with me now is former watergate prosecutor. first of all your reaction to what you just heard there and argument that she was making. none of the arguments make sense. they re all over the board. he committed a very serious crime. if you read the government sentencing memo. it s quite clear he told the truth about the professor t russian he met in i think land and come clean with the fbi in january of 2017. the fbi would have been able to assess the professor while he was in the united states. this is a lie on the fbi s investigation a negative impact. what is george papadopoulos gain from withdrawing deal from cooperating with mueller? is there anything. first of all t odds of him being able to withdraw it are about zero. very difficult to do it. not up to him, right. of course not. he has a heavy burden to meet to do that. if he were to be successful, what that would mean is the government could then turn around and prosecutor him for the crime of lying to fbi agent or even worse, obstruction of justice. the crime of lying to the fbi agent carries fiver years. right now limited to six months he could be sentenced to in prison. if he suddenly lost this deal, he could wind up if jail for ten years for obstruction of justice. thank you for breaking it down for us. we ll be right back. stay with us. introducing e trade personalized investments professionally managed portfolios customized to help meet your financial goals. you ll know what you re invested in and how it s performing. so you can spend more time floating about on your inflatable swan. 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case. also, arming teachers. the department of education weighing whether to let states use federal funding to arm teachers. we re going to hear from a student and a parent from parkland, florida. and unsportsman-like conduct. one of college football s most decaded coaches, ohio state s urban meyers, suspended for his response to domestic abuse allegations. a lot of critics are saying it was a slap on the wrist. is there a double standard at play? we ll dig into that. but we start with that breaking news. nbc news has just confirmed one of president trump s longtime friends, a man who may know his secrets better than just about anyone, was granted immunity in the michael cohen case. his name is michael pecker. he is the ceo of the company that published the national inquir inquirer. let s start with tom winter. hans nichols is standing by for us at the white house. tom, tell us all that you know. and somebody who either decided to cooperate and capitulate and pleaded guilty. do we know whether this is all that david pecker told prosecutors? do we know if there s other information that mr. pecker might have provided to prosecutors unrelated to this particular case but perhaps related to another case involving the president or michael cohen? so that s the exact question asked. i think at this point we don t know yet if his information went beyond the specific count, count seven, that s in the criminal information i have here, or whether or not this goes to any sort of other active investigation that s ongoing. of course we know that the case involving michael cohen was coordinated with and in conjunction with the special counsel s office robert mueller so does he have anything that extends beyond that, we don t know. it would we would presume perhaps that it s tightly correlated to the specific allegation, specific payment, but right now we don t know if it goes beyond that. hans, any reaction from the white house on any of this just yet? is there a briefing scheduled for any point this afternoon? there s nothing on the schedule. there s an opportunity to talk and engage with the president earlier this morning. the president kept it to the issue at hand. what s interesting about tom s reporting here is whether or not this additional flipper, this additional collaborator is going to stay within the four corners of that seventh indictment, that seventh plea. because even if it is there, this is significant because it s an indication there s more collaboration on the michael cohen s side of the story than there is from the donald trump side that s been going back and forth. when president trump this morning, when he was talking to fox news, had in mind whether or not david whether or not it would be that additional flip. let s listen to what the president had to say. this whole thing about flipping they call it. i know all about flipping for 30, 40 years, i ve been watching flippers. everything s wonderful, then they get ten years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is. it almost ought to be outlawed. it s not fair. so a lot of that interview from the president this morning. just in the last hour, we ve heard on capitol hill two different accounts from senate republicans. you have lindsay graham saying he suspects president donald trump is going to fire sessions after the mid-term elections. you re hearing from cohen saying he thinks that would be a mistake. a lot to sort through and as of yet no comment from the white house hans craig. i want to stop you there because lindsey graham, senior senator from south carolina, saying on the record he suspects the president is going to fire the attorney general. that s significant. we should also note that president trump and he are bffs. if anyone would know what the president might be thinking about, it would be senator graham. have we heard any more about whether the president s actually considering firing his attorney general? well, just dozens of hints from the president over the last 12 months. the most recent in this morning s interview. you re right to zero in on the suspects from lindsey graham, that he suspects the president is going to fire him. this is someone who plays golf with the president. who knows his thinking. is able to bend his thinking sometimes. so the question is, did donald trump indicate to lindsey graham that he was planning on firing jeff sessions? that would take the story to the next lelevel. as it is right now, this is his feeling, this is what he anticipates might happen. whether or not it s stronger than that or whether or not the president is using lindsey graham as a trial balloon, we don t know. craig. i think your latter point is very significant, hans nichols. it will be interesting to see if the white house says anything about the speculation. we ve just gotten a statement in from the attorney general. i m going to share that with you in just a moment. i want to play the sound bite we re talking about from lindsey graham, talking about the president s thinking as it relates to his attorney general. this is what lindsey graham said a short time ago. replacing attorney general sessions now would create havoc for the body. jeff sessions has done a fine job. he s an honorable man. replacing him before the election to me would be a nonstarter. senator graham just a few moments ago. this is a statement from the attorney general of the united states jeff sessions. a statement we got in just a few moments ago. i took control of department of justice the day i was sworn in, which is why we have had unprecedented success at effectuating the president s agenda. one that protects the safety and security and rights of the american people. reduces violent crime. enforces our immigration laws. promotes economic growth. and advances religious laborty. the actions of the department of justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. i demand the highest standards. i take action. however no nation has a better group of talented law investigators than the united states. i m proud to serve with them and proud of the work we ve done in successfully advancing the rule of law. again, that statement just coming in from attorney general jeff sessions amid suggestions from lindsey graham that the president plans to fire him after the midterms. chuck rosenburg is with me now. chuck rozenburrosenberg, msnbc contributor, also a former u.s. attorney, former fbi official. worked there for the department of justice. tim carney, commentator editor for the washington examiner. also joining us as well. tim, thanks for your time. chuck, let s talk about both of these stories. we ll talk about sessions and we ll talk about this news as it relates to mr. pecker here. let s start with sessions interfere with the investigation of bob mueller. this would be another step in that direction. he has threatened and berated his attorney general constantly in the media and over twitter. and while i may not be the biggest fan of the attorney general, if he s going to stand for the rule of law, i d like to see him stay in this job and do that. our man that covers the justice department, pete williams, joining us now from washington, d.c. pete, let me bring you in to the conversation here. we heard president trump in the interview this morning on fox talking about the attorney general. we heard from lindsey graham as well. this is a response to what the president said on fox this morning. where he said that jeff sessions has lost control of the justice department. this is response to that. because he says i took control of the department of justice the day i was sworn in. so it s a direct response to that. and it basically says three things. number one, it praises the people in the justice department. number two, he says he won t be subject to improper political influence. and then the other thing that s notable about it, it s something that jeff sessions does every time he ever appears in public. he praises the president. so even though this is a response to the president, he also says i m carrying out the president s agenda. i think you have to say there s probably no cabinet member who is more faithful about in every public appearance, praising the president, saying he wants to do the president s agenda on fighting violent crime. but to chuck rosenberg s point, you know, jeff sessions has taken a lot of hits from the president ever since the president was elected on twitter, in public statements, and this statement is very interesting in that, number one, it s pretty short. number two, it praises the president, but number three, for the first time in any of these pushbacks, he says the justice department is not going to be improperly influenced by political considerations. it s getting that pressure from all sides. it s getting it from republicans in the house who are pushing the justice department to release what is probably an unprecedented amount of internal investigative documents related to the mueller investigation and the hillary clinton e-mail investigation. and of course the suggestion that the justice department could be used to follow the political will of the white house. so it s a very strong it s a very muscular statement. it s surprising in the sense that jeff sessions has been taking these shots repeatedly and only now has decide to push back. in a very concise and, yet, muscular way. pete, again, i don t want to get you to spoke laeculate here you just alluded to it. the president has taken a number of shots at his attorney general on television, on twitter. why the response now? what do we make of the timing of this particular response this time around? my guess is it s because the president has kind of changed the normally the president s attacks on jeff sessions has been he should have recused himself and he didn t, which is something the president said again today on fox. this time, he brought something new to the party, saying jeff sessions has never had control of the justice department and i think perhaps that was an especially sore point and that s why he decided to pushback. now, also, it s very interesting, in terms of what lindsey graham said about the potential firing. in the president s comments this morning on fox, he seems to once again say that is something he just can t do as long as the mueller investigation is going on. he s gotten this message loud and clear from the republicans in the senate. not just lindsey graham and not just today. which is don t fire jeff sessions. he s popular among senate republicans. they basically said to the president if you get rid of jeff sessions, we re not going to confirm whoever you come up with to replace him as attorney general. so i think the president seems to know that that s a nonstarter. he seemed to acknowledge it today on fox. chuck, we know how the president feels about his attorney general. you still have a number of friends that work there at the justice department. how do they feel about jeff sessions? is he someone they still respect? well, i think everyone respects the position. we always respect the position. the attorney general is our boss when we re at the justice department. whether we re a prosecutor, dea, he s our boss and we follow that direction. that said, i think lots of folks would like to see the attorney general do more of what he just did today. which is publicly and clearly say that he s standing by the men and women of the department of the rule of law. that s what you need in a leader. you need to know that he or she [ rhythmic tapping ] hey, the rain stopped. -a bad day on the road still beats a good one off it. -tell me about that dental procedure again! -i can still taste it in my mouth! -progressive helps keep you out there. on the new sleep number 360 smart bed. it senses your movement and automatically adjusts to keep you both comfortable. and now, all beds are on sale. save 50% on the new sleep number 360 limited edition smart bed. plus, free home delivery. ends saturday. novation t inng blades here at gillette for 20 years. there s a lot of innovation that goes into making america s #1 shave. precision machinery and high-quality materials from around the world. nobody else even comes close. now starting at $7.99. gillette. the best a man can get. pawn but she says the evidence was overwhelming that manafort was guilty and she says 11 of 12 jurors wanted to convict him on all counts against him but there was one lone holdout. another female juror she said who couldn t be convinced. i asked her was this person also a trump supporter and she said she didn t think so based on the conversations about politics. it was just a woman who thought there was rez age doubts and really according to paul duncan could not explain her reasoning. but as for duncan, her position is, look, i wanted paul manafort to be innocent but he wasn t. he was guilty. there was a lot of evidence to suggest that. even though she s a trump supporter, believes trump s a great president, believes paul manafort was a good political strategist. and she voted to convict him, craig. to be clear here, ken, she believes that manafort was guilty as sin but that he s also a pawn in some sort of grand scheme. but i think i also hear you saying you had a bunch of jurors sitting around talking about politics? it was more subtle than that. okay. she said in discussions over the course of a two-week trial, you get a sense of someone s politics. that s what she explained to me. i think this is so interesting because, look, a lot of what this juror, paula duncan, believes about the mueller investigation and she said she doesn t follow it very closely. a lot of it may be mistaken. she thinks it s a witch hunt. it shows somebody like that can be persuaded. she sat through a 12-day trial. and she agreed, despite her political views, he was guilty and voted to convict him. i find that fascinating. i also find it quite dilania. a live look outside that san diego county courthouse where protesters are gathering as republican congressman duncan hunter and his wife were being arraigned on charges he misused roughly $250,000 in campaign funds. we ll look at that. also, the rise of me me me politics in the gop. 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is it different this time? well, think it s just really the president who s thinking has sort of changed. we re reporting the story to figure out what exactly is going on. really, president trump has been angry with jeff sessions, you know, since march of march of 2017 right after he was inaugurated. he s furious that sessions didn t recuse himself from the russia investigation. he s made that really known publicly. he s tweeted about sessions. he said in interviews that he wants sessions out. he has privately belittled sessions. so i think the combination of all the legal developments this week and then just this ongoing frustration may be boiling over at this point. and, again, we haven t heard directly from the president this morning or today that he wants to replace sessions immediately. this is something coming from the hill from senator lindsey graham. although graham is a close ally of trump s and someone who golfs with him and spends time with him pretty regularly. we ve been having this conversation. we ve also just gotten word that jeff sessions is headed to the white house, but we are told this was a preplanned meeting between the president and his attorney general that mr. sessions is going there to talk about criminal sentencing reform. but one would assume, jonathan, that this is something that would likely come up between the two men. i would imagine. why wouldn t jeff sessions just say the heck to this and resign? i believe he believes in the job he s doing. there are many republicans, conservatives, who feel like jeff sessions has not only been perhaps the most loyal member of the cabinet but perhaps the most effective. the make america great again agenda. and of course the forced separation at the border, a month or so back, is someone who is carrying out what the president wants. he told people around him he s not going to quit. graham s comments are interesting. because he was one of the leading voices counseling trump against firing sessions for a time. thinking that and mcconnell has more or less said, like, don t give us another confirmation hearing. we can t handle this. sessions has a lot of allies in the senate. still, they don t want to see him go. could it be that lindsey graham, again, someone who has been in the upper chamber since the 90s could it be that lindsey graham in that interview, that sound bite we ve been playing, was seeing that as sort of a flare? he was throwing up a flare for other republican lawmakers to create some sort of backlash, a preemptive strike? it s possible. certainly that happened in the past. we ve noted time and time again how rarely it is that republican senators stand up to this president. going to bad for jeff sessions was one of those cases. they ve done it before. they continue to counsel the president privately that he shouldn t. i think what we re seeing here is just as nancy said the president s frustrations boiling over in terms of this week that has seen the manafort conviction and cohen taking guilty plea. that he feels this is emblematic of this deep state witch hunt conspiracy that he thinks has been undermining him since the day he took office and he is lashing out at jeff sessions. remember, he has said time and time again where is my roy cohen? like, i want someone loyal to me like bobby kennedy was. nancy, i do want to talk about your article as well. unrelated to the jeff sessions news of the date. but you do write about the president and his detachment from reality as it would seem. you write in part, quote, the president is painting his own reality here. the president in an interview on fox news this morning was asked about the michael cohen payment. this is just part of what president trump said. did you direct him to make these payments? he made the deals. and, by the way, he pled to two counts that aren t a crime. which nobody understands. i watched a number of shows, sometimes you get some pretty good information by watching shows. those two counts aren t even a crime. clearly the president has been watching this show. but that notwithstanding, nancy, how do white house officials how do they try to even explain answers like that? well, i think there s a few things going on. one, i don t think there s a very coherraent strategy on howo deal with the fallout. two, i think there s a little bit of a strategy from outside allies and advisers from the white house. where they re going to try to undercut cohen and try to paint him as someone who s dishonest, someone who s changed his story and someone who would say anything that needed to be said to cut some sort of deal with the prosecutors and lessen his jail time. three, i just really think that, you know, the president, time and time again, has been very successful at undermining government institutions and the media by just continuing to repeat things that aren t necessarily true and sort of keeping on that and saying that. i think in this case, he s trying to do that, despite what we ve seen in the court doubts. i think for people in the white house, you know, this is a huge deal, but they re also going back to this bunker mentality that they have. where they re, like, this is just another crisis. sure. we ve seen all these crises before and this too will pass. nancy cook, thank you. jonathan, thank you, as always. right now in a federal courthouse in san diego, congressman duncan hunter and his wife margaret are being arraigned on charges they used more than a quarter million dollars in campaign funds to pay personal expenses and filed false campaign records. in the whopping 47-panel federal indictment, the hunters allegedly used the congressman s campaign account like a piggy bank. including spending more than $20,000 on vacations to italy and hawaii. another $11,000 on household items at costco. 600 bucks on an airline ticket for a pet rabbit. and if that s not unusual enough, they allegedly also spent more than $300 on personal items including punky brewster paraphernalia. on the taxpayer s dime. we re told from one of our producers in california both of them pled not guilty. and the government says it is open to a low bond, saying, quote, they are living paycheck to paycheck. nbc s kelly o donnell is live on capitol hill. jake sherman is a senior writer with politico. he is for some reason in new orleans. we ll get to that. kelly o., let me start with you on the hill what more can you tell us about duncan hunter and the response there on the hill to what he s been charged with? well, this is using campaign dollars, not taxpayer dollars. as what appears to be a slush fund as prosecutors lay it out. when the duncans could not the hunters could not make their ends meet, they would dip into the campaign coffers to cover their expenses. that s what s alleged against them. one of the challenges on capitol hill is the timing of all of this. house speaker paul ryan has stripped duncan hunter of his committee assignments. that is a powerful rebuke at this stage. there s always the tension when a member of congress is accused of a crime, of allowing the process legally to play out. there are political extend jed circumstances like not look like you re condoning this. the ethics committee having its own inquiry, putting that aside to allow the criminal prosecution to move forward. duncan cannot be pulled from the ballot. so the timing of this is frustrating to republicans because you ve got a red district in san diego that typically a republican would have an easy time winning. and certainly duncan hunter has over his several elections. but now he s so deeply compromised by these allegations and there really isn t an option for republicans. so he could resign his seat and still not be off of the ballot. he intends to fight this. we have seen in a very different case with senator bob menendez of new jersey where he went to trial, was acquitted on a number of counts and then the department of justice decided not to pursue a corruption case against him and he is up for re-election and is ahead in the polls. so they have to find that balance on capitol hill of taking action, looking like they take this seriously, and at the sa same time, letting the process play out. thank you for correcting that slip of the tongue. again, the charges here are related to using campaign funds, not taxpayer dollars. jake, hunter blaming the justice department for his problems. here s what he said. you have to partisan biased department of justice employees that are doing it to trump. they re doing it to me. this is political, period. this is the u.s. government, what i would call the deep state or folks in the u.s. government that don t care what the election does, that they want to rig the election their own way. deep state. rigged. jake sherman, it would seem as if the congressman from california is trying to take a page from the president s playbook there. he definitely is. deep state or not, you can blame it on whatever you d like, but there are facts here the justice department believes are facts they ve laid out. which is hunter spent tens of thousands of dollars on of campaign money on vacations to italy. he would have no business whatsoever spending that money there. that he was buying golf shorts and things that nature. justice department laid out a specific and well-defined case that they are using that money improperly. members of congress have very wide berth is using the campaign money. you see it all the time. members of congress giving out, you know, scarves and going out to dinner with their staffers. all on campaign money. so it is a kind of unclear line, but it seems like what the justice department laid out is not is far beyond the pale of anything i ve seen and i ve been looking at this kind of stuff for a decade. hey, jake, hunter also, again, he s running for re-election here. what are his chances, for folks who aren t following that race there very closely? and who his this gis this guy hg against? his chances independent of this incident would be very good. this is a slice of san diego county that is conservative. there s another seat around san diego that is more difficult which darrell issa has retired from. there are many members of congress, we ve seen it on the democratic side and the republican side that run for re-election while they re under indictment and win. i want to put what kelly said in kind of broader context. she s absolutely right, this is a tough position for republicans. i wrote a series of stories a couple years ago about aaron shok who resigned from congress. he still hasn t gone to trial two or three years later. this is a process that is really damaging for republicans, especially because two house republicans have been indicted this month. democrats are trying to make this a quote/unquote corruption election. about how republicans are not fit to govern. and that narrative they re laying out seems to be quite salient at this point. jake, you also wrote something in playbook this morning that caught my attention. the me, me, me era of politics. citing duncan hunter. you also wrote about the indi indicted new york congressman as well. indicted in the last few weeks. refusing to step aside. speaker ryan who announce head wouldn t run, retiring after election day. you see these all as examples of contemporary politicians who subscribe to the ethos of putting self before party. what s behind the shift in thinking? we could put these guys on the couch and be arbitrary psychiatrists as much as we want and i will tie this together to the previous segment here. i mean, we all understand the president is upset with jeff sessions about the russia investigation. but you have almost to a person republicans on capitol hill perhaps until today begging him not to fire the attorney general and still he can t get out of his own way and put the issue aside no matter how angry he is. i think that this has gotten worse in the era of trump. it s not just republicans, it s democrats too. there are scores of democrats who are urged the house democratic leadership to step aside and make way for new blood. i don t know what to make of this. but it does seem like it s two-headed. it s definitely politicians who are more perhaps self-interested is what people told us than ever before. it s also the weakening parties. parties are weaker than ever. have less sway over members of congress than ever before. why are you in new orleans? i cannot reveal that. this is an undisclosed location. okay. it s not for partying. i wish it were. new orleans is beautiful in august. playing coy here, usually forthcoming. jake is her msherman, thank you. kelly, thank you for being at the capitol for us, your assigned post. the department of education considering a plan to allow states to use federal funds to arm teachers in schools. how a parkland student and teacher feel about that. business unlimited card i get unlimited 1.5% cash back. it s so simple, i don t even have to think about it. so i think about mouthfeel. i don t think about the ink card. i think about nitrogen ice cream in supermarkets all over the world. i think about the details. fine, i obsess over the details. think about every part of your business except the one part that works without a thought your ink card. introducing chase ink business unlimited with unlimited 1.5% cash back on every purchase. chase for business. make more of what s yours. or any home, boat, treehouse, yurt, whatever. get the best price on homes, hotels and so much more. booking.com, booking.yeah the first survivor of alzis out there.ase and the alzheimer s association is going to make it happen. but we won t get there without you. join the fight with the alzheimer s association. i saw my leg did not look right. i landed. i was just finishing a ride. i felt this awful pain in my chest. i had a pe blood clot in my lung. i was scared. i had a dvt blood clot. having one really puts you in danger of having another. my doctor and i chose xarelto®. xarelto®. to help keep me protected. xarelto® is a latest-generation blood thinner that s. proven to treat and reduce the risk of dvt or pe blood clots from happening again. in clinical studies, almost 98% of patients on xarelto® did not experience another dvt or pe. xarelto® works differently. warfarin interferes with at least 6 of your body s natural blood-clotting factors. xarelto® is selective, targeting just one critical factor. don t stop taking xarelto® without talking to your doctor, as this may increase risk of blood clots. while taking, you may bruise more easily, or take longer for bleeding to stop. xarelto® can cause serious, and in rare cases, fatal bleeding. it may increase your risk of bleeding if you take certain medicines. get help right away for unexpected bleeding or unusual bruising. do not take xarelto® if you have an artificial heart valve or abnormal bleeding. before starting, tell your doctor about all planned medical or dental procedures and any kidney or liver problems. learn all you can. to help protect yourself from another dvt or pe. talk to your doctor about xarelto®. school districts may soon be able to use federal funds to buy guns to arm teacher. that s accord to a new report in the new york times. the times reports the department is eyeing the prog m program. that omission would allow the education secretary to use her discretion to approve any state or district plans to use grant funding for firearms and firearm training. senior administration official tells nbc news no decision is imminent. this stems from educators asking the education department about using these funds to buy firearms. our guest is a candidate for the local school board there. and matt dietech, a recent graduate, whose brother and sister survived that tragic shooting back in february. thank you both for your time this afternoon. tamial, let me start with you. lamar alexander was asked for his reaction. well, i m no fan of arming teachers, but the safe schools act for many years has allowed states to make the decision about how to use those federal dollars to make schools safer for children. your son was a survivor of that shooting. from your perspective, as a parent, a candidate as well, is there anything about this that s a good idea? nothing at all. i don t know if the trump administration or good old betsy are living under a rock, but you do not fix a problem by bringing more guns into the school. you do not arm teachers with guns. you give them more pay. how about you put that federal money into their salaries? or maybe we should implement mental health programs for children suffering mental health issueses or even teachers? why would you put more guns in into a school? are they not seeing what is going on around the united states? this is a bad idea and the trump administration, including betsy, really need to get it together. they are just making things worse. matt, you graduated from the school in 2016, but your brother and sister were survivors. your brother, as i understand it, has met with betsy devos. what s your family s take on this possibility? this is not a solution. this is a sales pitch. this is a distraction from the issue of gun violence in this agree that not only affects schools, but our streets and our church and our movie theaters and people walking home from school or going to football games. we have already had a shooting this year. we cannot stand for this. i cannot imagine someone more out of touch of what the students are going through than the current department of education and speciespecially b to play devil s advocate for a second, the argument has been made in the past that there are certain school districts in this country that are in rural areas. they have schools that are far from police departments. schools that are out in the middle of nowhere where it might actually make sense to have teachers armed in the classrooms. what would you say to that? what would you say about the idea that local school districts and local schools should be allowed to make these kinds of decisions? i m against it totally because why don t we put that money and hire more police officers? why don t we put more police officers in the school? not only that. why would you have a teacher with a gun? god forbid there is another shooting. what if that teacher accidentally shoots a child trying to get the shooter? there are so many consequences by putting more guns in the school. i am totally against it. hire more trained police officers or security guards. teachers are here to teach our children, not protect them, not have a gun on their side. they should have a pencil, a notebook or something to help our children. if we are actually talking about how to prevent gun violence in this country and protect students we have to look at the larger issue of how easy it is to obtain a firearm in this country and there aren t enough checks to stop domestic abusers and individuals from obtaining firearms. adding more guns into a situation has statistically shown us it creates more danger and puts more lives at risk. that s a high-five right. tenille, matt, thank you for your time and for your enthusiasm, as well, on this issue. thank you for having us. thank you very much. i would absolutely love lebron to replace betsy. that s another high-five. all right. continuing with the sports theme here, ohio state s urban meyer. he has been suspended for three games for how he handled domestic abuse allegations against an assistant coach. a lot of folks are saying that his punishment didn t go far enough. is there a double standard when it comes to accountability? what happens when you catch a fish? gecko: whoa. geico. more than just car insurance. see how much you could save at geico.com. i m ok! this wi-fi is fast. i know! i know! i know! i know! when did brian move back in? brian s back? he doesn t get my room. he s only going to be here for like a week. like a month, tops. oh boy. wi-fi fast enough for the whole family is simple, easy, awesome. in many cultures, young men would stay with their families until their 40 s. oxford university s head football coach has been benched for a few games. urban meyer has been suspended for the first three games of the season for mishandling accusations of domestic abuse. a lot of folks say this is a slap on the wrist. sally jenkins is a sports columnist for the washington post. let s start there. in this #metoo era, is it a slap on the wrist? oh, i think so. but worse than that, how do you think courtney smith, the victim of the domestic violence, is feeling about now to hear that urban meyer got a three-game suspension for mishandling, you know, what to her was the trauma of her life? and to be clear, courtney smith, married to zach smith, who vehemently denied he abused his wife. zach smith is the assistant coach under urban meyer. we should note zach smith has not been charged with domestic violence. but reportedly his wife shows the pictures of the abuse to urban meyer s wife rchts we. well, there were photographs and text messaging between urban meyer s wire and courtney smith. interestingly enough, urban meyer deleted all of his text messages prior to one year ago. so there is no way of knowing what he ever received. that was in the 23-page report that ohio state produced when evaluating what to give him as a penalty here. so it doesn t look great. at a minimum it looks like there was an attempt at a cover-up on urban meyer s part to delete those text messages. to you think if this was a lesser known coach, a less successful coach, if this were a coach of a football program at a d-3 school or something, would they have gotten the same punishment? how much of this is about being urban meyer at the oxford university, a national champion? there is no question the stakes are extremely high f financially for the university. there is a lot of bowl money potentially at stake if you are a number one team in the bowl championship series. so, yeah, the stakes are very high at these major schools. there is no question. the thing that s most disappointing to women observers like me is courtney smith s name was never mentioned at the press conference by urban meyer. they don t appear to get it. they don t appear to get that basically what this message sends, the suspension and the press conference that followed, is that guys are right when they tell a female victim, you know what? no one is going to care about you. we will have to leave it there. thank you so much. always enjoy your work at the washington post. thank you. i hope you come back. that is going to wrap up this hour of msnbc live. katy tur is standing by. i ll see you tomorrow morning on today and i ll see you back here on msnbc at 1:00.