that is something that for the past five years, i ve been dealing with on very obviously a firsthand basis. we see this happen time and time and time again. the bigger issue is how to stop this in general with any type of weapon. the fact is we are just over 24 hours out from this terrible tragedy and are still learning all the information. you know, but i think getting back to the bakes here and trying to figure out specifically what acts can be taken, what legislation can be proposed to stop all incidents like this regardless of the type of firearm used. let me ask you about the firepower needed to do that. if someone comes to a school armed, maybe a couple of people come armed with ar-15s with unlimited ammunition, what kind of firepower is needed to stop them at the door? can you outmatch the kind of firepower which is available at any gunshop in most states? unfortunately, i know my mop couldn t. i know my mom couldn t. representative moskowitz, you re down there. it s your responsibility to deal with the repercussions down there. what do we do with people who go on television with $3 million behind them like your senator who say we shouldn t talk politics because i m getting $3 million from the nra. i m getting the money to fight people talking. chris, i ll tell him to come the city of parkland. let him come and say that to the families who lost 14-year-olds, if that s his position, that s fine. he s entitled to that. but let him come, not in washington, d.c., not in the halls of congress, come to parkland. look these families in the face who are sitting in a room last night for six hours praying that their kid was in a hospital instead of on the floor of the school. and let him look them in the face and say, there s nothing we can do. it s too early to talk about your kid. we ve been doing that, chris. how is that working out for the country? i m wondering about the disproportionate of concern that you hear in these hours since this tragedy and all the tradition since. there s about one a week now, a school tragedy. eric is right. it is partially focused just on schools, this mass shooting. and i will say again, bringing these semi-automatic weapons to the schools, how do you keep them out of the door. this guy had a plan, smoke bombs, turn on the alarm and start mowing it people down. what s the plan of those playing defenses? what is the defensive plan? what s the nra plan to protect our schools? there is no plan. the plan is to be helpless and continue to feed the people giving you money and turn a blind eye to tragedy. when it s an illegal immigrant we need nud policy and to do something because our safety is at risk. when it involves a cun, we need to take a step back and get all the facts. why is there a double standard on tragedy with donald trump and republicans? the shooter s choice of military style weapon is an ar-15. according to experts, the weapon is designed to kill multiple enemy combatants at once. that s why it exists. despite that, it s easily accessible and easy to use for civilians across the country. you don t have to be a pro to use this gun. in florida, any 18-year-old can walking in as long as they re not a convicted felon. that s just about everybody. in five of the deadliest six shootings, the gunman in the case used an ar12 semi-automatic weapon. a gunman used an a rp to injury 12 people and injury more at a movie theater in colorado. on december 14th, of 2012, it was used to kill 27 people including 20 school children in newtown, connecticut. we remember that one. the gunman also killed his mother. on june 12th of, 2016, 49 people were killed and 507b hurt when a gunman opened fire with an ar-15 at the muscles nightclub in orlando. five months ago on october 1st, a gunman used an ar-15 to kill people at eight country music tes festival in las vegas. on november 5th, the ar was used to kill 26 church goers in sutherland springs texas, including eight members of one family alone and the pastor s daughter. earlier today the mother of one of the victims had this question for the president. let s watch. president trump, you say what can you do? you can stop the guns from getting into these children s hands! put middle detectors in every entrance to the schools? what can you do? you can do a lot. the interesting thing, i ll start with kurt on this one, is that the absence of conversation is mandatory now. you must not talk about it. and two weeks from now, we re not talking about this. they ll say you can talk about it but nobody wants to talk about it. you can t talk any policy. i don t want to hear from policymakers except about policy. that s why it exists. i don t want to hear how to contact my faith leader. i don t need trump to tell me how to find my church. i go there. i need him to lead this country in doing something about gun safety. he refuses to do anything. there s a reason why they re called policymakers. that s their job to be enact public policy that will stop these things from happening. after the vegas shooting, there was all this stock about bump stocks being banned. that s what takes a semi-automatic and makes it automatic. exactly. it s been months since vegas. the worst mass shooting in history. they re still league. there was no action or policy. there was bipartisan consensus on paper and in the news to get something done. they didn t dob anything about that. mr. moskowitz talk about state and federal. we have crime in different cities. there s gang crime in tern cities and this kind of mass shootings and there s cultural more rains things go into it the unhappy student. we know all profiles, all the stereotypes. the bottom line is this country, we have no more mental illness than any other country, japan or anywhere else. yet, we have killings on a mass basis because what we do have different than countries is lots ablots of combat weapons in the hands of regular people. i bet you the stores are being crashed right now because they re afraid somebody might outlaw them. they re hoarding them now. your thoughts. well, weapons that were made for afghanistan are on the streets of america. and let me tell you something, anyone who says they re for hunting, they re hunting children. it s time and time again that this weapon is used. i ll tell you, chris, the shooter here had 120 more bullets in his magazines that he did not use. he had extended magazines. he dropped his weapon and stopped. this could have been a lot worse. the number could have been 30 or 40 or 50. he was armed for war in the city of parkland. the safest city in the state of florida. in the state of florida, if you re the mayor of a city and you want to institute better background checks under the laws you ll be arrested in the state? that s the laws we put in place here. it is so backwards. you make a good point. not just the weapon he s got and the amount of bullets he s carrying with him. he was able for a bit to escape with the other students because he was young enough to look like one of the high school kids. a guy who looks like a high school kid goes into a gunshop and buys how many magazines of bullets, a gun within semi-automatic capability. and nobody questions him. and for all i know, he looked crazy when he went into that store. it s hard to assume he went in calmly without any sweat and just said me, sir, i d like to order an ar1515. it was damn easy to get that gun anton fit in with the students leaving the school that day, that s why he got away before the police officer got him. chris, we re in tmost powerf country in the world. we have the best economy in the world and yet can t keep kids safe in school. how is it possible that someone who might be a white nationalist who says on their facebook page they want to kill people and become famous, a famous school shooter, how can they walk into a gun store and buy an ar-15? he didn t take his parents gun. this was bought through the legal process. we have failed these kids. democrats, republicans. we have failed. let me bring in air car to talk about this. you have a personal horror in your life. tell me about and heroic behavior by your mom. if you had five minutes with this president, what would you say to him on this be? i would just want to know why. i honestly don t think that i would let the shooter speak. i would tell him about my mom, about the wonderful person she was. and then give him every single piece of detail about her tragic death. and how she literally laid herself on the line to protect the students and staff at sandy hook that day. tell him about my life since, the pain, the suffering. watching my nieces, my niece and nephews grow up without their grandmother. watching my sister and i struggle without our mom. if that story can t help to change the narrative, i don t know what will. when do you think about your mom? every second of every day. and what do you say to her? that i miss her. i miss her contagious laugh and her warm hugs. and i just hope that everything i m doing and everything that i have done and will continue to do makes her proud. it should because you re here. thank you. erica lavorty will, kurt bordello, and kurt moskowitz. keep representing the people and not the gun people. coming up, a stunning report from nbc news. more than 130 ploil appointees in the executive office of this president have been working without permanent security clearances. catch the names, jared kushner, son-in-law this ivanka trump, the daughter, even the white house counsel don t have clearance. why not? we ve got to find out. plus breaking news in the russian probe. steve bannon stonewalled the house intelligence committee today, not that the committee s worth much. we learned he spent 20 hours over the past week talking to robert mueller s prosecutors. and turmoil in the white house trump says he s totally opposed to domestic abuse. hmm. why is a top aide allowed to remain in a job after spousal abuse allegations surfaced in his faces? finally, some good news on this industry. this is hardball where the action is. excuse me, are you aware of what s happening right now? we re facing 20 billion security events every day. ddos campaigns, ransomware, malware attacks. actually, we just handled all the priority threats. you did that? we did that. really. we analyzed millions of articles and reports. we can identify threats 50% faster. you can do that? we can do that. then do that. can we do that? we can do that. our unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit you have happiness, those rights were spriped from college kids in blacksburg and santa barbara and from high schoolers at columbine. fran first graders in newtown. first graders. every time i think about those kids, it gets me mad. a lot of people think we don t have him anymore makes them mad. president obama fighting back tears as he recounted the litany of mass shootings that took place during his time as president. today president obama offered condolences to those affected by the latest tragedy and called for action. he tweetsed we are grieving with parkland but we are not powerless. caring for our kids is our first job. you be till we can honestly say we re doing enough to keep them safe from harm including long overdue common sense gun safety laws that most americans want, then we have to change. we ll be right back. welcome back to hardball. the rob porter scandal focused new attention on the security clearances that have or not been granted to the executive employees of the trump white house. nbc news is reporting that more than 130 political appointees working in the executive office of the president did not have permanent security clearances as of november, 2017. it s unclear how many of those employees may have had a chains change in their clearance since that time. it means roughly a quarter of all executive employees in the white house were working under some kind of interim security clearance ten months into the presidency. among them some of the president s top advisers including ivanka trump, jared kushner, white house council don mccab and sarah huckabee sanders doesn t have the right one as well as ten officials on the national security council and many others. this comes after trump s director of national intelligence washed minimal access toes information should be granted to those with temporary cure the clearances. if that is the case, the access has to be himmed in terms of the kind of information they can be in a position to receive or not receive. there s a serious public official. it s unclear what prevented so many from obtaining permanent clearances for so long and not clear how much access they ve had to sensitive materials. i m joined by carol lee, and chris lu, director of the obama transition, also assistant to the former president in the white house. thank you both for joining us. what are the reasons why there s such sloppiness and lack of safety precautions so many top people don t have the right clearances? we don t fully know because the process is not very transparent. the white house has not been forthcoming. there are a number of reasonsian someone could have a security clearance, interim security clearance months into the administration. there could be a backlog of requests. there could be things like someone who has extensive business ties. they have to go through those. if you have family living overseas, that could be it. when you talk to national security experts and legal experts about this, the thing that sticks out to them is just it s not necessarily the overall number but the people who are closest to the president still don t have permanent security clearances. while some of the individuals that operating on interim clearances play have them now, people like jared curb mer certainly does not. the chris lu, it seems to me my experience is when is you name a top appointee, they get through pretty quickly. these people are pretty high level people, the president s family, the press secretary, his lawyer, the white house attorney. you would think they would get priority. if they didn t get priority, it must be some red flag out there, not just the slowness of the process. there s some reason they haven t been cleared. that s absolutely right. how we avoided this in the obama administration is we precleared 200 appointees before election day to avoid the backlog. there are 250e7b8 assistants to the president. that s the highest rank. you should push those people in the queue before anyone else comes through. the fact jared kushner has been sitting there for well over a year while also receiving the highest intel briefing in the country with an interim clearance is trouble and should make you wonder wlrp national security is at risk right now. do you think the president asked his family members, have you been cleared yet? what is your problem or does he know what the problem is. we don t know. certainly now they would be having this conversation because the rob porter issue has been so much in the news. and there are some suggestions that the white house is leaning into deal with some of these interim clearances since porter by the let go this week. as a candidate trump routinely attacked hillary clinton for mishandling classified information. let s watch minimum in actinim candidate. this was not just extreme carelessness with classified material which is still totally disqualifying. this is calculated. deliberate, premeditated misconduct followed by a cover-up. she sent vast amounts of classified information including information classified as top secret. top secret. okay? she said she never septembnt or received classified materials. a lie. such a lie. she said she couldn t recall details about her mishandling of classified information. in my administration, i m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. we also need the best protection of classified information. i don t know what to say. i mean, you can say hypocrisy and this guy talks out of two sides of his mouth. you can say he ll attack hillary for any possibility of doing anything wrong without saying what was wrong that was done. yet in this case, oh livious. hypocrisy on so many different levels. they knew rob porter had a problem. they can argue about the degree of the problem, what the abuse was. they would know it. all that time, he said give him all the latest stuff. all the hot stuff. he knows how to violate the trust of the country because he did it. this is donald trump saying he hires the best people which we know he doesn t. him saying a businessperson needs to run the government. we see the problems. it s mishandling of information. the problem is right now there s a percentage of people who have interim clearances getting access to classified information who probably will not get permanent clearances. they will leave the white house having seen all this stuff, carol and nobody s going to be able to reclaim it. when we saw that happen. they can sell it for all we know. woo yes, they don t know they re taking it home in their bags. who is to stop them with this crowd. we ve seen donald trump do this over and over again. he ll say one thing and it doesn t apply to him. the interesting thing that s happening. > you were laughing. it sounds so ridiculous. rob porter s gone now. right? he has in his head i would think notes at home. all this classified stuff he s been looking at for a year. you can t get that back from him, can you? can you stop him from talking about it or selling it from a magazine article? if you re operating under an interim clearance, it would be illegal. but he never, but he s permanently compelled to keep that secret. he should be but this is why we have clearances to test people s honesty, reliability and trust worriedness. clearly porter doesn t meet those standards never will be cleared. thank you, carol lee, chris lu. up next, breaking news on the russian probe. we re learning tonight steve bannon spent 20 hours being grilled by robert mueller. today he was back on capitol hill, dodging questions on the house intel committee. that committee s not worth meeting with. this is hardball. stick with us. we ll be back. our factory in b more than a thousand workers are starting their day building on over a hundred years of heritage, craftsmanship and innovation. today we re bringing you america s number one shave at lower prices every day. putting money back in the pockets of millions of americans. as one of those workers, i m proud to bring you gillette quality for less, because nobody can beat the men and women of gillette. gillette - the best a man can get. fthere s flonase sensimist.f up around pets. it relieves all your worst symptoms including nasal congestion, which most pills don t. and all from a gentle mist you can barely feel. flonase sensimist. that he led adam schiff to threaten content proceedings against bannon. snif certainly, it will be our recommendation to our leadership that we initiate contempt proceedings. and i hope that we have a meeting on the minds. i spekt expect that we likely will, judging from the comments that my colleagues the majority have made publicly about the necessity of compelling answers to these questions. such a measure might face long odds. at least one top republican on the committee, mike conaway, did not rule out the prospect of holding bannon in contempt. betsy woodruff covers the russia probe for the daily beast. i m fascinated what he may have told muler. he mueller is the key here. the house intelligence committee is useless. the senate might do something. i respect burr and warner. let me ask you what bannon had to tell under oath mueller and what he refused to tell the house committee. the major outstanding difference is that what i ve been told is bannon refused to answer any questions from congress besides precleared ones had he given them beforehand about what happened during the transition and while he was in the white house. that is a massive vital key point of time that bannon just refused to take hard questions about. at the same time, i ve been told by a person very close to bannon he did answer beak anything mueller asked him. what we know now, what we can infer is that mueller unsurprisingly knows way, way, way, way more about what happened from the transition team to bannon s exit of the white house than capitol hill will probably ever know. i m not a legal correspondent. all i m interested in is impeachment and did the president obstruct justice or did he deal did he deal with the russians during the campaign. what would bannon know about either of those questions sitting in the oval office? we see him sitting on the front desk there all the time chatting away with the president, kibitzing, shooting the whatever. so he must have been there. when was he there? these kind of pictures. he must have overheard interesting conversations and was he pinned down by mueller about those. what is notable about his time in the white house, he was quite close with michael flynn. they were very much of the same mind thinking about iran. so flynn would have shared all that was going on. right. those where is bannon s closest ally in the white house probably was at least one of his closest allies was flynn. to the extent flynn has been involved in a lot of these conversations, bannon is probably very much clued in. you ve got manafort s not talking, flynn s talking. popped is talki papadopoulos is talking. there have been some reports in other outwill he busy haven t been able to confirm those. this is a significant number of folks close to the president intimately involved in the campaign now cooperating with mueller. a piece of that is probably the fact that just hiring an attorney to help you deal with an investigation like this is extraordinarily expensive. people hope testified before the house on this matter have to pay upwards of $20,000 to prepare for one congressional hearing. > let s use our smarts here. bannon is a big nationalist. parts that have is interesting, some of it is definitely awful. he wanted to deal with the russians because they re nationalists. big shot to big shot. wouldn t trump have talked to him about that and said how we re going to talk to putin, how are we going to work a deal on the middle east. wouldn t he have had those conversations that would have dealt with sanctions and the tricky stuff they shouldn t have been dealing with during the campaign? i think it s most likely flynn would have been the person mof involved about foreign policy. one thing bannon was an expert of was overstating his power and spinning a lot of reporters he was a puppet master. it s probable he would have been in the loop on those things. if you re trump, the president, do you trust bannon? i don t think so. trump said that almost on the record. he thinks bannon is deceptive and acted in bad faith. would he rat him out. would the president rat. emily: hut? would bannon rat out the president. 20 hours of testimony before mueller, if you re the president, what are you worried about? money, the president s finances, jared kushner s finances. what white house people are most concerned about isn t necessarily things that happened on transition and campaign but what could be more troublesome for people in the president s circle are all the financial dealings. money laundering. > thank you for joining us. up next, president trump forced to condemn domestic violence following allegations against rob porter. this latest controversy shows no signs of letting up. in fort because of this white house can t seem to get his story straight. nicholas kristof in the times today, lying is a bad. when you lie a lot, it s really bad. you re watching hardball. than our name suggests. we re an organic tea company. a premium juice company. a coconut water company. we ve got drinks for long days. for birthdays. for turning over new leaves. and we make them for every moment in every corner of the country. we are the coca-cola company, and we re proud to offer so much more. i start at the new carfax.comar. show me minivans with no reported accidents. boom. love it. [struggles] show me the carfax. start your used car search at the all-new carfax.com. always but especially today let us hold our loved ones close. let us pray for healing and for peace. and let us come together as one nation to wipe away the tears and strive for a much better tomorrow. welcome back. that was president trump today on the deadly shooting in florida. while the nation s focus has been on florida, the white house remains in turmoil inside of the rob porter scandal in part due to its constantly changing story. chief of staff john kelly first told reporters he acted immediately upon hearing about the abuse allegations. you heard out tuesday night. the 20 hours later he was gone. kelly knew in november the ex-wives had told the fbi and what had he told them. on monday, sarah sanders told reporters the investigation was still being handled by the fbi. the next day, christopher wray told senators under oath that the investigation was first completed last july. snoofr soon thereafter, we received requests for follow-up inquiry and we did the follow-up and provided that informations in november. and we administratively closed the file in january. . on tuesday, sanders reacted to that with a new story saying a separate office at the white house was still conducting an investigation. but that office is part of the president s executive office. accord og nbc, if there was a problem with somebody s security clearance, they would have flagged white house council don mcgahn immediately. amid all of this, many aides blamed kelly for the chaos with one calling hip, this what i can t believe, a big fat liar. somebody working for the white house called the chief of staff at the white house a big fat liar according to washington post. let s bring in the roundtable. i want to start with ashley parker who wrote that story, a top reporter for the washington post and political analyst. kris wilson a republican pollster cornell belcher. lesley stahl would call up and say can you tell me anything. i would say i m not telling you anything here s somebody who says our boss is a big fad idiot. it s stunning the lack of loyalty and the freedom you get sourcing over there. you don t laugh about this. you actually heard a person say big fat liar on phone. let me get that down here. i did get it down. we put it in a story. what s interesting about this is when kelly came in at first, there was a lot of discipline pep sort of staunched those leaks and chaos we saw under the first chief of staff in the early months of the white house. so this quote and sentiment told me how much general kelly has lost the support and trust and respect of his staff and his subordinates. part of that is because some of them believe he asked them to lie for him. 2407 minutes deal? exactly. an account they knew not to be true. the fact that someone would feel emboldened to say that to the media underscores the strife general kelly is now dealing with. chris, it looks like the public trying to read about this is reading about a cover-up of a cover-up. they covered cup why they kept porter in the white house. there s nobody wanting to work in this white house. now they have to cover up that. now people in the white house know exactly what s going on and leak it. i think big fat liar is probably caud progress from scaramucci s comments. scaramucci is now attacking kelly the mooch. you can t get away from the lack of loyalty that seems to exist with staff. i find that incomprehensible you have a white house operating in which there is no level of loyalty toward the chain of command. i could not imagine being in the position, much less kelly when he s got a staff that lost confidence. cornell, if you can t get sourcing on the hill and the white house, it s not just you but other reporters can get a great quote from people on the inside, is that because they think the president doesn t respect kelly anymore? they re not afraid of the banter? here s the thing. the president has grown frustrated and irritated kelly. when he does that, he begins calling friends and confidantes and some of his own staff asking what do you think i should do? should i keep kelly? whether he does that, that then leaks out in consecutive circles till it makes its way to us. cornell, the horrible shooting, from the first thing that hit last night, i said we re going to talk gun safety here and talk about the ar-15, available for an 18-year-old in florida. how many magazines you wan, kid? great. what s your plan for this? there s only one plan. shoot. shoot a semi-automatic weapon. battlefield weapon. so it s used for its purpose which in this case brutally stated is killing people. i don t hear politicians talk about it. by the way, unless you re from connecticut or from california, i don t hear anybody talking gun safety. i m going to disagree with you there. house democrats and senate dras have been fairly vocal about wanting to do something, common sense around gun laws. when? but if you look at this and look at pew research, 6% of americans think we ought to ban assault weapons. for americans this is common sense. but you have a congress that is bought and sold and owned by the special interests, the nra. when you look at the money they re funneling into our politics, they want something in return. they re getting something in return for this. it s blocking common sense gun legislation. right now, if you put a pump, the bump clip things, if you put that on the floor of the house, you wouldn t get a majority vote for it, but you would get a majority voing for that ban of that on the house floor because you would get you can t get the vote. that s my point. they re held hostage by special interests. do they say that among them selves? do they say i got the nra on my back. i can t move an inch. no, it s not about that. a national perspective on this and you look at it in districts where there is what i would call a hunting culture. and people who grow up with guns. it s really easy for us to label something as common sense legislation. one man s common sense. what s an ar-15 in terms of hunting. > it s used more for sport. what kind of sport. like gun ranges. i ve shot one at a gun range. it s fun. would i take it outside of a range, absolutely not. that s not my culture. why do the gun people i ve got one in my family, my brother. they ve got the second amendment thing. how come we managed to outlaw tommy guns? because all these chicago criminals, mobsters were using them to shoot cops. they said okay. how come the nra lives with what do you call an automatic weapons, tommy guns but semi-automatics into an automatic. why can t they outlaw that. most people didn t know what a bump stock was before las vegas. we do now. something should be done about it. i don t think the second amendment was bryn to cover bump stocks. process here is not about the bump stock itself. if it gets introduced by itself, it would be passed. if you read the second amendment, you had a musket which wasn t too accurate and it took back ten minutes to load it. so it wasn t like people walking around with ba zook kazan flame throwers. you can have almost thinking. you re not getting this on the floor because of special interests. point blank, end of conversation. if it got on the floor, it would pass. it s not going to get on the floor because there s big money in our politics. end of conversation. we should have a third house who actually votes on things. they actually vote. the roundtable is sticking with us. you re watching hardball. time to bask. in low prices! when we come back, and the hardball roundtable will tell me something i don t know. stay with us. when heartburn hits. fight back fast with tums smoothies. it starts dissolving the instant it touches your tongue. and neutralizes stomach acid at the source. tum tum tum tum. smoothies. only from tums looking for a hotel that fits. whoooo. .your budget? tripadvisor now searches over. .200 sites to find you the. .hotel you want at the lowest price. grazi, gino! find a price that fits. tripadvisor. on our daughter s birthday? moms don t take sick days. moms take nyquil severe. the nighttime, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, fever, best sleep with a cold, medicine. we re back with the hardball roundtable. time for ashley parker of the washington post to tell me something i don t know. there s a close friend of melania trumps. her firm was paid $26 million by the inauguration committee for her work. she kept $1.6 million of that herself. she paid her employees but it raised a lot of eyebrows in the west wing, a because of the eye popping amount and she has an unusual arrangement. a white house hard pass. meaning she can get on the grounds. graft. that s an open question. sounds like graft the way you describe it. that s the way you reported it. that s a hot one. kris wilson, cornell belcher. we ll be right back after this. that s good. i m walkin wow! nshine i m walking on sunshine wow! applebee s handcrafted burgers. any burger just $7.99. now that s eatin good in the neighborhood. today, the new new york is ready for take-off. we re invested in creating the world s first state-of-the-art drone testing facility in central new york and the mohawk valley, which marks the start of our nation s first 50-mile unmanned flight corridor. and allows us to attract the world s top drone talent. all across new york state, we re building the new new york. to grow your business with us in new york state, visit esd.ny.gov. i walked among the young people who got word the great brandsenburg gate was about to be opened, they stood solemnly wanting to be there when the historic moment arrived. a calmness from the san francisco examiner. i wanted to know what it meant all these people kept captive all those years behind the iron captain. i asked each of them i approach what s freedom mean to you? from some, i want the freedom to earn what i ve worked for and not be forced to do something because i m told to. a nurse told me how her hospital had been losing people like her, thousands fled to a freer life in the west. finally i heard the voice of history. this is freiheit a young man told me talking to you. he was telling me his new freedom rising up as that wall was coming down was the human act of simply talking openly to someone like me. from the first days of the cold war, we were told of the lack of freedom behind the iron curtain
enormous turn and that brought us to 24,265. these trade tariffs are widening a lot. it started with steel and aluminum. it s affecting a variety of products, everything from televisions and cigarettes to plastics. you name it. pork-related, beef products. soy beans, an area that they didn t want to get into that they re into. all of this was a big step-back moment to say it s bad, it s coming but maybe it s not coming at all. this was crazy. you re right. boy, just as the opening bell rang this morning at 9:30, it was looking like we were going to have one of the worst days you could see on wall street. we were down 500 points like this. a couple of things happened after that. the aforementioned larry kudlow did an interview and he shade we wouldn t see a trade war. the markets started to come back after that. there were technical factors at play. people in support levels, held up meaning that at a certain level in a market, whether it s the dow jones industrial average, maybe the nasdaq or the southbound 500, which all ended up in the green today. there s a test. are the buyers going to be there. the answer today was buyers we. the one thing that we hear from the wall street trading desk, one of the things we re hearing, some on wall street don t believe that president trump won t follow-through with the protectionist measures and at this point, that s all it is, talk. we ll take a look at the tariffs threatened by the united states and the retaliation that came swiftly from china last night. the u.s. list is longer. the u.s. list has more than 1,300 products on it. on the chinese list, it s the lost cost goods. i welcome it. so you think it s a good development. allen, all i know is this started targeting steel and aluminum. now it s about 1,000 different items, almost every agricultural item you can shake a stick at. does that worry you as a trader? we re seeing a tit for tat. this is nothing but talk right now. just a proposal. the market doesn t believe it s going to be as big a deal as it looked like this morning. you talked about technical levels. bounced off of lows. we had higher lows today than monday. so this is a healthy technical turn around and a big turn around. obviously we have to build on it. we have different economies. we re a service economy. they re not. they re a industrial economy. we re not going back to the 50s or 1930s and start making goods like we did on that scale. we re a different type of economy. so you can t compare them china is not a free market. we have a huge trade deficit with them at the same time. so we re giving them our money and they re buying our debt. that doesn t make sense. so the markets are going to be very concerned about it. again, i don t really call it a trade war. the tariffs have been in china for many years. their goods have been coming here with no tax or no tariff on it. neil: no, you re right. the chinese i understand that. many have argumented is this the way to deal with that. i m not here to debate that. i am noticing this the number of items affected. when you think about this started out with aluminum and steel to a list with more than 2,000 items. for example, i had no idea, maybe you did, that in beef alone, there s fresh and cold boneless beef. frozen beef with bones, frozen is this will never come to pass. larry kudlow and others have said it will never come to pass. it will never see it. no need to fear it. we keep adding on to it here. i know we ve got this window at times, some months here where these things would kick in. i know the deadlines in washington and apply it. we always push up against them. and then boom. right. as you mentioned, this is a process. the inese have not set a specific day. the u.s. s deadline is in a couple months. we have a good time frame to negotiate. in the background, we got a labor report. adp is very strong. the best in four years. beads very well for this nonfarm payroll neil: i agree with you. the underpinnings are very sound. earnings start in two weeks. neil: so will that offset what we re getting here? alan? yeah. we can focus on fundamentals and he how corporate america is doing. that starts in two weeks. let s look at the banks. these guys are doing well and that will get us become on focus and realize what the game is here. it s a game we don t like to play, chicken but some people look at the end result as worth it to some. neil: thank you all very much. those of you join tuning in and say wait a minute. i looked at the markets earlier and watching cavuto on fox business network. the markets were tanking. down hundreds of points, over 500 points and an idea that we were going into an extended trade war. then a reversal of 730 points. what happened? what is the more accurate sentiment in gray reburn, what do you think? which is real to you? neil, good to be on with you again. on the trade issue, i agree with a lot of the comments that you just got. the market the stock market we acted with throw the baby out with the bath water based on the chinese tariffs. the reality is, nothing has been put in place. what you re looking at is leverage. trump and his administration are looking at negotiating. that doesn t mean they can t happen and if they do, the problem is areas like soy beans and agriculture where those products are not that distinguishable from products from other countries. like you mentioned soy beans. we probably exported $100 billion in soy beans last year. $20 billion went to china. argentina export more than we do. i doubt there s a difference in the soy bean. neil: let me ask you this. free market fear, sure. there s a lot of purists that say, you know, we certainly understand the president s grievance with china. we understand even what is going on with his annoyance at amazon. that might be more politically motivated. but there s an eagerness to take on the chinese, to take on the amazon and their business practices, albeit a different case there. but i do know republicans an conservatives in general when john kennedy tried to put that stunt with the steel industry or barack obama went after the investment banking industry, that was an uprow. crickets now. yes. our trade gap is five to one. having tariffs won t shrink the gap. the issue here is intellectual property. neil: that s the battle royale. so much breaking news here. we re investigating for other developments that could be coming on this. larry kudlow on this ongoing trade war that is escalating but so tate by late in the day buying. more after this. i thought i was managing my moderate to severe ulcerative colitis. but i realized something was missing. me. the thought of my symptoms returning was keeping me from being there for the people and things i love most. so, i talked to my doctor and learned humira can help get, and keep,uc under control when other medications haven t worked well enough. and it helps people achieve control that lasts so you could experience few or no symptoms. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. be there for you, and them. ask your gastroenterologist about humira. with humira, control is possible. escondito. yes, at 5:00, the city council will hopefully vote with a simple majority or with a strong majority to join the department of justice lawsuit against the state of california sanctuary laws. i m an imgrant that is committed to and was elected to uphold the rule of law and to keep our community safe. i m going to do that and i m committed to fight to make sure that our community continues to be safe and our law is uphold. neil: have you gotten any threats or, you know, talk of freezing of funds or anything else from the state that you re violating what the state wants to do? yes. they are after us because we are a conservative city. we are a city that cares about the citizens of the community and the aclu is marching in front of city hall as we speak. it doesn t matter. i came from lebanon to keep my community safe, to keep my city safe. i m doing just that. but neil, thas escondido. the last 12 years, we ve been cooperating with ice. we have deported more than 2,000 criminals from our community. that resulted in reducing crime by 33% since 2010. our cooperation with ice has focused on illegal criminals, this is not about illegal immigration. it s about criminals. neil: the president wants to bring troops, guards to the border. ho you feel about that? i feel our president and the federal government should do anything and everything to keep our nation safe. you know, the sanctuary city is a threat not only to our city and sanctuary state is not only a threat to california, it s a threat to the entire nation. criminals historically have moved from one state to another, from one city to another. this is unacceptable, this is immoral, neil. we re not talking about illegal immigration. we re talking about harboring, protecting, catching and releasing illegal criminals. this is not the way that s not the america i immigrated to 32 years ago. neil: mayor, when i learn to reports coming out of your beautiful state, i get whiplash. i hear from the oakland mayer, jerry brown that they re trying to protect illegals. does that bother you when you hear this argument morphed into protecting immigrants when in fact they are really shielding lillega immigrants? absolutely. it s offensive. it s an offensive act. here s the story of california, the golden state. the golden state now is the last in quality of life, the highest taxed state, a sanctuary state and the debt is closing in to $1 trillion. california is 1% of the nation s population but it has 30% of the welfare, 25% of the homeless in the nation are here in california. so it s really and the highest poverty rate as well. is governor brown should focus on economic development and keeping that state safe. this is just unbelievable when he they care more about illegal immigrants than caring about their own constituents. the democrats and everybody else. i think they re losing that support. i think they re vulnerable now. there s a push back not only from us but from an average citizen. it s a nonpartisan issue and i think you ll see that a lot more moderate democrats are elected to sacramento to change that direction. neil: we ll watch closely. thanks, mayor. guess what mark zuckerberg will be testifying on capitol hill. no hoodie. bring a suit. more after this. little things can be a big deal. that s why there s otezla. otezla is not an injection or a cream. it s a pill that treats psoriasis differently. with otezla, 75% clearer skin is achievable after just 4 months, . with reduced redness, thickness, and scaliness of plaques. and the otezla prescribing information has no requirement for routine lab monitoring. don t use if you re allergic to otezla. otezla may cause severe tell your doctor if these occur. otezla is associated with an increased risk of depression. tell your doctor if you have a history of depression or suicidal thoughts, or if these feelings develop. some people taking otezla reported weight loss. your doctor should monitor your weight and may stop treatment. other side effects include upper respiratory tract infection and headache. tell your doctor about all the medicines you take and if you re pregnant or planning to be. otezla. show more of you. this is a story about mail and packages. and it s also a story about people. people who rely on us every day to deliver their dreams they re handing us more than mail they re handing us their business and while we make more e-commerce deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country, we never forget. that your business is our business the united states postal service. priority: you this is the story of green mountain coffee roasters dark magic told in the time it takes to brew your cup. first, we head to vermont. and go to our coffee shop. and meet dave. hey. why is dark magic so spell-bindingly good, he asks? let me show you. let s go. so we climb. hike. see a bear. woah. reach the top. dave says dark magic is a bold blend of coffee with rich flavors of uganda, sumatra, colombia and other parts of south america. like these mountains, each amazing on their own. but together? magical. all, for a smoother tasting cup of coffee. green mountain coffee roasters packed with goodness. and to maintain public confidence and congressional confidence in light of today s breaking news where 87 million people s data was affected. it s imperative that we believe you. that you have a maya culpa attached to his brief. he should steer clear of deception or fraud, anything that congress can count on later to hold him accountable in that way. there s a line out the door for questions for him. neil: all these new developments. now the records that up to 87 million users may have had the information improperly shared. who knows what will come up in the interim. he has to be on top of that. he might have none about some of this, zone of it he might not have. it s not a winning situation to be in. it s not. that information that facebook released today touched on a lot of issues that congress is in. there s opt out features and things built in that allows this for help for those with a nefarious intend could do so. that s the kind of thing that our legislatures are going to focus on frankly. how can we prevent this from happening again. how can this not be the norm so the loop holes that people can squeeze through won t happen again? this is merely the beginning. note the senate judiciary community has issued invitations to ceos of google andpple. there s a lot of questions that the plito. neil: this started with mark zuckerberg saying there s some regulation in order here. be careful what you wish for. don t you think it s possible that facebook will be looking at that but the entire industry? absolutely. again, it matters how we classify facebook. that s what inviting regulation. do we consider ate media company? regulation would be obvious. if it more of a newspaper? people get their news from it. only regulation in some regards but that would be more of a free speech forum. if you want to hold them liable, that goes back to regulation. what is difficult here, this is a novel area and up till now, the regulation has not been able to cover it. frankly with consumer data privacy so crucial and the front lines of all of our interests, it behooves everyone to classify it fast and to establish some type of regulation so this is prevented in the future. as congress said, there s a lot of questions in the consumer privacy protection field that we need answers to. neil: thanks, emily. good seeing you. thank you. neil: larry no sooner in as the national economic adviser director, he s slap in the middle of a trade war. he s not worried. should you be? we ll ask him next. than the standard treatment. eliquis had both. .and that turned around my thinking. don t stop eliquis unless your doctor tells you to. eliquis can causserious and in rare cases fatal bleeding. don t take eliquis if you have an artificial heart valve or abnormal bleeding. if you had a spinal injection while on eliquis call your doctor right away if you have tingling, numbness, or muscle weakness. while taking eliquis, you may bruise more easily. and it may take longer than usual for bleeding to stop. seek immediate medical care for sudden signs of bleeding, like unusual bruising. eliquis may increase your bleeding risk if you take certain medicines. tell your doctor about all planned medical or dental procedures. eliquis treats dvt and pe blood clots. plus had less major bleeding. both made eliquis right for me. ask your doctor if switching to eliquis is right for you. neil: for the third day now in oklahoma city, teachers are protesting. they say they re doing it for the kids. the governor thinks something else is going on. mary fallon next, the oklahoma governor. david. what s going on? oh hey! that s it? yeah. everybody two seconds! dear sebastian, after careful consideration of your application, it is with great pleasure that we offer our congratulations on your acceptce. through the tuition assistance program, every day mcdonald s helps more people go to college. it s part of our commitment to being america s best first job. shepard: all right. i don t think this was the start that larry kudlow expected, being swept to the middle of a trade war. the president isn t calling ate trade war. i don t know whether larry kudlow is. i m happy to have him with us. larry, welcome. congratulations, by the way. thanks, neil. i appreciate it. neil: sounds like a trade war to me. what do you think? no, i don t think it s a trade war. i think there s going to be intense negotiations on both sides. when you look at this whole picture, blame china. don t blame president trump. trump is the solution. for all these years neil: you think this is a solution, larry? i think for all these years, china has had unfair and illegal trading practices, neil. the rest of the world knows that. so president trump is out there firing shot as you the bow saying we mean business. he has broad support. this doesn t have to turn into a trade war. neil: why does it feel like it has? it started with a couple items. we re looking at aluminum and steel. maybe half a dozen. now between the two countries, it s over 2,000 items and could grow more. that sounds like a war. i don t want to take the worst case. as i ve said, each side has a position. the psident is a masr gotiator, right? art of the deal. he s going by feel here. i think he s on the right track. by the way, if you lean in to this, you re going to go through a process. the process will last awhile. the other side of that rainbow is a pot of gold. inside the pot of gold is growth. you open up markets, open up investments. stop intellectual property. fix that stuff, both sides will benefit for growth. the rest of the world will benefit neil: i hope you are to avoid that kind of thing. but this doesn t sounds like the same hands off larry kudlow that i respected and admired all these decades. not long ago, you said early march, we re hanging by a toe natural on nafta. if we have to walk out of nafta, this steel thing turned from a a minor irrant to a major calamity for our economy and our stock market. make no doubt about that. i mentioned that because it sounds like the guy that you replaced worried about that same thing, gary cohn. look, i didn t agree with the blanket tariffs. it s improved with the carve out. i ve been an opponent of china. they re closing markets and investments. they re not playing by the rules of the game. so what are we supposed to do? we have to react. president trump is doing what no president in decades has done. i think he has powerful support around the globe. neil: maybe they didn t do it for a reason. they can spread. you say this isn t a blanket tariff. it s grown to include between our two countries over 2,000 items. i worry, isn t that blanket enough for you? isn t that suffocating enough? a blanket tariff is a global tariff. we don t have that. the negotiations on nafta are going rather well. neil: what does that mean? what are you saying? that s about as much as i can say. a lot going on neil: you want to whisper in my area? later. that s the correction i hoped it would go. coming back to china, you just can t allow them to break all these trading rules. you can t. neil: is our response going to be i see where you re going from. i appreciate the president. because they do cheat. but are we reayolving anything? i think we re going to come to agreements. i personally i believe the chinese will back down and play ball. the president has a good relationship with xi. there s a lot going on here. nobody likes it but maybe that s what it takes. president trump i want to add this. he is a free trader. he will tell you that. neil: there s no way he s a free trader. i beg your pardon. the path to free trade has to center on fixing these unfair and illegal trade practices. neil: but free trade isn t slapping tariffs on your own goods to make sure that that s your point of view. i appreciate it. we ve known each other a long time. we don t know how this is going to end. it may have neil: i understand what you re saying. i appreciate your concern about this and the president. he s right to say this system is not fair or right. but i m wonder if we re swinging the pendulum the other way and seeing the effects on the folks that have to pay the bills, consumers. governments don t pay this. they do. in some of these futures markets, we ve seen soy bean prices coming down, pork prices coming down. this idea that all of a sudden folks in key areas that the president won and the midwest are taking it on the chin. what do you tell them? think a lot of those fix are sick and tired of unfair trade practices. the onus is not on president trump. the onus is on china. we re trying to unwind decades of poor trading policies. you re too quick to blame president trump. neil: i understand. i tell you the response is but tell that the farmer seeing the value of something that he farm goes down 4 to 5% in one trading day. i understand that. hopefully it will end and not come to fruition. you go into the heartland, you to the northern states, what we used to call the rust belt, those folks would love to have greater export markets and china is denying that. they would like market openings. they would like lower barriers. you ll get better trade numbers, more growth and so forth. so this is a tricky thing. this covers a lot of ground. the president has taken this initiative. you ought to give it some time, neil. don t neil: so you think in a couple months before this would take effect that you can have a deal scored by then? is the goal here as the president said, to shave $100 bill off of our trade gap? he said it s around a half a trillion. others say 350 to 400. is that to prove that the chinese are making an effort to make it right? i think the goal is to open markets and lower barriers and stop poaching intellectual property rights and technologies from american companies. that s what the goal is. if weain those and i believe we will, then these trade balance numbers will improve enormously. that will be a plus for all sides. that s how i think this is going to work. neil: i now you just started working for this president. how would other presidents if they see some successful results from this, that other respects try the same here and the notion that government shouldn t get involved in business and leave you espoused for decades i m not sure i understand that. where are you going with this, neil. neil: i saying everybody is a protectionist. every free trader believes that china must play by the rules. i don t know where you re going on this. no american neil: this isn t about china, larry. going after south korea. the mexicans and the canadians. looking at nafta. we just made a deal with south korea. you should be reporting that. it s a good deal. we did record that deal. and we re involved in a deal with nafta. you should be reporting that. neil: i did and i do. and i m asking you is this going to be the way these things are settled? that we re going to threaten action, we hope to see a reaction that won t get threats back but tariffs are on the table in the future. may be part of the negotiating package. you know, neil, go back several decades. republican and democratic presidents, they talked a lot about this unfair trading, they whined a lot about it and nothing was done. president trump is doing somethin neil: what do you think of what the president is doing on amazon? i think he s wants a level playing field with respect to taxing. that s what i think. neil: you don t think this is about the owner jeff bezos and the washington post ? i can t speak about that. i no with respect to the enter nell retailing, which will go on for a long time actually, amazon is building let s have a level playing field for the land base and for the internet. that s what he wants. the supreme court decision is probably going to come down on that side. this whole business will be fixed. neil: so when you talk about a level playing field, when walmart was capturing nation s attention and forcing mom and pop business, i don t remember you bemoaning that. amazon is being chargele by doing the same thing by this president. what do you think? what i think is let innovation and entrepreneurship work. i remember those charges against walmart. people figure it out that walmart was actually a big job creator. walmart was bringing in better quality goods. walmart s prices were lower. walmart created a tax cut effect by dropping its prices for middle and lower middle income people. so i think that worked. if you want to redo walmart, i don t know why. walmart is going internet. you ll have both. it s going to be a diverse economy. you can t repeal the economy and the entrepreneurs. you can put pressure on our chinese friends to change their trading practices. give mr. trump some credit, please. neil: thanks, larry. congratulations. more after this. trying something new can be exciting. empowering. downright exhilarating. see for yourself why chevrolet is the most awarded and fastest growing brand, the last four years overall. switch into a new chevy now. get 20% below msrp on all cruze and malibu lt models. that s over fifty four hundred dollars on this chevy malibu. find new roads at your local chevy dealer. with solutions to help provide income throughout. so you ll still be here to help me make smart choices? well, with your finances that is. we had nothing to do with that, uh, tie. or the suit. or the shirt. voya. helping you to and through retirement. neil: all right. the teachers are saying they re doing it for the kids. striking on a third straight day. they want better conditions, more funding for education, that sort of thing. oklahoma republican governor mary fallon wonders if there s something else going on here. governor, good to have you. thanks for taking the time. thank you, neil. neil: looks like this is getting bigger and bigger every day. it has been getting bigger and bigger. we ve had a deb abo how c we give our teachers a pay raise in the state of oklahoma. we had two special sessions this past year and now we re in another regular session. finally last week, i signed a bill to give the teacher as 15 to 18% pay raise based upon their length of service and to boost education funding by 19% in our state. the teachers went on strike monday. so there s been some questions about why are they at the capitol? they got their pay raise. they re talking about education with their elected officials. but education is a priority in the state of oklahoma. the legislature proves that bypassing the largest pay increase ever in the history of oklahoma for teachers. we appreciate them coming to us, welcome them but it s important to get back in the classroom and teach our children. neil: what is happening to the kids in the interim? they re out of school. it s not every district at the capitol protesting. but there s about a third of them in the state of oklahoma. a lot of children are out of school. some of the parents have brought their children to the capitol. some of the teachers have brought their own children to the capitol. it s a great learning experience or political movements, social sciences to come up and see the action being taken. but is been a busy week and an active week and a lot of people at the capitol. neil: thanks, governor. very busy news day. keeping track of that. just getting bigger and bigger. thanks very much. you re welcome. neil: i m old enough to remember when it happened when martin luther king was gunned down 50 years ago tonight. we know how things have changed and how in some cases they have not. the read on his mission a half a century later. he s playing with us. no, he s trying to tell us something. let s see what forensics thinks. sorry i m late. what did i miss? wanna get away? now you can with southwest fares as low as 49 dollars one-way. yes to low fares with nothing to hide. that s transfarency. neil: all right. this is the hotel in memphis, tennessee. the sight of the assassination of martin luther king 50 years ago. we have charles payne on what changed since then and maybe not. charles, your thoughts? a lot has changed. just came from having a black president, a two-term black president that was propelled by a position by a surprising win in iowa where he wasn t supposed to win. that is something that i don t think ten years ago we thought could have happened let alone 50 years ago. this is martin luther king talked the night before, the mountaintop speech. he talked about the buying power of black americans. it s $1.2 trillion. 600% more. we ve made serious strides. we have a ways to go but we can celebrated where we have come and one of the reasons is because of martin luther king. neil: we talked about the changes, jahmile when we talk about unemployment rates for african americans that have declined. i m wondering economically that is markedly different than it was 50 years ago today. well, i agree with charles, neil ve come so far, made significant probl on an economic justice standpoint and certainly civil rights. but one of the things we can t allow to have happen is for martin luther king s message to be watered down. he was in memphis where he was shot because he was there for low wage, you know, underpaid workers. his message around economic justice has gotten watered down to create crafty super bowl messages. we have to get back to that message. neil: who is that martin luther king figure today, jehmu? we talked about president obama and getting reelected. who would that like figure be now? the thing is, we don t need another one figure. i think what is so promising, when you look at the young people that are leading, whether it s black lives matter or the young parkland survivors, that martin luther king was 26 in the but boycotts. john lewis was 23. the little rock 9 were 9 and 15 and 16 years old. what is so excited, the collaborative leadership that we ve seen from this next generation. it doesn t have to be one person. neil: fair enough point. it s a coalition. neil: charles, is it your sense that capitolism this has come up a lot has failed black americans. what do you say to that? i d say absolutely not. but we re behind the curve. so you know, we don t have fortunes to pass on, which is always amazing me when blacks don t want to vote or vote against estate tax. we shouldn t have them. if a black person in a family become as multimillionaire, they will be the first in the history of the family and we would love to see them passhat on. but to your leadership questions to jehmu, tomorrow morning every black person that gets up and looks in the mirror is looking at the leader right there. begins with the person, the individual and we re inspired by those around us from martin luther king jr. to my mother and even my granddaughter inspires me. neil: thanks, guys. sorry we truncated time here. thank you. your inspiring messages. that will do it here. a quick peek of corner and broad. we had a 230 point run up. we had been down 500. it s been that kind of day. you know the drill what happens tomorrow. we ll be there. i need to shave my a1c i m always on call. an insulin that fits my schedule is key. tresiba® ready (announcer) tresiba® is used to control high blood sugar in adults with diabetes. don t use tresiba® to treat diabetic ketoacidosis, during episodes of low blood sugar, or if you are allergic to any of its ingredients. don t share needles or insulin pens. don t reuse needles. the most common side effect is low blood sugar, which may cause dizziness, swtiting, confusion, and headache. check your blood sugar. low blood sugar can be serious and may be life-threatening. injection site reactions may occur. tell your prescriber about all medicines you take and all your medical conditions. taking tzds with insulins like tresiba® may cause serious side effects like heart failure. your insulin dose shouldn t be changed without asking your prescriber. get medical help right away if you have trouble breathing, fast heartbeat, extreme drowsiness, swelling of your face, tongue, orhrhroat, dizziness, or confusion. ask your health care provider if you re tresiba® ready. covered by most insurance and medicare plans. tresiba® ready i had a very minor fender bender tonight! in an unreasonably narrow fast food drive thru lane. but what a powerful life lesson. and don t worry i have everything handled. i already spoke to our allstate agent, and i know that we have accident forgiveness. which is so smart on your guy s part. like fact that they ll just. forgive you. four weeks without the car. okay, yup. good night. with accident forgiveness your rates won t go up just because of an accident. switching to allstate is worth it.
good evening, i m ali velshi sitting in for lawrence o donnell. we have a very good last word for you. trump s tangled web. from russia collusion, to the president s tortured relationship with the truth. we ll look at it all over the course of this hour. the day began as a growing web of deceit between president and shifting stories between the president and rudy giuliani to clean up rudy giuliani s now-infamous fox news appearances. you ll remember he revealed that the president reimbursed michael cohen for the $130,000 hush money payment. there are new details that just broke within the last half an hour about when the president learned of that payment to stormy daniels. according to the new york times president trump knew about a six-figure payment that michael d. cohen, his personal lawyer, made to a pornographic film actress several months before he denied any knowledge of it to reporters aboard air force one in april, according to two people familiar with the arrangement. the times reports it is not immediately clear exactly when the president learned of the payment that michael cohen made in october of 2016. but, quote, three people close to the matter said mr. trump knew mr. cohen had succeeded in keeping the allegations from coming public at the time the president denied it. also breaking, new developments from the wall street journal about michael cohen s growing access to cash during the presidential campaign. the journal reports, michael cohen gained access to as much as $774,000 through two financial transactions during the campaign as he sought to fix problems for his boss, public records show. those transactions could factor into a broad investigation of mr. cohen s business affairs being conducted by manhattan federal prosecutors and the federal bureau of investigation. according to the wall street journal, in february of 2016, cohen nearly doubled the amount he could use on a bank credit lined tied to his manhattan apartment. increasing his ability to borrow by $245,000, three months earlier he gained access to another $529,000 through a new mortgage that he and his wife co-signed on a condominium owned by her parents at trump world tower. it isn t clear whether michael cohen used these sources of cash to settle problems for trump. but sources tell the wall street journal federal prosecutors and the fbi are examining whether michael cohen committed bank fraud by making false statements, inflating the value of his assets to obtain loans or misstating the purpose of his loan. michael cohen said he used his home equity line of credit to make the $130,000 hush money payment to stormy daniels. in an interview with the washington post this week, rudy giuliani said the president had reimbursed michael cohen for the stormy daniels payment and indicated that trump had reimbursed cohen for other matters as well. quote, he was paid by donald trump s personal funds and he was paid out of personal funds which covered that and possibly a few other things, you know, would be considered incidental. the repayments took place over a period of time, probably in 2017, probably all paid back by the end of 2017, that and probably a few other situations that might have been considered campaign expenses. giuliani also said this week that cohen resolved other problems similarly for trump. he didn t specify what they were or the source of funds that were used. joining us is one of the wall street journal reporters who broke tonight s story, michael rothfeld, thank you for being it us. thank you for your reporting on this. what s the implication here. michael cohen ended up taking $774,000 combined in home equity loans in the month before the election? that s right, ali. so the question is, what prosecutors are looking at is whether any laws are broken in terms of how michael cohen may have gotten access to cash during this period to use to help solve problems for president trump to keep things quiet, such as the stormy daniels payment. or were any misrepresentations made, as you said, in his in his applications to banks or statements to banks or in terms of what kind of campaign finance laws may have been violated. what we found was that well, first of all in november 2015, michael cohen s in-laws refinanced an apartment and took $529,000 out of the equity from the apartment. and he co-signed the loan for that. slush fund that might have been used to fix problems? yes, rudy said stormy daniels wasn t the only thing he solved for president trump, there were a few other things he got repaid for after the election through a retainer, $35,000 a month. so the information is conflicting and people are changing their stories but by and by, as the federal investigation is going on, we are learning more about what happened, and i think within some short period of time we probably will find out even a lot more about what actually happened. thanks for your reporting, michael rothfeld from the wall street journal. the breaking news keeps coming. the washington post just posted a new story, giuliani tries to clarify repayment to stormy daniels. in it the times reports that after rudy giuliani s media tour this week, some trump advisers said they fear that giuliani may have waived his right to assert that his conversations with the president are private, and that government or private lawyers pursuing lawsuits could now seek to interview him. joining us are jonathan alter political analyst and columnist for the daily beast. keira raumman, boston globe, the point for federal studies. and jennifer rodgers, executive director of the center for advancement of public integrity for columbia high school. thanks to all of you. a lot to digest. jennifer, let me start with you. going back to michael cohen may be establishing a slush fund or bringing in money he may have used to pay things off for donald trump, in the state of new york that s not actually legal. lawyers can t go around settling things for clients with their own personal money. it s not a crime but it s an ethical violation. if you re a lawyer in new york state, you ll get in trouble with the bar for doing that sort of thing, it s clearly prohibited. that s a problem for michael cohen to the extent his law practice goes. you and i were talking about this beforehand. a lot of this stuff starts to weave itself into a narrative that a lot of people already believe. there are a lot of people don t believe donald trump could not have known. this guy s a skinflint of legendary note. he didn t pay people small amounts of money, there s no real way hundreds of thousands of dollars could be paid on his behalf without him knowing. you re right. and we have this week confirmation of things that many people already believe to be true. looking back a week ago. we have the forbes 400 saying donald trump inflated his wealth wildly, pretended to be worth $500 million when he was only worth about $5 million. we have his doctor saying, i never wrote that letter saying he would be the most healthy person to serve as president, trump dictated me. we knew that by the tone of what it said. and now we have giuliani saying the president knew and he paid that back which is contrary to what the president said before, just last month, and then he confirmed it on twitter yesterday, appeared to walk it back today. but you have a situation where your credibility is lost if you re constantly changing your story. what is this about, jonathan, it s chaos, but the whole thing is perplexing. giuliani was brought in, in theory not just as a political adviser, but to be the president s lawyer, to try and bring some resolution to this issue of whether the president is going to sit down with robert mueller or be subpoenaed to talk to robert mueller. this doesn t look like the way you solve a problem. to say that rudy giuliani is rusty would be underestimating the situation. he hasn t been a prosecutor in more than 30 years. he s been in politics and he has really no experience with this kind of white collar defense at this level and showed it in the first couple of days and ticked off his client as you can tell from the president s comments. what s concerning to me is when people say, oh, i m not surprised, i knew that about trump, i knew he wrote that letter for the doctor, i knew he grossly inflated his wealth, i knew he was a liar about stormy daniels it has the net effect of normalizing trump, which has been the great challenge is to not just take it for granted that the president of the united states is a confirmed liar. that shouldn t be a dog bites man story. right. we should continue to have a sense of outrage about this, but sustaining that outrage over a four-year period is going to be very hard. i want to remind everybody that after everything indira laid out about what donald trump said and rudy giuliani said, trump this morning said to reporters that giuliani needs to get his facts straight. let s listen to this in the president s words. i ll tell you what, rudy is a great guy but he just started a day ago. but he really has his heart into it, he s working hard, he s learning the subject matter. and he s going to be issuing a statement, too, but he is a great guy. he started yesterday. he ll get his facts straight. he s a great guy. i will tell you this, i will tell you this, when rudy made the statement, rudy s great, but rudy had just started and he wasn t totally familiar with everything. and as the president said, rudy giuliani did release a statement this afternoon. here s part of it. the part about the campaign and the funds. he said, first, there is no campaign violation the payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the president s family. it would not have been done in any event goof been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not. second, my references to timing were not describing my understanding of the president s knowledge, but instead, my understanding of these matters. rudy giuliani in the same interview in which he said this wasn t a campaign violation said, can you imagine if this had come out right before the election? the implication again to what everybody else in the country thinks rudy giuliani said that was the case. now he s walking that back. if you re a prosecutor in this thing, this is too easy. it s interesting. so if the prosecutors are looking into this, if they want to make this campaign violation count, they will look at these things, they will have them in the arsenal for inconsistent statements and so on and they know what the defense is going to be. what they re going to do is make the case with the facts, not all these statements. look at exactly what happened, how the money was obtain the, who paid whom when, who knew what based on communications among the witnesses. they don t build this case with nonsense of the back and forth going around and they have these to have a little fun with. with the inconsistencies. michael avenatti, this is a civil case, but he s having some fun with it. oh, for sure. he s enjoying the fact that everybody who needles either rudy giuliani or the president gets something out of it. i talked to michael avenatti today about this, and the thing that you have behind you, trump s tangled web is, of course, a reference to him quoting sir walter scott on twitter saying what a tangled web we weave. he is saying this is about deception. he said he and his client, stormy daniels are leaning back and enjoying this. they describe giuliani as dazed and confused, and the deeper they go into it, the better it makes ms. daniels case or ms. stephanie clifford, her real name. it s not just the potential campaign finance violations, potential ethics violations. it s also potential false statements and potential obstruction of justice. let s not forget one of the most important things rudy giuliani said in that sean hannity interview, he said the president fired james comey because he refused to say that trump was not the target of the investigation. right. that goes right back to obstruction of justice. the latter part of that line oh what a tangled web we weave is, when we practice to deceive. these guys aren t practicing much. it seems more like the keystone kops, except it s the keystone kriminals. they didn t get the memo on how to lie. so this is what we ve seen unfold this week. they also had some very good news this week. there s a judge in the paul manafort case, judge ellis, who essentially rebuked mueller and his team and said they were out to hurt the president. we don t know whether that s an indication which way he ll of which way he ll move, whether he might throw the case out or do something else that would be unfavorable to the government. this is a story that s not going to be all bad news for the president. he had good polls too. i ll talk about that a bit. he was very quick to quote judge ellis when he got to the nra. this all happened early this morning. i wanted to go back to you jennifer, on the legality of it. it doesn t seem like they ve all practiced it. giuliani overnight to nbc news described his conversation with donald trump about the cohen reimbursements, i don t know why he s talking about this stuff to the news media, in an interview with nbc news giuliani insisted he only shared the details to daniels of the payment to daniels with trump about a week ago. i don t think the president realized he paid him back for that specific thing until we his legal team made him aware of the paperwork. he said the president responded oh, my goodness that s what it was for. oh my goodness doesn t sound like the president to me. maybe rudy is paraphrasing. why are we hearing these conversations? nowadays lawyers play multiple roles. they re often pr people, spokespeople, the rest of it. just because you re sharing a conversation with your client doesn t mean you re waiving privilege for all reasons. it may be something they decided the lawyer is going to be the spokesperson, there are good reasons for not having the client speak all the time. it doesn t mean that privilege is waived but why they decided as a strategic matter that these are things that should shared is beyond me. to jonathan s point it doesn t seem to be in order. the narrative is not clear. it seems to change so much. it s very incoherent. it s not the communications strategy you would want. part of me wonders whether that s the goal. thanks s ts to you guys, stick around. i want to bring in washington post editor ruth marcus and our msnbc contributors. thank you, ruth. ruth, what do you make of these developments. the idea that rudy giuliani has put on the table for scrutiny exactly how this all went down between the president, michael cohen, and stormy daniels. i don t know that he helped the president s cause much. that s a very restrained way of describing the premiere of the giuliani story. i mean, when the president is out there cleaning up after his lawyer, that kind of has things a little bit backwards. i think there s two different questions here. one is the public relations aspect to the question and one is the legal aspect. as a public relations matter, these constantly shifting stories and unraveling tales and the new york times story that says the president had known for months about the payment to stormy daniels, duh it s a great story, congratulations to my friends at the new york times but that s the only narrative that really makes any sense. but question whether people in the public who aren t already completely exasperated with the president s relationship with the truth are going to be moved by any of this. as a legal matter it s less completely clear to me the implications of this go make donald trump and the people around him life worse materially worse than they were before all of these allegations. there s, you know, a conspiracy case, there s questions about michael cohen s handling of client funds and bank statements and things like that. all of this is a big, big mess, but i m not sure it makes the legal mess that much messier. eugene, let s just think about, for those of us trying to piece this story together, you ve got the president saying what he s saying, vis-a-vis or at least in opposition to what michael avenotti and stormy daniels are saying about these statements, then you have giuliani contradicting the president, the president contradicting him. but then michael cohen, i don t know why he s talking either. talked to donny deutsch. donny deutsch went on morning joe to describe it. let s listen to that conversation. that was this morning. i spoke with michael cohen yesterday and he doesn t know what rudy giuliani is talking about. he said there are two people that know what happened, myself and the president. you ll be hearing my side of the story. he was obviously very frustrated what came out yesterday. okay, my side of the story, that s what i want to get clear. is the president trying to keep michael cohen from telling my side of the story? who s on whose side right now? this is just a wild guess. i would guess that michael cohen probably knows things that donald trump doesn t want made public, right? doesn t want him to tell. now, i don t know what those things are. i don t know if they have to do with stormy daniels or other things, whatever. there could be things about the stormy daniels affair that cohen knows and trump knows and trump doesn t want to get out. you know, but and i think michael cohen, through donny deutsch, was kind of reminding everybody, i m over here, i have a story to tell too. meanwhile, you have the extraordinary situation as ruth alluded to, the president essentially devising his own legal communication strategy. at times not even bothering to let his lawyers know what this is. certainly not cueing in his new lawyer, rudy giuliani, as to exactly what the script is supposed to be. this is you know, this is a he has a he s representing himself. so he has a fool for a client. this is ridiculous and he will only get himself in more trouble, not less trouble, by continuing this way, i think. jennifer rogers, as a federal prosecutor, what do you make of the idea that maybe michael cohen was, you know, facing the pressure from federal prosecutors and maybe deciding he was going to cooperate, and that somehow this was a signal. the idea that donald trump paid michael cohen back was meant to say michael cohen didn t do something of his own accord that was illegal so don t flip on us. does that make sense? it s hard to say. the decision to cooperate is personal to each person, it depends on your personal situation, your family situation, the time you re facing. whether you can do that time. the relationship against the person you d expect to cooperate against. it s a personal factor. i have no idea what s going on in his head. for him being willing to say that guy doesn t know what he s saying here shows frustration. the fact he s speaking out shows he s not happy with staying quiet. and letting the chips fall where they may. whether he flips will depend on a lot of things. we ll find out when we see the charges against him. that will be the big moment for him. the judge in california, in a separate case, declined to act there because he said he expected at some point in the near future, michael cohen will be indicted. how do you see it playing? i don t think giuliani helped his client. when he came on board, he was going to have this case wrapped up in two weeks. right? that was the promise. correct, he said that. the whole mueller thing was going to go away in two weeks. not only has that not happened, he s taken the president in deeper. he said off the wall things, like comparing the fbi to nazi stormtroopers in the mueller case. this is shocking coming from the mayor of new york post 9/11, a federal prosecutor, all of these things, to hear him, an ally of law enforcement, calling the fbi stormtroopers? i don t think that plays well. and the things he s done has given more ammunition to the side against donald trump. we saw citizens for responsibility and ethics in washington file their own complaint to the doj. and the office of government ethics demanding an investigation based on everything that he said, just in a fox news interview in one fox news interview. so far, he has not been helping the president s case. unless there s some strange strategy we don t understand. to pick up on indira s point, mayor giuliani said something that has not gotten a lot of notice to fox, he suggested that robert mueller did not have the authority to subpoena the president. and that is really a remarkable assertion if they decide to go down that road, because after the criminal case against president nixon, the subpoena was for tapes not for his testimony, certainly back in the day when ken starr subpoenaed bill clinton, there was not a question about whether u.s. versus nixon and whether the case in which the supreme court, the paula jones case said the president could be civilly sued, there was not a real question about the ability of the prosecutor to subpoena a president. right. the ability to indict the president is something different. so if either i don t know if giuliani was with the program on that, whether that signals, you know, the potential for long, drawn-out litigation with the special counsel on that subject or whether this was just another one of his off the cuff, unauthorized remarks, but it s pretty interesting. you bring up a good point there. we ve seen subpoenas to jefferson for documents, to nixon for tapes, to clinton for testimony. back in 1974 when nixon was asked to present himself i think u.s. district court for washington that went to the supreme court and was resolved within three months. nixon resigned so it made the point moot. but the fact is while we never tested the idea of a subpoena of a sitting president makes it to the supreme court and results in testimony, not a lot of lawyers i talked to said it can t happen. we seem to have a bit of history that suggests it can. watergate special prosecutor leon jaworski, replaced archibald cox, he had the tapes. so he didn t push the point of subpoenaing president nixon. he had enough evidence with the tapes. and they knew it months before nixon resigned. jimmy carter testified twice in two cases when he was president. so it s likely if this went to the supreme court that the supreme court would say, yes, the president is not above the law, he must respond to a subpoena. the question is what would happen then? i think the best predictions are that the president of the united states would take the fifth. eugene, he can take the fifth, agree to a sitdown where his lawyers are going to be present. i think most people agree donald trump going in front of a grand jury without his lawyers near him is going to be disastrous for donald trump. no i ll keep saying it. everybody in this country deserves a lawyer, donald trump may not believe that, but he deserves a lawyer. if i were one of his lawyers, if he had to sit down with an interview with mueller, i would tell him to take the fifth because he s just a loose cannon. is a very sort of minimalist way of saying what donald trump is. just off the cuff. and he can only dig himself a deeper and deeper hole, including all sorts of stuff that mueller doesn t know about. it would be, i think, a disaster. even worse than the political disaster of a sitting president sitting down for an interview and taking the fifth to everything. it s worth noting, mueller knows a lot so the president talking off the cuff and contradicting what mueller already knows to be true could get the president in a lot of hot water. everybody please stay with us. p mfsht caught up in the tangled web. but it was still all about donald trump and his impeach. next. how john kelly went from reportedly calling the president an idiot to this. everything is going phenomenally well. let someone else do the heavy lifting. tripadvisor compares prices from over 200 booking sites to find the right hotel for you at the lowest price. so you barely have to lift a finger. or a wing. tripadvisor. which is the only egg good eonly eggland s best. with more farm-fresh taste, more vitamins, and 25% less saturated fat? only eggland s best. better taste, better nutrition, better eggs. i m your phone,istle text alert. stuck down here between your seat and your console, playing a little hide-n-seek. cold. warmer. warmer. ah boiling. jackpot. and if you ve got cut-rate car insurance, you could be picking up these charges yourself. so get allstate, where agents help keep you protected from mayhem. .like me. mayhem is everywhere. are you in good hands? president trump s tangled web includes every twist and turn in the russian collusion probe this week. rudy giuliani is supposed to help decide whether the president will sit down for an interview with robert mueller and his investigators while the president and members of his inner circle smear the department of justice and smear the mueller team. and today in federal court a judge overseeing the case against paul manafort in the eastern district of virginia seemed to boost trump s case. manafort s attorneys are trying to get the charges of bank fraud dismissed arguing mueller overstepped the bounds of the russia investigation. judge ellis, appointed by president reagan, said he thinks the special counsel wants to squeeze manafort for information that quote would reflect on mr. trump or lead to his impeachment. ellis then opined that the person people do not want a special counsel with unfettered power. by the time president trump landed in dallas to speak at the nra convention, he read the news and used it on stage. just when i m walking on the stage, a highly respected judge in virginia made statements, it says, wall street journal, it says, judge questions mueller s authority to prosecute manafort. judge t.s. ellis, who is really something very special, i hear, from many standpoints, he s a respected person, suggested the charges before the u.s. district court for the eastern district of virginia were just part of the mueller team s designs to pressure mr. manafort into giving up information on president donald trump or others in the campaign. i ve been saying that for a long time. it s a witch hunt. we ve got room at the table for one more. pull up a chair ken dilanian. intelligence and national security reporter for nbc news. because he was at that court hearing today. ken, this is interesting. i think what our viewers are going to be curious about, was this a judge who was opining or was he really talking about how he might rule in this? that s the big question. a lot of legal observers i talked to think it s more opining. judge ellis was trying to make a point today and it was really interesting. representing robert mueller was michael dreeben, one of the most accomplished appellate lawyers in the country, appeared more than 100 times before the u.s. supreme court. he barely got a word out before judge ellis started firing sharp questions, raising questions about how these bank fraud and tax fraud charges against paul manafort could possibly relate to russia collusion. everything you said there, unfettered power, raising questions about the $10 million budget. this is a judge with qualms of a special counsel with an unlimited budget rooting around and going after the president. that said, it doesn t mean he s going to grant paul manafort s motion to dismiss the charges, which is a real long shot legal experts say. it s possible, it s conceivable he may say this exceeds your mandate and this is a case properly handled by the u.s. attorney in virginia in the eastern district. i want to go to ruth marcus on this. ruth, donald trump, whether or not the argument that judge ellis put forward that americans don t want a special prosecutor with unfettered powers, donald trump went to work trying to denigrate the mueller team. listen to what he said at the nra. in all fairness, bob mueller worked for obama for eight years. you look at the statements that were made. if you take a look, as an example, at the rod rosenstein letter to me prior to the firing of james comey just read it. the president spoke three times today, that was before the nra. he was doing a lot of talking. but the point is the president continues with the narrative of mueller as democrat errand-doer. in fact, bob mueller is a republican who worked in the bush administration as well. right. he said witch hunt multiple times in multiple appearances today. i want to say one thing about his comments about judge ellis. what i love about the president s view of the judiciary, i m being sarcastic there, is that his view of a judge depends on whether the judge rules for him or against him. if you rule against him you re a so-called judge and a disgraceful judge. and if you rule for him you re the second coming of oliver wendell holmes. lewis brandeis. all rolled together. so what is the president going to say about judge ellis if, as ken suggests, he allows the charges to go ahead? it strikes me the worst that can happen in the mueller case is the manafort charges are transferred to the eastern district of virginia, which handles those and can help squeeze manafort in some way and cause trouble for the president just as the cohen investigation can cause trouble for the president, even though that s being handled by the southern district. on the president s comments about mueller, and i think he s really, really ramped it up over the last several days, they re just i m going to use a favorite trump word, they re just disgraceful. mueller is a republican, there are democrats on his staff but they re all seasoned professional prosecutors and there s no reason or basis to question their legitimacy or bias. i want to make a point, judge ellis was in no way impugning the mueller investigation, he was not saying it was a witch hunt that it s not well founded. and i am pretty certain that he did not anticipate how his comments would reverberate around the political world today, how they would be used by the president of the united states to discredit the investigation. he was making a legal argument to a legal community about the special counsel and about a particular lawsuit, he was not arguing this was a witch hunt. jennifer rodgers, as somebody who s spent time in courtrooms what do you make of what judge ellis was saying? it would be hard to think anything you wouldn t say about donald trump wouldn t be reverberated around the world. was he doing what judges sometimes do, chastising an enthusiastic prosecution and warning them against overstepping their realm? they do sometimes do that, judges. i ve been in courtrooms where the judge has complained about policy of the u.s. attorney s office, i m seeing too many cases like this i don t like the way the office is handle that. it s often to be honest judges who used to be in the office, so they re picking a bit at policies of their old place of employment. in this case it s surprising that the judge wouldn t understand the play this was going to get and how it was going to be used. i think he said it with a purpose. enough of a purpose if you were one of those lawyers, usa versus manafort, one of the federal prosecutors work, that scare you? i don t think he s going to dismiss the case. some of the general comments he made don t go to the issue of whether there s a jurisdictional problem here. the motion is a jurisdictional motion. having read the papers, i think he will not dismiss it. but i do think he made those comments understanding that there was that they were going to be heard and that they would be used at least for some reason. so judge ellis is he turns 78 in a couple weeks. he s been on senior status for more than 10 years. he basically retired years ago. and one thing that he did not mention is that rod rosenstein signed off on this. this is the mueller team didn t just expand the scope of its investigation on its own. the person the deputy attorney general gave them permission to do so. so it s a little hard to see what the judge s legal reasoning would be to say that they had overstepped their bounds since that s the job of that deputy attorney general. i want to say it s not just judge ellis and this particular point here. there s more to the manafort investigation that has come out this week. first of all, we know the ukraine has stopped cooperating with the manafort investigation once the u.s. offered and decided to sell weapons to ukraine. that is very significant. we also know now the mueller team has questioned a russian billionaire who was on the sanctions list. they don t seem to be particularly interested in him specifically but possible in his ties to manafort. so this is more than judge ellis, let s be honest, i don t think any of us believe that donald trump had heard of judge ellis before these clips were handed to him and he suddenly called him very special and very great. as ruth said it s about are you on his side or not on his side. it s not about the legal understanding here. but let s not forget the manafort investigation has a bigger picture. and with this russian billionaire, with the ukrainians suddenly stopping, there s a lot more that we re still waiting to hear some other shoes drop. indira, thank you so much, ken dilanian, jennifer rodgers, thank you. coming up, donald trump may have lavished praise on his chief of staff in front of the cameras but new reporting says behind the scenes, trump is relying less and less on john kelly and taking matters into his own hands. every tv doctor knows nothing s more important than a good bedside manner. i don t know how to say this. it s ok doc. give it to me straight. no you don t understand. i don t know how to say this. i m just a tv doctor. they also know you should get your annual check-up. it could save your life. and now you can page a tv doctor to set up a check-up reminder. call 1-833-page-doc. cigna. together, all the way. well that s that s your job i guess. no one burns heon my watch! try alka seltzer. ultra strength heartburn relief chews. with more acid-fighting power than tums chewy bites. mmmmm.amazing. i have heartburn. heartburn relief from alka-seltzer. enjoy the relief. yoespecially when it comes to important stuff. like, say. your car. well good news, the esurance app lets you keep an eye on repairs when your car is in the shop. it s kinda like being there, without being there. which is probably better for everyone. that s insurance for the modern world. esurance. an allstate company. click or call. our friday night look at trump s tangled web continues and perhaps no area is more tangled than trying to follow the trump administration employment chart. look at how rachel s wall has grown over the course of the trump presidency, trying to keep track of everyone fired. look at that wall. when the boss donald trump praises you it s not necessarily a good thing. here he is today. i want to just tell you something, general kelly is doing a fantastic job. there has been such false reporting about our relationship. we have a great relationship. he s doing a great job as chief of staff. i could not be more happy. so i just want to tell you that. now in march it was trump s legal team that was doing a great job. he tweeted, the failing new york times purposefully wrote a false story stating i am unhappy with my legal team on the russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help me out. wrong. i m very happy with my lawyers. they are doing a great job. well, we all know how that turned out. john dowd and ty cobb are out, donald trump hired the lawyer that he said he wouldn t hire, emmet flood. and today donald trump said white house chief of staff john kelly is doing a great job praising him after a week in which nbc broke the bombshell news that kelly referred to trump as, quote, an idiot multiple times. the new york times have added yesterday that kelly and trump have grown tired and irritated with each other. and politico reported that kelly has been marginalized by the white house staff and the president, according to ten sources. despite private tensions, john kelly is willing to publicly flatter the man he reportedly thinks is an idiot. here he is giving john kelly a chance to publicly declare his admiration for the president. the new york times times has falsely reported, i just wanted to tell you that. general you may have something to say. it s a privilege to work for a president who s gotten the economy going, we re about to have a breakthrough on north korea, the jobs report today, everything is going phenomenally well, attacking the opioid crisis. it s nothing less than brilliant what s been accomplished in 15 months, i believe. what happens now to the man who called the president an idiot? that s next. liberty did what? yeah, liberty mutual 24-hour roadside assistance helped him to fix his flat so he could get home safely. my dad says our insurance doesn t have that. don t worry - i know what a lug wrench is, dad. is this a lug wrench? maybe? you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™. liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. it s nothing less than brilliant what s been accomplished in 15 months, i believe. we are back with our panel, ruth marcus, eugene robinson, and jonathan alter. ruth, help me unpack the nothing less than brilliant. there is no white house communications director. the president, we don t see his chief of staff with him all that often. we saw him today. the president very clearly didn t tell the white house press secretary about giuliani s plans. emmet flood, the lawyer that the president has now hired who represented bill clinton in his impeachment didn t know that giuliani was going on tv, but it s brilliant. nothing less than brilliant. nothing less than brilliant. is there something more than brilliant? i m going for a really highbrow literary reference here, and i m going to say this is the cat in the hat presidency. you may recall the cat in the hat comes back. the cat takes a bath in the tub, and he leaves a pink ring. and as they try to clean it up, it just spreads and spreads and stains everything. president trump s messes i m glad you liked it. president trump s messes end up staining everything, and they spread, and everybody who associates with him, i can t think of a single exception except for maybe the defense secretary, james mattis. everybody who is associated with donald trump ends up having his or her reputation diminished as a result and, hence general kelly exhibit a today. eugene, neil cavuto, on fox, i think said, that stink, mr. president, is your swamp. even though in conservative circles are starting to think this is too crazy to continue. well, it s too crazy to continue. look, cavuto, you know, was referring to all the swampishness, the very deep and getting deeper water that s around this administration. you look at the pruitt situation at epa. it s like a new scandal every day, the latest being the reports that scott pruitt came into the office and gathered the staff and said here are some places around the world i d really like to see, so find me reasons to go there. so that s how he works out his travel on the public dime. that s okay in trump world apparently if, when you appear with the president, you do what john kelly just did, which is flatter him with praise that would, you know, embarrass kim jong-un. i mean, you know, dear leader-style praise, and that s the sort of price of staying in the administration and having power in the administration. yeah. and beyond that, you can do what you want. we ve seen it in cabinet meetings before. but, in fact, to the scott pruitt point, this is remarkable what eugene was talking about. evidence that scott pruitt had a list of exotic destinations he wanted to travel to and informed staff he wanted them to find reasons for him to go to those places. but scott pruitt and mick mulvaney and others in the government are doing exactly what donald trump wants them to do. they are dismantling regulations. the stock market, though weak recently, has been strong. the jobs numbers are still pretty good, and this north korea meeting, if it happens, is going to be an accomplishment. the fact is the president still seems to think he s doing well. in fact, he had a bluster and a confidence about him today that i hadn t seen in a while. well, unemployment is down to levels we haven t seen since 2000. so he can say to his people, to his base, i am delivering for you in certain ways. notwithstanding those are continuations of policies we ve seen for years. right. but, you know, i think that ruth was too kind to him with the cat in the hat reference. i mean donald trump makes the cat in the hat look like abraham lincoln with his tophat, you know. this is a toxic waste dump, and i think that comey, who was wrong in a lot of areas, had it right that it s, you know, a forest fire. so the best that we can hope for is to start planning for what we do after, whether it s three years or, you know, seven years or whatever. but we need to start figuring out how we restore our democracy after the damage that s being done. and literally on a daily basis. and the first thing are these midterm elections. so i m struck by how there s really not enough focus yet on how we remedy this at the polling place. thank you, jonathan alter, ruth marcus, and eugene robinson. thanks to the three of you. tonight s last word is next.p. [ drum roll ] .emily lapier from ames, iowa. this is emily s third nomination and first win. um.so, just.wow! um, first of all, to my fellow nominees, it is an honor sharing the road with you. and of course, to the progressive snapshot app for giving good drivers the discounts no, i have to say it for giving good drivers the discounts they deserve. safe driving! that skills like teamwork, attention to detail, and customer service are critical to business success. like the ones we teach here, every day. (vo)have to happen?idn t and customer service are critical to business success. i didn t see it. (vo) what if we could go back? what if our car. could stop itself? in iihs front-end crash prevention testing, nobody beats the subaru impreza. not toyota. not honda. not ford. the subaru impreza. more than a car, it s a subaru.
phillip brucker said that the north korea breakthrough potential upped the stakes on the mike pompphaoeubmike pompeo. they may be playing with the one opening we have with north korea. do you agree or disagree with rucker in. heidi heitcamp got on or board with his confirmation. it will be close. there s some sense there is an issue where if you oppose pompeo you open yourself up to attacks. is and some of these red states is not supporting the president on foreign policy during this key moment. a lot of people a lot of democrats were forced on thursday to grudgingly acknowledge sort of admiration or respect for pompeo going to meet with kim jong-un over easter. it didn t move a lot of their votes. as you saw a bunch of the democrats on the senate foreign realizes committee, they still had to reiterate their opposition is. anna palmer from politico, what do you think is is the story of the week? i think one of the most interesting stories is u.n. ambassador nikki haley asserting herself and said, no, i wasn t confused, i believed the policy would strengthen u.s. sanctions against russia. it really matters in terms of her solidifying her position and saying i m not going to be beat around by this white house as many of the other principles and cabinet secretaries have been. nikki haley had quite the week, this controversy aside, she determined a public profile that is exceptional in public politics. do you agree with that, anna? yeah. she has continued to elevate herself as a serious player and the ability to be close to the trump white house but also on on the world stage be a real effective voice for this country. and i think you already started to hear this talk of, you know, capabilities persist, the pentagon has said. and then you ve got isis. in syria it looked like a victory kind of was on the cusp of taking place. now we are seeing a resergens. hope, let me ask you a question. did we get any knowledge on of whether or not the s-400 was used, whether or not the russian system actually engaged any of our missiles? what s your reporting on that? so russia is sort of using this as a marketing opportunity for the s-400, f-35 killer missile. the pentagon, though, that be unequivocal. russian defenses were not employed. and syrian defenses were in effective. 6th single one of the weapons reached their target. what do you think is the story of the week? i agree with james, north korea is the biggest story of the week. i m going to take ape different tact, though. we touched on heidi heitcamp. it is app example of congress and the white house and republicans trying to put some of these democratic incumbents on defense here. heidi heitcamp supporting pompeo s nomination. a few other democrats have not come on out yet and supported her. joe donnelly, joe manchin and others. republicans are trying to tighten the excuse on these folks and put them on defense ahead of 2018. i think that s a big story. but pompeo going to north korea i think will really elevate him. we re going to wait to see what happens on that if they actually end up going straight to a floor vote without him passing through committee. that will be a big question. it is a tightening of the screws on the 2018 candidates. you haven t seen foreign policy become a big campaign issue this year. we re starting to see a little bit of it. al, i can t imagine a democrat up for reelection wanting to spike the north korean opportunity. i think there will be a lot more votes than heidi heitcamp. the president said rand has always been with me more. he voted for john kerry in the foreign relations committee. does rand paul pass to get to the floor without any fill pwuflter nonsense that chuck schumer has been muttering about? i m not sure. i m very is skeptical to think he will. he didn t hold up the omnibus negotiations or the final passage of the bill. that was a shift intact for him. usually he is someone who doesn t even up caring about these types of things and will do what he wants. i would be surprised if he votes for pompeo to move him to the floor. but, you know, it wouldn t totally surprise me, but it would surprise me. let me play a clip if i can of the president talking about russia with prime minister abe. as far as the investigation, nobody has ever been more transparent than i have instructed our lawyers, be totally transparent. as far as the two gentlemen you told me about, they ve been saying i m going to get rid of them for the last three months, four months, five months. and they re still here. james, they re still here. he is talking about mr. mueller, mr. rosenstein and the russian investigation. do they go anywhere this week? what s your reporting on that? well, i think trump has sort of backed off a little bit from last week. he is more concerned about the michael co hen raid of his lawyer s office than he is about what mueller is doing right now. hiring routedy giuliani as part of his legal defense team. giuliani saying i think we can wrap this up in a couple of weeks. giuliani touting his long relationship with mueller and the president saying he can be a broker in some ways. people are still on edge. the president could move against rosenstein. he wouldn t get directly against mueller. you could see a scenario where jeff sessions left. whoever replaces him through the vacancies act would end up there. rosenstein assured trump that he is not a target of mueller s investigation and that that assuaged some of the president s concerns. nationally, i think a lot of liberals are still very on edge. there was a report from pittsburgh that the pittsburgh police department is preparing for potential riots in the streets. al weaver, very quick. what to you? do you hear about any changes at the department of justice? the president seemed to indicate no, that s not going to happen. what are you hearing? i m not hearing anything on that end. there is nervous senators up on capitol hill. tillis, graham have legislation out. that will help protect mueller. i don t see that going anywhere. mitch mccouple threw cold water on that this week. it remains status quo. all right. i ll be back with the panel on the most important person not named trump this week. stay with us. your hair is so soft! did you use head and shoulders two in one? i did mom. wanna try it? yes. it intensely moisturizes your hair and scalp and keeps you flake free. manolo? look at my soft hair. i should be in the shot now too. try head and shoulders two in one. alright, i brought in high protein to help get us moving. .and help you feel more strength and energy in just two weeks! i ll take that. -yeeeeeah! ensure high protein. with 16 grams of protein and 4 grams of sugar. ensure. always be you. with moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis? how do you chase what you love do what i did. ask your doctor about humira. it s proven to help relieve pain and protect joints from further irreversible damage in many adults. humira works by targeting and helping to block a specific source of inflammation that contributes to ra symptoms. humira has been clinically studied for over 20 years. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. ready for a new chapter? talk to your rheumatologist about humira. this is humira at work. time for our feature most important person not named trump. for me it is senator joe is mansion. we need one democrat other than heidi heitcamp to say i m voting for mike pompeo so we can put this silliness behind us. it is far too important for the democrats to be playing partisan politics. who for you is the most important person not named trump? i think it is robert mueller. all eyes continuing to focus on where is his investigation going. by he default, rudy giuliani is my number two pick. trump picking him as his lawyer was certainly a wild card this week. it has been a bad look for law enforcement with the james comey book tour going off the rails. and andrew muck cabccabe. it s stunning at a time in politics where there is rare lu a void of the back and forth partisanship and bickering, robert mueller, throughout this entire investigation, has stayed sigh and i think, because of that, has been able to be a figure that is above the fray. doesn t punch below his weight here. and i think that gives him even more standing with the american public and particularly with senators with trump potentially trying to move him. i agree. i continue to hope the president does nothing with the special counsel. hope speck, who do you think? i have an off capitol hill pick. mine is tammie jo schultz who piloted southwest flight 1380. everyone has heard her directing ground control as she brings the flight in, tphefbgs of of steel. she was one of the navy s first ever fighter pilots in the 1980s. she is starting this conversation about the possibilities for women in that field. still just 2.4% in naval aviation. is and martha mcsally running. a-10 pilot. another one of these extraordinary female aviators. al weaver, who is yours? i m going to cheat the rules and take two. kevin mccarthy and nancy pelosi. two california lawmakers who are both at the top of the caucuses outside of paul ryan. they are both leading with a myriad of questions surrounding them. the questions surround can he get to the 218 if the republicans hold the house in november. both he and pelosi have sharks swarming. the freedom caucus, they are looking into what they should do on this end. and seven months between now and then. for pelosi, you know, it s all a matter of will she stay or will she go in november. you have steny hoyer possibly moving up the ladder a little bit. i m going to take those two. it s interesting. jim jordan is sitting there wondering if my name comes up. the ohio congressman expected to challenge muck kaerbgt. mccarthy the clear front-runner at this point. i go michael cohen. he is a big question mark. not just personal attorney. we found out who his other clients were. open public speculation. the lawyer who has worked for trump for years, who negotiated both of his divorces, jay goldberg told the president in a phone call a week ago he should be careful when talking to cohen because cohen could be wearing a wire. he wouldn t be willing to do hard jail time to protect trump. cohen is under investigation by the feds separate and apart from the mueller probe for wire fraud, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations. so he potentially has real legal liability there. he probably knows a lot. what exactly, we can t know. that is a big question mark. that s something that really is keeping trump up at night. if michael cohen flips, as has been speculated is and gossiped, he could say anything and become the key witness against anyone. of course people will be awake at night. i want to close by playing one more trump bit with prime minister abe. he strikes at charges of collusion with this defense. there s been nobody tougher on russia than president donald trump. between building up the military, between creating tremendous vast amounts of oil, we raised billions and billions extra in nato. there has been nobody tougher than me. nobody tougher than trump. james hohmann, does that work? nikki haley announced on the sunday shows there were going to be new sanctions. trump didn t want those. they walked them back. and i think hawks feel like trump could be a lot tougher. i don t think it works on on capitol hill. it works with the base who doesn t care deeply about this issue. hope, 700 billion this year. 720 billion next year. a huge tkfpbgs bill. does he have a point here, he is tougher on russia than president obama was? we have seen him expel russian diplomats, impose lines of sanctions. there are things he has done. he really laid down the gauntlet the other day. we haven t seen him take further action. the ball is in his court on this one. when we come back, we will talk to my panel. and the safey for most parallel parallel parking job goes to. [ drum roll ] .emily lapier from ames, iowa. this is emily s third nomination and first win. um.so, just.wow! um, first of all, to my fellow nominees, it is an honor sharing the road with you. and of course, to the progressive snapshot app for giving good drivers the discounts no, i have to say it for giving good drivers the discounts they deserve. safe driving! for giving good drivers the discounts they deserve. fthere s flonase sensimist.f up around pets. it relieves all your worst symptoms including nasal congestion, which most pills don t. and all from a gentle mist you can barely feel. flonase sensimist. and loss of appetite. alice calls it her new normal because a lot has changed, but a lot hasn t. ask your doctor about ibrance. the #1 prescribed fda-approved oral combination treatment for hr+/her2- mbc. i begin my week with the capitalist comeback. the longtime ceo of carl s jr., then hardy s. he didn t make it to labor but he will make it with a best seller. it is a terrific book. anna, what do you recommend this week? i m a little bit different than typical books. lindy west and shrill. this is a book about body shaming. a woman s voyage to self is acceptance and patrols on the internet. it is a powerful read that you can get a lot from. did you podcast this? i do a women s podcast every week for politico and i did one that will be launching soon, the first plus-size native clothing company that is that was started on this finding clothes that actually fit people that are made for people or that are plus-sized. that is terrific. hope? i just finished fight like a girl which was just are leased this month. she was the commander of the only unit in the marine corps. that trains female marines. they are trained separately. she said separate is not equal. and that affects the outcome. she was ultimately fired from her position in 2015 because her higher-ups didn t like her leadership. but she raised rifle qualification scores significantly. they got rid on of things, chairs only set out for women after long hikes and not for men. it started this huge conversation about what it means to be equal. terrific selection. james hohmann? revolution of rocket kennedy. it opens with jfk s assassination, goes through rfk s. the 50th anniversary in june is. it tracks how he evolved and moved from an establishment figure to taking on lbj in the frontal assault way on on vietnam. such a tumultuous time. al weaver, how about yours? well, in honor of april and baseball season, i have one where nobody knows your name by john finestein. it s about life in the minor leagues. he follows players who are has-beens, future stars, anonymous, and absolute nobodies in aaa. it is timely because the omnibus there was a measure passed taking away minimum wage rights from minor league players. he always delivers the goods. the indians took on the brewers. thank you james, anna, hope, and al. thanks all of you for your books. thanks all of you for watching. buy the books we talk about. keep the authors going. keep the conversation going on msnbc.com/hugh-hewitt. see you next saturday morning here on msnbc. insurance that won t replace the full value of your new car? you re better off throwing your money right into the harbor. i m gonna regret that. with new car replacement, if your brand new car gets totaled, liberty mutual will pay the entire value plus depreciation. liberty stands with you. liberty mutual insurance. when it comes to travel, i sweat the details. late checkout. .down-alternative pillows. .and of course, price. tripadvisor helps you book a. .hotel without breaking a sweat. because we now instantly. .search over 200 booking sites .to find you the lowest price. .on the hotel you want. don t sweat your booking. tripadvisor. the latest reviews. the lowest prices. fthere s flonase sensimist.tchy and watery near pollen. it relieves all your worst symptoms including nasal congestion, which most pills don t. and all from a gentle mist you can barely feel. flonase sensimist. but as it grew bigger and bigger,ness. it took a whole lot more. that s why i switched to the spark cash card from capital one. with it, i earn unlimited 2% cash back on everything i buy. everything. and that 2% cash back adds up to thousands of dollars each year. so i can keep growing my business in big leaps! what s in your wallet? we need to help more tocalifornians get ahead.d, that s why antonio villaraigosa brought both parties together to balance the state budget with record investments in public schools. and new career training programs. as mayor of la, he brought police and residents together to get illegal guns off the streets - and keep kids out of gangs, and on the right path. that s antonio villaraigosa. a governor for all of california.
through the b.s. i don t know if there s been any. wants to cut through the b.s., get the answers to the questions about how long this is going to go on and this is what was most interesting to me. one of my sources says to me, he s going to find out if we have to fight and where this leads. they seem to think that rudy giuliani will be the one to be able to do that where nobody else was able to do that before. in some interviews today he talked about his prior relationship with robert mueller. it s not clear to me how a prior relationship with mueller would impact an on going investigation. and he told that in his interview that they do have a prior relationship. i think i should remind people that john dab the lawyer that quit also had a prior relationship with mueller. giuliani did work with mueller after 9/11 of course. but i think that whole we have a relationship and we get along can be overdone because a lot of people worked with mueller over the years. he also said i think when she pushed him on a time frame he said a couple of weeks. does it seem to you that giuliani is going to be on the legal team for long-term? no it doesn t. there s some sense that giuliani is going to go in there and say okay put all your cards on the table here. let us know what s going on. let us know what we have to do and that the mueller team is going to answer all of his questions. do we know how this came out? who approached him? because obviously rudy giuliani is a friend of theth. spoke out when few people after the access hollywood would speak out rudy giuliani went out on all the programs that day. we know they re good friends. he recently visited for example. we don t know if it was discussed then. we do know at one point he was being discussed as attorney general, if you ll recall, secretary of state and i m wondering if he joins this legal team whether he could ever become the attorney general because he might be conflicted because he represented the president. but they re friends obviously and what we do know is that the president is reaching back to people he feels comfortable with at this point. right. thank you very much. turning now to the other looming investigation involving another of the president s lawyers that have been recording that the president is fixated on the criminal investigation of michael cohen. theth said he is not a target in that investigation. so what more do we know about what rosenstein said to the president? well, we know that this is the result of to some extent the president s anger about that michael cohen raid that occurred early part of last week. that set the president off. came over to the white house and the deputy attorney general and basically told the president in this meeting that was attended by other officials closer to the president that listen, he s not a target of the michael cohen portion of this investigation. now i m told by a source familiar with this conversation that this was not any kind of assurance about the overall mueller investigation and that is because the president received that kind of assurance in the past, but of course ander so anderson, any legal expert will tell you those kind of assurances only go so far. they only work for what has been uncovered at that stage of the investigation. but my understanding as we re talking to the source earlier today is that the deputy attorney general did tell the president just recently and we believe this meeting happened late last week that he is not a target of that michael cohen investigation. do we have any information about how the president reacted to that or has subsequently reacted? well, we know he continues to be unnerved by the michael cohen probe. obviously michael cohen is a long friend of the president. has been his attorney for a long time. has been described piano others as a fixer for the president. and my colleague was reporting earlier today that the president has been consumed by this and i am also hearing that from other sources that this is something that he fixates on almost every day but anderson i will tell you i did talk to a source familiar with this, these conversations that go on inside the white house about this and this source said earlier today that the legal team with the president at this point is not concerned that michael cohen is going to turn against the president and start singing like a canary. one of the phrases we have been hearing this week. at this point they expect michael cohen to do what he has to do in this investigation but he s not going to be a cooperating witness against the president. of course that s how they view things right now. they can t see into the future and know what is the unknown but they re trying to convey that they don t think that should be a concern at this point but the president from what we re told is still very, very upset and furious that that probe has been washed and that those took place. the question is at this point what happens in the future to michael cohen? what kind of information is uncovered? what kind of case could be brought against him and could that case, perhaps, convince michael cohen to become a cooperating witness against the president. people are not concerned that s not going to happen at this point. thank you. first of all, this notion of rudy giuliani being able to come in in the short-term and fix this, essentially get this to come to a conclusion in a couple of weeks. what do you make of that idea? pretty arrogant to believe he would be in a position to do so. even if he has a personal relationship with mueller this is business and come pait s key. the president of the united states has not had competent council that can expedite it. it s slow because it has to be thorough and although most people are used to the idea of having immediate gratification in the news and perhaps a television program and law and order and an hour and have it wrapped up but when it comes to federal prosecution of this magnitude and investigation of this magnitude it will take tile to flush out all the details. so come in and say let me expedite this process that i can feel like i m not a target is an odd thing to think. david, certainly understanding why the president s team would want to do that. would you think giuliani is the person that can do that? sure. he s not only a close friend and confidant of the president but an incredibly capable individual in his own right. former prosecutor and mayor and he has a force of personality. a personal relationship with director mueller and i think he s going to try to nudge this along to a certain extent. but is an investigation like this something that can be negotiated away? i don t know if it s negotiated away. you can try to cut through the weeds here a little bit. whether the president is going to answer written interrogatories, whether he s going to testify, what that s going to look like, that can be expedited by having somebody with a force of personality like mayor giuliani on the team. they have been discussing this for months and they were already, the legal team, that morning of the raid on cohen s office was all ready to make a proposal to mueller about the president testifying and then there was the raid of his office and home et cetera and they pulled back. they had a meeting and they pulled back so they re already at a point now where things were moving along. and that point that may have changed dramatically, right? that morning things may have changed and mayor giuliani may have been brought in to piece it together again. there s whether or not the president will testify willingly and by the way it s not up to him ultimately. they could always subpoena him. which he could fight. he could fight. he could plead the fifth. they could try to get him to compel him. no president has ever been attempted to be compelled or held in contempt for that reason. he has that option but the idea of expediting the overall investigation to a conclusion is a very separate issue. one is about details. there s a political backdrop to this. there s upcoming elections this fall that are very important and director mueller is very sensitive to that. just like this afternoon we heard director comey, he s not political but he s political and director mueller doesn t want this hanging over as a cloud over the elections so that there s a reason that anybody can blame what happens in the fall on him. a lot of people looking into the mueller investigation, if robert mueller is trying to figure out intent. if they re looking at obstruction of justice, intent is critical in a lot of the president s actions and for that you would think they would have to actually interview the president. that s their point i think. they would like to interview him. the point from the white house is we have given you over a million documents from everybody that s talked to the president and that the president of course keeps no notes and does no e-mails. so you have all of this information. the lawyers, i don t think, muell mueller s team, i don t think they re going to buy that but they do understand there s different rules for a president than there are for you and me. does it make sense that rosenstein would say to the president, we think at the end of last week, that he is not t you know, the subject of a criminal investigation in terms of the cohen raid. it s possible. it s possible and the reason i say that is because it hasn t actually changed the ultimate objective. he could become a target at any time. all it takes is a piece of evidence to do so. i m not saying that s going to be the case here but they have been investigating michael cohen specifically for a number of months. so it s good news for the president. it s good news for the president. if that is an accurate report then it tells you that at this point in the investigation after months of reading his e-mails and stuff it s a great sign for the president of the united states. there s still so much unknown about why they re after him. what they re investigating. back to anderson s point about the obstruction charge. you re talking about the president s man here if that s what they re hanging their hat on i think they should move on. on the cohen thing, what i don t understand, i m not a lawyer, is why would rosenstein volunteer that to the president. he was not asked? is it to save his job? that s a possibility? a requirement. or is it something that he would do because he knew that the president was concerned about it and he shouldn t be. i m not going to say he s a guy that s going to get rolled here. he s a person who is a great character, high integrity. so why would you do it? i don t know. i think politics seeps into every phase of our government now. the three separate branches are becoming, you know, the judiciary used to be kind of independent. we hope it remains that way but the executive branch and investigative functions now seem to be points higher lliticized. they said they re not going to follow along with the president s immigration pledge. that s number one but number two there may be a nonclinical reason here and it may be that because there was a department of justice rule and discussion about guidelines about searching an attorney s office, maybe he was trying to explain to him that he was not after him as a target because he is the client of this person, which would have raised questions about the attorney-client privilege being at issue here. perhaps he is simply telling him this does not implicate or make your attorney client privilege any less because we re not after him about what concerns you. that may be a nonpolitical way to try to say this is not an issue for you. and separate from the mueller investigation. separate. if he sign aued off on the r. and perhaps he felt the need to explain that to a president that s very upset about it. as you said good news for theth, it s still, if i was the president i would still be concerned if my attorney that allegedly only had three clients, one of those clients saying i was never a client. the other one seemed to have a short-term need for a hush agreement, the president is his longest term client. you know, if i had that relationship with a friend or attorney who was under investigation i would still be nervous. and the key here is what you said, friend or attorney. because what he was to donald trump is going to be key in what s going to make him nervous. is michael cohen somebody that works for him and is an attorney or somebody that happens to have a law degree. that does not attach the attorney-client privilege. if most of their interactions were about business or not confidential or somebody else in the room or things that did not attach to privilege then you re asking the same question that president trump is probably asking, were you acting as my friend or my lawyer. if it was my friend i have a lot of information now that could be disclosed and making me or people a member of the trump organization very vulnerable. i didn t mean to interrupt you but i m sure that most of those conversations probably weaved in and out of privilege and nonprivilege. recorded conversations with other people, with third parties, who knows what is in those conversations. reasons for the president to be concerned. the president came out on air force one and said michael cohen is my attorney. talk to my attorney. so that s sort of pretty cut and dry. thank you very much. up next, breaking news on the new pecking order in the west wing of the white house. two new senior staffers getting the green light to bypass chief of staff john kelly and the justice department gives congress memos written by fired fbi director james comey about his most controversial conversations with president trump. and that more. the full interview coming up in this hour. this is what getting your car serviced at lincoln looks like. complementary pickup and delivery servicing now comes with every new lincoln. i won. giving you, the luxury of time. that s the lincoln way. i just need some rest. i m just worried about the house. and taking care of the boys. 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[ dog barking ] [ sighs in relief ] zach! talk to me. it s for the house. i got a job. it s okay. dad took care of us. principal. we can help you plan for that. non-drowsy claritin 24 hour relief when allergies occur. day after day, after day. because life should have more wishes and less worries. feel the clarity and live claritin clear. before discovering nexium 24hr to treat her frequent heartburn, claire could only imagine enjoying chocolate cake. now she can have her cake and eat it too. nexium 24hr stops acid before it starts for all-day, all-night protection. can you imagine 24 hours without heartburn? though the president hasn t told them that they re reporting directly to him, that is certainly the sense of functionality in the west wing that they are reporting to the president and not the chief of staff john kelly which makes that interesting now they have been on the rise for the last few days. we saw that obviously there with his scuffle with the united nations ambassador nick kkki ha. some saw that as a sign of his a asendance. she does outrank him being a cabinet member and then he is asserting his authority by hiring and firing and clearinghouse with the national security in particular one aid in particular that homeless security adviser that recently left the white house and i m told by sources that when he told him he was dismissing him, he was stunned and said he wanted to speak to the chief of staff john kelly but bolton made clear this is his decision to make and not john kelly s. what does this mean for kelly s future or lack there of in the west wing? well, that s the question. what does it do to his standing in the west wing? because whenever he became chief of staff everyone was reporting directly to him including ivanka trump and jared kushner and now we re seeing the change and they re reporting that john kelly is what aids see as a downward slide in the west wing because he used to hold staff meetings three times a week. now he only does them once a week. he used to travel with the president on every trip and now he does not do that and he used to have a toe in every decision but we re seeing people be able to overrule john kelly by getting rid of staffers like the deputy national security adviser who john kelly wanted to keep in the administration but bolton has dismissed him. it does raise a lot of questions about how much longer john kelly will be in this administration. fascinating. another development tonight the justice department has handed over to congress the james comey memos. they detail conversations in the months before he was fired. our justice reporter joins us now with more. now that they have been sent to capitol hill, we re waiting to see if members of congress released them can you explain why they re demanding these documents? sure. the memos provide an incredible glimpse into james comey s mind set leading up to his firing back last year and many of these issues are in dispute. for instance the loyalty pledge and allegation that president trump asked him to essentially let go of the investigation into former national security adviser michael flynn. now members of congress had seen some of the memos in redacted form but recently demanded they be unclassified and unredacted in full. the justice department official, steven boyd in charge of legislative affairs explains it this way. in light of the unusual events occurring since the previous limited disclosure the department has consulted the relevant parties and concluded that the release of the memorandum to congress at this time would not adversely impact any on going investigation or other confidentiality interests of the executive branch but he goes on to explain, anderson, this is an unusual move. did the special council s office object at all to the doj releasing it? no, in fact, i m told according to a source familiar that the justice department in fact consulted with the special council s office and mueller did not have any objection which is is interesting considering earlier this year cnn and other news outlets tried to sue in court to get access to the comey memos and a federal judge blocked it saying they were part of the on going investigation at mueller s request. thank you very much. jake tapper asked comey what he thought about congress seeing his memos. you ll hear what he said coming up later this hour. next the attempt by the president s supporters to smear mueller and james comey reaches an absurd place. we re keeping him honest, ahead. surpri hold up. hold up. we got a laggy video call here. you need verizon, the best network for streaming. trade ya. okay, people, that s a reset. let s take it back from surpri (avo) get $300 off the samsung galaxy s9+. because unlimited is only as good as the network it s on. for the big things in life, we tend to start small. less of this. cut back on that. but if it feels like a lot of effort for a little gain, change that. start with something that makes a big difference. .your student loans. refinancing with sofi could save you $30,000. it s an easier way to reach your life goal sooner. we ve helped over 195,000 people. we want to help you too. find out how much you can save in just two minutes at sofi.com/save. in just two minutes don t juggle your home life and work life without it. don t skip that office meeting for a board meeting without it. don t keep it real. keep it going. or simply keep it in the family without it. and don t turn that business trip, into an overdue family trip without it. the more you live between life and business, the more you need someone at your back. the powerful backing of american express. don t live life without it. with exciting new dishes like lobdueling lobster tails.r. and lobster truffle mac & cheese. classics like lobster lover s dream are here too. so enjoy these 10 lobsterlicious dishes now. because lobsterfest ends april 22nd. bombing at the time we had a terrorist attack in boston. this was a man that failed time and time and time again to protect american citizens. james comey was not the head of the fbi at the time of the boston marathon bombing. the bombing was in april. he didn t become fbi director until september. comey wasn t even in the fbi at the time. he was a private citizen. andrea mitchell the next day. i want to ask you about something you said on fox yesterday. you said jim comey failed to protect americans during the boston marathon since he was fbi director. the fact is he was not fbi director for another five months. as you know, jim comey served as the head of the boston office of the fbi at a period of time that i think mr. mueller served as the u. s. attorney in the state of massachusetts. but not during the boston marathon. not during the boston marathon but jim comey was responsible, i belief and we can go back and check for the whitey bulger disaster. he was the head of fbi whitey bulger had nothing to do with the boston bombing. there was no admission that he said something untrue. no apology. just moving along and decided to bring in the boston crime boss whitey bulger that had nothing to do with the boston bombing. he is attempting to grab at another straw saying comey was the head of the boston office at the time of the case. he was never the head of the boston fbi office. there s no record of him working in that office at all. now you might wonder where did whitey bulger come into all of this? why are we even talking about him? seems as though this may have started with this on a radio show earlier this month. not about comey but about special council robert mueller. i don t think he cares whether he hurts democrats or republicans but he s partisan. east a zealot. he kept people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover on whitey bulger as an fbi informer. two of them died in prison. two others along with the families of the dead men sued the government for $100 million. the now retired federal judge that presided over the case writes in the new york times i can say that mr. mueller who worked in the united states attorney s office in boston from 1982 to 1988 including a brief stint as the acting head of the office had no involvement in that case. he was never even mentioned. as the judge goes on to point out a former mayor of springfield massachusetts that served on the massachusetts parole board in the 1980s saw a letter from mueller opposing the release of one of the prisoners but no such letter has ever been found something the boston globe reveals and afterwards he never repeated the allegation but further investigation seems warranted. by then the genie was out of the bottle and the president s supporters took it and ran with it. you know what that means, enter sean hannity. robert mueller was the u.s. attorney in charge while these men were rotting in prison. while certain agents in the fbi under mueller covered up the truth. four men went to jail. he was mueller was involved in the case. we re going to go to crime families. let s look at the mueller crime family during mueller s time as a federal prosecutor in boston, four men wrongfully imprisoned for decades, framed by an fbi informant and notorious ganger whitey bulger while he looked the other way. when you re not interested in facts you can blame folks for anything. but they might do a better job of checking their dates and getting their story straight. joining me is shelly murphy. co-author of whitey bulger, america s most wanted gangster and the manhunt that brought him to justice. does it make sense to you that he is spreading this idea that jim comey was head of the fbi at the time of the boston bombing? yeah, i mean, it s just sirly not true. the boston marathon bombings happened before comey became director of the fbi. so to try to connect comey to the marathon bombings is just simply not true. and the mueller part of this, i mean, the whitey bulger saga is complicated. can you explain to people about it why this allegation is just without merit? well, you know whitey bulger was one of the most notorious organized crime figures from this area. he was able to get away with murders for years because he was an fbi informant but from 1975 to 1990. he fled boston just before 95, before his indictment. he was on the run for more than 16 years and there s just nothing in this long saga that connects mueller to white whitey bulger. mueller was in the u.s. attorney s office in boston from 1982 to 1988 but he did not prosecute organized crime cases. he was an informant for the fbi and there were cases that the fbi was building against the new england mafia at the time but they were under a different prosecutorial unit and i also might add that the whitey bulger story is a never ending saga in boston. congressional hearings, wrongful death suits, criminal trials, numerous hearings dating all the way back to the late 90s. i ve covered all of them and not once has mueller s name surfaced in connection with those. and the four people that were in prison for all of that time, two of them who died there, were able to finally sue and get money back once they were out. but mueller had, as far as you know, as far as your reporting is and the judge in the case said this as well, mueller had nothing to do with that either? no, and that s a case that i covered also. i went back and looked through all the old files and that was a terrible case. you had four men, wrongfully convicted in this 1965 slaying. two of them died in prison. the other two spent more than 30 years in prison and it was when the whitey bulger saga erupted. when it was revealed that he had a corrupt relationship with the fbi that there were these there was an investigation launched and it was a justice department task force in 2000 that found these old documents, hidden documents in the fbi files that indicated that these guys had been framed for a murder that they didn t commit. and that is how this case sort of erupted. so back in the 80s when mueller was in the u.s. attorney s office in boston and there were people that were writing letters, prosecutors, fbi agents, urging the state parole board not to commute the sentences of these guys but we were unable to find any letters that mueller wrote. you know, asking that they be released but i think also you need to understand that at that point in time, some of the prosecutors that were writing letters there s no evidence that they knew that these men were innocent. so, you know, that really, you know, the story sort of evolved years later. the idea that comey had any involvement with the boston fbi office and with whitey bulger again is just not true. well that is just i can t imagine where that came from. it sort of seems to have been pulled out of thin air because comey never worked in the fbi s boston office and i can t understand why somebody would where this could even have come from. it s nonsense frankly. i appreciate your time and your reporting. thank you for being with us. thank you, bye. up next an inspector general sends it s report to federal prosecutors for potential criminal charges. what his legal team is saying about that when we continue. and the safey for most parallel parallel parking job goes to. [ drum roll ] .emily lapier from ames, iowa. this is emily s third nomination and first win. um.so, just.wow! um, first of all, to my fellow nominees, it is an honor sharing the road with you. and of course, to the progressive snapshot app for giving good drivers the discounts no, i have to say it for giving good drivers the discounts they deserve. safe driving! raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens brown paper packages tied up with strings these are a few of my favorite things you can do it. we can do this. at fidelity, our online planning tools are clear and straightforward so you can plan for retirement while saving for the things you want to do today. -whoo! to look at is decide whether they should further investigate andy mccabe potentially lying to investigators as you know in the report the scathing report that came out last week it said that andy mccabe had mislead and had lied to investigators and his former boss james comey on four different occasions including three times under oath. this is something that andy mccabe has denied. he never mislead investigators. they never mislead james comey but so basically now this is in the hands of the d.c. u.s. attorney s office to determine whether it should pursue criminal charges. what s mccabe saying in response? so his attorney came out with a statement to this saying although we believe the referral is unjustified the standard for a referral is very low. we already met with staff members from the u.s. attorney s office. we re confident that unless there s inappropriate pressure from high levels of the administration the u.s. attorney s office will conclude that it should decline to prosecute. as you know, anderson, mccabe and his team said all along that they feel like mccabe has been unfairly targeted because he s the key witness in the comey obstruction of justice probe and they believe as mccabe himself said that he didn t do anything wrong and again just to reiterate just because there s a criminal referral that doesn t mean that there will be criminal charges at the end of this. comey weighed in on this referral in that interview with jake tapper. what did he say? he did. it s interesting because james comey was the one that brought andy mccabe on board as his deputy director. they had a close working relationship and now months later after this there s this i.g. report saying his deputy mislead investigators. here s what he told jake about that. how do you feel about your former deputy, according to the inspector general lying? lying to you. lying to investigators. for a leak that the inspector general said was only motivated to preserve his own reputation having nothing to do with the fbi and the public s right to know. conflicted. i like hm as a person. even good people do things they shouldn t do. i read the report. i m not the decision maker in the case. it s accountability mechanisms working and they should work because it s not acceptable in the fbi or the justice department for people to lack candor. it s something that we take really seriously. one of the exampled in the report is that mccabe claimed that he told james comey, his boss that he was going to authorize a disclosure, that he had authorized a disclosure of information to a wall street journal reporter about the clinton foundation. comey claimed that wasn t the case. mccabe never told him that. so that was one of the four examples there. president trump wbr id= wbr26942 /> no surprised here weighed in on all of this tweeting today anderson, james comey just threw andrew mccabe /b> under the bus. it s a disaster for both of them. getting wbr-id= wbr27044 /> a little, lot of their own medicine. so you can interpret that tweet how you want. thank you very much. more breaking news tonight, the president will not be attending the funeral of former first lady barbara bush. first lady melania trump will attend the memorial service on behalf of the first family to avoid disruptions of added security and out of respect for the bush family and those attending the service president trump will not attend. we asked what out of respect to the family. we know four former presidents would be there. the white house did not give a clarification. up next you ll see the full interview with jim comey. here s some of what he had to say about andrew mccabe. given that the i.g. s report has interactions it had with me and other senior executives i could be a witness. he had a lot more to say. the full interview coming up. vo: these neighbors are starting right. miracle-gro guarantees results with rich potting mix and essential plant food for three times the blooms. success is sweet. miracle-gro. three times the beauty. one powerful guarantee. join t-mobile and the whole family can stay connected with new iphones. which is great. .unless your parents thought you were studying. aren t exams this week? somebody s busted. so join t-mobile, buy an iphone 8, get an iphone 8 on us. all on america s best unlimited network. only at t-mobile. i m mark and i quit smoking with chantix. i tried, um, cold turkey. i tried the patches. i was tired and i was fed up. i wanted to try something different. for me, chantix really worked. along with support, chantix (varenicline) is proven to help people quit smoking. chantix reduced my urge to smoke. when you try to quit smoking, with or without chantix, you may have nicotine withdrawal symptoms. some people had changes in behavior or thinking, aggression, hostility, agitation, depressed mood, or suicidal thoughts or actions with chantix. serious side effects may include seizures, new or worse heart or blood vessel problems, sleepwalking, or allergic and skin reactions which can be life-threatening. stop chantix and get help right away if you have any of these. tell your healthcare provider if you ve had depression or other mental health problems. decrease alcohol use while taking chantix. use caution when driving or operating machinery. the most common side effect is nausea. quitting was one of the best things that i ever did. ask your doctor if chantix is right for you. many insurance plans cover chantix for a low or $0 copay. clinton foundation. if they ultimately bring a case against andrew mccabe would you be a witness for the prosecution? potentially. i could well be a witness. you express a lot of horror in the book when public officials and even celebrities lie to investigators whether martha stewart. yeah. so i would assume that you would be upset at andrew mccabe. i haven t heard you criticize him the same way you criticize others. so far it s the accountability of the mechanisms working because it s a department committed to the truth. so it s working. i don t know whether there s a criminal referral or what will happen but that s part of accountability and examination of what the consequences will be. for a leak that the inspector general said was only motivated to preserve his own reputation having nothing to do with the fbi or the public s right to know. conflicted. i like him very much as a person but sometimes even good people do things they shouldn t do. have read the report. i m not the judge in the case. i m not the discipline decision maker in the case. it is accountability mechanisms working and they should work because it s not acceptable in the fbi or the justice department for people to lack candor. it s something that we take really seriously. the justice department is also expected today to begin the process of letting congress see your memos detailing your interactions with president trump. is that the right decision to let congress see them. i don t know. i don t know what considerations the department has taken into account. it s fine by me. you don t care? i don t care. i don t have any views on it. i ll totally fine with transparency. i have tried to be transparent throughout this and i think what folks will see if they get to see the memos is i have been consistent since the very beginning right after my encounters with president trump and i m consistent but i don t know how many of that group. one of them is of the classified one obviously from when you told president trump in trump tower about what was in that two-page annex of the steele dossier. what were the other classified ones be about? well, i can t answer that if they re classified. you can t say the subject of them? terrorism. a number of conversations i had related to our investigative responsibilities and that i considered classified at the time. if i go beyond that i m breaking the seal on them. we are just learning that bloomberg news is reporting that rod rosenstein said he is not a target of the russia probe. that the point in the investigation what might that mean telling the president he s not a target? i don t know what it means. it s a fairly standard part of any investigation. trying to decide whether a person you re encountering is a witness, subject or target. target is someone on whom the investigation, grand jury has evidence sufficient to charge. witness is nothing to do with the exposure and i don t know the context of the deputy attorney general did that but that s the general framework. the president obviously had a lot of words in response to you. he called you a liar and a leaker. our reporting say that is a republican sneaking with the president says that the feels he weathered your book tour. has he come out unscathed? i have no idea. it s not about the president. i hope to be part of a conversation. president trump figures in that part of the stories i m trying to tell to illustrate ethical leadership. it is not about him. i haven t thought about it in terms of whether he is weathering it or not weathering it. i read the book. it is about your time as a u.s. attorney, your childhood and a lot in there about president trump, especially in terms of leadership and examples of how not to be a leader and an example of someone that s a bully and you talk throughout the book about how you hate bullies. i couldn t write about ethical leadership without the it is an important part of the book and not a book about donald trump and i hope very much it s useful long into the future beyond trump presidency. you call him morally unfit and the presidency a forest fire. do you think the nation would be better off if hillary clinton had won? i can t answer that. that s something that hypothetical is too hard to try to go back in time and it s hard to imagine how you don t think the nation is better off if hillary clinton had won. i don t think about it in about it in those terms, jake. the question is adhering to our values? i think the first thing to do is not get numb to it. calling for the jailing of private citizens, don t shrug. that is not okay or normal. the it s interesting that you won t go as far as to say that hillary clinton would be the nation would be better off if hillary were president because you have called for the nation to respond to the challenge of trump in your view by voting. presumably by voting against what he represents. is that not a fair interpretation? i actually think of as maybe it s the same thing but i think of it in terms of voting for something else which is the core values of this country which are more important than any policy dispute. i don t care whether people find in it a republican or democrat or neither. it is important that the leaders reflect the values because that s all we are. so you have spent decades building a reputation for being evidence based, for being nonpartisan. the fbi is an organization that is supposed to be evidence based and nonpartisan. do you worry that by painting this stark portrait of president trump and suggesting that the american people should vote for something other than the lack of values that he represents in your construct that you are sullying both the brand of comey and the brand of the fbi? yeah, i don t think so. i certainly hope not. because i m not criticizing president trump because he s a republican or because he has a certain view on taxes or immigration or anything else. i m criticizing him on the grounds of values which is at the center of the fbi and something that should be the center of all of our evaluations of our leaders so i get that it s relevant to politics but i see it as something actually more important than partisan politics something you said to me in one of the interviews stood out. quote, if you ve been investigating something for a year and you don t have a general intelligence of where it will end up you should be fired. you wrote something similar in the book. exonerating hillary clinton of criminal behavior. before you had even interviewed her. let s apply that same standard to the mueller investigation. you oversaw the russia investigation for almost ten months. did you, do you have a general sense of how that investigation is going to end up? in some respects i did at the time but not completely. i suspect that the team that s investigating it now has a general sense. i have no idea what that is but again it s a general feeling on the current course and speed to end up in this direction or that direction. where did you think it was going to end up? did you think it would end up with people around president trump being found guilty of conspireing, aiding and abetting with russians? i can t say. i ve left it out of the book for reasons that should be obvious. i can t talk about classified information or sensitive investigative details so i m not going to say. but your sense of where the investigation was headed is not classified. it is just your impression. obviously, the investigation continued since then. why won t you say? people want to know. you have left the impression that there s something there in your interviews. you have said when asked do the russians have something on president trump?