flight, an air canada flight, arrived in that very terminal on a flight from alaska earlier today, that he waited for his luggage along with the other passengers on that flight, that he retrieved his bags where he had checked firearms. these are firearms that you can legally check with the airline. and he legally was able to do that. he went to a bathroom, retrieved the firearm and came back out and started shooting. according to the initial investigations, it doesn t appear that he was targeting anyone in particular. he appeared to be shooting ram donnelly. there was no rym or reason to the shooting. but it appears that a lot of the people who he would have shot and some of the people that were killed might have been some of the passengers that were on this flight. again, he came on a flight, an air canada flight we re told, that came from alaska and landed earlier at ft. lauderdale international airport. again, this is a twist on something we ve never seen before. again, we ve seen shootings at airports where people come from outside the airport with firearms. you don t normally see somebody coming from an aircraft that s gone through security, again, with secured luggage. and then retrieving a firearm. this is not something that we ve seen before. again, this is still early in the investigation. there s still a lot of witnesses to be interviewed. there s surveillance camera footage to look at to see exactly how long this took. we don t know everything about his movements. again he appeared to arrive on this flight and then started shooting once he emerged from the bathroom. evan perez, stay there. i know you ll continue to speak to law enforcement sources here in washington. i want to go to cnn s boris sanchez, he is live at ft. lauderdale/hollywood international airport. i know that just after the shooting, there was a great deal of confusion and fear at the airport. we saw pictures of people after the gunman was taken, still running in fear. but now police are saying they re confident there was just a lone gunman here. that s right, jim. we actually heard from the broward county sheriff about 20 to 30 minutes ago and he told us that reports of a second shooter were unsubstantiated, they were simply rumors. we heard people screaming and running shortly after we saw a group of about six armed and heavily armed uniformed officers running across from terminal 2. this is terminal 2, this is where the shooting happened. this is the second floor. the shooting happened on the lower level in baggage claim. we saw the officers running across into these parking garages here and that s what really kicked off just panic here. there were people running in all directions from terminal 2 on to the runways from terminal 1, down here to where we re standing now, and then on to the runways. it was sheer chaos. things are much calmer now, but as the sheriff of broward county said earlier, this is still a fluid situation. officers from just about every jurisdiction and the southeastern part of florida are here. there are helicopters in the air, tactical vehicles as you saw a moment ago driving around. this is still an ongoing investigation. as you said, and as you heard from evan earlier, it appears that the shooter in this case arrived on an air canada flight, terminal 2 is the delta and air canada terminal, and then he apparently, sources say, went into the rest room, retrieved a weapon from his bag, and opened fire, killing at least five people, eight others were rushed to the hospital. there s no word yet on a motive. we understand that the shooter was put into custody without incident. he s being questioned as you said by local and federal investigators. one interesting point to note, especially because we saw so many officers go into these parking garages, i asked the broward county sheriff if, perhaps, they had identified a vehicle here at the ft. lauderdale airport that might belong to the shooter. he told me that at the time we were speaking to him he did not have a vehicle that belonged to the shooter that they were able to identify. again, this is a very delicate situation. still there are hundreds of people that are stranded. i believe we actually have one here now. sir, nice to meet you. nice to meet you. hear the initial shots. i heard the commotion. i was actually i just had back surgery and i was in a wheelchair and just had gotten through security so i saw the commotion and heard the people. i thought maybe just a fight or something had broken out at security. i actually was at the first gate that the wheelchair stopped at and got a call from my mom saying, what s going on. and i had no idea. i just heard the screaming. and not five minutes later, people came running down the hall screaming gun, gunman was coming. so everybody, you know, ran and luggage flying, purses flying, and i can t move very fast because of my surgery so i got up and started hobbling and all the restaurants were closing their cages and getting people into hiding places and a woman frozen kind of in the middle of the hallway and her child made it into the gate, so i took her into a corridor. we were stuck in that corridor about the last 45 minutes or so and then escorted out with guys with long guns and moved us away from the glass. so it does sound like maybe it was an unsubstantiated second threat. but people certainly weren t acting like it. ryan, it must have been horribly frightening for you, particularly you re injured. were people coming to your aid? what was the response from law enforcement and others inside the airport as this was happening? you know, a lot of confusion at first because people were aware that something has happened adjacent to us, but once everybody started running, i have to say the jetblue personnel, which is what i was flying, were great and the cops that came in initially the broward county sheriff local guys, they were great. i mean, since i was kind of stuck in a corridor with a woman who was frozen in fear, they just kind of guarded us on either side and stood there. and then like i said, finally escorted us out once some guys with long guns came in and they were homeland security guys, fbi, and now escorted us outside and kept us away from the windows. still see a lot of helicopters, lot of action but it seems to be calming down, but they definitely are still riding by with on the trunk of the cars with long guns out. so definitely not giving us the clear. in the midst of it i m told you shielded a child? there was a during the chaos? actually it was his mom. the child sat about ten feet from her and i handed the child to the chile s employee that was closing the gate quickly so they could hide and i ran back over, pushed the mom into a corner and laid on top of her. i m a big guy, so it was easy to cover her up. she was frozen. ryan, i m sorry you had to experience this, for anybody who went through this firsthand, but thank you for the help that you gave to others in need there. we appreciate it. i want to bring in the national security analyst julia kayyem, former assistant secretary for homeland security and phil mudd, a former cry counter terror aficial, tom fuentes, assistant fbi director with me here in washington. tom, a couple of things i would like to run by you in light of your experience. one, if you want to find a police with a big police presence it s, of course, america s airports today. this shooter struck in one of the least protected areas, in baggage claim, outside the security perimeter. baggage claim is open because people are arriving and may have luggage checked in. family members and others help them. they drive up and park, go to baggage claim, help them carry their stuff out. so yeah, they don t go through magna tumors to get in. you can have a threat from outside the airport easily or true in this case, if he had a gun in checked luggage, he can hide in a bathroom and go out on the sidewalk and come back in and begin shooting if that s what actually happened. julia kayyem, this is a situation, rare, that you have the shooter taken in custody unharmed. eyewitnesss have said that after firing these shots, he, in effect, laid down on the ground and waited to be taken. police able to take thhim, they say, with no shots fired. how unusual is that in your experience? it s very unusual for a preplanned attack. normally if this was something he flew across the country, at least from our understanding, you know, from alaska to florida, with a plan on doing this attack, you would think that his exit strategy was either to get out of the airport or to be killed. so this is very rare. so the other theory talking to law enforcement agents right now that i m hearing, the other theory is that something happened at the airport that triggered this, an altercation or something in baggage claim. those would be the only two theories, he didn t plan it, but he happened to have guns, or that the guns were, you know, sort of on the airplane and he planned to do this. because the rarity of getting someone who just sit downs and says here, take me away, has to be explained somehow and so those are the two theories of the case that investigators are looking at right now. and the suspect being questioned now. phil mudd if i can draw on your experience, i m told by officials that he had possible mental health issues, but, of course, it s early. the department of homeland security telling us there was no known motive at this time. tell us, if you can, the kinds of questions, the kinds of work investigators are doing now to figure out why he did this? first of all, i wouldn t be asking the question why at the moment. the first question is who. is there anybody else involved. was there a co-conspirator. if he s not mentally stable my first questions would be where are his friends, family, associates, does he have social media accounts that might suggest he was communicating to somebody about an attack. after that, i might get into motive. why did you do this. was it just a random act of violence. i m with juliette. this is odd you would bother to go across the country and buy a ticket to engage in a shooting incident at an airport against civilians whom you don t know. if you wanted to kill people why wouldn t you do it at the point of origin. a lot of unanswered questions. the first one, is there a single other person out there. that takes a while to figure that one out. tom, it is a way, though, to get a gun into an airport, is it not? put it in your checked baggage, legally check it, declare it, and when you pick it up you have a gun in an airport. i suppose you could walk into the baggage area as well because that s a place where, you know, there might be police around but you don t have to walk through metal detectors. hundreds of people travel legitimately with their firearms to go on a hunting trip or off-duty law enforcement or other military that may have weapons and check them in. there s procedures each airline has. tsa has for checking in a secure manner a firearm in your luggage, you know, making sure it has the right lock box and ammunition. the main issue is that firearm is not in the cabin. they re not in position to hijack the aircraft. when the plane lands they recover their luggage at baggage claim and once again they re reunited with their firearm. so yes, they could shoot on the front end of that through the detectors or ticket counter or on the back end when they recover it at the destination airport. julie ya kayyem, this is not the first time we ve seen shootings or terror attacks in that unsecured part of airports, remember look back at the istanbul attack a number of months ago in that area and the check-in area, outside of the security corridor, whenever that happens there s discussion why don t authorities move that cordon out further, right. is that something that homeland security has considered at various times and if so, why hasn t that step been take? well, it has been considered, but just to make it clear, so wherever you put the zone of security, there is going to be a zone of insecurity right next to it. you can move it out ten miles from the airport. mile 10.01 there will be insecurity. and the other aspect to this is, we are a global economy, global aviation. if you put too much security on any of these airports, you will i mean basically you re going to impede the movement of people and things. millions of people a day domestically fly and you re constantly weighing the challenge of security and flow. what we do see and i just, you know, to sort of say this looks like chaos, you know, look, sometimes there s organized chaos. this looks exactly how you would want it to look from a homeland security and public safety perspective. active shooter case you want people to flee. you don t want them to stay put. you have them shelter in place to ensure things are good. it looks bad but this is the way you want it to work because you want to protect people. you will never make the airports perfectly secure. a lot of it has to do with weapons and the achlts of weapons that are out there and so we shouldn t believe that if only we put the security, you know, further back everything would be okay. there s more we can do to protect these unsecured areas, but at some stage you will have an insecure area. juliette, tom, fim, stay there. we re continuing to follow this story and we will come right back to this breaking story. but first more breaking news. this is cnn breaking news. as i said, we have more breaking news on a separate story. one we ve been following for some time. the government has just released the declassified intelligence report blaming russia for cyber attacks during the 2016 presidential race. this has been a great deal of anticipation for this for some time. and i just want to draw your attention to a few headlines from this. it says that vladimir putin aspired to help donald trump win the election. that, the judgment of the u.s. intelligence community. i want to go to cnn s pamela brown who has the report. pamela, reading these pages here, first of all they make clear at the top, you know, that this is intelligence, it s classified, we can t lift the veil on everything, but we will in effect tell you as much as we can. that stood out to me. we assess that putin and the russian government aspired to help president-elect donald trump s election chances here. what other headlines come out at you from this report? well, it talks about the range of motivations here and as you point out, this report does not mince words. it comes out and says we believe vladimir putin med led in the election process and tried to hurt hillary clinton and help donald trump. it listed a few reasons why. one of which putin publicly pointed to the panama papers disclosure and the olympic doping scandals as ways that the united states was trying to undermine russia and so in the view of the u.s. intelligence, putin wanted to do this to get back at the united states. it says, he sought to use disclosures to discredit the image of the united states and cast it as hypocritical and it talks about why he wanted to undermine hillary clinton, saying he most likely wanted to discredit secretary clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012 and because he holds a grudge, he almost certainly saw disparaging against him. it talks about why the u.s. believes he tried to help donald trump. it says moscow saw the election of president-elect trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against the islamic state in iraq and it goes on to explain how the united states came to this conclusion. it says, we assess with high confidence that russian military intelligence, general staff main directorate, used the 2.0 persona and d.c. leaks.com as a way to release u.s. victim data. it says back in march that the military intelligence services stole these e-mails that we know were leaked from the dnc as well as john podesta, the clinton campaign chairman, and used this forum, the dcleaks.com and wikileaks in order to have the effect that the united states says russia wanted, which was to med dle in the process and help donald trump. it talked about the trolling operations, jim, and says it traced the likely financier of the so-called internet research agency, located in st. petersburg, russia, as a close putin ally with ties to russian intelligence. these are the troll operations that were apparently pushing out fake news. you heard james clapper say in that hearing yesterday that the russians were responsible for pushing out fake news against hillary clinton and the report says that is continuing to help this day and to expect more of this type of behavior from russia in the future. it also makes the point, i think this is important to emphasize and you heard this in donald trump s statement, there was no indication that the russians compromised or got involved in vote tallying. it said while the russian actors targeted multiple state or local electoral boards as we have been reporting, there s no indication that the russians got in there and actually messed with the vote tallies. jim? well, it s interesting that you make those points this was a comprehensive information operation. not just the attacks on the dnc, but also fake news, all intended it seems to sow doubt about the election. they made the point that the targets included associated with both major u.s. political parties. pamela brown, thanks very much. i want to bring in now california congressman adam schiff, the top democrat on the house intelligence committee. thanks very much for joining us this afternoon. you bet. good to be with you. so you have the advantage, of course, of having seen the classified version of this report as well, but without delving into the classified, now that this is public, what do you find the most convincing evidence to back up the intelligence community s assessment here? well, jim, the evidence is really what comprises the classified version and unfortunately i can t go into, obviously, paramount importance is protecting our sources and methods. i m sure the russians would like to know how we know the contents of what s been released publicly. i will say i ve been on the committee almost ten years. this is about as iron clad a case as i ve seen on any major issue. i think the intelligence agencies really did great work here and i think those findings are well documented and supported and i hope their presentation today to donald trump will cause him to change his tune about this because i think the facts are really undeniable. now, adam schiff, we have donald trump s statement, that followed his briefing earlier this afternoon we re told went for an hour meeting with top intelligence officials. in the statement, he doesn t say explicitly yes, russia hacked the election. he said while russia, china and other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through, he goes on to say, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election. seeing donald trump s response so far, in your view, is that sufficient? i m glad you raised that statement. no, it isn t. in fact, that statement is demonstrably false. the report did not go into whether this russian action changed the outcome of the election. in other words, had the determinative impact on the election. that s beyond the scope of what the intelligence agencies look at. the fact that there was no evidence of tampering with machines, doesn t mean that it didn t influence the outcome of the election as donald trump has said in his statement. in fact, quite the contrary. the daily dumping of damaging material to secretary clinton was enormously consequential in terms of her campaign, was enormously beneficial to donald trump and to ignore that, or to say it didn t happen, i think is quite inaccurate. and all of this was, of course, enabled by the russian cyber operations. let me ask you this, because you have been pushing for action on this for some time. the obama administration has come under criticism from republicans certainly, but also from democrats, for not acting earlier. because it was a month before the election when the intelligence community as you know expressed publicly they had confidence russia was attempting to hack and influence the election with a focus on dmtsic party. do you believe democratic party. do you believe the obama administration waited too long to act on this intelligence? i do believe they waited too long to act and this was point that senator feinstein and i made when we released our own statement about the russian involvement in the elections even before the intelligence community did. nonetheless that doesn t let either the russians off the hook or anyone else and it certainly doesn t mean that democrats and republicans shouldn t come together right now to develop all the counter measures we need to confront this russian covert influence operation in the united states and in europe, and i think we need to develop stronger sanctions against russia on what they did already if we re going to have any hope of deterring them in the future. i think it s save to say looking at donald trump s statements so far it s not exactly a fulsome endorsement of the intelligence community s assessment and as you know, up until this morning, he was disparaging the intelligence and as you know as well, had he s also called into question the capabilities of the u.s. intelligence community. from your perspective what do you what does the american public need to hear from president-elect donald trump now after those expressions of doubts? well, what s really missing from the president-elect statements today is, not just he had a good meeting with intelligence officials, but that he has looked at the evidence he looked at it now in detail, he knows the sources of that evidence, and he has convinced he is convinced the russians did this and there is going to be a price to pay for, he applauds the measures president obama took and we ought to do more and we re going to prevent russia from ever interfering in our elections in this way again. he hopes to have a different relationship with russia, that s fine, but he cannot continue to deny what has taken place and that is i think what he ought to be saying to the american people. congressman adam schiff, thanks very much. thanks, jim. i want to bring in now former california congresswoman jane harmon who served on the house intelligence committee and now president of the wilson center. jane harman, thanks for joining. you know intelligence matters very well. in your experience, have you seen the intelligence community lift the veil to the extent it has on its assessment that russia hacked the election? i think this is unprecedented, and add to that, that yesterday, the senate armed services committee really on a unanimous basis, aligned itself with the intelligence community evidence that this was clearly a hack. it s not just a hack of this election in 2016, but it goes back a decade according to the portions of the report i ve been able to read. that s three presidential elections. and it also, let s add in france and germany, as other targets of russia. most people think that where vladimir putin goes next is angela merkel to destabilize the last of the old generation of leadership in europe. so, with these tools, unfettered, russia uses offensive cyber to basically, as i see it, undermine democracy in the world. it s very serious. and i applaud trump s statement. i heard adam schiff, who now holds the position i did for some years on the intelligence committee, but i applaud donald trump for moving in the right direction and hopefully he will move further. just one last comment, jim, as we watch these events in ft. lauderdale unfold, it should remind all of us how important it is to have seamless, connected intelligence. maybe we could not have found this particular person, but when you look at how this overlay of law enforcement and other response is coming together, lots of this has to do with the corrective actions we took in congress after 9/11. we re much better prepared. you make a good point there. again we don t know the motivations of the shooter in florida, it s too early but that s essentially the intelligence community s job is to find intelligence, prevent bad things before they happen. i want to quote from donald trump s statement the final graph here, he says that we need to aggressively combat and stop cyber attacks. i will appoint a team to give me a plan within 90 days of taking office. if you were advising the president and his team, what steps would you advise them to take urgently? i know many republicans are calling for more severe sanctions than president obama imposed. what would you recommend? well a strong response against russia, even stronger than president obama s, is the first thing i would do. but you have to be careful. if we get into a tit for tat and we do something aggressive against russia in the nature that they did against us, we re ratcheting up danger to us. i don t know that that s where we go. some of this could not doesn t have to be public. i do agree with donald trump that not every move needs to be advertised. that would be number one. number two, i would encourage everyone in america to use the strictest cyber hygiene. a lot of this could have been prevented at the dnc if they had had better hygiene. i know at the wilson center, a think tank, understand that think tanks are targets, we have very strict cyber hygiene now and we train our people on it. if they can prevent this stuff from coming in to the dotcom space and we can do better in preventing it coming into the.gov, and we re doing a better job of that, that s another defense that the trump administration ought to roll out as fast as possible. congresswoman jane harman, thanks very much. thank you, jim. i want to return now to our other big breaking news story this hour, a mass shooting at ft. lauderdale airport. five people are dead. eight others are wounded. the airport remains shut down. the suspect, however, is in custody. and sources tell cnn he had a weapon in his checked bag, which he retrieved when he arrived there at ft. lauderdale. i want to bring back cnn justice correspondent pamela brown, she has new information on the shooter. what are we learning? we re learning, jim, investigators are looking into a possible altercation on the plane that the suspect was on from an core rage, alaska, to florida. there are been claims by witnesses, by some of those on the plane, that the suspect esteban santiago got into some sort of altercation on the plane with other passengers, and as we know, after he got off of that plane there in ft. lauderdale, he went into his checked bag, once it came through baggage claim, pulled out the gun that apparently he had filled out paperwork and declared before, and then opened fire, killing five people. we are still trying to get more information about this altercation and, of course, investigators, want to verify it. oftentimes as you know there are witness accounts, they want to corroborate that. the initial reports are that investigators are looking into this possible altercation between the suspect and passengers as a possible motive there for the shooting and in baggage claim at the ft. lauderdale airport. pamela, that would be enormously important, because it would imply, we want to caution our viewers these are early reports and facts, not conclusive at this point, it would be an indicator this was not previously planned. right? right. that it was more spontaneous, perhaps, a reaction to what happened on the flight? and that s exactly what investigators are looking at because, of course, when anything like this happens you want to figure out is this terrorism or some other motive at play here, some sort of issue, and so that is why this is a critical piece of evidence that investigators are looking at or claim i should say from the witnesses, this possible altercation may be one of the reasons, as you point out, sometimes there s multiple factors, but one of the reasons at least why he got off that plane and went into his checked bag and pulled that gun. we also are learning today, jim, that the suspect apparently was in the military. we know we heard from senator nelson earlier he had a military i.d. they were trying to verify the authenticity and we are told from our sources that, in fact, he was in the army. no criminal record we re told. we re trying to piece together more about the suspect or more about him, and that s the very late west he know right now. pamela brown, thank you very much. law enforcement officials saying there was some sort of altercation with the suspected shooter on the flight and after that altercation he went and retrieved the when and fired in the bag am area. i want to bring back julia kayyem, phil mudd and with me in washington cnn law enforcement analyst tom fuentes. with that new information, tom fuentes, possible altercation on the flight, what does that tell you at this stage. at this point we don t know who he was having an argument with. did he know them before. is this a group of people who were already friends or went hunting together or something and had a previous argument, continued on the plane with each other and then he continues it afterward when he has the firearm, or are they complete strangers and argued about overhead bin space or some other issue on the plane. so that will be determined hopefully pretty soon by the fbi and police that are doing the interviews of him as well as the passenger witnesses as to and the victims who he was arguing with. why were you arguing. what was the cause of that. julewel julia kayyem, airpor are tense places, it can be a tense time. that is an argument for not allowing people to even check weapons when they travel? well, it will be very difficult. people carry weapons for a variety of reasons, hunting trips, or they re moving and need to move their lawful weaponry and so i think the clear thing that we re all picking up on now, it s still undetermined whether he entered the flight with the intention to do this in ft. lauderdale or if something triggered him. and look, something could trigger anyone in an airport and they could be armed even if they weren t a passenger and just come in through baggage claim. so we have a lot more to determine at this stage, but i have to say, the protocols for putting guns in checked baggage are pretty strict. you have to show that the gun is lawfully yours, it can t, of course, be loaded, you have to fill out forms and that s actually part of the security process that someone like me never worried that much about and we just have to determine whether this was someone who used a potential loophole to attack an airport or actually was someone this could have happened anywhere. he s deranged or has mental issues and used a gun in his possession to kill people at an airport. to be clear, you may know this or tom, you can check both a weapon and ammunition? yes. tom fuentes shaking his head yes. yes. if you re going on a hunting trip you will have both with you when you arrive at the destination. the fact that he s coming from alaska might be why he was there. we don t know. that s exactly what i was going to pick up on. hundreds of thousands of law enforcement personnel who often travel with their weaponry. you have to fill something out. it s a protocol under the faa and tsa. you have to fill something out. you can t just do it. nonetheless it s a common procedure for people who own guns. phil, phil mudd, i know i m asking you this with a handicap because it s early, i m just asking you in light of your experience as a profiler, you look at this person here, altercation on the flight, carrying a weapon, but also other things like shooting and killing, and then laying down, letting himself be arrested, as you look at that early and incomplete picture what do you take away? as somebody in the counter terrorism business let me take you behind the door for a moment. the first thing people in my business think about they hope it s not terrorism. you know, in some ways if you have to rank incidents of tragedy and violence in this country, as soon as you get an incidence of terrorism you re saying who organized this is there an immigration issue, connection to isis. if we have someone that stepped off the plane, what i see in the initial stages of this, is an individual who doesn t show the characteristics of the people i used to worry about when i chased terrorism. we talked about, for example, lying down on the floor. the people i chased typically would want to have enough ammunition so they went down in a fire fight with law enforcement. that was not a suicide operation. that for them was a martyr dom operation. i look at this and say i think we might come to a conclusion over the next hours it was just one of those tragedies where you say i m not sure there s anything you can do. and just for the sake of our viewers, that word terrorism there. we don t have any evidence yet and no official has told me at this point. the official word we re hearing from multiple sources is no known motive at this point although the newest information there was an altercation on the flight could be indicative. i would like to make a distinction. we haven t seen this because we re always broadcasting about terrorism events and jihadist events typically they re not taken alive. state and local police will tell you, i was a street cop six years, there are plane situations police arrive, someone has shot their family dead, thrown the gun down and surrendered or committed in other serious crime with a firearm and when police arrive they surrender. so it s not uncommon in general circles even if we think it s uncommon in our circles. julia kayyem, as we re looking at this as well, what are the missing pieces at this point that you ll be looking for? the unanswered questions? well, during the press conference i thought it was interesting and this just having seen so many of these, the extent to which they are going to shut down the entire airport. that s, you know, that s better safe than sorry at this stage. they need to reopen it relatively soon. it s a major airport. and the faa and it tsa are working as we ve heard already to divert everything. you will start to see a slow reopening of different terminals. that s part of the protocol. the unanswered questions i have is just the basic one, is essentially was this a cross-country from alaska to florida flight which seems less likely to me or an altercation where he happened to have a gun. we don t know much about the assailant at this stage so we want to learn more. i have confidence that they believe, that the officials, just based on the press conference, they believe it s an individual assailant who got triggered by something only because they seemed quite confident and they wouldn t be, that the imminent threat was now over. juliette, phil, tom, stay there for a moment pap back to the scene of this shooting rampage, ft. lauderdale/hollywood international airport. boris sanchez is live just outside. boris, what are you seeing in the last few minutes from your vantage point there? jim, we re just waiting for a press briefing from the governor of florida, rick scott, set to start in about ten minutes or so. we ve seen several helicopters circling overhead. broward county sheriff s and others. as we heard from the sheriff of broward county, about an hour or so ago, this is still a fluid scene. it does seem, obviously, like it s way more under control than it was just a few hours ago. they just put up that yellow tape. we re seeing a very large law enforcement presence from all over the southeast part of florida here. the difficulty now is in canvassing all the passengers and people that are still here on the scene. there are several hundred people that can t go anywhere because the airport is shut down. and as you can see behind me this is terminal 2, this is where the shooting took place on the lower level in the baggage claim area. this is an air canada and delta terminal. and just to give you an idea this is the second floor, this is where the de par tours leave. the lower floor, the baggage claim area where the shooting happened is the arrivals. still, so much to piece together in this. one thing i did want to point out i asked the sheriff of broward county perhaps they identified a vehicle belonging to the shooter here at ft. lauderdale international airport. he told me they had not. we did see a large group of officials heavily armed going through the parking structure, so we were he still trying to figure out exactly what details might give us an idea of what was going through the shooter s mind and if this was something that was planned or if he was responding to an altercation on the plane as some of our sources have been saying. boris sanchez on the scene. joining me on the telephone is senator marco rubio of florida. senator rubio, thank you very much for taking the time. thank you. thanks for having me on. a terrible situation. our thoughts with you. a tragedy in your home state. if i can begin, can you tell us if there s any uptated information on the shooting? what can you tell us? well, i want to be very cautious about what we share because i think it s a fluid situation. i think you ve already probably reported the name of the assailant, i think you ve reported. there are still some questions whether it s clear he was an inbound passenger. that seems to be some confusion as of 15 minutes ago still among the agencies about whether he was inbound on an international flight or domestic flight but from outside the continental united states. i think, obviously, the other thing that s going on and you re probably seeing images of it, is they re just trying to make sure this thing is finished. there s always this concern if it were some sort of coordinated incident you would have one attack to draw in first responders and law enforcement and the secondary attack to target them. we know those are tactics that have been discussed in the past. that s part of what you re watching. then it goes to preserving evidence because if, in fact, this turns out to be a domestic prosecution they have to be able to prove it in court. so all of that is going on simultaneously. even as they are trying to run as much information as they can about this individual across data bases to try to begin to piece together what happened here. are you seeing any information, any indication, this was a coordinated attack, beyond a lone gunman? no. as of now, nor have any of the agencies indicated they suspect it. they ve got to rule all of that out. they will take every precaution on the ground. our immediate interactions with the fbi concluded that while their involvement because of the investigative capability and because it involves abation there could be aviation there could be federal criminal violations here, in fact there no doubt is, they do not at least initially see this as some sort of an act of terrorism in terms of what we normally associate with terrorizing. as of this moment anyway that s not the way they re approaching it. i m not sure they ve ruled that out. they have to gather information. we know throughout as we ask you these questions, it s early, the picture incomplete. we re hearing from law enforcement sources here in washington that this passenger had witnesses say he had some sort of altercation on the flight before he then retrieved his weapon from his bags and then carried out his shooting. are law enforcement sources there telling you any more about that? whether they believe that was the motivation? well, i m not prepared to say that was the motivation. i know that was mentioned as a potential cause and they wanted to kind of look into that a little further and get to that point. i think what they ll probably be troubled by the attack did not seem targeted at specific individual, but rather just kind of widespread across the baggage claim area. but that was, in fact, one of the potential causes that was brought up among several others. but we re not trying to be evasive. i certainly am not. truly they don t know. just a few hours removed from this happening and they have to piece all of this together before they know more. one of the things that s unusual about it is, if you wanted to shoot up the baggage claim area of any airport in america you don t have to fly there on an airplane, check it in your bag and wait for the bag to come out. you can just drive up, walk in and do it. so i think that s putting some doubt in their minds about premeditation in terms of that being a specific target. but again, we ll learn more, i imagine, over the next few hours and days. we know the name or multiple sources have told us the name esteban santiago. we re also told that he had a military i.d. on his person. i m curious if you know any more about his background? for instance, whether he was an active or former military service member? no. i can tell you that is the name, the name that i ve heard from multiple sources now and the military i.d. component. i did ask the question whether it was an active military i.d. and they didn t have the answer at the moment. i asked local law enforcement, the first to kind of move on that front in terms of identification. my understanding he is in custody and injured, so i imagine he s been transported to a medical facility. i don t have any more. i would say one thing the name, if you ran that name on just a public data base, obviously, without knowing more about who it was that s not an uncommon name. esteban is not an uncommon name. spanish. and santiago is not an uncommon name. it s not garcia or perez but it s not uncommon. i imagine they re trying to make sure they have the right person. through that i think the passenger manifest from the airline is probably brought into some high level certainty at this point. as of now there s nothing in what they know about this individual that has led them to change any of the assumptions that i ve outlined to you earlier here in this conversation. well, senator rubio, we thank you for taking the time and we re sorry that you and your state have to have experience violence like this. well just know that our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those that have lost their lives and several others that have been severely injured and as a result of this attack and we pray for them and hope that they will be able to make a full recovery. no question. we ll be thinking of them as well. senator rubio, thanks very much. thank you. i want to go to cnn aviation correspondent rene marsh. rene marsh, can you tell us what you re learning most recently about the shooter and the investigation so far? well, just to reset, jim. we know the name of the shooter is esteban santiago as you ve been mentioning there. he flew from alaska to florida. we do know, again, that gun was checked in his checked luggage. he had declared that weapon. and then he retrieved that weapon and that s when he opened fire after getting off of his flight. now, you know, many people may not realize, but he went about this all very legally. tsa rules are very clear, they state what the rules are for carrying a gun on board. you can legally carry a weapon as well as ammunition only in your checked luggage. you cannot carry that in your carry-on luggage. that s exactly what this individual did. however, when you do carry it in your checked luggage, it has to be unloaded. it has to be in a hard, locked case. and again, you have to declare it to the airline at that ticket counter. so to our knowledge, this traveler, esteban santiago, did all of those things and he did all of those things very legally. however, you have a problem which we ve talked about time and time again, with these airports, we saw it happen in istanbul where you have the soft targets of the airport that essentially if you talk to any law enforcement official, it really is virtually impossible to get the vulnerability down to zero. anyone will tell you that. and so this particular area where he opened fire, the baggage claim area, of the airport, wit yit was not by the checkpoint that is considered the soft target and he essentially took advantage of that and that is why we are where we are where the latest numbers are that five people had been shot dead an and we do know eight were transported to the hospital. to be clear we re showing live pictures there. we continue to see police activity on the tarmac. even on some of the highways leading into the airport terminal there, blocking traffic, et cetera. but also to be clear, a little less than an hour ago, police said they believe there is no active shooter still present, that it looks like this shooter who is in custody acted alone. have they changed that assessment? are they still acting as if there could be other assailants there? well, when we did get that update they did tell us that they had cleared everyone out of that vicinity because they had their s.w.a.t. team coming in and they were their s.w.a.t. team was going inch by inch throughout that area looking for others, potentially, but they did say they strongly believe they had their one shooter. however, they want a sterile situation so that not only can they make sure 100% that the threat is gone, but also looking for evidence because they need not only physical evidence, but, of course, they re going to want to look at that tape as well, that tape is going tell a lot as far as how long did this all go on. that tape will tell them exactly where he was standing, who he was aiming at, how he went about this as he opened fire on these innocent travelers, jim. rene marsh, thanks very much. please stand by. i want to bring in niegel nelson, he was there. he heard the gun shots as he waited in the security line. niegel, you think you may have been close to the shooter as this happened? pretty close, actually. so i was in the line waiting just about to step through the screening area when we heard the shots and there were people running behind us and screaming, security personnel screaming run run run. we ran. we were led out by the flight attendants and so on on to the tarmac. there we waited until about an hour or so when we got information as to what was happening. they tried to provide refreshments. i understand you may have heard more gun shots following that initial round of gunfire? this was about say 45 minutes to an hour after we were on the tarmac waiting when they got us all together and said that they they ve pretty much secured the building or secured the terminal and they were trying to get us inside. get us back inside. understood. that s when we heard shouting and screaming again and people started scurrying away. i heard at least two more shots. then, of course, we started running. i understand in that panic, you lost your shoes, just a sign of how quickly people had to get out of there? well, actually, i was, like i said, i was just about to step through the security screening. i put my shoes, phone, wallet, all my belongings into the trays. they were able to go through. that s when the shooting started and that s when everybody started running. i had to run without even a belt on my pant, with everything. i just had to run. now what are you seeing there right now, as understand you re still at the airport? i m still at the airport. we re i m in terminal d. terminal 2, section d6. we were let back inside. we re told they re doing some amount of checks still. they did confirm with us a while ago that they saw or they phoned found something suspicious and they re going to do a controlled explosion within five minutes or so, so the announcement just came over to tell us that we shouldn t panic or anything. so we re still waiting. they the security personnel they re moving around trying to keep us calm, trying to, you know, give us a sense of security and all that. well, thank you very much, niegel nelson, we here at cnn are glad you re safe. we want to go back to evan perez. i understand you have new information? you re welcome. all right. the fact that the suspect had with the fbi in anchorage alaska, recently about a couple months ago, he showed up at the anchorage office of the fbi and apparently exhibiting sh some kind of mental health issues. there was concern there. local authorities or himself. at some point he has checked into a local mental health institution according to officials we ve been talking to. this is still part of the early investigation still putting together a picture of exactly where he s been, what exactly might have led up to this shooting. but what we re beginning what s beginning to emerge is a picture of somebody who was exhibiting some kind of mental health illness, issues. he apparently checked himself in or voluntarily was checked in to a mental health institution there for some treatment. after he showed up at the fbi office in anchorage, alaska. after that, we don t know what happens next. we know that he did get on a flight from alaska and was flew into ft. lauderdale today. earlier we i think mistakenly said he had come through canada, but i think partly because of some of his initial interviews and statements to investigators, in which he indicated that he had come from canada. we now know that he, indeed, had come from alaska, had flown into ft. lauderdale airport earlier today, before he started carrying out this shooting. again, mental health issues is the picture that s emerging here from this suspect. that s right. i heard similar from u.s. officials earlier. evan perez, thanks very much. tom fuentes with me in washington and phil mudd still on the line. tom, as you listen to that, we re beginning to get a clearer picture perhaps of the suspect and the shooting. it could be serious mental health problems. we don t know the cause of it. you know, we ve had other incidents where somebody severely mentally ill does have access or owns a gun. which apparently is the case here. but you have situations where if somebody already owns a gun and then later gets mental health treatment there s no real way to find him and take the gun away. that s the possibility in this situation, he developed this problem mentally after he already owned the sgloon it s an issue that comes up so frequently with shootings that we cover, mental health, and that s one issue you hear from republicans as well, maybe they need to address the mental health issues as tied to gun violence. phil mudd, a lot of experience profiling bad actors tell us your view as we hear more information about the suspected shooter? i would step away from this and i think we will come up with the unavoidable conclusion we have another tragedy in america that s not preventable because we have someone that has mental health issues who didn t intend before he got on the plane on killing somebody. two quick things. did anybody know before he got on the plane that he had anger issues that might manifest themselves on the plane and did he talk about an incident of violence. my guess is no, but guess is not good enough here. there s a second bigger question. is there anything we can learn? we re talking about the issue of how do you think about someone who goes into mental health treatment who has access to a weapon. i think you to do an after action here but i m afraid we re going to step away and say in the america of 2017 this is just going to happen periodically. sadly, we come on the air with stories like this more often than we can coun. juliette kayyem, based on evan s information, the idea he arrived on ap earlier flight than we believed initially, and might have had some time to think about this before he acted? that s exactly right. what i m picking up on phil s point. what are we going to learn from this? obviously, you know, we have another major mass casualty shooting and there are debates, political debates, about guns and access to guns, but the other question i have, is if there was some sort of altercation or disturbance on an airplane, or around the airplane, what did officials at the airport, certainly plenty of them, whether it was at airline industry or tsa or local or state officials did they do anything or what did they do? i m curious about that only because we have to train these officials to be able to deescalate problems in a world in which we have too many lots of arms and unfortunately untreated mental health issues. and so that would be one of my takeaways from this as we started the hour, you know, i said this was a suspicion, that this was someone who got on a plane and didn t intend on doing this. and how can we deescalate these situations before they lead to a tragedy like this. just to reiterate some of that new information, learning now that shooter, one, had previous contact with the fbi, he was known to the federal bureau of investigation. two, that it is believed that he had mental health issues, possible mental health problems. in addition to that we learn as well there might have been altercation on this flight, an immediate perhaps triggering event. right. at this point we need to do the investigation. we need to find out what exactly happened. to the extent we can know it. we may never know what was inside his head that caused this to happen. and, you know, what his background is. so it s going to take more investigation to even have an idea of what happened here. tom fuentes, thank you. new information that being a photo of the shooting suspect here. i m going to go to our evan perez. that s right. this is a photo that we have of the suspect. you know, there was not a lot of we checked his criminal background. not a lot in his criminal background. very minor stuff that he that showed up in the records. and so this indicates that, aside from this recent visit to the fbi office in anchorage, alaska, there s really not much contact that police have had, law enforcement has had with him. we re told he has not shown up on any radar of anybody who is potentially extremist or radicalized. that s one of the first things unfortunately these days that law enforcement does when one of these cases happens, they check to see whether or not there s anything that comes up with regard to extremism. we haven t they haven t found any indication of that at this point. again, very few very minor criminal history is what we have in his background. and apart from just a couple months ago showing up at the fbi office in anchorage and exhibiting signs of mental illness that appears to be the extent of the law enforcement contact. significant law enforcement contact that this suspect had until today. jim? you re looking at the face there in that photograph of esteban santiago, the suspect in
main event is now over. so that does it for us from hamburg tonight. rachel will be back on monday, and i will see you again next friday live from iraq where we will take you to the front lines for the final push to drive isis out of the city of mosul. now it s time for the last good evening, richard. thank you for all that reporting. but you go, i do want to ask you given everything, do you think putin got what he wanted out of president trump today? i think he absolutely got what he wanted. i think he came in with this intention to have a long meeting. i think he wanted to overwhelm the president, presenting him lots of options, lots of things they could discuss, put some meat on the table for them to start digging right into it and hoping this will lead to more discussions, more follow-on, and a tighter relationship. interesting. richard engel, thank you very much. absolutely. i am ari melber live in new york for lawrence o donnell. now for months, people have been watching to see if donald trump would pivot. today it happened. president putin and i have been discussing various things, and i think it s going very well. we ve learned the president did, in fact, confront putin for meddling in the u.s. election. they had a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject. sergey lavrov coming out and saying that president trump accepted putin s denial. translator: he accepts the things that mr. putin has said. one administration source is telling me that is not accurate. bear in mind that unless it was tillerson himself, that person was not even in the room. just yesterday, president trump cast doubt on the allegations regarding russia. nobody really knows. nobody really knows for sure. it was only the russians, and they did so i have aggressively and effectively. at this point, let s talk about how do we go forward. yeah, let s. this idea of putting it behind us, i think, is a bit of a fantasy. there was a very clear, positive chemistry between the two. president putin is never going to be your friend. we need to treat him with extreme caution. the meeting is over. president trump and vladimir putin held that first meeting today eight months of course after an election that the u.s. government determined was targeted by russia. and this is the easy part, the talking part. any president would be expected to lay down a rhetorical marker in the first meeting with an adversary after attempts to interfere with our democracy. and a president who ran on putting america first, a logical application of that slogan obviously requires putting america before russia. but the trump administration instead offered a very mixed message, suggesting that donald trump talked to putin about russian interference, but that and it s too important to not find a way to move forward. too important to not find a way to move forward. notice that tillerson is treating his ideological conclusion as some kind of universal preference as if everyone thinks russia is such an important partner that its attacks on the united states must be just swallowed. of course most american leaders have not taken that kind of approach as a given, from president reagan to president obama, most leaders have not rejected american intelligence and called its conclusions into suggestion just to smooth over relations with this adversary. mr. secretary, can you say if the president was unequivocal in his view that russia did interfere in the election? did he offer to produce any evidence or to convince mr. putin? the russians have asked for proof and evidence. i ll leave that to the intelligence community to address. the answer to that question. and, again, i think the president at this point, he pressed him and then, you know, felt like at this point let s talk about how do we go forward. that s weird. tillerson is literally saying the u.s. intelligence community should answer the russians questions about evidence like our spies are answerable to the people they spy on, and they should provide evidence to the opponents they re accusing of these attacks. why would you want to give the russians any clues about how the intel community knows what it knows? in court, sure. american citizens have a right to see the evidence against them. this isn t a court. the russians aren t honoring our rules. they re breaking them. and if this is if this is any road to cyber war, something dick cheney himself suggested, well, you don t publicly tell your own intelligence officials, who of course risk their lives in these kind of wars, to brief the potential enemy. as for tillerson s key word tonight, question, the government he serves already has the answer. russia meddled in the election. the last administration announced it and acted on it. congress, in a bipartisan manner, has acted on it. and trump apparently brought it up today while also sowing more doubt about it. illogical, that position. but perhaps predictable. she s saying russia, russia, russia, but i don t maybe it was. i mean it could be russia, but it could also be china. it could also be lots of other people. it also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay? she doesn t know if it s the russians doing the hacking. maybe there is no hacking. once they hack, if you don t catch them in the act, you re not going to catch them. they have no idea if it s russia or china or somebody. it could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace. joining me now is david filipov from hamburg, germany, michael mcfaul, and julianne smith, former national security when he read it out. he didn t say president trump said i was concerned. are we overreading that? i ve seen that observation because it s noticeable, but is it a problem? you know, i worked at the white house for three years. i was in these meetings with both prime minister putin at the time and president medvedev. i never remember a kind of construction like that. i never remember a construction where it said it was noted, right, past tense. it was noted that the senate was concerned about this. why isn t president trump concerned about this? right. i just think by answering it that way, this idea that we re just going to move along after our sovereignty has been violated, that s not in the american interest. that is a weak response to what putin did last year. julianne, what did putin get out of this, and why was the meeting so long? well, i think he wanted to get a smile. he wanted to extend the meeting so that they d come out afterwards. there would be a lot of questions about what was discussed. there would be some confusion over who s reporting what. he wanted this to look like a fireside chat with some old friends. he needs that photo opportunity. he wanted to show that he could basically play president trump, and i think he did just that. i think trump came in unprepared. i don t think he was well briefed. i don t think his team readied him for this meeting, and i think the end result is that putin got just about everything he wanted from that meeting, including a very, very light touch on russian meddling in our election last fall. and that s a shame because this issue is not going to go away, or this tactic on the part of the russians. they re going to do this again. they did it in france most recently. they will likely do it in germany this fall. and i would assume that they re going to do it in 2018 and 2020 in the united states again. david, you know the old saying, don t know much about history. rex tillerson bringing up the chemistry between these two men for whatever reason. take a listen. the two leaders, i would say, connected very quickly. there was a very clear positive chemistry between the two. i think, again and i think the positive thing i observed, and i ve had many, many meetings with president putin before is there was not a lot of relitigating of the past. david, would you consider it relitigating something that the two men have never discussed before? that s what we call a leading question, but i don t know how else to ask it. well, i mean obviously the point of all this was to put all this behind everybody and have a nice picture moving forward, right? so the american people see this picture of, you know, president trump behaving in a dignified way with president putin. now we re all going to move forward and not think about this stuff anymore. this whole calculation is great for russia and maybe great for people in the rest of the world. americans who are really interested, like my two colleagues here on this panel, didn t get any answers. we didn t get any answers whatsoever. is putin going to have to answer for what he did? does president trump really believe that this election hacking happened? but for the people who don t care, they got a great picture of them kind of like wrapping it up. okay, that was too bad about that. let s move on. i mean i guess, i mean, ambassador, yeah, some people don t care by definition. then i guess well, they should care. they might not see the photo in the first place. but last time i checked, the american public does have issues with russia. i suppose some of the partisan lines of this are changing if putin is a stand-in for the republican party, but that shift hasn t completely occurred. and this would be odd ball in the extreme to suggest it s a win for a u.s. president to back off an adversary. and let s be clear about when secretary tillerson is saying the two leaders said, we should just move on and forget about the history, forget about the agenda, what is that agenda? that agenda is created by vladimir putin. he s the one that intervened in our elections. we didn t do that. he did that to us. he s the one that annexed territory in ukraine. he created that as an agenda item. we didn t do that. he s the one that doubled down and tripled down in his support for assad in syria. half a million people have died there. that agenda is created by him. so surprise, surprise, he wants to move on. that is not smart diplomacy. diplomacy is not a popularity contest. right. diplomacy is about defending america s national interest and defending international interest. thou shall not interfere in elections in other countries. thou shall not annex the territory of thy neighbor. we can t forget about those events. we have to make sure they don t happen again. julianne, the russian foreign minister basically stakes out this dramatic ground. this was headline breaking this afternoon with some pushback as we ve noted but saying, oh, yeah, and trump took putin at his word. take a listen. translator: president trump has said that he has heard clear declarations from mr. putin that russian leadership and russian government has not interfered in the elections, and he accepts the things that mr. putin has said. what s going on there? well, this doesn t surprise me at all that we have two conflicting versions of the meeting, and that s why the u.s. team, everyone should have agreed to bring in more staff, note takers. i know mike mcfaul when he was part of the administration as ambassador or as senior director for russia, he himself would be in a meeting like that to provide a readout to the press afterwards. we now only have the four principals that were in this meeting with two translators. the two translators are obviously not going to share their notes. so we re left with a question. who s telling the truth? do we believe the u.s. administration, president trump s version of the story, or president putin s version of the story? and neither one of these guys are known to be honest abe. right. they both have trouble with the truth obviously. honest vladimir. a subsidiary question are what are the foreign policy feeling that they can lie about the word of the president of the united states, apparently unconcerned about any reaction, which again if you re for america first and being tough, i would assume one of the benefits of being tough is countries don t get away with lying about what you said moments after you said it. david, going back to you, this is how the new york times put it, that they were trying to prevent exactly this kind of thing. i guess maybe it didn t work. quote, the russians had agitated to include more staff in the meeting. trump s team had insisted the meeting be small, avoid leaking and competing accounts later. and that was someone speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity, but we have competing accounts, month? yeah, we obviously were thinking all day about what was going on there. you know, ivanov also threw out american reporters from that briefing like myself even though the thing was broadcast live on russian channels. you know, there s an attempt in vladimir putin s presidency to whitewash the past, to make things a lot smoother, to present a view of the world that, hey, russia is just a country that s trying to get along. we re not really trying to interfere in anybody s elections. and these press conferences really played toward that. why president trump needs that is something that is harder to understand. but what the russians were trying to do was push this whole thing forward. that statement by ivanov, basically saying we confirm there was no hacking and the u.s. president agrees with it. and we ll be asking everybody we in washington, did president trump really accept this? did he really say that? it sounds out of this world that he would just go and put it away like that with the entire country interested in this investigation. ambassador mcfaul, i have the final question for you. it may be the hardest to answer. going forward, is the trump administration taking the position that russia either didn t meddle or it barely mattered, so it s all good, or is there a view that to the extent they meddled, it was to help trump? so he doesn t really need to prevent it because it could help him again in the reelect. i don t know the answer to that obviously. i wasn t in the meeting. by the way, i used to negotiate who would be in those meetings, plus one, plus two, plus three. i had assumed that the russians kept the americans out. if this reporting by the new york times is true, that raises serious doubts about the relationship that the national security adviser, h.r. mcmaster has, that the president doesn t even want his national security adviser in the room for fear of leaks. that s a big problem. right, because he wouldn t be leaking if it s working. there s only three people. i mean that to me is very disturbing. i hope we learn more about that. to your question, i don t know the answer with respect to how president trump s thinking. but i do know the answer with respect to how russia is going to behave. it is naive beyond imagination to assume that the russians or the chinese or somebody in the future is going to only hack is going to only interfere in our elections on the side of the republican party. right. that is crazy. so rather than debate about, you you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. or a little internet machine? 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[ laughing ] so all you pay for is data. see how much you can save. choose by the gig or unlimited. call or go to xfinitymobile.com introducing xfinity mobile. a new kind of network designed to save you money. the president opened the meeting with president putin by raising the concerns of the american people regarding russian interference in the 2016 election. just a day before donald trump, according to rex tillerson, was prettying vladimir putin on the russian interference in the election, he was publicly the u.s. intel agencies, who of course as we all know concluded unanimously that russia did in fact interfere. i agree. i think it was russia, but i think it was probably other people and/or countries, and i see nothing wrong with that statement. nobody really knows. i remember when i was sitting back listening about iraq. weapons of mass destruction. how everybody was 100% sure that iraq had weapons of mass destruction. guess what. that led to one big mess. they were wrong, and it led to a mess. that kind of set of comments may be habitual for trump, but it doesn t make it normal. sally yates, a doj career prosecutor who was acting attorney general at the start of the trump administration before she left over a travel ban debate, wrote this impassioned response. the president s inexplicable refusal to confirm russian election interference insults career intel pros and hinders our ability to prevent it in the future. joining me now for more is evan mcmullin, a former cia operative, co-founder of stand up republic. i m also joined by david corn, the washington bureau chief for mother jones and, apparently, david, a founder of nothing. it s on my bucket list. well, get on in. then again evan is a patriotic and physically courageous man which i always admire because it s not something i ever knew how to do. david, you ve covered this russia story a lot. talk to us about when you see that kind of response from someone like sally yates. well, i think she s reflecting what many people are thinking inside and outside of the intelligence community. the president also, in recent days said it was only four intelligence agencies that came up with this conclusion. it was really the ones that count, the nsa, the cia, the fbi, and joined by the office of the director of national intelligence, which oversees the whole community. so whenever he gets a chance, and you saw this in the readout with rex tillerson today. they diminish and dismiss the significance and the importance of this. he says he s honored to meet putin, the guy who attacked this country. he was talking this morning in a tweet about john podesta not giving dnc servers to the cia. all that is wrong. it has nothing to do with this. isn t this part of the problem. so then folks are trying to clean it up. so we re talking about 17 agencies versus four, and you get the feeling that this is a person who is a master of pettifogging, a master of parsing. how do you think the factual community should deal with that? that s why you ve got to stick to the big picture in terms of facts. it s quite clear that trump, from the very beginning, throughout the summer and since then, he s aided and abetted putin s campaign by denying or diminishing it or saying it didn t happen at all. again and again and again. and i think so we can make fun and say why is he doing this, but there s a reason why. and you have to keep presenting that bigger context. i think it s kind of disgraceful that even today he was not defending america s national interest when it comes to sitting down with putin and also joking with the guy about the media. and this is a guy who leads a regime where journalists are killed. you know, it s easy to go on and on and be outraged about this, but sometimes outrage is factual. that s right. look, i think what we saw in this european visit or what we ve seen so far was what you would expect to see based on trump s signaling during the campaign, that he was going to align with vladimir putin. that speech in warsaw was full of ethno nationalism language, talking about our culture, our civilization, not about democracy, not about liberty and equality, but it really is a term to describe ethnicity and describing a battle of civilizations between what we have in the west and other cultures, namely, i think, islam. so then he goes and he meets with vladimir putin, and all of a sudden the hacking isn t an issue. all of a sudden, we re making a commitment not to interfere in which protects him in the house still strong, still doubting what they re hearing from the intelligence community. as long as he can do that, then he s protected politically. this is now a political game, and that s what i think he s doing. david, listen to james clapper, of course, who used to be the head of dni, the agency you were mentioning here, talk about this and morale. it certainly isn t morale-building, i ll put it that way. i do think, though, that the intelligence community will continue to convey truth to power even if the power ignores the truth. and that s one of the great strengths of the intelligence community and the superb men and women who are in it. david, it may be a great strength of the intel community, but it is a little more depressing than the optimism he s trying to find because the main client of the intel community is the president. it s a sad statement. evan can probably speak to this better than you or i could. but people who work for the cia, case officers, often have to take tremendous risks, and they have to put their agents often in harm a way. now, if they all think that the guy at the top doesn t care about them or think there s part of a deep state allied against him, are they still going to take those risks? are people going to leave? morale is important in the epa. it s important in the state department, every place else, but it s very important for people who are taking those risks. sure. ultimately at the end of the day, a president can only make good decisions if he has good information and cares about that information. you know, trump is undercutting that whole premise, and that could lead us into even deeper and darker trouble. evan, you get the last word of this segment, and also is any of this going to potentially change based on the results of bob mueller s investigation? look, i would say this. what david corn just said is correct, but i think the issue mitch mcconnell and the trump white house have a special plan for a blitz. our panel will explain next. noo introducing the easiest way to get gillette blades text blades to gillette on demand text to reorder blades with gillette on demand. .and get $3 off your first order we are live here on friday night, and sometimes the breaking news comes in on friday. as i can tell you i m holding a washington post report out tonight that we re discussing for the first time on air on season that the white house and mitch mcconnell are planning a whoooo. you re searching for something. like the perfect deal. .on the perfect hotel. so wouldn t it be perfect if there was a single site where you could find the right hotel for you at the best price? 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[vo] progress is seizing the moment. your summer moment awaits you, now that the summer of audi sales event is here. audi will cover your first month s lease payment on select models during the summer of audi sales event. the new idea, the new strategy according to the post tonight is a deadline before the august recess. and key players in the strategy, according to this new report in the post, are mike pence and ted cruz. mitch mcconnell allegedly relying on them to shake up and try to get a consensus among republicans. the idea is that cruz can be a conservative firebrand and bring it all home. congress returns on monday. that means, according to this report, there would be just 14 days to pass trumpcare before this new self-imposed deadline before the august recess. i should note the obvious that you may know even if you are watching politics here on a friday night, and we welcome it. not everyone else is as focused on this in august. i m going to talk to my panel in a second about why that might be part of the strategy. meanwhile, senators openly questioning what s in the senate bill. senator jerry moran at a listening tour in kansas. we don t want to just go through the motions of some kind of legislation that we say is going to solve the problem when i m not and others are not yet convinced that what path we re on is going to actually make a difference in the cost to you, your family, and your businesses. now, why would a republican from that deep red state be potentially wobbling on the bill? here s some of what senator moran is hearing. americans don t work hard all their lives to have an american dream and get somewhere just to say, oh, okay. yeah, you can have all my taxpayer money, and i m going to go over here and curl up and die because you think i don t deserve health care. joining me now, a washington columnist for the boston globe, and also joan walsh, national affairs correspondent for the nation. joan, andy card used to say, you don t roll out a big product in august, or at least not a product you re excited about. not something you really want to sell. you want to wait until the fall when you re excited about something. i remember that too. this is crazy. also the idea of ted cruz as pitchman. i mean i know he s doing some weird ideological shape-shifting by suggesting that maybe they cut not cut but actually leave the taxes, some of the taxes in place. he s trying to act like, you know, the firefighter on the scene, but he s widely despised by his colleagues. i mean al franken, you know, joked that i know what you re going to say. i know. you know, people hate him more than i do, and i hate him. so this is a very, very weird situation. also people like jerry moran are home and hearing about why people are afraid of what they re trying to do. right. so i have no idea what they re doing. they should have talked to andy card. well, it has a patina of panic, but it may be a reflection that they think in the light of day, in the fall, you know, open season, the bill has no shot. so maybe august is the only shot. now, indira, i m going to put it to you straight here. i ain t that old, but i m old enough to remember when if you got a bad cbo score on a piece of national policy legislation, the response was to reform the underlying legislation to get a better cbo score. i mean people in both parties said, okay, we care about the numbers. if the thing is too expensive or has too many negative consequences, we ll fix it and go back to the cbo. instead let me read, quote, the goal will now be to counter the non-partisan cbo analysis of the legislation which shows 22 million fewer people would have insurance coverage, and to counter it to show from conservative groups and other republicans who say there are more benefits and less disruptions should the bill pass. translation, they don t want to fix anything that the cbo found. they want to point to alternative sources that make the bill look ostensibly better. well, alternative sources sounds an awful lot like alternative facts, ari. the problem here is that as you say, in the past the idea was to fight fire with fire. if the facts were that the cbo said this doesn t work, then you tried to find a way to fix it and make it work. this trump administration and also the republican leadership in the senate don t seem to want to try to fix it. they want to counter it and say, no, that s fake news. that s not true. let s just counter it with our own information. but what you said, i thought, was really interesting, that there was a tinge of panic or a patina of panic in the air, and they have ever good reason to be panicked, and why? an analysis that came out of m.i.t., and these are people who understand math unlike most people in america, and i would say that includes most of us. they analyzed of all the polls of looking at attention to, you know, legislation over the last 30 years. this is the least popular piece of legislation in 30 years. wow. you know, last month it was polling at 12%. i mean wow because it s not like every other piece of legislation that an unpopular congress has ever talked about is also beloved. so that s really saying something. i did say patina of panic, and that s because i like alliteration. i have a simple mind and it helps me remember things. we are going to fit in a quick break. when we come back, vladimir putin s controversial joke to donald trump. what if we pull customer insights from the data in real time? wait, our data center and our clouds can t connect? michael, can we get this data to.? look at me.look at me. look at me. you used to be the yes guy. what happened to that guy? legacy technology can handcuff any company. but yes is here. so, you re saying we can cut delivery time? yeah. with help from hpe, we can finally work the way we want to. with the right mix of hybrid it, everything computes. anticipated meeting between donald trump and vladimir putin, there was something caught on tape. it was a joke, and it was a joke about journalists. this was right after the official photo opp ended. news camera crews were just starting to break down. thank you, everyone. these are the ones, lol. but it s actually not that funny. when you think about the fact that of course both these men have tangled with the press. and while no prosecutor has ever accused donald trump of criminally violating the first amendment, he has of course been roundly criticized for everything from publicizing false stories to mocking an american journalist s handicap, to allegedly threatening to impugn journalists who want call and apologize to him for their coverage. there is no moral equivalence between that kind of conduct and vladimir putin s track record. that s why it was shocking to see an american president laughing with putin, who according to reports like this one in business insider has been accused of being involved in the deaths of more than two dozen journalists in his own country. indira and joan are back with us. joan, your thought watching that exchange between them. it was kind of horrifying. you know, putin is obviously trying to cozy up with trump. trump is trying to cozy up with him. but the idea that these two really authoritarians are making common cause around, you know, the free press, the allegedly free press, is scary. and trump needed his backing. i mean trump is kind of like the odd ball at these global meetings now. he s sort of an outcast because he s behaved so abominably. putin showed up today like he was going to be the one that protects the odd kid from the bullies or other kids. that s what it felt like when he was like, this is what s going on with the they re bonding over something. over that. over something really kind of awful. indira, joan calls trump the odd ball. others said it sometimes looked like g19 plus one. put this exchange about journalists in that context. here s the larger context. the larger context is that since 1993, 60 journalists have been murdered in russia. so whether vladimir putin was directly involved with those murders or not, certainly the russian regime has shown no love for journalists or the free media. it jails them. it, you know, has certainly been responsible for the murder of many of them. it is a very serious problem to try to conduct any kind of independent journalism in russia. it s just not possible. and our president has cozied up not only to vladimir putin as an authoritarian leader who has no respect for the press, but also turkey s leader, erdogan, egyptian leader sisi. he s made very flattering remarks about the philippine leader, duterte. all of these men who are strongmen, who have cracked down on the free press at home, it s appalling that these comments would be made in a country that is supposed to be setting an example. in warsaw, he also made comments that, you know, were attacking the free press. we re supposed to be out there as a beacon for the rest of the world, and it is disturbing that someone would make a joke on this. i want to say why would vladimir putin do this? let s not forget he was the head of the kgb. he was the head of the state spy and security service. he knows very well how to do personality profiling to know how to appeal to someone s weaknesses and strengths, and he knows this appeals to trump s ego. trump is obsessed with the press. appeal to him. cozy up to him by saying something like this. and to undercut any potential future u.s. statement about the treatment of journalists in the country, which would just dredge up that video which, to some eyes, would be embarrassing. thank you as always. i appreciate your insights tonight. thank you, ari. while trump was abroad, the top ethics watchdog for the federal government resigned. we ll tell you why next. i m going to break down his new msnbc exclusive interview. no, please, please, oh! 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could still see the potential for damage with flash flooding as well. the yellow track irma, the red track, maria. maria will make a right-hand turn, at least we think so. we always wait for that turn, guys. right now we hope it s a gutter ball between bermuda and the u.s. 48. with all of the attention on maria, we seem to have forgotten for a second about hurricane jose. is that doing anything right now? yes, let me get to it. it s here on this graphic. hurricane jose, it will eventually die out in the atlantic, but right now a category 1, category 2, somewhere in there, and then dying to a category nothing in about 48 hours, but will take a long time. this is sunday. it s almost five days away now and it s still sitting in the same place making waves and wind. the waves and the rip currents across the northeast are tremendous today. stay out of the water, please. that s all you need to do. chad meyers, we will take your advance. thank you. puerto rico is bracing for a direct hit from hurricane maria, that will happen tomorrow. nick valencia is live in san juan. good morning, nick. reporter: we have already started to see conditions deteriorate. walk with me a little bit and i will show you what we are dealing with on the beach. these waves are starting to swell, and the clouds are starting to creep into the blue sky and eat up what is left of it. we still see people on the beach. earlier we saw some of the hotel officials trying to keep people off the beach and they are not listening clearly and want to get in their last good swim before what local officials say will be great wind and rain tonight. there was a press conference on facebook live and said conditions will get worse and worse by the hour, and reminded people that flood something a major problem. one of the locals told us we are in a flood zone, and on the inside of a lagoon. this area floods during a normal rain event and that s not expected to be the case tomorrow but expected to be a category 5. shelters have been put in place, about 500 across the island. we understand it s being reported that some food is being rationed, including baby formula. they want to make sure everybody has resources at their disposal once the storm hits. we can t expect miracles. this storm is not going to change and people here are preparing for the worst. alisyn. thank you and be careful. we will check back with you. sources tell cnn u.s. investigators wiretapped former trump chairman paul manafort before and after the election. we have broken this story and we have all of the breaking details about why the government was listening to somebody so close to the president. and tell us everything you have learned. sources tell us that the fbi got permission from the secret surveillance court to monitor the former campaign chairman before and after the election. this is an extraordinary step for the fbi to do surveillance of a high-ranking campaign person, and there are interceptions that raised concerns about whether manafort was encouraging russia to help the campaign, and other sources tell us the investigation was not conclusive. robert mueller has been told of this. what does that mean? there s a lot we don t know about what was said. we were told the fbi does have communications between russian operatives relaying communications involving manafort himself. none of this amounted to what officials tell us is considered a smoking gun in the investigation, and there s a lot more work being done to determine if there s a criminal violation here. manafort has previously denied he knowingly communicated with russian intelligence operatives during the election, and he s also denied helping russia undermine u.s. interests. evan, why two separate times? why did they get two fisa warrants to monitor him? the order that began on manafort began back when he was a subject of an fbi agent in 2014 and that centered on work that was being done by a group of washington consulting firms, including his, for ukraine s that the president and manafort were still talk into earlier this year, and that s well after the campaign and after the president took office. during this time the fbi was listening to manafort and it s possible those conversations were collected. you remember the president tweeted that trump power oh, yeah. was wiretapped. does this mean he was right? well, it doesn t. the justice department denies the own lines were wiretapped but it s possible conversations were picked up with manafort. as recently as last week the justice department told a certain court it would not conform or deny where there was a fisa on any of this. what does it all mean now for that robert mueller investigation? it points to the fact that prosecutors and lawyers working for him are pushing forward on manafort. it s not clear what the plan here is, but as best as we can determine they do plan to charge him. this is something the new york times reported last night, and according to our own sources, that s accurate. the picture that is emerging they are going to use financial issues, tax issues and possible financial crimes to put pressure on him and perhaps use that to flip him. whether he has any actual information to provide for this broader investigation is a big question, but, again, the big unanswered question is what has been found to prove whether there s any crime in the weird connections that have emerged between the trump campaign associates and the russian government. evan, thank you so much for sharing all of that exclusive reporting with us. let s bring in our legal plan that will jeffrey taouza, and chris cillizza, and susan hennessy. great to have all of you. jeffrey, evan just gave us so much information there. let s start at the end. their reporting suggests that paul manafort will be charged with something and that they then might try to flip him or use him somehow to get to something different, bigger, more information. what does that tell you? it tells you they think paul manafort is the key to the investigation. if you look at the tactics, especially the search warrant at his house, which is very unusual for a white collar crime investigation, not unprecedented, but an extremely unprecedented tactic and it suggests they think paul manafort is still hiding things from them, and they want to get him to tell the truth and plead guilty in the process. whether he has committed any crime and whether he has any information to implicate others, we don t know. it certainly shows the mueller investigation thinks manafort is the key to the investigation. susan hennessy, you were trying to explain the significance of the developments overnight, and it was in 30,000 words, and i will sum it up in one word, really significant. you point out the timeframe as fascinating. the first fisa was before the campaign and the second after. so it s not necessarily clear as we sit here this morning what robert mueller might go after him for. exactly. there really do appear to be two distinct investigations, but there are connections. the first one, the early fisa warrant was for his connections to ukrainian government officials, and that predates the campaign, and the second one was related to the investigation into the russian and campaign official contacts, and the connective tissue there is paul manafort, and his connection to individuals with russian interests and connections to that country, but we are talking about two separate buckets here. what is interesting, as jeffrey mentioned, that mueller s team does appear to be mount pressure and be aggressive on paul manafort, and the real question is what else might he know? obviously this is huge and breaking and exclusive that cnn has. this is more specific and bigger than things that we had heard previously. the new york times also has new reporting with color about what was going on at paul manafort s house while robert mueller s team is trying to poke around and get more information. so here s this from the new york times. manafort was in bed early morning in july when an agent picked the lot on his front door and raided his home, and they took binders and copied his computer files and photographed the expensive suits in his closet, and then the prosecutors told mr. manafort they planned to indict him. your wheelhouse as politics, what does this all mean politically? i thought tommy lee jones is going to play mueller in the movie. that kind of stuff really sounds like movie they are picking the lock and take pictures of the suits and issuing warnings. to susan s point, they are taking a very aggressive approach here. i think you guys evan about this, and what i have seen politically speak something what you are see something trump and his associates trying to c conflight in some ways to prove donald trump s tweet in early march he had been wiretapped, and that s wrong, right? it s just wrong. paul manafort being wiretapped and donald trump being wiretapped by the orders of barack obama, that s not the same thing. again, it s so important to remember. this operates on two tracks. yes, there s a political track. there s the attempt to discredit bob mueller, and donald trump is saying again and again this is a witch hunt. the legal track continues and continues aggressively and really operates in a lot of ways, while, of course, the political pressures are there, and operates totally separate from it. no matter what is said, well, see, donald trump was right bob mueller and his investigation continues on here the way that politics is not terribly influenced by it. can i make one point about the investigation. we put a lot of emphasis on who will testify, will donald trump, jr., testify? these cases are made on evidence, paper trail, that s where this case is going to stand or fall. we know that witnesses by and large are not going to implicate donald trump if they are not forced to buy a paper or electronic paper. the fact that there are tapes and e-mails, that s what this case is really going to come down to, not the testimony. there are tapes, again, a significant phrase right there that we could not have said yesterday because we did not know that to be the case. susan hennessy, chris used the term plotting along, and i am not disagreeing with chris cillizza. one thing to keep in mind, there are a lot of different threats. one investigation into paul manafort, and investigations into michael flynn. there are a lot of pieces. this is an indication that the manafort piece of this investigation has progressed to the next phase. if he has, in fact, received a target letter, it s not clear from the new york times reporting what occurred but he has been informed he s going to be indicted. that might mean robert mueller is prepared for the next stage, which is the next stage. in trump s judgment, remember that first the ukrainian fisa warrant on manafort well predates him on the campaign, and he had done a lot of work in foreign countries, and some of it that had raised questions. i heard those sorts of things when manafort was brought on, and yet donald trump instituted him at the top of his campaign in order to try and secure him the nomination. that s not a legal thing but it does get to the judgment factor. you could have seen the potential problem with paul manafort coming a mile away. this was not something that even with the most basic digging you might have been able to surface. in terms of the different areas of investigation, the one that we should not forget is the whole idea of a possible obstruction of justice by firing james comey who was investigating the president. that is obviously another major focus of the mueller investigation. again, it s no small thing when a president s campaign chair is indicted. if that happens, that s a giant, giant thing. we tend to overlook the significance of that one statement. thank you very much. donald trump is preparing to make his first address at the united nations. how will he balance his america first policy with a call on world leaders to work together. we will discuss that coming up. . kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin trusted advice for life. kevin, how s your mom? 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i think it s possible. the world is confusing. i am not sure anybody could make sense of it, including tony blair who admits that. i would have to give trump high marks with north korea. the obama administration focussed on iran and not north korea and now north korea is the most dangerous place in the world and trump is focusing on it. from what i hear he will read his text today and stay within boundaries. nicky capable is very capable at the u.n. this is his biggest foreign policy stage so far in his presidency and he might say things that are helpful in clarifying how he sees the world and how the rest of the countries in the world who are also worried about north korea see the world. he has been talking and what he said yesterday at the u.n. is different than what he said on the campaign trail, and yesterday he was talking about how the u.n. does have problems, so let me play for you what he said yesterday, how he characterized it. in recent years the united nations has not reached its full p potential because of bureaucracy and mismanagement, and while the united nations on a regular budget increased 140%, and its staff has doubled since 2000, we are not seeing the results in line with this investment, but i know under the secretary general that s changing and it s changing fast. what did you think about what you heard yesterday and how different it was than what he said previously about the u.n.? alisyn, it reminded me about the things he used to say about nato. remember during the campaign he would say nato was obsolete and the u.n. was undemocratic. he said nato was no longer obsolete once he came in, and in the united nations case, he has a reasonable argument to make that the bureaucracy has gotten out of control and the return on the investment the country s make, particularly the united nations, which is obviously the largest supporter of the u.n. has been relatively low. he s got a difficult balancing act today as jane eluded to. the first is he comes as a president that talked about america first and he s in a building that is 15 blocks and a world away from trump tower, which is to say that it s all about the world first and the united states as one if the most powerful among many nations. walking that line will be difficult. and with iran, he has to make the argument he will leave the agreement, the 2015 iran nuclear accord if it doesn t get amended, extended and so forth. he will probably be a little vague about what his standards will be. this is difficult because the european countries are not coming with him if the u.s. goes out. and then on korea, he s got the additional problem that it s hard to make the argument you will reach a diplomatic agreement with the north koreans. if they have seen you just leave or threaten to leave a nuclear agreement with iran, and they would say why would we trust this administration. there s a lot of inner relationship he doesn t have to deal with during the campaign, but he does have to deal with as president. it s more under discussion right now with north korea, the so-called military action. james mattis looking at all different possibilities. he noted the united states has not tried to shoot down any of the north korean missile launches yet because they were not headed towards the united states or guam, but it s possible they might try to do that in the future. does that move the bar at all? well, it certainly would seem to me to move it because right now the u.s. has only done this if they thought they were threatened. i would be interested to hear what congresswoman harmon has to say about this, but shooting down a missile not aimed at your territory is a risky act, but it would start us down the road to conflict. what do you think? a couple things. david is a former and future scholar at the history center so he s smart. it s risk, and intercepting at boost phase on the launch pad is riskier. what will the north koreans understand this to be if we do this. 20 million people in south korea. on the other hand, the message isn t received yet. we have to contain this program. the world wants to contain this program. i strongly agree with what david said about iran, if the trump administration tries to get out of that deal it will send a very disturbing and destabilizing message to north korea. iran is complying with that deal. all of the intelligence agencies think it is. it has engaged in provocative behavior in the region, but that was not part of the deal. and that deal was a transaction, not a transformation. we need to be very, very careful. i think the trump team is doing a much better job, and he was praising the team and i want to praise nikki haley. i think she s doing a star turn as our representative at the u.n. that s good to hear. thank you very much for being with us. the gop is taking another shot at repealing obamacare. days ago they have a new plan that they are putting forward against the deadline of september 30th. what are democrats planning to do to stop this? we have a senator here next. experience a shift in the natural order. experience amazing. this is a bill that would deny millions of americans health insurance. it would mean that medicaid, which 70 million americans depend on in new hampshire, the expansion of medicaid gave health care coverage, and what it would do is kick people off of their treatment and it would wind up meaning people with pre-existing conditions would have to pay more or be denied insurance coverage. this is just the same kind of mean-spirited effort to deny coverage to people across the country. i mean, senator johnson sounded pretty bull yish on ish morning, and he said some of the republican holdouts, senator john mccain, they were going to be able to find some sort of deals, give them some sort of sweeteners for their state that would get them onboard to pass this. well, that may be the case. they are certainly reshuffling money so it s going to many red states, and in new hampshire we would lose $410 million, and ohio, they would lose upwards of $2 billion. the issue is it s the same problem with the process. this is legislation that has not had a hearing or bipartisan support. the sad thing is also that it s going to derail attempts by lamar alexander and patty murray who are making a strong bipartisan effort to address the immediate uncertainty in the insurance market that is affecting so many in the country, and it s hard to understand why there s a driving effort to pass a partisan piece of legislation that would deny people their health care. thinking of bipartisanship, i want to ask you about what you have seen in terms of protecting the d.r.e.a.m.ers. as you know nancy pelosi and chuck schumer sat down with trump in a surprise move, and president trump seemed to side with them and they say they will craft something to protect d.r.e.a.m.ers, and then something unusual happened yesterday, senator, nancy pelosi was met with backlash. he was in san francisco, and she was at a news conference and young i believe, d.r.e.a.m.ers, certainly young people were shouting at her and chanting. let me play a moment of this so you can react. you have cut off the d.r.e.a.m.ers who are here to speak. [ yelling ] [ chanting ] let us speak! let us speak! part of what they were chanting is let us speak, and it seemed she was allowing them to, but why of all people is she getting the backlash from d.r.e.a.m.ers? d.r.e.a.m.ers and young people across the country are frustrated, and they want to go to college and join the military and get jobs and be americans, which is what they are. this is the only country most of them have ever known. she s the person who is pushing the president to help, right? she is. i think the good news that we have heard from both republicans and democrats that believe we need to do something to protect the d.r.e.a.m.ers, and that s one i am certainly going to continue to work on. again, i am just confused about why they are holding nancy pelosi at fault here. do they not like she is working with the president on this? who knows what stirred up the an ph animosity. we saw it in charlottesville, russia, we don t know what is behind this, but what we do know is we need to take action to protect the d.r.e.a.m.ers to allow them to stay in america. let s talk about what is happening today at the u.n. what are you looking for and what do you want to hear president trump say? i hope the president will continue his more moderated comments about the role of the united nations and the world. it s very important for peace keeping efforts and important to address negotiations in hot spots around the world. i hope he will talk about the importance of american leadership in the world. we know that s what countries across the world are looking for. when we don t continue our leadership position, countries like china and russia and other rogue nations step in. it s important for us to continue a leadership role and i hope the president will reaffirm that. thank you, senator, for being with us on new day. hurricane maria now an extremely powerful storm tearing through the caribbean and aiming right at puerto rico. we will bring you its track next. certainly a cat 5. it s over warm water and there s no shear there, so puerto rico you are in the way. now is the time to make final preps and get in a safe place. it will be uncomfortable. there will be a lot of people in the strong buildings but 3.5 million people need to get out of the way. last time we had a big storm, only 1.5 million people. florida is different because of the migration there. and antigua is where michael holmes joins us live. michael. reporter: yeah, all night and right through this morning so far you can see the conditions behind me. the seas are just pounding out there, and trees have received damage and the hotel we are staying in, actually, but the real concern in dominica. we heard it from the prime minister before communications went dark that his own house had been badly damaged and he has been evacuated. we heard from radio operators that got word out that there has been structural damage here. we talked to a pilot that flies these islands for a living and he said a couple years ago a tropical storm did damage on dominica, and this is a category 5, communications are down and we are not sure what is going on there. guadeloupe also hit. that storm is 120 miles southwest of where i am now and you can see what it s doing to antiqua. less than two hours from now president trump will give a speech in front of the u.n. general assembly. we ll have that next. today s senior living communities have never been better, with amazing amenities like movie theaters, exercise rooms and swimming pools, public cafes, bars and bistros even pet care services. and there s never been an easier way to get great advice. a place for mom is a free service that pairs you with a local advisor to help you sort through your options and find a perfect place. a place for mom. you know your family we know senior living. together we ll make the right choice. reminds me of how geico hasd been saving people money for over 75 years. hey, big guy! come on in! let me guess your weight! win a prize! sure, why not. 12 ounces! sorry, mate. four ounces. i ve been taking the stairs lately. you win, big guy. sorry, scuse me! oh, he looks so much more real on tv. yeah. over 75 years of savings and service. get your rate quote today. lights, camera strike a pose your eyes work as hard as you do. but do they need help making more of their own tears? 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i think it does. the president of the united states has enormous power. i always said when president s speak it could send army s marching and markets tumbling, and here you have to hear from him on american policy, and it s significant. this is not just another political event. this is happening with this new cnn report overnight, the exclusive from cnn, paul manafort had his phones tabbed with fisa warrants twice during the campaign. this is not a drip but a torrent of water coming down on him. they wiretapped him after the election as well and into the first months of the trump presidency. did they capture conversations about the president and manafort talking about this particular case? did the president in any way signify to man fort that he s got his back? these are questions we don t know the answer to. certainly if i were the president s lawyers, i would be concerned about that. and clearly the government is squeezing manafort very hard, and that s how the investigations work. you take down people below your top target and you squeeze them and see what you can get. hillary clinton was asked about this yesterday in terms of if there were a bigger bombshell, if the mueller investigation leads somewhere, to a real smoking gun, something really significant, what would she do? let s listen to this. would you completely rule out questioning the legitimacy of the election if we learn the russian interference of the election no. you wouldn t rule it out? no. i am not sure when she answered that question she knewette. she has been subtly questioning the legitimacy of the election in many ways. her book focuses on the russia incursion and comey. we have constitutional processes to remove a president. i don t know there s a processes to invalidate an election. i would be very careful about how we approach all of this, because at the end of the day this is about a larger issue, which is our democracy. we don t want to undermine peoples faith. we want our processes to work. i think people think she meant somehow the election is invalidated, and i am not sure that s what she was suggesting. she will have to speak for herself. i read that and thought more is being made of it than it should. i think she think s there s questions about the legitimacy of the election now. have a great day. cnn special s coverage of the president trump s address to the u.n. general assembly will start after this break with wolf blitzer taking over. kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin kevin trusted advice for life. kevin, how s your mom? 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operators this week, but and i called one individual usually pretty connected and said any upcoming attacks that we don t know about? have you run the traps as well? well, i ve been focusing on the mueller trump russia news tonight, brian, but it s just so remarkable that there are so many possibilities here because of the posture of this administration. north korea, iran, yemen. we re taking military action in countries around the world where we haven t been before. you know, they re really leaning on the balls of their feet here in terms of the military and people are wondering, you know, what could be next. yeah. i think that s why people were so concerned when they backed away and looked at the substance of what the president said tonight. counselor, help us turn the corner into the mueller investigation. so mueller s associates have found the author of the dossier. we learn this a day after there were complaints in the senate that they haven t found, nor is he cooperating with them. does the mueller team get to be the first and last american interview with this gentleman? is mueller chief among equals of all the people investigating this? usually that s how it works. the senate and the house are working on this as well, of course, but so far they ve been deferring to the mueller investigation. and that s really the way that it should be because criminal charges are going to take precedence over any sort of impeachment proceedings or anything else that happens. we know that mueller is going to be writing a report when he s done about what happened here and in the case that criminal charges are not brought that report, of course, will go to the congress for any action that they may take. so it makes sense that mueller would go firs and also actually that steele would prefer to talk to mueller and his team. why is that? well, he s an intel officer, a former british intel officer. he s used to dealing with law enforcement. he s probably more comfortable in that world rather than dealing with congress, elected politicians. i think he d be a little bit happier to be with mueller and his team. so even to a brit, who has spent time in the intel world, this is a case where mueller s resume and reputation may have gained him entree that the senate has been unable to get. of course. i mean, mueller was fbi director for ten years, so i m sure that he even knows mueller and his work from his time with prish intel, trusts him as pretty much everyone seems to. i m not surprised that he was able to interview steele. ken, on the dossier, you noticed something about the senate briefing yesterday, the press briefing, just the way they were approaching the subject and dealing with it. i found it remarkable that the republican chairman of the senate intelligence committee richard burr basically said that while they haven t been able to corroborate many parts of the dossier, they did he used the word rebuild. i think he meant they were constructing a timeline in trying to line updates and times and facts. essentially they ve krobld parts of it. and i went back and checked with some sources to make sure i m understanding that correctly. it s absolutely what they re saying. they re not telling us which parts, but it s just remarkable to me that at this stage in the investigation you have mueller going with his team to interview stooem because after all the fbi has had this information in the dossier for many months. so what this tells me is they are now following up, following new leads. they want more information and this dossier, don t forget is a very i mean, it makes alarming allegations that donald trump is completely compromised by russia and that russian intelligence had completely infiltrated the trump campaign. eli, what ken just said is the kind of factual charge in chief in the document. the document also, how do i say this, contains a pornographic and decidedly none high generalic portion. knowing this was in the public sphere, donald trump who was enough of a germ oh phone to go a long time in his life preferring not to shake hands, especially at large gatherings, donald trump came out, talked to the media about this dossier. you re going to rescue me after we listen to donald trump. when i leave our country, i m a very high profile person, would you say? i am extremely careful. i was in russia years ago with the miss universe contest which did very well. the moscow area. did very, very well. and i told many people be careful, because you don t want to see yourself on television. cameras all over the place. and again, want just russia, all over. does anyone really believe that story? i m also very much of a germ aphone, by the way. believe me. what was notable about that answer and why it was a laugh line in the room, most of us in the mainstream media had not yet and still have not talked about the details in the dossier, knowing that people who want to read it can. they can and i don t know that we need to talk in great detail about it right now. we do not. but i will remind you that the campaign also had a partner graphic shall we say portion to it that was embarrassing for the president, the access hollywood tape and he survived that. i don t think at this point the president is worried about embarrassment. most of the salacious details in that dossier they did come out in the campaign and that s what precipitated that press conference right there. what keeps the president up at night what eats at him and what he conveys in private conversations i m told with people whom he speaks with about this investigation is the overarching concern about his legitimacy as a president, his presidency in whole in terms of what happens down the road. there s this uncertainty hanging over him that eats at him. it frustrates him. and anything just not knowing what s going to happen is something i think for a guy who is so reflexive in terms of tweeting all his inner most feelings, it s a little remarkable that we haven t heard witch-hunt, we haven t heard him complaining much publicly about this. he s still very concerned about this. you go back to the dossier and the things that are in that and the 2013 pageant in moscow and what was happening, some of the people who were around him then, his associates who ernds who are russians, they are part of this investigation. they re part of some of these people are the same people who were involved in setting up that meeting in trump tower where they were offering the information about hillary clinton. so there s a lot of overlapping circles here, and i think the president is just scared. he just wants to to be over. the people around him have had some success at tam ping down. counselor, if you re ty cobb over at the white house and you hear that mueller s folks have talked to steele, what are you thinking? oh, i think they re all terr pied. ty cobb is a very experienced lawyer, so i m sure he knows how to deal with this sort of thing. up, it s crisis time at the white house. they re having to gather up these documents and hand these things over. the mueller team is starting to purview people within the white house. it s crunch time. and so i think that they re all very worried about what will happen. and if you re mueller s person and by all accounts he has really put together kind of an all star legal team. what document to know from steele? do you ask steele show us your homework. exactly. so the dossier itself is not going to be usable evidence and steele himself is not going to be usable because he doesn t have personal knowledge. you need to get to under the dossier to the sources. they ll go to the sources themselves. they ll then try to corroborate those sources with other sources. evidence that actually can be used in ray court of law and not just kind of things that are good enough for an oppo report. there you have it. two journalists and a former assistant u.s. attorney in new york. it must be thursday night on our broadcast. first break for us and coming up, rex tillerson called to the white house amid this fall out and the boss s anger over being called a moron. new report on the ground that when the 11th hour continues on a thursday night. we re just getting started. hi, i m the internet! you know what s difficult? adulting. tj! get a job! hi, guys. i m back. time to slay! heals, heals, heals! yes! youuuu! no, i have a long time girlfriend. mom! i need my macaroni!!! you know what s easy? building your website with godaddy. pick a domain name. choose a design. you can build a website in under an hour. yeah! whoo! yes! get your domain today and get a free trial of gocentral. build a better website in under an hour. so we created the only bed that adjusts on both sides to your ideal comfort, your sleep number setting. you can even see how well you re sleeping and make adjustments. does your bed do that? the most amazing part is they start at $699. that s $200 off our queen c2 mattress. and free home delivery on select beds only during our fall sale. ends monday. visit sleepnumber.com for a store near you. the president is the leertd of the cabinet. he sets the tone. he sets the agenda, and i think that question makes no sense because of that. that s how the white house publicly handled the nbc news reporting that the secretary of state rex tillerson called the president he seshs a moron. privately tonight s new reporting says this. trump was furious when he saw the nbc news report, which was published shortly before 6:00 a.m. wednesday. for the next two hours the president fumd inside the white house, venting to kelly, officials said. nbc news can also report the chief of staff john kelly summoned tillerson to the white house and they were joined by mattis. the three men apparently huddled to discuss a path forward. with us to talk about all of it, axios national political reporter jonathan swan and white house correspondent for bloomberg shannon pettypiece. we welcome both back to our broadcast. jonathan, let s bump the focus out to a wider shot here. how bad, how poisonous is the relationship now, in your view, based on those you re talking to and is this at all sustainable? it s really bad. it s actually worse than i thought it was 24 hours ago. look, we reported three weeks ago that the relationship was terrible. we reported some things that trump had been saying about rex tillerson privately, that he just doesn t get it. that he s totally establishment in his thinking. he had alienated just about every constituency in washington. but in the past 24 hours, yes, trump has put on a public face of it s all fake news. i have full confidence in rex. his private face has been completely different. i now know have high degree of confidence in that based on conversation i ve had over the past 24 hours. their relationship is terrible. he views rex as being disloyal. he doesn t understand why rex couldn t just have come out and said no, i didn t call the president of the united states a moron. so, yes, it s really bad and i m yet to speak to anyone inside the white house who views this as a sustainable situation. that s not to say that, you know, i have any reporting to suggest that he s going to get fired on, you know, friday or anything remotely like that, but nobody thinks that this can continue. it s an unsustainable situation. all right, shannon. jonathan has nicely set up the equation here. here is the other part of this. with so many dar tours lately and especially given the number of foreign countries who vener ate the job of united states secretary of state may more than our president generates the job and title and role, can they afford a departure anytime soon? i think that and two other things may be the only things that tillerson has in his favor at this point based on i agree with a lot of what jonathan said. one, optically it would look bad because the president has already come out and called this a made up story, fake news, called on congress to investigate fake news. so if he fired tillerson now based off this report, he would be acknowledging that it was true and that his own secretary of state thought he was a moron. so i think there s going to have to be a little bit of time that passes. and, you know, despite the thakt that he doesn t have a lot of allies coming to his defense, he does have three really good advocates inside the white house right now in pence, kelly and mattis, who at least for now seem to be advocating for him and trying to keep him in that position. but unlike the price situation, there isn t this ground swell of support coming from the hill, from former administration officials from within the white house. with sessions that was really a red line. i don t hear that similar talk with tillerson. i think a lot of us who cover this white house now, we would be really, really surprised if tillerson is here long after his one year anniversary. maybe it makes it until then, but i felt like from the first month of this administration i thought it would be a surprised if he made it past one year, but i think we all feel increasingly so now. jonathan, where is that infrastructure package? that s my way of asking the next question. how much time and energy has this sapped from the administration and core lar aerl, how much work got done this week? well, again, these news cycles consume the president. he has obviously been dealing with las vegas and puerto rico. look, infrastructure has gone nowhere. i understand that that s just your way into this whole situation. what they have got now is a big problem ahead of them, which is continuing resolution to fund the government coming up in december. we ve got a defense plus up that who knows if they re going to get anywhere near the number that the defense hawks what. and guess what? they ve also got tax reform. that s still very, very, very thin at the moment. so they ve got a whole lot of lemgts laib work ahead of them and there s still huge problems internally. just asking as a taxpayer. you could brak a tooth driving across town in new york and so many other cities. shannon, do you, do we believe the stand by meesque band of brothers, these three, tillerson, kelly and mattis, this agreement they ve formed, one for all, all for one. if one of us is under attack, the three of us may consider leaving? i do. i think you re missing an important one too which is dunford, the joint chiefs of staff. i think tillerson, mattis and dunford, they re marines, they re generals. i think that is a real band of brothers there. i think possibly mcmaster also. he s not ma reasons, but a former military man. i think tillerson may be a bit on the outskirts of that because he does not share he has not literally been to war in the battle with these guys. but, you know, he is sort of globd on to their alliance here. so for now. but we re certainly going he s going to have to play his cards right. they re not going to be able to pull everything for him. all right. thank you very much. what an interesting conversation tonight. and there are so many moving parts. jonathan swan, shannon pettypiece, i hope both of you will consider rejoining us on this broadcast very, very soon and as soon as you have more news. coming up after our next break, trump has gone after the iran deal like it s a hobbled zebra in a nature special. but is he still as patiently against it as he once was or is he looking for an out? that and more as we continue. serious brain infection caused by a virus may be possible. tell your doctor if you have an infection, experience frequent infections, or have flu-like symptoms, or sores. liver problems can occur with entyvio. if your uc or crohn s medication isn t working for you, ask your gastroenterologist about entyvio. entyvio. relief and remission within reach. call prepared remarks. president trump today emphasized his displeasure with the iran nuclear deal, continuing a trend that stretches from the very beginning reaches of his campaign throughout his presidency thus far. i think the deal is horrible. i think the deal is absolutely horrible. kerry might be worse because he s making a deal with iran that is so bad and so dangerous and so incompetent and student that it will have grave consequences. i don t know if you ve been seeing what s going on with iran. they violated one of the worst deals i ve ever seen negotiated at any level. i m not talking about country. i m talking about at any level. this is the dumbest agreement i think i ve ever seen. as far as iran is concerned, i think they are doing a tremendous disservice to an agreement that was signed. it was a terrible agreement. it shouldn t have been signed. it shouldn t have been negotiated the way it was negotiated. i m all for agreements, but that was a bad one, as bad as i ve ever seen negotiated. the iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the united states has ever entered into. frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the united states. well now there s this. the washington post reports president trump plans to announce next week that he will decertify the international deal with iran saying it is not in the interest of the united states and kicking the issue to a reluctant congress. joining me now, joe certificate even scene president of the plow shares fund and author of these books pertinent to this conversation. so he s a romantic comedy writer. rick sentencing el. gentlemen, welcome. and joe, i d like to begin with you. what was the president basing that criticism on lo these many months? do you think he actually did a granular destruction of the iran deal or who had his ear, question one. and question two is for americans smart enough to be watching this broadcast tonight, what s in it for them? why should they if your view is support the iran deal? well, brian, it would be very interesting to know if the president understands what s in the iran deal. if somebody were to ask him to describe it because it s very hard to believe that the president would disagree with the deal that required iran to shrink its program down to a fracture of its former size before the deal and then wrap it in an unprecedented verification procedure. i don t understand why the president doesn t believe his national security team when they tell him to a person the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser, that this is a good deal in america s national security interests. i don t think he understands what s in it. incompetent he s trapped in this campaign rhetoric. it became a political point. the republicans oppose the deal because of democratic president had negotiated it. and so what s in america s interests right now? this deal is supported by all our allies, all our european allies. it s supported by people who were formerly opposed to the deal like chuck schumer in the senate, like senator cornyn. like the sawed i didn t see, like the israeli and military intelligence leaders. why? because it stops iran from getting a bomb. if the president pulls the plug and pulling out of this agreement that could put us toward pill terry conflict with the middle east at exactly the staple time. that is an extremely dangerous situation. you put it look that it sounds important. rick, so this now go z to congress whereel they always work with deliberate speed and always seem to do the right thing. what is going to happen then. i have to say i have not written any books that are relevant to this agreement with joe, but i agree with everything joe said. the president is still a captive of his campaign rhetoric. anything that barak obama did he has to reverse. and in fact, it s not let s stipulate he hasn t read one of the agreement. i think we can all agree with that. but it s want that difficult. iran was a nuclear threshold state that president, secretary of state, ernie mun ease went in ask basically created a situation where they pulled back. they destroyed reactors. they agreed to enrich plow the approximate.76 level. all of these things which make them not able to do a nuclear warhead. if we had that deal with north korea ten years ago, north korea wouldn t have a nuclear warhead. i actually think people like chuck schumer who were against the deal now came over for it. i think people will be reluctant to decertify it. we will be going against our allies, england, france, russia, china. this would make us so untrust worthy on the international stage. so, joe, you ve been around awhile. if both you guys are right and he s going to do this against a pile of evidence and all the aides in this area around him, that takes a pile of acquiescence. i get that there s one boss in the west wing, but there s a lot of people who are going to have to go against their principles and look the other way if this decision comes down this way. right. this is why they re scrambling. so there s other reports out tonight that mcmaster had a group of senators over to his for dinner on wednesday night, and he indicated that he was very uncomfort alk with this. you clearly see rex tillerson uncomfortable with this. defense secretary mattis testified on wednesday that it was in the u.s. national security interest to keep the deal, to stay in the deal. so they re trying to find some clever way out of this, some way to decertify iran s compliance on the deal on vague national security grounds but somehow stay in the deal. i don t think there s a way to do that. that s why some of these people are so worried that they re trying to do this hugh deany trick, redefine the deal. that s the latest gambit. unilaterally rediefine a deal that you negotiated with seven other countries. we re heading for a train wreck here on american diplomacy that s going to damage u.s. credibility for years to come. how is the state department and our secretary of state currently viewed by our friends overseas? well, our friends overseas don t know what to make of president trump. they were beginning to get acclimated to tillerson and then now they see this rupture that your earlier segment. it cannot be a good relationship and i can t see how tillerson lasts that much longer past his first year as your previous folks said. so i think people around the world are now worried because if that gets unraveled, then you have, you know, chaos as senator corker said. gentlemen, thank you so much. and by the way, everyone who needs the countervailing view of today s politics, buy rick sentencing el s book on man dell la. it will have the desired effect. if you need to be scared by any or all offo s books. thank you, gentlemen, both very much. coming up, is congress ready to take on at least part of the kun control debate by out las vegas just one part of an actual gun that s been in the news a lot this week. we re back with that right after this. my business was going nowhere. so i built this kickin new website with godaddy. building a website in under an hour is easy! 68% of people. .who have built their website using gocentral, did it in. .under an hour, and you can too. type in your business or idea. pick your favourite design. personalize it with beautiful images. and.you re done! and now business is booming. harriet, it s a double stitch not a cross stitch! build a better website - in under an hour. free to try. no credit card required. gocentral from godaddy. this part, which again can be bolted on to the hugely popular long gun, the ar 15 type rifle and the ak 47. so with us tonight, nbc news correspondent steve patterson who spent some time yesterday out in the nevada desert at one of numerous places in the nevada desert talking with a firearms expert about the kinds of weapon the gunman owned and used. steve, take it away. explain what this is. reporter: well, brian, in sort of the tragic irony in all this, the larger gun ownership community really before this week considered these bump fire stocks to sort of be something of a novelty, almost like a toy. i mean, nobody seriously involved in the marksmanship community, in the hunting community, certainly in law enforcement or in the military would ever really consider practically using these things. so for the purpose of what we re talking about, obviously semiautomatic rifle, one pull, one shot. fully automatic rifle you hold that trigger down and the gun continues to fire. what this does not do is fully convert a semiautomatic gun to a fully automatic rifle. what it does instead is as you re leaning on that stock, it makes you pull that trigger faster than humanly possible. it is wildly inaccurate. it is unwieldel, but uncan any the way it simulates automatic fire and it s practically haunting. we went to that nevada shooting range. i want you to take a look at this live fire example and we ll talk about it after the junk. so we ve got two semiautomatic women s, long guns. one is outfitted with the bump fire stock. correct. so we just want to know the difference between what it s like for you to squeeze the trigger each time and then what it s like when that bump fire happens. great. yeah. we ll start with the semiauto and i m going to put this trigger as fast as i can. so now we ll go ahead and do the bump fire. right. so you see that there. they re relatively cheap, about 150 to $3. easy to find, easy to install. but the most frustrating thing about these, the glaring loophole here is because every time your finger comes off that trigger and then pulls it again, they are technically legal. that is still technically a semiautomatic rifle. as we mentioned, wildly inaccurate, but if you have an extended magazine, if you have a scope, if you have a tripod, if you re sitting in an elevated position looking down on thousands of people, what the result was, obviously, this week was the worst mass tragedy mass shooting in american history, brian. steve patterson in the background there, of course, is the manned lay bay, hotel and casino in las vegas. steve, thank you so much. and joining our conversation at this point is erica warner, congressional correspondent for the associated press. so erica, how surprised were you? the nra so rarely gives up ground in their decades long fight for all freedoms possibly under the second amendment. how surprised were you that they opened the door today to increased regulation of this part? well, initially it was very surprising to hear not just the nra but before them leading congressional republicans open the door to any gun regulations, which have just been absolutely off the table after sandy hook, after orlando, after steve scalise, the house majority whip was injured in gunfire. but on closer examination there are some reasons that these bump stocks make sense as an area where the nra might be willing to put the cam el s nose into the tent, as they say. one is that as your correspondent was saying, they re very little used. most members of congress had not heard of these. they re not a widely used accessory among gun thuists. they do not account for a lot of re new for industry, which is an increasingly powerful part of the nra board. and as well this is something that can potentially be done by regulation as opposed to legislation. there is not a legislative fight. there s not a vote potentially. it s just done by the administration. and for those reasons this could be a relatively step for the nra to take. i should also add as happens, they are selling so fast and in such numbers because people anticipate losing the opportunity to own them that soon we re going to reach the point where everyone who wants one may have one. back to your other point. what about new town wasn t sad enough after those first graders? what about orlando wasn t sad enough? what is it about vegas that in your view covering that place seems to have prompted some movement? well, this is why those of us who have been around the hill for a while just felt so certain that nothing at all would happen. right. because as senator dine fine steen, who has been a leader on this issue, author of the assault weapons ban that was in effect for ten years before expiring in 2004, she tried to reintroduce that after new town and it went nowhere. and she said that if the sight of all these slaughtered school children doesn t do the trick, then nothing will. but then when it comes to just these bump stocks, this is a very narrow step. nobody nonetheless, it is surprise. but it is a narrow step, really the least they could do by some respects. in fact, democrats including feinstein are already feeling like the nra and republicans are kind of pulling a fast one here in taking aim at a very small device that before this incident had p not been well-known at all and instead of taking the legislative route to permanently ban it, just do a kind of do it by regulation and say, okay, now we ve done something. we ve acted. yeah. i heard one democrat today saying don t confuse this with gun control. this would be novelty device control instead. exactly to your point. erica warner of the associated press. thank you so much for joining us. thank you. and explaining all the politics behind this. another break for us. and coming up, word of another location across america. the gunman in las vegas may have been scouting. that when the 11th hour continues. history. nbc news citing senior law enforcement officials saying the gunman who massacred dozens in las vegas researched possible attack locations in boston and chicago. that s chilling. we have new insight from the gunman s girlfriend reporting, quote, she said he would lie in bed and just said moeng and screaming oh my god, said one of these former officials. joining us now shawn henry, former executive ken did he laneian rejoins us as well. ken, you were the author of all this reporting today. in the course of it, what was the biggest thing you came across. well, brian, that nugget that marilou danley toll the fbi that sherls him in mental anguish, lying in bed moeng, screaming oh, my god. at least gave us some indication that there were some mental problems here. and another source told us, you know, a similar story about mental anguish. that, of course, doesn t explain what happened. there are a lot of people in mental anguish in this country. they don t go out and commit mass shootings. we re really lacking four days after this incident any kind of picture of what the motive is. it s really an anomaly and mystery. but i ll say, though, we don t have the full ikt approximate here. the fbi and local authorities are looking presumably at his e-mail and private correspondence and reportedly a note that was left. and we don t know what s in that stuff, so they obviously know more than we do. but right now it s a haunting mystery as to what his mental state was and what his motive was. okay, shawn, of the three of us, you re the fbi veteran. a couple questions here. a, do you agree with the view that finding his carloaded up with some really dangerous stuff was maybe an indicator he had no surrender on his list of plans? and b, does any of from the girlfriend, any of the details that came out today get you closer to a motive theory? brian, you know, the tannerite and ammonium nitrate, you ve got explosive devices or materials that are used in ieds, that is a whole new aspect to this. we heard it early on in the week, but as we start to look at this and his motivation as this comes full circle, looking at all the weapons. and this is a much broader plot, i think, i listened interestingly to the sheriff yesterday talking. what he said out right that he s considering that there may be somebody else. he s want convinced that there isn t somebody else. and we, you and i talked about that efrlier in the week as well. so this mystery continues. when i listened to the dpirl friend today, there is not that much that i heard that was of concern. i heard the comment about mental anguish or screaming out in pain. i think that there s got to be a little more to that. i saw some other reports of neighbors saying that he liked his privacy. he built a privacy fence even though he had a home that was somewhat secluded. these are things we re going to get bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks. the last thing i ll mention, brian, is ken talked about exploiting, continuing to exploit e-mails. there are a number of electronic devices i ve heard about that he had that will be exploited. they ll be looking at who he was talking to in the days and weeks leading up to this. but as important, you mentioned scouting out some of these other areas and his credit card trail for the weeks leading up to this is going to be very important point for investigators to follow. those are the pieces that will help to pull this together as we try to determine what this crazy issue was and what caused this man to kind of go over the edge, brian. superb explanation, gentlemen, of these details that came out today and bringing us up-to-date on this grim investigation. ken did he laneian, shawn henry, both friends of our broadcast. thank you so much, gentlemen, for coming on. coming up tonight, someone in regular contact with the president that this country hasn t heard from in a long tomb. we re back with that right after this. hi, i m the internet! you know what s difficult? adulting. hi, guys. i m back. time to slay! no,i have a long time girlfriend. you know what s easy? building your website with godaddy. get your domain today and get a free trial of gocentral. build a better website in under an hour. last thing before we go here on a thursday night is a woman we don t hear much from and don t hear much about. evan that trump, donald trump s first of his three wives granted an interview to cbs sunday morning. she was asked about her relationship with her ex-husband, donald trump. is he still a big part of your life? yeah, he is. he is. in what way? well, we speak to each other. how often? maybe once a week. he asks for your advice. and he s still asking me for advice, yes. what will he ask for your advice about. he ask me about should i tweet, should i not tweet. he asked you should you tweet. yeah. and what have you told him. i say i think you should tweet. she said she turned down his offer to serch as ambassador to the czeck republic because she
thinking isn t a guns situation. when all in starts right now. good evening from new york. i m chris hayes. one week after we learned robert mueller had brought indictments against two top trump officials, announced a guilty plea for a third, all eyes on a former high-ranking official in the trump administration itself, michael flynn. a man who spent 24 days in the white house as the president s national security adviser. nbc news exclusively reporting that shmueler now has enough evidence to file charges in the investigation into flynn and his son michael flynn jr., according to multiple sources familiar with mueller s investigation. to be clear nbc news is not reporting who might be charged, only that there is sufficient evidence to file charges in that investigation. three sources tell nbc news that investigators plan to soon speak with multiple witnesses to gather more information about flynn s lobbying work, including whether he laundered money or lied to federal agents about his overseas contacts. that news comes as the two former trump campaign aides facing indictments that would be paul manafort and his deputy rick gates were back in court today. the federal judge ruling they must remain under house arrest with her movements tracked by gps as they continue to negotiate a possible bail package. the president weighed in on manafort in combination with sinclair broadcast group. the reputation i felt was good. i had him for a short period of time. he was only in there for a finite period of time. but, you know, i feel badly for him. i always found him to be a really nice person. were mueller to file an obstruction of justice charge against the president, it would likely be flynn at the center of it. former fbi director james comey says the president pressured him to drop the investigation into flynn over flynn s conversations with the russian ambassador during the presidential transition. remember, flynn denied discussing u.s. sanctions against russia with the ambassador during several exchanges, including, according to the washington post, during an interview with the fbi. but intercepted communications reportedly contradicted flynn s account. now comey says he refused to drop the flynn investigation. shortly afterwards, trump fired him. which led to mueller being named special counsel. do you think he would ever consider trying to have mueller removed? or have you pledged to just stay out of that? well, i hope he is treating everything fairly. and if he is, i m going to be very happy. because when you talk about innocent, i m truly not involved in any form of collusion with russia, believe me. after the presidential campaign last year was over, flynn, just like the now indicted paul manafort, retroactively went on to register as a foreign agent. during a period when he was attending secret intelligence briefings with then candidate trump, flynn was being paid more than half a million dollars to lobby on behalf of the turkish government. even had the audacity to write a pro turkish government op-ed in which he called recep tayyip erdogan chief antagonist, a muslim cleric living in exile in pennsylvania who erdogan blames for last year s failed coup. a senior law enforcement official tells nbc news s ken dilanian that in the weeks after trump was inaugurated, they were asked to extradite guillen. it s not clear whether the request came from flynn. i m joined by the national security reporter who has been doing some amazing report thong story. let s start with that we learn head got half a million dollars to represent turkish interests through an intermediary. do you actually think about expediting fethullah gulen which is a key goal of erdogan. what do you know of this extradition that would have happened after flynn was actually in the u.s. government? just the very, very basics, chris, just what we said in the story, which is that the fbi was asked during the trump administration while mike flynn was the national security adviser to take another look at this. and they had no reason to reexamine it because they had already looked at it during the obama administration and had no evidence to fulfill turkey s extradition request for fethullah gulen who lives in the poconos and is like public enemy number one for turkey. mike flynn at one point in the wake of the turkish coup actually gave a public statement saying the turkish coup could be a good thing. and then he completely 180 changed when he began being paid on behalf we now know by the government of turkey. and he published that op-ed on election day, which basically had turkish government talking points. it wasn t even disguised. a lot of people look at that and said obviously mike flynn didn t think he us going to win the election. because why would he publish that on election day? that s one of the really important things about this story is we are now saying that mike flynn s conduct as national security adviser is under scrutiny by robert mueller in connection with this gulen arrangement. be a little clear there and then we ll move on to the reporting about sufficient evidence. because to impact that the key there is this is an unregistered foreign agent that is established to represent turkish interests writes a op-ed. and there is some question about whether that overlapped while he was in the white house. we don t know. i m not saying that s the case. but it seems to me that that s a road investigators are looking at. that is absolutely at issue according to our sources is what official acts mike flynn took that seemed to align with his financial interests in terms of orchestrating the extradition of gulen to turkey. which, i should noted a big deal. and as law professor steve vladeck pointed out, if the case were to be proven a felony. let s talk about the idea sufficient charges in the flynn investigation. explain that reporting a little bit for us. yeah, chris. and we re not trying to be cute here. obviously both of these men, mike flynn, the former national security investigators and his son appear to be in serious criminal jeopardy. we just don t have the precision of sourcing. we re not saying charges are eminent against both men. what we re saying is mueller has the evidence sufficient to file charges. charges could come. charges may not come if they are negotiating a cooperation arrangement. right. if they reach a deal to cooperate, we may not see charges, chris. all right. ken dilanian, thanks for being with me. former federal prosecutor renato mariotti, a frequent guest on the show. let s talk about flynn jr. and the behavior of flynn and flynn jr. this is flynn jr. who was it s not just that he is his father s shoefnlt was a partner in their business enterprise. he was his adviser. he was originally going to be brought in to get security clearance as a staffer to his father, national security adviser. him this morning, flynn jr., the sjw route, the disappointment on your faces when i don t go to jail will be worth all your harassment. i believe that was yesterday. he also retweeted something accusing robert mueller of having conspired with hamas. what do you make of this as behavior from someone currently under investigation with possible criminal exposure? it s unbelievable. it s something i have not seen before in my experience as federal prosecutor. not only in my cases, but observing other cases. typically when people are facing a federal indictment, they re crapping their pants so to speak. they re very concerned. it is a big deal. it s a scary thing. usually you are not trying to upset the prosecutor. you re usually trying to see if you can convince them not to indict. so this sort of thumbing your nose at the prosecution, it tells me that either these people are extremely foolish or they are angling for a pardon in some way. or maybe they think they re totally innocent, and the government has nothing on them. you know, that s really hard to believe. i m sorry. i don t really believe that. i think that, you know, they ve got smart lawyers. michael flynn seems like to me he s had a very intelligent lawyer, i mean, the father does. i think that they re very soberly explaining this to their client. if not, they re not doing their jobs. mueller and his team have amassed significant evidence. if this reporting is accurate, which i presume it is with all the sourcing, they re telling people either flynn or these lobbyists that they re potentially trying to get to cooperate, that they essentially have the goods on flynn. they re going to be pursuing indictments. we should note, it jumped out to me that there are two things that reporting indicates flynn has done, which is lie to federal investigators when they asked him when the fick first questioned him about the conversations he had with kislyak about sanctions. and also didn t register as a foreign agent. right. both of which are, you know that s what george papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying, and not registering as a foreign agent is one of the things that manafort is being indicted for. and the second one, not registering as a foreign agent is a very straight forward thing for a prosecutor to prove. that s the sort of charge prosecutors love. because either you register order you didn t. it s the sort of thing, maybe there is some way in which flynn could say i wasn t really a foreign agent. but if that s something that mueller can prove. when you go and retroactively register, it hurts your case. either you did or you didn t. things that require intent or the intent to defraud, that can be complicated or corrupt intent we ve talked about on the show before. something like this is a fairly straight forward thing. how does mike flynn intend to beat that charge? it s hard to see. one of the dynamics that is at issue here is the idea of pardons. because the person at the center of this is the president of the united states who has this incredible power under the article 2 of the constitution to pardon. federal crimes. and the signals being sent back and forth, i want you to listen to what he said about manafort and get your reaction to it in this most recent interview. take a listen. what was it that convinced you he had to be let go? well, i think we found out something about he may be involved with certain nations. and i don t even know exactly what it was in particular. but there was a point at which we just felt paul would be better off. because we don t want to have any potential conflicts. and if there was a conflict, i don t want to be involved any conflicts, even though it was i could have kept him longer, i don t think anybody would have complained. but we don t want to have any potential conflicts of interest at all. no potential conflicts of interest. it s kind of weird, right? it s not at all what we ve seen from this president so far. we had the head of the ethics walter shaub leave because he was so concerned about the conflicts in the administration there doesn t seem to be much interest in clearing that up. in fact i think his assets have not yet been moved to really a blind trust like they should be. so that s hard to believe. you know, i think a lot of the things we re hearing from the president right now are hard to believe. he has been going around saying he is not under investigation. which anybody with two eyes can see that he is. i mean, if his lawyers are telling him that he is not under investigation, they re committing malpractice. one thing i would just remind people of, the original sin here that started all this was that phone call between flynn and the ambassador that they lied about. if they hadn t that got the ball rolling. so there is something at the beginning of this, it s useful to come back to remember where flynn was. renato mariotti, it s great to have you here in new york city tonight. thank you very much. joining me now conservative washington post columnist jennifer rubin and independent presidential candidate evan mcmullin. and jennifer, it s striking to me that the american first campaign appears to have had a number of high level officials who were essentially secret foreign agents. yeah. it s very peculiar. and most of them are connected to russia, which is even more peculiar. you know, if you talk to people who have been on presidential campaigns democrats, republicans, they have never seen anything like this. there weren t people communicating with the russian government during the bush campaigns or during any other campaign. and then you have on top of that the financial web that entails jared kushner, entails trump s son, entails trump himself. now we learn that wilbur mills has a connection. so it s a lot of coincidences, if that s what it is. but we ve never, i would suggest, had either a campaign or certainly an administration that was this intertwined with a hostile power after an election in which that hostile power intervened on their behalf. and that just stinks to high heaven. well, and that that pertains to russia, which is sort of true to the bulk. but evan, one of the things that is interesting to me here, because i think it sets a it gives you a sense of the general atmosphere around this campaign is the turkey part of it, right? there is no reason to believe that turkey did anything like russia did in the campaign and intervened. but here you ve got a guy who is one of the senior advisers to the presidential candidate of one of the major parties. and on election day, he is using that opportunity to write an op-ed on behalf of essentially his foreign client. it s hard to conceive of that in another presidential campaign setting, or am i wrong? no, you re absolutely right, chris. what you have here is an example of how much leadership really matters, both good and bad. and when you have a presidential candidate who sets the tone in the way president trump did, not releasing his tax returns, encouraging russia to interfere in our elections, then the signal is received by especially his team. and indeed it was. and not only, by the way, that signal received by his team, it s also received by interlocutors around the world, foreign governments, especially authoritarian or dictatorships that people are for sale in washington, at least in that campaign and potentially in the administration in the case that president trump won, which he of course did. so it s a signal that goes out far and wide. and it sells out country out, our integrity, our interests. most importantly, the sovereignty of the american people to choose their own leaders and have them serve in their interests and their interests alone and have them be accountable to them, the people. that s what is for sale now under this administration. not only, that jennifer, i am reminded of the fact that a central campaign theme was that hillary clinton was essentially a foreign agent, that she essentially had outsourced american interests to whoever had given cash to the clinton foundation or something like that. and meanwhile we ve got paul manafort. these are guys who are at the very, very top of this campaign, which was small campaign and not that many people. you ve got two people at the very top who are functioning literally cashing checks on behalf of representing the interests of foreign governments. and that tells us a few things. first of all, it reminds us that they had no competent people on that campaign, and very few people in the administration. because he was toxic. most of the foreign policy professionals on the right or the center right really were writing letters, correctly as it turns out, saying he is unfit to serve. so he didn t have quality people. second problem you had is apparently no one was vetd. it was well-known that paul manafort represented all kinds of horrible people, dictators, authoritarians, thugs. so did trump not know than? was there any vetting process? and third, there is a question as to how much they knew about flynn during the transition period. yep. were they told? did they know? did they not know? who exactly was told? and that also involves the vice president and governor christie. evan, there has been some interesting speculate of polling recently in the wake of the mueller indictment that reflects actually awareness of what happened with manafort s indictments relatively high. people who think the president committed a crime is quite high. it s interesting because people thought well, this is not really mine. polling has changed a bit. i wonder how central you think this is, at least for republicans or conservatives that you know, how central is their understanding of this story to their evaluation of the president? well, i would say among republicans, it s still it s still the case that most republicans are supporting the president. i mean, you see that i think 64% of americans are now saying that they believe the russia investigation is important and that i think there may have been a serious wrongdoing there. but then there is 32% that are in the camp that say no, we don t think it s that important, and it shouldn t be investigated. my hunch is that that 32% is also 32% that supports president trump. these are probably people who are consuming conservative media that is not just conservative media, but conservative media that has really become trump media. it s less conservative. it s just trump media. and so they re receiving a steady diet of lies and misinformation about the importance of this and about the progress of the investigation and they re receiving disinformation about the alleged wrongdoing of trump s political opponents. it s very hard. those people will still skeptical. i think what happens, though, in moderate districts that are held by republicans, it s a problem there. and it s a problem for republicans there. they re going have a hard time i think increasingly. yeah. holding on to those seats. and those seats are the majority makers. so at a certain point, first republican leadership will say hey, wait a second, we have a problem. i don t think they re going to be able to dig out of it for 2018. but you re still going to have members from deep red districts who have are supported by constituents who are unfortunately being misled by other outlets. and that s going to present an ongoing challenge, i think. all right, jennifer rubin and evan mcmullin, thanks to you both. thank you. next, the trump s latest surprise disclosure on russian ties. new revelations that a top member of the trump administration has shared business interests with the family of vladimir putin. that story after this quick break. when you have a cold stuff happens. shut down cold symptoms fast with maximum strength alka seltzer plus liquid gels. i enjoy the fresher things in life.o. fresh towels. fresh soaps. and of course, tripadvisor s freshest, lowest. .prices. so if you re anything like me. .you ll want to check tripadvisor. we now instantly compare prices. .from over 200 booking sites. .to find you the lowest price. .on the hotel you want. go on, try something fresh. tripadvisor. the latest reviews. the lowest prices. we create machines that make every experience more real. because the best feature of a pc gaming machine is the power to make you forget it s there. get $200 off at dell.com/gaming. ( ) if you re keeping track of trump associates who have got undisclosed connections to russia, you can add commerce secretary wilbur ross to the list tonight. thanks to the leak from the paradise papers which are making a splash around the world. we now ross retains to this day an interest in a shipping company that makes millions of dollars a year from a russian energy company whose owners include vladimir putin s son-in-law. and nbc news found that ross, quote, failed to clearly disclose those interests when he was being confirmed for his cabinet position. in a statement, the commerce department said that wilbur ross recuses himself as secretary from any matter regarding transoceanic shipping, which would seem like something maybe the commerce secretary should not be eare cuesed from. in an interview with cnbc today, ross denied there was anything wrong. there is not anything wrong at all. it s just an example of the press trying to find anything they can however remote or silly to attack the president and somehow link him to russia. this is nonsense. however, the new york times pointed out, quote, while several trump campaign and business associates have come under scrutiny, until now no business connections have been reported between senior administration officials and members of mr. putin s family or inner circle. ross does share something in common with those previously discovered ties. we only seem to learn about these connections once the people in trump s orbit have already been found out. only then does the administration come clean. congressman eric swalwell of california on the house intelligence committee is conducting one of several vexes into russian election interference and potential trump campaign ties. congressman, secretary ross says it s nonsense, that this is essentially you re look the press is looking for these connections and manufacturing them no matter how tenuous. what do you say to that? good evening, chris. what s nonsense is he was asked about his business connections to russia by the senate and did not disclose these business ties to putin s family. and, you know, just add him to the growing list of people on donald trump s team or in his family or from his businesses who had prior business or personal or political relationships with russia. and they all failed to disclose it. i should list those. the washington post did a really good job of sort of running those down. do you have an hour? well, i ll do a quick version. we have paul manafort. we have michael cohen. we have donald trump jr., carter page. we have jared kushner, michael flynn, george papadopoulos, jd gordon, who is in that infamous meeting we ve all seen pictures of, and jeff sessions. that is the nine people who had some kind of connections that they did not disclose or they denied that later came to light. and now you have wilbur ross as well. senator richard blumenthal has called for ross resignation or an ig investigation. do you agree with either of those calls? yes. absolutely i do. i also think he should be a part of our investigation. as a side note, chris, this week incidentally, you can t make this up, we re debating tax legislation that would make it even easier for businesses as the tax policy center says to offshore their profits and use shell companies like this, making it harder for us to expose these types of relationships. there is also some we got some of the transcript back from carter page s marathon session with your investigators. i don t know if it was in front of actual members or committee staff. i want to read first what he said. i want to play what he said to me about denying any official meetings or meeting with any officials when he was in russia. take a listen. again, i had no meetings, no serious discussions with anyone high up or at any official capacity. let me ask you this. it s just kind of man on the street, you know. circumstances that true? no, false. completely false. i can t believe he lied to me. i know. i know. chris, this was a member in an interview. and we were able to corroborate a number of allegations in the dossier. so he in july 2016 met with the deputy prime minister of russia. he met with officials from gas prom and rosneft, energy businesses in russia. sam clovis asked carter page to sign an nda. and a few months later he told sam clovis he was going to moscow. he did not tell him not to go. when he got back, he briefed sam clovis, as well as a number of other officials on the campaign about his trip to russia. what you make of carter page? you know, carter page is another team member who was eager to use his relationships with the russians to help the trump team. and he even was asking the trump campaign what he should say when he was over there in russia. and just like george papadopoulos, he was trying to arrange a meeting between donald trump and vladimir putin. now this is a theme that we ve seen throughout the campaign team. not just papadopoulos. remember, felix seder back in december 2016 is telling michael cohen if we can get donald trump and putin together, we can engineer this and make our boy president there is a theme of trying to get dirt on hillary clinton, trying to connect donald trump and putin. and of course failing to disclose it to anyone. there is a reporting today saying there is a bit of a split in the diplomatic corps about the president s upcoming meeting on the side lanes of a summit with vladimir putin. they re scheduled to meet face-to-face. obviously there are some who feel that obviously this is a nation that we have a lot of different issues with. we have to talk to them. there is others who feel that it will send the wrong signal. do you have a strong feeling on that? i have a very strong feeling on this, chris. what have we gotten out of this relationship with russia? they have received all the benefits. until the president wants to speak straight with vladimir putin and tell him we know what you did, you re going to pay a price for it. and until you stop because i don t think they have stopped we re not going to welcome you at the stable of responsible nations. all right. congressman eric swalwell, thanks for your time. my pleasure. next, the horrifying attack on the texas church that killed 26 people. and the president s very telling reaction, after this quick break. parents aren t perfect, but then they make us kraft mac & cheese and everything s good again. more! i love you, droolius caesar, but sometimes you stink. febreze car vent clip cleans away odors for up to 30 days. because the things you love can stink. yesterday a gunman identified as devin patrick kelley used a gun to murder 26 people at the first baptist church in sutherland springs, texas. at least a dozen of the victims that he murdered with that gun were children, and the deceased ranged in age from 18 months to 77 years old. people that were worshipping on a sunday. the mass shooting comes just one month after what was the largest mass shooting in modern american history, and that was when a lone gunman used multiple firearms, apparently all legally acquired to shoot and kill 58 people and wound more than 500 people who were taking in a concert. and so horrifyingly, here we are again. president trump in japan today on the first leg of his five-nation tour of asia said that the massacre that occurred in texas is not a gun issue. i think that mental health is your problem here. this was a very based on preliminary reports, very deranged individual. a lot of problems over a long period of time. well have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries. but this isn t a guns situation. i mean, we could go into it. but it s a little bit soon to go into it. this is a mental health problem at the highest level. it s a very, very sad event. these are great people, and a very, very sad event. but that s the way i view it. in the wake of mass atrocities, the president appears to have two modes. if the assailant is muslim, the president hardly waits until the bodies are counted to politicize and to criticize and to hector and to blame. and if the assailant is not, well, then, nothing, or something like that. compare his rhetoric this morning to his reaction to last week s violence in new york. we need quick justice and we need strong justice, much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. because what we have right now is a joke and it s a laughingstock. mr. president, do you want the assailant from new york sent to gitmo? mr. president? i would certainly consider that, yes. i would certainly consider that. send him to gitmo. i would certainly consider that, yes. senator kirsten gillibrand of new york joins me next. wakey! wakey! rise and shine! oh my gosh! how are you? well watch this. i pop that in there. press brew. that s it. so rich. i love it. that s why you should be a keurig man! full-bodied. are you sure you re describing the coffee and not me? even if you re trying your best. a daily struggle, along with diet and exercise, once-daily toujeo may help you control your blood sugar. get into a daily groove. let s groove tonight. share the spice of life. baby slice it right. from the makers of lantus, toujeo provides blood sugar-lowering activity for 24 hours and beyond, proven blood sugar control all day and all night, and significant a1c reduction. toujeo is used to control high blood sugar in adults with diabetes. it contains 3 times as much insulin in 1 milliliter as standard insulin. don t use toujeo to treat diabetic ketoacidosis, during episodes of low blood sugar, or if you re allergic to insulin. get medical help right away if you have a serious allergic reaction such as body rash, or trouble breathing. don t reuse needles or share insulin pens. the most common side effect is low blood sugar, which can be life threatening. it may cause shaking, sweating, fast heartbeat, and blurred vision. check your blood sugar levels daily. injection site reactions may occur. don t change your dose of insulin without talking to your doctor. tell your doctor about all your medicines and medical conditions. check insulin label each time you inject. taking tzds with insulins like toujeo may cause heart failure that can lead to death. find your rhythm and keep on grooving. let s groove tonight. ask your doctor about toujeo. share the spice of life. wow! nice outfit. when i grow up, i m going to mars. we re working on that. some people know how far they want to go. a personalized financial strategy can help you get them there. see how access to j.p. morgan investment expertise can help you. chase. make more of what s yours. earlier today senator ted cruz of texas described the church shooting as an act of evil and gave what has become by now a well rehearsed response by republicans when candidate about gun safety policy. we don t need politics right now. you know, i would note in new york we saw a terror attack just this week with a truck. evil is evil is evil, and will use the weaponry that is available. joining me now senator kirsten gillibrand of new york. senator, your colleague ted cruz was down in sutherland today. he was quite passionate that democrats and others shouldn t be politicizing this, angry that people would be invoking guns or talking about guns in the wake of this mass shooting. what s your response to that? well, i think he is wrong. our heartbreaks keep breaking over and over and over again. we cannot keep allowing this to be the new normal. and i think it is outrageous that congress has done nothing, has done nothing over the months and months that we ve seen gun violence, you know, terrible, unbelievable, heinous crimes being committed, and literally done nothing. what do you say to people who are watching this who just feel defeated and despondent on this issue there is the ritualization of it, the ritualization of the reaction to it, the ritualization to the backlash to the reaction. people feel like politics are just not functional, right? there is nothing that can be done. what do you say to someone who is feeling that way right now? well, i hope they speak out. because nothing ever changes in washington unless regular people speak out and demand action. i think this whole country should be crying out for common sense gun reform. the reality is that you don t need another disaster like this to happen to know what has to be done. we should be banning assault weapons. and these military-style magazine clips. we should be banning the kinds of guns that are being used in these crimes. we have to snake sure we have universal background checks. we have to make sure we have an anti-trafficking statute. these are the kinds of things we should be doing regardless of today s news. it s something that i cannot believe the congress has failed to do anything. in the five largest mass shootings in our nation s history, three have happened in the last 17 months. why could you think that is? what is your understanding as a legislator, as someone who has to think about solving policy problems? what is your understanding of that? i can t tell you, chris. i don t know. i just know that congress is doing nothing. because they lack the courage to take on the nra. they simply lack the courage to stand up and say this is about our communities. this is about safety. this is about what s important to us as a nation, and that we are not going to be beholden to an industry that puts profits first. and that s what we are up against. too many members of congress do not have the courage to stand up and say no. you represent you came up in politics in an area of the state of new york, the state you now represent where there are a lot of gun owners and where the nra is quite powerful. i wonder what your relationship is to them as an organization and to gun owners as a constituency? well, you can have the second amendment and you can protect hunters rights. but what i would urge all americans to understand is that is not where the american people are today. they want to make sure we end this kind of gun violence. and you ask nra members, you ask citizens across this country, overwhelmingly they support this kind of common sense gun reform. and just as advice to someone who doesn t necessarily see the issue this way you just need to talk to someone who lost a family member to gun violence. you just have to open your heart for a minute and feel for a second what it is like when someone is taken away from you because of gun violence. when you meet a mom whose child was killed in a park in brooklyn who is 4 years old you, have you to do something. it is time past. it is not about hunting rights. this is not about the second amendment. this is how do we keep our communities safe? and all of us should be fighting for it together and demanding these members of congress to do something. while i have you here, i want to ask you about a distinct but in some ways related issue as we learn about the shooter s relationship to domestic violence, violence against women, a common thread we have to say in many of these mass shootings, committed almost without exception by men. the sort of daunting awareness about sexual harassment and sexual predation that we ve seen sweeping across a variety of places. the ap reporting capitol hill in particular. and something that you ve talked about i think quite honestly and talked about sort of trying to approach legislatively the environment that you yourself work in congress. well, right now congress doesn t have a good set of policies either. and what we ve seen, chris, over the last several months, whether it s hollywood, whether it s news media, whether it s the nfl, whether it s college campuses, whether it s the u.s. military, we do not have transparency and accountability for sexual harassment or sexual violence. and we need to speak out and do better. i think the me too campaign is one of the most powerful campaigns we ve had because it s giving men and women the courage to tell their stories so people can understand this is pervasive. and it is prevalent. we have to do something about sexual assault, sexual violence and sexual harassment in society in all places. i m working to make a bill that congress does a lot better than it does today. the policies that we can follow up on at some point are sort of opaque. senator kirsten gillibrand, thank you for taking time. my pleasure. thank you. still ahead, what we now know about how senator rand paul ended up with five broken ribs after a dispute with his neighbor. that story coming up. plus, tonight s thing 1, thing 2 starts next. what powers the digital world. communication. that s why a cutting edge university counts on centurylink to keep their global campus connected. and why a pro football team chose us to deliver fiber-enabled broadband to more than 65,000 fans. and why a leading car brand counts on us to keep their dealer network streamlined and nimble. businesses count on communication, and communication counts on centurylink. american hands, american labor. tonight we have a brand-new very special jobs report for you specifically from mar-a-lago. and that s thing 2 in 60 seconds. should, should, should can you dance like you should can you dance like you should make the rules while dancing you could dance like you should can you dance like you should make the rules while dancing can you dance like you should buy american and hire american. right? we re going do it. atter what it. or where he is. and pain doesn t hold him back. thanks to dr. scholl s running insoles. the only ones proven to relieve and prevent pain from runner s knee, shin splints and plantar fasciitis. dr. scholl s. born to move. senator rand paul is recuperating at his home in bowling green, kentucky tonight after sustaining serious injuries on friday. it looks like he will not be in the senate for an extended period of time. on his facebook page, he gave a somewhat vague explanation of what happened. kelly and i appreciate the overwhelming support after friday s unfortunate event. thank you for your thoughts and prayers. the unfortunate event in question is that while paul was riding his mower at his home wearing sound-muting earmuffs, mr. paul s next-door neighbor, mr. boucher, came on to mr. paul s property and tackled him from behind, knocking him to the ground, which according to the senator s chief of staff resulted in five broken ribs and bruises to his lungs. boucher was initially charged with fourth degree assault, released saturday on a $7500 bond. but given the extent of paul s injury, prosecutors are reportedly considering upgrading the charges. meanwhile, the fbi is now involved as an assault on a member of congress is a federal crime. what possibly could cause boucher to attack rand paul, sitting u.s. senator, a man he has lived next door to for 17 years? a statement, boucher s attorney said, quote, it has absolutely nothing to do with either his politics or political agendas. it was a very regrettable dispute between two neighbors over a matter that most people would regard as trivial. the new york times jonathan martin reports that two kentuckians tell me rand s neighborhood fracas stemmed from a dispute over some sort of planting or flora issues around the properties. one big question now is how long paul s recovery might take, and whether five cracked rib others a flora issue might affect the outcome of, say, a tax reform. meanwhile, in virginia, there is is a vote tomorrow. the big question there can the trump playbook work on a candidate who isn t named trump? that s next. i ve been thinking. think of all the things that think these days. businesses are thinking. factories are thinking. even your toaster is thinking. honey, clive owen s in our kitchen. i m leaving. oh never mind, he s leaving. but what if a business could turn all that thinking. thinking. endless thinking into doing? to make better decisions. make a difference. make the future. not next week while you think about it a little more. but right now. is there a company that can help you do all that? i can think of one. somesend you and your family overwhelrunning. y can. introducing febreze one for fabric and air. no aerosols. no dyes. no heavy perfumes. it cleans away odors for a pure light freshness. so you can spray and stay. febreze one, breathe happy. but can also loweresterol, your body s natural coq10. qunol helps restore this heart-healthy nutrient with 3x better absorption. qunol has the #1 cardiologist recommended form of coq10 qunol, the better coq10. so we know how to cover almost almoanything.hing even a swing set standoff. and we covered it, july first, twenty-fifteen. talk to farmers. we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum on the eve of perhaps the most significant election since donald trump won the white house, the democratic party heads into tomorrow s governor s race in virginia facing many of the same challenges they did facing donald trump on election day last year. according to the latest polling average, ralph northam holds a thin lead over ed gillespie. going into this race, the expectation on paper is that this should be a win for democrats. the president has a 35% approval rating there and gillespie previously ran for u.s. senate in virginia in 2014, losing to incumbent senator mark warner. by running a campaign in which he s managed to weaponize immigration and challenging his democratic opponents on things like confederate monuments, gillespie has, according to steve bannon, closed an enthusiasm gap by rallying around the trump agenda. if that s the case, democrats better be very, very worried. tom perez is the chair of the democratic national committee. i guess, tom, a lot of people watched gillespie run this race and white identity politics and the monuments and the question is, what has the democratic party figured out in the year since donald trump was elected about how to successfully counter that message? it s all about getting out there and talking to people, chris. we made a massive investment in organizing. we ve got to be talking to people in every zip code and that s exactly what we re doing and what we re hearing is very simple. i want to keep my health care because i have a relative who s opioid addicted. i want to make sure public education works for everyone. i want to continue the progress that tear rry mcauliffe has brot to this state and i want a america that we can be proud of. that s what i m hearing day in and day out. i put 700 miles on the car just this weekend. that s what i m hearing and why i feel very, very good because the energy is everywhere. you know, you talk about competing in every zip code and there s been a big investment in democratic challengers. a lot more than in years past. but in everything you re ticking off there sounds a lot like what the clinton campaign ran on and i wonder if you feel there s an enthusiasm issue that the democratic party facing in getting its voters out in an off-year election like this. well, we always have to make sure that we re turning people out in these off-year cycles. and you mentioned something a couple of minutes ago, a couple of seconds ago, chris, that i think is so important. i think it s not a secret weapon but i think it s an enormous weapon in this race and that is the number 88. there are 88 democrats running for the house of delegates. now, in an ordinary cycle, if you go back the last four or five cycles here in virginia, there s been 40 or 45 democrats that have won. to put it differently, we have seeded half or more of the house of delegates. no opposition. and not only do we have 88 democrats running and i have spoken to almost all of them, all of the challengers, they re spectacular and they are out there. there s a candidate down in roanoke whose fiance was tragically murdered in an incident she was a local broadcast journalist and a disgruntled employee came in and shot her on the air. it was just a horrific incident. remember it. her fiance is running and he s running a spirited race. we re poised to elect the first two latinos in the state of commonwealth of virginia to the house of delegates. and i ll tell you, the energy that is generated and i was out with elizabeth guzman who is running here in northern virginia and you have the dnc and we re all in. with that sort of energy, it s a secret weapon. i want to ask you about something you just said, when you talk about seeding or not running anyone in half the house delegate races. this year there was this real effort to be competitive everywhere and it dovetails with the critique of the party that is in it donna brazile s book and which is essentially that the party institution was bankrupt financially, that it was not doing the things it should, it wasn t doing the things like helping to field candidates in every race and it was essentially busted out. is that an accurate characterization of the dnc that you inherited basically less than a year ago? well, the old dnc was about electing a president every four years. the new dnc is about electing democrats up and down the ticket from the school board to the oval office. we re all about making sure we take off year out of the elects lexicon of the democratic party. we made voter contact via phones, texts and other social media with another 500,000 people. we have to do that because today s school board member is tomorrow s mayor, is a decade from nows president. we re doing it now. i want to talk about the messaging stakes for tomorrow. gillespie barely dealt a primary against corey stewart. corey stewart ran hard on preserving monuments to the confederacy. gillespie has adopted that. kneeling during the national anthem, sent out mailers about that. what message has said that if that message works in defeating democrats tomorrow? . well, that message isn t going to work. phil murphy is going to win going away and we ll make history with the first