together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind, peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law. such is a world worthy of our struggle and worthy of our children s future. 27 years after president bush called for international order the strong men of saudi arabia and russia celebrated the lack of it as america pulls back under donald trump. friday marked that sharp split as the 41st president of the united states, george herbert walker bush, died at the age of 94. this morning we remember his life and his tremendous legacy, and how his approach to leadership stands in stark contrast with the politics and the news and the policies of today. welcome to morning joe, it s monday, december 3rd, with us we have the president of the council on foreign relations and the author of the book a world in disarray , richard haass, jon meachum is with us, he is an nbc news and msnbc contributor, nbc news chief foreign affairs correspondent and host of andrea mitchell reports, andrea mitchell is here, and columnist and associate editor for the washington post david ignatius as well. joe, wow, what a stark contrast between h.w. s legacy and the news we have today. well, it is, and it did, it did seem to become starker every time you saw stories about george w. bush george h.w. bush and the life that he lived. i will say that it s almost as if bush 41 inspired this president to even move beyond his own boundaries that he showed the first two years by delivering to this country and the world a statement upon george h.w. bush s passing that was graceful and was presidential and quite frankly what s been lacking a bit in the past. i want to talk to jon meachum who on wednesday will be eulogizing george h.w. bush and who spoke about him yesterday at the national cathedral. you know, jon, we to talk about what a great man george h.w. bush was and how he guided america and the world through the ending of the cold war, how he reunified germany, how well, just, you know, a cia director, an u.n. ambassador, ran the rnc, vice president, president, congressman, took courageous stands. he was a great man, but what is so remarkable in 2016 and the great take away from his life has to be that he was a good man. he was fundamentally a decent man. not only when he was president of the united states, but when he was a young child, a kid whose nickname was hab half because anytime you had a sandwich whoever he was with he would tell the other person, here, have half of mine. it was that generous spirit that made this great man a good man from the very beginning. anyone who was around him was enveloped by a kind of quiet persistent charisma. it s not a word we associate with president bush, we think of jack kennedy as charismatic, we think of reagan as charismatic, we think of clinton as charismatic, we think of george w. bush with a locker room charisma kind of one-on-one ability, barack obama has the big arena charisma. george h.w. bush in my experience and to my observation always communicated ineffably an ambient sense of confidence that your future, your country, would be safe in his hands, and they were big hands. he used to talk with that big left fist. i think that one of the remarkable things about him is he is of our time generationally, but he really has more in common with the roosevelts and the founders culturally and temperamentally than he does with the post in the 1990s forward. more in common, i think, with fdr than with bill clinton or even in many ways with his own son in terms of the politics they confronted. so he is a remarkable figure in that he was a little out of fashion even while he was reigning over the country. a couple things happened on his watch that shaped the politics we have now, the rise of talk radio, cable news was becoming more significant. he used to belly ache into his tape recorder all the time about what the talking heads were saying. and most importantly, the break among the house gop against his deal to get a budget, get spending controls, a deal that set with some higher taxes set the conditions for the prosperity of the 1990s in what was, i think, sort of the o.j. simpson bronco chase of modern partisansh partisanship. when bush was going out to announce that bipartisan deal in the rose garden newt gingrich leaves the white house, there is a split screen on cnn, drives up to the hill and there is a rally among the house caucus, gop caucus for gingrich. in many ways that set the stage for 1994, set the stage for just a more a more brutal politics. it happened, interestingly, to my mind, under the feet of someone who did want very much to govern with consensus, because consensus had shaped him. yes. you know, david ignatius, again, comparing where we were with george h.w. bush and where we are now, i read so much this weekend, but i think a paragraph in the president s own words, former president s own words, really boils it down that, yes, every politician makes mistakes, every politician is flawed, every politician will fight like hell to get their story out there and sometimes use very sharp elbows, but at the end of the day, you know, they put their country first and they put people around them first. this is part of a note that george h.w. bush wrote to hour recent dowd, he said, i reserve the right to whine, to not read, to use profanitiy, but if you ever get really hurt or if you ever get really down and just need a shoulder to cry on, or just need a friend, give me a call, i will be there for you. i will not let you down. now, if george h.w. bush who was skewered by the media throughout most of his political life had decided to call anybody an enemy of the people it would have probably started with maureen dowd, but he understood that the press wasn t the enemy of the people and even said basically at the end of the day, we re all in this together, and i will be here for you, just like i know you would be here for me. what a remarkable difference between 1988 and 2018. george h.w. bush never more than in the recollections that maureen has in that wonderful column was for a son of the elite a down to earth guy. he was funny, he was self-deprecating, he couldn t quite figure out why he liked this new york times columnist, but he did, and he kept writing to her. i think one of the things i liked most about him was that he was grateful in the old fashioned new england way. he didn t believe in showing off, the idea that you brag about your accomplishments would have been abhorrent to him, but he had an ability to make difficult things look easy throughout his presidency, that s especially true in foreign policy. we forget how hard it was to find a pathway so you could reunify germany, the cornerstone of the post cold war world was one germany. bush had to do that with great subtlety. a friend reminded me over the weekend we had the snl crisis over bush s watch and guess what, a lot of people went to i will gentleman. he didn t make a big fanfare of it but held people accountable. that s the one thing that happened never happened after the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. why weren t anybody punished? well, they were in george h.w. bush s presidency. i think those simple qualities that made him somebody that maureen dowd could tell funny stories about, i mean, that s what we all sense about him, that s what we love and we miss as we think about his passing. richard haass, you worked for president bush, bush 41, and obviously during very momentous times, so momentous that you didn t even have time to cut your hair or even comb it at times. my goodness. he was a very busy man. scraggly. he called that his neo einstein cut. richard, i m just curious, looking at pictures of this past weekend, vladimir putin high-fiving the crown prince of saudi arabia when other world leaders didn t want to be even seen shaking his hand, it just reminds me of how what a deft touch george h.w. bush had, that he was a realist, but at the same time would never allow something like that to stand without calling it out. what are we missing with the leadership of donald trump? george h.w. bush was a realist, but he was a realist who also had values and standards and principles. he always tried to balance it. one of the first tests of his presidency you will remember in 1989 was the crushing ever dissent in tiananmen square. what bush tried to do because he had been the former u.s. envoy to china, he knew how important that relationship was and he couldn t allow the relationship to end. on the other hand, he also knew it was important to send a message and sanctions were put into place and the administration tried to balance that. or when saddam invaded kuwait, one of the reasons bush felt urgency there is he was getting the reports of what was going on in kuwait and he essentially said we ve got to act here or if we don t there s not going to be a kuwait left to save. he didn t have the patience of some people who said, well, just let sanctions work. he said, no, we will give them a fair chance, but then if we must we will use force. and then what was so interesting is after we used force in a d decisive way, he showed restraint. he said if we try to liberate baghdad we will incur more casualties there than we did in liberating kuwait in a first place. there always was a sense of balance in the man between a kind of principle and a real determination. i think people underestimated the steeliness of determination, but he also had a sense, again, of limits, of restraints, and whether it was in their personal relations with people, there was a formality i remember once i was called over to see him, joe, and i got to the door of the oval office and john sununu was the chief of staff at the time and he said, what do you think you re doing, richard? i said i just got a message that the president wanted to see me. and he said, go back to your office and put on your coat, because i walked over with just my shirt and tie and left my shirt jacket in the office. there was a sense bush more than anyone else and this is a contrast to today obviously he had a sense, joe, that he was the temporary custodian of the oval office. he didn t own it. he was simply the 41st president of the united states, he knew there would be a 42nd, a 43rd and so on. so he was very aware, he had been given this trust. he was a borrower, if you will, of the office, but ultimately he knew there were limits and you had to pass it on to who came after him. and you brought up kuwait. it s o interesting. i remember being a young congressman and my chief of staff coming in and saying, do you have time to talk to the president? and since i was a back bencher, i said, the president of what? he said the president of the united states, the former president, george h.w. bush. i said, well, yeah. i scrambled around, i picked up the phone, and it s important for people to remember now, he was getting absolutely skewered in the years following the first gulf war for ignoring the advice of the red hot conservatives and some of his generals and stopping short of baghdad. he was getting killed and i was the one person on a panel that was defending him saying, no, we showed extraordinary discipline. he said we were going to liberate kuwait and then we were going to come home, and even with an open road to baghdad, he knew that s what he had promised, that s how he had built this remarkable worldwide coalition and he showed the discipline that few other leaders would show. because of it he didn t get en snarled in the war that his son got ensnarled in a few years later. it was that kind of dis mr. inn that actually made your father a very big fan of george h.w. bush. yes. i would say you could count the number of republicans that your father voted for on one hand. yeah. you actually could count the number of republicans your father voted for for president on one finger and that one president was george h.w. bush. yeah, and there s so much news to cover, but it s hard not to recognize that the passing of george h.w. bush has rekindled bipartisan good feeling on editorial pages and just about anywhere else that politics is spoken. president bush s death also has done what many previously believed was impossible, it s inspired the current occupant of the white house to briefly behave in a way that s presidential. with gracious words and a declaration of an extended period of national mourning. but what becomes undeniably obvious with every bio run about bush 41 is that stark contrast between these two men. bush served in the military, treated people with respect and dignity and put country ahead of party and self time and time again over his half century in public service. half century. over the last two years deviancy has continued being defined down by this current president, his cronies, his supporters, who love telling reporters that they don t care how deviant his behavior becomes. let s see what happens at wednesday s memorial service. my prediction is that trump fakes more respect for a family whose unprecedented history of public service has repeatedly belittled. then he goes back to making a mockery of the very office that george bush and this nation long revered. just as president bush s character was set even during his earliest days at andover with the stories that you all have told, donald trump remains the man, think about this, the man he was while avoiding the draft and then telling howard stern on the radio that sleeping around with women in new york city while avoiding sexual diseases was his own personal vietnam. he said that. as is always the case, the presidency does not shape character, it reveals it in a raw fashion and that is why we celebrate george h.w. bush s legacy and fear the next two years of mr. trump s wild white house lied. as we continue to watch that, andrea, it s conduct in office that we look at today with president trump and we look at over the past few days, even, which leaves our jaws dropping. well, certainly in personal and political and foreign policy and relations with the media the contrast could not be more stark. you have president trump returning from a g20 where he couldn t meet with vladimir putin for a variety of reasons, they said it was because of ukraine, but perhaps it would have been better to meet with him and stand up to him, publicly stand up to him on ukraine, rather than just avoiding the whole subject and the obvious implication was that he couldn t meet with him because of the plea agreement just hours earlier before departing of michael cohen. so all of that brought into gross relief as well as that extraordinary handshake, hand grip, bromance in between the two strong men who are sort of the book ends of the trump foreign policy. so many thoughts flood over me about george h.w. bush and the years and years of watching him in so many roles, the political role, which people have acknowledged, 1988 was a brutal campaign, lee at water s death bed confessions for the willie horton ads and other things that transpired, but the contrast between that and the touch decisions he made, jon meachum referring to that tough budget decision which did set the stage for years and years of prosperity as well as some of the other decisions that he made that contradicted his own previous more political impulses. he always, however, with maureen dowd and with others, i m thinking of peter baker s reminiscence about ann devroid the correspondent from the washington post that led to the demise of john sununu her own reporting and when she got sick with cancer the first person to respond was president bu bush. she had absolutely bedeviled him and he and jim baker got her into m.d. anderson for intensive treatments, tragically did not save her young life, but they did everything they could in houston to help her. it could not have been a more dramatic contrast because she was the toughest white house correspondent, maureen was certainly the toughest columnist, but there are so many other examples. marlin fitzwater represented the balance and the spirit of president bush 41 in terms of his role as press secretary and the contrast could not be more stark with what we see today. absolutely. jon meachum, we are possibly going to be seeing on wednesday act two in a remarkable public public play where we move from a mccain funeral, the john mccain funeral, which was unlike anything that either mika or i have ever seen in our life, a coming together basically of leaders celebrating what washington once was and what people believed washington could be again, and i can t help but believe that s what we re going to see on wednesday as well, republicans and democrats and independence and others saying this is who we have been, this is who we will be again. i suspect i suspect we may leave with many of the same feelings on wednesday that we did after the john mccain funeral. oh, absolutely. i think it will end up being, i think, the cumulative effect of the week is going to be a reminiscence and let s hope a celebration, not an internment, of an american order that looked outward to the world, did not look inward in an isolationist way. this will be about global engagement, it s going to be about free trade, it s going to be about an america where we understand that if we aren t involved in the affairs of the world, young men like george h.w. bush end up getting shot down out of the sky because that was the price of the isolationism of the 1920s and 30s. i want to say i want to mention two names here because i think president bush would want us to. from september 2nd, 1944 the day he was shot down in the pacific, every day he thought about ted white and dell delaney who is the two crew mates who died on that mission with him. he always wondered why he was spared. my own view of his life is that in many ways every subsequent day was an attempt to prove himself worthy of having been spared on that day. he understood that his life was no longer his own. he heard his mother s voice, his father s example always about to whom much is given, much is expected. and we can praise him and we will praise him without row plant sizing him. he was a flawed figure, the first person to tell you that would be barbara bush and the second would be bush himself. but i think his flaws make him more interesting and actually make this week more important to us culturally because if somebody flawed can do the great things he did, then perhaps all of us who are as flawed as you can imagine can do the same thing going forward. still ahead on morning joe, details on why the cia believes crown prince mohammed bin salman probably ordered the killing of jamal khashoggi. a new wall street journal piece undercuts the president s stance on saudi arabia. plus cohen, flynn, manafort, each is stacked up against bob mueller and a special counsel probe digging deeper by the day. we will preview the week ahead and the stunning developments over the weekend. plus here is bill karins with a check on the forecast. good monday morning. hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. we start this week nice and quiet and then a coast to coast storm to end the week. the only troublesome weather right now is this thunderstorm activity north florida and southern georgia, a tornado warning south of brunswick, georgia. the middle of the week cold air spills in from the north, that comes down the middle of the week and so let s take you through the week ahead forecast. today pretty quiet, no the too bad for any of your travel needs. then on wednesday here comes our coast to coast storm into california with more rain and snow, that s good news for them, by the time we get to friday this is a southern system so that s going to mean only the northern edge will have a chance of some of that snow and ice, maybe possibly oklahoma city to wichi wichita. this is four to five days away. by the time we get to friday afternoon we will take the storm through texas and through portions of oklahoma, also notice the blue is the snow on little rock. by the time we get through saturday we start to watch some of this heading to the east coast. if it s going to be a snornl for d.c. and the mid-atlantic it would most likely be as we go through sunday. we will keep an eye on that as we go throughout this week. for the rest of the week it s looking pretty quiet. not too much snow and ice to give you heartache or trouble on the roads or air. new york city is one of those spots earlier i was looking at that chance the snowstorm to come up the coast, right now it s looking to be south of the big apple. you re watching morning joe. we will be right back. here we go. discover. i like your card, but i m absolutely not paying an annual fee. discover has no annual fees. really? yeah. we just don t believe in them. oh nice. you would not believe how 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start with stelara®. so a and as if thatyour brwasn t bad enough,tals it.. now your insurance won t replace it outright because of depreciation. if your insurance won t replace your car, what good is it? you d be better off just taking your money and throwing it right into the harbor. i m regret that. with new car replacement, if your brand-new car gets totaled, liberty mutual will pay the entire value plus depreciation. liberty mutual insurance. liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. unstopand it s strengthenedting place, the by xfi pods,gateway. which plug in to extend the wifi even farther, past anything that stands in its way. .well almost anything. leave no room behind with xfi pods. simple. easy. awesome. click or visit a retail store today. the wall street journal has reviewed unreported excerpts from the highly classified cia assessment on the murder of washington post columnist jamal khashoggi which reveal some of the evidence linking saudi arabia s crown prince to the killing, it includes at least 11 text messages mohammed bin salman himself sent to his closest adviser who oversaw the team that killed khashoggi. just hours before and after the murder on october 2nd. in addition, in what the cia reportedly says, quote, seems to fore shadow the saudi operation launched against khashoggi back in august 2017, mbs told associates that if efforts to convince khashoggi to return to saudi arabia fail, they could, quote, possibly lure him outside saudi arabia. the assessment also states that the cia has, quote, medium to high confidence that the crown prince, quote, personally targeted and probably ordered khashoggi s death. although it adds, quote, to be clear, we lack direct reporting of the crown prince issuing a kill order. the cia s judgment is based on mbs personal focus on khashoggi and his tight control of the kingdom and the operatives involved in the murder and mbs s, quote, authorizing some of the same operators to violently target other opponents, adding, it s, quite, highly unlikely they would act without his authorization. i don t know what more the president needs. the president has questioned and dismissed our intelligence agency s assessment saying it did not offer a definitive conclusion, again, sewing doubt. mean while saudi arabian media is reporting mbs and trump had a, quote, friendly meeting at the g20. trump later told reporters that he, quote, had no discussion with mbs although a white house official told nbc news the two exchanged pleasantries at the leaders session. david ignatius, you were reporting on much of this last week, you put it all together, very obvious that what donald trump said about the cia s assessment just isn t true and also suggests that s why there was an empty chair where gina haspel was supposed to be when there was testimony before congress last week. joe, i don t think we ve heard the last of this. lindsey graham, senator lindsey graham, has made clear that he wants gina haspel s testimony about what the cia knows about mbs and his role in the killing of jamal khashoggi. what i reported last week is similar to what the journal has reported in the last couple days, if there was a smoking gun that would tie mbs to this killing it lies in these messages that were exchanged between the crown prince and his key aide in the roughly 36 hours surrounding the disappearance and death of my former colleague, jamal. we don t know what s in those messages, we can speculate, but until they re made public, that smoking gun is something we can describe, but don t have. it is clear that for some months mbs had been determined to bring jamal back to the kingdom, to in some ways stop what he saw as jamal s threatening journalism upsetting the crown prince and his small entourage and that the operation in istanbul came out of that kind of obsession that he had developed. going forward the one thing i keep hearing from people who care about saudi arabia, want a different kind of saudi arabia, is that somehow whoever runs that government there have got to be outriggers that stabilize the country and there needs to be a way for saudi arabia to assure the rest of the world this won t happen again. i think until we see those structures, those new ways of handling a head strong crown prince, handling the system of making decisions, we should withhold judgment about whether anything has really changed. richard haass, i m one of those people that have looked to saudi arabia and egypt to reform because i believe that a strong sunni world not only counter balances iran but also helps us move towards a more lasting middle east peace. i know a lot of people such as myself who believe that that s a positive development in the middle east are very concerned about what s been going on in saudi arabia and i do wonder, richard, how does any president, how does any administration after trump do anything but take the position lindsey graham is taking at this particular moment, which is we cannot deal, nor will we ever deal, with a government that is run by a leader, basically a de facto leader, who murdered a virginia resident, who had american children, and who was a columnist for the washington post and was murdered and sawed up, possibly while he was still alive, because of columns that he wrote in the washington post and because of political opinions he gave in free countries where you are allowed to actually criticize other governments. well, joe, as bad as all of that is, and it s as bad as things get, it s not the only indictments. this war that he has begun and prosecuted in yemen is a strategic and humanitarian nightmare, he s divided the sunni-arab world with his behavior towards qatar. he went into kind of a twitter war and then assault with canada when all they did was criticize them for, among other things, the great reformer has put and kept in prison all sorts of activists. i do not believe he is a partner for the united states. so what this administration seems to refuse to do, but congress will push it in that direction, is to set up a much more conditional relationship, essentially make the first requirement that they get out of yemen. by the way, that would be in their own national interest. the best thing congress could do would be to force the saudis to get out of yemen. it would be one way of saving this regime from itself, but we have somebody who is essentially impulsive and unchecked and we need to have i would argue different leadership in saudi arabia. again, if someone like george herbert walker bush were president, even though he had a close relationship with the saudis, what i would have recommended to him as his middle east adviser at the time is we send an envoy and we talk to the king and we basically say we care about this relationship, but this young man is not someone who can be entrusted with it. we have got to come up with an alternative leadership in saudi arabia that, yes, is committed to real reform, but, two, acts within the bounds of decency. andrea, i m so glad that richard brought up canada and mbs s radical response to canada because that s been overshadowed by khashoggi, but it shows, again, that temperamentally he is unfit, emotionally he is unsound and the united states it seems to me we cannot make long-term plans, long-range plans with saudi arabia as long as he s going to be having such a heavy hand in running that country. is that the feeling that lindsey graham and other republicans and democrats have on capitol hill? is that the growing feeling in washington s foreign policy community? absolutely. lindsey graham has been so explicit about it. he has said that he would never deal with this young crown prince ever again. we are talking about someone who s reign will presumably unchecked go for decades and decades, especially considering his ailing father right now. lindsey graham over the weekend retweeted a video that awful video of putin and mbs glad handing, if you will i don t even know how to describe the video of them, as you see it there, at the g20, and said, it s all right, this is give us more votes on the senate floor this coming week, more votes for the resolution that cleared unexpectedly with a 63 to was it 67 to 33 or 63 to 37 63 to 37 vote margin, a very unusual margin in the senate. the resolution to get it out of committee at least for a procedural vote to cut off u.s. support for the war in yemen. that given the opposition of the leadership in the white house was pretty stunning, but lindsey graham is now the point person on this. as much as he has switched sides and been somewhat of a weather vane in the last year given his political issues and reelection coming up in 2020, this is a very strong statement from the senate. look, you referenced canada. we saw the state department saying that they don t get involved in arguments between two allies when the saudis took on the canadians. how could the state department on that day say they can t make a choice between saudi arabia and our closest neighbor and ally and nato partner, canada? i mean, it was an extraordinary moment. you have absolutely seen how secretary pompeo making excuses, in fact, for the khashoggi murder as he came out of that briefing that was not attended significantly by anyone from the intelligence community of 100 senators last week. these are remarkable moments in the last couple of days and weeks and right now secretary pompeo has just taken off for a nato meeting in brussels which will be abbreviated because he s coming back for the funeral services for president bush, but he is going to be in brussels and we understand he s also going to be meeting with netanyahu tonight in brussels. there s going to be a lot of conversation, but i can t imagine pompeo coming into these nato meetings with clean hands on the saudi issue. andrea mitchell, thank you very much for being on on this important morning. coming up, last week we saw paul manafort s plea deal fall apart and michael cohen pleading guilty to lying to congress. this week there could be even more in store for robert mueller s russia probe. that discussion and the latest news next on morning joe. don t you get the best price booking at one of those travel sites? they tell you that, but when you book at hilton.com, you get the price match guarantee. so if you find your room at a lower rate, hilton is like. we re gonna match that rate and give you an extra 25% off. what would travel sites do if you found a better price? that s not my problem, it s your problem. get outta here! whoa, i really felt that performance. it s just acting, i m really good at it. book at hilton.com and get the hilton price match guarantee. if you find a lower rate, we match it and give you 25% off that stay. 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[woman 7] go to mypsaproof.com to see proof in action. the greatest wish of all. is one that brings us together. the lincoln wish list event is here. sign and drive off in a new lincoln with $0 down, $0 due at signing, and a complimentary first month s payment. only at your lincoln dealer. no one understands me. who can i call? someone who i know will always answer. yes, hello? michael cohen speaking. i will tell you anything you want. michael, it s donald. mr. trump, i m not supposed to be talking to you. come on, michael. i m going to get in trouble. but, mikey, mikey cocoa, i need a bowl of my mikey cocoa puffs. okay. fine. i can t say no to my donny trump alufagus. michael, at least there are some things they can never take away from us. our late night talks. they have them on tape. our vacations to moscow. they seized the records. what about our hairstylist? he died like months ago. i m sad you re going to prison, michael. you were like a son to me. then why did you make me do so much illegal stuff? because you were like a son to me. wow. that s robust and rich. joining us now editor in chief of law fair and msnbc nbc legal analyst benjamin wittes. betsy woodruff, editor of commentary magazine contributing editor john podhoretz and john s recent piece is entitled latest collusion news suggests mueller just might have a case. joe, there s so much out there. as we watch point by point coming out with the mueller probe it is hard not to get ahead and make a conclusion. in the words of karen and richard carpenter, we ve only just begun. john podhoretz, let s begin with you this morning, a man who is bathed in 1970s pop culture. that s true. and understands the reference. by the way, that s where we are, ari melber talks about rap and his rap artists that he heard last week. i talk about carpenter songs that i listen to on my parents carroo in 1971 and that s how it will be forever. so, john, you say that there may be a case for collusion yet. talk about your column and where you think we are right now. so i think we have in the information we ve got last week the first substantive narrative that suggests that something that started with russian intelligence ended up coming out of donald trump s mouth. that doesn t mean that he was knowingly part of a collusion, but, in other words, lucifer 2.0 develops intelligence through hacking about the dnc s claims, guccifer 2.0 apparently is in contact with a radio talk show host who talks to jerome corsi, jerome corsi then talks to roger stone, he tells roger stone that some stuff is coming down the pike and trump should start talking about hillary s health. this is at the beginning of august 2016, and at some point in the next couple of weeks trump starts talking about hillary s health. so what we have there is a very clear possibility that guccifer 2.0 gets something and, you know, four iterations later it s coming out of trump s mouth. now, that doesn t mean, again, that trump himself knew that the information had been gotten through the hacking of the dnc e-mails, but it is, after all this time, a pathway between trump through stone to russian intelligence. benjamin wittes, i want to ask you the same question about where we are right now. by the way, mika and i spent our honeymoon weeding and listening to podcasts. this is true. you were a model to us all. yes, everyone should do the same thing. exactly. but there is a column there was a column a week i guess it was about a week ago that talked about the parallels between how trump is treating the justice department versus how nixon treated the justice department and where it s leading us. talk about that in relation to also what we ve seen over the past week and where you think we are right now. well, so let me start with what john just said because the document that he is referring to is actually a proposed plea agreement between corsi and the justice department or mueller, and presumably, therefore, contains a relatively small percentage of what mueller could allege. this is what he was willing to settle for. and so i do think it s both that and a the cohen plea deal that was reached last week really suggests that there is a very a much broader hand that mueller is holding than that he s showing right now. than he s sh right now. that takes place, as you just said, against the backdrop of the president s continued abuse of the justice department right now in the form of the installation and maintenance of matthew whitaker as the acting attorney general. and so i think when you take all of that together, the basic lay of the land is that you have a special counsel with an extremely strong hand of which we re seeing a small piece being supervised in a fashion that, you know, is, shall we say, does not comport with the highest standards of the department. it s a very explosive situation. and betsy woodruff, we heard last week we should be expecting big news from the independent counsel s office, and we got that news. what should we be expecting this week? three potential pieces of news that could be coming. first potential sentencing memo that mueller is set to introduce regarding paul manafort. we ll find out what lies mueller alleges manafort told, whether he ll allege manafort lied to protect the president, floyd text himself or potentially lied to protect powerful russian or ukrainian interests. we don t know the answers to those questions but we believe manafort lied. second, they will keep an eye out for any sentencing memo regarding general flynn. there hasn t been any serious leaks out of those meetings. it s possible like flynn like george papadopoulos hasn t forked over any relevant information. we ll find out more when mueller releases documentation on that. another piece of the russian story, but really important, are the charges against mariah butina. she s currently being held in solitary confinement in jail in alexandria, virginia. her attorneys are negotiating potentially a plea agreement. if they are able to reach a deal, we could get more details about the way someone connected with very powerful russians was looking to build relationships in the republican party during the trump campaign. so this is david ignatius in washington. ben, you follow this as closely as anyone. i m curious whether you think whether we re headed towards a battle over a subpoena either by mueller or by the house, let s say, that would ultimately go to the supreme court for a supreme court judgment on whether that subpoena can be enforced against trump in this case. is that where this is going to end up? so the house would not be able to subpoena the president for testimony in the fashion that the court would enforce, in my opinion. look, the question with respect to mueller is really whether mueller wants to trigger that confrontation. there s no doubt that he has a very strong legal argument that he can issue a grand jury subpoena for testimony to the president. there s also no doubt that the president has two cards in his hand on that. one is that he has some nontrivial legal arguments that mueller can t do that and the second is that he has matthew whitaker supervising the investigation who would presumably have to approve such a subpoena and there s some reporting suggesting that he would not do so. so the first question there is, does mueller need the testimony and remember that even if he wins that litigation the president can assert the fifth amendment and not testify. so he might very well decide that it s not a fight worth having. on the other hand, he might go forward with it. so if the question hinges on the word you used inexorbily the answer is no. on mueller part it reflects the the question how much he needs the president s testimony in order to finish his investigation. could i ask a question? john, what do you think in terms of these gathering facts, it s a gathering storm of actual fact, how do you think the, say, 35%, 40% of hard core trump supporters are going to react when data is actually presented? are they going to accept it or not? based on the emails in response to my column the answer is no. not that that s data. but i think any absence of an actual, you know, smoking gun charge that trump was working in the service of russian intelligence, the trump base will believe this is a political witch hadn t and that mueller is serving, you know, sort of the interests of the media, the interests of liberals. there s some sense of which, assuming that mueller cannot close the circle, what you ll have is a pattern of everyone around him being nailed in some fashion for lying, for saying the wrong thing, for lying about the contacts with russia, but trump saying they are saying i didn t do anything. i didn t do it. i had no part in this. and without proof, you know, that is reasonable doubt, in my view. all right, benjamin and betsy, thank you both for being with us. still ahead much more as we remember former president george h. w. bush and we ll talk to deputy chief of standpoint andy card. plus barbara bush biograph engineer sbiographer susan page and the president s final moments. a spokesman tweeted this photo last night of the form president s service dog sully, lying by his casket ahead of this week s services. sully will return to service at walter reed this week after his service to the 41st president is complete. we re back in three minutes. the new capital one savor card. earn 4% cash back on dining and 4% on entertainment. now when you go out, you cash in. what s in your wallet? hi. maria ramirez! mom! maria! maria ramirez. mcdonald s is committing 150 million dollars in tuition assistance, education, and career advising programs. prof: maria ramirez mom and dad: maria ramirez!!! to help more employees achieve their dreams. the mission was not george h.w. bush. the mission was how do we serve the united states? how do we help the united states? how do we make the united states better? one of the jbs is to strengthen the institution of the presidency. bring honor to the office. and that clearly, george h.w. bush did. what people don t appreciate fully, even within his own party, is the degree to which he had to land the plane when the berlin wall comes down. you have chaos, potentially in the former soviet union and russia. and uncertainty in europe. all those things could have gone hay wire at any point and the restraint, the caution, the lack of spiking the football that they showed was, i think, an enormous achievement. welcome back to morning joe . it is monday, december 3rd. still with us we have the president on council of foreign relations richard haas. editor of commentary magazine and columnist at the new york post . historian and best selling author john meacham april and columnist, david ignatius. and columnist for the wall street journal and political contributor for nbc news and msnbc peggy noonan is with us. dan, you tweeted something this weekend that many others did, and your tweet caught me off guard as did the tweet from many others who said that the george h.w. bush was the best president of their lifetime, and your tweet said this. rest in peace to george h.w. bush, the greatest president of my lifetime. yeah, i said it. what made you say that and what made life long democrats like brzezinski vote for one republican in their lifetime and that republican was george h.w. bush? i think there s a couple of reasons. the most obvious is you can argue that george h.w. bush was the greatest foreign policy president we had potentially in the post-war era, at least since eisenhower. as you showed in the tape segment you had, it was far from guaranteed that the cold war would end as peacefully as did it. it was far from guaranteed that saddam hussein would be repulsed from kuwait. there are hundred other smaller areas ranging from trade policy to the korean peninsula to the greater middle east where the bush administration took steps hat successive administrations were able to build on. actually the most telling thing about bush as a leader was the degree to which people in his administration did extremely well that when they then served under his son developed reputations that were somewhat less savory. chi of dick cheney think of colin powell. his accomplishments have been underrated because he only served one term. you could argue the 1990 compromise with democrats on the budget was one of the most important steps towards fiscal rectitude and he paid the political price for that. then finally just the sort of graciousness which bush demonstrated always in his personal life, and i think that was sort of e-eof exemplified b clinton. john meacham, we were fortunate enough as a nation to be book ended in the cold war with two one term presidents who left office with clouds over their heads but ended up being reassessed. harry truman, it took about 20 years being reassessed as a near great or great president for what he did from 1947 to 1952. of course, he became president in 45. his great challenges with the soviet union started in earnest in 47. now we have george h.w. bush another one term president who helped end the cold war, landed that plane as barack obama said, and i want to quote another foreign policy expert who is not known to always say kind things about republicans and david said as a historian of the white house and in particular of national security and foreign policy making in the white house, it very early on became apparent to me in those areas that the george h.w. bush white house set the high watermark among all those of the post-world war ii era. extraordinary words from, again, so many people who were not partisan republicans. henry kissinger once told me that he thought george h.w. bush had the most momentous foreign policy presidency since harry truman which was remarkable for kissinger since he wasn t involved so you know that must be true. anyway, it has the virtue of being true. i think that s a great point. truman pops up in president bush s diary. he was stunned by the level of popularity that unfold in the spring of 1991. he said, you know, 89%, 91% and bush said there s nothing like it since truman. here s the realist in him. he knew it was soft support. he foresaw economic problems ahead. he knew that americans moved on very quickly. that they didn t vote about the past. they voted about the future. he was a much more astute politician than he gets credit for, for being. the other great thing, everybody says how he was a terrible campaigner. from the very beginning it drove him crazy to be told that. there s a wonderful story about when he was running for the senate in texas the second time in 1970 he goes into a fundraiser and gives a talk and not wildly successful and he s coming out and the campaign volunteer with him says you need work on these speeches. and he said you re driving me. so there was a competitive streak in him too. i think the foreign policy legacy as been striking to me that s what people focused on. it doesn t surprise me. but the steady hand. that s what he offered. i also think and joe, you would agree, we were incredibly fortunate as a country to have the 12 years of ronald reagan and george bush at that particular moment. reagan did things that george bush couldn t do and george bush did things that reagan couldn t do. he loved us from 1981 to 1993 in these momentous times. mika, i read something from christopher buckley who worked with george h.w. bush that actually talks about and we re going to get to peggy in one moment to talk about this. but the incredible grace that boston these men had. we ve heard about george h.w. bush s grace. but christopher buckley recounted a story that bush had told him about ronald reagan where he went in after reagan was shot in the hospital. he was in the hospital. went in and the room was empty. the president wasn t there. and he actually saw the president on his hands and knees, president reagan after being shot, wiping up water from the floor. and he ran and said, mr. president, what are you doing? what are you doing? he said i was trying to get a drink of water, i spilled it on the floor and i don t want some nurse to come in here clean up after me i made the mess, i need to clean it up. you just see that servant leadership that we read about in the bible. jesus talks about servant leadership and whether it was ronald reagan or george h.w. bush, we saw a picture there of jimmy carter. that s what made george h.w. bush so great. he understood he was serving the people, not vice versa. peggy noonan, i ll let you expound upon that. that generosity of spirit and that goodness, i think revolved around love of country and spirit and patriotism. yeah. you know, the writer in washington noted in a newsletter last night, he was thinking about george h.w. bush and he said, you know what s remarkable? after the fall of the soviet union, during the great efforts to reunify germany, george h.w. bush gave a state of the union address in 1992 and said these words. by the grace of god america won the cold war. he didn t say my administration won the cold war. he didn t say republicans fought and philosophy won the cold war. he said the american people won the cold war. it was an example, i think, of old style and old school approaches about who does the work here and who deserves the credit. it was a serious nod to the american people who for more than 50 years had put forward the blood and treasure to make this thing be handable and make the soviets finally go down and it was such if you go back and read it as i did last night, it was such a departure from the sort of presidential narcissism that we see now and it s seen in fairness for a long time. in the past 25 years we ve lost that kinds of presidential modesty in which they say there s been a great gain and you did it. peggy, you were there at the revolution. you were also there when ronald reagan left on january the 20th, 1989. i want people being too young to remember that time and hearing the accolades that george h.w. bush is receiving now. george h.w. bush is one of the great presidents of the post-war era. could you just explain how difficult it was for george h.w. bush to escape ronald reagan s shadow? we remember the newsweek cover talking about the win factor. i remember people saying george h.w. bush reminds every woman of her first husband. the insults became so bad that somebody had to actually write an op-ed that i still remember, my god 40 years, 30 years later called the george bush that i know. telling the story of how bush alone with a west texas contributor who made a racial slur when nobody else was watching and he desperately needed the man s money to win the 1970 senate campaign immediately got up and he said this meet is over, walked out and drove back home. or, of course, what he did in the war, that this was no wimp, this was a strong man. but that shadow of reagan hung over him not just in 1989 but really for many throughout his entire presidency. yeah, that s so true. i think it was a bit of a harassment to him and he had this funny chafing feeling where personally he liked reagan so much. he and reagan had worked together for eight years and seen each other at very regular lunches and worked out a really nice relationship that became a friendship, moreover ronald reagan had picked george h.w. bush from, it would be overstating it to say relative obscurity but reagan didn t have to pick george h.w. bush to be his vice president in 1980. so bush was so grateful to reagan. at the same time, reagan was a, in his time, a giant figure. he was the leader of an ideological movement that was on the ascendency. he was the guy that changed the republican party between 1979 and the day bush walked in as president from a moderate liberal moderate party to a fully acknowledged fully confessed conservative party. on top of that, reagan s way, part of reagan s way of governing had to do with going forward and speak what he thought were clear blunt truths that needed diplomatically to be said and making a great impression in that way. so that was hard for bush. bush loved him and at the same time couldn t help but feeling hey i m pretty good too. you re sort of getting all the attention or all of the admiration. it was hard for him. also another thing that was hard, reagan by the end of his white house, of his two administrations was beloved by the republican base, and really liked by most of the american people. for various reasons, from personal ones like how he reacted when he was shot to how things turned out diplomatically and economically. so they really liked him. bush didn t walk into the presidency with that great whoosh of love and affection behind him. he had to earn it in his way. i know he felt he was operating sometimes under a disadvantage. yeah. peter baker, this weekend i heard so many people talking about your column, i love you too, george bush s final days. it was extraordinary writing about an extraordinary man. take us into your reporting about george h.w. bush s final days. well, of course, president bush had been suffering from a form of parkinson s disease in these last few years that relegated him to a wheelchair and made it difficult for him to speak which was difficult for a man who was physical and athletic type of person, active person in these last few days before his death. he began to fade. he wasn t getting out of bed or eating as much. james baker served as his secretary of state but was friends from the days of the tennis court of the houston country club. came to visit him on friday. saw him. seem to rally in the morning, ate a breakfast of three soft boiled eggs and yogurt. he had come close it seemed several times to the edge only to rally one time after another. secretary baker left to go off for the day, he was going off to dinner, stopped by the house again to see president bush. president bush seemed pretty good, at least hanging on. secretary baker went to incident e-when he was coming back e-got a call time to come back to the house. when he got there he saw his friend fading. president bush was ready. secretary baker talked about speaking to him, seeing him light up when he came into the room. president bush said where are we going bake? baker said we re going to heaven. president bush said that s where i want to go. the title of the story i love you too, president bush s son they were in his houston bedroom, knew the end was coming. put the speaker phone and started calling kids who weren t in town, including of course his oldest son, george w. bush. his son told him avenues great dad, he loved him and president bush 41 said i love you too. secretary baker said no, sir were his last words and half an hour later he passed away. one issue that was important to president bush was china. we re coming up actually on the 40th anniversary of the normalization of relations with china, which of course was brokered at your home in mclean, virginia but before that, obviously, nixon opened china and george h.w. bush was sent to china to begin a pain staking process that ended up with normalization of china between jimmy carter and your father and the chinese. so let s talk about where that process stands now, richard haas. trump and the g-20 over the weekend, especially as it pertains to china and his meeting with the leader, is there a truce when it comes to trade or is trump getting played? i ll answer that. the short answer is there s a truce or a cease-fire that will buy you 90 days. that s essentially it. most of the big issues have not been resolved, have not even been tackled and they won t lend themselves to easy resolution whether it s forced technology transfers, intellectual property theft, transfers. one point about the president george h.w. bush, one of the things about his successful foreign policy hasn t gotten attention it deserves. he got a lot of attention for good reason. but it all worked with these big personalities because of one poern and that s was brent. brent set the model, the gold standard for being a national security adviser who had a close relationship with the president, so close even jim baker, dick cheney and others would let brent make their case to the president. dr. brzezinski would agree completely with you and he would say after myself, of course. he did it in a way it s a hard job. you have to balance being a counselor to the president and a broker. brent got it exactly right, was instrumental in keeping the u.s.-china relationship we were just talking about alive after tianemen square. it s because of 41 himself but also i think brent was the quiet guy behind the scenes who made the whole the greater than the sum of its parts. now with china we basically have a frozen trade conflict. explain. well, the reference to the many sort of border disputes that russia has had with other former states of the soviet union, often referred to as frozen conflicts where it s not obvious putin necessarily wants to actually negotiate a real peace. and it s not obvious to me donald trump wants to negotiate natural real trade deal with china primarily for two reasons. what he s asking china to do china is not prepared to concede. and second in trump s mind i think he thinks that a conflict is actually beneficial to him. he tweets all the time about all the money we get presumably from higher tariffs not realizing that money comes from americans paying higher taxes rather than from china. nonetheless that s his world view. he sees trade as a zero sum game and, therefore, he doesn t necessarily mind faiy mind if i persistent conflict. the likelihood this will translate into anything more substantive is not high. you see that in the mismatch between what the white house read out of the dinner meeting was versus the chinese read out of it. you know, there s differing aspects of it, the details don t much up. the notion they will settling this in 90 days is ludicrous. george, i apologize for not pronouncing your name with a flare of john meacham, which i thought was rackable. we ll work on that. but, john, i will say when i go back can you say that again, john meacham the right way because we mispronounce it. in in tennessee we say podharis. ton and pale of settlement, yes. you re splitting hairs again, john. okay. so, anyway, john, the one thing, john podaris, the one thing that has been consistent with donald trump, not abortion, not gun control, not even politic, he s always been a democrat who has been little right of center democrat but these trade dispute, can you go back and see him oprah winfrey in the late 1980s, on the today show and talking about americans being suckers, the japanese are taking advantage ever us, the saudis are taking advantage of us, everybody is taking advantage of us and if he were ever president he would go in and slap tariffs. donald trump has been saying this now for over three decades. he believes it to his core. i think it is one of the core one of the few things we can say he s consistent about over the course of his career as someone who speaks on public matters. and i think there s potentially a connection between his profession as a real estate person and this view, i would call zero sum view of trade, which is to say that in real estate people vie over pieces of land, right? and so you either get it to develop it or somebody else gets it to do it. you can t expand it. it can t be grown. it s a ploft land you put a hotel on it or a building on it. in global trade we re talking about things that are not zero sum. things can grow. you grow a marketplace. you create a product that creates its own market. this is unknown to trump. his whole thing everything is a battle over finite physical space and so all of trade is really about expanding opportunities for products in places where if it goes well the market it s not infinite but much larger than anybody knows at first glance. this is something that trump does not know. what knees is how to put up a building or how to make a deal to put up a building. this is why he looks at trade and says if they get something if they get more money and we get less, if there s a trade deficit that means we re losing and they are winning and that s absolutely not correct, that s not the proper understanding of how these transactions work or how these national how goods travel between countries, but there we are. he s president and he s now acting out this conviction that comes from him being a zero sum business. david ignatius? i want to ask peter baker, who offered that beautiful moving description of final hours of president george h.w. bush and his conversation with jim baker. just wondering, peter, those two in a sense symbolized what the republican party was and whether you have the feeling whether they would have had the feeling in that last conversation that that party is gone forever or that it can come back? you re right about that. of course bush and baker were a friendship, basically unlike any other in anales of american pills. president and secretary of state they were so close. it was not a marriage of convenience, alliance of interest. this is a friendship born of tennis courts on sundays. barbecues at their house. they rose through politics in meaningful. each experienced loss and was there for them for their friends when they had to get back up on their feet. when they took office they were in tandem very few others had been. it was a stifle republicanism we don t see today. it was conservatism with a small c, more traditional about conserving what s great about america not about activism the way today s conservatives might define themselves. yet they were thrown together these two sort of, you know, paragons of stability into one of the most unstable times in our history and it was their management of those force, those extraordinary changes that were happening around the world that transitioned us from four decade superpower confrontation into a new world where america stood alone as the sun superpower left. i think you re right. they looked at today s republican party and today s america with some degree of concern. president bush 41 didn t vote for donald trump he voted for hillary clinton. he was disturbed by him. he told another author he considered trump tube blowhard and not a serious figure. secretary baker did vote for president trump but i think he s found him to be very concerning in a lot of ways. they don t share a lot of approaches to things. but this is the world that they live in and they are are pragmatists and recognize their time on the stage was over and a new era would emerge and they hoped for the best because they loved their country. peter baker, john podaris and daniel thank you all very much for being on this morning. still ahead on morning joe, andy card served push 41 as a cabinet secretary and deputy chief of staff. he reflects on his late boss and friend next. and more with david ignatius and peggy noonan when morning joe comes right back. what did he say to you when you were president? i love you. and, you know, as corny as that sounds to sorry it is the most important words you can hear in life. you don t hear a lot of people say i love you when you re president. [ laughter ] i m ken jacobus and i switched to the spark cash card from capital one. i earn unlimited 2% cash back on everything i buy. and last year, i earned $36,000 in cash back. which i used to offer health insurance to my employees. what s in your wallet? we really pride ourselvesglass, on making it easy to get your windshield fixed. with safelite, you can see exactly when we ll be there. saving you time for what you love most. kids: whoa! kids vo: safelite repair, safelite replace this is moving day with the best in-home wifi experience and millions of wifi hotspots to help you stay connected. and this is moving day with reliable service appointments in a two-hour window so you re up and running in no time. show me decorating shows. this is staying connected with xfinity to make moving. simple. easy. awesome. stay connected while you move with the best wifi experience and two-hour appointment windows. click, call or visit a store today. you know my favorite story about all that is i just gotten sworn in and andy card said y-don t you go down to value and see what it feels like as president. i said okay. so i went down. i sat down there and taking it all in. and in walks dad. so andy told dad i was down there. he walks in, he says, mr. president, welcome. i said thank you, mr. president. and that pretty much was all that was said for a while and it was a very profound moment for me. joining us now former chief of staff for president george w. bush and assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for president george h.w. bush, andy card. what a legacy. and washington bureau chief for usa today susan page, her new book the matriarch barbara bush and the making of an american dynasty comes out in april. great to have you all to talk about the legacy of george h.w. bush. andy card, you said he was humbling to be with. can you talk more about that? president george h.w. bush is the finest person i ve ever met and he really is a role model for life and it was a great citizen not just of the united states but a great citizen of the world. so i was privileged to work with him. i first met him in the 1970s and would drive him around massachusetts and new hampshire in a little red chevy chevette. people thought he was the beer company guy. remarkable life he lived. it s a life of love. i saw that love for his wife, for i had children, for his grandchildren, for his great-grandchildren, for his extended family. just a life of love and it was contagious. he was most compassionate but he had the courage to do the hard work of getting things done. it took a lot of hard work for him to be as successful as he was as a president and much more successful than most people realize both on the foreign policy front where people do talk about that but on the domestic side where he got things done with a democratic congress because he had the courage to work hard and to pull people into agreement rather than push them away. john meacham. i have a question for susan who has been spending so much time pondering mrs. bush and her life and legacy. what s your view of, would there have been a president george h.w. bush without a barbara pierce bush? you know that was a question i ve asked more than a hundred people i interviewed for this book because i think it s such an interesting question. i tell you where i come down. i think they were indispensable partners. they each made the other bigger and better. in some ways such a perfect match. they had different strengths. they had different shortcomings. and the sharper edge that barbara bush had was sometimes used for longer political memory for slights and sometimes helpful to george bush. george bush s softer side was also sometimes, i think, helpful to barbara bush. sign that way, a marriage of 73 years through what extraordinary circumstances, through such great triumphs, and tragedies. they were fortunate to have met one another at that high school christmas dance in greenwich, connecticut. so, susan, i want to talk about loss being defining moments for this couple, even for the presidency but for this couple especially. i ll read from your piece and i know i ll have trouble getting through this so peggy i ll send it to you after i read from susan s piece in which she writes, when robin was being treated at new york s memorial hospital, brass bush set one rule. no crying in her room. her mother didn t want the little girl european settled by seeing adults in her life in tears. george bush a man of open emotion found it almost impossible to comply. again and again he told robin he had to go the bathroom. then stepped into the hallway to regain his composure. when robin died barbara was the one who collapsed into sorrow and george bush was the one who took charge. time after time during the next six months she said george would put me together again. the pattern of one stepping up when the other was struggling and of being able to switch those roles between them sustained the couple during times of political defeat and personal pain from then on. peggy? well, that says a great deal of the death of robin was a dreadful cloud that came into their pretty sunny lives as a young couple, left connecticut, coming to texas going into the oil business. a beautiful little girl became sick and then very quickly it became very serious. i think mrs. bush was sort of his president bush s, everybody needs a platform from which to move forward or from which to jump. you need a stable platform. that platform won t break. it won t move. it won t jiggle. i think barbara bush looked at then poppy bush and thought this is the most wonderful man in the world, key do no wrong. that s how she saw him. and that was helpful to him in his own conception of himself when he went forward. he always knew he could come back to her and she would tell him he was okay. it was a really partnership. i don t think they so much wanted the same things as he wanted certain things and they said if you want it, i want it. period. david. andy card, one of history s ridl riddles for me what george h.w. bush would have done with a second term if he had won it. do you have any thoughts? did he ever express anything to you that would give you a hint of what vision he might have had if he had been lucky enough to win that second term? i really believe if he had won a second term his top priority probably would have been to build on the madrid conference that secretary baker was conducting and the oslo accords and try to find lasting and meaningful peace in the middle east. he was committed to doing that and he was empowering jim baker. jim bake mother ti elevated him. i think he would have kwond the phenomenal success he had on the international stage. at the same time he was managing a tough congress. and i think that he would have been able to get congress to do things remember what he didn t do with congress and remember he had both the house and the senate were controlled by the democrats by pretty significant margins. so it wasn t easy to get things done. he got the clean air act passed. the civil rights act passed. he pass ada. helped mitigate the problems of the savings-and-loan crisis. he helped with education and child care. he got budget discipline. he got fiscal discipline. yes, he had to violate his promise on cutting taxes to get something done. he allowed for economies to grow for the next ten years. he didn t get credit for it. bill clinton didn t get a lot of credit. but george h.w. bush made that happen. so he had a big agenda to do as he was going forward and he would have gotten it done. but if he didn t win a second term or by not winning a second term he gave his son a chance to be president. i don t think his son would have been president if he had a second term. andy s point about what he would have done with the middle east is spot on. i want to ask you, susan, about the tax pledge. and whether he knew what was coming and to the extent that deafter he broke it, your sense of the deliberations he had about not whether to do it but how to do the policy. like, for example, why didn t he address the american people more directly on that. why didn t he take the most consequential decision of his presidency and not shape it more? it was so interesting. i was covering the white house the day that came out. we were in the briefing room. a junior white house aide came out with a the typewritten statement and pinned it on the bulletin board in the press room that had this statement that included tax increases as part of the budget deal. and it was as though the white house didn t understand how significant this was going to be, the violation of this pledge. and so that may have been one reason that they didn t do a better job in shaping perceptions of it and making the argument about why it was necessary. might have been possible to have this seen in a somewhat different light if they had done so. but george h.w. bush had such great skills. communication not really at the top of that list and there just may not have been a sense of how say a ronald reagan might have handled a similar challenge. andy card and susan page, thank you both for being on this morning. and still ahead the next generation of democratic congressional leadership is starting to come in to view. we ll talk to the newly elected democratic caucus congressman hakeem jeffries next on morning joe . if you want a car from a company that s been building them for 115 years, get a ford. if you want a car with driver-assist technology, get a ford. if you want waze and amazon alexa compatibility, get a ford. if you want a car that doesn t have any of that, get anything. but a ford. otherwise, you re gonna want a ford. if your adventure. .keeps turning into unexpected bathroom trips. .you may have overactive bladder, or oab. ohhhh.enough already! we need to see a doctor. ask your doctor about myrbetriq® (mirabegron). it treats oab symptoms of urgency, frequency, and leakage. it s the first and only oab treatment in its class. myrbetriq may increase blood pressure. tell your doctor right away if you have trouble emptying your bladder or have a weak urine stream. myrbetriq may cause serious allergic reactions. .like swelling of the face, lips, throat or tongue, or trouble breathing. if experienced, stop taking and tell your doctor right away. myrbetriq may interact with other medicines. tell your doctor if you have liver or kidney problems. common side effects include increased blood pressure, common cold or flu symptoms,. .sinus irritation, dry mouth, urinary tract infection, bladder inflammation,. .back or joint pain, constipation, dizziness, and headache. need some help managing your oab symptoms along the way? 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it s quite unfortunate that on their way out the door they continue to hide facts from the american people. what we ve seen in the last two years, joe, house republicans essentially have functioned as a cover up caucus, doing the bidding of president trump to try to hide facts as it relates to what may or may not have happened in terms of russia s interference with the election. they have not veered off the script even in their final days. richard haas, i ll let you ask the congressman some questions next. doesn t it seem strange that you actually have james comey who wants to testify publicly, wants complete wants the world to see what he s saying. and in the reverse, it s not the witness that is seeking privacy. it s the house republicans that want him to testify in darkness. it s bizarre. again, i think it says an awful lot about this republican congress and why they get absolutely walloped in 2018. it s a real case of they don t get it. ultimately most or all of it will come out. it s the sort of thing that ought to be straightforward. the american people have a right to know here. brandeis s comment about sunlight being the greatest disinfectant. we need some sunlight here. congressman, one of the first things that s going on you re plate is this new trade agreement with mexico. democrats have become more protecti protectionist. president has increased the pressure. essentially we re going to pass this new trade agreement or we re not going to have any trade agreement with mexico and canada. i think we should approach it with an open mind but put it in the context of our economy. the productivity of the american worker has increased. wages have increased by less than 10%. we have a situation where the great middle class and those who aspire to be part of it are in jeopardy. some of it is poorly negotiated trade deals. a lot of it is the rise of automaizatioaut automatization. put it in the broader ideal of how do we reach a point where the american worker has an opportunity to continue to robustly pursue the american dream. i have an open mind. i think we should all have an open mind as to what the right thing to do is in this particular incident. when talking about the judiciary committee and the fact that they. reporter: were going to subpoena comey and try to keep it hidden from the american people. talk about a house republican majority that to the bitter end just doesn t get it. well, i wonder what the house republican majority is simply doing now. we re in december. we re going to have a new congress sworn in thin january. the democrats have taken the congress. you re going to have a democratic speaker. i assume it is mrs. pelosi. certainly i m one of leader pelosi s 218 votes. you feknow what i m curious about? a party wins back the house of representatives in america. all of a sudden you ve got the gavel again, you re got the chairmanships. at what point do you guys, you heads of committees, you nancy pelosi and her people get together and say, okay, now we re putting together an agenda, this is the first thing we re going to do. when does the agenda come together? who s involved in making the agenda? what can america expect from a new democratic house? that s a great question. that process really began in terms of our closing argue document the american people, which we arctticulated in our f the people agenda. we said we are not going to fight for the wealthy. the republicans have done a great job of doing that. we re going to fight for working families, middle class folks, senior citizens, the poor, sick and afflicted. we re going to fight to lower health care costs. we re going to fight for a real infrastructure plan and we re going to work on cleaning up corruption in washington, d.c. bringing our democracy to life, ending the era of voter suppression and trying to get unregulated money out of politics. what can the new house do to protect robert mueller, the special counsel, if there s an attempt to dump him? it should be done in a bipartisan way. we re hopeful in the context of the spending agreement that is being negotiated right now that has to be resolved on or before december 7th that we can reach a bipartisan agreement to protect the special counsel. we know senator jeff flake has been a leader in this regard on the senate side. certainly we re prepared to act on the house side. instead of chasing folks like james comey, many on the republican side have refused to do what is enacting a provision to allow a full and fair investigation to take place. i don t want to contemplate a circumstance where president trump terminates the special counsel or allowed his lackey at the department of justice to do so. that would be incredibly grave. that would be the precipice of a constitutional crisis. yes. hakeem jeffreys, thank you very much for being on this morning. thank you. and peggy noonan as well. vladimir putin s spokesman appears to have changed his story about contact with michael cohen over plans for a trump tower in moscow. reall really. we ve just learned that german chancellor angela merkel will travel to washington to attend the funeral of george h.w. bush tomorrow nap is of note because the 41st president is credited with reunifying germany after the fall of the berlin wall. i m 53, but in my mind i m still 35. that s why i take osteo bi-flex to keep me moving the way i was made to. it nourishes and strengthens my joints for the long-term. osteo bi-flex because i m made to move. 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(vo) quickbooks. backing you. with my bladder leakage, the products i ve tried just didn t fit right. they were too loose. it s getting in the way of our camping trips. but with a range of sizes, depend fit-flex is made for me. with a range of sizes for all body types, depend fit-flex underwear is guaranteed to be your best fit. what is at stake is more than one small country. it is a big idea, a new world order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind, peace and security, freedom and the rule of law. such is a world worthy of our struggle and worthy of our children s future. 27 years after president bush called for international order, the strong men of saudi arabia and russia celebrated the lack of it as america pulls back under donald trump. friday marked that sharp split as the 41st president of the united states george herbert walker bush died at the age of 94. this morning we remember his life and his tremendous legacy and how his approach to leadership stands in stark contrast with the politics and the news and the policies of today. welcome to morning joe. it s monday, december 3rd. with us, we have the president of the council on foreign relations richard hawes. historian, jon meacham is with us. nbc news chief foreign affairs correspondent andrea mitchell is here. and columnist and associate editor for the washington post david ignatius as well. joe, wow, what a stark contrast between h.w. s legacy and the news we have today. well, it is. and it did. it did seem to become starker every time you saw stories about george h.w. bush and the life that he lived. i will say that it s almost as if bush 41 inspired this president to even move beyond his own boundaries that he showed the first two years by delivering to this country and the world a statement upon george h.w. bush s passing that was graceful and that was presidential and quite frankly what s been lacking a bit in the past. i want to talk to jon meacham who spoke about him yesterday at the national cathedral. you know, jon, we could talk about how great, what a great man george h.w. bush was and how he guided america and the world through the ending of the cold war, how he reunified germany, just a cia director, a u.n. ambassador, ran the rnc, vice president, president, congressm congressman. he was a great man. but what is so remarkable in 2016 and the great take-away from his life has to be that he was a good man. he was fundamentally a decent man. not only when he was president of the united states but when he was a young child, a kid whose anymo nickname was have half because every time he had a sandwich he d tell the other person when he was with, here, have half of mine. it was that generous spirit that made this great man a good man from the very beginning. anyone who was around him was enveloped by a kind of quiet persistent charisma. it s not a word we associate with president bush. we think of jack kennedy as charismatic, reagan, clinton, george w. bush with a locker room charisma kind of one on one ability. barack obama has the big arena charisma. george h.w. bush, in my experience and to my observation, always communicated in inefably kind of an ambient sense that your country, your future would be safe in his hands. i think that one of the remarkable things about him is he is of our time generationally but he really has more in common with the roosevelts and the founders culturally and temperamentally than he does the post from the 90s forward. more in common with fdr than with bill clinton and in many ways with his own son in terms of the politics they confronted. he was a little out of fashion even while he was reigning over the countries. a couple of things shaped the politics that we have now. the rise of talk radio, cable news was becoming more significant. he used to belly ache into his tape recorder all the time about what the talking heads were saying. and most importantly the break among the house gop against his deal to get a budget, get spending controls, a deal that set with some higher taxes, set the conditions for the prosperity of the 1990s in what i think were the o.j. simpson bronco case of partisanship. when bush was announcing that bipartisan deal in the rose garden, newt gingrich leaves the white house, drived up es up t hill and there s a rally for gingrich. in many ways that set the stage for more brutal politics. it happened under the feet of someone who did want very much to govern with consensus, because consensus had shaped him. david ignatius, again comparing where we were with george h.w. bush and where we are now, i read so much this weekend, but i think a paragraph in the former path s own words really boils it down that, yes, every politician makes mistakes, every politician is flawed, every politician will fight like hell to get their story out there and sometimes use very sharp elbows, but at the end of the day they put their country first and they put people around them first. this is part of a note that george h.w. bush wrote to maureen dowd. he said, i reserve the right to whine, to not read, to use profanity. but if you ever get really hurt or if you ever get really down and just need a shoulder to cry on or just need a friend, give me a call. i will be there for you. i will not let you down. now, if george h.w. bush, who was skewered by the media throughout most of his political life had decided to call anybody an enemy of the people, it would probably have started with maureen dowd. but he understood that the press wasn t the enemy of the people even said basically at the end of the day, we re all in this together and i will be here for you, just like i know you would be here for me. what a remarkable difference between 1988 and 2018. george h.w. bush never more than in the recollections that maureen has in that wonderful column was for a patrician son of the elite a down to earth guy. he was funny, he was self-debra deprecating. he couldn t figure out why he liked this new york times columnist but he did and he kept writing to her. he was graceful in the old fashioned new england way. he didn t believe in showing off. the idea that you d brag about your accomplishments would have been abhorrent to him. but he had an ability to make difficult things look easy throughout his presidency, especially true nor foreiin for policy. we forget how hard it was to find a pathway to reunify germany. bush had to do that with great subtlety. a friend of mine reminded me over the weekend we had the s & o crisis under george bush s wash. he held people accountable. i think those simple qualities that made him somebody that maureen dowd could tell funny stories about that s what we all love and we miss as we think about his passing. richard hawes, you worked for president bush 41. obviously during very momentous times, so momentous that you didn t even have time to cut your hair or even comb it at times. my goodness. he was busy strman about tow. looking at pictures of this past weekend, vladimir putin high-fiving the crown prince of saudi arabia when other world leaders didn t want to be even seen shaking his hand, it just reminds me of what a deft touch george h.w. bush had that he was a realist but at the same time would never allow something like that to stand without calling it out. what are we missing with the leadership of donald trump? george h.w. bush was a realist, but he was a realist who also had values and standards and principles. one of the first tests of his presidency in 1989 was the crushing of dissent in teen man square. and what bush tried to do because he had been the envoy to china, he knew how important that relationship was and he couldn t allow the relationship to end. on the other hand, he also knew it was important to send a message and sanctions were put into place and the administration tried to balance that. or when saddam invaded kuwait, one of the reasons bush felt urgency there is he was getting the reports of what was going on in kuwait and he said we ve got to act here. if we don t, there s not going to be a kuwait left to save. he didn t have the patience of some people. he said we ll give sanctions a fair chance, but if we must, we will use force. what was so interesting is after we used force in a decisive way to liberate kuwait, he also then had a sense of restraint. he said we had a mission here which was to liberate kuwait, but not to liberate baghdad. if we try to do that, we will go against what we promised people and we will incur more casualties there than we did in liberating kuwait in the first place. there always was a sense of balance in the man between a kind of principle and a real determination. i think people underestimated the steeliness of the termination. he also had a sense of limits and restraints whether it was in his personal relations with people. i remember once i was called over to see him and i got to the door of the oval office. john sununu was the chief of staff. he said what do you think you re doing richard? i said i got a message that the president wanted to see me. he said go back to your office and put on your coat. there was a sense bush more than anyone else as a contrast to today, obviously. you get a sense that he was the temporary custodian of the oval office. he didn t own it. he was simply the 41st president of the united states he was very much aware he had been given this trust. he was a borrower, if you will, of the office. but ultimately he knew there were limits and he had to pass it onto who came after. much more on this ahead as we explore the bush legacy. i used to worry about death. i don t anymore. but i have a feeling there s an after life and i have a feeling it s a good one. who would you want to see first? it depends. if barbara predeceases me, i d probably go with her. but i think my mom and my father and maybe robin, our literal gi d. 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tools are clear and straightforward so you can plan for retirement while saving for the things you want to do today. -whoo! while saving for the things unstopand it s strengthenedting place, the by xfi pods,gateway. which plug in to extend the wifi even farther, past anything that stands in its way. .well almost anything. leave no room behind with xfi pods. simple. easy. awesome. click or visit a retail store today. it s hard not to recognize that the passing of george h.w. bush has rekindled bipartisan good feeling on editorial pages and just about anywhere else that politics is spoken. president bush s death also has done what many previously believed was impossible. it s inspired the current occupant of the white house to briefly behave in a way that s presidential. with gracious words and a declaration of an extended period of national mourning. what becomes undeniably obvious is that stark contrast between these two men. bush served in the military, treated be eed people with resp dignity and put country ahead of party and self time and time again over his half century in public service. over the last two years, dooevit behavior. let s see what happens at wednesday s memorial service. my prediction is that trump fakes more respect for a family whose unprecedented history of public service has repeatedly belittled. then he goes back to making a mockery of the very office george bush and this nation long revered. just as president bush s character was set even during his earliest days at andoverw, h donald trump remains the man he was while avoiding the draft and then telling howard stern on the radio that sleeping around with women in new york city while avoiding sexual diseases was his own personal vietnam. he said that. as is always the case, the presidency does not shape character. it reveals it in a raw fashion. that is why we celebrate george h.w. bush s legacy and fear the next two years of mr. trump s wild white house ride. as we continue to watch that, andrea, it s conduct in office that we look at today with president trump and that we look at over the past few days even, which leaves our jaws dropping. certainly in personal and political and foreign policy and relations with the media, the contrast could not be more stark. you have president trump returning from a g20 where he couldn t meet with vladimir putin for a variety of reasons. they said it was because of ukraine. but perhaps it would have been better to meet with him and publicly stand up to him on ukraine rather than just avoiding the whole subject and the obvious implication was that he couldn t meet with him because of the preagreement just hours earlier before departing of michael cohen. all of that brought into gross relief as well as that extraordinary handshake, hand grip bromance between the two strong men who are the bookends of the trump foreign policy. so many thoughts flood over me about george h.w. bush and the years and years of watching him in so many roles, the political role which people have acknowledged. 1988 was a brutal cane. lee atwater s death bed confessions for the willie horton ads and other things that transpired. but the tough decisions he made, referring to that tough budget decision which did set the stage for years and years of prosperity as well as some of the other decisions that he made that contradicted his own more previous political impulses. i m thinking of peter baker s reminiscence about the great correspondent from the washington post who led to the demise of john sununu. when she got sick with cancer, the first president to respond was president bush. she had absolutely bedevilled him. he and baker got her into md anderson for intensive treatments. they did everything they could in houston to help her. it could not have been a more dramatic contrast because she was the toughest white house correspondent. maureen was the toughest columnist. but there are so many other examples. marlon fitzwater really represented the spirit of president bush 41 in terms of his role as press secretary. the contrast could not be more stark with what we see today. coming up on morning joe, david ignatius takes us through his latest reporting on saudi arabia s role in the killing of jamal kashoggi. what the cia says about intercepted messages from the crown prince himself. here we go. discover. i like your card, but i m absolutely not paying an annual fee. discover has no annual fees. really? yeah. we just don t believe in them. oh nice. you would not believe how long i ve been rehearsing that. no annual fee on any card. only from discover. is time you make for yourself. aveeno® daily moisturizing lotion improves skin hydration in just 1 day. and for twice the moisture, try the body wash, too. aveeno® naturally beautiful results® the united states postal service makes more holiday deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country. with one notable exception. (music throughout) unstopand it s strengthenedting place, the by xfi pods,gateway. which plug in to extend the wifi even farther, past anything that stands in its way. .well almost anything. leave no room behind with xfi pods. simple. easy. awesome. click or visit a retail store today. the wall street journal has reviewed unreported excerpts from the highly classified cia assessment on the murder of washington post columnist jamal kashoggi, which reveals some of the evidence linking saudi arabia s crown prince to the killing. it includes at least 11 text messages mohammed bin salman himself sent to his closest advisor who oversaw the team that killed kashoggi just hours before and after the murder on october 2nd. in addition in what seems to foreshadow the saudi operation launched against kashoggi, mbs told associates that if efforts to convince kashoggi to return to saudi arabia failed, they could possibly lure him outside saudi arabia. the assessment also stated that the cia has medium to high confidence that the crown prince personally targeted and probably ordered kashoggi s death. although it adds, quote, to be clear, we lack direct reporting of the crown prince issuing a kill order. the cia s judgment is based on mbs s personal focus on kashoggi and his tight control of the kingdom and the operatives involved in the murder and mbs s urging some of the same operators to target other opponents, adding it s highly unlikely they would act without his authorization. i don t know what more the president needs. the president has questioned and dismissed our intelligence agency s assessment saying it did not offer a definitive conclusion, again sewing doubt. trump told reporters that he had no discussion with mbs, although a white house official says the two exchanged pleasantries at the leaders session. david ignatius, you put it all together. very obvious what donald trump said about the cia s assessment just isn t true and also suggests that s why there was an empty chair where gina haspel was supposed to be when there was testimony before congress last week. i don t think we ve heard the last of this. senator lindsey graham has made clear that he wants gina haspel s testimony about what the cia knows about mbs and his role in the killing of jamal kashoggi. what i reported last week is similar to what the journal has reported in the last couple of days. if there is a smoking gun that would tie mbs to this killing, it lies in these messages exchanged between the crown prince and his key aide in the roughly 36 hours surrounding the disappearance and death of my former colleague jamal. we don t know what s in those s. until they re made public, that smoking gun is something we can describe but don t have. it is clear that for some months mbs had determined to bring jamal back to the kingdom to stop what he saw as jamal s threatening journal and that the operation in istanbul came out of that kind of obsession that he had developed. going forward, the one thing i hear from people who care about saudi arabia is that somehow whoever runs that government, there are got to be outriggers that stabilize the country and there needs to be a way for saudi arabia to assure the rest of the world this won t happen again. until we see those structures, those new ways of handling a head strong crown prince, handling the system of making decisions, we should withhold judgment about whether anything s really changed. coming up, we ll go live to argentina on the heels of the g20 summit. first, presidential historian joins us with his thoughts on the life of bush 41. i can do more to lower my a1c. because my body can still make its own insulin. and i take trulicity once a week to activate my body to release it, like it s supposed to. trulicity is not insulin. it comes in a once-weekly, truly easy-to-use pen. and it works 24/7. trulicity is an injection to improve blood sugar in adults with type 2 diabetes when used with diet and 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can see exactly when we ll be there. saving you time for what you love most. kids: whoa! kids vo: safelite repair, safelite replace dear bill, when i walked into this office just now, i felt the same sense of wonder and respect i felt four years ago. i know you will feel that too. i wish you great happiness here. i never felt alone as some presidents have described. there will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. i m not a very good one to give advice, but just don t let the critics discourage you or push you off course. you will be our president when you read this note. i will ysh you well. your success now is our country s success. i m rooting hard for you. good luck. president clinton reading part of the letter that president george h.w. bush left for him in the oval office on january 20th, 1993. reading that letter you just really saw his generosity of spirit. you saw the relationship that would develop over the years between the bushes and the clintons. h.w. bush really look out for him. i love the line where he says i was never lonely here. i think he wanted that for bill clinton. he wanted him to feel supported. their friendship grew into something much more. they were really like members of the family. the bushes saw bill clinton as a son. he saw the bushes as parents in some way. there was actually a deep love between both of them. you go back to the events of 1992. you could have never expected that. we love to gloss over how things used to be, especially in the age of trump. it was always as it was with george h.w. bush. no, not really. we read of eisenhower just bored to death when harry truman is trying to give him advice during the transition in 1952. ike had no use in 1960 when he was talking to jfk, there s the story of jfk looking at a button on the desk and if he presses it the helicopter comes. he basically says, son, you re going to have a lot more to worry about than pressing buttons on the white house desk. and yet here george h.w. bush, a unique grace that even presidents before donald trump did not seem to have with their successor. you re absolute right. sometimes it takes you decades to appreciate what you had and do not any longer have in a president these days. that s why i always think people say why do you have to wait i always say you have to wait at least 30 years to come to any kind of historical judgment of a president. imagine if we were all sitting around talking about george h.w. bush in january of 1993. we would probably have different judgments about him as president from the ones that we ve got this morning. george bush was not harry truman but there is one parallel. that is when truman let tft the white house in 1953, one poll found his approval rating somewhere in the low 20s. here we are over a half century later and most of us would say truman was the guy who allowed about ten cold war presidents up to george h.w. bush win the cold war. and even more than that, truman showed modesty and decent si and good judgment. in light of our current times, george h.w. bush looms as an even greater man. again, the uncommon grace he showed his successor bill clinton, who had just talked about him as a relic of a different age. and yet the grace there to say we re here for you, we re rooting for you, good luck. the morning he wrote that he was dictating into his diary his last morning in the oval office. he reflected on how wonderful barbara was, how essential she had been. he said people say i m disconnected but i never naefel that way and i have the same reverence for this office as when i came in. he would be riding in the back of a limo and people would be dhe cheering and he would say in his diary that day, they weren t cheering for me, they were cheering for the presidency. ruth marcus, a little over three years ago you wrote a washington post op-ed reflecting on george h.w. bush s presidency. the piece entitled what every president should learn from bush 41. we tend to recall him for his stewardship of the gulf war and his abandonment of his read my lips on taxes. not only a fiscal deal that paved the way to the balanced budgets of the clinton administration but also the passage of the americans with disabilities act and an important overhaul of the clean air act. still, the bush 41 example is more than mere historical artifact. it offers a presidential role model. he understood the value of painstakingly building personal relationships. how the assiduous courting of even the opposition could pay off even if years down the road. he was a president willing to bend, to risk reputation and reelection in the service of the national interest. ruth, it s a balance of grace, patriotism, humanity and also selflessness. it was never about him. the inspiration for that column, by the way, was mr. meacham s excellent biography. it s a reminder that the situation in washington, the toxic atmosphere of partisanship and tribalism that we bemoan now is not simply a creation of the current president, it s a creation of all of us in an era that has gone by. to look back on that bush moment is jon used the word in his book quaint. i hope we manage to summon that quaintness and get back to it in some way. and i want to say that fundamentif you want to know more about president clinton s relationship with president bush, he wrote an op-ed with us that starts with that beautiful, beautiful letter. the thing that s so amazing about that letter is the relationship between those two presidents, one leaving and one entering, was not exactly warm and fuzzy at the time. it had been a very bitter campaign. he summoned the grace to understand that the new president was our president, the country s president and then that beautiful relationship developed afterwards. michael, this weekend frank fleming wrote, george h.w. bush had the most boring presidency during my lifetime, which right now looks pretty good. looks great to me. it s like ike. ike was attacked for eight years for being a boring president. they wanted excitement and what we got was the 1960s. boring? the steady hand as jon meacham said, right now that seems like a brilliant way to lead. please bring it back. one reason why it was boring was because he had those personal qualities that we ve been talking about this morning. if you were decent to the opposition, if you tried to build bridges, if you showed them some respect, politicians all the way down beneath you through the congress to the local level, they all look at the way a president behaved because they want to be successful in politics too. so it rippled all the way through. the other thing is that george bush knew that in our society even little kids watch the way a president speaks, the way he behaves. it has even that larger impact. democratic senator kamala harris says she will decide whether she s going to run for president in 2020 by the end of this year. the california senator told me during the know your value conference in san francisco on saturday, quote, it s a very serious decision. over the holiday i will make that decision with my family. senator harris also said that she s aware of the challenges that a barrier breaking campaign will include, saying, quote, let s be honest, it s going to be ugly. when you break things, it is painful and you get cut and you bleed. and she said she was going to talk with her family about the reality of that and that it would be a family decision. would be a family decision. she s making it over the holidays. ruth, i guess we re about to enter into the serious time, sort of the sorting where we see which of these 572 democrats who say they re going to run for president, whether they re really going to jump in or not. kamala harris is interesting because she is depicted on the national stage as this far left senator from california, and yet you look at her background as a prosecutor out of san francisco who became an attorney general. when she ran for reelection in 2014 as attorney general, she had a lot of very conservative sheriffs in southern california, a lot of really tough law enforcement officers who probably voted republican most of their lives actually support kamala harris because she reached out to both sides. i guess a real challenge for her is going to be whether she can somehow translate that record in california to who she ll be on the national stage. the sorting and maybe you ve under counted with 572. there s probably more that have popped up while we ve been on the air. the sorting is going to be a challenge for everybody. kamala harris could be a very compelling candidate. i think one of the very big challenges for her and for a big number of that 572 has to do with figuring out how to not be seen as a creature of washington, because i think that the washington baggage is significant for a lot of the prospects that democrats have. they don t have a great farm team of governors and state legislators, so the natural place for democratic candidates to come from is washington, but that may not be the best place from which to run against this president. you know, mika, just a point of personal privilege. this weekend the know your value conference kwas extraordinary. it was the most extraordinary thing i thought happened in my life other than alabama. no. it was actually extraordinary. you had kamala harris there talking about knowing her value, mira sorvino. you talk about a raw presentation. natalie morales was there. the real stars were the women that were there, especially at the end. the women at the very end that got up on stage and talked about learning what their value was. oh my gosh. and learning how to move ahead when sometimes the odds are against them. and the competition was really incredible nap. that s the winner of the $25,000 bonus. it was incredible to watch danielle go from a shy student in california to being the biggest force on stage competing against other amazing women. you saw lisa borders there and cindy robbins who inspired sales force to spend $9 million to equalize the pay. it was an incredible day and a great way to spend the honeym n honeymoon. it really was. what s so interesting about all the women that got up there and spoke, they talked about how they wanted to learn their value not for themselves, not to get ahead in their corporate cultures or in their schools or wherever they were, but to serve other people, to help other people. it was very, very inspiring. thanks for your support. ruth marcus, thank you both. up next, it seems cohen isn t the only one who lied about plans for a trump tower in moscow. nbc s keir simmons joins us on that. to look at me now, you don t see psoriasis. you see clear skin. cosentyx can help people with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis find clear skin that can last. don t use if you re allergic to cosentyx. before starting, get checked for 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(indistinct shouting) but at the y, we create opportunities for everyone, no matter who you are or where you re from. for a better us, donate to your local y today. for a better us, this holiday season, families near you need your help. visit redcross.org now to donate. we were talking about the model t. now here we are talking about winning the most jd power iqs and appeal awards. talking about driver-assist technology talking about cars that talk and listen. talking about the highest customer loyalty in the country. but that s enough talking. seriously. that was a lot of talking. back to building oh, look. that was a lot of talking. another anti-wrinkle cream in no hurry to make anything happen. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair® works in just one week. with the fastest retinol formula available. it s clinically proven to work on fine lines and wrinkles. one week? that definitely works! rapid wrinkle repair®. and for dark spots, rapid tone repair. neutrogena®. see what s possible. can you just help us with how much contact there was between the president s former lawyer michael cohen and the kremlin, how many times were there e-mails or conversations? two e-mails. and one returned phone call asking what they wanted and what they were in contact, wanted to be in contact with also they were invited to an economic forum because we re told the presidential administration is not dealing with construction works. so we can, we can arrange a contact with the potential russian counterparts, but there s a perfect opportunity, like, economic forum. so you offering so they stopped making contact with you? yes, yeah. nbc s keir simmons caught up with the kremlin spokesman dimitri peskov at the g-20 and questioned him about his contacts with michael cohen and what contacts with the kremlin regarding the trump tower moscow proposal. what else did you learn? hi, joe. we just keep pushing forward with the challenging and difficult process of just trying to figure out who s telling the truth. we should just point out that president trump has scened his former lawyer michael cohen as a liar. but there you have president putin, one of his right-hand men, appearing to confirm the admission by cohen that he had contact with peskov s office. what he says is the kremlin saw it as another american businessmen. another contact they get dozens of per week. i said to peskov that people are going to struggle to understand that an e-mail from someone working with the then candidate trump would ring alarm bells. so there are many, many unanswered questions. another one is the role of the man called felix sater who was a former business partner of the then mr. trump. sater is alleged to have worked with michael cohen on the real estate deal in moscow. i wanted to know whether peskov had appeared on the radar in anyway. take a listen. do you recognize the name felix sater? any contact with a man called felix sater? no personal contacts with him has your office ever had contacts with a man i don t know. you re not sure, maybe? interested in foreign investments and that s why we re trying to create a z our own ken dilanian reached felix sater over the week whond told him i never spoke to peskov or his office myself. one last point, dimitri peskov s story has changed. in the past, it s been reported they left approaches unanswered. now of course he s saying there was this contact. so still many questions. still many questions, keir, yes and how interesting he says, oh, just another american businessman who was happening to run for president of the united states who the russians then tried to help get elected. thank you so much for your reporting. we appreciate it. jon meacham, final thoughts for you, as we close out a day where a lot of thoughts about george h.w. bush and a lot of thoughts about where we are in 2018. in a couple hours, he s going to begin his last trip to washington. he s flying up on what is air force one to lie instate in the capitol. it s a city he attempted to govern in a spirit of unity. and i think represented in many ways the best we can be. we want to give the last word to barbara bush would recorded for the bush foundation, the 1958 letter that her husband wrote in memory of their daughter robin who died from leukemia. here is part of that letter. there is about our house a need. we need some soft blonde hair to offset those crew cuts. we need a doll house to stand firm against our forts and thousand baseball cards. we need someone who s afraid of frogs. we need a little one who can kiss without leaving egg or jam or gum. we need a girl. we had one once. she d fight and cry and play and make her way just like the rest. but there was about her a certain softness. she was patient. her hugs were just a little less wiggly. my daddy had a caress, a certain ownership, which touched a slightly different spot than the hi dad i love so much. but she is still with us. we need her and yet we have her. we can t touch her and yet we can feel her. we hope she ll stay in our house for a long, long time. love, pop. hi there, i m stephanie ruhle. clearly a little broken up this morning. we start by talk about a final mission. president george h.w. bush s casket comes to d.c. today to begin days of mourning. being honored all around this country and the world for his services. i want and kinder and gentler nation. i m a quiet man but i hear the quiet people others don t. their concerns are mine. we remember the 41st president. we re going to cover the man in the middle. new documents tied to cohen s guilty plea put of putting trump right at the heart of the russia investigation. he was lyingo
if you re an active duty military or military veteran, sign up now and get your first year free. well, it s time to make another connection. a game show legend return. break out your leg warmers, wine and parachute pants for the ultimate eighties. pop culture trivia 83 show streaming now on fox nation, america is streaming. all right. unfortunately, that is all the time wly that e have left this . please set your dvr. why? so you never, everse, ever misss an episode of hannity monday through fridaye of, nine easter. in the meantime, let not your heart be troubled. why because greg.feld gutfeld well, actually sitting by with the idea to put a smile on your face, he s next. have a great night. yes. yes. yeah. i expect nothing less. happy tuesday, everyone. so today was a historic day. for the first time ever, hunter evf to hunter get of was found guilty of three felonies in his gun trial and faces to 25 years behindyear bars. the good news, if he goes bes prison lawyers say his family visits and his conjugal visits could be done at the same time ,but it s unlikely he ll get the maximum since it s his first conviction. community services likelconvicte he s already shown an interest in working with unwed mothers, just not the kids. n president bideotn froze for nearly 30 seconds at a white house event. bifroze his white house press tm hailed it as the longest he s gone without saying something stupid. he finally did out of it and exchanged a slight fist bump. doctors say his hand should heal in 4 to 6 months. riders from snl have beenn meeting with the4-6 mo biden top them reach young voters. meanwhile, writers, the biden campaign have been meeting with snl to help them write comedy. this week aoc and rachel maddow both claimed if donald trump is reelected, he ll lock them up even more terrified members of the view who fear trump will send them to fat camp mor researchers using a i have determined that elephants call each other by names in their ownelephant language. but i thought we already knew that. apolog the canadian cancer society has apologized for using the word for instead of thehe te more trans friendlndy front hole . not to be confused with the word. . south dakota governor kristi noem says trump choosing a woman vp would help him win. especially if someone needs to shoot a . and a texas court has ruled that books mentioning and cannot banned in schools and public libraries. it s great news for me and my new book, having 1,000% real. you know, it s you know, it s comin.g. you know it s coming. all right. so prior to, a jury finding bid hunter biden guilty in his gun gu, it unlikelyfound ally. the second amendment. you know, the thinany g that democrats hate more than they hate soap. last week in a last effort, hunter asked that charges be dropped because the questionnaire he filled out violated his second amendment rights. hunter s legal team argued that the question asking if he was a druggieargued t was adc unconstitutional and the state had no right to infringe on hiscause second amendment rights just because he did a little dopehe t and buy a little dope. i don ti mean george stephanopoulos. o i mean so much coke even scarred, would have recommendede rehab. still, the defense has a point. so why it unconstitutional? well, they argued that intoxication statutes cannot stretch far enough to justify disarming a sober citizeten based exclusivelyug on past drug use. and that use. sorry, makes sense. is it constitutional, ment t the government, to remove the second amendment rights of a person baseo condmentd on n interpretation of a subjective standard? an addicrpretation of t is subj moreover, you don t losefirst am the first amendment right because you do drugs. so why wouldghts lose the secont it s a precondition. all right. a higher authority of lawws whe that displaces lower laws whenever they come into conflictne com. same so let s forget about hunter. the same law would bar a wounded velat who uses cannabs for pain from exercisingro his right to self-defense.e imagine a person in recoveryn re who now owns guns. ve should he go to jail? never mind that this ruling dissuades people fromind the frh to treatment or seeking mental health help. i neededea just reading that nok did you break the law. sure. but it s an unjust law. sow you can disagree with me,wh but you re really disagreeing with the second amendment. the shall not be infringed. period. but if that sounds familiat if t you. then you must be paying attention to our very own kat timpenr veryf. ro the flashback. flashback, dude. you can make the argument instead that this isn t constitution at all becauseexce the second amendment doesn t have an exception in it. foptior if you re addictedyou to something real. yes. so you could makcan make the ae that his second amendment rights are being violated, whicriing violh it would be fune joe biden essentially asking the cour joet. to make that argument. yes, ma am. . ts next book the rules say you only applaud for me during the monologue. oud haha, but cat s next book should be called i try to keepat hunter out of jail. but imagine that the son ofpn a democrat president suddenly puts on an nra at. they say politics make strange bedfellows. well par, for the second amendmt sake, i hope hunter wore a . but i don t want the secondn amendment getting genital warts . so while the verdict might be bad news for hunter,d it s also bad news for the second amendment. he was found guilt fory of being in possession of a firearm as aa drug user or addict.t but there are many, many americans who fall into this amorphouns whos, but it offers trump a golden opportunity to condemn it and put the democrats in a boxity to c.e if trump calls this unconstitutional and the dems agree, suddenly they re on the the side of the second amendment. but if they don t, that forcesee them to applaud the guilty verdict of the president sguiltd i ll bet his dad would love that. so what of the commander in soiled briefs? no, he claimed he wouldn t. pardon hunter, but the odds of joe remembering he said that are slimmer. im the odds of michael loftus wearing underweathe oddsr. i td say it s just another ider it s just another headache for joe. but that assumes he hast feelings above the neck line. here s joe at a juneteenththsuma nighstt. i don t know if that was o that joe or a statue of joe. if it was any more frozen hamase protesters wouldrs spray painted intifada on his face. at this point, the best they can do for him is unplug him, wait 5 minutes, then reboot before calling tech support. you want hear some words?a gu here s joe today at a gunn summit. a gusurol summitn control summi. he s talking about you gun owners by the way if they want to think, to take on government, if we get outou of line, which they re talking about, well, guess what? they neetalkind f-150s. they don t need a rifle. what did he just say?i kind i kind of know what he said, l, it s not about what you need, dude. it s your right to have a rifld it so havee. and yet, this is the guy who believed january 6 was an insurrection. apparently we shouldn t worry because he has succeeds. or if 50 means he s effed upo . and so joe s h approvaisl ratins are dropping faster than jerry nadler s when his comes off. even liberal election forecaster nate silver is suggesting the unthinkable. biden drop out just like he did in 88 when dems went with a8 deo more marketable candidate, michael dukakis. silver says biden just hit an all time in approval, 37%. dropping out would be ak big risk, but there is some threshold below which continuing to run is a biggercr risk. dems would have been better servedwould ve b. biden had decided a year ago not to seek a second term and give voterk s say. among the many popularg th democrats across the country. yeah, but many popular democrats. e what i hope nate doesn t fill out a gun application soon because apparently he s high too. who do they have? this guy we. he looks like. he looks like the tennis pro who gave the entire country club chlamydia this chuckle monster. i ve seen whoopee cushions more depth. this guy. as transportation secretary. the only thing he transportedgam illegal immigrants on midnight flights. talkmiht fl about shallow bench. they make fox and friends look like this. a prim court mak. so what s joe think? na na na na. like looking? ywhere no. nobody steps down. not going anywhere. that s not way you do it. you r if you re going to be me, you got to run againste t me. nobody wants to do it, right.t oh, they got the californiwha gy with the hair and the teeth. come on.the te etonly one who likes him is him and we got a vp lady laughing. t kathy, good luckha with that jud the mayor guy. judge . pete. he can t be medgpete. nobody respects him. and it s not because he s . because he s not a real judge. h but we ve goe t to guess she can do handstands. rosie grant stands co-host about number two on yo he puts down ha ha and ha ha i m homeless founder of the largest party dog on mike i love the bumper sticker says food is for losers new.best york times best selling author and fox news contributor catch com. he doesn t wear hawaiian shirts . he wears hawaii as a shirt. new york times best selling author and comedian, former nwa world guy. so i ll go to you first,ut even though you re not a lawyer, but i m interested vei in what you thought of this verdict, givenctverdic your fees on the second amendment. well, you know how i feel. actually, we about it this mornin.w hoauseg. yes. yeah. and you also know that i agreet with everything in your monologue. i think that, you know, is something i write about a lot. my new book is the way that partisanship can divided us and actually convince us to argue in favor of giving up our owin fn rights. and i think this is a perfect example of that, because everybody who wantexampl becaus the biden family kind of go down. i understandfa and wherertainl that comes from, i certainly think that they ve been involvedey in i don t think that this is the thing to toammi slam them on because based on the data we do have o basedn drug use and on gun ownership, tens of millions of americans could be guilty of felonies and be facing decades in prison over this exact thin andg wherei there was i mean, would i argue that he was a responsible wae or here? no, i wouldn t. but there was no victim here. also, the law doesn t designate based on sentences, wh obviously you of someone who uses marijuana, who is a veteran, who is a wounded veteran foo n ored r pain, could fall thi under this. and i think that what you need neo to avoid and i write havin about this back to to avoid having partisanship kind cloud tak your thought is just take him out of it. take the biden s out of it. your, is it dowith you agree with and is it constitutional to have your second amendment rights, which it simply says shall not be infringednot ? u no.wa t but do you want that to be uhap to the subjective standardha of what does and does not qualify as an addict and then have the government quas at beik that are somehow allowed to make that determination? and if the answendr is no, as ii is for me, is i m a strong supportefor of the first amendment, then you have to be against this. and alsoe agt , even if you like the law, if you love the law, you think it s a great law, you haveeau have to say that you can t really argue that it s constitutional. there s a difference between a statutorty law and a constitutional law. and you can t argue that this is constitutional regardless of how you feee itl about.el abo so, emily, in theut green room, you said you hope hunter biden, frye reading my thoughts. yeah. do would you agree with kat ort do you think that this is is this a different how do you look at itho youk? it s such a great point. and then let s let s have that is the foundatiot n over which let s put historical statutory application. so bottom line, in 1968, the gun control act was passed where congress you can t own, you can t possess a gun if y you re under the influence right, if you re addicted to these controlled substances. enter 1970, the controlled substances act substances act, which defined what thathe contt i m going to go through the whole decade here. oh, no, no. but i m making a good point.he d gutfeld stop it. so since then, you know,it the reason that tens of millions of americans are vulnerable and als. theo o thousands of our brothers and sisters and parents and uncles have been i incarcerated is because of those laws going back all those decadeshoses. so currently right now, almosty 157,000 people are incarcerated federally. that s this is a federal prosecutore a and 10% of them. the second most is for firearmso offensesnd. es so number one is drug offenses. so i also feel that whenen jurym when they were polled in the beginning and they said over half of themd , that they have direct family members with drug use, problems with firearms, brushes with the law, etc., that theythey saw ths being one more person where just because of your last name, you re not going to get away with it. because i saw my family get incarcerated, too, and i saw thw my, you know, get the g, get taken away also. soay als the end of the day, whn the president released the statement, we love our son, you know, we re goinreleasayingl his family in court looks so angry. i feel famil welcome to the rear world because there eas 157,000 american families who are going through the same thing right now that hsthe just went through today. hmm. c. can i just, like, say something super fast? some thingyou to be?this a i would love i would love to see this actually get overturnedt overtuappeal on appd it can strengthen the second amendment rights for all oitf u. it would have to be the supreme court. yeah, they neede supreme d to circuit you l courts, you know, so it.eg all right. right. you two little legal ladies, pipe down. i got to get i got to getless g the guy in here. hey, do you wishuy you could t go to prison so you could have a roof over your head? i guessu coul i. do as a as a homeless. and i realized i realized noww t that i have a i ve developedd an a cardboard and shellfish allergy. s shellfiso no more sitting aroune beaten clams out of a box. i got a free tomato juice. i want to talk about joe locking up the day. you got to keep him away from bright light ls. t ligh yeah, it s like they re calling him home. that s where he wenty are. he was just standing there. uncle boosie. is that you. everybody in heaven on green threw. you can t even clap at that point as to the gun thing. it s, you know, it s a veryt good point. in iand true. and this isn t what i want hunter to go to jail. that s kinand isd how it feels . what about the rest of the laptop? yeaht th, right. sweet, i m tired. these crimes. where? well, in an excel spreadsheet, you got to be carefu likl about pulling that down. and how does that look when trump ha hiss his do something that s 34 felonies? yes, but you re slinging guns around high school dumpstersd and doing drugs like that s just three like that makes zero sense. the only thing good about this is it gively abouts hunter a ber story when he meets his fellowyn inmates. right? because if he s like, well, i opened up several shell companieif he severals and i wr money from the ukraine and then putting that in the shell thats and 10% would go to my father. you might as well just it, dude. right therea du. kyra s finish his finish his house. nailed it. yeah. he wouldn t have got that far. but it s all right. look, i really disagree with you and cat, but i just feel like your examples are flawedbut ife your. like when you talked about, oh, the veteran wait is legal prescription week is legal, so he s not an addict. he could say he can fill it. this guy lied about it being an addict. he s taking legal, illegal, controlled crack. okay. you have to commit the crime to get ie tt. and then he now he has a gun. and what do you how do you think that s going to go? there s a reason why that s in place. mplyanybods who lives in inner city, goes deal with drug dealers and that there s a reasonthso he was sohe dangerous. he s just lucky when he left the gun in then hen in it was se in his family who got it right. he left it there and someone tell it or he goes to pay. he doesn t have his money. there s a reason why when we put these things in place, if crack was legal, he wouldn t be an addict. alcohol he woul. unfor alcohol. unfortunately, alcohol is legal because it was firsttuly alcohs it s ten times worse than most drugs, 1,000%. but you can drink all the beerba you want and say, i m not an alcoholic and you re not lying. he went in thereen t lyihe aske are you an addict? said, i didn t check the box and then hadas h addict litera. 7000 people testify that he lied. so him sit in jail like the rest of ussend h who commit. crimes. you not smoke. crack is illegal. cr you go to jail. g we if you get arrested for a felony, you can t vote legal t . you get arrested for a felony, you can t vote. you can t own a gun is a reason for it ownn there a reason. all right. yeah, well, that was a spirited discussion spirited. all right, up next, pelosi admits some fault in the january 6 assault. if you ll be in the new york area and lake tickets to gutfeld, go to foxnews.com slash gutfeld and click on link to join our studio audience for five star backyards. yellow wood brand pressure treated pine. treated pine. if it doesn ntists hed the kacts you don t want it. an brain, scientists have discovered the key factors righ and memory issues. i m trying to get a thought across and ii startere forge ca the right way to say it. i noticed as i ve gottenbrbreakt my fifties, i started feeling like i was like a little more like i was like a little more forgetfuhrient, fog. introducing neuro cue the breakthroughne of the worl t multi action brain care by one of the world 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but they ve already breached the inaugural stuff. should call the capitol police. i mean, the national guard. ben why was the national guard there to begin with? they thought that they had sufficient. i question how far they haveow been. they don t know. they clearly know. and i take responsibility foron not havingsibili to prepare for because it s stupid to be in a situation that they thought they hadt they. they thought these people would act civilized. though athey thought these peope a . oh, wow. even with the mask. even with a mask, she sounds hideous. all right. emily, what is going on here? wh iy is this out now? what could be? why is she taking, like responsibility for this? there s something going on here. well ig , her daughter is making h a documentary. so this was part of all the fileer daughtey that s thatt after everyone found out about it. but the irondy y is that after we all saw this video, pelosi s spokesperson released statement saying that three years later, house republicans are still trying to whitewas ph january 6h . it s shameful, unpatriotic and pathetic. what i think is pathetic is the findings from the gop january 6 committee that returned ten key findings among the house democrats like speaker pelosi, were too concerned with optics after the summer of love. and so they didn t want to deploy the national guard. they were too afraid of having ready any form of lawf la enforcement because they didn t want it to look bad while the streets were being burneforn det down. so that it s all her fault, not trump s. yeah, she dis ar down sod it vi, vindicate trump who said that he called for ? e national guard yeah, i think it vindicateses trump and they should releas tr all of the joy sixersary right now. yeah. yeah. it s ridiculou6th people rightsr you it s like why are we seeingo thisw. now? ad becau nancy was must she must have really felt bad because both were going. yeah. like she was she was scared so sober that both hands had the ability to tald thk. i can grab that back of that t and talk to you. ,carrie, we hahat dad a responsibility. i don t know how i m going to buy stocks. do insider trading. if i hadnow., it felt likenc a performance. it s like she knew. like it s.kn i don t know. so let me get this straight. itew te knew they were going ine building. yeah. and she did nothing about it lr lock her up. 20 years. 20 years. u get.o yot yo. mm. o 20 years. cap. what do you make of. i see a conspiracy. i m wondering why this, why we saw this now and her. like you said, i m like her daughter filming this.trucky that s what i m struck by. her daughter film that she s making a documentary. what is going on in this family? yeah, yeah lik, yeah. i want to like the i would give anything. bravo reality show the pelosis . it s also creepy. it s so and by the way,g: it the jurys committee that why isn t that like eight it s likee that should be in there but it wasn t because the two republicans were republican. yeah what s that gold greg they saw something. they say if this keeps going on, it get gold ths we we got hm another hope. they put people lives at riskp y to get rid of trump. yeah, they could have made the call and they did it because thdn te this is how we m and that s what it is. yeah, it s anothet it is.rt s they re right. up next, rachel maddow declared trump makes her scared. our military has been infested by a woke revolution the military i think we grew up and you left your politics at the door. it s difficult to overstate the division that is being into our military. it s about our sovereignty. it s about our liberty. it s about our constitution. these veterans are putting the record straight. pete hegseth hosts the war pete hegseth hosts the war on warriors streaming only on fox nation. if you re an active duty if you re an active duty military or military veteranon p now and get your first year free. i look back with great i look back with great satisfactionle d. i look back with great 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it s how you think. do not feel ashamed or stupid as i am the 1% club mondays on fox and any time on prime with over 75 million multitude of viewers, more people to be than visit old faithful every year which means to me is more than spewing boiling hot water all over the place several times a day. to me, it s more popular than old faithful. a story in five words i will. trump send maddow camping. so, michae l. d when asked if she worriedtr trump could target her, rachel maddocould w told the ree sources newsletter, quote, i m worried about the country broad about d. enly o if we put someone in powerf who is openly vowing to build camp ts, hold millions of peopl, what convinces you that these massive camps he s planning are only for migrants? sog ar i m worried about me, but only as much as i m worried about all of us. so, mike, you live in these makeshift homeless camps. do you think she s. she has every right to be worried. she well, she should be worried about any kind of camp like rachel maddow. going camping is a show i would watch. yeah, because she would talkto d about how to build a fire and the history of fire all day long. and then she d starvedeath. to death. she s most boring. my goodness. i m serious, though. i wouly god. a show rachel maddow goes to camps. but but but no one no one soo going to go to a camp becauseset like conservatives don t want to waste the money on it. iv te ofright you d have to hiry counselors and then brainwashing y people of all different colors and spectrums. and then like gavin newsom can t buy a tent for a homeless guy for under 500. k yeah. so like rachel maddow, now, if d she wants to do an episode of naked and afraid, i d watchws it, where are my clothes? ram rachel maddow. ch i m naked and afraid. kat i love how think that if trump wins, like their career is in jeopardyeopard, their cars will explode if he s in power becaus h e, he ll give them soit much material, it will reinvigorate their careers . do you remember the show? like the tax returns? and they were like drying it out fo wholenothinr that time and nothi and it was like nothing. i rememberg that watching. thi yeah, i don t remember how much fun she had with that. yeah. i also just i can t if shes really believes it or not, that s what i can t decide. i can t decidere not lit. she really actually is afraid. or if she s just saying that ori it s even thinking about it. cause i don t. i don t. i don t know how you could really believe that. hod i think there s a lotratche of ratcheting up of rhetoric that happens, and it s alreadyet been ratcheted up so high that there s you have to just keep going and theep goingn you re maybe not even really thinking about it like you have to be. well, i m scared about this, but i think a lot of therump people that i talked to who support trump, this is likeus at the top of the list of why? because they re just like, oh, this that. this is why i shouldn t. and it s this thing that s objectively ridiculous, that it s self-important, it s importance. it s the kind of self-importanta air that these people have. it s such a turnoff to the average person where it s like you reallygen wh tohink that he s going to take time, that you re so dangerous that he s going to put you i t fson a shut up. : it s true. it s an ego thing. you always i it ego thisto - with entertainers. they go like, oh, they re going to come for me next. no, nobody- enul about any of these idiots. no everyone, barely own nobody who watch them except their own echo chamber. do you thinkoamber do going to e time to give that? and here s the thing, they re not going to have this. i disagree. you it worked the first time because people thought there might be some trut the fbecaus up w this russia thing. we put up with it for eight years now. yeah. now, wheh this[ bleeps r 8 yearn she comes in not to be like, what are you going to say now? liar. what else you got? because did it is past that. they overplayed their hand. now they re worried consequences. everybody who bought and tried to get away with stuff and lied and pushed false narratives are now afraidfa now a going tot their come up beings and they call it revenge. you re going to stick me in a camp. e what is that? no, but you shouldn t be allowed to call yourself a journalist when you peddle in lie aournalisen yous and narrative. so if anything, people, once he wins, you your whole thing,gn you ve got what are you going to do now? because no matter what you do, he s going to finish his four years and he wins. and they jus finisht can t have it.to l so yeah, he s going to lock meoc up. you know, the celtics don t wipn the championship. jayson tatum, jaylen brown are going to come to my house and beat mtaand e. by the way, what she how does she think he s going to lock lock her up like what could up i m like jeanette and she check out leaps from he becomes president i go to she leaves out all the stuff in between and that s what i was asking you guys like on what? like, is it because she is a journalist? is she er whatever is. kno i couldn t.e i didn t know because it is so preposterous. and if it is being a journalist, then look to your pal obama. h vo you want to see the high volumem of journalists that were in prisoprn. but to your point, too, it s like they re in a space capsulpsule and they haven t evolved. it is so outdated. it s like listening to robert de niro when he was rantingting and raving on the new york corner, the stuff that was coming rly the t out of his mou, you know, trump s not going to accept the results and the fascisesultsm and he s still wes a mask. and it was lik le watching someone from 2016 or even earlier and you re like, we re so past that. so i don t know who listens to her, but ittt know me sad to. i have to say this as maybe liam is this sounds that there i are camps with millions of people in them and they re in china. so i f i were her. tim i would steward her time and her platform a little better because the trum a lp derangement syndromeme is so old and i wish she wouldso use it for some actual good. well points. well put. maybe msnbc will bring in a bunch of republicans and they ll go on tv and say shy would go ae to go, yeah, oh coming up, a coach did a slam dunk, a question that stunk on your period. sutton gushes happen. thy goodbye gush beers thanks u to always ultrathin with rapidsn drive that absorbs two times faster. faster. hello clean and comfortable. always fear no gush. let s get the rest of these let s get the rest of these plants organic from miracle-gro has grown me the best garden i ever had. good soil and you get good results. this soil will blow you away. it s the martha stewart of soil. what is it about cindy crawford? the secret to cindy? surprisingly ageless skin is meaningful beauty supreme created by french anti-aging specialist dr. zhang lewis. of all his youth, preserving formulas come from a genetically unique melon found only in the south of 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nba finals 2 where you have two black head coaches. given the plight, sometimes of black coaches in the nba, do you think this is a significant moment that yok it s su pride i? how do you view this or do you not see it at all? i wonder how many of those are being christian coaches? i haven t heard an awkward ta silence like that since i showed up at larry kudlow ncs house and clothes and clothes. makes, what do you what was the what was the point that journalist was trying to make and what was the point? the athlett wapoine trying to ma well, the journalist that ske that come on that, you just stop using that term and it s yeah, that s more watered down . than racist. yeah. stop. what? what, joe? cam like i said, i used when joe came in, i thought he was too young. he didn t have experience as a lifelong celtic fan and then he pulls a stunt like this and you heard the proverbial race baiting pin just drop and nobody had a follow up question because they re all full. they were trying to get him br a gotcha moment to . and i m glad to see a brother s stand up and say, my skin has nothing to dayso with my coachig ability or anything like that. it was my work ethic and mit s y faith that got me where i was at. and so and it just ended it. forget the fact we re up to,. well, forget the fact that we re going to probably sweep forget the fact that will cain has to probably where i love tara s shirt for a whole week at tv for the bet. yeah, i invaded his i invaded his podcast and dropping the bet and the went for it.r li my kids have been prank calling him all week bin. but again, it just goeser back to the point, like most of us, where i m so of, hey, is is the funny black on my skin color light skin. d this has nothing to do with my character and my jokes. chd jokes. i m glad to see thate prominent black athletes are tied. a lot of times they takes the oh, i guess is cool and i m glad to find enough of this. and he puts he s done this before d t. he did it with the royal family. like, what was it like sitting next to prince? singe, was theres only because that s the only king i serve. so he just murdersg all the time. kat as a devout christian and sports lover, how do these comments how do these comments make you feel ho like i could be a sportswriter. yeah. yahoo! becau sports.se no, i m completely serious because i could have known he would have answered this way. and there are few things i follow less than basketball. okay?w because you know what i diwhatd i googled him. you know, to think that you rere goin goingg to go into an interw and not go, this is the same person when he was asked about you meeting with the royal family, he answered something along lines of, oh,, mary and joseph. right. this is a this is h thisa chrisr this is a man who prioritizes his faith, talks about his answhis faveuth. you could have known he would have answered this way if you bothered to google. so gle so sportswriters don t need to know sports. yeah, yeah. or even pretend or google it. so i m just saying like, you know, if i if things don t work out here on espn.go there you go. s. michael, do they do sy putting basketball game on at the shelter? no, they do not. no, don t do that. no. but they do throw chicken wings from a distance. they try to catch it very exciting. are they cooked or are they just not sure? from chicken brought to you, you re in a rural shelter where you actually had to fight to kill the chicken. you. yes. and you have to ride the rails out of town. yeah. with when you re in feathers, out of your teeth with your single can of pork, ca n be with all my belongings in a bandana segment i ve had. the question was crazy. likesports was like, for the first time since 1975. okay, so this was settled in 75. like, what are we are we lariously going to argue about lack of diversity in the nba? let ity inh, let s let s have tt fight. coralyzes ou trans people havent even coached one team yet. and that s what i want to see. i want to say let s get in there and fighet. like when you are single and help me change my dress. loe, you are insane. you are insane tonight. do off this you have taken special, outright outrageous pills. all right? laughs to you, emily, but goneye because them. what do you think? yeah, i love your point. do your research. do your research on the person that they are covering. but the problem is we live in an anti christian anti society so that s why harrison but but but thank you i always think about chris and i know that with right nowsi on why he was vilified for speaking up for his faith at aah catholic college. i had a note that the nfl had no problem having pray for tomorrow b their twitter handle all 32 teams when he tragicallyc droppeallyd on the field like oa prayer is only okay when everyone else does it. sone else i applaud thisoach coach irrespective of sports team skin colorsespectiv for bea bastion and a beacon forbe being a christian man in this social environment, right. wow. 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things about parts and . that is a great emily. come on.s a i as agrean adolescent boy, i kw in my past. not noinw. i love books about , but yeah, look i, i. if this is what gets i a little boy to read, then i love it. s i m all for it. i think it s funny that this whole article was filed under and is hysterical, that there s, like, columns of that. but at the end the day, the ruling said that you can t be on a book because you don t want people to see o the messagy ,but you can ban it ifout want t it s unpopular. so i feel like for thoselar so f communities that don t want their kids to read about and t then you can say, well, it s just unpopular. cat my dream is to be numberm one on amazon and the parazt category. i don t even know if there is a ine category, but i, i want to be the trailblazer. no, i m just i m really glad that this ruling has finallyse made because everyone on staff i know i speak for all of us. so we ve been really sick of pick it up your slack while you ve been away lobbying for that. it was tough. it was tough being a homeless guy. you come into a lot of contact with smelly and terrible. yeah. how? i know i m alive. yesterda contah smely is. but it really is a universal phenomenon that unites people rather than divides flat are always funny. are always funn are y and no r one wants as long as they re not teaching like little kids stuffteaching. right? those are. those are the only books you want out of the library. here ss seosare th i want to kns who s writing the these books. right? because like, when you write a book and you guys have written bote e a boh, i wre a book, neither stunning nor brave, doing well at amazon.com you don t you don t tell people about your book because then you ve got to do the follow up. this don mcmillan, that s like her whole thing. it s dshe s written like five bs exclusively about . what sthing all that about? and they all have, like, these pseudo titles. i brokd theye my so noisy. i need a second. but oh, all my. it s like, hey, lady, slowy, down. we get it ladie. i need a second. but it s a good. i glued my . i glued my . yes. wow. all right. we ll talk about that after the show, michael. reg: wil back after i look for star backyardsd cavi yellow with brand pressure treated pine. ifti doesn t have this yellow tag, you don t want your best defense againstainst erosion and cavities is strong enamel. nothing beats it. vities.d prone animal active shield because it actively shields the enamel to defendit r against erosion and cavities. i think that this product is a game changer for my patients. no works. backin. we talk about cash back it we about cash r back. we talking about cash back in. back in. we re not talking about brana g! no, we re talking about cashg back. we re talking about cash back. we talked cash back.t a game now, the game we ve been talking about practice for too long. word go practice. word go practice. we talk about cash back.k? you talking about cash back? i mean, not 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if david chase hadn t happened to be clicking around, he wouldn t see me in dr. rascals and i want to get that guy on my new tv show the sopranos. there s a lot of detail in my book and i think bill, bill was, the conversations we had, i haven t seen the film myself at ceramic just to see what happens. you haven t seen it ? that is all the time we have this weekend. we will see you tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. eastern for more morning joe. until then, enjoy the rest of your sunday. your sunday. good morning. it s sunday, june 9. i m alicia menendez. with michael steele and symone sanders townsend. we are following president biden on his final day in france and the appearance of his message of american leadership for folks abroad and at home. donald trump and his allies will payback was guilty verdict. however deranged that may sound . how congressional republicans want to use their power to punish. what could happen this week as trump pushes to be unleashed from his gag order. grab your coffee and settle in. welcome to the weekend. president biden is wrapping up his consequential visit to europe this morning in the next hour, he is expected to visit american military cemetery near paris. this caps a week of ceremonies commemorating the 80th anniversary of the allied invasion of normandy. the president used the stage to call for citizens to demand of accuracy cash against authoritarianism worldwide. we stand at an inflection point in history. the decisions we make now will determine the course of our future for decades to come. we have a lot of opportunity and a lot of responsibility. it gives me hope to know the france and the united states stand together now and always. me we continue to see democracy, may we in both languages, no we stand together. joining us is professor of history and author of strongmen , miscellany to the present, ruth ben-ghiat. presidential historian professor of history douglas brinkley. good morning. ruth, i want to start with you. i thought this week was incredibly important. a definition all week if you will. both on the global stage and here at home for president biden. he really connected a number of dots about the urgency and the washington post wrote a piece which i thought he talked will americans recognize their country in the dark and desperate portrait trump painted? or is the country s falling to pieces, he said. if he is not return to power, the countries finish. you want to be country anymore. or will americans instead choose to see a nation still striving to fulfill the higher purpose than biden described in memory of those who fought here, died here, literally save the world here, let us be worthy of their sacrifice. that, to me, was a consummating moment. i would love to get your take on how the president has framed his visit around this idea of, there is a bigger fight out there. those who come before have engaged in it and now it s up to us to engage as well on behalf of democracy. i think it s been extremely effective to frame this not only because the reason he is there is commemorating an important victory over fascism in world war ii, but it reminds us of the toll that bad leadership can have. not just on one s own country but on the world. when you have district to vengeful leaders with large armies, as you did with mussolini, hitler, and today with putin, he see the world is not safer. trump is trying to his tell us that the world may be safer because he is allied with people like putin but that s not the case and history is clear on that. i want to agree with michael that this week was in his word definition. when we were listening to president biden brought that he was expressing the urgency of this moment that we find ourselves in but with an i toward history. they were flourishes where he would say, how will we be remembered? how will this moment be remembered in 10, 20, 30 years. do you agree that this week was definitional and when scholars of history look back , how will this be remembered? on the short-term, it was a big win for joe biden. he went dess the famous spot where ronald reagan gave one of his famous speeches, and pulled up a very important speech, warning us about the need for democracy and the need to fight for freedom. reminding us that authoritarianism is on the loose yet again. really going after, going after people that are xena phobic, right-wing populist movement blooming in europe right now. i did come across as representing america as a statesman and promoting nato and protecting the ukraine and trying to create a stronger bulwark against putin s russia who is on a terror right now. to follow up on that point. i believe it was cass mood who wrote populism is a thick ideology mixed with faith and ideology. this right-wing populism on the rise in europe, populism doesn t have to be bad, but like bernie sanders is an economic populist. this idea that this dirty populism is the thing that s taking hold of places not just across europe but a sentiment like that at home. how does that dovetail with what we know to be true about our history? you see the republican party of today going back to the 1930s and embracing an isolationist plank. they are the henry ford s and charles lindbergh s of today. this is a fringe movement but isolationism over the decades has had its adherence. what is worrying about it is this friendship that trump has maintained with putin. he acts like he is putin s puppet is hillary clinton famously put it. he asked that way and with any authoritarian leader, if you chisel away at what donald trump is arguing, he sees a world of five big powers with five important authoritarian/in his case, democratic leader. we don t do business that way in the united states. trump is standing out as a loan silo because all the other presidents, ronald reagan was in the news because the spot biden chose to give his commemorative speech. reagan s is part of the other presidents club. ronald reagan but want to make sure we defended ukraine. that speech reagan gave in 1984 was about liberating eastern europe, getting the berlin wall to come down and breaking up the soviet union. american democracy on offensive posture and trump s an agent of fear. he is fear mongering the way he away long dated her father conklin. joe mccarthy famously. what is different is we had those tenets before of fear mongering but they never went all the way to somebody being able to take over the party of abraham blinken and also, with the specter of january 6 has happened in this millions of americans seem to shrug off january 6 is not a big deal, to me it s frightening. it tells you how deeply rooted social media has made right- wing extremism a disease across our land right now. give then everything we know and certainly that we have learned from history and historians like douglas, how did we get here? how do people move themselves into this space? the reason i ask, i am going to play the new ad from the biden campaign which lays out some of the more infamous quotes of donald trump and military service for example. he handed me his purple heart. i always wanted to get the purple heart. this was much easier. does donald trump even understand why someone is given a purple heart? why you receive the purple heart in the first place? here we are in this moment where people are looking past the man s attack on the military. his attack on institutions. his attack on the constitution. what to use senses going on that s animating this and allowing it to continue the way it has? i am glad the biden campaign made that at. it s very moving because it speaks to dess it gets to the heart of the fact that authoritarians are nihilist. they have no ideals beyond money and power. anybody who would do something like serve their country knowing they may be injured or killed, that makes them losers and dupes which are the suckers which are the words donald trump uses about our own people who serve. he mocks people who serve such as nikki haley s husband. in keeping with authoritarians throughout history because they despise the people think, quote, govern. they only want to dominate them, exploit them. this is why i go back to character and leadership and having somebody like donald trump lead our country, we deserve better. it s an incredible moment, douglas, to be living in, and i think about president biden on the world stage yesterday we were on air and prepared to talk about his trip to europe. in the interim, there was the hostage rescue out of gaza. i want you to listen to what the president had to say. i want to echo president macron s comments welcoming the hostages return to their families in israel. we won t stop working until all hostages come home and a cease- fire is reached. that is essential to happen. so often when i see these moments in the world s stage i m reminded of the argument that president biden made when he was running for president four years ago which is, we need someone from day one is ready to hit the ground running who understands challenges at home and challenges abroad. he really foreshadowed the years that would come in terms of the marriott crises they have developed in real time. when i was watching president biden these last few days, i m reminded of his greatness. often, we dismiss something that he says he seems to be an opportunity. there is this steady evenness, even low-key on this which may not make him kinetic on the campaign trail but it makes you feel saying that he is a states person. that he understands protocol. that he understands how important the u.s./french relationship is. he can talk about lafayette with president mccrone and understand the hours story the american revolution of two today with france. he has been there. he has done that. he has seen a lot. he was visibly moved at normandy when he went to the forest of crosses and stars of david and walked across. you can feel how emotional this was. biden had been born in world war ii, 1941, probably our last president that would be a world war ii president. he reminded us of the power of nato. this has been the essential alliance since 1945, 48 with harry truman, all the way up to now and there s only been one anti-nato president and that s donald trump. nato, the atlantic alliance is seminal for keeping our military , economic policies, and democracy, and culture even alive and well. i ve been deeply disturbed the weight trump pushed aside nato might as well just blow away the european union. it s refreshing to watch biden and know he has that long institutional memory and understands what containment of soviet expansion means back in the days. especially given everything that s going on. i will ask you to stick with us because we need to talk about the rest of the far right. it s not just in america. new details about the role american intelligence played in the israeli mission that rescued four hostages. rescued . auntie, you can t put that right in the dishwasher. watch me. with cascade platinum plus i have upped my dish game. i just scrape. load. and i m done. in that dishwasher? 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help people understand the importance of not leaning into this and this does not end well for anybody. we are lucky that southern poverty law center in alabama is continuing to monitor these hate crimes. that bit of luck turns to horror when we start watching the spikes in anti- semitism, spikes and anti- mexican rhetoric, and type black, anti-lgbtq+. the right wants to destroy the fabric of a multicultural america. as we are speaking in san diego, catholic charities, i am a check let a catholic. one of my favorite people is pope francis by catholic charity workers are being attacked and disrupted by handing out food and water to children that have come over the border in southern california. we are looking at authoritarian coming our way. when have we seen this before? we haven t. black america has. black america has had lynchings. we have things like the springfield race riot of 1908 or the race riot of 1921. we have had the institutionalization of jim crow and saw what did in decimating black americans. we have seen what this can do to indigenous people where their rights are stripped away and they are seen as something other. there is a real white supremacy movement alive across the land led by donald trump. at their core, the were fearful of this browning of america and this is seen as the last big stan to reclaim america as a white predominately white country. that anti-immigrant, anti- person of color rhetoric that is coming out of this right is ghastly. it represents the ugly part of our country. trump used to praise fdr for one thing, all the great things franklin d roosevelt, but the one trump talks about, was in a gray 20 put japanese in internment camps in world war ii? he would praise eisenhower, ike did many good things, two terms, but trump praises operation with back, bringing workers, agricultural workers and shipping them out of the united states back to mexico. this is the kind of movement we are dealing with. it is frightening. we have not seen something like this coalesce since the confederate movement before the civil war. it had spirits, mccarthyism was a big deal but fellow republican dwight eisenhower along with the u.s. army were able to chop mccarthy off at the knees. there is nobody out there to stop or slow donald trump down and it s going to be up to joe biden and kamala harris to talk about optimism and the economy and talk about better days are here to come. talk about the virtues of democracy and don t result of fear mongering that trump is doing to mobilize his base and beyond. ruth, we will give you the last word, but i m thinking the fact that the european parliament elections are enfolding this week, and we talked the radical right is on the rise in the juxtaposition between was happening at home and across europe and political wrote this week that the radical right arrival in the european stage will have a lasting impact. allegiance sees allegiances formed in early adulthood tend to last lifetimes unlike in the u.s. were support for trump is concentrated among the elderly. the insurgents have captured the youth vote in europe, likely lacking and support for decades. nowhere is it more clear that in the national rally party as it relates to what s happening in france. a 28-year-old later. what say you about this rise of the radical right, this dirty populism amongst young people? it s a big problem. far right authoritarians have been very savvy about using tribalism and using emotion. symone, i want to and on an optimistic note because it s too easy wherever we are living to think there is this wave and it will submerge us and it is hopeless. we should not resist. in poland, they successfully voted out, they immobilized the biggest rally and voter turnout since 1989 and they got rid of their far right government. in hungary, there s huge protests, the gop ideal right now, and we saw in india voters dealt him a defeat. it does not have to go this way. it doesn t have to be this way. ruth ben-ghiat and douglas brinkley, thank you. we will go to tel aviv as we learn more about the fallout from an israeli military mission in gaza that rescue four hostages. stick with his. you are watching the weekend. 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reporter: even as israel is celebrating the success of yesterday s hostage rescue, they are bracing for a significant political development in a couple of hours time. 1:00 p.m. eastern we are expecting benny gantz, the centrist opposition leader who joins benjamin netanyahu s wartime government to hold a press conference and we believe he will announce that he is resigning from netanyahu s government. let s be clear, assuming that s what happens, what that does and does not mean. it does not mean the fall of netanyahu s government but it would mean that the far right inside of that government, the same far right that is deeply opposed to the cease-fire plan laid out by prime minister by president biden rather last week would be empowered. you would not have that centrist more moderate element inside of the government to counterbalance the power of the far right. that is potentially a significant move. we were expecting benny gantz to hold this press conference yesterday, but he delayed it in light of the hostage rescue. going back to the four hostages. all are in good condition according to the israeli military. they spent their first night being treated at a hospital here in the greater tel aviv area. we had a chance yesterday to catch up with some of the friends of noa argamani, the young woman who was kidnapped on october 7 from the music festival, taken on a motorcycle into gaza. the friends of hers who we have been speaking to for eight months have just seen her for the first time. take a listen. how are you feeling? amazing. very amazing. speak and she is amazing. she is strong. she s laughing and smiling. reporter: what was the first thing you said to her? a big hug and so glad you are here. reporter: the joy at noa s return is tinged with sadness. her mother is dying of brain cancer, and her final wish was to see her daughter once again. the wish was fulfilled yesterday. noa going to her mother s bedside. her boyfriend is also one of the 120 hostages still inside of gaza. the israeli military acknowledged that while it was a major success, they cannot rescue all 120 those still inside. there will have to be some sort of deal let those people are coming home. while there is celebration here in israel, there is searing grief inside of gaza. the health ministry said at least 274 people were killed by israeli forces during that raid in central gaza yesterday. one of the bloodiest days in gaza we have seen in a long time. we do not know how many of those 274 are militants or civilians, but our team on the ground was at one of those hospitals in central gaza. they say they saw dozens of women and children dead and dying, being brought into the hospital. that is the price of rescuing those hostages. we have heard from jake sullivan, the national security adviser, that while the u.s. is celebrating the release of these hostages, the united states also believes that the safest way forward for the hostages and for the civilians of gaza is not through more rescues like this but through a cease-fire deal that would bring hostages home and and end to the conflict. with those 274 deaths yesterday, that brings the death toll in gaza since october 7, to 37,084 people as of a couple of hours ago. raf sanchez, thank you very much. president biden is making his play for anti-trump republicans. as campaign senior spokesperson this year to discuss it. that is next. dad and i finally had that talk. no, not that talk. about what the future looks like. for me. i may have trouble getting around, but i want to live in my home where i m comfortable and my friends are nearby. i can do it with the help of a barber, personal shopper and exercise buddy. someone who can help me live right at home. life s good. when you have a plan. smile! you found it. the feeling of finding psoriasis can t filter out the real you. so go ahead, live unfiltered with the one and only sotyktu, a once-daily pill for moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, and the chance at clear or almost clear skin. it s like the feeling of finding you re so ready for your close-up. or finding you don t have to hide your skin just your background. once-daily sotyktu was proven better, getting more people clearer skin than the leading pill. don t take if you re allergic to sotyktu; serious reactions can occur. sotyktu can lower your ability to fight infections, including tb. serious infections, cancers including lymphoma, muscle problems, and changes in certain labs have occurred. tell your doctor if you have an infection, liver or kidney problems, high triglycerides, or had a vaccine or plan to. sotyktu is a tyk2 inhibitor. tyk2 is part of the jak family. it s not known if sotyktu has the same risks as jak inhibitors. find what plaque psoriasis has been hiding. there s only one sotyktu, so ask for it by name. so clearly you. sotyktu. frustrated by skin tags? 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( ) [thud] president biden, i think, has been serious about courting independence, even right- leaning independents and anti- trump republicans. the campaign hired a national republican engagement director who before this role was cheapest after former republican congressman adam kinzinger. this comes as outside groups are boosting outreach to these voters, republican voters against trump launched a six- figure billboard campaign and four swing states featuring republicans who refused to cast a ballot for the ex-president. joining us is senior spokesperson for the biden/harris campaign kevin munoz. it s good to see you. it s interesting and politically exciting to see the biden campaign engage the way it is starting to push up against a lot of the narratives . we were talking earlier about the biden ads that are taking trump s words and putting them out there and saying he said this. it did not make it up. you have this pivot politically on the ground where you are bringing on republicans who can help and weatherford out of the adam kinzinger for environment. how do you think the shapes of narratively for the biden campaign. what are you saying to republicans, i know many of them, waiting for that invitation to the conversation. they want to see it come correct. they want it to come in a way that s meaningful, to reaffirm the coalition, if you will, that biden needs to win. let s look at the opportunity. 4.5 million republican primary voters have voted against donald trump this year. these are voters that didn t have to vote in a primary. donald trump is clearly the front runner, but they want to show they had not gotten donald trump does not have their support and they want somebody that stands for the rule of law, stands for democracy, stands for fighting for america on the global stage. these are voters that need to hear from the campaign and we need to earn their votes. we been running these ads and targeting these voters in battleground states amber brought on austin, he has two decades of history. we got to focus on building a bunch of trust to republicans willing to speak up and talk to fellow republicans and say you can support president biden. we think we have a good message not just because we are not donald trump but because joe biden has a proven history of getting things done, working across the aisle. look at the bipartisan plan that trump killed. we will talk about those issues. let s talk about the border you have progressives angry over the present eye latest executive action on asylum specific. listen to what this representative had to say yesterday. republicans have covered up for every failure there s by pointing to some vulnerable group of people. i think they ve been setting up this trap that unfortunately president biden has been pushed into with this executive order. do you agree with that that the president has been pushed into a trap by republicans. help me understand the political calculus. what you lose in the we have energy and support from progressives. where are you gaining it back? let s take a step back. on day one of this administration, joe biden brought forth a comprehensive immigration plan republicans have failed. they used the border as a talking point and refuse to work with those. even despite that, joe biden was able to negotiate a bipartisan border plan that would ve provided long-overdue resources to help secure the border, provide more resources for immigration courts, help expedite green cards for a lot of people that need more pathways to citizenship and what happened? donald trump killed it not once but twice. we are in this position where we were forced to take executive action that helps address what we can and cannot do with very limited resources and we have to be honest about that. that does not mean the fight for comprehensive immigration reform is over. you heard biden talk about it earlier that the fight is far from over but we have to be honest. the american people demand action when it comes to a broken immigration system. overwhelming americans support the action and comprehensive immigration reform and we have to remind voters that we have to work for the. i want to as quickly as a follow-up. a lot of reporting about the possibility of the administration considering ways in which they could address challenges in immigration on the interior including parole in place of american citizens. is this something we could see as soon as this coming week? i can t get ahead of policy announcement but you heard the president earlier, the fight for comprehensive immigration reform, dressier pathways to citizenship, especially for people who have been here a long time is critical. the american people do not like chaos. they don t want chaos at the border or in their communities. we have to continue that fight and we have to remind the american people of what donald trump is running. he wants to round up latinos and immigrants across the country. max detention camps. we have to do both. and the time we have left, a lot of times when folks talk about engaging we talk about the need for the biden campaign to engage republicans because as part of his coalition. moderate republican voters and independents. we talk about the need to gin up the base as well and treat base voters, young people, women, black and latino voters, what is the message when it comes to the economy for black and latino voters, young people . when i am talking to people, one of the chief concerns as economic. housing. the rent is too high all over. gut bless you if you want to buy a house and you were not rich. which your message to folks, here which is a about the border, trump scene phobic. what about the economy? we have to tell a story to the american people about who is fighting for them and fighting to make their lives better. it s not just the economy who is taking action to address corporate greed? action to address junk fees? lowering health care costs, cutting prescription cost for the american people? this takes time and these efforts to talk about the economy, connect joe biden s popular agenda, agenda that was hard to get past but he got it done, and remind them that not only did he make washington work but donald trump will undo all of that. he will increase health care costs. he s having big oil executives right his executive orders if they max out his campaign. we ve got to do it by showing up where voters are at. they are not watching the news every day. they are watching the weekend. we have to talk to them in tiktok. we have to be on the tabloid magazines. we have to be on podcast. we ve got to go but here s the thing. kevin, you ve got to connect to understanding that rent is too high. and understanding of the efforts we are undertaking are going to try to address that. the federal government cannot lower your rent, but policies can be put in place to make people to put people in better positions. wage increases would offset rancourt increases. that s important. symone hits an important part of this conversation for the biden team that connection of what s happening to me realtime i still don t know if you understand it and they want to hear that you understand that. absolutely. and i think we have a good opportunity. there is time but not much time. kevin muniz, good to see you. he tripled down on defending jim crow. that he did interfere with reverend sharpton is coming up and we will have some of that. be sure to follow us on social media. our handle his @theweekendmsnbc s to getting better with age. here s to beating these two every thursday. help fuel today with boost high protein, complete nutrition you need. .without the stuff you don t. so, here s to now. boost. frustrated by skin tags? 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[ engine revving ] [ laughing ] the dodge hornet r/t. the totally torqued-out crossover. my frequent heartburn had me taking antacid after antacid all day long but with prilosec otc just one pill a day blocks heartburn for a full 24 hours. for one and done heartburn relief, prilosec otc. one pill a day, 24 hours, zero heartburn. we will pick back up where we left off. i think kevin is a great spokesperson for the biden campaign. i thought he was clear and calm and comfortable. where michael ended is the most important place. there are specifics specific questions voters have about specific things like housing. prices. like criminal justice reform. i think this campaign has answers, but they have to give them. i just think with us than five months until people start voting until election day less until people start voting is to give the specifics. the details are the things that will matter to the voters and make a difference. you can t give specifics on the barbershop tour. you have to get them anywhere. i think that is a big part of it. you see people and hear people and we run into them in our respective communities. they respond to us on social media. beneath the surface is this keen interest in the answer to the question, how am i going to be better tomorrow? you are asking me for another four years and i don t feel good about these four years and i m looking finely back over the last four years of the guy who is an absolute bad choice. how to help me understand and contextualize this tomorrow? my today ain t so good. when you come with a laundry list of policy objectives, that what comes up for me is that some of it is about trusted messenger and not just hearing it from campaign staff. hearing from your neighbor who says i hear you and here are the things i have done. this is a down payment on a next term. yeah. that is important because in my universe they spread those lies and those conspiracy theories amongst themselves. they are so effective at pushing it into the broader mainstream to legitimize it. that point of having faces that people know explain the story of hot tomorrow is better i think will go a long way. what he said about corporate greed is real and junk fees, those are addressing what is happening but people may not know what junk fees or corporate greed are. one of the finest political communicators at the top of this block. i want you to refill the coffee. we have another hour straight ahead with political analyst rick stengel and national security analyst coming up on the weekend. e) saving for retirement was tough enough. 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(kev) yo, yo what s up everybody? how you doing? don t mop harder, (reporter 1) kev! kev! can i get a response to the trade rumors? (kev) trade? trade means movin man.we talkin about moving? moving means contractors, inspectors, strangers judging my carpet. we talkin about staging? we talkin about a faux ficus? a faux ficus? nobody s gonna bring a faux ficus into my house. (reporter 2) you could use opendoor. sell your house directly to them, it s easy. (kev) . i guess we re movin . (reporters) kev! kev! (kev) whatchu gonna ask me about next, man? practice? will come back to the weekend. breaking this hour, president biden is closing out his trip to france by paying respect to american service members to commemorate the 80th anniversary
all russian and soviet dictators, their problem is they always think that they re the last line of defense. you are in power. you have the right to, if you decide, to destroy it so nobody else will get it. the united states doesn t even notice that the soviets are on edge. they didn t even put the soviet reaction into ronald reagan s presidential daily brief. [indistinct radio chatter] [narrator] before andropov can act, the able archer operation wraps up on schedule. [pilot] roger that. [narrator] andropov is finally persuaded that this really was just an exercise. this time. [tim] the united states didn t know to ratchet down the tension when it really mattered. that is an indicator of just the lack of understanding that the united states and the soviet union had of each other. but in a nuclear confrontation, lack of understanding can have catastrophic consequences when adversaries have nuclear weapons pointed at each other and don t understand each other. every day in every state across the country, our political system is bankrolled by an army of fund-raisers, pulling in millions of dollars a race. sometimes it looks like you might imagine knocking on doors, calling every name in the phone book, and emails so many emails. but for all those little fish throwing $100 to their local race, it s the whales those campaign fund-raisers really need powerful, rich individuals and companies. and when they donate $25,000, $100,000, a million dollars, they want a favor.or 10. it should be obvious that s corrupt, but with a wink and a nod, political deals toe the bribery line every single day. and we may never have noticed that if a certain illinois governor hadn t flung back the curtain with an unrepentant ego, a political corruption crime spree, and a set of unprecedented audio recordings that shined a bright light on the inner workings of american political power. ladies and gentlemen, meet rod blagojevich. it was early morning, cause i used to get up every morning and turn on the 6:00 news, and, you know, like, you re kinda waking up, and then you re like, well, wait, what? [helicopter whirring] oh, sh , they outside of blagojevich s house! they got cameras, they got cars, and then they march him out. and you re like, that s our governor, joe. breaking news the illinois governor, rod blagojevich, charged with plotting to sell barack obama s former senate seat. tapper: remember this guy? he sure hopes you do. governor rod blagojevich went down in a blaze of infamy for one of the largest political corruption scandals of our time. the governor was allegedly trying to sell the illinois senate seat vacated by president-elect obama. in fact, part of the governor s sales pitch was that the seat still had that new obama smell. [audience laughter] appointing someone to the senate is a rare opportunity when the will of the people is swapped wholesale for a gubernatorial power trip. blagojevich had the sole authority to place whomever he wanted straight into the halls of the u.s. senate, and he was not shy about wanting a little something in return. with the fbi recording his phone calls, for the first time since nixon, the public was able to listen in on raw backroom politics, and there s nothing quite like hearing it from the horse s mouth. reporter: the criminal complaint quotes blagojevich as saying the senate seat was a valuable thing. you just don t give it away for nothing. another quote i ve got this thing, and it s bleeping golden. [blagojevich speaking] i ve got this thing, and it s [bleep] golden. -yeah. -[audience laughter] and i m not just giving it up for [bleep] nothing. [laughter] was there a second [bleep] in there? tapper: racking up a staggering 24 criminal charges, governor blagojevich s actions essentially boiled down to four things extortion, bribery, corruption, and wire fraud. and it wasn t just about the senate seat. blagojevich was also found guilty of extorting a children s hospital. you can t write this stuff. he s an arrogant punk who thinks that, you know, he s bulletproof. well, he s not. he was convicted on 18 total charges and sentenced to 14 years, the longest sentence ever handed down to a governor. people loathed blagojevich for the way he politicked, but was what he did so blatantly criminal? cause the truth is that the line between what s illegal and what s allowable is much murkier than we d like to think, and this is where the rod blagojevich story gets interesting. let me reassert to all of you once more that i am not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing. [camera shutter clicks] was rod a corrupt politician or just a politician operating in a corrupt system that still thrives to this day? so, governor, thanks for doing this. thank you. so you ve been out of prison now for almost two years. a little over two years. and you re still very outspoken about how you feel like the case against you was unjust. there isn t really an argument about what you said. -right. -it s on tape. right. the question is whether it was illegal and whether it was morally wrong. look, if you re saying, do we have a fund-raising system in america that you can arguing is legalized bribery? i think there s truth to that. but did i do anything other than that standard that every other person in politics does, from president biden on down? i did the same as them and nothing worse. there is this real problem in american politics today where prosecutors are weaponizing themselves, criminalizing routine illegal practices in government politics, and i think it s wrong when they do it to bill clinton. it s wrong, i think, when they did it to president trump cause i have strong views on that, and i know it was wrong when they did it to me. okay, lot to unpack there. let s talk about the chicago and illinois system, because you re hardly the first governor in history, even in recent history, to to go to prison. what s the situation here that causes this to happen? well, i think it s time-honored here, and there s a long history in chicago politics, illinois politics, where pretty much everybody gets rich. ah, chicago politics. it s like going to a pay pond when you go fishing. like, if you are a prosecutor, you cannot be in illinois and not get something. illinois is steeped in a rich history of political corruption that dates back a century to the prohibition era, when bootlegging gangsters such as al capone bought off politicians and police departments, keeping them drunk on power and.also just drunk. in rod s lifetime, illinois has developed a rap sheet that any mobster would be proud of more than 1,700 convictions for corruption, including nearly 30 chicago aldermen, eight stage legislators, two u.s. congressmen, and before rod came onto the scene, three governors. in an odd way, the very people who should hate the idea of corruption are kind of proud that this is al capone s illinois. chicago is a wink and a nod town. -it s a shot and a beer town. -[clink] lot of it has to do with family relationships, because a lot of the political leadership in chicago and illinois are family-related. there s the daley family, the madigans. all of these families sort of become part of this mafia. -yeah. -a political mafia, and they re the ones who make the rules. i didn t come from that. i had to marry into it. i met a girl on the 6th of march, 1988. she was wearing a red dress, and she happened to be the daughter of an old-fashioned chicago political war boss. and she s my wife patti. we fell in love. patti blagojevich is a loyal wife, she is a tough customer, and she s the daughter of dick mell. she s complicated. that budding relationship between those two is how rod goes from this nobody politically, finding a way to kind of imbed himself into one of these big political families in chicago. they have so much power. i don t think it was, you know, some great surprise that, like, you know, when it comes time to meet the parents, that dick mell was the father-in-law and the the powerful city council chieftain. we re gonna try to work together to put this great city back together so that we re all part of it and we all feel free. dick mell was a guy who always had the voice in the backrooms. he was a power broker in that kind of chicago classic sense. before politics, it was a nice relationship, but for the most part, respectful. and then because i was in the family, and i was actually pretty good at helping her dad, local politics, knocking on doors and trying to get him votes, there was an opportunity to run for office. in rod blagojevich, mell could see a guy that eventually, if he does it right, i could sort of pass the mantle toward. rod was an immediate hit with illinois voters, who sent him first to the state house in 1992 and then to the u.s. congress in 1996. dick mell says, i can see you being governor. and i gotta be honest, i m sure if i m looking at it from dick mell s position, he s saying, man, if i can elect this guy governor, i can run the whole state. reporter: the campaign for illinois governor has gotten pretty lively. you ve got chicago congressman rod blagojevich. what s that name again? -bala-jo-vich. -reporter: bala-jo-vich, huh? -bala-jo-vich. -you sure? positive. tapper: during rod s 2002 governor s campaign, dick mell s membership in the old school chicago elite was a definite bonus, but it was rod s working class bonafides and people skills that did all the rest. coming from the family he did, he had a real working class chip on his shoulder, and his two heroes were elvis and richard nixon, both because they were guys who came from the wrong side of their tracks and fought their way up and were kind of disdained by the elites. in fact, if those two gritty 20th century icons fought their way into a single person, you might actually end up with rod blagojevich, for better and for worse. the rod blagojevich that i first met was youthful. he was energetic. he had this kind of mane of black hair that was super thick, and you could tell it was filled with hair product. the hair so iconic in its own right, that it became a comedy staple on every late night show. -the hair. -the hair. really, it looks like you re wearing a toupée that s also wearing a toupée. [audience laughter] he had a huge infatuation with elvis presley. his charisma was disarming. [cheers and applause] [amplified voice] thank you. thank you very much. [cheers, whistles, and applause] but the elvis of illinois was itching to lose his colonel parker, because despite the many benefits of dick mell s patronage, rod was still in his shadow. you know, he really became known as dick mell s son-in-law first. and i know he hated that. he didn t know how to both be his own man and not let dick mell foreshadow him. the only way for rod to survive outside of his father-in-law s machine was to create his own cash flow. so his first step was to hire two of chicago s most bare-knuckled political fund-raisers, chris kelly and tony rezko. chris kelly and tony rezko could generate big bucks. they were fund-raisers. they were donors. you know, let s just call em what they were. they were influence peddlers. they wound up being able to shake the bushes here and help rod raise money. they promised access and favors if blagojevich won, and they got results. where dick mell s good old boys would fetch $2,000 at a time, kelly and rezko would shake loose 50 grand. all that money plus rod s appeal to voters who had felt ignored by the entrenched chicago political dynasties well, it proved to be an unstoppable combination. he ran on some things that were uniquely important to black people. healthcare for kids is a good idea. when he said, free rides for seniors on public transportation, that resonated with black people specifically. blagojevich became governor in 2003. -congratulations, governor. -thank you. may god bless you. [cheers and applause] how do you view your your time as governor apart from the scandals? how do i say this in a way where i don t sound like a guy without any humility? but i truly believe i was a great governor. i can t think of any governor in my life that did anything for anybody i knew that can walk around and say, you know what? thank you, governor. my daughter had healthcare through you. free public transportation for seniors and the disabled? i did that cause they raised the sales tax, which hurts working people and poor people and seniors. with the legislature raising taxes that hit lower-income illinoisans hardest, and rod striking back with policies to offset that, it s no surprise that his populist agenda made him a lot of enemies amongst the big political families. to the people and the masses, he was on our team, and to the aristocracy and to the political elites, he was this guy that was taking their resources and giving em to the peasants, and so he became robin hood. i knew the reality that i m gonna have resistance from the old guard, the old ward bosses, the madigans, daley to some extent, my father-in-law, and so the goal was raise money now and raise a lot of it so that you can afford to make enemies, and you can afford to lose support. right, but some of these people that you were that you were relying on like chris kelly were were corrupt. -right? -turned out that chris had problems in his own personal business, and he was found guilty of those things. had nothing to do with me. but, like, a lot of the people in the world of fund-raising are not necessarily. -they are not. -.upstanding individuals. -no, they re not. -yeah. -no, they re not. what s the saying? ignorance is not a defense ? tony rezco and chris kelly they started compiling this list of different entities that were state contractors, and they hit all those people up for money, probably with rod s assistance. hey, you got a contract? you wanna keep it? or you want to get more? you gotta pony up. a lot of people in play have scalpel-like tendencies when they fund-raise, and rod was probably more of a meat cleaver. [beeping] -[telephone rings] -kelly and rezco were using government levers to squeeze anyone they could for a campaign contribution kickbacks like a cushy job or a fat contract, a little light extortion such as holding up teachers funds. they had deep pockets to fill and a financial machine to do it. you can t trade official actions as a governor in exchange for campaign contributions or jobs. i mean, there is one simple word for that. it s called graft. graft is simply the use of political power and authority in exchange for personal gain. to state the obvious, appointing unqualified people to state positions because you wanna use the government as a vending machine for your political campaign that s completely illegal. the m.o. was to make money from every state petitioner possible, and small-town hospital ceo pam davis looked like just another easy mark. but in this case, the whole shakedown process is recorded by the hospital executive who was getting shaken down. [laughs] woman: he needs to reset your wire. [laughs] oh, god, another wire. sorry for, uh. -i don t care. -just in here. uh, the governor really wasn t on my radar, um, at all until i experienced an extortion attempt through one of his, um, colleagues. pam s hospital system wanted to build a new facility in plainfield, illinois. seems pretty straightforward, but there were red flags right away when she went to get government approval for the project. davis: in my case, the governor had appointed individuals to this board who had either contributed money to his campaign, so they bought their way on, or individuals that were controlled by the governor and other individuals and would approve only those projects where a kickback was going to be given. turns out the board was willing to approve the hospital. all she had to do was use builders and lenders who were in their pocket and pad the contract so the board could take. let s call it a transaction fee for their trouble. it became clear to me that this was a major extortion attempt, and i was furious. so i called the fbi. the feds set her up with a wire so they could listen in on her meetings with board members and get the dirt straight from the source. she d be meeting with these players, and they would be basically laying out the whole scheme to her. davis: the contract would be padded, um, by roughly $10 million so that that money would go then to the various players. at one point, i decided, i wonder if this goes up to the governor, because the governor appoints these individuals to the various boards. the feds were wondering the same thing, and over the course of their investigation, their suspicions proved to be spot on. out of the public eye, rod s fund-raising goons, chris kelly and tony rezko, felt safe to strong-arm money from donors across illinois. but unbeknownst to them, the fbi was following their every move as part of a far-reaching corruption investigation into the blagojevich administration. as the money rolled in, their role in rod s administration only grew, which had his father-in-law, dick mell, feeling as though he d been served divorce papers. as dick mell famously said, he got replaced by a trophy wife or trophy wives. those were the people who were getting the love that he should have gotten and wasn t getting. we all know that you got here because of dick mell. rod says, i got my own team, and so don t talk to dick mell. not only does he not do what you wanna do, but he said, don t talk to my boss. i m the boss now. well, dick mell ain t feeling that, and dick mell is not the type to be like, so, may i talk to you privately? mell wears his heart on his sleeve, his anger on his sleeve. .leave me out! he can love you today, and if he starts hating you tomorrow, he can, you know, pull the switch just like that. and mell becomes more and more resentful of being cast aside, and so that fueled this tension in that family to the point where it eventually exploded. [explosion] that explosion came in 2005, and though it may not have aired on reality tv, it was still inextricably linked to garbage. rod blagojevich closed down this landfill which dick mell was a part owner of. rod said that this was for environmental issues. tapper: what did he want you to do? leave it alone, and i had learned that it was operating in violation of the environmental laws. i had knowledge of that. uh, ultimately, i decided i had a duty, that i had to shut it down, and then he made some accusations that really unleashed the furies. dick mell called a press conference and basically accused rod blagojevich of selling board and commission seats within state government. reporter: mell has had a falling out with his son-in-law, the governor. this is a family at war. so your father-in-law, dick mell, accused chris kelly of selling political favors for campaign contributions of $25,000 to $50,000 at a time. tell me about where were you when you heard that he was leveling this accusation. i remember vividly. it was early january of 2005, and this was the consequence of me shutting down his landfill. the very next day, he called a press conference, and he was clever enough to accuse chris kelly, not directly me, but that s me. i don t think he envisioned that it would turn into something that would ultimately land me in prison, but i know he did this to hurt me politically and cause me problems with the fbi. tapper: mel s allegations backed rod into a corner, giving the fbi room to prosecute his inner circle, until in 2008, the feds secured a secret wiretap on the governor himself. feeling the squeeze, rod started looking for some kind of escape route, and then a golden opportunity landed right in his lap. at this defining moment, change has come to america. [cheers and applause] now that senator barack obama is president-elect barack obama, someone will have to take over his senate seat. this is the governor s decision. uh, it is not my decision. the criteria that i would have for my successor would be the same criteria that i d have if i were a voter. senator obama becomes president obama. he resigns his senate seat. according to the law here in illinois, you as the governor get to name his replacement. now you re excited about this, and you say on tape, i d like to get the [bleep] out of here, and you re talking about options for yourself. does that mean, i d like to get the [bleep] out of here, you were sick of being governor? that s absolutely the things i was saying, of course, and i was looking at all kinds of options. so he attempted to trade obama s seat for a golden parachute. he begins to be heavily courted by all sorts of people who would love to be that u.s. senator. they saw something really valuable here a very valuable bargaining chip that could elevate his power in some way or or benefit them monetarily. when i said i wanted to get the eff out of here, it s because the fbi people and my persecutors were all over me, and it s the sort of thing, when that stuff s swirling around you, you know that stuff s swirling around you. -right. -and it s there. it s everywhere, and it and it was just very clear to me that they were determined to get me no matter what. i guess one question i have is knowing that they were looking at you, why did you talk about this stuff that way? look, i had 2,896 days in prison to ask myself a thousand questions, including that. but you know what? what s the alternative? i have all my staff and lawyers. we all go to saunas and get naked and talk to each other so nobody s got wires on em? -no, or -what s the alternative? or you just don t say anything, or you just say, like, this seat is very important, and we wanna make sure the best person gets it. and separately, i am thinking that i d like to not be governor of illinois anymore. well said. i don t make a habit of telling politicians how to avoid jail time, but here s the thing. being more cautious could have gotten rod everything he wanted and kept him out of prison, but caution is not really in rod s dna. [blagojevich speaking] [line disconnects] jackson: you know they taping you, so you can t say that out loud, right? breaking news the illinois governor charged with plotting to sell barack obama s former senate seat. reporter: illinois rod blagojevich was arrested tuesday morning by federal authorities and charged with corruption. dude. dude! dude. you know they trying to get you, dawg. but why? why? reporter: the day after being arrested on corruption charges, illinois governor rod blagojevich walked out of his house and headed back to work. -[camera shutter clicks] -tapper: all in all, rod blagojevich was facing 24 charges connected to four specific events the attempted sale of obama s senate seat, withholding legislation that would benefit a children s hospital and racetrack in an attempt to get political contributions, and the attempted extortion of a highway contractor. [amplified voice, chanting] 2, 3, 4, blago must go! i personally think he should at least step aside if not resign. my husband is an honest man, and i know that he s innocent. jackson: he thought that he had the moral high ground. i don t believe there s any cloud that hangs over me. -man: governor, governor -well, getting back to that, can we discuss your i think there s nothing but sunshine hanging over me. he didn t show any of the humility or anything. you just can t stick your finger in the eye of the federal government. let me reassert to all of you once more that i am not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing, that i m confident that at the end of the day, i will be, uh, properly, uh, exonerated. [reporters speaking at once] i represented rod blagojevich in two of his criminal trials. i mean, he wanted to fight his case. he believed he was innocent, and he was working to that end to try and prove his innocence. anyone who believes that this was a selling of some senate seat doesn t understand politics. every single day in politics, that is what happens, is this horse-trading. and if you really listen to this in context, what you heard was talking with various people, getting annoyed, talking about nonsense, and then the end. nothing really that was ever acted on. later, rod blagojevich s lawyers would argue that what rod did specifically with the senate seat was no worse than when president eisenhower appointed earl warren as chief justice of the supreme court. back in 1952, dwight eisenhower s about to win the nomination to become the republican president. earl warren, the governor of california, is withholding the delegation s votes. governor warren tells eisenhower, i ll deliver the delegation for you on one condition. i wanna be the next chief justice of the supreme court. ike, the great war hero, shakes hands, says, you got a deal. he wins. one year later, earl warren is the chief justice of the united states supreme court. rod wanted a political appointment from obama, and for that, he was prepared to trade obama s old senate seat, which is actually legal. otherwise, eisenhower would have gone to jail, and americans would not have liked ike. do you see yourself as somebody who was just trying to function in perhaps an inherently corrupt but legal system, and that theoretically almost any politician could be snagged the way you were? absolutely. of course i do, except i m giving me higher marks. because i was using that money that that and that power gave me to fight an established system that served itself on the backs of the people, and when you do that, you piss a lot of people off, and they wanna get rid of you. but do you think that you re earthier about it? like, more outspoken about it? well, i wasn t hiding any of it, but these because it s legal, and that s how you govern. abraham lincoln was able to get the 13th amendment passed at congress, which ratified the emancipation proclamation, freeing slaves. he had to make political deals with members of congress to get the votes to pass it. -that s how you get things done. -you re not comparing yourself to abraham lincoln. -by no means. -okay. -and please say that. i m not comparing myself to abraham lincoln. you re not or the emancipation proclamation. okay, right. he s a lot taller than me, and i never did anything as great as that, of course not. -but you re also not talking about the i mean, the emancipation proclamation of course i m not. governor blagojevich tried to sell the appointment to the senate seat vacated by president-elect obama. the conduct would make lincoln roll over in his grave. you re very critical of pat fitzgerald. yeah, he s an evil guy. he s a wicked guy. he s a scoundrel, and he deserves to get an ass kicking. you know? and he s a big coward. anyway, go ahead. sorry. well, i think he would take issue with everything you just said. you know, he has a reputation for being the choirboy, for being, you know, an upstanding, moral person. he sees himself as, i am trying to uphold some basic standards for our politicians. that s how he views it. governor blagojevich has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political corruption crime spree. we had a political and public narrative that we had to overcome, and when the entire potential jury pool believes that your client is guilty before they ve even heard the evidence, you re going into the trial like if it s a basketball game, you re losing 100 to nothing. or it s like if you re a governor, and you re getting impeached 114 to 1, and the lone vote in rod s favor his sister-in-law, deb mell. done from office and eager to prove he was not a crook, rod knew exactly where to plead his case. please welcome to the program governor rod blagojevich! [applause] you are a charming dude with the best set of hair i ve ever [bleep] seen. [audience laughter] so i want this to be real. got some challenges ahead, but, uh, i m gonna trust in the truth and as it says in the bible, the truth shall set you free. rod blagojevich just.kept.talking. how are you? you wanna get on tv? come on in. i think he was able to warm himself a little bit with the public. better to be seen as a klutz than a crook. sure, everyone loves a good laugh, but oversaturating the talk show circuit may have had unintended consequences, as david letterman told rod when he appeared on the late show in 2009. the more you talked and the more you repeated your innocence, the more i said to myself, oh, this guy s guilty. [laughter] so during the period from your impeachment to your trial and your sentencing, you did a lot of media appearances. what was the strategy behind that? my feeling was like, look, i didn t do any of that stuff, and what does somebody do who s being lied about? but you have a tremendous desire to get out at the highest mountain and yell out, i didn t do it. well, letterman said that the louder you yelled it, the more it made him think you were guilty. yeah. yeah, i mean, i didn t i didn t convince him, but, uh, i think i convinced donald trump. that s why i got invited on celebrity apprentice, right? i have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don t give up. but, rod.you re fired. what i saw over the course of rod s career was a guy who started off as kind of a charming rogue and a guy who really did give voice to concerns that people had to someone who became almost a parody of himself. and by the time that trial came around, he really was his own worst enemy. see you in court. he thought that the court of public opinion could save him, but he had disturbed forces that decided, it was a wrap for you, dude. don t poke the feds, fam. just don t do it. man: blago, can i get your autograph? reporter: at verdict today, in a notorious case that federal prosecutors did not want to hear, rod blagojevich was convicted today on only one count. -see you guys! -man: way to go, baby! tapper: the jury was hung on all but one of the charges against blagojevich, and without unanimous consent, the result was a mistrial on the remaining 23 charges. the jury, like a lot of people to this day, just could not agree on whether what he d done was actually illegal. in that first trial, the jury deadlocked on everything except for lying to the fbi. -right. you were convicted of lying to the fbi. -right. -do you acknowledge that you lied to the fbi? -no. no. i don t. i ll tell you about that. it was about how much of your associates that were fund-raising for you, the degree to which you knew what you were doing. yeah, it was the issue was i said, i didn t, as a practice, track fund-raising. and who got contracts? i didn t. i didn t look into who got contracts. i wasn t interested in that. i had 27,000 contributors. i wasn t tracking who gave me money, who got what. the first trial was too confusing for the jury, and they had a lot of paper documents. it was a lot of witness testimony. man: governor, are you anxious for this to begin? i feel great. absolutely. what the government did in the second trial is they pared down their their case, and they believed that everything was in the tapes and they needed to make this trial a lot simpler. [blagojevich speaking] he was swearing a lot. .and upset and not appreciative of the position that he had. and i think that was more influential in the jury s decision than than anything. it made him look bad. breaking news right now the jury has reached a decision, convicting blagojevich on 17 counts of corruption. -reporter: wire fraud. -bribery. blitzer: attempted extortion. solicitation of a bribe. blitzer: racketeering. conspiracy to commit bribery and conspiracy to commit extortion. rod blagojevich was convicted on almost all counts and sentenced to 14 years. patti and i are obviously very disappointed, uh, in the outcome. i, frankly, am am stunned. when did you realize, oh, shit, i might actually be going to prison ? -from the beginning. -really? -i knew i was a dead man. -really? -yeah. -why? cause they have so much power and resources, and i, you know, wasn t really surprised when i got 14 years. the justification for the judge was, you treated this like a golden glove boxing match, but those corrupt liars are lucky dueling is outlawed, cause i d have challenged them to a duel. rapists and murderers get so much less time? that s why this system is so wrong and so broken. let me offer you an alternate theory. sure. my alternate theory is that the entire system of justice that we have in this country depends on prosecutors and police who are incentivized to get convictions. -mm-hmm. -period. what do you think of that? well, i think you re almost right. [laughs] i never took a penny. no one says i did. i keep saying that cause that s so important to me. i don t want people to think that i was some one of these corrupt politicians that was taking cash. tapper: but remember, even though he never actually got that envelope full of money, that was because the feds closed in before the senate deal was done. the offers being considered, campaign contributions or a lucrative job in a nonprofit, the fact of accepting them that would have been simply illegal, hence, the charge of conspiracy to commit bribery, which he was definitely guilty of. rod s argument is no cash changed hands, but prior to that, there had been plenty of money changing hands. there s ample evidence these government positions, these government contracts they were effectively for sale. it does not matter if rod blagojevich actually won the argument and got the money or the donations he was seeking. it s the ask. if something goofs it up, but the burglary or robbery s interrupted, it doesn t make it less of an intended burglary or robbery, right? he had his day in court. that 14 years was what the system gave him. so you went to prison for almost eight years? 2,896 days. and let me tell ya what gets you through prison when you have to face something like that. it s love and it s faith love for my daughters and my wife. you know, when i was arrested, within days, the vegas oddsmakers had it 9 to 1 that she was leaving. so in that sense, i ve been so lucky and blessed. after he was sent to prison, patti proclaimed his innocence, and she did try and go to any leader that she could find to have him either pardoned or commuted. and when all else failed, patti blagojevich knew exactly who to appeal to next. after rod goes to prison, patti was essential in keeping their life together. more than anything else, maybe, she got in donald trump s ear. trump had a connection with blagojevich cause rod was on the apprentice, and patti blagojevich was on fox news every day. you know, we know that president trump is a kind man, and he s compassionate. he s always been kind to my family. and when you speak on fox news, you have a direct connection with donald trump. today the president sprung from prison former illinois governor rod blagojevich, who was convicted after attempting his own quid pro quo. yes, uh, we have commuted the sentence of rod. i watched his wife on television. quote, um, i watched his wife on television. -yes. -end quote. how did how did that happen? i think he just saw he he would tell me he liked the fact that i was fighting back. i remember him saying something like, uh, you know, i have friends that go through what you re going through, and they re in a corner. they can t even move, and you re out there throwing punches. i think he liked that. i m so grateful to him. sometimes things happen in life where god intervenes in the most unbelievable ways. trump, blagojevich, fox news? i m not sure how much god played a role in any of this. when rod came home from prison after eight years, his daughters had grown up. how are your relationships with them? they re good. i m i m getting to know them. our family was broken for a long time. the difficulties that i talked about with my father-in-law, those were heartbreaking, because in spite of everything, i love him, and he s been good to me in so many ways. and, uh, you know, it s been a tough road for my wife. our lives could have been so much simpler, so much better. understandably, rod looks back on the time away from his family with regret, not for what he did, of course, but that he was sent to prison in the first place. but what else would you expect from rod? i am a political prisoner. i was put in prison for practicing politics. wait a minute. you re a political prisoner? nelson mandela was a political prisoner. political prisoners have no due process. i was thrown in prison and spent nearly eight years in prison for practicing politics, for seeking campaign contributions without a quid pro quo. you do have an obligation to at least admit what you did wrong, and you refuse to do that, and you re creating a whole new alternate universe of facts, and that may be big in politics today, but it s still, frankly, just bullshit. a reporter, uh, asked you if you wanted to say sorry to the people of illinois, and you said, sorry for what? -do you still feel that way? -very much so. i ve done a lot wrong. criminal? none. you and your defenders argue that the persecution, prosecution of you is about the criminalization of politics. in other words, there is horse-trading that goes on in politics. you do me this favor. i ll do you this favor, and that s all you were doing, and that it s legal, but they made it out to be illegal. well, first of all, it s not illegal. now you can argue whether we should improve our laws. that s a valid thing. i would think there s a lot of room to improve the fund-raising laws, but that s not illegal at all, and it s a common practice. now ultimately, after i ve been in prison for four years, the appellate court reverses that big lie of the sale of the senate seat, and they said it s routine political logrolling. and look, that s partially true. the court did vacate the conviction related to obama s senate seat, but they never said he did nothing wrong. the court said there was a jury instruction issue, and they upheld the remaining 13 counts. so contrary to his claim, he has not been exonerated. and for the love of elvis, we can only hope that rod s crimes are not routine. if there is a big lie, it s that he s a victim, especially since every other charge was upheld, including the extortion of a children s hospital. gandhi, he ain t. this isn t some sort of mystery, that, gosh, i didn t know. i had no idea. it s so gray. really? i think most of us have some gut sense of when we re beginning to get in trouble. i don t believe blagojevich has ever done any reflection on right and wrong. extorting a hospital never occurred to him that that might harm the citizens that he was elected to protect. he he has no ability to look at anything but himself. that s it. that s it. what s the worst thing that can be said about you that s accurate in your view, other than you were stupid to say that stuff? sure. look, i ve been accused of being a narcissist. i might plead to a misdemeanor on that, okay? um, i think i my judgment of some people was way off. i think i should have been a lot more vigilant and see some of the warning signs. i knew they were aggressively out there raising money, and i didn t slow it down because i wanted to raise the campaign money. i could have been more vigilant on that in retrospect. close, but no cigar. whether or not rod trusted the wrong people, he set them loose on illinois because they brought him the most money. whether the rules on political fund-raising are flimsy guardrails at best,
Everyone s like, i liked you at first when i heard it, i was disappointed, and nothing to do with president trump, it s the system. this stuff must happen in the forties and fifties, it s not supposed to happen anymore even the did nero thing outside, it s all part of the plan. and i even planned i kept saying is your first time living and breathing martyr in this country. and that happened tonight. i m ready to get mine on. ike i m calling a now, trump 24. it s ready to go. you should be inspired and anytime you been punched in the mouth, they should be a wake-up call to everyone anywhere because it they can do it they can do it to anyone creating new jobs, i don t like the way she was, semien my guys are gonna get together make sure you can get a business here.