say that you are the best msnbc host ever created by god. god created you, chris, to be here. thank you, michael. ec baldwin should be looking over his shoulder. no way. i was not lying, actually. that was me being nice. that is all in for this evening. the rachel maddow show starts right now. good evening, rachel. i don t take it personal at all. it was an impression. it was the voice of a certain hyperbolic character. i don t mind, doesn t bother me at all, which i m sure you can tell. thanks, my friend. thanks, michael. and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. here s the story. in march of this past year there was an explosion in pasadena, texas. pasadena, texas, is about 11 miles outside of houston. there was a big explosion followed by a fire. smoke and flames could be seen for miles around. look at that. the whole neighborhood around this fire and explosion had to be evacuated. even the houston ship channel, the freeway onramp for all american oil, it had to be shut down, the whole ship channel. it was not exactly national news when this happened in pasadena, texas in march. it was a big deal. locally it was a really big deal. a plume of smoke and fire at the prsi refinery, serious enough to shut down the washburn tunnel and ship traffic on the channel for a time. serious enough to recommend a neighborhood nearby evacuate. from sky eye s perspective, the area of the refinery where the explosion and then fire happened, an operator in the area was injured. that was coverage from the local abc station in houston at the time of this refinery explosion in march. thankfully it was only one person who was hurt in this blast but it was big enough, scary enough, you can see it fr this local coverage. wascary enough that it put a spotlight on that plant and not in a good way. part of what turned up in the local coverage of the aftermath of that explosion and fire was the bad record at that plant. they had a bad safety record. in 2015, 17 plants in and around pasadena, texas, reported on their workplace injuries for the year, almost a third of all the workplace injuries for that year came from that one plant. out of 17 plants who were reporting. after that explosion and that fire in march, the houston chronicle further dug in. they found that on the day that explosion happened, that plant was not legally operating. it was its permit to operate under the clean air act expired. they were running the plant anyway on the day the plant blew up. all of that bad press, all of that, i m sure, very unwelcome scrutiny came amidst an even larger overarching scandal, actually an international scandal involving that plant and the company that owns it. you heard that local news clip described as the prsi refinery. it s actually run, its parent company, is a company called petrobras, petrobras bought that refinery from another oil company back in 2006. the interesting thing about them buying it, the scandal about them buying it, is that when they bought it they really, really overpaid. they obviously overpaid, they paid $1.2 billion for that refinery when nobody thought it was worth $1.2 billion. why would a company radically overpay for anything? why would an oil company radically overpay for this refinery plant in pasadena, texas. we ll take one guess. the company in question here, petrobras, it s a state-run company, the government of brazil owns petrobras. that has practical implications. are government owned country. saudia ramco, petrobras, pemex. that comes in very handy for those companies. it s particularly handy for corruption i mean efficiency. i mean, think about it, you need policy decision made to clear the way for you to, i don t know, buy an asset somewhere or make some sort of deal? you don t have to bother lobbying for it. if you are the oil company and you are also the government, what are you going to do, lobby yourself? don t bother, you are one in the same, just do it. they all pull in the same direction. having a government-run oil company is also a great way for particular politicians and particular governments to stay in power. that government-run oil company in mexico, again, second-largest company of any kind on that continent, they ve been accused of funneling hundreds of millions of dollars back to the ruling party, the governing party back in mexico. and why not? governing party is controlling the oil company, why wouldn t they arrange for the oil company to fund them? it s a nice system if you can get in on it. oil companies, particularly big oil companies, they mint money. if you re in charge of a government that has one of those, i mean, that s a great way to enrich yourself. that s a great way to pay off and reward people for doing what you want. sometimes you can even do it legally with your government-owned oil company. i mean, if you have something as big and rich and rosneft at your disposal where you get to control who s in charge of it and who gets what pieces of it and what that company does, frankly, you could make everybody you know as rich as you want to make them. rosneft becoming a massive cash machine at vladimir putin s dispos disposal, that explains as much as anything how he has held on to power for these past 17 years. you can see why governments, particularly corrupt or kleptocrat i cklept kleptocratic governments, you can see why they might find it handy to have a state-run oil company. you can also see why state-run oil companies are such a source of corrupt power and since state-run oil companies tend to get something approaching monopoly control over oil in these big countries, it s easy to see how all the biggest oil companies on the face of the earth end up being this kind of oil company. end up being these companies that are attached to a government. oil company that is state run. all of the biggest oil companies are earth are state-run companies. all of them. except for one. the biggest non-government owned oil company in the world, the biggest oil company on earth that s not part of one country s government well, today their ceo took a giant step toward becoming the secretary of state of our government in the united states. maybe. probably. but maybe. and here s one thing i think it s worth appreciating about why this is happening. exxonmobil is based in texas but obviously and famously they drill for oil all around the world. wall st journal did a ve useful profile on exxon a couple days ago that laid this out really nicely. it laid out exxon s global reach, where they are already invested, where they have spent exxon money in the hopes those investments will pay off because they ll be able to get oil out of the ground in those countries. and exxon s interests span the globe. so, for example, papua, new guinea, which is like as far away from here as you can get, righ right? papua new guinea, a very remote country, very inaccessible in terms of its infrastructure. exxon has the rights to drill about 1.1 million acres of land in papua, new guinea. exxon has rights to drill another 1.1 million acres in nigeria. they also have a bunch of rights now in places you might not expect. you wouldn t think of as oil-producing companies, but in the netherlands exxon has the rights to drill about 1.5 million acres. another million and a half acres in australia. in germany, of all places, they have the rights to drill on just under five million acres in germany. in canada they ve got a bunch. canada just under seven million acres. they ve got rights to drill tons of acreage here in the united states. look at this. this is according to the wall street journal this week. exxon has rights to drill on roughly 14 million acres in the united states. that s a lot. that s, like, two marylands, almost two marylands. it s more than two vermonts, though, i did the math. that s a lot of acreage exxon has a right to drill in the united states and look at how much it outpaces all of exxon s other worldwide holdings right now. interesting, right? huge, right? until you see this. yeah. kind of an ah-ha moment, right? that line at the top there? that s exxon s holdings in russia compared to their other holdings all over the world. that s the number of acres they have right to drill in russia. and here s the really, really important part. do you want to know where exxon is not able to drill? they are not able to drill, despite those holdings, they are not able to drill in russia. this is also from the wall street journal. this is the number of wells exxon was actually able to drill in 2015 in all the places where they ve got these international rights. mostly, as you can see, the big dot there, they were able to drill in the united states, they were able to drill lots of wells in canada as well. that s the next-biggest dot there. but look at russia. can you not see it? put on your glasses. it s red and to the left of the united states. look at the number of wells they were actually able to drill in russia in 2015 compared to their drilling rights in that country. you want to know why they can t drill in russia despite the rights they have purchased to drill in russia? the reason they can t freaking drill them, the reason they can t get their money out of their huge investment they ve made in that country is because in our country the government is not the same thing as the biggest oil company in our country. in the united states we do not have an integrated oil company and federal government the way they do in brazil and mexico and saudi arabia and kuwait and the way we got all the other biggest oil companies in the world. and exxon can t get its return on its investment. they can t get their money out of russia. right? they can t cash in on what they ve invested in russia because the u.s. government made a determination that it was in the national interest, the national security interest of our country to put sanctions on russia that preclude doing that kind of business. when our government made the decision to sanction russia, that really, really cramp it had style of exxon. that really threw a huge wrench in their works because look at their investment in russia compared to other countries around the world in terms of where they have rights to drill. this is how they set themselves up under ceo rex tillerson. under ceo rex tillerson they made a half trillion dollar deal in russia to drill the arctic. it was going to be a partnership with the russian state-owned kremlin-controlled oil company rosneft. half trillion dollar deal. that was going to make exxon and russia and vladimir putin specifically hundreds of millions of dollars. perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars. they signed that deal in 2011. they actually struck oil in the arctic in 2014. just in time for the u.s. government to say nope, you re out. we re kiboshing the deal, we re putting a halt to all of it because we re putting these sanctions on russia for their behavior. russia loves exxon. exxon partnering with russia s state-run oil company, that s what brought their state-run oil company into the 21st century. that s what made russia s state-run oil company technologically capable. exxon is who taught them how to drill oil in hard-to-reach places because russia s oil is in hard-to-reach places. exxon partnering with russia s state-run oil company made that state-run oil company very effective and very rich. so russia loves exxon. exxon loves russia back because common bet on russia in a huge way under rex tillerson in terms of where they are planning on drilling their oil for the foreseeable decades. what they did under tillerson a few year ago was the biggest oil deal in the history of the world. and it got stopped by a policy decision made by the united states government. exxon needs the united states government to change that policy decision. exxon needs the united states government to change america s position overall about russia. simply so exxon can freaking drill over there. so they can recoup their giant investment in that country which outweighs what they are doing anywhere else in the world. they made a huge bet and they re going to lose it unless they get this change from the u.s. government. this is trillion-dollar math that all depends on the u.s. government getting in line with what exxon needs to do. and so exxon is now on the verge of installing its ceo as the head of foreign policy in the united states. so, i think you can probably understand, mr. tillerson, why some of us are very concerned about the president-elect s statements praising vladimir putin s leadership, his intelligence, including after being reminded of his ruthless persecution of political enemies and after receiving compelling information that russia has interfered with our elections. so do you think now is the right time to lift sanctions against russia? i think it s important that we keep the status quo until we are able to develop what our approach is going to be. that it will be all part of the approach. what do you think the approach is going to be? exxon ceo rex tillerson facing questioning today from new hampshire democratic senator jean jean shaheen. the big political news out of this hearing today was not necessarily the tough questioning that rex tillerson got from democrats. the big political news out of the hearing was the contentious back-and-forth that happened between exxon ceo rex tillerson and a republican senator by the name of marco rubio. the democrats gave tillerson tons of hard questions today but the reason it s so important that he also fought today with republican senator marco rubio is that if a republican decides to vote against tillerson, that conceivably would be enough to stop his nomination. that s the math on the committee, as long as all the other democrats, as long as all the democrats voted no as well, one republican no vote could stop him. reporter: have you decided how you re going to vote? did he answer your questions adequately about russia in particular? many of his answers were concerning to me. but there s a chance now to submit some questions in writing which we ll do as well. i ll consider everything and read through it and i ll make a decision here very soon. reporter: are you leaning one way or another? i wouldn t characterize it that way quite yet. it s clear i m concerned about some of his answers and i recognize the split on the committee and what it would mean so i have to make sure that i m 100% behind whatever decision i make, because once i make it reporter: because if you make the decision and vote against him you could stall this nomination. are you prepared to be the one republican to vote no? i m prepared to do what s right. if marco rubio does vote no on putting the ceo of exxon in charge of the state department, and if all the democrats on that committee voted no as well, rex tillerson s nomination presumably would be over. and that would be a very dramatic development. it would not be quite as dramatic as the u.s. government merging in a large way with our nation s largest oil company, but it would be pretty dramatic on its own terms. so we ve got eyes on that tonight. imagine the lobbying that marco rubio is being subjected to right now as we speak. there were incredibly dramatic developments in that story today. there were dramatic developments today on ethics as well, including the office of government ethics coming out on his own terms and making a pronouncement about the president-elect that nobody saw coming. we also got a health scare in the capitol tonight. one member of congress reportedly collapsing and being taken out of the capitol on a stretcher and being hospitalized. we ve got the latest details on that. there s a lot to come tonight. this is not a time to stop paying attention. stay with us. americans - 83% try to eat healthy. yet up 90% fall short in getting key nutrients from food alone. let s do more. add one a day men s complete with key nutrients we may need. plus heart-health support with b vitamins. one a day men s in gummies and tablets. it s not just a car. it s your daily retreat. go ahead, spoil yourself. the es and es hybrid. this is the pursuit of perfection. tadirectv now. stream all your entertainment! anywhere! anytime! can we lose the all . there s no cbs and we don t have a ton of sports. anywhere, any. let s lose the anywhere, anytime too. you can t download on-the-go, there s no dvr, yada yada yada. stream some stuff! somewhere! sometimes! you totally nailed that buddy. simple. don t let directv now limit your entertainment. only xfinity gives you more to stream to any screen. breaking news tonight from capitol hill and it s not good news. a congressman collapsed tonight in the capital. this is probably not a congressman you have heard of. he s a first term congressman named john rutherford from florida. he was just sworn in last week to start his first term in congress. you see him on the left with the mustache and red tie. apparently what happened is he was in the republican cloak room, that s the lounge and meeting area for republicans off the house floor, he was in the cloak room tonight and he collapsed. somebody called the authorities, congressman john rutherford was taken out of the capitol on a stretcher and taken to a nearby hospital. his dcampaign manager has been trying to keep people appraised. the campaign manager says congressman rutherford i in stable condition. as of about an hour ago we had word he was being evaluated in the emergency room. we will let you know more as you learn more. obviously everybody in the country is wishing john rutherford of florida a full recovery tonight. much more to come, stay with us. us. >much more to come, stay wit us. >much more to come, stay wit us. much more to come, stay with us. is there an elk in your bed? and voluntary. they say she ll be back to work soon but that s important for senator feinstein. we wish senator feinstein the best as she prefires come back to work. it also happens at a crucial time the other person behind senator feinstein who was notay absent was jeff sessions himself. little known fact, nominees are not required to be present at their confirmation hearings and today was maybe a good day for senator sessions to rearrange the paper clips on his desk instead of being there in the hearing room while this testimony was presented today. we were beaten, tear gassed, left bloody, some of us unconscious. some of us had concussions. some of us almost died on that bridge. it doesn t matter how senator sessions may smile, how friendly he may be, how he may speak to you. those two are committed to equal justice and our society wonders whether senator sessions calls for law and order will mean today what it meant in alabama when i was coming up back then. congressman john lewis today. he grew up in alabama not far from where jeff sessions is from. he was nearly beaten to death in alabama for marching for voting rights. congressman lewis advocated for a no vote for senator sessions to be attorney general on the basis of what he said was senator session s hostility to voting rights in general and in the south in particular. also testifying today was the national legal director of the american civil liberties union, david cole. this is interesting, the aclu wouldn t usually testify in a confirmation hearing like this but today mr. coal, in additile to taking issue with jeff sessions record on civil rights, he brought up a little known case that is following senator sessions like a string to a can on it tied to his bumper. in that case, he charged a local company with defrauding its customers and suppliers. his office indicted the company on 222 counts. his office touted the case as being of the most magnitude that the attorney general s office has undertaken in the last 25 years. case turned out to be a dud, though. the court not only through the case out. the judge in the case raised sharp questions about senator sessions now senator sessions and how he handled that case at the time. questions about whether he took the case as a favor to one of his campaign donors, whether he was misusing his office to basically help his campaign donors attack their business competitors using his attorney general s office as their weapon. the judge accused the alabama attorney general s office of serious and wholesale prosecutor misconduct while jeff sessions was in charge. the court finds even having been given every benefit of the doubt, the misconduct of the attorney general, jeff sessions, in this case far surpasses in both extensiveness and measure the totality of any prosecutorial misconduct ever previously presented to or witness bid this court. never seen anything like that. i would not have known about that before david cole testified from the aclu. joining us is david cole, national legal director of the aclu. thank you for being with us. thanks for having me, rachel. am i right in seeing the aclu wouldn t normally as a matter of course testify at a con dpir mission hearing for a nominee like this? it s been decades. we have a long standing policy of neither supporting nor opposing nominees for office and we didn t support or oppose senator sessions, we presented our concerns and our concerns are wide ranging and deep and our position is the senate should not confirm him until it gets satisfactory answers to those concerns. so many of the objections that have been raised to senator sessions nomination and the concerns that have been raised in terms what have the vetting process for him should be like have been about his record on civil rights. you talked about that today but you did also bring up this case that i realize it s been discussed and hashed through since he s been nominated but it s not as widely known. i wonder if you brought that up because you re worried that his previous experience as an attorney general at the state level, if that sort of alleged misconduct at the state level was extrapolated to the national level that that could be a particular kind of crisis that we might not be expecting from jeff sessions even as we do look at his civil rights stuff? well, absolutely. i think you ve got two things to look at with senator sessions. he was a prosecutor for a fairly extensive period of time and how did he exercise that power? and we find that he exercised in the a very, very disturbing way. this case was seen by the judge as the worst case of prosecutorial misconduct he d ever seen in his life on the bench. steven gillers, a professor of legal ethics at nyu who s been doing this business for 40 years says it s the worst case he s seen in 40 years. so are we now going to give to a person who abused his office in this way on behalf of campaign contributors a case that was completely baseless and all 222 counts were thrown out on prosecutorial misconduct grounds. are we going to give him the most powerful prosecutorial post in the nation? that raises serious questions and they don t just go to his ideology, they go to his exercise of this incredible power. david cole, aclu national legal director, appreciate both the magnitude of this decision to make that testimony today but also appreciate you sort of making it a national story. i think a lot of people wouldn t know about this had you not front paged it. thank you for being with us today. thank you. much more ahead. a very busy news day, busy news night. stay with us. c mon in, pop pop! happy birthday! i survived a heart attack. i m doing all i can to keep from having another one. and i m taking brilinta. for people who ve been hospitalized for a heart attack. i take brilinta with a baby aspirin. no more than one hundred milligrams as it affects how well it works. brilinta helps keep my platelets from sticking together and forming a clot. brilinta reduced the chance of another heart attack. or dying from one. it worked better than plavix. don t stop taking brilinta without talking to your doctor since stopping it too soon increases your risk of clots in your stent, heart attack, stroke, and even death. brilinta may cause bruising or bleeding more easily, or serious, sometimes fatal bleeding. don t take brilinta if you have bleeding, like stomach ulcers, a history of bleeding in the brain, or severe liver problems. tell your doctor about bleeding, new or unexpected shortness of breath, any planned surgery, and all medicines you take. talk to your doctor about brilinta. i m doing all i can. that includes brilinta. if you can t afford your medication, astra zeneca may be able to help. life. is unpredictable. life is deaths. and births. sickness and health. love and heartbreak. and covered california is there for it all. not just to help keep you well. but to make sure the cost of being unwell doesn t ruin this whole life thing. because it s more than just health care. it s life care. if you re going to run a marathon, you generally do not sprint the whole darn thing. but a marathon getting started at a sprinter s pace, that is basically the story right now in d.c. all day hearings on cabinet nominees yesterday and today and tomorrow. in addition to that the senate at this hour right now is engaged in an extended series of lightning votes on what honest ly are generally grandstanding and meaningless amendments but are also the first votes to repeal obamacare. they re doing this series of a zillion votes. they call it a vote-a-rama, not kidding. this vote-a-rama started three hours ago, it s still going right now. that s a live shot. it s due to keep going until 4:00 a.m. is our latest advice. but somewhere in this combination marathon and sprint is a guest of ours tonight. senator cory booker of new jersey is due to join us tonight live just as soon as he breaks free from the vote-a-rama, senator cory booker coming up. i hope. when you re close to the people you love, does psoriasis ever get in the way of a touching moment? if you have moderate to severe psoriasis, you can embrace the chance of completely clear skin with taltz. taltz is proven to give you a chance at completely clear skin. with taltz, up to 90% of patients had a significant improvement of their psoriasis plaques. in fact, 4 out of 10 even achieved completely clear skin. do not use if you are allergic to taltz. before starting you should be checked for tuberculosis. taltz may increase your risk of infections and lower your ability to fight them. tell your doctor if you are being treated for an infection or have symptoms. or if you have received a vaccine or plan to. inflammatory bowel disease can happen with taltz. including worsening of symptoms. serious allergic reactions can occur. now s your chance at completely clear skin. just ask your doctor about taltz. esurance, an allstate company. click or call. esurance does insurance a smarter way, which saves money. like bundling home and auto coverage, which reduces red tape, which saves money. and when they save, you save. that s home and auto insurance for the modern world. esurance, an allstate company. click or call. i know that some of my many colleagues aren t happy that i am breaking with sinatra diggs to testify on the nomination of one of my colleagues but i believe that in the choice between standing with senate norms or standing up for what my conscious tells me is best for our country, i will always choose conscience and country. i pray that my colleagues will join me in opposing his nomination. that today was the first time a sitting u.s. senator has ever testified against another sitting u.s. senator in a confirmation hearing. that decision by senator cory booker of new jersey today to testify against senator jeff sessions s nomination to be attorney general, that was a lot of things today but one of the things it was was history. joining us now for the interview is senator booker. senator, i know this is an incredibly busy night. thank you for your time tonight. thank you, rachel, good to be back on. how hard a decision was this? you knew this was unprecedented. you knew it would put you in the history books and probably attract the ire of a lot of your colleagues, how hard a call was this for you? it wasn t that hard of a call. these are issues that have been at a core of my work since i ve first gotten to public life, issues of civil rights, issues of equal rights, protecting vulnerable people. i m here because of strident lawyers who stood up and fought for my rights when it wasn t comfortable or convenient so this was a case with especially with the extreme views where jeff sessions doesn t even line up with the majority of his republican colleagues on things like criminal justice reform this was a case where i thought there was a clear threat to many people in our country and silence in that case is unacceptable. i had to speak up at every opportunity i had. you mentioned criminal justice reform there. you also said today if confirmed senator sessions will be required to pursue justice for women, his record indicate he is won t. he will be expected to defend v voting rights but his record indicates he won t. i feel like that s a powerful argument, i feel like the entire confirmation process thus far has been him trying to rebut that, trying to say i am not who you think i am, you have concerns about me on civil rights and equal protection and discrimination, don t have them, i don t deserve that nomination. have you been at all persuaded by the arguments he has made portraying himself very differently than he s behaved in the senate all these years? no, because he has a 40-year career of serving and many levels of law enforcement and as a united states senator. he has openly criticized the department of justice for doing the very things i talked about, criticized them for holding cities accountable for police treatment of citizens, criticized the department of justice guidance that was give on the stop bullying against gay and lesbian kids, criticized the department of justice for getting involved as a party to cases taking on states for suppressing votes. so here s somebody who has told us, shown us who he is. his whole career from his days of using his office to try to stop a group of lgbt young people from meeting on a college campus, this has been a consistent person and you have to give him this, for consistency in the things he s been doing and saying for all these years and you can t just somehow declare that you re going to be doing things differently suddenly now that you re up for this position. the unspoken rule that you violated today is one of these long-standing traditions of the senate in terms of the way that senators defer to one another and treat one other, the collegiality of that body. one of the consequences of those traditions is that everybody thinks that well, not everybody, a lot of people believe that jeff sessions, despite these concerns, that he will be confirmed, that he has almost an unbreachable advantage simply by being a united states senator who is being confirmed with the u.s. senate. if he is confirmed, if the odds are with him, are you worried about retaliation? about him getting his revenge on you, on your constituents or on the democratic conference? well, look, that s a profoundly powerful position and my concern is not the well-being of me or other electeds, this is a person that is in a position where he can defend or not or even make the lives more difficult of some of the most vulnerable people in america and so this isn t about what could happen in the realm of politics or even in the realm of my life. this is a real threat to those folks that i got into politics to try to do something for and with and try to make this america real for everybody. so i am i have a heaviness, a sadness from the day that donald trump announced this appointment, this has been weighing on me and my heart and i think most people don t understand the power of the justice department. nor do they appreciate how the obama administration through the justice department has been doing extraordinary things on mandatory minimums, on mass incarceration. this has been a great justice department that has been affirming the rights of the marginalized in our country and i think that s about to come to a horrible end and an about-face and it s going to necessitate more people speaking up, standing up, resisting and fighting. senator cory booker of new jersey joining us on a very, very busy night in the senate after what was a really remarkable day. senator, thank you, we ll look forward to having you back soon. thank you very much, rachel. senator cory booker joining us. you saw him there, he was in the u.s. capitol. that explains some of the statuary behind him. as i mentioned, the united states senate is involved in a series of lightning votes on amendments important and not important tonight but those are expected to go until 4:00 in the morning. we ll keep an eye on what happens in washington throughout the evening. stay with us. no sir, no sir, some nincompoop stole all my wool sweaters, smart tv and gaming system. luckily, the geico insurance agency recently helped baa baa with renters insurance. everything stolen was replaced. and the hooligan who lives down the lane was caught selling the stolen goods online. visit geico.com and see how easy it is to switch and save on renters insurance. government ethics, an independent non-partisan office that tries to stop conflicts of interest among high-ranking public officials. the head of that agency is a political appointee but the terms of the director of that office are staggered so stagger. so incoming presidents don t get to replace the head of that office the replace the heads of other offices. the current director of the ethics office started working there under president george w. bush. he became director under president obama. he will be the head of that office until midway through this next presidential term. his name is walter schaub. walter schaub has no reason to fear being thrown out of office by donald trump. donald trump is not supposed to be able to do that. well, today after the incoming president announced that he would not really be divesting from his business interests. walter made a remarkable public statement. he gave his blunt and passionate and patriotic assessment of what trump is offering. it s important to understand that the president is now entering a world of public service. he is going to be asking his own appointees to make sacrifices. he is going to be asking our men and women in uniform to risk their lives in conflicts around the world. so no, i don t think divestiture is too high a price to pay to be the president of the united states america. you see the lines being drawn now in d.c. we know donald trump on one side and democrats on the other. but this fight over ethics, this fight is something else. this is the incoming president versus ethics. and that fight has only just started apparently. th directv a, stream live tv anywhere data-free. join directv today starting at $35/month. no extra monthly fees. only xfinity gives you more to stream to any screen. you are the problem. you are the problem. can i ask you something? no, no. out of all of the candidates, name one who had a million dollar judgment against him for hiring name one. donald trump did. so you like rich people who buy politicians. where is your goldman sachs jacket at? where is your goldman sachs jacket at? you re losing an argument or don t want to have one, never a bad idea to yell out goldman sachs as an epithet. those pro trump protesters in indiana during the republican primary, they threw goldman sachs as an epithet at ted cruz because that s what donald trump had been doing to ted cruz. look. goldman sachs owns him. he will do anything they demand. he is in bed with wall street. he is funded by goldman sachs. he talks about how he is going to get well goldman sachs i know the guys at goldman sachs. they have total, total, total control over him. just like they have total control over hillary clinton. they have total. but they have no control, they have no control over donald trump. today the trump administration announced its fifth straight high profile hire from goldman sachs. just keeping track. the senior strategist at the white house, goldman sachs. the nominee to be treasury secretary, goldman sachs. the head of the national economic council, the president of goldman sachs. the head of the s.e.c., which is the top cop that polices wall street firms like goldman sachs. that will be a former lawyer for goldman sachs. and now today some new adviser job they created at the white house will be going to another partner at goldman sachs. anybody who told you definitely shouldn t vote for hillary clinton because look, goldman sachs. yeah you got suckered. today the incoming administration made one other big personnel announcement. they announced finally who they have chosen to run the veteran s administration. to the surprise of a lot of people, including apparently the man who was chosen himself. he had no idea it was coming. the nominee who was pickford the job is this guy. his name is david shullkin. he is the undersecretary for health at the v.a. he is there now. he is an obama appointee who is already running health at the v.a. during the campaign, the incoming president of course trashed the v.a. every chance he got, particularly its health care. he called v.a. and v.a. health a fraudulent enterprise. he said it was the most corrupt agency in the united states. he railed how how illegal aliens got better health care than the vets. but now apparently he is going to keep the guy in charge of v.a. health, and he is not only going to keep him on, he is going to put him in charge of the whole v.a. veterans organizations had feared that the trump administration would put somebody in the top of the v.a. who was bent on privatizing it and dismantling the whole agency. some of those groups sound a little bit relieved by this choice. am vets announced that they were pleasantly surprised with this choice. iraq and afghanistan veterans of america said they were optimistic about david shulkin, called him, quote, our best hope among the candidates reported in the media. that said, the pick is not without controversy. not only is he an obama appointee and currently there, he is not a veteran himself. if confirmed, the v.a. would be led by a nonveteran for the first time in its history. still, david shulkin was confirmed unanimously for his current job at the v.a. he is very much involved in running the v.a. right now. and for all those reasons and many others, he is expected to sail to confirmation. we ll of course keep you posted. stay with us. yes, we can. first of all, how you holding up? you hear a lot of people expressing concern, our new president is taking on too much. what exactly would you have me give up? this is where we monitored how the operation was going. we are done. how good is that? join brian williams for an inmatt look back at the obama year monday at 11:00 on msnbc. thanks for loading, sweetie. .oh, baked-on alfredo? .gotta rinse that. nope. no way. nada. really? dish issues? throw it all in. cascade platinum powers through. your toughest stuck-on food. nice. cascade. why pause a spontaneous moment? cialis for daily use treats ed and the urinary symptoms of bph. tell your doctor about your medicines, and ask if your heart is healthy enough for sex. do not take cialis if you take nitrates for chest pain, or adempas® for pulmonary hypertension, as this may cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. do not drink alcohol in excess. to avoid long-term injury, get medical help right away for an erection lasting more than four hours. if you have a sudden decrease or loss of hearing or vision, or an allergic reaction, stop taking cialis and get medical help right away. ask your doctor about cialis. bounty is more absorbent,mom per roll so the roll can last 50% longer than the leading ordinary brand. so you get more life per roll. bounty, the quicker picker upper here you go.picking up for kyle. you wouldn t put up with part of a pizza. um. something wrong? 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but, david, she moved on to say she s convinced a trade deal between the u.s. and the ucla is in both kun and the u.k. is in both country s interest but we didn t get a lot of detail. president trump believes in one-on-one trade deals specifically to the exclusion of multi lateral trade deals and would like to get a trade deal done with the united kingdom, particularly after brexit. i think he sees this as a big achievement and binding of president u.k. and united states that have moved at least in his view in a more nationalist direction. that s what he would like to do. i thought the prime minister s comments about nato were so fascinating, really, because there are so many people around the world, u.s. allies, republicans here at home, that are so concerned that trump could diminish the importance of nato as a part of our foreign policy. and they re all trying to tell news the media rest assured trump desiren t believe what respective countries. sandra: and this, david, is coming ahead of the phone call that we believe is happening tomorrow. he was asked about that, he said he believes that has been set up. that conversation would be happening tomorrow. what did you think of his comments leading up to that? well, you know, the interesting thing about russia and vladimir putin, the president never hesitates to say in his words, good, bad or indifferent, about other u.s. adversaries. but he carved out russia for special status. makes you wonder if he s going tossian reset. i don t think the question is whether or not we should have good relations with other countries. that s clearly always preferred. the question is, on whose condition. are we going to have good relationships with russia, china and other adversaries based on what s good for the united nations and the west or what s for the u.s. and the west or what s good for them. sandra: the president was also, i want to get to this sound as well, torture and terror came up in the press conference. here s what the president said on torture specifically. and what decisions he will be making on that, listen. president trump: general james mattis, and he has stated, publicly, that he does not necessarily believe in torture. i don t necessarily agree. but i would tell you that he will override because i m giving him that power. i happen to feel that it does work. i ve been open with that b. that for a long period of time. but i am going with our leaders. sandra: not necessarily what he believes in but he s relying on mattis, he says. lord taylor? well, in relation to this, the president would always put america first, remember that, he won t be the poodle of any other country, i m sure of that n relation to torture, it is imlegal, internationally. off was expressing his opinion. but president trump said he will listen to his advisors. i don t see a problem there. sandra: all right. i think the media looking for problems. be more positive, please. i believe in america. sandra: there are a lot of problems out there. i m going to have to leave it there. you have a great president. thank you. sandra: thank you, david, lord taylor. mr. trump rolls out a flurry of executive orders aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration. one border state governor is making tough moves of his own. we are in a legislative session, we are working on laws that will, one, ban sanctuary cities, we move from office any office holder who promotes sanctuary cities, impose criminal penalties as well as financial penalties. these birds once affected by oil i just want to find a used car start at the new carfax.com show me used trucks with one owner. pretty cool. [laughs] ah. ahem. show me the carfax. start your used car search at the all-new carfax.com. from my sweet dreams? thanks to tena, not tonight! only tena overnight underwear .with its secure barrier system gives you.. .triple protection from leaks, odor and moisture. tena lets you be you hard line on u.s. immigration, signing an order to build a wall along the u.s. border. that decision will have a huge impact on texas which shares more than 1200 miles of common border with mexico. almost all of that land privately owned. and some in the lone star state seem to be split on the president s plan. we can build a wall but it will be a waste of taxpayer dollars and its not going to stop people from coming across the border. we spend billions of dollars on this, we ll take a lot of local people s land for what? to slow people from crossing by two minutes? whether it s brick and mortar wall, some type of fencing, virtual fencing, technology, sensors, aerial surveillance, something needs to be put in place to help the agents. sandra: joining me is texas lt. governor dan patrick. thanks for being here this afternoon, sir. great to be with you. sandra: what do you make of the criticism you re hearing? we ve heard from the same people for a long time. they re just wrong about this issue, san drachl the president is right. we need the wall. as i mentioned yesterday when i was on fox as well, one of the reasons we need the wall, the president has said we re going to deport the criminals in this country illegally. we know, sandra, from looking at case after case after case that we deport them, they come right back. sometimes within days, to commit more crime. you want to keep out the criminals, the drug and the contraband. then you find legal immigration reform so people can cross who want to come into the country for the right reasons and the ones we say we want in the country. right now, it s still a wide open zone in many areas. sandra: i want to share with you what texas g.o.p. representative will herd is saying about the cost. he s saying building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border. big bend national park and many areas in my district are perfect examples of where a wall is unnecessary. and would negatively impact the environment. private property rights and the economy. these are not light opinions, and they re really warning people of the state that this will damage the economy? this will damage their ability to do business? it will be costly. well, sandra, congressman heard is a terrific congressman and i was i support him. but i disagree with him in this instance. look, we have, i ve been down on the border many times. folks who have never been down there don t realize in some places it s sonar re you can throw a baseball across it. some of our crossings, can you wade across them. they re just 10 or 15 yards. can you throw a football, short pass across them. other areas are larger. where we need the wall is mainly in our big cities, our big krogings. that s where people cross illegally and disappear into the city. we need a lot of protection around our big cities. then we need walls out in specific areas along the border, where we know a lot of crossings happen, with drugs and criminals. i do agree with the concept, and i don t know what the president s full plan is, but there will be places that we can do it with technology, with air cover, with cameras. we have 4,000 cameras on the border. when you fly over as i have before in helicopters on the border, you can look down at the various paths coming over from mexico in the more remote areas. it will be a combination f i were doing it, of wall particularly in our cities. where you have major city crossings, populations 1600,000 or more, you need to extend the walls to wish people down to those remote areas. easy to spot from the air. easy to signal to the border patrol or our state troopers on the ground, to intercept those people crossing. we can do this. and the private property owners, i ve talked to many of them, i have yet to talk, i m sure there are a few concerned, but i ve yet to talk to anyone who doesn t want a secure border. and that includes their land if they have fencing or technology or a wall, i think most will want to be involved. because up until just recently, until texas put forth a big effort, they were being overrun. they were losing their property. they off would have to carry a gun to go out on their own property. it s dangerous. sandra: i want to move on to another big concern in your state energy the city of austin, texas, and the sanctuary city status. and the words that we heard from austin, texas sheriff sally hernandez, staying i m following all state and federal laws and upholding constitutional rights to due process for all in our criminal justice system. our community is safer when people can report crimes without fear of deportation. and of course that is the goal of many that achieve the sanctuary city status, so the people still come forward. your thoughts and what you would tell how would you respond to her on that? well, first of all, she is very liberal in her thinking on this issue. very clear. and my partner and governor abbott has made it very clear we re going to take money away from her if she does not follow the law. under her guidance, for example, sandra, some one could rob a bank multiple times and she would not consider that a crime to hold some one for. you don t get to select who you want to hold, you follow the federal law as well as state laws or you lose federal funding from trump and state funding from us. and we re going to be very strong about this, sandra. sandra: so be specific when you say you re going to be strong. we re going to fast track within two to three weeks pass the sanctuary city law and it will have teeth in it. sandra: how specifically will you hand that will? that s a cher any of the city of austin. they get state funding and we will hold state funding. i know the governor and our office, we re looking at all funds that go into that city. and in some of our cities in the state it s significant amount of money they need. we will hold their funds if they do not follow the law. and then, i believe president trump will hold federal funds. at some point if you don t follow the law you may find yourself in trouble with the law. all we re asking is for these sheriffs to hold the criminals that are terrorizing our cities, and any cher that i have doesn t want to do that is putting our citizens any sheriff that doesn t at one time do it is putting our citizens in danger. they will be held responsible. sandra: thanks for being here. a live look at the march for life with a, d.c. where vice president mike pence spoke not that long ago. we ll tell you where they re heading. republicans move closer to an obamacare replacement. what did they come up during their retreat? 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[ applause ] sandra: we re live from the national mall in d.c. doug, what was the reaction like to the vice president s speech? i think tremendous enthusiasm here. i think there is a pal possible sense among the marchers, that the epoc has changed. for 44 years marchers have been coming to washington in an effect to try and change row v. wade, overturn or put dents in it in one worm or another. that law has remained in effect for all of those 44 years. there is now a very palpable sense that is going to change. they have a friend in the white house. the president tweeted out this morning as they were assembling, the march for life is so important to all of you marching, you have my full support n addition, heavy hitters in the administration, kellyanne conway and vice president mike pence, who is the was high-ranking public official over to speak at this gathering, spoke here today. here s pence and some of what he had to say. it is this administration, we ll work with the congress to end taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion providers. and we will devote those resources to healthcare services for women across america. as you heard, he also said in that earlier sound bite, life is winning again. this crowd definitely senses that. you see it in the crowd. sandra: how does this play into the upcoming battle over the supreme court nominee? that s really the linchpin upon which change hinges. people are excited about president trump s pick for a nominee. we know that that s going to be announced next thursday. we also senate democrats are very much interested in trying to block that nominee, if as in the words of senate minority leader chuck schumer, that nominee is out of the mainstream. i spoke to james langford from oklahoma a while ago at the march, he said there s no way democrats can block the nominee. there are a lot of other ways to address. this we ll look at all openings on the table. at the end of the day we will have our nominee for the supreme court. and of course the president trump has said that he is no in favor of a full nuclear option. in other words, a simple majority vote to push it through. should it come to that. sandra: doug, thank you. congressional republicans wrapping up their retreat in philadelphia this morning, before heading back to washington. and a big topic of discussion, sorting through the various plans to replace obamacare. chief congressional correspondent mike emmanuel is live in washington. what are some of the ongs throughout? a range of ideas. one expert said it would be wise to offer some proposals that would get at least some democrat support. kentucky senator rand paul, a medical doctor, has a replacement plan when focuses on tax credits and health savings accounts. it would abollish many of the central components of obamacare and would encourage allowing inexpensive insurance to give people the freedom to buy the coverage they want. there is a more moderate plan from louisiana senator dr. bill cassidy and maine senator susan collins. their plan would give states the options to keep obamacare, choose a new state alternative, or design a solution without federal assistants. it would scrap the individual and employer mandates. the president s point man on healthcare was asked this week about what s next. when i commit to, senator, working with you and every single member of congress to make sure we have the highest quality healthcare and every single american has access to affordable coverage. lawmakers are facing time pressure as con congressional leadership has set a goal of repealing and replacing obamacare and doing tax reform by august. san . sandra: how is this going to work? . the leadership aids i talk to say it s not going to be 2,000 page bill. they know some changes will come in the repeal process which requires just a simple majority in terms of support. sources say the trump administration will likely scrap thousands of pages of regulations imposed by the obama team. then there will be votes on bills which would require 60 votes in the senate and at least some democrat support. a republican senator tells us the priority is getting it right. i think the president is open to whatever we can pass that solves this problem. this is not the republican s problem. this problem was caused by the democrats. we feel an obligation to fix it and we re committed to fix it. ultimately it will likely require the president and his team to identify much what they want and then fight for it. sandra: mike emmanuel, thank you. president trump heading to the pentagon within the hour for a meeting with his new defense secretary as he targets america s enemies and openly says he disagrees with him on torture. plus, president trump welcomes britain s prime minister to the white house. but british reporters not so much. what do you say to the viewers at home who are worried about some of your views and worried about you becoming the leader of the free world? president trump: this is your choice of a question? 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[whisper: rocket] ugh. heartburn. sorry ma am. no burning here. try alka-seltzer heartburn relief gummies. they don t taste chalky and work fast. mmmm. incredible. can i try? she doesn t have heartburn. alka-seltzer heartburn relief gummies. enjoy the relief. sandra: we are awaiting president trump to depart the white house and head to the pentagon for the first time. the president is meeting with defense secretary james mattis, and the joint chiefs of staff where he will be briefed on isis, syria, and other national security concerns. national security correspondent jennifer griffin joins us live from the pentagon. what do we expect from president trump s visit today? well, we ve just learned that president trump will sign an executive order decreasing the size of the national security council, which critics said had grown into a large expansive seditionmaking body in a micromanaged war planning and operations. we expect president trump on arrive for his meeting with the joint chiefs at 3:15 p.m. he will oversee a ceremonial swearing-in ceremony for his defense secretary, jim mattis. we re told he will three sign three executive orders, including one ordering a program for extreme vetting of those seeking visas to come into the u.s. especially from countries that pose a threat to the u.s. he will sign an executive order dealing with military readiness, calling for the modernization of the u.s. military and the nuclear force. this will include creating a larger military. we have to take care of our military. our military is more important to me than a balanced budget. we ll get there with the balanced budget. we have a military that s really depleted. i want a strong miltie. to me that s much more important than anything. . president trump has said he wants to increase the harley by 28,000 troops by september, the air force by 30,000 airmen, marines by 10,000 troops, he wants more warships and plans to increase the size of the navy from 273 battle ships to 350. sandra, all of this will mean a bigger defense budget. sandra: what do we know about president trump s plans to accelerate the fight against isis? we know the president has given the pentagon 30 days to come up with a plan to defeat isis. some of his chiefs have already said there is no military solution to isis. trump will meet with the joint chiefs in the secure conference room at the pentagon known as the tank where he will issue a directive to the army, navy, air force and marines to accelerate efforts to defeat isis. none of the options have been signed off by the white house as of yet. but we have indication of what the pentagon will be suggesting. the plans include spend sending more special operations to syria, there are 500 troops on the ground there. deploying artillery, possibly. and apache helicopter gun ships, rocket launchers, staging them we re told on ships perhaps in the mediterranean. sandra: jennifer griffin live from the pentagon where the president will be very shortly. before heading to the pentagon, president trump held his first white house meeting with a foreign head of state, the u.c. prime minister theresa may, followed by a joint news? evens where mr. trump was asked about america s relationship with mexico. president trump: well, i think the prime minister has things she s more worried about than mexico and the united states relationship. but i will say that we had a very good call. i m not as brash as you might think. and can i tell you that, i think we re going to get along very well. sandra: marjorie is former assistant to the obama campaign and consulting. beverly hallberg the president of district media group. marjorie, you first, that was really a response that, you heard laughter from the press there. that was a response to president trump basically answering the question for theresa may, say sheeg has better things on do than worry about the relationship between the u.s. and mexico. he answered for her. then when it did come to her responding to that question, she said that s about right, we ll leave it to the u.s. and mexico. your thoughts? there was a lot more at stake for theresa may than donald trump. right now, given brexit and her need to execute on that exit from the e.u., she needs the u.s. she needs good relationships with donald trump there. s a lot of eyes on how this was going to play out. they re very, very different personality types. him being the quintessential salesman and she being more reserved and sort of a process in gray. how that was going to work out. he knew that she niedz him. that s a good position to be in. he had a lot to make up for, given the president of mexico cancelling his trip. he needed this to go well. sandra: beverly, how did you see this news conference, it was short and sweet, the answers were very to the point. some weren t even answered. your thoughts? well, i think as president so far he s kind of done the opposite what we saw on the campaign trail, which is he would speak for a long time at his rallies. when you take a look at his inaugural speech, which was very brief, then you come to this short press conference, i wonder if he s going to be a little more short and sweet. another aspect that was really interesting about this, is not only is this his first press conference, but you have two leaders that we would have never expected to be on the stage about a year ago. that is because of the working class in both countries rising up. i think the element of brexit, which they did in end the press conference on, is something you can unite on both sides of the pond. sandra: theresa may addressed the very thing that they both have in common. she said, we want to put interests of order working people first. well, it s a great talking point. it was funny, the gift she brought donald trump was a drinking cup from scotland. he celebrates his scottish heritage. he actually is a tee-totler. i wondered how that would go. finding any common ground is key. sandra: seemed like a good meeting, she said she was hon honored to meet with him and he said they had significant conversation. i want to talk about vice president pence. he spoke about trump s support at the march for life today. listen to this. that is evident in the election of pro-life majorities, in the congress of the united states of america. [ applause ] but it is no more evident in any way than in the historic election of a president who stands for a stronger america, a more prosperous america, and a president who i proudly say stands for the right to life, president donald trump. [ applause ] sandra: beverly that, headline is just about everywhere. that you look right now. what did you think of that historic moment? i was out there earlier, and i think where the energy the crowd came from, the highest elected owe firm that s ever attended the march for life. i think there was added energy, this is coming less than a week after the women s march. the thing i think is interesting, you did see these individuals coming up on one issue. especially after you had a women s march that said pro-life organizations were not allowed. this was more energetic than normal, not only balls the v.p. was there but also because women are standing up and saying, i care about the issue of life whether or not the media want to report on it or not. sandra: marjorie? the media is reporting on it. and i think what is interesting and is important about this pro-life march, as a catholic can i speak to this, pro-life is not just abortion. there it isn t a single issue, it s death penalty, how we treat refugee women and children, it s schools. when you think about life, and this administration talks about being pro-life they need to be thoughtful about how that encompasses all of the issues that are pro-life and making adoption accessible, supporting women when they re pregnant. before we have that conversation we can t move on to issues of abortion. sandra: it has been a big day and there is still a lot going on. the president is about to arrive at the pentagon. thanks to both of you ladies for being here. thank you. sandra: tens of thousands are taking to the streets for the annual march for life rally, president trump is closing in on his choice to fim the vacancy on the supreme court. with major implications for the roe vs. wade decision. mr. trump charting a new course after pulling out of the trance pacific trade deal, why america s farmers are anxiously watching the president s every move. 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(announcer vo) victoza® is not recommended as the first medication to treat diabetes and is not for people with type 1 diabetes or diabetic ketoacidosis. do not take victoza® if you have a personal or family history of medullary thyroid cancer, multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2, or if you are allergic to victoza® or any of its ingredients. stop taking victoza® and call your doctor right away if you get a lump or swelling in your neck or if you develop any allergic symptoms including itching, rash, or difficulty breathing. serious side effects may happen, including pancreatitis. so, stop taking victoza® and call your doctor right away if you have severe pain in your stomach area. tell your doctor your medical history. taking victoza® with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. the most common side effects are headache, nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. side effects can lead to dehydration, which may cause kidney problems. now s the time for a better moment of proof. ask your doctor about victoza®. and mexico. dan springer is in the court of washington. president trump believes we need to renegotiate trade deals with other countries as well? yeah, that s right, as you know this trade issue is so intertwined and such a state of flux. mexico central to the nafta deal, was also one of the 12 countries involved in the tpp. with that trade deal now dead, exporters throughout the u.s. are worried about future growth. washington state run as big trade surplus with major companies like boeing, microsoft. farmers are also important players. one-third of the state s apples are exported, 60% of all potatoes shipped abroad. the big concern is china which is the biggest producer of potatoes and always focused on more exports. if we lose market share we lose the ability to produce our product. if we lose that capacity, then we ll see a reduction in our acres. which impacts rural washington state dramatically. in 2013, washington state had exports total in value of $82 billion. that was one-eighth of the u.s. total that year. sandra? sandra: and farmers are hopeful trump can get the job done? yeah, it s interesting, they were both hopeful and also worried. most of those people we talked to are trump supporters. they believe he can work very quickly in replacing the tpp. but the big question is, would these bilateral trade dpreements that follow address the concerns of many who oppose t.p.p. all of those touched by trade will be watching closely. we continue to believe that we can find the best pieces of that agreement and maybe they ll carry forward into a new vehicle down the road. and trade experts say that the value of the u.s. dollar is also critical. that s something president trump is also addressing, saying it might be overvalued right now. sandra: dan, good to see you live from seattle. as we follow the march for life rally in our nation s capital, there s also activity at the supreme court. as we look ahead, to president trump s imminent nomination for the vacancy created by the death of justice an to nin scalia. karl cameron is live outside the high court in washington. hey, karl, a lot of anticipation over the scotus nomination. what can you tell us. the president says he s already made up his mind. we can tell you that the festivities on the mall ended about a an hour ago, the marchs are moring on the supreme court. they ve been arriving for the last 45ments or so. the supreme court block is literally ringed with demonstrators. the street in front of the capitol, between the supreme court, is absolutely jammed with demonstrators. 99.99% of the folks here today are pro-life. here at the court, there are pro-choice demonstrateors but they re outnumbered by huge amounts. the parade has been going, as i say, likely to go for another couple of hours. organizers say this is the biggest crowd they have had for the march for life. and clearly, they re very enthusiastic about what donald trump is likely to pick. they know that the president said he s almost made up his mind. mr. trump has not left the possibility of changing his mind at the last minute but told shawn hannity that in his mind he s made up that mind, we re going to have to wait until thursday. sandra: made up his mind and expected to make that announcement thursdays you mention, karl, for his pick for the supreme court. what can you tell us, what more do you know about that? well, the president has said that he started with a list of 21 potential supreme court picks. it was a list that he had help from the heritage foundation and the federal society picking. all 21 of them are pro-life. the president has said those he does not pick for the supreme court will be used to pick for appellate and district courts around the country. this is the vacant seat left by the demise of antonin scalia, one of the more conservative jr.ists to sit on the high court. republicans believe they can and should be able to replace and fill that seat with very, very conservative a very, very conservative nominee. mr. trump has said he s narrowed it down. aids say it s probably down to three and perhaps as few as two. neil gorsuch from denver is an originalist, a constitutionalist, very much in the mold of scalia. tom hardiman has a sister on the court in pittsburgh, he s high on the list. and then william pryor, who was considered to be a frontrunner but seems to have fallen into disfavor for a trans hive gender decision. sandra: we will be back. ir e. i just snapped a photo and got an estimate in 24 hours. decision. sandra: we will be back. definitely doesn t have that. you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™ liberty mutual insurance [phone buzzing] some things are simply impossible to ignore. the strikingly designed lexus nx turbo and hybrid. the suv that dares to go beyond utility. this is the pursuit of perfection. 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[ sighs sadly ] try this. but just one aleve can last 12 hours. tylenol and advil can quit after 6. so live whole. not part. with aleve. and check your sunday paper for big savings. and they re absolutely right. they say that it s hot. when really, it s scorching. and while some may say the desert is desolate. we prefer secluded. what is the desert? it s absolutely what you need right now. absolutely scottsdale. of the obama administration s final acts in office. a former president obama struck a deal to share intel with cuba, absent was a deal for joanne chessimard, convicted of murdering a trooper and hiding in cuba. rick? that s right, she s one of dozens of fugitives living in cuba. the superintendent of the new jersey state police calls it a slap to the face she and other killers and domestic terrorists are being left alone. i m mystified by this. a lot of peep in law enforcement are. she was a member of the black liber asian army, wanted on numerous charges when she was pulled over by police tw two other militants in the car. they were armed with handguns and extra ammo with more weapons and ammo in the truck. when the trooper arrived as backup the crew opened fire and forrest was killed. she was convicted but escaped in 1979 and found safe haven in cuba. president trump could revisit the deal, his administration has already threatened to terminate it unless political prisoners are released and fugitives from american law returned. the trooper s only son also pleading for justice, eric forrester, three years old when his father was killed, told fox news her return to the u.s. was not part of the deal is a disagrees. it disrye expects our family and every police officer out there who risked their lives every day and shows how much the obama administration regarded law enforcement. i can t understand as much as i troo i to rationalize this, i can t understand why it has not occurred in the dozens of meetings between the u.s. and cuban officials over the last two years. if the government can t help, someone else might. there s still a $2 million return for her return. sandra: thanks, rick, be right back. you don t let anything keep you sidelined. that s why you drink ensure. with 9 grams of protein and 26 vitamins and minerals. for the strength and energy to get back to doing. .what you love. ensure. always be you. a manmade avalanche in colorado creating quite a sight. whoo-hoo! unbelievable footage there. that is about 200 miles south and west of aspen. they got 95 inches of know this month. the wbr id= wbr35690 /> snowiest january in 40 years. those controlled explosions help avoid natural avalanches. an inferno fire in florida. in tampa, climbing 27 flights of stairs to put out the flames. the fire contained to a corner of the roof. /b>
everybody. what more can you tell us about this? you were given this information or permission by the senator or by his family in order to broadcast this? yes, they with his permission, i spoke to the doctors they ask that i talk to the doctors get the information about what happened. we know that on friday morning he went to the doctor s basically for a scheduled annual physical exam. he was complaining a bit of fatigue and said he s been feeling tired over the last few months. he also had a bout of double vision. but because of those things his doctors decided to order a cat scan of his brain. this is all friday this happened. it was that cat scan and an a subsequent mri scan of the vain that revealed this abnormality. it was concerning enough that urgently, within the next couple of hours, the doctors took him to the operating room, they per performed the incision in the left eyebrow area, removed some intone they believed they removed the entire tumor they could see from the area of the left front of his brain. this is a glee owe blas toe ma. it s the same type of tumor that senator kennedy had, that bo biden had. it is an aggressive type of brain cancer. so senator mccain and his family are dealing with the news and trying to decide the next steps in terms of treatment. he is at home, he was able to go home the next day after surgery. he had a rapid recovery. the doctors told me after he woke up from the anesthesia, he was alert, sharp, able to tell you what year it was. he was making jokes with the recovery room staff. but again it takes a few days for these diagnoses to come back because the pathologist has to review it and this is what they found. what are the potential next steps? well, this is one of those types of tumors that is it doesn t have a particular cure. there s not a type of treatment you can say is going to likely lead to cure. the types of treatments typically are a combination of che che chemo therapy and radiation to his brain. this is a discussion i m sure senator mccain and his family are going to have with doctors as how to proceed and when to proceed. just recovering from this operation can take a couple weeks, but to begin this therapy, radiation, chemotherapy. they have to wait three to four weeks until after the operation. he had the operation in arizona, at the mayo clinic there. this is a dumb question, but is this a tumor or is it more than that? this is a tumor. it is a type of brain tumor. it s a tumor that comes from the brain as opposed to types of tumors that come from somewhere else in the body and spread to his brain. this started in his brain. people were concerned about the melanoma having spread. but this is not a melanoma. this is a malignant cancer. what that means, you operate on this, it needs to be treated as well with chemotherapy and radiation. the concern is it will come back. that s the big concern with these type of tumors. in order to try to give him the best chance at that, it is likely he ll undergo further treatments in the next several weeks. i want you to stay with us. david axle rod is also joining us and gloer ya borjer. this is very devastating news for senator mccain and his family. very tough news to hear for everybody. he was first elected to the senate in 1986, more than 30 years ago. for the impact he has had, and continues to have, on the senate is not to be overstated. it s remarkable and don t forget he ran for the presidency twice and he told me he once came in second place, which wasn t good enough. you know, john mccain is a fighter. i think we all know that, all of us tonight. and, you know, this is a man who survived fire on the forest, shot out of a plane, would you say tortured, five years in a pow camp, melanoma. we ve been talking to folks close to mccain. he s been on the phone talking about his statements on health care and continuing to work. if i know john mccain he s going to want to get back to work as soon as possible and want to continue to do what he does best, which is represent the people of arizona. and be the lion that he is in the united states senate. you covered capitol hill for a long time, talk about the influence senator mccain has there and within the republican party. i interviewed him a number of times, he has a great sense of humor and is engaged in not just domestic issues but international. the only people who can call people little jerks and mean that as a term of indeerment, which he does. there is nobody who is the kind of fighter that john mccain is, never mind all the things he went through in vie yet nam, the melanoma he had in 2000, but that he s going constantly. warp speed always. you mention it had impact he had in the senate, a huge impact. but he has a huge impact globally. just this year alone, anderson, 75,000 miles to 15 nations across three continents he logged. i was talking to chris coons who went back to vietnam with john mccain and talked about the fact that chris coons, who s about 30 years younger than john mccain. he had to change his own schedule because he couldn t keep up with mccain. and the way he said mccain is revered by leaders across the country, even especially in vietnam, which was really interesting. b but covering mccain in the senate and i covered his presidential campaign in 2008 from start to finish. he has a fighter pilot s mentally which is you keep going and keep going. you don t look back, you don t think about regrets, because we all have them. but you keep going. that is his m.o.. there s no question knowing him and the way he likes to fight and he s probably also telling his joke that is he told on the campaign trail, in the words of chairman mow, it s always darkest before it s black. anybody who can survive what he did with his brothers in arms he spent years there under excruciating conditions. he is a fighter and he also in so many ways he s one of those politicians that transcends party lines. he does. i spent an hour with him the initial ax files on cnn with john mccain. and to hear him tell the story of his captivity and those very dismal years but the strength he drew from that experience and the lessons he drew from that experience was incredibly moving. yes, he s one of those people who has over the last 30 years found a way to work across party lines on issues like immigration reform, climate change. it didn t always make him popular with the base of the republican party. but even on the health care issues, as he was waiting for this diagnosis, he was issuing statements on bipartisan health care. i think that s who john mccain is. when i sat here listening to you and sanjay read that news, discuss that news, i thought of his friend ted kennedy, who eight years ago eight or nine years ago got a diagnosis like this and continued to fight through it, worked through it. but two those worked together on many, many issues. and, in fact, john mccain spoke at ted kennedy s memorial service. there aren t that many giants left in the united states senate. john mccain is a giant. we certainly wish him and his family the best tonight. i know there are a lot of people across the country and people he s met all around the world who are saying a prayer for him. so thank you all. in other words the president weighs in on his attorney general. he said to the new york times, you ll hear it all next. and while we make more e-commerce deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country, we never forget. that your business is our business the united states postal service. priority: you choicehotels.com. badda book. that s it?. he means book direct at choicehotels.com for the lowest price on our rooms guaranteed. plus earn free nights and instant rewards at check-in. yeah. like i said. book now at choicehotels.com yet up 90% fall short in getting key nutrients from food alone. let s do more. add one a day women s complete with key nutrients we may need. plus it supports bone health with calcium and vitamin d. one a day women s in gummies and tablets. yet at what is on the president s mind, the russian probe the man in charnl of it had to recuse himself. the president spoke to the new york times. the headline only hints at how much news he made. he expresses anger with comey and sessions and mueller. this interview is something. i want to start with what he told you about attorney general sessions. what did he say? he was clearly frustrated with jeff sessions he said that he would not have appointed him if he had known that he would recuse himself from anything russia related. he would have appointed somebody else. we know that donald trump has been angry with jeff sessions for quite some time, but it was a pretty remarkable statement for him to make on the record, for him to vent his ooire that y and make clear that he considers what jeff sessions did, which was a recusal because he was concerned about a conflict to be praum problematic he faulted sessions for turning an easy question into a hard one at the senate confirmation hearing. it s a sentiment a fair number of critics agree with. he also said that if sessions hadn t recused himself there wouldn t have ended up being a special counsel, is that right. he did. a couple weeks ago the president s anger with sessions was really at the root of what he was saying had to do with other issues. he believed if sessions had not recused himself from russian there would be no rod rosenstein stepping up, no special counsel appointed. it is all the original sin from there. he was less about mueller but he was clear that he believed mueller had a number of conflict of interest one of which trump aides talked about for quite some time was that they say that bob mueller interviewed as interim fbi director the by the way day before he was appointed special counsel. they consider that a mitigating factor to put it mildly. the president refused to say what he would consider a violation of the charge on the part of bob mueller. he wouldn t answer it. but he believes mueller s charge is on russia and he doesn t believe he s under investigation. he doesn t believe he is personally under investigation by bob mueller. that s what he said. he also had choice words for former fbi director james comey. he did. he said any number of choice words about james comey for some time. but he was very specific that he, you know, believed that comey was trying to essentially get leverage over him with that dossier, making all sorts of wild allegations about president trump and his appearance in russia in 2013. you know, he as we know, he was not happy with comey for quite some time, long before he actually fired him. there had been some belief that he might fire him immediately upon taking office. but i will say his frustration was less trained on comey than on sessions today. the allegation against comey, this goes back to the meeting when u.s. intelligence officials at the time briefed then president elect trump in trump tower and as comey has testified, comey pulled him aside after the meeting and told him about the existence of this dossier or two-page summary of thises dossier, the president saying he believes comey did that to get leverage to keep his job. essentially comey wanted to keep his job and that was the point in showing it to him. again, the president feels sort of vindicated as i think you have seen him say publically, that comey had to acknowledge under oath that he had told the president three times he was under investigation, he said he would not say that publically because it might change. the president doesn t accept that as an answer and was very frustrated that comey wouldn t say it publically. again, i think his frustration with the dossier continues and this was a piece of that. the white house went after cnn and others who reported that comey had briefed the president about the existence of the dossier and the two-panl summary of the dossier. i remember having a conversation with kellyanne conway where they seemed not to know it happened or denied it had happened. so the president is confirming, as has been confirmed already, that it did occur. it s fascinating to hear his perspective why that briefing took place with comey he thinks. and the second conversation with putin he said it lasted only 15 minutes. i have to go back and check the transcript what was said i just raid ead it he said 1 minutes because we have other sources that were there that said about an hour. he was adamant with that time frame, which was consistent with what white house officials said yesterday about this second get together. he was not defining it in his mind as an actual meeting. he told a long and elaborate story about sitting next to japan s prime minister s wife. he got up to see his own wife next to putin. they started talking. he did say the topic of russian adoption came up when he was talking to putin at the newer meeting. the topic of russian adoption, as you recall, was supposedly part of the subject of this meeting that the president s son, don junior had with the russian lawyer on june 9, 2016, one that was ultimately billed as dirt against hillary clinton. so it was surprising that came up, i have no reason to believe that it was anything other than coincidence. but the adoption relates to sanctions. it sounds like he didn t mention it, it be sounds like putin mentioned it. so if putin mentioned it, they re talking about sanctions. that was my read, but i don t want to get ahead of what the president said in his remarks. how does his demeanor seem? incredibly upbeat. when i contrast him on air force one last week and today with some of what we saw earlier in the administration, for whatever reason, he seems to be in a pretty good place. fascinating reporting as always. thank you. thank you. one other notable item from the interview, asked if mr. mueller s investigation would cross a red line if it looked at his family s finances. he said, i would say yes. he was asked what he would do, he said listen this is about russia. your panel is back. gloria, have you ever heard of a time when the president of the united states says such things about the attorney general, who he appointed, an oig who wttorn who was one of his earliest supporters, campaigned for him? no, his earliest supporter somebody who was with him every step of the way and i think what you heard in hearing maggie and in reading this remarkable piece in the new york times is that this is a president who s very angry at a lot of people who work for him, i made a list, jeff sessions, comey who used to work for him, andrew mccain, rod rosenstein, and of course special counsel mueller who he is not directly threatening but saying you have a lot of conflicts out there. so this is a list of. vegrieve enss. even though he was upbeat in mood, you could hear the grievance in the new york times piece. i talk to people who talk regularly with the president for months and we were told this is something he will not let go for months, his anger and ire at jeff sessions for recusing himself. if you remember, go back to his tweet, one of the first tweets he sent that got him as n big trouble as president it was the saturday morning after jeff sessions recused himself where the president tweeted that president obama was tapping trump tower. it was donald trump lashing out in furry, you know, maybe pointing his anger in the wrong direction, but that was where all of that came from. from jeff sessions recusing himself. and since then, as the president himself has now said in public on the record to the new york times. so many bad things for him have stemmed from that recusal. having said all that it s one thing to hear about private conversations the president has about his attorney general and how upset he is, it s another thing to throe jeff sessions under the bus and then put it in reverse and come back and do it again in the new york times. this isn t a former attorney general. this is a sitting oig. the person who he put in charge. and as i you said anderson, a guy who went out on a very big limb to endorse president trump. and that gave him credibility with the republican base in the campaign. does this mean that sessions needs to resign or something? i don t think so. donald trump operates by his own rules. jeff sessions is the attorney general. i m going to see on friday he s going to be giving a talk in philadelphia. he will continue pushing for longer prison sentences for more civil forfeiture, it s a bizarre situation, there s no doubt about that. but he is still the attorney general, he will continue to do what he s doing, advancing an agenda, which is basically donald trump s agenda but just under this weird cloud. i don t think he has to resign. if he had any dignity he would. i think he should resign. first of all, i d have to talk to maggie, i don t think it s in the report, but was this unsew listed? was it in response to a question. he may have been asked about something. i think to his point, why give this interview today of all days where health care is obviously the thing this is right after the lunch with the senators about health care. that s the other thing. nobody stands up to donald trump. we had him humiliate senator helder at that lunch and then he does this. i d love to see jeff sessions walk away at this point and on principle walk away. what s the the principle? i think go ahead. i think i think one of the reasons he went after jeff sessions is he blames jeff sessions for the rabbit hole of the russia investigation as he sees it. he said jeff sessions s led to the special counsel. he said jeff sessions is the one person who actually did the right thing. what jeff sessions did in that moment was honorable. but if you look at it i agree with you, but if you look at it from the president s point of view, the point he made to the times is okay if you wanted to recuse yourself and you knew all along that you couldn t deal with russia, tell me before i made you attorney general. he thinks that jeff sessions works for him. exactly. i agree with you. but i m telling you i m channelling the president here as hard as that is, but that s his point of view. that s right. e he thinks everybody works for him. the presidency, the white house is about him. he doesn t care about health care he can have a nice lunch and elbow some people in the ribs he doesn t care about the agenda that jeff sessions is implementing as the head of the department of justice, he views him as his personal lawyer and he s not doing his job. he doesn t see the mueller investigation as an independent investigation. he wants mueller to know he retains the right to get rid of him if he cross it is line. say what you will about donald trump you know what s on his mind. he doesn t sugar coat it. it s clear. he approaches its like a job interview. if you knew before you took the job you were going to recuse yourself, you should have told me before i gave you the job. that s right. and, you know, there is a corner of what trump says that makes a certain amount of sense. what really led sessions to recuse himself is that convoluted and false answer he gave which the president criticized him. to al frank from minnesota. he which he denied meeting any russians. which put sessions under the russia investigation, which meant he did have to recuse himself. there s no doubt that sessions made the right choice, the ethical choice in recusing himself. but that led to the mueller investigation, which is plaguing donald trump. he was on the campaign. he was a surrogate for donald trump. so even had that not happened, he probably still should have recused himself from this case. i think jeff sessions in that case did the right thing and that s what he s being attacked for. it s also interesting that he s accusing former fbi director comey basically trying to leverage the dossier to try and keep his job. do we have any evidence to suggest this actually happened, beside the president leveling this accusation? no, we don t. because comey testified about this, explaining why he felt he should give the information to the president. that he worried that if my memory serves me correct, that down the road the president finds out about it and he thinks they kept it from him, that wouldn t be fair. that s right. and that s what i was thinking about when you were asking me that question, james comey s tom this issue and the question of why he decided to pull the president-elect aside because he wasn t yet the president, when they briefed him in trump tower and give him this information and the fact that that that the president s then president-elect s reaction was so unbelievable that he had to run down to his car, pull out his laptop and write it in a way that he could remember and retain the contemporaneous notes but do it in a way that wasn t classified. there s no question about that. if memory serves me, and i might be wrong about that, but it was a decision by all the intelligence heads that comey would be the one to do this. right. i m not sure it was comey saying i want to be the one to do it because maybe this will give me leverage. that s true. now at the time the intelligence heads the others were obama appointees because he wasn t president. maybe it made sense because he was the guy staying on because he had a ten-year term. comey sin insists he did it for the right reasons. he felt if this was out there he wants the president to have a heads up about it, not because he was warning the president if he fires james comey it s going to get out there. it doesn t really make a whole lot of sense, but having said that i think taip take a step back. this comey story, the jeff sessions story and more recently mueller. you have such a sense in this interview about where the president s mind is. he is obsessing about these things. some of the things that he can t change that happened before, you know, really many months ago with comey, a guy he already fired. about feeling betrayed by his current attorney general and not having control over the current special prosecutor. and what are we talking about now we re talking about russia and we re doing it because it is the president of the united states who just blew a whole tank of oxygen into the story. you also get the sense this is a president who believes that everybody is out to get him. and talking about mueller, look he interviewed for fbi director. you know, i didn t give him that job now he has this and democrats working for him. rod rosenstein comes from maryland everybody knows there aren t a lot of republicans in maryland. andrew mccabe s wife gave money to the democrat policy. so it s not about mueller s qualifications or rod rosenstein s qualifications. it s about where he sees them on the spectrum and it s black and white, they re either with me or against me. and we should say maggie said he seemed upbeat, when we talk about obsessing and stuff, according to to maggie he seems in a good head space. that was the report that i got from several republicans who were in the health care meeting that he had with all republican senators. that he was jovial, that he tweaked senators like rand paul stop going after republicans on tv, maybe i should take you golfing to get you off tv for three days. but this particular issue he seizes on it and expands it. any professional would tell you stop talking about it he can t. the white house efforts to down play the second meeting between the president and vladimir putin at the g20 meeting, more on that ahead. when heartburn hits fight back fast with new tums chewy bites. fast relief in every bite. crunchy outside. chewy inside. tum tum tum tum new tums chewy bites. so, if anyone has a reason that these two should not be wed, speak now. (coughs) so sorry. oh no. it s just that your friend daryl here is supposed to be live streaming the wedding and he s not getting any service. i missed, like, the whole thing. what? and i just got an unlimited plan. it s the right plan, wrong network. you see, verizon has the largest, most reliable 4g lte network in america. it s built to work better in cities. tell you what, just use mine. thanks. no problem. all right, let s go live. say hi to everybody who wasn t invited! (vo) when it really, really matters, you need the best network and the best unlimited. plus, get the pixel, by google with no trade-in required. over the course of 9 days sthe walks 26.2 miles,. that s a marathon. because he chooses to walk whenever he can. and he does it with support from dr. scholl s. only dr. scholl s has massaging gel insoles that provide all-day comfort to keep him feeling more energized. so he even has the energy to take the long way home. keep it up, steve! dr. scholl s. born to move. presidential meeting with vladimir putin they made no effort to actually disclose. first we have breaking news on the three participants on the other undisclosed meeting. the one at trump tower last year billed as an attempt to get dirt on hillary clinton. we learned that donald trump jr., paul manafort, and jirk have dates to testify on capitol hill. they ve been called before the senate judiciary committee that s been scheduled on wednesday however paul manafort s spokesperson has confirmed he s been invited. we haven t heard from donald trump jr. s representatives. but senators expect both men to appear. the testimony by donald trump jr. as well as paul manafort that will be in public. it will be in public. if they both appear as requested it will be the first time senators will be able to drill into them on details about the june 2016 meeting that was set up on behalf of the oligarch. the russia american lobbyist so a lot of questions that could come from the senators if don junior and paul manafort do, in fact, appear. they wouldn t be at the same time, i would assume one would be after the other. we have two different sessions they re scheduled to appear in the second session to presumably they would be one right after the other and not at the same time. jared kushner also testifying next week before another committee, is that public? what do we know. that is definite. he will be appearing on monday. it s a closed session before the snal senate intelligence committee. the questions although we won t see it play out in public. it will likely include what he knew about the meeting at trump tower and senators will probably drilled into why jared kushner has amended his security form at least twice now. to disclose meetings with the russian ambassador, the chairman of the bank and the june 2016 meeting. so a lot of questions there, but that one while it s definite it will playout behind closed doors when jared kushner goes before the senate intelligence committee. thanks for that. the white house gave another one of their no cameras allowed press briefings today. they used some of it to talk about the president s previously revealed meeting with vladimir putin. it seems silly, said sarah huckabee-sanders, that we would disclose a dinner that he was already participating in. keep in mind the dinner isn t the issue, that was known. the meeting was not and the white house made it no effort to make it known. it s one in a string of previously unknown contacts big and small and people in donald trump s circle and russias. the undisclosed meeting with jeff sessions, michael flynn, it goes on. we re focussing tonight on the latest. it s important to point out this is what presidents do, meet with foreign leaders however after wards they do not conceal the meeting while pretending there s nothing unusual about concealing it. what s also not normal is the time of the meeting. not even another interpret orwas present. putting the quote from sarah huckabee-sanders in context because it s a bold claim to make. it s a bold claim to make but in line with what the white house was doing all day. saying this was a normal meeting, something that was not a surprise. the reality is the white house only disclosed this last night, 11 days after the meeting because it had already leaked out. it was not a normal meeting. they were having a dinner but the fact that the president was there having dinner sitsing next to the japanese prime minister. that s why the translator only spoke japanese. he was not intended to speak with the russian president that evening. they spoke earlier in the day for some two hours and 15 minutes. all eyes were on that meeting but it seems they had more to talk about. but this is what sarah huckabee-sanders said at the press briefing. they had a conversation, i m not going to get into the conversation. again this was a social dinner where the president spoke with many world leaders as is the purpose. i think it would be awkward for them to all sit at a dinner and not speak to each other. i would imagine all of you would agree with that. it seems silly we would disclose a dinner that he tha we had announced to you as participating in. yes, we knew he was at dinner with the other world leaders at the g20 summit but it was the fact he had a separate conversation that drew the attention of other world leaders that they were spending time together at the exclusion of other allies, but the white house would not say what they talked about during the meeting. president trump revealed more about what he said was in the meeting with president putin and put forth a new time line, basically saying it was much shorter. right he said the meeting was some 15 minutes or so to the new york times. i asked last night, a top administration official if the meeting was an hour long because that s what the people were saying that broke this story. and they said nearly an hour. the president saying 15 minutes. we know they stayed at that venn knew until midnight, long after it was scheduled. so i m not sure the 15 minutes is accurate. we ve seen story after story not necessarily the real story. the white house would not tell us today the length of the meet meting we asked sarah huckabee-sanders about that, she would not say how long it was or what they talked about. the reason it makes a difference is because there is no u.s. record of what happened at the meeting and a translator was only by the russian government. it s highly extraordinary, unusual to have a conversation like that between adversaries without having at least a translator from your own government there to make sure things aren t mixed up, confused and that was not the case. appreciate the update. joining us now is ian bremer and thomas pickering. rey ian the white house released an official statement calling this a brief conversation minutes after that an unnamed senior white house official told jeff zelenys after close to an hour. you have sources inside the room, do you know how long this was? yeah look the reason i found out about it is because a number of the 2: g20 allies were unnerved by the fact that trump s best meeting and best chemistry, clearly closest relationship among all these countries is with putin. it was the fact it was in front of all these people, it wasn t by himself. he s putting on display this very engaged, e ner jet ik, one hour conversation that apparently the senior white house official also confirmed to you, trump saying 15 minutes is unfortunately just not credible as we ve seen on so many of these issues on the u.s. russia discussion. in terms of other details, where in the room was it? other people were around other world leaders were around watching this you said? yes, there were a lot of empty seats because a number of the leaders and spouses didn t actually come. so as a consequence, true doe s wife was seated by hergs with empty seats on either side. i believe there was an empty seat near putin. so trump gets up leaves the japanese prime minister, the meal is 3 1/2 hours long. trump goes over to putin, my understanding it was at the table or right next to it and started engaging in this conversation, which now he hear is about adoption, read sanctions, and frankly, who knows what else. ambassador, when you hear the details, there s a big difference between a 15-minute meeting in which pleasantries can be exchanged and a discussion of nearly an hour. do you see a difference in that? do you believe there is? i do anderson. i think it s self-evident p. i think ian made it very clear. my sense is a conversation that long is probably half interpretation time and half statements on each side. that s still a half hour. a half hour is long time in international conversation. and talking about critical subjects can consume a half an hour very easily. i think we re now seeing some of the results of that. i understand that the syrian rebels are no longer going to be supported by the united states. one wonders where that came from and how it fit in either to that context or perhaps other things that one way or another are part of the u.s./russian dialogue. i think it s important not to, in fact, let the message here be the problem so much as understanding that it is important for putin and trump to talk, were there allied jealousies and it was unwise to do this in front of allies, but allied je lieied je low sis asi, they ve been in a deep hole. if putin and trump can dig us out in a serious way, fine. but it doesn t look like we have the great deal maker at work here if, in fact, we re ceasing something that was in our interest and in our way of dealing with the syrian problem was to support the opposition to assad, who we would like to see gone. so those are important pieces to look at. i think we don t know, we ll perhaps find out, we perhaps won t find out if there s no u.s. record. it s interesting that president trump telling maggie haberman that the issues of adoption came up, obviously on the russian he was saying it came up, i m not sure if he means he brought it up or putin brought it up. if putin did, adoption for russia means sanctions. clearly putin has been talking about the need to remove the sanctions for some time. another interesting point to the very appropriate one tom just brought up. is the russians have given the americans an ultimatum, they want these properties back and they re not do going to engage in a deal for them. and in the last few days we hear they re close with the trump administration to get these properties back. again, is there a qid for that quo. was this discussed between trump and putin privately. the russians were the only ones with a read out of that conversation. i think all of that is problematic for the united states and russia. i think one of my big concerns is that trump gets played here. he doesn t have his national security advisor or team he doesn t have any expertise on this issue. in the same way when he was in saudi arabia, we saw the saudis and others hosting him very well and saying you re a great guy and saying the evil irans and qatar supporting them and then we have a move against qatar and our allies and then tillerson and matson have to clean it up. to what extent is trump operating by himself going to give away the store. that s the concern here. i think people listening to this those people who like president trump say what s the big deal, he should talk to president putin. others who don t like president trump would have concern. have you heard about this happening before where there s not someone with the u.s. president or there was no talking points. i don t know if there were talking points or not. i think what is unusual is not to have one interpret tor from the u.s. side. it may have been it was unplanned and he had the japanese speaking interpret tor, and he thought had had to go and do some business. it was unwise if there were any difference in interpretations, two russians will agree and he will be out there alone. i don t think putin wants to in a sense publically nail him to the wall in a set of verbal arguments at the time, it s not in putin s interest especially if he s doing well. it is extremely unusual to do that. i do know that in the oval office there are often meetings with heads of state in which part of the meeting is a group meeting and part of the meeting is a one-on-one with interpr interpretors if that s necessary. that s to settle carefully prepared business worked up in advance and very much part and parcel of a government clearance process in which they say mr. president we recommend you do this, i agree, or i m going to do something else go prepare that for me. but unprepared and at this stage unverifiable. it has its dangers and one needs to be concerned about that. appreciate you both being on. when we come back more breaking news, we re going to sides up the new cbo numbers on obamacare repeal. does psoriasis ever get in the way of a touching moment? 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(shrieks in terror) (heavy breathing and snorting) no, no. the running of the bulldogs? surprising. what s not surprising? how much money aleia saved by switching to geico. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more. there are the wildcats til we die weekenders. the watch me let if fly. this i gotta try weekenders. then we ve got the bendy. . spendy weekenders. the tranquility awaits. hanging with our mates weekenders and the it s been quite a day. .so glad we got away weekenders. whatever kind of weekender you are, there s a hilton for you. book your weekend break direct at hilton.com and join the weekenders. meeting, still taking place at this late hour on capitol hill. you had moderates like lisa murkowski and conservatives like ted cruz. their goal would be to find a way around this impasse that divides the moderate and conservative wings of the party to move forward with a bill that would repeal and replace obamacare at the same time. the white house is involved, as well. we saw reince priebus walk in not too long ago. even though this meeting looks good and we got a lot of happy talk today out of senators and the white house, aides are cautioning us that these fundamental problems that exist still exist and they are a long way away from cutting a deal. the cbo report saying that 32 million fewer people would have health care coverage, explain more about what the report says. reporter: well, the cbo score was devastating to the republicans on a number of levels. you talked about how it will impact people on insurance. there was a deficit decrease in that report, but the real problem is what it says is going to happen to premium costs. that s long been the argument that repeal would lead to lower premiums. republicans would only argue this is only about the repeal portion and even if they only repeal, they have a plan to replace obamacare within two years, but some of these provisions would take place right away. so even though you heard talk about putting repeal only on the table first, that it s really the desire of almost all republicans to do repeal and replace at the same time. the problem is, they re just having such a hard time coming up with an agreement that everyone can get on board with. thank you very much. the white house just weighed in on the whcbo numbers saying it flawed because it doesn t take into account the president s full plan. the president is blaming democrats for the republican s failure to get health care reform done. the way i looked at it, we have no democrat help. they re obstructionists. that s all they re good at is obstruction. they have no ideas. democrats are saying hey, wait, we do have our own plans, including senator joe manchin. senator, the cbo score, premium also double by 2026 and 36 million americans lose their insurance, how much does that change the equation? from my point of view it doesn t, saying we re going to save $470 billion. that s a lot of money and we need to be as cost effective as we can. but the 32 million people that are going to lose their health care are going to be much more expensive than than. what happens to them when they go back to the way they were getting health care before? in west virginia, if you don t have health care, you go to the emergency room. if you re working, you re going to claim worker s comp. so you re using health care at the most expensive level you can. that s money taxpayers are paying. that s exactly. i had every hospital coming to me saying hey, i gave $10 million, $15 million. people came and couldn t pay. so i know the toll it takes in states. over the last 48 hours, president trump talked about repeal and replace, talked about just repealing to let it fail, now back to repeal and replace. what do you make of the president s approach and for you, what is the priority? is it the insurance networks and propping them up? i ve tried to remind the president and the white house, the president got elected with a tremendous margin in west virginia. those were mostly democrats. these were people upset with the previous administration, who thought they wanted a change and unorthodox. they didn t think they were electing somebody partisan like it s been before. so i would say to the president, there s a lot of democrats, a lot of people that are going to be hurt. there s not one demographic group in my state that won t be affected. a lot of people talk about bipartisanship. i talked to governor kasich yesterday about it. do you believe that s possible? we re talking about washington, d.c., where there s a lot of politics involved and each side has a reason to not cooperate with the other. anderson, we have 11 former governors and united states senators right now. four republicans, six democrats and one independent. we started talking informally, nothing formal former governors in the senate? i m a former governor for west virginia. we have 11 of us, former governors, we re recovering governors because it was the greatest job in the world because we could get things done. but we are used to in our work confinement as a governor of our state, bringing contentious legislators together, finding a purpose of moving forward, understanding the challenges every state has. we understand that. we think that we can add some clarity to this, and also some bipartisanship. that s what we re working on. so i ve said if the governors can t do it, nobody can. chuck schumer yesterday said that democrats are open to working with republicans, the door is open. he did seem to put self-preconditions on that cooperation. should there be preconditions on getting democrats to sit at the table? the only precondition we need is we re not going to repeal it, and the other precondition we need is we re going to go through a regular order. we re going to sit down and dissect the bill. nibble who has an idea, an amendment that comes before it goes through this process. that s the way legislatures work. that s the way the united states senate should work. we haven t done that for quite some time. that s the only preconditions you should have. anybody else that has an idea should be discussed. can republicans who have
say about this controversy after the sort of the statement after statement that changed the story a little bit on donald trump jr. s meeting with this russian lawyer. he basically said my son is a high quality individual, he s been transparent and open. he s come out and given the whole story. but there are a lot of questions that still remain and in the white house i think they re very well aware these are not questions that are going to go away and they re not questions that they re prepared to take. there s a lot of legal jeopardy around this meeting. there s a question of whether the president himself knew about it. of course we heard donald trump jr. say in the interview last night that he had not discussed it with his father. but that is going to really hamstring their ability to get ahead of this story. i think there are a lot of questions about what more the president can say without getting a little too close to what is really one of the more damaging revelations of the last few weeks on this story. trump jr. saying it wasn t worthy of telling his father because it was a nothing exists outside that west wing ecosystem, putting so much pressure on them right now? sure. well, first to be clear it wasn t actually us calling it a category 5 hurricane. that was a close republican ally of the white house calling it a category 5 hurricane and someone else compared it to house of cards on netflix. i think what the white house is feeling is a tremendous sense of frustration basically and even the people some people say this is a real issue. you can t argue with the facts. maybe as julie just said, some issues of legal jeopardy for the president s son and potentially others who get ensnared. even people who said this is overheated or overblown. this is not really a legal headache. it s a pr catastrophe and nightmare because it s again this russia cloud that the white house can t seem to shake. coming back over the administration. it something that upsets the president, makes him more prone to the sorts of tweets we have come to know that get him in trouble. and also again, distracts from his foreign trip he went on, they re expecting good coverage clinton/russia. i would have wanted that in the hands of the fbi and off my computer as fast as possible. i think there was a lot more happening in realtime. i don t accept that the president didn t wasn t part of it. you know, the same day that donald jr. accepted the invite to attend the meeting trump himself said, you know, in a few days we re going to have a big speech that lays out the terrible things that hillary clinton has done. i remember that day, we put together a whole team to get ready to defend. defend her. and that never came. this speech never came because i have to surmise they didn t get anything out of the meeting. did you have a sense that any of this was going on? obviously the intel agencies didn t come out until october the 7th to present what they knew. did you on the clinton campaign feel like something was happening there? i suspected that it was we knew that the dnc had been hacked by that point. right around that same day. like within days of that. of this meeting. and suspected it was the russians because it came from the obama white house and that was normally who was hacking you. but never imagined at that point something at this level that the russians russians, you know, they hack all the time. they hack everybody and try to get information on the political candidates, not that they d take the information and be part of the leaking targets of it. the defense from donald trump jr. was twofold. we re new at this, i get the e-mail, i have to replay to the e-mail. the second part was yes, we had the meeting but no significant information exchanged hands, therefore, nothing happened. nothing to be afraid of. they didn t see fit so report it. jared kushner was in the room as well. not only that but we had month after month of denial of anything to do with. we don t have anything to do with russia, we don t know where naivete charge. donald trump jr. was quoted as saying a large amount of business came from russia. this was set up as an acquaintance in the miss universe contest held in moscow. so the connections between donald trump jr., his father and russia are actually fairly extensive. from the psychological stand point, if this were the big nothing burger that trump and his team keep insisting it is, he wouldn t be so nervous about it. people aren t nervous about nonscandals. mark halperin, that s another layer to the story, reporting that donald trump himself, the president of the united states on the trip back from the g20 helped write and oversaw the writing of the response which was that this was a meeting between donald trump jr. and this russian intermediate about adoption policy out of russia. obviously that s crumbled since then. but the point being, the president of the united states was in the room crafting the response to this which turned out not to be true. well, the minute we saw that statement the first one and then the second one a lot of us asked that question, it was asked on monday morning s morning joe where did that statement come from? i don t think we leaped to the conclusion that it was written by people in the government and approved by the president of the united states, but that s what the new york times is reporting. this goes to one of the many layers of the onion that we re not seeing right now. which has to do with how much coordination there is amongst those who are involved here. it s one thing to coordinate when you re dealing with press inquiries or within an administration maybe dealing with the capitol hill. but this is more complicated. this involves government entities and private entities like don jr. and it involves an independent counsel who is looking at potential criminal charges. coordination under most cases is fine. coordination because it yielded a statement that was a series of statements that turned out to be untrue even though they were echoed by the white house chief of staff sunday morning is a problem and may become a problem legally for some people. ashley parker, we are hearing about shakeups in the west wing since after the president was inaugurationed. you have some reporting about ivanka trump and the president s son-in-law, jared kushner, pushing for a shakeup again. yes. a report in in reporting the story we found out that jared kushner and ivanka trump have been pushing the president to get rid of reince priebus. he s the one who s really earned their ire. that said, i have to say, you re right. this has been going on for a while. just because two people are against you doesn t mean you ll be gone. these are two powerful people but it s entirely possible, sure they re pushing for him to be out. reince has other people he doesn t like. this is a white house riven by competing factions and it s just sort of business as usual. there s an element here of crying wolf. we have heard about reince priebus being run out for months and he s still sitting where he s sitting. for the president for all his firing on the apprentice he doesn t like to fire people out all. if you start firing people, whom do you get to replace them? how do you find really top rank people who are going to come into this situation? not only with the palpable chaos there is inside the white house, but with the potential legal jeopardy of, you know, going out and making representations that later are undermined by the president or by discoveries by investigators or whatever. that s a real risk. i don t think a lot of people are going to be the president s the basic problem is that the president s political interests and his governance interests move in separate directions. the reason the president tweets is that it stirs the pot. it distracts the conversation. it outrages some segment of the media, especially perhaps you know, around these and other tables. that stirs the breitbart base. that works in his favor but it s a disaster for actually passing health care or any other form of major legislation because you have a white house that s sort of collapsing on itself instead of trying to work with congress. as we go to break, i want to give you the opportunity to respond to a criticism raised over the last 24 hours, talking about the clinton campaign and the story on january the 11th about ukrainian efforts to sabotage trump. the government officials, the piece reads tried to help hillary clinton and undermine trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. they disseminated documents implementing a top aide in corruption and they helped to research damaging information on trump. the criticism was this was happening on the other side too, not just a trump/russia allegation. there was a clinton/ukraine allegation. i think they relate it back to the one clinton staffer i never met. and if this is about directing the hacking of the rnc and of donald trump s chief of staff and that this woman these officials met personally with podesta and chelsea clinton and others, then you re quite confident in saying that? i m quite confident in saying that. we would understand the danger that would represent. we re just getting started here. kelly o donnell, ashley parker, thank you for reporting. coming up, donald trump jr. s quote love affair with moscow amid growing fallout, new reporting about his own ties to russia. ties that began long before his father s presidential run. plus, president trump s nominee to be the next fbi director in the hot seat today. senators grilling him on everything from the firing of james comey to the russia investigation and the efforts of special counsel, robert mueller. i would consider an effort to tamper with director mueller s investigation to be unacceptable and inappropriate and would need to be dealt with very sternly and appropriately indeed. when it s time to move to underwear toddlers see things a bit differently thanks to pampers easy ups while they see their first underwear you see an easy way to potty train pampers easy ups our first and only training underwear with an all-around stretchy waistband and pampers superior protection so you ll see fewer leaks and they ll see their first underwear pampers easy ups, the easiest way to underwear. pampers i just want to find a used car start at the new carfax.com show me used trucks with one owner. pretty cool. [laughs] ah. ahem. show me the carfax. start your used car search at the all-new carfax.com. only tylenol® rapid release gels have laser drilled holes. they release medicine fast, for fast pain relief. tylenol® of the don jr. e-mail and other allegations that this whole thing about trump campaign in russia is a witch-hunt? is that a fair description of what we re all dealing with in america? well, senator i can t speak to the basis for those comments. i can tell you my experience i m asking you as the future fbi director, do you consider this endeavor a witch-hunt? i do not consider director mueller to be on a witch-hunt. that was earlier today on capitol hill. the confirmation hearing for fbi director the nominee chris wray. the man president trump has chosen to fill this seat left vacant after the firing of james comey. the trump/russian collusion and donald trump jr. s e-mails showing he was willing to work with russia to help swing the election in his father s favor. here s more with lindsey graham who pushed for his thoughts on the actions of don jr. should donald trump jr. have taken that meeting? well, senator, i don t hearing for first time your description of it so i m not really in a position to speak to it. let me ask you this. if i got a call from someone saying that the russian government wants to help lindsey graham get elected, they have dirt on the opponent, should i take that meeting? inyou d want to consult i think if you get a call from somebody suggesting that a foreign government wants to help you, by disparaging your opponent, tell us all to call the fbi. to the members of this committee, any threat or effort to interfere with our elections from any nation state or any nonstate actor is a kind of thing the fbi would want to know. all right. so i ll take it that we should call you and that s great answer. a great answer, pal says senator garrett hague is joining us from capitol hill and bill gavin. garrett, pretty positive reviews across the line from democrats and republicans for the performance of chris wray today. yeah. willie, first of all that s why so many people on the hill appreciate graham. you have to never wonder what he s thinking about the issues. as for chris wray i think he pretty well nailed it today. the republicans were going to support him coming in this morning. i talked to probably the majority of the democrats on the committee afterwards and even those who weren t ready to say they d vote for him came away very impressed. i think the reason for that is he answered sort of the fundamental question here which was was he going to be the director of the fbi or donald trump s director of the fbi and based on some of the answers to the questions you have already played, you know, saying he doesn t think the mueller investigation is a witch-hunt, saying he d resign if he was asked to do something he thought was illegal or unethical, talking to the committee if he were asked to interfere or change an investigation in any way. he checked a number of the boxes and put himself on the record not just saying i will be independent but answering these questions in a way that suggests he really means it. the caveat to all of this, dianne feinstein the ranking democrat who says she does plan to vote for him. she said we won t know how strong his convictions are until they re tested. i want sounds like it sounds like they ll be tested. i don t think the democrats will try to hold this vote up or try to oppose him. bill gavin, as someone who served as the assistant director to the fbi, boy, what a moment to walk into this job. yes, you re the nominee of president trump, but there are investigations going on everywhere you look and you know that the president fired the last fbi director. willie, i was most impressed with chris wray s responses and the way he answered the questions today. it showed his personality. it showed his temperament. it showed his legal acumen in a lot of these questions. and it also showed he fully understands the internal workings of both the fbi and the attorney general s office. that s a big plus in something like this and i think somebody sprinkled ground glass on lindsey graham s wheaties this morning, but thement be line the way he the bottom line is he didn t lose his composure. and he showed a lot of depth of thought and honesty in the questions. i think that anybody who looks at chris wray as an individual who, you know, might be a little low key, don t confuse low key with being naive. i have been around long enough and in the fbi long enough to find that some low key individuals are silent killers. i just think that this after watching hip today i didn t know him from the past i go back to work for christopher wray in a heart beat. given what we know about president trump s relationship with the previous fbi director and that he demanded an oath of loyalty from his fbi director what do you think should be the mindset of chris wray coming into all he s coming into right now? i think he s a very, very steep learning curve in terms of what s going on. he kind of demonstrated that today with his answers. it is a steep learning curve for him, but i also think that if the president of the united states demands a loyalty oath for him, the next thing he hears from chris wray is a letter of resignation. he s a guy who will stand up for his beliefs. he expressed that today. i think he did it very well. let me ask you about chris wray, a guy that donald trump nominated obviously. republicanss and democrats, dianne feinstein among them saying he did well today. i m going to vote yes for him. what does the job look like in a way that was different maybe for a previous fbi director? i think the key difference is that wray is now entrusted with maintaining the integrity of government. it s not just simply about the fbi performing the tasks you expect the bureau to perform. it s about knowledge that the key people in touch stone institutions in this country not political hacks coming out of something like an american version of a chavista government. it sends a signal of government that confidence is at an all time low and they re attacking the deep state as if it s some kind of conspiracy against their elected officials. he s standing up and saying this sold deep state is what stands between us and the lawless regime. yeah, senator leahy asked about this loyalty pledge during the hearing today. and wray said my loyalty is to the constitution, and the rule of law and the fbi. you shouldn t have to make this point. but you do right now. this is a white house that does not respect limits. perhaps it doesn t understand. doesn t understand. doesn t understand there are limits. but there are. i think chris wray in his testimony, you know, set those barriers. set those lines. and i think he s going to demand that they be respect. i hope. all right. bill we ll be having broken glass on our wheaties tomorrow at your recommendation. some are getting more vocal over the russian headlines, but what will it take for more of them to distance themselves from the white house? we ll ask one who is breaking with the white house on a number of issues. everyone needs connected with the everyone needs connected with this campaign from time you saw dr. zi value go until you drank with the president, this drip drip drip is undermining the credibility of the investigation. what s going on? oh hey! that s it? yeah. everybody two seconds! dear sebastian, after careful consideration of your application, it is with great pleasure that we offer our congratulations on your acceptance. through the tuition assistance program, every day mcdonald s helps more people go to college. it s part of our commitment to being america s best first job. heri think i might burst... totally immersed weekenders. whatever kind of weekender you are, there s a hilton for you. book your weekend break direct with hilton.com and join the summer weekenders. that s mom taking care of business. but who takes care of mom? office depot/office max. this week, get this ream of paper for just one cent after rewards. taking care of business. and you came out yesterday and said the meeting with donald trump jr. and this russian intermediary was problematic. why is it so difficult for many of the colleagues to say that, at least there shouldn t be a meeting on the opponent, in this case, hillary clinton, and a foreign entity? i said at the very least this issue is this matter is now it s problematic and it s damaging. i agree with the segment you ran with trey gowdy who said that this drip drip drip is damaging the credibility of the administration. that if they have information about any potential contacts with the russians in the campaign days they should turn them over immediately. it seems we re learning about them from the media and the new york times in this case. it speaks to the broader issue of the russian policy. i m at a loss to explain, i won t explain this administration s attitude on russia. it s a hostile actor and that really has not earned anything that for example, we shouldn t be entering into a cyber agreement with the russians right now. i mean, they re clearly bad actors and there s no reason to do such a thing. they re trying to undermine our alliances in nato, trying to break up the eu, undermine american power and influence throughout the world. at this time we should be ratcheting up sanctions not trying to collaborate with them until their behavior changes. the response of trey gowdy has been the exception not the rule, speaking out on what donald trump jr. did. take us inside the cloakroom, what are they saying, what are republicaning really saying about what happened with donald trump? i understand that paul ryan has a job to do. there s some diplomacy there. what are they saying in private? well, i think my colleagues are, you know, very concerned about the whole matter. i mean, how can t they be? i mean, it seems to me on the one hand the administration has said there s nothing to see here, but it seems in many cases that the administration then does things to, you know, by firing jim comey and other actions that have been taken to try to slow down the proceedings. so it seems to me that if they have nothing to fear then they should welcome the mueller investigation and cooperate. anything that would try to, you know, impede that investigation, you know, sends a signal that maybe there is something they re hiding. i think that s why the administration needs to get out of its own way. congressman mark halperin is up the block from you in washington. and he has a question. not meant to be a cute or a trick question. what are the motivations for republicans do a tough, thorough, aggressive investigation of a republican administration that could do the republican president harm? well, look, we have a job to do as congress. we re a separate but equal branch of government. and we all i think everybody in congress in both parties know that russia did interfere in our election. that s beyond debate. as members of congress we have do is a stand up and say that was not only wrong, but get to the bottom of it. find out what happened, what they did, on the criminal side that s up to obviously director mueller to see what he might find. but we have a responsibility as congress to conduct proper oversight and when the russians meddled, we should be engaged and i d be saying the same thing if it were a democratic president. if the russians helped hillary clinton in that regard, we should be conducting that same level of oversight. congressman, let me ask you the question that lindsey graham asked the nominee for fbi director, if you received an e-mail from someone representing the interests of the russian government or any other government, saying i have some dirt on your opponent, let s meet about it, what would you do? wow. i mean never had that situation occur. but i ll tell you what. we have all as candidates i m sure we have had people come to us with information, you know, and i ll call its in the realm of opposition research. this is different. this is different. this is a foreign entity. it s usually and you always handle those things very delicately. i think with a foreign entity i would boy, i don t know what i would do. never thought about it. i guess the proper thing to do is to contact is to contact law enforcement. but i never had that situation and i hope i never do. but i think that would be that would certainly raise an eyebrow. i would have to have conversations with my team saying what s this about, if a foreign actor came to see me. in fairness though, many of us in congress we have constituencies where there are they re large ethnic communities and they speak with accents and you re not sure of their citizenship. look, russia is a hostile they re hostile to the united states, they re an adversary. we would have to be very careful with any kind of contact with an entity like that. so in your view, donald trump jr. should have gone to law enforcement when he got that e-mail? well, i would have run that up to the flag pole to the proper people in the campaign and said hey, this should have raised a red flag and turned this over to somebody, you know that s where i think he probably it would be proper to call the fbi. they have they re doing counterintelligence all the time and we all know that. and i think that s what i would have done. gone to law enforcement. congressman charlie dent, republican of pennsylvania, appreciate your time. thank you. still ahead donald trump jr. s ties to russia long before he exchanged e-mails with russians about hillary clinton. he had already cemented deep ties within moscow. up next, new reporting on his time there that reads like a quote, scene from a cold war spy movie. strapger to russia, politico reported that he quote spent far more time in the country and developed personal ties there that continued beyond the november election. and comments unearthed from the 2008 real estate convention proved that russia had not pooled the wool over his eyes when it came to their sinister dealings. quote, russia is just a different world he said. one where any investment is at risk because it is a question of who knows who, who s brother is paying off who, et cetera. it really is a scary place. now don jr. finds himself squarely at the center of a saga that seems straight out of russia s playbook. let s bring in ken dilanian, national security reporter and susan glasser international affairs columnist at politico and former moscow cobureau chief for the washington post. ken, let me start with you. a lot of people in the intelligence world have looked at this meeting set up with the russian lawyer as perhaps a dangling of bait to see how the trump campaign might respond. how would that work exactly from the russian side? yeah, no, you re right. almost every current and former intelligence official i have talked to about this sees its the same way. they say this is right out of the russian playbook. using a family member who has a relationship with the russian business man or the pop single emin agalarov and his father who is an oligarch. so they re play on that familial connection and they offer a promise of some information and then you know the russian lawyer may or may not have been involved in that. her story is she came to talk about the sanctions and this russian adoption issue. see may have been a she may have been a dupe, but they send her in there to see whether i m just repeating the theory that i have heard from many current and former intelligence officials to see if the trump campaign would be amenable to this gesture. and donald trump jr., you know, not only was he amenable. he took the meeting, brought senior members of the trump campaign. that may have sent a message in fact it was a dangle that that i d be open to future meetings. as someone who s covered russia for a long time n the interview with keir simmons yesterday on nbc, the attorney said i m not working with the russian government, i have no connection to the russian government. so that would put that at a random meeting between a woman who wanted to be put in touch with donald trump and an attorney from russia. does that fly with you? obviously vladimir putin remember has denied having any involvement with the 2016 hacking. people who have followed this closely whose opinion i trust on this believe that not only is the lawyer somebody who s very connected to the kremlin and has been used at their behest in a number of very politically sensitive cases before. but also, you know, in the same way that russia didn t actually go out of its way to hide the role. what i found living there for four years is that the kgb and the domestic successor the fsb is not at all subtle when its comes to things like this. that e-mail we when we read it yesterday, it was not subtle. it was can they really have put that in writing? i would say that the answer according to people who spent a lot of time looking at how russian spy agencies work is yes. it could be that unsubtle. and ken dilanian, how do you suspect russia if this was russian pushing this attorney toward the trump campaign chose don jr. as its mark in this case? well, you know, as you point out that politico story laid out that don jr. is doing business in russia going back to 2006. he s had a warm relationship with people in russia. he s tweeted about his pleasure with the country. he went to the miss universe pageant and he didn t you know, so they may have found that as a way in and they may have succeeded because he certainly was able to get the meeting with some of the senior officials in the campaign. bret, there aren t many people who believe this is a random attorney who decided she was going to call up a friend who was a pop singer, get him to have his publicist e-mail trump jr. and talk about the adoption. what s the chain of command knowing what you know? well, look, with all of these major operations, putin has been heavily invested in it. you know, i actually think back to the lit ve even coe murder and putin had a hand in it. one doesn t leave the kgb. she came in to talk about quote adoptions which is russian code for the magnitsky act. the most effective sanctions that we have placed against high russian officials for corruption and crime. this is a high priority for the russian government. what s also interesting beyond the question of what they could provide trump is there belief that trump would be the ideal president for doing russia s bidding should he succeed. and that s i think a point worth making because the administration has been so keen to deny that vladimir putin would have had an interest in seeing him elected as president. you know, susan, it s interesting listening to don jr. last night on fox he was asked specifically whether or not he had other meetings that he hadn t told people about with russia. he said i don t think so. i guess it s possible, i don t remember a meeting of some kind. but this does open up the question of what other meetings were there? if jared kushner was in the room, if paul man afort was in the room and you didn t report this one and jared kushner has two other meetings that he didn t report and had to retroactively put on his disclosure form, what else is still out there? well, the answer is a lot could still be out there. i was struck in reading this correspondence yesterday that it seemed in fact like there already had been a conversation. we don t have the context for it. but, you know, this correspondence suggests he s familiar with president trump s personal assistant rona. that e-mail correspondence suggests it s known that to trump campaign that the russian government is supporting them. that s the context in the way i read the e-mail so that suggests there s much more information we don t have. second of all, somehow, donald trump jr. he s just a kid, he s mistreated. not only is this a 40 something guy, but i think michael crowley s piece in politico it shows he s had over a decade of time invested and been a key trump organization business person in its dealings in moss row and moscow and clearly trump and his son would have been on the russian s radar screen even if they didn t expect him to run for president as few of us did. that would be standard operating procedure according to those i have spoken with for monitoring for surveillance, for having something on you. that was my experience as a correspondent there as well. they just want to have something on you. that happened by the way to my husband peter baker and i as soon as which arrived in moscow. there were you know outreaches from sort of shady people who we took to be connected with, you know, government organizations. that was every correspondent we knew experienced that. american business men experienced that. that would not be at all surprisi surprising. all right, susan glasser, we appreciate it. ken dilanian, thank you as well. the legal questions surrounding donald trump jr., did he actually break any laws and will his defense hold up in federal court? one of the special prosecutors during watergate joins me next. 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[vo] progress is seizing the moment. your summer moment awaits you, now that the summer of audi sales event is here. audi will cover your first month s lease payment on select models during the summer of audi sales event. i am totally blind. and non-24 can throw my days and nights out of sync, keeping me from the things i love to do. talk to your doctor, and call 844-214-2424. only tylenol® rapid release gels have laser drilled holes. they release medicine fast, for fast pain relief. tylenol® during the watergate scandal and former general counsel to the united states army. do you see a crime yet based on what you ve seen in the last 24 hours or so? i certainly see more than smoke now. you have a very clear violation of the election laws, which say you cannot take anything of value, which would include any kind of information that would be helpful to your campaign. you cannot take anything of value from a foreign national, let alone a foreign government. and i don t have any question in my mind that she was a foreign agent of a foreign government. but even if she wasn t, she clearly was a foreign national, and the meeting should have never taken place. i think it did send a message to russia that the trump campaign was willing and amenable to further meetings. well, here is the response from donald trump jr. it s a pretty easy one. he says nothing was exchanged, so there was no violation of any campaign law. he said he was set up for an adoption meeting by a guy he trusted or knew a little bit and he said it turned out to be kind of a bait and switch. it wasn t exactly what he thought it was going to be. he didn t walk out of there with any information. he called it a nothing meeting. so do you still see a criminal connection? i do. first of all, we don t know what information he got. right. we only have his version of it. and remember, you read the e-mail and it s a very clear request for a meeting about negative information from the russian government as part of their effort to help the trump campaign and to hurt the clinton campaign. that cannot be any clearer. and donald junior answered, i love it, especially if it s later in the summer. and that little phrase is being ignored. but remember, he met on june 9th with this russian lawyer, identified to him as a russian government lawyer. and on july 25th, on the eve of the democratic convention when the information was weapon niezed to do the maximum damage, that s when it was released, and that s exactly what donald trump jr. wanted and probably donald trump sr was to do the most damage with the information that russia had to hurt the democrats. and it did cause chaos. jill, we ve been so focused on donald trump jr. jared kushner was in that room as well. even if it was for 7 or 8 minutes. he breezed in and breezed out. and he was on the e-mails that had that subject line that said it was about russia and hillary. what kind of liability does jared kushner face right now? it makes it really hard to believe that he accidentally omitted that meeting, as well as the soeothers from his disclosu forms. so it makes me wonder why he still has security clearance until that s cleared up. that requires that he be totally honest on his disclosure forms. that is a criminal offense to violate by not disclosing it. saying you don t know or don t remember is not a defense, and it s hard to believe he didn t remember a meeting of that magnitude. all right. jill wine banks, former prosecutor in the watergate times. we always appreciate you. thanks very much. jen, let me go to you just for your thoughts and take a step back on this. donald trump, it s always been said that he was sort of one step away from this and maybe it was manafort or other people who were dealing with the russians if they were, in fact. but the minute he stepped in to help draft the other day on air force one on the way home from europe this explanation that turned out to be not true that meeting, things changed a little bit. it was a reckless thing to do and that became public. and mueller can now know that he was free to ask trump about that. think about that. and trump is basically under oath when he s talking to mueller. so that really opens him up there. and i just think when we learn more about this report, trump is going to be all over this. junior said that information would be helpful later. and then during our convention trump says russia, if sewer listening, go ahead and release those 33,000 e-mails of hill larry. i don t think that was a joke. i think that was a direction. and sink trump is if he is managing what junior s response to the new york times is, he is all over this. he s in every decision. skpl i just think that so when this all comes out, republicans are going to be in a very tough situation because they re going to have the president have a lot of facts showing his true involvement in this and have to decide what they re going to do about it. the echo i hear historically 30 years ago is iran-contra, but the difference is reagan could fire much of his staff to create some distance. the problem with having your family is you can t fire your son and you usually can t fire your son-in-law. so, gene, who right now sitting in the west wing of the white house or programs don junior in the outside of the white house should feel most nervous about what s happened in the last day. well, don junior, of course, but jared kushner, i think. he was the sort of cyber czar of the campaign. he is an official white house advisor. so he is has been right there next to the candidate all along and he was in that meeting. we were told he was in that meeting briefly, but he s the one who has had to amend his disclosure forms time and again. i think he would be feeling nervous right now. and another thing i think they re going to be watching, russian sort of fake news, very targeted messages that went out right before the election. wisconsin, michigan, in the places that were just sort of tipping toward donald trump, down to the precinct level these
something isn t to happen. that s all true about this white house but none of that apparently applies when it comes to trump talking to russia. in that case, notification comes from moscow. the last time trump talked to putin, which well, at least as far as i know, was november 21st. the first notification there was of that in the english language that trump would be speaking to putin that day, first english language notification is when reuters translated a notice from a russian based news agency that reported trump and putin would be speaking that day and it was the first any of us in this country heard of it. two weeks before that the big asia trip where the people of united states of america learned the president would be meeting on the sidelines of the asian summit with vladamir putin, and we learned that from a kremlin staffer and american reporters took that information and asked and before that the oval office meeting with president trump and russian foreign minister and russian ambassador and not only informed us in our country that event took place and russian and and he got our record of those meetings. american media was banned from that event, while a russian state media photographer was invited into the oval office to snap happy pictures, and then distribute them. so that s how we got our record of those meetings. and then again today. we got a nice readout from vladimir putin about a conversation that took place between donald trump and vladamir putin. thereafter, the white house confirmed that, oh, yeah, that happened. why does this keep happening? why do we consistently have to get news about the behavior and the meetings and the conversations of the american president from the russian government? it is very strange. and while we re on the subject, we also got late word tonight from a new report in the washington post that right after trump announced he was running for president, he announced in june 2015 this happened in july 2015, there was yet another instance when he was offered a one on one meeting with vladimir putin, according to the washington post tonight, the same russia connected publicist who later set up the trump tower meeting where he promised russian government dirt on hillary clinton to the top levels of the trump campaign, a year before the meeting happened, he made a direct offer via e-mail to donald trump s assistant at trump tower telling her that he would be happy to set up a putin meeting for this new presidential candidate donald trump. trump s assistant is a woman named rona graft, i have spoken with her in the process of trying to set up trump interviews. she s very, very nice. she s very efficient. we had known that graph is on the witness list for the house intelligence committee looking into the russia scandal. the wall street journal reported tonight that for the house intelligence committee interview with her, trump s assistant and also and house intelligence interview with felix sater, a russian born and part of the trump organization, who worked on the secret trump tower moscow project during the trump campaign. republicans for some reason decided that for those who interviews for graph and satyr, they would not do them on capitol hill and decided to send their staffers to new york city to do those interviews in the setting that would be more convenient for ms. graft and apparently also for mr. satyr. having staff conduct the interviews in new york, while actual members of congress are stuck back in washington for votes, i m sure that is very convenient for those witnesses, but it has the knock-on effect of preventing any members of congress, including democrats, from sitting in on any of that questioning. democrats on the intelligence committee are reportedly not that happy about it. and you ve got to imagine donald trump, jr. being like, wait a second, i run the trump organization. my dad s assistant gets them to come here and i have to go down i can imagine it s awkward. a lot going on tonight. one thing we have to keep track of on the show, who works at the white house? this administration is 328 days old. in that time there has been an unusually large number of people who have turned over, who have served in the trump white house for sometime, some of them in very senior roles but got fired or chose to leave for some reason or another and i m sure that we have missed some but just in terms of high profile jobs, we try to keep a running tally of notable officials that fled or been fired from the trump white house. the vice president s chief of staff for example has left as has the white house chief of staff, as has the deputy white house chief of staff, as has the first white house communications director and second and the white house press secretary and vice president s press secretary and the deputy national security advisor, the deputy chief of staff on the security counsel and head of the office of government ethics, the white house chief strategists and we found out the deputy assistant to the president that goes on fox news all the time, and we found out he couldn t get a security clearance, he left, too. and also, the secretary of health and human services, he left. that s not even counting the high-profile law enforcement people that have been flung out like acting attorney general sally yates. and the fbi director james comey and the dozens of u.s. attorneys they fired on no notice, get out by midnight tonight. it s a long list of people that served in significant roles who are already gone. well, this week we got two more names to add to the list. one of whom got a lot of media attention for her departure. her name is omarosa manigault newman. she was the communications director for the office of public liaison, which reminds me the director of the office of public liaison, that s another person that left. can we add that guy to the list, too? thank you. mrs. manigault newman was the communications director for the office of public liaison, which is not a high-profile office, let alone is that a high profile job in that office. the beef with her among white house reporters is that nobody was quite sure what she did at all but she is personally a high-profile person because of her reality show career. her departure this week attracted a lot of attention but there s been one other departure from the white house this week that s attracted very little attention. but it s for somebody with a much bigger job. her name is dina powell. before her appointment to the white house, she was working at goldman sachs. gary cohen was previously the president of goldman sachs, so when she came on board, it was thought that maybe she would be in gary cohen s orbit. she was named the deputy seek security advisor for strategy demand that role, a lot of normal republicans or even like never-trump republicans, they put faith in her thinking she might be a potentially moderating influence in the administration more broadly but in the national security council specifically. and the national security counsel and policy making in this administration is of particular concern. remember the national security counsel initially was set up by mike flynn and we all know how well that worked out. and remember, after flynn got appointed, after flynn being appointed national security advisor, the next shutter of fear that went through national security circles is when trump campaign ceo and white house the trump campaign ceo arranged to get himself a seat on the national security counsel, as well. remember that? people are like really, steve bannon has a permanent seat on the national security counsel? this is a guy that run as right wing website and makes movies how the duck dynasty guy looks like jesus. really? permanent seat on the national security counsel alongside michael flynn running it? i mean, i don t mean to pick on mr. bannon. i know he has had a bad week. alabama was as much his humiliation as the president s. remember, the whole point of bannon stoking the roy moore candidacy was to flex his steve bannon muscles and prepare for a global domination plan to run against every sitting republican senator like he did with roy moore. well, given how that worked out, the only people that may want to pay steve bannon to enact that plan now are probably democrats. steve bannon is having a bad week. everybody thought he might be this fierce spector in trump era politics in some continuing way. but, you know, if you think before this disastrous failure he had in alabama this week, the last big round of attention he got was when he was fired from the white house. before that, it was the time he was fired not from the white house but security counsel. they demoted him from the national security counsel then fired him from the white house. flynn and bannon were a weird idea for the national security council. both of them. flynn ended up resigning in the russia scandal for things that resulted in him pleading guilty and now he s looking at a potential prison sentence. bannon left not that long after but those guys had really set up the national security counsel in the first place and once they were gone, it raised the question of what would happen to the people they installed, forgive me, not kind. what would happen to the odd balls that they had installed? what would happen to the free thinkers they had installed at very senior levels of the national security counsel, which is a very important thing. in particular, when it came to dena powell, there was speculation on the national security counsel she might replace this guy. dena powell s title was deputy national security advisor for strategy. his title wasd deputy assistant to the president for strategic planning. that would be like if i came to work every day and i was the host of the rachel maddow show, but there was somebody else on staff who was the host of rachel maddow show. basically we have the same show. i expect there would be a fight to death and only one of us would keep the job in the long run. dena powell was expected to replace this man kevin harrington, one of the original let s call them free thinkers installed in a very important national security position back when steve bannon and mike flynn were in charge of that sort of thing. he came to this very senior job at the national security counsel with zero experience in foreign policy. zero. now he s supposed to be directing strategy for national security for the united states of america? never worked in foreign policy a day in his life, however, he had worked at one of peter teal s hedge funds. peter teal, the anti democracy german born billionaire who made his money at paypal, who bankrupted the gawker website for printing things about him he did not like. his work experience for running strategy at the national security counsel is he worked at a peter teal hedge fund and before that worked at a different peter teal hedge fund. well, this week we learned that not only did dena powell not end up replacing him, she is now leaving the administration, and he is still at the national security counsel. and we know that in part because the washington post reports today in the remarkable epic 50-source story that he, kevin harrington is one of the prorussia officials remaining in the white house who actually supports president trump s compulsive submistiveness toward russia and putin in particular. for kevin harrington, though, his motivation for his pro russia positions is reportedly a little it s free thinking. is that the word we re using? somebody that believes the end is near and only putin can save us. and this is like point 34 that we learn today out of 100 pieces of information the washington broke with this big story. according to the post and this remarkable story, there is an important national security story to tell about the consequences of trump refusing to admit to or grapple with in any meaningful way the fact that russia interfered meaningful in the election that made him president. according to the post s reporting, these are just some of the other important pieces of news they break today. according to the post, the president s daily intelligence brief is structured by the briefers to avoid upsetting him with any information he might not like to hear about russia. and i have to say this is a piece of reporting that raises troubling concerns whether or not the president actually reads, whether he reads intelligence briefings. quote, a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter says russia related intelligence that might draw trump s ire is in some cases included in the written assessment and not raised orally because then you can be sure he won t see it because it s written? the post also in this new piece today describes an extraordinary, what they call extraordinary cia intelligence that captured putin s specific instructions to attack the election. the stream of post election intelligence about putin apparently has given the intelligence community information that putin believes the operation to go after the election last year was quote more than worth the effort. that would suggest russia will keep trying to do more of it but the post reports that trump has never convened a cabinet level meeting on russian interference or what to do about it. in terms of the national security counsel, one official said there is an unspoken understanding within the nsc that to raise the matter of russia is to acknowledge its validity, which the president would see as an affront. after the new national security adviser, h.r. mcmaster brought in an expert, trump demeaned and insulted her in a way hard to believe for what we know about this president and his white house quote in one of her first encounters with the president, an oval office meeting in preparation for a call with putin on syria, trump appeared to mistake fiona hill for a member of the clerical staff. handing her a memo and instructing her to rewrite it. when hill responded with a perplexed look, trump became intimidated for not listening and mcmaster followed her. she s the russian expert on the national security counsel a legit russian expert who was brought into the national security counsel post the flynn and bannon debacle. just remarkable. we ve got greg miller here to talk about remarkable reporting including the damming and brand-new revelation even though they got caught planning to unilaterally lift sanctions and congress got alerted to that fact and blocked them from doing it, even after those efforts were exposed by congress and press and became a subject of great scandal in washington, after that, the administration and secretary of state rex tillerson continued to offer the russians in secret that the trump administration would help them out on sanctions. that they were happy to give them back some of what obama had taken away in punishment for them hacking the election. remarkable, remarkable reporting from the washington post. greg miller joins us next. give ancestrydna, the only dna test that can trace your origins to over 150 ethnic regions- and open up a world of possibilities. save 30% for the holidays at ancestrydna.com turn up your swagger game with one a day men s. a complete multivitamin with key nutrients plus b vitamins for heart health. your one a day is showing. that is true and i can bear eyewitness testimony. [ laughter ] bathroom diplomacy and thanks to extraordinary fly on the wall, fly on the wall, reporting from the washington post we know lbj is not the only american president known to mix business with bathroom. this is a section from today s reporting that s about the president s negativity toward nato and our nato allies particularly german chancellor angela merkel. quote, his demeanor with the german leader was in striking contrast with the encounters with putin and authoritarian figures. who were the three guys in the world he most admires? president xi of china, the president of turkey, and putin, said one trump adviser. they re all the same guy. merkel has never fit into that trump pantheon. before her arrival, senior white house aids witnessed an odd scene that some saw for the visit. russia news is not put in the oral briefing, only the written brief or buried so it won t upset him. are the briefers concerned about this? intelligence agencies concerned about this in terms of the president not having access to this information? i mean, so the answer is sort of yes and no, i guess. the intelligence officials we talked to emphasize they are not holding important developments out of the briefing. they are professionals. the daily brief is written by career expert staff. they aren t going to do that. this is their job and mission and a sworn duty one official told us but the way it s structured undergoes they think that through to avoid upsetting trump, to avoid getting the briefing off as you just read as one of the people voted off the rails by raising something that s going to upset him directly. they do this in a couple ways. one is to put sensitive stuff in print so that they can say yes, we delivered this to the white house and not withholding but not calling it out orally in his presence but adjusting the order or adjusting areas of emphasis and rachel, this is not the only example in our story today of how senior aides or senior advisors tiptoe around and our story talks about what one advisor calls the five and a half foot rule on really sensitive stuff likely to upset him where you have a consensus among lower aides to avoid carrying those decisions into the oval office out of fear you ll get an interruption from him or an overrule of something that others already agree is sensible policy. greg, let me ask you about another type of sensitivity in terms of the president and russia information. back in june, i think you were one of the reporters in the washington post story about an intelligence bombshell that was delivered to then president obama that included sourcing deep inside the russian government that detailed vladamir putin s direct involvement in the campaign to disrupt and discredit the u.s. presidential race, and that intel included putin s specific instructions. the overarching theme of your story is about the president being unwilling to engage with this information that russia interfered in the election. do we know if president trump seen that bombshell intelligence reporting detailing specific orders from putin? absolutely. that s one of the things we reported today is is that when the senior intelligence officials travel to new york after trump won the election but before he was inaugurated on january 6th this year, they laid out for him all of the most highly classified components of that intelligence case. this was one of the most critical pieces of evidence that they put on the table for the president. and as we wrote, these officials included former director of national intelligence jim clapper were worried that they were going to be thrown out of the room. they were prepared for a blowup and that ends up being a very subdued meeting and trump seems to go along with this and seems oddy acquiescent on this. they regard this as progress. he s coming around to accept this but as they over a period of several days continue to try to lock that in with him, he gets very agitated, starts railing how the intelligence can t be trusted and for him to admit this would be to fall into a trap and there forward, they never recover what they felt they had in that moment. that acceptance of the case. can i ask you just one follow up question on that particular point about that very sensitive intel, obviously, there is a lot of drama around the idea the cia has information that reflects putin s words and instructions in terms of ordering this campaign or discussing this campaign. is there any concern among the intelligence community that discussing sources and methods like that about somebody close enough to putin to get that information that there might be a concern in a security concern for that source in giving that information to the president, given his relationship with putin? you know, that s a really difficult question. we ve asked intelligence officials about that. i heard officials say they do have those concerns and there is that hesitation but that the president is the president and it s not and their job is to inform the president, the elected president. that is their duty. very difficult stuff. compelling, compelling reporting. these are difficult issues. the heart in your throat stuff. greg miller, again, congratulations on this piece today. thanks for being here. thank you very much. a lot more to get to. busy night. stay with us. shostakovich playing from our family to yours. may all your wishes come true this holiday season. aleve direct therapy. the only remote controlled tens device that s drug free, wire free for deep penetrating lower back pain relief. get aleve direct therapy with $10 back and extra bucks rewards at cvs pharmacy. 3 toddlers won t stop him.. and neither will lower back pain. because at a dr. scholl s kiosk he got a recommendation for our custom fit orthotic to relieve his foot, knee, or lower back pain, from being on his feet. dr. scholl s. born to move. why did you take credit card debt on? second kid. private school. medical bills. moving costs. solid ground. a personal loan from sofi is a smart way to consolidate credit card debt. certain borrowers cut their credit card interest rates 42% and increased credit scores 17 points on average. borrow up to $100,000 with low rates and no hidden fees. find your rate in just two minutes, and take on your debt at sofi.com. chart imitates life. this is what we call the horse shoe graph. republicans control the house with 239 seats shown in red. democrats have 193 seats shown here in blue. there are three vacancies, those are little gray ones down front. of the 239 red seats in the house right now, a chunk of the red squares are republicans that are nervous about last year s elections because a chunk of the red squares represent districts where hillary clinton beat trump. they picked the democrat for president that happened in 23 districts across the country and is that must have been exciting on election night. if you re one of the growing red squares thinking about election, that has to be worrying. anyone can concede in the 23 districts, the political wins are blowing in the democrat s direction for next year. those are places that supported hillary clinton. republicans are worried about those seats. but here is the chart part. come election time, if the wins continue to blow in democrats direction the way they are right now, those 23 will not be the only vulnerable seats that are keeping republicans up at night. since the 2016 election, there have been 68 contested special elections across the country for seats in state legislatures, in there has been a few u.s. house races and the senate race in alabama and watching the races play out is fascinating on the individual level but also fascinating in terms of the trend they represent. turns out it s not just alabama. if you look at the presidential results, a lot of races all across the country show democrats making really big gains. if you look at the results in the special elections since november, on average, democrats have improved margins by ten points. so compared to november, if that ten-point swing means if they won by two points in november, they re winning by 12 now. if they lost by 15, they are within five points on average. put the chart back up there. come election time in 2018 when every single one of these squares is up for reelection because the house is up every two years. if the winds keep blowing the democrat s direction the way they are now, democrats would grab not just the 23 red sheets where voters went for hillary clinton. a ten-point swing would have democrats flipping another 39 seats, as well. if you apply the average ten-point swing democrats have been enjoying in special elections since november, if that momentum still applies to races next year, that swing will have nancy pelosi measuring the drapes in paul ryan s office. a ten-point swing would cut republicans in washington off at the knees. so if you are a republican in congress right now, what these special elections are doing to you, they are giving you a horseshoe size lump in your stomach now. if republicans lose the house next year, it would be a huge deal for their party. but we might not have to wait for 2018 for a preview for that. hold that thought. it feels good to be back. i am totally blind. and non-24 can make me show up too early. or too late. or make me feel like i m not really there. talk to your doctor, and call 844-234-2424. going somewhere? whoooo. here s some advice. tripadvisor now searches more. .than 200 booking sites - to find the hotel you want and save you up to 30%. trust this bird s words. tripadvisor. in a very conservative corner of iowa. if you re chuck grassley, that counts as a change in the weather. the day after those elections, chuck grassley announced that he would no longer support two of president trump s most controversial nominees for judgeships. after that announcement from grassley, those nominees got pulled by the white house. then a similar dynamic played out last night with another trump nominee. this time at the epa. the president s nominee to lead chemical safety at the epa spent his career fighting against chemical safety rules on behalf of companies bound by them. he s gone now, too. he withdrew last night after two republican senators came forward, something changed their minds. they decided they were no longer going to support him. outright rejection of the president s nominees of the president s own party is a new thing in the trump era. turns out alabama senate elections have consequences. if you re a lawmaker and the president can make or break you by offering or with holding support that might factor into your decisions for supporting some of his embarrassing nominees. but now that they keep getting solidly rejected at the ballot box by the voters in red states, maybe the president s opinion doesn t matter to you as much. tonight, republicans are racing toward a vote on the big tax bill that the president is very much behind in theory they should be able to get this thing passed with just their own votes. tonight, that s looking wobbly. senator marco rubio announced he ll oppose the republican tax bill unless it s expanded unless it expands a child tax credit and followed by utah senator mike lee who is undecided on the bill, too. senator bob corker voted against the bill the last time. a no from rubio and lee would be it. it would be done. whether rubio and lee are ready to torpedo the bill remains unclear. it doesn t seem like they are the only republican senators ready to balk. could this week s republican disaster in alabama lead to furtherer bleeding among republicans on capitol hill for a very, very unpopular piece of legislation that the president nevertheless wants? hold that thought. remember how the economic crash was supposed to be a wake up call for our government? people all across the country lost their savings, their pensions and their jobs. i m tom steyer and it turned out that the system that had benefited people like me who are well off, was, in fact, stacked against everyone else. it s why i left my investment firm and resolved to use my savings for the public good. but here we are nine years later and this president and the republican congress are making a bad situation even worse. they won t tell you that their so called tax reform plan is really for the wealthy and big corporations, while hurting the middle class. it blows up the deficit and that means fewer investments in education, health care and job creation. it s up to all of us to stand up to this president. not just for impeachable offenses, but also to demand a country where everyone has a real chance to succeed. join us. your voice matters. anyone ever have occasional y! constipation,diarrhea, gas or bloating? she does. she does. help defend against those digestive issues. take phillips colon health probiotic caps daily with three types of good bacteria. 400 likes? wow! try phillips colon health. republican tax bill, either out at your representative s office in the district or capitol hill, today brought news that the republicans may have lost the votes among their own senators to get this thing passed. senator marco rubio and senator mike lee both republicans said they will be no votes on the tax bill unless it s changed in ways they like. is this thing potentially really at risk? joining us now is reporter siobhan hughes. she s within covering this on the hill. i appreciate your time. happy to be here. i m trying to do the republican math here. we have questions of rubio and lee. three others as far as i know, corker, collins and flake haven t committed to supporting it and then cochran and mccain with health issues and seems like a lot of wiggle room in terms of whether the republicans will have the votes. do you think they have the votes? the most likely scenario is that republicans pass the bill but today what we saw is that it is no longer impossible for this bill to be sunk. the math you described is a problem for republicans because they can lose no more than two votes and still pass this bill. you have listed far more than two republicans who can potentially be against this bill. in terms of the timing here, one of the things that i think has frustrated people who are against the bill or worry about the implications is they re going fast with it, a huge change to the tax code. they didn t spend time debating it and there s no external constraint that forces them to pass it so quickly. is it possible that they re going to have to spend more time either waiting for a score on this or horse trading on this that it might push it into the new year where the math would change against them after doug jones is sworn in? it s highly unlikely, but again, you can t say. so far, the senate we expected to vote on monday no longer has that on the schedule. vice president mike pence delayed a trip to the middle east to be here to cast a tiebreaking vote. there is the delicate issue of the health of senators john mccain and thad cochran. they re wild cards, x-factors and then the question of how you come up with the money for the extent of the changes senators lee and rubio want. that s $80 billion, not easy to find. they $80 billion change and the whole thing scored to add trillion and a half dollars to the deficit anyway. are they constrained fiscally they can t add more to the debt without changing something else fundamental about the bill or couldn t they just put that on the tab? no. you are right. they re constraint is 1.5 trillion and held themselves to that and now stuck with that number so they have to take something away from somebody else and you can imagine it ruffles feathers and don t know where they ll get the money to appease people. we ve been watching protesters and constituents making heartfelt, very compelling to my mind at least personal cases to senators like lisa murkowski in alaska, susan collins in maine, a lot of senators who might conceivably be on the bubble about this with personal pressure. is there a sign they re being moved by those kinds of appeals by constituents? so far there isn t a sign there would be a move, because these republicans are dedicated to the notion that on balance what they are doing is going to be better for people. one little wrinkle today is rod blum a member of the freedom caucus, an iowa republican, put out a tweet saying he was listening to his constituents and trying to make recommendations about what should be in the tax bill. seats are like that are looking at risk. mimi walters of california has had jitters and there s some of that but maybe not enough in the senate to change minds. siobhan hughes, thank you. appreciate it. thank you. all right. we ll be right back. lower back pain has met its match that s drug free, wire free for deep penetrating lower back pain relief. get aleve direct therapy with $10 back and extra bucks rewards at cvs pharmacy. that vote today was strange for a couple of reasons. one is that it directly overturned a decision that same commission made under three years ago. the fcc reversed itself on a huge, huge issue with implications for every internet user which is almost every american. and huge implications for every telecom company in the united states. reversed itself in a span of less than 36 months. the other reason this decision today was weird is because what they did today is wildly unpopular. like, toenail fungus unpopular. i should mention here that msnbc s parent company comcast is one of the nation s largest internet service providers and when we re talking about human beings, there are no human beings in favor of what the fcc did today. corporations are standing to profit for it, sure. actual humans, very few. the fcc made the decision despite the massive unpopularity and despite the fact that yesterday 19 states attorneys general asked them not to do it