plus, why is facebook reportedly asking banks for your financial information? good morning. welcome to early start. i m phil mattingly in for dave briggs. i m christine romans. it is tuesday, august7th. 4:00 a.m. in the east. let s start with paul manafort s right hand man rick gates. back on the witness stand in the one-time trump campaign chairman trial on tax and fraud charges. the stakes are high for the white house. manafort and his deputy know a great deal of what went on behind closed doors during key months of the 2016 campaign. yesterday, gates admitted under a grant of immunity he committed crimes alongside his former boss and against him as well. cnn has more from the federal court in alexandra, virginia. reporter: rick gates took the stand in the showdown we have been waiting for as gates Get a jump on the day s news with Christine Romans and Dave Briggs. every time he weighs in. it complicates the previous explanations for it. we are hearing from the president s aides that in the next coming days, the president s legal team will have an answer or response to robert mueller s team. will he sit for the interview and what conditions will he sit for an interview? they hope to have that accomplished by the end of the working vacation. he will meet with the ceos on tuesday night tonight for dinner at his bedminster golf club doing fund-raisers. so far, nothing else on the schedule. it is clear the working vacation still has russia hanging over it. christine and phil. jeff, thank you. a few hours ago, shortly after midnight, u.s. sanctions against iran went back into effect by order of president trump. renewed sanctions targeting gold, steel, aluminum and currency had been ususpended as part of the iran nuclear deal. some have pledged to keep up trade and cooperation with iran. so, is america actually going alone? we have senior international correspondent nick paton walsh live from london. reporter: because of the size of the global economy and reach, the u.s. will try to put sanctions back in. that does have a more far reaching impact and does impact european allies who signed on the nuclear deal. this is all with the decision to pull out of the nuclear pact by president trump. we had a strange moment as the sanction as peer s appear to co in. hassan rouhani has said that he could talk right now with donald trump were that offered. there is a caveat here. he would like sanctions lifted first. he said you cannot talk to somebody who has a knife stuck in your arm or back. there are many who don t want them to sit down soon. you may see internal problems. the local currency is collapsing quite quickly over the past year. you may see iran s government looking for an opportunity. they may see how negotiations with north korea and russia have ended up, perhaps a little less than what was agreed. vladimir putin and kim jong-un respectively and maybe they are trying to buy some time if they were to get in the same room. i think that idea is far fetched idea right now because both camps have ideas of what the two countries should be doing in terms of each other. we slowly see the economic pressure ratcheted up with eira. iran is calling it psychological warfare. it makes the people feel the government is not looking out for them. the american dream of putting a more moderate government in play in iran is far fetched. nick, internal and external implications. really across the globe. fascinating to watch. nick paton walsh, thank you. firefighters struggling to contain the 16 major wildfires devastating the state. one exploded and nearly doubling in size. mendocino complex fire is the largest in state history. flaming scorched 248,000 acres. the fire is actually two wildfires burning around clear lake across several northern california counties. as of last night, the fire was 30% contained. more than 100 residences have been destroyed. eight minutes past the hour. facebook wants your financial information. facebook asked several large u.s. banks for detailed financial information about their customers. think account balances and credit card activity. facebook wants to offer services on the app. it is not actively seeking data, but declined to comment if it has been talking to banks. it wants to keep users on the platform longer. the issue is privacy. facebook is facing criticism over handling data after exposing user information without content. none of the banks would confirm they were if talks with facebook. stressed the importance of privacy for customers. still, wall street liked that facebook is expanding to new services. stock rose 4% as people on facebook were screaming about this. if the streets are happy, the board room is happy. what would make somebody concerned when it comes to facebook? still to come, a frightening sight from behind the wheel. more on this deadly explosion caught on video. just ahead. plus the special election in ohio and what that could tell us about the november midterms. when i received the diagnoses, i knew at that exact moment . i m beating this. my main focus was to find a team of doctors. it s not just picking a surgeon, it s picking the care team and feeling secure in where you are. visit cancercenter.com/breast know about cognitive performance? as you d probably guess, a lot. that s why a new brain health supplement called forebrain from the harvard-educated experts at force factor is flying off the shelves at gnc. forebrain s key ingredients have been clinically shown to help enhance sharpness and clarity, improve memory, and promote learning ability. and now every man and woman in america can claim a complimentary bottle. just use your smartphone to text the keyword on the screen to 20-20-20. scientific research on cognigrape, a sicilian red wine extract in forebrain s memorysafe blend, suggests not only sharper recall, but also improved executive function and faster information processing. your opportunity to get into harvard may be gone, but it s not too late to experience a brain boost formulated by some of their brightest minds. just text the keyword on the screen to 20-20-20 with your smartphone to claim your complimentary bottle of forebrain. do it now - before you forget. that s the keyword on the screen to 20-20-20. against troy balderson. we get all of the latest from jason carroll in delaware, ohio. reporter: christine and phil, it is down to ohio. troy balderson should be writing his victory speech, but he is fighting for every vote he can get in the district against his opponent, danny o connor. the race is too close to call. that is a surprise for republicans here because this is a seat that republicans have held solidly for decades. not this go around. what happens in this race could very well pivot on independents. we spoke to some independents out here in the district and they tell us who they end up voting for very much may pivot on how the president and how they feel the president has been doing while in office. i believe that a man s character is very important and i don t believe our president currently has my best interests at heart and i watched some of the things that have happened in the past few months and it s a little scary. you are defining decision wasn t about candidates, but the president? more about getting democratic back intoes office and really for the people into office and really for the people. i m like millions of americans it is not if you like the candidate of choice, but who you dislike less. i think during the presidential election, i believe that is how trump ended up in office. i don t think the world thought he was the perfect candidate nor has he proven to be, but this race with balderson is the same way. reporter: trump was here over the weekend to rally the base and try to shore up support for balderson. it should be noticed that president trump carried this s district by 11 points two years ago. right now as voters head to the polls this morning, the race is too close to call. christine, phil. jason in ohio. thank you. info wars and alex jones removed from youtube, apple and facebook. the site violated the content policies. the move shutdown channels that gave jones access to millions of internet users. youtube removed his main channel which had 2.4 million s subscribe subscribers. the site is notorious for false conspiracy theories. it claimed the sandy hook massacre was a hoax and called 9/11 an orchestrated job created by the government. and three people killed by a blast in italy. the man caught this on his video during his commute. the gas tanker hit another truck. three people were killed and 60 to 70 people injured with serious burns. the cause of the accident is under investigation. the pentagon is banning deployed military personnel from using electronic devices with geo locations. they include apps that could disclose the users location. a possible security breach. the new policy comes after it was revealed in january that a fitness tracking app that maps exercise routines may have revealed the locations of security forces around the world. defense officials say the devices will not be banned. service members will be responsible for ensuring the geo locations features are disabled. a day at the zoo turned dangerous. more on the sudden destructive weather coming up. plus, remember when tv host told lebron james to shut up and dribble? we will tell you how the nba superstar has turned those words around. ahh. summer is coming. and it s time to get outside. pack in even more adventure with audible. with the largest selection of audiobooks. audible lets you follow plot twists off the beaten track. or discover magic when you hit the open road. with the free audible app, your stories go wherever you do. and for just $14.95 a month you get a credit, good for any audiobook. if you don t like it exchange it any time. no questions asked. you can also roll your credits to the next month if you don t use them. so take audible with you this summer. on the road. on the trail. or to the beach. start a 30-day trial and your first audiobook is free. cancel anytime, and your books are yours to keep forever. no matter where you go this summer make it better with audible. text summer5 to 500500 to start listening today. the answer is simple. i ll do what i ve always done. dream more, dream faster, and above all. now, i ll dream gig. now more businesses, in more places, can afford to dream gig. comcast, building america s largest gig-speed network. with weelcome back. a powerful hail storm wreaked havoc at the colorado zoo. two animals killed and 14 people were injured as chunked of hail, some as big as softballs, rained down monday at the zoo in colorado springs. it send bears running for cover in their enclosures. five of the people injured were taken to the hospital for treatments. officials say that zoo will be closed today while they assess the damage. what about us what about us pink is hospitalized in australia. this is the second time in as many days she was admitted to the hospital. she was first treated for dehydration and released on sunday. readmitted the next morning for a virus. it forced pink to cancel concerts. the ceo of nascar taking a leave of absence. brian france arrested in new york for running a stop sign sunday night and in possession of oxycodone. he apologized for his actions. his uncle, jim france, takes over. and showtime is partnering with lebron james for shut up and dribble. you may recognize that phrase. it examines the changing role of athletes in the culture and political environment through the lens of the nba. it is set to premiere in october. the series got the same from this comment from fox news host laura ingraham on her show in february. lebron and kevin, you are great players, but no one voted for you. millions elected trump to be their coach. keep the political commentary to yourself or as someone once said shut up and dribble. he publicly voiced support for the warriors and the decision not to visit the white house. serena williams sharing her struggles. she has been battling postpartum depression and not doing enough for her baby. the grand slam winner returned to the circuit five months ago after giving birth . in the message, she described being in a funk after suffering from a lopsided loss. good for her for being public about it. a lot of women don t like to talk about that. the more women who do, the better for everybody. a very real thing. with his former boss looking on, the prosecution star witness tells all the. and don junior s bait and switch claims of the famous trump tower meeting. more early start after this. rick gates says he broke the law for paul manafort and also stole money from him. we are going to put all of the sanctions back in as they were before and more. economic sanctions on iran now back in effect as of midnight. will the pressure on tehran force a further split? two fast moving fires merging into one inferno becoming the largest ever wildfire in california history. why does the largest an aluminum maker want an exemption from its business? paul manafort s right hand man rick gates. back on the witness stand in the one-time trump campaign chairman trial on tax and fraud charges. the stakes are high for the white house. manafort and his deputy know a great deal of what went on behind closed doors during key months of the 2016 campaign. yesterday, gates admitted under a grant of immunity he committed crimes alongside his former boss and against him as well. cnn has more from the federal court in alexandra, virginia. reporter: rick gates took the stand in the showdown we have been waiting for as gates testified for 45 minutes. during that time, manafort stared him down sitting seats away from him. he averted manafort s gaze. he was asked by prosecutors if he committed crimes. gates said he had. he explained he helped manafort file false tax returns and fed 15 overseas accounts used as part of the alleged crime. gates offered a twist. saying he defrauded manafort, his mentor and long-time boss. he had stolen several hundred thousands dollars from him by inflating his expense accounts. gates testimony is expected today. prosecutors intend to question him for another three hours. christine and phil. kara in virginia. thank you. don junior is dismissing the trump tower meeting and accusing the russian of bait and swift. switch. don junior claiming that russians wanted to give dirt on hillary clinton, but when they got there, it was about adoptions. it was a 20-minute meeting. it was nothing relevant to any of these things. that is all it is. that s all they got. that s not the premise that got them in the room. it was a bait and switch to talk about that. everyone has said that in testimony already. so this is nothing new. the president s son said all of the media scrutiny of the meeting with the russians is an attempt to divert attention away from his father s accomplishments. this week, president trump is he on what the white house calls a working vacation in new jersey. he tweeted over the weekend about the trump tower meeting and robert mueller s investigation. advisers are urging the president to cool it with the trump tower tweets. since they only give oxygen to the topic. we have jeff zeleny with more. reporter: christine and phil, president trump is continuing the working vacation in new jersey, one thing is clear he is staying out of public view, but we know one of the things on his mind. that russia investigation. we saw the tweets over the weekend when he was talking trying to explain what happened in the trump tower meeting in june of 2016. the president, of course, saying nothing was wrong. it was trying to get opposition research on hillary clinton. of course, that is not the original explanation from a year ago. we know a couple of things since that tweet over the weekend. we know as we head into the week, the president s aides and lawyers are asking him not to tweet specifically about that trump tower meeting. this is why. it is adding more complication every time he weighs in. it complicates the previous explanations for it. we are hearing from the president s aides that in the next coming days, the president s legal team will have an answer or response to robert mueller s team. will he sit for the interview and what conditions will he sit for an interview? they hope to have that accomplished by the end of the working vacation. he will meet with the ceos on tuesday night tonight for dinner at his bedminster golf club doing fund-raisers. so far, nothing else on the schedule. it is clear the working vacation still has russia hanging over it. christine and phil. jeff, thank you. a few hours ago, shortly after midnight, u.s. sanctions against iran went back into effect by order of president trump. renewed sanctions targeting gold, steel, aluminum and currency had been suspended as part of the iran nuclear deal. other nations that signed the nuclear deal remain in the agreement. some have pledged to keep up trade and cooperation with iran. so, is america actually going alone? we have senior international correspondent nick paton walsh live from london. nick, stroke of midnight. sanctions back in effect. reporter: absolutely. likely to see this morning the iranian economy take a further slip. it has been in trouble for past months if not years. pockets of protesters which brought the collapse of the local currency and dealing with the sanctions and threat of them building up to the midnight moment. you point out that the u.s. is going it alone, but sides as the big beast in the global economy. european ally who l allies wh disagree with the trump administration took years construct the size of the u.s. and european allies don t want to irritate it by doing business with iran or face u.s. sanctions. this means it is having a broader global effect. china coming in and europe is saying they will assist legitimate business continued in iran. i m not sure what they mean by legitimate. you may see that president rouhani is saying he could right now negotiate with donald trump. it seems to have a few caveats attached to it. he appears to want sanctions dropped first. he said you don t talk to somebody who has a knife in your back or arm. it appears that statement is under duress. there are american hardliners notably bolton and pompeo who think there should be 12 minutes e 12 points that iran should do before talks should happen. and washington managed to set the agenda from talks with north korea and russia and now they possibly could see an opportunity. it is move where the big sanctions on banking kick in. that will have an effect when donald trump is facing midterms. thank you, nick. firefighters struggling to contain the 16 major wildfires devastating the state. one exploded and nearly doubling in size. mendocino complex fire is the largest in state history. flaming scorched 248,000 acres. surpassing the thomas fire from last december. the fire is actually two wildfires burning around clear lake across several northern california counties. as of last night, the fire was 30% contained. more than 100 residences have been destroyed. the largest u.s. aluminum maker wants relief from the tariffs designed to help them. wanting an exemption on imported aluminum. alcoa makes aluminum for beverage cans in canada and with new plants opening in the u.s., alcoa says it is not enough to fill orders. trump administration slapped tariffs earlier this year. the goal to prop up the u.s. industry. it helps some companies and hurts those relying on foreign metals. u.s. companies pay import tariffs and many raising prices or cautioning as they get hit by high costs. it is unclear if alcoa will get an exemption. wall street journal is slamming the process. want a steel exemption? meet your new commerce overlord and they create new opportunities for cronny capitalism. the editorial board unhappy with the tariffs plan plans. regardless of your viewpoint, they have a way of getting in there. still to come, a frightening sight from behind the wheel. more on this deadly explosion caught on video just ahead. plus, what the high stakes special election in ohio could tell us about the november midterms. gimme one minute. and i ll tell you some important things to know about medicare. first, it doesn t pay for everything. say this pizza is your part b medical expenses. this much - about 80% - medicare will pay for. what s left is on you. that s where an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan, insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company comes in. this type of plan helps pay some of what medicare doesn t. these are the only plans to carry the aarp endorsement for meeting their high standards of quality and service. so call unitedhealthcare insurance company today and ask for your free decision guide. with this type of plan, you ll have the freedom to choose any doctor who accepts medicare patients. and when you travel, your plan will go with you - anywhere in the country. whew! call unitedhealthcare today and ask for your free decision guide. and it s time to get outside. pack in even more adventure with audible. with the largest selection of audiobooks. audible lets you follow plot twists off the beaten track. or discover magic when you hit the open road. with the free audible app, your stories go wherever you do. and for just $14.95 a month you get a credit, good for any audiobook. if you don t like it exchange it any time. no questions asked. you can also roll your credits to the next month if you don t use them. so take audible with you this summer. on the road. on the trail. or to the beach. start a 30-day trial and your first audiobook is free. cancel anytime, and your books are yours to keep forever. no matter where you go this summer make it better with audible. text summer5 to 500500 to start listening today. democrats and republicans glued to ohio s 12th congressional district tonight as voters head to the polls to fill a vacant house seat. the 12th district historically leans republican, but 31-year-old danny o connor is surging in the polls against troy balderson. we get more from jason carroll in delaware, ohio. reporter: christine and phil, it is down to ohio. troy balderson should be writing his victory speech, but he is fighting for every vote he can get in the district against his opponent, danny o connor. the race is too close to call. that is a surprise for republicans here because this is a seat that republicans have held solidly for decades. not this go around. what happens in this race could very well pivot on independents. we spoke to some independents out here in the district and they tell us who they end up voting for very much may pivot on how the president and how they feel the president has been doing while in office. i believe that a man s character is very important and i don t believe our president currently has my best interests at heart and i watched some of the things that have happened in the past few months and it s a little scary. you are defining decision wasn t about candidates, but the president? more about getting democratic back into office and really for the people. i m like millions of americans it is not if you like the candidate of choice, but who you dislike less. i think during the presidential election, i believe that is how trump ended up in office. i don t think the world thought he was the perfect candidate nor has he proven to be, but this race with balderson is the same way. reporter: trump was here over the weekend to rally the base and try to shore up support for balderson. it should be noticed that president trump carried this district by 11 points two years ago. right now as voters head to the polls this morning, the race is too close to call. christine, phil. thank you, jason. info wars and alex jones removed from youtube, apple and facebook. all three tech giants say the site violated the content policies. the move shutdown channels that gave jones access to millions of internet users. youtube removed his main channel which had 2.4 million subscribers. info wars did not respond to a request for comment. the site is notorious for false conspiracy theories. it claimed the sandy hook massacre was a hoax and called 9/11 an orchestrated job created by the government. among many other conspiracies. and a deadly explosion caught on video in italy. the man caught this on his video during his commute. the gas tanker hit another truck. three people were killed and 60 to 70 people injured with serious burns. the cause of the accident is under investigation. amnesty international says the u.s. number of deaths is likely much higher than first thought in raqqah. after strong denials, the early air raids killed 77 millions. they said this is only the tip of the iceberg. cnn s arwa damon has more from istanbul. arwa, what are you seeing? what are you hearing about what is actually happening on the ground? reporter: you know, it is complicated because the u.s. military historically has been reluctant to acknowledge civilian casualties and tend to do so when they received credible information that had taken place. that is what they are doing not just in raqqah, but mosul as well. when you take into consideration the bombardment and isis is known for holding hostages in their homes especially as battles were intensifies for raqqah and mosul, the numbers are certainly going to rise at this stage when you went into raqqah and the days after it was recaptured from isis, there were parts, phil, where you did not see color. that is how decimated everything was because everything was gray. people were talking about the intensity of the bombardment because there was nowhere to run. this is not just taking responsibility, but give the families the sense of justice for reparations done to them if the various societies will have a chance to recover from the atrocities they have been subjected to under isis and the horrors of the fight to liberate the various respective cities. to give you an idea, the coalition is investigating hundreds of reports of casualties. in the time frame of august of 2017 to 2018, it carried out strikes. it caused the deaths of around 1,059 civilians. there is no mechanism in place for them to look further into it. what amnesty international wants to see is a more concerted effort to give justice where justice is due. that will have long-term implications. that is right. we will see if they get that. arwa, this is an important story. thank you for your reporting. the pentagon is banning deployed military personnel from using electronic devices which have geo location like fitness apps that could disclose the location which is a security breach. the policy comes after it was revealed in january that a fitness tracking app may have revealed the location of security forces around the world. defense officials say the devices will not be banned, but service members will be responsible for ensuring that geo location features are disabled. a day at the zoo turns dangerous. more on the sudden destructive weather coming up. and remember when a tv host told lebron james to shut up and dribble? we will tell you how the nba star has turned those words around. wreaked havoc at the colorado zoo. take a look at this. two animals killed and 14 people were injured as chunked of hail, some as big as softballs, rained down monday at the zoo in colorado springs. it send bears running for cover in their enclosures. it damaged buildings and animal habitats. five of the people injured were taken to the hospital for treatment. officials say that zoo will be closed today while they assess the damage. and lebron james is partnering with showtime for a series which you may recognize. it came from the comment made by fox news host laura ingraham in february. lebron and kevin, you are great players, but no one voted for you. millions voted for trump to be their coach. keep the political commentary to yourself or someone once said shut up and dribble. she said that after james publicly expressed support for the warriors not to visit trump at the white house. time for a check on cnn money. corporate america making profits. stocks around president wor s a. wall street closed higher thanks to big earnings. berkshire hathaway rose after profits jumped 67%. the second best quarter since the recession. the season is not over. expect to hear from snap, disney and papa john s. a woman leading pepsi is leaving. she will be replaced by the global operations chief. nooyi helped turn pepsi into a large food and beverage company in the world. she is one of a handful of people of color and a woman to lead a fortune 500 company. her departure leaves 24 women. do you have a movie pass? it limits you to three movies per month. previously you could see one movie per day. moviepass is running out of money because of the low subscription price. that is less than some movie tickets. moviepass has to pay theaters to make up the difference. most customers see three movies or less per month. a perplexing business model. they are making promises they cannot keep. we are just short of 5:00 a.m. in the east. early start continues right now. stunning testimony from the star witness against president trump s former campaign
Coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. 2016. he was a very close ally of tom price, instrumental in price being chosen as hhs secretary. you know price has since left that post. collins attorneys have released an official statement saying quote, we will answer the charges filed against congress collins in court. and will mount a vigorous defense to clear his good name. it is notable that even the government does not allege that congress man collins traded a single share of innate therapeutic stock. we are confident he ll be completely vindicated and exonerated. the complaint also alleged that collins was at the white house attending the congressional picnic when he conducted some of the activity that led to the insider trading charges. this one is extraordinary for me. he s nots just being investigated. he s not just being charged. he was arrested. they knocked on his door and arrested him. a serving congressman. wow. joining me now nbc news investigations reporter tom winter live on the phone and former u.s. attorney for the district of new york. how does this go down? well, stephanie, as you said and as the diindictment says, t congressman was at the white house for a congressional picnic and apparently, according to the dime he received information he s on the board of directors of this immunotherapeutics, a company out of australia and received information that a drug trial was not going as well. as a matter of fact a completely clinny cal failure. according to the indictment he picked up the phone and calls his son. stock had been held pending news in australia, meaning no shares could be traded in australia, which is where the congressman had all of his shares. however, his son and several relatives and associates of his had their shares held in the united states. they were traded over the counter market here. so those shares were not held. that allowed his son, according to the indictment, to be able to place a number of orders and safe hold on a second. when you talk about the but hold on a second. when you talk about the trading halting. that s for regular shareholders. if you re on the board of directors, aren t you held to a different standard? that s exactly correct. that s the reason why and the congressman s attorneys are absolutely correct. congressman is not charged with selling shares or doing trading. as a matter of fact he lost a significant amount of money. but when you have nonpublic information about the company that may be material to the company in it stock, you cannot share that information before it s made public. so i can know about it because i m on the board of directors but i can t share that with somebody else before the company released a statement. that s where they re in trouble. how serious are the charges? this is not the first we ve heard about this with chris collins. previously, we had heard about him encouraging other members of congress when the stock price is very chloe, thlow. is this is is extremely serious. basically he s taking advantage of his fiduciary duty to this company and providing information to his son and other relatives so they can dump their stock, take the profits, before the bad news comes out to the public. basically, the investing public is being defrauded by virtue of what he s doing. let s add another level because the rules are different if you re a member of congress. in fact, they re better. they are. but, in this case, he s an actual member of the board. he s not just a member of congress. he s a member of the board. and what s startling here is that right after he gets the word on the telephone, it looks like the government s got all this phone records, all of his text records. he makes a number of calls to his son, does reach him at first. calls him six times. nobody calls anybody six time force a hey, how are you doing. absolutely not. when you juxtapose that with the next morning, he immediately sells all of his shares. then, i m sure the phone records show that he calls other family members, who in turn sell shares. you re talking millions of dollars here that s at stake. and very serious criminal activity to could wind up with him being in prison the next five years. millions of dollars. he is already a rich guy. i believe he was the first member of congress to endorse the president. he was one who was outspoken about the saying the president should not have to release his taxes. now i wonder why. tom, as of 2015, collins had the 10th highest estimated net worth of anybody in the house, more than $66 million. what questions i mentioned it briefly had we previously heard? i think these allegations related to specific stock issues, first came up over a year ago. i m not mead yoimmediately fami with any other issues he may have from a financial standpoint. it s serious. he surrendered himself to the fbi this morning. he s going to be presented in court later today. he s been indicted. this is kind of a more long-term case. something they developed a significant amount of evidence to. phone conversations, people that have agreed to provide cooperating information. i think at this point, the congressman s in a heap of trouble here. as it relates to the specific securities charges that he s been hit with. again, it s not just the congressman. it s his son, and the son s soon to be father-in-law? yes. well-established one that says birds of a feather flock together. president said drain the swamp. thank you so much. we re going to continue to cover this story as it develops this morning. and, now we get into this. two closely watched races from yesterday s primaries and especially elections. two close to call. people are focussed on politics. razor thin margins, what they mean for the midterms and for trump in 2020. you re watching velshi & ruhle. cause trouble with recal. - learning from him is great. when i can keep up! - anncr: thankfully, prevagen helps your brain and improves memory. - dad s got all the answers. - anncr: prevagen is now the number-one-selling brain health supplement in drug stores nationwide. - she outsmarts me every single time. - checkmate! you wanna play again? - anncr: prevagen. healthier brain. better life. are you ready to take your then you need xfinity xfi.? a more powerful way to stay connected. it gives you super fast speeds for all your devices, provides the most wifi coverage for your home, and lets you control your network with the xfi app. it s the ultimate wifi experience. xfinity xfi, simple, easy, awesome. we got breaking news. we just heard from president trump s attorney rudy giuliani. nbc s kristen welker is live at the white house. what did you learn? reporter: well i just spoke with the president s attorney by phone, and a couple key headlines to tell you about. they do plan to submit their counter proposal to the special counsel by the end of today. this is an offer for what an interview might look like with the president. giuliani telling me we re going to send it out today and it will be a legitimate offer to find a way to do an interview. it won t be a refusal. that s significant because giuliani essentially making the case we are keeping the negotiations open. i asked him why does he think the office of the special counsel is open to the possibility of a counter proposal. remember, they ve been going back and forth since january. giuliani telling moo he they didn t say in the last letter this is the final offer and we haven t done that either. effectively saying the tone of these communications that are going back and forth between each side is one aimed at finding some way to negotiate a potential interview. we know president trump has indicated behind the scenes to his legal team that he wants this interview to happen. his legal team far more skeptic skeptical. concerned about things like follow ups, interview stretching on for too long. we know in the last proposal, they did agree to some concessions, for example, they agreed to some questions receiving written answers. but, not the entirety of the enter view. that s something the president s legal team had floated. this is still a work in progress, i asked is it more likely than not that an interview is going to happen? he said it will make it more likely because we could have responded no. he s going back to this broader point that they are keeping negotiations open, so is the special counsel. when will we have a final answer? that remains to be seen. as they say in dumb and dumber, so you re saying there s a chance. kristen welker, thanks so much. we are also keeping a close eye on a high stakes primary race and especially elections that are too close to call. but both parties celebrating in a sign of what could come in november. in the battleground state of ohio, in a race that was not supposed to be close, republican troy balderson narrowly led democrat danny connor in the especially election for the 12th congressional district seat. solidly red for more than 30 years. the numbers are so close the race could be headed for a recount. another race is the republican primary for kansas governor. trump backed cris big night f women. victories in three states. pushed the number of women nominees running for the house to at least 183. according to the center for american women in politics, d.c. is about to get its first muslim congresswoma congresswoman. democrat won the primary last nite. she is set to ununopposed in november. joining me two. former senior strategist and pollster for president obama. let s start with you evan. first of all, let s talk balancedersbald derson versus o connor. and giving a victory speech. it is so close. i think balderson will end up prevailing at the end of the day given the way the provisional ballots will go. i think republicans are really trying to shine something that isn t good. this is a district that president trump won by 11 points. no democrat has been elected to this house seat since 1980. we are having a very big problem. if a democrat can bring it to 1754 votes in terms of margin of difference between the two candidates, in this district, i am terrified as a republican because it confirmed z everything we ve been seeing on the ground, erosion of married suburban white women voting for gop candidates and giving the majority in both parties. they are abandoning the party. if what you re saying is last night s election is not about who won and what s to come, democrats shouldn t lick the wounds, but the chops. i look to the green party. 1% of the votes. had that one percent gone to o connor, he would actually be slightly and just slightly but within the margin and calling for a recount. is this a moment for the democratic party to say listen, we appreciate green party k candidates. one believes in science, one doesn t. i said this for a long time. it s about green parties, right now. i think the sanders and alexandria cortez wing of the party. you have to make a decision whether or not you want to defeat republicans and put more democrats who will fight for working people in office or sacrifice people on the altar of political rigid ideal ji. we can t losing races by splintering the party. if you look where balderson under performed, you expect democrats to do very well in franklin county but also in delaware county. he did a little better there. i think there s a real pathway for democrats there to concentrate on delaware county and build up that margin. winning this district, if he wins it, if he holds up and wins by 1700, there aren t enough voters in rural ohio to make up the difference that democrats can gain in this district in both franklin and delaware county. but your concern that sort of the trump brand is hurting votes in suburban america, crisco not in a general election. i know the republican governor es a s association asked him not to g get involved in kansas. but he did anyway. i think that going back to the ohio race, and the midterms overall, i think the biggest story and what will be the biggest issue is going to be health care. danny o connor ran as his top priority are making it more accessible and afford b8. right there. that s what he ran on. he barely talked about trump. yet the more i speak to democrats, here, all day long, it s no trump, no trump. is the formula for the midterms put trump aside and run on issues that help americans. you can t put trump aside but you don t have to talk about it. he is hanging over competitive races like a dark cloud. that s what i have said to every democrat democratic candidate i work with. you don t have to invoke him. he is there. swing voters. look, people in kansas are salivating over being able to run against him with laura kelly, the democrat. it s not that long ago kansas elected a democratic governor. earlier this century. what you have to do as democrats is not wave trump in everyone s face every day. his approval ratings are still at historic lows. run the campaign and find the issues and values of which he s alienating those voters. and run those campaigns on a few issues where there s a huge wedge with trump, you don t have to invoke him day in and day out. in fact i think it s a mistake. make the campaigns about their lives. i should have asked before, but when you said your message to democrats is unify here, what did they say back to you? because i hear your message, but then when i look at them and hear what they have to say, when nancy pelosi tells rolling stone that seth moleton, stim ryan no major players i m saying aren t they young, future forward-thinking? i think the democratic party is a more diverse party. we ought to capitalize on that. what we need to do is win more elections at every level right now. you heard me say this probably a million times if you ve heard me say it once. right here on this show. we will not win elections if we don t appeal and keep to moderate democrats and moderate independents in our party. is diversity the voice. nobody has the guts to say i respect what you have to say but if you want us to win you have to get behind me. last night there were a couple of places where sanders and cortez supported candidates and lost. get on board with the person who won. that s what we do as democrats. if you want to win, if your ideology is more porntimportant out of our party. if you want to win back candidates who fairly won. cortez is saying well you need to run authentic. because if you run a moderate, they re not going to win. those who forget history are condemned to repeat. in 2006 democrats took back the house and senate because they ran moderate candidates. i don t think cortez s district in queens is anywhere comparable. they have different values and beliefs. authentic and idealistic are two different things. but she s conflating it with being to the extreme left. if you are somehow not on the extreme left you are a fake and not a real democrat and no better than a republican. i think that she really needs to hone in on, as to other democrats, health care. obamacare s premiums are coming out two 0 three weeks before election. those premium raises are going to be high and shocking. republicans own it. additionally, private insurance rates are going to be coming out and then. some are going up. i have a friend going up by 25%. that is something s people don t want. if democrats run on that and creand they re going to do very well and possibly take back the house. run on issues i call the 60% to 70% issues. people in your district and state agree with us at a level of 60% or 70%. mainstream issues on maihealth care, expanding obamacare, common sense gun law, improving health care, expanding made care. raising wages for people who got stiffed. big corporations profits went up. the income and equality divide is massive. president trump had the insight to go after it. he said he was going to solve it. here s what s happened. he hasn t solved it. he s exacerbated it. thank you so very much. next, breaking news, stay on that republican congressman from new york, chris collins arrested, charged with insider trading. we re going to dig into his latest final disclosures. you re watching velshi & ruhle with the new chase ink business unlimited card i get unlimited 1.5% cash back. it s so simple, i don t even have to think about it. so i think about mouthfeel. i don t think about the ink card. i think about nitrogen ice cream in supermarkets all over the world. i think about the details. fine, i obsess over the details. think about every part of your business except the one part that works without a thought your ink card. introducing chase ink business unlimited with unlimited 1.5% cash back on every purchase. chase for business. make more of what s yours. obama or bush at this point in the administration. the regulatory relief is really a part of the reason our economy is doing well. stock market s at record highs. pulled us out of the trans-pacific partnership that would have cost this country hundreds of thousands of jobs. same goes for the paris climate accord. we continue to follow the breaking news on that man right there. republican congressman chris collins of new york. praising president trump last year. but right now, congressman collins is due in federal court after being indicted on insider trading charges. pros kurtsers say he used z his position at a biotech firm where he was on the board of directors to help his family avoid almost 1 million bucks in stock losses. he surerves on the board of inne immunotherapies. he owns 17% of the stock. here s what happened. according to the indictment, last year, after discovering that a major drug trial had failed, he passed that information on to his son, but it wasn t public information yet. his son then allegedly told several others and all made quote timely trades company s stock. once news went public the stock plunged by 92%. indictment says the defendants avoided more than $768 grand in losses by selling their stock before the results went public. wo joining me now capitol hill correspondent and anchors. guys, i want to start with a quick flashback. january, 2017. jake sermherman tweets this. flash back overheard in the capital new york represent chris collins talking loudly into a phone off the house floor bragging about how many millionaires i ve made in buffalo in the last month. bragging about a stock he shared with people. wow! talk about what has happened here, and have we heard anything from republican congressional leadership? we knew there was investigation into this on the ethics side. there had been a lot of questions about this company, hhs secretary tom price. this was raised in his former secretary i should say. this was raised in his confirmation hearing. a lot of concerns about his involvement. to a certain extent it s not as big of a surprise as it could be. so far the sources i ve spoken to are saying behind the scenes they weren t aware that anything like this was coming. now the house speaker paul ryan had been pretty aggressive in pushing out members of his conference who have behaved badly. we talked a lot about sexual harassment instances, things along those lines. however, there s it s not unprecedented for a member of congress facing an indictment, facing charges to continue to serve. there will be some decisions that house leaders have to make about just how hard are they going to pressure chris collins to potentially step aside and take himself or the ballot or something along the lines if they feel this is serious enough to do that. they don t have a ton of options necessarily. they could push the ethics committee in theory, although they obviously have very carefully guarded processes that are already under way. but remember, senator bob th menendez served the entire time he was fighting charges. he was ultimately exonerated but now having a lot of trouble potentially in the reelection fight. there are some democrats wishing they had taken stronger action. perhaps an example to look at. could we see other lawmakers get dragged into this. chris collins was instrumental in then hhs tom price getting the job. but when he held office he was also involved in some of these tech companies. these tech stocks, though he didn t sit on the board. that s an interesting question. this is the indictment about 30 pages. what the law says is ultimately you can t tip people if you have material nonpublic information and have you a duty of obligation, a if you had fiduciary yaduty to the company. you can t tip people who then go on to trade. you need a tip, obligation and trade. indictment says they have all of those things here in this case with the congressman. what s striking to me is just how sloppy some of this allegedly was. you often see people going to extreme lengths to hide their trail. they use burner phones, meetings this indictment alleged he got an e-mail directly from the company about a failure of its major drug. its only significant drug, while he was at the white house congressional picnic. that s what s stunning to me. called his own son on his own phone. calls him six times. you don t call somebody six times unless the house is on fire or you re trying to save him a million bucks on insider information. that s exactly the question here. why would collins do that, knowing that those phone calls can be easily traced. all the text messages captured by the prosecutors. collins lawyers say because he personally never sold any shares of innate, the stock in question, therefore he s going to fight this. he s no the guilty. he s ultimately going to be exonerated. hold on then. the question is whether he tipped his son and the prosecutors are saying he did do that. okay. so it doesn t matter, though, if he didn t trade the stock. he is the one who shared the information as an officer of the company. he can t do that. then what position does that put the son in? he s in trouble and the son s soon to be father-in-law is in trouble too. i d a shakes peerian drama for the family. fiance s father and some other family and friends. they all make trades according to the indictment. you can imagine what thanksgiving is going to be like at that family this year. very, very difficult for those folks when prosecutors have the amount of evidence they have here on open phone lines, text messages, e-mails back and forth. it s all pretty blatant, according to the dime. now, maybe there s something we re missing here and you have to give the benefit of the doubt to those indicted. indict is an allegation at this point. everyone is innocent until proven guilty. there s a lot of smoke here, though. and collins and his friends and families are going to be at pains to explain what they did and why that was perfectly legal. all right. as of 2015, i want to say, he s the tenth highest net worth in the house. $66 million is a big number. before we go, the house is in recess now. does that blunt the impact of thi this in any way? sure. yeah. i mean it mean that is there are probably quite a few of collins associates or friends in the house who are glad they don t have to confront our cameras. all back home in the districts. at the end of the day this is going to be a story that drags on for a while. while we don t know if there are other members involved. obviously the tweet suggests he was excited about spreading this kind of knowledge around. so, who knows? it s possible we could end up following other threads over the months. and then, the questions are going to continue to dog leadership as well if he continues to serve in the congress. and we also haven t touched on the big question about what the president might do. remember, chris collins was his very first supporter in congress at a time when the president now president, was a candidate who the entire republican party was fleeing, was shunning. they were all hoping that anybody else on that debate stage was going to get that nomination. chris collins was out there having his back. that s the kind of thing that the president trump administration, his family loyalists don t forget that. i think that s another dynamic. ironically he was one of the few people saying he shouldn t have to release his taxes. i wonder why. thank you so much. quite a story. next, we got another biggie. elon musk pulled a president trump making a market shifting announcement on twitter with little information to actually back it up. the tesla ceo says he wants to take his company private and he s got the funding to do it. who are the mystery investors? we do not know and will shareholders vote with him? we ll see. they ve made a lot of money from this guy in the past. what hasn t made money is the company. you re watching velshi & ruhle on msnbc. but on the inside, i feel chronic, widespread pain. fibromyalgia may be invisible to others, but my pain is 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today for a free guide. medicare supplement plan. i ve been making blades here at gillette for 20 years. there s a lot of innovation that goes into making america s #1 shave. precision machinery and high-quality materials from around the world. nobody else even comes close. now starting at $7.99. gillette. the best a man can get. welcome back to velshi & ruhle. elon muc el elon mus elon musk set off a flury. i m considering taking tesla private at $420. funding secured. this single tweet caused shares to spike up 11% by the end of the day. this stock has a whole lot of short sellers. something like that hurts. cryptic announcement came after an exclusive report from the final times which revealed a new connection between the electric car company and the saudi arabia government. the public investment fund has quietly accumulated a stake of between 3% and 5% this year in the company making it tesla s largest single public investor. there are huge legal and technical complexities and if he is serious about going private, it is highly unusual to simply throw out a tweet like that. but, if nothing comes of this, if there is no deal and it was just a reactionary tweet in response to critics, which you know he is hyper sensitive of, then he could be facing some very serious penalties for making public statements that were untrue and drastically moved the market. that s the kind of behavior specifically that the sec investigates. joining me now the saudi stake is big. from your reporting is there any sign that they would want to go further and be that buyer to take the company public? well, we don t think they would go for the whole $70 billion he s possibly got to raise to get this deal done. if it he intends to. but before amassing it, they contacted musk about doing an investment, kind of raising money, issuing more stock. he was against it and turned them away. then they got the help of jp morgan to kind of buy the stock over the course of a year. but $70 billion. how does that make sense? this is a company with problems with the model 3. negative. who would want to do something like that? the board could say well he mentioned it last week. mentioning something last week and actually having a strategic plan are two very different things. i could say george clooney wants to date me. it means nothing. you re absolutely right. wait. so you think he s not. i didn t say that. you just said you re absolutely right. saying basically he s kind of the guy has not really been very clear at all about his plan. board today said he kind of floated the idea to them. but in the tweet he mentioned. he said i ve secured the financing. that indicated this was a done thing. but how is that even legal? when you say he wasn t exactly clear, he wasn t exactly clear. and it caused the stock to spike 11%. when a ceo of a pub you clicly company, it s vetted and run through the compliance department. at the beginning everybody thought this was a prank. we you can t joke about a public company. it s like pension funds, people who put the savings in this company. one of the largest investors is fidelity actively managed. they re not raising their hands saying what gives? i know elon musk has made them a ton of money but give me a break. the stock went up so nobody s probably going to complain right away. you ve got to believe that the schl e kr. is looking into this. they haven t put a statement out. but there s no way this can i mean we don t want to speculate but this can t really go under the radar. but you can t we can speak to elon musk and the type of person he is. this year, he has gone out, pushed against wall street analysts, attacked not physically, but gone after journalists. he is almost obsessed with short sellers in the same kind of obsession the president has against his critics. we re not talking about the average ceo here. absolutely. the short sellers could lose up to $4 billion out of this whole maneuver. i mean, again, you d expect these guys getting ready to sue the hell out of him because it is kind of suspicious, and there s definitely no set proposal. the board hasn t set up a committee to review anything. he said we just need the shareholders to vote. vote on what? we don t have a plan. how independent is this board? is. not very. there s question marks. he s done other deals in the past which were rubber stamped. brother is on the board. absolutely. says it all, right? but the question is his brother s on the board. independent board of directors. his brother. correct. so we ll have to see. this is not going to be a smooth ride for tesla and elon musk. that s for sure. no pun intended. james. thank you so much for joining me. i appreciate it. next, back to our breaking news. republican congressman chris collins. seriously. sec is going to be busy. arrested and charged with insider trading. a news conference expected atny moment. you re watching velshi & ruhle. charges against republican congressman chris collins. he surrendered to the fbi this morning after being indicted on insider trading charges. prosecutors say he helped his own family make illicit stock trades to avoid almost a million bucks in losses. house speaker paul ryan released this statement moments ago saying, quote, while his guilt or innocence is a question for the courts to settle, the allegations demand a prompt and thorough investigation by the house ethics committee. insider trading is a clear violation of the public trust. until this matter is settled, representative collins will not be serving on the house energy and commerce committee. whoo, that s pretty strong. there s been no statement yet from president trump. collins was the first lawmaker to publicly back him for president. you re going to start seeing a presidential mr. trump. he s talked about it, shifting into a more presidential speech-giving, policy positions, and demeanor. wow. joining me now, nbc news investigations reporter tom winter, outside the courthouse in new york. and former assistant u.s. attorney for the southern district of new york, nick ackerman. nick, you can probably tell tom where all the good food trucks are down there. tom, i read the indictment. what does it signal to you about congressional support? reporter: looking at the indictment today, obviously it s an allegation, there s obviously a court and a trial process they ll go through here. but the evidence appears to be pretty strong. there are people who are cooperating, and there are a number of telephone calls and text messages that the deposit has been able to get access to that lay out exactly who was telling what when, and what phone calls were made. stephanie, on june 22nd of 2017, they have clear communications that they can see, call records between the congressman and his son. it is during that conversation the government alleges that the congressman, who was on the board of directors of this pharmaceutical company, told his son, hey, this big clinical trial that they re doing for this drug that they hope to be able to release is essentially a complete failure. now, at that point the shares were frozen in australia, which is where the congressman had most of his stock, but they were not frozen here in the united states. and so his son later on, the next morning, placed a number of sell orders reaching 16 orders in total. he was able to save over a half million dollars in potential losses. once the news became public that the trial was a clinical failure authorize th for this drug. there are other family members that are tied up in it. cameron collins, the congressman s son, is one of the people who has been mentioned, as well as his fiance has been mentioned in the indictment. so we should get a little bit more detail here shortly. as you mentioned before, we ll have a briefing with the fbi assistant director, bill sweeney, and u.s. attorney general berman who sis a trump appointee. but the indictment is very specific. to your question, stephanie, when you have this level of information, and when you have this level of detail contained within an indictment, i think for people that read it, they kind of look at it and say, okay, the evidence here is pretty strong. and while everybody is innocent, you know, assumed innocent here in the united states, sometimes the evidence is so much that i think speaker ryan and his people were probably looking at that and saying, this person has a problem here. the evidence is so strong, i feel like i m missing something. chris collins, his son, his fiance, his fiance s father. i want to know who s going to be paying for the wedding after this. nick, given how clear-cut the evidence that we seem to have is, how serious is this? because usually an insider trading case, people go to great lengths. eamon javers mentioned it earlier, burner phones, middle men that are complete strangers, accounts in other people s names. this guy is at the congressional picnic, calling the son six times over the course of 30 minutes. you re not making a call six times about forgetting to set the dvr. this is serious. he received information at one point and he panicked, he called his son six times to try and tell him what was going on so he could sell it. the evidence here, as tom said, it is there s telephone records, there s text messages, it looks like they have some insider from the family who is actually cooperating here. that will make the wedding even more interesting, particularly if the insider is an invitee. it s going to be a complicated wedding. the indictment is about this one specific instance in 2017. but i want to point to a tweet that politico s jake sherman put o out. he reports that back in january of 2017, he heard collins talking loudly into a telephone off the house floor, bragging about the millionaires, quote, that i ve made this month. we re not talking january 2017. this was broader than that. if we had been tipping off others, whether it s people in buffalo, and we know then-hhs-secretary tom price had been courted, other members of congress, collins saying you have to get in on this deal, knowing he s a true insider. that s a fair point. the question is how broad does this go, how greedy was he. we do have one sort of theme that runs through this trump administration and all the people around trump, that they are all greedy, they re not in there for the public service, they re out there to line their own pockets, even if it means breaking the law. see mr. manafort. that s exactly what that trial is about. it s about agreegreed, cheating government, cheating the banks. this is more of that same pattern. there are some differences here, though. he s on the board of directors of companies, that s a problem. if you are a member of congress, even if you re on a committee that oversees a specific industry, as unethical as it may sound, you re allowed to trade securities in that industry. unfortunately, that s correct. and it s legal. that s the problem. that should be changed completely. there s no reason why people who are in public service should be able to trade on information that they get in public service. how common is it that they do? we don t know. but i think it s a problem. it s clearly a problem. i mean, certainly secretary price had that problem. i don t think we ever got to the bottom of it, because you ve got a republican congress that really didn t care to get to the bottom of it. it sounds like paul ryan does here. i mean, this is a time when we rarely see republicans stand up against the president or do much to, let s say, protect robert mueller s investigation. so for paul ryan, with only pretty limited information at this point, to come out so aggressively, that s not something we ve seen as of late from republicans. you re going to see it here, because you ve got 90 days until the midterms. and i think the last thing the republican leadership wants to make it appear is as though they re coddling somebody who has been accused of an extremely serious crime. so i think it s the timing more than anything else that has brought out this particular statement from the speaker. and talk me through how a pardon would work. president trump is all about loyalty. he remembers who cuts him. he remembers who sticks by him. and collins was an early supporter. yes, there s no question. trump could pardon him. he has the power to do it. it s not a situation where there s a conflict of interest between trump and this congressman. it s not like trump as far as we know is involved in this stock. no.
Laura Ingraham shines a spotlight on everyday Americans and examines how their lives are affected by politics at the federal, state and local level. hear planes flying fairly low over my deck, fighter planes. this is my personal home deck, and i wondered what this was about and shortly after that i got a phone call. one of the nice things about working in pierce county is we work closely with west pierce and tillicum police department. and we had people who responded from jblm who did great stuff. i get to work with people who are willing to when as soon as something goes down immediately respond and immediately cooperate closely. that s what we ve seen tonight. next 24 hours i m sure we will have some of our people there. we will have people from the federal government. we will have people from the bureau. i m sure as i said they will be looking at every i to dot and t to cross to find out what happened, why it happened and how it happened. this will be an issue if it was determined and likely to be determined there was a theft involved at sea-tac airport. there may be state charges as well but it s most likely the person who perpetrated this theft is no longer with us. thank you and your colleagues. thank you. [ phone ringing ]. you were listening to a press conference of a pierce county sheriff official talking about a plane that was stolen by a mechanic at an airport there. so we are closely following this situation, as he said. a plane crashed near seattle s sea-tac airport a horizon airplane taking off from sea-tac airport. witnesses saw the airplane being followed by military aircraft near the airport. the plane is a regional turboprop airport that can seat up to 76 passengers. the plane was stole bane 29-year-old mechanic and that no passengers were on board. it appears to be some sort of suicide attempt. they say at this point with what they re seeing with the damage and the flames it appears that the man on board that plane who was flying it, died. the sheriff also telling us tonight this was not a terrorist attack this was a single suicide male, no others were involved. coast guard is responding to reports of large plumes of smoke in the area. alaska airlines tweeting we have confirmed that a plane has gone down near patron island in pierce county, washington state. they believe they know who was on board. they are not releasing the name. there were no other people on board, no crew, no guests on that plane. we will continue to follow this break news out of washington state. we go back to laura ingraham, already in progress. laura: we can t allow our guy week. there has been a lot of drama in the paul manafort trial. i know you have been following the ins and outs of judge ellis. mueller s team filing a formal complaint about the behavior of judge ellis. the court s reprimand of governor counsel suggested to the jury that the government acted improperly in cont contravention of court rules. the judge is a cantankerous, old-style judge but there seems to be a real effort to kind of smear him now since he has been tough on the mueller case. what is your take here? i agree, laura. you clerked for the second circuit and for judge thomas. you don t win fights with federal judges and you don t try to pick fights with federal judges. i don t mind that the prosecutors are being aggressive and standing up for their position. i don t know if i would have filed something like that and would have asked for a side bar and say you told the jury you said something yesterday could you remind the jury that what you say is not evidence and you don t have an opinion in this case. that s how i would have handled it. one of the uncomfortable exchanges and there are many in the past few days, some of it is just entertaining. let s just say that. there s one point where judge ellis thinks that one of the lawyers for mueller is not looking at him. and so the judge says, i m here. from the bench. and he says i m sorry, i m listening. and ellis says i know when you look down, it s as if to say down for an interview with mueller s team or mueller will have to issue a subpoena and everything that entails. james, go ahead. well, look, i don t think mueller, himself, feels like he has that strong a hand to issue a subpoena here or to get the compliance he wants. laura: why? there s a lot of layers of why he doesn t have to follow a subpoena while in office. the fact they call the president a subject makes it tough to understand how they can ask questions about obstructions. obstruction is purely target. what they re look at is what are our chances if we subpoena him. we were going to get a motion to quash. what s it going to read like? it would be damning and powerful addressing everything they want to complain about when it comes to the mueller probe calling him a subject but treating him like a target. laura: is there any way that the special counsel will accept the terms that trump s leal tga team offered? no it in a million years. the president will never sit down and speak to these guys. he d be crazy to. the special counsel, bob is tough as a nail and hard as a rock. he will issue the grand jury subpoena and they ll file their motion to quash and it will make itself way up to the supreme court. laura: fantastic conversation, guys, have a great weekend. if you heard heads exploding in hollywood, there s a good reason. kanye west doubled down on his support for donald trump. keep it comin love. if you keep on eating, we ll keep it comin . all you can eat riblets and tenders at applebee s. now that s eatin good in the neighborhood. what it represented to me is not about policies, because i m not a politician like that but it represented overcoming fear, and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said, saying you can t bully me, news, hip hop community, they can t bully me. laura: remarks from kanye west on jimmy kimmel are giving a new bout of angina to hollywood. he claimed his support for president trump and clearly he s got no plans to stop fighting against the anti-trump group think and as he said the bullying of the entertainment industry. joining us now to analyze is radio talk show host and let s start with you, eric, kanye west, he is an interesting cat, an interesting character. he has a huge following. very much so. laura: i find it just fascinating that it s controversial for someone to say i think for myself. you won t put words in my mouth. you won t tell me the how what to believe or for whom to vote. i m my own person. somehow that s a point of controversy in the group think that is the entertainment industry today. i think he s just smashing the stereotype, and i think it s freaking people out. your reaction? well i don t think it s freaking people out. i think kanye is trying to l to both sides of the fence. he s always been a free thinker. a long time ago he stood up on national tv and said george bush didn t care about black people. he s always thought for himself. he s trying to cater to both sides of the fence. he wants to maintain the fact he does support trump but in such a way that could possibly apiece appease his followers who may not support trump. so really it seems more like a tactical marketing skill on his behalf rather than bullying. he s a multimillionaire. there is no way that he can feel bullied for who he chooses to vote for. kevin you understand what this is ultimately all about. absolutely. laura: there s a certain subset of the american political world that says if you are of a certain background or certain ethnicity, certain race there is only one direction you can go in, whether it s clarence thomas or walter williams or tom sole or any given number of free thinkers out there. they re vilified in some ways. yep. laura: kevin i find it to be a fascinating conversation. it is. it is not just entertainment laura the way you set it up. it s the black community that will ostracize you. and kanye got it right. he will be bullied. he named everybody in the mix. the liberals will bully you, the media will bully you, guys like this guy will bully you. kanye said what he said. there was no upside for him in this. he wasn t catering to any particular side. he said i m a human being, i m going to think for myself, i m not going to let anybody determine what i say as a man. good for him. he does talk for himself. i let you talk. he only impacted himself. not only has donald trump raise the the level of black support. he doubled to 29% now because people are finally starting to wake up. kanye brought a level of consciousness to many blacks in america who feel identically the same. i have been a conservative my entire life. i don t know what that wake up means but there are many people who need a kanye to say something like that. it is the left that are the biggest bullies on the planet. they re not bullies just because they disagree. the simple fact of the matter is there s not a disagree with the republican party more says but the black community feels have not been in their best interest. if kanye wishes to align himself with that, the issue is if he is aligning himself with the ones that most african-american communities don t support, that s the reality of the situation. not the same. laura: i think whether it s the violence in chicago, it had a huge spike under rahm emmanuel, democratic leadership, democrat is a protege of obama, things have gotten worse. you see the african-american community in the hardest hit neighborhood saying we want new leadership, it s not working. absolutely. laura let me respond to one other thing. no, no, no, you talked earlier. it is an issue. kanye west but threatened. black conservatives like myself get threatened all the time. i have never threatened anybody that differs from me politically and i never will. just because you haven t doesn t mean that liberals are not threatened. you said kanye west hasn t been threatened, there were rappers that came out and said you have a concert we re going to be there. a guy that was a crip said he wanted to kill him. that s the it will r vitriol that happens on the other side. don t pretend this doesn t happen. laura: i think debate is a good thing. i think it s positive. if it s just more chatter there is nothing positive that comes of it. let s hope something good comes of this. i want to get to another issue. i want to get our take on this national anthem protest, because it s reigniting now in the nfl, last night really cool, fun preseason games, a handful of players took knees or raised their fists during the anthems. the president, i guess not surprisingly tweeted out, in part, quote, numerous players from different teams wanted to show outrage at something most of them are unable to define. they make a fortune doing what they love. find another way to protest. you have kenny stills out there saying look at my twitter feed. i explain why i m doing what i m doing. look at my social media. it s not just a whim. i mean this, and he s sticking up for his right to do what he does. and i think that when we speak about bullying in politics, we have the biggest bully in the white house right now, given the fact that this situation has turned on racial lines in the fact that by trying to make it about the military. the players have been very adamant over and over it is not about the military, some of them have fathers, uncles, brothers, mothers, sisters, who have served in the military. it is about bringing attention to the racial injustices that have been done by the police and other instruments of government in this case. i do agree they need to transform to a more political base similar to what we saw happen in st. louis where the prosecutor was defeated by a democratic, more progressive opponent, maybe some of these athletes should take their protests to the polling places to draw people out to vote out some of these people, the prosecutors, the district attorneys, the people judges. laura: hold on. eric, i think that people i don t think people don t the fans feel everything is so infected with politics. can we just get together and root for our teams without a political thing. i think that s what more people are kind of irked by, not the fact that they re speaking out but they want just one zone where it s no politics. but mine i m off base. i think that s part of it. the idea it became racial because donald trump is the president is ridiculous. he was protecting the flag. america first, make america great again. he have the pointed out the inconsistencies in the black lives matter movement and the fact that these guys really were more self indulgent. let me just finish. the fact of the matter was it is self indulgent move by colin kaepernick and he s hurting the league and people understand that. look, you can try to make this black and white. the same problems that were persisting in the community, so-called policing issues, were happening during the time of obama. why didn t somebody take a knee then? they waited for donald trump so he could be the person to do it? who said they waited for donald trump? laura: this has been stirring for some time. it just happened to coincide with donald trump. the question is if this had happened while obama was president, do you think he would have take the same position that donald trump is? laura: of course not. no, he wouldn t have at all. you re right about that, eric, he would have probably supported the players and what they re doing. but the owners had this policy in place and they ve put it on the shelf now hoping to figure it out. guys have a great weekend. have you noticed recently how often some liberals invoke ronald reagan to make a left wing political point? a reagan cabinet member and biographer reveals the truth. a five year old girl molested by an illegal immigrant in philly. the u.s. attorney lays blame with city officials, he ll join us. the plane was stole bane 29-year-old mechanic and crashed while he was doing stunts. he reportedly told air traffic controllers that he was a broken guy and was joking about whether the airline would hire him if he landed safely. the coast guard is responding to the crash site at this moment where a large plume of smoke can be seen there. the coast guard confirmed. the plane has gone down in pierce county washington. we believe there were no guests or crew on board other than the person operating the plane and the sheriff s deputy has said we can confirm that there was no one on the plane other than the 29-year-old mechanic who was on the plane on some type of suicide mission of sorts. he spoke with air traffic controllers saying that he knew people loved him. he was a broken guy and at one point he says he has a lot of people that care about him. police are looking into this. we will continue to follow this story out of seattle throughout the night. for now we go back to laura ingraham, already in progress. back then, serving with ronald reagans and the liberals in the media. he is good being god, but one has to say, whatever criticisms came down during the reagan era and there were a lot of them. i got some. you got some, you were working for me. ronald reagan got plenty. nothing compared to what donald trump is getting. if they can use ronald reagan to beat up donald trump, they will do it and they will do it with a straight face i don t know how they pull off the straight face. laura: you remind us that the left will do anything to regain power. i want to play flash back sound from some of our favorites in the media. i believe this was during the administration or right after the president right after he passed away. let s watch. did his vision include extraordinary deficit and cutting the budgets for education and back of the hand in terms are you saying we have been unkind to him? i don t think history be kind to him or have any reason to be kind to him. i thought if you got into the oval office, mr. president i m down on my luck he would give you the shirt off his back and he would sign legislation throwing your kids off the school lunch program. laura: he wanted grandma to eat alpo. remember that? and catch ketchup was a vegetable too. and he becomes a paragon of virtue, barry goldwater was attacked by psychiatrists in the newspapers and denounced as crazy and now he is a paragon of virtue. the left hated richard nixon. i saw a historian favor nixon comparably to donald trump. then they become convenient tools to bash the current occupant of the white house. so it s nothing new. especially but it s especially with reagan. because they know nothing about reagan. as i said earlier, they re in over their head. they don t know what they re talking about. laura: we all worked for president reagan and we all know on the issue of immigration, the republican party, donald trump, if only again they were more like reagan on immigration. so let s play a few of the choice sound bites from president reagan on immigration. the simple truth is we have lost control of our borders. i have spoken of a shining city all my life. but it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, god blessed and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace. if there had to be city walls the walls have doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. bill, take a hit at that one. i get shivers when i hear him speak talk about the city on the hill. the city had walls and a door. the left takes that part of city on a hill. ronald reagan wanted everyone to come but they forget about the part about the wall and the country without borders is not a country. it occurred to me while you were talking to craig, two, three, four elections in the future we will see videotape of donald trump and liberals saying those were the days when people had heart and soul. laura: i don t think so. just a thought experiment here. could it be worst until it gets worse. bill might be right. there s so much the two share in common. you know, craig was saying the other day, or maybe i read it in his book, the commitment to a defense, to a defense buildup which was essential to both of them, the focus on a wall. reagan wanted to tear one down, the right one. and trump wants to build one up and that s the right one, too. they re very different personalities but going in the same way. but i would be interested in craig s opinion on this, i think this is a more conservative cabinet than ronald reagan had, don t you? i think so, but don t forget, bill, the bench, you were a great conservative in the cabinet and the bench was a lot thinner. this is a by-product of the reagan presidency, there s a lot more talent now available for the trump administration that wasn t available in 1980. laura: think about that. think of all the people waiting in the wings to get appointed to the appellate court. all of these people were children of the reagan era. i wouldn t be doing if what i m doing. the left would have loved that if not for reagan. i wouldn t be doing any of this. aaa and aa leagues are highly populated with the right people. i remember, laura, at our place, we were known as ft. reagan. we had 134 political appointees. and senator wiker said what are you doing with these appointees? and i said we won. we won the election and that was a great training camp and it s interesting to see where they have gone. television personalities. bill, they can blame you. thanks so much. and the so-called blue wave for democrats may already be fizzling out because of nancy pelosi. details after this. may be fading out a little bit. the house minority leader is becoming the shining star of the gop attack ads leading up to the mid-terms. here is a little sample. failed liberal policies is at it again, this time running for congress, this time he s not alone. now nancy pelosi and her washington democrats are bankrolling his campaign. because davis record in topeka is the pelosi agenda in washington. a vote for paul davis is a vote for nancy pelosi. laura: democratic house members smell blood. dozens of them and counting will not commit or out right they refuse to support pelosi continuing as the donald trump democrats house leader. joining us now to analyze rachel campos duffy and dezlin figurer row. tezlin, all parties have their person who you want to kind of move on. it s just the way it is. republicans have had the same issue, you know, not so much with boehner but the republicans wanted him to move on and ultimately he did. what do you see, though, you have this incredible number of democrat incumbents now at 51 who say, huh-uh, will not supporter. well it s funny you asked me what do i see because i feel like i m a prophet. last week i prophesized that the blue wave was bound to drown. just call me noah, laura. at the end of the day people are ready to move on. not just democrats saying they want to get rid of nancy pelosi, but also republicans and independents as well. third quarter of americans have been polled and say the time is over for nancy pelosi. it s sad because poorly tim ryan when he tried to run against nancy in 2006, people thought it was a joke. over 20 democrat leaders say they will not support her in june. now in august it s over 50 who are asking nancy to move on. it reminds me of that old stalker girlfriend that just refuses to stop calling on the phone and repeatedly doesn t understand the relationship is over. laura: you crack me up. i needed to laugh on friday that cracked me up. rachel, first of all the republicans kind of putting all their eggs in the anti-pelosi agenda? they have a great agenda on economic prosperity and relative peace out there. the policy thing gets a little old for me. nevertheless i guess it s kind of good, i guess. but don t both parties have these people who just refuse to move on? well you can walk and chew gum. you can tout all the good news that the republicans and donald trump agenda has brought about in their district and remind voters, make no mistake, i don t care what those 50 democrats are saying, if democrats take control of the congress, nancy pelosi will be the leader of the house. democrats are in step all the time. she will be the leader. and by the way, she embodies everything middle americans hate about washington. she represents san francisco looney policies that never worked. the republicans are back home kind of enthusiastic now. i don t think they were feeling so good a month ago, they re feeling good, back home, seeing the impact of their agenda, talking to constituents and face-to-face reminding them of who brought them about, who said it was going to be armageddon nancy pelosi and who called their bonuses crumbs. laura: they re personalizing it. they re working hard in their district. laura: they have to personalize their agenda. speaking of real clear politics average. let s put it up on the screen. today the democrats have a 5% advantage. but a month ago they had an 8.2% advantage, bloomberg opinion headline, by the way, kind of extends this conversation on this. pelosi is the wrong target for democrats. joe cunningham saying the democratic party needs new leadership. if elected i will not vote for nancy pelosi as speaker. time to move forward and win again. 34 say they re neither for nor against pelosi but 42 of the parties nominees say they will not support nancy pelosi. well who had the juice, though, to take on pelosi? let s say the democrats pick up the seats they need to take the majority? you have to have something to beat you know, you can t beat something with nothing. who beats pelosi? it s amazing that they continue to keep pushing nancy pelosi on people, it s amazing she won t sit down. a lot has changed in the last two years. i don t know the answer to the question. i would like to see them support congresswoman barbara lee. they claim to love black girl magic. let s see if they re willing to put an african american female in office. but that will be going a stretch. laura: i want maxine waters as speaker of the house. aunty maxine, i kind of like her. she s kind of fun. she doesn t like trump but they makes politics interesting. we re out of time, but we ll continue this conversation on radio next week. thanks guys have a great weekend. philadelphia sanctuary policies are slammed after a 5-year-old girl sexual assaulted by an illegal alien. u.s. attorney for philly says enough is enough. he joins us with his plans to take on local officials next. maybe not. no. maybe you could trust that during your fantasy draft .no, no, no. the computer won t auto-draft a kicker, in the 7th round. maybe you can trust you won t be kept at night because you auto-drafted a kicker, in the 7th round. (woman laughing) maybe you could trust that for the next 16 weeks you won t think about auto-drafting a kicker, in the 7th round. or. .you could just trust duracell. (duracell mnemonic) of philadelphia. tell me why from your perspective and then we will get into the specific case, why sanctuary status is harmful for public safety. well fundamentally those of us in law enforcement aren t supposed to play favorites. those of us who are prosecutors aren t supposed to play favorites. that s a fundamental principal. we re the supposed to enforce the law in a fair non-partisan manner. the problem with the sanctuaries cities is they turn that principle on its head and they politicize law enforcement. laura: what do you mean? they stand for the proposition that a certain group of people are not going to be subject to our laws for political purposes. namely we re talking about illegal immigrants. laura: well they make the opposite claim. those who are defending the sanctuary city policies, including the mayor and his boosters, mayor kinney and his boosters. they say sanctuary status keeps the place safer because illegal immigrants won t go to the authority because they afraid of being desported. it makes the city less safe if you don t have it in place. how do you respond to that? i think actually they have it exactly backwards. they do say that they think that it fosters trust among the community and law enforcement in order to not enforce immigration laws. actually what fosters trust between the community and law enforcement is when the community knows that law enforcement is not going to play favorites. if they know the rule of law is going to be respected the broader community, therefore, believes that law enforcement is doing their job. so when the proponents of sanctuary cities make that argument that you just articulated i think they have it exactly backwards. laura: the d.a. of philadelphia is not too pleased with your criticism of the sanctuary city policy. he said about your statement linking it rape by this juan ramon vasquez who was released, ending up raping a member of his own family, a 5-year-old child, he said, well, that s very dramatic to somehow link the sanctuary status to this rape. the trump administration has made it so immigrant children can get raped. they re linking trump to you, the deportation of actual victims of domestic violence and you re seeing this bubble up with the judge versus jeff sessions yesterday. so how do you respond to that? he s hitting you hard saying you re basically, this is typical trump administration stuff from you. i think that fundamentally, the problem with that statement is that statement is a political statement. he s going political. i am doing my best as a law enforcement officer to enforce the law in a neutral non-party apolitical manner. when you a proponent of sanctuary cities you are politicizing law enforcement. and the d.a. in philadelphia unfortunately takes a political approach to a lot of issues in law enforcement. what i m saying is respect for the rule of raw is a non-partisan neutral. laura: but they re saying we re not the immigration force. we have our hands full already. well, the fundamental problem again, is that not only are sanctuary cities, in my view, wrong, but they are essentially un-american. let me explain that a little bit. when you come before the law in america, it s not supposed to matter who you are, or where you re from, who your parents are or the like. everybody is supposed to be treated equally. if you politicize the law and you say we re not going to enforce the law against a certain group of people we re only going to enforce it against others you re essentially doing something i believe is un-american because you re not respecting the rule of law. laura: it s not equal justice under the law. 2014, arrested on an aggravated 2014, arrested on an aggravated assault, released, illegal immigrant. a year and-a-half later he was found to have raped a five year old little girl, member of his own family. and then of course when he s released in 2014, that was sanctuary city time. and they say well, making that leap from his release to the rape and sanctuary policies, that s unfair. do you obviously it s his fault for doing the rape, he s liable, but do the sanctuary city policy facilitate the rape of this little girl? not only facilitate it, it s 100% responsible for it. that is non-controversial. what happened in the timeline was mr. vazquez was deported in 2009. he then illegally reentered the country. he was arrested for an assault in 2014. we placed a detainer on him which is a request that if he is released from local custody, give the feds a head s up, we take him into federal custody and deport him. unfortunately philadelphia because they re a sanctuary city do not respect detainers, so when mr. vazquez was released in 2014, we didn t know about it. the philadelphia prison officials didn t tell us about it. instead of him coming into federal custody and be deported to honduras, instead he went into the community and as you said, he raped a 5-year-old. laura: mayor kinney reacted to that court ruling that affirmed the ability to have the sanctuary status without a diminution of funding. he did the big snoopy dance. let s watch. a sanctuary city. yes. a sanctuary city, yes. laura: so he s thrilled that they could cut off access to the feds. to the city arrest database. so the federal government, even if they wanted access in this sanctuary policy, they could not have access even to know who is in the state pen. correct. and one of the larger issues at stake here is that in the post-9/11 world it s very, very important that all levels of law enforcement are talking to each other. laura: i thought after 9/11, everyone is supposed to talk to each other. aren t we all supposed to be working together as americans to keep our communities safe? i do not understand the sank sanctuary stuff. i don t. i don t get it. the problem is prior to 9/11 a lot of law enforcement weren t communicating. we ve made a lot of progress. i think that having, for example, a sanctuary city policy where the locals are not communicating with the federal authorities and are in fact defying federal law is a step backwards and we do that at our own peril. laura: you re not a political figure but you live in philadelphia, in the area, what is your sense about the constituents? i mean minorities, the poor, the disadvantaged are the ones victimized the most by illegal immigrant crime. any sense about how they re feeling about this mayor? again i think that what people want is they want to know their law enforcement officers, whether federal or local or state, are enforcing the rule of law in a non-partisan, fair manner, treating everybody fairly. it s fundamentally un-american and unfair to not enforce the law against an entire population. laura: any sense about the nationwide injunctions, sanctuary city, defund? we have one federal district court ruling and other federal district court rulings on immigration. well first of all on that sanctuary city s case that you mentioned earlier, the last word hasn t been written on that. there was a case in my district that was ruled on. but there s lots of these cases going on around the country. they all sort of percolate their way up. laura: they re supposed to. there will shouldn t be a nationwide injunction with one district court judge, or should there be? no, there shouldn t be, you want several courts to look at an issue and eventually these things make their way to the supreme court will have have their final word. laura: are you having fun? the u.s. attorney of philadelphia is a cool job. it s a lot of work but the i m doing my best enjoying it. laura: thank you. great to see you. thank you so much. thank you. laura: we appreciate the u.s. attorney joining us and the job he s doing. we ll be right back.
Business news and analysis. violations. it could land him in prison from 3-5 years. mercedes, that issue will come up whether mr. cohen has decided to do this to get at this out of the way and hope and pray for a pardon down the road. certainly what our calling is done as wonder if they are going to get cooperation. frankly, they could have a discussion with mueller later on and find out what he knew. whether president trump knew of the meeting and what the meeting was taking place. and the payment to stormy daniels. whether the president knew about either of them. and, of course he has come forward and said, look, i think you did know. the back-and-forth can whether there are some continuation of discussion with mueller is left to be seen. he is without a doubt looking at something down the road. no lawyer wants to sit, even with that, no lawyer wants to sit in 3-5 years. that is a significant amount of time. neil: the former doj prosecutor, still better than what he could have made. the plea deal is something, as odd as it looks, a better alternative. almost by definition. if it is a plea agreement, each side is giving up something. realistically, mr. cohen must have thought he had greater exposure than 3-5 years. we have to look at the plea letter. it will be fascinating if and when we get a chance to look at it to see how it characterizes his involvement, what the statement of facts look like. is it really creating the ceiling and floor of 3-5 years. that is very unusual. even if it is an on-call operator plea letter, that is not rule out that he pulls the bullet back out of himself and cooperate before he gets sentence appeared we are not seeing the full pitcher even when we get the plea letter. neil: would he be sentence as soonest today? no, it is very rare that a person leaves guilty and gets sentence on the same day. neil: would he be considered a flight risk? the judge has that option. i would say, generally speaking, in a white-collar case where a client walks in the court voluntarily and is not trying to evade justice in any way, most likely they walked back out. there might be some conditions and restrictions, but it does not ring like the type of case where cohen will be going out the exit instead of going out to his car. neil: it would not be a paul manafort situation, regardless of how this issue works out for him, it is the first wave of indictments we have seen on 18 different counts. even if he were to survive them all, he has to wait and do for the second wave that comes later on? that is exactly right. done with respect to the plea. he is not going to face any additional charges that we know of. it will be done today. neil: we know going in there and sorting out what the deal is and whether he pled guilty? he was the victim, michael cohen, stormy daniels, those were payments made on behalf of the account of donald trump, right? the issue there, and that is why we want to look at the statement of facts on the plea agreement, is whether he is directly implicating the president for campaign finance issue. unfortunately, in today s world, not every hush payment is necessarily anything criminal. a may be embarrassing, it may be a bad moment for politics. but, it is really a question of whether that funding touched on the campaign funding that creates a possible liability for the president. again, not knowing whether he is cooperating or knowing if he is accepting guilt, we have to wait and see in terms of whether he is taking a bullet or aiming a bullet at the president. neil: that is well put. we will wait and see if that is what is going on in new york at the courthouse. we are told michael michael cos already arrived. in the meantime, there is another jury note in a separate issue. the paul manafort trial that has been going on. this is the fourth jury that has deliberations here. at the jury is confused on a number of matters. they wanted clarification from the judge. he is outside the courtroom and the in virginia with legs. if the jury submitted another note. we don t know the question. the prosecution and the defense are heading back. christine s lead attorney was asked if there was a verdict and he told a group of reporters that we would know in a few minutes. it will take a few minutes for the information to get out of the court, because there is no electronic. it has to be manually written down and carried out. earlier today, the judge told jurors that said they had a problem reaching consensus on some of the counts that if that continues to be the case, he will eventually ask them how many of the 18 counts they have reached unanimous verdict on and how many they have not. we don t know if that will happen right now. something else that the judge told the jury earlier, it is your duty as jurors to consult with one another and reach agreement. before the jury came into the room, the judge told the daniel patrick moynihan team and the christine that he does have the ability to reach a partial verdict but has not yet given the option to the jury. there are questions about how stuck they really are. somebody who still saw the note told me that it was edited and it did not appear that the jury was asking about a single count when it was initially drafted. it is not clear if they came to an agreement on a single charge or one single charge. it is a good point in this trial to have a question like that. the manafort defense team has said the longer deliberations go, it is better for their client, paul manafort. the judge instructed the jury to go back and review all of the evidence in the case. we don t know if they have decided that they have gone far enough, but again, we will know in the next couple of minutes. neil: thank you, james, what do you make of that anonymous situation there? 18 counts that the jury is waiting. if they are confused on one, and let s say that they can t unanimously convict on that. it doesn t mitigate the other 17. you could have a case where they are guilty on 12 counts. how do they go? in the federal system, if you get convicted of any counts, you are in trouble. from reading the tea leaves associated with the prior notes, it may be that they have reached the verdict on 17, if they hang on one of the 18 counts, it will not make a difference in the grand scheme of things. the acquittals or convictions within the 17 counts are going to become the law of this case. i think what you will see is a judge probably asking them at their note hasn t already taken care of it, asking them if there is any reason to keep deliberating on this one count. if they say no, we are at an impasse on this one counts, then he will take the partial verdict. partial in this case could mean 17 out of 18 counts. i think it is probably a fairly optimistic sign for the prosecution at this point. if they could get to the point where this jury methodically looked at exhibits and didn t immediately walk away from this case, despite the testimony, and they reach a verdict on 70 counts, i would be surprised if there weren t guilty verdicts. neil: thank you very much. the senator is commenting, i believe on the paul manafort case. let s go to him. he responded that he did stand by his testimony. we hope that today s developments and mr. cohen s plea agreement will not preclude him from an appearance where he is needed from an ongoing investigation. thanks very much, guys. they want i m sorry, they were talking about the palm: michaen situation, not the paul manafort situation. there are a lot of people that are going to look at the manafort situation, because no matter what is decided here, the second case that the government is bringing which they have a lot more ammo, right? i don t know if it is a lot more ammo. they have one additional fact that is pretty, and that is abstraction. if you recall, mr. manafort was not locked in this case. he had a number properties, duly angle bracelets on. i don t see that changing with a conviction of any count, i guess a straight acquittal, he might try to make a motion with the d.c. court to try to get back out into the community. but, realistically, on the immediate horizon, he has the foreign agent registration act violation and obstruction case waiting for him. it will be real interesting to see how strongly each side wants to pursue trial in that case after the start. neil: james, when the jury was admonished by judge see if ellis, it is your duty to agree upon a verdict if you can do so. if you can t, he seems to be saying, move on. that is called an allen charge. it is named after a case that went to the supreme court many years ago. it basically tells the judge that if the judge wants to push them in the direction of anonymous verdict he or she is allowed to burst in. it is very soft language overall. don t abuse your own reality here. stay with it. it is a little bit of a mixed message. it is designed to get them to a mixed verdict, but it is not the end of the world if you can t reach account. it is one of the things that the judge does when they get a sense that the case might be hanging. whether it really works or not is a different question. we are heading towards some sort of verdict by the end of the day or first thing in the morning. neil: if you are found guilty of all 18 counts, i guess he was spent close to 400 years behind bars. an unrealistic bill but that is. he would be staring at prison for the rest of his life. if there is certainly the option for the judge. in all white-collar cases, the sentencing guidelines are driven by the loss amount. the millions of dollars that were in play. back in somewhat hyperinflated the exposure when you start talking about guidelines of 30 years-like. i don t think it will be a serious conviction peered but he is looking at a lot of time. it could be eight years, ten years, 12 years. for a white-collar criminal, that is a serious head. if he gets convicted, he is looking at a sentence. the maximum sentence or the statutes allow or the sentencing guidelines. neil: you don t read it one way or the other in the time. the jury is delivering over something, the prosecution resolved, we are told by the behavior that paul manafort had today, he was unusually in a good mood. you don t read anything at the time i jury just wave stuff. not yet, they want to help with exhibits. there is 383 exhibits if i remember the number correctly. when you have that much to sift through, they are going to methodical and sift through 383 exhibits by count. that will take some time. i think what is more important is when they start giving note saying, we are hung, or we have a she. but the actual amount of time that is gone is not externally. we might have a prosecutor that is nervous or close business tomorrow. today is not a big shop if they come up with a verdict. neil: all right, i do appreciate that. in the middle of this, we are monitoring very, very closely. we are they away from potentially a historic development. the market, if we don t collapse within 20%, the largest bull market in american history. charles, we held onto a lot of our gains. i m wondering whether a lot of this other stuff that we are seeing play out, former top trump lieutenants like paul manafort awaiting their legal future. does that way on investors, do you think? we saw it a lot more earlier in the year, neil, when there was news out in respect to president trump or someone on his legal team. we were as high as 130 on the dow jones, but yesterday, we gave up 38 points, friday we gave up 59 points. thursday, we gave up 49 points when drawing us to the close. i think that is more of a summary of doldrums. we drift into these closes. i would not read too much into it. but it would be a heck of a one-two punch and a test for the market. i think also, when investors sought that cohen was going to get time, up to five years, it does not sound like someone who would flip on the president of the united states, we are talking market people, not lawyers. this could be a real subdued, benign response if wall street was really worried. maybe, we will know more in the morning, though. neil: over the many years we have been following these markets, they have more uncertainty. this is a new wrinkle of uncertainty. of course, improving earnings, the economy, and everything else that you have been talking abou about. that basic, fundamental backdrop remains. then what? if the street at the very least the president faces an extended legal quagmire, and that is a leaf, we are nowhere near that. then what? that is a great question. the regulatory cuts are in place. the tax cuts are in place. business investments have been increased. we are talking investments for capital expenditures, building factories, or you re building things that will make investments last 3-30 years. all of those things are in place. we have a heck of a momentum. it is hard to believe that the economy is about to collapse. you could get an emotional, knee-jerk reaction to the marke market. i certainly would feel if i m an investor, focus on the fundamentals. rather than the headlines on the front page of the newspaper. neil: all right, buddy, thank you very much. i did not mean to have that pause there. we are getting word that there has been a verdict, but they were not able to reach in the case of paul manafort. ten of the 18 counts involved. we don t know which ten they are. we do know that a verdict has been reached on close to half of those other issues. don t know, for example, whether it is one or two sided by the juror. there was some confusion. judge cfl is said, he wanted to go back to the drawing board and keep trying. his quote was, it was your duty to agree upon a verdict if you can do so. they are trying to do so, and apparently they have reached an agreement. on eight of those counts. 18 counts of particular. let s go to peter in the courthouse, outside the courthouse of alexandria, virginia. peter, what do we know? neil, we are getting word from inside the courtroom that the jury team came to a unanimous verdict on eight counts in u.s. versus paul manafort. there were 18 counts that he was being charged with. that means that the jury came back to the judge, they said they could not come to a unanimous conclusion on ten counts. again, information comes out of the courtroom as fast as somebody from our team can write it down and run it out. the first think that we got was word that there is a verdict, again in eight counts out of 18. we have long understood since the trial began that wants the jury determined that they came to a verdict, there would be about a 10-15 minute wait and that is because paul manafort is being held in solitary confinement somewhere in the courthouse. they have to go and get him. we saw his wife walk in with the manafort lawyer. they have their prosecutors in the courtroom already. if things are going according to the plan that was laid out a few days ago, right now, they are going to get mr. manafort and bring him to the courtroom so that he could have a verdict read on the eighth charges that the jury came to a unanimous verdict on. ten of them, still outstanding. we will hear what the judge wants to do with those. neil: peter, thank you very, very much. we are following the situation on michael cohen who bled guilty, we are told, on what would put him behind bars from 3-5 years. potentially, involving payments that were made on donald trump campaign with stormy daniels. we don t know for sure, but that seems to be the senator prior to entering the courthouse. robert, thank you for taking the time. nice to be with you, neil. neil: and the robert metaphor situation, 18 counts, if they reach agreement on ten, if they can, we don t know which of the ten or which of the eight. your thoughts? the option for the court is to decide whether or not to send them back to continue to deliberate on the ones that they have not been able to reach a verdict on. it sounds though, from what i understand them of the proceedings were this morning, the judgment was implying that if they could not reach a verdict as to one or more accounts he was prepared to accept a partial verdict. statement a partial verdict means what? if you can t agree on one, wipe out the others customer it does not. partial verdict means the court would be prepared to accept the verdict of which they reach unanimity. acquittal or conviction and with regard to the ones i could not reach on, those would be subject to possibly a retrial. neil: your gut feeling on this, they have reached an agreement on those matters. we don t know what the matters are. we do know that the judge decides from those counts about prison time. he does. neil: he does not decide today? it will be typically be several months before that will happen. if there is an acquittal, with regard to the remaining counts in which the jury cannot reach in a verdict, they would have to decide whether or not to retry him. neil: a follow-up matter, the second wave of this. a different district. that trial is scheduled to take place in october. neil: y kept behind bars during all of this? he originally was kept on bail. immediately after indictment. the reason he was in detained pending trial is because of allegations. i don t know all of the particulars. the substance was that he was hn touch with potential witnesses. that gives judicial attention in a hurry. neil: he was not a flight risk? he was tampering. that is different type of danger to the community. neil: robert, it is so good. let me switch gears a little bit regarding the michael cohen situation. he is not a cooperating witness. that is what i took away from it. hence the major negotiating. neil: he does not throw the major negotiating factor in all of this leading to a resolution was essentially what the parties would agree to as far as recommended sentencing range. that suggests to me that you would only be doing that, it was a straight up guilty plea and not cooperation. he is not a cooperating witness. i thought that from months. he was going to be a cooperating witness, i don t believe that mueller s prosecutors would have let go of that. they sent it to the southern district in new york which suggested to me that they had come to the conclusion that independently of that case had merit, but they did not suspect that he would cooperate with the government. that could be for two reasons. one, he was not interested in cooperating with the government, or two when he doesn t have anything. neil: 3-5 years in prison as a tourniquet? to go to trial and lose, in which case you would be facing substantially more time. neil: you could be held for president pardon. that as a positivity as well. neil: went there was part of anger on the team. i would assume bygones are bygones. he has not turned on the president or anyone else. it is entirely up to the president. we have no way of knowing what donald trump may or may not do. or when he may or may not do it. there will be a sentencing. sentence will be imposed. there will be presumably no appeal since he probably waved his right to an appeal when entering into a plea agreement. he will decide whether to step in at that point whether to commute to descendants or actually give him a full pardon. neil: now, as far as i can see, robert, these particular cases are financial apples and oranges. talking about collusion et cetera, et cetera. if you are sentence had veered into that area, not so much direct collusion, or working to fix votes or anything like that, but financial transactions? that seems to be the focus of the inquiry. i don t think it was reported as significantly as it should have been. mueller relinquished control over the michael cohen case which suggested to me that they no longer had an interest in that and not with proceed on its own course were unrelated of the mueller investigation. today seems to be two things. it disconnected from the russia collusion investigation, and second, michael cohen it is not, or at least not yet. neil: so, when you say it is a separate issue, the financial part of it, the financial dealings, not rigging boats or trying to gain advantages? it looks like potential campaign violations. all of those sorts of things. again, not all that unlike what we have seen already in the paul manafort case. neil: you saw going after bill clinton, wildly in courts, right? it veered wildly off course. along the way, there were applications made to the special division to expand that mandate. if it is warranted we can discuss whether or not it was appropriate and whether a special counsel should have been appointed to do that, but that is in fact what happened. we are all asking the reasonable question, which is where is this investigation going? and what does it have to say about collusion? neil: robert, can you stay here? john roberts who might have had a chance to talk to rudy giuliani, the president s lawyer on all of this. i just got off the phone and did not speak to him about manafort since we do not know what the outcome of that your decision is. i did talk about the michael cohen s guilty plea. according to rudy giuliani, he has plenty dumb academic he will not serve as cooperating witness toward the prosecution. rudy giuliani told me that his experience as a former district attorney for new york, if you are signing a cooperation deal, you leave the idea of a sentence open, because you want to have the maximum hammer in your hand in case the witness decides not to cooperate. the fact that they have agreed in advance to describe a 3-5 year sentence to cohen, is, is indication that at least in normal rules he has decided not to cooperate, and not ineffective. he might be completing plead ga campaign violation and what impact that might have on the president s case as it would seem to link the the trump camn was some sort of illegal activity. rudy giuliani told him that cohen s problem that he has had on many occasions that the president had no knowledge of the stormy daniels payment ahead of the election. and had only learned about it afterwards. rudy giuliani is on the record saying that the president has paid cohen back to $130,000. he said he doesn t see how it could affect us. the president s team is feeling pretty good about this at this point. i also asked rudy gianni if they had heard back on this responseo between eight conditions. they had not. any idea when it will come? any idea on and they will make a decision on when president trump will sit for an interview? he said they will not way forever. they may just make a decision if mueller takes too much time. they could say, you took so much time to get back, we decided that there would be no interview. cannon shot across the deck to say that you better get back to us or you will get nothing. neil: john roberts, thank you very, very much. robert ray, the former whitewater prosecutor, now if you have michael cohen pleading guilty for tax fraud, making excessive campaign contributions, we don t know all of the details of that. he did not and does not appear to observe do you think that when they were negotiating this that they were trying to negotiate this that they were trying to get that? i think the issue came up as to what michael cohen might have been an position to say about what the president s knowledge was during the campaign. that would be relevant, of course. neil: all all right hang on. on the issue of whether or not there was illegal neil: more coming out of that room behind him there. we have at least one guilty count. peter, why can you tell us? neil, the jury said they had a verdict on eight of the 18 charges and on count 1, the jury has a great unanimous decision that paul manafort is guilty of filing fake tax returns. i m getting handed sheets that have the word guilty on it five times. we have count one, two, three, four and five. 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. and paul manafort has been found guilty by the jury on all five of those counts. it sounds like, outside the court, there is just one person cheering. i could not tell what it was. 5 of 8 so far are guilty for the christine. we seem to have the next few charges any minute. we expect to find out what will happen and what the judge wants to do with these charges in which the jury could not reach decision on in the days of deliberation. neil: we are talking about paul manafort. alexander virginia. the accounts that were originally facing him on this way the microwave of the five guilty counts. separately, the michael cohen situation in manhattan. of course, the president s personal lawyer who had pled guilty to campaign violations and fraud, all of which could land him in the slammer for up to five years. robert, you are hearing all of this. more in the manafort situation. on the manafort situation, we have yet to hear about the remaining eight counts. it looks like there are five guilty verdicts. the other three are likely to be guilty as well. we will find out. he was found guilty as in regard to the tax counts. you file your own tax returns, you know what you file. you signed them. i suspect that the jury probably did have problems with some things related to the bank fraud charges. neil: awaiting financial decisions. a little bit more complicate it. neil: peter? on those three outstanding verdicts, paul manafort has been found guilty has appeared on a charges out of 18, the manafort jury said they could come to unanimous verdict on, they have been found guilty on all of them. the first five were on filed tax returns. these three have to do with a failure to file a foreign banking count report. bank fraud and getting a $3.5 million loan from citizens bank and bank fraud and getting a $1 million loan from the bank of california. we still do not know what the judge wants to do with these ten charges that the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on. they are eight for eight guilty against paul manafort. two of these three that came in carry a maximum prison sentence of 30 years of peace. the first five carry maximum prison sentences. one of them carries five, like us to 20, and two, 30-year sentence is good we are up to 80 years maximum 80 years in prison if my mental matt is correct. neil: i trust your mental math. it would be a lot of time. the numbers are so high. he is not going to get an 80 year sentence. neil: he could better get this? he certainly could decide. the government could choose to entertain the value of his post-cooperation in the verdict. the judge will decide on what to do with the remaining counts. he will probably ask the jury, i have accepted your partial verdict. do you think there is any reason to deliberate with the partial ten? i expect that the answer will be no and he will declare a mistrial as to those counts and discharge the jury. that will then lead the decision back in the hands of bob mueller to decide whether those ten mating counts will be retried in a separate proceeding. neil: all right, let s go back to peter. paul manafort, the former campaign manager for donald trump who is facing a lot of time behind bars or not. you have more details? we now know that there have been a mistrial declared in the ten counts against paul manafort in which the jury said they could not come to a unanimous conclusion about. out of 18 charges, they came back with eight guilty verdicts, and then the other ten, they were so stocked that the judge has now declared a mistrial. the information is coming from our team as quickly as we can possibly get it out. no electronic devices inside the courtroom. it is really a foot race between representatives of all the networks who have people upstairs on the ninth floor and in the overflow courtroom on the sixth floor here in alexandria. eight guilty verdicts against paul manafort, and ten mistrials on the other ten counts. neil: to update those guilty verdicts, count one, failing to file individual tax returns. there was an easy manner to prove. apparently the jury did subscribe to paul s individual tax return with the second count. individual tax returns and in a follow-up tax return. reading through these, a lot of these are tax and financial related. that would make sense. you have to sign a return, you presumably know what it is you sign. it is not up to the defense to say you didn t know. the other count about failing to register as a foreign agent and the fact that he had an overseas bank account. that is of the essence of the government s case. i don t remember or recall exactly what the subject matter is remaining. although, i do think that there was a significant defense raise at least in proportion to those charges of exactly what the government can prove as to what paul manafort knew. neil: early on, they can be tax related, then foreign bank and financial accounts that were misreported or failed to report. financial transactions. when you think about it, what is the defense for that? if you have foreign bank accounts if you are the nominee, and you have the foreign bank account, you don t register them. there s not much to the defense to say that you did not know. neil: by the wbr id= wbr26360 /> way, the president was apparently asked about the manafort situation as /b> he was getting ready to leave for west virginia for this political event. tonight, photographers tried to address this with him. he had very little to say. he ignored shouted questions on this. the motorcade came with i can review just as the manafort decision was announced. there is supposed to be a gag, but we don t know at this point. no reaction from the president. he will be in west virginia for a campaign event. neil: peter has more information for us now. again, focusing on the paul manafort situation. what do you have? neil, we are told that the jury has been dismissed as of a few minutes ago. the jury was sent home, thanked for their service, and they all asked the judge to please keep their name confidential. remember, a few days ago, a handful of news organizations, including the new york times cnn, filed a motion to intervene in the case. they wanted the names of the cheery, among other things in this trial. unseal before the verity. the judge said come out there have been threats against him, he did not see why there would not be threats against of the jurors at their names were released. at the time, he was not inclined to reveal the names. the jurors asked that the names not ever come out. they are now on their way home. neil: that is not unusual. people like their anonymity. all of this is what you would have expected. the jury was unable to reach a verdict on those counts. the judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial. he discharge the jury and sent them home. bob mueller s office will decide whether to retry this. i don t want to speak for his office, but it s probably likely like that will not be done. it would not result in the retrial. they are facing another proceeding against mr. manafort in october in any event. my guess is that we have now heard from this jury and that is the end of the manor. neil: you said that this was something that was much not easier to prove, but more black-and-white with financial matters. 14 of the 18 counts dealt with financial issues. they were black-and-white, tax disclosures, banking investment investments. the star witness in this case would be the documents. that certainly was true in regard to the counter that the jury ultimately was able to reach a verdict of guilty. neil: wasn t that originally the case that bob mueller was building? financial, follow the money? doesn t lead anywhere? that is the question, isn t that? does have anything to do, will it have anything to do with the investigation with the court mandate which is collusion? so far, it seems wbr-id= wbr28160 /> to be that the answer to that question is no. neil: no financial hanky-panky. what mayor giuliani said today about the michael cohen case is that it is accurately reported that michael cohen had nothing to say about donald trump s knowledge beforehand during the campaign. the fact that michael cohen is in trouble and pleads guilty to an offense of campaign violation really says nothing about the campaign or the president himself. i think that is why, you can quite accurately conclude from release, or at least what mayor giuliani is saying, about the president. neil: with michael cohen s lawyers who and in alexandria, virginia, manafort, the former campaign manager for donald trump is looking at a lot of years behind bars right now. again, a number of financial improprieties found guilty on eight counts. the judge declared it would be on another day. it is not exonerate mr. manafort on realty on these accounts. he could be looking at the rest of his life in prison. with us now is new jersey s republican governor, christine todd whitman. governor cuomo what you think about all this? it certainly is a bad day for paul manafort. he s looking at a long time behind bars. it would seem from the testimony that we heard from the documents that we heard that this is absolutely justified at the jury did its duty in a very complicated case. it had to have been mind-boggling for them with a lot of the testimony. where they did come to a decision they did appeared we should thank them for their service. but paul manafort is not going to be a happy camper tonight. we want you know, there is no collusion, governor. these are separate financial decision. the beauty about some of those issues is that they are very black-and-white, very simple, very clear. but again, there are a lot of people that are going to latch onto this and say collusion, there is a financial. coco it was never really about that. these were strictly on the financial of paul manafort and what he did. the fact that he has been associated with the campaign and with the president, there has been tarnished by that. that doesn t prove collusion, it doesn t prove anything beyond the fact behind this case. what else the special prosecutor has, we just don t know. what else he might be bringing forward in the next case, again, i don t have any idea. i don t think anybody really does. they are playing it very quietly. they are not trying to extrapolate from this at all. this is just what it is. it was based on the finances. it does not look good for paul manafort, certainly. it does not have anything to do with collusion. neil: let s bring attorney into this. the former whitewater prosecutor who talked with us by the way. i may get your sense of where this goes now. all of a sudden, we have to look at what could come next. it is more digging around in financial transactions western mark or does it tip the hand of where the mueller folks are going or totally separate? generally speaking, i think it is separate. in the sense it is obvious that they drill down hard on financial trade transactions with respect to the investigation of manafort. neil: so is it from that, what does it mean? if you are robert mueller, you re looking on how a jury has decided on this. even though it was not your case, but it was the buildup of your case, what does it mean? if you think about what the past shows, mueller has been following the evidence wherever it leads. and manafort s case, it led to financial transactions and charges of tax fraud, bank fraud, and other fraud against the government. i think that the fact that he did that in the past, he is perfectly willing to do that in the future. it has been pointed out. these charges are not about collusion, per se. they are about manafort s fraudulent activities. the question is, whether or not any of the charges can be applied against manafort to bring pressure against him in the russia case. there is nothing about russia in this trial and in this verdict. neil: all right, peter, maybe you could tell us more about what is going into that courtroom right now in alexandria, virginia. what can you tell us, peter? i can tell you that manafort according to our producer who is in the court, paul was stone-faced throughout. we also told that he will be sentenced on august 28th, and the judge who made a lot of headlines in this case for some of the comments that he made where he was very critical of the mueller team actually said that the government and the manafort defense both had zealots representation. again, this report will be set us on august 28th, and he does face about 80 years in prison as a maxim appeared on the 28th, he will have a chance to speak, which he did not do at any point during the proceedings here. neil: roberts comment that was very interesting. alice think donna, you almost think judges can be tough on prosecutors without necessarilye way or another. prosecutors are always worried about that. if they know the jury pays attention to signals, especially from the judge, that concerns them. the judge will stop here. but he also showed himself prepared to admit a mistake when he made a mistake as far as the prosecution was concerned. he did it in the presence of the jury. overall, i never really felt that the take away from that was that he was being unfair or unduly unfair to the government. judges have views about cases just like anybody else. their job, of course, is to remain neutral and not put their hand and the scales in one way or the other. it is obviously a concern if they were to tip the scales in favor of the prosecution, and in favor of the defendant. all defendants are deserving of a fair trial. prosecutors do not suffer from an unfair trial. i think the judge was hard on them. mostly in terms of moving it along. term, it prevail. neil: i m sorry, i left you out with all of these breaking news demo months. we are told that the senates is being moved to august 29th. what do you expect? i think that this is an interesting illustration. walking side-by-side with cohen, we see how many years that manafort is facing. that is exactly the risk that a defendant runs by going to trial. i want to point out for viewers that this is an opportunity for manafort to actually turn over some further information. it is a last chance that he can cooperate with prosecutors to have them lighten a potential sentence in their recommendation. it is honestly not a slam-dunk at all. speaking of slam-dunk s, i want to point something else out for viewers as well. in the charges here, the return verdict, we have an interesting pattern here. certain things that the media covered that seems to be a slam-dunk, filing reports on foreign bank accounts, those were not slam-dunk. most of those where the mistrial charges. the conspiracy charges, every single one was a mistrial. it was only the more now once, the filing false tax returns that actually returned guilty verdicts here. that is an interesting illustrator and potential piece of elements as we go into trial number 2. prosecution has a thousand pieces of evidence and documentations which is 600 more than we had for this child. neil: s bank fraud, bank fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to hide financial fraud from a financial institution. there was confusion there on the other counts. it was pretty cut and dry. neil: you knowingly sighed something. the instructions that the judge gives which the jury followed and did follow. you have to agree beyond reasonable doubt that he had criminal intent to commit bank fraud. in this case, there was a hard thing to prove. neil: you have to prove intent. it has to go beyond signing a piece of paper. you have to pin the tail on the donkey. you have to prove that he had that intent. neil: you went after bill clinton. i m curious as to what point, if you are the president, and you are seeing these results, rudy giuliani, should they talk about mueller or not? your decision to talk or not to talk? a couple of things going on here. one, i agree with governor whitman that independently, paul manafort has merit, meaning that there were underlying crimes here and had nothing to do with russian collusion. the jury s in the manafort case had a guilty verdict in the counts that they had conviction on. and with michael cohen, they entered a guilty plea. what does this have to do with russian collusion customer if there is no evidence of russian collusion, i think that weighs more in the balance of the president s continuing to apply pressure on the special counsel and refusing to grant a voluntary interview. i think that is where that comes up. the third thing to take a look at here and pay attention to is this critical period of time between now and the sentencing date, and also the second manafort trial. there is a fair amount of pressure on paul manafort if he had anything to provide, provided now. we will have to wait and see. my guess is that the critical time will be between now, the sentencing date, and the proceeding in d.c. in october as to whether or not he has anything further to say to the government. neil: as to all of this, what brought michael cohen down, or the president s secretary, pleading guilty to charges of campaign finance fraud, to hush money payments to stormy daniel stormy daniels, and playboy model karen mcdougall. it is out there. you never would have thought that this is where things would end up. the whitewater experience, who would ve ever thought a land deal would ve ended up in the situation in which you are investigating the president? neil: i am just wondering, if you are the president or his legal team, they have been talking about the mueller to be 29 hours. the president was perfectly happy, what you think that was about? we have talked about this before. the president rides this torment. i do. neil: would it be he and his talk? no. i think he applies pressure and labor day weekend will come and go. if there is no agreement by that point, i think the president says, thank you, very much. we will follow-up. we will follow-up with a response. the special counsel brings fax to the attention directly to the deputy attorney general who presumably will submit it to congress to release of the public for the congress to consider after the midterm elections whether or not impeachment proceedings will be brought. that will be the substance of it. i imagine that the republic will be debating that. neil: the house and the senate goes nowhere, right? exactly. even if it changes hands, the question is whether or not it will be sufficient to warrant a vote in favor of impeachment in the house of representatives. look at how that turned out for bill clinton. there is a whole another political conversation to be had over that. see what i hear you, robert ray. thank you very much. not about collusion, just about cash. this is about cash payment. the farias others that involved paul manafort and campaign
but he knew he was in the bathroom and he was able to get out of the building, again, because these exit doors were working well. i can t tell you how thankful i am just to do that one task homeland security told us to do. because in the past you couldn t push through the exit doors? they weren t easily opened. they had safeties on them so they couldn t open either way. but now he was able to get out. i mean, he could be alive because of this. where were you when you found out this had occurred? i was heading up to the service. i m there every i was there last night for service. i go up there around 10:00 and in the morning and one of the vice presidents that i work with on facilities now that i stepped down, he called. he worked for city emergency management. and he said he just got word there s an active shooter at tree of life. go up there and see if this is true. i tried to get up. i only live a block away from the synagogue. i tried to get up shady avenue and was police cars everywhere. guns drawn, rifles, i was surreal. we first thought it was a training, a drill, whenever it came over the police scanner. we thought we couldn t even believe it. have you heard about any victims inside, their positions? if you knew of them? no. i m sure i know everyone there. i know everybody in the building. i know that this i almost don t want to know but i have to know the tragedy that occurred inside. what have you been talking with with the other people that are past presidents or, you know, in a position of power within the jewish community here in squirrel hill? what has everyone been saying to you? well, i mean, all we had up until now, we had a i tried to call the i couldn t reach, but the other past presidents, i spoke to the current president. but we re all either not in the area or we were en route and we just couldn t get in there. i mean, i was talking like i said, i was walking up shady and all of a sudden the shouts from the police officers, just get out of here. you knew it was not a drill. have you had issues in the past with people coming in, people that were suspicious in anyway or did anything that caused you to be concerned? no, we ve never had any threats. i will tell you i ve always had a very watchful eye because of what s going on in the current climate, you know, you see these bombs being mailed across the country. and our security was really just that nobody s ever tried, you know, it was just the fact that nobody ever tried to do anything. because, you know, like most religious institutions, we have an open door. i asked the ceo of the jewish federation i ll ask you. can you describe for people that are watching that aren t from pittsburgh that tonight know squirrel hill what this means that they would be targeted in this manner? just means that moving forward, this is a real occurrence and that we need to learn from this. you want to be proactive and do things in light of this happening, it will be needed for security i m sure. because this is reality. you re glad, if you hadn t done that one thing, which many would think is a simple security measure, who knows how many people used those exit doors to get out. right. it was something that i was listening to the walk-through, i was listening to the homeland security experts. a lot of this comes down to ability to afford security. but to free up a door many times is free. just use it. and it doesn t cost anything. and we did it. and a guy that we love in the c cong congragation, you know, augie could be alive because of it. and he was not in the basement. are there ways to get out of the basement? there are, yes. yes, their are. new life congregation, their sanctuary is in the lower floor, they know the route to get out. what s next for you? next for me is going to be more training, saying this it s not that when i would get up as president in front of leadership saying this could happen, now it s like this did happen. we have to put forth efforts to secure our building and the other leaderships across squirrel hill and across the country are going to have to do the same. thank you for taking the time to talk to us. thank you. all right. we re going to send it back. this is cnn breaking news. hello, again, everyone. thank you for being with us. this breaking news we re going to begin with, a gunman opens fire in a synagogue in pittsburgh. officials report 12 casualties and at least four dead. cnn s nick valencia is tracking the story for us. what are you learning? so disturbing. how many times have we reported on similar situations, a mass shooting in an american city, this time in pittsburgh, in the squirrel hill neighborhood, a high concentration of jewish community there in that neighborhood. here s what we know. according to the website for tree of life synagogue, their saturday service, their shabbat service which is the busiest day for any synagogue, started at 9:45 a.m. the fir reports we got here at cnn, reports of an active shooter, came in just after 10:20 this morning. here s what we know at this time. according to our correspondent shimon prokupecz, at least 12 people were shot. what we can confirm is least four people died. at least three police officers injured in gunfire. the extent of their injuries has not been made clear. the shooter we can report is in custody, and according to kdka, that alleged gunman has been described as a white male, a bearded heavy set white male. he is in custody and is currently, at last report, being transported to a hospital with unspecified injuries. this is still a live scene. you re looking at images there on your screen. if it s still an active, chaotic scene there in the squirrel hill neighborhood of pittsburgh. we can only assume that police are continuing to sweep the area for other potential threats, perhaps even devices in that general vicinity. the president has tweeted about the incident. the vice president and the governor of pennsylvania, we understand, is en route. we just heard from the past president of the tree of life synagogue saying there are three competing services happening on saturday around 9:45 and upwards or nearly 100 people could have been in the building at the time of the shooting. again, this is all still a very fluid situation here. a very chaotic scene. another scary day here in america, fredricka. all right, thank you so much. we ll check back with you. let s talk more about all this. i want to bring in retired fbi supervisory special agent. former u.s. art marshal, art rodd rodderic. and former secret service a gent and department of homeland security official charles marino. glad all you could be with me. we just heard, you know, information coming from our sources. 12 shot. 4 confirmed dead. among the injured are three police officers. and so, james, does this tell you that there was an exchange perhaps of gunfire between this gunman who authorities say is now in custody and these at least three officers injured? absolutely. we have somebody who has committed murder, attempted murder and assaulted police officers and responding law enforcement. people have been texting and saying, you know, who has purview here. would fbi have oversight for something like this. as we were watching the feed there, i can tell you, i saw robert jones who s the fbi special agent in charge of the pittsburgh division on scene. he s the former assistant director of the branch at headquarters. the fbi will assist in this case until there s a determination which we re probably moving that direction that this could possibly be a hate crime. these are murders. obviously these are state charges. the police, it s their scene right now. the fbi will offer whatever type of response capabilities, investigative capabilities, for processing any type of evidence going forward. they re going to be working a collaborative effort right now until we determine what type of charges are going to be leveled against this gunman. you have multiple things going on. you have the investigation of the who, the what happened, the eagainst of events and of course anything that may have preceded what took place today. all at the same time. but what we heard from the former president of the tree of life synagogue who says just in recent years did they take action to have more exits, at the same time open doors, it s a place of worship. they want to welcome everyone to come in. only on special, you know, high religious holidays would they have security at the door. so today may have been a very porous day where everyone is welcome. how will investigators approach that, knowing there s so many ways of entry and exit? many religions have open door policies which means they welcome people to worship, particularly during the saturday morning service. i think local law enforcement and various communities around the country work with the fbi and work together to try to ascertain specific threats against specific synagogues. as i mentioned earlier, the percentage of anti-semitic attacks have gone up significantly. in 2017, we had 12 anti-semitic attacks in the state of new york alone. every synagogue has a security team regularly assessing what that threat environment looks like. interacting with local law enforcement in their community to ascertain what the threat level looks like who, i would imagine, james, are in touch with the fbi to track hate crime threat reporting. and evy, you know, while we heard from the former president who said, you know or evy, whether, while we heard from the former president earlier who said he worked with homeland security on advice on how to protect this place of worship, yet at the same time, you know, honor the open door policy allowing people in. how will investigators go about trying to see whether there s any correlation between what happened today and the shooter s acts today, whether there were any threats ahead of what happened today. if there s any history with the suspected gunman or gunmen, plural? they re going to look at that, but i think the most important thing to really look at here is that sometimes you don t need a threat. sometimes there is no warning. he had actually worked with security. i think that s important. so reaching out to local authorities. saying hey, you know what, we re calling from a church or synagogue or school, wherever you are, and asking them, inviting them over, will you come over and speak to us about this and will you speak to our staff about this. this way, everybody is trained. something as simple as making sure your emergency doors work can save lives. it s not just one door. know where multiple doors are. walk those doors. teaching them what s cover, what s concealment. that way, when you re an environment and something does happen, you can respond. you don t have the time to stop and think what do i do. because those seconds count. those seconds matter. it s super important for these communities. invite them, create relationships with them. also, they can train them what to look for. anything odd or any suspicious behavior or anything that might seem, you know, concerning. when you create this relationship, everybody can work collaboratively together. because i think what we ve been doing historically is putting the onus on law enforcement. law enforcement can solve this problem. law enforcement can figure this out. and we can t do that because law enforcement is most situations a reactive part of this. the problem happens, they try to get there as quickly as possible. we need to shift as we re seeing more mass shootings historically happen, we need to shift that perspective and say what can we do collectively to be proactive and try to mitigate or prevent them. and, art, while police say this is an active shooter scene, even though they have one suspected gunman in custody, what s the level of questioning, what kind of access what kind of information potentially can they get out of this suspect before they leave the scene, before they say all clear? yes, they re in the phase now of making sure that the scene is safe so there s a couple different things going on. not only are they clearing the facility, the synagogue, but also the parking lot surrounding it, and any neighboring houses to make sure everybody s accounted for and this individual was acting alone. they re also questioning him, as jim mentioned earlier, you know, we ve been talking about this public safety issue. as we did with the mail bomber. but, you know, they want to make sure this individual acted alone. that there was no other people helping him out. and that, you know, the area is safe. and one other comment on the top of the hour, evy was talking about the same thing, about the security surveys. both with my time with the department of security and the department of justice as a u.s. marshal, we did these security surveys all the time for places of worship. and that is key. because these surveys will talk about issues of exit doors, surveillance cameras, actual security at these facilities. it s incumbent upon these places of worship and schools to reach out to local law enforcement or to federal law enforcement when you get the surveys done. charles, what about resources? this happens when already the country, law enforcement, so many divisions, on heightened alert as a result of the 13, you know, pipe bombs that have been mailed across the country to a variety of people including, you know, former presidents. so now you ve got according to james information a little bit earlier, you ve got new york authorities who have now descended on protecting a number of synagogues throughout the city as a result of this shooting taking place in pittsburgh. talk to me about how resources are being fanned out, how multitasking, you know, is the real challenge today. good morning. thank you for the question and, you know, my thoughts and prayers go out to everybody affected by this event. and thanks to law enforcement for doing an excellent job. resores certainly are an important issue for local law enforcement. i think in the mail bombing case, you saw a perfect example of a prioritization where they needed to find this individual. you saw the joint terrorism task force with all of its resources. the investigation goes upon which is requiring resources. those resources will be brought to bear to see this through to a final resolution. in this case here, evy brought up a good point about coordination with local authorities. local authorities are very well trained regarding what types of resources to respond with dependent on the situation. here, it cannot be stated enough that the training and preparation and early engagement by many jewish organizations with the department of homeland security, many, many years ago, being aware of this very real threat that they face at their synagogues and other places of worship, were prepared with how to survive this type of event. at the end of this, it s going to be very interesting to find out how many lives were saved because of their preparation and practice for this type of event. but law enforcement is certainly there with the numbers that are necessary to stop the threat. josh campbell, cnn law enforcement analyst and former fbi supervisory special agent, has also joined the table here. you know, josh this is an immediate priority, simultaneous to the immediate priority of all these packages that have been mailed out which investigators continue to look at, as they have a suspect. we just heard from the fbi director wray who said yesterday don t be surprised if there might be other packages out there. so how simultaneously are these investigators happening separately? at the same time, perhaps there may even be, you know, a crossing of resources. the fbi has 56 field offices around the country. some 400 satellite offices. they re called residential agencies. these are the offices and communities around the country with the agents who work with state officials. they re used to working in their do main. what would happen here is authorities in pittsburgh in the field office will be working with their counterparts locally. that information is shared to larger networks around basically it s been set up where if you have information, you can blast that out to partners. you want to know if they know anything that might be helpful to you. that s all going on right now. lastly, there are so many resources that are available to law enforcement. it s what they call mutual aid. if something happened in one location, officers can ask for assistance. i m not so much concerned with the lack of resources. one thing that s interesting is if you re back at fbi headquarters right now and the department of justice, this is the central nervous system. you are monitoring both of these threats. as we speak right now, i have no doubt that cnn is in the strategic operations center and they re seeing what s happening on the ground, they re communicating with officers. trying to get that picture. very much an all hands on deck approach to be able to cover two high-profile incidents at the same time. sam, take us to the scene of what s taking place. while authorities say they have one person in custody, we don t know if that person is cooperating, providing any more information about digital footprint, about whether that person was working in concert with anybody else. at the same time, there s the immediacy of attending to the injured. we know there are 12 people shot. 4 dead. those are the latest numbers. authorities of course don t want those numbers of fatalities to rise. anybody that s injured is stabilized. they re going to take care of that first. james, you mentioned this earlier, they re also going to make sure whomever is coming out of this building is not implicated in the crime. those things can happen at the same time. while simultaneously trying to make sure this wasn t an isolated incident. we don t know this individual was in touch with anybody else or whether he inspired any other attacks around the country. we talked about that with respect to the bombing suspect and whether he inspired copycat attacks. this is a massive media event. i would imagine the fbi in coordination with local law enforcement around the country is advising folks on the ground to make sure no threats come up over the next hours as members of the jewish community participate in afternoon services on shabbat and other members of religious communities are also worshipping. if this is defined as a hate crime, also implicates other places of worship as well, i would imagine authorityings are coordinating again about any threats that come up. the digital footprint, you brought that up earlier, so important in investigating today. not just trying to understand the history. but sometimes it also raises a flag of what might be planned next. so within mere moments yesterday of mr. sayic s name being released to the public, we already had through alexis and nexus checks his bankruptcy filing. we had pictures of him, his social media platform. cnn was able to pull him out of a crowd in a rally and isolate that image. the digital footprint here is critical. goes back to motivation. we look at this. the pieces seem to fall into place. who were the victims. who were the people that were targeted. but people expressing the past week during this bombing square, law enforcement got to keep an open mind on this. law enforcement got to make sure they don t get so hyper focussed in one direction they close their bandwidth down and don t take everything into account. that s why profiling has become that for law enforcement. we want to make sure, look, active shooters, 4% of them are women, but immediately you re not going to rule that out and say this couldn t be. you ve got to make sure you keep everything in play and follow the evidence wherever it takes you. so evy while this was an active shooter scene right now, one person, according to authorities, is still or is in custody. can you explain for us what are law enforcement looking for? before they feel certain that they can give it an all clear? because the threat, the immediate threat, is over in that neighborhood. they re going to want to try to speak to him. hopefully he s willing to talk. that s the most important thing, asking him those questions right off the bat, who s working with you. are there any bombs. are there any other guns? just those immediate things. if he s speaking, that will be helpful to law enforcement. at the same type, you have to cooperate what he s saying, because obviously this is an individual who just opened fire. you can t take what they say also as the truth. getting that information verbally from him, trying to asset if there are other people involved, going around the areas, securing the area, finding out where he lives, his residency. they immediately want to go there, assess the environment, looking at the dimg tall footprints, looking at who he s talking to, contacting family and friends, doing all these things. you don t want to leave the scene until you really know what s going on and you feel comfortable leaving the scene. so them staying there and taking their time is a wise thing because they re trying to make sure they check all those boxes, not make it you can t make any assumptions, right? you can t assume, okay, we ve got him, good. also, how many weapons did he have? did he have any explosive devices? if you re looking at a large amount, there might be a question, well, did he get resources? did someone else help him? any other individuals involved? once you can say with some level of certainty, okay, we can remove, it s also rendering the area safe. this is a residential area. people live there. before law enforcement takings that huge printout, there s all these personnel. they want to make sure everybody else there is also safe. so it s not just securing him but securing the area and the people that live there. right. multiple teams had fanned out. josh. we can t underscore the potential value here, having a subject that s been taken alive. sometimes in there s an exchange of gunfire, a shooter will be neutralized. if they re able to take him into custody, now they can interview him. a dead body doesn t speak. it s almost a priority to see if you can extrapolate more information? the focus of law enforcement officers will be to neutralize the threat. they re not going to go into the scene thinking let s try to take this person alive. their main focus is does this person pose a threat. i m saying this is a benefit of having someone you can then interview. you can ask, why were you doing what you were doing? some people are proud of what they ve done and they want to tell you about it. other people may clam up. other people may regret the decisions they ve made. some people might lawyer up. it s a potential value to be able to ask questions. might it also be on display this is a particularly combative individual if we re talking about three police officers that were shot. the problem with these active shooter situations, the person committing them is some type of zealot or crazy person, going in there with the notion they re going to take their own life. that makes it very difficult. look where we are, just over a year from the law enforcement shooter. we still don t have answers there. why? he killed himself. had no digital footprint. and we re still struggling to piece it together. people argue and say why are you so focused on the motivation? well, it s causality. it helps us get in front of hopefully preventing the next one. a year ago, the attack in lower manhattan a few blocks from here. new york city decided to put up concrete blocks around the bike path. it s awful to say this in a free and open society where we cherish our civil liberties. but these are soft targets. and people are looking at them as such and going, maybe i can t get away with this at the airport. i can t take out my vengeance at the fed or museum where there s security but maybe i can walk into a house of worship or school or some place that doesn t have adequate security. this is terrorism in so many different ways. all right, moments ago, the former rabbi of tree of life synagogue, chuck diamond, spoke to reporters and he had this to say. 9:45. so jews come late to services so for a lot of people that s probably a good thing today. at the time, there s three services in the building. there s maybe 10 to 15 i would say for each service possibly at that time. people would be in the outer area. maybe just coming in. there are a few staff people who might be greeting people. is one entrance on on shabbat, there s no security. i have to tell you, i always in the back of my mind had something like this might happen, you know, because of the way of the world today. one of the past presidents, michael eisenberg, told us he did conduct training. yes. including homeland security. yes, people came in, sponsored by the jewish community the federation of pittsburgh. has a very active program. what kind of training did they go into in. well, i tell you, i wasn t there for that particular training. but it s something, again, as a jewish professional, what s going on in the world, even though we ve been fairly safe here in pittsburgh. it s just something in the back of your mind to see somebody i once had during the rmgs school time, religious school time, somebody pulled up in a long trench coat and went to go to the trunk of his car. i knew him, but i went out to check it out just to make sure. you just always have to be careful. i got a call from an old congregant who said what they heard i m concerned i m concerned about the people who were the early the people who came on type. most of them were older. and i just talked to one of their sons who doesn t know where his mother is. it s a concern. so many people showing up, not knowing if their loved one is all right. right. what is your words for them? just have some faith and hang in there and try to be of comfort for them. it s a very difficult time for all of us. for everybody. but for those who knew people who were there. i called people i knew trying to see if they re okay, you know, and one is a doctor and he said he saw somebody s name on the list who was taken to the emergency room who, again, was one of those people who was always there on time. have you talked to the con a congregation about what if this happens? no. i had in my mind what i would do in helping people. it s kind of frustrating, you know, in some ways wish you were there to help people. you always think, like, you can be of help to some degree. i worked in a synagogue in detroit, michigan i wasn t there in 1962, but a rabbi was killed by somebody who came in and we re hearing unconfirmed reports this was fuelled by hate. that s what it sounds like. there s a lot of anti-semitism out there and a lot of hate out there. just look in the news everyday. it s sobering that it s touched our community. i ve gotten text from people from india, from canada. wanting to know if everybody is okay. the man who is the past president says now instead of saying what if it happens, it did happen and hopefully get more done. during the week, the doors are locked. on shabbat, it s a little bit more of a chore because you don t necessarily have anybody in the office. to let people in. we can t let that happen. we have to take all precautions at all times unfortunately. have you been able to reach anybody you know who may have been in there? one person who was always on time with his son coming in from sewikly said he got caught up in traffic. he said, i m going to services. the police said no, you re not. and he went home. describe the jewish community in squirrel hill. it s a really nice i grew up here. i live right there, around the block. the house that i grew up in. and it s a wonderful jewish community. there s i think we all get together across the board whether it s orthodox or hasidic or conservative or reform. and we have wonderful jewish community centers. it s very vibrant, very active. do you know if any children all right, we re listening to the former rabbi saying it s a very sobering day. a lot now has to be reconsidered. he too recalls it being an open door policy at that church and says security was not something that would generally happen. high level security on shabbat. all of that now he says has to be reconsidered. so, again, active shooter scene there in pittsburgh, in this community, even though one person is in custody. meantime, we just got in this tweet from the president. this, now, perhaps his third tweet of the morning in respect to what s happening in pittsburgh. saying this now, events in pittsburgh are far more %-p. spoke with mayor and governor to inform them that the federal government has been and will be with them all the way. you re looking at a very rainy situation there at andrews. where the president s motorcade on the way before the president boards air force one. perhaps he ll have more comments. it s always an opportunity that reporters try to take. but given very rainy, nasty situation, who knows how difficult that will be. but of course we re on it. meantime, we re going to continue to talk here with my panel. shimon prokupecz, cnn crime and justice reporter. it was through your sources we learned 12 people were shot, a confirmation of 4 people dead. what are your sources telling you now? i think we need to be clear to viewers, there are no other shooters at this point, they believe they have the one person responsible for this in custody. law enforcement there is going through the building. there are several floors in the building. they re going through. there was some suspicious packages. we ll probably get an all clear here pretty soon. they ve gone through the building. we do expect the scene to open up for investigators to come in and start processing the crime scene. the other things we learned is that the shooter here, during th uttered anti-jewish phrases. certainly why police were taken him into custody. clearly this is now developing into obviously some kind of hate crime. so we d likely see the fbi come in and take over the investigation. let s listen in right now. be speaking, making a statement at the farmers of america. future farmers that have the big conference. we ll be making a major statement. it s a terrible, terrible thing what s going on with hate in our country frankly and all over the world. and something has to be done. something has to be done. it looks like results are coming in, they re more devastating than anybody thought in the morning. in the morning they thought it was the shooter but they had the shooter, they soon would, but the results are very devastating. you re seeing the numbers come in. so we ll be speaking to you at the conference, the future farmers of america, conference, and it s just a shame to watch this, to see this. for so many years, so much of it, absolutely a shame. have any questions? mr. president do you think you need to revisit gun laws? please? gun laws, mr. president. gun laws. well, again, this has little to do with it if you take a look. if they had protection inside the results would have been far better. this is a dispute that will always exist i suspect. if they had some kind of protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation. they didn t. and he was able to do things that unfortunately he shouldn t have been able to do. i hear the police were outstanding. i hear the police did an incredible job. as you know, numerous police were badly injured. but, again, law enforcement did a fantastic job. we re going to have a very complete statement for you. results are coming in of what took place, how it took place. again, law enforcement was outstanding. as always. i mean, as usual, and as always, law enforcement was really outstanding. they stepped up to the place. but pittsburgh, great community, incredible people. i spoke to the governor. i spoke to the mayor. to see this happening again and again and again is just a shame. mr. president instead of seeing it happen again and again, end this kind of violence? well, it s a violence you look at the violence all over the world. i mean, the world has violence. the world is a violent world. and you think when you re over it, it just sort of goes away, but then it comes back in the form of a mad man, a whacko. i think one thing we should do is stiffen up laws in terms of the death penalty. when people do this, they should get the death penalty and shouldn t have to wait years and years. now the laws lawyers will get involved and everybody s going to get involved and we ll be ten years down the line. i think they should stiffen up laws and i think they should very much bring the death penalty into vogue. anybody who does a thing like this to innocent people in temple, in church. we had so many incidents with churches. they should be they should really suffer the ultimate price. they should pay the ultimate price. i felt that way for a long time. some people disagree with me. i can t imagine why. this has to stop. we re going to have a statement at our stop with the young farmers. towards the beginning of your presidency, you met with the nra. you said maybe you were the president who can help solve this. do you see that now as a possibility? it s a case where again, nobody knows exactly what took place yet. it s too soon. this is a case where they had an armed guard inside, they might have been able to stop him immediately. this had been a case where if there were an armed guard inside the temple, they would have been able to stop them. maybe there would have been nobody killed except for him frankly. so it s a very, very very difficult situation. when you look at it, we can look at it two ways. again, if he had somebody to protect people. now, isn t it a shame you even have to speak that way? that we even have to think of that inside a temple or inside of a church? but certainly the results might have been far better. do you think al churches and synagogues should have armed guards? i hate to think of it that way. i will say that. so we ll see you with the future farmers. is that what you re suggesting? i mean, in this world, this is a world with a lot of problems. and it has been a world with a lot of problems for many years. many, many years. you could say, frankly, for many centuries. you re looking at what goes on, but certainly you want protection. they didn t have any protection. they had a maniac walk in. they didn t have any protection. that is just so sad to see. so sad to see. results could have been much better. it is a very, very difficult thing. for me, as president, to watch any of this go, you know, before i ran for office, i d watch incidents like this with churches and other things and think, what a shame, what a shame. but it s even tougher when you re the president of the united states and you have to watch this kind of a thing happen. it is so sad to see. so we ll see you at the with the young fampl rmers. do you think there s anything you can do with the nra? we re always talking. we re always talking to the all right, the president on his way to air force one there, on his way to the future farmers of america. before that, taking a moment there to answer questions from reports there with a variety of thoughts on the shooting that has taken place in pittsburgh. everything from the world is a violent world, saying perhaps what needs to be intentertained stiffer laws on the death penalty. bring the death penalty into vogue he says. he also says, you know, it s a case where no one knows. however, he also said if perhaps there was an armed guard inside the synagogue, they would have been able to stop him. meaning the one gunman that we understand at least is in custody right now. all right, back with me now. with my panel here. josh, sam. and shimon. sam, your first reaction there right? the president focusing not just on the consequences and not necessarily drilling down on the causation. you know, he did start out talking about, you know, this being a display of hate. but then went to stiffer laws. your thoughts? i think it s irresponsible. this is a live investigation. he made statements at the beginning this was far more devastating than he previously thought. we don t know exactly what he was briefed on. there is still people that have not been able to get in touch with their family members. there s still people waiting to hear if their relatives, if their children, if their parents may have been involved in this incident. saying it s more devastating than originally thought, i can t imagine how that must feel. this was his greatest hits. he went to everything he typically does in this situation. the death penalty. arming more people to prevent gun violence. going back to this notion this isn t the result of a narrative under way in america. this isn t the result of a hateful rhetoric increasing in this juncture. he s looking to point fingers. again, while this is an ongoing investigation and we don t have a whole lot of information yet. people are looking to the president to then address a causation of hate. this is a place of worship. and someone has gone into i place of worship, disrupted peace, killed, injured. people are looking for the president to talk about, you know, how do we get to unifying some kind of, you know, bringing people together message, josh? that s right. what we saw there makes it harder for law enforcement. when there s a major incident, the law enforcement community will reluctantly share information. they ll only share so much as much as they need to to inform the public about a threat. to let them know, okay, they re on the case. the reason why it gets frustrated now, to get information, is because they really hold that close to the vest because they don t want to speculate. they want to get the facts straight. i remember a number of these incidents where we re thinking, okay, we re pretty sure if this is the case. until we know what the truth is, law enforcement isn t going to go out there and speculate. we saw the opposite just now. and that s what s unfortunate here. i know working with teams under president george w. bush, under president obama, the white house teams, any time the president would step to the mic, they would have a reason, a message. determine what do they need to tell the american people because their words matter. i don t know if there was a strategy behind that but there was speculation. he s the commander in chief. he can say whatever he wants. law enforcement isn t going to overrule him. it s just fascinating to see that speculation about what s happened here. however, though, he has been breech briefed. he said we re learning more i think he s learned more loosely he says that. it is challenging because he instead of uniting folks and saying, you know, we ll get through this rt, we re coming oa pretty scary week in this country and still in the midst of. for law enforcement this is a very perilous time. when you talk to senior law enforcement officials, they will tell you what we re facing and what we re seeing on the threat stream, it s really scary what s going on. why you are making that point, year beiwe re looking at images. this is a large sin goynagogue e squirrel hill neighborhood. this is where a shooting took place earlier today. not long after services were to get under way. we understand they were going to be they were probably simultaneous at least three services taking place in this very sizable synagogue. police have said sources that shimon has spoke within confirming 12 people shot. three officers shot and four people had been killed. so continue with your thoughts. just to get back to that scene. to get back to what s going on. police have spent sort of the last several hours, couple of hours, going through, floor by floor, of this synagogue. they came across some suspicious packages. some stuff belonging to him. medical bags as well. obviously they were treating the injured. they don t believe there are any bombs or explosives inside the building. we should be seeing them exit the building where investigators are processing the crime scene. that makes it difficult, too. a shooting takes place. people drop what they have. their purses, they drop, they run, et cetera. they might be looking for a bag or anything in association with a suspect, they also have to treat everything, right, everything as potentially suspect. so it takes time. that s why now a couple hours after the fact it is still considered an active scene. especially we re hearing reports there may have been a jewish ceremony for newborn boys happening. there may be additional packagings that people brought into that building which would further complicate things. if you think about what happened just last week, right where we re seated, we talked a lot about what security officials here are wondering why do you evacuate a building if there s a device somewhere. they have to methodically work through and tick through every squash inch of a facility. a massive compound. they re going to have to go through all that. to your great point, they don t know what s suspicious and what s not. they treat everything suspicious unless they have that comfort level, okay, now we can move on. it shows the taskings, to show up to a situation where you don t know what you re dealing with. evy, so as it relates to the president s comments, he was there on the tarmac before getting on to air force one, with a scattering, you know, of thoughts about this investigation. it being, you know, worse than he initially thought. also, you know, going to thoughts of that s why you have to have stiffer laws, death penalty. had there been an armed guard in his view at the synagogue, perhaps this wouldn t be so bad. what s your experience in terms of a president s message, how it can either help or complicate matters? i think when he received his briefing and making sure what he does or doesn t address. there s a couple of things. one of the things that concerned me sometimes when i see when we go on air, we discuss these things, is when people address these shooters as crazies. and when we take and the president used that word, you know, a world of this is a world that is a violent world. and you have whackos. right. so the concern with that is when we put people in these boxes, we re not solving the problem. the capital punishment, that s after the fact. when people commit these egregious crimes, the more severe punishment will not help. but identifying individuals and labbi inlabeling them as such it going to be able to help us. but being able to understand why individuals do this, understanding who he is, is there a mystery of mental health? is there hate? what has happened in that person s life? if we can gather knowledge and identify the people who do this, understand the profiles. are there profiles? are there patterns? and then create a society where we can prevent this type of stuff. so calling people names or calling people crazy or whacko, that doesn t help. you re just putting somebody in that random category. as far as having somebody at the front door, security, you can have that. what i ve learned i do a lot of schools and religious places reach out to me and they will ask me, they ll tell me, what do we do? one of the biggest problems they have is money. they cannot afford to pay somebody to stand by that door all the time. resources is a big problem. we also see in this incident there was, what, three officers so far from what we understand were injured. they had a problem probably with this individual and were injured during a gunfight. having that security personnel, church, synagogue, school, any other soft target, that s a big undertaking. yes, it is. well, you know, on the issue of security, we ve heard a few different things. even a member of that synagogue. all saying there have been in the past some threats, anti-semitic behavior. we also heard the thought that police presence only takes place on high religious holidays. on a day like this, a regular saturday services, they don t have the same kind of intensified police security. but we do know, you know, across country at some synagogues we re learning right now as a result of what s taking place, they are heightening security. is there a regular practice perhaps at many synagogues across the country, given there has been a history of anti-semitic behavior, you know, from coast to coast? and we heard from the former president of this synagogue who said he consulted with homeland security about the best measures to put in place. the president was right about one thing. that is anti-semitism and hate crimes are not new. i think he d be hard pressed to find a jew or another member of a religious group that hasn t been some kind of hate crime. most synagogues around the country are aware of the toxic environment against the jewish community. very regularly share information with local law enforcement. certain synagogues have law enforcement, direct law enforcement relationships and even have security guards at the door. i belong to a synagogue. it has security personnel on the high holy days. we don t know exactly what happened at this synagogue. true security guards with pistols even at the door of a synagogue are going to have a hard time working against a man with an ar-15 or assault rifle. i don t know it is on the synagogue to really work better with local law enforcement. security doesn t always mean what you see either. correct. josh can speak to that i m sure. the direct relationship between local law enforcement is even more important today. yes, it is a reality in the united states. this is very unfortunate. as somebody who worked with different community groups. the religious community is different when it comes to how they look at security. it shows you when an incident like this happens in one location, it still terrorizes people. i look at this, it s hard to disassociate yourself. i go to protestant church. there s not an armed security guard. they re not constantly getting threats. there are security that rove around obviously, you know, we re in a heightened state there s a presumption of safety. correct. you re exactly right. unfortunately for the jewish community in the united states, security is a main stay. it is part of going to synagogue. i can tell you walking around los angeles, you see synagogues, you see a large security presence outside. you just can t forget what that means to people to know that i can t even go in to this facility to practice my faith and my work without always having to keep in the back of my mind, as a very real reminder in front of me, that i m under a threat. law enforcement and the jewish community, they re synced up across the nation. they share information. they share best practices. it s this reality. it s disheartening. sad when incidents like this happen. evy are you still there? one thing i want to jump on regarding what josh is saying, security and law enforcement, two different things. you can have security guards or people there. it doesn t always mean there s going to be armed. you don t know what their level of training is. here we have three officers who triy eied to deal with this individual and got injured. you don t know what level of training they have. you don t know how good they are. you don t know if they can run from i ve seen some security people in some places where i don t know if they can run from one corner of the block to another. so there s also that. security, law enforcement, they re not the same thing. just because you put somebody there who s got, you know, a uniform on doesn t mean they re going to be able to deal with the situation. right. i stink instincts are different. right, in orlando, there was a police officer out there who was overpowered by the shooter who was using high-powered weapons. that could be what happened here. there are some indications he was using high-powered weapon here. even if there was an armed guard there, what is one armed guard look, these situations are they re very different. there may be some common threads but there s no framework for terrorism. if someone wants to do something like this, there s really nothing anyone can do to stop. no matter how much security you have. the concern always is, as we hear, like, did someone know something about this individual and didn t come forward? did someone know that he was about to do this, that he was planning, that he had these weapons, he had these anti-jewish views? we ll see if that s the case and if someone didn t come forward or was this guy in hiding and planning this on his own. those are the things that usually prevent these kinds of attacks. once someone gets ready to do something like this and, you know, josh can certainly speak to this better than i can, there s nothing you can do to stop them. the idea there may be whethers thewhether s there was an armed guard or not. we should be focusing on the people who are injured. the people are now suffer, the families. on a saturday, it s it s the sabbath. like you re in there to pray. to be with your family. yes. this should not happen, right? that s the larger question here. in terms of what is going on. if this continues and just t continues to happen. that s something we should remember law enforcement is facing. this is a big problem. there are multiple hallmarks of terrorism, hate-filled acts like this. clearly no singular i have to go, i m sorry. we got you, evy, thank you so much. no singular framework for something as heinous as this. again this is still an active live shooter scene. even though one person is in custody. law enforcement remains there at the tree of life synagogue in pittsburgh. we ll be right back. eastbound and down. loaded up and truckin . are we gonna do what they say can t be done? 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