does it affect to change reality here? do they believe that two-state system is impossible, that is the talk in israel. now, that it is appears to be the new framework for a discussion, that is a fundamental change. special correspondent for the network, 25, 26 years. good to see you, thank you for popping in it you saw this news conference. play identity here a few minutes ago, the president and the prime minister as well. what struck you most from what we heard from the two gentlemen? what struck me most, netanyahu arriving, and the press conference, if i was a palestinian leader looking at this i would be deeply concerned. it was a love-in between the trumps and the netanyahus, that means between israel and the united states. there it was a mention that netanyahu made about the movement, the friendship with trump, saying, it was long overdue. a side mention of the relationship between he and president obama for a long time. that is what struck me. it is a new deck of cards on the table. i wouldn t go to say the two-state option is dead. it remains the only solution politically. if the wider arab world are brought into the negotiations, which seems to be the direction that things are going, they are not going to agree to a larger jewish state. they will only agree to a two-state solution. i think it is not dead. it is urgently needed. quick progress is urgently needed. we expect to see president trump and the prime minister in the oval office. other news, donald trump, as well as his associates, pushing back hard on the new york times story. blaming all of us to a certain extent for the fall-out with regard to general michael flynn. you are exactly right. it was striking, atmospheric, it does matter in terms of substance. pem netanyahu said, president trump didn t allow for real questions, trying to zero in on the issue of mike flip. the now former national security advisor. he said he blamed leaks, he called criminal acts, an effort to distract from millry clinton s terrible loss, he said he has been treated unfairly. if this was fake news, why, mr. president, did you fire lim? what was the basis for that? the fact that from the time of the department of justice sally yates, 15 days before mike pence was alerted to it. and january 26th, until a couple of days ago, that you kept mike flynn as your national security advisor, involved in the briefings, and announced the position on iran. having concerns, that you told about, did you keep him for that period of time. in many way, it is unclear if we will get those answers from the president. pete williams is standing by, unnamed sources, so many unnamed sources talking to media outlets about the investigations into trump s election team. as well as general flynn as well. walk us through the inquiries. for months now, they are looking at in hillary clinton s campaign. do did the russians do this by themselves? interesting inning any contacts between people in the u.s., and the russians during that time. it has been well known, some connected to the calm pain, others, business associates, were in russia during that time. number one, that there has been nothing found in any of the investigation that includes any collusion between people in the u.s., campaign, or the number of contacts wasn t very large, wasn t contact. that there were some communications, and that they are well aware of which ones those were. standby, we are going to the oval office. president trump, and prime minister netanyahu. nice article. i said, was that sara? any comment there was senior advisor. [ inaudible ] thank you. office. you were saying the reports, some of these reports, they may be a bit overheated. is that a fair adjective? based on your sources? they are midway through this t several months to go. no indication that there was any collusion, the number of these contacts was not a large number, they were not constant. they were not contacts, as far as the u.s. knows with russian intelligence people. one official told me today, you never know with the russians, there is no confirmed connection between the trump associates and intelligence figures. casy, talk to us about the democratic, national divide as the investigation of general flynn goes. so far, republican leadership is saying, any investigation into what happened to flynn and the increasing reporting that pete was talking about, be left with senate and house intelligence committees. this is important, partly because they do their work largely behind closed doors, working with classified information, yes, it gives leaders control over what is released afterwards. calls are increasing, senator graham saying a select committee should be formed to investigate this. in in fact, the trump campaign had contact with russian operatives. the investigation of russian they don t have a lot of tools, to work with, they need republicans, there is pressure on leadership. you if it gets too great, you may see a change in strategy. thank you as always. he is the ranking member of the armed services committee. congressman smith, thank you for your time. start with your reaction to what we heard from president trump, about flynn, saying he was treated very, very unfairly by the media. called it the fake media, and said the leaks are criminal. that makes no sense. if all of that is true, why did president trump fire him? obviously, this isn t something that is made up it is something that michael flynn d troubling enough to the white house, they had to let him go as the national security advisor. they found out the content of michael flynn s phone call wasn t what michael flynn said it was. in fact, it was about the sanctions, part of it was about the sanctions that penalty obama just leveed. president trump knew this, it was only that the media got to the story and made it public that made it public. i wish president trump would have some responsibility or have some of his administration take responsibility for their actions. the we might learn more about the relationship between general flynn and russia. some of his counterparts, perhaps in russia. do you have any more information about that? i don t have any more information than what is out there. the media, a remarkable job of pulling it out. one thing we don t have is exactly what is said in those conversations. we know that general flynn characterized what it was. that is something to be determined. frankly. and the larger issue, which you have been talking about, what exact influence has russia had. obviously, they hacked into the election, what influence do they have over the trump administration, the president has to tell us what is going on, instead of ignoring the questions, and claiming that everything that he doesn t like is fake news. that will get old. i think a select committee is what we need. you can i served on the benghazi commonwealth, for longer than i care to remember. select committees are not something that republicans are opposed to. i applaud senator graham, and senator mccain approached it in a reasonable way, it is bipartisan. on the house side, it has been ignored. some senators are admitting it is a legitimate issue. congressmap, thank you for your time, sir. thank you. microsoft poll question of the day. that is the question the pulse is live. it is pulse.msnbc.com. we will check the results later the broadcast. will the trump administration get behind the two-state solution. joe lieberman will stop by. he is outside the window. bringing him in after this. why was vice president mike pence kept in the dark for so long. why are some more interested in leaks. the future of business in new york state is already in motion. companies across the state are growing the economy, with the help of the lowest taxes in decades, a talented workforce, and world-class innovations. like in plattsburgh, where the most advanced transportation is already en route. and in corning, where the future is materializing. let us help grow your company s tomorrow - today at esd.ny.gov ago. the senior news editer is here to describe how the two-state solution would work in practice. here is the understanding for middle east peace until this morning. the two-state solutions based on the 48 borders, gazaa and the west bank, one state here, palestine. gazaa and the west bank, the rest of it is israel. one of the problems with that, one of the reasons that palestinian leaders said it wouldn t work. is the settlements, one of the questions is, what happens to them? the bigger question, what happens to the 2.5 million palestinians that live here in the west bank? what kinds of rights do they have? keeping in mind, this would all be one country, under a one state solution, minus the strip is one country. military service. all israeli have to serve in the military, three years for men, two for women. after that you are in for life as a reservist. land, that was there theirs, equal rights. would palestinians have the right to vote? same rights at israelis? the occupied west bank is under israeli military control. would that become under civilian control? these are a few of the very difficult questions that will have to be answered. walking us through what it all could mean. i want to bring in former senator joe leiberman, form als special correspondent, and bureau chief, and still with us as well. senator, i want to start with you. a snippet of what we heard from prime minister netanyahu. we will talk about it on the other side. here it is. the great opportunity for peace comes from a regional approach from involving our new-found arab partners in the pursuit of a broader peace and peace with the palestinians. i look forward to discussing this in greater detail with you mr. president. i think that if we work together, we have a shot. what does it sound like to you? a recognition of reality. the major conflicts in the middle east are sunni verse shi ite and isis, and the arab nations sharing a lot of opinions with israel, mostly about iran. there is a new reality. the arab nations are closer to israel. there is an opportunity to build on that. in my opinion. that close relationship between the arabs and israelis will not go public, if you will, unless there is progress within the israelis and the palestinians. that gets us back to the two-state solution. the two-state solution, i want to say quickly, is not the goal. the goal is peace. between israelis and palestinians, and hopefully, israelis and arabs, up until now, the general feeling has been, you can t do it. you can t achieve peace unless there is some respect for the rights of the palestinians, whatever the nature of that state may be. if you abandon that concept, i don t think there is a lot of chance for peace between israelis and palestinians soon. i hope i am wrong. we heard in the news conference or before the news conference, the cia director meeting in the west bank with palestinia palestinians. they are trying to get ahead between the loving between the israelis and united states, the palestinians must be looking at this with great concern. this was to reassure them their interests would not be ignored. this weekend be the end of the two-state solution. there is not like there has been negotiations for a one-state solution. in the absence of success of looking for a two-state solution, it will be one large state as israeli continues to settle large parts of the land. there is no chance that israel, who controls the land will ever agree to a one man, one vote situation in that piece of territory. while i have you talk about the dumpster fire that appears to be raging at 1600 pennsylvania avenue. are you a long-time member of the so-called washington establishment. how do you characterize the first 27, 28 days of the trump administration? unprecedented. tumultuous, president trump is so different from anybody we have had as president in modern times and committed to change. what has happened, beyond the changes that he has talked about and tried to begin to implement through executive orders, is the hint of scandal. president getting hold of it, he would benefit as much as anybody as a credible, independent investigation in the first instance of the contacts with russia. we know from american government intelligence conclusions, law enforcement, that the russians were hacking and trying to effect the outcome of our election last november. now, we have these connections between general flynn who now left and others in the campaign. we don t know what the nature of those connections were. whether it was worth listening to, it is not time to reach conclusions yet. it is profound questions. it is in president trump s, so he can get answers to them to governor the way he said he would governor. which questions would you be asking specifically, do you believe it is an instance that requires a select committee or that intelligence committee is more than capable of handling something like this? i have a lot of respect for both committee committee, they get a quick run at this. a special committee would be best. in order to be done. you have the separate investigation going on now through the fbi, and that is not going to be done soon either. so, this is a cloud that will hang overhead. the media is not going to level it go. it runs the risk of distracting the administration from doing what they said they were going to do, including getting the economy going again. do you think the national security advisor could call his counterpart in russia, without the president instructing him to do that or the senior members of the staff. remember, they weren t in office yet. general flynn, as part of the transition. of course, it is all quite suspicious. i haven t seen the transcripts of those conversations, fblg, it happened around the time that president obama imposed sanctions on russia because of the case they tried to effect our election. i don t want to run to a conclusion. he wasn t in the white house. he wasn t next to the president. if he did it on his own, that was reason enough to wonder whether he was ready to be national security advisor. mr. fletcher, good to have you back in the building as well. i will be around. new calls for an investigation into precisely who knew what, when did they know it, when it comes to michael flynn and dealings with russia. republican, tom cole will join me at the other side. that accepts medicare patients. plus, there are no networks, and virtually no referrals needed. so don t wait. call now and request this free decision guide to help you better understand medicare. and which aarp medicare supplement plan might be best for you. there s a wide range to choose from. we love to travel - and there s so much more to see. so we found a plan that can travel with us. anywhere in the country. [ male announcer ] join the millions of people who have already enrolled in the only medicare supplement insurance plans endorsed by aarp, an organization serving the needs of people 50 and over for generations. remember, all medicare supplement insurance plans help cover what medicare doesn t pay. and could save you in out-of-pocket medical costs. call now to request your free decision guide. and learn more about the kinds of plans that will be here for you now - and down the road. i have a lifetime of experience. so i know how important that is. here you go.picking up for kyle. you wouldn t put up with part of a pizza. um. something wrong? so when it comes to pain relievers, why put up with just part of a day? you want the whole thing? yes, yes! live whole. not part. aleve. democrats along with a growing number of republicans are calling for an investigation into general mike flynn s resignation to determine precisely what the white house ties are with russia. moments ago, president trump talked about the issue during a joint news conference with israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu. michael flynn, general flynn is a wonderful man. i think he has been treated very, very unfairly by the media. as i call it, the fake media, in many cases. papers are being leaked. things are being leaked. criminal action. i think it is very, very unfair, what happened to general flynn, the way he was treated and the documents and papers that were illegal, i stress that illegally leaked. republican congressman tom cole of oklahoma, is a senior member of the house, thank you for making time this afternoon. is that issue here? the issue the leaks or is it more complex than that? i think it is more complex than that. i had the opportunity to interact with general flynn a number of times i have a lot of respect for him. he served the country with disstinkz. i am sorry this happened. at the end of the day, there are serious questions, he deliberately or accidently mislead the vice president. there is a lot of controversy. i think the appropriate vehicle would be the intelligence committee, if someone thought it was illegal, the judiciary would be the appreciate place. explore and investigate it, have a thorough and professional investigation, and give general flynn a chance to tell the story. when, i don t have any questions about his patriotism. my question would be, you know, where you forthcoming with the vice president, and why not? national security advisor, i don t have any problems with him talking to other countries, that is their job. preparing transition is appropriate. even if he was talking about the sanctions? it depends on how it is phrased or what you say. we did not have a lot of diplomats expelled. that was a good thing, i think it is appropriate to be talking to people. it is not appropriate to mislead the vice president or members of the administration. they have to know what is happening. for whoever reason, honest and forthcoming, explain it straight up. he is not there now. that does suggest that there was a loss of confidence in the white house and his judgment. according to vice president mike pence s press secretary, the white house kept the vice president in the dark for at least two weeks. at least two weeks, about what it knew with regard to general flynn. does the sidelining of vice president pence, does that erode trust in this administration at all? i don t think so. there is a difference between sidelining and checking out something. just because you have been told something, doesn t mean it is true it intelligence can be inaccurate. you are dealing with an attorney general, the member of the preceding administration. i am not suggesting that she would do anything untoward. you don t know the source. you don t have a high degree of faith in it if you are thinking through your options, that is fine. in the end, the president did the right thing. came to then t handle the situation appropriately. and got the resignation. i don t know if you have had the opportunity at the press conference. when asked about it at the news conference, in addition to blaming the media, said it was connected to the defeat of hillary clinton. and it was a bit bizarre. hearing him explain it. to be fair, the only thing i have heard is the clip you played before i came on. i wouldn t agree with that clip. something went wrong here. that is yet national security advisor is the ex-national security advisor. that isn t the media s fault. no matter what administration you belong to, that is a fact you have to deal with in this town. the president made the right decision. i am sure it was a tough decision. if someone that you have faith in, that is your friend, a strong supporter, i don t blame the president for taking a couple of weeks to think it through, double check the facts, then he acted. did the right thing. paul mannafort, the former campaign manager is out, amid ties and concerns about ties to russia. are you at all concerned about this administration s connection to russia? no. i look at general maddis, and rex it tillerson. my view is tougher, as we should say, about valdimir putin and russia, the previous two administrations came n trying to set things with russia. i don t think it will happen. again, i tend to be more guarded on this. i don t think that i do believe the russians tried to manipulate the election, i don t think they were successful. you pay attention. calls growing louder for an independent investigation. the standing committee system would be sufficient. we look at the political fall-out. and the white house, that appears to be in chaos. our panel of experts after this. ! ! i shake it! glad i had a v8. the original way to fuel your day. now? excuse me. again? be right back. always running to the bathroom because your bladder is calling the shots? you may have oab. enough of this. we re going to the doctor. take charge and ask your doctor about myrbetriq. that s myr-be-triq, the first and only treatment in its class for oab symptoms of urgency frequency, and leakage. myrbetriq (mirabegron) may increase blood pressure. tell your doctor right away if you have trouble emptying your bladder, or have a weak urine stream. myrbetriq may cause serious allergic reactions. if you experience swelling of the face, lips, throat or tongue or difficulty breathing, stop taking myrbetriq and tell your doctor right away. myrbetriq may affect or be affected by other medications. before taking myrbetriq tell your doctor if you have liver or kidney problems. common side effects include increased blood pressure common cold symptoms, urinary tractinfection, constipation, diarrhea, dizziness and headache. it s time for you to make the calls, so call your doctor to see if myrbetriq may be right for you. visit myrbetriq.com to learn more. anyone ever have occasional y! constipation,diarrhea, gas or bloating? she does. she does. help defend against those digestive issues. take phillips colon health probiotic caps daily with three types of good bacteria. 400 likes? wow! try phillips colon health. watry.duo fusiong heartburn relief? duo fusion goes to work in seconds and lasts up to 12 hours. tums only lasts up to 3. for longer lasting relief.in one chewable tablet try duo fusion from the makers of zantac the fall out over michael flynn s dismissal, continues to dominate washington today. we bring in the national security analyst, former secretary of defense malcomb nance, and let me start with you evelyn. we heard from president trump, talking about the controversy, blaming the media and leaks as well. what do you make of that? i think, look, if president trump has something to hide, day one of his presidency, would have been, i want to look at how russia influenced the elections. there were carter page, the guy going back and forth, roger stone, the guy who tweeted right before the hacks of john of the campaign advisor to secretary clinton. he alerted the world to it. there were a lot of questions swirling around already. president trump has not chosen to do that. that opens up the line of questions about what his involvement with russia is. we haven t seen tax papers, why he refuses to say a bad word about valdimir putin, why his party line, his foreign policy, we are unclear what it is across the board. when it comes to russia, it seems, no matter what, he wants to cooperate. he doesn t want to say anything negative. it raises too much suspicious. malcomb, you have been on the record with trump aides and intelligence officials communitied with each other, during the campaign. what do we know about the communication? what do we know about the content of that communication? well, as you know, i wrote a book about this five months ago. having worked at nsa, i will stick what i know from the new york times. what they said, over the last year, several of these personnel on the campaign, the only named person was paul manafort were in direct communication with those recognized at russian intelligence officers, this was multiple contacts, and done, obviously, it was collected through nsa, under the jurisdiction of the fbi. where they monitored their communications and apparently, have some definitive information these people were either being handled or unwitting assets of russian intelligence, and were bringing their views to the white house. you know, what is most important to understand here is, that donald trump s loving embrace or moscow has never been adequately explained. it has to be explained. does he owe them money? what is the impetus why he believes that foreign policy is until that is done, it moves on from suspicious to sinister. those are the pish suspicious, moves on from suspicious to sinister. what s the end game for putin for russia here? what would their motivation be? can i if i could, i wanted to put it in that bigger con tek conte context, we don t think we re at war with russia but the way the russians defei feigfine their w on operation cyber offensive against us, fake news, harassing our diplomats in moscow. across the board, they have r.t., their propaganda network broadcasting here in the united states. the russians believe they re already at war with us. it s a war without bullets so far. and i think it s really important for us to wake up and understand that and the president needs to publicly acknowledge that because i think it s very dangerous for the american people to be under the illusion that somehow we can be friends with russia, when they view us as their adversary. jonathan that s right. i want to talk to you about new reporting you have with regards to steve bannon. steve bannon, of course, senior adviser, i forget his official title there in the white house, but he certainly has the ear of the president, perhaps more than just about anybody else in the west wing depending on who you believe. chief strategist is his official title. what can you tell us about this explosion that he had on a breitbart reporting? so there s a mythology that steve bannon is conducting all of his warfare through breitbart at the moment. look, you can say a lot of things about steve bannon but he s not an idiot and we know that he s very acutely sensitive to the fact that people think that breitbart news is a proxy for his views, and he s also acutely sensitive to the story line that there s this cold war between him and the chief of staff, reince priebus. anyway, breitbart s matt boyle, washington editor, punches out a story that published yesterday, which got the attention of a lot of senior people in the white house. it was a story basically saying that reince priebus was on his last legs, and steve bannon which, you know, i reported today, far from leaking that story, a lot of people reported that, you know, it must be done with bannon s consent. he actually got boyle on the phone and it was described to me was gave him both barrels so he was furious about this and genuinely furious. i ve run this story down through a number of different channels. evelyn, malcolm, jonathan, i wish we had more time. thank you for your time this afternoon. thanks, craig. breaking news from denver. an undocumented woman, mother of three american-born children, seeking refuge in a church right now to avoid deportation. our gaudy schwartz is on the scene. we ll check in with him right after this to find out what she is doing now to avoid deportation. ll your business bey when growth presents itself? 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reporter: yeah, that s news conference is still going on right now. see jeanette standing behindm e, that is ja neanette and her you daughter, siri, she s 6 years old. she was scheduled to show up for an i.c.e. check-in, after checking with her kids she decided to not run the risk of immediate deportation. i.c.e. issuing a statement saying jeanette has two misdemeanor convictions and in 201 2011 a judge originally issued a final order of deportation to mexico. she s an i.c.e. enforcement priority. her authority says the conviction was based on a 2009 incident of which jeanette was found guilty of using a fake i.d. so she could work. she s been here for 20 years. her done sattorney says there a pending stay applications in the work, one based on a u visa, because she was a victim of a crime here in the united states. for now it appears as though a lot of those fights and those stays will take place from inside of this church where this name is now seeking sanctuary. she s behind us right now saying that she is willing to stay here as long as it takes. craig, back to you. if he is deported, gadi, what happens to those kids? reporter: well, their naur is he here in the united states so they have a support system that has been set up. there s also a big community here that has rallied around this family. just talking a little bit about that, one of the case that influenced her decision, he says, was that case that we saw in phoenix, arizona, where a family in a similar situation showed up for their i.c.e. check-in and that mother, guadeloupe garcia was deported to mexico. that s what she said inspired this today. gadi schwartz for us in a church in denver, colorado, following breaking news for us. gadi, do keep us up to speed on what s happening there. i know you will. time now for one last look this hour at our microsoft pulse question. there was the question. can peace in the middle east be achieved in united states abandons two-state solution between israel and the palestinians? that was the question. a bit lopsided today. 97% of you say no. you still have an hour to share your thoughts, though. the pulse is still alive. pulse.msnbc.com. that s going to do it, though, for this hour of msnbc live. my colleague, katy tur, picking things up right now. hey there, craig. thank you. breaking news from the white house. president trump says the real problem isn t his former national security adviser who lied to the administration and the american public, it s who caught him in that lie. general flynn is a wonderful man. i think he s been treated very, very unfairly by the media. the fake media in many cases. papers are being leaked, things are being leaked. it s criminal action, criminal act. people are trying to cover up for a terrible loss that the
jesse: he is being looked at right now for not registering as a foreign agent. juan: that s a scandal in and of itself, he had a million dollars from turkey and then opposing any action that would not benefit a turkey as a u.s. official. jesse: that is not the focus the investigation. juan: trump said this was a witch hunt, you re doing the opposite. kevin mccarthy said it is a joke, i bet the russians are paying trump, this was last summer. i don t want anybody to say that someone is paying me. there was big news today that seems to me when you have rod rosenstein who was the deputy attorney general and acting attorney general because jeff sessions has recused himself tell people he knew comey was going to be fired, when he said the memo as a basis for comey s firing. he was set up and used as a stooge. greg: i m sorry, all of these errors are not political errors, their human errors. when trump says to comey, he s a good guy, go easy on him, that s a boss does. kimberly: why is that an error in the rosenstein piece in particular? greg: i don t like this guy, can you do a report on the them. i think i ve done that many times at work. kimberly: that s an error? greg: its nonpolitical human error commits what a guy does who s been a businessman. space bar you say it s loose semantics. kimberly: you re saying it s more loose semantics more than intent. before it s write a memo that will cover me because i want to fire him. juan: press secretaries didn t say trump told rosenstein to write the memo. it seems to me when you also have reports that the trump campaign had 18 undisclosed contacts with the russians in the last seven months, oh, gee, something s going on. then you have a trump saying that this is the greatest witch hunt ever. what does that do? greg: the opposite of a witch hunt is the way you might have approached lois lerner or how the media approached lois lerner and the irs scandal. if that s the opposite of a witch hunt. nobody bothered to hunt anythin anything. jesse: if you re on the defensive, your shredding documents and withholding information from congress, a holder was held in contempt of congress four. hillary destroyed a 30,000 emails, that s look a little defensive to me. juan: after all of the republican probes and hearings, anything? jesse: that s why he was fired because he botched that investigation. greg: you re laughing at the same argument you used on him. you re saying there s no there there because there hasn t been an investigation. juan: i said there was an unvested emma and extensive endless investigation of the benghazi, and irs. if kimberly: president trump today also denied that he shut down the fbi investigation against his former national security advisor, michael flynn. did you at any time urge former fbi director james comey to close or back down the investigation into michael flyn flynn. president trump: no, no. next question. have you wondered if anything you have done is something that might be worthy of these criminal charges as some on the left are implying? president trump: i think it s totally ridiculous, everyone thinks so. we have to get back to working our country properly it so we can take care of the problems that we have. kimberly: no. if greg: what do you expect him to say? do you think you re guilty of anything that was illegal? you ve got me there. what you expect them to say? juan: how about the old al gore, mistakes were made. he knows that mistakes were made, he knows there s been an admission the trump team and knew that mike flynn was under investigation when they put him in his national security adviso advisor? kimberly: how would you if you knew he was going to take the podium dana: i think referring to the special counsel, it would be fine, i m going to talk about whatever. if they know, fine, just say nothing more. just be quiet, move on. i also think that we can do this whole thing about what about in the past and it makes for good discussion and i do not like hypocrisy at all. i like that part of the discussion but it doesn t matter a hill of beans when it comes to this actual investigation. they ll say what about this, what about that from eight years ago. everyone should want this real tight and get it over with as quickly as possible. kimberly: with the likelihood of that? dana: i don t know if the facts, as more and more stuff comes out, the $500,000 in the turks, a conversation with susan rice, action that was not taken on his advice that wasn t disclosed and mike pence didn t know about that, nobody ever told me that he was under investigation, michael flynn s people say there s a lot here that i think will be cleared up pretty quickly by a professional like bob muller. jesse: flynn is a problem, as much as it pains me to say made a great point to the other day that hoping is not obstruction. if hoping was a crime, everyone would be in prison. the dana: when your boss says i hope you do this, that s why you document things, if that includes harassment or something like this jesse: if someone says i hope what happens if i don t considered harassment, but they have a lower threshold. before you might, but that s not what the law says. jesse: i think the law might be intense to undermine. dana: president trump is saying he s not under oath, jesse: i d hate to compare it to obama, there was not a smidgen of corruption in the irs. juan: here s the problem with intent. he tells everyone else get out of the room, i just want to talk to comey. jesse: maybe it was a romantic dinner, you don t know. kimberly: things are very different in the business boardroom, i want to have a talk, you are night ceo to cal, everyone leave the room. very different here and he needs to be advised as to what s proper to protect the president and the united states. coming up. yes, sweetie. greg: i d politely been trying to interject. one of the key examples with flynn whether it was right or wrong, it was not a political move on his part it s called a human move. if you re a nonpolitical person, what do you rely on? loyalty. he thinks this guy flynn made some mistakes but he s a good guy. that s a human response, it might not be the right response, it s not the political response, but it s a guy who defaults on loyalty which is kind of a human quality. kimberly: i m glad we waited for that point i appreciate it. president trump says he s close to picking the new fbi director will tell you who the frontrunner is, stay tuned, nex next. liberty mutual stood with me when this guy got a flat tire in the middle of the night. hold on dad. liberty did what? yeah, liberty mutual 24-hour roadside assistance helped him to fix his flat so he could get home safely. my dad says our insurance doesn t have that. don t worry - i know what a lug wrench is, dad. is this a lug wrench? maybe? you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™. liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. you need one of these. you wouldn t put up with an umbrella that covers you part way, so when it comes to pain relievers, why put up with just part of a day? 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juan: no. this was a surprise to me because like kimberly, i ve had very positive experience with senator lieberman over the years, i find him trustworthy. here s a situation right now. he was with a law firm since he left the senate and the law firm has representative trump and some litigation, in addition to which he is back to john mccain who was is very close friend in the senate, the three amigos, mccain, lindsey graham, and senator lieberman on somebody issues. he backed mccain against obama obama, that didn t sit well with the hardlines politics of the democratic party. subsequent to that, oppose the iran nuclear deal that obama was struggling to get past in the face of republican opposition. dana: just because his law firm had done some work for president trump who is a billionaire, it doesn t mean that joe lieberman was actually working on any of that business, i guess we would have to see if that was the case, doesn t seem he would be tainted in that way. jesse: i think is a great choice to be fbi director. i interned for joe lieberman when i was at trinity college in connecticut. kimberly: it explains her greatness, it s lieberman s wor work. jesse: was after, that games after. i think it smart enough if trump ever invites him over for dinner, he ll say no. he s not an electric speaker so i don t think he s going to be hot talking it s all over the place. just remember what his background is, he was part of the recount and urged gore to drop out to save the country and to heal the country. he was also someone that voted against clinton, what he did in the office was reprehensible. he voted for the iraq war, he s a principled guy with integrity. nonpartisan nonpartisan in y respects. juan: he s never been a prosecutor, he s never been an fbi agentthe justice department. never handled a major agency. dana: do have an interesting feelings on joe lieberman? greg: lieberman is a reasonable democrat, he s an old white male and we ve had enough of them appeared to mike. we are overlooking the obvious choice, who is available right now beloved by the media no matter what she does, chelsea manning. the bigot the mike biggest trader in history, who has the largest amounts of classified documents and 35 years and everybody still loves her. you know how you hire a safe cracker to hire a crack proof safe? hire the biggest trader so you can fight espionage. that make sense to me, the media will love it. juan: jessie thought they were going to say chelsea clinton. why not hillary clinton, she s available? greg: only person with less expertise than chelsea manning is chelsea clinton. dana: one of the most absurd comments about president trump ever from the ladies at the view, will play the tape next. of. of. the homeowner was outraged. luckily the geico insurance agency had helped her with homeowners insurance. she got all her shingles replaced. hansel and gretel were last seen eating their way through the candy cane forest. call geico and see how easy it is to switch and save on homeowners insurance. .doesn t happen by accident. p3 planters nuts, jerky and whaseeds.at? 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(parents whisper jingle) safelite repair, safelite replace. unfairly or as unfairly, let s talk about barack obama. jesse: barack obama. greg: the mainstream media was so obedient that he was left unchallenged and it resulted in a mediocre president. he had the potential to become a good president but he never had to try, he never had to explain himself. if you requested that he slain himself, that would be construed as racist. if you criticized obama, you were a bigot, we went through that for years. that assumption resulted in trump because of so many people were tired as being smeared as racist when they were just conservative. jesse: he never faced any adversity, that he had to overcome in his presidency. juan: what is going on? you yourself, i can say, i can give testimony, i m a witness come on greg gutfeld going after obama regularly. jesse: one guy on what network. juan: our network doesn t count, were not the biggest cable network in america. the biggest in the world. what an amazing claim, he opened himself up to such criticism that senator mccain would say no, no, i was treated worse. if you think about president clinton who was impeached, you think about richard nixon who was forced out of office can be a thing about jimmy carter who was mocked for failing or whatever he was doing, paddling with rabbits. jesse: they called trump a clan member. greg: they called him hitler. [laughs] i think that was fake news, the rabbit story. i don t know how many people know the rabbit story. kimberly: please tell. juan: he whacked the rabbit rabbit. kimberly: i think he murdered a bridge juan: at ln the country come obama wasn t born here. jesse: wasn t at hillary clinton who started that? greg: just raising the question, where was he born? jesse: i hope he was born in america. dana: that whole birth tourism think about total human error. greg: that was a jab at me. jesse: when she makes a comment like this on the view, people watch at home obama was treated really poorly, they yelled at you lied during the state of the union and they hear about the birth certificate or two people just say, you have to be kidding me. kimberly: the mainstream liberal media liberals are like the laugh track, everybody cheered. that s what people believe. that s what she believes. juan: if you attached president obama s name to any of the stuff that has happened to president trump in the last month, don t you think that this network, republicans would go ballistic? kimberly: they loved him, he was there guy, they would put them back in for a third term. jesse: they called him the messiah, they said he was a rock star. dana: i think there s a distinction that whoopi goldberg is making. president trump is saying no one is treated worse by the media. she said nobody s treating worse she means the republicans. the media didn t treat president obama badly. i think obviously the media takes a shot at republicans for decades, you have to factor that in. do you remember that first press conference when president obama as to what and chancy about the white house? there was actual news happening that day. i think president trump is much more accessible to the press even though he gets frustrated with them, he punches them and they punch back. i bet he does a lot more they get to hear his direct thoughts from twitter. greg: who is more transparent, trump or obama? dana: trump is not even close. jesse: big shots democrat makes a shocking admission about his own party. you can drive as far as you want for up to three years and be covered. so no matter where you go, your peace of mind and confidence will be as unlimited.as your mileage. visit the certified pre-owned sales event, now through may 31st. and learn more about our unlimited mileage warranty, only at your authorized dealer. mercedes-benz. the best or nothing. usaa gives me the and the security just like the marines did. the process through usaa is so effortless, that you feel like you re a part of the family. i love that i can pass the membership to my children. we re the williams family, and we re usaa members for life. it s about moving forward, not back.t. it s looking up, not down. it s being in motion. in body, in spirit, in the now. boost® high protein it s intelligent nutrition with 15 grams of protein and 26 vitamins and minerals. for when you need a little extra. boost® the number one high protein complete nutritional drink. be up for it .to a new world.s. deeper than the ocean. as unfathomable as the universe. a world that doesn t exist outside you. .but within you. where breakthrough science is replacing chemotherapy with immunotherapy. where we can now attack the causes of disease, not just the symptoms. where medicines once produced for all, are now designed to fit you. today 140,000 biopharmaceutical researchers go bodly to discover treatments and cures unimaginable ten years ago. .and are on the verge of more tomorrow. juan: one of the major reasons president trump is in the white house is because he connected with middle-class voters. many of whom it fed up with the typical ways of washington. now, chicago mayor rahm emanuel a big shot in the democratic party has offered his diagnosis for why the democrats seem so out of touch with regular america. i think we don t talk about and fight for the middle class, if they don t hear we are for them, were not going to convince them that they are wrong. it s not just a set of values that respect who they are in their lives. i think they can come off as a party disdainful of them is the bedrock of this great country. juan: do you agree with rahm emanuel? dana: i think it would be wise to listen to him. if you think back to 2006 when republicans lost all the seats in the midterm election during president bush s second term, who led the democratic effort for all those seats to be one? it was rahm emanuel. i think he understands politics and messaging very well. he s in the midwest is not on one of the coastal states were he s cocooned. if the dealing stories out of the house weren t digging up all the oxygen in the room, i think the bigger story would be the democrats six months, seven months after the election are still completely in disarray, they do not have a strong leade leader. they do not have a plan, they are running in all directions. they benefit from all of this trump coverage so they can escape under the radar. juan: so kimberly, what you hear which rahm emanuel says, he says democratic values are okay, it s just that middle-class americans aren t hearing it. is he lying or is this real? it s a failure to communicate. kimberly: how convenient for him to say they re the ones with the problem, they are not hearing it. the democratic party is perfect. he s not accepting actual responsibility to say that there needs to be transformative change within that party. if you don t take this election as a complete wake-up call, working-class men and women and middle-class families across this country resoundingly made a choice to go with donald trump and not to go with the party, why? because they are not resonated ticket speaking to their values come out to their pocketbook, to their dinner table at night to the gas in their car, to the job security that they hope and pray for. to be able to take their children. they need to wake up because this should have been an easy lay up for them and it s not, in the stead trump got it on a three-pointer shot. juan: he said this, president trump goes after the big cities like chicago for all the murderers and an end philadelphia and new york but he never goes after the suburbs where there s a real opioid crisis, never mentioned it. greg: he s a little late to the party. i think he s going to tell us about an great new setled seinfeld we should be checking out. he wouldn t know the middle class but sat in his lap. this is a guy in the middle of biweekly bloodshed in chicago was taking time out to chick-fil-a, his priorities are based on the people he hangs out with that charity auctions and cocktail events. he would break down it hypes if you want to walmart or a fridays or applebee s which have great ribs by the way. not the one of the midtown area, but it s okay. my point is this, he is so irrelevant and far gone, this is a story we talked about months ago. that was horrible to it, we could do better. juan: i saved this one for you because i think you would be the man to think is this the right solution. here s what he says, he thinks what we need to do is stop focusing on trump s antics, trump s statements, trump s tweets and a focus on the issues, the policy debates. jesse: i m not going to say he s right he s right here. even when he s right, he still speaks about americans like they are a different species. he s speaking about us and them and they don t understand us. it comes off as it s not me, no one wants to vote for a snob. he comes off as the pc police, they don t understand desperate he s like an anthropologist of studying some ancient tribe in order to gain their trust and trick them to sell them his land or something like that. trump speaks to regular americans, he doesn t need a translator. how do i talk to middle-class people? it s corny, i m not buying it. juan: i think he is onto something with the economic message. greg: he s on to something everyone else was onto two years ago. juan: kimberly said it right, democrats are still in disarray largely after this and their approval numbers are down now to the point where there almost equal with republicans. greg: everybody s down, let s face it. juan: some emotional news to discuss when the five returns, were going to pay our respects to the founder of fox news, roger ailes, he passed away, back in a moment. i ve found a permanent escape from monotony. together, we are perfectly balanced, our senses awake, our hearts racing as one. i know this is sudden, but they say: if you love something. set it free. see you around, giulia in fox news wild success but among those to which there were no opposition to their views. of those outside the news may not have liked fnc but their lives have also been improved by smarter analysis created by healthy competition. roger created a more informed public by making our competition work for it, which probably drove them nuts. the mark of an achievement is that you can t imagine the world before it. what was news like before fox news? it was a place where diverse opinions or scared, were millions of patriotic americans were ignored by a mainstream media dominated by a world of frightened, dull witted conformity. that era died when fox news was born. i wouldn t be sitting here if it weren t for roger. he gave me a show in the dead of night called red eye even though he had actually met me first. what was he thinking? i m 1 of hundreds of stories like that. he was a man who saw something in all of us, potential, talent, edge, things that other people didn t see, we will always be grateful for that. we saw something in him too, something will likely never see again. i m going to start with you dana, your thoughts? dana: when you said you wouldn t be here, i think that is true possibly for everybody here at the table. for me, i had never expressed my own opinion in public before i came here. i had been on television, i was speaking on somebody else s behalf. i don t know what he saw inmate that i thought i could do this, i remember when we first started the five six years ago, were talked about legalization of drugs, what do you think, i don t know. with some time and space to develop your career is actually developed here for me. i saw this george w. bush doesn t think he would ve been president without roger ailes and the political consultancy he provided for him and the humor. i would say this so i don t take up all the time. if you re interested and committed cajuns or television or you want to improve your own presentation style. he wrote a book called you are the message. if you haven t read it yet, put it on your list or reread it. it gives you the best insight in how to be a good communicator. it s technology agnostic, it s how to be the best communicator is yourself. my sympathies for his family. kimberly: that was also very instrumental in my life, it was part of the assigned reading at uc davis and my rhetoric and communication class. i loved the book, and i underlined, i highlighted it, no big deal. i never forget the day i was on cnn, roger ailes would like to speak to you i was like well. like the wizard of oz . i want to tell you i think you re doing a great job on television, interested in coming to the fox news channel. i was so excited i bought my book and it was all marked up and i was so happy to have him sign it. to meet somebody that had such an incredible, form of impact on so many people s lives. i came over here and he took a chance on me and developed me from a prosecutor into a talent, he saw something in all of us, each of us have a unique story. what i really loved most about him as he was such a loyal person. he was very devoted to his employees whether you were on camera, off-camera, we all mattered. he cared about our families, what my father was dying he was there for me. he became a second father to me. this is a complicated life he lived, he made me a better person. certainly a better cohost and on-air talent, very good to my son, we share sunday s it was all part of the family even though my parents have passed away and i have no family here. my heart goes out to beth and zachary who was a lovely young man who s been raised incredibly well, bless him and his commitment to not only the channel and all of our lives and to this country. juan: looking at it from a purely political standpoint, i think he had a key role in nixon, i think he had a key role in reagan, that s where i met him. i think he had a key role in george hw bush s presidency. he not only created the top cable news channel in america, but he also put powerful people in office i m just as her talk about mitch mcconnell, he wouldn t be there without roger ailes the senate majority leade leader. his influence and power is so incredible, i do think you ve got to discuss, he left here and very troubled circumstances. terrible charges against him, it s just not the roger i knew, not the roger i loved. he was so great to me come up and he persuaded my wife that i should come here back in 1996, 97 when i first signed a contract. just a great call all around. jesse: at i m incredibly grateful to work for roger ailes, one of the most patriotic people ever met. one of the funniest people very quickwitted. great judge of talent, understood the tv screen, an excellent storyteller and i owe everything to him. my whole life and career the last couple years, it is unfortunate he left here in conjunction with some of the charges, inappropriate behavior. i just want to say he s been a great father, great husband, i feel terrible for them and i wish them all the best and he s a very influential american. greg: one last thing, i was watching sean hannity on tucker and he said something that was so it sounded just like me. when hannity started he said he was terrible. i was worse. the fact that somebody would stick with you when you are bad, he stuck with hannity when hannity claims he was bad. you should have seen redeye in 2007, a sweaty mess like me? he stuck with it may be because he wasn t watching it, but he stuck with it bridget once again, our deepest condolences e five returns in a moment why do some cash back cards make earning bonus cash back so complicated? they limit where you can earn bonus cash back to a few places and those places keep changing every few months. the quicksilver card from capital one doesn t do any of that. with quicksilver you earn unlimited 1.5% cash back on every purchase, everywhere. leave complicated behind. what s in your wallet? but with my back pain i couldn t sleep or get up in time. then i found aleve pm. the only one to combine a safe sleep aid plus the 12 hour pain relieving strength of aleve. and now. i m back! aleve pm for a better am. at angie s list, we believe there are certain things you can count on, like what goes down doesn t always come back up. [ toilet flushes ] so when you need a plumber, you can count on us to help you find the right person for the job. discover all the ways we can help at angie s list. how if guests book direct ater, choicehotels.com and stay twice they ll get a $50 gift card? summertime. badda book. badda boom. got you a shirt! .i kept the receipt. book now at choicehotels.com no need with thending thcars.com app when on the lot, scan a vin to pull up all the info you need to help get the price you want. start scanning today. termites, we re on the move.24/7. roger. hey rick, all good? oh yeah, we re good. we re good. termites never stop trying to get in, we never stop working to keep them out. terminix. defenders of home. it s not a weekend hobby.ance? you have to live and breathe it for 50 years. it s the sound. and the fury. it s letting it all hang out there, and it s hanging on for dear life. that is what amg driving performance means. and this is where it lives. the 503-horsepower mercedes-amg c63 s coupe. kimberly: time now for one more thing. roger ailes the founder of the company died today at the age of 77. he was a patriot, he love this country, especially the men and women in uniform. on a personal note, he hired me in 2006 and he saw something in me and gave me the best opportunity of my life. i will be forever grateful. he was the most generous open hearted man who prided himself on loyalty and that s exactly how i will remember him. he saw something in each and every one of us who work here at the fox news channel. his camaraderie and positive attitude made this place thrive. he taught all of us to push ourselves, to believe in ourselves, if we could reach high to retire. may he rest in peace and god bless his wife beth and son zach. juan: first of all, god bless roger. but it s been another crazy week in washington if you been washed in stomach watching the news. while everyone think partisanship is at an all-time high, take a look at this picture. here have ultraconservative arkansas center tom cotton, thence s of nebraska and leading democrat in defiance of trump senator chuck schumer of new york. people began capturing this photo it looks like schumer and i are smoking reefer outside of wedding. they were not smoking reefer but as you can see in the second child, senator mccain joined in it so maybe there were a talk legalizing reefer. dana: video shows use of the turkish thugs who were beating up american citizens on embassy row. there s no video does date shot by voice of america that shows that race of erdogan himself saw what was happening, blessed it, turn around and walked back into the embassy. i would ask mr. president when you see air to him at the meet, punch back verbally. if he s able to deliver a message like this committee should do that nato in front of all of those leaders. jesse: address a scandal called tight gate, i wore a tie last night that was very, very controversial. it was from a britches in chappaqua new york, i was wandering the woods looking for hillary which are good to see on my weekend show on 8:00 on saturday night.
investigation of russian interference into the u.s. election and other matters. it s up to mueller to decide the other matters, to include the firing of the fbi director. michael flynn, a meeting between the fbi director and the president in the white house. just to be clear, the fbi investigation that s been going on, that was under director comey, that continues and that is what mueller is overseeing? he has oversight over the entire probe as it were. you re not going to stop any activity in the fbi anymore, you ve got a whole team there, and that s something you ve heard from the acting fbi director, as they search for a new director, that they re continuing their work. i have spoke to people inside the bureau, but this is a very independent-minded mueller. one other thing i ll note. i have been talking to people around washington in reaction to this, yes, comey s out, if you huge development today. just two days ago, white house press secretary spicer says frankly there s no need for a special prosecutor. so what is their thinking tonight? jim acosta joins us now. so what s the late word from the white house? reporter: it s hard to imagine a worse 72 hours in president trump s life. and what you re seeing tonight, anderson, is a very different president trump, a very restrained president trump, he s not talking about so-called judges as he did after the travel ban. he s not threatening the former fbi director james comey as he did last week when he talked about tapes on twitter. consider this very restrained statement coming from the president of the united states tonight on the tapping of bob mueller as special prosecutor, it says as i have stated many times a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know, there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity. i look forward to this matter concluding quickly. in the meantime, i will never stop fighting for the people and issues that matter most to the future of our country. an incredible turn of events when you consider the last week. remember the white house put out a same that essentially laid some of the responsibility for the firing of comey on rod rosenstein and you see rod rosenstein tapping bob mueller to be the special prosecutor. something that no administration wants to see happen at fi stage, let alone 150 days into a presidency. did rosenstein give a heads up to attorney general sessions? from what we understand, there was not much of a heads up before this announcement came down, from what i understand from talking to administration officials, rod rosenstein signed this order naming bob mueller as special prosecutor. white house counsel don mcgahn was notified and very soon after that informed the president of the united states that there was a special prosecutor looking how important is this? it s enormously important, but it s also i think a rare moment of unanimity and relief. because there is literally no more respected person in american law enforcement than bob mueller. when you look at his experience, 12 years as the fbi director. head of the criminal division in the justice department. u.s. attorney in boston. u.s. attorney in san francisco. appointed mostly by republicans, but occasionally by democrats, someone who has a reputation for integrity, for intelligence, for fairness. this is someone that both sides can trust. however it does mean that this is going to be a very serious and almost certainly lengthy investigation which cannot be good news to the white house. the president saying he s looking forward to this getting done quickly. it s not going to get done quickly. best of luck with that. dana you have new reporting on how this decision came about. what i m told from a senior republican source, rod rosenstein, and i think this is quite obvious based on the decision, and the bombshell we have tonight, the special prosecutor, was more and more agitated with the white house s actions and being put in the position that he had been put in, to the point where he was so angry, according to the source who was in contact with rosenstein, that he was ready to, quote, pack his bags, last week. with this decision, particularly on the heels of yesterday and the comey memo becoming public, and more importantly the content allegedly of the comey memo, this is basically the perspective of this republican source, throwing donald trump overboard. now we re talking about politically, and maybe even legally depending on how this goes. wanting to separate himself, obviously, from this and say, look, you guys are on your own and you re going to have this guy who has an impeccable reputation and impeccable experience and so forth obviously in a bipartisan way to do this investigation. the one other thing that this source says and we ll see if this source comes to bear, that the next big move on capitol hill and the next big public event was supposed to be james comey going to capitol hill testifying publicly. is that going to happen? it doesn t look like it. it is possible. but this source says probably what bob mueller will do is shut it down, meaning he will take stock of everything, including james comey s memos, including what james comey has to say, and perhaps prevent him or ask him, his good friend james comey, not to go testify. he s a private citizen now so he can kind of do what he wants. evan perez, who obviously is very steeped in these things, also notes if that happens, if james comey says huh-uh, i m not going to do it. that s another bad news sign for the white house which means that bob mueller is going to incorporate the comey memo and the comey conversation with the president into his investigation. if i could just add one point to that. comey almost certainly, when receiving a request to testify in front of congress, will go to his friend bob mueller and say look, what do you want me to do? what can i do that will jeopardize your investigation the least? and mueller, starting from scratch is almost certainly going to say, hold on, don t do anything, let me get my hands around this problem and then maybe we ll see if it s okay to testify. gloria, what do you make of this development? well, i think that it gives a lot of people some breathing room on capitol hill, the democrats have been calling for a special counsel, now they have a special counsel whom they respect and who is respected on both sides of the aisle. i was talking to a senior seener democratic aide who said to me, it s amazing to watch republicans on the special counsel go from we don t need one to he s amazing. so the republicans are applaud thing to a great degree because now they can go home to their constituents, they can say they are not ducking an investigation. they can say the special counsel is going to handle this and we need to get back to the people s business. i think mueller is an impeccable choice. i think people on the hill believe that he is. i think they are going to want to conduct their own investigations and jeffrey knows a lot about this because he was involved in iran contra and they re not going to be happy if comey doesn t want to testify, to be honest, because they re going to want to continue their investigation, the democrats, that is, and they re going to want to continue to go out on their own so you may see a bit of conflict there. in your views, is this a good move? first of all it s another self-inflicted wound, when the president blamed rod rosenstein for the decision to fire comey and rod rosenstein responded the way dana said he did. he made himself unfireable and became the most powerful person in the justice department. i would say this is a mixed blessing. for the american public, it s not such a good thing, we probably won t learn anything from this investigation, it s going to be secret, we will never hear from a witness, in the end we will either hear no indictment or an indictment. to the extent that we want to know what really went on, an independent investigation commission of the kind of 9/11 or the challenger, would have been better for the american public. and i think president trump could have avoided a special prosecutor if he had pressed for an independent commission earlier. some democrats still want an independent commission. is that possible? absolutely. as gloria was saying earlier, the fact that you have a congressional investigation and a law enforcement investigation at the same time can generate controversy and conflict. the most dramatic example being the issue of immunity. congressional committees want to get people to testify, so they want to give out immunity. law enforcement, they don t want to give immunity, and the most dramatic example of this conflict came involved in the investigation i was involved in iran contra, where john poin decisioner and oliver north were given immunity. we in the lawrence walsh investigation prosecuted them any way. they were convicted but north s conviction was overturned by the appeals court because the immunity was said to trump the conviction. that sort of conflict is very much possible. david axelrod, can you envision any scenario in which much or his surrogates criticize this? having embraced rosenstein on the decision to fire the fbi director, i don t think he s going to he s boxed, he s boxed. one interesting thing about this, if the president truly believes what he said in his statement that his campaign and his associate also be cleared by such an investigation, then he should welcome this. because if it had been the justice department that issued that statement, i think there would be broad skepticism about it. bob mueller, if he were to conclude that there were no laws broken, that there was no such involvement, carries much greater credibility. but on this point of the commission, there are going to be many, many democrats who are going to continue to push for this independent commission. because as he said, this process is going to be conducted in secret. and if this is a way of blocking the independent commission, that the country will never get the full picture of what happened. there s another important reason too, it s very likely no crimes occurred. if there was contact between the russians and the administration, it might be a terrible, terrible thing, but it wouldn t be a crime. so mueller wouldn t have jurisdiction to look into that. he can t generally look into things that might be politically or moralry bad. he is focused. he is ahab, looking at that white male. he gets the whale or he doesn t, but he looks at the entire sea scape. what s going for the country as an independent commission could possibly be, as david axelrod is saying, they want it to happen. republicans right now are running congress and they are breathing the biggest sigh of relief, i think we can hear it all the way up here in new york, because they feel that this is a big out for them. because they re going to take it out of the public eye? out of the public eye, and they hope what it means now is when they go home and get beaten up about, you know, what s going on, they can say you know what? it s in the hands of a very well respected prosecutor, bob mueller and i don t know anything about it, i can t talk about it. the investigations aren t over, so they are going to continue to investigate and hold hearings, so it s not going to go completely underground. it won t go underground, but it won t be broadened. one thing about these congressional investigations, they re not very well resourced. you ve got on the house side, seven part-time staff, working part-time on this issue, i think it s the same on the senate side. the special counsel will be fully resourced to pursue this investigation and that s one reason why there was a lot of interest in seeing a special counsel appointed. phil mudd, you know robert mueller. what do you make of this appointment? boy, on a personal and professional level, this is profound for me, i had an office, director mueller was down the hall, i must have been involved in 1,000, 2,000 meet wgs him. i never saw anybody like him, ever. for any american who looks for integrity judgment, i saw him do personnel, political investigations that involved corruption, i watched him make decisions in thousands of cases, when you had to decide whether to arrest a kid who was a potential suicide bomber or let the investigation go. anderson, i don t know what to say. i never saw anything like it. judgment, character, integrity, humility. if you have a kid and you ve despaired that there s not a hero in america, robert mueller is it. jeff, i heard you talk about leaks and this is something the president and republicans have been focusing on. it s not likely that there would be a tremendous amount of leaks coming out of this office. despite our best efforts. we will try, and the fbi will still be involved and the fbi is many what leakier organization than anything affiliated with mueller himself. but certainly the odds overwhelmingly are that this investigation will be tight as a drum, and we will not know. you can see who s walking into a grand jury room and who s walking out. you can know who s testifying. defense lawyers whose clients are subpoenaed can talk about it, and they often do. but in terms of knowing what s going on in this investigation there will be an fbi director, how do they work together, who oversees who and can the special counsel direct fbi agents to do things? the way it works, mueller will be in charge of the investigation. he will go to the fbi and say i need the following resources, i need 10 agents, and the fbi will almost certainly say we ll give you what you want. but the fbi director doesn t work for bob mueller. mueller will be in charge of the investigate shub. investigation. but he can draw on the resources of the fbi, and does he have his own staff? the fbi should work for bob mueller, let s be clear. once j. edgar hoover was exposed as the thug that he was, the fbi works for the justice department. yes, he has an independent statue 10-year term. they re not supposed to do investigations generally of potential criminal conduct. except under the supervision of u.s. attorneys or justice department attorneys and the special counsel is no different from any other prosecutor in the justice department, except he s not in the line of authority, he s been appointed specially, but he uses the same kinds of resources. so i think we can expect the same from him. now remember that ten years ago, if they asked everybody about his predecessor, comey, we would have heard the same praise, he was boy scout, he was fantastic, he was the greatest at this. but he succumbed to power. and i think the difference is that the new director has learned a lesson. he s not going to do what the old director did, although the temptations are there to do it. to be clear, he will also hire lawyers who will be the prosecutors and he s already hired two from his firm. all three of them have resigned from the firm. here s a question that i have, which is that the congressional committees have a different job. they want to present this to the american people who are really concerned about whether there was collusion, the russia hack and all the things that we have been writing about and talking about for these past months. the special counsel wants to figure out whether any crimes were committed. he wants to prosecute, and again, to jeffrey, this is what happened with lawrence walsh and the congressional committees on iran contra. so you have people with kind of different goals, because i think what you see, particularly from the democrats in the congress is they want to shine the light on this, one way or another, and a prosecutor really just wants to prosecute and doesn t want to shine the light unless it will help him in his prosecution. the special counsel is focusing on the legality, not the moral or doing something political inappropriate or doesn t reach a legal threshold. the leak about the israeli spy is almost certainly not a crime. now there is a crime, the people who leaked that information to the washington post committed a serious felony. and by the way, they re the ones who told isis that israel has a spy in their midst. that didn t happen from donald trump. he told the russians, but it is the leaker who s being praised all over the place, who is a felon, a criminal and should go to jail, who is the villain of this piece. and i hope that the new prosecutor will look into that leak. that s more serious than the leak that occurred if the oval office. i want to bring in laura jared, who was in the room at the justice department when all this came down today. laura, what was it like? reporter: it was a pretty fast moving turn of events, the reporters here at the justice department were gathered very swiftly just after 5:00, we were told to meet for a briefing. given about 30 minutes notice, we were given in that briefing the statements from the attorney general, rod rosenstein, as well the sat statute to understand the background. and the order from the deputy attorney general himself. i want to read to you just a little bit from his statement so you can understand the context here. he says in part, my decision is not a finding that crimes have been committed or that any prosecution is warranted. i have made no such determination, what i have determined is that based upon the unique circumstances, the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command and obviously it is rod rosenstein making this decision because the attorney general jeff sessions recused from anything related to the russia investigation, the trump campaign, the transition, back in march. so this was up to the deputy attorney general to make this decision. we re also learning a little bit about the chain of events that went on this afternoon. i m told by a source that the deputy attorney general s office called the white house counsel s office, did not give them a heads up but called them after this order was signed and attorney general jeff sessions was also informed of this decision after the order was signed, anderson. fascinating, david axelrod, one of the panelists earlier was saying this is kind of a situation of trump s making, by basically pointing to rod rosenstein as the reason why the fbi director was fired, then clearly rod rosenstein was angry, whether he threatened to resign or ready to back his bags, he denied that he threatened to resign, but he seemed annoyed by that. then the white house changed their tune. now it s rod rosenstein who is going for the special counsel. yeah, and i don t know him. so i m not going to sit here and say that out of spite he decided that he would take this step. but he clearly has felt the brunt of this, for a week he s been consulting with, he s been talking to members of congress and hearing from others and reading and he understands the atmospherics, so when he became the deputy attorney general, he was praised by both parties as somebody who was independent. he understands the situation. what he did today was very much about protecting his integrity and the integrity of the justice department. i just, anderson, want to respond to one thing that professor dershowitz said, it struck me as i was listening to him, that had the washington post not disclosed the fact of sally yates meeting with the white house counsel over general flynn, we don t know if he would have ever have been removed as national security advisor. it was only after it became public that the president took action on it. apparently it was only after it became public that the vice president knew he had been lied to. so i understand the sensitivity of leaks and the administration i worked for was tough on leaks for sure. but there s no doubt that some of these leaks have shown a bright light in places where light was very much needed. i have no problem with the washington post publishing it or the times publishing it. i do have problems with the people who work for the national security agencies leaking confidential information that may cost lives, that may make it much more difficult to detect laptops. remember the only way isis got this information is through the leak. and you have to be very careful when you leak, because you re taking the law into your own hands. you may not have all the information and know everything, we are still a country of laws and we have to make you can t say definitively what russia would have done with the information. they re not giving it to isis. they re not on talking terms. what about iran? they have done things that are actually helpful to syria. it s not as if bashar al assad is fighting a war against isis. he released david is saying he s allied with iran. that s very speculative. we know the first public disclosure of it came from the leaks from within the national security agencies and those leaks should be plugged. can we just come back to the broader question of the president and his actions and how his actions have consequences? i am not defending the leak or anything of the sort. i just want to point out what many people inside the white house and outside think caused this, which is the original donald trump attack of the intelligence community way back when, that really stuck in their craw, and he was warned, i can tell you, i know somebody who told this, you don t mess with the intense communities, because they have ways of getting back to you. it got back to intelligence committees that was then leaked to the washington post. can i answer one question? can bob mueller as special counsel be fired? the answer is yes, by president trump. that s different from the independent counsel law which has since expired and it s a parallel situation to what happened under watergate. which is when president reagan wound up demanding the firing of archibald cox, i m sorry, nixon. what did i say? reagan. when nixon demanded the firing of cox, that became the saturday night massacre. but he couldn t fire him, only the attorney general could fire him and the attorney general quit, the deputy quit and robert bourke came to the rescue of the president. and he fired him. but mueller can be fired by trump. so that s just something he could be fired but that would be a catastrophic decision that would have made the firing of the fbi director look like a small event. you would hope the president would learn something. he benefited nothing at all from the firing of comey. no benefit came. dplo if you re sitting in the white house tonight and you want to think about the things donald trump has done to himself, you can talk about the firing of comey and start with that and you can talk about his tweets where he threatened comey with the existence of so-called tapes. and reporting at cnn has said that as of last friday, rosenstein was not inclined to appoint a special counsel. so what happened between last friday and tonight? what happened is donald trump. and we have seen him be quiet on twitter, because perhaps on the advice of counsel. and i m assuming now that he s getting lawyered up, if he isn t already, that after donald trump started talking about the tapes, after we learned about, you know, and then we learned about the comey memo, et cetera, i think that you read that, if you re rod rosenstein and you think this is getting out of control. and at a certain point, you decide there is nothing else you can do, other than the big thing that you really didn t want to do, because we know how long and wieldy these investigations can get, but he did do what he didn t want to do which is appoint a special counsel. there are a lot of people who would like to hear from director comey about the notes he was taking about president trump, we may not have that opportunity unless he is willing to testify and come forward. i do think he should testify, but i think congress is going to blow this. gloria pointed this out, people are not focusing on the criticali criticality, the difference of what director mueller will do. he s looking backwards whether someone committed a crime that merits indictment by the justice department. the congress should be looking forwards, how do we protect the next elections, how do we talk about russia s cyber intrusions, how that implicated moscow in the previous election and look forward to protecting ourselves in the next election. i think he will be a fine witness. i think if he goes down with the congress, they re going to enmesh themselves into what happened in director mueller s investigation. they can t separate out we just lost the satellite link up. i want to expand on something dana talk about earlier about hearing a giant sigh of relief on capitol hill as lawmakers reacted to the naming of robert mueller. a lot of republicans have been saying there was no need for a special counsel or a prosecutor, what are you hearing tonight? reporter: anderson it s getting harder and harder for republicans to defend president trump in light of all of these revelations that continue to come up. particularly in light of the james comey memo suggesting the president tried to interfere in that michael flynn investigation. today, there was a softening among some republicans in their opposition to a special prosecutor. and a lot even the members of the leadership are raising concerns about the comey memo, say thing needs to be some investigation to get to the facts. so tonight there is a bit of a sigh of relief, take a listen. do you think the president was trying to obstruct justice in any way? it s hard for me to say anything on that, we want to gets more information, that s obviously a pretty brazen and big charge, but we deserve the answers to this and i think through an investigation, people need to understand it s going to take some time to get this set up, but we need answers, i look forward to comey s testimony and any other information we can get. are you concerned about this latest comey memo? of course. i want to get the facts. that s what we need to do. reporter: anderson, cornyn also praising the appointment of robert mueller as special prosecutor. he thinks that a joe lieberman were to get the nomination, he would get 100 votes. democrats are not there yet, but i am told by democratic sources tonight that it s increasingly likely that they ll allow an fbi director nominee to go along without a major fight, depending on who that person is, because they had said they wanted a special prosecutor named before they agreed to move forward on an fbi director nominee. so perhaps one fight averted. there are multiple investigations that we have been talking about in congress on russian interference, what happens to them on the special counsel, do they continue on? because there s a number of them. reporter: they will continue on but the question is what happens, because there is a fair amount of information sharing between the intelligence community and these committees on capitol hill in order to move forward. how will the new special counsel deal with these investigations on capitol hill. we don t know that yet, the senate intelligence committee leaders issued a statement tonight saying they expect to have a back and forth with robert mueller. i think we ll get an indication tomorrow when rod rosenstein briefs the senate about what happened here, and i m told that democrats had planned in a strategy session to pressure rosenstein to name a special prosecutor. now that he has, that session tomorrow could be a little less contentious. the appointment of former fbi director and respected lawyer robert mueller as a special counsel is a positive development and will provide some certainty for the american people that the investigation will proceed fairly. they go on to say after the bombshell reporting last night that the president had told director comey or suggested director comey couldn t give michael flynn a break, many will want to know, did that in fact happen? and the only way they will know if that in fact happened, unless it is so egregious and it was obstruction of justice and there s criminality there, the only way they would know it happened would be open hearings. that s right. and i m still struggling with the word deconflick shun. i ve never heard that word before in my life. public information will be disclosed, i don t think is quite as settled as alan does. it is possible that at the conclusion of mueller s investigation, he could file a public report. the independent counsel law, which kenneth starr filed a report, lawrence welch filed a report on iran contra. it is possible that he could file a report based on his investigation. u.s. attorneys have been much criticized for doing that. the job is to indict or not to indict. and what i m concerned about, is that mueller has so much credibility, he may actually tell some of these congressional committees, please, limit your investigation, don t mess around with our investigation. don t people have the right to know if the president of the united states tried to stop an investigation? i think they do. and that is why even though it has the potential to really hurt a president in their own party, republicans, who run these key committees on capitol hill, particularly in the senate, were trying to get james comey and still are trying to get james comey to testify in public, and the one thing we should underscore is how close james comey is to robert mueller, and the fact that people like lindsey graham and the judiciary committee were not able to set a date with james comey. and then suddenly poof, here s robert mueller as a special counsel. makes you wonder if there was a connection. this date back in 1973, was the first public hearing of the senate hearing on the president yalt presidential campaign hearings. joining me now, 44 years later to the day, two people who were major figures in watergate, carl burnstein and john dean. as someone who worked in a white house that was under siege and investigated by special counsel, what do you imagine the mood is like in the west wing? i would imagine it s not a very happy mood tonight. during watergate, that nixon white house was highly compartmentalized, need to know, and work went on when other sections were more obsessed than those directly affected by investigations. so it probably in the trump white house isn t quite that smooth. they re still working out their staffing and it s this has happened very early in their presidency, so i m sure it s a real ripple going through the operation. people in the white house, do they now see the special counsel as the enemy? i mean is that how he was viewed back in watergate? he wasn t to me. he probably was to some. because while nixon didn t want a special counsel, he actually threw some names out and tried to influence it. i left before the special counsel was appointed and so i wasn t really there. carl actually covered the final days pretty well in his book. so carl, a, what about that, and also you heard the response from the white house, kind of measured although defined statement from president trump tonight. has this whole thing been put back on the rails for the time being? what s happened is that this country has gotten through a moment of intense danger and pulled back from a precipice, because the president of the united states has been out of control and talking in a way of defying and demeaning the rule of law. and he s now constrained by the rule of law. so this is an immense event, and it occurred because rod rosenstein, who had been manipulated by the president, said enough. this cannot be. he tried to manipulate me in a statement that used me to justify the firing of comey. perhaps the attorney general of the united states was also complicit in that, jeff sessions. and therefore wasn t informed until about an hour after this occurred. we have a whole new set of circumstances here and it includes, as dana has pointed out, the republican party, but the republicans especially, not only can they breathe a sigh of relief, but they have been in a position of having to defend a president who many of them believe is not fit for office. that s what these four months have been about. the president of the united states through his tweets, through his public remarks, through his defiance of the rule of law has shown himself unfit for office and they have had to defend him and they no longer do. there s whole new rule of law mechanism in place, and that s what happened in watergate, is that the rule of law prevailed. we now have a structure this which that might happen here. it will be interesting to see if president trump resists the impulse to criticize the special counsel, to tweet about it late at night or early in the morning. what do you think would have happened back in the 70s if president nixon would have loved twitter? i think richard nixon would have had trouble operating twitter. he had trouble with his desk drawer, and those bottles that you had to push down to turn medicine bottles, he would fight those, so i m not sure he would be skilled at twitter. i have trouble going there actually. but can i add a footnote about what was reported through independent counsel. you go all the way back to jaworski, as special counsel, same status as mueller will have, he did send a report to congress, went to the judge, got permission to provide the information to the house judiciary committee, and the judge granted it. the grand jury information was sent up. so there s a long precedent for this material going up to congress. as jeff pointed out earlier, this won t take months, this will possibly take years, just like watergate took years to finish. what impact does that have on the administration and the country in the meantime? will the republicans be able to move forward with their legislative agenda? first of all, the president of the united states, with what s been going on by his own making, has been unsuccessful in governing the country from the white house. this should be an opportunity for him, if he s really interested in the truth. if he s really interested in governing, let him go ahead and do what the president of the united states does. i don t think that s a very likely event here. we need to get back to the central principle of what is occurring here, we have an ongoing investigation of whether or not the president of the united states and his associates have colluded with a hostile foreign power, that s what s at the bottom of this. and the other thing is the president of the united states has failed and resisted making his finances known and his dealings with russians, ethno russians, people in the former soviet empire, he s done an awful lot of business with them. that is going to be part of this investigation, in all likelihood. his sons have said, how much russian money has poured into their family coffers? i would be amazed if this is not a road that the special counsel is not going to go down. so now the president is in a position he has tried to resist and he no longer can effectively as he has until now. let me tell you why it would be wrong to issue a report. remember what a prosecutor does. he has a play thing, it s called a grand jury. he can put anything in front of the grand jury. the grand jury hears only one side of the story, it s secret. no lawyers are allowed into that grand jury room, it is a fundamental denial of basic due process for the prosecutor to come to any conclusion about what happened. the only thing he has the right to do is to decide, based on his evidence, that there is probable cause to continue to have an indictment. anything he does beyond that is ultravirus and every civil libertarian should be appalled at it because there is no fairness in the way the prosecutor gathers evidence. it s one sided, he doesn t gather exculpatory evidence, he doesn t hear from the defense lawyer, he doesn t have objections from the defense lawyer, it is a kangaroo court. it s an insult to kangaroo courts. i think that s an overstatement. but i do think there are other interests at play beside fairness and due process? actually the public s interest in this result that are we ll come back to you guys in a moment. joining us from the senate judiciary committee, democratic senator chris coons from delaware. robert mueller named as a special counsel. your reaction? anderson, i m encouraged. his long record of service as a senior federal prosecutor and as former fbi director, suggests that he s exactly the sort of person that many of us hoped would be named for special counsel. he has previous experience stepping up to an overreach, an exercise of power by an administration and with standing them, under the bush administration, when he and a number of other law enforcement officials threatened to resign if the president didn t respect their concerns about civil liberties. he s also a decorated marine vet ran and someone who i think will enjoy the respect of a wide range of members of congress. this is a positive and important step, anderson. to those americans who want to know, did the president try to get director comey to stop the investigation into general flynn, they may never get that information unless robert mueller determines that a law was broken. is there any concern that the other investigations going on in the senate, going on in the house, which have public hearings will not be able to inform the american people as much as they would like? as your panel has been discussing, anderson, that is a possible path. there will be prompt conversations between special counsel mueller and the senate intelligence committee. i think they need to coordinate. i would hope that the senate intelligence committee hearings will move forward. the entire senate has in front of them rod rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and there s a number of important questions that will still be asked of him about the role that attorney general sessions played in directing him to write the memo that led to comey s firing and whether or not he exceeded the scope of his recusal, and about what the president s role was in the firing of fbi director comey. as you just heard from carl bernstein, there s a number of other issues that have not yet been brought in front of either the senate judiciary committee or the intelligence committee, that i think are also going to be of concern to us. it is my hope, anderson, that at the end of this, there will be a public accounting of whether or not there was collusion between the trump campaign and russia. and it s important for public confidence in the rule of law and in congress that that result be reached. do you have any sense of what kind of a timeline we re looking at in terms of the special counsel investigation? it s my expectation that the special counsel investigation will be fully staffed and resourced and the odds are that that will allow them to reach a conclusion sooner than they might have on the current trajectory, but it could take several months or several areas, because the current fbi investigation has a counterintelligence component and a possible criminal component. there s a lot of details to go through here, a lot of individuals to interview, and a lot of documents to review. because of former fbi director mueller s senior experience, i don t think it will take him long to get up to speed and to be engaged and to be an effective leader on this investigation, but the result may be a year or two away. chairman, senator grassley, who was appointing a special prosecutor, said it doesn t matter if he thinks it s the right move. does it matter? i think what was striking was the number of my colleagues, republicans, who did not step forward and said we needed a special prosecutor, who did not step forward and say particularly after last night s alarming allegations in the press, that we need to get to the bottom of this and we need to understand whether or not our president has been inappropriately sharing highly and pressure the fbi director to drop an investigation of his national security adviser. i think it s striking. and i think in the end, the general public wants to know whether or not senators, both republicans and democrat, are going to work together in a responsible and bipartisan way to get to the bottom of this. i appreciate your time. thank you. just ahead, more reaction to all of tonight s big developments. it s our first commercial break in an hour. we ll be right back. anywhere? you got that right, kid show thing. get a directv all-included package for 4 rooms. only $25 a month, price guaranteed for 2 years. available for at&t unlimited plus customers. when it comes to heartburn. trust the brand doctors trust. nexium 24hr is the #1 choice of doctors and pharmacists for their own frequent heartburn. for all day and all night protection. banish the burn. with nexium 24hr. we re drowning in information. where, in all of this, is the stuff that matters? the stakes are so high, your finances, your future. how do you solve this? you don t. you partner with a firm that advises governments and the fortune 500, and, can deliver insight person to person, on what matters to you. morgan stanley. in the hours before the justice department named robert mueller as special prosecutor in the russia investigation, many republicans were resisting that step and urged caution over the allegations. here is what paul ryan said earlier today. there are a lot of unanswered questions. what i told our members is now is the time to gather all the pertinent information. we can t deal with speculation and innuendo. and there s clearly a lot of politics being played. democrats were having none of it. here is elijah cummings. speaker ryan has shown he has zero zero, zero appetite for any investigation of president trump. two different points of view, both represented here with the panel. kelly, what s your reaction to the naming of mueller? many of us had full faith in the justice department and rod who proved himself tonight when he did appoint a special prosecutor. he thought it was in the best interest for everyone. i think he was correct in that. this is good for the trump administration for two reasons. many of us have been saying there s no evidence of collusion, no evidence. this is going to force the democratic the democratic hand when in fact you have an independent prosecutor coming out and saying there s no evidence of russian collusion. they cannot attack the messenger here. the prosecutor would just say there s evidence of illegality, not whether there s collusion. when he says there s no charges put forth, that will be a good thing for the trump administration. number two, the last eight years we have seen his trust in american institutions demolished at the justice department when bill klepten meet with loretta lynch. this will restore the american people s trust in institutions amid a partisan environment. good all the way around. wait a minute. hasn t president trump gone after american institutions more than any president in recent memory? the intelligence community, the justice department. he goes after it all the time. that s what he came to washington to do. burn it to the ground, destroy the so-called deep state who is out there to attack him and leaking left and right. can we cut through the crap here? donald trump will be held accountable. what will hold the republicans accountable who enabled this man to go this far? we knew from day one what kind of person donald trump was. we knew that he had no respect for anyone let alone the rule of law. i want to know what s going to happen to people like reince priebus who demanded everyone in the gop pledge loyalty to this guy and now all these republicans are handcuffed to donald trump. where has this gotten us? where are the surrogates that barked and claps like circus seals? investigates as far as the eye can see. don t interrupt. let her finish. are you feeling good about that? how about letting her finish? i want to know. i think republicans like you who have given your loyalty to donald trump, what has he done for you? he dragged you into a terrible place. actually, if i look at what donald trump has done for me and middle class america, he has brought down the illegal border crossing by 60%. he has renegotiated trade agreements. is it worth it? he brought unemployment down to a low level. he is restoring american confidence in jobs. he pulled out of tpp. he is doing all give him credit where there has been credit. i m not giving him credit. he is dragging down okay. hold on. let s focus on the actual news tonight, mueller. paul, i mean for those can i for those americans that doesn t mean for those americans who want to know, did the president of the united states try to stop director comey from investigating michael flynn, they may never get that answer because maybe there was not enough evidence to bring a case against it in which case we won t hear anything from director mueller. we don t flow that. getting back to the debate that the professor had. many independent councils feel a need for the public interest to report. that s controversial. you are supposed to speak with an indictment. that might prompt a report. i would say, donald trump ran on a pledge of law and order and god help him he is going to get it. mr. mueller is a credible law enforcement official. he is going to get to the bottom of it. he may be pristinely innocent. and i will accept that if that s what we find. he is sweating bullets now. the next big story is the president has to lawyer up. he needs to lawyer up. right away. the white house counsel doesn t represent donald trump. he represents they were saying he should do that now. yesterday. by the way, he may well have. probably already has. we don t know. he has had a lawyer in the past in new york city. he is a civil lawyer. whether he retained a criminal lawyer, i don t know. but he s the lawyer also representing the russian company. what a coincidence. let me point out something. we have had independent prosecutors or special counsels going back to 1875. grant named the first one because of the whiskey ring or something going on there. there have been 20 since 1983. this isn t something unusual. jimmy carter had to deal, ronald reagan, bill clinton. ronald reagan never had but let me say this. let him finish. let me say this. as somebody who was involved with the campaign, i absolutely do believe they re going to show there s no collusion. what s going to happen then is some of the partisans aren t going to be as satisfied or as kind as paul. are they going to say he didn t have the resources he needed, he didn t have the right lawyers, are the republicans mr. mueller will tell us. will you be of good faith? i believe he will let justice department know, maybe congress know. senator franken raised about it, he needs to be resourced. he wouldn t have agreed to do
i say to him, be like john mccain, the way he behaves, the way he serves his country, the way he conducts himself in public service. i want my boy to be like him. i don t want him to be like president trump. senator bob kerrey, i know we are talking about john mccain and the country should be talking about him. but thank you as well for your heroism and the work you did in protecting this country both overseas and in congress. middle east tensions are rapidly escalating. palestinian protesters continue to clash with israelis for the seventh consecutive we can at the border of the gaza strip. may 15th is the day after israel s declaration of independence and subsequent war in 1948 in which hundreds of thousands of palestinians were forced from their lands. fuelling more of the unrest is the of mo of the u.s. embassy to jerusalem, which is scheduled for monday, the same day as israel s 70th anniversary celebrations. nearly an protesters have been killed by live israeli fire since the violence broke out on march 30th. at the same time, more violence between israel and iran in syria is raising fears of a possible war. it all comes the same week that donald trump officially pulled the plug on america s participation in the iran nuclear deal. i want to talk more about the unrest unraveling in the middle east with someone who helped write the iran nuclear deal. joining me now, nuclear physicist earnest moniz. sir, thank you for being with us. we appreciate this. i don t know how many ways we can underscore this. there are reasons people may not like iran. and there are valid reasons for which people may be frustrated with iran s perform an as a regional neighbor in the middle east. but nuclear deal in part authored by people like yourself was done to achieve some specific ends. and most people agree was achieving those end. can you talk to me about that? absolutely. first of all, let me make clear you can certainly count me among those who are shall we say are concerned about iran s behavior with hezbollah, in syria, yemen, human rights, missiles, and the like. as you said, ali, this agreement was it was long known as it was being negotiated, it was focusing on nuclear weapons, making sure that everyone, we and iran s neighbors, our friends allies in that region, would verifiably understand that they had no nuclear weapon, even as we then push back on all of those other behaviors that we obviously don t like. i would just maybe offer one analogy going back to president reagan when he negotiated with the soviet union on nuclear arms control. he focused on nuclear weapons as an existential issue even as we had many, many other disputes with the so yet union. you know, it s interesting, because donald trump s rhetoric about this is working with some people. i was speaking to somebody the other day who says iran s compliance with the aspects of this nuclear deal having to do with production of nuclear materials, the jury is still out on that. i want to be clear you made the statement after we made the announcement of pulling out of the deal as international inspectors who have been on the ground every day since the deal was confirmed the iranians have complied. let s be clear. let s be on the record. you are here. the jury is not out on whether or not iran was living up to its end of the deal as it related to nuclear materials? that s correct. everyone says that, including the president s cabinet members. so that s very important. secondly, i want to emphasize the compliance is not just in terms of how nuclear materials are handled. but very importantly again, secretary mat nis the congress two weeks ago talked about how the agreement put forward a probust verification regime. iran is also complying in allowing the kinds of inspections that occur not only at the places that they have announced nuclear activity but also at other places that the iaea has asked to go to. and that s very, very critical. and that i want to emphasize does not, to use the popular word, sunset. we have forever the ability of the international inspectors, presumably, often with guidance from intelligence sources in the united states, israel, and other countries, that if there is suspect activity the iaea has access and has access in a time period for which no other country in the world is subject. besides iran. does not participating in this deal make it easier or harder to achieve the more complicated aims in the reej, including limiting iran s activity in syria, in yemen, with hezbollah, as you have said? does it make it easier or harder? i think over time it will make it harder. i think there is a strategic error. and we ll see how the deal goes. but you know, the europeans have made it clear. russia has made it clear and iran at least for the moment has said it will continue to comply with the agreement. but you know, history would say that without the united states engagement that may be very hard to sustain over the long term. and now what happens if we have lost that verification regime. right. if the international community does not have the confidence in iran not rejuvenating its weapons program? you start pull that thread, and it s not very pretty in terms of regional instability. earnest moniz, the former secretary of energy serving under president obama who helped write the iran nuclear deal. mr. secretary thank you for being with us. thank you. with me live from gaza, matt bradley, msnbc news correspond on theent. these demonstrations will be taking place every friday. they will continue at least until may 15th but thing got really hot today. reporter: that s right we had another day of violence. we saw two journalists badly injured by gunfire on the israeli side here on the gaza strip side. i was talking to people. there is a lot of anger out there. there are protesters who are burning tires. they are lofting kites they have set on fire that have been wafting over to the israeli side and setting agricultural fields on fire on the israeli side. this is just a taste, kind of a preview of what we can expect come monday and news. that s when we are going to see this great march of return that s been going every friday for the last two weeks now turn into a big process. organizers i spoke to today said they are expecting hundreds had of thousands of people that will rival the violent deadly protest that killed more than 40 people back on march 30th. we can expect to see a lot more violence here. one thin that s interesting, hamas while it has quite a bit of control how the protests are going. the genesis this idea, the genesis of the movement doesn t come from hamas. it comes from ingroups here in the gaza strip. they are hoping it stays that way. they are hoping that hamas which has a stronghold on civic life here that they stay somewhat independent that they are able to exercise protests against the israelis without being under the thumb of hamas. when you go out there, you can see that, there are no hamas flags. just palestinian flags in the field out there facing israel. we will watch on monday when the u.s. embassy opens in jerusalem. matt bradley in gaza for us. at&t issued a mea culpa about hiring michael cohen. they released a letter to employees saying that hiring michael cohen as a political consultant was a big mistake. they paid cohen thousands of dollars for help in dealing with the trump administration on a number of matters including the acquisition of time warner that donald trump said he didn t want to see happen when he was president. the washington post reports that internal documents from at&t detail the $600,000 they paid to cohen and describes his contract, which highlights how he is to quote creatively address political and communications issues and advise the company on matters before the federal communications commission. i m joined by tom handberger. tom, it s not clear to me, i m not a lawyer. it s not clear what if anything michael cohen did may have been illegal. it seems he is involved in questionable ethical stuff. but at&t, a company that has business before the administration, paying the personal lawyer of president trump through a company that he established in the weeks before the election does not pass a smell test to this economics reporter. well, i think that your first assessment that there is nothing that s obviously illegal here is correct. in fact, the payment to michael cohen, although now the ceo of at&t and another company, novartis have apologized for hiring him is not illegal. the concern is, at least in the ideas of these ceos now, it s unseemly. large amounts of money going to a guy who was the president s personal lawyer. which would appear to be paying for access in effect. rather than expertise. but it s not illegal to pay someone. it s not clear that michael cohen was required in this case to register as a lobbyist. he did not register. so the issue here is one of ethics and optics, not a matter of the law. but as stephanie ruhle points out and you point out a lot, this is how washington works. just to put it in context, at&t spent $16.8 million on lobbying in 2017. so this was about 3.5% of their total of make of that what you will. but the fact is, this isn t all that unusual for the way lobeing works and the way businesses work. it s not necessarily draining the swamp, but it s not unusual. it s not unusual. in fact, paying individuals with access to decision makers in washington is an age-old practice. it is increased recently. that is the amounts of money that goes to those who have connections. in particular former lawmakers, former public officials. those include former head of the cia, the fbi, our most augusta institutions can become very wealthy simply providing this kind of advice to private sector interests. what is a little bit unusual in michael cohen s case is that he doesn t have the past experience that a former u.s. official would have. that is at&t we know hired him for his expertise at the fcc of which he has none. he has a phone, that might be the level of expertise. has some expertise in taxi and the trump business but fcc matters, nothing that i know of. and defense contractors and accounting. it is a mystery why he was involved in any of these businesses. as you point out, it may not be illegal. tom good to see you as always. tom hamburger with the washington post. let s talk more. jill wine bank, a watergate special prosecutor and an msnbc prosecutor. while it s interesting to me, jill, the optics of public companies with their legal departments and optics departments allowing this to happen, paying money to a company established a little before the election with no expertise in any of the spaces they needed work done. put that aside for a second. what s mostly interesting here. i m going to put that back the companies that gave money to michael cohen. money from columbus nova. that s the only group that gave money to michael cohen for real estate work. on the other hand they seem to have ties to russian oligarchs. this is all very strange. and i think when we are looking for crimes we need to look at where did the money go? it s clear that nobody hired michael cohen for his expertise. he doesn t have any. and he shouldn t have been the go-between. but that is the only explanation you can have is that people thought that he had access or that he would pass the money on to the president. so we have to once again, just like in watergate, we have to follow the money. we have to see where it went. that s going to be a key question. so the question and to tom hamburger s point. if michael cohen was successful in shaking people down or ins canning him he had access he didn t have good for him. that s the american dream that he is living. more importantly, though, at&t gave him $600,000 and novartis gave him $1.2 million and he funneled that off into om place that s his business. he took a loan on a property against his in-laws property which is weird given how much money was coming into his bank account but it is curious the money that we need to know where it went is this columbus nova stuff, because the other money, maybe they were duped into thinking michael cohen could solve their problems. but who is this columbus nova and where did that money go? that is the key question, columbus nova. but i would say there are business issues involved, too. if you are a stockholder on at&t do you want your money spent wasted on hiring someone with no skills? there is no excuse for that. and that s why apparently one top official of at&t has been forced to resign. apologies have been issued by at&t and novartis. so they made a mistake in doing this. and probably would have never said anything except that they got caught. yeah. that s the key issue. but you are right. the russian money is the money we want to find out about. equally so, what if the at&t money was given for a specific action by the president? then you have a quid pro quo and you have bribery. other than that, you don t necessarily have a crime. but we need to know where even the at&t and novartis money went not just the russian money. giuliani was asked about this. he said it is a dead issue as far as i m concerned. that combined with the vice president tell reporters that he thinks that the mueller investigation should wrap itself up because it hasn t found anything. this is the most interesting stuff yet. it is. and you have a real echo again of watergate. you had richard nixon saying a year of watergate is enough. and you have the vice president saying we gave 1.2 million documents. but you reason is given the ones that are needed. you haven t cooperated completely. don t shut down an investigation until it comes to its own natural conclusion. this is just wrong. and it is more of the obstruction. it seems plain to me. the more they attack the fbi. the more they attack mueller, the more they attack the department of justice. the more they attack rosenstein. those are things that are obstruction of justice. you can have obstruction even if you don t have an underlying crime. you can. and that s what this looks like. they should be more careful. and i wouldn t be taking my legal advice from rudy giuliani or factual statements either because we know how inaccurate he has been. jill, there is weird stuff going on these days testimony michael cohen stuff, the rudy giuliani stuff. it s hard to believe. always great to see you, though, gives us an excuse to talk often. jill wine banks, former assistant watergate special prosecutor. thank you ali. to the white house. kelly o donnell is standing by. she covered the mccain campaign i m sure in that press briefing that s underway with the health and human services secretary but sarah huckabee sanders hasn t started her questions yet, there are going to be a lot of questions about the mccain comments. i would expect that our colleagues in the white house press corps would ask about a staffer who made this remark about senator mccain in the context of the confirmation process for gina haspel who is the nominee to be cia director. mccain has a long standing public rohr record against the use of interrogation methods that are commonly referred to as torture. back in the bush era after 9/11 they were deemed legal under what is called enhanced interrogation technique. he has long been an opponent of that kind of aggressive sort of interrogation. in part fueled by his own experience in vietnam where he was held for more than five and a half years and was subjected to horrific levels of physical beatings and extreme pain. so much so that as you outlined at the top of the program he hasslingering effects today. unable to move his arms above his he will boesz. i was there for the campaign, every day of it in 2008 and first met him in 1996 covering politics. i was in dayton ohio when i announced sarah palin as his running mate. in a new book the final memoir as it s expected to be john mccain s restless wave coming out later this month. he points out he really would have wanted joe lieberman to be his running mate. there were lots of reasons based on the convention process why he was discouraged from doing that. lieberman had been the prior democratic nominee. there is some speak now between mccain and palin. we will talk about that at another time. i know sarah huckabee sanders has take ten podium. those conversations as you stated, we plan for a full day of meetings on the 12th with some time reserved to carry over if necessary. certainly, the best outcome would be an agreement for complete and total denuclearization. but this is the beginning part of these conversations. i m not going to get ahead of what we expect for that day. but certainly that would be i think the best outcome. and we have been pretty up front about that. do they think that can actually happen in a day? i m not going to get ahead of this conferring and the process. but there have been several conversations that have taken place leading up to both secretary pompeo has had now two meetings that have been part of this process. so it s not just one day. you have to look at the broader picture but certainly we have that time set aside at this point. justin. i wanted to ask about the auto meeting earlier today. i know attendees of these spitball sessions often leave with impressions that the president agrees with their position. i wanted to see if you could clarify both if the president or the administration has agreed to open negotiations with california on a national cafe standard rather than sort of the dual system that could economist. we haven t finalized what that looks like. but today we part of that conversation, part of discussion on how best to move forward. we are going to continue these conversations as we have a specific policy announcement on that front we will let you know. sarah? john. come back to north korea. the president says that he believes that it is kim s intention to denuclearization. but when you listen to the man in charge of north/south relations he says the reason why we are doing this is because the program is complete. the reason we are shutting down the test poup is because we don t need it. akin to somebody who builds a house and enters into negotiation to tear it down. what gives you confidence that kim actually wants to take apart something that he just built? look, the president is going into this with eyes wide open as he said many times. we will see what happens. but this is certainly a process that has moved in the right direction. we ve seen some signs of good will from north korea. just this week with the three americans brought back home. also, the stopping of the ballistic missile tests. stopping with their research and development on their nuclear program and we are going to continue to push for complete and total denuclearization. we are also going to continue maximum pressure until we see that happen. again, stopping the ballistic missile testing, stopping all this testing, according to that official is because they don t need it anymore. they are done. kinds like you can put the saws and hammers away because the house is done. again, the president has been very clear that we are going into this. certainly we would like to see something happen. but as he has said, we are going to see what happens. we hope not just for north korea but for the entire world that they do the right thing and that this goes forward in a way that i think everyone would like to see. ayman. thanks sara. this week the ceos of at&t and novartis said it was a mistake for their companies to work with the president s lawyer. does the president think it was a mistake for his lawyer to work with them? i think this further proves that the president is not going to be influenced by special interests. it s the definition of draining the swamp, something the president talked about repeatedly during the campaign. for anything beyond that i would direct you to the president s outside counsel. draining the swamp. i think it s clear that the deputy of justice opposed the merger. and so certainly the president has not been influenced by any or his administration influenced by any outside special interests. was the president aware blake. sarah, you said in this room the other day it is unlikely there is going to be an infrastructure bill this year. that was supposed to be the signature legislative item of 2018 for republicans in this administration. can you lay out for us what exactly is your is this white house s legislative agenda for this year? certainly we would love to see something done on immigration. it s something the president has been talking about for a long time. we have laid out the principles and the priorities that we would like to see as part of an immigration package. there is still some movement on that front. we would still like to see something happen. we would love for congress to actually show up, do do their jobs. democrats to stop opposing good legislation and actually fix our broken immigration system. is it fair to think the assume that immigration is a priority item for this year. it has been for the president and certainly something we will like to see. david. two questions. we have heard a lot about white house aide kelly sadler and her comments about senator mccain reportedly saying in a meeting the president shouldn t worry about the senator s opposition to the nomination of haspel because he is dying away. megan mccain wondered allowed today why the aide still has a job at the white house. does she still have a job? auto aim not going to comment on an internal staffer meeting. do you know if he was aware when he said that about the freedom of information documents that showed last year administrator pruitt had dinner in rome with a catholic cardinal who was under investigation for child sex abuse. i am not aware of that i haven t spoken with the president about administrator pruitt today. does the white house not think you need to condemn these remarks or i m not going to validate a leak one way or the other out of of an internal staff meeting. are you saying she didn t say this? again i m not going to validate a leak out of an internal staff meeting one way or the other. does the president regret what he said during the campaign about john mccain when he said he wasn t a war hero, he prefers people that weren t captured? i believe the president has spoken about that. i haven t talked with him specifically about that. jeff. if you won t comment on the specific comment, what does the white house believe about senator mccain? is there a tone set from the top here where it is allowed for an aide to say he s dying anyway. there is not a tone set here. we have a respect for all americans. and that is what we try to put forward in everything we do, both in word and action, focusing on doing things that help every american in this country every single day. i think if you look at the policies we have put forth you will see that reflected. why not apologize to senator mccain. i am not going going to get into a back and forth because people want to create issues of leaked staff meetings. does the president have confidence in secretary kneelen is. as we have said before, if the president has no confidence in a cabinet member he will let you know. what more does the president think nielsen can do now under the law that she hasn t done. does he want her to close the u.s./mexico border. he wants us to do a number of i think this. he wants us to work with congress as we have laid out time and time again and as we have called on them to do. if democrats in congress would stop playing political games we would love to secure the border, we would love to close the loopholes in the system. we would love to get a fix on daca. there are a number of thing we have laid out. we would love to see all of those things get done. is republicans pushing for a vote on the floor to get this going? if it addresses all of those problems certainly we would support things that actually fix the broken immigration system that we have. the secretary of homeland security made a statement which she said the president was rightly frustrated about congressional inaction. why was that frustration to the secretary. why did the president direct his frustration specifically at her at the cabinet meeting? again i am not going to get into a back and forth on an internal meeting however i can tell you that the president and the secretary share the frustration. democrats have got to stop playing games. they have got to stop doing this just because it is a mid-term year. they still have to do their job. and ooeld wields like to see them fix our immigration system. not only is the administration frustrated but americans are, too. 80% of americans would like to see this problem fixed. they want something to be done. they are begging congress to do it. and certainly, i think not only does the president have a right to be frustrated. he has a right to be angry. he is, he is expressed that. he has done it publically and he is going to continue to do that until we can fix this flob. in nafta, is the white house on track to meet speaker ryan s deadline on that next thursday on nafta. we are continuing in the conversations and we have made progress. hopefully we will get there. by thursday is the president willing to revisit this after the elections in mexico and the mid terms? we will let you know. kristen. a follow up on one of my colleagues, to be clear, doescaly sadler still work at this white house. yes, shes to. to follow up, more broadly, does the president set the tone or bear responsible for the tone in this white house? the president as i mentioned just a moment ago supports all americans. if you look at what he is doing every single day, he is showing up to work. he s working hard to make this country better. whether it s through building our economy, creating jobs, defeegt isis, fixing our judiciary system, helping with illegal immigration problems that we have the president is addressing a number of issues. that is what our focus is. that is what we are doing here every day. and that is what the president has i think laid out very clearly what his interests are. my question is a little different. does he bear responsibility for the tone set here at the white house and all of the staffers who work here frankly. certainly does. and i think he has done a good job of laying out what the priorities of the administration are and that what they are doing is helping impact americans all across the country. sorry kristen i have got to keep moving. so many of us have spoken to people who said they have heard these comments, do you say they are lying? are they lying. go ahead. sarah, general kelly came out and endorsed in an npr issue a pathway to citizenship for temporary restrictive status for people who have been in the united states for some time. does the president share the general s view on that. i haven t seen that specific comment from the interview. i know that the president and general kelly want to fix the system. did jen alkyly oppose the administration s push to actually give a deadline to some people who have been here over 20 years to leave the country? i would have to look at the comment before i could weigh in. right here. go ahead. thank you sarah. south korea has a huge stake in whatever kim and trump agree upon. will president moon or another representative of south korea be at the talks? i don t believe there are plans for them to be part of that specific day. but certainly have been a partner in this entire process. and as you know, president moon will be here on the 22nd to continue those conversations. and we continue to be in lock step with the south koreans. unt hunter. on monday the president tweeted quote the fake news is working overtime and said 91% of the news about me is negative, parentheses fake. do you have views about whether all the stories about the president are fake? no. why would he say that? i will take one more question. to follow up on the payments that michael cohen received from at&t and novartis. you said this is a sign that the president won t be influenced. but just to clarify, does the president think it is appropriate for his personal attorney to be collecting payments from private companies, presumably saying that or presumably promising to influence policy or to give them strategy on government policy? i think the bigger point is that the president is isn t going to be influenced by outside special interests. he is going to do what he finds to be in the best interests of americans across the country. thanks guy, hope you have a great weekend. and a happy mother s day. sarah huckabee sanders ending her press briefing. she started with the health and human services secretary on prescription drugs, then she want to questions saying about the comments made reportedly made about john mccain she is not going to comment on an internal meeting. she took a few questions on that and swatted down any ability to get a real answer from it and said that they respect all americans in the white house. did not specifically offer any apology, clarity, or embrace of john mccain. kristen welker trying to get to the bottom of not only whether it was set or what the general tone is, how the tone is set in the the white house. tell me about the exchange you had with sarah? first to the big question, ali, which is does selly sadler, the staffer here, who made those comments, essential saying john mccain s vote, he is quote, dying anyway. does she still have a job? one of my colleagues asked that question. sanders dodged initially. i went back and asked again. she was brief. she said yes. then i asked her, basically, does the president bear responsibility for the tone here at the white house. of course in the past he has criticized matter in mccain. that goes back to the campaign trail. he said i like people would don t get captured. he is a p.o.w. someone regarded as a war hero. a lot of people thought it was going to be the end of then candidate trump s campaign. he went on to win the primary. the two men have had a fraught relationship. listen to my we to sarah huckabee sanders. does the president bear responsibility for the tone set in this white house tmplg president as i mentioned just a moment ago supports all americans. if you look at what he s doing every single day, he is showing up to work, he is working hard to make this country better, whether it s through building our economy, creating jobs, defeating isis, fixing our judiciary system, helping with the i will league immigration problems that we have. the president is addressing a number of issues. that is what our focus is, that is what we are doing here every day. and that is what the president has i think laid out very clearly what his interests are. my question is different. does he bear responsibility for the tone set here and all of the staffers? he does, i think he has done a good job laying out what the it is proo of the administration are and what they are doing is helping impact americans all across the country. sorry kristen, i have got to keep moving on. so many of us have said they heard these comments. are they lying, sarah. go ahead. so an attempt to ask her again, if in fact the white house is making the case that the comments weren t said, they are not doing that, ali. that s what is so remarkable. they are not denying that these comments were stated. i was a part of a team of reporters that confirmed it with nbc news overnight. and we have three sources with direct knowledge of the conversation who essentially heard this person make this comment. so i asked her frankly, are all of these people lying? and she wouldn t answer the question. i think that is what makes this remarkable. the white house showing no signs that sadler is going anywhere. but certainly, the criticism continues and continues to mount. and continues to raise real questions again about the tone within this administration. when you have a president who has not refrained from lashing out at some of his some of the people who he has challenged, whether it be on capitol hill or elsewhere, ali. it is kind of interesting. because this is one one of those things that good communications people can actually tachblt there are a lot of people saying acknowledge, apologize and move on. now it s become something different. kristen welker in the white house. in the last hour president trump unveiled a plan to tackle an issue since he talked about since the presidential campaign. that is the rising cost of prescription drugs. the american people deserve a health care system that takes care of them. not one that taxes and takes advantage of our patients and our consumers and our citizens. these reforms are just the beginning. okay. here s what the president is calling for. stopping manufacturers were the regulatory process. disk medicare plan d sponsors more power when negotiating with drug manufacturers. requiring manufacturers to include list prices in advertising. this all sounds good. is it going to do anything to reduce drug prices? this is a subject i like talking about. let s look at the problem. according to the department of health and human services the united states spence $300 billion a year on prescription drugs. makes sense. we are an industrialized society and an aging population. medicare and medicaid account for 40% of the prescription drug spending. medicare is the largest buyer of prescription drugs in this nation. it s actually bigger than many nations spend on drugs. here in the united states, drug manufacturers are allowed to set their own prizes and they raise them as much as they want. drug companies say the higher prices help them fund research and investment making the united states a leader in bringing new drugs to the global marketplace. critics say it makes drugs less accessible to people who need them the most. the president say americans pay more for prescription drugs because foreign governments can export low prices from drug companies. this is nonsense. laws in canada and other places with universal health systems allow them to negotiate drug prices. the federal government is banned from negotiating cheaper prices. this isn t about other countries. this is about a law that prevent medicare from negotiating lower prices. the president also went after the pharmaceutical and health care lobbies which spend millions of dollars on lobbying. pharma, according to the center for responsive politics, it has spend $26 million in 2017. already this year, it s spend more than $10 million. obviously they going to ramp up now. joining us to talk about this is georgia republican congressman buddy carter. i love talking to congressman carter for many reasons, one of which is because he was the only pharmacist serving in the united states congress. he was there when the president made his announcent in. alex azar understands the industry. he was the president of eli lily in america. the president carrying on about other country s extorting has to be put in context. the american government can t negotiate prices the canadian government can negotiate prices with pharmaceutical. is that the heart of the problem? i m not sure it is the heart of the problem. i think what the president is also saying that intellectual property research and development that we americans pay for is being stolen essentially by other countries and they are using it and getting cheaper prices on these medications that we have to pay so much for. ali, today is a great day for american consumers. this is a president who truly gets it. he understands what common people are struggling with. the tax cuts and jobs act. now addressing prescription drug prices what we have done to increase our military spending. all those things are things that people were concerned with here in america. i don t get as much a chance to talk to you as i like. i want the stay focused on prescription drugs for a minute. sure. i agree with you, i don t think that negotiation is the heart of the problem. i do think pharmacy ben fete managers and the middle man as the president calls them might be a bigger part of the problem. listen to what the president said about that today. we are also increasing competition and reducing regulatory burdens so drugs can be gotten to the market quicker and cheaper. we are very much eliminating the middlemen. the middlemen became very, very rich. i don t find myself agreeing with the president of the united states all that often but the milledmen are a big part of issue. it doesn t exist anywhere else in the world. there is no pharmacy benefit managers in the way they are in the united states anywhere else in the world. how on earth do you get rid of them? well we can get rid of them. again, here s a president who truly understands. i have always said, the most immediate, the most significant impact we can have on prescription drug prices is to have transparency. the pmbms, the middlemen, if you ask them what s your mission? they will say it is to keep prescription drug prices low. it s not working out well for you at all. they bring no value to the system whatsoever. what they do is increase the price of the medications and don t pass the discounts on to patients to the consumers. what s the solution? let s think big. how do you make drug prices more accessible to consumers while ensuring the drug companies make money so they can continue to develop drugs. you know, they make the argument they make lots of drugs, done make money on some of them, they need to have blockbuster drugs and they have got to get a lot of money. what s the recipe for success here, as a guy who is pharmacist who has had to deal with customers who probably have had some difficulty paying for their medication what s the answer for you? transparency. no question about it. that s the key here. that s all we have ever also for with the middle men, the pbms is show us, show us what is happening here. why is it when i speak to the ever inner of epipen, when i ask them when it leaves you how much does it cost? $150. i said when it gets to me the pharmacist it s $600? what happened in between? what happened there? do you think when you talk about transparency i think of stories we have done in the last several years about drugs that were increased in price by hundreds of percent. the shaming certainly from the media didn t often cause companies to do anything about it. what is the feeling that if they are transparent about pricing what will happen? there will be public pressure to reduce prices? people can t boycott their cancer medication? you are exactly right. what will happen is that what the president has proposed is to have the discounts applied at point of sale. let the patient see the discount when they buy the medication. that will make all the difference in the world. what s the problem with the fact that the pharmaceutical companies are some of the biggest will beyists in our part of town? lobbyists in your part of town. they have influence. they are able to give talking points to members of congress that prevented legislation from going into effect that allow the american government, medicare part d sponsors to negotiate prices. again, the president kept talking about other countries. i come from canada, where they do negotiate the price of drugs, because that s what they can do. that s what the president proposed. he identified that today. he said look we need to be able to negotiation on behalf of as you pointed out earlier, the largest payer the biggest payer in the whole drug system is medicare. and they need to be able to negotiate prices as well. and that s part of what the president and secretary azar are proposing. representative buddy carter thank you for joining us. the only pharmacist serving in the united states congress. did president trump almost lose a is her inability to secu our borders? nielsen a protege of chief of staff john kelly reportedly told colleagues she was going to resign. the white house is pushing back on that story. we ll have the details after the break. you re watching msnbc s. (baby crying) don t juggle your home life and work life without it. and don t forget who you re really working for without it. funding to help grow your business. another way we have your back. the powerful backing of american express. don t do business without it. a top priority. here is some of what the white house chief of staff john kelly had to say about immigration during an interview with npr news. let me step back and tell you the vast majority of the people that move illegally into the united states are not bad people. they re not criminals, they re not ms13. but they are also not people that would easily assimilate into the united states. they are overwhelmingly rural people and the countries they come from, 4th, 5th, 6th grade education is kind of the norm. they re coming here for a reason and i sympathize with the reason, but the laws are the laws. according to the new york times and politico, kelly s protege kiersten nielsen wrote a resignation letter after the president bee rated her in front of the entire cabinet earlier this week. he accused her of failing to secure the border. nbc news has not independently confirmed the story. a spokesperson denied to both publication she had drafted a resignation letter. but in a written statement nielsen didn t deny she nearly quit. it reads in part the president is rightly frustrated existing loopholes and the lack of congressional action have prevented this administration from fully securing the border. i share his frustration. these are complex issues and i will continue to direct the department to do all we can to implement the president s security focused agenda. moments ago white house press secretary sarah sanders was asked about why the president took his frustration out on secretary nielsen. i m not going to get into a back and forth with you guys on an internal meeting. however i can tell you that both the president and the secretary share the frustration that congress is simply not showing up to work and getting their job done. democrats have got to stop playing games. they ve got to stop doing this just because it s a midterm year. they still have to do their job and we would like to see them fix our immigration system. not only are is the administration frustrated but americans are, too. 80% of americans would like to see this problem fixed. they want something to be done. they are begging congress to do it and certainly i think not only does the president have a right to be frustrated, he has a right to be angry and he is and he s going to express that. he s done it both publicly and he s going to continue to do that until we can actually fix this problem. joining us now to talk about this is politico employment and immigration reporter ted haas en, who could wrote the politico report. ted, put aside whether kiersten nielsen is in trouble with the president or not. fundamentally the president has really hitched his wagon to this immigration question and he s frustrated by possibly a lack of understanding of the way government works, that the exec stichl is a co-equal branch of government. unless congress gets this done he doesn t get to build the wall and get the border done. i was speaking with a dhs official who said nielsen, the homeland security secretary is under a tremendous amount of pressure to come up with results here. but really there are limitations to what any secretary will be able to do when it comes to illegal immigration. i mean certainly there are policies that can change, but the things the president is asking for and that he s trying to do would have to be done by congress at the end of the day. so, again, putting aside the president s frustrations, kiersten nielsen says this is a complicated issue. that s a fact. this is a really complicated issue. democrats couldn t fully get their head around it, republica republicans can t get head around it. we can agree a lot of americans are concerned about this issue. they are. we have lots of immigration issues. many are not about the southern border and people with a 6th grade education. they re about a labor shortage in industries in america. is there any real comprehensive work that is likely to happen in this administration? i think as you remember, back in february the senate actually tried to debate immigration and kicked around some different proposals. but at the end of the day none of they have were able to advance. and part of that is what the white house is asking for. i mean, they have a four-pillar plan that involves cutting legal immigration in half. and that s just not palatable to most democrats. actually all democrats in the senate. and then also to many republicans, moderate republicans as well. so, unless there is some flexibility with that plan, it seems unlikely that there is some kind of immigration legislation that is going to be reached in the next few months. well, you re the perfect guy to ask this to. you deal with employment and immigration. when the president carries on about 4, 5, 6% gdp growth, we have squeezed all the productivity we can squeeze out of workers. the only way to get higher gdp growth it s labor and productivity. the concept of cutting legal immigration into america doesn t square with what most economists think you need to grow the economy. that is absolutely right. i mean, i think most economists would say cutting legal immigration will lower gdp, gross domestic product. but that being said, the administration, when they ve gone out and argued for this proposal, they said it s not just about growing the economy and gdp. that it s also cultural and it s about who is coming into the country and how that can change the culture of the united states. very interesting topic, ted. we ll continue the conversation. i like having it with you. ted hess en is a politico immigration reporter. let s look at markets. the markets are ready for let s see where they are now. as of yesterday we had a six-day winning streak. looks like we re going to have a seven-day winning streak. you can see the dow just after 2:00 was down just a little bit, but it has recovered nicely. we are not up to where we were at the beginning of the year. this market has taken a beating in the first quarter of this year. but we are we re doing okay. we re getting back there. we re continuing to cover that with you. where you are winning on the market. you may be losing on gas prices, though. oil continues to set record highs. so, that s it for me. that wraps up the hour for me. i m going to see you back here tonight. thank you for watching. have a great weekend. deadline white house with nicolle wallace starts right now. /s hi, everyone.
by his thinking, why deprive good friday visitors of a good visit to an iconic irish pub. submit ted without judgment. that is our program for a friday nig night. whatever your persuasion, we wish you a good weekend. good night from our headquarters here in new york. hi, everyone. it s 4:00 in new york. icing is in and public criticism of russia is still very much out. nbc news with extraordinary reporting about donald trump s quote, president donald trump s national security advisor spent months trying to convince him to sign off on a plan to supply new u.s. weapons to ukraine to aid in the country s fight against russian-backed separatists. when the president finally authorized the major policy shift, he told his aides not to publicly tell his decision because doing so might agitate russian president vladimir putin. quote, he doesn t want to bring it up, one white house official tells nbc news. it is not something he wants to talk about, this source says. this new reporting helps fill in the blanks around what trump watchers have coined the president s do not congratulate call. that one where trump, over the objections of his national security advisors and in sharp contrast to the public statements from other american elected officials, congratulated vladimir putin on his election victory. nbc news reports that president trump also said to putin, quote, if you want to have an arms race, we can do that. now, while americans have debated whether to take trump literally or not, putin wasted no such time with that kind of foolishness, testing a new ballistic missile earlier today to help unpack the increase increasingly bizarre relationship between donald trump and russia, we brought in some of our best exporerts and reporters. nbc news national security military reporter courtney cube, one of the by lines of the report we started with. jill colvin, white house reporter for the a.p. chuck rosenberg, former u.s. attorney, former senior fbi official, now lucky for us an msnbc contributor. and steve schmidt is back with us today. courtney, let me start with you on your reporting, and i think this is a development since your story broke. i m sure prompted by the incredible detail in this account. but i understand that the much now expulsion of russian diplomats didn t have anything to do with the number of russian diplomats in this country at all. the head count could very much remain the same. it seems like another data point in the picture you paste you paint of a very conflicted donald trump when it comes to russia policy and russia p.r. that s right. so he was presented last week with president trump was presented with three different options and he ended up going with the middle one, the one that was in the middle of a lighter option against vladimir putin and the one that was the harshest, and that included expelling the diplomats from the united states. what we found here was president trump has to be really pushed along when it comes to doing things when it comes to any kind of response to vladimir putin and russia s continued provocations. one of the specific cases that we looked into was arms sales to ukraine. the proposal to send javelin anti-tank missiles to ukraine in their fight against russia sat on the president s desk from august until december. now outgoing secretary of state rex tillerson along with other administration officials had to really continue to press president trump to approve this deal and to send the weapons to ukraine. courtney, do you get any sense from being in the building that you cover that, you know, these military relationships, some of the intelligence relationships have been described to me as almost existing in a parallel reality with donald trump s public pronouncements and twitter feed. do you get any sense that this clash, that the fact that this sat on his desk for a good and important ally that has relied on the united states of america in previous administrations, that this is starting to strain the relationship between some of our important allies, at least from the pentagon s perspective? no, i mean you were spot on that they have a very different relationship, that it exists in a whole parallel universe. we often hear about general dunford, having discussions with his russian counterpart. there is this continuing no matter all the diplomatic problems that happen, there is this continuing de-confliction line. what that is, it s a way for the russian military and the u.s. military to talk on the phone directly to make sure that there s no altercations or any kind of problems in the air over syria where they re operating in really increasingly close space all the time. while there are sort of the incidents here and there, they continue no matter what happens on the diplomatic side, no matter what happens on the provocations from vladimir putin or conversations the u.s. military and the russian military continue to operate in a pretty professional way, nicolle. jill colvin, you cover that building. i m guessing there is nothing on background here from white house officials that surprised you. but it s pretty stunning to read in sort of the public sphere, courtney and our colleague kristen and carol s reporting, that aides said we can t go there, we can t talk about it. he doesn t want to tout his policy decisions. is this consistent with sort of the what you hear from being in the building you cover, the one behind you? you know, what s so interesting about that is that kind of really provided the internal script of what we all see play out every single day, which is we see we ve seen the press conferences, the president s twitter feed he won t go after putin, after the nerve gas attack in london. the president has not weighed in. the two issues he doesn t want to talk about stormy daniels and vladimir putin, the two people folks say again and again he doesn t want to criticize. there was something interesting in that story, that was his concerns about the potential arms war, the new nuclear weapons that putin claims to have created here. i thought it was really interesting that was the one area the president really seemed to get up there and be willing to be confrontational with putin telling him, you know what, if you re going to go and build these, we re going to build them even bigger. the president is someone who likes to project this strength and this air of power about him. and if you ve got putin who is kind of trying to play that same game with him, that s one area you might see the president potentially step up. steve schmidt, do you think that might have anything to do with any nuanced understanding of the cold war? do you think it would have to do with having bigger and better missiles? i think for sure he s making it up as he s going along. there s been no articulation, certainly not of a coherent strategy with regard to what s arising geopolitical adversary russia. a country with thousands of nuclear weapons, though its economy is smaller than the state of california s, it poses significant risk. and vladimir putin s number one objective is to undermine faith and trust in democracy across the western world. and in donald trump, he has a faithful ally because it is the president of the united states and his administration with their constant attacks on the rule of law on the intelligence community, on the justice department, and other vital institutions that are doing vladimir putin s dirty work. that would be of interest to him and what sorts of crimes he could be possibly investigating if this change in the platform and all of the context and communications between trump campaign officials and russians that we now know about are on bob mueller s radar, too? sure, nicolle. thanks for having me. some acts appear on their face to be benign, some appear to be ambiguous, some can appear to be nefarious. changing the platform on its face can be completely benign. let me give you an example. if you and i went out and bought ski masks that would be benign. particularly if we went skiing. if we bought ski mask ands robbed a bank, that purchase looks quite nefarious. the mueller team is collecting all this data, asking tons of questions, trying to understand motives because what may appear ambiguous can in retrospect turnout to be quite nefarious. analysis, right? if done for completely innocent reasons, if the republican party decided their platform was better without these planks than with them, then that s fine. that s the product of discussion and contemplation and negotiation. if they did it in return for something, something of value, either money or some other consideration, that could well be bribery. and so what s mueller looking at? bribery and obstruction of justice and interfering in the election. in several different manifestations, maybe to steal data and use it to the advantage of the campaign, or perhaps to just keep the russian government from releasing compromising information on the president. i don t know what the answer is yet, but i know that this pattern of conduct will help elucidate that. steve schmidt, one of the most searing memories of the 2018 campaign which we both served on mccain, he started most days by talking to one of his dearest friends, the leader of georgia, and i remember i was on the road with him and you called me. he talked every morning on his cell phone, on a colleague s cell phone. the reason for that was he was reassuring him at this time of russian aggression and incursion that america would stand with the people of georgia. i remember a day it was a critical juncture in the campaign, i was on the road with senator mccain, joe lieberman, lindsey graham, he started a political rally in a battle ground state by saying today we are all georgians. you were furious. not that americans are dumb, but in the middle of a presidential campaign, they re not thinking of who he is and they re not thinking about the country of georgia. i wonder what you think about the fact that that was the man that the republican party nominated in 2008, and in 2016 the gop platform was changed to articulate precisely, in full view, in public, vladimir putin s desired policy vis-a-vis ukraine. the american president would be hostile to autocrats. the american president would celebrate freedom and liberty and the concept of the dignity of the freedom of the human being. this president has no interest in it. what we ve seen is vladimir putin act with impunity, with very little push back. he s seeing what he can get away with. he s getting away with a lot. and i think the danger that lies ahead, what happens if vladimir putin instigates an article 5 nato crisis, for example, in one of the baltic republics? what will the response be? is it possible that putin could break nato over the next couple of years? we don t know the answer to any of it, but we have seen an american president who is, for whatever reason it is, absolutely timid for the first time since harry truman confronted the rise of the cold war, for the first time an american president will not confront an adversary, and specifically the leader of russia. it is bizarre. jill, let me let you jump in and pick up this thread based on the breaking news. just before we came on the air, we reported that bob mueller and his investigators detained a trump ally at the airport, at the logan airport. his name is ted malloch. he said he was told it was a felony to lie to the fbi. he would gladly cooperate with them. the agents produced a document allowing him to search his cell phone. i guess it was some sort of search warrant. chuck will correct me if i m wrong. and malloch said the questions got more detailed about my involvement with the trump campaign which was informal and unpaid. whom i communicated with, whom i knew and how well. they had a long list of names. he said they asked him about former trump campaign advisor roger stone, author jerome coursy and wikileaks. he said he met stone a total of three times and always with groups of people. he was asked if he visited the ecuadorian embassy in london where julian assange has been and he said no. how does this land, not the substance, everyone on the campaign is being pressed about ties to russia and potential conspiracy to commit crimes around the collusion investigation. but just the tactics. i remember hearing from white house sources that after the no-knock warrant was issued for paul manafort s home, after all the computers were seized, that people were more on edge. do these stories land with a thud in the west wing? at this point it s less of a thud than you ve got a boxer who has been punched and punched and punched again and it s one more hit coming at them. this lands, this is the first time i m hearing about this report. this lands as the president, as you know, is in mar-a-lago right now. he just got back from the golf course. the west wing is not particularly full today. people have chosen to take the day off or work from home right now. what s really interesting about this one is you see and we ve heard this a little bit especially when sam nunberg was on your air after he wound up being interviewed by mueller s team. they seem to be really highlighting roger stone and his potential interaction with julian assange and seeing that as a potential, you know, point of interest here clearly by these investigators. but every time the white house thinks that it moves on, every time they try to move to a policy issue, they try to break any new ground, it s again, russia, russia, russia. they just can t escape it. let me give you the last word, chuck rosenberg, in terms of helping us understand what this tells us about bob mueller s investigation and their interest in contacts with wikileaks. sure. first, i think that s right. they continue to poke and probe and prod at all connections russia. you are right, by the way, nicolle, they probably used the search warrant although at the border of federal law enforcement has a lot more leeway and may not need it. good prosecutors would have gotten one anyway to avoid litigating the issue. not all witnesses are crucial. this gentleman, i believe, is a british citizen so they have jurisdiction over him while he s in the united states. why not hand him a grand jury subpoena while he s here and find out what he knows. that s what they did. why not indeed. courtney kube, congratulations on your unbelievable reporting. it kept me up last night. i read it right before i went to bed. congrats. jill colvin, thank you for your extraordinary reporting every day from that place. can t be easy. when we come back, fox news is having a bad week over laura ingraham losing supporters. a former fox news contributor writes today he should have left sooner and claims he was blocked on discussing how the russians might have ensnared our president. also ahead, the washington post pulls back the curtain on one of the most important white house offices, in details how the effort to hire the very best people may have been doomed before the president even took office. and his friends and family mourn the death of stephon clark an unarmed black man fatally shot by sacramento police. we ll talk to our friend rev al sharpton about the message he delivered at the funeral and his advice for this grieving and divided community. you wouldn t accept an incomplete job from any one else. so why accept it from your allergy pills? most pills don t finish the job because they don t relieve nasal congestion. flonase allergy relief is different. flonase relieves sneezing, itchy, watery eyes and a runny nose, plus nasal congestion, which pills don t. flonase helps block 6 key inflammatory substances. most pills only block one. and 6 is greater than 1. start your day with flonase for more complete allergy relief. flonase. this changes everything. it is a support network that is will always react positively to everything that he does. it s not journalism. it is propaganda. our friend, that was our friend rick stengel on this program yesterday talking about where fox news fits into the white house. former fox news contributor the network worked to silence his concerns about the trump campaign in russia. ralph pete writing in the washington post, i was increasingly blocked from speaking on the issues about which i could offer real expertise. russian affairs and our intelligence community. i did not hide my views at fox and as word spread that i believed an investigation into russian interference was essential to our national security, i was excluded from segments that touched on vladimir putin s possible influence on an american president. his campaign or his administration. joining our panel today, evan mcmullen, former cia operative who recently ran for president as an independent. the rev al sharpton, host of politics nation here on msnbc. and president of the national action network. lydia, editor in chief, and brett stevens, op-ed columnist. steve schmidt is still here. let me start with you, evan. this was not some squishy moderate that fox news kept around from the old days. this was a highly regarded, i think former served in the army. uh-huh. and his expertise, he d been face to face with russian intelligence officers in his military career. and when he wanted to articulate his concerns, not simply about donald trump, but on behalf of america, he was shut down on fox news. what does that tell you? it s not a surprise. you used to have all kinds of conservative thinkers who refused to get on board with trump but would still be allowed on fox. that changed after the election and, you know, you don t see them any more. like george wells, they re all here right now. i d like to say brett stevens, exactly. ralph peters was suspended by fox for being too critical or disrespectful to president obama. this guy has the sort of fox credentials and he also has intelligence credentials and he is saying that, as you said, they wouldn t let him speak, use his expertise to tell the truth to the american people. that s a problem. but this is, this is how fox has become a propaganda mouth piece for the president, addressing a segmented audience, not with truth, not with facts, but with its own fake news, even as it calls out other reputable reporting that s not positive for the president, fake news. that s the what. what is the why? ratings. it is popular to offer political cover to vladimir putin? it s political audience. i can tell you when it happened, march of 2016, when it became clear that donald trump was going to be the nominee of the party and suddenly some of us who maintained our consistent opposition to trump s candidacy found ourselves being invited less and less often to the point of being never invited onto the network. now, whose decision that was your experience? that was my experience. whose decision was i don t know. it would be foolish to consider the possibility that a network owner who treasures his proximity to power, his proximity to the candidate and now his proximity to the president might be averse to having someone like ralph peters with impeccable conservative credentials attacking him for the right, precisely on this hypersensitive issue of russia because, of course, on this subject peters is absolutely right. i have to just say also, it s a business decision, right? if your audience is aligned with trump because of rote extreme partisanship, you have to keep that audience there. if you lose that audience, if they realize there is a problem with trump, they go to other competitors we put together, we wanted to show people who he was. he is such a right winger that fox is the only place he could find a tv home, i would guess. and so to the point but that s the point. this is someone who is 99% you re talking about it as a business. in the interest of disclosure i have to say working for republicans it was sometimes nice to have fox cut the republican side some slack. but i ve never seen steve schmidt what we see now day in, day out, the attack on bob mueller who was the republican pick to run the fbi after 9/11 and kept this country safe from terrorism. the attacks on the republican-run justice department, the attacks on the republican-trump appointed run fbi. this seems with the departure and whistle blowing, if you will, television version from this former contributor, this seems like a new layer of the conspiracy to cover up not just for donald trump, but for the russians. there was an extraordinary documentary, nicolle, that was unveiled in my hometown park city, utah, this past sun dance film festival. it was called our president. it was a look at all of the russian television coverage of donald trump during the election in the first months of the presidency. on russia state tv, he is routinely referred to as our, meaning, russia s president, russia s guy in the white house. and if you look at the themes that are spewed forth to the russian people on state-controlled propaganda tv about the conspiracy in the intelligence communities, the conspiracy in the justice department, the russia today coverage thematically is a very, very close to the type of stuff the american people are subjected to through fox news s misinformation campaign. in fact, i wouldn t fall out of my chair given the close coordination of stories whether by coincidence or design if there was a morning meeting to coordinate what we re going to talk about on the news of the day. but for sure, with the same exact intensity that russia today undermines america s institutions, fox news undermines america s institutions with salacious and false attacks impugning the credibility and motives of american patriots with nonsensical conspiracy informations, fake news, and misinformation. and we have never, ever seen an american television network so subordinate itself for profit to fake alternate reality news at the service of a political figure. it s positively frightening to see it developing in the united states of america. let me steve is talking about america, not homeland. lydia, let me show you something that our colleague richard engel is reporting tonight. it is in line with this fox news contributor s concern. the russians are up to no good. let s watch and talk about it on the other side. this is your kgb card. he says just last month he got a call from a friend still on the inside. he told me, look, be careful. look around. his source told him he was one of eight on a hit list. it includes skripal and christopher steele, author of the infamous trump/russia dossier. do you think that the fact that there are i mean, america it s so surreal. america s allies are responding to russia s actions in the u.k. against russians living there. do you think that there is a danger in not just people not seeing these stories, but being misinformed about the nature of vladimir putin s russia? there is no question that this is probably the grave est danger that faces our country right now. in that report which i watched earlier, you have the conclusion that the nerve toxin was likely smeared on the doorknob of this man s home. i mean that s something out of the americans. what s next? are we back into cold war duck and cover? so, i think it s a huge problem. and what is most worrying for me is i saw recently a chart that was done based on some facebook data where they were asking people about trusted news sources and sorting them by self-identified conservative or liberal. liberals, of course, had a significant amount of trust with a wide range of mainstream news organizations. but on the conservative side you had one outlier and that one outlier was fox news. i think it s extremely worrying that we have this very polarized news consumption audience. and television is so powerful, so if you have a whole segment of the population that is essentially getting all of its news and information from fox news, i mean, nobody on this chart, nobody trusted breitbart, nobody trusted newsmax even though we ve been extremely worried about those factors. it s not even about facebook. but fox news, i think, as it s become more and more heat and had more and more conspiracy minded and is ignoring the core stories, the things that are really a threat to our democracy, i think has in some ways emerged as enemy number one to our democracy. i don t think it s only the that they are trying to project something that is different. it s outright demonizing those that will not go along with the narrative. it s one thing to be right leaning or left leaning. it s another thing where you are now reinterpreting what the right is about. and i think what is unfair to a lot of people, including schmidt and present company at the table is that we are seeing the redefining of what it means to be on the right by whether or not you re loyal to donald trump. that s where that s exactly the point. that s where the danger is. fox news used to represent conservative opinion. now it represents a cultive personality. that s what s changed. that s my point. that s dangerous. and we never did that i mean, on this station, a lot of us were progressive, liked president obama, but there were people on the far left would come on this station and attack obama. he didn t define progressive politics. they are allowing trump to define the parameters of what it is to be a right winger. if you re anti-trump, you re no longer a legitimate right winger. that s dangerous. you come on over here. up next the shocker, the people in charge of hiring the very best people to work for donald trump do not appear to be the very best people based on an extraordinary piece of investigative reporting from the washington post. whoooo. i beg your pardon? 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(gasp) what s happening?! we flew her out. it s a family car, we had to put your family in it! yeah, it gets 7 thumbs up! we re going to use our smartest and our best. we re not using political hacks anymore. that s the people that do these deals. they re political hacks. we want experts, our finest people. we don t want people b level c level d level. we have to get our absolute best. i don t think so, mr. president. even your people in charge of hiring the best people aren t the best people. the washington post investigated the office responsible for hiring. we used to call it ppo or presidential personnel office and writes, quote, since the inauguration most of the staffers in ppo have been in their 20s, little professional experience apart from trump s campaign. even as demands mounted the ppo became something of of a social hub. for young staffers stopped by to hang out on couches and smoke electronic cigarettes. the panel picking their jaws up off the table. they re still here. this is vodka. i mean, i love my mommy water. i worked in the white house for six years and never played a drinking game there. look, is it any surprise that the best and the brightest aren t exactly rushing to this white house? i would say in their defense, if you were working in this white house, nicolle, wouldn t you have already been drinking heavily? i mean, let s not be glib on that point because, one, i would have never worked in the white house. people called me as i m sure they called you and sure they called you and asked if they should go in there and i ve said, no, run. i don t have any sympathy for people that go in there. they choose to be in there. when they get savaged in the press i heard from a couple today who were in the middle of a couple fights themselves, i m happy to listen but i feel no sympathy. they brought this on. and to me one of the biggest scams donald trump perpetrated on his voters was what we saw. hiring the best people wasn t some random thing he said. that was as central as building the wall. he made that central to his campaign implying that the president that was in at that time and those that preceded him didn t have the best people. but again, as someone that knows him, look at his management style i m going to say bush s bag person had a greater intellect and is more character than most of the people running around donald trump s west wing. i mean, the fact that they don t care who goes and works it makes me crazy. that s what tells you about whether they really care about the country. exactly. if you look at his management style, who did he have in the trump organization? his kids, michael cohen, and they paid homage to roy cohn. did he have the best and the brightest in the real estate business and in private industry? he s always operated that he s the smartest guy in the room, which means he by definition is going to have to have not so smart people in the room. let s think about the backgrounds of some of the people who have had trouble getting hired at this white house. never mind some very incompetent people working there. but you ve had, you know, domestic violence issues that have caused issues with security clearances, you ve got dwis, allegations of assault, financial double dealing, all this kind of stuff. so, best and brightest i don t think so. evan? i would say it used to be in the conservative movement that was before trump and that s a whole other topic we would call for accountable government, right? and trump comes in with bannon and says, look, we re going to dee construct the administrative state. we re going to drain the swamp, all this stuff. that sort of call for accountable government has now become an anti-government approach and argument such to the effect that they re unwilling to conduct effective governance. and i think it s really going to create problems. we ve been so lucky with the exception of puerto rico and what happened in texas, we ve been lucky that we haven t had additional crises in this country during this presidency. that will not last. we will face challenges and we re going to be unprepared for them. let me just yes. on a serious note, i remember in 2001 or 2000 when george w. bush was campaigning really against bill clinton more than al gore. he kept talking about restoring honor and integrity to the white house. and central to that sort of conservative view was that the white house was a sacred space, that it had to be treated with an immense out of respect. let me tell you how that manifested. we had to wear business if you went into the white house on the weekend, you didn t wear jeans and a sweater. i come into this building we re casually dressed, we were permitted to walk on the white house complex under george w. bush. there were policy disagreements with his administration. there is something that s been lost about what you said, the sacredness. steve, i want to read you something. i want to give you two facts and have you respond to them for us. let me read you one more chunk from the story because i think it will blow your mind this story triggered me today. made me crazy. then i want to tell you who retweeted it. someone i follow on twitter. so, ppo leader hosted happy hours in their offices that included beer, wine and snacks for dozens of ppo employees and white house liaisons federal agencies. white house officials confirmed in january they played a drinking game in the office called icing to celebrate the deputy director s 30th birthday. icing involves hiding a bottle of smirnoff ice and the person who discovers it, in this case the deputy detectiveoirector, g. this article was retweeted by kellyanne conway s husband on twitter who has been spending some time deleting some of his tweets of late. what do you make of the story and of the fact that even the husband of one of the president s i think most people would argue supporters retweeted an article pretty critical of them? yeah, it s not cute. it s disgusting. the comportment of these people is shameful. and none of these people who are working in the white house are hostages. in fact, we re the hostages and they re complicit with the hostage takers when we look at the assaults on these vital institutions and their work to degrade the office of president of the united states. it s just really a tragedy that we have tens of thousands of kids look at the president of the united states and they see a joke. you can t watch the evening news with your children because any different moment the newest porn star will be on explaining the relationship. and from a personnel perspective, we ve never quite seen the assemblage of crooks, just outright weirdos, wife beaters, complete and total incompetence that s been assembled. if you took the ten greatest hr managers in the world and put them together and said we want to form a 1927 yankees of incompetence, it s not possible they would have done a better job than assembling this team and it s not possible that this team could have let loose more chaos than they already have. evan is exactly right. as we get closer to the tragedy that will inevitably come to this type of people in an office where life and death decisions are made. just real quick. let s not forget that the place where trump has been most limited in terms of his choices of who to hire and getting people to come work for him is in foreign policy. right. none of the republican foreign policy establishment is willing to work for this guy at any level. and that should terrify all of us. and it is ridiculous, but it s also tragic the rev was in sacramento yesterday at the scene of another tragedy promising justice for the family and friends of stephon clark, an unarmed black man shot and killed by police. the rev also called out this white house for suggesting police violence is a local issue. we ll show you the remarks and talk to rev about the law and order president s silence on stephon clark. with esurance photo claims, you could have money for repairs within a day. wow! that was really fast. so it doesn t have to hurt for long. that s insurance for the modern world. esurance, an allstate company. click or call. or you could you experience it for realnce at the lexus command performance sales event. lease the 2018 nx 300 for $339 a month for 36 months. experience amazing at your lexus dealer. (vo) more dper rollres for mom more doing chores for dad per roll more earning something you love per roll bounty is more absorbent, so the roll can last 50% longer than the leading ordinary brand. so you get more life per roll. bounty the quicker picker upper. and we are here to say that we re going to stand with stephon clark and the leaders of his family. we are putting aside our differences. it s time for preachers to come out the pulpit. it s time for politicians to come out the office. it s time for us to go down and stop this madness. that was our friend and colleague the rev al sharpton speaking yesterday at the funeral for 22-year-old stephon clark, he was killed by police in his grandmother s sacramento backyard. nearly two weeks ago. the officers thought he had a gun but he was unarmed. he was just holding his cell phone. the part that upset so many in the community, officers arrived on the scene, they muted their audio on their body cameras. an independent autopsy ordered by the family revealed clark was shot eight times from behind or the side. it is unbelievable when you think about chilling. you have an overhead camera well, not camera, helicopter. that s videoing this guiding the police. so, why are you coming with deadly force when the most he could have done is go into a house that they would have found was his grandmother, called for back up, and apprehend him? the tape shows they immediately shot after saying show your hands. and it s 20 shots, nicolle, one black cop, one white cop. the protests have been all nonviolent. many whites marching because this is not about white and black, it s about right and nonviolent. many whites marching. this is not about white and black but about right and wrong and law enforcement. we began to move towards some progress in this area under the last administration with president obama s commission and calling for cameras on police but when you have police men on tape saying mute the sound then you are engaging in the most frightening of all and that is we are not going to be transparent at all. let me just say this very quickly. george bush sr. dealt with rodney king and when the tape came out rodney king fortunately didn t die. always met with us even if we disagreed with police brutality. this president saying that is a local issue. let s watch that. certainly a terrible incident. this is something that is a local matter and that is something we feel should be left up to local authorities. we want to make sure that all law enforcement is carrying out the letter of the law. the president is very supportive of law enforcement but at the same time in these specific cases and these specific instances those are left up to local authorities to make that determination and not something for the federal government to weigh into. every major civil rights case and every civil rights movement had to go to the federal government because dealing with local prosecutors you deal with the politics of the intrinsic relationship between police and prosecutors. secondly, what do you mean it s a terrible incident but for local authorities? what about dealing with the national issue of policing? one that you knew when you came into office, one this attorney general has to deal with. i think it was absolutely frightening to many of us to hear her say that. i wanted to address it at the funeral. i think that struck accord. you and i spent a lot of fall talking about this idea that it is too small for the white house to get involved in. he trolled the nfl every weekend. i want to show you how i lived in sacramento and was parade to see the owner of the sacramento kings response. we recognize your people s ability to protest peacefully and we respect that. we here at the kings recognize that we have a big platform. it s a privilege but it is also a responsibility. it s a responsibility that we take very seriously. and we stand here before you old, young, black, white, brown and we are all united in our commitment. i find that so important and significant because you take coach kerr with the warriors, you take the owner of the kings and you talk about the vacuum of morality and leadership. race relations in this country are a tender box. and the white house at best left the vacuum in place. are you heartened by the way you see some figures step into the vacuum? i think a lot of the family was who has been out front. the brother even said he wanted to see people work with them if they wanted to move positive. you have to remember all of these protests, dramatic, yes and drawing attention and so did all of us but all nonviolent. the only violence we have seen in this whole situation was when the police shot and killed stephon clark. i think this president had the obligation to address this. he tweets on people talking on television. he tweets on athletes taking a knee. you don t have anything to say when the whole country is looking at a tape. this is a tape. this is a president who encouraged the police to roughly handle suspects when they put them in the car. and he just came out saying we should have the drug they didn t say leave that to the local police. what thunderstois the standard ? i challenge you to show a single time when donald trump showed moral leadership. i think it is a good point. i want to jump in on this local issue. it s not just shirking the responsibility. going back to the civil war people who were racist or less sympathetic to the plight of african-americans would talk about federalism and state rights. this is a local issue. it s not for the federal government. our founders decided that the right to life was a federal issue when they put it in our declaration of independence. and so i don t want to hear that anymore. i believe that federalism is important but i don t want that to be carried by racists and bigo bigots. i have had enough of it. it s just i hate to hear that argument. i feel like we re going backwards and making america great again as though we are trying to go back to the civil war. if you talk to the effective police commissioners they will tell you the key to reducing crime is trust for the community. it cannot be police against community. it has to be with it. that is what the president consistently fails to understand. you have a minute. button this up for us. it s a young man who shot down, shot eight times in his backyard while unarmed in a city that both you and i know well, a city that we both lived in for many years. it s a tragedy but it also speaks to a reality in the country where there is not justice for many people. and that is prevalent in the african-american community. and so this is an issue that needs attention, needs leadership, needs moral authority from the leaders of the country which we don t have right now. on that sad note we will sneak in our last break. we ll be right back. o and got more. more savings on car insurance? 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