michigan school of public policy, former democrat tick columnist harold ford jr. and chris tip anderson, columnistened new poll numbers on the president we will get to and paul ryan as you know still seems to be like staying right in a very, very clear lane away from criticizing the president. frame the morning for us. well, you know, first of all, you talked about the sweet smell of tax cuts. we had bob corker on several kwooex weeks ago, even before his feud with president trump. he was talking about how this was going to make trying to pass health care look like a spring picnic and bob corke will be on today, he s sounding the alarm on the hymn. he wants tax cuts to pass. but at the same time he knows they will try to close $4,000 of loopholes, lots of luck. we will be talking to bob corker there. mika, i think barnacle and willie would both agree, the most important story out there was an incredible world series, mark barnical, it was a home-run derby. it was like a mid-summer s treat at the all star break except this was in october. exactly right a. mid-summer s treat. thank god for baseball, it rescues us once again from our reality headlines last night. dodgers versus astros, the dodger s manager makes a mess of the game taking his daughter out in the 4th inning. two-run home run. dodgers and astros back and forth for the 8th, 9th, 10th inning. they come back short in the bottom of the 11th. the series tied at one. man. mika what are your thoughts? i just, i don t know. . it s a great game. someone has no rooting interest in the series, you want a good series, it looks like it s shaping up to be that way. houston has had a nice year, it s tough to see. why would he take that picture out in your estimation? baseball is now a sport. it s so infused with stats. more than any other sport. you have stats for everything. the spin rate on a baseball t. percentage of curves they can get a hitter out. sometimes you get so wrapped up in the data that you are given that you don t take a look out with your eyes and see the human being on the mound. they kept him in. he goes to his bullpen, crushes his bullpen, has to bring if maybe the best relieve ken lee jansen in, in the 8th inning instead of the 9th inning and boom. it s really. mika, you know, it s a lot like this show, you save the matrix for everything. you know, it s like willie and i are working ten hours agree dand it s all about numbers, it s all about data, we dig into the da that. every question that s asked. every segment that comes up, it s saber matrix for television. i can t believe how long you guys go on and on about this. i wish we had a camera on mika s face when we were talking, there was physical pain on mika s face president trump s job approval numbers have taken hit. it fell to a new low to 38% approve. down four points in september. trump s disapproval rating hit a new high of 57%. he has seen a dip among his core supporters, there has been an 8-point drop among whites and ep van gel cal voters and 6 drop among other three groups, conservative, men and white voters, stop me whenever you want to. still. i ll actually stop right now go to kristen, yeah, you do polls all the time. again, trump voters still supporting about 87%. republicans still support him for the most part. these numbers are still only, but man is he bleeding independents and of course this is a low for fox news poll. he was at 32% in a poll earlier this month, gallup. they usually have around 36, 37, 38 t. base is holding but he s losing everybody else, isn t he? reporter: i think people are looking for the win. you told us there was gentleman to be all this winning, where is the when? for the most part, trump voters don t hold him responsible for that. they look at capitol hill. they look at democrats, they look at congressional leaders. they say this is what s causing the winning to have not happened in the way we promised. voters who were not trump voters, maybe were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. maybe he didn t participate in the last election. they are now wondering, where are the wins. so that s why this tax reform question is so interesting. because it s a chance to get something threw congress, the chance to find an issue that republicans are fairly unified on. it could give the president that kind of a win. yet from my vantage point, it doesn t seem the president is as focused as he is on say a fight with a gold star family and things like that. i think that s what you are seeing in these number, voters saying, where s the win? and, of course, that is so critical, willie, for the president to be focused if he wants to pass tax reform. he thinks it will be easy, as bob corker will be telling us when he comes on the show and other senators that i have been talking to have been saying, they re trying to close loopholes like trademarks of dollars in loophole, k street is going to swarm all over this place, will you have republicans in these bucklings, he said, this is going to be tough. you need a president that is focused non-stop, that s bringing people in, that s explaining not just bringing them in, going you are beautiful. this is great. this is the greatest bill ever. explain, hey, listen, this is what will be tough. this is what you can tell your constituents, if you pass your tax reform, x, y, z will happen. he was never able do that on health care reform who will believe he can do it on tax reform? he said on his trip last night, we will get tax reform by the end of the year, he has to have something open the board, he can go back to gorsuch. that was a big win driven largely by mitch mcconnell. we can dispute some numbers, harold, but he and not republicans, the reason a lot haven t crossed him in a way bob corker, jeff flake and john mccain have, they also feed something to go back to their voters and constituents and say you voted us in, we re doing it, otherwise that i don t have much to show, it s not just the president. i would agree with all you said, there is a long tradition in politics, campaigning one way and governing another. to a large extent, both of the parties, most are struggling with it. jeff flake was defeated in the occupation senate 12 years ago, they both campaign in ways they are not governing. you have a group of republicans who campaign on anti-immigration, anti-this anti-. that that group of people now want to see republicans deliver. they want a toy riev and govern differently. democrats have it on their side as well, obama wanted to close guantonomo bay and do some things, have you this collision of reality, it s campaigning and governing. it s a level we re talking about here with this president. he s confronting it. now you have u.s. senator versusing conscious calls saying i can t live up to or better live down to the way that i campaigned 12, 16 years ago. so when these realities collide, this is what you get. hopefully it signals there will be an upending with the way parties operate and there will be more adherence to the way you campaign, which may make campaigning more honest going forward, that s what i hope comes out of this honestly republican senator jeff flake of arizona says he hopes his rejection of president trump s falsehood and reckless attacks will be a tipping point. but for most members of his party it was another day. trump tweeted and in interviews, flake and bob corker s colleagues, once harsh critics of trump agreed. the president has his own way of communicating. look, it s worked. he s getting things dodge. he done. he s performing. he s not a cookie cutter. i think the republicans need a leader who takes the reigns, so long as his goals are the same and they are. i try not to make it about personalities or, you know, someone saying someone has less than a perfect character than they do. that s a little of the pot calling the kettle black as we tend to think, oh, somehow, you know, i m so perfect that i can criticize another person s character. one of the things the media missed on all this they keep saying senator so and so is a conservative, why is there such a disagreement? because we made this about personality and less about policy. i think it s unfortunate the nastiness that pervades washington right now and the political battles of personality that consume seemingly every minute of the media attention, and an awful lot of the time and energy here in this town. it s like you re back in junior high. i really don t care who passed the note to the cute girl in pig tails. we got a job to do, dam it. and so all of this nonsense i got nothing to say on it. everyone shut up and do your job. so joe, i feel like i d rather hear from you, the republican turned independent, because i don t think it s going to carry much wake coming from me. but i feel there is such a disconnect here at the three gentleman we just heard from are putting massive blinders on and disregarding behavior that defies humanity. we re not talking about bickering here, are we? well, we actually heard, willie geist, tv s willie geist, the last gentleman who spoke today donald trump would have us believe reading about his father in the papers released on the jfk asass fakes, if you believe donald trump, ted cruz father. right. had something to do with the jfk assassination. ted cruz wife derided by donald trump as being up attractive. ted cruz insulted time and time again by donald trump and him trying to sort of paint everything with a broad brush is sad. first of all, you wonder why he doesn t feel the need more to defend his family. how he does that, that s up for ted cruz to think about. jim imhoff said the president has his on way of communicating. yes, he lie, yes, he says he s going to strip licenses from news outlets with whom he disagrees, he uses stalinist phrases and calls the press the enemy of the people, calls other people the enemy of the people. he actually questions the legitimacy of the judicial branch and specific federal judicial judges. if barack obama had done any of these things, jim imhoff would have held eight-year hearings on it. so. yes, he does have his own way of communicating and imhoff says it works. actually no, the president has record low approval ratings. the republican party has its widest split in the generic ballot they ve ever had with the democratic party and congress s approval is sitting at 14% and almost a record low there. what he says said is patently false, jim imhoff. there is no reason to follow this guy. he se destroying the republican part party. if you just, as i said before, look at the data. jim imhoff, he said, maybe we do better, he s talking about flake and corker. maybe we do better, the people that don t like him, talking about trump, leave and replace them. that s him saying few don t like what the president is doing, maybe you should follow jeff flake out the door? the striking aspect. we showed three united states senator, jim imhoff, rand paul and cruz and ted cruz. the striking thing about the three of them is they are so filled with fear, the fear of getting tweeted against the fear of the noise, of the bannon wing of the republican party. i mean it s as if they are in a house that s on fire and they don t sense that the fire is eventually going to get to the room that they re in. kristen, in the polling that you ve done with regard to donald trump, to the president of the united states, and his status with the elderly people, with independents, with whomever, does the issue of incompetence ever come up? because that would seem to be his true weakness in the long run, incompetence the fact that they can t get anything done with him as president? i think for voters that already didn t like donald trump, that sort of baked into the cake for them. for voters who did vote for donald trump, again, you ve seen a handsful of them bleeding away, which is why his approvals used to be north of 40% are south of 40%, but among republican voters and the times of voters that senior imhoff or cruz is talking to, those comments they made are the sorts of things i will hear in focus groups from republican voters, that they just want to see things get done. that they get that the president tweets and they don t really like it. but you know what, i want to see things get done. in their perspective, they re not, you don t really hear people say, well, there is a co-equal branch of government. senators have every right to speak their mind. they want to see things get done. they view it as a distraction, they don t think the as far as making these comments are having any everything on changing the president s behavior so what s the point of it? which i think is an interesting architect. right. i believe if you disagree with this president. speak out by all means, i think it s also valid to say if you speak on the senate floor and give a speech that s love they the president doesn t change his behavior f. you haven t changed the minds of the people in your party, eight distraction? i think it s a fair question. so the vulnerability you pointed to it s okay if things get done. what if things don t get done, how quickly does that go down? is. reporter: i think if we get to the ends of the year, oba obamacare is in place the wall is still fought built, i do think you will start to see more folks going okay, okay, maybe it s not mostly the president s fault, but he needs to do something different if he want toss make this work. and that may be when you see those numbers get closer and closer to the mid to low 30s now to a story that protect overnight involving someone you see around this table every day, cnn is reporting allegations regarding our friend mark halperin over a decade ago, unnamed sources detailing unwanted advances and inappropriate behavior. hal person apologized for the pain his actions caused and said i will take a step pack from my day-to-day work while i properly address the situation. we will be following this story as it develops. i m sure we will be talking about it again when we know more about it still ahead on morning joe the chaerm of the foreign relations committee, bob corker joins us, senate democrat chris coons, who is warning that republican jeff flake s exit from the senate should scare democrats and the chairman of the house freedom caucus, congressman mark meadows will be our guest as well. but first, bill kierans, with a check on the forecast. bill. reporter: good morning to you, mia, a heads up to the northeast and the mid-atlantic. if you have weekend plans sunday, we have a big storm coming. first getting to the current storm which is still soaking areas from connecticut up through maine. this has been like a 24-hour rain event. it will continue through the day today. here s 5:00 p.m. still raining from albany up through burlington, hit and miss showers as the steadier rains come to an end, i don t think we will get flooding the only exception, if maine, the leaves come down, the other area of interest. there is associated. this is the origins of our big sunday storm in the northeast. right now, it s a tropical disturbance off anything raunic. i m not concerned it will become a tropical storm or a hurricane or anything like that. the thing that is important all of that moisture and rain is in south florida on saturday and then it gets drawn right up the eastern seaboard as we go through sun. this will become a pretty big storm over new englanded on sunday, gusts maybe as high as 60 miles an hour and three-to-five inches of rain. in the mountains as much as six inches of rain. we will have possible power outages and tree damage as we go into sunday into monday in the northeast. keep that in mind for your week plan. washington, are you looking to avoid that big storm on sunday, probably rain food, today looks like a gorgeous day, though, you are watching morning joe. we ll be right back. zplmplts accused of obstructing justice to theat the fbinuclear war, and of violating the constitution by taking money from foreign governments and threatening to shut down news organizations that report the truth. if that isn t a case for impeaching and removing a dangerous president, then what has our government become? i m tom steyer, and like you, i m a citizen who knows it s up to us to do something. it s why i m funding this effort to raise our voices together and demand that elected officials take a stand on impeachment. a republican congress once impeached a president for far less. yet today people in congress and his own administration know that this president is a clear and present danger who s mentally unstable and armed with nuclear weapons. and they do nothing. join us and tell your member of congress that they have a moral responsibility to stop doing what s political and start doing what s right. our country depends on it. it s a warm blanket. it s a bottle of clean water. it s a roof and a bed. it s knowing someone cares. it s feeling safe. it s a today that s better than yesterday. every dollar you can spare helps so much more than you can imagine. please donate now to help people affected by hurricane harvey. your help is urgently needed. . because everything s a reality show. president trump is set to embark on his first age of business as president next month with stops in china, south korea, vietnam and philippines. it comes at a time with extremely high tensions with north korea, which is bounds to be a major topic of discussion during the trip. yesterday a senior official told the u.n. the u.s. should take a threat from the foreign minister pyongyang would detonate a hydrogen bomb adding it has always brought its words in action. joining us from seoul, south korea, kir simmons reporting from inside north korea. here, defending is jim mattis is arriving today, what s at stake with this trip? reporter: yeah, a lot. a great deal. actually, he s really going to have north korea the top of his agenda with three u.s. carrier gripes now operating in the region and general joint chiefs general dunford was expected to arrive here just in the past few hours t. president, of course, as you say, due to come to the region next month, so i mean is this the most intense region in the world right now? yes, absolutely it is, mika, we spent a week in north korea and the insights that we gained by having that time there were really a platform for us, i got to say, i think one of the things we experienced inside that country. you ask, we ve bought the to speak to a lot of people. admittedly people in pyongyang and in that social circ, certain etch lons of society, you ask any question, they very quickly come back to telling you about their admiration and respect for the supreme leader kim jong-un. they will little you about the importance for them of the ideology of self reliance, they are clearly as they tell us, convinced they may need to go to war and frankly they would be prepared to go for that ideology, you never know the people what they are telling you, whether there are layers there, in terms of what we ve experienced, that is the kind of strength we ve experienced. hey, keir, it s willie, i m curious, people walking seoul and the streets as well, they live with the threat of north korea just over their border every day, but what is their sense right now? is it an elevated sense of fear they feel the rhetoric has been ratcheted up? reporter: you know, people in seoul have lived with this for so long, it s important to remember north korea has had nuclear capability and to attack this city for a very long time. so it isn t now people here i guess in a way one of the issues in the u.s. is that i think people at times fail to really understand the history of this region and in that, particularly in washington, they kind of fail the american people, i guess there would be some people that say history started during the obama era. in north korea, history goes back to 1945 to 1950. as far as they re concerned, for example the korean war never ended. so if you don t understand that, if you don t understand the region and the pressure for some time and the role of history here the roam of communism in the u.s. and how that played out over time, i don t think you begin to get to a place where you might be able to run it back. let me say one other thing, though the positive thing. up with thing with north koreans are very interested of what we think of them, we went around and they had gifts given by leaders around the world they are interested. many say they would like peace while they are prepared for war. keir sim mops, thank you very much meanwhile, in a rare message, kim jong-un yesterday september his congratulations to chinese president xi jinping following xi s victory. and the north korean leader wasn t the only one. president trump tweeted that he quote spoke to president xi of china to congratulate him on his extraordinary elevation. also discussed north korea and trade, two very important subjects. trump also later added, quote, some might call him king of coin. this rise is something that virtually never happened in china. you may recall trump also praised turkey s erdogan after his consolidation of power earlier this year. this virtually never happens in china. they call him chairman mao because he had an expansive board. he was just a figurehead. no, maybe it s historical ignorance. i don t know, but the one thing we do know is while we have a president who is trying to strip licenses from networks or says he s going to look into strip licenses from networks that disagree with him, something he can t do, or he challenges the first amendment, he challenges the free press every single day, he attacks journalists every single day. he attacks federal judges every day, he attacks the under pings of our constitution every single day, he praises dictators and china, dictators in the philippines, tyrants, who have actually taken a country that your father believed could be a lynchpen to the new middle east and europe and turkey and has completely turned it into a despottic regime, which actually punishes journalists more than just about any other country. mika, it s the trend is unmistakable. thank you. this man worships autocrats. he admires them. he admires them seizing power and he has very little respect for whom people that run western-style democracies, he gets if fights with the merkels, he gets if fights with the macrons. he gets if fights with the mays. he doesn t get in fights with tyrants, of course, you know, it speaks actually to his intentions when you hear him stripping licenses from networks with whom he disagrees. i think you nailed it. you talk to anybody from a countries not built on the foundations of democracy, they will tell you this is how it starts. i m saying it very calmly. you look at the trend, it is unmistakable coming up, should democrats be scared? hold on, i got to say one thing, guy, one thing, though, this is where it s important. i m so sorry to interrupt, but here s the difference between the united states and china. here s the difference between the united states and turkey, here s the difference between the united states and the philippines. right now people watching this show have the ability to start organizing and they have the ability to start recruiting candidates and they have the ability to put candidates up, to run for election, whether they re republicans or independents or democrats, who say no to donald trump s view of the constitution and who says no to his praising of autocrats and tyrants aacross the gobi. that s what we can celebrate it s so depressing. let s celebrate the fact that this morning where you were sitting right now you can make a difference. can you either run for congress or you can run for the senate, or can you help somebody do it by even knocking on doors, making phone calls, it doesn t matter what party they are. if they say no to trump-ism, and you think that s something that s important to you. you have a chance to check this tie towards the sort of autocracy that donald trump celebrates seemingly every day coming up, should people with scared that jeff flake is retire sfk that s what senator koonce is say anything a new new york times op-ed. we ll ask him why next on morning joe. zplmplts this is not a cloud. this is a tomato tracked from farm to table on a blockchain, helping keep shoppers safe. this is a financial transaction secure from hacks and threats others can t see. this is a skyscraper whose elevators use iot data and ai to help thousands get to work safely and efficiently. this is not the cloud you know. this is the ibm cloud. the ibm cloud is the cloud for business. yours. marie callender s turkey pot pie staa rich, flavorful gravy.in and a crust made from scratch. because she knows that when it s cold outside, it s good food and good company that keep you warm inside. marie callender s. it s time to savor. (tires screeching) (bell mnemonic) . welcome back to morning joe, joining us now democrat senator chris coons of delaware who writes a piece for the new york times titled why jeff flake s exit should scare democrats. good morning, it s good to see you, you write flake s retiring is deeply principaled to me. he represents a retiring party. senator imhoff said maybe this should be the trend, talking about donald trump, if you don t like it, maybe you should leave. i serve with senator flake and for corker, although we disagree on a wide rain him of things, senator flake is a western republican, a conservative, from different faiths from different value frames. we have served very well together on the foreign relations committee because we share a compliment to america s role in the world that leads the fight for noble freedom that leads based on our commitment to open societies, to free press, to human rights, not just our narrow national self interests. i think senator flake saw clearly the threat to that position that donald trump s international policies present and that made it harder and harder for him to be successful in a primary campaign. if the voices are missing from the other side of the bias in the foreign relations committee and if as for imhoff is saying, only those who are mindly loyal to president trump should continue to serve as republicans in the senate, then i m gravely concerned what that says for marc remaining the beacon of freedom in the world. he was pretty honest on this show yesterday, why not stick around and fight donald trump if this is how you feel. he said, plainly, i can t win. i can t win this primary fight inside the state of arizona, do you view a as an opportunity for democrats? maybe a democrat can when a seat in arizona or tennessee, if steve bannon and that wing of the party want toss primary every republican senator except for ted cruz, isn t that good for you a and the democrats? well, it s food in a narrow sense. that s right. my election was certainly facilitated by a divisive primary that led them to choose a candidate for the general election who wasn t very competitive and i m good friends with congress woman kiersten cinema who would make a great senator, exactly the point of my piece that we shouldn t be celebrating just the pharaoh partisan victory of campaigning one seat or losing one seat in thea. we should be looking at this, democrats and republicans as patriots and asking whether what jeff flake has been saying about our presidenten in p isn t true and something that calls us to action and to work towing in a way that strengthens the role of the senate going forward. senator, good morning, harold ford, let s turn to issues for one moment, two of them. how are things going with the negotiations between carden and corker around iran, around iran and two, we had keir simmons awaiting general mattis visit anticipating president trump next week. where do you stands there and what is your thinking of diplomacy? we are getting reports it s failing on the north korea part. well, harold, i am very concerned about the ways the president has under mined his secretary of state, secretary rex tillerson and made it harder and harder pursuing with north korea by engage income a personal barrage of attacks on kim jong-un the leader of north korea. i do think there are ongoing conversations between cramer corker and ranking member carden on the senate foreign relations committee about our path forward now president trump dessertified part of the jcpoa under a statute we have. it started off a period of 60 days where we will be looking hard in the senate at what else we could be doing to reign in iran s bad behavior in the region. i oppose renegotiating, reopening the jcpoa. all of our european allie versus communicated to us that they won t welcome that. they won t participate in that. i am clear about the real threat iran poses to our interests, our allie israel, to the people and the security of the region by supporting terrorism. we ve given president trump strong tools. when the senate voted 98-2 passed a few sanctions law t. president hasn t yet taken that up to impose sanctions against russia or use it as strongly as i think he should against iran. i think will you see bipartisan work in supporting and strengthening our multilateral actions against eve i think we will save the jcpoa and that will support diplomacy against north korea. senator chris coons, thank you very much for being on the show. coming up, joe biden is giving new signals about 2020. morning joe is coming right back. liberty mutual stood with me when i was too busy with the kids to get a repair estimate. liberty did what? 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(vo) go national. go like a pro. multiple officials tell nbc news the trump administration is moving to using drones in the fight against terrorists in niger. the plan had opinion under consideration since before that deadly ambush earlier there month. but that incident ramped up urgency within the administration to take more aggressive action. three u.s. officials tell nbc news the u.s. government is now pushing niger to allow armed droeps at u.s. bases in t dro. bases in the country. they tell nbc news the ambushed control was conducted a far more complex counter terrorism mission than previously believed. it may have been tracking a suspected isis militant in support of a second and more secretive joint u.s. and french special operations team working in the area. here is president trump yesterday when asked about the mission. did you authorize the mission? no, i didn t. not specifically. but i have generals that are great generals. these are great fighters. these are warriors. i gave them authority to do what s right so that we win. that s the authority they v. i want to win and we re going to win. my generals and my military, they have the decision-making ability. as far as the incident we are talking about, i have been seeing it like you have been seeing it. i have been getting reports. they have to pleat the enemy and they meet them tough and that s what happened. can you yeah. could you kind of describe what he just said? sure, again. and again, you kind of look at history, mike barnicle remember when harry s. truman says when the buck stops somewhere across the potomac but not that desk. this is the second time he s done this he says i didn t authorize this mission that went badly. he blamed the generals for what happened in yemen. of course, we will now say the obligatory i ve never heard a president of the united states, i ve never heard a commander in chief speak so spou ardley and pass the buck to generals, pretending as if we don t have civilian of the military in this country, which has been a hallmark of our nation for over 40 years. here he goes again trying to blame generals for this mission that he obviously authorized. yeah, joe, clearly, there is an element in the president s job the commandner chief job he doesn t understand or adhere to. he certainly did authorize that mission in a sense, whether he realizes it or not t. larger issue, though, we have been operating as a nation around the globe in many, many countries around the globe, so many countries that the average american certainly doesn t know and clearly some of the united states senators don t know without a renewal of the authorization of the use of force force troops. there are a couple occupation senators engaged trying to get that back on the docket for a vote now for a couple of years at least. it has to be renewed. we have to look at our role in the world, especially militarily, because again as referenced again and ape gen, last week by general kelly the latest. fewer tan 1% of the people in this country serve in the united states military are if danger, their families here at home, knowing that their sons an daughters and husbands and fathers are out in the world performing dangerous operations when the rest of us, we can get gas, get coffee in the morning. we are remotely isolated from the realities of the dangers they face each and every day. harold, as you know the president couldn t authorize every operation, this is a case in niger and the american people at large, you take a look at ma american troops are in harm s way every day, and they are dotted all over africa and southeast asia and the middle east. there are american women and men going on missions like this that don t prove to be fatal in the end every day. it s one more reminder how far spread we are and how few people are out there doing it on behalf of the rest of us. our previous guest chris coons have been a proponent of this. it s astonishing the president doesn t get it or he wants credit when it goes well and deflects blame when it doesn t. if you have a family member serving, and you heard the president say that, probably the most disturbing thing he said was i m watching and learning this on television just like you. that can t be reassuring to a citizen or citizen with a family member in the military that the commander in chief is disavowing responsibility and suggesting that he s learning all about this via media reports, the same media he calls fake media. the coming up, the trump campaign tries to distance himself from the company whose ceo admits to trying to help wikileaks release hillary clinton s e-mails. morning joe is back in just a moment. hi, i m joan lunden with a place for mom every day we hear from families who partnered with a senior living advisor from a place for mom to help find the perfect place for their mom or dad thank you so much for your assistance in helping us find a place. mom feels safe and comfortable and has 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than just a number. so we provide personal financial advice for every retirement investor. or a little internet machine? it makes you wonder: shouldn t we get our phones and internet from the same company? that s why xfinity mobile comes with your internet. you get up to 5 lines of talk and text at no extra cost. so all you pay for is data. see how much you can save. choose by the gig or unlimited. xfinity mobile. a new kind of network designed to save you money. call, visit, or go to xfinitymobile.com. i will tell you this. russia, if you re listening, i hope you re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. i think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. let s see that happen. you may recall that request from then candidate donald trump during the summer of 2016. now the trump campaign is trying to down play the connection with the head of a data firm who admits trying to team up with wikileaks. the daily beast was the first to report that alexander nixa reached out offering the firm s help releasing hillary clinton s 33,000 missing e-mails. on twitter he confirmed the offer that was made and that he declined. trump s campaign released a statement claiming it relied on the rnc and the data experts as, quote, our main source for data analytics but failed to mention the campaign paid the company almost $6 million for the services. the firm is also partly owned by the mercer family which has close tied to steve bannon. mike pence, jared kushner, and others tied to team trump, in fact, steve bannon was once on the board of cambridge analytics and divested his interest in the company to join the trump white house. any link you see that might point, actually strike you in some way? this is what s fascinating. i am not normally in the business of the trump campaign puts out a press release and i defend. what s interesting is in the republican data and polling worlds, this idea that the trump campaign and the company had less of a close relationship than meets the eye rings true. one of the complaints that you will hear in republican data and polling circles is that came bridge analytica has always oversold their role about we have fascinating techniques and we practice the dark arts. and a lot of it was overblown. now that the trump campaign is coming out and saying that officially because the company has gotten themselves in a little of a mess with the wikileaks folks, in a way i actually find the trump campaign s press release credible. it aligns with what other folks have been chattering about in these circles for months? . i ll give you the other side of the story from what i heard from people inside the trump campaign very high up in the trump campaign dragged time and time again that they had a great relationship with this company, and that cambridge an lit ka was going to make the difference. they were going to find voters nobody else could find in florida, north carolina, ohio, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. so throughout the summer months, i was told time and time again that the press s description of the trump campaign is being less than tech savvy was wrong and it would be cambridge analytica that was going to make the difference. coming up, a new poll shows the president s support is eroding among several groups that went big for him the me election. we ll have the new numbers, plus senator bob corker and mark meadows joins us. we re back in 60 seconds. g wher. it s never been easier. except when it comes to your retirement plan. but at fidelity, we re making retirement planning clearer. and it all starts with getting your fidelity retirement score. in 60 seconds, you ll know where you stand. and together, we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. time to think of your future it s your retirement. know where you stand. i knew at that exact moment . i m beating this. my main focus was to find a team of doctors. it s not just picking a surgeon, it s picking the care team and feeling secure in where you are. visit cancercenter.com/breast i think the press makes me more uncivil than i am. people don t understand. i went to an i vy league college. i was a nice student. i did very well. i m a very intelligent person. the fact is, i think i really believe, i think the press creates a different image of donald trump than the real person. welcome back to morning joe. it is thursday, october [ laughter ] in. i went to an ivy league college. i was trying not to say anything snarky, joe, because it s a morning show and i m happy. you should be. i went to an ivy league college. i m a very intelligent person. i did not go to an ivy league college, as i told the students at harvard when we were up there a couple weeks ago, i went to the university of alabama, and we affectionately call harvard the university of alabama of the north. i may not be the smartest guy in the world, but i can listen to the president s statements and read his tweets. he s not a civil man. we are not the ones going in and pressing his fingers on the tweets. it s just again we talked about the big lie a couple of days ago. even though it s funny, because he s so insecure that he has to tell people he went to an ivy league college and he s a very intelligent man. the sad part is this is another day of lying. this is another example. willie geist, this is another example of where you know, right is wrong. black is white. left is right. up is down. it is the big high concept where i can lie. i can say whatever i want to say, even about the smallest of things. and i will define my own reality and since it s a personality cult, people who follow me will go yeah, listen to him, he says he s a civil guy. it s just the mean people in the press that make him be that way. i don t understand the link between civility and an ivy education. you can be smart and uncivil at the same time. this is him talking about gold star families and him saying the things he says in his own words. these aren t interpretations. these are reporting of uncivility directly from the mouth and twitter fingers of the president. can we just go back to this ivy league comment one more second. it s so outrageous he feels that it s necessary to constantly prove his i.q. whether it s an i.q. stand off with rex tillerson or to brag about the ivy league. i think he has a legitimate chip on his shoulder because he transferred in to penn from florida. i think it goes back to the example of someone who buys a real slick, expensive sports car. does show want to buy a sports car? no. that s the example. the president obviously needs to cover for something that s severely lacking. that s what guys anyhow. the president talked about the specifics of his body on a stage. yes. hands. you know, obviously everything he says it s the opposite, and he doesn t want people to know. but joe, i just want to remind you that you are a harvard fellow. uh-huh. yeah. and, again, again, the importance of that is what? that ha varvard is what? the university of alabama of the north? yes. that sort of roll tide. that s sort of circling, a perfect circle there. i have now been to the two best institutions exactly with crimson in their name. with us, we have elise jordan, political writer for the new york times, nick confisori, writer on pbs, robert costa. another controversial month as taken on donald trump s approval rating. the approval rating fell to a new low, down four points in september. the disapproval rating hit a new high of 57%. and a steep drop among independent voters from last month, approval down 15 points to 30 %. and disapproval up to 5 5%. a poll asked voters for their opinion of the president. 63% say he is not honest or trustworthy. 60% said he does not care about people like me. and that he lacks the knowledge, judgment, and compassion to serve effectively. joe? bob costa, as far as our stories, we seem to be covering every day whether it s about bob corker or jeff flake, the numbers that matter there are obviously the republicans that are staying with this president, and right now it s still roughly eight out of ten. that s enough to keep most republicans in line. especially in red districts. but you look at the fox news numbers falling off just like gallop has had, even hasn t had him in the 40s in a very long time. and it looks like his base only strategy really has blocked him out from about two-thirds of the electorate. what s the feeling on the hill? what s the feeling around washington about the fact that this man remains mired with these low approval numbers? there s a contrast when i m talking to republican lawmakers when them and president trump. they see in president trump someone who is relentless in his combative personality, always on conservative social media. he s part of the culture. the lawmakers worry they don t have the ability to be everywhere and involved in everything like president trump is. and if they don t get a tax cut through and they just have to run on the confirmation of gorsuch in 2018, they re going to be in a very limited spot politically to make their case. the new york times is reporting the president s brand of hard edged nationalism with the gut level cultural appeals and hard lines on trade and immigration is taking root within his adopted party. those uneasy with grieve answer politics are giving in or giving up the fight. here s the president speaking yesterday from the white house about the party s unity. we have great unity. if you look at the meeting yesterday, we had virtually every senator, including john mccain. we had a great conversation yesterday about the military. i think we had a i called it a love fest. it was almost a love nefest. maybe it was. but standing ovations. there is great unity. if you look at the democrats with bernie sanders and hillary clinton, that s a mess. honestly, when you look at when you take a look at what s happened with hillary clinton and bernie sanders and the hatred and the division and the an animosity, honestly, the republicans are very, very well united. so elise, yesterday in the wake of jeff flake s speech and bob corker s comments, i guess the question among some republicans was is this a crack in the ice? are jeff flake and bob corker and john mccain and george w. bush s speech earlier in the peek a sign of things to come. a republican of oklahoma said maybe we do better by having some of the people who just don t like president trump leave and replace them. so rather than this being a great movement away from trump, at least among senate republicans, it looks like flake and corker for the moment are outliers. i think they are and the kul l louse a lot of senate republicans a making, oppose the president why? we know how this president responds to criticism. you get a public lashing. you get into a public back and forth, and does it change anything? i could be more effective if i just keep lay low and try to just not make waves but actually use what influence i have. look, willie, it s not a fight for the soul of the gop. the fight is over trump one. what you have here is a rump of governing wing republicans who are going to stand against him and then leave. they ve put their line in the sand on the way out. and across the country, it s becoming more and more trump s party. there are trump people running for office, and the people who replace these senators are probably going to be more in less in the mold of mccain or trump. trump won. triple byline story in the washington post. you were in the byline about some establishment senators putting on a plan to take on steve three shirts and the plan he has to run against incumbent republicans. how many are in the ghost army taking on steve bannon? you saw in the alabama senate race the super pac aligned with majority leader mcconnell spent over $10 million to try to boost the incumbent luther strange. he was defeated. and because of how that played out, there s a new effort afoot in washington with the senate leadership fund and other establishment republican forces to try to give some kind of support to veteran seasoned lawmakers like senator corker and senator flake, people nervous about 2018 and pull them back from the edge of retirement or walking away, and that comes through a social media campaign. it comes through money in the campaigns as well. joe? all right. let s bring right now the chairman of the house freedom caucus. congressman, always great to talk with you. let s start first, i have to ask you, did you go to an ivy league college? no, i didn t. so i was actually down at the university of south florida in tampa. good for you. good for you. in god s country. that s good. that s very good to know. let me ask you a couple questions. everybody is talk about tax reform. i want to talk about something that s always concerned me and always concerned conservatives. that is the deficit. a report came out a couple days ago that the deficit is exploding upward. it s higher than expected this year. close to $700 billion. it s expected to be a trillion dollars faster than expected for lots of reasons. even with dynamic scoring on these tax cuts you re talking act, the deficit still explodes. what can be done to move us back to a direction where we can even start talking about balanced budgets again? well, joe, maybe you need to leave from behind the desk and come back and run for congress again. we know that you were oh, no. oh, no. a fiscal hawk. washington d.c. does one thing well. that s spend money, and very few times have they showed restraint. you know the budget we passed out of the house actually had 20 $3 billion in mandatory spending cuts. in the senate, nothing cut. the deficit continues to increase, and we as we look at tax reform, the 1 $1.5 trillion in the budget that will pass later in the house does not shed a good light in terms of the deficit. the strategy employed not only by the white house but by many conservative members is trying to return much of that money back to the taxpayer, make sure we give them back their money. it s theirs to begin with, and hopefully get the economy going so that what we can do is actually broaden the base and actually increase the amount of revenue because of growth, and then continue to make some fiscal decisions going on. but i ve been here long enough. you were here where you got to see that very few times when it comes to cutting a program, can you make that happen. i think the biggest thing for us is making sure that we don t grow the size of government going forward in the next ten to fifteen years. if we just cap that at about a 2.75% rate, we can balance over 15 even with the tax cut. that s what i m hopeful we can do. won t the tax cut actually increase the deficit and make it go up even more? well, in the in the scoring. even with dynamic scoring, i want to be honest. shortly in the short run, it does that. i can make the case with gdp growth over a 16-year period that it will balance over that length of time. but in the short-run, we will see an increase in deficit. it s not something that i espouse or think is necessarily the best way, but it s the only thing that we can get through a gop-led snootenate, and it s no just gop senators. if you looked at the democrat budget voted on in the house, it had 10 trillion in new spending and increased the deficit threefold on what we ll be voting on today. there s not a lot of fiscal restraint. you have to take an approach to hopefully increase the gdp growth. we ve got a very aggressive progrowth tax reform plan that s being rolled out in the coming days here that hopefully will get us back on the right track. to make this tax reform package pass, you and republicans in the senate and any democrat that wants to cooperate, you re going to have to close about $4 trillion in tax loopholes. that is going to cause i promise you the greatest mass migration from k street to capitol hill that you have seen in your time on capitol hill. and while you may disagree with some of the things bob corker has said, i don t, but you may. the one thing that bob corker says that you should agree with is that that s going to make tax reform every bit as tough as passing health care reform. that while it unites the party, do you have 218 members that are going to be able to say no to all the lobbyist groups when you start closing trillions of dollars in tax loopholes? joe, you re spot on, and everything you just said, i wouldn t disagree with a single thing. i can tell you i ve met with senator corker on a number of things. he is, indeed, a deficit hawk. i went over to meet with him and talk to him about really this budget agreement that they have in the senate. but you re right. i mean, we have already started to see, but we are going to see legions of k street lobbyists coming in. that s why it s important for members of freedom caucus to make sure their voices are heard. we believe our lobbyists are the millions of forgotten american men and women back home that don t have hob ylobbyists. we had probably ten or 15 cfos here yesterday from companies talking about what they want to see. the interesting thing is what i ve shared is everybody is for cutting out the corporate loopholes unless it s their corporate loophole. i m very aggressive, willing to stand up to a lot of the special interest carveouts and making sure we re doing that and meeting with democrats to see if we can find some common ground to not only address that, but make sure that we put more money in those middle income wage earner s pockets and not just special interests here on capitol hill. all right. university of south florida, mark meadows. thank you so much for being with us. thank you. good luck closing those 4 trillion in tax loopholes. we need your help. come on back. okay. i won t be doing that. thank you. mika, back to you. you know, this is for anybody that s been on capitol hill before, and has seen tax reform or any variation of it where you re starting to change the tax code to give tax cuts to one group or take tax cuts away from one group, that is when the most intense lobbying comes. it s why we re going to be talking to bob corker about, mark meadows is right. he s a deficit hawk. and i personally, i don t know how they get the votes to close $4 trillion in tax loopholes. if they can do it, god bless them, but i don t think they can. all right. bob costa, you have new reporting on the republican civil war that s already shaping next year s midterms along deeply personal lines. allies of mitch mcconnell are engaging in a new assault aimed at discrediting former trump chief strategist steve bannon. former mcconnell chief of staff has described steve bannon as a white supremacist. and after a challenger danny tarkanian challenged. the mcconnell aligned senate leadership fund tweeted back here s another pledge for danny tarkanian to sign backing bannon over ex-wife charges. it includes a blistering headline claiming that bannon is, quote, anti semitic. bannon has denied the claims filed by his wife in a 2007 court statement. and the washington post reports a bannon confidant said he responded to the attack on his character with laughter. costa, tell us more. what s going on here? mika, we saw what happened with alabama. the bannon movement on the right side of the gop, it moved from being a nuisance for the senate leadership to being a problem they have to address. when i m talking to my top sources in washington, they say we have to deal with bannon. we can t be disrupting our entire play book and stoking unrest about leader mcconnell. they re really thinking hard about how do they push back on him personally and on his allies to try to make sure they preserve this narrow 52-seat majority. all right. well, at this point, though, the personal attacks on steve bannon, i mean, there have been some incredible stories that have been reported here. where does this cross into the personal and the situation with his i m not asking joe this. i m asking costa, just curious with his ex-wife. is it part of this? the senate leadership fund tweeted this story, and it s trying to bring up all these old former controversies about bannon. the point of the attacks is to make bannon toxic for candidates like tarkanian. this is the senate gop leadership saying wait a second before you really move close to bannon. he s a toxic figure. yep. joe? you know, mike barnicle, i don t know why they would have to go into his personal life and his and make personal attacks against a guy where sort of a he said she said in divorce documents when they have charlottesville. when they have the things that he printed at breitbart. if you want to make somebody toxic, there is no he said she said when you go to what he printed in breitbart, some of it under what he said and stated openly, anti semitic. doesn t this get back to what we ve been talking about for days if not months. it s the fact that the republican party, especially within the senate, a huge percentage is co-raled and put in a corner by fear and by a loud group of republicans who are not the majority of the republicans, but a very loud group led by steve bannon who can shout down any common sense anecdote to the policies of paralysis that s seized washington d.c.? yeah. you know, willie, my personal feeling is right now everybody is freaking out about steve bannon and obsessing about steve bannon. what what i see, you have a guy that s doing everything we can do to find the most unelectable republicans, the type of republicans that people like claire mccaskill have dreamed of. my prediction, democrats are going to romp in 2018 if steve pann bannon gets his way, and the day after everybody will go of course. of course this was obvious. steve bannon was getting people wildly out of the mainstream, people kicked off the bench twice and people this and that. i mean, this, to me, seems to be e t the equivalent of the manager letting players have vodka in the world series. and yet, people are running scared. if you look at roy moore in alabama and the departure of jeff flake, the announcement of that the other day, steve bannon and the people who work with them and the people who share his world view were celebrating. you know that better than i do. they were celebrating the departure of jeff flake. we got this one. now let s move around the country and get more. to joe s point, you could make the case as senator coons that it opens the door to a democrat perhaps winning in some places where they don t normally win. for the moment steve bannon feels like he s winning. and you have to look at senator mccain who gave a speech last week where he said he took on bannon right at bannon. he called it half baked spurious nationalism taking over the gop. mccain is staying. he s fighting bannon. it is intriguing as a reporter to watch all this candor, but the candor happens when the republican senators choose to retire. i would like to point out i think steve bannon is a brilliant media strategists. he jumps into a campaign in the final three months and manages to create this narrative that he won the election. angering donald trump. he manages to say that oh, he pushed roy moore to the finish line when roy moore has been a known quantity for decades in alabama. and he s been doing his whacky business down there for ages. so i m curious how this is going to end when races are on the line and they have to win because steve bannon certainly didn t win in mississippi. nick, this better be good. i read this washington post stories and i have flash backs when the democrats were sure they could sink trump with his attacks on his character and past. mitch mcconnell s personal superpac funded by rich guys is coming after me and my family. i suspect it will be effective in the knife fight. robert kos can a, thank you for being on. still ahead on morning joe, the senate s top voice on foreign relations. republican bob corker joins the conversation. how he s charting american policy overseas on behalf of a president with whom he deeply disagrees. but first, new york times columnist tom friedman joins the table. you re watching morning joe. we ll be right back. if you have moderate to severe ulcerative colitis or crohn s, and your symptoms have left you with the same view, it may be time for a different perspective. if other treatments haven t worked well enough, ask your doctor about entyvio, the only biologic developed and approved just for uc and crohn s. entyvio works by focusing right in the gi-tract to help control damaging inflammation and is clinically proven to begin helping many patients achieve both symptom relief as well as remission. infusion and serious allergic reactions can happen during or after treatment. entyvio may increase risk of infection, which can be serious. while not reported with entyvio, pml, a rare, serious brain infection caused by a virus may be possible. tell your doctor if you have an infection, experience frequent infections, or have flu-like symptoms, or sores. liver problems can occur with entyvio. if your uc or crohn s medication isn t working for you, ask your gastroenterologist about entyvio. entyvio. relief and remission within reach. and it s also a story mail aabout people and while we make more e-commerce deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country, we never forget. that your business is our business the united states postal service. priority: you 29 past the hour joining us now, tom friedman. tom, your recent piece for the new york times is entitled general mattis stand up to trump or he ll drag you down. why mattis specifically, and tell us a little more about what you think the ramifications of kind of, like, operating as if everything is normal and everything is okay in the white house? well, mika, when this administration started i did a column saying there are five people there who could be a source of restraint on the president. pompeo, kelly, tillerson, mcmaster and mattis. most of them generals, as it were. and i think what s happened is they ve gone down like bowling pins except mattis. tillerson had to explain why he hasn t been castrated which means he was. kelly blew himself up last week. mcmaster doesn t seem to have much of a relationship with the president, and pompeo, has i think sold his soul. he told us the intelligence committee is determined the intelligence agencies mattis is the last man standing. i think he s the last person in the administration the president is really afraid of and who hasn t sold his soul on this issue. so how is it possible given what we know about these generals and about their service, how is it possible that he hasn t already tried? i mean, how can all this time, and all that has happened and all this all that s been side and transpired, go by and he hasn t tried yet? that, i have no idea, but listening to your conversation before i came in, it s interesting to me, there s kind of three identity issues playing out now. one is among republicans. what does it mean to be a republican? and that is this fight between bannon and mcconnell and those you talked about. the second is between republicans and democrats. republicans say the problem is between us and them. forget about this other stuff. we have to get our tax bill through. i don t want to talk about anything else. and the third is a conversation i think that s going on with flake and corker your next guest, but also a lot of other people, and we have a president now who is attacking the two fundamental pillars of our country, truth and trust. if there s no truth, we can t have a democracy, and if there s no trust in our institutions and there s republicans and democrats saying what trump is doing, the danger is he s attacking the two pillars of our democracy. and, therefore, none of this other stuff counts. which one of the struggles is going to predominate. but what i was writing about in the column is there s got to be someone there who stands up for truth and trust. there s a wisdom that s become gospel that if you think it s bad right now at the white house with these generals around, wait until you see it without the generals around. in other words, you should want you may have disagreements with them on specific matters, but you should want them around to contain the president for lack of a better word. do you buy into that? when this started, i did, but i wonder now. i don t see the proof. where is the defense of truth and trust? i don t see what we re getting. i wonder if i don t know what they re going to do, but if they leave and say you can govern with your kids and sarah huckabee sanders, go for it, let s see how that works out. but i think this issue of truth and trust is the alarm bell that people are really ringing. i think it s hugely important. we still haven t had a real crisis yet. the only crisis are the ones donald trump has created. what happens when trump has to look into the camera and say i had to bomb north korea? trust me. when pompeo comes out who has boldfaced lied and said the three intelligence agencies russi concluded russians had no influence on your election. you mentioned sarah huckabee sanders. in a crisis, you mention pompeo, how does that work from the press office? from the podium as it has so far i mean, given her performance so far and sean spicer before her? and does that play a role in what you re talking about? absolutely. i ve said this on the show before. there s a distinct between moral authority and formal authority. so we have a president who has formal authority. he s still president of the united states, but we has no moral authority. sarah huckabee sanders has no moral authority. all that debate with kelly, what it was about, was i think he blew up his moral authority and so she basically took out his uniform and said no, but he s got this formal authority. a lot of people said wait a minute. when you blow up your moral authority, you cannot use a general s uniform to clean up the mess of the president. and all of this now is just daily gris for the news. wait until we have a crisis. when you find we have a president with formal authority and no moral authority. is the press in the white house credible? i don t hang out there, but not in my mind. we re talking truth and trust. trump is talking rage and grievance. there s a big part of the country that wants to hear it. that feels trust with washington has been broken over and over again. trust and terruth are not alway terms associated with that place. how do you address that? how do you make them an audience for truth and trust again? i just came from london. i was there for the past couple of days. want to see what happens when someone wins office or a national position and they only have one paragraph? they got their rage paragraph. in london it was brexit. we re going to get out of the eu. everything is going to be fine. it s all going to be good. and then the morning after comes and it turns out they have no second paragraph. they have no way of delivering on it. london today politically i was educated there. i got married there. it is in a mess i have never seen before. because they have no idea how to actually do brexit. now, when i listen to bannon, all the things about globalists and free trade, we re going to wreck all this stuff. they have no second paragraph. if steve bannon, what s your plot if i how are we going to do this? grow incomes for middle class people while we disconnect in a connected world, and show me some place on the planet other than north korea where it s working. he has no second paragraph to your question. rage and we re going to push back on the system. when you elect people who have no second paragraph, what you get is brexit. and what you got in london today, ask them how is it working out for you? joe in. well, tom, you know, no second paragraph. no plan b. a lot of people would say very little character. if that s the case, aren t you better with a general mattis and a general kelly being in there and at times having to bite their tongue, at times having to bow their head, and endure instead of having the gorkas and bannons of the world, the mike flynns of the world? perhaps it s not a zero sum game. and if there is a crisis with north korea, i m wondering, how much do they have to endure so we re better off that they re there instead of the mike flynns and the steve bannons of the world? joe, i m sure that s the case. i just hope they are truly exercising the influence that we want them to exercise. i don t think that s so clear anymore. all right. tom friedman, thank you very much. his latest book thank you for being late is out in paperback. up next, new reporting from thy time magazine that refers to the president s crew as the wrecking crew. back in a moment. [bell rings] so i was at mom and dad s and found this. cd s, baseball cards. your old magic set? and this wrestling ticket. which you still owe me for. seriously? $25 i didn t even want to go. ahhh, your diary. mom says it is totally natural. $25 is nothing. abracadabra, bro. the bank of america mobile banking app. the fast, secure and simple way to send money. except when it comes to retirement. at fidelity, you get a retirement score in just 60 seconds. and we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. it s your retirement. know where you stand. we re on a mission to show drip coffee drinkers, it s time to wake up to keurig. wakey! wakey! rise and shine! oh my gosh! how are you? well watch this. i pop that in there. press brew. that s it. look how much coffee s in here? fresh coffee. so rich. i love it. that s why you should be a keurig man! full-bodied. are you sure you re describing the coffee and not me? do you wear this every day? everyday. i d never take it off. are you ready to say goodbye to it? go! go! ta da! a terrarium. that s it. we brewed the love, right guys? (all) yes. welcome back to morning joe. while the president tweets his cabinet is rewriting the rules of government. that is the argument made in the new time magazine cover story titled the wrecking crew . joining us now, michael duffy. michael, good morning. good to see you who are we talking about specifically? obviously this was part of the promise made by people like steve bannon, we re going to tear down the establishment and rebuild it in our own vision. they did promise to do it. and we could have picked any department. we picked epa. housing, and education to look at some of the things that were a systematic dismantling. this is most dramatic at epa to scott pruitt. he s looking at admission standards to pesticides to the kind of rules that power plants and coal plants have to abide by. and we can see across the board that they replaced a kind of concern about health for a concern about the health of companies. so that s they re not trying to hide it. it s easy to see. it s true at other places as well. and beneath the diversion and division of this white house, there s a pretty systematic change at a lower level. and this is not something done in the shadows. in fact, when donald trump talks about his long list of achievements over the first nine months he includes deregulation. he said we promised deregulation. we have it. you talk about ben carson at hud and betsy devos at education. in the obama era they put forth a set of legal standards for what has to be shown or proven on college campuses to generate convictions of sexual say sa assault. it looks like the education department under devos will raise it up to a higher standard either beyond a shadow of doubt or something that requires more evidence to be put on the table. that will change that conversation on the campuses at a time when this is really in the news. i think that s most telling there. at hud, it depends on who gets federal subsidies and why, and for how long. that seems to be changing. but, again, we could have chosen almost any department and looked at this. michael, one of the elements in this very valuable edition of time magazine, let s go back to education. last week to very little notice, devos seemed to go along with eliminating 72 stipulations having to do with special needs children. that affects an enormous number of parents and children themselves across this country. and i sometimes worry, i don t know whether you worry at all about the fact that we are hit with a niagra of stories out of washington having to do with the president and his behavior, and are we do you think that we are ignoring some of the elements within the media, as our job, some of the elements you raise with this issue? yeah, i think one of the powerful elements of trump s way of i would say, quote, governing is that diversion is such a big part of it. he diverts, i think, when he wants to divert from his own actions or lack of action. but it also keeps a lot of reporters looking in one direction when there are substantive things happening elsewhere that will have effect. the 70 or 72 ability disability they re reviewing or suspending have been in place for closer to 25 years. it goes back to the first bush era, and so, yeah, who can keep up? and a lot of the news organizations are pressed for resources at time like this. so it s harder to keep track of them. that s why we thought it would be good to shine a light on them now. michael duffy, thank you so much. the new issue of time is the wrecking crew how trump s panel is dismantling government as we know it . joe biden has been making campaign appearances for fellow democrats lately, but what about his own political projects? the editor and chief of in style tells us about her conversation with the former vice president. morning joe is coming right back. america s beverage companies have come together to bring you more ways to help reduce calories from sugar. with more great tasting beverages with less sugar or no sugar at all, smaller portion sizes, clear calorie labels, and signs reminding everyone to think balance before choosing their beverages. we know you care about reducing the sugar in your family s diet, and we re working to support your efforts. more beverage choices. smaller portions. less sugar. balanceus.org. bp engineered a fleet of 32 brand new ships with advanced technology, so we can make sure oil and gas get where they need to go safely. because safety is never being satisfied. and always working to be better. magic is pretty amazing. it can transform a frog into a prince. and sadness into happily ever after. but it can t transform your business. for that, you need dell technologies. 7 technology leaders now working together under one name. we re transforming jet engines into turbo-powered safety inspectors. dairy cows into living, breathing, data centers. and even a single hospital room into a global diagnostic network. and though it seems like magic, it s not. it s not the simple wave of a wand. it s people and technology working together to transform impossible into reality. magic can t make digital transformation happen. but we can. let s make it real. witness katy perry. witness katy perry become a legal witness. witness katy perry and left shark. or a card shark. grandma? witness katy perry work. witness katy perry firework. witness katy perry swish. witness katy perry. aaaaaaw look at that dog! katy perry: with music videos and behind the scenes footage, xfinity lets you witness all things me. in an interview with in style magazine, joe biden explained what he has to offer the presidency, saying, quote, i think this moment in american history fits into my wheelhouse and the strengths that i have. i am, i think most people will say, fairly knowledgeable about american foreign policy. i m pretty good at diplomacy internationally and bringing people together, cutting through and settling things. i think what people are looking for most, and i hope i have it, is authenticity. the editor in chief of in style magazine, laura brown who conducted that interview joins us now. good morning. good morning. is it a departure for in style? a progression i would say. i m focusing on inspiring people. i think there are a few more inspiring in this country and particularly in this climate. joe biden fits into this category? very much. when we heard he released a book, detailing the last year when beau was alive, his son, and how he was managing the illness of his son with his job, rather big job. so the minute we heard that was coming out, we kind of jumped. we re very flattered. what struck you from your interview. he is very you know him. very much at ease in his skin and a very, very frank and straightforward person. what struck me was he has this uncle joe persona, this rockwellian i put him in a levi shirt. he does have a statesmanship with those ray bans on, incredible. very tall and quite imposing. he s got an ease in his skin. after 44 years in public service, you have to have that. seems like he was fairly open about the potential of running for president. very much. that s the question everybody is asking. he was open in saying 3 1/2 years from the time of the interview to the next election is a long time in politics. i am still mourning my son. my family is still mourning. i don t know. we re going to see how we do. she said my health, only 75, my health is pretty good. it s a huge effort, a huge mental and physical effort that i still don t understand. i think he s reconciling all of that. had you met him prior to the interview? yes. i met him twice over the course of the interview. i met him in his kitchen actually. he has a jazzy espresso maker. he made me a coffee and gave me a tour of the place. it seems like they re still getting used to being out of d.c. here is my gate and here is what i do when i don t have to do this all day. he has the jacket, the vp jacket with the patches. he had them on. he said, i guess i better take them off. he took them off and put them in his pocket. did it strike will you at all how relatively normal he is. ? i think he s famously normal and approachable, yeah. when you re on that stage physically and metaphorically, i can understand it could be removed. i think he just doesn t have that technology. he s a very warm person, the consoler-in-chief given his personal losses and he understands others. i think that s honestly where he draws his power and his strength is from being with people and engaging with people. he s a recounter, he loves telling stories, loves giving hugs. jill told me i m a little touchy feely with people. my mom said never let people go by without saying something nice to them. what s wrong with that. he was with john mccain when he gave him the award. he spoke about the state of affairs as john mccain did in the country. talking with him, what s his general feeling about the early trump years? he said he was trying to give it a year. a lot of people were going to wish for the best. now he s like, we can t. basically he said he got very worked up and said silence is complicity and gave a number of examples about that. he was like, they re throwing a sheep skin over democracy. they start with undermining the media, then the courts, and we have to stand up and we have to fight. he was just very he speaks so passionately. it was kind of upsetting and inspiring to hear him speak like that. at the end he was like, we ve got to stand up. we ve got to fight. that s what he s doing. that s what he s motivating the rest of us to do. you can read the interview with former vice president joe biden in in style. laura brown thank you. we can t wait to see you, you ll be speaking at know your value at the grand hyatt. he s also a judge i ll be judging you. we re not judging one another. joe and willie and laura will be judging the bonus competition along with our other guests. great interview with the vice president, thank you. joe? i think joe biden getting back to joe biden, i think, mika, and you and i know the guy. he is a guy that can win wiscons wisconsin, certainly can win pennsylvania going away, be strong in ohio, win michigan. those are the sort of states joe biden would have never lost in 2016. but the question for joe biden is a question for a lot of republicans. can he get through a primary process that s moved much further left than joe biden is comfortable being on the campaign trail. i think one thing might be is that maybe he can this time given everything. maybe things have adjusted. it might have been tougher last time around. president trump s approval rating hits another low in a new fox poll. we ll have those numbers. what s taking the trump administration so long to implement the sanctions the president reluctantly signed into law two months ago. senator bob corker, the chairman of the senate foreign relations committee wants to know. he joins us to talk about it this morning, among other things. things. we re back in a moment.of serio. neulasta helps reduce infection risk by boosting your white blood cell count, which strengthens your immune system. in a key study, neulasta reduced the risk of infection from 17% to 1%. .a 94% decrease. applied the day of chemo, neulasta onpro is designed to deliver neulasta the next day. neulasta is for certain cancer patients receiving strong chemotherapy. do not take neulasta if you re allergic to neulasta or neupogen (filgrastim). ruptured spleen, sometimes fatal as well as serious lung problems, allergic reactions, kidney injuries, and capillary leak syndrome have occurred. report abdominal or shoulder tip pain, trouble breathing or allergic reactions to your doctor right away. in patients with sickle cell disorders, serious, sometimes fatal crises can occur. the most common side effect is bone and muscle ache. so why go back there? 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[laughing] nature s bounty lutein blue. because you re better off healthy. the bottom line is i would run a campaign i could be proud of, where i didn t have to cozy up to the president and his positions or his behavior, i could not win in a republican primary. that s the bottom line. it s not that you have to just be with the president on policy. you can t question his behavior and still be a republican in good standing. do i wish these differences wouldn t be happening out in the public? yeah. i think people should settle their differences personally. i think it s better that way. i think it s in our interest to have party unity so we can corporate to work for an agenda. if you listen to anything jeff flake said yesterday, his problems with the president go far deeper than personal differences as the house speaker described it. for now the president is getting cover on capitol hill, at least as long as the sweet smell of tax cuts still hang in the air. good morning everyone. it s thursday, october 26. welcome to morning joe. with us we have veteran columnist and msnbc contributor mike barnicle, msnbc political analyst and professor at the university of michigan school of public policy, former democratic congressman harold ford, junior, and columnist at the washington examiner, kristen anderson. joe, we have new poll numbers out on the president that we re going to get to. paul ryan, as you know, still likes to be staying in a very, very clear lane away from criticizing the president. frame the morning for us. first of all, you talked about the sweet smell of tax cuts. we had bob corker on several weeks ago, even before his dispute with president trump. he was talking about how this was going to make trying to pass health care look like a spring picnic. and bob corker is going to be on today. he s sounding the alarm on the hill. he wants tax cuts to pass, but at the same time he knows they re going to try to close $4 trillion worth of loopholes, lots of luck. so we ll be talking to bob corker there. mika, i think barnicle and willie would both agree the most important story out there was an incredible world series. mike barnicle, the home run it was a home run derby. it was like mid summer s treat at the all-star break, except this was in october. you got that exactly right. a mid summer s treat. thank god for baseball. it rescues us once again for the reality of our everyday headlines. last night dodgers versus astros, dave roberts, the dodgers manager makes a mess of the game by taking his starter out in the fourth inning. the game ends in the 11th inning, george springer, two-run home run. dodgers and astros back and forth for the eighth, ninth, tenth and 11th innings. they come up short in the bottom of the 11th. the astros go back to texas for the next three games with the series tied at one. man. mika, what are your thoughts? i just i eight home runs? a great home run. no rooting interest in the series, you just want a good series. looks like it s shaping up that way. houston has had a tough year. i think roberts has had a heck of a year. why would he take that pitcher out in your estimation? baseball is a sport so infused with stats, more than any other sport. we have the spin rate on a baseball, the percentage of curves that can get a hitter out, sliders that can get a hitter out. sometimes you re so wrapped up in the data that you don t take a look with your eyes. he goes to the bullpen, crushes his bullpen, ends up having to bring in maybe the best relief in major league babe, janson in in the eighth instead of the ninth inning. boom. mika, it s a lot like this show. we use sabre matrix for everything. willie and i are working ten hours a day, and it s all about numbers, all about data. we dig into the data. every question that s asked, every segment that comes up. it s sabre matrix for television. i can t believe how long you guys can go on and on about this. i wish we had an isolated camera on mika s face. there was a look of physical pain. bullpen, whatever. okay. president trump s job approval numbers have taken a hit this month. the president s approval rating fell to a new low in the fox news poll, just 38% approve, down four points in september. trump s disapproval rating hit a new high 57%. trump has also seen a dip among his core supporters, an eight-point drop among white evangelical voters. also down eight points among whites without a college degree and six-point drop among conservatives, men and white voters. joe, stop me whenever you want to. i ll actually stop right now and go to kristen. kristen, you do polls all the time. trump voters still support him 87%. republicans still supporting for the most part, eight out of ten supporting. those numbers are holding. man, is he bleeding independents. this is a low for a fox poll. he was at a 32% earlier this month. gall gallup. the base is holding, but he s losing everybody else, isn t he if. people are looking for, where is the win? you told us there would be all this winning. where is the win. for the most part, trump s own voters don t hold him responsible. they look at capitol hill, democrats, congressional leaders. they say this is what s causing the winning to have not happened in the way we were promised. voters who were not trump voters but maybe give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe didn t participate in the last election, the observers of politics. they are wondering where are the wins. that s why this tax reform question is so interesting because it s a chance to get something through congress, a chance to find an issue that republicans are fairly unified in. it could give the president that kind of a win, and yet from my vantage point, it doesn t seem as though the president is as focused on that as he is on, say, a fight with a gold star family and things like that. i think that s what you re seeing in these numbers, voters saying where is the win. of course, that is so critical, willie, for the president to be focused if he wants to pass tax reform. he thinks it s going to be as easy as the donors want tax reform, so give us tax reform. again, as bob corker will be telling us when he comes on the show and other senators that i ve been talking to have been saying, they re trying to close loopholes, like trillions of dollars in loopholes. k. street is going to swarm all over this place. you ll have becomes knees buckling. he said this is going to be tough. you need a president focused non-stop, that s bringing people in, that s explaining not just bringing them in and saying you re beautiful, this is great, this is the greatest bill ever. but explaining, this is going to be tough, but this is what you can tell your constituents, if we pass this tax reform, x, y and z is going to happen. he was never able to do that on health care reform. there s no reason to believe he ll be able to do it on tax reform. he made that promise reportedly last night to a group of donors, saying we ll have tax reform by the end of the year. he s got to have something on the board by the end of his first year. he can go back to gorsuch, driven largely by mitch mcconnell, of course. he can talk about the strength of the economy. we can dispute some of those numbers, harold. but he and senate republicans, and the reason a lot of them haven t crossed him in a way that bob corker and jeff flake and john mccain have is they also need something to go back to their voters and constituents with and say, look, you voted us in to do tax reform, we re doing it. otherwise they don t have much to show either. it s not just the president. i would agree with all you said. there s a long tradition in politics, campaigning one way and governing another. to a large extent, both of the parties, but the republicans, it s manifesting itself in the biggest and most pervasive way are struggling with it. jeff flake is a friend i served with in congress. bob corker who defeat ed me for the united states senate almost 12 years ago, they both campaigned in ways that they re not governing. you have republicans who campaigned on anti immigration, anti this, n anti that. they arrived there and want to kof earn differently. democrats have it on their side as well. obama wanted to close guantanamo bay and other things and did not. there were voters that were upset. you have the collision of reali realities, campaigning and governing. at the level we re talking about here with this president, he s confronting it. now you have these u.s. senators who are having conscience calls saying i can t live up to, or better yet, live down to the way i campaigned for 12, 16 years ago. when these realities collide, this is what you get. hopefully it s a signal and there will be more adherence to the way you campaign which may make campaigning more honest going forward. that s what i hope comes out of this. still ahead on morning joe, president trump is set to clear the release of files related to the jfk assassination, the murder he once linked to the father of a politician. that politician, ted cruz is defending the president and attacking the media. the brave new world in republican politics is next on morning joe. for the holidays, we get a gift for mom and dad. and every year, we split it equally. except for one of us. i write them a poem instead. and one for each of you too. thats actually yours. that one. yeah. regardless, we re stuck with the bill. to many, words are the most valuable currency. last i checked, stores don t take words. some do. not everyone can be that poetic voice of a generation. i know right? such a burden. the bank of america mobile banking app. the fast, secure and simple way to send money. bp uses flir cameras - a new thermal imagining technology - to inspect difficult-to-reach pipelines, so we can detect leaks before humans can see them. because safety is never being satisfied. and always working to be better. when you clock out, i ll clock in. sensing and automatically adjusting to your every move. there. i can also help with this. does your bed do that? i m the new sleep number 360 smart bed. let s meet at a sleep number store. accused of obstructing justice to theat the fbinuclear war, and of violating the constitution by taking money from foreign governments and threatening to shut down news organizations that report the truth. if that isn t a case for impeaching and removing a dangerous president, then what has our government become? i m tom steyer, and like you, i m a citizen who knows it s up to us to do something. it s why i m funding this effort to raise our voices together and demand that elected officials take a stand on impeachment. a republican congress once impeached a president for far less. yet today people in congress and his own administration know that this president is a clear and present danger who s mentally unstable and armed with nuclear weapons. and they do nothing. join us and tell your member of congress that they have a moral responsibility to stop doing what s political and start doing what s right. our country depends on it. start here. at fidelity, we let you know where you stand, so when it comes to your retirement plan, you ll always be absolutely.clear. it s your retirement. know where you stand. you ll always be absolutely.clear. tais really quite simple.est it comes in the mail, you pull out the tube and you spit in it, which is something southern girls are taught you re not supposed to do. you seal it and send it back and then you wait for your results. it s that simple. republican senator jeff flake of arizona said he hoped his defiant rejection of president trump s falsehoods, reckless behavior and personal attacks would be a, quote, tipping point. for most members of his party, it was just another day as president trump tweeted, jeff flake with an 18% approval rating in arizona said a lot of my colleagues have spoken out. really? they just gave me a standing o. in interviews yesterday many of flake and bob corker s colleagues some of whom were harsh critics of trump agreed. the president has his own way of communicating. look, it s worked. he s getting things done. he s perform iing. he s not the cookie cutter, and i think republicans need to have a leader that takes the reigns and does things the way he wants, so long as his goals are the same, and they are. i try not to make it abiliou personalities or somebody has less of character. that s the pot calling the kettle black. we tend to think i m so perfect i can criticize another person s character. one of the things the media has missed on all this, they keep saying senator so and so is a conservative, why is there such a disagreement? because we made this ability personalities and less about policy. i think it s unfortunate the nastiness that pervades washington right now and the political battles of personality that consume seemingly every minute of the media attention and an awful lot of the time and energy here in this town. it s like you re back in junior high. i really don t care who passed a note to the cute girls in pig tails. we ve got a job to do, damn it. all of this nonsense i ve got nothing to say about it. everyone shut up and do your job. so joe, i feel like i want to hear from you, the republican turned independent because i don t think it s going to carry much weight coming from me. i feel like there s such a disconnect here, the three gentlemen we just heard from are putting massive blinders on and disregarding behavior that defies humanity. we re not talking about bickering here, are we? well, we actually heard, willie geist, the last gentleman who spoke today, donald trump would have us believe is going to be reading about his father in the papers released on the jfk assassination. if you believe donald trump, ted cruz s father had something to do with the jfk assassination. ted cruz s wife derided by donald trump as being unaguirre attractive. ted cruz assaulted time and time again by donald trump. him trying to paint everything with a broad brush is sad. first of all, you wonder why he doesn t feel more of a need to defend his family. exactly how he does that, that s up for ted cruz to figure out. we heard jim inhofe say the president had his own way of communicating. yes, he lies, and yes, he says he s going to strip licenses from news outlets with whom he disagrees. he uses stalinist phrases and calls the press the enemy of the people, calls other people the enemy of the people. he actually questions the legitimacy of the judicial branch and specific federal judicial judges. if barack obama had done any of these things, jim inhofe would have held eight-year hearings on it. yes, he does have his own way of communicating, and inhofe says it works. actually, no. the president has record low approval ratings. the republican party has its widest split in the generic ballot as they ve ever had with the democratic party and congress s approval is now sitting at 14%, an almost record low there. what he said is patently false. jim inhofe, there is no reason to follow this guy. he s destroying the republican party. if you just, as i said before, look at the data. well, jim inhofe went a step further, mike. this is his quote yesterday. talking about flake and corker, maybe we do better by having some of the people who don t like him, talking about trump, leave and replace them. that s jim inhofe saying if you don t like hat the president is doing, maybe you should follow jeff flake out the door. we just showed jim inhofe, rand paul and ted cruz. the striking thing about the three of them is they are so filled with fear, the fear of getting tweeted against, the fear of the noise of the bannon wing of the republican party. it s as if they are in a house that s on fire and this they don t sense the fire is eventually going to get into the room that they re in. krist kristen, in the polling that you ve done with regard to donald trump, the president of the united states and his status with elderly people, with independents, with whomever, does the issue of incompetence ever come up? that would seem to be his true weakness in the long run, incompetence, the fact that they can t get anything done with him as president. i think for voters who already didn t like donald trump, that s sort of baked into the cake for them. for voters who did vote for donald trump, again, you ve seen a handful of them bleeding away, which is why his approval ratings that used to be just north of 40%, are now a little south of 40%. among republican voters and the types of voters that a senator inhofe or a senator cruz is talking to, those comments they made are the sorts of things that i will hear in focus groups from republican voters, that they just want to see things get done, that they get that the president tweets and they don t really like it. but you know what? i just want to see things get done. in their perspective, they re not you don t hear people say, well, there s a coequal branch of government and senators have every right to speak their mind. they just want to see things get done and they view it as a distraction. they don t think the senators coming out and making these comments are having any effect on actually changing the president s behavior, so what s the point of it which i think is an interesting argument, right? i believe if you disagree with this president, speak out by all means, but i think it s also valid to say, if you speak on the senate floor and you give a speech that s lovely, that the president doesn t change his behavior. if you haven t changed the minds of people in your party, is it a distraction? i think it s a fair question. the vulnerability that you just indicated, that you pointed to, it s okay if things get done. what if things don t get done? how quickly does it come down? that s where the wheels come off. if tax reforms don t get done, obamacare still in place, no major movement on tax reform, the wall is still not built, i do think you ll start to see more folks going okay, okay, maybe it s not mostly the president s fault, but he needs to do something different if he wants to make this work. that may be when you see those numbers get closer and closer to the mid to low 30s. coming up on morning joe, on his asia trip next month, president trump will visit china, whose leader he is congratulating for consolidating power. it comes amid new threats from north korea. we ll get the latest reporting from the region next. in a few moments, senator bob corker will be our guest. dad: molly, can you please take out the trash? 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reporter: a lot. a great deal. he s going to have north korea top of his agenda with three u.s. carrier groups now operating in the region and chairman joint chiefs general dunford was expected to arrive here just in the past few hours. the president, of course, as you say dur to come to the region next month. is this the most tense region in the world right now? absolutely it is. we spent a week in north korea and the insights that we gained by having that time there were really impactful for us i ve got to say. i think one of the things to say is just the strength of ideology that we experienced inside that country, we got to speak to a lot of people, admittedly people in pyongyang and in that kind of social circle, if you like, the higher echelons of north korean society. you ask if people question any question, and they quickly come back to telling you about their admiration and respekd for the supreme leader kim jong-un. they will tell you about the importance for them of ideology of self reliance. they are clearly, as far as they tell us, convinced that they may need to go to war and frankly, they would be prepared to die for that ideology. you never know in north korea whether what people are telling you is what they really think or whether there are layers there, but in terms of what we experience, that is the kind of strength that we experience. coming up on morning joe, senator bob corker is standing by. he joins the conversation live on morning joe. most american homeowners would be shocked if they knew just how rich they were. the average american home value has increased $40,000 over the last 5 years. but many don t know you can access that money without refinancing or selling your home. with a home equity loan, you can pull cash out of your house for anything you need- home improvement, college tuition, even finally getting out of credit card debt. come to lendingtree.com to shop and compare home equity loans right now. because at lendingtree, when banks compete, you win. all this stuff you see on a daily basis on twitter this and twitter that, forget about it. let s focus on improving people s lives and doing what we said we would do that accomplish that. that s what we re focused on. are you going to ask about this? keep the blinders on. house speaker paul ryan reacting on tuesday to president trump s attacks on bob corker and bob corker hitting right back. the chairman of the foreign relations committee, senator bob corker of tennessee joins us now. joe? hey, bob. senator, thank you for being with us. i want to ask you the same question i asked mark meadows a guy who said like you is a deficit hawk. i asked him how in the world they were going to be able to close $4 trillion in tax loopholes without getting stampeded by people on k. street. he seemed to admit that it was going to be a real problem. how do you i know you want to pass this tax reform bill badly. how do you do that? how do you close $4 trillion in loopholes and how do you stop this from busting a hole in the debt? joe, let me walk through and make it simple. i think because of the actions on the senate floor to move past the parliamentarian, people are not really understanding what s happening here, so if i could just take a moment. we passed through a budget that gave $1.5 trillion headroom to the tax writers. it was moved past things you know about, static scoring, those kind of things. half a trillion of that was to align us with current policy. what did in the senate was pass something that allows for $1 trillion in dynamic scoring. it s got to be achieved or people like mark meadows and myself likely would not support it. but i think it can be achieved. what we ve done is allowed for $1 trillion in potential dynamic scoring if we do this the right way. there s actually $5 trillion that has to be dealt here with to achieve the goals that have been laid out. $4 tril i don t know, 80% of what we re doing is closing loopholes. i m all in. this is going to be if we do it right, it s going to be the biggest tax wright, re-tax write since 1986. you re right. we ll have to close $4 trillion of special interest, and some of these, by the way, have been in the code for years. that is going to be tough work. that s the spinach of this deal. people keep focusing on the senate budget and not understanding that the real work is getting ready to take place where the tax writers write out of the code $4 trillion in benefits to individuals and to businesses to reform the code to make up 80% of what it s going to take for us to actually do what we want to do to get corporate rates down to 20%, deal with the territorial issues, deal with pass-throughs. i m all in. i m excited about this. but joe, i do see some fear in people s eyes. you ve been around here and you understand what s getting ready to take place. that s what i told congressman meadows. he s never seen the human wave from k. street over to capitol hill like he s going to see now. he s also going to get a lot of angry calls, and you are and everybody else from constituents because closing tax loopholes sure feels like tax increases to the people whose tax write-offs are being taken away. give us examples of some of the mover popular tax write-offs this bill will have to close. i was just on a sister program to you. i ll talk about the ones out there publicly. i want to give the tax writers as much chance for success as we possibly can and them to lay it all out at one time so they aren t piecemeal divided. one of the big ones is state and local taxes, $1.2 to $1.3 billion. if you start eroding this, you re saying we re not going to get here. i had a great meeting the other day with our tax writing folks who i have a lot of respect for. they ve gotten about $3.6 trillion of tough stuff that has to be done to close loopholes. they re still trying to get another $400 billion. when they do that, they re getting into the quick, getting into some really, really tough measures that are going to be highly controversial. if you don t do it, you don t achieve what s been laid out in this tax reform package. willie geist. senator corker, let me ask you if i could, the white house privately and in some ways publicly has said the reason you ve been lashing out against them lately is you asked president trump if you could be secretary of state and he denied that request. sarah sanders was asked this question on tuesday. she said, yes, that is my understanding. did you ask president trump if you could be his secretary of state? i ve been on your program numbers of times. they interviewed me for the position. i was absolutely i thought rex tillerson was an inspired choice. i think you saw me in his hearings almost answering his questions for him. i was thrilled with the person they selected, especially after i ve seen how they ve treated him. that s a ridiculous thing. i don t think rex tillerson has a closer friend on capitol hill, closer supporter, someone who wants to see diplomatic activities to succeed than bob corker. he knows that. the white house knows that. president trump has anyway, it s a ridiculous assertion. the argument is twofold, one that you ve been criticizing him because you were not made secretary of state and you were frustrated by that, but also, you re not coming back, not running for re-election so you feel liberated. would you have said all the things you said this week if you did have to face the voters again? did you see the chattanooga rotary club interview that i gave when i was still contemplating whether i was going to run again or not? yes. did you see earlier comments i made about chaos? this has been building for a long time. i had a private dinner with the president. i ve played golf with the president. i ve intervened when the staff has asked me to intervene, when he s getting ready to go off the rails which happens, as you know, often. look, i ve done a lot of things privately. this has just continued to build. but i think the thing that has probably caused me to be most critical is kneecapping his secretary of state when we re trying to deal with north korea in a manner that doesn t lead us to a regional, global conflict. when you end up putting yourself in a position where you re not supporting trying to resolve, especially with china, this issue diplomatically, you basically are taking the country to a binary choice which can, in fact, lead to war. that s when i began i think when he got upset with me was when i talked i don t know why. i complimented his national security team for keeping us from chaos. look, i don t want to rehash all of that. i ve got stuff to do here, tax reform. we ve got issues to deal with with iran. one thing i don t get up in the morning and think about is what s happening at the white house relative to out bursts. as you know, your relationship with the president is critically important as chairman of the committee that you chair it is not important. you made your kmernts on tuesday and then went to that lunch. did you speak to the president at the lunch? have you spoken to him since you made your comments on tuesday? so look, i sat in my same seat i sit in every week at lunch. the president came into the room from another door and it was on the far side. i have not spoken to him. look, i m constantly in touch with tillerson, with pence, with mnuchin who was just in my office recently on the tax issues. to be honest, my relationship with the president is not relevant. i m dealing with the principals who conduct foreign policy, and i hope more and more he ll leave these issues to them. mnuchin, gary cohn from time to time the way we feel about each other which is not particularly positive, is irrelevant to me carrying out the responsibilities i have here. totally irrelevant. what might be relevant is the potential that our democracy is being threatened in any way. and i wonder i wonder if you could help me understand what s going on with some of your republican colleagues, some who say it s a lot easier to speak the way bob corker does because he s leaving. it s maybe you want to get that? i ll call later. that s not the president, is it? is it easier to say because you re leaving, or is that an excuse on their part? one of your republican colleagues even said that the president doesn t lie, he speaks in hyperbole. what s going on? look, i ve said about all i need to say. i don t want to create a whole other series of 48, 72 hours worth of stories. i understand that. i ve been very clear about how i feel about all of this. i think when you have a governing model that s about dividing the country, when it s about resentment, when you only focus on keeping your base solid to the extent of really alienating other people, instead of trying to bring our nation together, to bring out the better angels in our citizens, i just got an e-mail from a great friend of mine at a university last night talking about the wonderful young people there, typically presidents try to be aspirational in what they do, they try to bring out the best in our country. again, i ve already said this before, i hope it isn t like repeated 80 times in the media over the next 72 hours. but that to me is not happening, and i m going to continue to rail against that in an appropriate way. i don t want to have an ongoing, quote, unquote, feud. that s not who we are as air mans kachlt it doesn t just affect us, by the way. i m hearing from people in europe. it affects the world. we are the greatest nation on earth. typically our presidents understand that and they try to bring that out, not just in our country, but they understand the place our country has in affecting everything else. i don t think we re ever going to see that. that s what s been disappointing, especially since working towards this is something we began in private, became a little more public and obviously now very public. but i want to focus on the work i have to do. i have months to do everything i possibly can to make this country as great as it can be and to make sure our role in the foreign relations committee and the world is what it s supposed to be. i just don t wake up in the morning thinking about how to feud. that s right. mike, go ahead. senator, let s get to the work that you re doing. as we speak right now, a third carrier group arrived in the sea of japan, that s three united states aircraft carriers in the sea of japan. what s going on and when is the united states senate going to get around to redoing the act of force which is now 16 years old. first of all, the obama administration felt they had the legal authority to do what they re doing against isis based on the 01 aumf and the 02 aumf. i agree with them. the trump administration believes they have have the abili ability, recently four soldiers killed based on those a umfs. i agree with them. i think they have the legal authority. what we re going to do, to answer your question, on monday night of next week, we have tillerson and mattis coming in. we have a hearing on this very topic. as you know jeff flake and tim kaine have an aumf they ve offered. there have been other people that have done the same. we re going to begin this debate about what congress s role should actually be. whether you think you have the legal authority or not, should we be involved as we move into different countries dealing especially with isis. so that s one issue. the second issue is going to be, in something like north korea, what is it the president can do without any input from congress? i think people would be shocked to know what those things are. we ve got some members like senator markey, he s concerned about what a president can do with launching a nuclear weapon in 120 seconds. all of these things will be discussed. i m not particularly laying out a position right now. but we re going through a series of hearings to do exactly what it is you re requesting. i do hope we ll be able to update the aumf. i do. that takes 60 votes in the senate and takes the house there s a lot of division over what powers the commander-in-chief should have. but we re going begin that process monday. i appreciate you highlighting it. i have a feeling it will be highly watched. senator bob corker, thank you so much. good to have you on the show. thank you. up next, why does vladimir putin want to control ukraine? ask stalin. pulitzer prize winner ann applebaum sugge explains what i means for washington s approach to washington next on morning joe. 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ask your hep c specialist about harvoni. 51 past. joining us now, pulitzer prize winning historian ann applebaum, author of red famine, stalin s war on the ukraine. you spent six years on this book and your time cing could not be more perfect to have to releasing now. joe, take it away. thank you. anne, it s a remarkable work and absolutely chilling. can you explain how a famine began in the soviet union and stalin actually had a chance to alleviate that suffering. he could have done several things which you lis, including asking for foreign aide like he did in 1921, but instead he actually accelerating the famine and it led to 5 million deaths. how did he do that and explain why did he do that. that s right. the famine was caused more generally by chaos by his agricultural policy, forcing state farms. then he made the decision to widen and deepen it specifically in ukraine. he saw ukraine as kind of competition for the bolsheviks. he worried about ukrainian nationalism, he worried about peasant rebellion. he put a kind of cordon around ukraine and had add series of searches. this was a famine caused by teams of people going house to house and taking people s food and leaving them to starve to death. and it was it really was the use of famine as a device of war and you saw that it was ruthlessly effective and by the end of it, 5 million russians were dead. what was it, 3.9 in the ukraine? yes, it s 5 million total and then about 3.9 million in the ukraine. the death of the idea of ukraine yan nation, but also, there was a second part of this. talk about stalin hunting intellectuals and artists and other free thinkers. yes, the famine was half of a policy. the other half, as you say, was his attack on intellectuals, writers, artists, anybody who had any kind of independent mind or any who might prove a political challenge to the leadership. his idea was to eliminate all political opposition and he feared in particularly ukraine where they had a separate national identity and a history in 1917, ukraine had had its own government, so he sought to eliminate that and make sure the bolsheviks were the only one in power. can you explain the bafflement, complete bafflement of actually communist in ukraine that would write polite letters to joseph stalin, asking is the starvation of our people now official policy? people really couldn t believe it and there were letters in the archives, peasants and others would write in to moscow and say, don t you know this is happening, surely you re not aware of it. some of them would say, well, you know it must be the bourgeois i must is there done this, it can t be the soviet state that carried this out. many people throughout the soviet union and the world would have trouble believing the state could actually carry this out, could organize a famine and kill so many people. stalin tried to cover it up. for many years the cover-up worked. here we are, 35 years later, with vladimir putin, ukraine very much in the headlines, based on the way he s treated that country. how does it relate to what we saw in the past? what s the historical path that got us to where we are today? so there is a clear relationship. the feeling that stalin had that ukraine is not just a fara way country where there could be some problems or distant problems but it s actually an existential challenge to him. this is something similar to what putin feels to ukraine. when he saw in 2014 all those young people waving flags and calling for rule of law and democracy, he thought that could happen here. this is something that could happen here in moscow, and that was why he then invaded crimea. they re related countries, related languages and he couldn t stand the idea they would take a different path or european path. you ve been working on this book for six years, studying ukrainian history and then watching as the presidency campaign unfolded. what did you think when paul manafort was made campaign manager of president trump s campaign? anybody who worked on ukraine in previous years knew who he was because he was the main adviser to the pro-russian president, the one who had carried out these authoritarian changes and he was the one people were protesting against in 2014. he lived in kiev for many years. he had a big staff there. he was a well-known figure there. my first thought when he was appointed as campaign manager, i wrote this at the time in the washington post, this was going to be the crimeanization of the u.s. they wrote, a great crime in front of us. and then the annex conversation of crimea right in front of us, and yet different technique, propaganda, misinformation. is this somehow embedded in the story of ukraine? oh, yes, absolutely, so the soviet disinformation and cover-up and propaganda techniques had very much been adopted and adapted and sort of reformed for the modern cyberworld by the modern russian security services. it s a little bit different now. their tactics are different. they don t use mass murder anymore as a tactic, which stalin did. you can see this desire to divide people, create scapegoats. as you saw with the when facebook released the kind of ads that the russianings wes we buying and using in the united states, were defined by setting them against other americans. this is a very old soviet tactic. the book is red famine, stalin s war on ukraine. thank you for being on the show. on tomorrow s show, new jersey governor chris christie joins the conversation, and we thank you for joining us today. that does it for us for now. stephanie ruhle picks up the coverage in just a few moments. hi there, i m stephanie ruhle. this morning, a party divided. the president downplaying any split between himself and moderate members of party. we have actually in the republican party in a true sense, we have great unity. at the same time, he s also hitting back on calls for him to be more civil. the press makes me more uncivil than i am. i went to an ivy league college. i m a very intelligent person. going to an ivy league college, being an intelligent person doesn t make you civil. a national overdose. public trump expected to announce a public health emergency on opioids. if we had a terrorist organization killing 42
it? this is donald trump s doing. what we are seeing is what he wanted people to see. when a desperate people in the other side of the border to see, wanted americans to see and democrats to see so they would build his wall. but is this a step too far? donald trump said he can shoot someone on fifth avenue and get away with it. is separating kids from their parents what he had in mind? is this proof of what he can get away with? or is it beyond even what his people will swallow? good evening, i m chris plaj mas in washington. president trump and his administration came under intense criticism for the so-called zero tolerance immigration policy. resulting in forced family separations. much of the mounting public outcry was sparkeded by images like these. of small children looking on as u.s. border patrol officers detained their parents. then there are the newly released recordings sobbing children at a detention facility. nbc news has not obtained the audio from a civil rights attorney who he said he received it from client. let s listen. nbc has not been able to independently authenticate that recording. the administration would continue to prosecute all criminals. dhs is no longer ignoring the law. we re enforcing the laws as they exist on the books. as long as illegal entry replains kranl offense, dhs will not look the other way. despite the mounting pressure, the president is also pushed back against criticism. immigration is the fault and all of the problems that we re having because we cannot get them to sign legislation. we cannot get them even to the negotiating table. i say it s very strongly the democrats fault. the united states will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. it won t be. seeking to deflect the president laid blame at the feet of democrats. those comments contradict statements by his own attorney general. and cleave hief of staff who he champion this policy. i have put in place a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry on our southwest border. if you re smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you. and that child may be separated from you as required by law. a big name of the game is deterence. if it s a family separation stands as a tough deterrent? could be a tough deterrent. a much faster turn around on asylum seekers. even though they say that is cruel and heartless. i think cruel and heartless, i wouldn t put it quite that way. the children will be taken care. they re put into foster care or whatever. but the pig boibig point is th t elected to come to the united states. there is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or very long. zero tolerance which the administration rolled out back in may is the brain child of senior policy adviser steefphen miller. rolling out the policy was a simple decision by the administration. washington post is also reporting to the president saying political advantage in all of this. according to the white house officials, the president s calculated he will gain political leverage and congressional negotiations by continuing to enforce a policy he claims to hate. joining me right now is nbc news white house correspondent kristen welker, peter baker from the new york times, jennifer ruben from the washington post and jacob subrov is outside of one of the largest immigration processing centers in mcallen, texas. i want to start with kristen. kristen, it seems like they said in the cowboys movies, this president is speaking with a forked tongue. one is this is our policy of zero tolerance. we believe in it. we have to separate. we have to put the parents on trial. the other statement coming out from the secretary of homeland security was, oh, yeah. by the way, if you want to change this, go ahead. we would like you to do that. we want to change the policy. we believe it. that makes no sense to a person listening. i think that s why this is such a growing crisis for this administration. you heard those two different messages on display in the briefing that was given by dhs secretary neilsen and then sarah sanders who really stressed the president hates this policy. wants to see it changed. is bothered by it. secretary neilsen really dug in on the fact that this is a crisis created by past administrations. is it a policy that this president is responsible for or not? i tried to press neilsen on that point and said the bottom line is this started when the attorney general announced that zero tolerance policy. if the president hates it, why doesn t he pick up the phone and change it? she, of course, punted. she put the blame on congress. it s becoming very difficult for them to explain this and to be on the same page. it looks to me, you know, covering politics all these years and looking at her, she did a very good job today of defending what can t be defending. basically, they want to change the policy but they re proud of it. is she in detention? is she on the line for her job? i think this is a critical test for her. we know that she was essentially picked by chief of staff john kelly, ultimately president trump got onboard with this. but there have been some tensio tensions behind the scenes, some differences of approach. the president said descent feel as though she is securing the border enough. i think this is a critical test. that briefing whats a critical test for her. will she be able to keep this up? that s a big question. he undoubtedly was watching that briefing today. she faced a lot of tough questions, chris. last question to you. this is the one i want your answer. you re on television. you broadcast. you get the message across. i try to do the same thing. the president is very good at creating reality tv. he creates a world through television. this is a television show that nobody wants to watch. no american wants to watch kids and hear them crying. kids crying when they cry at church is fine. but these kids are crying because of policy, because their parents have been taken away from them. that s why they re crying. how can the president defend what he knows is a lousy reality show? i think he s struggling to do it, chris. you saw that when he surprised us and came out on the north lawn on friday. and we peppered him with questions about this. the humanity of it. he got very upset. and he pointed the finger at democrats. that s his tactic right now. to point the finger at democrats. it s a tough argument to make though because, of course, there is his own zero poll rance policy. i do think that we have seen president trump dig in whether it comes to having a fight. he rarely backs away from a tough fight, chris. we re watching that unfold right now even though as you rightfully point oiut, these images is not what the president or the first lady wants to be watching. i think the question is will he add any point back away from this fight? just tonight, ted cruz is introducing emergency legislation. so the pressure is mounting on this president to do something. he knows he does have the power to do it. the question is will he? kristen, great watching you there. i love the back and forth. i think you hit them right on the rhead with the policy. a policy they claim they invented but they claim the democrats for not getting rid of it. this is crazy talk. let me go to jacob at the reality that exists down there, not just the tv show. jacob, tell us what you see down there, what we should know. well, let me just also sing kristen s praises. she asked the question we still don t have an answer to. where are the toddlers? where are the girls? we ve been given access to two 100 facilities run by health and human services where the separated child migrants are being held. i ve been in one of them. nbc s got in another. we haven t seen any girls or toddlers. what we do know and what i would like to know, what the president would react if he got to see what i saw in that facility is that 1100 young kids have been separated from their family right here in the rio grande valley border patrol sector and in this building right here, the mcallen processing center, there were 1200 people last night. whether you walk in there and there is talk of cages or not, what do you want to call them? there are cages. they look like dog kennels. they re not just adults or families together. they re young children sitting in there and increasing number of young children sitting in those cages because they were separated from their parents. and more are being separated every single day. it makes you sick to look at. i would like to know what the president would think if he was actu actually inside there? the secretary of home land security has been down here and inside the detention centers. i d like to know shz hae behas here since the separation policy was put in place? has she taulked to the border patrol agencies? the four social workers in there last night having to deal with increasing number of children separated from parents because of the very policy. it s not a democratic policy. it s a policy put into place by donald trump. who put together the policy of separating boys from girls and younger kids. that is sophie s choice kind of thing. did trump call that in from the bench? who put that policy in? letting you see the older boys. who told them not to let you see the girls and younger boys? who did that? the shelters are controlled by the department of health and human services. the facilities are run by professional, competent childcare professionals, licensed professionals, doctors in those facilities. licensed caregivers in those facilities. by all accounts, health and hum human services is doing a good job of taking care of the children wlachlt is dumped on their plate by this administration, the children coming out of this building is more kids than ever before. so there are 11,000 children currently in the care of health and human services. today they said only about 1,000 of those have been separated from their parents. if you extrapolate the rate at which the kids are coming out of this facility and going into that one, it will be 20,000 by august. why don t they want to show us yet where the girls are and where the toddlers are? what the toddlers care look like? people are concerned about the young children. and they want to know that they re okay. let s talk about the heat down there. they put the kids in tents. by the way, side question wlach. what do the pr people tell you about letting you see the boys and not the other children wlach? what is the execution for that? that s a good question. i truly believe they want to get us in the places. they have not done it yet. they tell us we ll get you in as soon as we open up one of the places for a tour. there is only a couple of them and bouncing around the country from one of threes to the other. this tenlt city, i believe, will be next on the list for us. we re going to try to get into that tenlt city, tent camp is the way to call it where the overflow crowds are being held right now. but, look, if i was them, i d make it a priority. the american people want to know. people are contacting me on social media every day. where are the girls? where are the toddlers? it is something i m hearing over and over. if i was them and standing behind that desk or going around the country on the site surveys tlashgs is t , that would be the first thing i do. they now know everything thanked thanks to your reporting. they re splating kids for pr reasons. let me go to peter. what do you make of the front page impact here? i get the sense this is one time where trump has cut down his coalition to a smaller number. they may be against illegal immigration. but not this cutting edge stuff. yeah. it is striking over the weekend you saw critical mass begin to build of criticism that wasn t just from the left but also from the right. obviously laura bush, the former first lady, some senators like susan collins and lindsey graham and also the new york post editorial page. i think that was why you saw so many administration officials starting with the president himself out there today trying to push back, trying to defend themselves. they re on the defensive on immigration which is a position they re not used to being. and they re trying to get back on the offense. do you think they re going to be able to pull back on this policy that they put into effect without law? they went their direction. will they change and give it up now that the heat is on? that s an interesting question. any other administration probably would have done that by today just, you know, the national political course of things. that tape you played is obviously very powerful. the pictures that have come out of the region are very powerful. normal political reaction would be to make the pictures and audio go away. but that s not the way this president generally reacts. he doesn t like it to be pushed. he s using this, obviously, to push congress to get legislation he thinks is necessary to defend the border. but if it looks like a cynical ploy, that s one more piece of criticism from people even in his own party. thank you, peter. let me go to jennifer. god s children. i open with that. they are god s children. every religion believes that. kids are kids we get from god. they come to us. we re responsible for looking out for them. they don t decide what country to live in. and we have to look out for them when they re here. yet this is trump s country. he keeps winning the pr wars. will he win this one? i don t think so. i think speaking of religions, you have really every religious group out there, catholic bishops, reformed jews, methodists. even franklin graham. yeah, a big trump supporter condemning this and condemning sessions for trying to quote scripture in defense of this. i think peter and the others are exactly right. the pictures and the sound are going to naw at american s hearts. ted cruz doesn t make compromise o on policy issues, went down to the border. he had film taken of him sitting with kids and talking to parents. now he s scared and introducing emergency legislation. you had ben sass who likes to write a tlot of facebook posts saying this policy is wicked. will he join a policy initiative? i think you ll see some movement in congress and trump will will try to take credit for it. at this point, no one cares who gets credit for it. the republicans look awful. i think mothers especially. yes. absolutely. i just looked. you don t have to be a genius to see the women like laura bush and milana trump are making noise about this. this is for real. thank you. great reporting. great in the action fighting to get the truth in that press room. jacob, you do this better than anybody, that on scene reporting, the best there s peter baker, i love the front page of the new york times because of you. coming up, we ll get the politics of the president s policy of separating kids from their parents doing it sneakily as we is he had tonight. trump and the republicans are on the hook for a policy roundly criticized as immoral separating boys from girls and older from younger so it looks good? he s doing it. plus, long time trump associate roger stone now remembers isn t this cute remembers have a meeting with a russian pushing dird on hillary clin. he called p himself henry greenberg. like a baseball player. told the house intelligence committee he had zero contacts with russians but now he remembers the meeting. remember what i told you years ago about rolling disclosure? you remember it at the appropriate time. this is set up by another trump pal. michael caputo is going to join us. and the hardball roundtable over what is lahappening in mexico. and someone says trump lies all the time. and the party will pay the price. finally, let me finish with trump watch. there is hardball, where the action is. with hotels.com to give venture cardholders 10 miles on every dollar they spend at thousands of hotels. all you have to do is pay with this. at hotels.com/venture. 10 miles per dollar? that is incredible. brrrrr. i have the chills. because you re so excited? because ice is cold. and because of all those miles. obviously. what s in your wallet? 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keep them together. and don t put them on trial? wait, if they re coming here for asylum or refugee status, there is a hearing that will take place for them to be able to present evidence that they ought to be asylum people and come into the country. and children can stay with them in that situation? absolutely they should. i mean it s just in humane that they don t. i agree with those who say that the children are being used as pawns. pawns for a wall, pawns for whatever the president is seeking. this is not the first time. think about that was happening with the dreamers. is that what you hear? he thinks he can get the wallabee using this kids as kidnappees, holding on? we ll keep the kids here until you agree to put a wall up? you know, certainly he s behaved like that before. in the dream act context. even if you think about using children as pawns, think about the chip legislation that was held up long for children s health. yes. but in a larger budget debate. he was fighting for his wall. there is something that the president and the president alone needs to change. he can do it tonight if he s listening. meanwhile, homeland security secretary neilsen said this today. there has been much outcry, consternation and misinformation from many in the press and congress and advocacy groups over the last few weeks that we at dhs are intentionally doing things that are unhumanitarian, cruel, immoral and disgraceful. we are doing none of those things. we are enforcing the laws passed by congress. it is important to note that these minors are very well taken care of. don t believe the press. they are very well taken care of. i m joined by texas democratic congressman. he joined two facilities in brownsville, texas. i don t think it is the press versus the president. they want the daddy, their pappy. congressman? well, that s right, chris. we had an opportunity today to see the youngest victims of donald trump s brutal policy of separating young kids from their families. we saw what was called an infant room and one of the infants is 8 months old. he had been separated from his family for over a month. and there was another girl that was about a year old and she had been separated from her parents also. these kids, their parents are nowhere to be found. if you watched her today, she looked like a zombie denying reality on behalf of the president. there is a brutal policy and it has to stop. she said two different things which clashed into each other. one was this is policy. she wants you to change the policy. it doesn t make logical sense whatever your motions are in this thing. the president has the absolute ability to stop separating families. he is basically engage flg state sponsored child abuse to use that as leverage to vote for a boerd wall. he is treating the kids and behaving like this is a real estate deal where you put pressure on the other person by raising rents or negotiating over square footage or something. he s doing that with the lives of kids. let me ask you about something. they re letting the press see the older boys but not the younger boys or any of the young women, the girls. are you able to ask the as a member of congress, can ask you to see how they re treating the young boys and how they re treating the girls? you are able to get through what they don t let the press see? we did. at one of the facilities, we did see young girls. but to be honest, the answer was still not very clear as to where all the girls are. now that said, there are many contractors. this facility was run by southwest keys. there are many contractors that do this and many facilities. so it s also possible that many of the girls were not at these two facilities. sounds unlikely. thank you so much, senator tammy baldwin. thank you. texas congressman, thank you sir. roger stone, you know him. previously denied, of course, having met with russians during the 2016 presidential campaign. now he and another trump adviser michael caputo say they were in contact with the russian promising dirt on hillary. they all meet with these guys that have dirt. michael caputo joins me after the break. we may be one of the world s most familiar companies, but we make more than our name suggests. we re an organic tea company. a premium juice company. a coconut water company. we ve got drinks for long days. for birthdays. for turning over new leaves. and we make them for every moment in every corner of the country. we are the coca-cola company, and we re proud to offer so much more. okay, so. my mom washes the dishes. .before she puts them in the dishwasher. and if they come out gross. .she washes them again. so what does the dishwasher do? new cascade platinum lets your dishwasher be the dish washer. these new actionpacs unleash three different cleaning agents that dissolve food, lift it off, and rinse it away the first time. wow! that s clean! and less work for my mom. new cascade platinum. nothing cleans better. you might or joints.hing for your heart. but do you take something for your brain. with an ingredient originally found in jellyfish, prevagen is the number one selling brain-health supplement in drug stores nationwide. prevagen. the name to remember. i want to ask you directly if you had contacts with russians nationals during the campaign? first of all, i appreciate you having me here today to clear this up. the answer, chris, is categorically, no, i have no russian clients. i was not in touch with anyone in russia. i wasn t talking to anybody i believe to be interimmediate airy for the russians. i reiterate again, i ve in no contacts or collusions with the russians. welcome back to hardball. that is roger stone, of course. categorically denying he had any contact with russians during the 2016 campaign. and now roger stone and another former campaign adviser michael caputo are reversing accounts saying they did have contact with one russians who was trying to sell them dirt on trump s 2016 opponent, hillary clinton. according to stone s account to the washington post, he met with a man who called himself henry greenberg who offered damaginging information about hillary clinton. however, he didn t reveal the information he claimed to possess. caputo said he spoke with greenberg by phone and arranged a meeting for stone. text messages show that after the meeting caputo asked stone, how crazy is the russian? stone said, he wants big money for the information. waste of time. caputo replied, the russian way. anything at all interesting? and stone said, no. neither disclosed that testimony. he said he had no contact with russians. i spent my time in front of the committee detailing the fact i had no contact with russians. i never heard of anyone in the trump campaign talking with russians. but i never was asked questions about my time in russia that i never seen spoke to anybody in russia. i never heard the word russia and we did not use russian dressing. they both said they forgot about the meetings until the text messages. they also say they were set up. greenberg said he worked as an informant to the fbi. the post says there is no evidence that greenberg was working with the fbi in his interactions with stone. i m joined by michael caputo, the former trump campaign adviser. of michael, if you were on a jury and someone said they forgot in the midst of this russian thing we ve been talking about every night for the last couple years and didn t remember hearing from a guy who called himself henry greenberg, the name of an american baseball player with heavy russian 5: accent, you forgot you got the call and forgot you called roger stone after he had this meeting and forgot all three incidents and forgot them all under testimony and only when the memory was picked by something that in terms of texts that you remembered. do you think you d believe such a claim? if i heard what you just said, i would say you re correct. there is two plinz minutes of m in 2016. i recalled it in preparation for the meeting with the senate intelligence committee on may 1st and the mueller meeting on may 2nd. that s two years later. two years later. two years later, right. and mueller asked me the same question precisely that was asked of me at the house. in fact, the mueller investigator seemed to be reading it from my testimony, from my house testimony. he said the exact same question did any russian ever offer you any information about hillary clinton? i revealed immediately, yes, a man named henry greenberg came to me and offered me negative information about hillary clinton and yada yada and he was extremely disappointed that i answereded it with full disclosure which i have not done in front of the house permanent select committee on intelligence in july of 2017. we then got into back and forth on this issue which made me believe very clearly that the mueller team knew exactly what went on in that meeting. after i left, i started an investigation which is up now at democratdossier.org and proved that henry greenberg is not his name. he has four names. he worked as an fbi informant for 17 years. so tell me exactly the moment when it clicked on you that you had contact with this so-called self identified henry greenberg, the russian? whether did it click on you, oh, yeah? whether d when did that happen? when i was preparing for the senate and the two years later? the mueller investigation? probably mid second week or early third week of april whether when i was preparing. in the midst of the talk of the russian influence, it did not jog your memory this memory, did not come to the surface of your mind even in preparing for sworn testimony of the house intelligence committee? it didn t occur to you that is something that happened? no, it didn t at all. first of all, it wasn t the only approach. do you think roger stone forgot all those three incidents you had shared with him, the telling him about it, reaction from him, both you guys forgot it all. indeed. in fact, roger didn t know until i reminded him whether i figured it out before my move to the mueller team on may 2 nnd. roger had the same inability to remember. for me, it was total of two plinz minutes of my life. we were not reminded by the texts. the texts were presented to me after i disclosed the meeting. so that is categorically incorrect. those texts are texts from roger s telephone. how they got ahold of roger s texts, i don t know. whether yn you heard about t offer for $2 million you were going to get dirt on hillary clinton, it made sense. hillary is the favorite. why did you decide or roger decide it wasn t worth the money even if it would turn the election around if there was real dirt there like money coming from russia to hillary or something like that? i imagine that s what they were selling. something to do with finance. what else could they be selling? according to the washington post, this henry greenberg, he s got four different names, none are the birth name, he told the washington post he was offering information from ukrainian friend who was employed by the clinton foundation and fired and angry and had damming information. that s what he told the washington post. i never heard this in the conversation. i would find that alluring as well. do you think you broke the law? first of all, chris, i didn t hear any of this at all. i didn t hear anything about money being $2 million. if you read the text thaended the whole thing with me and roger, it is about big money. i didn t know about $2. i didn t know about ukraine. as far as i know, nobody knew about ukraine until henry greenberg talked to the washington post last week. were you aware at the time that taking something from a value from another country would be illegal? did you sense even then do you sense even now it would be illegal to take dirt which has campaign value from another country? well, first of all, henry greenberg is an individual not a nation. if he was representing any nation, he was representing the federal bureau of investigations because he worked for 17 years as an fbi informant. but in addition, at the same time, it doesn t matter if it is a french-ka fladian that called me, a german that called me. at the time, late may, nobody s antenna was up about russia. i wouldn t have even crossed mind. fit was coming from a government, i would report it to the general counsel immediately. but it wasn t a government. it was a crack pot as far as roger figured out. we figured out later after i got really interested in the questioning that proved that the mueller investigation knew more about it than me, when i proved it s up at democratdossier.org, he s been an fbi informant for 17 years. you said that. when was working on a lunch break when he met with roger, we ll have to find out. he was no longer an agent for the fbi. how many how do we know that? we don t flow that. we don t know that. he filed an affidavit with ins court in california that he swore under oath that he was an fbi informant for 17 years. chris, he s an illegal alien. only in this country on an fbi informant visa. why is he still here? you have your own credibility problems here. i wouldn t be shooting air rows at anyone else because whether you forget you had a russian connection for two years, that s astounldi astoun astounding to people. with an fbi informant. why didn t you bring it to the country s attention two years ago? shouldn t the country know you were dealing with the russians? we weren t dealing with the russians. we were dealing with a guy from henry greenberg from russia. you were trying to get to roger. nobody got listen, chris. here s the situation. you got him on the phone with roger. listen. i know you re fixed on whether or not roger and i were honest to the house permanent select committee on intelligence. i know that s where msnbc is fixed right now. the house intelligence committee is as well. there was no illegal exposure. we have no criminal exposure. we fulfilled our commitment and responsibility. that s a fact. but what i want to know is why you don t care if an fbi informant who was a violent russian criminal was sent into a white color investigation by james comey? that s the question we need answered. you know why? this whole thing you re coming out with at this convenient time two years later, the whole thing you re doing smacks of john teen and the nixon cover-up. why is it it is way late. why is any of this convenient to me? because you re going to make the case that you were used. why is this convenient to me? i let you make the statement twice. you said you were set up. because it s part of a setup scenario. i think it is a glance. you said scenario twice. i know what you re doing. can you we have a delay here pare here apparently. i know i m getting interrupted. what you would like me to answer now? you already told me you remember all this two years late. thank you michael caputo. good luck with your setup story. i hope you you heard that. so convenient. two years later they remember and they establish this and they put this together. and the defense is they forgot. henry greenberg seld i have dirt on hill rich. he had had a conversation. he seld it was toofaid it was t. in caputo s defense, it seems like they did forget. the reason for that is he told the house intelligence kmlt committee he didn t remember. more importantly, they corrected the record tlachlt is significant. that said, this seems like it should have been a pretty memorable interaction. anyone that would come to you two years later they bring along this little kite spring. oh, yeah, by the way, it was all a setup. they didn t even remember it for two years. now they remember it. it was a setup. how did this clever memory not only came back to them, but they the defense of it came back to them. probably because of the spy gate story. people on the right have been pushing really lard for this notion. there is a web of informants and the fbi was engage flg waing in that were orwellian. the fact they re coming forward and michael caputo is nice to come on the show to tell me it is part of a positive pr campaign. betsy, thank you. up next, hardball roundtable weighs in on the fight at the border. and a warning from a member of congress. he says everyone in the party says that president trump lies all the time. and that republicans will pay the price for refusing to do something about it. well, you know, joe walsh said other things over the years. you re watching hardball. it s pretty amazing out there. the world is full of more possibilities than ever before. and american express has your back every step of the way- whether it s the comfort of knowing help is just a call away with global assist. or getting financing to fund your business. no one has your back like american express. so where ever you go. we re right there with you. the powerful backing of american express. don t do business without it. don t live life without it. jimmy s gotten used to his whole yup, he s gone noseblind. odors. he thinks it smells fine, but his mom smells this. luckily for all your hard-to-wash fabrics. .there s febreze fabric refresher. febreze doesn t just mask, it eliminates odors you ve. .gone noseblind to. and try febreze unstopables for fabric. with up to twice the fresh scent power, you ll want to try it. .again and again and maybe just one more time. indulge in irresistible freshness. febreze unstopables. breathe happy. ito take care of anyct messy situations.. and put irritation in its place. and if i can get comfortable keeping this tookus safe and protected. you can get comfortable doing the same with yours. preparation h. get comfortable with it. welcome back. amid the growing uproar over the separation of children from their parents at the border, the department of home land security secretary neilsen today continued to say that will is no such policy. let s watch her. it s not a policy. our policy at dhs is to do what we re sworn to do which is to enforce the law. well, let s bring in the hardball roundtable for that one. chris wilson is a republican pollster and jose muno is a democratic strategist. jose, you re up. so what do you think of this thing? these kids are apparently hiding the girls. they re hiding the young boys. they re showing the older boys. but it sounds awful. the crying on the tapes are brutal. this is horrible. we re talking about 2,000 children, some of them girls who have been separated from their family. literally, at the expense of president trump trying to get the obsession you see that picture of the kid in the red shirt. horrible. that picture grabs you. i know. the president can literally pick up the phone, call dhs, call jeff sessions and the department of justice and say stop the separations. we don t need to use 2,000 children as literally negotiation clips hips. ted cruz is the most liberal voice i ve heard. ted cruz wants to change this policy. he introduced legislation tonight to fix this. i think it is has a real opportunity for bipartisan support and it could have it fixed within a week. hopefully we can see people come together. does that tell thought politics are not working in the president s favor that ted cruz is to the right of him? i think this is a matter of something just needs to be fixed. you make my point. i think that this is a policy that s both political and cultural. remember that president trump built his campaign on immigrants and rapists. and today he called them thieves. there s this idea don t they look like rapists or thieves. people surrounding the president, including stephen miller and steve bannon from the outside thought they could put this policy in place and people would go one step further and say mexicans are rapists and criminals and we should separate the families. chris, do you think steve miller is having a good day at the white house? look at these kids. senator john mccain tweeted and called the policy of separating children an affront to the decency of the american people and controversy on the values our nation was founded. that s he s in bad shape too. let s talk about this about what happened with joe walsh. the members of the house where he served for a while all believed the president lies all the time. hell of a statement, any way. they all believe he s a liar. incredible statement. i covered capitol hill. there are a lot of when you talk to republicans off the record, a lot of you give you this link, we know he messes with the truth. we understand this is a lie. we can t say it out loud because we re scared of our district. i m a little uncomfortable with us making joe walsh the final arbiter of who s telling the truth and who doesn t. there s a reason he s no longer in congress. joe walsh doesn t have any idea what donald trump says or who he is you don t think the back room chatter i m not talking about that. us using joe walsh i doubt he has many friends. i think he does for the most part. if he shows up and comes to congress and talks to them as he has recently, that is something that still means something. it s important to them. my reporting tells me that republicans are very wary of this president. they don t trust him. there s this idea that he could force them into pushing for a policy they don t like. he doesn t have any relationship with the president that makes them feel like they can trust them. i get a sense that it s coming to a very divided state. i don t think there s an easy ad adjudication of all this stuff. i don t think it s going to be simple. jose? i think we ll have a fight that goes on. it won t be settled by a simple vote of impeachment. i think the president with this issue has found the sensitive, human piece of it that i think is going to change some sides but most of its ideological warfare. i agree 100%. with the whole russia investigation it is going to go well until the midterms. we re going to continue to talk about this day after day. the president of the united states currently, president of the united states of america, we have to really just think about that for a second, lies on a daily basis, every single day. he gets to pardon on a daily basis. it s unbelievable. here s rudy giuliani today just throwing out the idea, he ll pardon when the time comes. this is how the country will stay divide it. you ve got a smattering of pardons out there. the country will just be more divided. the president has signaled through the parties he s already done that he s open to pardoning on political reasons. i ll say this, we always talk on this show about democrats getting their message, how will they get it together? kids being separated from their families could be the thing that gets democrats to actually say, this is what we re going to unite on. more than parkland. in some ways. they don t have to fight the nra on this one. we ll be right back after this. or psoriatic arthritis, little things can be a big deal. that s why there s otezla. otezla is not an injection or a cream. it s a pill that treats differently. for psoriasis, 75% clearer skin is achievable with reduced redness, thickness, and scaliness of plaques. and for psoriatic arthritis, otezla is proven to reduce joint swelling, tenderness, and pain. and the otezla prescribing information has no requirement for routine lab monitoring. don t use if you re allergic to otezla. otezla may cause severe diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting. tell your doctor if these occur. otezla is associated with an increased risk of depression. tell your doctor if you have a history of depression or suicidal thoughts, or if these feelings develop. some people taking otezla reported weight loss. your doctor should monitor your weight and may stop treatment. other side effects include upper respiratory tract infection and headache. tell your doctor about all the medicines you take and if you re pregnant or planning to be. otezla. show more of you. billions of problems. morning breath? garlic breath? stinky breath? there s a therabreath for you. therabreath fresh breath oral rinse instantly fights all types of bad breath and works for 24 hours. so you can. breathe easy. there s therabreath at walmart. a hilton getaway means you get more because. you get another day in paradise. get a sunset on a sunday. get more stories to share. get more from your summer getaway with exclusive hilton offers. book yours, only at hilton.com this was a big weekend for our family. carolyn matthews, our daughter was awarded a graduate degree in business from stanford university. it came within just weeks of her earning a graduate degree in public affairs from harvard. carolyn, continues to overwhelm kathleen and i with her achievements. we could not be more proud, obviously. we ll be right back. [ roar ] [ heavy breathing ] [ scream ] rated pg-13. woman: it felt great not having hepatitis c. it s like a load off my shoulders. i was just excited for it to be over. harvoni is a revolutionary treatment for the most common type of chronic hepatitis c. it s been prescribed to more than a quarter million people and is proven to cure up to 99% of patients who have had no prior treatment with 12 weeks. certain patients can be cured with just 8 weeks of harvoni. before starting harvoni your doctor will test to see if you ve ever had hepatitis b which may flare up and cause serious liver problems during and after harvoni treatment. tell your doctor if you ve ever had hepatitis b, a liver transplant, other liver or kidney problems, hiv or any other medical conditions and about all the medicines you take including herbal supplements. taking amiodarone with harvoni can cause a serious slowing of your heart rate. common side effects of harvoni include tiredness, headache and weakness. ready to let go of hep c? ask your hep c specialist about harvoni. i love you baby applebee s 2 for $20, now with steak. now that s eatin good in the neighborhood. trump watch monday, june 18 nl, 2018. there s a reality behind these pictures we re seeing today. it is the trump policy of treating people who enter our country without authorization as criminals. criminals who deserve to be put in jail. this leaves their children detained elsewhere. there s a larger reality which everyone in the country fully understands. these families crossing into this country without authorization are desperate. do desperate human beings seeking a better life, any obstacle is cruel. that includes a national border. the question we in america face is how to set a national immigration policy which by the fact of it is going to cause a certain amount of cruelty to limit that cruelty. perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured but we can reduce the number of tortured children. if you don t help us, who else in the world can help us do this? that s hard ball for now. and it really is. all in with chris hayes starts right now. tonight on all in. they could be murderers and thieves and so much else. a moral crisis in america. the president has the ability to stop this if he d like. thousands of children taken from their parents at the border. this is a jail. as the white house defends their horrific policy. they re not put in jail, of course. they re taken care of. tonight, the ever changing
kind of right up in their faces. she was arrested a few minutes ago and taken away in handcuffs. what you want to see is folks keeping their distance and standing, facing the police, that is great. you don t want to see anyone go up to them on purpose to provoke action. police have ben really stoic in not reacting to whatever things are being said at them. if things are being thrown and we ve seen some of that going onme onment. i don t know if we decided what that was, but it was basically to say keep away, a little poof something, protecting the perimeter or the no man s land between the police and the protesters. we haven t gotten confirmation on exactly what it is, but we can understand your tactic and philosophy and approach, which is to say, hey, keep your distance, don t come any closer. we re good with you being there exercising your first amendment rights. you can say what you want, but don t throw things at us or come up to our faces and threaten us. even with this escalated tension in the last 30 minutes or so play out, you know, compared to what we ve seen around the country, we hope this will be able to take a turn towards tamping down tensions and knno hostility between the two. there was one person who had a scuffle with an officer and was arrested. dan noyes is in downtown san jose. dan, what have you been seeing and hearing? i m at the corner of seventh and santa clara streets. there s standoffs happening right now. police have come on the intercom to say that they have declared this an unlawful assembly. there s a standoff here. the crowd, 150 people, are not bundle. they aren t going anyplace. now, the police officers fired a couple of rubber bullets, i believe, in response to some people throwing things at them. i heard the shot of what looked like a riot gun. they might have fired a rubber bullet. i m looking at it right now. i m not definite, but that s what i assume it was. they warned, they tested a low-frequency audio device, which is basically crowd control. if it gets too crazy, too tense, they ll actually fire off this audio device and it really does incapacitate can you make out what people are saying, dan? as you re hearing now, they re ordering people to disperse. they re ordering people to disperse. as i was saying, that audio device will send out a signal that makes it just painful to stay in the area. they have tested that device and people are, of course, getting concerned. but overall, you know, this is by no way it is oh, i see what looks like a scuffle over there. looks like police a are responding to someone. there we go. there s tear gas going on. and some rubber bullets fired. i see the projectiles going into the crowd. i m turning away my eyes so i wouldn t be hit. i mean, i ve done stories on those projectiles, and they can blind you if they hit you in the eye. they are plastic projectiles, but they re full of metal pellets, so they do hurt. the crowd is going back. there are some okay. there are some people who are staying. and they are standing up to the police. as the standoff goes on a woman just told me it was a peaceful protest until the police showed up. the police are trying to take some control. these protesters blocked this intersection, took it over. and there s a standoff right now. as i said, the police did fire projectiles into the crowd. they did fire off some tear gas. but this was quite windy out here, so the tear gas quickly dispersed. i actually see someone who has the unless that s something else. anyway, the people are not backing down. some of the crowd is coming back towards the police officers. this is not a good scene. no. the police have shown their force. they told the protesters to leave. more police look like they re moving in. dan, keep us updated there and stay safe, obviously. this is what we re worried about as things escalated today, as tensions rise. most of the protesters have been peaceful, but some have seemed to agitate the police or at least try to provoke the police. now police seem to be responding. dan, what are you seeing now? the police are giving another warning. they are repeating this is an unlawful assembly. you have to disperse. they re holding their signs, some are cursing back at the police officers. kind of an ebb and flow. the police will have their show of force, the protesters leave. the show of force stops it is protesters come back. so it is a very tense situation right now. dan, is there the sense that it s building towards something? because we saw a line of police on the move in usefulnenison. and then we saw a huge collection of police motorcycles suddenly arriving at the same scene. what do you think? is it building towards one area? is it just what we re seeing here is where it s all happening in terms of this confrontation? oh. sorry. what is that? what happened here was that someone someone threw a bottle at the police officers. and they responded with those that riot gun, that gun that shots t shoots the projectiles. you always have some cover, so i m positioned behind a tree that i can look out, see what s happening, and then if there s something kicking off, i can take my cover. very smart. the police are moving now. they are pushing forward. the police are pushing forward. you have some officers on motorcycles. you have other officers in riot gear. they re doing their best to try to t thi intersection. looks like they re about to clear that intersection, seventh and santa clara street. dan, where are they pushing people towards? can you tell? is there a direction? where are they heading? they are heading west on santa clara street. looks like they just they are firing into the crowd again and again. i can see the projectiles flying through the air and hitting the protesters. they are keeping the shots at base level. that s really important because, as i said, you can take out an eye easily with those projectiles. loks like what they wanted to do was to retake that intersection. they were not going to give up thatn. intersectio r now they are pushing the st. seventh street and sixth street. moving down the block. dan, are you on the move again walking behind the police now? where are you exactly? well, i m right at the line with the police officers. okay. i am with the i am just to the side of the protesters. i m trying to keep my distance. we re right at horace mann elementary school right now. the officers saying again and again that this is an unlawful assembly and you have to disperse. they are pushing their way down santa clara street to get these people to disperse. but i tell you, dan, i m looking down the street and it looks like there are more people gathering. this is not dispersing. it s getting bigger. we re moving, but it s not dispersing. they re just pushing the group back and more people are gathering behind the police line, sounds like. exactly, exactly. dan, please do be careful. we know you have a lot of experience covering these types of situations, but it looks awfully tense and tre s so many things that could go wrong. so please, please do be careful. i appreciate that, kristen. i have had a lot of experience doing this. on the way here, i got to say that the people, protesters i met and talked to there s another rubber bullet. i ll bring back a souvenir for you. but the protesters i talked to were all perfectly fine with me many knew i was with channel 7. i don t fear any tension or aggression from protesters. but of course i m doing my best to stay out of the action. sure. again, a rubber bullet just theextnterctn sixth streety police officers would you say are in that immediate area versus the protesters? dan, did we lose you? all right, we may have lost dan noyes. dan literally is down there somewhere along that tree line right where the protesters and the police are meeting. police trying to push them down the street trying to get them to disperse, but as he has pointed out, they re really not dispersing. they re just being pushed farther down te street and more protesters are gathering, it seems to him, behind the police line. so police are effectively moving them, but not dispersing them. the point of confrontation is simply moving.but yohtthey re eo we seeerio thi as dan reported, pellet guns and tear gas. at the protesters. earlier, dan, it looked like they were sort of aiming in the empty spots away from people, but as this continues to escalate and officers are on the move, we have seen some pellet guns being fired at people, you know, at the foot level, knee level. which is designed to sort of sting, scare, and intimate. you don t want to get hit in the face with that. but no injure anybody. here we have a little bit more. when you see running, you really start to worry that the situation is deteriorating rapidly. we saw at least one protester who they can t into a scuffle with an officer who was eventually taken down. i hope we don t see a lot more of that situation. but as you said, the protesters are not backing down. there s another man now. flex cuffs being put on him. dan noyes is back on. dan, update us. we re watching a man being arrested. sorry about that, dan. i had to quickly move away. the police just surged in a pretty big way, firing rubber bullets and some tear gas as well. as i say, the tear gas disperses very quickly in the breeze that s out here. but they had a sudden burst where they charged the protesters. that seemed to work. it s definitely scattered them. the thing is, it s scattered them now to a wider area. people backed off the immediate face-off with the police officers, but then they have scattered to different streets along the way. i saw one young man who was hit with a rubber bullet in the leg. it hit him so hard that it took him down. he was in obvious pain. i asked him whether he was okay. i looked at the welt on his leg. that s exactly what i knew it to be. those rubber bullets, they call them projectiles of force, plastic covers with metal inside of them. they hurt. they sting, yeah. would you mind if i okay. i was just handed a projectile from a bystander here. these are not as heavy as some of them i ve felt. can i have this? okay, thank you. so i m hearing there are both projectiles here. here s a new theme, dan. this is something that s happening right now. people are taking a knee. probably 40 people right now taking a knee right in front of the officers. we don t have that shot yet on sky7. yes, now we see it. we ve got it. we see it. so the protesters have decided that tactic that s best is to take a knee and not move. the officers have formed up their line. they are just watching. i m just a couple of feet away from that very front line where you see the protesters. as you can hear probably, dan, they re shouting i can t breathe, i can t breathe. you have probably 30 people across the right in front of the officers. you have another 60 people also taking a knee shouting i can t breathe. which is, of course, a reference to george floyd, the man in minneapolis who died in police custody over the weekend. as you re hearing again, dan. the officers is sending out a warning again. this is an unlawful assembly. they are doing their best to take back this intersection. seems like they just want to keep on pushing the protesters further away to get them to disperse. and i got to say the protesters are resilient. there we go again. they re scattering, firing projectiles. some of the protesters have run away. others are keeping their locations. hey, dan. i m just wondering if you can educate me on the strategy of trying to take over an intersection and to push the protesters back. i m wondering if there is no aggressive action toward the line of officers, why the need to kind of push them back and retake an intersection, intersection by intersection. kristen, in my experience, it would seem that the officers are doing their best to get the crowd in general to disperse. if they can keep on pushing them back, i think they re thinking hopefully they ll be able to tire them out. the problem is, these protesters are resilient. they do move back when there s something firing, when there s tear gas, when there s a projectile. they move but they reform. right now you have that other standoff. but het goes. of just letting them be and stay there? oh. see, what happens is that someone will challenge the officers, get up into their face, and then the individual officer will respond, and the other officers will support him. that s exactly what happened here. there s a young man who i saw earlier who seemed to begh offe. forward to that young man. the other officers also joined in. and they ran just a little bit, chased the young man away. they didn t catch him, but they have now reformed again in that thick line of police with the people kneeling in front of them. so this is very much a standoff right now. you re listening to the chants are going on [ inaudible ] but this wind is really picking up dan, you re a bit garbled at the moment. let s give you a moment, see if the signal improves from your cell phone. try again, dan. i was just going to say [ inaudible ] the wind is right in the face of the officers. okay. the wind is picking up, he said. it s right in the face of the officers, and that the tear gas that they have used in a couple of occasions out there not particularly effective because it s blowing in the wind as dan described. dan is there right on the scene. he s literally almost in the frame from sky7 that you re looking at just to the side in a safe location. he describes he s done this a lot and he knows what to do. he s taking good care of himself but he s bringing us remarkable fir firsthand accounts from street level. his signal got garbled at the end. kristen, for two and a half hours plus roughly, we just saw very peaceful protests, inconvenient searched for people on 101 and streets on san jose who got held up in traffic. but for the last half hour it s turned with a smaller group of protesters. you see that incident where there was a scuffle on the left with police. one man was put to the ground and arrested. dan, i just want to mention that our senator, kamala harris, who, as you know, is mentioned as a potential vice presidential running mate for vice president biden, she has tweeted out a video message saying black blood stains the sidewalks of america. folks are in pain and have been for a long time. floyd should not be dead. and it is seemingly in agreement with her message that s bringing these protesters out here to san jose, the streets of san jose this evening. as you said, a protest that involves starting at city hall, going over to highway 101 and shutting down the freeway. a blockade of traffic eventually resolved when they made their point there and marched off the freeway, but now after a fairly long standoff with police, we are seeing clashes. we are seeing both sides, protesters throwing things, police taking action on them, whether it s arresting someone or here s on the left is video of the man throwing punching frantically with police and police wrestling him to the ground. moments later he was taken off in handcuffs. the picture on the right side of your screen is live. again, there s more direct confrontation with police. police have been trying to maintain kind of a neutral zone of 10 or 15 feet as much as possible, but that has continually broken down. now you see what looks like one protester pushing another back, maybe trying to talk them into, hey, be cool, stay back, you know. don t keep going toward police. obviously they re trying to keep this protester away, the guy in the light blue shirt who will have none of it. he s back in the face of an officer. , dan, you always hope that cooler heads will prevail because anytime you have a large group of protests other any issue, you have a mix. most people just out there to make a statement and be heard and exercise their first amendment, you know, freedom of speech rights. a lot of people just regular citizens. and then you have a few that get mixed in there that are more inclined to make trouble and kind of distract and detract from the main message that the peaceful protesters are trying to make. so we hope that it is the peaceful protesters who will pr prevail here with their message of solidarity for george floyd. some do deliberately try to antagonize the police and then accuse the police of responding. it s difficult on both sides. here you see, again, more intense interaction with protesters trying to hold back a protester, it looks like. if you notice, kristen, the police are slowly inching forward subtly here, just pushing them back slowly. even as this continues. try, as dan noyes who s on the ground there describes, trying to get them to disperse or at least take them out of certain interactions so they no longer control the interactions, the protesters, that is. but they re slowly pushing them, pushing them back inch by inch. but the protester are not, as dan pointed out on the scene, not backing down. when we get dan back, i d be curious to ask him what are some of the words that he had heard of that were hurled in both drerksz. directions. one of the things he talked about as the protesters took a knee a la colin kaepernick many years ago, they started shouting i can t breathe which is, of course, a direct reference to s he couldn t breathe. larry beil is watching this as well. larry? yeah. i just wanted to note the symbolism involved here with the colin kaepernick protest of several years ago. protesting exactly what we just saw a few days ago in minneapolis. there was a lot of confusion at this time because he initially sat down and then after talking with some friends in the military, decided taking a knee was the more appropriate act. and this is exactly the kind of situation that kaepernick was trying to bring into focus. and put a spotlighted on. so there s a great deal of symbolism with protesters now doing what kaep did. he p he s been very active on social media as well throughout the years but more so in the past few days trying to make the point once again that this is what i was protesting about. you can make the case that we have not made a lot of progress in the years that have passed. good point, larry. thank you. let s turn our attention now to mike lowe from the santa clara police department. mike, are you there? mike, can you hear us? yes, can you hear me? yes, mike. thanks for coming on. mike, as you watch what s transpiring, tell me what you re ragy is by san jose police as they trying to move these protesters around. actually, i m with the sheriff s office. my apologies. no worries. we got a call from highway patrol when the protesters were gathering on highway 101. so we mobilized our resources and have dispatched our deputies out on patrol to assist the san jose police department and the california highway patrol. so our main focus right now is just making sure everyone stays say we understand people are frustrated. we do want people to exercise their first amendment rights, but to do so peacefully. and ultimately we want everyone to be safe. based on what you ve seen, sergeant lowe, are the protesters in that very front line in that direct standoff with officers doing what you consider safe actio? i am not in a position right now to be right therefrt line ho do know that it s a very fluid and rappid situation. we have our deputies deployed to numerous locations across san jose permanent near t san jose, primarily near san jose. this is a difficult situation for police to keep order but at the same time allow people to express themselves and their anger and fruchgs ovstration ov happened in minneapolis. what is the challenge for the police officers on these lines to keep control and yet not escalate this situation? very difficult, is it not? very difficult, very challenging. and i think as law enforcement officers part of our job is to show that tremendous restraint who must these types of situations where things are very tense, very action packed right now with a lot of things going on. but we have to remain calm and do with a we can to just make sure everyone remains safe. we do have our crowd control unit mobilized what is the special training for crowd control unit. what is that unit surprised of? that s interesting. the unit is comprised of deputies, sergeants and staff within the sheriff s office. they train specifically to handle large crowds, whether it s at a ball game or sporting event or any sort of large event like this. but any time you have something like this, we want to make sure people stay safe and remain peaceful. i have one question about the motorcycles that we see. is that a modern-day, you know, for a long time crowd control, police departmts ud officers on horseback, because it s intimidating and well above the crowd. is this a modern-day version of that? we do have motor have motor. i m not sure if our sheriff s office are on steed right now. they re much easier to get around if they need to access an area where a vehicle or standard patrol car couldn t get to. our motorcycles are able to access a location much quicker. just a line right in front, behind the first line of police officers on foot. we re looking at a line of motorcycle officers right behind them. very interesting to see that tactic. sergeant low,e. i m wondering about your training. i m imagining it s similar to police on the front line. at what level do they respond. with rubber bullets. tell me about the actions and reactions that is deemed appropriate as you ve been taught? i think like any law enforcement agency, we have our use of force policies and use of force continuum. however, in times like this, i
democratic stronghold. went for president trump in 2060. peter ducey life in hampshire. reporter: pete buttigieg is one of the only democrats that president trump talks about publicly as having a chance of being the democratic nominee. now president is talking about mayor pete personal life. don t you think it s great to see the fact the you have guys on the stage with its husband in its normal i think it s absolutely fine. reporter: the judge so that and told i am more interested in policies that affect lgbtq people and they find that he is in fourth place among primary voters truly elizabeth warren, bernie sanders in the front runner joe biden who pete buttigieg is choosing to challenge on specific parts of his record. [inaudible] i m a two way and on any of my competitors i will say, i was opposed to the record really he sent supporters about event tonight and he wrote this, if we ignore the voters that does not share our worldview we will surrender our ability to speak directly to millions of american voters. if we don t show up the conservative media will tell our side of the story for us, they will continue to claim american values like freedom security and democracy as property of the gop. we do expect him to be here in new hampshire soon and the folks back home have noticed the south bend tribune points out an article that mayor pete has been out of town about 45% of the time in recent months. kristen: peter will be there all day long giving us a preview of the town hall. and for all of you at home you can watch the townhall life on fox news at ten eastern and be sure to stick around after the show tickets fox news sunday. an exclusive interview with amy klobuchar. 2:00 p.m. eastern. leland: easy day for chris. trey coming up on fox news sunday. negotiations the stall between china and the u.s. tried to come up with a final trade you. david joining us now with the chopper ministership. he supporters of the president. it does not appear this is ending anytime soon, a lot of people waiting to see how long this will go for. we do know the conversation will continue behind the scenes president trump and his team cannot back down and try to get the officials to not giving in to those demands. soybean farmers getting hit hard as they continue to see prices drop and many waiting at the trade war trying in many cases to just run business. farmers to grow soybeans are faced with the possibility of not making money to do so. i will do everything i can to cut the expenses i read albee renegotiating, trained to lower my cost to production to soybeans. the president says several times he is considering a bailout for farmers that would literally go in the mail to help them through this difficult time with china. some farmers said they gladly take the money others said they don t want to. pat toomey a republican said he is against a bailout but he s in favor of president trump s approach to china here he is a couple hours ago on fox news sunday. this agreement won t solve all the problems. and the tariffs are absolutely painful and dislocating but if in the end, we end up with an agreement that gives us a meaningful reform of china s most egregious behavior we might look back and say this is worth the price that we are paying. he looked back and said he might, we don t know how long the stalemate will continue between the united states and china. i want to point this out to you, it s a couple of dates old, but interesting. it shows the pulse of the country, it s highlighting the trade war with china, 34 are told to believe the increased tariffs on imports from china help the economy 45% but it hurts the economy. president trump encounter parts president th is the first in thc to the senses happen. kristen:leland: it does not seee they will get there in the next month or so. kristen: congressman justin has become the first republican on capitol hill to kiss president trump of engaging in impeachable conduct enterprise president trump is fighting back on twitter and gear is here to break it down, this is not a big deal, the first republican member to come out and call for president trump s impeachment, this is after about everyone in d.c. in the 13 after reading the mueller report as lawmakers of both parties for making up their minds long before it was done. they try to mislead the public about the conclusion and not impeachment he states the president actions meet the threshold or congress to take action even tweeting while impeachment should be undertaken only in externally circumstances the risk we face an environment of partisanship is not congress will employ too often rather that congress will employ it so really it cannot deter as misconduct. no surprise president trump fired back framing in part, never a fan, a total lightweight who opposes me in some of the republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy. indy i say justin is a loser who sadly plays writing to her opponents hand. he mentioned his first republican maker too, of the support of the idea of impeaching president trump and democrats have been quick to respond. michigan responded one 100% in agreement, # time to impeach. , when a member of his own party is calling for the president impeachment, shouldn t that tell you something, trump should be impeached. however, this morning, mitt romney was also a frequent critic of the president said the evidence to impeach president is not there. i don t think that there is the full element that you need to improve an instruction case. i don t think a prosecutor would look and say we have all the elements that would get this to conviction. everyone reaches their own conclusion, as i read the report i was troubled by it and very disappointed for number of reasons. but he did not suggest that this was time to call for impeachment. reporter: gop leadership is blasting that he is only trained to get attention so it s worth noting that the michigan lawmaker is not rule out the possibility of running against president trump in 2020 and a libertarian. kristen: interesting. leland: with that we bring in pennsylvania congressman, member of the house a progression committee, good to see. we appreciate on a sunday, there s a lot of other things to be doing but talk to us. does this change anything? what we talk about? let s talk about what he said. first republican, in favor of impeachment, do you think this changes materially for democrats? a little bit, he has always been thought of as an independent thinker and somebody who s not afraid to march to his own drum. i have hardly disagreed with him on many of his positions? you agree with him on this? let s not rush to judgment either way. they quoted him as saying, i think is right, we have to take a measured approach, i have not read the entire 400 page report myself. the american public will give a chance to the issues that are cover for that. let s not gauge into a rush of judgment. impeachment is in the cards but let s think about it. for now, your home state of pennsylvania, joe biden yesterday, a rally in philadelphia, this is what he said about the economy. take a listen. i know president trump likes to take credit to the economy and economic growth but look at the facts not the alternative facts. [cheering] president trump heard in economy from the obama administration that was given to him just like he inherited everything else in his life. leland: reasonably book and agree that the economy is doing pretty well. 2.8% on appointment record, now we look at the fox news poll about who is resourceful for that. nationwide, 44% of americans say that trump and republicans are responsible, only 50% of credit to obama and the democrats as joe biden would like. you ve endorsed joe biden is a straight talking point? i ve endorsed joe he s from her town. i have known him 20 years. one thing i like about joe, i think a lot of people like about him he is unscripted, he does not have a bevy of handlers imaging him. he speaks from the heart and that is what people believe, people trust him that he means what he says and as far as who can get credit for robust economy that is an internal question, are you to give credit to any politician at all? it out to be the first question. when the economy is doing well, will be able appointment, when you blow on appointment, that is not the whole question, there are a lot of people that i talked to that are working two jobs and when you cannot pay the bills with one job to an employment rate is irrelevant. leland: this should be an interesting question, pennsylvania 17, you won in 2016, president trump one your district about three and half points over heller claim. give us the list of why that happened and why you think joe biden is somebody who can flip your district back? i think the first point, we don t want to make the same mistake that military leaders have made, don t fight the last war. what happened in 2016 was president trump versus a strickland and that s a matchup there should be viewed as what they called sue generation of its own kind. you cannot really translate, you cannot transit that and you cannot translate it to the 2020 presidential either. leland: broker, was not latin? ask your producer they ll tell you about that. [laughter] leland: i appreciate it. it s good to talk to you as always. we ll have you back sometime soon. happy to be here. kristen: asked me and i didn t know. we re going to turn to the other side and bring a north carolina republican congressman and house of homeland security mark. think of her coming on the show. always a privilege. kristen: i would like to start with what your colleagues said, the first republican congressman to call for the president impeachment, a big step, your response? i would start by saying dustin wash is just as much republican as bernie sanders is independent. sometimes people try to create a firestorm around certain issues on this particular one i would choose to believe bob miller in his 12 democrats who found a different conclusion. kristen: do you think republicans might follow suit and call for the president impeachment after justin did? to my earlier, you said other republicans, i know he is elected as republican, i don t see this in north kelowna the president trump that 90% i believe there saying specifically to keep on doing what you re doing. kristen: let s talk what immigration the president put forward his merit-based proposal this week and i want to play something when your colleague said this morning on fox news sunday, this is pat toomey. i fully embrace the idea that these people with greater skills and education and knowledge should be welcome but i think people with lower skills can contribute as well. i d be open to expanding that category as well. kristen: would you be open to expanding that category, people with lower skills as well? that category has already been expanded, if you look at the president s proposal when i was there in the rose garden, we are only try to get up to standard what is compared to other international countries, for example is bumping this up to 57% merit-based, canada and australia are still over that close to 63%. we want to make america better by doing so it s bringing in people who contribute. 57% if i did my math, that s still 43% remaining of times and places that we can get people in up to 1 million, 1.1 million to anuradha bhagwati great american that this is all swinging to merit-based, that is not accurate. something else the chopper ministration is considering moving migrants to other cities we know they have said that they will not move them to northern border control facilities but i m curious if you d be open to allowing some of the migrants into district? i think the biggest issue issue, the crisis of the border, any city is concerned about an influx of infrastructure problems that can break down potentially this is considering all this and i believe the president s right to push back any of this. to ease a bargain closer to the border, if it came to that would you be open to allowing the chopper ministration and dhs to move the migrants to district? temporarily, if that s what we have to do to resolve some of the capacity we are seeing at the border i think were open to some of that but we want to make sure his long-term solution. kristen: i want to talk to about something happening in your state. your state may soon join the list of states passing more strict antiabortion bills, and the house made votes to override the veto a bill and what this bill would do would make it a felony for a doctor not to provide care for an infant after a botched abortion. use for the quick. i believe i do, without question. along with over 70% of other americans who believe it s inhumane in humoral to allow a baby to die on some table and some clinic somewhere just because that child and that baby survived a botched abortion, it s ludicrous we re having this discussion. and states were pushing back you have actually suggested the it s a route to consider. i applaud them and i will hope it will continue to keep up the good work. kristen: will watching what happens in your states more. mark walker, thank you so much. leland: new information on the plan the sense migrants across the country, what one border town near said it is his only option. our members shop a little differently. so we reward every purchase . let s see what kate sent. for you. for all of us. that s for me. navy federal credit union our members, are the mission. s. s.u. s.u.v. these letters used to mean something. letters earned in backwoods, high hills, and steep dunes. but somewhere along the way, suvs became pretenders, not pioneers. but you never forgot the difference, and neither did we. there are many suvs, but there s only one legend. hurry in now to the jeep celebration event and get $500 additional bonus cash on select models. you see clear skin. cosentyx can help people with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis find clear skin that can last. don t use if you re allergic to cosentyx. before starting, get checked for tuberculosis. an increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur. tell your doctor about an infection or symptoms, if your inflammatory bowel disease symptoms develop or worsen, or if you ve had a vaccine or plan to. serious allergic reactions may occur. how sexy are these elbows? 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[spanish recording] so again, using para , you re talking about something that is for someone. pretty good. could listening to audible inspire you to start something new? download audible and listen for a change. most of us don t know how much data we use. .but we all know we re paying too much for it. enter xfinity mobile. america s best lte with the most wifi hotspots. combined for the first time. when you re near an xfinity hotspot, you re connected to wifi, saving on data. when you re not, you pay for data one gig at a time. use a little, pay a little. use a lot, just switch to unlimited. get $250 back when you buy a new samsung galaxy. call, visit or click today. the question i have in the democrat party, weren t we not focused at the crisis of the board that the president has been talking about, it s averaging over 4500 apprehension today, these are family units. leland: georgia republican, on sunday morning peter this morning, questioning why democrats will hold hearings about the so-called dreamers rather than deal with a crisis on the border. jeff paul on the west coast newsroom with just about the crisis is getting by the day. hi jeff. initially border patrol in san diego that they were considering buying migrants to detroit, buffalo in miami to relieve pressure from overcrowded shelters. the chopper ministration appears to be backing off the plane. in a statement acting custom and border pretension sanders has entered accurate reports in the press the cb at trinity bps has no plans to move them which includes photo. sheriff s in public county said border patrol notified them in their communities could start seeing up to 1000 migrants being phone and per month beginning in two weeks. the plan received backlash from local and state officials including the palm beach county sheriff who said it was not ministering. today homeland security acting secretary tried to explain the confusing back-and-forth and where the initially considered fine those who communities and change her mind. communities all over the country are extremely generous but not ready to receive the flood of immigration. we looked at it from a plane perspective. we have stations imported, and stations on the border. there are small stations, a few agents that are busy patrolling the areas. leland: cb pieces they already transported hundreds of migrant families by bus and airplane from overcrowded facilities to less crowded one but just along the southwest border, border patrol in san diego confirmed migrants are being flown from texas. leland: jeff paul and the west coast newsroom, thank you so much. kristen: congress tries to pass immigration reform bill, new fox room poll finds 54% of americans disapprove of president trump s handling of immigration while 51% they disapprove of border security policy. the mayor of el paso, mr. mayor, thank you for coming on the show. that you kristen. kristen: somebody who lives and works right on the border, what is your take on the border security policy and specifically the immigration proposal that they put forward just to speak? particularly i like senator graham s proposal, people don t realize, were dealing the humanitarian economic and affirmative crisis. were overwhelmed and it s all because of the antitrafficking victim protection act of 2008 which was only designed for unaccompanied minors coming from guatemala, honduras, or also over. in the said he did not have to enter at a port of entry, he could enter anywhere along the border and not straining the cbp resources, it s killing us in apostle visa have between october and january of last year we had 2000 we could release an apostle we are not averaging 600, i d 6600 released last week. kristen: i want to dig in to what you re talking about, i want to dig in to the hard data little bit more. take a look at these numbers were here. over the last fiscal year to date, the el paso sector has seen 2000% increase in family apprehensions and close to four 100% increase in unaccompanied minors. how much of a crisis this is become for your community in your city? put those numbers in context for apostle, every thousand have coming to junior today. people to understand they are processed and then released once they have encopresis and data, then released to the sponsors. the problem is the processing, we are overwhelmed of the process. the border patrol just set up to sell cited tents and one of the processing centers that cost our taxpayers for the next four months $36.9 million per people don t realize, this is not a humidity crisis, out of sight out of mind, el paso is the largest mexican border, but the intersection of three states, we have an original population of 200 million people. the largest in the city on the mexico border in the nation. but the processing cannot be handled. we are one ngo that handles much in there usually an apostle and their sense off to wherever the sponsors are. kristen: to help the process concerns, the chopper ministration has talked about moving some of the migrants to other cities, they pushed back saying they will only be moving them to select cities, but before they came out and clarified the governor of florida said, i m sorry that our states and our communities cannot accommodate this influx of migrants, when you hear the governor of florida seen something like that how does it make you feel as somebody has to deal with the crisis whether you like it or not dan or dale? they don t understand, it s not in my backyard issue. the migrants do not stay there, their processor, they are leaving in 24 to 48 hours wherever the sponsors are throughout the united states. some might be important, so might be in the northeast, northwest. it does not matter, that is where the sponsors are. it s a matter processing and what were saying, the apostle were sector is overwhelmed, cbp is doing a magnificent job as law-enforcement caring for people that they are in a position, it s tenuous. kristen: we wish you and everyone in your community well. thank you. leland: president trump reacted to some of the countries most restrictive abortion laws more on the white house, hi allison. reporter: he says controversial alabama law and more on that in just a few minutes. liberty mutual can save you money by customizing your car insurance, so you only pay for what you need. oh. yeah, i ve been a customer for years. huh. only pay for what you need. liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. if ywhen you brush or floss, you don t have to choose between healthy gums and strong teeth. complete protection from parodontax has 8 designed benefits for healthy gums and strong teeth. complete protection from parodontax. . . . with moderate to severe ulceratiyour plans. crohn s, can change in minutes. your head wants to do one thing. but your gut says not today. if your current treatment isn t working. ask your doctor about entyvio®. entyvio® acts specifically in the gi tract, to prevent an excess 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incest and protecting the life of the mother, which contradicts alabamas strict new anti-abortion law that fast a few days ago. allison betteallison barber is t time white house with more. reporter: president trump in what he outlined is not what the alabama law did. the alabama law goes further than what president trump outlined. it only allows for abortion in instances where the mother s life is at risk. president trump did not mention alabama by name. he certainly seemed to be referencing it. writing in part, quote, i am strongly pro life, with the three exceptions, rape, incest and protecting the life of the mother. the same position taken by ronald reagan. we must stick together and win for life in 2020. if we don t say united as one, a all of our gains for life can and wil rapidly disappear. alabama s law classifies abortion as a felony. if a doctor performs one r, they could spend up to 99 years in prison. kentucky, alabama and ohio banned abortions after a heartbeat is detected, six weeks into a pregnancy. other states are considering similar legislation. the laws are expected to be blocked while legal challenges play out. president trump seemed to talk about legal challenge as well, tweeting we have come very nature the last two years with new federal judges, the mexico city policy and a new and positive attitude about the right to life. the radical left is imploding on this issue. president trump has made it clear that in 2020 he wants and expects abortion rights to be an issue. the president has tried to paint democrats as far outside of the mainstream when it comes to their position on abortion rights. kristin: coming up at 9:00 p.m. eastern, steve hilton has a long interview with president trump. don t want to miss it. leland: we are hours away from the fox news town hall with mayor pete buttigieg. you can see the stage getting he set, chris wallace getting his questions ready, as is the audience that is about to be there. this is what wallace had to say l earlier today about the growing popularity. we have more people that have said they you will show up than for any of the town halls, including bernie sanders and howard schultz. he has interesting things to say. you could argue i m not saying he s going to end up where they did, but it s a little bit donald trump. bit like donald trump, like barack obama. he is different and breaks the mold and voters seem intrigued by that at this point. leland: with that we bring in our panel, from pennsylvania. arnie, first to you. are you ready to put mayor pete in that same group of barack obama and donald trump? no, it s way too early. but mayor pete is incredibly intriguing. he s articulate. he has a different sexual orientation which also makes him a phenomenon. but more importantly, he s embraced his faith, he talks about being the mayor of south bend, one of the most sort of challenged cities in the country and he really sort of changed it. and the other thing that s interesting, we re going to be talking about biden, so biden announced yesterday in pennsylvania and there are around 6,000 people that showed up in philadelphia, a big city. when mayor pete announced in south bend, he had 6,000 as well. so here you have both of them, biden and buttigieg, both of them having 6,000 people show up but biden is such a known quantity and buttigieg is an unknown quantity you a. the enthusiasm was obvious from the beginning. leland: in a state like pennsylvania, biden does much better than buttigieg head to head against president trump. noteworthy that biden beats president trump in a head to head by almost 10 points in pennsylvania. yeah, and i think biden would do well here. but leland, i looked at the poll and there s a lot of stuff there that seems to with a bit unbalanced. i would call it closer than that. biden is th the the contender. i think there were only 3,000 people there yesterday. i know they were going through the streets to bring people out for biden. i don t think it was enthusiastic. leland: i will not be in the business of estimating crowd size and leave that to the two of you. leave that to donald trump. leland: leave it to you guys. real quickly, you call mayor pete a phenomenon. the town that the town hall will be in is one that was reliably blue, then flipped to donald trump. what makes a good candidate in new hampshire that may not necessarily expand around the country? remember, mayor pete in terms of his appeal to minorities, especially african american voters, is almost nonexis nonex. here s what a candidate for president neats to do. they need to acknowledge people s fears whether it s fear of climate change, the economy, the opioid crisis, people s fears and anger is legitimate. they have to accept the urgency of change. we need to address climate change, we need to address things like the economy, for example. i ll give you a great number. joe biden was talking about the economy that was inherited by donald trump. so in 2000, 64% of people were participating in the workforce. today, it s only 60% of people who can be working are in the workforce. again, you have to thread this together. leland: there s always a disconnect between how people feel versus what the numbers say. as we pivot, in terms of fears, this is an interesting point, dom, for you to look at. this is what came out about bernie sanders and the foreign policy, quoting the new york times t quoting sanders. as the mayor, i did my best to stop american foreign policy which for years was overthrowing governments in latin america and installing puppet regimes. operative words, i did my best to stop american foreign policy. do independent voters have a fear with that? well, i think it s the new york times reporting this. so that s one thing. and two, he was the mayor of burlington, vermont. i m not sure what he did. apparently, leland, there are rumors of these rallies and others where people are saying very anti-american things, directly contravening our policy in most graphic terms. bernie sanders did not do anything to stop it. that s the thing that started to swim. swirl. he honeymooned in the soviet unions. leland: he also had an interesting relationship with a commune in his younger years. but [ laughter ] leland: this brings up an important point. we ll give you the last word in new hampshire. people in new hampshire have a different view than people in burlington, vermont. are they ready for a socialist bernie sanders who wants to have this super liberal foreign policy. are we talking about they re worried about bernie sanders? what about donald trump who talks about how he s in love with kim jong un, what about president trump who basically believes a kgb agent, president putin? i think republicans shoul be she worried about the policy of the current sitting president. he was opposed to the war in vietnam, the war in iraq, those kind of things leland: not going to watch with independents. that s not going to work. i m not defensive. i m pointing out our president and pointing out a young bernie. they have interesting choices. leland: that is for sure. 7:00 p.m. tonight, we ll tune in to at least dig in a little more on pete buttigieg in new hampshire. can t wait. leland: thanks, guys, appreciate it. kristin: as tensions with iran escalate, president trump says he s not interested in waging a new war with tehran, but some congressional leaders aren t quite convinced. we ll break down the president s strategy, next. what if i wielded the power of i could bend reality to my will, with a snap of my fingers! i just saved money with geico. i saved hundreds of dollars! nice! that is a lot of money. the power is exhilarating!! hahahahahaha! hah. ha. just got something in my throat. yea. marvel studio s avengers endgame. in theaters now. now s the really fun part:m car. choosing the color, the wheels, the interior. everything exactly how i want it. here s the thing, just because i configured this 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(vo) quickbooks. backing you. applebee s new loaded fajitas. now that s eatin good in the neighborhood. kristin: a former nato commander is saying the u.s. is in, quote, a dangerous place with iran but he believes tehran will back down amid rising pressure from the united states. but still, some of the president s critics say the trump administration is marching the u.s. towards war. i think what we re seeing unfortunately is what looks a lot like people in the trump administration trying to create a pretext or executio excuse foo to war against iran, a war that would undermine our national security. kristin: we re going to dig into this a bit deeper by talking to the foundation for defense of democracy former treasury department terrorism finance analyst, jonathan shanzer. let s start with this intelligence. how solid do you think this intelligence may be? i know it s obviously tough to say and tough to reveal publicly, but how solid do you think it is? having not seen it, i can t vouch for it. what we can say is that initially we were hearing that the brits were disagreeing with the intelligence and all of a sudden they got on-board and we re starting to see the europeans embrace the same intelligence. in other words, a all of oural lies, it took them a little while but they ve come around to this and i think they re verifying what the united states first put out as a major concern. kristin: that s something senator marco rubio said as well, he wasn t thrilled the trump administration took long to brief senior members of congress about what the intelligence was. once he got the chat clas classd briefing, he seemed to come around. there s been criticism that they wanted to be briefed sooner from the trump administration. we know there s going to be a briefing on tuesday. these members of congress, were they right to want this briefing sooner, you think? of course, they should be briefed, they should be aware of the concerns that the united states is looking at right now. but let s just put this in perspective. the iranians have been engaging in malign activity across the middle east for a long time, for decades. they ve actually killed 600 american soldiers. they have been harassing the israelis. they ve been harassing the saudis. this is something we know they ve been doing. so this is a more recent iteration of what the iranians have been doing. but our members of congress understand full well what iran is up to more broadly in the middle east. kristin: do you think, based on your experience, in your opinion do you think the trump administration did the right thing in making these moving these military assets to the middle east, partially closing the embassy in baghdad? are they in solid ground in doing that 1234. without having seen the intel, i think you it probably sounds right. hwe were going to be moving the carrier group to the persian gulf regardless. we moved it up a little earlier as a show of force. i don t see anything wrong with that. closing the embassy, i don t know what the specific threat was, but no one was talking about a march to war when we closed our consolate in basra back in september to nonessential personnel. this is something we ve done for a while in response to security threats. sounds like the administration is taking proper steps. i don t hear anyone talking about a march to war. if anything, you hear the administration s critics how lonhowelling about it howling about it without anyone saying it s going to happen. kristin: someone asked the president, are we going to war with iran, he said i hope not. we will see where that stands. h?we have seniors at moorehouse college receiving welcome news at the graduation ceremony today. we ll tell you what made this crowd of students give a standing ovation. with venus, you re in charge of your skin. so, write your own rules. because no one gets an opinion on why you shave - or how you show your skin. it s a revolution in sleep. the sleep number 360 smart bed is on sale now during our memorial day sale. it senses your movement, and automatically adjusts to keep you both comfortable. it even helps with this. so you wake up ready to hit the ground running. only at a sleep number store. during the memorial day sale, save $1000 on the new queen sleep number 360 special edition smart bed, now only $1,799. only for a limited time. sleep number. proven, quality sleep. .to give you the alrprotein you needin ensure max protein. with less of the sugar you don t (grunti)g i ll take that. (cheering) 30 grams of protein and 1 gram of sugar ensure. for strength and energy. monitor their blood glucose every day. which means they have to stop. and stick their fingers. repeatedly. today, life-changing technology from abbott makes it possible to track glucose levels. without drawing a drop of blood, again and again. the most personal technology, is technology with the power to change your life. life. to the fullest. leland: tornadoes ripping through the heartland this weekend. you can see the storms still on the move. jacqui heinrich following the damage. hi, jacqui. reporter: hi, leland. a second severe weather event is on frac for tomorrow, track for tofor tomorrow. in and around dallas, heavy rain and significant flooding as a line of storms moved west to east, residents are under a flood warning right now and are being warned not to drive or risk being swept away. all of a sudden, we got in water. it looked high. we kept going to try to goat out and get off the road. and all of a sudden, the water was so deep. reporter: at least 11 tornadoes ripped through the southern plains, from friday through last night, injuring a few people an decembe and decems and businesses. at least 40 preliminary reports were recorded across kansas and nebraska. two super cells tracked for hundreds of miles. in oklahoma, a confirmed ef-2 tornado destroyed two homes and injured one person with winds up to 130 miles an hour. the national weather service says its path was short but the winds were severe. and in texas, about 150 miles west of fort worth, strong winds forced a nursing home to evidence a actuate. several homes and businesses were damaged there. more flash flooding is possible today for the lower miss sip valley lower mississippi valley. more than 14,000 people are in the dark in texas, 51,000 in louisiana and 9,000 in arkansas. it s snarling airports for a second day with more than 1,000 delays and more than 300 cancellations nationwide, about a third of those cancellations in dallas/fort worth alone. tomorrow is now expected to be the worst day in a week-long severe weather track, texas through oklahoma and kansas in the line of powerfu powerful to, large hail and downpours. leland: jacqui, thanks. kristin: it is time for my favorite story of the day. a huge surprise for this year s moorehouse college graduates. watch. this is my class, 2019. [ cheering and applause ] and my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loan. [ cheering and applause ] leland: took them a minute to figure out what was going on. kristin: because these students have probably hardly believing it. that was th commentment speaker saying he would pay the entire student loans for the graduating class. the announcement got applause, a standing ovation. that s about $40 million for about 400 students. leland: unlike me, they will actually remember their college commencement speaker. that s all for us in washington. mr. sunday from new hampshire takes over with say yo amy klob. we ll see you soon it lets you know when you go too fast. .and brake too hard. with feedback to help you drive safer. giving you the power to actually lower your cost. unfortunately, it can t do anything about that. now that you know the truth. are you in good hands? do you (low battery sound.) want a charge? yeah (battery charging.) how ya like that? how ya like that? how ya like that? how ya like that? how ya like that? what you think of me now? thank you so much. 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when was it released. today s testimony follows an explosive day in the impeachment inquiry yesterday, though. for the very first time a witness says he personally heard president trump demand ukraine investigate the bidens. and even more here, this state department official says that he was told that the president didn t really care about ukraine, only, quote, the big stuff that involved the president. and democrats are accusing president trump of witness intimidation after he insulted the former ambassador to ukraine on twitter. he tweeted as she was testifying. president trump slammed her and her job performance and then said he had a right to defend himself. we re covering this from all angles for you. rene marsh in washington, kristen holmes on capitol hill. let s start with kristen. kristen, good morning to you. reporter: good morning there, victor. that s exactly right. so essentially what we just saw was mark sandy going behind these closed doors. he is a career official with the office of management and budget and they re hoping to get that timeline to see what he knew about withholding that funding from ukraine. i want to talk about that testimony that happened last night behind closed doors because we re hearing from a lot of democrats who are saying that this was really critical testimony, that they believe it advanced the impeachment inquiry. here s why. this is about a man named dave holmes. he is a staffer at the u.s. embassy in ukraine and we learned through public testimony earlier this week that he overheard a conversation between president trump and the ambassador to the european union, gordon sondland. i want to set the scene here just like holmes did in his testimony. he said he was able to share this conversation because they were out to a meal. him, sondland, two other staffers, when sondland placed this call to president trump. president trump speaking so loudly that holmes was able to hear him. at one point sondland had to move the phone away from his ear, that s how loudly he was talking. so this is what holmes says that he heard in this conversation. he said then i heard president trump ask so he s going to do the vex? ambassador sondland replied he s going to do it, adding that president zelensky will do anything you ask him to. now, the phone conversation ended there, but the conversation between sondland and holmes did not. holmes asking sondland is it true that president trump doesn t care about ukraine? holmes says that sondland replied that the president only cares about, quote, big stuff that benefits the president like the biden investigation that mr. guiliani was pushing. now, this raises a lot of questions. first of all, it brings president trump closer to this pressure campaign. but it also raises questions about gordon sondland who testified behind closed doors and never mentioned this phone call. so he will be testifying in public next week. obviously this is going to be a question that these lawmakers have. kristen holmes, we appreciate it so much. thank you. i want to bring in cnn s rene marsh as well because we ve heard from ambassadors, diplomats and policy experts. people might be wondering why are we hearing from an official from the budget office? right. so this has really become central, the office of management and budget, also known as omb. essentially for people who don t know, this agency doles out money that congress approves and make sure that agencies don t overspend and also make sure that the money that s been approved is spent. that s why this agency has become so central because this is where thine freezing of that aid occurred. mark sandy who just arrived on capitol hill for his closed-door deposition, he will be the first omb employee to testify behind closed doors. he s a long-time career employee. he s worked under administrations of both parties. and so far we have had very little visibility on the behind-the-scenes workings for all this all played out. democratic investigators are really hoping that sandy will shed some light on those internal conversations when the administration was taking this very unusual step of freezing this $400 million in military aid that congress, by the way, had already approved for ukraine. now, he will likely be asked several questions, including did the freeze raise any alarm for him. was he told why it was happening. how involved was he in this process or was he cut out of the process at some point, and we do know that political appointees signed some of the documents freezing this aid and that in itself is very unusual, according to sources who have spoken to cnn. back to you guys. all right, rene marsh for us. thank you. to the white house and our own sara westwood here. have you heard a reaction from the white house this morning to all of this yet? reporter: christi, all through yesterday the white house was continuing to attack the impeachment inquiry, the democrats who are leading it and trying to undermine the credibility of the witnesses that we ve seen testify so far. and that pattern continued yesterday with the president tweeting out that attack on former ambassador to the ukraine, marie yovanovitch as she was testifying before the house intelligence committee. chairman schiff gave her a chance to respond and she said she felt intimidated and even some republicans said they did not degree with the president s decision to tweet an attack on the witness as she was testifying. democrats are saying they might consider this witness intimidation. jim clyburn even saying they could possibly consider it as a potential article of impeachment when the inquiry reaches that point. president trump defending himself said he was just exercising his free speech rights and didn t think he was intimidating anyone. take a listen. were you trying to intimidate ambassador yovanovitch? i just want a total i want freedom of speech. that s a political process. the republicans have been treated very badly. sir, do you believe quiet. quiet. sir, do you believe your tweets and words can be intimidating? i don t think so at all. reporter: campaign sources tell cnn many privately believe it was a mistake for the president to attack yovanovitch as she was testifying before the house intelligence committee with one source telling cnn it allowed democrats to control the narrative surrounding yesterday s hearing, so putting the president and his allies at a messaging disadvantage as they were trying to combat what was an emotional day of testimony on capitol hill yesterday, victor and christi. we saw a few republicans push back against the tweet from the president yesterday. sara westwood, thank you so much. so the president ignores the advice from his most senior military commanders by intervening in three highly consequential war crime cases. that s coming up. plus former president barack obama issues a warning to the 2020 democratic candidates. we ll tell you what that is. of nowhere. those are the ones that show up and change everything. yicovanovitch. yovanovitch. yichlt. yovanovitch. do your asthma symptoms ever hold you back? 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we ll get a chance to question this guy. i m sure the democrats well, i m betting they ll bring him in for a hearing. we ll get a chance to question him in the open. we can t really talk about what he had to say because he didn t release his transcript i understand. okay. thank you. thank you. all righty. so, margaret, you know, republicans argument up to this point has been that none of the witnesses spoke to president trump. but david holmes overheard president trump. he heard his voice on this phone call. is this a game-changer? well, christi, it s an important turn of events. based on what we learned yesterday about what he said in that deposition does seem basically certain that the democrats will bring him forward for public testimony. remember what s going on now is this sort of two-track where people are deposed and then there is a public portion of the testimony. so i think that will be important. of course we ll hear from gordon sondland himself. part of what s important about what mr. holmes had to say, it again changes kind of the known world of facts and adds information that ambassador sondland had not come forth with before, so i think he s going to be pressed very hard, at least by the democrats on the committee, to explain why the story keeps changing. margaret, you brought me into my next question for asha because i want to talk about why holmes testimony was important. he heard the conversation between president trump and ambassador sondland. he confirms bill taylor s testimony that president trump s focus on himself and not on ukraine and he contends that sondland told him president trump only cares about big stuff that benefits him as opposed to ukraine itself. that he was pushing the biden investigation that guiliani was pushing as well. what does all of this mean when we look ahead to the space that sondland, ambassador sondland is in and what he s going to say on wednesday? yeah, so holmes is really important because he has firsthand knowledge of this call. he was sitting there and he heard he overheard this conversation. i just want to emphasize that because one of the big objections that the republicans have had is that everything has been hearsay. so we are getting closer to getting firsthand corroboration and information. as far as sondland, you know, he s in a little hot water because his previous testimony even after he amended it once said that he never had any direct communications with anyone at the white house about the investigations into the bidens or 2016 election. this directly contradicts that. he would have had a follow-up call, if this is call, the day after trump spoke with president zelensky. so he has a little bit of explaining to do there. and then for president trump, of course he s not under oath, but he did say publicly that he barely knew who ambassador sondland was and this would obviously cast doubt on that claim as well. all righty. so, margaret, i wanted to ask you about something that stephanie grisham, white house press secretay, released after ambassador yovanovitch s testimony yesterday. she said she testified under oath that she was unaware of any criminal activity involving president trump. she wasn t on the july 25th phone call and she had no knowledge about the pause on aid to ukraine, basically saying she didn t add anything to the conversation. what value did ambassador yovanovitch bring to the inquiry, and how, might i ask you, did president trump s simultaneous tweet about her change the narrative or the takeaway of it? yeah. i mean yesterday s testimony certainly had a different flavor than day one because ambassador yovanovitch was willing to talk sort of extemporaneously about her concerns about the shock value of being a career service foreign service and ambassador and have the president turn against you to a foreign leader. so she was able to kind of give us a world view and a look inside the ranks of the state department and the foreign service to understand how deeply shaken u.s. foreign policy and the people who carry it out have been by all of this. but it was perhaps the president s own action with that tweet that gave kind of like the clearest picture, like unfiltered picture of how this is happening in realtime and it caused a lot of the republicans on capitol hill a great deal of concern and discomfort. they thought that was sort of an unforced error that the president ended up revealing what he s been trying to deny about making this personal or being heavy handed or, you know, being more concerned about how this all affects him than he is about the good of the country. all those arguments that the white house has been trying to tamp down, the president ended up elevating them with that tweet yesterday. there were a lot of republicans on capitol hill and inside the white house who thought that was a big mistake. asha, before i let you go, president trump s personal attorneys are asking the supreme court now to block this house subpoena for president trump s personal finance documents, aka of course his taxes. jay sekulow, his attorney, filed the papers yesterday and he s arguing that allowing the subpoena to go forward, the house subpoena, that means congress is now free to investigate every detail of president trump s personal life. is that what s at stake here, or does the president just not wanting to release his taxes? well, the president definitely doesn t want to release the taxes, but this is essentially a separation of powers argument. the white house wants to claim that if congress exercises its oversight powers and, you know, that they re essentially they re suggesting that congress is on a fishing expedition to find evidence of a crime or something like that. you know, the house has broad oversight authority to request these, and i think it s going to be up to the court to decide how to balance that with the executive branch. so far the white house has lost both at the district court and in the appellate court, but this will be a pretty serious decision in terms of the balance of powers between congress and the executive branch. all right. margaret talev, asha rangappa, we appreciate both of you being here. thank you. president trump has ignored advice from his defense secretary and pentagon officials and cleared three u.s. service members accused of war many crimes. cnn was there when first lieutenant clint lawrence reunited with his family. watch. now, lawrence was convicted of murder after ordering his troops to fire on three people in afghanistan. the president personally called lieutenant lawrence after he was released and the young lieutenant was appreciative of the call. i d like to say thanks to president trump. i had the opportunity to talk to him today on the phone with vice president pence. he sounds just like he sounds on tv on the phone. he s actually pretty funny too when you talk to him on the phone. it s very clear to me that vice president pence and president trump are very much in support of our military and i just i appreciate the whole country for everything that all of you have done. well, defense secretary mark esper and other senior military leaders have told the president that a presidential pardon could potentially damage the integrity of the military judicial system. the white house budget official is on capitol hill as we speak here getting ready to testify in the impeachment inquiry. we re going to talk about the history of impeachment with author frank bowman who can really walk us through what to expect here and how significant it is. stay close. tremfya® helps adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis uncover clearer skin that can last. in fact, tremfya® was proven superior to humira® in providing significantly clearer skin. tremfya® may increase your risk of infections and lower your ability to fight them. tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms or if you had a vaccine or plan to. serious allergic reactions may occur. tremfya®. uncover clearer skin that can last. janssen can help you explore cost support options. no cover-up spray here. cheaper aerosols can cover up odors in a flowery fog. but febreze air effects eliminates odors. with a 100% natural propellent. it leaves behind a pleasant scent you ll love. [deep inhale] freshen up. don t cover up. febreze. that could allow hackers devices into your home.ys and like all doors, they re safer when locked. that s why you need xfinity xfi. with the xfi gateway, devices connected to your homes wifi are protected. which helps keep people outside from accessing your passwords, credit cards and cameras. and people inside from accidentally visiting sites that aren t secure. and if someone trys we ll let you know. xfi advanced security. if it s connected, it s protected. call, click, or visit a store today. right now white house budget official mark sandy is on capitol hill. he s expected to testify behind closed doors and explain what he knows about the president s decision to hold up aid to ukraine. this morning we re learning new details in fact from a witness who said he personally heard president trump demand an investigation into the bidens. he says the president was told that the ukrainian president would do, quote, anything you asked him to, and told lawmakers that the u.s. ambassador to the eu confirmed the ukrainians were going to, quote, do the investigation. the impeachment hearings into president trump are obviously historic. this is a moment for the country. it s only the third time in 45 years that americans are witnessing this process. joining us to talk about the history of impeachment is frank bowman. he s a floyd r. gibson missouri endowed professor of law and the author of high crimes and misdemeanors, a history of impeachment for the age of trump. good morning to you. nice to be here. okay. so let s start here with process. republicans have complained so much about process. you ve seen some complaints during the testimony yesterday of ambassador yovanovitch. this morning this was what we heard from congressman jim jordan. they can keep, you know, having secret depositions down here in the basement of the capitol, but i think the american people see through this whole thing. see through this whole thing. is there something to see on the other side of this? is this something that s uniquely abnormal? no, there s nothing abnormal here, at least in terms of taking depositions of witnesses in private before you put them on before the national audience. this is certainly something that republicans themselves did in previous times when they were investigating, for example, hillary clinton and benghazi, but more importantly, any sort of investigation, whether it s a criminal investigation, whether it s civil litigation, whether it s an impeachment investigation, the first thing you re going to do before you bring a witness in front of a public forum is you re going to depose them in advance. there s nothing abnormal about that at all. so there are some republicans who say the president, he has not met the criteria for impeachment. that, yes, what he did was wrong but it s not impeachable, do you agree with that? no. the constitution says, of course, that presidents and other officials are impeachable for treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanors. one of the principal high crimes and misdemeanors that traditionally has been impeachable is an abuse of power. and the narrative that is being laid out in increasing detail up on capitol hill is one of abuse of power. the president of the united states using the great power of the united states, the great power of his office to extort from a vulnerable front line state threatened by russian aggression, investigations or at least announcement of investigations that are favorable to his private political interest. that s a classic abuse of power and certainly it would be impeachable. now, the other thing that is being spoken of a great deal now is bribery. it s one of the specific items that can be impeachable. it s notable, i suppose, that house democrats seem to be speaking in terms of bribery. i m not sure that s entirely wise, but i understand why they re trying to do it because they think, i gather, that explaining bribery is somewhat more somewhat simpler for the average person than explaining high crimes and misdemeanors and the concept of abuse of power. but frame it how you will, the narrative that s emerging fits into either category. does in this case a firsthand account what s the value of that? because what we ve heard from republicans for i guess the first month of this was that this is all secondhand. the whistle-blower didn t have any firsthand information. there is this statement that cnn has from david holmes who says he heard the phone call between gordon sondland and president trump. but is that necessary here? i mean this is a political, not a criminal proceeding. i think it s helpful in that it tends to diminish the effectiveness, if any, of the republicans claiming that there s no firsthand testimony of exactly what mr. trump said about ukraine or about the aid. of course there s always the irony of the fact that to the extent that there are any missing links between the president and the conduct, it s because the president has refused to allow the people that know the most about that link, people like mick mulvaney and others, to come down and testify. i think having someone that actually overheard the president speak is certainly helpful, because it eliminates that quibble, if you will. it diminishes that component of the republicans argument. the other thing to note is that the republican congressmen in that proceeding seem to view their role as being the president s defense lawyers, not as being congressmen who are representing not only the country but also the institution of congress in the very serious enterprise of investigating the impeachment of an american president. what they re doing, the role that they re presuming to take here is really quite unprecedented in american history, certainly in the history of recent impeachments. in both clinton and in nixon, the president s party, while they certainly weren t happy about having a president of their party being impeached, they were insistent that the facts be produced. they then argued the implications of those facts, but they were insistent the facts be produced and they didn t venture into wild conspiracy theories or diversionary tactics the way that i fear republicans are doing now. all right. frank bowman, thank you for sharing your perspective with us. we appreciate it. my pleasure. coming up, former president barack obama wades into the 2020 political debate with a warning for the 2020 democratic candidates. if you live with diabetes, why fingerstick when you can scan? 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i think he is right. i think that a lot of people will listen to him. he has been somebody who has not been quick to weigh in into the democratic race. he did that just now. i think that his comments will travel far and wide. but look, this is what primaries are for. i have been incredibly impressed with elizabeth warren s rise with the excitement that she brings, with the support that she brings, especially among the progressive democrats. and i think that s a great thing. and if you see what she has done recently, i think she is heeding exactly what president obama is saying in that she is offering a little bit more tempered policies. a transition to medicare for all. so i think all of these things are things that are going to be robustly discussed, have been and will continue to be during the democratic primary. that s what they re for. yeah, that transition plan came out published on medium yesterday. but the president saying don t go too far left, don t go past public opinion, pace yourself. is that in conflict with this man from 2008? and where we are met with cynicism and doubt and those who tell us that we can t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people. yes, we can. is this his own cynicism and doubt? i don t think so. i think in fact that is exactly what he is saying. yes, we can change things. yes, we can improve things. but you have to do it in a way that brings the american people along. frankly, for the democratic primary, that brings the majority of democratic primary voters along, which are a little bit more moderate than what the progressive left would have you believe. now that doesn t mean that we can t talk about bold ideas and bold ways to really change things, especially for those for whom the politics of the usual haven t worked. and again, i think that s what a robust democratic primary is for. so, alice, let me come to you and we re using this conversation to talk about things other than impeachment that maybe didn t get as much coverage in the last day or so. the president s long-time political advisor roger stone was convicted on seven counts. several sources say the president in the lead-up to a verdict had considered whether or not he would pardon him. do you think he will? do you think he should? he absolutely positively should not. whether he will or not remains to be seen. nothing would surprise me. but let me just say this, no one should be in prison more than roger stone based on the dirty tricks that he has done for democrats and republicans. he is getting exactly what he deserves. the prison door couldn t hit him on the rear fast enough in my opinion. he has engaged in tactics that are simply criminal. and finally he is paying the price. he has what he calls the stone s rules where he acts as though he is above politics and above the law. and one of the things that he has said often is stone s rules exist because the truth is too painful and lies will land you in prison. well, there you go. don t let the door hit you on the way out and by felecia. this is something that should have happened all along because of what he s done to democrats and republicans. i m sure he ll do and say anything he can to avoid a long prison term, but no one deserves to be in prison in politics more than roger stone. i appreciate the bye felicia effort, but it s the bye and then felicia. you ve got to hit the bye first. that was a nice try. the washington post was reporting that the president s doral resort was not one of the early contenders to host the g-7 according to some secret service emails they have obtained. now we have learned that republican national committee, this from the new york times, they will hold their winter meeting there. i don t remember your view of doral as a g-7 pick, but is this again self-dealing now, just the rnc s money? i look, i think they can choose where they want to hold these events regardless of who owns the property. $600,000 last year alone to the president s properties. i have said all along i wish there would have been more separation between the president s business dealings and events that are political. i wish they would have completely severed all business ties when he took office. however, that did not happen. but we can all agree that this is not a surprise, that this type of activity is happening. i wish there was a further separation, but at the end of the day the rnc is they get money from donors, and their money they can spending that money exactly how they want to spending it. if it happens to be with a trump property, there s nothing folks can do about it because this money comes from donors and this is where they choose to hold these events. speaking to donors, maria, this new super pac promises to spend a million dollars to get senator booker, cory booker on the december debate stage. he s rejected super pacs but now he has one. former vice president joe biden rejected super pacs and now he has one. governor patrick says he ll likely need one. the president and the rnc have $300 million they have raised for this election. is there a consequence for candidates who reverse or turn the other way when democrats primary objective is just to win? no, i don t think so because democrats primary objective is just to win. that is exactly how important it is not just for democrats but for the country to get trump out of office. now, in an ideal world, most democrats would want to have would want to have money out of politics, right? they have always talked about that. that has not changed. but they also know that they need to be able to compete with a president who is bringing in the type of money that trump is bringing in. and so i don t think that it will that it will be a consequence for them moving forward because, again, what democrats wanting most of all is to keep their eye on the ball and that is to elect a candidate who is going to be the best equipped to get the most corrupt president we ve ever had in our history out of office in 2020. alice stewart, maria cardona, good to have you again. thank you so much, victor. thanks, victor. have a good weekend. it s ultimate tailgate time. you know who s in the middle of this. coy wire. hey, good morning to you, christi. the florida a&m university perched atop the highest of seven hills here in tallahassee is the perfect place for our first hbcu tums ultimate tailgate. they play victor s alma mater, howard today. so stay tuned for some serious, serious trash talking. ( ) only tylenol® rapid release gels have laser drilled holes. they release medicine fast, for fast pain relief. tylenol®. those are the ones that show up and change everything. those are the ones that show up the amount of student loan debt i have i m embarrassed to even say i felt like i was going to spend my whole adult life paying this off thanks to sofi, i can see the light at the end of the tunnel as of 12pm today, i am debt free we have no debt, we don t owe anybody anything, and it s fantastic laso you can enjoy it even ifst you re sensitive. se. yet some say it isn t real milk. i guess those cows must actually be big dogs. sit! i said sit! dana-farber cancer institute discovered the pd-l1 pathway. pd-l1. they changed how the world fights cancer. blocking the pd-l1 protein, lets the immune system attack, attack, attack cancer. pd-l1 transformed, revolutionized, immunotherapy. pd-l1 saved my life. saved my life. saved my life. what we do here at dana-faber, changes lives everywhere. everywhere. everywhere. everywhere. everywhere. 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(food grunting menacingly) when the food you love doesn t love you back, stay smooth and fight heartburn fast with tums smoothies. tum tum-tum tum tums a little bit later today former nfl quarterback colin kaepernick is taking a practice field, hoping to show teams he is ready to get back into the league. coy wire has that and more in the bleacher report, live from tallahassee, florida. coy, good morning to you. reporter: good morning, victor and christi. kaepernick says he s been working out every day for three years waiting for a chance to get back into the league. well, today that time has come. a league statement thursday said that 11 team reps will be at a session and it s reported that more have confirmed since that time. now, kaepernick, he ll be put through drills and an interview at the atlanta falcons facilities indoors. the session is closed to media but everything will be recorded so any team that s interested can get that footage. former browns head coach hue jackson and former dolphins head coach joe philbin will be running the session. nfl wide receivers will be there to catch kaepernick s passes. it is a big college football saturday. here we are at florida a&m university where the rattlers are 8-1. they have a record-setting quarterback. victor s alma mater, howard, is the opponent. they re only 1-8. the venom pom squad has a very special message for you. florida agricultural and mechanical university! i mean that was nice, but i don t think y all are going to stand up to the bison. that s just my feeling. good luck, though. all hbcu love. you know none of them can hear you? coy will tell them. good luck, everybody. we re back in a moment. dana-farber cancer institute discovered the pd-l1 pathway. pd-l1. they changed how the world fights cancer. blocking the pd-l1 protein, lets the immune system attack, attack, attack cancer. pd-l1 transformed, revolutionized, immunotherapy. pd-l1 saved my life. saved my life. saved my life. what we do here at dana-faber, changes lives everywhere. everywhere. everywhere. everywhere. everywhere. learn now genetic genealogists are teaming up with law enforcement to help crack cold cases. our dna carries a specific instruction set for an individual s physical characteristics. with a small sample the labs can create a facial composite that predicts what a person looks like. it s technology that can help break criminal cold cases wide open. it s the kind of stuff from a sci-fi movie. it s definitely very sci-fi. after being brutally beaten, 17-year-old brittany marcell was put into a coma. she lost all memory of the attack leaving police with just a single piece of evidence, a single drop of blood. for the next ten years the case went unsolved until marcell recalled a name, justin hanson. with that blood they thinked hanson to the crime. he was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison. going forward the number of cold cases will decrease and also active cases can potentially be solved more quickly. cases won t have to go cold. it costs about $3,000, but the results can mean authorities spend less time and manpower to solve a case. dna can t reveal a person s age, so it estimates what a person would look like based on how long ago the crime was committed. basically we re predicting where the face falls on different facial dimensions and what we call face space. by generating leads from dna left at a crime scene as opposed to matching it to a database, it is giving law enforcement a powerful new crime fighting tool. (man sneezes) what s the time? device: a dime is ten cents. severe cold or flu? take control with theraflu. powerful, soothing relief to defeat your worst cold and flu symptoms fast. device: (sneezes) theraflu. the power is in your hands. for the first time prince andrew is answering questions about his relationship with jeffrey epstein. the problem was once he had been convicted, i that s the bit i kick myself for on a daily basis because it was not something that was becoming of a member of our family. we try and uphold the highest standards and practices, and i let the side down, simple as that. prince andrew s full interview will air tonight and we ll play that for you tomorrow morning right here on new day. more than 8 million tons of plastic endi up in the world s oceans every year. a lawyer in india is taking on this global problem and he is one of cnn s top ten heroes. it was like a carpet of plastic. for the first time in my life i didn t want to be in the water because the garbage was like five and a half feet. the problem of pollution is created by us. with this in my mind i started to clean the beach. i told myself it will be difficult for a single man to do it. i said why not take this personal journey to others. this huge ocean is a problem. we ll have to rise up in huge numbers. when you have a complicated problem, sometimes solutions are simple. to vote for your favorite top ten hero go to cnnheroes.com, and thank you for doing so. we hope you make good memories today. thanks for being with us. there is much more ahead in the next hour of cnn s newsroom. fredricka whitfield is up next. i suffered with psoriasis for so long. i felt gross. people were afraid i was contagious. i was covered from head to toe. i was afraid to show my skin. it was kind of a shock after. i started cosentyx. i wasn t covered anymore. four years clear. five years now. i just look and feel better. see me. cosentyx works fast to give you clear skin that can last. real people with psoriasis look and feel better with cosentyx. don t use if you re allergic to cosentyx. before starting get checked for tuberculosis. an increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur. tell your doctor about an infection or symptoms, if your inflammatory bowel disease symptoms develop or worsen, or if you ve had a vaccine. .or plan to. serious allergic reactions may occur. i look and feel better with cosentyx. five years is just crazy. see me. ask your dermatologist if cosentyx could help you move past the pain of psoriasis. 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