difference of opinion on immigration legislation that we ve put forward. you ve had different ideas. i have no doubt that as attorney general, you ll faithfully execute the office. i appreciate the answers that you have given today. unanimous consent to submit a column written by our own attorney general in arizona, mark burnovich for the hill . without objection it will be included. supporting your nomination. let me talk to you about an aspect of immigration that s important in arizona. as you know, we have a large border with mexico. we have a program called operation streamline that has over the years been tremendously effective in cutting down recidivism in terms of border crossers. it s intended to reduce border crossing by expeditiously prosecuting those who enter the country illegally over a no tolerance or zero tolerance policy. it s credited with being instrumental in achieving better border security specifically in the yuma sector along the western side of arizona s border with mexico. nevertheless, in recent years, the u.s. attorney s office for the district of arizona adopted a policy that he wanted prosecutions for those that cross but for, well, without criminal history other than simply crossing the border. i have asked attorney general holder and attorney general lynch as well as secretary johnson at homeland security on what is being done here, and i haven t gotten a straight answer. no matter how many times i ask the question, so i m looking forward to a little more candor here as attorney general if you are confirmed what steps will you take to restore operation streamline to a zero tolerance approach that s been so successful in arizona? a portion of arizona s border. zoo thank you. senator flank, i have enjoyed working with you, and i know the integrity with which you bring your views on the immigration system. like you, i believe that streamline was very effective, and it was really a surprise that it s been undermined and significantly. the reports i got initially some years ago, maybe a decade or so ago is it was dramatically effective. i would absolutely review that, and my inclination would be at least at this stage is it should be restored and made sure it s lawful and effective, but i think it has great positive potential to improve legality at the border. well, thank you. it s been effective at yuma,and i can tell you there s concern there on the sheriff s office, sheriffs will dumont and others concerned that we re seeing an increase in border crossings simply because of cartels understand very well what where there s a zero tolerance policy and where there is not. word spreads. we can quickly get to the is there any reason why we haven t expanded this program to the tucson sector if it s been successful elsewhere? i don t know what reason that might be. it seems to me that we should examine the successes and see if they can t be replicated throughout the border. all right. well, thank you. look forward to working with you on that. i appreciate that opportunity to work with you on that because i have long felt it s the right direction for us to go. thank you. we have a successful program, then it s difficult to see it scrapped and to see the progress that s been made in certain parts of the border done away with. let me get to another subject here. victims rights. this is an area of the law that you have shown particularly interest in over your time as a senator. i have with me letters of support for your nomination from various victims groups and advocates. the victims of crime and leniency. victims and friends united op ed by professors paul cassel and steve twist all in support of your nomination. i would ask that these documents be placed for the record. as attorney general, what steps will you take to insure that victims rights are protected? cannot forget victims rights. we have a victim witness legislation that creates within each united states attorney s office a victim witness coordinator and the job of that person is to make sure that concern of the victims are he d prosecutors and law enforcement officers, but also the bureau of you will lead not only department of prosecutors and law enforcement officials, but also the bureau of prisons. you ll be responsible for 190,000 federal inmates currently in custody. this is an often overlooked part of the attorney general s role, but it s important part of the position that you ll be nominated for. i believe one of the highlights in your record in the senate is your leadership in passing the prison rape elimination act of 2003, it or pria, which passed both chambers without objection and was signed into law by george w. bush. this was a bipartisan bill. you worked across the aisle with the late senator kennedy as well as with republican representative frank wolf, democrat representative bobby scott in the house. i have letters of support from anti-prisonrate rape activists that i would also like to be part of the record without objection if i could. thank you. the prison actually do get prosecuted was a real step forward. we do not need to subject prisoners to any more punishment than the law requires. thank you. just remaining seconds i have let me say there s another area that we have worked on and hopefully can continue to work on, and that s the area of duplicative doj grants. as you know, department awarded approximately $17 billion in grants over the years brrn oij reports, have all shown there s duplication and waste. sometimes fraud and abuse. we continue to commit to work to root out this kind of duplicative action there. well, i know you have had a history of being a staunch defender of the treasury and those that abuse it. i believe it s the same way. it s the taxpayer s money. every dlaer that s extracted from an american sit zblin that goes into the government needs to get to productive valuable activities. it is a cause of great concern. i will make it a priority of mine to make sure that the dollars we have are actually getting to the purposes they re supposed to go for. it s one thing to say i did a great thing. i got more money for this good purpose, but did it really efficiently and effectively go there. did it really make a positive difference? i think the department of justice can utilize the grant programs to help valuable activities and it needs to guard against improper activities. thank you, senator sessions. we ll break for about 30 minutes and reconvene at 1:40. senator comens would be next up, and he has indicated he will be here on time. adjourn, recess for now. the senate judiciary committee now in recess. 30 minute lurchl we just heard from the chairman chuck grassley make that announcement. hel hello. i m wolf blitzer. i m jake tapper. it s 1:00 p.m. here in washington d.c. thank you for joining us. it s been a very, very intriguing, important several hours, jake, that we ve been listening to jeff sessions, the senator from alabama who has been nominated to become the attorney general of the united states. i want to start off quickly and play this little clip. he announce reasonable doubt that if there were any legal proceedings to go against, the former democratic presidential candidate hillary clinton, he would recuse himself. in light of those comments that you made, some have expressed concern about whether you can approach the clinton matter impartially in both fact and appearance. how do you plan to address those concerns? i do believe that that could place my objectivity in question. i have given that thought. i believe the proper thing for me to do would be to recuse myself from any questions involving those kind of investigations that involve secretary clinton that were raised during the campaign. or could be otherwise connected to it. this country does not punish its political enemies, but this country insures that no one is bottom of the law. very intriguing the way he said that. it was a bold moment. he said he would recuse himself. some of the other things that he tried to make clear were that even if he opposed laws that had been passed, he would abide by them. whatever his personal feelings, he thinks that same-sex marriage is the law of the land. president trump has said and talked about how he would protect the rights of lgbt americans going forward. roe v. wade he said also is staging little mock confirmation hearings at the trump transition office. we ve got an excellent panel here that s going to help us better appreciate what we just heard. associate editor of real clear politics, a.b. stoddard. justice correspondent pamela brown, april ryan, white house correspondent washington bureau chief for american urban radio networks, cnn political comme commentators chuck hyde and simone sanders. pamela brown, you cover the justice department for us. your immediate thoughts? first, when it comes to torture, he was asked about waterboarding, which, of course, we heard trump talk about on the trail saying he wanted to bring that back, and sessions did not mince words. he said it s illegal. it is improper. that is the way the congress has voted. that presents an interesting situation there depending on what trump wants to do when he takes the white house and his top law enforcement officer views it that way. we talked about the muslim ban. again, something that trump talked about on the trail. he says that he opposes that, and it s clear that he is taking i am not naive. i know the threat that our rising crime and addiction rates pose to the health and safety of our country. i know the threat of terrorism. i deeply understand the history of civil rights in our country and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our african-american brothers and sisters. i have witnessed it. that was in his opening statement. he clearly came prepared to try to diffuse what had hurt him so badly in 1986. what s so interesting is that was initially not in his opening statements. we re told from a source that this morning he woke up, and he felt very compelled to confront what happened in 1986 with the failed judgeship. he felt like it was important to make it clear to the people and to the people there in that room that he is not a racist, that this was a characterure of him and that it was false and so he added those comments and those comments about that back in this morning, wolf. jeff, when you take a look at the bottom line, it s very, very hard for a united states senator sitting colleague of senator sessions to come out against them, but some will. some will, without a doubt, and i would not be surprised at the end of the day if this is maybe largely on party lines, but i think one of the biggest differences here is if he was not a sitting united states senator, this hearing would be entirely different. the proceedings would be different. senator dianne feinstein, of course, the ranking democrat on the committee, pointed out that, you know, he is the candidate for attorney general. we re not talking about his senate record here, but the reality here is that those strong relationships that he has with republicans and some democrats is going to play a key role in virtually all of this. they are giving him the benefit of the doubt. you saw susan collins introducing him and basically saying what happened 30 years ago isn t as relevant as right now. yes, he is going to have tough questions. more tomorrow probably than today. one other people are giving their sides of this, but he is a u.s. senator, and that helps him immensely. senator al franken, the one non-lawyer on the senate judiciary committee, basically accused senator sessions of inflating his pro-civil rights record, suggesting that desegregation school desegregation cases that he had claimed to have been in charge of, that he first overstated how many there were and then basically he was taking credit for work that he really didn t have much to do with other than he was the u.s. attorney or the attorney general of the state of alabama. it was kind of a strong charge to make. yes, it was interesting. sessions actually did back down a bit. he said that he wasn t as involved, and their number wasn t as high as it was originally stated, but that he didn t do anything wrong. i think what s interesting as franken went after his character, most everyone else was sticking to policy differences. democrats have huge policy contrasts with senator sessions and the department of justice will change radically from the obama department of justice. i think it was strong of him to so strongly defend himself against the 1986 event when he was passed over for the judgeship to defend himself against charges of being racially insensitive so that they can move on to policy differences and not be in so that he is not vulnerable to character attacks. i think democrats waste their time if they go after him on this. there s so much on sentencing, on immigration, on voting rights and civil rights for them to actually question him about and create contrast with him about that they should probably stay away from the issues of 30 years ago. you saw just as jeff was saying, you saw the senators just in such a defer he shall crouch, they would the democrats would start by saying, well, we talked about this in our meeting together. i ll just throw that question out there first. he had done a great job of talking them through these issues long before the lights were on. stro i don t think he is getting dick durbin s vote. he made it clear that the casm between the two when it came to immigration reform, specifically what you do with the so-called dreamers, the 800,000 people brought here illegally when they were children through the no fault of their own, durbin wants them to be given citizenship ultimately, and sessions, it sounded like, has a fairly hard line position on it. it shows how well prepared he is, and it s not just in trump tower where they ve been practicing for this. it s in the senate buildings. it s also at the republican national committee, private organizations like america rising. they are all preparing not just jeff sessions for this, but a team to move his nomination forward. democrats are obviously doing the same on the opposite side. what we re seeing is the tip of the iceberg on this. it looked as if he was prepared anticipating almost every question that came up where. he was anticipating every question, but the issue is he is giving answers, but there s more to get into the weeds about. particularly when it came to issues of voting rights. 30 years ago does matter where, to hear some people in congress, in and some senators wanting to testify against him about things that he said that naacp is unamerican, that is a real issue. he denies that. he denies it and he said he abhors the kkk. he said he does abhor the kkk. he said that. he did put to death under his watch leader of the kkk. right. now, let s go into this piece. the voting rights piece, which is interesting. his state right now is in the middle of this voting rights issue. many of the alabama motor vehicle offices were moved out of urban areas. people had to go to driver s licenses to get to the polls. here he is saying, oh, he plooefz in voter id, and then they just came up with an agreement with the department of transportation to fix this problem, and this is the devil is in the details. this is the first time in 15 years that people have not seen the full enforcement of the voting rights act, and there is still a problem. if they get into that piece, that is a big piece. then criminal justice. it almost sounds like he was in a different stand than president-elect donald trump. donald trump says he is putting more of a focus on supporting the police, but now we heard sessions say, yes, we support police but also he supports kplooint community policing, which is a big piece in the urban community to help stop much of this tension, which is considered once the tension happens, it s considered a national security issue from jay johnson, the head of homeland security. the issue is donald trump really has put a focus on supporting police and now he is talking about community policing and also making police more responsible if there is something that happened. it s an interesting dynamic today. when you watch this hearing and obviously jeff pointed out if this were just alabama attorney general jeff sessions or u.s. attorney jeff sessions, there would probably be more hostility and aggressiveness towards him. what s your response? how do you think he hangdsed himself understanding that you disagree with a lot of his positions? i mean, i think he handled himself well. i think some of the questioning was soft. if you will, in a lot of instances. this was just the first half. we have a whole other afternoon of this, and then tomorrow we ll see testimony from folks like cornell brooks, the current president of the naacp, the oldest and boldest civil rights organization in america. we will hear testimony from senator booker. lots of folks who will offer some color and additional details to what we heard senator sessions say today. i was shocked when senator sessions said that he basically thought that voter id was okay if the laws were written well, but also noted that, oh, but as attorney general if he was to be confirmed as attorney general, he would have to look at all the legal aspects, but personally that s how he feels. i am shocked that no one pressed him to allude that he is saying that he wouldn t take his personal feelings about voter id into the office as attorney general. again, i think he had some soft questioning. i think folks really like jeff sessions, and they this is their colleague. if he is not confirmed, guess what, he is coming back to the senate, and nobody wants to make an enemy. he has co-sponsored lots of helpful legislation, but the fact of the matter is we have to question on the merits of his policy and, you know, what he stands for and what kind of department he would put together. i don t think that s all the way broken through. here s an exchange. senator sessions had with senator dianne feinstein, who says the new ranking democrat on the judiciary committee. the issue of abortion and same-sex marriage. listen to this. i think we have that clip ready to go right now. you have referred to roe v. wade as one of the worst colossally erroneous supreme court decisions of all time. is that still your view? it is. i believe it s it violated the constitution and really attempted to set policy and not follow law. it is the law of the land. it has been so established and settled for quite a long time. it deserves respect, and i would respect it and follow it. five justices on the supreme court, the majority of the court, has established the definition of marriage for the entire united states of america, and i will follow that decision. jeffrey tubbin, our senior legal analyst. someone who is opposed to roe v. wade, very strongly, jeff, says roe v. wade, it is the law of the land. it has been so established. it has been settled for quite a long time, and then he said it deserves respect. similar words as far as same-sex marriage are concerned. that was significant coming from senator sessions. it is significant, but it also leaves a lot of room for the justice department to take and support steps that restrict the right to abortion. the obama administration justice department was very aggressive in saying to states that we do not believe under the constitution you can establish barriers to abortion rights in setting up rules for clinics, rules for doctors that make it difficult. this administration is going to be very different. it is true that the ultimate decision will not be challenged yet by this administration, but, remember, there is already one supreme court vacancy. one of the leading candidates for this vacancy is the attorney general of arizona of alabama, who followed jeff sessions as attorney general of alabama. now a federal judge, bill pryor. he, too, thinks roe v. wade was a terrible decision, and if he is nominated and confirmed, he can actually do something about it. yes, this attorney general if he is confirmed will not directly attack it, but the federal government can do a lot to restrict abortion rights and president-elect trump has made clear that s a priority for his administration. we have more analysis coming up from jeffrey tubbin. i want you to stand by. our senior political reporter manu raju is just outside. room where senator sessions has been testifying in this confirmation hearing. he has a special guest with him. manu. thanks. i m here with senator chris goose from delaware. about to ask. what do you want to hear from senator sessions? what i want to hear from senator sessions, clear and concise answers to a number of questions i ve got about his actions as alabama s attorney general, about his actions as u.s. senator. blocking bipartisan criminal justice reform efforts, blocking bipartisan efforts to outlaw the use of torture, and some of his historic involvement in the civil rights movement both in his home state of alabama and what he has done as a senator and what he might or might not do as attorney general. we ve had a very full morning. it s been many hours since we started at 9:30. he has answered a lot of questions. in my view the american people deserve a really full and fair hearing for their next potential next attorney general. this morning he also said that his critics, especially back in the 1980s, were trying to paint a characterure of him on the issue of race. do you buy that? do you think his critics were trying to paint a characterure of him back in the 1980s, and do you believe that he has a strong civil rights record? what matters to me is his voting record as a senator and the things i have been able to work with him and not been able to work with him on in the six years we ve served together in the senate. there were two issues we worked well together on. i appreciate that. there were many, many others where we weren t and where our values and priorities are quite different. you ve heard many different senators ask questions about immigration, about civil liberties, about civil rights, about russian cyber hacking, and about some of the claims made in the trump campaign. i look forward to continuing that line of questioning. before i let you go, are you leaning yes or no on jeff sessions right now if you were to vote for him, yes or no? the whole point of skrg a hearing that s going to last all day today and another hearing that will last all day tomorrow is to make up my mind after i have heard all the evidence. i have a number of questions based on his record and based on some of the things he said today. i have more questions, not fewer. senator, thanks for talking with us. back to you. all right. manu and senator chris kuhns. still to come, we re going to have much more on the confirmation hearing of senator jeff sessions. thoughts on a potential ban on muslims entering the u.s. also we re keeping a close eye on another hearing on capitol hill. this one regards the intel regarding the russia hack and we are just a few hours away from president obama s last big speech as president of the united states. we re live from chicago with a preview coming up next. you do all this research on a perfect car, then smash it into a tree. your insurance company raises your rates. maybe you should ve done more research on them. for drivers with accident forgiveness, liberty mutual won t raise your rates due to your first accident. and if you do have an accident, our claims centers are available to assist you 24/7. call for a free quote today. liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. welcome back. we re awaiting the turn of the confirmation hearing for senator jefferson boregard session iii, nominee for u.s. attorney general. we re keeping an eye on the intel briefing regarding the russia hacking. we ll update ow that throughout the hour. first, president obama, he is set to give his farewell address to the nation later on tonight in chicago. our white house correspondent michelle kazinski is joining us from the site in chicago. give us a preview, michelle. yeah, this is a good-bye as well as a homecoming. he is coming back to this city, his hometown, you could say, where his political career began. this is important to him, obviously. some people will line up 14 hours before this speech will begin. there s an anticipatory thing right now. this is something that he has been working on now for at least a week or so. it s been through several drafts. he wants to get this right. he doesn t want to focus on listing his accomplishments. whenever he makes the public address, but they want this to be different. they want it to be forward-looking and optimistic. when you look back to past presidents, farewell addresses, they always give a sort of cautionary advice to the next administration. george w. bush talked about continuing to fight for truth and justice. to keep up fiscal responsibility in the world. the white house says that president obama is going to follow that theme. he is going to look challenges that america faces moving forward, and he is going to give his share of advice on how best to face. they say that he is going to focus on american values, on fairness, justice, and diversity. still ahead, we re getting ready for the return of the confirmation hearings for senator jeff sessions. take a look at these live pictures coming in from the room. the senators will be going back in there momentarily. our special coverage continues right after this. of a trip to athens, greece. you accidentally booked a flight to athens, georgia. with travelocity, there s no fee to cancel or rebook most flights within 24 hours. travelocity® wander wisely™ it s set to resume momentarily. once it resumes, we ll, of course, resume our own live coverage. also ahead, our retired marine corps general john kelly is due before the senate homeland security committee and his nomination to become the next secretary of homeland security. that s scheduled to begin at 3:30 p.m. eastern. less than two hours from now. we ll have live coverage of that as well. and another key hearing is underway right now as well. the heads of the fbi, the cia, and the nsa. the national security agency. also the director of national intelligence. they are testifying before the senate intelligence committee on russian interference in the u.s. presidential election. right now i would like you to hear some of the sounds, some of the arguments that were made, the legal points from the hearing on the attorney general nominee, jeff sessions. let s begin with this. [ yelling ] wow. for the clan and what it represents and its hateful ideology. i insisted on maurice of the southern poverty law center, his lawsuit that led to the successful collapse of the klan, at least in alabama, the seizure of their building, at least for that period of time. i am not naive. i know the threat that our rising crime and addiction rates pose to the health and safety of our country. i know the threat of terrorism. i deeply understand the history of civil rights in our country and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our african-american brothers and sisters. i have witnessed it. we must continue to move forward and never back. during the course of the presidential campaign, you made a number of statements about the investigation of former secretary of state hillary clinton relating to her handling of sensitive emails and regarding certain actions of the clinton foundation. mr. chairman, it was a highly contentious campaign. i, like a lot of people, made comments about the issues in that campaign with regard to secretary clinton and some of the comments i made. i do believe that that could place my objectivity in question. i ve given that thought. i believe the proper thing for me to do would be to recuse myself from any questions involving those kind of investigations that involve secretary clinton that were raised during the campaign. we can never have a political dispute turn into a criminal dispute. that s not in any way that would suggest anything other than absolute objectivity. this country does not punish its political enemies, but this country insures that no one is above the law. do you agree that the issue of same-sex marriage is settled law? supreme court has ruled on that. the disents disented vigorously, but it was 5-4, and five justices on the supreme court, a majority of the court, has established the definition of marriage for the entire united states of america and i will follow that decision. you have referred to roe v. wade as one of the worst colossally erroneous supreme court decisions of all time. is that still your view? it is. i believe it s it violated the constitution and really attempted to set policy and not follow law. it is the law of the land. it has been so established and settled for quite a long time. it zebs respect and i would follow it. april ryan, the white house correspondent in washington bureau chief for american urban radio networks and cnn political commentators doug high and simone sanders, where pamela, let me start with you. i think there are probably a lot of viewers out there who heard senator sessions say that he, if attorney general, if he is confirmed, he would recuse himself from any matter regarding hillary clinton. a lot of people might have thought i thought this was all settings settled. i thought the case was closed regarding hillary clinton. what could he be talking about theoretically? we know the fbi director both came out and said they didn t find probable cause to prosecute. i think what he was referring to is the ongoing probe into the clinton foundation. we had previously reported that there was a preliminary inquiry into the clinton foundation that s been going on over the last several months, and doj did not give the authorization for a morrow bust investigation. it was sort of at a stand still before the election. we ll have to see what happens now under the new administration. i think that s what he was referring to. . i said he had not studied the hacking situation and was not necessarily up to speed on that. it seemed like to me he was trying to get that issue off the table as soon as possible in case donald trump was potentially watching this hearing. then he went on and as the hearing went on and said that he was aware of it, but i was struck by that, but, again, i was just struck by his he was utterly prepared for this. 20 years is a long time to prepare. he wanted right out of the gate to exactly go back to that moment from the 1980s. a very painful moment. he talked about a race much more openly than i thought. again, talking to just a few staffers up there. you know, this may be a party line confirmation. important to remember he needs only 50 votes, 51 votes, and republicans have those votes. you can bet at least a few democrats unless we learn something else may support him as well. and maybe presumably he is up to speed at least a little bit on the russian hacking. this theoretically could become part of his job if he is confirmed because the fbi is part of the investigation into whatever hacking took place, the intelligence community part of which is the fbi plays a role, and if there are any criminal charges that take place. this would be under attorney general jeff sessions. right. he was asked if these probes lead to further russian connections that even go to trump or his staff, you know. is he willing to follow there, and he said that he would. senator graham after learning that he had not really studied the briefing or had the . he asked you like the fbi and laid the trap that sessions would say of course i respect the fbi and they do a good job so that not only because the fbi has determined that the russians have hacked into this, but the hornet s nest he s backing up the full department. this hearing has resumed. let s listen in. i won t know unless you tell me that there s any sort of 15-minute break or anything, you let me know. thank you, mr. chairman. senator kulens. well kwom senatcome senator koch gra congratulations to you. the next attorney general of the united states will assume leadership of the justice department ton the he lels. cause for muslim ban, patrols, issues of a potential russian cyberattack, calls for mass deportations and chants at some rallies to lock her up and given the divisiveness of this election i think it is critical that the next attorney general be well-suited for this position and this time and as such i think a successful nominee has to be able to persuade this committee that he will act fairly and impartially and share in this. we ve worked well on state and local law enforcement issues, on the reauthorization of the child abuse act. i appreciate that partnership, but there s also been many issues on which we have disagreed. issues from immigration, civil liberties, criminal justice, voting rieghts and torture, andi am concerned on a number of these issues when we met last week so i am grateful to the committee and chairman that we are going to have a full hearing on all of these issues today. let me start with the time you were alabama attorney general and how you received direction from the department of justice. it was the only that handcuffed criminals to hitching posts. it was used for miprisoners bei perceived to being unwilling to participate whether serving on a chain gang and cuffed at both wrists at chest height sometimes at eight or nine hours without access to water or even a bathroom and you and the attorney general received letters telling you the alabama lea s use in both men s and women s prisons was unjustified, but as i understand the hitching posts continued to be used. and was not acted on to terminate it. the state of alabama was sued not just about hitching posts but chain gangs. the a man could be put on a chain gang for not making his bed, being shaved, shackled between eight chain of men and the case brought demonstrated were disproportionally affecting african-americans. in later litigation the practice of using the hitching post was called by an alabama judge the most painful and torture rous short of execution. and the united states supreme court said the hitching post was clearly unconstitutional when it was used in alabama. can you please tell me your view of using the hitching post in corrections and what action you would take today if these practices were restored? thank you very much, senator. that was an issue of the governor who campaigned and promised that prisoners should work and he was determined to make that happen. i believe the litigation occurred after my time as attorney general but i could be wrong and i will supplement the record for you. i believe the cases were after leaving, but the issue is what we have dealt with by congress and state legislatures. i think good employment of a prisoner is a healthy thing. i do not favor personally this kind of work, i think it should be more productive work, work to help the individual develop a discipline to use when they go on to private life after they leave prison. after the supreme court ruling i think it s crystal clear what the law is, that was disapproved and disallowed and found to be unconstitutional and i would absolutely follow that as attorney general. in your view, did it take a ruling by the u.s. supreme court to clarify this constituted torture, that it was not just bad corrections policy but substantively torture of prisoners? senator, i don t recall ever personally being engaged in the studying of the congressional issues at stake. it s legitimate for prisoners to work but they should be on decent conditions and i think it should be the kind of work that s productive and could actually lead to developing good habits. i ve heard some evidence on that subject, so i do not have a legal opinion about the case. have not studied the details of it. just to be clear what i was pressing you on there was the use of the hitching post which is a disciplinary measure that has been abandoned by every state but alabama it was used by the stocks centuries ago and tr struggling to me that it continued without challenge. and to address ways in which our criminal justice system is broken and the disparagement of incarceration that has happened over the last 30 years. we wrote about the importance of balance of criminal judge, senators cornyn, lee and flake have all addressed mandatory prison sentences and incarceration, and in my years you have opposed all of these buy partisan sentencing reforms, help me understand why you are against the revisitation of sentences that may have been overly harsh when initially imposed and help me understand whether you think it is ever proper for a prosecutor to charge anything less than the most serious charge possible. a lot of questions, so the sentencing act has one foundational requirement now and that s the minimum mandatories. the guidelines have been either made voluntary by the sentencing commission and the courts and the policies of the attorney general, so the thing that does stand in place are the min numb minimum mandatories, the minimums for sentencing offense, in 2001 it was opposed by the bush administration, a number of years later could have been done in 2001 when i made a speech in favor of it. made a speech saying what you are saying that it was disproportionally impacting our african-american community and we needed to fix it and eventually it was passed, so i have a record of doing that, number one. number two the guidelines were reduced the justice department has reduced its requirements, the justice department allows a prosecutor to present a case to the judge that doesn t fully reflect the evidence that they have in their files about a
katy tur picks things up. i m not sure that donald trump can speak fluent japanese. we have a team of reporters working on finding that out. we also have a team of reporters to break down donald trump s second bilateral meeting. that press conference that we justaw between donald trump and the prime minister of japan, shinzo abe. it has been a gruelling week for the new president. his major policy and major policy point, executive order struck down at least temporarily by the courts. that press conference we just saw touched on that. let s get our viewers up to speed with the highlights and then we ll talk all about it on the other side. i m curious about yesterday s ruling in the ninth circuit court. has it caused you to rethink your use of executive power and pow will you respond and will you sign new executive orders and perhaps a new travel ban? we are going to do whatever is necessary to keep our country safe. we had a decision which we think will be very successful with. it shouldn t have taken this much time because safety is primary reason, one of the reasons i m standing here today. you said earlier this week and i m quoting for you, you said i learned a lot in the last two weeks and terrorism is a far greater threat than the people of our country understand. but we re going to take care of it. based off of what you have learned and now knowing that your executive order is at least temporarily on hold, do you still feel as confident now as you have been at any point that you and the administration will be able to protect the homeland. we will have tremendous security for the people of the united states. we will be extreme vetting, which is a term that i developed early in my campaign. there are tremendous threats to our country. we will not allow that to happen. i can tell you that right now. as i said, we have a team of people to break this all down. let s go over to peter alexander in the white house and was in that news conference. peter, correct me if i m wrong, we did hear donald trump say there is going to be some sort of new security measure in place by next week. do we have any idea whatsoever what he could be talking about? we don t know exactly what that is. i think his word was that it will be put into place rapidly. here s what we do know. we do know following the ninth circuit court of appeals decision, this ruling basically keeping the stay in place right now on his executive immigration order that senior officials at the white house tell me before and after that ruling they have been having conversations about their path forward that include continuing to pursue this case further. they tell me they believe they will be proven correct on the merits of the order itself but separately they say that they are working on potentially signing another immigration executive order going forward in their words so it can be put into place very soon. that s one thing we ll watch right now. president trump today given this is a topic many americans have been focused on and given some of his past comments even last week on twitter he said basically if the court ruled against this that americans could never have the security that they deserve. he said he felt confident that americans would have the security they deserve and he basically said he had no doubt that he would prevail in federal court. let s go over to pete williams, our nbc justice correspondent, who is in washington. pete, what is the next step for president trump and if he does go over and amend this executive order as peter just mentioned, is there a way to do so to get around the courts? there are a number of options. one is to go to the supreme court. there doesn t seem to be any rush to do that. i m not even sure that s going to happen today if they decide to do that at all. a second possibility would goo the full ninth circuit court of appeals. doesn t seem to be much point in that. if they do pursue this in court as the president said, it would seem the logical thing would be the supreme court. they haven t, as i understand it, made a decision to do that yet. the other problem here is no matter even if they were able to persuade the u.s. supreme court to lift the stay and let the government enforce this order, there s another stay likely coming from the federal court here in alexandria, virginia, which heard argument on a preliminary injunction and lawsuit brought by virginia which makes virtually the same claims that the two states did that prevailed in the ninth circuit yesterday. one possible way to improve its legal standing would be to narrow the executive order. ninth circuit court of appeals in its ruling last night seem to point the way of this saying one of the reasons the states have a good case is that the executive order effects green card holders no matter what the white house said. that s what the executive orders said and people who have visas are visiting here faculty, students, people who want to travel for high-tech companies, fa families divided and said the executive order appeals to people overseas who want to come here from those seven countries for the first time, perhaps the executive order would have an easier time in court. i was reading the decision yesterday by the court and on page 27 or so there was the judges talked about the white house s defense. said they didn t have a defense and they didn t think they needed to have a defense. they didn t have evidence, excuse me, and they didn t think they needed it. they said we disagree. the white house was basically arguing that donald trump as president, commander in chief, has the authority, no matter what, to institute policies he believes are in the national security interest. is that what the decision was holding up or did the decision strike that down definitively? the decision rejected the claim that this wasn t reviewable. that it shouldn t be reviewed by a court and rooted that judgment in some very big cases, including the case in 2008 where george w. bush said, look, i can hold a bosnian foreign resident at guantanamo, and they don t get to come into u.s. courts. that was a very compelling argument. talk about law and politics. politically the notion that someone who is not an american who is in gitmo because they might have been a terrorist doesn t get to come use our courts and our benefits. it was politically appealing. the supreme court rejected that said even with national security, there s access to the court. that reviewable thing is something that has not obviously been accepted by the ninth circuit or even other courts. for example, they did get a positive ruling that s been talked about less by district court in boston but that also did review and take the case. it didn t dismiss it for lack of standing and didn t basically say this is such a differential item of national security we re not going to touch it at all. they lost that round but there s a lot of other strong arguments on their side when they get to the merits. i want to talk about something else that i saw not necessarily on the travel ban, but on donald trump s national security adviser, michael flynn, who came in, sat down in the front row of that news conference. this is coming amid some serious allegations that he s facing. he flat out denied that he spoke to the russian ambassador to the united states about sanctions before donald trump was inaugurated. he denied it. sean spicer denied it. reince priebus denied it. vp mike pence denied it. you see mike pence shaking hands with mike flynn a moment ago. is this a big deal? it s a very big deal because we may have a case where as andrea mitchell said just recently, we saw russian behavior do something unusual. after we expelled russian diplomats, we shutdown two big russian facilities that were weekend homes but operations but president obama said intelligence activities were going on there. russians didn t escalate. in the midst of that, we know that mike flynn made a series of phone calls and had exchanges and i suspect somewhere we have the transcripts of those calls because the russian ambassador is someone who would fall under the national security agency s watch list. i think that will be interesting to find out whether the signals intelligence on that activity produces transcripts that eventually see the light of day. and the big thing was we don t know whether mike pence lied to the american people or mike flynn lied to vice president pence. that s the key thing. the legal part of this is that people keep saying the logan act was never enforced. the logan act basically is a provision that says that if you are a u.s. citizen, you cannot go negotiate private deals with foreign governments particularly ones with whom we have an antagonistic relationship. this looks like a textbook violation of the logan act. politically though, how bad is this for this administration to have sean spicer, white house spokesman, vp mike pence and reince priebus chief of staff come out and say he never said it. he never discussed sanctions. are they going to pay a price in congress? are they going to pay a price in terms of trust with the american people? it s horrible for them obviously. the question of the price they re going to pay is different. first of all, trump voters are pro-russia as we ve seen. they aren t alarmed by this in the way you would normally expect. i think, if in fact, the problem goes back to flynn and not pence or staff, i can imagine them tossing them under the bus over this. the question of the transcripts which the new york times reported do exist will put to the test his words. was it a lie or not? we ll know pretty quickly. the spies are always listening. we always have former governor of new mexico, bill richardson. you spent quite a bit of time in the white house, not this particular white house. i know it s hard to talk about what goes on behind the scenes in this one. tell me in your experience if a high level adviser or the nsa frankly said something that was incorrect and maybe told the vp something that was incorrect and convinced sean spicer, the press secretary, if he did that, what sort of consequences normally would there be in place if it was found out that that was not true? well, there would be very severe consequences. i would think that the national security adviser would have to resign. i think what we re seeing here is a foreign policy, national security policy, in total disarray. the travel ban, damage control, of course there will be a plan b. this relationship with japan, damage control, it s a good summit. it s a very important u.s./japan relatiship that needs to be repaired and it s on its way. but lurking on all of this is this mistake that the president made in taking the phone call from the taiwanese and putting aside the one china policy, which has been the cornerstone of american foreign policy and now the chinese are wondering with abe is japan now the center of u.s. policy in asia? you know, there s a foreign policy national security decision making with the national security adviser now with a son-in-law. is he in charge of foreign policy. what about the secretary of state? the national security adviser. general flynn. what s his role? it shows that you can t make foreign policy by tweeting, by executive order, without sound preparation. what about the secretary of state? rex tillerson. he seems to be a capable person. is he involved in any of this? i m concerned. and dignitaries arrived, president obama wouldn t be at the door. it would be protocol in that white house that another individual would bring that foreign leader inside where they would meet the president in the oval office. similarly today during the news conference, president trump for the first ten minutes of shinzo abe s comments was not wearing the translation headset. he wasn t wearing it. we reached out to the white house for more detail about that. he did appear to be engaged in the conversation. it s not entirely clear how much of it he understood. tt was a big question that everybody had. exactly. pete williams, final word to you. let s talk more about the ban. just tell us what is next? well, as i said before, the next option is going to the supreme court. i don t know that they re going to do that. they don t seem to want to do it very quickly or possibly revising it. pete williams, thank you very much. our entire team, ton of people here to break this down for me. thank you all. next up, more on trump s national security adviser michael flynn, who is in the hot seat right now. did he actually break the law? the logan act you just heard steve mention. we ll talk to ambassador to russia michael mcfall. he joins me next. knowing where you stand. 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. parts a and b and want more coverage, guess what? you could apply for a medicare supplement insurance plan whenever you want. no enrollment window. no waiting to apply. that means now may be a great time to shop for an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan, insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. medicare doesn t cover everything. and like all standardized medicare supplement insurance plans, these help cover some of what medicare doesn t pay. so don t wait. call now to request your free decision guide. it could help you find the aarp medicare supplement plan that works for you. these types of plans have no networks, so you get to choose any doctor who accepts medicare patients. rates are competitive, and they re the only plans of theirind endorsed by aarp. remember - these planlet you apply all year round. so call today. because now s the perfect time to learn more. go long. a foreign diplomat. let s parse it in different layers. generally speaking in my view americans should have the right and should not be illegal to talk to foreign diplomats. that s the ambassador s job here in the united states of america. i just hosted him at stanford a couple months ago. that was my job when i was a u.s. ambassador to talk to government and civil society people. so generally speaking, we shouldn t start to make that a problem. that s my first point. second, obviously u.s. officials and u.s. nongovernment officials and oil company executives and former secretaries of state when they meet with russian officials probably are expressing different opinions about obama administration policy when i was in the government. they didn t agree with everything we did. sometimes they said that publicly. i have no doubt that they expressed that privately. that should be okay as well. you should have a right to have a different opinion from your government. what you shouldn t do is undermine u.s. policy in a direct way. especially when you re a member of the transition team. we have a norm that says one president at a time, and i don t know the law. i don t want to speculate about the logan act, but the norm that we should have one president at a time and not undermine a sitting president should be respected and that s what troubles me about the reporting in the washington post today. that s what could have happened. michael flynn talked to the russian ambassador. i know president obama put sanctions on you and expelled a number of russians from this country in retaliation for mettme meddling into this election but don t worrybout it and be cool because when we get to the white house, things will change. i don t have any independent confirmation that s what he said. the story is impressive in its reporting, a. b, another thing we should note, president putin did not react and did not respond as he usually does. that was most certainly my experience when i was in the government, was striking to me. i said that when he decided we won t expel those diplomats. that s not how they responded, for instance, back in 2000 when the bush administration expelled a bunch of diplomats in the beginning of their administration. the russians responded in kind here he had a different response. that s intriguing and different. former u.s. ambassador to russia michael mcfaul, thank you. and up next we discuss trump s stunning defeat in court over his travel ban and what happens next. fun in art class. come close, come close. i like that. 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are you hearing rumblings from them about this matter? at this moment, not yet. it s still new. on the fundamental question of the russians interfering with our elections, there is a uniform concern by members of congress that that is something that just cannot be brushed aside. we have to get right to the core of this issue. anything that flynn did to give assurances to putin through the russian ambassador that there would be relief given from the obama sanctions immediately after the trump administration was sworn in would go right to the core of whether or not mr. flynn is in fact qualified to be an adviser to a president of the united states on the most serious national security issues, which our nation is confronted it. senator, on the travel ban, the white house is looking at redrafting it according to nbc news reporting. what would it need to look like to get your approval? it would have to be constitutional. we operate in america under a rule of law, not a rule of men, not a rule of trump. these executive orders have to comply with constitutional protections. the fifth amendment due process protections. the 14th amendment due process protections. these are not things that just can be casually dismissed by any president. that s why these constraints are placed upon the books so that we have a system of checks and balances. they should just tear up this existing executive order. it is not going to ultimately be something that they can t implement. they should go back to the drawing table. make sure that it s not just a ban on muslims that goes right to the core of whether or not we are going to allow for the establishment of religious tests within our nation and try to craft something that is consistent with our national security interests but simultaneously reflects our highest constitutional goals to give equal protection and due process to people who come under the laws of our nation. senator, thank you so much for joining me on this busy friday. guys out there, did you see this? angry constituents grilling congressman jason chaffetz demanding he investigate president trump s conflicts of interest and that is not all. voters are upset about everything right now. the travel ban. the future of obamacare. so given that, can democrats seize on the backlash? congressman joe crawly of new york joins me next. evere plaque psoriasis. be the you who shows up in that dress. who hugs a friend. who is done with treatments that don t give you clearer skin. be the you who controls your psoriasis with stelara® just 4 doses a year after 2 starter doses. stelara® may lower your ability to fight infections and may increase your risk of infections and cancer. some serious infections require hospitalization. before treatment, get tested for tuberculosis. before starting stelara® tell your doctor if you think you have an infection or have symptoms such as: fever, sweats, chills, muscle aches or cough. always tell your doctor if you have any signs of infection, have had cancer, if you develop any new skin growths or if anyone in your house needs or has recently received a vaccine. alert your doctor of new or worsening problems, including headaches, seizures, confusion and vision problems these may be signs of a rare, potentially fatal brain condition. some serious allergic reactions can occur. do not take stelara® if you are allergic to stelara® or any of its ingredients. most people using stelara® saw 75% clearer skin and the majority were rated as cleared or minimal at 12 weeks. be the you who talks to your dermatologist about stelara®. glad forceflex. extra strong to avoid rips and tears. be happy, it s glad. i did. n t. hat? 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i would correct one thing on that. yes, hillary clinton didn t win democrats didn t win the house or senate. we picked up six seats in the house. i agree this was not a stellar year for us by any means but there were positive signs. i do think that much of what we re going to deal with is really the bombastic nature of this presidency and trump regime and olding our republican sideth aisle accountable. they are squeamish about this. beyond holding donald trump accountable, what sort of solutions are the democratic party proposing to get voters to their side? one thing that s hurting americans right now is college affordability. their ability to actually afford and to send the children to college. and really do that in a debt free way. democrats have plans. we have a plan to actually provide for debt free college for people who are struggling to really advance the way in this country. we re here to protect the affordable care act and expand those opportunities to make sure that anyone who wants insurance can have insurance. we want to have a portable life-long pension for people who have worked their whole lives that really need to retire in the middle class. that s what democratic party has stood for and has stood for and will stand for. that s why we re going to win the election in 2018. congressman joe crowly, democrat of new york. thank you for joining us. let s talk to brendan steinhouser. you know how the tea party movement works. you were there back in 2009. you saw how that enabled a wave of republicans to win in congress and ultimately for donald trump to win the white house. how do the democrats use that sort of same anger, that same grassroots frustration to their advantage? it s going to be tough. they do have a bad map in 2018 and a lot of senators who are going to be competing in 2018, democrats, who are in trump states. so they ve got a really tough road ahead. i think they really have to pick and choose what issues they focus on and go back to the pocketbook issues and democrats are going to have to rethink their message a little bit on things like taxes and spending and regulations on small businesses. those types of issues will be front and center in 2018 and they have to appeal to small business owners and moms and pops of the world and middle class americans who had been squeezed and a big challenge ahead in 2018. donald trump has only been president for three weeks. it feels like it s been so much longer. we re seeing angry town halls and protests around the country. is that sort of grassroots anger, that sort of grassroots energy sustainable for long enough for the democrats to use it to their advantage in 2018 even though the map is not necessarily in their favor? sure. it can be. they ve got a lot of work to do. they need to provide training and support to their activists. they need to get some wins. if they continue to ask activists to go out there and call senators and congressmen and keep losing vote after vote and losing on nomination fights, people may get burned out and say i won t pay as close of attention. they have to come up with some wins whether on the local level or at the state level to convince activists that they can win because otherwise you can see people get demoralized and leave the process. we did that well in the tea party movement was providing those small wins and motivation and continuing to train people and teach them how to be effective as activists and also in elections. personal note, you have a very cute baby. i saw your wife posted on instagram of her watching the television the other day when you were on. congratulations. thank you. i appreciate it. let s check today s microsoft pulse question. we have been asking should congressional committee investigate kellyanne conway s comments about ivanka trump s clothing like. 85% of you say yes. 15% say no. you have time to vote, go to pulse.msnbc.com to let your voice be heard. next up, the ucla view of trump s travel ban. where the fight goes from here. nosy neighbor with a keen sense of smell. glad bag, full of trash. what happens next? nothing. only glad has febreze to neutralize odors for 5 days. guaranteed. even the most perceptive noses won t notice the trash. be happy. it s glad. befi was active.gia, i was energetic. then the chronic, widespread pain drained my energy. my doctor said moving more helps ease fibromyalgia pain. he also prescribed lyrica. fibromyalgia is thought to be the result of overactive nerves. lyrica is believed to calm these nerves. for some, lyrica can significantly relieve fibromyalgia pain and improve function, so i feel better. lyrica may cause serious allergic reactions or suicidal thoughts or actions. tell your doctor right away if you have these, new or worsening depression, or unusual changes in mood or behavior. or swelling, trouble breathing, rash, hives, blisters, muscle pain with fever, tired feeling, or blurry vision. common side effects are dizziness, sleepiness, weight gain and swelling of hands, legs and feet. don t drink alcohol while taking lyrica. don t drive or use machinery until you know how lyrica affects you. those who have had a drug or alcohol problem may be more likely to misuse lyrica. with less pain, i can be more active. ask your doctor about lyrica. 21 daysown for the trump administration and all of this happened just in the last week. really mostly yesterday. trump lost his travel ban appeal. we learned michael flynn may have lied about russia. kellyanne conway may have broken the law and now we re ending the week the same which it started. a political power fight over immigration. donald trump s third week in office began with a punch in the gut. a judge in seattle blocked his travel ban only a week after the executive order was signed. judge robart s decision effectively immediately, effective now, puts a halt to president trump s unconstitutional and unlawful executive order. the president, a self-proclaimed counterpuncher, hit back in a flurry of tweets calling the judgment of the so-called judge ridiculous and telling americans to blame the courts, not the commander in chief, if something bad happens. from there, things got worse. sunday the west wing requested the ban be restored. it was denied. his trademark executive order was losing and so was his team. patriots down, trump left his super bowl party early but while the pats came back to win in overtime, the president s fight wasn t over. a third straight week of unrest. everything that he s done over the past ten days is amazing. we re very excited about every single executive order. but the ban wasn t it. trump also faced bipartisan backlash for saying this to bill o reilly. do you respect putin? putin is a killer. we got a lot of killers. do you think our country is so innocent. that was just sunday. trump needing a win, got three by the end of the week. devos, price and sessions. i, jeff sessions, to solemnly swear tensions so high during sessions confirmation that senator warren was silenced for reading the words of coretta scott king. is there an objection? i appeal the ruling. objection is heard. the senator will take her seat. and that was about as good as the news got for the white house. the temporary fate of the executive order was still looming. are you arguing that the president s decision in that regard is unreviewable? yes. opening questions of where the case could wind up. supreme court you think? we ll see. for trump, what the court s intent was. i don t want to call a court bias. we haven t had a decision yet. but courts seem to be so political. backed in a corner and looking for a distraction, the president lashed out at his favorite enemy. it s gotten to a point where it s not even being reported and in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn t want to report it. once again, raising the issue of conflict of interest. kellyanne conway in trouble with the house oversight committee. go by ivanka s stuff is what i will tell you. i hate shopping. i m going to get some myself today. sean spicer not doing himself any favors in the press conference. this is silly. next. thank you. you ve asked your question. thank you. potentially giving melissa mccarthy some new material. okay. we re going to have to wait and see whether or not melissa mccarthy shows up tomorrow on snl. we don t have to wait for more talk on this travel ban. that s going to continue to be a fight no doubt about it. joining me now, lee, you have a lot of experience in this. you ve been doing it for years and fighting the government for decades now. specifically on immigration issues. do you think that there s a way they can redraft the order that would make it constitutional and acceptable? right. i do not think that any ban they would put in place would be acceptable or legal. if they talk about something radically different, just different vetting procedures, that s one thing. if they re talking about a complete ban, especially one that s focused on muslim countries, no, i don t think any redrafting can be done. if they do redraft it and it s exempting green card holders, providing due process provisions and really refining and defining what it means when it comes to religion, is that something that you could potentially find more palatable if they talk about the national interest? right. there s no question the president should be protecting national security. what we object to is the overbroad nature of this and just sweeping everyone in. some of our clients worked for the u.s. military but they were swept in. the other myth out there is that if you exempt green card holders, everything is fine. it s not just green card holders because the religious discrimination affects everyone. could they add due process and take out religious discrimination, we talk about a different thing we would have to look at. i don t think the redrafting is going to remove the taint of religious discrimination that s gone on. there s a good chance that this is going to go to the supreme court potentially. donald trump said that he would welcome that if it needed to happen. are you prepared is the other side prepared to argue this in front of four on four panel. obviously they don t have their ninth judge in place at the moment. you know, we re definitely prepared. i think you see everyone geared up. it s not just the lawyer but the community groups and everyone. we ll do whatever we need to do. i don t know that they re going to take to the supreme court right now especially in this early posture. if they do, we re going to be prepared. one of the amazing things is that when i walked out of court after arguing that first muslim ban case the saturday night, there were a thousand people out there. that s an unbelievable confluence of community groups, leaders and lawyers. we re in a real civil rights moment not just lawyers going into court making technical arguments and not just protests but everyone combining. we ll definitely be ready if they do it. what do civil rights extend to? if you re an immigrant trying to get into this country not yet here but you re working at it, do our american civil rights, our american beliefs and ideals extend to you trying to get in or just once you get to this soil? if you re outside the country, do you have a legal right to come in automatically? no, of course not. no one is arguing that. but can the u.s. government select who they re going to bring in by race, religion, no. that s what we object to. if congress is going to limit the number of immigrants we re going to bring in in a given year putting aside refugees which is a separate thing, that s fine. but if it starts selecting people on the basis of region, that s where aclu objects. thank you. next hour, the man who possibly has the answer for how president trump can salvage his travel ban harvard law professor joins kate snow. we ll be right back. american express open cards can help you take on a new job, or fill a big order or expand your office and take on whatever comes next. find out how american express cards and services can help prepare you for growth at open.com. bounty is more absorbent,mom per roll find out how american express cards and services so the roll can last 50% longer than the leading ordinary brand. so you get more life per roll. bounty, the quicker picker upper parts a and b and want more coverage, guess what? 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here is the clip in question with janine pirro of fox news for an interview to air saturday. are you moving so quickly that your communications department cannot keep up with you. yes. that s true. what do we do about that? we don t have press elliot necessary found it so hard the believe that he would have reassured the president that he is somehow not under investigation note once, and certainly not three times. let s bring our kickoff panel on the, the veteran new york times chief white house correspondent peter baker is with us, who happens to be our newly minted msnbc political analyst. vivian solana, and matthew nussbaum. good evening to you all. peter, i was watching you on live television slight after 4:00 p.m. eastern time. micolle wallace played the clip. that i can t talk about. i won t talk about that. all i want is for comey to be honest. i m sure he will be, i hope. you reacted in real time. i m not going to talk about that. you think this is a very serious moment right there. i do. it s very striking. it s been 40 years since we had a president that we knew of anyway who wasrd recording on any regular basis, tape recording his conversations. there is a reason why other presidents haven t done it. because it didn t work out well for richard nixon, obviously. the idea that he is putting out there is either he is in fact taping conversations with the fbi director of all people or he is bluffing or misleading in order to intimidate somebody who might have conferring that he considers to be damaging i guess. either scenario is stunning i think for any white house. vivian, this would appear to be a second straight interview done perhaps outside the authority and track of the press shop in the west wing. lester holt, and then janine pirro in two straight interviews the president has made news n. three separate depictions of the west wing, i have read about a dark place this week a place where people who did not want to encounter the president had their doors closed. what can you speak to the mood him since the very, very beginning, relative and closest advisors, the original staff of his campaign his inner circle is getting smaller. he is apparently getting very, very tense with the situation that they can t sort of shake off the whole russia allegation. so it s really an interesting time. and definitely can be felt, the tension, throughout the white house. and matthew, let s talk about the comey angle, respectfully he would insert the word integrity in every sentence he utters publicly if he thought he could. he has now been accused of what the president has ascribed to him, and that is saying three times, reassuring the president, you are not the subject of an investigation. let s talk about, call it comey s revenge and how you think that s going to play out now? well, basically what we have is donald trump s credibility versus that of james comey. i m not sure if that s a fight donald trump wants to pick. james comey, for all the controversy he has been a part of, remains a respected figure certainly among the fbi and among law enforcement and among some on capitol hill and the idea that he s the one pushing these false narratives and the it s the president who is the one delivering the truth on this seems a little dubious to a lot of people, all the more so because the president has been acting so defensive making this veiled or not so veiled threat about recording their conversations. and then of course the quote you showed, someone close to comey saying i hope there are tapes. so, again, in a credibility battle i m not sure if that s one that trump comes out on top. peter we have been talking 16 weeks now of this administration that the president is not, shall we say an institutionalist. he is not among those of us who have been steeped in history in the ways of the presidency because we have learned about it and find it interesting. he came from another world. does that explain the fact that he apparently did not know what his words in neither confirming nor denying recording the kind of scrutiny that the brief papers with janine pirro would bring? i think you need to remember this is the first president who never serve admin in an elected office and never been in the military. this is all new to him. it is a strength and a weakness. a strength obviously because people who support him and love the fact he is shaking up the system and when they see everybody pile on like washington is doing they get defensive and say that s because he is trying to drain the swamp. it s also a weakness in that he doesn t understand where the pitfalls are like politicians would. most politicians understand hinting at the idea of a secret taping system would raise echos you don t want to raise. most administrations try to avoid it. now it s unavoidable. and who does he listen to. is there anybody out there who can get to him and make him understand why there might be consequences to the thing he does on twitter and in these interviews? the answer seems to be no at the moment. vivian, what steps were taken to further enhance the trump legislative agenda today or at any time this week? it is a hard to say, a lot of the communications have been surrounding this issue about firing director comey. as far as any of the major items on the agenda that he is trying to carry out sort of further his health care bill, you know, the tax plan, things like that, everything is sort of they are still rolling but there isn t a lot of attention because so much energy and effort is going into this whole issue of director comey being abrupt lee fired and the russia investigation. i just want to point out something that peter said earlier. it s really important to remember that again, is it a bluff or there really evidence of something secret? this is at same president who threw out serious wiretapping allegations against president barack obama. yet we have never seen those claims substantiated. again we have a situation now where there is so much energy going into these claims that have no evidence to back them up. it s engaging people on the hill. ow lawmakers are being engaged where you are having to reopen investigations and dedicate so many resources into these issues. and then president trump gets really angry when they get so much attention. it s sort of a vicious cycle we are leading. that s where we are now. it s fascinating to watch, but also very troubling for a lot of people who do want to see him fulfill his campaign promises. our whole panel is going the stand by. we are going to fit a brief break in here and continue our conversation. coming up, new reporting tonight on former trump campaign chairman paul manafort. former national intelligence director james clapper weighs in on the russia investigations that as we mentioned keep dogging this white house. we are back with all of that right after this. show me the top hot 100 artist. they give awards for being hot and 100 years old? we ll take 2! [ laughing ] xfinity x1 gives you exclusive access to the best of the billboard music awards just by using your voice. the billboard music awards. sunday, may 21st eight seven central only on abc. there is new reporting from the wall street journal about the sweeping russia investigation of it says, quote, the justice last month requested. bag records of paul manafort as part of a widening probe related to donald trump s former campaign associates and whether they concluded with colluded with russia forgive me in interfering with the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the matter. manafort has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and in the past he said any suggestion that he coordinated with russia is unfounded. when the white house talks about the russia investigation he often points to comments made by former director of national intelligence james clapper. in march he told chuck todd to his knowledge there was not the intelligence to definitively answer whether there were improper contacts between the trump campaign and russian officials. today andrea mitchell asked him about that again. it s not surprising or out of or abnormal that i would not have known about the investigation or each more importantly the content of that investigation. so i don t know if there was collusion or not. i don t know if there s evidence of collusion or not. nor should i have in this particular context. our panel remains with us. peter, vivian, and matthew. matthew, we ll begin with you. on this week where we had the so-called two sergeis in the oval office, where we had the russian news agency wandering around the oval office and taking what stood for hours as the official photoers. henry kissinger shows up in the oval office and the man running the russian investigation is fired. this is about optics. is it another lost week to this matter. this week was a disaster for the white house. no other way to put it. from the mess anning perspective they were all over the map. they had the president undercutting communications staff, his own vice president. tweeting out this morning that his press secretary can t always be trusted to give accurate information. and you have all this when they could be pushing health reform in the senate, when they could be laying the ground work for tax reform and they could be preparing the president for his foreign trip. instead we have another week consumed by russia and with this wall street journal report you are referencing it s more of a drip, drip, we know the president hates the story but its a not going away. and it doesn t go away when you fire the person leading the investigation. as one wag put it tonight, how many coal mines were reopened today? zero. peter, among your travels covering four presidents you were also the former moscow bureau chief. how much of this, given what you learned about the soviet and then later russian mentality, how much of this is deja vu and how much does it inform your reporting? it s deja vu. it s not surprising that the russians would try to meddle in the affairs of other countries. it s part and parcel for what they have done for many years. there is a feeling on their part they are simply retaliating. this blame us, blame the united states for meddling in their neighbor when ukraine and the ballotics and georgia and so forth. and even the election of vladimir putin. they blame hillary clinton for rousting out protesters in the streets. they said that was hillary clinton personally doing that. that s one reason why you saw them take off after her in last year s election. it is deja vu. it s surreal seeing it now on this end as opposed to that end. that does not mean there is necessarily links with the trump people. that s still something that s an uncertain part for us. we are still waiting for real conclusions by investigators on that. vivian i m guessing the sunday morning shows will be something to watch. we may have some democrats actually passing out from hyper ventilation over this. it started today. they just can t believe they may get a shot at the possibility of recorded phone conversations. what is next week supposed to feature? next week is jam packed actually from the beginning. we have visits from the crown prince of the you united arab emirates. we have a visit from the president of turkey, which is going to be a very significant visit because obviously he is a very controversial figure. he is basically just won a referendum to gain more power, monopolize more power in his country. then eventually his president will make his way to the middle east, saudi arabia, israel, and europe for his first foreign trip. that was supposed to be very significant. this week, in fact, was supposed to be a planning week for him. and that s why the white house originally said he was going to scale back his public appearances today was to prepare for the foreign visits. unfortunately he has been consumed by other matters as we ve seen. it s going to be interesting how this plays out. even with sergey lavrov coming to down this week a lot of reporters asked him what do you think of the firing of james comey and he joked and said oh, my god was he fired? he kind of blew it off but i m sure a number of foreign leaders overseas are going to be asked because there are a lot of eyes on this situation. russia and the united states have been basically in a struggle for power, especially in the middle east, for many, many years now. the syria situation is a very significant one and on the mind of a lot of people. a lot of people want the know is he going to give russia a free pass or not? this is not something that is just impacting washington or the united states. all eyes around the world on this issue and everybody is going to be asking about it. three terrific journalists to start us off late on a friday night as we put trump administration week 16 in the books. peter, vivian, matthew, thank you all for coming on with us tonight. coming up after our next break, jim comey in his own words and in the eyes of his coworkers will be joined by two former colleagues of his when the 11th hour continues. hey allergy muddlers one of my daughter s said dad the problem is you are the man. i thought that was a compliment. and i said thank you. she said i dopamine that as a compliment. you are the man, who would want to work for the man? i get that but the truth is if you know what this man and woman were like, you would want to be part of this. hey guys thank you for hard you have been working. you have been killing it. you are one of the things that i have in mind when i tell the american people look, don t freak out, right, let us do our work. thank you for that. that was from a show called inside the fbi on u.s.a. network that airs thursdays at 10:00 p.m. and that comes close to portraying the james comey a lot of his associates know. this is what donald trump said about james comey yesterday. look, he s a showboat. he s a grand stander. the fbi has been in turmoil, you know that. i know that. everybody knows that. comments like that from president trump about james comey cannot sit well with his defenders or the more than 36,000 employees and the 56 field offices of the fbi. we learned yesterday from comey s replacement, the acting director andrew mccabe what the vast majority of rank and file employees at the bureau in his view have deep and positive connection with comey. many have quietly replaced their facebook photos with a photo of their old boss as a show of solidarity. james comey and as we mentioned a source close to comey told nbc s ken dlanian he hopes there are tapes saying that would be perfect. joining me, stacey plastic ket. importantly, she was senior counsel for then deputy attorney general james comey. with me, ron has kell, former 30-year veteran of the fbi and former assistant director at the bureau. welcome to you both. stacey, we ll begin with you. a lot of the president s narrative n plain english, didn t sound like the james comey people knew at the bureau. the desire to have dinner with his boss, for starters. but then asking to stay on four years into a ten-year term. and then reassuring the president he wasn t under investigation. did you have that same reaction? that does not sounds like the james comey that those of us who worked with him at the deputy of justice during his tenure as deputy attorney general know. james comey was a man of you had most integrity. almost to a fault. and we saw that earlier this summer with the way that he conducted himself, may in some instances seem to have overstepped the line. but i think that was based on his belief in his public servitude and his idea of having an honest and open dialogue with the people of america to whom he feels the greatest bit of gratitude and servitude towards. in your day job as a member of house oversight, what was your reaction to hear there may be recorded conversations? well, you know, back in april, myself and congressman ted lou as well as kathleen rice all being former federal prosecutors wrote a letter to the department of justice requesting that a special prosecutor be put in place because of what is now happening. there cannot be any seeming politicizing of this investigation which is exactly what is happening. and the notion there would be tapes are something that the oversight committee, both the ranking member and i think think that chairman chafe, et cetera would want to dig into at this time. ron, i have referred to former director comey as kinds of an elliot necessary character, affectionately. as a catholic, i can also say he has the bearing of a member of the college of cardinals. talk about the director comey you knew and worked under. and talk about the hit his reputation has taken this week. well, first, like stacey said, i saw a person of impeccable credentials, trustworthiness, smart as a whip, so experienced. i had said to many people when he was the nominee that the fbi is getting a rock star. and i fully believe that and when i came to work with him, you know, i saw the human being as well as this incredibly capable boss. you know, i ve told others a store on when we had the government shutdown when i was assistant director. his secretary called me the first day that the non-essential employees were allowed to come back to work. and i got a call were the director s secretary asking me saying mr. hosko the director would like to come down and visit the criminal investigative division. he came down with, you know, one support employee with him and walked the floors of my division, several hundred strong, meeting in small groups with people, apologizing to those who had been sitting out as unessential or non-essential, and just saying thank you for what you do. and he has done that on a regular basis, with sick agents, agents who have put great cases on the boards can get a call out of the blue from jim comey telling them what a great job they have done and what an asset to the organization. you know, i think what his dismissal to me and i think to a lot of my former colleagues is nothing less than obscene. this is a great american, a patriot, a public servant who felt like this was the pinnacle of his public service career. to me and to a lot of other people is a disgrace the way this has been handled. stacey, yes. brian did. yes. we have the remember this is the james comey who was willing in the bush administration to stand up against the white house, during the torture memos. and with that was able to ask his staff each to prepare their resignations and willing to leave the job. the idea of him begging to keep his job as the fbi director doesn t ring true to most of us who worked with him. but i think we need to really the idea of him begging to keep his job as the fbi director doesn t ring true to most of us who worked with him. but i think we need to really expand outside of just james comey and really look at what this investigation is about. we need to allow special prosecutor be put in place so that the work of congress can still go on now. you know, we talk about the investigations that are happening, the intel. of course tell continue to have their investigations, but they cannot do that if in fact those agencies that requiring information from are tainted by invex from the white house and other political individuals trying to steep into it. we are trying to do work in congress. my district, the virginia islands is looking for equity. we have issues of health care, tax reform, infrastructure, the growth and the future of our young people. and that s this is a distraction from the american people. whatever the outcome, no american is going to believe and feel confident in it unless a special prosecutor is put out in place. the honorable stacey plastic ket gets to go home to her district in a beautiful place, the virgin island. come on down. don t tempt me i ll be down there for breakfast. and veteran fbi agent john hosko. thank you for appearing with us. the question arises, can conservatives be pro trump in this environment or are they more successful being the anti anti-trump? we ll explain with charlie sykes right after this. they are totally suffering from a syndrome. trump derangement syndrome. the democrat party is going bananas, completely totally unhinged on the road to literal insanity. the democrats are convinced the russians stole the election. conservative media reaction to the firing of fbi director comey. more broadly, many republican lawmakers avoided commenting on the firing this week. according to nate silvers 538, of 52 republicans in the senate 25 either gave an ambiguous reaction or gave no statement at all. only a quarter of them defended the president s decision. similar story in the house. they have been home on an 11-day recess. here with speaking paul ryan today wbr id= wbr23300 /> shielding questions on the firing. i m not going to comment on their private conversations. i ll let the president speak for himself. /b> the president made his decision. wbr-id= wbr23425 /> there is nothing i can do about that. i m going to focus on what i control, which is my job. joining me from wisconsin conservative commentator and msnbc contributor, charlie sykes. his new op ed in the new york times is titled, if liberals hate him then trump may be doing something right. in a moment we will make him account for that headline. and jeremy alter, msnbc analyst. charlie, what is your central holding about what conservativism has been replaced with? it s been replaced by this viralent loathing for the president, anti-anti-trumpism. they have three choices. you are going to have some people who go to the mat to defend president trump. sean hannity. the never trumpers who will break with him. but the reality is this is a difficult moment for republicans as long a as the republican base is supporting trump. the safe space is not to necessarily support or defend trump.it s to change the subject and attack his critics. in some of the sound bytes you play, notice how they pivot. it s not about trump. we are not going to defend trump. but let s beat up on liberals. it s talk about the hypocrisy of the liberals. things that make the liberals heads explode. that s what the conservative media is talking about right now. that means rather than focusing on ordered liberty it s turned into a party dedicated to trolling the leif. whatever upsets liberals is good enough for them. i m not sure that s a winning streep. jonathan, the three of us are of a similar age. having said that, when you say the word tapes, when you indicate recordings of private conversations, it gets your attention. is this sustainable? and how does this end? well, i personally don t believe there are tapes. i could be wrong. but i think that what will happen is pretty soon the conservative media, after it s clear that trump was just saying this in order to, you know, bluff and hold some cards over comey, that the conservative media will say, see, trump was punking them, he punked the liberal media, the gullible liberal media believed there were tapes. this is out of the trump playbook. he will make it seem lying he has something on one of his political enemies. i find it hard to believe that trump so stupid as to keep tapes. charlie, we do talk about him, the plight term is anti-institutionalist, someone who came to office not with the reading and learning background in the trappings of government and the machining of government that most do because he came from another world. that s why people so often look at him and listen to him and say you can t say that. or if you say that, you will exposure entire press team s efforts this week. if you say that, you will invite subpoenas from the hill and it keeps happening. yeah, and even by the standards this president, this really has been a stunning series of days. look, we know that in fact as you point out that he is he has displayed his ignorance about, you know, the constitutional form of government and about the norms. we have seen how erratic he is. we have seen how he is unburdened by much allegiance to the truth. you have to wonder whether or not the president is too addled to know how corrupt he looks or his behaviors that become. we are at the point now where this is no longer a parlor game. what we are seeing i think it is a dawning on a lot of people and a lot of republicans are genuinely horrified or ought to be horrified by this. we are actually seeing a president coming out and all but acknowledge he is engaging in the obstruction of justice of that s what is so breath taking about it. because you want to say do you understand what you just said, you are threatening somebody, you are implying you engaged in nixonian taping, you are trying to blackmail the head of the fbi who was in charge of investigating your campaign? so we are seeing openly something that none of us i think ever imagined we would see out of president. jonathan, something i repeat all the time. republicans were the heros of watergate. right. having said that, who are you looking to these days. well, i think we have to look to john mccain and lindsey graham. maybe ben sass richard burr. richard burr, ben sass and some of the others are like charlie, principled conservatives. this is a character test for the republican party. it s going to go on for a while. i think a lot of them are failing the character test. they are putting their integrity and principles in blind trust. it s about one of the only blind trusts that we have in washington right now. but they are making their loyalty to this man, this very flawed, impetuous, incompetent, and you know, possibly incriminated man the bases of their political future. it is a very riskly political strategy for them. and i can t there won t be some others who will rise as barry goldwater and others did during watergate and come out of this looking good because they went to conscious and principles over partisanship and loyalty. the top of their ticket goes into the weekend at 38% pop layer. charlie sykes, jonathan alter, gentlemen, our thanks for appearing with us. coming up after thebreak on the week len rehessinger is invited to the oval office, they might be looking for micro phones in the oval office. back with more after this. getscreenednow.org it only takes a minute to take care of yourself, and nothing rhymes with org . programs regularly scheduled for this time will not be seen today in order that we might bring you the following nbc news special report. watergate, senate hearings. romantic titles back then. that was july 16, 1973, very important day in american presidential history, important because that s the day we learned from the senate testimony of former nixon white house aid alexander butterfield. mr. butterfield, are you aware of installation of listening devices in the oval office of the president? i was aware of listening devices, yes, sir. if i can move on to telephones. are you aware of the installation of any devices on any of the telephones, first of all in the oval office? yes, sir. unbelievable moment. fast forward to today and the president either hinting or bluffing or threatening to have recordings of private conversations in the white house. for more tonight we are joined by michael and among his many works and nine books on presidents two books on the recorded conversations of president lyndon johnson taking charge and reaching for glory and point of personal privilege but if you buy the audio books you get the johnson white house tape recordings as narrated by michael beshlaus. there is a scene when nixon comes to the white house. he is going to move in. and johnson is showing him around the place and they both get down on their knees. what did johnson want to show richard nixon? there is nothing i can say that is going to match that build up. thanks for the kind word, by the way. what happened was that johnson was showing nixon around the private rooms of the upstairs of the white house and says come into my bedroom. johnson gets down on his knees and as the story is told sort of almost crawled under his bed and nixon wondered what is going on here. johnson apparently pulled out a lot of wires and said these lead to my taping system. dick, you really should have a recording system the way that i do records my telephone calls, records even here in my bedroom, records oval office conversations. when nixon went home he said that s the last thing i want to do is record all of these conversations. the second i m president pull all of this stuff out. then about a little more more than a year in he began to think the idea was a good one because nixon was worried the people who work for him might take all sorts of credit for things that nixon felt that he deserved so nixon felt that to record all of this conversations essentially wall to wall because it was not a system with a switch as johnson had. he could use this to protect himself. the early system used a dictaphone recording mechanism. it was pretty primitive. today the president says tapes in quotes meaning recordings perhaps. michael, i know lbj wanted in part for leverage to remind people what they had said or promised to him over the phone he always had the transcript if he needed it. if this current president is recording private conversations in the white house other than making himself a huge subpoena target, is there anything wrong with it? is there anything illegal? illegal is a question. in terms of shattering precedence and shattering things that presidents have been doing before ever since that day that you just showed with alexander butterfield in july of 1973, nixon had to immediately stop taping and pull out the system and later presidents have all said i will never do such a thing because it reminds people of nixon who behaved badly, but it violates people s civil liberties to record conversations with the president that are supposed to be private without their knowledge. and the other thing is that presidents have felt that if people even had the suspension that when they go into the oval office or talk to a president on the telephone that they are being taped they are not going to give a president unvarnished advice and that will wind up hurting the president. our thanks for joining us late on a friday night. to our viewers to hear what the recordings sound like the books are taking charge, reaching for glory. try the audio books. thank you. a final break for us. when the boss makes news on twitter in the morning what do you say at the news briefing in the afternoon as the 11th hour continues. you just said a minute ago that what president was but you stood at the podium and said the tweet speaks for itself. when do you decide when a president s tweets, when his words are open to interpretation and when they stand on their own? last thing before we go that was back in march hallie jackson ask ag question a lot of us have had about the white house press shop and that is how do you decide who to defend what the president says on twitter and when to deflect. sean spicer has held 49 press briefings. in 31 of those there have been questions about what the president on twitter including two biggies that he was somehow wire tapped by president obama and that there might be a recording of his dinner conversation with james comey. throughout sean spicer has relied almost exclusively on a go-to response. i think the president s tweet speaks clearly for itself. i think the tweet is pretty clear. i think the president made clear in his tweet that he was referring to the fake news. the president was clear that it was wire tapping. i will say the president has tweeted about this and is clear he believes there is surveillance. i think the tweet speaks for itself. sometimes you don t have to read too much into it. referring to the tweet. the president has nothing further to add on that. he simply stated a fact. the tweet speaks for itself. i m moving on. just today comedic national treasure melissa mccarthy was spotted driving her sean spicer podium all over the streets of new york. it is clear she is hosting saturday night live less than 24 hours from now. that is it for us for tonight. happy mother s day.
not just a friend, just a good guy, a friend for a very long time. that s what the president said. and the two of course do seem particularly close in photo after photo. here they are greeting the tesla ceo, elon musk, in the state dining room as trump signs an executive order about the oil pipeline industry. and this, trump speaking on the phone with vladimir putin, and who is there? steve bannon. and then when they worked together in the white house, check this out, their offices, steps apart. in fact the only person who sat closer to the president of the united states than bannon was president trump s son-in-law, jared kushner. even the official chief of staff, reince priebus, sat farther away from president trump. and of course as trump knows well from his real estate days, power is all about location, location, location. slamming bannon, though, was only part of the white house operation today. the press secretary tried to rip the book itself and its author, michael wolff. could you just give a few examples of things that have been said in this book that are false, that you would like to set the record straight on? there are numerous mistakes, but i m not going waste my time or the country s time going page by page talking about a book that s complete fantasy and just full of tabloid gossip, because it s sad, pathetic, and our administration and our focus will be on moving the country forward. okay. it is not complete fantasy. i want to make it clear, we have not independently corroborated many of the details in the bombshell book, but let s just take two examples. two of the people who are in the book are verifying part of what s in it. trump supporter anne colter confirmed her quote to the washington examiner. she said to trump nobody is telling you this but you can t, you just can t hire your children. and janice minn said everything she knew about an intimate d wolff said he didn t know who that was. not true. we ve heard donald trump talk about john boehner for years. but on the whole this has rocked the white house, this has overtaken their agenda. they wanted to start 2018 talking about immigration. republican leaders i m told are going to camp david this weekend to talk about the agenda. on the same day this book is coming out. so the president will be meeting tomorrow at camp david at the very moment this book is coming out. so the reality here is in terms of winning or losing, i don t think we know the answer to that yet. one thing is clear, the president had a close connection to steve bannon. we ll see if that s ever rebuilt or not. at this point it seems unlikely, erin. that is for sure. of course another thing that is for sure is this book is a best seller. outfront tonight, the white house deputy press secretary. i appreciate your time coming on to talk about this and give your side of the story. you heard sarah sanders downplaying the relationship between president trump and steve bannon today. the reality, you just saw it. bannon was in the room constantly. i was in a meeting, right, it was kellyanne conway, reince priebus, sean spicer, jared kushner, the president, at the time the president-elect, and steve bannon. he was there all the time. okay. i mean i m looking at a picture now, you re showing multiple people in the same picture. it wasn t like the president was sitting alone with steve bannon plotting and deciding how to move forward. i mean obviously steve bannon was on the campaign. obviously he was in the white house. but he wasn t on the ballot. the people voted for donald trump. steve bannon was not some svengali for the campaign. donald trump was able to defeat 16 republican candidates, accomplished republican candidates, seven weeks before hillary clinton could defeat three and that was without steve bannon. we just passed tax reform without steve bannon so i m not sure what you re trying to get at here. even you just made the point that you haven t corroborated so many of the stories in this book. i do want to make one point if i may. right, but i don t want to confuse that with that we ve tried and failed and are saying it isn t true. i m just saying cnn has not had the time to go through and corroborate that. i just want to make it clear. this morning i released a statement on behalf of the white house about a meeting that president donald trump was having with several sitting united states senators about a major agenda item moving forward and it was immigration. i received no and i also had an on the record statement in that e-mail. i received no fewer than three inquiries from cnn asking for corroboration, which is exactly what cnn is supposed to do. however, this book comes out and you guys run it lock, stock and barrel out deciding to corroborate any of it ahead of time? what we re showing you are steve bannon s quotes, which were on the record from steve bannon, okay? he has not questioned any of them. that is all you have seen on this program right now and of course as i point out, janice minn corroborating a dinner she was at and ann coulter corroborating his. sean spicer denied his, mick mulvaney denied his, so i just want to know where it stops because it s pretty obvious that there are many discrepancies. this is full of false information, inaccuracies, and quite frankly this author is quite frankly a crackpot, fake news fantasy fiction writer and it s been proven time and time again. by his own admission he says he s loose with the facts and journalists say that s his reputation. so let s not run this wall to wall on cnn saying it s all factual, it s not. again, what we re saying is this is what the book says and the quotes i m sharing are from steve bannon. i want to talk to you about some of the allegations who they are attributed to say they happened, okay? okay. but first i want to talk about the effort today to say steve bannon wasn t a big player, wasn t instrumental to the winning, all the things you just said. it s not just the pictures, which you re right, it s not just him and the president, but it includes jared kushner, who i think we all know is close to the president. who s still there, by the way. right. i m just simply saying if you ve got a group and it s jared kushner, steve bannon, the president and someone else, i think people know the point i m making. it isn t just the pictures, it s what the president of the united states himself said about steve bannon, who again is on the record in these quotes in the book. here s the president. i have a very good relationship, as you know, with steve bannon. steve has been a friend of mine for a long time. i like steve a lot. steve is very committed. he s a friend of mine and he s very committed to getting things passed. i like mr. bannon, he s a friend of mine. bannon has you know, i like him a lot. he s actually a very good guy. steve is a very good guy. now the book comes out and, what, he s just a total liar? all that s false? i m trying to understand. well, that was then and this is now. obviously over the course of mr. bannon s time in the white house, you ve seen the results that he produced, which was desist. they re not ceasing and desisting. in fact they have pushed the publish date up by four days. it s coming out tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. the publisher says we see it as an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse. what s your response to that? i m no attorney so i m going to leave the attorneys to litigate with the attorneys for the the spokes people for this piece of tabloid trash, but it s pretty obvious that if i were an attorney, there are plenty of accusations in that book that have already been disproven. there are plenty of accusations in that book that are not credible. and again, i m not an attorney but it seems like i d have a field day with that in a court of law. let me just take one. janice minn, editor for the hollywood reporter was at that dinner which included roger ailes and steve bannon. she said that it was an astonishing dinner, everything in the book is absolutely accurate. one of the exchanges that was reported in the book about that dinner went like this. what has he gotten himself into with the russians, pressed yes, and that s what we do every single day. thank you so much, hogan, i appreciate your time. absolutely, thanks, erin. i want to go to mark preston. your reaction, mark. well, a couple things. i think the most important thing that hogan said out of that interview, erin, is that he said all bets are off now. meaning that the war that we ve been discussing or we think might come to fruition between steve bannon and between president trump is very much real and is very much not going to be over any time soon. we saw steve bannon kind of try to put i guess a fig leaf or olive branch out to the president by saying some nice things on his breitbart radio program, but the fact of the matter is it s clear that the president wants blood now from steve bannon. look, they re engaging in a he said, he said, he said, she said, whatever it is. well, two said that but how many more people you heard that whole exchange and back and forth. they want to raise doubt on everything in here, and as he points out, there are some things in here which are directly contradicted, the people who are in, not about that particular exchange but others that people said didn t happen. they think that raising more questions will cause a problem. but of course the book will be a top best seller. how does it play out? it plays out this way. if we go over the past year and take the book and overlay it with the reporting with cnn, the washington post, the associated press, there does seem to be a lot of similarities. certainly the way that donald trump came to decisions. one of the most important things that i read that came out of that book is the disinterest that we saw from president trump when it came to details about very important subjects. people that i have talked to over the past year have corroborated that. they told me that he was very disinterested in these details and the chaos in the white house is very much real. yeah, certainly we have that. there s a couple instances of things in here that i know from talking to the people involved also happened as reported. again, a couple out of many, but we ll see as the reporting continues. thank you so very much, mark. next, did trump really need a crash course on the constitution? the man who briefed him mentioned, quoted in this book, will be my guest next. and growing alarm tonight about trump s mental state. a yale psychiatrist actually briefed lawmakers about it. and the big chill. the bomb cyclone as it s called crippling cities across the entire east coast. the storm s pressure expected to drop to a level that you would see in a massive hurricane. smoi but when we brought our daughter home, that was it. now i have nicoderm cq. the nicoderm cq patch with unique extended release technology helps prevent your urge to smoke all day. it s the best thing that ever happened to me. every great why needs a great how. steyer: the president s national security adviser guilty. his campaign chairman under indictment. his son-in-law secret talks with russians. the director of the fbi fired. special counsel robert mueller s criminal investigation has already shown why the president should be impeached. you can send a message to your representatives at needtoimpeach.com and demand they finally take a stand. this president is not above the law. a heart transplant. that s a whole different ballgame. i was in shock. i am very proud of the development of drugs that can prevent the rejection and prevent the recurrence of the original disease. i never felt i was going to die. we know so much about transplantation. and we re living longer. you cannot help but be inspired by the opportunities that a transplant would offer. my donor s mom says you were meant to carry his story . including within that at least two dozen requests of him asking to have an interview with the president, which he never did. wolff, though, said he had extraordinary access to trump. he said he was able to take up something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the west wing, an idea wolff claims was encouraged by the president himself. wolff says he conducted over 200 interviews over 18 months, says he has tapes and says those interviews include the president himself and most members of the senior staff. also according to axios, the reporting outlet, wolff says some of those conversations are taped, including those with steve bannon. so outfront now, one of the people quoted in the new book, sam nunberg. good to have you back on, it s been a while. the white house is calling the book complete fantasy, sad, pathetic. you just heard hogan gidley in a similar vein. you spoke to michael wolff for the book. three times. you had conversations. you re quoted in the book. you re mentioned in the book several times and now we re looking at it, sam hasn t seen all of the times, but one time he quotes about how you were explaining the constitution to trump. right. he quotes you as saying i got as far as the fourth amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head. tell me the context in which this happened. sure. first of all, the context of it was that the president before the first debate, i was out of the campaign starting around september of 2015. the president before the first debate was going to one of his properties in europe and we were trying to get a lot of issues in before he left so he couldn t get these gotcha questions or infamous gotcha questions before the 2016 cycle. the infamous one asking rudy giuliani the difference between a sunni and a shia. i was able to go over some of these questions where i thought possibly on the constitution some people either on the stage as competitors or some of these moderators would try to ask him quick questions. it wasn t to teach him the constitution. he knows the constitution. it was to say here s per se something that has been asked before. we didn t get we only got to the fourth amendment there and at that time he remembered. besides running for president, he was running his business. so i m not criticizing michael. i like michael. a political book, i believe it s not nonfiction, but on the other hand, they use puffery and try to create a narrative. so you did get as far as the fourth amendment. you don t know his motive for becoming disinterested. he had a ton of things to do. one other thing in general that i wanted to say that s perhaps not in this book is the president and i had a common disagreement. the president was 100% correct and i was incorrect. about whether there was going to be a gotcha question. in general what the average voter wanted. if the average voter wanted cerebral esoteric minutia answers, then they weren t going to vote for donald trump to begin with. the president understood if he was going to win the nomination, he understood this better than me that it was going to be about big ideas. so you re getting to the motive of whatever it was, disinterested or and i m not spinning for him. i m a supporter of his. i don t work for the white house and don t try to make money off the white house. from where i stand he s appointed the best judges. and you agree with his politics. you were working for them briefly. many of the quotes here, rupert murdoch, expletive, and by the way, that s the trend all the way through the book. there s a lot of cursing. we re new yorkers. you know what i mean? this is a very aggressive type and those quotes are in there. yes. but most of them consistently point to trump s wide-ranging ignorance. you re framing that, it sounds like in this conversation, the context of he had other things to do or he judged that the voter wouldn t care. in general but what s your takeaway about his ideas and interest in policy. in general, he is a stubborn, stubborn man in a way where you can argue with him about what he needs to know, you can argue with him about what he wants to do, but i tell you what, he s sitting in the oval office. say what you want about him, he got 306 electoral votes. he won the states that i didn t think he was going to win up to four days before when i was talking to people in the campaign and the trend was going there. and i could see that and i m surprised from reading the book. i don t know this because i don t talk to him while he s in the white house. i can see he s not going to change. that is him. that is it. so you know steve bannon well. yes. you just heard hogan gidley come on and say they don t know each other. it s absurd. he did a pretty bad job, by the way. were they close? they re very close. they were very close. i can tell you when i worked from the president from 2011 through 2015, and i was essentially with michael stone and roger stone, the only people supporting and believing that he could be elected president, there were two people that would take our phone calls. steve bannon at breitbart, chris ruddy at news max, that was it. and he was a very good person for us to get you know, to spring ideas off of. i m sorry that this happened. i disagree with what steve said about don junior. he should not have said that. steve should also not havin sin waited anything about money laundering with the trump organization. i had nothing to do with president trump s business or president trump s business. anything i heard of anything, there was nothing above the letter of the law there. look, i think you re putting the nuance here, which is important. overall yes. the president is saying bannon is sour grapes, he s lost his mind was his quote. yes. you were let go from the trump campaign and then sued for allegedly leaking information. that s what they have said. what s your response if they come out and say hey you, you re just sour grapes, you re a liar, as you heard hogan try to do about everything in the book. my response is i hope the president is very successful. i m not trying to get a job in the white house. i think it s amazing that he won this election. i i think he s a man of historic proportions. one of the things he took a quote out of context was he s going to be the most famous man in the world. i support his re-election and hope to be able to donate to him in 2020. my point is anything i told michael, the point was this guy is a very unique, interesting guy. you re not going to see this. the same way you re not going to see another barack obama, you re not going to see another donald trump in the oval office. thank you very much for your time. now let s go to our chief analyst gloria borger and richard painter. gloria, a big takeaway from sam. he s not denying what was said in terms of what he said. obviously he s trying to say maybe that the nuance of it is a little bit different when it s coming in but he s not saying that that moment did not happen. no, he s not. look, his point i think to you is that donald trump is different from anyone we ve ever seen in the oval office. right. that he s unique, he s interesting, and he s stubborn. this is who he is. and that, you know, he didn t deny the anecdote at all, but it seems to me as if he said this is the guy who won. right. that s who he is. it is what it is and that s who he is. so take it for what you want. but it is what it is. richard, president trump s lawyer, that cease and desist letter, they sent it. the response is no. they think it s an extraordinary contribution to american society. they are not pulling it out. but this pulling the book out. i m sorry, in fact they re rushing it to the press. yet the white house is fighting this so aggressively. i don t know if you heard hogan gidley but everybody is a liar, liar, liar. why not just ignore it? i don t know why the president is doing that. apparently that briefing on the constitution, up through the fourth amendment, i assume he spent the whole time speaking of the second amendment and guns. the first amendment he has no idea of. there is absolutely no way you can go into court and get a judge to enjoin the distribution of a book. even the new york times when they were publishing classified information in the pentagon papers, the courts were unwilling to hold that the new york times violated the law by doing that, the same with wikileaks. we do not enjoin publication of anything. this book doesn t even contain classified information. libel suits cannot be brought by public figures unless they show an extremely high degree of malice and reckless disregard for the truth. those suits can only be brought after the fact, after the book is published. so this idea that you can ask for cease and desist is utterly ridiculous. it shows no understanding of the first amendment of the constitution, and we just don t do business that way in this country. in russia or some other country maybe the president can say that a book can t be sold and shut down the presses. not here. all right, not here. as we said, 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning that book will be on the shelves, four days earlier than planned. thank you both. next, remarkable meetings between lawmakers and a yale university psychiatrist who said trump is, quote, unraveling. i ll speak to a congressman who was briefed and can tell you what was said. and president trump taking credit for north and south korea talking. does his own secretary, secretary mattis, agree? because getting what you need should be simple, fast, and easy. download the xfinity my account app or go online today. new tonight, the president s mental health was the subject of a meeting between a dozen lawmakers and a yale psychiatrist who believes the president is, quote, unraveling. news of this unusual meeting coming as the white house for the second time in as many days is defending the president s mental health. what s the president s reaction to the growing number of suggestions both in this book and in the media that he s mentally unfit to serve as president? the same way we have when it s been asked before, that it s disgraceful and laughable. if he was unfit, he probably wouldn t be sitting there and wouldn t have defeated the most qualified group of candidates the republican party has ever seen. this is an incredibly strong and good leader. sunlen serfaty is outfront in washington tonight. so what can you tell us about this meeting, how it came to be and who was there? erin, this briefing happened in early december up here on capitol hill. a small group of lawmakers took this briefing, about a dozen democrats and republicans and at least one republican senator took this meeting. this meeting was set up by a former u.s. attorney at the request of many lawmakers. a briefing specifically to look at donald trump s fitness, mental fitness to be president. i spoke with one of the psychiatrists that briefed these lawmakers, dr. bandy lee from yale university. when i spoke to her today, she said the lawmakers in that briefing were engaged, they were asking questions, interested, and specifically in that briefing she said she believes according to her professional opinion that donald trump is showing signs of impairment is what she told them. she believes he s become very unstable very quickly, that he is unraveling. again, in her opinion. and that she believes he seems to be losing his grip on reality. and she left that meeting, erin, with the impression that many lawmakers were legitimately concerned about president trump s mental health. a big side note to all of this, one that dr. lee did emphasize in my conversation with her today, she said she s not in a formal position to formally diagnose his condition given that there are certain protocols for medical professionals and given that she has not examined him herself. thank you very much. i want to go to maryland congressman jamie raskin who met with the doctor. i appreciate your time. what did she tell you? well, i think she spoke to a lot of people in the mental health community in telling us that there are growing signs of paranoia, delusion and isolation in the president s behavior. any hope that we had that it might turn around or get better was dashed by the discussion. she and other mental health professionals we ve spoken to have said there are other people who they have treated with the same kinds of symptoms and there s basically no real medical cure for the condition that he s demonstrating and their object in treating people with these symptoms is to contain them and to keep them away from weaponry. so contain them and keep them away from weaponry. and you re saying she is not the only professional of her level of expertise who said this to you? well, dr. lee, of course, editted a book called the dangerous case of donald trump. and there are dozens of essays and articles in there. i read the book before she came down. you know, there s this group called duty to warn with thousands of mental health professionals. now, from our perspective, we re not psychiatrists, we re not mental health professionals, that s not our job. but it is our job to enforce the constitution. and the 25th amendment has a way of dealing with this potential crisis. and i want to ask you about that, it s about fitness to serve. but first sarah sanders, she says it s disgraceful and laughable to question the president s mental fitness. he wouldn t be in the oval office if he was unfit. what s your response to that? she has a point. the man went through a grueling campaign and he won. yeah. to begin with, the president himself has called people a nut job, a basket case, accused other people are going insane as recently as yesterday when i think he said that steve bannon was losing his mindin. to the psychiatrist that looks like a massive projection on the part of the president. look, this is america, we ve got the first amendment and everybody has a right to speak whether in a book or from the oval office and people can talk. my interest is doing our duty under the 25th amendment. 50 years ago both houses of congress, overwhelming majorities of democrats and republicans alike said we ve got to prepare for the possibility of a president who becomes physically or mentally impaired and unable to execute the powers and duties of office. and there are two ways that the provisions are activated under the fourth provision of the 25th amendment. one is the vice president and the cabinet can act, but the framers of the 25th amendment knew that the cabinet that s not going to happen. so the other is the vice president and a body to be set up by congress. that body unfortunately was never set up. in 50 years that body has not been set up, but we ve got legislation to do it. today the 57th co-sponsor joined the legislation and it s a bipartisan body appointed by republicans, by democrats, with a chair appointed by democrats and republicans together with psychiatrists, with physicians and with former states people on it. so there s nothing to be afraid of because this body will act in the interest of the country and that s what the 25th amendment is all about. okay. so let me ask you, though, to this point. your republican colleague in the senate, richard shelby, today said i don t know the president well but i spent an hour and a half with him back in september, just the two of us talking. he seemed to be lucid. i think he s different, i think he s unique. we re all unique individuals. that s his description of it. look, we all know it, the guy isn t like pretty much anybody else. that s unique. that doesn t mean that he s unstable. is it possible you re blowing all of this out of proportion? well, every person in the country is unique, undoubtedly. the question is whether or not you are constitutionally capable of executing the powers and duties of the office of the presidency of the united states. you know, we have 535 members of congress. we only have one president, and that person as the president reminded us this week has control over nuclear weaponry and the ability to take the world to war. so this is this goes beyond the normal push and pull of the daily political gossip. this goes to the question of the security of the country, the survival of our people and people around the world. so i just think that we need to take our responsibility seriously. there s enough questions that have been raised that we would not be doing our constitutional duty if we don t set the body up in the event that things continue to spiral downward. congressman raskin, i appreciate your time. thank you. thank you very much. and next, president trump taking credit for talks between north and south korea, which, bby the way, historically important thing, a big success. his own defense secretary doesn t seem quite to agree with who gets the credit. and the east coast frozen. laguardia airport in new york barely reopening. other airports completely shut down. a massive cyclone bomb. ian bremmer is president and founder of the eurasia group. it s great to have you in person, ian. good to be here. the president came out taking full credit, that s the way he operates, saying it s international pressure, it s a much broader thing. which is it? i ll give him partial credit here. stuff he s done well. he s gotten the chinese more onboard, tougher sanctions, including at the security council as well as cracking down individually because he linked it to american trade. he made it a high priority issue. that s worked. he s also forced the north koreans under pressure to consider that talks with others would be a good idea, right? so you give trump some credit for that, more than you would obama. but north korea testing all these icbms, ramping up on that, which is quite dangerous, doing it because they re concerned, they feel like they need a stronger deterrent before they go into negotiations. they have definitely picked that up because of trump. most importantly, south korea, our ally, going by themselves to talk to the chinese and the north koreans because they understand that trump s america first policy sure as hell isn t a south korea first policy. they have to worry about themselves. that s what they re doing. that s an ally that isn t as strong of the americans right now working their own game. all right. so the president finished that tweet, i said in part. the end of the tweet said fools, referring to the experts who said that he wasn t doing a good job. talks are a good thing. now, look, a lot of people would say of course talks are a good thing, exempt the president for himself said talks were a bad thing. in october he tweeted i told rex tillerson, our wonderful secretary of state, when you know something like that you know he s about to slam you, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with little rocket man. okay, so now talks are a good thing but then they were a bad thing. the thing about trump is his ability to pivot 180 when it serves his purpose at the moment is vastly greater than any other president. mexico is going to pay for the wall, now they re not. he thinks it s a strength to be completely inconsistent. i don t know if he thinks it s a strength. i certainly think that he s in the moment. he s tactical, he s not strategic. in that regard, if there were the potential for a deal between north and south korea, that trump would have personally savaged a month ago, he could swoop in and say my deal. we could see a break-through because of trump s inconsistency but we could also see war. that s a pretty terrifying binary choice. it s binary. the last 20 years haven t been good. a whole bunch of presidents kicking the can down the road. building in one direction. but no one ever said there s going to be a binary outcome, which eventually i guess there would have been. eventually the alternative is we just learn to live with a nuclear north korea. and that s the way it is, as the united states has done with nuclear power after nuclear power. yeah. i mean i think it is certainly much more likely today that a miscalculation will lead to war on the peninsula. and what s your take of the my button is bigger than yours, which at best was juvenile? yeah. but i will also say that 98% of the coverage that i ve seen at least in the united states this week on north korea has been about the button. yeah. and by far the most important point on north korea is that for the first time since kim jong-un has become leader, the north and the south koreans are now talking routinely by telephone directly. that s actually what matters. it matters because it could lead to a break-through and it could isolate the americans against north and south korea. we should be talking about that, but it s not entertaining and trump knows how to get us worked up by putting these tweets out. i mean it is a useful strategy. all right, ian, thank you so much. wonderful to see you. you too. next, blizzard warnings maine to florida. the berweather bomb cyclone, th is the technical teller, delivering. and the president s bizarre appearance at the briefing today. he was 200 feet away. why did he appear like this? cyclone wreaking havoc. jfk closed. too dangerous to take off. hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded. savage winds pushing frozen massachusetts bay over its banks. foot of water surging through boston. homes and buildings surrounding by floating chunks of ice. cars submerged, frozen and conditions are getting worse because of the temperature plummeting. alex this is incredibly powerful storm. what is it like where you are right now? reporter: you re right. this bomb cyclone exploding up and down the coast of massachusetts, mass flooding into homes and roadways. leading to rescues in homes from vehicles. here in boston this afternoon i watched flood waters come up over the docks of the boston harbor, mixing with snow in the streets. creating this slush-like thing that looked like molten lava, told tide reached 15.1 feet, possibly tying a record from 1978 blizzard. snow not falling but gusting all around. watched crews working all day to clear the roads. this is in center of boston, done a pretty good job clearing this road. 750 vehicles out clearing roads, sidewalks, throwing down salt to make it safe for people. city officials asking people to hunker down and stay at home for their own safety and so they can do the work to clear the streets. in terms of the snow, look at all of this, this is all from the last 24 hours. falling at rate of two to three inches throughout course of the day. reaching as you see now, around a foot i would say. up to my knees. in some parts up to 16 inches. it s not the know that officials are worried about. bostonians and people from massachusetts can deal with snow and cold. used to it. but wind that follows the snowstorm, the extreme cold, temperatures down to under zero, possibly setting records, can lead to power outages. governor of massachusetts has said 24,000 outages already and could crow, people losing heat is danger they face. and airports closed across the east coast, worst is still to come. cold is crippling and perhaps greater in some places than anything ever before seen. yeah. these crews city can deal with snow. that s not what they re afraid of. arctic temperatures. talking about go to minus seven between now and sunday. temperatures that we re told by scientists are seen on mars. can have a crippling effect as you said. power and heat, that s dangerous situation for people who have been told to stay home but now home, possibly without power or heat by the tens of thousands. erin. thank you alex from boston. breaking news in the russia investigation from robert mueller, new york times reporting tonight that president trump told the white house s top lawyer to stop attorney general jeff sessions from recusing himself from the russia investigation. white house counsel mcgahn according to times told sessions and he did not listen as we know. times said upon hearing that he was going to recuse himself president erupted in anger in fronts officials saying he needed attorney general to protect him. special counsel robert mueller has learned of this. on the phone, michael zeldin, cnn legal analyst, worked with bob mueller. the new york times, michael schmidt reporting. way he wrote first sentence is important. president trump gave firm instructions in march to the white house s top lawyer, stop the attorney general jeff sessions from recusing himself in the justice department investigation into russia. firm instructions to the white house top lawyer. what does it mean? well, it means that the president wanted don mcgahn to try to talk sessions out of his belief that the justice department regulations that prohibit him from being attorney general on this didn t apply. mcgahn failed to convince sessions of that. he was quite clear in his testimony that he believes correct in his belief he has no choice but recuse himself because of the role he played in the campaign. mcgahn tries, sessions adheres to the law. mcgahn fails, president erupts. what that is relevant mostly to russia investigation is whether it s another brick in the wall as we keep calling it of the president s obstructionist behavior. do you think it is obstruction when you hear this? no. i think the president has the right to say to his white house counsel, go talk to the attorney general, try to convince him he doesn t need to do this under the president s interpretation of the law. because the attorney general doesn t agree with him and does recuse himself, doesn t make it obstructionist behavior. but it does speak to the president s state of mind about the russia investigation and how concerned he was about how much mueller might do damage to his presidency and that he needed as they say in the new york times article, a roy coen, someone to protect him from mueller. he s concerned about mueller but can t get his attorney general not to obey the law. good for sessions, bad luck for the attorney who has to deliver this message and obviously bad luck for the president because he s still enmired in this mess. the justice department is fighting back tonight michael, spokesperson telling us about this report from michael schmidt, a top notch reporter from the times, could not and would not happen. plain and simple. this is the way they handle everything in the trump administration, just say point blank something didn t happen. maybe it didn t, maybe it was slightly different or maybally point blank lie. it s hard to tell the difference. mcgahn had to know at this point there were clear regulations that prohibited attorney general from overseeing matter involving political campaign in which he was active participant. wasn t a choice for sessions, that s what he testified to, that s why he recused himself. mcgahn has a client demanding an outcome that s not obtainable. that s just the way it is. maybe the justice department s point of view is he didn t order sessions to stay on but rather tried to convince mcgahn that sessions didn t have to do this,
people do once they get here and people who are more likely to succeed will get preference and those who are less likely to succeed divulge. what s wrong with that? took a very important points. the first is that the united states is not a company, it s not a school, it s a nation. second point, we want to make sure that we scrutinize every person coming here into the country, we want to make sure that they don t have any terrorist background, we want to make sure they don t have a violent criminal record. no one disputes that. let s get to this point, very important, the united nations ws created mainly in the declaration of independence because the king s restricted immigration, because the king of england said states, colonies, you can no longer bring people from other countries. what happened? american revolution, a beautiful idea of this nation came about. tucker: [laughs] the american revolution was spurred okay. [laughs] okay. let s back up a little bit. you said that the two standards we need to apply our people aren t terrorists and they don t have a criminal record. would you apply those standards in your own life to anything? i will hire this person, let them into my school, married this person, just as long as this person doesn t have a terror background or a criminal record. shouldn t we aim a little bit higher than that a if we really care about the country? of course. we want to have standards but at the same time, what made this great nation is what we have seen in the statue of liberty, give me your poor, huddled masses. your ancestors came here when they were poor. many and stressors, the founding fathers came here when they were poor. you are successful fox news host. tucker: you are kind of missing it. we are not in the 18th century now and if you really care about the country, he would think deeply about what s going to make it better and safer and more prosperous, happier, more cohesive. you don t adopt a faith-based approach that says there is an inscription at the bottom of the statute new york harbor and hope for the past. why wouldn t you say, for example i will throw a stat out here the science talent search s competition tries to identify kids who are good at science, a pretty good measure, it tested students in america. 14 of the top 40 had indian immigrant parents. so that was addressed, gee whiz, that and a lot of other markers suggested that indians do pretty well. why not encourage more indian immigration? why would that be bad? we want to make sure that we attract the best, obviously, but we want to attract people who have w a belief of what it means to be american, someone that believes will make him here, work hard, that is what makes this nation great. it doesn t mean about people, give me your scientists, engineers. if you work hard, you can be an american. tucker: okay. we can roll without them too. we are not going to measure success or intelligence or anything like that, just hard work. so you wouldn t be against saying if you are here is an emigrant, you take no public benefit of any kind, you can t go to an emergency room for health care, you can t use emergency medicaid for u your health care, you can t take any kind of program at all because why would we bring people here and give them free stuff? would you before that? i am for no taxation without representation. tucker: what about the hard work part? they should be able to get protection, health care, if they are paying for their own doctor, paying for their own security. tucker: old. how about this? wouldn t be fair for the people who own this country, which is its voters, citizens, to say we will do a really simple cost-benefit analysis on every immigrant. are you paying more than you are taking out and services? about that? if you are not coming up to leave. what do you think about that? and 2016, undocumented immigrants contributed $2 trillion tucker: don t give me generalizations. how about an age specific case we say, if you are an immigrant listen, for me, i want to make sure that i m here representing veterans, i am representing military families tucker: come on. let s have a rational conversation. you are capable let me ask you a simple question. if more immigration always makes the country richer, why does the state with the most immigration, which is california, keep getting poorer? it has more property than any state. 100 to five californians is poor. if immigration makes is richer, why is california getting poorer? i would say that california has a surplus of more than $10 billion, into the statebe economy. why? many factors. it s a welcoming state. tucker: wait a second. hold on. california has gotten poorer. one in five californians is poor, that was not the case when i grew up in california. it has the most immigration, so if immigration always makes us more prosperous, why is the opposite happening in california? it s a very simple question. i think there is many factors. i don t think it has to do with immigration. i think it has to do with the fact that we need to manage budgets. i think republicans and democrats would agree on that. i think immigrants tucker: it has nothing to do with that. even if california is now poorer than mississippi, immigration, which is the main thing that separates california for mississippi, has no role in that because why? do you have data or you don t want to admit it, like everyone else? i don t think we have dated to blame immigrants for every problem of the world. tucker: we are giving them credit for every success, we are seeing this country is rich because of immigrants, here is a stage with the most immigrants, wise of the poorest state? am i being crazy? i think it is a fair question. california has a surplus right now, the economy is doing very well. i could also say that immigrants are doing great, there are many factors in the play. tucker: [laughs] at the end of the day one it s doing so well that it s a poorest state. tucker: lost up with a magical thinking and get real. things are changing very quickly and we care about our country. the point is not to make other countries happy, it is to protect our people. i hope you will give us a pass. let s work together. tucker: caesar, things for joining us. enter clave and is a contributing editor and he just wrote a piece that has been pinging around the internet, responding to president trump s immigration remarks, and he joins us tonight. andrew cuomo thanks for coming on. thank you for having me. tucker: this is one of our pieces at probably 1 of 3 of our viewers got this weekend. the opening line, nothing scandalizes the left like the truth. what does that mean? the left makes simple facts seem rude, and unkind. if you say men and women are a different, have different desires, different career paths, that african-americans commitdi disproportionate amount of violent crimes, if you see that muslims committed disproportionate amount of terrorism, suddenly the rear they call you a bigot, they say that you are racist, sexist, is homophobic, whatever, until the statement of simple data, something that is factually true, become f unexpressible, you are not allowed to say them. i don t think conservatives fully appreciate the power of that kind of mental slavery. conservatives are not very good with culture and we don t understand the way it wraps itself around your mind and keeps yourself from saying the things that you are thinking. tucker: shouldn t all american citizens, regardless of political party of philosophy, by virtue of being american, demand to live by the standard we always have lived by? truth as a defense. if it s true, i have the right to say it. shouldn t we stand by that? yes.o usually, it used to be that the first amendment and the fact that americans just tend to be kind of loudmouth sensei wood comes comes into their head, that used to protect us. but the left has been good at making sure look, we learned that twitter is a shadow planning conservatives. we have seen how google fires a guy who states something that is politically incorrect. we have seen prager university videos band on youtube. we know that there is this massive and when conservatives go to universities, they are met by violence resistance, even if they are very intelligent people like ben shapiro or charles murray, they are met with violent resistance. the left is very intent on silencing right-wing opinion and it s very powerful. you look at what s happening in europe, where there immigration policy, since the war, have virtually destroyed their culture. people who come out there and say, you know maybe islam doesn t fit in england, maybe it doesn t fit in the scandinavian countries, are destroyed, they are made into pariahs. as a result, we saw how in england, at a conservative estimate, 1400 little girls were raped by muslims because the police didn t want to come out and call them out and say that they were afraid of being called racist.re they allowed this atrocity to continue. one of the things that i seee when i look at donald trump, i m a very polite guy, and i m a guy who doesn t like to offend people, just like most of us, one of the things i see that works for donald trump is his rudeness, his bullishness, actually have shattered this prison of political correctnesse managed to construct. i think that is the reason that that comes out of his mouth and every tweet that he sends out is such a scandal. if you turn on cnn over theer weekend after his remarks about haiti in african countries, every one of their anchorman was crying. their trembling lips in the misty eyes because it was so intolerable to them that donald trump was not restrained by their definition of what is cruel and their definition of what is impolite. this i is a network for anderson cooperrd called ordinary right-wing americans, he called them tea beggars, and now when haiti is insulted, suddenly anderson, his lip is trembling in his eyes are misty. it s ae form of bullying. it is simply a form of social bullying. i am grateful for donald trump for shattering that, even when he does it in ways that i find appalling. tucker: i agree completely. societies that hate themselves this much tend to collapse. i m glad you are fighting. andrew cuomo thanks a lot for that was a great piece. g my pleasure. tucker: driverless cars could be dominating roadways in your city sooner than you think. word of the implications, not just for driving, but for american workers? the people who immigrate here adding those jobs, there is ach connection between technology and immigration and we ll get to it next. stay tuned. (burke) at farmers, we ve seen almost everything so we know how to cover almost anything. even a swing set standoff. and we covered it, july first, twenty-fifteen. talk to farmers. we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum copdso to breathe better,athe. i go with anoro. go your own way copd tries to say, go this way. i say, i ll go my own way with anoro. go your own way once-daily anoro contains two medicines called bronchodilators, that work together to significantly improve lung function all day and all night. anoro is not for asthma . it contains a type of medicine that increases risk of death in people with asthma. the risk is unknown in copd. anoro won t replace rescue inhalers for sudden symptoms and should not be used more than once a day. tell your doctor if you have a heart condition, high blood pressure, glaucoma, prostate, bladder, or urinary problems. these may worsen with anoro. call your doctor if you have worsened breathing, chest pain, mouth or tongue swelling, problems urinating, vision changes, or eye pain while taking anoro. ask your doctor about anoro. go your own way get your first prescription free at anoro.com. i have to tell you something. dad, one second i was driving and then the next. they just didn t stop and then. i m really sorry. i wrecked the subaru. i wrecked it. you re ok. that s all that matters. (vo) a lifetime commitment to getting them home safely. love. it s what makes a subaru, a subaru. tucker: the driverless car tucker: the driverless car revolution could be here sooner than we think, in fact, a lot of revolutions could be here sooner than we think but in this case, general motors has requested partition dull my permission to test drive these cars are earlier as next year. it is self-driving without any human backup. if that test is approved, it will send a shock wave through the american economy and very few people are talking about this. it turns out that more than 5 million americans are not living by driving trucks and taxis and delivery vehicles. a lot of these jobs are the last remaining ones that provide a decent living without a college degree. instead of preparing for this coming wave of unemployment, american elites are in importing more drivers even as they make cars driverless. only 4% of new york cabdrivers are born in the u.s. it s a real question. austan goolsbee is professor of economics at the university of chicago s booth school of business and he joins us tonight. i think it is a fair question and a real one but it s not just limited to driverless cars. i m sure you saw the mckinsey report recently that said by 2030, 73 million american jobs could disappear because of automation. let s say hysterical by double. let s say it s half that.s it raises questions about our immigration policy. why are we importing people for jobs that are disappearing? first, i think you should be thinking about the big issues and anybody who is going to criticize you for that, i think is wrong. we should be thinking about tha that. tucker: no one seems to be. in my opinion, you are mixing up the timing a little bit. so the immigrants already came to the country and now they are failing for jobs that are there. nobody is saying, let s develop driverless cars and let s import foreignve drivers to drive cars- tucker: know, but we import over io we are continuing to import without any abatement at all because of the democratic party is demanding it, more than a million low skill workers every year.. one of the going to do when these drop go? is a simple question. simple question, for the last hundred years, as jobs have been replaced, we have created jobs in new sectors. so as automated assembly lines got more and more robotic sized, people moved into services. now some 75, 80% of the economy are service jobs. why do we have seen and immigration historically, if we are in. it s with growth, not many immigrants want to come to this country. tucker:ea austan, which are leaving outcome as an economist, i think you would know this, in earlier periods, there s only been one, the social safety net was a fraction of what it is today. you couldn t realistically come to this country in 1913 and expect that your basic needs to be taken care of by the state. it s very different now. tucker: that s not true there has only ever been one automation or replacement of technology. that s been an ongoing problem for 140 years. tucker: hold on. this is actually happening. even if people are coming here and not finding work, they will still live better than they did and burkina faso. why wouldn t they continue to come? it very obvious and i don t understand why that is part of the calculation. we are not fighting about illegal immigration. tucker: we are talking about legal immigration. i m talking about legal immigration. and if we look at the immigration that comes tou this country, if we do not allow immigration, the native-born population in the united states demographics look just like japan and china and western europe and we will not have money for social security or medicaid. tucker: oh, we won t. unfortunately, we don t have time to unpack this. i don t accept that stipulation. let me ask you this. knowing what we know about the evolution of the american economy becoming more tech focused, why are we importing people who have a higher likelihood of succeeding in that sector? we are not doing that. our immigration policy is based on lettuce picking. why would l we do that than a high-tech world. it s not only lettuce picking. it s as fair point to say we should have more skilled immigrants. the danger of that, of course, you would block say doris salt who came to this country with no education, she had a child who cared polio. tucker: spare me. i am for immigration, lots of immigrants starts company stt companies, as you know. here s a list. number one country, india.in canada, united kingdom, germany, france, armenia, none of these countries are in the top five for immigrants to the united states. no one is from haiti, el salvador, honduras, mexico. there is a massive difference between who where you are importing and who is succeeding. yes or no. you are singling out just mexico, central america, the know, singledyou out africa. it s completely not true. there are a large number of entrepreneurs coming here from africa, educated people. if you look at china and india, the republican party had explicitly tried to reduce thef amount tucker: wait a second. if that s true, then, why is google the most powerful company in the world by its own numbers, only employing and its tech side, 1% black employees? 1%. i don t understand. either google is racist black employees are native born.. what are you saying? tucker: you are saying that a lot of the immigrants are going into high tech, then why isn t that reflected just look at the statistics tucker: then why are google s ex-employees, the most important tech employee in the world, why are they 1% black? with the answer? one, what are their share of immigrants, what are they doing. you are saying, what share of cool came from africa? that is what you are asking? we have very little immigration from africa. tucker: that s not true, actually. we have an awful lot of immigrants from africa. you maybe haven t been keeping current on this. i m not against african immigrants. i m just saying, why can t we bf thoughtful in how we admit as i started, that is perfectly tucker: your party only cares about voters. tucker, i have no problem, let s have a rational discussion about that. with the president has proposed, as you know, is limiting immigration of all forms, dramatically reducing the number of high skilled visas tucker: you know who supports less immigration? it s the public who on this country! [laughs] whatever. tucker: austan goolsbee, thanks for joining me. thanks for having me, tucker. tucker: as the me to movementvi claims more victims, more women are warning that it is going too far. one woman joins us next. julie is living with metastatic breast cancer which is breast cancer that has spread to other parts of her body. she s also taking prescription ibrance with an aromatase inhibitor, which is for postmenopausal women with hormone receptor positive her2- metastatic breast cancer as the first hormonal based therapy. ibrance plus letrozole was significantly more effective at delaying disease progression versus letrozole. patients taking ibrance can develop low white blood cell counts which may cause serious infections that can lead to death. before taking ibrance, tell your doctor if you have fever, chills, or other signs of infection, liver or kidney problems, are pregnant, breastfeeding, or plan to become pregnant. common side effects include low red blood cell and low platelet counts, infections, tiredness, nausea, sore mouth, abnormalities in liver blood tests, diarrhea, hair thinning or loss, vomiting, rash, and loss of appetite. julie calls it her new normal. because a lot has changed, but a lot hasn t. ibrance, the #1 prescribed fda-approved oral combination treatment for hr+/her2- mbc. tucker: heather mcdonald is a fellow at the manhattan institute and another me too skeptic entry joins us tonight. ready think it iss going at this point? it s going toward the disappearing of men. we will see a wave of new gender quotas throughout the economy on the assumption that if we don t have proportional representation of men and women across workplaces and signs in computing and entertainment, it is because of gender patriarchy and harassment, which is simply not the case. with what we are saying, tucker, a sexual liberation having a nervous breakdown. before sexual liberation hit in the 1950s, you had a set of traditional norms that recognized this basic truth: men and women are different. it s not social construction. men and women have different biological drives.s. their libidos are different. and we had a set of norms that restrained the male libido, norms of dental manliness and courtesy and chivalry, and we had a default for premarital for females that was know, and that gave females the power to say yes but they didn t have to negotiate with the male libido at every instance of some drunken coupling. sexual liberation through that all out and said men and women should go mono e mono on the sexual battlefield, they are equal in their desires, equal in their responses to casual sex and it turns out, when you set the default ideas for premarital sex, a lot of women have a hard time negotiating a no . instead of recognizing that we have screwed up the default setting, and are working against biology, women are blaming the patriarchy when the opposite is the case. tucker: whatever its effect has not made women happier the last 50 years. there has been a longitudinal study on this and american women have not become happier. i wonder if you destroy men, complete the destruction of men, they are pretty close to being destroyed i would say, how does that help women? what would be the effect on women? i think you ll see a lot of regret. why aren t men accordingly? basically, civilization has been created by people with very powerful egos. it is of no relevance to me whether they were male or female s. i want that meritocracy, i want people with drive to succeed, and if you have a rule that says powerful man should be out of the picture, i think we are going to reach a novelization all stasis. tucker: yeah, i mean, this has profound consequences. i can smell it. it s a big deal. heather, thank you. thanks, tucker. tucker: there is all-out war in silicon valley. conservatives are accusing google and twitter of censorship because they are committing it, while facebook has been accused of kowtowing to the chinese communist party because it is. mark steyn joins us to weigh in on the valley s many crises. stay tuned. next time, i want you on my bowling team. -that s me. -jamie! -yeah. -you re back from italy. [ both smooch ] ciao bella. tucker: the long simmer tucker: the long simmering contact dominant conflict between conservatives and silicon valley is increasingly lurching into an all-out war. just last week, james demaree sued google for firing him over an internal w memo on diversity but was basically unremarkable by normal people standards. now, conservative journalist chuck johnson has sued twitter after it banned his account. milo yiannopoulos and roger stone threatens to do the same thing. new videos, meanwhile, from project veritas suggest that twitter deliberately shatter banned several users likely for politically motivated users. twitter did not deny it. author and columnist mark steyn joins us tonight to assess the wreckage of silicon valley. we learn that a lot of these companies suck up to the repressive, authoritarian government of china, and squelch speech for the sake of increasing their profit margin. is there any moral authority left in silicon valley? i don t think so. china is the last big market to conquer. it doesn t really make a lot of difference in money terms but down the road, they see it as that. and if you look at had, in particular, the internet has, in the last ten years, i love the internet, i preferred to the internet ten, 15 years ago in the last decade, it is dwindled to a duopoly, basically facebook and google, who, between them, take 84% of the digital revenue on the entire planet excluding china. and that actually means that google andbo facebook account fr over a 30% all revenue on the planet. basically, beyond market pressures, and they have a highly ideological, politicized staff who, as we saw in these leaks from twitter, basically are glorying, reveling in the power they have to do down there ideological foes. t tucker: i don t understand. aa simple question, since they live in washington, you have to grow companies, at least two, that are operating what is a textbook monopoly to the detriment of consumers in this country. they are really a threat to the u.s. government, and they are more powerful than the u.s. government and the u.s. congress, which is charged with overseeing this in preventing this from happening, throws up his hands and says, i don t see violation. i don t see how they can sit impotently in the face this threat. no, i thought senator lee was rather unimpressive on your show a couple of days ago. very disappointing. in a sense, we are not very potentially dangerous situations here because as you say, this is a de facto google-facebook monopoly. around the planet. if you look at, for example, the european union, angela merkel actually wants facebook, she s caught on tape with mark zuckerberg, in effect asking him to control and enforce the restriction of sort of right-wing populist movements in germany. theresa may in britain looks on facebook and twitter for for ie same way, that she wants them te her enforcers. and i think the danger here is that in america and the european union and elsewhere, in essence, the natural political inclinations of facebook and google are incentivized by craven politicians. it s a kind of if you want to steer clear, they are beyond commercial pressure now. only antitrust pressure in washington or in brussels could restrain this entity. but in a sense, they have found a political sweet spot that incentivizes the left-wing thought control they are engaging in. tucker: yet, republicans control almost all levers of power in the u.s. government and are doing nothing. maybe later in the week you can come back onma and tell me what the point of voting for them in the first place was. i would be interested to know. [laughs] that may be a very long and depressing program depressing program. tucker: [laughs] it might be. marx died, thank you as always. and a ratings bomb to boot. thanks a lot, tucker. tucker: thank you. we veys got new developments in the mystery of the mandalay bay shooting in las vegas. stranger then you may imagine. we ve got them. we ll be right back. it was really easy. easy. that d be nice. phone: for help with chairs, say chair. phone: for help with bookcases, say bookcase. bookcase. i thought this was the dresser? isn t that the bed? phone: i m sorry, i didn t understand. phone: for help with chairs, say chair. does this mean we re not going out? book-case. see how easy renters insurance can be at geico.com. when it comes to travel, i sweat the details. late checkout. .down-alternative pillows. .and of course, price. tripadvisor helps you book a. .hotel without breaking a sweat. because we now instantly. .search over 200 booking sites .to find you the lowest price. .on the hotel you want. don t sweat your booking. tripadvisor. the latest reviews. the lowest prices. my husband is probably going to think i m crazy. he thinks i m going to see my sister! sometimes the confidence to be spontaneous starts with financial stability. once i heard it i was shocked. i just thought, i have to go get it! it s our tree! see how a personalized financial strategy and access to j.p. morgan investment expertise can help you. chase. make more of what s yours. tucker: this is a fox news alert. a ton of new information coming out in the las vegas shooting investigation. a month long one. charlie tucker: this is a fox news alert. there is a ton of new information coming out in the las vegas shooting investigation, the month long charlie man is a document. docy filmmaker. but we will start with dan bongino. what if you learned? there is two big outstanding questions. the first is obviously motive. why does a guy like this engage in one of the largest mass murders in american history? although the motive is still unclear, and i can t confirm everything, i believe there is a high probability you will see something that looks like some form f of radicalization. what that right i like isolation was, always associated with islamic terror, giving them a threat, that may not be at. it may be some kind of political motivation, as well. but motive is outstanding. one more quick point on this, tucker. i don t think the target selection here was random. the fact it was a country music concert, the fact it waser las vegas, i don t think this was random. may in fact when it all comes out in the wash, be ait factor. one other quick thing, second point. was he alone? it s pretty obvious he was the gunman in this case, based on the evidence we have.bu but that is not what i m asking. was he alone or did he have some kind of support structure in place? lot ofi think when a this gets fleshed out and reseat the report start to become public, i have a really hard time believing that he will be the only person involved. there has to be some level of logistical support or operational support are similar in this. tucker: one indication of thosee are the email accounts that paddock maintained that we learned about a couple of days ago, from which he sent emails. vermont to the other, basically addressed to another person. that person is not named, but he is clearly writing to someone else. not just notes to himself. when you make about? this is very bizarre, tucker, and spend bizarre since day one. my understanding was that he was emailing himself, which kind of adds to the whole mystery. of course, the new development of his girlfriend admitting to investigators that her prints were on the ammo. this is an instant replay to the pulse nightclub tragedy where the significant other on that case will be going to trial in orlando march 1st, very interesting to see what will happen with marilou danley, the girlfriend of mr. paddock. as we went to the two questions that dan asked him a key questions, i would add a third. did federal or state authorities have any knowledge at all of paddock? had they had contact with him in anyway? where they aware of him before the shooting? do we know anything about that? not to my knowledge, no. the fbi has said that they now know there was a lot of ammo and the residents of the shooter, which, to me, is not very revealing and shocking news to anybody. tucker: especially not in this case. dan, do we have any i don t want you to speculate or get over your skis at all because it s too important and we don t want to muddywe it with things e don t know for certain but do you have any understanding of why it s taking so long to get basic information out of this investigation and any indications indication as to why it is being conducted and is haphazard, sloppy way? i do. i always appreciate you wanting to stickde with what we know. despite the government has been unnecessarily chris burnett, which has sponsored conspiracy theories. tucker, think about this, there is a very serious economic and financial incentive for a lot of potential secrets in this case to be kept quiet for a while, and to keep this off the front pages and tell news blows over. it s very obvious. it doesn t take a conspiracy theorist to figure out, one of the major tourist attractions in the world, las vegas, a lot of outdoor activity on the strip, you don t want on the front page of every paper, from now to perpetuity, the fact that you could be subjected to sniper fire fromed a building in the las vegas strip. tucker: i know. big companies should not have influence in criminalfl investigations. that is just as 101. i m not justifying it. tucker: you are right. i don t want too think of that s true but that clearly is and it s distressing for you gentlemen, thank you both for that update. we ll be back.st meanwhile, hawaii, the state, had 30 minutes of panic over the weekend as you sought after officials mistakenly reported in an incoming ballistic missile. that is bad. but what we do about it? what happened to the guy who made that mistake? we ve got an update coming up. it s ok that everyone ignores me while i drive. it s fine. because i get a safe driving bonus check every six months i m accident free. and i don t share it with mom! right, mom? righttt. safe driving bonus checks. only from allstate. switching to allstate is worth it. theratears® uniquefer from the electrolyte formula, corrects the salt imbalance that causes dry eye. so your eyes will thank you. more than eye drops, dry eye therapy. theratears®. and i m the founder of ugmonk. before shipstation it was crazy. it s great when you see a hundred orders come in, a hundred orders come in, but then you realize i ve got a hundred orders i have to ship out. shipstation streamlined that wh the order data, the weights of , everything is seamlessly put into shipstation, so when we print the shipping ll everything s pretty much done. it s so much easier so now, we re ready, bring on t. shipstation. the number one ch of online sellers. go to shipstation.com/tv and get two months free. that s why at safelite, we ll show you exactly when we ll be there. with a replacement you can trust. all done sir. grandpa: looks great! tech: thanks for choosing safelite. grandpa: thank you! child: bye! tech: bye! saving you time. so you can keep saving the world. kids: safelite repair, safelite replace exin the 2018xus lexus es and es hybrid. lease the 2018 es 350 for $339/month for 36 months. experience amazing at your lexus dealer. stay at la quinta. where we re changing with stylish make-overs. then at your next meeting, set your seat height to its maximum level. bravo, tall meeting man. start winning today. book now at lq.com suffered a brief, terrifying panic over the weekend with the islands emergency distress system mistakenly warn people that a ballistic missile, presumably from asia, was invalid, despite causing a major panic, officials have labeled the whole affair and unfortunate accident, some one pushed the wrong button. they tried to move on. should they move on? in national affairs columnist for the national review ? says someone should lose their job over this. i think it s a very fair point. has it always been the custom in the united states, that when you commit some massive scroll but work, everythings is fine? window that start? i think 2001 was the watershed after 9/11, 18 intelligence agenciesin failed o detect the terrorist attack. as far as i know, no one got fired, no 9 one got demoted, and no one resigned. tucker: what are the long-term consequences of this? no one is-t ever held accountabe for anything? your earlier show segments. a slow decline in civilization, if people want a personal responsibility, if we don t want people to standards of behavioro down to hell. tucker: so if your job is to maintain or or operate an emergency alert system, and you tell people that they are going to die in a missile launch, what should happen to you? should you keep your job? right now the guy has been temporarily reassigned. i think more disciplinary action is necessary. the guys above have failed. the people who were in charge, they had a system in which there was no way too countermand the alarm. there was no way to send out a false alarm. that is why it took 38 minutes in which a million and a half people m were terrified in order to correct the mistake. that is unacceptable. we should have disciplined at the top and discipline at the bottom. sean: by the way, for the record, since we are on the subject, a lot of speculation as to what happen. we are buying the press the wrong button exclamation? apparently, the fellow clicked the wrong button and then he was asked, do you really, really want to do this, and he said yes. that is apparently what happened, and he didn t know what he had done until the mobile phones of his fellow employees started going berserk. unacceptable behavior by him, even more unacceptable lack of safeguards of a point of his bosses. tucker: maybe this is why you are more likely to die in your job as a federal employee then to be fired. [laughs] i don tur know i am laughing. it s not funny. in hawaii, that s true. tucker: good to see you. sadly, our show is over. an hour slipped through our fingers like sand through an hourglass. tune in every night at 8:00 to their show that is a sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink.ro don t forget to dvr it if you can figure out how that works. if you can, good luck. again, we said at the beginning of the show, we are going to try to make the people who run this