first a cnn exclusive on the mueller investigation. in the clearest sign yet that president trump is considering sitting down with the special counsel even though that s the last thing his advisers want, sourcing telling cnn that trump has begun to prepare for a possible interview with mueller. in another exclusive we have learned that one of the trump campaign s earliest foreign policy advisers who was not coffee boy at all, in fact he literally had a seat at the table, was part of the effort to expose damaging information about hillary clinton during the campaign. joseph schmitz pushed the fbi and the house intelligence committee to review materials from the dark web he thought were willing s missing e-mails from her private server. sources say they believe the material was fake. let s discuss it all now. i want to bring in cnn s chief national security correspondent mr. jim sciutto, our legal analyst michael zeldin, robert mueller s seshl special assistant. juliette kayyem and cnn contributor garrett, the author of the threat matrix inside robert mueller s fbi and the war on global terror. we have certainly assembled the right group to discuss this. jim, i m starting with you. good evening to all of you. exclusive reporting from cnn, the president has begun taking preliminary steps to prepare for a possible interview with the special counsel. can you fill us in on what more you are learning. my colleagues are learning that president trump who has in his public statements been back and forth as to whether he was going to testify, often saying he would, we re told that behind the scenes he is more back and forth, not quite sure if he is making that commitment. but at least he is taking a step and beginning to be prepared for such an interview if he decides to do so. and that would be of course something that some of his advisers warned him against. we had roger stone on the air a short time ago on anderson s show saying he is concerned that this is a perjury trap. but also concerned he might catch himself or be caught in a lie by robert mueller and the investigators. but the lawyers are taking the step of preparing him for sitting down with the special counsel team. all right. juliette, what does this tell you about the trump team s view of where this is going with the mueller investigation? well, i give them credit for trying to prep the president, whether he is or isn t going to testify. at least they re trying to do something. but it s just a couple of extra points to what jim was saying. i mean, the first is the president lately hasn t been that busy. if you look at public records or daily records about what he is doing, maybe he has a meeting here or there. this may actually confirm what he has been doing during the times, that he is trying to precip with the lawyers. but look at what roger stone says, the second thing is roger stone says, you know, a perjury trap. he is worried about it? why? because the president doesn t know how to tell the truth. if you are the outside world or enemies or they re worried that the president lies or can t stick to a story. it s hard to say it s an effective leader or commander in chief for the nation. and this is just consistent with the narrative that s being sort of exposed, unfortunately, to the outside world as well. garrett, president trump claims he is he has nothing to hide, even as the guilty pleas from his campaign associates are piling up here. why wouldn t he why wouldn t he sit down with robert mueller? well, i think he is going to. for two reasons. one, i think that he thinks he is smarter than robert mueller. i think he thinks against a weight of the evidence to the contrary that he can outmaneuver one of the most talented teams of prosecutors ever assembled in the course of the u.s. justice system. then the second thing is i think in donald trump s mind he doesn t think he has done anything wrong. and so i think both of those point to him thinking that if he just sits down with bob mueller he can sort of go manno a manno like a new york real estate deal and come out the better half. i think donald trump has not figured out that going up against the full weight of the mortgage deal on a new york city office building. maybe he doesn t know what i don t know obstruction you think he doesn t understand michael what obstruction is and maybe if he is actually even done it? i m not saying he has. but do you think that s the case michael? i m not sure i agree it s right to sell the president short in respect of his failure to understand the importance of this interview. i think he fully well understands what it is. i think the preparation probably speaks to the fact that he realizes that this is not a civil deposition and that he has to prepare for this thing. i think his lawyers are probably impressing him the seriousness of this. whether he will do his homework or not remains to be seen. but i would be careful about trying to analyze the president in respect of in interview. if this interview occurs. and i think it has to because i think the law of the land will require it if mueller pushes the proposition. you think it s going to happen. will be a serious i think it has to happen. because the way the law sets up with nixon versus the united states, and clinton versus jones, the president really can t resist testifying. mueller has to show that he can t get the evidence from another source as a predicate for the interview. and i think that with respect to obstruction of justice and the collusion conspiracy stuff, there is no other evidence other than the intent of the president. and that s to come from the president s mouth. then the question becomes don, what will be the nature of the interview? will it be an under oath interview or not under oath? it really doesn t matter much. if it s under oath and a person makes a material lie they can be charged with 1621 perjury. if it s not under oath and they make a material false statement they can be charged with 1,001 making a false statement, carrying considers o serious criminal penalties. that s not so much a matter of importance whether under oath or not. all right. interesting. let s talk about another cnn exclusive, jim. you have new reporting on the lengths the trump campaign went to to try to get dirt on hillary clinton through the infamous e-mails. what more can you tell us? this is joseph schmitz, a foreign policy adviser to president trump during the campaign for a number of months, not an insignificant adviser. he was at the famous meeting pictured there in march 2016. but he was a former defense department official in the bush administration, considered for secretary of navy after president trump was elected. he obtains what he believes to be the deleted hillary clinton e-mails from the dark web. and relentlessly we are told by multiple sources he goes to multiple u.s. agencies, including the fbi, state department, the intelligence community, later the house intelligence committee, saying pushing for the emails to be declassified. so that they could be reviewed and potentially disseminated. he is not taken seriously at each of the agencies. in fact they didn t want to touch the material because they doubted the providence from the dark web, weren t sure who made it. and frankly had a lot of doubt as to whether the e-mails were authentic. he was rerentless. and you look at this alongside other efforts by trump campaign advisers who were open to, it appeared any way to get to damaging information on hillary clinton regardless of where it came from, the trump tower meeting in 2016, donald trump junior saying i love it when russians said they had dilatory on hillary clinton regardless what that potential dirt was or how they got it. george papadopoulos bragging a australian diplomat that he had been told by a professor connected to russia that they had dug up stolen hillary clinton e-mails. fitting into the larger picture you see a tremendous effort here by trump advisers to try to get that material regard willings are where it came from. jim, thank you we re done with you. but we re going to stick around and continue our conversation. thanks, thanks. good night, jim. good night. we ll see you on the other side of the break with the rest of the gang. don t go anywhere. you won t see these folks at the post office they have businesses to run they have passions to pursue how do they avoid trips to the post office? stamps.com mail letters ship packages all the amazing services of the post office right on your computer get a 4 week trial plus $100 in extras including postage and a digital scale go to stamps.com/tv and never go to the post office again so here is a look at what happened this week if the russia investigation. on monday we learned the special counsel is investigating a possible possible meeting between julian assange and long-term friend and adviser roger stone. stone send sent an e-mail claimed to have dined with assange he said that was a joke and denied it on our air a short time ago. the security cameras at the embassy would demonstrate that no such trip was made. i did produce airline tickets and so on. well that night court documents reveal that it was deputy attorney general rod rosenstein who specifically authorized the special counsel investigation and indictment of former trump campaign chairman paul manafort. on tuesday we learn mueller s team told trump s lawyers that the president was not a criminal target but a subject in the ongoing investigation. now the debate is over exactly what that means. subjects sometimes become targets. special counsel female is actively negotiating to interview the president. if the president sits down with mueller s team, he runs the risk of contradicting or worse, incriminating himself. and on tuesday, alex vander swan became the first person sentenced in the russia investigation. he pled guilty to lying to investigators which netted him a sentence of 30 days in prison and a $20,000 fine. on wednesday we learned about paul manafort s attempt to have his case thrown out. his attorneys argued that the entire order appointing mueller was invalid. and tried to have the criminal charges against him dismissed. the judge wasn t buying it. manafort faces charges of money laundering, bank fraud, conspiracy and other charges. he is looking at up to 305 years in prison. cnn exclusively reported on wednesday the special counsel s team has taken the unusual step of questioning russian oligarchs who traveled into the u.s. at least one of them was detained as his private jet touched down and his electronic devices searched. and now we learned the president is beginning the initial steps of preparing for a possible interview with mueller. let s bring back michael zeldin, juliette kayyem, garrett graff. juliette earlier this woke we saw a little bit of the court filings which showed the deputy ag rod rosenstein personally erz authorized the investigation and indictment of manafort. was that surprising to you? yes it was. that is the fourth filing in about ten days that really did start to sort of show a mueller theory of the case. it was very bad for march. in fact, of all the people you re talking about manafort had the worst week because the filing said we are going to we are looking at theories of the case, potentially collusion, unrelated to what we ve already indicted him for which was of course the financial dealings. manafort had a bad week. roger stone obviously had a bad week. donald trump had a bad week with the news about him being a subject not a target. the oligarchs had a bad week and guess who didn t have a bad week. that was of course the special counsel robert mueller. he just continued down this path so that every friday he has a bunch of movement heading closer and closer to the white house. and a lot of scrambling by a lot of other people. i ll add one more thing. there is all the other names coming out now. shmitz today that jim was talking about with, people around the campaign that were involved. there are going to be all the people we never heard of before come out making pleas all sorts of things, as this case is really in a hot a hockey stick mode right now. it s ramping up very quickly. we got schmitz and who knew who vander swan was. no one did. i had never heard of papadopoulos before he pled. yeah, interesting. i was thinking about paul manafort. 305 years in prison. what do you say to that? i give up. i mean, that is- that is unfathomable. michael, look, manafort s attempt to have the civil and criminal charges dismissed were pretty quickly thrown out. on what grounds did he try to challenge the deputy ag? what he tried to say was that mueller didn t have the mandate to investigate those charges that related to ukraine private business dealings and the failure to register as a foreign agent or failed to pay taxes on those monies. so he filed a motion to dismiss the indictment against him on the grounds that mueller was acting outside of his mandate. mueller responded to that with an opposition to the motion to dismiss. and in that motion as appendix b or c i forget he attached a letter that rosenstein wrote to him in on august 2nd. remember mueller is appointed may 17th. in that letter rosenstein says to mueller, you have my authority to investigate these ukrainian money laundering tax and failure to register charges. so amy berman jackson, the judge says that looks like mr. manafort that ends your case. he had the authority from rosenstein to investigate that. what is significant beside manafort having a very bad day was that in that same august 2nd letter what rosenstein says if you look at the way the letter sets up you, bob mueller can investigate manafort for collusion and for this ukrainian stuff, and if you look at the way the letter sets up. it looks like there are about six or seven other people who are listed under the blacked out section that mueller has the authority under this august 2nd letter to also investigate. so who s the blacked out line is really what is going to portend their future going forward. and i think what we will see on future fridays when mueller drops out of space these new names and new charges that none of us had heard about. can we oh hold it up to the light and try to figure out who is under that. no, but you can you can. blacked out line? what you can do is you can look at the amount of space it took to set out the charges against manafort pch it s about that much. then if you look at the space blacked out it s about that much. and so that s to my calculation about six to eight names. gotcha. it would take us a long time to figure out. that was good information. garrett, let s bring you in. do you know do you think the president is more receptive to the idea of an interview since according to the washington post mueller told the president his lawyers at least that he wasn t a criminal target but a subject in this russia investigation? yeah, you know there s been a lot of ink and air time spilled this week over trying to figure out what the difference between subject and target really means. partly because, you know, if we believe that the justice department sort of operating theory that the president is actually not able to be criminally indicted while in office, it might mean that bob mueller is simply saying you re the president of the united states, you can never be a target of this investigation. but you re still a subject to it, which means that we have reason to believe that your behavior in this is not entirely innocent, that you were sort of a material part of in unfolding story. and that is when you sort of combine it with some of what michael was saying, and what you were sort of laying out that took place this week, this incredibly bad week for the president in terms of us beginning to get a sense of just how much is still behind the curtain here, that that memo was from rod rosenstein was heavily redacted. there is obviously a lot of information in there that we don t know. remember, bob mueller isn t out doing wild goose chases for this. he is not saying, hey, rod, it s bobby, i ve got in sort of crazy hunch about manafort and russia and ukraine. i just want to sort of go off and spin my wheels on it. you know, he is presenting evidence and talking to rod rosenstein briefing him to get the permission to do this. so there is sort of lots of information already that bob mueller knows before he even gets to the point of that that memo with rod rosenstein. great information. i got to go, michael. i got to go. you know we didn t mention in everything, you know, garrett said a bad week. we didn t mention stormy. but we re about to. thank you. michael cohen. there we go. stormy and michael cohen. you never ask me on you never ask me on for stormy. we ll get there eventually i m sure. everything sort of ties together. everything will merge. story is not going anywhere, juliette. thank you, guys. i appreciate it. when he come back news on stormy daniels as i hinted. more than hinted. the president s legal team a small victory today. but has president trump already ruined his chances of winning the case? 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then why why did michael cohen make this if there was no. you ll have to ask michael. michael is my attorney and you ll have to ask michael. do you know where he got the money to make that payment? no, i don t know. daniels is suing to get out of the confidentiality agreement she claims is void because donald trump never signed the deal himself. avenatti says that trump s claim that he knew nothing about the payoff steering reporters to his attorney michael cohen instead bolsters stormy daniels case. it s like christmas and hannukkah rolled into one. you can t have an agreement if one party claims they knew nothing about the one of the principle terms of the agreement. the president shot himself in the foot, thrown his attorney basically under the bus in the process, put himself in dire straits with the state bar of new york, because according to the president now mr. cohen was this agreement and doing this on his own without consultation with the president. reporter: a granting trump s attorney request for more time to respond to daniels lawsuit until a decision is made on whether the case is moved out of the courtroom and into private arbitration. you know any subsequent phone calls. reporter: daniels former attorney keith davidson represented her in that agreement. in an exclusive interview with cnn davidson said after he was fired from the case michael cohen was encouraging him to spill his guts about the daniels case and the case involving play boy playmate karen mcdougal say they had affairs. michael cohen called me in the last week or two. reporter: what did he say to you? he called to offer his opinion as to whether or not miss daniels and miss mcdougal had breached the attorney/client privilege and there by waived it. and it was his assertion that each of them had. and he was encouraging me and informing me as to his opinion. and he suggested that it would be appropriate for me to go out into the media and spill my guts. reporter: are you here at the behest of michael cohen? no. no. no, not in any way, shape or form. reporter: but he did tell you to go out on spill your guts. yes. reporter: why do you think that is? well you d have to ask him. reporter: now cnn is learning after the daniels deal was done, cohen referred a client to davidson. davidson tells us the client was a producer on the apprentice. the miss usa pageant and miss universe all involving donald trump. labla had an issue with actor tom armed who tweeted several times last fall that labla possessed damning information about trump that arnold claims involved russian president vladimir putin. davidson says he wrote a cease and desist letter to his attorney on his behalf. labella told cnn a friend called labella never considered david his attorney because he never paid him. then just last month arnold commented on twitter that michael cohen had chuck labella hire keith davidson to try to keep me quiet about trump, russia, miss universe 2013. chuck labella said the tweets from tom arnold are slanderous accusations and outright lies. michael cohen has not commented on the story. as for donald trump the white house continues to deny affairs with either of the women. sara sidner, cnn, los angeles. thank you so much. i want to bring in now defense attorney joe tacopina and areva martin, the author of the best seller make it rain. good evening to both of you. areva we heard from sara there there are many twists and turns to the scandal. did stormy win this week? who won. it was a good week for stormy, although the we heard about the judge s ruling today where he granted the extension that michael cohen s team wanted with respect to responding to this complaint. now, we know that stormy daniels team wants to go and a quick trial. they want a deposition and move forward with the litigation and the federal judge is saying wait a minute something has to be decided. i have to make a decision about whether this matter will be referred to private arbitration. i ll i m not allowing to you start discovery. i m not going to set a trial date because a fundamental question has to be answered as to the validity of this arbitration agreement. rook, when they remove this matter, cohen s team from the state to the federal court they did so for this reason. they knew that federal judges are no nonsense, play by the rules and a federal judge doesn t like the fact that stormy daniels attorney didn t make himself available for what s called meet and confer. they want lawyers to work out these things like extensions. they don t want you running into court every time, you know, there is a request, particularly a request like this for a simple extension of time to respond to a complaint. so the judge wasn t too happy with stormy daniels attorney circumstance particularly since he found time to appear multiple times throughout the week on national television. yeah. so parental he had some time he could have met and conferred but didn t. the judge was piqued with both side particularly on stormy daniels side with the attorney appearing on television. speaking of what the federal judge did granting this request for president trump s attorney to extend the deadline, joe, to respond the original lawsuit, how much of a win is this for the president? is it? no, a win? it s not a win. it s done routinely. extensions are granted on a daily basis in every type of a case. but this judge made it clear he granted the extension but he is none too happy with either party. understand this, a case like this makes a federal judge want to throw up in his mouth. they are intellectual for the most part, real jurists like to deal with matters of importance appear and to them this type of litigation is sickening. and then to see the lawyers on tv you know back and forth having lawyers and lawyers on tv back and forth, not doing the work but arguing, you know, their points, you know publicly is not what a federal judge wants to see. but granting the extension is not a win. he didn t dismiss the case or the claims. isn t it right out of the president s play book? isn t he sort of fighting fire with fire? maybe that works for the court of public opinion but not for a federal judge? yeah, it s dangerous. it s dangerous. i mean what happened yesterday i don i want to make sure you understand the significance of it i was shock the president hadn t commented on this at all. so against his character. almost an admission obviously. but the fact that he said what he said on air force one yesterday just changes everything in this case. he confirmed what michael cohen has been had initially said. right. when he was doing that slide, which is the whole thing about he didn t know about the lawyer paying $130,000 of of money to stormy daniels for this confidentiality agreement. if that s the case the agreement is fraudulent. it s null and void. i got to get a break in joe let s talk about that on the other side of the break and we ll play what the president said. we ll be right back. yes. oh, look. another anti-wrinkle cream in no hurry to make anything happen. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair® works in just one week. with the fastest retinol formula available. it s clinically proven to work on fine lines and wrinkles. one week? that definitely works! rapid wrinkle repair®. and for dark spots, rapid tone repair. neutrogena®. see what s possible. essential for the cactus, but maybe not for people with rheumatoid arthritis. because there are options. like an unjection™ . xeljanz xr. a once-daily pill for adults with moderate to severe ra for whom methotrexate did not work well enough. xeljanz xr can reduce pain, swelling and further joint damage, even without methotrexate. xeljanz xr can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections, lymphoma and other cancers have happened. don t start xeljanz xr if you have an infection. tears in the stomach or intestines, low blood cell counts and higher liver tests and cholesterol levels have happened. your doctor should perform blood tests before you start and while taking xeljanz xr, and monitor certain liver tests. tell you doctor if you were in a region where fungal infections are common and if you have had tb, hepatitis b or c, or are prone to infections. needles. fine for some things. but for you, one pill a day may provide symptom relief. ask your doctor about xeljanz xr. an unjection™ . ask your doctor she pretty much lives in her favorite princess dress. but once a week i let her play sheriff so i can wash it. i use tide to get out those week old stains and downy to get it fresh and soft. you are free to go. tide and downy together. but one blows themisturizer all out of the water. hydro boost from neutrogena®. with hyaluronic acid to plump skin cells so it bounces back. neutrogena® back with joe tacopina and areva martin. joe talked about it earlier. let s talk about the president. let s play with president said what he said on air force one yesterday. watch this. mr. president, did you know about the $130,000 payment to stormy daniels? no. no. what else? then why why did michael cohen make it if there was no you ll have to ask michael cohen. michael is my attorney. and you ll have to ask michael. do you know where he got the money to make that payment. no, i don t know. so, areva, said he couldn t believe the president opened his mouth and answered that question. what do you think the the implications could be of that not knowing saying he didn t know about this $130,000 payment of supposed hush money? that makes the contract unenforceable. why didn t he have an agreement suggesting this contract is between stormy daniels and david dennison, who we know is president donald trump. the drafting of the agreement was sloppy. we ve seen so many things that michael cohen has done that just speaks to sloppy lawyering. we have seen so many other things michael cohen did in this lawsuit with respect to the settlement that speak to slop were lawyering. and the president making this statement continues the pattern we ve seen with respect to how the matter was handle from the beginning. for me it was never a question will the president speak on this? it s always a question when he would speak. because avenatti has done a brilliant job of provoking the president. you put that with the 60 minutes interview from stormy daniels we all knew that trump would have to respond. and the question was what would he say when he responded. and he said the worst thing he could say to advance his case. okay. this is what i want to know, joe. what is the bottom line with all of this? let s just say that, you know, they say well this contract was null and void. or the president does have to be deposed. whatever, what is the bottom line? what is the legal exposure? does he have any legal exposure because everyone think everyone feels he did it. stormy daniels told her story. so what s the payoff here? don, please. why why doesn t someone who is representing him understand that or even contemplate what to do? because all you need to do here. stormy daniels brought a lawsuit saying they wanted the agreement to be rendered null and void. they wanted rescission. they wanted i mean that s what they were looking for. if i were trumps lawyers i would say okay we agree null and void. forget it. buy, good day. she already told the story. she has gone into great detail on stuff that wasn t even aired that hopefully will never be aired. but she went into great detail about the one night stand. what else can she say. there is nothing else to tell. the only way it gets sticky for the president is if these sort of facts start getting dove into in other words where the lawyer for trump is saying he paid out of his personal funds money for hush money for stormy daniels not to talk about the alleged affair and trump didn t know anything about that. just imagine what that says. that s cohen. cohen is exposed then. then that s cohen. cohen is exposed. cohen is exposed from an ethical standpoint enormously but this agreement is gone. the agreement is gone. trump can put it way. listen, listen, for me let me get this out. for me the worst-case scenario for the president is to be deposed. if he just said let it go stormy daniels told her story it s over he doesn t have to be deposed move on, worry about mueller. go ahead, areva. if it were that simple, that s what he would have done. would have done that. we can t dismiss what trump has done. so many women came forward before the election and made ails with donald trump either consensual or non-consensual relations but this is the case. this is the one case where he went to great lengths to prevent her from telling her story and from enforcing this hush agreement. why this case? i think we have to ask ourselves why this case? there is something unique about this case that donald trump is concerned about that michael cohen is concerned about. okay. that s different from every other women. all right thank you both i appreciate it when we come back, the trump white house could be the most chaotic in history. but is that just the way president trump wants it? we ll talk about it. oh, look. another anti-wrinkle cream in no hurry to make anything happen. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair® works in just one week. with the fastest retinol formula available. it s clinically proven to work on fine lines and wrinkles. one week? that definitely works! rapid wrinkle repair®. and for dark spots, rapid tone repair. neutrogena®. see what s possible. i m the one clocking in when you re clocking out. sensing your every move and automatically adjusting to help you stay effortlessly comfortable. i can also help with this. does your bed do that? oh. i don t actually talk. though i m smart enough to. i m the new sleep number 360 smart bed. let s meet at a sleep number store. 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. so this may be the most chaotic white house ever and that may be just the way the president wants it as press secretary sarah sanders said today he s the only one elected to make decisions and outline policy. let s bring in gwena blair, author, and matt lewis, columnist for the daily beast. you wrote a story in politico, trump has the white house he always wanted. you say no doubt trump saw his share of standard pyramid charts at wharton but he s preferred a wheel. a work flow diagram at the trump organization would have put him at the hub and spokes to small number of top staff. we heard the president has always considered not having a chief of staff. he has considered not having a chief of staff, communications director. it s him alone, do you think that will work in the white house? the white house is, let s see, the number of people that he s the boss of, at least not every day, but he s in charge of, is something like i think 2.5 million, the number of people at the trump organization is 22,000. i did some math, it s 122 times more. so that s kind of tough. that way of running an office with is small, tight staff, everybody is reporting to him directly, nobody is in between, and he s constantly like sort of micro managing, checking on them, making everybody feels kind of insecure, there s no kind of alliance among the employees, the staffers, they re looking to him, he s constantly putting them at each other s throats. he s done that all along and he s done it at the white house. she said there s no business plan, no layers of authority, instead trump comes up with an idea work it up in his head and tell one of his hand-picked diamonds in the rough to get moving on it. that sounds familiar. the announcement to send troops to the border sounded like an announcement his team had to react to after he announced it himself. that rings true. that s how he likes to operate. he s been successful. that s the other problem when someone has been repeatedly successful following a template, it s hard to tell them they can t do it again. they said i couldn t get elected president, i did it my way and i got elected president. it s going to be difficult to get him to change. he tried to have a little bit of normalcy, order, and that didn t last. he fluctuates. he listened to john kelly a little while, and then goes on to someone else. this is who he is. he s 71 years old. he said he s not sure if it works, he tries, he goes back and forth, right? he briefly had a flirtation with the idea that maybe you d have some experts, maybe you listen to them maybe you d listen to john kelly. maybe you d listen to john kelly. maybe. but the guy was always lecturing him. and i don t think trump basically wants i think most of us, me, you, you have an idea that you kind of things are upset and in disarray and you want to get back to some version of normal that s calmer. he s the opposite. he doesn t want to get back to calmer and normal. he wants to stay in chaos. it s his comfort zone. nobody else knows what s coming. they don t know what to do and they look to him for the answer for who s in charge. he s comfortable in that situation. i think that s what he s recreated again and again. he wanted to get rid of the normalizing factors. we know he likes to cause chaos. what about when a subordinate causes it, like in the case of scott pruitt? i think it s the exact opposite. if donald trump causes a scandal and somebody else has to clean it up, somebody else has to go out in front of the press and sort of take the heat, that s okay with donald trump. but if donald trump has to now take a little heat for somebody else s scandal, i don t think that he has a long leash for something like that. i don t think he has much tolerance for you know, there can only be one trump, you know. and in a way, if you re out there causing problems, you re encroaching on his turf. that s his job. yeah. you know, he he doesn t like to fire people. that s the thing. he spent this whole time at the apprentice saying you re fired. he doesn t like to. he was doing it in front of a camera. first love. it wasn t for real. pruitt is like a mini trump right now. i think trump keeps changing his mind if that s working for him or not working for him. if he has any specific loyalty to pruitt, forget it. as long as he figures it s working in his favor. it s like fixing washington, getting rid of the old washington that was broken. bringing in somebody new, getting rid of regulations. as long as pruitt keeps doing that, maybe, maybe. as long as it works for him. thank you both. i appreciate it. have a good weekend. you know the date in november but you don t know the whole story. the days after the death of a president. here s a preview of a new episode of american dynasty: the kennedys which airs sunday night at 9:00. you know the date in november, but you don t know the whole story. jackie kennedy travels from the hospital to air force one to accompany her husband s body back to washington. lyndon johnson is waiting on the plane. eager to be sworn in lbj calls bobby kennedy for the precise wording of the oath of office. president johnson wants jackie to stand next to him for his inauguration. she insists on wearing her blood-stained clothes. american dynasties: the kennedys, new episode, sunday at 9:00 on cnn. them all out of the water. hydro boost water gel from neutrogena®. with hyaluronic acid it goes beneath the surface to plump skin cells from within and lock in hydration leaving skin so supple, it actually bounces back. the results will blow you away! hydro boost and our gentle exfoliating cleanser from neutrogena® . child hunger and lack of he had occasieducation are massive problems, but a farmer has a simple solution, serving one free meal at schools. and mihis work has grown and celebrated a mind blowing milestone. we started serving 200 children. and it is beyond our wildest dreams that it would grow like this. have served 1 billion meals since we began. it is very humbling. really more than ever, we feel that this work of ours has just begun. to see what some of the children somewhere gone on to achieve, what our full update on him or to nominate someone you think should be a cnn hero, go to cnnheroes.com. that is it for us tonight. thanks for watching. tragic accident in canada. 14 people killed where a bus carrying a hockey team was hit by a tractor trailer. trade essentials. u.s. markets bear the brunt of a possible trade war between the united states and china. and targeting putin s friends. the u.s. imposes new sanctions on oligarchs to close in on the russian president. live from cnn world headquarters in atlanta, we want to welcome our viewers here in the united states and all around the world. i m george howell. cnn newsroom starts
she had a problem with youtube. we called the cop again and told him that she might there is a reason she went from san diego to there so she might do something. i didn t know she has a gun and i thought maybe she was going to go and start a fire or something. bill: jonathon hunt piecing the pieces together in san bruno, california. what about the timeline of the family warnings? according to nasim aghdam s father, he called the police first on monday after he had been unable to reach his daughter for a couple of days, bill. so you have that on monday. at some point she leaves the family home, which is north of san diego. then on tuesday, yesterday morning, 2:00 a.m. she was found by police in mountain view just 30 miles south of youtube s headquarters here in san bruno. she was asleep in her car at the time. they talked to her. they let her go because according to them she didn t appear to pose any threat to either herself or anybody else. 10 hours later she shows up here at youtube headquarters and carries out this attack. now, which police department did the father speak to? that s the big question. one we don t have an answer to right now. certainly it wasn t the police here in san bruno. i spoke to the police chief today about that and asked him how he would feel if some police department somewhere knew a woman with a vendetta and on her way here and he wasn t told? depends how the information was received and how it was related, who it was relayed to. there could be a process there we would want to take a look at rather than jump to any types of conclusions. certainly that call that the father of nasim aghdam says he made is now very much a part of this investigation. bill: how much have you learned about her motivation so far, jonathan? this all seems to come down to the way that she monetized the many videos she put on youtube. a lot of them as an animal rights activist were about animal cruelty. youtube recently changed the views in the number of views you have to get before you can start making dollars off those videos. according to her family, she felt she was in her words being sensored by youtube and was unable to make money. so that s why she was so angry with youtube. the police chief says that s very much the focus of their investigation now. exactly where that anger came from and how it appeared to boil over here yesterday in such tragic fashion. i also asked the police chief, bill, you ll remember there were some rumors yesterday this may have been about a domestic dispute. i asked the police chief if they had any evidence that she had any personal relationship with anybody whatsoever anywhere on the youtube campus he said there is no evidence at all. it appears that her victims were absolutely randomly chosen. bill: more to be learned. jonathan hunt live in northern california today. heather: we have brand-new reaction out of the white house at this hour after president trump says that he wants the u.s. military to secure our southern border. president trump: we have very bad laws for our border and we re going to be doing some things. i ve been speaking with general mattis. we ll do things militarily until we can have a wall and proper security, we ll be guarding our border with the military. that s a big step. heather: allison barber is live for us at the white house. the president mentioned he intended to meet with his defense secretary to talk about this plan. do we know if anything came out of that meeting? a few details. the white house says they plan to use the national guard in order to execute at least part of this plan. no official numbers coming from the white house just yet but a white house official tells fox news that it will be a substantial mobilization and in a statement sarah sanders said in addition to mobilizing the national guard, quote, president trump and senior officials also agreed on the need to pressure congress to urgently pass legislation to close legal loopholes exploited by criminal trafficking, nark owe terrorists and smuggling organizations. many of the left are arguing against sending troops to the border and some on the right have concerns as well. francis rooney said in part there should be enough agents at the border to stop and vet those trying to cross illegally. i don t really think feel comfortable with deploying military troops and creating the possibility for an increase in violence and escalation of the conflict. if president trump follows through with the plan he wouldn t be the first president to send troops down to the border. president obama did it back in 2010, as did president bush in 2006. heather: with other things going on china threatening to retaliate against new u.s. tariffs with measures of its own. they announced those. what s the president saying this morning about that? right now he is saying there is not a trade war at least for now he seems to suggest a trade war has already happened. he wrote on twitter we re not in a trade war with china that war was lost many years ago by the foolish or incompetent people who represented the u.s. now we have a trade deficit of $500 billion a year with intellectual property theft of another $300 billion. we cannot let this continue. yesterday president trump said the u.s. has a problem with china. he says past u.s. presidents are partly to blame but he said they should and that the u.s. plans to negotiate with china. china hasn t said when the tariffs will go into effect. if they do a lot of tariffs seem like they re geared at and hit areas that voted for president trump particularly hard. heather: bill will talk more about that now. bill: charles payne is on stand by in a moment here from fox business on what it could mean for you and for our economy. stand by for that. charles in charge moments from now. fox news now confirming that special counsel bob mueller telling president trump s legal team the president is not a criminal target in the russia matter. peter king member of the homeland security committee. good day to you. thank you for your time now. we can report the conversation happened about a month ago. simple questions here. if true, what does it mean to the case if he is not a criminal target, sir? well, i guess anything subsequent can still come out. it s been going on for almost two years. if they haven t found any evidence of collusion, any evidence of cooperation between the trump campaign and russia, this shows this investigation has gone nowhere and shows there is nothing there. to me it shows also the special counsel should never been appointed in the first place. the intelligence committee looked at this and had over 70 witnesses and there hasn t been one bit of evidence showing any collusion between the trump campaign and russia. if you talk about a fiasco, talk about an abuse of time and power, this whole investigation into russian collusion which is not there. it has divided the country and spent hundreds of millions of dollars. bill: we re taking hits on your signal. a lot of bad weather in the northeast. we can still get the gist of what you re saying here. it has been reported did he intend whether or not to halt the russia matter, which would suggest that there would be some sort of obstruction case involved here. what is your read on that as we try to put those pieces together? bill, i don t see that at all. the president made it clear even when he fired jim comey and he made the term later on because of the russia thing. i believe it was because jim comey talking about an investigation into alleged russian collusion when there was nothing there. the fact that he was broadcasting this, the fact that he was telling the president privately that he was not a target, that he was not involved in the investigation but refused to say that publicly. it was tying the president s hands in dealing with foreign leaders. i think the president had every right to fire jim comey and also the president at the time he fired comey said the russia investigation would continue. to me there is no evidence of any collusion there whatsoever or obstruction of justice. bill: now it s been reported also that a couple of attorneys said it would be awkward if he didn t speak with mueller. do you have an opinion on that as to whether or not he should sit down and answer questions? a lot of people believe it could be a perjury trap. what is your view? it can be. if he ising to go in there should be a narrowly defined area. not every business deal or check ever written over the last 20 years, every bank he has dealt with. that s a perjury trap. if they can narrow it down to specific questions and time and place then it may be a gamble the should take. it has to be narrowly defined. anyone in front of a skilled interragator, they can get you to make a misstatement and say it s a lie. if it s a set up he shouldn t do it. narrowly defined he should consider it. bill: last point it is suggested the leaks that came out last night are designed to pressure the president. do you believe that to be the case? you know, there are so many leaks in all directions here. i think the president should listen to his attorneys. they should do what has to be done and again ignore the pressure, ignore the leaks. the fact is so far after 18 months, almost two years there is nothing there. he should ignore the leaks. don t give into any pressure at all. do what he and his lawyers think is the best thing to do and forget the pressure. bill: peter king from new york. thank you for coming back. alan dershowitz is on stand by next hour to answer these questions as well. every lawyer has an opinion. we ll get his coming up. heather: horrible news to report here. four marines are feared dead after a chopper crash in southern california. what may have led to the tragedy. bill: also heather homeland security finding rogue listening devices in washington what s that? a stingray? now the question comes who put them now and what foreign nations might be involved or is it your own government? heather: i want to know. right now we hear president trump has made a decision on whether to pull u.s. troops out of syria. more on that up next. president trump: saudi arabia is very interested in our decision and i said well, you know, you want us the say, maybe you ll have to pay. i want to get out and bring our troops back home and start rebuilding our nation. the. so to breathe better, 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. was a success for lastchoicehotels.comign badda book. badda boom. this year, we re taking it up a notch. so in this commercial we see two travelers at a comfort inn with a glow around them, so people watching will be like, wow, maybe i ll glow too if i book direct at choicehotels.com . who glows? just say, badda book. badda boom. nobody glows. he gets it. always the lowest price, guaranteed. book now at choicehotels.com heather: a fox news alert for you, four marines presumed dead after a helicopter crash in southern california that happened yesterday near the u.s./mexican border. all four crew members who have not been identified were on a routine training mission when the chopper went down. the cause also still under investigation. but we know this is the most deadly crash for the marine corp since a cargo plane went down in mississippi last july killing 16 people on board. president trump: we have a problem with china. they have created a trade deficit. i blame our representatives and presidents for this. they have a trade deficit of $500 billion a year. it s not something we can live with. so we ll be working with china and negotiating with china. bill: the last point is a key point. president trump on trade with china before beijing slapped new tariffs off $50 billion on american products. cars, planes, soybeans. the move in response to u.s. measures targeting chinese goods sending stock futures down. we ll go lower in 15 minutes. charles payne host of making money. nice to see you. bring the pain. here we go. is this a good idea? i think it is. they are proposed tariffs both sides right now. both sides left 60 days of wiggle room while they negotiate behind the scenes. president trump brings up critical, important points. we are people out there consider tariffs to be the weapons of trade wars. we ve been in a trade war with china for decades and we re losing it mightily. it there are two things going on right now. trying to fix trade so that our companies have fair access to 1.3 billion people in china. trying to get them to stop ripping us off. another interesting aspect to this. if you read the report that came out from u.s. trade representatives. i went through it this morning. a key focus on the future as well. china s goal of being the dominant world power and economy. they have a thing they want to be the innovative nation by 2020. the world s innovative leader biff 2030 and the world s powerhouse scientific by 2050 and supplant america as the supreme economy in the world. those are great goals. we shouldn t allow them to get there by stealing our technology. bill: you are making an argument about the future. you have are also making an argument about the past. past, tomorrow and future. bill: you said something critical. they re negotiating right now. there are no tariffs in place. you have a two-month window. a two-month window. if someone wants a trade war we will fight to the end. if someone wants to talk, then our door is open. of course they have been talking behind the scenes and china understands what s at stake. the advantage for xi. emperor for lack of a better word. he controls the media so he won t have anyone out there saying he is nuts, crazy or mean spirited but there is no social safety net in china. they don t have unemployment benefits or the things we have in this country. if it was a prolonged war ultimately he would have more to lose an we do. we are a larger economy at this moment. bill: we have the higher ground at the moment. we have the higher moral and economic ground and stronger position if we take advantage of it. unfortunately president trump will get a lot of pushback from the media who wants to see him fail. the only mistake he is making now is not articulating to the american public. there will be pain. any time you talk about a fight there is pain involved. but the ultimate goal and long-term benefits i would love to see him articulate that to the american public beyond tweets. bill: i wonder if they work. you think about the time frame. we re in april. a mid-term election seven months from now. you don t want to step on the message of the tax reform plan that was passed and it s doing it right now. if you negotiate and get a deal over the next two or three months you lay the ground work late summer, fall and the issue is off the table. heather: jobs report 241,000 jobs created last month. 65,000 in goods producing. good news amazing. this is headlines and speculation and driving the market down. president trump can get them both on the same page going into the mid-terms one heck of a telling. you believe there are good indicators for the economy, right? great, strong, powerful. we got a report on jobs out of this world, phenomenal. bill: see you on fox business. heather: coming up outrage over the trump add min traition s proposed citizenship question on the 2020 census. this is not just a matter of trying to be accommodating or not accommodating to immigrants. the constitution requires us to count everybody. it requires the census bureau to count everybody. we ll tell you about the growing number of states now taking legal action plus there is this. do you unlock your car? your car is on fire. bill: dramatic rescue all on camera. details on how this turned out coming up. they re all going in the same direction but in very different ways and pampers gives all of them our driest best fitting diaper. pampers cruisers with three-way fit. they adapt at the waist, legs and bottom with up to twelve hours of protection for all the freedom to move their way in pampers cruisers only pampers diapers are the number one choice of hospitals, nurses and parents. hi dad. no. edon t try to get up. hi, i m julie, a right at home caregiver. and if i d been caring for tom s dad, i would have noticed some dizziness that could lead to balance issues. that s because i m trained to report any changes in behavior, no matter how small, so tom could have peace of mind. we ll be right there. we have to go. hey, tom. you should try right at home. they re great for us. the right care. right at home. you know what s not awesome? gig-speed internet. when only certain people can get it. let s fix that. let s give this guy gig- really? and these kids, and these guys, him, ah. oh hello. that lady, these houses! yes, yes and yes. and don t forget about them. uh huh, sure. still yes! xfinity delivers gig speed to more homes than anyone. now you can get it, too. welcome to the party. bill: 18 states, 6 cities filing a lawsuit against the census bureau to add a question to the census. the lawsuit claims it would undermine the accuracy of the population count. we ll see where that goes. heather: we have some breaking news from overseas now. israel saying that it has stopped a major attack on its naval forces off the coast of gaza and they ve arrested 10 palestinians suspected of planning it. the news amid increasing violence along the israeli/gaza border. we are joined now with more. according to an israeli statement the plot was uncovered after an israeli naval vessel stopped a palestinian fishing boat off the coast of gaza. they re only allowed to fish in a small area. the fishing boat had left that area. israeli commanders say militants from the terror group islamic jihad planned to use one boat as a diversion to lure an israeli navy and a second fishing boat would fire a missile at a ship and a third would capture soldiers to hold as hostage to use as a bargaining chip in the future after thousands of palestinians protested along the israeli/gaza border last friday. demonstrations left 18 palestinians dead and 700 wounded. isly official efs have been defending their use of live ammunition on protestors including unarmed protestors. benjamin netanyahu said this latest terror plot shows, quote, the true intentions of terror groups in gaza and heather, we expect protests again this friday and for the following fridays until may 15. the situation in gaza is heating up and looking like we could see significance violence over the next six weeks or so. heather: thank you. bill: in a moment new reaction coming in from president trump on his push to secure our borders. president trump: it seems they ve broken up large numbers of that particular caravan and we ll see what happens. but we re prepared at our border. we cannot have people flowing into our country illegally, disappearing and never showing up to court. bill: on the same day the president proposing sending military troops to guard the southern border. dr. kelly ward will tell us what she thinks about that idea plus have you seen this today. officially found out i cannot go on the ship 100%. so we re leaving and trying to find flights for tomorrow and they sent out guys with ar-15s when my dad was talking to the desk about not being able to get on. heather: the pregnant woman escorted off a disney cruise with armed guards and her whole family. she ll join us next with her side of the story. i wanted to be clear. i wanted it to last. so i kept on fighting. i found something that worked. and keeps on working. now? 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they were back up above 24,000 following what happened on monday when they took a big plunge. bill: monday you re down 700 during trading. come back. we ll see where we go throughout the dai. his big point is previous administrations have not taken the issue on. his campaign ideas, this is something he has been talking about for decades as a businessman here in new york. we ll see whether or not he can find victory on said issue. heather: regardless of this, great employment news today with employment numbers. bill: good indicators on the economy. strong indicators, too. we re watching it now. 32 minutes past the hour. more on this. president trump: we have very bad laws for our border and we are going to be doing some things. i ve been speaking with general mattis. we ll do things militarily until we can have a wall and proper security. we ll be guarding our border with the military. heather: president trump making waves yesterday announcing that he wants the military to guard our southern border until the wall is finished. the white house releasing this statement on the president s plan. it says he received a follow-up briefing to discuss his administration s strategy which includes mobilization of the national guard. dr. kelli ward is a republican candidate for the u.s. senate in arizona as she joins us. obvious question, do you think it s a good idea? i do. as a military wife myself, my husband served in the military for 33 years. a lot of that in the arizona air national guard. go copperheads. and the national guard is very well prepared for this mission. they ve been doing it in other countries for decades. and we have got to do something to stop people from getting into our country illegally. it has been detrimental to our economy and healthcare, education, public safety, corrections. we ve got to secure the border. that means building the wall but until we build the wall i think this is a great option. heather: i know that you know this firsthand because you have been down to the border a couple times. i wanted to ask you specifically. i was looking at some of the pictures and things from a visit with jim chilton. he has a cattle ranch down there. there he is. tell us about that visit. mr. chilton is amazing. he has a ranch that s 55,000 acres and 25 miles of his ranch is right up against mexico. he took me down to the border a couple of weeks ago. we re supposed to believe that the four flimsy strands of barbed wire between mexico and the united states are supposed to protect our borders from the traffickers. heather: he was able to go right underneath and stand on the other side. he was. it s easy for people to come across that border. people bringing drugs, illegal guns, human trafficking. the things that the people who are trafficked are subjected to are appalling and we ve got to build the wall and support president trump in his efforts to build the wall. we can t be talking about trust funds to do it. we have to actually fund the wall and then construct it. heather: some other things the president has talked about. he talked about making amnesty claims more difficult. ending protections for children arriving without parents. you were talking about that and allowing families to be detained longer. we have to do something. he is exactly right whenever he talks about other countries having very strong immigration laws and our country not being as strong as we should. we have to end the policy of catch and release. that s been very detrimental. if someone manages to get one foot into the united states, our regulations and our policies require that they are detained and then released and expected to come back in years for a court date. most of them do not return, which is unacceptable. heather: one of the areas going back to the military guarding the border where the pentagon says they could contribute would be the air force s barry goldwater live fire range in arizona. yes. i think strategically deploying the national guard or military to secure the border especially utilizing cooperative states like arizona and texas for that national guard presence you could move the border patrol to california and new mexico if they aren t being as cooperative with the president in his effort to secure the border. so there is a lot we can do. i can tell you i have a twitter poll and facebook poll up @ kelli ward az on facebook. it is in support of utilizing the military to secure our border. heather: speaking of voting a big issue moving forward towards the mid-terms you are running against arizona congresswoman martha mcsally. one of your tweets that you talked about her being a flip-flopper on the immigration issue. yes. she has gone back and forth. before she was for amnesty. she voted nine times for amnesty at least and since she is running for office she has become a campaign conservative. we re used to that in arizona. we saw it with senator mccain and flake. people are tired of that brand of politics. they want a reliable conservative in the united states senate from our state. i look forward to getting there and serving the people. heather: hoping to replace retiring senator flake. thank you so much for joining us, dr. ward, we appreciate it. have a good day. bill: dramatic video now i want to share with you. police officers rushing to save a man from a burning car. check this out. can you unlock your car? your car is on fire. i m trying. thank you. thank you. let s walk him over here. bill: this is from oklahoma city. the officers spotting smoke on the highway after the vehicle rear ended another car bursting into flames and hitting a signpost and crashing off the road. removing the driver police said they smelled alcohol. he was charged with dui but they saved his life. when they see smoke on a highway like that they do a lot of dangerous things. heather: officers and first responders responding to things like that on the highway putting their lives in danger. bill: we don t get a chance to see it. heather: we re not done yet. wisconsin governor scott walker issuing a warning. a liberal candidate picking up a judicial seat in his state. the gop needs to be ready for a blue wave. bill: the future for syrian and u.s. troops in syria we re learning the president has made a decision. more on this developing story. we ll bring it to you straight ahead here when we come back. president trump: we do a lot of things in this country. we do them for we do them for a lot of reasons. but it is very costly for our country and it helps other countries a hell of a lot more than it helps us. so we re going to be making a decision. president trump: saudi arabia is very interested in our decision and i said well, you know, you want us to stay, maybe you ll have to pay. i want to get out and bring our troops back home. it s time. we were successful against isis and will be successful against anybody militarily but sometimes it s time to come back home. and we re thinking about that very seriously. bill: that s president trump from yesterday. just now we re hearing the white house will issue a statement regarding our future military involvement in syria today. stay tuned for that. former counter terrorism advisor to vice president dick cheney lieutenant colonel michael waltz with me now. as i read between the lines here the fact that he mentioned it so much yesterday, he is trying to squeeze money from saudi arabia. if you get that money, maybe things continue the way they are with that mission in syria. it is just a guess. is it a good guess? i think if you look at what he has done nato and getting those countries to step up, he has been incredibly effective. if we do take a play out of bush senior s playbook if you remember in the first gulf war he pressed both the saudis, gulf states, japanese and germans to help share the burden there. i think if that s the chess move here he is correct. our allies in the region particularly the kurds and arabs that are finishing the fight to isis and the iranians need to hear that america is resolved and america is resolute and is not going to abandon them. bill: simple question. if 5% of the territory is now held by isis and 95% has been wiped out, why don t we wipe out the other 5%? it s incredibly complex situation on the ground. one is that the turks are now attacking the kurds who we ve been working with and essentially have diverted our allies on the ground. i want to be clear here we have less than 2,000 soldiers on the ground. there is not hundreds of thousands like in the iraq war or the surge into afghanistan. less than 2,000. and those allies need to hear that we re with them. if we completely leave, we will have isis 3.0. they will begin plotting attacks and launching attacks into europe and united states and to go back again after those allies have been essentially annihilated will be difficult. bill: the commander-in-chief is aware of that. i m certain that general mattis, the central command responsible for the middle east and the special operations commander are advising him of that. i hope it is a chess move to get others not only to support the troops on the ground. the saudis and others, but also the reconstruction cost. i think this is what set the president down the road when he found out that we had pledged over $200 million to rebuild syria and the region does need to step up in that regard in a big way. bill: the leader of saudi arabia has been in the u.s. for two weeks, three weeks at a time here with a lot of shall we say politicking and meeting and greeting. again we re reading between the lines to figure this out. we re not leaving isis, watch this year. we re in syria to fight isis. that s our mission. the mission isn t over. we re going to complete that mission. bill: well, pretty simple. that s right. we need to not only finish it and completely annihilate them i want to see their leadership annihilated. one question i have is where the baghdadi, the leader of isis. and then setting the conditions on the ground so that we don t have a reemergence. isis came about whether president obama completely ripped everyone out of iraq and al qaeda at that time was completely on its back foot and then isis emerged from what was al qaeda. we have to prevent that from happening again. look, we all want the soldiers to come home but we have to set the conditions that we don t have isis 3.0. bill: two more things. the saudis don t want iran to move in there. they have to a degree. but if you vacate you have left a playing field entirely wide open. when the united states leaves a vacuum it is filled with bad actors. it will be iran, russia and assad regime and crush the folks we ve been working with on the ground. have no uncertain terms that s what will happen and we ll essentially have the region explode again just like when president obama turned his back over eight years. bill: is this do you come out and say we want to get our troops home like you have stated and the president stated? but perhaps in the near term you need to finish the job and maintain the posture that is aggressive. that s absolutely right. i think we ll see a strong statement that the region needs to step up in a big way financially to rebuild syria after eight years of civil war and counting. bill: thank you, michael. michael waltz there, good to have you back with us today out of washington, d.c. we ll see what happens from the president s decision today. heather. heather: and special counsel robert mueller telling president trump s legal team that the president is not a criminal target in the russia investigation. we will talk with alan dershowitz about that up next in the next hour. plus a pregnant woman and her family were escorted off a disney cruise by armed guards. that story is going viral and we ll have that woman up next. originally discovered. in jellyfish. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown to improve short-term memory. prevagen. the name to remember. when did you see the sign? 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heather: emily jackson joins us live now. thank you for joining us. we appreciate it. thank you. heather: first off, how are you feeling? are you doing okay? the pregnancy and everything is fine? yes, i m doing great. heather: great. you and your family, you packed up, you left st. louis and headed to miami to go on this disney cruise and tell us what happened. as we had went into the port to board the ship, as we approached the front desk i got up there to go get my key, take my picture with my daughter because we were going to be in a room together and i they asked me if i was pregnant and i had answered and said yes and she said how far along? i said 25 weeks. she said well that is going to be an issue. i ll need you to step over here. she had me go over to the other side of the counter where i waited for someone to come over and tell me that i was not going to be able to board. heather: the issue was the 24th week and we can bring up this statement from disney. their actual policy they say that women who have entered the 24th week of pregnancy as of their embarkation date, who will enter their 24th week will be refused passage. neither a doctor s medical statement or waiver of liability will be accepted. so did you know that when you went down to take the cruise? no, i did not. heather: it was on their website. did you also have a doctor s note? yes, i did. i didn t bring the note thinking that it was going to override their policy or anything. i brought the note because i had been to the doctor for my routine checkup two days prior and he just knowing i was going to travel he told me i may as well go ahead and bring the note along with me. i did notebook the cruise so i didn t look at any of the restrictions and with just talking the him i didn t think there was a reason for me to be concerned about going on the trip. heather: that s not your issue anyway, their policy itself. you re more concerned how you were treated after you found out. so what happened there? you had to wait for your luggage. you have two children by the way under the age of two. yes. we were in their waiting area on the inside for about an hour and we were actually standing over by the window trying to get service to find other arrangements such as hotels because there wasn t any reception in there. they had basically told us to figure it out on our own. they didn t offer to help or anything like that. and then my dad had went up to the front desk area and the workers were all seated behind a glass and there was actually another family waiting to get help as well and none of the workers were coming out of the glass and so my dad did raise his voice and say can we get some help? the other customer next to us, she has actually since messaged me saying how she is so sorry i m receiving so much backlash. she was there and saw that how we reacted and said she thought we handled ourselves very well and they were frustrated as well the way the workers were handling themselves and they were talking badly about us and making fun of us. heather: i know you were concerned about men there with guns, assault rifles i think you said and there were some dogs as well. they have now said disney said that was miami-dade police department. have you talked to them? well, the problem was after my dad had raised his voice at that point they had called over the security. so it is not like the security had already been standing there. they came up behind us after they asked for help. heather: thank you for sharing your story. hopefully it will all get resolved. thank you. heather: have a good day. bill: breaking news. a trade showdown heating up between the u.s. and china. president says no trade war. what will he say on that today? 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hi, bill. if it is not a trade war yet, it is certainly a potential trade spat. china putting 25% tariffs on as you noted, $50 billion worth of exports from the u.s. over 100 key products like soybeans, airplanes, cars, chemicals. economists were surpriefsed how fast china came out with these 11 hours after the u.s. put tariffs on $50 billion worth of exports from china. they were surprised how politically tactical the chinese tariffs were hitting products especially agriculture coming from key president trump supporting states. remember, this is the second round of tit-for-tat tariffs after the u.s. put levies on steel and all aluminum. economists agree that president trump has a point when china s theft of intellectual property. some complain about his numbers. others about the potentially dangerous tactics. if there is a cautionary note in all of this neither u.s. or china are slapping these tariffs on right away. at least in the u.s. there is a review process. that could take a few months. china also today saying it would go to the world trade organization. it is the threat, however, bill, that has wall street and a few other folks quite spooked. bill: i would agree with that. thank you, greg palkot reporting in london. thanks. heather: now to another fox news alert the president promising strong action on immigration today tweeting about it this morning less than 24 hours after saying he wants to send the national guard to the u.s.-mexico border. president trump: we have very bad laws for our border and we are going to be doing some things. until we can have a wall and proper security we ll be guarding our border with the military. that s a big step. heather: william la jeunesse is in los angeles. william, the president won t move them until the wall is built. right. but the question, heather, is in what capacity? what would the rules of engagement be during that period? previously the guard helped build fences and roads, kept vehicles running and operated radar and surveillance cameras and maintained sensors and units in the field did not confront immigrants but called in agents to make an arrest when necessary. president trump: until we can have a wall and proper security we ll be guarding our border with the military. that s a big step. we really haven t done that before, certainly not very much before. so right now the border patrol is shorthanded and down 2,000 agents and losing more each month than it hires. secondly processing a single central american takes hours. if a guardsman could handle that function agents could stay in the field. right now we have no details from the administration when or how many guardsman could be mobilized or where they would go. good guess, south texas. heather: we re hearing mexico is helping break up the caravan of illegal immigrants headed to the u.s. that s true. mexico did deport some of the 1300 central american immigrants. others received visas allowing them to stay there a short time and some will go home. others say they ll continue coming to the u.s. to claim asylum or chris illegally. to taint us, to use us to enforce his poll seals of fear as if these were soldiers. look at the women and children fleeing the violence. our destination is to reach the united states. to support those who remain. not long ago my brother was killed. he was killed cruelly. doing this for him and his family, that is why we re fighting to go there. the caravan may be broken up but agents say there is a daily flow of immigrants entering from mexico to the u.s. traffic fell after the president s election. as these figures show almost every month since apprehensions have increased word has spread that catch and release continues. the president wants to end that. given the court decisions about detention it will be easier said than done. back to you. heather: most things are. william la jeunesse live for us. bill: let s get analysis. guy benson. how are you doing? fox news contributor. what do you think about the idea? does it happen? i think the president has the authority to do this and i ve read some reaction to it saying it s an overresponse from the trump administration and this caravan is not a significant enough event to justify this type of action. the president shouldn t militarize the u.s. southern border. president bush did it in 2006. president obama did it in 2010. so regardless of the merits and what you think of the president s action and his potential reasons behind it, it is hardly unprecedented. bill: i think what it shows, he is determined to get border security. the wall, passed in the budget was given a fraction of the money. he isn t giving up. bill: $1.6 billion in the budget deal allocated to the wall. what that really means is fixing existing fencing for the most part. what the president is probably telling congress and democrats and republicans alike, this is still a priority for me. if you aren t going to get serious and take lasting measures to secure our border, i ll send the military down there. i can do it and use the national guard and if you think it s a waste of resources and a waste of time, let s get about going through the process that i want to have happen, and build the darn wall. bill: here is ken paxton texas a.g. he have was with shannon last night and said this. federal issue. if the president thinks national guard will help us, given the situation in mexico and this caravan of people, certainly we re open to that. if it provides greater security and protects our citizens. bill: okay. then this tweet comes out. our border laws are very weak while those in mexico and canada are very strong. congress must change these laws now. democrats stand in our way. they want people to pour into our country unchecked. crime, we ll be taking strong action today. what are they going to do? we might see as we ve been discussing this deployment to the southern border. we heard from william la jeunesse in his report that there is this backlog. we have lost a lot of agents, border patrol agents and a huge amount of time that is wasted reportedly in logging each person who is captured at the border, each illegal immigrant. if there can be extra hands to go through that process logistically maybe some of this is justified. there is only so much the president can do unilaterally. if he wants the wall built, it needs to be an act of congress and good luck with that. this congress seems totally incapable of accomplishing anything on immigration. bill: i don t know if they ll get much legislation done before the mid-terms. final point on that. there was a suggestion about a week ago the president was offered we ll give you the $25 billion, you take care of a deal and we have the daca deal and we re off. do you think he would come around for the four pillars plan? i thought it was modest on his part and i supported it. i m moderate on this issue myself. when it came up for a vote in the senate, it failed and didn t even come close to getting 50 votes. the other plans got more than 50 votes but fell short of the 60 votes they needed. it was dead in the water. that s the reality on the ground in the senate. what s the next step and what s the potential agreement that could come to a compromise? $25 billion for the wall. more limited dream act for the daca individuals. to me it seems like a fair trade-off. again, what might seem fair and logical in this town doesn t necessarily get done. bill: got it. okay. work on the logic. thank you, guy. guy benson in d.c. thank you. heather: today marks 50 years since the assassination of dr. martin luther king junior. a live look happening at the civil rights museum in memphis where a day of tributes are planned getting underway now. other cities around the nation planning events to honor dr. king. the civil rights icon was shot and killed at the age of 39 back on april 4th, 1969. james earl ray was later convicted for his murder. bill: what a moment that changed hills hills history there is a ceremony around the corner in new york city last night as we all remember that 50 years later. in a moment here mark zuckerberg head ceo of facebook will take questions on capitol hill over your data and privacy matter and he will testify before a house panel in about a week. coming up here. heather: another republican warning about a blue wave in november after a democrat wins a state race. so is this an ominous sign for the gop? we ll ask rnc spokeswoman. bill: new reaction on the news special counsel bob mueller told the president s lawyers a month ago president trump is not a target in a criminal investigation. but there is more to that. we ll tell you what that s about next. if you re ready to be done and let the chips fall where they may and have it be over you do the interview. it is fool hardy to imagine that somehow this matter could conclude without the president providing some testimony. you wouldn t accept an incomplete job from any one else. why accept it from your allergy pills? flonase relieves your worst symptoms including nasal congestion, which most pills don t. flonase helps block 6 key inflammatory substances. most pills only block one. flonase. if these packs have the same number of bladder leak pads, i bet you think bigger is better. actually, it s bulkier. always discreet quickly turns liquid to gel, for drier protection that s a lot less bulky. always discreet. bill: breaking news from the u.n. a face-off with russia over the use of chemical weapons on behalf of assad and syria. here is the u.s. ambassador nikki haley leading that effort today. she started speaking a moment ago. want to drop in here for a moment. one member of this council shielded the assad regime from any consequences. then blocked us from renewing the joint investigative mechanism. our consensus broke down. the world today is a far more dangerous place because of it. the assad regime keeps dropping chlorine bombs on innocent men, women and children. just these past few weeks when the regime seized eastern guta there were credible reports of chlorine gas attacks. it s a sad fact just a few years ago a single chemical weapons attack would have united us in shock and anger. it would have been enough for us to take immediate action. now we have a regime that uses chemical weapons practically every other week. our lack of action has consequences. when we let one regime off the hook, others take notice. the use of nerve agents in salisbury and other places proves this point and reveals a dangerous trend. we are rapidly sliding backward crossing back into a world that we thought we left. no one wants to live in a world where chemical weapons are used. no one wants to live in fear that a colorless, shapeless gas will suddenly seep into our lungs and leave us gasping for air. if we do not act, if we do not stop and change course, this is the world we could be fast approaching. even as the security council has remained deadlocked, some have stood up to demand accountability for the use of chemical weapons. the general assembly overwhelmingly approved the creation of the international impartial and independent mechanism on crimes committed in syria collecting evidence for future prosecution. the united states also fully supports france s international partnership against impunity for the use of chemical weapons. bill: she is about to say we ve done it before with all the profound differences on this counsel. the u.s. refuses to believe we can t come together and stop chemical weapons not just to protect the syrian people but to protect us all. that speech continues from the u.n. we ll gauge the consequences of this action and her words coming up shortly. heather: first another republican warning his party is at risk of losing seats to democrats in the upcoming mid-term elections after a liberal judge defeated a conservative judge in the race for wisconsin s supreme court seat last night. wisconsin governor scott walker tweeting this. tonight s results show we are at risk of a #blue wave in wisconsin. the far left is driven by anger and hatred. we must counter it with optimism and organization. let s share our positive story with voters and win in november. we have a republican national committee spokesperson and joins us to talk about this. thank you for joining us. are you concerned about a blue wave in wisconsin as a result of this race last night? we re always concerned. ronna mcdaniel and president trump have both said history is not on our side here. as the chairwoman said we want to defy history. looking at wisconsin in particular, it is not predictive of what we ll see in the fall for a few reasons. kristin snyder had a sophisticated analysis and said the last three april elections we ve seen turnout of 792,000. the presidential elections it was 3 million. governor elections two million. we ll see three times the turnout and i want to point out in 2008 a conservative judge won in an april race but president obama carried the state by 14 points and reverse in 2015 you had a liberal judge win and president trump of course took wisconsin the first time a republican took the state since 1984. it is not predictive but a cautionary tale. heather: president trump won wisconsin by less than 1%. something i found interesting with this particular race the amount of money from outside sources that came in. do you think that s an indication of what is going to be happening moving forward specifically with these judicial seats? because there are 74 judicial seats in 32 states at play in 2018. do you think that is going to become a focus with democrats specifically? no doubt about it. you are pointing out spot on. a key takeaway from this race. we saw eric holder, his outside washington-base group pour money into this race. billionaire hedge fund manager poured money into the race. the far left liberal base is motivated and you have these big-time millionaires and billionaires pouring money into local races. we have to be aware of this as republicans and stay motivated and have to show up in november. heather: democrats need 24 seats. they need to flip 24 seats in order to take over the house. eight of those gop seats they rated likely democrat leaning or leaning democrat. 22gop seats rated as a toss-up. so in terms of moving forward and knowing that information, what do you need to do? first off we have to look at the primaries and what is happening. oats instructive what is going on in the democrat being party as a whole. you look at california where you have 10 or 11 democrats running in the primaries. texas where you had bernie sanders group fighting against the democratic establishment. there is infighting that will complicate the path forward for democrats. we need to expose these democrats. people like connor lamb who won in pennsylvania talked like donald trump but vote like nancy pelosi. we can t let democrats get away with the balancing act, acting like a republican and governing like a liberal. we need to expose them. heather: that s what happened in pennsylvania and you had also what happened in alabama as well. we have to go. we have had breaking news. thank you so much for joining us. appreciate it. bill: so is someone spying on you in washington have a look at this? what is that? what are the listening devices and who owns them? one school is hosting a christian privilege seminar. what do you think of that, america? you know what s awesome? gig-speed internet. you know what s not awesome? when only certain people can get it. let s fix that. let s give this guy gig- really? and these kids, and these guys, him, ah. oh hello. that lady, these houses! yes, yes and yes. and don t forget about them. uh huh, sure. still yes! xfinity delivers gig speed to more homes than anyone. now you can get it, too. welcome to the party. bill: this time in washington, d.c. department of homeland security saying they can be used to intercept cell phone calls and messages. an image. associated press put this out. releasing an image of the stingray two. former c.i.a. officer buck sexton to talk about this. good morning to you. do you know what the string ray is? lots of folks can use it and you can get some things commercially. this is a reminder for everybody there is constant possibility of surveillance, interception, all of that stuff going on in this country in our day-to-day lives. bill: some people think it s nefarious. it could be. you would think so. bill: it s mobile, right? it depends. there is a range of these devices. some are pretty basic and really just give geo location data. others that allow for active surveillance of the actual conversation, more sophisticated having to do with what it does to the cell phone signal it gets. law enforcement has used them to great effect in the country. they keep it quiet. it has been reported pretty widely now. if you can get them on the commercial or black-market not hard to use. the concentration of military, national security folks, government folks in washington, d.c., if i were a russian spy it s the best place i could think of to set up something like this or any spy from any country. bill: you could buy one of these. get your hands on one from your own government. people have the technology outside of our own borders. lots of ways to do this. a reminder there is operational security all of us would be informed about. be careful because of communications going over an unclassified system won t be kept secure. beyond that folks in their day-to-day lives, all the things you re doing are susceptible to interception, surveillance and people spying on you. bill: a great reminder. what would someone use this for? a criminal matter? or something worse? it all depends. the most common way that you would use this if you have the higher end version would be to listen in. the it acts as a dummy cell tower. it would allow a third party to listen in on everything we were saying. so it allows for active surveillance of a phone conversation. very illegal, of course, but people could do this. if you were trying to get an edge on government negotiations or just do some industrial bill: if i go get a stingray and place it near your office i can listen to your phone call. you could. bill: i can figure where you are. the ping emitted on your smartphone tells me where you are, correct? depending on the model. bill: can i legally do this or do i need to go to a judge? if a private citizen does this they re looking at federal criminal charges certainly. and if a law enforcement officer does this they have to get a warrant for it. not something that you can set up and do. geo location data different from active surveillance of a phone conversation. you absolutely would need to get. bill: last point here. the u.s. government could use it, private detective could use it, a foreign national could use it. d.c. has been a hot bed of espionage as long as there has been a washington, d.c. bill: how much of this is going on today? some ofist we don t talk about. some of it we don t know about and some you can assume is happening. that would be for folks walking around the district now. we re in new york another place you find a lot of government figures and financial information that s valuable. your cell phone conversation is getting more secure and doing things on the encryption side and email is getting more secure but technology to interception it gets better, too. bill: thank you. heather: coming up special counsel robert mueller told president trump s legal team he is not a criminal target in the russia investigation. so is the president off the hook? alan dershowitz joins us. bill: looking forward to that. you re looking live at the youtube shooter s home in california. police might be getting closer to learning about a motive. what the suspect s family is telling police before gunfire rang out yesterday afternoon. we heard boom, boom, you know. and everybody looked up and didn t know what it was. i saw her and it was a woman and she was firing. i don t know why i didn t get screened a long time ago. i kept putting it off. what was i thinking? ok, mr. jones. we re all done. i told you it was easy. with life line screening, getting screened for unknown health conditions is so quick, painless and affordable, you ll wonder why you hadn t done it before. so if you re over age 50, call now and schedule an appointment near you. for just $149- a savings of over 50%- you ll receive a package of five screenings that go beyond your doctor s annual check-up. ultrasound technology looks inside your arteries for plaque that builds up as you age and increases your risk of stroke and heart disease. after all, 4 out of 5 people who have a stroke, their first symptom is a stroke. so call today and start with a free health assessment to understand your best plan of action. so why didn t we do this earlier? life line screening. the power of preventvention. call now to learn more. bill: here we go fox news alert. here is what we re learning about the woman who opened fire at youtube headquarters. live pictures from the suspect s home in southern california. family members say that nasim aghdam was a disgruntled youtube user blaming youtube for cutting ad revenue from her website. here is what her brother had to say about that. she had a problem with youtube so we called the cop again and told him that she might there was a reason she went all the way from san diego so she might do something. i didn t know she has a gun and then i thought maybe she was going to go and start a fire or something. bill: she died yesterday self-inflicted gunshot wound. the three people she shot and wounded did not appear to be targeted. heather: more to come on that for sure. a key development in the russia investigation. special counsel robert mueller telling trump s legal team last month the president is not currently a target of the criminal investigation. but he remains a subject of that investigation into russian interference with the 2016 election. chief intelligence correspondent catherine herridge is live from washington with more on this. hi. good morning. a source close to the matter confirms to fox news the president s legal team was told in early march the president was not a target of the special counsel investigation but considered a subject or witness. special counsel robert mueller was at the meeting in early march and the conversation was in the context of a possible interview with the president. some members of the legal team concluded an interview wasn t in the president s best interest because it would elevate or likely elevate his criminal jep or dee. the republican chairman of the house government oversight committee reacted. i think if we weren t in a political environment he probably wouldn t have said. that you generally don t tell people you aren t under investigation because you don t know what the next witness is going to say. legal experts say the issue with any interview is that it can create conflicting statements and also statements that conflict with the paper trail in this case emails. heather: what about the white house? where do they stand on the issue? we may learn more later today if there is a white house briefing. after john dowd resigned from the case he was against a special counsel interview the president was pressed by reporters on his position. would you like to testify to special counsel robert mueller, sir? president trump: i would like to. bill: after providing witnesses and records on a voluntary basis the source told fox news there was still no evidence to support criminal charges against the president adding the leak they believed about the march meeting appeared to have an effort to further pressure the president and his legal team. heather: catherine herridge live for us. bill: i want to bring in alan dershowitz and thank you for being here. welcome back to the program. you have a lot of opinions on this. take them one by one. not a target of the legal investigation. so our viewers understand here the definitions, target versus subject. target is a person to whom the prosecutor has substantial evidence linking them to the commission of a crime. a subject is a person whose conduct is within the scope of the grand jury s investigation. if all of this is true what do you conclude as of today? it s very simple. he has to be a subject not a target before the justice department can ask him to testify. generally the justice department does not ask targets to testify because if you are a target that means you will be prosecuted and so telling him he is a subject is just another way of saying we want you to testify. we will subpoena you in front of the grand jury if we can t make a deal with you. it is a magic code word. it is just a way of saying you have no excuse not to testify. you aren t a target just a subject. in many cases subjects become targets. bill: on its face is it good news legally for the president? i would say it s good news for the president but he has to be very cautious. targets sometimes evolve from subjects particularly if they testify and they testify in a way that the prosecution thinks is false. so caution is still the by word. the biggest development i thought in the last couple of days it s now obvious the mueller thinks he is wrong he thinks collusion is a crime. in his memo he talks about colluding with the russians or collusion as a crime against the federal government. i want to issue a challenge to him right now. i challenge special counsel mueller to cite the statute or the case or the source or any legal information that would make collusion or colluding with russia a crime. he have is not going to be able to find it. there isn t a case. bill: why do you conclude based on the little evidence and information we have that he is pursuing collusion? this was perhaps some suggest he is going the other way. well, he is probably going both ways. but in the memo he authorizes that he rosenstein authorizes mueller and he accepts to investigate collusion or whether or not manafort and other colluded with the russians. now you just can t make up a crime. special counsel have a lot of power, attorneys general have a lot of power. they do not include making up a crime. only congress can enact criminal statutes. congress has failed to enact a criminal statute making collusion a crime. if congress wants to do that it has the power to do it subject to a presidential veto. without a statute making collusion a crime a special counsel can t magically create a new crime where there is no crime. collusion is simply not a crime. bill: axios reporting earlier today that part of mueller s focus is to try to figure out while in office whether or not the president tried to halt the russia matter. it sounds like some deal with james comey or something within that relationship there. it sounds like he is building an obstruction case. is that on its face what it appears to be there? if he did, then of course rosenstein would have to recuse himself. he is the primary witness in a collusion case. he is the guy who wrote the memo. one interpretation of why rosenstein has appointed a new right-hand man to sit in the office next to him he knows he will have to recuse himself if there is an obstruction of justice charge or investigation. you cannot have the same person prosecuting the case, rosenstein, and being the main witness in the case. and that s the situation he would find himself in if there were any charges of obstruction of justice relating to the comey firing. because he wrote the memo. bill: you argue with me all the time as commander-in-chief there is no obstruction because you have the authority to make those decisions and you stand by that. you raise more questions for me. two more, all right? based on what catherine herridge is reporting just there, there is a suggestion that the leak now public as this conversation happened in early march five or six weeks ago is meant to pressure the president to go ahead and talk to mueller. do you believe that to be the case? that s exactly the case and calling him a subject rather than a target is additional pressure for him to testify because he can t generally say to the public look, i don t want to testify. it is a witch hunt. they are going after me. they re telling him he is not a target, merely a subject. he have is a witness and everybody has to testify as a witness. it is not legal pressure but public pressure. bill: the last point relates to th. it has been reported two of his personal attorneys jay sekulow and ty cobb the other it would be awkward if the president didn t speak to mueller. do you agree with that phrasing? awkward is not a concept that any lawyer should take into account. you have to consider the best interest of your client. it is okay to be awkward. it is not good to walk into a perjury trap. awkward is not a good reason for making a decision relating to whether he testifies. just remember in the end the prosecutor has the leverage to call him in front of a grand jury. unlikely he would do that but he has the ultimate authority. bill: the logic is the president called it a witch hunt. go ahead and talk to them because you have nothing to hide is the basis for that reporting. sir, thank you so much. hope you come back. alan dershowitz, thanks. heather: coming up attorney general jeff sessions taking action on a number of issues including his appointment of a federal prosecutor to investigate alleged misconduct at the f.b.i. and justice department. why our next guest says that s preferable to a second special counsel. touch is how we communicate with those we love, but does psoriasis ever get in the way? embrace the chance of 100% clear skin with taltz. for people with moderate to severe psoriasis, up to 90% had a significant improvement of their psoriasis plaques. with taltz, 4 out of 10 even achieved completely clear skin. don t use if you re allergic to taltz. before starting, you should be checked for tuberculosis. taltz may increase risk of infections and lower your ability to fight them. tell your doctor if you have an infection, symptoms, or received a vaccine or plan to. inflammatory bowel disease can happen with taltz, including worsening of symptoms. serious allergic reactions can occur. ready for a chance at 100% clear skin? ask your doctor about taltz. try it for as little as $5 a month. bill: moments ago brand-new economic advisor taking questions from reporters on the north lawn about the new tariff developments with china and a possibility of a trade war. he said this. sglaots bill: it s part of the process. he is ultimately for free trade. he wants all of this with the least amount of pain and again here is the key point. both sides benefit by positive solutions that lower barriers and the markets. that s important. china will benefit and we ll benefit, the whole world economy will benefit. that is a growth action, i can t emphasize that enough. this whole administration is about growth, prosperity, optimism, jobs, wages. bill: he is a communicator. king dollar there moments ago at the white house. heather: attorney general making moves on immigration and claims of misconduct at the f.b.i. and the justice department. jeff sessions appointing a federal prosecutor to investigate those claims. my next guest writing a piece to thank sessions for his latest action in that piece he says this among some other things. by reading the riot act to his reluctant f.b.i. director and shunning the appointment of another special counsel mr. sessions has rendered a service to the constitution, to the good government and even mr. trump, though he may not realize it. bill mcgurn is the columnist for the wall street journal and joins us to talk more about this. i ll use the first line of your piece. what does jeff sessions have to do to get a nice tweet from his boss? a big move. appointed a u.s. attorney all the powers of a prosecutor. he can get search warrants and subpoenas and go to a grand jury to indict all the powers of a prosecutor combined with the inspector general s investigation. that s a very serious step and amazing how little attention it is. and how many republicans were grousing because he didn t name a special counsel. heather: chairs from three gop committees requested the special counsel. right. some of them were mollified by this and thought this was a good idea. to be clear i think a special counsel is always a bad idea. a corruption we ve inherited from washington it is more from a special counsel to an independent counsel back to a special counsel. the only thing we have out of this process worth anything is justice scalia s opinion eviscerating the idea of this office. i have think this is a very serious step. clearly former deputy director mccabe thinks its serious because he started raising money for his defense. congress needs to keep its job and the other is the department has to clean up its house. people say they can t do it. heather: the other issue president trump as said has accused them of slow waung and getting documents. he is right on that. it was good to see the attorney general called the f.b.i. director onto the carpet and said you start providing these documents and they ve doubled the number of f.b.i. agents. even more important that providing them to congress is providing them in an honest way. some key material has been redacted. blacked out. if you re a congressman and you get the thing blacked out you don t know what would there. president trump could assign someone to comply with congressional demands and review redacted material. maybe his lawyers are telling him let other people do the dirty work. he could do that. they should be on parallel tracts. the problem a lot of people outraged by the f.b.i. and d.o.j. s behavior think they need a special counsel because it s the only way to get to the bottom of it. the moment you have a special counsel don t do anything to impede the criminal investigation. we the american people don t get the information we need. heather: i think the american people would like a resolution to it at this point. thank you for joining us. i ll say thank you to you. how is that? bill: is there christian privilege in america? one university thinks so. it is hosting a seminar to explain why. why do you think of that? a source tells fox news president trump is not a target in special counsel mueller s investigation. so where does the probe go now? ari fleischer joins us. new details on the shooting at youtube headquarters. why the shooter s father says he warned police about his daughter beforehand and president trump says he wants to pull u.s. troops out of syria. what would that mean for the fight against isis? top of the hour. bill: thank you. george washington university hosting a seminar called christian privilege in america. the course description describes how students will learn about how christians and white people get unmerited perks and live easier lives. fox news contributor robert jeffress has ideas on this. good day to you. you ve seen what is the purpose of the seminar? explain that. the content is somewhat unclear. the purpose of the seminar could not be more clear. it is just one more excuse to attack christians and restrict their very real constitutional rights. and bill, the problem with creating an imaginary problem like christian privilege is it often provokes a dangerous solution. that s what s going on here. read the course description and it starts with a false narrative that christians have an unfair advantage in this society and then it proposes quote leveling the play field, which is always code for let s take away the real constitutional rights of christians for the free expression of faith in order to create an imaginary right for non-christians to be free from public expression of faith. bill: i m a christian, you re a christian. why would we have an advantage? well, here is what i don t know what they would say. that s part of it. a false narrative. they give no specifics. are there some general advantages to being a christian? well, when you are in a country in which 75% of the people self-identify as christians, yes, you will probably see more merry christmas signs than happy ramadan signs. is that an unfair advantage? of course it isn t. bill: it suggests a more secular world, does it not? absolutely, bill. this is part of the secularist crusade that began 70 years ago to separate our nation from its christian heritage and the playbook by this group or the aclu or americans united for separation of church and state is all the same. let s revise history and deny america s christian heritage and secondly let s restrict the rights of christians for the free expression of faith. look, the first amendment is about the free exercise of faith. it is not about the freedom from religious expression bill: you make interesting arguments here. they should invite you to come to the course and have this debate. i would love to do that. bill: in a fair and balanced world it would be the right to do that, right? they aren t fair and balanced like fox news is. bill: thank you for coming by today. enjoy your privilege, sir. thank you. heather: very interesting. well, robert mueller telling president trump s legal team that the president is a subject but not a target of his russia investigation. what that means and some new reaction from the white house in a live report. your heart doesn t only belong to you. so if you have heart failure, ask your doctor about entresto. it helped keep people alive and out of the hospital. don t take entresto if pregnant. it can cause harm or death to an unborn baby. don t take entresto with an ace inhibitor or aliskiren, or if you ve had angioedema with an ace or arb. the most serious side effects are angioedema, low blood pressure, kidney problems, or high blood potassium. entresto, for heart failure. we re on the move. hey rick, all good? oh yeah, we re good. we re good. terminix. defenders of home. how would you like a three-day ride? i had a great time. you re okay. so we started our program two hours ago and we saw the dow fall off the floor. it s coming back already. it was down 400. the world in which we live. it s less than 1%. if you want to play in that game you have to deal with it. have an awesome day. have a great day, everybody. we have to run. see you later. bye. jon: fox news alert for you on the russia investigation. a source telling fox news that special counsel robert mueller has told president trump s legal team that the president is not considered a criminal target. good morning to you. i m jon scott. those comments apparently came last month as mueller s team was negotiating a potential face-to-face interview with president trump. john roberts is live on the north lawn with more. what can you tell us? good morning. we have know it s about a month ago during a meeting about a potential interview between the president and robert mueller that special counsel made the assertion while the president is part of the investigation, he is not a subject of a criminal probe. on the surface of it, though, the statement doesn t really mean a whole
things, interfering with the 2016 u.s. election. and it is especially notable for a couple of individuals who have been targeted. putin s son-in-law among them, a billionaire who is part of the special counsel investigation into possible collusion between trump associates and russia. cnn s kara scanle is taking a closer look at how the individuals fit into the mueller investigation. but i want to start with michelle kosinski. what can you tell us about the key figure in these new sanctions, olwleg deripaska. you mentioned deripaska, he s thought to have had ties with paul manafort. former trump campaign chairman, also his partner rick gates, both of whom have been indicted in the robert mueller russia probe. deripaska made a lot of money and is expected to be deeply connected to the russian government. in fact, the way it is described here by the treasury department, he presented himself as essentially being a member of the russian government, even though technically he was not. so that connection exactly wasn t mentioned within the sanctions material. but he s one of the several. i would call this a handful of top figures. we have putin advisers, a putin son-in-law who became extremely wealthy after marrying into the family. we have the head of gazprom, the huge russian state-owned energy company, and on and on. these are significant figures. you have to say, though, that among the original list that treasury was forced to put out by congress had they passed the bill, mainly to punish russia from meddling in the 2016 election, they put out a list of more than 200 people who could be targeted. now we see 24 people targeted as well as a handful of other businesses. you re going to have questions, why relatively few sanctioned now, why did it take months to sanction these people? and also, the reason for these sanctions now includes meddling in the 2016 election, but the way this was presented was it was a long string of russia s bad behavior around the world that prompted these sanctions. in that string of bad behaviors, administration officials did mention this morning in talking to reporters that it includes russia trying to undermine western democracies. so they only mentioned u.s. election meddling in a very general sense. since then, though, the administration has put out basically a paper list of russia s behavior and reasons for these sanctions along with more detail. and in this material they do spell it out. they say russia s interference in the 2016 election. now, when they re spelling out russia s bad behavior overall, though, it is notable they also don t mention the attack, the nerve agent attack in the uk just last month. we re told by one senior official that the reason for that is they didn t want these new sanctions to appear to be a continuation of the tit for tat between the u.s. and russia over that. wonder if that s avoidable at this point. kara, you have reported on how the mueller team questioned a couple of these oligarchs had they were traveling to the u.s. one of them even had his electronic devices searched while his plane was still on the tarmac. connect the dots here for us. we don t know the names of the individuals who were stopped by mueller. but what we do know from this list of those individuals that were sanctioned today is that a number of them do overlap with actors that mueller is investigating as michelle described. oleg deripaska, head of an aluminum company, he invested in a venture that paul manafort and rick gates were involved in. manafort reached out to an i intermediary of deripaska. there is no indication the two over spoke. but you can see how they overlap and rick gates is cooperating with the investigation, and as part of that cooperation has to talk about everything. he was also a deputy chairman of the trump inauguration committee. another individual on the list is victor vexleburg, an energy oligarch and he attended two events of interest. he was at a dinner that michael flynn attended in december 2015 with vladimir putin. that we know caused a lot of controversy. he also attended the trump inauguration with at the invite of a friend of his, according to his spokesman who told that to the washington post. another name on the list, designated as a government official, is alexander torshin, a banker in russia, also very closely associated with the nra, he is puts himself out as building the russian equivalent of the nra, attended a number of the conventions. and we understand that congress is looking at him, mcclatchy reported that the fbi is looking into whether he illegally funneled money into the nra and to the trump campaign. so while none of the individuals have been accused of any wrongdoing, they are now put on this sanctions list, you know, which has ties to the election and it will remain to be seen whether mueller makes any moves against them, but, you know, we see now there are some connections between at least these three individuals and several people within mueller s orbit. kara and michelle, great reporting. i want to talk more about this now with chris cillizza, our cnn politics reporter and editor at large, and former u.s. attorney michael moore. michael, included in this list is a gentleman we were just talking about, oleg deripaska, a billionaire connected to paul manafort, under indictment for money laundering allegations. did these sanctions back up the mueller investigation? i think it probably sheds some light on the reality that there has been russian meddling and that there has been russian involvement and i said this will be a money case and they ll follow the money. the timing of the release of the sanction is unique. i don t want to say that the public is being played by trump, but it seems like every time we have any type of pressure or negative press about the trump administration, whether pruett, whether that be porn stars, whatever it is we turn around and suddenly something happens with some russian sanctions. these have been in play for some time. an order under obama s administration to create a list and now we re moving forward on sanctions. i don t know how much it really gives credence to the mueller investigation. i think that s already there. it simply affirms the fact there has been russian involvement in our elections. and as i say, at the end of the day, i think we ll be talking about money. it concerns me. i heard about back channels and discussions with russians, these things have been out there, the sanctions possibility has been out there for so long. you got to wonder did some people already have word, did they move asset, did they close business arrangements, have they shifted assets to other family don t know. when congress almost unanimously passed sanctions and the administration missed the deadline and decided not to go forward with them at the time, that was the main concern of so many experts, it would allow those close to vladimir putin, it would allow them to shelter the money they say when you bring up mueller looking at oligarchs and then sanctions, they say actually this is a good thing. it means the fbi and the treasury department, which, you know, they re both a part of the intel community, it means they re talking to each other, they re sharing information and that they re taking action against bad actors. but does it also undercut the president and what has been soft rhetoric? so, on point one, i think that s largely true. bringing the full force of government and government coordinating, no easy thing on and it doesn t happen all the time. very rarely happens. donald trump aside, very rarely happens in any white house, in any administration, is a good thing. i ll note many russia experts that i talk to, that we heard from on our air, said the way that you get putin to pay attention is you go after the oligarchs who are his friends. because if they feel squeezed, then they complain to him and he feels under more pressure. that puts aside your point, which i think is a good one, about the delay in doing this. right, which does matter. yes. it is somewhat odd when you have the president of the united states being asked earlier this week about vladimir putin and saying i don t know what kind of relationship. he was asked, is he a faoe? he could be a friend or a foe, we ll see. we have this. what we have consistently seen, whether it is h.r. mcmaster, no longer working there, rex tillerson, no longer working there, the folks who have been primarily responsible for the russia relationship have tended to be more hard-line in wanting to be more hard-line than donald trump has been at least publicly. this is, i think, in keeping with that. chris, thank you so much. michael moore, appreciate you as well. we have some breaking news, lackluster jobs report and the growing trade battle with china putting new pressure on the markets today. the president is threatening to get tougher with china. details ahead. the president finally breaking his silence on what he knew about the $130,000 payment to porn star stormy daniels. and now stormy s lawyer says this just changed the case in a huge way. we ll take a look at that. patrick woke up with a sore back. but he s got work to do. so he took aleve this morning. if he d taken tylenol, he d be stopping for more pills right now. only aleve has the strength to stop tough pain for up to 12 hours with just one pill. tylenol can t do that. aleve. all day strong. all day long. and for pain relief and a good night s rest, try aleve pm for a better am. come fly with me, let s fly, let s fly away. president trump is ratcheting up the trade dispute with china, saying he ll consider an additional $100 billion in tariffs. in a radio interview this morning, the president even said he would be willing to take a hit in the stock market if it improves the trade imbalance with beijing. let s listen to what he said. we already lost a trade war, we don t have a trade war. we lost a trade war. the easiest thing for me to do would be just to close my eyes and forget it. if i did that, i m in the doing my job. so i m not saying there won t be a little pain, but the market has gone up 40%, 42%. so we might lose a little bit of it. but we re going to have a much stronger country when we re finished. the tariffs are adding another jolt it a wild week on wall street. the dow has been in the red all morning, traders also deal with the news of a disappointing jobs report. i want to go to the new york stock exchange with cnn money correspondentristina alesci live for us. i don t think a weaker than expected jobs report helped the situation. but the market is concerned about the additional potential tariffs and more so the escalating rhetoric from president trump. you know, they see this as provopr provoking our biggest trading partner and biggest trading partner china has other levers it can pull. this is a fairly risky way traders and even executives to get to the negotiating table. china can pull a bunch of other levers here, it can make it difficult for u.s. companies to do business there, for example. it can limit tourism dollars coming into the u.s. these are all things that investors and traders are talking about when you re publicly provoking your biggest trading partner in what attempts to be sort of a political message to really, you know, rally the base. and that is what is concerning traders here today. we re down more than we were earlier this morning. and so we re going to be monitoring the situation very closely. all right, cristina alesci, we appreciate the report. the president s talk of new tariffs has china already issuing threats of another wave of retaliatory tariffs on u.s. goods. could it be this is simply a negotiating tactic or something more? jeff zeleny at the white house live for us and, jeff, just minutes ago, you heard from the president s chief economic adviser, what did he say? we did, brianna, good morning. the reality is larry kudlow, the president s chief economic adviser, has been coming out and speaking virtually every day for the last several days here, trying to ratchet down the rhetoric and trying to explain this is all part of a process this is something that is being negotiated very much in public. but this is what he said a short time ago when we caught up with him on the north lawn here at the white house. we re not running a trade war. if you read this thing, you ll see. this is just a proposed idea which will be vetted. nothing has been executed. there is no there there yet, but there will be. so this is something we have heard all week long from larry kudlow, basically on his first week on the job here, fresh off the commentary side of things at cnbc. he s saying this is a process, an ongoing negotiation, discussion. he said nothing is happening. in fact, things are happening. look at the markets there. i can tell you the white house is watching the markets very carefully, particularly that lackluster jobs report earlier this morning. and, jeff, moments ago, the president weighed in on scott pruitt, his embattled epa chief. what did he say? he did, indeed. this is something we have been watching here very carefully. the headlines are racking up against the epa administrator for misspending for a variety of conduct. the president is saying he s still with him, but our reporting this week also suggests the president had still been earlier this week considering him as a potential replacement to jeff sessions as attorney general. perhaps acting attorney general because he s already a confirmed cabinet secretary, that is likely now not to happen. the president weighing in on that, a short time ago. this is what he said. he said, do you believe the fake news media is pushing hard on the story i m going to replace attorney general jeff sessions with scott pruitt who is doing a great job, but is totally under siege? do people believe that stuff? so interesting on a couple of levels here, he does say he s doing a great job. so a vote of confidence in one respect, also saying under siege. one thing that is different to point out here, as we think of all of the other secretaries and top officials who left this white house, scott pruitt has a lot of conservative support here in the business community from others about the regulations and things he s actually doing at epa. the wall street journal having a very strong editorial of support for him this morning, telling the president to stand by him. and he s hearing from a lot of business leaders. that is what is different here. they like what he s doing at the epa, rolling back a lot of obama era regulations here. we ll see if that wins out or the negative headlines in the mind of the president, because, of course this is the president s ultimate decision. jeff zeleny, thank you. there is a lot to break down. let s discuss this with josh dawsey, white house reporter for the washington post and cnn political analyst. it is notable there have been so many pronouncements, sweeping pronouncements that the president has made without really much policy. you got military at the border. don t know how many guard troops there are going to be. what they ll be doing. are they going to be armed? you have the withdraw from syria. no timeline. and now maybe $100 billion in additional tariffs on chinese products, but the details are vague, we don t know if this is if this is going to happen. what is the president doing here? the president has gone, tr s frustrated for months, slow walked and having advisers around him who do not necessarily support or try to at least morph some of his own agenda and what we have seen in the recent weeks from the president has been unchaining to say exactly what he wants to say. troops at the border, his own press shop wasn t prepared to roll that out. pulling out of syria, a decision that is contradicted or contrasted by a number of his national security advisers who do not necessarily think that s a good idea. and more tariffs, which he s been warned against by many people. the president is increasingly telling folks, my instincts are right. one thing he s learned in this offense is the power of his twitter feed can make the entire government apparatus go into overdrive. so the president can post something quickly and then different agencies, top advisers have to go into place of implementing it. there are times we have seen with the transgender troop ban last year, the president was tired of the discuss, tired of the lawyers telling him this and that, he just tweeted it and we re seeing a lot more of it these days. the president coming to a gut decision, deciding he s ready to move forward on something, and tweeting it without looping it out of key people and having everyone else kind of scramble. let s talk about scott pruitt who heads up the epa. it is true that on the left you have people who really have him in their sights because they just hate the agenda that he s promoted. but look at all of this bad behavior, right? renting a room from a lobbyist, he raised salaries of his aides, asked security to use sirens so he could go through traffic to dinner, he reassigned staffers. when they told him that there would be problems, because you have five times that officials warned him about this according to the times, and then the folks were reassigned or demoted, the list goes on and on as you see here. can he really move past this? well, it is a good question. you have president who does not like to see a cascade of bad stories about a cabinet member. we have seen this time and time again. the president supports someone and his support fades as stories build into a crescendo. here it is hard to know what is going to happen. unlike some of the cabinet secretaries who have been deposed, the president is hearing from folks on the right who like scott pruitt. mcconnell allies say it would be very difficult if not impossible to confirm a new epa head. no deputy in place now. some factors are mitigating scott pruitt s, you know, negatives on the other side on his ethical conduct and problems he has. but it is hard to imagine based on conversations that i and my colleagues have had with folks on the white house that if this drumbeat of stories continues, that the president sticks by him forever. now, the stories could stop, things could change with this president as we have seen time and time again. he will make a decision on the gut. and i think what scott pruitt, he certainly is in dicey territory, you see what the president tweeted earlier, totally under siege, those cannot be calming words for scott pruitt to see on the twitter feed. but he has not made an indication he s ready to make a move yet. presidential personnel purgatory again today. presidential personnel purgatory, i love it. you have a wonderful friday. thanks for being with us. thank you so much. coming up, for the first time, the president breaks his silence on that $130,000 payment to porn star stormy daniels, denying that he ever knew anything about it. stormy s lawyer now celebrating the president s comments. we ll tell you why next. hi. i m the one clocking in when you re clocking out. sensing your every move and automatically adjusting to help you stay effortlessly comfortable. i can also help with this. does your bed do that? 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no. no. why did michael cohen make this, if there was no truth to the allegations? you ll have to ask michael. michael is my attorney and you ll have to ask michael cohen. do you know where he got the money to make that statement? no, i don t know. check out this tweet. we very much look forward to testing the truthfulness of mr. trump s famed lack of knowledge regarding the $130,000 payment as stated on air force one. as history teaches us, it is one thing to deceive the press and quite another to do so under oath. avenatti said plahe plans to ree a motion to depose the president and michael cohen. the first one was unsuccessful. michael, this is the topic we re always discussing, the two of us here. but is there truth to this? does the president s denial actually help stormy daniels case? i feel like i m back in grade school and the letter of the week is p. we re talking about putin, pruitt, porn stars and payoffs. that seems to be the news cycle we re going through. i don t know it necessarily makes the case for stormy daniels as they move forward, the interesting thing is that trump is going around, sort of like a big mouth bass, and stormy s lawyers throwing out a bait, a big flashy lure and trump jumps at it. now, so he s got a situation where he s denied knowledge of the payoff, that brings in question federal election laws, what he knew, may be subject to testimony under oath and contradictory information. we don t know what the daniels team has. and neither does the president necessarily at this point. so i don t know that it was the best thing for the president to jump at the bait. whether or not the judge turns around and lets him be deposed based on that statement alone, i don t know. his problem is he s subject to deposition in other cases. and once that discovery starts, and once they have a chance to get the president under oath, it can be a bad day for him. tying it back to russia, i think that s why you see such consternation about whether or not he should go talk to bob mueller. he just cannot just cannot control what he says. if he did not know about this payment, does it strengthen the argument that this money is a campaign contribution for michael cohen? i think it does. i think it puts cohen in some jeopardy. i find it unbelievable that he didn t know about the payment. that s you got a lawyer who clearly has made his affinity for the president known, hard for know imagine that at some point he didn t go to him and say, man, i ve done this great thing for you. i ve tried to i made this this story will not be a problem, they didn t have some discussion, they seemed to share a lot of conversation and strategy, so just is almost unbelievable to me that at some point the president was not made aware of the payment. that is hard to imagine and why in the world would cohen put $130,000 of his own money in, you know, at that point. that seems ridiculous. safe to say you re not paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the goodness of your heart on behalf of your clients. i would not be stroking a check for it and i certainly if the president was my client, he and i would have had a serious discussion about whether or not he can keep his mouth shut as the case moves forward. michael moore, thank you so much, sir. right now, the market, back in the red, as the president defends his threat of new tariffs on china despite the concerns from american form farmers who could get hit the hardest. i ll speak with a congresswoman from illinois who shares their fear of the trade war. first, we want to spotlight a former cnn hero of the year, his goal to help stem global child hunger and lack of education by serving one free meal a day in schools. his organization marries meals started small back in 2002 but hbut his worth has grown tremendously. we started serving 200 children. and it is beyond our wildest dreams it would grow like this. incredibly recently we serve the 1 billionth meal since we began. very humbling experience. but for us it is very much the next triumph waiting. really more than ever we feel this work of ours has just begun. all right, you can watch our full update on him or you can nominate someone that you think should be a cnn hero. just go to cnn heroes.com. hey grandpa. hey, kid. really good to see you. you too. you tell grandma you were going fishing again? 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(vo) the best things in life keep going. that s why i got a subaru, too. love is out there. find it in a subaru crosstrek. welcome to holiday inn! thank you! wait, i have something for you! every stay is a special stay at holiday inn. save up to 15% when you book early at hollidayinn.com i m the one clocking in when you re clocking out. sensing your every move and automatically adjusting to help you stay effortlessly comfortable. i can also help with this. does your bed do that? oh. i don t actually talk. though i m smart enough to. i m the new sleep number 360 smart bed. let s meet at a sleep number store. your plaques are always there at the worst times. constantly interrupting you with itching, burning and stinging. being this uncomfortable is unacceptable. i m ready. tremfya® works differently for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. with tremfya®, you can get clearer and stay clearer. in fact, most patients who saw 90% clearer skin at 28 weeks. stayed clearer through 48 weeks. tremfya® works better than humira® at providing clearer skin and more patients were symptom free with tremfya®. tremfya® may lower your ability to fight infections, and may increase your risk of infections. before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. tell your doctor if you have an infection or have symptoms such as fever, sweats, chills, muscle aches or cough. before starting tremfya®, tell your doctor if you plan to or have recently received a vaccine. ask your doctor about tremfya®. tremfya®, because you deserve to stay clearer. janssen wants to help you explore cost support options for tremfya®. with pg&e in the sierras. and i m an arborist since the onset of the drought, more than 129 million trees have died in california. pg&e prunes and removes over a million trees every year to ensure that hazardous trees can t impact power lines. and since the onset of the drought we ve doubled our efforts. i grew up in the forests out in this area and honestly it s heartbreaking to see all these trees dying. what guides me is ensuring that the public is going to be safer and that these forests can be sustained and enjoyed by the community in the future. our breaking news, the trump administration announcing new sanctions against uber wealthy russians. the companies that they run and top russian government officials. the white house says president trump is standing up to russia s activities including meddling in the u.s. election. joining me now is democratic congresswoman robin kelly of illinois. she serves on the house foreign affairs and oversight committees. congresswoman, thank you for being with us. thank you for having me. i want to start with the news of the sanctions. seven oligarchs sanctioned. 12 companies. 17 top government officials and allies of putin. do you support the trump administration s move here? well, i think it is about time that he s done something, because it seems like he s been very lax when it comes to president putin and russia and the things they have done. you for you it is welcome, you feel like it is just too late. do you feel like it is enough? i think he s taken his time, i m still very concerned about elections and tampering and what they have done in our country and other countries also. the former national security adviser h.r. mcmaster said the u.s. failed to impose sufficient costs on russia. do you think that s still the case? i have to see everything that he s doing, but, again, i think he s been slow to act and i would have to see if more should be done and could be done, which i tend to think there is more to be done. i want to move now to talk about tariffs. as a congresswoman from illinois, in the midwest, you are familiar with the concerns, you re hearing the concerns from constituents and also from other people and neighboring districts as well. you say that the back and forth with china will ultimately hurt your constituents. illinois is a leading producer of soybeans, which is one of the goods that china is planning to make u.s. farmers pay tariffs on. what is really at stake here? agriculture is very, very, very important. not only to my district, but the state of illinois. and we re already losing since earlier this week crop value. i think about $275 million. and we do a lot of business with china, over a billion dollars with our soybean, with our corn, over 50 million, and even in the auto industry it will be a big problem. and ford is my biggest employer. i m very concerned about my farmers, my district is urban, suburban and rural and i m very, very concerned about what will happen with them. what do you want the president to do? these aren t in effect at this point in time. there have been questions about whether there could be some sort of negotiation. what do you want to see happen? i would like to see some diplomacy first. but also you have to have the right people in place to carry out that diplomacy. i would like to see if it should come to that, some sanctions, but also working through the world trade organization. we had some successes there, and we closed some loopholes, but i think to automatically jump to tariffs was not the right move and many, many people feel like that in a bipartisan way. and speaking of the republican senator from nebraska, ben sass, has said that as well. hopefully the president is just blowing off steam again, but if he s even half serious, this is not. let s absolutely take on chinese bad behavior, but with a plan that punishes them instead of us. this is the dumbest possible way to do this. do you think that having some bipartisan backing here is going to help your concerns be heard? i think it will help, but, you know, the president seems to walk to the beat of his own drum and he doesn t seem to listen to those who surround him, so it is hard to tell. but, of course, always better if it is bipartisan. congresswoman robin kelly, we do appreciate you being with us. have a wonderful weekend. thank you for having me. still ahead, president trump provides a conspiracy theory about illegal voting in the 2016 election. why is he still pushing it when it is already been debunked? hi, i m bob harper, and i recently had a heart attack. it changed my life. but i m a survivor. after my heart attack, my doctor prescribed brilinta. it s for people who have been hospitalized for a heart attack. brilinta is taken with a low-dose aspirin. no more than 100 milligrams as it affects how well brilinta works. brilinta helps keep platelets from sticking together and forming a clot. in a clinical study, brilinta worked better than plavix. brilinta reduced the chance of having another heart attack. .or dying from one. don t stop taking brilinta without talking to your doctor, since stopping it too soon increases your risk of clots in your stent, heart attack, stroke, and even death. brilinta may cause bruising or bleeding more easily, or serious, sometimes fatal bleeding. don t take brilinta if you have bleeding, like stomach ulcers, a history of bleeding in the brain, or severe liver problems. slow heart rhythm has been reported. tell your doctor about bleeding new or unexpected shortness of breath any planned surgery, and all medicines you take. if you recently had a heart attack, ask your doctor if brilinta is right for you. my heart is worth brilinta. if you can t afford your medication, astrazeneca may be able to help. i ve got a nice long life ahead. big plans. so when i found out medicare doesn t pay all my medical expenses, i looked at my options. then i got a medicare supplement insurance plan. 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(snaps) if you d have told me that i could afford. a gig-speed. a gig-speed network. it s like 20 times faster than what most people have. i d of said. i d of said you re dreaming. dreaming! definitely dreaming. then again, dreaming is how i got this far. now more businesses in more places can afford to dream gig. comcast, building america s largest gig-speed network. president trump is going after the caravan of immigrants headed through mexico toward the u.s. he s painting them as dangerous criminals, even calling migrants rapists as he gets ready to send national guard troops to the border. here s what he said. remember my opening remarks at trump tower when i opened, everybody said, oh, he was so tough, and i used the word rape. and, yes, they came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before. they don t want to mention that. so we have to change our laws. joining me now, emily tisch susman and brian lanza, cnn political commentator and former communications director for president trump s transition team. so i think it is important, emily, to point out that it is not unusual for migrants to face sexual assault. that is very true on the root. there is no evidence, however, that that is going on when it comes to this caravan. in fact, one of the reasons that migrants ban together is to avoid that very problem, and we actually haven t seen that report that the president is talking about. what do you make of his comments? his comments are disgusting as usual and a distraction as they always are. every time he does this, he comes back to the same chorus, right? we have seen this over and over again. whenever he doesn t like what he s supposed to talk about or doesn t like what is under a microscope, like i would say you did a great report earlier on scott pruitt and the epa, he comes back to the same thing over and over. always immigration, and it is often voter fraud. it is attacks on vulnerable communities and communities of color. comes back to it every time. he s had some pretty strong rhetoric and imagery when it comes to immigration, brian. a representative from latin america told cnn that trump is just looking for more excuses to demonize migrants from latin america, migrants currently on the caravan. what do you think about that? listen, i think you go to the violence that takes place along the border routes. when the president uses that data, we may not have specific data on this now. he s extrapolating. we know this thing always happens. we had a magazine that said up to 80% of the women and kids are sexually assaulted and raped on the way up. he s just extrapolating that larger data into is he extrapolating or conflating. when he gave his opening remarks of his campaign, he was talking about immigrants being rapists. they re not one and the same, because the assertion by some is that some of these migrants are, at least in part, assaulted through the process but not by other migrants. subject to the coyotes who are trafrking th i trafficking them. so they re not the same. i think there s both that come across the border illegally. you ll have the woman on the route that are sexually abused, that are sexually assaulted by the coyotes and the percentage that come across. there are reasons that they can t come across the normal way, some have criminal backgrounds. that will be taken into account along the route, and as they get you the u.s. they ll continue that same kind of behavior. i think crime takes place on both sides of the border, not just one. when the president puts focus on it, he says, this is something i based my campaign on. immigration is an important issue. securing the border is an equally important issue. that s why he constantly brings it up. it s not a distraction. he s been talking about this solidly for three years now. he s painting the picture of a crisis, which is not to say that there is not a problem, i think there is a lot of agreement that this is an issue that needs to be tackled. but you had border crossings last year that were about one-third of what they were in 2006, which is when president bush called up the national guard. today you have about two times as many agents, border patrol agents, than they were at that previous time. so what do you make of this, emily, this picture of a crisis when it does seem like, as we talk to experts and ask them about it, they say that there isn t one? migrant border cross ing is t a 46-year low. he is always trying to create a crisis and only in the areas he wants to be able to have his messaging around and it is always attacks on communities of color. for him to paint the idea that he s trying to protect vulnerable communities, that s why he s talking about this, because he s trying to protect women and children who are crossing, is really ridiculous. when, in fact, his immigration policies are not just rhetoric, they are not just to bolster his base, they are really harmful to families. they are deport ing mothers who are taking care of children. they are deporting caretakers of disabled people. they are deporting pastors. that s what immigration policies are doing. so to focus on the national guard based on a manufactured crisis is really ridiculous. i want to ask you, brian, about a claim he made yesterday about voter fraud. let s listen. there are many places like california, the same person votes many times. you probably heard about that. they always like to say, oh, that s a conspiracy theory. not a conspiracy theory, folks. millions and millions of people. and it s hard because the state guards their records. they don t want to see it. his own administration failed to prove this. why is he so fixated on this, brian? it s not a topic i think he s going to win. some voter fraud does take place but not to the millions and millions he stated. that said, the process can get better. i think there is probably some tidying that needs to take place during a provisional balance. which a lot of people are voting but they re getting disqualified. that s on the rise in california we should pay more attention to and that is the result of voter fraud. it does take place. it s not at the level the president sees it, but if we don t address it short term, you ll see it at higher levels. brian and emily, thanks very much to the both of you. conor mcgregor facing assault charges after allegedly attacking a bus, and it was all caught on video. we ll have it next. with the power of 335 turbo-charged horses lincoln mkx, more horsepower than the lexus rx350 and a quiet interior from which to admire them. the lincoln spring sales event is here. for a limited time get zero percent apr on the lincoln mkx. hurry in today to your lincoln dealer. moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis was intense. my mom s pain from i wondered if she could do the stuff she does for us which is kinda, a lot. and if that pain could mean something worse. joint pain could mean joint damage. enbrel helps relieve joint pain, and helps stop further damage enbrel may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma other cancers, nervous system and blood disorders and allergic reactions have occurred. tell your doctor if you ve been someplace where fungal infections are common. or if you re prone to infections, have cuts or sores, have had hepatitis b, have been treated for heart failure or if you have persistent fever, bruising, bleeding or paleness. don t start enbrel if you have an infection like the flu. since enbrel, my mom s back to being my mom. visit enbrel.com. and use the joint damage simulator to see how joint damage could progress. ask about enbrel. enbrel. fda approved for over 18 years. and it s also a story mail aabout people and while we make more e-commerce deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country, we never forget. that your business is our business the united states postal service. priority: you he got famous fighting other fighters, and today he s infamous for fighting a bus. take a look at why conor mcgregor is in the news and why it s important today. the mixed martial arts star reportedly is the one seen on video throwing a dolly into the window of a bus full of ufc fighters in brooklyn. mcgregor is charged with assault. he left a police precinct a short time ago in handcuffs. we have video of that right here as he s exiting. and cnn s jason carroll is i covering the story for us. what happened, jason, and is there any possibility of a publicity stunt or was he really ticked off? is there a possibility? yes. there is talk about whether this was all drummed up for publicity, but conor mcgregor spent the night in jail and he is already being escorted out of the precinct in handcuffs. you saw the video there. this happened in brooklyn, much of it caught on cell phone video. video shows mcgregor and some members of his crew. they took an elevator to a loading dock and he s accused of throwing trash cans, and it didn t stop there. mcgregor also threw a dolly. you can see him throwing a dolly at a bus. they say it ended up hurting at least two fighters on that bus. ufc fighter michael ciesta has facial lacerations and borg had head injuries. the question is why. there is some bad blood between mcgregor s camp and a russian fighter scheduled to fight for mcgregor s lightweight belt. that russian fighter, by the way, says he is laughing inside about the incident. the ufc president says this is no laughing matter. he spoke to mcgregor about what happened, and he says mcgregor tried to justify his role in it, but he says there simply is no excuse. you want to grab [ bleep ] friends and come down here and do what you did today? it s disgusting. and i don t think anybody is going to be, you know, huge conor mcgregor fans after this. whether it was bad blood between fighters or a publicity stunt, mcgregor is facing several charges, including three counts of assault and one count of criminal mischief. back to you. jason carroll, thank you. and thank you so much for joining me. inside politics with john king starts right now. welcome to inside politics. i m john king. thank you for sharing your day with us. the markets don t like it and farmers don t like it. but president trump says a little pain is worth it if he can force china to be a more fair trading partner. plus tough new sanctions sure to anger vladimir putin.
begin at 8:00 a.m., but today it did, because i happened i just happened upon this magical television that was happening at 8:00 a.m. and was cutting between msnbc and fox news. because michael avenatti was reacting to it live while donald trump was saying it on another network and it was an amazing half hour. i know you are neither an early riser or drinker but part of me imagines you in a bathrobe with a glass of red wine watching that happening. it was built for you. it s amazing. i m hoping no other day starts for me that way. i m hoping that was the last of those. thank you. thank you, rachel. today one of the president s most trusted add visors told him, we re running out of time. with new york city prosecutors tightening in on michael cohen and robert mueller tightening in on paul manafort as paul manafort approaches a trial in a few months and with rudy giuliani making no progress with robert mueller on monday in his first discussion with the special prosecutor as one of donald trump s defense lawyers and with the trump white house reaching crazier levels of chaos than anyone imagined under the reince priebus run, this time last year, the president s trusted adviser has had to tell him something today that he has never told him before. mr. president, we re running out of time senior adviser to the president who delivers his advise every morning from his seat on fox & friends, advise the president almost always follows had to tell the president he was running out of time. because he could see that his performance as an unhinged caller to fox & friends at the 25th minute was the performance of a man out of control. steve doocy and the president s two other advisers on fox & friends looked very worried this morning. they want donald trump to succeed. they want donald trump to continue being president. and look how worried they look for donald trump this morning. that is basically the way they looked for almost every second of the 31 minutes that donald trump was haranguing them and their audience this morning. rupert murdoch, the creator and current boss of fox news wants the trump presidency to continue. so at minute 25 of the ranting of donald trump this morning, rupert murdoch had had more than enough. rupert murdoch who was one of the guests at the first trump white house state dinner this week with the president of france told the fox news control room to shut it down and a director in the fox news control room told them to shut this down as fast as they could because it had become a harmful appearance to donald trump, the president, and to donald trump the suspect in the robert mueller investigation, and donald trump also known as david dennison in the stormy daniels case. there s no other way the president of the united states calling in to a cable news show would have been told we re running out of time. no commercial is that important that you would cut off the president of the united states. no producer or director of a cable news show would have the authority to cut off the president of the united states. that was a call that had to be made at the top. rupert murdoch knew the president was going to be calling in to fox & friends this morning so rupert murdoch, who s an earlier riser than i am, was surely watching. and rupert murdoch watched the creature that he created. the man who never would have squeaked out a win in the electoral college without the full support of fox news, the president who had rupert murdoch at his first state dinner. rupert murdoch was watching that president sink deeper and deeper into a public display of madness and get himself deeper and deeper into legal trouble, which our first guest tonight, michael avenatti, was already analyzing on morning joe on this network while the president was still talking on fox news. but donald trump couldn t be stopped by rupert murdoch or steve doocy as quickly as they hoped. he kept talking for a full three minutes after steve doocy warned him, we re running out of time. and the president s friends on fox & friends stared into the camera where they knew donald trump could see them, but they couldn t see them, and they looked straight at the man filled with fear for him and what he might say next. they looked like worried clinical psychiatrists staring at an out of control patient through a one-way mirror. donald trump sounded today like a man running out of time. he sounded like a man who wants to stop time. and he sounded like a man desperately trying to get his story straight before he has to tell it under oath to special prosecutor robert mueller. or to michael avenatti in a deposition about stormy daniels. and today, those two words, stormy daniels, proved just how frazzled the president of the united states is. just how far michael avenatti has pushed him. because today was the very first time that the president of the united states said the words stormy daniels. and when he did, all the lawyers closing in on donald trump pounced on what he said. how much of mr. president, how much of your legal work was handled by michael cohen? as a percentage of my overall legal work, a tiny little fraction. but michael would represent me and represent me on some things. he represents me, like with this crazy stormy daniels deal. he represented me. and, you know, from what i see, he did absolutely nothing wrong. there were no campaign funds going in then why is he pleading the fifth? because he has other things. he has businesses. from what i understand they re looking at his businesses. and i hope he s in great shape. michael avenatti will give you his reaction to that in a minute. but while michael avenatti was on morning joe and the president was on fox news, enough was delivered so that michael avenatti immediately pointed out that the president was contradicting himself saying on fox news that michael cohen represented him in this crazy stormy daniels deal, but on air force one he said this. mr. president, did you know about the $130,000 payment to stormy daniels? no. then why did michael cohen make it? you have to ask michael cohen. michael s my attorney, and you ll have to ask michael. michael avenatti wasn t the only lawyer who bounced. in a letter delivered to federal judge wood today just about the hearing of the evidence of michael cohen, federal prosecutors quoted donald trump on fox & friends this morning as supporting the prosecutor s claim that there is very little material in what they seized from michael cohen that is protected by michael cohen s attorney/client privilege with donald trump. the letter says, quote, president trump reportedly said on cable television this morning that cohen performances a tiny, tiny little fraction of his overall legal work. in the hearing today in the cohen case with the agreement of both sides the judge appointed a special master, a referee, who will help decide what evidence, if any, is protected by attorney/client privilege. the master is barbara jones who was chosen for her judgeship she has been in a private practice the last five years. and prior to her career as a judge, she was an assistant u.s. attorney and worked under republicans and democrats. michael avenatti rose to speak for a few minutes in the middle of the hearing today saying quote we just effectively your honor want a seat at the table. by which he meant he wanted to protect any possible attorney/client privilege issues that might arise for his client, stormy daniels, if she is mentioned in some of michael cohen s seized communications. when michael avenatti sat down, he received the best review the judge offered for any of the lawyers appearing before her today. judge wood said i have difficulty understanding any flaw in mr. avenatti s position. that is a position shared by many of the people who have watched you on the program and shared by me. we ll pick up the discussion of what happened in the courtroom today, where the case goes from here and where the cohen investigation goes from here. we ll be right back. nick was born to move. 3 toddlers won t stop him. and neither will lower back pain. because at a dr. scholl s kiosk he got a recommendation for our custom fit orthotic to relieve his foot, knee, or lower back pain, from being on his feet. dr. scholl s. born to move. with this level of intelligence. it s a supercomputer. with this grade of protection. it s a fortress. and with this standard of luxury. it s an oasis. the 2018 e-class. it s everything you need it to be. and more. lease the e300 for $569 a month at your local mercedes-benz dealer. mercedes-benz. the best or nothing. michael would represent me and represent me on some things. he represents me like with this crazy stormy daniels deal he represented me. joining the discussion now michael avenatti the attorney for stormy daniels and jill wine-banks an msnbc contributor. michael in the courtroom today were you surprised to see the prosecutors pounce on that fox & friends appearance as quickly as you did with their inserting in their pleading today that the the president said michael cohen does a tiny amount of legal work and therefore there s very little attorney/client privilege here. i wasn t surprised, lawrence. this is a two-way gift for both them and us. it came out of nowhere. if we scripted this, lawrence, we could not have scripted it better. if the president is watching, please call in to fox & friends tomorrow and every day next week, please. whatever you do. and please speak about our case and stormy daniels, please mr. president, thank you. this was the very first day the words stormy daniels passed the lips of the president of the united states while president. correct. they passed his lips many times prior to this, but you re correct. since he s become president, lawrence look, i can t emphasize enough you could not script this out any better for us. the president and michael cohen, every trap we lay they step in it. he is the president is undisciplined. he shoots off the cuff, he says whatever comes to mind, and that may work in a political campaign, but it is an unmitigated disaster as it relates to being a litigant in a case like this. you have two answers about the president s involvement. you have an air force one answer that he says i knew nothing about it. you have michael cohen saying in the past, the president knew nothing about it. i took care of it without the president knowing. now you have the president today saying, he represented me, past tense, with this crazy stormy daniels deal he represented me. that sounds like he was aware that michael cohen was representing him in those discussions that created that agreement in the first place. which one do you like better? which one helps your case better? which one do you want to be true? that the president knew nothing about it therefore there is no agreement were or the president says michael cohen did represent him in this case? the beautiful part is this is a buffet, it s not an a la carte menu, so we don t have to pick one, we pick both. not only did he say he represented me, but then he actually doubled down and said he represents, current tense, me. he tightened it up for us, which i truly appreciated by the way because that helps us even further in the case. so we re going to see how this plays out, lawrence. the beautiful part of this, from my perspective is, as you know we have a pending motion to take the deposition of the president. what he did today adds considerable fuel to that fire for that deposition. why do i say that? the reason i say that is because now we have inconsistent statements. we have michael cohen and what he said some time ago, coupled with the statements by david schwartz, the guy that he trotted out for a couple weeks who now can only be found on milk cartons to explain michael cohen s position i forgot about him. he s disappeared. he used to drift through cable news shows yelling at you sometimes. correct. we ve called around to local hospitals he s not present there, i m glad to hear that, but he has disappeared. separate and apart from that we have the air force one comments on april 5 or 6 and now we have these comments. you cannot reconcile these three sets of comments all of which gives further credence to our motion, we need to take his deposition, put him under oath, find out what he knew about the agreement, what he paid, didn t pay, we need to know this. we re entitled to 7 hours, i think two is sufficient. in fact, if he s like this morning we can do it in two minutes. if the president is claiming this is a burden on his time, does it help your case with the judge when the president spends half an hour on fox & friends talking about whatever goes through his mind, including by the way, your case? it certainly doesn t help. i saw that interview. and he was unraveling throughout it. it was an incredible interview. and michael is quite correct that this will help in terms of getting a deposition. because he has said inconsistent things now. and there should be some obligation to answer to that. it s really incredible to wonder what does the president actually believe? does he believe the things he says, and i recently had a conversation with a psychiatrist who was trying to explain to me the difference between someone who just plain out lies and someone who is delusional and actually believes what they are saying. his conclusion was that trump must believe what he s saying because he says things that are so harmful to his self-interest that he couldn t possibly lie that way if he was being sensible. so he must be delusional. he can also be both. jill, i want to get your reaction as a former federal prosecutor to the appointment of the special master today in the evidentiary case involving michael cohen. i think it gives everybody what they need. it will eliminate any objections to it being an unfair process. i happen to be lucky enough to know judge jones. i worked with her in the pentagon committee looking at sexual assault in the military and got to know her very well there. she followed me in the organized crime section. so i share some background with her in terms of that prosecution. she is an excellent choice. they could not have done any better. she will do a very excellent job. michael, we learned a lot about what s actually how the evidence is being physically conveyed. michael avenatti has got a big collection of blackberries, iphones, ipads, electronic devices michael cohen has this collection of electronic devices that are now in the custody of the fbi that they re studying. by my count it s 16 iphones, blackberries. 16. that s a big number. i don t know how much old phones you have laying around your home, i don t have anywhere close to 16. including blackberries. so my belief is that michael cohen may have seven, 10, 12, 15 years worth of cell phones that have now been imaged by the fbi. what that means is, unless he forensically erased them, and i doubt he did, what that means is every data point of those cell phones is now in the possession of the fbi. we know, according to what the president said on fox & friends , he described the relationship as spanning 20 years. presumably the fbi has all the conversations between michael cohen and the president spanning 20 years. that should send a chill down the spine of the president and michael cohen. it should also send a chill down the spine of anyone else that had any other dealings with michael cohen that were anything other than above board. because the fbi has it all. that s why i use that phrase from steve doocy today, we re running out of time. when i heard it, i felt like that is the story of where the president is now not just in the fox news interview but there s a proceeding going on now guided by a special master where they re digging into every one of michael cohen s phones that he s used the whole time he s known donald trump. i ll say this, when i heard reports that michael cohen recorded his conversations with people, like so many instances in this case, i said that is not possible. i can t tell you how many times i ve said that in this case and i ve been proven wrong. the fact that he saved all these old cell phones, i think there s little question at this point these recordings exist. if these recordings exist, there s no finer piece of evidence of than a videotape. so if michael cohen took pleasure in recording his conversations with individuals where he threatened them, intimidated them, engaged in anything that can be described as illegal conduct, he s in many worse position than i thought and i always thought he was in a bad spot. jill, a question on how long you think it ll take the fbi to go through the evidence. the prosecutor suggested one of them might take 90 days, the rest of them seemed like something they could do quickly. down loading it isn t the problem. it s interpreting them, that will take a bit longer. i think there s so much to be worried about here. i don t think it s the stormy daniels payment that is going to bring down cohen or the president, because i think, as michael is suggesting, that the evidence that has now been obtained will show business wrong doing for many, many years. and much of that will be very serious threat to the career and future of both michael cohen and the president. so i think there s a lot to be worried about well beyond the stormy daniels amount. jill wine-banks thank you for joining us and michael avenatti thank you for joining us. and congratulations on your very positive review from judge wood in the courtroom. it s early, lawrence. you re doing well in round one. thank you. coming up donald trump showed this morning why he can never, ever, ever go under oath. or at least why his advisers are wisely telling him he must never go under oath. brad s been looking forward to this all week, but how will his denture cope with. a steak. luckily 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about shield annuities from brighthouse financial- established by metlife. we need to help more tocalifornians get ahead.d, that s why antonio villaraigosa brought both parties together to balance the state budget with record investments in public schools. and new career training programs. as mayor of la, he brought police and residents together to get illegal guns off the streets and keep kids out of gangs, and on the right path. that s antonio villaraigosa. a governor for all of california. play [music plays]his . when everything s connected, it s simple. easy. awesome. here s why donald trump s lawyers do not want him to testify under oath ever about anything. good morning, i picked a very, very special day because it s melania s birthday. i said let s do it on melania s birthday. happy birthday to melania. do you want to tell us what you got her? i better not get into that because maybe i ll get into trouble. maybe i didn t get her enough. i got her a beautiful card. i m busy to be running out looking for presents. i got her a beautiful card and beautiful flowers. maybe i didn t get her so much. he can t sound like he s telling the truth answering what did he get his wife for her birth day. but he sounds like the cheapest rich guy. i m sure melania likes her card and her collection of cards over the years. but what if the president has to fire everyone to end the special prosecutor s investigation then he might never have to testify under oath in the special prosecutor s investigation. and today he hinted at that possibility more than once. you look at the corruption at the top of the fbi, it s a disgrace. and our justice department, which i try and stay away from but at some point i won t. our justice department should be looking at that kind of stuff not the nonsense of collusion with russia. could you hear him? was that loud enough for you? he just said at some point he will interfere with the justice department s investigation of him. but the united states senate took a step toward making that more difficult when they passed a bill to protect the special prosecutor by a bipartisan vote of 14-7. lindsey graham, who voted for the bill said this. i am glad we did this today for the special counsel. i stand with my colleagues on the other side, on this side, that president trump somehow tried to fire mr. rosenstein or get rid of mueller it would blow up in his face, it would create a crisis for this country, we don t need that, let s move forward in a professional way. joining our discussion, a former assistant director for national intelligence, frank faguli and eugene robertson, an msnbc political analyst. gene what did you get your wife for her birthday? i know that s a tough question. maybe i didn t get her so much. i didn t mean to grill you here. unbelievable. look. in terms of ever, ever talking to mueller under oath or you sit down in front of mueller, you re subject to perjury. either he never does it or he takes the fifth. there is no way that i mean, lawyers would have to throw themselves bodily between the president and that hearing room. they simply cannot permit this. from their point of view. it would be great, in terms of justice, i think. but i just cannot imagine they re going to let that happen. let s listen to one more piece of the president saying he s not tampering with the justice department, but he just might change his mind. i m very disappointed in my justice department. but because of the fact that it s going on, and i think you ll understand this, i have decided that i won t be involved. i may change my mind at some point because what s going on is a disgrace. frank, i may change my mind at some point, he says what s going on in the department you used to work in is a disgrace. look, a couple of things. one is when we hear the president said what s happening at the department of justice is a disgrace, what s happened is horrible, what we are hearing is the execution of justice is horrible in his eyes. the carrying out of justice is disgraceful because he defines justice differently. so the bill that s been proposed or coming out of the judiciary committee is more than just protecting mueller. it s more about protecting our system of justice and sending a message to the president that this is something that cannot be tolerated and you don t have the option of doing this. this is not your grounds keeping crew at one of your golf properties that you can fire because you weren t happy with their performance. twice in the james comey memos that were released last week, two different memos that comey made of his conversations with the president, he reports that the president, quote, said he didn t stay overnight in russia. and in another he says the president said he hadn t stayed overnight in russia in the miss universe trips. that s all in how the cavorting with prostitutes couldn t be true. then he heard thomas roberts coming out publically, who was there the whole time president trump was there, reporting on how many nights president trump spent in moscow and other sources and logs of aircraft on how long he was there. now today on fox & friends, the president has adopted now the story that he did, of course, spend the night in moscow and he s now trying to blame james comey for getting it wrong when all james comey was doing was writing down what the president said. let s listen to how the president said it today. i went to russia for a day or so, a day or two because i own the miss universe pageant. so i went to watch it. everybody knows, the logs are there, the planes are there. he said i didn t stay there a night. of course, i stayed there. i stayed a short period of time but, of course, i stayed. when you re under oath and they ask you how long you were in moscow, an unacceptable answer is a day or two. those are different answers. it s a day or two days or something else. it s also totally unacceptable to say i didn t spend the night there and then to say, of course, i spent the night there. and it s somebody else s fault you have that impression. whose credibility, frankly, do you trust in this exchange, right? do you believe james comey or do you believe donald trump, that he told him something different? truth to donald trump is what he wants it to be. that s his idea of truth. it s whatever story suits him right now. that s not the justice system s idea of truth and that s not bob mueller s idea of truth. frank we can see in the way the president is working the story, he is adjusting his testimony to what becomes public. a week ago thomas roberts hadn t said that, thomas roberts was there as a co-host of the beauty pageant, he interviewed trump on camera one day, saw him there the next day, saw him at the party after the show. and thomas hadn t talked about that until this week and we had the new reports this week of what the logs of aircraft shows about trump s travel and that information wasn t out a couple weeks ago, but now that it is, donald trump has the day or two version of staying in moscow. this is the sliding value of truth in the president s mind. i got to tell you, lawrence, one of the things the first thing that hit me this morning with the rantings on fox was not the content of what he was saying, because he shades the truth depending on the day but he was doing it at all. from my experience with the fbi, what the president is doing at that time of the morning is receiving intelligence briefings, securing our nation. instead our president was ranting on cable news. and making his defense more insecure. frank, thank you very much for joining us. gene we re going to come back with you. coming up, i m going to say something, i m going to say something about fox news that i have never said before and might never say again, and i m going to say that next. once there was an organism so small no one thought much of it at all. people said it just made a mess until exxonmobil scientists put it to the test. they thought someday it could become fuel and power our cars wouldn t that be cool? and that s why exxonmobil scientists think it s not small at all. energy lives here. sometimes you need an expert. i got it. and sometimes those experts need experts. on it. [ crash ] and sometimes the expert the expert needed needs insurance expertise. it s all good. steve, you re covered for general liability. and, paul, we got your back with workers comp. wow, it s like a party in here. where are the hors d oeuvres, right? [ clanking ] tartlets? we cover commercial vehicles, too. i think there s something wrong with your sink. we cover commercial vehicles, too. but as it grew bigger and bigger,ness. it took a whole lot more. that s why i switched to the spark cash card from capital one. with it, i earn unlimited 2% cash back on everything i buy. everything. what s in your wallet? i m going to do something tonight i have never done before, might never do again. i m going to recommend, strongly recommend, that you watch, in its entirety, all 31 watching anything on fox news but donald trump spent 31 minutes this morning building his wall. you can watch him build it. and it s not the wall that he talked about in the campaign. it is a wall of madness that he is building around himself. and the tenth minute of watching it is deeply disorienting. it s like nothing you ve ever seen. but the 20th minute is more than twice as bad. and the 25th minute feels like an explosion point, which is why fox news tried to shut down the interview repeatedly beginning at that 25th minute. and so find it on line, youtube, the fox news website, wherever it is. and treat yourself to something historians will watch 50 years from now. because it is one of the best views yet into the workings of what s left of the mind of the president of the united states. here is a sample. just beginning with donald trump s 10,000 discussion of his electoral college victory a year and a half after his electoral college victory. remember we won the election and we won it easily. a lot of people say it was close. by the way they like to talk about electoral college. it s an election based on the electoral college. it says if you re a runner you re praking for the 100 yard dash as opposed to to the one mile. the electoral college is different. i would rather have the popular vote because it s easier to win the popular vote. i got 306 and she got, what, 223. there was no way to break 270. i heard that on cbs, nbc, abc, they re all fake news. i heard that for so long and cnn. i heard that for so long. there is no way. they re trying to suppress it. everyone goes home and says you know, i really like donald trump but i ve watched on the news, and they don t know it s fake news, i ve taught them it s fake news, i watched on the news he can t win. so let s go the movies and we ll you ll find out in the midterms if they go if you know what they re talking about on the darling and the movie, you re better than i am. i don t think the woman in the middle there, who i ve been told is ansley airhart, i don t think she has an idea what they re talking about. donald trump talked to fox & friends this morning about other cable news shows on other networks like this one, and he said this sentence, i don t watch them at all. that sentence was immediately followed, without a breath, with the sentence, i watched last night. you re going to see this in a moment. what you re going to see is utter madness in action at verbal high speed. i don t watch them at all, period. i watched them last night. i don t watch them at all is a pathological lie, which is exposed by donald trump s very next sentence. here is more of the most dangerous mind in the history of the american presidency. i don t watch them at all. that makes it easy. i tell you what, i watched leaking, lying comey last night and i hated to do it. people are saying you re still looking good, mr. president, i would always watch now frankly i don t have times, for two reasons there s too much. but whether it was good or bad i would watch. i don t want nbc anymore they re as bad as cnn, i made them a fortune with the apprentice. i made them a fortune. you would think these guys would treat me good. i made them a fortune and they treat me horribly and falsely. i don t watch things i could put it out of my mind and i never thought it would be possible. it keeps you on the ball. you keep your sanity. sanity? he actually referred to the elephant in the room. he referred to the biggest elephant in american, donald trump s sanity. the thing most in doubt about donald trump, his sanity. and you have to see this, because you might never see this again unless trump goes on fox news again and fox & friends hosts are trying to get the president of the united states to shut up and get off their show. our justice department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with russia. there is no collusion with me. all right. and russia. and everyone knows it. we could talk to you all day and we know you have a million things to do. good luck mr. president. good luck with your book. thank you. and happy birthday to melania. we ll see you next thursday, mr. president, call in again sometime. very nice that you call in. call in again sometime. well, if we re lucky, he will. ancestrydna can reveal where in the world you re from. and with 5x more detail, it can lead you on an unexpected journey. .that brings you closer to home. for just a few days, it s only $59 to discover your heritage. so instead of telling stories of where you went. .you can tell the story of where you come from. get ancestrydna for just $59. the lowest price of the year. but i m not standing still. and with godaddy, i ve made my ideas real. i made my own way, now it s time to make yours. everything is working, just like it should and experience more adventure it s with audible.utside audible has the world s largest selection of audiobooks and for just $14.95 a month you get a credit good for any audiobook. if you don t like it exchange it any time. no questions asked. you can also roll your credits over to the next month if you don t use them. with the free audible app adventure goes wherever you do. start a 30-day trial and your first audiobook is free. just text listen17 to 500500 to start listening today. hi dad. no. edon t try to get up. hi, i m julie, a right at home caregiver. and if i d been caring for tom s dad, i would have noticed some dizziness that could lead to balance issues. that s because i m trained to report any changes in behavior, no matter how small, so tom could have peace of mind. we ll be right there. we have to go. hey, tom. you should try right at home. they re great for us. the right care. right at home. the people have to understand how dishonest the news is. and in all fairness to fox, you guys don t always treat me great. but you treat me fairly. you know, it s not like fox is perfect for me. they re not. they re tough. but at least it s fair. when you look at some of the others, you look at like cnn, they ll have a council of seven people, and of the seven people, every one of them is against me. i m saying, where do they even find these people? i m not your doctor, mr. president, but i would recommend you watch less of them. i m not your doctor, mr. president, but i would recommend you watch less of them. that is dr. brian kilmeade, who was playing, in effect, donald trump s psychiatrist in this particular part of the interview this morning. joining us now, daniel dale, washington correspondent for the toronto star, who live tweeted the entire fox news interview this morning. and eugene robinson is back with us. daniel, i was watching your tweets. i was watching the interview live. i was trying to not answer the phone, people calling me, saying watch this interview, which i was already watching. we could go on and on about it. give us some of your highlights. well, the tone was striking to me. you know, trump keeps exploding after he manages to behave himself for any period of time. we see this when he goes on foreign trips and then comes back. and i think we saw it with his, you know, two days of being on his best diplomatic behavior mostly with the president of france. he just cannot contain himself. he s like a kid whose mom tells him f you behave at the dentist, you can run around the house and tear things up. he got himself in legal trouble at least once, maybe twice. he messed himself up on michael cohen. he weighed in on a matter very likely of interest to special counsel robert mueller with the russia hotel thing. he lied a whole bunch as he always lies a whole bunch. and i think what was also notable to me is that it s often the easy interviews, the easy settings where he feels comfortable where he gets himself in trouble. it s not the hardball one, not that he does hardball interviews, subjects himself to that. but it s when he feels like he can just talk, whether it s a campaign rally or he feels like he s amongst friends on this friendly network. just talking. it s not like he s getting tripped up by someone else. he trips himself up. that is a great point. it turns out the softball interview is not the safest place for him, that he actually gets too comfortable. i want to play something he said when doc ronny. that was of course his choice to be the secretary of veterans affairs, which we knew on this program days ago was never going to happen. that nomination was withdrawn finally this morning just before the president went on tv actually. let s listen to what the president said about that. doc ronny you know, we call him doc ronny. we call him admiral ronny. he s an admiral, highly respected, a real leader. he was the doctor to president bush, to president obama and the family. he s been my doctor, and he runs a fantastic operation. you know, they have many doctors, and they run a fantastic operation. and honestly i said it to him. he didn t come to me. i said, you know, doc, you run a great operation. how do you think you d do at the va? these are all false accusations that were made. these are false they re trying to destroy a man. by the way, i did say, welcome to washington. welcome to the swamp. gene, there s no evidence at all that any of these are false accusations. and, yes, he was the doctor to a couple of other presidents, neither of whom tried to make him a cabinet member. that s exactly right, lawrence. even if you assume that all the accusations are false, which we cannot assume, and i don t think we believe, it was a crazy thing to do. you need a secretary for veterans affairs, the second biggest department in the federal government, and you say, hey, let s put doc ronny in there. he s a good doctor. he s my doctor. i like him. i mean that s a crazy thing to do. you know, something you said earlier that historians will look at this interview in 50 years. as long as there are historians of the presidency and historians of the media and historians of madness, this interview will be scrutinized and replayed and examined for its it is just the craziest thing that s happened, oh, you know, since last tuesday, right? because that s the trump administration. one other thing trump did, by the way, during the interview was blow what seemed to be a kind of chill wind toward michael cohen in the sense that he really distanced himself from him. oh, michael cohen, he doesn t do much work for me. he has a business. i don t have anything to do with it. i hope he s okay, but, you know, very you know, good luck to you, whoever you are basically. and, daniel, he offered a theory of the case of why michael cohen might be in trouble, and he said that michael cohen does a lot of different kinds of businesses and the investigation is probably about his business. right. well, that s trump saying the investigation is about something that s not me. that was trump fumbling. and there are, you know, to not dismiss it entirely, there are reports from credible outlets that there may be matters related to michael cohen s business, something to do with taxi medallions that may be under investigation. but the attempt by the president to distance himself from his longtime right-hand man, his political fixer, i think is laughable. well, yeah. of course they re investigating his businesses, but the president shouldn t be saying, this is what i think they re going to go after and find something. good point. lawrence, the president shouldn t be doing this at all. there you go. that s where we are. thanks for joining us tonight. really appreciate it. we re going to be right back. ev. yes. do you think it s going to surprise your daughter? 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i think it s time to think about jardiance. ask your doctor about jardiance. and get to the heart of what matters. this is kind of a big deal. sure. yeah, french president at the white house. when president emmanuel macron greeted president trump, he kissed trump on both cheeks. did you know that? [ applause ] yeah, kissed him on both cheeks. yeah. then out of habit, michael cohen showed up and handed macron $130,000. conan o brien gets tonight s last word. the 11th hour with brian williams starts now. tonight president trump has spoken out in praise of fox & friends after his eventful and rambling half hour long television interview this morning, described by maggie haberman has another installment of this president versus the presidency. it included trump s admission michael cohen represents him in the stormy daniels case and trump s threat that someday he won t stay away from the justice department. and tonight there s also this. the leader of north korea became the first to cross into the south since the fighting stopped in the korean war when eisenhower was our president. the 11th hour on an eventful thursday night begins now. good evening once again from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. day 462 of the trump administration, and the president stepped right into the legal battles surrounding his personal lawyer, michael cohen. in a let s call it freewheeling and at times rambling phone interview with fox & friends, which took place right after his pick to run the va withdrew his nomination, president trump both distanced himself from cohen and for the first time admitted
good evening from new york. i m chris hayes. tonight the president of the united states somehow finds himself in an even deeper legal crisis than he was just 24 hours ago. the president s lawyer in the mueller probe, rudy guiliani, just revealed seemingly out of nowhere his client has been lying about the payment to stormy daniels and also managed to expose the president to further legal jeopardy. we found out federal investigators have monitored the phone records of the president s long-time attorney michael cohen and the special counsel just filed a request for 35 blank subpoenas to compel testimony against the president s former campaign chairman paul manafort when he goes on trial this summer. even for an administration defined by chaos and a president who is already the subject of criminal investigation, things continually manage to get worse. the shock of the president s own white house, his attorney, his outside attorney rudy guiliani just gave a string of live interviews on national television in i which he revealed the president has been lying about the hush money to stormy daniels and everyone around him has been part of the cover-up. did you know about the $130,000 payment to stormy daniels? why did michael cohen make it if there was no truth? you have to ask michael. michael my attorney. you ll have to ask michael. do you know where he got the money to make that payment? no, i don t know. i ve had conversations with the president about this. there was no knowledge of any payments from the president. the president was not aware of the agreement. at least michael cohen never told him about the agreement. i can tell you that. okay. we ve been hearing that for months i guess. the president doesn t know. mike cohen sort of out of the goodness of his heart because he gloves donald trump foots the bill for $130,000 to pay off a woman who did not have an affair with the president. giuliani acknowledged contrary to those accounts the president guess what, personally reimbursed michael cohen for the $130,000 paid to stormy daniels in exchange for her silence. that money was not campaign money. sorry, i m giving you a fact now that you don t know. it s not campaign money. no campaign finance violation. so. they funneled it through a law firm? funneled through a law firm and the president repaid it. oh, i didn t know he did? yeah. oh, i i didn t know that. no one did. rudy giuliani and president did, mike cohen did. giuliani claimed that because of the way the payments to cohen were structured at the time, the president did not know he made them till a couple weeks ago. even if that were true, it still exposes the president to a number of potential campaign finance and banking violations. giuliani tried to invoke the same defense used successfully by john edwards in his campaign finance trial that the payment had nothing to do with his political campaign. this was for personal reasons. this was the president had been hurt personally. not politically, personally so much. and the first lady by some of the false allegations that one more false allegation, six years old, i think he was trying to help the family. hmm. help his family. giuliani blew up that entire argument within just minutes pointing out what seems obvious on the face of it, that stormy daniels was paid off to prevent a scandal in the days before the presidential election. imagine if that came out on october 15th, 2016 in the middle of the last debate with hillary clinton. so to make it go away, they made you this payment. cohen didn t even ask. cohen made it go away. he did his job. for more on the president s growing legal troubles prrks national security analyst clint watts. daniel goldman, former assistant district attorney. from the same office that rudy guiliani used to run. what are the legal consequences of what giuliani has now admitted? well, the legal liability now for the potential campaign finance violation shifts a little bit from what we thought was michael cohen making an excessive campaign donation by paying off stormy daniels 11 days before the election, now it goes over to donald trump who is allowed to give his campaign as much money as he wants but he must disclose what he gave. and so by saying that i knew about it and i repaid him, giuliani referring to trump, that is an indication now that donald trump may be in the threshold of a campaign, or the clenches of a campaign finance violation. what do you think, clint. it s hard to watch giuliani talk. the more he waves his hands, the more you know there s something not right. well, i have to say, as a new yorker and as italian american, i am a little offended by that. the intensity picks up when the story gets crazy. so whether you know, the way he is describing it, he s essentially saying the president knew about this and he s saying as he used in his own words, he is funneling money, which funneling is a term you usually don t want to use talking about what the president is doing because it says you re trying to covertly send money to an associate which is what this is essentially about which is why did you do this, if this was not that important and if cohen didn t need to do this, why just a few days before the election would you do this if it happened many years ago. that comes down to intent. the best gloss on this, if you put some sort of method to the madness, it s some argument that goes like this. michael cohen made the payment before the election but he knew he was going to get paid back by president trump so it wasn t a campaign finance donation. president trump didn t pay hip back until after the election so he wouldn t have had to disclose it. okay? and somehow in that whole entanglement, maybe you have an argument there was nos campaign finance violation. that s not what they re say. that s not at all what giuliani has been saying over the last 24 hours. they should hire you. that s a better legal argument on behalf of the president where like everybody has just enough knowledging to not violate the law. that s essentially what you re saying. > i think that s the best argument i can think of. there are hoes in it. the broader thing to me about this is the level of sketchiness that is now here s rudy guiliani beak saying why are you guys stressing out about this. this happens all the time. take a listen. i think when cohen heard $130,000, he said my god, this is cheap. they come cheap. let me get the thing signed off. in other words, to make it go away rather than fight this allegation. don t you think a lot of these people would pay that when they can? i represented i can t disclose, i represented clients who paid substantially more than that. does this happen a lot like you said in the tweet when you re waety? if you re wealthy, you re a target. we know michael cohen is being looked at by the southern district of new york, he s been raided. there s a ren register of call logs according to reporting today. it seems like there may be more there. if they re already moving on this in terms of the pace of this investigation, i would not imagine that simply a referral to rod rosenstein that gets sent to the southern district of new york would go trigger such a rapid response. just looking at this from the outside, it would seem they were already moving on some sort of investigative case whether it s white collar, what have you. this gave them that extra meat they needed to really go for the more investigative steps like showing up at his door and actually doing a search warrant. it seems that this was a pile on. this wasn t the first thing that came out of the blue. the focus has been so much on the stormy daniels payment and the campaign finance violation. but if you look at the filings by the prosecutors in the southern district, they are emphasizing to the judge that most of their investigation and most of the communications that they are privy to through e-mail search warrants relate to cohen s business dealings, completely separate from the campaign finance violations. as someone who worked there, there s no way they re doing sequential search warrants for a home, office and hotel room based on campaign finance allegations. your reaction to something giuliani said about the agents doing there raid and weather caused them. take a listen. only possible violation there would be was it a campaign finance violation which usually would result in a fine, not this big storm troopers coming in and breaking down his apartment and breaking down his office. storm troopers can you believe this is the rudy guiliani on 9/11 that was the rallying person that literally brought the nypd and fbi together so we can counter-terrorism and now talking about storm troopers, the same rudy guiliani there was talk this is trumpville in new york city going into election day. for him to say that, he s trying to tear down institutions in the united states and putting wedges in between local and federal government. and it s just a sad state to see what was once a storied individual take had route and really follow the president destroying u.s. institutions. clint and daniel, thank you both for joining me. the president and his legal issues mount. ted lieu a member of the house judiciary committee, your colleagues, congressman, seem to be ramping up attempts to cut all this off at the pass. where do things sit right now? i find it despicable that some colleagues of mine in the house are trying to impeach rod rosenstein and i think he absolutely did the right thing when he said the department of justice would not be extorted. i was watching the interesting conversation you had. i think it s pretty clear that the president was using michael cohen as a straw donor to conceal the true source of the payment. that s a flatout campaign finance violation and because it exceeded $25,000, that s a felony. i think that s enough to get fbi agents to show up on your doorstep. do you think that s what this is all about? do you think at the core there s a serious question of a campaign finance violation. it s one aspect. i would not be surprised there are business problems michael cohen had. what s important is that this is an investigation run separately from robert mueller, a u.s. attorney s office for southern district of new york. those prosecutors and dpoib agents will do their jobs. because of rudy guiliani s stunning admission last night about the president reimbursing cohen, they re going to want to talk to the president now. now you ll have two sets of investigators wanting to talk to the president of the united states. what does it mean we now know the president lied about this? you know, chris, today is thursday which means we find out what the president lied. this was such a stunning number of lies. this is the fourth iteration of this story now. the first lie was oh, stormy daniels is all fake news. then it was well, it s not fake but no money changed hands. then it was, well, michael cohen made the money, didn t get reimbursed about now we know trump reimbursed him. the mounting number of lies shows that they were really, really scared of what the story was going to do. now it s full blown in front of the american public. at its base, it s really about donald trump having an affair with a porn star trying to cover it up, but the way he did it violated campaign finance laws. congressman charlie dent says there should be hearings on this matter. said if obama were doing it, we would be waving the bloody shirt. what would congressional oversight of this look like if the members and the majority wanted to exert it? we would have hearings next week. i have to say i was deeply disturbed when paul ryan threatened saying hey, if the democrats take back the house, we re going to be subpoenaing people. well, yes. we re going to be executing our responsibility to be a collect and balance on executive branch and we will be issuing subpoenas to make sure we have appropriate oversight over the executive branch and all the bad things happening. do you think, do you have any confidence that would happen short of democrats taking the majority? only if a lot more republicans retire because i ve seen a lot of courage from republican who are retiring. congressman ted lieu, thank. you thank you. how will the president habl the mounting legal pressures? victoria toensing is one of the president s informal legal advisers talks about the latest in the mueller probe. don t go away. i think that s going to be pretty interesting. ant stuff. like, say. your car. well good news, the esurance app lets you keep an eye on repairs when your car is in the shop. it s kinda like being there, without being there. which is probably better for everyone. that s insurance for the modern world. esurance. an allstate company. click or call. let s do an ad of a man eating free waffles at comfort inn. they taste like victory because he always gets the lowest price on our rooms, guaranteed, when he books direct at choicehotels.com. or just say, badda book. badda boom. book now at choicehotels.com you wouldn t accept from any one else. why accept it from your allergy pills? flonase relieves your worst symptoms including nasal congestion, which most pills don t. flonase helps block 6 key inflammatory substances. most pills only block one. flonase. he fired comey because comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn t a target of the investigation. he s entitled to that. hillary clinton got that. and he couldn t get that. so he fired him. and he said i m free of this guy. latest rationale for donald trump s firing of james comey. joining me to discuss the latest on the investigation, former federal prosecutor victoria toensing, former legal adviser of the president. conflicts prevented her from joining legal team. just to clarify, i m not advising the president about this special counsel mat pempt only way he s going to hear what i m going to tell you is if he s tuned in. i m sure he is. a boy can dream. let me start with what rudy guiliani said there. if the president fires the fbi director because he refuses to publicly clear him in an investigation, there are some who argue that on its face is obstruction of justice. i don t know who those would be. i think they didn t make it to law school. the president under article 2 has the unfettered authority to hire and fire people. don t forget civil service protection is not involved. he can hire and fire all of these people. comey and kelly. and because of article 2, but how would firing comey ever be obstruction of justice? there s 15,000 more fbi agents that are there. as the fired and the investigation continued. so what does that obstruct for goodness sake? i ve heard that argument before, alan dershowitz made it, joseph digenova. liberals and conservatives. it s impossible to obstruct justice when the president is exercising his full article it s impossible for a president exercising his rightful presidential authority to obstruct justice by doing it, right? that anything he does there, he has unfettered power to hire and fire. that s right. it seems that problems too much. if president obama comes in when the fbi and the justice department are investigating robert menendez in new jersey and he says look, i need that senator s vote and he fires the u.s. attorney in newark because he wants him to stop going after an robert menendez he s obstructing justice clearly even if he has the power to do it. no, he s not. you think that s fine. i m just telling you what the law is. no. i know your wife s a lawyer. maybe she can tell you what the law is. take your argument. let s go with it. it s obstruction of justice. so a possible crime. right. now, rod rosenstein talked with the president about the basis for firing comey. rod rosenstein wrote a ter dg memo entitled restoring the credibility of the fbi, and gave the president three-pages of reasons why comey should be fired. so therefore, rod rosenstein under yours and mueller s theory that it might be obstruction. right. is at best a witness under my theory but a co-conspirator under your theory. although he gives. who reports to rod rosenstein, gets a conflict. i just want to be clear, the rosenstein memo, this what s so strange. the may memo. the may memo is a manifestly and obviously pretextule as we learned from the president and rudy guiliani. you have to understand how all of us were pauled all of us a part of the justice department and know how comey usurped the role of the lawyer. he may have a law degree but he was an investigator as head of the fbi. we were appalled. you just need to know that. appalled by the fact because he was too mean to hillary clinton? well, yes, that s the other reason. he usurped the role of the attorney general and then he revealed information uncovered in an investigation. you re never supposed to do that. i watched the president and republican party, all those people in the circle quote james comey at that event all the time. no one said he shouldn t have released derogatory information. i did, chris. i m saying it again today. i praise you actually for your consistency. i think i agree with that. that was a position of the show. i guess my point here, it s fundamentally this. is this the case that the president with country intent can use his constitutional authority to fire people in pursuit of obstruction of justice or is that not you don t grant that s conceptually possible? no, you cannot delve into his intent in a matter where he has unfettered authority. let me give you another example. before we go there, chris, will you address the issue of rod rosenstein supervising a case where he is at best a witness and at most a co-conspirator? i think that s a legal problem. i m a lawyer before i m a republican. i didn t go to law school to be a republican. all i know he has checked in with the department of justice whether he should recuse and followed the recommendation. did they make the wrong recommendation? i don t know the substance of what s inside the redacted memo of rod rosenstein. i don t have a position. what i am driving at is whether the president in a fundamental sense is above the law. i want to give you another hypo here. let me give you another one. i can give you an example of unfettered authority. may i do that. okay. bill clinton. received $450,000 from marc rich s ex-wife and hillary clinton received $100,000 for her senate campaign. and bill clinton pardoned marc rich. you know who opened up a case against bill clinton? do you know? james comey. uh-huh. i know this case well because we represented somebody in the matter. and guess what, he had to close the case because bill clinton even having received over half a million dollars in personally for the pardon, they could not look into the intent of the president for that. i m saying all these questions mueller has posed are improper because they re looking into his intent in article 2 authority. you will concede, right, that the president can commit crimes. yes, of course. obstruction. if he does things like he conspire to violate the computer fraud and abuse acted or he. if he distors documents or if he tells somebody to lie, simple stuff. all of that stuff. you re of the belief the only remedy fur that is impeachment, right? that is because the justice department has a long held opinion in olc, the office of legal counsel that says that a president cannot be indicted. in both parties. do you understand why people have a hard time with the credibility of the president s denials? it doesn t what do you mean, denials of what? everything. he said he didn t pay off stormy daniels and did he. i said i would not talk about stormy daniels on your show. i don t appreciate it coming up. listen. i do not opine about like the media, i do not opine this things i do not know about. my only about that we can be talking about what he ate for breakfast. there s a material misrepresentation that comes from the white house. do you understand why people are skeptical when they say we re on the up and up here how we ve conducted ourselves? i m talking about this case and the special counsel. i m saying it doesn t matter if one day the president says he fired comey because he wouldn t come out publicly to say that he was not a target. or if the next day he says that it s because i was mad at him and didn t like the cut of his jaw. it can be ten reasons or no reason. it is unfettered just like the pardon power for bill clinton when he got half a million dollars. if he came right out and said look, i told him to lay off michael flynn. he didn t and i fired him. you think even if he came out and said that, that would be fine. he can do it for any reason. he may not like our constitution but that s the way it is. now, if he went to a witness and said i want you to lie about michael flynn to help get him off, that would be a crime. last question here. if the pardon power. only one more? well, you ll come back again. i enjoy doing this. the pardon power is unfeathered. if the president s bag man intim days a witness and gets caught for it and the president pardons him afterwards, that s fine? yeah, completely unfettered power. those are the two powers he can fire whoever he wants and pardon whoever he wants and neither of those things can be obstruction of justice. not just in my mind. in the mind of many legal scholars both on the left and the right. not unanimously. i want to be clear about that. some people don t understand the law. people always say that. victoria, thank you for being with me. i d like to have you back if you will come back. okay. thank you. coming up, 35 blank subpoenas requested by robert mueller. what this means for the manafort investigation right after this. so, you guys have recently started dating. yes. - yes. a little less than a month. coming up on two months now, yeah. cool. so, i want to show you guys these three chevy suv s. the first one is called the trax. beautiful! do you think it would be good for moving in together? moving in together?! ahhh! - ahhh! okay, well, this is the chevy equinox. wow. nice. perfect for when you two have your first kid. give me some time. okay, this is the traverse. for when you have your five kids, two dogs and one cat. 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proficiency to get the job done. and the whole time i have been in the fire service, pg&e s been there, too. whatever we need whenever we need it. i do count on pg&e to keep our firefighters safe. that s why we ask for their help. here to sift through that attorney lisa green. professor at the new school and senior editor at the daily beast. the position victoria held there which is one that a bundle of people defending the president have, what do you think of it. well, i would take issue and i thought you did a deft job of pushing back. it s a much more nuanced topic. whatever you think about it, it s not like something everyone knows. oh, this is open and shut. the president can do whatever he wants. that is not true. the president cannot do whatever he wants. what we re seeing in her argument is the strain of a larger argument we ll start hearing when his new lawyer comes to start working and start asserting executive privilege. a much more assertive defensive obstreperous role saying you can t touch this. you can t touch it it, corrupt intent, that s what you have to show to show obstruction of justice. is that there was corrupt intent. which he has essentially argued is that the president is above the law because he can dismiss someone with corrupt intent not because certainly if he was dismissing comey for some other reason, it would not be corrupt intent. policy disputes, et cetera. but to suggest that the president of the united states is somehow protected from any kind of criminal violation that has corrupt intent as part of it to protect himself from violating from an investigation about violating other criminal laws is essentially to argue that the president of the united states is not subject to the laws of the land. it does feel like we re running up against, we re headed towards another fight with thenismon precedent here whether fundamentally, whether we view the president as subject to laws here. we re potentially just rolling past it and don t know if this is a wiggle fight or a political one. my 6-year-old, i didn t do anything wrong and you can t punish me. and that s not the point, you re in trouble now. that s what s getting argued here. you can t judge presidential intent. anyway s his intent is fine. and anyways and anyways. we should say we don t know the full facts. when the full facts are out, but what was interesting she conceded even if he fired comey because of flynn, even if he said to him, let my buddy go, stop investigating my dude, and he didn t and he fired him for that, if he admitted. here s the thing. he can pardon flynn so what he was really trying to do is protect from the investigation. he has all he could have used his executive privilege to protect flynn by saying if there was an investigation and then an indictment and then an actual prosecution, cothen pardon him. but then you would suffer the consequences of i think you would still suffer some political consequences of pardoning. so this was a weird end run. here s the other thing, too. i feel like this is laying the ground for what is esz ca lating aggressiveness, maybe moving against rosenstein at some point. maybe pardoning people you know, give michael cohen a blanket pardon. all of that stuff seems possible. rudy guiliani right now, harry, i know it s someone you ve covered for a while. he seems at the center of this. i can t figure out what he s doing. he doesn t care. i m serious. rudy guiliani is not so smart, is not so foolish. he s in the middle of his third divorce hanging out by himself in the club in jared kushner s building smoking cigars not having gotten a role in his administration. we re all talking about him and he s happy. last he was seen, he was working with former ag mike mukasey to defend account guy breaking the iran sanctions rudy guiliani trying to cut a deal on his blood vess here he is suddenly people care about him again. he s sucking up that attention and if you look at that fox interview. very trumpian. big-time. he kept talking about we and you could see the pleasure in his face like he was reanimated and now he got to say all the stuff he says to his friends how the fbi is full of storm troopers, the boss, not the rank and file who leaked to him which we re still waiting for the ig report on. it was almost like rudy attended for extra credit this studio 54 school of law. what do i mean? he and trump are saying outrageous things, sort of casually misogynistic. it s attention getting. but this is not a joke. we re not in a discotheque and the 80s are over. we re watching someone who seems to be at odds with a disciplined approach. we heard it from victoria to put pressure on prosecutors by attacking the basis for their investigation. and it works with the base. right. it works with the base. i think what giuliani definitely scored points on last night although all of us can pull it apart from a lee analytic standpoint is nothing happened here. i got to say part of what is being peeled back, the sketchiness factor. what these folks are, here s giuliani talking about this deal where he has this little parenthetical with a little profit thrown in for michael cohen. take a listen. everybody was nervous about this from the begin. i knew how much donald trump put into that campaign. i said $130,000? he s going to do a couple checks for $130,000. when i heard cohen s retainer of $35,000 when he was doing no work for the president, i said that s how he s repaying it. with a little profit and a little mar yin for paying taxes. for michael. michael s got that s seriously. michael s been demooed. last on the show we talked about how he had done a tiny amount of work for the president and rudy says essentially no work at all for $35,000. looks like it was over $300,000 in incidentals on top of the payoff. look, when rudy guiliani runs for president in 2008 and pat robertson be endorses him, you know he s pro guy marriage, cross dressing, living with and he s choice of the evangelical community that s the moment when all bets were off and became about power. that auger is where we re at with trump and makes his return in this setting fitting in a way. these would are thick as thieves no one else can break the generational connection. thank you all. ahead, what to do with a white house so openly and regularly lies to the american people. which by the way, includes scott pruitt and he s tonight s thing 1 thing 2. it s a very good one next. nick was born to move. 3 toddlers won t stop him. and neither will lower back pain. because at a dr. scholl s kiosk he got a recommendation for our custom fit orthotic to relieve his foot, knee, or lower back pain, from being on his feet. dr. scholl s. born to move. tired of wrestling with seemingly impossible cleaning tasks? using wipes in the kitchen, and sprays in the bathroom can be ineffective. try mr. clean magic eraser with durafoam. simply add water, and use in your kitchen for burnt on food, in your 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competing in the swamp loiks. he got in hot water over an apartment he renned from a lobbyist in d.c. who had business before the epa. now we know he once bought a home with a lobbyist. the grand home was reg r reg zered to a slel company owned by pruitt who was a state senator as well as a lobbyist. the new york times reports whitefield was a regular sistered lobbyist who was pushing for changes to the state s worker compensation rules changes that, lo and behold, pruitt championed in the legislature. this is the best part. he s purchasing with a lobbyist. they purchased that house at a steep discount from another lobbyist who worked for a telecommunications company with business before the oklahoma state legislature. scott pruitt isn t going to window the swamp olympics. he also has to bring down the competition. how he s trying to do that is thick two in 60 seconds. that s just what oscar mayer does. with no artificial preservatives, any added nitrates or nitrites, and by waving bye 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(car horn) so scott pruitt s team is trying to distract from the epa chief s transgressions by pointing fission at other scandal ridden members of the cabinet. the atlantic with a great scoop today that a member of pruitt s press team, michael abud has been shopping around negative stories about leaks coming from ryan zinke s staff with the intention of taking the heat off pruitt. when reporters started making calls about the claims, staffers were able to figure out it was abud behind the stories lodged a complaint with the white house personnel office. you remember that particular office from the report earlier this year which describes the pp oo as something not unlike a frat house. it sounds like they pulled it together since then responding strongly to the complaint about pruitt s aide and inchoiring whether they were able to fire him. only pruitt has that authority. we don t know how much of this whole plot pruitt knew about, but a white house official with knowledge summed it up nicely, absolutely nothing scott pruitt did would surprise me. ck match, is this for real? yep. we match all the cash back new cardmembers earn at the end of their first year, automatically. whoo! i got my money! hard to contain yourself, isn t it? uh huh! let it go! whoo! get a dollar-for-dollar match at the end of your first year. only from discover. you wouldn t accept from any one else. why accept it from your allergy pills? flonase relieves your worst symptoms including nasal congestion, which most pills don t. flonase helps block 6 key inflammatory substances. most pills only block one. flonase. the president of the united states, he s getting ready to negotiate probably one of our most historic agreements since the opening to china. nismon with iran. and we got kim jong-un impressed enough to be releasing three prisoners today. and i ve got to go there and jay sekulow and the we have to go there and prepare him for this silly deposition? rudy guiliani doesn t have security clearance, he s just the president s personal lawyer. threw was on trump tv making a major foreign policy announcement of matters of life and death telling the world apparently north korea was planning to release three americans being head prisoner today. the white house said they cannot confirm the validity of what giuliani said. ben rhodes former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications was the president s right-hand man on foreign policy. what do you think about this president s approach to korea at this point given the news these hostages or prisoners might be released? well, i mean, chris, it s hard to tell. first of all, part of what is so confusing right now is that he s at the beginning stages of a negotiation with north korea, has not gotten in the room with them. yet, he s tearing up a deal with iran or threatening to that already imposes constraints on the iranian nuclear program. at the same time that he s initiating negotiations with north korea, he s threatsening to scrap an agreement that achieves what he s trying to achieve with north korea with iran in a way that will undermine our credibility. it s also confusing at no point in my eight years would we have outsourced a negotiation over something like prisoners or brief them. it s a question of how does rudy guiliani know this if he doesn t have a security clearance. what do you think accounts for the seeming con dra tra dictions between north korea and iran? trump hasn t articulated what would be a successful deal with north korea. they ve made a commitment to denuclearization through the obama administration. that s not new. it s preferable to conflict. but there s no scope of what timeline they ll denuclearize, what the inspections will be. what you can take away is that he is as opposed to anything barack obama did. and barack obama with several other countries negotiated the iranian nuclear deal. that has very strict constraints on the program. and yet, he s prepared to scrap that at the same time that he is you know, celebrating the fact that he might negotiate with kim jong-un and suggesting he should get the nobel peace prize when we don t know what that agreement would look like. he s being lobbied by benjamin netanyahu of israel are, muhammad bin salomon of saudi arabia, united arab ep rats about those three countries in particular hate the iran deal and will tell anyone they hate it. they kind of hate you because they think you were part of it. i m aware. you are hated by the people that they hire. you re hated by the people that view them why do they hate it so much? well, i mean, chris, all i can take from this is that the iran deal prevents iran from getting a nuclear weapon. it s not a broad rapprochement with iran to deal specifically with the fact we want to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon. what they would really like is escalation with iran and potentially regime changing with iran. that s why this is dangerous. there s not any reason to precipitate this crisis with the iranians. there s a deadline of may 12th that allows us to stay in the deal. the fact is if we pull out of the deal, it risks confrontation with iran and it may be those governments want that confrontation between the us the and iran. they want a conflict between the united states and iran. and frankly, it s not in our interests to get into another war in the middle east particularly with a country as significant as iran that could frankly be much more complicated war than even the wars we ve had in iraq and afghanistan. so i think that those countries are very focused on escalating a confrontation with the iranians. i don t think it s in america s interests to lift the constraints on the iranian nuclear program and rick that confrontation. ben rhodes, thanks. still to come, a look at the white house s comfortable relationship with telling plipz sarah huckabee sanders was put on the spot about that today. her response next. for just $15.99. you can enjoy the classics you love, along with new creations like savory crab-topped shrimp, decadent parmesan truffle shrimp scampi, and creamy shrimp and lobster pasta. your perfect shrimp plate is just waiting to be discovered. but shrimp trios won t last, so get to red lobster today. and get your red lobster fix with our weekday lunch starting at $7.99. happy anniversary dinner, darlin . can this much love be cleaned by a little bit of dawn ultra? oh yeah one bottle has the grease cleaning power of three bottles of this other liquid. a drop of dawn and grease is gone. but prevagen helps your brain with an ingredient originally discovered. in jellyfish. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown to improve short-term memory. prevagen. the name to remember. you said on march 7th there was no knowledge of any payments from the president and he s denied all of these allegations. were you lying to us at the time or were you in the dark? the president has denied and continues to deny the underlying claim and again i ve given the best information i have at the time and i would refer you back to the comments you yourself just mentioned a few minutes ago about the time line. that statement was in reference to the reimbursement, the payment. i gave you the best information that i had. sarah huckabee sander was caught red handed today having deceived the american people. this is nothing par from the course. nothing from this white house can ever be assumed to be true. here me to help me understand the kind of toll this takes, congressman from oklahoma. am i crazy to think there s a level of deception here that is different in kind or degree of other administrations, other politicians? i ve never seen anything like it. donald trump is still in the persona of a new york developer hustling money to build buildings. he tells lies, nobody checks on it. you can do that when you re building buildings in new york ci city. when you re in congress nands the white house every time you say something, people write stories and check to see if it s true. he just doesn t get it. there s so many things he doesn t get. does he not get it senator boxer or pay no consequence for it? i think donald trump doesn t know what he says from one day to the next. right. seriously. this is an incredible situation. i think the new york times is actually looked at all presidents and yes all of them have lied from time to time and they actually made a point that donald trump has lied more than 2,000 times. look at other presidents, republican and democrats, 85, 90 times. this is unbelievable. i feel for sarah huckabee sanders because maybe he tells her one thing and she goes out there and says it, and the next day he says something else. she s got to be the one to decide if she wants to do this. all she says is talk to the president s lawyers. talk to rudy giuliani. why didn t she stand up there and apologize that rudy giuliani actually compared this country to nazi germany when he said the justice department acted like stormtroopers. i m stunned at that from a man who pulled us together after 9/11. this is a sick situation. even trivial matters, i ve been slightly obsessed with the doctor situation, ronnie jackson comes out and gives this glowing account of the president s health. the previous account with dr. bornstein, it was dictated by the president. the astonishingly healthy letter. how do you navigate thinking about this white house having to assume that they are lying all the time? everybody who works for anymore knows in other words to keep him happy you have to lie. you have to do whatever story he s telling at the moment. part of the problem is he knows the base he has and he has to keep his base happy and they either don t care. they either believe everything he says or they don t care. they re with him no matter what. he can get away with it. the problem he s going to run into i watch this and saw victoria tensing on here before trying to do the richard nixon defense if the president does it, it s not wrong. it s not going to work. he s digging himself in deeper and deeper. it s all coming out of his own mouth. you ever work with someone go ahead. i was going to say he s so right. we know no one is above the law. we know that in congress. you have the ethics rules if you break them. eventually, you ll get in trouble. we know that when you re president and you have an entire country with a free press watching what you do. you ve got to walk the walk. this man and mickey is right on this point too, he never was used to telling the truth in his business. we know he never paid the bills of people who did work for him. he comes with an attitude that is frankly, more like the mob than it is running an administration. it s like a criminal enterprise. here s the point. mueller s on the case. mueller knows the truth. whether we know the truth or we don t know the truth, i believe mueller knows the truth and has the goods in so many areas here. it s getting very close. a question i d like both of you to answer in your respective political careers, you ever work with someone or have someone who you served with that was like this? that you just could not trust a single thing they said? no, chris. i m a republican and when i was in the house it was completely dominated di democrats and we were on opposites side but i never doubted they were being truthful. you did not run into people like this? i did not run into people like that. they were people who lived in the public spotlight. they understood that what they said would be challenged. that people were going to be looking at what they said and checking it out. i can t think of a single instance in either party who was just so cavalier with the contacts. how about you? it s true when you re in congress and working to get things done for the american people and somebody looks you in the eye and they say i m with you on that one. you could take it to bathe bank? really. maybe they have other problems in their life, i don t know about that. i can tell you when it comes to work, your word is your bond. you never get anything done if you cross someone or lie to someone. it just doesn t work. it s like it s interesting. it s not necessarily the character is the environment that you re in just out of necessity there s a certain degree of trust that has to happen for people just to get the job done and someone like the president who didn t come up through that came up through the new york real estate world has a very different mode he s adapti adapting to. always great to have both of you. thank you. on nights like tonight when we have so many great guests and fascinating interviews, i didn t write that own copy. i didn t call it fascinating. the guests are fascinating. you can catch them any time, anywhere with the podcast. that s all in for this evening. rachel maddow shows start now. thank you. it is hard to know where to start on a night like this after a day like this. in a world like this. let s just start right here tonight. let s start with this. james comey was right. he fired comey because comey would not, among other things, say he was a target of the investigation. once upon a time, the white house tried to pretend that president trump fired james comey, the director of the fbi for something having to do with the handling of the hillary clinton e-mail