on a friday night, good evening once again from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. day 554 of the trump administration, and the president escalates the war on his former lawyer and confidante, michael cohen, while denying that he had any advanced knowledge about that june 2016 meeting in trump tower. a source has told nbc news cohen is willing to tell robert mueller that donald trump jr. informed his father about the meeting before it took place. trump s son had that meeting with several russians after he was told they were coming prepared with damaging information about hillary clinton. well, today the president responded with this so, the fake news doesn t waste my time with dumb questions, no, i did not know of the meeting with my son, don junior. sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam. taxi cabs, maybe? we ll explain that one. he even retained bill and crooked hillary s lawyer. counsel. mueller s office says it plans to call 35 witnesses and financial crimes trial of ex-trump campaign chief paul manafort, which is slated to begin tuesday. this is the first of two trials for manafort. the witness list was made public just today. the biggest name on it, no surprise, is that man, rick gates, manafort s former partner and one-time deputy on the trump campaign who pleaded guilty and is now cooperating with the mueller investigation. after all of that, let s bring in our lead-off panel on a friday evening. the aforementioned emily jane fox, senior reporter for vanity fair. we should add, she just wrote the book on the trump family. it s called born trump: inside america s first family. josh gerstein, senior white house reporter for politico. and jill wine banbanks, former watergate special counsel. good evening to you all. emily here in new york, i d like to begin with you. if this relationship hasn t soured, i d hate to see a relationship that has. seems a little chilly. offer to donald trump, but some people have argued that perhaps he s sending a smoke signal looking for a pardon. pardon, yeah. now, people who are close to cohen and familiar with his thinking have flat out denied that time and time again to me. they have said, the way that you would get a pardon is not by angering the president and sticking a thumb in his eye repeatedly, and even if he were to get some sort of prepardon, then he would undoubtedly be subpoenaed and would have to testify and then would not be able to plea the fifth. that s something that according to all my reporting he s taken off the table. on the other side, you have president trump s camp. and there was a school of thought on friday when the recordings were first released and rudy giuliani was the only person on the record describing the subject matter on that tape yeah, we quoted you on this broadcast. yeah, so he was able to control the narrative for a few days until lanny davis did put out the actual recording earlier this week. and so, it was kind of a smart tactic to be able to define the narrative, even though we now know that the very best case for rudy giuliani, there are questions raised about the narrative that he laid out there. so, what you have is a complicated set of motivations from each side, characters on each side that are not necessarily the most trustworthy or have the greatest credibility. and so, to try and determine who leaked what when is a difficult game. i will say that from my reporting in the cohen world the past 24 hours particularly after this revelation last night about what michael cohen may know about the trump tower meeting, they have said over and over again, we did not leak this, because this does not serve us. to have this out in the public was not our strategy. we wanted to be able to go to the special counsel, robert mueller, with this information. it doesn t serve us to have this out in the public. now, it is possible in some way that it does serve president trump to have one of the most damaging things out there, perhaps to control the narrative again, and perhaps to make it more difficult for michael cohen to cooperate. if michael cohen is not going to cooperate, then maybe the president can breathe a little easier tonight. and josh, the only problem with conversations the likes of which we re having here is it s about the mechanics of leaking, and we re forgetting the story in chief is, oh, yeah, by the way, it s alleged the president had a heads up on russians coming to his office building in new york prior to him becoming president with dirt on his opponent. at the top of the ticket, as they say, one donald trump has been conspicuously silent but for his twitter feed this week. right. and you know, given his no collusion mantra that he s put forward time and time again, there could hardly be a more damaging allegation then that he was aware in advance that his campaign was endeavoring to get damaging political intelligence about his opponent from russians and russians that i believe his own family had been told had some connection to the russian government. so, there s no question that this would injure his narrative if people believe it. i think the problem is, as emily points out, there s a need for some additional cooperation. you have a number of people whose credibility is not particularly high and who have made statements that prove not to be accurate. the real question i think is not whether michael cohen has stories that could damage the president but whether he can lead robert mueller or other federal investigators like the folks in new york to provable facts, to other sources of information that can allow them to assemble a damaging case against the president. if it s just stories that he s telling michael cohen, i don t think it s going to be that damaging. and now to jill weinbanks. counselor, if there s a short version of this answer, if it s answerable, in your view, how has cohen s case changed this week, since tuesday? how has trump s case changed this week? i would say that cohen is in the same position he was in terms of whatever evidence positions against him but that he has put himself in a better position, because if he really does have the willingness to testify that he was in the room when donald trump sr. learned about the meeting in trump tower, and if he will identify the other people who, rumor has it, were also in the room, it means that it s not his word against the president s word. and as everybody has pointed out, they both have credibility issues. giuliani is saying that cohen is a pathological liar, and he knows that because cohen lied for his client for many years, which is not exactly a very strong defense. and what does that make the client who hired the lawyer to lie for him? so, they both have credibility issues, but if he can identify other witnesses, i think josh pointed this out, it means that there is a really credible case. and to some extent, if i m viewing this as a trial lawyer, juries really can make logical conclusions, and the evidence at this point is now getting very compelling that there was a clear willingness to accept help from the russians to win the election, to collude with them, as the public is calling it, or to enter into a conspiracy with them, which is what the crime is. and i think it really has gone to the stage where we re really getting somewhere now, and we could have a very significant case. emily, the counselor is right. last night, watching rudolph giuliani on cnn, it was straight up character assassination, calling a person who was up until recently the personal, trusted lawyer of the man who became president a pathological liar. if you believe the theory that the leaks have come from the trump camp, that would hold that this is some of the worst, most damaging stuff cohen has to tell the feds. but your reporting tonight is that cohen is sitting on top of a, quote, treasure trove. is that a promise or a threat, or did they not characterize that? i think it s both. i think there is a combination of things that is happening right now. cohen had been preparing since early july for the onslaught that we are now seeing. he had heard word from people in the president s orbit that this kind of character assassination was coming, and he wanted to be ready to combat it, because he, as he has said, he has a family to protect, he has a duty that he feels he wants to serve to his country, and he wants to smack back if he is smacked. and he feels right now like he is the most under siege from someone he was incredibly loyal to for more than a decade, and he doesn t want to take it anymore. and so, what he is saying is that, like we saw last week, if rudy giuliani is going to come out and categorize a tape like this, perhaps leak it or perhaps try to control the narrative, then he s going to release the tape in two days and try to correct the record. and he said to people who are close to him, if they want to keep playing this game, i ll play it and i ll play it to win. so, that is what i think, if rudy jagiuliani and the trump surrogates continue this character assassination we saw last night, then we re going to continue to see the kind of behavior from cohen that we ve seen in the last week. i have to ask you a question because you re still young and you have your whole life ahead of you. maggie haberman tonight talked about this is what she called it, the culture of corrosive lying surrounding this story on both sides. does it get to you? you re writing down some of these quotes that become the news of the day. i think as all reporters are doing right now, you re just trying to get to the truth, and that is the hardest thing to do right now because there are so many people who are not honest brokers in this whole set of characters. and all that we can do is try and get to the truth of the matter, and trust who you think should be trusted and has proven to be a trusted source for you. it is wearing, but it is worth the wear and tear that it takes. all right, josh, next week begins the manafort trial, unless we re looking at another delay. what stood out to you, if anything, if anyone on the witness list? well, it s going to be a cavalcade of sort of haberdashers? haberdashers, if you call someone a tailor who sells suits to someone to a total of $800,000 over several years, you re going to see people that specialize in high-end landscaping $500,000 that manafort spent on that. it s really going to be sort of a lifestyles of the rich and famous episode, i think, with one after another of these individuals coming in and testifying not just that manafort spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on their products, but that the method of payment was highly unusual. we had these exhibits come out publicly yesterday where people have written in longhand that these funds were transferred from some strangely named account in sky precypress, whet improvements or for a mercedes-benz that went for $130,000. probably not typically the way people pay for these kinds of purchases, even if they re lucky enough to have the money to do so. jill, we re also going to be seeing something important next week. this is the first of about 100 times i plan to say it these are public servants who are going to be putting themselves and their argument forward at trial. every one of the lawyers in this case could exponentially improve their salary in the private sector, especially with the pearl of any association to the mueller investigation on their resume. instead, they re going to lay it all on the line. this is a very closely watched trial, the first of the mueller effort. it is. and every one of them is dedicated to finding the truth and presenting it to a jury for them to evaluate. and i think that s what we will have. it s going to be a very exciting week. but if i could go back to something that was said, i want to address why possibly trump would have leaked this. and it s because one of the first things that a trial lawyer learns is that if you have bad news or bad facts, it s better to get them out yourself first. don t wait to have to take it on cross examination. put it out on direct examination. it s much more effective in front of a jury for you to put it out. and in the way that this has happened, they did have a couple of days of their narrative, sort of explaining away this very bad for example, the tape. then you hear the tape, and you go, whoa, it s nothing like what giuliani said. that s completely off. but after two days of hearing it, his base will believe that what he said is true. they will pay no attention to what they actually heard on the tape. and so, that is a reason why he might have gone ahead with it. and the other thing is, the value of cohen is not diminished by these leaks because he still has to be a witness in a trial. it s not enough even to have the tape. someone has to explain the tape and someone has to say, did the president say use cash or don t use cash? and he is the one who can do that because he was the other party to this conversation. so, i don t think it hurts his value as a witness, and he still will be valuable. and if he wants to make a deal with mueller, i think mueller would find him very interesting. our thanks to jill weinbanks, to emily jane fox, josh gerstein, the members of our lead-off panel late on a friday night. the good news, i ve been assured it s friday. there will be no more of this for this week. coming up, more talk of another u.s./russia summit. this time, one suggested by vladimir putin. and the white house says the president is open to a visit to moscow. lord knows he s been there before. and later, with midterms fast approaching, the administration says foreign interference in our elections will not be tolerated. we ll try to arrive at a definition of that when we come back on a friday night. it clear that his administration will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections from any nation state or other malicious actors. all this as nbc news reports, as the headline says pretty clearly, trump administration has no central strategy for election security, and no one s in charge. that s pretty direct. our own ken delainan writes even members of trump s national security cabinet have acknowledged the need for a central, unifying effort, one that experts say is missing. senior officials have also admitted that the government has failed to take steps necessary to give the russians second thoughts about intervening in american politics. that s where these next two gentlemen come in. two guests each with a book relevant to our conversation. first, malcolm nance, veteran of naval intelligence, security ops, homeland security, and the author of, get this, the plot to destroy democracy: how putin and his spies are undermining america and dismantling the west. plus, we have clint watts back with us tonight, former fbi special agent, former member of the joint terrorism task force. his latest book, get this, messing with the enemy: surviving in a social media world of hackers, terrorists, russians, and fake news. these guys are a lot of fun, trust me. so, clint, are we getting played before putin ever dealt with our invitation to come to washington, which was smartly delayed after mcconnell and the speaker of the house visited the president. the president s now being invited to moscow of all the places on the planet? yeah. as i ve talked about on this show with you before, president putin owns president trump. he s pushed him both directions and set him up in these scenarios. i m not sure president trump even minds because he adores president putin, it seems like so much. but you could see this coming. i mean, this play was going to be there. and every time these overtures are made and then pulled back, it puts russia in a very strong position where they can then make these challenges, push these things. when you say, russia, do you have those e-mails? i think it was two years ago today, when you make that statement, it puts you in a very weak hand if you ultimately become the elected official, because you have someone across the ocean who has been influencing the election, who is in a powerful position, and who is manipulating the system, whether it s information in foreign policy around the world in ways that are to the detriment of the united states. so, it makes president trump really look like he has a weak hand in this scenario. and if he goes ahead and takes it, you know, part of the reason why they wanted to delay it for the witch hunt is they probably want to delay it for the midterms. reaction was not good here in the united states, republican or democrat, to that helsinki summit. now president putin puts it out there. do you go to moscow right before the midterm elections? it probably isn t a good political strategy for the president. malcolm, our friend, clint, is absolutely right. it was two years ago today in response to a question from katy tur, who just anchored the hour before us. we ll take a look at what the president said then. we ll talk about it on the other side. russia, if you re listening, i hope you re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. i think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. malcolm, we were all around back then. and in the media, i think it s fair to say it was kind of passed off. it was laughed off. how do you think history will end up judging that moment in the trump campaign? well, happy russia if you re listening day, and i think that it will resonate throughout history just like that. to be honest, just 24, almost 36 hours before on this network, we made the first warning that this was a russian attack on the united states and on the electorate, and i know that by that morning, we were taking it pretty seriously on air. but i don t think that people understand the capacity of these foreign actors, in this case, russia, in creating not just a social media storm where the media just took off after it, but also creating the metanarrative around the entire election that hillary clinton s e-mails were bad, and they just played on our own investigations in congress and our own freedom of speech weaponized it and then used it against us. and that s why we have a situation where we have a president of the united states now may, in fact, be beholden to a foreign power, like clint said. malcolm, how s it going to go down with your colleagues and members of your life s work that the national security adviser in the white house is now kind of trolling the mueller investigation by using the phrase witch hunt? yeah. there has never been a national security adviser who is so blatantly and openly political in this way. i mean, john bolton just came out and used witch hunt right out there, as if this was a legitimate way of doing governance in his position. it s dimly looked down upon, believe me. there s a lot of people in the community, and i m sure, throughout the political world who just were astonished at this. but russia has to be delighted, because now this means the narrative of the entirety of the trump administration from top to bottom in, you know, from, in every aspect of government, from national security all the way over to the guy cleaning at the gsa, everything is now a witch hunt, and that, of course, plays to our opponents. clint, i have to read you a headline from the new york times tonight, david sanger s piece russian hackers appear to shift focus to u.s. power grid. that gets your attention. his lead sentence is, state-sponsored russian hackers appear far more interested. that s what got my attention. far more interested this year in demonstrating that they can disrupt the american electric grid than the midterm elections. and he goes on to cite u.s. intelligence officials and tech company executives. what do you think of that? they re trying to essentially build options, whether it s warfare or negotiations. a lot of times, you ll hear people say, well, they didn t actually turn out the power, they re not doing an act of war, but this is actually leverage that you can have. so, we know about this now. what do we have to do? in the united states, we have to go around and check all of our electric systems to make sure that there isn t a foreign adversary that s in those systems. and we have to them safeguard against that. that can be used as a tool. that s a negotiation tool that they can use in terms of dealing with this. i think it s important to recognize that hacking is going to continue, but the targets will probably shift. in the 2018 midterms, sure, i imagine that the russians will do some sort of audience sustainment, you know. they ll repeat the narratives that are pro russian, but what do they gain, really? how much can they really gain with the election of one senator or congressman here or there? what they can gain, though, is building additional capability and going after things like the power grid, water, other utilities, looking into other sources of information or hitting even our financial system, which is a technique we ve seen from other state actors, going after u.s. institutions. the banking sector maybe is a target. those are things that are different capabilities that they can try and build out, and we ve seen them use these sort of attacks. and ukraine. ukraine is almost always the test bed that they use for their cyber warfare. they launched an attack called black energy during the middle of winter and shut the power off in that country, and they use these attacks very successfully, both as a warning but also as an intermediate step to full war. our thanks tonight to two really smart guys who live and work in a scary world. clint watts here with us in new york and malcolm nance, who has written all of the books behind him. gentlemen, thank you both for coming on a friday night. coming up, i think we d all agree the house of representatives deserves a month off for good behavior. when we come back, the republicans who are heading home determined to hold onto their seats come the midterm elections. year, i am sorry about that. 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well, certainly, house republicans are very concerned about losing their majority. for mitch mcconnell, there s an outside shot that senate republicans would lose their majority. certainly, they re trying to build up as many votes as they can for the president. but this, right now, i think the president is treating the midterm elections as though he is on the ballot this time, because he knows that if one of those chambers of congress flips, his agenda will be put on ice between 2018 and 2020. and if he s, as he s running for re-election, remember he filed we zoom back out a little bit filed for election on inauguration day, an unprecedented thing. he s been holding political rallies earlier and more frequently than past presidents have in advance of the midterms, and now he says he s going to be out on the trail six or seven days a week. he understands his own political fortunes, and certainly, the fate of his agenda rests on his ability to have a republican house and senate going into 2019. nancy, i want to show you three states, nbc news/marist polling that are just coming in, not unimportant politically. michigan, minnesota, wisconsin. trump is under water in those three pivotal states right now. let me ask the question a different way. do you think the president accepts and is willing to be a realist about being a potential drag? absolutely not, and i think we saw that with his comments on sean hannity s radio program today, where basically, he said that he was going to go out there six or seven times a week. the irony is that a lot of these candidates don t necessarily want him to go to their states. a lot of them want to run on things that perhaps the trump presidency can take some credit for, like conservative judges or the state of the economy or the tax bill, but they don t necessarily want sort of the picture of trump in their district. and so, he is inserting himself in some races where it s going to be much trickier. but as jonathan said, you know, i really think that he finally has caught on to the idea that his political fortunes are very much linked with republicans staying in control of congress, and that s particularly true of the house, which a lot of election experts expect will flip to democrats, at least at this point. if democrats take back the house, they ll also take back the house oversight committee, and they could really bury the president under a lot of hearings, subpoenas, and potential impeachment proceedings. jonathan, a senior lifelong democrat said to me yesterday, remember, no one can lose like the democrats. and since you are co-author of one of the chronicles of the last major democratic loss, we should probably put a giant asterisk on this conversation, and we should also emphasize to folks, these are individual house district races. your results may vary, correct? that s absolutely right, brian. i think if you re trying to get to add up the 23 seats that democrats need to take the house, you can see some pretty easy places for them to pick up seats on the east coast and on the west coast. but in order for them to actually flip that chamber, they re going to have to win some tough contests in the midwest and in the heartland. and you know, a lot of those prognosticators believe that s going to happen at this point. i think a lot of the battle that you re going to see over the next couple months with the president hitting the hustings is going to be in that sort of center part of the country. the one difference i would say between a presidential election and congressional elections is that in congressional elections, sometimes you can win just by being against the president of the united states because people want to put a brake on what that president is doing . in a presidential election, usually you have to have an argument against the other person, and your own agenda you re offering. nancy, i know you took creative writing as a young journalist on your way up. with that in mind, how does donald trump spin a loss of majority the day after the election? doesn t that make it kind of a wartime footing? and doesn t that just change everything? yeah, it would really make it a wartime footing. i mean, i feel like it s a little bit early to say how he s going to spin it. i think in the meantime what he s going to do is what he started doing already in the last 24 hours. he s really started talking about how democrats will abolish i.c.e., how they ll raise taxes, and he s also starting to make the argument, which congressional republicans have been wanting him to make for months, which is really focusing on the economy. and we saw that this morning at this press conference he gave where he talked about the great gdp numbers. that s what republicans they want him to stick to that message. he s not great at staying on message and staying disciplined. we saw him at one tax cut touting speech throw a speech up in the air and say, well, this is boring, much to the chagrin of a lot of republicans in washington. but i think if he can stick to that pro growth economic message, that could help republicans in a lot of these vulnerable districts. two great writers and reporters, jonathan allen and nancy cook. our thanks for joining us on a friday night at the end of yet another workweek. coming up for us, 44 years ago today, washington was consumed by a different controversy. it was the day house members started voting on whether or not to impeach the president of the united states. a look back when we come back. an energy company helping cars emit less. making cars lighter, it s a good place to start, advanced oils for those hard-working parts. fuels that go further so drivers pump less. improving efficiency is what we do best. energy lives here. it s a high-tech revolution in sleep. the new sleep number 360 smart bed. it intelligently senses your movement and automatically adjusts on each side to keep you both comfortable. and snoring? 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then or now, or both? today, in current time. because you know, because like beschloss, who is the gibbon of twitter, sometimes july of 74 seems better. i think it got realer, to use a very elegant literary term. what we forget sometimes in the maelstrom of what we do, in the maelstrom of your broadcast and just the tsunami of information is that these things do take a good bit of time, from june 17th, 1972, until august 9th, 1974 was 27 months. joe mccarthy rose and fell from lincoln s birthday in wheeling, west virginia, in 1950, until late 1954. legal time does not work along the same geological spectrum as political time. political time wants action immediately. we want a decision. we want to finish a news cycle. legal time takes longer. and i think given, you know i don t know about you, but if i found out that my lawyer had been taping me and that a special prosecutor of the stature of robert mueller had access to those, it would go down as not a good week. yeah. well, one of the great bromides of watergate is that the heroes of watergate were republicans. it s true. if you had to extend that to present day, you d venture any names? you d care to guess? no, and i m a little counterintuitive even on that. there were, i think, seven republicans on this date in 1974 who voted for article one of impeachment against president nixon, which was really the most significant one, and i suspect the one that had had gone to the senate would certainly have passed. bill cohen was one of those republicans of maine. hamilton fish of new york. we ve talked about it. there s this legend about how barry goldwater and hugh scott and john rhodes went down to the white house to tell nixon the support wasn t there anymore, but that was august 6th, i think, august 5th. and one of the things and i think this is worth everybody remembering is, about politics and law moving differently things do at some point start to snowball. and what happened for nixon in july of 74 was the house judiciary committee under rodino, who was doing everything he could to be quite fair about it and move with some deliberation. remember, in the anniversay of this, the supreme court said that nixon had to turn over the tapes. and of those tapes was the great smoking gun tape where nixon actually says, we re going to use the cia to block the fbi from investigating the break-in. it led to the obstruction charge. and insofar as there is if not a parallel at least one of mark twain s historical rhymes, it doesn t repeat itself but it rhymes, i do think what we saw this week in trumpland was the beginnings maybe even the middle of what an obstruction case might look like. we know we ve always suspected he knew a great deal more about what was going on around him than he s let on. and i think we re beginning to see how an evidentiary trail may actually bring that home to us. and this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we make it a habit to invite jon meacham on our broadcast. jon, my friend, thank you very much. always a pleasure. thanks, brian. we re back with more right after this. that s confident. but it s not kayak confident. kayak searches hundreds of travel and airline sites to find the best flight for me. so i m more than confident. how s your family? 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Coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. they will appear before lawmakers just, at that point, less than two months before the election again, i understand they re going to ask some more questions, some more hearings. what is congress prepared to do to stop this, to say we re do everything you possibly can to make sure there is not outside influence in our elections? well, lindsey graham told me this shows we need an olive government approach. introducing this legislation in part. trying to get the president to joinest. he wants to see more pressure being put on russia. we re also hearing that some of these pages have been identified, and russia is an equal opportunity offender here. that our political leadership not to necessarily follow the rabl trail that the russians are from the white house on this issue. donald trump had his first ever national security meeting the other day devoted to this subject. didn t make any statements, didn t give any orders as far as we know. the fbi has a foreign influence task force. the nsa is trying to step up its game in cyberspace. what officials tell me is there s no unifying strategy and there s no leadership from the white house and there s certainly been no steps taken to deter russia from this behavior. there are things that the united states could do to respond. it could release embarrassing information about putin s corrupt billions that he has stashed away in bank accounts. we re not doing it. the president has elevated this as an important issue to be concerned about. even though the director of national intelligence about a week ago gave a speech, said this is happening. exactly what facebook is describing today, dan coates said is happening on a daily basis. the russians are meddling in our politics. he says the system is blinking red and it was almost a cry for executive branch leadership we have not seen, chris. let me get your reaction about the ads, the timing. here we are, 98 days out from the midterms. yes, in terms of the timing, what we find is usually they try and infiltrate audiences on social issues so that later they can drive them on political influence. so this is a tactic we saw in terms of both the left sort of leaning accounts and the right sort of leaning accounts back in 2016. we ve also seen mentioned, you know, there s been two different daily beast reports in the last week that have said that two different senators were targeted in terms of hacking or spear fishing or different baiting campaigns and that is if you want an influence in the election year, you target them with hacks in the year before, which was 2017. so what this shows is a very consistent pattern. even when the social media companies change their term of service or knock these accounts down, russia, other state sponsors, are going to continue to use this technique because it s very effective. it s very cheap. you can do it from afar. and the u.s. has not responded in any cohesive way to this sort of russian influence. when you saw some of the republican senators go to moscow on that fourth of july trip, they even said, well, everyone does this. this is essentially giving a free pass to any country around the world if they want to do political influence, go to social media inside the u.s. facebook put out a statement and one of the things that they say in it is these bad actors have been more careful to cover their tracks. when you look at the whole statement, you realize the complexity of what they re trying to do to continue to track them down in real tie, to prevent what s going on. how difficult is this? how difficult is it to say in the next 98 days, there s going to be significant progress made so when we look back on it, we ll say there was no real overriding influence in this election. well, all it takes is money and effort. and they have to be willing to spend the money to clean up their platform. it looks like they re also reaching out to outside groups to partner with them in fighting some of these bad actors. they cited this outside group the atlantic counsel digital forensic lab. i think that s a positive development for facebook. this is a big change, isn t it? just the fact they re out ahead of this now. yes, this is actually kind of different. we re used to seeing them with their head in their sand, denying responsibility, really downplaying things. here, they really seem to be stepping into the line of fire. it seems to go along with several different business moves we ve seen them take, you know, their stock dropped 20% last week and part of that was saying we re going to spend extra money to clean up the platform that s here in ten years instead of being turned into this total mess. so this and the communications shop, so we are seeing a different facebook. but is it going to be different enough, soon enough, to help us in these midterm elections. tony, during the earnings call last week, i understand facebook kind of sidestepped whether it had already found election interference. assuming they are announcing that they found something, why wait until today? well, in fact, in june, facebook officials were telling us that they hadn t found anything and i think for a lot of folks when they heard the news today, they thought back to when mark zuckerberg said it was essentially crazy that russia could have interfered and produced information on the platform which is obviously a position he since has withdrawn there. but, you know, as you guys pointed out this is going to come down to capitol hill and what they re willing to do to hold facebook to the fire or whether they or others in government are willing to secure the regulations that could stop this sort of thing. we ll see facebook on the hot seat tomorrow when members of congress and the senate intelligence committee hold a hearing on social media and what can happen in the 2018 midterms and again in september when we expect the chief operating officer to testify. so this is just the beginning for facebook. and, you know, just to the point of the stock price, one of the other reasons that stock price dropped is because facebook was facing the threat of regulation. folks thought maybe facebook s privacy problems had finally caught up with it. now the question investors might have to ask is has this issue around disinformation caught up with facebook, only adding to the regulatory threats. let me follow up. because obviously september s going to be huge. sheryl sandberg is probably one of the best known faces in business today. let s go to tomorrow and the key questions and how what s being revealed today might change that. facebook is and isn t the one testifying tomorrow. there s no rep from the company going to be sitting there facing lawmakers. you can expect democrats and republicans to land on the company and its peers in social media for failing to do enough. we re talking about disinformation right now. sort of things that might affect how americans view political issues. this is just actually one smaller slice of the larger issue about hate speech and a because and other kinds of bad things that sometimes tend to proliferate on social media. there s just a general apprehension and dislike by the part of members of congress right now with how these social mediay s aies are policing what appears there, whether election relate order not. so fueled members of congress to do more, to regularly the more what happens on social media. let me go back to something that s in this statement that came out from facebook. it reminds all of us of just how inexpensive it is to do what s being done. they ran about 150 ads for approximately $11,000. $11,000. when we re talking about campaigns that cost millions, multimillions of dollars. paid for in u.s. and canadian dollars. first ad created 2017. last created in 2018. again, you don t need to have huge financial backing to run an operation like this. right. they re really getting their bang for their buck. this is exactly what these systems are designed to do is, you know, take messages that are manipulate our emotions and get us to stick around facebook and get it to the right people the quickest. the problem is now that foreign actors in russia have figured that out and they re using this very system to drive those to the people at a very low cost. i remember who said this exactly, someone said that now with the social media tools like facebook, twitter, you can take over an entire country for the cost of a helicopter. clint, that s a perfect lead to give you the last question. as people are watching this trying to absorb exactly what this new information means, what should they know? i think the good thing is that facebook is watching these accounts now and these efforts to do manipulation. so that s a positive thing. we ve seen a lot of changes made on the platforms. i think the thing to always remember is what are you getting your information from? social media is not reliable for political and social information, especially when things get passionate. whether you re russia or any other manipulator in terms of politics or social issues, social media is the great way to dupe you into reading and sharing something that may or may not be true or authentic. whether facebook changes their terms of service or not, there s always going to be a manipulating behind the scenes that is going to try to achieve what their goal is. this is the most cost effective influence machine ever made in world history and it s highly effective. so tony, for people who want the opportunity to separate fact from fiction, what s the best advice you can give them? well, you have to go to good news sources. i know i m a little biyalsed in saying that but it comes down to figure out who you follow and why you follow those accounts. the news networks that you happen to watch. it really does at some point fall on the consumer to make better decisions which is an uncomfortable truth these days. the same thing goes whether you re on facebook or elsewhere. if you re following accounts on twitter, you have to be more mindful about the kinds of things you re sharing. that being said, it s a very hard thing to do. we mentioned at the top of the segment the bit about trying to stoke protests. there was an account that was trying to get folks to turn up at an alt right rally in washington, d.c. more than 2,000 people rsvd d to that event. just to give you a sense how easily these things can be passed along and how easily consumers can be duped. my thanks to you for scrambling to cover this breaking news. great reporting, thank you. also breaking news on white house chief of staff john kelly. the request the president made about his future plans. a new mission for nba star lebron james. education. he just opened a school in his hometown of akron, ohio, for at risk third and fourth graders. kids there have a longer class day, a longer school year, and it offers on site food pantry for student families as well as resources for moms and dads. in an interview about the school, lebron got pretty personal. he talked about the state of race and division in america and also the role he thinks president trump plays in that division. he s dividing us and what i noticed over last few months, that he s kind of used sport to kind of divide us, and that s something that i can t relate to because i would say sports is the first time i ever was around someone white, you know, and i got an opportunity to see them and learn about them and they got an opportunity to learn about me and we became very good friends and i was, like, oh, wow, this is all because of sports, and sports has never been something that divides people, it s always something that brings them together. in 5th grade. we got married after college. and had twin boys. but then one night, a truck didn t stop. but thanks to our forester, neither did our story. and that s why we ll always drive a subaru. booking a flight doesn t have to be expensive. just go to priceline. it s the best place to book a flight a few days before my trip and still save up to 40%. just tap and go. for the best savings on flights, go to priceline. investigation is a witch hunt. even though none of the charges involve manafort s time with donald trump. the trial was expected to last about three weeks. we ll keep you posted on jury selection. we ve got breaking news involving the president s chief of staff john kelly. nbc news has learned that kelly plans to stay at the white house through the 2020 election. nbc s kristen welker is live at the white house with the latest. i mean, after all these months, kristen, of rumors that john kelly was on his way out, what are you hearing now? well, this is a significant development, chris, my colleague peter confirming according to a senior administration official that john kelly on monday told his staff that the president sktd h asked him to stay through the 2020 election and he agreed. it s significant for a range of different reasons. john kelly was brought in about a year ago to try to bring order and stability to what was then a very chaotic white house. a lot of people felt as though he was successful. to some extend, he obviously stemmed the flow of people coming in and out of the oval office. he couldn t stop the president from tweeting, no one can. look, he did have an impact here on the white house. publicly, he had had some controversies with the president. broken with the president for example several months ago, that roiled president trump. and it was broadly thought his influence here was waiting. and he was eyeing the exits at his one year mark. now that one year mark has passed. and he s still here. so it is significant. and the fact the president has asked him to stay through 2020, a sign the president who was thinking at one point about having no chief of staff at all has decided he wants to have a chief of staff, that a chief of staff is necessary and significant and plays a critical role here at the white house. i think the big questions and the unanswered questions are just how much influence he will have moving forward, what will his relationship with the president be. it has been up and down. clearly it seems as though the president has decided to keep him so things are on pretty good footing at this point in time. they celebrated his first anniversary on the job and they put that picture out there, so we ll see going forward. we know things, the more they change, the more they stay the same. in this white house, it s the more they stay the same, the more they change, right? great to see you. as we celebrate andrea together. absolutely, i loved your story at the top of the show, that was perfect. true, she s unbelievable. plastic guns printed at home easy to make, nearly impossible to track. the new effort to stop the texas man from putting the instructions online for just anyone to see. this is your wake-up call. if you have moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis, month after month, the clock is ticking on irreversible joint damage. ongoing pain and stiffness are signs of joint erosion. humira can help stop the clock. prescribed for 15 years, humira targets and blocks a source of inflammation that contributes to joint pain and irreversible damage. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. help stop the clock on further irreversible joint damage. talk to your rheumatologist. right here. right now. humira. no matter how much you clean, does your house still smell stuffy? that s because your home is filled with soft surfaces that trap odors and release them back into the room. so, try febreze fabric refresher. febreze finds odors trapped in fabrics and cleans them away as it dries. use febreze every time you tidy up to keep your whole house smelling fresh air clean. fabric refresher even works for clothes you want to wear another day. make febreze part of your clean routine for whole home freshness. republican party writ large where trump s picks have recently won their primaries and what s most important, how loyal does the modern day republican have to be? check out a clip of this new commercial from desantos. everyone knows my husband ron desantos is endorsed by president trump but it s also an amazing dad. ron loves playing with the kid. build the wall. he reads stories. then mr. trump says you re fired. i love that part. that s a real commercial. here to break it down, nancy cook, white house reporter for political, phillip rutger, the washington post. what do we make of it? i mean, it s not your everyday run of the mill political campaign, but it also, i guess you could argue, does what commercials is supposed to do, which is grab attention. yes, and it makes people talk about it. we re talking about it 24 hours after the ad was released. but i think it speaks to a much larger point we re seeing in the midterms in which the president is really playing an increasingly important role in giving his imprint to certain candidates and giving them a huge boost. you know, desatnis, for instance, was behind in the polls. trump supported him in a series of tweets. and now he s up ahead of his opponent, putnam, who really, you know, is a longtime office hold holder, a florida politician a lot of people know. it looked look he is going to win. i feel like it s an interesting moment for the midterm because i feel like it shows the white house at least how they can use the president in the months leading up to the midterms by sending him out to these rally, by using his twitter feed. i think they feel very encouraged by this. desantis was on fox news earlier. we also do it in a way people can get a little laugh out of and have a lighter touch, you know, for people getting upset about it, shows they have no sense of humor and they totally don t get what we were trying to convey. nancy, what does the average florida republican seeing in this that is going to be useful to him? is it just his wife saying you know his wife endorsed by don trump? it was a key state for him in 2016. and i think that he is calling out desantis on twitter saying he s tough on crime, he s follow the president s agenda. that s been a huge boost to the candidate in florida. there s a great write-up in the new york times about how important fox was also to the lead. quote, it was quote that begot mr. desant i s candidacy. by going on the network as often as he could to rail against mueller s investigation. he has appeared on fox prime-time shows least 41 times since mr. trump was inaugurated. mr. desantis attracted the president s attention. is this a blueprint for what other republican candidates can do? go on fox as often as you can, catch the president s attention and he ll tweet about you? yes, i think it is, chris. as we all know, president trump watches those shows on fox, if not live, he watches it on his, you know, fancy dvr recorder. and so if he sees desantis on there defending the president, attacking the president s enemies, be they robert mueller or anybody else, that s earning brownie points in the eyes of trump. and trump is really trying to throw his weight around in politics right now. he knows that his approval rating among republican voters nationally is very high. even though he s polarizing and overall unpopular with theelect. he knows that a tweet here, a tweet there or an endorsement or an especially a rally like he s doing tonight in florida can make a difference for these candidates. the state of the race in florida in mid-june had adam putnam up double digits. nbc and meris had him up 27 points. so then donald trump tweets his endorsement, june 22nd, congressman ron desantis is running for governor of the great state of florida. loves our military and our vets. he will be a great governor and has my full endorsement. now look at the latest polls. mason dixon has desantis up four points. florida atlantic university up nine points. when the president feels strongly about the role he can play in these midterms and this twitter account and his endorsements, is he right, phillip? well, he s right about the power they can play in the primary. the republican primary. his endorsement carries a lot of weight in florida. that s why you see those poll numbers changing for desantis. but there s a real risk, a danger for trump s candidates in the general election because the president remains polarizing with the general election trat. if you look at a state like florida, there are a lot of swing voters who may be turned off by how closely aligned desantis is aligned with trump and it s why some establishment republicans in florida are a little concerned. they feel that putnam, who has a little more distance from the president, might be a stronger election candidate the other big race in florida is for senate. you ve got the republican candidate, current governor rick scott. he is not hugging trump like this. he isn t even scheduled to attend the rally tonight. even though, i mean, you d think he could, he could make the time if he wanted to. what s going on there? it s a bit more nuanced than him just completely distancing himself. today actually he was at the white house for a bill signing. and so i think he s doing this public thing where maybe he doesn t want to appear at the beside the president, sort of huge rallies that will be televi televised, but he is cozying up to the president at a fund-raiser today, appearing at the white house with a bill signing, so he s still staying close to trump. this all seems this event especially tonight seems to fit what the lead editorial in the wall street journal called trump s lose the house strategy. they attribute this to steve bannon. they say stress issues that polarize the electorate, to drive voter turnout among the trump base this means muting talk of tax cuts in the economy and talking up immigration and trade policies that bash foreigners. is trump okay do you think with losing the house, if he can keep the senate? what s going on there? well, his focus is very much on the senate. because he sees a chance that to beat a lot of democratic incumbents. in races and states trump carried in 2016. so the president s eyes have been more focused on the senate. there is concern of course in the white house and by the president about the possibility of losing the house. but they also accept the reality that the house is much more likely to fall into democratic hands. so they re doing what they can to preserve the republican majority in the senate. all right, let me get your quick reaction to just seconds ago, the tweet by donald trump. i don t know if you got an alert on your phone. i don t care what the political ramifications are, our immigration laws and border security have been a complete and total disaster for decades. there is no way that the democrats will allow it to be fixed without a government shutdown. yes, i think that he talked about this yesterday in a joint press conference he s being consistent about it, that s for sure. republicans who are nervous about a government shutdown don t seem to be registering with him. i feel like congressional leadership has sort of ignored him on this. to me it seems like this is something he s really trying to do to rally his base. talking about immigration, talking about a shutdown, talking about the need for a border wall. these are messages that are very popular with his base and help to get him elected in 2016 and so it makes sense to me before rallies this week in tampa and in pennsylvania that he would return to those messages. thank you so much. tonight s florida rally for the president, an example of just how trump tends to dominate the midterms. even as a new article in vanity fair concludes that his own 2020 re-election team mirrors his 2016 team in one very important way. chaos. gabe sherman is an msnbc contributor and he wrote that piece. how chaotic is it? this is really kind of a repeat of what we saw in the last cycle where the president likes to pit his advisers off of each other, including members of his own family, as they fight for sort of what the priorities and the message of this re-election should be. what s winning now and what is clear is what you just talked about in the last block. clearly donald trump is running a base strategy. he thinks his best way to both hold on to the house and senate this cycle and then get re-elected in 2020 is by mobilizing the coalition that turned out in 2016, which are working class whites and people who traditionally don t vote in presidential elections. people who are disaffected and alienated from presidential politics. we have this big picture, the silent majority stands with trump. notice that they say majority. yes, and this really of course sort of upended and shocked what we all thought was conventional wisdom. reporting this piece, i went to a rally he held in duluth, minnesota. in many way, it felt like a reunion more than a rally. they relived their greatest iii the wall. this is a road show that the president thissive rue iv thriv using it as a preview almost of what he s going to do in 2020. chaos is how he ran his real estate business, his campaign. maybe we shouldn t be surprised there s chaos again for 2020. you also write that steve bannon as the president s ear again. i mean, jared and ivanka, i can t imagine are too happy about that. yes, clearly this is, again, sort of a repeat of what we saw in the early days of the trump white house where you had these competing factions. while bannon and the president aren t personally close, they had that bitter falling out following comments bannon made in michael wolfe s book fire and fury, bannon speaks to the president through other channels including corey lewandowski. so when bannon wants to get a message to the president, he has lines of communication. as we ve seen, trump threaten aa shutdown. he is running, and as steve bannon told me, it s almost as if bannon is in the white house checking off his white house board of all his priorities. so really quickly, you know, not everybody in the republican party sees the electorate the same way donald trump or steve bannon does. what the aare the chances of hi getting a republican challenger? very high. there s likely to be in fact, bill krystal even floated the idea. kasich? kasich, jeff flake, bob corker. there are lots of candidates. the question is, we ve talked about is, donald trump commands the trump base. people who vote in primaries are base voters. so it s hard to see a primary challenger really getting any traction. wow, it s just a fascinating story. people can read it in vanity fair. missile fears. u.s. spy agencies say there are new signs that north korea is working on new missiles and it comes just weeks after the president said that country is no longer a nuclear threat. plus, reunited. you ve probably seen the video. president obama, his vice president, joe biden. so you have, your headphones, chair, new laptop with 24/7 tech support. yep, thanks guys. i think he might need some support. yes start them off right. with the school supplies they need at low prices all summer long. save $200 on this dell laptop at office depot officemax. about the colonial penn program. here to tell you save $200 on this dell laptop if you re age 50 to 85 and looking to buy life insurance on a fixed budget, remember the three p s. what are the three p s? 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what we know is it s very much the same as it was before the big summit meeting seven weeks ago. before that, north korea was making icbms, making fissile material for nuclear weapons. they re still doing the same thing. this latest story is looking inside the factories where they make these icbms, the production lines are still going. they re still making missiles cap ibl an of reaching the united states. you write intel officials, quoting your story here, senior north korean officials have discussed their intention to deceive washington about the number of nuclear warheads and missiles they have as well as the types and numbers of facilities and to rebuff international inspectors. we go back to the president talking about we re safer. are we better off, the same or worse off than we were seven weeks ago when donald trump met with kim jong-un? i think this actually, this part of the intelligence is a little bit more worrisome. if you think about it, maybe they re just off to a slow start. maybe they re going to start dismantling missile programs in the future. what s a little more alarming to people who look at the intelligence is the fact they re actively trying to deceive us. they know some things about their nuclear program. we don t know everything. we tonight know where all the bombs are. so they re talking among themselves about trying to keep this stuff hidden, to give over maybe some of it, to try to get a good deal with the u.s., but not to get rid of all of it. there s active deceptive maybes. now we talk about iran, a country that as recently as nine days ago he was threatening with consequence, promised to crush its economy with international sanctions, he accused it of fomenting terrorism. so which is it? does he want to sit down and talk with them or are they the bad guy? well, it s a bit confusing, isn t it right? the iranians, just in the last few hours, their reaction has been interesting because they re not sure what to make of it. it s great when you have leaders sit down and they can try and take the volume down a notch or two and try and get some, you know, rapport going but you can t translate that necessarily into having success and trying to dismantle a weapons system as we re seeing in north korea. just a handshake alone is not nearly enough. that face-to-face meeting that usually happens after a long, long negotiation. let me just ask you really quickly about what will be the dangers of a meeting between trump and rouhani? what worries national security folks? i m sorry, i thought that was you were addressing someone else. yes, the worry is that sometimes if there is a sense there s mo h momentum, if there s promises made and suddenly north korea doesn t come through, then you revert back to the threats of fire and fury and things could get very heated very quickly. it s always better to try to have, you know, negotiation, you know, people working on the ground, to try to work out terms of the agreement, and then work out leaders to bring in, to put the final stamp on things but that s not what happened this time. joby, thank you. instructions that anyone can download to print plastic guns and rifles using 3-d printers. all of it now online despite eight attorney generals trying to block it. trump today tweeting, i am looking into 3-d plastic guns being sold to the public. already spoke to the nra. doesn t seem to make much sense. democrats quickly fired back. it s a dollar short and a day late. where the heck has he been? they are just enslaved by the nra. the president s really tough on gun safety until the nra shows up in the white house and he caves every time. these guns are untraceable. they are a menace that will increase the availability of deadly weapons to criminals on the street. nbc s tom costello has been following the story, and tom, the first question i got from somebody is do they work. so i think that there is a lot of confusion out there about what this actually is a plastic gun, the 3d printer. what are they and what is the real concern here? well, they do work. i mean just the fact that they are plastic and keep in mind that we have plane, and technically planes made of oplastic, right? they are durable and well made. the concern of course is that if they are in fact undetectable as senator bloomenthal suggested you could smuggle it into the airport and into the airplane and into the halls of congress and into the prison and you can imagine how they would be really the kind of weapon that many people would be excited to get their hands on. and the concern is that terrorists are now going to be able to download the instructions and print these weapons in the basements, and not just the terrorist, but any criminal could do that. i checked with the ts, a short time agoed and they have uncovered four weapons made of plastic, and the 3d printed weapons that they have uncovered four of them within the past year. so the obama administration moved to stop the gentleman in texas, cody wilson, from putting this information online. even though by the way, there is a lot of it already out there. but he was going to be the definitive repository. and so it is like putting the jean genie in the bottle, because it is out there. right. and he had the instructions for the ak-47 weapon, and the obama administration voted to block it saying that we cannot export this into the hands of terrorist, and he said that he had a first and second amendment right to publish the information and to make a e weapon himself in the basement. then the trump administration decided to drop the objection even though the obama administration had been winning every court verdict, the trump administration dropped the objection. and so now, u under the trump administration s agreement with mr. wilson, he will publish as of midnight tonight on august 1st, of course, which you have now state, eight state attorneys general moving fast to try to block him. i talked to one of the fathers from the high school in florida, marjory douglas stoneham high school where those students were kill and i asked one of the fathers about it. this changes america forever. someone can walk into the gun and you won t know it. airplanes and you could be flying with someone with a gun, and you won t know it. and courthouses and someone has a gun and you don t know it. and that is the risk. i think that a lot of people agree that is the risks, but it runs right up against the first and the second amendment arguments as well. tom costello, always good to see you, my friend. reunited former vice president jbd and former president obama grabbing a lunch. they thanked the work of the military staff and their families. what you have done already rendered service whether as an active member of the military or the spouse, family member and then to then to come back again and do more for your communities is what makes us proud. yes, sir. all right. so we so appreciate you guys. i am joined by megan ogilvy, the dog tag, inc. officer. and not every day showed up to the bakery, and did you know they were coming? you had to because of the secret service? no, we had 15 minutes when we were first told and they said they will be here within the next six to seven minutes. were you freak iing out? totally h. but we were so thrilled. we run a fellowship program that empowers wounded veterans and military spouses and caregivers and we were so thrilled with the opportunity, and so we brought the entire fellows downstairs and the entire staff came in and me and the souse chef were the only ones who knew, and when president obama came in and shook my hand he said that we have been following what you are doing, and we are encouraged by it, and with rehere to meet the fell lows and then vice president biden came through and shook my hand and of course a hug, and proceeded to meet the fellows and genuinely asked them about the service, and where they served or where the loved ones serve and the goals of being in the program and the entrepreneurial ideas. explain the program, because those of us who have been working in d.c. know it and it has a fantastic reputation, but let the rest of the people of the country know what happens there. so we run the dog tag bakery in the heart of washington, d.c., in georgetown and we use the bakery as a living business school. above the cafe we have a classroom where we have fellows who go through seven courses taught by the georgetown professors to have continuing studies. in five months they graduate with a certificate of business from georgetown university and so then they can a apply that with different rotations of the communications, development, and front of house and back of house and the reality of what it looks and feels like to run their own obusiness as a lot of the fellows in the alumni have their own entrepreneurial ideas and small businesses. i have to ask you a quick because we are almost out of time. one, what did they get, and i notice ad tip jar in the picture, and did they tip? yes, they tipped and two, they both had the same sandwich which is a chi bau batta sandwi with a side of a salad and a blueberry ba blueberry basil cake. oh, that sounds so good. and i thought if they were going to be showing up, oh, i wish i had worn something else to dday a few people asked that, but we were so grateful and honored and inspired by the whole day and them taking the time to come to our bakery and supporting the mission was overwhelming, and we are still reeling it in today. megan ogilvy, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. thank you for having me. we will be right back. it felt like my heart was skipping beats. they said i had afib. what s afib? i knew that meant i was at a greater risk of stroke. i needed answers. my doctor and i chose xarelto® to help keep me protected from a stroke. once-daily xarelto®, a latest-generation blood thinner significantly lowers the risk of stroke in people with afib not caused by a heart valve problem. warfarin interferes with at least 6 of your body s natural blood-clotting factors. xarelto® is selective, targeting just one critical factor. for afib patients well managed on warfarin, there is limited information on how xarelto® compares in reducing the risk of stroke. don t stop taking xarelto® without talking to your doctor, as this may increase your risk of stroke. while taking, you may bruise more easily, or take longer for bleeding to stop. xarelto® can cause serious, and in rare cases, fatal bleeding. it may increase your risk of bleeding if you take certain medicines. get help right away for unexpected bleeding or unusual bruising. do not take xarelto® if you have an artificial heart valve or abnormal bleeding. before starting, tell your doctor about all planned medical or dental procedures and any kidney or liver problems. learn all you can to help protect yourself from a stroke. talk to your doctor about xarelto®. the products i ve tried just didn t fit right. they were very saggy. it s getting in the way of our camping trips. but with new sizes, depend fit-flex is made for me. introducing more sizes for better comfort. new depend fit-flex underwear is guaranteed to be your best fit.
A woman peers into a neighbor s yard and sees something for a few mysterious seconds: a man, a woman and a moment that s unsettling. What she saw and what she. what had she seen? was this drowning really an accident? she s got a huge gash on her head. something like that is not consistent with just falling down. a husband and father is suddenly under suspicion. he s crying and we re crying. he said, they think i hurt mom. three daughters stand by their dad. and one prosecutor stands firm. he s holding his wife of almost three decades under the water. my job is to get justice for cristi hall. was it murder? hello and welcome to dateline extra. i m craig melvin. in this hour, a story that calls to mind the master of suspense. a plot straight out of an alfred hitchcock film. a young woman peers into her neighbor s yard and sees something for a few seconds. a man, a woman, and a moment that was unsettling. was it some kind of accident? a crime? maybe even a murder? what she saw and what she did would set in motion a chain of events that would divide a family and a jury. here is keith morrison. we know the truth. and we know everything that happened. how do we know what we know? it s emotionally unsatisfying not to have that answer. though it is, even if we ve seen something, or if we think we have. and thus the question at the heart of the whole puzzle. is this woman right? i know what i saw. and i know the conclusion of my story. of course she does. of course she does. so why does this other woman think this? she doesn t know for sure what she saw. a question, we say, on which all the rest will turn. why don t we begin here. calimesa, california, riverside county. historic missions. suburbs creeping around the rim flirty at the gate. [ laughter ] in short order, chris and cristi got married. she was 17. he, 20. and as the girls grew up, they said they never doubted for a single moment the powerful bond of love. their parents with them, and with each other. they were probably closer with their parents than most children. they re the parents i hope to one day be. cristi, the vivacious but you of the family. chris, her perfect mirror. my dad is a little more kicked back, quiet, relaxed. they re the perfect balance. chris was a police officer in san bernardino until he was shot in the line of duty. then he went off to become police chief in two small towns in idaho. then in 2005, anticipating an empty nest and eventually retirement, the halls boston this place in calimesa. life seemed to have hit a sweet spot. we happened to be laying on the bed with her. we started talking. she was like, i am just i m so happy that i have you girls and dad. it was one of those conversations that you don t have every day. still, there was work to be done. it was not a new house. it could use some remodeling. particularly the bathroom. courtney was still living with her parents as the work began. they re going to be doing the tile work and stuff. so we wouldn t have a shower for that day. so, shower out of commission, they decided to wake up early, put on their bathing suits and rinse off in the outdoor spa before the contractor arrived at 6:45 a.m. it was june 7th, 2007. chris got up first, turned on the spa to warm it up, then called brianna at her college dorm in san diego. your wake-up call, baby. get out and go on that run. back at the house, courtney dozed through her first wake-up. while chris and cristi made their way outside to the spa. just after 6:30, chris looked in on courtney again. second call. and headed back to the spa. life s last normal moments. 6:37 a.m. i got up out of bed. i was putting on my robe. i heard this panicked, panicked scream from my dad yelling for me. i ran down the hallway to the back porch and i saw him just trying to pull out my mom out of the spa. emergency. it was she who dialled 911 as she and her father struggled to lift her mother out of the spa. it was the first moments of the worst day of our lives. is it possible for people to understand what it s like to be in that situation? i don t think so. to see just both your parents in the worst times that you ve ever seen them. obviously my mom unconscious. and my dad just panicked and for the first time in my life, seeing him just that way, not knowing what to do. because he was a cop, he was used to dealing with these kinds of things. he was a cop used to dealing with those kind of things with people that were not his wife. so courtney took charge. after calling 911, she started cpr on her mother with her father. emt and firefighter eric norwood was the first to respond. he just started, help my wife, oh, my god, help my wife, help my wife. chris hall was kneeling at his wife s side, more in the way than anything, and so hysterical they had to move him out of the way. he didn t want to leave her. he kept holding her hand, yelling her name. the paramedics worked on her for 20 minutes. no vital signs. none. no words to describe the fear and the anxiety. you re losing your mother and watching her go right in front of you. we tried to save her together. we just couldn t. the ambulance rushed her off to the hospital where she was declared dead. she had drowned in the family spa. a private family tragedy. except maybe not so private after all. someone was watching. farmers, we ve seen almost everything so we know how to cover almost anything. even vengeful vermin. not so cute when they re angry. and we covered it. talk to farmers. we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum [music playing] (ceo) the employee of the year, anna. (vo) progress is in the pursuit. audi will cover your first month s lease payment on select models during summer of audi sales event. home right away. it was courtney who eventually broke the news to ashton and brianna. their mother, their father s wife of close to 30 years, was dead. but neither courtney nor countries waited at the house to tell them what happened or to comfort them. nor did they linger over the body at the hospital. they couldn t. because father and daughter were escorted to several squad cars and driven to the police station to talk about the accident. what was that ride like? quiet. i remember crying the whole time. i couldn t comfort had i father. he couldn t comfort me. we got to the station and they said that my dad would be a few more minutes. chris, so frenzied at the scene, had calmed down by then. he was a cop among cops, after all, and he understood what was necessary to sort out what happened. i can t even start to imagine what you re going through, okay? just, you know, it s a death investigation, and we have to do this. happy to help, he said. whatever would get him back home to comfort his daughters as quickly as possible. we re all so close. chris told investigators what happened. how, as courtney slept, he and cristi were in the spa bathing. she got out, went in, went to the bathroom, got some more coffee, tried to wake up courtney. courtney didn t wake up, apparently. she came back out. as cristi returned to the spa, said chris, they passed each other on the patio. he went in the house, stopped by courtney s room to make sure she was awake, then went right back outside and saw his wife floating face down in the spa. he called courtney, he said, and they began a frantic effort to revive her. in your gut, tell me what happened. she slipped or something. i don t know. that s the only thing i can think of. but chris apparently hadn t noticed the nasty three-inch laceration on cristi s head. and here the point of the police interview is revealed. she s got a huge gash on her head, okay? something like that is not consistent with just falling down. not consistent with just falling down? why would the police think that? i mean, you ve been around for a while. i know where you re going. and no. why in fact was this ex-police-chief being questioned at all about the apparently disastrous accident that killed the love of his life? and the answer was right next door. when chris and cristi hall took their outdoor bath that morning in june, someone was watching. her. i got up at 6:00. got my coffee. lindsay patterson was on leave from her i.t. job in the navy, visiting her mom who lives just over the backyard wall from the hall house. lindsay was inside, in the bathroom that faced away from the hall house and out onto the street, when she heard a noise. it was a horrible scream. it was just, something was wrong kind of scream. a woman s, she thought. she went outside to tell her mom. i said, did you hear that scream? she said, yeah, but i think it s just kids playing in the playing in the pool. kids, at six something in the morning? lindsay walked over to the six-foot brick wall between their yard and the halls . she stepped on the planter, she said, and looked over the wall. at that point i saw a man with his hand, one hand on top of a woman s head and one hand on her back, and she was face down in the water. like something was going on? yeah, that s what i assumed. that is, she thought she was looking at a sex act in progress. i don t know why it didn t seem right. but something made me want to look again. that s 90 seconds, she said, between her first and second looks. this time, she said, she only saw the man in the spa. he s leaning back, just relaxed in the hot tub. but i don t see her. he s got his elbows back, he s kind of looking around like nothing. where did the woman go? lindsay told her mom something seemed strange. she again tells me, lindsay, stop being nosy, don t worry about it. but it just didn t seem right. it wasn t enough time for her to have gotten out and gone inside the house. so, said nancy, she went to the wall again. her third and final look. at that point he was getting out of the jacuzzi. and he was in a very big rush. she s still nowhere to be seen. the look on his face was almost undescribable. it was almost as if he had just gone into another world. it was scary. it was instinct that told her something was wrong, said lindsay. so she called 911. 911, state your emergency. a woman was killed. now, hours and hours later, the detectives confronted chris with lindsay s story. why, they asked, didn t her story match his? i m not going to say she s lying, she sounds like a truthful kid, whatever. but i don t know. i can t explain what she s saying she saw. so now that question we posed as we began. did lindsay patterson really know what she saw? two in one? i did mom. wanna try it? yes. it intensely moisturizes your hair and scalp and keeps you flake free. manolo? look at my soft hair. i should be in the shot now too. try head and shoulders two in one. sfx: [cell phone dialing] no. no, no, no, no, no. cancel. cancel. please. aaagh! being in the know is a good thing. that s why discover will alert you if your social security number is found on any one of thousands of risky sites. return from the police station. and they wondered, why was it taking so long? then the phone rang. and they had their answer. you know, broken-up words, and he s crying, and we re crying. that was when he said they think i hurt mom. he was very upset. but he didn t sound surprised when he said no, he was crying. he was crying. he was upset. very upset. but by the time police investigators were questioning chris, remember, they had heard from lindsay patterson. and at the station, chris s version of events in the spa differed in one crucial detail from what lindsay described seeing that first time she period over the wall and into the hall s backyard. that specifically, me holding her down in there, there s nothing that took place in that jacuzzi that would explain that. there was no sex. there was no i don t even think we had any contact while we were in the jacuzzi other than when i was getting her out. but investigators were getting a good look at christie s body and saw wounds that to them suggested a struggle and more than one nasty blow to the head. so the police had to choose. which version, chris hall s or lindsay patterson s, was more likely the true story of what happened? tom dove is a senior investigator for the riverside d.a. i think they felt this was enough to say this was not an accidental drowning. it was purely much more suspicious than that. and so before the night was over, chris hall was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife. the girls could stop waiting. he wasn t coming home. it was obviously a tragedy, losing our mother that day. but this is a tragedy on top of a tragedy now. because knowing our parents, it s the farthest thing from truth. and one that felt infected by some kind of madness, said the girls. cristi was the love of his life. how could he be accused of harming her? she was happy too, they said, as happy as she had ever been, they knew based on that mother/daughter talk they had not long before she died. she kept reiterating how happy it was. me and brie will always cherish that. that being the last time we actually saw her. kind of burned into your memories. yeah. but right or wrong, the legal trigger had been pulled. chris hall spent almost two months in jail, until his daughters received the payout from cristi s life insurance policy and used the money to bail him out of jail. then he went home to prepare, with the help of his daughters, for a murder trial. it s very surprising to have a client in a murder case out on bail. but he was a special man. and this was a special situation. these are attorneys who would eventually defend him, although at first they only heard about the case. steve harmon and paul gretch. you ve said two things. special man, special situation. i think both of us can say this is a man that we like and we know. we don t feel he could have done anything like this. chris hall and his daughters prepared for a trial which they hoped would make clear to everybody, the police, the neighbor, the world, that chris would not, could not, did not harm the love of his life. there was never, in 30 years of marriage, never one moment of violence. there was no motive for this man to kill his wife. they had a look at the neighbor s eyewitness account and suggested it was really not conclusive at all. it was tragically incomplete. she saw three snapshots. what is missed by everyone is the wife getting into the jacuzzi, slipping, falling into the jacuzzi, hitting her head, going unconscious, and drowning. see this sharp corner sticking out into the spa? hitting your head on this would certainly have opened a gash and knocked cristi out, said the attorney. she didn t see what was really happening during the times when she was not looking. that scream that made lindsay patterson look over the wall? lindsay, they pointed out, was in a bathroom facing the street, not in the backyard when she heard it. it could have been anybody. and courtney, near the spa, didn t hear anything. we think she misinterpreted what she saw. lindsay concedes she didn t know what she was seeing in those glimpses that morning. something was wrong. yet you hadn t really seen anything. but i knew something was wrong. i don t know if in my brain i was putting things together. but from between the scream, the position that he was holding her, and the not just not having enough time for her to have gone inside. it s like you ve got three different snapshots. right. of something going on there. right. and had to kind of work out what this was. yeah. i wasn t thinking at that point, oh, this man murdered his wife. but now, based largely on that account, chris hall would go on trial for murder. and it was a trial for his daughters too. he loved her. they were each other s best friends. and this is just this is not fair to him because he truly loved her more than more than anyone. and yet the prosecutor was going to try to prove that this family man and former cop murdered his wife. could it be done? -i ve seen lots of homes helping new customers bundle and save big, but now it s time to find my dream abode. -right away, i could tell his priorities were a little unorthodox. -keep going. stop. a little bit down. stop. back up again. is this adequate sunlight for a komodo dragon? -yeah. -sure, i want that discount on car insurance just for owning a home, but i m not compromising. -you re taking a shower? -water pressure s crucial, scott! it s like they say location, location, koi pond. -they don t say that. it s like they say location, location, koi pond. i ve been making blades here at gillette for 20 years. there s a lot of innovation that goes into making america s #1 shave. precision machinery and high-quality materials from around the world. nobody else even comes close. now starting at $7.99. gillette. the best a man can get. burke strunsky is a hard charging man, ex-member in good standing of the d.a. s office, now senior deputy in riverside. that takes skill, persuasive pour. strunsky would lead them in the case against family man chris hall. mr. hall on the surface looks like a loving family man. he looks like a good father. he s somebody that had the support of his family. but strunsky was buying the loving father and family man bit. when he heard about chris hall s obvious grief, the wailing that went on after the so-called accident, the phrase that crossed his mind was, it s an act. i think it was a wonderful performance by the defendant of acting like a bereaved husband. but when you look at his actions, how little he did to help his wife. who tried harder to save cristi? not chris, said the prosecutor. but his daughter. she called 911. she helped him get the body out of the spa. she is the only one that did chest compression. he had no interest in truly helping his wife. a matter of opinion, of course. but prosecutor strunsky poked around in chris hall s past as a policeman. and what did he find? this man had an uncanny ability to fabricate stories. seven years earlier, while hall was chief of police in cascade, idaho, he was charged with and convicted of misuse of public money, embezzled $9,000, spent ten months in jail. a white collar crime, hardly murder. but what struck the prosecutor is that he says hall tried to cover it up. to plant a fraud, to lie about it, not just lie about it, but lie about it effectively. i think that was very telling about who we were dealing with. suddenly the prosecutor s prospects were looking better. at the trial, strunsky made lindsay patterson his star witness, of course. it was her story, after all, that got the whole thing started. but almost as important, he called the riverside county medical examiner who testified that those lacerations in cristi s could not in his opinion have been the result of a single accidental fall. and the bruising on her face and body was the hallmark of a homicide. the totality of injuries were not consistent with somebody slipping and falling and then a rescue attempt. and there was a clump of hair in the bottom of the spa, instinct entwined with a broken hair clip. that, he said, came from a violent struggle. when you lose that amount of hair, it s not explained by any fall. there were minor hiccups in the case. lindsay patterson, for example, was a little inconsistent about how long she looked over the backyard wall that first time she saw something going on. was it just a few seconds? or as long as a minute? but either way, said the prosecutor, lindsay was sure she saw physical contact. that was the important thing. he was given the opportunity to explain any physical contact that could in any way reasonably explain what lindsay patterson saw. in other words, were they washing each other, were they involved in a sex act? was there anything she could have misinterpreted? and at the end of the day, you re not just stuck with the fact that lindsay patterson made a mistake. you have to actually believe that lindsay patterson really hallucinated about everything she saw. and what made lindsay s story all the more convincing, stayed prosecutor strunsky, was she told it before finding out what happened to cristi. she dialled 911 a full minute and a half before anyone from the hall house did. before lindsay had any idea how it would end. here is what the jury heard her say in that call. and i saw him put her underwater and hold her there. and she was still on the phone with 911 when chris hall came outside and found his wife s body floating in the spa and called out for courtney. investigator tom dove. i heard it best described during the trial as a cosmic coincidence that someone could see something that they perceived to be more than just some kind of kinky action in a jacuzzi in the morning, and then that actually turn out to be true, that a woman was actually drowned but that spa. that is not a coincidence. that is what she saw. the prosecution s theory? somehow, sitting in that spa that morning, chris was overcome by some private fury, who knows what. the hidden violence, is what strunsky called it. and then killed his spouse when he thought nobody was looking. chris hall ambushed his wife, grabbed her by the hair, slammed her head twice into the concrete edge. he s holding his wife of almost three decades under the water, showing absolutely no mercy, no remorse. and absolute desire to end her life at that point. and then the piece de resistance. he then gets out of the spa, walks into the house where his plan is to wake his 22-year-old daughter, who he can use as an alibi witness. one little quibble. why? in fact, as convinced as he was of hall s guilt, strunsky conceded the why was a problem. he didn t legally have to know, he said. but he just didn t. there it was. it s emotionally unsatisfying not to have that answer, not to know the entire narrative of what happened. but you would want to know why this guy, married to this woman for almost 30 years, apparently happily, would suddenly turn on her and drown her in the pool. right. and i m not sure we got the answers to that specific question. kind of an important question, isn t it? it s an important question, and a question that we ask in all spousal homicides. so, proof enough? or reasonable doubt? almost three years after cristi hall s death, a riverside jury would have to decide. but allstate actually helps you drive safely. with drivewise. it lets you know when you go too fast. .and brake too hard. with feedback to help you drive safer. giving you the power to actually lower your cost. unfortunately, it can t do anything about that. now that you know the truth. are you in good hands? tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. help stop the clock on further irreversible joint damage. talk to your rheumatologist. right here. right now. humira. the jury in chris hall s murder trial heard dramatic testimony from his neighbor, lindsay patterson. patterson claimed she had seen hall in the spa with his wife moments before she drowned. she said chris hall s hand was on his wife s head and back while she lay face down in the water. now it was the defense s turn to show that chris hall loved his wife, would never harm her, and that her death was a tragic accident. here again is keith morrison. chris hall s daughters sat through every miserable minute of their dad s trial for murder here at the courthouse in riverside, california. their review of the prosecutor s portrait of their father? it was a lie, they said. it was hurtful to us to hear someone basically say he knows our parents better than we do. and he knows our father is a sociopath, and that we re blind to it, and he knows there was hidden violence in our parents marriage and we just didn t see it. you re basically telling us we didn t know our whole lives were a lie. and there s no proof of that. chris hall had never been violent, argued the defense, had no motive, no reason to suddenly turn on his wife, it had to be a freak accident. so, said the defense, lindsay patterson didn t really know what she saw. in fact if she really witnessed chris hall drowning his wife, why then didn t she claim to see cristi s body in the spa when she looked again? it didn t make sense. but the highlight was the daughters testimony, emotional, quite powerful. it put prosecutor strunsky in a strange position, at odds with the victim s own family. if we had any inkling, we would have seen it, they say. they truly believe that in their hearts. this weighs on my greatly. but my job is to get justice for cristi hall. after six days of testimony, two days of deliberations, the jury couldn t decide. it was a deadlock. the judge declared a mistrial. chris hall walked out of court with his family, free. but not quite in the clear. and nothing at all like a victory for the hall daughters. what was it like to get that hung jury? what did you think then? that was tragic. that was devastating to us. you expected a not guilty verdict? yes. not a doubt. deputy d.a. burke strunsky was disappointed too. he was also determined to retry the case. first he sent his investigator on a mission to explore the life and marriage of chris hall. and what do you know. in idaho, where hall had been a disgraced police chief, the investigator uncovered a startling accusation. chris was a great, great con man. former los angeles police officer jerry winkel is a county commissioner in idaho now. but once upon a time he was chris hall s friend, that is, before a night of poker and booze when he said paul made a disturbing revelation, that he had shot himself in the leg in order to get retirement benefits. chris had been drinking beer. he came out and told me that he had shot himself. but there was more. d.a. investigator tom dove discovered a secret. not in chris s past but in cristi s. there had been infidelity in the past. the affair was relatively brief, years earlier. but she had been in phone contact with the man just days before she died. had chris found out? impossible to know. but when investigator dove talked to cristi s co-workers at the clinic where she was an x-ray technician, several said they noticed a change in her usually vibrant personality. one co-worker told them more. that she was contemplating a divorce. if true, it might persuade a jury. prosecutor strunsky also needed to explain why lindsay patterson didn t see cristi s body when she looked over the wall the second time? the prosecution hired a water expert to do a recreation of the hall spa. she s been assisting law enforcement with drowning investigations for 20 years. she got in the spa. from the center of the pool and towards where lindsay was standing, anywhere i was laying, you could not be seen from lindsay s viewpoint. once i sank below the surface and hit the bottom, you could not see me at all from lindsay s viewpoint. and now the prosecutor was ready. in may 2011, one year after the first jury deadlocked, burke strunsky went back to court armed with new evidence for a brand-new panel of hall s peers. jurors heard medical experts testify about the injuries to cristi s head and once again heard the 911 call. cristi s co-workers testified for the prosecution. and his once-friend testified. i was ashamed to admit he was once a police officer. well-known attorneys steve harmon and paul gretch entered the scene and came out swinging. that story about cristi s affair, for example? there s a shadow hanging over this, a very human shadow, which was that she was having a little affair, right, had a boyfriend. yes. if the husband knew about it. but the wife never, ever mentions it and tells the husband. no one tells the husband. quite right, said the judge. and because there was no evidence that chris knew about his wife s affair, he ruled it out of the trial. the story about hall shooting himself for retirement benefits? that was just absolutely a lie. that s wrong. there was never, never any evidence or indication or not even a moment s breath that he shot himself. anyway, the story was prejudicial, said the judge, so he threw that out too. as for what lindsay patterson says she saw, chris hall holding his wife s head underwater, the defense had prepared its own visual demonstration, had taken pictures from her angle at the wall to show that it could look like two people were touching in the spa even if they weren t. this is what she described seeing in her testimony. but on the close-up, what do you notice? they re not touching but they re in position where they could be. but that s different than actually touching. again, the hall daughters were there every minute. their father s enduring champions. and this time, more family members came to court. two of cristi s own siblings testified for chris. and said the same thing. we have not a doubt in our minds that this was not a moment of violence. this was not a murder. the victim s own center and own brother. that s an amazing thing to see. perhaps it was. but listen to this. the defense had one more very significant witness. a witness who oozed credibility. the sitting medical examiner for neighboring san bernardino county, who stuck his neck way out to disagree publicly, in a court of law, with the medical examiner from riverside. he found this to be an accidental death, not a homicide. this was not some ordinary hired gun. this was a public official who said straight out that cristi s head injuries should and perhaps should be explained by an accidental fall. he didn t rule out homicide? he didn t rule out homicide. but he said the preponderance of the evidence was towards an accidental drowning. what i have always been astounded by with this case is that the hall family lived so close to the san bernardino border, if cristi had slipped and fell four or five blocks over, the pathologist in that county would never have filed criminal charges. an accident of geography. so now a second jury would sort through these two sets of allegations, these two opposing realities. and decide whether chris hall would turn and embrace home and his loving daughters a pair of handcuffs and a life in prison. no, what? i just switched to geico and got more. more? got a company i can trust. that s a heck of a lot more. over 75 years of great savings and service. you can t argue with more. why would ya? geico. expect great savings and a whole lot more. oh! oh! ozempic®! 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(vo) ask your healthcare provider if ozempic® is right for you. ugh we re gonna be late, we re gonna be late! hold on, don t worry, there s another way [siri: beep beepá] directions to the greek theater. can i get a connection? can i get can i get a connection? i can see it in my, see it in my reflection. ohhh can i get a connection? tryna find the old me we all want to know you know, the new, new thing. with xfinity s retail stores, you can now see the latest. want to test drive the latest devices? be our guest. want to save on mobile? just ask. want to demo the latest innovations and technology? do it here. come see how we re making things simple, easy and awesome. plus, come in today and ask about xfinity mobile. a new kind of wireless network designed to save you money. visit your local xfinity store today. chris hall s first trial ended in a deadlocked jury. but with new evidence presented by both sides during his retrial, the jury was able to reach a verdict. now, with the conclusion to our story, here is keith morrison. may, 2011. for the second time, 12 men and women of riverside county, california, filed out of the courtroom, a second jury, to make a life decision about chris hall. did he murder his wife? which of the medical examiners should they believe? whose account of the defendant s character and, perhaps most important, what did lindsay patterson see when she peeked three times into the halls back yard. do you ever have those sort of little dark moments of the soul where you think, i may have misinterpreted, misremembered it s something i ve thought about every day, whether i misinterpreted, whether i think i saw something that wasn t there. i didn t see everything. yeah. but i saw what i saw. and i know the conclusion of my story. i know it. i know it. right here. i know it. of course, chris hall s daughters say they know the truth too, real thing. in their hearts. i think that we were the three most critical jurors in that courtroom. believe me, if we had heard anything or had any inkling that our father could have done this, as much as it would hurt and as much as we love our father, we would want that justice for our mother. the jurors deliberated two days and then broke for the long weekend. it was memorial day. halls daughters felt good. things can only go so wrong before so long before something has to actually go right for us. we just did a lot of talking about the future and this, you know, being over, this being finished and honestly i was concerned about dad and how he was finally going to be able to grieve for the loss of his wife. then it was tuesday, 8:45 in the morning. the jury gathered. and minutes later, a signal. they were ready. chris hall and his daughters rushed to court. and in the end it was very quick. guilty of first degree murder. their father would not be coming home. probably ever. he was being cuffed. and potentially put away for life. and yeah. it hurts. and we are angry about that. you can still hear those daughters. i can. thinking you unfairly convicted their father. absolutely. it weighs on me. but at the same time, i know who i am dealing with when it comes to chris hall. in fact, he is the one that s stolen their mother from them. it had been a peculiar fact of this case that the victims and defendants families stood solidly together against the prosecution. what no one knew was the truth was more complicated. offer the verdict at chris hall s sentencing a letter was produced from one of chris hall s brother, billy carlton who until now had said not one public word about the case. we would like to ask his honor for the maximum sentence, wrote billy. the pain that my family has suffered through this tragedy is unforgivable. i didn t want to hurt the girls. i had to say what was on my mind. there was a deep divide in the family said billy. some of the relatives believed chris was innocent but he and he said others including cristi s uncle steve mundy urged on the prosecutor silently. half the family was convinced he was innocent and half was convinced he wasn t. that s hard to do when you have a big family and you all have to be together once in a while. when it involves as member as loved as cristi was. exactly. does that explain why this kind of group of people in the family decided to just let justice take its course? we talked about it quite a bit. you ve got to know when to show up sometimes and when not to show up, just to keep what s left of the family as together as you can have it. thank you so much for coming. when it was over, hall convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life, some of cristi s relatives met with prosecutor strunsky and thanked him. thank you for putting him away because he is a murderer. and the hall daughters, having lost their beloved mother, fought to save a father they adored, and having lost that fight, aren t quite sure what they ll do now. for the family. to say we were close is an understatement, you know. to go from that to being not able to be there with each other. it s it s the biggest heartbreak that anyone can ever experience, i think. that s outline for this
Coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. Coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. million, which means there s about $16 million unaccounted for. that was unreported to the irs, so he s not paying taxes on that. a lot of that was money that he made from his work for ukraine overseas, and then funneled that through bank accounts in cyprus. we know that he used a lot of those funds to pay for that lavish lifestyle we heard about last week and early this week. things like his ostrich jacket that has gotten so much attention in this trial. who doesn t want an ostrich jacket? ashley parker, as this case moves forward, the question of whether president trump is going to be talking to bob mueller, it seems to be stuck in the mud. this is the president s tweet today. this is an illegal brought rigged witch hunt run by people who are totally corrupt and are conflicted. it was started and paid for by crooked hillary and democrats. phony dossier, fiesa disgrace and so many lying and sdis honest people already fired. 17 angry dems? stay tuned. ashley doeses president want to talk or just appear that he wants to talk? those are both good questions and it sort of has changed over the months. this has been a process that s been going on, these negotiations back and forth between his legal team, and let s point out his legal team has changed a lot in terms of who s on it and who s off it and mueller s team. but at the very least he wants to appear to want to talk. that s part of his strategy to win the public relations war which is really how he views a lot of this. and in moments, there are moments where he actually does over the advice of just about all of his lawyers, regardless of which iteration of legal teams they came from, he does want to talk. it goes back to the reason he wants to get with foreign leaders and strong men one on one in rooms alone. he believes correctly or incorrectly that he s a very savvy negotiator. he also believes correctly or incorrectly that he did nothing wrong and he thinks that he can convince mueller of that but his team is worried he ll perjure himself. i want to play something rudy giuliani said last night about why president trump should not testify. here it is. we offered him an opportunity to do a form of questioning. he can say yes or no. we can do it. if he doesn t want to do it, he knows the answers to every question that he wants to ask. why do you want to get him under oath? do you think we re fools? you want to get him under oath because you want to trap him into perjury. we re not going to let you do that. chuck, what is a perjury trap? what is rudy giuliani talking about there? well, a perjury trap has a very specific meaning, craig. either mr. giuliani doesn t know it or he does and he s just making stuff up. here s what a perjury trap is. if mueller were to subpoena the president into a grand jury and ask him about obstruction of justice and the president were to lie, that would be perjury, but it s not a perjury trap. a perjury trap is a very specific thing. if mueller were to ask the president, for instance, about a relationship the president had 20 years ago with a model unconnected to any election so there s no campaign finance implications and the president lied about that, that could be a perjury trap. it s completely extraneous to the thing that mueller is investigating. but if it s about the thing that mueller is investigating, perjury or interference in the election having conspired with russians and you lie, not a perjury trap. and by the way, there s a really easy way to avoid perjury. you tell the truth. ashley, president trump s problem with ethics got a smidge worse with the indictment of congressman chris collins yesterday. take a look here. guilty pleas from mike flynn, rick gates, george papadopoulos, plus manafort on trial. then you have a slew of white house officials and advisers who have resigned. been ousted or are under an ethics cloud. then you ve got the trump family and associates. you ve got their own woes from russia to security clearances to questionable business dealings. ashley, does the white house worry that this midterm election is going to be a referendum in part on ethics in washington? well, first of all, it s certainly undercuts the president s boast that he only hires and surrounds himself with the best people. the white house i can tell you is generally worried about the midterms, particularly the house, and the big concern there is if they lost the house, the democrats could begin not just impeachment proceedings, but more than that, just sort of those cuts by a thousand knives of committees and hearings and inquiries. it s more actually, though, i have to say a lot of the republicans out in the country and some of them running for office who are concerned that this midterm becomes a referendum on the president and some of his ethics problems and some of these scandals. although, again, there s also a lot of republicans who would love the president to come to his district, so that s sort of the challenge the white house is trying to figure out. where can you send him where he turns out the base and where do you send him that he absolutely tanks the thing for the person he s trying to elect. big thanks to all of you on this thursday. tariffs cost jobs. a south carolina plant ready to close because of the president s trade war. we are going to go there live to talk to people who live there who do not want to be used as political pawns, they say. also voice of the people. radio host will be here in the house and we ll talk about race relations under president trump as we approach the anniversary of those deadly clashes in charlottesville, virginia. and hail to the chief. the president plotting his midterm strategy with big promises to campaign for republicans as ashley was just talking about there. we ve got two former chiefs of staff. one who served a republican president, one a democrat. they ll talk about how to balance campaigning with the work of running the nation, right after this. , through dna i found out that i was only 16% italian. he was 34% eastern european. so i went onto ancestry, soon learned that one of our ancestors we thought was italian was eastern european. this is my ancestor who i didn t know about. he looks a little bit like me, yes. ancestry has many paths to discovering your story. get started for free at ancestry.com dinner date.meeting his parents dinner date. why did i want a crest 3d white smile? so i used crest. crest 3d white removes. .95% of surface stains in just 3 days. .for a whiter smile. that will win them over. crest. healthy, beautiful smiles for life. with prebiotics and probiotics to help support digestive health. are you ready to take your then you need xfinity xfi.? a more powerful way to stay connected. it gives you super fast speeds for all your devices, provides the most wifi coverage for your home, and lets you control your network with the xfi app. it s the ultimate wifi experience. xfinity xfi, simple, easy, awesome. apprehension about trump s political capital lingered in washington and on the campaign trail in a flurry of actions on tuesday. democrats turned out in droves and significantly overperformed expectations by posing serious challenges to republicans in staunchly gop districts. let s bring in andy card, chief of staff for george w. bush. he s an msnbc political analyst, and matt mcclarty, former white house chief of staff for president clinton. always good when we can get two chiefs of staff together here, gentlemen. thanks for your time. andy, does it ring true, is there concern about the president s ability to deliver votes come november? well, there s no concern about his ability to deliver votes during a republican primary. he s shown that he can go out and motivate people and get them out to vote and can also raise a lot of money. i think he s going to be doing that. yes, i do think there are questions about the general election, the off-year election. we were going to have many remembers running in congress. i think it s a challenge for the republican party because it s always the challenge for the republican party or democratic party when the white house occupies somebody of the different party label. that s just the reality. it comes down to the grounds game. i do think the republicans are working very hard to make sure they have a good ground game in november and we ll see the result of that, i think, thanks to the president helping to motivate the people who will be on the ground running out to get support for republican candidates. but it s going to be a tough year for republicans in november, i think. mack, here s the thing, though, andy maintains the president is able to turn out votes in primaries for the republicans. how much does he galvanize the opposition? how much do you think folks that might not vote in a primary or special election, even a midterm election, but because president trump has decided to visit that particular district, they decided, you know what, i am going to go vote but i m going to vote against president trump. andy has got it right on most of his points, as usual. i think you ve got it right. it s a two-edge sword. we re now moving into the general election, not the primaries, as andy noted. i don t think there s any question, craig, right now the democrats have the energy on their side. i think all the polls suggest that. that s really what you noted in your question. so i think the white house is going to have to be careful where president trump campaigns, but that s not unusual for any sitting president. but i think right now, the wind is at the back of the democrats. how much wind are we talking? are we talking enough wind to take back the house or just a little bit of wind? well, that s the question of the day. we re going to find out in november. i think the odds are the democrats are likely to take over the house. nancy pelosi likely to keep her job? well, we ll see. there s been a lot of controversy. just like president trump is a motivating issue negatively and possibly in certain situations in raising money, so is nancy pelosi. andy card, congressman collins, let s talk about his don t even allow the perception of doing something wrong. with regard to people being charged, remember, they re innocent until proven guilty. congressman chris collins has to put up with rules in the house on how they determine they want him to act as a member of congress. when it comes to removing him from the house, that s a decision that he would have to make. i don t think history has shown that a lot of people who are charged decide to leave congress to face the charges. he pleads innocent. i consider him innocent until proven guilty and that s the way i do with everybody. i think we ve got to respect that. mack, john kelly, president trump s chief of staff, there was a lot of hubbub when he became chief of staff. a lot of folks around the president said that this was going to be the guy who was able to keep this president in check. he was going to keep the white house the trains in the white house running on time as they say. how would you characterize how general kelly has performed so far as chief of staff? i d say to be fair i think mixed. i think general kelly did come in, as you noted. i think he did get some process in order. i think he s established good relations on the hill. but at the end of the day, the president sets the tone, craig, as andy so well knows. in this case i think the wind seems to be or the situation is let trump be trump. he s really pretty much following his schedule with general kelly now supporting that, but not in the way that it initially began his tenure as chief of staff. all right, gentlemen, thank you both. thank you very much. great to be with mack. thank you. same here. that was nice. we don t get a lot of that anymore. that s nice. a little civility on cable television. yeah. a tv plant ready to layoff its workforce. more than 100 people. they say it s all because of the president s trade war with china. we are live at america s best state, my home state, south carolina. we re going to take a look at how it could affect not only those workers but the entire community. what s that do to a community? well, it drains the life from it. this is your wake-up call. if you have moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis, month after month, the clock is ticking on irreversible joint damage. ongoing pain and stiffness are signs of joint erosion. humira can help stop the clock. prescribed for 15 years, humira targets and blocks a source of inflammation that contributes to joint pain and irreversible damage. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. help stop the clock on further irreversible joint damage. talk to your rheumatologist. right here. right now. humira. trade war with the united states, announcing it s going to be imposing tariffs on an additional $16 billion in american autos and energy products. the move in response to trump administration s plans to implement a second round of tariffs on chinese goods about two weeks from now totaling an additional $16 billion. back here at home, a south carolina television-making company says it might be forced to shut down a plant and layoff all 126 of its employees because of president trump s tariffs. we sent nbc s vaughn hillyard to check it out. he s on the ground in winnsboro, south carolina, home at the element electronics. what are people on the ground telling you there, vaughn? reporter: yeah, good afternoon, craig. you re familiar with this community. i believe you grew up just about 30 miles from here over in columbia. here in fairfield county, this is a largely rural community. we focused on a lot of farming communities around the country but this is a manufacturing hub, or at least it was. unemployment here is over 10%. fairfield county has the highest unemployment rate already. so the news just two days ago that element electronics, the television assembly plant would be closing and putting 126 more people out of jobs was a difference-maker here. when you go around and talk to community members around here, it goes beyond just a job. it s the families, the communities, restaurants. it goes to the very nature and the very face of this community. i want to introduce you to terry vicar, one of those community members, and this is what she told us just yesterday. those 126 employees live in fairfield county. they support all these mom-and-pop businesses. now the disposable income they had that allowed them to go out to eat on friday night, they have to save that money for their mortgage, tax, taxes, school expense, insurance, those necessities of life. so that s a detriment not only for their livelihood, but also for the other businesses that rely on that disposable income to stay open. and what does that do to a community? well, it drains the life from it. reporter: i asked terry how long are they able to weather it? she said a restaurant may be only able to weather one week, two weeks. if the profit is not large enough to sustain these companies, what does that community look like. we caught up with senator tim scott, the republican senator here 15 miles down the road. i asked him that question, is there urgency. this is what he told us. i told the president my concerns about tariffs going forward and it hasn t changed so to the extent that we can find a way to help alleviate some of those concerns long term by eliminating future tariffs i think is a spot on good thing to do. you said the administration had suggested nafta would be negotiated by april. there was an urgency to this. yeah. that s something that the administration is going to have to recognize. do you think they understand that urgency? i think they do. reporter: i asked the senator that question about urgency because now this trade war has been going on for five months. frankly when we re talking about china, it s chinese goods. the supplies that come here the company here uses to make those televisions. so where do these tariffs go? that s the question there has not been much of an answer from from this white house. larry kudlow said on friday there s conversations at the highest level, but there have been no formal talks since dating back to june with china. the question here is ultimately what are companies like this going to do? they have until october when they close but it s not these guys. it s the auto manufacturers in the eastern part of the state. they are waiting for progress on this trade war and the trade front that the president has tasked himself with being a part of. vaughn hillyard there in winnsboro. full disclosure, my mother s first teaching job was there in winnsboro. she thought at kelly miller elementary school. vaughn, thank you for that, sir. i m joined by the democratic candidate running for governor of south carolina. this is state rep james smith. representative, good to see you, sir. thanks for your time. i know that you went to the element plant yesterday. what did you hear from plant workers and the company s owners about trying to save those jobs? it s great to be with you today. i didn t get a chance to speak to any of the plant owners, but what you re hearing all across fairfield county and all across south carolina is that these job-killing tariffs are hurting our state. it was important to be there and to provide the leadership of what ought to happen. you know, i m running for governor. we ought to have a governor who s going to fight for south carolina families and south carolina jobs. so i went to fairfield yesterday to show what ought to be happening. we ought to be marshaling our resources and getting our congressional delegation together, organizing our chambers of commerce and knocking on the door of the oval office and telling the president how much this is hurting our state. the guy that you are running against, henry mcmaster, republican there in south carolina, this is what this is what he has said about element electronics. take a listen. we are doing every single thing that we can, making every effort, every contact. i ve spoken to the president and the vice president myself several times about this as well as wilbur ross, the secretary of commerce and others in the administration. your response? well, craig, i heard he said he had a full-court press going on this matter. if that s a full-court press, then he shouldn t either be our governor nor a basketball coach in this state. the fact is so much more needs to be done and so much is not happening. it s been very clear that this governor cares more about his friendship with the president than he does about the people of our state. i dare say he could even finding fairfield county on a map, much less lead us where we need to go in the future. president trump has said he intends to slap a 25% tariffs on $200 million more. there s fears there could be layoffs at the bmw plant in greenville, volvo was considering adding 200,000 jobs in south carolina because of tariffs. if you are elected, precisely what would you do to try and keep these jobs in the state? sure, i would do what this governor is not doing. build a broad bipartisan coalition to make the case to the president. you know, you just can t sit in an office and not get out and work with the people of our state. we would already be in washington with all of the heads of our chambers of commerce around the state and making the case to this president about how harmful this is to the people of our state. it takes that kind of leadership to make a difference. but the fact is, that s not happening right now. the graphic up right now we re having this conversation detailing the three states that have been hit hardest so far by the president s tariffs so far. south carolina number three on that list. mr. smith, thank you, sir. appreciate you. come on. good to be with you, craig, thank you. appreciate it. this weekend marks the anniversary of the deadly protests of the white supremacist rally in charlottesville, virginia. radio host charlamagne tha god standing by to talk about how things have changed since that day. also, she s back, and allegedly she has tapes. omarosa ready to release a book about her time in the white house. as you might imagine, she has a lot to say. welcome to the place. do you accept medicare patients? i sure do! so call unitedhealthcare today and ask for your free decision guide. oh, and happy birthday. or retirement. in advance. i ve been making blades here at gillette for 20 years. there s a lot of innovation that goes into making america s #1 shave. precision machinery and high-quality materials from around the world. nobody else even comes close. now starting at $7.99. gillette. the best a man can get. california fire authorities today are reporting another member of that state s firefighting team has died fighting that carr fire in shasta county. that s what the fire is being called, the carr fire. the individual mechanic assigned to the carr fire was killed in a traffic accident. this incident brings the death toll now from five to eight, excuse me. five of those were civilians. the fire so far has scorched more than 175,000 acres. it remains less than 50% contained. it is roughly the size of los angeles and it is so far it s the largest fire in the history of california. it s one of several wildfires burning out of control right now in that state. she abandoned years of professional loyalty to president trump when she was unceremoniously escorted from the white house after resigning last december. just months later, omarosa newman had this to say on a reality show. i was haunted by tweets every single day, like what is he going to tweet? does anybody say to him, what are you doing? i tried to be that person and then all of the people around him attacked me. it was like keep her away. don t give her access. no, it s not going to be okay. it s not. would you vote for him again? god no. never. in a million years, never. with her forthcoming tell-all being released just days from now, the daily beast is reporting that the former apprentice star seek receicre recorded conversations with the president. conversations that she has since leveraged while shopping her book. jonathan capehart is here with me, pulitzer prize-winning writer for the washington post. he s also an msnbc contributor. what, sir, do we know about these reported omarosa tapes? we just know that apparently these tapes exist. craig, i m laughing because we all knew this was coming. did we? come on. you knew that omarosa was secretly recording him? not that she was secretly recording. but she s saying that happened and this is reported, i am not surprised. i interviewed omarosa in august of 2015, the first weekend after donald trump appeared in his first presidential debate. i brought her on because i was subbing for steve kornacki and we brought her on as the trump whisperer. it was in that interview where she basically laid out why we were getting donald trump wrong. we were not looking at him through the reality television prism that had taken over america, we are looking at him through the political prism, which she said was wrong. she said also in that interview that she was a diehard democrat, she wouldn t be voting for donald trump. she had hillary clinton tattooed on her left arm. fast forward, she is an advisor on the campaign, she s an advisor in the white house. so she switches allegiances so quickly. so i m not surprised that she goes on reality television after she leaves the white house, whispers that she was living in fear of tweets. i am not surprised that it is now being reported that she secretly recorded conversations with donald trump. it is the reality television character. that is who she is. that is the reality that is the trump white house. nancy cook is joining us now. nancy cook is a white house reporter for politico. nancy, thank you for being with me. this is what donald trump tweeted about omarosa five years ago. honest omarosa. she won t back stab, she ll come at you from the front. nancy, how is the white house reacting to the tell-all? how is the white house reacting to the tapes? are they reacting at all yet? well, i feel like most of the white house is either, you know, off this week, trying to have a quieter week or they re up in bedminster where i think they have been talking about a lot of other things, including trade and the midterms. but my understanding is that they have been pretty surprised by the idea that omarosa had the tapes. i think everyone was really looking towards the fall and much more worried about the upcoming bob woodward book just because he s a great reporter. there was a sense that he got access to a lot of people and documents. so this omarosa book i think will catch them a little bit by surprise just the way fire & fury did in the way i don t think they re totally prepared for it. the daily mail obtained an excerpt from her new book where she writes, quote, his mental decline. his mental decline could not be denied. many didn t notice it as keenly as i did because i knew him way back when. they thought trump was being trump, off the cuff. but i knew something wasn t right. i ve read some other excerpts of the book, they sent over a couple of copies, i haven t read the whole thing. this is going to be the question that s asked over the next week as she promotes this thing. is she credible? that is going to be the question. is she credible, but also is what she s written credible? does it comport with other things that has been reported about the president? there have been people there have been reports raising the question about the president and people worried about the fact that he repeats sentences. remember, there s reports that he s repeating sentences more frequently than he did before he went into the white house. the excerpt you just read comports with that reporting. i think the 1-2 punch of a deeply reported, highly sourced, credible reporter like bob woodward, a book coming from him twinned with a book, admittedly sensational book from omarosa who knew the president before he was the president, the two of them together are going to present yet another picture of this president and this white house that will probably knock the white house back on its heels the way nancy said, the way that fewerire & fury did. you wrote about how white house officials close to the president are trying to reel hope hicks into a role in the president s 2020 campaign. what more can you tell us about that? i think a lot of people were surprised when she went on air force one this weekend to this rally in ohio with the president and a bunch of his family members and staff. you know, my understanding is that a bunch of people in that orbit definitely are interested in having hope work on the 2020 campaign. she remains very, very close to the trump kids, especially jared and ivanka. that s who she was visiting this weekend in new jersey. she just has this ability to really translate trump s instincts into actions the way a lot of people around the president find soothing, so i think there s a big push to bring her back, even in an informal capacity for 2020. her friends and allies say i think she d be open to it. i don t know that she ll take a job like the communications director or anything like that formal, but i feel like she is continuing to play a key role, particularly as we look to the next presidential election. nancy cook, thank you. jonathan, you re going to come back. we re going to talk about this space force stuff in just a few minutes. charlottesville one year later. as we approach the anniversary of the deadly protests of a white supremacist rally, how has this country changed? have we changed a great deal? i m going to talk to radio host charlamagne tha god about that and a whole lot more. also, melania trump s parents were just sworn in as american citizens. the ceremony was just a few hours ago here in new york city. their immigration lawyer says their application process and interview was no different than anyone else s who applies to become a citizen in this country. this is the ocean. just listen. 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[ engine revving ] yes, i was busy! -24-hour roadside assistance. from america s number-one motorcycle insurer. -you know, i think you re my best friend. you don t have to say i m your best friend. that s okay. charlottesville and parts of northern virginia are going to be under a state of emergency this weekend. governor ralph northam issuing a declaration over concerns of possible unrest as that city marks one year since a white supremacist rally left one person dead. violence broke out in the city as white supremacists, klan members, white nationalists, neo-nazis marched to voice their support for their movement. also to protest the planned removal of a statue of robert e. lee. the group unite the right had been denied permission to march this year in charlottesville. today, however, they were granted a permit to hold a rally in d.c. i want to bring in charlamagne tha god, the wildly possible host on power 105.9 .1, mr. melvin. excuse me. i got it wrong. i want to play something the president said. this got a lot of attention right after the rally. this is president trump. i think there s blame on both sides. you look at both sides. i think there s blame on both sides. and i have no doubt about it and you don t have any doubt about it either. and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say that. blame on both sides. when you heard that, what did you think? that was him not wanting to denounce his base. a base full of bigots and prejudiced people. he knows if anybody shows up for him, it s going to be those people. that s what that was. you think that was not even so much a dog whistle no. just a megaphone. that was not a dog whistle. that was, hey, don t blame my people for this. it s blame on both sides. no, it wasn t. the blame goes to the people who were there to cause harm that day. the blame goes to the people that were there being prejudiced that day, the bigots, the racists. that s where the blame goes to. a year later, where do you think we are in this country, a year after charlottesville? i think right now we re in that same place. i think the energy has gotten worse. i think that the mask has been pulled off america. i think that when donald trump makes statements like that, he lives license to the people to keep the racism going, to wave that bigot flag high. i think it s just as worse if not more worse. just last week there was a group of pastors, black pastors who met with the president at the white house. this is the comments one of the pastors made who was in attendance. take a listen. this is probably going to be the i m going to say this at this table, the most pro black president that we ve had in our lifetime because and i try to analyze the people that i encounter. this president actually wants to prove something to our community, our faith-based community and our ethnic community. the president has not polled well since he took office. you talk to a lot of folks on the radio. do you get the sense that is changing at all? absolutely not. the dye is getting to his brain and causing him to say things that are simply not true, like donald trump donald trump actually has policies that are hurting african-americans. you know, when you are in the white house and you re trying to reverse everything that barack obama has done, barack obama s policies directly did affect a lot of african-americans when it comes to education, immigration, the environment. the thing donald trump is doing is hurting african-americans. lebron james opens this school in akron, ohio, free meals, access to food pantries for needy families. you know, he s referred to maxine waters on more than one occasion as a low iq individual. he s made other comments, the s-hole countries. do you get the sense that the president just doesn t care what black and brown people think about him or his policies, or you think there s more to it than that? remember when kanye west said george bush doesn t care about black people? yeah. donald trump doesn t care about black people. that s all it boils down to. but you saw the group of pastors sitting around the table. a lot of those pastors feel like they were walking in and god told them to be there and they felt like they could get through to them. i understand why they feel that way. if kim kardashian can get through to donald trump, i can understand if you feel like you re a pastor you can get through to him but that s just for photo ops. you don t think he knew the one-year anniversary of charlottesville was coming up and he wants to look like he s in the good graces of some black people in our community. so you get the people who are foolish enough in a sense or feel like they can make some change happen to come to the white house and take a photo op with them. that s all. you ve probably seen this. nashville police just released some surveillance video and it shows something that we have unfortunately seen far too often in this country. it shows an officer chasing and fatally shooting another black man. what s got to change? what s got to change is we need more people from the community in police uniforms. people from the community that are of the culture that are people of color who know that, you know, low tyrone on the corner isn t a threat. you know him since he was a kid. you know little tyrone s parents. you probably went to school with little tyrone s parents. you know how to act with blangd brown people on a regular basis. the only people think that we re threats are people that don t deal with us on a regular basis. thank you, my friend. 1 105.1. we are nationally syndicated. 80 markets across the country. there is another show. we can t plug all your jobs, because you have like six. what s the name of the book? it s called black privilege. it s a new york times best-seller. i have another book coming out out october 23rd. it s available for preorder now. it s about anxiety that i experienc experienced ptsd and trauma i want you to talk about that. that is not something that people that look like us i will, i will bring the picture of the puppy licking your face. i will bring that next time. space force. vice president pence just laid out the white house s plan to create a sixth branch of the military. seriously. the space force right after this. i m alex trebek here to tell you and a price that fits your budget. i m 65 and take medications. what s my price? 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no, i did not, craig. i did not know we needed a space force. i know we need to have astronauts, american astronauts who can get to the international space station without the help of the russians. i did not know we needed a force in outer space to protect us from what. i have no idea. it s not clear how much it s going to cost and who in congress is backing it. but it did seem odd that the president announced the creation of this space force today, or the vice president. yes. it is odd. and you raised the right question, craig. how much is this going to cost? where is this money going to come from? i m old enough to remember when republicans on capitol hill used to always worry, fret about debt and deficits and, you know,
Former GOP representative Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski interview newsmakers, politicians and pundits about the issues of the day. that s 1,754 votes ahead in a sdlact h district that has been in gop hands for three decades. the official outcome way not be known until other ballots are tallied and the race could be headed to a recount if the k candidates end up within 1% of each other once the votes are certified. this morning, balderson is claiming victory. o connor has not conceded. regardless, we ll see a rematch when they compete for full term in congress. welcome to morning joe. it is wednesday, august 8th. with joe, willie and me, we have associate editor of commentary magazine noah raufman. former treasury official and morning joe economic analyst steve rattner and national political correspondent for nbc news and msnbc news, is he still away, steve kornacki. but you see this same thing happening. they re bleeding. republicans are bleeding so badly right now in suburbs, and then you go north of frank lynn county to the excerpts, they re basically splitting it, holding their own, but, again, losing a ton of votes. this is a party, the republican party, that s becoming more and more every day a rural party. also, the thing i ve always loved and talked about it for years on this show. i love what madison and hamilton and our founders did when they put down a government that constantly has this system of checks and balances, elections every two years. that always have the electorate sort of tugging and pulling. you see a lot of voters out there thinking, a lot of republicans, a lot of moderates, a lot of independents, thinking that donald trump has gone too far so they re pulling back the other way. yesterday something remarkable happening in missouri. a very conservative state, pro-trump state, pro-republican state. you actually had people coming out in a referendum, and dealing a blow to the right to work forces who were really buoyed by a supreme court decision seen as a death nail for unions. yesterday, i ve got to say. that union in missouri, one of the biggest wins in a very long time and, again, you just have to believe. once again. that s the electorate sort of tugging and pulling back. oh, okay. supreme court s going to take us too far to the right, we re going to pull this country back to the center. pretty remarkable what we see in, you know every time americans go to the voting booth. amazing to watch overnight, and the people are having a chance to speak. willie geist, the president is certainly taking this one in ohio personally. he s declared victory. sent out a tweet last night. we don t have an official call yet here at nbc news, but he s declared victory saying when i decided to go to ohio for troy balderson, he was down. not good. after my speech saturday night, a big turn for the better. now troy wins a great victory during a difficult time for voting. he will win big in november. steve car knacky, cautalk about what happened yesterday. big republican state and president trump won it two years ago by 11 points. first of all, numbers here. is there a chance with balderson up by about 1,700 votes now with provisional ballots, mail-in ballots that that result changes, that o connor somehow comes out on top? the suspense is extra weird on this one, because you expect the provisional ballots to break towards the democrat. you don t expect them to actually erase 1,754 vote republican lead. however, if the margin were to cut that 1,754 in half, not implausible, then the overall victory margin for balderson would be under .5 points. by state law if you re under .5, more generous than you ll see in other places but under .5, automatically there s a recount. we re in a situation now i think it s plausible that o connor with the provisional votes can get it close enough that the state law is triggered, causing a recount, and even then if you re a democrat, i wouldn t get your hopes up necessarily. the recounts don t tend to change huge numbers of votes. o connor in a position needs to change 700, 800 votes. nothing s impossible? politics. much rather in balderson position than o connor, but it s not implausible we are going to go through a recount that could take this thing out into late august. talking late august, early september recount, as joe said, then another election between these same two guys two months later. however that comes out if there is a recount what did we learn about the state of the republican party last night? yeah. three parts to this district. focus an the suburbs right in and immediately around columbus. northern franklin county. more than one-third of the district. put it in perspective. the franklin county part, span of six year, contribute to donald trump, obama winning by three points in 2012, clinton by 18 in 2016 to democrat danny o connor winning by 31 points, in the span of basically half a decade. that the trump effect in places like franklin county, ohio. last night, margin was there for democrats. turnout if you told democrats this is what franklin would look like, they would have set that s it. we win. start the celebration. what didn t happen, turnout not great in rural parts, but boardson attracted trump-level support among those who voted in the rural part of the district. talk that might recede back towards democrats. didn t happen. balderson up around 70% in some rural counties. that didn t happen. bottom line, came down to delaware county. wealthy, suburban. a little different i think in character than franklin county when we say suburbs. franklin is a little more closer to, a little more in some cases blended with the city. when you take a step, that next level of suburb out, kind of delaware. what happened there, by historical standards trump didn t boardson didn t do well for republicans but matched the trump number and didn t fall back further from the trump number. looks like just enough to hang on s in what was a trump district by 11 two years ago. ask quickly, steve, about delaware county. not dissing donald trump and we d all say it here. i think that donald trump in most republican primaries is going to be the deciding factor. what s interesting last night, and a bit ironic, a guy he can t stand, john kasich. if you look at delaware county and look at kasich s home county and see that actually, and franklin county, trump s candidate s getting wiped out. but in delaware county, a last-minute endorsement by john kasich had to have a significant impact for the republican candidate and help him hang on there. right? so funny. think of events in the final days of this campaign that got so much attention. overinterpret everything, can you do that, but you can see them having very different effects on very different groups of voters in the district. kasich coming out, endorsing the republican. absolutely. kasich coming out saying, publicly hey, i don t know if balderson even wanted trump to come out. you can see that argument made for delaware. the fact donald trump was out there, the day before the election, you had balderson dissing and makebackfired right there. didn t last night. balderson came out, thanked a lot of people. he didn t thank john kasich which was not a class move. and maybe he s trying to please donald trump by not thanking john kasich. that s somebody that would help him out in november. so we ll see. politics is always very fascinating, but noah, you tweeted end of the night that for conservatives, for republicans, not a lot to be cheerful about. a very bad night for republicans underperforming, and you said, for conservatives and for the conservative movement, the worst bit of news actually came out of missouri. yeah. you mentioned it was the right to work vote. missouri, as you said, pretty red state at this point. senator claire mccaskill notwithstanding and half the union is right to work. essentially means, you don t have to join a union if you join a union shop. don t have to be forced into a union shop. and if you do, you don t have to be forced to pay union dues. the supreme court you mentioned and we re seeing a rollback. on the state level democrats are expected to do very well particularly in governorships. spent a lot of time focusing on congress but governorships are far more important when it comes to reforms, advancing conservative reforms and they ve done extraordinarily well advancing them over the obama years. it is disheartening from a conservative perspective. look at more of the national environment, got a taste of it in ohio but is a some, too, in washington. a top two primary system. functionally a democrat versus republican race, and candidates like incoumbent representative cathy mcmorris rodgers got barely ahead of her democratic opponent, 4/10 point at this point and the fourth ranking republican in congress. very little, look at results of last night and say republicans had a very good night. they squeaked out something of a victory in ohio, you could call it a victory but it s a very pureic one. historic night for candidates and the numbers are only going to go higher. laura kelley, nomination for governor. in michigan, former democratic leader of the state senate gretchen witmer handedly won her party s gubernatorial nomination, women, now the major party nominees for governor in 11 states breaking the record of 10 set in 1994, and that number is almost certain to grow with the remaining primaries. and at least 20 more women nominated for the u.s. house last night, that total is now at 182. a record number of major party nominations with still more to come and one more milestone last night as michigan s rasheda talib likely will become the first muslim woman in serve in congress. a former state rep, unopposed in the general election for the seat. long held by ex congressman john conyers. i think in a lot of ways this is a response to trump. joe, women are stepping up. yes. willie, so much, and, again, not a surprise. just like 1996 was a response to bill clinton. 2010, a response to barack obama. no doubt about it. 2018 seems to be such a response to donald trump, with the republicans underperforming everywhere. and women, democratic women particularly, doing well in these early contests. yeah. no question. what a preview, perhaps what we ll see in three months. last night across several states, steve rattner, get to your charts in a few minutes and look at the historical perspective on all this, but just what can donald trump expect three months from now, when you put together that history of what a sitting president faces in his first term and all the energy we re seeing among democrats right now? without stealing my own thunder from my charts, i m sure steve kornacki knows all this, combined with the president s approval rating, a mid-term election is incredibly bad news for president trump. saying something about the women a shout-out, went home to michigan to fight out michigan 11 against an incumbent republican, stetted down. she stepped down. they give her a good shot at winning. awesome. noah it s awesome. while it looks like democrats, a lot of women, in the democratic party will do exceptionally well, you look on the republican side, and just like you said. you ve got people like barbara comstock in northern virginia who is in danger, and actually as of last week was not getting a lot of support from the major party. you just talked about the fourth ranking republican. another woman. underperforming in ways we ve never seen before, and i wonder if that has to do with her being a woman in the republican party? or if it s just that mainstream conservatives in the age of trump are going to underperform every time nap this is a party right now that is, at least in the primaries, at war with itself? i m not sure if there s a gender-related aspect there to the extent i could say there might be one, women in general in the electorate, to say nothing of the republican party, railroad all that hot on donald trump. the president has been that is the understatement of the morning! women a lot of republican women. literally. i guess that s a better way to put it nap really is, noah, as you look at the map last night, and you look at these races as we continue, this is sort of the home stretch before we go into the final push after labor day. that seems to be the overarching headline of all of these results that women have not just been offended by donald trump, but they have been activated to such a level that, that s probably, women are probably the greatest threat to the republican majority right now. yeah. i would say that s probably accurate. and we saw some of the backlash that a lot of us predicted would occur with the shifting republican coalition towards white working class voters, former democratic voters. a big broad base of voters without a degree that can get you states like michigan and wisconsin and pennsylvania, but at the expense of the former that core republican base status quo ante, marginally affluent upper middle class degree holders. and ohio 12 is a really well-educated district and that s where you re going to see the backlash. see it from women. see it from degree holders. people making more than the national average and the income scale, and that s where the traditional republican base was. so where that base exists and it s deflated and not turning out, republicans like barbara comstock, like kevin mcmorris rogers are going to suffer. women are going to be i think what we re seeing in realtime is women carrying out one of the key tenants, joe, of know your value, which is step up, because no one s going to do it for you. absolutely no one. in the age of trump we have to. and the second one is, women are learning in realtime to fail publicly. andrea accostio cortez, a rough run since she won in new york, but we do it, just like men and have a bigger reaction to it, because for some reason, when women fail it s much more of a story than men, but we re pushing through it. much more at knowyourvalue.com. still ahead on morning joe we ll talk to the democrat locked in an election too close to call. danny o connor joins us inalities while. plus susan page writes in usa today about whan what happene and when bob mueller issues a public report. examining why conservatives aren t freaking out about republicans budget-busting deficits. don t get that. and barbara mcquade is live outside the courthouse in virginia where paul manafort is on trial. but first, bill karins with a check on the forecast. bill? good morning to you, mika. big thunderstorms causing a lot of delays in new york city. more of those up and down the east coast. today it s so hot and still so humid out there. going all right this morning. areas dealing with a little rain, southern ohio rain overnight. louisville, cincinnati and additional storms through kentucky. five p.m., coming home from work today. these area, showers and storms, watch out from nashville to knoxville to chattanooga. areas in the mountains of north carolina, west virginia, throughout new york state. areas of the catskill and possibly around the mass pike. later than 5:00 p.m. maybe 7:00 or 8:00 p.m., bet chance for boston, new york, into d.c. hit and miss. not everyone will get them. extremely hot. 38 million people in the heat advisories. last day of it. showers and storms cool us off and a slightly drier air mass moves in for tomorrow. out west, the story is still the heat. los angeles a little cooler for you and how about the pacific northwest? this will be the hottest two-day stretch of the summer from spokane into areas of interior washington state, 105 today. boise, 102. seattle 93. friends in portland, oregon, 97 degrees today. the heat continues in the west along with all the extreme fire danger and the fires that are burning are still burning hot, and you have to feel for the firefighters. new york city, what a thunderstorm last night. a lot of clouds, lightning. could do it again later this afternoon. you re watching morning joe. we ll be right back. i thought i married an italian. my lineage was the vecchios and zuccolis. through ancestry, through dna i found out that i was only 16% italian. he was 34% eastern european. so i went onto ancestry, soon learned that one of our ancestors we thought was italian was eastern european. this is my ancestor who i didn t know about. he looks a little bit like me, yes. ancestry has many paths to discovering your story. get started for free at ancestry.com do you want the same tools and seamless experience across web and tablet? yes? great! then you re ready for power e trade. the platform, price and service that gives you the edge you need. sweet! e trade. the original place to invest online. but there s one. that blows them all out of the water. hydro boost water gel from neutrogena®. with hyaluronic acid it goes 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tracking poll so he went from even in the race with collier to up seven points after trump weighed in. in michigan, republicans nominated another trump endorsed candidate. john james for u.s. senate. james faces an uphill battle against democratic senator debbie stabenow, and in washington s eighth district, republican dino rossi advances in the race for an open republican-held seat clinton won as democrat kim schreyer leads another democrat who who gets to head the general election. steve kornacki, professor pearson who would ask us a question that would always be a setup. you knew you were about to get run over and he said, you should see the next question coming at you like a slow-motion low motive, coming out of a tunnel. right at you. well, you could, you could say the same about the republican party s fortune. in fact, we ve all been talking about it for a year now. you have a donald trump endorsement that helped somebody like kris kobach, possibly win the republican nomination, but then sets him up, sets the republican party up for a, makes it more likely that they lose in the fall, because of just what we saw in the ohio race last night. the massive bleeding of republicans and in what was once a republican stronghold. the suburbs. since the late 1960s have been where republicans have gone to win elections, and now, you know, a donald trump endorsement of a candidate like kobach that repels so many people in those once solidly republican areas. so, you know, a win in september or a win in august possibly leads to a big loss in the fall. that is certainly the it was so striking you had that trump endorsement of kobach in a couple of hours later on monday right before the election, mr. kansas republican politics, bob dole, 95 years old weighs in with endorsement of the opponent, the acting governor. establishment speaking in response to donald trump making that move. interesting thing, when you put those results up now where kobach is clinging to the lead just over 500 votes, it s one county, one giant county, one giant suburban upscale more affluent county, johnson county, overland park, right outside kansas city where outstanding votes have been for the last eight hours basically everything s from johnson county. when johnson county was completely outstanding at about midnight, everybody s assumption, that s it. now collier s going to win the nomination because kobach won t win in the suburbs. now about two-thirds of johnson county has been counted overnight and kobach continues to lead those suburbs have not strangely enough come through for collier the way they expected them to overnight. i think it s true. kobach in november, a democrat, saying, goodness, a golden opportunity to win if kobach s the republican nominee. the suburbs supposed to be endangered, republicans voting there maybe now are not seeing it that way quite as much. yeah. willie, kobach winning. if he ends up winning. it s like claire mccaskill trying to draw todd akin back the last time she ran. you never know how it turns out. kobach may be different than todd akin when he gets out on the campaign trail, and may do much better, but just generally, you do have trump candidates, people embracing donald trump, setting themselves up for a much bigger fall come november. there s a reason the republican governors association and other national republicans pleaded with president trump not to endorse kris kobach. in fact, many of his own advisers reporting in the new york times on monday pleaded with him not to endorse kris kobach for the korea reason you ve laid out. polling shows he is not a good candidate for republicans and democrats could then not only win back the governor s mansion in kansas but also energize democrating to come out and vote in the house races in kansas down ballot to vote against kris coreback. get to the charts and look at the big picture. steve rattner what are you leading with? the house. not a good night for republicans. i ll show you data from other midterm elections that won t look better for the republicans than we saw last night. start looking at the last 13 or so mid-term elections. we plot the presidential approval on the vertical axis against the number of house seats won or lost on the horizontal axis. drew a line called aggression analysis across them to basically find what is statistically most accurate. what you find, about a 70% correlation between a president s approval rating and the number of house seats won or lost in a midterm. at say 50%, that would lead you to expect something like a 30-seat loss in the midterms. however, we have a president, we know is at 41%. if you start at 41% and draw a line across, you would find it comes out around here in the, about 60 very vote loss category. note the two red dots above here represent our two most recent you d call wave elections. 1994 and 2010, both with presidents who is not even as low popularity as donald trump but somewhat low popularity and you can see that there were masses losses from both of those folks in the midterm. reminder, democrats only need 23 seats to flip the house. exactly. if you look at another indicator where the republicans sit, which is income dents deciding not to run. as you know, something like an 85% re-elect rate for incumbents. having an open seat, advantage for whichever party is contesting that seat. you can see again going back to 1976, the number of retirements both democratic and republican over that period of time, you can see for example, in the 1994 period, there were a huge number of democratic retirements. that presumably anticipated the wave election of that year, but you also see this year up to i think 41 at the moment. republican retirements, and that is a historically high number for republicans and historically high for both parties and much lower number of democratic retirements. that augers well for democrats trying to contest open seats in a house that tends to go with the incumbent. lastly, 1,000 prognosticators who tried to run simulation what s they think will happen this fall. one by the economist, ran 10,000 simulations of various outcomes using both national variables and local variables. they found that by their math there s about a 71% chance of the house flipping to democratic by at least one vote. they found that if you that there s a 50/50 proposition of about a 14-seat majority for democrats in the house which would be a swing of about 37 votes. and so by their math, there s almost a 70% probability of the house flipping. close to 100% chance of democrats getting more votes and a lot of this, of course, comes down to the built-in edge for republicans the way the gerrymandering has worked, the way the districts are set up. the economist thinks about a 3.5% edge for republicans. other numbers as high as 7% even see 10% but all does not auger well for the republicans. yeah. noah rothman, you never know exactly what s going to happen in these races. i remember 1998 while bill clinton was in the middle of impeachment, many democrats and republicans were expecting a massive wave for the gop. they ended up i think picking up four seats. and that led effectively to the end of newt gingrich s speakership. 2002 leading up to the iraq war. many surprised that the republicans actually picked um some seats in that off year election. so sometimes there are surprises that and we could all be surprised this fall. maybe the republicans come out in massive numbers. you re smiling. i m just saying, anything is possible. i m not exactly sure what would do that, and i was looking at a frank lutz tweet last night. a one-point victory is nothing to celebrate talking about in ohio 12 saying the gop will have to do something raeally significant in september if they want to keep the house. what could that be? what could republicans do in september for the three days back from their august recess before they leave for their september recess to actually hold on to the house? it s tough to envision, and nobody seems to have any interest in doing very much of anything in congress. it seems like the conservative movement, to say nothing of the republican party. it is pretty deflated. i don t remember the last time i heard a conservative talk about a conservative idea. they talk how awful the liberal ideas, the spoesdemocratic poli, you would think people would be defending, for example, the extent to which right to work legislation, we talked about in the last break harks spre, has across the union and liberating people from the confines of a union to which they do not belong. you would think you would hear people talking about the economy, the extent it demonstrated capacity for growth. 4% gdp growth, good number. unemployment, 4%, pretty good number. record employment among minor y minoriti minorities, et cetera. but you don t really hear that. fear is a better motivator than enthusiasm, than, you know, thankfulness towards the republican party. but i just don t see it. i don t see any of it manifesting in some sort of a victory, and donald trump leaning in to these primary victories, demonstrating saying that he is responsible for the victories a tone deaf. it s silly. he ll have to run away from a loss in september if republicans suffer. he s setting himself up as the key architect of voters, whatever the voters want to do in november. whether they go to the polls for him or against him, he s supposed to be preserving his mandate and he s not doing that. running in front of that saying it s all about me and that s going to backfire in november. if there were any conserve 2i6sh conserve conservatives left in the republican party, they ask about putin and protectionism, but what conservatives left in the party would be energized to go out for the sort of things that got me and i m sure you voting for candidates in the past? are they small government conservatives? i mean, here you have donald trump running up the largest federal debt ever. you ve got donald trump promising the most tariff taxes on middle class and working-class americans than ever before. you have donald trump and the republicans in congress passing the largest spending bill ever. let me say that again. donald trump and republicans that dominate congress passed the largest spending bill ever, and the deficit s exploding to over $1 trillion a year, and, no. those aren t barack obama s deficits. you can look and see what donald trump s own government is saying, and trump s actions over the past year, the past year and a half have added hundreds of billions of dollars to his deficits. what small government conservative will get excited and say, hey, i m going to call all my friends at church and tell them to go with me to the voting booth? and entitlement reform as we understand it, it s necessity, is not on the table. nobody wants to talk about it. like putting nor pyour peas on table first saying, eat up. i know there s mixed feelings about the tax bill and i have as many mixed feelings about it as you do because the extent it balloons the deficit, but there is some value to it in the sense that it has put so much so much money into the economy. so much liquidity into the economy you can have the kind of bits activity without that kind of boost that comes from anticipation that the corporate tax, for example will generate capital investment. make that case. say that be less afraid of this tax bill. there s only major reform the congress has passed. make that case. i understand that, but mika, the tax bill is deeply unpopular with the american people. most americans believe that the benefits went to well, actually, who donald trump said the benefits went to. his friends. denied it after had passed. went to march large oh sat around with millionaire friends and said, i just made you all a lot of money with the tax cuts that i passed. you ve got that side of it. it hurts donald trump the populist, it hurts populist republicans. it looks like it s going to billionaires and to ceos and multi-national corporations for stock buybacks and then on the other side of it you have conservatives thinking, gee. it wasn t really targeted to stimulate the economy, and it s just driven us deeper in debt. that s why, and we could go over the numbers later with steve rattner, but that s why even the one thing they did. cutting taxes. deeply unpopular with many americans. well, on taxes and on immigration, the president has done things that i think hurt his positive brand with the people who were blindly following him. i think those two issues have problems that will stick with him. still ahead, we re learning new details about last month s summit between president trump and vladimir putin, but it s coming from moscow. of course it is. of course. plus, trump has been tweeting a lot about the mueller probe lately. senator lindsey graham says he s talking about it a lot, too, on the golf 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president on the golf course about 20 times. and something that s even harder. when you re in a roomful of constituents, the overwhelming majority want you to do something on one of the most heated issues of the day. lindsey graham stepping up, saying you know what? sorry. we need to finish the mueller probe. yep. and you know, we talk about republicans not showing courage enough. certainly in that clip, that s lindsey graham doing he s right politically. it s best for the republican party it would lead to a meltdown that would really hurt republicans. lindsey has been straight, got to see it through the end. let the chips fall where they may and let s see how the russians interfered with american democracy. so that was i thought i thought certainly a lot more courage than most of his republican colleagues have shown in town hall meetings and with the president. yeah. senator graham has done a service several occasions over the last couple of years speaking to president trump and telling him the truth, but it is instructive that the president, 20 times, probably an exaggeration. probably not, actually. well, whatever the number is, that the president is obsessed with this. he has it in his mind and is asking people around him why he can t just end the mueller investigation. we all know he s asking. the idea people put out there, he would never do this, political suicide, trigger a constitutional crisis, just ask lindsey graham if president trump would be willing to move the pieces around to get rid of bob mueller and end this investigation. i think the answer is, yes. joining us now, white house correspondent for reuters, jeff mason good to see you. good to be here. you cover the white house very closely. how much has the president trump been watching on cable news, paul manafort going through his trial ant sees his son don junior might be in some trouble as well. how obsessed, concerned is the president with the mueller investigation? really obsesses with it and the fact he s sort of on vacation now, although the white house doesn t want to call it vacation in bedminster, even more time to watch television and weighing in on that. people have been asking me also, why is seems like the escalation. an escalation between the media and the president in the last few weeks and that s maybe why as well. he likes to choose a scapegoat. often the media or somebody else when really upset about something and this is likely one of the things really on his mind. what was discussed during his hour-long meeting in helsinki last month with putin, although, again, coming from moscow. a document obtained by politico, putin presented president trump with a series of requests including a proposal to hold new talks on nuclear arms controls and prohibiting weapons in space. the document purportedly a page of proposed topics for negotiation also addresses rising tensions in eastern europe. the kremlin and president trump previously revealed syria was discussed in the meeting in addition to president putin s proposal to have u.s. officials will ed head to moscow to talk with those held in exchange for being able to ask about the 12 indicted here. asking exactly what was said between president trump and president putin. you re saying today the president direct ud to make the issue of election meddling a priority. how do you explain the disconnect between what you are saying, his advisers, and what the president has said about this issue? i m not in a position to either understand fully or talk about what happened at helsinki. i ll turn it over to the national security director here. the issue was in fact discussed and in fact president putin said the first issue president trump raised was election meddling. should americans believe he is listening to you, your advice? or that he is going his own way when he s having meetings like he did with the president of russia? i think the president has made is abundantly clear to everybody who has responsibility in this area that he cares deeply about it and that he expects them to do their jobs to their fullest ability and that he supports them fully. jeff, the president shortly thereafter answered your second question calling it a russian hoax at a rally after re reportedly sent his national security team out to talk to you all in the briefing room. so who do believe? that s the question. going on one reason i asked it that day. in the run-up to the moscow not the moscow, the helsinki summit. the meeting with putin. all of president trump s avoiders were talking about russia s maligned activity. president trump said he would raise it. and given the opportunity by myself and john lamere from the a.p., he didn t raise it at all. the question, when you bring out advisers like that at the white house saying this is a big deal, something that president trump trump is really interested in, is really concerned about, do you believe them or do you believe him? you know, jeff, it s really jarring to see donald trump s national security adviser, john bolton, up there only because he has been vladimir putin s toughest critic. we talk a good bit about how putin loathed ambassador mcfaul, but i think if you lined mcfaul s words up next to john bolton s, bolton s would be just as tough or perhaps even tougher if we can even imagine that. and then you look at what john bolton said about north korea, basically came out and said, yeah, they re doing nothing on nuclear weapons. they re continuing to move forward and not adhering to any promises they made. that s exactly what you expect from a john bolton outside of the government but we re hearing it from john bolton inside the government. what can you tell us about this relationship, this tough anti-communist hawk, anti-north korean hawk, anti-iranian hawk? how is that relationship working out with donald trump? is donald trump obsequiously says he ll talk to the iranians without preconditions and not from a position of strength. he s obsequious in front of kim jong-un and obsequious in front of kim jong-un? word of the morning, obsequious. it s one of the conundrums of president trump and his team of advisers. he seems to be happy with ambassador bolton. you re right the policies that bolton talked about before coming into the administration are many cases completely at odds with the man he works for now. it s hard to get any information about the nsc that bolton needs about that. he had positions before he came into the administration. now his job is to serve the president. the president said as a candidate, i m my best adviser and seems to be following that as a way of dealing and setting national security now that he s in office. all right, jeff mason, thank you for being on this morning. still ahead, we have more from mark leibovich s article with paul ryan for the new york times magazine. keep it right here on morning joe. this is a story about mail and packages. and it s also a story about people. people who rely on us every day to deliver their dreams they re handing us more than mail they re handing us their business 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 (electronic dance music) special elections and looking ahead to the midterms? are they voting on these issues? i think they re voting on one issue in the midterm and the issue is trump. the question of trump is what do you make of him? what do you think is most important, mueller, russia, do you think it s the tweeting, do you think it s the economy? do you think it s what he does to his opponents, how he gets them riled up? maybe you like that. it s however you look at trump and whatever you think of it, i think everything kind of filters through that. they say midterms are a referendum on the president, never been more true than now. yeah. in terms of the economy, this president is so unpredictable, i think there s going to be an effect on the economy that people are already feeling. it s the subtle instinctive thing. we ll talk about that. steve, thank you very much. coming up, we ll talk to danny o connor, the democrat locked in in that ohio special election that is just too close to call. plus, the trump campaign comes up as a topic for the first time in the trial of paul manafort. we ll go live to the courthouse for day seven of testimony. morning joe is coming right back. hey allergy muddlers: are you one sneeze away from being voted out of the carpool? try zyrtec® zyrtec® starts working hard at hour one and works twice as hard when you take it again the next day. stick with zyrtec®. muddle no more®. and try children s zyrtec® for consistently powerful relief of your kid s allergies. time to thank vice president pence. congressman pat teaberry. chairman steve stivers. there s many others, i could go on and on. republican troy balderson he thanked a loft people last night for his narrow lead in ohio s special election. but he didn t thank the state s republican governor. he didn t thank john kasich, joe, who held the same congressional seat and who vouched for balderson with ohio voters. balderson holds a raiser thin edge over democrat danny o connor, but the race is too close to call in a district that went republican by almost 37 points less than two years ago. welcome back to morning joe. it s wednesday, august 8th. kind of a special day. it s a special day. katheri katherine scarborough s birthday. we have noah rothman, former treasury official, steve ratner and joining the conversation washington bureau chief for usa today susan page, former chair of the republican national committee, michael steele, he hosts the aptly named podcast, man of steele. i like it, michael. thank you. that s good. because you are a man of steele. co-founder, publisher real, clear politics tom bevan joins us now. tom, i m reading this guy, sean t. at rcp, you may know him, but sean wrote last night this tweet which i thought really sort of summarized everybody was freaking out on all the channels over who was going to win this race or who wasn t going to win this race and it was a nail biter. sean tweeted i know people don t want to hear this, but at this point it doesn t really matter. ohio 12 shouldn t even be a nail biter for the gop. even with two solid candidates running. talk about the ohio race, whether you agree with your colleague that a nail biter in ohio 12 is a bad sign for republicans generally. yeah, look. i agree with sean. let s use the sports analogy since it s columbus, let s say this is like ohio state, okay, they re playing a team they play every year and win by four, five touchdowns. last night they won in overtime by one point. if you re an ohio state fan, you re happy they won but you re saying oh my god, what does this mean for my team for the season that s coming up. i think that s where the republicans are. they spent $3.5 million in this district. they brought in all the big guns to drag balderson across the line. they re not going to be able to do that in the 50 competitive tossup and lean republican districts that are in play in november. they re just not going to be able to cover that much ground. it does oger poorly for republicans and democrats in november. michael steele, you ran the republican national committee, ran it through some very, very successful election cycles. you had to be looking at the map in a way that the democrats are looking at it right now. right. because my gosh, we ve all been talking about the 24, 25 seats that hillary clinton that are republican seats where hillary clinton did better. right. this expands it out, though. there are like 68, 69 congressional seats where, you know, clinton did better than here, however it works. this expands the map to 67, 68, 69 seats, makes it a lot harder for republicans to figure out exactly where they need to defend this fall. it does, joe. the bottom line is that republicans got exposed last night. this district is really one of the most conservative, reddest-leaning districts in the country, in the top seven of those districts, and to be in this position going into the fall is not a good sign. it does augger well for democrats looking at the map. they now see real wins in front of them. they have an opportunity that they had not really seen crystallize before. it came closer into clarity last night with the ability to go out and do that ground game district by district. they don t have to play the way the republicans have to play. in other words, dumping a whole lot of resources into this districts. they have a ground team they can learn from how to put together the kind of race that not takes a competitive race and make it more competitive but actually deliver the win. that s where the republicans got exposed last night. their resources will be stretched thin. and their ability to actually buttress back against what the democrats will do becomes much more difficult. yeah. tom, let me go back to you for a second. i was mentioning to noah before that my entire adult life, republicans especially presidential candidates have gone to tsuburbs to run up big victories. that s how they wan, reagan and bush, you name it, they all won in the won in the suburbs. now you have republicans getting slaughtered in counties like franklin county, which we always saw as sort of our version of broward county for democrats. yeah, no. that s absolutely true. what we saw in 2016, that was one of the big shifts. the question is whether that shift is this is something that s a permanent feature now moving forward. republicans have to have those voters, right, as part of their coalition if they want to continue to win at the state and national level. this is what you saw balderson try and do, right? you had trump come in and try motivate the base in the you recall parts of the district and then you had kasich vouching for balderson and trying to win back some of those votes and at least keep the democrats margins down in the well educated suburban areas where the republicans struggled in 2016. looks like they will struggle there in 2018. the question is whether that s a permanent shift or not. susan page, your reporting is on the front page of usa today this morning, revealing evidence that donald trump s base continues to support the president. of the most recent survey made of trump voters you write in part this the loyalty of trump s voters has been a political strength for the president through 18 tumultuous months in the white house. now two thirds of the supporters believe russia interfered in the 2016 election, they tend to accept declarations by the president and his team that the allegations and investigations have been overblown or disdirected a conclusion with potentially enormous consequences down the road. if and when special counsel robert mueller releases a public report, those voters are poised to take any negative findings with a grain of salt. as the investigation has intensified, their predictions about history will judge trump s presidency have risen. susan, i think it s fascinating because as the media rightfully asks the questions and follows the mueller probe, there s definitely a different take across america especially among trump s base. you know what was interesting to us in talking to these voters that we ve been checking in with since the 2016 election, is that they do believe that russia meddled in our election in 2016. but they see it through the same lens that the president is offering them, that everybody does it or collusion isn t illegal or the real collusion was with the hillary clinton campaign. and this is, i think, the success of the president s political strategy when it comes to address the mueller accusations. there s no ways that the tweets that the president has been making on mueller serve his legal interest, but it s clear they served his political interests here. even among the voters who see russia as an adversary and are suspicious of russia, many are old enough to remember the days of the cold war. even though they don t like russia, they don t like putin, they do trust donald trump. michael steele, just as president trump loomed over last night s elections particularly in ohio, he will loom over the elections in three months. you point out last night in ohio is game one of a two-game doubleheader. we ll see these guys go at it again in three months at the end with a recount even. if you re the chair of the national republican committee, what are you thinking? what has to change over the next three months? is it changeable in that short of time with president trump controlling the levers of what goes on? you start by asking yourself where is the weakest part of my line? my front line, defense to hold off that 23 seat opportunity for democrats, where is the weakest link there? and i begin to take a closer look at the type of candidates that are running. the resources that are available, the ground game that s in place and whether or not the state party organization in addition to county and local organizations are all prepared to do what needs to do to hold that line. how much re-enforcement do i need to put there? the senatorial committee. so that becomes an important assessment. but here is the other thing, willie, i think the party needs to do, we have this the history that when we win, we somehow forget how and why we won. we don t really dig down and understand the real nature of the win. so if you take this as a win, which the party likely will do outright, you still have to step back and go, it was a win but was it really? and assess and analyze exactly what happened on the ground with messaging, with organization, and again the role the president played or didn t play since you have the white house available to you to make that win a possibility and does that translate in the fall. well, now more mark leibovich s remarkable interview with house speaker paul ryan the new york times. ryan talks about his relationship with the president saying trump used to call ryan boy scott, quote, i thought it was a compliment, said ryan, but after the republican-controlled congress passed a few bills, trump announced to ryan that he would stop using the nickname, quote, so i guess he meant it as an insult all along the speaker said. i didn t realize it. ryan shrugged. he put out a tweet last night that was really good, ryan told me after he and the president hung up. it was apparently an innocuous tweet about trade. leibovich writes that the speaker s words carried the vaguely patronizing tone of a parent affirming potty-training milestones. i don t spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff? shouldn t you, leibovich said. if you re not going to touch that, who is? i don t think he s going to do things like that, ryan said of trump. he already has leibovich said referring to trump s pardoning of law-breaking allies like joe arpaio and dinesh d souzd souza. triablism and identity politics are twin scourging that contributed to the environment that exists today. donald trump didn t give us all this. donald trump is showing us what it looks like. what is he going to own anything? or take on anything or is he just going to leave as badly as he is there right now? i don t get it. i don t get it either. a lot of people who have known paul for a very long time. he s a good guy. i always believed personally, willie, paul is a great guy. i always liked paul. i don t think, though, i ve ever been as surprised and i guess confused as the reaction of somebody who is seen a conservative warrior like paul ryan through his entire career, never been surprised at somebody that in the time when he has the ability to stand up and right the ship of state as the third ranking constitutional officer in america that time and again he has backed up he s hidden. oh, i haven t seen this. or this story. or i haven t heard about that story. i haven t looked into this outrage or that outrage. we re not talking about policy issues. we re talking about racist statements, unconstitutional statements. third in line, you re going to close your ears? again, i actually as you can tell i don t have words to adequately express myself about how a guy has behaved when america needed him to stand up and speak out, not start a civil war but just adhere to the basic tenants of democracy. he has not done it. he has not defended constitutional norms. at the times when he has, it s almost reluctantly, when he s pushed into a corner and finally says, okay, okay, yeah, he shouldn t have said that. he shouldn t have tweeted that. tariffs are bad. he has, noah rothman, you know, he has built a career on being a conservative serious, fiscal conservative, tax reform. i m not sure as speaker of the house he was ready for the challenge that donald trump on a personal level would present because clearly he hasn t stepped up and confronted him in ways that most people would have hoped he would. yeah. i sympathize with the speaker. as joe said, his obligation is to not start a civil war and attack the president or even criticize him forcefully would be to invite the president ignite is civil war himself. the speaker s position is not that solid. anybody in a leadership in congress is not on solid footing. i sympathize with him for this point, he spent six of eight years in his in the obama era 2010 through 2016 building a conservative coalition, the most conservative coalition in congress, i think. at least my life time and possibly ever. then donald trump runs for the presidency and explicitly anti-conservative message. he says i like the individual mandate obamacare. we re not touching social security. and he wins. and he wins a mandate. so we have a conservative coalition in congress and pretty anti-conservative president. there s very little you can do there that won t risk stepping on a land mine, won t risk blowing up this coalition. as a leader, his responsibility is to keep the troops in line, not to necessarily be an ideologic fire brand. all that is well and good, but now he s retiring. so do you expect that either post-retirement or before he retires, at some point do you think he ll stand up and be a profile in courage? i don t know about that. but donald trump s utility as a vehicle to animate republican voters is going to be tested in november. and if he shows that his utility is limited, the calculation might change. michael, still though, paul ryan is more than just a republican. he s more than just a guy that s trying to herd cats. as john roberts saw himself, he is the speaker of the house. he s the protector of the institution. he s the protector of the legislative branch of article, one the republican legacy. are we the party of abraham lincoln? or are we the party of david duke? there is no doubt publicly that donald trump s voice has clearly stated in 2018 that he wants the republican party to be closer to david duke than abraham lincoln. it seems that paul ryan has more of a responsibility than just staying in power as speaker of the house. he has the responsibility to the constitution he represents, to the party he represents. yeah. and to the country he serves. that s not me being poly anish. he should be polished enough, skillful enough as a politician to do two things at the same time. yeah. i agree with that and i think that going back to the point that was just made about the coalition that he spent so much time building what i find fascinating about that process, the end part of that process is that he never used the coalition to fight for the very things you just describe. you have you are number three in line to the presidency. it s not like you re sitting in a corner. you are a player on the field. and as a player, who has pieces that can be moved on that field, he never really figured out how to use that leverage effectively. he didn t have to create a civil war with the president. yeah, we know the president will go off in a tweet. but you have this coalition of like-minded soldiers who have been out there fighting for this moment where those big policy issues could be put into practice and capitulated. they gave into a tweet. they didn t stand up for the constitution. they gave in to a sly word by the president or fear of a very narrow base and didn t push back. i find that fascinating that with all that building of coalitions and policy, you didn t use it as a soft hammer to push back and redefine the relationship with the white house. i do find it amazing that members of congress that have voting cards walk around in fear perpetually of a negative tweet. tom, let s end with you. we ve all talked about the house. the house is much easier to game out. democrats need 23, 24, 25 however many seats it is. it looks like they re probably going to get that if last night is any indication. the senate, though, much, much tougher to sort of game out. what s that looking like as we move towards labor day? that s a great question, joe. not enough attention has been paid to the senate. we look, the democrats right now are looking decent in the senate. they ve got a small lead in nevada. missouri is doing okay. highcamp doing okay in north dakota. we have joe donley in indiana. if that race if joe donley is doing well in indiana, you re looking at a situation where democrats could be gaining a seat or two in the senate and potentially it s going to be creeping closer to a point where they might be able to take the senate as well. that s a huge story that currently really hasn t been covered. the one bright spot for republicans right now is in your home state where rick scott is leading bill nelson. hard to see if democrats will do as well as they seem to be doing in some of these other states that rick scott is going to pull one out in florida, but that s where that s right now what republicans are hanging their hat on. boy, tom, isn t florida a remarkable state. it s a state that most thought hillary clinton would be winning because it was diverse, getting more diverse by the day. yet it s actually a state that sort of become little from a totally purple swing state tim russert sayi ining florida flor florida fl. a state moved from red to purple back to red. it went from looking at early precinct returns we got this is a lock. it s a no brainer. it s done. to wait a minute. hold on a second. let me see what s going on. oh my god, what just happened? it was a state that democrats thought they had in the bag. it is surprising. you have this influx of folks from puerto rico democrats are trying to register and in the orlando i-4 corridor area. it s a fascinating place to watch. and i think that race is going to be close and it s going to be expensive. it s going to be high profile. and it s going to be part of the mix certainly in terms of whether democrats are able to take control of the senate or not in november. all right, tom bevan, thank you very much. still ahead on morning joe, we ll speak live with one of those two ohio candidates we ve been talking about. democrat danny o connor joins us in just a few minutes. but first, paul manafort is staring down a potential prison sentence if convicted on a litany of charges. the government s star witness rick gates returned to the stand as manafort s legal team tries to go after his credibility. we ll go live to the courthouse straight ahead. you re watching morning joe. we ll be right back. at ally, we re doing digital financial services right. but if that s not enough, we have more than 8000 allys looking out for one thing: you. call in the next ten minutes. and if that s not enough, we ll look after your every dollar. put down the phone. and if that s not enough, we ll look after your every cent. grab your wallet. 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(dogs barking) the old one s just fine! we ll do anything, seriously anything, to help our customers. thanks. ally. do it right. it s a high-tech revolution in sleep. the new sleep number 360 smart bed. it intelligently senses your movement and automatically adjusts on each side to keep you both comfortable. and snoring? how smart is that? smarter sleep. to help you lose your dad bod, train for that marathon, and wake up with the patience of a saint. the new sleep number 360 smart bed, from $999. smarter sleep will change your life. booking a flight doesn t have to be expensive. just go to priceline. it s the best place to book a flight a few days before my trip and still save up to 40%. just tap and go. for the best savings on flights, go to priceline. this is not a screensaver.game. this is the destruction of a cancer cell by the body s own immune system, thanks to medicine that didn t exist until now. and today can save your life. it s the ultimate wifi experience. xfinity xfi, simple, easy, awesome. this morning marks day seven of the trial of former trump campaign kmarm paul manafort. evidence and testimony from rick gates yesterday appears to confirm exclusive reporting from nbc news earlier this year that the special counsel s team was investigating whether manafort promised the ceo s of federal savings bank a job in the white house in return for $16 million in home loans. yesterday the jury was shown e-mails manafort gates of favors. caulk did not get a job in the administration. manafort launched calk part of a quid pro quo agreement for the loans. when manafort s attorney questioned gates about any other members of the special counsel s team had asked about his time on the trump campaign, prosecutors objected. lawyers were called to the bench. the court then went into recess and the topic never came up again. gates also testified that he had embezzled from manafort part of an extramarital affair nearly ten years ago, kept an apartment in london, flew first class and stayed in luxury hotels. joinsing us now barbara mcquad. good morning. what was your headline walking out of the courtroom yesterday? i think my headline was that gates got beat up a little bit on cross-examination and may have been damaged but i don t think so much so that it s going to lose the case for the prosecution. and what about this relationship with calk? who exactly is he? how does he figure into this big picture for paul manafort? yeah, he s an interesting name. he is this person who is a lender from a chicago bank, lent paul manafort during a time when he lost his job, lost his money, was really broke. lent him something like $16 million. and his name then shows up on the counsel of economic advisers for president trump. paul manafort, as you said, wants him to be considered for secretary of the army. he shows up at the inauguration. he s an interesting figure. we have not heard a lot of evidence about this particular loan yet. i imagine that gates was put into the middle of the trial by prosecutors, so that if he were to stumble, they started strong, they ll finish strong with a lot of evidence on paper that is much harder to cross-examine. obviously as we said many times, this trial is not about paul manafort s role as president trump s campaign chairman during the campaign, but it is obviously why so many people are interested in it to see if there is any crossover in there. what did you make of the judge yesterday sort of snapping on and calling the attorneys to the bench and shutting down conversation about that part of paul manafort s career? well, i thought it was interesting because the prosecution did raise for the first time yesterday the name trump was uttered outloud in court. it s sort of been like vold mort, never to be spoken aloud. yesterday it came up in a very narrow context of this particular bank fraud and that was all we heard about it. on cross-examination, the defense really wanted to delve deeply into this. they asked a very open ended question did there come a time when you met with the special prosecutor s office and were asked questions about president trump. and so that was when the prosecution jumped up and said, objection. lengthy side bar and never heard more about it. they moved on to another topic and i think that s because there s a whole world there that the prosecution does not want exposed to the world, including on going investigation about what s going on with connections. to the detriment of prosecution, i think the jury is left with a misleading impression because they now know that rick gates has been promised a lot of things, leniency, including the possibility that his lawyer can ask for a sentence of probation and the government will not oppose that. now, that doesn t mean he ll get probation. the judge gets to decide. but sounds like a real sweetheart deal when you think of all the many years in prison he was looking at. my guess is the reason he got so much benefit is not just for his testimony in this case, which is really a tiny sliver of his cooperation, but for all of the other cooperation he has given about all the other things about what he learned on the campaign in exchange for trump. this jury will never know about that. so i worry that it looks like he s getting a real sweetheart deal when manafort is exposed to likely many, many years in prison. right. barbara, steve ratner, just to broaden out the question about the judge a bit because i think back in the spring during some pretrial stuff he said some things that the trump administration liked. since this trial began, there have been a number of occasions where he s snapped at the prosecutors, told them not to talk about things, cut them off, whatever. a, what should we make of that, if anything, about the judge s attitude toward this trial and this case? b, will it matter when it ultimately goes to the jury? well, i am told that this is kind of the way this judge operates. he is very much a part of the trial. he is very noticed. he injects himself into the case very much. i m told that s the way he rolls in many cases. i worry about the impact he could have. he has been very hard on the prosecution in the interest of move things along. he s constantly after them to stop asking questions. with a witness like gates bs it s really important they get an opportunity to corroborate his testimony to show documents that he s allowed a lot of lee way there. to me, yesterday when gates was testifying that manafort was very involved in knowing all of the financial matters, the judge said well obviously he wasn t watching that closely because you were able to steal from him. a gratuitous comment. this is a person who the jury sees as the authority figure and independent judge and expert on the law to say that has to have some influence on them. i m really worried about that statement. yeah. barbara, noah rothman from commentary. briefly on that point, i think yesterday we learned that con stan tin, a ukrainian businessman, active ties to russian intelligence up to and including 2016 that gates testified that manafort directed him to report overseas income as loans in order to lower taxable income and some of that income came from this gentleman. what do we make of that? do you have any idea whether that registered with the judge or the jury? i don t think it registered to the judge and jury that s a connection to russia or russian intelligence. they ve been focussed very much on the significance of padding the income or lowering the income as the case may be here to try to reduce paul manafort s tax bill. but in the bigger picture as observers, there are bigger themes coming out. keep in mind, that is money coming from russian intelligence. what was the purpose of that? other themes, these are incredibly reckless fraudsteres in paul manafort and rick gates. donald trump put these people on his campaign in high level positions. did he know about their backgrounds? did he know or not care? everybody else knew. surprise if donald trump didn t. barbara mcquad translating what she sees in the courtroom for us. good to talk to you. thanks so much. great. thanks, will li. still ahead, the results for ohio s special election are razor thin. we ll talk to danny o connor about his continued bid to turn the reliably red district blue. morning joe will be right back. i get it all the time. have you lost weight? 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(vo) go national. go like a pro. tomorrow we rest and then we keep fighting through to november. let s go out there! let s get it done! let s change this country! joining us now the democratic candidate in ohio s 12th district, which nbc news says is too close to call, danny o connor. and danny, the president, the republican party in ohio and your opponents are calling you the loser this morning. to that you say what? i say that, you know, we re excited to continue to have this conversation with voters each day about why we need folks who are going to go to washington and fight for working people. this race is too close to call. the margin is 1,700 votes. w we have 8,000 votes left to be counted. the fight continues. we ll be out there campaigning today. we re not resting because people are counting on us to get it done for them. danny, how strange is it that you have to run a marathon all for the glory of running a sprint for a full term? it s got to be kind of unsettling for you but also kind of confusing for voters. you know what, it s awesome, i think. it gives me opportunities to have more conversations with folks about the direction that they want to see our country go in. and when people sit around the kitchen table at night, they re worried about how they re going to pay their mortgage, how they re going to afford to retire, how they re going to afford these rising costs of health insurance. these are things worth fighting for. to have this conversation like we have been and will continue to do is really just an honor and a privilege. so you did better than any democrats has done in ohio 12 in, my gosh, i guess in your life time. but the question is let s say you come up short 500 to 1,000 votes. the question is where do you find those votes? what s your message to some of those rural counties that like so many rural counties across america feel like donald trump is a lot more interested in their best interests than nancy pelosi and the democratic party that you represent? yeah. the good thing, joe, is that we have three months to talk to those folks still. the way i campaigned and the way we work, we sprint hard across all seven counties of this district. i want to represent all seven counties in congress. we re just going to take everyday and try to win every single day, talking to people about the issues that matter to them because that s how we re going to win this thing in november and that s why we feel so good right now. so danny, there s a question about nancy pelosi and whether you would support her as speaker. some people say you bungled the question the second time it was asked. seems like you clarified it. but just so we have it on the record, if you become ohio 12 s congressman when they go around at the beginning of the next session, will you vote for nancy pelosi to be your speaker of the house? no, i won t. and we really need new leadership because what we ve seen in washington and i think this was demonstrated last night, the same old politics aren t working. the desire to fight things out in the partisan nature instead of being pragmatic isn t getting the job done for working families. that s why we re having so much success here and convincing so many people to support our new version of leadership is because people recognize that we need to have change in washington. they recognize that i m someone who wants to get the job done for their family. danny, i ve known nancy for a long time and like her personally, but there aren t a lot of people in middle america, there aren t a lot of people from youngtown, ohio, to columbus, ohio, that believe that democrats have leaders that represent their interests. there s a massive cultural disconnect. who is the type of speaker for the democratic party that you would like to see and therefore the democrats that would better represent rural counties across your district? you know, honest to god joe, i don t have anyone in mind. i would have to see who is running. i want to be a part of the conversation. i know when i m out talking to families, whether in their coffee shops, doorstep, in their homes, they re worried where we re headed as a county. they re worried about folks like my opponent who wants to raise the retirement age, serious issues that families are facing. people don t ask me about the inside game in washington because it s not what keeps people up at night. it s kitchen table issues. danny, willie giest in new york. he said he pushed balderson over the top here. if this result does, in fact, hold. republicans as you know sent in the big guns. president trump showed up there, the vice president among many others. are you disappointed that more national democrats didn t come in and support you that maybe would have given you that advantage to win here? no, not at all. you know, we ve had grass roots support from the beginning. what s more important to me is having folks in licking county and delaware county and marion county, everywhere in between who are fighting for me and who have my back because they know i ll fight for them in washington. i think that all these people coming in, they fly in for a couple hours, give a speech at some fancy dinner, then they leave our community. they re not walking on our streets. they re not dealing with the public health crisis that we have with addiction. their kids don t go to our schools. i think having a true grass roots campaign is what s important. that s what we re focussed on is making sure that we have conversations. that s what we re going to do for the next 90 days. we re going to be sprinting. do you think, danny, the president pushed balderson over the top here? no, i don t think he knows what he s talking about in that regard because when i am out talking to folks, i ask them what they re worried about. they say we re worried about health care. we re worried about social security. we re worried about having economic opportunity. folks aren t worried about people showing up for a couple hours and leaving. i think that we re in a race that s too close to call. the gap is 1,700 votes with 8,000 to be counted. and we re sprinting today. we ll be out talking to voters throughout the day. we ll be doing that tomorrow. and we ll be continuing through november. and we might take a break on some saturdays to watch some football, but we ll be talking to people. all right, danny o connor, candidate for congress in ohio s 12th district. a race that is too close to call this morning. thanks for being on. susan page, looking at these numbers, this could go either way. what do you think will put one or the other candidate over the edge in this district? well, of course what s remarkable it s so close in a district that donald trump won by 11 points. one thing i noticed was that there was a green party candidate in this race that got more than 1,000 votes, not quite the margin between the two major party candidates but close. and i wonder if that could end up making a difference and whether that is a little bit of a red flag for democrats that there s that all this energy among the most liberal voters in their party and that you need to keep them in the fold if you re going to win competitive districts like this one. and michael steele, your thoughts before you go? it s interesting listening to danny. the question becomes, so you wont have the big guns coming in on the republican side this fall because they can t be there in all the other races. and the democrats are interested but not that interested because they re going to be trying to get other seats. how he puts together his ground game to go to joe s point about capturing those suburban voters, those center right republicans and democrats who may still be on the fence about his campaign will be very interesting to watch. all right. michael steele and susan page, thank you both for being on morning joe this morning. coming up, conservative columnist john pa doer its has a theory when it comes to the president s media bashing. we ll ask him about that ahead on morning joe. how do you win at business? stay at laquinta. where we re changing with contemporary make-overs. then, use the ultimate power handshake, the upper hander with a double palm grab. who has the upper hand now? start winning today. book now at lq.com. are you ready to take your then you need xfinity xfi.? a more powerful way to stay connected. it gives you super fast speeds for all your devices, provides the most wifi coverage for your home, and lets you control your network with the xfi app. it s the ultimate wifi experience. xfinity xfi, simple, easy, awesome. steve ratner, the critical reason for donald trump to get re-elected in 2020 is the same region that we are talking about all this morning an yesterday. that is of course the midwest, the upper midwest. where trump s populism, the usa today today is crumbling. a lot of that has to do with tax cuts. only 37% of americans in a recent poll said they supported the tax cuts. should republican candidates run on those tax cuts going in to the fall? well, i think the facts are around the tax cuts are not good for republicans. 84% of the benefits from the tax cuts went to either business or individuals making over $75,000 a year. the average middle class american got something like a $900 tax cut. half of which has already been eaten away by higher gasoline prices. real wages after adjusted for inflation are flat in the last several months and they ve gone up less under trump than they did under obama. so i do think that the tax cut economic message is a really tough message for a republican to run on. noah, it is one thing to be running on tax cuts in a primary. if i were a republican this year, i would be running on the tax cuts in the primary. quite different in the general election. let s say in more blue-collar districts, even places like ohio 12. should republicans run on those tax cuts in the general election? i think they should for two reasons. one, it s pretty much the only thing that this congress has accomplished. it is their major piece of legislation. if you re going to run on an accomplishment, you got one. you might as well run on it. second, you don t get to a place where you are 37% without losing a lot of partisan republicans. we re all partisanship would kick in if republicans would make the case for tax cuts. they are afraid and are running away from it. i think that s a mistake. you could make the kay the amount of economic activity we saw in the last quarter is partially due to the fact that we ve injected all this money into the economy why are republicans afraid of the tax cuts, noah? because they re at 37% approval rating. it is self-generating this approval rating when you aren t making the case, the predicate for these tax cuts. it may be somewhat self-generating but it is also the facts. the facts are 84% of the benefits go to wealthy americans and the american public has figured that out. in addition to that, they have busted the budget, which is an issue near and dear to joe s heart, my heart and probably a lot of other people. in addition to that, this 4.1% gdp number which noah correctly points out does result a bit from the tax cuts is a one-quarter phenomenon. any projection by anybody shows growth going back down toward 2% over the next four quarters. so noah, way back in the ice age in 1993, i saw john kasich and tim penny talking about deficit reduction on the floor of the house. it was during my spring break and i was watching that on c-span which tells you what a loser i had been for a very long time. but kasich inspired me to run for congress and inspired me to run for congress because i believed in balanced budgets. i believe that we needed to be fiscally responsible, that we needed to save this country, the american dream, for the next generation. is that just a thing of the past? nobody talks about that. does nobody in this my former party does no conservative care about these issues anymore? because we re melting down at a $21 trillion national debt. the new york times made a good point republicans don t talk about the debt anymore so why would democrats even pretend to care. in 2020 we had the simpson-bowles commission because republicans were making a big deal about the debt. you can move the ball ahead if you talk about the deficit but nobody s talking about it. we just heard from o e owe congressional candidate danny o connor who hopes to help his party take back the house this fall. we ll break down the balance of power on capitol hill and just how much momentum the democrats really have 89 days out. plus, twitter says it is up to journalists to counter the conspiracy theories being pushed by the likes of alex jones on social media. reporters say they have, with facts, and it only encourages the info wars crowd even further. will twitter ever have to take responsibility, any responsibility, for part of this? morning joe is coming right back. [telephone ring] ahoy-hoy. alexander graham bell here. no, no, my number is one, you must want two! two, i say!! like my father before. [telephone ring] like my father before. ahoy-hoy! as long as people talk too loudly on the phone, you can count on geico saving folks money. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. these are the specialists we re proud to call our own. experts from all over the world, working closely together to deliver truly personalized cancer care. expert medicine works here. learn more at cancercenter.com second time. can you believe how close this is? we are in a tight ball game! we went door to door. we went house to house. we made our case for change. we re going to make that case tomorrow. we re not stopping now. tomorrow we rest, and then we keep fighting through to november. let s go out there, let s get it done! let s change this country! the closely watched special election in ohio is this morning too close to call, according to nbc news. you heard at the top, republican troy balderson and democrat danny o connor speaking last night with balderson currently leading o connor by less than 1% of all votes cast. that s 1,754 votes ahead in a district that has been in gop hands for three decades. the official outcome may not be known until over 3,400 provisional ballots are tallied in the coming weeks. and the race could be headed to a recount if the candidates end up within half a percent of each other after the final results are a certified. this morning troy balderson is claiming victory but danny o connor has not conceded, and regardless of the outcome, we re going to see a rematch between these two come november when they compete for full term in congress. welcome to morning joe. it is wednesday, august 8th. with joe, willie and me, we have associate editor of commentary magazine, noah rothman. former treasury official and morning joe economic analyst, steve ratner. and national political correspondent for nbc news and msnbc is he still awake? is he still awake? steve kornacki. joe, the guy s been up all night. he s been up all night. look at him. these two poor candidates have been up not only all night but been up probably the last three weeks. think about think of what they re doing. they are fighting tooth and nail. they re giving everything that they have all for the glory of winning a special election that will seat them in congress for about a month and a half. and then they have to do it again. of course, run for full term in november. but mika, this is this race we don t know who is going to end up winning it. regardless of who ends up winning it, republicans certainly know, as well as democrats, that i mean this is another race where republicans have underperformed. they underperformed in a district that is deep, deep red. i mean i ll talk to steve in a second. i think maybe democrats have won it once since the 1930s. but you see the same thing happening. they re bleeding. republicans are bleeding so badly right now in suburbs. then you go north of franklin county to the exurbs. basically splitting it, holding their own. but again, losing a ton of votes. this is party, the republican party, that s becoming more and more every day a rural party. also, the thing i ve always loved i ve talked about it for years on this show. i love what madison and hamilton and our founders did when they put down the government that constantly has this system of checks and balances, elections every two years, that always have the electorate sort of tugging and pulling. you see a lot of voters out there thinking a lot of republicans a lot of moderates, a lot of independents thinking that donald trump has gone too far. so they re pulling back the other way. yesterday something remarkable happened in missouri. a very conservative state. a very pro-trump state. a very pro-republican state. you actually had people coming out in a referendum and dealing a blow to the right to work forces who were really buoyed by a supreme court decision that actually was seen as a death nail for unions. well, yesterday i got to say that union win in missouri, one of the biggest wins they ve had in a very long time. and again, you just have to believe, once again, that s the electorate sort of tugging and pulling back. oh, okay, the supreme court s going to take us 2-4 to the right? we re going to pull this country back to the center. pretty remarkable what we see in every time americans go to the voting booth. it s been amazing to watch overnight and the people are having a chance to speem. but willie geist, the president certainly is taking this one in ohio personally. old, he s declared victory. he sent out a tweet last night. of course we don t have an official call here at nbc news but he s declared victory. he said when i decided to go to ohio for troy balderson, he was down in early voting 64%-36%. that was not good. after my speech on saturday night there was a big turn for the better. now troy wins a great victory during a very tough time of the year for voting. he will win big in november. so steve kornacki, let s talk about what happened last night. as mika referenced, this has been a republican seat since 1982 consecutively since john kasich won it. president trump less than two years ago won it by 11 points. first of all, the numbers here. is there a chance, with balderson up by 1,700 votes right now, with provisional ballots, with mail-in ballots, that that result changes, that o connor somehow comes out on top. the suspense here is extra weird on this one because you expect those provisional ballots there to break toward the democrat. you don t expect them to actually erase 1,754-vote republican lead. however, if the margin there were to cut that 1,754 in half which is not implausible then the overall victory margin for balderson would be under .5 points. by state law, if you re under .5 that s more generous than you ll see in some other places. but if you re under .5, there is automatically a recount. so we are in a situation right now where i think it is plausible that o connor with the provisional votes can get it close enough that the state law is triggered causing a recount. even then, fur peaif you re a d, i wouldn t get your hopes up because these recounts don t tend to change huge numbers of votes. o connor probably would need to change 700, 800 votes. but you d much, much rather be in balderson s position than o connor. but it is not implausible we ll have a recount that could take this thing out in late august, early september. another election between these same two guys then two months later, as joe said. however that comes out, if there is a recount, what did we learn about the state of the republican party last night? i mean there were there were three parts to this district but focus first on the question of the suburbs right in and immediately around columbus, northern franklin county. it was more than one-third of the district. put this in some perspective. the franklin county part of this district has gone in the span of six years you can attribute this entirely to donald trump from obama winning it by three points in 2012, to clinton winning it by 18 in 2016, to the democrat danny o connor winning it by 31 points last night, from 3 to 31 in the span of basically half a decade. that s the trump effect in places like franklin county, ohio. and last night the margin was there for democrats, the turnout seemed to be if you had told democrats the start of the night this is what franklin s going to look like, they d say that s it, they won, let s start the celebration. those were more than the numbers they thought they needed. what didn t happen for them last night, turnout was not great in the rural parts of the district but balderson attracted trump-level support among the people who did vote in the rural part of the district. there was some talk that that might recede back towards the democrats a little. didn t happen. balderson was up around 70% in some of these rural counties so that didn t happen. bottom line, it all came down to delaware county which is wealthy, which is suburban. it is a little different i think in character than franklin county when we say suburbs. franklin county is a little bit more it is closer to it is little bit more in some cases blended with the city. when you take a step at next level of suburb out, that kind of delaware. what happened there was by historical standards trump didn t do balderson didn t do well for a republican but he matched the trump number, he didn t fall back further from the trump number. it was just looks like just enough there to hang on. in what was a trump by 11% two years ago. i want to ask quickly about delaware county, steve. certainly n lly not dissing don trump. i think we would all say it here, donald trump in most republican primaries is going to be the deciding factor. what s interesting last night and a bit ironic, a guy that he can t stand, john kasich. if you look at delaware county and look at kasich s home county and see that actual lly and frankly county trump s candidates getting wiped out. but in delaware county a last-minute endorsement by john kasich had to have a significant impact for the republican candidate and help him hang on there. right? yeah. it is so funny. you think about some of the events in the final days of this campaign that got so much attention. you can overinterpret everything but i can see them having very different effects on very different groups of voters. kasich coming out and endorsing a republican in the district giving that more moderate republican stamp of approval, absolutely. you look at delaware county, kasich coming out, for that matter, and saying publicly, hey, i don t know if balderson even wanted trump i don t know how this guy ended up out here. you can see that tailor made for delaware county. the fact that donald trump was out there, the fact that the day before the election you had balderson is dissing franklin. my god, you look at the turnout in franklin, maybe it backfired right there. i tell you what, he didn t last night, balderson came out and thanked a lot of people. he didn t thank john kasich, which was not a class move, and maybe he s trying to please donald trump by not thanking john kasich? that s somebody that would help him out in november. so we ll see. politics is always very fascinating. but no withah, you tweeted for conservatives, republicans, last night a very bad night, not much to be cheerful about. a very bad night for republicans underperforming. for the conservative movement, the worst bit of news actually came out of missouri. you mentioned it. it was the right to work vote. missouri is pretty red state at this point. senator claire mccaskill notwithstanding. half the union at this point is right to work which essentially means you don t have to join a union if you join a june onshop. you don t have to be forced into a union. if you don t join a union you don t have to be forced to pay union dues. it was the supreme court decision you mentioned and we are beginning to see a big rollback here. on the state level democrats are expected to do very well, particularly in governorships. we spent a lot of time focusing on congress but governorships are far more important when it comes to advancing conservative reforms like this. they ve done extraordinarily well in advancing them over the course of the obama years. if we see this roll back right now it is extraordinarily disheartening from a conservative perspective. if you look at more than the national environment we got a taste of it in ohio. but we saw some, too, in washington where they have a top two primary system. functionally democrat versus republican race. candidates like incumbent representative kathy mcmorris-rogers got just barely ahead of her democratic opponent .4 point at this point and she s the fourth-ranking republican in congress. there s very little you can look at the results last night and say republicans had a very good night. they squeaked out something of a victory in ohio. you could call it a victory. coming up on morning joe, women are now major party nominees for governor in 11 states. and some more glass ceilings are about to break. that s straight ahead. but first, bill karins with a check on the forecast. morning to you, mika. definitely the dog days of summer. not a lot has changed in the west and east coast, we re still stuck in oppressive humidity on the gulf coast, eastern seaboard. heat indices 90 to 100 from boston down through the southeast. few people are under heat advisories. 39 million people. about the same people yesterday from philadelphia, new york, hartford, boston. richmond and norfolk, wilmington, myrtle beach and almost down to georgetown. west coast still under excessive heat warnings in las vegas but they ve been dropped in los angeles and phoenix just a couple of degrees cooler today. now we are seeing the peak of the summer heat in the pacific northwest. portland under an excessive heat warning, along with spokane and a good section of northern half of montana. these will be the hottest two days of the summer for this region. he are right under the heat dome here and that s not good news for all the firefighters out there trying to fight these blazes. portland today, 97. redding, 103. these are temperatures in the shade, remember, this afternoon. vegas, 108. it will be a little bit cooler by the time we get to the weekend but still very hot on thursday. medford and seattle at 102. no such cooling for california. you ll probably have to wait another couple weeks or months until you get a little cooldown as we head toward the fall season. new york city got hit, nailed by some thunderstorms that had some significant airport delays yesterday evening. we can easily do that again today. much of the eastern seaboard, carry that umbrella. you re watching morning joe. we ll be right back. a hotel can make or break a trip. and at expedia, we don t think you should be rushed into booking one. that s why we created expedia s add-on advantage. now after booking your flight, you unlock discounts on select hotels right until the day you leave. add-on advantage. discounted hotel rates when you add on to your trip. only when you book with expedia. your insurance rates a scratch so smallr you could fix it with a pen. how about using that pen to sign up for new insurance instead? for drivers with accident forgiveness, liberty mutual won t raise their rates because of their first accident. liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. it s a high-tech revolution in sleep. the new sleep number 360 smart bed. it intelligently senses your movement and automatically adjusts on each side to keep you both comfortable. and snoring? how smart is that? smarter sleep. to help you lose your dad bod, train for that marathon, and wake up with the patience of a saint. the new sleep number 360 smart bed, from $999. smarter sleep will change your life. tremfya® is fors caadults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. i m ready. 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. tuesday was a historic night for female candidates and the numbers are only going to go higher. in kansas, state senator laura kelly won the democratic nomination for governor. and in michigan, the former democratic leader of the state senate, gretchen whitmer, handlely won her party s gubernatorial nomination, which means women are now the major party nominees for governor in 11 states, breaking the record of ten set in 1994. and that number is almost certain to grow with the remaining primaries. with at least 20 more women nominated for the u.s. house last night, that total is now at 182. a record number of major party nominations with still more to come and one more milestone last night as michigan s tlaib will likely become the first muslim woman to serve in congress. a former state rep, she s unopposed in the general election for the seat. long held by ex-congressman john conyers. i think in a lot of ways, this is a response to trump. joe, women are stepping up. yeah. willie, so much. again, it is not a surprise. just like 1996 was a response to bill clinton. 2010 was a response to barack obama. no doubt about it. 2018 seems to be such a response to donald trump with the republicans underperforming everywhere. and women democratic women particularly, doing well in these early contests. no question what a preview perhaps of what we ll see in three months. steve ratner, we ll get to your charts in a few minutes and look at the historical perspective on this. but just what can donald trump expect three months from now when you put together that history of what a sitting president faces in his first term and all the energy we are seeing among democrats right now? without stealing my own thunder from my charts, i think the summary and i think steve kornacki knows all of this a swing of this magnitude combined with the president s approval rating, combined with the fact that it is a mid-term election is all incredibly bad news for donald trump. but can i just say one thing about the women? on a personal note, shout out to my own colleague, haley stevens, who was chief of staff on the auto rescue task force. went home to michigan to fight out michigan 11 against what appeared to be a incumbent republican. he stepped down. she just won the primary. she ll face another woman in a republican-leaning district but where i think most people give her a pretty good shot of winning. that s awesome. noah, while it looks like democrats lot of women in the democratic party are going to do exceptionally well, you look at the republican side, and just like you said, you ve got people like barbara comstock in northern virginia who is in danger and actually, as of last week, was not getting a lot of support from the major party. you just talked about the fourth-ranking republican, another woman. underperforming in ways we ve never seen before. i wonder if that has to do with her being a woman in the republican party or if it is just that mainstream conservatives in the age of trump are going to underperform every time, that this is a party right now that is, at least in the primaries, at war with itself? i m not sure if there is a gender related aspect there. to the extent i could say there might be one, it is that women in general in the electorate, to say nothing of the republican party, aren t all that hot on donald trump. the president has been that is that is the understatement of the morning! as you look at the map last night, and you look at these races as we continue, this is sort of the homestretch before we go into the final push after labor day. that seems to be the overarching headline of all of these results, that women have not just been offended by donald trump, but they have been activated to such a level that that s probably women are probably the greatest threat to the republican majority right now. yeah, i would say that s probably accurate. also we saw some of the backlash that a lot of us predicted would occur with the shifting republican coalition towards white working class voters, former democratic voters. big broad base of voters without a degree that can get you states like michigan and wisconsin and pennsylvania. but at the expense of the former republican really core republican base status quo ante which was marginally affluent, upper middle class, degree holders. ohio 12 is a really well educated district. that s where you are going to see the backlash. you ll see it from women, you ll see it from degree holders, people making more than the national average in the income scale. that s where the traditional republican base was. where that base exists, and it s deflated, and it is not turning out, republicans like barbara comstock, like kathy mcmorris-rogers are going to sufficient. coming up on morning joe, we ll talk about the future of the house and senate next on morning joe. this is a story about mail and packages. and it s also a story about people. people who rely on us every day to deliver their dreams they re handing us more than mail they re handing us their business 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 oh! oh! ozempic®! 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(vo) ask your healthcare provider if ozempic® is right for you. statistically most accurate. you find about a 70% correlation between a president s approval rating and the number of house seats won or lost in a mid-term. if he were at 50%, that would lead you to expect something like a 30-seat loss in the mid-terms. however, we have a president who we know is at 41%. if you were to start at 41% and draw a line across, you would find it comes out around here in about the 60-vote loss category. note that two red dots above here represent our two most recent i guess what you would call wave elections. 1994 and 2010. both with presidents who had not even as low popularity as donald trump but somewhat low popularity and you can see that there were massive losses for both of those folks in the mid-term. reminder, democrats only need 23 seats to flip the house. exactly. exactly. if you look at another indicator of where the republicans sit, which is incumbents deciding not to run, as you know, there s something like an 85% re-elect rate for incumbents so having an open seat certainly is an advantage for whichever party is contesting that seat. you can see again going back to 1976, the number of retirements, both democratic and republican, over that period of time, you can see, for example, in the 1994 period, there were a huge number of democratic retirements and that presumably anticipated the wave election of that year. but you can also see this year, you re up to i think 41 at the moment republican retirements. and that a historically high number for the republicans, historically high number for both parties and a much lower number of democratic retirements. so that all augers well for democrats trying to contest open seats in a house that tends to go with the incumbent. and then lastly, there have been 1,000 prognosticators who have tried to run simulations of what they think is going to happen this fall. here s one by the economist which ran 10,000 simulations of various outcomes using both national variables and local variables. what they found was that by their math, there s about a 71% chance of the house flipping to democratic by at least one vote. they found that if you there is a 50%-50% proposition of about a 14-seat majority for democrats in the house, which would be a swing of about 37 votes. and so by their math, there s almost there s a 70% probability of the house flipping. there s close to 100% chance of democrats getting more votes. a lot of this, of course, comes down to the built-in edge for republicans, the way the gerrymandering has worked, the way the districts are set up. the economist thinks there s about a 3.5% edge for republicans. other numbers are as high as 7%. i ve even seen 10%. all of this does not auger well for the republicans. coming up on morning joe paul ryan talked about the debt crisis all the time when barack obama was president. it was very important. it was important to him. it s what conservatives care about. that s part he who he was. i ran for congress. that s why we all went to washington, to take care of big spending. we re small government conservatives. weird, we re not hearing much about it now that republicans are running billion dollar deficit. where did that go? we ll talk about that straight ahead. kids vo: safelite repair, safelite replace you always get the lowest price on our rooms, guaranteed? let s say it in a really low voice. carl? lowest price, guaranteed. just stick with badda book. badda boom. book now at choicehotels.com quote, accounts like jones can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it is critical journalists document, validate and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. this is what serves the public conversation best. several journalists then posted screen grabs of them doing just that offering hard factual reporting to contradict jones false claims, only to face more skepticism and attacks from jones supporters. this, joe, is it is a long-running controversy about what a platform is. is it a publisher or not. and can they completely separate themselves from any responsibility. well, no, they can t. they re the ones that are publishing the lies and jack dorsey s defense is pretty remarkable. when you have info wars founder spreading lies that actually endanger of lives of sandy hook parents, he s sitting there going, well, it s not really up to us to determine whether these are actors who are pretending that they re 6 and 7-year-old children s bodies were riddled with bullets on the friday before christmas vacation. that s really up to journalists to figure that out. right? i don t understand. as david french said, if it s slander, if it s a lie, then isn t that the best measure of whether you publish it or not? okay. so this goes directly to the heart of corporate strategy of social media companies. right? so there is a provision in the law, and has been governing this for two decades, that basically treats information that travels over the internet as though it is a letter inside an envelope. and twitter and facebook and your e-mail companies and all of that are held harmless by the law because they re like the postal service. they re not responsible for what s inside the envelope. right? that s the legal theory. it s not a legal theory. it is how the law works now. that is unsustainable because it is not the case that twitter and facebook are simply delivering mail from one person to another. these are public, free-access sites, and i think there is going to be an enormous amount of pressure over the next couple of years to compel these companies to i mean a change in the law that says that they are not harmless for the information that s purveyed on their site. i think there well, you know, john, they actually profit from spreading lies, from spreading slander. and if any public figure tries to speak out against it, then that generates more hate, which of course generates more traffic, which benefits twitter even more. jeff greenfield wrote this. if someone tweets that jack dorsey presitsdz over satanic chi child rape slauters at twitter hq, you don t know how to be be an arbiter of that truth? calling sandy hook a fake is not a viewpoint, for god s sake. you have the same person, karen, talking about how robert mueller is at the middle of a child kidnapping ring. again, there s absolutely no defense for any of this speech. it s slander, and it i don t understand why twitter a eter dragging their feet here. i think corporations are struggling to sort of figure out what s the line between speech that is offensive and speech that is actually harmful. and it is a difficult thing. free speech now corporations are not bound the way the government is to respect freedom of speech. well, karen, just to step in here though, how difficult is it to figure out whether it s slanderous and whether it is acceptable or not, to spread rumors that led to pizza gate, that led to the shooting at pizza gate. or that sandy hook parents are actors who are actually having to move from one place to another to another because the hatred spread on twitter and other sites are actually leading them to fear for their lives? my own opinion is that alex jones has definitely crossed that line and the issue for twitter is going to be potentially this may be something that ends up getting settled in court and costing them a lot of money. but it s a business decision and the fact that so many other social media platforms see it so clearly, i don t know what is going on in twitter s business model where they think that this is like a good idea. can i just yeah. jump in. if if it s a bad idea. if twitter is supposed to mediate the comments, twitter s an unsustainable business. god knows, 5 million, 10 million tweets a day? every one of them under an editorial policy would have to have an eye cast on it by a twitter employee to approve it before it goes up. that is not any way that that company can manage. so noah, part of the counterargument to this is that if you take hate speech talking about libel, slander and even harassment. if you take this as hate speech, social media companies should not be in the position of determining what is hateful in speech and thereby putting people out of the public square whose world view they disagree with. alex jones may be a unique case, but the precedent of their deciding that could be problematic. yeah. then you have to define what is hate speech. in the uk they don t have a first amendment. you can be prosecuted for things that you post on social media that run afoul of certain guidelines. the extent to which you could punish people. i do not understand the impulse among journalists to say why doesn t twitter police this speech? we don t want to have to do this. this is ridiculous. i don t want to have to address this. why not? my impulse is always to say that the cure for the ills of free expression, is always more free expression. to extent to which we are shutting this down creating a taboo around it isn t healthy, it is not going to make it go away. jones isn t a new phenomenon. there was a 9/11 conspiracy. everybody likes doing this. i don t understand why there is a reticence to engage this guy. he s a target. there is a line. john, to your column in the new york post that there may be something behind president s blame the media blitz. my view is when last week as the heat trump turned up the heat on the media, horrible people, enemy of the people, all of that, that it seemed weird because he had so much good news to bandy about. right? 4.1% growth. reporting 9% unemployment. this is what you want to talk about on the campaign trail or a normal politician would normally want to talk about. is trump putting successes and saying vote for my people so we can keep this going. that was not where all the energy was. i m wondering whether somewhere in the back of his mind or even as a possible deliberate white house strategy the idea now is that he is establishing the predicate for the reason that republicans lose the house in november, which is to say the fake news did it, the fake news made me lose. yep. and that if you think about it, when in 2016 when he kept refusing to say that he would abide by the results of the election because the election was rigged, this is a new way of saying the election he can t say the election was rigged because republicans run most of the electoral processes in the united states. states and he s the president and they have the house and the senate. so he has to have another reason why he lost, that he can blame, and it is the media. this is vintage trump. karen, we ll get to your piece in just a moment. but from our knowledge of his personality and the way he thinks, i don t think this is white house strategy. this is just what trump does. this is his sweet spot. he also was just a master of distraction and the media is one of his favorite ways of doing that. in part, i fault the media here because we essentially swing at every pitch he throws over the plate here. it is also a way of turning the conversation from places that he doesn t want it to be. that s actually a great baseball metaphor. it is like watching your favorite team and watching a batted batter swing at one low and outside pitch after another. that is what the media s been doing for the first 18 months of the administration. every tweet is breaking news. every insult is a screaming headline. that s exactly what he wants. what he doesn t want, karen, he doesn t want americans reading stories about what you say a trump republican should be worried about, which is, again, the reason i got in to congress in 1994 was about the rising deficit, the rising debt. it was at $4 trillion then. it s at $21 trillion now. and trump is spending biggest spending bill ever passed by this republican congress because of donald trump. and it s really trump also, by the way, ran on the promise that he would not only reduce, but that he would pay off the national debt. he s going exactly the opposite direction. it s really surprising how few conservatives are even willing to talk about the fact that the receipts to the government have gone down drastically thanks to tax cuts, that spend something growing, that trump has taken entitlements completely off the table. and now republicans are talking about a second round of tax cuts. all of this is ballooning the deficit to levels that we have never seen in a time of prosperity. deficits usually go down when the economy is doing well. john, we have to talk about mission impossible in just a second. but first, since we ve exhausted our analyst this morning over almost three hours of ohio 12, what s yours? what happened last night? what happened last night is the republicans lost the house. i mean, there are 23 seats. democrats needed 23 seats. there are 24 seats that have republican congressman that hillary clinton won the cd in 2016. if any of them has an even remotely credible candidate, the democrats wins. under these the thing that we saw last night is democrats up 10%, republicans down 10%. so no one survives that. and with republicans and the president with their foot on the gas in that district trying to push him over the top. okay. mission impossible. your review, you write one of the most astounding action adventure pictures ever. the most entertaining picture of the year. based almost solely on your review i took my kids to see it. i agree, it was incredible. trust content from john podhoretz. i wasn t expecting to feel this way about the movie. i find i ve been very meh on both of the six mission impossibles. fourth was kind of fun, fifth was okay. this just knocked me out of the back of the theater. forget the plot. we were discussing this. you can t understand the plot! i just don t get it. don t try to follow the plot. tom cruise still has it, and then some. so good. don t you agree, mika? i don t get it. no, i just no. i m going today. i m not into all this stuff. karen tumulty, thank you very much. thank you, both. coming up, president trump has recently praised saudi arabia s leadership and hammered canada s. now those two countries are locked in a growing diplomatic dispute. will the u.s. take sides? the president might but will the u.s.? there are two separate things there. that s all next on morning joe. how d that go? he kept spelling my name with an i but it s bryan with a y. yeah, since birth. that drives me crazy. yes. it s on all your email. yes. they should know this? yeah. the guy was my brother-in-law. that s ridiculous. well, i happen to know some people. do they listen? what? they re amazing listeners. nice. guidance from professionals who take their time to get to know you. hi! how was your day? it was good. it was long. let s fix it. play connection by onerepublic. (beep) these days, my waves get lost in the ocean seven billion swimmers man i m going through the motions sent up a flare need love and devotion trade it for some faces that i ll never know notion can i get a connection? can i get can i get a connection? can i get a connection? can i get can i get a connection? are you one sneeze away from being voted out of the carpool? try zyrtec®. it s starts working hard at hour one. and works twice as hard when you take it again the next day. stick with zyrtec® and muddle no more®. since joining ninehahi, ubmonths ago,o. my priority has been to listen to you. to cities and communities, and to my own employees. i ve seen a lot of good. we ve changed the way people get around. we ve provided new opportunities. but moving forward, it s time to move in a new direction. and i want you to know just how excited i am, to write uber s next chapter, with you. one of our core values as a company, is to always do the right thing. and if there are times when we fall short, we commit to being open, taking responsibility for the problem, and fixing it. this begins with new leadership, and a new culture. and you re going to see improvements to our service. like enhanced background checks, 24/7 customer support, better pickups, and ride quality, for both riders, and drivers. you ve got my word, that we re charting an even better road for uber, and for those that rely on us every day. i do. check out the new united explorer card. saving on this! saving on this! saving in here. rewarded! learn more at theexplorercard.com saudi arabia and canada are currently locked in a diplomatic row over human rights with both countries refusing to back down despite a threat to future trade deals and a flurry of other sanctions. it began last week over canada s foreign minister tweeted concerns over a recent arrest of a woman s rights activist in saudi arabia who had relatives living in canada. the saudis responded with fury calling it a string of diplomatic sanctions against canada while expelling the canadian ambassador. on monday, the saudi government froze all new trade with ottawa. and ordered around 16,000 students studying in canada to leave. for its part, canada doubled down on its stance but their foreign minister stating canada will always stand up for human rights in canada and around the world and women s rights are human rights. the arab league, bahrain and the palestinian authority have all stood by saudi arabia, while the u.s., traditionally, one of canada s closest allies has remained on the sideline. reuters reports that canada now plans to seek help from the united arab emirates and britain to defuse the dispute. meanwhile secretary of state mike pompeo recently lifted restrictions in $195 million in military aid to egypt, frozen last year in part to protest that country s desire human rights record. pompeo is scheduled to meet later today with egyptian foreign minister shukri. we recently statistic down with the frorm and asked him the status of human rights in the country and the u.s./egyptian relationship. mr. foreign minister, 40 years ago, mika s father, dr. brzezinski, as you well know, was part of the camp david accords where egypt and israel came together and brokered a very difficult piece. but one that s ensured 40 years of peace in that region, at least. the lack of major ground wars. where are we now in the peace process, and what is the possibility of reconciliation between the palestinians and the israelis in 9 months and years to come? we are at a difficult stage in terms of pursuing the peace process. current developments in the situation in the region has complicated the process, but we re still confident that the united states and its efforts to communicate and to encourage both sides to reach a negotiated settlement, with the assistance of countries in the region, primarily egypt, and we re confident that the united states has the resources, has the ability, these negotiations have been under way for 25 years. and many of the issues have been discussed between the two sides and the parameters are well defined by the international community through the security council and other direct negotiations between the two parties. mr. foreign minister, this is willie geist. as you know, the sanctions that were part of the iran deal, the iran deal that was ripped up a couple months ago, the sanctions back in place. with the elimination of the iran deal with president trump is the world now safer? well, the marines have been fraught with difficulties and dangers over the last seven, eight years. and we have to, i think, resolve all of these issue, including the potential threat of nuclear proliferation from iran. and there is room for the efforts being undertaken by the europeans. and we would hope that more favorable agreement can be reached in the foreseeable future. and mr. foreign minister, yas yasmin vossoughian has a question for you, mr. foreign minister. good morning, sir. i want to the go off of what willie was just asking about, do you think that president trump said he would meet with president rouhani with no preconditions involved should be meeting with him? well, the president in making that declaration, i m sure, has the best interests of the region at heart. and is continuing to work towards the stability, security and maintaining the peace in the region. whether that meet will go materialize or not remains to be seen. the initial reactions of the iranians was not forthcoming. we believe that discussions, negotiations, communication can always lead to a greater understanding. and agreements related how best to deal with the challenges and the threats of the region. i just want to talk to you about your human rights record in your country, mr. foreign minister. the u.s. real lease $195 million in military aid making that decision to the end of july. we know that money has been withheld because of your human rights record. human rights watch says your ghost continues to preside over the worst human rights crisis in decades, what is your response to that, where are you with regards to the human rights? unfortunately, that seems like a gross exaggeration, i believe if you monitor the conditions in egypt, the freedom of the press, the freedom of the political association and the general conditions and egyptians in general, being satisfied and confident with the current leadership and the current policies. we have every determination to continue on the road to reform. and not to say that everything is perfect. but we are dedicated to creating political, economic and social reform. this is a process of evolution for any society, and we will continue to address it in most transparent and impactful manner. what is the greatest challenge, right now, to the u.s./egyptian relationship? i believe that, to work together, to regain the stability, to regain the status of the nation s states of the region so they can undertake the responsibilities in protecting their citizens against terrorism and to provide the necessary