Rachel Maddow takes a look at the day s top political news stories. whether a person is too close to the subject of the probe, whether jeff sessions would beak be more of a trump campaign surrogate who happened to be attorney general rather than acting as an independent law enforcement officer. if sessions didn t recuse after that statement, it would have made him look even more like he was doing trump s bidding. and trump apparently didn t know that making that statement would also as just a general matter of embarrassment, make him look weak and out of the loop about a decision that was already done. because there were reports that show the internal doj process had already resulted in sessions accepting that nonpartisan recusal recommendation from the career staff earlier that week and that jeff sessions was already working with doj officials op writing the very rationale they would soon release to the public. in fact, it was barely an hour after trump put that public pressure on sessions to stay in charge of the probe to not recuse that jeff sessions stepped out to the world with a fateful announcement that would actually change the arc of this entire probe. it would enrage trump, it would make rod rosenstein a new household name in every household that follows the news these days. and then what happened next is at issue and it s in the news tonight. donald trump responding with a mix of call it personal rage and a kind of management impotence by which i mean that he freaked out enough that a lot of people heard about it but did not follow through to actually do the firing of jeff sessions that he initially demanded in his initial freakout. so there were credible sources able to tell both the new york times and the washington post that trump was fuming about firing sessions that he told his aides he wanted it done. of course, we know he did not get it done. and that s not all. donald trump was apparently unaware completely unaware of a pretty key rule in legal recusals. i m talking, of course, about no backies. the doj doesn t recommend a legal recusal for say some factual reason and then just take it back. that s what the trump was demanding. he told sessions to take back the recusal from the russia probe in our time line, this was a few days later, march 4th and sessions goes down to mar-a-lago where the president objected to his decision to recuse himself. mr. trump it the times reported who had told aides he need aid loyalist overseeing the inquiry berated sessions and told him to reverse his decision, an inappropriate request. sessions refused. confrontation being investigated by bob mueller as are the president s private and public attacks on sessions and the efforts to get him to resign. so let s take this all together. there are many people i m sure you know many people who say this. that donald trump is somehow ignorant or clueless hors d oeuvre. you hear that from time to time. and donald trump may certainly be ignorant of all kinds of things, certainly the things he doesn t care about. but the evidence in this mounting case shows that he is very informed and very canny about using a whole range of tactics to get what he wants in there criminal probe. now, here is how that is key to where this probe is heading. donald trump deploys both public and private means to do these things that look like evidence of obstruction of justice and that s key to what is the disturbing news tonight. so let s go back into the timeline. donald trump presses sessions and ha became part of mueller s probe itself because had he an interest which demonstrates sessions overlooked role as a key witness into the investigation into whether trump tried to obstruct the inquiry. mueller s investigators pressed current and former white house officials about trump s treatment of sessions and whether they believe the president was trying to impede the investigation by pressuring him. the attorney general beintervied at length. of the questions mueller wants to ask trump, eight reit to sessions among them what efforts did you make him to try to get him to reverse his recusal that s the context for what trump did today. while we don t usually treat trump s tweets as news stories because they re often ploys and some are just lies there one is important. this is a terrible situation and attorney general jeff sessions should stop this rigged witch hunt right now before it continues to stain our country any further. mueller s totally conflicted. his 17 angry democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to the usa. what are we looking at there? we re seeing the public part. what else is trump doing to shut down the probe in private tonight? that s a big question. you can also see how this is evidence of obstruction that concerns even trump s own lawyers because their argument today was hey, no, trump did not say what he said, that his call to stop the probe was not really a call to stop the probe, not an order. mueller s investigators may disagree with that. they are probing how the president talks to and pressures the doj. one democrat a former prosecutor, spoke to how this all fits into criminal intent. clearly there statement is serious and substantial evidence of criminal intent. even if it doesn t constitute a crime itself. the president is coming close to actual committing the crime of obstruction of justice if not crossing that line already. and these tweets adding to each other amount to evidence of criminal intent. there is now right now a clearly credible case of obstruction of justice against the president of the united states. so why is this happening now? well, there s a new report that suggests it s not just the manafort trial which shows what happens to the defendants who don t cooperate with mueller but also that trump learned within the last day the special counsel will limit the scope of questioning and would like to ask questions both orally and written for the president to respond to. in other words, there is still serious pressure for an interview. according to news sources familiar with the president s actions wednesday, that was the genesis for his early morning tweet storm. rachel pinpointed a lot of important issues today require to us focus on what people do. not just what they say. the question that could determine the future of the trump presidency tonight involves whether trump is trying to do something with what he s saying to his attorney general and to the other doj and fbi officials that he s well he s attacked, berated, undercut and, of course, who he s tried to remove from office. remember, this is the still the only american presidency to ever successfully seek the removal of the top two officials at the fbi. they re now both potential witnesses to obstruction. it s the only presidency inivity under investigation for the unsuccessful efforts to remove both an attorney general and a special prosecutor himself as the probe remains open. and that, of course, is just what we know based on what s in public and what is leaked. so one more thing as you take it all together. there is another reason why donald trump may be writing things about sessions that look self-incriminating 0 twitter that have his own lawyers saying they weren t what they are. this theory requires to you entertain the belief that the president is more canny than clueless. donald trump s team has good reason to have learned by now that mueller s case uses donald trump s past efforts to squeeze and oust jeff sessions. mueller s case may have already strong evidence of that. provable evidence. and so knowing that it looks moved that far but he certainly made the effort to appear he was reducing some of the questions. do you have any hints over whether he is prepared to go to the supreme court if trump won t sit down and how do you trigger that? when do you do that? so if one signal we know very clearly that mueller has given the trump legal team is he would like to avoid a subpoena fight. and there are all sorts of good reasons for that, ari, like he knows that that will take months. there s very little chance that the court of appeals which would certainly be involved on the road to the supreme court would move with any alacrity. this could takes months to fight over an interview and a constitutional question that s never been answered, can you force the president to the table to talk about acts as president. and if there s one thing we know, as well, mueller has gathered a lot of evidence. he s interviewed a ton of people. he s pressaged in his questions that he s hinted at to the trump legal team what he s interested in. and obstruction is a central piece of what he wants to get from the president. you say obstruction and that brings us to the most damning and perhaps the most obvious question that i m sure many of us watching would like your view on. why do you think donald trump wrote something today on the internet that was so blatantly self-incriminating about potential obstruction of this case which is an investigation into his obstruction? so two things. i agree with all the prosecutors that i ve spent a lot of time with as a reporter in federal courts all over. i agree with them that any statement you make that suggests that you re threatening or intimidating or encouraging a certain course of action is not a crime but certainly goes to your state of mind. and could be part of a mosaicing that any prosecutor could lay out orging look, the president was really sig that willing to tens of millionses of people this is what he wanted. and that is not a crime but it builds the color around the state of mind of the actor, the president. the second thing is your question about why did he tweet. the president has shown a talent for sending a message early in the morning either about his anger or about the topic he wants all of us to be talking about. and in this instance, i believe he s been watching a lot of coverage of paul manafort s trial. obviously, we re mot live inside that trial but he s watching the cable news, minute by minute updates. and he wants to send a signal about how he feels this is wrong. and it could be just a signal to his base. and nothing more. well, you said it was a mosaic of sorts. i wonder whether it s a self-portrait titled evidence of obstruction, given how drastically blatant it was. carol, we always appreciating your reporting and nuance. thank you so much. i turn to senator chris coons on the senate judiciary committee and rebutting giuliani s assertion that have collusion is not a crime. he re he i want to start with your view of whether what donald trump wrote on the internet today is evidence of potential obstruction. well, it s certainly evidence of his state of mind how he views the ongoing mueller investigation and of what he thinks should happen. his saying this morning that jeff sessions should shut down the mueller investigation which he calls a rigged witch hunt as a number of commentators have said so far this evening could be entered into evidence as something that suggests what his state of mind has been. i ll remind you this goes all the way back to his lester holt interview following his firing of fbi director james comey. whether he said that he had the russia investigation in mind when he fired jim comey, the former fbi director. so i think there s abundant evidence that obstruction and intent to interfere the ongoing investigation into whether or not rush yar committed some conspiracy with trump campaign in order to violate our federal election laws. that s something that s been out there in plain view now for months. frankly, my answer as to why president trump did in this morning is a combination of appealing to his base, delegitimizing the mueller investigation and he frankly partly just can t help himself. right, because as we ve reported his lawyer s reaction shows that this was coming from the top and that they wanted to say it didn t do what it did. getting to your other piece, you know, sometimes it feels like we re all going through a type of law school together in this era. you would be one of our voluntary professors i suppose. collusion, conspiracy, criminal hacking and theft, fraud fraud against the units, foreign campaign contributions are all felonies that relate to what has been alleged in 2016. walk us through your point about what trims constitute collusion. well, first the term collusion here is being used casually. what it s really referring to i ll remind you is a conspiracy to break federal election laws. the federal election law and i think it is title 52 of the u.s. code, section 30121 says that it is a crime to solicit or accept a thing of value from a foreign national in order to influence a federal election. i m summarizing what is a much longer paragraph. but essentially, that s what it says is that a foreign national can t contribute either money or a thing of value and an american can t solicit or receive a thing of value from a foreign national in connection with a federal election. that s really the crux of what s being investigated here is whether or not the russian well documented wide scale russian effort by dozens of military intelligence officers tore influence the american election and to be offer hacked e-mails was in some way either solicited or accepted by the trump campaign team. that s why i think the developments in recent days that michael cohen may well be willing to testify that president trump knew about the june 9th trump tower meeting with russians offering dirt on hillary clinton could be a key turning point here. there s lots of public evidence of an enthusiasm by the highest levels of the trump campaign to accept information derogatory to hillary clinton and his campaign. there s lots of evidence that robert mueller s investigation has made public through indictments of russian efforts to influence the outcome of the campaign. what s been missing so far is something that connects point a to point b and makes it into a conspiracy. that may well it be the evidence that robert mueller is preparing to present. i m remind you lying to federal investigators is also a federal offense and sometimes things that are said on twitter whether it s by donald trump jr. or paul manafort or others, what really ends up being the thing that hangs them up is having testified in front of a committee or to an fbi investigator one way and it being proven that the facts are the opposite. i think those are the three core issues here. finally federal election law working in partnership to break the american laws which is conspiracy and lying to investigators most of the indictments that have so far come out from the mueller investigation move along one of those three tracks. i expect we ll be seeing more indictments in in the near future. to paraphrase it, sounds like they were right to say collusion is not a crime because it is like four crimes. that s right. what we are commonly referring to as collusion is a complex series of violation afsz federal election law, of truthfulness to investigators and the commonly known crime of conspiracy which is i think 18usc371. that s just working with more than one other foreign break federal law. that s simple conspiracy. senator chris coons, a member of the senate judiciary committee, i really do appreciate your time tonight. thank you, ari. still ahead there could be a big development in paul manafort s trial. we have that former federal prosecutor who was in the courtroom today in just a moment. i love you, basement guest bathroom. your privacy makes you my number 1 place to go number 2. i love you, but sometimes you stink. febreze air effects doesn t just mask, it cleans away odors. because the things you love the most can stink. and try febreze small spaces to clean away odors for up to 30 days. breathe happy with febreze. 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. with our largest variety of crab all year! like new crabfest combo. your one chance to have new jumbo snow crab with tender dungeness crab. or try crab lover s dream. but hurry in. cause crabfest will be gone in a snap. 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. now, to the trial. mueller s prosecutors moving fast in day two of paul manafort s trial which is what s generally required in this rocket docket. in fact, the prosecutors say they re way ahead of schedule on this trial and could rest their case as early as next week. many witnesses may be afraid of mueller s team but the judge there t.s. ellis is not. of course, he s not supposed to be. seconds after prosecutor an season yea starred delivering his opening statement, the judge cut him off. the prosecutor saying a man in the court did not believe the law did not apply to him and collected over $60 million for his work in a country called ukraine but this man didn t want to report his income so he used foreign bank accounts to funnel and boom, the judge interrupted the evidence you contend will show this? the prosecutor says yes. and judge ellis does a little smackdown. that s the way i would put it. and the prosecutor tried to continue saying to funnel millions of dollars and judge ellis collapsed back and says, did you hear what i said? then we get a more typical response. the prosecutor says yes, your honor. the judge says all right, do it that way please. ellis pressed both sides. he is a known stickler and told manafort s lawyers they also must speaking in evidence telling them it s preferable if you couch in this case your argument or your defense in terms of you will hear evidence that dot, dot, dot. now right out of the gate that has been the issue. today the judge didn t mellow out at one point scolding the prosecutors and defense team to rein in their facial expressions. it s been reported that lawyers upon leaving the bench roll their eyes communicating to those watching them essentially why do we have to put up with this idiot judge. don t do that. obviously, if i were to see it, i might be a little upset. you can see that running a courtroom sometimes is no different than dealing with well, your average teenager at least in the view of this judge on the record. put aside the facial expressions and what s going on is the judge is trying to trim the sails of aggressive lawyers and that includes mule he s aggressive prosecutors. he took issue with the word oligarch, arguing it is just despot tick power exercised by a privileged few and by that definition, principles of high schools are oligarchs, too. what he was getting at what i want to avoid somehow to use the term oligarch to mean manafort was being paid by people who are criminals. the only thing we know about them is if they had a lot of money. it has come to have a pejorative meaning. he told them look, find another term to use. almost immediately, not being able to say the word oligarch, that s kind of like a banana peel for the prosecution and i ll read from what we re learning from this trial. the payments were made on behalf of mr. ian cuevich i would say oligarchs the prosecutor said but by wealthy businessman. the judge said who paid. the prosecutor said those are the oligarchs. the judge said those are the individuals who financed it. don t use that term. now we go back to what good lawyers do. they said understood. there was also a matter of whether the prosecutors can use photographs of expensive suits as evidence. there were brand names that were greek to this judge. the judge said if it doesn t say men s wearhouse, i don t know it. that got something of a laugh. then what happened did not. we re showing you this because it matters legally. judge ellis hinting these pictures of manafort s very fancy suits may never get to the jury. the big curveball came when he starred questioning other evidence that pertained to rick gates. that s manafort s former deputy who mueller got to cooperate. gates testimony has the potential to be the most riveting pivotal portion of this trial. maybe of the whole mueller prosecution up to point. we re talking about the deputy campaign manager for donald trump who flipped. but look at this. judge ellis says you re going to offer up mr. gates, aren t you? . and mueller s prosecutor says your honor, we re not sure if we are. he may testify in this case, your honor. he may not. that is one of those things that sounds very measured. we may do this, we may not but actually has really big repercussions what we ll hearn from there case. whied the prosecution be considering not putting what is described astaire witness on the stand. i m joined by barbara mcquade at the trial today and josh gerstein reporting as politico s correspondent and covering the manafort case since the we beginning. barbara, i will you the that question to you. yeah about, whether gates will testify? interesting moment in the trial. and there was sort of a sudden hush in the courtroom. and then a sudden scurrying when a number of people ran out the back. in fact, judge ellis himself said that s a surprise to me. and apparently to about 25 other people in the courtroom who just ran out of here like ras fleeing a singing ship. presumably reporters who were going to report back there statement. and if you think about it, it may very well be that they decide not to call rick gates. in my view, the case is.coming in very well. they ve gotten in lots of documents. this is primarily a paper case which if you re a prosecutor is a dream because paper doesn t lie. paper doesn t forget. paper doesn t admit to biases and so if you can problem your case with paper, you may not need a live wit fles who can go sideways in a lot of ways. it sounds like they re playing it by ear but may well end up not causing rick gates because they don t need to and he prens potential ricks. good trial litigators have no attachment to anything that s come before. they just want to make the case to win. is there something going on some of the undercutting by the defense counsel was effective enough they want to keep this option open. yeah, i think so. there were noncommittal today and don t need to be. when you put a name on your list it, is who you may call. but you don t have to call all of them. when you do call a witness, you re required to turn over all of their prior statements on the subject matter and required to turn over anything that could be used to attack their credibility like the plea deal, like anything bad that he has admitted to, any staps he s made about the russia matter. it may be that prosecutors would rather hold that information close to the vest for now and save him as a witness in the washington, d.c. trial that s going to occur in september. they can get through this one on paper and save him, think they ll view that as a good thing. they can make that call next week when they see how the case has come in and decide if they need to call him at all. josh, walk us through the color from taking just a few quotes. did you ever see eye rolling and how pivotal is this judge? i think some of the eye rolling may have come during the jury selection process when we had very long sidebars. the judge does seem to really be riding the prosecution. now, there wouldn t be any reason for him to be riding the defense because the defense at the moment is putting in a few cross-examination questions at the end of each witness called by the prosecution. so it s really the prosecution s ball on their side of the field at this point. been the judge is beak limiting the amount of evidence that i think the defense might view as prejudicial. as you mentioned, the issues of the photos or the photos of the ostrich jacket, photos of home renovations that were very expensive, photos of all the suits of all the other luxury goods that manafort used pone to buy money that the prosecution says came from his work in ukraine, but the judge is trying to keep this really to facts and figures to the invoices to the paper. let me draw you out on that. do you think this is fair in the criticism of the mueller team is they re trying to make paul manafort out like he s sean diddy coves and had fancy coats and fancy brands and that legally, there s not the problem. it s kind of unfair and what they really have to problem is that there was tax evasion. do you think the judge is hitting that right and fairly? i think he is. he does bring it up a lot. i d say roughly every hour or two, he makes a comment about manafort is not on trial for being rich or for having a lavish lifestyle or extravagant tastes and the prosecutors will often agree with the judge but they insys they need to show the value of these luxury goods and that manafort was getting them to really convince jurors that manafort s tax returns could not possibly have covered the lifestyle that he was living in addition to trying to prove his point of the very, very strange payment arrangements, nearly every vendor who came up said they were paid by overseas wire transfers from shell companies whose names they had never heard of or only got from the manafort. today we had a strange development of forged invoices a couple of vendors saying that they were being shown invoices with their company s name at the top of the letterhead but that they were not authentic. it appears somebody fortunatelied those as part of the process of getting these bills paid by shell companies can overseas. it sounds exhausting to be that shady all the time. but we don t always relate toe what defendants are accused of, innocent till proven guilty, of course. former u.s. attorney barbara mcquade and politico s josh gerstein. we have one more note. manafort has those expensive tastes and that includes we re going to show you a $15,000 ostrich coat. josh just mentioned it. we want you to see it because you re not a juror. you have every right to the information out there. here is we submit to you the ostrich coat in question and we submit it to you without comment. we ll be right back. always have been. when i found out i had age-related macular degeneration, amd, i wanted to fight back. my doctor and i came up with a plan. it includes preservision. only preservision areds 2 has the 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such good and important work for the environment. together, we re building a better california. so check this out. the scene outside republican senator s john thune s office today. this is the dirksen senate office building right ahead of the senator s scheduled meeting with trump s new supreme court pick bret kavanaugh. nbc counted about 200 demonstrators lining the halls. they stood mostly in silent protest. with the protest under way, senator thune s meeting was moved in fact this happened the last minute. they brought him over to mitch mcconnell s office suite in the capitol. the public not permitted so protest serious couldn t get as close. when they got word the meeting was moved, they marched on the hart office building where he was scheduled to meet with the john boozman. protesters singing songs, they were blocking the halls and some chanted oh, hell no, kavanaugh. dozens of them were then arrested for that conduct. according to capitol police, 74 people arrested and charged. the counts around crowding or obstructing because you can t interfere with the gathering places there. when disability rights activist aidy barkin was wheeled into a police holding area he was cheered by.protesters. the battle is still in the early stages, democratic senators saying they not meet with kavanaugh. they want more facts from his time serving as bush s staff secretary in the white house. meanwhile, republican chuck grassley who leads the judiciary committee says he has mot said when these confirmation hearings will actually start. but he does admit they are not likely till september which, of course is getting close to the midterms themselves. if today s any indication what s to come, it could be a lot more bumps on that road. it s the ford summer sales event and now is the best time to buy. man: (on tablet) preparing classic campfire trout. say what? trout. trout. alright. you don t think i need both? why does he have that axe? make summer go right with ford, america s 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post and the times reported last summer that the middle of the 2016 campaign, the trump org was actively secretly trying to bid the trump tower in moscow. as we know, candidate trump was signing documents about that deal during the campaign at the very time he was publicly insisting he had no business des with russia. this may, buzzfeed s anthony cormier and jamp lee poed advanced the story with another scoop that the negotiations for trump tower moscow were far more extensive and lasted longer than reported and the planning went on after trump became the nominee and that the negotiations conducted by michael cohen included plans for trump to make a mid-campaign trip to moscow also known as a great idea. the buzzfeed report includes another bombshell on the subject that relates to collusion. even before mueller was appointed special counsel, fbi agencies learned that cohen was in frequent contact with foreign individuals about trump moscow and that some of those individuals had knowledge of or played a role in 2016 election meddling. that would be like a big headline all on its own if we didn t have so many other things happening. it s one exhibit in the collusion issues around trump. now, buzzfeed s cormier and leopold this team is back with a new scoop. this one is about the accused spy maria butina currently in jail accused of acting as a russian agent. prosecutors accuse her of waging a covert operation of influence targeting the nra and other conservatives and allege she was aided by u.s. persons one and two. first one matches political operative paul erickson who also had a relationship with her, the second one i.d. and giorgio neil junior, a rockefeller heir, a conservative writer and he worked on the pat buchanan campaign in 92 with erickson. the details are piling up about her alleged influence campaign in the u.s. financed by a russian billionaire with deep ties to the russian presidential administration. to use a word you can t use in the manafort trial, that oligarch had a son who worked as a volunteer on trump s campaign. now sources are saying butina first told the senate about this funding source in her interview there. today the senate unanimously approved turning over that transcript what she told them and the details about the billionaire to prosecutors, as well butina s defense lawyer. buzzfeed reports federal investigators hot on the trail and reporting that the investigators are looking at $300,000 in these transactions by butina and erickson which includes $90,000 sent to or from a russian bank. the transactions were actually first flagged by anti-fraud investigations at wells fargo who in some cases found no an apparent economic business or lawful purpose to explain them. those records also now handed over to the fbi. joining me now is one of those authorize of those scoops, buzzfeed reporter anthony cormier. i guess i should start with wow. thanks. there s a lot here. a whole bunch going on. $300,000, what does it mean? we know now this massive counter intelligence investigation is doing what all investigators do, following the money. they want to know who was supporting her in the u.s. and what she was doing with the funds while she was here and whether or not anyone else was involved with this sort of what they are alleging is a grand conspiracy to influence political figures in the u.s. on russia s behalf. right. when you say anyone else involved, it s oh, are she and torsion linked to putin some sort of tiny lone would he have sleeper cell or are there other dogs on this russian dog sledding team. both russian and american i think. telling us they want to know to whom torsion was funneling money, whether those are russian individuals and were torshin was sending pone to anyone in the u.s. that s not been proven. we can say that s what the fbi is sniffing around at. you re familiar with the term what happens in las vegas stays in las vegas. what happens online has not stayed online in this case. the midterm campaign hacking we re hearing about involves offline events, the digital operations mueller charged involve a lot of offline problems. how much of this looks to you like bigger offline physical activity inside the united states and how does mueller view that even if this predates his mandate. i won t speak for mr. mueller. but i will say that our sources in the fbi tell us that that money has to go somewhere. right? these are this is cash. it moves. they want to know where it went. it s going to be difficult when you deposit cash on the front end, it s hard to know where it came from, when you pull it out, it s difficult to know where it went. they re the fbi and this is a massive sweeping counter intelligence investigation. our sources are telling us they are firmly going to get to the bottom of it. torshin being so hands on as a putin billionaire means what? you can make a bee line to the kremlin if stands up, if the butina charges stick. if they find out where the money came from and where it went, it will be very difficult for kremlin to say we had no idea. final question. a lot of the discussion about regulating finance and banks in america. is this story which you report begins with bank regulations and laws forcing oversight a sign that s an important part of overseeing banks? absolutely. we jason and my partner and i have been reporting on this sort of money and steen again and again whether it s citi in the past, wells fargo. they are critical vectors, points where fbi is able to go and pull records. as we saw earlier in the show today, paper doesn t lie. the fbi is using paper to make these cases. it s fascinating and as we ve shown in our introduction, you ve been doing a lot of reporting. thank you so much anthony cormier. democrats say they got good news. 97 days out of the midterms. that s next. raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens 97 days out of the midterms. that s next. and warm woolen mittens brown paper packages tied up 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house. the latest poll out of that district, the democrat trailing the opponent by just one point. well within striking distance which we ve just shown you would be a huge shift blue in the state. democrats say this is not the only good piece of data they re getting right now today. over in texas, which, of course is relily red the idea of an incumbent republican senator like ted cruz losing to a progressive upstart democrat would seem like a total fantasy but there is this poll out of texas, the democrat running against ted cruz beta o rourke trailing by six points. that is tight for texas. larry sabato the said the race has an upset potential. if you follow the news or live in texas, you know everyone loves ted cruz. he is super popular and well liked. that s an issue anytime you run against him. having said that, there is a bat signal thing going on for at least the democratic party s biggest cheerleader, former president barack obama using today as thisser good data is coming in to release his list of endorsements for the midterms and trying to push some over the finish line and chipping away at the republican majority in congress. it is now 97 days from the midterms and this former president is choosing this as his moment to get back in the spotlight saying he s eager to get back into politics. we re about to enter the sprint to november. make sure to stretch. with expedia s add-on advantage, booking a flight unlocks discounts on select hotels until the day you leave for your trip. add-on advantage. only when you book with expedia. add-on advantage. i never thought i d say this but i found bladder leak underwear that s actually pretty. always discreet boutique. hidden inside is a super absorbent core that quickly turns liquid to gel. so i feel protected and pretty. always discreet boutique.
Brian Williams examines the day s top political stories and current political-campaign news. already several witnesses in on just day two. all of it as the 11th hour gets underway on a wednesday night. good evening from our nbc news headquarters in new york. this was one more in a string of extraordinary days in our country. because this was what we woke up to from the president of the united states. quote, attorney general jeff sessions should stop this rigged witch hunt right now before it continues to stain our country even further. perhaps just as extraordinary, nothing happened after that. it was wednesday in america and tonight robert mueller and his team remain on the job. the negotiations for a possible sitdown interview between robert mueller and president trump. we report on the latest offer from the special counsel writing that mueller, quote, indicated this week that he s willing to reduce the number of questions his investigation asks. according to two people briefed on the negotiations. in a letter sent monday mueller s team suggested that investigators would reduce by nearly half the number of questions they would ask about potential obstruction of justice. two people said it s unclear which topic or topics would be left out. michael schmidt and maggie haberman wasted no time. they wrote, quote, president trump pushed his lawyers in recent days to try once again to reach an agreement with the special counsel s office flouting their advice that he should not answer investigators questions. mr. trump has told advisors he s eager to meet with investigators to clear himself of wrongdoing. in effect, he believes he can convince the investigators for the special counsel, robert s. mueller, that this is a wish hunt. he s always been interested in testifying but it s us, including me, that have a lot of reservations. they sent us a proposal. we responded to their proposal. they took ten days and we got it back and now we re in the process of responding to their proposal. again, all of this comes as the president escalated his attack on the russia investigation. here s what he said in this particular tweet, this is a terrible situation and attorney general jeff sessions should stop this rigged wish hunt right now before he stains the country any further. this whole obstruction thing is nonsense. if he wanted to obstruct it, he would have obstructed it. he has a right to defend himself. if he believes he s innocent, he is innocent, he should speak out. white house also moved quickly to frame trump s words as nothing more than his own personal view. it s not an order. it s the president s opinion. the president is not obstructing, he s fighting back. the president is stating his opinion. he s stating it clearly. he s certainly expressing a frustration that he has with the level of corruption that we ve seen from people like jim comey, the president s angry. frankly, most of america is angry as well and there s no reason he shouldn t be able to voice that opinion. but remember what the white house once told us about how we should regard what this president says on twitter. are president trump s tweets considered official white house statements? well, the president is the president of the united states so they re considered official statements by the president. he s willing to speak candidly about the reaction by many lawmakers in the capital. every morning we wake up and he tweets something. mueller s going to finish his investigation. the truth is all going to come out. that s the best thing that could happen for the president and for the country. after that from senator rubio let us bring in our leadoff panel on a wednesday night. peter baker, jill colvin, john high heilman and harry litman. former u.s. attorney, former assistant deputy attorney general under president clinton. peter, i d like to begin with you. i d like to read to you what sally yates wrote on social media. today our president called on our reduced attorney general as shocking as that is. what s more dangerous is we ve gotten used to it. the rule of law won t evaporate overnight but it can slip away if we let it. there we have the president s own words to judge him by. this is on him. this is one of those lessons we get to see if words have consequences. what is fascinating is how much this plays out in public out loud. what we see from the president s tweets is him saying what would have been a scandal has like president nixon been found to have said it privately in a taped session in the oval office. the tape that finally undid him in watergate was hearing him order his aides to tell the fry to layoff the watergate investigation. here you have the president saying on twitter the attorney general who reports to him should shut down the investigation directly. and it is in fact both surprising and yet not surprisi surprising. it s the kind of thing he s done for a year and a half. we have kind of as a society gotten accustomed to it to some extent. harry, i don t walk around quoting u.s. code. for god s sake i don t comment on that. particularly on this argument you started hearing from someone late today as twitter still seems to so many people as a medium. this could still be kind of slow rolling obstruction in plain sight and the three words in the obstruction portion are if you re trying to influence, intimidate or impede an officer of the court. how is this not that? how is this not that? exactly right. and in some ways the notion of whether it s preparatory or a command almost doesn t matter although it s a very, very tenuous distinction. saying, would you look at this? not only and they didn t just jump to it this morning. i mean, they ve been looking at the tweet carefully all the way through. the whole kind of pattern of tweets where he goes back and forth and seems to be dancing around the notion of the two other words from the statute, corrupt intent. we re going to put these altogether and see if we can make a case for his wanting to close it down basically to protect himself, the white house and his family. no doubt just like any other statement it s sort of silly to say it s on twitter or white house stationery. it s a statement from the president of the united states and it s admissible and they are analyzing it. jill colvin, tell us what you and your colleagues are reporting about this president and the atmospherics. the confidence of this president, he is definitely not happy right now. the president was watching television, watching coverage of the beginning of the trial of paul manafort this morning. we re told that s what sparked the flurry of tweets. one confidante said that the president is, quote, in a dark place. the president has been furious. it s been building over the last couple of weeks. he was furious at the media the way that he felt that he was not given enough credit for the meeting with vladimir putin. putin was portrayed, he felt like he didn t get enough credit for meeting with kim jong-un in singapore. and you ve got a president who feels the media is attacking him and the government is coming in and attacking him right now. you have in addition to the both democrats and republicans. there are a lot of things about twitter. it s a heck of a medium in some ways. it s beneficial in other ways. it s the same thing that the op ed is in the new york times in 2018. those words are hanging out there. harry, are you a member of the club despite all of the great bylines. i may be a member. you ll believe a mueller/trump meeting when you see it? in other words, i ll believe it when i see it like i don t think it s going to happen. i m a long term card carrying member of that club. i think however much they pare it down, it will be questions if he answers them falsely he ll be subject to criminal charges. there will be questions did you know flynn was under investigation? we have new reports that shows he was. there are probably half a doze other thing that trump doesn t know and mueller does and, yeah, i don t see his sitting down with them under any circumstances where there s criminal penalty and i don t see mueller situation. we knew if we needed any help that the president s words were going to be impactful. the minute we learned how many news organizations got what the president meant to say, phone calls afterwards, i know yours was among them. absolutely. they re trying to make the part, this is an opinion, not a command. that s because they understand there is a line. that s where they ve drawn the line. he can express his opinion, they can say he wants to shut it down. there may be a moment he can change his mind. he s been convinced and fired rod rosenstein, firing bob mueller would create such a blow back against them? what he s trying to do is in effect continue to shape public opinion to make sure his base and maybe some other people believe this investigation isn t legitimate. there isn t no reason to believe what might come out of it that might come out of this investigation and to prepare the ground with what will lay the groundwork when we hear about the investigation. jill colvin, we mentioned three whole news media briefings for the month of july from the white house. they are, i should point out 1-0 for august so far. we had one today. the president is about to go down for ten days. rush limbaugh was able to talk to him today. is the philosophy going to be acknowledgment, deep dark in the west wing or in the residence don t that he d like to take that back today? i don t know on his part. in the residence? probably not. a lot of people in the building wish he wouldn t have done what he did. when you get back to the situation with mueller and the interview, i think a lot of people are going to interpret it in a somewhat panicked the way. the notion that he s giving ground. to me it indicates a position of strength that he when you look at this new reporting. if it s true that mueller has already talked to we know he has talked to previously mcbegan and they have already testified to him that, yes, trump has been presented with a time line and evidence of the fact that the fbi was investigating flynn before he had his conversation with comey telling comey to layoff. there s memos, documentation president s words, just days ago the times reported that mueller is examining all the president has said about jeff sessions as part of his wide-ranging obstruction investigation. he can throw this morning s tweet on the pile. here with us to talk more about it, clint watts, former fbi special agent. his latest messing with the enemy, surviving in a social media world, hack eers. i have to ask you if you came across the type of behavior we re seeing from the nation s top executive in your old day job at the fbi, how would that alter your investigation? what would that do? it adds to the pile. it continues the time line. several interesting thing about this obstruction angle, hearing negotiation from the mueller team about taking written responses to questions and then sitting down for an interview. i m sure isn t that just to get him in the door? it is. it can play very much to the president s disadvantage because strategically, he doesn t like to leave very much. he ll be working with so he s going to have to go in and understand and know what the state said, the president is at a huge disadvantage. he doesn t know everyone what mueller has talked to, what they have told him and what documents, texts, also match up to a time line. we ve seen here on nbc news. well, comey when i got rid of him, it was because of the russia thing. these republicans are very damning. even dpe not actually obstruction. it s the attempt to be struck in terms of how the investigation progresses. the mueller team probably has all of the data it needs to ask the questions, have the president come in, it s very difficult for the president to be consistent with the written statement and the bottom line. any acknowledgment by those around the president that his tone isn t always that of an innocent man? reporter: absolutely. his lawyers, his legal advisors, you know, around a year ago when he first started building up the legal team really emphasized to him that you cannot be making public attacks against mueller or against this investigation. they were successful. last time trump would say no collusion and he pretty much tamped down in the personal attacks on mueller but that strategy he felt wasn t really working for him and there was a moment there was a particularly activist michael could he heen raced and he had already been intesting the water and the rhetoric. he had been told this investigation would be done by 2018 with his lawyers. he continues to see voompt from people in his administration and campaign. that was the moment he said, forget this. i m going on full attack mode. rudy giuliani was brought in to be the public attack dog of the client. it is a major share we were when the latest advice. you wrote about the latest stage and looked at it in another way, it looks like mueller is trying to say whatever you need to do to get the guy in here, get him in the door. that s typically how these negotiations work. yes. to the point the guests were making earlier, doesn t look like mueller is caving. mueller really knows the answer to a lot of his questions and the point clint was making, to some extent, the trump does know what the documents are out there. they know what the witnesses have said to some extent. mueller has more, many, many more pieces of this puzzle than the president s team does. he knows the answer. he wants to get those on record. around obstruction, one of the main ones was to determine the press s impact. they want to give us and that is typical for how things go. any of these sort of, you know, carefully core rio graphed negotiations. he s agreed to stick around and we re going to put his web training to use. clint, our thanks for now and shannon, our thanks for coming on. coming up, incredibly expensive men s wear, wire homes. why are transfers from bank accounts in cypress. when the 11th hour continues. friel much paul manafort enters tomorrow. prosecutors talked about how manafort made his money in the u skran and how they contend he presented it to the united states. they have piles of evidence on how he paid for things largely through foreign bank transfers. we re guessing not a lot of members of our audience have paid for things through foreign bank transfers. the president who has sought to distance himself from his former chairman did weigh in today writing, quote, looking back on history who was treated worst, alfonse, killer or paul than ford. darling now serving solitary confinement although convicted of nothing. where is the russia collusion. that s our president. here to talk about it, daniel goldman. and rachel is with us. i m sorry for the long day this makes for. talk about what was presented today. the judge s theory that he s not allowing photographs to be displayed in court but he s going to allow the jury photos when they go off some day to deliberate. that s in part because he wants the trying to move quickly. he s been adamant and they re able to move. they were supposed to take three weeks and the government says they will fin next week. you might not want a person knowing how much media coverage this case is getting, but it seems like he might not let them show the jury. in the end they came in, they came in at the end of the day but they did get pictures of the $650,000 ostrich jacket and i think an $18,500 python jacket and all sorts of other very expensive suits. man likes jackets. counselor, a couple of questions for you. first of all, this is a nonsee questered jury. the president is tweeting about the defendant in a way that they can all see proclaiming his innocence. where do we find that? what do we do with that? the judge will inspect the jury. do not read about the case. do not watch television about the case. this is a different world where we re dealing with twitter. i don t know if the judge has instructed the jury not to read twitter but that s what they need to do. we re not see questered like the simpson trial, for example, but they have obstructed the two not to read any newspapers. we have to interrupt our conversation to ask rachel, have you heard such a charge from the judge? no. i m not sure he knows what twitter is. at 78 he will admit it. he always says i would say don t look it up in an encyclopedia, but i m the only person who does that. don t look it up online. assuming they hold to that, they haven t heard the trump tweets. you could be in a coffee shot and it might come across your vision. dan, we did hear he gave the government roles a couple of brush back pitches, shim movement. they keep showing the lavish lifestyle. you can over play that hand. not a time to be a rich guy, but you have to understand the context of this. it s not just that he lived a lavish lifestyle although that is sort of his motive, particularly when the money dried up after he stopped working for kovich in 2014, that he wanted to continue this lavish lifestyle. you also have to be able to show in a tax fraud case that what you declared for your income tax is less than what you actually earned. one way to do that is to show what we call in prosecutor world, unexplained wealth. how can you be playing out $6 million in cash, if, for example, you only declared that you made 1 million. it is very relevant evidence. i think what the judge is getting frustrated with is don t try to over sell it. that s not really what s relevant. what s relevant be is the money not the photograph. so he s trying to stretch that and keep things moving. rachel, what were the hints that rick gates, star witness, former manafort assistant, may not end up taking the stand? so one of the prosecutors did say gates may or may not testify. obviously that caused a lot of commotion. but i think there s not much to it. always prosecutors when told not to put in some evidence because a later witness will testify to it will say, well, we haven t we re not sure that person will testify so we should put it in now to make sure they can account for any possibility, you know, whatever might happen to rick gates. i think he was doing that the way prosecutors do and he did sort of immediately walk it back and saying particularly that s true of any witness. it would be shocking if rick gates didn t testify. he is a key witness in this case. yes. and the defense is planning to blame everything on rick gates but i m sure prosecutors were preparing for that. counselor, i have time for a yes or no? yes, but i gave you a one word answer. the prosecution did not include gates very prominently in the opening statements. that would indicate they would certainly be calling him. the fact that they didn t is interesting. they didn t try the case with gates as a witness. great thanks to our two guests. terrific segment. daniel and rachel, thank you both very much. coming up, you may have seen them displaying the letter q. they are a conspiracy group willing to believe, say, perpetuate just about anything. their story when we come back. . try metamucil, and begin to feel what lighter feels like. it was always our singular focus, a distinct determination. to do whatever it takes, use every possible resource. to fight cancer. and never lose sight of the patients we re fighting for. our cancer treatment specialists share the same vision. experts from all over the world, working closely together to deliver truly personalized cancer care. specialists focused on treating cancer. using advanced technologies. and more precise treatments than before. working as hard as we can- doing all that we can- for everyone who walks through our doors. this is cancer treatment centers of america. and these are the specialists we re proud to call our own. treating cancer isn t one thing we do. it s the only thing we do. expert medicine works here. learn more at cancercenter.com cancer treatment centers of america. appointments available now. q con spspiricist at the trump event. qanon stormed the great awakening. he said, this is the calm before the storm. that launched us into the q being military intelligence. talking to all of us. letting us know what s going on behind the scenes, letting us know the covert battle. what can you do? spread it. combat the mainstream media. we re fighting a battle on all fronts. there is a q coin. here is the comment from trump that gave this group a lot of fuel. a photo op during a white house dinner for military commanders and their spouses. note what the president says here which would normally be filed during the toss off work. what s your thoughts? talk. it s a storm. what s the storm? military people, i will tell you that. what storm, mr. president? you ll find out. thank you, everybody. calm before the storm. nbc news reporter ben cohen covers this and has been looking into the group and writing about them. we ve asked clint watts, former fbi agent to stick around. ben, i guess their motives and beliefs, what else should we know about them? unfortunately, you got it all right. there s not much to know. this is a conspiracy theory that donald trump is doing everything right. anything that looks like he s doing it wrong is the right thing. they ve misconstrued typos to make it look like he s in on it. at the end of the day this is a situation where people on the internet can t grapple with the reality of the situation. it s to take out all of the disinformation. that s what you see here, they ve accused people from celebrities to politicians of a sex ring. it s pizza gate. it s amped up with the help of people on twitter, reddit and facebook. you do your work as we do ours in a free society where it s hard to limit this kind of thing. it s hard to squelch or suppress it. look at the climate this is coming up in. right. going back two years ago we saw the kremlin pushing a lot of disinformation around the election. what we re seeing now is a lot of high end production. the videos are very good which makes them more convincing. you re seeing them spread very rapidly. the key phrase there, the calm before the storm. what you can do if you re a good social engineer and you can pick out the phrases and combine them into a conspiracy it seems more convincing to people who don t really know the details. i m not so much worried about russian disinformation, i m worried about american disinformation. it s a public safety issue. we ve seen people show up with shutdowns, if you look at it it has all of the elements of what would be an uprising. so i think it s a really dangerous phenomenon especially when you see it tied to the president and his rally. in the immortal words, it s all fun and games until something goes wrong. we ve already seen it with the pizza gate. a man walks into a pizza parlor and shot it up assuming there was a child sex ring in the basement. there s a guy who blocked the entrance to whoever dam. since he s gotten into jail he s sent a bunch of wild letters to the president. there s a guy in arizona who has for the past few weeks, he has a felony trespassing charge because he believes that a homeless camp he was live streaming it on youtube and facebook until they brought it down. this has real life consequences and it s happening all the time now. the people putting up q signs at trump rallies is not going to help it. clint, how much do you fear this group is getting a wink and a nod from the right people to not stop and what can the government do in a free society? part of the reason why this works is we asked politicians that we see foreign media influence. we had a meeting in the senate. the intelligence committee was talking about the media and disinformation. they can make manipulated truths. they can do that faster than they can identify them and swap them down. in that lag time we have lots of changes happening. one in four don t think they should have their children back united. four in ten don t actually think it s a bad idea for russia maybe to medal in our election. this is like breaking something and dividing it. those people with sophisticated technology that can mine and grab an audience and can slickly produce content can drive major events, political, public safety. you can get people to show up with rifles. this is a dangerous situation and if our politicians are not tamping it down or not saying much or are letting it go, it could be really devastating to our country in the long run. in this world we ve seen people can show up with guns they ve compiled on a 3-d printer. the president has a rally in ohio. we will watch for this and see who turns out in both cases. we d love to have you gentlemen both on again on this subject if you d agree to that. thank you so much for coming on. disturbing topic. appreciate it. much more ahead on the 11th hour when we come right back. hateful. when you come across an indispensable twitter account it can be so useful and refreshing. that s where michael beschloss comes in. he is a long time friend of this broadcast and truth be told of this broadcaster. he s one of the great presidential historians and authors of this time. michael s twitter feed does not disappoint. just in the last few days he has given us richard nixon jumping off a limo, mid town manhattan 1956, general ford s cue card from when he took the oath of office and an early selfie taken by young jackie kennedy. but then today there was this from michael and we couldn t help but notice this it said the 11th hour from this week back in 1974. indeed, for richard nixon it was the proverbial 11th hour as
Rachel Maddow takes a look at the day s top political news stories. many months later, that s after the inauguration, after the election, when fbi director james comey went down to the hill, where he was testifying and said, yes, there was an open probe. by that time, the fbi had also initiated a separate but related investigation and that has now been broken much into public view, much more, because the break came with this very curious indictment of a woman named maria butina. now, she was suspected as an unregistered agent of the russian government. that she was trying to mount this covert influence operation through a conservative group, a gun rights group in the u.s. tonight, the same reporter who had the breakthrough scoop about the steele dossier has a new and obviously provocative question. did alleged russian spy, maria butina, cause a leadership shake up at the nra? the backstory here is an fbi dive, prior to the fact of trump becoming president, into russian attempts to influence the nra, which itself is a weird story. this is their second visit. they go to russia. butina facilitating a meeting with a ceo of a private russian gun manufacturer, which produces a sniper rifle identified by the pentagon not for domestic use or hunting, but actually as a threat to american soldiers. the nra leader is treated to a tour of that facility and a chance to shoot some guns on site. the nra reportedly spent $30 million to support trump in 2016. and on the one hand, they do typically support republican nominees. but here s what you need to know. that was triple the amount they spent on behalf of mitt romney just four years prior. and then in january, you get this report in mcclatchy, the fbi investigating whether the russia used this relationship with the nra to illegally funnel foreign cash into the gun rights organization as part of an effort to support trump. so ever since maria butina was arrested and charged with her conspiracy on behalf of russia, the nra has consistently declined to comment to all kinds of sources and all kinds of publications on this association with what is now an indicted russian spy facing those allegations. now, journalist david corn is raising this question about whether the arrest of butina caused a leadership shake up shortly after at the nra. corn writing that on may 7th, the nra released a curious press release, declaring oliver north, who has his own history as a key player in the iran contra scandal, but is also a standing nra board member, was now, quote, poised to become the new president. this changing of the guard and how it happened was odd, he writes. earlier that day, peter brownell finishing his term announced he would not seek a second annual term for 15 years. the nra leadership followed a pretty specific pattern. we re getting deep into the bylines. but an officer elected by the board to serve two consecutive annual terms as second vice president and two as executive vice president and fweenl as president but the brownwell transition broke the tradition and puzzled many nra watchers. it even puzzled the incoming president of the nra himself. colonel north, what s your reaction to being elected as president of the national rifle association? well, it s an unexpected privilege. i m grateful for the unanimous support of the board. i did not expect that this was going to be happening at this annual meeting, but as soon as i get everything in order in my family, because this was very sudden, i ll be back to take that gavel. those kind of on-camera interviews are useful. may have sounded like a basic question, but we learned from oliver north s own mouth, this was unexpected. this was sudden. he was getting ready to adjust at the last minute. and then you have a true state secret that was unknown, at least to the public at that time. two weeks earlier in april, fbi agents clad in their tactical gear were raiding butina s apartment where they arrested her. now, we know that from these reports. and corn asks, did that fbi investigation of butina lead to nra president peter brownwell s decision in the words of oliver north to suddenly step down? he had, of course, interacted with butina in moscow three years earlier, and the nra could shed light on this. we would love to bring you their side of the story. any comment, with anything vague, anything. but they are declining to comment tonight. same for brownwell. corn reports he s not taking calls. i m joined now by the reporter at the center of the action, david corn, washington bureau chief for mother jones. david, we always learn a lot from you. i appreciate you joining me this friday night. thanks for having me on the weekend. heading into the weekend. you have a lot on this story. as you know, rachel has been on many pieces of this story for quite some time. what has advanced through what s happened with the nra? and let me start with the biggest question. i don t need to save it. reading between the lines of your reporting, are you saying you have reason to believe there is another indictment coming pursuant to the nra case? i m not saying that. i don t know that and i don t make any predictions on what the mueller investigation is going to be or the butina investigation, which is separate. we keep being surprised. and the big picture here, ari, is that we keep learning new things. things that we didn t know a week ago, six months ago. so on all of these investigations involving michael cohen, trump/russia, and of course the nra investigation. but it was, as you noted, it was very puzzling when the nra went through this leadership change. i remember getting the press release and it was weirdly put. oliver north is poised to become nra president. not that he s been chosen nra president, but he s poised to become nra president. and as he put it, it was news to me. and no one could really explain why this very hierarchical organization that had very strict rules of succession in terms of its leadership would all of a sudden pluck a guy out who didn t see it coming and make him president of the nra when he wasn t prepared to be. and then only recently with the butina case, did we learn about this fbi raid. and remember, her partner, romantically and politically, was a guy named paul erickson, who was an nra activist. and he had been working with her to infiltrate, penetrate, make connections with people in the nra and other conservative groups. so if she were raided, as she was, one would expect him to know about it and word to start filtering out. which could have caused a tremendous panic within the nra and might have and might have led to anyone being connected with butina, to be scared, i m not sure about an indictment, but to be scared of being caught up certainly exposure. yes. and pete area brunell was very much involved, having gone on trips that butina organized and having been one of the nra highest officials that she had cultivated. when you look at the nra, which has a lot of seasoned political professionals, people may disagree with their views on gun rights and access to guns, but these are people who have been around washington, made it to the top of one of the most powerful organizations around. how can one benignly or positively explain the complete idiocy or ignorance that would be required to think that an authoritarian country would have a vibrant, private gun rights movement? you know, there s so much puzzling about this. in the book i did with michael isikoff, russian roulette, we wrote about the butina case before it became a criminal case, and we noted that she had shown up at nra events and other conservative events like cpac, the annual get-together, and was really trying to make friends with some of the leading officials. in fact, one fellow, you know, who said, by his own admission, he s in his 60s, doesn t have a lot of hair, has a little bit of a paunch, said, i m not used to young, attractive women coming up to me and saying, will you be my facebook friend? can i snapchat with you? and he thought there was something odd and weird that butina and this russian legislator named aleksandr torshin kept showing up, and that the nra that he was a part of was embracing this pair of boris and natasha. so there were some people who thought this was odd. but certainly if you watch that video of david keene, if you watch the video that was made of peter brunell in 2015, these guys are really having a good time. they re getting off making these russian connections so you re saying there was some suspicion about a snapchat honey pot? yeah. i think i mean, i think some people saw it that way. but it s clear at the time and it was clear in the 2016 campaign that whoever was masterminding this, whether it was torshin or somebody else, they had a pretty good insight into american politics. if you want to work your way into, you know, influencing republicans and conservatives who are now, you know, controlling all arms of government, do it through the nra. and they tried right. what decade warren zivon say? bring lawyers, guns, and money. yeah, the you know what has hit the fan. family show. family show, david! but i give them credit. you re saying it was done out in the open. you re getting at the fact that they were quite adept at infiltrating specifically the conservative wing of american politics in the way they did it. and that gives, of course, insight into what they re accused of with regard to the trump campaign, with j.d. gordon, a trump adviser who sits at the nexus of guns and trump. it s so much fascinating stuff, the final question i have for you we haven t even gotten to, which is the way you continue to figure in this. your report the people have known for a long time. your name and reporting came up in the very controversial debates over the wiretapping of carter page and whether your material was underlying material for that law if wiretap today we see in the little parts, and i shared this with viewers at the top, the little parts that we do glean from what s come out with steele is the fbi assertion that they stopped working with him, because of what he told you and what you published. your response, sir? well, i think we knew that already. we certainly reported that in the book, michael isikoff and myself. so it s not a surprise. it confirms that. and you know, the point i would make is that when i talked to christopher steele in the very end of october, 2016, he was talking to me very reluctantly. he was scared. the material that he had found, connections, allegations between the of interactions between trump and the russian government frightened him as a veteran counterintelligence officer. and he had taken his material to the fbi, had been working with them, but he felt this information needed to get out in some way before the election. that the american public had to be told this. so, he david, had the fbi publicly confirmed that on the record before? no, not at all. so why now? in fact, they were doing everything do you know why now? excuse me? do you know why now? well, the reason is, the conventional reason, that it was a counterintelligence operation that was ongoing and jim comey and others have explained that they don t make that information public, even when members of congress ask. now, steele s position was that he thought there was enough connections, enough to worry about without knowing the full picture that the fbi should have worked harder, you know, at least the u.s. government, someone in the u.s. government, to make more of that available to the public before they cast votes on november 8th. so that s why he talked to me. when he did that, the fbi said, okay, now too much of your own, you know, of a lone wolf doing this on your own. and we don t want to work with you anymore. but i think he knew that this would get him in trouble with the bureau. he thought it was important that the public knew something about this. it s fascinating and it s a story that obviously has gotten deeper and you ve been there from the start. i do appreciate your time tonight, sir. well, always good to be with you. you know that. thank you, david. we turn now to more news on this potential legal quandary for the president. i m going to be joined in just a moment by the pulitzer prize-winning reporter who s actually tracked donald trump s business dealings as closely as just about any reporter. now, looking at those legal questions, this reporter began this day with a scoop of his own about a notable spike in revenue at donald trump s new york hotel. after two years of sagging revenue, that hotel suddenly gets 13% more in the first quarter. the hotel s general manager says the spike was from, quote, a last-minute visit to new york by the crown prince of saudi arabia. those hotel stays by the prince s entourage was enough to boost revenue for the entire quarter. it s not clear from the trump organization or the saudis whether they paid for those rooms. the question here is whether the president is violating what is known as the emoluments clause. last week, of course, a case got a green light for a lawsuit against the president over this very allegation. now, after the washington post published this story about the spike in revenue, the attorney general of new york announced her state also probing the same question. is the president violating this ban? joining me now is david fahrenthold, political reporter for the washington post. what s most important here? the big picture we re seeing here is that we really don t know, even 18 months into the trump presidency, we don t really know even the basics about what foreign governments are spending money at the president s properties. what foreign governments are actually using trump s businesses to pay donald trump, who then is overseeing u.s. relationships with those countries. this letter from the gm at the trump hotel in new york indicating this big group of saudis came in and it boosted their revenue for the whole quarter. you know, that s just an indication of what s possibly out there that we don t know about. you obtained this letter, but it was sort of put out by the trump business side themselves. they put themselves on blast. was that out of you know why they did that? um, no. this letter was meant for investors in the trump hotel in new york. so the trump hotel is owned the individual hotel rooms are owned by outside investors. and so this letter was meant for them, to sort of reassure them. as we said in the story, it had been a couple of bad years at that hotel. 2016 and 2017, the numbers had gone down. this was the general manager saying, hey, things are looking up again. this quarter has been good. and i ll explain why. basically saying, you know, i m working for you. i m trying to make the situation better. here s how we did it this time. do you think we should infer something negative about the trump organization s refusal to provide actual accounting of what they re donating back? i mean, i don t really know what we can infer from it. the thing you can tell from the way they ve reacted to these questions is that the trump organization is a private business. and it has always been a very private business. it had always kept as many details about its operation as it could secret. so even now that donald trump is in the white house, the trump organization, which is still owned by him, still seems to see itself in the same light, we re a private business, we do what we want, to the degree that there are legal requirements for us to disclose things about our business, we ll do it. but we won t go beyond that. the idea that there might be some sort of need for transparency above and beyond what the law requires, to be to reassure people that the president wasn t sort of conflicted between his business interests and the public interests, they don t see that at all. they haven t responded to that at all. so we only know about his business dealings with foreign governments kind of through media reports, through dribs and drabs here and there. right, and through as often what you have been able to obtain by old-fashioned shoe leather reporting. david fahrenthold with the washington post, thank you so much. thank you. we have a lot more in this show. we will 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. jimmy s gotten used to his whole yup, he s gone noseblind. odors. he thinks it smells fine, but his mom smells this. luckily for all your hard-to-wash fabrics. .there s febreze fabric refresher. febreze doesn t just mask, it eliminates odors you ve. .gone noseblind to. and try febreze unstopables for fabric. with up to twice the fresh scent power, you ll want to try it. .again and again and maybe just one more time. indulge in irresistible freshness. febreze unstopables. breathe happy. ensure® 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. one of them, cindy laporta, testified. she is one of paul manafort s accountants. and in light of what she has confessed to on the stand, it s quite clear why she wanted that immunity deal that the judge approved. remember, yesterday s revelation was from manafort s long-time bookkeeper testifying that he went into something of a financial turmoil in 2015. that was before he offered his volunteer services to trump. and today, it was manafort s longtime accountant backing up that same story, testifying manafort s income dropped conspicuously after 2014, and that despite repeatedly asking manafort if he or his family had any foreign accounts, manafort would say no. now, this is around the time of the day when paul manafort s wife, kathleen, left the courtroom. reports are that she was dabbing her eyes and she was visibly upset. and it s what happened next, when cindy laporta, the first but theness to testify with immunity, took the stand. and this could be, if you look back at this trial, everything that happens before the trial is speculation. when we look at what s actually going on this week, this could be the turning point. laporta alleging that in september of 2015, this was when manafort was in financial trouble, she gave him an estimate of the taxes he owed, and she was told manafort couldn t pay it. quote, rick that s rick gates, who s also expected to testify said it was too high. manafort didn t have the money. manafort s solution, laporta testified, was to inflate the amount of a loan which would then reduce on paper his reported income, and thus his income tax, and in turn, what he owed the government. in other words, tax fraud, tax evasion. which, as a professional involved in this business, cindy laporta did understand. so then you have mewer s prosecutor ask, what was your understanding at the time of whether that was appropriate? laporta replies, it s not appropriate. and she confessed she went along with it and helped manafort falsify those critical documents. i could have refused to file the tax return. that would have exposed the firm laporta reported. i could have called them liars. but manafort was a longtime client of the firm. i didn t want to do that either. she added, quote, i very much regret it. and that is immunity witness number one. there are four more people who have immunity who are ready to testify, plus the star witness, rick gates. we turn now to our in-house experts. josh garcia, and joyce vance, a former federal prosecutor as well as an msnbc analyst. they both kept a close eye on the case. josh, you were in the courtroom today. how damaging was cindy laporta s testimony and could you glean at all from the mood of the jury or the faces that she was hurt at all by the fact that she was in on the bad things she was talking about? i didn t get a sense that she was hurt. i mean, they knew that she had immunity. but she did seem like she was someone who was along for the ride here. unlike even gates, she didn t have any direct financial interests in these offenses that were being alleged. she was just accused of, essentially, having accepted what her clients wanted her to do, rather than resisting them. but i thought, ari, this was by far the most damaging day yet for manafort in the trial. i felt like some of the other evidence earlier in the case about the tax issues that he was spending way too much and transferring money in from overseas, it s still a little murky, you know if his tax returns were off, how much were they off? by $100,000? is that a lot on $1 million? does that amount to fraud? i don t know. but the stuff we heard about today seemed like very specific transactions, not only tax fraud, but a lot of very damaging evidence on bank fraud also came in through cindy laporta today, where she was specifically involved in apparently forged documents being turned over to banks. and it just sounded like the kind of conduct that is very intentional and very hard to explain away. it s fascinating, coming from you, having been there every day in court. because, joyce, i think josh is referring to something that prosecutors know well, which is that lawyers and accountants and definitely judges love paper evidence. but normal people respond to stories. and cindy laporta told a story today. that she was under pressure, that this was wrong, but she went along with paul manafort s alleged crimes. do you think that kind of story is critical to mueller winning this case? it s the perfect sort of complement to the documentary evidence, to all of the paper that the jury is seeing. and it s not a problem if the evidence feels a little bit murky at this stage. because the prosecution s job right now is to put facts and it in front of the jury. and then in their closing argument, they ll get to assemble all of those facts and do a cohesive story that will be used to convince the jury of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. the story, the sort of almost human interest that they hear today from laporta, i think is helpful in getting the jury through to that point. josh, on the idea of hiding the foreign accounts, how damning was that? because, taken together, it seems to go to manafort s deliberate criminal intent. that s the way mueller is playing it forward. but again, trials have two sides and i think we can definitely expect manafort s defense counsel, when it s their turn to say, after this entire probe, all of this attention is on whether he said or correctly remembered all of this foreign stuff, even if he got it wrong, how big a deal is that? well, you know, they did say that in addition to sending the typical questionnaire that goes out to clients about whether they have foreign bank accounts that the accountant said, well, we e-mailed them specifically and said, we want to ask you again, do you have foreign accounts? do you have signature authority over them? and manafort or gates in various instances wrote back no. i think that that s problematic, but i do think it could be explained away potentially as an oversight or some confusion about what counts as signature authority. that s what the defense seems to be arguing. i do think, again, that the bank fraud testimony that came in cases where at one point, there was a $1.5 million loan outstanding, and it was a problem when getting another loan. and suddenly there was an eight-month backdated document available saying that loan had been forgiven and it was on stationary that seemed to be kind of shady and a signature that seemed shady, that kind of testimony, i just think is very, very damaging. and as you know, ari, bank fraud, those counts carry a 30-year maximum penalty on each one. the law takes that very, very seriously. and i think there s real trouble on the bank fraud charges for manafort. right. you see real risk there, as you say, this was the best day of the case. final word to you, joyce. when you look at what they re going to do when the when manafort s team gets in the ring, so much of this coverage is what looks bad for him. could you give us any wisdom on what they ll try to do to rebut what josh says has been a tough day? they don t have much of a rebuttal opportunity here. their best argument, the argument that they suggested that they would use in their opening statement is that it wasn t manafort, it was gates. but there was testimony from witness after witness yesterday and today, indicating that manafort was the person who provided them with final details. manafort saw and reviewed every document before it was signed and filed. it will be virtually impossible for them to make that argument. and they ll be stuck, as so many defendants are, simply with arguing that the government didn t present enough evidence to meet its burden of proof and that it s not enough for the jury to think that the defendant might be guilty. that the jury should, in essence, hold the government responsible for proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. doesn t look like the government is going to have a lot of trouble here, though. right. and that the best they can do is say, if you have any doubt, whether maybe rick gates was actually secretly pulling the strings or any doubt whether paul manafort was actually confused, then maybe throw it all away. and i think that speaks to why it s been such a methodical case for mueller s team. my special thanks to joyce and josh. we greatly appreciate it. i will tell you, still ahead, goats can eat your trash. they can trim your grass. they can even help you exercise and nail your perfect yoga position, the downward dog. we are going to explain how goats fit into some very important developments. look at the one on the back. that is that s some serious yoga posing there. that s when we re right back. the fact is, there are over ninety-six hundred roads named park in the u.s. it s america s most popular street name. but allstate agents know that s where the similarity stops. if you re on park street in reno, nevada, the high winds of the washoe zephyr could damage your siding. and that s very different than living on park ave in sheboygan, wisconsin, where ice dams could cause water damage. but no matter what park you live on, one of 10,000 local allstate agents knows yours. now that you know the truth, are you in good hands? 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is this the best we can do? it s hard to track down all these goats. i know what you may be thinking as you watch the news, what are we even talking about? but perhaps these goats are an allegory for vigilance about facts in our trump era and how some people are using energy and diligence to fight assault on the facts and their slow progress could even put them in the running for, yes, goat of fact checking. the greatest of all time, my apologies, but we wanted to at least show you the goat videos. and that story is worthwhile and it s coming up. from the very beginning . it was always our singular focus. to do whatever it takes, use every possible resource. to fight cancer. and never lose sight of the patients we re fighting for. our cancer treatment specialists share the same vision. experts from all over the world, working closely together to deliver truly personalized cancer care. and these are the specialists we re proud to call our own. expert medicine works here. learn more at cancercenter.com appointments available now. well, esurance makes it simple and affordable. in fact, drivers who switched from geico to esurance saved an average of $412. that s auto and home insurance for the modern world. esurance. an allstate company. click or call. paying too much for insurance that isn t the right fit? well, esurance makes finding the right coverage easy. in fact, drivers who switched from geico to esurance saved an average of $412. that s auto and home insurance for the modern world. esurance. an allstate company. click or call. you can barely feel. flonase sensimist helps block six key inflammatory substances. most pills only block one. and six is greater than one. flonase sensimist. for weeks, aclu lawyers have been pushing the trump administration to hand over basic contact information for the families of the migrant kids who have been separated throughout this process, specifically trying to help parents find their kids. last night, they told the government, instead of addresses from moms and dads, what they have received from the trump administration is just vagaries about the parents whereabouts, which could be anywhere from a detention facility to being abroad. of the 572 children in custody, 410 have parents who are not in the u.s., likely because they were deported by trump. the trump administration is now saying this, the aclu should use their resources and network of law firms and volunteers to make contact with those parents abroad. the trump administration, of course, are the ones who deported or separated all of these people. now they want someone else, i guess, the aclu, to clean it up. how s that playing in court? not well. this is the new story. the judge tonight overseeing those court-ordered reunifications says this new trump effort is unacceptable. quote, many of these parents were removed from the country without their child. all of this is a result of the government s, the trump administration separation and inability and failure to track, excuse me and reunite. the reality is for every parent who is not located, there will be a permanently orphaned child and that is 100% the responsibility of the trump administration. i m joined by msnbc correspondent, jacob soboroff, who has reported extensively on this story for years now, before the separation policy kicked in, and before this period of litigation ensued. number one, your view of what was a smackdown of this idea that the aclu should clean up trump s mess. that s exactly what it was. it was a smackdown, a clap back from the judge. and i was in court a week ago tonight, down in san diego, when the judge said he was going to order both of these parties to come up with a plan to reunite the remaining kids. 2,551 was the overall number. 572 is the number of kids that still, months later, haven t been reunited with their parents, ari. and the judge was flabbergasted. he just said, there is no plan. nobody came up with a plan. i ordered you last week to come up with a plan. the administration submitted, in this paperwork, this court filing last night, thursday night, a plan that basically said, you know what, if the aclu really wants to do it that badly, you guys should take the lead and we ll be the supporting role here. right, it s remarkably cynical. you would expect it from other parts of the administration in rhetoric, to go to a judge and say it is pretty wild. it s as if somebody complained that, say, inmates are not being fed meals in prison and the response of the government is, fine, you feed them. you come to the jails and feed them. it doesn t even make sense. just logically, you re the trump administration. you are the ones that put into place this systemic policy to separate all these kids, that had never been done before, to take them away from their parents, to do this as a deterrence policy that nobody else would come into this country illegally. a strategy we know doesn t make sense. and then when the thing doesn t work out, just lake there was no plan in the beginning to put it into place and that s why it was such a disaster, they just decided, you know what, we re not really going to come up with a plan anyways to undo this and we ll ask somebody else to do it. right. so there s a lot of mess there. i do want to hit one positive part that i m curious about your view, because you ve been covering this so closely. you mentioned the filings, right, we have this. this is a government filing. the 572 number is what the trump administration coughed up under pressure. and so while much of this was a complete unforced humanitarian crisis because of trump s orders, what do you think of the fact that over these weeks, we see the court system working, we see the accountability and the pressure on, we see the majority of the families reunited under the combination of public advocacy, public scrutiny, and judges and courts forcing their hand. it s an extraordinary thing, and an inspiring thing, quite frankly, for me, making the journey down there, being inside these detention centers and seeing the children in cages, knowing that talking about this stuff, the public pressure not only to get the president of the united states to sign that executive order and stop the policy, but to go into the court, without this judge. said to chris hayes in the last hour, probably 5,000 children that were separated instead of 2,551. in the first day, over 1800 kids are placed with the family or a sponsor and the remaining 572, he is forcing the government to go out there, put a point person in place and reunite the rest of these folks. you ve been so close to it, i think that s important. it s not to say this is making things better. it s making them less terrible for people but for the people affected less terrible is something the court system is achieving and that s important. jacob, thank i for all your contributions to the story. still ahead tonight, a lot of paper but not a lot of time. we ll explain ahead. [upbeat music] got his answer and it is no. the answer officially, quote, we currently expect to be able to complete this review by the end of october 2018, which is, golly, pretty close to the midterms. the national archives says it potentially over 900,000 pages of documents to produce just from the republicans request. this is a key space to watch. ooh, heaven is a place on earth uhp. i didn t believe it. again. ooh, baby, do you know what that s worth? i want to believe it. [ claps hands ] ooh i m not hearing the confidence. okay, hold the name your price tool. power of options based on your budget! and! we ll make heaven a place on earth yeah! oh, my angels! ooh, heaven is a place on earth [ sobs quietly ] ooh, heaven is a place on earth ito take care of anyct messy situations.. and put irritation in its place. and if i can get comfortable keeping this tookus safe and protected. you can get comfortable doing the same with yours. preparation h. get comfortable with it. in his first speech to congress. according to data provided by the department of justice, the vast majority of individuals convicts of terrorism and terrorism related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country. sounds important, if true. well, the editor of law fair ben wittes, noticed it didn t sound like something the doj would have produced. so his team debunked the core of that claim. it appeared they distorted separate data from the national security division of the justice division. but he kept pressing for the data he claimed was his source. finally this week he got an answer. there are no such records in justice department files. in fact, he notes not a single e-mail, not a report, nothing. no responsive records located the doj said. wittes says that means the president stood up and made a representation to congress about immigrants that wasn t true and attribute beautied it to the justice department data which doesn t exist. this is a governing problem. democrats in congress pressing the administration on the issue of how this happened and who was involved so they can prevent it. the wider context is this forced fact checking comes as the president calls the press the enemy of the people and is in a fight with the new york times editor-in-chief this week and the united nations over his attacks in the free press. the doj data reveals a separate prong of donald trump s strategy that should be exposed. undercut the factual press a. if this all sounds exhausting, it may be supposed to be exhausting. he used federal transparency laws to expose the lie and make trump s own justice department confirm it. just like the washington post continues to check the
encourages everyone to have of an open dialogue about issues facing children today. as you know mrs. trump has traveled the country and world talking to children about their well being, healthy living and the importance of responsible online behavior with her be best initiative. her platform centers around visiting organizations hospitals and schools. and she would be open to visiting the i promise school in akron. the i promise school is the school lebron james opened, who in an interview said he would not sit across from the president. the other part of the statement i find notable, ana, responsible online behavior coming on the heels of a tweet the president of the united states sent out insulting someone. ana. exactly. i also want to ask you, boris, about this familiar face. someone who used to to work in the white house apparently spotted boarding air force one. what can you tell bus hope hicks showing up? yeah, that s right, the former director of communications for the white house making a surprise appearance today, not only in new jersey but also boarding air force one apparently on the way to the president s rally in in ohio. you recall earlier in year in february she testified before congress she told white lies on behalf of president trump. one day later she announced her resignation. within a month she left the white house. it s surprising to see her on the landscape again. but we know that president trump occasionally even officials that have left his campaign or left the administration he often keeps in contact with them. corey lewandowski is another example. we ll see if hope appears on stage tonight. i find it interesting because i i remember a few weeks ago the president hinted at maybe she wants to come back to the white house. perhaps more to that. thank you, as you continue to cover ohio where the president will be speaking in a couple of hours with the back drop of the drama around lebron james and the first lady s public opposition to her husband s tweet coming hours before that rally in ohio. lebron james home state. let s talk about it with cnn The latest news and information from around the world with host Ana Cabrera. but, you know, the president uses the bully pulp it on a number of occasions to bully people and not to unite and bring the country together. and so this is just one example of that. and i don t expect le stop doing it. do you think he is going to be able to let melania s statement roll off his back heading into the rally, knowing he doesn t let go easily the slightest critique. we have seen him in condition contrast with another family member, ivanka trump saying the media is not the enemy of the people. we have seen melania have her own voice in the administration. draw contrast with her husband. we will see what his reaction is tonight. he has a rally where he is in campaign mode. we know what that looks like. and he is supposed to be there for a republican candidate, kathryn, because this is a district trump won by 11 points. and now look at the latest polls when you look at the republican versus the democrat here, the i think of conor lamb, in pennsylvania. . white house aides tell us that president trump is doing more rally. the third in this week in three states. they believe it lifts his mood and provides distraction from the russia investigation. do you think that s true. i think this is absolutely about playing the greatest hits. what we should expect is lots of crooked hillary, fake news media, trump is besieged and persecuted by the russia hoax. black athletes are unamerican. all of that. because that distracts from unflattering news coming out about trump himself, about his former campaign chairman, paul march. that trial is in the news. i m sure he doesn t want more attention paid to that. or if there is attention it s the sense of it s unfair and it s a witch hunt and they re going after me. the campaign rallies are not about supporting any particular candidate which is ostensibly the objective here. though we know that mueller is looking at tweets and the body of evidence in this investigation just earlier this week he was you know seen as directing his attorney general to end this probe entirely. which speaks volumes about where the president is. he is also trying to win a pr argument, kind of in the court of public opinion on this. trying to say, you know, look i ll cooperate with mueller. we really know how much legal exposure he could be. ladies good to have you with us. thank you very much kathryn, katlyn. nice to see you. she was hiding in plain sight, a suspected spy who had access to the state department and secret service caught meeting with russian bell. how she got away with working inside the u.s. embassy in moscow for more than a decade. we ll discuss. oh, no. oh, no. oh, god. caught on tape. proof of why it s never a -we re in a small room. what?! -welcome. -[ gasps ] a bigger room?! -how many of you use car insurance? -oh. -well, what if i showed you this? -[ laughing ] ho-ho-ho! -wow. -it s a computer. -we compare rates to help you get the price and coverage that s right for you. -that s amazing! the only thing that would make this better is if my mom were here. what?! an unexpected ending! i couldn t catch my breath. it was the last song of the night. 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®. to help protect yourself from a stroke. [stomach gurgles] when you have nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea. girl, pepto ultra coating will treat your stomach right. nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea. try new pepto with ultra coating. okay here a story ripped straight from the pages of a summer spy novel. a senior trump administration official tells cnn that a woman working for years at the u.s. embassy in moscow was caught red handed passing information to russian intelligence. we know she is a russian national the secret service hired more than a decade ago. she came under suspicion during a security review and fired last summer after officials discovered she had regular unthorsoned meetings with russian intelligence officials. cnn law enforcement analyst and former secret service agent jonathan wakro is joining us to discuss how big of a deal is this. this is a big deal. the secret service released a press statement stating that this video didn t have access to classified or secret information. that s true. the way that the u.s. embassy and consulates are set up there is a bifurcating of information of information that can be accessed by foreign service nationals and those used by u.s. citizens working abroad as part of the diplomatic mission. i don t think that any classified information was ever leaked. but she had access to email, the intranet. how can they be sure? again we know that russia is fairly fikted right when it comes to cybersecurity. right. russia is playing the long game here of intelligence collection. they re in the targeting one specific piece of information they wanted from this woman. they wanted over a longer period of time information about the agents, the case work, budgeting, a lot of administrative stuff that may see deminimum must to some. but to a sophisticated russian intelligence collection gathering operation it s critical. it fits different pieces along their puzzle line to string together their counterintelligence operations against u.s. assets not only in russia but worldwide. she is able to be there for teen years. she may not have information at her finger tips that they are concerned about as you spoke of, no classified information. abilitily. that she would have access to. she would know who is who get a lay of the land. this is a classic threat of the insider threat. the person that s a trusted betrayer. someone that has shone up every day, reporting shows that she was a quiet woman backup she was a mother, married. just went about her business every single day. she did interact with you know law enforcement sources as part of her job. where she was the remember, u.s. law enforcement has no authority in a foreign country. they have to rely on the host country to execute on law enforcement mission. she played the bridge between russian law enforcement and u.s. assets. that was part of her job. and that was disclosed by the secret service. however, what other information was she giving? what other types of information was it, about upcoming casework, was it about agents that could potentially be you know recruited or targeted? personal information on those agents. ? individual married or not? again, it goes into the larger collection process that the russians are running around, you know, u.s. diplomatic endeavors worldwide. when you talk about the vulnerability that maybe has always existed because of that, just the nature of the work and the location of the work. are there safeguards to avoid this situation. there are. you have to how you deal with an insider threat you have to have access control to information. you have to have it very segmented and siloed especially in a foreign locale. information is off to the side. but complacency kills in this time. he has been there more than ten years. they rotated in and out. she was the constant. so just that little bit, the drip, drip, drip of information that she was able to collect and potentially give over to intelligence services in russia, it s damaging. it s damaging to overall national security picture. thank you so much. jonathan. i appreciate it. good to have you with us. almost all undocumented immigrants living in the u.s. don t have health insurance. and that has some of them now waiting until they are on the brink of death to get emergency treatment. cnn s sanjay gupta takes a look at the crisis. ner literally pushing them themselves to the brink of death to get treatment. they are. am i overstating that? 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how can i share new plans virtually? how can i download an e-file? virtual tours? zip-file? really big files? in seconds, not minutes. just like that. like everything. the answer is simple. i ll do what i ve always done. dream more, dream faster, and above all. now, i ll dream gig. now more businesses, in more places, can afford to dream gig. comcast, building america s largest gig-speed network. we devoted a lot of coverage lately to the well being of undocumented immigrants coming into this country and the conditions they face when crossing the border. but those who have been in the united states for years face their own serious health concerns. and our chief medical correspondent dr. sanjay gupta has one mother s story. in order to really understand what s going on here you re going to need to suspend disbelief. lucia is dying. her lungs drowning in fluid. her electrolytes fluctuating which would willy and heart precariously close to shutting done. this 51-year-old mother has end stage renal decease. full on kidney failure. the function of the kidney is to bilt filter blood of toxins and fluid. people on average live 10 to 14 days when kidneys stop working. to continue living you need a process to filter blood, which is a dialysis machine. for most that treats the. . but here is the thing lucia is allowed treatment only when she essentially arrives at death s door. the emergency medical treatment act of 1986 says hospitals in the united states must care for anyone with a medical emergency, regardless of the citizenship or ability to pay. but they are not obligated to prevent that emergency from happening in the first place. what is happening inside the body. for these patients, because they only come in once a week instead of the three times per week excess fluid stays in their body and goes into their runnings, into their legs. separate from that the toxins nld up. one of the most important being potassium which at high levels makes the heart stop. this is no way to live. about as close to death as you can get. and what s more, research shows that treating patients with emergency dialysis versus standard dialysis is nearly four times more expensive because the patients like lucia are so much sicker when they come for treatment. they are literally pushing themselves to the brink of death. they are. to get this treatment. am i overstating that. not at all. there is no question it works. lucia. look at lucia now. after dialysis removed ten liters of fluid from her body. how are you feeling. right now i feel good. still, lucia is always worried. mostly about her family, especially her son alex. he watches his mother steadily decline every single week. this is their life. how hard has this been on you on your family? it s been really hard. it s been really hard for my family. the worst is for my son. he worries about me. because just a few days from now, like clockworks lucia will once again go to precipice of death just so she can live. i ll tell you it s unclear how long lucia can carry on like this. week after week going to this precipice of death. a kidney transplant would improve life and cull down on health care costs. she is not eligible for that. she is eligible to donate her other organs whenever she passes. that is the reality of the situation for people like lucia. dr. gupta, thank you for that reporting. it became an iconic political blooper. just cross this this open place. um-hum. more than 25 years after president bush seemed to marvel as a grocery store scanner president trump may have had a supermarket slip-up. we ll explain next in the newsroom. again. ooh, baby, do you know what that s worth? i want to believe it. [ claps hands ] ooh i m not hearing the confidence. okay, hold the name your price tool. power of options based on your budget! and! we ll make heaven a place on earth yeah! oh, my angels! ooh, heaven is a place on earth [ sobs quietly ] place. um-hum. you have to go where the code is. actually it s got a band. that was president george h. w. bush, of course in what became known as his infamiliarous grocery store scanner moment which is apparent for politicians seem out of touch. more than 25 years later president trump had his own supermarket slip-up talking about voter id. listen. we believe that only american citizens should vote in american elections. which is why the time has come for voter id. like everything else. you know if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card. you need id. you go out and you want to buy anything, you need id. and you need your picture. the internet went wild on the idea of needing id for groceries. inspiring mock ups of shopping identification cards. and this instagram post from the late show we card under 18 no groceries. well joining us niepow presidential cnn historian douglas brinkley. when you heard that did it bring back memories of bush and supermarket or are the overblown. i thought about george bush and he paid dearly. he tried to say i eat pork riends and play horse shoen a he was from a wealthy family. it makes him seem incredibly detached from everyday life. trump says even worse. it s not about quizzed on the price of bread or milk. it s just thinking you need an id to buy groceries in america. that s somebody that doesn t understand the american way, that every moment right now everybody is buying groceries without ids. but it s the thing that refuse attention to he retract or say i m out of touch or make a joke. instead i blames the critics. i mean he could have also made a clarification. maybe he was talking of buying alcohol at the grocery store. i don t know. but it seems kind of silly. but historically the little political slip-ups do have staying power as you point out. but look at the others. gerald ford biting in the tamale without eating a husk. and eating a flel cheese stake with cheese whizz and dan quail spelling potato with an e. add a little bit to the end. spell that again. add one little bit on the end. potato. how is it spelled? you re right phonetically but what else there you go. all right. that kid was writing in cursive amgts. i mean what is it about the moments that stay in the public psyche doug. because bush 41 was a one termer and dan quail was a one-term vice president. all of us misspell words but if you are giving a lesson to school kids and misspell it lives eternally. wherever dan quail goes today people mention on daily basis. hey, potato man. it sticks to you. i think trump will get away with this. but there was a more menacing comment that trump made which is about voter registration-his desire to kind of stop disenfranchise voters trying to make this more of an id america. that doesn t go well with libertiarians people he has to court. and so it was a very muddled moment of a difficult week for president trump. there is one president that he loves to compare himself to. and that would be abraham lincoln. here he is this week. i could be more presidential than any president in history except for possibly abe lincoln with the big hat. i don t know. abe. abe looked pretty presidential. what do you think? he is tough. i admit it abe lincoln is tough. but we love abe lincoln. do you think he holds lincoln out as a goal post of sorts? i know he has never read a book about abraham lincoln. i actually asked president trump when he got elected about presidents. and he said he never read a book or bioography of log innen. he just knows the cutout characteristic of linking with the beard and hot. that s what he reflects on. but i think he is being funny. he knows donald trump that the big criticism of him is that he doesn t seem serious main. he blew it in helsinki. he doesn t seem to be up to speed on understanding how history is a tool to guide him through his white house years. hence, he made the lincoln group. and it s so self-agrandizing, only lincoln maybe is better than me. but truth is if you look at presidential polls donald trump right now is ranking around warren harden and james buchanan. hold that thought for a second. because i talked about polls and abe lincoln in a tweet writing highest poll numbers in the history of the republican party and that includes abe linkin and ronald reagan. there must be something wrong. check that poll. lincoln died more than 70 years before modern polls were taken. that aside, it seems clear he is obsessed with that. and he wants that number one ranking. he wants the number one ranking. and rinken is everybody s number one. the problem was when lincoln won. there was 7 states not in the union. and limited to the northern part of the country. we were fighting a civil war and people weren t taking quasi scientific polling of a president. he is just trying to have his name. trunk and lincoln aren t they dollar. the thing is all presidents try to claim lincoln. remember barack obama launched his presidential campaign from springfield. and george w. bush even now says his favorite president is lincoln. the recent director of the bush library in dallas is now the director of the lincoln library. everybody likes linking because whenever you get beat up no bad you think you have it it lincoln had it worse. he ends up being number one. doug, always fascinating conversation when you are on thank you. thank you. one of the most powerful men in television staying silent amid sexual harassment allegations. the growing controversy surrounding cbs ceo les moonves next. plans.ess it comes with a ton of entertainment options. great, can you sign for this? yeah. hey, uh.. what s in that one? that s a shark. new and only with at&t, you can get unlimited data, 30+ channels of live tv, and your choice of things like hbo or amazon music. more for your thing. that s our thing. visit att dot com. open today now has the first lady weighing in, seeming to take sides with lebron james. also there has been a sighting of hope hicks apparently traveling with the president today. it s not clear why she travels with the president after she resigned her post as communications director in february. but we are staying on top of all of this. again he is going to ohio to campaign in a very close race it appears going into tuesday s special election. in a district that has for a very, very long time gone republican, a deep red district. it has gone red in 88 of the past 98 years, if you can believe it. and the latest polls show this race twoon the republican and democrat neck and neck. he is going to campaign for the republican trey balderson. we stay on top of that as the evening continues. in the meantime cbs chairman and executive les moonves is staying silent about the sexual harassment allegation that is threatened to end his career. this week the network s board agreed to hire two law firms to conduct a full scale investigation after a report by the new yorker ronnen farrows accusesed of executive of making unwanted sexual advances advances over the years. in many facets of the company careful not to overgeneralize but there are a string of examples machinistsed in litigation and complaints inside the company where people said this happened to me too. this wasn t just les moonves this was a culture of protecting powerful people. many of the charges are decades old and pre-date moonves s arrival at cbs but this week the l.a. times reported cbs board members that several months ago los angeles police investigated moonves for an alleged sexual assault. joining us the founder of two women advocacy sites, the list and change the ratio. i m glad to have your voice on the show this afternoon. we have seen a number of other high profile people quickly lose jobs of allegations of sexual harassment. charlie rose at cbs. why do you think cbs is handling this differently holding back before taking action? well, i think there are a few reasons. i think probably one of the top reasons is the way the stock performed following these revelations from the new yorker. it tanked. who likes when a stock tanks. and cbs is a very big company. but also les moonves is very paufl. we are talking about the consolidation of power over years. the head of a network, someone extremely powerful. and these and the instinct of these companies is button down the hatches. go to the mattresses any other metaphor you might want. no, no we did never did anything appropriate. our kurmt is great. but if you read the new yorker piece there were harrowing ails of less moonves not only making unwanted sexual advances but enacting vengeance against women who rejected him. and there were economic and professional repercussions as a result that derailed many careers. so this is serious. and it wasn t just moonves. the larger question is the. right. the per missive atmosphere at cbs for men who misbehaved. and the tenure of jeff bigger from 60 minutes is called into question with the reports. and i will add that this is not the first time. this may be the first time the reports are officially coming out. but it s hardly not the first time it s hardly the first time that, you know, reporters have been investigating. right. and involving cbs specifically, i mentioned charlie rose there a moment ago. but the president of cbs films, terrie press, a woman put out a statement regarding the moonves situation. here is what she says. i do not believe it s my place to question the accounts put forth by the women but i find myself asking that if we are examining the industry as it existed decades before through the lens of 2018 should we also discuss a path to learning, reconciliation and forgiveness? outrage is a valuable commodity but its usefulness can be diminished by overuse and understanding and learning from the past is the way towards a future that reflects real change. again, as far as we know the allegations involving moonves are all from decades ago before the current me too movement which she seems to be referencing here. should moonves be given a second chance? is it possible he learned from lessons that have you know emerged after the me too movement or during this most recent me too movement. i don t understand i don t understand why these predators and these perpetrators of not just bad behavior but of, you know, of an overafternooning culture that was damaging to women these are just the ones willing to speak up on the record why are we giving him the benefit of the doubt? so far i haven t seen any evidence that he deserves the benefit of the doubt. so apologies for that. see if i can get rid of that. sorry. anyway, i think that in this case, anything from a cbs executive should probably be questioned because the i mean they have a vested interest in the result of this investigation not disrupting their corporate environment. but to say that outrage has its place but not always has its place, i mean that s very disingenuous. there is a lot to be outraged about in the reports of moonves s behavior. and there were 30 sources at cbs who came forward and attested to this, according to the new yorker. and they are they are well-known for the fact checking department. indeed. rachel, thanks so much. thank you. coming up, call it the trial of style, the ostrich coat, a python blaze are, a little plaid mixed on. joanie mos reports on the clothes at the center of the paul manafort trial. fish. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown to improve short-term memory. prevagen. healthier brain. better life. our new, hot, fresh breakfast will get you the readiest. (buzzer sound) holiday inn express. be the readiest. i knew at that exact moment . i m beating this. my main focus was to find a team of doctors. it s not just picking a surgeon, it s picking the care team and feeling secure in where you are. visit cancercenter.com/breast you re smart,eat you already knew that. but it s also great for finding the perfect used car. you ll see what a fair price is and you can connect with a truecar certified dealer. now you re even smarter. this is truecar. 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. - (phone ringing)a phones offers - big button,ecialized phones. and volume-enhanced phones., get details on this state program. call or visit and accessoriesphones for your mobile phone. like this device to increase volume on your cell phone. - ( phone ringing ) - get details on this state program call or visit (electronic dance music) center, ohio. you see this room filling up. this is at a high school there where the president will host a rally tonight, what he calls a make america great again rally, in part trying to avert a special election loss as he campaigns for troy balderson, the state senator in a tough fight to represent ohio s 12th congressional district. this includes affluent suburbs of columbus and central ohio. this is a deep red district. it s gone republican for many, many, many decades. and yet the polling show this is race now neck and neck. we are staying on top of this. in the meantime we are staying on top of the latest in the paul manafort trial one includes ostrich and python and plaid. omy. jeanie moos reports on paul manafort s interesting fashion choices. the price of the ostrich jacket don t bite until you see it on the invoice. $15,000. and you re probably imagining this. but i would imagine like feathers on it somewhere. we had one tweet manafort s $15,000 ostrich jacket probably looked like a but i m going to imagine b anyway. even kimmel fell for the feathers. that should be what he has to wear in jail. just sitting in a cell dressed up like big bird waiting for the trial. but the jacket is actually leather not feather. you know it s ostrich from the bumper-to-bumpers that were followicles with where the faithers were. he also bought the ostrich vest for 9500 something mr. burns on the simpsons didn t vest. soo see my vest made from real gorilla chess. ostriches get no respect. and near does an ohs strich jacket. it s something you need to work for trump that allows to you stick your head in the sand. but the legislator is considered luxury. it ends up in $35,000 birken bags by ermez. who know who else flaunts it as a status symbol. hot talk back it up. in the latest video about money. but ohs strich wasn t even manafort s most expensive exotic skin. that would be the $18500 python jacket. then the plaid, so similar to one worn by trump exlawyer michael cohen that someone tweeted did manafort loan cohen his jacket. still it s the ostrich jacket that has everyone craning nieskes. he had a coat made from an ohs strich which explains the state s first witness. we haven t even manafort in it. yet someone noted this looks better wearing it. in the eyes of the ohs strich, manafort is already guilty. jeanie moos. cnn. does that make him guilty? new york. finally, a bizarre story out of yellow stone national park
Rachel Maddow takes a look at the day s top political news stories. so that was the answer. that s the tension on the intelligence. then there is a separate tension about how do you investigate, indict and punish the people identified by that very intelligence for attacking american democracy? we all know, there is a busy special counsel that trump has denigrated and at sometimes lied about. so a question on that was posed to the fbi director who of course, let s not forget has this job because his predecessor was fired because of the same russia probe and that firing is now part of the obstruction inquiry. i have a question for director wray. thank you. the special counsel robert mueller has indicted more than 20 russian officials based on work by the fbi for med ding in the 2016 election. the president has tweeted that that investigation by the special counsel is a hoax and should be shut down. i know you ve said you don t believe it is a hoax. why would the american people believe what you re saying about the fbi when the president says that the investigation by the special counsel is a hoax and when the press secretary yesterday said that there was a lot of corruption within the fbi? do you have any response to those things coming from the white house? i can assure the american people that the men and women of the fbi starting from the director all the way on down are going to follow our oaths and do our jobs. a strong question. the answer is up in the air. that is a statement that could mean something. that oath that he referenced is to the constitution. not the president. in our history, there are certainly officials who took their oaths to mean they had to stand up to criminal conduct when discovered by their peers or superiors. but let s be clear. director wray s statement could mean nothing because it s leaning on a cliche rather than stating unequivocally today the fbi director still has mueller s back and isn t going to change his actions or his words just because the president down the hall keeps running down the probe. there s one more insight we can probably glean from today s events and it came from intel chief dan coats, the one who chose to tel everyone before that trump was hiding the putin meeting s contents from him which is something he doesn t have to put on black in front of the nation. but he did it again today. putting on the record this was not arab of timing or delay or sitting down with his boss. it s been three weeks and your nation s top intelligence officials still doesn t know what happened in helsinki. in the run-up to the helsinki summit, the u.s. officials, the nato ambassadors to russia said the president would raise the issue of ma line activity with president putin. he didn t discuss it, at least at the press conference. you re saying the president has directed you 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 mixture of truth and fiction of cynicism and ernestness. the fiction and the cynicism was john bolton trying to suggest from the moment donald trump took office, he has had a strong and forceful policy to counter foreign election intervention and russian meddling. that s just false. we ve reported that it s false. anyone who has a twitter feed knows that s not true. what he s done is undermine at every turn the conclusion of the intelligence community that russia interfered. even tonight hours after this event, donald trump gave a speech in wilkes-barre and again referred to the russia how much. he said his relationship with putin could be good but hindered by the russian hoax. that part of it was ridiculous. but chris wray, paul nakasone, and dan coats, i believe do have an interest in trying to do something and did want to communicate to the american people that the government does recognize this is a problem. they re trying on flag that the russians still throughout intervening and there are some things that they are doing about it. the most interesting thing that i heard was paul na casone who commands cyber command, the nation s cyber war force said that he was prepared to go after foreign medlers in our election and he seemed to suggest that he had presidential authorization to do that. i think it is up in the air. we need to pin it down of he can t use the vast cyber arsenal at his disposal unless donald trump allows him to do that. but that was the biggest news. that cape out of what many of those people said. other things they said we already knew. yes, the russians continue to meddle in our politics. yes, dhs is reaching out to the states to try to shore up cyber security. yes, the fbi has a foreign task force and no, there is no presidential leadership. the president wasn t there. there s no central unifying force that knits this together. let s dig into that point you raised. it is common to say this is better than nothing. you hear that a lot in washington where a lot of times nothing is what s going on. it is a low bar for the administration. so while better than nothing, as you say, without the president there, doesn t it still look like the cyber security plan is sort of a headless body where these various agency folks do what they can but we all know and see that the head of the government is undercutting them before and after? yes. and the biggest evidence of that is that they re having this news conference 100 days before the mid-terms. it s about a year and a half too late because none of this behavior by the russians stopped at all after the 2016 election, particularly the intervention on facebook and twitter, the attempt to divide americans by creating false personas and stirring up trouble. that s been going on. and dan coats gave a speech where he said the system is blinking red. so yes. you re right. we can shore up our cyber defenses and we can do a lot of different things to try to defend. but the russian intelligence hackers are always going to get in in some fashion. the way that you stop them is to deter them. to make them pay a price. and the only person who can do that is donald trump. and just briefly, to that final point. you ve reported on this. one of the issues with the obama administration and the perils that are posed even if someone tries to take it seriously was obama s approach, the washington post noted seemed to be don t make things worse. obama s advisers concern any pre election response could provoke an escalation from putin. putting aside the trump piece of this, what is the problem for the pus as you put it, lives in a glass house when it comes to escalating a cyber global war? that was a reasonable concern by barack obama. we are the most vulnerable of any society. we are the most internet connected. and we are extremely vulnerable to russian cyber attack. and they are in our networks, including the critical infrastructure. most intelligence officials and experts that i talked to feel like, what else can we do? there has to be a response to this. we are wide open to an attack on our democracy. and the russians have not been deterred in the least and there has to be something we can do to deter them. nbc s ken dilanian, all over the story. thank you so much. as we turn to our next guest, i want to look at march of next year. just after the 2016 election. the senate intel committee was looking at these issues and they heard testimony from a former fbi special agent. clint watts. and he said something that s echoed in people s heads ever since. this is not new for the russians. they ve done this for a long time across europe. but he was much more engaging this time in our election. why now? mr. watts? i think this answer is very simple and is what no one is really saying in this room which is part of the room active measures have worked in this u.s. election is because the commander in chief has used russian active measures at times against his opponents. on 11 october, president trump stood on a stage and cited what appeared to be a fake news story from sputnik news that disappeared from the internet. he denies the intel from the united states about russia. he claimed that the election could be rigged. that was the number one theme pushed by rt sputnik news all the way up till the election. as we look at another election, i want to bring in clint watts, he ses an author of messing with the enemy. i imagine that as a person involved in law enforcement, you don t get great personal pleasure, ego from being early and right about that is such a massive problem. but the way you put it there in a serious setting to congress that early on was was far ahead from where people were comfortable stating it the problem that you said these russian measures were put in place basically more effectively because of the way donald trump behaved. how does that context apply? it is a happy, sad moment. that is a briefing that should have happened in february 2017. president trump was briefed about this before the inauguration, we know now. and yet there was no response. and the person that should have been leading that press conference today is the commander in chief of this country. it is his job to defend all americans against enemies, foreign and domestic. and particularly when they come together. he should be trying to ensure the integrity of our electoral process or democratic institutions. so what was fascinating today was essentially, the leaders of these institutions, many of whom have been battered essentially by their boss are now moving around them to serve the american people. i thought director wray s comments were right on target. he said i am in charge of our organization and this is what we re going to do. the same with the nsa director. he said i m willing to strike back against russia and i might do it. it is almost independent. it is shocking that we re talking about this. this should be led by a task force, headed by the commander in chief. it should come from the national security staff and it should be an integrated strategy. what if we launch that offense stib cyber attack but then we receive a counter attack in cyber space that turns off the lights in one of our cities? this requires coordination. so while i m happy to see these advances being made and i m sure this is just a reaction to that hel cink can i summit and the fear that many americans have legitimately about the interference in our election, i still worry that we really don t know what the right happened and the left hand are doing and who is in charge of this. and this is now. this is not litigating 2016. helsinki is now. whatever was secretly discussed is operative now. the mid-term meddling is now. do you have a view, given the great expertise, beyond what most of us have access to, what dan coats is doing there and repeatedly saying he s out of the loop? yeah. i think he is trying to make sure that he is honest with the congress which is oversight over him, and with the public. i find value in that. while i m disappointed what his answer is what it is, at least he is telling the truth saying this is my position, this is what my job is and this is what i know. what makes me nervous, as we saw on that stage in aspen, he didn t even know that the white house would extend an invitation to vladimir putin to come to the united states. this is stunning for the head of our intelligence to be that out of the loop. so while i like how a lot of these leaders, these institutions are moving around the president, i m alarmed where our country is. a year and a half later, we re just now saying we ll do something about the attack two years ago. you make such an important point. it s something rachel has obviously been all over in her reporting which is if the head of intel doesn t know the decisions being made to give putin that benefit, that honor, then obviously they re not making a pretense of having consulted him which means and that is decision is being based on whatever. some other thing and given the investigation questions about whether there s anything nefarious there. clint watts, we really appreciate your time tonight. thanks, ari. we have a lot more coming including day three of paul manafort s trial. stay with us. hundred roads named park in the u.s. it s america s most popular street name. but allstate agents know that s where the similarity stops. if you re on park street in reno, nevada, the high winds of the washoe zephyr could damage your siding. and that s very different than living on park ave in sheboygan, wisconsin, where ice dams could cause water damage. but no matter what park you live on, one of 10,000 local allstate agents knows yours. now that you know the truth, are you in good hands? moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis was intense. my mom s pain from i wondered if she could do the stuff she does for us which is kinda, a lot. and if that pain could mean something worse. joint pain could mean joint damage. enbrel helps relieve joint pain, and helps stop further damage enbrel may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma other cancers, nervous system and blood disorders and allergic reactions have occurred. tell your doctor if you ve been someplace where fungal infections are common. or if you re prone to infections, have cuts or sores, have had hepatitis b, have been treated for heart failure or if you have persistent fever, bruising, bleeding or paleness. don t start enbrel if you have an infection like the flu. since enbrel, my mom s back to being my mom. visit enbrel.com. and use the joint damage simulator to see how joint damage could progress. ask about enbrel. enbrel. fda approved for over 18 years. gacan start in the colon, n, and diarrhea and may be signs of an imbalance of good bacteria. only phillips colon health has this unique combination of probiotics. it helps replenish good bacteria. get four-in-one symptom defense. let your perfect drive come together at the lincoln summer invitation sales event. get 0% apr on select 2018 lincoln models plus $1,000 bonus cash. gates will take the stand we learned today. they have every intention of doing it. to be clear, the testimony could reverberate well beyond this trial. for all the talk of people flipping and the intrigue about what mike anybody or george papadopoulos may have told mueller, when gates speaks under oath in public in this trial, it will it be the first time we actually hear a trump campaign aide legally turn on another trump campaign aide. and the other development might be a little more melodramatic. it is one that a lot of people are talking about. we return, of course, to the ostrich jacket. mueller s team file agovernight motion challenging the judge s decision to keep from the jury photos of manafort s sartorial tastes the fancy suits and $15,000 ostrich jacket. prosecution arguing evidence that through wire transfers, that he controlled to u.s. vendors is directly relevant to the elements of the defenses. that is very lawyerly. judge ellis responded i m well aware the evidence is relevant and that s why i permitted the government to introduce the amounts of money that he spent. the relevance being, okay, do the receipts. the judge goes on to say, what i have not permitted is to gild the lily. if he spent a lot of money on fancy clothes or watches, or cars i guess you would call them designer clothes, they re not men s wearhouse clothes but it wouldn t matter if he had spent money on men s wearhouse clothes. you want to the introduce pictures of these suits, that meaning the picture aspect itself the judge argues isn t relevant at this point and kind of besmirches the defendant and engenders some resentment against rich people generally. that s how the lawyers get into the little details because they have a reason, mueller s team toe want to have the jury see with their own eyes the fancy spending. some of this sounds like an episode of the rich and famous. you almost don t need the pictures. they re talking about a $10,000 system put in the house with red and white flowers shaped like an m off the driveway and a manmade pond in all of the hamptons that was complete with a water fall feature. then the receipts are from the bookkeeper we mentioned. she dealt with manafort s income expenses and this super rich consultant was living a lie. he was on his way to being broke. he lied to financeable institutions to get loans. he couldn t pay his own family s health bills. the prosecution asked, did there come a time when manafort had trouble paying his bills? and she said yes. here s where it comes together. that was part of what was presented today. that was part of 2016. evidence showing manafort needed money. instead of seeking a new consulting gig or some new financial retainer, his plan was to take a demand dg full time high stress job as a volunteer. we all know that because he had a written pitch that leaked to trump which offered his campaign services for free. no paid job. the worst news for manafort is that all of this written and testimonial evidence today suggests he was broke and that led him to commit alleged financial crimes. the wider question no matter what happens in this trial is whether paul paul manafort s plan to work for free was itself another financial lie. did he have a plan, executed or not, to use the trump campaign like prosecutors alleged he had used so many others as a witting or unwitting accomplice to new different illegal money schemes. to be fair, that is not what s charged in this trial. but to be fair, this investigation ain t over either. we re now joined by the justice correspondent for politico josh gerstein and msnbc contributor, and barb barb mcquade, an msnbc analyst. your view of day three. i think that they want to make the case as they said in their trial brief. this isn t just a matter of spending money. it is spending money very lavishly. one of the things they have to prove, when paul manafort signed his income tax returns, he knew that those were false statements. he knew that the amount of income he was declaring was far less than what he had. how do you show that? you show it by showing all of the different things he s spending money on. i m concerned that information is coming in so quickly, so fast, so much that the jury is having a hard time keeping up. when you see the pictures, it does bring that home. and it helps explain the motive for the bank fraud charges which is the cash dries up and this is someone who loves money. so when the cash dries up, he needs and is desperate for cash which explains why he s motivated to engage in that bank fraud to get the cash he feeds to pay his expenses. josh, your views. well, i am reminded of an old english teacher hop used to say show, don t tell. the problem is that the judge is insisting that the prosecutors only tell and very rarely show. so as a result as barbara is alluding to, jurors are getting almost the equivalent of a ledger of expenses which simply may not carry as much weight as seeing the actual items. the prosecutors say they re not trying to make fun of manafort or besmirch his reputation but to emphasize these are not business expenses. these res actually personal expenses. they could not be any other. these oriental rugs were not going into an office. they were going into his homes. than and they re just the kinds of spending that could not conceivably relate to any legitimate business expense. which goes to something we ve seen in other cases where there s an accountant s defense. people say, hey, my people were doing this. a lot of money flies around. i didn t really know. whereas if you have enough ostrich jackets and the jurors say i remember the ostrich jacket, wouldn t you remember it, it clears that hurdle to some degree. barbara, could you speak to the mueller s team, the theory of the case from the mueller team that they want to give more than one reason why manafort acted this way. today in the spotlight, the reason was he was desperate, he was broke, and he made these decisions. but they ve also separately made the arguments by suggestions and in writtenfyings that he was greedy, to use a more proverbial word, scummy. why do you think they re using more than one theory of why he would allegedly commit these crimes? i think they need to establish theories for both sets of counts in this case. there s a set of counts that relates to the filing of false income tax returns. for that part the purpose is showing his knowledge of the income. and then there is a series of charges related to bank fraud. with regard to those charges, they need to show the motive that he was running out of cash. so that s why he was involved with this money. so there are two different motives. two different theories for the two different sets of cases. the legal standard under the rules of evidence is the evidence should be permissible unless it is substantially more prejudicial than it is probative. because it is probative, these the things he himself bought. it is hard to argue that it is substantially more substantial than probative. and josh, what about the big question that we ve teed up tonight and has come up before in reporting in the new york times and your publication, as well, that this was an unusual volunteer arrangement? there is no question about that. and at a particular moment. i think it s because this is case spans a long period of time from 2010 or back to 2005 to 2016 and 2017 right into the heart of the trump campaign and beyond. in 2010, manafort seemed to be doing okay. he was bringing in a lot of money from this deal with viktor yanukovych. and the oligarchs supporting the party of regents. he spent $60 million in ukraine. even with a lavish lifestyle, you can manage to spend a few years on $60 million but it had begun to dry up in 2015 and 2016 and that s when the desperation set in. and the real question is, was that job at the top of the trump campaign a product of this desperation? was he going to go through the revolving door and become another washington lobbyist once again like everybody else? or was there something more nefarious at work? barbara mcquaid and josh, thanks to both of you four expertise coming straight out of the courtroom. and we will 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. when you bundle your auto and hwith esurance, you could save with their single deductible. so if you confused the brake with the gas, or if your lamp post jumped out of nowhere, or if you forgot your bike was on the roof rack, you only pay one deductible -instead of two- for a claim involving both your auto and home. and when you save that much, it s almost like it. never even happened. that s auto and home insurance for the modern world. esurance. an allstate company. click or call. about energy efficiency. we actually saved $50,000. and that s just one school, two semesters, three girls. together, we re building a better california. here s a bombshell from the guardian newspaper in the u.k. a suspected russian spy has been working undetected in the heart of the american embassy in moscow for more than a decade. the russian national has been hired by guess who? the u.s. secret service and was understood to have had access to the s internet and e-mail systems which gave a potential window into the confidential material including the schedules of the president and vice president. investigators have established that she was having regular and unauthorized meetings with russia s principal security agency. it was operating under the umbrella of our own u.s. government undetected for, yes, a decade. what kind of damage could have been done over all that time? and what happens next? this is a big one. michael mcfaul, former ambassador tore russia under the obama administration joins me. i guess we should start with, when did you first learn about this and based on your knowledge of this embassy, where does this person fit? well, i only learned about it when press reporters started poking around about it. i did not know about it when i was ambassador. it sounds like this woman worked for me when i was there. i don t remember her or recall her. obviously, this is not good news. we don t want to have people working for the fsb inside the embassy. interacting with people, having access to information. there is good news. i think it s highly unlikely she had access to classified information. that are just does happen in the embassy for russians for foreign nashs working there. but because she worked for the secret service as you just alluded to, she probably would have access to the schedules of people like the vice president and president. that obviously is not good. walk us through where this fits on the spectrum of expected, possible, low risk, impossible. you operated in an environment where rachel and others have reported on before where there were all kinds of explicit measures taken against you and your team there. so you obviously, this is not like working in the canadian embassy. i should say the u.s. embassy to canada to be precise. did it cross your mind that this was part of the risk you faced from your own staff or russians hired by secret service and the embassy? absolutely. of course. with good reason. just one anecdote and i need to be careful what i talk about and what i don t. when i would go to meet with members of civil society, i would show up and would be all kinds of protesters there. sometimes as many as 50 protesters outside, blocking the doorway for how i could get in there. how did they know my schedule? these were not announced meetings. so one way might be through cyber activity. another might be from people like the individual that were working with us and somehow got access to the calendar. remember, she didn t work close to me. right? this woman in the secret service. but they got to know other russians that works in the building. they got to know my bodyguards who are russians, different staff members and that s the other way that information transfer could happen. right. let me ask you, as well about the most messed up part of this from what i can tell and this is probably not something, if you say you re just learning about it, it doesn t vol your leadership. the report is that the secret service quietly terminated this person and there is no the repo service quietly terminated this person and there is no leadersh. the report is that the secret service quietly terminated this person and there is no indication of any other measures of accountability. this comes at a time when they re talking about indictments of russians and hoping to potentially get them. maria butina is in custody. others could be caught by an interpol warrant if they re caught and face justice. mueller didn t indict them as just an exercise. could you shed any light on at least in this report that it sounds like this person was quietly fired? well, i would say two things. three things. one, i don t know the full facts. we ll have to learn that. number two, we obviously could not have arrested her in her territory. that s what s different about butina versus this vid. but three, there should have been a thorough investigation. in fact, oftentimes we would run counter intelligence on someone like that to follow them to try to understand what they re doing to try to get greater fidelity as to how the fsb works. and remember, it dedicated lots and lots of resources. i m being vague on purpose following every single member of the u.s. embassy and first and foremost me and they re really good at it. just to dismiss somebody without trying to investigate and figure out what they were doing if that holds to be true, then that i think was probably a mistake. and final question then. certainly can t arrest them on sovereign territory out of the blue. but the fact that this was reportedly a mole inside the secret service and you would want to get that informs, they were in u.s. employ. so what about sending them on a mission abroad to the united states and then holding them there is this? you watch a lot of spy shows, don t you? in all seriousness. spy shows? just watch the news, man. that s a very interesting idea. should that have been done before? that s a great observation. because obviously, this was an employee. if everything that has been reported is true, i want to keep saying that. i don t know the actual facts. we should have taken more precautions. and obviously this person was not fulfilling their contract as has been reported. to the united states government and that has implications and again, we just want to know more than just kind of sweeping this under the rug and moving on. we want to take advantage when we learn this. obvious, we did have some good intelligence that we know allegedly that she was reporting to senior fsv officials. that s the mark of good intelligence. but we should have taken more appropriate measures to learn more about what happened including i m mot a lawyer and i don t pretend to be one, but including, of course, were there criminal activity here that should have been investigated. ambassador, it s an intriguing story as you mentioned in your nuance. it s a brand-new one from the guardian . we may yet learn a lot more. we appreciate the expertise you have having worked inside the building where these activities allegedly occurred. thanks for spending some time with us tonight. thanks for having me. appreciate it. up next, there is a friendly game you might want to play of name that town. we ll be right back. save up to 60% on hotels with priceline. ito take care of anyct messy situations.. and put irritation in its place. and if i can get comfortable keeping this tookus safe and protected. you can get comfortable doing the same with yours. preparation h. get comfortable with it. let s do some politics. in one minute, we re going to bring on a hard working political reporter on assignment in an american swing state. it is in the city of 40,000 people. this is 20 miles sort of south southwest of scranton with a hyphenated name that i m not going to say this, because here on the show we haven t found a consensus how to say it. we do have one example. we present the great gene kelly. the one and only eugene curran kelly born pittsburgh wilkesboro the right way to say the might be wilks berre, pennsylvania. however, that s not what the local chamber of commerce say. welcome to the greater wilkes-barre chamber. so we have weeks barra in the running, also wilkes-barre. if there are any others out there, well, take it away mr. mayor. if there are any other and welcome to the virtual tour. of wilkes-barre pennsylvania. maybe they re just low key about it. wilkes berry. that s the third pronunciation that we have found to be a great town. weeks barra, wilkes bear, wilkes-barre. any way you want to say it. that s where we re going next. w what that s worth? wilkes-barre. any way you want to say it. that s where we re going next. r wilkes-barre. any way you want to say it. that s where we re going next. r wilkes-barre. any way you want to say it. that s where we re going next. a wilkes-barre. any way you want to say it. that s where we re going next. r wilkes-barre. any way you want to say it. that s where we re going next. , wilkes-barre. any way you want to say it. that s where we re going next. on earth [ sobs quietly ] now i m gonna tell my momma that i m a traveller i m gonna follow the sun now i m gonna tell my momma that i m a traveller i m gonna follow the sun transitions™ light under control™ but behr premium stain y can weather any weather. overall #1 rated, weathers it all. find our most advanced formula exclusively at the home depot. outlines has wide corroboration is not any good faith attempt to rec within this history but rather a choreographed attack by the anonymous left. i d like to think the reason you see the left plst coming after me and lies being told is because we re being effective. the guy who is making the most noises has a criminal background. it seems to me it was sequenced and choreographed by the left and everything they have done. the timing is suspect when you think about how this whole story came together. jim jordan has taken this on partly by arguing that he s actually a victim of people who are only doing this for politics. amid these allegations jordan is running for speaker. so he would be the most powerful person in congress, as well as second in line to the presidency after the vice president. congressman jordan has been pressuring victims of the abuse to recant on aspects of their allegations. two etch wrestlers at thing nbc the day after they made these allegations against the congressman at least of turning a blind eye to dealing with with the abuse by the doctor that jordan got another retired coach to reach out and pressure them into issuing statements of support for jordan. one saying i will defend jordan until i have to put my hand on the bible and tell the truth. then he will be on his own. the next wrestler saying when he refused, jordan s allies began attacking his credibility. another saying what a world we re living in when a member of congress is digging up dirt on sex abuse vips like us. the retired coach did not return calls seeking comment to explain all this on the record. jordan s people say that he has many supporters and , of course, we encourage folks to speak the truth. whether the new reports will change anything about jordan s political race here in the house is open. the president and republican leaders have not weighed in in any great detail. this vein of reporting is a campaign issue in the ohio special election. that s the race next week. there is a new ad there online asking whether the republican candidate in that race stands with the victims or stands with jim jordan while he was a coach and the approach he took. i turn to jonathan allen who is out in the field looking at all of these races. what is important here to you about the way jordan is handling this? because on the one hand, he stands not accused of the original misconduct and yet the way he s responded as you have reported has raised new questions with the very affected community including self-identified people who say they were victims. right, ari. you not only have these allegations that jordan was aware of and turned a blind eye but now allegations of a cover up. that quote you read before is devastating. i m going to be with jimmy until i have to put my hand on a bible and swear under oath at which point i m casting him aside. this is really tough stuff. i think the problem for republicans right now is there is a little bit of that washington bubble. they seemeded to have forgotten what happened to them in the 2006 midterms when there was a cover-up of the mark foley page scandal. a lot of them obviously weren t in congress then but you would think they were politically aware. they seem to be unaware of the larger moment in american history where you have got all these sexual abuse revelations, starting back in the penn state case and the joe paterno team. more recently michigan state. this seems like an untenable thing for jordan particularly as a speaker candidate, one of the democratic groups going after one of his fellow ohioans they re asking if he will support jordan for speaker. oh, my god, what would happen nancy pelosi was the speaker. you can imagine a series of democratic ads on what if jim jordan was the speaker of the house do you think this cuts across party lines out there? absolutely. this is one of those issues that does cut through because unfortunately sexual abuse has, you know, hurt so many people in our country. and even people who aren t victims of it certainly can understand. this isn t a partisan or political issue. it is a character issue. right. it goes to not only what happened, how did it look in the moment from what someone saw, but given what has been called out in the reckoning that s been demanded, how do you deal with it now. that seems to be where he s under extra scrutiny. thank you for making time for us tonight. thank you. we will be right back. to nourishing 3 minute miracle, to the moisture-infusing gold series. we give more women great hair days - every day. pantene. i m discovering a russian spy. ambassador mcfaul s revelations about spy novels. we ve had quite a show tonight. that does it for us. we ll see you again tomorrow. you can tune into the beat at 6:00 p.m. eastern tomorrow. i will be joined by john podesta and eddy griffin. something else we re looking forward to, it is time for the last word with lawrence o donnell. good evening, lawrence. i m glad you covered the jim jordan case. we haven t had a spot to squeeze it into in the show, but i certainly have been tweeting about it. the day will come in these civil lawsuits about it where he is going to find himself under oath in a deposition at some point about this. you make that point. and i think the corollary to paterno, which was a cultural