developing stories including more on russia. a poll showing over half of americans say they do want an independent inquiry of the links between trump and russia. more than 60% say this is concerning for what it actually means for our democracy. couple that with the former national security adviser, mike flynn, offering testimony in exchange for immunity. now, today. vladimir putin spokesman claiming there is actually nothing to uncover. are you concerned about anything he might say about his contacts with russia? no. we are not. any blamings that russia could have been interfering in domestic affairs of the united states is slander. peskov saying that an allegation regarding the russian government s involvement in the recent killing of an opposition lawmaker is absurd. how will these events affect the already rocky path ahead for the trump administration? joining me now is ron klain, a former senior aide to president clinton, matt miller who worked at the department of justice for eric holder and maya wiley, vice president for social justice at the new school and former counsel to mayor de blasio. a lot of you have experience in government and how scandals can grow and mutate. ron, what do you make of the most recent thing with russia basically putting its people out brazenly on american television, which is their right, even as all the allegations pile up and we see reports of the russian lawmakers assassinated and targeted and thrown off a building. as you alluded to in an earlier segment, ari, the russians are engaged in active measures to try to corrupt our democracy, to try to break apart our democracy in this country and other western democracies around the world. so the fact that their spokespeople are out advancing that message, advancing propaganda, should be no surprise to people. of the many sad things and there are many sad things in the first 70 days of the trump administration i don t think there is anything sadder than seeing our government, our great democracy, aligning itself with these horrible forces of intolerance, of anti-liberalism. they re trying to destroy democracies around the world. then you go to how this all works in government, matt. substantively, procedural. rhetorically, the trump white house has done everything it could to make it look like its defending russia in all this. there hasn t been a pause or we welcome the facts that come or are cooperating. quite the opposite. i won t list the litany, matt. listen to john mccain, no liberal critic, explaining why this all piles up to needing an independent committee. this is why we need a select committee, martha. every time we turn around, another shoe drops from this centipede. matt. yeah. senator mccain is right. the trump s embrace of russia goes back to before he was president, goes back to the campaign. and what s surprising politically a little bit is that he hasn t recognized, you know you would think that if you are in the middle of this kind of scandal where you are under investigation for potentially coordinating with russia intelligence to try to steer the election to you when they re all of his famous comments during the campaign, you would think they would take a politically smart path. just have the president come out and say one tough thing about vladimir putin and it would go a long ways for them politically and they re not willing to do that. i think it has something to do with trump, who he is. he likes to be flattered. he likes the way that vladimir putin has said nice things about him. i think it has something to do with he doesn t want to admit that his campaign did get the help from russia because he knows that leads to questions about his legitimacy that he is very, very sensitive to. i think this is an important part of what trump has to do right now. he has to say that, actually, i am the president of the united states and of all americans and i m going to come forward. i m going to come clean. i m going to cooperate. instead, he sends tweets that suggest that somehow this is a witch hunt against his administration. we have to remember that both his attorney general, jeff sessions, whose office introduced carter page. former campaign manager, paul manafort. so many connections right now to a folks actually talking to a russian ambassador and allegations that there were communications between carter page that he was supposed to pass on to trump that he was going to, in fact, get rewarded mr. tillerson, do you believe that vladimir putin and his cronies are responsible for ordering the murder of countless dissents, journalists and political opponents? i do not have sufficient information to make that claim, but i am not willing to make conclusions on what is only publicly available or have been publicly reported. this is classified, mr. tillerson. these people are dead. ron, what do you make of the exchange now two months later with what we know? the senate should never have confirmed rex tillerson. it s sad that marco rubio voted to confirm rex tillerson after giving those answers. this goes back to what maya said before. it s all the people around trump who have these ties to russia. mr. tillerson made a lot of money doing business in russia. former senator sessions now attorney general and his team have ties to russia. when you put it together it lays at the president s doorstep. when it has been laid at his doorstep his answers have been disappointing. he was asked about these crimes. russia has committed, killing journalists. instead of deploring it, condemning it, he said, oh, our country is not so innocent either. that idea that we re going to lower our human rights and civil sights standards, lower our civil liberties standards to russia s level as a way of getting along with russia is a deplorable concept. that s what the president has said to defend his friends and allies in russia. we covered this last hour. there is so much. the other thing that s brand-new and hasn t been on tv yet, maya. we were debating out this outreach on obamacare from president trump is going to work. new sound of rand paul, a big critic. he was a roadblock, maybe striking a balance. maybe donald trump finding in personal diplomacy what he couldn t find on the house floor. rand paul, brand-new, after golfing with trump. great day with the president today. we did talk about some health care reform. i think the sides are getting closer together, and i remain very optimistic that we will get an obamacare repeal. thanks. maya. hard to believe. you don t buy it. i don t buy it. i buy that there are conversations happening and the republicans feel a lot of heat to get a win on something they crashed and burned dramatically on. unless you have something to address the fact that the previous plan was going to literally take tax credits from those earning $200,000 or less a year and essentially give a give-back of $7 million a year to the top 400 earning americans in the country and leave 24 million americans without health insurance, i think that s a tall order. the numbers don t lie. what did you think also of rand paul s sunglasses? i thought they were quite interesting and not going to get him over the edge when it comes to support for this bill. you re not throwing any shade over there. i have a lot of shade to throw, but rand paul is not worth my shade. control room saying you need to wrap. sometimes they say need to wrap. i was interested in your take. maya wiley. good sport and knowledgeable lawyer. matt, ron. thank you for your expertise. tonight, millions of young people mobilized in 2016 not only for hillary clinton as some think but many for president trump. now we ll hear directly from them about what they think. and as always, we have ari s inbox. but first, stay with us. the point growing up trump, right up after the break. and one more segment. only invisalign® clear aligners are made with smarttrack® material to precisely move your teeth to your best smile. see how invisalign® treatment can shape your smile up to 50% faster today at invisalign.com the markets change. at t. rowe price. our disciplined approach remains. global markets may be uncertain. but you can feel confident in our investment experience around the world. call us or your advisor. t. rowe price. invest with confidence. except for every ladies night. vegetarian. only glad has forceflex to prevent rips, leaks, and punctures. so whatever you throw in the bag. stays in the bag. be happy, it s glad. but i keep it growing by making every dollar count. that s why i have the spark cash card from capital one. with it, i earn unlimited 2% cash back on all of my purchasing. and that unlimited 2% cash back from spark means thousands of dollars each year going back into my business. which adds fuel to my bottom line. what s in your wallet? investigation. he has certainly called the independence of his committee into question but as a legal concept he hasn t triggered the traditional causes for recusal like say a financial link to the outcome of the inquiry. here is how one ethics professor quoted it. it does not create a legal basis for seeking recusal. there is a strong political argument for recusal. the argument that he has fractured the bipartisan relationship of the committee was spoken on by adam schiff. i think it rises to the level of recusal. ann chapel. who takes flynn up on this immunity? right now, nobody. the congressional committee saying it s not on the table at the moment and that it s too early for prosecutors in the criminal case to hand out immunity deals. last question from lana. can a regular citizen sue a fez ral agency? the answer, sure. there is a federal law that empowers a private citizen to sue for injury or loss of property or death for any wrongful act committed by a government employee. those are the answers for the inbox this week. get your question in next week if you e-mail me or tweet me right now at the #thepoint. after the next break, we have the special that i have been plugging all day, growing up trump, hearing directly from a new generation of leaders. first we ll talk to the young activists in the resistance against trump. that s after the break. then we ll hear from young people energized by the new president, followed by a discussion among all of them together. i promise you guys it will be unlike anything else on tv tonight. they ll call back. no one knows your ford better than ford and ford service. right now, during the big tire event, get a $140 rebate by mail, on four select tires. knows how it feels to seees your numbers go up, despite your best efforts. but what if you could turn things around? what if you could love your numbers? discover once-daily invokana®. it s the #1 prescribed sglt2 inhibitor that works to lower a1c. invokana® is a pill used along with diet and exercise to significantly lower blood sugar in adults with type 2 diabetes. and in most clinical trials, the majority reached an a1c goal of 7 percent or lower. invokana® works around the clock by sending some sugar out of your body through the process of urination. it s not for lowering systolic blood pressure or weight, but it may help with both. invokana® can cause important side effects, including dehydration, which may cause you to feel dizzy, faint,lightheaded,or weak, upon standing. other side effects may include kidney problems, genital yeast infections,changes in urination, high potassium, increases in cholesterol, risk of bone fracture, or urinary tract infections, possibly serious. serious side effects may include ketoacidosis, which can be life threatening. stop taking and call your doctor right away if you experience symptoms or if you experience symptoms of allergic reaction such as rash, swelling, or difficulty breathing or swallowing. do not take invokana® if you have severe liver or kidney problems or are on dialysis. tell your doctor about any medical conditions and medications you take. using invokana® with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. it s time to turn things around. lower your blood sugar with invokana®. imagine loving your numbers. there s only one invokana®. ask your doctor about it by name. welcome back. as promised we turn to something a little different. in a moment, we ll hear from young people forging their political identities in the trump era. let me tell you why we re doing this on the point. one shortcoming of political journalism is representation. we can t hear from anybody and sometimes we hear from almost nobody. elections involving tens of millions of people when you think about it, get narrated by dozens of people. younger americans are under represented. they will literally live with the consequences of today s politics longer than the rest of us, whether that s debt, prosperity, war or peace. the media also spins a lot of narratives about the new generation, that they re apathetic. even though the turnout was historically high in 2016 or this they re monolithic when we find great diversity in their views and actions. we hear that they re in the streets against trump when several young blocs were split. white women under 30 with college degrees, backing trump and clinton at the same right. young white women without degrees broke for trump. clinton slipped with youth, dropping about five points. there are two areas where data shows young voters are a lot like their parents, race remains a huge dividing line. white young voters broke for trump by five points. minorities more for clinton. for a generation growing up on facebook, snapchat, and trump s twitter. skepticism of major news media running high less than 20% of americans saying they trust the news media, i guess that s us. and that s a view they hold regardless of race or party. is that a response to media failures or all the alternatives online or growing up on a president who often attacks the press more than his opponents? we don t need to speculate today. we ll ask them. we have young leaders from the trump movement we ll hear from in a minute. first, right here some folks leading the resistance. now, let me go ahead and introduce everybody. we re going to bring back them all together, i should mention, for a joint panel in a few segments. first when we talk to trump resistance voters. richie torres youngest elected official in new york representing the bronx. imani editor in chief of muslim girl a social justice activist and blare, founder of equality for here. zena maxwell. former aide to hillary clinton s campaign. thank you for doing this, you guys. i think it will be something different and interesting. show of hands. how many since the election have been at a march or protest? how many have done it in march, in the last month? staying high. richie, as our young elected official, what do you think of the street part of this which is different in social justice than just going to the voting booth? it shows that change has both an inside and outside game and puts the myth of millennial apathy to rest because donald trump s election set off a wave of demonstrations. there were millions of americans who participated in the women s march, not only in washington, d.c., but in every major city across the country. those demonstrations were largely driven by millennials. you are shaking your head. go ahead. well, i just think that, you know, it was so powerful to see the women s march but also to acknowledge the amount of people who have been participating in the marches. i have been involved in black lives matter style movements and in that type of activism so i m excited to see the uniting of forces of people who might have been more on the fence in terms of participating in activism. i wish there was more reliance on the wisdom of those who have been doing it but i m excited to see the momentum of people in the streets, people bringing pizzas to the protests and coming out and supporting. you contrast that as someone who uses music. hillary clinton had a lot of musicians out. i don t know whether it helped or hurt her. we ll play a little bit of lady gaga, who was big for her on the campaign trail. take a listen. it s an honor tonight for me to say, a 30-year-old woman from an italian-american immigrant family [ cheers and applause ] that i am with her! [ cheers and applause ] but as i mentioned, she did worse among young people. well, i think that, you know, i believe that just being a musician necessarily, because i like your music doesn t necessarily mean that i am somebody that s going to like or agree with your political thing. celebrity just to be a celebrity is not something that is going to guarantee somebody as a vote. i think you have to be intelligent and understand the issues and be issue driven. people look for people who have been out there. if you haven t been on the front lines of the protests and movements and just get out there to say you re getting behind a political candidate i kind of wonder how serious i can take you if i haven t seen you being on the front line of some of the issues in the first place. imani. honestly, the statistics about white women voters doesn t surprise me too much. we really have to consider whose backs the past election fell on. it was entirely people of color. it was our livelihoods that were thrown under the bus in the debates and the discussions taking place. many of us were excluded from the conversations. a lot of people are saying that one of the positives from trump s presidency is that it s rallied people together. it s gotten a lot of people in the streets. you could have asked a person of color prior to the elections if racism was still a thing and they would have gladly answered the question without this. yeah. i think the election showed that young people want to participate in this in politics and get out in the streets and do activism. they were doing that before the 2016 election. that s going to continue no matter that was going to continue even if hillary clinton had been elected president. what i think trump does is create a catalyst and really a sense of urgency that you have no choice but to get into the streets and continue your activism. absolutely. i think that, you know, even if hillary had won, and a lot of people like to imagine what it would be like and that it would be this wonderful fantasyland but there were a lot of issues with her policy platform. i think we d still be doing this work. the segment is growing up trump, but we grew up obama and there were still a variety of issues to fight against. that would be the case whether or not trump was in office. i just think there is more energy behind it now. there may be more energy. one of the things we ll talk with the trump folks coming up next is that young people who were trump supporters were far more enthusiastic. listen to donald trump talk about his young support and what he believed was bernie overlap. i ll go a step further. i think a lot of the young people with bernie sanders will come to my side. they want jobs. they say what s happening. bernie sanders and i agree on one thing, trade. that we don t know what we re doing on trade. the difference is i ll make great deals out of it. he doesn t know what to do. i don t necessarily agree that his voters were energized and hillary s weren t. to me, in my community, what i saw was people energized mainly because, like, our lives are on the line. you know what i m saying? trump s rhetoric has actually led to people being killed right now in the united states of america, whether you we re here in new york city where a guy came to specifically target a black man and killed him, you know what i m saying? as i walk the street i have to understand that. i don t necessarily think that just because trump was a celebrity on the apprentice this somehow meant more people were energized by him or younger people were energized by him and not by hillary. i dismiss that. i don t agree with that. imani what s the message to people who are newly engaged if they weren t excited before november? it s important to center the voices of people who are being impacted by the policies. this is truly an opportunity to elevate narratives that are on the line right now and have been marginalized. with the current politics taking place around us and it s important to make sure movements are led by those people, that we re giving space to their voices and in ways that are contributive to the moment. richie how old were you when you were first elected in new york? 25. in a rush. what s changed for you since then? the stakes are much higher. we have a president now who is intent on dismantling the social safety net. in the new york city council i chair the new york city housing authority. that s the very first program that the trump administration has targeted for budget cuts. immediately, $75 million worth of budget cuts. which will translate into more elevated breakdowns in public housing. the stakes are much higher than before. last question for each of you. we are doing dialogue and have trump folks coming up next. what would you want to hear from them next? i just want to hear a good reason why they re supporting trump. i haven t heard one yet. i want to hear one. i don t want to hear alternative facts. i want to hear real facts and real reasons why you would support somebody with a rhetoric like trump. i am optimistic that they want to convert to our cause. you re here for conversion. proselytizing is hard. optimistically i would like to hear a rejection of the normalization of racism that we re seeing but again, high hopes. this is television. we always have high hopes. i want to know how they were able to overlook the access hollywood tape that broke late in the campaign cycle. how can you vote for someone who has spoken like that on the record? we re going to have their questions for you as well. right back with more of this special. stay with us. researchers of technologies that one day, you will. some call them the best of the best. some call them veterans. we call them our team. at red lobster s lobsterfestime. any of these 9 lobster dishes could be yours. so don t resist delicious new lobster mix and match or lobsterfest surf and turf because you won t have this chance for long. .one of many pieces in my life. so when my asthma symptoms kept coming back on my long-term control medicine. i talked to my doctor and found a missing piece in my asthma treatment with breo. once-daily breo prevents asthma symptoms. breo is for adults with asthma not well controlled on a long-term asthma control medicine, like an inhaled corticosteroid. breo won t replace a rescue inhaler for sudden breathing problems. breo is specifically designed to open up airways to improve breathing for a full 24 hours. breo contains a type of medicine that increases the risk of death from asthma problems and may increase the risk of hospitalization in children and adolescents. breo is not for people whose asthma is well controlled on a long-term asthma control medicine, like an inhaled corticosteroid. once your asthma is well controlled, your doctor will decide if you can stop breo and prescribe a different asthma control medicine, like an inhaled corticosteroid. do not take breo more than prescribed. see your doctor if your asthma does not improve or gets worse. ask your doctor if 24-hour breo could be a missing piece for you. learn more about better breathing at mybreo.com. a traveling aide on the trump campaign. paul anthony, leader of the new york state young republicans and nicole hart. new events chair of the new york state young republicans. thank you all for being here. let me start out by asking you starting on this side, what is the best thing you think donald trump has done so far as president from a young american perspective? so far i would say the most important thing he has done is to order the start of the wall. i think that s very important to secure our border. we need to protect our citizens, and we need to know who is coming in and out of the country. yeah. i think he has done the best job in getting people more involved in the political process. less people are watches videos and signing up with the county legislators. i love that donald trump is deconstructing the administrative state. we ve sold out to a bunch of technocrats and now donald trump is beginning to roll it back so that the government can serve the people. you know, this was an election about jobs. over 30% of young americans still live with their parents. i am looking forward to him injecting some life back into our economy, lowering the tax rate, and getting young people back to work. getting good jobs. let me put up something that a lot of people don t realize in terms of donald trump s success with young people. i mentioned this earlier. it s striking. the excitement on candidates for young american voters, right. donald trump supporters here, 32% basically told pollsters they were very excited. only 18% of clinton s young supporters there, under 30 millennials, excited. does that surprise any of you? or what do you make of it? doesn t surprise me at all. i think that we see on the democratic side there have been more efforts to try to go to the base and get grass roots. that s why you need george soros to get the grass roots moving. on the republican side it s genuine and people are excited about president donald trump. i am not surprised at all. donald trump is bold, brash, he is not afraid to address problems that everyone knows are true but many have been too afraid to address in the past. not only did he over-perform with young people but also minority communities. he got a larger percentage of the black, his spannic did muslim wheat than obama did in 2012. for far too long democrats have taken young and minority votes for granted while offering little in the way of policies that lift up those communities. paul, do you agree? what do you hear from people when you tell them that you are a trump backer? it s crazy. i honestly my father forbid me interest saying insults i received on social media. literally i think this is a great opportunity for people to really get involved. not really a big fan of listening to the static. i am an advocate of winston churchill when he said you won t get to your destination if you stop to throw rocks at the dogs barki ba barking at you. this was a trump supporter recently talking about plants closing. laurie clements who works as a meat cutteder. it s getting to the point where, if things don t turn around, the doors will close. and it s going to hurt a lot of people. i want to see him do what he says he is going to do. make america great again. the people of this country have lost a lot of faith in this in their government. the government has done a lot of things that weren t for the people. ellie, what specifically do you think he s done to create jobs in the united states? he signed an executive action to get regulatory reform started. he has empowered heads of agencies to start the reform to ignite and unleash jobs prosperity and great things in america. we re excited about it. you can t tell yet whether that s creating jobs. well, sure. the thing is that you have such an entrenched state, the federal bureaucracy is so marred with the democratic laws that have been put on the books over the last eight years. it will take time. we re only two months in. i think president trump has started with encouraging signs. like i said, it will only get better from here. on the dialogue, and next we ll bring everyone out and have a joint discussion. but when you heard some of the questions there at the end of the segment with the resistance, starting with you, nicole, did you have a response or did you think anything was a fair criticism of president trump? i wouldn t say i necessarily think it s fair. i think we are all very diverse people here. there has been a lot of negative talk about trump supporters, and i think it s all very false. we are very open-minded and we support everyone. i think we all just want what s best for the country. i agree. it s literally unfair for you to justify and label someone based upon the worst of donald trump s rhetoric. i heard a lot about protesting and not too much on how people are getting involved and changing direction and taking the initiative individually to make america great. on the point, it s no secret. a lot of discussion of race and those issues. one thing from fortune magazine on the way donald trump has engaged folks. the quote. trump giving us the wink-wink. editor of a white supremacist website after trump retweeted two other white genocide theorists within a minute. it isn t statistically possible that two back-to-back could be random. it could only be deliberate. the stats there being that at least 75 users were wrapped up in the hash tag. what do you make of that, any of you, because that s been a persistent criticism as well as birtherism. there are young people who don t identify as being excited by that part of his appeal but it was there. one thing i don t think the president has gotten enough contract for is an executive action he signed to move the initiative from the department of education to the white house and assigned white house staff to work on it. something president obama didn t do. he took a lot of heat for this from outside groups because it was stuffed in the education department. now it s a priority of the administration. i think we need to give the president more credit for some of the things he s been doing. i think i heard from the liberal panel a lot of talk about rhetoric, right. i don t like some of the stuff that trump has said, but liberals have this obsession with diverting attention away from actual policies that matter and on to fluff and rhetoric. i am sick of talking about rhetoric. let s talk about policies here. do you think the words are pc? i mean, one of the trump is politically incorrect. that s why everyone loves him. we re going to bring you together but we wanted to hear everyone first. some felt the access hollywood tape which exposed that language. i did not like the access hollywood tape, trust me. i care more about the job market, the economy, getting a good health care system in place than i do about a 2005 tape of a conversation that trump had in private. let me play a little bit of donald trump in the closing of the campaign, which is very interesting to look back at. you all say you were excited by him. you all were with him, right? and this was a time period when a lot of the country wrote him off, wrongly. just at the mark of was he likely to win, could he win. a lot of people who had their smart money, thought they knew what they were talking off. you obviously didn t. hear was donald trump in the mood, defendanconfident, in pena where people said he couldn t win and dissing hillary clinton for relying on the celebrity thing which comes up a lot. i didn t have to bring j.lo or jay z. i m here all by myself. just me. no guitar, no piano, nothing. you know what we do have, and it s all of us, all the same. we all have great ideas and great vision for our country. i think that hillary clinton steered away from getting involved to actually talk about policies. she was bringing people in like lebron james, j.lo. what did it say to you? i think it s offensive and pandering, like bringing a bottle of hot sauce on the air waves. you felt that it wasn t her connecting with the community but more assuming that, what, that that would validate her? i feel like she was trying to assume an identity and trying to be young and hip. like my 50-year-old aunt coming in and say, hey, paul, what s popping, what s cool? it didn t look natural. did you remember that night? i was there in pennsylvania. i remember just the energy and intimacy of the event and those events across the country, that everybody in the room really felt like they had the opportunity to do something that they could never have the opportunity to do again for the rest of their lives. this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and they did it. we ll do a quick break before the finale. did you all coordinate the red? no. just happened. i guess republicans truly are united. when you are on brand, you re on brand. we ve heard differing viewpoints on the trump presidency from these generations of voices. conversation is not over. the most important part comes next. having heard from both sides, we bring them together and we ll listen to what they have to say. stay with us. whether it be with customer contracts, agreements to lease a space or protecting your work. legalzoom s network of attorneys can help you, every step of the way. so you can focus on what you do and we ll handle the legal stuff that comes up along the way. legalzoom. legal help is here. [kids cheering] [kids screaming] call the clown! parents aren t perfect but then they make us kraft mac & cheese and everything s good again. not to be focusingo finaon my moderatepe. to severe chronic plaque psoriasis. so i made a decision to talk to my dermatologist about humira. humira works inside my body to target and help block a specific source of inflammation that contributes to my symptoms. in clinical trials, most adults taking humira were clear or almost clear, and many saw 75% and even 90% clearance in just 4 months. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. ask about humira, the #1 prescribed biologic by dermatologists. clearer skin is possible. . welcome back to the point. we ve heard from two young passionate groups about their hopes and fears for the trump presidency. one group wants to stop the trump agenda and the other hoping to see the president fulfill the promises he made. here on the point growing up trump we ve brought them all together. blare, what did you think of what you heard from the young trump supporters behind you? i think that, you know, one thing i want to say is that, with trump saying something in private, integrity is about not what you do in public but what you do in private. we want a president with integrity, and i don t feel that s something we have right now. you don t feel the president trump today has integrity. i do not. ellie. one thing we need to understand going forward is that people really don t care about these certain issues we try to make touch points. i think i heard the word nothing burger once on your shows. this is more of the same. people voted on the merits and want to hear about jobs and infrastructure and immigration. imani. trump has the support he does because fear-mongering is the political equivalent of click bait. it will obviously work and energize people. we ve been throwing entire minority communities that are already targeted under the bus because, what, we want to talk about jobs? what s the tradeoff. we are literally saying that we can sacrifice an entire part of the fabric of our society just to continue elevating an already privileged part of america. i would like to say that this is something that s really been happening in america before donald trump s presidency, it s not really about white people attacking black people or dominicans attacking haitians, it s happening amongst ourselves. black people are attacking each other much more than the caucasian community is. more people are doing more across racial lines, across gender. we don t necessarily have a traditional set of values. the millennial generation is the most diverse and progressive in history. we ll get in the streets, run for office and make change in our electoral process. nicole, look at the issues as a young woman excited by donald trump. these are issues people under 30 care about. stress about finances. 64%. student loans, 79%. big impact. thinking you have to tap into whatever little you have saved for retirement because things are so bad. what do you think donald trump is doing for that? he has already talked about lowering taxes. he is reducing federal regulation. he has made a law that says for every regulation that is proposed they have to get rid of two. that helps businesses. you know. as millennials, we have kind of gotten used to the fact that it s difficult to find work, and i think that s a shame because that s not the way the country has always been. you re shaking your head. you re talking about jobs. this president came out against a livable wage. this is a president who it s easy to say rhetoric is rhetoric when the rhetoric is not directed towards you. minimum wage doesn t help. that just makes businesses able to hire fewer people. i am half hispanic. i have a lot of friends. black friends, jewish friends. they all want good jobs, not bad jobs. you do that by making an economy that s flourishing and making it easier for entrepreneurs to hire people. we want to get the government off the back of people who are creating jobs in this country. that s what trump wants to do. this is the same rhetoric that we heard under george w. bush, and the whole economy almost really collapsed internationally. he did so bad on the economy that he wasn t even invited to the last two republican conventions. something in medicine they all eatra jennics. a lot of the liberal policies are well intentioned. you think of minimum wage and it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling but it actually hurts small businesses and hurts for people looking for jobs. it helps people working at a minimum wage to have food for the families. ones who are able to keep jobs. look at what s happening at mcdonald s. they re putting in machines in place of human workers because it s too expensive to keep hiring people. liberals don t understand the difference between good intention and good policy. richie. so far, the trump transition shows every sign of governing incompetently. the president promised a health care plan that would cover everyone and instead put forward a health care plan that, according to the republican-picked congressional budget office would cost 24 million americans their health insurance. he was going to cut medicaid by $800 billion and literally redistribute it for tax cuts for the rich. a show of hands. how many of you at one point since 22 have been on your parents health care plans. paula, that s something you would worry about if they do repeal. as you know, there is a big movement to repeal the whole thing. i think it s going to be it will be a really big disaster if we don t replace it with something that works. i work in an emergency department and we have a labor act where we can t turn away a patient no matter if they can pay for health insurance or if they have it or their ability to pay. i will feel the brunt of this. do you think donald trump understands health care when he said no one knew it was this complex. i have the utmost confidence in his ability to surround himself with people who know health care. donald trump is our president, the representative, not the person with all the answers. it s up to us to reach out through our congressmen to help him make the best decision that works for us. nicole mentioned the wall. how about the two swings on the travel ban. none of it is implemented because it was blocked in the courts because of the way they rolled it out. does it concern you from a competence perspective? i don t think necessarily. i think, necessarily. i think, you know, he s working on it. it s a very new administration, and i have confidence in donald trump that he will get everything done that he said he would. yeah, you know, the first rollout, or the first version of that plan was not well thought out. that s why they reintroduced it. but this everyone understands what this is about. this is about keeping us safe. people have seen what s happened in paris, what s happened in europe. we don t want that here. so i think people understand, yeah, the first version of that bill was not great, but the intention behind that bill are known and i think they are working on it to iron out some of the problems. several people look like they want down the line here. down the line. we ll get a response from chris as well. go ahead. i think that the propensity for americans to say, oh, this makes us safe, you re ignoring the fact we re not safe. we have mass shootings at a rate that no other country sees. it s ridiculous. to say we have some foreign i e inenemy of a different religion that s coming in to harm us, it s completely unfounded. we have violence in america and it s perpetuated by people who look just like the president. paul. my previous statement, i honestly think black-on-black crime is underreported. we want to shed light about a police officer killing a black man, but we have cities such as chicago where it s normal, you don t put it in newspapers anymore. it s on the news all the time. the violence in chicago is definitely in the news. black people who kill other black people go to jail. absolutely. the reason black lives matter in the streets is there s no accountability for when police kill black people. that s the conversation black lives matters is having. not about the violence in the inner city. i m a strong advocate of the black community telling each other that black lives matter, you have other options opposed to being ridiculed by being called white, for being able to talk and articulate your thoughts in a professional way. you is other options on the street as opposed to what s being pushed to you on the airwaves. do you think donald trump hit the right balance in the campaign that, yes, police risk their lives and their lives matter but a lot of black men according to the data are shot down in ways that other groups aren t? the data does show that. i believe he could have done much, much moreget ing the proper liaison to direct the message. i want to know where the all lives matter crew is. where s the all lives matter crew when we re talking about building a wall and keeping people out? a wall that the united states is going to pay for. your taxpayer dollars will pay for. when it s, you know, white supremaci supremacists, committing violence, we don t see trump tweet about everything else but he doesn t tweet about that. we don t even see that when a white child gets killed by police. right. girls are missing in d.c., we don t hear the all lives matter crew. you re talking about turning somebody away at a hospital that doesn t have health care. i thought this was a country based on christian values. is that the type of society we want? you want to talk about all lives matter, i think the one thing that trump can do, we haven t spoken about yet that will help all lives, bring in school choice. in inner cities plagued with violence, you re seeing minority children affected by poor education at a higher rate than all other children. that s because they re not afforded the opportunity to go to the school of their choice. you have these democrat politicians like obama sending their own kids to expensive private schools in limos while they deprive minority communities of school choice. these public schools are failing. the limo might be a security thing. right. go ahead, richie. immigration, one of the darkest moments in american history was when the united states turned away jewish refugees fleeing nazi germany. as a result, many of those refugees died in the holocaust. now we find ourselves treating syrian refugees with the same heartlessness that we did gy refugees a few decades ago. what s supposed to distinguish the united states is the idea all of us can become american regardless of whether we re born here. right? imgragmigration is the heart at we are as a country. donald trump is an attack on the american ideal. here s thing, almost humorously you were talking about good intentions versus good policy yet we spent the last five minutes listing out all these failed policies that trump has attempted to enact within his first 100 days alone that have obviously been embarrassing at how badly they have been. and the thing is, i don t care what kind of friends you have. if you re friends with muslims or black people or whoever, if you re supporting someone who is exploiting those communities in order to get to where he wants to be, in a position of power, then that is you renouncing our american values. like, if we re talking about bad policies, we re at a historic low, not only with the approval ratings that trump is suffering from right now on a national scale, but also the travel ban, i.e. the muslim ban, implemented solely to dis criminacriminate a religious background from end urg our k entering our country. go ahead. as a jew, i find it astounding the myriad ways democrats find ways to connect what happened in the haolocaust to what s going on today. the syrian refugee crisis is absolutely not comparable to what happened with jewish refugees. what s encouraging is the fact that donald trump, president donald trump, has indicated that he wants to put up safe zoens in syria. let s make sure it s safe there. i m hearing a lo t of anger and fear from the left and i think to blame for that, we can point our fingers at the media that has gone out of its way to completely kind of, you know, distort a lot of trump s policies, for example, the muslim ban. it s not a muslim ban. you re in a setting by at least one media news organization. right. that s tried to give no, no, exactly. i m so appreciative of that. but i think one great example is this notion that his travel ban is a muslim ban. the most populist muslim countries in the world are not emp on this list. for political reasons. yet again, how is it we have an exception for the muslim ban for people who come from a christian background? which was changed in the second ban. i was going to say in regards to the kusht political climate, a lot of people are so divided right now. a lot of people are in campaign mode. i tried to work for president trump. almost as if they re being twha2008 obama haters. the reason people don t want to work with trump, it s not because people are comparing to the holocaust for tragedy reasons. we re comparing to the hall c t holocaust, future generations are going to ask how we let this happen, the same way we re asking how the holocaust took place. richie, briefly? during the election, he said he wants to ban muslims. we re only judging him by his own words. we re going to take a quick break, and a final word after this. is not a marathon it s a series of smart choices. like using glucerna to replace one meal or snack a day. glucerna products have up to 15 grams of protein to help manage hunger and carbsteady, unique blends of slow release carbs to help minimize blood sugar spikes. every meal every craving. it s the choices you make when managing blood sugar that are the real victories. glucerna. everyday progress. before fibromyalgia, i was a doer. i was active. then the chronic, widespread pain drained my energy. my doctor said moving more helps ease fibromyalgia pain. she also prescribed lyrica. fibromyalgia is thought to be the result of overactive nerves. lyrica is believed to calm these nerves. woman: for some, lyrica can significantly relieve fibromyalgia pain and improve function, so i feel better. lyrica may cause serious allergic reactions or suicidal thoughts or actions. tell your doctor right away if you have these, new or worsening depression, or unusual changes in mood or behavior. or swelling, trouble breathing, rash, hives, blisters, muscle pain with fever, tired feeling, or blurry vision. common side effects are dizziness, sleepiness, weight gain and swelling of hands, legs and feet. don t drink alcohol while taking lyrica. don t drive or use machinery until you know how lyrica affects you. those who have had a drug or alcohol problem may be more likely to misuse lyrica. with less pain, i can be more active. ask your doctor about lyrica.
carried political and potentially legal peril. the strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for donald trump jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. they wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn t be repudiated later if the full details emerged. but within hours, at the president s direction, the plan changed. flying home from germany on july 8th aboard air force one, trump personally dictated a statement in which trump jr. said he and the russian lawyer had primarily discussed a program about the adoption of russian children. when they met in june 2016, according to multiple people, with knowledge of the deliberations, the statement, issued to the new york times, as it prepared a story, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was, quote, not a campaign issue at the time. the claims were later shown to be misleading. further down in the washingt wa post story, quote, as special counsel robert mueller investigates potential obstruction as part of his broader probe of russian interference in the 2016 election, these advisers worry that the president s direct involvement leaves him needlessly vulnerable to allegations of a cover-up. quote, this was unnecessary, said one of the president s advisers, who like many other people interviewed for the story spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. now, someone can claim he s the one who attempted to mislead. someone could argue the president is saying he doesn t want you to say the whole truth. now, just in the past few minutes, nbc news has got an statement from one of the president s outside lawyers. responding to this reporting from the washington post. attorney john dowd calls the report, fake news, incorrect, and misinformed and of no consequence. joining us now is carol lining, and she s one of the reporters who broke this story for the washington post tonight. carol, thanks very much for joining us. so the president s lawyer is saying that your story is fake news. first of all, can you tell us how many people are corroborating that this account occurred, saying that donald trump was the one dictating the talking points? you can t tell us who, but tell us how many, maybe? i can tell you, it s multiple people from lots of different walks of life, joy, and these people have put themselves in the line, in a way, to tell the full story. i think it s a fairly simple story. it s that the president who believes that he s the best politician, he s the best advocate for himself. and now it s becoming clear he thinks that he has the best sort of legal strategy, took this dilemma, as he viewed it, by the horns, and decided he would decide how it was going to be handled. and how the public would learn about this meeting. and how it would be characterized. and did the people that you talked with explain how donald trump settled on the idea of adoptions as the excuse for the meeting? well, you may remember, joy, that this meeting was a place where the russian lawyer, president did not want to describe the actual story of what happened. and he had not just a hand in it, but the most important hand in it. and we know that donald trump did, hilmself, use the adoption talking point in his new york times interview, when he s asked a question about melania sitting next to vladimir putin, he sort of spontaneously brings it up. so obviously he believed in that talking point. according to your reporting, did anyone in trump s inner circle maybe push back on this idea of using adoptions, a, because at some point the actual contents of the donald trump you know, discussions, the trump junior discussions about setting up this meeting could leak out and they could be proven to be wrong, or saying the word adoptions would trigger questions about the magnitsky act? i don t think there was a lot of concern about what words would trigger what. it was, you know, remember that the attorneys for jared kushner are the people who first find this information. they re trying to respond to than they did, but the president decides he can handle it. and he issues this statement that doesn t provide a fulsome argument. doesn t explain what the meeting was really about. doesn t explain, in a clear way, why donald trump jr. showed up that day and why he asked jared kushner and pfraul manafort, th campaign manager at the time, also to attend. well, they don t have the benefit of their lawyers, but the benefit of each other. and two know exactly why they have a meating. it is shocking that he would all agree, but just invent a different reason. carol leonning, thank you very much. in terms of how this washington post reporting relates to the obstruction investigation that s underway at the fbi, i want to bring in barbara mcquaid, former u.s. attorney for the eastern district of michigan. all right, well, miss mcquaid, first of all, thank you so much for joining us. my pleasure, joy. least, and his advisers knew the actual contents knew what that meeting was about and decided to use a different story, unless he simply didn t talk to donald trump jr., didn t talk to jared kushner, and invented a reason and imposed it on trump junior. does that make any sense? i would think that robert mueller would want to try to get to the bottom of it by talking to as many people as he could. but the fact that donald trump is out there, misleading the public, is what prosecutors refer to as consciousness of guilt effort. if you re out there telling a story that later turns out to be not true, you know, people begin to ask, what were the motives for that? and one motive might be, you were trying to conceal the truth, because you know you are guilty of a crime. and does this now set up a potential for robert mueller to want to interview donald trump, to find out whether he knew the contents of those e-mails when he invented this talking point? well, i m sure he would love to ask him that question, but my guess is he will refrain from doing so. typically what you want to do in an investigation is gather as much information as you can from documents and lower level participants in a conspiracy to learn as much as you can, so if and when you have the opportunity to confront someone who might be considered the very big fish in a case like this, you would have it. so my guess is he would refrain from doing that at this point. but at some point, he may very well want to ask those questions. the four people who are involved here. you have paul manafort, the campaign chairman at the time. jared kushner, who s in charge of the digital and other aspects of the campaign, and you have donald trump jr. all three received this e-mail. it was in their inbox. it bounced back and they all got it and it had that headline, russ russia, clinton, highly confidential. would robert mueller want to interview each of them and look for discrepancies in their stories or in what donald trump says later. and if there are sbrediscrepanc what would be the consequences? i know jared kushner gave the statement, he receives many e-mails a day and didn t read all the way down through the chain. but the subject line itself said russia, campaign, personal and confidential, so it had some red flags there that i think is very difficult for people to ignore. and i think someone who is seeking to learn the truth would want to ask all three of them about that. and, you know, it is a crime to provide a false statement to investigators or to commit perjury. and so if the stories don t match up, that would certainly be cause for further investigation, to try to figure out which one s true. and which one might be making a false statement. wow, the heat just got hotter. barbara mcquade, thanks so much for your time tonight. thank you very much, joy. to recap where we are right now on this meganews tonight, a bombshell report from the washington post this evening, reporting that donald trump thi himself dictated the misleading statement initially released by his son, donald jr., about his meeting with a russian lawyer last summer. during the campaign. but that s not the only big breaking news tonight out of the white house. we also learned today of a staffing shake up that set a new record. we are quite literally in unprecedented territory right now. the very latest on the shortest-serving white house communications director ever is coming up next. stay with me, mr. parker. when a critical patient is far from the hospital, the hospital must come to the patient. stay with me, mr. parker. the at&t network is helping first responders connect with medical teams in near real time. stay with me, mr. parker. .saving time when it matters most. stay with me, mrs. parker. that s the power of and. the all-new volkswagen atlas. seats seven, sleeps six. life s as big as you make it. so it only made sense to create a network that keeps up. introducing xfinity mobile. it combines america s largest, most reliable 4g lte with the most wifi hotspots nationwide. saving you money wherever you check your phone. yeah, even there. see how much you can save when you choose by the gig or unlimited. call, or go to xfinitymobile.com. xfinity mobile. it s a new kind of network designed to save you money. so tonight we got the breaking news from the washington post that president donald trump himself is the one who dictated his son, don junior s, misleading statement about his meeting with a russian lawyer during the campaign. that breaking news is the second major development today, hinting at the chaotic world that is the trump white house. and we learned earlier today that the brand-new white house communications director, anthony scaramucci, is out, after less than a week on the job. a tenure so short it sets a new record. seizing the title from the reagan era, and another time of chaos and crisis, at the highest levels of government. ronald reagan was the first elected republican president since watergate. for his supporters, he would come to symbolizes the renaissance and recovery of the party from its darkest hour. almost to a one, republicans today claim reagan as a hero and a role model. but while he was in office, ronald reagan endured some genuine scandals. and with those, his presidency suffered seriously difficult moments. one of those was the iran/con tr tra scandal which famously involved the secret sale of weapons to iran, so the foundation could fund their preferred side in nicaragua s civil war. the idea was to get money from iran and possibly the release of u.s. hostages, while also achieving the white house goals in central america. it was a huge scandal at the time, with congressional testimony by lieutenant colonel oliver north. you may know him now as a pundit on cable tv, but at the time, he was right at the center of this epic white house scandal. as part of the unfolding of that monumental tale of possible criminality in the white house, in late february 1987, just days before a devastating kone inini congressional report on iran/contra, the white house was beset with infighting between the president s top staffer and the first lady. it was also dealing with a surprise revelation about the dark past of its newly lly appod white house communications director. we re saving the best stuff for the last act. reporter: but the president s closest friends are worried that there may never be any best stuff. they re blaming his problems on chief of staff, donald regan. the first lady isn t denying that regan that has hung up the phone on her twice. friends say she is furious with the chief of staff and that her husband knows it. regan was in his usual place today, riding alongside his boss. he told aides he will not resign and blamed others for the latest problem. questions raised about the new white house communications director, john koehler. press secretary marlin fitswater said colin did not tell the white house that a 15-year-old he belonged to a hit group. today the revelation that the chief of staff directly blames the first lady as pushing through the nochlgs of john koehler. as a 10-year-old, koehler was briefly a member of a nazi youth group. although koehler has been defended by many prominent jewish organizations as a victim of the circumstances of his youth, it was another embarrassing piece of news the white house didn t need. well, it came as a great surprise to me that the white house didn t know it. i firmly felt that they had that security file. and it seems to me that if the fbi tells the white house the guy is clean, he s clean. reagan s chief of staff was fighting with nancy reagan and then his communications director tupp turned out to have been in the hitler youth as a grade-schooler. within days, both men would have been out of the administration. john koehler lasted just 12 days on the job, making him the shortest serving white house communications director up to that time. meantime, chief of staff, don regan got the boot in a process that was anything but organized. but the sequence of events that led to regan s resignation shows even that effort was bungled. thursday night at 6:30, president reagan called howard baker to offer him the job. baker, according to an aide, had already decided he would accept if asked and did not hesitate. at 10:30 friday morning, president reagan told republican congressional leaders they would be pleased with his new chief of staff. he did not reveal the name of his choice. dennis thomas, a top aide to regan, was at that meeting. regan quickly learned that his replacement was set, which was news to him. regan was furious. according to that white house aide, it was regan s understanding that his resignation would come on monday, at his own instigation. regan stormed out of the white house. when he got home, he notified the white house he no longer needed the secret service or a car. this morning, the white house sent a car to pick him up anyway. regan rejected it and drove his own car in. no, thank you, i can drive myself. white house infighting and shake ups are as old as the presidency itself. but what we ve seen in the past few weeks from the current white house is raising the bar for infighting and shake ups. today we learned the white house communications director, anthony scaramucci, is out after less than a week on the job. his firing came at the hands of the new white house chief of staff, john kelly, apparently in his first official act on the job. axios reports, shortly after he was sworn in this morning, he brought scaramucci into his office and said he had to go. this comes a week after he told ryan lizza in an obscenity-filled rant that he wanted everybody everyone out. beating even john koehler, the guy who served in the hitler youth. that s even less than michael flynn s brief 24 days of national security adviser, the shortest tenure of anyone in that post. it s certainly less than reince priebus whose 189 days on the job made him the shortest serving chief of staff. and much less than the six months of white house press secretary, sean spicer, himself one of the shortest serving people in that job. this recent staff shake up resembles less of a merry go around than a circular firing squad. after sean spicer hits the ejector seat, scaramucci s first task was to get rid of reince priebus, and get him fired. and now priebus replacement, john kelly, has fired scaramucci. it all makes perfect sense. joining us now is john swan. what a hot mess. explain to us first of all, this sort of question that was left hanging in the briefing today. does anthony scaramucci still have a job at the export/import bank? i m not clear on that. yeah, nor am i. they left it open, friends of his believe that he s going to be looked after in some way, shape, or form, but i don t know what that means. i know that he wants a job in the mirpgs. again win just have no confirmation that he has one. yeah, so walk us through how this happened. because, obviously, general kelly came in and wanted to have some authority. what did it come down to in terms of him being able to get rid of the newly hired mr. scaramucci? well, i think you have to go back to thursday night with ryan lizza, the conversation that anthony scaramucci had with him, where he suggested that steve bannon do various things to himself and said horrendous things about reince priebus. now, there s a lot of like history being rewritten today. i can tell you, it s complete nonsense that the president was offended by those comments or that the trump women somehow this was some sort of apostasy and they all rose up in anguish. that s just not true. in realtime, with we know from our reporting that the president found the remarks amusing, at first, and then later in the evening, as the negative coverage pailpiled on, he got q angry and told anthony scaramucci and told him off a little bit. but the next day, he was joking about it. this was really john kelly. and for general kelly to take the job, he made the demand that he gets complete authority. and that everything goes through him. and the way to demonstrate that is to fire someone who, by official decree in the press release, doesn t report to him, reports directly to the president, and had been causing, from kelly s perspective, all sorts of problems, both cultural problems and, you know, credibility problems, by the comments he d made to the press. so this was a signal that kelly s in charge, he s been fully empowered in a way that reince priebus was never empowered. so this was as much a symbolic act as anything else. but you mentioned the question of who anthony scaramucci would have reported to had he remained. did that become an issue where he was told, you can report to kelly and stay, or no no, never even had the opportunity. no. anthony scaramucci, my understanding, from my conversations today, would have happily reported to general kelly. and this was not some sort of a stand down, where he said, i only report to the president, that just doesn t mesh with the conversations i ve had today. and you also reported that steve bannon, who i like to always remind people, is the alt-right representative in the white house, also kept pushing to have scaramucci let go. is that explain that a little bit. oh, steve bannon was working to undermine and destroy scaramucci to the very end. him and reince priebus, at the end of reince priebus s tenure, he was basically in the bunker with steve bannon and a few mid-level communications staffers. there was really no one else defending him. and together they were skechemi to undermine. first it was to block scaramucci. and once scaramucci was in, it was working with various people to get messages to the president that he was unacceptable. they saw the new yorker interview was a great interview to try to undermine him. and bannon, my understanding, from sources close to him, is that he s delighted by today s news. i m sure he is. i mean, because otherwise, he was called a contortionist in not a nice way. who likes that. jonathan swan, national political reporter with axios, thank you very much. all right, the thing about making big change, like hiring a new chief of staff, is that it does create other staffing opportunities and changes inside the white house, like firing scaramucci. in this case, hiring this particular chief of staff has raised a bigger staffing question outside the white house. and that story is next. hi. .as it affects how well brilinta works. brilinta helps keep platelets from sticking together and forming a clot. in a clinical study brilinta worked better than plavix®. brilinta reduced the chance of another heart attack. or dying from one. don t stop taking brilinta without talking to your doctor,. .since stopping it too soon increases your risk of clots in your stent,. .heart attack, stroke, and even death. brilinta may cause bruising or bleeding more easily,. .or serious, 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is one name people are asking about. jeff sessions. you might know him as the current attorney general of the united states. the president has been openly criticizing, blasting, and generally complaining about his attorney general, saying how unfair and disappointing it is that sessions recused himself from the russia investigation. what donald trump cannot do without potentially causing a political earthquake inside his own party is fire jeff sessions. and what he cannot do by law is fire special counsel, robert mueller. at least not directly. only mueller s boss at the department of justice can do that. which is why, just as a matter of what-if strategery, if trump did want to get another attorney general in place without having to actually fire jeff sessions, one thing he could theoretically do is move sessions to general kelly s old job at homeland security. after all, sessions is a famously superhard liner on immigration, so deporting people would be a natural fit. he already got confirmed by the senate when he became attorney general, so the law would allow him to run a new agency for at least six months. and with sessions out of the way, trump could shuffle someone else into the role of acting attorney general. and that person could potentially wait for it fire bob mueller. the white house today got asked about the possibility of sessions changing jobs. the answer made news in two different ways. there are no conversations about any cabinet members moving in any capacity and the president has 100% confidence in all members of his cabinet. so news item number one. for today, at least, jeff sessions is not changing jobs. and news item number two, despite everything he s said about this ag, the president has 100% confidence in him. at least for today. joining us now is michael beschloss, nbc news presidential historian. always good to talk to you. same here. what do you think of this strategery theory, that donald trump could pick up his toeratty general, drop him into, and free himself to fire bob mueller. it s in character. the question is whether jeff sessions would go along with it. sessions, by all accounts, has for decades wanted to be attorney general. you know, one of the most prestigious jobs in that cabinet. department ofho homeland securi, not so much. so whether sessions would accede to that, hard to say. i doubt it. is there a historical precedent for a president moving the cabinet around in this way, you know, that you know of. it happens sometimes, for instance, in 1945, franklin roosevelt had fired, essentially, henry wallace from his ticket. he had been vice president, needed a place to put him, wallace wanted to be secretary of commerce, so roosevelt fired the secretary of commerce, jesse jones, to create some space for that. but the difference was, if donald trump s objective here is to shut down the independent prosecutor, bob mueller s investigation, in order to save his protest, there s is no historical precedent for that. and speaking of that, tonight we have this huge washington post story that donald trump in the service of trying to end this investigation or curtail it, actually came up with the talking points that his son, donald jrunior, used to excuse this meeting involving eight people, including multiple russians tied to the kremlin. what do you make of that? it sounds very much in character for donald trump. very much like richard nixon. john ehrlich, nixon s aide, who finally went to prison for a year and a half in the watergate scandal said in retrospect, nixon couldn t keep his hands off a cover-up. he wanted to be involved. there s no way you would have gotten him away from this. so the suggestion that donald trump is, you know, trying to pull the strings, to keep russia from being investigated, doesn t sound so hard to believe. and the question, of course, comes back to, what is it is that he s afraid of? what is so terrible in terms of his involvement in russia and that of his campaign, that he is so terrified to have it investigated? and taking advantage of your president to ask you about everything in the world. i have to also ask you about this appointment of general kelly. the idea in most white houses, in the jim baker, for example, you bring in someone with stature and gravitas and they get things together. do you think that that sort of method and methodology applies with this particular president? you were talking very rightly about ronald reagan and jim baker, probably the best chief of staff of modern times. that worked, because reagan was modest. he said, there s all sorts of things i don t know, especially because i haven t been in washington, i don t know how to deal with congress. jim baker was an expert in that. reagan allowed himself to be managed for four years. can you imagine donald trump allowing himself to be managed? plus the fact is that john kelly, general kelly has many qualities, but politically experience, he does not have. the last general to be chief of staff was alexander haig, one of the interesting questions was whether haig would, you know, resist nixon s effort to cover-up watergate or would he essentially tell nixon not to do it. haig was the one as chief of staff on the night of the saturday night massacre and during a day or two before then, he called up the attorney general, eliot richardson and his deputy and said, nixon wants you to fire archibald cox, the special prosecutor, this is an order from your commander in chief. i hope that s not a precedent we see here. that s a pretty chilling precedent. michael bebeschloss, thank you. moscow has retaliated big-time against u.s. sanctions and so far silence from the president of the united states. that story is next. plp blp state dinner. that was 1988. but two years earlier, things were not as friendly. today it was the soviet s turn once again. they kicked out of moscow five american diplomats, their retaliation for the 55 soviet diplomats who are expelled from the united states yesterday. they also withdrew more than 250 soviet citizens who helped run the american embassy in moscow. drivers, maids, and so on. reporter: in moscow, not one of the embassy s 260 soviet employees showed up for work today. diplomats began doing the maintenance jobs, which will now take up much of their time. how about a hammer? volunteers staffed the embassy snack bar, the only place in moscow to get a hamburger or a pizza. in addition to expelling five u.s. diplomats, the soviets declared were spies, gorbachev banned locals from working at the u.s. embassy in retaliation. coincidentally enough, in 1986, donald trump was reportedly angling to get president reagan to name him as an envoy to the soviet union, to negotiate nuclear disrmment. the reagan administration said no, so we never got to find out how that would have worked out. but in 1986 episode when the soviets expelled our diplomats and banned local soviets to working for the u.s. is the closest historical president to what happened this weekend, when russian president vladimir putin ordered the dismissal of 755 people from the u.s. embassy in russia. the u.s. has approximately 345 americans currently in moscow, and at consulates and in other russian cities. according to a 2013 state department report, a big chunk of the people who will be dismissed will be russians. the locals, who have jobs at the american embassy and those consulates. putin claimed that this was in response to new economic sanctions, passed by the senate and the house, and set to be signed by the president. but these are also a delayed response to the obama administration seizing two russian compounds in december, and expelling 35 russians, who president obama said were spies. on friday, putin seized two u.s. diplomatic properties, and ordered the u.s. embassy in moscow to downsize its staff. now we re learning that putin also wants the local staff members out. last week, we learned that donald trump plans on signing that sanctions bill into law. he hasn t done it yet, but the white house says he plans on doing so. in the meantime, the president and the state department have made no official public statements about putin s retaliation. and joinings us now is michael mcfaul, former cedambassador to russia. thanks so much for being here. great to be here, joy. so ambassador, how unusual is it for the president of the united states or the warehouse or the state department to have made no statement about what russia has done, in terms of telling those 575 staff to stand down. well, first, i ve been trading e-mails and meeting with other ambassadors today. and i think this is the largest expulsion in the history of american diplomacy. i m glad you brought up 1986 in your setup piece, but this is much bigger and nobody can think of another expulsion this size. and yet, the white house, the president of the united states, is silent. it s extraordinary. i think it s outrageous. when i worked at the white house, i worked there for three years. we made statements on all kinds of things, much lesser things that we had in the voice of the president. he needs to begin to push back on this, because it looks like a very weak signal that he s sending if he doesn t say anything. what do you make of the delay in signing the now overwhelmingly passed those new russian sanctions. because that is what putin is reacting to, but donald trump haven t even yet signed the legislation. you know, perhaps he s trying to cut some kind of deal, you know, maybe give back those two properties that the russians have in the united states, in return for lowering the number that they need to go home. and the russians that will be fired, i m glad you mentioned that, because that s the real people that will be hurt by this. those russians, by the way, are going to have a really hard time finding new jobs, having worked at the american embassy. but to be honest, i don t understand it, because i don t really understand president trump s policy towards russia in general. he talks nice to mr. putin, president putin, this is the result, maybe it s time to tray a new strategy. you know, i have to also get your take on this new washington post story that donald trump dictated the talking points to his son, for the meeting that donald trump jr. had with several russian nationals. and what do you make of the fact that what he chose to use as the excuse was this issue of adoptions. he also brought it up in his new york times interview, spontaneously, when asked a question about melania sitting next to putin. he again brings up adoptions. what do you make of that? that means that the russians were talking about lifting sanctions. because back in 2012, when i was the u.s. ambassador in russia, we adopted a set of sanctions, a human rights sanctions against human rights violators in russia. it s call the magnitsky act, and in response, putin not only put americans on a sanctions list, but then he went further. and he banned adoptions by american citizens. so when you hear adoptions, you should think this is a discussion about sanctions. all right. well, former ambassador michael mcfaul, thank you very much. really appreciate your time tonight. sure, thank you. and if you thought the republican mission to repeal obamacare was over, think again. inside the latest efforts to bring trumpcare back from the dead. plus, the stealth group that s been meeting behind the scenes, all along. next. mom, i have to tell you something. dad, one second i was driving and then the next. they just didn t stop and then. i m really sorry. i wrecked the subaru. i wrecked it. you re ok. that s all that matters. 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it s about 40. 42 i think. maybe 44. what s the balance? it s supposed to be even. we re right about even. it s pretty evenly divided, 20, 22 on each side. why don t you explain to us what are the priorities in your proposal to repair the affordable care act? well, we focused on an area that everyone agrees really needs work and that s the individual marketplace. we ve seen premiums going up through the roof in certain states. a lot of uncertainty and it s really hurt by the president s announcements that he s just going to cut off the cost-sharing subsidies basically, the cost-sharing reductions. so we know this needs to be fixed, and the uncertainty is causing premiums to go through the roof. right now insurance companies are getting ready to set premiums for next year, and so we know we need to fix this. so a group of us had decided a few months ago we wouldn t even touch health care. too difficult. we d work on some easier topics. but when it was clear this might crater in the senate, we thought we might as well start trying, see what we can do in this area. we ve got a list of those priorities if we can put them up on the screen. there are these five planks of what you re trying to do. one is, as you said, fund those cost-sharing reduction payments through congress, create dedicated stability fund for states to lower premiums and limit losses, exempt small businesses from the employer mandate, repeal the medical device tax and provide changes and clear guidelines for insurers to sell across state lines. let s go to the employer mandate piece for just a minute. a lot of people are wondering why would you let out companies with fewer than 500 employees from getting their employees insured, and what would happen to those employees? a number of us, we don t all support all of these provisions. but what we found is this. almost all big companies provide health insurance plans because it s an attractive thing for their employees. but smaller companies have often found that it s very expensive for them to do it and, in fact, their employees might be better off if they joined the individual pool and got subsidies that way. got it. so the bottom line is what we re trying to do is get everybody insures. the more people who are insured, their health care is better, and a bigger pool, more people in the insurance pool means costs are lower for everybody. that s really the bottom line. we ve got a find a way to get everybody in the system. that will lower costs across the board, and make sure nobody has to worry about, you know, getting hit by a car tomorrow or like a friend of mine s son who was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age 22 this year. yeah. you havenshouldn t have to w about that. this is really just 3% to 10% of the group we re talking about. it s the individual market. that s really where it s so volatile. we need to fix it. it s just fairer for people. good luck. we hope that you succeed. congresswoman elizabeth esty of connecticut, thank you so much for your time. thank yos, joy. thank you. we ll be right back. you re going to be hanging out in here. so if you need anything, text me. do you play? use the chase mobile app to send money in just a tap, to friends at more banks then ever before. you got next? chase. helping you master what s now and what s next. this timyou haveis turn. 4.3 minutes to yourself. this calls for a taste of cheesecake. new philadelphia cheesecake cups. rich, creamy cheesecake with real strawberries. find them with the refrigerated desserts. rethink your allergy pills. flonase sensimist allergy relief helps block 6 key inflammatory substances with a gentle mist. most allergy pills only block one. and 6 is greater than one. flonase sensimist. that the president was joking when he suggested last week that police officers not treat people they re arresting too nicely. speaking before an audience filled with members of law enforcement, the president said that officers putting suspects into a squad car should not take care to avoid banging the arrested person s head on the car door. he told them, quote, you can take the hand away, okay? regardless of how unfunny it was when he said that, law enforcement agencies around the country have come out and said the president should not talk like that, which is why the white house has out again today claiming it was a joke. but here s something to watch for. tomorrow at noon, attorney general jeff sessions travels to atlanta to address law enforcement leaders. sessions has been under lots of heat from donald trump for not recusing himself in the russia investigation. but sessions is also the nation s top law enforcement official. does he bring up what the president said about not handling suspects too nicely? does he answer questions about it if he gets asked? well, that happens tomorrow at noon, and you can expect people to be watching. that does it for us tonight. we ll see you again tomorrow.
a rose beggarden event tomorrow are told. then later in the week the president will be going to ohio. and it is notable they are putting him on the road for this. because he is someone that does well pitching things to crowds and feeds off that energy. sometimes makes him go off script, but if he can deliver a solid pitch and a good message, i think it is a necessary piece of momentum for this administration that s been largely bogged down in controversy. now a little bit about what we have heard with his infrastructure plan is it involves a trillion dollars in public and in private investigation. and it is something that capitol hill should be able to get behind. but it is something we have heard about a lot from him. and it is important in the aftermath of the foreign trip. a lot of people said what worked is the administration gave people something else to talk about that was not russia or controversy. and this is a way that a lot of republican strategists said to me, you need to give him something else. and policy and infrastructure is definitely something else to at least give the white house a investigations that they are not enough. we have msnbc s scott cohen in los angeles. let s pick it up with you on this. give us a sense of the tone of what you have been hearing, is it peaking right now or is it kind of lowering in intensity because it is right around 2:00 where you are at? reporter: well, richard, the event has wrapped up just a short time ago. and there was a fair amount of enthusiasm. you laid out what the themes are, the marches for truth, the idea of getting strait answers about the russia investigation and the independent commission in addition to the special counsel. they are pushing through with all of that. some people s minds already made up. congressman maxine waters getting a big cheer out of the crowd when she said, get ready for impeachment. and as people marched through the streets of los angeles winding up at city hall, a lot of people sounding the same sorts of themes. listen. i m tired of the lies that are coming out of the trump administration. and i m tired of the russian connection that they keep trying to deny, but oh, we forgot about this one. we are paying very close attention to everything that s going on. and that they can t just ride us off as paid protesters or the extreme or, you know, elite liberals. reporter: the issue, though, is that there were not a lot of people here. you compare this to the women s march in january which was the biggest one across the country. this plaza in front of city hall was jam packed. it was nowhere close to that. and people recognize that. the marcher that is we talked to said, yes, there s a bit of fatigue here, that s something they have to battle against, but the people who were here say they hope to continue to be out raising attention about these issues throughout the summer. richard? they were hoping for the millions that they saw during the women s march. it is now subsided a little bit there in los angeles, but i heard a little rock n roll and that s the intersection of southern california. scott cohn, get out there and do a couple moves if you can. thank you, sir. former fbi director jim comey is set to testify before the senate intelligence committee if president trump does not try and stop him along the way. but the white house is leaving the nation guessing this weekend as trump insider kellyanne conway showed friday. will the president invoke executive privilege or does he want former director comey to testify before congress? we ll be watching with the rest of the world when director comey testifies. the last time he testified under oath the fbi had to scurry to correct the testimony. the president will make that decision. russian president vladimir putin is deflecting the idea that his country was involved in the election hacking. and in an interview were form s premier of nbc s sunday night with megyn kelly he said this. translator: hackers can be anywhere. they can be in russia, in asia, even in america, latin america, they can even be hackers, by the way, in the united states. very skillfully and professionally shifted the blame as we say onto russia. let s bring in the national political reporter for bloomberg politics and washington examiner jaime winestein, host of the jaime winestein podcast. we have two different reports as of this hour on this saturday as to whether executive privilege may come into play here to deny james comey from being able to testify on thursday. it s a new york times and bloomberg, well, you might be partial to what might be the reporting, but tell us what you re hearing? richard, i think the testimony this week from james comey, the former fbi director, will be the most hotly contested since hillary clinton did the marathon 15-hour session before the benghazi session. two questions democrats want to get to the bottom of. and both have to do with conversations reportedly that mr. comey had with the president while he was fbi director, one involves the president reportedly telling or encouraging mr. comey to shut down the investigation into michael flynn. and the other was, what the president reportedly suggested or asked for with the former fbi director s loyalty. legal experts raised doubts as to whether they can do this. if the president does this, they could theoretically be shut down by a court. and it would be politically dangerous because it creates the impression that the white house has something to offer. but the white house says they have nothing to hide. so it would be a perilous move. i want to guess that the president is a difficult man to predict. that would be very true. jaime, reflect on what you are hearing, sir, about the reporting. i know bloomberg is saying it is still in consideration. the new york times saying no, what are you hearing? it seems that it would be hard to invoke executive privilege considering president trump has tweeted about the conversation he had with james comey. so a lot of legal experts suggest if you re going to say executive privilege, this conversation was just between me and someone in the in the executive branch. you can t tweet about it and then try to claim executive privilege. i think what is going to be interesting is wlp jamhether ja comey thought the conversation that reportedly took place about michael flynn was obstruction of justice. and then i think you re going to hear him get questions, especially from republicans, is if he did think it was obstruction of justice, what was he going to do with the memos? was he going to recommend that the president be tried for obstruction of justice? was he just going to keep them filed away? or when were they going to see the light of day? because we only learned of them and most people it seems that the fbi only learned of them after he was fired. and we can see this. i mean, just being quite a spectacle and you sort of outlined a little bit of that, jaime, but sahil, he could have copies of the alleged notes he takes after conversations. he could have exhibits that he s passing around during the testimony. this could really turn out to be something. you know, there s certainly questions as to whether it will and the likelihood of something coming out is anticipated to a large degree because mr. comey said he kept memos based on secondhand sources. he s kept memos of conveions with president trump. the president asked him this that democrat argue if true constitute obstruction of justice. so this moves very quickly into the territory where as i mentioned, it ends up not becoming the crime but the cover-up if the white house doesn t handle it wear. it s a tricky situation for them if they invoke in executive privilege and can t shut him down. that s one of the five investigations ongoing. we ll talk about robert mueller s investigation and the reporting is that he s expanding who he is looking into. we have heard the names jared kushner and paul manafort and the attorney general s name as well. what does that say in terms of the duration that i talked about last hour, this means obviously more work to do, but the way the special counsel and his strategy is being employed. that s the nature of these type of investigations. in fact, that s a danger. if there are charges on something like collusion, it could be a financial crime or trying to hide something, obstructing justy ttice in som or perjury, these are special ways prosecutors can find their way going away from what they initially looked at, collusion, and find crimes elsewhere. so that is a threat to many members of the administration that this might not just be a collusion investigation at the end of the day. so how wide might this go, sahil? eye mooe bri jaime says when you have special persons employed, it will start to bring in details and the investigation if you will have outlets or tributaries that were not expected. well, you go bac to the 90s when you think of a special prosecutor looking at bill clinton s crimes and what ended up getting bill clinton impeached was emergency. the process of if he hasn t done that, it s far from clear that anything of that sort would have happened. we know the president is extremely frustrated by the investigations and the talk. he s repeatedly said it s concocted by democrats to come up with an excuse for losing an election they should have won. that frustration is going to loom large over what type of white house this is. and we ll see if it will cost them this week. and it will be important how the white house handles this. we have two people that have mini countdown clocks in the white part of their eyeballs. many people are watching to see what happens. it will make cable news great again, that s for sure. that s right. thank you so much, jaime. it s a graeat conversation. we ll show you more on the discussion with vladimir putin on the new premier of the show sunday night with megyn kelly at 7:00 eastern on nbc and your local affiliate. check your local listings. darrell issa won a raizor thin margin last year. it won t be easier for him as he begins campaigning in just months. a live report is next. anything. even a coupe soup. 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[burke] and we covered it, november sixth, two-thousand-nine. talk to farmers. we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum everything your family touches sticks with them. makeure the germthey bring home don t stick around. use clorox disinfecting products. because no one kills germs better than clorox. at crowne plaza we know business travel isn t just business. there s this. a bit of this. why not? your hotel should make it easy to do all the things you do. which is what we do. crowne plaza. we re all business, mostly. congressman darrell issa is facing heat from his c constituents. i ve been a republican for many years. i voted for reagan and voted for both bushes and never voted for a. however, i am afraid of president donald trump. i was out of the district campaigning all over for rubio. he was my first choice. would i like to have him put away his phone for twitter? yes. nbc political editor beth fooey is joining me now with the congressman had a town hall. we saw a little right there. beth, what a great place to be today as we try to get a sense, right, of that barometer and that benchmark on what republicans are going through who are right there in the middle. and darrell issa is one of the toss-up elections in 2018. yeah, he s interesting, richard, he s one of few republican members of congress actually doing the town halls. number one. number two, he s probably the most high-profile house member actually out there doing these town halls. remember, he was the chairman of house oversight during the obama years. he had a very high profile there. he was subpoenaing witnesses and holding hearings. he was really sort of on the chase for many members of the obama administration during several, what he believed were scandals, like the fast and furious gun running situation and the irs supposedly targeting conservative groups. darrell issa was all over those things. now he s seen the other side of the equation. he s now in a district that almost rejected him in 2016. he won by the barest of margins. donald trump overwhelmingly rejected in california, including in darrell issa s district and he s trailed everywhere he goes by protesters and is back in the district. so what you heard today and you played some of that before, is that darrell issa is distancing himself from trump. he can t fully push him away but he can t embrace him either. on the issue of oversight, he left the oversight committee and went back to it. and he was telling me that the reason he did that was because he wanted to help hold this administration s feet to the fire as he did with the obama administration. so let s listen to that. i came back to oversight because president trump s administration is going to need oversight. and i will push for it. will i stand up to this administration? yes. i ran in the past on my record, i ll run in the future on my record. they took a picture of the first and only time i had met with donald trump and they put it up there as the reason not to vote for me. reporter: he s keeping the president at arm s length, richard. sop much at stake, so much at shake. he only won by 1600 votes or so in 2016. he felt it today from your interview as well a what happened at the town hall. beth, appreciate it. thank you, beth. pop star ariana grande pays a visit to fans injured during the terror attack at her concert in manchester, england. wondering, what if? i let go of all those feelings. because i am cured with harvoni. harvoni is a revolutionary treatment for the most common type of chronic hepatitis c. it s been prescribed to more than a quarter million people. and is proven to cure up to 99% of patients who have had no prior treatment with 12 weeks. certain patients can be cured with just 8 weeks of harvoni. before starting harvoni, your doctor will test to see if you ve ever had hepatitis b, which may flare up and cause serious liver problems during and after harvoni treatment. tell your doctor if you ve ever had hepatitis b, a liver transplant, other liver or kidney problems, hiv or any other medical conditions and about all the medicines you take including herbal supplements. taking amiodarone with harvoni can cause a serious slowing of your heart rate. common side effects of harvoni include tiredness, headache and weakness. ready to let go of hep c? ask your hep c specialist about harvoni. there s nothing traditional about my small business. i count on my dell small business advisor for tech advice. with one phone call, i get products that suit my needs, and i get back to business. of being there for my son s winning shot. that was it for me. that s why i m quitting with nicorette. only nicorette mini has a patented fast dissolving formula. it starts to relieve sudden cravings fast. every great why needs a great how. exclusively to megyn kelly and opens up about the 2016 election. what he now says about the allegations ussi hacking. [radio alarm] julie is living with metastatic breast cancer, which is breast cancer that has spread to other parts of her body. she s also taking prescription ibrance with an aromatase inhibitor, which is for postmenopausal women with hormone receptor- positive her2- metastatic breast cancer as the first hormonal based therapy. ibrance plus letrozole was significantly more effective at delaying disease progression versus letrozole. and ibrance plus letrozole shrunk tumors in over half of these patients. patients taking ibrance can develop low white blood cell counts, which may cause serious infections that can lead to death. before taking ibrance, tell your doctor if you have fever, chills, or other signs of infection liver or kidney problems, are pregnant, breastfeeding, or plan to become pregnant. common side effects include low red blood cell and low platelet counts. .infections, tiredness, nausea, sore mouth, abnormalities in liver blood tests, diarrhea, hair thinning or loss, vomiting, rash, and loss of appetite. julie calls it her new normal. because a lot has changed, but a lot hasn t. ask your doctor about ibrance, the number-one-prescribed, fda-approved oral combination treatment for hr+/her2- mbc. brtry new flonase sensimists. allergy relief instead of allergy pills. it delivers a gentle mist experience to help block six key inflammatory substances. most allergy pills only block one. new flonase sensimist changes everything. welcome back. i m richard lui in new york city. here s what we are watching at the bottom of the hour here on msnbc. a white house official says president trump will launch an infrastructure week. that announcement of that week and that plan will happen at the white house at the rose garden on monday. the new york times reporting that the president will call on states and cities and corporations to pay for many infrastructure costs. like roads and bridges. demonstrators are out today across the country including los angeles, washington, d.c. and 100 other cities. they are demanding answers in the russia probe calling for independent investigations by congress to uncover any potential ties between russia and the trump administration and the trump campaign. all eyes will be on former fbi director james comey as he s set to testify before congress. this thursday in the russia question investigation. the white house could block to move his testimony, although the new york times is reporting that will probably not happen. so it could go either way. and an iowa gop political tradition got a vip visit this afternoon. vice president mike pence underlined his praise of donald trump and senator joni ernst s annual roast & ride event. we were there before, during and after at the central iowa expo talking to voters there in boone, iowa. and it s a hot one today, von. what kind of reaction, nevertheless, did you get? because there were a lot of folks out there. reporter: yeah, richard, there were more than 500 bikers that took about the 50-mile trip from des moines up here to boone, iowa n the northern part of the state. they had both republican senators, joni ernst, chuck grassley, congressman steve king here. this was one time where it was a swing state, a place that obama won eight and four years ago. but this year donald trump won. mike pence was delivering the message that congress needs to do more and congress needs to produce results to fulfill the trump agenda, setting up what could be 2018 tough midterms if the voters here, many of whom i talked to, over issues of health reform and tax reform. i want to play a sound bite of mike pence setting up for the crowd where the trump administration is at. take a listen. president donald trump has brought america back and the world knows it. president donald trump withdrew the united states of america from the paris climate accord. and put america first. as the president explained, the paris accord punished theed united states. no doubt about it. how great is it to have a president who is more concerned with des moines than denmark? reporter: richard, as you heard, he took his own spin on the president s pittsburgh to paris comparison. so this is interesting, because you were listening to the speech here, this as the vice president was really focusing on these grassroots issues, which are really resonating. you were telling us last hour as well as this hour that the idea of paris and international issues are not necessarily something that is what they care about on the ground. then we have the infrastructure plan that was announced and the infrastructure week just announced within the last hour, too. it seems like we are putting together, if you will, a little bit of a theme atic to think about that issue and health care. reporter: exactly. when you heard the vice president expand there a little bit on the paris accord comment, saying that this is about the american worker. no longer can we make sacrifices through the likes of china and india. and he really kind of hammered home that, not only on that issue, you re talking about infrastructure, talking about health care, bringing it back and making this essentially it felt like the campaign even though six months ago was the election. and for everything not happening over in d.c., he s really trying to take the message here. but i want to mention real fast what you didn t hear from mike pence was on the issue of russia. there s still a lot of questions that mike pence has really avoided answering. he s hasn t had a major interview in more than a month outside of fox news, about reporting that jared kushner met with the russian banker during the campaign or jeff sessions reported meetings with the russian ambassador. for as much as he s trying to hammer home and focus more on the people here, there s still so many of those questions, richard, that is what we have been talking about this hour but they have been unanswered by this administration. a very good point you make there, vaughan, in the key swing state in the midwestern firewall that donald trump won in 2016. we got to keep an eye on what is happening in iowa. vaughan, appreciate it. russia s president vladimir putin continues to speak out about his views on the 2016 elections, by the way. speaking to nbc s megyn kelly, which you can catch tomorrow night on the premier of sunday night with megyn kelly. keir simmons is here with the latest. keir, what has been the reaction to putin s remarks in that interview? reporter: i think folks here are taking in the many faces of president putin that we saw over the past 24 hours here in st. petersburg at times angry, at times seeming to joke around. some headlines for me, him telling megyn kelly, and we will hear that in the interview tomorrow, that perhaps the cia could have been behind the hacking of the u.s. elections. the cia pushing back very hard on that kind of a suggestion to nbc news today. meanwhile, it was interesting to hear president putin seemed to align himself with president trump over president trump s decision, for example, to get out of the paris climate accord and on the issues of nato what president putin had to say, very similar to what president trump has said, arguing that nato, for example, should align itself more towards the fight against terrorism. but the main headline was the continued denial by president putin that russia had anything to do with intervening in the u.s. elections. take a listen. translator: hackers can be anywhere. they can be in russia, in asia, even in america, latin america, they can even be hackers, by the way, in the united states. very skillfully and professionally shifted the blame as we say onto russia. reporter: now, on the same day that president putin was speaking here at the conference center, i managed to track down sergey gorkov who met with jared kushner, president trump s son law we found him a we wanted to ask him what happened in a meeting with jared kushner back in december. sergey gorkov was not enthusiastic about answering our questions. take a listen. keir simmons from nbc news. you re the subject of intense scrutiny in america because of your meeting with donald trump s son-in-law jared kushner. any comments reporter: i know you do. there is some confusion on what exactly happened. were you talking about business or were you talking about policy? no comments, please. reporter: have you been contacted by the fbi or would you be prepared to talk to them? mr. gorkov. i m sorry. it s just a question of understanding what happened in the meeting. no comments, please. please. reporter: can i just ask you, was it a political meeting or economic meeting? can we interview you at a later date? submit all comments. reporter: if it is an innocent meeting, why won t you talk about it. mr. gorkov, if it was an innocent meeting with jared kushner, why don t you want to talk about it, sir. i m sorry, don t please don t push me out of the way. i just want to ask you about the meeting you had with jared kushner. please explain it. we really do want to hear if it happened. if it was an innocent meeting, please just explain what happened in the meeting, mr. gorkov. were confusion has come from the fact that the white house suggested jared kushner was there in his role as part of the trump transition team. meanwhile, the bank has suggested that it was a business meeting. we reached out to jared kushner s attorney but no response so far today. but a source close to jared kushner did suggest that he was there, indeed, as a representative of the trump transition team. back to you, richard. keir, thank you so much. keir simmons with that report. let s bring in michael allen, former majority staff director of the house permanent selection committee on intelligence. you were watching that along with me here, michael, your thought on what keir was able to, if you will, get from pursuing mr. gorkov. again, mr. gorkov not wanting to answer any of keir s questions along the way. your reaction? well, as extraordinary reporting from keir, i think that is just the kind of thing the trump white house probably doesn t want to see on tv, which is enterprising reporters chases down russian bankers asking about the president s family. but it i don t know that he got any news or clarification on whether it was an economic-type meeting or political meeting or both. but we certainly saw an interesting line of inquiry that we ll hear about in the coming months. a big question that keir was trying to get reaction from. another point here since we are talking about russia and talking individuals from russia, that s the president vat meyladimir pu. keir was also expressing some of the reaction based on the panel that megyn kelly moderated as well as her interview with vat meyer putin. vladimir putin. that will be broadcast tomorrow on msnbc news. one of the points that vladimir putin brought up is the hacking could have happened anywhere. it could have even be related to u.s. intelligence agencies, one of the 17 agencies. and he brought up the idea of the cia, he even brought up the idea of megyn kelly s very own child being able to do this. he went through a long litany here of this is not russia. you re right. he said all but the 400-pound person in his basement. my first reaction to putin was, of course he would say that. look, he s a kgb agent trained by the kgb. it s a country run by their intelligence services and intelligence officers. they re having a field day. they don t want democracy set loose in their neck of the woods. and so they love this spectacle that they have, in part, caused, which is to portray democracy here in the united states as disorderly and unconcern. and so i think the russians are very much enjoying this. and that disinformation, if you will, that putin is putting out is part of top larghe larger st no doubt. part of the strategy that russia has been framed, that s really the argument he s making at this point. russia not involved. russia is framed. how might that be played out? because he s saying, look at the other groups, don t look at russia. well, i think it s unfortunate and i hope we won t hear anyone in the united states following up on that line of argument menation. i have a feeling that s why he put it out there in hopes other people would say, hey, yeah, you know what? maybe that was someone that wasn t russia. our intelligence communities are very certain on this fact. it sounds like everyone inside the administration is united behind the assessment of the intelligence community. that it was indeed russia. but listen, russia may have favored donald trump over hillary clinton, but they re still not friends of the united states or friends of the trump white house, even though it seems that way at times when you see the pictures that have come out. russia is trying to oppose us around the world, syria, afghanistan, libya, certainly in europe and the rest. and so unfortunately, there are strategic adversary and they are going to stay that way. as we look at what the president vladimir putin has said in terms of the panel and what we have released of that interview with megyn kelly, we will learn a lot more when we play that full interview tomorrow on nbc news at 7:00 p.m. thank you so much, michael allen, for giving us your perspective based on your experience on what has been said so far with megyn kelly. we are following at this hour breaking news, this just coming into us. what we understand right now and it s early, but metropolitan police at london bridge, you can see right in the middle of the screen right now, a car and some individuals running over some individuals. they have closed traffic going both ways at london bridge. and it s a late in the evening right now on a saturday. we are just getting this information into us. breaking news again, the london bridge closed in both directions. a car hitting several individuals, at least. we don t know the exact details, but we re going to look more into this video. it has not been verified that it is terror-related. that is not the words we re hearing yet, but we ll take a short break and look into this. stay with us. you wish to see. what i have seen? 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summertime. badda book. badda boom. got you a shirt! .i kept the receipt. book now at choicehotels.com i decided to see if there was a way for design to play a. .positive role in what was going on in the world. there s a jacket that s reflective for visibility. .a sleeping bag jacket, jackets that turn into tents. i usually do my fashion sketches on the computer. i love drawing on the screen. there s no lag time at all. it feels just like my markers. with fashion, you can dress people and help people. it s really cool to see your work come to life. we re following breaking news on msnbc just into us within the last ten minutes. london bridge in london in the center of the screen right now, what we are hearing from met politan police is they closed traffic in both directions. the concern here is this after what police say they were responding to some reports. and according to the bbc, that a van has hit pedestrians on london bridge there in central london. it is not being called at this moment a terrorism event, a terror event. but they have closed again to traffic going both ways. lucy kavanaugh is there as our correspondent. what are you hearing, lucy? we don t have a lot confirmed, but we have heard an incident happened on london bridge according to the london transport system. they say the london bridge station has been closed at the request of the police. a reuters reporting on the scene had seen about ten police vehicles heading towards london bridge. sky news another television outlet here has been reporting that a white van ran over potentially some people on the bridge. there a reporter on the ground was saying emergency services are there and a heavy armed police presence on this location. now, regardless of what actually took place, it s understandable of course that the authorities here are taking this very seriously. this comes on the heels of that devastating attack in manchester last week in which 22 victims lost their lives. not to mention orvs, tthe westm attackast march, whi was a this is the very early hours as we try to get more details as they come in. one witness told bbc news that a white van veered off of the road in london on london bridge and hit five or six people. some of the witnesses reported seeing medical services. the police at this moment are not explaining the incident this was. nobody is jumping the gun to call this an act of terror. this is saturday night, there could have been folks who perhaps consumed too much to drink and took crews down on this bridge. so this is a very early hour, but police are spearing no expense and treating this as serious as possible in light of the increased attacks on london. richard? one of our producers who was having a meal in the area is also telling us that they were told to stay in place by the authorities that were there in that vicinity having a meal in other restaurants. they should not move as they continue to look into this incident. but lucy, as you understand the area so well, these reports coming from the bbc and others. a van has hit pedestrians. give us a sense of the log donl bridge ar london bridges. there are certain ones with cordens down the middle and others that don t. there are cones and also cordens that sometimes sit on the side where pedestrians move back and forth. describe to us if you can the area of london bridge in the center of the screen of what the cordens are, the barriers are, that may or may not have been there to protect pedestrians or not. reporter: right. you see the photo on the screen there, it s a larger bridge and a large pedestrian area on both sides of sort of where the cars go. and, of course, this is popular tourist area. anyone visiting with family and friends or anyone to go out on the town, the going out areas aren t necessarily right there, but this is a very popular area for people to take a stroll or maybe a walk. this is likely an area that would have had quite a few people walking through there at the time. it is very difficult for authorities to protect these kind of spaces, obviously in the aftermath of westminster. they have been putting up more security quarters. i m not actually certain there was anything to prevent the potential attacks, but there is something like a space to keep them from the cars. the parallel you re bringing up about manchester, it is an unfortunate coincidence. we were just reporting on this about ariana grande as you mentioned the concert. a huge concert, that s right. she s going to donate the proceeds to the filiesured or killed because of t terror incident and the threat increased. tell me what theresa may did with the threat level and where it stands right now in london at the moment. reporter: well, that s interesting that you mentioned that, richard, because the threat level in the u.k. used to be critical. they i m sorry, severe. i m sorry to wrap. these are the images just coming in to the u.s. we can clearly see that the officer is moving with speed. and you are general did as they put on their vests. and the perspective on this photographer is one or two or three blocks back. but we can get a sense of the energy here. the pictures just coming intoba. these pictures just coming in as more emergency selection are making their way. police vehicles full of again, law enforcement moving on to the location. as they were showing as you second ago. we ve seen pedestrians on the right-hand side leaving. it doesn t look with great urgency. we were able to see a handful of law enforcement gearing up to move toward what could be the incident. but again, we re not completely sure about the timing or exact location but maybe you can tell by looking at these pictures that are just coming in to us at msnbc about where and which side this perspective is. can you tell? i want to point out how shocked and terrified these families look. we saw a young girl with her mother. it looks like people are quite upset. quite understandably so. especially on the heels of manchester attack. before the manchester attack took place, the threat level here was severe. it was taken up to critical in response to that attack. we saw more armed police officers on the street and not the just police officers but armed soldiers who took over key tourist sights. buckingham palace and westminister. but that was done effectively in order to free up more armed police officers across the uk. not just in london to do more patrols. to basically spread out, fan out across areas. that might be common in the united states or others, but not in the uk where police are unarmed. i want to bring in some new information that we re hearing. this is not confirmed by nbc news but sky new is saying there may have been a stabbing attack according to witnesses after this car allegedly ran over some people. and we are learning some new information. british police officers are saying that multiple resources are attending this incident at london bridge. they re asking people to avoid the area. that is a strangely worded statement. what that means is they are deploying, it sounds like all the resources possible to this incident which would give us a sense that it probably, it may not be as casual as perhaps a drunk driver but something perhaps more serious. but we have not confirmed that yet. this is a short statement from british police. as you were reporting unfortunately during manchester attack, this is a police force, the metropolitan police, not only very capable, one of the most capable to respond to such incidents but they are now on higher alert. as you re describing earlier. just because of what happened in manchesterful that s why at this moment we watch with this piece of information as we re hearing from reports and sources that this is of note. at least at this poin although many would hope that it would be an incident that might be an unfortunate happenstance. because of the prelude to today, to 10:53 in london, we have our focus and on our eyes on what may be happening. because of what happened in recent months, across the uk, paris is what we were watching in the lead-up to the election there. there is also of note. also in the uk in a number of days so the intensity, the focus again on such incidents is a little bit different. a little bit higher right now. especially in central london. there is an election coming up on june 8. this is an mexico teresa may called for to boost support for her party. to obtain for herself a clearer mandate for those brexit negotiations that will soon be taking place. what we saw in the aftermath of the manchester attack is that the party s popularity has narrowed. the lead has narrowed in the polls. unclear how this is going to affect the situation so late in the game. a lot of questions being asked about the government s ability to for example, handle terrorism incidents. one of the critical things, the 22-year-old who killed himself and 22 others, he was known to the authorities, to british authorities. the internal fbi equivalent, m inch 5, have him on the radar. he was known to them but not followed for whatever reason. so a lot of tough questions being asked when you have these radicalized young men. and how do you stoick on that case? how do you continue to monitor them? it takes police resources to do that. so this, whatever this incident may end up being, obviously, does not bode well, i should say, for this upcoming election. do i want to point out something else we re hearing. a witness telling a reuters reporter that sheid see people with apparen knife wounds on london bridge. now wve this from two different news sources. the media reports do seem to indicate that there was a vehicle that injured people and potentially something 22nd a knife. perhaps a stabbing. this is just could not jectionture at this point but we are getting it from two different media sources as we work the verify it ourselves. live pictures coming to us from london, england. we have some sound. our nbc news correspondent in london watching this, knows the area quite well. it is 10:56 local time. this camera angle here, we re just getting thought video raw. we re showing it to you. way in the distance there, in the center, in the back, are about four or five vans. there were a good number of law enforcement that were gearing up. it was unclear in terms of what sorts of gear they were putting on and as you can probably tell by watching this video, you see pedestrians walking in the opposite direction without great speed. and then also more law enforcement vehicles going to that location. you see it there. again, not with sirnens on. so the video that we re just getting, if you re just joining us again, we are getting reports coming out of london. we can see vehicles moving live to the incident. okay. now we have more sound here. they are moving toward what we believe to be the location of the incident. the reporting again, not confirmed by nbc news, stabbings, we have heard of one or two from local media. and others reporting to local media. we ve heard from the bbc, a van hitting pedestrians on london bridge, and we are yet to get confirmed details by nbc news. we re watching all of this. this is just happening within the last 15 minutes along with lucy cavanagh who is there at our bureau in london. we have mychichael allen, of th house intelligence committee. he is familiar with this incident. and i guess one of the questions we got is that unfortunate correlation that lucy was describing to us, michael, in recent months, if not the last year, that upcoming elections, at least in two incidents here, paris and now, excuse me, in france, and now the uk. on we have terror related incidents. so there is this heightened acute of what might be happening here on london bridge. have you heard anything in terms of what s happening here? and what is your reflection based on the pieces of information we can gather so far in. with the appropriate caveat that s it may turn out not to be terrorist motivated. the islamic state and other terrorist groups obviously have always had a great fascination with landmarks such as parliament. and it looks like from your live coverage there. parliament square. they have always been interested in elections. and we have a gigantic election coming soon in the u.k. this reminds me a little bit of brussels a couple years ago when the police there started to make arrests, other associates and
obviously the investigators are still trying to figure out what was behind this, who the bomber is. i m told they ve identified a male as the bomber but they re still trying to learn more about him. what is most striking to you? what was the bomb made out of? because that leads you to oo lot of conclusions. this is the deadliest terror attack since july 7th, 2000 fiv 2005. and almost certainly a hydrogen puraukside bomb. because the signature of al qaeda and isis are these kinds of bombs. so where was it made? because you need a commercial refrigerator often the store the chemicals. they re very toxic if you re making these kinds of bombs, you re oftenb wearing a gas mask. there s a whole apparatus i would be looking for. we don t know if it s a hydrogen peroxide bomb. would it be a loan wolf scenario? or how likely would that be? i m skeptical. we ve had people in this country build those bombs and kill themselves. it s difficult. you need training. i ve been in bomb making courses where it takes many hours. the proportions are very, very careful. this is not something you can just read on the internet and make, usually, by yourself. i ve spoken to british counterterror officials repeatedly over the last several months and they talk about a constant level of threat and a number of plots toward it in recent months. they re already on the highest level you can imagine. at the end of the day is difficult to prevent. i would say impossible. if you think about the united states and what wrooee ve heardm all 50 states thousands of cases, i would estimate i ve worked with european security services, they re sitting on at least 10 times the threat per capita. you have questions about how many people i can follow and the toughest question, intent. i m looking at a subject saying i ve got to choose between 100 people, which ones i have to cover. within two weeks that individual may say i m transitioning from i m interested in jihad to i m killing somebody. and you ve got to determine which of those people you re triggering you ve got to follow. 200 cells, 2,000 suspected jihadists. 10,000 suspected supporters of jihadists. you don t have the man power in a country like that and you saw that in france. they can t follow all of them, even if they have a suspicion. and phil, i think you would know this in your own experience. do do a bombing, it probably looks like you have some kind of support system. it s not a single actor is more likely to do something like using a car to mow down people, as you saw outside the houses of parliament a couple of weeks ago. so at this point, talking to law enforcement officials, their initial suspicion is that we re going to see the high likelihood that this person had a support system, probably had some kind of training, as peter burgen was mentioning and so there s a lot more here to get to the bottom of. and how concerning is this for u.s. law enforcement? all law enforcement in the world is understaffed when it comes to trying to track all the people that may do something. so more than to narrow that down. they can t follow everybody and rely as much as possible on intelligence, on individuals cooperating in the community to tell them of suspicious persons and electronic capability and of course then we have the other argument in a free society about civil liberties. do we want metta data being stored, nsa wire tapping international calls. all of that type of thing kicks back in. so it s very concerning. and we don t know because it s early. a question that s going to be addressed is was this inspired or directed? was this someone who became self radicalized, maybe found some of the recipes in effect for the bombing online? or if they had some sort of contact at home. the truth is both of those is unsettling and alarming in its own way because the self radicalized are harder to track and the directed ones means there s a line back to the organizations in syria. they ve directed all of their followers all over the world so they don t have to micromanage each individual case or have this person saying are you ready, do it today. they dispatch them like zombies. was there involvement that led them to a particular target? and was there anything recently coming from isis, which we know has been calling on followers in europe to launch terrorists attacks. osama bin laden s son has called for these kinds of attacks recently. school shooters look at other school shootings. so we have an attack at a concert hall, similar to that of bataclan in paris and it was an american star as it was an american band in paris. there s a copy cat aspect here. we ve had 850 brits go to get training in syria. we don t know we obviously don t know at this time but brits have been pretty lucky so far. certainly you have both heard from british officials that they have hundreds of these guys that have come back and as isis gets pressured in iraq and syria, more of them are coming back and they re very particularly worried about them in places and concentrating in places like manchester and midlands and london because that s where there s a support network. and no one is off limits. scle clearly the target was womenen and children. it s pam s reporting that they have an idea on who they believe to be the suicide bomber. they re now i imagine looking at his connections. walk us through what the law enforcement process is now. you ve guatemala enforcement intelligence. the first tear is are there co consphe conspirators. the question is are there conspirators involved in the tack tomorrow? where did the money go to? the most critical element communications. i wauncnt a cell phone. i want a laptop. second tier would be who radicalized support network and you re looking down the road. is there a tether that goes back someplace else? might be western europe, might be syria. can we get enough information against a safe house in syria among the people who might have been involved. and you ve got to be worried in a couple hours people are going to go to work in london whether or not there could be other people who might be waiting in the wings to do something just like this. squh you look at other attacks, we ve all coveringed t covered the paris attacks for instance, look for other contacts. and look for how big the web grows. there s a possibility of a loan actor. one of the possibilities we saw in paris and brussels was that in those neighborhoods almost no contact with people very isolated. so they had a difficult time getting operation and you could argue one way or another whose fault that may be. but they had isolated communities that had been there for a couple of generations and not really assimulated. so the question now is is manchester in a similar situation. do we have an isolated neighborhood where people don t feel assimilated, they feel like foreigners. so we haven t heard that part of this yet of the police relationships in those neighborhoods. you have the profile of the folks who were the average local teen. you have that uk, you have that here. who were assimulated and and isis attacks in europe have been a phenomenon. all these people went through the belgium prison system. you have britain is partly proteched by the channel, partly protected by a very good intelligence service and maybe a little bit of luck. unfortunately this is a new development that is pretty worrisome. for a while we have seen a lot of brits go to iraq and syria for training. the numbers for french and belgium is much larger. the french have a better handle on what tom is talking about is definitely a problem in the uk. they ve certainly done a better job of trying to infiltrate and keep an eye on those people coming back. you never know it s a resource problem. in russia and tonight is the night that we have developments sadly. we certainly do. we have breaking news in the trump russia investigation. cnn can confirm that president trumpt personally asked officials to publicly deny collusion and we re told the request was made back in march and the director of national intelligence and the national security agency refused to comply and special counsel robert mueller has been briefed on secret memos from fired fbi director james comey and that includes the memo in which comey documented his claim but the president asked him to end his investigation of fired national security advisorer, michael flynn. tonight a key house supervisor showing flynn lied to investigators about who paid for his trips to russia, including a 2015 speaking engagement that he falsely claimed was funded by u.s. companies, this as he s defying a subpoena and invoking his fifth amendment right to testify. the panel isopen on the possibility of holding flynn in contempt of court. this is certainly stunning information. we learn the president made calls to his two top intelligence officials to try to knock down what james comey said publicly. so we learned that he made a request to the fbi director. knocked this story down and the fbi directorer said no and wrote it down in a memo. we confirm tonight as first reported by the washington post that after comey made that famous testimony march 20th where he confirmed in a public setting that fbi was investigating whether members of the trump team had communicated and colluded with russia in the campaign, that he made calls to dan coats and to the director of the national security agency, admiral mike rogers and asked them to publicly state that there was no evidence of collusion. they both refused that. and they were uncomfortable with it, my sources tell me. felt this was undue pressure that president was putting on them with an investigation underway. and with this report joug, it show as pattern because as you ll recall, we reported that reince priebus called the fbi to publicly reporting about communications between russia and trump and what really stuck out to me in particular reading this article in the washington post was that white house officials reached out to the fbi, people in the fbi trying to get them to end the investigation into michael flynn. it means this is spreading. obviously you have a boss. the boss is really unhappy. he s ubseszed with this. he s reaching out to everybody he can because he still thinks he s running the trump organization rather than be president of the united states. he s telling his people can t you talk to people over there and put a stop to this and the washington post reporting says that these white house officials did that. we know about reince priebus s outreach, which he has explained. he did that, i believe last february but this is a plural. this says they sounded out top intelligence officials about intervening with comey. so suddenly this is spreading. i think part of the problem is the president has had a lot of frustration about the fact that he thinks there s information that shows there s no collusion and he wants look, in his last press conference he mentioned that he can only speak for himself. the first time he s used that language. he s suggesting other people have problems but not he himself. i think one of his great frustrations has been he knows comey has briefed members of congress and among the things he did not say to them was that donald trump was personally under investigation and he s suggested he is not. and why can t comey come out and say that? that s what the president s frustration has been. and he s been hanging on, james clapper, the former director of national intelligence who said some of the same sentiments. testimony before multiple committees, he would not rule out the possibility of the president himself. tomorrow will be a key moment, both dan coats and mike rogers are appearing in separate hearings on separate issues on capital hill. coats will go before the armed services committee, lindsey graham also sits on that committee. so you may hear concerns from republicans on this issue of whether the president tried to undually pressure his chiefs to bat down these stories. the commonality in all of this is that a pattern of interference. at a minimum, right? you can debate the definition of obstruction of justice and that s a fair debate because that s a legal question but you have a pattern, at least of a president going to the fbi director, we know, going to the heads of intelligence agencies during an active investigation. didn t anyone say you can t do that? they did refuse the request. shouldn t he know he can t do that. either he knows and is okay with crossing the boundaries or he just doesn t understand the rules. there are boundaries beteen the white house and the fbi for a reason. talking to white house officials, you can hear their frustration because i think there s been an effort to try to threat president know here s what you can do and here s what you cannot do. roger stone is still in touch with the president and we ve heard from other people under investigation in this investigation who are still talking to the president. this is something because of the appearance and they re talking about the weather. it does not look good. and how he fired one of the u.s. attorneys from new york. he tried to call berock before his firing and he thought that was inappropriate. and did not take the call. but the president seems not to have gotten that message when he talks to the other investigators. we have a special counsel of course, robert mueller and your reporting today was thatd he has begun to look at the comey memos, right? so look at the fact that the president interfered with comey s investigation. that s right. i m told by a person familiar that part of this probe will likely focus on obstruction of justice and he s less than a week into his special role as special counselal, he s already been briefed on his memos and one memo in which he wrote that the president asked him to end the michael flynn probe and now the former director, comey will be a witness in this investigation. it raises the question what about him testifying? he has given the investigation indication to congressman chaffetz today that he wants to talk to mueller before he testifies because now he s a key witness. so even if he continues with his plans, it raises the question that mueller and is there concern that he might not be able to appear at all. there s concerns about what he may say. i spoke to one of the members of the senate intelligence community and he said that s a concern. what can james comey say publicly? the top democrat had a chance to talk today. he said that mueller and comey were having a discussion in terms of what comey could say publicly. if mueller had it his way, he wouldn t testify at all. he wants to tell his story. this is not a shy person. this is somebody who kept these memos and has a story -ing. insisted on a public testimony as well. exactly. he has a story he wants to tell. so while he can t talk about the investigation or he can t talk about what he was doing, but he can talk about what was in those memos, it would seem to me. and whether the white house tries to assert any kind of executive privilege. there is some waving of that privilege that has already been done at least in the view of legal experts who watch this kind of stuff. but we can probably expect there is somebody at the white house who is looking at this and trying to figure out a way to reserve that. buse we don t know everything else comey has in these memos. certainly the white house doesn t know everything in the memos. untlsz lless the lawyer, the house counsel has talked to him about what he toads comey. and makes you wonder if mueller will tell comey not to reveal anything else because they re considered evidence in the investigation. the president is on his first overseas trip. he s had a moment to shine, i imagine, with a big arms deal with saudi arabia. he s gone to the western wall in jerusalem. they ve talked about peace in the middle east but he s going to come back in a few days and comey appearing and dragged back into it very quickly. this was supposed to be a reset and in many ways it was. the president s had, so far, a very successful trip. and so what they re trying to do is reset. you saw that reince priebus high tailed it back here because they ve got budget coming out tomorrow. i don t have to tell you this. they ve got lot. they want to deal with tax reform and the president hasn t been tweeting on this at all because he s been abroad which may be a blessing. so when he comes back, he s going to i m sure he s aware of this post story and he s going it get back in the thick of it. he was obsessed about it before, i don t think it s going to lessen any given this story about dan coats and he kept the story alive today by in the meeting with netanyahu he said that was a trouly remarkable moment. in effect confirming that israel was the source of the information. that issue is not going away. members of congress absolutely want to get records of that meeting, particularly in light of the reports friday of him calling james comey a nut job in that meeting. and you re seeing the white house already kind of preparing for the fact this is going to be a kochcontinued crisis. we re told cory lewandowski met with the president before he left and it s to bring him back to do crisis management or control. we re told that s an issue, an idea under serious consideration. he s a lobbyist. he he s got a very interesting list of clients and i m sure he doesn t want to divulge if he comes back to service. i think it s going to be an indication of how seriously they re taking this. shake up is not gone. there was supposed to be a staff check up a while ago. i think he s still very much alive. we don t know how it s going to land. good way to keep fear in the west wing as well. one of the other star witness before committees coming up will be general michael flynn. today we learned he s going to take and the question is what s ne next? both of them areopen on the idea of trying to hold him in contempt of congress or doing something to try to get access to these documents. we know going through the contempt procedures is a long process, very difficult to enforce but the idea for burr and warner is to scare the other witnesses into complying with the request for other records, particularly in communication with russian officials, anything they ve talked about with russians, they want to make sure those recrrds turned over. michael flynn, i talked to a source close to him who says he s not going to testify publicly if it does come to it. but burr may make him plead the fifth publicly in an effort to embarrass him. it does seem flynn have specific issues that only apply to him. not registering as a lobbyist for turkey. reporting foreign income. not the same issues daes s and elijah cummings today. this is so much news. we have concern about the committees getting riled up in partisanship but you have the republican chairman subpoenaing and saying no immunity for michael flynn and you better bring those documents. talking about contempt. now it makes you wonder bigger picture, gloria, how damaging this is for president trump the white house if his former national security advisor is pleading the fifth, not responding to a subpoena request. it doesn t look good and donald trump, we believe, remains friends with flynn. he s an orphrphan to everybody e at the white house but i don t think to the president and today elijah cummings,ing the democrat charged that flynn lied on his security clearance forms and said that he told investigators he was paid by u.s. companies when he travelled to moscow in december of 2015 when we know that he was paid by russian television and that we had only insubstantial associations with foreigners and we know he had dinner with vladimir putin. so i think that there is a large credibility problem for flynn, which of coursic mas ask the question why did he become national security advisor? and you made the mention of showing bipartisanship. the democrats are pushing jason chaffetz to issue subpoenas for white house documents to show whether or not michael flynn disclosed any of these issues, these foreign payments, any connections with the russians. something the white house has not yet comply would because the white house says they claim they don t have some of those documents. but nonetheless, chaffetz has been silent on the issue and he s leaving soon. so what s going to happen after. you have these investigations on capitol hill, this special counsel probe. we were told that robert mueller who s now over seeing the probe has been to the fbi headquarters, been meeting with counterintelligence agencies that have been meeting with this case. how is this going to move forward? do you think he s going to try to negotiate and say i m taking the lead here? look, he is. and he wants to do this quietly. he wants to do it with a little less drama perhaps. he s hiring people. he s going to make sure i think he s working quickly to make sure he gets security clearances and make sure this investigation is well funded and it will go wherever it will go. and i think i mentioned this in our last the last time we did this that one of the things to keep an eye on is as this investigation goes forward, are we going to get an answer from the justice department as to when robert mueller finishes the investigation, if he finds any kind of criminal activity it even goes to the president perhaps. we don t know where he ll end up. will the justice department promise to refer that to congress? because as we know there s an existing legal guidance to the just department that does not allow you to charge a sitting president with a crime. so the question for the justice department and rod rosenstein in particular, will you make a promise that you ll refer to congress which then congress has a political solution to all of this? congress has a different investigation. just as in iran contra. we keep talking about ancient history. but the congressional investigators wanted to get to the truth and so they gave oli north immunity. where the special counsel did not. it took years for him, after oly north testified in congress, it took him years to convict north and that was overturned because he couldn t prove that he couldn t uphold the conviction without using the immunized testimony from congress. so that got really tricky and complicated. but the american public knew what happened before the courts decided anything because they heard from oly north. the iran contra. a lut of folks i ve spoken to ing all the comparisons to waterga watergate. but many will say iran contrais a better parallel partly because of the process and regan survived the controversy but debillidated. he eventually over came it. it was key what he did. you wrote an interesting article. the former bush official, he talked about how regan was able to get over this and one of the ways was by embracing the investigation. he made changes. this is not something that donald trump has seen any inclination to do. we ve seen his efforts to bury this, to tell people it s fake news, to tell his intelligence officials to stop the fbi from looking at this. he s doing all of the opposite things that ronald regan did. let s take a moment to look at the positive. he s tried his intelligence chiefs, they refused. he tried his fbi director, he refused. he did get fired. he had his man at the department of justice and the deputy ag. he appointed to special counsel. you have a lot of push back in the way it s operating. do you think part of this is because he went from oo business world where he was head of a company to now being in a world where there are checks and bal ngss? he was running the trump organization and i would argue it was probably okay to take a loyalty oath to donald trump because that was the man you were working for. asking comey to ledge his loyalty is not the right thing to do. even if it he appointed you you take a pledge to the united states. you don t take a pledge, personally to donald trump. so that is the difference here and the question swl the president it it. or is he ignoring? did white house counsel ever tell president trump you shouldn t talk to comey, to these intelligence agencies about the investigation? and maybe they have and we don t know. maybe they need someone teels come in and do an intervention. they may be able to get through to him because they clearly understand there s a risk here for the president. the fact they re thinking about bringing in outside counsel to personally help the president through this crisis shows you that they realize this is something very risky for the president. sqwhen sally yates came in wh her hair on fire about general flynn, did he go into the president and say you know, we really we have to think about this? to be a fly on the wall during that conversation. sorry to cut you off. but your reporting, gloria. chris christie did not want flynn to be national security advisor. general flynn, i m told, wanted to be national security advisor, secretary of state or secretary of defense. chris christie was fired, the first transition team was fired. he was not on their list for any of those jobs. and i believe they might have thought of him for d & or director of national intelligence, something like that. but they knew he was trouble for them. and i believe to a certain degree, after their first briefing that i believe it went so badly for flynn that donald trump came out of it and spoke with someone with whom i spoke who said that was really bad and donald trump agreed but said he s been so loyal to me. always back to the loyal thing. the thing for flynn that won this job for him was the fact he had a direct connection with the president. this is something that nobody else could really interfere with. and jared kushner was also supportive. you ask the question who s standing up to the president? you had sally yates stand up on the travel ban. she was fired. portrayed by the president and many in the party as an obama partisan, even though she served previous administrations of both parties, etc. but perhaps easier to make that argument to some degree. and james comey. he served both parties, both administrations. he s fired, call him obama was guy. now you have two of trump s own guys, as it were, direct of national intelligence said no, he would not knock down these reports. mike rogers, who was meeting in trump tower during the transition. there was talk of him being the director of national intelligence. i m not saying he s trump s guy but certainly not somebody they considered an obama and they re saying no to him. richard nixon hate to bring this up. but you ll recall sdhg cia to get the fbi to end the investigation into watergate. i think that s one of the things in the trump cabinet, there are a lot of officials not necessarily have been trump cheerleaders all the way to the from the starting line. nikki haley, for one. she did not support donald trump during the primary. she was very critical of donald trump and you have seen her break from the trump administration on key issues. that s why it s going to be so interesting when dan coats is asked direct questions about whether the president pressured you to knock down reports because cotes, i know he s not necessarily someone who carries water for donald trump. he wasn t during the campaign. what will we do now one of the most fascinating things is talking to people on capitol hill, who are trying to figure out exactly how far they need go or can go to support the president simply because there s a lot they don t know. they simply don t know if they stick their necks out for him, will they find out in the end that actually all of this is true. just in talking to people on the hill, you get this sense of tension as they try to figure out how much to embrace the president or whether they should step back and let the democrats do their thing. and that s why the news of the special counsel was so welcome by many republicans, even though they didn t want one before he was opointed and as one democrat told me he s awesome because it could take off their plate but as you have this drip, drip, drip of stories coming out every day, whether it s cnn or the washington post or the new york times, they re coming out every day and republicans have to respond. and it s the obstruction aspect that is the most alarming to the republicans on the hill. the collusion aspect is something a lot of the republicans are not sure it s there. but when talked about interfering. against the back drop, the president has been traveling overseas. i want to bring in our cnn senior white house correspondent in jerusalem. how has the administration been handling all of these revelations day after day? reporter: they ve certainly been watching these revelations as they happen in real time and as gloria was saying earlier the chief of staff, reince priebus and chief strategist, steve bannon are back in the west wing. they are monitoring all of this and that is for a reason. this is a part of a split screen operation. no questioning the president is seeing this trip as a welcome distraction. he s seeing this trip as a way to sort of get back on track but the underlying sort of feeling out here among aids, advisors, you can see it on their face every moment a new story pops like this. it revurts them back to what s awaiting them in washington and earlier when the president was meeting with the british prime minister sorry the israeli prime minister, netanyahu, he slipped and talked about the thing he said to the russianing officials in the oval office. he said i didn t say israeli, well, no one said he did. that was the one moment you could see the president was clear that he still had russia on his mind but as he goes forward, more than the attack in manchester on his mind. the president will be giving a speech before going to the rome, to vatican and brussels and to the g7 meeting in italy and back to washington late saturday and again all of this is waiting for them but behind the scenes, i am told by senior administration officials and advisors they are narrowing in on the personal lawyers that he will have. a team of lawyers. i m told there s not go foog be one individual who s going to be working on this, on this side as an outside lawyer. it s going to be a team of lawyers and of course that is something that is always necessary. other white house staffers may have to lawyer up. but this is very much in the moment here. they re certainly doing everything they can to stay focussed on this trip but they re definitely watching every bomb shell that happens in washington. and has the white house had any response to the terrorist attack in manchester? reporter: no, they haven t, pamela. we re told by administration officials that they are preparing a statement. they are go having to a statement at some point. we thought it might be here by now but the sun is just about to arise. it is arising in jerusalem and the president is waking up to what is the first major terrorist attack of his presidency. the biggest one no question. he s been talking about extremism, combatting extremism. well, this rests exactly that heart of that to. he ll be giving a speech in a couple hours time. and he s heading to europe tomorrow. this is something he s been talking about a lot and is indeed the biggest challenge facing him but we re awaiting a specifics on the attack. and back to our breaking news. cnn has learned that president trump persuade two of the top intelligence officials to issue public statements knocking down the probe into possible cuflugz to the trump campaign and russia. joining me we have representative, a democrat on the judiciary committee and a republican on the armed services committee from indiana. if i could begin with you, congresswoman, what s your reaction to our reporting that president trump made calls to admiral mike rogers in effect asking them to knock down evidence in this investigation? i think it s incredibly troubling. i think it continues a stream of events. i feel a little bit like i have whiplash going from one story to the next. but all of them point to this president trying to interfere in an investigation. i think that we are looking to get to the bottom of this. the question and i think you were discussing it earlier is what kind of informication we get as we look into all of these issues. you use the word interference. i think if it s true, i believe it is obstruction of justice. we have to prove intent. that is part of the obstruction of justice. but the more we have stories, the more it seems intent is there. but you have him calling now two intelligence directors and i think you get into this is a person determined to try and stop any investigation into michael flynn and that is i think for nothing else he should thds that this would be very bad optics but that s in the best case scenario. i have it ask you because you re a veteran. and this would mean he was orderinging a navy admiral to tamp down an investigation. if these allegations are true, this would be a pattern of a #of troubling allegations. i think republicans and democrats are unified to support the mueller investigations, his independence, his integrity that he s brought and credibility along with the congressional investigations in the house and senate. let s let those investigations do their work before we make a rational statements about anything further than that. i m content in letting these run through the process. i m content in wait interesting the slegzs to work through the process to make statements about what hypothetically should happen. i think that s important and entirely appropriate to allow the investigations to work through the process before making statements about what might or might not happen. it gets down to what is the standard here. if is proven to be true that president of the united states is director of the fbi and told them to stop and active investigation, would that to you let s forget the legal terminology. would that be undue interference? there s no question these allegations are serious. they undoubtedly be an independent investigation as well as the the investigations in the house and senate. i believe it is a completely responsible and appropriate to allow the investigations to work their way through the process before addressing hypotheticals. and that brings to the next question because you have a special probe who is take over the investigation. i was talking to one official saying there is concern on his part that you have these two investigations where they re calling witnesses to testify as well as james comey and how that could interfere with what he s trying to do. it is a chal fging situation. we saw a tiny hint of it. there wasn t much that was classified but one of the things very frustrating to many of us in the room was when we were just trying to get information about why he wrote the memo, why did he write the memo? did he just wake up one day and say hey, this would be great or did someone tell him to write it? if that was the case he didn t answer any of those questions and he dreked that to the fact wednesday is congress has an oversight authority we should be able it continue to investigate as this goes forward and while it s true we want to wait for the facts to emerge, we can t afford to wait for a long time particularly with story after story emerging. this latest news is extremely distressing. and the fact that michael flynn will invoke his fifth amendment rights in response to subpoenas from the senate intelligence committees. here s what president trump said about those who take the fifth. she has people taking the fifth amendment. four people plus the guy who illegally did the server. so there are five people taking the fifth amendment. like you see on the mob, right? the mob takes the fifth. if you re innocent, why i can t say or defend whether or not he is 199but nal be a part of the investigation. what do you make of the fact he is taking the fifth. it s a troubling. it s part of a troubling series of actions by mr. flynn. and it it, kwen, foreshadows a troubling pattern of behavior we ve seen in recent weeks. i want to ask about your because of course we ve heard many democrats in public criticize the president s behavior here. it s only in the last week or two where speaking to folks on the hill republicans who at least privately some publicly but many more trieftly say listen this is getting to a different level. wide eyed was the way one republican lawmaker described it to me last week. do you sense a change in the last or two about the level of concern from inside your own caucus. a concern in whether or not we will fulfill an agenda we set to out to fulfill fl i m a freshman on capitol hill. to address the big issues of the day. as we get caught nup the frenzy over each breaking news item from day to day related to the administration, it is definitely a distraction from our ability to do that. but is it more of a distraction? are you becoming concerned and other flo republicans concerned that the president did something here that requires a remedy? right, that may have crossed a line? begin it s err responsible to say too much more without lourg the investigation to work through the process. i believe it s important to allow director mueller to do his work, allow the congressional committees to do their work before before speaking anything saying anything further about mr. what pmgtly could come next. this could take a while for the investigations to wrap up. what would you like to see in the meantime. we would like to see each of those roles has a slightly different charge, a special prosecutor, special counsel has a different charge. we have been calling for an independent commission sort of like. 911 style. a commission that would be made up of citizens that could actually look at this what s happening not only in the short-term but in the long-term and then we would like to have the information right away around the memos, around some of the answers. you know i think it s a little bit more than a distraction. i really do. i understand the challenges of trying to implement an agenda for the majority party we re talking about the sangtty of the democracy. and to me that s what s at stake here. it s more than a distraction. it is deeply concerning to the future of our country and the future of are our democracy. i want to continue the discussion of the stunning developments right here in washington. cnn dmirmd the president trump that is two top intelligence oberles publicly push back on the investigation and on the possible collusion between the russia and the campaign. gloria borger set the stage for us. how significant is this? well i think it s very significant. because it comes on the heels of our understanding that he tried to that the president of the united states tried to shut down the investigation with james comey and then i think what you see here is more evidence of that. more evidence of the president of the united states trying to say, let s let s cool this investigation. is there any way you guys can sort of figure out how to stop it? what we have a president obsessed with this, concerned about what it means for his administration and potentially for him. and he is try to end it and doesn t seem to understand that he really cannot ask these people to do that. we shouldn t minimums words here right. now we have granted they haven t given public testimony yet comey cotes and rogers but there are people who know they are talking to people. myself and included and kohl comey written memos how he is going to testify on the hill. this is a president going to senior intelligence and law enforcement officials and giving them instructions about an ongoing investigation. right. not good. not good. now, we know from our reporting, pam, that that director comey was keeping these writing these memos because he thought that somehow he could teach the president what was appropriate and what was inappropriate. it didn t seem to me from my sources that that director comey at that point thought it was obstruction. he thought that this was somebody who toents know. it made him uncomfortable but he didn t necessarily in that time it was. that s going to be the one area where republicans defenders of president trump are going to seize on in the hearings why didn t james comey raise this earlier either in hearings or in private or even in classified briefings with the senate intelligence committee leaders? he did not do that. why not that s going to be whether you guys mention how you expect him to address it. but does he pass the threshold of believability and credibility? how do the voters view it? how doo are do sloughers senators. if he didn t view it as obstruction i think that s a big deal for republicans in congress to to illuminate. and also by the way it s a kind of curious practice to be writing these memos and talking to people outside the fbi about what you re discussing with the president i think that s a question we re going to hear members of congress wanting to hear from comey. because it is sort of weird. i was told by one source. he might have thought it was obstruction. i was told exactly that s what we were told we ve been talking to. in retrospect he did believe the president was trying to sfluns him. i did ask someone that he speaks to and said why would he share this with you to your point? and basically said this person said he was using close associates as a sounding board because it did make him uncomfortable. now, whether that s the right answer that s not for. i can tell you this i ve watched a lot of jim comey hearings on capitol hill. and every time someone asks him about some conversation he has had with the president he sauls says i can t talk about what i discuss with the president because i cannot and you know, look that is usually a very good answer that a lot of people give. because it is true you want to give advice to the president you don t want to go on blab it. however it appears that comey was telling his friends about this. aen that is a strange nirng. unless you re genuinely alarm p laura coats if we could bring you in because general michael flynn has his own legal challenges now and taking the fifth first of all can he take the igt fifth. he can. there there is consequences to the taking the fifth. you have the issue of contempt. you could certainly say i m not going to be amenable agreeable. there is clearly a criminal investigation that s going to be looming overhead where any statements he may give or any documents he may produce will certainly tend to show either be incriminating whether guilty glt or or not it s meant to protect even the innocent people from saying you cannot government force me to build the case against me. the burden is always on the government whether congress or prosecutor to say are you dlt you can t actually prove your innocence. there is consequences two paths to take either the congress can say we re going to recommend to a federal district court that they told new contempt good luck with that or say to the doj justice department please hold the person in contempt. good luck with that. laura i want to ask you on friday i asked you the same question. when at that point we just knew about the president s conversations with comey now we know the president had similar conversations with the director of the national intelligence and the head of the nsa. is that obstruction of justice when you have a pattern then of similar pressure applied to senior officials. well i believe that the contextle many clues we re speaking about all the circumstantial stuff does lead to the conclusion of the obstruction of justice. however as a former prosecutor would i charge just that? no and here is why. that s really an add on claim if you nink about that s a crude way of thinking about it add on. if the goal is to get the highest charge possible obstruction is a way to add on a penalty perhaps or to show there is somebody trying to impede my quest for what the charge is. you know it forms articleless of impeach. it can on at least two presidents it is a serious charng and allegation. but if your goal is actually to understand what collusion in nebulous terms mean what penalty or law you can attach to the term collusion. obstruction is not the end game. i think that s the reason you have prosecutors right now and perhaps mueller and everyone else saying we re not going there yet because that is not the goal. that s a step in the direction trying to add the cherry on top the prosecutor who is clearly sell innovating over the concept of collusion. gloria it s a political question. do you get republicans onboard? if we get we re many steps from that stage. but who call it obstruction as well. it s very early on. i remind you that you know eye in the nixon impeachment question the house judiciary committee voted out the articles of impeachment less than half the republicans voted that. we are a long way from there. we are a long way from republicans just jumping overboard. i think the people need to know more about the discussions with comey, need to know more about this so-called collusion. node to i just think we re
much of the world. one thing has worried me over these months, these he two super power egos would get into a test of whose is big we are the world itself is the stakes. none of that today. none of it, let s pray, ever. that s hardball. all in with chris hayes starts right now. tonight on all in president putin and i have been discussing thank you, thank you. russia says the american president he accepted a full denial of election interference. both sides have agreed to put it behind them. there was not a lot of relitigating of the past. what we know about everything that happened. vladimir putin met the donald trump behind closed doors. it is a forgery. the trump/russia for russia, the united states. it is an honor to be with you. the two leaders appeared chummy throughout the day. president trump even sharing a laugh with putin who has been accused of having journalists killed about, the american reporters covering their meeting. thank you. the two met behind closed doors for more than two hours. afterward, the only other american, secretary of state tillerson, claimed putin was pressed. the president opened the meeting with president putin by raising concerns of the american people regarding russian interference in the 2016 election. they had a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject. the president pressed president putin on more than one occasion involving russian involvement. president putin denied such involvement as i think he has in the past. but tillerson s counter part emerged from the meeting with a very different story. translator: president trump has said that he has heard clear declarations from mr. trump that russian involvement has not interfered in the elections and he accepts the things that mr. putin has said. he semis this. they said lavrov s comments were not accurate. an unnamed official. while we have no way of saying what was said in private, we can he what president trump said in public. i think it was russia but i think it was probably other people and/or countries, and i see nothing wrong with that statement. nobody really knows. nobody really knows for sure. that was yesterday. this is giving the russian award. i think what the two presidents i think rightly focused on is how do we move forward? how do we move forward from here sf it s not clear to me that we will ever come to some agreed-upon resolution of that question between the two nations. many accounts indicate that russian election interference hasn t stopped here or abroad and it doesn t appear to be just elections. we learned yesterday, for example, that russians are suspected of hacking the nuclear sites in the u.s. a top pick did not even come up. joining me now from iraq, christopher hill. your reaction to the news that came out of today s meeting. well, first of all, i think it was a pretty successful meeting by all accounts. i was not very astonished that president trump talked about the hacking and putin denied and it president trump said okay, let s move ahead. what i thought was interesting, it appears that rex tillerson had a good day. he showed that he was able to put his imprint on some of the work they re doing. especially that deal and how it works out in syria. the big takeaway, they are announcing the cease fire had southwest syria, if i ll not mistaken. in some ways, that has been a big thing trump has signaled for a long time. working with isis and fundamentally being fine with assad staying. i think ultimately, that is the idea. the problem is the trump administration hasn t told us, what is the goal in syria? they don t seem to indicate, what do we want? do we want a unity state? do we want a parliament system? when they can define that, and maybe harmonize that with other players, including russia, then we have a chance of making the cease fire hold. i think it was small step in a small area in southwestern syria and i think they re trying to see if they can start process there. it was a fairly deafening silence on the issue of north korea. i don t think russia gave us anything at all. if someone pointed a nuclear missile at them, they would know what to do about it. i ll a little disappointed at how that conversation is turning out. the other issue i have, and i would be curious to your response. it seems there s not a particularly reliable narrator for what happened in that room. we have contrasting versions of what happened. the and there is a sort of grain of salt that it appears you have to take all accounts with. you ve got it. and it is not unusual to get two different readings of a meeting, lavrov and his customary charlieing way, that was quite at odds with what secretary of state tillerson said. that s why there are note takers. they sit on the side of the room and they take notes. apparently president trump didn t want anyone else in the room. i guess he looks at every note taker and thinks of that person as being a leaker. but there are reasons you have note takers. there was a moment i wbr id= wbr4621 /> want to play jumped out at me. take a listen. thank you. that s putin leaning over and saying to president wbr id= wbr4721 /> trump, these are the ones that insulted you. pointing to the press core. given that numerous journal the /b> i haves in russia have been murdered in cold blood, and often thought to be partly at the hands of putin or his surrogates, what did you make of that moment? to be frank, these two leaders have raised tastelessness to an art form. it is kinds of appalling that putin would do that. i think our president needs to be reminded now and again that there is a little dignity of this business and he d better lay off the press. it doesn t play well overseas or this country either. in this country, it is a mosh pit on everything. overseas, i don t think he should be playing game. the posture from tillerson and the president, and it seems to be what the russians want as well. let s just cabin that whole unpleasantness around the election. who is to say what really happened. and work together on mutual areas of shared interest. again, fine for the latter part. you do wonder what that means for what other future operations the russians may undertake. well, fair enough. there s an old adage that lawyers look backwards and diplomats look forward. and i think tillerson is trying to figure out what can be done as he looks forward. it is pretty appalling issue. where if it is true, if foreign minister lavrov s comment that president trump semied putin s explanation, then you kind of wonder, is he putting more faith in the kgb than the cia? there are big problems here. and i don t think we can let this go. now, tillerson was suggesting we come up with something and i think he was hinting at the fact we re all a little concerned about what would happen in the 2018th elections, if the russians were just warming up in 2016. i think this is quite an assault on russia s part on our process. and i think we have to be not only extremely vigilant but really, really pushing back the russians. and president obama did that with a few sanctions at the he believed there. frankly, this is a lot more serious than whether or not they get to use a weekend house if new york. ambassador christopher hill, thank you for being with me tonight. thank you. joining me now, moscow journalist, and the former cbs moscow correspondent, jonathan sanders. i ll start with you as someone who covered russian politics and putin specifically. what do you think he was looking for out of this meeting? he got everything he was looking for. first of all, the sentence, the two presidents. so he looked presidential. he was on the national, international stage as an equal to the most powerful man in the world. his probe to do something in syria has turned out to be quite been official for him. when they sent the russian earl into syria, president obama said it will be a quagmire. that quagmire is leading to a de-escalation and a peace process, and the very steps being taken have three routes. one is a city in kazakhstan where they started negotiating deconflictization. two is what john kerry was doing in the last days of the obama administration. and three is the dialogue after the shootdown of the syrian plane that went on between the american military and the russian military. that s leading to the beginning of the end of the war in spoir has gone on for seven years exclaimed 400,000 lives. that s a significant step forward. putin didn t get everything he wanted. we didn t hear putin saying anything to mr. trump about american exercises, military exercises in the baltic states. something that has ignored a lot of russians. so wasn t a perfect day for both sides bust it was a big plus for mr. trump, mr. putin, mr. tillerson, and always for sergei lavrov. and this does sflog fierce cold war atmosphere that has been whipping around us for so long. especially whipping around us on cable news programs. the idea of meddling, which is this word that keeps coming up. there is an interesting statement that tillerson said, we sort of agreed not to meddle in each other s internal affairs. and this has been something both the chinese and the russians have been laser focused on. the u.s. should keep its mouth shut about anything happening internalfully russia. and that seemed to me like a takeaway for putin. something that he has long sought. i feel like that is a pretty standard response when it comes to russian politics. they like to point to what the united states has done. whether it be meddling and other countries. electoral processes, regime change, things like that. so this was an opportunity for russia to say the same thing. i m surprised that trump brought up the election tracking issue on. one hand, you have to realize that no matter what he would have done, people here are going to be skeptical of him because there have been so many questions around this administration. so what would have been enough to bring it up in a more forceful manner rather than just saying, okay, we discussed it. my other question, other point that i want to make, we need to come up with a way of being tough on that issue. sanctions just don t work. and jonathan, you would know this. you spent a lot of time in moscow. the way the russians respond to pressure or childing from the international community, to keep doing it. to turn inward. that may be true with public perception. but the sanctions, after crimea have created significant hardship and upper rungs. it has been clear the russian state wants them lifted. and chris, they re on their way to being lifted. if the very smart way we saw tillerson trot out just before the meeting, that they ve appointed a special representative to deal with ukraine on the eastern regions, to begin to negotiate that and the man is supposed to be in moscow coming up, that s a very cher way to push this forward. i don t see how i don t 19 interrupt you. i don t see how that s possible given the political dynamics that president trump is dealing with at homes. russians went in going that was a nonstarter. not today, not tomorrow. but in six months, perhaps. that s the question, right? they re sort of concrete things the administration can do that putin would like to see they will do. give back as a starting point, the two compounds were seized as kind of retribution for the election activities. and then eventually lifting sanctions. there s tremendous pressure. at the corner of all this is this very big unresolved issue. that there was a sustained and sophisticated effort to criminally sabotage a campaign in the u.s. and one that has not been resolved or foresworn in any way. it seems hard to move on to other issues to a degree it is left hanging out there. chris, when the hearings began, senator warner said, oh, my. this is like propaganda on steroids. what s the surprise? propaganda? or steroids? the russians have been interested in doing things in american elections since 1920. it was ham handed before. now digital technology has changed things. we have to ask the basic question underlying this. why are they so good at hacking? why are they so good at cyber warfare? and why are we not particularly up to snuff and up to speed? the scary answer may be, their math education system far superior to ours. i think you have a good point in terms of human resources and people who are skilled at this. russia is very rich that way. true. that sounds uncomfortably close to blaming the bank for being ronald. we know that these things can happen. you can penetrate all sorts of inboxes and people get good at this. but there s a violation here that remains massively unresolved. and back to your point, from the context of any political situation that will move forward in this relationship, it can t just hang around as an unresolved thing and expect the politics to change. thank you both for your time tonight. thank you. ahead, can president trump agree to disagree? the conflicting reports and the reaction from capitol hill. ount. because each day she chooses to take the stairs. at work, at home. even on the escalator. that can be hard on her lower body, so now she does it with dr. scholl s orthotics clinically proven to relieve and prevent foot, knee or lower back pain, by reducing the shock and stress that travel up her body with every step she takes. so keep on climbing, sarah. you re killing it. dr. scholl s. born to move. yeah, and i can watch thee bgame with directv now.? oh, sorry, most broadcast and sports channels aren t included. and you can only stream on two devices at once. this is fun, we re having fun. yeah, we are. no, you re not jimmy. don t let directv now limit your entertainment. xfinity gives you more to stream to more wbr id= wbr11777 /> screens. meddling in another election process, we know about russia is trying to meddle with democracies. even house speaker wbr id= wbr11910 /> paul ryan can admit that what has been so hard, that russia interfered in /b> the 2016 election, according to the russian version he with what happened today, the president accepted putin s denial of any involvement in the election. giving equal credence to the u.s. intel xhublt s findings is a grave dereliction. the two countri first your response to this idea of a working group between the united states and russia to explore election interference or cyber security. well, you know, i hope that the american people won t fall for that kind of putting together of some kind of commission to deal with hacking and that s what they re describing. as a matter of fact, i think americans should be very, very concerned that this president sat down with putin who we know hacked into our election system to the dnc, and to many of the states that are now coming forward with this information. and to sit down with him and not have a real discussion. to delve into real concerns about what s happening and get a commitment from putin that they would never do it again americans want to hear that conversation. obviously, this president brought it into the room. there was. so pressure, from the media and everybody else, he could not afford to go into that room and not pretend he was dealing with the issue. he didn t deal with it. he took it up first. it was dismissed. it was intractable. now let s move on. and this thing about a commission and also, what they re going to do with syria and having some kind of cessation of the war there. i don t know if putin was in a position to negotiate and make all the differences for syria. not that i care about assad. but i would assume that he would have something to say about it. i think we re getting played by our president and certainly by putin. i don t like the idea that our president, again, would go into a room without any note takers, without any staff, without others who should be in the room who really understand foreign policy and who really understand putin, and come out of it saying how honored he is to meet with him and how in fact they re going to start meeting together. this is ball sanctions. of course, tillerson was in the room because that s at the top of his agenda. to lift the sanctions so they can drill into the arctic. you have trump who is agreeing to lift the sanctions and aboutt the dnc did. but them they fully cooperated with the requests that the filibuster made. so this guy is unhinged. and i think he is under so much pressure from this russian are investigation that when he is in the corner, all he does is he strikes back and he doesn t care about whether anything is true or not true. what did you make of that statement from the president? well, he doesn t know the difference between what podes podesta s role was with the dnc and clinton. what he thought he was setting up was this proof that we have no proof. that s what putin has said. that s what he continues to say. it is almost in your face, you can say what you want but you don t have any proof. i think this president, trump was playing into that and trying to say, well, you know, they have proof if they wanted to share it but they wouldn t let us see it so they must not have any proof. he thought when he did that, that he was nailing podesta. because he had control of the dnc and the server so we can dismiss that as another trump not knowing what he s talking about, not knowing what he s doing, and trying to give some cover to putin. that s what that is all about. people, we must keep our eye on these sanctions. first of all, the united states senate has passed legislation. very strong lotion sanctions. we must support that. because putin didn t just the want trump elected because he didn t like hillary. it is because he knew that trump would be a part of helping to lift those sanctions. and i call the kremlin klan all of those allies of the president who will benefit from it. who have indicated their connections to russia and to putin and the oligarchs. so they re trying to play us. we should not buy into anything that we ve heard happened. because we don t really know. and he does not want us to know. he wants us to be in that position where we re trying to figure out what they said and we can t be certain. it is not substantive and we have to keep our eyes on sanctions. thank you for joining me tonight. you re welcome. the ethics office is stepping down. i ll ask him why he is leaving now. mom, i have to tell you something. dad, one second i was driving and then the next. they just didn t stop and then. i m really sorry. i wrecked the subaru. i wrecked it. you re ok. that s all that matters. (vo) a lifetime commitment to getting them home safely. love. it s what makes a subaru, a subaru. why? we can t stay here! terrible toilet paper! i ll never get clean! way ahead of you. charmin ultra strong. it cleans better. it s four times stronger and. .you can use less. enjoy the go with charmin. i could actually run my business. i could run my business and run government at the same time. i don t like the way that looks but i would be able to do it if i wanted to. i could run the trump organization. great, great company. and could i run the company the country. i would do a great job but i don t want to do that. the big question was how donald trump, the country s first real estate mogul president who to this day has not released the tax returns works resolve the vast potential conflicts of interest. they tweeted to then president-elect, it is good for you, very good for america. oge applauds the decision. bravo. og empbl is delighted that you have decided to divest your businesses. of course, he really hadn t decided to do and it the man goading him to do so would become the lone voice in the federal government publicly taking a stand against corruption in the administration and risking his job to do it. after the president announced he would not divest from his business, instead turning over control to his sons, he condemned it in his speech. stepping back from running his positions is meaningless from a conflicts of interest perspective. this is not a blind trust. not even close. the only thing it has in common is the label, trust. nothing short of divestiture will resolve these conflicts. that prompted had chaffetz. it drew a warning from the incoming white house chief of staff. the head of the government ethics ought to be careful. he is becoming extremely political. apparently may have publicly supported hillary clinton. so i m not so sure what this person in government ethics, what sort of standing he has anymore in giving these opinions. but schaub continues to take on the administration. and forcing the white house to disclose numerous ethics waivers they granted to senior staff. now six months before the end of the term, he is stepping down and he joins me right here for an exclusive live interview, next. just like the people who own them, every business is different. but every one of those businesses will need legal help as they age and grow. whether it be help starting your business, vendor contracts or employment agreements. legalzoom s network of attorneys can help you every step of the way so you can focus on what you do. we ll handle the legal stuff that comes up along the way. legalzoom. legal help is here. introducing the new sleep number 360™ smart bed. the only bed smart enough to change sleep as we know it. it senses your every move and automatically adjusts on both sides to keep you comfortable. and snoring.. does your bed do that? right now save on sleep number 360™ smart beds. plus, it s the lowest prices of the season with savings of $500 on our most popular p5 bed. ends sunday. to be ethical. i don t see that. i see him taking positions that he has not even looked at. he seems to be in the spin room from the democratic side of the aisle. joining me now, that person. now the outgoing director of the office of government ethics. let me start with this. i think it is important to lay this down. what is your job? what are you tasked with doing at oge? well, hi, chris, it s nice to be here. the office of government ethics is the prevention part of the government west work the administration, not only presidential appointees but also rank and file employees. we help then disclose their financial conflicts of interest. we re there to solve problems in advance. that s what i ve been doing under three presseses now and i ve really enjoyed the job. my understanding is this grows out of watergate. you are there because there are criminal statutes, conflict of interest laws, that people might violate and you re there to protect them from doing that. essentially. that s right. as i said, we re the prevention mechanism so we re really helping to set people twoe steps back from the line. hopefully, only inadvertent. these are extremely complicated laws. they re nuanced and always past after the last crisis. our job is to serve as the translator and to help find ways to make they will work together. and we have a really big education foundation ensure that federal employees, or political appointees, understand the rules. and we often work very closely to prevent those problems. you said you served under three presseses. how different was this than the other two? well, i have only got really good things to say about the ethics program that president bush ran and the ethic program that president obama ran. we got off to kind of a good start initial when i this administration because he had picked an the excellent transition team and we worked an outside nonprofit group to bring the two campaigns transition teams together and work them and help make sure they were ready for the transition. and i have to say a great respect for both teams. i saenlt congratulations e-mail to the winning team and i sincerely told them i was looking forward to working with they will i got a very nice message back saying they felt supported by oge and were looking forward to getting down to the task at handled. and then they were replaced about our current council of the president. since then i would stay ethics program has been a very serious disappointment in the white house. what do you mean by that? the ethics program, is a compliance based program in many ways. we have very basic bare bones criminal laws, civil laws, administrative regulations, that say here s the absolute minimum you re going to do. that s just the skeleton. and the meet of the program has been the ethical traditions and the norms that has evolved over 40 years. and we re able to say, in most cases, that we have the gold standard of ethics programs internationally. and that federal employees are not just merely not criminals. that appointees are not just avoiding violating laws but they go further and come apply with those traditions. an example is that with presidential nominees, the primary criminal conflict of interest statute says you can t participate in something where you have a conflict of interest. so you can come into government and keep all of your could not financial interests and not run afoul of that law if you were will to put your feet up on that zpeks read your newspaper all day and do your job. that s unworkable. we take a risk management approach. we set up other mechanisms to prevent conflicts of interest and we are two steps back from the line. the consistent approach that i m running into has been, if it is not illegal, we re going to do it. if there s an argument, we re going to do it. that has undermined the program that has existed for four decades. what i m hearing is they have taken an aggressive posture in terms of where they can set up with respect to the line on conflicts, particularly. this is a really important question. your job is to certify that there s no conflicts. i want to talk about, i want to you give me this. can you definitively say that everyone in the white house including the president, free of conflicts of interest? well no. we ve received very little information about what the individuals in the white house do on a day-to-day basis for a living. they ve negotiated ethics agreements and they ve refused to even let the office of government ethics see it. we ve asked for information. it is like pulling teeth. weeks go by before we get answers in many cases. after i issued a data call for all the waivers and notifications that were issued at the end of april, they refused to anxious any questions from my staff whether any individuals had received waivers. so i want to be really clear. there are criminal conflict status. there are people who retain, they have to recuse themselves. can you differeefinitively stat they have gdone that? to be fair, i would have to rework that question a little bit. i m not trying to dodge but it is a little more nuanced than. that i would like to say there is no basis for any specific violations. i don t have enough information to say definitively there could not be that. the bigger concern is because this is a risk management program, it has become clear that they have a much higher tolerance for risk than we do. we have a lot more concern over presidential no, ma am nieces. they have to get our sign-off before they can get a hearing to come into government. white house appointees are in government long before we get their reports and we re almost doing a post mortem to see if there was a conflict of interest. with nominees, we work to prevent them in advance. so documenting a higher level of risk is inconsistent with how we ve run this program. people have said, is there definitely a violation. or can you definitively say that? once the violation has happened, we have failed. it is incumbent upon the office of government ethics to object before we reach that point. we re supposed to prevent that from happening. thanks for making time tonight. thanks. the weaponizing of fake news. plus, t plus, thing one and thing two next. pain isn t always fair. i m not going to let it change my life. aleve is proven stronger on pain than tylenol 8 hour. and only aleve has the strength to stop tough pain for up to 12 hours with just 1 pill. this is my pain, but i am stronger. aleve. all day strong. .as it affects how well brilinta works. brilinta helps keep platelets from sticking together and forming a clot. in a clinical study brilinta worked better than plavix®. brilinta reduced the chance of another heart attack. or dying from one. don t stop taking brilinta without talking to your doctor,. .since stopping it too soon increases your risk of clots in your stent,. .heart attack, stroke, and even death. brilinta may cause bruising or bleeding more easily,. .or serious, sometimes fatal bleeding. don t take brilinta if you have bleeding, like stomach ulcers,. .a history of bleeding in the brain, or severe liver problems. slow heart rhythm has been reported. tell your doctor about bleeding,. .new or unexpected shortness of breath, any planned surgery, and all medicines you take. if you recently had a heart attack, ask your doctor about brilinta. my heart is worth brilinta. if you can t afford your medication, astrazeneca. .may be able to help. in our house, we go through a lot of mom!et paper. so we switched to new charmin super mega roll. get six regular rolls in one with charmin super mega roll our longest lasting roll. guaranteed to fit. enjoy the go with charmin. thing one tonight, this young administration has shown it is really into space. like really into space. the vice president cares very deeply about space policy. vice president pence promise that had our administration, because mike is 57 into space, would revive the national space council. buzz aldrin didn t seem equally enthusiastic on everything that happened that day. keep an eye on his expression. everybody wants to be on this board. people that you wouldn t have believed loved what we re doing so much. they want to be some of the most successful people on this board. i feel very strongly about it. i felt very strongly about it for a long time. i used to say before doing what i did, i used to say, what happened. why aren t we moving forward. a some point in the future we ll look back and say how did we do it without space? yesterday, while president trump was in germany, vice president pence got to visit the kennedy space center where the moment happened. he announced, we might be invading mars. that s thing two in 60 seconds. showing off my arms? that s cool. being comfortable without a shirt? that s cool. getting the body you want without surgery, needles, or downtime? that s coolsculpting. coolsculpting is the only fda-cleared non-invasive treatment that targets and freezes away stubborn fat cells. visit coolsculpting.com today and register for a chance to win a free treatment. you give us comfort. and we give you bare feet. i love you, couch. .backsweat and gordo s everything. i love you, but sometimes you stink. new febreze fabric refresher with odorclear technology. .cleans away odors like never before. because the things you love the most can stink. and plug in febreze to keep your whole room fresh for up. .to 45 days. breathe happy with new febreze. mike pence sound pretty excited about the future of space exploration while speaking at the kennedy space center yesterday. here from this bridge to space, our nation will return to the moon and we will put american boots on the face of mars. boots on the ground on mars. it was during the tour though that pence really showed off his space fandom. when he saw this sign, you bet wasn t going to stop him from slapping a hand on that piece of critical space flight hardware despite the sign that said, do not touch. pence embraced the moment saying marco rubio, if you re going to do it. nasa had its blessing saying it was okay to touch the surface. those are day to day reminder signs. we were going to clean it anyway. liberty did what? liberty mutual paid to replace all of our property that was damaged. and we didn t have to touch our savings. yeah, our insurance won t do that. well, there goes my boat. you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™. liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. and our firefighters safe. together, we re building a better california. did you watch rachel s show last night? she led with an exclusive report about what appeared to be a top secret nsa document that purported to show that a member of the trump campaign team was working with the russians on hacking last year. but after maddow and her staff consulted experts who have worked with documents like this, the conclusion was the document they received was a fake. the big red flag for us is that the document we were given this is part of what made it seem so red hot it names on american citizen. even if the typos and the weird spacing and the other odd stuff had snuck through for some reason, an american citizen s name would not have snuck through. not at this level of an nsa report. that our document contains an american name spelled out, that says to experienced people who ve worked with this stuff that what we got is forged. it s fake. now news organizations can pay a stiff price for running with things they get from questionable tips and sources. as rachel reminded us it was in 2004 that dan rather and cbs news got hold of documents that purported to highlight details of george w. bush s national guard business. the comes whose origin was murky. they blew up ending rather s career and damaging that news organization. it also killed any further reporting into george w. bush s military service during that election year. now someone is shopping fake trump collusion documents perhaps with a similar goal in mind. whether or not the trump campaign did it, one way to stab in the heart aggressive american reporting on that subject is to lay traps for american journalists reporting on it. trick news organizations to report what appears to be evidence of what happened and then after the fact blow that reporting up. you hurt the credibility of that news organization. you also cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future. whether or not it s true. right? even if it s true you plant a permanent question. a permanent asterisk. a permanent who knows. as to whether that too might be falts like that other story. whether that too might be based on fake evidence. so head s up, everybody. part of the defense against this trump-russia story includes somebody presenting a classified report and shopping it to other news authorities. david k. johnson, next. award winning interface. award winning design. award winning engine. the volvo xc90. the most awarded luxury suv of the century. visit your volvo dealer today and get up to $4,500 in allowances. i .prilosec otc 7 years ago,my doctor recommended. 5 years ago, last week. just 1 pill each morning, 24 hours and zero heartburn. it s been the number 1 doctor recommended brand for 10. .straight years, and it s still recommended today. use as directed. my hands that if i run with it and it is a fake i m blown up. right. and in that case the white house authenticated the document. but there is a real serious problem we re going to see more of in the future, chris, with fabricating documents to mislead news organizations. it s not entirely new. you may recall in the george w. bush documents case that affected dan rather and cbs that while the documents were shown to be fakes, kate and another reporter at the the new york times interviewed the general s secretary who said well, you know, that s exactly what he was saying at the time in the office and he did have documents though i didn t type them. in that case and others that i m aware of, there have been cases where you take a document you know is real, and we recreate what will be exposed as a fabrication to discredit the issue. so the broader thing to me at this moment is, governor paul lepage in maine, a big trump supporters with tells the media something. let s flood the tip lines with fake tips and times saying the that the white house tried to do this. i know people who have said the white house has attempted to shop them fake story to get them to run it so they can rebut them because it is a valuable, particularly in the moment in this white house to call this fake news. wh what do you about that? you have to be extremely careful with documents that don t come out of a public report. if you copy it out of the courthouse record, that s one thing. and if it s too good to be true it probably is. when i was exposing the lapd s massive worldwide spying, i got a document one day that was unbelievably juicy and i looked at it and said this is too good, it s too new. and when i i came to learn years later from a senior officer that in fact it was planted in an effort to discredit me. you have to be careful when handling documents to authenticate them and you have to show them to the people you re going to write about or broadcast about and get their responses to it. and there is at this point this sort of ratcheting up of the stakes, because of this idea of fake news that if you there s a real incentive on the part of the white house to kind of get people to get stuff wrong, even on sort of easy stuff, not big cloak and dagger stuff with documents being fabricated but easy stuff. because at this point it s such a kind of core narrative that they re telling the country about basically them against a duplicitous press. let s remember that vladimir