own new program which will air 6:00 p.m. weekdays. we ll announce the start date eventually. but you can mark your calendar in a rough way if you want. a big breaking news night. so i m happy to hear what rachel maddow has in store for us. you re giving us a calendar alert that could exist in the age of digital calendars. you re telling us to pencil this in in general but i can t give you a start date. write a macro so at some point that stakicks in and it starts. that s all i was allowed to say. a very laurie approawyerly a tonight i had an a block all set and ready to go. we worked on it this weekend. all this breaking news stuff this evening and then this happened this evening and we had all of this crazy stuff happening with the legal teams that are trying to defend or senator rand paul from kentucky said he wouldn t vote for it because repealing obamacare was still too much like obamacare. whatever. for whatever reasons the two of them said they wouldn t vote it. so we were heading into this week thinking. because we knew the next things that were going to happen in the health care bill that might affect those numbers, either collins and paul changing their mind and additional senators joining with them and saying no, which would of course end their chances of repealing obama cair. we knew some of those things were going to fall into line. we knew heading into this past weekend that today, monday, or maybe tomorrow, tuesday, the congressional budget office was going to give us a new score of the republicans bill which tells you not just how much it s going to cost but how many millions of americans it s going to cost their health insurance. we knew it was going to happen today or tomorrow. we knew from senator mcconnell s vote that he wanted a vote by thursday. an impending vote can be something that presses the point, makes people decide what they re going to do. so we knew those triggers were coming. but then this weekend senator john mccain was admitted for emergency surgery or admitted for surgery to repair a blood clot. we re told that was serious surgery, the reaction in political terms from republicans was that they wanted to delay their vote until senate mccain was recovered and back in washington. obviously everybody wishes senator mccain the best. it was a little jarring to see the political response immediately from his party that the way they re responding was by holding off this vote. that s what they said. then we learned that the cess n congressional budget office wouldn t be putting out their score today or tomorrow. all that meant is the triggers that were going to happen this week were gone. they were their bill was perched and paused and finally balanced on the edge of failure. would anybody else come out against the bill? would that congressional budget office be terrible and cause more republican to say no? would the impending vote on thursday be enough to nudge individual senators one way or the other? those were supposed to be the trigger points. when both of those triggers fell away and neither were going to happen this week, we assumed that we just have another week of stasis. they re right on the edge of failure. two votes and they can t lose another. tonight it has fallen apart. we got the first inklings this evening from senator ron johnson of wisconsin suggesting that maybe he would vote no, that he was offended about the way mitch mcconnell has been talking about the obamacare repeal. i don t know if that s what opened the flood gates. right after that, then a half our hour ago senator mike lee of utah tweeted my colleague jerry moran and i will not support the motion to proceed on this bill. and it was lining ke we th all week long we would be standing at two. now all of the sudden they went from two votes they could barely afford to four votes. how did that happen? is this some sort of disturbance in the force for this evening and they re going back to a safer position tomorrow and in the days ahead for this week or did this thing really just completely fall apart tonight. millions of people s health insurance is at stake if. joining us on the phone is frank tharp who has been following these events. thanks for taking our call. thanks for having me. when i described about the timi timing, it was me observing this out of washington in terms of what i expected. did people expect that tonight would be the night we would get a whole bunch more republican senators saying no? there wasn t the expectation that this is going to happen tonight. i think that there was an expectation that most of these republican senators who were on the fence were waiting on the cbo score and now that had been delayed we were expecting the announcements to happen once that came out. but there was also an expectation that folks, they didn t want to be the one senator one the one that doomed the bill. so the idea that senators lee and moran came out together and did this together, it makes it a lot of sense. it allows them to be able to do it together, now it s four, not three. neither one of them is the one senator that decided to be the nail in the coffin for this current version of the bill. but, you know, notably, you know, somebody like jerry moran, he came out saying he wants to basically start this process over. notably, jerry moran was one of the republican senators to actually have town halls during the 4th of july recess. i don t think there was an expectation that this was going to happen so early. but i also think that it did it needed to be at least two senators to come out to get this number to over the two that would actually kill the bill. frank, that s a good point about how senator moran has been approaching this. i ve been trying to keep an eye, and my staff, we ve been trying to keep an eye on what s happening in the states, what s happening in these senators home offices, what s happening when they re facing their constituents about this. and kansas is one of the states that is a conservative state. a lot of red state voters with the red state mind-set. but there are been tons and tons of demonstrations and town halls, a lot of home state pressure on a nart like jerry moran to vote no on this. and if you re looking at it from a national perspective, you wouldn t expect. but that has got to be part of what s in his mind and he s approaching this. do you know if senator mitch mcconnell has a plan around the traffic cones that have been put in his way? is there a temporary problem, something he anticipated or is this really potentially the end? it could be. but i mean we re waiting to hear back from mcconnell s office own what they plan to do. it s likely senator republicans will meet. they always meet on tuesday. they have their lunch and mcconnell has his press conference, where he and leadership, they speak to the reporters on capitol hill and tell them what they re going to do, the next steps. that s where we ll end up hearing what they want to do here. the thing is, you know, if senators moran and susan collins wanted to scrap the entire bill and start over again. wanted hearing, one with more time. and there s a real question about whether or not they have more time. whether or not they can do that, even with the two extra weeks they ve given themselves during the august recess. and between now and lunchtime tomorrow, whether or not there s doing to be moderate republicans who are expecting to come out against the bill, whether they will start to trickle out now that they know that this bill is or at least this current version is not going anymore. fascinating stuff. frank thorpe, thank you very much. i know you re in the middle of reporting this out tonight. that last point that frank was making there, for the people on my staff who have been watching this more closely and for steve b bennon, once you get past the hurdle, once you get past the two votes that they can endure and still pass this thing, what we have been expecting is that that would sort of open the flood gates and you would get, in all likelihood, you will get a whole bunch more senator saying no once some people have sort of broken the ice there. so what frank was saying about expecting the moderate senators to sort of all pour out now saying we re all no votes on this as well. i will tell you from perspective of my staff f staand steve s ex which i trust a lot, this that is what a lot of people 0 expecting. this year we ve learned to expect the unexpected. we tend to look at news from congress as to what happens there is driven by forces that are prurly inside washington, d.c. you re covering stuff in washington and so you look around in washington to see what explains what just happened. i continue to believe, though, that if you really want to understand why republicans are failing again to pass their health bill, right, why republicans with republican control of the house, republican control of the senate and a republican in the white house who would likely sign anything labeled health care, why these folks cannot pass the one thing they all agreed on and campaigned on, repealing obamacare, why can t they do it? i don t think it can be explained in washington. i think in order to understand that you might also look around at what is happening right where you live. for example, take the ninth district in virginia, represented by this guy, congressman morgan griffith. a republican congress from virginia. he voted to repeal obamacare. his constituents say if the republican bill becomes low law, 62,000 people in his trikt will lose their health insurance. to help drive that point home, they made him a visual aid. this weekend the constituents spent their sunday stapling 62,000 pieces of paper in a paper chain. every link represents an individual person in that district who would lose all health insurance under the republican health care plan to repeal obamacare. 62,000. they pieced out together, laid it out flat across a football field. the whole thing clocked in around 3 miles long. then they stuffed all 15,000-plus feet of it into crash bags and delivered this chain to their congressman, morgan griffith. grass roots efforts did not take the weekend off, leading into this dramatic develops tonight. tucson, arizona, you know how hot it is in mid july, protesters braved brutal heat outside senator john mccain s office. few people brought umbrellas with them to stay cool. over in north carolina, patrick mchenry s constituents prusedsp up his sign with tombstones reminding him of people who could die because of the bill. here in california a good size group of people turned up to talk to paul cook. when they founld out the office was closed, they stood downstairs chanting, we ll be back. . when the senate got to work today in washington, d.c., they would barely make it through the door. protests started in the senate atrium in washington, d.c. people chanting their stories about how obamacare helped save their lives. capitol police gave their first warning to clear the area. protesters sat down on the ground. police started rounding them up, folded up their banners and made arrests. some people made it upstairs, 15 activists crowded into the office, wrote him a song to he s a jolly good fellow expect they changed the word to you should vote no on health care. protesters were less jolly here, yelling, your job is on the line. eventually they were kicked out of that office. they parked themselves on the floor right outside the senator office door. police made more arrests there. include this woman in a wheelchair who kept chanting. more than 30 people were arrested at the capitol today. while they were going on, a group stopped a bunch of senators at their d.c. offices. they call thoechlss the little lobbyists. carrying around a binder of kids who have stayed alive because of obamacare. nobody was senator elher s staff were able to meet with them but think did give the kids ice cream. which was awesome. after enduring this face-to-face pressure, this kind of intense pressure from their constituents for weeks and weeks, both at home, in their home states and home districts and also at their offices in washington, d.c., the flood gates really did open tonight. they had two no votes before tonight. that s all they could spare. now we re up to four. four members of the senate who shay they re firmly against the bill. that means that mitch mcconnell is not going to pass this thing. not unless he changes two of their minds and doesn t lose anybody else. so what happens now really is anyone s guess. this is really big news tonight. but i got to tell you one constant throughout this entire process from the very start has been how the majority of this country really strongly does not want the republicans to do this. and these protests have been relentless. they re still planned, more are still planned at the capital and all over the country throughout this week. but they ve had a huge victory tonight. joining us tonight is ezra eleven, a cofound are of indivisible, helping folks to organize all across the country. they ve taken point in as best they can when it comes to the health care bill. mr. levin, appreciate you taking the call. thanks for calling me. pardon me take on why this is big news toe night and where i think this comes from. as somebody who has been really involved as these indivisible groups across the country have mobilized so aggressively on this. are you seeing this tonight as a victory? are you cautious in viewing what s happening here? do you think you ve won? so this is absolutely a win. i think the way you framed it was absolutely right. change is coming to washington. it is not starting in washington. we are, as of thursday, six months into the trump presidency. there s a unified conservative government the likes of which we have not seen in over a decade and yet they have yet to pass a single significant piece of legislation. that he s not because they don t have control of the government. they do. it s because the people are against the agenda they re pushing. it is amazing to see. tonight is a big win. its not a final victory but it is a huge one win and one that groups across the country have been working towards and will continue to work towards. really all across the country. that s inspiring to see, people standing up on their home turf making their voices heard. that is the core behind the indivisible movement. wherever you live you should be contacting your own officials. that s why there have been so many calls across the country for town halls and me other meeting, any other forum where representatives have to look their own constituents in the eye. given that has been your focus on the indivisible side of things, what do you make about the direct action tactics that we re showing on the screen here, people doing sit-ins, people protesting, getting arrested. how does that integrate with the kind of work that indivisible has been doing? i have a huge amount of respect for the groups on the ground. they ve been indivisible members, planned parenthood and move on and others. this is a direct part of this strategy, which is shining a light on exactly what congress is doing. i think one of the interesting things we ve seen over the last several months is republicans aren t holding town halls. they re not facing their constituents. very few are. what we re seeing in response to that is if you re not going to come to me, i m going to come to you. they re going to the district offices and other public events and it s working. senator moran ought to get a lot of credit. he was within of a couple of republican senators who held a town hall over the july 4th recess. held it in a very tiny town in kansas with population 277. 150 people showed up at that town hall, including kansas city indivisible and others who made the trek out there to talk to their senator. that works. showing up and doing sit-ins works. it s about putting pressure on. hey we re watching you. i love seeing that. ezra levin, thanks for talking to us tonight. it s a big busy night with the breaking news. tomorrow is a big busy day, a national day of action. keep this pressure on and we ll kill this bill. magain the republican effort to repeal obamacare appears to have fallen apart. as you heard ezra levin say, a cofounder of a group nationwide organizing efforts that s really been trying to stop the republican effort to repeal obamacare. you heard him say this is not over. kraushsly optimistic. but four republican senators saying they ll vote no is enough to kill it. i for one was not expecting this development tonight. we ll talk the one of the democratic senators on the democrat side of the bill to get his perspective on how final this victory is. senator chris murphy from connecticut is going to join us live next. stay with us. boost. it s about moving forward, not back. it s looking up, not down. it s being in motion. in body, in spirit, in the now. boost® high protein it s intelligent nutrition with 15 grams of protein and 26 vitamins and minerals. for when you need a little extra. boost® the number one high protein complete nutritional drink. be up for it pain can really pain is sometimes in my hands, right before a performance especially. only aleve has the strength to stop minor arthritis pain for up to 12 hours with just one pill. this is my pain. but i am stronger. aleve. all day strong. when you switch to progressive. winds stirring. too treacherous for a selfie. [ camera shutter clicks ] sure, i ve taken discounts to new heights with safe driver and paperless billing. but the prize at the top is worth every last breath. here we go. [ grunts ] got em. ahh. wait a minute. whole wheat waffles? [ crying ] why! wait a minute. whole wheat waffles? anyone who calls it a hobby doesn t understand. we know that a person s passion is what drives them. [ clapping ] and that s why every memorial we create is a true reflection of the individual. only a dignity memorial professional can celebrate a life like no other. find out how at sanfranciscodignity.com. afford. they can t pass their bill like that. that said, very few people don t expect them to quit trying. senator chris murphy here tonight. thanks for being here. we re trying to figure out i guess whether this is a normal pothole or an axle breaker. how big of a deal are the defections tonight? there s a couple of wheels off tf bus tonight but this is a bus full of republicans ultimately determined to deliver this bill. they are not going to give up on it. but the statements tonight, paired with those from susan collins and rand paul, they feel a little different. susan collins says it s time to sit count and work with democrats. jerry moran s statement tonight criticizes the behind closed doors process and says it s time to start over. you have the feeling this is beyond a couple of small fixes. it proves that reports of democracy s death was overexaggerated. it no matter how long you have been promising it. i think they re going back to the drawing board at this point but they re going back to the drawing board. they re not giving up. it s hard to remake a fifth of the american economy with a bill on what you hold no public hearings and that there s really no public debate in the senate about it. i wonder, when you talk about them going back to the drawing board, do you look at the types of criticism that have been laid out by the senators who now say they re no votes. do you think there s a chance that mitch mcconnell might go back and start and do this in a normal wray where there s haerks, a publicly viewable process an an actual debate? it would be a fairly sizable admission of guilt if he did that and opened up a process after he swore he didn t need it. but the public hearing process is not just for show. it actually is a means to get real feedback from professionals and experts. and i think part of the hesitancy of a lot of republicans, and i put jerry moran in the category to support this bill, this wasn t just a moral monstrosity, it was an int intellectual train wreck. it may be the only way for them to have an open process in which they solicit feedback of people who know what they re doing. that being said, mcconnell would have toed a mitt that the way he did this was wrong and i think that will be a tough thing for him to do. i hope they do that but i would expect that they would go back behind closed doors. i ve asked you this before and i think i know the answer to it is going to be the same as the answer you gave me before. given the fact that they cannot seem to get this thing passed, at least not yet with votes from members of their own party, has there now been any effort by mitch mcconnell, by the republican leadership, by any of your colleague to get any democratic votes? have they changed their mind on that or are they still trying to do it purely with republicans. what a political gift this would be for the democrats if they continue to do this in a way that secured only republican votes. there s only political upside the democrats. but we re actually sincere in saying that we hope that they come and talk to us. they ve got to jetson the tax cuts and gutting of medicaid, we will talk to them about their concerns of flexibility if they will give us some long term guarantee that these exchanges will be solvent and strong. and wouldn t it be great for health care to stop being a political football that gets tossed from one side to the other every five or ten years. i don t know that mitch mcconnell thinks we re sincere, but we are. the answer is no, they haven t reached out to us but it would be to their political benefit and to the country s policy benefit if they actually took us up on the offer. thank you for helping us through this tonight, sir. really appreciate it. thanks. we re continuing to follow the breaking news tonight. the latest effort, the only effort on the table right now to try to repeal obamacare, the republican bill in the senate as of right now is dead. they could lose two votes. as of the last hour or two they re down to four no votes. this is a story that started breaking in the states, that started break in all of those congressional district offices and senate offices out in the sticks and all of those places across the country but today it came home to washington and this bill right now is dead, at least for now. much more ahead tonight. stay with us. 811 is available to any business our or homeownerfe. to make sure that you identify where your utilities are if you are gonna do any kind of excavation no matter how small or large before you dig, call 811. keep yourself safe. so this is the news that we bumped right from the top of the show when we got the breaking news about the health care bill dying in washington. we re continuing to keep an eye on that tonight. but i wanted to let you know that the wall street journal reported this evening that a new subpoena has been issued into the investigation into paul manafort. this is from the journal tonight. the subpoena is from the district attorney s office in manhattan, directed at a small bank in chicago run by a member of president trump s economic advisory panel. the subpoena is reportedly seeking information on some gigantic multimillion dollar loans that the tiny bank gave to paul manafort in november, the month of the election and in january, the month of the inauguration. and i say these loans are guyian ti dpsh gigantic. apparently what looked nutty to investigators about the loan is the $16 million that the bank gave to paul manafort, that $16 million was almost one quarter of the bank s equity capital. i don t speak banker either. but that means that the bank had x amount of money it could loan out in total in the world. and these loans that they gave to paul manafort was them loaning him one out of every four dollars they could loan to anybody in the world. this one bank bebt over so far to give him money. one out of every four dollars that they were able to loan they loaned to paul manafort all at once when the campaign was we really don t know what was going on there. but the journal does raise one interesting prospect in a new report they posted tonight. quoting from the journal tonight. the bank s loans to mr. manafort equaled almost 24% of the bank s reported $67 million of capital. from the time the loans were issued, mr. calling, had expressed interest in becoming mr. trump s secretary of the ar army. he s giving these gigantic loans that his bank cannot afford. steve calq is the head of the little bank in shi. he did not become secretary of the army. was there any connection between him wanting to be army secretary and giving those seemingly inexplicable giant loans? no idea. but the journal is raising those two points together tonight and reporting that the d.a. s office in manhattan has subpoenaed this bank in chicago for information on those loans. and you have not heard this story before. it rhymes with a lot of the other stories that we ve heard about paul manafort. in mid june we learned that the fbi was looking into mon that fort s real estate deals in southern southern. in april we learned that a federal grand jury subpoenaed paul manafort s bank records. in march, richard engel reported that the attorney general of the nation of cypress had been asked to hand over information about paul manafort s offshore banking activities. and tonight, new york prosecutors from the d.a. s office subpoenaing this bank in chicago, run by a campaign adviser th adviser. and that s all just the law enforcement stuff. we also learned last week in the the new york times, almost in a passing reference, their big story on the trump tower meeting with donald trump jr. and paul manafort and jared kushner and all of those russians, the par ren thet kl reference, paul manafort had disr discussed that meeting with congressional investigators. which means in addition to him handling all of these subpoenas, paul manafort has also apparently been discussing things with congressional investigators. i didn t know he was talking to them. there was a period of a couple of months he said he would register as a foreign agent and the time when he finally did. that meant it was months after a lot of people had aseemed he had done it when paul manafort finally filed as a foreign agent and declared over a two-year period he had been paid $17 million by a political party in ukraine. those numbers may be starting to look a little hinky as well. anne cramer at the the new york times said even though paul manafort said he and his firm were paid nearly $17 million from this political party in ukraine, he found that that political party in ukraine which supposedly paid them, they said they didn t spend $17 million on anything. they didn t spend $17 million in total over that same period, not just on him but on everything they spent money on combined. in 2012 manafort says this ukrainian political party paid him. that same year this ukrainian political party said it only spent $11 million on everything it spent money on. the following year it was worse. manafort said he received $4.5 million from that party but the political party says it didn t spend $4 million in total on everything it spent on that year. it s like, you know, showing up and yeah, my lemonade stand paid for it. if he didn t get the $17 million from that political party and the records say he didn t, then where did he get the $17 million from? i don t know and neither do you. but you know what? there s another thing here that really, really, really does not make sense. and it doesn t make sense in washington and that s next. stay with us. at panera, a salad is so much more than one thing. panera. food as it should be. .to a new world.s. deeper than the ocean. as unfathomable as the universe. a world that doesn t exist outside you. .but within you. where breakthrough science is replacing chemotherapy with immunotherapy. where we can now attack the causes of disease, not just the symptoms. where medicines once produced for all, are now designed to fit you. today 140,000 biopharmaceutical researchers go bodly to discover treatments and cures unimaginable ten years ago. .and are on the verge of more tomorrow. i know if the pain comes, i m not gonna get my job done. pain s kind of self-defining. when it hurts, it hurts. when i can t do something, it makes me feel isolated. with aleve, you can stay strong longer because only aleve has the strength to stop tough pain for up to 12 hours with just one pill. tylenol can t do that. i get to be present and enjoy what i love. this is my pain. but i am stronger. aleve. all day strong. all day long. check this sunday s paper for extra savings on products from aleve. and when youod sugar is a replace one meal. choices. .or snack a day with glucerna. .made with carbsteady. .to help minimize blood sugar spikes. .you can really feel it. now with 30% less carbs and sugars. glucerna. there s nothing more than my vacation.me so when i need to book a hotel room, i want someone that makes it easy to find what i want. booking.com gets it. and with their price match, i know i m getting the best price every time. now i can start relaxing even before the vacation begins. your vacation is very important. that s why booking.com makes finding the right hotel for the right price easy. visit booking.com now to find out why we re booking.yeah! wilmerheal is a big famous american launch. offices all over the country, big name lawyers, particularly washington lawyers associated with the firm. for example, robert mueller, brought on as exfbi director looking into the trump-russia thing. robert mueller quit his partnership at wilburheal in order to take this job and that created an issue for that law firm. no matter how big and professionally operated a launch law firm is. even with robert mueller quits wilburheal, there were concerns related to jared kushner in the russian affair. jared kushner s lawyer also worked for that same law firm. robert mueller quit that firm to take to job but you may see how the firm might worry that one of its expartners is leading the investigation into russia and another one of the partners is representing one of the dudes right in the middle of the russia scandal. that worry about the same law firm having that connection to both sides of the case, that was the explanation that we got from jared kushner s lawyer last week as to why she was dropping out of representing him on russian matters. once robert mueller left to form the special counsel s office, we advised jared kushner to get legal advice as to whether to continue with us. she had to drop out because she worked at bob mueller s old law firm. well you know what? paul manafort s russia law firm works at wilburheal, the same law firm. which is fine. he s otherwise a totally normal choice for somebody to represent paul manafort in the russia investigation he s up to his neck in. expect w except why did jared kushner lose his russia lawyer but bpau manafort gets to keep his russia lawyer. how can there be a conflict or one of them and not for the other. and while we re on the subject. there s something even weirder going on with the lawyer hired to represent donald trump s eldest son. the president announced the formation of his reelection campaign on the day he was inaugurated. that campaign has just released its first sec filing. we ve learned a couple of things that don t make sense. first of all, if there s one thing that you think the members of the trump family could afford paying for themselves, it would be their lawyers, right? it s kind of a personal thing. i mean the whole family s public persona is about how fabulously wealthy and independent they are. donald trump jr. is not paying for his own lawyer in the russia lawyer. his russian lawyer is being paid for by people all across america who send campaign donation to president trump. why is he getting a lawyer paid for by campaign? the lawyer himself a week ago today explained to new york law journal why he had been hired to represent the president east eldest son. quote, trump jr. hired an attorney but congressional committee members are interested in speaking with him, quote, so you get a lawyer, he said. that was the explanation, that was monday, july 10th, a week ago today. the first day that any member of congress ever said publicly that they wanted to speak to donald trump jr., it was the previous day. july 9th, a bunch of members from the investigating committees said they wanted to talk to donald trump jr. we know that they didn t also reach out to him in private because the lawyer has said on the record that donald trump jr. has never been privately contacted by any of the committees. so him having to appear before these committees or members of the congress being interested in talking to him, that s the purported explanation as to why donald jr. is getting a lawyer being paid for by the campaign. as of july 9th and 10th, members of the congressional committees were saying they wanted him to come testify. that s a fine explanation. that makes total sense. except with the sec filings that came out shows that donald trump jr. s lawyer was actually hired in june, when no one from any congressional committee was talking at all about wanting to interview donald trump jr. so the explanation they ve given doesn t make sense. something weird is going on with paul manafort s representation, with jared kushner s representation and also with donald trump jr. s representation. something doesn t make sense about the public explanation about all of those legal teams. and i m not sure who will ever be expected to tell the truth about these things. but the on the record explanations so far do not pass muster. and this is driving me nuts. we re going to figure this thing out. i m telling you. this should be easy to figure out. we are going to figure this out. watch this space. your bbut as you get older,ing. it naturally begins to change, causing a lack of sharpness, or even trouble with recall. thankfully, the breakthrough in prevagen helps your brain and actually improves memory. the secret is an ingredient originally discovered. in jellyfish. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown to improve short-term memory. prevagen. the name to remember. (singsong) budget meeting. sweet. if you compare last quarter. it s no wonder everything seems a little better with the creamy taste of philly, made with no artificial preservatives, flavours or dyes. made with no artificial preservatives, tech: when you schedule with safelite autoglass, you get time for more life. this family wanted to keep the game going. son: hey mom, one more game? tech: with safelite, you get a text when we re on our way. you can see exactly when we ll arrive. mom: sure. bring it! tech: i m micah with safelite. mom: thanks for coming, it s right over here. tech: giving you a few more minutes for what matters most. take care! family: bye! kids singing: safelite® repair, safelite® replace. magnitsky is not one of the hard ones. the majinsky act. no, there is no majinsky act. this is the high-profile lawyer working for the president on his russia legal team. he s the one who was brought on board because he s supposed to be the excellent tv communicator. and now he s being investigated by the department of justice. so he s being investigated for taking the action that the attorney general deputy attorney general recommended him to take. first of all, you ve now said he is being investigated after saying no. you just said that he s being investigated. no. chris, i said that the let me be crystal clear so you completely understand. we have not received, nor are we aware of any investigation of the president of the united states. sir, you just said two times that he s being investigated. jay sekulow is the lawyer who was brought on to the president s legal team because of his excellent tv communication skills. here he was this weekend. do you accept what we heard from the president s pick to run the fbi that what should have happened there if, you know, a situation where you have representatives of a foreign government offering assistance in an election, that what should have happened is the fbi should have been notified? well, i ve wondered why the secret service, if this was nefarious, why did the secret service allow these people in. the secret service doesn t comment on stuff like this, but after that guy went on tv and said that, they had to put out a statement saying, that s not how it works. donald trump jr. was not a protectee of the united states secret service in june 2016. thus, we would not have screened anyone he was meeting with at that time. the duh is silent. so the president has assembled a small team of lawyers to represent him in the most serious scandal afflicting any president in modern history. this guy, majinsky, sekulow, he s one of the president s lawyers. apparently the president is keeping him. it has also been reported but not confirmed that the new lawyer that the president has brought on now to take over the russia defense will mean the demotion of his other lawyer who used to be in charge of his russia defense. i should tell you the new lawyer who the president is reportedly bringing on board will apparently be a member of the white house staff, which means that for him at least, you and i will be paying for his salary. other than him, though, it was reported last week that the president might be trying to make the republican party, the republican national committee, pay the expenses associate thd h his other lawyers. the rnc committee chair responded that she s not sure that would be legal. but for all the pieces of this that don t yet make sense, that we haven t yet tracked down and explained. i will tell you one piece is crystal clear. now we know why there was such urgency to start raising money for the president s re-election campaign the day he was inaugurated. because they are paying a lot of their legal fees out of campaign funds for the president s family, for who knows how much of the campaign. that is how they are paying for at least some of their lawyers. so when you see somebody in a make america great again hat, which you paid the campaign to get, you know what that hat means? that hat means billable hours. billable hours being covered by that person in that hat whether or not they knew it when they bought it. 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. (singsong) budget meeting. sweet. if you compare last quarter. it s no wonder everything seems a little better with the creamy taste of philly, made with no artificial preservatives, flavours or dyes. made with no artificial preservatives, wise man, i m nervous about affecting my good credit score. i see you ve planted an uncertainty tree. chop that thing down. the clarity you seek. lies within the creditwise app from capital one. creditwise helps you protect your credit. and it s completely free for everyone. it s free for everyone? do hawks use the stars to navigate? i don t know. aw, i thought you did. i don t know either. either way it s free for everyone. cool. what s in your wallet?
we know you love it, so get more of it, with applebee s new bigger bolder grill combos. now that s eatin good in the neighborhood. welcome to kasie d.c. i m kasie hunt. we are live from washington every sunday from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. eastern. tonight it turns out the most consequential thing released from james comey this week was probably not his book. plus, climate change and the president s legal team. the outlook is cloudy for michael cohen. the attorney general and rod rosenstein. and later, we are witnessing a genuine thaw in relations with north korea or are we witnessing the art of the deal as written by kim jong-un? bill richardson joins me live to talk about the hermit kingdom. but first we start with two images. the first an actual photograph of four presidents and their wives. the photograph was taken by paul morris at the funeral for barbara bush. in the center you can see george h.w. bush, behind him his son george, his wife laura, his arm around the clintons. on the edge melania trump and michelle obama arm in arm. the other image, you re going to have to conjure for yourself. the sitting president, donald trump at mar-a-lago, tweeting 29 times since friday about michael cohen, james comey, michael flynn, the special counsel, about a form aide that he calls drunk and drugged up loser. and what he calls a third-rate reporter named maggie haberman. he insists that she is someone who i don t speak to and have nothing to do with, but there they are in the oval office. she has interviewed him multiple times. to talk more about all of this, i want to welcome in my panel. the co-founder of foundry strategies and msnbc political analyst rick tyler. pulitzer prize winning white house reporter for the washington post and msnbc contributor my friend ashley parker. nbc news intelligence and national security reporter ken dilanian and white house correspondent for pbs news hour and msnbc contributor yamiche alsindor. this is the first time i ve seen you on the air since you won your pulitzer last week. congratulations to you and all of your colleagues. thank you. at the washington post. but we ve talked a lot about this theme that the president is isolated and increasingly as time has worn on he seems to be more and more isolated. i think it certainly set into sharp relief for me the difference between that photograph where he was obviously excluded and what has gone on over the course of the weekend. do you think this is the most isolated time yet for this president? yes and no. i mean, if you look at his west wing and his white house, there s been stunning turnover, and not just across the board. but some of these people who are really sort of comforts to him, hope hicks, his trusted communications advisor, keith shiller, his long-time body guard who played a key role there, a number of people who he really knew and was familiar with and liked. that said, he still does what he s always done, he s always had a kind of small group of people around him and he still stays in touch with them late at night on the phone, when he s down at mar-a-lago. john kelly, his operator. he s surrounded by people, might not be the chief of staff wants him to be around but he s not purely isolated. ken dilanian, what potential damage has the president done with these tweets that have been sort of aimed across the board? ink chuck todd was talking this morning on meet the press how it feels like the focus is russia, russia, russia. the weight of this investigation sort of pressing down more on the president and the country as a whole. you mean aside from damage to our national fabric, kasie? it makes him look guilty at the end of the day. the way he is continuing to attack anyone that he feels can hurt him in the russia investigation, anybody that seems to be a witness. although interestingly he hasn t attacked michael cohen yet because he believes his lawyer and long-time confidant may be on the fence and there may be a chance he can flip and there is a chance he might not flip. donald trump has words of support for him this week. yamiche, weigh in on this question. what was your take? we watched and talked, going to talk more about barbara bush later on in the show. sort of the dignity and grace that she showed on the national stage and the contrast with, you know, the events of the last year. i think there are two things. the first is there is this kind of stunning moment where president trump said people keep saying i m going to fire robert mueller, i m going to fire rod rosenstein and then rod rosenstein, but they still are here. they re still people that are working and i haven t fired them. it felt like for a couple moments there, i would say i won t venture to say a whole day people thought oh, these people are going to have their jobs, they re not going to go anywhere. he talks about james comey setting off the investigation of the special counsel, it s built off an illegal act. what does that mean? it started to he will like, okay, is he building a case or dropping crumbs for why he s going to fire these two men and why he s going to try to stop this investigation? there is that one thing. during a funeral while everyone is watching the bushes, while everyone is kind of reminiscing on what the quorum is like and how beautiful the casket, i think the nation as a whole was kind of pausing to think about all of those things. you had donald trump go on a rant of all rants that really showed that the republican party is in completely different hands now. this is not the bushes. as much as people might have made fun of george bush and he had his on issues with katrina and the war on iraq, people thought he was someone who didn t have any decorum, was tearing away at the national fabric. i think you re right, there has been some george w. bush nostalgia that has people papering over some of the things we remember of his presidency at the time. rick tyler, what s your point? i think yamiche s point is a good one. perhaps it is those people in the photograph who are going to be the ones that are permanently outside the frame. many of those people ran against each other, but they were still able to appear in the same room at the same time. they hadn t diminished or demeaned themselves to the point where it just would be embarrassing. now, the white house a little bit of cover saying the secret service would have created disruption on the funeral and it would have. but i think trump s presence there would have created a much larger disruption. and i do think the bushes who i have disagreed with many, many times, but it s hard to argue that they aren t honorable people. i remember visiting the bush library, which you can argue is a propaganda place, but perhaps any presidential library presents the best history possible. i read a letter by george h.w. bush to his boys during watergate and he was concerned about the way his boys would perceive watergate. and it was a father instructing his younger sons and it was about character and honor and dignity, and we re lacking that in this white house right now. so, speaking of those tweets, in a series of other tweets throughout the weekend, the president is questioning the legality of the special counsel, claiming that james comey illegally leaked classified documents. he also slighted his own attorney general, quote, gop lawmakers asking sessions to investigate comey and hillary clinton. good luck with that request! meanwhile, the washington post reports, jeff sessions warned the white house he might have to leave his job if president trump fired his deputy, rod rosenstein. on the call reportedly to don mcgahn last weekend, sessions expressed the difficult position it would put him in. the call came after rosenstein approved the raid on cohen s offices and home. ken dilanian, what are the ramifications of these potential dominos if sessions does think if rosenstein goes i have to resign, too? i do not think the congress would approve 509 attorney general in the first place. but that aside, i mean, it seems like that would, in fact, spark the crisis based on this reporting. absolutely. they certainly wouldn t approve an attorney general without that person promising to continue the mueller investigation as it s happening. so, leaving that aside, i mean, actually one of the implications of this sessions threatening to resign, is that a motivating factor for donald trump to make this happen? but look, that would absolutely cause a crisis in congress and in the executive branch. donald trump could put acting people in who could potentially remove robert mueller, but as james comey said many times this week, you would have to fire the entire justice department and the entire fbi to make this investigation go away. the documents, the findings, those would simply go if mueller was removed, they would go to u.s. attorney s offices, the fbi would still have them. they don t go away. the investigation doesn t close. ashley, the rumor mill on rod rosenstein seems to ebb and flow, if it s the tides, i don t know what it is, every few days or a week we seem to get a new round of the president is about to do this, another report he thought about firing mueller at such and such additional time. where does that stand right now? how secure is rod rosenstein? first understand we have to put it in context. the president often sort of floats ideas and bounces things off of aides and friends and says, you know, i m so fed up with him. i think i should fire him. what do you think? do you think i should fire him? and that doesn t what do you think? that doesn t mean it s necessarily going to happen. and as yamiche mentioned earlier he said in the press conference, look, people have been writing these stories four or five months and these two men are still here, aren t they? and that s true, and there is sort of an adage people say, pay attention to what the president says, not what he does. although sometimes he does do the thing he s saying, such as firing james comey. so, it s tenuous. right. you bring up comey as well. i want to play a sound bite that we have from susan collins on meet the press this morning because it seems to me that in some ways comey did some damage to himself over the course of the last week. take a look. i cannot imagine why an fbi director would seek to essentially cash in on a book when the investigation is very much alive. he should have waited to do his memoir. i think this is an interesting assessment from a senator who is, by all accounts, you know, carries some antipathy towards donald trump. she raises the question we talked about this initially that does this potentially and ken dilanian, i m interested to know your opinion on the impact of the investigation. politically, rick tyler, do you think that james comey did himself well over the course of the last week? is he did he survive politically as the stand-up courageous guy he set out to paint a portrait of himself in this book? i think it s kind of a break even. we have to remember something. james comey was fired. they took away a man s career. a prosecutor that went all the way back to when he worked for rudy giuliani and before that. they took away his career. they also besmirched him publicly. he had a right to make his case. it couldn t be done in sound bites. i read his book. i disagree with some of the things he s done and said. did he make a mistake he thinks he made a mistake writing about the size of the president s hands and his hair and other things. i m sure the publisher had more to do with that than james comey did. he certainly did take us inside the room. i think the book is interesting. it does give justification of why he did a separate press conference from the justice department about reopening the investigation of hillary clinton s e-mails, which i profoundly disagree with. but he has a rationale for that and people can decide on their own. but i think on balance, he probab probably broke even. ken, is it your opinion he helped bob mueller or not? i think there is the potential. in terms of the impact of the investigation, if mueller didn t want this to happen, really put his foot down, it wouldn t have happened. it s not that these words are going to interfere with the investigation, but the damage that he may have done to his credibility, as you say, going to the size of donald trump s hands and the color of his skin and just appearing to be cashing in, i agree with everything rick said. susan collins is raising a fair question. to the extent he is a crucial witness in any obstruction of justice case to be made against donald trump, i think this could do some damage, yeah. and, yamiche, with the memos coming out after the book was released, the memos do seem to add credibility to whatever may have been taken away from him from his references that some people interpreted as maybe below the belt takes. the memos were coming out and democrats were clamoring for them. it bolstered his case and damaged his credibility. it was such a partisan response to the memos. you had republicans jumping and running, it shows this is not obstruction of justice. nancy pelosi tweeting donald trump has a contempt for the rule of law. as a reporter, i saw, not only did we know about the details of the memo. there was a part where james comey said he would give him honest loyalty. he called me back a couple months later, couple weeks later. you remember that thing about woods i told but? basically, i remember that. it showed he was trying to hold onto his job. he s thinking of his career, ten years down the line i want this to be a whole thing i can close and i can serve. in reality i think if he s looking back, he s probably i think doesn t feel as great at the idea that he had that loyalty hanging over his head because the memos don t paint him as someone saying, donald trump, you cannot say that. that is completely unethical. that s not there. i don t know it helped his credibility. ashley, what s your take, do you think the memos bolstered comey s stature across the board or is yamiche right? i don t know. that s a good question. my understanding, i m not a legal expert, those memos written extelemunmporaneously c used as something happened and they would be very valuable to robert mueller and his team of investigators. the memos do bolster his account of what did happen. he s sort of been very consistent in that, what leaked out in the news reports, what we then saw. but as yamiche said, i do think everything is sort of at this point seen through a partisan lens. people will pick and choose what they want to take from that. it also came out in response to the republican investigators who want these hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of documents that rosenstein has no hope of fulfilling, which will set up a pretext of why he needs to be fired. there is talk of republicans trying to impeach him. he says, okay, i ll send over the comey memos. he does. what happens? within one hour they are leaked. i mean, these supposedly illegal classified memos and now everybody gets to read them. they re a whole lot of nothing really. so what do you think the fbi what do you think is going to happen when the fbi sends over a million documents, many of which are classified? they re going to leak. th that s what capitol hill is best at sometimes. the president tweeted 29 times since friday. it can be hard to keep up so we here at kasie d.c. distilled them to under 20 seconds for you and, oh, we put them in the president s own words. almost. nancy pelosi called numbers maggie haberman. stallone. drunk, drugged up. loser. washington post kim jong-un. southern white house. debbie wasser man schultz. johnson. and the dishonest media. the dishonest media, much more to come on our show tonight. the state of play in tennessee is awkward. we ll talk about the unfolding mid terms there. plus, new reporting just out on the trump administration s approach to kim jong-un. but first, the dog eat dog world of the trump legal team. plus, join us on twitter at kasie d.c. throughout the show. please, this is my favorite, join in using the hashtag dogs watching kasie d.c. send your photos of dogs. we ve had cats, birds, no iguanas. if you have one go ahead. everyone watching the show. we ll be back in just a minute. i m your phone, stuck down here between your seat and your console, playing a little hide-n-seek. cold. warmer. warmer. ah boiling. jackpot. and if you ve got cut-rate car insurance, you could be picking up these charges yourself. so get allstate, where agents help keep you protected from mayhem. .like me. mayhem is everywhere. are you in good hands? experience a blend of.and raw power,nship. engineered to take the crown. presenting the all-new lexus ls 500 and ls 500h. experience amazing, at your lexus dealer. fthere s flonase sensimist.f up around pets. it relieves all your worst symptoms including nasal congestion, which most pills don t. and all from a gentle mist you can barely feel. flonase sensimist. my time is thin, but so is my lawn. thick r lawn 3-in-1 solution. my time is thin, but so is my lawn. with a soil improver! seed! and fertilizer to feed! now yard time is our time. this is a scotts yard. former new york city mayor rudy giuliani and two other former federal prosecutors join president trump s legal team this week. of course, in the case of giuliani, the president is adding someone who served as one of his most reliable lieutenants during the 2016 campaign. i am sick and tired of the defamation of donald trump by the media and by the clinton campaign. i am sick and tired of it. this is a good man. this is a man with a big heart who loves people, all people. from the top to the bottom, from the middle to the side. oh, boy, did you miss him? and after the president s victory in november there was a flood of speculation about giuliani joining the incoming trump administration. much of it fueled by giuliani himself. he offered me two very high positions in government which i turned doubt r down because i didn t want to do it. which ones? i don t like to mention because the other person becomes the second choice, but they were two very high positions in government. was one secretary of state? it was not. two very high positions, cabinet-level positions. when the dust settled, giuliani was on the outside looking in. now the new york times reports the president has repeatedly offered giuliani the job of attorney general during the transition, but that he turned it down because he wanted to be secretary of state. the times also reports that some close to the president now believe he could try to replace jeff sessions with giuliani in the coming months. ashley parker, put in context. what does it mean that giuliani is now on the legal team? that it s a great question. thank you. you re welcome. part of our reporting and part of our understanding is that the president has been incredibly frustrated, seeing all these reports in the news about how his team has tried to hire sort of top notch white collar criminal defense attorneys, people to join his team and they ve all said no. so the president grew frustrated. he became involved in the hiring process himself. he often likes people who look the part, sort of celebrities. giuliani fills all of those roles for him. he can be an attack dog. he s a great television surrogate. he s a big name. what is more clear, the key question is how good is he in the actual role that he s been hired for, which is going in and talking to bob mueller and helping bring a close to this investigation soon. right. ken? this is a really important point because if i was under federal criminal investigation, i would want a guy like abby lowell representing jared kushner who has gotten people acquitted and made deals. that seems to be the most important goal here, acquittal. rudy giuliani for all his tal enlts, that s not what he does. he has n t practiced this kind of law for years and the president has not been able to secure the services of somebody with a great reputation in this field and i think it s going hurt him down the line because the mueller team are a bunch of killers. they are not fooling around. they are some of the best prosecutors in the country and you need somebody of equal status to deal with them. ted olson, somebody they tried to get to join the team absolutely wouldn t do it. yamiche, it falls under the category of larry kudlow joining as economic advisor. he does, to ashley s point, likes people he sees on tv. he does like people he sees tv. i imagine he likes what he s going to get from rudy giuliani when it comes to the tv portion of his job. somebody who is loutd, loud, critical of robert mueller, someone who will not be hard to find when reporters are trying to get quotes. but in terms of what he s going to do legally for him, i m with ashley. i have no idea what the qualifications are if he can fill those qualifications in the way that the president needs him to because at pbs we ve had the same reporting everyone else has, which is that we ve talked to lawyers who have turned down the president, which is a remarkable thing to say. i think a pretty remarkable, like everybody else can tune in. you re the president, you can t get a lawyer, that s kind of remarkable to me. yeah, let s talk a little about the president s other lawyer perhaps, maybe the important piece of all this right now, michael cohen. and, rick tyler, there seems to be increasing concern, although we did point out the president has kind of held his fire around michael cohen the past couple days hoping he can convince him not to flip. there are a lot of lawyers who want to work for michael cohen, though. [ laughter ] rudy giuliani may have been first choice for two cabinet secretaries. he s 15th choice for the president s defense team. i m sorry, what was your question? [ laughter ] michael cohen who apparently is people do want to represent him, in your view. it seems like the president is really extraordinarily focused on whether cohen is going to decide to cooperate with bob mueller. not with bob mueller directly, but the southern district of new york. if the president hasn t done anything wrong he has nothing to worry about. if he has done something wrong, he should worry a great deal about michael cohen. michael cohen always professes loyalty. i want to mention something about loyalty we don t often talk about in the city. it s a one-way street. in general most politicians don t have loyalty to the people who have been loyalty to them. after the politician cuts their ties, that loyalty will wear thin. if michael cohen is in any legal jeopardy and his freedom can be taken away, i don t think there is any doubt in my mind that he would cut a deal. the other thing is there s no loyalty when you re facing ten years in prison. if you don t believe that, ask sammy who flipped on the gotty family. that was the a case mueller was involved in. and james comey. he said he would take a bullet for the president. stormy daniels s president said it s one thing before the bullet. and president trump hasn t treated him so well the last couple years. maggie haberman won a pulitzer prize, they aren t unnamed sources. michael cohen was treated terribly, he was treated like garbage. i m sure the president is thinking back, man, this is someone i ve kind of not been super nice to and he could have a lot of leverage on me. all right. there he is, the man himself who you may have seen a tweet up on the screen a minute ago. he said, when asked on the street whether or not how things were going, he said, well, it s a lot. just ahead, no secretary of state, no problem. we ll talk about how the trump administration managed to get pyongyang to put nuclear tests on the table. bill richardson joins me live next. don t forget to catch headliners. michael flynn, msnbc s chris mathews hosts this special hour that takes an in-depth look at the once decorated general. that s coming up after kasie d.c. when heartburn hits. fight back fast with tums smoothies. it starts dissolving the instant it touches your tongue. and neutralizes stomach acid at the source. tum tum tum tum. smoothies. only from tums (burke) seen it. covered it. we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum let your inner light loose with one a day women s. a complete multivitamin specially formulated with key nutrients plus vitamin d for bone health support. your one a day is showing. to balance the state budget with record investments in public schools. and new career training programs. as mayor of la, he brought police and residents together to get illegal guns off the streets - and keep kids out of gangs, and on the right path. that s antonio villaraigosa. a governor for all of california. ahead of president trump s highly anticipated meeting with kim jong-un, new reporting out tonight from the wall street journal suggests the white house won t lift sanctions until north korea has made progress dismantling its nuclear program. the north korean leader announced friday that his regime has suspended all nuclear and long range missile tests. kim also announced he ll shutdown a nuclear test site on the northern part of the country saying, quote, it it s done its job. estopp he stopped short of saying it will dismantle it. president trump insisting north korea has, quote, agreed to denuclearization. to discuss all of this i want to welcome in former u.s. ambassador to the united nations bill richardson. thank you for your time tonight. i appreciate it. thank you very much, kasie. i want to saturday simply tau as someone who has dealt with the north koreans in the past, is there some reason to trust they re going to do what they say they re going to do in this case? this is how the north koreans negotiate. they throw out trial balloons. they throw out favorable press of what they re going to do. and then sometimes, most of the time they don t do it. this is how they kind of posture themselves. but what i think is important, this is positive. the fact that they re saying they re not dismantling their nuclear weapons. they might freeze missiles, nuclear activity, conventional weapons, they re going to shut down their reactor. i think it s important that we have a strategy. and the president shouldn t take the bait of responding, also his spokesman gloating the reason the north koreans are doing this is because they ve been pressured. just steady, get a plan, strategize. it s going to they re not going to denuclearize, especially in the first meeting. probably it s going to take years if they ever do. were you encouraged to learn that mike pompeo had met secretly with kim jong-un, as you point out, if it is the case they re not going to d denuclearize starting with this first meeting? does the president walking into that room essentially mean that we ve reached the limit of what we re able to do diplomatically? that s usually the last step in this process. yes, i mean, this is an unusual process from the top to the bottom. and i supported the president when he took this gamble and risk and agreed to the meeting. now, i was encouraged by pompeo going to north korea. they talked about probably not full substance, but they talked about probably where the summit will be held, when logistical issues that are very important. the fact that kim jong-un is involved himself in the negotiations. it s good he doesn t have a nuclear negotiator. the fact that he received somebody lower rank, secretary of state designate i think was good. so, i think things are moving in the right direction. i just worry that the white house, one, is impatient, has no strategy. the president has to respond to every little news item. he should just let pompeo develop a strategy and stop tweeting every every day about something kim jong-un does. the north koreans do this. they re good at it. but in the end i think it s going two individuals sitting together and trying to make it a deal and that s what s key, that s good. i m going to give him credit for this summit. i think it s the right thing to do. what do you know about kim jong-un as a person? the man who is going to be sitting across from president trump that you think will help people understand what the president is facing. what does the president need to know about his personality? well, first that kim jong-un i ve never met him. but i ve known a lot of officials there. but he is not like his father. he s not like a rug merchant, deal maker. okay, we do this, this is a bargaining chip. i think this man has been underestimated. i think he s had a plan all along. i think he s a rational actor. i think he wants to eventually maybe make a deal on nuclear weapons so that he can improve his economy, which is shattered, which is in very bad shape. so, i don t think we should under estimate him. what the president should do more than anything is have a plan. not be impulsive, not shoot from the hip. just have some very clear objectives and goals and then have a plan b because the worst thing that can happen if 24 summit is a disaster and then we re going to go back, not just the status quo, but to something worse, which we all don t want. that is exactly what i was going to ask you to wrap up here. what do you in your view is a realistic worst case scenario if this goes wrong for the u.s.? well, there s no agreement on anything that is missile or nuclear related. i suspect, and there will be an agreement on getting the three americans out, hopefully remains of some of our soldiers, some human rights initiatives between north and south. i think what s very important, kasie, is the south korean, north korean summit that is going to take place very soon. we ll more or less what north korea is willing to do through the summit with south korea. although kim jong-un may have a plan b after the south korean summit. you know, they re all over the place. this is why we should not react to their every move. but so far their every move has been positive. so, you know, take some credit, but don t gloat like the white house is doing. oh, it s because we pressured him and we re great negotiators. that s not the way to negotiate with north korea. bill richardson, thank you so much for your time and your insights tonight. i really appreciate it. thank you, kasie. thank you. still to come, new polling shows a growing gap for republicans and a key voting block. we ll explain. and later. michael flynn, general flynn, is a wonderful man. i think he s been treated very, very unfairly by the media. it s very, very unfair what s happened to general flynn the way he s been treated and the documents and papers that were illegally i stress that, illegally leaked, very, very unfair. michael flynn tries to make a comeback. will the president have his back when he does? kasie d.c. back in just a moment. captivating exteriors dynamic lighting elevated comfort powerfully efficient and one more thing the world comes with it you can go your own way. the 2019 jeep cherokee previously treated withd platinum-based chemotherapy, including those with an abnormal alk or egfr gene who ve tried an fda-approved targeted therapy, who wouldn t want a chance for another.? who d say no to a.? who wouldn t want a chance to live longer. opdivo (nivolumab). over 40,000 patients have been prescribed opdivo immunotherapy. opdivo can cause your immune system to attack normal organs and tissues in your body and affect how they work. this may happen during or after treatment has ended, and may become serious and lead to death. see your doctor right away if you experience new or worsening cough; chest pain; shortness of breath; diarrhea; severe stomach pain or tenderness; severe nausea or vomiting; extreme fatigue; constipation; excessive thirst or urine; swollen ankles; loss of appetite; rash; itching; headache; confusion; hallucinations; muscle or joint pain; flushing; fever; or weakness, as this may keep these problems from becoming more serious. these are not all the possible side effect of opdivo. tell your doctor about all your medical conditions, including immune system problems, or if you ve had an organ transplant, or lung, breathing, or liver problems. a chance to live longer. because who wouldn t want.that? ask your doctor about opdivo. thank you to all involved in opdivo clinical trials. i just drank tons of water a proall the time, it was never enough. my dentist suggested biotene. my mouth felt more lubricated. i use the biotene rinse and then i use the spray. biotene did make a difference. [heartbeat] my mom washes the dishes. .before she puts them in the dishwasher. so what does the dishwasher do? new cascade platinum lets your dishwasher be the dish washer. three cleaning agents dissolve, lift and rinse away food the first time. new cascade platinum. kyle, we talked about this. there s no monsters. but you said they d be watching us all the time. no, no. no, honey, we meant that progressive would be protecting us 24/7. we just bundled home and auto and saved money. that s nothing to be afraid of. -but -good night, kyle. [ switch clicks, door closes ] i told you i was just checking the wiring in here, kyle. he s never like this. i think something s going on at school. -[ sighs ] -he s not engaging. welcome back to kasie d.c. joining me on set is john, director of polling at harvard university s school of politics. he s here with new numbers in the school s survey of millennials. sir, welcome to the show. thank you. i m a bigad meyerer of the work you all are doing. we had a little of this conversation on morning joe earlier in the week. your numbers revealed some remarkable things about the institutions that millennials trust and don t trust, which is to say it seems like government and old school media is out, and amazon is in. in a word, yes. but i think it speaks to something much bigger than that, kasie. for example, two-thirds of millennials now including post millennials in the survey as well, survey of 18 to 29-year-olds have more fear and hope of the state of american democracy. and the organizations in the institutions on the bottom part of that list very much are the reasons in which they have that fear. congress, the federal government, the president, and the media. yes, congress does not fare particularly well, 17% say they trust the congress. you also ran some numbers on the fbi and the d.o.j., 42% saying think trust the fbi, 45 saying the trust the department of justice. have those numbers dipped in light of the president s attack on the institution s? this is the first time we asked about those institutions as part of the survey. generally the organizations that the president has been attacking have been increasing at least relative to the last year. the media compared to the last couple years is up 6 points the last five or six years. starting from a preload base, but still up. we ve seen the same thing when we look across a couple different issues as well. would you say millennials are not buying the president s use of the term fake news sne they re not buying that. they re concerned about the intake of news, what s real, what s fake, et cetera. but it s almost like one of newton s laws which is for every action there is a reaction and i think what we re seeing in this poll is the reaction of young people is to, is to think about how to organize and then to show up in november. rick tyler, to bring you into this conversation as well, this your polling seems to indicate that republicans are digging a major hole with millennials. do you think there is any hope, rick tyler? what do you think your party needs to do to fix some of these numbers? 69% of millennials would prefer democratic control congress, 28% republican. that s a huge problem. if i m wrong, millennial generation is now the largest voting generation and will continue to be and the republicans have got to figure out how to win them back and how to have a vision for the future. part of the administration is it s to tactical, nobody knows where we re going. there s no aspiration for what we re working for. and couple that with the things that millennials look toward and believe in, this administration seems antithetical to things they believe and trust in. what are you finding are the differences among, you said you included post millennials. so, people keep telling me i m a millennial. you are a millennial, no question about it. but i don t think i have anything in common with the youngest millennials. how are the people i might arg argue spend a lot more time on snapchat than i do, by the way. you found some interesting differences with the group that s behind us. i do think that from an ideological or type ology point of view, there aren t tremendous difrss between people in their 30s and 20s. the difference is more around the use of technology. you re absolutely right. instagram, snapchat far more likely to be part of the average habit, daily habit of a post-millennial folks in their teens and early 20s. but the millennials that came of age post 9/11 became past of the movement of the obama campaign, which are the most reliable democratic voters in the electorate. they re in their mid 30s and now they re older, have families, careers. this group is locked down for democrats maybe for the next couple decades. certainly more probably more likely to vote as they get older. yamiche, you and i covered bernie sanders together which was an interesting study in where many of these millennial voters seem to be. what did you learn on the campaign trail about the difficulty republicans have with this age group? i think the main difficulty, especially when it comes to president trump is that millennials are people are inkreetsingly people of color and increasingly are about embracing diversity and embracing diversity not just in race, but in gender and in sexual orientation. and when you think about the conservative republicans, i m not talking about what president trump might be doing on twitter, but the republican ideals. people are having whole platforms about abortion, having whole platforms about maybe school choice where some people think of that as kind of digging into segregation and allowing people to segregate themselves educationally, millennials are looking at that. not only do we not like the characters of the republican party, but their actual policies don t seem to match with what i believe in. bernie, what s so interesting is he was so unabashedly progressive. i think hillary clinton had a lot of things they had in common. there were a lot of things bernie ran on democrats secretly wanted to say, bernie said them out loud. he said free college? we ll say free college. that s what got millennials excited about bernie. one issue that stuck out in particular to me, john, is your polling on gun laws. 77% of millennials said they thought that this was an important issue. 64% of them want stricter gun laws. over almost 60% support an assault weapons ban. did you get the sense this does have the potential to become a voting issue for millennials? we have not necessarily seen that be the case. it has every bit of potential. 25% of the 77% say it s the most important issue. what is interesting about this issue is we have been tracking this now for over a decade. a lot of the attitudinal shift has been happening already. we saw a 20-point across the board attitudinal shift in democrats and republicans on issues related to gun control and assault weapon ban. republicans start in the 20s, they re now in the 40s. democrats in the 50s now in their 70s. what we re seeing is i think the parkland students and the way in which they and other students have organized has essentially accelerated this and turned it from an ideological opinion shift to something that could motivate millions of young people in november. so, speaking of difficulties for republicans, this weekend has underscored some of the awkwardness that died in the wool old school republicans are dealing with now. for example, mitt romney suffered an embarrassing, if minor set back, in his bid for the u.s. senate. he narrowly lost a nomination battle yesterday during utah s republican convention. it means he ll be forced into a june primary race against state lawmaker mike kennedy. and then there is retiring tennessee senator bob corker. he upset some republicans this week after praising the democrat running for his seat, former governor phil. take a look at what corker said when he was asked this morning why marcia black burn, the republican, is better. most people in our state, it is a red state. we ll focus on the first vote she makes, and that s the vote to elect the majority leader. senator, that s not a ringing endorsement of marcia blackburn to say she should be elected because she s going to vote for mitch mcconnell. well, dana, i m supporting the nominee. i ve worked with the nominee for sometime and i don t know what else to say. okay. we ll leave it there. rick tyler, do you have anything else to say? he he wouldn t even say her name. i would say he forgot her name, but he literally would not say her name. there is, of course, we should say there is some back story here. he is good friends with the republican nominee rather, the democratic nominee, ashley parker. but this has been started when the christian scientist monitor said i m going to vote for marcia blackburn, but i m not going to say anything bad about my democratic friend. it was leaked mitch mcconnell sent him a message, the message doesn t seem to have registered. you spend more time on capitol hill than i do, but the thing that is amazing watching him, there is a small group of members of congress who are basically retiring or not likely to be in office for that much longer who feel free to say publicly what everyone is saying privately. so, you know, you talk to members privately off the record. on tv as you say they are on message. he has that liberation and it s kind of fun to watch. quickly, mitt romney, i think you and i kind of both were like, oh, you know, we watched mitt romney lose a major race. there is not really it seems as though he s still in very good position for the primary. but this is somewhat unfortunate considering his history. yes, exactly. i mean, by all accounts he s still, as you said, in good position pofor the primary. there is something demoralizing about the man for president not being able to finish first. in utah. in utah. and not quite his home state, but a state that has a lot of good will for him and his family. right. a very, very narrow loss to the state senator mark kennedy. so, still some road to hoe for mitt romney coming up in the next couple months. thank you for your insight. i appreciate it. rick tyler. thank you, both. i appreciate it. when we return on kasie dc, remembering the remarkable life of barbara bush. once there was an organism so small bush was real and that s why people admired her and loved her so. that was former florida governor jeb bush yueulogizing s mother, barbara bush, yesterday. four former presidents joined hundreds of other mourners at the private service inside the nation s largest episcopal church. mrs. bush was at the heart of the bush family dynasty and just the second woman in american history to watch both ha a husband and a son serve as president. and the woman known inside her family as the enforcer was reportedly in great spirits during her final days. a source close to the family told cbs news she was alert and having conversations over bourbon the night before she died. and her eldest son, president george w. bush, offered this recollection of the very last time he saw her. we had a wonderful visit. she was strong, lucid. funny. still. funny. she and i were needling each other. the doctor came in, she turned to the doctor and said you want to know why george w. is the way he is? the doctor looked somewhat surprised. she said, i drank and smoke when i was pregnant with him. former president george w. bush about his mother. in our next hour, we ll have the best of the sunday shows in the kasie dvr and talk about the return of michael flynn. kasie dc back after this. i have no fear of death. which is a huge comfort because we re getting darn close and i don t have a fear of death for my precious george or for myself because i know that there is a great god and i m not worried about that. liberty did what? yeah, liberty mutual 24-hour roadside assistance helped him to fix his flat so he could get home safely. my dad says our insurance doesn t have that. don t worry - i know what a lug wrench is, dad. is this a lug wrench? maybe? you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™. liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. ancestrydna has 5x more detail .and it s now on sale for just $59. it can lead you on an unexpec ted journey. .to discover your heritage. get ancestrydna for just $59. the lowest price of the year. what s going on? oh hey! that s it? yeah. that s it? everybody two seconds! dear sebastian, after careful consideration of your application, it is with great pleasure that we offer our congratulations on your acceptance. through the tuition assistance program, every day mcdonald s helps more people go to college. it s part of our commitment to being america s best first job.
here with us. good night from nbc news headquarters here in new york. happy thursday. the time has come to establish the united states space force. that was not a scene from a movie. that was that was real. the space force is actually happening. they ve got plans. they re finding money. michael bey is on board to direct the whole thing cries president mike pence laying out details for president trump s proposed new branch of the military, the space force, but critics say it is a waste of money and unnecessary. plus, dozens of children are killed after a saudi-led coalition air strike hit a bus in yemen. this morning there are calls for an investigation. first lady melania trump s parents become u.s. citizens, apparently benefitting from a policy president trump has sought to end. good morning, it is friday, august 10th. i m david gura alongside louis bergdorf. ayman and yasmin has the morning off. the trump administration as nounsed i nou announced i think plan to create a space force. vice president mike pence announced the new branch yesterday at the pentagon. the goal of the force is to protect the u.s. from emerging threats while combatting space-age advancements by china and russia. at the announcement, the vice president outlined a pentagon report delivered to congress later in the day. the 15-page proposal has a plan to pave the way for the space force including the creation of a u.s. space command over seen Updates of the day s news. was justified. the consequences have been devastating, more than 10,000 people dead, mostly civilians. it is the children, half of yemen s population, who bear the brunt of this war. matt bradley, nbc news. our thanks for that report. difficult piece to watch there. shifting gears to north korea, they re slamming the u.s. in stepping up pressure in a push to get the regime to denuclearize. a statement says it lacks basic decorum. the country says it has been working with the u.s. by returning soldier s remains from the war and halting work at the test sites. but reports show north korea is far from stopping production of nuclear missiles. last week secretary of state mike pompeo said there s still a ways to go to achieve ultimate denuclearization from the rogue nation. new court filings show hundreds of migrant children still remain separated from their parents. of the 2,551 separated from their parents at the southern border, 559 are still in government custody. 386 have parents who have already been deported, and officials have heard from 299 parents in the last week. however, they do not have any information for 26 parents and still have not filed a plan to reunite any of the 559 remaining children with their families. meanwhile, a federal judge in washington ordered a plane carrying a mother and daughter to return to the u.s. while their deportation hearing was under way. u.s. district judge emmet sullivan called the removal outrageous and threatened to hold attorney general jeff sessions in contempt. aclu attorneys were notified of the removal of the woman and her daughter during recess and requested that the judge delay the deportation. upon arrival in el salvador, the pair was sent back to texas to build up their militaries and provide significant force to use in 30 days or less by the year 2020. the report worrying about the deal being up ended seems to be well-founded given the president s skeptical attitude at the conference. we re protecting germany. we re protecting france. we re protecting everybody, and yet we re paying a lot of money to protect. we have to talk about the billions and billions of dollars being paid to the country that we re supposed to be protecting you against. if you look at it, germany is a captive of russia. so we re supposed to protect germany, but they re getting their energy from russia. explain that. a reporter for the washington post , eugene scott. i want to start by asking about the significance of the reporting in the times today. you have followed international conferences like this before. i mentioned communiques are often hammered out in final separated from their parents in the wake of the president s zero tolerance policy. i think it is too early to talk about legacy at this point as we are still talking about children very much hanging in the balance here. how concerned do you think the white house is about this? how much reevaluation has there been to the white house s approach to immigration as a result of this policy, eugene? reporter: well, there s certainly real concern about how their base has responded to this. most republicans have looked at this policy as problematic and have been quite disappointed that when this decision was made that no decision to reunify, reunite these kids was in place. that s why you re seeing the white house still have some of the challenges that it has had moving forward during this election cycle when people who are running on trump s support, with trump s backing are finding themselves having to answer questions about this. the flip side of that is the democrats will not be able to campaign very aggressively in republican states against this policy because they fear having the impression that they are more focused on immigrants than the american population. and so it will be a threat to the white house, but not as significant as one would think. eugene scott joining us from the washington post. stay with us. we ll come back to you in a bit. still ahead, we re getting a firsthand look inside a new mexico compound where authorities believe children may have been trained to kill. the details of that disturbing story are coming up. plus, the very latest in the paul manafort trial as prosecutors look to rest their case against the former trump campaign chairman today. those stories and a check of the weather when we come right back. traveling lighter. taking a shortcut. (woooo) taking a breather. rewarded! learn more at theexplorercard.com i ve been making blades here at gillette for 20 years. there s a lot of innovation that goes into making america s #1 shave. precision machinery and high-quality materials from around the world. nobody else even comes close. now starting at $7.99. gillette. the best a man can get. are you ready to take your then you need xfinity xfi.? a more powerful way to stay connected. it gives you super fast speeds for all your devices, provides the most wifi coverage for your home, and lets you control your network with the xfi app. it s the ultimate wifi experience. xfinity xfi, simple, easy, awesome. we re learning new details about a hidden desert compound in new mexico where according to court documents children may have been trained to commit school shootings. this morning we are getting our first look inside that compound where police say 11 neglected kids were found, allegedly in the hands of muslim extremists. nbc news correspondent gadi swartz has this story. reporter: inside this compound a chilling mix of children s toys and weaponry. this is for an assault rifle. reporter: the property littered with gas, trash and korans. this shooting range was kept clear where authorities think children were given advanced weapons training to prepare for a school shootings. one boy had been used in the use of assault rifle to kill as many as possible. investigators alleged the suspects were muslim extremists, all five related to a controversial leader in brooklyn who claims he had no recent contact with his adult children. or family saying this is so bizarre, it is weird. what is going on? reporter: the local sheriff confirming the fbi was watching the compound. they didn t find that child. reporter: property owner jason badger says for months he begged local investigators to do something about the family squatting on his land, worried about the little boy named abdul he recognized from the missing child s poster. i called the missing and exploited children s hotline, i called the state troopers and county sheriff and notified they were on the property. reporter: now he wished investigators moved in sooner. he said they didn t want a police officer to come up here and do that kind of stuff because they didn t want to risk a waco situation. reporter: the sheriff denied our interview request and the fbi is it not commenting. or colleague reporting. well, the government intends to rest its case against former trump campaign chairman paul manafort today. yesterday s proceedings focused on the fraudulent tactics he allegedly used to get bank loans. in one instance an officer testified he listed a property on a loan application as a second home only to find out his son-in-law was renting it on airbnb. the major headline from yesterday was the rare apology from the judge. he went off on prosecutors wednesday for keeping a witness in the courtroom when he allowed it to happen. prosecutors filed the motion asking the judge to correct the record. he did so yesterday, admitting, quote, it appears i may well have been wrong. and the lawyer best known for representing porn star stormy daniels says he is exploring a run for the presidency. michael avenatti, who emerged as one of the president s outspoken critics, is currently in iowa. tonight he is expected to speak at a democratic fundraiser along two other declared democratic presidential candidates. that event in the past hosted other stars on the left like barack obama, hillary clinton and bernie sanders. avenatti tells the des moines register, quote, i want to come to iowa and listen to the people and learn about some issues facing the citizens of iowa and do my homework. let s get a check on your weather with nbc meteorologist bill karins. bill, you say it will be the best day of the weekend forecast? yeah, that s my advice for people in the mid atlantic and to the northeast. your friday evening activities, you have a better chance of good weather for that than over the weekend. the forecast going downhill, especially for southern new england. this morning there s not a lot of troublesome weather. phoenix had thunderstorms go through. southern new mexico, not a lot of horrible stuff. central texas getting some of the rain. as far as the excessive heat goes, today will be one of the hottest days in boise history. all-time record high of 111. there s some indication it could get up there about 108 or so. from spokane to central portions of the rockies here, very hot, in montana too. here is how the forecast looks. there s 108 in boise. billings at 98. salt lake city at 100. the fire danger continues to be high throughout all of the west and the smoke is a huge issue for people trying to breathe with respiratory issues. in the east we re in the 80s and 90s from new england. 91 in d.c., and it is by far the best day you will get out of the next four or five. if you get lunch outdoors, i know it is hot, but try to enjoy it. into the weekend forecast, especially as we get intoed saturdintoed into saturday is when the rain will come up the eastern seaboa seaboard. i told them the graphic would work, but now it doesn t want. just the way it goes. there it goes. there s saturday. it shows the possibility of heavier rain and thunderstorms especially southern new england and areas of the mid atlantic. flood risk in areas of central texas, and unfortunately it doesn t change until sunday. still on-and-off wet weather through the at lane tick region. from the i-95 corridor south wards, it could be a good weekend to watch pga tour golf, go through the netflix list. i appreciate it. still ahead, the nfl preseason getting underway but some of the attention is focused on the sidelines rather than the field. we will explain why next in sports. how was your day? it was good. it was long. let s fix it. play connection by onerepublic. (beep) these days, my waves get lost in the ocean seven billion swimmers man i m going through the motions sent up a flare need love and devotion trade it for some faces that i ll never know notion can i get a connection? can i get can i get a connection? can i get a connection? can i get can i get a connection? night s opener against the steelers. jenkins should not face any discipline since the league previously suspended the enforcement of the anthem policy passed in may which requires players to stand if they are on the field during the anthem, and fines teams for any players who in fact protest. nor should three members of the miami dolphins who protested during the national anthem ahead of last night s exhibition against the buccaneers. two of the players, wide receiver kenny stills and albert wilson reportedly dropped to a knee. the nfl released a statement during the game reaffirming its desire for players to stand during the anthem, while talks with the players association continue. the man at the center of the story, former 49ers quarterback colin kaepernick tweeted this photo of him and stills, acknowledging the miami receiver for his protest of systemic oppression along with williams for joining. going to the pga championship where gary woodland sits ahead of the field after the opening round in st. louis, leaving 47 players who broke par. he sank seven birdies putts on the way to a 6 under 64, giving him a one-shot lead over rickie fowler who finds himself in the hunt. still winless while playing his 36th major start. he s going to get one soon, i feel it. finally, we go to major league baseball where in toronto the red sox mookie betts hit for the first cycle last night. singling in the first inning, he tripled in the second and doubled in the four. he capped it with a solo home run hit out to left field in the ninth inning. it is not enough though to get boston the win as toronto stops the music for boston, 8-5. the momentum had to stop sometime for boston. thank you very much. still ahead, it has been 11 months hins hurricane maria left puerto rico devastated and officials say the death toll could be higher than initially reported. plus, the trump administration fan for a space force is being met with scepticism this morning, including a few senior defense officials. we will be right back. the digital divide is splitting this country. we have parents who are trying to get their kids off of too much social media and computers, and then we have parents who would only hope their children have access. middle school is a really key transition point, right. the stakes start changing. students begin to really start thinking about their futures. what i like about verizon s approach is that it s not limited to just giving kids new tools, it s really about empowering educators to teach in different ways, and exposing kids to more active forms of learning. giving technology is not a total solution. teaching technology, now that is. your hair is so soft! did you use head and shoulders two in one? i did mom. wanna try it? yes. it intensely moisturizes your hair and scalp and keeps you flake free. manolo? look at my soft hair. i should be in the shot now too. try head and shoulders two in one. you might or joints.hing for your heart. but do you take something for your brain. with an ingredient originally discovered in jellyfish, prevagen has been shown in clinical trials to improve short-term memory. prevagen. healthier brain. better life. disaster. the official toll is 64, but the puerto rican government has released an unofficial estimate showing the number is actually more than 20 times higher. nbc s gabe gutierrez has more. reporter: new confusion surrounding puerto rico s death toll with the island s government acknowledging more than 1,400 people may have died following hurricane maria in a draft report to congress, dramatically higher than the previous official count of just 64. the president touted the low death toll in october. if you look at a real catastrophe like katrina and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, everybody watching can really be very proud of what s taken place in puerto rico. reporter: the actual number now controversial. a harvard study estimated it could be more than 4600. the official government count unchanged, waiting on another study that s not yet done. this as people are still struggling almost 11 months after the storm. our thanks to gabe gutierrez for that report. stunning development there in puerto rico. president trump is once again railing against the ongoing russia investigation. he tweeted yesterday, this is an illegally brought rigged witch-hunt run by people who are totally corrupt and/or conflicted. it was started and paid for by crooked hillary and the democrats. phoney dossier, fisa disgrace and so many lying and dishonest people already fired. he tweeted a post from graham ledger who said, quote, there s been no evidence that trump or the campaign was involved in any kind of collusion to fix the 2016 election. in fact the evidence is that the opposite that of the operates, that hillary clinton and the democrats colluded with the russians to fix the 2016 election. well, the house judiciary committee is reportedly getting ready to issue subpoenas for people connected to the controversial steele dossier. two congressional sources tell the hill that republican chairman bob goodlatte is preparing subpoenas for bruce ohr, his wife nellie ohr, fuse co-founder and other officials. according to the hill, bruce ohr has come under republican scrutiny for his contacts with simpson and former british spy steele during the 2016 campaign, a revelation that sparked demands from trump allies for a special counsel investigation into the doj and fbi last december. simpson hired steele to help compile the controversial dossier that made salacious allegations against president trump s ties to wife. ohr s wife worked for fusion gps during the 2016 election which republicans seized on as a possible connection that links the opposition research firm and the justice department. kansas city of state kris kobach has announced he will recuse himself from recounting the votes in the republican primary for the state s governor as his lead dwindles. yesterday he reversed course, saying he would recuse himself from a potential recount after saying the day before he would not. it comes amid growing pressure from his opponent who sent a letter that kobach reframe from instructing county officials on counting of ballots. as that plays out, kobach s lead has shrunk to 91 votes. election officials discovered a mistake in the listing of one county while tallying the votes. the results do not include provisional ballots or mail-in battle which are expected to be counted by next week. following vice president pence s space force announcement yesterday, president trump could barely contain his tweetment, tweeting this. space for all the way! not everyone shares the president s enthusiasm. the idea has been met with opposition from some in the defense department, including from defense secretary james mattis as described in the wall street journal. quote, late last year the secretary in a letter to the leaders of the house and senate armed services committees said he opposed a new military service dedicated to space. he wrote he didn t want the additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint war fighting functions. he s apparently since refined his position to be on board with the president. the creation of a sixth branch of the military would need approval from congress. the president s plan is being met with a lukewarm reception. democratic senator brawn schatz of hawaii tweeted yesterday, quote, the vp announced a new military branch, a space force, because no republican is willing to tell potus it s a dumb idea. although space force won t happen, it is dangerous to have a leader who cannot be talked out of crazy ideas. former nasa astronaut mark kelly was also critical in his assessment of the idea. the only person that i ve heard say this is a fantastic idea is the commander in chief, the president of the united states. everybody else says it is redundant, it is wasteful. we don t have the need out there right now. i would have hoped he would have waited a few more years to get a it more educated on what our military capabilities currently are and what the threats are out there. i think there s a little bit of lacking of understanding in the white house at the highest levels at this point. joining us again, reporter for the washington post eugene scott. eugene, the administration is saying they want it to happen in two years. you listen to commander kelly, you hear from brian schatz via twitter, other lawmakers as well, how likely is it to happen on that aggressive timetable? not likely to happen, especially if the republican party does not do well during the fall elections. he needs approval he being the president from congress to move forward with a new branch of the military. and if democrats are as successful as we ve seen them be so far, they re not going to provide more spending for more military devices and goals and agendas that the left feels like we already are overfunding. how did we get here? you go back and look, this was kind of a throwaway line in a speech the president delivered. now when he goes to these rallies, it is one of the lines that gets the most applause if you look at the white house pool reports. as i mentioned, you got the defense secretary questioning the need for this, why this is a priority here for the administration. what is your take on that? how does it come to life in the way that it has? i think there are two things. one, i mean russia and china are very active in space in terms of like missiles and just monitoring other countries. i think the president wants the u.s. to have a larger footprint somewhere out there. but i think also the president has consistently shown interest in communicating this tough guy image that his critics say is rooted in perhaps some insecurities related to not having served in the military himself, and these veterans, these military individuals are people who looked at him and aligned with his agenda and he wants to maintain their support. i don t know how he s going to be able to do that by diverting r resources from the air force which says they re already understrapped, to a new military unit that no one seems to say we really need besides the president and his top aides, specifically mike pence. yeah, eugene, on that point lastly here, what is the case that the white house is making? you look at that 15-page document that the administration released yesterday, you listen to vice president mike pence talking about what the space force might do. he is speaking in general terms, broad terms here. is there any legitimate rational for doing this at this point in time? it is just not clear right now why the space force is needed. it is a whole, i think, approach to saying we are tough on russia, we are tough on china in this way, from a president who consistently is told he s not tough enough on russia or china. maybe i think he need one more area to be able to point to do say actually we are doing what needs to be done to protect the u.s. from these threats. thank you, my friend. i appreciate it. that s eugene scott, a political reporter for the washington post. white nationalists had set to hold their second annual unite the right rally directly across the street from the white house this sunday. according to the application, a maximum of 400 attendees will be there. it is expected to draw white supremacists, neo nazis and kkk supporters. as many as 1500 counter-protesters are expected to attend. d.c. meteorologipolice say thei be to keep the attenders separate to avoid the showdown of charlottesville last year. states of emergency have been declared in virginia and charlottesville, 1500 miles away from the weekend rally. president trump facing questions over his in-laws becoming american citizens using the same process he railed against in the past. bail cairns will join us once again with another check on your weekend forecast when we return. what does help for heart failure look like? the beat goes on. it looks like emily cooking dinner for ten. the beat goes on. it looks like jonathan on a date with his wife. la-di-la-di. entresto is a heart failure medicine that helps your heart. so you can keep on doing what you love. in the largest heart failure study ever, entresto was proven superior at helping people stay alive and out of the hospital. it helps improve your heart s ability to pump blood to the body. don t take entresto if pregnant; it can cause harm or death to an unborn baby. don t take entresto with an ace inhibitor or aliskiren, or if you ve had angioedema with an ace or arb. the most serious side effects are angioedema, low blood pressure, kidney problems, or high blood potassium. ask your doctor about entresto for heart failure. yeah! entrust your heart to entresto. the beat goes on. (burke) abstract accident. seen it. covered it.ce music) we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum i do. check out the new united explorer card. saving on this! saving on this! saving in here. rewarded! learn more at theexplorercard.com i ve been making blades here at gillette for 20 years. there s a lot of innovation that goes into making america s #1 shave. precision machinery and high-quality materials from around the world. nobody else even comes close. now starting at $7.99. gillette. the best a man can get. welcome back. there are questions this morning about a possible double standard when it comes to the first family. first lady melania trump s parents became u.s. citizens yesterday, apparently through a legal process president trump has repeatedly criticized and said he wants to end. nbc news national correspondent peter alexander has the details. reporter: the first in-laws, melania trump s parent, sworn in as citizens. they took the oath in new york city. their experience reuniting questions whether they obtained citizenship through chain migration, a family reunification process president trump has repeatedly denounced. we have to end chain migration, and we have to build the wall and we re going to do it it. reporter: viktor aknavs and his wife became citizens. asked if they used chain migration, the attorney said, i suppose it is a dirty, dirtier word. the first lady s parent familiar sights at the white house. it all comes days after nbc news was first to report the trump administration is considering a crackdown on legal immigration. a proposal that would make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they or anyone in their household has ever used popular public assistance programs like obamacare or food stamps, a move that could impact 20 million legal immigrants in the u.s. a federal judge has ordered the trump administration to stop deporting some immigrants seeking asylum to escape gang and domestic violence. the judge also ordering a plane carrying a mother and daughter to the el salvador to return around and bring them back to the u.s. david. thanks to peter alexander for that report. let s get a check on the weather with nbc meteorologist bill karins. you are tracking weather in the west coast, that weather so critical to the wildfires still burning in northern california. yeah, of course, if any new blazes form, too. it is still very dry and hot as can be. right now our current map for this is uncontained, large fires across the west, 56 of them. we ve been focusing on california of course because of the mendocino which is biggest in their history and the carr fire which has claimed another life, it has killed eight people and over 1500 structures, so those fires got the most attention. there s 11 in california and about 16 in the rocky mountains. all of this equals horrible air quality throughout the region. of course, with it still be dry and hot, we have red flag warning which means if fires form they can rapidly spread today in northern california, western half of eastern half of washington state, also northern idaho and a good chunk of montana here. this is where it will be really hot with billings about 98, salt lake city at 100. boise at 108, and if that happens, it will be only three degrees away from the hottest temperature ever recorded. thankfully we cooled off in seattle after the recent hot stretch. maybe isolated and flash flooding arkansas and through areas of the southeast. enjoy the beautiful weather in new england and the mid atlantic because over the weekend the storm system from the south will move north ward. soggy will be the word used in areas of eastern north carolina, virginia beach, norfolk. there will be periods of rain going through saturday and eventually that works into southern new england with thunderstorms and heavy downpours. it looks to be about a one to three-inch rainfall event. we had a lot of wet weather in the region, so isolated flooding could be a problem. southern new england, new york city especially, hit and miss showers and stormts s in d.c. boston to new york city to providence and hartford could see wet weather. our friends in dallas will be cooler with showers and storms. it is funny, for the east coast viewers the summer started out pretty dry and hot, and then it has gotten really humid and soggy the last month. i m getting in my run this afternoon. appreciate it. still ahead, one popular restaurant chain looks to tap in to expanded sports betting to increase its line. the tribune files suit over a failed deal. details on those stories and others driving the business day next. and packages. and it s also a story about people. people who rely on us every day to deliver their dreams they re handing us more than mail they re handing us their business and while we make more e-commerce deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country, we never forget. that your business is our business the united states postal service. priority: you another anti-wrinkle cream in no hurry to make anything happen. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair works in just one week. with the fastest retinol formula to visibly reduce wrinkles. neutrogena®. for the $3.9 billion deal, which as you know, u.s. president donald trump had voiced his support for in the past. in the lawsuit they cite belligerent and unnecessarily protracted negotiations with tesla s board could ask elon musk to recuse himself when it comes to the discussions as to whether or not to move forward on that plan to take the company private. now, all in all, this could be a $72 billion deal, closer to $80 billion if you count the debt involved. so many questions still to be answered here on exactly where elon musk intends to get that financing. expect to get answer there s in the coming days, perhaps. interesting time for tesla. buffalo wild wings, frequent ee often in college, looking to become a one-stop destination for places wagers on sports. already a destination for wings, beer and sports. what more can you tell us? why not? right? you have your wings. the game s on tv. now saying we re going add sports betting to this. this is all taking advantage of changes in the supreme court ruling on lifting restrictions related to federal, legal betting. so buffalo wild wings wants to explore traps even a partnership when it comes to offering sports betting in their restaurants. as you know, in all 50 states here. this could be interesting, because the company is still in the exploratory stages. many say they he s in a partner because betting laws change state-by-state. sounds like a perfect friday night. i don t know. i say keep it wholesome. watch the sports, drink the beer. eat the wings. too many distractions. coming up, mike allen with a look at this morning s one big thing and coming up on morning joe, the president looking to establish u.s. dominance in space. more on the white house s call to create a space force as the administration makes the case for a need to secure our safety in the heavens. just how much does this plan cost taxpayers and whether it will have the support in congress to actually get it off the ground, pardon the pun. morning joe is moments away. look at my soft hair. i should be in the shot now too. try head and shoulders two in one. you shouldn t be rushed into booking a hotel. with expedia s add-on advantage, booking a flight unlocks discounts on select hotels until the day you leave for your trip. add-on advantage. only when you book with expedia. raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens brown paper packages tied up with strings these are a few of my favorite things these are a few of my favorite things ancestrydna can open you to a world of new cultures to explore. with two times more detail than any other dna test. you can get a new taste of your heritage. save 40% with our lowest price ever. joining us from washington with a look at axios a.m., what is the one big thing this morning? we ll try to continue to keep it wholesome. happy friday. axios s one big thing midterm, messaging meg. we have an unusual situation where as we head into labor day the heat of midterm campaigning. both parties having to make on the fly adjustments to messages because they ve turned out to be problems or be duds. for democrats that means mueller and the russia investigation, which they plan to talk up, turns out that motivates republicans more, because of president trump s rallies and rudy giuliani s constant appearances on tv, it s actually republicans that are riled up about the russia investigation. of course, impeachment an issue republicans were afraid would backfire and that abolish i.c.e. boom also co-opted by republicans. see it on the air president trump and republicans candidates are talking how they re going to protect the immigration agents. michael, i want to ask about tax cuts. something the president is fond of mentions. talked about it yesterday at bedminster, a roundtable on prison reforms but tax cuts came up. how enthusiastic of republicans to talk about the tax plan? turned out to be a big dud. a surprise. this was going to be the centerpiece of the fall. it was going to be tax cuts. we ll determine whether or not they kept majority, what republican operatives told me. instead, didn t make it out of march in that pennsylvania race where congressman connor lamb showed they weren t a popular issue. polling shows it soaked through, showing these helped the wealthy the most so republicans are talking less about it. saying to me it s just not popular. let me asking you about the democrats and a push for the blue wave. the president talks a red wave or red tide. you pick which you like. this is a cool graphic that you can see on axios and if you take the movement in the big ohio race this year, this week, and you extrapolate it to the rest of the country. if the rest of the country moved as far democratic as that ohio district did since 2016, there would be a gigantic blue tsunami. remember, democrats need to net 23 seats. they would net 43 seats as we see in this graphic, if everyone in the country moved the same place ohio did. republicans would lose 100 seats giving democrats a massive 43-seat move, 20 more than needed. let me ask you about the white house s data operations as we look ahead. the way the white house is working with the campaign and the rnc to decide where the president goes. mike, he s expressed enthusiasm for being on the campaign trail six or seven days a week as we approach the midterms. what did axios learn about the way the white house, the president is using data deciding the way to go? six or seven may turn out to be three or four. he actually has a day job as the president reminds him. the president is excited to get out there and axios found out from our conversations with the white house that will try to be systematic and scientific in where they put the president. they know that there s a lot of places he will hurt. they doesn t automatically help, and as usual around this white house, you have the audience of one. it s a lot better for them to be able to say to them, sir, the data says you d be better off here rather than this candidate doesn t want you, doesn t play well with the boss. always good to talk to you. reading axios a.m. in a little while. viewers, you can sign up for the newsletter at signup.axios.com. that does it for us. morning joe starts right now. because in some parts of the country, it does seem like the america that we know and love doesn t exist anymore.
working for stone in 2010. in august 2017 she took over as stone s scheduler, but she says she did not work for him during the 2016 presidential election. kristin davis is a good friend of mine. she is a brilliant woman who has paid her debt to set. she was not working for me during 2015. she worked for me during a portion of 2016. she went back to school to learn i.t. skills. she has helped me build some websites. she has no knowledge whatsoever of any russian collusion, collaboration with wikileaks, or anything else having to do with the 2016 election. stone is not only under suspicion, but might be a target of the special counsel s investigation. already mueller s team has interviewed two people close to trump s long-time confidant. a third was held in contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena. ari melber broke the news last Katy Tur hosts coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. jail, or ask for a stay pending an appeal by a appellate court to test whether or not the summons was correct or not. sometimes a subpoena is overbroad, sometimes it asks for material that s privileged. i would think he wouldn t be held in contempt unless he had no basis for it. we keep going back to roger stone and this is our lead story because this is something that keeps coming up with the mueller investigation. what does stone have to do with the russia investigation. and from what we have been able to piece together is that from other witnesses who have been interviewed by the special counsel s team and the reporting that we have done is that it could be that mueller s team is seeing stone as a back channel to julian assange, to wikileaks, and whether or not he knew about the emails that wikileaks was going to lease before they released them. after all he sweeted it will soon tweeted it will be john podesta s time in the barrel. it was john podesta s time in the barrel. extension. wikileaks is believed to be that organization. stone is kept surfacing as a predictor of what was the information to come and the guccifer 2.0 account was cited in there. that was openly available information. that is not really clear is which of these people or which of these things are coming up. so the manhattan madam, what did she have in terms of access? she knows timeline. she can help corroborate that. she knows communications and she may know finances. it could be about other associates she saw and you would want to confirm the timelines, especially when you are dealing with the wikileaks issue. who is randy cred co? an activist in new york. he has been involved with politics. he does impersonations of people on phones. he used to go on the albany show all the time with the new york post guy. what does he have to do with roger stone? roger claimed that he was his conduit or he was his contact for who gave him information in germs of julian assange or wikileaks and what was going to be released. i was asked about their relationship. it came in 2013 when we were going to use kristin davis to run as a libertarian comptroller against eliot spitzer. she got arrested, so we couldn t continue. he was a subject. what was interesting from what you were saying is they specifically asked me, what do you know about roger and donald trump? how often they communicated? let s say at that time late in the fall, to which i gave them some information i knew that was never asked in the grand jury. they didn t need it on the record. interesting. sam nunberg, anna schechter, clint watts. stay tuned. john flannery, we have more questions for you basil breaking news in the paul manafort trial as we said up top. the court was scheduled to reconvene a couple minutes ago after an abrupt and unexpected recess this morning. the prosecution was expected to rest its case today, but then judge t.s. ellis halted proceedings and ordered the jury to return at 1:45. it is now 2:12. we are waiting for an up jat from our reporters in the courtroom. john, given your experience in matters like these, what s going on in your estimation? why would a judge halt proceedings so abruptly? well, there are two paths here. one is what was said by the judge in court as reported. there was a 15-minute recess in which they talked with both defense and prosecution on a sidebar with white sound being pumped through the courtroom. and then he said that he had to take two hours. he being the judge, judge ellis. he said that he had other matters pending that he had to take care of. that didn t sound true to me because he s been pushing this trial to go forward and the government would rest today. so it doesn t make sense to me that he wouldn t have scheduled that before the regular court date for this trial. there is also a report that he asked for the roll of the jurors. that makes it sound like there is a question about one of the jurors and maybe that juror or jurors is being questioned about what other contacts they may have had or what information they may have gotten that is prescribed against being received by any juror during the trial. there is also a strong instruction to the jurors when he told them they were going to have a recess until about 20 minutes ago, which is now extended, as you noted, and the instruction was whatever you do, don t talk about the case, don t deal with anyone, and that s a usual instruction, but those in the courtroom apparently thought it was very stern. the question of juror misconduct usually starts with an interview of the juror, if that s what happened, and that can be a lengthy process and there can be a question of who else one spoke with and so forth. again, that s a speculation. but it seems to fit more likely why we ve had this recess than other explanations like he had to handle other cases. and just one other thing. there was a sidebar discussion between the lawyers and the judge a little bit earlier today that the prosecution wanted to get sealed. the judge agreed to seal the sidebar discussion. it concerned some of rick gates testimony, and it seems indicate, it points us to, and tell me if i m wrong, but it seems to point that rick gates testimony could be about other things he said about the larger russia investigation. exactly. and whether there was any coordination with the trump campaign. the question was put by the defense. it s interesting. the defense didn t want any reference to the campaign or trump. the judge basically ruled that that would be the case. then the defense on cross of gates asked him whether or not he had testified in cooperation with mr. mueller about the campaign, and that s when it was objected to by the prosecution. then they went and had the sidebar, and that s when, as a result of that sidebar at the end of it, the prosecution asked to seal the entire matter and there were no further questions and he wasn t permitted, as i understand it, to answer in the courtroom whether or not he had given testimony. and it s kind of interesting because gates may have had some contact with stone. we have other witnesses that may be in a position to testify about contacts with stone. so this may or not we ll know sometime soon, i suspect, after the manafort trial, what the connections are. we can guess that mr. x is mr. gates and so forth. plainly, he has been cooperating with the campaign. that makes sense. he was working with the trump transition period as well. so he carries on after manafort was not involved in the campaign and was not involved in the transition. very true. john flannery. john, thank you very much. thank you. up next, donald trump s former white house aide and long-time associate now says that donald trump is a racist. (vo) people with type 2 diabetes are excited about the potential of once-weekly ozempic®. in a study with ozempic®, a majority of adults lowered their blood sugar and reached an a1c of less than seven and maintained it. oh! under seven? (vo) and you may lose weight. in the same one-year study, adults lost on average up to 12 pounds. oh! up to 12 pounds? (vo) a two-year study showed that ozempic® does not increase the risk of major cardiovascular events like heart attack, stroke, or death. oh! no increased risk? ozempic®! ozempic® should not be the first medicine for treating diabetes, or for people with type 1 diabetes was not involved in the campaign . don t reuse needles. do not take ozempic® if you have a personal or family history of medullary thyroid cancer, multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2, or if you are allergic to ozempic®. stop taking ozempic® and get medical help right away if you get a lump or swelling in your neck, severe stomach pain, itching, rash, or trouble breathing. serious side effects may happen, including pancreatitis. tell your doctor if you have diabetic retinopathy or vision changes. taking ozempic® with a sulfonylurea or insulin may increase the risk for low blood sugar. common side effects are nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain, and constipation. some side effects can lead to dehydration, which may worsen kidney problems. i discovered the potential with ozempic®. oh! oh! oh! ozempic®! (vo) ask your healthcare provider if ozempic® is right for you. with the new chase ink business unlimited card i get unlimited 1.5% cash back. it s so simple, i don t even have to think about it. so i think about the details. fine, i obsess over the details. introducing chase ink business unlimited with unlimited 1.5% cash back on every purchase. i ve been making blades here at gillette for 20 years. there s a lot of innovation that goes into making america s #1 shave. precision machinery and high-quality materials from around the world. nobody else even comes close. now starting at $7.99. gillette. the best a man can get. blamed both sides for that violence. so far today the white house hasn t made any mention of the anniversary or the deteriorating state of race relations in this country. but this morning the president indirectly touched it, going back at the nfl after several players protested during the national anthem as the nfl kicked off its preseason last night. trump claimed the players are, quote, outraged at something, most are unable to define. odd since the players have repeatedly made it clear that they are outraged about police brutality against african-americans. the president believes attacking the nfl is a winning political issue for him. his former top political strategist steve bannon said identity politics, i.e. race, was a winning issue in 2016 and will still be a winning issue in the midterms and 2020. but now someone else who served on his campaign and in his white house is saying donald trump s race baiting is deeper than that. omarosa manigault newman says donald trump himself is a racist. in her book she claims the president used the n-word repeatedly while taping the apprentice and there are tapes to prove it. she says she has never heard him say the word herself, and was only told about the tapes through three unnamed sources. nbc news has yet to verify those sources. joining me former rnc chairman michael steele and szerlina maxwell. glad you are here to talk about this with us. before we get into omarosa, i want to talk about the state of race relations in this country. i don t think any of us should find it surprising that the president has intimated comments about the one-year anniversary in charlottesville. after all, we saw what he said yesterday. it seems clear where he stands on this issue. michael, what do you think about him going after the nfl today of all days? well, katy, i think not to correct you, i think that was his statement about charlottesville. that s the tweet on the anniversary of charlottesville to continue to play the race politics of the nfl and to go after these athletes who, the last time i checked, as we ve beat this horse many times, know have a constitutional right to express their views in that setting. so i think the president did respond to charlottesville through his tweet this morning, and it again is not, you know, a dog whistle or a bullhorn. it s all kinds of noise, but the fact of the matter is it plays to a base response that he wants to illicit, that gives him comfort and they are comfortable with the folks who love those tweets. zerlina? i agree. i think the base of the republican party right now or some of the folks in the base of the republican party are very tolerant of racism. that is the state that we are in right now as a country. charlottesville was a flashpoint for this country. after charlottesville, if you stayed on the side of supporting donald trump, after he said that there were very fine people standing among nazis, then you picked a side. you stood on the side of the line where you said nazis are perfectly fine with me. and i think that every single time donald trump says something that could be considered racist or is racist, we have a responsibility as citizens to call it out because there are actual consequences in the real world. neil wilson as a young woman, a young african-american woman killed in oakland, california on public transportation allegedly by a white nationalist, and i think that when violence is happening in the real world to black and brown people as a result of some of this rhetoric, we have to call it out. we have a responsibilities. talking to people who stayed in the administration after that, after donald trump said these things about charlottesville, i double checked to find out when exactly omarosa was fired from the white house or left the white house, depending who you believed, and it s december of 2017. that s quite a while after, michael, what happened in charlottesville. yet, today she is coming out and claiming it was uncomfortable for her to be there and she had to take a stand or she is claiming that this in book. what do you make of this? hashtag not credible. you know, can we just not please, let s not go down this rabbit hole, people. i am not buying the, oh my god, woe is me, this was horrible when it was made very clear to us by omarosa that those of us who were repeld by this president s behavior, his words and actions would bow down to him. my question to her is, are you now bowing down to him? the rest of us who have a problem with this, which you now seem to have, we were told this would be the consequence. i am not buying this. it s about book sales. it s about being close to the president. it wouldn t surprise me if she and the president have worked out it reality tv production and this is all just nor traumore d b.s. to distract us from the real narratives eat agent this country on race, on economy, on health care, and certainly, you know, everything else. i just i m not playing this. sorry. let s play omarosa in that front line interview that you referenced. it aired in september of 2017. i can tell you, because i was involved in it, it was taped in the fall right after the election. so it was at least taped right after the election. here s what omarosa said about president trump. every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to president trump. it s everyone who has ever doubted donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him. it is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe. i mean, i think it s ironic that today we are like omarosa said donald trump is a racist as if what he says in private he hasn t also been saying in public where we can see it for the past few years. he started as a birther. he said the central park five deserved the death penalty. it s not a mystery he is racist. omarosa is saying what we all know is not really breaking news. she is validating it. and as for those tapes, i have to say people have heard whispers people have been talking about the existence of these tapes. i think people have been tweeting about the existence of these tapes and demanding that mark burnett release them for many years. this is not new reporting. it s not new stuff that s out there. nobody has heard these tapes. nobody has gone on the record with their name saying, i have heard this tape, i have heard the president say these things. omarosa is now just talking about second-hand knowledge here. something else. moving on from omarosa. let s go to fox news. let s play, first off, what laura ingraham said the other night about the changing demographics in this country. because in some parts of the country it does seem like the america that we know and love doesn t exist anymore. massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the american people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don t like from virginia to california. we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed. now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases legal immigration that, of course, progressives love. i m going to give that to you first. i think we have to stop pretending this is not racism. this is plain, you know, open and out there racism. she is talking about race. when she is using the word demographic shift or the words demographic shift, she is talking about the racial makeup of this country and the fact that in a few years we are going to be a majority brown country. white people will not be the majority in the country anymore, and the folks that are not comfortable with that are consuming fox and it s dangerous what she is saying. there is violence happening to black and brown people in the real world. i have a new clip in a moment. i am going to take a brief pause. we have news in the paul manafort trial. michael and zerlina, stick with us basil that breaking news in the paul manafort trial. nbc news national security and justice reporter julia ainsley has just left the courtroom. what s been going on? reporter: so, katy, we just got out of a three and a half hour recess only to come back and have the judge say, please bring your next witness. this is incredibly unusual because it was seen as there was a issue with a jury. over this recess the sergeant-at-arms was seen going to the zwrjury chamber, bringin them to the judge s chambers. we have seen the court reporter. there will be transcripts of what happened come out later. we were preparing for a possible mistrial. we were just scrambling out here to give you the news to find they have called their next witness, dennis ricoh. he was on the schedule to go before the jury. he worked at the federal savings banks, which gave a $16 million loan to paul manafort. so the key here now is to see if one of those jurors has been dismissed. i was not in a position where i could see how many came in at the time. we are going to see if maybe perhaps an alternate there were four alternates in the case who might have swapped in with one of the 12 main jurors. one thing that the judge said today before we left for this long recess was to remind them at least three times not to talk amongst themselves or with anyone from the outside about this case. of course, that s hard to do because there is so much coverage of this case and there are so many high opinions of it because of paul manafort s relationship to the trump campaign. that s what we have for now. we will be looking at that as we go. come back out if you have any updates. appreciate it. and now let s go back to zerlina and michael. i want to get one more beat on this conversation about race and play that fox news clip i teased a moment ago. here is something from fox this morning. a hispanic guest saying that dems have to import illegal immigrants to vote for them, and also addressing black population growth. watch. a lot of people in the black community are recognizing that the democrat party is throwing them overboard for illegal aliens because what do you mean? well, the democrat party has been so good at promoting abortion inside of the black community, has been so good about curtailing the population in the black community, it s no longer a growing demographic in this country as compared to the rest of the country. so the democrats see their future of importing illegal aliens from all over the world into this country and those in the black community here in the united states are witnessing the democrat party chucking them overboard. michael, what s going on at fox news? i have no idea. i thought you would pass that one to zerlina. i mean, that was a meeting apparently i was not at. so, zerlina, i don t know if he had a meeting we don t know about. all of a sudden this is happening in our community? look, this is the level of crazy that we are in right now. we are in a reality tv space. every moment of the day is another episode of someone coming out speaking from a part of their body that the sun never reaches, and i think that s important for us to give context to this and understand that this is gibberish. there is a demographic shift occurring in this country. on a conservative level, 2043 is the turning point. i predict it will probably be a little bit earlier where you have a black and hispanic, black and brown united states. there are a lot of white folks inside and outside my party, inside and outside the democratic party, americans who are not happy about that prospect. this is the kind of crazy you get when people aren t happy. okay. we are going to move on to one other topic. we are going to talk about congress. to do that i want to bring in nbc political reporter alley vitale. my cohort on the campaign trail in 2016. she is back on the road covering the midterms. there is a lot of drama within the democratic party maybe drama is an inflated word for this. but there is talk about nancy pelosi and whether or not nancy pelosi should remain as leader, and if it comes to that, speaker of the house if the democrats are able to retake control. nbc news has done a survey and counted more than 50 democratic candidates who oppose pelosi as the leader. nine of them are incumbents. we know there have been an onslaught of gop ads against a number of democrats running for congress in the midterms trying to link them with her. nancy pelosi is a gop bogey man. what s going on? that s exactly right. i mean, it s not the first time we have seen republicans use this strategy of pegging every democrat in the field to nancy pelosi because to the average voter who doesn t spend all day watching cable news they have to pick the least common denominator of who do people associate with the democratic brand. as much as this is a republican tactic to trot out nancy pelosi to push voters back into the conservative camp, you are seeing in a lot of these red to blue districts that the dccc is trying to bring back into the fold, it s candidates who know if they take a position either way, yes, republicans will jump on them, but it s also kind of hard for democrats to say i m a first-time politician, i m running for the first time, sfroert me, and we are going to keep the same leadership we have had. as much as it s a republican thing, the challenge has been that it s from the left, it s from folks like alexandria ocasio-cortez who said she didn t want to vote for pelosi, now says she is willing to vote for her as an option. so it s a really interesting trend. maybe drama is not the right word. it s something percolating and it could become a little bit more dramatic closer to november. is it because pelosi is part of the old guard and they want fresh faces? is it because she is so good at raising none and there is a push back in taking money from super pc pacs, cleaning out politics? or because the gop have her to run against and they use it when they can as successful, i don t know, a baton as they can make it? i think it s a combination of all of those things. the attacks on nancy pelosi and hillary clinton, too, i call this is the who does she think she is rule of american politics. you think it s because she is a woman? yes. not only because she s a woman. i m not saying that all of the criticism of nancy pelosi is because she s a woman, but a lot of the criticism is because she was a successful speaker. she did not put any bills on the floor that did not pass. john boehner and paul ryan cannot say that. the fact that she is a very effective whipper of the votes, she always has a couple in her back pocket, makes sure that the legislation she puts on the floor is definitely successful. i think young ambitious men, they are the most outspoken in terms of their criticism of nancy pelosi. i think we have to speak truth to power when we re talking about women in leadership positions and ambitious women and how we critique them in a different way we do men in the same position. michael, what are your thoughts? and i like to agree with zerlina. my take away is this key thing, having done battle with nancy pelosi directsly in 2009 and 2010 is she is effective. she is effective as hell. she is a very competent politician and, you know, i think a lot of democrats who underestimate her ability to work her will on that caucus are going to be sitting there with a lot of egg on their face come january of next year as they vote her in as the next speaker, if she wants it. that s the thing that s going to be really the most important part of this narrative, is if nancy pelosi decides, yes, she wants to finish the job that she has started when she was speaker under this particular president. then it will be a battle royale because she will not go nicely into that good night. she is from baltimore. she is from a very, very powerful and strong political family from back in the day. she learned well the art craft of politics. you saw, to zerlina s point, she worked it magically to get everything she wanted done, done. republicans can t say that. even democrats before her can t say that. so you cannot take away her effectiveness. if she wants it, she will get it. thank you for setting it up for us. always good to see you. lonely on the campaign trail without you. don t worry. you will see me again soon. michael steele, zerlina maxwell, thank you for knocking all the pins down for us. we covered every topic in the last 15 minutes. thank you, guys. up next, why a federal judge threatened to hold attorney general jeff sessions in contempt. i was just finishing a ride. i felt this awful pain in my chest. i had a pe blood clot in my lung. i was scared. i had a dvt blood clot. having one really puts you in danger of having another. my doctor and i chose xarelto®. xarelto®. to help keep me protected. xarelto® is a latest-generation blood thinner that s. proven to treat and reduce the risk of dvt or pe blood clots from happening again. in clinical studies, almost 98% of patients on xarelto® did not experience another dvt or pe. xarelto® works differently. warfarin interferes with at least 6 of your body s natural blood-clotting factors. xarelto® is selective, targeting just one critical factor. don t stop taking xarelto® without talking to your doctor, as this may increase risk of blood clots. while taking, you may bruise more easily, or take longer for bleeding to stop. xarelto® can cause serious, and in rare cases, fatal bleeding. it may increase your risk of bleeding if you take certain medicines. get help right away for unexpected bleeding or unusual bruising. do not take xarelto® if you have an artificial heart valve or abnormal bleeding. before starting, tell your doctor about all planned medical or dental procedures and any kidney or liver problems. learn all you can. to help protect yourself from another dvt or pe. talk to your doctor about xarelto®. i ve been making blades here at gillette for 20 years. there s a lot of innovation that goes into making america s #1 shave. precision machinery and high-quality materials from around the world. nobody else even comes close. now starting at $7.99. gillette. the best a man can get. but he has plans today.ain. hey dad. so he took aleve. if he d taken tylenol, he d be stopping for more pills right now. only aleve has the strength to stop tough pain for up to 12 hours with just one pill. aleve. all day strong. these are the specialists we re proud to call our own. experts from all over the world, working closely together to deliver truly personalized cancer care. expert medicine works here. learn more at cancercenter.com but if something happened to you. you need life insurance! and chances are selectquote can get it for you for under a dollar a day! selectquote found michael, 38, a $500,000 policy for under $23 a month. selectquote found anna, 37, a $750,000 policy for under $22 a month. selectquote s secret? they comparison shop select group of great companies like these for your best rate. give your family the security they need. at a price you can afford. since 1985, selectquote has saved over a million families millions of dollars on life insurance. call the number on your screen. or go to selectquote.com. discover what over a million families know. we shop. you save. and i don t add up the years. but what i do count on is boost®. delicious boost® high protein nuritional drink now has 33% more protein, along with 26 essential vitamins and minerals boost® high protein. be up for life. basil this is pretty outrageous. that s how a federal judge responded to news that the trump administration put a woman and her daughter on a plane to el salvador while their deportation hearing was still ongoing. the judge ordered the plane to turn around and return to the u.s., and also threatened to hold the attorney general of the united states, jeff sessions, in contempt of court. the case was brought by the aclu and it challenged the justice department s move to curtail immigrants from seeking asylum due to domestic and gang violence in their home countries. joining me jacob soboroff, who has been following this story from the beginning, and retired immigration judge paul schmidt. jacob, tell us what happened last night. it was unbelievable, katy. there is this case with eight plaintiffs in federal court. it s brought against specifically attorney general jeff sessions for these new restrictive policies that make the bar higher for passing a credible fear interview to clear asylum. you mentioned it. stricter regulations around domestic violence, around gang violence, around sexual abuse, and so one of the plaintiffs in this case, despite the fact the case was in the process of being adjudicated, was put on a plane and deported to el salvador yesterday in the middle of the case. the judge found out about it. because the aclu brought it up in court, actually said in court, turn the plane around, and bring it back to the united states. the plane landed in el salvador. they stayed on the plane. the plane took off. carmen is the name of the woman, the pseudonym in the case, and her daughter headed back to the united states, landed in texas and the case continues. again, the attorney general, he threatened to hold the attorney general of the united states in contempt of court for this behavior by the government. and the aclu is challenging this. they don t think that this is a valid ruling or a decision by jeff sessions. the court is threatening to hold sessions in contempt. let s remind everybody the latest numbers of families who are still separated at the border. 2,551. that s the number that were originally separated. 559 are still separated. 365 parents have already been deported. paul, we do know that it s going to be really difficult to reunite those families, to find those parents who have already been deported. my question to you, given everything we re seeing on this and the way that judges have even been defied, and the way the government isn t living up to these deadlines that are given to them, who is going to be held accountable for this? is it going to come to jeff sessions actually being held in contempt, and what it should. it should. katy, this is i m stunned. absolutely stunned, as somebody that worked for the justice department for 35 years, been involved in the field for 45 years. the level of disrespect for the judiciary, the unprofessionalism of the department of justice attorneys and the just plain stupidity of the litigation strategy under jeff sessions is simply stunning. now, i ll tell you that when i was the general counsel of the old ins, we had a few instances where, by mistake, somebody who was under a stay got put on an airplane. you go in there. you basically get on your knees. you tell the judge, judge, i m so sorry, it s going to be taken care of, we apologize. i ll tell my clients not to do that. you know, these attorneys go in and basically, judge, you know, it s not your problem. i am stunned. because they are doing it and they are shrugging their shoulders, as you just said, what happens after that? what recourse do the judges have to hold the government accountable for this beyond what they are already doing? well, i think judge sullivan just showed you. i think i actually think judges have been remarkably tolerant. the judge in the separation of families case. basically, the justice department took an in your face position of, judge, you find them. and the judge, you know, has worked to try to get you know, told the government to find them. but that s in in your face position. i think sessions should definitely be held in contempt, and ultimately he can go to jail. that s exactly where he belongs. wow. jacob soboroff, what happens next? let s me say judge sullivan in the case in washington and then judge zabra in the southern look, i knew nothing about immigration law and immigration cases and what happened in federal court before i saw these kids locked up in cages. judge sabra is the reason these children are being reunited in the first place. the government never had a plan. the aclu brought this case out here in california and the judge basically said, where is the plan? the government said, there is no plan. and a judge literally ordered the government to come up with a plan. that is what is being cared out right now. totally remarkable. jacob soboroff, remarkable, unbelievable. you name injury superlative. unbelievable. thank you very much. jacob soboroff, paul schmidt, thank you as well. thank you, katy. meanwhile, dozens of children in yemen were killed when their bus was hit by a bomb. how was the united states involved? your business. so this won t happen. because you ve made sure this sensor and this machine are integrated. atta, boy. & yes, some people assign genders to machines. & with edge-to-edge intelligence, you ll know your customers love this color, & don t love this one. never getting grape again. & you can adjust in near real time. & if someone tries to breach your firewall in london & you start to panic. don t. you ve got allies on the outside, & security algorithms on the inside. & if it s jammed up here, & it s hot in here. & you know both those things, you can do this. & your flowers won t wilt. at&t provides edge to edge intelligence. it can do so much for your business, the list goes on and on. that s the power of &. & when her patient s blood pressure drops, she can share the information with. dinner date.meeting his parents dinner date. why did i want a crest 3d white smile? so i used crest. crest 3d white removes. .95% of surface stains in just 3 days. .for a whiter smile. that will win them over. crest. healthy, beautiful smiles for life. backpacks and school uniforms, covered in blood. after their school bus was hit by a bomb, a crater at the site of the air strike, the smoke of the blast visible from miles away. this little boy covered in soot and surrounded by the dead just minutes after the strike was asked if he was okay. my legs hurt, he said. saudi arabia and the united arab emirates have been bombing yemen more than three years helped by intelligence, advice and equipment from the u.s. they re trying to fight off the houthis, rebels backed by iran. saudi arabia and the uae said this attack was justified. the u.s. said it had nothing to do with it. but as the war goes on, the consequences have been devastating. more than 10,000 people dead, mostly civilians. but it s the children, half of yemen s population, who bear the brunt of this war. matt bradley, nbc news. joining me from istanbul, borju. thank you for joining us. those images are awful. can you just tell us what are we doing in yemen? what s the u.s. doing in yemen? well, it was the arab spring and yemen fell into chaos, various factions started fighting each other. the houthis, which are aligned with iran, took over the capital. saudis and the emirates didn t like that so they wanted to fight the houthis, and the u.s. at that time, the obama administration, was trying to keep the saudis happy as it was putting together the iran deal so it reluctantly signed on for this adventure. at this point, it s just gotten worse and worse and worse. what was supposed to be an effort to get the houthis out of the capital of yemen that was supposed to take a few months has now dragged on, as matt bradley pointed out, for three years. i get that. but why is the u.s. directly involved in this fight? why does the u.s. see it as a necessary for our troops to be out there? well, i mean unfortunately it s become sort of part of this almost soviet-era style proxy war between the united states and iran. so because the houthis have gotten closer and closer to iran and to tehran and hezbollah, the u.s. feels it s sort of incumbent on itself to support the effort to fight it. you have a very poor country in yemen that doesn t have a lot of resources. one thing that s very important about it is that it abuts a very narrow stretch of water through which a very large chunk of the world s oil supplies go through. and so in a sense, it s a war over a very important strategic piece of territory in the middle east that the u.s. feels is important. so the u.s. says it was not involved in this. the washington post is reporting on the nature of u.s. involvement in general in support of saudi arabia in yemen and they report the u.s. is helping the coalition. the only party in the conflict to use warplanes with refueling, intelligence and billions in weapons sales. the coalition mostly uses u.s. and british-made fighter jets. human rights groups and washington post journalist seen remnants of u.s.-made bombs at attack sites where civilians were struck. the u.s. as of now i think cannot say, and correct me if i m wrong on this, but cannot say whether they made the bomb that hit this school bus, but heather nauert, spokesperson for the state department, was asked about this and whether or not the u.s. would rethink its support for saudi arabia in yemen after this attack which killed so many kids. she s called for an investigation and said that they are concerned. borzou, what do you make of that? well, at this point, katy, the details that you mention i think are important but almost beside the point. the trump administration is so close to the saudis and the emirates, it seems to be you can t really distinguish where one country s policy ends and where the other begins. you know, we basically through almost happenstance without really planning it have gotten into bed with this whole war and it s really hard to get out at this point. ugly things are happening. the war is getting uglier. you have maggie michaels of the associated press has been reporting on these horrendous human rights abuses allegedly at the hands of our allies in yemen. we re very close to the emirates and close to the saudis politically. there s no criticism of anything that saudi arabia does at this point in the region. so it really, i think, hurts the u.s. image, it makes the u.s. seem like it s hypocrites condemning certain wars but not condemning others. condemning certain human rights abuses but not others, and it makes it a very, very tough position for u.s. diplomats who are trying to explain the u.s. position abroad as well as in other contexts. here s what the pentagon told vox. we may never know if the munition used was one that the u.s. sold to them. another pentagon spokesperson said the u.s. central command was not involved in the air strike in saada. thank you very much for joining us today, we appreciate it. we ll be right back. the line between work and life hasn t just blurred. it s gone. that s why you need someone behind you. not just a card. an entire support system. whether visiting the airport lounge to catch up on what s really important. or even using those hard-earned points to squeeze in a little family time. no one has your back like american express. so no matter where you re going. we re right there with you. the powerful backing of american express. don t do business without it. don t live life without it. if yor crohn s symptoms are holding you back, and your current treatment hasn t worked well enough, it may be time for a change. ask your doctor about entyvio, the only biologic developed and approved just for uc and crohn s. entyvio works at the site of inflammation in the gi tract and is clinically proven to help many patients achieve both symptom relief and remission. infusion and serious allergic reactions can happen during or after treatment. entyvio may increase risk of infection, which can be serious. pml, a rare, serious, potentially fatal brain infection caused by a virus may be possible. this condition has not been reported with entyvio. tell your doctor if you have an infection, experience frequent infections or have flu-like symptoms or sores. liver problems can occur with entyvio. if your uc or crohn s treatment isn t working for you, ask your gastroenterologist about entyvio. entyvio. relief and remission within reach.
good evening. i m chris matthews in washington. federal prosecutors in new york have accused the president of criminal violation of the federal campaign laws. they say trump directed that s the word michael cohen to cover up a campaign contribution in the form of payments with two women with whom he had sexual relations. this comes from the southern district of new york, not robert mueller, not the so-called 17 democrats the president says are working against him, not the deep state, not from a witch hunt. it s from one of the two sentencing memos filed in the case of trump s former lawyer, michael cohen, today, which are shedding new light on the president s potential legal exposure. as trump s longtime fixer, cohen pleaded guilty in august to campaign finance violations and making hush payments to two women on trump s behalf. and now, tonight s sentencing memo makes clear that with respect to both payments, cohen acted in coordination with and at the direction of individual one. that s the president. we re also getting new insight into what cohen has told the special counsel in the ongoing probe of potential collusion with russia. according to the filing from mueller s office, cohen not only provided information about the moscow real estate project trump tower over there that trump pursued during the election, but also provided information about attempts by other russian nationals to reach the trump campaign. according to the memo, quote, cohen spoke with a russian national who claimed to be a trusted person in the russian federation who could offer the campaign here s a phrase political synergy, in other words, working together, trump and russia against hillary. prosecutors say cohen provided useful information concerning certain discrete russia-related matters, according to its investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with company executives. that s trump company executives. that s how cohen got the information he s been using to try to save himself. and cohen also provided relevant and useful information concerning his contacts with persons connected to the white house itself after january of 2017. however, despite cohen s assistance, prosecutors in the southern district of new york still recommended a substantial term of imprisonment for michael cohen, given the nature of his crimes. also tonight, prosecutors detailed how trump s former campaign chair, paul manafort, lied to them repeatedly while he was supposedly cooperating with them. what a news night. i m joined by ken delanian, julie ainsley, a security and justice reporter for nbc news, barbara mcquade, former u.s. attorney out of michigan. mimi roca, former u.s. assistant district in the southern district of new york. i want to start with ken and focus on one thing first. i want to focus on the criminal violation of the campaign laws, this effort to cover up what is really a campaign contribution of $130,000, $150,000, adding it up to cover up these affairs with these two women. the president directed that activity, according to this memorandum today. ken. yes, chris. and in fact, michael cohen already stood up in court and said that when he pleaded guilty to these charges in the southern district of new york. but what s different today is that the u.s. attorney s office, a representative of the united states of america, is endorsing that view in black and white in a court filing, that cohen acted in coordination with and at the direction of individual one, donald trump, who had become the president of the united states. now, the reason i ve been told it s not accurate to call him an unindicted co-conspirator, butt there is still an issue of criminal intent. the way the campaign finance law is written, prosecutors have to prove for a violation that you had an intent to violate the law. normally you hear ignorance of the law is no excuse. in this case, ignorance of the law can be an excuse. if donald trump was told by a lawyer, hey, this payment is okay, it s not a violation of the campaign finance law, that would be clearly a defense. but the facts outlined here suggest a scheme, suggest people who knew what they were doing was wrong, particularly cohen. and clearly, if a president of the united states was able to be indicted, this is a case prosecutors would pursue to the last document, to the last witness, chris. and just to make your point again, the prosecutors in this case in the southern district of new york, the federal prosecutors basically nominated and confirmed by this republican senate. these people say that michael cohen had criminal intent. they said he knew the law, that he had worked in politics. absolutely. he knew this was a cover-up. julia, your thoughts on that, that cohen, directed by individual one, the president, is accused of knowing what he was doing. is it possible or plausible to assume that the guy who told him what he was doing didn t know it was a criminal act, the president? yeah, chris, before i came out here, i saw that individual one was the number one trend on twitter, at least in this region, and it s because individual one is named in both of these sentencing memos we ve seen tonight from the southern district and from the special counsel. in the mueller memo, individual one is the owner of the company, the real estate company that cohen worked for. that would be trump organization. that would be donald trump. and he is the one who, i m reading here, would have conferred with cohen about reaching out to the russian government. then when you talk about the payments to the women, the individual one goes on to become the president of the united states. pretty clear that s donald trump. and that he also worked with him, talked to him about the payments to those women. so, in a lot of ways, it cannot be underscored that these memos really aren t about cohen. i mean, they are about cohen, but they really point to the president in a way we hadn t seen before and point to this administration, not just the campaign, but what s going on inside the white house. let me go to barb on this, because i think the language was very strong. i was really impressed by the spirit of the prosecutors language. they talk about how people go door to door in politics, they lick envelopes, they do all of the work of politics in an open, transparent way because that s what the law and our democracy is all about, is transparent politics. and this skulduggery, this middle of the night going to that magazine, getting them to catch and kill, getting them to kill the story about these affairs, all this done purposefully and deliberately and intricately to cover it up, to make it nontransparent. they really threw the book at this. they took this campaign violation as dead criminal activity. one of the things that a prosecutor is required to do in a sentencing memorandum is describe to the judge the nature and seriousness of the offense. and here they describe this as a very serious offense. the whole purpose of campaign finance laws is to provide transparency and who s paying for things and how they re being run. and in fact, they used the word cloud, that michael cohen and individual one went out of their way and took deliberate steps to cloud that transparency by making these payments to hide the truth from the public so that they could cast aine formed vote. when we have a democracy, it s based on the ability of voters to cast an informed vote. and when you re hiding the truth from the american people, then democracy breaks down. that s a serious crime. well, on tonight s multiple court filings, they appear to indicate that president trump himself could be facing new legal exposure, including implications in a federal crime. the president, or individual one, as he s called here, responded tonight with a show of confidence. he tweeted this is outlandish. totally clears the president. thank you! well, that s just crazy talk. let me go to mimi on this. you know what s interesting how character and morality all come to play here, that you know, sometimes progressives play this game and sometimes conservatives play this game and trump-ites, whatever you call him. they say personal behavior doesn t matter. it s about politics and ideology conforms to the candidate and it doesn t matter who the person is. here we are talking about a guy and his affairs and the way that his character shows him having the affairs and his character showing him covering up the affairs and how he uses his lawyer to do it and how he uses his money to do it, and now it s all about protecting his chance to hold public office. it all integrates together. that s what i find faci and the prosecutors talk like that. they hit the guy morally. that s the way i read the document. it wasn t a cold, secular document. it s saying this is what brings the toxicity into american politics, these affairs being paid off, women being paid off, power being used to snuff out the truth and not enlightened democracy, but to deny the truth to democracy and the voters. your thoughts. absolutely, chris. and look, this is a typical southern district. and frankly, any u.s. attorney office type of document where you talk about the purpose of the laws and the spirit of the laws, and that s important, as barb said, to explain to the judge in terms of sentencing. and judge polly is a judge who takes those laws very seriously. i think it s important to point out that there was a phrase used in the southern district memo about the evidence against cohen being, quote, overwhelming, and that he didn t cooperate out of sort of the goodness of his heart or spirit, but because he was really caught red-handed. so, for trump to say that this clears him, we don t know that all of the evidence that is, quote, overwhelming against cohen, but i m willing to go out on a limb here now and say that given what the southern district has put in black and white, in writing, about the president s actions, i m willing to bet that there is good evidence that trump had the requisite intent to commit this crime as well. and i ll go out on a limb and say this is the biggest act of self-delusion since baghdad bob, who said they were winning the war. i want to bring in ari melber, who s been brilliance on this tonight, msnbc s chief correspondent as well as host of the beat. ari, i love the way you put it up and i want to go back to a deeper question. when trump got away for a while, for a few weeks, with the access hollywood tape that everybody said was going to kill him, reince priebus was going to walk over it, smart republicans, decent republicans said this smells too terrible to withstand, to survive. and here we have a president basically being charged by the federal district of new york up there with basically covering up a couple affairs with money and power and doing it in a way that i can get away with this crap. this is stuff i can get away with. i ve got this fixer lawyer here, cohen, he does this crap for me. i ve got a magazine that s going to buy this crap and kill it for me. i ve got it all wired. i can get away with it, just like he said in the access hollywood, i can get away with it. i thought it was interesting the way you talked about it tonight. well, you laid it out, chris. that attitude that was caught on tape was not just bragging about sexual assault, which itself is potentially felonious conduct. it was also, as you just put it, his belief that lets you get away with it. well, that s not how those people felt, because many of them spoke out. that s not how the prosecutors in new york have deemed the conduct. and they say michael cohen had that same mentality. if you want to call it the trump organization mentality, it is we ll just get away with it, the rules don t apply. i mean, this was a two by four striking michael cohen in the head over and over today. and this is someone who went out there and did media leaks and tried to say he was doing it both ways or he was going to do this because it was for the good of the country, or he said he wasn t taking a pardon, as if this was something for him that s sitting around on a silver platter, i mean, the privilege of that. and this is the federal prosecutors, as you re alluding to, saying no, it doesn t work like that. you re busted. that s why you re in trouble. you re busted. that s why you re sort of cooperating. and it still wasn t good enough, so you should do hard time. that comes against another thing i think s going to royal the city you re in, the manafort filing, which is getting attention, although it s partly redacted. chris, it says in here on page nine we only dealt with this briefly on my hour paul manafort authorized people to speak with the administration on his behalf and then lied to mueller about it. paul manafort was in contact with, quote, administration officials in 2018. who are they? did they lie about it? are there other people inside the white house who are on the hook in these implicated crimes? let s talk about your interesting way of putting it together, street corner cop. you said there s the good cop, the bad cop. you basically said the new york prosecutors were the bad cops. the good guys were the mueller s crowd in washington. talk about how that worked, because it seemed to work against michael cohen. new york thought he s a sleazeball, basically said you re as bad as trump. you re as bad as trump because you re a fixer. you help guys like him. you re an enabler. you help bigshots get away with crap nobody should get away with, buying off women, empowering yourself at the expense of other people s powers and dignity. and then we re going to screw you! but down in washington, they can stay nice to you because you ve been whispering in their ear for a couple of months, and they re going to be nice to you, but you re going to serve time. looks like real time. i think there s a strategy here. remember there was talk from pinned pu pundits about when sdny got involved mueller hand off the case? no, he never handed it off in that sense. he referred things jurisdictionally, but he s a by-the-book guy, but he never gave up control as he said under penalty of perjury to the russia probe. so mueller s the good cop, saying give us what you ve got, we ll take it in and try to award people who cooperate, but sdny is the bad cop, saying this isn t cooperation, this is crap. you didn t fully cooperate. this isn t going to be treated under the legal jargon as technical total cooperation, which gives him the sentencing guidelines benefits. and by the way, you only did it because you had to. so, what does that tell us? it tells us you ve got folks who are quite independent up at sdny. it stands for southern, but your panelists know some people refer to it as the sovereign district of new york, and that s the place that produced james comey, ma mary jo white, rudy giuliani, preet bharara. tell me about that culture. rudy giuliani was up there. what is it about the southern district that they re so tough, they suddenly look like dick tracy? what are they about? they seem to be the tough guys of the government, not the deep state in d.c., that nonsense, or the 17 democrats. these look like what do they call them, the g-men. they re going to get the bad guys, the fbi. you definitely have a pride and attitude up there that this is the most important district, this is the only district with its own foreign policy, just like people say about the new york city mayor s office is different than being the mayor of boise, idaho. no disrespect to idaho. and so, i think there s an attitude that they patrol wall street, they patrol weorld trad center, they deal with things on a national-international level, and that feeds that attitude. and again, to not lose the threat as we talk about what mueller got out of this, he got his cooperation from cohen. he tells the story through the footnotes of his filing here, that michael cohen came in and thought he was smartest guy in the room, tried to volunteer a little bit in his first meeting with mueller s team but lie about trump tower. they said we already know about trump tower moscow, so you just screwed yourself. then they brought him to the next meetings and got him to flip and turn. meanwhile, up in new york, prosecutors are saying that s fine, but what we re doing tonight and again, chris, this cannot be overstated what we re doing tonight is stating that the sitting president directed a campaign crime because he thought it would help him win an election, which through the electoral college he did win. that s where we are. that s my lead, too. thank you, ari. go ahead. why is cohen not getting credit for cooperating with the southern district? they say in the document because he refused to answer questions about other crimes they were investigating and past criminal conduct, which is bizarre, because he seems to have fully cooperated with robert mueller, but for whatever reason, he would not he only met with the southern district prosecutors a handful of times and he refused to answer their questions about manners they cared very much about, and that s why they re bringing the hammer down him and he s facing 3 1/2 years in prison. we re also receiving a sentencing memo in the case of paul manafort, who as we learned last week, you got all big three tonight, allegedly broke the deals of his plea deal by lying to prosecutors as well. and the sentencing memo on manafort says he lied about his contacts with his russian business partner who mueller was previously described as someone with ties to a russian intelligence. more significant is the filing states that the evidence demonstrates that manafort lied about his contacts with trump administration officials, which he had denied. for instance, in a text exchange from may 26, 2018. that s this year. manafort authorized a person to speak with an administration official on manafort s behalf. furthermore, a review of documents recovered from a search of manafort s electronic documents demonstrates additional contacts with administration. mimi, i want to talk to you about this russia thing and what we re learning here. it wasn t just the trump tower business. it was going on right through the campaign. in other words, trump was working for money while working for votes, anything but a conflict of interest. but the idea there were russians. and this is the whole thing about the russian thing, all the time these spooky russian figures reaching out like tentacles, trying to establish relations with trump against hillary clinton, at the same time the trump people are either grabbing onto those tentacles or trying to send their own tentacles back to mass cow. they re both sides trying to hook up, to use a modern term, and it s getting out into the public information now. your thoughts. absolutely. i mean, in some ways, we ve all been focused on a sort of narrow scope of this. you know, russia hacked the election, hacked the e-mails, you know, did anyone within the trump campaign know about that or help that? and i think, again, we still don t know the definitive answer to that, though it s looking more and more like the answer to that question is yes, from these filings. but i think it s much broader than that. it s about the word synergy is really perfect, right? it s not collusion as much as people working, coordinating together towards a common goal, which also sounds a lot like conspiracy. that s pretty much the definition of conspiracy, if that goal is criminal. and here we know the goal for the russians was criminal. and you know, i think there s a very good chance not chance, but i think the evidence is starting to pile up more and more that trump and his team were also working towards that criminal goal, which was to swing the election in illegal ways to get a trump tower business deal out of it and other things that i think we don t know about. and one point i want to come back to about what you read about manafort s lies. you know, these guys, over and over again, they lie, and they keep getting caught by evidence. and i mean, it shouldn t be shocking me because i ve seen it with defendants before. i m sure barb has, too. you know, they keep getting caught and then they try to change the story to fit the evidence that they re confronted with. manafort did it. cohen apparently did it. and i think people are still doing it to this day, like stone and corsi. and that s why you just can t take things at face value that they say. you know, we were in catholic school about 1,000 years ago, they used to have the milk bottles. they said the white bottle was clean, so the dark milkshake was the sin and you were evil. look at the three different examples we ve got. flynn goes completely clean this week. he s apparently going to walk. cohen couldn t decide when to do. he would give some information up but not enough to get sprung. and this other guy, manafort, is just being hard-nosed. he s just a hard guy. it s not too late for cohen, though. he can still cooperate with the southern district and get credit for that later. what was your key on that? i heard you earlier what indicates to you he s still in play, if he comes out with more information against trump, for example. does he have a chance to get lesser of a sentence? well, clearly, factually, there s information the southern district is interested. they basically said that, right, by saying that he wouldn t cooperate on past, other criminal areas, other areas which i am inferring relates to the trump organization and other dealings, you know, not necessarily related to the campaign, or maybe related to the campaign. you know, remember, cohen implicated the trump organization, essentially, as part of that criminal scheme. so, i think the information he has the opportunity, he has things that are of value to the government. you know, the government would be obviously leery of still cooperating with someone who s lied, but he has enough also truth-telling on his side on the mueller side, and there s specific mechanisms in the criminal, federal criminal rules that allow for a defendant to get cooperation credit after being sentenced. so, i think the opportunity s still there. mimi, you ve been great all night tonight. i ve been watching you all night. thank you for helping all our shows. you re the pros. stick with us, tonight s bombshell report is highly explosive. incredibly damaging to the president s claim that the special counsel s investigation s a hoax or a witch hunt. this is coming out of new york. this is a home game for him. the feds up in new york are going after him, accusing him of directing, which is basically directing a crime. in fact, new york federal prosecutors believe the president of the united states did direct michael cohen, according to today s paper, their memo, to direct two federal offenses by paying two women we know who they are, stormy and mcdougle for their silence about alleged affairs by what s called catch-and-kill. again, federal prosecutors write that cohen admitted with respect to both payments he acted in coordination and here s the word and at the direction of individual one. that s donald trump. in addition to the special counsel s filing seems to undermine president trump s claim that he had nothing to do with russia. according to page four of the special counsel s filing tonight, michael cohen made false and misleading statements concerning outreach to russian officials. cohen had, in fact, conferred with individual one, believed to be president trump, about contacting the russian government before reaching out to gauge russia s interest. in other words, they decide to get together, trump and manafort, to get together with the russians. the meeting ultimately did not take place. joining me is congressman ted lou, democrat from california, house judiciary committee, patricia bertrand and david is washington bureau chief with mother jones. congressman, thank you for joining us. a lot of paper here tonight, but the one thing that jumped out at me was president of the united states, individual one, directed a crime. thank you, chris. when you look at what the prosecutors did in the southern district of new york, they allege that donald trump directed two campaign finance violations. these are felonies. and you can infer intent by looking at a defendant s statements. so, i m a former prosecutor. and if you look at what donald trump said, he did not say, hey, i made these payments to kara mcdougle and stormy daniels because it was perfectly fine. he denied doing it at all, because he knew it was illegal. now we have a president who committed two felonies while running for president. it s so intricate, congressman. if you look at the document today, the memorandum, the amount of paperwork and phony shell organization creation, everything, it seems like they know that there s criminal intent here. absolutely. individual one, who is donald trump, was mentioned over 20 times in these documents, and it s very clear donald trump was intimately involved with a lot of these decisions, or a lot of things that michael cohen was doing, and prosecutors are basically laying out that michael cohen brazenly violated the laws and donald trump directed him to do so. what about impeachment here? when you look at this, is this enough to bring charges? is this enough for hearings? is this enough for committee hearings by the house judiciary committee on this president s behavior? so, i m on the judiciary committee, and my view is that impeachment, like the power to declare war, is one of congress gravest responsibilities. it should never be our first option. i think we need to wait for the special counsel investigation to conclude. these were court filings that were done for sentencing purposes. we don t know how much special counsel mueller knows about what s going on with russia and these other related activities, specifically at donald trump. we should wait for the investigation to conclude and make a decision then. when do you think that would come? give me a time frame right now. here we are, right before the holidays. congress is going to be in the third of january. right. you re ready for business pretty early. when do you see the judiciary committee getting started and looking at these charges? we get subpoena power january 3rd. there is something very telling in the michael cohen sentencing filing by special counsel mueller s office. they state that he gave information on russia-related matters core to their investigation. that means special counsel mueller understands full well that his core investigation is russia collusion, that these other things like obstruction of justice, perjury, campaign finance violations, they re tangential, but he would not have said that if he didn t intend to deliver on his core mission. i think that will happen sometime next year. congressman lieu, thank you for joining us this friday night. according to the memo just discussed, cohen spoke with a russian national who claimed to be a trusted person in the russian federation, who could offer the campaign, what a phrase, political synergy. collusion is another word for it. prosecutors say cohen provided useful information concerning certain discrete russia-related matters core to its investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with company executives during the campaign. i want to bring in david on this and natasha. david first. we re talking here about cohen s relationship with trump executives, the family members, the people at the top, working on russia stuff, but this phrase, synergy, sounds to me like a synonym for collusion! well, it could be. they claim that that conversation didn t lead to anything. but the second quote that you just cited from i think is the most significant thing on the russian front in all these filings. we ve got to take it slowly. that cohen provided mueller with useful information, certain discrete russian-related matters, plural. so we re not talking just about the moscow tower project that we know about. russian-related matters core to its investigation. trump keeps saying there s nothing about russia here. mueller is telling us core to our investigation hacking? i don t know what it s about, but the other part, that cohen obtained because of this contact with trump organization executives. so, here you have the trump organization being tied to russian-related matters that mueller says are core to my investigation. you know, trump told us trump turned his company over to his kids. well, kids? could be the kids well, they re the top people. it could be trump himself because he s still running the company. there s been no real distance there. but during the campaign, this all happened during the campaign. there was something going on between the trump organization and russia, or russia-related issues, beyond the moscow project, that we don t know about, and it blows out of the water, which has already been blown out of the water, the claim who s this russian we re hearing about that is a trusted official, meaning close to putin who was reaching out to the trump organization? well, that person has not been identified. i know that i and other reporters will be on this trying to figure this out. it s not the tower probably not papadopoulos connection. but we see again and again and again, whether it s in skia, papadopoulos, whether it s the maltese professor, whether it s carter page talking to people. again and again we re coming up with dozens or over a dozen points of contact between the trump clan and russia during the campaign, let alone trump contacting putin s own office for help on a project that any filing says would have earned trump hundreds of millions of dollars. hundreds of millions of dollars. that s real money. even here. let me go to natasha now. your thoughts about the russian piece of this tonight, because i see two leads in the paper tomorrow morning. that s the way i still look at things. one lead is the president basically directing campaign violations at a very high level, lots of money, hundreds and hundreds of thousands to catch and kill stories about his affairs. then this russian thing, picking up information from the cohen memo and the manafort memo. there s people coming in from the dark, from moscow, who want to connect with russia, create some synergy with his campaign. and of course this financial thing that went all the way through. according to cohen, it never stopped, and that s in the filing today. the campaign never caused the money-making effort on the part of the trump people to stop. yeah, and mueller also revealed something else really interesting about trump s interests in fomenting a relationship with vladimir putin during the campaign. he revealed that trump and michael cohen were having conversations in the fall of 2015 about reaching out to the kremlin to try to connect trump and putin while putin was in new york for the u.n. general assembly in september of 2015. so that indicates that whether or not trump at that point was pursuing the trump tower moscow deal, there seemed to have been an interesting on his part to get in touch with vladimir putin that early on in the campaign, which is absolutely remarkable. i mean, he had just announced a couple months earlier that he was running for president, and now he s eager to meet with vladimir putin, one of the first world leaders he s eager to meet with is putin? i mean, that just raises so many questions in and of itself. then of course, the fact that not two months later you have another russian offering to make this connection between trump and putin is also extremely suspicious. but i have to agree with david here. i think that the most pivotal point in that mueller filing about michael cohen is the fact that he has information related to the core of the investigation. does that have to do, for example, with michael cohen potentially going to prague to pay off russian hackers as the steele dossier said? remember, that put cohen at the center of these efforts of potential conspiracy between the trump campaign and russia. so i think that that right there just means that there s so much more left to cohen s cooperation, even though the southern district of new york is very unhappy with the extent to which he s cooperated with them, which may indicate that cohen is more reluctant, perhaps, to throw people associated with the trump organization under the bus. he does not seem to be shy about detailing the efforts between trump and the rest of the campaign to coordinate with the russians during 2016. thank you, natasha. let me go back to kent. it seems to me the wall was the wall too high to climb in terms of criminality? in other words, as much as cohen tried to help nail trump, as much as he tried to help on the russia front, the business end and the synergy, all that stuff, it wasn t enough to make up for his own crimes, so he s still going to have the book thrown at him. or is he still able to climb that wall and get out of this thing? i think it s not about that he didn t give them trump, because he clearly did. look, if donald trump wasn t the president and was able to be indicted remember, justice department policy says you can t indict a sitting president it s pretty clear that he would be the target of an investigation about illegal campaign donations related to these payments of women, based on what cohen has given him. i think he didn t get the deal because had he refused to answer questions about his past criminal dealings. and you know, there s been rumors about ties to organized crime. who knows why he didn t want to answer questions about certain things. he s had a long and colorful business history. right. but i just want to go back to one thing natasha and david were just saying. donald trump in his first presidential news conference was asked five times whether he was aware of any campaign officials or himself personally was in touch with the russian government or russian officials, and he flatly denied it. and this footnote you ve been referring to in this mueller document completely refutes that. had says he conferred with michael cohen about reaching out to the russian government. we shouldn t forget that. i know we re used to donald trump not telling the truth, but this is a major deal. he adamantly denied any ties to russia and these documents suggest there was outreach to russia, and that michael cohen has told the special counsel a lot about it. okay. how much underworld possibility is there here? because we talked a couple days ago about manafort and something brilliantly said, i think susan page, said there are worse things than imprisonment. when you deal with russia and ukraine, these are frightening people. if there is a connection with the mob, there are threatening possibilities to everything in your life. does that make sense to you, because you just alluded to it? is there a notion that these guys have a darker context in which they have to survive? well, in terms of manafort, i ve always resisted that idea because the russian mob, the russian government, mob-connected people don t tend to bump off americans in the united states. but he may be worried about it. you know, you can t discount it. with cohen, i think it s a little darker situation and we re not clear about his past business ties and who he s got relationships with in new york. and i m not discounting that that could be a motivation for him, because it s really strange. like, why would you not you re cooperating with robert mueller. you re telling him everything he wants to know, but you won t answer basic questions from the southern district of new york, won t even meet with them about your past history and they re going to lock him up. why not? because they ve had a lifelong mandate to fight the mob and it s possible they would like to get a kill there. barbara, last thought on that. is there reasons you have experienced in your life as a prosecutor that there are people who are more afraid of other forces than they are of the law? well, sure, there are other things. sometimes what s going on is they re protecting someone else. there s a loved one, there s a family member or someone that they fear that they want to protect. so, that s the kind of thing, because it s in michael cohen s best self-interests to be fully cooperative. everything he tells them they re not going to used against him, they re going to use in the prosecution of other people. so the conclusions that come to my mind are either someone he wants to protect or there s someone he fears. well said. thank you, natasha bertrand, david and ken dilania nnk and barbara mcquade and ari melber for joining us from the beat. much more on today s breaking news. senator richard blumenthal with the senate judiciary committee, will join us next to discuss the court filings and what we learned today about russia, about criminality, about a president who s been, well, he s got his name mentioned. he s called individual one. and according to that filing from the southern district of new york, he directed the criminality in that campaign violation. in another big story today, trump has his eye on a new attorney general whose history includes criticism of the mueller investigation. big surprise. and his sweeping view of wide-ranging executive powers. we ve got the older kavanaugh coming i guess for ag. go figure. this is hardball, where the action is. when i say, drivers who switched from geico to esurance saved an average of $412, you probably won t believe me. but you can believe this, real esurance employee nancy abraham. look her up online. esurance, it s surprisingly painless. a peaceful night sleep without only imagine. frequent heartburn waking him up. now that dream is a reality. nexium 24hr stops acid before it starts for all-day, all-night protection. can you imagine 24 hours without heartburn? discover card. i justis this for real?match, yep. we match all the cash back new cardmembers earn at the end of their first year, automatically. whoo! i got my money! hard to contain yourself, isn t it? uh huh! let it go! whoo! get a dollar-for-dollar match at the end of your first year. only from discover. with my bladder leakage, the products i ve tried just didn t fit right. they were too loose. it s getting in the way of our camping trips. but with a range of sizes, depend fit-flex is made for me. with a range of sizes for all body types, depend fit-flex underwear is guaranteed to be your best fit. unstopand it s strengthenedting place, the by xfi pods,gateway. which plug in to extend the wifi even farther, past anything that stands in its way. .well almost anything. leave no room behind with xfi pods. simple. easy. awesome. click or visit a retail store today. we re continuing to follow the breaking news tonight. boy, is it big. in three separate filings, federal prosecutors have provided a number of new bombshells tonight. federal prosecutors up in new york say trump directed lawyer michael cohen to cover up a campaign contribution in the form of payments to two women with whom he had sexual relations. we re also getting new insight into what michael cohen has told the special counsel in the ongoing probe of potential coalition, well, sinnynergism w russia, they call it. according to the filing from mueller s office, cohen not only provide information about the moscow real estate project over there that trump pursued during the election but also provided information about attempts by other russian nationals, trusted nationals, they re called, to reach the campaign and set up a sort of synergy between the trump people and the campaign against hillary. so, it s russia and trump against hillary. separately, prosecutors detailed how trump s former campaign chair, paul manafort, lied to them repeatedly while he was supposedly cooperating with them. for more, i m joined by u.s. senator richard blumenthal of connecticut, who sits on the judiciary committee. senator, a lot tonight. how do you react to the southern district of new york s report that the president directed the criminal violation of the campaign laws to cover up his affairs with susan mcdougle and with stormy daniels? the sentencing memorandum, first of all, is a bombshell in showing why prosecutors in the southern district of new york, independent of the special counsel, believe that donald trump committed a felony that enabled him, or at least helped him to become president, and covering up those payments was part of what was done, part of the conspiracy of which president trump is an unindicted co-conspirator. think about it for a moment, unindicted co-conspirator. and the further information in this bombshell memorandum shows facts in evidence that link that conspiracy to russian collusion with the trump campaign and potentially obstruction of justice. so, the pieces of the mosaic or the puzzle are coming into place and the walls are closing in on donald trump and his inner circle, including his family. well, the president said in that infamous access hollywood tape that he could do what he wanted with women because he s a celebrity, he could get away with it. is he right or is he caught? is he caught now because he was basically charged by the federal prosecutors up in new york, not here in washington, but up there, charged with campaign violation and a campaign violation being payments to shut people up, to pay them off, and to kill the story? there s a basic tenant of the american rule of law that no one is above it. no one is above the law. that was the lesson of watergate. i hope it will be the lesson of this dark period in our history, too. remember that those government prosecutors who have in effect named donald trump as an unindicted co-conspirator, so far unindicted, are not in this special counsel s office. they re in a separate office and they will survive any effort by the president to shut down the special counsel. but all the more important now to ensure the independence and integrity of the special counsel. because as the walls close in on donald trump, he is going to be more desperate, more destructive, and potentially more damaging, and that s why i am going to demand of this new nominee, william barr, as attorney general, that he commit specifically and unequivocally to protect the integrity and the independence of this special counsel. by the way, on that topic tonight, because it is emerging as a big story between now and the next year, the republicans still control the senate with 53, 54 seats. they can get a majority vote and get this guy confirmed. how do you as a democrat stop that, if you want to do so? i m going to be asking tough questions and i m going to be demanding specific commitments. for example, that he will commit to approving any subpoenas issued by the special counsel. i see. approve the budget, approve the indictments that may be handed down and avoid constricting the authority of the special counsel. i think my republican colleagues are going to be very, very interested in those answers. i think they want this investigation to be completed, and their fear is that there s an attorney general who will, in effect, commit another saturday night massacre, even if it s a saturday night massacre in slow motion, which is the danger from the acting attorney general, matt whitaker. and remember, william barr has cast dispersions on the prosecutors in bob mueller s office. he has said that hillary clinton and uranium one are worthier of investigation than collusion between the trump campaign and the russians or obstruction of justice, and i want specific, definition commitments he s going to protect the special counsel. i m going to press for legislation that will require full disclosure of any findings in evidence from the special counsel, including a report. and i think those kinds of commitments are absolutely necessary. okay. and democrats as well as republicans can unite about them. before you leave tonight, i want to get your thoughts up in the tri-state area, up there in new york, the new york southern district of new york has basically pointed out, they have said charge the president with directing a political activity, the cover-up of that campaign contribution in great, intricate fashion, according to that memo today, about how michael cohen really went around to try to create the paperwork to make it look like something it wasn t. they say in that memo today, in that sentencing memo, that michael cohen knew what he was doing. he s a lawyer. he was politically sophisticated enough to know he s breaking the law. and proof of that was the way in which he was covering it up, with such intricate effort. do you believe it s possible or plausible that the president of the united states, who was directing him to do so, didn t know he was doing so to cover up a crime? i believe it is totally implausible that the president had no idea there was a cover-up ongoing here, if he knew the facts, as apparently, the southern district of new york believes that he did. it seems both impossible and implausible that he didn t understand the motive and the criminal intent here as well as the actions. and one more thing. this hammer over michael cohen, the recommendation for additional time i think is a point of leverage and we ll see more coming from michael cohen. knowing what you know of the law as former attorney general of connecticut, sir, all those years, longer than you ve been a senator, much many more years, do you think that the reason the president wasn t indicted is because he s president and that s it? that otherwise, he s guilty? i happen to believe the president could be indicted. i may be in a minority in that opinion, and the trial could be postponed until after he finishes his service. i think that there are legal obstacles to such an indictment, and the special counsel or the southern district of new york is going to have to convince itself and the american people, and ultimately, a judge, that those obstacles can be surmounted. but the report, i think, will be extraordinarily damning, whether or not there is an indictment. when he leaves office, he gets an indictment. that s certainly reason for your democratic party to find a nominee who can defeat him this next election. thank you very much, senator richard blumenthal. great to have you on. up next, president trump says there s nothing to see in the court filings tonight. he s clear! he s clean as a whistle! there s nothing here. he is baghdad bob. he s not seeing what s happening on the war front here. you re watching hardball. her. take your razor, yup. alright, up and down, never side to side, shaquem. you got it? come on, get back. quem, you a second behind your brother, stay focused. can t nobody beat you, can t nobody beat you. hard work baby, it gonna pay off. you got this. with the one hundred and forty-first pick, the seattle seahawks select. alright, you got it, shaquem. alright, let me see. and then, more jobs robegan to appear.. what started with one job spread all around. because each job in energy creates many more in this town. when the guy inown front slams on his brakes out of nowhere. you do, too, but not in time. hey, no big deal. you ve got a good record and liberty mutual won t hold a grudge by raising your rates over one mistake. you hear that, karen? liberty mutual doesn t hold grudges. how mature of them! for drivers with accident forgiveness, liberty mutual won t raise their rates because of their first accident. liberty mutual insurance. liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. if your moderate to severeor crohn s symptoms are holding you back, and your current treatment hasn t worked well enough it may be time for a change. ask your doctor about entyvio®, the only biologic developed and approved just for uc and crohn s. entyvio® works at the site of inflammation in the gi tract, and is clinically proven to help many patients achieve both symptom relief and remission. infusion and serious allergic reactions can happen during or after treatment. entyvio® may increase risk of infection, which can be serious. pml, a rare, serious, potentially fatal brain infection caused by a virus may be possible. tell your doctor if you have an infection experience frequent infections or have flu-like symptoms, or sores. liver problems can occur with entyvio®. if your uc or crohn s treatment isn t working for you, ask your gastroenterologist about entyvio®. entyvio®. relief and remission within reach. welcome back to hardball. we re continuing to follow the big news tonight of the three separate sentencing memos regarding trump s former lawyer, michael cohen, and trump s former campaign chair, paul manafort. we re getting new insight into what cohen has told the special counsel in the ongoing probe of potential collusion with russia, or as the russians call it, synergy. and in manafort s sentencing memo, we re learning manafort lied about contacts with his russian business partner as well as his contacts with members of the trump administration when they were in office. but donald trump tonight is claiming that he s not worried. he tweeted, totally clears the president. thank you! let s bring in tonight s hardball roundtable, adrian elrod, former director of strategic communications for hillary for clinton hillary for clinton! hillary for america. that was not intentional. for america. sher michael singleton, political consultant and sam stein, politics editor with the daily beast. sam, let s go through the first one. i m struck by trump s resolute denial of reality. you re struck by it? i m not struck by that. the prosecutors up in new york, not the 17 democrats he talks about, not the witch hunt, all that stuff, the deep state. feds up in new york said, they said definitively he directed his lawyer to break campaign laws. he directed the commission of a crime. unlike you, i m not struck by him denile reality, this is how he exists to build an alternate reality in which he is clean and innocent and above it all. at some point, facts are stubborn things. in this case it is very clear that tweet he put out is erroneous. it s a lie. he s in serious potential legal jeopardy here and what they lay out is a case in which he deliberately went out of his way to pay hush money payments to people because he knew specifically, specifically that it would have a bad campaign impact, a violation of the campaign finance laws. i thought it was very direct. as i said earlier, it was almost like a sermon for the prosecutors. people like you, who work in legitimate campaigns, working for people like hillary, working very hard all the time. in the daylight, everybody knows what you re doing. knocking on doors, position papers. here s this sneaky business of paying off these two women, violating campaign laws, it s a campaign contribution. you re working a publisher to catch and kill and it s all done intricately to avoid being caught. that s what i ve been thinking about a lot today, while we were slaving away at hillary clinton s campaign, writing policy papers, really focusing on the nuances in these health care proposals she was putting out, these guys were in trump tower conspiring on how to implement the moscow project the contrast between the two campaigns, the motivations he had to run for president were so different. that s what i keep thinking about today. i wonder the idea of winning is everything, doesn t look too good. it doesn t. john edwards, that was a walk in the park in comparison to what s going on now. the fact of the matter is, we re going into january, chris, the president is going to have to answer for this. democrats are going to have oversight. i suspect that michael cohen will likely be subpoenaed. any of your guys likely to break loose, marco rubio, anybody that might say enough is enough? i don t foresee that happening until there is a dig isn t decrease in support for this president. i don t see that happening. having a beer, talking about this, yeah, they got him the new york guys got him, big deal. is that what they re going to say, big deal? we were talking about this before the break. the issue is, so many people have in some ways become de sensitized to this stuff. the american people should be concerned and freaked out about what s going on with the president of the united states. to the point, i think that what happened in watergate is actually very informative here. there were dead enders, but they weren t a small group. they re a fairly large group of nixonian dead enders up until there were tapes. when the tapes came out, it was hard, tangible proof. george wallace, people like that? yeah, and once you see something or hear something that cannot be refuted. that changes things. we have documents and allegations and testimony. he can dismiss by saying these are disgruntled ex-employees, angry democrats. all the media conspiring against me. once we actually see primary evidence, that is a game maker. what is the primary evidence? what makes you think that s going to change? 35% of republican voters? what hit me was new york feds, new york state officials the state governments, virginia s going to go after him, everybody who sees crime is going president trump dropped major hints this morning that he was anticipating something big coming. he s right. just before dawn preponderate launched a preemptive strike in a series of angry tweets, many with typos and misspellings, proving they re his, lashing out at his special counsel. among other things, robert mueller and lying james comey are best friends. throughout his tirade, he attacked john brennan and james clapper, hillary clinton and justice department officials including his own deputy attorney general rod rosenstein. he never gets tired of hillary, does he? she s always the foil, the one he goes to. it s a common thing among republicans, by the way. when you test that with republican voters, that hillary clinton and nancy pelosi are two individuals two strong powerful women. fog machine, when they were afraid trump was going to lose the second debate, they said we re going to unleash the fog machine. that s forget the evidence, forget everything, just remember, what side are you on? what side you on? and just remember where you are and go after trump. the problem with trump, though, is that he s reducing his own side. it s not just the is he? he s not going after the hillary clintons of the world. today he spent time going after his old secretary of state, rex tillerson and calling him dumb as a rock. why did he do that? because he said something about him earlier in the morning. dumb as a rock? it s odd, he appointed him secretary of state. it s fifth grade. it sounds crazy. but four republican voters, they look at tillerson s comments and they say you re not loyal to the president. the president has a right to critique you and fight back. i don t agree with that, but explain this behavior by your kindergarten class. here s the president going after his very recent secretary of state. watch. it was challenging for me, coming from the disciplined, highly process oriented exxon mobil corporation to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn t like to read, doesn t read briefing reports, doesn t like to get into the details of a lot of things. i d have to say to him, well, mr. president, i understand what you want to do but you can t do it that way. it violates the law. it violates a treaty. i think he grew tired of me being the guy every day that told him you can t do that. nobody wants to be trump s hall monitor. anyway, trump responded this afternoon with a tweet calling tillerson dumb as a rock and said he couldn t get rid of him fast enough. he was lazy as hell. nice way to treat your recent major employee. i mean, but look. we do know he s exactly right. i remember during the campaign, when donald trump, i want to say, that he made it very clear he loves reading people magazine and the new york tabloids. that s what he likes to read. he doesn t like complicated policy papers or read the daily intelligence briefing. that s been those are facts we ve known for a long time. sometimes it s worth stepping back and recognizing what just happened here. the former secretary of state said he had to stop the president from breaking the law. that s crazy. i mean, that is just crazy. and we just sort of take it because it s, you know, every day in trump land. speak for yourself. i brought this up because what s noteworthy though is the manner in which they talk to each other. we re talking about the president of the united states of america. the expectation is that this is someone who s objective, has discernment, approaches things from all sides, all issues, spending long hours reading through the briefing papers, not someone getting oral briefings. that s absurd to me. i don t think we ve ever thought that was happening with donald trump. as president. we shouldn t stop or seize our expectations. nbc news reported the president s outgoing chief not really an outgoing personality, but he s outgoing, john kelly answered a narrow set of questions from the special counsel earlier this year, questions related to potential obstruction of justice. a person familiar with the matter says kelly was asked about a conversation he witnessed between the president and former white house counsel don mcgahn who spent over 30 hours testifying before the special counsel. in that conversation the president asked mcgahn to publicly refute, that he the president ordered the firing of the special counsel, robert mueller. according to new york times mcgahn did refuse trump s order wbr id= wbr35120 /> to fire mueller in 2017 and never issued any denial that he had done so. sam? just think about it. the president talk about obstruction of justice. he fires the fbi director, then fires the guy named to go after him and that s not obstruction? no. it s all happening like right in front of us and sometimes we are just like can t keep track of it all. i go back to the moscow tower meeting arranged with don jr., a massive deal. let s say we didn t know about /b> it and it came out tomorrow, it would be cataclysmic. but it s now baked into the cake. a lot of stuff is just baked into the cake. i think the sun is going to pay here. just pass we forget so quickly, yesterday they buried, down in texas, college station, they buried a former president. i thought the public tribute, while it didn t reflect all national opinion, there s a lot of populist attitude out there, i think it reflected a lot of nobility in the american government. a lot of people i watched those people, joe biden, al gore, a lot of people paying tribute to that man that was real on wbr-id= wbr35720 /> both sides. absolutely. we had a true moment. i think it was not just yesterday, it was this week where we saw both sides come together to honor such an incredible former president and now we have today where it seems like all of that is the clintons were there too. there was chatty stuff going on there. a niceness there. and then the weirdness happened. he hands it to an attendant, like he s god, and they didn t treat him with a lot of warmth. it felt like, you know, there was a politics where we knew we