Himes, democrat of connecticut and important to this conversation a member of the house intelligence committee. Congressman himes, a very basic question to you is how do you now proceed with this split between parties within your own committee and was the apology from your chairman enough for you today . Well, the apology itself really cant possibly repair the damage that was done by this bizarre maneuver that chairman nunes did yesterday. I mean, you know, by taking material, not even sharing it with the committee or the Committee Staff to the white house and mind you, this is material that was generated presumably at one of the intelligence agencies. These are executive branch agencies. They could have gone straight to the president but instead it goes via devin nunes personally, not via the committee, it goes to the white house, that really damages the perception of impartiality, therefore making it all the more important that this investigation really be undertaken not by members of congress who are in the political fray but by an outside, Bipartisan Commission that can have the confidence of the American People that nothing is being done to help the president or try to bring down the president or whatever other political agendas may exist. If that doesnt happen, are you guys equipped to keep going with this and pull off a fair and full investigation . Well, were in a little bit of a bind because right now were the only game in town, the Senate Intelligence committee and house intelligence committee. Those are the only investigations happening. So were we to walk away, that might be very much in the interest of somebody who may be, you know, was in fact working with the russians, colluding, whatever it may be. I think there are people who would love nothing more than for this investigation to go away. If this becomes a whitewash, if we get denied witnesses, but sits were the only game in up to, we will keep working as long as this appears to be at least possibly an objective investigation of a terribly important thing. Youre obviously not going to share it but do you yet know this piece of evidence that the chairman walked over to the white house yesterday . I think its not right to call it evidence. Chairman nunes said it had nothing to do with russia that, it was legally collected surveillance and that there was incidental collection of, i guess, associates of the trump campaign. And, no, we havent seen it. We have been promised it but heres the thing, brian, people need to understand that incidental collection happens every minute of every day. We are listening in on all kinds of bad guys abroad and it turns out that bad guys sometimes talk about the president of the United States or jim himes or brian williams. And when that happens, that is what is known as incidental collection and it is very carefully handled. If theres u. S. Person information in what it is very, very carefully handled. My husband spigs is there is nothing there from a very tough announcement from the fbi director on monday. Mr. Quigley of illinois side the evidence hes seen amounts to probable cause to use an old courtroom lawyers terminology to suspect confirmed ties between team trump and the russians. Would you agree to that same wording . Different people have seen Different Levels of this material. You saw that the ranging member, adam shift, said and hes a member of the gang of eight. They get to see some stuff that is highly sensitive that regular Committee Members dont, at least immediately. So i take adam at his word. There is clearly something here, as he said that, makes it at at some point more than circumstantial, but i dont think its time for us to be characterizing the evidence yet because this investigation is still very much in the phase of gathering that evidence. Before i let you go, a quick prediction, up or down vote tomorrow on health care . I notice youve been pressing members of congress on the question. I will tell you this. It looks like a real uphill fight. You know, theyve lost a lot of the Freedom Caucus members and its not getting as much attention. You talked to Leonard Lance earlier tonight. There are at least a dozen of the moderate, often clinton district republicans who are realizing this could be a fatal vote. I think it is a very, very tough sell tomorrow for this socalled Health Care Reform bill. Congressman jim himes, democrat of the state of connecticut. Thank you very much for staying up late with us. Thank you, brian. Coming up after our next brea beingan the fractured republican conference come together on this vote . That and more when we continue. This is the silverado special edition. This is one gorgeous truck. Oh, did i say theres only one special edition . Because, actually theres five. Ooohh aaaahh uh hooooly mackerel. Wow. Nice. Strength and style. Its truck month. Get 0 financing for 60 months plus find your tag and get 5500 on select Chevy Silverado pickups when you finance with gm financial. Find new roads at your local chevy dealer. If there was a vote today how would t bell go down . There are not enough votes as of 1 30 today. What are the concessions the president was offering . There are no new concessions. Im a no vote. Im desperately trying to get to yes. They are stubbornly holding the line, rebelling against party leadership, demanding concession, even after the white house said there would be no more and calling this vote to happen tomorrow for better or worse. The question is can speaker ryan corral his conference before tomorrows vote . Does the speaker have the full support of the white house . We are joined tonight by conservative radio talk show hughes hu host hugh hewitt an robert costa remains with us, has returned with us. All right, hugh hewitt, ideologically you would be a member i think its safe to say of the Freedom Caucus. Do you think this thing will pass . And as a smart guy who went to harvard, do you think it should pass . I think it will, i think it should and i think id be in the republican study group, not the Freedom Caucus. The patriots were down 25 points in the third quarter, they won. Speaker ryan is a little behind. There will be two groups of republicans, those who voted with the president , the Vice President , mccarthy and those who voted with nancy pelosi to keep obamacare. What list do they want to be on . Its not the alamo. Theyre not crocket and travis and buoy. Theyre not going to get a monument for voting no tomorrow. Theyre going to go done in Republican Party infamy if they kill the effort to repeal obamacare and get it to the senate. But your answer seems to be along the political lines of with you or against us . As a political matter, do you think it better for the country and living, breathing americans who need health care to pass this tomorrow . Absolutely. Not only did i speak to the speaker but to john thune and lindsey graham, Kathy Mcmorris rogers and in fact obamacare is collapsing. Its particularly devastating on people who have medicaid but cant get in to see doctors. I think the block granting of medicaid and a major entitlement is a once in a generation opportunity. So i think by tomorrow morning as they sleep on it, the conservatives in the Freedom Caucus are going to say i think wed better get this to the senate. And i think charlie dent and his friends are going to hear that veiled threat at speaker ryan. I defer to robert on this and theyight be reading that as do we really want to participate in weakening a speaker we can work with and getting my friend jim jordan as speaker. That was a pretty specific message coming from 1600 tonight. And robert, how does ryan manage this period and what we already know and can see is coming out of the white house and how does the president , do you think, play it . Well, brian, i asked a friend of the president a few minutes ago is the president angry tonight at the oval office . They said, no, he wants the vote to happen now. He wants to see who is against him, who is with him. Hes kissed enough hands, hes had enough chatty meetings, its time. Hes not an ideological president , hes not driven by this urgency to have some kind of conservative project on health care but he wants it done. Hugh hewitt, a question along these lines but on a different top being and that is surveillance. Nunes from your state goes over to the white house and shares this intel with president trump. President trump minutes later says he feels somewhat vindicated by it. Tonight for the second night in a row i note that fox news during their conversations had the banner trumps surveillance confirmed. Do you equal what donald trump said about wiretaps specifically with what nunes delivered yesterday, does this connect the dots for you . No, and i think the president ought to call director comey and ask him directly and maybe on the record in a joint appearance is there anyone in my white house who is under investigation because if there is, i have to separate them from the white house. Thats an old lesson fromn old nixon person, even though i worked for him after the fall, you dont want people under investigation in your white house. But while thats also going on, brian, i would point out the third story of the week, the big win for the president , we have a troubling story in the house, an interesting story with devin nunes, hes won the gorsuch nomination. The reid rule is going to be invoked if schumer carries off a filibuster, so its been a very good week for the republicans no matter what happens tomorrow. And as for the nunes story, im laying way back on that because there are two parallel narratives here pip have no clearances anymore. Someone is not telling the truth. Someone is going to get burned very badly. Ladies and gentlemen, you just heard hugh hewitt insist this was a good week for republicans. Well leave it there. You bet. Hugh hewitt, thank you. Robert costa, our continued thanks, especially for sharing your uptothement repoinute r tonight. And the Time Magazine journalist who interviewed the president is with us here tonight when the 11 1 1th hour continues. Decades of bitter failure and to offer the American People a new future of honesty, justice and opportunity. Arent you tired of the same old li lies . While sometimes i can be too honest, Hillary Clinton is the exact opposite. She never tells the truth. In ts journey i will never lie to you. Then candidateontrump on the campaign trail back in august, promising to never lie to his supporters. Now lets take a look at the cover of the new edition of Time Magazine, is truth dead . Michael sheerer recently interviewed the president. It is a fascinating interview capped by the president s remarkable assertion that, quote, i cant be doing so badly because im president and youre not, an assertion sheerer points out is indisputably true. Michael scherer joins us now to talk about the striking nt vi interview. Thank you for joining us tonight. While it reads more chevy chase than fdr, what specifically led him to declare himself president as compared to your lowly status as citizens like the rest of us. It was the very end of the interview and it was the third time i asked him to address him if the credibility of his office was under threat when things happened like on monday when fbi comey basically came out and said his tweet about president obama wiretapping trump tower was wrong and previously hed answered it by saying did you see the crowds i had in kentucky two days earlier on monday, i had 25,000 people there. And his point was, you know, the proof of his success, the proof of the confidence he has in the American People is the election that happened last year and the support he continues to see when he travels around the country. And so i pressed him on it again and he was basically saying to me i won. And thats why im not worried. Michael, he seemed to be trying to sell you a notion that either he is a predictor of events or his words canhen cause things to seem or become true in 24 to 48 hours. What were some of the world events news stories that he put into that category . The immediate one where he said did you see what happened last night in sweden, referring to an incident in the immigrant community there. Nothing happened a night before but a couple days later there was a small riot in a suburb of sweden and he was arguing to me that that proved that what he had said before had been true. You have to sort of step back here and look at the broader frame. We tend to talk about truth and falsehood in journalism, in politics as a binary, either one or the other, black or white. He approaches it very differently. Its very much a negotiation for him. I think this comes out of his Business Career beforehand, he talked about truthful hyperbole in one of his early books. He was always selling something, selling himself and he often,age rated and often litigated reality. He did this very effectively during his campaign for president. Thats what he was doing here. He may not literally have been saying something that was true when he said it but his point was i have a great instinct and the literal words that i use dont matter as much, its the fact that im effectively right. He argued there were a number of things that were disputed at the time and werent backed up by facts at the time but that that came true and that should give him some leeway here. He talked about predicting brexit, about predicting trouble for brussels before the big terror attack there, he talked about predicting that Anthony Weiner sexting would cause trouble for Hillary Clinton, which we know did happen a couple weeks before the election. So he was speaking of his own sort of prophetic powers as a defense of some of the factual errors he said recently. Channel your inner David Mccullough and michael beschloss. As a student of politics and history at least, tough question to answer but take a whack at it. How different a president is this compared to all of the standing history of the presidency heretofore in u. S. History . Im not as good as them going back 30 or 40 years. I wouldnt want o say how Andrew Jackson approached these issues. I think can you say at least in the televised era hes taken a very different approach and ill point to just a couple specific examples. He argued repeatedly in our interview and he did it on the campaign as well that if he quotes something, hes not saying it. We have just not had a president in recent memory who has not tried to carry with his public statements a gravity of the office. Trump approaches this very differently. He can say ted cruzs fath consorted withhe man who murdered j. F. K. , even though theres no evidence because the National Enquirer quote a story about it. No one has defended it but he called the newspaper. He called the newspaper. He said it was printed, i was just repeating it. Back during the campaign, i asked him about a racist meme that he had retweeted that alleged a majority of white murders were commit bted by bla assailants. That was factually incorrect. I asked him dont you feel you should correct it . And he said thats just a tweet that i retweeted. That historically is a dramatic shift. We have to recommend to our viewers that they read the transcript and the accompanying piece of journalism with this interview. It is fascinating. Michael scherer, thank you for coming on. Thank you, brian. Our final break coming up. And after that the final test of the man who ran on his resume when the 11 1 1th hour contin. Whether youre after supreme performance. Advanced intelligence. Or breathtaking style. Theres a cclass just for you. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Lease the c300 sedan for 389 a month at your local mercedesbenz dealer. Mercedesbenz. The best or nothing. At angies list, we believe there are certain things you can count on, like what goes down doesnt always come back up. [ toilet flushes ] so when you need a plumber, you can count on us to help you find the right person for the job. Discover all the ways we can help at angies list. Because your home is where our heart is. This is not a screensaver. Game. This is the destruction of a cancer cell by the bodys own immune system, thanks to medicine that didnt exist until now. And today can save your life. Last thing before we go this evening, its useful to remember as we witnessed tonights cancelled vote on health care, as we head into tomorrows upanddown vote, this is a president who ran on his resume. More than that, on one quality in particular. I want to win. We know how to win. I want to close. Im a closer. Even in sport, ive always been a closer. If we had somebody who can get people together and knock Heads Together for a couple hours, wed win. Ive watched politicians all my life. If you cant make a good deal with a politician, then theres something wrong with you. We need a leader that wrote the art of the deal. I do hundreds of deals, the deals come out of my ears. Most of them are phenomenal deals. I want to make great deals for the people and i have the greatest negotiators in the world. Everybody wants me to negotiate. Thats what im known as as a negotiator. The test of those deal making skills will come tomorrow as the signature piece of legislation come to an uporduown vote. It has been a remarkable day a a remarkable night in the news. We have vermont senator Bernie Sanders joining us on what has been a landmark day in washington. Today is the day that democrats decided to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination. Todays the day when the Republican Congress was supposed to repeal obamacare and throw 24
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