the president didn t answer the question of whether he had talked or has talked to kim jong un. we can be confident there have been back channel communications going on throughout this entire public feud. the question is whether the president himself has engaged in those back channel communications. i thought what jen kelly said john kelly said was pretty stark. i believe we have run out of road. that is a pretty stunning thing for the white house chief of staff to say. we ve heard similar sentiments in the past, talking about diplomacy. it is reassuring in my view for the white house that john kelly, not taken in by the shows from north korea and the joint female ice hockey team at the olympics. this is a show they are putting on and i think there are a lot of people who would like to believe they are sincere and that after three decades of lying and insincerity, it s reassuring to know they are not taken in by that. bret: obviously a lot of questions i wanted to ask.
those words already coordinated with the interagency. sometimes and importantly with our allies and partners and in this case when you tweet about south korea, you want to include the south koreans and the japanese, as well. this doesn t appear to have that at all. the second thing is you want clarity and so bright. of course, that, tweet had none of that either. it was petulant, sophomoric and it was completely unnecessary. it was unhinged from the very good work that his national security team has been doing for many months. think about what they ve been able to get china to do. yes, they can do more but they have put in place tougher sanctions than anybody else has. i believe secretary tillerson and secretary mattis are serious when they talk about diplomacy being in the lead. i have to believe that there are at least efforts under the table to try to do something, some kind of back channel communications. this kind of thing under cuts all that. what really worried me last night whe
september th, jeff sessions had another meeting with the russian ambassador that he forgot. i did not have communications with the russians. on september 20th, wikileaks contacted donald trump junior with the password of an anti-trump website. hours later, trump junior responded and then according to the atlantic, relayed the message to senior members of the trump campaign including bannon, conway, digital director and kushner who reportedly forwarded it to hope hicks. then wednesday, hillary clinton is done with a hash tag, wikileaks. i have a back channel communications with wikileaks, but they certainly don t clear or tell me in advance what they re going to do. two days later trump junior asked behind the wednesday leak i keep reading about. there was no response. on october 7th th as trump came under fire for the access
40 years in prison and millions in fines. he s 68 years old. the rest of his life will be behind prison. the prosecutors are swinging. they re saying, judge, we want him under house arrest. we want a $5 million bail. any defense attorney will tell you, we re talking about economic crimes here. it s money laundering. you don t have economic criminal charges and $5 million bail on top of it. you don t see that. that s why they re taking such a significant approach with manafort. shepard: so if you re the prosecutor and you re trying to get manafort to tell you whatever he knows, you wait and hear what it is that he tells you before you decide whether to drop the charges. that s right. all of the back channel communications begin. his attorney came out shepard: he says he s fighting. fighting, swinging. great. obviously he s doing this to send signals to the prosecutor. we re not going to lie down here. we re going to fight it.
i think we were reporting he threatened to resign, whether or not he considered it was in his own mind. nbc s peter alexander is at the white house, he went directly to the white house to talk to the president. does it look like his job is safe? reporter: well, i guess that remains to be seen, the president appeared to be sufficiently satisfied by what he heard. he said that the secretary of state effectively refuted nbc news s reporting, but again, we didn t hear that same point made by rex tillerson earlier today, he said he wasn t going to address these sort of petty matters here. but to be here, the secretary of state katie said that the two men were on the same team and shared one mission, but it s obviously they re not on the same page and i point to what happened just a matter of days ago, you remember the secretary of state when he was overseas working on his diplomatic effort to try to diffuse the situation with north korea, said that there were some back channel communicati