have a hard time talking well, that s a perfect entry into my next question. it is people like you that would probably raise their eyebrows as to what his outgoing chief of staff told the los angeles times today saying that it s not a wall, it s never really been about a wall. do you believe the chief of staff, or is that one of the reasons he s leaving? i m glad you asked. look, i have enormous respect for general kelly. i ve been invited with him into a lot of conversations in the white house to talk about this very issue as part of the president s hispanic council, about the wall, about immigration. he s probably, i would say, more hardline than the president on issues of immigration. remember, he was head of dhs. head of southern command as well. so he s hardly a permissive open border or porous border guy. quite the opposite. but the semantics of a wall, i mean, how do we define wall? i think a working definition is something that s hard to get through, whether it has
campaign chairman for donald trump. so it s an extraordinary connection. yeah, matthew, good thing you were there to ask those tough questions. also pretty remarkable that deripaska used the term fake news in his response to you. terrific reporting. matthew chance, thank you, live from moscow. with us now to discuss this, former u.s. assistant attorney for the southern district of new york, also a cnn legal analyst, and knee deep in all the reporting on this russia situation. i mean, what you have here are allegations that paul manafort owed this russian oligarch, who is connected to vladimir putin, millions of dollars and that one of the ways he may have been offering to pay that off was to get meetings with then-candidate trump. is this the smoking gun? could this be the collusion conspiracy that robert mueller may be looking for? it could lead us there. it s a reminder of just how deeply compromised paul manafort was when he was named the campaign chairman in march of 2016. th
this art of the deal well, guy, it never actually did pass the house. the house passed a different version. they passed a bill that had no border wall funding. and that s all reporting. we don t know what he was considering or not considering. thankfully he came down on the side of he says the vice president told senators. we know that. the vice president told senators he was going to it wasn t public. look, here s the point. the promise for the wall was a foundational promise of 2016. perhaps the foundational promise. he was unambiguous. the people handed him that mandate. the mexicans can still pay. that s easy to do down the road, very easy. tax remittances. let me tell you this. if the president does not hold the line on this, people like me, people who worked hard for his 2016 election, are going to
well, okay. now let s have a deal. let s cut a deal. i believe in the deal, but you got to give something. what mcauliffe was saying was no deal, no negotiation. that s the opposite of leadership, guy. this is the problem with the democrats getting control of the house. their agenda is antagonism, resistance. resistance is not governing. you don t know. they haven t even taken office yet. they were for the wall before they were against it, to channel john kerry, because they voted for 700 miles of border barricades. senators named obama, clinton, biden, schumer all voted for serious border barricades before it became an issue of donald trump. let s move on to a different topic. i have you both here. you re both experts on a lot of these topics. i want to move on. guy, you ve hinted about it. this new phase of the investigation into russia once democrats take over. they re going to have a ton of subpoena power. impeachment is in the background. you know a lot about impeach
barriers on the border which is something they can do. you will see exactly that part of what the military does so well. defensive positions. you funnel people toward a particular entry point then can you deal with them there. that supports the border agents as well. i will say this. they say all the time a military guy replace as border guy. anybody who knows headquarters. if you have a border patrol guy who has been in headquarters for years and suddenly an army guy shows up, is he not well-seasoned to be on the border either. it s not a one for one swap. it s the right move. doesn t exponentially increase our ability to enforce the border. brian: use a gun? self-defense, that s it. ainsley: operational faithful pilot. pete: patriot. three helicopters companies on the border as well. ainsley: what will they be doing? moving border patrol agents to two locations where they otherwise couldn t go. brian: show me your lining please, pete? pete: only for brian.