vice president mike pence was quick out with a statement saying he knew nothing about this, no contact with wikileaks, something he had also said during the campaign. don jr. s lawyers were very quick to respond to this. one response i have not gotten though, which i have asked for, is response from trump s lawyers so they have yet to weigh in on this. phil rucker, it was extraordinary this weekend to see, again, how far the president went out of his way to accommodate and show kindness to vladimir putin. in that one case we mentioned at the expense of the home team. that s right, and it s not that surprising because over the course of his presidency, and even during that transition period, president trump has cast doubt on the findings of the u.s. intelligence community that russia did, indeed, meddle and interfere with the 2016 election. that is a definitive finding by his cia, by his fbi, by all of these agencies, and trump has not taken it seriously or even believed it fully. t
and during dinner in manila last night, philippine president duterte serenaded trump with a traditional love song. so that s right up there on the top-ten list. the next day trump said the two have a great relationship and he laughed as duterte called the media spies for trying to ask questions. part of a remarkable weekend for the president that also saw him trolling the head of north korea via twitter. why would kim jong-un insult me by calling me old whether i would never call him short and fat? oh, well, i try to hard to be his friend and maybe some day that will happen. when asked about that, his chief of staff john kelly told reporters he zecht, quote, follow the tweets, adding, quote, we don t. i don t. i don t allow the staff to. we know what we re doing. with us from manila, the philippines, jonathan la mere, white house reporter for the associated press and an msnbc political analyst who now has thousands more miles on his
how much of that is correlated in time, how much of that is causal? causal because of any back-channel communications between people like donald trump jr. and roger stone and others within the trump camp who may have been in touch with wikileaks throughout the campaign. shannon, how germane to the story is the fact i guess the way the math works out, it broke when the traveling white house was sleeping on the other side of the world? once again, the president on a foreign trip right as some news about don jr. e-mails is breaking. remember it s almost like deja vu. we re got even one year into this administration. when the president was coming back to the middle east and trying to come up with a response to those don jr. e-mails between the russian lawyer that were coming out. so, yes, this story broke. we don t know if the president was awake or asleep at that time. he has been keeping odd hours in asia. we don t really know yet what was the response was. certainly everyone back he
don junior a link to help him spread the contents of those stolen e-mails. trump junior did not respond, but then 15 minutes later, candidate donald trump posted this on twitter. very little pickup by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by wikileaks. so dishonest. rigged system. donald trump jr. has now confirmed the existence of these conversations. he posted screenshots of his own of the messages on twitter writing, here is the entire chain of messages with wikileaks with my whopping three responses. which one of the congressional committees has chosen to selectively leak. how ironic. meanwhile, that news came after president trump tried to do some damage control on the last leg of his asia trip. he s walking back comments he made defending russian president vladimir putin and insulting the u.s. intelligence community. trump told reporters onboard air force one he believed putin s assertion that he didn t interfere with the u.s. election. he said, in effect, he
certainly in public anyway. and it adds a new complexion to that episode. and peter, more than that, i m reading from your transcript, he says of comey, look at his testimony. his testimony is loaded up with lies, okay? so he s accusing comey of perjury. you and i have both noted that comey in terms of kind of his bearing and demeanor has been someone people have said could be mueller s son in terms of washington veterans over the years. we established that he kind of updated his view of the second pull aside meeting with putin at the dinner but he also updated his view of the meeting trump tower, don junior a year ago that is getting so much attention. yeah, he did. it s nas fascinating. he said we did talk about adoptions and he noted the irony of that coming up with his putin conversation given that it had been in theory at least the topic of conversation that don junior had with those rushes back in june of 2016. he said he didn t know about the