phone calls, meetings. i had a private meeting with the vice president at one point. is it hard at that point you ran on repealing obamacare. this is the time. the bell is ringing. go. i had an opportunity when we were at the white house the second time we were over there, and it was a very directed appeal, that we need to come together as republicans. i made a statement to the president with my colleagues and with his team there that i m not voting for the republican party. i m voting for the people of alaska. and i remember being so proud of you for saying directly to the president what your obligations were. and that s the way i feel, too. the people of maine don t expect me to be a rubber stamp.
what we what do we know? if you believe the intelligence agencies, which i do, because i have no reason not to. what we know is they unanimously agree that russia meddled in this election, to aid donald trump and to hurt hillary clinton. what we don t know broadly speaking we don t have the full picture of how they did that. now, i would argue, and i would take the senator s word for it, but what we re trying to do from a journalistic perspective is we re trying to unveil as much of that picture as we can. do we know more about it as it relates to the donald trump jr. meeting in 2016? we do. do we know if that s 20% of it? 5% of it? 80% of it? we don t. we re looking at the we see one little piece. go ahead. i m sorry. you mention that you know there is a donald trump meeting.
campaign, t a campaign, it s all irrelevant if you want to talk about the election. we re not talking about the election. i don t think it came out of my mouth. this is not about russian interference. you know what? it is exactly about that. i think one of the reasons that this meeting is so troubling is because what the president had called a hoax, and a witch hunt is now demonstrably not that because russian people reached out, and not, like, citizens. not just, like, good people from russia but a lawyer of very specific contacts reached out to his son with a solicitation of negative information about his political opponent we had this conversation. it shows it s not a witch hunt. what happened in the meeting? what do we know? we know why we hent to the meeting. it s hard to know what happened in the meeting. you want to relitigate, and not cover the honor system this
sourcing, they believe that now infamous don junior meeting over at trump tower along with paul manafort, russian attorneys, jared kushner, for a minute there, that the original statement, which said no, no, no and i m entirely abbreviating this for you, but no, this was about adoption, when in actuality, when the e-mails came out, we clearly saw it was about getting dirt on hillary clinton. this was the original statement because we just heard sarah huckabee sanders saying the president weighed in, didn t dictate but did weigh in offering suggestions. the original statement here, so we re all on the same page, we primarily discussed a program about the adoption of russian children that was active and popular with american families years ago and was since ended by the he goes on, russian government. but it was not a campaign issue at the time, and there was no follow-up. let me play some sound too. this is from one of president trump s lawyers saying that the president had nothing to
think, this is the third or fourth time i ve done it just today is to stop the nuclear program, stop the missiles, stop the aggression. that s what we re focused on. in regards to north korea, and we re going to continue pushing on that, continue working with our allies and partners to accomplish that and do what is necessary to achieve it. are they an add veversary? i think in some ways, they get to decide by the actions that they take. if they want to stop their nuclear program, stop the game, stop the missiles, stop the aggression, we may be able to find ways to move forward but those are the priorities of this administration. secretary mnuchin had a meeting on the hill this morning with senate leaders about the debt ceiling. apparently, according to reports, they didn t get anywhere. obviously, this has the potential to affect the stock market rally that the president is so pleased with. i think the whole country s pleased. yes, that s true. do you have any reason to beli