the big thing now is whether trump decides that shutdown politics work for him. they normally don t. they never really have. for either side. but if you talk about focusing attention on a shutdown versus focusing the attention on the fact that i m now criminally liable and the russians colluded and there s a russian spy in court today, my former lawyer was sentenced yesterday, for trump, that may be better politics. that s a wild, wild, wild theory of look over there, to shut the government down so you don t focus on russia. it is wild, it is irresponsible, and it s totally possible. doug? yeah, you know, one thing that donald trump and his team are very good at, they play star wars with us all the time and basically say these are not thedroids you re looking for. we go down a rabbit hole that distracts us from what is typically the news of the day. that s a skill that donald trump has. we fall for it every time. i m guilty of it as well. i would tell you that shutdowns aren t
khashoggi s murder are unraveling. new york times columnist nick kristof with us tonight to weigh in as the 11th hour gets under way on a tuesday night. and good evening once again from our msnbc news headquarters here in new york. day 642 of the trump administration, and the president appears to be gearing up for another meeting with putin of russia, just days after the midterm elections are concluded in this country. and of course it was just days ago when the feds identified the latest russian accused of meddling in our elections. in fact, our upcoming midterm elections. today trump s national security adviser john bolton met with vladimir putin in moscow. the focus was trump s decision to pull out of a three-decade-old nuclear arms control treaty, but the idea of another face-to-face sitdown was apparently not far from putin s mind. president putin said in the
another meeting with putin days after our midterm elections? it s a great question because they haven t really answered that one yet. the president has not yet been back overseas since his helsinki trip. he s not met with foreign leaders on foreign soil since that trip. there s been no particular outcome from that meeting that we ve seen, at least publicly. and there s no build-up to the idea that this meeting s going to be a breakthrough on any particular issue of contention between the two. it s going to come right after the midterm election, so at that point there will be a new congress having been elected. we don t know if the democrats will win the house or the republicans, but there could be a seismic shift in the electoral landscape here in the united states. and there could be concerns or issues about whether russia had played a role in that election. we ve already seen robert mueller indict one person, one russian just in the last few days for trying to intervene in the 2018
putin standing right there next to him, still viewed by so many as a low point in his presidency. just now president putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. every intelligence agency has concluded that russia did. who do you believe? president putin, he just said it s not russia. i will say this. i don t see any reason why it would be. president putin, did you want president trump to win the election? translator: yes, i did. the president did try to clear all that up when he came home, but the damage was largely done. today in moscow, john bolton said he talked with putin about election interference generally, and he was asked if he thought russia was trying to meddle in the upcoming vote just two weeks away here. we re obviously monitoring the potential for foreign interference in our elections across the board very closely. fbi director christopher wray said about a month ago that we didn t detect anything like the
treaty, which by the way it was constantly violating anyway but because of the move that john bolton pulled now russia looks like the adult in the room that actually wants to talk details and complexities and negotiate and keep the parameters of this treaty in place. which by the way it needs to. it s expensive to do all this stuff and russia is not flush with cash right now. their gdp is smaller than that of the state of texas, as i always try to point out. clirnths i hate to skip out, but just because bolton repeat td on russian soil. this notion that the chinese are a real problem, they re the guys you guys ought to see about meddling. you ve written about the russian meddling in our elections. and elsewhere. can you address it once and for all? yeah. it is a bait and switch. let s focus on china, don t focus on russia. the problem is the senior intelligence officer probably said what china is doing in cyberspace, meaning in terms of hacking, is on a much grander scale. or has b