independent actor meeting with don jr., jared kushner and paul manafort in june of 2016. the times notes that the information contradicts the story from the trump team that it s a useless meeting of adoptions that didn t go anywhere. this morning before the russia developments broke, donald trump tweeted, it is now commonly agreed after many months of costly looking, that there was no collusion of russia and trump. was collusion with hc! congressman schiff reports, mr. president, the special counsel and the congress have come to no conclusions yet. we ll let you know when we do. joining us now is ken delaney, a reporter for nbc news, and malcolm nance, msnbc counter terrorism and intelligence expert. natasha, we re scrambling to confirm this news from cnn. what do you think is the import of it? well, we are not there yet, joy. we have not confirmed it to our satisfaction and so going to
well, number of analysts i have spoken to said it s unlikely that the russians would have been able to target the ads the way they targeted them, target the people they targeted during the campaign without any help from americans who would have had the kind of knowledge of the sbi ka sys of american politics to really be able to figure out who was going to be vuler in to the fake newses, who was most, you know, susceptible to changing the vote as a result of this barrage of disinformation and propaganda. an enthat according to people i have spoken to very much something they thought that americans would have had to have been involved in. isn t that their expertise. data mining and data analysis. indeed. thank you very much. appreciate it. thank you. coming up, on a big news night, my interview of tom steyer on a mission to get donald trump impeached. nick was born to move.
the constitution, and the words high crimes and misdemeanors written by alexander hamilton, it s a question really of violating your trust with the constitution and the american people. and the one that traditionally has been used is when you re obstructing justice which mr. trump definitely did when he fired the head of the fbi for trying to investigate him with regards to his ties to russia. so from the standpoint of high crimes and misdemeanors, i think people should go back to the original text, understand what the framers of the constitution were describing and understand that historically this president is more than met that, that line in the sand. yeah. should democrats run on if you put us in charge of the house we ll impeach donald trump? do you think that s a winning message for democrats? you know, i m not doing this from a cynical, political standpoint, joy. i believe that our country is at risk and i believe we should be telling the truth about this.
undermined. we can argue the impact and whether it was successful and whether it influenced the election or not and yet the republicans who claimed to be patriotic more than anyone else, dissing the intelligence community an endoid doing nothi deal with what happened in the past and not dealing with the future. that s surprising. the things you were working on this week, also before this big news or potential news broke tonight, you had the news that the attorney who met with donald trump jr. and paul manafort and jared kushner directly connected or using talking points shared with kremlin sources and your reporting on the connections between the data firm that was run by paul manafort i m sorry, steve bannon and this potential sort of outreach to wikileaks. so, i mean, i think for a lot of people it is very confusing. this sort of russia scandal is so far reaching.
details about the research firm that worked with the trump campaign in the election. the wall street journal has new reporting on rebecca mercer who partly owns the firm and according to the journal rebecca mercer asked the chief executive who was working for donald trump s presidential campaign whether the company could better organize the hillary clinton e-mails released by wikileaks. according to a person familiar with their e-mail exchange. here s how congressman adam schiff, the ranking member of the house intelligence committee, described the wikileaks connection today on morning joe. here you have not only the head of the data analytics arm of the campaign reaching out to someone the cia director says is a foreign intelligence agency affiliated with and working with the russians and peter smith in contact with flynn apparently and also reaching out to likely russians on the dark web the look for these e-mails.