boris sanchez joins us from the white house right now. the president has been tweeting an awful lot today, a little about the democrats, a little bit about the snow, a little bit about syria. does the president have cabin fever on this wintry day there in washington? reporter: he certainly is taking to twitter, claiming that democrats are having fun while he is back here in washington, waiting for them to discuss a potential reopening of the federal government. president trump did not specifically address any of the details contained in those two reports, both in the new york times and the washington post. he did say in the new york times report that that was an insulting report. we should point out press secretary sanders put out two statements about both of these articles. she used very similar wording to describe them, in both cases dismissing them but then calling into question president obama s toughness saying president trump had been tougher on russia than obama.
and told his interpreter not to discuss what happened with any administration officials. i want to bring in our national security analyst, who served as the assistant secretary at the department of homeland security. juliette, on friday night when we learned that the fbi had opened an investigation into whether trump was a russian asset you said this, quote, how would a president compromised by russians behave? give me any moment in the last two years where trump has behaved differently. and now we ve learned that trump has allegedly gone to extreme le lengths to conceal his conversations with putin. what say you now? second story by greg miller of the washington post about how trump tried to essentially hide the information of the discussions that we know about, right? there might be others, but that we know about between him and putin just adds to the list of unusual, weird i don t know. give it the adjective you
want behavior that trump shows only when it comes to russia and only when it comes to putin. yes, we have sanctions against russia right now. did trump embrace those? no, he fought them until congress actually passed them and his administration delayed them. does he support nato? no. nato is very concerned about the rise of russia. look at helsinki. did that look like a moment, a person tough on russia? no. it looked like someone who put russia s interests ahead of the united states. so the combination of his conduct, the hiding of the notes, the you know, attempting to undermine the mueller investigation and the firing of comey with the policy that he is enforcing against russia was my main point, which is tell me what an uncompromised president would do and trump has done the exact opposite, consistently. well, trump allies say in this case, according to the washington post reporting that he tried to conceal some of these conversations because of
putin, up to and including that astounding helsinki summit, the subject of part of that washington post report where the president met privately with putin and basically came out on the stage with vladimir putin and complimented putin and questioned the american intelligence community. garret, do you know congress tried to question that interpreter? that s a very complicated answer. and there are some legitimate executive privilege concerns stemming from the idea that presidents need to be able to have some private conversations with foreign leaders and that s not necessarily a precedent that we should want to set as a democracy and as a government but you do have to look at the pattern of behavior here which this is a president who knows
the rio grand since the 1950s. they live off the rent money dozens pay to live on the water s edge. when they say we need a wall here, what do you say to that? it s just money spent that it won t help for us. it s not going to help. the wall is not going to help at all. construction of a border wall is slated to start in february, which will leave their property sitting in a no man s land between the wall and the river, essentially cut off from the united states. so you re running out of time? yes. what can you do? you can t fight the government. we re trying. we re trying to stop them to stall a little but we can t stop the government. they ll do what they want to do. that was ed lavendera reporting. dramatic 911 tapes revealing a shocking discovery the moment health care workers discovered a patient in a coma for more than 20 years had given birth.