down, ones that have been disputed by top u.s. intelligence officials. i m not going to play his comments but you need to know that they re happening. jonathan carl laid out the highlights in a tweet a couple hours ago. he tweeted this. tucker carlson says the u.s., quote, helped encourage the russian invasion, says that they engineered a coup in ukraine in the name of democracy, confirmed russian claims about bioweapons are totally and completely true. who else says this b.s.? well, vladimir putin. joining our conversation, the aforementioned jonathan carl, abc news chief washington correspondent, author of the book betrayal. ambassador michael mcfaul and rick stengel are still here. i will cop to monitoring fox news last night because i m, as an ex-republican, i m still haven t given up my fever dream that something will break the fever, that there will be this moment when fox news will break up with putin, and i thought this might be it, so i have been monitoring it.
i can craft a bill that they will go with. they didn t. the bill was presented this week. it didn t get one republican vote. so, i think that many of us and i m guessing even the president said, okay, senator manchin, we went gave you the time, you did your bill, you couldn t get a republican. now it s time for even the president to say, we ve got to deal with how we carve around the filibuster. and i think that the ammunition in terms of an argument that the president and those of us that have been pushing for the president and the senate can use now is we gave you your chance. you wanted to do your bill. we said, fine. go ahead and do your bill, senator manchin. we gave you the time. the republicans didn t give you one vote. so, now what is the excuse for him and sinema? i guess, one ex-republican here, i m not sure you needed ammunition. these bills are fueled by lies. voter suppression laws, there
it to the loonie bin and he was helped by media acting like the blast from the past to indulge his unhappy exes. mitt is still mad about trump. washington post and cnn will let him cry on the shoulder. it s tempting for mitt. it feels good to get hugs from a media who once friended you a sexist bully and hurts dogs and keeps women in binders. obama s dry laugh when mitt maybe rush is a problem. this attention is a strange new respect that s gone by tomorrow. the media may pretend to like you because you hate trump but they are just using you. the media was brutal to mitt as they are to anyone right of gastritis trump hadn t won, had a ben rubio or bush, do you think they would ve been spared? jeb would have been called a warmonger and rubio a misogynist. to the press, and only acceptable republican is an ex-republican. her name is joe scarborough.
are, they re firmly in the obstruction camp, that s the big difference between now and watergate, at the time of watergate, there were a few honest republicans who realized they could not let nixon get away with this stuff. so far, there are no republicans that are willing to stand up to trump. it s interesting what max is saying, it goes to president trump s mind-set. the republicans have formed this wall of defense around the president. publicly. they are defending him. it brings him no comfort, it doesn t calm him down. he s been a command and control person his entire life. he was taught by roy kohn and some of the other people that helped him come up in business, you get what you want and you do what it takes to get it. he had a very small family he business, he relight on family members, he relied on people like michael cohen to be fixers to deal with problems as they came up. now he s president of the united states.
on fifth avenue and his supporters would be behind him. that s why he has the hutzpa to be attacking people on twitter. you said it doesn t matter, when you re talking about the president and what i said in my opening remarks about if he says it in public. it doesn t matter if it s whispered in secret or shouted for all to hear. it doesn t matter if the investigation is stopped or not, a crime is still a crime, even if it s not carried out to a successful conclusion. the impeachment proceedings would have already started if the congressional republicans weren t including with trump to obstruct justice. what do you think when things like that are said? i m an ex-republican. they are protecting donald trump as evidence is accumulating.