not even on his level. these are not stateheads. these are smaller people. he wants to punch down when they are people of color or women, what is that? listen, i ve been thinking of that since it happened, people say he s always about race, it s not necessarily always about race. it s about race until it s not. so someone said this today, this is a gold star mother, she said this on cnns air, i want to get your response. let s play it. the sentence that he said after that, which was i suppose it must hurt anyway speaks more to his personality and his feelings about maybe people of color. that it just didn t it didn t ring true.
there s anything routine for green berets, but it did not go that way. when the firefight and ambush broke out, niger does not allow air strikes in its country, so the only thing that could be done to help them was 30 minutes later some french aircraft came in and flew low passes over the battle area to scare off the isis fighters and it was only after that that they were able to get evacuation forces in to help them. barbara starr, thank you very much. as john said, you have been on top of this from the beginning. we know you will continue to be and appreciate it. with us now is gold star mother, karen meredith. she comes from a long line of families that served this country in the military, and lost her only child, her son in iraq in 2004. he joined the army out of high school in 1995, and stationed in iraq in 2003 and was given the chance to lead his own platoon.
[ inaudible ] as far as the stance we take, the tactical efforts we take and the force detection efforts and the capabilities, i don t telegraph that. i don t want to tell the enemy what we re doing. so i prefer not to answer that. and we honor our fallen in america. and that s all the more i ll say about the gold star thing. thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. and that s the defense secretary james mattis answering some of the tough questions that are still lingering out there. what exactly happened in niger that led to the death of four americans? what are we exactly know about what went wrong with that mission? and about the recovery operation. joining me from the pentagon correspondent hans nichols from washington. you heard the top of that, we did not, did we learn something new there? well, i think we learned the extent of the full investigation is taking place and the fact the secretary of defense is fully behind that and they want to gather all the facts and then h
and generally if a gold star parent, gold star mother is grieving and has something to say, we should listen. and i think that s where the president went wrong is in following up beyond that and trying to make it about himself. it s not about him. it s about myesha johnson, it s about her children, her unborn child and the lifetime that they ll have now to have to deal with this. a child who will never know his or her father. gold star brother dante zapalla, thank you so much. hope you honor your brother s memory by coming here. we appreciate your time. thank you so much for having me. for the most part former president george w. bush has stayed on the political sidelines since leaving the white house, but not today. he stood up to take a stand against hate and bigotry calling on americans to remember what makes us americans, unity. bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the american creed. we ve seen our discourse
you then had right after he became officially the nominee at the convention, immediately harmed himself by attacking the wife of a gold star mother, suggesting she might not have spoken because she was a muslim woman as opposed to a grieving mother which is why she didn t speak. you ve had a serious. the cycle played out over and over again with trump. it doesn t mean he doesn t settle in. people have various ways of dealing with anxiety and stress. clinton did, obama was the least visible on this, frankly. but people have various ways of dealing with this. trump has never been an elected official before. his first elected office is the presidency. that s a big deal. i think there were a lot of things at play on saturday. i think the problem is not that he s having this kind of sort of episode, but i think the problem