Daniels . Prosecutors say trump directed illegal hush money to two women. When during the campaign i would say mexicos going to pay for it. Obviously i never said this and i never meant theyre going to write out a check. They may even write out a check by the time they see what happens. They may. Mr. President , did you know Paul Manafort was sharing polling data from your campaign with the russians . No, i didnt know anything about it. Nothing about it. So he denied knowing about the Stormy Daniels pay off. He denied knowing mexico would write a check for the wall and he did know that. And he denied knowing his campaign was sharing polling information with russia. It is friday. Along with joe, willie and me, we have National Affair analyst and msnbc cohost, executive producer of showtimes the circus, John Heilemann, republican strategist and msnbc contributor rick tyler is with us as well. Joe, this shutdown, it continues. Its getting painful. People are getting paychecks today with a
ridiculed by some of his right-wing opponents. and to your point, noah ross pointed out a few examples of how conservative republicans not only didn t go along with the wall plan but actually were hostile to it. senator john cornyn stood next to donald trump yesterday but less than two years ago he said i don t think we re just going to be able to solve border security with a physical barrier because people can come under, around it and through it. lindsey graham now asking the president to declare a national emergency, but graham said the border wall is probably not a smart investment. and the wall stro the wall stre found in republican lawmakers from southwest border states who defended trump s funding request to start funding the wall. in a usa today survey found
less than a quarter congressional republicans would endorse border wall funding. james, i could go on and on and on. there s so many examples of that hostility. we don t have to go back to two years ago, your first point is equal li equally effective, let s go back a week or two and this were fine keeping the government open. go back to december 18th and all the newspapers reported on a voice vote where there was no sort of recorded opposition, entire senate under mitch mcconnell had passed kind of clean funding bill that we re talking about no that said, okay, let s keep the rest of the government going and we ll worry about the wall later on. and senator john cornyn of texas was saying we have every indication the president was behind this. december 18th is the state of play. december 19th is when ann coulter, rush limbaugh, the fox news apparatus started saying what a concession, what a
system. heilemann. i m going to ask you a question that s not directly about the book but did you read the book, john? i sped read through this thing index. no. there is an index. you have to look and see if your name s not in it, people won t read it. i looked to see if barnicle s name is mentioned. he s mentioned like 37 times in the book so it s worth reading. the woman who wrote this book sits on the senate judiciary committee and next week will begin the process of confirming a new attorney general, who has written some things as a private citizens, expressing a lot of criticism and doubt of the special counsel, someone who has not been meeting with a lot of your democratic colleagues. i don t know if you ve met with him or not yet. i have not. tell me what your attitude is. what are the kinds of questions you want to ask him and what do you think your recommendation, your vote for his confirmation or not, what are the things on
but all you have to do is look at the history of what the national enquirer has done. you can ask you guys, as you just said you were threatened but ask ted cruz and the stories that were planted in the newspaper about alleged affairs that were proved to be completely untrue. so now it s a matter of public knowledge that the national enquirer was in bed with donald trump and working on his behalf. the question is would they continue it after they struck a deal with the southern district. donald trump is still trying to convince americans that a renegotiated trade deal is the same as mexico paying for the wall and it seems like the buck has stopped with just about every president in recent memory except for donald trump. we ll explain that. plus, john meacham jones us on the 30th anniversary of ronald ray gonereagan s farewell addre.