mome from michael flynn s guilty plea to big question marks at the state department, lots to talk about this morning on gps, we ll get right to it. david stanger national security correspondent for new york times. and a columnist at time and julia yoffe, staff writer at the lan tibatlantic. david, where do we stand now? if you looked in february, the white house said basically, we had no contact with the russians. where are we now? well, fareed, since february, we ve discovered at least nine members of the trump transition team, or their the campaign
over. and that really changes and limits the choices the president has, including whether or not he wants to try to shoot one of these down, if it s approaching american territory, whether he wants to go do a preemptive strike, or whether, as i suspect, we ll just end up living with it. julia, at a time like this where you have this huge crisis, it seems an odd thing to have a changeover at state to sideline or fire rex tillerson, and in any case, tillerson doesn t seem to be effective at state in order to function. he doesn t have a point man for east asia or a point woman for east asia. so many positions unstaffed. he seems intent on gutting the state department, driving out the most senior, most experienced diplomats, who will take decades to replace to get people up to snuff. if we ever get another chance to restaff these positions. but i think also, it s a weird
it all starts with a wish. the lincoln wish list event is here. sign and drive off in a new lincoln with zero down and a complementary first months payment. where we can find common ground. big enough to dance on. for a better us, donate to your local y today. and we are back with david sanger, ian bremer and julia yoffe. we could talk about flynn forever, but let s get to real substance, by which i mean, north korea, foreign policy substance.
ability to reach the united states is just about there. so this game is pretty much over. and that really changes and limits the choices the president has, including whether or not he wants to try to shoot one of these down, if it s approaching american territory, whether he wants to go do a preemptive strike, or whether, as i suspect, we ll just end up living with it. julia, at a time like this where you have this huge crisis, it seems an odd thing to have a changeover at state to sideline or fire rex tillerson, and in any case, tillerson doesn t seem to be able to function. and he doesn t have a point man for east asia or point woman for east asia. he seems intent on getting the state department, driving out the most senior, most experienced diplomats, who will take decades to replace to get people up to snuff. if we ever get another chance to restaff these positions. but i think also, it s a weird
seems to be though we don t know the details of that discussion yet, that what he was doing was essentially saying, hold on. don t retaliate. we ll take care of this once we come into office. now, the question is, why would he lie about this? and why would you actually make promises to a foreign government before you are in office? the right answer would have been, we hear your concerns, mr. ambassador, and we re happy to take it up with you at 12:30 p.m. on january 20th, but we can t until that time. and so now the question is, who else knows, and as we reported in the times today, my colleagues reported that, in fact, there were many others who were consulted about these interactions with ambassador kislyak. and as you said, you know, why does everybody keep lying about this if it s all very harmless. julia, again, big picture. remind us, why is it that the trump administration seems to have been trying to be nice to the russians? isn t that sort of the question is, all these