where white house communications director kate benningfield was asked is ukraine winning? could ukraine win? and she was very, very careful, again, to not engage in sort of that narrative and sort of engaging in the question of who is winning this war. now, the war as it has been more protracted and as we have seen just the atrocities, the images of the horrific casualties that we re seeing from ukraine, there is a realization and a growing recognition that it is so important to try to stop vladimir putin, but also to make sure that the country is weakened, including militarily so that this kind of thing cannot be repeated in the future, anderson. mj lee, appreciate it. thank you. the secretary of state s trip to ukraine and the return of american diplomats to the country shortly before air time i spoke with state department spokesperson ned price.
know the answer to that. i think he should release it. i think we should know that answer. at the white house, communications director kate benningfield said this about donald trump s request. so what i would say about that is what kind of american, let alone an ex-president thinks that this is the right time to enter into a scheme with vladimir putin and brag about his connections to vladimir putin. there is only one, and it s donald trump. joining me now is peter strzok, former deputy assistant director at the fbi counter intelligence division. he led the fbi investigation into russian interference in the 2016 election. he s also the author of compromised counter intelligence and the threat of donald j. trump, i took a bite of lentils during the break, and they re getting stuck in my throat. i apologize. let me ask you about where we stand right now right now with russia from a u.s. intelligence perspective, from a counter intelligence perspective, what
white house communications director, kate benningfield had to say. listen. we have information that putin felt misled by the russian military, which has resulted in persistent tension between putin and his military leadership. we believe that putin is being miss and foreign by his advisers, about how badly the russian military is performing, and how the russian economy is being crippled by sanctions, because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth. can you shed some light on what this strategy here is? why are they releasing this kind of intelligence, publicly? they were very effective in the lead up to the war, with russia s plans. is this also in that same light? well, i think first off, it is important to just get information out, because very little information is getting to the russian people, is even getting to vladimir putin, as she says. so putting these things out in a very public way for the united states gives them a better chance of penetrating, so th
reporter: well, what the white house is saying this morning and we heard from kate benningfield they re going to get this done. we heard time over time this trip for the president was not a deadline he was racing to meet in terms of gets his infrastructure bill over the finish line. let s listen to what the president himself has been saying. he told lawmakers behind closed doors he wanted to have the climate pieces in place by the time he went to glasgow for the major climate summit. he said their seats in congress, majorities, was on the line in trying to get this done. what the president effectively tried to get done yesterday was will this process draw to a conclusion sooner rather than later? he was hoping to have a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure plan yesterday to effectively move it to his desk so he could sign it.
with the taliban to bring some order to the situation and bring an efficiency and a volume to the evacuations of both american citizens and our afghan allies. there are tens of thousands of people, the president has said up to 65,000 afghan allies and their families. we ve seen estimates of 10 to 15,000 americans still in the country who they want to get out. but kate benningfield, the white house communication director acknowledged to our colleague brianna keilar this morning that the united states doesn t have a firm handle on exactly how many americans there are. how many americans still in afghanistan? do you have a number. we don t have a precise number and there is say reason for that. it is because the number of people of americans in afghanistan includes people who may have left the country, who may have left over the course of the last six months. so what we re doing is working to identify how many americans