after president trump scolded allies in his nato address and failed to sign on to a climate change agreement at the g7 summit german chance lar angela merkel suggested europe can no longer entirely rely on the you states. she emphasized europe must take its destiny into its own hands. joining me now are steve clemons, editor at large of the atlantic and an msnbc contributor, john finer, form earp chief of staff to secretary of state john kerry, and gordon chang is a daily beast columnist and author of many books including nuclear showdown north korea takes on the world. gentlemen, good to see you here. thank you for joining us on memorial day. steve, let s start with you. angela merkel said what people have been thinking. there has been an erosion in u.s. relations with our european allies. we have a president who has articulated things other american presidents have been concerned about in the past. but there s never been a question that the u.s. and europe are together when it
getting access to the leaders they are traveling with. the united states has a traveling press pool that can only get off-camera briefings, and all they want, hallie jackson and others to do is say their accomplishments and show the pictures that are coming either from foreign press or submitted to them by the white house of him holding the oar or doing the sword dance. this does not feel like a western, open democratic press to me. this is not what the united states does. joy, it s not extraordinary. it s outrageous. it s outrageous because donald trump works for the american people. he works for you, me, all of us. and the purpose of what he is doing is he is doing something or supposed to be doing something for the benefit of all of us collectively. we re not seeing that right now. and that s the outrage. last word to you malcolm nantz. this is orchestrating and micromanaging it in a way that does not feel like western democracy to me. i jokingly have said that donald trump ha
this briefing was the second one that was not on camera. we asked for it to be on camera. the ground rules were, no, it was going to be off camera, although on the record. i would characterize the mood in the room, regardless of what the administration wanted to talk about, the reporters had a series of questions relating to the domestic issues and continued pressing on those questions, despite the administration officials in the room continuing to essentially and it s extraordinary. cannot say it enough how unusual that is. nbc s hallie jackson. thank you for joining us from italy. appreciate it. back with me, malcolm nantz and jack rice. i stress that. they did not want to deal with the kushner news. they batted that away and sent h.r. mcmaster out there to be the guy. he seemed not to want to take too many bullets. he punted the question about kushner. how unusual is it for the traveling american press pool not to get live briefings with the president they are traveling with a
special counsel to manage this investigation going forward. i think our critical question has to be, can they really be independent? all right. senator chris coons, thank you for making time tonight. joining meow is malcolm nantz and karen greenberg, director of the center on national security at author of rogue justice, the making the security state. amy, let me begin with you because you worked in a legal position in the department of justice. it strikes me we re sort november unchartered territory here in so far as when is the last time we had an active fbi counterintelligence investigation that had the president s own campaign within its scope and the president fired the fbi director? all of these events are clearly unprecedented. it s a sad day for the department of justice. and i did work there for 20 years. i don t like criticizing the department of justice but the department of justice is all
this is not how you if you want to fire somebody. and it makes you ask the question, why did president trump do this in a way that jim comey was unprepared? so i think that s actually a very important question that isn t being raised. was the investigation about to go into another step? or did comey not have chance to prepare for this? and so the question is, really, did comey have some sense that he needed to put his house in order in case he were taken out? so i think that s a very important question. i think it is true everybody was stunned. i m not sure they should have been, but i think that you wonder why this didn t happen in january and was the reason to sort of not do anything to catch him off guard and to catch the department and the fbi off guard? i think that s right. malcolm, do you have confidence that whatever the status of and i want to be clear here. it is totally possible that the