Bbc anchor katty kay. From the Washington Post euGene Robinson, New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters and in new york veteran columnist and msnbc contributor mike barnicle. Good to have everyone with us this morning. We begin with this, former state department speaking out the Trump Administration planning to roll back punitive measures against russia almost as soon as he took office. Dan frooed who served until late february said colleagues asked them to appeal to congress after they were directed to develop a sanctions lifting package and to arrange a summit between trump and russian president Vladimir Putin as part of a grand bargain with moscows. To these officials it felt like a winwin for putin who said they were unclear what america got out of the deal. Quote, weve ben reviewing all the sanctions and this is not exclusive to russia. The administration backed down after senators made clear they would pass a law to enforce obamas punitive measures. But a Washington Post report we
Thats clever. Today the white house is yet again attempting to mop up yet another selfinflicted mess. A day after insisting that russia was no longer targeting the u. S. , the president went on a tweet storm. He deemed his summit with putin a success. He dubbed the media the real enemy of the people and thanked fox news for their defense of him this morning. Quote, trump recognized russian meddling many times. Many times . Many times . When . If it is russia, nobody knows. Its probably china or it could be somebody sitting in his bed. You dont know who broke into dnc. Now, whether that was russia, whether that was china, whether it was another country, we dont know. I notice any time anything wrong happens, they like to say the russians. She doesnt know if its the russians doing the hacking. Maybe there is no hacking. They always blame russia. I said it very simply. I think it could have been russia, but i think it could well have been other countries. In reality, donald trump has almo
solicitor general and no prosecutorial experience and compared to bob moouler who has been a professional prosecutor all of his life. and so you can see that starr really didn t have the experience, background to make a lot of the critical judgments about what he was doing to do, and what he shouldn t be doing, and how far to the take things, and that is reflected in some of the most controversial decision s, and the most controversial decision of all was of course to get involved in the lewinski matter in the first place. he had been appointed to the investigate the land deal, and whitewater, and that investigation dragged on for years, and then the lewinski thing came along and to the surprise of many, and including myself at the time ken starr jumped on it. michael isikof is in your
without bail charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the russian government. a gq magazine correspondent and daniel goldman, guys, russian roulette, that book by david corn and michael isikof talks about that moment we saw when butina is asking president trump or then candidate trump a question, how she got there, how she asked the candidate that and why the candidate said he would not be for sanctions. it was ithe first time he said that. they said much later trump s campaign advisors would watch the video of this encounter and wonder about it. steve bannon raised it with rnc chair reince priebus, how was it that this russian woman happened to be in las vegas for the event and how was it that trump happened to call on her? and trump s response, it was odd, bannon thought, that trump had a fully developed answer.
way? look, i don t know. april, would you know that? i don t know, either, but i will tell you this, today in the white house briefing, i asked sarah huckabee sanders, you know, if donald trump jr. did collude with russia, and she said, absolutely not. she said, certainly not. so she was firm with that. i asked her about other people and she could not give as firm an answer, but she s saying he did not collude. so, i don t know how the family operates, but this they re standing by him, at least earlier today, they were standing by donald trump jr. so i ask you, mark, i asked these guys because we ve all been covering the trump family for a couple years now. michael, i m sure for a lot longer than all of us. nothing to do with age, just because you ve been on the beat. would that happen, would donald trump operate, you think donald trump jr. operate outside the bounds of his father?