morning joe. it is wednesday, march 29th. we have a lot to get to this hour, including a major development in the investigation into former president donald trump s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. a federal judge has ordered mike pence to give testimony. meanwhile former trump ally chris christie appears to be willing to play the anti-trump role if he gets into the 2024 race. we ll have more on that new reporting. and we re still on so called indictment watch since the president announced, the former president, that he was going to be arrested. we ll have the latest on the manhattan grand jury s investigation into the hush money payments to a porn star. plus, an update on the continuing protests in israel, and what president biden is saying about meeting with the country s leader, along with joe, willie and me, we have the host of way too early, white house bureau chief at politico, jonathan lemire, just ran over. how does he do that? and member of
he may have information that no one else has, particularly conversations with donald trump. he s going to have to testify most likely, and this is part of a flurry of rulings, as you guys know, in recent days where the special counsel has won on these issues and has gotten court orders to compel the testimony of a variety of former aides to former president trump, including chief of staff mark meadows and people like dan scavino, and senior national security aids, like the former director of national intelligence jon ratliffe. they re going to have to testify before the grand jury investigating january 6th, and even more dangerous, i think, than any of that stuff was the ruling that s requiring the president s own lawyer to testify in the documents case, and he did that last week in front of the grand jury. that is very very dangerous for donald trump, guys. all right. ken dilanian, thank you so much.
america is back. [ applause ] reporter: german chancellor angela merkel says the u.s.-led exit, quote, sparked a domino effect that ultimately culminated in the taliban s return. this is a very bitter development. bitter, dramatic and terrible, especially for the people in afghanistan. reporter: and, wolf, we should also note from that pentagon briefing today we found out that there are u.s. fighter jets flying over kabul to ensure the security of this mission, this evacuation effort currently underway. though, officials said there have been no hostile interaction between the taliban and u.s. officials so far. all of this is likely to be front and center when there is a virtual briefing by the top national security aids with senators tomorrow, wolf. i want you to standby. i ll bring you back in just a moment. but right now i want to go to the afghan capital for a firsthand report of what s happening right now on the ground. here is our cnn chief
response. from michael cohen s plea in court yesterday, we know they did reply to him. that means the kremlin was helping cover this thing up too. just step back from this a second, right? this means, yes, during the transition, the top two national security aids in the incoming trump administration were compromised by russia. russia had leverage over them, because of them lying about their dealings with russia. also, as a presidential candidate, trump was definitely, we now know compromised by russia, he was lying about his dealings with russia, and russia knew it, and russia was helping to keep the secret. this is bad. we ve got a presidential candidate, for one thing, offering a $50 million gift, it s a gift to a foreign leader, secretly. he s compromised on that, they can expose him for that if they want to. russia has compromised him, he s lying about this on going business pursuit in russia, and
say he doesn t want to talk about it. your reporting today comes in the wake of the do not congratulate story where the president was reportedly advised in writing by his national security aids he should not congratulate president putin and called up president putin and congratulated him right away. is there concern the president s behavior towards putin, the personal level, the way he s talking to him is under cutting the policy impact of the increasing increasingly tough measures? there is particularly on that phone call. we were told the president may not have seen them but the aids decided not to brief him on that orally because he was going to do what he wanted to do anyways and so there is concern that he s, you know, he s not being tough enough in his rhetoric and that somehow diminishes the