the senate must pass those tax cuts. bring main street roaring back. and that s what s going to happen. in all fairness this is going to cost me a fortune, this thing, believe me, believe me. this is not good for me. me it s not so i have some very wealthy friends not so happy with me but that s okay. wait till you see what finally comes out in what i call the mixer. the beating heart of our plan is a tax cut for working families. that s what it is. i will tell you this in a nonbraggadocios way. [ laughter ] there has never been a ten-month president that has accomplished what we have accomplished, that i can tell you. that i can tell you. welcome back to hardball. president trump being modest as always, touting the republican tax bill which appears to be headed towards passage tomorrow morning, perhaps. senate. s cleared a major hurdle when arizona senator john mccain signed off on the legislation.
mueller, who s an experienced prosecutor at the federal level, might be looking at a rico charge, criminal enterprise, looking at all these tidbits put together and saying they show an effort to make money along the way to the presidency. right. right now it seems like you have two tracks that mueller s taking. the obstruction track, and the collusion track. the one that is most dangerous for the president is of course the obstruction track. but in terms of his questioning of paul manafort, rick gates, mike flynn, it seems he s using the possible penalties with rico and with money laundering, tax fraud, things like that, in order to pressure them to tell him what happened during the 2016 election, to kind of get to the bottom of whether or not there actually was collusion or whether there were more meetings that we don t know about or more communication between trump campaign officials and the russians. what s your sense of this almost bumper cars, there s so many people being inte
that they re not expecting. and ideally they wouldn t have to defend. but in terms of if you re asking who are the adults who walk into the oval office, i think there is still a sense that it is sort of the generals, it is general kelley, it is mcmaster, it is mattis. it s obviously not quite tillerson anymore. but there are sort of these adults around him who people have correctly or uncorrectly pinned their hopes on, can sort of reason with the president if that s what the situation requires. usually sometimes we teal with israelis, for example, very smart governing group, i think they re playing chess, we re playing checkers. right now i don t know if we re up to checkers. netanyahu, is he worried about jared kushner, worried about tillerson? trying to shine up the president? how do you, if you re a smart foreign leader, find the way to the brain of our country now? it ultimately we re playing a big game of sorry! when we should be playing chess as you said. and really you h
obstruction or has ever been given orders to an obstruct this investigation? i guess the second question is the more pertinent one. i think it suggests that, in all likelihood, he was asked to do something and he declined to answer that question. he was, as he has been in many other settings, conveniently amnesia-hit by much of what s been asked of him. and often would just respond by saying i do not recall, i do not recall. when he was asked the question by congressman schiff, he just declined to answer it altogether. what valid justification could he have for not answering that question? executive privilege? what is he talking about when he says, i can t answer that? he is just declining to answer it. he can t invoke executive privilege. he says that he wants to position himself in such a way so that if the president does invoke executive privilege, he
average republican who voted for trump is not going to do well here. what do they get and why do they have to pay off their donors? i have a sneaky suspicion in your party, donna, doesn t mind this, because a, their contributors make a lot of money out of this tax deal, and they get to run against him, it s perfect, it s a two-fer, they get all their fat cats saying, hey, thanks for not getting in the way of the republicans, giving us a tax break. by the way, we get to run against it. well, come on, chris. i think they d much rather make sure [ cross talk ] do you think policy and the they ve done a great job stopping this bill? there s definitely more grass roots i don t think they have to they don t have to what? they don t have to do anything because the republicans, to your point, they have to get something done, so this is one of those things where they got john mccain in a room and said, look, if you don t sign on to this thing and we don t get something done, w