welcome back, everyone. i m alex witt at msnbc world headquarters in new york. 34 past the hour. here s what we re monitoring. we re going to politics and the senate race in alabama with just three days left until voters take to the polls. democrats are deploying the most high profile black lawmakers hoping they can help doug jones defeat roy moore. nbc s vaughn hill is outside the brown chapel ame church in alabama. doug jones is set to speak there in a little bit. welcome to you. give me a sense of people s state of mind there, particularly following the president s endorse plenty for roy moore. yeah, good afternoon. we were down there yesterday for his speech over in pensacola which is about 20 miles outside of alabama. the president was emphatic with telling alabamians to go vote for roy moore. we caught up with many of the faithful republican voters who said they will be casting their
and they were hiding their true identities. joining me now is jill winebanks. i m curious what you think of this warning. i think it s significant not because they warned her so much, as i m sure she told the president. and despite that warning, the president continues to defend russia and putin and deny that they have anything to do with hacking or interfering with the election. it s just another piece of evidence to me of the president having been in some way compromised by russia and cooperating with them in ways that are not in america s best interests. i will make the aanalyze when i did earlier on a broadcast, i would go to my executive producer and say, hey, look what i m getting. but your certainty, what is that based on? is it on common sense that hope hicks told the president or on
please just finish my question. when is the time and place to do this? and when would you expect that to happen? if you look at a calendar, whether do you think something like that could happen and would you be willing to help organize it, put it together and make sure that everybody who wants to address the president on the issues of civil rights gets to the overal office al office and conversation? i can make it happen. i bant to make it happen. i think black history month is a good time to do it. that s february. so it s something that the president would be very inclinld to do. in fact, when there is controversy in recent past, i want to call any names, i invited high profile athletes to have a sit down dialogue sum military with the president about the issue of race relations and they all declined. i don t want to throw them under the bus. there are names out there. the most high profile basketball players and others in the country. they declined. did they give you reason
vote for roy moore. this is what a few of them told us. what is the president s backing of him mean? it means that he he stands behind him and he believes him. i believe. the whole thing has me so fired up and i offered to take anybody and everybody to the voting polls. why do you think the president backed him? because he s got conservative values that i think alabama needs to have and keep. i think the lies. so, alex, what you heard, there is a base of support for roy moore in this state. you didn t just hear it yesterday. we heard it around the state. but what we re looking at is going to be turnout. how many loyalists are going to be coming out for roy moore? then the other question, the other two sects, the republican crossover voters n 2012 there was a race roy moore was engaged in for chief justice. he beat the opponent in this race by 3% despite mitt romney on the same ballot, he won his race in alabama by 18%.
your experience with watergate? why are you certain she talked to the president? well, i think there are three things. one, she went to don mcgann. if she went to don mcgann, she probably went to the president. but secondly, it s her general relationship with the president. she is with him all the time. she participated in many other events involving the russians including the drafting of the phoney statement about why don jr. was having a meeting in trump tower with the ambassador. those things. and then the third is because i m a human being and using kplon sen common sense and saying that is something she would have done. so i think that his knowledge of it is very incriminating for him to continue to defend and say well, putin says he didn t do it and so i believe him.