with putin days after. the worry is justified. the president thinks he can be friends with putin. former national security advisor hr ma h.r. mcmaster complained during his time in the white house according to u.s. officials. i don t know why he would want to be. the post continues, adding, putin complains to trump during their phone call about fake news and how in putin s words, the quote, deep state is conspiring against them with putin tell trump it s not us, it s the subordinates fighting against our friendship. joining me now, peter baker again, michael crowley and our team back here. peter, let me ask you about this because this comes bear a a month after a similar circumstances. the president feuding with his allies at the g-7, including our friends from canada before he went to see kim jong-un. now he s on his way to nato. there will be some hot conversation to take place there before he warms up to vladimir putin. talk about the risks at stake in the next week.
first of all, peter, easy to say i ll take a bullet until a loaded gun is pointed right at your chest. it doesn t seem like such a good idea. people don t take bullets for other people. that happens in the movies, not in real life. barb knows this as a federal prosecutor. he has to look out for himself. he s said as much. right now it s his family and himself why is he being public? why is he being public? yeah. i m not sure he should be. i agree with barb. it seems a little strange that lanny davis would also wade into a public debate. it s in michael cohen s best interest to keep quiet and tell the truth, period the end. this is rudy giuliani. a little bit of what he said on the stormy daniels case as it relates. we sort of fact check the president s lawyer. take a listen. but to be clear, the president did not direct michael cohen in advance to make those payments? as far as i know, that is right. and second, even if he had, that would not necessarily be
we were just talking about that death of a british woman, a result of poisoning believed to be the responsibility of the russians. in a statement to nbc news an nsc national security council spokeswoman says the u.s. continues to concur with the united kingdom s assessment that russia is responsible for the march chemical attack in salisbury. while the current incident remains under investigation, we stand with our allies in condemning the use of chemical weapons. peter baker from the new york times is here again. peter, i want your reaction to that. the white house sent this to me within the last hour that there is no condemnation of russia, no mention of vladimir putin. for a president who s been criticized from the very start not being critical enough of putin, this seems like a pretty mild response, once again. and remember, he expelled russian diplomats a couple of months ago in collaboration with
there really is going to be progress here. peter, that s what was sort of striking in the president s tweet this morning, right? this is a guy most of his deelds had to do with real estate, not with nuclear weapons. saying, i have confidence, kim jong-un, my partner in this deal, will abide by our handshake. yeah, exactly. i was struck also by the word contract he used. contract as if there was actually some sort of let s face it. this wasn t an agreement. this was a 391-word statement of intent, a statement that we would like to get to a certain place where we could denuclearize the north korean state. that was not a contract. there was no specifics in there. a contract in the same sense donald trump said i m going to sell you some floors on trump tower, but we re not going to tell you what the price s we re not going to tell you what the date of close is, how many floors we re going to sell, you know, where the financing would come. none of those details had been worked out. so
self-value, self-interest. is this unprecedented, this moment? i think it is literally unprecedented, peter. even nixon wasn t appointing justices to the supreme court during watergate so it makes it different. but there is an important but here and it is this. regardless of who he puts on the supreme court and i agree with your panelist. it s going to be one of the four. they re going to be conservative. the supreme court precedent that very clearly says in u.s. v. nixon, the president cannot assert executive privilege to keep documents and materials from a grand jury. there is another really important case, clinton v. jones that says a sitting president has to submit to a civil deposition and those were both unanimous decisions, peter. i think regardless of who the pick is, and despite the fact that he s picking someone while he s the subjects of an investigation, there is very clear precedent about what a president must do in response to an investigation. but, donna, which of