hi there, everyone. it s 4:00 in new york. there s brand new reporting that drives home the fact that donald trump is his own worst enemy when it comes to his many, many, many legal problems and when it comes to the indictment and the classified documents investigation turning him from a disgraced twice impeached once indicted ex-president. in that case he has no one to blame but himself. the washington post reports late last year team trump hit a fork in a road, a point in which trump could have chosen an option that very well may have avoided an indictment in the documents case. from that new reporting, quote, one of trump s new attorneys proposed an idea in the fall of 2022. the former president s team could try to arrange a settlement with the justice department. the attorney, chris kise, wanted to quietly approach justice to see if he could negotiate a settlement that could preclude charges hoping the department would want an exit ramp to avoid prosecuting a former pre
with the grand jury investigating donald trump s attempts to overturn the election and his role on january 6. the former president reacting to john allen. mr. president, what do you think of mike pence testifying today? i don t know what he said. i have a lot of confidence in him. pressure rising. calls for president biden and house speaker mccarthy to restart talks on raising the debt ceiling and mounting fears over the real-world impact of a potential and historic u.s. default. good day. i m andrea mitchell in washington. for the first time in modern history a vice president has testified in a criminal probe about the president he once served. mike pence spent seven hours before the grand jury thursday in the special counsel s investigation of donald trump s attempts to stop the peaceful transfer of power and trump s role in the capitol attack. pence was brought in by jack smith early in the morning thursday after just the night before the appeals court rejected don
off of the gulf coast there. we re not going to get a sense of it until tomorrow. but yes, it looks pretty path down in. and we ll be talking about this later in the hour. thanks, chris. and thank you for joining us. hurricane ian continues to create a swath of in made landfall just after 3:00 this afternoon in southwestern florida, near k o connor, a island off of the coast of fort myers. ian came ashore as a category four hurricane with 150 mile per hour winds. just a few miles per hour shy of a category five. only for hurricane stronger than that have made landfall in the united states ever. but it is not just the strength of the storm, it is the size. this is the view of hurricane in from the international space station this afternoon. just showing how massive the storm is. the national river describes in as battering the florida peninsula with tied and winds, and flooding. ian has just now weakened to a category two storm with maximum sustained winds of 105 miles
pandemic lockdowns that harmed children, closed businesses and churches even, the endless re-upping of emergency covid powers, the destruction of historical markers and status. the use of big tech as top defenseers for the cart regime, all of this, all of it points to one ugly inescapable conclusion. our government is being run by a kadri of powerful post-american forces. our current political leadership acts as though our constitution and the freedoms recollected by that constitution are no longer valid. there will always be a reason for them to ignore our constitution these days, like systemic racism, climate change or another covid vary gentleman, maybe gun violence, january 6th. and they won t explicitly say it, at least not yet, but they don t want us to live under a constitution that leaves the primary decision making to the people of the 50 states. nor do they want the designation american citizen to really have any special meeting at all for any of us. so we ll retain
know, have many accomplishments and obviously in the case of mcconnell has gone very high, about as high as you can go in the senate, does that override for a lot of folks any concerns there might be even if they have questions about their ability to do the job. it s just frankly a certain level of respect. that s right. respect and an acknowledgment that someone like senator mcconnell, politics aside, he understands how the levers of power work, and he understands how to use them, but look, if members of congress need a road map for how to do this, they only need to look over to the house and see what happened last year with speaker pelosi stepping down after two decades at the top. she s now speaker emerita. she s in this position now where she s able to give advice and counsel to the current leadership team as requested, but she also gives them space to lead as they see fit. so in many ways, that is a case study for how the upper chamber could do it, if they so choose.