sam nounberg recalled telling roger stone jr., another adviser. we will get him to talk about he s going to build a wall. you say this has become, peter, a symbol that the president is boxed in by. can you explain this? look, you know, if you are somebody who worries that there s been too much immigration over the years, you have a lot of different things that you would like to accomplish, a lot of different policies or laws you would like to change, practices you would like to implement. the wall is only part of that. if for some of these hardliners, not even the most important thing, but there was a visceral thing for president trump or candidate trump to seize on when he was running for office and his advisors knew that and that s why they put this in his script in effect. it was something that a builder or developer like he was could feel almost viscerally like with his fingers. one of his biographers said he could almost hear the beep, beep, beep of the cement trucks backing up.
republican base, party base, but at the same time he may not remember to talk about it, so let s keep telling him to talk about a wall. that is what is causing literally the government to be shutdown at this moment. the president not talking about things because he was as we remember so off the cuff during his campaign rallies, does this make sense to you, the description by sam nunberg? well, first of all, i m glad to see sam looking better than when we saw him looking about six months ago. this is bad policy, it s a childish device they gave to a president who nobody thought would win, and now it s caused a government shutdown. this is just really bad policy and it doesn t seem to be well thought out. what struck me there is that this is coming from the minds of roger stone and sam nunberg who are not the varsity, so to speak, in terms of campaign talent. these are people who are not really versed in serious policy and shouldn t be coming up with things to guide a campaign. they
white house officials have arrived to discuss the president s price tag for the wall but optimism appears to be in short supply. mick mulvaney making this new prediction in an interview. i think this is going to drag on a lot longer. we re back to square one, $5.6 billion and they re at zero. let s bring in adrian, former director of strategic communications for hillary clinton s campaign, john calloway and amy tarcanen. before i get to this topic, you were listening to sam nunberg, give me a reaction to your thoughts about this, the genesis of this whole wall during the campaign for donald trump? adrian, you can go first. i think it looks like he s being boxed in because of a, you know, maybe not very well thought out strategy by his some of his strategists including roger stone who basically said we want him to talk about immigration and this is a very important issue to the
get in, you know, sort of interrogatories, written interrogatories which are formal questions put in question form. i think that john is probably more right than less as always that these are probably more topic sentences, areas of inquiry than they are specific questions that they want specific answers to but rather we want to talk to you about the topic of communications around the june 9th meeting. we want to talk to you about the topic of roger stone s knowledge of wikileaks. we want to talk to you about the topic of your counterintelligence inquiries, et cetera. so that s an important that s an important point because if the president knew exactly the questions as worded, one might be able to give very precise answers and leave it at that. if these are just general topic areas, and there s more possible questions within these topic areas, that then leaves more
post-truth world. more questions from the article i just want to read to our viewers. when did you become aware of the trump tower meeting, the june meeting with donald trump jr.? what involvement did you have in the communications strategy including the release of donald trump jr. s e-mails and what communication disease you have with michael d. cohen and felix seder and others an foreign nationals about russian real estate developments during the campaign? what discussions did you have during the gain about russian sanctions and what did you know about russian hacking and social media and other acts at the campaign? what did you know about communication between roger stone and his associate julian assange or wikileaks? joining me now on the known is joan dean and we have jeff zeleny standing by at the white house. john dean, as you look at these questions being asked, is there something that jumps out at you? the very fact that the questions are out there, my first reaction sugge