become all too obvious, a fact all right. ahead of impeachment hearings next week, to avoid what has become all too obvious, a fact pattern of wrongful behavior and arguable abuse of power, gopers have created two main distractions. let s call them thing one and thing two. thing one is the notion that unmasking the whistle-blower is the key to everything. the president pushes the idea. who is the whistle-blower? we have to know. is the whistle-blower a spy? and it rolls off the tongues of his allies on capitol hill. frankly i think the american people have a right to know who this whistle-blower is. one, there s a law that makes that not the case. but the intrigue is very intoxicating. but let s look at it with sober eyes and see it for what it is, a nontroversy. not only is unmasking potentially illegal and/or proof
earlier. we all go back to an era of a cold war with russia. we go back to things like missiles and aircraft carriers and the kind of base fear we grew up with. this is so different now. in a way, lower ticket, lower tech. for lack of a double authentication on google, foreign power can hack into the american election and then some. so how have the tools of the battle changed? how much have they changed, barry? let me start off by saying i ve spent most of my adult life studying the russians. and it s been a good bet as the soviet union came apart in and out of moscow, kiev, mostly arms control dealings, tremendous admiration for the russian people physics, math, ballet, literature, courageous military. they ve turned into a criminal oligarchy run by this fellow
question about vladimir putin being a killer by saying, you know, is this country so innocent? that was such an extraordinary expression of the kind of moral equivalence and the belief that the world is rotten that we ve never seen a president of this country express. let me talk about that or ask you about it in macro term, not a moral term. it s said what putin wants is a world order like we had before world war two, when the big powers, the colonial power, the french, the british, the portuguese, the italians attempting it and the russians and the german, big powers left other big pyres lone. you grab yours, i ll grab mine. we ll let a few new people in the block grab a couple like mussolini can grab some territory. putin really wants that back again. he feels constrained because he is constrained. he would love to gobble up the baltic states again, gobble up in terms of sphere of influence ukraine. but he is constrained by the world order that puts a premium on little countries
and then once vladimir putin consolidated his power, he broke that he has a vision, a vision of european global power playing. and he has a vision for the world, which involves you him, the russia having to have allies. so by, you know, bringing on, you know, his donald trump and giving him the compliments and working him, you have to understand, this was the spy master in chief of russia. yeah. he ran human intelligence operations in west germany. he knows how to manipulate people. now he is a spymaster with atomic weapons and unlimited money. he can use his dominance to influence any weapon he wants and he has done it. malcolm nance, our thanks. barry mccaffrey, our thanks. another breck for us. our coverage continues.
though they may be, their essential mission is to get at the truth. and of course the trump administration has gone to war with all of those institutions whose essential mission is to get at the truth. and we as americans, republicans and democrats should just be very, very concerned about that, and very careful about what happens in the future. for example, if there is some sort of terrorist event, or if there is belligerence abroad that creates the atmosphere for this administration to take additional steps to concentrate power or additional steps that might be considered autocratic. congressman jim himes, fourth termer from the district of connecticut and democrat on the intelligence committee. thank you, congressman, very much for joining us tonight. thank you, brian. i appreciate it. over to andrea mitchell. you have some of the response tonight, the pushback from the trump administration on these stories we ve been talking about. especially on the sessions story. now spec