what you were talking about, our obsession with russia and the responsibility laying with the clintons, there s a report out today based on a lawsuit that was filed that says that sean spicer met with a campaign donor and a journalist from fox news where they were pushing around this story that seth rich, who was murdered, was perhaps the one responsible for the wikileaks breach. two questions. sean put out a statement, he said it was just a brief meeting. he said the guy didn t know the president. the lawsuit alleges that the president knew about it and had an influence on the story. did the president know about the story pre-publication and did he have an nuaninfluence. the president had no knowledge of the story and it s completely untrue that he or the white house were involved in the story. beyond that, this is ongoing litigation and i will refer you to the actual parties involved. does it disturb you that the press secretary of the united states, you just gave this
bigger story, as if he s inciting violence, which is just not the reality who s turning it into a bigger story, ben? this is what the president of the united states decided to post today. he could have posted about health care. he could have responded to criticisms you re playing into the exact point that i m making here and the point that i m making is, you re over i think everyone s trying to overmake this into too big of a deal, overexaggerate this. it took me three seconds to retweet that tweet earlier saying we re going to talk about it this morning. i m sure the president saw it and thought it was pretty funny and said i m going to retweet this. it took him seven seconds. it didn t take him 72 hours or 24 dhours no i agree with you on that. he s a busy man. he s not just tweeting all day. but what he does for seven seconds with hurt people. david zurawik, the president s acting strong and that s what his supporters on reddit are saying, this is a show of strength. i
and influence their coverage. trump denied this but scarborough said he has receipts. he says he has text messages proving that there were communications between trump aides and scarborough. essentially what scarborough says happened is they keep reaching out to him and saying if you call up the president and apologize, the enquirer won t be mean to you. we ll get the piece to go away. some analysts said that sounds a lot like black mail. now trump said actually it was scarborough calling me trying to stop the story and i said no. either way, both men seem to be confirming that trump has weaponized the national enquirer. back with me now the panel, carl bernstein, kelly mcbride, olivia nuzzi and ben ferguson. i m told scarborough doesn t want to show these text messages because he uses these people as sources, anonymous sources. he doesn t want to burn them. i think it would help to have some evidence to back up his assertion. what do you make of this idea the president could be using
world donald trump knew from his disco days and from getting in the celebrity columns. it s like walter winchell era. i think, unfortunately, that s what he thinks the press is. he doesn t know about the high end of the press that carl bernstein represents. and i think, listen, if joe scarborough did put his hand in this, and say we ve got it, i think at some point, there s some pressure on him to show some evidence, because trump will keep saying like, fake news, blah, blah, blah. i believe i mean, you know, give me between mika and joe and trump i m going with mika and joe. but, this is a case now where if that s true, that s horrible. and brian you know everybody on this panel knows how this stuff is done. it s a kind of wink and nod and informal thing. maybe jared kushner said just call the president up and make this thing go away have a better idea for a story for you. yes, yes, yes.
says on editorial cause, we have to play error free ball. now, in this case, we saw the trump administration make the most out of this error. and try to exploit it if we re being frank about it. the president s sons and the president himself weighed in on twitter. also this week another news outlet had to retract a story that was vice news. it was a story about trump and disney world. not a big story. not a bombshell. but one that had errors and had to be retracted. let s discuss this with our panel and examine what went wrong here beginning with carl bernstein. carl, of course, you worked with cnn now, but i love your honest sense of what happened here. what went wrong? well, first, institutions that are enemies of the people do not make a priority of correcting their mistakes, calling attention to their mistakes, and leaving from their ranks by order of the management those who made the mistakes. that s what cnn did in this