media will be looking to see if president trump does engage vladimir putin on russia collusion excuse me, russian meddling in the election. obviously as we ve been seeing in these last couple of weeks these ads that have been coming out. if he doesn t talk to vladimir putin about that, we can guarantee that there will be bad headlines. i will say in terms of the u.s. engaging russia on north korea, that is something that the white house has hinted or even made statements about for the last couple of months. i remember sometime this summer that the white house actually put out a specific statement saying they would like russia s help on north korea. and a number of experts that i spoke to afterward who work on north korean issues every single day said well, that was kind of new. we haven t really done that before. and as chris was reporting there at the top, she said that there have been no real conversations, just a couple of early engagement points that maybe this is something they
talked about opioids, but they are in the one off statements or declarations. we haven t seen a sustained public pressure campaign from him. i don t necessarily think he would need to set a level of funding or anything like that, but he does need to put the pressure on congress to act. i haven t seen that from the administration. it s a great point. as he does so and the first lady said she will take this on now. i hope she does. the funding is one question and the conversation is another. the police say they need something different than the governor or the police chief. the needs are different depending where you are. attention is what everyone needs. the president doesn t talk about himself and his life, but talks about himself a lot. he doesn t talk intro expectatively a lot. i don t know a family who doesn t know somebody who is dealing with this. either their own family or family close by. one of the things the president said was talk about his brother s addiction to alcohol.
i ll be joined by john berman busy at work. don t say anything. he doesn t talk until the top of the hour. always hard at work writing, the berman. see you in a bit. thank you. see you soon. gas prices still rising more than a week after harvey knocked the gulf coast oil refining industry off line s. some relief in sight? we ll get a check on cnn money stream next. no splashing! wait so you got rid of verizon, just like that? uh-huh. i switched to t-mobile, kept my phone-everything on it- -oh, they even paid it off! wow! yeah. it s nice that every bad decision doesn t have to be permenant! ditch verizon. keep your phone. we ll even pay it off when you switch to america s best unlimited network. they always refer to me as master sergeant. they really appreciate the military family,
concerned about optics. and i wish they would be concerned about people. president trump decided to make this trip very quickly while there is still an ongoing disaster, and more rain. we don t know how many people have died. we don t know how many people are still trapped. it s a little bit uncomfortable to hear about the long-term, which is certainly important. and i m not, you know, taking away from that at all. when right now we need to be reassured that search and rescue is going on. that national guard is there. that perhaps we re going to deploy the 82nd airborne like we did with hurricane katrina. this immediate response that people are getting dry and they re getting to safe spaces. why are we talking about recovery and money and how much things cost when this is all about response? the most experienced person in that room is the fema director, long, and he s been through this many times. he s doing a good job. he s doing a good job and we should be listening to him. h
reporters are very much aware. so this has been an ongoing basically story line from them that these contacts initially never happened. then they acknowledged that the contacts did happen but say that the meetings were inconsequential. then when we find out that they were very specific discussions about setting up in this case a communications channel, you know, depending on who you talk to, they might say that that is a very normal thing for people to do or, like you heard from the spokesperson for the white house, spicer, basically neither confirming nor denying that it happened and basically questioning why we would report stories about this without named sources. the sneakiness of this is so overwhelming as you point out. trump comes out and says months ago, i would have had him do that if he hadn t done that about flynn. i want to have these conversations. first of all, kushner doesn t talk first of all. he s like garbo. he doesn t talk. no one s ever heard the guy talk. then of