don t like the state department and they want to curtail its power. president trump s budget proposes a 29% cut to the state department, the secretary of state rex tillerson is on board for the slashing as he made clear today answering the very first question he s publicly taken from a reporter since assuming office. the level of spending that the state department has been undertaking particularly in this past year is not sustainable. i m confident that with the input of the men and women of the state department that we are going to construct a way forward that allows us to be much more effective, much more efficient and be able to do a lot with fewer dollars. rex tillerson appears to have gone from being one of the most powerful non-elected officials in the entire world to bag spectral presence. his stature is so diminished that when the top diplomat from
and let me tell you something, i think we ought to go back to the first one and go all the way which is what i wanted to do in the first place. joining me now is hawaii s attorney dug chin woug chin. attorney general, let me ask you about something you cite in your court filing. you cite a comment rudy giuliani made which has become legendary which is basically that the president asked him to explain on television how the executive order came to be. he said when mr. trump first announced it, he said muslim ban, put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally. why is that legally relevant? that doesn t strike me as having legal force, what adviser the president says he says at a private conversation with the esidt of the united states. here s our argument. it was that context matters and essentially what sufficient that is one of the legal issues going on in this case which is that the u.s. department of justice was really trying to limit the court to justice the
thank you, we re leaving. reporter: excuse me, mr. secretary, can you respond? we haven t had any time in here. i m sorry, you re going to have to lead. let s go, guys. reporter: do you think you ll have a deputy any time soon, sir? when do you think you might have a deputy? this way, this way. as you can see, our own andrea mitchell has been relentlessly trying to get simple answers out of secretary of state rex tillerson ever since he took office in january. tillerson has so far been the least transparent secretary of state in the modern era. under his tenure, the state department got rid of daily briefings for nearly seven weeks and he broke with decades of tradition this week not taking the usual pool of reporters with him on his first foreign trip to asia. there is one reporter who s been allowed to travel with the secretary. her name is erin mcpike, she s from a semiobscure conservative outlet called the independent
journal review and she happened to have published a highly complimentary piece about the secretary earlier this month. joining me, anne-marie slaughter, president and ceo of the think tank new america. i ve been obsessed with this press aspect of the story because it s hard to communicate why it matters but it does matter that the secretary of state has briefings everyday they that they let reporters in. it s the way checks and balances works. the state department talks about what we re doing and reporters ask tough questions and citizens get to make up their minds but it s also important for the world. this is what leading or simply being an enormously important power in the world is about. you have foreign policy and other countries get to sort of see what that is and ask questions, too. in fact, john kirby, who is the spokesperson in the last few years of the obama administration, i remember him
invest in them because i believe in the mesh worker and we need the real faces of the american people just like the folks who talk about how the affordable care act saved my life. what do you say to mulvaney s line that we can t ask a single mom in detroit or a coal miner in west virginia to pay for something like the coalition for publ public broadcasting? folks, let s look at the line item. look at the defense budget and what they re trying to do there and by the way our military right now is the world s most effective military around so let s start with that. you order one less plane and you are funding legal services, you re funding so many other issues. budgets are moral documents and this budget reflects a total abdication of responsibility to train workers, to invest in