syria. and one of the other things that the foreign minister took a swipe at was america s policy in syria. have a listen to that. they tried to negotiate and then said okay we cannot reach the deal so kurds you are on our own. we are leaving. then after they left the kurds and left syria, they said, okay, we don t have any more obligations in front of the kurds. but we are coming back for oil. not for the kurds. it s an interesting zigzagging, you know. reporter: sergey lavrov is clearly rejoicing in some of the foreign policy confusion on the part of trump administration. one of the interesting things that we keep seeing from russia, we can t say this often enough, they very often criticize the u.s., in fact rip into the u.s. very seldom criticize president trump himself, jake. interesting. fred pleitgen, thank you so much. i want to bring in phil mudd. a former cia and fbi official.
senate seats and i think we lost the presidency. manu, just to clarify, did he say that the russians were coordinating with the trump campaign? he absolutely did, jake, and i asked him for specific evidence of that and he would not go there. all he would say is, well, it was in press reports. i said what press reports, and he wouldn t cite anything in particular, but this was harry reid defiant until the end, not showing any regret whatsoever for the losses in november. i also talked about some of his colleagues who were up for consideration for the white house post including joe manchin, the west virginia democrat who he took a swipe at and said he actually seems to be campaigning for the job and he does not think the heidi hide camp would take a job with donald trump. one person he said will have a hard time getting confirmed, rex tillerson. but as we know, harry reid will not have a vote next year.