okay. good morning. welcome to morning joe. it is thursday, april 18th. along with joe, willie, and me, we have former white house director of communications to president obama, jennifer palmieri. she s co-host of the msnbc podcast with claire, how to win 2024. chief white house correspondent for the new york times, peter baker is with us. and the author of how the right lost its mind, the bulwark s charlie sykes is with us this morning. we have a lot to talk about. in a few minutes, willie, we ll talk about speaker johnson and ukraine. i must say, he s had a conversion. you know, it s like a christmas carol. the ghost of the republican party past came to visit him in the middle of the night and said to him, well, and he said, yes, sir. no, i think no, listen. what do i say about conversion? i ll take em.
i m going to allow an opportunity for every single member of the house to vote their conscience and will on this. i m willing to take personal risk for that because we have to do the right thing and history will judge us. i do not spend time walking around thinking about the motion to vacate. i have a job to do here and i m going to do the job. regardless of personal consequences, that s what we re supposed to do. speaker mike johnson pushing forward with a series of aid bills despite push back in his party. the question is how much will he need to lean on democrats to get that funding passed? plus the senate dismisses articles of impeachment against homeland security secretary alejandro mayorkas. and what to expect today when jury selection picks up again in former president trump s hush money trial. good morning and welcome to way too early on this thursday, april 18th.
including technical coverages or we could have shared those photos with the american public and asked the american public to assist us in identifying these individuals as quickly as possible so that we could arrest them as quickly as possible and safely as possible. there were various pros and cons to each pathway we could have taken. we had a vigorous discussion in my office wednesday april 17th and thursday april 18th, around midday on thursday, the 18th, we gelled around the position that we were going to release the photos at the press conference later that day. i stand by that decision. i strongly feel it was the correct decision and we knew all week that support from the american public would be absolutely critical in allowing us to savely apprehend the subjects and we felt that was quite true and prophetic auz the week went on. you were unindated with cell phone video and people responding. how do you watch all of this and assess it and figure out what
could be the critical clues you needed to identify the suspects. we had over 120 analysts and agencies at the fbi laboratory in quantityco, virginia, analyzing thousands and thousands of still photos and videos we were receiving. we had many individuals in boston as well analyzing photographs. but when you acquire videos that are in very approximate location to the blast sites and it gives you a window into individuals that were around those blast sites, preceding the blast, those are the videos you focus upon and watch hundreds and hundreds of times until you can spot patterns of activity that indicate you re on to something. you told 60 minutes it was your wife the night there was another shooting who first said these could be your suspects. tell me about that. yes, she did andrea, that was the evening of thursday april 18th after we held the press conference at the sheraton where we revealed the photos of white
the two students are seen with dzhokhar tsarnaev in this picture in times square from sometime last year. now, here are the facts as asserted by the criminal complaints against these three released just moments ago. on thursday, april 18th, three days after the bombing, after the photographs of the suspects were released by the fbi, kadyrbayev was driving home when phillipos called him and told him to turn on the tv because one of the suspects in the boston attacks looked familiar. he did so and agreed one of the bombers looked like tsarnaev. he texted, have you seen the news? he told him the tv news was showing photographs of tsarnaev and identifying their friend dzhokhar as one of the terrorists. as their apartment the two looked at photographs of tsarnaev broadcast by cnn. kadyrbayev then texted the third