homeland security official d disclosed during an intelligence committee hearing there was evidence that russia targeted election-related systems in 21 states during the campaign. on november 1st, also in front of the senate intelligence committee, facebook admitted more than 150 million americans were exposed to russia-linked propaganda on facebook and instagram. and during that same hearing, twitter announced that it found about 37,000 russian-tied accounts, which generated 1.4 million election-related tweets, which got about 288 million impressions. stephanie, i mean, tell me they weren t involved. that s a little weird. nice way to put it. joining us now, nick ackerman, legal analyst, and former assistant special watergate prosecutor. nick, president trump told reporters he couldn t stand there and argue with putin
true, but it takes me back to the op-ed wall street journal article that said, come clean. no more drip, drip, yet another person in your orbit who had contact with russians and weirdly didn t remember they had contact with russians. if i were the prosecutor, and i heard that part of the statement, i d ask, who else was present? who else overheard? my guess is there are other people who overheard that statement who could testify to that fact. so then you re left with the bodyguard, going back to donald trump s hotel room, where the only potential witnesses are a bunch of russians who are never going to testify in this case. right. and it is important to all those people who keep on saying, no votes were changed, that this influence campaign has been proved. we ve got facebook saying it. twitter saying it. we have the dni and three other intelligence agencies saying it. that s right.
dnc and the clinton campaign. and then maybe the most easy to understand political argument, he is saying that as republicans are trying to make some advances legislatively, which they have struggled with during his time in office, this is somehow a distraction from that. those are good political arguments for the president to make to his supporters. of course a special counsel is working in a parallel track, doing the work that is intended to be in secret and the grand jury process is intended to be in secret. so there are some questions about how even the awareness of an indictment came out, but we ll see how that plays out over the next few days. so the president not addressing sort of the headline, but talking about all of the atmospherics and sort of waging his own political response using twitter today. nothing official from the white house on the expected indictment. alex? all right. as always, many thanks to you. kelly o donnell at the white house for us. let s get more now o
ken burns was on the air with the 18 hours of vietnam, and you go back and look at the beginning of that, and then the consequences of it, and it really is something to keep in mind. as we go forward. it is, and donald trump is not the first person to say the united nations has been inefficient. madeleine albright said the u.n. must reform or die and the long running joke over there is how many people work at the u.n.? the answer, about a third of them. i mean, and that that s a 40-year-old joke. donald trump s instincts are not going to change. you see it on twitter. but i was struck in reading more about reagan. i covered eight years of him. the change from the man who talked about the evil empire and the man who cut deals with gorbachev and talked about the vision of a world without nuclear weapons is extraordinary. it was smart advisers. i think that having kelly and mattis around him is really
only. we re looking at his policy, and we re talking to mattis and tillerson and others who apparently are talking to the president daily. yeah. i think the difference between the day we sat here on inauguration day, today, steve bannon is not there. michael flynn is not there. general kelly is there. general mattis is there. he s surrounded himself with different people, and as much as we hear from president trump on twitter and short bursts, we don t often get to see him articulate his world view and where he believes we should fit on this great map of the world. so what do you think you re going to hear from him today that makes more clear where america is going? i think it will be more pragmatic. he ll find somewhere in the middle. i don t think he ll go in there and beat the hell out of all the leaders before him. i think he s now more under the influence of the generals we ve