democrats who are in districts where president trump remains popular or where he won in 2016 to have to be on the record. so there s a political benefit to the white house to try to challenge them to take that full vote. benefit with the asterisks of obviously they don t want to have impeachment go forward. they re trying to manage a situation fraught with peril all around. to answer your question, it s unknowable if the white house would then suddenly be more cooperative. our experience has told us that they will try to use any available method to slow things down. slowing things down gives them more of a chance to push this deeper into what will be the election year and to try to again mask all of this in sort of a wrapping paper of partisanship which speaker pelosi has tried to say, issues for the election should be left to the election, this is constitutional. the white house is saying it s all partisan. it s all political and trying to fight on those terms. craig?
your reaction to the offensive that we ve seen play out over the last few hours against these kurdish forces that have been allied with the united states in its fight against isis for a number of years now. thank you for having me. my reaction is that this is a tragedy. as you mentioned, i did have the opportunity to travel to the region, both to turkey and the syrian/jordanian border with a bipartisan delegation from armed services, foreign affairs and intel committee. we landed on the ground to this news of this president s decision to withdraw. it was literally jaw dropping. bipartisanly we couldn t understand having met with so many people in the region, that that was the decision our president decided to move forward with. did you get an opportunity to get a chance to speak with any of the local officials there on the ground? what was their assessment of and reaction to president trump s decision? well, we were not there during the time that that decision was made. we were t
say they feel the allegations against president trump are serious and should be investigated. but 49% don t favor impeachment. let s talk about your book for a moment. you ve laid out, and i haven t had a chance to read it yet, but as i understand it, you lay out fairly well the russian disinformation campaign as it is understood. are there fears that the russians might also be working to influence public opinion with regards to impeachment? absolutely. in fact, the senate intelligence report that came out yesterday starts tracking all the things russians have been doing since the election. they say the russians increased the amount of disinformation they re doing. a lot of my book is about this troll factory creating content that helped trump hurt hillary clinton. i m absolutely certain they re doing it now to undermine the impeachment inquiry. also, their larger goal is
people that are supporters of trump, there s a very strong belief that we need to close our borders to immigration. and people differ on that, but that s certainly one of the mantras of this president. what this whole thing is about is opening our electoral borders to interference by foreigners in the core element of free and fair elections. it doesn t make sense to close the physical borders but open and allow illegally the borders to be open on attacking the ability of americans to control their own elections. that s what makes this so important and actually bipartisan. it s not a pro tum thing. it s a pro american voter thing. kim wehle, thank you. rick stengel, always good to have your perspective. breaking news we continue to follow at msnbc. as you saw at the bottom of your screen, now we ve taken this picture to turkish air strikes.
does vote on impeachment. does the administration comply then? reporter: well, that s a real question. the administration is setting it up as if they would, and yet when we look at history, they have tried to use every tactic to slow the process down within their available arsenal. so one of the arguments we ve seen them make is because the last two impeachment inquiries against bill clinton who was impeached but not removed obviously, and richard nixon where the inquiry began, but he chose to resign. in each of those cases, there was a full vote of the house. that is recent precedent. but the constitution does not require the house and speaker pelosi to follow that. so if the white house were to prevail in that argument and to say the full house must take a vote and that would unleash some additional rights from the president to challenge witnesses, to get access to additional information and things like that, one of the political arguments to that is it would also compel those