fully prepared to undertake that action. here for our lead-off discussion on a monday night, philip rucker, white house bureau chief for the washington post, imperil atkins, senior washington correspondent for wbur, boston s npl news station, and peter baker, chief white house correspondent for the new york times. good evening, gang. welcome to you all. peter, i d like to start off with you. i m going to ask the same question of your colleague, mr. rucker. do you believe based on power of observation that the president feels he s in control of any of this narrative? well, look, you know, he dominates our conversation like nobody else. if anybody can control a narrative, it would be him. but right now i think he s in a position he hasn t been through. he is, in fact, seeing other actors on the stage, in this case, the house democrats, putting out more information each day. he s making his own mistakes as
times. and kim atkins, senior news correspondent at wbur in boston. kristin, let s talk about mick mulvaney, the cabinet meeting, all of these contradictions. where does it stand right now? reporter: andrea, the white house is in damage control mode. president trump, as you mentioned, right now holding a cabinet meeting and he s speaking out. we ll likely get that tape shortly. but he s trying to reset the narrative here. he s talking about syria. he s trying to make the case that the cease fire is holding, talking about the low unemployment rate. but the reality is the headlines of last week and this weekend have been making things more complicated for this administration. mick mulvaney, who came out to the briefing room, i was there and he essentially acknowledged that the administration was withholding aid for ukraine in exchange for investigating democrats in the 2016 election. he was trying to clarify and clean up those comments over the weekend, and of course you have this stu
the question the very legitimacy of this entire proceeding. we ll see what fiona hill has to say, if she has an opening statement like we got from ambassador yovanovitch and what sort of areas she fills in. you get the sense the white house doesn t have a concerted legal strategy. they re very much focused on the p.r. side of this. hans nichols, thank you. garrett, really kwiekly here, timing, do we know how long this thing will go today, when we might hear something? it s scheduled to go as late as 6:00 this evening. most of these depositions have been all-day affairs, we think they got a later start this morning, but craig they could be locked up in the basement for hours. okay, garrett haake, we ll let you get back to it. thank you, thank you, hans. i ll turn to chuck rosenberg, former u.s. attorney and former senior fbi official and kimberly atkins, washington news correspondent for wbur, both msnbc contributors. ms. atkins, what do democrats
we ve seen the knew every candidate in this race has to be prepared for everything he s going to bring. so it really was puzzling in that way. perhaps they thought they were in a really solid position because of those poll numbers. but, again, we ve seen elizabeth warren sort of chip away at all demographics and especially in places where joe biden is struggling like with young people in moving her numbers with people of color and really coming up in a way that, perhaps, the biden campaign was not expecting. wbur s kimberly atkinson, the boston globe s james pendle and the washington post eugene scott, thank you all for being on this morning. coming up, whether it s paul manafort, hunter biden, or donald trump, ukraine keeps popping up in the news. gq correspondent julia joins us ahead to explain why. plus, the new yorkers david
thank you both. all right. lots to dig into here. joining me, kimberly atkins, senior correspondents for wbur, msnbc contributor, lonnie chen, former advisor to mitt romney and a research fellow t hoover institute. and howard fineman, an msnbc political analyst. longtime reporter and colleague and friend of mine. let me start with what we re seeing with the president and this in some ways it s sort of the president on steroids. it is. we ve seen all of this before. so far, just be clear, up until now through the mueller report, through every other controversy, the president more or less has escaped from it. he has gotten out of it. he saw the mueller report, the result of that as a victory. this is something different, this is something different, but so far the strategy has worked for him is my point. he thinks he is able to talk out talk himself out of, outsmart everyone, obfuscate to the point of getting out of a predicament. the problem here, as we saw with him sort of being