Pick to oversee the Mueller Probe. And why Hillary Clinton is saying, i told you so about trump and the russians. From everything i see, has no respect for this person. Well that is because hed rather have a puppet as president. No puppet. No puppet. All in starts right now. Good evening from new york. Im chris hayes. It is a question now front and center in american politics. In fact, it is become so central that even Donald Trumps absolute favorite fox news host was forced to ask him on Live Television this weekend, is the president of the United States an agent of a foreign power . Is President Trump a russian agent . Is he a plant . Does he go about president ing with the interest of russia in mind. A puppet whose strings are being pulled from abroad. This is the stuff of political thrillers, of the hollywood blockbusters and a question floating around our real life president for sometime because of his bizarre and suspicious behavior with respect to Vladimir Putin and russia. Because of the fact that russia interfered in the election for his ben knit and the 101 contacts between trumps team and russialinks operatives and his Campaign Manager gave polling to a certain assessed to be a russian agent. Because the president refuses to condemn putin for anything because hes repeatedly lied about all of this. A question acutely felt in this moment when the world watched as the president was asked whether he believed u. S. Intelligence or Vladimir Putin and this is what he said. Just now president putin denied having to do with any of the election in 2016 and every u. S. Intelligence agency has concluded russia did. My first question for you, sir, is who do you believe . My second question is would you now with the whole world watching tell president putin and denounce what happened in 2016 and warn him to never do it again . My people came to me, dan coats came to me and some others and they said they think its russia. I have president putin, he just said it is not russia. I will say this, i dont see any reason why it would be. I have great confidence in my intelligence people. But i will tell you that president putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the 12 people. I think that is an incredible offer. Okay. Thank you. An incredible offer. An offer you might say to collude on the investigation. Now, we have two new pieces of information. Friday night the New York Times broke the story, the fbi was so freaked out by trumps firing of james comey that they started a counterintelligence investigation into the sitting president of the United States. Not something they would do lightly. And then over the weekend, the Washington Post greg miller reported this. President trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of conversations with russian president Vladimir Putin including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials. Current and former u. S. Officials had said. Just to be clear. This is wildly diverge ents from protocol. As president you want to create paper trails for all sorts of reason when you speak to foreign head of state because the information has to be shared with the rest of the government to make policy and why the heck would you rip up the notes from a world leader unless you were covering something up so in the wake of these two stories and everything else, there is fox news Jeanine Pirro attempting to dismiss the question as ridiculous while also clearly needing to ask it. Are you now or have you ever worked for russia, mr. President trump . I think it is the most insulting thing ive ever been asked. I think it is the most insulting article ive ever had written. And if you read the article, you would see they found absolutely nothing. But that the headline of that article, it is called the failing New York Times for a reason. Theyve gotten me wrong for years. Theyve gotten me wrong for many years before that. You will notice, the president does not answer the question. He did earlier today when confronted by nbcs kristen welker. Mr. President , yes or no, have you or are you now have you ever worked for russia . I never worked for russia. And you know that answer better than anybody. I never worked for russia. Not only did i never work for russia, i think it is a disgrace that you even ask that question. Because it is a whole big fat hoax. It is just a hoax. Weird he doesnt say it was a disgrace to Jeanine Pirro asking that question. And as the shutdown enters day 24, the question of the president s loyalty to his own nation has never been more in doubt. That raises another question. What is to be done about it . Greg miller covers the Washington Post and broke the story that trump concealed details of facetoface encounters with putin and offer the the apprentice and first take us through what your reporting indicates of how anomalous the president s behavior around his talks with putin compared to other talks with World Leaders. It is beyond anomalous. It is abnormal approaching unprecedented as far as i can tell. All of the president s that weve known in our lifetimes have had meetings with the russian leader but go into the meetings with abundant staff, with detailed preparations. They want witnesses for the meetings for multiple reasons. One, to make sure there is no misunderstanding of what transpired to generate a record of what happened and then so they partly so that that record can then be shared with others in their own administrations so they could implement whatever agreements or policies are reached in those discussions. And trump doesnt do anything like that. He intentionally keeps his own aides on the outside of these closed door meetings. He doesnt really listen to them going into the room or tell them what happened when he comes out. And it is more than the remarkable story of him confiscating the notes of the interpreter, which is an amazing piece of reporting that you got that information. But it is also the case according to your reporting that in the other meetings hes had, there has been no paper record, no post briefing, nothing that a member of the government could access to look at what are the notes of what happened here. That is right. He has had meetings or encountered or conversations with putin in five separate places around the world since taking office. And there isnt a single comprehensive account of any of those. And you know you dont have to take my word for it. You could look up prior president s transcripts with conversations with World Leaders like this. The clinton meetings with yeltsin in the 1990s have been declassified and you can read detailed transcripts of everything they talked about and im not sure well have records like that out of this administrati this administration or this president. At the dinner at g20 after the president met with putin and he walked over to the empty chair and talks to him somewhere shy of an hour. Ian bremer said the most unusual thing is that he didnt tell any advisers about it afterwards. Does that scan with what you reported. That is consistent with how hes carried himself and the white house didnt reveal that that conversation had taken place i think more than ten days afterward. And this is what we say in the story that we published this weekend. This is a this is not just a oneoff thing, this is a pattern with this president of going to significant lengths to conceal details about his conversations, his meeting with the russian leader. Has the white house denied this reporting . No. Theyve denounced it. But not that is a big difference. But not denied the fundamental details here, that this happened, that this interpreter was told to stay quiet about what had happened. That this ibts this interpreters notes was taken from him and theyve not disputed any of the facts. Do you know who the interpreter is. I have an idea who this person is. Hadnt been publicly identified. It is a different interpreter than the one we saw in helsinki a year later. These are state Department Officials who are experts in the russian language who do this for many highlevel meetings. We should note they are not there to serve as recordkeepers. They are there to translate and so the discussion at the moment about whether to subpoena these notes or try to compel this individual to testify, it is really a sign of the desperation here because there is really nobody else you could turn to to get a reliable account of what happened. Greg miller, thanks. Great reporting. Appreciate it. Joining me now, malcolm nance and terrorism analyst with 35 years in counterterrorism and intelligence and the author of the book how to plot to hack america and Matthew Miller and former chief spokesperson for the Justice Department. Malcolm ill begin with you. As someone who i think is for a long time had this as the working theory of how the facts arrange themselves, what do you think . Well, i think that the reporting that we got this weekend really spells out what the fbi had to have thought. It would have been malpractice for the fbi not to have considered with the intelligence they had, Going Forward and certainly by the time that donald trump came out of the meeting with Sergey Lavrov and serg Sergey Kislyak and said he fired the fbi director because of the russia thing and stopping the russia investigation, they had to assume that there was a nefarious intent in his activities and it is quite possible he could have been turned or was working in his own interest which equaled russias interest. Let me follow up on that. There is all of the terms, that hes run as an agent or witting or unwitting and hes been turned. What does that mean . Lets turn this away from a president. If a foreign power manages to acquire an american individual in asset, a person in business or the state department, there are different ways that can play out. What are they . What does that mean . Well there are varying degrees and the most common start off with a useful idiot. A person who does something for their own interest, which just happens to align with a foreign powers interest. Then there is a fellow traveller. That is a person who has ideologically the same as another power and they do things because they believe the same beliefs. Then you have an unwitting asset, a person doing things for their own self interest but are also understanding that other forces may be impacting them and they dont care. And finally, a witting asset which is a person who is well aware of who is pulling the strings and is accepting that. But that is different from an agent. Usually that is a person who has a contract, who is working with a foreign power, knowingly as their spy. What do you think of this . You work at doj. The remarkable decision by the fbi to open a counterintelligence inquiry into a sitting president. What is your read on that. In a Perfect World it is not the decision you want the fbi to make on its own about a elected president but often in the government your choices arent between good and bad, they are between bad and cataclysmic and if you put yourself in the shoes of the fbi in that critical eight and nineday period between when james comey was fired and bob mueller was appointed and theyve been looking at this question implicitly and the president knew there was a reason why he asked james comey whether he was under investigation and he wouldnt say it publicly because it might change and you might be under investigation at some point. So if you are the fbi, you now have seen the president move against your investigation. Hes fired the fbi director and more tellingly, youve seen the Deputy Attorney general help the president do it. Rod rosenstein . Yeah. Rod rosenstein. The person that you would go to consult with about this decision, you think maybe he is working with the president to end the investigation. I think what they were doing, they decided we need to make this explicit with the lester holt interview and the letter when he included russia but they are trying to protect the investigation and bureaucratically the one thing to make this investigation unkillable is make it an investigation into the president. Make it hard for anyone to move against it and maybe force the Deputy Attorney general to point a special prosecutor which is what happened. So that movement from a bureaucratic perspective is protecting it as youre watching the president in realtime attempting to obstruct justice. Yes. Making his a subject of the counterintelligence investigation doesnt give them anything they werent already doing, just a bureaucratic thing. So the only reason it makes sense to do it is if you are saying were worried about this investigation. If you go back and get in a time machine and go back to may of 2017, people in the department of justice were entirely freaked out that the wall that had always separated the department from the white house was crumbling down and they needed to do something to build it back up. Malcolm, what is your understanding of the worst Case Scenario here . Well, the worst Case Scenario is that donald trump is a wholly owned subsidiary of the kremlin. That he is not only in debt to the kremlin he is aware and it is made clear to him that that debt is going to be used against him and it will be leverage and that he will will do the bidding of Vladimir Putin. Vladimir putin is a kgb human intelligence officer. His job was to turn people into traitors and to run agents into west germany to steal technology. He knows what hes doing. His senior staff were exkgb and fsb and a person like donald trump is a godsend. Putin wouldnt do it directly, but through inference and he would use his oligarchy for donald trump to do the things he wants and hes already indoctrinated him and as were seeing now, these things are playing out and the fbi had to have known it because the u. S. Intelligence community knew this well before the election and had to start an investigation to determine if he was moscows asset. Witti witting, or wun witnessing. Thank you both. Mike quigley served on the House Intelligence Committee and you have power. You were in the majority and you control the agenda though you are not chair. What are you going to do about the revelations that weve heard . Look, i think there are a lot of questions raised recently but none of them are a great big surprise to us. Ill say this, after watching for over two years i would tell the American Public, there are no coincidences. The fact that Deutsche Bank was the only bank that would do business with the president before he was elected was also the bank that laundered money for the russians, the fact that the president slow rolled out sanctions against the russians, the fact that he would rather trust a foreign adversary, president putin over his entire Intelligence Community and fired sessions and comey. There are no coincidences. I believe the president of the United States has been compromised. Whether he made all of these extraordinary policy decisions based on bad policy choices, or they were he was compromised must be the subject of the investigation. What do you mean we must be able to get those records. Want to ask about that but follow up. What does it mean to you, explain in plain terms, what does compromised mean to you . I believe that the russians were the sole source of funds through the Deutsche Bank. I cant believe that there is that coincidence. I believe they were able to use that so that he relied upon them and the evidence around the corners bothers me a great deal. The fact that the trump tower in moscow was something that the president lied about through the campaign and that they were offering president putin the penthouse suite, these are extraordinary revelations. The only way we find out is we have all of the information and all of the communications of the actual documents and i read the other day it is Something Like 101 contacts and it is hard to believe there arent more. Until we get the financial documents and the sources of information, we wont know for sure. But it is certain that the president has acted like hes compromised from the beginning of his campaign. He attacked those multinational agencies that fight back against russian aggression. The u. N. , the e. U. , nato. Putting this altogether, it is just to me too much of a compromise too much of a coincidence. There is discussion about the possibility of subpoenaing the translator or translators who have been in the room for the meetings. Is that something you would favor . Absolutely. I favor subpoenaing those transcripts, i favor subpoenaing his financial documents but the translator. I want to be clear. The actual the linguist at the state department, it would be unprecedented absolutely. You want to see them before your committee. It is totally unprecedented and extraordinary act to do that. But understand the story coming out about the fbi suspecting the president of the United States having been compromised, i think it is important for the American Public to recognize that and reflect for a moment just the state of where our democracy is. If that is indeed true. The mere fact that people at this high level of the fbi would question the loyalty of the president of the Un