The latest political developments of the day and interviews with top newsmakers are featured. we're not doing enough. look at these five people. here's the thing, john. there is a whole cottage industry of distraction folks. this is a distraction from x or distraction from mueller. i'm not sure that was the case because there are a lot of fires happening now around this administration. the robert mueller, paul manafort, special counsel, jeff sessions fire series is one of them. there is also the election en r interference fire, big deal. i had conversations with folks on the other side of folks on capitol hill, both parties. one consistent theme i heard in relation to election interference, leadership starts at the top. i asked point blank, who do you talk to in the white house, who do you talk to in the administration? nobody, we don't know who the point person is, we don't know what their strategy is. this is somebody who is at a high level over there. this seemed to be a way of the white house coming out to be able to say, we've got this. we are working on this. but, john, if it was a janitorial crew as you described it, which probably doesn't do justice to the high level of folks we saw in the room here today to be fair, there were some more messes made frankly, february 2017. the whole attack is to undermine american confidence in election systems and the vote and democracy. so they are doing essentially what they have pledged to do in their positions. i am going to serve out my role. now, the problem with this is director wray said this is what's happening in my agency. and then he sort of allude we'll coordinate amongst ourselves up here the this is not how you run a strategy to counter russian interference. it comes with a mandate. it's the president who is the leader. it's the national security staff that coordinates it. the nsa director basically said we will launch a counterattack. he sort of put that on the table today. that is unheard of in cyberspace because we're more vulnerable than any other country in the world. what if we do that? are the other parts of government prepared? is wall street prepared for a financial attack? is our infrastructure ready? this is a really -- it seems like the parts know what their missions are and what they should be doing. no one at the top is really putting -- >> let's list tone what hallie jackson said and phil said. all of them raise fundamental question. you're frustrated with the narrative. you want to soft the problem. you need actions to coordinate. it's easy to solve that problem. you have the president of the united states take the bull by the horns and go out and lead on this. why is it these five people can get out and say this stuff and donald trump still either can't or won't? >> that's the big question. the easiest thing to do if they want to signal how serious they are about this is do what any other president or lawmaker or politician would do in their place. the president will come out to that rostrum and he would say, here's our five-point plan for stopping russian interference in the election. they didn't do that. and the only conclusion you can draw is they can't do that because he won't do that. and i don't know why and that's what the russia investigation is basically for. you would think that at this moment when the president is being investigated on suspicions that he or his people were colluded with russia, that they would take pains to be aggressive when it comes to the -- our own intelligence agency saying we're under attack. and yet even at this moment they have chosen not to do that from the top. it's very strange. >> you look like dr. freud on this matter because you have a view that i've heard you expound about why donald trump captain say these things that go to his psychology, his insecurities, his political vulnerabilities. but please, hold forth. >> and it's not just the explanation close to him and people who work for him provide when you ask this question. he believes any suggestion of russian interference in his election dee legitimatizes his win. he got elected because of his charisma, not because of his message, not because he was the superior candidate, but because russia helped him. he had a hand from putin. u.s. intelligence did conclude russia did interfere in the election, they did so to help president trump and putin said himself a couple weeks ago next to trump that he wanted trump to win that election. so there is not a lot of doubt about that, but trump himself cannot bring himself to fully sort of say it and acknowledge it publicly because he views it as seeding something, as a weakness. >> hallie jackson, whenever you have new information, there is like a little bit of tremor in the force. i felt it just now so i think there is a chance maybe you have something you want to say -- >> was that tremor coming from -- >> it's wiggling. what's new hot off the press on your end down there? >> let me just say this. i'm told now, our teams as we are reporting out the events of the last two hours, my colleague peter alexander who is sitting back in the booth tells me a white house official says the president wanted these five people. he asked for these five top officials to come out and do this briefing today and do this in front of the media and do this just before, by the way, the president gets on a plane, heads up to pennsylvania and then goes out to bedminster where he will be hunkered down for a little while which i think is a notable point here. and just to play off what phil is talking about, that freudian look, what people say who are close to the president, president president himself also tip toes right up to that line when he's asked about these questions in response by touting what he believes was this big election victory and pointing to all the states he's won and talking about the number of people who voted for him. i think that is an indication, very publicly from this president, of what you're seeing phil talk about. >> so he's the most van hollen ubl preside -- voluble president in history the twitter machine. according to this reporting, i have to get these five people out in front of the camera raises an interesting question. i want to raise what hallie raised when we started the program, something dan coats said, something he said before. i want to play the sound. an extraordinary thing, we're this far from helsinki and dan coats is still saying what happened between donald trump and vladimir putin. >> in the run up to the helsinki summit, u.s. officials, ambassador to nato, ambassadors to russia said the president would raise the issue of malign activity with president putin. he didn't discuss that, at least at the press conference. you're saying today that the president has directed you to make the issue of election meddling a priority. how do you explain the disconnect between what you are saying, his advisors, and what the president has said about this issue? >> i'm not in a position to either understand fully or talk about what happened at helsinki. >> okay. that's the director of national intelligence, right? he's an important guy, supposed to know a lot of stuff. he said this before to andrea mitchell. it's how many days since andrea did that interview where he didn't know what happened between trump and putin. he's saying x number of days later i don't understand what happened between trump and putin. nick, help me out here. how can that be? >> because the president won't tell him. i don't know, it's as simple as you think it is. >> does he even remember? >> that meeting was arranged to leave as little of a paper trail as it is possible for a president of the united states to ever leave. so for some reason the president wanted there to be a bit of a veil of secrecy around that meeting, but what is more striking as you point out is, our top intelligence official doesn't know what happened and he can't be told. >> there is no way to interpret this -- it's not an oversight. the president hasn't had a chance to connect with coats and let him know what happened. he want it had to be a secret meeting. it's still a secret meeting even from the people who should be at the highest level of government to know what happened. that is an act of intent. what does one read in that act of intent on donald trump's part that he's still keeping this secret from dan coats and presumably others? >> i think this is why we had the series of announcements today because when i talked to friends either in government or out of government, current republicans who will just always vote for republican, that helsinki press conference was like oh, my god, is this a m manturian candidate? when you watch that press conference, everything that's been said about trump, you start to say, wow, what if this is true? we're having this reaction today about election interference. he knows that this is a mistake, but yet he won't talk about that press conference. he did not even communicate to d.n.i. coats he was going to extend the invitation to vladimir putin to come to the united states. and when coats was on stage and shocked about that, as he should be because he should be the first person that's told about this, he has to go back and essentially negotiate with the president to calm his anger from what i understand. so this is a crazy scenario and even with all the pressure -- and i think a lot of that apprecia pressure is from capitol hill, the institutions donald trump is in charge of. even with all that pressure, he will not take the next step and say i am going to be tough on russia and here's what i'm going to do. >> hallie jackson, we're going to lose you and i can't let you go without asking one last question. on the basis which you just reported donald trump said these five people should go out and make this statement, right, the logical implication would be trump is not going to attack them later tonight on twitter or on stage at his rally in pennsylvania. but that's the logical implications. do you have any sense, given what you've observed overall your time covering this president, that there's no chance that now trump, because of his insecurities about the legitimacy of his election, is not going to go out and undercut all five of these people in the coming minutes, seconds, hours? >> i don't know, john. any topic on any question at any point in this administration, if you can ever get me to say donald trump would or would not do something, i think that is risky and dangerous. for a reporter to do, just based on the past practices of this president, i will say this. from what we have been reporting out over the last maybe 3, 4 days or so, the president is stewing, but he is stewing on what is happening on the robert mueller side of things, paul manafort day three of the trial. were the president to go off script in pennsylvania, it seems likely based on what the president has said publicly he may riff on that. he may riff on the koch brothers as the feud heats up. has he undercut his own principles, his own top officials in the past? yes, he has. will he do it again this time? >> probably. >> no crystal ball here, john. >> let's just say probably. not for sure, but probably. hallie jackson, you're awesome. phil rucker, equally awesome. still really awesome. thank all three of you. they're sticking around. when we come back, we have donald trump's private rage over the mueller probe now on full public display. is he putting himself in even more legal jeopardy? plus, with trial of trump's former campaign chairman now in his third day, we will look at how and why donald trump and paul manafort may have been a match made in heaven for each other. and it's a simple question. is the -- the president has decided it's not worth an answer. when i found out i had age-related macular degeneration, amd, i wanted to fight back. my doctor and i came up with a plan. it includes preservision. only preservision areds 2 has the exact nutrient formula recommended by the national eye institute to help reduce the risk of progression of moderate to advanced amd. that's why i fight. because it's my vision. preservision. also, in a great-tasting chewable. your digestive system has billions of bacteria, but life can throw them off balance. re-align yourself, with align probiotic. and try new align gummies, with prebiotics and probiotics to help support digestive health. instead seek some answers in written form, according to one person. joining us now for this conversation from the washington post, national political reporter and the moderator of washington week, the robert costa. paul butler, former federal prosecutor now georgetown law professor. and joining me at this table, rick stengel, and mimi roker, now distinguished fellow at pace university law school. i know why nicolle complains about our long titles. guys, it's great to see you here. robert costa, i want to start with you because of phil rucker, one of the great trump psychologists, you're a man with the window into the president's psyche. what's going on here? i sense from your reporting and from what we've been watching that you had at least some kind of a theory, some insight into what it is that's fueling the president to behave in the way that he's behaved, especially yesterday with this tweet in which he seemed to obstruct justice right here in front of the whole american public. >> john, you have to separate the president's actions from his tweets. talking to mayor giuliani today and other white house officials and trump advisors, they say the president, of course, is furious as he watches paul manafort's trial. he's unhappy with rod rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. he's unhappy with attorney general jeff sessions. this is obvious. but he has not moved to fire them. he knows there's a political fallout should he ever move in that direction. what they're really mounting is not so much a policy war or legal war, it's a public war, a political war about the credibility of this ongoing probe. that's all ahead of that expected report from mr. mueller. >> so, bob, i want to stay with you and ask you this. the president said in his tweet yesterday, we spent now more than 24 hours kind of agog at it. there are theories that drove him to send that morning tweet. some having to do with the notion that he's still upset, angry about the original sin or what he sees as the original sin of jeff sessions recusing himself. others saying that he's in a panic mode because he thinks that maybe mueller has the capacity -- has more on him on obstruction of justice than he previously believed. what's your sense of the various theories if it's right trump is in a state of rage and that rage fueled that tweet, what do you think the source or the primary source of that rage is? >> the timing is notable because we know on tuesday evening bob mueller gets in touch with rudy giuliani and jay sekulow, the president's lawyers. wednesday morning he tweets about ending the investigation. that's a juxtaposition. based on my reporting, he was watching the manafort trial talking about advisors about trade deals. feeling he was always distracted by the mueller investigation. and he has just erupt the at different points during his so-called executive time when he's in the residence with twitter. this is the president alone. this is not him in the oval office necessarily coming up with some kind of strategy with advisors. this is the president, his aides tell me, being his own strategist, almost his own lawyer as he confronts all of these challenges. >> paul butler, you know what they say about lawyer -- a client who has himself for -- a client who treats himself as his own lawyer. i want to play for you right now some rudy giuliani sound to get to one of the things costa just mention the what the strategy might be on the part of the president and his team as they confront the question that they have confronted now for months, which is whether to sit down for an interview with bob mueller. let's listen to giuliani right now. >> is he still interested in meeting with mueller? >> well, he's always been interested in testifying. it's us, meaning the team of lawyers, including me, that have the most reservations about that. as lawyers, i don't know, you all watch television. i don't know if you find a lawyer on television that ever thinks their client should testify. >> why should we believe that, though? because everything that he says indicates the opposite, that he doesn't want to -- >> really? i haven't heard him say that. i've heard him say i want to be interviewed if my lawyers can reach an agreement on what the ground rules will be. we've had a hard time doing that, but we're still -- i'm not going to give you a lot of hope it's going to happen, but we're still negotiating. we haven't stopped negotiating. >> so, paul, you just listened to rudy giuliani who is a lawyer and certainly plays a lawyer on tv. what do you take from listening to that about how the president and his team are thinking about this prospect? >> rudy giuliani is a bad lawyer with an even worse client because his client does not take good legal advice when it comes from folks, usually other than giuliani. we know that, in part, because even giuliani has suggested that the president should stop tweeting, because every time he tweets about this probe, he digs in further in terms of his exposure to obstruction of justice. and the problem with an interview by mueller is that even the best client would have to be extremely well coached. they'd have to prepare for it. and they'd have to listen to their lawyer. and we know that the president would not do that. and again, just like he's digging himself further in with these tweets, man, can you imagine him and mueller one on one? we know who would come out of that with a win. >> paul, you just said rudy giuliani is a very good lawyer. i don't think you're alone in that view. one thing that is true rudy giuliani says over and over again, the president wants to do the interview, and he, rudy giuliani and the other lawyers, think it's a bad idea. i assume you think that, at least in that piece of advice, that giuliani is on the right track and you don't think there is really any good scenario for donald trump sitting down with bob mueller. >> you know, again, even the best kind of clients, the people who have actually no exposure, they're totally innocent. if they're going in with a sharp as prosecutor as giuliani with, again, a whole team of great fbi agents and other investigators and they're going to sit down with donald trump, i mean, there's just no way that trump comes out of that not having further exposed himself to criminal liability. so, again, even the best client in a situation like this where the prosecution is clearly focusing more on trump, i think that's the explanation for these kind of increasingly desperate tweets. again, his lawyers are meeting with mueller. mueller is telling them the status of the investigation. and apparently what they report to trump does not encourage trump to think that they're going to absolve him of any criminal responsibility. >> all right. so, mimi, i have a couple questions for you. the first is when you see mueller at least ostensibly agreeing to limit the scope of the questions or do some written and not all of them in the room, what does that tell you about? is he operating from a position of strength or a position of weakness, number one? and number two -- you can answer both of these in a row. number two, how good a case can mueller build without an interview if he doesn't get one at all? >> i think that -- first of all, i think we have to take with a grain of salt the reports of what mueller is willing or not willing to do. we are hearing this all -- this is not the mueller team leaking it. this is through trump's team. and they have self-interest here. and, you know, they want the pressure to be on mueller to limit the questions. so i'm not sure i completely buy that, first of all. but if it is true, i think mueller at this point doesn't need trump to come in for an interview in the sense that it sounds like -- this is where i think the tweets are coming from. it sounds like there is a pretty compelling case right now just based on what we know and mueller knows so much more on obstruction and, frankly, on the russian conspiracy. i think the tweets are being fueled not by rage, but by panic because more and more facts are coming out. you know, mueller has been very tightly sealed and we haven't heard a lot. but recently more is coming out through cohen and through the manafort trial, et cetera. and i think it's throwing trump into a panic. >> i think you're donald trump, you're sitting around hearing all this in the manafort case, a paper case. the guy has so much on paper that the case is very strong. you're trump, you're starting to realize even if you don't have the conversation, that the special counsel already has so much information that you're in a lot of trouble. does that make sense? >> yes, i think so. i mean, he's hearing that some of his closest advisors apparently talked to mueller and said that trump knew when he asked comey to layoff flynn that flynn was under investigation. that's something trump has been trying to deny for so long because it puts that request, to layoff of flynn, in a much different light if he knew he was under criminal investigation at that point. that's just one example of the things that he's hearing now. >> nick, i want to ask you and rick, i'm going to ask you both the same question in some sense. we've been saying it for a long time, if you look at the way trump is behaving and the way giuliani is behaving they're engaged in a political campaign, not a legal campaign and ultimately they think -- >> correct. >> this is going to be -- if impeachment is on the horizon potentially, what they're trying to do is discredit the process, discredit the special counsel and rally support or at least enough support to survive. if you look at the acts of the president and his lawyer in the last 24 hours through that prism, does that make sense, or are they in some ways potentially doing themselves some political damage by behaving, even by trump standards, kind of over the line way he's behaved in this last day? >> i think it makes total sense. look, it's a political outcome in the end, right? and what sounds better for the president to say, i totally want to testify, but my punk lawyers won't let me because, you know, bob mueller is unfair and mean, or, are you kidding? i'm never going to testify and i'll plead the 5th if he brings me in. what sounds better to the public? obviously the first one. there is no way they're going to admit up front or now they have no intension of having him in there. as everyone has pointed out, he will probably be a disaster in that scenario. he was the last time he was deposed that we know of in a civil lawsuit. it is a mine field for him. >> stengel, we have to get to a break. i'm going to put you on pause ask you're going to answer the first question in the next block. first i want to say good-bye to the great, the one, the only bob costa and the magnificent paul butler spectacular on camera. up next we'll have day three on the paul manafort trial. we learn more about the similarities he shares with the president than we first thought. 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(harmonica interrupts) everytime. geico. 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance. so let's promote our summer travel deal on choicehotels.com like this. surfs up. earn a $50 gift card when you stay just twice this summer. or, badda book. badda boom. book now at choicehotels.com along seemingly at warp speed down in alexandria, virginia. today on day three of the trial, we got three appropriately big developments. first, after the prosecution yesterday cast doubt on the question whether they were going to put rick gates on the witness stand. they clarified today that in fact they will have him on that very stand. second, the judge in the case says he is not likely to allow photographs of manafort's flashy suits including that one made of os strich, because they could, quote, besmirch the defendant. the bookkeeper said he didn't know about any of his foreign bank accounts, but she did provide an extraordinary picture of the financial problems manafort was having before he joined the trump campaign. nbc's ken dilanian has been following the trial up close and personal and joins us now. also joining this table eddy, man of the glod squad, msnbc contributor, ken. i ask you, i tease this thing with the bookkeeper. lay it on us, give us the picture. >> yeah, john. her name is heather walsh and she testified about three hours. i think her testify is the most significant of the trial in terms of where this fits into the larger russia investigation which as you know is not coming up at the trial. the jury is not hearing about russia, russia collusion. the jury doesn't know the prosecution worked for robert mueller. but she painted this incredible picture of a firm and a person, paul manafort, who is in absolute dire financial straits after 2014 when his patron was sent packing in exile to russia. the firm started losing money, massive amounts. the firm lost $1.6 million in 2016. what else happened in 2016? paul manafort went to work for the trump campaign for free. so we know this. he was scrambling for cash at that time, committing bank fraud allegedly as you talked about that as well. also in debt to a russian oligarch, and someone mueller identified as having ongoing ties to russian intel jenls. we all need to ask ourselves how desperate was manafort at that point, what was he willing to do if the russians put the finger on him as part of their collusion and intervention campaign in the election. >> i don't think paul manafort is a start-up guy. but every time i think about this model, i think about a guy willing to forego salary to make it up in equity. if he got stock options in the trump administration and got paid off down the line, it might make sense. let me ask you this other question, ken, real quick. the gates confusion, can you just explain -- last night we were talking e oh, my god, they might not call rick gates. we're definitely going to call rick gates. what is the explanation behind that, what seems to have been some waivering on the part of the prosecution? >> i think we led a little into much of a comment by the prosecutor yesterday who was mindful of the fact that the defense has rested its whole case presumably on blaming rick gates. the prosecutor maybe wanted to throw a little miss direction and raise a question whether rick gates is going to testify. he's going to testify, they made that clear today. they are really quick to point out he's not the star witness. they don't need him to make this case. this is a documents case. we have already seen massive amounts of evidence of purchases of luxury goods by paul manafort paid for by bank accounts in cyprus that he never declared on his taxes. his story is going to be that was an accident, that that was incidental. and i can't think -- find any legal experts who has seen a defense like this work. >> mimi, i have to ask you this quick question. we're going to go deep law now, right, trial practice. the jury wants a birthday cake for a member of the jury. i think that's sweet, but you think it means more than that. >> it's a good sign for the prosecution. if i were a prosecutor on that case, i would be happy that they asked for a birthday cake for one of the jurors because -- >> they're going to share some of the cake? >> because, you know, i like birthday cake. a happy jury is a good jury for the government. here's why. to acquit you need 12 jurors to agree on acquittal. you need 12 to agree on convicts. in this kind of case unlikely you're going to get 12 people to agree on acquit. what you worry about is one or two sort of lone wolfers who doesn't want to go along with the program. you have a hung jury. if they're celebrating birthdays, talking about personal stuff, they're bonding, that's a good thing going into deliberations when that time comes. >> rick stengel, i said i'd get to you. i want to talk to you about this rather than the thing before because you'll have interesting things to say about it. one of the things we're seeing here as we watch trump's behavior is he for a long time was only talking about manafort and all of a sudden now he's talking about manafort, right? and it seems like there's a lot of -- they've known each other for a long time. >> yeah. >> they seem to have more in common than a lot of people sort of pay attention to and i think a lot of it has to do with foreign dictators. i want to read something from the daily beast, a piece that talks about -- it says over the years -- betsy woodruff piece. over the years manafort's firm made millions of dollars by representing a rogue gallery of clients, dictators, guerrilla groups and desk pots with no regard for human rights massive amputation ands oversaw state sanctioned rape. the list of manafort's clients is a horror show long before you got to ukraine and russia. mubutu, incredible array. what is that, the fact that paul manafort liked to deal with strong men and donald trump seems to like to have some affinity for strong men. what does that tell you about some of the things that might bind them together? >> and, by the way, that wasn't a red light for donald trump. the thing, john, that i actually know a lot about here is ukraine. i went there three times when i was with the state department. ukraine in that era when manafort was there, was an incredibly corrupt place. so, yes, did he hide money from taxes? yes, because he was getting money in paper bags, millions of dollars from people. the thing that people also have to remember part of this whole manturian, he's outside of moscow being pet by vladimir putin every day. this idea of what maybe mueller is trying to get at eventually is manafort obviously had very direct connections with the kremlin. he was working for all the proxies for the kremlin. not just for one or two years, but for ten, 15 years. and he was working against this thing that we are all for, which is ukraine being more western rather than eastern. henry kissinger famously said, ukraine -- russia with ukraine is a european power. russia without ukraine is an asian power. putin wants to be a european power. >> i raise my question with you again. i remember when manafort came on. i mentioned mobutu. you had marcos and others he represented. with trump you have erdogan, kim jong-un, duterte. these guys seem to, if not have an actual affinity for thugs, dictators and strong men, they certainly don't have an aversion to thugs, dictators and strong men. they don't vana version from making money from thugs, dictators and strong men. are these guys just peas in a pod here, is that the difference between manafort and donald trump? >> basically until we find out something more concrete. it seems to me dispositionally, both of them are not constrained by any ethical kind of commitments outside of the pursuit of their own interest. and, and what follows from that is that they're willing to, shall we say, push up against the lines of what's legal in pursuit of they are self-interest. what's interesting about this case, it's a documents case. we see underneath all the connections that would make i think donald trump go apoplectic. dispositionally they seem to be two peas in a pod. second, they don't give a dam about the ethics of it all. >> on the other hand, i just want to point out that the president appointed as his campaign chairman a man whose business, whose stock and trade -- >> right. >> -- was influencing american policy makers on behalf of foreign powers. that was his campaign manager. >> yeah. as soon as you saw that you thought this is not going to end well. ken dilanian, you're awesome. mimi rocca, i real lie like ken, but you're way more awesome. thank you for being on the show. when we come back, will the conspiracy extremists that showed up in florida show up with president trump tonight? 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well, if you thought that was dra matt i dramatic and spurious, we're just getting started. let me introduce you to q a nontrying to elbow it its way into the mainstream with q swag to trump rallies. q is the moniker for the movements anonymous leader. he or she claims to be a high-level government official with top secret security clearance sharing bread crumbs from time to time. when trump just said the number 17, that was apparently a nod to the group because q is the 17th letter in the alphabet and -- i know you all think i'm high, but not right now. this is the real thing that these guys do and talk about. the story here, though, is less about a deranged tin foil hat conglomerate and more about the president himself. these q a non people were noticeably present at trump's rally in tampa. because of that everyone is going to be on the look out for the q a non people at his event tonight in pennsylvania and, in fact, we have already seen q a non people at the event in pennsylvania. that's a picture, the first sighting of a q a non person there. there is talk about license plates in the parking lot. we're going to have an orgy of q-anon before this hour is over. clint watts is with us and the rest of the table remains. i want to ask you a question because we talked about this last night. you freaked me out. we were sitting in the green room before brian williams' show. you're the russia guy. he said, i'm not worried about russia any more and social media. i'm not worried about russia disrupting american society. i'm worried about q a non. why? >> this play is take not on by everybody. this is very american. it looks to be american made. it's more sophisticated in some ways. better production value, sophisticated. it's spreading very quickly, it's multi platform and it connects with conspiracies and takes on its own life. it also is talking about there being a deep state or a government that almost needs to be overthrown and they have a video called the plan. essentially here's what we are going to do. this is the kind of stuff that leads to violence, public safety problems. you know, these conspiracies lead to elected officials being challenged with falsehoods, so this is what i'm worried about going forward. it's not going to be the russians doing it, it's everybody else. >> can i piggyback on that because clint is the expert. but i dealt a lot with russian disinformation. and it's still going on, that's why it was so important what they did today. there's no off switch, right? so if you take the internet research agency, which clint wrote a lot about, they are still putting out stuff all day long and every day. i've been a recipient of it. they have very bad english. they can't even curse in a good way. these guys, if you have an american disciple of them that are using those techniques and knows how to use american vernacular, that is dangerous. >> it's much more effective. >> i want to bring this back as i said in the intro here, i want to bring this back to trump. so you think back to 2016 and 2017, things we've seen. you've got charlottesville and the swastika, neonazi folks. people retweeting anti-semitic stuff. you've got david duke. in every instance, the president has exhibited one characteristic which is if you like donald trump, he is loathe to distance himself from you. he gives license to all manner of vile behavior on the part of these hate groups and other forces. is this qanon thing the new version of that? >> i think so. there was a post civil rights consensus about how we talked about race. it was coded language, racial dog whistles, but it was all kind of underneath the surface. but with trump's election, it's like the armies storming of white house yelling make america great again and this is just the latest flank of it, latest battalion. because look at this. steve bannon is running around europe saying we should wear our ethnic pride like a badge with pride, right? >> white pride. >> white pride, right? and so here you have folks who are trafficking white supremacist logic, using language which is deeply and profoundly anti-semitic because they're talking about jewish financiers who run the world and stoking all of this kind of fear in order to really set the stage for in some ways disrupting the way in which we move about. and trump mahas mainstreamed th. >> i want to read from a story in "the new york times" to talk about the what the stakes are and how dangerous this is. the paranoid world view has crossed other from the interpret and into the real world several times in recent months. on more than one occasion people believed to be followers of qanon have shown up sometimes with weapons in places that the character told them were somehow connected to anti-trump conspiracies. a man drove an armored vehicle to the hoover dam on what he said was a mission from qanon. that is just one example. also pizzagate. there's the michael avenatti example. this is not just sort of fun and games here and it's not even just wacko. this is crossing the barrier into that people are showing up armed and dangerous. >> there has always been a lunatic fringe in american politics. it's never had somebody as tolerant of them in the white house as donald trump. he indulges it to a certain extent. certainly with the white nationalists and to some extent here. as a matter of trade craft, john, as you know, these rallies are tightly cordoned. if you come into one you're searched by the secret service and they open your backpack. if they wanted to keep q signs out of this rally, they could. if they were worried about it and thought they were giving license to people who were going to shoot up gas stations, they could do something about it. they're not. they're not. >> here's the question. i want to end on this question. so the answer to this is what some the answer to this is sunlight is the best disinfectant, we should talk about it to show how dangerous and lethal it is or to ignore this stuff and not give it a platform. >> well, i'm a sunlight guy. i think sunlight is the best disinfectant. at the same time, it's a free speech issue. q is not protected by the first amendment if it leads directly to violence. that is what brandenburg has said and the courts have said. when these peoplin see ie incen it. >> ignore it. people like me and others, we have to deal with the real-life consequences of these folks and raise our children in an environment that they are defining. so sunlight -- sun light is dangerous for some of us. >> we've got to get out. i would love to talk to clint watts about it. this is a topic we're not going to let go of. ivanka trump shot down her father's claim that the press is the enemy of the people and now he's responding. it's pretty amazing out there. the world is full of more possibilities than ever before. and american express has your back every step of the way- whether it's the comfort of knowing help is just a call away with global assist. or getting financing to fund your business. no one has your back like american express. so where ever you go. we're right there with you. the powerful backing of american express. don't do business without it. don't live life without it. her father has stated repeatedly, the enemy of the people. her answer, which marks one of the few times she's publicly distanced herself from her dad has gotten a lot of attention and it seems the president has noticed. he just tweeted, they asked my daughter ivanka whether or not the media is the enemy of the people. she correctly said no. it is the fake news, which is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people. and while ivanka was able to definitively answer a question that should be easy to ranswer, sarah huckabee sanders today was not. >> for the sake of this room, the people who are in this room, this democracy, this country, all the people around the world are watching what you're saying, sarah, and the white house for the united states of america, the president of the united states should not refer to us as the enemy of the people. his own daughter acknowledges that. all i'm asking you to do, sarah, is to acknowledge that right now and right here. >> i appreciate your passion. i share it. i've addressed this question. i've addressed my personal feelings. i'm here to speak on behalf of the president.