A close, good evening once again from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. Day 785 of the trump administration. Lets toss this in. With the mueller Team Offering scant clues today about where they are headed, and we will get to that in a bit, today was in part about this president issuing his first veto. It was republicans, members of his own party, lets not forget, who crossed over, joining the dems to reject the president s selftitled National Emergency. Well, today he reinvigorated that talk and the need for a wall along our southern border. It is a tremendous National Emergency. It is a tremendous crisis. People hate the word invasion, but thats what it is. Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution and i have the duty to veto it, and im very proud to veto it. He was then asked if he had sympathy for members of his party who support Border Security but felt they had to vote for the resolution because they opposed executive overreach. They were doing what they have to do and im look, i put no pressure on anybody. I actually said i could have gotten some of them to get along. I said i want you to vote your heart. Do what you want to do. Im not putting any pressure. Ill let them know when theres pressure, okay . And i told them that. When i need your vote, im going to let you know. I didnt need the vote because we all knew it was going to be a veto and theyre not going to be able to override. Well do a fact check in just a moment. Trump is right about a override. Speaker pelosi announced the house will vote on march 26th to try to override the veto but its not expected to pass. Along with that veto, trump set another more veiled political message. Among the people standing around the president in the oval, it was unusual to spot his new attorney general william barr. He made sure to broadcast the governments position on any future legal challenges to his boss Emergency Declaration. Mr. President , your declaration of an emergency on the southern border was clearly authorized under law. The humanitarian and security crisis we have on the border right now is exactly the kind of emergency that president s are permitted to address under the National Emergencies act. Right. What youve done from a legal standpoint is solidly grounded in law, and from the standpoint of protecting the american people, its imperative. You dont see or hear that every day. So this veto means many things, include that the wall he promised that mexico would fund will be covered by american taxpayers. Though nothing here is inevitable. Congress, of course, can stop it if they found the will. You may recall the battle over the budget started us down this road late last year, and the president s threat about what would happen if he didnt get his wall funding. But you know what ill say . Yes. If we dont get what we want, one way or the other, whether its through you, through military, through anything you want to call, i will shut down the government. Okay. Fair enough. Absolutely. And i am proud. We disagree. I tell you what, i am proud to shut down the government for Border Security, chuck. That was the prelude, in fact, to a 35day partial shutdown, longest in our history. Trump issued the Emergency Declaration on 15 february after signing legislation that funded the government through september. Legislation that provided 1. 38 billion for about 55 miles of border barriers. Trumps action also sends a clear message to his supporters as he ramps up his effort to hold on to the white house after todays veto signing. His Campaign Announced a rally for march 28 in grand rapids, michigan. With that, lets bring in our leadoff panel on a friday night. Annie carney, white house report for the New York Times, jonathan allen, Nbc News National Political reporter, and we welcome to the broadcast the often quoted seldom seen around here andrew, congressional reporter for politico. Good evening, welcome to you all. Annie, point of information. I just said he signed a veto. Technically a sleet is the sending back of a piece of legislation to congress. Not kind of the absence of a signature. Having cleared that up, trump said he didnt really have to twist any republican arms. Annie, whats the truth . Well, that is not exactly what happened over the past few days. He in fact has been making a lot of phone calls to republican senators. Hes been calling Mitch Mcconnell regularly. In his pleas to the republicans asking them to vote with him, he has been making a personal pitch, ill credit my colleagues at competitors at the Washington Post with reporting this out, that they asked him for to explain the constitutional reasons for this. And he made it all about him. He said, you know, this could hurt you politically if you dont vote with me. This is vote with me. It was about him, as is most things with trump. So the idea that he wasted no Political Capital on trying to win over votes, in fact they knew it was an uphill battle. Republican senators have been signaling for a long time that they have major problems with this, but the hope was to keep defections low, single digits, four, in fact, they had 12. Even the loss was bigger than they expected it to. Pence was over there a lot. There was a lot of Political Capital spent from the white house in trying to limit this rebuke from his own party. So this idea that he said ill let them know when i need their vote, thats just not the reality of how this played out. John, as we saw, they put together a document for him to sign and show around the room. Not entirely necessary. You spoke today with a prominent republican coms person who called this a gift to donald trump. Who was that and why would he say such a thing . Matt schlapp, the chairman of the american conservative union. Very close to donald trump. Former member of the george w. Bush white house political team. He says its a gift to donald trump because donald trump wants to run against washington again, and in order to do that, in order to run against washington, not only does he want to run against democrats, he also wants to be able to run against republicans a little bit. If you look at his 2016 campaign, he said he was going to clean up washington. He basically gutted the Republican Party to do it. Then ran against hillary clinton. And so this is an opportunity perhaps to distance himself a little bit from the Republican Party. I think what you see on substance here is republicans bucking him in the senate on all the little agenda items from now until the end of the congress. Youre seeing an assertion of power by republicans in congress. Theyre going to battle him on the budget. But he doesnt care about all those little things. What he cares about is the wall. What he cares about is the messaging. What he cares about is the politics and what he cares about is what it says about him. So for the 2020 reelect, this may be a chance for him to go to voters and say, look, im trying to clean up washington. Look at even these republicans, theyre standing in my way. Andrew, to that last point, what will this usher in . Are we going to see people kind of remaining in the ben sasse mode of sound and furry and furrow brow and go ahead and vote with the president at the end of the day. Or are we going to see people finding courage in the corners of congress . Well, i think this week alone you had the vote on the National Emergency disapproval. Cutting off support for the saudilead coalition there. In the house, the overwhelming 4200 vote on basically endorsing this idea of making the Mueller Report public. We saw this morning the president doesnt think there should be a Mueller Report. Just this week alone, we have three very prompt neinent exampf republicans starting to warm up to bucking trump. You mentioned senator flake, senator tillis and ernst and gardner do not want to end up like him. For example, with senator tillis, congressman mark walker and mark meadows, it was reported were flirting with the idea of primary challenges to senator tillis. And i think if you have a primary challenge from the right from these guys who are very supportive of President Trump, i think there is a nonzero chance that the president would support them over tom tillis. So i think thats one of the reasons why senator tillis had been one of those folks who flipped to the other side. John, one of the questions we try to ask around here every week, and weve taken this to the very end of the week. Is there a semblance of an agenda . Is the white house up on the hill as white houses normally do pushing legislation for a view of our country . Its the right question, brian, because there is no agenda. There is absolutely no discernible agenda from this white house that values congress, that values a sort of typical process. What youve got from a domestic policy standpoint is a budget that just came out that calls for tremendous cuts in domestic programs that no one in congress is going to go along with. Not only the democrats. The republicans arent going to go along with. There is no real formal plan to try to get any of those things done. You basically have the wall. The president is focused solely on the wall in terms of domestic policy. In terms of Foreign Policy been youve got potentially military intervention in venezuela. Youve got the north korea situation. You want to talk about bad 24hour periods for a president of the United States, kim jongun just a couple of weeks after meeting with the president is now talking about restarting his launches, restarting that phase of his nuclear program. You have the senate rebuking the president. There is not any sort of coherent policy agenda coming out of the white house right now. Just the wall. Annie, its been a good week for your biline, and one of the things we learned from you was this increasing pressure on the president s family coming out of the house investigations. Tell us about that and how its likely being felt in the west wing, because thats where youll find the president s family most days. Thats right. So i the piece that youre talking about right now, i looked at those 81 document requests from House Democrats sent to people in the white house and extended trump world, and it was noted that, you know, oh, ivanka trump is notably absent from this list. It includes her husband Jared Kushner. Her brothers. There was a sense that the democrats are tiptoeing around her because it would really be an aggressive poke the bear move to go for the daughter. A closer read of those 81 document requests shows that 52 out of the 81 people were asked for documents about ivanka and about her financial interests and about foreign donations to her or to her businesses. So while she wasnt asked for documents specifically, there was a lot of documents about her requested. So this idea that theyre scared to touch ivanka, if you look closely, theyre actually looking for a lot of information about her, and looking at emoluments issues around the family members. Yeah. That will be interesting. If that comes to fruition. Yeah. Andrew, this is your beat as well. And i often think about this. Will you will you know this moment when you see it . Will there be a Tipping Point between now where people vote with this president . Despite all the noise. They vote with this president. And a day where that might be something they have to account for before their voters back home . Well, i think the one issue where that might come up is this issue of impeachment. You heard nancy pelosi make a lot of news this past week when she went further than she ever has in terms of setting the bar very high for impeachment. She basically said it needs republican buyin, right . That means either the evidence laid out in the Mueller Report or these various house investigations is going to have to be so overwhelming that its no longer politically expedient for republicans to stay with the president. But i think that is much further down the line and nancy pelosi would like for it to be have you seen more carefully chosen words than nancy pelosi, who preannounced it with this is news to the reporter. There is a parallel to what annie was reporting. Annies reporting about how theyre looking at ivanka. Right. And ivanka documents. But there is nothing sent to ivanka. So with nancy pelosi, shes saying, you know, im not interested in impeachment. Im not into impeachment. This is news. She wants that to be the message. Meanwhile, her Committee Chairman at the oversight is Reform Committee at the judiciary committee, the intelligence committee, the ways and Means Committee are all conducting the business of an impeachment investigation. They are all looking for the information that would form the background of an impeachment. So that is Going Forward right now. She is in control of those committee chairmen. If she did not want that happening, it wouldnt be happening. So its a little bit of smoke and mirrors to say shes not interested in impeachment. Theyre going to provide all of the information that would support articles of impeachment at some point, should they come forward, and even if they dont, i think the idea here is that that would be a very long process. All of that information will come forward and at some point, as she i think referred to, you might have a situation where it would be republicans that would want to remove the president more than democrats would. And annie, i see you were nodding. You agree with johns contention that thats what theyre conducting here absent calling it that . Well, the white house officials ive talked to certainly view the 81 document requests as the roadmap to an impeachment. Thats how thats what they have made of that. Also, the question of Nancy Pelosis statement there raised a lot of questions among democrats. Saying if not trump, who . Its not worth it was a controversial statement in her own party. Saying they understand politically the argument that if you cant convict in the senate, this is politically damaging for democrats to go down the impeachment road. That being said, is there some damage to not, you know, the tom steyer argument is isnt there damage to not doing something that we believe in that we believe there is enough evidence here and potentially more with the Mueller Report to impeach this guy . And its just not political expedient to do so. How is that a good answer either . So there is its a complicated issue for democrats. And after all, were never more than 15 minutes away from a tom steyer commercial. Annie karni, jonathan allen, andrew, our thanks on a friday night for joining us our conversation and making us all better educated as a result. Coming up, the mueller team today says its still working with one of trumps former Campaign Aides on as they put it several investigations. That stuck out to us. What does it tell us, if anything, about how long theyll be at this . And later, the Prime Minister of new zealand calls out farright extremism after dozens of muslims are massacred in that horrifying terrorist attack. 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Find out how much you could save. At bankofthewest. Com ev President Trump now appears to be trying out a new line of attack on Robert Mueller while hes still calling into question muellers investigation. Writing, quote, the special counsel should never have been appointed. He continues. There should be no Mueller Report. Thats especially bracing considering this is the day after the entire house voted to make the Mueller Report public, and on the Mueller Investigation front today we learned that rick gates, the former deputy to manafort on the campaign, is still talking to prosecutors. His lawyers and the special counsel have filed a status report that says, quote, defendant gates continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations, and accordingly the parties do not believe its appropriate to commence the sentencing process at this time. This is notable. They say theyll have their next update may 14, thats 60 days from now. Tonight there is also new reporting from the New York Times about that Russian Oligarch with close ties to the kremlin who was once a business associate of gates and manafort. The times is reporting that Oleg Deripaska is suing the u. S. Government and our treas