Really a struggle over the Jared Kushner security clearance business with john kelly or is john kelly just going along with this whole thing . You know, friday is going to arrive which is going to be the date by which john kelly said the new security clearance thing was going to be in effect and either the new security clearance thing isnt going to be in effect and Jared Kushner is going to still have his gig or there will be nepotism suggestion for Jared Kushner or were all going to pretend they didnt say any of the things they said in the past week. I dont know. Im betting on the nepotism exception issued specifically by the president. He has the power to simply grant Jared Kushner whatever security clearance he decides to grant him. And then well see that little white house line that we see at the briefing every time where they say oh, we can never comment on security clearances. And thats the end of it. The thing interesting about this is by john kellys own design is this is a fuse that ends in a firecracker. He says this will all be done by friday. Hes going to be humiliated or jau Jared Kushner is going to be humiliated or the white house will have something to explain. But it will happen on a timeline by the end of this week. My i told you so moment last night. We talked about the 2 00 Briefing Schedule for today and i told you do not even look at the tv at 2 00. Do not worry, it wont start on time. You were very, very right. I got lots of people telling me today, hey, lawrence was right. But everybody knew that. That was not a prediction. That was just a subtle fact. It was a prediction and you got it right. I think you can rest on those laurels. I think im going to take that. Another day, another guilty plea. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller obtained another guilty plea in the investigation of the president and the president s campaign and the president s family and the president s assorted societies around the world. This time Robert Mueller charged and got a guilty plea from a lawyer involved in the case. No doubt stunning the rest of the criminal defense lawyers representing witnesses and suspects in this investigation. Well have more details on that guilty plea later. But one of the extraordinary things about that new guilty plea is that it was not even mentioned in todays White House Press briefing because the briefing was so short. It was less than 20 minutes long. And that is the white house strategy on briefings. Make them so short and so rare that it is impossible to ask all of the questions about all of the chaos and all of the suspected corruption and all of the violations of security clearance protocols and all of the failures of the president of the United States to defend this country against an attack by a foreign power. There has not been a White House Press briefing in a week. At the last White House Press briefing, most of the questions were about what john kelly knew and when he knew it and what john kelly did to protect his favorite staff member rob porter after it was revealed that rob porter was accused of violence against both of his former wives. That is where we left it in the White House PressBriefing Room last week and today there was not one question about rob porter in the briefing. Because it worked. The white house strategy worked. Just wait out the news cycle. Just wait for a subject change. And thats how theyll get away from rob porter and the john kelly problem. And they got that subject change in the form of mass murder in the president s own back yard in florida on wednesday. A tragedy that provoked this question today from john roberts of fox news. Does the president have any ideas, any ideas at all on how to address this or is he starting from scratch . I can tell you that the president supports not having the use of bump stocks and that we expect further action on that in the coming days. He ordered the department of justice and the atf to review the regulation of bump stocks. My understanding is that review his been completed and move ment will take place on that shortly. But the president , when it comes to that, is committed to ensuring that those devices are again, im not going to get ahead of the announcement, but i can tell you the president doesnt support the use of those accessories. On the broader problem of deranged individuals getting ahold of weapons and killing people, does he have any ideas on how to deal with this . Look, again, thats part of a lot of conversations that were going to have. So are you suggesting he starts from scratch . If he has to lfb isten to a bun people and doesnt have any ideas of his own. Any ideas of his own. Thats fox news asking does the president of the United States have any ideas of his own . Of course he doesnt have any ideas of his own. But apparently he used to have at least one idea. The president in 2000 did support an assault weapons ban. Whats his position now . Is he open to reinstating the band . Im going to spare you the jibberish that followed that question. It was a simple yes or no question and there was nothing in that answer that indicated a yes or no. Just the usual nonsense words that comes out of that microphone. The press secretary was asked if the president supports the utterly foolish and dangerous and impossible idea advanced by former House SpeakerNewt Gingrich that six to eight American Teachers in every American School should be carrying guns at all times to fight off mass murderers. It is an idea that would create more armed teachers in america than Armed Police Officers in america. I promise you Newt Gingrich has not done the math on this. It is the single most ridiculous idea that has been suggested in this arena and the White House Press secretarys answer was i havent spoken with him about speaker gingrichs plan so ill have to get back to you on that front. So the White House Press secretary has no idea whether the president supports a crazy idea. But that is her standard answer for most questions. The White House Press secretary standard answer for most questions is i have no idea what the president thinks about that. The White House Press secretary offered jibberish and lies when asked about the president s reaction to the indictment on friday of 13 russians for interfering in our election. She actually offered the lie that President Trump has been much tougher on russia than president obama. Now, lets just zoom in on one particular exchange on russian interference. Is he angered by this or outraged that russia tried to interfere in our system . I think hes angered that anybody would try to meddle into our system. Is he angered that russia interfered and notice that she cannot bring herself to say that the president is angered that russia has interfered in our system. She switches it to hes angered that anyone would interfere with our system. She cannot say the word russia in that sentence. She is not allowed to. She knows it. She knows what the demand is from her audience of one. And then she was asked this about Jared Kushner. The staff on friday with security clearances that those with interim security clearances by the end of this week that were outstanding since june of last year would lose their access to classified information. One of those would be Jared Kushner. Can you talk about how hell be able to do his senior job if he does not have access to classified information. Again in the interest of time and your sanity i will spare you the nonsense that came out of the microphone in response to that. But you should know that tonight john kelly issued this written statement. I will not comment on anybodys specific secure clearance situation or go beyond the memo released last week. As i told jared days ago, i have full confidence in his ability to continue performing his duties in his Foreign Policy portfolio including overseeing our Israeli Palestinian peace effort and serving as an integral part of our relationship with mexico. Everyone in the white house is grateful for these valuable contributions to furthering the president s agenda. There is no truth to any suggestion otherwise. Turning our discussion now, josh earnest, former White House Press secretary for president obama. David fromm is with us. Hes the author of the New York Times new best seller trumpocray. And nor ra. Josh, i want to start with you. This was about an 18, 19 minute press briefing. I remember you used to do them that could last over an hour if there were enough questions to fill that space. This clearly looks like the strategy is limit these briefings to the point that they cant possibly ask everything that needs to be discussed approximate. And also have them infrequently enough that the way to end the John Kelly Rob Porter story is to let enough days of silence go by before you speak again. Lawrence, you have touchdown on what is clearly an element of their strategy. Some of this has to do with the impossible situation that sarah huk Huckabee Sander finds herself in. The graphic youve had up crystallizes the problem she faces which is that President Trump doesnt actually have any ideas of his own. It makes it very difficult to put her in a situation where shes supposed to use the White House Briefing to go and advocate for ideas that dont apparently exist. When i was the White House Press secretary, my responsibility, what i spent my entire morning on leading up to the briefing, was actually gathering my staff and policy experts throughout the white house to discuss what our position, what our ideas, what our record and what results we had on the topics of the day. What are the questions we know were going to get asked about, whether its Foreign Policy and the progress we made against isis or domestic policy and the progress we have made on the economy or on a range of other areas. But anybody who stands behind that podium these days doesnt have the benefit of that kind of substance that they can go out and defend or advocate for. And so its not particularly surprising that they might go for a week without doing a briefing. Just for your viewers at home, you need to understand how unusual that is. It would there might have been a couple of times over the holidays or when president obama might have been on vacation, over the sumner august with his family where we may not have done a briefing for a week, but typically that was because there wasnt that much controversy in the world. There wasnt that much that the white house had to account for directly. And that clearly is not the case for whats transpired in the last week. And its put the Trump White House in a very uncomfortable position. For a white house that is focused on optics and projecting strength, they look to everybody whos watching, scared to answer any questions. Its not a good look for the leader of the free world and his team. David fromm is the veteran of a Republican White House yourself. I want to get your reaction to what you saw in that Briefing Room. You are right about the power of the change the subject messaging method. But you do run out of rope if your plan is to distract attention from scandals with more scandals because evenly you just have a big bag of a lot of scandals. White houses dont do these things because they are so committed to openness. They say they do. The real reason you do them is in order to asesert a white houe message. Otherwise the tv is going to be there. The media are going to be there. Theyre going to run stories and the question for a white house is do you want to have an impact on those stories. When you hunker down and put your pillow over your head, you surrender the ability to do that. Look what happened this morning. The president got a little bit late access to a Washington Post story in which another woman came forward to say that President Trump had assaulted her. She had contemporaneous emails that this happened a decade ago but that day she emailed her mother and other people in a short period of time. What was the white house response . The president this morning erupts in a twopart twitter storm about this. Well, this is now part of the national agenda. There was no plan. There was no consideration. He insisted this is something i would never have done except we have his voice on record at about the same time as he was assaulting this woman boasting this was his method. Im so glad david mentioned that case because this was a front page story in the Washington Post. Its not mention ed in this briefing today partially because of how short it was, deliberately short. Scheduled to start at 2 00. It doesnt start until 3 30. It goes 20 minutes. Its because the latest front page story of the latest Sexual Assault by the president and everything that the white house is afraid to talk about. Absolutely. I would say the problem for them is not that they have dominance or dont have dominance. The headline is they are drowning in scandal. The operative thing they were asked about today that trumped Everything Else was the fact that russia meddled with our elections and donald trump hasnt said word squat about that really. Fundamentally we have a foreign adversaries interfering on our elections to help him and to elect him and hes basically fine with it. They have to in essence, sarah Huckabee Sanders had to lie and basically say this is obamas fault and everyone knows that donald trump isnt doing the sanctions, hasnt actually lifted a finger in any way to impact putin from any tool that he had. So i think the real issue here is that they are mired in one scandal after another. Whats so really pathetic about this white house is someone could have asked them about their Washington Post quote in which you have a white house staffer saying the slaughter of 17 children was a reprieve for them, a political reprieve from the porter scandal. That is how rock bottom this white house is. But its also obvious that thats the way they were using it and so that unnamed source in the Washington Post who said that was simply speaking, josh, a quick last word, that was simply a statement of the obvious for this white house. Yeah, it was. I think we saw more of that over the weekend with the president s tweets on a variety of topics, most of them attempting to obscure the scandal that engulfed his white house. I was remembering back to five years ago this weekend. I traveled to florida. I was the Deputy Press Secretary at the white house. I traveled down to florida with president obama who was looking for a long weekend away. The big scandal of that weekend that left the White House Press corp enraged at the way that i was managing them was that president obama went golfing with tiger woods without telling the press corp in advance. Its an indication of how far weve come. Those were the days. Thank you all for joining us. I really appreciate it. Tom issued a code red on donald trump yesterday. It has become tom freedmans most circulated column ever. It is mandatory reading and tom freedman will join us next. And later in the rewrite tonight, above and beyond the call of duty, the new Job Description for American School teachers who in the words of one teacher take a bullet for the kids. vo you can pass down a Subaru Forester. But you get to keep the memories. Love. Its what makes a subaru, a subaru. avo get 0 apr financing on all new 2018 Subaru Forester models. Now through february 28th. Of being there for my sons winning shot. That was it for me. Thats why im quitting with nicorette. Only nicorette mini has a patented fast dissolving formula. It starts to relieve sudden cravings fast. Every great why needs a great how. Our democracy is in serious danger. That was the first sentence of a column by tom freedman. It describes the Trump Presidency in truly threatening terms, threatening to the United States of america. Tom freedman was not scheduled to post a column, but at the end of a weekend of president ial misbehavior, he felt himself compelled to say something. It is one of the most instructive in the history of New York Times columns. He travels the world trying to translate everything thats happening into clear concepts that readers around the world need to know. You might not agree with everything you read in friedman columns, but they are a search for the worlds best ideas and that is a search that is usually optimistic. Those columns are read closely by leaders around the world, but it is entirely possible that the president of the