andrea, do you believe it this tame any more than the other times? i do believe it. the reporting from every one of these sources is that he is on his way out. they had a christmas dinner for the staff to know at the white house and it was possibly his last big event there. we think it is imminent. we know it s been long the desire of members of the family and others close, close people around the president who felt that he was not letting the president run the white house the way he wanted to run it. we know that he clashed with jared kushner over the security clearances and he kept a lot of the other good friends corey lewandowski and others out of the oval office. they no longer had walk-in privileges. that s the kind of order you would want in a white house but it created a lot of resentments. now it s a pretty logical time going after the midterms going into a re-election mode as the president wants to and you would want to have someone more politically adept than this
coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented exxonmobil corporation to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn t like to read, doesn t read briefing reports, doesn t like to get into the details of a lot of things but rather just kind of says, look this is what i believe. and you can try to convince me otherwise but most of the time you re not going to do that. the response, as predictable as a beautiful sunset in texas hill country, came from donald trump this afternoon and we quote. rex tillerson didn t have the mental capacity needed. he was dumb as a rock and i couldn t get rid of him fast enough. he was lazy as hell. it was right around this time last year that nbc news first reported tillerson called the president a moron, something tillerson refused to confirm at the time. with us tonight, our own andrea mitchell, nbc news chief foreign affairs correspondent and, of
around this orbit? what s striking, of course, is some of the harshest critics you see of president trump are the people that once were in his circle. people who actually worked with him, whether it be now his first secretary of state, whether it be his ghost writer on his first book, the art of the deal, whether it be the guy who ran his casino in new jersey, whether it be one of his contestants from celebrity apprentice or the producer who helped make celebrity apprentice in the first place. these are the people out there saying things about the president that describe what they found disturbing and when he pushes back, he elevates their stature in effect. i mean, a lot of people were paying attention to what rex tillerson said today but then it leaped on into a further stratosphere when the president took it on himself rather than letting it go by and hoped it wouldn t be as noticed. other presidents hadn t even criticized by disgruntled former aides would have tried to turn
2018. yeah, that s right. and the discussions between administration officials and paul manafort s counsel obviously raises the specter of a pardon for paul manafort and one has to wonder at this hour whether that s his ultimate game. in response to my former professor alan dershowitz and the sense that this is only political and there s no criminal activity, just imagine had a u.s. senator taken hundreds of millions of dollars from the russian federation during an election campaign and then once that person was in office actually did every single thing that the russian federation asked to include stating they believed the kgb s word over the cia, no one would have any doubt that there was criminal an activity afoot. again, i say, put it that way, this sounds serious. we have asked a lot of our front four and we are in their debt. thanks to peter baker, joyce vance, frank figliuzzi and jeremy bash for their superb analysis of what we keep saying is such a consequential friday.
campaign and the russian government or at least government linked that spanned years, it s not so much smoke and mirrors. it s looking like hard evidence. jeremy, by the way, we must say on this broadcast once a week don t lie to the feds. rule two is see rule one, don t lie to the feds. paul manafort, i note, went before the grand jury on october 26 and november 2. six days later he s called out for lying to the feds. a lot of the big convictions in this case, george papadopoulos, cohen, flynn and manafort, have been about obstructing the investigation, about misleading investigators, both the senate and house intelligence committee as well as the fbi as well as the special counsel s office. and i think fundamentally what bob mueller is signaling to all of the targets in this investigation, including the person who sits in the oval office is that if you try to obstruct a criminal investigation, we re coming right after you.