it was putin strikes again, he s tried to poison his opponents. including in the united kingdom. he s mounted other assassinations and parks in munich and the rest. this is right out of the vladimir putin playbook, but nonetheless, it s a bold, strident move. i think i understand what ambassador mcfaul is saying, it seems like a show of weakness, but at the same time, i think the alternative was worse for vladimir putin. i think he needed to send a message to all of the other security clicks and oligarchs and other power factions within the still in charge, their source of funding and protection is still viable and i think that s what he was after if indeed this news turns out to be
steve ban none. a few months ago thinking about the war zone that was going on in the white house between the two power factions. you still have a measure of that but kelly has really clamped down on that. the bigger question is not whether trump wants him there, but whether kelly, himself, wants to stay there. remember, there is this freelancing that goes on trump tweets in the off hours and that makes it very hard to be a chief of staff. melissa, how effective has the new job for about two months now, the new chief of staff been in this role of trying to bring some order to the white house? well, it seems like initially, especially when he was hired, we did see a noticeable shift among the white house like tom mentioned with the warring factions and that certainly seems to have been tamped down a little bit. but i think, of course, a lot of people were hoping where kelly could really make a difference is in the tweets that the president was sending in the early morning hours when
brought to the table. one of the big problems for reince priebus was that he was never able to consolidate power in this west wing that was filled with these power factions and it s not clear that any of the rivaling factions will just immediately subordinate themselves to john kelly. you had jared and ivanka trump. now you have scaramucci, a whole new competing faction within the west wing so it s not clear that john kelly will be able to get control of all of these groups and have them report directly to him. remember that scaramucci is a direct report to the president. that s going to be a problem for john kelly because it will limit his ability to control what damage scaramucci does moving forward. i m going to get to scaramucci in a moment but tom, let me come to you on the issue of reince priebus. our white house reporting says
at the same time, you wonder, the revolutionary guard corps is much more capable than a lot of other adversaries the u.s. has faced, particularly like al qaeda. why couldn t they do this themselves? why did they have to outsource this to a drug cartel. these questions have to be answered. how likely are there rogue elements inside iran at this point that would maybe not tell the upper elite about this and go off on their own? well, look, there s a lot of competing power factions in iran. the revolutionary guard corps happens to be one of them. the revolutionary guard corps has its own economy, they have their own economic interests. you have people in there that are, number one, very, very ardent, iranian nationalists and people that don t always agree with the idea of cooperating with the united states, even if it seems to be in iranian s best interests. i think it s definitely a very serious concern and especially if you have the idea that there are people within the revolutionar