Democracy. gnashing of teeth. john avlon, we ll hear a lot more from james comey today. on thursdays, he sits down with jake tapper live on the lead at 4:00 p.m. still hear his teeth gnashing. i do to. a tough new round of sancti announced by ambassador nikki haley. however, the man on the other part of your screen didn t sit too well with him. so, are the sanctions going to happen or not? here we go again. next.
Vladimir putin, missiles are coming and get your troops and equipment out of the way. we are not interested in striking you, we hold you responsible but they are going after assad and whatever has been used to conduct those chemical attacks, jake. thank you so much. and we re back and continuing the conversation with the panel. jeb psaki from the obama white house, isn t sara sanders correct, russia is responsible for protecting as yapd and guaranteed there would be no kml weapons and any confrontation with syria might also clue russia. look, i agree on the first two absolutely and i think they ve been a bad actor who should have been held accountable longer with more implementation of sang sancti and which only the united states can do. i think the issue that i have and others will have with her comments and the tweet of trump today is that it is treating military action very flippantly. military action is a very serious decision.
Will, indeed, be imposed by the trump administration? i do think they will. they would be flouting the will of congress if they didn t impose them. and i have confidence in secretary mattis who has testified behind to the armed services committee that they will impose the sanctions. but there is no reason for the delay. there is simply no strategic interests not to impose the sanctions. and it does make you wonder what the motive is with the president, and, frankly, it fuels speculation about russia s involvement with the united states election. so i think it s in the president s own interests to put that to rest, to impose the sancti sanctions and do what congress wants the president to do. let s turn to north korea. you have a senior administration official telling us, cnn, that the trump administration has decided to be more quiet, to be more discreet as that official put it about speaking publicly about u.s. military exercises
Very serious attack, very sophisticated, and the problem, wolf, is, it s going to happen again. and that s what worries me. how do you prevent? you hear jim sciutto, your team s exclusive reporting. how do you prevent this from happening in 2018, 2020? because the russians are not going to stop. that s right. they re not going to stop. and i think that s a really important point. we can do things like sancti sanctioning them when we figure out who was behind it. which oligarch, which agency. we can do those kinds of things. but you know what, i believe the strongest defense is for us to understand what they re doing, and so when it happens, we can say, oh, that s just the russians again. i ve been to eastern europe, talked to people there in ukraine, poland, and they say that the best defense is when the public is a better consumer of information and doesn t take everything at face value that we see on the internet. on a totally, totally different issue, a political issue, the de
Let s bring in karen bass, member of the house foreign affairs committee. let s get right to it. do you agree with reince priebus that if tillerson is picked as secretary of state, his relationship with vladimir putin could be useful for the u.s.? absolutely not. i don t believe that at all. i think it s an inherent conflict of interest. he has hundreds of millions of dollars, $500 million worth of deals that were interfered with with russia because of sancti sanctions. so my concern is that having somebody with a conflict of interest like that when we as congress or president obama imposed sanctions against russia, that s in a direct conflict with his financial interests. so i think this is an inappropriate aprointpointappoi. i hope three or four republicans will cross over and not agree to this apountment. what if he would valued stock