face-to-face finally. the presidents of two su superpowers play nice after a year of no talk. that s tonight on news talk . good evening. i m abby phillip in new york. tonight, what president biden calls important progress between the united states and china. the specifics may seem small, but the american president calls the areas of agreement important on fentanyl, on keeping the phones open between militaries and on artificial intelligence. today we watched carefully orchestrated diplomatic theater between these two superpowers a handshake, a walk outside, a hollywood mansion in woodside california, but the stakes are far more consequential than fiction. to take a tumult uous year and basically put it to the side. that you and i understand each other clearly leader to leader with no misconceptions or miscommunication. we have to ensure that competition does not veer into confl confliction. a short while ago at a rare press conference, the president called it his
clear that if republicans try to repeal the power we just gave medicare to reduce prescription drug costs, i will veto it, i will not allow it to happen. if republicans try to walk away from the historic commitment we just made to deal with the climate crisis, i will not let that happen. if republicans try to cut social security or medicare, i will not let that happen. reporter: and now, erin, when i asked the white house press secretary earlier today where exactly the president would be willing to compromise she couldn t point to any specific areas. but the president was very specific in trying to draw those red lines talking about the issues that he would veto. and so the big takeaway from the speech today is that this is a president gearing up for the very high possibility of a republican house who s trying to project strength, who s trying to show the leverage that he has as he prepares for the possibility of divided government and the many negotiations to follow. erin? jeremy,
you ve ever read any of his depositions, he lies with impunity, and at the end of the day, they would end up getting a second charge on him, which of course would be lying to the authorities. so, i mean, the idea of the stupidity on that point, it sounds for many if you think about the strategy here, if the idea is to, on the one hand, convince your supporters and your base that it is wrong to take the fifth although it is your right to do so, it s the government s burden to prove it, and then to be able to turn it around, there s been a lot of support and people saying that s a good decision because everyone s against you, and you re not going to have a fair shot. there s no due process for you whatsoever. you can t comply with the system. what do you make of that sort of thought process of, well, it s appropriate he thought for him because everyone s against him. everyone s trying to attack him. he wouldn t get a fair shot. he s a victim. right, except that s the point i was go
declassified and first i want to be clear. once you re no longer the president, you don t get to grandfather in the authority to classify or deal with classified materials, right? correct. the moment joe biden took the oath of office, donald trump lost any and all constitutional authority he had for four years under article 2 of the constitution and as the president. but up until that moment, he had unlimited, unfettered discretion to declassify documents while he was president. but there is a process. he couldn t point at a box and say, i declassify everything in that box, but the documents themselves still have to be processed for declassification. there s markings on every classified page, on the header and footer of every document, indicating the level of classification. there s classification markings on each document indicating when it was classified, by whom, under who authority. that has to all be addressed. that all has to be marked out and written as declassified by
with information of that sort. so it s not hard to imagine that that happened in this case. now, of course, if that were to be the case, and we do not yet have information that it is, that person, this informant, couldn t just be sort of a willy-nilly, no one has access, who is this person? it would have to be for the same reason we talk about getting a warrant actually approved by a judge in the home of a former president, i would suspect if there is an informant, they had to have damn good evidence to support it in some respect. another point before i get to you, elliot. andrew, i have to tell you, i was a little stunned and taken aback by christopher wray s response about the even suggestion about having evidence planted. i would have expected there to be a more vociferous protest that would have happened as opposed to a referral to the doj. what do you have to say about the idea? i know you mentioned it was absurd. but what do you say about the idea that there s even a suggesti