The latest Political Developments of the day and interviews with top newsmakers are featured. Were not doing enough. Look at these five people. Heres the thing, john. There is a whole Cottage Industry of distraction folks. This is a distraction from x or distraction from mueller. Im not sure that was the case because there are a lot of fires happening now around this administration. The Robert Mueller, Paul Manafort, Special Counsel, Jeff Sessions fire series is one of them. There is also the election en r interference fire, big deal. I had conversations with folks on the other side of folks on capitol hill, both parties. One consistent theme i heard in relation to election interference, Leadership Starts at the top. I asked point blank, who do you talk to in the white house, who do you talk to in the administration . Nobody, we dont know who the point person is, we dont know what their strategy is. This is somebody who is at a high level over there. This seemed to be a way of the whit
he indulges it to a certain extent. certainly with the white nationalists and to some extent here. as a matter of trade craft, john, as you know, these rallies are tightly cordoned. if you come into one you re searched by the secret service and they open your backpack. if they wanted to keep q signs out of this rally, they could. if they were worried about it and thought they were giving license to people who were going to shoot up gas stations, they could do something about it. they re not. they re not. here s the question. i want to end on this question. so the answer to this is what some the answer to this is sunlight is the best disinfectant, we should talk about it to show how dangerous and lethal it is or to ignore this stuff and not give it a platform. well, i m a sunlight guy. i think sunlight is the best disinfectant. at the same time, it s a free speech issue. q is not protected by the first amendment if it leads directly to violence. that is what brandenburg has said and
fueled not by rage, but by panic because more and more facts are coming out. you know, mueller has been very tightly sealed and we haven t heard a lot. but recently more is coming out through cohen and through the manafort trial, et cetera. and i think it s throwing trump into a panic. i think you re donald trump, you re sitting around hearing all this in the manafort case, a paper case. the guy has so much on paper that the case is very strong. you re trump, you re starting to realize even if you don t have the conversation, that the special counsel already has so much information that you re in a lot of trouble. does that make sense? yes, i think so. i mean, he s hearing that some of his closest advisors apparently talked to mueller and said that trump knew when he asked comey to layoff flynn that flynn was under investigation. that s something trump has been trying to deny for so long because it puts that request, to layoff of flynn, in a much different light if he knew he was u
oligarch, and someone mueller identified as having ongoing ties to russian intel jenls. we all need to ask ourselves how desperate was manafort at that point, what was he willing to do if the russians put the finger on him as part of their collusion and intervention campaign in the election. i don t think paul manafort is a start-up guy. but every time i think about this model, i think about a guy willing to forego salary to make it up in equity. if he got stock options in the trump administration and got paid off down the line, it might make sense. let me ask you this other question, ken, real quick. the gates confusion, can you just explain last night we were talking e oh, my god, they might not call rick gates. we re definitely going to call rick gates. what is the explanation behind that, what seems to have been some waivering on the part of the prosecution? i think we led a little into much of a comment by the prosecutor yesterday who was mindful of the fact that the defense
meddling a priority. how do you explain the disconnect between what you are saying, his advisors, and what the president has said about this issue? i m not in a position to either understand fully or talk about what happened at helsinki. okay. that s the director of national intelligence, right? he s an important guy, supposed to know a lot of stuff. he said this before to andrea mitchell. it s how many days since andrea did that interview where he didn t know what happened between trump and putin. he s saying x number of days later i don t understand what happened between trump and putin. nick, help me out here. how can that be? because the president won t tell him. i don t know, it s as simple as you think it is. does he even remember? that meeting was arranged to leave as little of a paper trail as it is possible for a president of the united states to ever leave. so for some reason the president wanted there to be a bit of a veil of secrecy around that meeting, but what i