a brand new poll releasing right about now reveals what voters now think of joe biden and america s economy. plus the trump organization s former financial base is in talks to potentially plead guilty again this time to perjury. and i ve told this to anybody who will hear it. i am not going anywhere. nikki haley is holding out even with calls for her to quit the race. but for how long. what s going on, welcome to our viewers in the united states and around the world. i m omar jimenez in for kasie hunt. it is friday, february 2, 5:00 a.m. on the east coast. coming up, a new cnn poll, numbers just in, they show america s deep pessimism about the economy might be easing up even if only a little. 26% say the economy is starting to recover versus 48% say it is still in a downturn. which doesn t sound great until you compare it to the poll last summer when only 20% said the economy is recovering. like practically everything else now, views of the economy are sharply split
well, i think you re spot on. the intelligence assessments of what the russians were planning to do and what was happening with them massing at the border, some of the false flag operations that the intelligence community projected, and i think thereby undermining russia s ability to prosecute those have been really, really important to this effort. i think that most of us would have thought that the russian army would have performed far better than it has, and i was in ukraine about a week before putin s invasion of ukraine, and talking to the minister of defense and to president zelenskyy about what they needed, and they assured me at that time that they could fight the russians, that they were fully capable of doing that, that they needed weapons and support from the u.s. and nato, but that the ukrainian people were going to fight this aggression, and certainly, that has proven to be true. what is your sense about what
one of president volodymyr zelenskyy s was making kind of the same type of plea for the west to do more. calling specifically on western leaders and religious leaders to do more. going so far to say that if they did not do more, that blood would be on their hands as well. so, i mean, the rhetoric is really going up, and that is because there are real lives at stake. mariupol s city council says there were a thousand people, families, children, sheltering in that steel plant that you were showing. underneath there, that is really under siege, and like you said, it is really a city that is on the brink of collapse to the russians. i wonder if you can sort of take us through the country because i ve spoken to my colleague, ali arouzi, about how
they left those bodies on purpose as a way to terrorize the ukrainian people. so you re absolutely right. we keep talking about the conventional war that is already begun or is about to begin. i think we re already in the early stages of it around donbas, connecting crimea to donbas. that s putin s objective. but simultaneously, he will continue to terrorize ukrainian people as he did in lviv. as he did in kharkiv as you just showed. he will continue that part of the war as well and that s by design. those are not mistakes. he is designing, he is doing on purpose this terrorist actions against ukrainian innocence civilians. my colleague, rachel maddow, who s back on mondays now and accused last night and interviewed ann applebalm. of course, rachel being rachel pulled out the essence of what president zelenskyy said that
made the world and the united states and our nato allies more willing to consider other options for the ukrainians so they can keep up this fight. we don t want to see that kind of behavior, the horrible atrocities we ve seen, people being brought out into the street and shot, maternity wards being bombed, women being sexually assaulted in front of their children. we don t want that behavior to go forth and to be unpunished in any way, and i think that has also provided us, the united states, with more comfort in supplying more weapons to the ukrainian people. the behavior you just described, rape as a weapon of war, indiscriminate targeting and killing of civilians, and perhaps things that we don t know about, things that may not be public at this point, seem to be the kind of evidence that president zelenskyy mustered in a call on friday when he reportedly asked the biden