Dan coats, kirstjen nielsen, National Security advisor john bolton and the head of u. S. Cybercommand and director of the nsa each delivered stark warnings about ongoing Election Interference donald trump was on stage at a rally in pennsylvania calling the entire investigation into russias effort to attack our elections a hoax. In helsinki, i had a great meeting with putin. We discussed everything. I had a great meeting. As i have said consistently, russia attempted to interfere with the last election and continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day. But i got along great with putin, and everybody said, wow, that was a great. The russians are looking for every opportunity regardless of party, regardless of whether or not it applies to the election to continue their pervasive efforts to undermine our
fundamental values. Now we are being hindered by the russian hoax. Its a hoax. Our democracy itself is in the crosshairs. If i get along with vladimir putin, thats a good
republican party right now. you can t decouple these things. you can t decouple this ridiculous pillow conference in the middle of the country right now, where people are saying over and over again that this election was stolen by the chinese. or maybe it wasn t the chinese. you can t couple that from vaccine hesitancy. it s all comes back to this one dog whistle that donald trump perfected over the last four or five years. which is, that there is the government cannot be trusted, period. they went after me, donald trump. they re going after you eventually. this is a deep cynicism. you have to confront that cynicism and as ben rhodes just said, you have to confront the social forces on social media that pushes things to the front of your feet. and then eventually to real life and real life policies. professor perry, the attorney general eric holder is talking about this just today on and this nbc, about the demographics and the way things are interpreted both by
mainstream republican party right now. and you can t decouple these things, you can t decouple this ridiculous pillow conference, where people are saying the election was stolen by the chinese or maybe it wasn t the chinese. it all comes back to this one dog whistle that donald trump perfected over the last four or five years which is that the government cannot be trusted, end of story. they went after me, donald trump, they re going after you eventually. this is a deep cynicism. you have to confront that cynicism and as ben rhodes just said, you have to confront the forces on social media that pushed those things to the front of your feed and then eventually to real life and real life policies. professor perry, the attorney general, eric holder, was talking about this just today on msnbc, about the demographics and the way things are interpreted both by democrats and republicans right now. let s just play what he had to
russians involved in targeting the united states election process. now she then stepped back and said she agreed with the assessment of the intelligence community that came out in early 2017, that found that, no, this was a russian operation. this wasn t the chinese or the iranians. but the president himself has put some of his intelligence chief, particularly neilsen, in the uncomfortable position of finding themselves on the verge of contradicting themselves regarding these matters. the reality is that it s very possible for people in the intelligence community and in the defense space to act without necessarily matching the president s rhetoric. we see this recently from the pentagon. the pentagon released $200 million to the ukrainians to support their military and defense two weeks ago. that s something that very much would not have been matching the rhetor rhetoric that president trump has been using regarding putin. there are lots of steps that can be taken, in many cases taken
with what her predecessor said. it alliance with what this bookkeeper said yesterday. paul manafort was in the clear business of trying to hide his foreign bank accounts and trying to use fraudulent financial information in order to secure loans, making it look like he was in better financial standing than he really was. part of the defense s argument has been wouldn t a tax preparer have a lot of this information? didn t paul manafort give them a lot of breadcrumbs that would have led them to figure out he had foreign bank accounts if they had really been concerned? but we ve seen a lot of bullets in that argument today because she is saying we didn t ask for all of that information. we were just there to prepare the forms. and paul manafort s attorneys are also trying to argue that he wasn t really paying close attention, that rick gates was handling a lot of this for him. glen, what do you make of the defense argument so far? reporter: katy, you know, you can argue that paul man