♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: president trump is one step closer to getting his tax cut. the house voted thursday to pass withoutte budget plan the votes of the democrats. for more on this, i'm joined from washington by al hunt of bloomberg view and also mike allen, cofounder of axios. before we get to tax reform, tell me what is happening in the republican party when you have some criticism of the president by jeff flake, by john mccain, by george bush, without naming

the president, and of course bob corker. what does this mean, if anything, today in washington? mike: charlie, it's the republican party and we're seeing more clearly on the national stage the split that we've been seeing in the house, that we look at so carefully during health care. now we are seeing the trump and bannon part of the party, and this more traditional part of the party where so many senators are now saying publicly what others are saying privately, behind the scenes. charlie, here is the twist, and here is why a lot of the coverage this week has been very misleading. the twist is that all those senators and republicans around the country that think privately the criticisms that mccain and corker and flake and bush and others are saying publicly, they are going to keep it private. trump is strong in their state and their districts.

donald trump is now more commanding of the party than he has been at any time. there is not going to be any sort of tipping point when these folks start to speak out against him. at the moment, trump very strong with the republican party's, house and senate. al: if anything, mike understated the case. this is donald trump's party. jeff flake gave a remarkable senate floor speech. i think you have to go back to margaret chase smith in 1950 with the declaration of conscience against joe mccarthy to find something like it. he talked about how trump has debased political dialogue, political integrity. it had almost no public affect, because trump does dominate this party in washington, but particularly out there in the country. jeff flake and john mccain speak out. then you look at someone used to

think of as an independent as lindsey graham. he's become a trump poodle. this is donald trump's party. so he gets his tax cuts and tax reform? al: they get a tax cut. they won't get tax reform. that's what they desperately need. this is where republicans and trump are on the same page. they desperately need a success. this has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with politics. i think they will get a tax cut but almost no tax reform. i would guess it is not going to be popular. you don't pass big things on a strictly partisan basis and have it succeed. mike: i think mr. hunt is right about the diminished ambition of what they might pass. but even that may be hard. correct me if i'm wrong about this but i think it will be , harder than people think, the

way one person expressed it to me is that it's health care is one part of the economy, tax reform is everything. how do you pull off these specific cuts? this is one of the downstream worries for trump, about antagonizing these republican senators, that we agree that he is strong now, but if you've only got 52 republican senators, so you can only lose a couple, senator mccain, senator bob corker of tennessee already reluctant to vote for tax cuts that just add to the deficit. now they have even more coverage of that, the president this week saying that bob corker, chairman of the senate foreign relations committee, could not win an election for dog catcher. you lose a couple of them, and even modest tax cuts start to look shaky in the senate. then over in the house, where

you still have the math problem that you had during health care, you have the divided republican conference, if it starts to look shady or uncertain on the senate side, they will take a tough -- they will say, am i going to take a tough vote to eliminate some tax breaks for interest me? t are important to that could mean that even tax cuts could go down. charlie: also on capitol hill next week, some of the giants of silicon valley are coming to testify. mike, we been hearing about the idea that these companies are so powerful, and they are so ingrained into who we are today, that they need some supervision, some monitoring and perhaps regulation, maybe even breaking up. does that idea have legs? mike: it does, and it's getting increasing legs because it appeals to both republicans and democrats for different reasons.

this could be a remarkable scene tuesday and wednesday on capitol hill, something we haven't seen in years. it's been years since they testified, facebook, google, and twitter, testifying before the senate judiciary committee and the next day before the senate and house intelligence committees, looking into what happened in the 2016 election, what's being done preemptively ahead of 2020, and the subtext of that, as you say is, what what's being done preemptively else is going to be done to rein in these companies? democrats very concerned about the concentration of wealth and power, wondering if those companies should be broken up or regulated more. and as we have talked about on the right, among republicans, so much suspicion of these platforms. a little ironically, perhaps, since whatever effect the russian ads had on the social

platform, they seem to if anything have helped donald trump. but republicans look at these companies as political actors, advocates for the other side, people who want open borders, more progressive social policies, so republicans also would love to take big tech down a notch. al: as always, mike said tell me if i'm wrong. i've been trying for 20 years and have never been able to. i think maybe the bottom line will not occur. there is a left and right coalition that both are angry at big tech. i think that will break down when it comes to what you can do about it. for all the concerns and anxiety, this is an enormously powerful group. remember their fight against the hollywood studios, who they clobbered four or five years ago. my guess is there will be a lot of sound and thunder, but in the end, not a whole lot will happen. charlie: there's this issue of

sexual harassment happening a lot in lots of conversation, lots of women coming forward. we are seeing a lot of talk about what it means and where it's going. is this touching washington? where is it in the nation's capital? mike: charlie, what we are seeing is that industry by industry, this is becoming a -- [no audio] -- in look at the industries it has touched since then, and i thinkdia,

next is government. you were right to bring in washington. one of the fascinating, leading-edge stories of this week, associated press correspondents and a couple of statehouses asked around. just a few statehouses involved came up with hundreds of people saying that when it comes to lobbying, legislation, that some of these issues that arose in hollywood also are issues in state capitals. there you're going to see investigations, accusations. this is going to be if not the story of the year, one of the stories of the year, because every industry has a list, every industry has targets. there are a lot of men who are rightly worried they are next. al: i agree. the california state legislature already has taken action, and i think congress will be the next target. charlie: let's turn to the president. notwithstanding what we said about senators and the former

former presidents that have spoken about the president, he's getting ready to go to china. what are the difficulties that he faces right now in this fall season as he tries to get some legislative victory on the board, and he's got steve bannon out attacking the republican establishment? where is he in terms of his own presidency? al: he starts off with historically low popularity, and as we said earlier, he has great strength in the republican party, which means he has none among democrats and is really weak among independents. that's not a good political position. it might help with your own party caucus, but i don't think he engenders a lot of fear among democrats around the country. there's a whole question about whether he can govern. i think that was implicit in some of the stuff that george w. bush said.

general kelly was going to bring order to the white house, and general kelly just has had a visible week in -- a miserable week in which i think he might never recover from. i think for all the successes we alluded to earlier, and i would add the opioid speech, which was a rare moment of looking presidential, i still think this is a very troubled presidency. mike: charlie, you mentioned the china trip, and i know that has been on your mind for a while. this fascinating asia swing, the choreography of a presidential trip abroad always so vital, but this will be one of the most fascinating presidential trips we have ever covered, because he could be going to japan where he will see the emperor. he's going to be going to south korea, where so many american citizens are worried about what might be happening on the other side of the border, and he's going to china, where president

xi has never looked stronger, his name written into the constitution. president trump will probably ask him for tips on how to get that done. [laughter] all this is designed to bring pressure on north korea, and that's why this is so delicate and fascinating, reporting this week. do you take the president to the demilitarized zone? such a frequent stop for presidents, reporting as if they had decided not to do that. concerns about both the look and also the physical danger that might be involved. charlie: north korea will clearly be one of the topics there. we heard from the director of the cia this week an alarming assessment of where the north koreans were. we have an interesting piece coming up on "60 minutes" this weekend on this next subject.

al, north korea, where are we? al: there's certainly more talk about a possible military solution now. that's not to say it is going to happen, but it is a serious situation and nothing is going , to be accomplished without the chinese. not onlyg right now, in china -- imagine donald trump in the american constitution, somehow it doesn't quite come altogether -- but around much of the world, there's a feeling that the chinese leader is a more formidable and enduring figure than the american leader. nothing good can happen in north korea without the chinese. charlie: mike allen, al hunt, thank you so much. ♪ turning to further elaboration of events in china,

china's communist party held its congress this week, its 19th congress. president xi was enshrined in the party charter. president xi emerges as china's most powerful leader in decades. as david ignatius writes in friday's "washington post," maybe the last two appeared less powerful than you are. we are now talking to david ignatius. set up for me how xi became who he is and how that might be a threat to his power. david: this week's party congress was a coordination of xi as supreme leader of the kind that china is not seen since mao tse tung. five years ago when he became chair of the communist party he , began consolidating power in a way that was not immediately clear, but we can now see was from the beginning a decisive

attempt to put his personal imprint on china and really change the nature of what is then a collective, shared, fairly cautious leadership after mao. the way he did it was to seek to purify a communist party that had become corrupt. he was correct in seeing that as china grew rich, the bribes that were being paid to party officials and generals in the army were beginning to weaken china, to eat at the core of the system and make people doubt the party's fitness to rule. as i noted in my column this morning, in the last five years, under xi's leadership, 1.5 million members of the communist party have been disciplined. 270,000 have been prosecuted. 11% of the central committee has been prosecuted for corruption

or other crimes. the same thing has happened with the military. 13,000 officers have been sacked. 50 generals have been replaced. during the last five years of xi's reign, you've had basically a complete turnover of the leadership in china. the new people are his people. what that means is he now owns china. he is responsible for every bit of its economic, foreign and security policy. they are all his people. there is nowhere else to turn. once upon a time it was collective blame and credit were shared. not anymore. the point of my column this morning was, that is a little bit dangerous. when you own responsibility for a country as big as china, if things go wrong, you have to take the blame. there is nowhere else to share it. i have been hearing from the china watchers that i respect the most, murmuring that even as xi has consolidated power, the

chance that he could have a misstep down the road may actually have increased. charlie: what happened to his close friend and ally who was on the standing committee, but was no longer on the standing committee? some thought if he had continued on the standing committee it , would give xi an opportunity to say we're no longer honoring our 65-year-old rule. david: there's a lot of speculation about the chief enforcer of xi jinping's anticorruption campaign, it was thought his tenure in the senior position might have been extended as a kind of a forerunner of a similar extension for xi when he finishes his second term as general secretary.

typically there has been a 10 year term limit and is thought maybe he would be the forerunner to break that mold. it didn't happen. there are all kinds of rumors, and i note for your viewers that this is speculation, but there are rumors that there may be issues involving his family. the most likely theory is that xi wanted to save this mold breaking for himself and didn't want to use that unusual tool to o early for his ally, but down the road five years, say perhaps it's time for me to continue as leader rather than turn over to someone else. the important point is there is nobody else in the wings. it's the first time in a decade -- in decades there has not been a next generation leader preselected. so we'll head to the end of this 10 year period without any

obvious successor in place. charlie: most of the people in the standing committee are over 60 themselves. people, --e older they are older people, xi's contemporaries. it was thought there'd be some younger people in their 50's to be in line as leaders there is , speculation that xi doesn't doesn'tulation that xi want competition, the younger guy jockeying for the position. but he's going to have a group of contemporaries, essentially unchallenged rule. chinese politics is very factionalized. his faction dominates both the politburo itself and the standing committee, which is the key ruling body, four of the seven members. he is really in the drivers seat in every way possible. charlie: now that he has consolidated all this power and stands alone, will china be different? will it be more aggressive?

does it have ambitions for greater influence around the world? david: i think that maybe the most important corollary of the party congress we've just seen. china under xi is being more explicit and direct about its ambitions not to be a regional power in the south china sea, but to be a global power. xi talked a lot in his lengthy speech about the strategy known as one belt, one road, which is essentially a chinese idea for consolidating trade all the way to europe through central asia. it is a very ambitious scheme, and it's about china projecting economic and ultimately military power. xi also in his report to the party sketched a process of growth for china not simply

through his tenure, but all the way to 2050. in that sense he has ambitions that go beyond his personal ambition to be a mao-like leader. he has a vision of china, calls it the china dream. i think americans need to understand that china sees american power weakening. preparing its own instruments, financial, military, and otherwise to fill , the space that in china's eyes, america's giving up. charlie: you see the rise of chinese technological companies that are in some cases bigger than the companies they were paralleling. s speech made note of the specific areas he wants to dominate. internet communications technology, artificial intelligence. go down the list. one thing he did not talk about specifically but they talk about often in other venues is quantum

computing. it is a subject i read a new novel about. the scope of china's ambition i think is central now. americans need to see it clearly. the period in which the chinese , wait was hide and bide for america, hang out in the shadows as it were, that period is over. there is coming to china a man from the west, from washington dc. what is the significance of this, and what might come out of it? david: i think president trump's visit to asia and particularly china, which begins is the most november 3, important trip of his presidency to date. the chinese understand that trump is reaching out to embrace

xi, the trump who through last year's presidential campaign at tacked china. he said china is raping us on trade. all that rhetoric is gone. he now speaks of xi as "my very good friend, a very good person." he likened him to a king, and he did not do that critically, but almost enthusiastically. he may have ambitions of his own, but i think he sees xi is a kindred spirit. they are both kind of big guys physically, tall and burly. they both have a direct, emphatic style of leadership. xi is sometimes known as big daddy xi. xi da da. i think trump would love to be

seen in a similar way. i think the chinese will go all out to make the visit as friendly and successful as possible. they will have big welcoming ceremonies. the chinese can put on a spectacular show. i think there will be efforts to make the relationship appear personal and warm and involve the families in some way. i think the issue we should focus on -- because they will be a lot of confetti tossed in the air -- is whether the chinese are actually willing to deliver more on north korea and trade in particular. president trump has made a big bet that china will help you koreaally squeezing north will help them get more from , north korea in terms of actual negotiation about their weapons their weapons -- than any president has gotten before. he also hopes that the very unbalanced trade relationship u.s. has had with china for decades will change, that

chinese will recognize a more balanced playing field in trade. that's the way both sides are setting the table. i think both sides have such strong interest in this visit being successful that headlines will probably be positive, but the chinese will have to move some especially on north korea. ,charlie: david ignatius, thank you so much. we will be right back. stay with us. ♪

♪ charlie: roger altman is here.

he's the founder and senior chairman of the investment banking firm evercore. he has an op-ed in today's washington post in which he writes, "the election of donald trump was the greatest presidential upset in modern u.s. history. now with his presidency reeling amid a special counsel probe and absence of legislative achievement and dismal approval ratings, many americans already seem to view his victory as the equivalent of a 100 year flood, in other words, the type of surprise that today's voters won't see again -- except they will." i'm pleased to have roger altman back at this table. why will they? roger: they will because the underlying cause of such voter anger that reflects itself and trump's election his economic. there are some basic facts that

frame that. wage trends,t household income trends, the financial condition of american households and income mobility, you see stagnation. wages have not risen in this country essentially for 40 years, 0.2% as of the end of last year. real median household income has not risen in 20 years. the federal reserve does a survey every three years of what they call the well-being of the american household. last year what they found was quite stunning, 46% of american households could not meet a $400 emergency expense without borrowing or selling something. charlie: you suggest that signals a new era of extreme voter discontent. yes.: the american dream you are essentially suggesting is over, because the dream was that each generation would do better than its predecessor. roger: the data shows today,

and there is some very profound research done that shows for those who were born in 1980 and , the 1980 cohort, who are roughly 35 years old and in their prime working years, only about half of that cohort is going to live better than its parents. if you were to measure the 1990 group, which is 25-27 years old, and they haven't done that yet, but you would likely find that less than half is going to live better than its parents because this trend has been going down steadily for 40 years. charlie: and why is the trend going down steadily? roger: most economists would cite three or four factors. globalization, technology, the decline of unions, and stagnant results on education in this country. college completion rates, for example. and these trends, unfortunately,

are verynow, deep-seated and very long-term, and they are not likely to abate. therefore there is nothing to suggest that this vast income stagnation is going to change, and therefore, the anger that we saw in 2016 i think is the beginning of a period of election volatility driven by that voter anger, and we will see continued surprises, and trump is just the first. charlie: yet you say it's possible to imagine a bold policy agenda that might move wages up. items on the republican wish list like business tax reforms, steps to increase college interest rates, expansion of the earned income tax credit, and better protection against abuses and work schedules and all that. you are saying it's possible to imagine, but are you saying you can imagine it, but it won't happen because of the political

gridlock? roger: in a perfect world, if and we don't live in that of course, there are five or six great big steps the country could take which, at least over the next few years, seven or eight years, could well move wages up, and i cite a few of them there. let's just take the example of the giant federal infrastructure initiative. i'm talking about one trillion $2 trillion over 10-20 years. that's something we should have done 10 or 15 years ago. we are nowhere near doing it. infrastructure is not on the agenda right now and washington for reasons that are strange, but it is a perfect example. charlie: it's on the agenda, but it is after so many other things. roger: both sides agree we ought to have an infrastructure initiative, but they cannot agree on it, so it's not going

anywhere. democrats typically view this as grants to mayors and governors , and that's not perfect either, historically. it's a type of thing that's a perfect example of what we could do in a different political environment, but we are not doing. and so, you just cannot say to yourself with a straight face that were going to take any of the steps that could possibly have a medium-term upward impact on wages. we are not going to do them. charlie: you say there also continues to be a debate on whether income pressures that have kept wages as they have, come from cultural factors such as rebellion against the establishment, or something else? roger: you know there is a big debate right now as to what really caused the election result of 2016. on one side you have sociologists who think it is

primarily cultural factors and anger toward the establishment, as people see the establishment, and economists, many of which think it's the economic factors i talked about. my in view, as i say in the piece, is the two are interrelated. i think it's one issue, not two, but i think at the very bottom of it all is the vast stagnation. charlie: you were an advisor to secretary of state clinton. did she believe in this? did she appreciate this? did she understand this? roger: she did understand it, and didn't need any help from me to do that. most people think about these issues understand this problem. charlie: but it speaks to the economic discontent, the problem s people are having, it speaks to all those things, yet they listen to another candidate rather than her. roger: there are so many factors

that explain her failure to win, but i think you had a very angry electorate, for the reasons we are talking about here, and he . charlie: and he was able to tap into it more than she was. roger: because he was talking about blowing everything up and changing everything. for reasons of this unhappiness and stagnation, that appeals to people. charlie: look at the economy today. we just had a recent report, 3%, we have stock markets going through the ceiling. what's going on with the economy? roger: there is a widespread view right now in the investment community that we are seeing what they call synchronized global growth. we are seeing an acceleration of global growth. china doing better, europe finally beginning to come to

life, and some improvement in the u.s. growth rate. we saw that today. 3% is a good quarter. and that's the main factor driving markets to these breathtaking levels, and i think there is reasonable data to suggest that global growth is doing better. the imf has changed its forecast and so forth. i happen to think the stock market is at scary levels, but that is a whole different issue. the data i talk about in this piece -- the stagnation i talk about in the piece incorporates the latest data. yes, the economy is doing a little better over the last couple of years. average hourly earnings have picked up. charlie: unemployment is down. roger: 4.2%. that's all reflected. charlie: all those economic

factors, whether market factors, gdp factors, employment factors, signaling the economy is sort of coming out of -- if anybody said -- roger: if anybody said we are going to be able to grow at 3% plus for the next quite a few years, we would see wages and incomes improve. charlie: growth of the economy is crucial? roger: yes, but our demographics, for example, the declining size of our workforce . as the population ages and a large percentage of, for example, working age males are not in the workforce, for all sorts of reasons, and the opioid epidemic is one of them. charlie: technology -- roger: and so forth. but the demographic center say we don't have the capacity today to grow on a steady, year after year basis at 3%. we have about a 2% long-term

growth potential, just based on the size of our population. birth rate -- charlie: are you saying any politician who says we can achieve gdp growth of 3%-4% -- roger: if you could wave a wand and take the steps we talked about here, you could probably get the gdp growth up in five years, six years, something like that. do we have the capacity to grow at 3% for the next 10 of them 15 years? we don't. we don't. we would have to have a very different immigration policy and see our population as a whole start to grow, instead of be stagnant. you cannot grow -- growth is a function of basically productivity, or capital and labor, to put it that way. the workforce in this country is not particularly growing. so you cannot grow at 3%-4% in for the long term if your

workforce is not growing. japan is seeing this problem to a very deep degree because its population is actually declining. charlie: japan has an older demographic than us. roger: right. it's good to see the economy show a 3% growth rate, don't get me wrong, that is great. there has been a little blip in wages in the last two years, but the long-term trends are not changing. not in my view. i wish they were. charlie: there is nothing we can do. we just talked about the economic results that are in. do you expect to see, if we don't do any of the things recommended here, to slip even further behind in terms of wage , in terms of economic growth? roger: you have had the show.s on this there is an enormous debate about the long-term demand for work, and whether technology is going to undermine the long-term.

i happen to be a bit pessimistic on that. that technology has created as many jobs as it has destroyed historically, but think the accelerating pace of technology, which is astonishing, suggests to me that it's going to undermine the demand for work. so i think over the next 10-20 years, we are going to see this continued stagnation and very unhappy voters and that will produce election surprises. over the very long-term, it looks very tough to me. it looks different. charlie: steve bannon said we will either have economic nationalism from the right or from the left. roger: one outcome that would not surprise me would be to see either in 2020 or 2024, the exact opposite of trump. charlie: that would be from the

left. roger: exactly. we have -- i don't know if we have a tradition, we have a dynamic in the modern era where voters tend to want to opposite of what they just had. so obama following george w bush, jfk following eisenhower and so forth. charlie: reagan following carter. roger: the exact opposite of trump would be someone like sanders or elizabeth warren, someone like that. it would not surprise me at all if that's what we get next in this era of surprises. the country is so polarized, and of course the politics reflect that. if you had a massive wave for where both houses of congress went the other way, in this case democrat, and democrats would pass lots of legislation, yes, but i don't see that happening.

i don't see the pendulum swinging up from this country myself. charlie: roger altman. stay with us, we will talk about the kennedy assassination. stay with us. ♪ is this a phone?

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so all you pay for is data. see how much you can save. choose by the gig or unlimited. xfinity mobile. a new kind of network designed to save you money. call, visit, or go to xfinitymobile.com. ♪ charlie: on thursday night, the trump administration released thousands of government files regarding the assassination of president john f. kennedy that

took place on november 22, 1963. the documents were made public in accordance with the 1992 law that allow their release after 25 years. bowed to trump advisors in withholding certain documents over national security concerns. joining me is dr. larry sabato of the university of virginia. his team of researchers is currently reviewing these 80 files. please to have him back on this program. welcome. let me begin with this. what are historians looking for here? i know you're continuing to look at these documents. what might they find? larry: there are little gems, little nuggets throughout. i think gradually, these nuggets will fill-in pieces of the puzzle we have never quite fully understood. what are we looking for? we are looking to see if anything contradicts the basic conclusion reached by most people who really examined the

assassination, that lee harvey oswald was the shooter, probably the lone shooter, that is my view, in dealy plaza. we want to know more about him. we want to know what his motive was. we are still unsure about the motive, unfortunately thanks to jack ruby, who i consider one of the real villains of the kennedy assassination. had he not shot oswald, it's almost certain the police would have gotten from him his motives rather quickly, by hook or crook. charlie: and what to we know -- is there anything new to know about why jack ruby did it? larry: not in these documents we have seen so far, and i want to stress, we have not come close to finishing the work just on these, and the ones that trump held back may well include more information about ruby and oswald and everybody else. that is the good stuff. what we've got right now basically doesn't change the

timeline of the assassination, doesn't change the basics, but it does add some very interesting little qualities to it that we were not fully a mill prior to this. charlie: like? larry: i will give you an example. one document had been released in part before this and this particular document shows that a telephone call was made to a reporter at a cambridge newspaper in the united kingdom. the call came in at 12:05 p.m. dallas time, in other words 25 minutes before president kennedy was assassinated. the anonymous caller said, you'd better call the u.s. embassy. there is going to be big news coming out of the united states. either that's the greatest coincidence in world history, or it suggests that somebody knew something from some source about what was going to happen in dallas. what is new about it is, we

didn't know that british intelligence had checked that out and checked the reporter out. to the extent they were able to do so, they validated it. they were never able to find the person. in those days it was impossible, particularly if you are calling from a phone booth. so we will never know who that anonymous person was, but it certainly was odd. charlie: what else, that is a fascinating tidbit. larry: oh, there are so many other things. cuban intelligence person in 1967 who is chatting with another cuban in an interview, and they were discussing the kennedy assassination. one of the cubans said to the other, you know, lee harvey oswald must have been a pretty good shot. and the second cuban said he was, he was very good, i knew him. was it true? was it true? maybe they were bragging. if it were true, how did he get to know the harvey oswald?

embassy inhe cuban mexico city where lee harvey oswald went before the assassination and spent six days? we knew about a few hours that he went to the soviet and the cuban embassy. what happened? and also, j edgar hoover suggested to the warren commission that his sources had told him that fidel castro said, has oswald was leaving the cuban embassy, i'm going to kill john f kennedy. i'm going to prove my fealty to the revolution. i'm going to kill john f kennedy. charlie: i'm sorry, i missed that. who said that? larry: j edgar hoover. no, oswald said that. charlie: oswald said i'm going to kill him and prove my fealty to the revolution? larry: yes, that is essentially what j edgar hoover said to the warren commission. why didn't the warren commission follow-up?

first of all, they did not have direct access to fidel castro. second, they downplayed the mexico city incident, for obvious reasons. president johnson, j edgar hoover, and others, in various ways, formal and informal, communicated to chief justice warren and others on the warren commission that the last thing they wanted was for anything to come out of this commission that could trigger a nuclear war between the united states and the soviet union. johnson feared that the american people, if they thought the soviets or the cubans had anything to do with this, would demand retaliation, and that it would inevitably lead to nuclear war. charlie: there comes out of this also someone named el mexicano. who is that? larry: yes. no one is entirely sure. this is a very odd instant. we are investigating it. i think i am going to take a pass on that one for the time being. charlie: because you don't know

enough yet, or because it is so tantalizing, you want to have more before you say anything? larry: both. we want to find out what we can find out. charlie, you have seen intelligent files before. you have raw information here, you have a lot of gossip and rumor and innuendo, and people writing down anything that anybody who called in said, and of course, a lot of it is just junk. it wasn't true. it wasn't true then, and they may not have even taken time to debunk it. charlie: one theory is that both the cia and fbi wanted to cover up their own, for lack of a better word, incompetence. larry: charlie, they dropped the ball on lee harvey oswald. think about this guy. he was one of the few american defectors to the soviet union. i mean, who wanted to go to the soviet union back then? he defected. he was a very strange person

before that. he had been arguing marxism in his marine barracks and gotten into fights about it. then he comes back after having defected with money provided by the state department and almost immediately is campaigning on behalf of fidel castro in new orleans. then the story gets more complicated, but essentially, he stood out like a sore thumb. he was a misfit. he was a sociopath. both the cia and the fbi knew it. they were tracking him in various ways. the shocker in this is, not only did the fbi and the cia not communicate regularly with one another, and that is putting it mildly, neither one of them ever told the secret service about lee harvey oswald. this assassination could definitely have been prevented. charlie: that noncommunication pervaded the government all the way up through 9/11. larry: it sure did, and it was supposedly fixed after that.

i will bet you that there are still problems we don't know about, because it is human nature. agencies want to reserve information to themselves. knowledge is power, and they have the power as long as they have the information. which is another reason they are arguing so strenuously to keep many of these documents hidden, . charlie: but at the same time, our you suggesting, or do you know, that those documents that have been redacted, that they are withholding for now, are some of the things that really contain the questions that most everybody wants to know more about? in other words, what they're hiding or keeping for themselves under national security reasons is the very thing that most people, analysts and researchers, know contains possible further understanding of what happened? larry: that would be my guest. there has to be some reason why they think it is so sensitive. it cannot just be that there is

the name of some source and they are suggesting that the ones who are living -- and there can't be many -- would be endangered, potentially. and now they are adding their families, too. well, people have families for generations in decades and centuries. is that going to be the permanent excuse for keeping this private? there has got to be something in there that embarrasses them or gives us a new theme, a new line and theysassination are not interested in letting everybody know what that is. charlie: did hoover ever talk about this to any degree? larry: only privately. he like to talk to the president about it, some of the people in the justice department, and the senior people there, and of course senior people in his own operation. he had strong opinions about lots of things. he was furious at the dallas police department. the fbi called and asked what they needed, that it was essential to protect oswald. the dallas police department

said, oh, we don't need any help, everything is fine, nothing will happen. and we know what happened. hoover went through the roof and called it inexcusable and realized immediately what it meant. it meant no end to conspiracy theories, no end ever. we will be talking about this 200 years from now. not you and i, but others. charlie: robert kennedy's son told me in dallas, and only one time, that his father never believed the warren commission, or something close to that. that doesn't say he had a theory as to what had happened, but he said he was troubled by the warren commission's report. can you tell me more about that? larry: that's exactly true, and i've had a chance to talk to a couple of the kennedys over the years, and they all report the same thing. that it seemed impossible to bobby kennedy and also to jackie kennedy that this was the product of one man's

imagination, and that he managed to carry it off. although strange things happen. it is possible if you look at human history, some of the least people can take care of some of those with the most to offer. but the kennedys thought at various times that it was castro seeking revenge, or it was the anti-castro cubans seeking revenge because of the bay of pigs, or that the soviet union might have been involved, or the mafia, the fact that the kennedys had pursued jimmy hoffa , other members of the mafia, who knows? but all the evidence we have, and every piece of investigation that has been done by a neutral party, not trying to prove a particular theory, suggest that oswald at least was the lone shooter. if others were involved, that's another subject entirely. it is possible that there were people behind oswald. charlie: larry, thank you so much. a pleasure to have you on the broadcast. larry: thank you charlie. charlie: thank you for joining

us. see you next time. ♪

>> you are watching "bloomberg technology." the white house says most of the alleged activities for which and a former business associate were indicted have nothing to do with president trump and everything to do with hillary clinton. the white house pointed fingers at the research from that produce the dossier. paul manafort's attorney addressed reporters a short time ago about today's indictment. >> i think you all saw today that president donald trump was correct. there is no