le weme ouranel oiticalis. seung min kim covers congress in the white house for the washington post. john harris is with politico and nancy cordes is our correspondent at cbs. this week was it in doubt or was susan collins the key vote kind of always going to yes and there was nothing to stop her to going to no? >> one interesting thing mitch mcconnell pointed out with me is that he didn't know what the

votes were until he walked in the chamber and heard every one of his members vote aye or in lisa mckowski's vote. with susan colin's speech it seemed like a yes but wanted the ts crossed but it was at a time where we saw senators like lindsey graham go to the mat for judge kavanaugh. to see her and knowing she was able to get to that place while she was undecided all along was interesting. and we saw for a while she wanted to be a yes. i think these are republican senators they want to vote in favor supreme court justice. she never voted against a nominee but intesting

to see how it played out in the end. >> leader mcconnell he said after dr. ford testified they said it thought i may be the end and the base was fired up. what happened between the two? >> i think judge kavanaugh who surprised everybody with the fiery blast he delivered with his testimony did follow the essential rule of modern politics in the polarized era which is getting people to say which side are you on. it was an interesting thought experiment, if people expected him to have a more temperate statement saying maybe something happened but it wasn't this and i regret i drank too much as a young person and i'm a more mature person now, would that

have worked? going back to my experience that middle of the road approach he probably did the politically shrewd thing saying i'm drawing a sharp line and everybody can decide which side they're on. >> nancy, you were all over this. the democrats, how did they feel they did at end of this politically and what democrats care a great deal about is protecting witnesses an listening to the accused. >> i think they're incredibly de jected but i feel they had no choice but to go to the mat. their base was so frustrated after the merrick garland situation and they wanted to say

show us what you got this time parn it left them with no choice but to stall and delay and do everything they could. >> one strategic point about going hard and strong and who's side are you on. michael avenati who came in with a late-breaking addition to the store combreep lots of democrats -- story and lots of democrats are saying he took a case with ford and turned it into a circus losing the high ground. >> was interesting to see all the way along how they dealt with the allegations because at first they kept them at arm's length and the day julie swetnic had a restatement, i had one republican aide saying america should be devastated, michael

avenati brought the heat and then democrats then retreat. the challenge for democrats was their line was you should believe women. they didn't have the option to pick and choose saying we believe these two women but don't necessarily believe this woman so they were stuck with an all-or nothing situation. >> i asked about the vote. >> i tried to talk about murkowski and her vote and her reasoning which was the temperament issue which i found fascinate. you have to look at lisa murkowski and her political history. i know the president told my colleague in a phone interview that it won't play well for her politically. remember, this is a woman who lost her own primary and the party leadership shunned her and

had to resign from her leadership post and then won a write-in campaign and her last name is not easy to spell. she has a very unique political coalition in alaska. she doesn't need the party leadership to succeed. >> it's our job to talk about political strategies an dissect them but we can't lose fact that mathematics is decisive in these things and there's no way with a margin that narrow somebody like mish mcconnell well want to push people out of the party. mathematics is what matters and will carry the day. >> she and susan collins have different political calculations. you often see them voting together but in this case you had alaska leaders coming out kansas kavanaugh and native american groups influential in alaska coming out and may not

have been worried about the political price she'd pay where susan collins knew it would be different in maine. >> speaking of political calculations, john, you talked about this, who's side are you on? senator john corner -- cornin said it was a sympathetic reading of dr. ford and then president trump basically making fun of the fact she couldn't remember certain thing. did that moment play some role in this when the president did what a lot of people thought at first was oh, my gosh, he's not being restrained, he's making fun of this woman or did he know something smart about politics these days? >> it depends on whose ears are receiving the mess page --

message. i don't think many republicans were ready to hear that but mathematics were decisive. i think there were a lot of people in trump's base who were eager to hear that and enjoy it. so and we still don't know the political implications. in red state senate races like north dakota, this probably or democrats defending a seat there but kavanaugh helps republicans. i think we'll probably see the opposite in a lot of the suburban races on which there's different directions. >> that's a great point. seung min, what do you think of the long term? do people stay fired up for the next month? >> i think they would because we saw the impact as a 1991 proceeding with now justice

thomas and anita hill and the year of the woman coming after that. the midterms are only a month away. it will be a fascinating experiment to see how much this matters because the big test is only a few short weeks away. mitch mcconnell and i've never seen mitch mcconnell so happy than in the last couple days. he told me he saw polling showing how unifying the issue was for the republican party. >> just on the democratic side, they've been hard to find after this loss. we tried to reach out to a number of them. will somebody be able to make use of this to get their own voters? >> even democrats will acknowledge when you talk to them they're already saying out on the stump when they go home for the weekends the republican base is more fired up than it was just a few weeks ago. so they acknowledge this say real thing. it's not just a blip.

they're encountering it and their base has been fired up for a long time so they've sustained this level of energy. is the republican energy a blip and now that they got the supreme court justice they want, do they go back to being content or is that energy that is going to last another month? >> one way in which it may last, john, is related to something that was written about in the new york times. he's been a vocal trump critic. he said in this case he was happy to have the president because he was feeling great so that in trump at least one big bully was willing to stand up to the others, the others in the case being those on the left. and so the idea is that if to the left is behaving in this way, we need our bully. do you think that's an argument that grows beyond this moment? >> there is a phenomenon in politics and i wrote a little bit in politico today. we're more virtuous but the

other side is more ruthless and they benefit by being more ruthless and a bunch of democrats believe that today. mitch mcconnell's ruthless but it worked by bending procedural rules with merrick garland and the fbi investigation into kavanaugh. i think it's conceit of both parties, if we can be as vicious as the other side we'd prevail. different than 1991, we're now in a political culture where a lot of people have trouble remembering what they were indignant about the week before last. remember in 2016 we thought the access hollywood tape was going to sink donald trump and that was not the decisive factor. >> back to mcconnell for a moment. you could make a case conservatives are happy to have two people on the court. clearly donald trump is responsible for that but mitch mcconnell may be a great deal

more responsible in that he held up merrick garland's nomination which got people worried about donald trump's situation, worried, yes, but he shepherded through two -- this is a historic career-tapping moment the three thing mcconnell has done. >> there's thing policy wise he cares more about than helping reshape the judiciary and what he did was blocked many of president obama's circuit and district court nominees. which is why when president trump was elected he came up with this historically high number of vacancy. president trump and mitch mcconnell had the two justices with brett kavanaugh and neil gorsuch and has reshaped the

judiciary and they said blocking garland was one of the best decisions he made. >> he said he won't question people's motives about the kavanaugh vote but republicans were successful. mitch mcconnell also talked about bipartisanship. is he going to make the senate come back to its old ways? what do you make of that? >> i think there's a lot of pessimism on both sides that the senate can work the way it used to. the reality is there's almost nothing more momentous that senators do than decide on a justice who the potential to change the balance of the supreme court. so this was always going to be a battle royale no matter who it was, brett kavanaugh or anyone else it was going to be a huge clash from the beginning. >> and with partisanship in the

court -- >> i think mitch mcconnell likes to think of himself as an institutionalist. he won but he owns the way he won which is the senate is polarized and the president's been polarized and that's why he was scratchy and defensive with was scratchy and defensive with you. >> we'll end on scratchy and defensive. thank you for being here. we'll be back in a moment.

>> we go now to seoul, korea. >> and he received a warm welcome when he landed which is in contrast when he was stood up by chairman kim jong-un in july. this time around the american and north korean delegation led by secretary pompeo and chairman kim met for two hours followed by lunch and the two sides are getting closer to figure out where and when president trump wiz -- will hold a second summit with kim and they want them to denuclearize by end of 2021 and the wants sanctions lifted and the u.s. to declare an end to the korean war, neither of which are likely in

the near term. so he is here to reassure the minister talks are moving in the right direction. >> there's many steps along the way. we're taking another step forward. >> as secretary pompeo said president trump will meet chairman kim at the earliest possible date. before he returns to washington pompeo wraps up the tour in irish -- asia and will attempt to smooth over tensions stem from the ongoing trade war with the u.s. >> harold barnet in seoul, south korea. week be back in a moment. this is not a bed.

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>> we're back with reporter and ourer greg miller. his latest book is "the apprentice." welcome. >> thank you. >> lets start with the recent news which is of indictments against russian hacking having to do with the olympi

>> these are indictments we're just learning about now but they're for activity that was happening around the same time as the election. i think it shows we're in a new era of he iespionage and that'st the book is largely about. we face a great challenge at the moment from russia using espionage and cyber operations to go against s adversaries and the president refuses to acknowledge that. >> and now everybody knows about it but was the obama administration slow on the up take? >> they were slow in one important way. i think at the time when the initial penetration of the dnc

of russian hackers was detected it was another in a long line of cyber penetrations by china and russia and grab stuff and look at the secrets, end of story. nobody saw the weaponizing of the information by posting to wikileaks and later helping donald trump win. >> your book connects what we thought were separate events and puts them in a narrative. on the wikileaks point they thought it was mischief making but then deployed in the middle of an election. >> everybody expects russia to engage in espionage and the united states does as well and take it what they get and throw it out for the world to see is unusual but we see it now more and more. it connects to the hacks of anti-doping agencies.

they're designed to be overt acts an steal information to try to discredit an adversary of the kremlin. >> and the question of whether the information was weaponized with the help of anybody in the trump orbit. >> we're waiting for robert mueller to give you will the find answer to that question and of course what i did in the book is trace out all the connections and there are many many connections. the trump tower and paul manafort's connections an lots of interactions between trump and his family even before the election and seeking meetings with vladamir putin and so forth. >> what else in the book when you think of the big pillars of the story which you've had a chance to think about because you've taken a step back from the news stories.

>> i think part of the value of the book is putting it together in one place because i was a reporter at the post covering the stories as they were unfolding and even the mike flynn story and i was getting lost in the deluge of information. i tried to put it in the book in a clean narrative and even then i was seeing connections i was blind to at the time. it's astonishing. >> the administration has talked about china and the threat from china. put that in context with respect with what the russian have done and what are the chinese up to? >> it's interesting the administration's going after china right now and china of course is aggressive in espionage and cyber espionage and has been for many years. the administration hasn't coughed up much evidence they're interfering in a meaningful way nane upcoming election. china puts ads in newspapers and thing like this but the contrast

is striking. ia andther points econcile. hav along the line in the last few years. >> we've never seen the president really call out russia in any meaningful way for what happened. >> let me ask you since you covered national security, give me a sense where president trump as a president that interacts with his security officials how does he do it relative to how previous presidents have done it? >> unlike anything we've seen in our life time in terms of his disengagement from national security apparatus and beyond that it's almost a schizophrenic administration at time and the book goes into detail.bo as pr and how he's treated russia often in conflict with his

advisors and cabinet. >> and what is the difference between john bolton and mcmaster. >> he tried to bring the president along through briefings and meetings and i think bolton appeals to trump in a way that he simplifies thing for the president. it's a much smaller, tighter-held process. >> does that error then it's perhaps more -- argue then it's more efficient? >> except there's more important people on the outside. more important voices probably not getting heard the way they were heard under mcmaster. >> quickly, what's the thing on the national security horizon we should be paying attention to? >> the mueller probe wrapping up. we're about to enter act three of this crazy drama. >> thank you for being with us. >> thank you. >> and we'll be right back.

>> that's it for us today. thanks for watching until next dickerson but i'll he see you every day this week on cbs this morning. captioning sponsored by cbs captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org this is not a bed. it's a revolution in sleep. the new sleep number 360 smart bed is on sale now, from $899, during sleep number's fall sale.

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