by the house intelligence chairman, congressman devin nunes of california just yesterday sharing information from his committee's russia investigation with the president. he's supposed to be heading up the investigation. nunes apologized to committee members for that breach in protocol today. also today his democratic counterpart, ranking member intelligence committee ranking member congressman adam schiff of california is revealing even more information about the evidence he has seen thus far after telling our own chuck todd yesterday the evidence of collusion between team trump and russia is, quote, more than circumstantial, he said this today in an interview on cnn. >> we have received additional evidence and new materials have been made available to the committee. i don't feel comfortable talking about particular evidence either that the fbi is looking at or that we're looking at but i do think it's appropriate to say that it's the kind of evidence

that you would submit to a grand jury at the beginning of an investigation. >> with us tonight live from washington congressman jim himes, democrat of connecticut and important to this conversation a member of the house intelligence committee. congressman himes, a very basic question to you is how do you now proceed with this split between parties within your own committee and was the apology from your chairman enough for you today? >> well, the apology itself really can't possibly repair the damage that was done by this bizarre maneuver that chairm nunes did yesterday. i mean, you know, by taking material, not even sharing it with the committee or the committee staff to the white house -- and mind you, this is material that was generated presumably at one of the intelligence agencies. these are executive branch agencies. they could have gone straight to the president but instead it goes via devin nunes personally, not via the committee, it goes to the white house, that really damages the perception of

impartiality, therefore making it all the more important that this investigation really be undertaken not by members of congress who are in the political fray but by an outside, bipartisan commission that can have the confidence of the american people that nothing is being done to help the president or try to bring down the president or whatever other political agendas may exist. >> if that doesn't happen, are you guys equipped to keep going with this and pull off a fair and full investigation? >> well, we're in a little bit of a bind because right now we're the only game in town, the senate intelligence committee and house intelligence committee. those are the only investigations happening. so were we to walk away, that might be very much in the interest of somebody who may be, you know, was in fact working with the russians, colluding, whatever it may be. i think there are people who

would love nothing more than for this investigation to go away. if this becomes a whitewash, if we get denied witnesses, but sits we're the onl in up to, we will keep working as long as this appears to be at least possibly an objective investigation of a terribly important thing. >> you're obviously not going to share it but do you yet know this piece of evidence that the chairman walked over to the white house yesterday? >> i think it's not right to call it evidence. chairman nunes said it had nothing to do with russia that, it was legally collected surveillance and that there was incidental collection of, i guess, associates of the trump campaign. and, no, we haven't seen it. we have been promised it but here's the thing, brian, people need to understand that incidental collection happens every minute of every day. we are listening in on all kinds of bad guys abroad and it turns out that bad guys sometimes talk

about the president of the united states or jim himes or brian williams. and when that happens, that is what is known as incidental collection, and it is very carefully handled. if there's personal information in what -- it is very, very carefully handled. my suspicion is there is nothing there from a very tough announcement from the fbi director on monday. >> mr. quigley of illinois side the evidence he's seen amounts to probable cause to use an old courtroom lawyer's terminology to suspect confirmed ties between team trump and the russians. would you agree to that same wording? >> different people have seen different levels of this material. you saw that the ranking member, adam schiff, said -- and he's a member of the gang of eight --

they get to see so stuff that is highly sensitive that regular committee members don't, at least immediaty. so i take adam at his word. there is clearly something here, as he said that, makes it at at some point more than circumstantial, but i don't think it's time for us to be characterizing the evidence yet because this investigation is still very much in the phase of gathering that evidence. >> before i let you go, a quick prediction, up or down vote tomorrow on health care? >> i notice you've been pressing members of congress on the question. i will tell you this. it looks like a real uphill fight. you know, they've lost a lot of the freedom caucus members and it's not getting as much attention. you talked to leonard lance earlier tonight. there are at least a dozen of the moderate, often clinton district republicans who are realizing this could be a fatal vote. i think it is a very, very tough sell tomorrow for this so-called health care reform bill. >> congressman jim himes,

democrat of the state of connecticut. thank you very much for staying up late with us. >> thank you, brian. >> coming up after our next break, can the fractured republican conference come together on this vote? that and more when we continue.

if there was a vote today how would the bell go down? >> there are not enough votes as of 1:30 today. >> what are the concessions the president was offering? >> there are no new concessions. >> i'm a no vote. i'm desperately trying to get to yes. >> they are stubbornly holding the line, rebelling against party leadership, demanding concession, even after the white house said there would be no more and calling this vote to happen tomorrow for better or

worse. the question is can speaker ryan corral his conference before tomorrow's vote? does the speaker have the full support of the white house? we are joined tonight by conservative radio talk show host hugh hewitt, and robert costa remains with us, has returned with us. all right, hugh hewitt, ideologically you would be a member i think it's safe to say of the freedom caucus. do you think this thing will pass? and as a smart guy who went to harvard, do you think it should pass? >> i think it will, i think it should and i think i'd be in the republican study group, not the freedom caucus. the patriots were down 25 points in the third quarter, they won. speaker ryan is a little behind. there will be two groups of republicans, those who voted with the president, the vice president, mccarthy and those who voted with nancy pelosi to keep obamacare.

what list do they want to be on? it's not the alamo. they're not crockett and travis and buoy. they're not going to get a monument for voting no tomorrow. they're going to go done in republican party infamy if they kill the effort to repeal obamacare and get it to the senate. >> but your answer seems to be along the political lines of with you or against us? as a political matter, do you think it better for the country and living, breathing americans who need health care to pass this tomorrow? >> absolutely. not only did i speak to the speaker but to john thune and lindsey graham, kathy mcmorris rogers and in fact, obamacare is collapsing. it's particularly devastating on people who have medicaid but can't get in to see doctors. i think the block granting of

medicaid and a major entitlement is a once in a generation opportunity. so i think by tomorrow morning as they sleep on it, the conservatives in the freedom caucus are going to say i think we'd better get this to the senate. and i think charlie dent and his friends are going to hear that veiled threat at speaker ryan. i defer to robert on this and they might be reading that as do we really want to participate in weakening a speaker we can work with and getting my iend jim rdan as speaker. that was a pretty specific message coming from 1600 tonight. >> and, robert, how does ryan manage this period and what we already know and can see is coming out of the white house and how does the president, do you think, play it? >> well, brian, i asked a friend of the president a few minutes ago, "is the president angry tonight at the oval office?" they said, no, he wants the vote to happen now. he wants to see who is against

him, who is with him. he's kissed enough hands, he's had enough chatty meetings, it's time. he's not an ideological president, he's not driven by this urgency to have some kind of conservative project on health care but he wants it done. >> hugh hewitt, a question along these lines but on a different topic and that is surveillance. nunes, from your state, goes over to the white house and shares this intel with president trump. president trump minutes later says he feels somewhat vindicated by it. tonight for the second night in a row i note that fox news during their conversations had the banner "trump's surveillance confirmed." do you equal what donald trump said about wiretaps specifically with what nunes delivered

yesterday, does this connect the dots for you? >> no, and i tnk the president ought to call director comey and ask him directly and maybe on the record in a joint appearance is there anyone in my white house who is under investigation because if there is, i have to separate them from the white house. that's an old lesson from an old nixon person, even though i worked for him after the fall, you don't want people under investigation in your white house. but while that's also going on, brian, i would point out the third story of the week, the big win for the president, we have a troubling story in the house, an interesting story with devin nunes, he's won the gorsuch nomination. the reid rule is going to be invoked if schumer carries off a filibuster, so it's been a very good week for the republicans no matter what happens tomorrow. and as for the nunes story, i'm laying way back on that because there are two parallel narratives here pip have no

clearances anymore. someone is not telling the truth. someone is going to get burned very badly. >> ladies and gentlemen, you just heard hugh hewitt insist this was a good week for republicans. we'll leave it there. >> you bet. >> hugh hewitt, thank you. robert costa, our continued thanks, especially for sharing your up-to-the-minute reporting tonight. >> and the "time" magazine journalist who interviewed the president is with us here tonight when "the 11th hour" continues.

i am running to end the decades of bitter failure and to offer the american people a new future of honesty, justice and opportunity. aren't you tired of the same old lies?

while sometimes i can be too honest, hillary clinton is the exact opposite. she never tells the truth. in this journey i will never lie to you. >> then candidate donald trump on the campaign trail back in august, promising to never lie to his supporters. now let's take a look at the cover of the new edition of "time" magazine, "is truth dead?" michael scherer recently interviewed the president. it is a fascinating interview capped by the president's remarkable assertion that, quote, i can't be doing so badly because i'm president and you're not, an assertion scherer points out is indisputably true. michael scherer joins us now to

talk about the striking interview. thank you for joining us tonight. while it reads more chevy chase than f.d.r., what specifically led him to declare himself president as compared to your lowly status as citizens like the rest of us? >> it was the very end of the interview and it was the third time i asked him to address him if the credibility of his office was under threat when things happened like on monday when fbi comey basically came out and said his tweet about president obama wiretapping trump tower was wrong and previously he'd answered it by saying did you see the crowds i had in kentucky two days earlier on monday, i had 25,000 people there. and his point was,ou know, the proof of his success, the proo of the confidence he has in the

american people is the election that happened last year and the support he continues to see when he travels around the country. and so i pressed him on it again and he was basically saying to me i won, and that's why i'm not worried. >> michael, he seemed to be trying to sell you a notion that either he is a predictor of events or his words can then cause things to seem or become true in 24 to 48 hours. what were some of the world events/news stories that he put into that category? >> the immediate one where he said, "did you see what happened last night in sweden," referring to an incident in the immigrant community there. nothing happened a night before but a couple days later there was a small riot in a suburb of sweden and he was arguing to me that that proved that what he had said before had been true.

you have to sort of step back here and look at the broader frame. we tend to talk about truth and falsehood in journalism, in politics as a binary, either one or the other, black or white. he approaches it very differently. it's very much a negotiation for him. i think this comes out of his business career beforehand, he talked about truthful hyperbole in one of his early books. he was always selling something, selling himself and he often,age rated and often litigated reality. he did this very effectively during his campaign for president. that's what he was doing here. he may not literally have been saying something that was true when he said it but his point was i have a great instinct and the literal words that i use don't matter as much, it's the fact that i'm effectively right. he argued there were a number of things that were disputed at the time and weren't backed up by

facts at the time but that that came true and that should give him some leeway here. he talked about predicting brexit, about predicting trouble for brussels before the big terror attack there, he talked about predicting that anthony weiner sexting would cause trouble for hillary clinton, which we know did happen a couple weeks before the election. so he was speaking of his own sort of prophetic powers as a defense of some of the factual errors he said recently. >> channel your inner david mccullough and michael beschloss. as a student of politics and history at least, tough question to answer but take a whack at it. how different a president is this compared to all of the standing history of the presidency heretofore in u.s. history? >> i'm not as good as them going back 30 or 40 years. i wouldn't want to say how andrew jackson approached these

issues. i think can you say at least in the televised era he's taken a very different approach and i'll point to just a couple specific examples. he argued repeatedly in our interview and he did it on the campaign as well that if he quotes something, he's not saying it. we have just not had a president in recent memory who has not tried to carry with his public statements a gravity of the office. trump approaches this very differently. he can say ted cruz's father consorted with the man who murdered j.f.k., even though there's no evidence because "the national enquirer" quote a story about it. no one has defended it -- >> but he called the newspaper. >> he called the newspaper. he said it was printed, i was just repeating it. back during the campaign, i asked him about a racist meme that he had retweeted that

alleged a majority of white murders were committed by black assailants. that was factually incorrect. i asked him don't you feel you should correct it? and he said that's just a tweet that i retweeted. that historically is a dramatic shift. >> we have to recommend to our viewers that they read the transcript and the accompanying piece of journalism with this interview. it is fascinating. michael scherer, thank you for coming on. >> thank you, brian. >> our final break coming up. and after that the final test of the man who ran on his resumé when "the 11th hour" continues.

last thing before we go this evening, it's useful to remember as we witnessed tonight's cancelled vote on health care, as we head into tomorrow's up-and-down vote, is is a president who ran on his resumé. more than that, on one quality in particular.

>> i want to win. we know how to win. i want to close. i'm a closer. even in sport, i've always been a closer. if we had somebody who can get people together and knock heads together for a couple hours, we'd win. i've watched politicians all my life. if you can't make a good deal with a politician, then there's something wrong with you. we need a leader that wrote "the art of the deal." i do hundreds of deals, the deals come out of my ears. most of them are phenomenal deals. i want to make great deals for the people and i have the greatest negotiators in the world. everybody wants me to negotiate. that's what i'm known as, a negotiator. >> the test of those deal making skills will come tomorrow as the signature piece of legislation come to an up-or-down vote.

that is our show for tonight. good night to all of us from new york. tonight on "all in." >> nobody knew health care could be so complicated. >> the president can't close the deal. >> we have to ask some honest questions about why this went down in flames. >> a stunning rebuke for the president and the speaker as republicans pull trumpcare. >> reporter: is there any pl if the bill doesn't pass tonight? >> no. >> tonight, as the president's team storms the capitol to try to revive the bill, how the deal was undone. what happens next, and what this means for americans caught in the cross hairs. >> i don't know if you want to call this on trump's part a rookie's error. plus, the devin nunes debacle continues. >> the president didn't invite me over, i called. i called down there and invited myself. >> tonight, the calls for a select committee grow louder.