fascinating senator lindsey graham. he doesn't take prisoners. and before then, follow me on twitter @greta. be sure to check out my facebook page. "hardball" with chris matthews. starts right now. see you tomorrow night at 6:00 p.m. eastern right here on msnbc. the president's man. let's play "hardball." good evening. i'm chris math use. in washington, the chairman of the house intelligence committee, devin nunes says he's not going anywhere. in spite of growing calls for him to step aside, he'll remain at the helm of the investigation into russia's interference in our election. >> are you going to stay as chairman and run this investigation? >> why would i not? you guys need to go ask them why these things are being said.

>> can this investigation continue with you as chairman? >> why would it not? aren't i briefing you guys continuously and keeping you up to speed? >> they're saying it cannot run -- >> you got to talk to them. that sounds like their problem. >> well, nunes has to answer for that secret visit to the white house. later he said it was out of duty that he raced to tell the president what he found. again, he says that the white house itself. he also stopped to hold a press conference all this before ever having the ability to share the information with members of his own committee, which he still haas nt done by the way. he now says he won't tell his committee where he got whatever he has and whatever he's talking about. let's not forget the stakes here. the russians wanted donald trump elected in the first place. they broke into the democrats' e-mail so they could hurt hillary clinton and help her opponent. as former vice president dick cheney said, in some quarters, this would be considered an act of war. what is the connection between trump and manafort and stone and michael flynn and various other

characters and what we still call without love from the kremlin, who paid who? who got what? who still owes who? don't weigh all want to know what role any american played in encouraging the russians? these r some of the serious questions about devin nunes. is he interested in answering those questions? last night, nunes says the democrats are just scared of what he called his investigative skills. >> i'm sure that the democrats do want me to quit because they know that i'm quite effective at getting to the bottom of things. >> all right. well, let's hope so. >> speaker paul ryan said today he doesn't want nunes to recuse himself. however, a few republicans are raising red flags about the actions of chairman nunes. here were senators john mccain and lindsey graham today. >> do you think it was appropriate that he went to go view these so-called intelligence reports on white house grounds? >> well, i think there needs to be a lot of explaining to do. i've been around for quite a

while, and i've never heard of any such thing. >> i think you put his objectivity in question at the very least. if he's not willing to tell the democrats and republicans on the committee who he met with and what he was told, then i think he's lost his ability to lead. >> keep in mind the treasury of information possibly being guarded here with those late-evening runs to the white house back and forth and mysterious cancellations of hearings as well. the jewels being guarded here are the meetings, conversations, possibly deals that may have been cut between the representatives of president trump during the campaign or after and the people at the kremlin looking out hour by hour for their interests in russia. i'm joins by congressman jim heinz from connecticut. congressman, do you think chairman nunes can get us an honest look at what role the trump people played regarding the russians during the last presidential campaign? >> well, i think his actions in the last week or so have really called into question whether he could ever do that. i mean we had the open hearing canceled on the sort of

flimsiest of pretexts. and now his behavior, which has mystified republicans as much as democrats has done two ings this. one, raised questions about exactly what he's up to. we all know he was on the trump transition team, so there's a question of divided loyalties. just as important, chris, investigations involve people willing to take risks and come forward. maybe it's intelligence officers. maybe it's whistle-blowers who want to provide information. but if those whistle-blowers, potential whistle-blowers or intelligence officers are worried that the chairman of the committee may turn right around and take their testimony to the white house, which is one of the subjects of the investigation, they're not going to come forward. so there's a whole bunch of reasons why this investigation is, at best, under a very dark cloud. >> you're investigating the white house and its role, potential role in the last campaign, and yet the chairman of your committee sneaks down there in the evening. he says weekly he goes down there, comes out, and then goes back down there the next morning with a report that he got from the white house. does that sound like a masquerade to you? why would you go to the white

house, pick up some unclear information, then race back down there the next day to very dramatically announce you've got something that might be of interest to them and refuse to share that with either democrats or republicans on your committee. what makes sense of that? try if you will. >> i'm with lindsey graham and john mccain. i've never seen anything like it. look, let's take chairman nunes at his word. he has said this has nothing to do with russia, that he has no reason to believe this collection was illegal. he has certain concerns about picking up americans in surveillance. by the way, that happens every single day. so he sort of talked about these issues of did the intelligence community handle these intercepts correctly? hey, that's exactly why the intelligence committee exists, to do that kind of oversight. so the right thing to do, if this is in fact what he says it is, would have been to come back and say, hey, guys, i found something that raises some questions. let's talk about it. loet's look at what it is. if we've got an agency to go hold accountable, let's do it. instead he's done the very opposite of that, which in the absence of fact and transparency, boy does rumor ever rush to fill the vacuum.

>> well, he said he wanted to help the president because he felt the president was under pressure. what do you think of that? everything he said is, i'm helping the president. he's not investigating him. he's helping him. >> if i think way back to fifth grade civics, if i recall correctly, the role of the congress is not to help the president, certainly not because he's taking heat in the press. the role of the congress is to serve as a check and a balance. one thing i know for sure is our committee's role is not to help the president. our committee's role is to do oversight of, you know, of a very big and to some extent dangerous operation, and that has come to a screeching halt because meetings are being skansled. we have done no business this week. so quite apart from the investigation, the critical oversight as peblths what this committee does are now in deep freeze. >> right now are you more inclined to believe the president's people had nothing to do with working with the russians, talking to them during the campaign about the russian effort to help them or more inclined to believe there was something in conversations between the two? >> well -- >> which way do you lean right now give the information you

have? >> as one of the investigators, i'm going to do the right thing and not trade in speculation and my own opinions. >> i'm talking about what you've heard. >> here's what i think. what i think is there are a huge number of questions about the bizarre number of contacts of the president's people with russia and the bizarre fact that repeatedly these people have, to put it nicely, misstated the nature of those contacts. and now we have this behavior from the chairman, who i hasten to add is a friend of mine and who has really done a good job as chairman up until this point that can't really be explained, you know, in any reasonable way. let me put it this way, chris. there are, today, far more questions than ever before about exactly what the heck is going on with this white house, why they're acting as though they are guilty rather than they are innocent, and how can we best get to the bottom of it. >> do you know anything about his former staffer who now works for trump in the white house, that he may have been going to visit? do you know anything about that? >> only that he's a former intelligence committee staffer

who now works in the white house. >> do you think that's his source? is that his source? >> you know, again, chris, i'm going to do the right thing here and not speculate. we got to keep this on the up and up. could be, but who knows? >> i didn't know it was speculation. i thought you might now. chairman nunes says today he won't reveal his source of the information to members. let's watch. >> so you're not going to tell the committee who your source is? >> we never talk about sources and methods. i wouldn't expect you to do that either. you guys are so infatuated with sources. >> well, what do you make of that? i mean he talked to somebody at the white house and he treated him like a secret source. i mean the president runs the white house. he's talking to somebody at the white house, and he's acting with all this cloak and dagger attitude about i've got secret methods that i don't give them away. you're at the white house. you get checked in. it's all public record. you're in the log books. you're there. you say you go there weekly. the president knows you're there. there's no way he could not know you're there. what's all this so-called -- the

only person he tells everything to is the president apparently. >> well, two things. one, you know, the people who produce this intelligence, whether it's nsa or cia and i don't know because i haven't seen it yet -- >> somebody at the white house. >> they work for the president. these people who do the intercepts work for the president. there's an easy way for the guy who sits in the oval office to call the cia and nsa and say, hey, what have you got? that has not happened. there's been this congressional intermediary. the chairman has promised to show all of us on the committee these intercepts, to go through them and to explain why he chose the path that he did. so the one thread we have to hang onto right now is chairman nunes' promise to us to share this information and to pursue it. the moment he does that, maybe we can start clearing this all up. >> thank you. u.s. congressman himes, thank you for joining us from the intelligence committee. yesterday, congressman nunes defended his secretive run to the white house to meet that source he has there. let's watch nunes.

>> it's actually pretty common. probably at least once a week if not more than that, we have to go to the executive branch in order to read classified intelligence. soo that could be the white house grounds. it could be the white house. it could be the pentagon. it could be cia. there's a number of places where go. i've been working this for a long time with many different sources, and needed a place that i could actually finally go because i knew what i was looking for and i could actually get access to what i needed to see. >> former acting director of the ci, a john mclaughlin had this reaction to the actions of chairman nunes. >> let's just make clear this is totally off the chart behavior. i mean i've been the subject of congressional oversight for 30 years. >> decades, right? >> and i followed it very closely since leaving the government, and i can't imagine this happening under any former leaders of the intelligence committee. >> so what's going on here? >> good question.

i'm joining by michael allen and michael steele. i guess we're still at this whole question of this sort of merry go round. this chairman of the question goes to the white house, maybe the eob. he goes in there. he said won't say what he got. then he shows up at the white house the next morning to report on what he got from the white house. the whole thing looks like a masquerade. >> it's definitely extraordinary. it's really hard to explain. let's just start with nunes is the chairman of the committee, has the right in law to view any type of classified information. this type of transcript is not the kind of thing that you can get out of the house intelligence committee. you can request it. so i suspect he went down there to read the intelligence, write down the numbers. we've seen nunes say in the news that he's made requests of the nsa, and that's what the congressman there is talking

about, that he soon thinks that nunes will be able to produce this information for the committee to view. but as far as the going back and forth, i think he realizes he made a mistake. >> let me explain the conversation. you don't have to speculate very hard here, michael. all you have to do is imagine he asked for a meeting with the president and said, i got some hot stuff for you. this is going to help exonerate you or at least muddy the waters as he put it. it says there was some surveillance done of your people, not during the campaign. there wasn't any wiretaps, none of that, but there is this thing where there's this surveillance where some of your guys names showed up or were recognizable. trump would say, where did you get that from? he said, i got it from the eo, about, from the white house. tell me where you got it. no, it's a secret. the whole thing is a big parody. there's no way he had a conversation like that with the president. he can't say your people told me or i got a mole in here. it's an insane conversation, and you know what, michael, it didn't happen. it didn't happen. somebody put together this whole

masquerade because all trump works for is keeping the news a little better than it would be otherwise for a couple days and he gets through the night. this whole think was just to muddy the water for a couple days and have us talk about it instead of talking about the investigation of his contacts with the russians all during the campaign. >> i kind of come down on that because the behavior of the chairman is just so out of bounds for what anyone in that position has done in the past, and certainly given the sensitivities that are involved here, i would think you would be uber cautious about contacts with the white house since you are purportedly investigating -- >> the white house. >> yeah, the white house. and the campaign attendant thereto. so -- >> but did you listen -- excuse me for interrupting. but his defenses were so complicated and varied. first of all, i go down there every week and i go to a whistle-blower, and apparently the whistle-blower doesn't know the chairman of the intelligence committee is coming in through

clearances every week. he doesn't know he's being ratted out. and that supervisor never blows the whistle on the whistle-blower. never tells the president you've got chair of the intelligence committee coming in and out of this place every week or so getting information about you, mr. president. you can't go in and out of the eob without the president knowing about it. he's the chairman of the intelligence committee. it doesn't -- none of this holds water. you're looking at me like i'm thinking here. this doesn't make any sense. >> no, it doesn't make any sense. >> okay. thank you. >> you made the point, though, that at some point it all has to be revealed. he has to have this conversation in front of his committee at some point, i would think. >> he says he won't tell them his source. his source is in the white house, working for the president. >> he's not a reporter. >> he's treating it like a whistle-blower and trying to protect this guy's identity. >> how can he do that? >> it's going to come out sooner or later. >> well, it's done. there's no way you don't know this. i worked at the white house. you know how it worked.

you got to get cleared it. someone has to escort you. even if you're cleared, they have to walk you to the room. you can't just go wandering around. >> i know. it's all going to get found out. >> by the way, the president knows all this. everybody we're talking about, he's laughing at because he knows exactly what nunes did. he probably told him to do it. nunes shows up, go get some stuff. bring it in to me and we'll make it look good. you're looking at me like i'm the wizard of oz here. coming up, trump can't seem to stop deflecting issues back to his 2016 rival. his latest attempt said the russia story is a hoax and the house intelligence committee shouldn't be looking at his alleged ties to russia. they should be looking at clinton. plus former vice president dick cheney weighs in on russia's meddling in the election. he says in some quarters -- i love the way he talks -- this would be considered an act of war. if he were president, it probably would be war. if anybody would know that. also the life of richard nixon

holds even more significance now in the time of donald trump. from their policies to their strained relationship with the media, take a allisten. >> it is time for the great silent majority of america to stand up and be counted. >> the silent majority is back, and we're going to take the country back. >> word for word. when we show you later in the show when we did the interview with jack who wrote this great book about nixon, the parallels are word for word between the trickster and the trumpster. it never stops. stick around for that. finally let me finish tonight with a trump watch again. this is "hardball" where the action is. ♪ nah. what else? what if we hire more sales reps? ♪ nah. what else? what if we digitize the whole supply chain? so people can customize their bike before they buy it.

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the 2015 rule required power plants to curb their greenhouse gas emissions. >> the action i'm taking today will eliminate federal overreach, restore economic freedom, and allow our companies and our workers to thrive, compete, and succeed on a level playing field for the first time in a long time, fellas. it's been a long time. >> trump's got another planet for us to live on. anyway, former vice president al gore voiced his disagreement with the president, saying no matter how discouraging this executive order may be, we must, we can, and we will resolve the climate crisis. we'll be right back. a meeting? it's a big one. too bad. we are double booked: diarrhea and abdominal pain. why don't you start without me? oh. yeah. if you're living with frequent, unpredictable diarrhea and abdominal pain, you may have irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhea, or ibs-d. a condition that can be really frustrating.

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welcome back to "hardball." when things get tough, president trump deflects and often distracts. when news broke that his campaign was under investigation for ties to russia, he accused president obama of wiretapping him. when director james comey publicly confirmed the fbi

investigation, nunes tried to shut the hearings down entirely. now trump is accusing the clintons of their own shady dealings with russia. he tweets, why isn't the house intelligence committee looking into the bill and hillary deal that allowed became uranium to go to russia. russian speech money to bill the hillary russia reset, praise of russia by hillary or pod es tra russian company. it's a hoax, #make america great again. what should be noted, politifact has deemed all those statements by the breitbart people misleading. anyway, the allegations come from a book clinton cash, written by peter schweizer, president of the government accountability institute which is co-founded by his honor, steve bannon. anyway, at 7:16 this morning, president trump then promoted a segment on fox about podesta's alleged ties to russia. at 7:17 schweizer appeared on air. for more, i'm joined by jennifer palm areary and john brabender,

a republican strategist. what do you make of all this, john? i know what we always do or see happen in politics. you just try to say the other side has got a problem too so maybe you'll shut the whole thing down. what do you make of the charges here if anything? >> i think what people have to understand is we're now in an era where there's no such thing as governance in washington. we're only in perpetual campaigns. and what donald trump instinctively is doing is when he is attacked, particularly when he believes it's unfairly, he's going back to the tried and true things that happened in the campaign. he forces it back to the other side, and people start to muddy the water, and then we move on to a new issue. but let's make no mistake about this. the reason this exists is that the democrats don't really care about russia. they care about the 2018 elections. they don't care about getting to the bottom of this. they only care about pinning it on donald trump, and that's why we're in the environment we're in today. >> jennifer, do you care about the 2018 elections? >> i do care about the 2018

elections. >> he's figured you out. >> i do care about russia more. i do care about resolving -- >> do you think there's a russian connection? >> yeah, i do. >> do you think trump played ball with them? >> i do believe that as somebody who lived through the campaign, i believe at some level the campaign was coordinating with wikileaks which our u.s. intelligence agencies tell us was russia-directed. the timing of when e-mails were leaked and when they were leaked. he do believe it was just all too neatly packaged. >> why would they do that? why would they play ball with russia, because russia was helping them? >> i think what people have to realize with russia and because, you know, with jared kushner, for example, people are saying is it really so bad he met with this sanctioned bank? is that they try to make it comfortable for the person, right? it's not as if they come -- it's not as if kislyak comes to jared kushner and says, i want you to do a meeting that you should be uncomfortable with. they try to make it seem like it's not a big deal. so here's a case where wikileaks is helping the russians and their interests are alive with donald trump's, and what's the

harm? and wikileaks and the donald trump campaign coordinated the timing of the e-mails. but they try to make you feel like you've never crossed a line where you're actually undermining -- >> how did you learn this? >> how did i learn about the -- >> about how they operate. >> because i worked in democratic white houses for 12 years. >> that's the way they do work. what they say is they call up a pro forma thing, can i have a press release you guys put out yesterday? next thing they call is you've been helpful to us in the past i think you'll be able to help us with this. all of a sudden you feel like you're trapped and they're going to testify against you. this is what the reds do. the east germans used to do this. i assume the russians do it. you think the trump people got involved in it that way? i'm trying to be nice here. did they get suckered into this thing? >> yeah, but this whole argument is sort of ridiculous because -- >> no, it's not. i'm telling you how it works. >> but we know the russians tried to intervene, but they failed. the only thing that really came out is that the clinton campaign

colluded with the dnc to game the system against bernie sanders. if the clinton campaign wouldn't have done that, there wouldn't have been anything for the russians to have leaked. >> i mean among the things that they did was, you know, was for three solid weeks have news be dominated that was about the context of john podesta's e-mails. so they did -- >> making unkind comments about the candidate. they had a lot of stuff. that was to create disruption. >> it just every day blocked out the sun. every day that is what we were dealing with. but, again, we're even now getting deflected by, like, the details what occurred on the campaign trail as opposed to -- >> let me talk to brabender. john, you know how you disrupt another campaign. you're not going to smile your way through this. i know you know. what you do is -- you rent all the buses so the other team doesn't get the buss that weekend, or you make robocalls to the offices so they can't answer the phones.

there's all kinds of ways to screw up a campaign and the russia nsz found out the way to do it was hack into the e-mail and have podesta defending every day some crap they got out the door through a hacking operation. that's good dirty tricks. you know that. >> i'm not arguing that the russians very well may have tried that. >> they did it. >> they didn't try. they did it. >> but there was no rationale of why they had to coordinate this with the trump people. if they're really smart, they're the last person they're going to coordinate with this. >> we have the communications director of the clinton campaign here. >> i mean the trump campaign was always ready to go with their statement of the day on whatever e-mail it was that had gotten leaked by wikileaks. so that was our experience in -- >> roger stone knew all about podesta two weeks ahead. >> roger stone was saying in august that it was going to be podesta's time in the barrel. he had another comment in august pre-saging some other leaks that wikileaks did. so there is a lot of reason to

believe there was collusion here. >> jennifer, i've done a lot of campaigns too. in a presidential race, both sides are dealing with something big on a weekly basis. >> john, never in our history, never in the history of our republic have you had another country -- >> i don't think the russians -- >> try to interfere to affect the outcome of an election because they didn't like hillary clinton and they wanted donald trump as president. >> do you think you lost the race because of the russians' involvement? >> that doesn't matter. what matters is the russian government came in here with the intent of interfering in our elections, and they succeeded. people are still not taking it seriously. it should be investigated and it should be -- >> absolutely. >> you know why they lost the race. they didn't take my advice to run a real rust belt campaign. anyway, that's just my thinking. i'm not always right, but i was right about that. thank you, john brabender and jennifer palm area ray.

brabender, you know how the game is played and i think trump may have been involved. up next, as calls for the house intelligence committee chairman to recuse himself, former vice president dick cheney weighs in on the investigation, calling the russian role in the 2016 campaign an act of war. just be glad cheney is not calling the shots. we'd be at war with the russians over this. this is "hardball," where the action is. i use what's already inside me to reach my goals.

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welcome back to "hardball." speaker paul ryan says he doesn't want house intelligence chair devin nunes to recuse himself from the investigation, but he's losing the confidence of democrats and some republicans. look at this. >> well, i think you put his objectivity in question at the very least. if he's not willing to tell the democrats and republicans on the committee who he met with and what he was told, then i think he's lost his ability to lead. >> it's time for devin nunes to leave this investigation, let alone lead it. so he should be gone. >> well, look, at this point there's really one thing that needs to happen to rescue this investigation, and that is that chairman nunes needs to recuse himself. >> i think there needs to be a lot of explaining to do. i've been around for quite a while, and i've never heard of any such thing. >> michael turner came to nunes' defense today on msnbc. >> what do you think about chairman nunes? do you believe that he needs to

recuse himself? >> absolutely not. and of course the calls that you're getting from just the democratic side are there because they're partisan calls. the reason why these calls are being made is because devin nunes has come forward and said that the intercepted communications of the incoming trump administration that were possibly reviewed by the obama administration needs to be a serious issue that's reviewed. >> nunes said the investigation by his intelligence committee will continue even though the committee has canceled all hearings for the rest of the week. that includes the hearing scheduled for today when former acting attorney general sally yates was to testify. press secretary sean isis-- let bring in our "hardball" round table. eugene robinson, an opinion writer with "the washington post" and jennifer jacobs. i want to go to heidi first and just go through.

where's this stand? is this going to not get anywhere now? the question is moot? i mean this guy says, i'm not telling you where i got all this information. i'm not telling you really what it is. i'm not sharing it with my fellow republicans on the intelligence committee, but at some point i'll share the information itself. i'll just never give you any history of where it came from. it doesn't make sense. >> they're not only calling off hearings but regularly scheduled normal meetings. so, yeah, it's kind of ground to a halt there. >> could it be the comey testimony last week wasn't what they want to be doing? >> absolutely. that exposed there's an investigation in the first place, and i'm sure that the white house is not happy about any of this. but what's happening here, chris, and i can't believe this isn't getting more attention, is why was nunes doing this in the first place? as someone who was a campaign surrogate, who was actually briefing trump during the campaign on intel stuff, who was taking phone calls during the transition. he was one of a handful of people on the transition

committee, taking phone calls from foreign officials, fielding calls for michael flynn. this is all just kind of bringing to a head the fact that perhaps he shouldn't have been -- he was compromised from the very beginning. >> do you think his skin may have started to crawl as he headed down to the white house and changed cars. he changes cars, heads down, loses his staff. then he meets with maybe a former staffer in the eob. >> this is weird. lindsey graham at one point called it inspector clouseau. but no one has ever -- i was up on the hill today, talked to somebody who had been on the intel committee at various times for a long time, over a long period. never heard anything like this. never saw anything like this. a chairman sort of going out and, you know, gumshoeing, you know, doing his own investigation, bringing in this information, not saying where it came from so it can't be evaluated. >> but then to give away his motive. i did it because the president looked like he was in the hot seat and i wanted to help him

out politically. he doesn't even claim a clean reason for doing this. >> right. so as long as he's running the investigation, there is no investigation basically. >> i think that's the question. there's only three instrumentalities that will get to the truth, the fbi, the intelligence committee, where are we going to get the truth? it would be nice to get this thing shut down in a couple weeks or months. it would be nice to find out there was a russian connection from the trump end or not. >> you're right. it's going to be the senate that's going to have the focus next. you've got some gop skep tiblgs that are going to have a free hand on this. they'll take the vinvestigation where it leads. >> you trust that committee? >> i think that's where the focus is going to shift. there are enough people skeptical of trump that will take it where it leads. >> that just may be the first shift, right? as more information continues to come out -- and this is just the beginning, about sessions needing to recuse himself, nunes needing to recuse himself. all of this feeds into a drum

beat of the democrats calling for an independent investigation. >> here is the greatest hawk in history weighing in on russian meddling in the 2016 l. listen to dick cheney. >> there's not any argument that at this stage, that somehow the election of president trump was not legitimate, but there's no question but what there was a very serious effort made by mr. putin and his government and his organization to interfere in major ways with our basic fundamental democratic processes. in some quarters that would be considered an act of war. i think it's the kind of conduct and activity we'll see going forward. >> what quarters would that be? i'm just -- i mean act of war? i mean cheney was ready to, you know, head to the -- >> someone else might have said a hostile act.

>> this will elevate this among establishment republican circles. >> absolutely it will. number one, no one doubts that dick cheney has intelligence sources and knows -- you know, he knows what the intelligence says. >> you mean that second unit over at the defense department? the scooter libby operation? >> and. he's convinced this did in fact take place, and he's emphasizing in his view, it was a hostile act. how do you respond to a hostile act? well, if it's russia, you probably respond with more sanctions or something like that. you don't roll the tanks. >> jennifer, i want to remind everybody here by my question to you. suppose this had happened and hillary had won the electoral college, lost the popular vote, and it came out she was getting help from the russians. in fact there was even questions about whether she was responding to that help in various contexts. you think there wouldn't be something like a seven days in may going on right now? that's what i think. the right wouldn't have stood for this. >> no, exactly.

if dick cheney were in this administration, do you think there's any doubt he would be taking a more hard line on russia at all? absolutely not. >> so that's the oddity of this. the republicans don't like russians. they just don't like them, and they don't like them since the cold war. i forgave them for 20, 30 years, so i'm used to having different views of the russians because i liked yeltsen and gorbachev, and i thought they were demac ra tiezing. then they went back to this russian nationalism thing they're into and our president now likes that stuff. >> and lindsey graham and john mccain are somewhat liberated to speak about it, but you have to wonder to your point how many of these hawks, these traditional more republican hawks are just holding their tongues because they've been on that side for so many -- for a generation. >> let's be talking about this. my english is dying here. let's talk about honesty. do you think politicians like lindsey graham, veterans, especially john mccain, honestly care whether the trump people had something to do with the

russian involvement in this campaign? >> oh, yeah. >> they honestly want to know and expose it. >> you had ben sasse from nebraska today was saying, remember here, this is putin here trying to undermine nato. he was saying look ago the larger picture here. this is serious. >> they don't like nato. >> the smart ones know they'll be the next target. >> up next, the round table is sticking with us. these people tell me something i don't know. and an entrepreneur named sharon. its witnessed 31 crashes, 4 food fights, and the flood of '09. it's your paradise perfected with behr premium plus low odor paint. the best you can buy starting under $25. unbelievable quality. unbeatable prices. only at the home depot. hei don't want one that's haded a big wreck just say, show me cars with no accidents reported

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we're back with the "hardball" round table. heidi, tell me something i don't know. >> chris, my colleague at usa today has an exclusive report out today showing that as trump expanded his real estate empire, he came -- was fronted or did business with a number of russian very rich oligarchs who also had ties to organized crime. they were connected to money laundering or actual criminal organizations. now, the trump folks did respond and said none of this was direct

contact. it was all through third parties. but it does feed into this narrative about trump claiming that he does haven't any russian ties when, in fact, by their own admission, there were deep ties. >> something about trump and russia. anyway, gene. >> i talked to nancy pelosi today. so if president trump seriously wants to move on infrastructure in a way that's not just basically a giveaway to developers or seriously wants to move on jobs, she'll pick up the phone. but so far, nobody's called. >> so they just want to have a tax break for somebody. by the way, i don't understand privatizing highways like 95. how do you that? >> democrats are not big on that. that's not the call they want to get. >> tax reform. my bloomberg colleague is reporting that trump is going to be briefed on thursday on various options for a way forward on tax reform. it will be various options. they're going to have a big powwow on thursday at the white house. gary cohn, his economic adviser

is going to be one of the people leading that conversation. >> it would be so great to pick out like 20 or 50 targets around the airport we're going to rebuild. l.a. airport, laguardia, penn station in new york. things that people would be proud of as public places, you know? >> mm-hmm. >> and then at the end of the administration, some landmarks like there is in this city to what roosevelt built. thank you. up next, richard nixon has always been a fascinating figure. but interest in his presidency matters even more now in the era of trump. the auth ear of a brand-new book on the life of nirksen joins me to explain why. you're watching "hardball," where the action is. flonase helps block 6 key inflammatory substances that cause all your symptoms, including nasal congestion and itchy, watery eyes. flonase is an allergy nasal spray that works even beyond the nose.

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money, manage your health and more. need to be thorough. moments ago, president trump spoke to senators from both parties at the white house. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. thank you very much. nobody ever told me that politics was going to be so much fun. but we're doing well. it's doing very well. we just had a long call from general mattis. he knows better than anybody we're doing very well in iraq. our soldiers are fighting and

fighting like never before, and the results are very, very good. i just wanted to let everyone know. i have some very special friends in this room, especially -- i must tell you we have the republicans, but i even have a couple of democrats. i said we had a dinner here about three weeks ago, and it was so beautiful. we have these incredible musicians from the marine corps and from the army. incredible actually. and i said, you know, i'd like to do something special. i'd like to ask the united states senate with spouses to come and hear how good it was. it was just a beautiful evening. and so here we are, and shockingly, it's semi-bipartisan. a lot of people showed up that people weren't expecting, which is a very good thing. [ applause ] which is a very, very good thing. and i know that we're all going to make a deal on health care. that's such an easy one. so i have no doubt that that's going to happen very quickly. i think it will actually. i think it's going to happen because we've all been promising -- democrat,

republican, we've all been promising that to the american people. i think a lot of good things are going to happen there. we'll talk about infrastructure. we're going to talk about fixing up our military, which we really need. there has been a depletion, and we're going to make it so good and so strong. i there's been, i think, never been a time where we needed it so much. and we're going to be doing a great job. and hopefully it will start being bipartisan because everybody really wants the same thing. we want greatness for this country that we love. so i think we're going to have some very good relationships. right, chuck? i see chuck. hello, chuck. and i really think that will happen. so, again, enjoy these incredible musicians. they are really something special. and i hope we're going to do this many, many times together as a unit. thank you all for being here. melania, thank you very much. our vice president, did we make the right decision with pence? right? [ applause ] huh?

and, karen, thank you very much. so nice. >> well, that was president trump. of course moments ago at the white house. we're going to see since the beginning of the 2016 campaign, i should say, pundits and historians have made historianse made frequent comparisons between president nixon and the white house donald trump. through their respected campaigns and presidencies, nixon and trump adopted similar themes, both appeal to the silent majority of the mernts, both attacked the media for treating them unfairly. the rhetoric shows a striking resell plans, watsemblance -- resemblancech watch this. >> it's time for the sigh leapt majority to stand up and be recounted. >> the silent majority is back. and we will take the country back. >> we should hit hard on the issue of law and order and the issue of justice. >> and i want everything to be law and order and justice and everything perfect. >> the wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the united states of

america. >> this is a massive crime wave, that's what's going ohappen. it's not going to happen if i get elected. >> i have never we heard or seen such outray just, vicious, we started reporting in 27 years of public life. >> i have never seen more dishonest media. >> when the opinion is expressed label it so. don't mix the opinion in with reading the news. >> reading false newspaper articles and seeing false things on television, i mean really, really biassed reporting. >> when a commentator takes a bit of news and then with knowledge of what the facts are, distorts it, viciously, i have no respect for that individual. >> i read stories that they write that are knowingly false. they're knowingly false. they know it's a lie. >> well, if you remember, it is also clear the russian scandal bears many of the hallmarks of

the national democratic committee. both were encouraged by the president. both presidents try to bury this story after they were elected. the many parallels that came in, nixon and trump is another nixon deserves a fresh look in the context of today's political landscape. in his new book, richard nixon, "the life" showcases nixon's long career, exploiting how his perseverance helped propel him to the white house, his personal insecurities led to his downfall. i am welcoming you. i have to tell you, it's an amazing piece of work. what do you think? i think i've always not been a nixon hater. you remind too much of my dad, out of world war ii. the first in the family. i sympathize with this upward struggle, but i never, after years of watching him, i don't believe him. i think he was imitating somebody else. he imitated eisenhower with

his voice. he imitated other people. i didn't think there was a richard nixon. >> jack kennedy said that, you know, i have it easy, i can be myself. nixon has to be thinking who he is all the time. he has this grievous person amendment t. original title for the book is richard nixon and american tragedy. it is a shakespearian tragedy. >> from the beginning when he smeared his first congressional opponent and then he could have been easily, but he had to roll up the score against him by calling her pink dun to her underwear, he is calling her a fellow traveler. she was a liberal. she was no red. she wasn't henry wallace, even that part. why did he -- he wrote up the score in '72, writing all the dirty tricks, why didn't he satisfy himself with victory? was he afraid of losing again. >> >> massively insecure, from his childhood, both financially insecure and emergency turbulent household, his mother was a

saint who retreated to her closet to pray. as nixon once famously said, my mother never said she loved me. >> he lived in an iceberg and a tornado. >> yeah. >> his father was always yelling. the mother was cold. >> the father used to leave small change around the house so when nixon's cousins would come to visit, he would test her honestly. pick the coins up. >> let me say something positive why everybody should read this book. we had a lot of presence in my lifetime. very few are interested. even reagan, a successful president politically. no doubt about it, isn't personally interested. nixon is. kennedy is. roosevelt was. there is something about, what do you think it is that makes people want to know more? i pick on it. if i see newspaper comments, nixon, i read the whole column. if i see kennedy, i read the whole column. i won't read a lot about other people, jerry ford, you know, even obama is not that personally interesting, a very

successful president. >> kennedy, richard nixon, lbj, outrageous personalities. they had to fit themselves into a role and had differenty doing it. to read that and read about them, how they did that to see the play all the way or to read, on kennedy, it's just fascinating stuff being handed the chance to do a biography on nixon, it's a no-brainer. >> isn't that weird you get elected the president of the united states, the person that comes with you is yourself. the guy shows up in the oval office with you, nobody else, just you, it's scary. >> and in nixon's case, he talks and he talks and he talks, around we have it all on tape. you know. >> unbelievable. >> he's a monster. >> you write great books, richard nixon, "the life." great review in the washington post. this is the nixon book the other catalogue with all the presidents on the shelf. it's this baby. get it hard, too. get the ebooks. get the real thing. when we return, let me return

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trump watch tuesday march 28th, 2017. do you think the man in the white house is happy? how long do you think the thrill lasts? you know, the i can't believe i'm president fit our need? i can't believe i'm living here in the white house feeling. how long does that feeling overwhelm a person before they realize he or she brought themselves with them to the white house? you know the baggage, the thing that makes me a person. makes a person mean. >> that includes the querks the habits, the resentments, the fears, the weirdness, i imagine in a few days, weeks at the most, a few president will find himself alone out there in the presidential mansion, alone to walk downstairs among the historic rooms, looking at the portraits, feeling the spirits perhaps left behind. yet soon i imagine, the one spread a new arrival needs is the one that drove them there in the first place that troubling presence called the ego. and there he is, causing trouble out the door, getting mad, tweeting, plugging into the world, unsure, whatever, with

nothing, no one to get in the way to protect him from, you know, himself, that spirit that came in the door with him on inaugural day. i'm thinking of him, donald trump, up there in the white house, wondering what the "new york times" has ready for him comef:00 a.m. in the morning, up with the is up, you might say. it's about something he said or done or been, it's about him, emanating from him, travel now back to meet him. all there is to do now, that's if you are mr. donald trump is hit that sob with another tweet. right between the eyes. that's "hardball" for now. thanks for being with us. "all in" with chris hayes starts right now. >> good evening from san francisco, i'm chris hayes, we have a big show tonight, including my interview with a senator who says the president today signed a declaration of war on the environment. the new federal probe into who the president is hosting at