tv The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC April 3, 2017 9:00pm-10:01pm PDT
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former nbc ceo, and% susan wright who died in 2016. over the last 24 hours, look what they built, however. land marks around the nation and world were bathed in blue for world autism day. perhaps there was one near you. that's your broadcast this evening. thank you for being here with us. and good night from new york. buzzfeed ali watkins has a sort of jaw dropping scoop tonight about the trump campaign. that story dropped tonight just in the last couple hours. we've got ali watkins here tonight to talk about that story we've got her exclusively. you are going to want to hear that. we're also going to be joined by michael leiter. he's the former director of the national counterterrorism center. big show coming up tonight. a lot to get to this hour. one of the weirder stories is the revelation that jared
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curb, the president's 36 year old son-in-law is in baghdad today. the u.s. secretary of state has not been the baghdad since the new administration started. but jared's there. that said, it's not totally clear what the secretary of state does in this new administration. i mean, take the president's special envoy for middle east peace. that is a person that has been appointed to be the trump administration's eyes and ears, the point person on middle east peace. that person doesn't report to either the president or secretary of state. that person reports to jared. "the new york times" and the "financial times" report in detail today that the preparations for the critical meeting this week with president xi of china, those preparations are being led by jared. jared has been been put in charge with relations with china more broadly including preparing for the presidential meeting. he has been put in charge of u.s. relations with canada and u.s. relations with mexico,
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including building the wall. he has been put in charge of all trade deals. "the washington post" reported last week he's in charge of re-imagining the veterans administration. he's also been put in charge of solving the ownership yes, i do crisis and national broad band policy and criminal justice reform and the rebuilding of the nation's infrastructure. young mr. kushner also apparently sits in on national security council principles meetings when it comes time to discuss the nuclear threat from north korea. and now today, baghdad. busy young man. hopefully he was adequately prepared for all these enormous responsibilities by his vast life and work experience which consists entirely of him inheriting his father's real estate business. he also did have to run the business himself for a time while his dad was in prison. but he has this remarkable portfolio, maybe an unprecedented portfolio of both
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international and domestic responsibilities within the administration. and that portfolio is made all the more remarkable by the fact that we now know that his wife, the president's daughter, will also be getting a senior white house job. we know she's alreadsittinin on many of the most high-profile visits by many foreign leaders to the united states. between her and her husband, jared, their experience and expertise in the world lies in the fields of real estate and jewelry marketing. but the two of them will be now in charge of the most important and sensitive stuff in the government of the richest and most powerful nation on earth. incidentally i should mention we learned that the administration has now found a new job as well for laura trump. who? laura. laura is eric's wife. the trump leakers firm exists as
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a political entity. the firm that runs the digital side of the campaign will employ laura, eric trump's wife. i have no idea what her work experience is, but i'm sure she's absolute best qualified person in america for that job, whatever that job is. in the past we've had like, you know, a first lady who worked on health policy. once had we had a president who hired his brother as attorney general. but we've come to think of those things as exceptions to the rule. we never thought of ourselves as a country where uday and qusay get to be ministers of whatever they want. we're not a ruling family kind of place. now that's what we are. and here is a rude consequence of that for our new ruling family. this remarkable consolidation, of power in the hands of a few underquaffed family qualified
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family members. today this new thing that we've consolidation of american government power in the nuclear family of the president, today that potentially started to become a liability for the administration and for the government in terms of the most serious scandal that looms over the new administration. this is fci ukten. fci stands for federal correctional institution. it's a low security prison in lisbon, ohio. 200 male prisoners there. this weekend, that particular prison released a russian spy. technically his release date was not until the end of july, but they let him out on friday with time off for good behavior. that said, this russian spy was
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not released back into the community at large when he got sprung from federal prison on friday, the federal prison system released him to immigration and customs authorities because as part of his plea deal, he agreed he would immediately agree that they would deport him back to russia. after serving his prison sentence. this guy who was just sprung from prison, yes, evgeny buryakov. evgeny buryakov. when the fbi busted the spy ring that he was part of a couple years ago in 2015, there were three alleged spies who were named in the criminal indictment, the indictment was brought by preet bharara's office in the southern district of new york. funny how his name keeps coming up. but evgeny buryakov was one of the three people named in this ring. he's the one they caught. they arrested him january 2015 at a supermarket in river dale,
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new york. by the time they brought those charges, the other two guys had fled back to russia already. one of them has been employed as a trade representative for the russian federation in the united states, and the other was a attache at the united states. they both went back to moscow. they both escaped being arrested by the fbi. but this guy who got caught, this guy who's been in prison until this weekend, this guy who they actually nailed, he didn't have an official government cover job like the other two did. they were all named in the indictment. the other two had cover jobs working for the russian government. his cover job was a nonofficial cover. his cover job was that he worked at a bank. he was an employee of a russian bank called the v.e.b. he was the number two at v.e.b. new york office. when he was arrested and charged with being a spy and put on trial, his employers, this
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russian bank paid for his legal defense. and that wasn't all they paid for. on the day that he got arrested at the supermarket, his wife and two kids reportedly fled their home and went to the the rezidentura. they fled to the building that houses the russian mission in new york. associates then reportedly ran sacked the apartment the family had lived in. he's in fbi custody. the wife and kids have gone to the the russian mission. associates tore the apartment apart, smashed up the wall board, broke the place apart. apparently they were looking for anything that evgeny buryakov might have left behind or listening devices that the fbi might have hidden in his family apartment. apparently the fbi had put both cameras and microphones all over the family apartment.
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but by the time his associates were tearing the place apart, the fbi had reportedly taken them all back. this is like amazing spy movie stuff, but think about the practicalities of it. you can imagine how evgeny buryakov's landlord felt about the state of the that apartment when he found out his tenant's going to prison. the rest of his family has fled. now he's got this literally mess on his hands. once again, the bank came to the rescue. in addition to financing evgeny buryakov's legal defense, the bank reportedly settled with the landlord for about $45,000 to cover the cost of the damage done to that house when his friends tore the place apart after he got arrested by the fbi and charged with being a spy. evgeny buryakov and all the
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stories of how he handed off intel to the other russian spies who were in this ring with him and the drama of his arrest and family fleeing in the dead of night into the rezidentura, and the bugs that the fbi placed all over his house, all of this stuff has be fascinating color by one of the most lurid russian spy scandals in the past few years. but that bank and that spy scandal are turning out to be a pesky asterisk that keeps getting affixed to lots of things about the new trump administration, because that bank where he was secretly working as a russian spy, that is a state-run russian bank. russian prime minister medvedev is on the supervisory board. the chairman of that bank started his career by going to kbg school, the college that russia operates where people who are going to join the successor agency to the kbg. that fsb-trained chairman of the bank was hand-picked to be
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chairman of the bank by vladimir putin himself last year. that bank for a million reasons should have a flashing red light when it comes to russian operations here in the united states. after all, it is a matter of public record that bank harbored a high level spy who was working there as cover and paid for his defense and paid for cleaning up his apartment after he tore it apart looking for the fbi bugs. that's why it waastonishing news a week ing a today when the "new york times" reported that jared kushner had not disclosed a meeting he took during the presidential transition with the chairman of that bank, with the putin hand-picked fsb chairman of the spy bank who apparently met in person with jared kushner in december. jared kushner never disclosed that meeting despite all the other troubles that have plagued this young administration about their undisclosed contacts with russian officials. for whatever reason, jared
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kushner did not disclose that meeting until it was reported in "the new york times" a week ing a today. that alone is sort of problematic enough when it comes to someone with a portfolio with a broad range domestic and international portfolio that he's been assigned by his father-in-law in the new administration. troubling enough. but now buzzfeed adds their new scoop tonight. as i mentioned, this spy ring that got busted by the fbi, three russian guys, one guy who had what they call nonofficial cover who worked at this bank. the other two guys, their cover jobs were official government positions. one was a trade representative for russia. one of them worked at the russian mission to the u.n. when it came time to feed their stolen documents and intel from their spy ring back to moscow, what would happen is these two guys who had official cover, they would take care of that part of it.
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not the guy who worked at the bank because he had no relationship with the russian government. but the other guys who had official cover and russian government jobs, whenever they had anything though transmit home, they would go to the rezidentura, a secure facility where they could make encrypted transmissions back to moscow center, back to spy headquarters in russia. and the way the fbi caught them and blew apart this spy ring with these three guys was absolutely genius. the fbi aranged to have somebody feed these guys sensitive stolen documents. and they handed these documents over in binders. and these russian guys, these spies, they took the binders with this juicy intel into the rezidentura in new york and the fbi had hidden microphones inside the binders.
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so they got to listen to everything these guys said, even though they thought they were in the most secure environment. inside the russian mission they thought they were essentially on russian soil. they certainly had diplomatic immunity, they were in russian space, but the documents they had were bugged. there were microphones in the binders. so the fbi got hours and hours of tape off those microphones in the binders of these guys talking when they were sure nobody could hear them. one of the things those guys talked about was the other guy in their spy ring who worked in the bank. that's how they got him. another thing we talked about was their repeated efforts to recruit americans for their spying efforts. when this case broke open in 2015 and they released the indictment, a lot of the news coverage was about the facts he wanted to target college girls
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in new york to be russian assets. that had a nice tabloid appeal to it, even though the indictment didn't indicate they had too much success with the college girls effort. where they did have success was with male number one. a quote from the indictment here. quote, on or about april 8th 2013, the defendant discussed efforts working as an consultant in new york city working as an intelligence source. what i will quote you is a conversation between the two russian spies, the guys who got charged but never went to prison because they had already fled back to moscow. this is the two guys who are now back in moscow who never got arrested. this is them speaking at the rezidentura having no idea they're being surveilled. they're speaking to each other in russian. this is the fbi translation. spy number one says,
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male-1 wrote that he's sorry. he went to moscow and forgot to check his inbox. but he wants to meet when he gets back. i think he's an idiot and forgot who i am. plus, he writes to me in russian to practice the language. he got hooked on gazprom. it's obvious he wants to earn lots of money. spy number two says, without a doubt. then spy number one says, quote, he says they've new project right now. new energy boom. it's about to take off. i do not say anything for now. the other spy says, first we'll spend a couple borrowed millions. and then the first spy laughs. and then says this, quote, it's worth it. i like that he takes on everything. for now his enthusiasm works for me. i also promised him a lot. that i have connections in the trade representation, meaning you, that you could push contracts. i will feed him empty promises. and then the other spy who is
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working as a russian trade representatives swears, he is bleep, no, then he'll write me, or write to our clean one. meaning he will write to the trade representatives office and accidentally not talk to a spy. he might talk to a real trade rep. wouldn't that be terrible for their recruitment efforts? the first guy says don't worry about it. quote, i did not say the trade representations. i d not even say this was connected to a government agency. this is intelligence method to cheat. how else to work with foreigners? this was a conversation sur veiled by the fbi through their magic microphone in the binders trick. that conversation happened in april 2013. they are talking about an american citizen. they're talking about recruiting an american asset for their spying. that happens in april. in june the fbi decides to act. june 13th that same year, they paid that american guy a
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visit. quote, on or about june 13th, 2013, agent two and i interviewed male-1 he said he first met the defendant on january 2013 at an energy symposium in the city. during this time he gave him his business card. and two e-mail addresses. turnover following months, e-mail 1 and the defendant changed e-mails about the energy business and met in person on occasion with male-1 providing the defendant with male-1's outlook on the energy industry. male-1 also provided documents to the defendant about the energy business. so forget the college girls thing which didn't work out for them. this is what the russian spies were after. this is start of how they cultivate americans to betray the united states. start off friendly, with a business relationship or an academic relationship. start off with could just let us know your own thoughts on
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specific industries or specific things in the u.s. government. maybe you could help us by showing documents from those industries. let's stay in touch and start a transactional relationship. can i see what you've got? i'd love to see those documents, what else do you have? i'd like to see more that type of document. this is how they did it, right? maybe it turnsnto someing, maybe it doesn't, but you cultivate assets. this is what they do. this is why they're here instead of working at home in moscow. buzzfeed news reports tonight that male 1 in that indictment is the trump campaign foreign policy adviser carter page. he was recruited by russian spies in new york city in 2013. he was successfully recruited. he handed them documents and information to help them and was enthusiastic about their relationship. that adviser carter page met with a russian intelligence
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operative named victor podobnyy who was later charged along side two others for acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government. a former campaign adviser met with and passed documents to a russian intelligence operative in new york city in 2013. the adviser met with the russian intelligence operative named victor podobnyy who was later charged with two others. quote, a court filing by the u.s. government contains a transcript of a recorded conversation in question he speaks with one of the other men busted in the spy ring, igor sporyshev. buzzfeed has confirmed male-1 is carter page. here's my favorite part. how did they confirm he's male-1? quoting from ali watkins' story,
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quote, carter page confirmed to buzzfeed news on monday that he is male 1 in the court filing and said he had been in contact podobnyy. so jared's in baghdad at the invitation of the joint chiefs. meeting with the troops, visiting u.s. embassy personnel. there's nothing too sensitive for jared to be involved in, let alone to be running in this new administration. he is leading u.s. preparation for the china meeting. he was apparently at the table for the decision for launching the yemen raid that killed a u.s. navy sale seal. at a scary time in terms of north korea's nuclear capabilities, he's at the head. but 130i9 nonprofit in the coming days he will have to make time in his incredibly busy schedule to testify to the senate intelligence committee about why, during the presidential transition, he met with the
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fsb-trained official who vladimir putin hand-selected to lead a russian state bank that is currently sanctioned by the u.s. government and that harbored a russian spy network in this country that among other things recruited a trump foreign policy advisor as a russian intelligence asset just a few years ago. amid all the worry and focus and scandal and investigations about the russian attack on our election last year and contact between trump campaign and russian officials, amid all that furor, jared took that meeting in december with the guy from the russian bank and he never said a word about it until a newspaper reported it. buzzfeed reporter, ali watkins, wlos the one who unmasked the trump foreign policy adviser, joins us next. beyond is a natural pet food
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>> we heard you might be announcing your foreign policy advisory team soon. >> we are going to be doing that. in fact very soon. i'd say during the week we will be announcing some names. >> any you can start off with with us? >> well, i hand thought in terms of doing it. but if you want i can give you some of the names. i wouldn't mind. i'll be a little more accurate with it. okay, ready? walid phares, who you probably know. ph.d, counter terrorism expert. carter page.
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ph.d. >> carter page, who is he? that's what everybody said at the time. then-candidate trump said he was the number two list on his foreign policy advisors for his campaign. now buzzfeed news reports that among many other things that carter page turns out to be, he was also recruited in 2013 as apparently an unwitting american source for a russian spy ring that was operating out of new york city. joining us is ali watkins. she's a national security correspondent for buzzfeed news. who bloke this story tonight. thank you for being with us. >> thanks for having me. >> can i ask you about one detail that strikes me as weird? >> okay. >> when we found out you guys had this scoop today, we were like scrambling, that's the v.e.b. case. let's go back and look at the indictment. we're putting it together.
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just out of curiosity, i wonder if that guy is in prison in ohio. i googled him in the federal prisoner locator thing and was shocked to find out he had just been released on friday. >> total coincidence. i called tornado try and see where he ended up who are what happened to him. and the law firm was like, he actually gets out in 48 hours. and i was like, wow. that's really strange. total coincidence. weird one just timing-wise. >> we expect he's probably back in moscow right now. >> a condition of his deal. he was here on an expired visa. and he had to go back to mousk and leave u.s. soil. they might confirm if he left or not. i don't think they necessarily knew that the intention was to go back. >> in terms of carter page and his appearance in this spy saga, do we know anything about what he hand over, what he gave these russian spies? >> there's a couple things we know. page was not in the government at that time.
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there's nothing to indicate there was anything sensitive. there would be really -- it's hard to imagine him having a lot of access to sensitive information at that time. he was not in trump's orbit. he was a private sector employee. >> that was 2013. so nobody was in his political orbit at the time. >> true, but he didn't have access to anything sensitive. it does not appear he handed over anything sensitive. >> that's not unusual at least the the way the prosecutors and fbi explained it at the time. when we cultivate assets, they start small, they don't necessarily start with people even think they have access to sensitive information. they just start a relationship that results in the turnover of documents, get that pump priepd and cultivate people for the long term. >> absolutely. it's something as little as making that connection. it's a long game. you can check in with someone in
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five or tenears. it's certainly a long game. >> why did carter page confirm this to you and what was his affect towards this information and it becoming public? >> he was very forthcoming. i had been doing a lot reporting on it. so i knew it was him in the document. when i asked him about it, he said, yes, i'm male-1. he confirmed he's the anonymous male in the document. >> you were able to figure this out before you got the confirmation from him, the icing on the cake is him saying, yes, it's me. the reason i want to be clear is we just heard then candidate donald trump there naming him as one of his foreign policy advisers, the second person he came up with on the initial list. isn't this the sort of thing that should have turned up in vetting? >> that's the question moving forward, right, is what did the trump administration know and when did they know it essentially.
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really want to be clear here. this was three years before page had any kind of connection to the campaign. doesn't appear there was anything sensitive. clearly that was a known fact in certain corners of the bureau. certain corners in new york. page was very forthcoming with it. i think that is the question tomorrow, is what did the trump administration know and when did they know it. >> even if page himself was an unwitting cultivated asset, he knows it happened to him because the fbi went and told him that's what happened when they interviewed him. had he been vetted even being directly asked have you been in contact, he would have had to say, yes. >> presumably. yeah, if you want to answer truthfully. >> weird way to get to be a top foreign policy adviser to a presidential campaign. congratulations on this. i appreciate it. it was fun to follow in your foot steps. it's incredible stuff. ali watkins, national security correspondent for buzzfeed.
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sitting in on the president's meeting today with the egyptian president was the deputy national security adviser k.t. mcfarland. the number two official on the national security official makes sense she was in on that meeting, except for the news she's on her way out. reportedly she's not going to be deputy national security adviser for long. she's off to be ambassador to singapore.
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ambassador to singapore is a great gig if you can get it. unless the gig you have to give up to take it is national security adviser. no offense whatsoever to singapore, but that's like being coo to deputy undersecretary of pencil sharpening at the suburb satellite office. a source says mcfarland froefrd stay on in some capacity in government in washington, such as a possible role at state. state as in the state department in foggy bottom in washington, d.c., not city state of the singapore 10,000 miles away from d.c. staffing not national security council has been a real issue
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for this administration besides michael flynn being fired as national security advisor after 24 days on the job, another deputy national security adviser position getting unfilled as soon as it got filled. there was also last week's reporting that two national security staffers were involved in the sharing of classified intelligence reports with the house intelligence committee chairman devin nunes shared those reports reportedly on the white house grounds in the middle of the night for reasons that still haven't been explained and that the white house is only partially copped to but not really. one of the staffers has been named at 30 year old ezra cohen watt nick. he was elevated to a fancy job, senior director for intelligence at the national security council while michael flynn was still there. i have to tell you, we have now reviewed the resumes of what we believe to be the nine people who held that job prior to ezra cohen watt nick getting it in this administration. we have found that none of the prior people who held that job
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had fewer than 12 years intelligence and military experience. ezra cohen watt nick only graduated from college in 2008. he has vastly less experience than every person who has ever had that job before on the national security council. what was he doing there in that job? what's he still doing there? when mike flynn was fired, hr mcmaster came on as his replacement. he was blocked by jared kushner and steve bannon. national security adviser mcmaster was told they had to keep this guy on. why? as for cohen watt nick, he's being cited today by conservative news out lets that former obama national security adviser, susan
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rice asked for persons to be unmasked in u.s. intelligence reports. now, there's nothing illegal or improper or unexpected about a national security adviser unmasking those names. there's no allegation that she leaked those names if she did have them unmasked. nor is there any allegation she made any of those public. by making those allegations about susan rice, the national security council itself appears to be operating at a political level to shape a conservative friend alternaveo th trump/russia scandal, one that stars the obama administration as the villains instead of vladimir putin. however you feel about that story itself, what does this mean in national security terms. national security council is for a reason. is it weird that this is what the national security council is being used for right now? is it dangerous?
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reports that north korea is trying to market the kind of lithium that would help you make a hydrogen bomb. today "the financial times" reports that the chinese president's meeting with our president later on this week is expected to be a very high-stakes event and that wile the chinese government is bringing the full force of their diplomatic power to bear on that meeting, the person who's heading up preparation for that meeting on behalf of the united states is the president's 36 year old son-in-law. choose your adventure right now in terms of national security things you want to worry about. right now there's something strange going on with national security and how it's being hagglinged in washington. the national security council among other things, they're caught in the middle of what appears to be an effort to manage and politically shape the sandal around the russian attack on our election last year and the trump
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campaign's potential contact with russia. we all expected there would be a political effort to shape the response to that scandal or even to shape the way the intelligence about those matters received, circumstance circulated and politicized. i'm not sure everybody thought that would be run out of a national security council though. how weird is that? how worrying is it in terms of the opportunity cost for the other stuff the national security council ought to be worried about righnow. joining us is michael leiter. he worked closely with the national security council staff. michael, nice to see you thank you for being here. >> good to be here. >> let me as you a big picture. when i take to other national security professionals, particularly people who have had big jobs like you have, they do not seem to be widely alarmed at the trump administration's national security capacity. there does seem to be faith in people like defense secretary mattis and the national security
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adviser hr mcmaster and others. is that your view? >> there are some who understand the issues, are mature, worked within the national security establishment. mike pompeo. >> there are some who understand the issues, are mature, worked within the national security establishment. generally people think they've got good, solid judgment and will seek out expertise. i think the big question and the reason i'm not as confident as others sha the struggles we see within the administration suggest those individuals, while important to their departments and agencies, aren't actually central players at the white house in national security decision making and aren't shaping policy and aren't helping the president set his priorities. so it's great if you have a strong team. but if you're not talking to that team or using their expertise, then it doesn't matter who's on the bench. >> the news that general mcmaster may have wanted to fire this young man who's been named senior director for intelligence and national security council, i
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find it unusual that he's in that job. i don't mean to talk about him in personal terms. i'm just comparing his resume and length of service and experience compared to other kinds of people who have had that job. it's strange to me he's in that job. it's very strange to me and worrying to me that general mcmaster wted to getid of him and the white house told him he couldn't. what is your take on that? >> i think anytime you run a government organization, you iran show. you want to be able to choose your team. if the boss said i don't have confidence in that individual, and the boss says i don't care he's staying, it's worrisome. you point to mcmaster being one of the adults in the room but he can't choose his own team, it makes us question the degree of influence he has with the president. i think the individual, i don't know him either. he's certainly on the junior side of this. he hasn't had the multitude of agencies in the field 20 plus years of intelligence experience. and i fear that some of that
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youthful indiscretion, if i can use that phrase, may well have led him down a path with chairman nunez which honestly just throws up smoke and keeps anyone from getting to the reel issues that you identified and it's diverting us from the important national security issues that we face around the globe. >> the diversion factor that, the thing that's most interesting to me is is not mow diverted are we, are we able to refocus on the important issuance. the thing that worries me, i have no expertise in this field at all, but i worry that the national security council, somebody who's operating as senior director for tfor the nay council political smoke making, is involved in political diversions. i worry about that in terms of the other stuff the national security council has to do. i also worry could they stick their hands into the middle of an ongoing investigation? do they have access to stuff
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where they could do real harm? >> first of all i would say there is some history at the national security council putting its nose or hands into places it shouldn't be. i don't want to suggest we've gone this far, i have this lieutenant colonel oliver north. during iran contra. and being operational witut legal restriction they're working within. there is some risk when you have inexperienced staffers on the national security council who may not fully appreciate what they should and should not be doing because it could implicate the investigations being done by the fbi. all that being said, the basic idea, the reason we ended up in this sort of alice in wonder land world, is because it starts with a tweet from the president saying i just saw something on tv. there is illegal unconstitutionally political motivated surveillance. that's a big deal, rachel. >> it's a big allegation. >> and in any other world, the
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president would have turned to his national security adviser and say, i just saw this. get me the director of the cia, and fbi. i want to figure out if there's any truth to this and it would start there. and it would be handed to the staff of the national security council to investigate and they would know what's going on. what we have here is a president tweeting. that tweeting then leading to his request to congress to investigate the executive branch where he could have figured it out in a ten-minute meeting. and then you have the national security council feeding information back to congress. it is beyond a hall of mirrors. it is simply confusing the issue. it's diverting us from those real issues. equally important, it makes our allies worried. the fact is, whether you're talking about north korea or china being more aggressive, all these issues are ones we have to focus and our allies need our focus. if we're focused internally, they don't believe we have the time and attention to do that.
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>> it's one thing that political hacks do that work. it's another to have the national security staff at the highest level working on that stuff instead. michael leiter, former director of the national counterterrorism center. it's nice to see you again. thank you. lots more ahead tonight, stay with us. ♪ and the moon up above ♪ ♪ and a thing called love. ♪ ♪ let me tell you 'bout the stars in the sk♪, ♪ a girl and a guy♪ ♪ and the way they could kiss on a night like this ♪ life's as big as you make it. introducing the all-new seven seater volkswagen atlas ♪ and a thing called love. a 401(k) is the most sound way to go. let's talk asset allocation. -sure. you seem knowledgeable, professional. i'm actually a deejay. -[ laughing ] no way! -that really is you? if they're not a cfp pro, you just don't know. cfp. work with the highest standard.
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thought that he would find peace and contentment in california, well, it wasn't exactly a home coming celebration for him in fresno. right down to an anthem which you may not recognize. ♪ mixing anger with humor, they greeted him with a rebound edition of the russian anthem. but nunez snuck into a back door where he changed the sung, speaking to an agricultural group about water issues in the val. >> hey, hey. devin nunes got to go. >> outside, several hundred demonstrators, some holding signs with russian insignia. >> this whole congressional investigative committee is just deinvolved into a joke.
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he needs to recuse himself or taking it seriously. we want to find out what happened with russia. ♪ ♪ nunez, nunez, listen or we'll knock you out♪ >> in frno, california, his anger constituents listen or we'll throw you out, playing the russian national anthem as his track. that is turning out to be surpriseingly big factor in the big fight democrats just picked in washington. that story's next.
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bounty, the quicker picker upper denver, colorado, this weekend, people rallied to call on the state's two senators to vote "no" on i'm just going to object neil gorsuch for the supreme court. senator michael bennett says he won't support the filibuster against gorsuch, and corey gardener, he's, yes, for gorsuch all the way. we'll see if either of them pays a price for that stance on gorsuch in gorsuch's home state of the colorado. even without michaelbennt, democrats have the votes to mount their filibuster against neil gorsuch to stop him from being confirmed with the court. that showdown will be later this week. today every democrat on the judiciary committee voted against neil gorsuch's nomination, but that was just a signal of the bigger fight that
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will come over this in the next few days. here's one thing to stick a flag in though in this news today. democrats on the judiciary committee were taking this unified stand against judge gorsuch today, they did something else that got a lot less attention. the judiciary committee also voted to advance the nomination of this man, his name is rod rosen seen the. the white house has nominated him to be the number two official at the justice department under jeff sessions. who's number two is important because the attorney general, jeff sessions, has recused himself. that means any justice department investigation of such things would be overseen by rod rosen stean if he's confirmed. that would be his call as well.
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during his confirmation hearings last month, richard blumen that will asked which road would he likely take. would we may look back on this as a momentous strategic decision by the democrats. stick a flag in this one. note this one for the record. that does it for us tonight. we'll see you again tomorrow. now it's time for the last word with lawrence o'donnell. good evening, laence. >> good evening. rs
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