gaerds for that particular town hall. wherever the president is he has a lot on his plate this weekend. msnbc will be covering all of it. "the 11th hour" with brian williams is live starting right now. tonight, owl eyes on north korea, where it's saturday morning and pyongyang. and with tensions building, the world waits to see if kim jong-un will test another nuclear weapon. also back in washington, the trump administration guarding privacy or lacking transparency? with a policy change just revealed today. and protecting the president up and down the east coast, wherever they go. why this administration poses the largest challenge of the modern era. "the 11th hour" begins now. good evening once again from our headquarters here in new york. day 85 of the trump

administration. and week 12 of this young administration is ending with all eyes squarely on north korea. the secretive nation says it is ready to go to war with the united states if that's what president trump wants. these are pictures from this morning's military parade. speaking to the "associated press" there, their vice foreign minister also said president trump's tweets are making tensions worse. pyongyang has determined that the trump administration is more vicious and more aggressive than the obama administration. officials are trying to determine if north korea is planning a sixth nuclear test any time over the next hours or days, for that matter. the last such test was in september of last year. pyongyang says it will conduct its next nuclear test when it deems necessary. and citing washington's reckless actions so far, presumably navy ships moving closer to the

korean pence peninsula, north korea says it's ready for a preemptive strike of its own. as the trump administration's plans, the ap is quoting administration officials tonight saying they are looking to stress maximum pressure and engagement that reportedly means leaning on china to turn up the heat. we've heard the president say that much. and hoping that should another nuclear test happen both russia and china will acquiesce to more sanctions. u.s. officials tell the ap if any military engagement occurs the goal would only be north korea's denuclearization. right now it's already nearly midday on saturday. and the reclusive state, it happens to be the biggest holiday of the year, known as the day of the sun, honoring the country's founder, kim il sung. there are giant likenesses everywhere. from childhood every north korean gets taught the mythic stories of their greatness.

today's day of the sun sunday celebrations like so many in the past featured an elaborate parade to display the state's military capabilities. let's bring in our panel. ambassador nancy soderberg who worked with president clinton and as ambassador to the united nations. david sanger fresh off a trip covering the secretary of state in moscow. and part of the "new york times" team that we should add won a pulitzer prize earlier this week. gordon chang is here with us in new york an expert on north korea and china. written books on both countries in fact. and msnbc military analyst, barry mccaffrey. a decorated combat veteran in

vietnam. a ground commander in desert storm. and military experience throughout the world. you flew the most miles to be with us tonight. you get to go first. where do you think we are, we with a new president vis-a-vis north korea in your view? >> you have got a couple of dynamics going right now that add great unpredictability to all of this. the first is, as you suggested before, there is this consent that there's going to be pressure, and then engagement. well, this is not exactly a new policy. this is what bill clinton tried in 1994 during the '94 crisis. it's what at various points the bush administration tried first by trying to freeze out the north koreans in the first term and then engaging them in the second. president obama really never did manage to engage them. what makes it different now, brian? a few things. first of all, the north koreans have made clear that no matter what, they will never give up their nuclear weapons and their missile program. and frankly, it looked at from

their perspective they would be crazy to do it. they look at for example, the engagement that colonel gaddafi got involved in in libya. he gave up a much smaller nuclear program, one that had not deployed any weapons, of course. and got all these promises of engagement with the west. when the moment came and his people turned against him you saw what happened. the north korean view is we are never giving it up. and the american view is we are not talking to you until you give it up the question is, what's going to give here? that's why i think we are moving toward probably as big a crisis as we saw in '94, if not bigger. >> ambassador, this is your line of work after all, are we missing something? is there something we are not pursuing? is there any new angle on this

old crisis? >> i think president trump has correctly identified the role of china as the linchpin to this issue. there really suspect a military solution here. it's going to be diplomatic. and really, back in '92, under the first bush administration the north koreans figured out that their one piece of currency was their nuclear program and they have used time and time again to get more from the international community. i can remember meetings at the white house under bill clinton where we are looking at the options and they are all terrible. so you have to pick the least difficult of the options. and it tends to be a very difficult diplomatic route. and i think the president's right in trying to pressure china to step up here. over they never really have. and it has to be a diplomatic effort. but china has to say, this is not going to stand. president george w. bush tried to ignore and stand up to the north korean regime in the years of 2000. and the north koreans simply threw a nuclear hissy fit and ultimately he made another deal

which the north koreans several years later violated. so i think we are entering a crisis because this third generation of north koreans is more erratic than their predecessors. but you can't sort of just play whack a mole with the nuclear weapon system in north korea. it's much more complicated. they are much deeper. they are much more diffuse. and it would probably backfire. so there is very difficult options here. but i think the president is getting to the right answer here, which is to pressure china to step up and get a stronger diplomatic deal. but it's a really tough problem. >> i want to let our viewers know this is not just file tape we are running on the side of the screen. these are live pictures of the annual military parade going on in pyongyang, coming up on noon their time. the square is designed to make the individual look and appear

small and emphasize the power and size of the state, or in this case, the power of their mobile missile launchers. walt disney could not produce a more lavish event outdoors with just thousands of people there. no one is missing their color card for the day. no one is missing their position. this is their job. and of course the maximum leader is in the reviewing stand watching it all. gordon you made the most interesting point here in the studio before we came on the air, that you see something very significant in the trump administration cruise missile attack on syria a week ago where it affects north korea and china. >> yeah, before thursday i think everyone was saying it is a 100% chance that the north koreans would dead nate their sixth nuclear device.

what happened on thursday evening when you had president trump announce the missile strike on syria, you had syria's good friend, xi jinping the ruler of china right next to him. i think the chinese were stunned by that. also, we had the test of the mother of all bombs yesterday on an underground facility. and no country has put more facilities underground than north korea. so essentially, the north koreans have gotten that message, that trump has a pretty low threshold for the use of force. >> general mccaffery i was going to facetiously say that wouldn't it be nice if the united states could in a big fashion drop a bomb that would destroy underground destruction and get global coverage of it but that already happened. do you think that was perhaps aimed elsewhere in the globe? >> i don't think it was. i think the general was trying to go after taliban and isis both of whom are winning the insurgency in afghanistan. afghanistan is starting to come

apart. we are not going going back in with ground forces, nato or the u.s. i think that was an air offense. i don't think this is a crisis. the crisis is in the coming five years for sure the north koreans will end up with a hundred nuclear devices, probably an icbm that creditably can threaten the mainland u.s., submarine launched ballistic missiles. they already have solid fuel, road mobile launchers. north korea is actually a desperately poor country with a primitive armed forces which by the way active and reserve is 25% of the entire population. maybe 25% of gnp on defense. but now they have got 15 nukes.

i'd be less concerned about this weekend and the thought that an irrational preemptive strike would take place on north korean nuclear facilities. i'm sure we are not going do that. but i am concerned about the fairly short period of time five, ten years we will be at great risk. >> david sanger, there you go, a kinds of review of the challenge that awaits this administration. as we said, you have just returned from traveling with the manifestation of the trump administration, and how other countries see us, specifically on this trip, moscow, the foreign minister and mr. putin. what is the mechanism like of the state department under trump compared to the traveling state department you are quite used to? >> well, the first is we don't travel with it very much. we travel alongside it because

mr. tillerson has decided not to take most reporters on the plane. i think at this point you are seeing rex tillerson have a little bit of a hard time getting across a thought that he truly represents the single voice of american foreign policy because right now there is no single voice. and north korea's is an interesting example of that. you saw early tweets from the president even before he was inaugurated saying, the north koreans say they are going to launch an icbm, it's not going to happen, as if he would step in preemptively, and now that they have had to go look at the

options that nancy and others just talked about, they are discovering, as nancy said, there are really no good choices. brian, i want to take you back to the video you were showing, the live video of the parade for a moment. there were a couple of thing that jumped out at me as i was watching these come across on the monitor. verse of all the very large number of mobile missile launchers these are carried on. these are meant to send a message. the message is if you think you are going to do a preemptive strike remember that most of our missiles now are sitting in tunnels underneath mountains all around the country and there is no way you are going to get at all of them. the second is some of the missiles they have been showing including the kn 08 there, which are some of their intermediate range ballistic missiles are the very same missiles that we described a month ago in a story that describe a secret program that president obama began to try to attack the launching systems with a cyber and electronic warfare methods. and you have seen a lot of these missiles go off into the ocean. that has not stopped him from turning out either these missiles or dummies. we don't know what's inside. but we are definitely in the midst of a contest in which they are saying we can produce these faster than you can defeat them or find them. >> ambassador, if you had 60 seconds or 60 minutes with the

new president to tell him something about the north korean character, what you've come to know about the people we're dealing with here, what would it be? >> it depends on one man, the current president, kim, and he's irrational, erratic. he had his half brother assassinated. he is ruthless, doesn't care about his people and he will respond erratically to any kind of threat so it is a very dangerous situation. i think what the president is doing is recognizing that his campaign rhetoric doesn't fit reality as every president goes through and he is pivoting towards the geopolitical reality here which i think is a healthy thing. so listen to your advisors, tread very carefully on this issue. it is not an easy or quick fix. >> gordon, is kim jong-un suicidal on top of everything else? >> no, but i think he has a very low threshold of risk. because since the end of january and through the middle of

february we saw four instances of suggesting instability, including assassinating his elder half brother. but more important, the demotion and the detention of the minister of state security, and the execution of five the ministers' senior subordinates. there is all sorts of trouble in this regime. i think that kim may feel he has less to lose these days. when you have an american president who appears to have a low threshold for the use of force you have a real issue because there you have two leaders with very different calculus of risk at this point. >> and look at the statues coming down the main road. i also loved the kind of -- of the two ancient military commanders flanking kim jong-un, one of them has a card at the ready in case he has to say something to the leader to mask whatever he's saying from lip readers. and the balloon release has been ordered. we will take a break in our conversation. we're asking our entire panel to

stand by with us. we'll resume our conversation after the break. from north korea to syria, to the bomb dropped on those isis tunnels just yesterday, the president who ran on america first has already shown great interest in reaching overseas. that and more when our discussion continues. ♪ ♪

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let's go. i'm ready. are you my uber? [ horn honks ] hold on. don't wait for watchathon week to return. [ doorbell rings ] who's that? show me netflix. sign up for netflix on x1 today and keep watching all year long. and you know i tell this all the time, the word unpredictable. we have to be unpredictable, folks. our military -- unpredictable.

obama gets up, we will leave iraq, and he gives a day. we are going to have an unpredictable. i get criticized because i say unpredictable. the enemy turns out to be ten times tougher than we thought because they know our plan. we have to be unpredictable folks. we have to be unpredictable. we are too predictable. >> don't you long for those days of the campaign. welcome back to "the 11th hour." as you just saw specifically on foreign policy, use of military overseas, candidate trump promised more than once to be unpredictable. white house press secretary sean spicer's version of the same thing, quote, we are not going to telegraph what we're going do maybe used on a post of foreign policyish ice over these last 12 weeks including just this last tuesday when he was talking about north korea. >> the president has been very clear when he is negotiating or dealing with an issue you don't telegraph to people how you are going to handle it. we don't telegraph what we're going to do. i think he has been clear he will not tolerate some of this action by north korea. but to answer your question, i

think i have said this before on a variety of topics. the president is not one who is going to go out there and telegraph his response. i think he keeps all options on the table. he keeps his cards close to the vest. >> the same day that was said, the president said on twitter, quote, north korea is looking for trouble. if china decides to help that would be great. if not, we will solve the problem without them. u.s.a. we're back with ambassador nancy soderberg, goran chang and barry mccaffery. ambassador, is unpredictable a foreign policy? >> no in particular the syria strike has broad support. no one knows whether there is a plan to back it is up of it's fine to be unpredictable and not show your cards but you have to have a plan. i think that's the question with this president, what goes with these actions, military actions alone don't work. you have to marry force and diplomacy, that's the prescription for success. he has time to do it.

on north korea he asked for options the full range of options i think he needs to have a deliberate discussion of those and a plan. he can keep his cards to his vest, but what's causing some concern among foreign policy experts is is not a lot of assurances there is real strategy that's going with some of these military action. he has time to get them but we want to see a little bit more on the planning side to accompany some of these actions. >> david, americans heard him say who knew health care was this complicated? the world heard him say about china and north korea, it's not so easy. it's not what you'd think. he was briefed on that history by the president of china. my question to you is, how much -- and we talked about this with andrea mitchell a little bit -- how much of the mechanism of foreign policy -- the state department, is not there, it's

missing. >> most of it is missing. the only confirmed personal at the state department right now is the secretary of state and a holdover, tom shannon who has been acting as the undersecretary. the rest of the assistant secretaries, undersecretaries, all that expertise is not there. career people are there. it's not clear how much they are being listened to. i wanted to relate back though to the question of unpredictability when it comes to north korea. yes, you want to be unpredictable with your adversaries, and you want to be highly predictable to your allies. and it's the unpredictability that is so woring right now to the south koreans and the japanese. because the north koreans don't have a missile yet that can reach the united states. they are working on it but they don't have it. they have plenty that can reach

south korea and that can reach japan, and our troops there. and of course they have artillery batteries that general mccaffery can describe better than i can that are just over the northern edge of the dmz and they could wipe out seoul without using any nuclear weapons at all. so the south koreans are saying to president trump, hey, slow down, because any decision you make is -- could end up being taken out on us. now i've been told in recent days, including today, that even if they do a nuclear test in the next few days, the americans probably will not respond in a military manner. they will use the method -- they will use the moment to try to truly clamp down on north korea's economy or what's left of it, which is mostly through china as we've discussed. and they may also increase their anti-missile capability there, which -- the fleet is moving up. it has some agis cruisers on it as well.

i don't think you are going to see an immediate move because it's as gordon said not as easy as dropping the mother of all bombs in a remote part of a distant land. >> gordon, what worries you tonight? >> i guess there are irreconcilable differences among the parties involved, united states, china, north korea. and as you have the south koreans are in a state of political flux with the impeachment crisis. they are going to have a by-election on may 9th. that gives kim jong-un the north korean leader maybe an opening to cause trouble in a non-kinetic way. it's going to be very difficult for the united states to respond. and you know, essentially, this -- four years from now the north koreans will have a missile that will reach the lower 48 states. it will have a nuclear weapon at the tip of it. that's not very long and we don't have very much time to figure that out. >> general mccaffery, you get the last word. god forbid it ever becomes germane to our conversation but remind the folks watching at home, what do we mean when we

say a carrier battle group? how much defensive fire power is included in what is now 300, 400 miles off the coast? >> a carrier strike group has a considerable amount of fire power to carry out a preemptive strike to try to get at some of the nuke device. a lot of weapons in south korea with the south korean army and our own forces. there is b-52s backing all this up on guam. i think this leads us in the wrong direction. we are not going to conduct a preemptive strike on north korea to go after their nukes this weekend. not going to happen. the south koreans will not sign off on it. it would be a disaster. by the way, brian, we know we can take apart the north korean armed forces probably in 180

days. it's primitive. the airpower is zero. the navy -- we've got to get their subs before they get out of port but basically it is an easy job. but it is a humanitarian disaster in south korea and probably would include engaging japan. so that's not going to happen. what is going to happen is the north koreans are not giving up their nuclear weapons. so we've got diplomatic, economic leverage, covert action, and we better build a serious ballistic missile defense system in the region. and i think a lot of that is underway. thaad is going in now. pac 3 patriot missile is there. navy agis air defense, saam three is there. i think we have to wait these people out. we are not going to take out their nukes. >> in plain english, nothing good on this good friday on this front. what a mess. our thanks on this friday night to ambassador nancy soderberg, to david sanger, just back in this country, to for done chang, and general barry mccaffery. thank you all so much. coming up after our first break a white house announcement today that has critics questioning the transparency of the trump administration. "the 11th hour" continues after this.

late this afternoon, the friday of a holiday weekend, the white house revealed a new policy to keep private the names of people who visit. it's a change from how the white house operated under president obama. and critics say it's the latest in a string of decisions by team trump to block transparency. tonight it's the timing of this decision that's getting a lots of attention as the press corps has been asking about these visitor logs for over a month now.

>> will the trump administration continue the obama administration's practice of releasing publicly the visitor logs. >> we are currently evaluating our procedures on that and when we have an announcement i'll let you know. >> one more question. >> yeah. >> when will the white house release the visitor logs? >> we are reviewing that now. >> joining the conversation, jonathan alter, sabrina from washington. and huh-uh it, host of the appropriately named huh-uhity show. welcome to you all. jonathan we were talking before the break. and i was making the point that this can be a complicated business. there are many ways to bring people into the white house. down the northwest gate down the driveway with a bank of cameras, they can come in west exec avenue.

they can come in on the ellipse. that's how first children have first sleepovers without all the families being exposed to the media. what is this hubbub about specifically? >> this is basically saying, on the part of the trump administration, that the nation's business is nobody's business. and they can do whatever they want. they can get -- let lobbyists into the building every day, and that we won't know about it until five years after donald trump leaves the presidency. so they are claiming that this is so that they can, you know, bring supreme court nominees in or bring national security people in the there is a crisis with some secrecy. but there are provisions for that. >> there is always been allowance for that. >> there is always been a way to keep real things secret. this is just a smoke screen for more of what we've seen with trump not releases his taxes

just saying none of your business. we'll do whatever we want. it's more banana republic stuff. >> sabrina we did say on this broadcast last night, warning we are heading into a holiday weekend for most americans. friday night is an ideal time to release a story, the coverage of which you are not going to like. >> absolutely. and this is an administration that has already faced a great deal of scrutiny when it comes to its commitment to transparency. as jonathan mentioned there is breaking with the 40-year precedent of releasing tax returns. that's something we haven't seep from this president. now it's not just about who comes in and out of the white house. it's about which individuals or groups might be trying to influence this administration on policy and giving the public of

sense of who has the president's ear. now, the obama administration voluntarily released as many as 6 million names of visitors during his two term presidency. and many times that didn't include scores of lobbyists and it didn't always reflect well on his administration. when it came to matters of security or judicial issues, then they did handle those on a case by case basis. i think this is something that the president is receiving a lot of criticism from both sides on. it's not just a partisan matter and government watchdog groups i have spoken to said they expect to see him in court. >> huh-uhity, it is how we learned how many lobbyists were crawling all over obamacare initially. i will say this tomorrow, traditional tax day, you are going to have marches in a lot of the cities in this country about transparency. the theme, trying to get donald trump to release his tax returns, trying to focus attention on that issue every day. and now this. this doesn't -- the optics of this are not good. >> i agree, brian. i don't think this is a good decision. i have been thinking about it all afternoon. the only good reason to make this decision is to give president trump the tune the reverse it quickly.

and i don't understand the timing even though it is a classic friday night dump. president trump has found his footing in the last two weeks. neil gorsuch confirmation, a very successful summit with the nato secretary general a very warm international welcome of his swift action in syria. jeff sessions has -- there was an l.a. times story showing that 40% of the illegals crossing at the border has declined. i think that general mattis and general dunford have got a strategy that's unfolding in real time. general mcmaster on his way to afghanistan. why in the world, after two great weeks, do something that brings down criticism across -- i think sabrina noted -- across the political spectrum. >> hugh, let me ask the follow-up, what would it have hurt? >> there are needs for secret meetings. there are famous secret meetings, i think the most famous, john scalley of abc news meeting with the kgb resident during the cuban missile crisis. but that was at the willard

hotel. there is a need for secrecy but you can always go offsite i just don't understand this, brian. doesn't make any sense to me. >> you know, there have been many examples of presidents secretly bringing people in to meet with them. and it's never a problem. what this is about at bottom is that donald trump doesn't believe he is answerable to anyone. if you look over the course of his career, he never has. the idea of accountability is a foreign concept to him. and the problem is he's, you know, in the presidency, it is an accountable office. you are accountable to the congress, the courts, and in this case, to the public. if you don't have any of that sense of what's required of you -- not by law, but by the norms of our constitutional system, your operating at odds with that system. >> so sabrina if we've seen a migration to the mainstream even just this week in the west wing it wasn't going to include this topic?

>> it wasn't. actually i think it could also be related to some degree because you are seeing the president adopt more mainstream republican positions and you see also individuals within his administration who are gaining in prominence, such as gary cohn, former goldman sachs executive director of the national economic council in the white house of the it could be this component where he ran very much on draining the swamp and perhaps he doesn't want the supporters who thought he was going to rid the white house the influence of lobbyists and wall street to see people coming in and out of the white house as he also evolves his opinions on issues such as the export import bank and currency evaluation with respect to china. >> thanks to our panelists for joining us tonight for this discussion. coming after our break, as donald trump evolves on his views has he abandoned some of the voters who sent him to the dance? that's next when "the 11th hour" continues. ú

how about if i were to say to you that donald trump doesn't really have a political philosophy? try bullet pointing what donald trump is. and i defy anybody to be able to do it. he is not being true to his principles. yes, else. you just don't know what they are. >> rushbo, rush limbaugh, on his show yesterday. president trump has flip-flopped on several positions he ran on with the campaign. a president with record low approval ratings could be losing some of his supporters at this point. quote, trump's base turns on him. reads the headline in politico. reading from the story, another quote, their complaints range from trump's embrace of an interventionist foreign policy

to his less hawkish tone on china to most recently his marginalization of his nationalist chief strategist steve bannon. he is failing in their view to deliver on his promise of a transformative america first agenda driven by hard edge populism. i am joined now by the story's coauthor, politico's alex eisenstaedt. still with me here in new york, jonathan alter of the daily beast. in addition to asking our viewers to go to politico in such large numbers we may crash the site as they read your piece over the holiday weekend. tell us as you wrote your piece what you found and what were some of the notable quotes from trump's base that stood out to you. >> we spoke to nearly two dozen of trump's most loyal stalwart supporters, people who gave up their jobs to support his campaign. people who advised him. almost with uniformity, but there were some exceptions a lot of people feel let down by his presidency. threat high expectations and they feel some of those hopes

have been dashed as he pursues a more mainstream agenda. >> jonathan, the question, is is there wishful thing among liberals involved here that for every marginalized bannon there is opposite reaction. >> i think it is a little bit of wishful thinking. he is way down in the polls compared to other presidents but i do think he was right when he said during the campaign that he can go out on fifth avenue and shoot someone and there would be a hard core base there. the problem is that the red meat of the campaign becomes mystery meat in the presidency. things are not as clear and simplistic. you can't just pander in the way he did then. he is coming face to face with the reality. his fate will still depend on what happens with the economy.

it's only if he doesn't deliver the jobs that he promised the forgotten people that he will go down into the 20s. >> i love the euphemism cultural liberal from new york. donald trump was kind of in many ways a cultural liberal from new york. and some of his staff members have migrated from new york to the white house. are we going to test the size of his base. do you think his hard deck is 35, 36%. >> look, he has to be concerned about these poll numbers and party strategists who are starting to map out whether keeping the republican party's majority in the house and the senate they are starting to look nervously at the numbers as well and they are worrying about trump losing support of his base. we are going to test and see how low he can go if you can lose more of his base supporters. >> allen, where is the agenda. we hear they are going to go

back at health care. fluttering at 17%. where is health care reform, infrastructure? >> it is a great question. a lot of people are wondering that same thing. we talked to long time republican economists who helped donald trump draft his tax proposal during the campaign. and they are saying where is the tax reform package right now? there are people concerned about this. it's something that's going to get more attention. people want to know what is going to happen with infrastructure and is his health care something that's going to ends up passing? these are things he talked about a lot during the campaign. >> thanks to you gentlemen for joining us at the end of a very long week. when we come back, protecting the trump administration, the people, the real estate, the unprecedented amount of security involved to protect the trump family and top officials. that's when "the 11th hour" continues.

tonight the first family is staying at the resort the press have dubbed the winter white house, mar-a-lago, a trump-owned golf club in palm beach, florida. one of three home bases the secret service is tasked with securing these days. also including trump tower here in new york where the first lady and the president's youngest son live and of course the white house, the 18 acres of that complex. add to that the responsibility of protecting the president's four adult children and then exponentially, their families. and as the "new york times" puts it, the first family's needs are straining the secret service. with us again tonight is security expert evvie she served on the protective details of presidents obama and george w. bush. thank you for coming in. is this a case where there are such stresses? cnn is reporting there are 21 total protectees.

such stresses on the secret service you can be working counter ft -- >> when we had the clintons come to new york at the time i worked in the new york office and you would be on a rotation where they would pull you to help supplement certain assignments. so this is common. what is uncommon is that we are looking at a large number of protectees doing a lot of travel and then we have three different locations that we are protecting simultaneously. and that is where the challenge is. >> what worries you most? a glass tower in mid town manhattan -- he has yet to come back to visit since being elected president. or the fact that dinner guests in mar-a-lago.

you can bring whoever you wish to dinner. you can get access, physical proximity to the president at dinner on saturday night. >> i don't like either one. i have to be honest. when we would arrive to the white house after being out even doing a coffee run or anything like that, when we would come back he always had the sense of relief. we are here, everyone is safe and accounted for. when you have all of these variables and there are so many different things to control it gets complicated. you can put a stellar plan together. the more components that are out of your control because to some degree they are, when you have people coming into mar-a-lago they pay a membership. can you name check every person? people have access to him.

they can see him. they can touch him. all those things come into play. trump tower we have talked about before. that is not a structure. that really is safe and sound. there is nothing like the white house. let's not forget the white house itself, that has been there for how many years. it is a structure with layers and layers of security put into place. so this is unorthodox. what maybe we might be legislatures do is say this is too expensive. sth obamas would go to chicago, hawaii. we may see fiscally where there is such a level where they say you are going above and beyond what is fair maybe possibly to the taxpayer. let's put a cap on this. you may see something like that happen. at the end of the day the secret service will do it. they will pull assets out from field offices.

they investigate counterfeit electronic crimes fraud. those are going to take a back seat now. >> thank you for stopping by our broadcast on a friday night on a holiday weekend. coming up after a break, has it only been 12 weeks of this new administration? that question and the proper answer when the 11th hour continues.

last thing before we go, another week that was and still the pace of news is exhausting as we cover this new administration. perhaps its useful on this good friday night to recall that it was just monday, after all, when neil gorsuch became justice gorsuch. the first justice ever to sit on the court along side a justice he once clerked for, in this case anthony kennedy. it was just tuesday that sean spicer told a stunned briefing room that hitler never used chemical weapons on his own people and unlike assad of syria sent people to holocaust centers. he apologized before close of business that night. if it is wednesday it must be moscow where rex tillerson met with putin while back home the

president said relations with russia are what he called an all-time low but quickly theorized he wasn't counting the cold war. yesterday the u.s. dropped that largest ever nonnuclear bomb ever detonated on a battlefield. it happened in afghanistan but many have theorized it was intended for a wider global audience. afghan officials say the bomb killed 36 isis fighters. and president is in florida for his easter weekend. we wish you and yours a happy one. happy passover, as well. that is our broadcast for tonight and for this week. thank you for being here with us and good night from new york. with heightened tensions from syria to north korea, a foreign policy novice surrounded by

generals and fans. >> one of my favorite things is watching bishops drop on bad guys. >> i'm joined by the congresswoman calling to curtail the president's use of force. then >> -- surrounded by generals and fans. >> well, one of my favorite things is watching bombs drop on bad guys. >> tonight i'm joined by the congresswoman calling to curtail the president's use of force. then the russia probe. >> i don't remember. we'll see what comes out in this fisa transcript. >> warnings with trump campaign linked to russia that came from u.s. allies in 2015. plus, a show of force. [ audience chanting "shame on you" ] >> the resistance prepped for a nationwide march tomorrow to reject this idea. >> the only ones that care about my tax returns are the reporters. and the president's brand-new appointment. >> i've set up a special offer just for our viewers. >> "all in" starts now. good evening from new york. i'm joy reid in for chris hayes. it is now 8:30 on saturday morning in north korea.