the 2020 elections, it was john mccain who recently said to "the new york times," quote, they see weakness in this president. look, it's not a nice business we're in. we'll choose to end it there hadn't that is your broadcast for tonight and for this week. thank you for being here with us. good night from nbc news headquarters in new york. correspond kneel i couldn't say vanderbilt was one of the richest americans ever, so much so that his name is kind of synonymous with what it means to be a rich person now, right? vanderbilt? he was a self-made man. was a new yorker. he started off as a kid running ferry services between is it a ten island and manhattan. he worked his way up to running and owning multiple ferry services and then steam boat lines. started off with regional steam boat likenesses and then ultimately he got to ocean going steam boats. he hit the real dirt when he started to close the loop on

transportation. he got into the business of shipping by sea and also by land. by the civil war era, vand built was one of america's great railroad tie coons before there was a grand central station in new york city, there was a grand central depot that haven't built created as a terminus for his train lines in new york city. to this day the last street that runs right up one side of grand central station that's called vanderbilt avenue that's named after him. for years, for decades on the other side of grand central station from vand built avenue, there was another monument to vand built that didn't use his last name. the nickname that everybody used for him was the come monthdor. it's a high rank in the navy. he never served in the nea but

apparently he got the nickname of the commodore in his days as a kid running those ferry services in new york harbor. the other guys who worked the harbor alongside him called him commodore as a way of teasing him. and it stuck. and then that kid who they mocked as the commodore grew up to amass one of the largest fortunes in american history. the kind of fortune that leaves a mark. in 1917 right next to the then-brand new grand central station opposite vand built avenue, a huge new hotel went up with thousands of rooms. it was called the commodore hotel. it was named after correspond kneel i couldn't say, the commodore vand built. had a statute of him right out front. and that hotel was one of new york's big successful shmancy centrally located famous

hotel starting in the 20th century and going on for decades. it was right next to grand central. used to be his old grand central depoe, the hotel was huge and did great for decades. until it didn't. by the 1970s, 100 years after vand built's death, new york city was in its drop-dead phase and the commodore hotel next to grand central station was on its last legs. commodore hotel went bankrupt in the 1970s. when someone wanted to buy the hotel and re-do, that became one of the biggest high profile deals of that developer's life.

it was a big deal because the commodore hotel was a big landmark piece of new york real estate right next to grand central station. it also had this poetic storied connection to the great vanderbilt family. but it was a high-profile deal because that young real estate developer put the city over a barrel in order to do the deal. >> you want tax abatements and special treatment. by and large you've gotten special treatment? >> that's correct. >> hektd very special treatment ten years ago when new york city was thought to be going bankrupt. trump, who was then a brash 28-year-old, bought the difficult lap dated commodore hotel on 42nd street just as it was about to be boarded up. he gutted it.

>> from a real estate has become the hottest city in the world. people are flocking here by droves. and i guess a lot of things had to do with it, mostly i feel it was the psychology of making new york a winner as opposed to a loser. >> it's a nice line, but straight public relations. the tax holiday that the trump organization was given to build this hotel in 42nd street is it worth $45 million but donald trump wouldn't dream of blushing. >> probably it's greatest thing the city ever did and the city is the first to acknowledge it. they went overboard and gave a break for the first time in the history of new york we got this commercial tax abatement. i would have never built the development if i didn't get the tax abatement. >> taking over that old landmark hotel when the city was in dire straits. that whole deal wasn't a private real estate deal. it involved a whole a lot of skin in the game from taxpayers. the arrangements over that hotel deal was trump would be absolved

of paying millions of dollars, over $150 million in property taxes that the city would have otherwise collected from him. in exchange the stiff new york was basically -- they became a stake holder. they were guaranteed financial stake in the hotel's success. the city would receive annual payments based on how the hotel did each year. the city gets a piece of the hotel's revenue. and you know what? the hotel did pay the city. the whole deal worked for a few years until it didn't. trump got his side of the deal okay. he didn't have to pay $150 million in property taxes. but by around 1986, the hotel was doing really well. it was doing better than it had ever done before revenue wise. so the city was expecting the several million dollars from the deal each year thus for. starting in 1986 the payments

stopped coming. the hotel just randomly that year sent over a few hundred thousand dollars instead of the millions of dollars the city was expecting. that's where the story gets really good. it was bad, terrible for new york. bad overall in terms of the balance of good and evil in the world. but this story is good for us as americans in our in terms of trying to understand what's happening to our government and to the american presidency now and why. this is why. this is andrew weissman a career prosecutor who made his name helping to dismantling organized crime networks including organized crime rackets that were running schemes on wall street. one of those cases got him involved in the prosecution of a one-time member of the trump organization a man who played a key role in the development of and the money behind the trump soho project. he also led the enron task force which unraveled that

multibillion dollars complex corporate con job. andrew weissman works for robert mueller now. then there's lisa page. she's a former prosecutor with deep experience in organized crime and money laundering including working with an fbi task force that has pursued money laundering cases related to putin-connected oligarchs. this is greg andres, he's the latest hire we know of on robert mueller's special counsel investigation. he ran the fraud unit in the criminal division of the u.s. justice department. he specializes is money laundering, tax fraud, market manipulation, corruption. greg andres is a big fish. he also now works for robert mueller. three weeks ago, bloomburg was first to report the mueller investigation was turning to trump's business past.

trump's business transactions. that ninety we called john dowd to get his response to the news. he responded to us bizarrely. mr. dowd told us he did not believe that business transactions were under investigation by the mueller investigation. he told us he just didn't think that was true. and then he told our producer who was on the phone with him, quote, this is the last call we will ever have, and then he hung up. it was really weird. whether or not the president's lawyer chooses to believe it or not, by the end of last week, cnn was flashing it out. quote, the fbi is reviewing financial records related to the trump organization as well as trump himself, his family members, his campaign associates. they've combed through the list of shell companies and buyers of trump real estate properties and scrutinized the tenants of trump tower reaching back more than a half dozen years.

that recent reporting about the special counsel investigation turning the president's finances to his business dealings, that comes on the heels of months of reporting at the mueller investigation includes the financial and business relationships of trump national security adviser michael flynn, culminating this week with news of the fbi rated manafort's virginia home two weeks ago targeting banking records and tax information. the president's lawyer, john dourksd may of course the have heard enough to believe this is all real now, real enough that he wrote an anger 3:48 a.m. e-mail to a "wall street journal" reporter demanding any evidence that might have been seized from paul manafort's home during the raid must be suppressed. that was free legal advice, by the way. paul manafort is not john dowd's client. his client is the president,

which you would think wouldn't give him enough time to be working for other people as well, apparently proceed pro bono at 4:00 in the morning on a weeknight. but here's the tell. here's where history starts to help and where something that otherwise doesn't make sense kind of starts make sense. look at the difference how paul manafort and donald trump are reacting here to what's going on in the mueller investigation. paul manafort has dropped his previous legal representation as of last night. he has now set up a new legal team to represent him, one that specializes in taxes, banking, foreign crypt practices act. his new lead lawyer is literally a certified public accountant in addition to being a lawyer. that makes sense given the turn in the investigation. in contrast, the president is not doing that. the president is not putting together that kind of team. he's got the new york guy who

handled his divorce records and who threatens "the new york times." he's got the christian rights attorney who goes on funds a lot and who could definitely defend the president very well if it turns out the major legal liabilities that he's put up a ten commandments tablet in the oval office. the president also has this new lead attorney whose highest attorney experience in the past was having a hedge fund client not just convicted but given the longest sentence ever for insider trading and whose more recent financial experience appears to be the late night misspelled e-mails about the wrong client that he's sending to the "wall street journal." hey, at least it's wall street. as this investigation into the president has turned into a follow if money kind of thing, as it has turned toward financial matters, the president has not tuned up his defense, his representation, to meet that kind of a challenge. he doesn't have legal financial

specialists on board. he doesn't have tax attorneys on board. even previous presidents in other smaller scandals have had. other presidents in smaller scandals have had people on board at this stage going through the finances with a fine-toothed comb, red teaming any discrepancies or potential problems. whether or not there is anything in president trump's finances that will ultimately draw attention from the special counsel, it's interesting and notable that the president doesn't appear to be preparing any sort of financial defense against a special counsel team that is absolutely chock-full of financial specialists. why is that? go back to the commodore hotel. when that deal between trump and the city of new york went bad in the '80s because the city figured out he had stopped paying his part of the deal,

when that that went basd bad, something unusual happened. he used this deal to not pay property taxes. when the city realized he wasn't giving them their cut of the profits, they didn't just sue him to get their money. they got access to his books. there was a ciauditor's office. he had this deal with the city. so the city was able to get the books. the city was able to audit the hotel. and to this day, that commodore hotel scandal remains one of the only times we the public have ever been allowed to see how the president conducts himself financially in business. >> '80s new york city officials found that his partners had short changed the city out of

$2.8 million. >> it was an example off extraordinary flimflammery. >> audittors found trump in this letter he signed formally authorized accounting changes that understated the hotel's profits to lower what was owed the city in rental fees. >> uniquey? it was very sneaky. he cheated the city a substantial sum of money. >> she was the new york city auditor general in 1986. and it took a couple of years, tons of stone walling on the part of trump, but container ber seen the and her team did audit and report on how trump was running that business. and her public report concluded that basically trump was running two sets of books. one that was the real estimate of prochltsd at the hotel and another set they used just for this deal with the city to try to maintain a front that showed that the hotel was broke and

didn't have to pay the city anything. the city's audit said trump used, quote, an accounting methodology that the abrent and distoretive to make it look like the hotel owed less to the city. abc looked at this again last year. cbs got forensic audittors to look at the five kids. they described, quote, failures in basic bookkeeping, and efforts to stymie officials. in the course of trying to do this audit at the hotel back in the day, the autotors at one point were physically blocked from being allowed into the trump hotel to start the audit and that went on for more than a year. according to the cbs's report, it was what the city's audittors

discovered inside that most surprised them, the amount of financial information that was simply missing, the amount of missing information was staggering. ledgers to show income expenses, the ledgers for seven months out of the 12-month year were simply gone. the hotel said the ledgers had been sent to new jersey and then lost in a flood? the computerized version of those records, the hotel said those were sent to chicago, but after those records got sent to chicago, somehow they just disappeared. sad. but the audit did get done. it was very, very ugly. all sorts of shenanigans went on for years with this inning thflt at one point trump offered a job to the auditor's brother so he could work at the trump organization. the trump side sued the city

over releasing the report to the public. a city clerk then conveniently mislabored the case so it effectively got lost in the files for years until after trump had sold off his shares at the hotel at which point another clerk came across the mislabored case and resurrected it. it was just a disaster. but if you are wondering why, now as an american citizen, why as president donald trump is behaving strangely when it comes to special counsel investigation, consider that the potential legal exposure of his financial dealings as a businessman, if that's where the special counsel's investigation is going, that would be something almost prpunprecedent in his entire 71 years of life. obviously he hasn't released his tax returns, two pages of one

federal return from 2005. that's all anybody has seen of his taxes ever. his business, the trump organization, it's privately held, and it's beyond that, infen tes mally small. there's also a trump foundation which as a nonprofit, they did have to make public disclosures because they're nonprofit. those filings were such a line by line disaster area they became a full-time beat for reporters like "the washington post's" david faron hold last year earning him a pulitzer prize and showing the country how trump illegally used his nonprofit to settle lawsuits related to his business and make political donations to appear to be tied to things he wanted for his business much how they used the nonprofit as a way to uses other people's money to pay for things like his son's boy scouts

membership fee which was $7. he also used his nonprofit to buy portraits of himself to hang at his golf courses. that created such a mess for him that he tried to close the nonprofit and new york state won't let him because they say if that thing got shut down, it would interfere with an ongoing investigation. so that didn't go well. and that foundation stuff which was a catastrophe, that's just what happened when people got a peek at what's supposed to be the nonprofit part of his finances the part he knew would have to one day be open to the public. if it's true the investigation is now prying open the real business part of his finances, stuff he never thought would ever be made public, it is worth knowing that we've had precisely one peek over the years into what those look like.

>> it was an example of extraordinary flimflammery. >> extraordinary flimflammery. it's also worth noticing that the president appears to be making no preparation whatsoever to defend anything in his finances, to boack him up, lega representation. the tiny window we have had into what's in his finances makes that seem like an insane strategy if he's really going there. why doesn't he think he needs to play defense on this stuff? america has always had rich guys. new york has always had rich guys. some rich guys had fortunes big enough that for more than a century they left a mark. in this case, modern history gives us reason to believe this

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david j. johnston is the the journalist who got his hands on the only bits of trump donald trump's federal taxes that have ever been released. he's the reporter who obtained two pages of trump's 2005 tax returns which the white house later confirmed were authentic. david is a specialist on tax issues and financial reporting, he's also the foushd of d.c. report.org. many johnston, it's great to have you back. thank you very much fund-raiser being with us tonight. >> thank you, rachel.

>> so you saw my opening remarks there about the window that we've had in the past into the president's finances, the special counsel robert mueller is reportedly looking into the president's business transactions, his financial transactions. you know more about donald trump's financial past than anybody else on earth who's not named trump. given what you know and given what we now understand about the mueller investigation, does it strike you as strange that the president doesn't appear to be red teaming his financing, having a legal team and forensic accounts go through his stuff to build up a defense for those records against whatever mueller might find? >> well, any normal person you would expect that of him. let me begin by making a very important point. most people who are in business are fundamentally honest. they may do things here and there and cut edges, but overall they conduct themselves with honor. donald trump has no honor. he doesn't see anything wrong

with the things that he does. one of the reasons they may not be worried at all about what's going to happen is he now that see power of the pardon which is pretty close to unlimited. he can't undo what's happened, and he has in the past relied heavy on missing records and documents. that's a lot of what bureau seen t the's work was about. it's not particularly surprising but talks important thing to keep in mind here is that to trump not paying you for work that you did, not honoring a contract, cutting off the health care of your own grand nephew and putting his life in jeopardy, what else could i do would be his attitude. you see this in everything he says and does. >> david, in terms of what's about to happen here with the mueller investigation, obviously we've seen this news that fbi agents rated paul manafort's

home, reportedly after financial information. we've had reports about the grand jury subpoenas that have the button out not just from congress but federal prosecutors offices for flynn and manafort. these are people around trump who would conceivably be in a position to be able to be witnesses if they were flipped on anything untoward that might have happened with russia during the campaign, the kind of pressure that's coming down from this team that mueller's put together with all these financial experts will be looking not for matters of honor and whether or not somebody's savory businessman, but they'll be looking for crimes. >> that's right. >> short of a pardon, is there a way the president should be preparing for that that anybody should be preparing for that kind of scrutiny? >> as you pointed out he hasn't picked exactly the folks you would expect his lawyers to represent these things. mueller's team is not heavy on counterintelligence. it's very heavy on financial

fraud, on money lauraing, those are the areas i'm sure donald is highly vulnerable. he's had several transactions with russian oligarchs that make no business sense whatsoever, they only make sense if they're part of fraudulent transactions. there have been numerous examples of people who got mortgages with no underwriting because trump told various bankers to do so. the story of the clerk who misfiled in manhattan, we had the mystery of the missing manhattan sewage that was crucial to his efforts that failed later to develop the west side yards. i'm sure mueller's people are going to discover lots of problems with records being n nonsense -- nonsensical.

they have been persuaded to act improperly. it's not different with what the russians do as it was clear they were trying to do when they met with donald trump jr. last year. >> in terms of the president's legal representation, i am very struck by, as you were describing, the expertise of his team and the type of folks he's brought on and the kind of work they've done in the past, especially the contrast with the type of financial and tax experts who mueller has on his side of the ledger. if you were advising the president in terms of how to put together effective legal representation given what you know about his finances, what kind of legal representation should he have? >> he needs to be lining up criminal defense lawyers whose background is in successfully representing people who've been gone after by the s.e.c., by

preet bharara and others. frankly, the best advice he can probably get is if you haven't lost records, lose them because those records will come back to haunt you. records leave fingerprints elsewhere. the financial enforcement group we have which is essentially irs people, they are good at finding a particular transaction, connectsing the dots on things, and mueller that see team and the resources to go and pursue these things and if they can turn a handful of people, especially if those people are smart enough to have kept something to protect themselves if it went badly, they will make a case. >> david k. johnston, investigative journalist. appreciate you being here on a friday night. thanks for your time. >> thank you, rachel. >> lots more to come tonight. stay with us.

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here's the headline. north korea attacks on u.s. military bases in pacific over bombers deployment. north korea threatens attacks on u.s. military bases in pacific over bombers deployment. quote, if the u.s. is reckless misjudging the trend of the times and the strategic position

of the dprk, everyone will face ruin. that was the threat, the weirdly-worded always over-the-top threat. but that headline was not from today. it was not from this week. it was from this time last year, this time last year north korea was threatening to shoot missiles at guam. it's a very bad thing, but if you have been hearing this week that the reason our president is issuing these threats now to start a nuclear war with north korea, the reason the threats are so scary and the brinksman ship is so insane this week, if you've been hearing that that reason is because of the north koreans coughing a new red line and threat to think shoot missiles at guam it's undoubtedly a bad thing that they're making these threats, but it's not new. they threaten to shoot missiles

at guam all the time. >> today's warnings from north korea are the latest in a series of provocative threats which have forced the u.s. and south korea to plan for possible military retaliation. the north koreans claim they put their long range missiles on high alert aimed at american targets in guam, hawaii, and the u.s. mainland. >> that was not from this week. that was not from this year. that was not from last year. that was march 2013, another time when north korea was threatening guam and in that case they were not just threatening guam but hawaii and the mainland as well. it's really bad that north korea's threatening guam. guam is u.s. soil. it's really bad that they're mounting those threats but they do it a lot. what's different this week in terms of it feeling like we're on the brink of war like never before, what's different is not that north korea is doing something they've never done before. it's now how threatening their behavior s. their threats

obviously have to be taken seriously, they have been in the past, but we haven't had weeks like this. what is truly unprecedented is the behavior of the american government, not north korean government. president trump threat understaened war, and then he announced he'll be speaking with the chinese president tonight and then i kid you not, he said, quote, hopefully it will all work out with north korea. and then he proceeded to threaten north korea again. what he happened this week, this strange netherworld of threats and over-the-top alit rative comments from the president about nuclear war is not because of something definitively new. by a "washington post" article that described one confidential defense intelligence agency report, a report that's not been

publicly released. it's a report that supposedly concluded that north korea has miniatureized a nuclear weapon and can fit one on a missile. they have been exactly wrong about this exact thing before, and no other intelligence agencies still now, all these days into this crazy period we're in right now, no other u.s. intelligence agencies have come out and made their own case publicly that supports those same conclusions. what does explain the president spending the last four days threatening a war against north korea. what explains such a change toward north korea when north korea hasn't changed at all. what explains potentially starting a war over this and threatening it every day? joining us now is joe cirincione, president of the flous ploughshares fund. mr. cirincione, i know from an inside source that i'm screwing up your vacation which makes me

particularly grateful that you are here tonight and i'm sorry to your family. >> thank you very much, rachel. i'm in cape cod. >> i he or she wish you a tan and a blue fish to make up for all of this. >> done. >> joe, i feel a little bit alone in the wilderness on this one. is it true that there is nothing substantively new from north korea? obviously they're a military and nuclear threat. they've been advancing over the years. they had another missile test a couple weeks ago. is it true there's really nothing new that led to this week of this incredible brinksmanship we're seeing? >> not this week. you're right. they have achieved the capability to launch a ballistic missile at the united states. they may have the ability to actually a nuclear war head on there. they don't know if it's reliable yet, but the last sufficiently

test happened two weeks ago. you didn't see aftthis reaction. what we have is a d.i.a. intelligence assessment leaked to the "washington post." i don't hear the trump administration complaining about this leak. it may be correct. i personally think that it's more or less correct. but we don't know, the dicker.i should show their work. we need the other assessments that are slowly leaking out. let's see why they're holding these judgment. let's have hearings in congress, closed fund-raiser classified information, open so the rest of us can do this. remember, when we were in the buildup to the war with iraq, there were also these intelligence statement. it's when they made an unclassified version public that

some of us doubted it. maybe we learned our lesson. it's time for us to take a closer look at this particular assessment. >> joe, the sort of common windows about the structure of how these decisions are being made within this administration in this white house is that while the president might be unpredictable and might be sort of freelancing on these and issues saying things that come to mind for whatever reason, there are adults on national security matters, h.r. mcmaster, secretary mattis at the department of defense. there are adults there, experienced national security professionals who will make sure the right processes were followed if we were to make a major change in our stance toward that country. is there any indication that those adults in the administration are doing anything like that? are you seeing any signs that there's going to be an effort to

make a case to the public for what is driving this radical change from the president? >> i was very disturbed by the press conference today to see the president trot out his secretary of secretary of state, his national security adviser as props to validate his statement. he made even more wild statements today, that there was a military option with venezuela. what is he talking about? i don't see any evidence that the real experts, the people who actually know what they're doing have control over this situation. they are being dragged behind by the president who seems to make it up on the fly. when he says i'm not going to talk about that, we don't talk about that, what he means is i don't know what i'm talking about. i just thought this up a minute ago. these words are coming out of my mouth and i'll leave it to my

staff to adjust or explain what i'm saying. this is troubling enough when it comes to things like venezuela, when it comes to what could be the largest war we've seen on this planet since world war ii and possibly a nuclear exchange, this is downright dangerous. this is not normal. this is bizarre. we are witnessing the destruction of american grand strategy before our eyes. we're witnessing the collapse of american credibility. i don't think the adults have control over this situation. >> joe cirincione, president of the ploughshares fund. thank you. i appreciate you being here tonight, joechlt back to your vacation with you right now. >> thank you, rachel. >> we have much more to come tonight. stay with us. mail it in. learn about you and the people and places that led to you. go explore your roots. take a walk through the past.

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friend joe cirincione, national security pro, lifetime of experience in these matters, you might have seen just a moment ago on this program, joe cirincione in the most polite and prof orrial kind of way, he did lose his mind a tiny little bit about the president of the united states, our president threatening a war with venezuela today. joe was not kidding about that. here's what he was referencing. >> you told us that you're considering venezuela. what options are on the table right now to deal with this mess? >> we have many options for venezuela. by the way, i'm not going to rule out a military option. we have many options for venezuela. this is our neighbor. this is -- you know, we're all over the world, and we have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away. venezuela is not very far away, and the people are suffering, and they're dying. we have many options for venezuela, including a possible

military option if necessary. >> that would be a u.s.-led military operation? >> we don't talk about it, but a military operation and military option is certainly something that we could pursue. >> hear that, southern command? hear that? hey, marine corps, ready to invade venezuela? ready to dust off those plans because the president at his golf course tonight, apparently off the top of his head, announced that was -- what was the phrase? certainly something we could pursue. reuters is reporting tonight that the pentagon has not actually received any orders from president trump on a possible military option in venezuela. a pentagon spokesman telling reuters, the pentagon has received no orders. they're referring all questions on this matter to the white house. that said, i think a lot of us would actually be grateful if people stopped asking the

president questions that could conceivably be answered with the answer, yeah, we can use military force there. maybe just stop asking him questions where that could conceivably be the answer because every time somebody asks him a question like that, he thinks it sounds like a good idea. so maybe just only questions about, like, animals or his family or ties. only questions about ties from here on out. we'll be right back. happy anniversary dinnedarlin'

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happy friday, everybody. i want to tell you that the great joy reid is here tonight live right here after me. she's doing "the last word" tonight. also the great brian williams is here live tonight with "the 11th hour" after joy reid, so there's plenty of reason to pop more popcorn and stick around for this evening. but i want to tell you in addition to that, in addition to those fine folks coming up, we have one more story that we've got for you tonight. it may affect your plans for next week maybe. but the real reason you want to hear it is that it's a mystery, and who doesn't love that at the end of the week? that's our last story tonight, last story of the week. that's next. stay with us.

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president trump is supposedly in the middle of a 17-day working vacation at one of his golf clubs in new jersey, god bless him. but today he announced a change in plans, which is, um -- it's a mystery. until today, this was the president's official schedule. sunday night he was supposed to travel from his new jersey golf club back to trump tower in new york city to spend the night at trump tower for the first time since he was inaugurated. home sweet home. the plan was for him to stay at trump tower, sunday night, monday night, tuesday night, until wednesday. then he was going to go back to new jersey, back to the golf club in new jersey for the rest of the week. today law enforcement in new york, the folk who's help protect the president while he's at trump tower, they got word of a change in plans.s who's help protect the president while he's at trump tower, they got word of a change in plan who's help protect the president while he's at trump tower, they got word of a change in plans who's help protect the president while he's at trump tower, they got word of a change in plans. politico.com was first to report that the president has no longer, well -- we don't know how this affects everything else, but he's now scheduled to fly to d.c. on monday, and that's weird for more than just the reason that he's supposed to

be on vacation. the white house is undergoing renovations right now. the oval office is empty. there's no desk, no chairs. the walls of the office are all covered up in plastic. presumably part of this long vacation plan was because the president had to get out so the workers could do their thing. so why is he heading back now? the president was asked about it today, and he said this. we have a very important meeting scheduled. we're going to have a pretty big press conference on monday. we don't know what it's about. here's a really weird possibility. bloomberg has new reporting tonight, citing four sources saying that, quote, some white house and republican officials are exploring the idea of putting democratic senator joe manchin in charge of the energy department. current secretary of energy is former texas governor rick, oops, perry. he's apparently among the candidates to replace john kelly at the department of homeland security. they're citing three people

familiar with the deliberations. now, the homeland security job is open because john kelly became the president's new chief of staff. so maybe what's happening on monday is they're announcing the start of musical chairs? senator manchin leaves the senate to go take rick perry's job. rick perry leaves his job to go take john kelly's old job. but then who would take senator manchin's old job, the senate seat from west virginia? well, the person who would get to pick joe manchin's replacement in the senate is that state's governor, jim justice who, remember, just switched parties and is now a republican. presumably newly minted republican jim justice would put a republican in that senate seat that up till now has been held by democrat joe manchin. that would matter because it would put the president and the republicans one vote closer to getting key legislation through like, say, killing health care. so manchin of course is a conservative democrat. he's facing a tough re-election battle in 2018. tonight his office is saying he has not had any recent

conversations with the administration about the energy position. so it's a mystery. we'll see if this very important meeting and this pretty big press conference on monday involves joe manchin and this good evening, rachel. it always comes back to killing obamacare. all roads lead back to that one, same, exact place. >> well, when you're within one vote, every vote is the most important vote in the world. >> i got to say rick perry as homeland security director blows my mind. my mine is blown. >> here's the thing. could you imagine rick perry as energy secretary? right? >> no! >> no. >> no! >> here's been my theory. my theory has always been that now that there's nobody at homeland security, they move jeff sessions from attorney general over to homeland security.