i'll be back. almost as it it's the day after the holiday and they need all their anchors to do two shows so the lucky half of the other anchors are at home watching tv with think families, eating pie, having turkey, shopping on black friday. >> look at the money we're saving, though! >> i don't think you're seeing my face. >> i see you. think of the money we're saving. working. me and you. >> doing them a service. you're welcome, msnbc. >> have a good afternoon. see new an hour. i'm ali velshi. 3:00 on the east coast, 10:00 at night when egyptian families are reeling on an attack against a mosque during prayers. a warning now. some of the photos we'rable to show you of bodies and blood are going to be disturbing. what we know right now -- egyptian officials say a group of militants moved on the mosque in four separate vehicles

setting off explosives, blocking exit roads and then firing on unarmed worshippers in the latest attack by militant groups in a region hit by typically church bombings in recent years. this is already the deadliest attack on egyptian civilians by extremists in the nation's history. a troubled history at that and the death toll could rise. sirt increased at cairo's around and man check points. and the president called this criminal and vow iin vowing to those who did this. we have to get smarter and tougher than ever before. we will. need the wall, need the ban. god bless of people of egypt. unclear what the wall or the ban would have had to do with this

attack in egypt. and joining me, ali arouzi, koe covering the story since it broke. what's the latest? >> reporter: you mentioned, israel hit by its deadliest attack. friday pairs massacred by militants. as you said, at least 235 people have been killed. another 110 injured. attackers using guns and bombs attacked the mosque which is in a village of the same name and the numbers going up through the day. as we mentioned, 110 people injured, and we've been told a lot of them are in very bad condition. now, dozens of ambulances carried casualties from the scene to nearby hospitals after the attack. an attack that wassiously very well organized by very heavily armted perpetrators. some carrying rpgs and fired them into the church. egyptian officials say the militants were in four vehicles, bombed the mosque.

rained gunfire down on the worshippers. they also shot people as they were trying to escape the mosque and shot at ambulances trying to rescue people that had been injured. no group claimed responsibility for the attack, but egypt is been a target both by isis and al qaeda in the past. and especially their security forces. their security forces have been targeted heavily by he's militants. and we've just also learned recently from our bure 0 au in cairo, egyptian military forces, strikes in several mountainous areas surrounding the mosque where the militants are believed to be hiding out. according to egyptian security forces. but it's been a very, very bloody day in egypt, and we also heard reports that family members have rushed to the mosque to see what had happened, to find missing family members and they were just presented with a bloodbath there are

people lying on the floor of the mosque, covered in blood. some covered in sheets. so a devastating scene in egypt today, and i think president el sisi, very tough on militants, will have a very harsh response for them. we've already seen the air strikeses, and i think we're going to see a lot more in the comes days. >> ultimately, ali, while most of the attacks egypt has seen in recent years have been attacks on churches, this concept of extremist groups not being able to be controlled by the egyptian government is one that goes back decades. >> reporter: absolutely. goes back decades, and it causing a lot of internal strife in egypt as well. these are people killing people from their own religion which shows in the broader picture there, when a country of 100 million people, they don't -- isis, al qaeda and things don't really have much support amongst the regular people there. i mean, they're all victims of this. but that's just the way they

operate there, unfortunately. you know? nobody -- everybody is fair game for isis even if they share the same religion. >> right. ali, by the way, doing double duty for us. a scare in london earlier today. we've got the all-clear on that now. fears there had been gunfire in a tube station evacuated and police now said they've all stood down on that. >> reporter: right. thankfully it seems to have been a false alarm. london transit authorities, the station reopened after what was a very large-scale security alert. they saw people being evacuated from the underground and from shops, amid reports of gunfire and police immediately scrambled to the scene after there were reports of gunshots. people ran in panic and sheltered in stores. police have recently said that they found no trace of any gunfire or any suspects, apart

from one minor casualty caught up in the stampede, nobody hurt. we also heard the bangs may have been caused by an electrical fault that sparked the panic. this shows how on edge a city like london and paris and barcelona are because of being victims of so many terrorist attacks. on a busy shopping day near christmas, you hear a loud bang, everybody panics. >> no kidding. thanks very much for that. from london, ali aroussy. joins us, "new york times" foreign correspondent who is with us. thank you for being here. >> thank you, ali. >> talk about the situation in egypt. a group was responsible for shooting down a russian airliner in the sinai. isis-related group since renamed itself, isis in the islamic state of the sinai. we don't know this is a group but we know there are extremist groups there that the government is struggling with in egypt? >> there are. by far the most important group, the islamic group in the sinai. they took out the metrojet

flight and led this horrible sectarian war against christians and unique about isis, unlike al qaeda, shown some reticence, not a lot, some reticence in terms of hitting shia and seins, they made it clear, they are not muslims, don't consider them part of the faith so they are part of their sectarian war. >> and a branch of islam, generally don't get involved in these things and generally thought of not someone you attack. these mum lslims attacked were sunnis. >> exactly. >> and a history going back 100 years of extremists who have not found a place -- put it this way. that might be too far. a lot of people, maybe half the egyptian population, that doesn't support the government and doesn't sort of find a place inside the structure of the government. the best way to describe this is sort of like iraq. where isis found a home, because there were so many disaffected people? >> true. and the sinai has other

similarities. it's a rocky mountainous difficult to govern area. it's been a lawless area for a long time. and in general we see these groups find safe haven in the lawless places. >> what do egyptians do in these cases? a lot of large-scale attacks over the years. egypt by the way, a place that benefited from a great deal of touri is tourism. they've seen a decline since these attacks have taken place. what can they talk about? >> the same puzzle facing so many other countries from libya to egypt to iraq to now afghanistan, even parts of pakistan and elsewhere. i don't know that we know for sure what works. the sisi government is trying some hard-line tactics against this group. >> right. >> unclear if that's going to -- to work. what this group does, always feeds on the local grievances.

takes local grievances and find partisans that way. long disenfranchised from egyptian society as a whole. that festering wound is the kind of thing a group like isis or al qaeda can find an on-ramp sboonchts rig. >> right. egypt has a political problem. to get sisi into power and mohamed morsi out of power, it wasn't a normal election. basically disenfranchised anyone who was working with the muslim brotherhood. >> right. >> egypt, while we think of it as a democracy, it's a democracy for people who believe in government and are not muslim extremists. that's an ongoing, brewing problem for a country of 100 million. >> right. you could say the history of egypt has been the muslim brotherhood found a home through democracy. were democratic elected into the presidency, and then overturned in a popular-backed, still military maneuver.

>> right. >> that has been one of the lessons both al qaeda and isis repeatedly harped on. to say, democracy doesn't work for you. there's no home through the ballot box. the only home, through the sword and through, of course, by which they've been -- >> a particularly heinous attack. thanks very much. msnbc contributor and "new york times" foreign correspondent. president trump also had a call with turkey's president erdogan today as russia, iran and turkey take a larger role in reshaping syria after six years of civil war. admiral, msnbc's chief diplomacy analyst and former supreme allied commander forena eer for. thanks for being with us. >> great to be with you. >> five years ago if we had said the president of the united states and the president of turkey were getting together to talk about issues of stability in syria, that would have made a great deal of sense. increasingly, the world is a little unclear about the role of

turkey's president erdogan both in turkey itself and with turkey's stability and in terms of regional stability. >> that's absolutely right, ali. we ought to be very concerned about that. we tend to think of turkey as this kind of bridge between east and west, and it plays a bit of that role in the nato alliance, of which, of course, it's an early member, but turkey is a power center unto itself. it has echoes of an ottoman empire rattling around in it and it is drifting away from the west, from nato and from the united states. we will be in great peril if we cannot pull turkey bark towarck us. >> and part of the job the president has, met in sochi with putin and syria exists or -- the syrian, assad administration, exists today because of the sponsorship of russia. there are now two other players in the region that are important. iran, which is an unabashed

supporter of bashar al assad and turkey which is not. so in what way can turkey be effective in trying to, you know, to fix the situation in syria? >> first and foremost, turkey a nato member has deep connectivity in the military to military sector. so first and foremost, a source of information, intelligence, boots on the ground. secondly, they have influence with various factions in syria, which can be very, very helpful to us, and, thirdly -- and perhaps most importantly, geography. this is a long border that connects from the mediterranean across to iraq. when you put all of that together, ali, we ought to be focusing a great deal more of our strategic attention on turkey and how it can work with us across the spectrum of those activities. >> there are reports that turkey

and the united states are not going to provide arms to the syrian kurdish militia anymore. amounts hard to understand where the kurds fall in this because there are different kurdish groups. but one of the most effective fighting both isis and a regime have been the syrian kurdish militia. what's the impact of that? >> a mistake for the united states to simply walk away from the entire spectrum of kurdish activities. and that really runs the gamut, from legitimate, near state quality governance that's occurring in the kurdish population in iraq, for example, to these various disparate groups that have been very effective fighting against the islamic state in particular and against, of course, syria and bashar al assad. so what we need to do, ali, is be subtle in arming those groups, in working with those groups, that are really in the fight with us, and paying a

modicum of attention to the turkish stlu there be radicalized elements in the kurdish we should not be supporting because they pose a threat to turkey. a very delicate walk but one the administration has to do. >> admiral i want to ask you something. yesterday the president was speaking with troops via video camera. listen to something he said to some of the troops out there. >> i have to say just directly to the folks in afghanistan, everybody's talking about the progress you've made in the last few months since i opened it up. we opened it up. we said, go ahead. we're going to fight to win. we're not fighting anymore to just walk around. we're fighting to win. we have to let you win. they weren't letting you win before. they were letting you play even. we're letting you win. >> admiral i don't know how to say it. that's just weird. it's insulting to the men and women who have been in afghanistan for close on 17

years in different rotations. i don't know how that goes over with military people. we weren't letting you win? >> it doesn't go over well at all, ali. frankly, i commanded that mission, as the nato commander, that's a nato mission. i had 150,000 nato troops, about 100,000 americans. i assure you, they were fighting to win every minute of every moment. under previous presidents. i think this is just an example of our current president trying to score cheap political points by mismessaging what is happening. in fairness, there is an uptick, small uptick, in tactical activity, but to impugn the desire of our troops to win throughout this 17-year journey we've had in afghanistan is unsettling to any active duty military or those like me who served previously. >> the presiding general, nicholson, in afghanistan has

told hans nichols he feels they're in a stalemate. given what he asked the president for, but that there's a stalemate there. what breaks the stalemate there? given that this is, by the way, one of the hardest places to get the upper hand in, in all of history. >> we're going to need a little bit more air power to maintain the edge and move out. we also need to bring in more trainers. again, we ought to keep this in perspective, ali. we've gone down from 150,000 troops when i led that mission, and down to about 15,000 troops. it's a 90% drop. they're only doing training and some special operations. we need more trainers, more air power. if we combine those two things, we can move this forward quite effectively. there is still hope in afghanistan. >> thank you for being with us. hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend. dean of the fletcher school at

tufts university, former nato supreme allied commander. up next, ousted national security advisers mike's flynn's team cuts ties with president trump's lawyers. a shift in robert mueller's probe in russian interference in the 2017 election. the question, could flynn be cooperating with the special counsel's investigators? you're watching msnbc. to cut my a1c. weekends are my time. i need an insulin that fits my schedule. ♪ tresiba® ready ♪ (announcer) tresiba® is used to control high blood sugar in adults with diabetes. don't use tresiba® to treat diabetic ketoacidosis, during episodes of low blood sugar, or if you are allergic to any of its ingredients. don't share needles or insulin pens. don't reuse needles. the most common side effect is low blood sugar, which may cause dizziness, sweating, confusion, and headache. check your blood sugar. low blood sugar can be serious and may be life-threatening. injection site reactions may occur. tell your prescriber about all medicines you take and all your medical conditions. taking tzds with insulins like tresiba®

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the white house is reacting to a potential bombshell report on the russia investigation. in t "new york times" says mike's flynn's defense team cut off ties with the president's legal team. in west palm beach, kelly o'donnell not far from the president's home in mar-a-lago. what is the white house saying and this report? >> reporter: well, it is a potentially significant signal, and why do we say that? typically defense teams when they have overlapping areas of

interest, like they work together in a campaign. including candidate donald trump now president. michael flynn and others. they would share information as a part of the investigative process, if they are submitting documents, or they might be questioned in some way. when that ends, it does typically signal that there is a change in how that person is dealing within the investigation. so if michael flynn's team says to the president's lawyers we're no longer going to have that information sharing, on its face it's important. we don't know exactly what comes next. the white house said they expect it is possible that michael flynn would be cooperating. in part because some of the things that have come out broadly in the news media are areas where flynn has been vulnerable, even without getting into secret stuff that the mueller investigation might have turned up. i'm talking about things like specific forms required to be filled out, or issues of

disclosure that it would appear he has some legal exposure. so they have long expected that there could be an issue. flynn has a son, same name, also looked at in this investigation for their foreign lobbying work. working together in a consulting firm prior to flynn's government service in the white house. so that's the backdrop for this change and why it appears to be significant. like so many things with the mueller investigation, that team keeps a very tight lock on what's happening. so we have to interpret from the outside. now, there are white house sources who say, no angst, no worry here. this is something we expected. others who say, don't interpret cooperation as meaning a direct reflection on the president. it's interesting. it's important. what it all means yet we don't have a full picture. ali? >> kelly, thank you. good to see you, as always. probably the last time i'm talking to you before the weekend. have a great one. thanks for your york. kelly o'donnell for us. by the way, michael flynn's son has been tweeting for everybody to calm down about it.

here with me, nick ackerman, legal analyst for msnbc. special prosecutor in the watergate case. first of all, the mike flynn jr., calm down business, kelly brings up an interesting point. it could mean cooperation in the allegations we assume robert mueller has, but it could mean he has information on the president? >> oh, i think if it wasn't beyond what they already have him on they wouldn't be interested. they would just indict him, convict him and send him off to jail. >> right. >> what they're interested in, what he has on the president, on jared kushner, don junior and others that would have been involved in the comey firing and other russian allegations that are being investigated. >> for those, so people were watch and tell someone else the story. it's kind of hard to understand, what this break in information-sharing is.

not just a break in communication. there was an agreement to share information with michael flynn and the white house, because they both had shared interests as it related to the mueller investigation? >> right. traditionally, in a criminal defense case, what defense lawyers do and individuals, enter into what is known as a joint defense agreement. what this does is, it brings together all of the individuals under investigation. their lawyers, the individuals, and they're allowed to talk to their lawyers and the lawyers to talk to each other under conditions that are privileged. >> got. >> it meaning that those conversations are not discoverable by the government, and do not get out. >> right. >> but what has happened here, let me just refer you to one paragraph in this agreement, which is typical in all of these agreements. it says -- in the event that any of the undersigned counsel determines that its clients no longer has or no longer will have mutuality of interest in a joint defense

it will promptly notify the other undersigned counsel and withdraw from this agreement, which agreement will therepon be terminated, provided, however, that such termination shall not affect or impair the obligations of confidentiality with respect to this agreement or defense materials. so, in other words, clearly, what has happened here is that michael flynn has entered into a cooperation agreement with the government. under this agreement, he has to notify other members of the agreement, probably including the president himself, that he no longer is part of this agreement. >> he doesn't have to notify the other meshes of the agreement. why? just has to -- his lawyer has to say, we do not have a mutual interest in continuing to share information with you. >> correct. but also means that the conversations that they had during that period of time, what each of them said with their lawyers present, all of that, still is maintained under a privilege. >> i got it. mueller can't get that stuff. >> he can't. but we do know that president

trump was absolutely laser focused on a concern about mike flynn, because when he talked to james comey and tried to get james comey to back off that investigation, the big question is, why? is it because flynn has evidence on trump? >> right. >> is it because he has evidence on don junior? kushner, other family members? that's the big question here. >> so the idea that the white house and michael flynn jr. is telling everybody, calm down. there might actually be something to this? >> certainly sounds that way, because you don't back out of a joint defense agreement unless you're enteri ining into a cooperation agreement. >> thanks for being with us. former prosecutor in watergate. coming up, don't stress. still hours left to do black friday shopping and snap up big bargains. after the break, how brick and mortar stores are working hard to compete with the massive

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the biggest shopping day of the year is upon us. this holiday season a mad dash for black friday and cyber monday dials online is causing the online shopping boom to break records. according to adobe analytics consumers already spent $33.3 billion shopping online. up 18% over last year. don't let that surprise you too much. obviously every year will be

bigger than the year before until we've saturated the online world. cyber monday, monday after thanksgiving, expected to be the largest in history, expected $6.6 billion in sales. y'all like to spend money. in all, holiday spending expected to generate $107 billion in sales, increase of 14%. some of the stuff you buy online is from brick and mortar stores, some isn't. if you are most lly a brick and mortar store, how do you compete? one of the hottest places to be is in new jersey. best buy, i made a purchase. bought a tv. got it from best buy. the best deal couldn't be had unless i went into a store. so i got the second best deal, because i could get it online. the point best buy trying to make to me, ali velshi, the absolute best deal, you have to come into a store. >> yeah. not only come into a store, line up last night or early this morning. i have a feeling, you were already anchoring a show around

that time. happening here, basically, you want the best deals you have to come to the store. the best deals are probably on tablets, computers, televisions, things like that. you see the lines wrapped around the buildings. coming in on black friday. trying to capitalize on big deals because basically, foot traffic for these stores are down. online sales are up about 18% according to the new data you got there from adobe. across the board, still the best day to go shopping if you want the big ticket items as a cheaper price and see a major struggle fighting brick and mortar retailers. so as a result, releasing cyber monday deals. heard from walmart, target and amazon, of course, ali. >> and a fun gig you've got today, jo ling. fun to be around all of the people. at a best biin jeuy in jersey c and tackling tax reform.

under a tight self-improsed deadline 15 working days left in the year and internal key provisions threatening to doom the republicans push for a single legislative win this year. bring in a "washington post" opinion columnist and a cnbc editor at large. i have a column you wrote the other day i love and have been showing it to everybody. the title here is "and the biggest loser in the gop's tax plan is -- dot, dot, dot -- humans. your home argument a tax plan good for some entities, humans, not included. >> yes. if your last name is not llc or inc., you're probably not groin to benefit a lot from this bill. this bill is heavily weighted for corporations. higher income people who are lots of money coming in passively because they own shares in corporations. they are the big beneficiaries. us little people, us human

people, you remember mitt romney says corporations are people. you're not a corporate person if you're a human person, you don't get much of a tax break. >> claims corporate tax cuts will unleash a wave of business investment and therefore economic growth most of which trickles down to the little people, people. hard to find an independent economist who buys this. even corporate executives don't back up the story. you and i talked about it all week. fine if you believe this and say that's how we want to do the tax cut. the selling point, don't worry, you people, it's going to work for you. >> right. what they're trying to argue is that the conventional way that we've thought of who benefits from a corporate tax cut is mistaken. the conventional view, that the large majority of the benefit goes to the people who own the business. and only a small amount goes to the workers. the administration and republican leaders are trying to argue, no, no.

that's all wrong. it's flipped. most of the corporate tax cut would go to workers eventually. now, that is a very hard sell. i think you find that the american public is very disbelieving of that, and one of the the consequences of this, i want to cite another outstanding column from katherine is that the higher deficits that result from this plan are going to -- require budget cuts later, and as katherine wrote in a piece a few days ago, the biggest shortfall the united states has right now is in human capital. and what you get from education and training to try to add greater value domestically within the u.s. economy, and this is a plan that would likely result in diminished investment in human capital. >> right. again, when you add up something that doesn't dynamically grow the economy, if we end up with a larger deficit, you end up get are more cuts. katherine, one of the things that's flown a little under the

radar, it's only in the senate bill, the idea that they are repealing the individual mandate having to do with obamacare, which is kind of tricky. the one thing, harder to get average people to go out and protest a tax bill than it is to pro test the elimination of obamacare but your argument is this isn't even good for the government? >> no. it's not good for the government. for a number of reasons. some of them political, some economic. so if you repeal the individual mandate, actually most americans don't like. right? they like most of the components of obamacare, but not that particular provision. if you repeal the individual mandate, that means that healthier people stop buying insurance pshgs younger people. premiums rise as a result because the pool of people buying insurance tend to be sicker and older and, therefore, more experiencive on average. what will happen is, health insurance gets more expensive. so people may not make that direct connection. how you get from a. to b.

get rid of the individual mandate, insurance is more expensive, but it will. that's unlikely to be good for markets. for health insurance markets. unlikely to be good for people who get insurance that way, and for the legislators who depend on the votes of those people. so if voters make this connection, which is not so intuitive, it's going to be very bad for these elected officials going forward. >> and a relate point is, if insurance gets more expensive, the subsidies paid out under obamacare to people who make below a certain amount are going to increase. so that is a -- a second way that it is potentially problematic. >> yes, yes. >> so what happens? how do they sell this? you have the northeast republicans in high tax states who didn't even vote for the house bill, because of the s.a.l.t. deductions, state and local tax deductions being eliminated. at some point this is going to be another squeaker and becomes

one of the bad bills with too many components to get it passed in a way that congress can get it passed without real tax reform? >> i think, ali, this is going to be the ultimate test of tribal allegiance. a plan if you look at the polls is not very popular. in fact, most people say they want taxes on corporations and wealthy people to go up. republicans believe, and sincerely believe, that cutting taxes is the key to economic growth. the evidence for that is not great, and even under the most generous interpretations of the effect of this plan, tax foundation, for example, under the house bill projects we'll never get 3% growth in the first ten years. it's dubious on the growth effects, but if republicans believe and are persuaded the survival of her party and ma joshties depend on passing this bill, that could be enough to put it over the finish line. it wasn't for obamacare, but that may increase the urgency of

it right now. >> a weird way to do business. thanks, guys. terrific to see you. thankful for the fact you are always around to answer tough questions. thank you both. opinion columnist at the "washington post" and cnbc editor at large. coming up, update on the north korean soldier who made a daring escape into the demilitarized zone and shot along the way. plus, a look inside the rogue regime from someone who lived and worked there.

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this dramatic video released wednesday of a north korean soldier risks his life for a chance to escape the regime of kim jong-un captivated audiences showing tense moments crossing the border to the south and fellow north korean soldiers firing at him, following him in one insan francisco crossing over the borderline. shot several times, he's a nice guy. many hope the 24-year-old soldier surnamed o can offer incite to life inside north korea. joining us, author of "without you there is no us: my time with the sons of north korea's eli elite," and former ambassador to the u.n. samantha powers and spokesperson at the treasury department covering terrorism and national intelligence under president obama. su

suki, you've lived in north korea. seen two sides of the coin. the elite, who keeps kim jong-un in power and he keeps relatively satisfied and other things journalists don't normally see going into north korea. how real people exist. >> yes. i mean, what i found really striking about following north korea over a decade, and talked to tons who crossed the society and lived under cover under the creme de la creme to come to the top of the class and found remarkable how everybody was under the tightest control. >> and described it as almost feeling like a cult. >> there is a cult religious aspect of great leader, actually a physical lack of control because everybody's movement is watched and you can't travel between towns or go out of the country. information is also censored. they don't get internet or anything not also overheard by the government censorship. you have basically this control

on every single level. every hour of their lives are also occupied with views of the great leader and education controlled, and you learn aboutant great leader. there is a reason why north korea is the way it is. >> and this doctor who examined the soldier who crossed said he had intestinal worms, parasites and was thin. we hear constantly about the fact they have lower collaloric intake. are they well taken care of or people in the low classes of society in bad shape? >> it's a country of famine. gigantic percentage. and 70%, 80% are under -- malnourished. the fact they suffer from hunger is actually a known fact. the doctors always detect constantly on the northern

border that border is china, there is, you know -- i mean, you can't really verify statistics, but about 100,000 in the border area, undocumented refugees basically. >> right. >> so this soldier coming to the dmz towards the south is an unusual case. we haven't really had a case like this, where -- >> highly risky, too. >> he jumped into gunshots. >> knew he would be fired upon if he was going to do that. we have to learn more about this. one of the things, sanctions attempt to do is affect the people who are empowered by a country's leadership or are helping that leadership be empowered. how does one think about north korea this way, when the people are so badly off? >> right. most of that really is genuinely imposed by the regime itself, and so when treasury thinks f s the sanctions and towards those

with objectionable behaviobehav. when it comes to north korea, they're not benefiting, not able to import luxury items, items needed to advance nuclear program specifically or money that goes to fuel the nuclear program. it's specifically tied to that, and not anything that would affect food or medicine. that's something that's a major caveat for the u.s. government. >> a big difference between the famine you described and the few hundred elite families in north korea whom king jong-un attempts to keep happy? >> there's that, and also i think when you think about north korea we, of course, there's a famine, there's a gullah, but psychological abuse. when i talk about the control, yes. people are suffering from hunger. but they also are suffering from human rights violations constantly. that's, what i mean, when i say the control over on some level,

perhaps except just a few families, i just didn't see much exception how little they knew. >> really interesting. thank you for sharing some of this. we'll have to continue this discussion to just hear more and more about this. we're at a point we do need to understand more about the north korean people. "without you no us" the author, sookie, and former spokesperson for former ambassador at the u.n. samantha powers and always a great guest to help us understand how sanctions actually work to change things. have a great weekend. still to come, we'll take you to a south dakota indian reservation. what they're doing to overcome's suicides and addiction, when we come back. [ click ] [ keyboard clacking ] [ clacking continues ]

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talk to one today and see why we're bullish on the future. was supposed to be a wake reup call for our government?sh people all across the country lost their savings, their pensions and their jobs. i'm tom steyer and it turned out that the system that had benefited people like me who are well off, was, in fact, stacked against everyone else.

it's why i left my investment firm and resolved to use my savings for the public good. but here we are nine years later and this president and the republican congress are making a bad situation even worse. they won't tell you that their so called "tax reform" plan is really for the wealthy and big corporations, while hurting the middle class. it blows up the deficit and that means fewer investments in education, health care and job creation. it's up to all of us to stand up to this president. not just for impeachable offenses, but also to demand a country where everyone has a real chance to succeed. join us. your voice matters.

the younger generation of a south dakota tribe is trying to pull its reservation out of poverty and addiction. savannah sellers has more on the challenges facing this native american community. >> reporter: this is pine ridge, one of nine indian reservations in the state of south dakota. back in 1830, the government forced native americans onto land like this. >> you look around here and it's basically a third world country. >> reporter: it's one of the poorest places in the states and now there's talk of cutting f t funding here. >> what problem yourself seeing? >> drugs and suicide. >> reporter: two-thirds are alcoholics, people aren't

expected to live past 66 and suicide takes four times as many young adult lives. >> there's a word for it. it is something we talk about in lakota. the sacred circle is broken. >> reporter: but this new generation finds promise in two places -- their heritage and education. >> we're not the stereotypical alcoholic or not all doing meth. >> i always knew i was lakota but i didn't understand the hurt that's still here. >> reporter: they live here on pine ridge. both have friends who are hooked on meth and some who have committed suicide. >> what's different in you that you have hope? >> the hope like stems from knowing my culture. everything, my ancestors have been through. >> there's been a lot of attempts to fix what's been done here. it just seems like it's not working. >> reporter: they both want to go to clollege. >> education has the power to change lives. >> reporter: sdorian has a plan to keep the tribe's language alive. >> be strong. recognize who you are. >> and savannah sellers joins me

now. what a great story. what helps them separate -- you talk about the fact they were forced onto these reservations close to 200 years ago. how they're going to break that cycle of people around them addicted to drugs, chimalcoholi suicide. >> for these two particular kids they go to a school called red cloud school which keeps the class sizes small and they try to focus on things they do face at other schools. esperanza is going to the university of new mexico. dorian still has one year left of high school but their plan is to come back to the reservation and they want to be teachers there to try to continue -- >> they want to scale this up. see if they can get more kids into this and break that cycle or continue that circle. >> yeah, exactly. she's getting a degree in secondary education and coming back and dorian wants to be a lakota teacher to help the kids

connect to their heritage in a positive way to keep it going. >> thank you. i'm really glad you did that story. you can see more of her reporting on snapchat at "stay tuned" every day 7:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. join ari mel ber and students at the john j. college for a special edition of "the beat." they'll explore the legal arguments in the russia investigation from inside a mock court at the college. "russia on trial" debating evidence of collusion tonight at 6:00 eastern on msnbc. we'll be right back. it's what this country is made of. but right now, our bond is fraying. how do we get back to "us"? the y fills the gaps. and bridges our divides. donate to your local y today. because where there's a y, there's an us.

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that brings this hour to a close for me. i'll see you back here monday with stephanie ruhle and 3:00 p.m. eastern. we don't have a show this weekend. we'll see you next week. check me out on social media. have a great weekend. look who is back. >> wait a minute. i don't get to watch you tomorrow? >> no, we've taken the week off. >> can i find you on snapchat, twitter, instagram -- >> i do less of that now. i -- i just listen to people's comments more than -- >> i'm going to send you faces on snapchat. >> have a great afternoon and a great weekend. >> ali velshi, have a great weekend. it's 1:00 p.m. out west and

4:00 out east. the latest development, michael flynn's legal team has cut ties with lawyers around president trump and his family. so is flynn flipping? the white house tells nbc news it's not worried. >> one white house official says, look, there's no angst inside the white house about the fact that flynn is no longer sharing information with the president's legal team. they say he's got to do what he's got to do. >> a signal that michael flynn is at the very least considering some sort of plea arrangement or cooperation arrangement with the special counsel robert mueller. >> there is every indication what robert mueller is doing is methodically trying to gather information and go up the chain. >> i'm suspecting that because donald trump protected him so much, he knows something really significant. >> i don't think this goes anywhere to michael flynn and o potentially his son. >> and bring it