the author speaking candidly for the first time on the "today" show with savannah guthrie. the book hits the shelf four days early. >> i actually spoke to the president. whether he realized it was an interview or not, i don't know, but it certainly was not off the record. my credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than perhaps anyone who has ever walked on earth at this point. under pressure. new revelations about how president trump ordered his white house counsel to try and stop the attorney general from recusing himself in the russia investigation. >> it just gives us a sense of how the president sees the job of his top law enforcement official, not as someone necessarily to follow the facts, but someone to protect. >> and drill, baby, drill. angering governors on both coasts, including some republican allies. president trump carries out his threat to open protected ocean waters to oil and gas drilling.

>> our country is blessed with incredible natural resources, including abundant offshore oil and natural gas reserves. but the federal government has kept 94% of these offshore areas closed for exploration and production. and good day, everyone. i'm andrea mitchell in washington. michael wolff, author of "fire and fury," the new book sparking a firestorm in the white house and throughout the political world, speaking out for the first time. it was in an exclusive interview with savannah guthrie of the "today" show. he gave an account of a dysfunctional inner circle led by a more dysfunctional president. >> according to your reporting, everyone around the president, senior advisers, every one of

them, questions his fitness for office. >> let me put a marker in the sand here. 100% of the people around him. >> jared kushner, his son-in-law, ivanka trump questioned his fitness for office? >> and i want to be careful about who i spoke to, because the nature of this kind of book is you kind of grant everyone ava avail. but having said that, certainly jared and ivanka in their current situation, which is in a deep legal quagmire, are putting everything on the president. not us, it's him. >> and what are some of the ways the president was described to you by those closest to him? >> i will tell you the one description that everyone gave. everyone has in common. they all say he is like a child. and what they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification.

>> nbc national correspondent peter alexander is at the white house. peter, the continuing reaction, the tweets from the president today, fury inside the white house, attempts to try to block the book with legal threats, if not going to court. so all that did was have the publisher publish four days early and it's already jumping off the shelves. we got our copy first thing. what more reaction is there from the white house today? >> reporter: andrea, the point you make, i think, is striking. that's why we understand from the conversations i've had privately here was there is a lot of push toward the president saying, this is not the best course. you're only going to draw more attention to this book. in fact, right now the book is being sold as the book the president doesn't want you to read. cramer books, one of the hot spots to pick up a book even in this area, shortly after midnight this morning they sold out quickly, the 75 books that they had. the white house has been pushing

back fiercely today. you hear the president calling this going after the author, one of his aides calling it a crackpot fictional writing, sarah huckabee sanders trying to downplay access michael wolff had to the president. wolff said earlier today it was three hours in total, including the campaign. sarah huckabee sanders saying there was one short phone call and it wasn't an interview in any way. the white house has said these are misrepresentations of information, that this is just all to sell books, and the bottom line, they insist, is it's gossip tabloid fodder. andrea? >> at the same time, michael schmidt of the "new york times," with another blockbuster report with efforts of the president to tell don mcgann, the white house counsel, to get the attorney general sessions not to recuse himself. which could be, depending on how

it was phrased and how much the president pushed hard for this, it could become part of an obstruction probe. >> reporter: i think that's right. the reason this is important, obviously the president has said repeatedly, as he did again on twitter today, there is no collusion. that's why there's all this attention on these other issues, because they couldn't prove the collusion here. who knows whether they do or don't find collusion, but there does appear, based on this reporting as you confirmed by our colleagues here on nbc news, there appears increasingly to be serious questions about whether the president did obstruct justice. as the reporting goes, the president in effect pushed don mcgann, his white house counsel, to lobby jeff sessions not to recuse himself. the president was angry, he was furious after the fact. that in effect he said he wanted an attorney general who is more like rfa to his brother jfk. like eric holder to president obama, basically someone who was allied and had an allegiance to him. beyond that some of the other

colors, some of the other details, we're learning that reince priebus kept handwritten notes during the course of time he was here serving in the west wing. all of this is significant. and even one other fact, that jeff sessions' aides had apparently sought damaging information on james comey before comey was fired, as if to say they were looking for some reason to better explain the firing beyond the russia probe, which the president in his conversation with lester holt says was certainly on his mind. andrea? >> peter alexander, thanks for braving a very cold lawn of the white house today. >> thanks. security analyst jeremy bash who is chief of staff at the pentagon. and matt miller, former chief spokesman for attorney general eric holder. and eugene robinson, columnist at the "washington post." a wealth of talent here. happy friday, everybody. matt, i want to ask you first about the reaction inside the justice department. do these revelations by mike

schmidt confirmed by msnbc news about the way the president pressed to stop jeff sessions from recusing himself? we knew he was angry about it, he said that to the "new york times" last summer and then repeated it publicly. but the degree to which he tried to get them to stop this russia probe at the very beginning. >> yeah, i think we learned two important new things about where this obstruction of justice probe may go based on this story. one is more evidence about the president's intent. proving intent of obstruction of justice is always a hard thing, because actions that would be legal, such as firing jeff sessions, are illegal if you're trying to thwart the investigation. it is clear he was trying to thwart the investigation. he wanted the attorney general to block it. and specifically the attorney general himself. we learned that -- the justice department denies this, but mike

schmidt reports that an aide to the attorney general was up on the hill before the firing asking congressional staffers to dig up dirt and get it to press about the fbi director. if that was something the attorney general was doing as part of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, if that was an overt act he took to further that conspiracy, the attorney general himself could now be a subject of that investigation. that is a very difficult place for the chief law enforcement officer of the united states to be. >> and jeremy, we also learned that reince priebus was taking notes. first of all, one of the first things that any chief of staff usually tells the white house staff, don't take notes. for a variety of reasons. that's sort of the rule of thumb in washington. reince priebus, chief of staff, was taking notes and that those notes confirm james comey's notes of his conversation with the president. the president told reince priebus, i said this to james comey about trying to cut this investigation off. >> there are three reasons why those notes will be given weight

by the special counsel. one is they're handwritten, second, they're contemporaneous, and third, they're kind of a statement against interest, in other words, a statement against reince priebus' boss, the president, basically corroborating james comey's testimony. the president reached out to him and said, i want you to spread misinformation about the status of your investigation, which of course comey said he wouldn't do. back to matt's point, i think what we learned from this new reporting is that firing jim comey was plan b. plan a was to keep sessions in place and have him obstruct the investigation. sessions had no choice. he had to recuse himself. and i think at some point we have to ask this larger question of what does a cabinet official do when the president of the united states repeatedly asks you to do the unethical? >> and eugene, about the michael wolff book, which fits into all of this. he's writing about steve bannon from bannon's perspective, obviously, suggesting that firing comey was the worst possible thing and actually laying part of the blame at the feet of jared kushner's father

to protect any money laundering allegations against his own real estate interests, to take it another point further. but in your own column, you're writing that no competent white house communications shop would have given such access to any journalist, let alone one known in new york media circles as a shark among sharks. day after day wolff feasted. >> he did. can you imagine any white house, a journalist, just sitting there in the lobby of the west wing? somebody would ask, what is he doing here? what is this about? and if it's michael wolff, does google not work in the white house, i mean, just to see what he's done in the past? by the way, one of the things he's done in the past is a book about rupert murdoch that rupert murdoch hated. so given murdoch's closeness to this administration, one wonders why there was no sort of communication about this.

it's very strange. >> and i thought that michael wolff was very artful about the way he answered savannah's questions about his access to the president. he said that he had three hours of conversations with the president not related to the book but during the campaign and after the election, which means the transition. he skirted the issue of how much, if at all, in the white house. sarah sanders has tried to minimize the contact with the president. the fact is that everybody knew the boss had approved him being there. there's no other way somebody could sit in the west wing lobby on a couch for that many hours. you've had access to white houses in the past. as a journalist, you can't walk in and out there. >> just to state the obvious, you need an i.d. or you need someone to wave you into the white house complex. even to get into the west wing, you need further credentials to be there. >> and he didn't have a press or visitor credential, he had a special credential because steve bannon had authorized it. >> anybody else there at this

hour, they're there because the president has allowed them to be there. >> there were other issues raised in the book which are of grave concern and should concern all americans if they can be validat validated. one is this reference that savannah asked wolff about, about the president's mental capacity. it was raised at the briefing yesterday. let's watch. >> you say, for example, that he was at mar-a-lago and didn't recognize lifelong friends. >> i will quote steve bannon. "he's lost it." >> eugene? >> you know, this is an amazing thing. this is sort of putting down in very stark terms what sort of, you know, has been buzzed about in washington for a long time. there are questions about the president's, a, his capacity to focus, his capacity to process information. does he read? does he fully ingest and then

digest all the information flow that a president needs to? and second, there's been this question, and i have heard it from people who have known him for a long time, as to whether he is as sharp as he once was, just to put it euphem irk mrkeu. >> it is said they work his name into briefing material because he doesn't read. >> one thing that comes through loud and clear in this book from people who have watched the administration from the inside or the outside, that the president is not in a lot of ways fit to be president. whether that's temperamentally fit, mentally fit, he's not fit in a lot of ways. now what this book raises is

whether he's mentally fit to be president. you can look at all the ways he behaves in office and find that when it comes to things you expect of the president, the ability to confront serious issues in a serious manner and make appropriate decisions, he does not have that capability. >> one of the triggers to that was this week's tweet about north korea. >> i was going to say, the acid test of a president's fitness is the output of his conduct and his judgment, and this week's tweet talking about his nuclear button and threatening the north koreans with offensive nuclear annihilation, i think, shows that his judgment is way off and he's not conducting american foreign policy in a way that promotes peace and security but could actually lead to war. >> at the same time we've got the questions about trying to shut down a book's publication. now, legal experts would tell you that it's very, very hard, especially prior publication when the book was already out, and a public figure cannot sue

for libel or slander as well as non-public figures. >> prior restraint is exceedingly rare. that just doesn't happen. nobody is going to stop this book, not that it could be stopped now, anyhow, and be, because of sullivan and "new york times" a public figure, basically can't sue for libel or slander. if the president did try to sue, he would then be subject to discovery and would have to produce all sorts of documents and information and be deposed. there's no way that's a good idea for him. >> one quick follow-up about the journalism of this, because there has been questions raised about michael wolff and the quotations. a lot of people who have covered the white house much more closely than any of us on a daily basis and cover the campaign, our colleagues tell us that a lot of this rings true, the behaviors that are

described, the internal talk about warfare. many wonder if there is a dramatization at play here. >> one is, are the quotes not cooked, but enhanced. are things condensed? is reality heightened in a magazine way as opposed to a newspaper way? they're kind of two different styles. i don't know the answer to that. you know, michael wolff is not a guy who just, out of whole cloth, makes up his books. he doesn't. he sdoes the reporting. he's not just some crackpot. the second thing is was he told a lot of stuff off the record that he then put on the record. it means a lot to you, it means a lot to me, it means a lot to

nbc news and the "washington post." i don't think it's an advisable thing to do, but it's not against the law. if somebody said it, they did say it. that source won't talk to you begin, but said is said. >> this is not our last conversation on this subject. thanks so much, jeremy, matt and eugene. coming up, the president heads to camp david today with congressional leaders focusing on the 2018 midterms and how much of a distraction this might all be. the daily bombshells about the inner workings of the white house. we'll talk to a republican who was with the president yesterday. james langford reports. you're watching msnbc and "andrea mitchell reports." time to bask... in low prices!

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all the political turmoil over the michael wolff book is overshadowing fast approaching deadlines facing this white house. the president met with republican lawmakers yesterday, including james langford, to talk about issues. thank you for joining me. >> thank you. >> i wanted to talk to you about immigration, but first, how does anything get done in a white house that is described as consumed with reacting to this book? >> honestly, i was in the white house for an hour and a half yesterday. the only comment that came out about the book entirely was a press person that made a question to the president during

the pool time. otherwise it just didn't come up. if it skumz ticonsumes time, i see it yesterday. >> you were right there at the table talking about immigration. did the president seem focused? was he on top of the issues? these questions have been raised. sarah sanders had a address them at the briefing yesterday. >> we were talking about policy dealing with immigration. the question was how do we get a resolution on this? he wants to see a resolution by the first week of march. there was a lot of conversation about these issues. we have to come to a bipartisan solution. he's very focused on coming to a bipartisan solution, we have to do that in the senate. the interesting to me on the book -- i haven't read it, obviously -- the same thing happened with the obama

administration. there were lots of conservatives that wrote books on president obama. this is not unusual, i would think, for a white house. liberals will be more frustrated with what they are, books are going to come. this is just the modern reality the presidents are going to have to face. >> the comparison would be, though, that there are insiders quoted on the record who are white house staff members talking about him in such disparaging ways. that said, this is in some ways a good thing in that mitch mcconnell and the caucus might be relieved that steve bannon has been os ttracized, that he losing his funding. does 2018 look a little easier for the republican incumbents? >> we'll see what it looks like in a few months. the policy is the key issue, and that's what people elected us to do to be able to get done what

needs done. >> speaking of getting done, let's talk about immigration. you have the president demanding there be a wall because of this, border security. you and others are spoken about a virtual wall instead of a brick and mortar wall in all cases. are there compromises for democrats to the president and to democrats? isn't there something that could be worked out? >> i absolutely think there is something that could be worked out. the last several months most of our meetings have been about daca and trying to resolve this. we've put on the the succeed act. dick durbin put out the dreamer act. but the problem has been the rest of it. border security and national security hasn't been a partisan issue in the past. president obama, when he was senator obama, voted for the secure fence act that put up 650 miles of fence. that was one of the things that chuck schumer voted for as well in 2006. so the 650 miles of border wall

that already exist on the southern border were a result of that vote. that was a wide bipartisan vote. this is becoming a more partisan issue because obviously the president talks about it more, but i don't think it should be a partisan issue. all of us should want to have national security to know who is coming in, who is going out and being able to help monitor that. there are some crossing our border that really do intend to do us harm. we should know who they are. but a vast majority coming over want to be a productive member of society. we need to figure out who is productive and who wants to cause us harm. that shouldn't be a divisive issue. >> we have a bipartisan letter from former homeland security secretaries, including napolitano and jeh johnson most recently saying march is not the deadline that many, including the white house and democrats, thought. in fact, to protect the dreamers, you have to do something by january because

there is so much processing that has to be done. do you think that is realistic, to get something done on the dreamers' piece of it by january? >> when we do the dreamers' piece, we have to do all of it. when i say all of it, i don't mean like the comprehensive bill several years ago. we try to reduce the scope to the minimum we have to do that connect to the dreamer issue. we can go back to 2012 when president obama created the daca program. we immediately saw in 2013 and 2014 an unprecedented amount of people of dreamers coming to the united states that president obama over and over again said would not have access to this program. they were being told they were trying to move them into the country illegally, but president obama was clear they would not. so whatever we do for the daca, we also need to deal with some border security and be able to send messages to central america as well that, hey, this is not just a welcome to everyone to be able to come, it's for a select group.

we need to be able to help process that. that smaller part can be done, i would think, before we get to the march deadline. if we need to be able to extend some access between now and then to protect some individuals, that's good. but the people who are exposed are people who literally didn't sign up again or didn't renew again in time for daca. those who are already in daca, they're in protective status and will stay that way. >> senator langford, thanks for joining us. >> thank you. slick move. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle promising to fight the president's proposals on drilling in the u.s. i'll deal with that coming up next. you're watching "andrea mitchell reports." i don't know why i didn't get screened a long time ago.

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with me is the senator in public works. good morning, senator. >> good morning, andrea. >> so do you're trying to preve it or stretch it out? >> the president is now saying it will be okay to drill off cape cod for oil, miami beach for oil, santa barbara for oil. you can drill under this new rulemaking in the lower 48 states off the coastline of any state regardless of how important tourism is to that state's economy, regardless of how important fishing is to that economy. it is absolutely irresponsible. especially since it's off the coastline and just last week president trump's department of interior announced they're going to lower the safety standards for drilling off the coastlines of our country that were put on

the books by the obama administration after the bp oil spill disaster in the gulf of mexico in 2010. so across the board, it's just very disrespectful of individual states to be able to protect their own coastlines, to make sure they are able to prioritize how they want to use the ocean off of their state. >> we've heard from rick scott, the governor of florida, definitely opposed. we know what california is going to say. i know from my own experience out of santa barbara in the '80s how those channel islands were still being cleaned up from that spill, and bp. your colleague from maine has tweeted today, a -- i oppose drilling off the coast of may

know may kno-- maine. i oppose to any drilling. >> i think this will lead to a bipartisan firestorm in opposition. i intend on introducing a congressional review act, that is, an ability by the congress to overturn regulations that any administration, but now the trump administration, have put on the books. it only requires 51 votes in the senate, requires just a majority in the house to do so, and i think there is going to be sufficient bipartisan support to overturn this rule. i think we are going to see democrats and republicans along the coastlines united, ensuring that we do not run the risk of a repeat of the bp oil spill in the gulf of mexico. for massachusetts, for florida, for california, but for every state. it could be an economic disaster. with the oil then going to china, believe it or not, the

profits going to exxonmobil and all the environmental risks being run by the states and their economies for a very small benefit for the oil industry. >> before i let you go, i wanted to ask you about this "new york times" reporting which we have confirmed at nbc news that the president was pressing his general counsel, his white house counsel to stop -- try to stop the attorney general from recusing himself on the russia probe, asking -- sorry -- asking where is my roy cohn? that's a reference that might not be accessible to a lot of younger people, but we're talking about roy cohn from the carter era, but we're also saying he protected obama. is that the right attitude of a press secretary to the attorney general? >> essentially roy cohn was a hatchet man for senator joe

mccarthy in the communist witch hunts of the 1950s. roy cohn ultimately became a very close legal associate to donald trump. what we're hearing is that he wanted a roy cohn-like person, meaning donald mcgann, the white house counsel who is supposed to be representing the american people and not donald trump as a private citizen, as roy cohn was doing, to say to jeff sessions, you cannot recuse yourself. even if you are conflicted, even if you did have dealings with the russians, even if you were an intimate member on the campaign team of the trump administration throughout 2016, you should not recuse yourself from the russian investigation and whether or not they had compromised or attempted to compromise the elections in 2016. absolutely irresponsible. donald mcgann should no longer be working in the white house. he has already forfeited that

because he should be representing the american people. when jeff sessions made the decision to recuse himself, he made the right decision. and he testified to that effect before the congress. he knows he made the right decision, and so ultimately, the president shouldn't be looking for roy cohn, he should be looking for an atticus finch to do this job, to ensure that the integrity of the legal system is protected. that is not what happened here. it's just another piece of evidence that something very wrong happened during that election cycle of 2016 in the relationship, the collusion between the russians and the trump campaign. >> well, thank you very much. na thank you, senator markey, for being with us today. >> thank you. a vice chairman of the chief of staff sharing a personal connection. his tragedy about the growing

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the statistics are staggering. more than 64,000 americans died of a drug overdose in 2016. according to the centers for disease control, this is the leading cause of death for people under 50 and synthetic opioids are expected to push the death toll even higher. for retired navy admiral james sandy winterfield, the opioid

crisis is deeply personal. in an essay for the atlantic, he writes, as an admiral, i helped run the most powerful military on earth, but i couldn't save my son from the scourge of opioid addiction. admiral, vice chairman of joint chief of staff. tell me about adam and about how you as a family did everything you could to try to prevent this terrible loss. >> thank you for having me on today. i really appreciate it. >> it's our pleasure. >> jonathan grew up as a typical military kid. he was very smart, he was very athletic. he also, though, for whatever reason, many, many moves, being a younger brother, what have you, suffered from anxiety and depression and was misdiagnosed as having add. was given aterol for that which was a big mistake to give to people with anxiety.

ended up self-medicating with alcohol, and one thing led to another with xanax and, unknown to us, alcohol. we decide to do put him into inpatient treatment. he was there 16 months. did extremely well. we saw our son coming back to us, this wonderful kid we grew up with. he got his emergency medical technician qualification while he was in that process and was able to help other kids start as a freshman at university of denver, and we did not realize how deeply that opioid molecule had buried itself inside his brain, and unfortunately we lost him. >> what can families do? you deal with a tragedy which never goes away, but you've dedicated yourself to helping other parents. >> andrea, i wouldn't blame any family that goes through this horrible experience for just curling up in a little ball and wanting it to go away. we decided that we had the opportunity, because we know how to get things done, we have a

lot of very good friends who are very generous, and we would not be able to live with ourselves unless we tried to do the very best we could to prevent other families from going through the same thing we did. so we put together our foundation. we're working very hard to stand that up, and we want to help this whole nation overcome this horrible epidemic, and in particular, help families avoid our tragedy. >> and the website is safeproject.us? >> yes, ma'am. we stood it up on november 29 and we're running as fast as we can. >> the united states said it was a national crisis, but frankly we've seen little evidence of a real push in terms of high profile leadership or commitment from the presidential level. what would you like to see from the administration, from congress? >> i'll start by saying that i'm violently nonpartisan here, and i think it's a balance sheet. >> the military officer, retired that you are. >> right. i applaud the first lady for standing up and talking about

this. i applaud the president for bringing governor chris christie on. i think it's one of the most important things he will do in his political life. >> he's been eloquent. >> he has. i see it as not just a public crisis, this is a national emergency. this is not just about losing people, it's about the tragedy that goes along with their kids, it's about what the white house itself has said is a $5.4 billion a year hit on our economy. a lot of this stuff is coming in from overseas, black tar heroin, fentanyl. so i would characterize it differently, as governor christie did, as a national emergency that demands that kind of response. >> we seem to be so short-focused in terms of dealing with this crisis and that crisis, and we've got all the foreign crises that you're well familiar with. how do we get the country to really mobilize and get people like me and others who have not been personally affected to see it the way it is? >> well, there are really five

things we think the country needs to do, and they're all very interrelated, but you're pointing to the first and most important one, andrea, and that is public awareness. there are two things that happen when public awareness rises of this epidemic. first of all, we can start getting rid of the stigma associated with addiction. it is a disease, not a moral failing, and i think americans are beginning to realize that, so we have to treat it like that. another thing, if public awareness raises, then we can put pressure on the political system to provide the resources that are necessary to fund the rest of those four or five things we have to do as a nation, including prevention, getting the prescription medicine piece under control, law enforcement medical response and, very, very importantly, treatment. >> admiral sandy winnefeld, thank you and your whole family for your commitment to this. >> thank you, andrea. we are very appreciative you had us on today. we're going to do the very best

we can in conjunction with a lot of very good organizations that are trying to do the same thing in the same space. >> we will follow. thank you. coming up, the biggest loser. will steve bannon ultimately be the person most hurt by michael wolff's tell-all? that tops inside scoop coming up next. i wanted to fight back. my doctor and i came up with a plan. it includes preservision. only preservision areds 2 has the exact nutrient formula recommended by the national eye institute to help reduce the risk of progression of moderate to advanced amd backed by 15 years of clinical studies. that's why i fight. because it's my vision. preservision.

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steve bannon's unfiltered attacks on president trump and in particular, on don junior, have incensed his biggest financial backers with the rare public statement from rebecca mercer praising president trump and making it clear she is cutting off funds to the embattled strategist. let's get the inside scoop from the veteran conservative radio host and msnbc contributor, and "the new york times" congressional correspondent and an msnbc contributor, and jeremy peters, foretimes political reporter and our msnbc contributor as well. from your reporting, what has happened in this fight, this internal republican fight. bannon could be the big loser if he has lost the mercers. he might even lose breitbart.

the board is thinking of firing him. >> steve's job is not secure at breitbart. he may not be there for very much longer. his job is so involved there. having lost the support of rebecca mercer, if she is working to get him out, he could be in danger. the larger question is whether or not he can survive apart from trump. if he purports to be the voice of trumpism, of the nationalist, populist conservatism that swept across the country, if that's his job, how can he do that if trump is saying i want nothing to do with you. >> trump tweeted that the mercer family recently dumped the

leaker known as sloppy steve bannon. smart! that's just one of the tweets. this has real implications. bannon has not even been able to open a bank account with the republican organization he was putting up. >> it very hard to see how steve bannon stays relevant. you think about the strikes against him. he's lost trump. he's lost the mercers. if he loses breitbart, that's three strikes. in trump world there's always an act ii. but folks like mitch mcconnell have to be relieved. steve bannon was going to lead the revolution against the republican establishment and right now his endorsement is toxic. on the other hand, look. steve bannon helped create this particular universe which was more about the cult of personality of donald trump than about ideas.

he helped create this echo chamber. and kind of ironically, it looks like he'll be a victim of it. >> janice is one of the co-presidents of the hollywood reporter. obviously working closely with michael wolff. she was on "morning joe" talking about the access that he gained to this white house. >> he said i don't know what they think i'm doing and different answers at different times would be, but i'm going to keep doing it until they tell me not to. i said to michael, is the jig up now kelly is there? and michael responded to me. there's so much chaos, i think i'm last on the totem pole of kernels. and he did proceed to be in there even with kelly in the white house. >> this validates what a lot of you reporters have been saying. that there is chaos in this white house. >> it does validate it.

and part of it is that it shows that chaos isn't just entertaining to people. something we laugh at. it can be problem attic and dangerous to the president. what we see is that chaos loud someone who was adversarial, who did not have the president's best interests at heart go into the white house and be able to report all these details that are essentially embarrassing and be able to say, i was in the white house and able to meet with the president. why donald trump is saying that he didn't meet with this author, the idea is that he was around the white house. people saw him. they can't deny that he was given great access and access is problematic now. >> and you've known how unusual it is for someone to have that kind of a pass. >> it doesn't surprise me. in there was so much internal dysfunction and chaos that somebody like mike wolff who is

not well known, even to members of the president's inner circle, could be unseen. and i do think there is a certain arrogance that this president has. the people around him have. they can charm people and pout a good face and everything is fine. don't worry about it. it came around and bit them. >> thank you all so much weex we'll have more ahead. ancestrydna makes over 10 million new family connections, every day. that's more ways to discover new relatives. people who share your dna.

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and that does it for us today. for andrea mitchell reports. >> have a good weekend. here in new york city, fact or fiction. the author of the new book takes us inside trump's world, defending his work and he doesn't pull any punches. he reveals people around trump think he's at best like a child. at worst, a moron. plus, sloppy steve. president trump doing what he does best. branding his former ally turned persona nongrata. steve bannon with a new nickname. and under pressure. how the white house put the screws to jeff sessions to try to stop him from accusing himself in the russia investigation. and the search for dirt on jim comey. we start with the first public interview with t