thank you so much. thank you. so we're doing it. yes. start saying yes to your company's best ideas. we help all types of businesses with money, tools and know-how to get business done. american express open. ♪ morning glory, america. i'm hugh hewitt. joined this morning by an old friend, reince priebus, former white house chief of staff. maybe the most successful republican national committee chair the last 30 years. welcome back. good to see you. >> i'm glad to be here, hugh. thank you. let me begin with the breaking news and then we will dive into the trump presidency. in friday's "new york times", incident was alleged you had talked to the president and urged him to fire john kelly. did that happen? >> that wasn't what was in the article. the article simply said we talked about it. and we didn't. >> oh, you did not? >> no. >> the president has never complained to me about general

kelly. on top of it, i would never -- number one, he didn't do that. number two, i would never bring up such a subject. i'm not going to sit around and talk about the management of the west wing. that just didn't happen. i like john kelly a lot. i think he is an american hero. it is is a huge job. i used to say what anyone thinks the job is, just multiply it by 50. but it is a huge job. and when a four-star combat marine says it's the hardest job he's ever had in his life, i think that means something. no, the president doesn't complain to me about any of those sorts of things. >> did you, as can chief of staff, know about the charges of rob porter? >> no. >> how is it that two chiefs of staff would not know? why don't you explain how two chiefs of staff would not know. >> i don't know about anything after i left. >> right. >> but, you know, after six months, it's not bizarre to have a group of people that don't

have their security clearance yet. i had left after six months. it didn't rise to a level of, hey, this is what the situation is here. now, we had other clearance issues where people hit a brick wall. they weren't going to get clearance. some people smoked pot. you know, things like that. but as far as this particular issue, i was surprised as anyone when the daily mail article came out. i didn't know rob that was. he was always what everyone described. >> let me go back to when i was back in the white house days with reagan. young lawyers reviewed these young redacted fbi files. if they don't flag it for deputy counsel it doesn't get flagged for white house counsel or chief of staff. do you think that's what happened here? >> no. i think they take time. you get a temporary security clearance. just to give you an idea, i was probably one of the very first files to be sent in.

i think maybe of anyone in the west wing. at least i'm darned close. i got my temporary the end of december. i don't think i got my actual permanent until april. and i have nothing. i have no liens. i don't have any lawsuits. maybe a couple speeding tickets a few years ago. it just takes a long time. >> yeah. let me turn to special counsel investigation. you sat down with them and you talked with chuck about it last week. how long did you sit down for? >> i can't really talk about that. i don't want to do that. i don't want to be rude to you, but i'm not going to talk about anything that has to do with the investigation. i can't. i think you can understand. >> i get that. but was it relaxed? was it adversarial? >> no. they were professional. they were polite. it wasn't something where i was being trapped. >> and there's a new report this morning that steve bannon has been picked up on the carter page surveillance.

i want to talk about this carter page fisa warrant in a second. would you be surprised if you turned up on surveillance tape somewhere? >> i don't know if i would be shocked. i don't know to the extent of what was going on in that investigation. i was rnc chairman. obviously through the entire campaign i've never met any of these folks that people are talking about like carter page or george papadopoulos. i don't know who they are. i've never met them, at least as far as i can possibly remember. that's the extent of it. >> it is is reported you are still talking to the president a lot. >> i wouldn't say a lot. i talk to him. i care a lot about him and what he wants to do. it's not my day-to-day life anymore. >> are you still talking to steve bannon? >> i do once in a while. it's been maybe a week or so since i talked to him last. >> there are concerns -- everyone knows you're getting along well with the president. but there are concerns that the president and steve bannon are

not getting along well and steve bannon may have creative narratives to share with special counsel. did you share those concerns? >> no. i think in the end people are going to be honest with special counsel. that's the whole point. i don't believe that. i think when you sit down with the fbi, there is an aura of this is a serious discussion we're going to have. and there's no time for playing games. >> and i want to talk to you about the fisa warrant on carter page. one last question about john kelly. did he make a mistake? is it a firing mistake? more than two chiefs of staff in the first year would be a disaster. >> i don't know what anyone really knew after i left. you know, be it's hard to say. because i don't know what was discussed. i don't know the specifics. what i know, though, is the rob porter that we all knew in the west wing. >> yeah. >> it was one of those sort of moments where people just said, you're kidding me. we're not talking about rob

porter, are we? the eagle scout, rhodes solchol, harvard, undergrad. i'm not saying that is an excuse for anything. i don't want anyone to think i am. i'm not. >> you're shocked stpwhreut was very surprising. >> let me go to the question at hand, carter page fisa warrant. devin nunes was on my radio show this week. he said, i'll paraphrase, hillary clinton bought information from russians that she then fed to the fbi for the purposes of getting a warrant on the trump campaign. that's pretty close to exactly what he said. what do you make of this story, the other russia story? >> it's a political mess. it was a political mess from the very beginning. and there's no way, when people say we can't insert politics into what's happening with these investigations. the problem is it is is political, and you can see it. people are people.

you see the texts between the two folks having an affair. politics is everywhere. and as much as we want to believe out there that somehow there is this iron wall between what happens in the doj or the intelligence community or, you know, you name it. the epa. or the halls of congress. it's all political. and it is impossible to subtract it. for people to believe there isn't a political piece is total naivety. it is is troubling. it is awful the way this is playing out. but i also agree that it doesn't -- it doesn't taint the work, i believe, that bob mueller is doing on the other serious piece of the investigation. so i think you can have both. i think that can go on in an honest, honorable way. and you can be outraged by the fact that some of this may have

been completely perpetrated because of poll tux. >> yeah. ing secretary clinton told me when i interviewed on my radio show, you can hold two thoughts. one, it's good that mueller is doing his job, and it's terrible that the fbi -- a handful of fbi people acted this way. a couple of resignations at the department of justice as well. >> but i think people need to understand that we can have this sort of intelligent conversation on a saturday morning about these things. but when you're living it every day in the west wing, and the president has to put up with this 24/7 and he hears that this entire situation that now he's embroiled in and others, like all of us that worked there, may have been started based on a political document paid for by political people. it's infuriating. and people have to understand that i think the president has a right to be infuriated. >> last week when you were talking to chuck todd on "meet the press", you told him you

never heard talk of firing mueller. the obvious follow-up a week later is what's your recommendation of the on president? mine is do not fire mr. mueller. what's your advice? >> that would be my advice as well. i wouldn't fire bob mueller. but that presumes that the president needs that advice. he doesn't need that advice, because he's not going to do it. at least to me, like i said, i never felt that was the situation i was in. >> when you worked with the president, as you continue to talk with him, he has a unique decision-making style, which is very inclusive of lots of points of view. as chief of staff, that has to be maddening. on the other hand, the results are pretty good. >> that's what people need to understand. the president his entire life, starting with a little bit of seed money from his dad to build up a $10 billion operation, to being the guy to go down the escalator and maybe one of a few people in america that thought he was going to be president was

himself. and he did it pretty much by himself. now, what he does do, though, is he brings people around him a desk like this. say it's an issue like trade. he has no problem, and i think he enjoys the sort of method of learning and talking things through, having complete opposite people on a particular piece of policy matter. and letting them argue it out. it was not uncommon for us to argue over trade or what we will do about the paris agreement or argue about whatever that item may have been. regulations, taxes, isis. you name it. you hear all of these reports. the media focuses in on that side of equation. >> and the tweets. >> and the tweets. but it is that type of of decision making that is creating these great results. so what i would suggest is that people stop focusing on the process, which works for the president and has worked for him his entire life, and focus on

what was the final decision? what was the final decision? regulations. judge gorsuch. more federal judges than anyone in history except for maybe washington. you have isis almost eradicated. it is very difficult to actually come up with a list of things that anyone could have possibly done in his first year than president trump. >> we will come back and talk about that after the break. a quick question. do you expect another supreme court vacancy? >> i do by the game of possibilities. >> were there whispers in the white house before you left of be ready? >> not quite. but i do think there will be some vacancies. >> we will be right back. more with rhines breince priebu. stay tuned. stay with me, mr. parker. when a critical patient is far from the hospital,

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welcome back. i'm hugh hue wet. you can hear me monday through friday 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. on the salem radio network. saturday mornings i'm here on msnbc. with me is reince priebus. his second extended interview. the first was on "meet the press". as chairman of the rnc you led the reform effort that organized the primaries into a coherency calendar that moved up to july. the 12 debates of which i participated in four of them. those debates actually changed american politics forever. did you have any idea when you organized the debate calendar and insisted there be a presence on the stage that you were setting a new set of rules that would be ideal for donald trump?

>> no. i thought it was going to be a deal for showcasing really great candidates. it was going to be a deal for putting the party committee in front and giving the party some leverage over the actual nomination process of the party. it used to be many, many years ago delegates would run in particular states. the delegates would get elected by people in their states within the party. and the party in tpfrastructure would elect a delegate and they would go in and choose the nominee from which they are a delegate from. somewhere along the way, somebody said we could bind the decision of the delegate to the overall decision of people in the state. so we would get more people involved. that created an is entire complication which decentralized the power of on a political party. if you were a member of the nra, you would vote for the president of the nra but you would be a

member of the nra and you would pay money. in our party, we got to the point where people that weren't really involved in the party were picking the nominee of the part. i tried to do things to bring that control back. >> very successful is things. things that got president trump in a position to win the amazing upset. however, tom perez is sitting over at the dnc. by the way, who do you have on your radar as the top two or three democrats you're worried about? >> i'm not worried about much of any of them. it's hard to tell. if vice president biden is going to run, he would be formidable. look -- >> harris? >> i don't find the bench to be incredibly strong. that's what they have. they have a bench that is sort of like a mile wide and an inch deep. you know, they're decimated in governors. there is no leadership in the

u.s. senate. very difficult for a house member to come out of nowhere. >> so here's the problem. they have a mile wide bench and they all want to run for president. oprah, mark cuban, tim ryan. >> i would expect not so much joe biden. i would suspect someone we're not thinking about, someone in business. someone maybe from hollywood. i would think it going to be someone not yet discovered. >> perez is sitting over there. he's got no money. people are leaving. they are internally divided. it is not like when you took over from michael steele. a mess. what is it specifically about debates? people will want a lot of them. there will be a lot of democrats. would you advise them to have a committee to couple people out who have no path to the nomination or do it the reince way, everybody gets a shot at about 2%? >> just to say something polite, which is right.

michael steele had an enormous amount of god-given talent and he is smart and sharp. we did win the house when he was chairman. so he gets the kudos for that. perez, superdelegates is a disaster. they need to get rid of it completely. they need to obviously control the debate calendar, make sure they are having some say over who the panelists are. and take -- be a little bit of an authoritarian on the process. because it is actually the process of the parties that control who should be the nominee of the party. and if there's no value of the party and the party doesn't have anything to give, then the party loses its way. the other piece that you have to do, which we did at the rnc, we built up -- i don't remember the exact number. but over six years, over a billion dollars of infrastructure we were giving the winner of our 16-person debate and primary situation.

and so unlike the democrats, we at the rnc built hundreds of millions of data and voter identification. turnout. a lot of boring things people don't like to talk about. it is important that the party build it. whoever wins the race plugs into it. that's what president trump did. as far as the candidate in the electorate that we were in, he was actually the perfect candidate for the situation we were in at that time. but what he also had was a national party that was basically the guts and the nuts and bolts of the operation. >> he would also go on any show -- i interviewed him 16 times. >> that's right. >> why has he stopped that? he still tweets? he stopped engaging. he very rare ly loses engaging. >> one thing about the president that he could do better than anyone is take an issue on and put it to bed. and he did that in the west wing. and we would be relieved for a

number of days after the president decided -- i feel it. let's do a press conference today. i'm going to the deal with these issues. and when he did, everything went away for a while. and he was good at that. personally, it's not my business anymore. but if i were him, if i was advising him, i would say do more media. because i think he's really good at it. >> more media? more tweets or less tweets? >> you know, look, i've been on both sides of this issue with the tweets and initially -- i'm a straight-laced guys. >> you and you are both mid-westerners. paul ryan. rob porter. >> don't tweet this. others chimed in, the first lady and the family. but at the end of the day, he goes through the whole campaign. he is listening to people saying don't tweet this, don't tweet that. he tweeted it, and he won. so i'm at a place now on the whole tweeting issue that i think more or less people like

me were wrong and people like him were right. >> last question is about the cabinet. you were there through the transition, the most conservative of my lifetime. my son worked for scott pruett. he is a friend. rick perry say genius. we want every part of energy going. zinke helping out parts of the coast is a good thing. are you happy with the way cabinet government has turned out on capitol hill? >> yeah. and he empowers the secretaries as well. he really doesn't micromanage what they want to do, who they want to hire. and he lets them govern. i think that the cabinet is something that, you know, personally i'm very proud of. i played a part in that. >> yeah. >> and i thought if you look at the people that he's put in place from top to bottom, it is really the cream of the crop. >> any doubt in your mind he is running for reelection? >> of course he's going to run. >> any doubt that mike pence

will be his colleague on the ticket? >> i have no doubt about that. look, you see the approval numbers are coming back up. by the way, i a little lways re people of his approval numbers. on election day it was 37 and he won. now he is in the low 40s to mid-40s. i think some had him even higher than that. the point is in december he was at 32. one had him at 42. and ra rathmussen had him at 40. the economy will be strong. >> reince priebus, thank you for joining is me very much. i will be right back. my day starts well before

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a very good morning to all of you. i'm al, wit here at msnbc world headquarters in new york at the half hour. here's what we're watching for you. a live picture of capitol hill where house intel democrats are pushing back after the president refused to authorize the rehe lease of their memo. it's a move one democrat on the on committee is meant to ends the investigation. >> this has nothing to do with transparency, with a seven for truth. it has everything to do with this week's installment coming either out of the chairman of the committee or ron johnson, a secret society fame or the white house to erode confidence in the