school. thank you to everyone. i enjoyed it, karen, hope we get to do it again. >> we will, we la. we have a lot of big issues to discuss. >> apple changing the world ayers next friday. -- airs next friday. that is it for "all in" this evening. rachel maddow's next. do you remember when he was going to hire his personal pilot to be the head of the faa? sure, why not! trump air operations during the campaign included one plane tearing off the runway and almost careening onto a highway and shutting down laguardia airport. different incident, a hired pie hot was-- pilot was a fugitive m justice, but trump liked the guy who flew his airplane during the

campaign. and isn't there something in the government about the guy who flies the airplanes? good idea. that caomes up next month. who knows, maybe he will put his personal pilot in charge of the faa. today we got close to that idea. we learned of this as a fait accompli. and admit it, when you heard that trump named his personal physician to be the head of the v.a., admit it, first person you thought of was this guy. no the that guy. what's amazing about that guy. not just that he was an incredible character. that he submitted a physician's report on the health of this presidential candidate, donald trump, that was like a cross between refrigerator poetry and north korean state media articles about the dear leader's

300th birthday. remember that? trump's labts test results were astonishingly excellent. anything that astonishes a person in a lab is usually bad. his physical strength and stamina are extraordinary. if elected, i can state unequivocally that mr. trump will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency. that was a very strange iteration of the traditional doctor's note about a presidential candidate's health. but then trump did get elected. and that history with his private doctor meant there was little more intrigue than usual surround bei surrounding the president's first examination by an admiral jackson. >> this is the president's unbiased health assessment. his weight, a very stout 239

pounds. he has a gorgeous 44-inch coke bottle waist. and with legs that seem to go on forever. size 12 shoes. you can fill in the blanks there. it's my expert medical opinion that the president has a rockin' bod. >> that was not the actual white house physician. that was the "saturday night live" version of the white house physician, because there had to be one. after the actual white house physician gave his press briefing on the president and his health. it was so excitedly positive it left reporters who were also doctors, like cnn's sanjay gupta feeling like they had to retranslate for the american public the information that admiral jackson was providing, because maybe somebody should

take the hearts off the eyes. >> how would you characterize the president as an average 71-year-old male. >> hands down, there is no question he is in the excellent range. that's not me speaking. that's objective data. you can look at the data collected. and he will definitely fall into that category. overall, he has very, very good health. excellent health. dr. gupta? >> just to be clear, he is take cholesterol medication, he has evidence of heart disease and borderline obese. do you characterize that as excellent health? >> his heart is very healthy. those are all things we're looking at, there's stroke issues there, too, but, you know. >> president trump has just announced that white house physician admiral ronny jackson will be his nomination to head

the veterans affairs. it is the second largest organization in the government, one of the largest of any kind on earth. serves 20 million veterans. dr. jackson is beloved as a white house physician, not just by the trump administration but by previous white house occupants as well. he was white house physician r george w. bush and barack obama. he has never run any large organization of any kind before. i want to stress. people who really like him, they say he's a great white house doctor and is really nice. we know for sure that he definitely likes the president. so there's that. we're going to have some expert opinion as to whether this new appointment seems like a good idea. but for now, it means we have to add another name to the departure board. for only the third time. we have to put a senate-confirmed cabinet secretary up there. the first cabinet secretary to

go was tom price at health and human services, then it was rex tillerson at the state department. now we can add this way? this way. three, two, one! ah, there it is. secretary of veterans affairs, david shulkin. like lots of trump cabinet secretaries, including tom price and ben carson and ryan zinke and, arrannd, and, david shulki he, too, had embarrassing ethics problems, including lots of taxpayer spending for what looked like long european vacation for him and his wife. but like i said, there are lots of trump cabinet secretaries who have that particular embarrassing problem, even worse than he does. but now he's the one who's out. and part of this may be just another instance of the president seeming to enjoy doing

his shopping on tv. it may be that when everybody else saw over the top, hyperobsequiousness, the president saw, hey, i like the way that guy talks on tv. we do know from weeks of reporting and multiple outlets that the president really wanted to hire for this job one of the hosts of fox and friends. there was a guy at fox named pete hegseth who the president wanted to put in the vchb.a. jo. there's a number of reasons why that couldn't and didn't work out. we'll have that in a few minutes. but the president isn't hiding his light under a bushel for his preference for hiring people off tv. he likes the way they talk about those jobs on tv. larry kudlow, just hired to be white house chief economic adviser, whether or not you liked gary cohn, he at least had

been president of goldman sachs. he comes from a tv show. right after he hired dgary kudlow, we learned about the national security adviser whom he liked watching on tv. there may be trouble ahead for that national security adviser appointment. it does not require senate confirmation, but we learned from trump's first national security adviser mike flynn that there still can be trouble if you try to keep somebody in that job who's caught up in active fbi investigations, technically if they're active counter intelligence investigations. so, stay tuned for that. we have that story coming up. shopping off your tv set isn't always a great way to vet nominations. it can also be trouble for the

president's efforts to put together a legal team to represent him in the russia scandal, in the mueller investigation. one of the more remarkable things that happened just in the last week, god, it feels like years ago now, but just in the last week, the president's lead lawyer on the russia scandal quit, when it emerged that the president had picked out two new russia lawyers whom he liked the look of on tv. joe digenova and victoria toensing, from tv. so john dowd took himself out. that all happened, though, before the president had actually met these two new lawyers anywhere other than through his tv screen. and when they finally arrived at the white house on thursday night, turns out the president didn't like them as much as he had on tv. a white house official described them as dishevelled in their

appearances when they arrived at the white house. the president was not as impressed with them in person as he had been when they had the tv makeup on and the underlighting and you can't see that pants. anyway, that is how we have arrived at the president not really having a legal team on the russia scandal anymore. jay sekulow is his one outside attorney now. he's also a fox news guy. he has been, spent this week trying to calm everybody down by saying it's not just him. he's got other people working with hem frim from his conserva activist legal group. that includes, we learned today, the author of this book "byzantine rome and the greek popes". he has a phd in medieval history, which he pursued, quote, following a mid-life crisis. he wrote his book on the greek popes and eventually went back to practicing law, mostly working as a contract prosecutor for local d.a. oz s in georgia.

back in the '80s, he was involved in a jews for jesus case with jay sekulow, the fox news guy. but that's pretty much it. it's great for this guy, right? look at the head heine line in today, spurned by top lawyers, trump's defense elevates washington outsider. you're burned out in georgia, having a mid-life crisis, you have your monographen published. the next day you're representing the president. and you have no experience whatsoever no anythi whatsoever in anything like this. well done for him. but for the presidency, it's a weird situation, right? especially since things do seem to be taking a bit of a serious turn in this big national

security investigation that is swirling around the president. lawyers for the special counsel's office and for attorney alex van der zwaan have now exchanged court filings in advance of what's expected to be mr. van der zwaan's sentencing next week for lying to investigators. his lawyers in this filing today literally argue, i'm quoting here, his days are empty and lonely. they provided testimonial from his mother, including the all-caps statement, alex is the only support and joy of my life. testimony from his mother saying how much she loves him. there's a lot of detail from his pregnant wife and how much she loves him as well. his soul mate. he's said to be very sorry, quote, alex has learned his lesson, and there is no risk that he will re-offend. those are the kinds of arguments that alex van der zwaan's lawyers were making to the court. in response to those arguments, the special counsel filed their own document with the court, in

which they tore mr. van der zwaan's head off. the fact that your wife is having a baby isn't reason for you to get leniency from the court. the fact that you stopped lying and pled guilty after we caught you isn't cause for leniency either. he does not deserve credit for adhering to the law. the special counsel's filing literally ends, the last sentence with suggesting that if he really wants to get home for the birth of his first child, maybe he should hurry up and get to prison to start his time. the special counsel's office is not messing around. it's important to remember that even though alex van der zwaan has pled guilty, he's not cooperating. he has not agreed to cooperate with the mueller investigation. he pled, and he wants them to be lenient, because he pled, but he's not cooperating with them. so presumably, this very

"hardbal hardball effort is to get him to change his mind about cooperating. this is important, while they are ripping van der zwaan's head off in in filing, they also make explicit something that i think ought to be unnerving to this white house, even if the president doesn't necessarily have lawyers anymore who can explain this to him. quote, among the topics about which the defendant lied were his communications with trump deputy campaign chair rick gates, his communications with a ukrainian business associate of manafort and gates, person a, and his failure to produce an e-mail between himself and the ukrainian business associate. all important matters in the investigation. the lies and withholding of documents were material to the special counsel office's investigation that gates and person a were directly ch communicating in september and october of 2016 was personal

nent that person a has ties to a russian office. he admitted he knew of that connection, stating that rick gates told him person a was a russian intelligence officer with the gru. that's all in the alex van der zwaan sentencing stuff that's going back and forth. part of the story is van der zwaan pleading for leniency and the special counsel not at all indicating that they are down with that. but the other part of it is the special counsel's office showing their hand as to something they've got. dear mr. president with no little team. these filings from the special counsel's office now spell out explicitly that during your presidential campaign, your campaign manager and your deputy campaign manager were in frequent contact with, what's the phrase? with a person the fbi assesses

to have had current ties to a russian intelligence service. and they couldn't have been unwittingly duped into doing this, because your deputy campaign manager is on record, telling other people at the time, hey, call this guy. he's gru. he's russian military intelligence. and that's not us guessing at what the special counsel office is looking at, that's them telling us what they've got in court filings, where they are also going super aggressively at a guy they've already got to plead guilty. they're still trying to get the court to throw him in prison even after his guilty plea. so the president likes turnover. he likes watching tv. he likes maybe hiring people from tv. he likes firing really senior people all the time and keeping everybody on their toes. the president not having a russia legal team anymore doesn't even make this list. but the investigation is getting explicit and aggressive.

and it seems like it very well may be about collusion with russia, directly. we've also now got the first report that the president may have opinion offering pardons to at least two of the people who ultimately got charged. there's chaos in this young administration, sure, and that is interesting for all sorts of reasons. i don't think, though, that you can separate that from the fact that there is also now a legal hurricane swirling around a basically unreinforced, undefended president. ♪ we came with big appetites. with expedia, you could book a flight, hotel, car, and activity all in one place. ♪

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"new york times" is first to report today that president trump's lead russia lawyer until recently, john dowd, the times reports that last year he raised the possibility of the president issuing a pardon for paul manafort and for michael flynn, according to the times, john dowd raised that prospect last year in discussions with manafort and flynn's lawyers. quote, the discussions came at special counsel was building cases against both men, and they raise questions about whether the lawyer, john dowd, was offering pardons to influence

manafort and flynn's decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the investigation. of course manafort and flynn made very different decisions on that score. manafort pled not guilty and is fighting more than 20 felony counts from the special counsel, looking at life in prison if convicted. flynn pled guilty, and he's now cooperating. if the president's lawyer was talking pardons with them last year before they made those decisions, then why did neither of them end up with a pardon? and is the president or his lawyer potentially in trouble for doing this? if the pardons were offered as a way to try to dissuade these guys from cooperating with mueller's investigators, is that a big deal? and is that potentially criminal? obviously, the president has the power to pardon, it's in the constitution, but if he offered it that way, to try to dissuade someone for cooperating or testifying in an investigation, might that be looked at as potential on strubstruction of justice. joining us is bob bauer.

am i asking the right questions here? it seems as a matter of strategy that it's interesting if these conversations happened but neither flynn norman fo manafora pardon. did those teseem to be the righ questions to be asking? >> i think it's very clear they were improper conversations to be had. there's no way that the president of the united states's lawyer, acting on his behalf should be exploring a pardon with individuals who have testimony that touch directly on his personal helegal affairs. that either a was an ex sepgsly foolish thing to do. >> when a president lawfully and normally exercises the pardon power, are there sort of

firewalls set up, communication firewalls, or is the president isolated in the amount of communication he's able to receive and from the right people in terms of respectfully and legally considering somebody's pardon in the right way? >> very much so. over time, pardons have been prepared in the first instance in the particular office of the department of justice, and there's a real attempt for the white house to articulate the standards for granting pardons and for the department of justice to use those standards to prepare recommendations for the president, of potential ben fisheries of pardons. all of this is coordinated, and is meant precisely to lend the appropriate sew bright and regularity to the president's consideration of pardons. for a president's counsel in a heal case to discuss potential pardons is extraordinary. >> we should say that john dowd deny this is in a pretty blunt way. he told the "times" that their

story is not true. dowd for his part says there were no discussions, period. as far as i know, no discussions. it doesn't sound like an overlawyered careful denial. it seems like a blaununt denial. we should be clear that's how he's talking about that. i don't know what to make of that blunt denial. i'm not inclined to believe that he would blatantly lie about something this serious. >> i don't have any information to suggest that. but i would point out first of all, that he said if one wanted to parse his comments that there were no discussion of pardons. he may have raised it, and then there was no ensuing discussion because the lawyers for mr. flynn decided not to pursue it further. so there may have been no discussions, but it may have been raised with them. then secondly, there's odd suggestion that as far as he knows there were no discussions, well, he was directly involved in the discussions. either he knows he was involved in them or he doesn't. so it sounds a little bit like a

variant on the "as far as i can recall", although it's not stated that way. >> it's hard for me to separate controversies in reporting and the ongoing troubles the president is having assembling a stable and talented legal team to defend him and represent him in this scandal and related matters. what do you make of the fact that the president's legal team has been so in flux and doesn't appear to have anybody that has experience. >> the president has had difficulty atrabtsing the people who have the most experience. he's also lost some of the lawyers that he started with. mr. kasowitz left, although he apparently is consulting with mr. trump by phone, mr. dowd has left. and won o-- one wonders, maybe having lawyers of that experience is not important. he'll have the lawyers, direct

them in how he wants them to behave. worse comes to worse, he will take the position that mr. sekulow has articulated, that the president cannot in fact be prosecuted for obstruction of justice and he'll offer pardons and he can't be questioned about the issuance of pardons. and if you have that legal view of your office, who needs lawyers? >> i am reading into the tone of your comments that you think that that regal view of his office would be mistaken. >> i think it's entirely mistaken. i think mr. sekulow believes it. some of mr. trump's lawyers have articulated that view from time to time. i think it's extremely ill-advised for them to count on that. we have seen over time that when those arguments are brought before the courts by presidents looking for special exemptions from legal liability, the courts have typically ruled against them. >> bob bauer, thank you for your

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there's a man named pete hegseth who's a host on the fox news channel. he's perhaps most well-known for the team he threw an ax at a west point drummer on live television. thankfully the drummer was able to walk away with nothing too

serious. he is with a group called concerned veterans for america. they were funded lavishly by the koch brothers. it was to privatize the v.a., to essentially abolish the v.a. it is the second largest agency in the government. it provides service to 20 million american veterans. and because the vfrpts .a. is essentially a single payer system, it is a conservative fantasy to kill it off. but the koch brothers picked it as a project and funded pete hegseth and his veterans graoup to make that a mainstream option for republican politicians. a lot of republican candidates came out in support of privatizing the v.a., thanks in large part to intense lobbying

by pete hegseth. he soon became a very frequent face on fox news and a host on fox news, which is maybe why it should not have come as a total surprise when we started seeing multiple reports saying that donald trump wanted to get rid of the current v.a. secretary and appoint that good-looking guy from fox. he is now picked to take over for david shulkin. the president had been telegraphing for weeks that he wanted shulkin gone and that he was going to replace him with pete hegseth. but this came in, pete hegseth's experience as a combat veteran and commentator on fox would seem to appeal to the president, but his appointment could extend

two disruptive narratives playing out in the white house, marital infidelity and nepotism. and, while running a political action committee in his native minnesota, hegseth spent a third of the pac's money on christmas parties for families and friends. and so maybe that is the reason it took the president so long to officially announce he was replacing his v.a. secretary, because the guy he really wanted, the guy he found so attractive on the tv machine, there were about to be some public issues with him that would be a hypocrisy problem for that young man, given his stern, family values, anti-divorce statements including while he was running for office, now that he's just had a new baby with the nice lady he works with even before divorcing the second wife. today the president announced that he is firing david shulkin and announced a surprise, dr.

ronny jackson. if this president really does pick cabinet officials from the tv machine, dr. ronny jackson has not been all over tv like his colleagues. he's a navy admiral. he has made just a few tv appearances, but it was a memorable one. >> good afternoon, everyone. to start with, what i'm going to do is read to you the summary of the president's physical vitals as follows. age, 71 years and seven months at the time of the exam weight, 239 pounds, a history of elevated cholesterol and on a low dose of crestor. the president is very healthy and will remain so for the duration of his presidency. okay. with that he'll tai'll take som questions. >> can you tell me how a guy who eats mcdonald's and all those diet cokes and never exercises is in the shape that you

describe. >> i would say genetics. it's just the way god made him. >> can you imagine the president watching that? the only thing he heard was good genes gen genes, blah, blah, blah. he is a rear admiral in the navy, served in the white house for the past three administrations. he is by all accounts beloved in that position. today the president picked him to run the v.a. second-largest agency in the entire government. good genes. joining us is the ceo of iraq and afghanistan veterans of america. good to he ssee you. >> let me ask you go your reaction to shulkin's ouster.

>> the carnage and disruption and chaos of the rest of washington has finally come to v.a. in many ways it was this isolated oasis but brewing below the surface. there's a lot going on in the v.a. that would have been front page before this year. now for the next probably ten years. the very soul of the v.a. is at stake, whether to privatize it, how much and all the controversies around that. david shulkin was always in that. we thought his shelf life would be pretty short. he was an obama holdover, he probably wouldn't last more than a year. so this was probably going to happen at some point. now here we are. he had a couple of i.g. investigations. he started to lose favor with the president and veterans groups. the v.a. is tough to manage anyway. it was only a matter of time before the president pulled the trigger >> what about ronny jackson? the president likes to look

around the room imagine somebody in the job and it's a surprise. in his case, a serving admiral, knows the president has a good relationship with him. nobody's got a bad word to say against him, but it's a totally strange pick. >> it's a surprise pick. as a doctor in the military, it's going to feel like he was driving a sports car compared to driving the v.a. which is like a 18 wheeler broken down driving through a combat zone in bad weather. this is where top leaders go to fail. we've had a v.a. secretary resign or be fired in the last three presidencies. so this is a tough job for anybody. we say it's the second-hardest job in washington to begin with. but going into this environment, he's an unknown. so the confirmation hearings are absolutely crucial. is he an empty vessel? does he have strong views on

privatization, how is he going to tackle post-traumatic stress disorder. $200 billion and 300,000 federal employees who don't know what's going to happen. good, hard-working people in the v.a. haven't known what's going to happen for weeks and don't know what the future looks like. >> and intense political winds blowing around. the reason i highlight this guy who was not chosen is because there was incredible lobbying to turn the v.a. into something different than what it is. that's been the undercurrent. veterans committees in congress certainly are being buffeted by those winds, do you feel like that should be a central question that he has to sort of stake a claim for? show his familiarity with? >> yes. >> in order -- >> it's the central issue. ultimately, he'll probably get confirmed. we'll see unless he gets surprised. it's probably someone who's more

likely to be confirmed. >> just because of deference of his military -- >> yes. shulkin went through. it had the advantage of the rank and the status that military officers have, but this is one of the most important confirmation hearings that i've seen in recent memory because it has to do with a fate of a huge part of our government. when it's good, it's the g.i. bill, when it's bad, it's phoenix scandal. the battleground, it's like "game of thrones." winter is coming. winter is here. now people are going to go to their corners and rally, and the veteran groups will be in the middle, trying to add light to the heat surrounding these issues. >> all right, i feel like i never have you here on good news days, paul, it's always like something's crazy! help me through it. >> a lot of bad news. >> we'll be back, stay with us. liberty mutual stood with me

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mentioned at the top of the show that there's some new reporting that may be a problem with the president's appointment of yet another foxness -- fox news personality. john bolton. stay with us. can make you feel unstoppable. but mania, such as unusual changes in your mood, activity or energy levels, can leave you on shaky ground. help take control by asking about your treatment options. vraylar is approved for the acute treatment of manic or mixed episodes of bipolar i disorder in adults. clinical studies showed that vraylar reduced overall manic symptoms. vraylar should not be used in elderly patients with dementia due to increased risk of death or stroke. call your doctor about fever, stiff muscles, or confusion, which may mean a life-threatening reaction, or uncontrollable muscle movements, which may be permanent. side effects may not appear for several weeks.

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here is the business website of a man named tim glister. he's british. he worked for the british parent

company of cambridge analytica. you can see that this british guy brags on his website, he touts his experience working in the u.s. in the 2014 midterm elections, specifically working to elect thom tillis to be a republican senator from north carolina. he said he spent three months in north carolina with a consultensy team create highly-targeted advertising that harnessed scl's national database of voter issue sentiment and psychographic profiles. and then he, on his website, he shows an ad from that election, to illustrate his work on behalf of thom tillis, during that election, which is weird,

because from what we can see, this guy is not american. he's british. and american law says only american citizens are allowed to directly or indirectly participate in u.s. political campaigns at any sort of level that involves decision making about the campaign. you can hire non-americans to lick envelopes or whatever, but hiring him to help thom tillis' campaign -- having somebody not american do that, that might be a little much for american law. so, first of all, this raises the question of foreigners working on u.s. campaigns. second of all, this is about cambridge analytica, the data firm for the trump campaign. put that same quote up there again. this guy is bragging about the harnessing of the national database. according to whistle-blowers,

that is what they obtained illicitly from facebook. they took private data from more than 50 million americans without permission thanks to a stealth software package who was jointly employed by cambridge university and by cambridge university and a university in russia. cambridge analytica founded by robert mercer worked on a lot of republican campaigns in 2014, and then went on to work on the trump campaign in 2016. they've come under intense scrutiny. ousted their ceo, got kicked off facebook, and came under investigation not just by the british, but also the. yesterday companies linked to cambridge analytica may have been used to dump tons of

illegal money into the british brexit campaign. part of that allegation is that these companies linked to robert mercer were set up and used as a way to hide money that was going into campaigns. >> we mentioned it a couple times, actually, we had seen one invoice or more than one invoice, is that right? >> yes. >> it's interesting because you quite famously they have no money whatsoever, so i'm wondering what they were doing to pay for this -- >> you have to remember, part of the brilliance of cambridge analytica is that it doesn't -- like it doesn't need to make money because it's robert mercer's project. so robert mercer, he's a billionaire, he doesn't need to

make money. so -- and further, if you -- if you, as an investor of a company, put money as a shareholder, as an investor in that company, that's not classed as a political donation. that's an investment in a company that you're an owner of, right? i'm proving r&d, expanding our teams. but you can do that, more pointedly, and continue to invest purposefully into a company so that it can also work for particular entities at a subsidized rate or in some cases for free. so one of the things i would point out is just because there is, you know, a bill with a particular number on it with ca, it doesn't mean that's the genuine value of the work that was produced.

because part of the brilliance of the set up that robert mercer created, it becomes easy to get around campaign finance laws, in terms of declarations because it's an investment. he's a shareholder he can invest. >> so what's emerging about this investigation overseas, about this company, is an allegation from the whistleblower is the way this company worked, they did lots of works for campaign but had the luxury of not charging much for it. robert mercer could afford to fund the company and the company could afford to charge the campaign almost nothing for their work no matter how much work they did. presto-change-o, this becomes robert mercer illegally overfunding a campaign without

anybody on either side disclosing it. that's the allegation for the brexit campaign, and by allegation that's for the republican 2014's midterm elections where they allegedly had foreign workers coming over here working as a dry run for the 2016 election race. and that's a question for the 2016 election itself where the trump campaign paid cambridge analytica just under $6 million for the data operation, that was brought up on our show a couple days back, people should start looking at the smallness of that number. >> there are all kind of potential violations here. first and foremost is cambridge analytica itself and how it works with the trump campaign and is that truly the value, a couple million dollar compared to what someone said was $100 million in value, that's a potential major election violation. >> so if these allegations about

unreported outside campaign donations are true, the question is how did they do it? what are the mechanisms they used to move this money around? what should we look for to find out if the money was moving this way in our politics. that brings us back to thom tillis and the british guy who's bragging about the work he did on thom tillis' campaign. watch this. this is the very end of that ad that he's been featuring there. see the bottom part there? this is an ad that a british guy is bragging about having worked on, dreamed up for the thom tillis campaign, while working for cambridge analytica. according to the disclosure at the end it's paid for by the

john bolton super pac, also funded by cambridge analytica, which is now facing whistle-blower allegations that they sent foreign workers to work on republican campaigns and this was set up as a way to funnel mercer's money into campaigns without it being seen. john bolton's super pac is apparently one of the links in that, and he has been named national security advisor. since we got a look at that british consultant's website, a couple things have happened. the british guy didn't answer our e-mails, at least in the form of an e-mail reply. but after we asked him about the john bolton super pac ad he changed his website. he took down the john bolton super pac ad and now he put up an exciting picture of thom tillis, which maybe the british

guy also helped with. now he -- now that he's had the better part of four years to reflect on it, he's changed it to say really he was helping a local political party with something a lot simpler. none of that highly targeted psychographic profile stuff that's in the headlines. that was the first funny thing that happened. the second thing is now they intend to file this complaint that alleges that the john bolton super pac was making excessive and unreported contributions to the thom tillis race in 2014. john bolton with all the mercer money. it hasn't been a week since the president named john bolton national security advisor. but if he didn't want to end up

in a michael flynn situation, bolton might be an odd pick. here's a russian ad. and now there's money showing up in cambridge analytica. and now comes this watchdog complaint about john bolton's pac in the election. we are six days out from announcing bolton out from this incredibly sensitive job. have a choice. heck of a way to get started. you wouldn't accept an incomplete job

from any one else. why accept it from your allergy pills? flonase relieves your worst symptoms including nasal congestion, which most pills don't. flonase helps block 6 key inflammatory substances. most pills only block one. flonase. i am terrible at this. last night i was early, tonight i'm late. it is 19 seconds past time for "the last word with lawrence o'donnell." i'm sorry. >> i needed every one of those seconds, rachel, to try practicing saying this name, andrew, that's the part i can say. ekonomou -- i'm not sure. >> i think of him as the author of the book about