that wraps it up for me this hour. i am kasie hunt in for my friend ali velshi. thanks for watching. "deadline white house" with nicolle wallace starts right now. >> hi, everyone. it's 4:00 in washington, d.c. where fbi director christopher wray and deputy attorney general rod rosenstein just left a meeting with the president after a punishing weekend long twitter tirade from the president. he unloaded on the d.o.j. and the fbi over the mueller probe and the original counter intelligence investigation into his campaign launched when the fbi found the interactions of two trump aides sufficiently fishy to ask an fbi informant to gather more information. one tweet veered way beyond normal presidential conduct, and even beyond normal trump conduct. one of the president's closest allies acknowledged today. "i here by demand and will do so officially tomorrow that the

department of justice look into whether or not the fbi/doj infiltrated or surveilled the trump campaign for political purposees and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the obama administration. rosenstein responded swiftly kicking any such investigation over to the inspector general and issuing this statement. quote, if anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action. so far silence from christopher wray on this particular presidential threat. the fbi director did last week offer a pointed condemnation of a sustained campaign to investigate the alleged fbi informant close to the trump campaign. >> i will tell you that as anybody in the intelligence community knows, human sources in particular who put themselves at great risk to work with us and with our foreign partners, have to be able to trust that we're going to protect their

identities and in many cases their lives and the lives of their families. and the day that we can't protect human sources is the day the american people start becoming less safe. >> so, were there fireworks in wray and rosenstein's face-to-face meeting with the president? was donald trump assured his appointees are looking out for him or can all sides just take a deep breath and live to fight another day? those are the questions this hour. here to help us answer them some of our favorite reporters and friends from "the new york times" mike schmidt, ashley parker with the rare on-set appearance from the washington post, and matt miller former chief spokesman from the justice department. matt, you have been tweeting prolifically. i know you have so many thoughts. what has rosenstein done to the justice department by agreeing to carry out the investigation the president is calling for? >> you know, i think what rod is doing here is taking really a dangerous gamible. what the president requested was really inappropriate. it was the red line that presidents don't ask for. they don't ask for political

investigations. they don't ask for any criminal investigations out of the justice department. i think what rosenstein did is what he's done before where he tries to give just enough. we've seen him turning over documents to congress justice department wouldn't usually give. he's given just enough space to buy space for him and bob mueller to complete his investigation without the entire justice department being blown up. what i worry about is that he's really compromising the department of justice's independence when he does this. these erosion of norms that happen slowly. if you look at what the president did today, he asked for something inappropriate. not only did no one push back on him, he got a little bit of what he wanted. it's a dangerous precedent. >> but does rosenstein have many options? aren't there articles of impeachment drafted by the looms in the house republican, freedom caucus? >> that's exactly right. he is without a doubt in a tough spot. you have republicans pushing him, a president who won't back him up. usually when the justice department decides not to turnover documents to congress the white house backs them up.

>> usually always, always. >> always. i forget, always. >> even george w. bush. that is how -- i mean, comey became a household name when he and mueller threatened to fire over a now famous bedside incident over -- presidents almost always yield to sort of the collective political will of that building. not happening under this president. >> no. you see the president actually on the phone with people in congress. some of the most conservative members of congress coordinated an attack plan on the department and on rod rosenstein. so, you're right. he didn't have a lot of options. he's in a really tough spot. but, you know what, at some point -- put it this way. he gave a speech a few weeks ago where he said i refuse to be extorted. i'm going to push back. no one can threaten me and we saw him cave a little bit. i hope his gamble is the right one. i worry at some point he has to stand up to the president and yesterday might have been the right time to do it. >> ashley, we don't have a read out yet from the meeting. we're waiting for our white house reporters to give us one.

but there is speculation, rampant speculation, you guys report on it all the time, rosenstein's job is constantly in peril. i'm told the president understands he can't make the switch until after the midterms. he's sort of stuck with sessions and rosenstein until after that point. do you understand this to be an instance of over used any sort of inflection point for rosenstein? >> i think it's a pivotal meeting and it will be interesting to see how far in those reports that come out the president pushed for what he's sort of been saying publicly and how much they stood there -- >> didn't they bring in someone to do document production for the freedom caucus members? >> u.s. attorney. >> yeah. i mean, i think when you mention -- when you talk about an inflection point, i go back to what you just said about the midterms. there's a number of people i've talked to who are talking to the president saying, what you're seeing now publicly and it may be privately, is the president basically getting ready to lay the p.r. groundwork and the political groundwork for after the midterms regardless of the

result, to be in a position to potentially do what he wants to do, which is make changes at the justice department. and the goal for him and potentially you see this now from rudy giuliani, is to get the public to where that doesn't seem like such a red line and such an egregious thing. >> condition them for an unprecedented move. you spent time with rudy this weekend, interviewed him. here he was -- or here's the president actually on fox and friends talking about the high bar it would take for him to get involved with his own justice department. >> you look at the corruption at the top of the fbi. it's a disgrace. and our justice department, which i try and stay away from -- but at some point i won't -- our justice department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with russia. >> that was angry president trump. but rudy telegraphing some of these attacks on the justice department as an obvious strategy for protecting the president in the mueller probe. >> this is the most aggressive we've seen.

the president has said these things over of the past year, but now it's the double barrel of the president and rudy really going at this and creating an enormous amount of headlines and movement here. the question i still don't understand is what's the play? are they really just trying to muddy the waters and make it like a political fight? are they really going sit for an interview, are they trying to put leverage on mueller for the interview, or will they have to go to court and fight over a subpoena? i just don't know. it seems like an enormous amount of noise. they probably think in the short term it's been effective. i'm not sure in the end what it will really change. >> this double barrel rudy -- kick it back to you. one of the theories they're conditioning the 40% of the country that's behind them, the if he shoots people on 5th avenue for something that looks like a saturday night massacre for anybody that remembers what that was or felt like. it could be part of a strategy to do just that. >> absolutely, right.

part of it is the conditioning and part of it is that the president has long said and long griped he's told people, i want tv lawyers. so, what giuliani is doing is basically prosecuting the case in public that the president has always wanted to make. and he makes here and there on twitter but nothing like we've seen from giuliani's p.r. offensive. the important thing to keep in mind, double barrel, giuliani and the president are spending enormous time together >> burning the phone like teenage girls all day, all night. >> trying to get healthy together. one of them is sort of healthy. i think one important thing is when you see giuliani on tv or giving these interviews, you have to keep in mind that he is channeling the president. he is not always doing it as articulately as some might like or without -- >> i thought you were going to say as the president. they seem to be reading from the same script. >> that's exactly what you're seeing. >> that's the plan?

rudy and thelma and louise? >> the thing that is remarkable, whenever the president has a lawyer, the lawyer tends to take on the president's personality. it's emboldened rudy in a way that has allowed him to push this thing as far and wide as possible. and the thing is the strategy is not that different that what happened under ty cobb and john dowd except they weren't out there publicly. rudy is out there publicly now in a way that makes the president happy. >> last time i was here, you and i were with sally yates. let's watch that and talk about her warnings. >> i think what we're seeing here is the president has just taken his all-out assault on the rule of law to a new level. and this time he is ordering up an investigation of the investigators who are examining his own campaign. you know, that's really shocking. >> it is -- maybe you can explain to our viewers how high the alarm has to be for sally

yates to speak out. pretty high. it's pretty hard to get her to sound that alarmed about something she's seeing. she sort of is an institutionalist who believes we'll survive this, but i'm guessing what she saw over the weekend gave her sufficient alarm for her to go out this morning on morning joe. >> that is absolutely right. what the president did is a fundamental red line presidents aren't supposed to cross. they aren't supposed to get involved in any investigations in the department of justice. multiply that by 100 or 10 if they involve investigations into themselves which this one does. >> and his kids and son-in-law. >> all his associates. you have him trying to undermine the investigation into himself by ordering investigations into political opponents of his it from the former administration and career law enforcement agents. i think what he's doing, i think he is trying to condition the public to the idea that whatever bob mueller produces at the end of this, you can reject this as the product of a biased investigation. but he's also conditioning the public that it's okay for him to interfere with the justice department like this. that's what worries me and i

suspect what worries sally about what happened yesterday. the president sent this tweet. you heard no push back from republican members of congress. there was no outrage. by the end of the day he had gotten some of what he wanted. if you're out there as a member of the public, you're watching this, you say maybe it is okay for thement to order up investigations because the deputy attorney general put out a statement saying if there was something inappropriate that happened, even though there is no evidence of it, we need to find out. >> two other folks that reacted in a similar way or two former heads of the cia, john brennan and mike hayden, both with pretty strong words for the president, and brennan and the president went back and forth. brennan tweeting any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists. i think the most recent one was senator mcconnell of speaker ryan. if there trump continues the disastrous path you will bear responsibility. you do a great disservice to our nation and republican party who enable trump's self-serving actions. that invited a three-tweet storm and i'll spare our viewers the

whole thing. i'll give you the highlights. john brennan is panicking, tweeting the president, he's disgraced himself, he's disgraced the country and disgraced the entire intelligence community. he's the one man largely responsible for the destruction of america's faith in the justice community. what's that fight about? >> brennan has been a great target for trump. he's been out there publicly really aggressively and the republicans are deeply skeptical of brianna an's role in the entire thing and they've tried to paint him among the other folks they tried to go after at the fbi. one of the people at the root cause of this. the one thing we were talking about rosenstein and sort of what's going on there that i remember is that when comey was still fbi director a long time ago, he thought by march of 2017 they had gotten the white house to the place where they were going to respect the lanes of

the road. he told his friend they had figured -- they had gotten the white house to a good place where they understood -- >> why did he think that? he had worked something out with mcgahn? >> there had been discussions back and forth. it's just interesting how i guess far away we've come from that. >> it's interesting. the person that would have had that responsibility would have been the white house counsel don mcgahn who today i was told he's no longer one of the shiny pennies. he and kelly have this nonshiny penny status in the west wing. they don't have as easy time getting the president's ear as john bolton and larry kudlow. pick this up, ashley. talk about the fight with brennan. it's not just in the justice department, but among the intelligence community, the career professionals are being denigrated when the facts don't support the president's personal interests, his legal interests or those of his friends and family in the russia probe. >> that is exactly it. we've seen that since the beginning of this administration. it's sort of -- it seems on the surface a little incongruesome

for a preside -- incongruouos. it goes back to the original sin which are they were the people who went to him to say there is this dossier that exists and they were the people who were often bringing him bad news and they were the people who were investigating russia's interference into the 2016 presidential election. and so because of that, because he takes that so personally, he is now in the situation where he is at war with all of these different factions of his own government and the sorts of people who you traditionally want to keep closest to you. >> like your fbi director. can you talk about how weakened christopher wray is after his grave concerns the nunes memo was released and redacted by the white house, he made his grave concerns known, he put the entire credibility of the fbi behind a statement from the fbi saying he had grave concerns?

he testified on wednesday, we just played it, about the danger to our national security, the danger to any informant helping the united states of america, the danger to an informant's family if they're outed. this news organization, none of your news organizations have reported a name. it can be found. can you talk about christopher wray's power or lack thereof as director of the fbi? >> clearly the president isn't listening to christopher wray when it comes to protecting intelligence assets. although that name hasn't beneficially turned over to congress yet, it's out there publicly. he's been blown as a confidential source of the fbi. any investigations he's assisted in are blown. any associates he had who were under cover or might be put in danger by foreign governments are now exposed. chris wray and rod rosenstein warned about this clearly. the president wouldn't listen. devin nunes wouldn't listen and now a serious national security risk has been put into play. i think for christopher wray what he has to do is assure the people in his building that he will continue to fight for them. that he will continue --

>> but fight and lose -- >> fight and lose -- i think what he has -- he has to keep fighting. there is nothing he can do to control the president of the united states. all he can do is act with integrity on his own regard. what he can't do any more is convince foreign governments, foreign law enforcement agencies, cooperators with investigations that he can protect them because what we've seen in the last week is that he can't. >> all right. everyone staying put. when we come back it's starting to look like rudy giuliani might be playing let's make a deal with bob mueller's investigators playing jen ga. what rudy says may be the end by date for the obstruction of justice investigation. also ahead, questions about more monkey business with foreign governments in trump tower, and don junior is the common denominator. we'll bring you the latest. and chaos as the foreign policy strategy. not exactly panning out the way the president had hoped. we'll bring you that story, too. stay with us. hi, kids! i'm carl and i'm a broker. do you offer $4.95 online equity trades? great question. see, for a full service brokerage like ours,

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so, rudy, did you go on fox news last night? >> like 20 times, yeah. don't worry, i told them you are openly colluding with russia. but i concluded, so what? >> rudy giuliani's legal strategy not far from the truth. his personal attorney negotiating with robert mueller about bringing the russia probe to the end. if you believe rudy's version of events, he says the deal is going great. mueller will wrap up investigation into president trump by the end of the summer. according to the times, quote, mr. giuliani said the office of the special counsel shared its time line about two weeks ago amid negotiations over whether mr. trump will be questioned by investigators.

adding that mr. mueller's office said that the date was contingent on mr. trump sitting for an interview. times adding by putting an end date on the obstruction inquiry, giuliani is apparently seeking to publicly pressure mr. mueller to stick to that time line. has he met mr. mueller? so far there haven't -- there hasn't been any evidence that mueller has ever responded to public pressure and there is no word from anyone inside the special counsel's office on what -- whether mueller actually made these concessions in dealing with trump's team. joining the conversation now washington post columnist eugene robinson. you've been watching mueller along with the nation. >> yes. >> it sounds like this was a conversation and maybe rudy only shared, you know, his end of it. >> or made it up. i mean -- frankly -- >> it sounds like something was offered in exchange for something else. >> yeah. >> he shared the side that worked for him. >> exactly. look, his credibility on telling us what robert mueller intends

to do and when he intends to finish his investigation is zero as far as i'm concerned. i mean, his approach to defending the president -- >> he is the president's lawyer, though, representing him. is that more reason to be alarmed? >> no, i mean, it's an odd kind of legal strategy, right, is to go on all the shows and just say crazy stuff. and i guess confuse everybody as to the state of the actual state of play of the investigation. what he's actually hearing from mueller -- i assume giuliani knows what he's hearing from mueller, but i don't assume he's telling us. >> it's your story. you tell us what rudy is hearing from mueller. is it possible it's not mueller doing the talking? people who know mueller say mueller wouldn't tell a dying relative what his plan was for the next day, let alone rudy giuliani who is all over tv telegraphing it. >> it's mueller's office having

these meetings with giuliani. mueller is in the meetings. there are other folks from the office there. what's gone on here, what it looks like, is that mueller really wants the president to sit for an interview. >> why? >> because mueller believes that to complete the investigation, he has to talk to the president. he has to know whether he had criminal intent in the decision to fire comey and the other obstruction of justice -- >> what are the other -- you have all the story about the obstruction questions. what were the other obstruction buck snets wh buckets. what does he want to ask about? >> the efforts to get sessions to resign, when he had don mcgahn lobby sessions to not recuse himself from the investigation. talk about his efforts to fire mueller himself when trump asked don mcgahn last year to, to have mueller fired. >> and some of this information is coming to mueller in real-time. people have having to go back and update their testimony.

i guess my question is how do you wrap up an investigation of obstruction of justice if the obstruction is ongoing? >> that's a good question. what giuliani is trying to do here is he's trying to say it's part of the larger narrative. let's bring an end to this. this has gone on for a year we have the midterm elections coming up. try and put some political pressure on mueller to basically say, look, if this thing goes on beyond september, you are unfairly influencing the electorate. >> one of the targets, so that you and your colleague maggie haberman report, we want the concentration of this to be on comey versus the president's credibility. and i think we win that. people get that, mr. giuliani said, adding he also hoped the justice department opened a criminal investigation into mr. comey for perjury and his role in the disclosures to "the new york times" last year about his encounters with the president that prompted mueller's appointment. this is what rudy's friends and giuliani call the original sin.

you've been tough on comey at times. what do you think of this as a legal strategy? >> i think rude hayes been watching too much fox and friends. outside of that world, there is no fair rational person that looks at jim comey and looks at donald trump and thinks donald trump is the one telling the truth about those encounters. that is beside the fact jim comey wrote memos about them that would be very serious evidence that would back up his side of the case. and told associates of his exactly what happened. so, it's not just comey's word. >> and all of them are witnesses in the mueller probe so those are already in big binders stacked in the special -- >> all of them are witnesses and many of them have had their own troubling interactions with the president. andrew mccabe one of the witnesses had his own moments with the witness where the president encouraged him to do inappropriate things. it is donald trump versus a number of people at the justice department, if he fbi, and all of the american people who have watched him publicly try to interfere with this investigation on twitter and interviews. it's not, you know, it's a little bit of a diluted point of view rudy has on this. >> it's not no obstruction

donald trump tweets every day. his daily, you know, mantra is no collusion, no collusion, whether it's on tax cuts or the trade war. just wrapping up the obstruction probe clearly wouldn't give the president the peace of mind he so desperately seeks. >> right. that's correct. there's two key buckets he's looking in and the key one or not the key one, but the original one is collusion. but trump aides i talk to say -- and this may be true or untrue, it's hard to gauge, but that the president truly in his heart believes that there was no collusion. he is tweeting what is deeply true to him. whether it is actually true is another question. but he on some level feels he has less to worry about when they're looking in the collusion bucket because he feels he has done nothing wrong and he thinks they will find nothing through. the obstruction thing is trickier, although you'll hear him say, i did nothing wrong, so there was nothing for me to obstruct. that's not, of course, quite how

it works. but it all goes back to his belief that he did nothing with the russians in the 2016 campaign. >> but these are two distinct universes, right. the universe of what donald trump deeply believes and may very sincerely believe happened, and the universe of what actually happened. >> not saying the same thing. >> i know, exactly. >> but i mean, so even his friends are talking to him on television. we turned on some sound of governor chris christie who is a close outside advisor to the president. but even he seems to be dispensing legal advice on television. >> i've told him many times that there's no way to make an investigation like this shorter, but there's lots of ways to make it longer, and he's executed on a number of those ways to make it longer. bob mueller himself is not a partisan. he's an honest guy, a hard working guy, he's smart. and you can't argue that the investigation hasn't been effective so far. a number of guilty pleas, couple of indictments in a year. it's pretty good work.

and so i said all along, i don't question bob mueller's honesty or his integrity, never have. having worked with himself enyears, i still wouldn't. >> that is some distance chris christie haggled. he yelled at me once, what are you working for bob mueller? i said some things about bob mueller. it seems at the one year mark mueller has proven to be careful. he's proven to be a leak-free zone. and i think the president's friends and allies are concerned that he has some exposure on the obstruction question and that around collusion, they know ma mueller knows more than the president. >> exactly. they don't know what he knows. certainly not all of them know what mueller might know about collusion. you know, it has been a really productive investigation over the past year with all these indictments and guilty pleas. that's unusual. it's unusually fast for this much to have happened. so, the idea that this is sort of dragging on and on and on

compared to others, special and independent counsel investigations, this is -- i'm sorry, mr. president, this is just getting started. >> i think you're right. all right, matt, we lose you, but thank you so much for spending time with us. when we come back, a story donald trump called long and boring on twitter was enough to suck him into bob mueller following the money. that story is next. (baby crying) (slow jazz music) ♪ fly me to the moon ♪ and let me play (bell ring)

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yet another story about team trump eagerly meeting with foreign governments offering assistance with their presidential campaign effort. "the new york times" reporting on a previously unknown meeting in trump tower in august of 2016 in which donald trump, jr. metta long with erik prince, the private security contractor and black water founder, joel zamel an israeli media specialist and

george nader who told don junior that the princes who led saudi arabia and the u.a.e. were eager to help his father win election as president. it is a known known that bob mueller is looking into contacts between foreign governments and the trump campaign. one of the reporters who broke that story said on msnbc earlier, what's been striking is this appears to be a pretty active line of inquiry. joining us on set now, michael steele, former chair of the rnc. what do you make of this crush of reporting over the weekend about bob mueller's clear lines of investigation? he's following the money wherever it leads. it's not just ties to russia that are under scrutiny. it's ties to mid east governments and all the consultants that brought them into trump tower. we have another meeting with don junior as the common denominator. he obviously saw himself as, i don't know, some sort of c

consigliary for his father, people come in want to bring posters, he brought in foreign governments. >> couple things. one, why are we surprised? at this stage -- at this stage of inquiry, why are we surprised that we have found out about yet another meeting that supposedly never happened? and so that's number one. the surprise element for me is just long gone. number two, for me it's always been about following the money, believe it or not. it's not been about the dance of collusion. it has been about how donald trump, before had he got into the presidential race was trying to position his enterprise to take advantage of relationships around the globe starting with russia. the presidency offered an opportunity for him to expand that operation. so, from a business perspective, this is part of a business plan. and the meetings that these individuals had, there was no concern about the political nor legal consequence of them because this was all about a

broader deal that was set in motion -- >> this is illegal as people doing -- let me read from the piece. it is illegal for foreign governments or individuals to be involved in american elections. it is unclear what assistance saudi arabia and the emirates may have provided. two people familiar with the trump campaign said officials did not appear to be bothered about the cooperation with foreigners. honest answer, do you have any idea they think it was illegal? >> they never made the appropriate inquiry. i almost bet you there was such a wall built around that inner circle that the lawyers who were somehow tasked to the campaign were not aware that these conversations and meetings were taking place, that these were something that were off the books. they were part of an ongoing business proposition the trump team had put in place before they even got into a presidential campaign. for his son to say, dad is running, you want to help, great. come up to trump tower, we'll kabitz a little bit and workout a deal.

>> these weren't meetings with sweden or australia, canada, no. they're meetings with countries where there are huge -- you know, money pots of opaque money, of money whose origin is hidden. >> the united states government. >> there you have it. >> let me ask you about your colleague's comment that was clear they reported this out that mueller had already traveled all of this terrain. do you guys have that sense that you're now sort of catching up to stuff that mueller already knows about? >> he is always ahead of us. >> no offense, but i'm glad. >> we are faster ahead than we are, but not to bring it back to rudy, like i've done all day, but what rudy said yesterday about this -- what i found sort of funny and interesting -- rudy says, this is a great sign for us. nothing came in the meeting shows that they can't find collusion in russia. they're looking in other places.

where are we going to look now, africa and south america? this is a good thing for us. this is a good story for us. >> ashley, the president once again, rudy tweeting, this is getting ridiculous. failing and crooked but not as crooked as hillary clinton, he calls the story boring, long and boring story indicating that the world's most expensive witch hunt has found nothing on russia and me so now they're looking at the rest of the world. do you think they're actually comforted by this story? do you think this is more fog? >> it's sort of a deft piece of spin because in general, the more the special counsel looks into other avenues and other channels, most people would be a bit alarmed or concerned or worried. but the president has spun it as, you know, they can't find anything with russia so now they're just going on even more of a wild goose chase. it's unclear to me if he really believes that or if it's convenient spin.

>> the truth is it's such a small swath of the public that is still persuadable on the mueller probe. he's more trustworthy than the president. but the trump base, it doesn't matter whether collusion -- it doesn't matter any of this ends up to the trump base. what do you think the import is for these developments? >> the import is for mueller is doing it is what it is. we'll have to wait and see how that plays out. in terms of importance to trump world, to me the reality of it is, if none of this mattered, then why are you tweeting about it? >> and why is your friend chris christie on tv telling you you can only make things worse? >> why are you running through attorneys like water on a hut summer day? despite he wants to play it off, call it boring, "the new york times" is this, washington post is that, the truth of the matter is he's about to get stung. he's deflecting, trying to diffuse the impact so that when the time comes, he calls on that base, and they make the loudest

noise they can on his behalf. >> you keep going back to the money, which is the right place to go. >> yep. >> and i keep going back to the michael cohen raid which -- exactly. i mean, that got to the president, i think, in a way other things might not have. >> could the family be the common link? >> it could, certainly could be. the one thing we've gotten out of it, if the times wants to get out rid of all the news fit to print, not as crooked as hillary clinton. >> give it a nickname. when we come back, the washington post out with fantastic new reporting on how confusion and squabbling do not make for clean foreign policy wins for donald trump. stay with us. we came here for the friends.

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we're back with some breaking news from the white house. the press secretary releasing this statement on the yut come of the president's meeting with his top justice department and

fbi officials. sanders saying, quote, based on the meeting with the president, the department of justice has asked the inspector general to expand its current investigation to include any irregularities with the federal bureau of investigations or the department of justice's tactics concerning the trump campaign. it was also agreed that white house chief of staff kelly will immediately set up a meeting with the fbi, doj, to review highly classified and other information they have requested. so, it sounds like, eugene, matt miller's prediction at the top of our hour was precisely right. rosenstein finding middle ground where they add to the highly regarded inspector general's load. >> what rosenstein said yesterday will -- the inspector general will get right on this. so they'll do that. the second part of the statement is i'm not sure exactly what that means, though. does that mean -- >> kelly will have a meeting? >> he'll have to disclose the source anyhow?

or not? or just talk about not disclosing? i'm not clear on that. >> i think the white house wants the name so they can leak it. >> well, yeah. they do. >> is it part of satisfying the freedom caucus members we were talking about at the beginning of the hour, part of speeding up document production is to get some of these agitators off the backs of the justice department? is that part of what happens if this -- >> rosenstein, once again, showing that he is sort of the ultimate survivor here. after rosenstein was named as the deputy attorney general back in 2017, comey told one of his friends, he said, i'm not sure about rod. you know, i think he's a good guy, but he says he's really the ultimate survivor. he'd been u.s. attorney under different administrations. he said i think rod may be willing to do things politically to keep his position. and here rosenstein is navigating these incredibly difficult things the past year. still the deputy attorney general, still overseeing the

mueller investigation while trying to pacify the president. >> if you're right, then he hasn't really found any middle ground at all. he rolled over and has done with the president wants the justice department to do from the beginning, something he said out loud, he wants his guys. >> the second part of that statement plays, how that plays itself out. what comes out of this meeting with the dni and doj, et cetera, what is the president and the white house specifically looking for and asking for that they want to put on the table? and i bet to your point that rosenstein is going to be rather smooth about that and very careful about it because at the end of the day, the fbi and all of these agencies do not want their sources revealed regardless. and they're going to protect that as much and as hard as they can. >> do you get the sense, ashley, in reading this, they were able to explain that to the president, educate him on the importance of this? or does it sound like they're simply going to go along and create a process giving detractors of the bureau and

justice department what they wanted? >> i think from reading that frankly it's just a little unclear. i mean, the second part especially is the more intriguing part. it sets up a meeting. to me the interesting question is what happens in this meeting. is this a meeting to discuss options or is this a meeting to sort of hand over the goods. and you don't really get a clear sense from that statement. the other thing i would say is i have to believe -- and people do seem to believe rod rosenstein does have some personal red line. you know, we've reported he's told friends earlier he's at peace with any decision that may happen. if he has to get fired, if he has to resign, he's fine with that. but to mike's point, he is a survivor. i think what you're seeing here is as long as there is some room to get a middle ground, to expand the inspector general's probe but not start something new, he is going to try to do that as long as he can. and he probably has fair reason to believe that him being there, even if he's sort of, as matt said earlier, compromising and giving an inch is still better

than him being gone entirely. >> and mueller losing the protection. >> exactly. >> do you think that this was wray and rosenstein and sort of the d.o.j., i don't know, deep state, if you will, spinning the president saying, yeah, we'll speed up document production, we'll get them what they need, or do you think this is a loss for the two buildings -- >> i just don't know. we don't know. literally, it says there is going to be a meeting, right, between kelly and the folks who don't want to give up the name, right? and so is kelly really going to push them to release the name of a classified source, having served in the military all his life, knowing what classified sources mean, knowing what this means for our relations with other countries, with other intelligence agencies? you can't do that. you can't do that and expect to have the kind of cooperation

that we need. so, maybe they're just telling, mr. president, we'll take care of -- >> don mcgahn -- >> maybe not. maybe the president is insistent and we just don't know. >> all right. we're going to stay on it. up next, the chaos strategy. ♪ ♪ (baby crying) ♪ ♪ don't juggle your home life and work life without it. ♪ ♪ and don't forget who you're really working for without it. ♪ ♪ funding to help grow your business...

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emboldened trump reaches for historicum triumphs in hopes of bolstering his party this the midterm elections he finds himself repeatedly stymied by his old patterns of chaos. take the president's summit with north korea. "new york times" reports trump is worried this could turn into a quote political embarrassment ask aides whether or not the meeting is worth the risk. ashley, every foreign policy person i talked to, whether they were a democrat or republican, whether they were a bush republican or a trump thought it was idiotic that he telegraphed that he was one going to win a peas prize and this was how else going to hold onto the house and senate in the mid terms. it seemed like it took 11 days for that to come true. >> he seemed a little overeager in these negotiations. the one thing his aides have always said and he has always said is by being unpredictable and rash, all these things

people think is negatives they tried to spin it and argue in that it means he is a good negotiator because the other side never knows what he will do. he can do anything at any minute. but if you look at what he says you get a sense of how desperate and eager he is to get a deal on this. it would be historic, a capital w win something barack obama couldn't do. it could set him up in theory for the peace prize. he telegraphed where i think he wants this to go, which makes the current unraveling we are seeing more difficult to palette and difficult to navigate. >> i want to read more from the piece. you write about how he loves pitting everyone against each other. trump enjoys and encourages infighting which often leads to the feuds spilling into the public arena. i like conflict trump said in march. i like having two people with different points of view.

i certainly have that and then i make a decision. i love watching it, seeing it, i think it's the best way to go. he ended up in a war of words with the national security adviser about the libya model. >> because he didn'tr doesn't know what it is. the problem is, in this case it is the president versus anything who knows anything about north korea. >> are you defending john bolton? >> what? >> are you -- >> on this score, yes, i would disagree with his policy probably, and i have never before defended john bolton but in fact he does know about north korea. he knows about north korea's geopolitical space, in northeast. he knows how kim jong-un would look at that. and you know, thinking decades down the road of where he will be if he agrees to this or that. president trump knows none of this, therefore he's going to

talk to this guy, make a deal? it makes no sense. >> i think a critical part of that goes to the man himself, a man who has professed a lack of interest in reading, a lack of interest in being briefed. what's important about those two things, particularly in the job of president is that you have to absorb and internalize so that you can assess and then go out and figure out what your policy is going to be, how you want to move forward on these things. i think what is happening now is he is getting all of this information, he's beginning to see just how difficult this is to do, to put this summit on in the time span they want to put it on in to get the outcome he wants. and north korea is not necessarily playing ball the way he thought they would, saying and doing some things that are problematic. then there is south korea. south korea is moving forward. i think there is also the concern that south korea is going to come up, the south korean president is going to be the one who is going to be the champion at the end of the day

and not the president. i think more than anything else that sticks in his craw. >> is that a worry, that he may get the peace prize instead of the president. >> or at least share it. >> are you picking that up, ashley. >> i think the broader issue, to make it more broad than north korea, as you know disagreements in a white house are not uncommon. there is often vigorous policy debate. the difference is it takes place behind the scenes and you rarely have a president is one of his top advisors contradicting each other. or if you take china and trade you rarely have two of the president's top advisors screaming at each other in the streets of beijing. the president has chosen advisors that are sort of made for tv. elevated them, given their their own back stories now they get all of this coverage and it's distracting. >> we have to sneak in our last break. we'll be right back. smuggled booze and dodged the law. even when they brought you in, they could never hold you down.

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succinct things. she tweeted after the statement from the white house came out that reminder, trump is a subject of the investigation he will apparently succeed in obtaining evidence in and that no subject is entitled to during a criminal investigation. this is unprecedented. joyce clearly not a fan of the breaking news from the white house this afternoon about the process they set up. my thank the eugene robinson, mike schmidt, ashley walker. mtb starts right now. >> if it is monday, it is tea trump tower meeting, the quell. tonight, new collusion questions after the revelation of a second secret trump tower meeting. plus, demanding justice. the president orders the justice department to investigate whether the fbi infiltrated his campaign. >> the president has just taken his