msnbc will have complete coverage of the battle for control of congress from here on in. also, if you missed the last word on tv, you can get the show any time as a podcast. listen for free on apple podcasts now or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast. listen for free on apple podcasts now, or wherever you get your podcasts. trump's people. let's play hardball. good evening. i'm chris matthews in washington, and welcome to the "hardball" labor day show. and for purposes of this holiday we're calling it the real characters of trump world. president donald trump campaigned on his star factor, as the host of the reality show "the apprentice," and that mindset has followed him all the way into his presidency where there's never a slow newsday and every action he takes falls somewhere under unprecedented. for the next hour we're going to look at the cast of characters of trump's reality show presidency.

there are the villains, the sycophants, of course, the flippers and the would-be celebrities of course. and some of them are heading to prison. and others are helping to put former allies in prison. there's been backbiting, social climbing, conspiracies and yes, relentless drama. and one sideshow came full circle when omarosa manigault newman, who played the villain on "the apprentice" and later a white house aide, came out with a new tell-all book. omarosa's strategy on "the apprentice" was to mirror trump's own behavior. here she is on season 1. >> heidi was fantastic. and i will tell you that i haven't always been a fan of heidi. i haven't always thought that she was professional nor that she had much class or finesse. >> that's very nice. >> thank you. >> that's one of the worst compliments i've ever heard. >> best compliments, i have no class. >> but i've been very candid with heidi, have i someone. >> yes. i appreciate that. >> i'm not so sure. that's maybe the worst thing i've heard here.

>> i had a lot of class. >> that's the worst thing i think i've ever heard. that's the worst compliment i've ever heard. >> omarosa used her book tour to keep her story relevant by making news in every interview. let's watch. >> i asked you before a couple hours ago omarosa if you have any other recordings. you wouldn't share them here. do you got some? >> i have plenty. >> anything mueller would like to see? mr. robert mueller. >> if he -- if his office calls again -- >> would you be a great witness in this investigation by mueller? >> absolutely. anything they want i will certainly cooperate. >> do you think trump should be impeached? >> at this point yes. >> you were instructed according to your book to bring up the e-mails at every point you could at the end of the 2016 campaign. >> that's correct. >> hillary clinton's. e-mails. >> yes. that was our talker. >> did donald trump know about those e-mails before they came out? >> absolutely. it's interesting he's trying to silence me. what is he trying to hide? >> he thought i could be disposed of. but donald trump is wrong. >> trevor, i would say this. if you see me in a fight with a bear, pray for the bear. >> everything that's in my book

"unhinged," everything you that see in quotes is verifiable, it's documented and it's corroborated. >> when others tried to refute her, omarosa had the tapes to back up her claims. here's her recording of chief of staff john kelly firing her in the situation room. >> i think it's important to understand that if we make this a friendly departure we can all be -- you can look at your time here in the white house as a year of service to the nation. and then you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation. >> after former trump campaign aide katrina pierson said she was never part of a conversation about whether trump used the n word on "the apprentice," omarosa released a tape of that very conversation about trump to "cbs this morning." let's listen. >> i'm trying to find out at least the context it was used in to help us maybe try to figure out a way to spin it.

>> patton then described a conversation she had with then candidate trump about making the slur. >> i said, well, sir, can you think of any time this might have happened? and he said no. >> well, that's not true. so -- >> he goes, how do you think i should handle it? and i told him exactly what you just said, omarosa, which is well, it depends on what scenario you're talking about. and he said, well, why don't you go ahead and just put it to bed? he said it. he's embarrassed. >> well, omarosa also released audio of trump's daughter-in-law lara trump offering her, omarosa, a job on the 2020 campaign in exchange for her staying quiet about her time in the white house. >> it sounds a little like obviously that there are some things you've got in the back pocket to pull out. clearly, if you come on board the campaign, like, we can't have -- we got to -- >> oh god no -- >> everything, everybody positive, right?

>> i'm ginned by shannon petty, jason johnson, politics editor at theroot.com, betsy woodruff, politics reporter at the daily beast, and dana milbank, political columnist with "the washington post." also jonathan allen, national political reporter for nbc news digital. what a cast to talk about what a cast. and i must say that. shannon, she seems to be the first person to stride onto the stage, and i mean the stage, who has the same abilities for tv, the game that trump plays so well, that he has. >> case in point, having audio. what makes for good tv? audio. tapes. visuals. she understood that. it's a basic thing. but president trump, the ultimate producer. she is also an ultimate producer. you know, knows how to present herself on tv, knows how to get attention with a tape recording. and i think there's a lot that's been said about omarosa, but i think she has highlighted a very crucial flaw in trump that he has a hard time seeing who his friends are and who his enemies

are. she was obviously making these tape recordings for a long time. he obviously thought she was someone he could trust and has of course been proven wrong. >> and he built her up, jason. he made this -- he stepped back and glowed at her performances on "the apprentice." you can see that. >> kept bringing her through, did the omarosa ultimate merger, a dating show. he created this monster, for lack of a better word. >> or a beckett, if you want to be literary. >> but here's the thing that also is fascinating. you could teach a master's class on her book rollout. i have never seen anyone -- and we've seen books come out of white houses before. who've managed to do like 72 straight hours of press and drop one little nugget of information on every single show she went on. this is dangerous for national security but it's a brilliant rollout on her behalf. >> i think it's a fall rollout to come. i think it's still going. shannon. i mean betsy. >> one thing that's important to remember with omarosa is she very much was pure showman.

during her time in the white house, white house officials told us repeatedly that she just wasn't moving the ball forward on many important issues and in fact there was nearly a crisis in the leadup to the first african-american history month of trump's presidency because omarosa was supposed to have a leadership role in setting up events, making things happen, and the night before certain white house officials realized that there were a number of people who hadn't been invited, who hadn't been looped in. so it was almost a minor crisis. and there's a host of examples of situations like that where omarosa instead of accomplishing jobs she was supposed to get done with seems to be focused more on being in the room for certain meetings. and of course the fallout of that is she had recordings from being in the room for those meetings with tectonic consequences. >> in a weird way too she was perceived by a lot of white house aides as being incompetent but i was always told that trump always trusted her. >> what her job was. i literally asked her that question at a conference last year, and she couldn't really explain it. that's part of how you get in

trouble. >> the president might have the same answer when asked about his job in moving the fall forward. there's a certain cosmic justice in the whole thing here. the president came in. and you know, who's he going to staff his administration with? the usual suspects had absolutely no interest in it. what he did is he built his staff in his own model. it may not be trustworthy, maybe a little fast and loose with the truth, questions about loyalty but brilliant showman. so this works to an extent when they're all rowing in the same direction. when you see now with a michael cohen, with a omarosa, is they have prodigious talents if they're used against you. >> they sure are. anyway, former trump lawyer michael cohen took center stage earlier this year after he implicated the president paying hush money to adult film actress stormy daniels and "playboy" model karen mcdougal during the 2016 election. might those references to adult actress and -- anyway, playboy, the whole thing, this is so trumpian. anyway.

cohen released a secret recording of himself and the president discussing a possible payment to mcdougal. let's listen to this tape recording. >> i need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend david. so that -- i'm going to do that right away. i've actually come up -- and i've spoken to allen weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up. with -- >> so what are we going to pay? >> yes. and it's all the stuff -- all the stuff. because here you never know where that company -- you never know what he's -- >> maybe he gets hit by a truck. >> correct. so i'm all over that. and i spoke to allen about it. when it comes time for the financing, which will be -- >> way a sec, what financing? >> we'll have to pay -- >> cash. >> no, no, no. no, no. >> cohen isn't a new figure in trump world. of course in a tape from 2015 released by npr this year, he made an astonishing claim to a reporter asking about allegations by trump's first wife ivana in a 1989 deposition

that trump raped her. let's listen. >> you're talking about donald trump. you're talking about the front-runner for the gop, presidential candidate, as well as private individual who never raped anybody -- and of course understand that by the very definition you can't rape your spouse. >> ivana said in 2015 that the story is totally without merit. well, cohen then threatened the reporter. >> mark my words for it. i will make sure that you and i meet one day when we're in the courthouse, and i will take you for everything you still don't have and i will come after you daily beast and everybody else you that possibly know. do not even think about going to where i know you're planning on going.

so i'm warning you, tread very [ bleep ] lightly because what i'm going to do to you is going to be [ bleep ] disgusting. do you understand me? don't think you can hide behind your pen. okay? it's not going to happen. >> jonathan, do you understand me? do you understand me? that is mob talk. and that is definitely back room with a rubber hose, don't mess with me stuff. that's not the somewhat sympathetic figure we see walking to and from the courthouse these days. >> he's a lovely calm gentleman. i think hollywood actors are going to be fighting each other to play michael cohen in the movie version of all this someday. i mean, this character is unbelievable. you see -- you know, shame and contrition in the courtroom the other day. again, talking like a mob enforcer much -- not a fixer or a lawyer but like an enforcer. what's fascinating, though, about the recording of trump which seems to implicate a lot of other people, or at least bring them in, david pecker, other lawyers in the trump operation, what's amazing about

that tape is that's what you would expect the fbi to get if they had had a wiretap authorized. and this is michael cohen taping it himself. you have to wonder about two things. number one, you know, how little he trusts donald trump to begin with. and number two, you know, sort of how dumb he is to do that in terms of the potential for that to become a huge legal liability for himself in the future as we have seen it did. >> how many mob movies have we seen, i've seen a lot, where they always check to see if you're wired? trump never checked to see if these guys are wired. these women, they're wired when they go in to see him. >> no. and we say this over and over again but it does have that sort of a mob feel you like they should all have certain nicknames that should be passed around. >> mikey the rat. >> and everybody has their price for a certain amount. there appears to be loyalty. you have the president talking about john dean the rat. you have him talking about flipping -- flipping should be a crime.

>> alfonso capone. >> i thought it would be tazio is the smart move. it was clemenza. the one that comes to you is the traitor. it's all fitting here, jason. >> this is why i don't understand anyone would do go fund me for this guy. why are people coming to his defense now. >> i want to see more of it. >> when he is clearly aggressive. this speaks to the culture of this administration in general. you notice also his logic, his logic was oh, you can't do that to your wife. that speaks to that overall misogyny in this administration that like -- >> who said, that by the way? >> that's cohen. your definition, you can't rape your wife. ask john wayne bobbitt. you can. it speaks to not only the violence, the misogyny, but also just the rage that seems to flow through every member of this administration. >> meanwhile, former campaign manager paul manafort has been a major target of the mueller investigation. though manafort was in charge of trump's campaign during the pivotal months spanning the end of the republican primary season

through the republican national convention, the president has attempted to diminish that role. let's watch this. >> i think the whole manafort trial is very sad. when you look at what's going on there. i think it's a very sad day for our country. he worked for me for a very short period of time. but you know what? he happens to be a very good person. and i think it's very sad what they've done to paul manafort. thank you very much. >> before joining the trump campaign manafort had had extensive political and financial ties to russia of course. we know that. he also attended that trump tower meeting with the russian lawyer to get dirt on hillary clinton and played a role in softening the republican party platform on aiding ukraine against russia. all helpful to moscow. during the campaign, however, manafort denied that the trump campaign had any relationship with russia. let's watch. >> are there any ties between mr. trump, you or your campaign, and putin and his regime? >> no, there are not. it's absurd.

there's no basis to it. >> this is an absurd attempt by the clinton campaign to try and get the focus off of what the real issue is. >> they're pretty desperate pretty quickly is all i have to say on that. >> what do you make of this guy? lately trump's going back to him, shannon. and showing tremendous empathy for the guy. like i'm going to pardon you, buddy. >> and trump doesn't -- like most things with trump, you don't have to say anything. you could just be quiet. you know, you don't have to step into this. trump goes out of his way, even on twitter, to defend paul manafort. there seems to be a pretty growing consensus, i don't have any fact that this is the case, but an assumption of a paul manafort pardon coming at some point. there seems to be a growing assumption of that. and yeah, he also likes to portray paul manafort as someone who's barely involved in the campaign. which is a classic move. everyone who gets caught up in a legal issue is now all of a sudden someone he barely knew. >> betsy, he also did that with flynn for a while, remember? he was sort of teasing him,

offering him, i'm really sad for the guy. then he sort of stopped that stuff. he's still working on manafort. >> what's interesting about the flynn situation is that he has been working with mueller's team for months and months now. and the date of his sentencing keeps getting moved forward. now, there hasn't been public reporting as to what exactly flynn is helping mueller find out, but it's generated a ton of speculation, and i imagine some stress in the white house that this person who is deeply involved in the president's campaign, deeply involved in those consequential early few days in his presidency, has been quietly talking with mueller for months. >> so many concerns if you're trump. anyway, the panel's staying with us for the hour. and up next, this guy. >> you know, you're really beautiful. >> this may be the best of all. oh, you dirty boy. oh. oh! donald, i thought you were a gentleman. >> you know, he is an actor. and we're watching that today too.

that's the president's lawyer during happier days. our panel weighs in on rudy giuliani next.

welcome back to "hardball." rudy giuliani was once known as america's mayor. america's mayor. but this year he took on a different role as trump's tv defense lawyer. he started off his public campaign defense of the president by openly admitting that trump repaid that money that was funneled through a law firm to stormy daniels. >> having something to do with paying some stormy daniels woman 130,000? i mean, which is going to turn out to be perfectly legal. that money was not campaign money. sorry, i'm giving you a fact now that you don't know. it's not campaign money. no campaign finance violation. >> they funneled it to the law firm. >> funneled it through the law firm and the president repaid it.

>> well, giuliani's defense of michael cohen evolved, of course, as talk of cohen turning against the president grew louder. >> imagine if that came out on october 25th, 2016. cohen did his job. >> michael cohen i think would tell you he's got nothing incriminating with the president. and really they should stop going after him. they're torturing the guy. >> i don't see how he has any credibility. this is basically if you had a trial, and there won't be a trial here, but if you had a trial, why would you want to pick? there's nobody that knows him that hasn't warned me that if his back is against the wall he will lie like crazy. because he's lied all his life. >> well, rudy's defense of the president also shifted from saying there was no collusion to arguing that collusion isn't a crime. >> this started as collusion with the russians. no. now they go to obstruction of justice, collusion among the players. what they're really trying to do

is trap him into perjury. and we're not suckers. >> the whole investigation is totally illegitimate. he believes if he gets the chance to explain it people will understand no collusion with the russians, no obstruction of justice. they have to come to grips with the fact they are investigating an innocent man. and you can do that forever. you're never going to find any evidence. somebody's got to put an end to this. >> and he did not collude. there's no evidence he colluded. but in the alternative collusion is not a crime. >> when you tell me he should testify because he's going to at tell the truth and you shouldn't worry, well, that's so silly because it's somebody's version of the truth, not the truth. he didn't have a conversation -- >> truth is truth. i don't mean to go -- >> no, it isn't truth. truth isn't truth. >> back with the panel. jonathan, i hate to say this but i think he gives criminal law a bad name. i can think of the worst criminal lawyers that will say anything in defense of a guilty defendant, anything. and this guy has proven he can outdo any of them.

>> chris, i think we should stop considering rudy giuliani as a lawyer for purposes of defending donald trump or really any other purposes. this is not somebody -- this is somebody who has done as much to make the case that donald trump could be implicated in crimes as he has to take away from it. he goes and says this isn't -- you know, this isn't campaign money. well, that's not actual good for donald trump's case here. rudy giuliani has, you know, done the job he's been asked to, much like many other trump aides have, which is to go out and say things for the president that are not true, absurd, things that can be disproven immediately and sometimes things that evolve and can later be disproven. we've seen between the president and giuliani and all the other people who've represented the president the story about the hush money payments just change from there were no hush money payments, the president didn't know about the hush money payments, he didn't know about them till later on, all of a sudden -- it is basically a distraction, a pr distraction

from what's actually going on here, which is there's serious legal jeopardy for a lot of people around the president of the united states. we don't know whether the president can be indicted. we may find out. >> shannon -- >> i think rudy is intentionally making this a distraction public relations campaign because he believes this is not going to be a criminal case, this is going to be about impeachment. >> therefore, truth isn't truth. >> and muddy the waters. if he can muddy the waters. if he can confuse people at home who don't follow this all the time. if he can create confusion, create a shadow of a doubt, and solidify trump's base and give them talking points to help defend the president. that's his job. that's what he is here to do. and you can say a lot of things about rudy giuliani. but through his career he has known how to manipulate the media, how to manipulate public perception, how to set a public relations trap for people. so the people who know him say don't count him out on that count, on managing public relations. >> jason, does this mean the prosecution here, mueller, is going to need a tape like they

needed -- jaworski needed a tape against nixon? because i get the sense if you can say truth isn't truth, what you're really arguing is if you're willing to believe my side of the argument i'll say anything. >> they're going to need a lot more evidence than what we know of now. that's probably why they're taking as long as they need to take. unless you get a direct e-mail that says trump for sure, we can prove he knew about the meeting, unless you can get? some direct commentary from the president or an e-mail that confirms it, yeah, that's what mueller is going to need. but i think the problem sort of politically you hear from giuliani and a lot of these people, first it was collusion, collusion's not a crime. it's like in the fugitive, i didn't kill my wife. but if i did it was an accident. that doesn't work, right? you would still end up going to jail. you would still end up committing a crime. >> he didn't kill his wife. >> of course. >> that's critical. >> that's the critical thing. we don't know. we're finding out. >> one-armed man did. another reliable defender of the president this year was california republican representative devin nunes. i love this guy's name. known for his midnight run to the white house to view reports that he said unmasked members of

the trump transition team. he then went back to the same white house the next day with the news he got from the white house the night before and he announced his findings and he briefed the president on what he got from his own white house. this is incredible. >> i have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the president-elect and his team were i guess at least monitored and disseminated out in intelligence. >> what i saw has nothing to do with russia and nothing to do with the russia investigation, has everything to do with possible surveillance activities, and the president needs to know that these intelligence reports are out there. and i have a duty to tell him that. >> i felt like i had a duty and an obligation to tell him because as you know he's been taking a lot of heat in the news media. >> well, this year nunes continued to do whatever he could to discredit the russia investigation itself. he attacked the intelligence community and falsely claimed that the russia investigation itself started solely because of

that christopher steele dossier. he also threatened to impeach deputy attorney general rod rosenstein and fbi director christopher wray for not turning over documents he wanted from the mueller probe. >> i think the american people understand that the fbi should not go to secret courts using information that was paid for by the democrats to open up investigations and get warrants on people of the other political party. that's the type of stuff that happens in banana republics. >> so there's clear evidence of collusion with the russians, it just happens to be with the hillary clinton campaign and the democratic national committee that the news media fails to talk about or fails to even investigate. >> the more they throw at you the more you know to keep digging because you're getting really, really close. >> our committee continues to look at conspiracy. we're looking at obstruction. we're looking at misleading congress. >> we will have a plan to hold in contempt and impeach. >> i'm not worried about vindication because i sleep well at night because i've been telling the truth the entire time. >> this guy talks like one of

the old soviets. you know, during the cuban missile crisis. they will say anything that serves the purposes of their political cause. >> and the irony is he's the chair of the intelligence committee. nunes and intelligence are an oxymoron based on his performance. >> upper case i. >> over the recent years. >> and then he has to recuse himself because of that performance on the white house lawn but he continues to meddle in the investigation and throwing himself at it. i mean, in a way, it's nice we've paired him here with giuliani. have giuliani doing the crazy uncle routine. you've got nunes doing an inspector clouseau over here, and all of it is to just throw up a whole lot of dust so that nobody can keep track. >> nobody thinks this guy can get defeated for re-election. he's probably got 90% of his people in the district all behind trump, and there he's right in line with him. >> that's right. he's in a safe republican district. he's unlikely to be going

anywhere. one piece of the nunes saga that's just especially eye popping is that he spent weeks and weeks sort of bashing the justice department for not turning over a certain stack of documents that he really wanted to see. and he said these documents were going to blow wide open the hillary clinton conspiracy that's were going on. absolutely essential that the american people saw knees these documents. and then when the doj finally acquiesced and turned over these documents, made them available to nunes, he didn't actually read them. he had his staff read them but he himself despite making a host of cable television news appearances, talking about how intrigued he was by the material in these documents, how it was going to change everything, when he got the documents didn't look at them. we never heard about them again. >> jon, your thoughts. >> i was just going to say, if nunes was not protected by the speech or debate clause in the constitution as a member of congress you'd be looking at him as a potential co-conspirator in any russian collusion. this is crazy the lengths he has gone to including his little dexy's midnight run to the white

house we've been talking about to grab their stuff and report back to them. all the stuff has been in furtherance of an effort to help the president. i don't think it's a distraction. to some extent there's a conspiracy theory going on within members of the congress who are trump supporters. i think they truly at some level believe and have to believe that what you saw in action, law enforcement in action where you have coordinated agencies working together on an investigation of certain members of the trump orbit, they look at that and they think that's a conspiracy but that's actually how law enforcement works. >> it's an embarrassment. the guy's an embarrassment. up next the trump reality show character whose media blitz earlier this year was so strange one anchor asked him if he'd been drinking. he really did. i mean, she really did. this is "hardball," where the action is. ahh... summer is coming.

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welcome back to "hardball." former trump adviser roger stone, who's a self-proclaimed dirty trickster, could be under scrutiny in the russia investigation, particularly for his august 2016 tweet warning ha that it would soon be podesta's time in the barrel. a couple weeks later wikileaks published john podesta's e-mails. stone has spent the past year discrediting the probe, of course. let's watch. >> i never had any advance knowledge of the content, the source, or the exact timing of

the wikileaks disclosures. i never predicted that john podesta's e-mails would be hacked. i predicted that his business activities would come under scrutiny. >> this entire narrative is based on a false premise from our politicized intelligence agencies that julian assange is a russian agent. no he isn't. he's a courageous journalist who has an incredible track record for accuracy and authenticity. >> i'm not involved in any collusion, coordination, or conspiracy with the russians or anyone else. and there's no evidence to the contrary. i received nothing from wikileaks or from the russians. i passed nothing on to donald trump or the trump campaign. we've been through this ad nauseam. it is a wild goose chase. >> i think if they bring a case against me it will be a fabricated case and there's no circumstances whatsoever, ed, in which i will testify against the president. >> real quickly -- >> of course when he came out with that little teaser, that john podesta with the dnc was about to be facing his time in a

barrel, in other words, he is going to have his unpleasantness coming upon him and of course a couple weeks later all the hacking came out, and then he's tried to be -- i think it's kind of cute there, jason, in his denials. i didn't have an exact time, i didn't do this. if you listen to him the way he said dissembled there he didn't exactly deny he knew something. >> oh, exactly. he's just dancing. he's soft-shoeing around everything. if and when he gets dragged in, and he will, because there will be additional investigations into him, he can say i never said i didn't know anything, i just said i didn't know what 4:15 p.m. on this particular -- >> like bill clinton said i didn't have sexual relations -- >> exactly. i wasn't aware of these kinds of things. what this speaks to, though, is all of this dissembling. it's what makes your regular people look at this administration and look at this clown car of people that trump is running in the white house and say why don't any of these people sound honest to me? none of them do. >> and there's a real sense that roger is in some real serious legal peril. >> i sense that too. >> there is a grand jury that

has heard from not just an interview with robert mueller, a grand jury that has heard from a number -- everyone from roger's former assistant to his driver told friends -- obviously, i don't think anyone knows what the legal jeopardy could be and maybe the grand jury won't vote to charge him with anything. but the fact they have a grand jury that has been interviewing a number of people all over roger's universe shows there is definitely something that investigators are focusing in on some sort of criminal activity, focusing in on, and maybe they won't find anything but there's some jeopardy. >> it's like driving around in a red sports car past a state trooper. you're just inviting being stopped, right? >> i think so. >> roger stone behaving -- he calls himself a dirty trickster. he dresses with a sabo road or whatever -- fancy clothes. he just serenades you. you think there's trouble here. >> he's been a flamboyant character for decades. and i don't -- it's not necessarily what they're looking for -- >> a mattress jacket. there is a comeback. >> beautiful.

it may have nothing to do with what we're all seeing in these remarks. this is a guy, he's a regular on alex jones. i mean, even more than people typically in the trump orbit. he's too explosive to be brought into the white house in any official role there. but i think even to a greater extent than other officials he's operating on a whole level of dishonesty. i wouldn't even try to parse the statement. >> anyway, on march 5th former trump adviser sam nunberg was served with a subpoena from robert mueller. instead of working to produce the documents the special counsel requested, nunberg spent his day defying mueller. on live cable television, telling reporters he didn't want to cooperate with mueller as to implicate roger stone. he wanted to get in trouble with stone. the situation quickly devolved. let's watch. >> i'm not going to cooperate when they want me to have -- when they want me to come in to a grand jury for them to insinuate roger stone was colluding with julian assange. roger is my mentor. roger's like family to me. i'm not going to do it.

the president's right. it's a witch hunt. i'm not going to cooperate. why do i have to spend 80 hours going over my e-mails -- i think it would be really, really funny if they wanted to arrest me because i don't want to spend 80 hours going over e-mails i had with steve bannon and roger stone. trump may have very well done something during the election. i don't know what it is. i could be wrong, by the way. >> do you think i would -- carter page is a scumbag. carter page was colluding are the russians. >> i'm not going to jail. come on, ari. >> talking to you, i have smelled alcohol on your breath. >> well, i have not had a drink. >> wow. at the end of the day nunberg decide cooperate with the subpoena. >> betsy, lots of showing there, and being accused of having a few pops before air time, that's new for a while. that's a new one. >> it was maybe the trumpiest 24 hours on cable news, when nunberg took all three networks

by storm, basically spent the entire day bouncing from studio to studio to studio talking about how he wasn't going to comply. but then thanks to one of the guests on ari melber's show, he changed his mind. and within about 48 hours, he was telling mueller all sorts of information and finding e-mails and, you know, had sort of cleaned up his act. what's interesting is since then at least based on roger stone's instagram it appears the two men have had a falling out. roger stone recently posted a picture of a pile of excrement and said "revealed, a new photo of sam nunberg." not a very charitable thing to put on your instagram. >> i'm going to keep up on that. >> it's part of the job. >> i think patton moynihan's been proven right. we're defining deviancy downward. coming up, the coffee boy and the pop star. they've both become key figures in the russia investigation. you're watching "hardball." many people living with diabetes

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former trump campaign adviser george papadopoulos was once dismissed by another campaign aide as nothing more than a coffee boy. well, last year papadopoulos pled guilty to lying to the special counsel about contact he had with a suspected russian agent who allegedly told him the russians had dirt on hillary clinton. prosecutors said in august that papadopoulos didn't provide substantial assistance to the russia investigation, in fact much of the information he did provide came only after the government provided him with information it had obtained already on its own. we're back with our panel. this guy papadopoulos, jonathan, take over for me on papadopoulos. he is one of the minor characters but certainly part of this story. >> to some extent he's a gadfly in trump orbit and i'm sure all the people close to the president, of all the president folks donald trump has tried to distance himself from, saying i wasn't close to this guy, it's probably truest of george papadopoulos. obviously not true of michael cohen or paul manafort -- >> but we saw his picture at that big meeting which was proof

he does exist. he was in the room. he was more than a kato kalin character. he wasn't just hanging around. he had some role. >> this is the key, chris. as any good reporter knows and as any good investigator knows, talk to the assistants, talk to the coffee boys. everybody's got some piece of information. in this case george papadopoulos had pretty important information for robert mueller. >> another unlikely character in the russia investigation is russian pop star emin agalarov. in 2013 donald trump filmed a cameo that an emin music video while in moscow for the miss universe pageant which emin and his oligarch father partnered in. what's he doing over there? earlier this summer emin released a satirical music video featuring "surveillance footage," so-called, of a look-alike trump with beauty pageant contestants in a hotel room. that's troublesome. the video also features emin slipping cash to stormy daniels. there he is.

the agalarovs also helped set that up infamous meeting in trump tower in 2016, the one we all talk about. emin also addressed that meeting in his interview with vice news. >> i said listen, there are some people that want to meet you, they obviously want something that could potentially help resolve things, you could be interested in or maybe not. if you could spend five minutes of your time i'd be grateful. if not, no problem. obviously don jr. being don jr. said of course. i'll do it if you're asking. >> oh, my god. how do you get so russiaphiled? why is this president so intrigued and interlocked and messed up with so many -- russia characters. >> it's not just russia. it's so many characters, full stop. and i think this is what we were talking about earlier, the notion that the usual suspects haven't come in here. so you've got the russian pop star. you've got the playboy model. you've got the porn star. you've got the lawyer who was dealing with cab medallions in new york.

you've got crazy uncle rudy. you've got a guy from the meinek muffler shop with an important job in the administration. >> who's that? >> cabana boy at hud in the department of agriculture. and the idea is they're interchangeable. one will pop up for a while and fade away, oh, michael cohen's back. it's a reality show cast of characters that are ever interchangeable. >> these are the people that trump is of. >> right. >> he comes from that world. he's not just going to it. >> he brought this with him. it's clue. did they do it in trump tower with a candlestick and a russian mobster porn star -- this goes to omarosa. this goes to his whole administration. he's not careful with who he spends time with. this guy is like a michael buble mixed with jersey shore pop star maniac who's been running around the country spending money like crazy. who knows what he could be talking about. and when your friends make joke videos about kim jong un erasing your image from hanging around with prostitutes those aren't good friends to have. >> imagine if you're robert mueller and these are your witnesses.

these are the people that are going to help you put your case together. >> who does he trust. >> when people attack -- oh, sam nunberg's not a very trustworthy witness or michael cohen, there aren't any trustworthy witnesses. you're not going to find the pope in this cast of characters. that's what you're going to have to work with. >> is that trump's game, only hang out with sleaze? >> by choice or circumstance. i don't know. or fleas. anyway, coming up, the reality star of the year. you might be surprised. you're watching "hardball."

are president trump's tweets considered official white house statements? >> the president is the president of the united states. so they're considered official statements by the president of the united states. >> welcome back to "hardball." that was former, former white house press secretary sean spicer telling reporters last year that president trump's tweets are in fact presidential statements. in the past few weeks alone the president has made official statements on topics even he admits are not presidential such as calling omarosa a crazed crying lowlife and a dog and openly saying that he doesn't care what the political ramifications of a government shutdown are. trump told football players to be happy, be cool instead of protesting, attacked one of the most respected athletes in the country, lebron james, and incorrectly blamed the california wildfires on bad environmental laws. he's targeted the news media multiple times noting when you claim you just give them more

publicity but i'll complain anyway he says. and he's spent a lot of time attempting to diminish the russia investigation writing "the good news is your favorite president did nothing wrong." well, we're back with our panel. i want to start at the end with betsy and work all the way through. what do you make of the big guy, what do you make of his ability to stay up there doing this stuff? >> what's really interesting is these tweets sometimes come in waves, depending both on the time of day of course -- we know that early in the morning as he's gotten further into his presidency his aides have done less to rein in his twitter habits. so he's seen more of these early morning tweet storms that are just the result of him having unstructured time. >> i hear it's when he reads the papers in the morning, gets to the headlines. >> i think you're right. >> jason. you're up. we've got to move. >> it's amazing why nobody has taken this on from him at this particular point. is we've stopped worrying about him starting a war with twitter and started focusing on the fact he

damages our economy. he damages investigations. he could harm elections with 142 -- >> look what the market did. >> market's fine for now. but the market's not fine in south africa, in other countries. >> he's worried about the white settlers -- the things he worries about. go ahead. >> a former trump adviser told me that twitter trump is like a jealous mistress that it's a way for him to get everything out that he has and the aides feel that he can get it out in the morning and then go to work productively and focus on what he needs to do. but even his supporters, the number one thing they say is i love him, i love him, but i wish he'd stop tweeting. >> let me go to jonathan next. your thoughts about the big guy. >> the president so much prioritizes being an entertainer and being able to drive news cycles i think that's what he wants. the end result of this will be someday historians will look back at the collected papers of donald j. trump will be a lot more interesting than those of millard fillmore. >> wow, dan. >> i've heard a defender of the president say he's part 10-year-old and part statesman and the problem is the 10-year-old wakes up early. >> i'll tell you what he does that seems to be new.

and i'm not sure it's good. he dominates the moment. i mean, any moment is king to him. there is no past. there is no future. there is no consequence. listen to me. >> this goes back to when he was a new york real estate developer when he invested a huge amount of money according to the tabloids. he learned early on if he was commenting on whatever the story of the day was he'd be able to make headlines he'd be able to be on the news. he did the same at his weekly appearances on fox and friends. instead of trying to push the things he believed in or his convictions, he just sounded off on whatever the day's shiny object was, and he's carried that into the white house. >> except it's starting to feel like that burden is overwhelming a bit, that you can only jump on so many chainsaws. >> really? i used to think you could wear out your welcome but i don't know if he's in that business. >> i don't think that's ever going to happen. when it comes to politics i don't think disgust or rage or offense can ever be exhausted. as long as he keeps tweeting,

he's going to have people who like him. as long as he keeps tweeting, there's going to be democrats who hate him. >> i bet you go to new press secretaries and new members of congress who die for any publicity they can get. they can't get on any local affiliate. they can't get radio play with their little beepers. they're dying to be noticed. and this guy's constantly noticed. >> and to betsy's point, he'll comment on the news of the day but he also becomes the news of the day by whatever he tweets. we all have reporters working at 6:00 a.m. now who are there to write the tweet of the day story. >> he is president. the panel's staying with us. you're watching "hardball."

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thank you, shannon pettypiece, jason johnson, betsy woodruff, dana milbank, and jonathan allen. and that's "hardball" for now. thanks for being with us. happy labor day to everyone. tonight on "all in" -- >> i don't think there's going to be a blue wave. i hope there's a red wave. >> 64 days until november 6th. will the country choose to take back power from the party of trump? >> this is indeed the most important election of our lifetime. >> tonight, the efforts to flip the house. >> the contrast between house republicans and democrats could not be clearer. >> the chances of a democratic majority in the senate. >> i don't think i see that blue wave. >> and the role of women in the resistance. >> the women liked me. you know? >> "all in" starts right now. good evening from new york. i'm chris hayes. it is labor day. the traditional start of the electoral season. and there are just 64 days until the midterm election