real estate holdings, pie best-selling books and making love to women who's won prizes for their beauty. but not anymore because i have a great girlfriend. that's true. the point is -- [ laughter ] [ applause ] >> i can't win. you can't win. >> that is donald trump in 2004 joking about money and women. while hosting the comedy show he now says should be tested in court. good morning and welcome to "morning joe." it is monday, december 17th. just one week away from the holidays. happy holidays, everyone. however, this is not a sleepy late december monday morning. >> no, it's not. >> no, we've got no fewer than seven topics each of which could be a big lead story on a normal

day. new white house chief of staff, one who just before the 2016 presidential election called trump a, quote, terrible human being. >> oh, awkward. >> that could be really awkward. also a major court decision has now placed the entire affordable care act in real jeopardy forcing tens of millions of americans including those with pre-existing conditions to now have to worry over the christmas holiday about their son, their daughter, their mother or father no longer having health care coverage. president trump went on a twitter rampage on sunday or more like a tweet hurricane than a tweet storm covering a range of hot button topics. the president's lawyer, rudy giuliani, went on the sunday talk shows, wow. with a performance filled with dodges, admissions, confused answers and a disjointed defense of the president and the independent counsel investigation and "the washington post" points out that almost every entity the

president has ever run is now under some form of investigation, every single one. >> the definition of the walls closing in. >> a bad day. >> we have a few new nbc news national polls with some dang dangerous indications for the president. his re-elect ratings sunk into the 30s and unless a sudden compromise is reached large portions of the federal government will shut down on friday. so what do all those major stories have in common? like so much of the country's public dialogue these days, they all revolve around donald j. trump and the most distressing factor for those like us that is exactly how he likes it, joe. we know that. >> but it's not how he should like it. >> it doesn't matter. >> you would think by now the evidence is all out there that disruption for the sake of disruption, chaos for the sake of chaos.

>> deflections. >> talks about insults for the sake of tossing around insults, this strategy, it's what i've always called the strategy for the 33%. it doesn't work. you can look at polls over the past several weeks, you can see people only 28%, 29% of americans support the way donald trump and rudy giuliani but really donald trump have handled the mueller investigation. that's about as bad as it gets. you can look at the polls from this weekend and what do you find? it used to be if you were a politician and only -- less than 50% of the people that were in your district or in your state wanted to re-elect you being in the 40s was seen as something that made you vulnerable. being in the 30s, well, that's just untenable for the president. it doesn't get any worse than that for somebody that wants to be re-elected and you add to all

of that, of course, the real poll that took place over the past month or two and that is what happened on election day when americans went out and voted in almost record numbers in midterms, republicans lost the popular vote by more than any party has ever lost a popular vote in midterms. they lost 40 seats. they had the worst performance since watergate. i mean, mr. president, listen to all of this. this is not working. this disruption every day, the chaos, the tweets. not working. and the question is, mika, whether there is anybody that can reach the president. i suspect it won't be the new chief of staff because, of course, when you have somebody that has called you a terrible human being in public, that's a difficult person to trust. >> you can only hope.

with us we have political writer for "the new york times" and msnbc political analyst nick and eddie glog jr. and msnbc contributor noah rothman and washington anchor for bbc world news america, katty kay. so let's get into the news and start with one. a rainy weekend in washington and president trump went on a twitter tirade. remember michael cohen only became a rat after the fbi did something which was absolutely unthinkable and unheard of until the witch-hunt was illegally started. they broke into an attorney's office. why didn't they break into the dnc to get the server or crooked's office? where do we begin? the national review's andrew mccarthy, former prosecutor and frequent critic of the mueller

investigation responded, sir, in mobster lingo, a rat is a witness who tells prosecutors real incriminating information. searches of lawyer's offices common enough that doj has a procedure for them. here it yielded evidence of crimes you said he should be jailed for. you should stop. >> noah, significant that andy mccarthy that carved a place on national review and fox news as a frequent critic of the mueller investigation is now coming out and becoming more critical of the president, it seems, by today suggesting that what is happening actually is not a conspiracy and especially telling the president this weekend he should just stop. >> he certainly is right. andy's correct on two points. one is sort of philosophical that the president, the head of

the executive branch should not be calling people who work with the government who work with prosecutors rats potentially in tainting future prosecutions by communicating to other potential cooperators that the head of the executive branch doesn't look kindly on this sort of thing and might get a better deal if they were to decline to work with prosecutors is dangerous and certainly unprofessional and unbecoming of the executive branch. second, andy is talking about the southern district of new york which isn't the mueller probe or something the president can't wave away and andy knows these guys and i think he's right. the charges that were brought against mr. cohen and the charges being investigated that are linked to the president are very serious and that's the kind of thing he can't just make go away with an executive order and so the president is behaving like he's in real trouble and i think he's right.

>> well, eddie, he also is behaving as andy pointed out like a mobster. he said this is what mob bosses say and, by the way, when you use the word "rat," that is somebody who is telling the truth to the feds. we had a republican president suggest without irony that somebody should break into dnc headquarters. we'll just let that hang out there. >> so much hanging out there. >> the president is unthinged. >> yeah, it seems like he's in a full-blown panic here. the walls are closing in. one of the interesting things about this is that trump has consistently undermined basic republican principles and one of those has been a kind of defense of the rule of law. he's just flouting this at every turn in light of his own self-interest. the idea of donald trump invoking language of a mobster, rat, only confirms in the kind of commonsense understanding he has mobster-like qualities and

so i think all of this is an indication, joe, that he is in full-blown panic mode. the twitter tsunami indicates he knows something else is coming down the pick. an anvil is about to drop, not a shoe. >> mika, we saw this a few weeks ago before the other shoe dropped in the cohen case, we saw him go on tirades saying mueller or the southern district of new york must be preparing something else. i think here though with every organization he's ever run as the "washington post" said seemingly under investigation this is a president who does feel the walls coming -- closing in on him quickly. >> hard not to worry about the impact of whatever deflection is coming. trump continued the complaints, this time against his former attorney general, writing, jeff sessions should be ashamed of

himself for allowing this total hoax to get started in the first place, later writer they are entrapping people for misstatements, lies or unregulated things that took place many years ago. our president also complained about what he was seeing on television, quote, a real scandal is the one-sided coverage. hour by hour, of networks like nbc and democrat spin machines like "saturday night live." it is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and dem commercials should be tested in courts, can't be legal? only defame and belittle. collusion? >> katty kay, this proves our point. this is a president who has not only no interest in understanding nato or foreign policy or after james mattis found out after giving him a

briefing of history, post 1945, he has no interest in understanding the first through the tenth amendments or constitution of the united states and suggesting that a comedy show have an injunction slapped against it because it is critical of a politician. any first year law student would tell you in america that the most protected speech in america is political speech and certainly this sort of parody fits neatly in there. >> yeah, it's not the first time the president has raised the prospect of revoking television licenses including cnn and mentioned nbc in the past and talked about the need to have a state broadcast so more accurately he feels reflects his positions and supports the administration. i don't know why the president is doing this except to reach out to his base because it wouldn't take him two seconds to find out this was not something he could do.

he doesn't seem to mind whether policies he floats on twitter are actually enactable. it is whether they reach his base of supporters. he's stuck at 38%. you've spoken about this several times that he is not since the midterms making an effort to expand his base. he is pitching again and again to his base and the only purpose of these tweets as far as i can see is for him to remind his base that they need to be angry about something, that they need to be angry about "snl" or need to be angry about cnn and that's what he seems to be doing with these tweets. they have no policy implication. >> well, the backdrop to the president's sour saturday and sunday is as we mentioned that he is under increasing pressure from an array of investigations into his presidency. campaign, personal life and businesses. first there is the special counsel's probe into russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible attempts to obstruct

justice. followed by federal prosecutors in new york investigating alleged hush money payments to women before the 2016 campaign, as well as a burgeoning federal probe into trump's inaugural committee spending and a new york state investigation into whether the president improperly used his charity for business, political and personal matters. meanwhile, lawsuits into whether the president is violating the constitution's emoluments clause through his hotel and a defamation lawsuit by former apprentice contestant. meanwhile, "the new york daily news" reports the state attorney general is investigating claims of harassment and immigration fraud at the president's new jersey golf course. >> nick, it just continues day in and day out but it does all

seem to be coming together. against the president at the same time. i just want to say the president's strategy of striking out and attacking mueller and attacking the investigation using terms like witch-hunt, it's failed miserably. like i said before, he's polling in the 20s when it comes to his handling of the mueller investigation. you would just think that any rational human being would say, my gosh, i've driven my poll numbers down in the 20s on mueller. i've made him far more popular than me. my real act is now driven down into the 30s. i need to try something differently. but it's just not in him. >> if i were his lawyer i would have them build an indoor golf range in bedminster because these rainy weekends are a real tweet storm time for the president. look, in one sense he is writ n winning. he hurt the standing of the mueller probe in some degree.

but you're seeing a presidency in greater crisis than any that's unfolded. his affairs, his kids, his deals, his hotel, his tweets, his campaigns, his charity, there is no facet of his life that is not being scrutinized closely by people who have subpoena power or a grand jury. it's got to be frightening for any person and you can see it in his behavior that he feels the walls closing in. >> well, i think he's saying this morning thank god for rudy who is his attorney. thank goodness. when you have all these things coming at you what you need is a great attorney. here is rudy giuliani on the sunday shows. >> and did roger stone ever give the president a heads-up on wikileaks leaks including hillary clinton in the dnc. >> no, he didn't. not at all.

i don't believe so, but, again, if roger stone gave anybody a heads-up about wikileaks leak, that's not a crime. it would be like giving him heads-up that "the times" is going to print. this is why it's so weird, strange, the crime is conspiracy to hack. collusion is not a crime. doesn't exist. i ran that office. i know what they do. >> you know how the southern district is run. >> no, actually i don't. i'm disgusted with the southern district. the southern district says you can get out of jail if you do this. you got three years now. there's a real motivation to sing like crazy. he's got to do a lot of singing to get out of three years and will say whatever he has to say. he's changed his story three or four "time"s. >> so has the president. >> the president is not under oath. according to the answer he gave, it would have covered up to

november of -- covered all the way to november 2016. said he had conversations with him about the president. they -- >> earlier they said they stopped in january 2016. >> i mean the date -- until you actually sit down and answer the questions and you go back and you look at the papers and you look at -- you are not going to know what happened. that's why lawyers prepare for those answers. >> good luck. good luck. after what they did to flynn and trapped him into perjury and no sentence for him, 14 days for papadopoulos. >> when you say good luck, you're saying no way, no interview. >> they're a joke. over my dead body but, you know, i could be dead. >> according both to cohen and pecker, the head of the national enquir enquirer, they say they were in a meeting with donald trump in the summer of 2016 in which they discussed the payment to karen

mcdougal. >> we're talking about something that doesn't matter. whether it happened or didn't happen, it's not illegal. >> you're moving shells around on me. either it happened or it didn't happen. >> but that's what lawyers do all the time. you argue in the alternative. i'm telling you -- >> i'm asking for the truth. >> i'm telling you definitively. i want the truth too. >> oh, my gosh. >> can you see it on twitter where people will take quotes that trump defenders have made over a year that says he didn't do it. not sure if he did it. doesn't matter if he did it. it's not a crime if he did it. rudy giuliani actually did that several times. he did it with mcdougal. i think he did it with russia. he did it with one other thing. that's astounding that we also -- one other astounding thing we learned if rudy giuliani actually was all there when he was answering the

question mentally that donald trump told voters, told americans that nobody in his campaign had any contact with russians during the campaign. that's what mike pence said as well. and donald trump said i have no business with them. i'm not even talking to them. said that during the middle of the campaign. rudy giuliani just admitted yesterday that donald trump was actually talking to russia all the way up to november 2016, the month of the election, about building a trump tower moscow. he also, by the way, side note said that the republican run southern district of new york is disgusting. and also said the president can lie because he's not under oath. where do we begin with rudy giuliani's performance yesterday? >> it's tough to say. so you lingered on that november 2016 thing which is pretty important. i think probably the explanation

for the presidency is he didn't expect to win. he thought he was going to lose. and he would be very well positioned after he lost to advance his personal finances, advance his family's standings and his businesses. i don't know what the theory of the case is that rudy giuliani just articulated. sounds like he was throwing things at the wall seeing what stuck, seeing what his interlocutor reacted to and pursuing the legal theory that way. sort of how donald trump reads a room which is very good, reads a room and moves in the direction that the audience wants him to go. that's not what an attorney does or a spokesperson does. they have some sort of strategy when they go into the rooms. doesn't seem like rudy giuliani has any strategy whatsoever for defending this president. he just says what feels good in the moment and that gets you into a lot of trouble, e.g., november 2016. >> yeah, and, nick, noah brings up a great point. the man never expected to win. you read what michael lewis

wrote and what chris christie said about election night. when the results came in, donald trump looked shocked. melania was crying. karen pence when mike pence came over to hug her said don't touch me. you got what you want. you got what you wanted. that it was actually -- it was not the scene of a campaign that was victorious, it was the scene -- almost seemed like something out of a wake. donald trump never expected to win. never wanted to win. this was as we've said here before, this was a branding exercise that went horribly wrong and now a lot of people are going to jail because of it. >> well, certainly is not a man who looks like he's enjoying himself as president from day to day. but, look, the trump tower deal and russia was poised to be the biggest score of his career in real estate. it was going to be worth

hundreds of millions of dollars potentially which is a lot bigger than his past licensing deals so i think he was looking towards that. it was the unchartered territory he always wanted to go to as a businessman and we see this as well, though, this point, joe, that he also wouldn't want to n untangle himself from his own business after he became president. there was a reluctance, he obviously had not gotten prepared for that eventuality and we see more downside for the president now over and over that he refused to back away from his business. he put his kids in charge of it and they're still around the campaign and around the white house and that continues the questions of being too close to foreign powers taking money from foreign dictators and countries through his hotel, it's an unending stream of problems for him. >> you know, mika, what is clearly evident, the further we move away from november 2016 is the fact that donald trump and

the republican national committee both had the same goal, they didn't expect donald trump to win. they just didn't want him to get blown out by eight or nine points. because it would have been embarrassing to him. the rnc because that would have meant they would have lost the senate and the house. here you have is everything happen something foreign policy to saudi arabia, foreign policy toward russia or foreign policy all across the world can be explained by business. it's still all about money with donald trump. and this is a guy who didn't want to be elected president and as nick just said he wanted to stay involved in his businesses because that's what matters to him. not governing. the most important democratic nation on the face of the earth. >> and still ahead on "morning joe," senator orrin hatch walks back his suggestion that he simply doesn't care about trump's legal issues. what inspired the utah republican to rediscover his

failty to the rule of law. ryan zinke's flag will no longer be flying over the interior department. >> do you think he'll give us one of those gold coins with his face stamped on it. >> that was a pretty incredible run. memories that will last a lunchtime. and the president revels in the demise of the conservative magazine "the weekly standard." as it was said on twitter it's shocking he's not invited to more funerals. you're watching "morning joe." we'll be right back. ♪ ♪ ♪ the united states postal service makes more holiday deliveries to homes

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the operation used every major social media platform including youtube, google and instagram to help elect president trump and even increased once trump came into power. the research by oxford university found that while the overall intensity of posting across platforms gruyere by year with a particular spike during the six months after election day 2016, this growth was particularly pronounced on instagram which went from roughly 2600 posts a month in 2016 to nearly 6,000 in 2017 when the accounts were shut down. across all three years covered by the report russian instagram posts generated 185 million likes and 4 million user comments. what is clear, the report says, is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the

republican party and specifically donald trump. i mean, katty kay, where do you begin with questions in terms of approaching the media company, the tech companies themselves as it pertains to this, they've been fairly defensive on capitol hill. >> yeah, i mean, look, social has become in some senses a real threat to democratic processes when it's undermined and used in this way and this report which is bipartisan from the senate intel committee, a rare thing we get now comes to a very clear conclusion that russia across multiple platforms did a huge amount to help the republican party and to help specifically donald trump get elected and they carried on doing it after he was elected and sought to divide people, they sought to discourage some groups from going out to the voting booths and undermined african-american

m networks and boosted those in favor of donald trump and it's alarming for the fate of democracy & for democratic election processes when it can be manipulated this way. the chinese decided the answer is to ken sure the internet massively because now they're saying, look what's happened in the west. you created this thing and these social media platforms and being used against you. they are being used to cause divisions in your country and used to undermine faith in your election processes, so i don't see how this ends because the social media giants have no interest really in regulating to the degree this they would have to and often we've seen those hearings taking place on capitol hill and seems like our congress people don't understand the technology here and understand what they're dealing with so how can they regulate it properly. >> eddie, the irony, my gosh, the irony, for me, my family, a bunch of fdr democrats who started worrying about the

soviet union like so many people and became reagan republicans because reagan was going to defeat the evil empire and bring down the iron curtain. so now we have in 2016 to 2018 the party of ronald reagan being buoyed by an ex-kgb agent's propaganda machine. >> it's bizarre, joe. we can almost describe it as bizarro world in my comic book nerdy moment. we know russia tried to impact the election. we see concretely the ways in which they tried to exploit our divisions and really deepen the wounds and divides in the country in order to shall we say create a pathway for their guy

to win and the question is what is the congress doing? what have they done to address what we see as clear evidence? i think the answer is basically nothing. and we have to ask the question why? >> if only we had someone who covered this intensely. nick confessore, i feel like every time i see this story covered, there is google, there's instagram, there's facebook, you name it. and they're called social media platforms or tech companies or whatever but they're never called anything that takes any responsibility for what happens within the entities. when does that change? you know, when we see that they can impact society, that the information that flows through them is used as weapons of war. >> well, look, the sad truth is these platforms are the greatest mechanism for spreading lies and

disinformation that any government could ever imagine building in history and i want to point you to one important thing in the story. it should make you see red. it says that google and google has gotten off pretty easy in this discussion, facebook and twitter are often focused on but google and youtube are really important players here so google refused to give the researchers for this report and refused to give the senate the underlying information about how these videos on youtube from the russians spread. so they only provided copies of the videos which is ridiculous. the whole point is to study the information networks, how these videos were propagated and shared. how they spread around this platform and google stiffed the researchers and stiffed the government on this question and wouldn't give them the data. i can't believe that and when i read that my mind was blown. >> you know, noah, if there had been a report that showed this much disinformation moved

through cbs news, "the new york times," a large publishing company, abc news and they were covering up how russian propaganda and vladimir putin used their networks, used their newspapers to influence the 2016 campaign, there would be a crisis on capitol hill. there would be -- i mean, you would have charges possibly. i can't imagine how dramatic those hearings would be and the ramifications for those networks and for those newspapers and yet here we have facebook, google, instagram, really facing no retribution whatsoever even when we find out top executives did everything they could especially at facebook to cover up the truth about russia. >> yeah, and you mentioned i think what is the key point here is that these are publishing

companies and they don't view themselves as such and just part of -- >> but they are. >> i'm not sure regulation is going to be the way to go here to make sure that we have an appropriate outcome for what gets published on these internet sites because they're publishing companies and i don't think they're subject to that kind of regulation, but there needs to be a paradigm shift within these companies about what they are and what they put out there and it's very possible they could open themselves up to antitrust suits if they were to become publishing houses without naming themselves as such and have them broken away from the broader platforms like facebook and google and twitter. they are putting out information to the public and they've absolved themselves of any responsibility for it and that is untenable. >> all right. still ahead, we're learning new details about the 7-year-old guatemalan girl who died in border patrol custody. plus, nbc news obtains disturbing new video showing

migrants being marked with numbers on their arms. we'll talk to two reporters who have been covering the crisis at the border from the very beginning. "morning joe" will be right back. fact is, every insurance company hopes you drive safely. but allstate helps you. with drivewise.

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she died some hours after passing into u.s. territory. while she was under the protection of customs and border patrol. who bears responsibility for her death? >> our hearts break for the tragic death of the 7-year-old girl, the loss of that precious life is horrifying. it is a painful reminder of the ongoing humanitarian tragedy that is illegal immigration and the misery that it spreads. a coyote dropped off 163 migrants in an extremely remote section of new mexico. smuggling organizations profit off death and misery. they are vicious, vile organizations. >> that was senior adviser to the president and one of the architects of trump's immigration policy, stephen miller. discussing the death of a 7-year-old girl from guatemala. she died in u.s. border patrol custody just hours after arriving at a border patrol station in new mexico with her

father and a group of roughly 165 other asylum seekers back on december 6th. this morning the department of homeland security said she appears to have decided from sepsis shock. dhs also stated during their initial health screening the father denied that either he or his daughter were ill. official autopsy results are still pending. over the weekend attorneys for the girl's family called for objective and thorough investigation into the girl's death. just days after her death, president trump pushed his child separation policy while making a false comparison to his democratic predecessor saying the democrats policy of child separation on the border during the obama administration was far worse than the way we handle it now. remember the 2014 picture of children in cages, the obama years, however, if you don't

separate, far more people will come. this shows mexican officials putting numbers on the arms of migrant adults and children. it's all part of a new deal quietly struck between the trump administration and mexico two months ago. joining us now is nbc news correspondent cal perry, just back from reporting in juarez, mexico and also with us julia ainsley. cal, we'll start with you. what did you find out? >> mika, i'll take you inside this center in juarez as you sort of alluded to, a new policy shift once again happening with very little transparency up until a few months ago. if you were trying to come to the united states you would present yourself as the president wants at a port of entry where your asylum claim would begin to be processed. well now they're keeping back from the border. they're putting them in this center in juarez and can show you the video from inside it. children and their fathers and

parents terrified they're still going to be separated once they get to the border. juarez is not a safe city. it's difficult to get in and out of this city. and as the president says, you know, present yourself at ports of entry. well, that's becoming more and more difficult because of what's happening sort of behind the scenes. i want to play for you now to give you a sense of what's going on down there a sound bite from a guatemalan father and son as they approached from that then you'll hear from beto o'rourke and his reaction to the death of the 7-year-old girl. >> translator: i don't want to. i am afraid. it's not easy to separate. to make money and why am i going to separate from my son? no, i don't think so. i don't want to. >> is that his biggest fear?

>> yes, it is. >> dhs said as part of their statement parents shouldn't be doing this. what is your reaction to that? >> you do not travel 2,000 miles with your 7-year-old child for kicks. to take advantage of another country. you do it because you're desperate. what would cause you to take your child and make that journey unless it was the only thing you could do to save your child's life? so our responsibility once those parents arrive here with their children is to make sure that those kids are okay and that they fully survive that journey and that we follow our own asylum laws and the best traditions and promise of this country. >> the inherent contradiction is this, the customs and border patrol releasing a statement to us late last night in part it rides port of entry facilities were not designed to hold hundreds of people at a time

when people may be seeking asylum. i'll let you read the rest of that the bottom line is this, the president has told people to go to ports of entry. customs and border patrol is saying the shining city on the hill which is el paso is full. so you have this deep contradiction and messages continuing to be sent from this administration around the world that basically america is closed. the things that should not be normal, mika, children with numbers on their arm, children dying in the desert, children being held in a tent facility in texas able to speak to their lawyers only 20 minutes a week. these things are becoming normal by this administration which continues to shape policy on the fly without any transparency. >> and, julia, trump's tweet just so cruel and how the policy is supposed to work to keep people from coming. everything about it is heartbreaking and i don't think represents who we are. this separation crisis still

exists, does it not? they say they pulled back the policy but there are children still waiting. >> there's a lot of problems with that tweet not to start with the spelling error with separation there but, you know, part of the thing too, this administration is self-inflicting their own wounds. it was a policy to criminally charge all illegal border crossers and therefore separate them from their children. that was not an obama administration policy. that's a trump administration policy and that's why we saw the number of separations skyrocket earlier this year. and there are a number of other self-inflicted wounds here too. stephen miller is trying to put this narrative on the parents bringing up their children. but really a lot of this has to do with trump administration policy, not to put more people at the border who can process asylum claims or provide medical care, remember, this girl did not receive medical care until an hour and a half after a bus ride to a larger facility. there's no medical personnel at

the that remote border station. they are not putting those kind of people down there, instead they're trying to build a wall. not putting down humanitarian aid but troops. we can see these decisions being made over and over again and another thing i want to point out when we talk about the border wall funding something the president is willing to shut down the government in order to get. we've seen barriers be built in the past. what it does is forces more people to make the dangerous treks like jakelin caal and her father had to make -- it's called a deter tent strategy and it forces them through these places and another policy that they want to push through but courts have blocked so far is to make it illegal or impossible for someone to get asylum if they enter the way jakelin caal and her father tried to without going through those legal ports of entry which as we can see from the numbers building up at the border that's elie hard to do and under international law you're allowed to claim asylum no matter how you entered united

states. >> we want to continue to dig deeper into this issue, this topic and what's happening. cal perry, if you could stay we'll get to you right after the break and be right back in just a moment. ♪ ♪ the greatest wish of all... is one that brings us together.

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. welcome back. we're talking with cal perry about the crisis on the border. he's just back from juarez, mexico. nick, you have a question for him. >> i'm confused about something. we saw statement from the border patrol they are overwhelmed at the ports of authority, they can't process all these people. these people have been marching from honduras for two months and enough time for the white house to move troops to the border and back. >> they are intentionally moving staff from el paso to california using the caravan as an excuse to do so. that's what they are saying to people as they turn them away. we don't have the staff.

we're at capacity. this country helped write refugee laws after world war ii. you should be allowed to present yourself to cbp and have your asylum request started. the other thing i would say and i'm not advocating this facility, its ridiculous we're putting kids in the middle of the desert and isolating them from rest of society but right now there's 2700 children in that facility and 3800 beds so there's 1100 beds not full. >> where do we go from here? any effort on capitol hill to deal with the crisis at the border? >> unfortunately, not, mika. we see congress in a lot of ways has thrown up their hands when it comes to immigration. there could be a worthy debate to be had about asylum. we're seeing asylum claims skyrocket. a lot of those are legitimate. we could have a discussion about what that looks like and what

our policy should be. instead we're seeing the trump administration come out with these very draconian asylum policies to make them wait in mexico, to make it illegal or impossible to come through without coming through a port of entry, to scale back on the humanitarian resources down there. they are checked by the courts but not really checked by congress like they used to be. >> nbc's cal perry and julia aimsly, thank you both. coming up, under investigation on multiple front, there are new signs that the president may be cracking under all the legal pressure. plus a federal judge drags republicans back into the obamacare fight, a battle for which they are still unprepared. >> mika, it's interesting, the "wall street journal" warning republicans that this is going to get overturned by the supreme court, and will only strengthen the hand of those who support obamacare. so we don't know how this is

going to end up but most likely not well for the republicans. "morning joe" coming right back. - [narrator] the typical vacuum head has its limitations, so shark invented duo clean. while deep cleaning carpets, the added soft brush roll picks up large particles, gives floors a polished look, and fearlessly devours piles. duo clean technology, corded and cord-free.

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your doctor should monitor your weight and may stop treatment. upper respiratory tract infection and headache may occur. tell your doctor about your medicines and if you're pregnant or planning to be. otezla. show more of you. this last week was a pretty bad year for donald trump. think about what's currently under investigation for him. trump's campaign, his

transition, his inauguration, his business, and his presidency. so everyone check your cards because you might have impeachment bingo. and for that president trump said saturday night live's ability to poke fun at the president should be tested in courts. welcome back to "morning joe". it is monday, december 17th. getting close to christmas. still with us we have political writer for "new york times" and msnbc political analyst nick confessore. eddie junior. associate editor of commentary magazine and msnbc contributor noah roth man. washington anchor, katty kay. and joining the conversation nbc news capitol hill correspondent and host of kasie dc, kasie hunt. also with us former house oversight committee spokesman

curt bardelo. >> george w. bush could count ofry week somebody mocking him. bill clinton was mocked relentlessly. so donald trump suggesting that you get a court injunction against "saturday night live" doing what it's been doing now for decades. little ridiculous. >> yep. we begin this hour with the new nbc news "wall street journal" poll that finds most americans 55% want house democrats to provide more oversight when they take power by opening a number of investigations into the president and his administration. 43% do not. and when it comes to russia's meddling in the 2016 election just 34% believe the president is being honest and truthful. more than six in ten americans do not believe him.

as far as the president's job performance, 43% of americans approve, 54% disapprove. and when it comes to the president's re-election, only 38% of registered voters say they would definitely or probably support him. more than half, 52% said they would not. >> you know, it's really, we have so many different ways to go with these poll numbers. but, i got to say, kasie hunt, the most concerning for republicans and for people inside the trump administration has to be the question whose policies do you want enacted in the new term? who do you want leading washington as far as policy goes? 48% say they want the democrats, only 19% say they want donald

trump. it is shocking that less than one in five americans want donald trump's vision of america enacted over the next two years. i have never heard anything like that before in a poll following a mid-term. >> it's pretty stunning, and that vice that republicans in congress are in, it's just getting tighter and tighter and tighter. and you're going to see it all play out this week as -- you know we hurdle towards a shutdown that literally nobody on capitol hill wants. normally when you have some sort of a shutdown like this, there's some constituency some, where even if it's a one man show in ted cruz who is gunning for a shutdown in the congress. in this case, congressional republicans are looking down pennsylvania avenue and thinking what is this guy doing? they all want to leave town for christmas. they could easily agree and pass a spending bill. the president is out there on a limb by himself insisting he has

to have a border wall or he'll shut down the government. that's one example how congressional republicans are increasingly at odds with a president in their own party and it comes in this greater context of all of these investigations which nobody wants to talk about. there's a report in "the washington post," the reporter went around and asked a bunch of republicans outside the chamber about these investigations, and i mean the quotes are border line absurd. chuck grassley was like stop, stop, i haven't read it, i don't want to take questions about this. john kennedy called it a stupid question. the divide, it's bigger than it ever has been before and those poll numbers help explain why that is. >> noah rothman, it's never made sense to me the president's immigration policy, you just look at the numbers. even after the president got elected, building a border wall was a loser. the president's immigration

policies are actually the minority even in the rank-and-file of the republican party, if you take polling on specifics. but just think about these numbers and i wonder exactly what republicans on capitol hill are afraid of these days? 62% of americans believe that donald trump is lying in the mueller investigation. only 38% want him re-elected president of the united states. that's a devastating number for anybody that knows anything about re-elect numbers. and only 19% of americans, only 19% of americans want congress to follow the president's policies over the next two years. 48% want democrats in congress to control it. where do republicans go from there? >> yeah. i mean, i'm not entirely sure. the real numbers i suppose are a

little early in the 2020 cycle and after repudiation of president trump at the polls you expect them to be artificially depressed. the border wall issue and immigration issue distinguishes the republican party from the trump party. always has. the gop has never had an interest in funding even a modestly funded $25 billion a bo boondoggle in the desert. they knew it's a waste of money. we're down to $5 billion where the president could declare victory and walk away. he's not interested in that. he wants to agitate as we said in the last hour, he wants to agitate his base. that base though it makes up a majority of the republican party is not the entirety of the republican party and not the republican party's constituencies in these districts where they lost. you can be a minority party and ideologically homogeneous or a

governing coalition and the president prefers the former than the latter. >> what does it like when 48% of americans say they want democrats running policy in congress over the next couple of years. and only 19% say they want washington to follow donald trump's vision for america. 19%. you worked with members. you spent a good time on capitol hill. how do republicans respond to that? >> well, i think what you're going to see a lot of investigations from congress from places like my old stomping ground at the oversight committee. recognizes big dilemma how will they match their past rhetoric wanting transparency. republicans were relentless at investigating barack obama's administration, things like fast and furious and benghazi. now democrats will exercise that authority. they see this election as a call

for checks and balance. when you look at the president's numbers there's a massive trust deficit. traditionally presidents have some room with the american people because there's some good faith there. he doesn't have that. as democrats begin to find things, do these investigations, get new facts those numbers will only go down for president trump. >> mika, the republican congress knew what they were doing with their investigations. in fact, kevin mccarthy the minority leader for republicans in the new session actually bragged on television about the benghazi hearings going on so long that they dragged down hillary clinton's ratings. so, of course, the republicans can't expect the democrats to not conduct investigations because they actually did it and, in fact, did it to such an excessive amount that many people believe they were distracted from more important jobs. >> there are so many legitimate questions clearly as well. a federal judge in texas has

breathed new life into the fight over obamacare ruling the health law is unconstitutional. in his 55-page opinion, u.s. district judge connor sided with a group of republican leaning states led by texas. they argued obamacare could no longer stand in the wake of last year's republican tax bill which got rid of the penalty for americans who do not buy insurance. the ruling is expected to be appealed to the supreme court, the law will remain in place for now. following the ruling, president trump tweeted wow, but not surprisingly, obamacare was just ruled unconstitutional by a highly respected judge in texas. great news for america. joe, i find it difficult to celebrate the thought of health care being ripped away from millions of americans. >> well the "wall street

journal" editorial page wrote this morning, no one opposes obamacare more than we do. democrats confirm it was designed as a way station to government-run health care. but they go on to say but the federal judge's ruling friday that the law is unconstitutional is likely to be overturned on appeal and they boomerang on republicans. so this is the "wall street journal" editorial page. it's been really one of the fiercest opponents of obamacare from day one. actually says that this ruling will boomerang and i agree, the supreme court will overturn this lower court ruling. >> another win for republicans, kasie hunt. this seems like it's a lump of coal for them politically as well. >> the reality is they spent the mid-term campaign telling people they wanted to support people with pre-existing conditions. good luck finding a republican

on capitol hill that say they want to take that protection away. it's considered a right by the vast majority of americans. so the challenge with this ruling is that, you know, he took a very narrow, you know, piece of this, congress zeroing out the mandate. said well congress intended to overturn all of this and he threw the entire thing out. you know the idea you can do that and then turn around and provide health care to millions of people has proven to be wrong over the last couple of years. health care legislation is near impossible. so if this were to actually come to fruition it would be a political nightmare for republicans heading in to the presidential election. >> if anybody wants to see how difficult this was going to be for republicans all they have to do is google rcp. look at the poll numbers for

obamacare. more popular today than ever before. >> yeah. because of the pre-existing conditions, because of the ability to keep your children on your insurance program until the age of 26. both of those extremely popular at the moment and why did the democrats do so well in the mid-term elections in the house of representatives? because nancy pelosi had an absolutely iron fast rule you were going to campaign in suburban districts on the affordable care act. you were going to campaign on health care. those members that campaigned on health care and stuck on health care and didn't get distracted by more cultural issues they were the ones that did well in the mid-term elections. it's a winning strategy for democrats and losing strategy for republicans to be on the wrong side of this. it begs the question, if it hadn't between tweeting this week maybe the president wouldn't have tweeted so much. >> president trump is under increasing pressure from an

array, and i mean an array of investigations into his presidency. his campaign. his personal life. his businesses. prabl practically everything. first there's the russian probe. then attempt to obstructing justice. then a federal probe into trump's inaugural committee spending. and a new york state investigation into whether the president improperly used his charity for business, political and personal matters. meanwhile lawsuits into whether the president is violating the constitution's through his business and hotels and a former contestant alleges that trump defamed her after she claimed he sexually assaulted her. the "daily news" the new jersey

attorney general is investigating about immigration fraud. >> things are going badly. i can tell you, he has america's mirror working for him. >> who are you going to call? rudy. he was on the sunday talk shows trying to defend all this. >> and did roger stone ever give the president a heads up on wikileaks leaks concerning the dnc? >> no. i don't believe so. again if roger stone gave anybody heads up on wikileaks leaks it's not a crime. it's like giving them a heads up the "times" will print something. this is why this is so strange. the crime is conspiracy to hack. collusion isn't a crime. doesn't exist. i ran that office. i know what they do. >> you know how the southern district is run. >> i don't.

southern district says you can get out of jail if do you this. he got three years now. he has to do a lot of singing to get out of those three years. he's changed his story four or five times. >> so has the president. >> the president is not under oath. >> did donald trump know that michael cohen was pursuing the trump tower moscow in summer of 2016. >> according to the answer he gave it would have covered all the way up to november of 2016. said he had conversations with them. president didn't hide this. >> earlier they said those conversations stopped in january of 2016. >> until you actually sit down and answer the questions and you go back and look at the papers and look -- you're not going to know what happened. that's why lawyers, you know, prepare for those answers. >> good luck. after what they did to flynn, trapped him into perjury and no

sentence for him. 14 days for papadopoulos. i did better on traffic violations than they did with papadopoulos. >> you said good luck. >> they are a joke. over my dead buddy. but, you know, i could be dead. >> according both to cohen and to pecker, they, again, he's the head or was the head of the "national enquirer" they say they were in a meeting with donald trump in the summer of 2016 in which they discussed the payment to karen mcdougal. >> it doesn't matter. whether it happened or didn't happen it's not illegal. >> you're moving shells around on me. either it happened or didn't happen. >> that's what lawyers do all the time. you argue in the alternative. >> i'm asking you for the truth, sir. >> i want the truth too. >> chris wallace, i'm asking for the truth. just give me the truth. all i want is some truth as john lennon would say.

eddie, i guess the lawyer in me, i have these things that you check off. he's disgusted by the southern district of new york. okay. i can check that off and tell you that a republican that donald trump appointed runs that office. he's disgusted by the fbi. a republican that donald trump appointed runs the fbi. rudy said that we had general flynn trapped into perjury as andy mccarthy said in a tweet last week no, actually he wasn't trapped. he had been planning to lie for a long time. he constructed that lie. he lied to everybody inside the white house and then he lied to investigators. so there was no entrapment there. then as we talked about last hour, usually we have to wait six months or a year for, what we saw unfold with rudy, to

unfold where they change their story and it's a sliding story where oh, he didn't do it. it's a lie. it's a lie. and then it's well, i don't know if he did it or not and then it was well even if he did do it, it's not bad. and then, of course, they end up going he did it. we had rudy do that on karen mcdougal, roger stone, wikileaks, and trump tower in moscow and for me the most shocking revelation other than the donald trump is still allowing rudy giuliani to go out and make matters so much worse for him is that rudy giuliani admitted that donald trump and his team were still talking to moscow up until the election in 2016 about building trump tower moscow, when trump had lied to voters for a year and a half saying he had no dealings with russia whatsoever. >> yeah.

noah made a great point in the last segment, in the earlier hour about the trump organization never thought they were going to win and that they would have played it out until november. when i look at rudy giuliani, it looks like an old man gone bad in the teeth. and his purpose is to throw smoke bombs, to confuse, and it's an extension of the way in which trump govern, chaos, and it's obviously the heart of his legal strategy. one of the interesting things is that at least for me he says that this was a conspiracy with regards to hack with regard to wikileaks. he said that's not illegal. it's not a conspiracy to hack. if i understand mueller's indictment it's a conspiracy to defraud the u.s. and that's really important. the conspiracy to defraud the u.s. government. and i think as long as he's throwing these smoke bombs to confuse us, we might not keep our eye on what really happened and what really happened in my mind donald trump may have

ascended to the highest office in the land illegally and in some ways illegitimate as president of the united states. >> i have a question. the chaos strategy we've seen first the pr strategy and now legal strategy apparently is a chaos strategy seems to work okay in an environment if your party controls all the levers of party. what's about to happen is demonstrate will control the house oversight committee and they will have some power. what's going to happen next and how will this strategy stand up in a washington that's now divided? >> well we've seen in the first two years the trump presidency this strategy worked because republicans who ran the oversight committee didn't do anything. trey gowdy didn't issue any subpoenas on this trump administration. that's about to change. when you look at they investigations going on right now things that will be looked on and pick up on by congress is what trump has done well in interest. like conflict of interest in the

white house. the trump business, the government activities are going to be heavily scrutinized. they actually have power. they can issue subpoenas. they can get documents. they can talk to staff. they can get closed door testimony. later today, jim comey is coming back to the oversight committee to have another sit down about russia. these are breadcrumbs and blueprints for democrats when they take power in a couple of weeks. >> curt, thank you very much for being on the show this morning. still ahead we just mentioned that nearly half the country wants congressional democrats to set the policy for the nation. so what would that look like? we'll ask one of them, congressman-elect, tom mel

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congressional seats on their way to a house majority in the 2018 mid-terms, including the small blue wave that swept over four of the gop held districts in the state of new jersey. joining us now is the democrat who unseated five term incumbent republican leonard lance in the race for new jersey's 7th congressional district. a former u.s. state department official under president obama, congressman-elect tom malinowski. welcome to the show. great to have you with us today. tell us what the priorities will be? will the top priorities to take on trump or to find some middle ground to get bills passed? >> i think in the next few weeks you're going to see chaos in the white house and a disciplined focus in the house of representatives on getting legislation passed. that's our job. we're going to fiercely defend

the mueller investigation, the justice department and fbi so they can do their job. we'll focus on gun safety and infrastructure. health care. those are issues that voters are demanding we get stuff down on. >> some bills allow trump to be challenged. a parallel track. >> well, i think the challenge to trump is that we're going to be actually responding to what voters are demanding their government work on. we have this decision out of texas which puts health care right back on the front pages of the national agenda. republicans have been saying for months they support protection for pre-existing conditions, that they support the so-called popular parts of the affordable care act. we'll give them a chance to prove it in the next few weeks by proposing legislation that at least had bipartisan support last year to shore up the affordable care ac.

we'll shore up background checks that gun owners want to see. we want to protect our democracy. this will be a test more for republicans in the senate than for donald trump. we're going to see if we can get some things done and send them to his desk and try to contain chaos from the white house. >> all right. i'll send it to kasie hunt. >> good to see you this morning. there's a new report out in politico this morning that nancy pelosi seems to be succeeding in convincing some of the more progressive members of the incoming democratic caucus that trying to go to impeachment right away is not the best strategy. do you think that's happening? are leaders succeeding in convincing the loudest voices pushing for impeachment to hold off and wait until mueller's findings come out? >> i hope so. i'm beside myself over what happened in 2016 and we now know president trump was doing real

estate deals with the russians even as they were helping him win an election. but i think we also know that in america, if it ever comes to impeachment of this president or any future president it's got to be seen as the patriotic thing to do and not the partisan thing to do. the first thing is we have to defend the institutions that are conducting this investigation. we have to see what information they delivered to the congress and to the american people and at that point we'll do the right thing. we'll do the right thing for the country and the constitution. but for now let's focus on doing our jobs on health care, infrastructure, taxes, the issues that voters send us to washington to do something about. >> all right. we'll send to it our two new jersey residents, noah rothman and eddie. >> congressman you talked about how democrats in the house want to shore up the affordable care act and preserve it. but it seems we have just an illustration in that law how

irresponsible congress has been regarding funding it. there's few funding mechanisms implementing it. at what point do we say, okay, we need to pass something like we have in new jersey now, an individual mandate that funds these laws and makes them sustainable in the future? >> you're answering your own question. the judge in texas was wrong on the law but he actually had a point about the individual mandate being key to this law and weaver taken care of that in new jersey. we restored an individual mandate and you know what the result is? insurance premiums for new jersey voter for citizens this year are down 9%. $1500 per family for people in the unsubsidized marketplace. do you think american people would like to see a $1500 decline in their health care

premiums? we have a chance to do that. >> is that how they are going pitch it? we'll bring your premiums down not that we're going reimpose a tax. >> the cost of health care is the number one issue facing the american people in this country. it's bankrupting america. premiums have been rising. that's the reason for this revolt in the suburbs or one of the main reasons for the revolt against the republican party. the affordable care act took one step down dealing with that question including a mandate. we got to shore it up and got to think about the next steps. >> two part question. what about nancy pelosi following up on the question about leader pelosi and the more progressive part of the incoming class. what is your position around the new green deal that folks like alexander cortez is putting forward. second question is about new jersey. here we are in a moment where

we're worried about what happened in north carolina, what happened in wisconsin and michigan and then new jersey democrats talking about redistricting. what is your position? obviously it was stopped. but give us a sense of the insider game there. >> let's take the first question first. i think -- we got to do something about climate change and this is not a partisan issue. this is about protecting our planet and so i support the idea of having a select committee over the next two years to debate and propose some of the fundamental steps we're going to have to take to deal with that. the green new deal as i understand it is about a lot more than that. it's about single parent health care, about guaranteeing jobs for every american. i really worry if we try to enact the entire progressive agenda in one fell swoop we're going to enact nothing and we won't do anything about climate change. we have to be realistic on that. on redistricting we as democrats and i think patriotic americans are fighting partisan

redistricting all around the country, in wisconsin, in michigan, in north carolina. the last thing we need is for new jersey to move us in the opposite direction and i'm glad to say that democrats, progressives, republicans in new jersey came together to say that that redistricting plan was a mistake. i think we now have the moral high ground to continue this fight, to protect our democracy around the country. >> congressman-elect tom malinowski. thank you very much for being on the show this morning. coming up we'll talk to pulitzer prize winning author and "new york times" columnist thomas freeman. "morning joe" is coming right back. [woman 1] this...

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do i like donald trump? no. is he a role model for my sons? absolutely not. she's not a role model for my daughter. we have two of the most flawed human beings in the country. yes i'm supporting donald trump.

i think he's a terrible human being. >> that was donald trump's new chief of staff, talking about donald trump. >> happy days are here again. >> the "daily beast" uncovered that footage of mick mulvaney blasting trump as a terrible human being during a november 2016 debate saying hillary clinton was also as bad. mulvaney put his opinion in writing posting on his facebook page after trump's "access hollywood" tape surfaced quote, i think one of the things we've learned about donald trump during this campaign is that he's not a very good person. and omb spokesperson responded by calling the remarks old news. adding these comments were made in 2016 when he was a congressman, and had yet to meet the president. congressman mulvaney continued to support then candidate trump throughout the election. and his support for president

trump has never waivered while serving within the administration. he both likes and respects the president and he likes working for him. >> close quote. katty kay, this is a quote that came up after the appointment as chief of staff, and as we know the president is paranoid, believes everybody is against him and now a chief of staff who is on the record in audiotape saying quote donald trump is a terrible person. how does that work out in the ♪ >> yeah. not a good role model for his children, for his sons or his daughters. the president has had reportedly a good relationship with mick mulvaney in the past two years. mulvaney comes out of the conservative wing of the republican party. he's been a supporter in terms of policy of southeast things the president has wanted to do. but we know that president trump didn't want a new chief of staff. he would prefoesh his own chief

of staff. he's being put in the position of acting chief of staff after other candidates pulled out. nick ayers, then a slew of other people who said they didn't want the job either. and you won how this is going to affect the relationship. president trump doesn't like being criticized. he's pretty thin skinned about this kind of thing and if this runs, this clip runs of him acterrible person, however much the press wing of the white house puts out a statement saying he hadn't met him then and now he met him and thinks he's a fantastic person that clip is still out there. still going to get replayed. >> it's out there and more problems for the president inside the white house and probably will make mulvaney's situation more difficult. but, talk about mick mulvaney for a second for people who hasn't paid close attention the arc of his career.

this is a guy much like paul ryan who is respected as a deficit hawk when he was in congress. was a take no prisoners deficit hawk. and was seen as a purist. and yet as omb chief he's spent his time along with donald trump pushing for the largest deficits and the largest national debt in u.s. history. how does he square that? how do republicans scare that? how does the press scare that? >> frankly i don't think republicans in congress necessarily do. his flipflop on the question of donald trump's character is dwarfed in some ways by his flipflops on policy in this area you point out. he wasn't known just as the deficit hawk, he willing to throw the rest of his party under the bus in service of that one goal, he was one of the members of the freedom caucus

who caused john boehner and paul ryan the most amount of headaches as they tried to figure out, you know, how to -- we had divided government for quite some time as they tried to keep the government open, to actually keep the wheels of government moving even as these things were going on. and, you know, he marched a couple of months ago into the republican conference and was basically laughed at, you know, by members of his own republican conference because he was in there trying to convince them to blow through these budget caps that they had fought tooth and nail to secure and everybody just could not believe that of all people it was mick mulvaney coming in there trying to tell them to take what was a very difficult vote for them. >> and, again, if you talked to members they would say he was so self-righteous when it came, mika, actually to balancing the budget, and the spending caps and doing all the sort of things that conservatives used to do.

and as omb chief he gets a little bit of power and what's his legacy there? being the biggest spending liberal in the history of the office. running the largest national debt in the history of the office. adding an additional trillion dollars based on policy in over the past year in the office if you project out over several fiscal years. he's not a conservative. he's not a moderate. as omb chief he has been a big spending liberal. >> this should be interesting. if you missed any of our earlier conversations this morning, be sure to check out our podcast. "morning joe" is back in a moment with tom freeman.

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. joining us now "new york times" columnist and pulitzer prize winning author tom freeman joins us. >> so, tom, a lot to cover from this weekend, but why don't we just start with the president of the united states calling his former attorney a quote rat for cooperating with the president's own justice department. put that in historical context for our viewers. >> there's only one word that comes to mind, joe and that's unprecedented. we're in a place we've never been before. i was just on cnbc a little while ago. one thing that strikes me about this moment is you've seen the instability in the markets. >> built is the product of many

thing. but it's also driven by people seeing a president of the united states acting in these incredibly unpredictable ways. one minute negotiating with the chinese. basically suggesting a deal. a huge trade pact is on the way. the next minute tweeting he loves tariffs. i think it's got a lot of people around the world unnerved. i just came from paris and rome and madrid and the way they look at america right now is that a country that they counted on, for its stability, to really partner with them in navigating the world after world war ii has really become a completely unpredictable agent right now. and i think it's affecting everything from economics to geopolitics. i'm not sure -- at this stage his behavior has a lot of people

unnerved. >> that impact is not being felt just in geopolitics in europe and asia but a region you've written about a great deal throughout your entire career and that's the middle east. what is the long term impact of the president, his son-in-law and his secretary of state giving a free pass to a saudi crown prince who tortured and butchered, murdered and buried a "washington post" columnist? >> so the way the trump people have set this up is that we have two options. one was to give him a free pass for this and the other was to break relations with saudi arabia and they'd never buy another dime of american weaponry and never sell us another drop of oil. that was basically the dualism that this administration set up. of course there was a middle approach. the middle approach would have done mbs a favor not to mention us.

we should have censured him based on our valued. we should have demanded that he end this stupid blockade of qatar, release these women driving activists and keep going down the path of moderating saudi islam. let's member, mbs had a huge upside. he did things that none of his predecessors were doing in terms of really taking on the moderation of islam, letting women drive, opening the country to western cinema and culture and on the economics taking away subsidies. he had a big downside because he was impulsive. the problem was he needed a coach. we didn't even have an ambassador in saudi arabia for the last two years. he had basically a texting relationship with jared kushner.

these countries in the middle east that are allies, they all have extremist tendencies. but over the years what they've counted on the u.s. -- the leaders of these countries needed to go to their hot heads and say i'd love to do that crazy thing but you asked me to do, but the americans have said we can't do that. had we made real demands on him -- there is now an armed, weaponized civil society able to use social networks now to dog him wherever he goes. it wasn't an accident that he had to stay in the embassy in buenos aires.

he was worried he was going to be served a warrant. what you're not going to see is the massive private investment in his economy to create the jobs for young people that he needed there so he could get them off the government payroll onto the private sector. that's going to be the long-term destabilizer. >> let's talk about the long-term implications across the globe. when you have a president that forgives vladimir putin for his autocratic actions, for the murdering of journalists and political opponents. then the president and his son-in-law and the secretary of state mike pompeo ignoring the conclusions of the cia, an agency that he had just worked for last year. what message does that send not only to saudi arabia and russia, but to turkey and to tyrants

across the globe? >> it means you have license, basically. you see what happens when you give license to people, whether it's putin or mbs. everyone reads that. you know, america is so important for the world in maintaining certain norms, a certain baseline. when we go dark, when we start behaving in roguish ways, it simply becomes a license for everyone else to do it. now, these are hard choices. i recognize that. people are going to do bad things. but the choices are not between saying nothing and saying i'm a tough geopolitical guy and the world's a bad place. >> i'm curious. am i being naive when i say, yes, people do bad things. the united states and of course

dr. brzezinski. sometimes you need to make alliances with people who weren't democratic champions to take down the soviet union. but in this case, we're talking about the abduction, the torture, the murder of a "washington post" journalist, a virginia resident. am i being naive for thinking this is actually more than just when good leaders do bad things, that this actually puts us in a position where it is hard to deal with mbs moving forward past trump? >> i would have come out and censured him directly. i would have banned u.s. contacts with him until we saw some kind of change in behavior, some kind of change in regime. we did ourselves and saudi arabia no favors by simply giving them a green card. >> talk about unprecedented, how

about the position some cabinet members may be in and secretaries like -- i just question all the time mattis and pompeo and the position they're in. what if they vehemently disagree? what if they veehemently disagre with the president's approach? are there options? >> again, these kind of impossible questions that we're getting now because of this kind of president, but i think the reason i come down on someone like mattis staying is because when you read all these books that have come out in the last year, what you realize is there's so much more crazy going on inside this administration than any of us realize, way beyond the decisions of how do we or not censure the leader of saudi arabia when he's been involved in the murder of a columnist working for an

american newspaper. i think there's so much day to day crazy in there that we have no idea about, i don't want to pull the mattises out of there. four senior officials have resigned over corruption in just the first two years. they drained the swamp right into the oval office. i'm just begging anyone with any sort of brains, stability and rationality to stay, because he can't attract the b-team anymore. look what happened getting a new chief of staff. we're down to the c and d players now. if we've got an a player like mattis there, i say god bless him. these are the kind of choices we have now. >> tom friedman, thank you. still ahead, president trump rages on twitter, talking about what he calls the russian witch hunt, rats and the real scandal, suggesting the courts should step in to protect him from

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television's really just a hobby for me. i'm primarily occupied with my real estate holdings, my best selling books and making love to women who have won prizes for their beauty. but not anymore, because i have a great girlfriend. that's true. the point is -- [ laughter ] [ applause ] >> i can't win. see, you can't win. >> that is donald trump in 2004, joking about money and women while hosting the comedy show he now says should be tested in court. good morning and welcome to "morning joe." it is monday, december 17th. just one week away from the

holidays. happy holidays, everyone. however, this is not a sleepy late december monday morning. >> no, it's not. >> no. we've got no fewer than seven topics, each of which could be a big lead story on a normal day. there's a new white house chief of staff, one who just before the 2016 presidential election called trump a "terrible human being." >> awkward. >> also a major court decision has now placed the entire affordable care act in real jeopardy, forcing tens of millions of americans, including those are pwith preexisting conditions, to now have to worry over the christmas holiday about no longer having health care coverage. president trump went on a twitter hurricane on sunday, covering a range of hot button topics. the president's lawyer rudy giuliani went on the sunday talk

shows. wow. with a performance filled with dodges, admissions, confused answers and a disjoints defense of the president and the independent counsel investigation. the "washington post" points out that almost every entity the president has ever run is now under some form of investigation, every single one. >> that's the definition of the walls closing in. >> that's a bad day. >> yeah. >> national polls have dangerous indications for the president. his reelect ratings sunk into the 30s. unless a sudden compromise is reached, large portions of the federal government will shut down on friday. so what do all those major stories have in common? like so much of the country's public dialogue these days, they all revolve around donald j. trump. and the most distressing fact of all for those like us who have known him a long time, that is exactly how he likes it, joe.

we know that. >> it's not somehow he should like it. >> doesn't matter. >> you would think by now the evidence is all out there that disruption for the sake of disruption, chaos for the sake of chaos, tossing around insults for the sake of tossing and insul insults, this strategy -- it's what i've always called the strategy for the 33%. it doesn't work. you could look at polls over the past several weeks. you can see only 28-29% of americans support the way donald trump and rudy giuliani, but really donald trump have handled the mueller investigation. that's about as bad as it gets. you can look at the polls from this weekend and what do you find? he's got reelects in the 30s. it used to be that if you were a politician and less than 50% of the people in your district or

in your state or in the country wanted to reelect you, being in the 40s was seen as something that made your vulnerable. being in the 30s, well, that's just untenable for the president. it doesn't get any worse than that for somebody that wants to be reelected. and you add to all of that, of course, the real poll that took place over the past month or two and that is what happened on election day when americans went out and voted in almost record numbers in midterms. republicans lost the popular vote by more than any party has ever lost the popular vote in midterms. they lost 40 seats. they had the worst performance since watergate. i mean, mr. president, listen to all of this. this is not working. this disruption every day, the chaos, the tweets, not working. and the question is, mika,

whether there is anybody who can reach the president. i suspect it won't be the new chief of staff, because of course when you have somebody that has called you a terrible human being in public, that's a difficult person to trust. >> you can only hope. with us, we have political writer for the "new york times" and msnbc political analyst nick con fis sorry. noah rothman. and washington anchor for bbc world news america katty kay. during a rainy weekend in washington, president trump went on a twitter tirade with ataatts on law enforcement. remember, michael cohen only banal a rat after the fbi did

something which was absolutely unthinkable and unheard of until the witch hunt was illegally start. they broke into the attorney's office. why didn't they break into the dnc to get the server or crooked's office? where do we begin? the national review's andrew mccarthy, former prosecutor and frequent critic of the mueller investigation responded, sir, in mobster lingo, a rat is a witness who tells prosecutors real incriminating information. searches of lawyer's offices common enough that doj has a procedure for them. here it yielded evidence of crimes you said he should be jailed for. you should stop. >> noah, significant that andy mccarthy that carved a place on national review and fox news as a frequent critic of the mueller investigation is now coming out and becoming more critical of the president, it seems, by today suggesting that what is happening actually is not a

conspiracy and especially telling the president this weekend he should just stop. >> he certainly is right. andy's correct on two points. one is sort of philosophical that the president, the head of the executive branch should not be calling people who work with the government who work with prosecutors rats potentially in tainting future prosecutions by communicating to other potential cooperators that the head of the executive branch doesn't look kindly on this sort of thing and might get a better deal if they were to decline to work with prosecutors is dangerous and certainly unprofessional and unbecoming of the executive branch. second, andy is talking about the southern district of new york which isn't the mueller probe or something the president can't wave away and andy knows these guys and i think he's right. the charges that were brought against mr. cohen and the

charges being investigated that are linked to the president are very serious and that's the kind of thing he can't just make go away with an executive order and so the president is behaving like he's in real trouble and i think he's right. >> well, eddie, he also is behaving as andy pointed out like a mobster. he said this is what mob bosses say and, by the way, when you use the word "rat," that is somebody who is telling the truth to the feds. we had a republican president suggest without irony that somebody should break into dnc headquarters. we'll just let that hang out there. >> so much hanging out there. >> the president is unhinged. >> yeah, it seems like he's in a full-blown panic here. the walls are closing in. one of the interesting things about this is that trump has consistently undermined basic republican principles and one of those has been a kind of defense

of the rule of law. he's just flouting this at every turn in light of his own self-interest. the idea of donald trump invoking language of a mobster, rat, only confirms in the kind of commonsense understanding he has mobster-like qualities and so i think all of this is an indication, joe, that he is in full-blown panic mode. the twitter tsunami indicates he knows something else is coming down the pike. an anvil is about to drop, not a shoe. >> mika, we saw this a few weeks ago before the other shoe dropped in the cohen case, we saw him go on tirades saying mueller or the southern district of new york must be preparing something else. i think here though with every organization he's ever run as the "washington post" said seemingly under investigation this is a president who does feel the walls coming -- closing

in on him quickly. >> hard not to worry about the impact of whatever deflection is coming. trump continued the complaints, this time against his former attorney general, writing, jeff sessions should be ashamed of himself for allowing this total hoax to get started in the first place, later writing, they are entrapping people for misstatements, lies or unregulated things that took place many years ago. our president also complained about what he was seeing on television, quote, a real scandal is the one-sided coverage. hour by hour, of networks like nbc and democrat spin machines like "saturday night live." it is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and dem commercials should be tested in courts, can't be legal? only defame and belittle. collusion? >> katty kay, this proves our point. this is a president who has not

only has no interest in understanding nato or foreign policy or after james mattis found out after giving him a briefing of history, post 1945, he has no interest in understanding the first through the tenth amendments or constitution of the united states and suggesting that a comedy show have an injunction slapped against it because it is critical of a politician. any first year law student would tell you in america that the most protected speech in america is political speech and certainly this sort of parody fits neatly in there. >> yeah, it's not the first time the president has raised the prospect of revoking television licenses including cnn and mentioned nbc in the past and talked about the need to have a state broadcast so more accurately he feels reflects his

positions and supports the administration. i don't know why the president is doing this except to reach out to his base because it wouldn't take him two seconds to find out this was not something he could do. he doesn't seem to mind whether policies he floats on twitter are actually enactable. it is whether they reach his base of supporters. polling shows he's stuck at 38%. you've spoken about this several times that he is not since the midterms making an effort to expand his base. he is pitching again and again to his base and the only purpose of these tweets as far as i can see is for him to remind his base that they need to be angry about something, that they need to be angry about "snl" or need to be angry about cnn and that's what he seems to be doing with these tweets. they have no policy implication. still ahead on "morning joe," we mentioned rudy giuliani's efforts to defend the

president on national tv. what he said about wikileaks that raised as many questions as answers. first, here is bill karins with a check on the forecast. >> i don't have good news. at least it's not going to be snowing or icy anywhere this week, but another huge rainstorm is on the way. this weekend was a washout in many areas of the east. we had flooding rains around d.c. we had a lot of scenes like this where we had the snow melt and rainfall from this week. we cleared it finally late on sunday in areas of virginia. we're still watching that rain exiting in the east, but it's left its mark. if you think this year's been wet, it has in the east. washington, d.c. is now two inches ahead of their wettest year on record and we've still got about half of december to go. as i mentioned, another rainstorm is on the way. baltimore's close to their all-time record. wilmington has record breaking rif rainfall, charleston, lexington,

roanoke. middle of the country looks perfect. oklahoma city, st. louis all the way back through atlanta, nice day today. in houston to louisiana on wednesday, rainfall moving in. on thursday this mess sweeps through the southeast. airport delays possible atlanta, jacksonville, charleston, charlotte and raleigh on thursday. this huge rainstorm will cover much of the northeast and new england friday. november was cold and snowy and here we are in december, one rainstorm after another. the hopes of a white christmas fa fading. ♪

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welcome back to "morning joe." rudy giuliani was on the sunday talk shows trying to defend the president, but he at times appeared a bit confused and at other times wavered on what seemingly should have been straightforward answers. >> and did roger stone ever give the president a heads-up on wikileaks leaks concerning hillary clinton and the dnc? >> no, he didn't, not at all. i don't believe so. but, again, if roger stone gave anybody a heads-up about wikileaks leaks, that's not a crime. it would be like giving him heads-up that the times is going to print something. this is why this thing is so weird, strange. the crime is conspiracy to hack. collusion is not a crime. doesn't exist. i ran that office. i know what they do. >> you know how the southern district is run. >> no. actually i don't know. i'm disgusted with the southern

district. the southern district says you can get out of jail if you do this. he's got three years now. there's a lot of hotmotivation sing like crazy. he's changed his story four or five times. >> so has the president. >> the president is not under oath. >> did donald trump know that michael cohen was pursuing the trump tower in moscow into the summer of 2016? >> according to the answer that he gave, it would have covered all the way up to november of 2016. he sa >> earlier they said those conversations stopped in january 2016. >> i mean, the date -- until you actually sit down and answer the questions and you go back and you look at the papers you're not going to know what happened. that's why lawyers, you know, prepare for those answers. >> does the special counsel want to interview the president? >> yeah. good luck.

after what they did to flynn, the way they trapped him into perjury and no sentence for him -- 14 days for papadopoulos. i did better in traffic cases. >> according both to cohen and to pecker, again, he's was the head of the national enquirer. they say they were in a meeting with donald trump in the summer of 2016 in which they discussed the payment to karen mcdougal. >> we're talking about something that doesn't matter. whether it happened or didn't happen, it's not illegal. >> you're moving shells around on me. either it happened or it didn't happen. >> that's what lawyers do all the time. you argue in the alternative. >> i'm asking you for the truth, sir. >> i want the truth too! >> you can see on twitter where people h take quowill take quot

trump defender has made over a year that says he didn't do it, not sure if he did it, doesn't matter if he did it, it's not a crime if he did it. rudy giuliani actually did that several times. he did it with mcdougal, he did it with russia and one other thick. that's astauoundastounding. also another really astauoundin thing we learned, if rudy giuliani was all there when he answered the question plenty me donald trump told americans that nobody in his campaign had contact with rushes during the campaign. that's what mike pence said as well. donald trump said i have no business with them, i'm not even talking to them, said that during the campaign. rudy giuliani just admitted yesterday that donald trump was actually talking to russia all the way up to november 2016, the

month of the election about building a trump tower moscow. he also, by the way, side note said that the republican-run southern district of new york is disgusting and also said the president can lie because he's not under oath. where do we begin with rudy giuliani's performance yesterday? >> it's tough to say. so you lingered on that november 2016 thing, which is pretty important. i think probably the occam's razor explanation is that he didn't expect to win. he thought he was going to lose. and he would be very well-positioned to advance his family's businesses after the election. i don't know what the case is that rudy giuliani just articulated. sounds like he was just throwing things at the wall, seeing what stuck, seeing what his int

interlocutor agreed to. an attorney is supposed to have some sort of a strategy and it doesn't seem like rudy giuliani has any strategy. he just says what feels good in the moment. that gets him into a lot of trouble. coming up on "morning joe," president trump doesn't buy the intel community's assessment that russia is hacking our politics. so what are the chances he'll believe the new findings prepared for the senate that say the same thing? "morning joe" is coming right back. here we go.

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the "washington post" has obtained a report prepared for the senate that provides a sweeping look at russia's disinformation campaign around the 2016 election, which found the operation used every major social media platform, including youtube, google and instagram, to help elect president trump and even increased once trump came into power. the research by oxford university and a network analysis firm found that while

the overall intensity of posting across platforms grew year by year with a particular spike during the six months after election day 2016, this growth was particularly pronounced on instagram, which went from roughly 2600 posts a month in 2016 to nearly 6,000 in 2017 when the accounts were shut down. across all three years, covered by the report, russian instagram posts generated 185 million likes and 4 million user comments. what is yeaclear is that all ofe messaging clearly sought to benefit the republican party and specifically donald trump. katty kay, where do you begin with questions in terms of approaching the media, the tech companies themselves as it pertains to this? they've been fairly defensive on

capitol hill. >> social media has become in some sense a real threat to democratic processes when it's undermined and used in this way. and this is bipartisan from the committee that russia across multiple platforms did a huge amount to help the republican party and to help specifically donald trump get elected and they carried it on after he was elected. they sought to divide people. they sought to discourage some groups from going out to vote. they undermined african-american networks on social media and they boosted those conservative networks that were in favor of donald trump. it's extremely alarming. it's alarming for the fate of democracy and for democratic elections processes when it can be manipulated in this way. the chinese have decided that the answer to this is to sensor the internet massively because now they're saying, look what's happened in the west, you've

created these social media platforms and they're being used against you to cause divisions in your country and used to undermine faith in your election processes. i don't see how this ends because the social media giants have no interest really in regulating to the degree that they would have to. often we've seen those hearings taking maplace on capitol hill d it seems like our congress people don't understand what they're dealing with, so how can they regulate it properly? >> so now we have in 2016-2018 the party of ronald reagan being buoyed by an ex-kgb agent's propaganda machine. and you don't have republicans speaking out against it aggressively. >> it's bizarre. it's bizarro world.

all the data is in. we know that russia has tried to impact the election. we've seen concrete lay tly the they've exploited our divisions and deepened the divide in our country and create a pathway for their guy to win. the question is what is the congress doing? what have they done to address what we see as clear evidence? and i think the answer is basically nothing. and we have to ask the question why. coming up on "morning joe," according to one survey, a whole lot of people believe winston churchill was a fictional character. >> god help us. >> the famed prime minister was indeed a real person and we explain why it's critical for the next generation to know that.

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welcome back to "morning joe." katty kay, kasie hunt, nick confessore are all still with us. joining us now, columnist for the "new york times"," brett stevens. and professor at tulane university, walter isaacson. >> the president is being taken over by investigations both in his professional and personal life. the "washington post" says almost every organization he's ever been a part of is under investigation. there is really no parallel here, so i won't ask that tired question. i instead will ask you, how does this compare to the challenges nixon faced in the summer of '73 into '74? >> this is many more things swirling around.

and like nixon, a deeply flawed character right in the center of the storm. when even his owned a addled juliewel giuliani says yeah may he lied but he wasn't under oath. you have this weird dynamic with things that are really horrible, affecting people down here in louisiana that they're all talks about. they're just appalled at what could happen if you end up having a health care law, and yet you get so distracted by it because this guy keeps throwing off scandals. >> walter, you talked about giuliani's addled performance yesterday. you actually had the president's lawyer going on george steph p

stephanopoul stephanopoulos's show and he admitted to the president of the united states conspireing along with a.m.i. to pay off money for political purposes and you also had him admitting that the president of the united states lied to the american people when he was running, because they were involved in trump tower negotiations all the way to november of 2016, the month he got elected. >> yeah. and you see the ripple effect. i mean, we've still had a foreign policy that has kowtowed to russia. i mean, you were talking about churchill a little bit earlier. he stood up to russia. unlike trump. he's kowtowing to russia. likewise, he lied about paying off strippers and other people as hush money. these type of things -- we've

almost lost our capacity for outrage and even more importantly, they ripple out into policies, whether it's kowtowing to russia or the loss of affordable health care for people. that should cause people to really be up in arms. i know you took solace perhaps in those polls with him down at 38%, but i still sometimes find whether i look at the last election or the midterms or the polls, i'm still stunned there isn't more of a revulsion against what's happening. >> well, and to hear rudy giuliani put it, the president lies, but that's okay because he's not under oath. for some reason, that seems to make a difference. it is absolutely staggering. kasie hunt, back to health care, though, and the issues that really impact the american people. is this something, this latest development, that republicans can get behind?

>> you know, i don't think this is going to be the easiest issue for them to navigate despite the president tweeting about it. i think -- health care legislation, we've learned, is just incredibly fraught. it is so hard to do. and this ruling was -- while it focused on a very narrow sort of -- the grounds were vary narrow, but the effects were sweeping. the judge used it to strike down the entire law. if this does go forward, all the protections in obamacare are lost. there's not a political plan to follow that, so i don't see how that's a winner at all for republicans. >> brett stevens, you wrote a fascinating column recording winston churchill. i thought the great line was, we reconcile ourselves to the decadence of the present only if we choose to remain ignorant of

the achievements of the past. i've long believed that donald trump has succeeded because so many americans have been cut off from their past, not only their past united states history but also western civilization and the history of the world. >> i think it tells you the effects of not studying history for generations, not just one, but generations of school children, is that we have no idea what real statesmanship ought to look like. i've been reading andrew roberts' magnificent biography of churchill. it's just astonishing to be reminded here is a man who fought in four wars on three continents by the time he was 25 and who in his early 30s, before the first world war, was the greatest social reformer of his day. he was responsible for mine

safety, he was responsible for old age pensions in great britain. he introduced super taxes on the very wealthy, which is also a reminder that the great conservatives also can have a social conscience. all of this is unknown to us even as the conservative movement claims to worship the memory of winston churchill. they should get acquainted with the real figure to understand the distance between what an actual conservative ought to be and the kind of pale cheap imitations we have today. >> brett, you also quote in your piece that survey that shows that a fifth of brits think that churchill is a fictional character. more think that sherlock holmes is a real character and eleanor rigby. maybe she should be. that survey actually dates to 2008, i think, which is before social media, before the big wave of fake news.

i read the piece. it's interesting about churchill, but i did this if people were that misinformed back in 2008 before they've un inundated with the kind of misinformation of the past few years. >> i heard a completian se ian instead of shaking hand, we should just hit our heads as a way of greeting one another. there's really no substitute -- many of us have vacations coming up. this is a thousand page book here. pick it up and read it. it's a good use of your time and it turns out to be an immensely pleasurable exercise not having to check your social media feed, not having to go online all the time.

just distract yourself and live in the past from around 1874 to 1965. you'll be very happy. you'll learn that people are complex. they're not easily reduced to charact cha care -- >> how do you sort through winston churchill in 1940 saved western civilization. he made some terrible mistakes before and after. he also had the view of an englishman in his time, 1940. how do we sort through that just like the trio of virginians, jefferson, madison and washington, who together actually created the concept of

individual rights over monarchs, put it into practice and liberated the world. they were also slave owners. how do we sort through these horrible dilemmas of these men who had horrific flaws but created political institutions and showed leadership in other ways that actually liberated a planet eventually? >> i teach history down here at tulane and that's the main thing we look at, is how do you judge somebody both in the context of the time and whether they got out ahead of history and helped lead their time. when i was at "time magazine," we had to pick the person of the century. there were four contenders, winston churchill, albert einstein, gandhi.

winston churchill was a great writer of history, so he fully understood history and he was able thus to stand up to the nazis, rally britain to its finest hour, rally the west and then warn us against russian communism. he was ahead of the curve on history. however, he had one blind spot, which is was really against decolonizati decolonization. so what you say is, as part of this whole package, this is a person who deeply believed in liberty, believed in the freedoms of the west, but sometimes wasn't right in step with history. i still think churchill is one of the greatest people of the past century, but we have to remember they're human and, as brett said, not all of our heros have to be saints.

>> noah rothman, let's talk about this weekend, another topic that i know is important, not only to you b. and that is the president's attacking of the weekly standard in the time that it actually had to be closed up. >> yeah. i honestly don't know what i'm at liberty to say with regard to the standard, save for the fact that it is an absolute tragedy. even before the trump era it was one of my favorite magazines. in the trump era it has been indispensable. its loss is without equal and parallel and for anybody to be celebrating what happened to these individual, for them to have lost their jobs at the height of the christmas season and for them to be looking for a space to land now and to say

this is an i.victory for me is nakedly hostile. it's unbecoming of the office and it seems to have been a theme this morning. >> talk about the demise of the standard and the president dancing on its grave. >> of course it's typical of the president. he celebrates the destruction of a small business. it's also typical of the president in its anti-intellectualism. the simply fact is that the weekly standard at its best was an extraordinary collection of the liveliest and most independent conservative minds in the united states. part of what trumpism has been about so dolefully, so shamefully is it's been the elevation of essentially third, fourth and even fifth tier conservative so-called

intellectuals. i think of steve bannon, sebastian gorka. people

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network, colleen harris, the president of the national action network, reverend al sharpton. good to you have on this morning. >> reverend al, it looks like peace is breaking out, bipartisan at least for one day in washington, d.c. may actually happen. >> well, that is the hope. i think if there's going to be some bipartisanship, it should be around this issue. i think that when we have seen when it was introduced in the house and people like hakeem jeffreys and others were convincing some of us in the civil rights community that were reluctant about it because it doesn't give us everything we want but it got to where they put sentencing and dealt with having people close to their families, things that are really needed that you couldn't be purist about it. and then when grassley and others really pushed this forward and kept their word on

sentencing, i think many of us have become supportive and hopeful and if there is anything that could bring other parties together, it ought to be around criminal justice issues, even the president has endorsed it. >> al, you've been around long enough to understand that days like this don't, at least lately have happened less and less where bipartisanship breaks out but how fascinating that you've had the kochs on the right being for this, mark holden working with people like valerie jarrett during the obama administration to make sure a day like this came. why is this an idea whose time has come from people on the right and left? >> i think it approaches from different reasons. people on the left want to see justice, criminal justice reform, want to see people that have been sentenced to an inordinate amount of times for

minor crimes like marijuana possession or something to not have to do those crime. people on the right is looking at the cost. if we look at how much we spend incarcerating people more than any country in the world, they're saying we cannot continue to pay for this. it doesn't matter how you get there as you and i, joe, as older baptists say it doesn't matter how we get them to come down the aisle, as long as we convert them, we've done our job. >> let's talk about what will happen here, what the hoped outcome is and what are the real changes we'll see, especially as it pertains to sense tetencing. >> i believe we'll have a bipartisan bill. there are outliers, senator cotton and senator kennedy. i think the vast majority of republicans will vote for this

bill because a lot of leaders don't want to be on the wrong side of history. this bill addresses mass incarceration, which is the civil rights issue of my generation. >> i see from senator kennedy this could increase the deficit by hundreds of millions of dollars. i feel a dr. evil moment. will it? >> no, that's absurd. we're not reinventing the wheel here. more than 30 states across the country interest implemented significant criminal justice reform and they've seen lower crime rates and they've saved in some cases billions of dollars. common sense will tell you if you put people back to work, if they can improve their education, if they can secure adequate housing, if they can support themselves and support their families and find a pathway back to society that's successful, then they're

hopefully going to turn away from crime for good and that will ultimately save us money. >> and keep us safer. >> so what does this mean for the bigger picture? let's say we take this step, we get beyond cotton and kennedy and this legislation is passed. what does it say about the broader issue of criminal justice? >> i think what it could say is that we are again pursuing to try and change the criminal justice system to make it fairer and more humane. yesterday senator kirsten gillibrand and i talked about she wants the next step to be no cash bail. so it's named first step in order to have the first step you need to be able to bring people together. but just because you are make the first step doesn't mean it's a walk toward justice. you have to have a second step, a third step. if we can start with the first step, never did a conservative on kentucky think they'd spend their birthday with al sharpton

talking about criminal justice, let's come together. >> i got a text from my father. he's fine with it. >> oh, he see? >> i guess with the president tweeting we're going to have to sum up the day with way too many legal issues with this president to be able to describe them before the end of the show. joe? >> the president is tweeting this morning but he's tweeting policy and talking about the possibility of bipartisan on health care reform. >> okay. that does it for us this morning. stephanie ruhle picks up the coverage right now. >> i'm stephanie ruhle with a lot to cover this morning, starting with speak and spin. president trump's personal attorney rudy giuliani once again undercutting his own client.