evidence that clearly must have not been presented in court that he did have some knowledge of the plan if he didn't order it. >> all right. thank you very much. that does it for me. i hope everyone has a safe and happy holidays. tonight going over the newly released documents, they offer a time line for the president. the call to ukraine, the holdup in the aid money. they've also fueled democrats demands for witnesses at the senate impeachment trial. the republicans seem no closer to thinking that's a good idea. plus, the former national security adviser speaks out on the world leader the president seems to enjoy and the threat of a missile launch just in time for christmas. and these remain unusual times for presidential speeches and speech patterns. tonight we'll talk to an expert on both as "the 11th hour" gets underway on this not so silent monday night. good evening once again are from

our nbc news headquarters here in new york. day 1,068 of the trump administration. the start of the holiday week brings no let up from the partisan fight over this looming impeachment trial in the senate. late today the president launched new attacks from mar-a-lago against democratic leaders in the house and senate, quote, nancy pelosi is doing everything she can to delay the zero republican vote articles of inpeachment. that was the early spelling before the correction. she is trying to take over the senate and crying chuck is trying to take over the trial no way. what right does crazy nancy have to hold up this trial? none. while speaker pelosi weighs whether to delay transmitting the articles of impeachment to the senate, senate minority leader schumer has sent his colleagues a letter ramping up his original demand that witnesses and documents be subpoenaed for this trial. schumer also cited e-mails the trump administration released to

the center for public integrity, which shed new light on the timing of that freeze on aid to ukraine. here's what we mean. in one e-mail, senior budget office staffer michael duffey wrote to the pentagon's comptroller about the hold on that aid on july 25 about 90 minutes after trump hung up the phone with ukraine's president. duffey closed with this, quote, given the sensitive nature of the request i appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction. senator schumer called that proof that subpoenas are needed and issued a warning to senate republicans. >> if everything was on the up and up, if the call was perfect as president trump said, why does one of his top aides, who's

a political appointee, say let's keep it hush hush. we at the very minimum will require votes from all the senators on each of the witnesses and about each of these sets of documents. and i don't think my colleagues, democrat or republican are going to want to vote to withhold evidence in such an important trial. >> schumer will need 51 senators to force votes to compel witness testimony or to produce documents with 47 democratic senators on his side, schumer needs four republicans to break ranks and cross over to his side, again, just to approve hearing from witnesses and producing documents. back in '99 during the clinton impeachment trial it was maine republican susan collins who was calling for more evidence then. >> i am willing to travel the road wherever it leads, whether it's to the conviction or the

acquittal of the president, but in order to do that, i need more evidence. i need witnesses and further evidence to guide me to the right destination to get to the truth. >> today the current senate majority leader had this message for his counter part among the democrats. >> what i've been advocating to senator schumer is exactly the same way we handled the clinton impeachment 20 years ago which he voted for. you listen to the opening arguments. you have a written question period, and at that point in the clinton trial we had a decision about which witnesses to call. if we haven't ruled out witnesses, we've said let's handle this case just like we did with president clinton. fair is fair. >> meanwhile, on another front, maryland democratic senator chris van hollen has written to the government accountability office asking for its opinion on the legality of trump's move to hold up congressionally approved

aid to ukraine. van hollen believes trump may have violated the law by not telling congress. >> we've asked gao to take a look at this argument. i think to the extent that they agree, it will just be more evidence on top of the already mountains of evidence that this was far from a perfect call and a perfect action. >> tonight "the washington post" reports this. at least 37 republican senators are expected to vote against both articles of impeachment against president trump. they go on to say it means that it is mathematically impossible for trump to be removed from office assuming this 37 number holds. but that is, after all, all the way into next year, and let's bring in our lead off discussion on a monday night here in late 2019, joe colvin white house

reporter for the associated press, john meacham, pulitzer prize winner author and historian and co-author of the book "impeachment: an american history," also with us barbara mcquade, former u.s. attorney for the eastern district of michigan. and counselor, i'd like to start with you. when you read a figure like that in "the washington post" that 37 republican senators have said, yeah, we're going to acquit, what does that mean for the word impartial in the oath they are all going to raise their hands and take when the senate chamber in effect becomes a trial court? >> it is disappointing to think that people have their mind made up when they have not yet seen the evidence. you know, in a criminal case a

defendant is indicted, but that alone is not enough to mean that he's guilty of the crime. the jury is supposed to then sit and listen to the evidence impartially, and all these statements that we've heard from mitch mcconnell and lindsey graham that they're going to be in lock step with the president i think suggests that they are abdicating their duty to be impartial jurors and decide the facts as they will be. you know, at the end of the day, they may very well find acquittal for president trump, but you at least like to think that they are keeping an open mind and that if there is some evidence that sways them, some new witness testimony, perhaps, that they would make that decision. so i think it's disappointing to think that their minds are made up.

>> joe colvin, i don't know how to ask this politely. the president certainly expects and wants a speedy trial. can he withstand a full and fair trial? >> i mean, the president really sees a trial as his opportunity for vindication. you know, there's been this back and forth between him and mitch mcconnell. mcconnell believing that a trial should go quickly, that there is no benefit to republicans in stretching this out whereas the president continues even, you know, behind closed doors to talk about this idea of a very dramatic trial where you'd parade all of these witnesses he believes would be very beneficial to him. the president really sees a trial as an opportunity for him to be acquitted as well as vindicated, a chance for him to be able to go out there on rally stages come 2020 and tell people, look, the house, these democrats were out to get me. they impeached me. you know what the senate did, they acquitted me. they found me not guilty. therefore i am free. i am cleared. my name is cleared, and i have won. that's the platform that he hopes to be able to use going into 2020. at this point, you know, there's still this hold up obviously in even getting to a trial, and there's a lot of questions still about what that trial's actually going to look like. >> now i'm prepared to yield to the gentleman from tennessee, and the question is what is the chance, john, the senate finds a way to 51 to vote for either a notable boldface type witness or documents people know exist? >> that's the most likely scenario that may be damning with the faintest of praise and prediction, but it seems to me getting four republicans is not impossible.

there are two thoughts here. one is when the president says he wants a trial, he doesn't want a trial. he wants senator mcconnell to ram through an acquittal so he can dine out on that going forward. and the second thing is what i would want to know if i were in the republican caucus in the senate is what don't we know? we're finding things out as we speak. i don't think anyone believes that this is somehow a one-off, that president trump has just behaved this way in this one instance, and i think that the more you can find out about the one instance, however, the more you perhaps protect the republic

from really a kind of lawlessness and why can't we let the facts come out and even if that doesn't change a single mind in the senate caucus, at least we'll know what's been done in our name. >> barbara, this latest e-mail that came out, part of a freedom of information act request gives a lot of senators, members of the house something to hold onto, and the public something they can absorb. 91, 91 minutes after the phone is hung up to the aid being hung up its, whether it will be turned into a song from rent or turned into a giant clock that someone can move the arms on on the floor of the senate, we'll have to stick around. i want to read you part of what was said in a "washington post" op-ed. we think his e-mail is most fairly read as a reference to congress and perhaps some others in the executive branch. basically, a white house official was telling the pentagon comptroller don't tell congress about all this. barb, i guess the fair question coming out of that, how many other e-mails like that one are

out there that we could discover before the start date of a senate trial and could be used in oral arguments? >> yes, and you know, to john's point, what else is out there that we don't know yet? we're going to have an impeachment trial. it could all be over by the end of january, and then what happens when we see these e-mails or we read john bolton's book and it turns out that all of these facts were true and, in fact, even worse than we ever imagined? don't we owe it to the generations to come to say that we handled this moment appropriately, that we had all the facts and that we worked to get all the facts? the reason we don't have all the facts is because of impeachment article ii. president trump has withheld those things and obstructed congress in its inquiry. and so i think demanding witnesses and even documents for the trial is not an unreasonable request. >> and jill, i have this from heidi przybyla on twitter today, the morning of his july 25th call asking ukraine for a favor to investigate joe biden's son, trump was reading a fox poll showing two things.

biden with a commanding lead for the democratic nomination, biden beating trump by ten points in a general. and i guess, jill, the question is how can white house officials continue to believe that biden was not the overall impetus? >> i'm not necessarily sure that's what white house officials believe. that's obviously the line that they say and what the president has continued to say, that this has nothing to do with joe biden, even though he was actually asking newly elected president zelensky to investigate joe biden, to investigate his son hunter, to investigate burisma, to investigate this conspiracy theory alleging against intelligence officials conclusions that it was actually ukraine that interfered in the election and not russia -- not russia but ukraine instead. this is kind of a line that they have been trying to push in order to kind of try to counter act this idea that the president was trying to damage one of his political rivals.

it's really interesting, the president's twitter feed sort of always provides this really interesting in time version of exactly what he was looking at. again and again it's the president's offhand comments, things he says off the cuff on the south lawn, for instance, asking china to investigate the bidens that wind up really coming back as evidence the democrats can use against him. things for instance in the mueller report where his words are being used to build that case against him. >> john, mark short, the chief of staff for vice president pence in addition to giving kind of glancing approval of the russian talking points on ukraine also found a way to kind of defend the president hinting that john dingell might be in hell. what do you make of these times we're living in, john? >> well, let's hope they pass. what we're seeing is an exaggerated version of a lot of perennial american forces, zen

phobia, reflexive partisanship. these have been with us from the beginning, and they'll be with us to the end. our greatest moments have been those in which we have made those forces ebb as opposed to flow. right now they're flowing, and one thing we can see in the impeachment drama and one thing that would make me feel slightly more confident about the future of things is it's perfectly fine. it's within their constitutional duty for united states senators to say this is not an offense for which these two articles do not rise in their opinion, to removing a president from office. that's -- they're elected. they took the oath. that's their job. that's their call. if the voters don't like it, we can throw the senators out. but let's at least get to a point where we can agree about the common sense, the actual discernible reality of the facts in front of us because this

country was founded on partly because of a pamphlet called common sense and this idea that reason would always have a chance against passion in the arena. and that's what's on trial in many ways here. >> and let's don't be quoting . >> and let's don't be quoting talking points translated from the original russian, jo colvin, barbara mcquaid, joe meachum, happy holidays to you, greatly appreciate you being on this monday night. it looks like kim jong-un could ruin christmas across a wide region of the earth with a missile launch and one criticism a trump white house adviser has on the strategy of north korea. and later, where does president obama stand on joe biden's run for the white house, as the 11th hour is just getting started on this christmas eve eve, otherwise known as monday night. . they never stray from their predetermined path.

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well, we'll see about north korea. i'd be surprised if north korea acted hostilely. i have a very good relationship with kim jong-un. i think we both want to keep it that way. he knows i have an election coming up. i don't think he wants to interfere with that. we'll have to see. >> not long ago north korea warned it would deliver the u.s. an unwelcome christmas gift as they put it, if there's no progress on nuclear talks. additionally and just in time for the holidays, nbc news has

learned the kim regime appears to be expanding one of its nuclear sites. now satellite imagery showing increased activity at a long-range facility that kim jong-un has visited several times of late. meanwhile, in an interview with "axios," the often elusive john bolton, trump's former national security adviser says he quote, does not think the administration really means it when president trump and top officials vow to stop north korea from having deliverable nuclear weapons or it would be pursuing a different course. bolton goes on to say, quote, the idea that we are somehow exerting maximum pressure on north korea is just unfortunately not true. well, with us tonight is admiral james stavridis, annapolis graduate, retiring with the rank graduate, spent 30 years in the u.s. navy, retiring with the rank of four star admiral. former head of the u.s. southern command, former supreme allied commander of nato and in case anyone on your list is a military history buff or would profit from well-written lessons in leadership, the admiral just

happens to be the author of a new book, and it's called, "sailing true north: ten admirals and the voyage of character." we're so happy to have you back on the broadcast. i guess my first question will bring down the energy. what's the chance our president has been played by the north korean leader? >> i'd say about 100%, brian. i hate to say that. let's do the good news first. the good news is as opposed to fire and fury, and we're ramping up for a war on the korean peninsula, we've now moved into kind of rope a dope. but on the other hand, here i got to agree with former national security adviser john bolton that we are not progressing toward the stated goal of denuclearizing this peninsula, and i think kim is just kind of playing along. he's right on playbook from his father and his grandfather. he's looking to gain concessions, and i think there's probably a two in three chance over the next couple of days we

will see a long-range ballistic missile launch. he may not do that and sort of say, well, with my dear friendship with president trump i'll walk it back a bit, but i think kim is hungry for attention right now, brian, so look for that launch. better than even chance. >> think of the relevance he has craved since he's been in power. think of how we have fed that relevance with the visit to the dmz, sit-downs on live television in both countries with both leaders. the question is how does this change? he knows very well when our election day is. how does this change 11 months from now? >> if president trump is returned to office, i think that at that stage of events you'll see him become more quiescent. he'll be more willing to play along. if president trump is not returned to office, i think kim has a pretty tough hand to play. anyone who comes in from the

democratic side i think is going to have to play against this pattern that we've seen of the white house being manipulated, and i'll tell you, brian, as someone who served a long career in the military, when i first saw that north korean flag alongside an american flag and our president rushing out to shake hands with a dictator who runs a dystopian kingdom on that peninsula, it made my heart hurt. >> well, as of tonight we have some 37,000 american souls in uniform over there. that's why we have to hope for the best most immediately. hey, i want to ask you about a subject you and i have talked about here before, and that's eddie gallagher. the navy s.e.a.l. was invited to mar-a-lago this weekend, give him a chance to thank the president for reversing his demotion, and the "new york times" writes this, just as a reminder to folks what this was all about, from his unit two s.e.a.l. snipers told investigators that one day from his sniper nest, chief gallagher

shot a girl in a flower print hijab who was walking with other girls on the river bank. one of those snipers said he watched through his scope as he dropped clutching her stomach and the other girls dragged her away. your reaction to any or all of this admiral? >> let's be absolutely clear. he was convicted on mutilating a corpse, and if anyone wants any sense of chief gallagher, google chief gallagher's war trophy photo, and you'll see him holding by the hair a dead boy, a teenager, holding a knife to that corpse's throat and the caption he put on his social networks was i got my knife skills on. that's not what the military is all about. president trump says we train them to be killing machines. that's wrong. we train them to be thinking machines, to make the hard decisions in combat and for him

to be feted by the president at mar-a-lago is a staggering image to me that undermines good order and discipline. >> tonight as we are thinking of all americans foreign and domestic serving here and overseas in uniform, we also wish you the happiest of holidays. thank you for coming back on our broadcast. >> thank you, and spare a thought for those forward deployed in the military, brian, thank you for saying that. >> absolutely. thank you, sir. coming up, as we continue, after three years as president, some of donald trump's words are more mystifying than before. we'll ask an expert about that, a man who columbia university believes indeed has the best words.

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an absolutely perfect phone call to the new president of ukraine. that was a perfect call. >> had a perfect phone call with the president of ukraine, like i mean perfect. >> the phone call that was perfect. >> a perfect phone call, i made a perfect call. not a good call, a perfect call. a friend of mine who's a great lawyer, did you know this would be the subject of all the scrutiny because the way you express yourself this was like a perfect call. >> it was a perfect call, in fact, it was two perfect calls. >> a perfect phone call, an absolutely perfect call. >> the thing is, however, we keep learning new details surrounding that july 25th phone call that the president has

repeatedly called perfect with ukraine's president volodymyr zelensky. "the washington post" reports 29 times in the past three months president trump has used twitter to implore the country to read the rough transcript of his july 25th call. the president has also instructed his gop allies to use a similar defense writing on twitter back in november, the call to the ukrainian president was perfect. read the transcript. there was nothing said that was in any way wrong. republicans, don't be lead into the fool's trap of saying it was not perfect but is not impeachable. no, that is much stronger than that. it is much stronger than that. nothing was done wrong. one annoying small fact to inject here, we never got a transcript. we would, in fact, love to read a transcript of the call. we were given a summary by the white house and there is already sworn testimony that the summary is wrong. it's incomplete. be that as it may. isn't it still all about words?

and to that end it is our great pleasure to say back with us again is john mcquarter, our public linguist, often pushed into the position of trump explainer, for which he comes armed with a ph.d. in linguistics from stanford. a professor at columbia university, contributor at the atlantic, the host of lexicon valley podcast at slate and the author of over a dozen books in his spare time. when you're not here we're thinking about what we're going to ask you on your next appearance. >> that's wonderful to hear. >> as my mom would say, that beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. you should do a show on that. please. >> i actually will. >> phraseology. perfect phone call. not in the recorded human history have i ever heard a phone call described as perfect because it's such an imperfect vehicle to start with. so the news media is now calling it a perfect call ironically.

his base is calling it a perfect call seriously. a friend of mine is ron poe peel, maybe the best marketer of the last half century on television. this is marketing, introducing a concept we didn't know existed before and by sheer weight of insistence and repetition making it a thing. >> mm-hmm. it's interesting calling a phone call perfect, and that that wasn't just a tick. when i first read that i thought that's just the way he happened to put it when he was sitting there eating funions and typing one night. you usually call something perfect when you're rating it from a distance. it's as if he's judging some sort of beauty contest or something, it was perfect, which shows you how far he is from thinking about what the issues really are, with why people have issues with the content of the call. the marketing part comes in in

that there's a complete disconnect when it comes to him and his people with the objections that a lot of us have to the appropriateness of that call. the details are just utterly ignored. they're not playing the same game we are. they're not indulging in facts and reasoning. they're doing something else because they see themselves as having a higher purpose. they think that there's a larger story and that history will pardon them. the problem is the larger story is clearly built on sand. >> what about when you look behind him at a rally and someone is handed the crowd read the transcript t-shirts. we can't, again, we would love to read the transcript. we were given a summary replete with gaps and ellipses. >> and of course if we actually could read the transcript, the people reading the t-shirt wouldn't read the transcript. the issue isn't what the transcript would say and whether or not the president was doing something that was inappropriate. we're supposed to think of the phone call as perfect the way somebody's bathing suit might be

perfect and we're supposed to think that the larger issue is, what, the idea that he's not a details man, that there might be some things he did that we might call tacky. but unfortunately the larger issue is simply the president's narcissism and bucking him up. so unfortunately what i see when i see these things, such as somebody using perfect in that way over and over again, the eccentric capitalization, the vicious abuse of people without any thought of it. all of this is based on two things. anybody who works for this man is either a cynic or -- and brian, this is the hard part. we as polite american people have been trained to not talk outwardly too much about some people having more mental candle power than others. it's considered tacky, especially if you have a college degree. but i think we have to understand that when it comes to a lot of this, it's not a matter of trump and his people having a strategy.

we're talking about people frankly, trump of course and then many of the people who work with him, these people are working on a lower level than a lot of other people. these people aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer. there is a reason why, for example. notice how easy it is to imagine the president in private moments trying to put m&m's in alphabetical order. do you notice that that feels kind of plausible? it's because we're talking about people who aren't thinking of that high of a level. if that sounds snotty, it is. the problem is, we have people like this who are running the nation. it's impossible to have a productive dialogue with people who are working on that level. >> in modern day america, did the phrase quid pro quo ever stand a chance? >> frankly i'm afraid that their reasoning about these things is not what we would expect. we're expecting close reasoning and exchange. these people are flying above it with the idea that there are larger issues at hand when in fact the large issue is simply whether or not donald trump snaps the towel properly in the

locker room and wins, and that's all it is. that's what was accidentally allowed into the white house. >> the democrats are having their own argument should it have been called bribery or extortion from the get-go and not a latin phrase. our guest has agreed to stay with us over the break. coming up, the president asked his audience days ago for a word at his rally, and they knew exactly what word he wanted and they shouted it back at him. we'll talk about the word, its import, and all things verbal right after this. to be honest a little dust it never bothered me.

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trump got the crowd to do the weirdest call in response i've ever heard. >> sinks, showers, and what goes with a sink and shower? [ laughter ] >> his crowd knew the answer was toilets and they were right a second later he renewed his strange feud with flushing. check this out.

>> him. >> so some poor guy in his audience waited in line outdoors in michigan in december to support the president. he gets inside, the president points at him and says this guy destroys toilets. >> colin jost who went to harvard university by the way taking on donald trump. this riff the president does on toilets goes back to something he must know about the new plumbing standards and tank sizes. that has become flushing 10 to 15 times, which strikes me would call up the need for a doctor more than a plumber perhaps. >> usually, yes. >> but what about his control verbally over a crowd that knows the next word he's looking for? >> you know what he is is oral. what he reminds me of is how human language emerged. we tend to talk in little packets of seven to ten words at a time, not in the long sentences of the wall street

journal, and language is about conversation. it's a lot about emotion, and rhythm, and if you're dealing with a society that is before writing, then an awful lot of convincing people is based on intonation and on rhythm and on energy. that's the way it goes. the printed page is a very artificial thing. it really transforms your mentality. and so what he's doing is he's being somebody who demonstrates that he i guess we should say doesn't happen to be a reader. this is not a man of the printed page, so what he's holding is a rally. everything that he does in the name of politics has the atmosphere of something that you would usually expect at some kind of sporting event, and that includes the low level of vocabulary necessary to having a sporting event. you don't need to have verbal subtlety at a sporting event, you wouldn't want it. but the problem is he takes that kind of atmosphere, that kind of going for the gut and brings it into leading a nation with no sense of the fact that you're

supposed to at least make a stab at grandeur. he often reminds me of lyndon johnson who was not the most refined person, was not the most supremely educated person, but came to the office and knew that he had to pull his gut in. you hear the little stories about stuff he did in the bathroom talking about toilets, et cetera, but that was scuttlebutt, and you didn't know as much about it at the time. he tried to project an image because he was running a big and important country. trump doesn't have any sense of that. >> we've checked and lyndon johnson never flushed 10 to 15 times as president. this next bit was a name that must have triggered trump back to an age where in a tough school you'd make fun of kids' names that were beyond the ordinary. this became a name trigger that ended up making fun of a guy that served in the house from 1955 to 2015. >> dingell, dingell. you know dingell from michigan?

debbie dingell, that's a real beauty. so she calls me up like eight months ago. her husband was there a long time, but i didn't give him the b treatment. i didn't give him the c or the d. i could have. nobody would have -- i gave the a plus treatment. she calls me up. it's the nicest thing that's ever happened. thank you so much. john would be so thrilled. he's looking down, he'd be so thrilled. thank you so much, sir. i said that's okay, don't worry about it. maybe he's looking up. i don't know. >> so many things going on there. i'm duty bound to point out that the endangered species act clean air, clean water, civil rights act would not look the same arguably without john dingell in congress. he represented michigan. that's where the rally was, dingell, you could hear the repetition. it sounds funny to him. the joke about him looking up from hell, even the pro forma nature of being president and

allowing a burial with full military honors. he's buried in arlington, world war ii veteran. he assigned that to kind of favor status. it started with the pronunciation of the name. >> you know, it's interesting. he's sitting there using the name, and he's implying that it sounds like some kind of genital, isn't that funny. of course it reminds you've of uncle whoever that counselor at camp. everything about the man is easy, always easy. for example, never mind the history of the man who he's talking about and his significance. donald trump has the historical sense of roughly a kitchen cabinet. the past doesn't matter except as possibly it flatters him in the present. once again, it's about orality. before you can write history down, people tend to preserve history in their heads often with some one or two people who remember the history, and the history tends to be massaged to fit the needs of people living difficult lives in the present. just mastering details such as

what franklin pierce's wife's name was. it's not important if you don't have paper to preserve those meaningless details. he has this preliterate sense of how history works and then just the meanness. if you talk to an actor, they'll tell you as fascinating as it is to watch somebody be angry in a play, angry is easy. if somebody doesn't know how to act, it's fairly easy to have a tantrum. what's difficult is getting on stage and conveying things such as genuine happiness or remorse or ambiguity, and notice how those three things are utterly alien from anything we've seen of trump. what you see is a certain joy in making fun of other people. this is a truly inferior person to be leading this nation, and the bit with dingell he ought to be utterly ashamed of himself. and yet as we know, life will go on, and that thing could possibly be reelected because

that's how life works. we've unleashed something that's truly frightening. >> this is the day we begin booking your next appearance. >> i hope so. >> thank you very much. tell the good people watching the name of your podcast again. >> that podcast is called lexicon valley, and please listen to it because i do it and i enjoy it. >> and he uses words throughout i'm told, john has been kind enough to join us again. we'll be back right after this. ♪

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the mayor just recently had a fundraiser that was held in a wine cave full of crystals and served $900 a bottle wine. >> this is the problem with issuing purity tests you cannot yourself pass. >> elizabeth warren is facing some criticism this week after that exchange with mayor pete. the washington examiner reports, quote, massachusetts senator's own campaign fundraisers have sometimes taken place at a

restaurant boasting bottles of wine that cost more than $6,500, and the associated press has details about a fundraiser in boston last summer writing this, for top donors those who could contribute or raise 5,400 per couple or 2,700 a person, there contribute $5,400 per couple or 2,700 a person, there was a vip photo reception and premium seating. there's was also a gift for those who gave $1,000, wait for this, a wine bottle. is just weeks to go before the iowa caucus so we bring in jason johnson. i think you and i will always have this story, because it was in this studio the same night that we learned what we know about wine caves and chris cals. crystals. i don't want to speak for you, but you seem to be learning it

in full stride. is this like let he or she is who is without sin cast the first bottle? >> exactly. it's so humerus. but this was good strategy, basically, by elizabeth warren. she attacked mayor pete at a time when he was getting a lot of criticism from the left for having big donors and not being accessible and she played upon that in the debate. she had to know full well that she was going to be exposed, but no one reads the retraction and what we discover two or three days later. i don't care if it's a wine cave or hennessy hideaway, whatever it is, people who are running for president are going to raise money, they're going to raise money with alcohol and gifts and they're going to give access to people who give them a lot of cash. but elizabeth warren has brand herself as i'll take the money, but that's not for access and mayor pete hasn't been able to do is that for me. >> anyone wants to do fund raising for me, it's coka koca-

in a bottle, not a can. former president barack beobama has gone to bat for elizabeth warren. and if warren becomes the nominee, obama has said they must throw the entirety of their support behind her. i got two questions for you. "a," do you believe this reporting? and, "b," what about joe? >> so, one, i do believe the reporting. it's been very interesting who's really sort of claimed the obama legacy. he had a lot of staff go with beto. he's had stuff come out and endors maye enendorse mayor pete. everybody expects him to be respective of joe biden. but we keep getting these leaks of obama himself that he's not

that supportive of joe biden. that he's suggested, joe, you don't have to do this. that's also in play and biden has to realize that at some point should he become the dom knee, he's going to have to get a full-throated, enthusiastic support of barack obama. >> it seems to me this democratic race has enjoyed something like stasis for a good long time. no huge changes. in your view, we are due for one in six weeks in iowa? >> i think we are. now, i don't know who that person is going to be. but every single consultant that i've spoken to, people on the ground in iowa, people on the ground in south carolina say cr cory booker has a great team. joe biden is soft among educated, high enthusiasm

long-term caucuses that you have in iowa. i think there's a good chance had the we can have a very late night in early 2020. we may not find out until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and how joe biden performs at the end of the day if it's close or if he loses in iowa could change the dynamics heading into super tuesday. >> do you promise me you'll do your level best to have a merry christmas? >> i will do my absolute best to have a merry christmas and quansah and hann quansah and hann quansah and hanukkah. >> sometimes it's as if green energy did a wrong to donald trump along the way. green energy did a wrong to donald trump along the way. tom steyer: i'm tom steyer,

and i approve this message. climate is the number one priority. i would declare a state of emergency on day one. congress has never passed an important climate bill, ever. this is a problem which continues to get worse. i've spent a decade fighting and beating oil companies, stopping pipelines, stopping fossil fuel plants, ensuring clean energy across the country. how are we going to pull this country together? we take on the biggest challenge in history, we save the world and we do it together. i am all about livi♪g joyfully. hello. the united explorer card hooks me up. getting more for getting away. rewarded! going new places and tasting new flavors.

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last thing before we go here tonight, in case you haven't heard it or perhaps you want to hear it again, donald trump has revived his longstanding war on wind mills. this first started when he fought them nearby his scotland property. since then, he has blamed wind mills for most of the ills in our society. for starters, pollution, noise, cancer, and lowing real estate values. so far he has not blamed wind mills for moderate to severe plaque ser rayo sis. but it's early. here now is the president tilting at wind mills again this

past saturday. >> we'll have an economy based on wind. i never understood wind. i know wind mills very much. i've studied it better than anybody. it's very expensive. they're made in china and germany mostly. very few made her, almost none. but they're yoofs manufactured. tremendous if you're into this, tremendous fumes, gases are spewing into the atmosphere. you know we have a world, right? so the world is tiny compared to the universe. so tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. you talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right? spewing. whether it's in china, germany, it's going into the air, it's our air, their air, everything, right? >> some hints embedded flight there as to why "the washington post" called it a baffling rant. plus, it's the holidays and on that note, have a great one. we'll close with the picture of the tree we decorate every year

and keep out back here. that is our monday evening broadcast. thank you so very much for being here with us and good night from our msnbc news headquarters here in new york. r msnbc news headqe in new york. good morning, everyone. i'm ayman alongside alex witt on this christmas eve morning. we hope everyone is having a very nice start to their holidays braving all the traffic and travel out there. >> yeah. >> final push. >> can we just say something? i see your voice is a little gravelly it's because this is the amennet work thyman network we have a lot to get to. it was the morning before christmas and all you there the house. democrats may be considering additional articles of impeachment against donald trump. plus we'll have