this was the scene near corpus christi, texas on memorial day weekend this year. as you can see from these images, the beaches were just packed. there was a sense this strip of texas was somehow safe from coronavirus even as covid was raging in other parts of the country. few, if any, cases had been reported in corpus christi.

given that sense of security and given that the county didn't require masks, lots of out-of-towners just flocked to the area for memorial day. the head of the local tourism bureau said the entire city was completely sold out, every hotel, every short-term rental. and then very quickly the consequences arrived. soon corpus christi had one of the fastest growing outbreaks in the state of texas. the city went from reporting barely any new cases a day to tallying over 400 new cases in one 24-hour period. and this wasn't just a one off. it wasn't just corpus christi. memorial day weekend was when things really started to spiral out of control. memorial day is the end of may, right? by june 11th of this summer, cases were rising in nearly after the states in the country. in texas alone, that rise in cases meant that hospitals very

quickly became inundated as well. there was a 42% uptick in patient numbers in hospitals in the two weeks following memorial day weekend in texas. in arizona it was a similar story. new case totals every day following the memorial day weekend and then hospitalizations followed. hospitalizations shot up 49%. even in places like arkansas that got less front page attention last summer, hospitalizations in arkansas went up 88% in the weeks following memorial day weekend. and it would be one thing if this was a one-time natural experiment, right? if the country saw what happened on memorial day weekend and then we decided that, i don't want to do that again, prepare myself for the next summer holiday. that's not how we do things in this country anymore. this is a graphic from the covid

tracking project showing daily coronavirus cases reported across the united states. and as you can see, things really took off in the days and weeks following memorial day weekend. but take a look at what happened on july 4th. july 4th the country was reporting 54,000 cases a day. then look at what was happening two weeks later. shot up to 77,000 cases a day. two weeks after july 4th weekend, 20,000 more americans per day were being diagnosed with covid. if cases skyrocketed that much after july 4th, after memorial day weekend and then after july 4th, what do we expect from this weekend, labor day weekend? we're looking at a very different landscape, actually, from where we were earlier in the summer. for one thing, lots more things are actually open now. businesses are ramping back up

and opening back up. schools are opening back up, as are colleges. many of which have been holding classes for weeks now. and while that might feel great in some ways, it's not happening because covid numbers are down. covid numbers are still really high. we're still up around 40,000 cases a day. and we've got a lot of covid in the country. and this many more things being open, there is more opportunity for the virus to spread now than it did back in july when we had that big spike after july 4th. there is more virus to spread now. we have now topped six million cases. there is a lot of covid out there in our country. we're not only closing in on 190,000 deaths. we're over six million cases with lots of stuff more open. this is the landscape we are looking at heading into this final weekend of the summer. and all of this is happening at a time when the school numbers show us what happens when people come together in large numbers

in places where they haven't figured out how to stop the spread of the virus while people are in the same place. for example, more than 1,100 students at the university of iowa have already been infected. keep in mind, the semester began last week. up until just a few days ago, that school had planned to hold its football home opener before 25,000 fans. thankfully, that's been called off. fans will no longer be allowed in the stands. but more than 1,000 student cases at the university of south carolina. north carolina, more than 3,000 college students have been affected. the governor of missouri said yesterday that more than 7,000 college-age people in missouri have tested positive. the recent rates have been staggeri staggering, like 45% positive in college towns in missouri now. at the same time that the virus really seems to be spreading

unabated in college towns and in schools across the country, we are learning more about what may be happening in terms of the national strategy in dealing with this problem. we talked for a long time about the fact there didn't seem to be a national strategy. now it seems like there is one, but it's one that we have to disce discern, and it's a little disturbing. earlier this week, you remember us talking about how the president fell under the spell of a new coronavirus adviser at the white house. he is a doctor named scott atlas. he is not an epidemiologist. he does not have an infectious disease expert at all. his specialty is doing mris of the spine and brain, which is super cool and i definitely don't know how to do that, but it has nothing to do with covid at all even though the president had seemed to put him in charge and signed on to his contrarian thinking which appears to entail, basically, letting the

virus spread mostly unchecked throughout the country because he believes it doesn't matter how many people get it as long as they are low-risk individuals. eventually, that will allow us to build up population immunity or herd immunity, no matter the staggering cost of life along the way. the country does appear to be on track to follow this as a new federal response, a new federal response to the epidemic where we let it run rampid and try to protect the old people somehow. this is from "politico".com this week that hasn't received much debate since it's apparently been slow rolled out by the president and this new adviser. just eight weeks from election day, the white house has stopped trying to contain the coronavirus. shifting instead to shielding the nation's most vulnerable groups and restoring a sense of normal normalcy. the change is a concerted effort to increase public approval of president trump's pandemic response and bolster his

election chances by sharply reducing covid case counts and the number of deaths and hospitalizations attributed to the virus. this is according to five people familiar with the strategy. they're not trying to reduce the number of cases or hospitalizations or deaths. they're just trying to reduce the number of them that are called covid. according to a republican close to the administration who adv e advised elements of the response, quote, this has to do with the president trying to shift away from testing. they don't want the numbers to keep going up. not getting people tested, not having the numbers go up doesn't mean there aren't more cases. it just means you don't know about those cases and those people can't take action to prevent themselves from giving it to other people. but this apparently is the new strategy. don't try to contain it. don't even test for it. reduce the number of tests. and if a lot more people have to die while we pursue this, then

let's not talk about this as our strategy. let's just do it. whether or not they're going to confirm that hoping lots of people get covid is the new national strategy, we are seeing the president himself starting to act this out at his public events. earlier this week, the president held an event at wilmington, north carolina to honor world war ii veterans. some were in attendance, but they didn't do any social distancing. no masks to be seen. yesterday at another presidential event, thousands of people gathered packed shoulder to shoulder at a campaign stop in pennsylvania. again, nearly no masks and no distance. the president actually opened a community meeting in kenosha, wisconsin earlier this week by encouraging those present to please take off their face coverings. sure. why not? i mean, we have seen this from the president before and we have said this is a form of modeling bad behavior, creating potentially super spreader events himself whenever he does

this congregate events for his campaign. but the president is also making this part of his messaging. just this week explicitly mocking joe biden for wearing a mask and also talking too much about covid-19. because what sort of a leader would do that? the amount of covid in the country right now, how open the country is right now, what's happened after previous holiday weekends and the presidential leadership on this, which is apparently that the more people who get it the better heading into this holiday weekend it sort of feels like a perfect storm. joining us now is somebody who understands these things better than the rest of us. dean of the school of public health at brown university and newly so. congratulations on your big new job, and thanks for being here tonight. >> thank you, rachel, for having me on and thanks for the remarks. >> i have laid this out in layman's terms, in terms of what i'm worried about, and what

seems like a worst circumstance than previous summer holidays heading into this one. do you think that's an appropriate way to look at it or have i got any of this the wrong way around? >> no. i think you have got it exactly right, rachel. we went into memorial day with about 20,000 new cases a day and opened up a lot, but we didn't have schools open. we didn't have colleges open. and we saw those very large spikes that you laid out. again, we saw a big bump after july 4th. and part of it as we approach each holiday we keep thinking that the pandemic is behind us. and if we just go back to normal, it will be fine. of course, the pandemic is not behind us. it won't be fine. so i am deeply worried about what happens in the days and weeks ahead. >> are we doing more testing now as a country, or are we doing less testing? part of the reason that people focus on positivity rates is because in order to know what your positive rate, you have to

know how many tests you are giving and how many of them are positive. a low positivity rate means you are doing a lot of tests and not too many people who are getting tested turn up with a positive result. i know that positive rates, especially in some parts of the country now are scary high. but what about the overall number of tests that we're doing? are we getting more people tested in this country? >> so we're better than we were on memorial day, so that's good news. but if you compare us to about a month ago, we have actually started heading down. and this is puzzling and really disappointing because there is no good reason we should be doing less testing. we need a lot more testing. and i often point to states like new york, which is doing an extraordinary number of tests. and they are finding very few cases. their positivity rate is very low. that's the model. that's what we want to get to. we want to be able to test a broad swath of people, find everybody who is infected.

that's how you contain the virus, and that's how you make life safer for people to get back to schools and go back to work. >> is there any particular part of the country or are there regions in the country or types of communities in the country that you are particularly worried about, either for this holiday weekend or just for the stretch of days and weeks immediately ahead of us? >> yeah. so the south is doing, again, better than, let's say, mid-july when the country really peaked. places like arizona, texas and florida are clearly down. that's good news. but they still have a lot of cases. if you just look across the south, about 20,000 cases per day. and then a few states are doing very badly. you mentioned some of them. iowa, the dakotas, missouri, kansas. so a whole set of states that are, i think, in a lot of trouble as we go into labor day weekend. of course, as we go into the

fall, we will have people spending more time indoors. cases will rise. so we have a lot of difficult days and weeks ahead unless we get our act together. and i'm worried that we will not get our act together. we will just try to waive the white flag and try to get our way through this. >> are you concerned that the white house has pivoted to a new national strategy that, in effect, whether or not they're willing to articulate it this way, is aimed at infecting lots of people so as to try to build up immunity in the population. i know that mathematically, frankly, it's insane. we're talking about millions of people dead under this kind of a strategy. but do you see signs that that's actually what they're pursuing. >> we certainly hear it from dr. atlas. what he says is the term they use is protecting the vulnerable. the idea is let's just let everybody else get infected. it sounds totally reasonable until you think about it. the problem is moment you think

about it you realize a couple of things. first of all, a lot of people are vulnerable. anybody with high blood pressure, diabetes, almost half the adult population is potentially vulnerable. older people live around and interact with young people. they don't live on an island somewhere we can just protect them. we know when you see large outbreaks in the community even among young folks it seeps in because we're all part of the same community. we visit the same grocery stores. so this strategy of let everybody get infected except the elderly i think has no chance of working. lots of countries have thought about it. no one has actually tried to do it. i don't want america to be the country that does this. >> dean of the school of public health at brown university. they're lucky to have you, sir. good luck with your new endeavor here and thanks for being with us tonight. i really appreciate it.

>> thank you, rachel. all right. it's been a big and busy news week already. some of what they told us coming up next, more ahead. stay with us. for america. it's 5g ultra wideband, and it's already available in parts of select cities. like los angeles and in new york city. and it's rolling out in cities around the country. with massive capacity, it's like an eight lane highway compared to a two lane dirt road. 25x faster than today's 4g networks. in fact, it's the fastest 5g in the world. from the network more people rely on. this is 5g built right. only on verizon.

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this is from page 111 of stephanie winston's new book. 35 days before the inaugural. she says, back in new york i attended a meeting with president-elect trump in his office. i thought i was a horder. his office looked like a garage sale. stephanie, donald said, tell me what's going on with the inauguration planning. ivanka joined donald and me for the meeting. i presented to the two of them. i grabbed my binder, went over to donald's side of the desk and sat with my knees on the floor. he sat in his red leather chair ready for me to proceed. i went over hundreds of pages.

ivanka made comments and asked questions. will there be a red carpet? after the parade, donald said, quote, i don't want floats. i said okay. the president continued. quote, i want tanks and choppers. make it look like north korea. there was no way. he really wanted troops and armored tanks? that would break tradition and terrify half the country. when ivanka heard north korea, she didn't bat an eye. i walked out of the meeting ruffled and worried. i texted a friend and colleague, north korea style military para parade. bad idea? former friend and adviser to melania trump. she played a key role in organizing the trump inauguration in 2017 that has led to so much consternation and so much league trouble ever since.

she has written the most detailed account of all of this. in her new book called "melania and me," joining us now for the interview is stephanie winston wallkoff. thank you for being here. >> thank you for having me so much, rachel. i wouldn't rather be anywhere else. >> it's nice of you to say that. obviously, there is a lot here. there is a lot that's very raw here, particularly about the distress about the dissolution of your friendship with the first lady, the circumstances on which you left the white house. i want to talk about some of what you described about the inaugural. you're pretty frank about the idea that there is a lot of missing money, unaccounted for money in terms of what was raised versus what was spent. do you feel like you have a general grasp of how much money

that might be or do you have a theory or any knowledge about where it might have gone. >> well, i do know at the time that i questioned where the money was going or how much everything cost, i was asked to not attend anymore budget meetings. so it took me a few years to figure everything out. but it's just, you know, people need to just follow the money. >> in terms of who is following the money, it is remarkable that you describe the difficulty and the decision that you made to cooperate with these multiple ongoing investigations, including the d.c. attorney general and having received a subpoena from the southern district of new york. i know these are ongoing proceedings and you are limited in what you can say. but do you feel that the people who are investigating this know what happened to the money? do you feel the investigations are on the right track in terms of what happened to these tens of millions of unaccounted for dollars? >> rachel, unfortunately with our justice department right

now, i don't really know entirely what's going on with some of these investigations, and that's a really sad and challenging place to be, especially since this election was right around the corner. i do know that attorney general is still investigating. it's still open. as far as the southern district, i don't know where that stands, as well as the intelligence committee. >> have you been -- has the white house contacted you since your book was on track to public and since people started to realize what was going to be in this book? has either the justice department or the white house, anybody else in the trump administration contacted you? >> i have actually been contacted by both, the white house and the justice department. >> can you tell us anything about either of those communications starting with the white house in terms of what they wanted to communicate to you or what they asked of you? >> a couple months ago i had a

cease and desist, as well as, you know, again, the last thing that any of these people want is for the truth to be told. i have lived with this on my shoulders for the last several years trying to make sense of it all, trying to understand what happened while i was working at the inauguration, but also what happened while the pressure was building and mounting around the, you know, the 990 and the releasing of where $107 million was spent. this is, you know, it's like donald trump's best game is three card monte. everything is a shell and everything is going in different directions. chaos is just part of the game. and as you said earlier, and i love it, you know, only the best. and quite a bit -- quite a bit of the best.

>> you describe in the book how -- sorry. i didn't mean to interrupt. please carry on. >> no, no. i apologize. >> this delay is very awkward. the satellite delay is made all the worse by all the covid-driven kremlins. that is my fault. first of all, go back and say whatever you wanted to finish. i'll ask you another question is if the white house was telling the truth when they put out public statements denying that first lady melania trump and the president had no role in planning the inaugural and that when the white house said they didn't know about any concerns about budgeting or how much things would cost or how things would be carried out during the inaugural, your book would seem to give lie to those statements and make sure when the white house said those things that those weren't accurate. >> the machine of the false narrative that gets created by the white house is so

overwhelming and so powerful, and the fact that people really believe when you look around of the people that were actually involved in planning the inauguration that they're going to pin it on me because i was melania's friend, it worked, right? it was a shiny object. the only person willing to help her. and, you know, that spotlight shown right on me without even calling me and asking me if it was the truth. so my integrity, my reputation, everything was destroyed in a matter of seconds. and it was as if no big deal, just flick it off and move on. and i wasn't prepared to do that. but i didn't -- sorry. >> having the opportunity to tell your side of the story and to explain what happened during the inaugural, to explain even what you could tell was happening with the financials of the inaugural, being able to put it in this book, does it make

you feel not -- i guess not protected in any way, but at least does it make you feel like you are in a stronger position because at least now you can articulate what you saw where you came from and what your side of it is. it feels like a lot of the frustration was feeling that you weren't able to defend yourself. >> i'm still not allowed to say everything. i am saying as much as i can within the law. i think that being muzzled with an nda for all these years it has been claustrophobic to say the least. i stopped living a regular life. i have three incredible children, a husband. i sort of locked myself in. and it's amazing to me that, you know, i'm part of three different investigations. yet, i'm a witness to all of them. and it really is a charade of shenanigans, and i feel that the

trump presidency is just our country. i had no choice but to not tell this story. i had to be here. do i feel protected? i actually do feel more protected because now everyone knows the truth, and i have been able to share my life story with what happened because it took over my life. and am i, you know -- it's complicated. >> it is complicated. if you don't mind staying with us while we take one quick break, there is one element of your brauk that struck me. a long quote you attribute to the first lady that is an important news story. i would like to ask you about that if you could hold on with us more one more minute. >> absolutely. >> we'll be back with stephanie winston wolkoff. we'll be right back. we'll be right back. it's the ones that got away that haunt me the most. [ squawks ]

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one of the indelible imagines we have is the day when she boarded a plane to go visit immigrant kids who had been separated from their kids at the border and she wore this green jacket that said on the back. i really don't care. do you? after that visit, stephanie recalls a 70 minute phone call she had with the first lady about that trip. i want to read you from that part of the book, quoting the first lady here. they all went crazy about the zero tolerance at the border. they don't know what's going on. the kids were brought in by coyotes, the bad people who are trafficking. they're not with their parents and it's sad. but the patrols told me the kids say, wow, i get a bed? i will have a cabinet for my clothes. it is more than they have in their own country.

they are taken care nicely there. they're using that line and it's not true. reading that quote from the first lady is a cut punch of its own. but she says these are the words of the first lady. back with us is a former senior adviser to first lady melania trump. thanks again for being here. i have to ask you, should we understand this to be a verbatim quote from the first lady? >> rachel, there is no way to fabricate any of my story. the only way to tell my story is to say it exactly the way it was. the fact that the white house is

trying to disparage me and claim my character is anything but what i know -- again, i was a respectful person. it's only going to have me discuss more and more the truth, the facts and they're all either in some type of, you know, asemblance that has 100% backing. i would never do that otherwise. >> there has been some reporting, public source reporting about your book that says that part of the way you can back up these quotes and some of these extensive detailed an tech dotes is you do have some recordings of these conversations. can you comment on that at all? >> so rachel, i haven't commented in the past. one of the reasons i'm going to the show with you this evening is because i have been accused of taping my friend, as the white house said, and how horrible of a human being i am for doing that.

you're right. if she was my friend, that would be horrible. but melania and the white house had accused me of criminal activity, had publically shamed and fired me and made me their scapegoat. at that moment in time, that's when i pressed record. she was no longer my friend. and she was willing to let them take me down, and she told me herself, this is the way it has to be. she was advised by the attorneys at the white house that there was no other choice because there was a possible investigation into the presidential inauguration committee. and that's not how you treat a friend. so i was going to anything in my power to make sure that i was protected. at first i really did think maybe she would come to my aid. maybe she would tell the truth. she turned her back. she did. she folded like a deck of cards, and i was shocked when she did

it. >> are you saying that at this point you decided in order to protect yourself that you -- that you would make recordings of some of your conversations with the first lady or that you did? >> i did, rachel. i did. and, again, to have to admit that it is disgraceful if any other context. but who would believe any of this otherwise? you can't make this up. but, again, i need the evidence. i needed the evidence. >> if the white house continues to call you a liar and say that you have made up these conversations and that these things that you are attributing to the first lady or the president are things that didn't happen, do you have plans to release those tapes to the public or to play them for reporters so that other people can validate what you are saying? >> there is a report coming out. again, full disclosure, i'm not going to lie about it.

i just can't rachel, so i'm going to tell you. i have admitted there is a report coming out that i did play it privately because -- to justify that i actually did visit and what it did say in her own voice. again, the more they continue to come after me and, again, the more they continue to lie about what they have said, done and do, the more i will continue to, you know, prove their claims false. the last thing they should be doing is coming after me. i wanted to just write this book and move on. i didn't actually expect them to say -- of course they're going to -- i expected them to just say, oh, she's a this and she's a that. but they have gone on way too long and i'm not going to let them take my integrity away anymore. >> stephanie winston walkoff, key figure in the trump

inaugural. i know this is hard stuff to talk about, and i know this book was hard to write. i know because i read every word of it. i was very moved on your take of it. thanks for the trust in being here tonight. come back any time you want to talk. >> thank you. i'm honored. thank you, rachel. all right. we've got more ahead here tonight. stay with us. tonight. stay with us when our daughter and her kids moved in with us...

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the first and only formula with adaptagrip cushioning technology. choose poligrip cushion and comfort. "the new york times" was the first news organization to break the news that president trump had asked fbi director james comey to go easy on national security adviser mike flynn. they also revealed that comey had written contemporaneous memos documenting that interaction that he had with the president. that came out under the line of mike smid. he also called comey putting out

the word that the president was not under investigation. that was also reported by mike schmidt. then the times broke the news they asked jeff sessions to go back and retake control of the mueller investigation after attorney general sessions had already recused himself. that again was reporter mike schmidt. he was first to report that he ordered robert mueller to be fired, only backing off when don mcgahn threatened to quit. we later learned that mcgahn had to cop raoperated extensively. he was first to report in the days after james comey was fired, the fbi opened an inquiry into whether or not president trump was secretly working as a russian agent. first to obtain the questions that special counselor mueller wanted to ask of trump. trump had wanted his justice

department to prosecute political adversaries, including hillary clinton and james comey. on top of story after story after story on the russia investigation, michael schmidt was the first to report president trump overruled national authority officials in order to give jared kushner top security officials. the new york time's michael schmidt has been a fearsome scoop machine during the trump area. now with this new book, he's breaking even more news. among the book's many revelations is the fact that no element of the u.s. government, including the mueller investigation, including the fbi, has ever examined president trump's ties to russia, including his financial ties. it is not that anybody looked into that and found out all was fine and that's why we never heard anything about it. literally nobody has ever looked, not the fbi, not mueller, not the intelligence committees, no one. joining us now for the interview

is washington correspondent for "the new york times," the aforementioned michael schmidt. congratulations on this. thanks for being here tonight for the first interview. >> thanks for having me. >> so i have read enough of this stuff that i know that you are thinking now nobody is going to read the book because rachel has read so much of it, but i want to zoom in on what feels to me like the very heavy revelation you land on by the end of the book about there not being any counter intelligence investigation of the president. how does this -- how should people understand the importance of that and how different is this from what we previously understood about what had been looked into and what hadn't? >> i think that the media and a lot of folks in the country assume that robert mueller was doing something that he wasn't.

and then that he was going to be coming down from the hills and he's going to get to the bottom of all these questions. in the midst of the mueller investigation, we reported that that counter intelligence investigation had been opened. but when the mueller report comes out, there is nothing there. it's not there. there is all this stuff on obstruction, but there is nothing about trump's long-standing ties to russia. if you look at the questions that mueller wanted to ask the president, it's all stuff related to 2016. it's not stuff about his history. so you looked at this, and i said, well, we wrote this story about this counter intelligence investigation and we learned that mccabe thought mueller was absorbing it. so where did it go? so i thought maybe it was in the redacted sections of the report. so i talked to people who had seen the unredacted sections of the report, and they said that

it was not there either. and i just thought that, given all of the attention that russia has received during the trump presidency, that it was important to try and make it clear to the public that these questions were not answered by mueller. mueller said this in his testimony on capitol hill. he answered these questions. but it never got the attention for the whole public to sort of digest it and understand it. and i went back and i looked at that testimony and i said, i need to try and tell as much of that story as possible because i don't think people understood what the russia investigation was. and i think that they thought it was something that maybe it wasn't. >> mike, why did rod rosenstein not tell andrew mccabe who had

approved the opening of this investigation, why did he not tell the fbi leadership that he had chi barbed this investigation. it seems the fbi was under the sense that mueller had taken it over. mueller mueller mueller, the way that he wrote about it in his report, indicated he thought he was feeding that stuff back to the fbi. you reported it ended up in neither of those camps. the investigation wasn't done. why did rosenstein keep this from the fbi when he made this call? >> rosenstein felt that mccabe and the fbi were out of control. mccabe had taken this decision to open the two-pronged investigation on his own, and rosenstein felt that mccabe may have conflicts of interest. the president had been attacking mccabe. the bureau was grieving over the firing of comey. and here was the fbi opening up the most extraordinary investigation you can ever open on a president. is the president compromised by

our chief foreign adversary? and rosenstein did not want this all to turn into a fishing expedition. he did not want this thing to go on for years and for there to be this examination of every little thing in donald trump's life to figure out what his ties were to russia. rosenstein thought that it was not a secret that the president had an affinity orders russia. he had essentially run on that, and that this was not something that should be undertaken. he says to mueller, if you guys want to do more, you can come back and ask for that. but he tells mueller to focus on the 2016 election. focus on whether crimes were committed as part of that. >> clearly, though, at the leadership levels of the fbi, they weren't under the same -- they didn't have the same understanding about this as rosenstein did. i want to play you a real quick clip from andy mccabe on "60

minutes," talking about what he thought happened to that counterintelligence investigation and why he thought it was safe. control room, this is clip number two if you can play this in a way that mike can hear it, and so can our viewers. thanks. >> i met with the team investigating the russia cases, and i asked the team to go back and conduct an assessment to determine where are we with these efforts and what steps do we need to take going forward? i was very concerned that i was able to put the russia case on absolutely solid ground in an indelible fashion that were i removed quickly or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace. >> you wanted a documentary record. >> that's right. >> that those investigations had begun because you feared that they would be made to go away. >> that's exactly right. >> andrew mccabe thought that he

had made sure that the counterintelligence case couldn't vanish in the night without a trace, that it couldn't be made to go away, at least without people knowing that it had been made to go away. it seems like that's exactly what happened, though. >> well, this is about these eight days in may between the firing of comey and the appointment of mueller. comey is fired. the white house relies on a document created by rosenstein as the white house's rationale for the dismissal. the president comes out afterwards. he says a lot of unusual things. mccabe and these investigators eventually sit down in this period of time and open up this investigation, and they believe -- mccabe believes by opening it, he will be protecting it, that he will be creating a paper trail, and he's pushing rosenstein to appoint a special counsel. he's saying, we need a special counsel. if we had had one in the clinton email case, we would be on much different footing. this needs to happen. and rosenstein goes ahead, and he appoints mueller.

and mccabe thinks it's one of the greatest accomplishments of his life. here he has opened up these investigations, and bob mueller, one of the great heroes of the post-9/11 era, is going to take these over, and he will be a safe steward for these investigations. and mccabe goes, and he briefs mueller on these investigations, and he assumes for the remainder of his time as the deputy fbi director, which lasts for several more months, that mueller has taken these over and will do them. mccabe then, two years later, picks up the mueller report and looks at it and says, it's not there. >> remarkable stuff. michael schmidt, "new york times" washington correspondent. the author of "donald trump v. the united states: inside the struggle to stop a president" which comes out tomorrow and is chock-full of craziness. good luck on the book tour. thanks for being here first.

i really appreciate you making the time. >> thanks for having me. >> all right. we've got much more ahead here tonight. stay with us. it's 5g ultra wideband, and it's already available in parts of select cities. like los angeles and in new york city. and it's rolling out in cities around the country. with massive capacity, it's like an eight lane highway compared to a two lane dirt road. 25x faster than today's 4g networks. in fact, it's the fastest 5g in the world. from the network more people rely on. this is 5g built right. only on verizon.

i could see what he meant to the african-american community.

>> this 5-year-old kid asks obama, is my haircut just like yours? president obama bent over and let that kid touch his head in his hand. >> that image stands for how kids will see themselves differently forever. >> i thought, who is this man? how does he deal with crisis? leadership, character, and empathy. don't you wish we had that now? >> programming note. that is a clip from the excellent new documentary that's called "the way i see it," which is about former chief white house photographer pete souza. pete souza, you know, worked in the obama administration. did you also know that he worked in the reagan white house. he is now viewing life at the trump white house with considerable dismay. msnbc and focus features announced this week that this new doc, the way i see it, is going to be released in theaters september 18th, but is going to make its tv debut here on msnbc, which is very cool. we're going to show that on tv

for the first time ever friday, october 9th, at 10:00 p.m., which is awesome. put it in your calendar now. friday, october 9th. all right. that does it for us tonight. we will see you again on tuesday when i will be interviewing a man named michael cohen, the president's former personal attorney. eek! have an excellent labor day weekend. good night. president trump, as we alluding to, getting absolutely slammed from all sides. a shocking report by any standard revealing, according to multiple sources, direct disparagement of the military veterans that serve america, that keep him and us safe. sources tells in the atlantic the president refused to visit a military cemetery in france over fears the rain might mess up his hair and why should i go to that cemetery. it's filled with, quote, losers. then calling out marines as, quote, suckers for getting killed. the president