the fallout from the donald trump jr controversy continues the latest on this edition of politic. politicking on larry king will the white house ever put this russian controversy behind it and if it does will all the president's team remain standing in the end or will people very close to president trump pay the ultimate political price if not legal price will jump right into it we're joined by steve cohen democratic congressman from tennessee member of the house democratic steering and policy committee he also serves on the ethics and judiciary committees and is a member of the commission on security and cooperation in europe. it's congressman

joins me live stands yury hall in the united seas capital congressman what's the reaction to those emails thing with donald trump jr. i think most democrats think it's important lincoln what is the story about the trump campaign in russia working to defeat hillary clinton and issues that special counsel moller will be looking at republicans i think have some of the same thoughts but they're much quieter about it because they're concerned about the trump support within their districts everybody thinks it's unusual because they've done nothing but the nod the nod the not that there was any connection with the campaigns and here the valley was a connection with russia but i eagerness on the part of donald jr to get information that was allegedly harmful to hillary and from the russian government the old saying the u.c.b. of the looks like a dog in bags like a bug it warms like a duck it's probably a duck is there and don't actually is there

a duck here. i think i think there is a duck i think there's wild rice and i think there is a little bit of nice plum sauce. so it's going to get bigger. it's going to get bigger and my concern is that as mother looks at this and this president trump sees his family involved and they're all involved jared pushchair and donald trump jr now i'm afraid he'll end up hiring bob muller because that's the way he is and that's what he did to jim comi and if he does that you'll have to go through people at the justice department to do it will be like a saturday night massacre and you'll see unrest around the country because it'll be the equivalent of a war on the rule of law so you better be going back to the nixon era. and indeed it will and it's scary this is even you know nixon did a few good things with the some environmental. issues the clean air act and going

to china but he had he had a. moral deficiency morally challenge drummer son in law gerry cushier and his campaign chair paul newman of for attended that meeting the done who do you went to what about their legal liability should clear shouldn't still have security clearance i don't think he should i mean that's an important thing in a. you need to have allegiance only the united states of america now only to meet with the russians which was improper but he didn't disclose that until recently there have been too many areas where the product family just seems to have amnesia about meetings with russia. i have no only met with a few russians and they've all been in russia and i remember those meetings they they remember those meetings they just simply didn't put them down on the forms and it's perjury not to do so and they shouldn't i don't think he should have a security clearance beyond that you know larry you need somebody like philip of the big it involved somebody who's an experienced ambassador and foreign policy

expert to go in on critical foreign issues like the middle east and and israel and the palestinian authority to try to help your nation with foreign policy not a thirty six year old with no government experience no foreign affairs experience and basically the experience of buying a building on fifth avenue with this father. do you do you see is the worst you think that russia might have affected the outcome of the election. i have no question but that the dropping of the e-mails and they. caused many people to change their opinion or to move a little bit away from hillary clinton and that that affected the outcome of the election. or donald trump jr says he did not tell his father about that june meeting with the russian attorney because there was nothing to tell do you believe that. well it's hard to believe him when he's changed his story three or four times

over the last three or four days. you know and it took. him a year to admit it was here in a month after the meeting he went on television and lambasted the clinton people saying they do anything to win this election they live they way out they live a lot and there's nothing to do with russia and just a month earlier he met with this russian attorney trying to get information on clinton so you know this man's track record is not very good even he says he's he may be good in the paddock but once he gets into the into the end of the starting gate the people tears he can't get on the track and run concerning donald jr his father said my son did a good job he was open he's transparent he's innocent and this is the greatest switch in political history saying and with an exclamation brows it was your reaction. well you know nixon denied everything up until the end and that there was anything to the watergate break in the paying of hush money and so it's so similar to the situation with nixon there was

a program i saw about watergate and it would just parallels to this are constant and of course a father is going to say things that offend his son and i understand that but he's not transparent he only released those tapes when he knew those e-mails when he knew the new york times had him in the new york times was going to release that messed up and transparent that's been crafty and smart and get your one chance to get stuff but now when the media tells you about it ask you for comment because the next time they're going to ask you for a comment and push send immediately do you have confidence in the special counsel do you have tonsils and similar. bob muller as fine a gentleman as i've come in contact with in the united states government he was highly respected this highly respected by everybody that knows this job he did at the f.b.i. he is a class act. do you really think trump could draw but. i think he might you know his his impulse was to go after people and to fire people that's what he did on television you're fired that's what he likes to do. he did it

with kali i believe that was because he was hot on his tracks and i think he'll do what mahler to. why these things steve the kid says and then seems to regard putin so things are a bit. it's bizarre larry he treats angela merkel with disdain on occasion he has run ins with the australian prime minister he very you know that mt bunting they grow president the mexican president so many people he has bad things to say about but who he treats like. is best friend in the world. who's not a good guy he was a k.g.b. agent once k.g.b. always k.g.b. i was in minsk at the time the trumpet boot we were talking at the g. twenty we had votes there on human rights democracy electoral expansions and the integrity of national governments like you cry the russian federation voted against

the western world on almost every vote against human rights against minority rights against voting rights and against territorial integrity that's what the russian federation is about is how they voted in minutes they're not good guys they're not going to work with us on cyber security they don't need to work on cyber security you get too popular to run against putin you get killed or you get arrested and disqualified they don't have elections and they stole ours. that that assembly that you attended in in minsk you said the real russia was exposed there as opposed to the think russia that sells for. that's exactly right larry the real russia is repressive and wants to have total state control and doesn't think about people's individual rights right to assemble right to participate this is not democracy and there is no democracy in russia and whatever truck did to say it's an honor to meet you i mean what mayor sir macca gone up to al capone. it's.

basically it was an analogy. steve thanks. for the marry your champ. continuing the conversation on the e-mail controversy and more i'm now joined by joel reuben he served as deputy assistant secretary of state legislative affairs in the obama administration and is president of the washington strategy group of global governmental affairs advisory firm he joins me from washington joe what's the international end tact of the. controversy larry it's great to be with you and the international.

the national weather service in sterling virginia has issued a special memory warning for it but he could be from drum point maryland to smith point virginia chesapeake bay from north beach to drum point maryland chunk and river cambridge maryland and the little town and river banks and river two booms island maryland ten years sound and inland waters pounding bloodsworth island title potomac from crime island maryland to smith point virginia title potomac from indian had to come island maryland until one am it eleven thirty seven pm a strong thunderstorm was located seven nautical miles west of broome island moving east at twenty knots hansard wind gusts thirty four knots or greater source radar indicated. impact boaters and small craft could be thrown overboard by suddenly higher winds and waves capsizing their vessel locations impacted include chalk and river red and green light black on that point chris field southwest middle grounds fuel pools point st george island point no point calvert cliffs routes one point

eight the targets seaplane with me smith island piney point mouth of the potomac river depot mantic river mouth and ten year sound. to safe harbor until hazardous weather passes. the special counsel still does report to the president and that is problematic because he will continue to be looking over his shoulder as will other senior officials so it really needs to be going further at this stage he needs to have the independence and the clarity of his role as an independent voice and he needs to have his charge changed to being that was an independent investigator to really ensure that there is a clear free and unfettered access that he needs to come to the kinds of conclusions that the american people are looking for assuming the president was not involved in any of these discussions what does he do now. the president is

unfortunately not clarifying for the american people what he knows and what he has known and his staff his son clearly his current attorney general his son in law have all at different times been unclear about what it is that they have done in engaging with russia and that has undermined the word of the white house and so we're in a moment where the president he may not want to do this instinctually he clearly enjoys going on twitter and doing brief press conferences but he hasn't made a speech from the oval office this might be the time for him to do that it may be the time very much for him to come straight out directly see american people in a clear format and say this is what i know this is what i'm standing for and this is where i want to go heading forward if he doesn't do that it's going to continue to swirl as we've seen in recent days stay right there we'll have more politicking

right after the break. about your sudden passing i've only just learnt you worry yourself and taken your last term. to you as we all knew it would i tell you i'm sorry. so i write these last words and hopes to put to rest these things that i never asked. i remember when we first met my life turned on each. but then my feeling started to change you talked about more like it was a kid still some are fond of you those that didn't like to question are. secretly promised to never be like it's one does not leave a funeral the same as one enters mind gets consumed with this. speech there are no other takers. that mainstream media has met its make.

i do not know if the russian state caught into john podesta scheme ailes and gave them to wiki leaks but i do know barack obama's director of national intelligence has not provided credible to support his claims of russia i also know he perjured himself in a senate hearing three months before the revelations provided by edward snowden he denied to be n.s.a. was carrying out wholesale surveillance of the us. the hyperventilating corporate media has once again proved to be an echo for government claims that cannot be verified you would have thought they would have learned something after serving as george w. bush's useful idiots in the lead up to the invasion of iraq. it is vitally important that the press remains rooted in a fact based universe especially when we enter an era when truth and fiction are becoming indistinguishable.

welcome back to politicking and we're talking with joel reuben he formally served as deputy assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the obama administration and is president of the washington strategy group he is joining us from the nation's capital should we be concerned that steve bannon jarrad cushiony meeting with private military contractors about the white house privatizing the afghanistan war. well the overall frame on afghanistan is very troubling this is the longest war in american history over sixty just about sixteen years now it's cost over a trillion dollars we've lost several thousand lives and we need

a real policy on afghanistan that wins that get success that helps to defeat the taliban in a manner where the afghan government can sustainably maintain security in its country and help improve the lives its of its people we don't need two processes though to get there in terms of internal american government decision making we have a national security adviser and a charming master who's very adept highly regarded across the national security community and in the military he needs to know that what he recommends to the president is the recommendation of our best and brightest minds on national security a secondary. approach a secondary assessment can be very damaging to make masters process in my first interview with putin about eight years ago he said he does not like to give advice to other countries but he said stay out of afghanistan is a no win was the right. well it hasn't yet been

a win and it's very hard for americans to understand what it is that we're there for right now we know why we went there after nine one one and that was to defeat al-qaeda to defeat the taliban to help move that country in the right direction and for many years we have engaged in military fights alongside an afghan army that was growing in stabilizing but we have to ask what is our long term goal here and how long will we be there but we haven't asked those questions and so currently the president has delegated authority to the secretary of defense mattis to make his own decisions outside of the framework of a real interagency discussion with the state department and others about the real objective here and that's troubling so i don't think the american people really know why we're in afghanistan what we're fighting for and admire putin the russian people they went through eight years of war in the eighty's there they lost over

fifty thousand soldiers there. we have lost significantly there too as well we really do need to have a clear policy we don't have one currently erik prince suggests that the white house used private military units what is the argument against that. it's a mixed bag we did have private contractors in the tens of thousands in iraq we saw the downside of that in iraq in the in the mid two thousand when two thousand and five two thousand and six defense contractors were essentially replacing american military personnel but with less accountability and it created major problems for the american footprint in iraq with the iraqi government and the iraqi people ultimately leading to a decision by the iraqis to have us depart the country and we've seen that that may not have worked out actually for iraq's benefit we need to ensure that the people who were fighting on behalf of the american people of course and the afghan people

in this context have confidence in our presence their private security contractors do not generate that kind of confidence amongst the local population so it's a very delicate political issue. and of course the confidence and trouble around the world is very low right well it is and it's troubling when we hear our allies like the french and the australians and the germans talking about moving beyond the united states we have to remember that as americans we don't control or run the world we are one major player significant country but if we choose to withdraw it's not as if the world stops the world will go on the japanese when we pulled out of the trade agreement in the pacific the japanese made their own agreement with the european union things will happen and we will get left behind and that is not in our national security interest and unfortunately president trump is experiencing

right now the downside of that which is that countries will begin to listen to him and less and less how worried are you about north korea. extremely worried north korea continually tries to raise a tan and say pay attention to us we currently don't have a policy that shows that we're really paying attention we're talking about north korea we're telling the chinese that they need to do more and that's essentially it i truly believe that we should be engaging more aggressively diplomatically on the north korean issue with our allies again showing real leadership with our allies and also engaging at the united nations and potentially directly with north korea to let them know this is what they can and can't do and we shouldn't be outsourcing our diplomacy to other countries that we should be engaging in right now because they are on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon that can be launched intercontinental and that is very dangerous to our security thanks for your time today joel always good talking with you my

pleasure away thank you when it comes to russia gate and all of that entails as well as other controversies in which this administration is embroiled the white house is almost pushed back by labeling the resulting press coverage think news as well as claiming a bias by mainstream media they also claim the electorate is not interested in anything related to russia or into mr trump's business holdings and of course his infamous tweets is the war between the press corps the white house anything new in d.c. and who's to blame for the escalation of the current battles between the two joining me to talk about this dave ruben host of the rubin report and online current events and political talk show dave you exist in a world that is somewhere in between the mainstream media and the world of blogging what is your audience interested in with regard to the white house and russia. i like will you bring that question because i've been trying to figure out what world

it is that i exist in and i think that does kind of get to it look trump has driven a truck through the mainstream media this has happened already and whether you like it or not and it you know it's interesting talking to a guy like you today about a topic like this as i did your big sister in the mainstream media for a long time you're doing the digital thing now as a my these things are very different and trump drove the truck through it and now the question is all right there's pieces everywhere and what's going to happen after that i think the truck needed to go through there was so much corruption in mainstream media there was so much cozying up to power and you know all the cool luzhin between we know that you know donna brazil giving questions to hillary clinton vs c.n.n. and all kinds of things like that and the media had no problem sucking up to our under under obama now they don't like trump so they're attacking trump by the way

there's plenty of good reasons to attack trump but what my audience cares about right now is trying to figure out something that is true and that's the problem right now is that everyone is sort of going down their own lane of truth so if you're on the right you pick your websites to go to you pick your channels to watch if you're on the left you do that same thing just with different outlets and people want truth and i try my best and i think you do as well to try to bring them some are i don't know the truth i don't i don't know the truth but i will try to ask the right questions to get some semblance of truth is it linda of the audience is the audience the digital audience is no difference than the mainstream or we're all just people right. well yeah we're all just people but the digital audience which obviously skews younger is asking questions in a different way so if we look at the analytics you know for my show it skews very young where cable news skews very old i think the average fox you fox news viewer

is somewhere around seventy years old we're closer into the mid twenty's these people they didn't grow up in the in the c.n.n. that you remember for example they grew up in a time where the media was so three and so patently obviously dishonest but not only that in a time where cable news said ok m s n b c we're on the left with the democrats news we're on the right with the republicans they grew up in a time where the jig was up it was as if we saw behind the curtain and we saw standing there and he wasn't this big scary green guy and they don't care for the old stuff so whether whether you like it or not whether there are good journalists or not there absolutely are good journalists without question but i think the bigger problem is that all of these sites these buzz feed's and boxes and mother jones and all these things they have activists that are masquerading as journalists and this is the problem that people see online because you know in the old days if

somebody ran an untrue story it was really hard to get the counter narrative out there but now with twitter and with i phones and with you know with you tube you can get the counter story out there so it's harder pass off stuff that's not on it according to politico of on good terms job and cushion and malani a trump all want mr priebus out as white house chief of staff is that what you're hearing. well i read the politico piece i mean you know that there's so many leaks coming from the white house we don't know where these leaks are coming from you know if you listen to some people they say they're coming from deep state people you listen to some people are coming from disgruntled from people regardless of where the leaks are coming from i think everyone getting caught in this endless drama i think is is the bigger problem right now we we need to be able to basically trust that the media is doing a good enough job so we can figure out what's real you know is russia this russia thing real is any of the policies what the health care policy any of these things

is tax policy getting rid of regulations are any of these things real and the problem is that the hysteria has now been ramped up to a place that is almost untouchable and how do you ramp down some of that so whether they want to get rid of priebus or not i almost think that's a sideshow to the bigger issue which is that we got to figure out how most of us who care about the truth can can agree on some truths otherwise the rest of the stuff just doesn't matter if you're really into the world of social media directly every day you know what is trump i'm going right and what is he doing wrong as it affects them. yeah well for the record you know i like your thoughts on sunday nights more than most but. you know. what he's doing right well i'll tell you what the media's doing wrong first and then i'll answer that so what the media is doing wrong is the second trump tweet something the media is outraged they don't give us a chance to be outraged as regular people they start writing all the pieces on how

outraged we are in twitter is outrage at the top ten reasons that trumps tweet outrage this person all adds up and that's just all sideshow what they should be reporting on is what the facts are trump is using the media and i don't think i think if you hopefully you'll have money or show sooner and or i'll have him on here and we be able to ask him well are you just manipulating them and i think he would i think he would actually admit it that what he's doing is just playing their game that it's just all sort of a shell game so i would prefer that we lived in a world of twenty seventeen where the president was not tweeting these crazy things where the media was a little more responsible where the president acted a little more presidential all of those things i would prefer this happens to be the world that we live in at the moment and what i think the only way we can make any of that better is that if you don't think if you don't like the tweets and you don't think that they're important and then just let them heat but when we're focused on tweets all the time we're just missing what the real issues are the real

things that matter to people about jobs and health care and the rest of it is all those things he of time do they. my pleasure my grave rumor host of the ruben report and thank you for joining me on this edition of politicking remember you can join the conversation on my facebook page or tweet me at kings things and don't forget to use the politicking hash tag and that's all so this edition followed. about your sudden passing i've only just learned you were a south and taken your last turn. here at the top to you as we all knew it would i tell you i'm sorry i could so i write these last words in hopes to put to rest these things that i never got off my chest. i remember when we first met my life turned on each. but then my feeling started to change you talked about war like it was again still some are fond of you those that didn't like to question our ark and

i secretly promised to never be like it said one does not leave a funeral the same as one enters the mind it's consumed with death this one quite different i speak to you now because there are no other takers. to claim that mainstream media has met its maker. i'm a trial lawyer i've spent countless hours poring through documents that tell the story about the ugly side of. corporate media written users to talk about the car but i'm going to paint a clear picture about how disturbing alcool blood corporate conduct is because the mob these are stories that are no one else until a markup to a host of american. question.

the french president in manila among crawlin says defeating terrorism in syria is more important now sitting president assad who was speaking after talks with donald trump in paris. says the iraqi military is holding at least one hundred and seventy families in a detention accountable for their alleged links to islamic state. also in the headlines on our team from the u.k. with board concludes the mission to stop human trafficking in the mediterranean. from one of the stories had to dot com coming up. in mexico talking about a crisis on think government bond market.