how quickly allies fell out and how the story and script changed. >> steve clemens who is the way we so often find out about what's going to be the next day's story and script, and how tonight's events will be covered going forward. steve thank you very much. >> thank you. >> and thank you for your patience it's been a busy night. rick stengel who was on 24 hours ago is back with us 24 hours later. former undersecretary of state for public diplomat maes and deposit affairs at the state department in the obama administration, and oh, by way was the editor of "time" magazine for a long time. eugene robinson, a fellow scribe remains here with us. steve schmidt remains by satellite with us. rick, we talked about this possibility. this is -- i heard the political discussion tonight on chris matthews before we knew what we were going to be covering. this is the opposite of the bannon nationalists. but this is also something barack obama was unwilling to do. >> and i have to take a little bit of issue with what steve was saying. i mean, you know what they don't teach you at diplomacy school?

i want to go to steve clemens. steve, as i mentioned to you a moment ago, you've blown up my twitter feed. people seem to think when anyone in the media or on tv says, oh, this is good that donald trump is admitting things are more complicated than they were on the campaign trail, and this is normalizing him and really what we should be up here saying is he clearly lied about janet yellen, about interest rates, about nato, about health care, all these things. how do you address this? >> i address it impirically, and with all due respect to viewers who see this as normalizing donald trump, as we've seen with jared kushner and steve bannon, some of the globalists who used to be with goldman sachs, you.nyou don't have to agree with everything that steve mnuchin might represent, but they have a very different picture than steve bannon or miller or some of the other dominant caretakers of the trump presidential soul, if you will. i think there is a real struggle to define the features of the trump presidency, and i thin

. >> joining us now, steve clemens, editor at large at the atlantic and an msnbc contributor. ing is one of the kinder assessments we've been hearing about this meeting. >> to put -- i talked to a good chunk of both republican and democratic senators. one of the senators i spoke, to unnamed said that he thought it was high quality briefing. it was good to have that. but that was the only positive comment that i heard about the briefing. and as you said, we had dan coates. you had rex tillerson, you had jim mattis, and jim dunford giving these talks. and it was very interesting how a number of senators just sort of dismissed how unprepared and kind of out of his league rex tillerson was. that was another of the takeaways that i heard tonight from a number of senators who really, you know, really resented being kind of march down to the white house as the house was able to hear what they could in the house. they didn't like what happened tonight. >> but they would not have resented it if they came out of that building thinking this was an important meeting, and we learned a lot.

joining us now back with me joan walsh, msnbc political analyst and david corn from mother jones and steve clemensoins us as well. steve, let me start with you. you look at this situation. is this a mood? is it a policy? or is it not a policy because it doesn't have content? >> i think it's both policy and just donald trump doesn't like to travel abroad. it's just too much trouble. different time zones, jet lag. you know, he's just not into the global thing. he is into having people come to him. and i take him at his word. he said that, you know, he is -- he has this bizarre notion that america can basically close itself off from most of the rest of the world. and not suffer from that. and we see it repeatedly both in his straight policies, a lot of the foreign policies and naive and disconnected despite the fact that he's been a lot of places and done hotel deals and licensing deals abroad. he seems to be very, you know, he's just not curious about the rest of the world. i think that's driving that. i think that translates into policy and it translates into a bit of disregard to our allies that i

. >> let's bring in steve clemens, washington editor at large for the atlantic national journal and courtse's an msnbc contributor. steve, always great to have you here. >> great to be with you. >> are we getting any closer to confirming who shared this information and whether it was politically motivated? >> well, i mean, i think the "new york times" report takes this farther, but others have had trouble validating what they have done. but i think that now that the white house has shared the same document that werer shown to devin nunes with adam schiff, things are beginning to get a little more in alignment. devin nunes continues to be wounded by all of this. he continues to be someone who can't come forth with his own story or won't come forth with it and he looks compromised in this. and i think despite his agreement now with schiff that they're going to proceed, that they're going to call the witnesses they want to do in this committee and get the investigation about russian meddling in the u.s. election back on a track, right now, there's a lot of tension between these two and a lot

steve clemens, thanks for joining us tonight. let's double underline. you were not asserting facts or in your first answer tonight. you were taking motivations and saying here is a logic set to apply to these possible motivations. >> absolutely. thank you, lawrence for making that absolutely leer. >> apparently not all of our viewers in the press get that. thank you, steve. >> thank you. >>> coming up, big news in the investigation into the 2016 hacking of our election. a hacker who could know a lot about it was arrested in spain. malcolm nance says that is a very big deal, and that's why we're going to cover it closely in the show with malcolm nance. because when he says something is a big deal, it's a big deal. >>> and president trump promised that he would confront china on day one. this weekend, it wasn't exactly a confrontation. george will will join us on the trump presidency meeting reality once again. >>> for me it's been a very interesting experience. but in the end, i think it's going to be an experience that leads to an even better health car

. >>> i want to join -- i want to bring steve clemens in to talk about this and steven norper to talk about this. a lot to talk about here, gentlemen. steven, i want to talk with you. we heard pence say we'll deal with north korea with or without china. is that even possible? >> it's not possible. he also said that he believes china is the key to denuclearization. tensions are very high but china needs to be at the table as well. >> they have shown great restraint due to the loss of life that any action would have on south korea specifically. why? why is that restraint being shown here? >> because i think virtually every scenario which shows if there was a hot conflict with north korea, that would put in harm's way between 250,000 and a million south koreans and that's before you get to japan. so as we've talked a lot about plus sister, not very much planned, i think that particularly when he was in mar-a-lago and japan, it was interesting, that was the first time we were able to see donald trump actually behave in a restrained way and i think it's because his defense advisers are ver

chief foreign correspondent richard engel, bob scales, the atlantic's washington editor at large steve clemens, and huffington post global editorial director howard fine man. great to have all of you here. general, second largest bomb in our arsenal, wal us through. what is this thing and how much damage c it do? >> this is a modern version of the vietnam era daisy cutter. it is 11 tons of explosive. it's not dropped from a bomber. it's dropped from the weird gate of a cargo plane. a para chute pulls it out, it separates from the parachute, and it's guided to the target by gps. >> so it's accurate. >> it's precision accurate. but the purpose of this is not fragmentation, not slhrapnel. it's to buildup an overpressure or blast, if you will. purpose of it is to collapse buildings, tear up rail junctions, collapse tunnels through the blast. it doesn't kill through shrapnel. so, it makes it unique in the arsenal. and the nation, we've got 13 of these left. they've been sitting in florida for, what, 15, 16 years. >> why use it now? >> well, first of all, this was a special operations command reques

an cia operative and ran for president in 2016, bob url lick, a congressman from maryland and steve clemens at the atlantic and an msnbc contributor. good morning to all of you. jeff, let me start with you with this interview with donald trump. everyone is focusing on the remarks he made about north korea. he said it's -- there's a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflictithorth korea. absolutely. jeff, how did you hear those remarks? is it a warning? was it a threat? >> well, it's a good question. it's hard to say whether it was a warning or threat. it was certainly an acknowledgement of the fact that president trump and his team are seriously considering military options. it's not their first choice. he did say that he would like to pursue diplomacy and that's clearly something that they have laid the groundwork for this week. but then when we asked him about that as a follow-up question he said, we would like to do diplomacy but it's hard. so clearly this is something that he's taking seriously and that is a serious option. >> he's done something else when asked about n