[speaking another language] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> jesse: you paid for bert and ernie in baghdad.mbing these people? now are paying for their muppet shows? we are sick, there is something sick about us. you also paid for an irish dei musical. >> it is an honor to welcome all of her guests tonight for this important event. increasing access to opportunity and equity is a cornerstone of the biden administration and we are so proud to be playing this for you here. >> jesse: this is a government theft ring. we spent $2 million for transit surgeries in guatemala. i will vote on a limb. one guatemalan dude got breast implants and we probably kicked back the rest of the cash to a crooked guatemalan politician. and the corrupt liberal ceo of the group they laundered the money through. because all of this money we're spending, we could have turned the whole world trends. we could've made every man woman and every woman a man but this kind of money. he really think it cost $20 million to produce an episode of "sesame street"? you could hire tom cruise to playoffs for the grouch for that mon

initial invasion of baghdad in march 2003. he rolled his. mechanized division straight from the kuwait border overland right into the center of baghdad, won a silver star for his valor in that operation, then to afghanistan, where he led the 10th mountain division. then he became chief of staff at centcom. then he was the top u.s. commander in the iraq war. in the whole war, he was actually the one who wound down u.s. forces at the end of the iraq war. he was then named vice chief of staff of the united states army. then he went back to centcom, this time as commander of centcom. then he built and led the force that waged the war against isis. and then, and only then was he considered for the really big job, secretary of defense. and that is the man who just left office as secretary of defense, the man who just arrived to take his job. he was a platoon leader in the national guard. but now he, too, is secretary of defense. both of them obviously honorable records of service, not equivalent, though, i think you'd say in terms of demonstrated

whitehouse calls for i think there's a landscape defined late election the it's a pm in us laura in baghdad on here in moscow. i mean the, you're welcome to the new so it's the day after the phone call that some of the world, donald trump looked, trimmed and have both shared and upbeat reaction to the conversation between vladimir putin. i'm the u. s. president and mark the 1st contact in 3 years between the leaders of russia and america. the push limit is global. there to secure the heads of states agreed yesterday during a telephone conversation that they themselves would continue to contact and are looking to a separate meeting. and we also agreed that instructions would be given immediately to the relevant aids so that they can start the necessary work. now, of course, the work will be started quickly. it will be necessary to wait for certain developments. it will be possible to talk about where, when and so on interest, which was an important conversation, considering the situation of the last several years when there has been no high level contact between moscow in washington. but of

to china, comes a year off to the 2 nations place to deepen ties, despite disputes of a security. baghdad much se reports real tracts in vietnam built during its french colonial period are struggling to keep up with demand. now the country is seeking a revenge with paging as its backer. in $8000000000.00 railway will be built slater this year, connecting vietnam's port, city of high phone to the city of loud chai. on the border with china, the vietnam says it will promote economic growth and tourism, carrying both passengers and freight cars at a higher speed. trade between china and vietnam is already absolutely massive. in this railway, it's designed to make this trade faster, cheaper and more predictable as well. so currently china supplies much of the raw materials that fuels vietnam's, manufacturing sector, and keeping that pipeline study is absolutely critical. china will fund the project to loans as part of it's built in road initiative. a trillion dollar mega project aimed at building a global infrastructure network in neighboring low china built to major high speed rail and just

gibbo, reggie, bob, dave, jonesy, and patty these people were killed on a routine flight between baghdads a result of an on poorly protected aircraft. this is the largest single loss of life in the iraq war. with the prime minister join with me to thank and recognize our service personnel for their service and their sacrifice? and the stoicism of their family as we join to commemorate such a tragic moment? p.m. starmer: i thank him for reminding the house of this case, and i know that condolences of the whole house remain with the families of these brave soldiers. we will never forget the vital role they played to support the coalition operation in iraq. and i thank him and pay tribute to his service. we are immensely proud of our armed forces and their courage and dedication as they keep our country safe. p.m. starmer: the prime minister may know that this time last week representatives of those who have been injured seriously by covid vaccines were giving evidence to the covid inquiry, including my constituent. i hope he also knows that the compensation available rakel to the health se

and there's no more burt and ernie in baghdad >> i was just say a strong message to democrats who areut there pretending to be outraged about the long list of crap that this administration is cutting. federal waste in funding like $2 million for sex changes in guatemala. 20 million on a new ceasesame street show. i could go on and on and i'm happy to provide this list to every single one of you. democrats are outraged that the american people want to be -- they want their taxpayers going to good use, not stuff like this >> jesse: we can add more to the list. $43 million on a gas station in afghanistan that had no customers. still less though than what biden paid for a charging station here. one and a half million to promote gays, lesbians and trans in jamaica. jamaican me crazy. 4 million for trans-serbians. 5.5 million for gay rights in uganda. over 6 million for men who have sex with men in south africa. that's just how it was described. 17 million to promote inclusion in vietnam. it's just probably another way of saying it went to trans. we paid them to cross dress. 25 million to p

the dividing america is normal versus cases, the list, trans, in ireland "sesame street" in iraq baghdadants to defund police tip off bad guys when good guys are could he go at the sport this, they did he have usaid i think we will keep winning like november 5. maria: are you able to get the access that you need is elon musk, and president trump going to be able to get access that they need in order to continue this work? you know, that they are trying to stop him from looking at the treasury documents that needs to see. >> yeah, you know why we will because again common sense, american people are like wait a minute. is exposing all this you are going to stop him? we are going to have the fight out in court i get that one decision about department there are over 108,000 employees in treasure can have sez to information the president of the united states elected by 77 million people makes elon musk federal employe can't the other -- appointees treasure department can't a question secretary of treasury according to judge decision secretary bestent may not get access in the end i think we w

i am not a military veteran, i went with the state department and worked on counterinsurgency in baghdad. >> what was it like they are at the time? >> a tremendous -- what was it like they are at that time? >> a tremendous privilege. during the iraq surge we took a war that was losing and turned around. it wasn't -- it was and it -- a tremendous experience. i was doing high-level things in a rack and would go with the general and ambassador to see the iraqi prime minister and work on issues at the highest level of government and in afghanistan i wanted something different and to push out. in a rack i was officials state department officer. in afghanistan i was in a hotbed of taliban activities and of all things that is where i met my wife, elinor, she was british-born. i'm now we have five kids. >> winded politics into the picture? for you? >> when i was in the middle east. i have seen good things about american national security and some steaks -- mistake so i thought this would be a good time to use my efforts had been in the public and private sector and where i felt the most happy is

someone that searched in combat, that served 20 years ago in baghdad, i loved seeing young people reinvigoratednt to serve, it happened in the last two months, amazing. >> probably not peaked yet, my hunch your fellow veteran, combat -- pete hegseth runs defense department, might have something to do with it also. and i know you are west point grad, i am reading in paper today, west point is scrubbing itself of all d.e.i. programs. >> yes. larry: top to bottom. >> yes. larry: do you approve. >> i heard a few things, i saw a few things flash up about clubs scrapped, i much want to look at it and ask a few questions. larry: it may not be scrubbed the way you want. >> it may not be, i want to disassociate d.e.i. from ethnic clubs that are talking what makes country amazing, i don't want people hired or trained or training changed because of way someone looks oh, someone's ethnic back yow background, but culture we grew up in should be celebrated and talked about. larry: usaid, a flawed program. >> extremely. larry: i love this story, turns out that the left wing magazine, politico, media outlet, w

how does bert and ernie in baghdad help our national security? this isn't a victory for dictators.id money was propping up dictators. the dictators be like. and if we didn't like the dictator, usaid money went to regime change. this money was just about putting everybody in our pocket. and the deep state put the kickback in their pocket. we told you how foreign aid goes to coos and revolutions will get this. we told you wednesday that usaid money was used to trigger trump's impeachment through the cia whistle-blower and now we are finding out that usaid administer the billion dollar loan that biden dangled with ukraine to get the prosecutor invested under his company fire. usaid doesn't just mess around overseas, they have been caught screwing around here. usaid coerced big tech to censor freedom of speech. they did it right before the 2022 midterms. but the most criminal elements of this foreign aid to scheme is that the math shows it is one big kickback racket. this is in "the wall street journal". quote, some dollars do reach intended recipients around the world. but plenty of t

going 20 years in baghdad. i love the faces of young people reinvigorated spirit. it happened in just the last two monarchies and amazing for that paradigm shift. larry: you're fellow veteran and combat pete hegseth running the defense department might have something to do with it. you're a west point grad and reading in the paper today, west point is basically scrubbing itself of all its dei programs. >> yes. larry: top to bottom. do you approve and heard about it? >> i've heard a few things about it and saw a few things flaker about some clubs that are also being scrapped. going for them may not be again and going for them and that's in the country and that's our diversity. i don't want to see people being hired or trained and training for them being changed going for them. going to celebrate the difference and having it in the country as black man sitting next to white man here and having it in common, we're all americans the culture is celebrating and going for them. larry: last one, we spent too much time if there are, usaid flawed programs and going extremely

the french are sending an envoy who are supposed to go to baghdad to conduct diplomacy, to establish a castle. and they and michaux lobbies to be appointed on this expedition and the crown and marie-antoinette in particular agrees to underwrite his cost to the middle east. and so michaux spends three years traveling throughout the middle east. he travels all the way up to the caspian sea and returns to paris, and he returns ladened with all of these treasures. he carries back with him. he can. he's the person that's believed to be the first person to create a french to persian dictionary. he carries back something called the michaux. and i read about this. michaux stone is described as 50 pounds, and it had this this kind of ancient hieroglyphics on it that nobody could interpret. actually, nobody could actually crack it until the mid-19th century, but everybody knew it was valuable because it had sort of data on it. when i went to paris to conduct research and to kind of walk in me shows footsteps, and they had stone out. the stone was only about this big, but it's 50 pounds, which

the world, as you just saw, from moscow to beijing, nairobi to ramallah, havana, islamabad, kabul, baghdad over the united states, starting with iowa and new hampshire, this hour has always been driven by what i love most deep reporting on politics and foreign policy. as i announced last october. in these challenging times, i want to get back to my roots and learn more about your lives. tell your stories. as we face tectonic changes in our nation and our world. after also doing that for 17 years, hosting this daily show on msnbc, i'll be doing that from now on full time, where this amazing ride first started 47 years ago, right here at nbc news as chief washington and chief foreign policy correspondent, continuing to cover politics and foreign policy. above all, i'm proudest of the young journalists who appeared first on our program and are now among our top correspondents, and especially the women from print and broadcast, who are now regulars on all the networks but got their first breaks right here. and i'm grateful to my fellow correspondents at nbc news, this incredible team who broug

initial invasion of baghdad in march 2003. he rolled his.rder overland

building bridges and roads in certain countries, and we're putting big bird and bert and ernie on tv in baghdad. who do you think is going to have more influence? so what elon musk is saying this is stupid. let's stop it. let's focus on serving the american people, not having these agencies do what they want. here's another thing, sean. 10,000 people work at usaid. 1000 of those 10,000, over 10% of those individuals. one month after hamas attacks, our best friend, the state of israel, one month later, those 1000 people did an open letter calling for a ceasefire in gaza. are you kidding me? so, of course we need to scale this agency back and get rid of some of those people who have that attitude and are saying those kind of things about our dear friend and ally, the state of israel. you know, mark meadows, i really pride myself in doing a lot of research, and we spend a lot of time looking for waste, fraud and abuse. i know senator joni ernst had requested this information repeatedly, and they they, they use obscure names to really hide where the money goes and what the money went for. where i g

crazy things with their being used for i point to sesame street and iraq, burke, ernie, big bird and baghdadf money when you look at the debt we have been running. shannon: do you worry that goodwill the american people yes i nietzsche's going out of my tax dollars and no, i'm not okay with a lot of the stuff. federal workers have not been the most empathetic characters for a lot of americans but others are and share their stories and entire offices are wiped out. people are crying. they're completely unnerved and have no idea how their agencies are going to run. >> shannon, i grab this headlight national parks in chaos after "washington post" story but here's the first paragraph california national park and trump menstruation fire the only locksmith on staff your next sentence he was fired, his ssoul employee with keys and institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms. that's the best you can do? the real question is how did visitors get locked in restrooms? this is how ridiculous some of this is but maybe there been mistakes made but i think the intensity and the

the bureaucrats who decided big bbird and bert and ernie on baghdad news, can't question the those people. can't question the 108,000 people who work at treasury. no, no, no, they're smarter than the folks president trump has asked to come in and look at where our tax money is going. can't question -- i mean, i think about this. the smartest bureaucrat in the history of the world, dr. fauci, the things he told us. we weren't allowed to question him for two years and he ran our lives. and here's the irony. everything he told us turned out to be false. told us the virus didn't come from a lab. yes, it did. we got agencies now that tell us that, confirm that. told us the vaccinated couldn't get, couldn't transmit it. wrong on both those counts. told us six feet social distancing was made on science. they just made it up. here's the kicker. he told us this is the first virus in history where there was no such thing as natural immunity. can't question him. got to trust the bureaucracy. i prefer to trust the people. oh, by the way, remember when they tried to set up a bureaucracy in the governm

. >> the and having big bird and bert and ernie on tv in baghdad. so that's what he's pointing out.hat's the kind of stuff we need to get rid of. and frankly, 77 million people knew he was going to do this and they voted for him. but on election day, i just want to because of. >> this, i just wanna be clear. well, first of all, usaid, we don't need to. they do other things besides the programs. they deal with, humanitarian issues and the like. but, but, but you're okay. it sounds like you believe that congress needs to have some say ultimately here. >> well, i think that i think in the end that will be the case. but i do think what what elon and his team are doing, um, at the at the request, at the urging of the president, and it's something that he campaigned on and it's something that people evaluated and voted for on november 5th. and he went on an overwhelming way. um, i think that's entirely appropriate. >> okay, so speaking of elon musk, the there was a judge that ruled over the weekend, as you know, about his access to the treasury department payment system. the judge says it

and it might prove hard to fix, as susan, you laid out so well, remembering what was happening in baghdad all those years ago. and in your most recent piece, susan glasser. lisa rubin, thank you very much. kelly o'donnell. thank you as well. i hope you got your your bugs sorted out out there. still ahead, despite the white house saying a federal funding freeze would not impact its programs, head start says it's been unable to access money allocated for its its expenses. the deputy director joins us next. what he says will happen if head start runs out of cash. plus, what foreign policy experts say president trump's plan to remake gaza is doing to trigger extremists and make us less safe here at home. and what the acting fbi director says he was just forced to do to answer to the trump administration's demands over january 6th. we are demands over january 6th. we are back in 90s. tap into etsy for home and style staples to help you set any vibe. from custom lighting under 150 dollars to vintage jackets under 100. for affordable pieces to help you make a fresh start, etsy has it. carl: beli

i was the intelligence briefer in baghdad for ambassador job negroponte who was the first ambassador to iraq. i would provide him intelligence briefings early early in the morning. one day he came back from a trip to washington and said, i'm going to be nominated to be the first director of national intelligence. it's this completely new position. it's a position that has been created because of the failures of 9/11, our failures to anticipate the attacks of 9/11, to put the pieces together between the fbi, the cia, the military, all those who had a piece of the story but didn't have a place and a venue to combine it all together to anticipate the most devastating attacks on the u.s. soil since pearl harbor. i came home and happened to be one of those first employees to set up the director of national intelligence. i think i was employee number five, john negroponte's first special assistant. so i was his body person, helping him set up that office. so when i talk about the nomination of tulsi gabbard, i don't do it willy-nilly. i don't do it without a background on these topics. and

and you can imagine, you know, if baghdad was difficult, gaza would be, you know, x, you know, percentage more difficult than that in terms of a military campaign. you know, it just it's at odds with sort of his whole approach on the campaign trail as well. >> yeah. and it's at odds with, you would think even the conversations he has had with saudi arabia, mbs has been a close ally in the past of the trump administration. just a little strange to think of. and i've been trying to go around and round figure out what they could possibly mean by this. in your most generous assessment of it, you could try and think of a marshall plan. but this is not that, because he has said he would remove the palestinians and go in and actually potentially send u.s. troops in. so it's very different from that perspective. obviously, there's something that needs to be done in gaza post the israeli invasion and the damage that's been done there. but this is very different from the marshall plan after world war two. >> yeah. i mean, the immediate criticism you heard over the over the night last night was that

the bureaucrats who decided big bbird and bert and ernie on baghdad news, can't question the those people. can't question the 108,000 people who work at treasury. no, no, no, they're smarter than the folks president trump has asked to come in and look at where our tax money is going. can't question -- i mean, i think about this. the smartest bureaucrat in the history of the world, dr. fauci, the things he told us. we weren't allowed to question him for two years and he ran our lives. and here's the irony. everything he told us turned out to be false. told us the virus didn't come from a lab. yes, it did. we got agencies now that tell us that, confirm that. told us the vaccinated couldn't get, couldn't transmit it. wrong on both those counts. told us six feet social distancing was made on science. they just made it up. here's the kicker. he told us this is the first virus in history where there was no such thing as natural immunity. can't question him. got to trust the bureaucracy. i prefer to trust the people. oh, by the way, remember when they tried to set up a bureaucracy in the governm

spent 32,000 for transgender, it's probably not a wise expenditure to have sesame street played in baghdad, iraq, but instead of saying we should figure out how to stop that they are saying, we have to stop the guy who's pointing out the stupid things that government is spending money on. taxpayer money, the money that represents their money on their credit stupid things. now it's being reported that there is something worse going on. it's been reported today that media outlets were paid at the millions of dollars by usaid -- the media outlets are saying this is for subscriptions to their publication, but i find that interesting. the fda played -- paid politico $517,000 for 37 subscriptions. that seems kinda high to me, does that seem that way to you? >> doing the math quickly, that seems excessive, yes. quakes maybe there is some explanation, may be politico is so darn important that it cost that much in taxpayer money should be spent. but i find that interesting, 517,000 for 37 subscriptions when is the press, the government paying the press, does that jeopardize what the press -- the fr

your money, john, on sesame street in iraq, in baghdad, $10 million on guatemalan sex changes, $10 milliono uganda for circumcisions for men. i mean. >> hold on. all those things are voted on by congress. all of them. doesn't mean they're right. >> who ran congress? the republicans ran. i'm a republican. the congress passed this stuff. this isn't made up out of nowhere. this stuff is all approved by the republican congress. >> right? but doesn't mean it's right, though donald trump traditionally is. i mean, if anything, he's an independent, though he would if he was here now, i guess, john, he'd call you a rhino, a republican in name only. >> i don't care what he calls me. i was a republican when he was a democrat. okay. i've stayed. i'm a reagan republican. when he was president, all this stuff you read, you know, off about zimbabwe or whatever that stuff was in and happening when he was president. why didn't he get rid of it when he was president? >> well, the argument is, i mean, the answer to that the argument is that he surrounded he didn't know how government worked. he surrounded hi

your money, john, on sesame street in iraq, in baghdad, $10 million on guatemalan sex changes, $10 millionuganda for circumcisions for men. i mean. >> hold on. all those things are voted on by congress. all of them. doesn't mean they're right. >> who ran congress? the republicans ran. i'm a republican. the congress passed this stuff. this isn't made up out of nowhere. this stuff is all approved by the republican congress. >> right? but doesn't mean it's right, though donald trump traditionally is. i mean, if anything, he's an independent, though he would if he was here now, i guess, john, he'd call you a rhino, a republican in name only. >> i don't care what he calls me. i was a republican when he was a democrat. okay. i've stayed. i'm a reagan republican. when he was president, all this stuff you read, you know, off about zimbabwe or whatever that stuff was in and happening when he was president. why didn't he get rid of it when he was president? >> well, the argument is, i mean, the answer to that the argument is that he surrounded he didn't know how government worked. he surrounded hims

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