mollie hemingway. and shelby holliday, and juan williams. larger media is donald trump employs people and possibly they aren't properly vetted. mollie: we don't have a cabinet secretary at the veterans administration. this is a very important agency that serves the health of our veterans. that's an important story how he's nominating people. but that larger narrative misses the point. a lot of americans voted for trump because he does things differently than people in washington. howie: shaking things up has positive and negative effects. the media take was how can jackson be named to run the va, no management experience. trump likes him because he praised his health. and the media pounced. juan: i wouldn't say the media pounced. initially it was the basis of reports to the senate. what are these allegations? then subsequently the reporting comes out based on leaks coming out of the senate that military people have gone to senator tester and the allegations, the glad started. howie: it turns out some of these allegations about wrecking a car

we are back with mollie hemingway. cebook has global clout and it's relying on outside fact checkers. why is it important to be truth squadding the fact checking. mollie: people intentionally writing false stories that get shared. their is an air of objectivity that goes with a fact check. some visual metric of whether they are telling the truth. and very few people read the underlying pieces which can tell us whether to take that fact check seriously or not. whether people are judging opinions or facts. how they are determining whether something is true. these are things that will be helpful to the news consumer. howie: sometimes you get into opinion and sometimes the fact checkers have kind of a tin ear. mollie: recently you had a situation where the christian site babylon said cnn was washing their newsroom spin cycle. and snopes looked at this like it was worthy of news. howie: a picture of a washing machine is designed to get laughs. mollie: i think facebook figured out the problem. but the damage is done. it's so

mollie hemingway, senior editor at "the federalist." mike allen, cofounder and executive editor of axios. a busy day on a lot of fronts. let's start with the value of these fbi agents raided the president's personal attorney. the bar has to be pretty high. >> the two words that stuck out in your set up were aggressive and squeeze. michael: is the rosetta stone to trump incorporated, broadly defined. there is no one who knows more about what's going on, what exists, what records there might be. this will rattle the president, and mueller well knows that. still want to get to that point where you are taking communications potentially between an attorney and his client who happens to be the president of the united states, that is significant. >> it is absolutely significant. there will be a lot of questions asked about what led to this not just because cohen was complying but we are dealing with the president's attorney himself. in the context of the larger fbi probe going on, we have inquiries into the hillary clinton investigation where

mollie hemingway, writing today, "comey's memos indicate dossier briefing of trump was a set up." she will be here in a moment to take us through the anatomy of that leak as will congressman peter king of the intel committee and jessica tarlov joining us as well. first, catherine herridge with the latest tonight on comey, clapper, and why the democratic national committee is suddenly launching a slew of lawsuits at russia and the trump campaign over the 2016 election. good evening. >> thank you, martha. tonight that she was on the other foot with fox news confirming that comey is under investigation for leaking the memos, whether he might handle classified information, as well as in communication to outside the fbi including contacts with reporters. as you mentioned, another former senior intelligence officer who oversaw the 17 intelligence agencies, director of national intelligence james clapper, also under the microscope. in the memos, comey writes, that it was clapper who told him to privately briefly incoming president about the unverified salacious claims in a trump dossier

howie: poll mollie hemingway is with us. mollie: a lot of people watched his but it kind of ended up being a little bit of a dud. if they are using this story to go after the president they would like it to be more substantive. mollie: a lot of journalists are not huge fans of the president and they thought this would be a good avenue to pursue their less than happy feeling about him. howie: some news outlets said stormy was threatened instead of stormy saying a man she can't identify confronted her in a parking lot. mollie: donald trump is someone who bragged about his infidelity for decades. this is baked in to what people think about him. people had to make a decision when they voted for him, and people made that decision for trump. the threatening thing would be new. though it's reminiscent of what we heard during the bill clinton scandal how people close to him threatened. howie: i spent years covering the clinton sex scandal. anyone who says the press gave bill clinton a pass has amnesia. many of the revelations were br

with me now, the senior editor at the federalist and fox news contributor, mollie hemingway. the president understandably upset. what is going on here? mollie: there is so much going on. we note offices were raided. the people who got the search warrant had to show probable cause and there is wrongdoing going on. the wrongdoing may not be related to trump or russia. if it were there is a lot me need to find out. this is a pretty aggressive move by the fbi. there is a lot we need to find out. kennedy: michael cohen's attorney said the office of special counsel actually was in possession of the information that led to the search warrant. what do you know about that? mollie: if they had information and it's not related to what you are supposed to be investigating, treasonous collusion with trump and russia. maybe this was the proper way to go by the. right to the fbi office and let them handle this. but it is really unprecedented. if you think about the way the fbi handled hillary clinton. they had one of their appointees call hillary and they gave her immunity and they didn't re

mollie hemingway, senior editor at "the letter list. what do you make ofo this, mollie?r a year of rigorous investigation, there is no evidence of treasonous collusion between trump on the russian government. that is not very surprising. what they did show was that there is quite a lot of collusion at the highest levels of government to cook up and propagated narrative of russian collusion. we learned from his committee about the fisa abuse at doj, where they used an mike a research document bought and paid for secretly by hillary clinton and the depth oe democratic national committee to secure a wiretap, and then you picked up on this otherng thing, james clapper gave contradictory testimony under oath about he wastoha looking to cnn. that is interesting. the whole thing but got everything going was this briefing of president-elect supposedly about the dossier. we later learned it was about one salacious part of the dossier. this was highly placed, well sourced, it looks like it went to clapper, someone close to him. learning that this was all done, that comey was asked

mollie hemingway, senior editor at "the federalist." let's start with the international stuff.tuation. clearly they have a personal rapport, these two. there were air kisses. >> flicking dandruff off shoulders. >> bret: they also seem to have, or ci tie even though there are differences, on moving forward with something new. >> something new. macron worked really, really hard to sell trump on this idea of using the iran deal as a foundation and building on it, auntie came about with three pillars that would address trump's concerns. in addition to stopping iran from developing nuclear weapons in ten years which the current agreement does, you would add on something that would keep them from doing it permanently. ballistic missiles, stopping them from interfering in yemen and syria and iraq. he wants to use the existing agreement is the foundation. trump was talking about something a little different. he was talking about starting a whole new foundation. i don't know exactly how it works if on may 12, as i think trump hinted today, he wants to scrap the deal. >> bret: yeah, moll

. >> shannon: i want to play what mollie hemingway had to say on "special report" talking about mueller and the fact that he seems to be feeling pretty confident these days. >> mueller is unafraid. it's worth remembering that he was also unafraid when he botched the anthrax investigation by targeting the wrong person. a blunder that cocked, cost taxpayers a lot of money. there is a burden of proof that the fbi, department of justice, special counsel have to meet. president trump talked about the conflicts of interest. >> shannon: he talked about them tonight when he was asked about -- why haven't you fired mueller? he did not give an answer but he went on to talk about rosenstein. clearly these two men are on his mind. >> i remember they can start investigation. the democrats went after ken starr, everyone who worked for him it was a republican, you shouldn't believe a word he said. this is not unusual to make the special counsel a political punching bag. the only thing i can tell the president, mr. mueller has a good reputation. he's doing his job professionally as far as i can tell, a

that's why mollie hemingway today wrote this whole thing smells like a big set up. whole meeting talking about thes to yea, rattle trump or try to rattle him. we don't know if it's true. there is this thing and looks like they are saying. this tom, your reaction? >> it is puzzling. the administration is just getting started and already the fbi director is memorializing for whatever his purposes were. >> laura: you don't memorialize to make yourself look bad. you memorialize to make yourself look good. >> i think that's fair. this is exceedingly unusual. i can't imagine any other administration where a few days in you have someone needing to create this sort of record. there is unusual things going on here. >> laura: congressman desantis, there is a comey point in these memos that talked about cnn. i want to read it he says i said media like cnn had them. the memos. and were looking for a news hook. i said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the fbi halls the material or that's redacted, and that we were keeping it very close hold. he said

mollie hemingway senior editor at the federalist and now mike allen co-founder and executive editor ofthis right. but, let's start with the james comey interview. thoughts about you know, what new came out of it and the take the reaction today. >> the biggest new thing for the president is that he has someone competing for the airwaves with him. this is counter programming the trump show, the president is so used for the last year, 15 months now of dominating the airwaves. now we're going to have five weeks of comey and we saw from the president's tweet that it's already in his head. not necessarily anything new. the real meat of this had come out during james comey's testimony. >> i mean, i haven't gotten a lot new out of the book so far. but, mollie? >> i'm not sure about the counter programming issue. i think you have a president who is very good at slinging mud and james comey is trying to sling mud as well. his whole image that he wants to project he is honest boycott. the book comes out and paints a different image. a lot of people think hes comes off somewhat weird and petty and

mollie hemingway, senior editor at "the federalist" ." a lot to cover, jonathan. the main things really what we talked about, north korea and what's coming up. especially standing alongside the japanese prime minister. >> the japanese are anxious about this. they not only, we talk a lot about intercontinental ballistic missiles here in the united states. they are worried about short-range missiles. this is really in their neighborhood. it's an existential threat in their neighborhood. a bit, there was a lot of communication from sources on both sides that was not being translated necessarily through the nsc to the president. he wanted to get in front of the president and have a direct conversation. >> bret: the other thing we may find out is the disconnect about whether or not sanctions were moving forward against russia and what happened with nikki haley, u.s. ambassador to the u.n. she announced the sanctions were coming. the back-and-forth, that she doesn't get confused. the reporting that the policy change from sunday to monday. >> reporting out that says the

mollie hemingway from "the federalist," and charles lane at "the washington post."hink it's fair to say that they struck back harder than people expected, announcing tariffs on $50 billion of u.s. exports, including soybeans, which is really key, a big market and china for u.s. soybeans and also aircraft. but no dates were set and the trump administration says it is not setting a date. it will go to a process that goes into mid or late may. are we in a trade war with china or not? >> we are awful close if we are not there already. the big question is whether this is bluster from the trump administration and a strong push back, certainly a stronger pushback than many in the trump administration had anticipated. peter navarro expected that he didn't expect them to retaliate because they recognize we were just trying to balance with the trump administration sees as a trade imbalance and lo and behold we are seeing pretty serious retaliation. the chinese were smart and strategic about how they retaliated. it's very clear that they picked industries and products that hel

mollie hemingway senior editor at the federal list.onal public radio" and joe digenova former u.s. attorney. catherine, first to you, you have covered this for a long time. what stuck out with you. >> the amazing exchange to me is when you had director comey confirm that he shared those memos documenting conversations with the president with three other people so the columbia professor, that's what he testified to also what he described as his personal attorney patrick fitzgerald and then this other attorney. what's key here is that he told you, bret, that those memos were returned to the fbi after they found classified information. he can call it whatever he wants. that is a classified spill of information. doesn't matter whether they have clearances. they didn't have the ability to secure that information. >> bret: joe? >> i was amazed -- i thought it was breath-taking duplicity. america's dirty cop continues to amaze me with the destruction of the institution that he used to lead. and what catherine has just said is stunning. it's n

mollimollie hemingway senior editor at the federalist. they join us tonight. mollie do you make of this? what's the take away. >> they found after a year of rigorous investigation there is no actual evidence of treasonous collusion between trump and russian government. that's probably thought very surprising. what they did show was that there is quite a lot of collusion at the highest levels of government to cook up and propagate a narrative of russian collusion. we had already learned from this committee about the fisa abuse at doj where they used a research document bought and paid for secretly by hillary clinton and the democratic national committee to secure a wiretap on a trump campaign affiliate. and then you picked up on this other thing that's interesting. james clapper gave contradictory testimony under oath about what he was leaking to cnn. and that is interesting. the whole thing that got everything going was this briefing of president-elect trump, supposedly about the dossier. we later learned it was only about one salacious part of the dossier. >> this w