i wonder if germaphobe trump booted mulvaney after seeing mulvaney's talk at c-pac.. ( coughing ) >> something happens. i used to run into this stuff. it's noting, look at it. would you agree with me? in terms of a style. let's see, in the last 20-- you know what-- you know what-- ( coughing ) thank you. might be able to tell, i've got a little bit of a cold. ( laughter ) >> stephen: now, we don't know the identity of the c-pac attendee who was infected, but nadividualad no, be on thlookous wo ( cheers and applause ) >> jon: oh, oh! >> stephen: play it safe. trump did reportedly shake hands with c-pac chairman matt schlapp who had interacted with the infected person, which makes the president just two degrees of separation away from the virus. oh, no! coronavirus is based on degrees of separation? quick, somebody check on kevin bacon! he's a potent disease vector! he was patient zero for dance fever. ( laughter ) one person who did have sustained contact with the individual is texas senator and chonky wolverine, ted cruz. ( laughter ) cruz says he has no symptoms, bu

rs like mulvaney who host a weekly check-in with staff.e, pick up a free meal. >> how are you doing? >> doing good. >> reporter: and meet one-on-one with the chef. >> we need to come together so much more than we ever have. we need to be support systems for people in these times. >> reporter: a comforting reminder that the chef still has their back. "sunday today," joe friar, sacramento. >> thank you very much. >>> next on "sunday today," harry smith on the animals reclaiming some of their territory while humans stay indoors. >> they're pretty opportunistic, they're not being distracted i by visitors and they're spreting out and enjoying. >>> later, a life well lived. the world war ii hero's whose super emma just about sleeps in her cape. but when we realized she was battling sensitive skin, we switched to new tide plus downy free. it's gentle on her skin, and dermatologist recommended. new tide pods plus downy free. safe for sensitive skin with eczema and psoriasis. at&t knows you have a lot of things on your mind. staying connected shoul

or mulvaney's when they take your temperature at the door and you can prove, look, i've just tested and'm negative. you can kind of see that world based on where china is now. how closer we to mass testing? you've got 5 5 million citizens you've got to deal with? >> we're nowhere near where we need to be on testing and let's just be straight with folks. a few weeks ago we were talking about re-agents and extraction kits and not having enough capacity to do the diagnostics and now the biggest challenge is the swabs and the media. the biggest point is we're getting point of care testing and the adoption of a lot of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit including thor isology test and the blood-based test and the prevalence, and to be able to isolate and quarantine people, that will allow us to advance our economic recovery and allow us to do it in a safe and responsible way. let's just be careful at this moment and we're so desperate to get out of our homes and to get to places like this, to reconnect with family and friends and let's not runt 90-yard dash and this country has come so far

and then mulvaney and stephanie grisham left us in the oval office. i don't know how many times, you work there, i don't know how may times you were in the oval office alone. but i have never been in the oval office alone. the doors were closed, it was just the three of us. i cannot tell you exactly how long it was. he think it was two or three minutes, but it felt like an hour. zeke muller with ap leans over to me and says what are we doing? we are definitely being taped, we are being watched. we just sat there in silence. and then the president came back in and we had this meeting that lasted upwards of an hour. i, at one point sat there thinking, here i am sitting across the resolute desk from the president of the united states was donald trump. and 25 years ago, almost to the day, 25 years earlier, i had been with him in trump tower running around trying to find michael jackson's bodyguards and doing this kind of gossip tour of celebrity apartments in his building. you know, who could have imagined that i would end up where i was, and he would end

secretary, was brought in by the press secretary and the chief of staff stephanie grisham and nick mulvaney and with two of my colleagues on the white house association board and we were brought in through the outer level of the oval office that was empty we were asked to sit the three chairs in front of the desk and then told weight and then mulvaney and grisham watched us in the oval office. you worked there i don't know how many times you were in the oval office alone, but i have never been alone. doors were closed. just the three of us and i cannot tell you exactly how long it was. two or three minutes. it felt like it our. we sat here what are we doing? we are definitely being watched. we just sat there in silence then the president came back in and we had this meeting lasted upwards of an hour. i at one point sat there thinking here i am sitting across the desk from the president of the united states who is donald trump and 25 years ago almost to the day i had been with him in trump tower trying to find michael jackson's bodyguards and doing this gossip tour of celebrity apartments in

mulvaney and stephanie grisham walks into the oval office. you work there i know how may times you are in the oval office alone. but i have never been in there alone. the doors were closed just the three of us. i cannot tell you exactly how long it was. two or three minutes but it felt like an hour. zeke miller leaned over and said what do we do? of course we are being taped and watched. so we just sat there in silence and the president came back in and we had this meeting that lasted upwards of an hour. i am one.sat there thinking that here i am sitting across the desk from the president of united states who is donald trump and 25 years ago almost to the day, i had been with him and trump tower running around trying to find michael jackson's bodyguard and doing this gossip tour of celebrity apartments in his building. who could have imagined i would end up where i was and he would end up where he was. here i was a junior tabloid reporter in new york city. he was a flamboyant developer who like to get his name in the tabloids. then 25 years a

we have occasionally like mike mulvaney did a briefing. i think that we just went, we passed a one year anniversary of the no press briefing by press secretary, which i find astonishing. >> guest: it is. and you make the point, which i think is a valid one, and an important one which is i want to gegive to it, but my argument about the need for a press secretary having regular press briefings, we are in an extraordinary moment right now where the president is doing his own briefings every day and it is a whole different extraordinary time in a crisis, but i think it's important to see the person that is speaking on behalf of the executive branch in the united states of s government, speaking on behalf of the president coming out and taking questions every day from all comers. i think it's important for us to fall in terms of the newsgathering even though admittedly the information isn't that visceral, some is more useful than others. but i think it's important symbolically. it sends a message to the country and to the world that the most p

you say that based on the situation there, did mick mulvaney, did steve -- did mick mulvaney push back at you and did you feel the need to push harder and that's why you put the memo out. is that true or not true? >> what happens in the situation room by definition needs to stay there. i can tell you that there was disagreement among the task force about it. i tried to provide some clarity with a fairly straightforward analysis of the costs of the travel ban which would entail disruptions to business and travel versus the bigger cost. we didn't know this at the time but in case the seriousness of the pandemic emerged. what's important is the president independently of that memo made what i think in the history books will be judged as a pivotal decision in the crisis, and it started in motion a set of events that have led to the largest industrial mobilization since world war ii. it has led to the use of the defense production act for the first time since the korean war to great effect. it's led to a quarantine which we had never done before. all of these things, the president got treme

chief of staff mick mulvaney was on his way out the door. the president himself was distracted by the impeachment trial. there was a dispute between mulvaney, who still headed the budget office at that point and the health human services secretary, secretary azar, about how much money would be needed to combat the virus as it started to reach american shores. when the president spoke in mid-january at davos, at that moment the united states had just one patient, a coronavirus patient, a lone figure in washington state. a month later when he finally addressed it from the white house briefing room in the first of these task force briefings that have now become daily rituals, the united states had just 15. and he said we're ready. we're going to stop this. now, of course, as we sit here today, over 23,000 americans are dead. so the president today, in an unprecedented fashion, you know, used that taxpayer-funded video to try to refute these reports, tried to lay out his own version of the timeline. but in this case, brian, it seemed like the fa

there and you're offering us a little bit of hope there gavin newsom, the governor of california, mulvaney's in sacramento and a shout out to gardenia bread, encinitas, valley junior high school. thank you very much. i do appreciate it, sir. >> very grateful thank you. >> take care all right. do not go anywhere tonight we have a very special friday night for you, jim is off so no "mad," but we'll be doing another full hour of "fast money" from 6:00 to 7:00 options action is ahead 5:30 to 6:00 and from 6:00 to 7:00, 3:00 to 4:00 where we were talking about fast money you are watching cnbc and the dow is up today. we're back after this. there are times when our need to connect really matters. to keep customers and employees in the know. to keep business moving. comcast business is prepared for times like these. powered by the nation's largest gig-speed network. to help give you the speed, reliability, and security you need. tools to manage your business from any device, anywhere. and a team of experts - here for you 24/7. we've always believed in the power of working together. that's why, when

that testify truthfully are the ones who lost their jobs the ones who flooded the congress mick mulvaney a member nick used to be the chief of staff and he said about the ukraine deal well of course you get to get over it we always do these things so we obviously would have undercut the president's killing that nothing was wrong done here you know i'm not going to testify i don't want to say anything about this now when you have national security assessments that are supposed to be available to the congress of the united states since they fund the trillion dollar plus national security budget no we don't want to tell you all the secret off the record we need to have all of this their own so that contempt of congress is a huge issue abuse of the powers of the president abuse of public trust yes this is the abuse of public trust of the powers the present with regard to his obstruction of justice he did cooperate in the moeller investigation at least 5 or 10 times he attempted to obstruct it by asking his subordinates to have mr molder fired to have mr sessions the attorney general on recus

there was basically a void at the top, remember the president fired his acting chief of staff mick mulvaney on march the 6th as this pandemic was taking hold and the crisis was growing really exponentially at that point. he named mark meadows a close ally, as his next chief of staff. he didn't take over the job until this week. you needed someone to step in that void, and that was jared kushner. to go to hhs, go to fema, to cut through red tape, bring people together. look, he doesn't have an expertise in this. he's not a health expert. he has the ear of the president so when agency officials hear from him they believe they're hearing from the president. that could be good or bad. there are some complaints at fema when the president hears from a governor or a couple of governors they didn't get these supplies or want these supplies and has jared kushner call them and say go ahead and ship them. there's a concern on a part of fema whether or not this is a national prioritization, supplies are being sent to the right place at the right time based on the whole picture than a phone call. on the

white house aides met with nick mulvaney, acting white house chief staff on the 2nd asking him to getsident to pay more attention to the virus. did address it in speech in michigan only to downplay the threat. >> we're working closely with china and other countries and we think it's going to have a very good ending for us, i can assure you. >> january 29th, white house trade adviser peter navarro wrote first of two memos about dire consequences. warned the virus could cause more than 500,000 deaths in the united states. president has said he didn't see the memo. but this wasn't the first time the administration was alerted to the threat. according to abc news, intelligence community had been raising concerns about contagion in china and been raising concerns in president's daily brief. >> when did you first learn? >> about the gravity of it, it sometime just prior to closing the country to china. >> referring to january 31st, when white house announced travel restrictions to china. >> foreign nationals other than immediate family of u.s. citizens and permanent residents who have trave

we wouldn't have written it if mick mulvaney or reince priebus shed tears. it was a story.'t know why he felt the need to embarrass his own chief of staff that way by having talking about this with him sitting there but also to attack a reporter at what is supposed to be a briefing about health. he literately came out and started doing it, not like he got asked a question. it takes away the virus, the economy, which is why i or either one of those is going to get healed and it's unfortunate for voters and for the general public that these briefings have frequently devolved into that. >> as you know, maggie, all of the coverage of the coronavirus and this health crisis that we're in has' clips clipsed muc the presidential race. former vice president joe biden is trying to get some of that spotlight back. he's just put out a big political ad, campaign ad about how he thinks president trump has been handling this. let's play a quick portion. >> he failed to act, so now trump and his allies are launching negative attacks against joe biden to hide the truth. here are the facts.

chief of staff mulvaney was out the door, feuding with hhs secretary azar. had the administration moved even a few weeks sooner, we might be looking at a very different impact now. when the president did speak at the end of february, at the time, he said, and i quote him, "we're ready for this." at the time, the u.s. had 15 patients. that was it, 15. now, we have over 20,000 americans dead. >> also, jonathan, it's important, it was remarkable that the president actually had someone who worked on his team that got out and admitted the truth and said things were going to be bad in the united states and that this was coming. the president was so angry as he was flying back from india that he canceled the meeting to make plans on how to save americans' lives. they weren't able to reengage him again for a long time. >> that's right. part of the issue here, joe, is there is no one in the white house who has been able to, during that stretch, was able to redirect him. his focus was elsewhere. he didn't want to do anything to potentially roil the markets, slow the e

according to the "washington post," white house aides met with mick mulvaney, acting white house chieff, on january 27th, and asked him to get the white house to pay more attention to the virus. president trump did acknowledge the virus three days later in his speech in michigan, but only to once again down play the threat. >> we're working closely with china and other countries and we think it's going to have a very good ending for us, i can assure you. >> january 29th, white house trade adviser peter navarro wrote first of two memos about dire warnings about the spread of the virus in the u.s. warned the virus could cause more than 500,000 deaths in the united states. the president has said he doesn't see the memo. this wasn't the first time the administration was alerted to the threat. according to abc news, intelligence community had been raising concerns about contagion in china since november and in january started including information about it in the president's daily brief. >> when did you first learn? >> about the gravity of it, it was sometime just prior to closing the count

i mean, no one has successfully gotten the phone logs from tony fauci or secretary azar to mick mulvaney i wonder when the first call came in from secretary azar to the white house saying, houston, we have a problem, we are not china. we cannot lock this country down. bob woodward says the truth emerges. >> it absolutely does and that's all information that i think is very important to understanding how we behaved in this crisis. look, i teach at the university level and the one question that students have asked me since this crisis is what is our government actually supposed to do in times like this? the fact that we've had very different responses not just from the president but also from governors, you had the governor of alabama saying we're not california so we don't need to do the same things that california does. while i may technically understand that those two states are very different, the fact that we didn't have the sort of unified approach to how our government should go about handling this crisis is incredibly troubling. i think there's another piece that gets underreported

meeting in early february where the president's top coronavirus experts, led by then chief of staff mulvaney of hhs alex azar, and they were just incredibly confident that they had beaten coronavirus. at that time there were only a few cases can here. they were reflecting what the president said in those clips because they thought that the travel bans have kept it out of the united states. we told them that they needed money and they needed money fast in order to buy supplies, in order to higher more staff, and they told us that they didn't need any funding, that they had everything that they needed, and i walked out of that closed-door briefing just with chills running down my spine because many of us on both sides of the aisle knew what this virus had done in china. we knew it was a matter of time before it arrived here and it was just shocking how cavalier the administration was. this was at a time when the president real, you know, viewed this as a hoax. he said so on tv and the reason that we're in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that china did. it's not because

whether senior white house officials knew about the memos, people like mick mulvaney and so on. these memos raise lots of questions and the president didn't put them to rest. >> the w.h.o. has long-standing problems, huge bureaucracy, lot of reasons, they're out of china. they pretend taiwan doesn't exist and ignore taiwan's response to the coronavirus which seems to have been very effective. there are a lot of reasons to criticize them. it's interesting the president has really jumped on top of this. sanjay, stay with us. jim, gloria, thank you very much. still to come, more on the adjusted model that suggests fewer deaths than predicted just days ago. the director of an institute whose model was cited by the white house officials will join sanjay and me to discuss what this means for the weeks and months ahead. later, remembering the victims. i'll speak to the widow, the wife of a man who passed away after he struggled to get both testing and care for the disease. at philadelphia, we know what makes the perfect schmear of cream cheese. you need only the freshest milk and cream

mick mulvaney, the president's chief of staff was there on capitol hill very early in the process briefingrs. having chaired a committee, one that's bigger than the intel committee, i can tell you, there's a very real opportunity -- when they were so focused on trump, trump, trump, they were not paying attention to the intelligence and other things that were happening around the world. it's only congress that took their eyes off the ball. people like tom cotton, they were paying attention. nancy pelosi, adam schiff and that whole show, no. they were doing something else that was not productive and that opportunity cost us a lot of time and time is lives. >> sean: judge, we could now -- how exponentially worse with this country be tonight? how many more americans would likely have contracted this virus without the travel ban? how many americans likely would have died if exponentially you run the math on this? if they didn't have the travel ban, ten days after the first case. >> you know what, sean, there's no way that i can go through the numbers, but what i can tell you is this; this presi

there was a turf war between the white house with its outgoing chief of staff mulvaney who at that pointpowerless, on his way out the door, but he still held control of the office of management and budget, was feuding with health and human services and secretary azar in terms of how much money was needed to fight this. above it all, there was the president himself distracted by impeachment, not wanting to give us it the attention it deserved. >> the impact of that delay has been profound and you summarize i had this way am i'm quoting your story. life-saving medical equipment was not stock piled. travel largely continued ian abated. public health from china wasn't provided or deemed untrustworthy. a white house ridden with rivalries and turnover was slow to act. protecting a robust economy he a viewed central to his re-election chances. even as people were worried about, what you call the prevailing voices in the white house were worried about big steps that could broil the financial markets, right? >> that's exactly right. steve mnuchin, jared kushner and others were in line with where

this let me read to you something for your analysis from mick mulvaney of all people.arty is interested in deficits when there's a democrat in the white house. the worst thing in the whole thing is deficits when barack obama was the president. then trump became president, we're a lot less interested as a party. paul? >> yeah. they were complete hypocrites, in fact i told you that after in column after column all through the obama years. this was a complete fraud from the beginning. nobody in the republican party actually cared about deficits. >> do you think that there's a space between economics, journalism and whatever the debate is to then do something about that? i mean, do you view the tea party as having been less than an honest movement? >> well, look, the tea party was never about deficits. if you back to -- go back to the beginning, is the government going to take your money and help people with darker skin, let's been host. the tea party wasn't about the deficits. and a fair number of people have good intentions did buy into the deficit stuff and they are per

" "the washington post" reporting, ap reporting is that he was warned several times by even mick mulvaneyn chief of staff and national security council, peter navarro, the economic adviser. alex azar, health and human services secretary. and what the president did was downplay a lot of these warnings. in fact, when the woman who handles respiratory and immunization said something without his acknowledgment, he basically said, these people are alarmist, because it is spooking the stock market. i just think that you have to say the president has some responsibility there. does the press? i like what you read about the "times" because it is a reminder. lots of people were slow to come to this. "the new york times" is not the president of the united states or the governor of the state. and they have information at a different level. that's why when dr. fauci was asked this question yesterday on television, he said, yes, if we would have acted more quickly, lives could have been saved. i like to look forward and say, let's come together. and i don't think you can excuse the fact that we were s

exactly two months ago today, in february, this is what then-acting-white-house chief of staff mick mulvaney told a conservative conference about why journalists were covering coronavirus and the administration's failures to adequately prepare. >> the reason you're seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be what brings down the president. that's what this is all about. i got a note today from a -- from a reporter saying, what are you going to do today to calm the markets? i said, i might tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours. >> how embarrassing. as cnn's kaitlan collins reports for us again now, all of these new questions come as the president you do states to start trying to get back to normal. >> reporter: facing questions about what he knew and when, president trump says he isn't sure if his intelligence briefings earlier this year included warnings about coronavirus. >> i have to check. i would have to check. i'm going to look as to the exact dates of warnings. >> reporter: "the washington post" reports that trump's daily intelligence br

moment so a lot of them are out there with no supervision there is no white house function and nick mulvaney is a smart guy but he's not drilling down on coal policy he's just not. a lot of these folks are fairly young and ideological and will punch as hard as they can inside the government these are not necessarily trump's policies and that they had a position on ask they would do it. >> how did you know what the book was done? this is a story there will be another tweet tonight. how did you figure out your ready to put in! on the story to publish the book? >> the paperback says material i should say i have new material for my just because so much happens every day. one of my editor said you are done. [laughter] we wanted, i asked if i could interview trump i made it clear it would be critical and she made it happen we waited and that was the last thing it was february and the editor said you cannot do anymore. otherwise it is a magic realism i'm writing the book every day something new happens and with wilbur ross does something crazy or stephen nguyen it would never and. so we had to end

mick mulvaney was the acting chief of staff back then. the president had isolated him to many degrees. this is not just about the president. this is does he have a ready for prime time team in the white house and around the administration? peter navarro did write that memo. you might say, why is a trade adviser writing about this? peter navarro, whether you like him or not keeps a very close and skeptical eye on china. the navarro memo came a week after republican senator tom cotton of arkansas sent a letter to hhs and other administration officials saying do not trust china. he had been looking at the intelligence, senator cotton, and he believed the numbers coming out of china, the story coming out of china was simply not true and he warned the administration a week before peter navarro, saying do not trust them. you need to take a closer look at this. important from senator cotton just like peter navarro, he said the united states government needs to ramp up and ramp up now. the president now blames the world health organization and no

those who were guarding the economy and the stock market, including the chief of staff at the time, mulvaneye were these frictions and battles inside the administration. what do we care about more, preventing this virus from spreading in the united states or preventing the stock market from plunging? >> all right. greg miller, thank you so much for being with us. thank you and your colleagues for great reporting. an important story in yesterday's "washington post." we'll be talking to you soon. >>> let's bring in right now the council of foreign relations head, and ask you, richard, to give us more of a global view. we hear, generally, italy, the cases may be going down. same with spain. uk continues to skyrocket. china, itwe really don't know exactly what's happening in china because they haven't been transparent from the very beginning. then, of course, japan may be facing a few rough months ahead. what can you tell us, looking at the global stage, how this pandemic is playing out, and what lessons you've learned from it so far? >> well, joe, what you've just described is the mixed bag. in