harry litman, lisa graves, sam stein, thank you for starting us off. really appreciate it. >>> and when we come back, a warning that foreign state actors like russia and north korea are already at it again. they are already attacking the 2020 presidential campaign. and it is pierce that elizabeth warren's tax plan is winning president trump's -- is beating the president trump tax bill in popularity with voters. former bill clinton secretary of labor robert riesh will be here to discuss all of that. >>> and in tonight's "last word," we will evaluate andrew mccabe's credibility about what he said on this program last night and on his book, "the threat: how the fbi protects america in the age of terror and trump". >>> as of tonight, as of right now tonight, not one person has contradicted a single thing that andrew mccabe's bob contaiok cor anything that andrew mccabe has said in interviews. ♪ turn up your swagger game with one a day gummies. one serving... ...once a day... ...with nutrients that support 6 vital functions... ...and one healthy you. that's

sam stein, you have a president here who is actually calling himself a liar.administration are false. he's saying information garnered from his own trump administration cabinet agencies are lies and the he appointed are liars. this is the domestic version of him saying that he believes vladimir putin's intel assessments more than he blo believes his own intel community. remember we all made fun of kellyanne conway when she talked about alternative facts? well, that's what they specialize in now. >> just watching him up there, your jaw hits the floor. we asked the homeland security for data points to bolster president trump's claims. they just didn't get back to us. there are no data points out there to actually support what he's saying. nip think i think we all know that. but it gets to noah's point, we essentially have a president who is riffing, who is creating policy off of no concrete policy data and we have institutions of government, whether it's the department of homeland security, whether it's congress, ll it the deputy kwieb kwieb and at some point th

let's get the inside scoop from mike memole, msnbc contributor sam stein, and beth lui. mike, you were there in the audience, you saw the way the kids reacted. this was classic biden. of what's your read on this? >> yeah, andrea, that's right. i'll be perfectly canned it with you. you know from the discussions that we would have off the air here in the bureau and elsewhere that my own reporting and my experience in covering biden now for more than a decade had been pointing me in a direction that he was less likely to run in 2020, that we would have a similar situation as in 2016 where he got close to the line and backed off. but my conversations over the last week or so with members of his inner circle has me realizing that his default position is that he will run for president. two things are clear, one is that he believes he has time. you were in munich, you heard him say over the weekend that he thinks we start our election process too early. as one biden adviser said to me, we just had the super bowl. we know family is still a factor, it's not a factor in the same w

jeff bezos -- and i trust all of sam stein's great reporting, and roger stone is a good likely subject hasn't been charged with yet. i think talking about saudi araa because jeff besos wrote about it. this is from his post last night. it is unavoidable that certain powerful people will wrongly conclude i'm their enemy. president trump is one of those people obviously by his many tweets. the post essential and unrelenting coverage of jammal kashog kashoggi. kashog kashoggi knit together for me, frank, that observation, i think, pretty diplomatically put, i think the "national enquirer" is an intersection between donald trump and saudi arabia, and there is signal intell that the "new york times" reported on that mbs saying in a recorded call that was intercepted that he wanted to put a bullet in shshk khashoggi. >> the enemy of my enemy is my friend. and that may be applicable when we're talking about ami, besos, and saudi arabia. understand that saudi arabia has a outstanding intentilligence service. they are capable of a lot including operating inside of the united states. acting in th

for more, i'm joined by robert costa and sam stein. thanks so both of you for being with us. me start with you, this idea of a campaign strategy built on finishing the wall in 2020. is there a larger strategy here other than just getting out of the shutdown mess of the last couple months? is there a larger strategy about basically continuing this conversation all through the 2020 campaign on the part of the white house? >> the president debuted this message at his el paso rally last week and talking to his political confidants, it's the start of the 2020 campaign of making finishing the wall the central tenet of that campaign. trying to make sure the conservative voter who rallied behind the wall in 2016 remains with president trump in 2019 and 2020 through the churning political waters of robert mueller's investigation and everything else that could come. by underscoring the commitment to the wall, they hope to keep that base with them. >> so sam, i guess that's the question. from now until election day 2020, you know, in 2016 the message you heard from trump was bil build t

talk to your doctor about mavyret. . >> sam stein has a new piece in the daily beast.lking about what the problems were in 2016 campaign. and i remember going through the 2018 cycle and the two campaign committees tried to find a pact to not use that data if it happened in 2018 and they couldn't come to an agreement so the question became what would happen in 2020? and the first instinct was well, let's see if every democratic candidate would come to some sort of pledge to not knowingly use anything hacked online against their opoens. and all the democrats said we'll have to ask the republicans too. and trump said he would not use posts by liberal media. >> so if wikileaks digs into someone's e-mail and publishes, they're on record saying they will not knowingly use published hacked material against their opponents. now, the tricky part which prohibited a pact from being formed in 2018 is what happens if a member of the media writes up something like this? a hacked document becomes a front page story the the "new york times," can the candidate realistically avoid talki

paul butler is onset, carol lee, and sam stein, at "the daily beast," it is a big, big news day. what was that? >> i have interviewed terrorists that were more cooperative and respective than matt whittaker was today. i say that with sadness because the attorney general role is america's lawyer. we're his clooint and we're represented by the congress members sitting in that room and he treated us with utter disdain, sarcasm, barely barely trying to get through this seriously. this is basically thumbing your nose at oversight by the people. and the way he conducted himself today is an indication that he is not america's attorney, he is seeing himself as trump's attorn attorney. >> and i understand some of whittaker's goals today, there was a lot of preparation, but not for the reasons we may believe. whittaker was auditioning for another job in this administration, he had an audience of one, and he had as one of his goals to be the sarah huckabee sanders of the justice department, does that explain some of what we saw? >> it jives with what we saw today. i think possibly we will s

got up in arms about senator gillibrand even thinking about using a fork for her fried chicken, sam steinotograph of donald trump ready to use his knife and fork on a bucket of kentucky fried chicken. donald trump was doing it on his private plane. a private plane proves donald trump is not a man of the people. but donald trump's voters wisely did not care about that. anti-trump voters didn't care about it. no one voted against donald trump because he uses a fork to eat a bucket of fried chicken. but the news media will continue to pretend that this stuff matters. it is a habit they just cannot kick. matthew iglesias of fox, with whom i cannot remember last time i disagreed, observed this is more seriously with democratic candidates than republican nominees. every democratic nominee is inevitably put through a series of au then sisity tests that republicans are exempted from because it's in the interest of the rich people who run the media to sideline the substantive steaks in american politics. yes, that is what happen but not why it happens. the rich people who run the media could not c

and here at the table sam stein, politics editor at the daily beast is here. amy stoddard is making her way to the table. that's how we go here, if they're here, they're here, ready when they're ready. we will start with you, devlin. what are you watching in this stone proceeding? if you could just sort of rank on sort of the scale of corruption to stupidity, brazen to devil destructive, finger in the eye of rule of law, and this is also a case of sort of spiting himself. roger stone getting himself in trouble today in court. >> yeah, the stone hearing really is amazingly weird. i started covering courts more than 20 years ago, and one of the things that hand in the course of of this is stone's lawyer filed something called a notice of apology to the judge in preparation for this hearing. i have never heard of a notice of apology before, i have never seen a notice of apology before. pretty sure it's not even a thing. anyway, the issue with the stone -- with stone is that he sent out an image on social media, instagram, that basically had a picture of the judge

. >> it was also, sam stein, factually inaccurate. a problem there saying anything is a rhetorical success. also, if a seventh grader had written that in a speech class, they would have gotten an f. again, it was written so badly. i would criticize the segues but there were no segues from partial birth apportion until cancer. >> they didn't like the rhyming couplets around cancer? that didn't do it for you? i find it ot that people at this point in his presidency can take a speech and assume he is interested in governing unity. there is no new donald trump. he is who he is. hours before the speech he was at an off-the-record gathering where he was blistering in his criticism of john mccain and then went after adam schiff at an appearance at the state department. i don't know who can get duped into believing there's any real calls for unity and the idea that he was threatening and not subtly that there would be war if there was any investigation into him. >> i thought it was ot the oppoe of a unifying speech if you threaten to shut dow