now tonight, spencer ackerman reports in the early days of the trump administration, one of mike flynn's hires quote proposed withdrawing some military forces from eastern europe as an overture to president clinton seeking to reposition military forces to please putin. something that smelled to a colleague like a return on russia's investment time on president trump. the official that offered the proposal was kevin harrington. his title is senior official for -- strike that -- strategy planning. he did have one influential credential. he was a managing director for the teal macro hedge fund and thus close to trump patron and ally peter teal. according to spencer ackerman's reporting, this guy in the early days of the trump administration proposed taking all u.s. troops out of the baltic states as a gesture to the kremlin. he reportedly made this proposal in february by march, he was proposing that the u.s. should drop all sanctions on the russia oil industry. sure, why not? kevin harrington again is someone with no known national security credentials. he was memorably described as believ

. >> for more on the dubious moorm, i'm joined by white house reporter austin and spencer ackerman. spencer, you've been reporting on this. what are they doing? what is the game plan here? >> so, this is somewhat like -- this is somewhat like when galileo ends up transforming our view of a helio centric universe and in order to sort of fight off that transformation, you have to get into ever more exotic theories. >> right. >> to kind of explain this. and you end up getting the idea of like the retro grade motion of gestalt. >> spencer. >> it's an interesting thing to watch as applied to this memo which to be very clear, i have not read and we only get you know, snippets from what we can report on. what we know right now from our reporting last night myself and betsy woodruff at the daily buy of the," the memo names particular sort of conservative people of the moment to include the former fbi director jim comey, the current deputy attorney general rod rosenstein, and as one of the more famous targets at this point by the president the deputy director of the fbi andrew mccabe. now, am

. >> now there's a piece -- spencer ackerman is reporting in "the daily beast" even after the election, an acolyte of michael flynn and peter theil was floating the idea of withdrawing u.s. forces from parts of europe that the united states has been defending since the cold war, just to please vladimir putin. the evidence is mounting that this administration is attempting to appease putin. and so when you couple that with these ties before the election, does it -- you ran for president of the united states. can you imagine why somebody like lindsey graham, who used to be a hawk, could possibly not be interested in exploring that further? >> no, and he has been. lindsey graham's behavior over the past month or two has been absolutely bewildering. i'm somebody who has had a great deal of respect for him. i just don't understand it. i absolutely don't understand it. the russian sbts feared in our election. they would like to deprive the american people of unimpeded power to choose their own leaders. the russians want to have a say in that. they had a say in that in 2016. it's a huge natio