Tuesday on Morning Joe, hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski opened the show by discussing House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes and whether he should remove himself from pending investigations concerning Russian ties to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Scarborough began with a question: “Alright, so let's ask a question, Mika, that needs to be asked at the top before we get into this news. Who decided that Devin Nunes was...qualified to be the House Intel chair? Because from everybody that I've spoken to who have worked with him, Republicans, Democrats, they say he is not up to that task.”
Brzezinski answered: “Well look, he has completely proven that...Some people thought he should be chair, that's fine. He became chair, that's fine. He has completely undermined himself. It is now proven ten times over, and this isn't us. This is just reality.” Scarborough, mentioning his days as a congressman, cited: “I can say this as somebody that helped run Newt [Gingrich] out of the House, he would never put somebody like Devin Nunes -- Nuvez, whatever his name is -- in as Intel chair.”
Former editor of the Washington Post, David Ignatius, replied, bringing up the committee: “It is splintered, almost shattered now after what Nunes has done. It's going to be hard for Republicans on the committee, even if they want to do the right thing to operate in a bipartisan way so long as Nunes is there really in effect leading the President's defense.”
Brzezinski responded: “So that's the question everyone is asking. Should congressman Devin Nunes recuse himself from leading the House Russia investigation, as if it's a question.” Scarborough retorted: “Let me think about this. Yes”
Nick Confessore of The New York Times, later joined the conversation, adding: “It's going to be a real problem for the House investigation and their role in oversight which is solemn and sacred. I think what's going to happen now is the Senate investigations will kind of move to center stage and the house investigation is going to be -- become less credible. You know as a result. It is too bad” Scarborough and MSNBC political contributor Mike Barnacle both replied: “The House investigation is over; It’s over.”
Author Eddie Glaude Jr. later gave his opinion: “I think there's a constellation of folks that I think inform what we have, a general environment of a politics that we're engaged in without trust. This is the latest incident.” Brzezinkski chimed in: “That environment started on day one when the press secretary held a bogus press briefing.” Scarborough added: “A lying press conference” Brzezinksi continued: “ And it hasn't gotten better. And I really don’t know if they even understand – like the seriousness of the cavity, the crack being developed between the White House, the press spokesman, who is supposed to be the spokesman for the people and the American people. David Ignatius, have you ever – is Sean Spicer credible?”
Ignatius began to answer: “Well, we've had some bitter relationships between White House press secretaries and the press that kind of goes with the territory -- ” Unsatisfied with his answer, Brzezinski interrupted: “That's fine, but is he credible?” Ignatius answered again:
I don't think he answers questions in a way that the press corps as a group takes as in any way adequate or responsive. This latest is an example. Let me just focus for a minute on the Nunes White House part of the story. If you take Nunes on what he said, he has gone to the White House to meet a source clearly from the intelligence community who is giving him information that the heads of the agencies, the NSA and the FBI decided not to give in their testimony, in their appearance before the committee. In other words, it has not come up through official channels. So there's some other group in these agencies that's decided to take most sensitive information, by his account these appear to be intercepts that either have been unmasked or partially unmasked. So he thinks he knows what is being talked about. And then showed him the intercepts in the White House in some sort of secret context. He then goes and talks to the President about this evidence, won't share it with the committee. It raises the question about whether there's a group in these agencies that is so convinced that the President is being done wrong, that this is partisan, that they've taken it upon themselves to take action. And I think that's an issue people need to pay a little more attention to whether there is some separate group.
Scarborough, speculated: “I think there's a lot of smoke here more so than fire. I don’t think they have – I think if they had information that was damaging to the Obama administration, it would be in your newspaper by now. I think they’re bluffing. I think they're trying to keep attention off the main headlines.” Barnacle added: “We keep hearing that there's another issue, at least in speaking with people, members of congress on both sides of the aisle, an umbrella issue hanging over all of this, and it's competence. The competence of this young administration. 65, 66 days into the administration, everything they've touched thus far has had a level of incompetence to it, including Intel.”
Later, Brzezinksi began closing out the segment: “Still ahead on Morning Joe, more on whether Devin Nunes should lose his top spot -- ” Interrupting, Scarborough asked: “Wait a second why are we still asking this question? We answered that. Right?” Brzezinski, agreed: “Because people are actually are asking it I guess. I don’t know. Are they? Good point.” Sarcastically, Scarborough retorted “Okay and also another question MSNBC polled, should we put our hands on hot stoves? You can answer that along with the Devin Nunes question.”
This is the full exchange that took place on March 28:
MSNBC - Morning Joe
3/28/17
6AM
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Alright, so let's ask a question, Mika, that needs to be asked at the top before we get into this news. Who decided that Devin Nunes was–MIKA BRZEZINSKI: President?
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Qualified– was qualified to be the house Intel chair because from everybody that I've spoken to who have worked with him, Republicans, Democrats, they say he is not up to that task.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Well look, he has completely proven that. So I don't really -- leading up to it, if some people thought he should be chair, that's fine. He became chair, that's fine. He has completely undermined himself. It is now proven ten times over, and this isn't us. This is just reality.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, and David Ignatius, Newt Gingrich when he was speaker of the house–
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: It’s sad!
JOE SCARBOROUGH: A lot of people in the press didn't like Newt. They beat the hell out of him. Newt Gingrich was known as being a really rough and tough partisan customer. He would never put somebody --
DAVID IGNATIUS: I would hope not
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I can say this as somebody that helped run Newt out of the house, he would never put somebody like Devin Nunes, Nuvez, whatever his name is, in as Intel chair. I've never seen anything like this before.
DAVID IGNATIUS: You know Joe, during Newt's time, at the committee unfortunately was sharply divided, it had some tough years and then something amazing happened. Republican Mike Rogers, ex-FBI agent came in as Republican chairman, put there by John Banner, and he made a deal with his democratic ranking member who was Dutch Ruppersberger, a former prosecutor from Maryland. They basically said I've got your back. I'm going to make sure we don't get divided and set ourselves up for attack. And for the first time in a long while that committee really worked. They passed authorization every year. They got important legislation out. They did oversight. I tell you, the country misses people like Mike Rogers and Ruppersberger. Now that– I think, you know, Adam Schiff, a lot of the members of that committee are doing an outstanding job. But it is– it is splintered, almost shattered after what Nunes has done. It's going to be hard for Republicans on the committee, even if they want to do the right thing to operate in a bipartisan way so long as Nunes is there really in effect leading the President's defense.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: So that's the question everyone is asking. Should congressman Devin Nunes recuse himself from leading the house Russia investigation, as if it's a question.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Let me think about this. Yes
(...)
REPORTER: Can you rule out that the White House or anyone in the Trump administration gave chairman Nunes that information?SEAN SPICER: I don't know what he actually briefed the president on. But I don't know why he would come up to brief the president on something that we gave him. I'm not aware of it but it doesn't really pass the smell test.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Actually, yes, it does. It does pass the smell test.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: You know what? There has been a problem from the get go here.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: It really– it does pass the smells. It smells. It smells because he holds the press conference on capitol hill saying I've got these great revelations which he doesn't even have. He gets them at the White House. And then he holds another press conference at the White House.
NICK CONFESSORE: It– you know, it's going to be a real problem for the house investigation and their role in oversight which is solemn and sacred. I think what's going to happen now is the senate investigations will kind of move to center stage and the house investigation is going to be -- become less credible. You know as a result. It is too bad.
MIKE BARANCLE: The house investigation is over.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: It's over. I mean Eddy, don't you agree? How can you have a house investigation when the American people are lied to, the whole thing set up to make it seem like, I've got this information. I found out one, two, three, four, when he heard it from the White House. He didn't even have the documents which he claimed he was taking down to the White House. Then he goes to the White House and they gave him information at the White House. By the way, let me just say, the same information that the white house had been trying to leak to all of us for three weeks.
EDDIE GLAUDE JR: And ironically after complaining vigorously about leaks.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: About leaks.
EDDIE GLAUDE JR: And then saying that he was going to reveal the information on Friday to his colleagues. And that never was revealed. And we were already kind of questioning whether or not he could be objective given that he served on the Trump transition team. And now he's doing the PR work, carrying the water as it were, for the Trump administration.
MIKE BARNACLE: Well one of the questions that ought to be answered is who signed him into the White House?
EDDIE GLAUDE JR: Exactly.
MIKE BARNACLE: Who signed him in?
NICK CONFESSORE: And who briefed him?
MIKE BARNACLE: Yeah, you've got to be signed in. I mean you can't just walk onto the grounds of the White House.
EDDIE GLAUDE JR And I think there's a constellation of folks that I think inform what we have, a general environment of a politics that we're engaged in without trust. This is the latest incident.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: So that environment, you know, I brought this up with Josh Earnest yesterday, that environment started on day one when the press secretary held a bogus press briefing.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: A lying press conference
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: And it hasn't gotten better. And I really don’t know if they even understand –
JOE SCARBOROUGH: He lied about crowd sizes
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Like the seriousness of the cavity, the crack being developed between the White House, the press spokesman who is supposed to be the spokesman for the people and the American people. David Ignatius, have you ever– is Sean Spicer credible?
DAVID IGNATIUS: Well, we've had some bitter relationships between White House press secretaries and the press that kind of goes with the territory–
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: That's fine, but is he credible?
DAVID IGNATIUS: I don't think he answers questions in a way that the press corps as a group takes as in any way adequate or responsive. This latest is an example. Let me just focus for a minute on the Nunes White House part of the story. If you take Nunes on what he said, he has gone to the White House to meet a source clearly from the intelligence community who is giving him information that the heads of the agencies, the NSA and the FBI decided not to give in their testimony, in their appearance before the committee. In other words, it has not come up through official channels. So there's some other group in these agencies that's decided to take most sensitive information, by his account these appear to be intercepts that either have been unmasked or partially unmasked. So he thinks he knows what is being talked about. And then showed him the intercepts in the White House in some sort of secret context. He then goes and talks to the president about this evidence, won't share it with the committee. It raises the question about whether there's a group in these agencies that is so convinced that the president is being done wrong, that this is partisan, that they've taken it upon themselves to take action. And I think that's an issue people need to pay a little more attention to- whether there is some separate group.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: By the way, David, and then holds a press conference after talking to the president with information that has not been shared with congress. And– I don’t know. You know what? I think there's a lot of smoke here more so than fire. I don’t think they have – I think if they had information that was damaging to the Obama administration, it would be in your newspaper by now. I think they’re bluffing. I think they're trying to keep attention off the main headlines.
DAVID IGNATIUS: I think this is like a classic Trump move, it’s a counterclaim, it’s a counter-suit. I think they have evidence that will back the counter-suit. And we'll see more of it. They will say there was collection, incidental collection, not illegal, not under those improper -- but there was incidental collection that got people in the Trump transition team and then it was unmasked and shared. They'll go through a whole list of things and try to make that the issue.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Mike?
MIKE BARANCLE: Well, David, we keep hearing that there's another issue, at least in speaking with people, members of congress on both sides of the aisle, an umbrella issue hanging over all of this, and it's competence. The competence of this young administration. 65, 66 days into the administration, everything they've touched thus far has had a level of incompetence to it including Intel.
DAVID IGNATIUS: Well the competence question where the president, according to these Gallup polls, approval level lowest in memory, obviously comes to the floor. Last week after the defeat of the health care bill and the seeming decision to go to Trump 2.0, you thought ok maybe people have said we aren't getting this right, we are going to have to rethink how we do this. There's some evidence of that in a number of areas, some evidence in foreign policy, certainly some evidence in the legislative strategy, but not on this issue of the investigation.
(...)
JOE SCARBOROUGH: One of the great mis-readings, and I've said it all along, so it's not like I'm looking at this poll and seeing this. One of the great mis-readings, Mike Barnacle, of Donald Trump's victory is that this represents a new moment in American political history. And the undervaluing constantly. We do this all the time. We look at the last poll result and say this is where America is, yay America or how-- Hillary Clinton's ridiculously bad presidential campaign never gets factored into the equation when people are putting on sackcloth and ashes and talking about how horrible America is. This is Trump's base, it’s 35, 36%. Again, about 10% of the people said, okay, Trump lies and he's corrupt. Hillary lies and she's corrupt. Okay we voted for them before and we think she's corrupt and we think they've made $200 million cashing in on access. Okay let's try this other guy. He may be crazy as hell, but he's not a Bush or a Clinton. So let's try this. People have so discounted that including, and especially --
MIKE BARNACLE: The press.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: The press–
NICK CONFESSORE- And the President
JOE SCARBOROUGH: The President- - and our favorite player of the week, Steve Bannon. [Imitating/mocking Bannon] Oh, they're going to want me to be Vladimir Lennon and tear down the government because 65% of Americans are against us. What idiots.
MIKE BARNACLE: Joe, every four or eight years when this country does the last thing it does perhaps communally, votes for P0resident of the United States, the winner and the staff are always accorded some sense of genius by the media. You know, oh, James Carville and Paul Begala, they were geniuses–
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know they were geniuses for about two months. Then everybody said get the idiots out of the White House–
MIKE BARNACLE: Yeah and so you know, Steve Bannon–
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Of course, they're not idiots. You're never as smart as people say you are and you're never as dumb as people say you are.
MIKE BARNACLE: That’s right it’s like a baseball team, that's exactly right. But– The larger point here, again, back to competence, and this is a very young administration, I don't want to embroider what's going on here with 66, 67 days into this presidency. A lot can change. A lot has already happened. But on the 100th day of his presidency, I believe it's April 28th, the congress is either going to default on the nation's debt or go forward as we've been going forward.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: By the way, anybody who thinks it gets easier -- So let me tell you, what's going to happen here, this is going to be a turning point. Trump is going to find out once again he's not going to have the votes of Republicans to do this, and I am not knocking Republicans, I refuse to raise the debt limit to $4 trillion back in '95, '96. So I'm not knocking them. He's going to have to deal with Democrats. And if he wants to get his 36 to 56, he's going to have to fire Steve Bannon and anybody else who calls themselves a lennonist who wants to destroy the American republic and government and start working with Republicans and Democrats and doing what 78% of Americans told NBC news a couple weeks ago they want their leaders to compromise and work with the other side and make Washington work again.
MIKE BARNACLE: Not only that, but given who he is, given who you know who he is and who he has always been his entire life --
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Personally a charming guy.
MIKE BARNACLE: Absolutely. And you have to know because of his background, because of his nature, he's sitting there today alone, isolated, knowing that what he needs is a win.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: He needs a win and he has people around him that don't know how to deliver that win. He loves Tom Brady and he loves the Patriots. Maybe this will help him understand. He is Tom Brady playing on a lousy team with the worst coaches in football.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: That’s a great way of putting it.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: And even Tom Brady can't win a football game when you've got the lousiest coaches on the football game. ‘Hey why don’t you do another quarterback sneak?’
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Unless you deflate the balls.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: But it's fourth and 17. ‘Quarterback sneak left then.’
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Maybe you cheat.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I mean that's what he's got right now. No you are right, and we'll see what happens. But it's pretty simple. Get rid of Steve Bannon. Find somebody who actually knows what's happening on capitol hill.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Try not to lie.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Stop tweeting which even his supporters want him to stop tweeting. Pass a tax reform bill with the help of Democrats and pass an infrastructure bill and take a deep breath and look back and see your 36% is suddenly 45% and you're not the laughing stock of the world.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Okay. On that note, still ahead on Morning Joe, more on whether Devin Nunes should lose his top spot --
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Wait a second why are we still asking this question? We answered that. Right?
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Because people are actually are asking it I guess. I don’t know. Are they? Good point
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Okay and also another question MSNBC polled, should we put our hands on hot stoves? You can answer that along with the Devin Nunes question
