Summary
President Trump returned to the White House after three days at Walter Reed. Trump's doctor gives conflicting statements about his health.
Transcript
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: Good evening. Happy to have you here with us tonight.
It was a beautiful fall day in 1955. President Dwight David Eisenhower was on vacation. He was enjoying a game of golf in Denver, actually near downtown Denver.
And the day reportedly started out more than fine. The president's doctor would later say that the president had been in a, quote, exuberant mood that day. It was fantastic.
But things would eventually take a dark turn that exuberant day in 1955. President Eisenhower's golf game that day ended up getting interrupted over and over and over again by phone calls, specifically phone calls from the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.
Every couple of holes, the president was dragged off the course to go take another call from Dulles. Now, even on a good day, President Eisenhower was known to have a bit of a temper.
But those interruptions of his golf game that day, which apparently the president considered quite unnecessary, they really just set him off, like over the top set him off. According to one bystander, the president became so angry at one point that the veins, quote, stood out on his forehead like whipcords.
In addition to being visibly spitting mad and upset, the president also started complaining about what he described as indigestion. His stomach was upset, but at least that, the president just chalked up to the fact he had scarfed down a hamburger with Bermuda onions at lunch. Perhaps he'd eaten too fast and that's why he had the indigestion.
Eisenhower's medical team would later agree what happened on that golf course in Denver was probably President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack out there. But he didn't seek help. Nobody sought help for him. Instead the president went to bed that night without having any medical attention at all, only to wake up at 2:00 in the morning complaining of chest pains.
President Eisenhower's wife, Mamie, called the president's personal physician, Major General Howard Snyder. General Snyder was a doctor. He was a surgeon, but he had no real experience in cardiovascular medicine. Despite that, even though he was the physician to the president and even though the president was suffering from chest pains, General Snyder just decided that he would attend to the president that night himself.
He went to the president's bedside. He didn't call for any other doctor or specialist to come help. With no cardiologist in sight or even on the phone, General Snyder came in, this surgeon, and he just decided that he would treat President Eisenhower then and there by himself. What he did was he gave President Eisenhower a whole bunch of different medicines, including a healthy dose of morphine, which eventually put the president to sleep.
Even though that doctor, that White House physician, General Snyder, later said he was disturbed and alarmed and shaken by Eisenhower's condition that night, he made no attempt to summon outside assistance or to get advice from any other doctors.
By 8:00 a.m. the next morning, President Eisenhower's team was publicly passing off the whole episode as no big deal. The White House press secretary told reporters, quote, the president suffered a digestive upset during the night. If he does come into his office today, it will not be until considerably later. Just a little digestive upset.
President Eisenhower didn't wake up that day until around noon, and it wasn't until then that General Snyder actually called the nearby army hospital and asked for a cardiac specialist to come immediately to take an electrocardiogram. And what do you know? That electrocardiogram confirmed that President Eisenhower had, in fact, suffered a massive heart attack. It was lucky he survived.
Nobody had sought help the previous day on the golf course. No evaluation of him at all until the president woke up in the middle of the night complaining of chest pains, and then it wasn't until more than ten hours after that, after the White House press secretary had assured everybody that it was fine, just a little tummy ache. It wasn't until ten hours after the chest pain episode that his own doctor even thought to call for help.
Presidents don't always get great health care. I mean they often do, but not always. And when the president's care is inflected by an attempt to minimize the situation, to tell people it's nothing, to not arouse too much worry, to keep things seeming normal even when they're not, I mean that's bad in a whole bunch of different ways. Not being clear-eyed and honest and blunt about the president's condition, especially if that's because they're trying to create a false reassurance to the public that everything's fine, that's just -- it's bad, right? It's bad practice for a democracy.
We, the people, are supposed to be the ultimate authority of who's in control of our government in this country, right? We should therefore know as a democracy with confidence whether the president is well enough to continue discharging the duties of being president. If they're trying to create a false impression that he is but really somebody else is discharging the duties of president, that's very serious in terms of our democracy.
Similarly, if senior White House staff are all put out of commission by an infection sweeping through the West Wing, the people of this democracy should know whether the top echelons of the government are in place to continue discharging the duties of governance, or are we creating a charade in which we are trying to pretend like everybody's in place, things are running as normal, but really there are other people and other entities that we are not discussing who are really in charge since all the people who are purportedly in charge are actually home sick.
I mean, it's -- it is bad practice to have no clarity on what's really happening in terms of our democracy, also in terms of national security. If our adversaries around the world are trying to assess if this might be a moment to hit us, if our adversaries around the world are trying to assess if this might be a moment to take advantage of us, if our adversaries around the world are trying to assess whether or not the U.S. is at full strength and full focus in terms of leadership, and if they, our adversaries, like the American public, cease to believe the public assurances about the president's health because they are plainly bunk, I mean that's bad on a whole bunch of different levels in terms of what our adversaries might do to take advantage of this moment.
But also, I mean just at a basic human level, trying to maintain some kind of false front to the public that everything's fine with the president when you either don't know it or it's not true, that can also be bad for the president's health itself. Eisenhower's heart can tell you that from experience.
President Trump returned to the White House tonight after three nights spent in the hospital at Walter Reed. He staged a kind of performative return that may have tried to be a sort of triumphant "I beat the virus" thing with Marine One landing right next to the White House and the president then tromping up the stairs into the White House.
This may have tried to be a sort of triumphant return impression, but the real impression it created was something almost opposite to that. I mean the president walking up the stairs to the south portico, but then turning out to face the cameras while he was -- could be plainly seen really gasping for air, huffing and puffing, mouth breathing, and trying to pull in air while his chest sort of rose and fell with difficulty, looking out at the cameras.
If the idea was to show that he's all better, you know, he's got his hair done again, he's got his makeup on again, he's himself, that was undercut seriously by the sort of unnerving spectacle of the president really visibly appearing to struggle for breath.
But spare a thought for the White House staff as well, you know, for the military aides and the cooks and the gardeners and the security guards and the cleaners and the ushers and the butlers and the valets and everybody in that complex. I mean after the president did his thing walking up those stairs, he ripped off his mask right before he walked into the White House complex not wearing it, right? He gets there wearing the mask, takes it off, and then that's how he goes into the White House.
This is a man who tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday, who has had symptoms serious enough to require multiple days in the hospital and supplemental oxygen and all sorts of experimental therapies, who even tonight appears to be struggling to breathe, and he's insisting on being not just out of the hospital but being back home in a house that is also a workplace for hundreds of people. And he is apparently not going to wear a mask there. He took off his mask before walking without it on into the White House.
The president also appears to have worn just a cloth mask, not an N95 or anything, inside the hermetically sealed confines of the presidential limousine this weekend, right? In which he was accompanied by at least two secret service personnel, who he had drive him around outside his hospital room this weekend so he could wave at people holding Trump signs.
Secret Service agents sign up because, in part, they are willing to take a bullet for the president. They are willing to give up their lives to save his life if somebody tries to assassinate the president. They're willing to get in the way of a bullet. But taking a bullet for him from an assassin is something quite different than taking a viral bullet from him because he expects you to drive him around in the big car with the windows that don't roll down so he can go wave at people while he has a super contagious potentially lethal infectious disease.
I mean, God bless the Secret Service and all the people who work anywhere near this president at this insane time given what risk he's apparently willing to take with their lives for not much reason at all. But we are also now in this fact-free or at least gray zone in terms of what's really happening right now at the top of the U.S. government. After a third round of bizarre and elliptical and not credible briefing from the president's physician, Dr. Sean Conley, it is hard to have confidence that Dr. Conley is telling the truth, let alone the whole truth about the president's condition. I mean a lot of what he has told us is odd.
The president, for example, may be the only human being on earth who is taking this particular combination of therapies for COVID if we believe what Dr. Conley tells us about the president's treatment regime.
"The Washington Post" spoke with the chief of infectious diseases at Mass General. "The Post" reports that Trump may be the first patient -- he's certainly among the first to receive an unusual combination of three strong treatments with a handful of supplements and over the counter drugs sprinkled in.
The head of the largest health care provider in New York state tells "The New York Times," suddenly, they're throwing the kitchen sink at him. It raises the question, is he sicker than we are hearing, or they're being overly aggressive because he's the president, in the way that could be potentially harmful.
"The Post" spoke with several doctors who, quote, expressed worry there's no data indicating how these treatments might react with each other, especially in an overweight 74-year-old man with a mild heard condition who is the high risk group for severe coronavirus disease. The president took a dose of an experimental monoclonal antibody therapy that is not approved as a COVID therapy and for which the president had to make a compassionate use application to the company. Compassionate use is a type of access that usually granted for people at the end of their lives, people who have no other treatment options to try to save them.
Why did he go straight to that experimental therapy for which he required compassionate use authorization? While we're talking about it, why did they give him the high dose of that drug instead of the low dose of that drug? Again, it's only been tested in small-scale clinical trials. Why give that to him right off the bat?
The president is also taking remdesivir. They say he's taking a five-day intravenous course of that drug. He's not done with that five-day course yet. A hospital typically doesn't discharge a patient in the middle of a course of IV medication, but he went back to the White House tonight anyway. The president is also taking a steroid called dexamethasone which can have serious cognitive and mood-related side effects. The president is also reportedly taking zinc and vitamin d and the drug that's the basis for Pepcid and whoever knows what else.
That combination of drugs is a serious thing and an unusual one. So we are in uncharted territory here in terms of how these drugs might interact or whether they might be contra indicated in combination for any reason, including side effects. This was the headline in that "Washington Post" article speaking with specials about how confused they were by the president's purported treatment regime.
Quote, Trump's early hospital discharge mystifies doctors. Subhead says, they say he's in a particularly vulnerable window for COVID-19 patients and should be watched closely while taking an unusual combination of drugs.
Robert Wachter, chairman of the University of California at San Francisco's department of medicine said any patient of his with Trump's symptoms and treatment who wanted to be discharged from the hospital after three days would need to sign out against doctor's orders because it would be so ill-advised. Wachter says, quote, for someone sick enough to have required remdesivir and dexamethasone, I can't think of a situation in which a patient would be okay to leave on day three, even with the White House's medical capacity.
William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt's Medical School concurring, saying the idea of sending Trump back to the White House today, that idea, quote, absolutely not.
But there he is and taking off the mask right before he walks inside the White House, gasping for air.
Why is the president getting this treatment that Dr. Conley has described? Do we believe that this is the treatment the president is getting?
I ask because Dr. Conley's pronouncements have been hard to believe at times, often inconsistent, and they've required repeated correction. Why is the president's treatment being overseen and explained to the American people by Dr. Sean Conley in the first place? He's an osteopath.
Nothing against osteopaths, but you would expect this team to be led by an infectious disease doctor, no? At least an internist? Somebody who does something other than osteopathy.
For that matter, why is Dr. Conley still the one briefing the public on the president's condition after multiple misstatements, including on the timeline of when the president was first diagnosed and first started receiving treatment and when even Dr. Conley's written statement trying to clean up those mistakes was full of errors, including misspelling at least one of the drugs that the president is taking.
Is someone who's an experienced COVID clinician making top-level decisions on the president's care? Is it Dr. Conley? Is it possible this is a case of what they call VIP syndrome, in which the patient insists on what he wants to be treated with even though that combination of treatments makes no sense from a clinical perspective but everybody goes along with it anyway because the patient is a VIP?
Why won't the White House release basic information on things like the president's vital signs and whether there were abnormalities in his lung scans, his blood oxygen levels, how much oxygen he received, how many times he received it, at what saturation and for what length of time? Why is the White House specifically and repeatedly insisting that we, the public, are not allowed to know when the last time was that the president tested negative?
They really don't want us to know. They really insist on us not knowing about the window of time in which the president was potentially infected, the window of time between his last negative test and his first positive test, right?
Now, you don't always turn up positive immediately upon becoming infected. It may take a few days for the test to be able to register enough virus in your system to give you a positive result. But knowing the difference between the last negative test and the first positive test, knowing what that window was, knowing about the progression of the virus and how long it takes to actually potentially turn up a positive test result after infection, this would be helpful. This would be helpful maybe not to the president's care, but it would be helpful to a lot of people who have had contact with the president or contact with his close contacts in the time around his infection.
I mean, what the White House says is that the president got his positive test result late on Thursday night in the 48 hours before getting that positive test result, we know the president had his debate with Vice President Biden. The one where not only did the candidates not wear masks standing onstage socially distanced, but there was a rule in the hall where everybody attending the debate had to wear a mask.
The Trump family members decided to break that rule. They took off their masks and refused to wear them throughout the whole debate.
In that same 48-hour period before the president's test result, the president held a rally in Minnesota with thousands of people where no one, including him -- basically no one including him wore masks. In that same 48-hour window, the president met with supporters at his golf club in Bedminster. He traveled to Bedminster, New Jersey, right?
He travels to Cleveland, goes to the debate, travels to Minnesota, does the rally, travels to Bedminster to do his fund-raiser, takes photos with everybody for the campaign fund-raiser that he holds there. I mean, he met and traveled over this -- just that 48-hour window with dozens of White House staffers, and he didn't wear a mask for any of it. Was he infected all that time? When's the earliest time at which he could be infected?
Asking for a friend. Asking for the dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of people who may have been in proximity to the president over the time when he was first infected. We know he had symptoms by the time he first tested positive. When was the last time he got a negative test before then?
Knowing the window is not necessarily helpful for understanding the president's health. It is -- would be very helpful, it is important for figuring out who else the president potentially infected because it could be legions.
If they won't tell us when he got infected, if they will not clarify when his testing revealed his exposure and infection for the first time, we are left to wonder, like, how many things the president did where he potentially infected everyone near him, but also how many things the president did while he might have known he had COVID. Were there multiple tests? Did he do a rapid test before he did a confirming PCR? What was the timeline of his testing? Let us know as a matter of public health.
"The New York Times" is first to report tonight that the White House has decided not to do contact tracing for the Saturday event before the president's formal diagnosis at which a lot of now infected people were present, all together with no masks on. The White House has decided -- this is from "The New York Times" tonight. Quote, the White House has decided not to trace the contacts of guests and staff members at the Rose Garden celebration ten days ago for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, where at least eight people including the president may have become infected according to a White House official familiar with the plans. They've just decided not to trace those contacts.
The White House has also cut the CDC out of the contact tracing process. The CDC has the government's most extensive knowledge and resources for contact tracing, but the White House has elected not to use them for this. They're just not tracing those infections.
To the extent that tracing efforts are being done for the 48 hours before the president got his positive test result on Thursday night, those efforts are being run by the White House medical unit headed by Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, the osteopath, who has been the public spokesman for Mr. Trump's doctors since he got sick.
Dr. Conley today explicitly denied to reporters that he had anything to do with contact tracing around this burgeoning cluster of infections surrounding the president. He said today, I have nothing to do with the contact tracing. But according to the White House, Dr. Conley is in fact the person who is in charge of that contact tracing.
When Hope Hicks first tested positive early on Thursday, from that point forward, it's very simple. Everybody in the White House who had any contact with her in previous days should have gone into quarantine for at least two weeks. Instead, they just carried on, including the president. And now they're just not bothering to track what appear to be myriad infections that they have caused by this neglect.
Not that they've caused in some at a remove sense of mishandling the pandemic and undercutting public health authorities and mocking protections recommended by public health authorities to keep people from getting it, right? Not just spreading misinformation, not providing PPE, not providing clear guidance, politicizing the science around these things. I don't mean -- I mean all of that.
But I mean here, a lot of people may have literally been infected with COVID by the president personally. Like his breath, other people infected, could have been lots of them. They should tell us that so those people who are in contact with the president, however many days are relevant here, can themselves not only get tested but themselves start doing their own contact tracing in terms of who else they might have infected.
The president himself appears to be the source of a significant COVID cluster. He's home now, though.
At least 30 states have rising case numbers right now. They said this would happen in the colder weather. It's not much colder yet. We're already heading back up. We're already back up to 50,000 new cases a day.
The ellipse outside the White House this weekend was filled with 20,000 black chairs. Look at that. That's 20,000, not 200,000. Each of those chairs represents ten Americans dead from this thing already.
The president today said, nobody should be afraid of COVID. Yeah, everything's fine. He's infected. He's on multiple experimental therapies nobody has ever tried in this combination before. He's been in the hospital three days and now apparently still sick, still receiving intravenous medication among other things, there he is out of the hospital, ripping off his mask so he can go inside the White House without it on, gasping for breath.
This is such a mess, and nobody knows what's happening even tonight, even to him.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REPORTER: Why remdesivir on top of the antibodies?
DR. SEAN CONLEY, PRESIDENT TRUMP'S PHYSICIAN: So remdesivir works a little differently than the antibodies. We're maximizing all aspects of his care, attacking this virus, you know, multi-pronged approach. It's the president. I didn't want to hold anything back.
REPORTER: When did he begin dexamethasone treatment?
CONLEY: The potential risks and side effects we all discussed. We looked at the data and decided that we'd rather, you know, push ahead on it than hold and risk, you know, the opposite.
I'm not going to go into all of our debates about specific medicines and therapies. He's on a routine regimen of, you know, COVID therapy. I'm not going to go into specifics of what he is and is not on.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: I'm not going to go into specifics. Not going to go into specifics. Why would I? You figure it out yourselves. Does this seem normal? Trust me, this is routine.
Joining us now is Dr. Vin Gupta from the University of Washington School of Medicine. He's former pandemics consultant at the World Bank.
Dr. Gupta, I really appreciate you making time to be here with me tonight. Thanks.
DR. VIN GUPTA, PULMONOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON MEDICAL CENTER: Thanks, Rachel.
MADDOW: When Dr. Conley there described what the president -- the way the president has been treated as a routine regimen of COVID therapy, is that true?
GUPTA: You know, Rachel, it's a really important question, and it's very true if we just admit to what's going on here, that the president rules in, based on the information that we have, that he was short of breath, his oxygen levels -- the ones that we know that have been reported have been less than 94 percent -- just those two points, rule him in per WHO criteria for severe COVID-19 pneumonia.
So in that setting, for acknowledging that as fact, going to Walter Reed, immediately gets started on dexamethasone, that clinical presentation bought him dexamethasone. It's the one thing that we know could be effective. He ruled in for that. He ruled in for remdesivir.
It makes a ton of sense, Rachel, that he would get treated in that way. What I want to know is what does his chest CT or his X-ray show? What are his basic labs showing? What about a blood gas? Things that pulmonologist and infectious disease doctors across the country have asked for the 210,000 Americans who've lost their lives because of COVID-19 pneumonia.
That's what the president has. He might have a milder version of it but he still rules in technically for the definition of severe COVID-19 pneumonia.
MADDOW: In terms of the way that the information about the president's health has been conveyed to the public, it hasn't inspired confidence both because of the lack of specificity from Dr. Conley from the way that he's waved off certain questions without explanation of why he's waving them off, but also because he's given some inconsistent information, including stuff that he's had to go back and revise.
If you could wave a magic wand and invent a new spokesperson to give us meaningful information about the president's condition that you think the American people should have, you just mentioned a few things there, a chest CT or chest X-ray, his basic labs, potential blood gas reading. What are the things that you think that we should demand to know about the president's condition in order to better understand his level of illness?
GUPTA: You bet, Rachel. So anybody that comes in with shortness of breath that we think they're high risk for COVID-19 and then proven in the president's case to actually have it, these are what I want to know, especially if they're gasping for breath the way the president looked like he was actually audibly gasping for breath after he did a -- what we call a modified stress test walking up a flight of stairs.
I would -- what I want to know when somebody like that is -- I want see a chest x-ray and a high resolution CT scan of the chest. Let me take a good look at his lungs and see if there's any -- we use the term as technical term infiltrate or ground glass opacities. Those are technical terms.
What we want to know is, is there evidence of pneumonia, something filling his airways and his lungs? The answer is probably yes, absolutely because they gave him dexamethasone and remdesivir.
There would be no other reasons to give those medications. There's no FDA approved reason to give those medications unless it was COVID-19 pneumonia.
I'd also want to get renal or kidney markers because we know COVID-19 can impact the kidneys. Want to make sure the president's kidneys are doing okay because a lot of patients that go into the ICU for severe COVID-19 pneumonia have kidney failure, need dialysis. Let's see how he's doing there.
What about something called a D-Dimer? It's a type of lab value that helps us risk stratify the president in this case as to whether or not he might be at a high risk for blood clotting because as you know, Rachel, this has been talked about at length. COVID-19 patients, especially those in the ICU or with severe illness are at risk for blood clots. So, what does that look like?
He didn't even -- when asked the question, he was actually asked the question, is he on a blood thinner, Dr. Conley didn't mention it. Again, these are weird, almost unnecessary things to try to hide. There's no reason to hide, why they didn't report on the results of the CT scan or a chest X-ray and these basic lab values.
No reason to hide it. We're all understanding that COVID-19 is a difficult, multi-organ system disease. Let's try to help them out. Let's explain to the American people what's going on. They should be forthcoming with these details.
MADDOW: Dr. Vin Gupta, pulmonologist, assistant professor at University of Washington Medical School -- Dr. Gupta, thank you very much for helping us understand this tonight. Your clarity is really appreciated.
GUPTA: Thanks, Rachel.
MADDOW: All right. We've got much more ahead. Again, the president did come home tonight from Walter Reed Hospital after spending three nights there. The circumstances of his arrival were unnerving. The president is visibly gasping for air while standing outside the White House.
The president then recording a video inside, he appears to have taken off his mask even though he's just been diagnosed with COVID-19 and has been very symptomatic. He took off his mask in order to enter the White House and then was not wearing a mask inside the White House. Just as a reminder, the White House is a workplace for hundreds of Americans, and the president has COVID, and he's apparently not wearing his mask inside the house, the White House.
More to come tonight. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MADDOW: Tomorrow this new book comes out by former CIA Director John Brennan, and, of course, it comes in the middle of this maelstrom of a news cycle. But anytime somebody like John Brennan writes a book, it's going to have news in it just in terms of what he has been through. John Brennan was deputy director of the CIA during 9/11. He was chief of staff to George Tenet during the George W. Bush administration. He was President Obama's top adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism.
He then became CIA director after the David Petraeus CIA directorship blew up because of the FBI investigating Petraeus disclosing classified information to his mistress. Remember that scandal? Used to be that scandals in Washington actually had consequences.
There's lots of news large and small from the new Brennan book. You can hear about the Obama transition team leaving John Brennan accidentally stranded at the Chicago airport. You can read what John Brennan's wife-to-be thought of him getting his ear pierced when he was his 20s, also his whole motorcycle phase.
You will learn about John Brennan's belief that one former intelligence committee chairman from the Republican Party was profoundly lacking in actual intelligence himself. Brennan describing him as neither, quote, genuinely interested in national security nor smart.
You can read some of the drama about how the Obama administration kept secret the plans for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
You can learn about how Brennan, like lots of people, is aware that part of the motivation for Putin to interfere in the 2016 election was to hurt Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming president because he hated her.
But Brennan also has a unique vantage on Putin's grudge against Bill Clinton as well, which could have been another reason Putin went after President Bill Clinton's wife, Hillary, when she became a candidate. I did not know that story at all. That's in the book. Fascinating story.
You will also get John Brennan's lengthy, detailed, fairly furious take on the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture and secret CIA prisons. Director Brennan does not call it torture, and he is no fan of that report, and if you want to know why, here is his definitive and detailed take on his own terms, on his own roll in all of that.
But when it comes to the current president and the current presidency, there's a whole bunch of very interesting news here. Here, for example, is director Brennan's description of Donald Trump. This is during the Obama to Trump transition, when John Brennan was first briefing Donald Trump on what Russia had done to help him win the election.
Quote, Trump's demeanor as well as his questions strongly revealed that he was uninterested in finding out what the Russians had done or in holding them to account. Rather, he seemed most focused on challenging the intelligence and analysis underlying the judgment among the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the judgment that Russia interfered in the election and that the interference was intended to enhance his election prospects.
And then Brennan says this. Quote, it was also my clear impression, based on thousands of such briefings I have conducted over more than three decades, that Trump was seeking most to learn what we knew and how we knew it. This deeply troubled me as I worried about what he might do with the information he was being given. Foreign intelligence services take much the same approach when they're briefed by the U.S. intelligence community on wrongdoing by their governments. They look for perceived weaknesses in the intelligence and analysis that could be exploited as well as for clues that could help them uncover and then seek to eliminate the human or technical sources providing sensitive and damning information.
During the briefing, Trump posited his own theories about election interference and his skepticism that the culprit was Russia, articulating what would become a well honed attack strategy seeking to discredit any suggestion that his election was fraudulent or in any way influenced by Russian interference.
It could have been the Chinese, he interjected several times during the briefing, seeking to deflect focus away from the unanimous assessment that the Russians were responsible.
Also in Brennan's new book, there's been lots of speculation, including by me, as to whether the intelligence agencies felt like it was safe to actually brief Trump and his team on sensitive Russian sources. I mean, here's Brennan in this book saying he believed that when he was briefing Trump about what Russia did, it was his impression as an experienced briefer that Trump was trying to figure out how much Brennan knew about what Russia had done, what his sources were, how they had figured this all out.
If they're worried that -- if they're worried about disclosing sensitive sources to President Trump about how they've learns about what Russia did, well, how do you deal with that, right? This is information that would get those sources burned, if not killed, if somebody on team Trump actually told Russia what the U.S. sources were that led to this information.
Well, now we learn in this new book that John Brennan in fact had those worries and he acted accordingly in his briefing with Trump and his team. He says, quote, I had decided beforehand that I would share the full substance of CIA intelligence and analysis on Russian interference in the election without providing any specific details on the provenance of our knowledge.
The sensitive sources and methods related to counterintelligence and Russia are among the nation's most prized jewels, and I lacked confidence that all the individuals in that conference room had the requisite understanding of classification procedures and controls, not to mention the personal discipline and integrity to avoid devastating disclosures, either inadvertent or willful.
Moreover, given his public praise of WikiLeaks, his strange obsequiousness toward Putin, and his disdain towards the U.S. intelligence community, I had serious doubts that Donald Trump would protect our nation's most vital secrets. So some of them he kept back.
John Brennan also writes in his book that he still to this day has worries about how exactly Donald Trump won election to the U.S. presidency. Quote, did the Russian interference that the intelligence community had warned about tilt the election in key swing states so that Trump came out on top? Those questions haunt me still.
Even though John Brennan retired from government at the very moment that Donald Trump became president, President Trump has never been able to leave John Brennan alone. He's obsessed with him. He's called John Brennan myriad names. He's accused him of myriad crimes. He claimed to have revoked his security clearance even though he didn't.
Trump's attorney general ordered an ongoing investigation into the CIA's actions under Brennan in 2016. When John Brennan went to access his records from his time as CIA director to consult them so he could write this book, access that has been provided to all previous CIA directors, he discovered that President Trump had issued a directive specifically about him, blocking him from accessing those materials and furthermore, forbidding anyone in the intelligence community from sharing classified information specifically with John Brennan.
Imagine the president being so obsessed with you that he uses the power of the presidency just to make your individual life more difficult even after you have left government. Trump's obsession with John Brennan has practical consequences, but it's also on its fact -- on its face, you know, telling about the president and his obsessions. It also leads to the title of the book, "Undaunted: My Fight Against America's Enemies at Home and Abroad." In the at home there, the emphasis is silent.
Former director of the CIA John Brennan joins us next. His book is out tomorrow.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MADDOW: Joining us now I'm pleased to say is former CIA Director John Brennan. His new book is out tomorrow. It's called "Undaunted: My Fight Against America's Enemies At Home and Abroad."
Congratulations on the book, Director Brennan. It's nice to see you.
JOHN BRENNAN, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Thank you, Rachel. Thank you for having me on me on tonight.
So, I read it cover -- I read it cover to cover. I learned a lot. I'm also still a little bit surprised that you wrote it because it is my sense that since leaving government, that sort of sigh of relief has never really ended, that you are happy to have left this part of your life behind you, and that you might prefer to be more anonymous than you ended up being in your retirement.
MADDOW: Well, I certainly wanted to be. But unfortunately, Donald Trump has not allowed me to be. I feel an obligation to speak up and speak out.
But as I say in the book, one reason why I wanted to write it was to give Americans a sense of the world of intelligence and national security. And I'm really hoping that by doing this memoir, I'm going to convince Americans to disregard the craziness of Washington and the maelstrom that you talk about in terms of the political environment right now.
This country faces enormous security challenges in the coming decades. And we need America's best and brightest to join the Foreign Service, join the intelligence community and law enforcement and military and others, and to give back to this great country of ours.
I was honored and privileged to serve in a number of positions and to witness history. And so, I wrote this book to give people a sense of exactly the types of challenges as well as opportunities there are to do something on behalf of your fellow citizens. I'm quite proud of the fact that I was able to serve for so many years with some tremendously gifted, talented and patriotic women and men.
And so, this is my contribution to the public discourse, about national security and against encouraging young Americans to really pursue their ambitions if they, in fact, they see that public service is something in their future.
MADDOW: I have to ask you just as somebody with the three decades-plus experience you got working in the White House at very senior levels, working for multiple presidents, being a daily briefer for presidents, serving as CIA director ultimately, this particular and unique crisis situation that we're going through a country right now, not just the Trump presidency but the situation with the president's illness and the lack of clarity and seemingly the lack of candor around the president's condition, I have to ask if you feel there are national security implications of that that we should be aware of or on the lookout for?
BRENNAN: I think there are very serious national security implications. As you point out, I don't think the American people can have any confidence that what they're hearing right now about Donald Trump's health is accurate. Unfortunately, this administration has a very strong track record of deceit and dishonesty. And the confusion coming out as far as medical status adds to that uncertainty in terms of do we have somebody in the Oval Office right now? Who can discharge the duties and responsibilities of the office of the presidency?
Now, the 25th amendment makes -- it provides a process, a legal basis in order to transfer power to a vice president if that person in the Oval Office is unable to discharge the duties. I don't believe that Donald Trump is going to relinquish them even if he goes to more serious illness and is incapacitated.
And I think our adversaries around the world, whether it'd be Russia, China, or others, are they seeking to take advantage of this opportunity now when there clearly is distraction within the national security hierarchy and that Donald Trump clearly is just focused on his medical condition and trying to present an image of being resilient and we all hope that he recovers fully from this. We do.
But I do think it is still quite uncertain and disconcerting that we don't hear what we hear from the highest levels of our government is indeed factual.
MADDOW: One of the unique and very interesting chapters in the book is sort of world tour that you give where you talk about your interactions with world leaders and what your impressions were of them. And you get a sense about your training and also your experience reading people.
Given that, I find it a little disturbing what you just said that your read on President Trump is that even if he were quite severely incapacitated by illness, it's your impression of him that even in that circumstance he might not relinquish power. That's -- that's a sobering -- that's a sobering assessment.
Yes, how does one determine that somebody is unable to discharge the duties of the office of the presidency? Again, the 25th Amendment provides a legal basis to do it. But I can see Trump continuing to resist it even if his mental acuity diminishes because of illness or because of the treatment that is being given in terms of the impact of the medicines that he's had.
So I do believe that the collections -- intelligence collection systems of our adversaries are ramped up right now to try to get a better sense of exactly what's going on. And might the Chinese decide to do something, for example, in Hong Kong, might Russia and Putin decide to do something in Belarus, might other countries try to take advantage of the time when there is this lack of coherence within the national security structure as far as what the condition and the abilities of the president of Donald Trump are?
And so, therefore, this is a time I think it's very -- it's incumbent on those senior officials in the White House to keep the members of Congress informed and to be as truthful and as forthcoming as possible about the ability of Donald Trump to carry out those duties or not.
MADDOW: Former CIA director John Brennan. The new book is called "Undaunted: My Fight Against America's enemies at Home and Abroad." It is a fascinating look at the scope of his career which is the modern history of American national security, a particularly unnerving window in terms of the Russia investigation and this presidency and Director Brennan what's been your life made a lot more difficult by this president even after you left government service. Thank you for your service to the country, and thanks for helping us understand the book tonight.
BRENNAN: Thank you so much, Rachel, for having me on. Really appreciate it.
MADDOW: All right. We'll be right back. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MADDOW: One last quick update for you tonight before we go in the midst of going on tonight. We have learned that President Trump's son Eric, the blond one, who now runs the day to day operations of the Trump Organization, Eric Trump was interviewed under oath today by state prosecutors in New York.
The New York A.G.'s office has been investigating if the Trump Organization committed fraud by lying about the value of its assets for bank loans and tax purposes. Eric Trump had blown off the previously scheduled interview with the A.G. in July. A state judge had had ordered him to appear this week. We now know that Eric Trump did make that appearance today under oath by video.
We know the interview ended some time after 5:00 this evening, but as for how long it last or what he said? But we don't know. But I bet we will someday. Watch this space.
That does it for us tonight. We will see you again tomorrow.
Now, it's time for "THE LAST WORD WITH LAWRENCE O'DONNELL".
Good evening, Lawrence.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.END
Content and programming copyright 2020 MSNBC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2020 ASC Services II Media, LLC. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of ASC Services II Media, LLC. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.