Jan 30, 2017 - Politics & Policy

Trump team spills to Morning Joe on executive order fallout

On their show this morning, Joe and Mika of MSNBC's Morning Joe discussed their meeting with President Trump yesterday and other conversations with senior administration officials over the weekend. The highlights:

  • Stephen Miller was behind the executive order: "You get a very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your Cabinet agencies to go to hell. And Washington's in an uproar this morning — forget about what's happening in the street — because Stephen Miller decided he was going to do this without going through the regular interagency process."
  • The Mattis/Kelly/Tillerson reaction: "If this did happen again, the president would have serious problems with his foreign policy team as well as the entire government."
  • Trump's okay with it: Trump expressed no regret about the executive order rollout, but senior administration officials had discussions regarding how it was not properly communicated both to the media and other federal agencies.
  • National Security Council meetings: It took Joe 4 hours to nail down confirmation from the White House that the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have open access to NSC meetings.
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