where the multibillion dollar agency for federal rail safety is being run by a former intern with no experience or expertise in the field whatsoever who was also running a whole >> good evening, rachel. that sounds optimistic for infrastructure when you refer to it as infrastructure week. because i have a funny feeling it's infrastructure day we'll never hear it again. >> at the white house press briefing, one question about infrastructure. all the rest was about the shall haver who left for domestic violence.

>> he said infrastructure is sexy to him. i thank him not just for that psychiatric peek into the brain of donald trump but to get people to pay attention to infrastructure if that's what it takes because we're going to talk about it later in the hour. ezra cline is going to come on to analyze this bill, but to try to get the public's attention and government attention to infrastructure is a challenge we have failed. >> absolutely. and having the president pronounce the word sexy while talking about it, maybe you're right and it's going to help but part of me thinks it's going to hurt. >> i may put the word sexy on the wall behind me. it's infrastructure day, it's the only day i can do it. you can only do that on infrastructure day. >> good night lawrence. >> good night.

well, in an op-ed posted in "the washington post" tonight it says, telling others about abuse takes strength. that's what rob porter's first wife says in that op-ed piece. colby holderness said she had to say that because of something kellyanne conway said yesterday when she was asked on cnn if she was worried about the white house communications director, hope hicks now that she's the current girlfriend of rob porter whose former girlfriend along with two wives said he was physically abusive to her. kellyanne conway said there's no reason to worry at all about what he might do to hope hicks because hope hicks is so strong.

kellyanne conway said, in the case of hope i have rarely met somebody so strong with such excellent, excellent instincts and loyalty and smarts. smarts. rob porter's former girlfriend just wasn't strong enough. that's why he physically abused her. his two former wives just weren't strong enough, that's why rob porter physically abused them. that's why he punched colby holderness and gave her that black eye, because she wasn't strong enough. that's the trump white house position on why no one has to worry about hope hicks because she's stronger than the women rob porter victimized. here's colby holderness's answer to kellyanne conway and the trump white house, the people who believed she just wasn't strong enough and that's why rob

porter punched her, she wrote being strong with excellent instincts and loyalty and smarts does not inoculate a person against abuse. it doesn't prevent her from entering a into a relationship with an abuser. abuse often doesn't manifest itself early on, only later when you're in deep and behind closed doors. the really ugly side of rob's abuse only came out after we married, following three years of dating. hope hicks has always gotten very special treatment from donald trump and the trump family and from the trump campaign press and from the trump white house press corp. watch this very unusual moment in the white house press briefing room in the first week of the trump presidency with hope hicks.

you've never seen that happen with sarah huckabee-sanders. in fact, i have never seen social kissing like that in the white house. i've never seen it in the senate. i have never seen it in any professional setting in washington. that was a hope hicks inspired moment. that's the kind of special attention and special treatment that hope hicks is used to. and that's part of why she's been mostly protected up to now in the news media, even though she is, without question, the most incompetent white house communications director in history. in the new book "fire and fury" steve bannon calls hope hicks, these are his words, dumb as a stone. because hope hicks is incompetent and unprofessional, it became public information

that she chose to have an affair with the married trump campaign manager, corey lewandowski during the campaign. that affair burst into public view when they had a lovers' shouting match on the streets of new york city near trump tower which was captured and reported in the news media. how incompetent is that for a campaign communications person and a campaign manager. hope hicks was the co-author of white house chief of staff john kelly's defense of her boyfriend, rob porter, after the first news reports that her boyfriend had been violent with both of his former wives emerged. that statement that hope hicks cowrote takes its place as one of the most false and most stupid written statements ever issued in the trump white house. it says, rob porter is a man of

true integrity and honor and i can't say enough good things about him. he is a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional. i am proud to serve alongside him. hope hicks has demonstrated in every way possible, in her personal and professional life in the last two years, that she is an utterly incompetent professional who would never be employed in a white house. could only be employed by the most incompetent president in history. and that the judgment in the conduct of her personal romantic life is, to put it mildly, questionable. first a married man, then a wife beater. but it is this hope hicks who the trump white house holds up to the world as being immune to the possibility of physical abuse by a man she is dating

because, you know, strong women are immune from this. because the trump white house and donald trump personally believe that bad things only happen to weak people. eric trump believes that. he said his sister, ivanka is, quote, a strong powerful woman, she wouldn't allow herself to be subjected to sexual harassment. of course, trump and trump world cannot think consistently about anything. they insist that the only reason donald trump himself has had to endure the bad thing of having over 20 women accuse him of sexual assault and sexual harassment is not because he is weak but because he is powerful. those women accuse donald trump because he is powerful and famous, that's according to everyone named trump, including melania trump. no one believes a single trump accuser so no one in trump world

is allowed to believe any woman to accuses. that's why donald trump tweeted on saturday peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. some are true and some are false. some are old and some are new. there is no recovery for someone falsely accused. life and career are gone. that is the only sympathy donald trump has expressed in the case of accused against violence against a woman. sympathy against the accused. donald trump has help with that tweet because he doesn't use legal phrases like due process and he doesn't know what they mean. donald trump couldn't bring himself to say a word of sympathy to rob porter's former wives and there's no reason to think he feels anything to the victims of violent men.

he has never condemned domestic violence. the white house press secretary was asked about that today and she said she was condemning domestic violence and so that's the same thing as donald trump condemning domestic violence, because she speaks for donald trump, except when she gives those answers saying i have no idea what president trump thinks about that because i haven't spoken to him, therefore, i cannot speak for him. nbc's pierre alexander tweeted this. trump has 47 million followers and has tweeted 37,000 times. if he wanted to the condemn domestic violence post-porter allegations, seems there would be a simple way to deliver that message without sending sarah sanders to do it for him. joining us now kimberly atkins,

also with us, ruth marcus. and, ruth, to kimberly also, you both have the floor to comment whatever way you want. but ruth i wanted to start with the striking phrase from donald trump, of all people, due process in that tweet. your reaction to the that? >> in a word, galling. of all the people who do not have standing to complain about people not getting due process, donald trump would be first among equals. he only cares about due process, it would seem, when it goes to friends of his or political allies of his who have been accused in particular of assaults on or abuse of women, but when it came to the central park 5, when it came to locking up hillary clinton, when it comes to accusing president obama of criminal wiretapping of him in trump tower, where was

the due process then? where was his concern about due process then? >> i want to listen to something that the white house press secretary said today. not because it's true, and i don't usually show what she says because it's always just a pack of lies. there's a bunch of lies in here, especially about the sequence of how the white house handled it. this was the official statement that was written for her, possibly co-written by her, to read out there today. i want us to consider what this means for how the white house will handle this issue going forward. let's listen to that written statement that she read today. >> look, we learned of the extent of the situation involving rob porter last tuesday evening. and within 24 hours, his resignation has been accepted and announced. we announced a transition was going to happen, within hours it did. the president and the entire administration take domestic violence very seriously and believe all allegations need to

be investigated thoroughly. above all the president sports victims of domestic violence and believes everyone should be treated fairly and with due process. we've addressed this situation extensively and we have nothing more to add at this time on that topic. >> kimberly, one of the true sentences in that statement was the last one. when she said, we have nothing more to add at this time on that topic, and she didn't no matter how the reporters tried to go at it. i read that statement as simply the white house saying, we are going to say absolutely nothing about this, and we are going to trust that the white house press corp. will lose interest in this because the white house press corp. always does. >> and it was essentially a denial, too. i mean, the idea that it was only last week that they got any idea that there was a problem with rob porter is just, regardless of what set of facts

you believe, is just wrong. we know that there was a problem with his permanent security clearance, he didn't have it more than a year in and we knew that months beforehand, the white house was notified of this fact. we know that the fbi notified don mcgahn about problems with that security clearance. we know that an ex-girlfriend contacted the white house when she found out that hope hicks was dating rob porter to inform them of the abuse allegations. there was a protective order issues, there were blog posts. if the white house was unaware of this situation, it was because it would be a case of the most willful blindness in history. so the idea they can say it was just last week and as soon as we found out we moved within hours, it just isn't true. it's another denial. even though sarah huckabee-sanders said today that domestic violence should be

taken seriously and is taken seriously by this white house, the facts belie that. so does the fact that the president still, at this point, has not acknowledged these women, not acknowledged these accusations, has only given statements in tweet and in person defending rob porter. >> ruth, one of the reasons that previous white houses respond more fully in these situations is that they believe the questions will never stop if we don't get out there and respond to a certain amount, at least, of the information. this white house believes that the questions will always stop on any given particular controversy because they always have. remember when john kelly for example got caught lying about congresswoman wilson, the white house press corp. did not ask about that for more than a day and a half, they stopped, never asked about it again. so it seems like this white house is relying on the pattern that they have been able to rely

on up until now. >> that's the real challenge of covering this white house, because one reason that the questions stop isn't just that my colleagues in the briefing room run out of steam in asking them, it's that there's another issue, another scandal or potential scandal to be turning your attention to, another set of tweets or other things that need to be explored. so they're so good at distracting us by kind of tripping on their own messages, it's infrastructure day slash week, that you do get distracted and you do forget to keep banging at them. and they're really -- it's a pretty effective strategy of stone walling. as i was looking at their effort to try to just shut down the questioning and provide no more in the way of tick-tock, then the, oh, it was 40 minutes and it was all over thing, which is just completely ridiculous, as kimberly so well explained.

i was thinking back to what it was like with the hill participating in this eagerly, looking into the firing of the travel office at the clinton white house, and you would have thought that was -- you know, unbelievely huge scandal for all the effort put into it. but one thing that's different between then and now is not just the energy of the press corp., because i think the press corp. has been pretty energetic here, but also a willingness to do some congressional oversight or in that case it was a little bit of hostile oversight. but it helps to have one branch of government looking at the over branch of government as well. >> kimberly we had experts on the program last week saying that -- who are familiar with the white house security clearance process. they said they firmly believe that the fbi would have shown

the paragraphs of the black eye to white house chief of staff or white house counsel just about as early as they obtained them. they believed there would be next to no real delay in showing that to the white house. we don't know whether that actually happened. that was supposition on their part. but what are the chances that we will actually learn any more information from the white house than what we know now about how they handled this and what we know now completely contradicts every single thing that sarah sanders said publically today. >> if past is prologue, the chances are high we will continue to find out information from this white house. but to the point about the fbi giving the details and the evidence in this case, it also stands to reason that a chief of staff and a white house counsel, when they are -- when they find

out that someone is having difficulty obtaining a permanent security clearance and certainly, once the fbi flags them, if it was someone like rob porter who was working so closely with the president and handling such sensitive information, it would be incumbent upon the chief of staff and white house counsel to find out what is up and what these allegations are, so if they didn't do that, certainly they would have seen the pictures and found out about the protective order and much more. so this idea they didn't know, and once they found out last week, they acted quickly. again it doesn't make a lot of sense. it was either negligence or again, willful blindness. >> kimberly atkins thank you for joining the conversation. >> my pleasure. coming up can john kelly survive his handling of the rob porter story. and rachel brand is

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when john kelly became the white house chief of staff the news media gushed with praise. the "new york times" called him, quote, a beacon of discipline. his hometown newspaper was lavish in his praise. but now his hometown newspaper

has turned on him and is hitting him harder than any other newspaper in the country. on friday they said john kelly is the perfect donald trump staffer. he's a bad person, who is bad at his job. today boston globe columnist wrote, since he went to work for donald trump, kelly has squandered so much of his honor, so much of his integrity and so much of his identity that, frankly, i don't recognize him anymore. also today, another globe columnist wrote, john kelly has violated the cardinal rule of being white house chief of staff. advance the president's agenda and don't become the news. it's past time for him to go. but will he go? joining us now is the columnist for the boston globe. and back with us is ruth marcus. it seems boston's familiarity

with john kelly has produced some of the strongest pros against him in the columns there. and your piece today saying it's time for john kelly to go, that's being echoed by other commentators. do you think this could do it? that this could drive john kelly out? >> well, i don't think our columns are going to be what drives him out. if anything, it's possible, that the so-called media rails against him, the more donald trump may keep him in longer although i think he's tiring of him from the reports i've gotten inside. he's looking at other candidates for the job, including mick mulvaney. i want to say not all journalists in boston supported him last year when he was made chief of staff. in july i wrote a column saying this guy is terrible for the job, he's going to fail, he

can't do it, he's a terrible choice. but i think most of the media jumped on the band wagon that was group think and wishful thinking hoping this former marine general was going to discipline this president but this is a president, number one, who doesn't want to be discipline preponderance of the evidence and john kelly has shown in the six months he was homeland security secretary that he shares the native views and buys into the worst views that donald trump has. so i think he's been encouraging those and enabling them and not reigning them in. it goes to be untruthful about crime and terrorist statistics. lying about a congresswoman from florida. calling dreamers too lazy to get off their asses and it goes on and on. it's not just the domestic violence violence thing. >> ruth i'm going to read one

more piece of kevin's column and the reason i do is because he was praising john kelly before any of these controversies. he said, last week, kelly sounded like any number of vaguely racist callers to any number of radio talk shows dismissing immigrants as lazy. kelly is the chief of staff not rush limbaugh. it was undignified to talk about anybody in that fashion. ruth, this is such a turn for john kelly in the media, but is it a turn for him in the white house? do you see the possibility of this ending john kelly's time in the white house? >> i think it's possible. i think the irony is his time in the white house would probably end for the wrong reason. that is, you know, some of us have looked at his conduct as chief of staff and been both surprised and appalled, instead of being the grown up in the room, he's kind of the

mini-trump in the room, echoing a lot of the president's worst habits. but i think if the president decides to get rid of john kelly, it probably won't be for the reasons of offensive behavior that bother us, but because he chafes under kelly's efforts which have been semi-successful to impose control on trump and trump's access if not to his twitter feed, at least to talking to outsiders and reaching out to outsiders, so he's been chafing under that for a while. this may be the straw that broke kelly's back, but the main reason i think would be that donald trump doesn't like anybody telling him what to do. >> indira, chris christie who might want john kelly's job said yesterday that john kelly, we haven't heard from him directly yet, and i think the president needs to hear from kelly directly before he can make an evaluation of competence.

so chris christie is not trying to help john kelly there, but the -- the question of where the pressure comes from on john kelly's job is a complicated one. in any other white house, there would be a need for the white house chief of staff in the middle of a controversy to step up to that microphone himself today -- and when i say that, it's hard to think of another white house where a chief of staff was ever the center of a controversy, the last one i can think of is john sinunu in the 1980s. >> i talked to chris whipple, who interviewed the 17 living former chief of staffs, nothing including reince priebus, and the truth of the matter is he regards john kelly as the worst chief of staff even worse than don reagan, who was ousted by nancy reagan when he couldn't control the iran-contra crisis. john kelly has failed at his job.

if his number one job is control any crisis, advance the president's agenda and stay out of the spotlight, he has failed on all three measures. it is he who, from the reporting i've done, helped derail the president's own daca deal. so that right there is insubordination i would say. >> thank you both for joining us, really appreciate it. coming up, why president trump says, and he really does say this, he said it today, you'll hear him say it, infrastructure is sexy. that was his word, sexy.

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trump's obstruction of justice is far more extensive than nixon's. those are not my words. that is a headline in "the washington post." tonight we've learned the reason associate rachel brand is quitting. nbc reports that, quote, rachel brand had been unhappy with her job for months before the department announced her departure on friday. brand new frustrated by vacancies at the department and feared she would be asked to oversee the russia investigation, sources said. rachel brand would only take over special prosecutor russia investigation if deputy attorney general rod rosenstein was fired or quit. according to nbc news, public

criticism of deputy attorney general rod rosenstein by president donald trump worried brand that rosenstein's job could be in danger. brand would be next in line to oversee special counsel rachel maddow's investigation, thrusting her into a political spotlight that brand told friends she did not want to enter. joining us now, ben wittes. also with us harry litman he is now law professor at the university of california. and professor litman, you're comparing the obstruction of justice case against donald trump to the case against richard nixon. what do you see? >> look on the actual legal charge, i made the point and i think it's straightforward, that nixon, we kind of forget, did

his sort of awkward halting efforts to suppress the probe. trump, by contrast, has been all-in and much more crass and open about trying to tell the director of the fbi to smother things and then trying to fire him after. that's half the point. but the other half that i tried to make is -- and this is another real contrast with nixon -- is the way trump has -- what you could call kind of high crimes. the wanton lying, the trashing of the fbi, the contempt for the judiciary. the sort of thousand points of arrogance and lawlessness, the way in which he's advanced us toward an autocracy. all of that seems to be a matter of indifference to republicans who are thinking about short term political gain over duty to country.

>> benjamin wittes how would you compare the two, nixon and trump, at this stage of the evidence? >> the comparison is a little bit difficult because we have all the evidence about nixon and we are mid investigation about donald trump. and so, i guess anything you would say now would be a little bit tentative. but look, i think there's one major difference that may cut in president trump's favor, actually. which is that with nixon's case, and actually, also with bill clinton's, some of the activity that he was accused of and, in fact, did, involves activity that has simply nothing to do with the being president of the united states, coaching witnesses, in nixon's case arranging -- helping arrange payments to witnesses. you know, whereas with trump there is this question as to

whether all of the activity that is potentially obstruckive is activity that is encompassed within his duties as president of the united states, which if that is the case, that would make a criminal case against him quite difficult, irrespective if you think like i do it's really bad and should be grounds for impeachment. >> i want to go back to you on this development with rachel brand and her quitting her job. it seems to me the two words in the background of that story are the words robert bork. meaning if you are a republican in the justice department with high hopes of the future, possibilities of your career, those possibilities always include senate confirmation, including the ultimate seat on

the supreme court, which was denied to robert bork when he was nominated because of his involvement in an investigation like this. it seems there is no real way, when you look at the past, to come out of one of these investigations and go on to a higher position in the government confirmed by the senate. >> so, look, i -- i read the story that you guys ran. and, you know, look, the atmosphere in the justice department, in the government, is pretty toxic. so if people were fleeing for the hills to avoid the oncoming apocalypse, i could hardly blame them. that said, i talked to rachel last week when this broke, and that was not the impression that i got. to be candid, my impression of

what happened with rachel was she was there, wal-mart came along and made her a really tremendous offer. and frankly, the -- you know, i -- i think what's going on in the government is not a pull to stay is the way i would read it. but i -- i was a little bit skeptical at this idea that she's sort of fleeing for not wanting to take over for rod when he gets fired. >> harry, litman, your reaction to this? >> i see it differently. i know rachel as well. and i know that was the story. i think certainly she's been up close with rod over the last year. i was just struck by seeing a picture of him. he's aging like a president, as the saying goes. there's just been tremendous unwarranted pressure on him. but i also think the point you

made in the story about the essentially unstaffed vacancies underneath, very hard to do her job. and then, finally, this public trashing of the department of justice with no push back from sessions. i take ben's point, but these jobs come along with a lack of frequency. and i think nine months is short. and if she hadn't been miserable there, there wouldn't have been the siren song of wal-mart. >> thank you both for being with us. in our next segment, president trump makes history. he is the first president of the united states to call infrastructure sexy.

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what can a president [ do in thirty seconds? he can fire an fbi director who won't pledge his loyalty.

he can order the deportation of a million immigrant children. he can threaten an unstable dictator armed with nuclear weapons. he can go into a rage and enter the nuclear launch codes. how bad does it have to get before congress does something? one of candidate donald trump's most repeated campaign promises was that he would stop the crumbling of america's infrastructure with a much-needed massive federal investment. >> we will build the greatest infrastructure on the planet earth. the roads and railways and airports of tomorrow. >> we can have plenty of money left over for infrastructure, you know the infrastructure of our country -- it's also great jobs -- but the roads, the airports, the hospitals, the tunnels, the bridges.

>> wouldn't it be great if we could rebuild our infrastructure, under budget and ahead of schedule? we can do it. but i know how to build. >> today president trump released what he is calling an infrastructure plan that does not actually guarantee the building or repairing of any infrastructure at all anywhere in the country. at best the plan suggests that the federal government would be willing to pay as much as 20% of the cost of an infrastructure project where cities and states would have to be willing to cover the other 80% or more of that project. of course, the reason the federal government is in the infrastructure is because the states cannot afford to cover that much of their infrastructure costs and much of our infrastructure is, by its nature, interstate, like for example the interstate highway system. the federal government has always covered a much higher share of federal infrastructure

costs than 20%, usually around 80%. offering 20% is like someone making you the offer of paying 20% of a $500,000 rolls royce for you. you still cannot afford the other $400,000 for that car. the most likely outcome for the trump infrastructure plan is nothing. meaning no infrastructure bill is likely to pass this congress. if the trump infrastructure bill did pass the congress, the outcome is still likely to be nothing or next to nothing. there actually might be no cities and states that take up the federal government's offer to cover 20% of a new infrastructure project that the states and cities are not already planning to pay for on their own. when we come back from this break, you will hear donald

trump telling you what he finds sexy about infrastructure. and it's worth waiting for. he is the first president ever to call infrastructure sexy. he did that today. for my constipation,

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to me this is a very, very sexy subject. the media doesn't find it sexy. i find it sexy, because i was always a builder. i always knew how to build on time, on budget.

that's what we want here. >> let's see if ezra cline finds it sexy. ezra, in that meeting today with mayors and governors in the white house about infrastructure, the president promised during the campaign he's going to be the greatest builder ever in the white house. he actually said to them, after he made them this offer to pay a small amount of some of these projects he actually said to them, if you don't want it, that's okay with me, too. that's how hard he was actually pushing it today. if you don't want it, that's okay. >> you know what i find sexy, not that i expected to find this my conversation. a fully funded bill might work. the white house says it's a $1.2 trillion bill. this is a $200 billion bill. it has 200 billion of funding in it that they said they would pay for, but now how.

it takes 100 billion, where the feds give $1 towards every 4, and reverses it so it's a $1 federal match. the rest is a hodgepodge of funds. they're saying it's going to elicit all of this money coming from other people because they want to spend it so badly that it goes up to 1.5 trillion. that isn't how this works. i didn't understand why they didn't go big on an infrastructure bill, but they didn't and this is not what they promised in the campaign and it wouldn't do what they're saying and hoping it would do. >> one political reason is that the people who actually write this stuff, the congressional republicans, are opposed to this kind of spending. they've been opposed to it for some time.

so trying to get them to take money and apply it this way was an unlikely prospect from the start. so they've come up with this thing that chuck schumer is calling a mirage. it's likely none of those mayors and governors will take any of this 20% funded money. >> you know this. this is part of the lowering of the bar for donald trump. presidents do, they lead their parties in places they didn't mean to go. george w. bush on medicare part d and no child left behind. you can go through example by example of presidents pushing to embrace parts of agenda that the party wasn't on before. or going to work with another party. he could get some republicans and a lot of democrats together on an infrastructure bill. the fact that he's decided to make no deals, that's him not having the interest or intention to dig in on the details, push his vision to an agenda and push those in his party behind that agenda.

there's a lack of leadership, he only does what's easy to do with republicans, not what was meant to be a disruptive force in this presidency. it's a disappointment in his administration. >> if they could get some of the media to believe this is a $1.5 trillion bill, surely donald trump is one of the people they could convince. >> i'm sure that's correct. that's been a big problem. you never know when donald trump is pitting out these lines if he's trying to fool you, if he's fooled or he has fooled himself. i often think, covering the trump administration, that the president is lying more than he doesn't know what's going on. >> please come back on another night because we do have crumbling infrastructure, this is an urgent subject and we didn't get to some of the whacky ideas like selling your favorite

airport or frequently used airports, the president would like to sell those to private interests. we need to cover all of this, we have to do it on another night. ezra cline, thank you for joining us. tonight's last word is next. oh, that's lovely... so graceful. the corkscrew spin, flawless... ...his signature move, the flying dutchman. poetry in motion. and there it is, the "baby bird". breathtaking. a sumo wrestler figure skating? surprising. what's not surprising? how much money heather saved by switching to geico. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more. a farmer's market.ve what's in this kiester. a fire truck. even a marching band. and if i can get comfortable talking about this kiester, then you can get comfortable using preparation h. for any sort of discomfort in yours.

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time for tonight's good news. the weapons company that made the ar-15 assault rifle used in the sandy hook massacre of those

children is filing for bankruptcy. the company that controls remington is trying to get out of $700 million in debt, get some relief from debt. gun sales have slowed significantly. possibly because of reduced fears of -- by gun owners that president obama will take all of their guns away. remington's sales fell by 27% in 2017. after their gun was used to kill 26 people in newtown, connecticut the company struggled to attract investors to their war machines and killing machines. that is tonight's last words. still ahead, are the democrats going to try to get their memo response to the devin nunes memo released. mike quigley, who is on the

house intelligence committee will join brian williams and that is "the 11th hour with brian williams." spokeswoman says he takes domestic violence seriously. he just won't say it himself publically. and the white house struggles for a time line of who knew what when. a new report on why the number three at justice is leaving. and what it may have to do with the mueller investigation. the reporter who broke the story is here tonight. as questions mount on security clearances in the trump white house, all eyes on the hill where the nation's top intelligence chiefs make an appearance in a few hours from now. "the 11th hour" begins now. good evening from our nbc news headquarters in new york. a new week brings day 389 of the trump administration.