through the g-7, locking horns with u.s. allies on trade, russia, and climate change. will it amount to anything? plus, in a move that could vet millions for trump's business, the president pitches business, the president pitches his florida resort as the site for next year's g7 using his farewell news conference to tout its abundance of parking. and finally, good news for the residents of newark, new jersey, whose water contains dangerous levels of lead but more waiting lies ahead as the "the 11th hour" on a monday night starts right now. good evening once again from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. i'm steve kornacki in for brian williams who has the night off. day 949 of the trump administration. the president is back in washington after a weekend of erratic behavior, unexpected pivots and erroneous statements

in front of some of america's closest allies at the g7 summit in france. aside from brazenly pitching his own miami resort as the location for next year's g7, more on that later, trump closed out the summit with a new line on a possible trade deal with china and a new set of claims. >> china called last night and said, let's get back to the table. >> you had many calls over the last 24 hours, but certainly over the last 48 hours. >> so the chinese are saying that there weren't -- >> the chinese aren't saying that. excuse me. let me explain something. the vice chairman of china, did you get higher than that, other than president xi. the vice president -- the vice chairman, it's like the vice president. the vice chairman made the statement that he wants to make a deal. >> whether or not we make a deal, it's got to be a great deal for us. >> president xi is a great leader who happens to be a brilliant man. and he can't lose 3 million jobs in a very short period of time.

>> trump was asked about his various statements about negotiations with china and quickly became defensive. >> what it comes from is the back and forth and the changing of statements from yourself so that -- >> sorry. it's the way i negotiate. >> is that a strategy? is it a strategy to call president xi an enemy one day and then say that relations are very good the next day and then, you know, it's gone back and forth -- >> the way i negotiate. it's done very well for me over the years and it's doing even better for the country. >> trump also had a lot to say about iran. that nation's foreign minister appeared at the g7 summit on saturday. french president macron, who is trying to preserve the 2015 nuclear agreement trump abandoned, invited foreign minister zarif at the last minute. while trump did not meet with him today he did not rule out a future meeting. >> would you agree to meet with -- >> if the circumstances were correct or right, i would certainly agree to that. we're not looking for leadership change. we're not looking for that kind

of change. we're looking for no nuclear weapons, no ballistic missiles. >> president macron said he would like to see talks between you and president rouhani within weeks. does that sound realistic to you? could you see yourself in talks with iranians? >> i don't know the gentleman. i think i know him a little bit by watching over the last number of years that's happened. i'll tell you one thing, he's a great negotiator, but he -- i think he's going to want to meet. i think iran wants to get the situation straightened out. >> vladimir putin was not at the summit in person, but trump made sure he was not forgotten. the president continued to advocate for russia's readmission to the g7. >> i think that having president putin in what was the g8, he was a member of the g8. and i heard he was a good member of the g8. having him in i think is more of an advantage. >> a few years ago russian

foreign minister saying it's not their foreign policy pursuit to return to g8. what's your reaction? >> well, you know, we'll see. i know one thing. if they were invited back, i think they would be there. >> trump also reiterated the false allegation that president obama pushed russia out of what was then the g8 because he was embarrassed when russia annexed crimea from ukraine, which was the official reason for russia's suspension from the g8 in 2014. fox news had this fact check. >> president trump says the russians were removed from the group because putin outsmarted president obama. it was unanimous. the reason, putin invaded and annexed crimea. >> nevertheless trump managed to bring up his predecessor's name more than a dozen times. >> look what they did to get the deal. look what they did to john kerry and to president obama.

a very, very big and important area in the middle east where the red line was drawn, and then president obama decided that he was not going to do anything about it. i know you like president obama, but it was annexed during president obama's tenure. it was sort of taken away from president obama. not taken away from president trump. taken away from president obama. >> but president obama was unable to stop it. >> president obama was pure and simply outsmarted. somebody should have done this. something should have been done by president obama. >> the president was a no-show at the meeting on climate change despite worldwide concern about fires in the amazon. given trump's past skepticism about climate change, it may not be surprising he was not at the meeting. here's what he said when asked about it. >> were there any conclusions -- >> i'm going to. it's going to be our next session. but we haven't had it yet. >> in fact, the meeting already happened. here is trump's empty chair while other leaders opened the

talks according to the white house press secretary, the president had scheduled meetings with germany and india, however, photos of that meeting show the leaders of both germany and india at that meeting while trump's chair remains empty. later he was asked about his past comments on the impact of climate change. >> there was a significant talk about climate change. i know in the past you've proffered some skepticism of the science of climate change. what do you think the world should be doing and do you still harbor that skepticism? >> i feel that the united states has tremendous wealth. the wealth is under its feet. i've made that wealth come alive. i'm not going to lose that wealth. i'm not going to lose it on dreams, on windmills, which frankly aren't working too well. >> and along with all of that, there was this from trump about the first lady and north korea's dictator.

>> with respect to north korea, kim jong-un, who i've gotten to know extremely well, first lady has gotten to know kim jong-un, and i think she would agree with me. he is a man with a country that has tremendous potential. >> you may not recall seeing any images of the first lady and kim jong-un together because, as the white house press secretary explained, they have actually not met. quote, president trump confides in his wife on many issues including the detailed elements of his strong relationship with chairman kim and while the first lady hasn't met him, the feels like she's gotten to know him too. here for our lead-off discussion on a monday night, philip rucker, white house bureau chief for "the washington post," christopher dickey, veteran foreign correspondent and the paris-based news editor for "the daily beast" who happens to be with us in new york tonight, and tamara keith, white house correspondent for npr. thank you for being with us.

chris, let me start with you. maybe to put this in bigger picture perspective, these g7, g8, whatever it happens to be called in any given year, these meetings have been going on for decades now. this one produced for all of the noise and for all the sort of chaos that's been stirred up by the president's various comments today and actions over the last few days, this didn't produce any broad-based agreement on on major issues between the participating nations. how different is the g7 under trump versus past presidents? >> i'd say it's almost worthless under trump. it was never worth that much to begin with. it was a club of the richest democratic nations. they came together when there was still a soviet union to present an alternative vision. we're rich, we're democratic, this is the model that you should follow. they brought in russia in the 1990s, not because it was very rich, it wasn't, but because they thought it had democratic potential and they wanted to encourage that.

vladimir putin basically shot all that to hell. he is a murderous autocrat and trump now basically acts as if he's at a club that he knows he should be blackballed in. and he runs around and bullies his way through everything and the only consensus that really existed at this g7 was let's just try to keep him from going too crazy. they didn't want it to blow up the way it did in canada in the last one or even in taormina in italy, the one before. they wanted trump to sort of be there, make a show and leave. macron, president macron of france, he sort of has a reputation as the trump whisperer, the person who can sort of influence trump, although he's been disappointed on a lot of issues. he had a couple of little prizes for trump. one is you're going to make advances on iran. we're going to hold that up as a potential breakthrough.

and, of course, trump was busy touting his new breakthrough with china. i think the one thing your report didn't mention is he announced that breakthrough with china before the stock market opened here on monday. having crashed the stock market on friday with his erratic behavior and his erratic statements about china, his main thing was he wanted to see the stock market go up again. this is all tactical stuff and it's all embarrassing. why do we have a g7 anymore? why are we going to have it at a trump country club? >> what chris is outlining is how perhaps the other participating nations, leaders viewed this, how does the trump administration view it? how does the white house view it? do they think they actually got anything out of this? >> the president seemed pretty happy at the press conference, certainly, and, you know, everyone is talking about him, talking about his performance. and if they're talking about him, generally speaking he feels like he is winning.

and certainly in the case of today, he was able to go out there and on a number of occasions say so-and-so wants to make a deal. he says that iran wants to make a deal. he says that china wants to make a deal. now, whether there's actually a deal in the offing or whether this is vapor ware and nothing happens isn't clear at this point, but it certainly gave the president another day to move forward, a day when the markets did perform better certainly than they did on friday. >> phil rucker, i want to reed something you wrote in "the washington post." you said the entire 44-year vision of the g7 gathering according to the non-u.s. participants is to hash out global issues. among like-minded democracies, so the discussion quickly turned even more fundamental, whether

the leaders should assign any special weight to being a democracy, officials said. most of the other participants forcefully believed the answer was yes. trump believed the answer was no. painting a bit of a vivid scene there. explain it a bit more, could you? >> yeah, steve. a senior official who witnessed all of this told my colleague it was as if trump himself were a dictator in those meetings, the way he talked about democracy versus other forms of government, the way he defended and even promoted vladimir putin quietly. he obviously talked about putin, in that press conference, but he also talked about him extensively in these private sessions with the other leaders, really advocating on putin's behalf, becoming a cheerleader of sorts. and, of course, he said i would plan to include putin, invite putin to next year's g7 summit which he plans to host at his golf course in florida. but it's a noteworthy move for an american president to be advocating on behalf of the

russian autocrat and not be the forceful defender of democracy in that setting given long history of the g7 as a group and previously g8. >> chris, you just expressed a bit of a pessimistic view, but the role of the g7 or lack there of. the united states is due to host it next year. the question of where it will be. we'll get into that later. also this issue of the president going out of his way to say he would like russia back in this group and would like putin to come to the united states next year for this session. how will that go with the other members? >> they don't want it. they said no already. they support democracy, and trump has a real serious case of dictator envy. i mean, he loves to talk about his friendship with kim jong-un, who's probably the worst tyrant alive on the planet right now. he loves vladimir putin for reasons we've never really known or understood.

and he has all kinds of admiring things to say about xi jinping. he doesn't talk about any democratic leader with the same tone of admiration that he tends to -- or even love that he tends to turn on these tyrants. now, should then the g7 be modified to embrace more tyrants? no. look, there's an organization that does that, and that's the g20. in fact, the reason putin is not pushing to get back into the g8 is because there is the g20 and he can sit around with other tyrants, mohammed bin salman, he can sit around with xi jinping, he can sit around with leaders of the 20 richest countries, not the seven richest countries, and feel right at home. i think probably president trump would feel more at home in that environment too because the only measure there is money, and the only measure trump really

understands is money, not democracy, not ideals, not human right, not science, none of those things, just money. >> there was an exchange we played a little bit earlier where the president was asked about his statements about the status of negotiations with china seemed to be all over the place. he basically said at the press conference, look, this is how i appreciate. you were saying it's unclear what the status of the negotiations of the talks or lack of negotiations, lack of talks is with china. when the president says this is how i negotiate, i think there's a question there of interpretation. does that mean it's sort of -- it's a self-contained thing? it's entirely how trump is thinking about something at the moment or does it reflect a broader strategy that the administration is pursuing? >> the administration's strategy is the president's strategy, and we've seen that repeatedly.

and certainly in this case president trump with these china negotiations really has been all over the place as michael of "the new york times" pointed out in that question. on friday he was referring to xi jinping, the chinese president, along with his hand-picked fed chairman as enemies. and now he's once again lavishing praise on xi. president trump going back to when he was in real estate, which, of course, is very different than international negotiations, but he's always been all about keeping people off balance. i mean, that has been perhaps the most recurrent character of the trump administration of the last 2 1/2 years. >> another characteristic we've seen before and heard before from this president is he invoked his predecessor by name. we played it there multiple times barack obama's name coming up.

the president taking all sorts of shots at him there. again, something you may not have seen past presidents do at an occasion like this, but with this president it's almost standard, i suppose. >> we'll see if there's no norm or tradition or protocol that president trump feels he needs to honor. in this case, he wanted to place blame on president obama, even though as i believe shep smith at fox news was saying, it was actually putin who invaded crimea. it was esteemed a violation of international law by all members of the g7 and issued a joint clarification kicking out russia from the group and laying preconditions that russia would have to meet in order to come back into the group and that would include recognizing the sovereignty of ukraine and de-escalating in crimea which putin hasn't done. president trump wants to bring

him hymn back into the organization without russia doing anything to atone for its misdeeds. if trump were to have russia come to the summit next year in the united states, that's an election year, presidential re-election year. as we've talked about on this program time and time again, the u.s. intelligence agencies have directly warned the president and the public that russia is trying, actively trying to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, just as they did in the 2016 presidential election to help trump win that election. and so that would be a pretty extraordinary move for this president to welcome putin to america in an election year while his own country is trying to interfere in our election here. >> right. i mean, picture a year from now you'll be pretty much moving into the home stretch of the 2020 election. that will be the backdrop for the next one of these g7 sessions. phil rucker, tamara keith, christopher dickey, thank you all for being with us. coming up from russia, if you're listening to russia, are you coming, president trump aiming to bring next year's g7

to his florida golf resort. we're going to talk to an expert on trump's finances. >> later, foreboding numbers for joe biden, another new poll out just a few minutes ago. we'll have that for you while the former vice president's campaign insists his support is solid. "the 11th hour" just getting started on a monday night.

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we have a series of magnificent buildings, we call them bungalows. they each hold from 50 to 70 very luxurious rooms with magnificent views and what we have also is miami. and we have many hundreds of

acres so that in terms of parking, in terms of all of the things that you need -- >> in my opinion, i'm not going to make any money. i don't want to make money. i don't care about making money. >> the united states will host next year's g7 summit. just before leaving this year's meeting, donald trump made something of a pitch to hold it at his own golf resort in florida, west of miami. that would also give him the chance to host vladimir putin at one of his properties if russia were readmitted to the g7 or if trump simply invited him. today trump was asked about inviting the russian leader to the summit. >> would i invite him? i would certainly invite him. whether or not he could come psychologically, i think that's a tough thing for him to do. >> the prospect of a summit at one of trump's properties raises all sorts of questions about mixing his for-profit business and the presidency. here's what trump and his advisers said about potential conflicts after he won the 2016 election. >> do you think he'll turn it over to the family or put it into a blind trust?

>> i'm not ready to reveal any of that. people in this country knew and accepted and celebrated this business that donald trump has built throughout his entire life. so now we're working on making sure that all those conflicts are taken care of. >> he is so focused on taking over as president, that's his only focus, the only thing he's worried on. he's completely getting out of the business, handing it over to the family. >> my two sons, who are right here, don and eric, are going to be running the company. they are going to be running it in a very professional manner. they're not going to discuss it with me. >> here to talk about all of this, pulitzer prize winning reporter of "the washington post." david, thank you for joining us. i was looking at the last couple times the united states hosted the g7 summit, i think in 2012 it was at camp david. in 2004 it was, i think, in

georgia. it was not at a trump property either one of those recent times. the possibility that it would be in 2020, ethically, legally, constitutionally, are there specific provisions that could come up against? >> the most important is the emoluments clause in the constitution, which was the original anti-corruption statute in the constitution. it says that presidents can't take emoluments which means payments from foreign states. and so by setting this up this way, trump would basically invite that, you might even say compel these foreign states if they want to go to the g7, they got to buy hotel rooms, food, put money into his pocket. trump said the emoluments clause shouldn't just mean bribes, but okay to do business with him. if you believe doing business with the president is a violation of the emoluments clause, this is that on an enormous scale. >> he said that if this happened

he wouldn't make money off this. is that a claim you're able to check and verify? >> no. right now he says that his company donate what is it calls foreign profits, profits from doing business with foreign governments. it's donated $340,000 to that end to the u.s. treasury. we do not know what the number represents. we don't know the overall revenue trump gets from foreign governments, how he calculates that figure. even if he's giving away the profits doral is hurting. this is a resort that's in a lot of financial trouble. it's declined a lot under trump's leadership. just putting money into it to keep it afloat even if you don't make a profit would still be a huge boon for him. >> it's interesting. there's the question of what the direct benefit of an event of this might be and also the publicity of getting the name of it given what you're saying about its current financial state. david, thanks for taking a few minutes. appreciate it. coming up, two important numbers from this weekend, 15,000 and 20%.

we'll get to that on the big board when "the 11th hour" continues. - in the last year, there were three victims

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guess what, folks, we have another day -- actually two new polls. you can call today a pick your poll day when it comes to the democratic race for president. there's one that came out early today. i'm going to show you that first. got a lot of people talking because, look, joe biden, we've

seen joe biden all year running in first place in the democratic race. a monmouth poll that came out this afternoon, joe biden behind bernie sanders and elizabeth warren, sitting there at 19%. obviously best poll bernie sanders had since biden got in the race. elizabeth warren has been steadily climbing. a big drop for biden from what we've seen in other polls. that's a big drop from what we've seen in the monmouth poll before this. what in this poll was fueling that drop for joe biden? a couple things. first the question of ideology. we saw him struggling among liberal voters in the democratic race. you see him in third place here. but moderates and conservatives in the democratic party, there are still moderates and some conservatives in the electorate. biden has been cleaning up among them in other polls. in this one, only 22%, barely ahead of bernie sanders. he was struggling there. he had weakness there. also there was this age divide.

this is something we've seen in poll after poll this year. you could basican half. half democratic voters are over 00 and half are under 50. in the under 50 category, biden falling all the way down to 6%. we've seen him struggling with note voters in this poll this, monmouth poll today. that's as bad as it's been, tied with andrew yang, the former vice president among democrats under age 00. if you don't like joe biden, that's the poll you want to be talking about right now. but now in the last hour, another poll has just come out. morning consult does a weekly survey of -- they've been doing it all year. the morning consult poll came out. look at this. they have joe biden at 33%. they also have sanders at 20%. he's 20% in both of them. warren back at 15%. again, morning consult's been doing a weekly poll for months now. there is where it's been for a while in the morning consult thing so you got one poll that's got really alarming news for

biden and one that kind of looks like status quo. if you average everything together, biden still in the lead in this race in the average, probably in about the high 20s if you average every poll out there. you have two polls today, you can pick your poll depending on the narrative you want to craft. when i the way, the poll, that monmouth poll also made news. critically next democratic debate, middle september, you have to qualify for it. these ten candidates are on the stage. the deadline to qualify, wednesday at midnight. one candidate, tom steyer, the billionaire, he is one poll short of the threshold. you got to hit 2% in four different polls. if you do that and you raise the money, you can get on stage. steyer has raised the money. he's one poll short. he did not hit that number. he did not hit 2% in that monmouth poll today, so steyer is still short of qualifying. he would need some other poll to come out either tomorrow or wednesday. he'd have to be at 2%. otherwise steyer will not make the debate. only these ten candidates will.

and if only these ten candidates do, guess what that means, all on one stage, all on one night, all together, one night, one stage, one debate, something we haven't seen yet. keep that in mind if things hold the way they are. coming up, the biden campaign's forceful response to today's numbers. "the 11th hour" back after this.

joe biden's campaign pushed back on that new monmouth poll that shows him in a virtual three-way tie with elizabeth warren and bernie sanders. that poll comes as elizabeth warren drew another large crowd over the weekend. this one was out in seattle, an estimated 15,000 people showed up to hear her speak at a town hall. for more we welcome to the broadcast a national correspondent from politico. also covering the 2020 campaign,

nbc news correspondent mike memoli. thanks to both of you for being with us. natasha, let me start with you. it's always interesting when you see these candidates get the giant crowds. sometimes it seems to mean something. you can remember barack obama, sometimes it doesn't translate when they actually start voting. i remember howard dean back in 2003, early 2004. what does it look like with elizabeth warren? >> there's no question there's a huge contrast with what warren was showing, the people that were showing up to warren's events back in january in iowa and so forth, even in massachusetts. they were nothing like this. she's creating a movement bit by bit. she is. and it didn't start off this way, but it's growing. you know, will someone be able to take her down? will she lose some of her own momentum? that remains to be seen, but so far what's interesting about it, it wasn't like she shot up quickly. she had actually a very difficult, bumpy rollout in

january, but she overcame that and steadily she's growing. not just in the polls, but in crowd size. >> mike, there is that morning consult poll out tonight, the biden camp is pointing to that one energetically. >> yes, they are. >> if you look inside that monmouth poll, if you take the horse race number out of it, one thing they found was that elizabeth warren they found among democratic voters to be the most popular candidate, and popular in terms of the favorable rating. biden's negatives have risen over the last few months. where the horse race stands, it does seem that biden has taken hits among some democratic voters. negatives have gone up a bit? >> the biden campaign forcefully pushing back on this monmouth poll saying it's an outlier, looking at the small sample size, pointing out in august it's a dead period for polling to begin with. this was conducted over a summer weekend. you're not going to get the kind of response rate you like.

but they also think that the fundamentals, the theory of the case for them is really still strong, that the number one issue for democratic voters continues to be donald trump and who is the best candidate to beat donald trump. they still believe and voters do show so far in these pollings that they think joe biden is that candidate. the risk of this electability focus strategy is it exposes them to media news cycles they hate, frankly, which is emphasis too much on a bad poll and the emphasis as well on the kind gaffes, verbal miscues that we've seen mounting. to the warren point, as natasha points out, she started out sort of undervalued in large part because of the concerns about the dna test, this pocahontas issue and what you've seen over the course of the campaign is she's reminding democrats of why they liked her to begin with. so it's really created this situation where we essentially have a two to three-person race

heading into the next debate. >> natasha, in that first democratic debate a couple months ago, you saw biden. obviously he had that encounter on stage with kamala harris. it helped her momentarily, it certainly seemed to hurt him back then as well. i think now folks are looking at it looks like elizabeth warren is going to be on the same stage with biden in the next debate in september and i think wondering if something similar might happen then. >> well, it's certainly the battle everyone's been waiting for, people have said that biden skated by being able to avoid warren the first two debates. on the other hand, warren has really dominated because she was sort of central at least in the first debate and, you know, with bernie sanders in the second debate, the two of them joined up. so it will be interesting to see how both of them respond, how both of them think on their feet. but warren is, you know, no question a formidable debater. >> just quickly, mike.

i'm curious. there's a widely publicized and most folks have seen the video over the weekend. joe biden in new hampshire talking as if he was in vermont. what do you hear from the biden campaign about that and about the concerns that it raises about whether he's up to this? >> yeah. i was there for that. it was, frankly, a baffling moment. reporters looking at each other wondering how he could make that kind of mistake. this is the kind of thing where the biden campaign will respond to say we make too much of an issue out of this, there are other candidates making mistakes on the campaign, but we're just trying to play into this issue. that's why this is a matter of making that electability case, that exposes you to these kind of issues. the candidate who can most disqualify joe biden likely is joe biden himself. >> mike memoli and natasha korecki, thank you for being with us. >> thanks. coming up, today's breaking news developments in the newark water crisis. how the city intends to bring safe brinking water back to its

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we are here to announce as i said earlier a $120 million investment made possible by the county improvement county to expedite the modernization of newark's drinking water and infrastructure at no cost to the affected homeowners. >> after weeks of controversy, officials in newark, new jersey, today revealed their $120 million plan to speed up the process of restoring clean drinking water. instead of ten years to replace lead pipes, officials now say it should take less than 30 months to replace about 18,000 service lines in new jersey's largest city. the proposal still needs the approval of county and city officials who are expected to hold meetings and to vote tomorrow. many newark residents have been relying on bottled water for weeks and tonight frustration is still growing. dozens of people demanding clean

water protested outside of the prudential center, the site of tonight's mtv music awards. earlier our own ron allen spoke to one resident about today's developments. >> they said today that they're going to replace the pipes, the bad pipes over the next 30 months. >> okay -- 30 months? that's a long time. yeah, i understand they can't do it overnight, but, come on, 30 months. >> it was going to be ten years? >> ten years? >> now they're speeding it up. >> okay, well -- >> that's still a long time. >> that is a long time. >> back with us tonight is knowledge native nick confessore and dr. john torres, medical correspondent for nbc news. nick, let's pick up on that reaction. i think when you hear just 30 months in isolation, 2 1/2 years, i think everybody says that's a really long time to fix this. you have the mayor there saying

this is a great triumph. why is that a fair framing of this? >> if you go back to march when they first broke ground on replacing the lead service lines, it was a $75 million bonding plan that was going to take ten years and cost residents up to $1,000 per household. that's a lot of money in a city like newark where the average median income is $34,000. fast forward to today, once the crisis has really accelerated, they were able to announce a new $120 million plan that was going to extradite it to less than three years. 18,000 pipes is a lot of pipes, so even the ability to do that in 30 months is giving some skeptics some hesitation. when you frame it like that, it looks like a significant development and it's one of the first bits of news and progression we've seen in a long time in newark. >> we've been talking about the city handing out bottled water and residents forced to rely on that. does that mean there are residents who for the next 2 1/2 years will have to stay with bottled water? >> they certainly hope not. all we know so far about the

current bottled water distribution is that they have been testing for two weeks and will be testing for two more. they haven't updated us on what these tests are proving. we asked the mayor and he's going to wait until there's a scientific sample. right now they're working on getting the corrosion inhibitor in the water set. that takes up to six months. once that's set, in a worst case scenario, hopefully they won't need to use bottled water anymore. we won't know when they can stop distributing until the tests are done. >> we know instinctively you don't want lead in your water. but specifically medically, for children, for adults, what are the consequences of that? >> for everyone it's a toxicity. it's a heavy metal and it gets into our body and disrupts the cells and how they work. it gets to the brain, the spinal cord, and can also go to the kidney and heart. it can cause a lot of problems. it's a cumulative process. the more you're exposed the more problems it will cause and start building up. that's why three years even

though it's not going to be ten year, three years is still a long time. six months is a long time to be exposed to lead. it affects children under 6 and developing fetus and their brain and brain development is probably the bigger issue. can cause cognition issues hypertension, high blood pressure situations. this is one of those things the longer they're exposed to it the more problems it's going to cause for them. >> is there a treatment for somebody who's been exposed maybe exhibits the symptoms? >> if it turns out that their lead levels are high and they've dropped, standards, say it's high at this point, if they're high, the first treatment you do is you remove the exposure to the lead. that's the very first immediate thing you do. once you remove the exposure, the lead levels will naturally start dropping. if they got to a high enough level especially in a developing child, they could be permanent issues, permanent damage. if it gets high enough in their body, there is a medicine called

a chelation that they can use to let lead out of their body. it's reserved for children with very high levels. for most of them the main point is just remove the exposure as soon as you can. >> the big question, i think, and the backdrop for all of this is how it ever reached this crisis point in newark in the first place, especially in light of everything we saw in flint, michigan, a few years ago. nick, you were part of a team at "the new york times" that really took a dive into this question over the weekend. we're going to talk about that in just a minute. nick and dr. torres are staying with us. coming up, more on the crtical lessons learned from the critical crisis in new jersey's biggest city. that's when "the 11th hour" continues. these folks don't have time to go to the post office they use stamps.com all the services of the post office only cheaper

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well, we mentioned this a minute ago, but over the weekend "the new york times" reported on a long line of questionable decisions that led to the current water crisis in newark.

our guest nick shared a by line on the story. it reads, quote, an investigation by "the new york times" based on dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of public records reveals blunders at all levels of government in safeguarding newark's water infrastructure. city officials brushed aside warnings and allowed the system to deteriorate while state and federal regulators did not intervene often forcefully enough to help prevent the crisis. still with us, nick and dr. john torres. nick, so take us through this because the political response from the city of newark initially when there were indications began emerging was essentially there's no crisis here. and you also uncovered technically speaking what apparently happened to trigger this crisis in the first place. >> yeah, if you were to go back to 2015, it appears that that's when the city started tinkering with its water a little bit to deal with a problem with carcinogens, and to do that they started making their water slightly more acidic. now, what that did was for 20 years newark has been combatting lead.

it has these ancient old pipes and they were using this chemical called sodium silicate to prevent the lead from leeching into the water. when they made the water acidic to deal with one problem they rendered the sodium silicate ineffective. now what we found in our report is they never did a test before doing that. the state was unaware they were doing this. city officials couldn't produce any tests that showed when they were looking to change the acidity, they wondered what other impact it might have on their water, so that's what started the snowballing effect from our report that brought us to 2017 when the first lead level exceedence first came to newark. that came in june, july of 2017, and the mayor was basically, his entire message was the water is completely safe to drink. don't worry here. there were legal things the city had to do, testing, mail anyone whose house turned to positive tests. those are random samples you then extrapolate from. 18 months the entire message from the city was these are outrageously false statements coming in about our water and the water is absolutely safe to drink.

if you were in 1 of those 14,000 or 15,000 households getting elevated lead levels of the water from the lead leaching to the pipes, that was not true. the mayor was trying to say the water source from the reservoir was not contaminated. that was true. but when it comes to what the residents were hearing and what was coming out of their faucets, there was a significant amount where the water was not safe to drink. >> you know, dr. torres, when you read nick's story and you think about how big this country is and how common political dysfunction is, and you have all these intermingling of agencies at different levels of government, we've seen it in flint, we've seen it in newark. are we likely to see this in other places? >> steve, i think we are because the infrastructure in this country has aged. it has a hard problem of trying to get that up to date and modernized. like you said, 1986 is when the standard came out saying anything after 1986 you cannot have lead pipes in the house. what the epa says, houses built before 1986 more than likely has lead pipes or lead solder to join the pipes together that could be leaching lead.

those are houses that need to be tested. different sources are saying there could be hundreds of cities out there that have similar problems, maybe even worse problems. we just don't know about them yet. >> nick, very quickly, the mayor, given what you've told us, given what you've reported, what's his standing in newark right now? >> he's an incredibly popular mayor. up until this moment there hasn't really been much of a controversy, much of a scandal. he took over from cory booker who was pretty popular but as he left there were a few issues due to rising crime, budget cuts. there was some corruption at the watershed commission under him. up until now the mayor has been very popular. he's a very important ally of governor phil murphy. he's pretty well liked around the state which has surprised so many people to see how his messaging and handling of this issue has been in contrast to how we've seen him run the city so far. >> it's a depress story in

some way, fascinating story as well. very well reported by you and your colleagues. appreciate that, nick. dr. john torres. thank you for being with us tonight. that is our broadcast for this monday night. thank you at home for being with us, and good night from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. tonight on "all in." >> it's tremendous wealth. i'm not going to lose that wealth. >> the president skips out on climate as the world's most important resource burns. >> i'm not going to lose it on -- on dreams, on windmills. >> tonight, trump's head-spinning turn on the global stage as it relights to china, russia and a planet in crisis. then as the impeachment count grows again, did the president just announce high crimes and misdemeanors in france?