out roaring for hillary clinton and against donald trump. good evening from new york. i'm brian williams. rounding up an hour or two with 55 days to go until the election, 13 days until the first debate, we begin tonight with news that is just now breaking about more potential trouble within the republican ranks. it's about colin powell, former secretary of state, in personal e-mails first viewed and reported by buzz feed news tonight and then minutes ago confirmed by our own andrea mitchell powell referred to donald trump as quote a national disgrace and an international

pariah. the e-mails were obtained by d.c. leaks which is rumored to have ties to russian intelligence services. in the e-mails seen by buzz feed, powell also said at one point yeah, the whole birther movement was racist referring to trump's comments calling obama's birth into question and the hackers have a lot more of his e-mails. our best in the business team is here tonight to react. robert costa washington post and political analyst nicole wallace and steve schmidt. robert, let's begin with you. this is always an uncomfortable nexus, kind of a new area for law and journalism of stolen material that slops over into

the public realm in this case confirmed by a public official. >> we are in this new age of political journalism and politics where everything private will become public or has the threat of becoming public and this is something we're dealing with each and every day and especially in this campaign with wikileaks and different ties to russian intelligence with the democratic national committee, this is looming over this entire campaign. >> nicole, you know general powell, he was forthright when contacted by andrea mitchell, a wounded veteran of combat in vietnam, he doesn't scare easily but there's concern about what else. >> both campaigns responded as you might have expected them to respond. the trump campaign said he's voted democrat in the last two elections and we would expect him to be critical. the clinton campaign didn't want to engage with him after the

recent history with him but in some ways to me it's a life line to the very debate that's happening right now with hillary and her fruit basket full of deplorables. he's saying the same thing she has. he calls the birther movement 99% racist if you want to make an apples to apples -- i'm full of fruits tonight. she's in trouble because she said half of his supporters were deplorable. in these e-mails, which i'm sure he never wanted to be public, he says 99% of the people who believe in birtherism are racism. i'm sure this wasn't his intent but he's making the same argument that she made and had to walk back. >> steve schmidt with us from chicago tonight. what do you make of this? >> look, i think the number of people that qualify as legitimate statesmen in the united states and less than 20 and chief among them is colin powell.

he's broadly respected in this country and he's saying donald trump is a national disgrace. his opinion matters. endorsements are overblown in this campaign but he's one of the one that matters. for him to enter this race as an antagonist of donald trump it's not good news for donald trump. >> andrea mitchell is working this story tonight and look for more of this tomorrow morning on morning joe and elsewhere. now quickly to the news from the trail tonight. in pennsylvania this evening donald trump made his case targeted at suburban women with his daughter ivanka speaking for and about working women, talking about a story she read about the struggles of a single mother, how it gave her an idea for a child care plan for her father's campaign. trump also said this about where

his opponent is on the issue of child care. >> very little meaningful policy work has been done in this area and my opponent has no child care plan. she never will and if it ever evolves into a plan, it will never get done anyway. >> the fact is hillary clinton formally unveiled her child care back in may. trump also tonight revisited the basket of deplorables line from the clinton campaign. >> while my opponent slanders you as deplorable and irredeemable, i call you hard working american patriots who love your country and want a better future for all americans. >> robert costa, as so many things do this comes back to you. what did you make of tonight's event a in terms of his familiarity with the material on the teleprompter and the

material being discussed and this role as donald trump as a candidate? >> i started hearing about this over the weekend about this child care speech being in the works and i said who's involved and it's kelly ann con way. she's working with ivanka trump. she recognize in these last weeks of the campaign trump has to do to reach out to more suburban women. if he's not reaching women he doesn't have a shot. that's the trump campaign's view of the campaign. >> in the windup the speech could have been written by harry hopkins. as some were quick to say kind of an entitlement expansion if you read it literally. >> he will be pressed in coming days about how he'll pay for it, this to me though was the ivanka speech.

it wasn't run through the policy apparatus. it isn't a particularly republican approach. and it feels to me like a purely political calculation. it's not something he's ever talked about. there's no -- to the degree that he's ever spoken out on issues and family, he's really not got a body of statements about equal pay. the truth is hillary clinton, whatever you think of her, has been working on these issues for decades. >> steve schmidt, your turn. >> look, i think that's exactly right. i think it comes across exactly like it is we have a political problem with women voters so we're going to go give a child care speech and that will solve our problem with women voters. at the end of the day these issues are not something that donald trump has been talking about over the course of the campaign. i think it's going to have a very small effect in terms of fixing his larger problems with women voters that have built up now over a two-year period and

not without cause. >> here we are this evening 11:00 p.m. eastern time. we had several breaking stories in the hours before we went on the air. robert, one of them has to do with the attorney general of new york launching an inquiry into the trump foundation. republicans were quick to point out tonight he's on hillary clinton's leadership council, he's maxed out as a personal donor, but he's the attorney general of the state of new york. what do you know about this? >> he's still the attorney general of new york and this story has been building slowly over time but it's certainly been building and my colleague at "the washington post" sits right next to me and he goes document by document trying to find out what this foundation actually does and how does it using its funds. it's been pretty vague because donald trump has not released his tax returns so a lot of the reporting has been done in the dark and people wonder how has this foundation functioned,

where does it funnel it's money. >> i think we have the reaction from at campaign in the form of a graphic quote here. the attorney general is a partisan hack who has turned a blind eye to the clinton foundation for years and has endorsed hillary clinton for president. this is nothing more than another left wing hit job designed to distract from crooked hillary clinton's disastrous week. we'll take that as a no. >> listen, you're colleague has done an -- talk about a body of work. his reporting on the veterans and the alleged donation to veterans actually forced a donation to a veteran's charity. this is a line of inquiry that not enough people pay enough attention to. maybe there's a good story to be told but they're not telling it and it doesn't look like they

have an interest in being forthcoming about what the charity has done. >> one of the things we heard from president obama today, he took a broad swing at all of us and said the press quote gives up basically in the face of relentless verbal donald trump. >> the president had a pretty sharp message today and you see him continuing to have an incredulous pitch to swing voters, he's saying how can you let this and he's saying to swing voters is trump a spokesperson for understand he's been a vocal media critic throughout the campaign. >> it was an afternoon event. it was hot outside. part of his appeal to the enormous crowd in philadelphia was to stay dehydrated and he said bend your knees, don't look your knees, keep going up and down, stay in the game. he was not far from the rocky

statute from the top of the museum steps, went full on after donald trump and became the most energized and engaged incumbent surrogate for the party in recent times. here is some of his attack on donald trump. >> i keep reading this analysis that trump has support from like working folks. really? this is the guy you want to be championing working people? this guy who spent 70 years on this earth showing no concern for working people. this guy's suddenly going to be your champion? he wasn't going to let you on golf course. >> that's just some of it. steve schmidt in chicago, there are incumbents you have known

and loved in office who have compared to this degree of energy taken a pass on being surrogates for the next man or woman up. >> you think back to dwight eisenhower being asked about richard nixon in the 1960 election about his contributions to his administration. he famously said give me some time, i'll get back to you. clearly president obama is all in for hillary clinton. i think it bears mentioning that the incumbent presidential party has been rewarded with a third term three times in the last 100 years and barack obama took that stage today with poll numbers showing him with an approval rating at 58%. that's nearing the level of approval rating that ronald reagan was at in the 1988 election where george herbert walker bush became the third example of the incumbent

president's party getting that third term. the speech was just brilliant. it was funny. he's a world-class political athlete and i think one of the examples in the speech he starts talking about the foundation, which is so be-devilled in the clinton campaign, he goes you want to talk about foundations, you have the clinton foundation that saved the lives of millions of people and you have donald trump's foundation and here you have a foundation that he took money from other people and he commissioned a six-foot high painting of himself to much laughter in the audience. he's going to be out there and he's going to be a powerful surrogate for secretary clinton and i think he's going to be very impactful over the remaining 56 days of this campaign for sure. >> nicole, the military has a great expression, force multipliers and surrogates are supposed to be force multipliers. >> i joked earlier in the day if you get a doctor like that first one for donald trump to write a

note to have obama stand in for her it might help her. she is vulnerable and she's not doing as well as donald trump is among working class in the battleground states that remain. the map is smaller. she's still ahead in the battleground states but she has a vulnerability and i think her folks will acknowledge she does it is among the voters that president obama spoke directly to and that side, that team, team clinton with obama and vice president biden is another extremely effective surrogate for her. >> with our personal thanks to steve schmidt in the magic tv box, to robert costa who we seldom get to see in person because he's on the road, thank you very much for coming by. coming up on the other side, attracting a crowd, there's

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my concern is just making sure that folks particularly african-american folks don't say we're not as excited because barack and michelle are leaving so we're just going to not register and we're not gonna vote.

if we had that attitude, then we will turn back a lot of the progress that's been made. >> if you were listening to hot 105 in florida today, then you heard him. that was president obama on the air with them earlier. concerned about voters' enthusiasm for hillary clinton. this has been much talked about as 6,000 people showed up to hear him speak in philadelphia today. as steve schmidt mentioned tonight the president's approval rating sits at 58%. that's according to the abc news poll. that's the highest it's been in that poll since just after he was first elected back in '09, that same poll shows it may be an area of need for the nominee hillary clinton just over one-third. 36% of likely voters who support her are very enthusiastic about her candidacy. trump has a 12-point edge over her on this key question. to our panel we go.

we want to bring back nicole wallace and welcome in the president of the most action, a progressive advocacy group. let's begin with what's been called the excitement gap. >> well, i think there are a bunch of dimensions to the story. i think it's important to remind folks that not only are you enthusiastic about voting, but do republicans and democrats really like their candidate. republicans don't really like their candidate. in fact, by about half as much as democrats like their candidate. so i do think among the base of democratic voters people do respect and like hillary. is this a sense of a change and a wave election? no. i mean, i think it's very clear that secretary clinton has made her selling point, her experience that she's a tried and true trusted hand. this just happens to be a time when most working and middle class americans want a big sense of a change. they want that sense of an

outsider coming in to shake things up in washington and she personifies washington to a lot of people. >> the president woke up to good news on the income front, there's a portion of the speech dealing with the fact that median incomes are up, poverty rate down. here it is. >> let's face it, republicans don't like to hear good news right now, but it's important just to understand this is a big deal. more americans are working. more have health insurance. incomes are rising. poverty is falling and gas is $2 a gallon. i didn't even -- thank you for reminding me. thanks, obama. >> nicole, wallace, love him or hate him. >> i say love that gas is $2. i'm psyched every time i fill

up. thank you obama. >> speaking of the next person to run, for starters a communicator who can deliver that unlike anything we have ever seen. you can say that clinically. >> i don't want to send anyone to the mini bar, but he's not on the ballot. hillary clinton is. >> is love transferrable. >> in my personal dating life but in politics never before has it been. and the truth is polls put out by democratic partisans highlight the enthusiasm gap. she has a big problem and she's why he's going to be on the trail from now until election day. she does not inspire the sort of confidence that he did that anything that people hate about washington will change. his brand was change. her, she has a 60% number of people that distrust her and find her not honest and forthcoming. his positive attributes do not apply to her.

he may get a few more people to register and help people to understand the stakes but it's most likely he's used as a weapon against donald trump. >> minutes ago we were talking about donald trump the presidential candidate however he's back on twitter tonight. we just saw this. the real donald j. trump, why isn't president obama working instead of campaigning for hillary clinton leaving someone in the studio to say he's back. how do you do this practically though back to nicole's question, how do you say if you love me, if you love these principals, here's your candidate? >> well, i think that actually the clinton campaign thought this was going to be a campaign about things like that, right, and they front-loaded a bunch of really progressive potentially transformative the major issue of our time which is economics and equality. they did a massive finance reform plan and debt-free

college and child care although trump didn't take the time to read it. criminal justice reform, all those things are building on deepening and expanding the obama legacy but bernie sanders and elizabeth warren are demanding. they really set up an argument to say we are going to be the sort of heart of the democratic party right now, which is a progressive heart which is going right to the heart of economic and inequality and yet it has not been a conversation about policy for the past nine months. i mean, they really have not been able to have that conversation. they would love to have it. it's been about the e-mails or donald trump's tweets. >> a lot of conversations haven't taken place but thank you for tonight's. we've been wanting to have you on. thank you. the next break we'll be back with more including a preview of tomorrow right after this.

when were you notified about this pneumonia diagnosis? >> we talked sunday and i reached out to her as soon as the incident happened. >> you weren't uniformed on friday. >> i talked to her on sunday. >> don't you think that was a little bit delayed given the seriousness of the issue. >> i didn't think of it that way. >> tim kaine, hillary clinton's running mate, that was tonight wvit television, our sister station in detroit, notable there because her running mate learned pretty much when the

rest of us did that the diagnosis in fact was pneumonia, that it was a contributing factor to the dehydration her campaign said led to her wobble and near passing out there at the 9/11 memorial. we learned late today hillary clinton is in fact going back out on the road thursday. she will go to north carolina, a prime member of our battleground map, after that a couple of d.c. events. donald trump's taping with dr. oz is tomorrow. that's when dr. oz and trump will reveal what they plan to reveal about donald trump's health as the subject of health continues to be one of the many issues in the 11th hour of this campaign. that's it for us tonight. "hardball" with chris matthews starts right now. he's back. let's play "hardball."

good evening. i'm chris matthews in washington. did you catch president obama today? if you didn't you missed the start of what could be the wildest barn storming presidential campaign ever and certainly a campaign for someone else's. barack obama made it clear today it's personal. he's in the race to succeed him because he wants hillary clinton to win and fanatically wants donald trump to lose, lose humiliatingly, lose in such a way that he'll disappear from the country's public life and a clear sign the press knows how to do it he choose pennsylvania today as the place he would plant his stake in donald trump's heart knowing trump knows he needs pennsylvania. he went there today in the 80 degree heat to rouse philadelphians in the same way he did in getting himself eld