All right, welcome everybody to the Jim Acosta show. It is Thursday, and I guess the expression of the day or the phrase of the day is two weeks. You've heard Trump push things off before for two weeks, usually for things like the infrastructure bill that didn't happen during his first term. This time he is saying he will decide on whether to go to war with Iran in two weeks. But by then,

who knows what the world will look like? That's because the Israelis and Iranians are already at war

and a hot war at that. My big guest today is Connecticut Democratic Congressman Jim Himes. He is the

ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Congressman, good to see you.

Jim, thanks for having me back. Congressman, good to see you.

Jim, thanks for having me back.

Hey, no problem. And we should just get right into this here because, I mean, what do you make of Trump hitting the pause button here? I mean, it sounds like it's an infrastructure bill or a

health care bill that he wants to wait two weeks on. This time, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, your thoughts.

Yeah, well, I guess I'm not surprised, right? And, you know, the fact that we're not reading about a

U.S. attack on Iran right now actually gives me a little bit of comfort. I was asked this morning,

you know, if you're advising the president, what do you do? And the advice I would give the president is, you know,

you are in a point of maximum leverage right now, right? And often, you know, the regime has been

badly hurt, badly embarrassed. They're probably worried about what's going to happen inside Iran

with the Iranian people. So now is the time to call them up and say, you give up any enrichment, which, by the way,

is the deal from the old JCPOA. And yes, that had a fuse on it, but you give up any enrichment

and this stops today. Point of maximum leverage. So, you know, the fact that we're not talking about a

U.S. attack leads me to believe that maybe that's what's happening, which I think is good because, Jim, I mean, I'll try to make this quick, but war in the Middle East is a hell of a roll of the dice, right?

Oh, yeah.

You know, there's some chance you could have the best case scenario. Setting aside right and wrong and justice and injustice and all that, there's some chance you could get the dream scenario,

right, which is that the Iranian people finally decide they've had enough and they overthrow

this regime and, you know, you get a situation where, you know, this incredibly educated,

very capable people decides that we're going to rejoin the company of decent nations.

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