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Billionaire birther Donald Trump on Monday revealed that Republican officials are hoping that he will play a part at the Republican National Convention in Tampa later this month.

During a weekly call-in interview, Fox News co-host Brian Kilmeade noted that it had been confirmed that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Fox News host Mike Huckabee and others would be speaking ahead of Mitt Romney's formal acceptance of the Republican nomination for president.

"Do you think that you're going to have a role there?" Kilmeade asked Trump.

"Well, I know they want me to," Trump replied. "And I'll see what happens."

Just one day before the convention kicks off, Trump will already be in Tampa to receive the "Statesmen of the Year" award from the Sarasota County Republican Party.

Conventional wisdom is that Trump's insistence that President Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen would bring Romney unwanted criticism at a time when the candidate is trying to win over independent voters. But those views didn't stop the former Massachusetts governor from attending a political fundraiser with Trump in Las Vegas earlier this year, just one day after the reality star told CNBC that "nothing's changed my mind" that Obama was born in Kenya.

“In his own words, @BarackObama ‘was born in Kenya, and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’ This statement was made, in writing, in the 1990s. Why does the press protect him? Is this another Watergate?” Trump opined on Twitter the day after the Romney event.

And on Monday, Trump was at it again, insisting that Romney should not release his tax returns if the president continued to refuse to release documents that the billionaire believes will prove his point.

"I'd like to see his college records, I'd like to see his college applications, I'd like to see something about his past, which many people know nothing about," Trump told Fox News. "I'd like to see his passport records, which are sealed. You know that Obama's spent over $4 million in legal fees to keep these things quiet, and then he stands up and says he wants to see [Romney's] tax returns."

"If Obama gives some of his sealed records where all of this money has been spent to keep them sealed, I would certainly make that trade," he added. "I think that would be a trade that you'd like to see. I tell you Fox & Friends would like to see it. I'd think you'd find some things that are very, very interesting and very shocking."

(h/t: Politico)

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Here we go again with Bloody Bill Kristol proving he's wrong about just about everything. From this Sunday's Fox News Sunday, Kristol thinks it would be a great idea for Mitt Romney to pick Condoleeza Rice as his running mate. We all know how well listening to Kristol's advice worked out for John McCain last time around when he picked Caribou Barbie.

Considering, as Roberts noted, that Rice has already said she doesn't want it and that Republicans are desperately trying to pretend George W. Bush never existed, I'm not expecting Mittens to be naming Rice as his choice for veep any time soon. In the mean time I guess we can all just hope he's silly enough to listen to Kristol.

ROBERTS: Right. I want to finish out this week with something else that Bill wrote about, and that is the potential veepstakes and Ann Romney saying we're looking at a woman.

Do you think that woman is... ?

KRISTOL: I think it could be Condoleeza Rice. And I think Ann Romney is very close to Mitt Romney, in certain respects (ph). I know she's a very impressive woman in her own right. I don't think she's just talking. I think if she says the Romney campaign is looking at a woman as a possible V.P. pick, (inaudible) --

(CROSSTALK)

ROBERTS: But Condi just said time and time again, no thanks, don't want it. It's not me.

KRISTOL: Well, Dick Cheney said no, thanks, I don't want it in 2000. And the truth is, if you just step back -- and, I mean, I have -- I, myself am for Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio and other types like that. But if you are -- as the Romney campaign is -- data-driven and you look at polls and you look at Condoleeza Rice as favorable and unfavorable ratings, including among swing voters, women voters, et cetera, you could make a case that -- and she's totally qualified. But she also be an exciting pick. You could talk yourself into picking Condoleeza Rice.

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I highly recommend watching the entire show if you have time which you can catch here if you don't have the show recorded at home, but here's one of the better portions of this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes which followed their panel discussions which took at look back at the invasion of Iraq as the Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq ends today.

HAYES: Since we're taking a look at the legacy of the Iraq war today we thought we'd approach our now we know segment a little differently. One of the striking features of our tortured relationship with the war and it's aftermath is that as a byproduct of a kind of collective, social PTSD we simply no longer talk about Iraq very much at all. Because of this we've allowed so many of the key figures who engineered the war, sold the war and oversaw the bloody quagmire to escape the kind of public sanctions their failures merited.

So we thought as part of our looking the war squarely in the face it would be interesting to take a look at where some of the major and not so major players in our war effort and anti-war effort are now.

On Chris' list, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Judith Miller, David Addington, Paul Wolfowitz, Cindy Sheehan, General Eric Shinseki, Ari Fleischer, Jessica Lynch, Ken Pollock, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith and Paul Bremer. Sadly as Chris noted here, no bad deed has gone unrewarded when it comes to this group, most of whom are now making a comfortable living at conservative think tanks and are sadly still allowed to come on television and are asked for their opinions.

I'm quite sure we'll never see a segment like this on Meet the Press since David Gregory wouldn't want any of them to fall off of his potential guest list.

Best line of the segment:

HAYES: Doug Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense, who Geneal Tommy Franks once called "the f-ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth," is advising Rick Perry on foreign policy.

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It's not often I get to cite a link from Fox News as bizarre as this one so since the video is from Shep Smith's show today I'll use their text as well.

Could a lovestruck dictator be the reason why Libya abandoned its weapons of mass destruction program?

The evidence is thin, but Muammar al-Qaddafi appears to have had a crush on Condoleezza Rice, at least that's what a find by rebels at Qaddafi's Tripoli compound have uncovered in the form of a photo album dedicated solely to the former U.S. secretary of state.

Apparently Qaddafi's adoration of Rice was no secret.

"Leezza, Leezza, Leezza ... I love her very much," the colonel reportedly told Al Jazeera in 2007, calling her his "darling black African woman."

Rice had dinner with the despot in 2008 at the compound where the photos were found. At the time, Qaddafi reportedly greeted the secretary of state by putting his hand against his heart.

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Rachel Maddow asks why during the week that Osama bin Laden was killed, the Sunday morning show producers decided to bring on one Bushie after another to sit at the grown-up table and give their opinion on the matter.

If that question sounds familiar for our readers here it's because just like this past Sunday, our own Nicole Belle asks that same question pretty much every week when we cover the Sunday morning bobblehead shows here at C&L. I wonder if David Gregory's producer was watching? It would be nice to get him or her to answer Rachel's question.

I'd love to see Rachel get Meet the Press, but she probably couldn't get any Republicans to come on with her, or not very many of them anyway. Unlike David Gregory, she actually asks follow up questions to people who come on the air and try to lie to her.

Transcript below the fold:

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In what turned out to be a very contentious interview, the Last Word's Lawrence O'Donnell pressed former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice about the Bush administration's use of faulty intelligence to invade Iraq. Rice was defensive and got angry with O'Donnell for his line of questioning and was still defending their excuses for the invasion.

It got sticky pretty early:

O'DONNELL: As we look back and reflect on September 11th today, I want to quote something that President Bush said about September 11th, the lesson of September 11th. He said this repeatedly. It became boilerplate in the speeches.

"September 11th taught us a lesson I will never forget and America must never forget -- America must confront threats before they fully materialize. My administration looked at the facts and the history and looked at the intelligence in Iraq and we saw a threat."

He's clearly saying that September 11th is the reason he looked at Iraq differently and saw a threat there.

RICE: Yes.

Are you surprised by that?

O'DONNELL: Yes. Because --

RICE: After September --

O'DONNELL: -- because Iraq had --

RICE: -- after September 11th --

O'DONNELL: -- nothing to do with --

RICE: -- after --

O'DONNELL: ---.

RICE: -- after, of course you look at threats differently. Your country has just been attacked. You know that you cannot allow threats to materialize.

Do you know how many times I've been asked --

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: But there was nothing in the --

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: -- threat that Iraq --

(CROSSTALK)

RICE: Lawrence --

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: -- presented --

(CROSSTALK)

RICE: -- Lawrence --

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: -- that was in any way related to us --

(CROSSTALK)

RICE: Lawrence, we can end this --

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: -- and.

(CROSSTALK)

RICE: -- interview right now if you don't want me to finish my --

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: Go ahead.

(CROSSTALK)

RICE: -- my point.

Thank you.

If one looks at what happened to us on, we didn't connect the dots. There was a threat materializing that we didn't respond to. Saddam Hussein had been a threat from the time that he invaded Iran in the late 1980s, through the 1991, when, in fact, he went into Kuwait, dragging us into war.

We thought he had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction. And in a context in which terrorism and weapons of mass destruction was a nexus that we could not allow, we decided that this was a threat that had to be dealt with.

O'DONNELL: Forty thousand casualties later, in Iraq, 4,400 military -- American military deaths in Iraq later, would you say that is the single biggest miscalculation that the Bush administration made, that Osama -- that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and must be stopped by those military men who went in there and found no weapons of mass destruction?

RICE: Sadda -- Saddam Hussein was threat. He had used weapons of mass destruction. This was not --

O'DONNELL: But we now know he wasn't a threat --

RICE: Lawrence, are we going to do this with my answers or with --

O'DONNELL: Go ahead.

RICE: -- your commentary?

It's about time someone subjected one of these Bushies to an interview where they were pushed the way Rice was here. This is the way any of them should be treated any time they're allowed on the air. I'm tired of watching them all come back on the television to revise history without even being questioned on their lies on Iraq and WMD's, much less challenged when they lie on the air as Rice did here.

Rachel Maddow came on the air a few minutes early to discuss the interview with O'Donnell.

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Full transcript below:

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From Countdown April 30, 2009. Keith reports on Condoleeza Rice's run in with a group of Stanford students. From that exchange:

Student: Is waterboarding torture?

Rice: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — And by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did.

Student: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

Rice: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

John Dean feels that Condoleeza Rice just admitted to being part of a conspiracy to commit torture.