show them so you can grasp the horror happening in syria. it s been happening for seven years, in fact. local and international activist groups say barrel bombs filled with toxic gas were dropped from helicopters over the town on saturday. some of the victims choked, they say, then died of suffocation. cnn has been unable to independently confirm either the images or account in part because syrian government forces surround the city. we want to bring you the latest now from inside syria. cnn s fred pleitgen is the only western journalist right now in damascus. tv journalist. he joins us now. what are we learning from your sources of what people on the ground experienced? in douma? reporter: they said it was absolutely awful, achbd sndande. i can tell you, that day started with a huge amount of air strikes over the douma area which was encircled by assad forces but held by the rebels at the time and apparently those helicopters showed up and dropped canisters. the opposition is saying
they say shortly after the can st canisters were dropped, a toxic gas was released and people started to have severe respiratory problems. they had hundreds of people had trouble breathing, a lot of them, of course, trying to seek medical aid which in itself was almost impossible in those besieged areas. that s also where some of those horrifying images came from of children having trouble to breathe. people then lying on the floor, people with oxygen masks trying to get help some way. then, of course, they say dozens of people were killed. we still don t know the exact death toll, but even after all this has happened, the russians, anderson, are still saying they believe that all of this is a hoax. anderson? and what s the assad regime saying? reporter: that s interesting because the assad regime said they were pressing an offensive on the area at the time but the offensive was moving forward so quickly they didn t need poison gas to move quicker. they also say the areas that were
and nobody bothers looking at that. and many, many other things. i think it is a disgrace that a thing like that can happen. reporter: a couple of things to point out, the president said at one point they found there was no collusion with russia. mueller s team has not issued a finding. another thing is the decision the president has to make at this point and that is whether to fire the special counsel robert mueller or push out rod rosenstein which could in effect put him out of a job. i started to hear this, if the president doo does that, they w move towards impeachment in the house. firing robert mueller is the whole ball game. i don t know if that is the case. i think the ball game is what
attorney/client privilege. were there communications of coverup if the president said he didn t do it? is that a crime if they talked about it? we don t know. that is one of the things that they are trying to get to the bottom of. and the special counsel says this isn t in my jurisdiction, this is somebody else s jurisdiction, so i am going to hand it over to them and i think what we saw today, anderson, was a president and i was told who was much angrier at rosenstein, and jeff sessions than he is at bob mueller. gloria, a lot to learn. more on what the president said and what to make of the entire scene in the cabinet scene, jim acosta joins us now. he went on for some time and it was extraordinary to watch. reporter: it was. and we were watching the