you want to know the truth. the enemy of the state is him and the group that control him. the fbi and the justice department have become vicious monsters controlled by radical left scoundrels, lawyers and media who tell him what to do. cnn chief national affairs correspondent jeff zeleny is live for us this pittsburgh. i want to ask you about one moment over the weekend about the former president s rally and it was very unusual. cynthia hughes who runs a support group for january 6th participants spoke, she was given this platform to speak at trump s rally and was telling the story of her nephew who is a january 6th rioter and a nazi sympathizer who once said that hitler should have finished the job, which, you know, makes it kind of tough for trump and his supporters to really push back on this semi-fascist moniker that biden is giving. boy, it sure does. i mean, of all the defendants from january 6th the former president could have invited to speak at his rally for all
actually, about whether he was going to back down a little bit, right? because we saw the increase in threats against the fbi, this is a law and order president, but the fact that he didn t and the fact that he s leaning into this, it does concern me a little bit. but i think it s part of a strategy. if you undermine the fbi you undermine whatever it is that they find. so whoever donald trump puts whoever donald trump mentions, he puts a target on their back. so it may not be logical to people who are on the left looking to see what the strategy s but for his followers this really works rhetorically. for his followers, but in pennsylvania which is observe a swing state, there is a contested governor s race, contested senate race there, what s the risk/reward calculation. it was supposed to be a rally for mehmet oz and mastriano and he barely mentioned those guys. i do think there is a risk in doing that. i think that donald trump, again, he is just somebody who is not traditional
putting this pressure on people within the gop so that way he remains the lead in that party and continues to have this joud sized influence. ellie, what about the legal risk in all of that? in the sound bite we just played you heard donald trump referring to the fbi dumping out cartons on the floor, which you can read actually you could infer, then, that s an admission that the documents were there to begin with. right, it undermines the whole they were planted defense, doesn t it? look, i have to object to the characterization of course as fbi agents and doj as vicious monsters. i m going to say it anyway, that is utterly unacceptable. by the way, donald trump s whole categorization of this search is way out of line. the notion that his place was raided with no warning and it was this drastic step. i mean, that is completely contradicted by the factual record here. if anything you might ask why doj was to patient, was so solicitous by letting this drag out through informal nego
now and will continue to in the future. we made the investment, we re glad we did, it will benefit the nrsc and the party as a whole for cycles to come, but not now. look, it s pretty unusual to say we ve made this investment, it may not be helping now but it s going to help over the long term. and they might be right. maybe years from now this could benefit the republican party but right now it doesn t. and one of the problems is that these lists, the emails and phone numbers they ve vacuumed up, the tactics they were using, the tactics they used to raise the money from these people, people inside the republican party have been telling me these are exploitative tactics. explain this in detail. so we found that there were text messages going out, this he would find somebody s phone number and know that they were a republican donor. so in this sort of win red online donating system your phone numbers, your credit card is all saved. so they would send you a text message and say a p
shoot. it was not just my home that was raided last month, it was the hopes and dreams of every citizen who i ve been fighting for since the moment i came down the golden escalator. former president trump in wilkes-barre, pennsylvania, over the weekend lashing out at the fbi over its search of mar-a-lago. one january 6th committee member told cnn trump s attacks on the fbi could potentially amount to incitement joining us now natasha alford and he will knee honing. natasha, when you see the events saturday night, i heard from a republican strategist said that donald trump fell into joe biden s trap. biden went and gave his big speech calling out donald trump thursday night and this was trump responding to it. what do you think? i think that i was curious,