Wolf Blitzer looks at politics, Breaking News and international stories. I had an aide next to my ear nearly screaming within the last several minutes when the president was with the italian president in the oval office but its an example of just how hard they are trying to keep reporters from asking the president questions. Obviously they cant be do that in the News Conference coming p up. You may see the president with the investigation, the president may be tempted to call on somebody in the friendly conservative media to lob a softball at him. Weve seen him try to do that before, wolf. Its one of these q a questions. Two questions from american questions, two questions from italian journalists, is that right . Thats right. Obviously the president at some of these two plus twos, one thing that weve noticed is at the very end of it, this happened at checkers with
mueller and the Special Counsel calling him out by name. There are some glaring factual errors in his tweets. Lets go to a fact check. We are talk being about the three tweets in the last 24 hours. Heres the first. The Robert Mueller rigged wish hunt, thats a mouth full. Your english teacher wouldnt love it. Its not true. Heres muellers team that we know about. 13 have at one point in their lives been registered as democrats, four no party affiliation. Worth noting but this is also worth noting, you recognize that guy . Thats Robert Mueller, the Guy Running The Probe Appointed by george w. Bush to be the director of the fbi, appointed by Rob Rosenstein and a republican. This is the boss, this is 9 second in command when youre
again, theres nothing in here that speaks to a conflict of interest as we would define it. You have three tweets, a bunch of claims and you have seven, eight, nine things or willful effort by donald trump to cast whatever bob mueller finds as being easily dismissed by him and his supporters. Really escalating as personal attacks on Robert Mueller. The president s Tweet Attacks are certainly also being backed up by Rudy Giuliani, the president s personal lawyer. He tried to clear up the president s point on a number of investigation issues. Listen. Hes rearing to referring a dispute that wasnt settled. I know how convinced he is that he didnt do anything wrong and
wants to explain it. You can only investigate an origin original problem. Theyre saying donald trump is unethical, scum bag, we have 183 unique tape recordings, only one with the president of the United States. He turned out to have a close friend betray him like brutus put the last knife into caesar. When don jr. Made calls to a blocked number, was that the president . I dont know. I cant tell you. I wouldnt pardon me. If he did that to me. All right. Lets get some analysis from our legal analyst, Rachel Coates and laura bates and our chief political analyst gloria borger. All of a sudden Rudy Giuliani is
saying he doesnt know if collusion is a crime. Thats moving the goalposts a little bit. What hes saying is if it were Collusion Trump would have had to pay for the hacking for russias hacking the American Election and he said hacking is a crime and then he went on to say and disparage michael cohen. They are punching back. I know hes quoting shakespeare here and how it has dissolved. Its up to bob mueller to figure out whos telling the truth here and what occurred and what did not occur and what cohn knows and what he doesnt know. And laura you can talk about this. If he says collusion is not necessarily a crime, Rudy Giuliani. Alan desh wits hr show wits sayt a crime. Lets put it to bed. When its used here in terms of an Umbrella Showing there is two coordinated people showing there is a conspiracy, it could be a whole host of things. To have Rudy Giuliani focus on the underlying substance, if you tell everyone, no, no, no, he didnt do this, its not a crime if i did do it. Are you saying he did or did not do it . Remember, as the focus has been on mueller and rose jerosenstei
the legal team, the more important nurms are what is the actual grand jury information. They have to be questioned to figure out, well, is it a partisan affiliation . Its like murder on the orient express. Its becoming more and more laughable. If you substituted conspiracy for collusion. Defraud the United States government, period. Or conspiracy to encourage russia to illegally go a hhead try to steal information. Another c word, Campaign Finance issues, et cetera. Giving contributions to a government or campaign. All of the different c words may not sound like collusion, but they fall under an Umbrella Term which is the number one seed to
focus on. If you wont address that, all of a sudden the president in his tweets going personally after Robert Mueller. Its the Robert Mueller, why is he doing this . Hes been calling it a witch hunt for how many hundreds of times. Yes, youre right. This is definitely more personal meaning Robert Mueller specifically calling this a scam and investigation. Republicans on the hill are successfully arguing that some people at the fbi have had some sort of bias against the president. They have held up these Text Messages between peter strzok and another agent saying they dont want trump to be the next president. Theyre going to stop it. What hes trying to do is take that strategy and pull it towards mueller. There are no Text Messages like this with mueller. He was appointed by a republican. He has served republican president s. This is not going to stick. He is a republican. Exactly. Christopher wray was named by the president and is a republican as well. The president sads about Robert Mueller, we have a very nasty and contentious business relationship. Yesterday Rudy Giuliani was asked on new day what are you talking about . And giuliani refuses to say. Its hard to know what the president is talking about but there have been stories mueller left the president s golf club and wanted a refund on his dues and the stories are that it was resolved amicably and that there were letters exchanged and that it was you know, it was not it was not a terrible thing and that it was it was
resolved. I mean, it hardly seems to me to be a disqualifier. What the president is trying to do is to further get his base together about Anything Mueller might do. Dont forget the context here. The context is that trumps lawyers have proposed sort of some kind of hybrid way in which perhaps they could hear from the president preinauguration versus post inauguration, maybe they can work something out. Mueller has been like buddha. They have not heard a thing. He has been sitting there and they have not heard a thing back from him. Rudy giuliani told dana bash that its time for us to hear back from mueller so i think the president is probably a little agitated by mueller right now to the lawyers. So consider that context as you think about the President Tweeting against mueller now
because hes trying to kind of get this resolved and push him to some resolution. Knowing what i know about bob mueller, which is only from other people, i dont think hes a guy that can be pushed. Another reason this doesnt just happen in a vacuum is Paul Manafort is going to be on trial this week. Starting tomorrow. Right. Former head of his campaign. Right. Theyre going to be calling 35 witnesses to talk about what manafort had done in terms of working for the ukrainian official, taking money, not paying taxes on it. This is going to be bad headlines for trump. We could see another Campaign Manager testifying against the previous Campaign Manager. It will be a bad week for him and he knows it and is tweeting aggressively. Well stay all over and question this event with the visiting italian Prime Minister. Theres a lot more coming up. The republicans dont want it. The president threatening a Government Shutdown if he doesnt get one thing. Well discuss. Plus, The Koch Network. Theyre now saying the Trump Administration is too divisive and is willing to give money to the democrats. Ill speak with a representative of the koch agency. Theyre using air marshals to put it out. We have new information. You might take something for your heart. Or joints. But do you take something for your brain. With an ingredient originally discovered in jellyfish,
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the president has money for the border wall with mexico. With just over just under 100 days before the mid term elections, theres fear at least among many republicans that all of this could end up helping the democrats. Is the funding of the border wall going to wait until the mid term elections . Probably. Thats something we do have a disagreement on. Youre not worried about a Government Shutdown . No, thats not going to happen. I dont like play iing politics. I dont think it would be helpful so lets try and avoid it. The president is facing a backlash from one of the Republican Party biggest supporters, the koch brothers. Theyre saying President Trumps
deivy divisiveness is cause being problems. Joining us is james davis, hes a koch network spokesman. James, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. So why is your network raising the alarm right now about the president . Well, weve always had the same vision, how do we remove barriers that are Holding People back from achieving their potential. So our engagement in the Public Policy and political process is just a small part of what this network does overall. It gets obviously a lot of attention. So as we look at the successes weve had in working with partisan coalitions throughout time, weve seen some great success. Tax reform. Weve seen justices. Weve seen va reform and i could go on and on, but weve also seen tremendous set back and those set backs are significant. A 1. 3 trillion spending bill. Then we see families being
separated at the border. These are just injustices that we have to continue to fight against and so we want to make it clear that Building Policy Coalitions as we have moved forward we think is the best way to bring cut through the divisiveness that weve seen across the country and to actually mobilize on some change and make progress on some of these issues. Weve talked about one of those areas this week. You had right to trial legislation which is for terminally ill patients, the ability to use experimental drugs. Congress completely agreed on this. The house and senate had legislation on it. The president mentioned it in the state of the union address. The American People overwhelmingly support it and yet congress was going nowhere so we said we have to step up our efforts and we launched a campaign ad lighting it. We mobilized grassroots and low and behold we saw tremendous
bipartisan support both in the house and senate and then the president signed it into legislation. Thats the kind of leadership that we need to bring forward to tackle these problems. Important issues, youre aware The Koch Network has been trying to persuade the president to shift his views on trade and tariffs. He has trade battles going on with china, europe, canada, mexico. Is that a threat to the overall u. S. Economy . Absolutely. Economys going really strong right now. The numbers just came out 4 point be point 1 . That is tremendous. Stronger than years and thats a testament to the work done on tax reform and removing the regulatory barriers. The tariffs threatens to undermine that progress significantly. This is a tax on the American People after all and, you know, even the policy thats put forward, its hurting the very people that it was meant to help, farmers now need a
bailout. Theres a 12 billion bailout being put forward. Its really not a bailout for farmers as much as its a bailout for the bad policy. At the end of the day we were talking about putting the policies in place for the bad actions on trade. Who holds our debt . China. You cant make this stuff up, wolf. The president s former chief political strategist, steve bannon, he replied yesterday telling politico that officials at The Koch Network, im quoting now, need to shut up and get with the program. How do you respond to steve bannon . Were not going to get into the divisive nature and continuing in that course. Were focused on uniting people to tackle challenges and help people succeed. Thats where our focus is going to be. Ill leave that to steve bannon. One final question on the Budget Deficit. Its exploding right now. Ill put some numbers up on the
screen 20678916 the Budget Deficit for that year, 587 billion. First year the Trump Administration went up to 660 billion. The Congressional Budget Office suggesting it could be a trillion dollars next year. Less revenue coming in because there have been tax cuts for the military and other issues as well. How does The Koch Network feel about a trillion dollar Budget Deficit coming up . We think thats awful. The problem is not a tax cut americans rightly deserve. That has stimulated the economy. The problem is the 1. 3 trillion package that republicans signed into place. That is a lack of leadership. Any democrats yet joining your network for support . Have you got any names youd like to mention . We have an open invitation. You know what, regardless of whether we agree on every issue or not, right . There are certainly issues where we can find common interests so we can unite to build strong bipartisan coalitions and drive these policy changes so that we can make some progress. The problem is its so deviivis and faction allized that even when you do find opportunities where theres agreement, its hard to work with one another because those relationships with been destroyed. What we see is we need to work