assistant to george w. bush. scott, let me start with you, were there echos of the axis of evil speech that president bush spoke about before the war against saddam hussein in 2003? this definitely had shades of that remark and i m glad to see that because during the campaign, donald trump ran as something of an isolationist and if you watched today s speech, he took you on a world tour of american priorities and american engagement. if you were expecting donald trump the isolationist you did not get that today. it was a firm and measured speech today, he spoke in clear terms. i was proud to see him call out the programs on petfar and malaria that the united states has invested in. i think he hit all the right notes for his american audience. i think his base will love it. i think a lot of americans agree with his message on reforming the u.n. and some gallup polling conducted earlier this year, only 37% of americans felt the u.n. was doing a good job and 60% thought it was doing a bad job. his calls for reform at the u.n. i think fall on some welcoming ears in the united states. brian fallon, i m going to play the clip on iran, on the iran nuclear deal, that the president just he spoke very bluntly about that, seeming to suggest there s going to be a new strategy as far as the u.s. is concerned and as you know by october 15th the u.s. must certify whether or not iran is in compliance with the iran nuclear deal, which the obama administration certainly helped work out. listen to this. the iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transaction the united states has ever entered into. frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the united states and i don t think you ve heard the last of it. believe me. it is time for the entire world to join us in demanding that iran s government end its pursuit of death and destruction. all right. certainly sounds like he s getting ready to walk away from that iran nuclear deal. but what was your reaction? i thought that was one of many examples of how intellectually confused, if not outright incoherent, the speech was. in one breath he was urging the world to come together and collectively confront the threat of north korea and in the next breath he is chiding the world over the last time it came together and did rally as an international community to stop a nuclear iran. he s also withdrawn from the paris agreement. he s gone around criticizing the united nations as a body. this is a guy who goes around thumbing his nose at international entities and international attempts to confront global challenges, and so what moral standing does he have to call on the world to act collectively against north korea? if you think about it, he gave a whole tribute in the beginning of the speech to this idea of sovereignty, basicallying may an agnostic valueless vision for how nations should independently decide their self-interest and let that be the predetermining factor and in the next breath tries to cast the struggle against north korea in moral terms, good versus evil. i thought this was an intellectually confused speech, a strained attempt to square his america first doctrine from the campaign, with the reality of the global challenges that the united states faces. you can t decouple america s leadership role in the world from the democratic values that we stand for and that have sort of provided the undergirding for the post-world war ii era democratic era around the globe. i think it will prompt a bunch of eye rolling if not literally and metaphorically of other leaders of the allied nations that he s gone around criticizing during the campaign and since. i want to bring christiane amanpour in this conversation as well. you had a chance to sit down and interview the president of france, emmanuel macron. i wonder if you were watching the speech with him and got his reaction? you know, i m sitting here at the french mission to the united nations. it is incredible that as i was speaking and wrapping up that interview and had already spoken and really sort of plumed the deaths of mr. mack con s view on the iran deal we heard what president trump said and i put it directly to president mack con, that this was the worst deal in history, an embarrassment and we ll see what will happen. mr. macron was very polite and very considered. but very clear in that he believes and so do all the other international signatories to the iran nuclear deal, that this is the best deal that can be accomplished right now. and getting rid of it, particularly in the context of the fact that north korea is actually now a nuclear power with the very imminent possibility of having intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that could reach american territory and certainly many parts of the world, he said it is not time to ditch the iran nuclear deal and he is going to try to convince president trump when he sees him again, he s already talked to him as he did last night, when he sees him again around the u.n. right now and in the next couple days, not to ditch this deal because it is the best that they have right now. he agrees with president trump on other issues regarding iran, that there must be more and better monitoring and bringing into line iran s ballistic missile program, that there must be a concerted effort to stop or to put the brakes on iran s what they call negative malign influence in the region whether it s in syria or whether it s in iraq or yemen whether it s in that part of the world. on many things they agree but not on ditching this deal because he said it would make it worse. when i asked him about north korea and you heard what president trump said about north korea, calling kim jong-un rocket man, saying that he was on a suicide mission, he again said, we all condemn what kim jong-un is doing. but a military solution is not the solution. he said just look at the map. there would be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of casualties should some kind of war break out in the e-john and elsewhere. region and elsewhere. macron wants to try to work with president trump and the rest of the world leaders here to enforce the sanctions, to be as tough as possible on north korea, but this must be a diplomatic and economic pressure, he said, and not a military solution, not at all. christian is going to have more on her interview with president macron coming up later on his program on cnn international. christian, stand by. jeff zeleny, you re over at the united nations. the speech, i sense and you may have a better appreciation of this than i did, got sort of polite applause from the international delegations, but certainly not enthusiastic applause. wolf, certainly that is true. polite applause in a couple areas, but not much applause throughout the course of the 41-minute speech. perhaps not surprisingly, it s difficult to align that parts of the world are going to hell. this was a very somber speech if you will, and i remember thinking back to the first appearance that president obama made here in 2009, as president, of course a far different reception. of course he had a booming enthusiastic applause. the world views these two leaders differently, no question, but as we sort of process and tick through other elements of the speech, i do think one headline as well is refugees. he talked about that and said the cost of resettling one refugee in the u.s. we can assist more than ten in their home region. again that is his view. the nationalist view of the trump side of the white house there, really speaking out against what many in his base, many evangelical support refugee resettlement. that is another issue we would be talking about a lot more if not for north korea and iran. on iran we are expecting this administration to reveal something about their strategy in october. they have to, of course. they have one more deadline. wolf, i think it s important to put in perspective. we heard candidate trump talk again and again about ripping up the iran nuclear agreement. he has found that it s much more difficult in office as he suggested on the campaign trail, so despite his tough rhetoric here and, indeed, there was tough rhetoric he suggested now might be the time to pull out of what he called a one-sided agreement. we still have to wait and see if he actually goes through with that and does that, wolf. yeah. he also really went after iran for supporting what he called radical islamic terror organizations. he specifically cited isis, al qaeda, hezbollah, the taliban, among others. there s a lot more to unpack, a lot more to assess. we re going to take a quick break. kate bolduan is standing by and she s going to resume our special coverage right after this. when i look in the mirror everyday. when i look in the mirror everyday. everyday, i think how fortunate i am. i think is today going to be the day, that we find a cure? i think how much i can do to help change people s lives. i may not benefit from those breakthroughs, but i m sure going to. i m bringing forward a treatment for alzheimer s disease, yes, in my lifetime, i will make sure. for tech advice. dell small business advisor with one phone call, i get products that suit my needs and i get back to business. he s on his way to work in alaska. this is john. he s on his way to work in new mexico. willie and john both work for us, a business that employs over 90,000 people in the u.s. alone. we are the coca-cola company, and we make much more than our name suggests. we re an organic tea company. a premium juice company. we ve got drinks for long days. for birthdays. for turning over new leaves. and all of our products rely on the same thing we all do. clean water. which is why we have john leading our efforts to replenish every drop of water we use. we believe our business thrives when our communities thrive. which is just one of the reasons we help make college a reality for thousands of students. today, companies need to do more. so john and willie are trying to do just that. thank you for listening. we re listening too. sfx: t-mobile mnemonic sfx: t-mobile mnemonic sfx: t-mobile mnemonic t-mobile s unlimited now includes netflix on us. that s right, netflix on us. get four unlimited lines for just forty bucks each. taxes and fees included. and now, netflix included. so go ahead, binge on us. another reason why t-mobile is america s best unlimited network. sfx: t-mobile mnemonic have you any wool?eep, no sir, no sir, some nincompoop stole all my wool sweaters, smart tv and gaming system. luckily, the geico insurance agency recently helped baa baa with renters insurance. everything stolen was replaced. and the hooligan who lives down the lane was caught selling the stolen goods online. visit geico.com and see how easy it is to switch and save on renters insurance. hello, everyone. i m kate bolduan. we are following breaking news on the monster storm barreling through the caribbean and headed right for puerto rico. hurricane maria. the storm that has already delivered a direct hit on the island of dominica as a category 5. now a brand new update has been put out by the national hurricane center and what it means for u.s. territories. cnn meteorologist chad myers with the new forecast. what are we seeing right now? the hurricane center just put out the 11:00 advisory, just minutes ago, and we are still at 160 miles per hour and the storm is still moving towards st. croix and puerto rico. the u.s. virgin islands and the british virgin islands still in the cone, so is puerto rico. the entire country, the entire territory, absolutely under the control of this category 4, maybe category 5 storm. here s puerto rico. 3.5 million americans live here. here it comes right along the shore. making landfall if the center of the cone is correct because the cone is getting smaller now, near palmos delmar. the area that will see the hardest wind damage, across the area as well, there is a national forest there. it is a rain forest. that will be damaged, but certainly not going to hit the populated area, let s say, if san juan was on the southeast coast. san juan is on the north coast. san juan is still going to have wind of 130 to 140 miles per hour. there will be weeks without power and may be weeks without water. this area, this territory, is certainly very much in danger of a life-threatening storm surge, a storm wind, and, of course, flooding with it. 15 inches of rainfall possible across parts of puerto rico will make mudslides and really more flash flooding because it is a very well-forested area. so this island is so forested we re not going to see the potential mudslides like we see in haiti where the deforestation has taken over so many of the land areas that mud comes down rather than water coming down. there is the storm right now. 160 miles per hour. we still have gusts to around 190. hurricane hunters are in the plane, are in the storm right now in their plane and they just found a 188-mile-per-hour wind gust about 700 feet off the ground. not the surface but 800 feet, 700 feet and that certainly some spots in the caribbean are well above that. there are spots in the d.r. that are, you know, 12,000, 10,000 feet high. the higher you go in a hurricane, mort the wind is, and there are plenty of spots there that are higher than sea level. kate? when it comes to places like puerto rico, i mean, you know, of course everyone is looking back in their hurricane history, but it s been something like more than over 80 years since a cat 4 or cat 5 has hit puerto rico. we don t know what could happen. no. 1932 was the last cat 4, 1928 the last cat 5. so much has happened from where there were 1.4 million people, now above 3.5 million people. the infrastructure and wires put up, the homes built, people living along the shore, a beautiful coast, why would you not want to live along the coast, that s the issue we re having now, where do we put these people, how do they get out of the way, but so many of these coastal homes and communities are not safe at this point. if you re talking about a ten foot storm surge, it is very, very important before nightfall to get into a safe place. no way to move tomorrow morning. category 5 is the latest update from the national hurricane center. chad myers is tracking all of it minute by minute. thank you so much. with puerto rico s 3.5 million people now in the cross hairs of hurricane maria the governor declared a state of emergency but is worried people aren t listening to the warnings. listen here. complacency worries me the most. some people might think might not really understand the magnitude of this hurricane or might think that it won t hit us as hard and all indications are that this is going to be devastating and catastrophic. this is going to be a very dangerous time and we want to make sure right now is recognize that infrastructure is going to be broken, but we need to focus on saving lives. absolutely right. let s go there right now as maria is heading that direction. nick valencia is in san juan with much more. what are you hearing from folks there? frantic last-minute preps are under way as people prepare for the worst of the storm to come. there s a lot of anxiety here, kate, among the residents, emotionally they ve been through so much. you see some of the sandbags at the hotel here has put up. check out how dark the clouds are now starting to get out there. it was about two hours ago we saw a rain wall form out there in the ocean. things have been slowly increasing, though. that wind has been sustained. i ll show you around the hotel where we re at. we ve been kicked off the beach because people are preparing for the worst. the governor giving a dire last-minute warning saying it s time to act right now. if you can get out, if you can evacuate, the time to act is now. the last-minute flights are under way. airports here close at 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. respectively so if you can afford it there is still time to catch last-minute flights. i mentioned the anxiety among residents. you have a territory here that still people here have no power. it s still noticeably damaged. you see roofs that are still damaged. you see people that are still struggling with the cleanup efforts. here we are about a week later after hurricane irma came through here and didn t give a direct hit to this island territory and now residents in this island territory are staring down at something that is expected to be much, much worse. kate? yeah. it must be exhausting the warnings coming out. no direct hit the last time, but this one is much more serious it seems for puerto rico. nick there is. thank you so much for following this throughout the day. we have a cnn exclusive we will bring in a moment. cnn has learned that u.s. government wiretapped president trump s former campaign chairman paul manafort. this is before and after the 2016 election. what does this mean for the russia investigation, what does this mean for paul manafort and what does this mean for the president? that exclusive is ahead. plus, a hail mary of all hail marys we will call it when it comes to health care with the last-ditch effort, will the last-ditch effort to overhaul uber get through or will it hit the very same wall all of the other past efforts have? where are the votes right now. that s coming up. you do all this research call for a free quote today. liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. you don t let anything lkeep you sidelined. come on! that s why you drink ensure. with 9 grams of protein, and 26 vitamins and minerals. for the strength and energy, to get back to doing what you love. ensure, always be you. at holiday inn express, we can t guarantee that you ll be able to contain yourself at our breakfast bar. morning, egg white omelet. sup lady bacon! fruit, there it is! but we can guarantee that you ll get the best price when you book with us. holiday inn express. be the readiest. he s on his way to work in alaska. this is john. he s on his way to work in new mexico. willie and john both work for us, a business that employs over 90,000 people in the u.s. alone. we are the coca-cola company, and we make much more than our name suggests. we re an organic tea company. a premium juice company. we ve got drinks for long days. for birthdays. for turning over new leaves. and all of our products rely on the same thing we all do. clean water. which is why we have john leading our efforts to replenish every drop of water we use. we believe our business thrives when our communities thrive. which is just one of the reasons we help make college a reality for thousands of students. today, companies need to do more. so john and willie are trying to do just that. thank you for listening. we re listening too. allergytry new xyzal®.ou have symptoms like these for relief is as effective at hour 24 as hour one. so be wise all take new xyzal®. . now a cnn exclusive the u.s. government wiretapped the former trump campaign chairman paul manafort. sources are telling cnn. that surveillance according to sources took place before and after the election, as manafort emerged as a central figure in the russian medal election meddling investigation. to shimon and evan perez and pamela brown. lay it out for us. what have you learned? sources tell us, kate, that the fbi got permission from the surveillance court to monitor paul manafort before and after the election. this is an extraordinary step for the fbi to do such surveillance of a high-ranking campaign official and, of course, manafort is now at the center of the russian meddling probe. we re told there are intercepted communications that raise concerns about whether manafort was encouraging russians to help the campaign. other sources have told us that this intelligence was not conclusive. as you know special counsel bob mueller who s looking into this has been provided all these communications. what exactly do we mean by encouraging? we re told that fbi has communications, right, that these are talks between suspected russian operatives, relaying what they claimed were discussions with manafort, as well as communications involving manafort himself. none of this has amounted to what people consider a smoking gun in this investigation. there s still more work being done to determine whether there s a criminal violation here. manafort has previously denied he ever knowingly communicated with russian intelligence during the election, and he s also denied helping russiaens undermine u.s. interests. from your reporting we know he was under surveillance and then a period he was not and then under surveillance. do we know whether or not president trump spoke to manafort while he was under surveillance? what we ve been told by sources the time period under which manafort was under surveillance we re still talking early this year well after the campaign, and we ve learned from sources that manafort was talking to the president, that he and the president were communicating during that time. so it is possible that those conversations were collected. the new york times, shimon, flushes out some other details on the search and kind of what is followed. tell us about that. yeah. the new york times yesterday afternoon in its report said gave some interesting details about how the raid, the search took place inside manafort s home in virginia, which happened over the summer. you know, they describe how fbi agents who entered the home, picked the lock, in some raids sometimes they bust through the door, in this situation they picked the lock, they went through the house, manafort was sleeping, he was woken up, they searched him, and then they searched his home. they took photos of various suits, expensive suits is what the times says, they then took some materials in binder and copied some information on his computer, and most interestingly, probably, is that, you know, the times says that bob mueller s team, the special counsel s team, told him that he should be expected he should expect an indictment. all right. sh shimon a lot in there, thank you so much. so joining me now, jeffrey toobin is here, the former federal prosecutor and cnn senior legal analyst. so jeffrey, it s not every day, i think it s important to point out with all the details we have here, not every day that the former campaign chairman of a president is under federal surveillance and federal investigation. it s the only one i can think of was john mitchell who was president nixon s campaign manager who ultimately went to prison in watergate. so he was he was being wiretapped. he was being listened to. he was under surveillance for a period of time that was before and after the election. how serious is this? it s really serious and it s worth remembering, the fbi can t just wiretap anyone they want. they have to go to a judge and they have to present evidence that this person is a there is probable cause to believe that this person is involved somehow in counter intelligence, in aiding foreign intelligence services. that doesn t prove that they are, but it certainly suggests that the fbi had more than a hunch and they did it twice. so on two occasions they had enough evidence to persuade a judge to approve this kind of wiretap. as you heard, i was asking shimon about some of the reporting, some of the intelligence suggested that it appeared that manafort was encouraging russians to get involved, but it s unclear exactly what that means. what is the universal possibility when you hear that? it s very hard to delineate the entire universe of possibilities but remember, we do know that all the intelligence agencies agree that russia tried to help hillary clinton lose this election and donald trump win this election. whether it was efforts on facebook, whether it was wikileaks. the question at the heart of this investigation is, did anyone affiliated with the trump campaign encourage russia, participate with russia, in those efforts to help trump? that presumably is at the heart of what mueller is looking at. one of the many things that he is looking at at this very moment. stick with me. we re going to bring in to join the conversation a cnn legal analyst who conducted classified investigations of suspected foreign agents to the point that jeffrey was getting at, ash shah, to wiretap manafort investigators had to get a fisa warrant of course. what did they need to do, what did they need to show, what exactly did they need to say in order to convince a judge to go along? yeah. so i got fisa warrants when i was in the fbi and i can assure you it s very difficult. you just don t walk into a court and order a fisa. it s not a starbucks. so you have to actually have conducted an investigation for usually a period of many months, where you re getting whether it s intelligence from our agencies, maybe you re digging through their trash or conducting physical surveillance, you re gathering a lot of information in order to show a court that there s probable cause to believe that as jeffrey said, this person is knowingly acting on behalf of a foreign power and engaging in clandestine intelligence activity. so they are they are looking like they are spying on behalf of this foreign government. and what your intent is, what you re trying to convince the court is, that if you commence this electronic surveillance, again you are already using other techniques, we need to use the other technique because we believe that in these communications, we re going to get more foreign intelligence about what this foreign intelligence service is up to and how this person may be participating in it and potentially other people who are involved. because, you know, intelligence agencies are human source based services, just like our cia. they re recruiting people on the ground. you want to know who they re working with. also, human who are doing these investigations. i bring that up because you re back in your old post you were not blind to the world going on around you. would there be an extra level of scrutiny that would be offered or demanded for a fisa warrant for someone who is so closely linked to the president-elect or the president of the united states? absolutely. so in the fisa statute itself first of all, there is a broad provision that people, especially u.s. persons, cannot be surveilled based on solely first amendment activity and political activity is given some of the biggest protection under our first amendment. this is going to be something that is going to be looked at generally, anything associated with a political campaign, very carefully. then on top of that, you have an active, ongoing election. now look, the fbi has a very checkered past okay in the 70s they were doing some incredibly sketchy stuff involving political figures. they don t want to touch this with a ten foot pole if there s any doubt, especially when it goes to a court. there has to be that additional level. then they get to a court and the judge looking at this, now this judge has no skin in the game, this is an article 3 federal judge with life tenure who s going to be looking at this, that judge will give it an extra level of scrutiny of to make sure that, you know, this is the check on the executive branch on the fbi to say i want to make sure you re not up to something, you know, that you re not supposed to be doing. so i think at every level, particularly given the target, particularly given that, you know, there was an election that was under way, careful scrutiny. jeffrey, of course when you hear the word wiretap if you follow the news or the election or the president at all you know where everyone s mind goes, to the tweet that he put out in march that created such a problem for him and created so much confusion. does anything in this that you see coming out in this report, does anything that we ve learned now overnight and today, does anything contradict what the fbi and the justice department put out in their statements in response to the president s tweets, essentially saying they have no information that supports those tweets? right. the most important tweet that you re talking about is the one where he said, president obama had my wires tapped in trump tower. there is nothing in this report that suggests president obama had his wires tapped in trump tower. the only possibility it seems is that trump s voice was picked up on a wiretap of paul manafort s phone, somewhere, whether in trump tower that s something we don t know, right. on his cell phones or most taps are on cell phones, not land lines. so no, it is it does not vindicate this trump, this tweet by trump, earlier this year, and it is worth pointing out that then director comey, the department of justice more recently, have all said there was no the department of justice under jeff sessions says they do not. i think the statement was we confirm that there are no records related to wiretaps as described by the march 4th, 2017, tweets. which seems pretty categorical to me. give me your final thoughts. well, i think that there are tapes and so to the extent that there are associates of the trump campaign who have been captured in some of these communications we know that they are going in to some of these committees to talk and those committees those statements that they made can be prosecuted if they re false and they may be called to testify in front of a grand jury or become targets of mueller s investigation. so i think this changes the game a little bit in terms of both putting pressure on people who may have something to add and definitely on manafort. absolutely. because, you know and i think that he probably has way more information to give and the criminal angle that mueller is pursuing is i think intended to pressure him into providing more information on the intelligence front. yeah. all right. asha, jeffrey, great to have you. thanks very much. a lot more to come in this for sure. coming up for us a new health care push, but will republicans face the very same problem how the gop s last-ditch effort to overhaul obamacare could come down to, say it with me now, just one republican senator vote against. we ll be right back. t-mobile mnemonic sfx: sfx: t-mobile mnemonic t-mobile s unlimited now includes netflix on us. that s right, netflix on us. get four unlimited lines for just forty bucks each. taxes and fees included. and now, netflix included. so go ahead, binge on us. another reason why t-mobile is america s best unlimited network. sfx: t-mobile mnemonic parts a and b and want more coverage, guess what? you could apply for a medicare supplement insurance plan whenever you want. no enrollment window. no waiting to apply. that means now may be a great time to shop for an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan, insured 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[ l vwho can turn the worldan jeton with her smile?s who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? well it s you girl, and you should know it. with each glance and every little movement you show it. you re gonna make it after all. it takes a long time to get to the top. you re gonna make it after all. but with america s best you re gonna make it after all. bumper-to-bumper limited you re gonna make it after all. warranty, the all-new volkswagen tiguan will be there every step ow! of the way. at the top of the hour, senate republicans will be meeting behind closed doors for their weekly lunch. the lunch not a surprise. i don t know the menu. i can t tell you. the topic is a last-ditch effort to pass an overhaul of obamacare called the graham cassidy bill, graham and cassidy came on this show to unveil their plans here just over the summer. but since then, the effort didn t really go anywhere or did it? speaker paul ryan is calling it the best last chance for republicans to fulfill their seven-year campaign promise to repeal obamacare. but the clock, it always is on capitol hill, is ticking on this one in a big way. cnn s brian nobles is on capitol hill watching all the movement here. ryan, what are you hearing right now? are the votes there? kate, if this seems like a report we did for you about a month ago, that s because it s exactly the case. in fact, you could probably you find one of those and hit play and we would be in the same spot. we re in a razor thin margin so fun for you to do it again. exactly. we re essentially at a razor thin margin here of republicans trying to push through another health care reform bill. this one slightly different than the one that they presented about two months ago, but again, essentially it s the same group of players that we re keeping an eye on. right now, our whip count is pretty fluid. a whole bunch of senators who remain in the undecided camp. only one senator, senator rand paul of kentucky, is an outright no, but the other senators that voted no in the past, senator john mccain, senator susan collins, they are definitely in the leaning no camp right now trying to be won over by the supporters of this bill, lindsey graham and bill cassidy. others like lisa murkowski of alaska is cautious in her approach, wants to see the bill play out before making a definitive decision. the big difference here is we may not get a full score from the congressional budget office for several weeks, until after the september 30th deadline which is crucial to the passage of this bill which means a lot of sthors will be flying senators will be flying blind as far as the impact of this bill long term but they are trying to convince them they know their numbers are strong, this is a viable alternative, it will be better for their individual states because of the flexibility this is going to allow states in terms of block grants and they believe that they can evenly push this over the finish line. like it was two months ago, it is going to be very close. it is going to be very close and it s going to be very close because not only the timeline but what is in the bill. it is similar, but it is not the same from the bills that have been proposed and pushed and failed in the past. lay it out. what s in this bill and what s different this time and very much the same? let s talk about what s the same and one of the reasons they will have hard time pushing it through because it is pretty much a wholesale repeal of obamacare. it will get rid of things like the individual mandate which is a core tenant of obamacare. it s going to keep in place some of the tax credits that made obamacare what it is. now what it does do, which is slightly different, is takes the bulk of this funding and wraps it up into individualized block grants issued to the states and that will give the governors some level of control as to how they will issue their medicare payments. now the reason they re making this pitch to these individual governors because they feel that there s a funding imbalance right now in terms of medicare, especially through obamacare, where there s a small group of states, highly populated states, that are getting the bulk of the funding. the pitch they re making to a senator like dean heller who is, of course was on the fence and a no vote at one point that nevada would do better under this plan and the thought being if you put it in the hands of the governors they will be able to make easier decisions for their individual citizens. of course, the problem is, kate, there are still medicare cuts in this bill. that s one of the reasons that susan collins of maine has been reluctant to get behind in and democrats still feel these core tenants of the bill that rip away the things that they feel were important in obamacare are now gone and that s one of the reasons that if this is going to get done, it s going to be done with all republican support. keep in mind, kate, even if we get it through the senate, even if it passes through the senate of 50 votes, it then has to go to the house and will likely not be able to be changed so the members of the house will have to vote on it as is if they want to pass it and right now we have no idea what rank and file members of the house feel about this bill as it currently stands. we have no idea on a whole lot of front os fronts and not a lot of time. thank you so much. all right. let s talk about it. joining me cnn commentators and analysts former republican senator and presidential candidate rick santorum here, doug high the former deputy chief of staff, ryan fowler a former spokesman for hillary clinton s campaign and kirsten powers is here. senator, i must start with you because you were very much involved in the conception of this health care plan. no matter how great the policy is, in your mind, there is a very important thing that is missing as ryan pointed out. the official score from the official score keeper of legislation, the cbo. why are you okay with them moving ahead with a vote without knowing the full impact. first off, cbo has communicated to the republican sponsors of the bill they will have a score in time for there to be a score before the final vote. so i think we re pretty confident that will be the case. let s just be honest, there s really two chunks to this bill. one as mentioned before, is the per capita cap on medicaid scored by cbo and there really aren t any substantive changes to it and that score is known and out there and been there for months. the other part is a block grant that takes the money from all the obamacare taxes, the only taxes that are repealed under this are the taxes on employers and individuals because of the individual and employee/employer mandate and the medical device tax. it s about $250 billion in taxes. it s not small, but it s all related to the employer and employee mandate. the rest is block grants to the state. let s be honest, how difficult it is to score a block grant that says this is the money every state is going to get. so there really isn t a whole lot of question here about how much money this will cost. it s pretty laid out in the bill and that s why we re fairly confident cbo will get a score. kirsten, something similar was said by senator ron johnson, one of the now sponsors of the bill. he said it this morning for our viewers, listen to this. cbo takes so long, this is actually pretty simple. we re taking $1.2 trillion of obamacare funding and we re pretty well attaching to the senate health care bill which has already been scored and doesn t take a rocket scientist to kind of add those two figures up and give us the score we need to actually vote on this, but cbo is cbo and they re saying they need weeks. i reject that notion and think we can decide based on the information we already have. do you think that s going to be good enough for skeptical republicans? well, i think susan collins is going to be the main one who has been concerned about the cbo score, right. so i mean we re only talking about a few people here basically rand paul, john mccain, susan and lisa murkowski. these are people who have been skeptical. mccain seems to be moving in the direction of the bill because his governor of arizona has endorsed it. you still have, you know, rand paul seems pretty entrenched and that leaves collins and murkowski and collins has been very clear . the rest of the people don t seem to care that much about the cbo scores because they got bad scores and they seemed okay. i call them bad in the sense that people will lose their health insurance. for republicans that s not the concern. the concern is not about universal coverage. it s about sending it back to the states and letting the states decide what they want to do. what are they going to do with the block grants and what that means in terms of people being covered by health insurance. the voices in my head say you are shaking your head. i can t believe that are republicans are considering going ahead with this. you don t make a sequel to a movie that bombed at the box office. it had a 17% approval rating and this is worse than the original. the cbo said they might be able to examine some of the impacts, but they are unlikely to publish a number of how many people will lose coverage under this new proposal. that is the critical number. this bill is not following regular order. if john mccain is going to be consistent for why he voted against the bill last time, he should be voting no. they are doubling down on cuts to medicate. people like lisa murcowski and susan colins and states that expanded medicate populations will see deeper cuts and those states that have done the right thing by accepting federal funds to cover low income populations. i didn t think it was popular to have a bill that was less popular than that over the summer. they are making it here. with all due respect, brian, as someone who drafted the bill and can tell you the details, you are wrong. it s not rocket science. can you tell us as you are sitting here today how many peel will lose coverage? is it 22 million like the bast bill? brian, other than the money that is taken out because of the employer mandate, all the other money is going out to the states. if the states want to put an employer mandate and the state of california wants to do an employer and individual mandate, they can. what does it mean? california would get a lot of their money back. they don t have to put up a 10% match. you didn t mention that. our bill doesn t require them to put up a 10% match to get their funds. if you allow me to finish. secondly, we also allow for 15 and up to 2915 and 20% of the second block grant that was obamacare spending to be used to help the basic medicaid program. states will have a flexibility if there is a shortfall, they can use money from the other block grant that doesn t require a match. medicate does require it to be able to help out. they will have flexibility to be able to deal with both of the populations. there is less money, yes. some states like massachusetts and california and oregon, about five or six straights that are very high cost and expensive medicaid states will get less money under the bill. almost every other state will do better? they run more efficient programs. what are about louisiana? louisiana will be fine. hold on a second. let me bring in doug on this. one of the things that we heard from senator who is haven t been able to say where they land is that they need to learn more. they need to learn more about the bill. they need to know more about the bill. i do wonder, is there some benefit to the fact that the country has not been talking about this health care plan and been very focused. the news cycle and the elected officials, the white house, everyone has been distracted, if you will, and focused elsewhere, but not on health care. north korea, hurricanes. is there a benefit that the eyes of the country may not be on this debate to getting this through? i think the eyes of the country have been on the health care debate for seven years now. we have been heard that republicans have been unable to do anything. they are right. i think this is an elvis presley moment for republicans right now. it is now or never. we have a september 30th deadline and we tried to do things in the past and failed. in 2014 when i worked on repeal and replace. it s now or never on a 50 vote. it s not now or never on getting something done. you need to deal with the regular order which is a 60 vote threshold. i don t have high hopes on anything bipartisan, but we can talk about the hillary 2008 campaign was a terrible movie. we had grown ups and grown ups two. this happens in politics all the time. if you are republicans and have been campaigning on this for seven years, this is the time to act. if you are a republican senator and didn t like the things in this bill and previous renditions and you will be expected to vote for it in this bill, that can be a tough pill to swallow. what do you say to rand paul who said this is obamacare that redistributes the money. i have something momentarily that responds to rand paul in great detail. give us a preview. the preview is that rand paul said this doesn t repeal obamacare. what doesn t it repeal? they are right. the medicaid expansion goes away. we repeal medicaid expansion at the end of 2019. the tax credits and the cost share reduction payments to insurance companies go away. the mandate to buy insurance goes away. the mandate for employers goes away. all of these things, everything that obamacare is goes away and is repeal and replaced by a system that says we are going to equally apportion money based on 50 to 138% of pof effort tow every state. california s poor people will get the same amount of money as new hampshire. that s a fair system and not what obamacare is today. still are the votes there? no one has the answer to that. thank you very much. coming up for us, all eyes on hurricane maria after the storm devastated islands already in its path in the hard hit caribbean. where is maria headed next. it is a category five still. patrick woke up with back pain.
that s all the time we have. i hand it over to don lemon. 360 will be back tomorrow. this is cnn tonight. i m don lemon. the magnitude of this day is unbelievable. it is historic. it is a moment when our country is on the brink. on the brink of what could turn into a constitutional crisis and potentially on the brink of military acts in syria. a furious president trump surrounded by grim-faced military leaders in what was planned to be a meeting of syria, his arms folded, blasted the fbi raid today on his personal attorney michael cohen. i just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, good man, and it s a disgraceful situation. it s a total witch hunt. i ve been saying it for a long time. i ve wanted to keep it down. we ve given, i believe, over a million pages worth of documents to the special counsel. so let me be absolutely clear about this. the president is absolutely wrong. nobody broke into michael cohen s office. and nobody, not even the president, is above the law. a dozen fbi agents armed with search warrants legally seized documents from cohen s office, his hotel room, and reportedly his home. a source telling cnn those documents are related to stormy daniels. another source telling cnn the search warrant was very broad and included bank records. but ominously, president trump views this as an attack on him and on the country. sources telling cnn tonight that the cohen raid sent the president over the edge, because his attorney is like a surrogate family member. it s a disgrace. it s frankly a real disgrace. it s an attack on our country and it s an attack on what we all stand for. so when i saw this and when i heard it, i heard it like you did. i said, that is really now on a whole new level of unfairness. so he believes it s unfair and it s an attack on him. and he believes it s politically motivated. never mind that these are the facts. it s his own hand-picked deputy attorney general overseeing the mueller investigation. and today s raid was authorized by the u.s. attorney in manhattan who was hand-picked by guess who? president trump. they found no collusion whatsoever with russia. the reason they found it is there was no collusion at all. no collusion. this is the most biased group of people. these people have the biggest conflicts of interest i ve ever seen. democrats all, just about all, the democrats are a couple republicans that worked for president obama. do you see the body language there? the mueller investigation is not over. so the president is wrong, wrong when he claims they found no collusion. and the fact is, robert mueller is a republican. but sources warn the president s anger could lead to him firing mueller. why don t i just fire mueller? yes, fire the guy. well, i think it s a disgrace what s going on. we ll see what happens, but i think it s a really sad situation when you look at what happened. many people have said, you should fire him. again, they found nothing. and in finding nothing, that s a big statement. remember the investigation is not over yet. they haven t found nothing. and it s not just mueller who could be on the president s austin, you heard the president. he is angry. cnn is reporting the raids on michael cohen s office, reporting a raid on one of his homes as well. at least a dozen fbi agents involved. this is aggressive. it s aggressive, but i think we need to be clear about what was going on here. this would have been executed pursuant to a search warrant, which means that the fbi obtained permission from a judge to enter these facilities. they would have had to show probable cause that in these locations and in specified places, documents, devices, they were going to find evidence of a crime. and a judge would have had to agree to that in order for them to do it. this was i think calling it a break-in is really characterizing this as something that it s not. and the crimes here apparently are related to bank fraud, which is obtaining money through illegal means from a financial institution, and potentially campaign finance violations, likely contributions that would have been disclosed as required by law. let s talk a little more about that, because our gloria borger is reporting that the search warrant was related to stormy daniels, and search warrant was very broad in terms of items sought and the search included bank records. why do a raid like this instead of calling up michael cohen s attorney and saying, we need you to turn everything over? i think there is a false assumption that everything is handled, when you re talking about courts of law with gentlemen s agreements saying, why don t you fight this in a court of law? they may not be comprehensively giving you everything you need, so you have the right to get a search warrant, especially since there could be something fleetingly going away, like certain documents. don t confuse the two investigations. this was a referral by special counsel mueller handed over to an independent u.s. attorney who is of manhattan, somebody who was chosen by the president. the president actually had a hand of interviewing, much to the chagrin of many people, who replaced the people he fired just last year. the reason that s significant here is that there is an illusion that somehow mueller has been orchestrating this entire thing. what happened is a referral meaning, i may have seen something. this may interest you. it is not within my particular mandate. if you would like to, or you feel so desired to do so, please investigate it. it was not a mandate for the sdny u.s. attorney to do anything about it. it showed an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, and backed up by more than just mueller. a magistrate and the sdny attorney. so the president has conflated the term to be a witch hunt to include these two things that are quite distinct. quick question before i go to michael. the attorney-client privilege, does it apply here or not apply here, laura? we have to see, because every communication between michael cohen and donald trump did not necessarily fall under privilege. it would have to be counsel sought him on legal advice. if someone was in the room on a communication, cc in some way, it would not apply. and if the communication between the attorney and the client was somehow in furtherance of a crime, then poof, it goes away, would not be honored. this is not up to mueller, this is up to a court of law to decide. michael, you ve worked with mueller, correct? yeah. i ve got a couple questions for you here. the first one is why would the southern district of new york be investigating or looking into possible election crimes? because it s a crime to willfully violate the federal election laws. and they were given a referral, it appears, from mueller to say that this may be ongoing and worth your inquiry. we don t know also, though, whether or not this pre exists mueller s investigation. it could well be that the stormy daniels aspect of this is one aspect. there may be other women similarly situated or other people similarly situated that the investigation was ongoing, just like we had in flynn, where it was ongoing when mueller stepped into it. he found something additional. it was related. he passed it on. the rule of law was upheld and the process was adhered to. and so that s what prosecutors do. they look at crime and make prosecutorial decisions about whether it s worth prosecuting. and mueller can t if he finds something that looks like a crime or something unusual, he just can t ignore it, right? that s right. and if the reporting is accurate and it s early and we have to be very careful to not be, you know, too far ahead of ourselves, but if mueller came across something he thought needed a criminal investigation and worthy of inquiry and it s outside his mandate, then he is to go to rosenstein. rosenstein then makes the decision whether to leave it with mueller and expand the mandate, or take other action as appropriate. it appears from the reporting that he felt other action is appropriate, was the appropriate step to take, and he gave it to new york. then what laura said, because she said don t conflate or confuse the two. these are different investigations. this raid was actually referred, as we said, by mueller to the deputy attorney general rod rosenstein. then on top of that was authorized by the u.s. attorney in manhattan, jeffrey or jeff b b berman, who is the president s own pick for that office. so the idea that this is a witch hunt just seems ridiculous. if you look at the deciding officials that would be involved in a case like this, and you have to remember, don, that when you go into an attorney s office, it really requires permissions at the highest level. so you probably had christopher wray, the head of the fbi, rod rosenstein, the acting attorney general. the interim u.s. attorney for the southern district of new york, berman, and the head of the criminal division in the main justice department, all of whom are seasoned lawyers, all of them happen to be republicans, which i think is irrelevant, but the notion that that crew would somehow conspire to engage in a witch hunt against the president s lawyer for allegations of campaign finance violations doesn t hold true to me. i agree that it s relevant, but i think it s important to point out that the president keeps saying it s a witch hunt, it s the democrats, why aren t you looking at hillary clinton or barack obama, when these are his own hand-picked people. i don t know who is better to answer this, if it s osha or if it s laura. the reason i ask why didn t the federal government investigate this, would that be the eeoc? is that laura? i ll jump in, mike. it s true it is the fbc. the notion that the fbc has been a toothless dog when it comes to a lot of these cases, because you have to have the majority rule but also have to be unanimous issues about these very issues, about campaign finance, et cetera. even when they had the opportunity like the john edwards case to look at these examples of what may be campaign contributions, this counsel don mcgann was on the committee and he said, let s not go ahead and prosecute this the same way, although it ended up having an acquittal and hung jury. the fact that you have these kids being wrang he would by the fbi or the fbc could be because they ve been a notable toothless dog in some ways. she can speak all of next segment. the justice department and the fec have concurrent jurisdiction in matters such as this. the fec does the civil side of it, the u.s. attorneys does the criminal side of it. they both have concurrent jurisdictions, one criminal, one civil. osha, he keeps saying this was a break-in. these are anything but unlawful. this was anything but unlawful. this was a break-in raid, correct? this was pursuant to a search warrant. one thing going off what laura said that the president needs to understand is that this is happening. the fact this has referred to was beyond mueller. it s not going to stop the investigations. it s not going to stop the investigations coming out of other offices across the country. if mueller goes himself, the same thing will happen when he fired comey. these are now in the criminal justice system. judges have seen the evidence. search warrants have been issued. grand juries have been on it, indictments have been done. i think he is sorely mistaken if he thinks that getting rid of mueller will stop anything that s already been started in our justice system. she has spoken. don t go away. we have much more to come on the raid. the break-in of michael cohen couldn t have come at a worst time when the trump team is coming up empty. lincoln mkx, more horsepower than the lexus rx350 and a quiet interior from which to admire them. the lincoln spring sales event is here. for a limited time get zero percent apr on the lincoln mkx. hurry in today to your lincoln dealer. in birds eye protein blends. ok. they re delicious side dishes with the protein of beans, whole grains. .and veggies! mmm, good. my work here is dooooone! bird s eye protein blends. so veggie good. janice, mom told me you bought a house. okay. [ buttons clicking ] [ camera shutter clicks ] so, now that you have a house, you can use homequote explorer. quiet. i m blasting my quads. janice, look. i m in a meeting. -janice, look. -[ chuckles ] -look, look. -i m looking. it s easy. you just answer some simple questions online, and you get coverage options to choose from. you re ruining my workout. cycling is my passion. you re ruining my workout. with expedia you could book a flight, hotel, car and activity all in one place. his anger tonight over the fbi raid of his attorney michael cohen. anger, sources fear, could push him over the edge. osha, let me ask you, maggie hagen reported tonight in the new york times and she tweeted, trump is angrier than he s ever been, including the two news cycles. what that translates to is unclear, but mboth trump and cohen believe this is really mueller and that farming it out to sdny was a figure leaf. both sources say that this has crossed the red line that trump laid out for mueller going outside his purview. has he crossed the line? we need to understand that when mueller has an appointment with rosenstein, he has a subject kind of scoped. if he encounters something that s beyond the scope, he doesn t just shrug his shoulders and walk away. what if he discovers a human trafficking ring or pornography? does he say, oh, that s beyond my scope, carry on! no. the department of justice is required by law to investigate any evidence of criminal activity. so it will be passed on, as it was in this case. what this tells me is that rosenstein is actually taking his oversight responsibilities very seriously. he s not allowing mueller to continue something that might be very far outside his scope, not letting him cross that red line. instead he is allowing the regular prosecutors in the appropriate offices of the department of justice go along with this. and again, in this case it s a u.s. attorney that was interviewed by trump himself. so, again, as i mentioned before, he will be disappointed if he believes that getting rid of mueller or rosenstein or sessions is in any way going to stop this ball from rolling. this is coming at a time when the president s legal team is really diminished, and some say frankly they are outgunned by mueller s team. is that the way you see it, laura? i see the time ing is very curious given last week the president looking to sit down with mueller and his professional team. yet again you have someone conflating two issues, most likely investigations, with the hope that if you undermine the credibility of the investigation, it will give the president of the united states political cover to possibly say either he won t voluntarily sit down with that team per advice of counsel, or he ll be subpoenaed by mueller and his team and will be able to plead the fifth and say, it s not political suicide here. what i m doing is not going to answer questions in a witch hunt because we know that mueller is farming things out for fig leaf purposes as well. i think the fact he had his diminishing legal team is only going to exacerbate the president s narrative that for him to feel he has cover that mueller is run ning a witch hun and he s trying to hoodwink the entire american public, none of which have played out in the facts. so it was told to lou dobbs that he wants to consider impeachment. and the grounds for impeachment is following the law? it s not really a sensible position. what rod rosenstein did is what he swore under oath to do, which is uphold the law, as did christopher wray. the base of it, it appears, is they don t like how they re exercising their constitutional obligations because it is pillaring someone that they like politically. that s not what impeachment is about. that doesn t meet any one standard of definition of a high-crime misdemeanor style abuse of office, so i think it s rhetorically sort of convenient but not practically doable. what kind of charges can come from all of this? go on. i was just going to point out that increasingly, the deep state is consisting almost entirely of republicans, which is very odd. and i think that should be a clue that the only deep state that exists right now is the deep state of denial in the white house and among his lawyers that this is getting very bad for them. and he needs to get better legal advice on how to handle it, including potentially not talking about obstruction of justice on television like he did today. michael, what did you want to say? i m agreeing with asha for sure. i think the whole criminal justice system works best when each side is well represented. i think it behooves the president so take a step back, find a competent team so they can address the issues that are raised in a prudent, lawful and sober way, and i think we ll all be advantaged by that. there is no good in having a president without representation adequate to those who are looking into allegations of wrongdoing. i just hope he steps back, finds good counsel, lets them build a team for him, let them meet with mueller and make a forward path sobek get this resolved and behind us, whatever that is. hey, laura, two things if you can answer quickly. what kind of charges might stem from this? from michael cohen, you re looking at possibly bank fraud or tax-related issues, perhaps campaign finance issues. the president doesn t seem to have an exact link to this yet so i can t state what charges will be brought against him or anyone else. you talked about these kinds of cases, attorney-client privilege, can be waived. has this come up before? the notion of a waiver bwoul be different. that s saying i do not want my client to be held to that amount of silence. it will not protect communications. if they re made to forward a crime or hide criminal activity. also the notion that it can only exist if it was between the attorney and client. not outside entourages, not third parties who are around, not anybody who was bc d or cc d around it. just one on one, no one else around in furtherance of legal advice, they ll be protected. if it s about business or anything else could he talk to michael cohen now and it would be privileged? he could talk about issues, but i suspect there is a cone of silence they ll want to put between him and michael cohen at this point in time, because he had a great degree of exposure, and the president wants to have a 10-foot pole between them who he calls a good man. when we come back, it s like 1998 all over again. remember bill clinton and monica lewinsky? are we seeing a much bigger sex scandal that will rock this white house? 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this is about mueller s investigation. that s disingenuous, don, let s be honest. your show and this network for months and months have screamed russia, russia, russia. guess what? there s nothing there that connects to president trump. how do you know? are you part of the investigation? how do you know that? no, no, no, no, no. how do you know that? are you part of this investigation? no, because if you take 20 lawyers, biased lawyers who hate the president, tens of millions of dollars, the full investigatory power of the united states government and you can t find anything after a year of having been investigating the people who are running this investigation were hand-picked by the president of the united states, skand many o the people who are running this investigation or part of this investigation are also republicans. how did all of a sudden robert mueller, who is beloved by the right wing and donald trump and everyone, all of a sudden become a pariah because he s all of a sudden doing his job? being a republican hardly means you re in favor of president trump. he says it s a witch hunt by the democrats, and he says most of the people on the team are either democrats or have donated to democratic entities. they re republicans who can t stand the president, and by the way, i think the republicans sadly are as complicit in what s going on now in terms of these swamp tactics as the democrats are. let me just be very blunt. the president needs to fire jeff sessions. he needs to fire rosenstein. he needs to fire mueller. this is a sham investigation. this is his own justice department trying to usurp the power of the presidency. if the congress wants to investigate this, they re a co-equal branch, go at it. but his own justice department if he s innocent, why would he fire those people? it s not about innocence. it s because they re creating a witch hunt atmosphere that s really, in many ways, i think reminiscent of what we see in dictatorships. when you raid the president of the united states private attorneys, residents and offices, and when you say we re going to pierce attorney-client privilege, what you re admitting here is we have nothing on russia, nothing significant, nothing we can hang our hat on, but we are going to find a way or make a way to impeach the president of the united states. let s just be honest. that is the end goal here. that is the goal of the washington swamp. it s the goal of the media, is to impeach the president. and the president has to say enough. we have business in this country to attend to. that s quite a tale you weave there, but go on. it s quite a tale and it happens to be the truth. it s why the president needs to take action. let somebody else talk. go ahead, dana. are we done now? we re hardly done. i m one of those true republicans that can t stand this president because he has hijacked the republican party, and he has hijacked democracy. that being said, frankly, don, the trump apologist has sidetracked so much, i kind of forgot your question. can you refresh my memory? i said the president has called the raid of cohen an attack on our country and an attack on all that we stand for. is that appropriate? yes, it s appropriate, and i m going to tell you why. one of the things that differentiates the united states of america from many other countries, including dictatorships, is that in this country nobody, nobody, not the president do you think it s appropriate to call it an attack on our country? no, i think it s appropriate for michael cohen to be investigated and to be raided. because in the united states of america, one of the things that distinguishes us from many other countries is that in this country, nobody, not the president of the united states or his minions or his personal lawyer or whomever, is above the law. they are all subject to the law, and they all need to behave legally. so i do think it is appropriate for him to be raided. look, follow the trail. follow the money trail. i mean you know, i actually marvel at the fact that donald trump has gotten as far as he has gotten with his limited intellectual curiosity, vocabulary of about a four-year-old, and the worst damn lawyer that any of us have ever seen. this guy couldn t even get an mba executed. dana, you ve been demeaning the president in this manner for so long. he went to an ivy league school and he s a self-made billionaire. i wish i were that dumb, i don t know about you. let s get to point about our democracy are you going to answer the question or continue to pivot. it takes time and we only have one segment. because you really talk and talk and talk, and steve, make your point. i m trying to. i m trying to. so at this point there s three of us in this panel. you spoke all you wanted to without any of us interrupting. i now spoke and it s charles turn. he answers to no one which is why he needs the truth. a lot of people try to downplay the whole stormy daniels story. they re saying, oh, this is about an affair. we know it s not about an affair he had years ago. this is possibly breaking lawsuit, campaign finance, breaking election laws, and that s what it appears this may have come down to. wouldn t that be incredibly ironic if this piece of it becomes the thing, becomes the biggest thorn in his side? around that story has always been just an incredible amount of smoke. what did cohen tell his bank when he was getting the loan? he said he got a loan, i guess, a second mortgagor something. what do you tell them? you can t lie to them and say it s for one thing if it s for another. why did the detectors and they reported it, did the president know about the agreement which he says now he did not know about it. did he know about the payment? did the president pay him back? would he ever ask the president to pay him back? there s a lot of smoke and mirrors on this, and the easiest way not to get in trouble is telling the truth. i don t know yet if they have told that truth, but something about their activity around this caught the eye of mueller and his investigators. they referred it to another group of fbi investigators, attorneys of new york. they went to a judge. a judge evaluated what they brought to them, and he said, it looks like this warrants the search warrant. so something there is tripping a lot of triggers. and there are six major things that you have to attain in order to get before obtaining a search warrant, investigators had to obtain the evidence. the warrant had to come from an assistant attorney general or the attorney general. he had to confer with the department of justice before receiving it. privileged communications between cohen and his science. a clean team, including lawyers and agents not working on the case. we must ensure that the. researchers had to develop a review process for the seized material. that s a. it s a lot of hoots, but don, i want to know, what happened to russia? where did russia a go. i know we re krumplged for time, but this is an important conversation. as i said from the very beginning when you started to talk, these are two. . tell trump not to pleat up with porn stars, and he s married, and drop his trousers. okay, guys. i got to go. i gotta go. if you don t want that to come out, don t say it. remind me of the question, don? we ll be right back. & to personalize their treatment, imagine what we can do for the conditions that affect us all. imagine what we can do for you. an angry president trump during a meeting to talk about syria going off on the fbi raids of his attorney michael to hen. two huge stories that could get much, much bigger. i m talking to nicholas kristof, writer for the new york times. what doou you think about this? we have two separate investigations related to the conduct of the president. it s unbelievable. i guess i do worry that the president s reaction clearly he s so viscerally angry. it does raise the risk of the mueller investigation, whether he replaces sessions or he s clearly angry about this. and many trump supporters and his spokespeople are conflating the two investigations into one. this is not robert mueller s investigation. no, there is a referral, but this is a separate investigation, and it s also important to note that even if mueller is ousted that the southern district of new york investigation will continue. so these are you know, this is an incredible moment when we have two separate federal investigations of criminal behavior. and again, he called this an attack on our country, an attack for all that we stand for. but even while all of this is going on, i want to talk about what s happening now. i want to talk about what s going to happen with syria. it may be more likely to happen in syria because of the events today. do you think it s a wag the dog situation? i don t know, but i do i think that it was likely this was going to happen, anyway. i think it s almost 100% certain that it s going to happen now after this. you heard the president say today, talk about the timing, he said u.s. would be withdrawing from syria soon, remember. john mccain is basically he s blaming those words at least for the chemical attack. here s what he said in a statement. he said, president trump last week signalled to the world that the united states would prematurely withdraw from syria. bashar assad and his russian and iranian backers have heard him and emboldened by american inaction, assad has reportedly launched another chemical attack against innocent men, women and children, this time in douma. is he right? was assad emboldened by president trump s words? it s a little harsh and i don t think it s fair to blame president trump for the use of chemical weapons. that s on president assad, that s on iran and that s on russia. but it is true that assad has repeatedly used chemical weapons back since 2012 because the international community, in part represented first by president obama, most recently by president trump, has kotolerate it. a year ago president trump fired 69 cruise missiles at a million dollars each into the ground. that was a one-off event that didn t change the calculations of assad. and from that point of view, mccain is right that trump did not stand up to it, that when he talks about pulling troops out of syria that that, i think, does make assad a little more likely to think, yeah, he can do whatever it takes to win in that area of eastern bouta. this is the end of the t tomahawk missiles you re talking about. there was an attack on 80 people. 48 people died saturday in douma. president trump called putin out by name for backing animal assad. why do you think the president is calling putin out now? i don t call the president reprehensible for not calling him out. i was glad he called him out now. but it sure does look like he is going to fire missiles at syria, but the problem is, does he have any military force is important when it s harnessed to some sort of broader vision, when it s harnessed to a strategy. i don t see what that strategy is in the case of syria. i don t see what that gives us leverage to do. this is a really dangerous moment in syria with the israeli strikes apparently having killed four iranians. we re really concerned whether there will be another israel-lebanon war. i don t have confidence in president trump using his military toolbox in ways that will avoid problems with russia and with iran, and in ways that will actually advance syrian interests and our interests and global interests on the ground there. we ll know what s going to happen soon. the president indicated today as well that we will know. i think it s coming. thank you, nicholas. appreciate it. when we come back, evidence that scott pruitt lied about controversial raises given to friends who controversial pay raises. what can you tell us? what do you know. as you mentioned, last week i reported that scott pruitt had signed off on two really hefty pay raises for two of his staffers back from oklahoma. what was controversial, though, was not so much the raises themselves which, yes, were quite large, but the white house refused to sign off on these. when that happened, pruitt ordered his aides to sir cup ve circumvent the process. and then they interviewed pruitt and he denied any knowledge. what i can report today though is that an e-mail is currently circulating the agency which n which sarah greenwall, one of the aids who received the raises said pruitt was in fact the one to sign off on these. i have two administration official whose have seen the e-mail confirming that to me. what s happening right now, don, is epa officials know there s an investigation into these raise says so they re trying to corral all the relevant materials that may appear to contradict what pruitt said in his fox news interview. this one is troubling them the most, though, because it s not really something they can explain away. let me ask you this, because you re saying there s an e-mail floating around. it s not from pruitt. the epa spokesman said there no evidence in the e-mail that pruitt knew about the pay raises or that he even saw the e-mails. that is correct? what the e-mail says, it s sarah green wawall telling hr t c confirm that her raises have been processed and she says the adm administrator approved these raises. the statement i got in my professional opinion seemed to indicate they were confirming that fact but not that it was correct necessarily. now it s almost like they re throwing the onus on her to explain that she was in fact wrong for saying that. great reporting. we appreciate your time. when we come back, the president is angry about the fbi raids on michael cohen. is he going to do anything about it. why don t i just fire mueller? well, i think it s a disgrace what s going on. we ll see what happens. we ll see what happens. wonder what he means by that. a family of seven technology leaders working behind the scenes to make the impossible. reality. we re helping to give cars the power to read your mind from anywhere. and we re helping up to 40% of the nation s donated blood supply to be redirected to the people that need it most. magic can t make digital transformation happen. but we can. do ndo not misjudgenity quiet tranquility. with the power of 335 turbo-charged horses lincoln mkx, more horsepower than the lexus rx350 and a quiet interior from which to admire them. the lincoln spring sales event is here. for a limited time get zero percent apr on the lincoln mkx. hurry in today to your lincoln dealer. i knew at that exact moment . i m beating this. my main focus was to find a team of doctors. it s not just picking a surgeon, it s picking the care team and feeling secure in where you are. visit cancercenter.com/breast introducing walit s a great days. for a great deal! tender, center-cut sirloin or chicken on the barbie, fries, a draft beer or a coke, all for just $9.99. only for a limited time. so don t walk, run to outback. well, lik-oh!st of you, i j-very nice.a house. now i m turning into my dad. i text in full sentences. i refer to every child as chief. this hat was free. what am i supposed to do, not wear it? 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to an end as he stated many times. we look forward to that happening. the president is not obstructing, he s fighting back. the president is stating his opinion. he s stating it clearly. he s certainly expressing the frustration he has with the level of corruption that we ve seen from people like jim comey, peter strzok, andrew mccabe, there s a reason the president is angry. frankly, most of america is angry as well. there s no reason he shouldn t be able to voice that opinion. once again as i stated earlier, the president stating his opinion. it s not an order. he s been crystal clear how he feels about this investigation from the beginning. you said a moment ago the investigation itself is corrupt. the mueller investigation, you mentioned comey and strzok. the entire investigation based off dirty, discredited dossier that was paid for by an opposing campaign. The latest news from around the world with host Brooke Baldwin. at a public rally and yet people trying to yell over and defending them from doing their jobs and yelling their network sucks on live tv. do you support that or not. we certainly support free will do of the press, we also support freedom of speech and we think those things go hand in hand. what s she saying there, kaitlan? she took an interesting tactic, brooke, blaming the media saying they report too much on national security interest and reveal too much intelligence sometimes, which is an interesting approach that had nothing to do with what was happening at that rally last night. i think the reason the white house was asked this question was not simply because the crowd at the president s rally was championing this, it happened when the president was a candidate. of course sarah is right, they do have free speech to say whatever they want. the point of this is the president himself retweeted a video of those supporters of his chanting at jim acosta saying that. that s why the white house is getting the questions. it s not simply that it happened but the president retweeted it and seemed to endorse it happened on his own twitter feed where the white house says he s expressing his opinions. jeff, you were in the room. when that happened, what was the reaction in the room? the reaction, sarah sanders said on the one hand, yes, the white house does not endorse any of that. as kaitlan said, that s not actually true. actually the defense of this, going back to how she says the press needs to act responsibly. no question that is accurate. but then she brought up a debunked, absolutely false statement really from more than a decade ago about a cell phone conversation of osama bin laden being reported on. it was reported at the time, that was debunked literally a decade ago. sarah sanders was reading that from the podium as a fact using it as an example of how she says the press is not responsible with national security measures. that was their prepared response to something that happened last night, going back decades ago to something that has been debunked. the reality is the white house has done very little to push back on the violence atri ralli and conversations atriali s at. the majority of people are interesting, kind and courteous. there are always a number of people who are chanting slogans like this. that certainly gets attention. but the white house drew itself into this, as kaitlan said, because the president endorsed it. brooke. jeff and kaitlan, thank you very much. back to the president s tweet this morning on sessions and questions of obstruction, with me harry litman, former u.s. attorney, deputy assistant attorney and cnn national security analyst and former fbi special agent. great to have both of you on. harry, let me start with you, you ve got it, on this tweet where you essentially have the president ordering his own attorney general to end the investigation into himself and campaign and russian interference that already clearly produced dozens of concrete results not to mention the new york times last week broke the story that the personal counsel is looking into trump s tweets into their wide ranging obstruction inquiry. do you think, sir, on the face of it, is the tweet obstruction of justice? you know, on the face is one thing, but the basic question about whether it s strong evidence of obstruction, is it a command or kind of suggestion. man, it s a mighty thin distinction. he uses the word should. but he says right now it is staining our country. it s a rigged witch hunt. i think if i were in the oval office and hearing the president of the united states use these words, i would take it as an order. by the way, order or not, it s still solid evidence of obstruction. the big we is going to be, is he trying to shut down the probe and why. yeah, it certainly doesn t help him. the times does report it. but he should have known this from his lawyers months ago. each and every one of these tweets is totally admissible. it s not simply the individual ones. as you put them all up against one another and follow the sequence, it really spells out someone who is ordering this probe to be shut down. asha, you heard sarah sanders say, no, no, no, this wasn t an order. this was trump s opinion. he s simply expressing his frustration. you have the president s attorney then soon after, rudy giuliani, saying, no, this was his first amendment right of free speech. to harry s point he said should, didn t say must. but aren t these tweets official samts from the white house? how do you read this. yes, they have been construed as official tweets. we know, for example, travel ban litigation his tweets were used as evidence of what could have been his intent in promulgating that. brooke, i just want to point out the irony, when he s stating these things and freedom of speech but i think it was only a week ago he started to strip high national security officials of security clearances for expressing their opinions. right. one thing i just want what i see in addition to what harry said about the pattern of obstruction, he s clearly feeling heat. it could be for the manafort trial and what he s afraid will come out. let s remember mueller that indicted 25 russian nationals and 3 russian companies. that can t make putin very happy. this is starting to uncover, embarrass and expose their operations here. i have to wonder in that private meeting one-on-one, whether he has pressure coming from another direction that we don t know about to try to get rid of this investigation. harry, just going along with this tweet and i want to move onto manafort, if trump made this request in private, this order or whatever you want to call it in private, wouldn t mueller then be like green light, interview witnesses, who was in the room just as he has for comey and conversations around michael flynn. wouldn t that be similar? completely. so that s right. you would go through and ask how would a reasonable person have construed this kind of eruption from the president and especially the giuliani statement it s just first amendment is a real non-s.e. s r sequitur. it s just speed. how would you take it, et cetera. it s right flat out in front of us. i don t think it takes much of a strong inference to say trump is trying to issue an order here. the point you make is good, sessions is recused to either a bizarre order to try to carry out. rod rosenstein, leads you to wonder, does he understand that. the other piece you didn t hear from russia today, not only did russia attack and interfere in the u.s. elections in 2016, they are still doing so into the midterms this november. so asha, even if this wasn t an order, why would this president why would the white house want this whole investigation to be shut down because of russia currently? that s the question. once again, these are going mueller is equally going after russians as much as links potentially between the campaign. if the president was being sincere when he stood walked back his walk. i can t remember where we are in the walk backs to the walk back, he believes the assessment that russia interfered in our election, this cannot be a witch hunt. this is finding the people responsible for that election interference and that cyber attack. so you know, it s trying to have it both ways and very puzzling. asha and harry, thank you so much. great, great point. thank you both on that. coming up next, we want to get to paul manafort and the trial at the courthouse in virginia. day two of the form early campaign chairman. details on why one of the star witnesses may not testify. gut wrenching video of aeromexico plane crash and its aftermath. amazingly every single person on board that plane survived. in just a couple minutes we ll talk to the teenager who shot this video. later members of a conspiracy theory group show up at the president s rally last evening in tampa. we will explain who they are and why they were there. stay with me. i couldn t catch my breath. it was the last song of the night. it felt like my heart was skipping beats. they said i had afib. what s afib? 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when you switch to liberty mutual, you could save $782 on auto and home insurance. and still get great coverage for you and your family. call for a free quote today. you could save $782. liberty mutual insurance. liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. a bit of this. why not? your hotel should make it easy to do all the things you do. which is what we do. crowne plaza. we re all business, mostly. promise anything. even though they mention what they might hear about rick gates, maybe they didn t want to promise he would take the stand. the defense attorney will hold them to having failed to keep a promise. the second reason is more seemed like they were having a little trouble getting some of the testimony through with the fbi agent. the judge was getting frustrated and wanted them to move the documents in through mr. gates. the prosecutor does not want to wait to put in evidence. you never know what s going to happen during a trial. no, your honor, let s let this witness move documents then they are in evidence and you can do what you want with them. it may have been more games manship and to try to throw the defense off saying this is all mr. gates is doing. the other development, just ran through fancy ostrich jacket, watch, clothes, apparently the prosecution wanted to show these photos of these lavish items to the jurors and the judge said no. the judge said specifically plp manafort is not on trial for having a lavish lifestyle. why would the judge make that call. first the prosecutors are trying to paint the details, get out their story. they wanted to get out onthe narrative this guy was funding his lifestyle with money he didn t declare income taxes for. they wanted to show the jurors this isn t a little amount of money, serious amounts to buy big things, fancy clothes, clothes that most people on the jury don t buy and fancy cars. which would have potentially resonated with the jurors and the prosecutor wanted that. the judge is trying to say, we re not going to convict someone simply because they are wealthy and how they spend their wealth. it has to be they lied to the irs and lied to the banks. that s the only crime there. each side is fighting to tell their narrative right now and the prosecutors want to say ostrich jacket every time every day until closing because that says, hey, that s a person who knows how much money they have. he s not being duped by his assistant, rick gates. apparently they aren t allowed to say the word oligarch. it s a hard one to pronounce. rich, rich russians. last question. do you think in the end paul manafort will testify, take the stand. very unlikely. most defense attorneys caution against that at every turn. it s very risky, very hard not to get caught in some type of inconsistency and really not necessarily sure there s much upside. sarah coyne, thanks. thanks for having me. a girl that survived the plane crash and pulled out her phone and started rolling. this is her video of the aftermath. we ll talk to her and an expert about what went wrong but how 103 people survived it. him and believe he may be suicidal. the doctor was shot while cycling to work on july 20th. and now to this story here out of mexico where it s being called a kind of miracle. aeromexico jet crashes and burns near the airport. when you look at these pictures, somehow all 103 people on board managed to survive. watch as a passengers records the moment. this is strong wind gusts, brought down this twin-engine jet moments after takeoff. can we say how extraordinary this is, when you see this plane make this nosedive, crash, full fire and everyone on board survived. you know, it s actually getting to be more typical, more the rule than the exception. there have been many recent plane crashes, for example air france in toronto, singapore, in taiw taiwan, asiana, more survived than not. crasheses improved to help people survive the crash. before then you think no one survived a crash. not so anymore. federal aviation association said over 80% of accidents no one dies. incredible. it s incredible. what happened? well, i think if given this tape, often passenger cell phone recordings can be extremely helpful in investigations, and it will be on the black box but the weather played a role. so many have wind shear, detection, these microbursts are so powerful they can literally drive a plane into the ground. a lot of the study stemmed from delta air lines flight 191 which crashed in dallas. tomorrow will be the 33rd anniversary of it, august 2nd, 1985. there aind shear, microburst, drove a plane into the ground. it s important to know this, not only can it put a plane in the ground. excuse me we re going to trump s personal attorney rudy giuliani. i said it just yesterday on fox that we believe that the investigation should be brought to a close. we think they are at the end of it. they should render their report, put up i guess if we were playing poker, we re not, put up or shut up. we have everything to believe they don t have anything. the president has done anything wrong. they don t have any evidence he did anything wrong. they have evidence up this alley and that alley, chasing things about cohen. we found out t scl. week before that t horo report cast doubt on the legitimacy of the clinton investigation and in particular this one. although in the clintonvestig hy were biased but no effects of bias. in this investigation they ren . that s still investigated. they had such a severe bias they shouldn t hav been involved in it. i don t know what the consequences lawyer, one of the consequences would be you re going to attack the legitimacy of the investigation. the attorney general see this as a directive? no, it isn t at all. as we said immediately, it s an opinion. he used a medium he uses for opinions, twitter. one of the good things about using that, he s established a clear sort of practice now that he expresses his opinions on twitter. he used the word should, he didn t use the word must. there was no presidential directive to follow it. he didn t direct him to do it and he s not going to direct him to do it. is he still interested in meeting with mueller? he s always been interested in testifying. it s us, meaning the team of lawyers, including me, that have the most reservations about that. as lawyers, i don t know, you all watch television. i don t know if you find a lawyer on television that ever thinks their client should testify. why should we believe that, though? everything he says indicates the opposite, he doesn t want to? really? i haven t heard him say that. i ve heard him say i want to be interviewed if my lawyers can reach an agreement on what the ground rules will be. we ve had a hard time doing that. we re still i m not going to give you a lot of hope it s going to happen. we re still negotiating. we haven t stopped negotiating. the most recent letter, they sent us a proposal. we responded to their proposal. they took about 10 days. yesterday we got a letter back for them. we re in the process of responding to their proposal. why doesn t he fire rosenstein. he wants the investigation to come to a conclusion and not interfere. what s why this whole obstruction of justice is nonsense. if he wanted to obstruct it, he could end it. then you could battle whether he has the legal right to do that, which i think he does. he s not going to do that. he has made it clear he wants it to run its course. on the other hand he s a person with a first amendment right to defend himself, first amendment right to express his opinion. as a president it s more important to express his opinion. these kind of allegations can do damage to the country, not just the particular president. if he believes he s innocent and he is innocent, he should speak out. you said the other day conclusion is not a crime. some people said you re moving the goalpost. no, no, no. i said that from the very beginning. you know, jeff, it s like an alternative argument, which is a little too subtle, i guess. he did not collude. there is no evidence he colluded. in the alternative, conclusion is not a crime. so if you wrote a brief, you d say throw it out on the wall, no conclusion. if you don t want to throw it on the wall, throw it on the facts. do you think obstructing is a crime? of course it s a crime. you said the president under article 2 of the constitution, i m not fog to tell you my opinion of it because i haven t gotten to the conclusion of researching it. under our conclusion if the president is acting within his capacity as president and he fires someone, that can t be questioned. now, is there a narrow area where you could question him? i don t know. we don t have to deal with that. he had legitimate reasons for firing comey. just look at the horowitz report about his investigation of hillary. look how he started the investigation. look how he ended the investigation of hillary, rather. the whole who areal in the bureau was under serious questioning while he was there. a host of reasons. he wrote memo. a legal defense under article 2 and factual defense. if he didn t have article 2 he didn t obstruct anything. the cases say this, not all of them but many, the best proof is in the pudding. he didn t obstruct the investigation. it s been going on for a year and a half. they talk to every witness they want to. they haven t asserted an executive privilege. they have every single document. unlike other presidents, who had every right to do it, but we didn t assert executive privilege. thank you. thank you. i didn t witch it. i understand there was a big development but i don t know. okay. so this is obviously rudy giuliani, this is the president s attorney. he s at this campaign event in new hampshire and he was caught by reporterses. he s made news, he was on cnn with allison cammarata this week. the latest thing this week was conclusion isn t a crime. let s read from headlines we heard from rudy giuliani now. talking about a lot coming from the tweet the president sent out earlier this morning essentially saying his own attorney general should end this, in his words, witch hunt, this entire investigation where mueller was appointed not, by the way, by the ag but rod rosenstein, deputy attorney general. saying the mueller team, they don t have anything. saying this whole investigation needs to end, we heard from sarah sanders in the briefing. reiterating about what the president said in a tweet, it wasn t a directive, it was an opinion. no, they don t want to fire rod rosenstein. so let s go to harry litman, former u.s. attorney who is back with us. i ve got to tell you, the point in the end, harry, where you heard rudy giuliani say he did not collude. on the other hand conclusion isn t a crime. i m getting lost or confused in all the spin. yeah, i think that is the country. they backed away from no conclusion, to, well, maybe conclusion isn t a crime. i think here it s a misnomer. they haven t been talking conspiracy. the bigger point is his assertion about the legal and factual defense, the notion that under article 2 the president can t violate, be guilty of obstruction of just, something the supreme court has announced. on the facts, it doesn t really matter where the investigation has the president when he was speaking with comey was trying to shut it down for so-called corrupt motives basically to keep it coming home to roost in the white house. so i think both it s factual and legal defenses don t really hold up. it has been a series of statements, restatements and revisions from rudy giuliani in the last few weeks who seems at peace with it. another statement from rudy giuliani, harry, stay with me, julia, he have you standing by as well. giuliani on this whole will the president sit with mueller for the interview, he said the mueller team counter-offered on this trump interview, might that be a reason why the president seems so rattled today? we don t know yet. it seems a big hint. we re reporting i m trying to report right now about what this letter from mueller actually said. we don t know. we know they had not heard from mueller. it was radio silence for a while. perhaps they heard something back that could have agitated him, although i into with a source earlier that said that wasn t the case. it is an important piece of information rudy let out there. we need to unravel this. otherwise his arguments are the same that the president said should and not must. i don t know about you, if the president of the united states said to me, you should do something and i worked for him, i don t think there s a lot of difference between those two. but i think they are trying to slice the salami, because an order could be interpreted as more obstructive than just a kind of a suggestion that, you know, i hate this investigation and you ought to make it end. as you knowr brooke, sessions has recused himself. so he can t actually fire mueller. he would have to ask rosenstein to do it, if he could ask him at all. which he just said they don t want to. right. they don t want to. look, the president has wanted all these people gone. we know that. he s tweeted about sessions, he s tweeted about mueller, he s tweeted about rosenstein. this is not new. the president doesn t like any of these people even though, by the way, as you know, he has appointed each and every one of them except for mueller whom rosenstein appointed. harry litman, if you re robert mueller, the special counsel here and you re obviously looking at the president s tweets, taking in what the president s attorney is saying on television, what are you thinking right now? first i m thinking this is all admissible. much of these might be designed to play to the base or whatever but each and every tweet is going to be a piece of evidence that s going to go to the critical issue in obstruction. we know for sure he tried to shut down the probe. the question will be did he have so-called corrupt intent. was he basically trying to keep protect his own skin and that of his family. each of these is going to be significant. i think they are also significant in the aggregate, brooke, because the more the president sort of waffles and says different things and back pedals and changes the narrative, the more it looks like the truth is, in fact, something he knows he has guilty knowledge about, which is he s trying to shut it down for selfish reasons. let me jeff toobin is joining us. i m told he s at there he is. jeff, you re there in new hampshire. were you there when giuliani was talking to reporters? did you just hear what he said? yeah. that s why i m here is i m following mayor giuliani around. i thought he said something interesting i had never heard him say before. he said, well, this was on twitter where he gives his opinion, and it s not the statements on twitter are known to be opinions as opposed to presidential directives. i don t know what exactly to make of that. official white house statements. well, that s the other thiet. i believe sarah sanders in the past said these were official white house statements. that distinct was something new i hadn t heard before. i don t think if it s legally significant but it s an attempt to draw a line between what he says on twitter and official orders that he gives. i don t know if that would hold up legally. i don t know how you would test that. that distinct that distinction the mayor drew is one i hadn t heard before. saying the mueller team reaching out and counter-offer for interview between the president and mueller team. tell me more about what the president said and your interpretation of that. one thing he has been saying all week, i ve been with him much of the week, ten days ago we responded to their latest proposal for the interview but we hadn t heard back from them. today we just heard back from the mueller office in terms of their latest counter-proposal. this has been going on for months this drama about will he testify, will he not testify, these negotiations. based on everything i ve heard from the mayor, notwithstanding the president s professed desire to do this. it certainly seems like no interview is happening. that then raises the question of whether mueller will issue a subpoena and are we off to a multi-month legal battle that could wind up in the supreme court. just in terms of a voluntary agreement to testify, that sure looks unlikely based on everything i ve seen. just lastly back to giuliani regard to this tweet, it wasn t a directive to the attorney general, it was the president s own opinion. he was the one who said he didn t say we have the tweet highlighted, he said attorney general jeff sessions should stop this rigged witch hunt. it s not like he said must, which sounds mighty reminiscent to me, jeff, who said on the would, wouldn t think. yeah. you know, again, when the president of the united states says to a cabinet member, you should do something, that skhur sounds like an ordered to me, whether it s on twitter or not. the interesting distinction the mayor was attempting to draw moments ago, oh, well, it was on twitter so it s more of an opinion rather than a directive. people can evaluate as they choose to. okay. all right, jeff toobin, thank you so much in new hampshire. gloria and harry, thank you. beautiful, beautiful this time of year. quick break and back with more on this breaking story next. fact is, every insurance company hopes you drive safely. but allstate helps you. with drivewise. feedback that helps you drive safer. and that can lower your cost now that you know the truth. are you in good hands? 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(giggles) get symbicort free at saveonsymbicort.com. if you can t afford your medication, astrazeneca may be able to help. automatically adjusts on each side to keep you both comfortable. and snoring? how smart is that? smarter sleep. to help you lose your dad bod, train for that marathon, and wake up with the patience of a saint. the new sleep number 360 smart bed, from $999. smarter sleep will change your life. the website for touted plans for 3d printed firearms went dark overnight. federal judge blocked a deal the texas based non-profit reached that essentially makes it illegal to print them online after president trump said 3d guns don t seem to make much sense, sarah sanders is blaming the department of justice for approving the settlement. the department of justice made a deal on the president s approval. on those regards, this administration is glad it is delayed to support the already decades long rule on the deal that prohibits a wholly plastic gun. i wanted to follow up on this today the defense distribute the company behind this have already distributed the plans for these guns. so what now? over a thousand people were downloading this. they were teasing they were going to put it out today. they put it out a couple days ago. there was before the temporary hold, he didn t seem so worried. listen to what he said right then. i already upload the plans. the ship has sailed. it s throwing information out. it s irrevokable. no one can take it back. those blue prints are there. people have taken of the site. you don t see them. there is a hearing next ike e week the judge before said there are some serious issues here first amendment issues. it will be interesting to see how this plays out. as we said yesterday, tremendous implicationles. back to our breaking news, the president beats the jeff sessions should end the russia investigation. his attorney rouge rouge just weighed in. stay with me. i did mom. wanna try it? yes. it intensely moisturizes your hair and scalp and keeps you flake free. manolo? look at my soft hair. i should be in the shot now too. try head and shoulders two in one. moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis was intense. my mom s pain from i wondered if she could do the stuff she does for us which is kinda, a lot. and if that pain could mean something worse. joint pain could mean joint damage. enbrel helps relieve joint pain, and helps stop further damage enbrel may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma other cancers, nervous system and blood disorders and allergic reactions have occurred. tell your doctor if you ve been someplace where fungal infections are common. or if you re prone to infections, have cuts or sores, have had hepatitis b, have been treated for heart failure or if you have persistent fever, bruising, bleeding or paleness. don t start enbrel if you have an infection like the flu. since enbrel, my mom s back to being my mom. visit enbrel.com. and use the joint damage simulator to see how joint damage could progress. ask about enbrel. enbrel. fda approved for over 18 years. i knew at that exact moment . i m beating this. my main focus was to find a team of doctors. it s not just picking a surgeon, it s picking the care team and feeling secure in where you are. visit cancercenter.com/breast so let s promote our summer travel deal on choicehotels.com like this. surfs up. earn a $50 gift card when you stay just twice this summer. or, badda book. badda boom. book now at choicehotels.com another day, another recall on some food you may have in your refrigerator. they are warning accidence of salad wrap products could be making you sick. dozens of beef, poultry and salad items were sold at popular chains like kroger s, trader joe s, sell by dates july anything through july 23rdful so if you think you might have something like this in your refrigerator, you can log onto the usda website, usda.gov. i m brooke baldwin, thanks for being with me. let s go to washington, the lead with jake tapper starts right now. thanks, brooke. guiliani just told mueller, put up or shut up. shut up.
quick final note on what donald trump jr. told laura ingraham today. we mentioned it in our report on the administration shifting story on the trump tower meeting in 2016. you heard donald junior get caught off when asked about his contradictory stories. here s what he said when he called back. they started playing the recording and then it got cut off. it was a 20-minute meeting. tended up being about essentially nothing that was relevant to any of these things. and, you know, that s all it is. should have played that right after we aired the first part. the news continues. i want to hand it over to chris cuomo. cuomo prime time starts right now. happy to use our time to get the record straight, anderson. always good to see you. i m brushing my hair just like you. that s what you get for wearing my suit. i am chris cuomo. welcome to prime time. rosie o donnell has reportedly gathered hundreds at the white house for a musical protest. but this ain t smiles and show tunes. she is spoiling for a fight. her history with trump is as long as it is ugly, and she is here to make her case to you. the president is not in the white house, but he may once again be watching prime time, and if so, the invitation stands. listen to rosie or not and come on to this show and make your case to this smart and concerned audience, sir. and it would be good for the president to explain his latest apparent admission by tweet. now trump says that trump tower meeting with a russian operative was about getting dirt on clinton. remember, that s not what he wrote about that meeting. what will it mean to investigators? and the white house says it is reimposing sanctions on iran. why now? what changed? what are the risks? we have all the factors laid out for you, and i have a new do. it s monday. let s get after it. did you know that there has been a nightly protest at the white house every day since trump s meeting with vladimir putin in helsinki? well, there is, and you re going to hear about it now because longtime actress and longtime thorn in donald trump s side rosie o donnell joined the mix and brought all of these stars from broadway with her. why? let s find out. rosie o donnell, thank you for being on cuomo prime time. thanks for having me, chris. so you re down there in the nation s capital. it s being billed as a party with a purpose. what is the purpose? the purpose is to remind people of the truth that lives inside them so that when they re so confused and lied to by our president and this administration, they re able to find that thing about america that they love and that s true and that s real and remember that feeling and hold on to that feeling as we go through these next very tumultuous weeks, as we lead up to the election and the mueller report finally coming out, that it s going to be very loud, and it s going to be very crazy. and we all have to remain focused and centered on the truth. is it just good vibes that you re spreading there, or do you have a message of what you want to happen with this president? well, i think most of america wants him to be out although you can t tell that from reading some of the you know, watching fox news or whatnot, which is just like state-run tv in russia at this point. so all we have to do is encourage people to show up, to protest, to use their voice to save democracy. we ve got just a couple months till november, and till then we have to fight with everything we got because if somehow they re able to rig the elections again, as i believe they did in 2016, then we re going to all be in trouble as democracy dies right here on our watch. well, one step at a time. the russian interference is a known fact. the impact on the election is not a known fact. you believe the actual outcome well was rigged or just that there were efforts? yes. no, i do believe it was rigged. i don t believe it was efforts. and if you listen to all of our mainstream intelligence people, they believe it too. they don t believe votes were changed. well, i do believe that there were exact well, you know the facts, right? yes. you know the facts. what do i think? did they come in there and make trump win when every single exit poll and every person in america knew for sure that hillary clinton was going to win? do you think there was anything to do with russia or just a real big swirl for donald trump in these specific areas with the same exact amount of votes that were needed? i don t know. it looks very hinky to me. here s why i ask you about what this is about because let s say you win. let s say the democrats win. you get the house. probably not the senate, but you get the house. there s a call for impeachment among progressives like yourself. yes. two things happen. well, i don t think it s just progressives, chris. there will be a call for impeachment from all those not heard, who are the majority in america. okay. i give you that fact. i ll stipulate to it for the point of this argument. okay. so everybody calls out. you don t have the votes. it doesn t happen. you galvanize support for the president, and we are torn more apart in this country. are you worried about that outcome? no, i am not. i am believing in the american people. i believe in this country. i believe in what it was founded on. i believe in the constitution. i think that on election day, we re going to show up in a huge way, in a way that we haven t ever seen before in the united states. and people have just really had enough. they ve had enough of a president who separates families and puts babies in cages. you know all of the catch phrases. every day he does something worse than the day before, and he tops it and tops it and tops it. i believe that trump is loathed in america, that people are embarrassed and ashamed of who he is, and that come election day, we re going to stand up at the polls and let him know. and unless he goes in and has the russians kind of fix it like he did last time in 2016, you know, we re going to see him gone. and that s what i m waiting and hoping for and hoping that people across the country are inspired to use their own voice in whatever way to get people to know that this country is worth fighting for. amen on that. the more people get involved, the higher the voter percentage is, the more people will get what they want. it will reduce the effects of money on politics. it will make everything better, not perfect, but better. so i m all with you. the more people go out and vote their conscience, the better, whatever their conscience is. here s my other concern. yeah. there is reason to criticize the president. i am not going to fight you on that point. however, for the democrats to come into mainstream power, so that means that they have what the republicans have right now, the house, the senate, the white house, i think history suggests you have to be more than anti. you have to be pro things. you have to give people a reason to believe. you have to give them some type of sense that captures their imagination and gives them hope. what is that for democrats where they can say not just he s a liar, he s a bad guy, but here s how we ll make the economy even better, which is hard given the numbers. that we ll be even safer than we are because that s what people will be looking to. well, when you report the economy, you report how it affects the top 1%, or you report how it affects everyone. the economy is doing good if you re a multi-billionaire. it s not doing good and the tax cuts didn t do good for the average american. so i don t believe that the economy is thriving with the metrics that you guys are using. but the fact of the matter is he s not only bad because he s a liar. he s bad because he doesn t know how to inspire people or invoke that emotion in them of truth d and what about his rallies? first of all, people are paid, chris. you know that. people were paid since he went down on the escalator. he pays people to show up at those rallies. that is a fact. but i don t know that that s why he gets tens of thousands at the rallies. i thunk he captures a lot of motion for people. when did he get tens of thousands at the last ral lay? tell me when? at the tampa i think they only had 9,000 seats and there were people outside, but rosie, i ve seen him. he gets big groups of people who come out. he gives themes that resonate. whatever they re positive or not, that s up to people to decide. i don t have the facts that his crowds are bought off. but you can look at well, you can look at all the requests for extras to come and cheer with signs for him. you can find those tangible pieces of evidence. those are not real rallies. you know, when he went down on that escalator, he paid all those people there, calling rapists and mexicans rapists. this is not real what he s doing even though he keeps screaming that you guys are not real. i know he does that. i know he does that, rosie, but listen. look, i ve known you a long time. you ve known my family a long time. i know your mom. and mom would be the first one to say, let him say what he s going to say. you say what you know is true. you always keep your dignity. you always fight the good fight. so that s what we do. when he came down that escalator, did i see the reporting that there were paid people there? yes, i did. did i believe it? yes, i did. have i seen it at all of these rallies? no, so i m not going to do what the president does. i m not going to say they re all bought off, they re all fake, because i think that s b.s. i don t think it s true, and i m not going to play to it just because i think it s satisfying. but you could do the evidence to find out. sure. we do it all the time. lead with that story before you play his rally. to play his rally to me is just falling into his hands. i don t play his rallies. i do truth check every night. i do magic walls. i find all these different devices because i want people to know what s real and then they can act on it. that s why i m talking to you because people need to know what you re doing, know where people s voices are, and then they can make their decisions about which side to join and hopefully there s common ground that gets here sooner rather than later. i hope there is common ground. people ask me all the time, your son s a marine. how can you have a son whose a marine when you re such a pass fist kind of a person? i love and respect my son, and i can hold two opposing thoughts in my head at one time. one is i m terrified something is going to happen to him, and the other is i m so immensely proud of the commitment he has given to this country because he believes in this country the same way that i do. i believe in america and what it stands for in the constitution, and this president and administration has done everything they can to undermine it. and it s not okay. it s not all right in any way, and we have to use our voices and fight. you do exactly that. that s why good men and women like your son are fighting for our freedoms. and when somebody serves in a family, the whole family feels it. the whole family sacrifices. so thank you to your entire clan for the dedication to the country. thank you. and the service of your son. thank you, chris cuomo. peace. let s see. we ll be following what happens at the white house, and we ll see what the impact of this party with a purpose is all about tonight. now, back to another big story for you. they told us that the meeting in trump tower with the russian operative was about adoption. you remember that? the whole statement that they wrote, the president had no role in. well, we know that s not true, and now we have the president apparently admitting something that s even more important. cuomo s court is in session, and you need to weigh in. there are the counselors, next. stadium pa : all military members stand and be recognized. sometimes fans cheer for those who wear a different uniform. no matter where or when you served, t-mobile stands ready to serve you. that s why we re providing half off family lines to all military. crisp leaves of lettuce. freshly made dressing. clean food that looks this good. delivered to your desk. Chris Cuomo asks the tough questions to newsmakers in Washington and around the world. or if you forgot your bike was on the roof rack, you only pay one deductible -instead of two- for a claim involving both your auto and home. and when you save that much, it s almost like it. never even happened. that s auto and home insurance for the modern world. esurance. an allstate company. click or call. a lot of paints say ordinthey can do the job,ver. but just one can behr through it all. behr premium plus, a top rated interior paint at a great price. family friendly, disaster proof. find it exclusively at the home depot. all right. cuomo s court is in session. here is the new fact. there seems to be another crown prosecutor friend or whoever these people were reaching out. they weren t soliciting, but they did go to the meeting. and the question is what happened afterwards? and there are some strange coincidences when you look at the indictment, the dates that are in there and other things that we know happened subsequent to that meeting. but i ll let my colleague make his case and then respond. he s smiling wide. but add this to the mix for yourself, professor. one step farther than asha wants to go. if it s illegal to solicit and you find out that someone has dirt for you and you know what kind of person it is, and you go there to get it, why isn t that soliciting? and then what do you make of this in context? well, first of all, it may very well be soliciting, and it may very well be a thing of value. the problem is it would be unconstitutional for a statute to prohibit a candidate from obtaining information from any source whatsoever. just like the new york times can t be prohibits from obtaining information or chris cuomo can t be prohibited from obtaining information, even if the information you have was stolen, even if you know it was given to you by manning or snowden, or daniel ellsberg. the constitution requires an open marketplace of ideas. and you cannot construe a statute that was intended to prevent financial contributions largely to apply to information, to apply to facts, to apply to news. that would be unconstitutional. so you re hitting her with the pong papentagon papers defe. you re saying that opposition research, dirt on clinton, is information just like if it came to me, asha, and therefore it doesn t qualify under this statute. absolutely. this is a false analogy, chris. first of all, political campaigns are not news organizations, and here the key word in what professor dershowitz just said is the open marketplace of ideas. when you have something happening surreptitiously, under the table, secretly, that is not an open marketplace of ideas. now, if the trump campaign went on tv and said, hey, the russian government just gave us all this stolen information and told the voters that, that would be one thing. i still think it would be a crime, but at least they re being transparent. when they are concealing the source of that, that is exactly what our open society is meant to prevent. we want people to evaluate information in context. and just to bring this back to the framers of the constitution, they were worried about two things, chris. they were worried about foreign influence and self-dealing. this is why we have a natural born citizen requirement. we want, you know, loyalty. we don t want influence from outside. this is the federalist papers 68 where hamilton warns of foreign governments trying to infiltrate our elections. so i completely disagree that this is permissible as some kiekind of first amendment right. professor. the statute itself clearly is intended to cover financial contributions. it s always been applied that way. it has never been construed or interpreted then why didn t they say that? why didn t they say what? money. well, they did. they said something of value. right. but why didn t they say money? but you have to construe a let me be even more specific. even if they intended to cover this, they can t cover it because it could be unconstitutional. you cannot regulate ideas. the federal government simply doesn t have the power under the first amendment to prohibit a candidate remember, a candidate is also expressing first amendment views. he has exactly the same status as the new york times and as you do. he has the right or she has the right to use any information from any source, and it doesn t matter whether it s a foreign or domestic source, and that s why to construe an ambiguous statute that way would violate the first amendment. and the first rule of constitutional construction is if you have a statute that s capable of being construed in two different ways, you must always construe it constitutionally consistent with the first amendment. i hear the arguments on either side, but there s something else going on here. lying, okay? there is lying going on here, professor. there was lying going on about what we were told about this meeting. the statement that was done about it. the president s role in it. and then even when that statement was written, it was deceptive about what actually happened in the meeting, and that seems to be clear on the face of this tweet, asha. so even if it isn t illegal, what does this mean to investigators in terms of looking at a pattern of behavior of how this then-candidate, now-president treated these types of issues? it means that they believe that they were doing something wrong, period. that is why people lie. i mean you know that from being a parent and watching your 5-year-old. you know, one thing, let s just assume arguendo as we would say in legalese, that these are crimes and that, you know, they did agree, and there is, say, a conspiracy. there s an affirmative defense in conspiracy where if you renounce the conspiracy, you say actually, i don t want to do this anymore or i don t want to have anything to do with this, that can be your defense. and, chris, i think it s important for viewers to remember that in august of 2016, the fbi went and warned the trump campaign that russia was trying to infiltrate their campaigns and influence the elections. and at that point, that was the time for every single person who had these sketchy contacts to come forward and say, you know what, that s kind of funny because, you know, two random russians showed up in trump tower. that could have been a defense, and yet at every turn they have chosen to lie, conceal, deflect, and cover up every contact that they ve had, not just these three people in the meeting, but everyone else associated with the campaign. what you re doing final quick word, professor. what you re doing is what so many people do. you re conflating bad conduct with criminal conduct. this may be bad conduct. lying is not a good thing if there was lying here. but to turn this into a crime, imagine if hillary clinton were elected president, and she were being investigated, and these were the charges. every civil libertarian would be up in arms talking about the first amendment, talking about the right of association, talking about all of these rights. but a double standard is being applied depending on which shoe the foot is on, and that s very inconsistent with the due process of law and we re dealing with the cards in front of us right now. as we all know that s right. lying is is a problem. it is a political problem. it is not a legal problem. maybe so, but it s a problem nonetheless. you cannot turn tweets it s a problem. i m not here to defend anybody s problem. it s a problem. not every problem has to be a crime in order to matter. that s the flip side of your argument. but i got to go, professor. that s what i ve been saying for two years. that not every problem is a crime. that s all i m saying. right. but it doesn t have to be a crime to be a problem. that s the flip. thank you as always. got to go. tough sanctions on iran are about to go into effect tonight at midnight. that s how urgent it is. why? is your spidey sense going off here? why now? this seems a little strange. i agree with you. i feel you on this. why is it happening right now? i m going to tell you what the administration says. we re going to look at whether or not it s true that allies may be in with us on this. is that all true? facts, next. a place with 24-hour fvalet servicee and a boutique salon a place with all day arts and crafts it even has a day spa a place that s so much like home, because well. it is home home instead senior care when you need personalized care in the comfort of home. you might or joints.hing for your heart. but do you take thing for your brain. with an ingredient originally discovered in jellyfis prevagen has been shown in clinical trials to improve short-term memory. prevagen. healthier brain. better life. comcast, building america s largest gig-speed network. all right. at midnight eastern tonight the trump administration is going to restore sanctions on iran that had been lifted under the 2015 nuclear accord. why now? okay? 2015 deal, may 8th is when the president stepped away from this. that s 90 days. 90 days. why now? that s how long he had to do this. co-have put these sanctions back in at any point. now, what they re telling us is that s because iran has been using the money that had got released when the sanctions were relaxed to sow chaos in the region. it doesn t smell right. you know why? they ve been doing that all along. in fact, that was a big point for trump in nixing the original deal. remember? it doesn t do anything with all the menacing that they re doing. however, remember back in 2015, all the countries involved said the deal was just about nukes, not all the other bad stuff that iran was doing. just for context. all right. then they say, well, there s new violations of what they were supposed to do under the deal even though they walked away from the deal, which you would think would relieve iran of those types of considerations. but that s not true. international inspectors say that they are complying with the deal. what does that leave? i wonder if this tweet put this tweet back on the screen for people, the one the president put out there. i wonder if the tweet with the president admitting that he knew what that meeting about not that he knew, but that the meeting was about getting information on clinton. i wonder if the timing of that has anything to do with this abrupt turn to iran, especially when the real sanctions on iran aren t scheduled right now. they re in november. so why do it now? however, in fairness, the new sanctions are going to be imposed, and we do have 90 to 100 days after he walked away as a transition period that the administration gave companies to wind down contracts with iran in order to avoid penalties. so we are within that window, so maybe that s why they re doing this now just to be fair. however, so now that trump has decided this is what s going to happen, the timing aside, what does it mean? all right. here are the pluses to the move. here s the first big plus. ready? money is power, right? a paucity of money, when you cut money, you cut it, that creates what? pressure, okay? that s what this is about, pressure. a big ugly word because i can t write because i m a lefty. and this is what the key is here. take away the money, you apply pressure. a u.s. official says that nearly 100 international firms have announced their intent to leave the iranian market. now, that s going to hurt. you combine that with more squeezing by the government, these renewed sanctions, there could be civil unrest. in fact, national security adviser bolton pointed to riots on sunday as proof of desired pressure. what s the hope? that unrest equals a deal, okay? that s what you re hoping is that they ll come back to the table and say we want to make a better deal. here s the flip, though. rouhani, the iranian leader, says the opposite is true. you sanction us like that, we re less likely to deal. bolton suggested that our european allies are considering joining the u.s. move. here s the problem. there is no proof of that. here are the facts. the eu, russia, china, they re all sticking with the accord. they put out a statement on monday. what did they say? the eu, the uk, and france all said and germany we deeply regret that the u.s. is doing what they re doing right now. the eu announced it was going to take legal steps to protect eu companies doing legitimate business in iran that gives them back their money, okay? one more point for you. let s be very clear. iran is not china. it is not even north korea. it s not russia. how? they re driven by religion. they are zealots there. religion, ethnic conflict. those are the driving forces, not just economics or mere land grabs. so if a tougher round of sanctions that is going to happen tonight is going to then give an extra step to what s supposed to happen in november with these even more biting sanctions, those are on iran s sale of crude oil and transactions with its central bank. those are big. what happens? the markets, the military, resulting mayhem are all potential negative outcomes from this kind of move. so it is a gamble. those are the factors here on the white board of everything at play with the somewhat random decision. what about this strategy or lack thereof? we have an expert. phil mudd is here. he knows the problems. he knows the potential solutions. where does this fit? next. when you rent from national. it s kind of like playing your own version of best ball. because here, you can choose any car in the aisle, even if it s a better car class than the one you reserved. so no matter what, you re guaranteed to have a perfect drive. [laughter] (vo) go national. go like a pro. see what i did there? a lot of paints say ordinthey can do the job,ver. but just one can behr through it all. behr premium plus, a top rated interior paint at a great price. family friendly, disaster proof. find it exclusively at the home depot. before discovering nexium 24hr to treat her frequent heartburn, lucy could only imagine enjoying a slice of pizza. now it s as easy as pie. nexium 24hr stops acid before it starts for all-day, all-night protection. can you imagine 24 hours without heartburn? for all-day, all-night protection. come hok., babe. nasty nighttime heartburn? try new alka-seltzer pm gummies. the only fast, powerful heartburn relief plus melatonin so you can fall asleep quickly. oh, what a relief it is! twitter feed and the show s feed if you didn t get it. how about the strategy in play? for that, we ve got as good a guest as we can have. cnn counterterrorism analyst phil mudd. let s make three quick points. first of all you say don t get too deep in the weeds of strategy. look at the president first, why? i love these strategy conversations. can we look at the personality of the president? repeatedly he s told us how he thinks. he s told this, and he said this publicly, i m the only policymaker in public office. forget about state department. i m the man who makes policy. and he s told us repeatedly, i m a genius. what has he done in every circumstance? north korea, u-turn. russia, u-turn. g7, he goes to canada and embarrasses them. u-turn. nato, u-turn. they re not our friends. this he into ed to pay more. he comes in and says i m smarter than bush. i m smarter than obama. in every one of these circumstances, i m u-turning because my solution is a better solution. same thing with iran, u-turn. so the u-turn here would be him actually, to me, it looks like stepping on the gas and saying, i m going to sanction them. the timing is a little curious, but let s take the tactic. i m going to sanction you to come to the table and say, i want a better deal, mr. trump because my people are rioting. i m squeezed. i m poor. good luck. if you re going to sanction someone that way, one of the lessons of history is you ve got to make sure they don t have too many pressure valves where they can turn off the pressure someplace else. let me give you three pressure valves that are going to help the iran rn yarns. number one, the europeans are coming out saying we re not with you on this one. number two, people who aren t side by side with the president so far on this time, that is longtime friends with iran for decades. that s the russians and the chinese potentially not only buying oil but defense contracts with the iranians who have got a lot of oil money. when we think we can squeeze the iranians unilaterally, they re saying i ve got the europeans, the chinese and the russians. ain t going to work. in terms of getting that unrest going, getting the progressives such as they might exist inside the iranian government and larger society to work with the united states to create change there, you say a move like this doesn t necessarily help. well, careful. there s traditionally over the course of dakdss two camps in iran. you have the reformists. let s not call them moderates. people who want to move forward. and you have the conservatives. so the conservatives would have said be careful with this deal with the americans. be careful. in 2015. that s right. since the revolution in 1979, they ve been our enemy. they like the saudis. we hate the saudis. big american military presence in the persian gulf. we don t like them there. if you were a conservative wanting to attack the people who made the deal with the americans this time, you re going to step back and say, i told you. you signed the deal in 2015, and they screwed you again. you cannot trust the americans. this is nmore evidence of it. fill mid, three solid points. appreciate it. so it is the eve of a big election night in america. why? tomorrow four states are holding key contests that could ultimately alter the balance of power in congress. one of the candidates in play is in kansas, and he s being hailed as the next big thing by progressives. introducing brent welder and big news of a very powerful new friend in his corner. who is it? what does it mean? next. ballpark.ore than just a day e stadium pa : all military members stand and be recognized. sometimes fans cheer for those who wear a different uniform. no matter where or when you served, t-mobile stands ready to serve you. that s why we re providing half off family lines to all military. like my father before. [telephone ring] like my father before. ahoy-hoy! as long as people talk too loudly on the phone, you can count on geico saving folks money. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. so, boy, oh, boy, is this some mix of what you have going on in the primary there. i was just trying in the break to figure it out. i can t give you a sense of what we think is going to happen. what do you think happens tomorrow night, and more importantly, why? well, we are up in the polls right now both in the general election. we re beating congressman yoder by seven points, which is the largest lead of any democratic challenger in the country. we re also up in the primary polls for tomorrow quite a bit. now, obviously i am not taking anything for granted. we re working hard for every single last vote, and we re going to keep working hard until we beat congressman yoder in november because obviously this is an extremely important election. you know, i had rosie o donnell on earlier. tonight she s got people who are broadway performers down in front of the white house. i don t know if you had a chance. i know you re campaigning. but the conversation for her is trump s got to go. he s a bad guy. he does bad things. the democrats have to win. my point back is anti is not enough. when you look at big turns, whoever wins in midterms does it because they are offering something for, not just against. and when i was looking at your site and looking at some of the messages, where do you think the democrats come out on that? how do you make the point that you re better for the economy with all those robust index numbers that we ve seen, that you re better for national security when we re in a relatively safe state? how do you make a better case? well, you know, i was one of the first staffers on barack obama s campaign. i was the national field director for the teamsters. i ve been around organizing for a long time. and what i ve seen unfortunately for so many years now is that the democrats keep losing and losing and losing. we ve lost the white house. we ve lost the house, the senate, state legislators, the governorship, and we ve deny doing generally the same way, trying to run candidates on a and it wasn t worked. i m a labor lawyer. i spent the last decade in teamster labor halls around the country. what i find is these people that voted for barack obama and then donald trump will come back to the democratic party, but you have to tell them exactly what you re going to do for them. you have to talk to them about these bold, progressive economic ideas. that s how we re going to win them back. i think that s why i m beating congressman yoder by seven points right now, the largest lead in the country even though i m right here in kansas. these economic ideas are resonating so well with people in my district. the third district includes kansas city, am i right? yeah, that s where i live in fact, so i hope it does. so that s helping you in terms of a message that will go to a more diverse and a bigger population. when you say about winning trump voters back, a lot of them are voting for him on cultural dynamics. they re not the blue collar, pocketbook economics that i grew up with a father who was in the democratic party as a governor, and he talked to that a lot. that s not the dialogue anymore, and it seems to be that you have two layers of conflict and challenge to deal with. that one that they re talking culture, not just commerce. and, two, that the left has a divide, which is guys like you and the criticism will be, mr. welder, you re free everything. you re free everything for everybody. free, free, free. can t have enough tax money injected into people s lives versus a more centrist approach. how do you deal with both of those burdens? you know, one thing you didn t mention that i think is actually extremely important to these working class folks that we need to win back is finally ending the corrupting influence of big money in politics. that s something that i ve been working for myself throughout my life. i actually, when i started running 14 months ago, pledged that i was never going to accept one penny of corporate pac money. i ve been involved in politics long enough to see how that affects things and how it causes these politicians like my opponent, kevin yoder, who has taken more money from the payday loan sharks than any member of the house or u.s. senate to side about giant banks and giant corporations instead of people. that is the thing i think is resonating most with people is they re ready to send someone to congress who is not corrupted and who rejects this kind of corporate spending. you re still going to have to deal with the free, free, free. i interview bernie all the time. i saw hoe ocasio-cortez, that worked in her district. there we especially in the third district where you are, because you get outside that city, you get a different viewpoint. what is going on with ending spending? you have a conservative group. do you believe they re trying to help you by all the people have to go on. you have to google it for yourself. they put a ton of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars into this seat, and they re running ads that some of your opponents say are helpful to you. what is going on? why is a conservative pac doing ads that some say are helpful to you, and how do you see it? those are the strangest ads i ve ever seen in my entire life. i have no idea what their motivation is. what i do know is that i m beating kevin yoder by seven points. you do know that because you ve said that three times. why are they putting this money in the race? i m proud of it. i m proud of it. it s the largest lead of any democratic challenger in the country, and it s right here in kansas. i think that pretty much kind of speaks for itself as far as the policies i m running on. i m fighting against the corruption. you know, kevin yoder votes with donald trump virtually ever single time, and people are sick of it, and that s why i feel really confident that we re going to be able to flip this seat in kansas. you know, 25,000 people have gone to brent wilder.com to give small donations, 25,000. brent welder, it is an interesting race. i d never think that the biggest dollar amount of ads going into your campaign would go from ending spending, a group that gave a million dollars to donald trump. when we see the results please come back and make the case if you wind up on top. thank you so much. can t wait. donald trump s tactics as i call them are well-known. if you criticize him he will attack you brutally. and what happens? his base generally a little bit about what he said about lebron james and don. d lemon is here with the reaction you ve been waiting for. looking good and smart next. crisp leaves of lettuce. freshly made dressing. clean food that looks this good. delivered to your desk. now delivering to home or office. panera. food as it should be. panera. a lot of paints say ordinthey can do the job,ver. but just one can behr through it all. behr premium plus, a top rated interior paint at a great price. family friendly, disaster proof. find it exclusively at the home depot. come from your business number. them, not so much. we let you keep an eye on your business from anywhere. the others? nope! for a limited time, when you get fast, reliable internet, you can add voice for just $24.95 more per month. call or go online today. call or go on line today. don lemon is going to join me right now. as you know cnn tonight follows cuomo primetime and as you all know don and i are friends. but objectively d. lemon you have a following and fans for a ren. and it ain t because they think you re dumb. here s what the president tweeted. lebron james was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, don lemon. he made lebron look smart which isn t easy to do. i like mike. who s the real dummy? a man who puts kids in classrooms or one who puts kids in cages. #be best, of course refers to first lady s campaign for better character. what was the point you want people to take from this? who s the real dummy? i want people to take the truth from this. who s the real dummy. lebron james is okay, chris, listen, you re sitting at home, watching the report he s not even at home in bedminster. he s watching a report on someone who happens to be black and they re doing something really great for their community and not only changing kids lives but their families as well, changing the trajectories of their future and you call me dumb and him dumb by default. if you can t say anything good don t say anything at all. why did he feel the need? i was aiming to do exactly what i said there, who is the real dummy? somebody who sits down and sees this or someone who s putting kids in classrooms. you point out material misstatements and lies by the president and his administration and he hates it, so i ve prepared something for you. listen to what was written about the president lying and the damage. and i ll tell you who wrote it afterwards. if you and i fall into bad moral habits we could harm our families our employer and our friends. the president of the united states can incinerate the planet. seriously the very idea that we ought to have at or less than the same moral demands placed on the chief executive that we place on our next door neighbor is ludicrous and dangerous. and then he went onto this, for those around the president our leaders must either act to restore the lust s and dignity of the institution of the presidency or we can be certain that this is only the beginning of an even more difficult time for our land. for the nation to move on, the president must move out. you know who said that? vice president mike pence wrote it in the 90s about bill clinton. now he is apparently immune to hypocrisy. but what does that tell yo about what you re up against? that was then, this is now. we re up against tribalism. we re up against people who will lie, steal, and cheat, lie to their own mother, lie to themselves about what s right of this country, lie about truth and facts. lie about any terrible misdeed, any awful saying they will just ignore it for their own political purpose. they will ignore the bigotry and the pettiness and the childishness about what donald trump said about me and lebron james and others just because they want to gain some political clout or they want a few more dollars in tax money. at what cost? i ll tell you as much as it would usually make me jealous and angry towards you to be maen mentioned in the same sentence with lebron james, it is warranted here because you both were bringing about the best in what that situation was supposed to be. here s what the president tweeted about us. the fake news hates me saying they re the enemy of the people only because they know it s true. i m providing a great service by explaining this to the american people. they purposely cause great division and distrust. they can also cause war. they are very dangerous and sick. now, this is an example of the lie. how? it s a material misstatement of the fact to deceive. we ve pushed back on propaganda before. and the president is the only person that can start a war, not the press. and it s exactly his vast power, that s why people like don lemon hold him to account. lies are dangerous. you know what projections
Chris Cuomo asks the tough questions to newsmakers in Washington and around the world. it looks very hinky to me. here s why i ask you about what this is about because let s say you win. let s say the democrats win. you get the house. probably not the senate, but you get the house. there s a call for impeachment among progressives like yourself. yes. two things happen. well, i don t think it s just progressives, chris. there will be a call for impeachment from all those not heard, who are the majority in america. okay. i give you that fact. i ll stipulate to it for the point of this argument. okay. so everybody calls out. you don t have the votes. it doesn t happen. you galvanize support for the president, and we are torn more apart in this country. are you worried about that outcome? no, i am not. i am believing in the american people. i believe in this country. i believe in what it was founded on. i believe in the constitution. i think that on election day, we re going to show up in a huge way, in a way that we haven t ever seen before in the united states. and people have just really had enough. they ve had enough of a president who separates families and puts babies in cages. you know all of the catch phrases. every day he does something worse than the day before, and he tops it and tops it and tops it. i believe that trump is loathed in america, that people are embarrassed and ashamed of who he is, and that come election day, we re going to stand up at the polls and let him know. and unless he goes in and has the russians kind of fix it like he did last time in 2016, you know, we re going to see him gone. and that s what i m waiting and hoping for and hoping that people across the country are inspired to use their own voice in whatever way to get people to know that this country is worth fighting for. amen on that. the more people get involved, the higher the voter percentage is, the more people will get what they want. it will reduce the effects of money on politics. it will make everything better, not perfect, but better. so i m all with you. the more people go out and vote their conscience, the better, whatever their conscience is. here s my other concern. yeah. there is reason to criticize the president. i am not going to fight you on that point. that emotion in them of truth and what about his rallies? first of all, people are paid, chris. you know that. people were paid since he went down on the escalator. he pays people to show up at those rallies. that is a fact. but i don t know that that s why he gets tens of thousands at the rallies. i think he captures a lot of motion for people. when did he get tens of thousands at the last rally? tell me when.? at the tampa i think they only had 9,000 seats and there were people outside, but rosie, i ve seen him. he gets big groups of people who come out. he gives themes that resonate. whatever they re positive or not, that s up to people to decide. i don t have the facts that his crowds are bought off. but you can look at well, you can look at all the requests for extras to come and cheer with signs for him. you can find those tangible pieces of evidence. those are not real rallies. you know, when he went down on that escalator, he paid all those people there, calling rapists and mexicans rapists. this is not real what he s doing even though he keeps screaming that you guys are not real. i know he does that. i know he does that, rosie, but listen. look, i ve known you a long time. you ve known my family a long time. i know your mom. and mom would be the first one to say, let him say what he s going to say. you say what you know is true. you always keep your dignity. you always fight the good fight. so that s what we do. when he came down that escalator, did i see the reporting that there were paid people there? yes, i did. did i believe it? yes, i did. have i seen it at all of these rallies? no, so i m not going to do what the president does. i m not going to say they re all bought off, they re all fake, because i think that s b.s. i don t think it s true, and i m not going to play to it just because i think it s satisfying. but you could do the evidence to find out. sure. we do it all the time. lead with that story before you play his rally. to play his rally to me is just falling into his hands. i don t play his rallies. i do truth check every night. i do magic walls. i find all these different devices because i want people to know what s real and then they can act on it. that s why i m talking to you because people need to know what you re doing, know where people s voices are, and then they can make their decisions about which side to join and hopefully there s common ground that gets here sooner rather than later. i hope there is common ground. people ask me all the time, your son s a marine. how can you have a son whose a marine when you re such a pass fist kind of a person? i love and respect my son, and i can hold two opposing thoughts in my head at one time. one is i m terrified something is going to happen to him, and the other is i m so immensely proud of the commitment he has given to this country because he believes in this country the same way that i do. i believe in america and what it stands for in the constitution, and this president and administration has done everything they can to undermine it. and it s not okay. it s not all right in any way, and we have to use our voices and fight. you do exactly that. that s why good men and women like your son are fighting for our freedoms. and when somebody serves in a family, the whole family feels it. the whole family sacrifices. so thank you to your entire clan for the dedication to the country. thank you. and the service of your son. thank you, chris cuomo. peace. let s see. we ll be following what happens at the white house, and we ll see what the impact of this party with a purpose is all about tonight. now, back to another big story for you. they told us that the meeting in trump tower with the russian operative was about adoption. you remember that? the whole statement that they wrote, the president had no role in. well, we know that s not true, and now we have the president apparently admitting something that s even more important. cuomo s court is in session, and you need to weigh in. there are the counselors, next. fact is, every insurance company hopes you drive safely. but allstate actually helps you drive safely. with drivewise. it lets you know when you go too fast. .and brake too hard. with feedback to help you drive safer. giving you the power to actually lower your cost. unfortunately, it can t do anything about that. now that you know the truth. are you in good hands? crisp leaves of lettuce. freshly made dressing. clean food that looks this good. delivered to your desk. now delivering to home or office. panera. food as it should be. panera. sometimes a day at the ballpark is more than just a day at the ballpark. stadium announcer: all military members stand and be recognized. no matter where or when you served, t-mobile stands ready to serve you. that s why we re providing half off family lines to all military. up that trump tower that that trump tower meeting was about obtaining dirt on hillary clinton. the president says it is totally legal. is that a fact? no. let s bring in asha rangappa and professor alan dershowitz. now, the statute at play that people are going to hear discussed, i want to put it up on the screen for them so all the legalese doesn t go over everybody s head. this would be the concern. you keep hearing lawyers tell you all the time and experts and some not so experts saying, you can t get help from a foreign inimical power. here s the law. it shall be unlawful for a person to solicit, which means to try to get, accept, or receive a contribution or donation prescribed in these different places from a foreign national. asha rangappa, former fbi agent, law degree, make the case. is this tweet a problem? this tweet is a problem because it s acknowledging that the purpose of that meeting was to obtain information that would benefit the campaign from foreign nationals. now, there are a few legal issues here. the first is whether what was being offered was a thing of value. this is something you ll hear lawyers arguing about. and a big clue here is in the recent indictment that robert mueller just filed against the gru officers, and in that indictment, the charges for hacking which he brings against those 12 gru officers alleges that the stolen e-mails were worth over $5,000, which makes them a thing of value. i think you could argue that they are valuable in many other ways, but he s essentially laying the groundwork that this was a thing of value. the question here is did they accept or receive it? i think that here you do have the other party, the russian crown, prosecutor, friend or whoever these people were reaching out. they weren t soliciting, but they did go to the meeting. and the question is what happened afterwards? and there are some strange coincidences when you look at the indictment, the dates that are in there and other things that we know happened subsequent to that meeting. but i ll let my colleague make his case and then respond. he s smiling wide. but add this to the mix for yourself, professor. one step farther than asha wants to go. if it s illegal to solicit and you find out that someone has dirt for you and you know what kind of person it is, and you go there to get it, why isn t that soliciting? and then what do you make of this in context? well, first of all, it may very well be soliciting, and it may very well be a thing of value. the problem is it would be unconstitutional for a statute to prohibit a candidate from obtaining information from any source whatsoever. just like the new york times can t be prohibits from obtaining information or chris cuomo can t be prohibited from obtaining information, even if the information you have was stolen, even if you know it was given to you by manning or snowden, or daniel ellsberg. the constitution requires an open marketplace of ideas. and you cannot construe a statute that was intended to prevent financial contributions largely to apply to information, to apply to facts, to apply to news. that would be unconstitutional. so you re hitting her with the pentagon papers defense. you re saying that opposition research, dirt on clinton, is information just like if it came to me, asha, and therefore it doesn t qualify under this statute. absolutely. this is a false analogy, chris. first of all, political campaigns are not news organizations, and here the key word in what professor dershowitz just said is the open marketplace of ideas. when you have something happening surreptitiously, under the table, secretly, that is not an open marketplace of ideas. now, if the trump campaign went on tv and said, hey, the russian government just gave us all this stolen information and told the voters that, that would be one thing. i still think it would be a crime, but at least they re being transparent. when they are concealing the source of that, that is exactly what our open society is meant to prevent. we want people to evaluate information in context. and just to bring this back to the framers of the constitution, they were worried about two things, chris. they were worried about foreign influence and self-dealing. this is why we have a natural born citizen requirement. we want, you know, loyalty. we don t want influence from outside. this is the federalist papers 68 where hamilton warns of foreign governments trying to infiltrate our elections. so i completely disagree that this is permissible as some kind of first amendment right. professor. the statute itself clearly is intended to cover financial contributions. it s always been applied that way. it has never been construed or interpreted then why didn t they say that? why didn t they say what? money. well, they did. they said something of value. right. but why didn t they say money? but you have to construe a let me be even more specific. even if they intended to cover this, they can t cover it because it could be unconstitutional. you cannot regulate ideas. the federal government simply doesn t have the power under the first amendment to prohibit a candidate remember, a candidate is also expressing first amendment views. he has exactly the same status as the new york times and as you do. he has the right or she has the right to use any information from any source, and it doesn t matter whether it s a foreign or domestic source, and that s why to construe an ambiguous statute that way would violate the first amendment. and the first rule of constitutional construction is if you have a statute that s capable of being construed in two different ways, you must always construe it constitutionally consistent with the first amendment. i hear the arguments on either side, but there s something else going on here. lying, okay? there is lying going on here, professor. there was lying going on about what we were told about this meeting. the statement that was done about it. the president s role in it. and then even when that statement was written, it was deceptive about what actually happened in the meeting, and that seems to be clear on the face of this tweet, asha. so even if it isn t illegal, what does this mean to investigators in terms of looking at a pattern of behavior of how this then-candidate, now-president treated these types of issues? it means that they believe that they were doing something wrong, period. that is why people lie. i mean you know that from being a parent and watching your 5-year-old. you know, one thing, let s just assume arguendo as we would say in legalese, that these are crimes and that, you know, they did agree, and there is, say, a conspiracy. there s an affirmative defense in conspiracy where if you renounce the conspiracy, you say actually, i don t want to do this anymore or i don t want to have anything to do with this, that can be your defense. and, chris, i think it s important for viewers to remember that in august of 2016, the fbi went and warned the trump campaign that russia was trying to infiltrate their campaigns and influence the elections. and at that point, that was the time for every single person who had these sketchy contacts to come forward and say, you know what, that s kind of funny because, you know, two random russians showed up in trump tower. that could have been a defense, and yet at every turn they have chosen to lie, conceal, deflect, and cover up every contact that they ve had, not just these three people in the meeting, but everyone else associated with the campaign. what you re doing final quick word, professor. what you re doing is what so many people do. you re conflating bad conduct with criminal conduct. this may be bad conduct. lying is not a good thing if there was lying here. but to turn this into a crime, imagine if hillary clinton were elected president, and she were being investigated, and these were the charges. every civil libertarian would be up in arms talking about the first amendment, talking about the right of association, talking about all of these rights. but a double standard is being applied depending on which shoe the foot is on, and that s very inconsistent with the due process of law and we re dealing with the cards in front of us right now. as we all know that s right. lying is is a problem. it is a political problem. it is not a legal problem. maybe so, but it s a problem nonetheless. you cannot turn tweets it s a problem. i m not here to defend anybody s problem. it s a problem. not every problem has to be a crime in order to matter. that s the flip side of your argument. but i got to go, professor. that s what i ve been saying for two years. that not every problem is a crime. that s all i m saying. right. but it doesn t have to be a crime to be a problem. that s the flip. thank you as always. got to go. tough sanctions on iran are about to go into effect tonight at midnight. that s how urgent it is. why? is your spidey sense going off here? why now? this seems a little strange. i agree with you. i feel you on this. why is it happening right now? i m going to tell you what the administration says. we re going to look at whether or not it s true that allies may be in with us on this. is that all true? facts, next. hawaii is in the middle of the pacific ocean. we re the most isolated population on the planet. hawaii is the first state in the u.s. to have 100% renewable energy goal. we re a very small electric utility. but, if we don t make this move we re going to have changes in our environment, and have a negative impact to hawaii s economy. verizon provided us a solution using smart sensors on their network that lets us collect near real time data on our power grid. 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(shelee) if we can create our own energy, we can take care of this beautiful place that i grew up in. it s so hard to believe but it s all coming back me. baby, baby, baby. all you can eat is back, baby. applebee s. for a limited time, when you get fast, reliable internet, you can add voice for just $24.95 more per month. call or go online today. call or go on line today. all right. at midnight eastern tonight the trump administration is going to restore sanctions on iran that had been lifted under the 2015 nuclear accord. why now? okay? 2015 deal, may 8th is when the president stepped away from this. that s 90 days. 90 days. why now? that s how long he had to do this. he could have put these sanctions back in at any point. now, what they re telling us is that s because iran has been using the money that had got released when the sanctions were relaxed to sow chaos in the region. it doesn t smell right. you know why? they ve been doing that all along. in fact, that was a big point for trump in nixing the original deal. remember? it doesn t do anything with all the menacing that they re doing. however, remember back in 2015, all the countries involved said the deal was just about nukes, not all the other bad stuff that iran was doing. just for context. all right. then they say, well, there s new violations of what they were supposed to do under the deal even though they walked away from the deal, which you would think would relieve iran of those types of considerations. but that s not true. international inspectors say that they are complying with the deal. what does that leave? i wonder if this tweet put this tweet back on the screen for people, the one the president put out there. i wonder if the tweet with the president admitting that he knew what that meeting about not that he knew, but that the meeting was about getting information on clinton. i wonder if the timing of that has anything to do with this abrupt turn to iran, especially when the real sanctions on iran aren t scheduled right now. they re in november. so why do it now? however, in fairness, the new sanctions are going to be imposed, and we do have 90 to 100 days after he walked away as a transition period that the administration gave companies to wind down contracts with iran in order to avoid penalties. so we are within that window, so maybe that s why they re doing this now just to be fair. however, so now that trump has decided this is what s going to happen, the timing aside, what does it mean? all right. here are the pluses to the move. here s the first big plus. ready? money is power, right? a paucity of money, when you cut money, you cut it, that creates what? pressure, okay? that s what this is about, pressure. a big ugly word because i can t write because i m a lefty. and this is what the key is here. take away the money, you apply pressure. a u.s. official says that nearly 100 international firms have announced their intent to leave the iranian market. now, that s going to hurt. you combine that with more squeezing by the government, these renewed sanctions, there could be civil unrest. in fact, national security adviser bolton pointed to riots on sunday as proof of desired pressure. what s the hope? that unrest equals a deal, okay? that s what you re hoping is that they ll come back to the table and say we want to make a better deal. here s the flip, though. rouhani, the iranian leader, says the opposite is true. you sanction us like that, we re less likely to deal. bolton suggested that our european allies are considering joining the u.s. move. here s the problem. there is no proof of that. here are the facts. the eu, russia, china, they re all sticking with the accord. they put out a statement on monday. what did they say? the eu, the uk, and france all said and germany we deeply regret that the u.s. is doing what they re doing right now. the eu announced it was going to take legal steps to protect eu companies doing legitimate business in iran that gives them back their money, okay? one more point for you. let s be very clear. iran is not china. it is not even north korea. it s not russia. how? they re driven by religion. they are zealots there. religion, ethnic conflict. those are the driving forces, not just economics or mere land grabs. so if a tougher round of sanctions that is going to happen tonight is going to then give an extra step to what s supposed to happen in november with these even more biting sanctions, those are on iran s sale of crude oil and transactions with its central bank. those are big. what happens? the markets, the military, resulting mayhem are all potential negative outcomes from this kind of move. so it is a gamble. those are the factors here on the white board of everything at play with the somewhat random decision. what about this strategy or lack thereof? we have an expert. phil mudd is here. he knows the problems. he knows the potential solutions. where does this fit? next. sleep disturbances keep 1 in 3 adults up at night. only remfresh uses ion-powered melatonin to deliver up to 7 hours of sleep support. number 1 sleep doctor recommended remfresh your nightly sleep companion. available in the natural sleep section at walmart. now i m gonna tell my momma that i m a traveller i m gonna follow the sun now i m gonna tell my momma that i m a traveller i m gonna follow the sun transitions™ light under control™ it is such a good time to dance it is such a good time to [ laughing ] scoobidoo doobidoo scoobidoo doobidoo [ goose honking ] [ laughing ] a bad day on the road still beats a good one off it. progressive helps keep you out there. for you on the white board. we ll put it on online, on my twitter feed and the show s feed if you didn t get it. how about the strategy in play? for that, we ve got as good a guest as we can have. cnn counterterrorism analyst phil mudd. let s make three quick points. first of all you say don t get too deep in the weeds of strategy. look at the president first, why? i love these strategy conversations. can we look at the personality of the president? repeatedly he s told us how he thinks. he s told this, and he said this publicly, i m the only policy maker in public office. forget about state department. i m the man who makes policy. and he s told us repeatedly, i m a genius. what has he done in every circumstance? north korea, u-turn. russia, u-turn. g7, he goes to canada and embarrasses them. u-turn. nato, u-turn. they re not our friends. they need to pay more. he comes in and says, i m smarter than bush. i m smarter than obama. in every one of these circumstances, i m u-turning because my solution is a better solution. same thing with iran, u-turn. so the u-turn here would be him actually, to me, it looks like stepping on the gas and saying, i m going to sanction them. the timing is a little curious, but let s take the tactic. i m going to sanction you to come to the table and say, i want a better deal, mr. trump because my people are rioting. i m squeezed. i m poor. good luck. if you re going to sanction someone that way, one of the lessons of history is you ve got to make sure they don t have too many pressure valves where they can turn off the pressure someplace else. let me give you three pressure valves that are going to help the iranians. number one, the europeans are coming out saying we re not with you on this one. number two, people who aren t side by side with the president so far this time that is longtime friends with iran for decades. that s the russians and the chinese potentially not only buying oil but defense contracts with the iranians who have got a lot of oil money. when we think we can squeeze the iranians unilaterally, they re saying i ve got the europeans, the chinese and the russians. ain t going to work. in terms of getting that unrest going, getting the progressives such as they might exist inside the iranian government and larger society to work with the united states to create change there, you say a move like this doesn t necessarily help. well, careful. there s traditionally over the course of decades two camps in iran. you have the reformists. let s not call them moderates. you have the reformists, people who want to move forward. and you have the conservatives. so the conservatives would have said be careful with this deal with the americans. be careful. in 2015. that s right. since the revolution in 1979, they ve been our enemy. they like the saudis. we hate the saudis. big american military presence in the persian gulf. we don t like them there. if you were a conservative wanting to attack the people who made the deal with the americans this time, you re going to step back and say, i told you. you signed the deal in 2015, and they screwed you again. you cannot trust the americans. this is more evidence of it. phil mudd, three solid points. appreciate it. so it is the eve of a big election night in america. why? tomorrow four states are holding key contests that could ultimately alter the balance of power in congress. one of the candidates in play is in kansas, and he s being hailed as the next big thing by progressives. introducing brent welder and big news of a very powerful new friend in his corner. who is it? what does it mean? next. i get it all the time. have you lost weight? of course i have- ever since i started renting from national. because national lets me lose the wait at the counter. .and choose any car in the aisle. and i don t wait when i return, thanks to drop & go. at national, i can lose the wait.and keep it off. looking good, patrick. i know. 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( ) (grunting) today is your day. crush it. angie s boom chicka pop whole grain popcorn. boom! all right. a key factor in how the midterms are going to go down may be what happens this week in kansas. this is a state that hasn t sent a democrat to congress in over a decade. but there is this crowded field in tomorrow s primary that features a choice between a more centrist approach and the more liberal policies, aggressively so, backed by people like bernie sanders and his acolyte and the big winner in new york, alexandria ocasio-cortez. they have both thrown their support behind my next guest, congressional candidate brent welder. good to have you on, sir. hey, chris, great to be here. thank you so much. so, boy, oh, boy, is this some mix of what you have going on in the primary there. i was just trying in the break to figure it out. i can t give you a sense of what we think is going to happen. what do you think happens tomorrow night, and more importantly, why? well, we are up in the polls right now both in the general election. we re beating congressman yoder by seven points, which is the largest lead of any democratic challenger in the country. we re also up in the primary polls for tomorrow quite a bit. now, obviously i am not taking anything for granted. we re working hard for every single last vote, and we re going to keep working hard until we beat congressman yoder in november because obviously this is an extremely important election. you know, i had rosie o donnell on earlier. tonight she s got people who are broadway performers down in front of the white house. i don t know if you had a chance. i know you re campaigning. but the conversation for her is trump s got to go. he s a bad guy. he does bad things. the democrats have to win. my point back is anti is not enough. when you look at big turns, whoever wins in midterms does it because they are offering something for, not just against. and when i was looking at your site and looking at some of the messages, where do you think the democrats come out on that? how do you make the point that you re better for the economy with all those robust index numbers that we ve seen, that you re better for national security when we re in a relatively safe state? how do you make a better case? well, you know, i was one of the first staffers on barack obama s campaign. i was the national field director for the teamsters. i ve been around organizing for a long time. and what i ve seen unfortunately for so many years now is that the democrats keep losing and losing and losing. we ve lost the white house. we ve lost the house, the senate, state legislators, the governorship, and we ve been doing it generally speaking the same way, trying to run candidates that are running on a corporatist message, on a center-right message, and it hasn t worked. i m a labor lawyer. i ve spent the last decade in teamster labor halls around the country. and what i find is these people that voted for barack obama and then donald trump will come back to the democratic party, but you have to tell them exactly what you re going to do for them. you have to talk to them about these bold, progressive economic ideas. that s how we re going to win them back. i think that s why i m beating congressman yoder by seven points right now, the largest lead in the country even though i m right here in kansas. these economic ideas are resonating so well with people in my district. the third district includes kansas city, am i right? yeah, that s where i live in fact, so i hope it does. so that s helping you in terms of a message that will go to a more diverse and a bigger population. when you say about winning trump voters back, a lot of them are voting for him on cultural dynamics. they re not the blue collar, pocketbook economics that i grew up with a father who was in the democratic party as a governor, and he talked to that a lot. that s not the dialogue anymore, and it seems to be that you have two layers of conflict and challenge to deal with. that one that they re talking culture, not just commerce. and, two, that the left has a divide, which is guys like you and the criticism will be, mr. welder, you re free everything. you re free everything for everybody. free, free, free. can t have enough tax money injected into people s lives versus a more centrist approach. how do you deal with both of those burdens? you know, one thing you didn t mention that i think is actually extremely important to these working class folks that we need to win back is finally ending the corrupting influence of big money in politics. that s something that i ve been working for myself throughout my life. i actually, when i started running 14 months ago, pledged that i was never going to accept one penny of corporate pac money. i ve been involved in politics long enough to see how that affects things and how it causes these politicians like my opponent, kevin yoder, who has taken more money from the payday loan sharks than any member of the house or u.s. senate to side about giant banks and giant corporations instead of people. that is the thing i think is resonating most with people is they re ready to send someone to congress who is not corrupted and who rejects this kind of corporate spending. you re still going to have to deal with the free, free, free. i interview bernie all the time. i saw how ocasio-cortez, that specific people were open to needing more from government. worked in her district. especially in the third district where you are, because you get outside that city, you get a different viewpoint. what is going on with ending spending? you have a conservative group. do you believe they re trying to help you by all the people have to go on. you have to google it for yourself. they put a ton of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars into this seat, and they re running ads that some of your opponents say are helpful to you. what is going on? why is a conservative pac doing ads that some say are helpful to you, and how do you see it? those are the strangest ads i ve ever seen in my entire life. i have no idea what their motivation is. what i do know is that i m beating kevin yoder by seven points. you do know that because you ve said that three times. why are they putting this money in the race? i m proud of it. i m proud of it. it s the largest lead of any democratic challenger in the country, and it s right here in kansas. i think that pretty much kind of speaks for itself as far as the policies i m running on. i m fighting against the corruption. you know, kevin yoder votes with donald trump virtually ever single time, and people are sick of it, and that s why i feel really confident that we re going to be able to flip this seat in kansas. you know, 25,000 people have gone to brentwelder.com to give small dollar donations or volunteer on this campaign. 25,000. that s how we re building a people fuelled campaign. even though i m rejecting corporate pack money. the biggest dollar of adds would come from ending spendsing. a group that gave a million dollars to donald trump. we ll follow lt race carefully. please come back and make the case if you winds up on top. thank you so much. can t wait. so, donald trump atactic. well known. if you criticize him he will attack you brutally. and what happens? his base generally what about what he said about lebron james? and don? don lemon and here with the reaction you have been waiting for. looking good, and smart. next. keep it comin love. if you keep on eating, we ll keep it comin . all you can eat riblets and tenders at applebee s. now that s eatin good in the neighborhood. come hok., babe. nasty nighttime heartburn? try new alka-seltzer pm gummies. the only fast, powerful heartburn relief plus melatonin so you can fall asleep quickly. oh, what a relief it is! now i m gonna tell my momma that i m a traveller i m gonna follow the sun now i m gonna tell my momma that i m a traveller i m gonna follow the sun transitions™ light under control™ omar, check this out. uh, yeah, i was calling to see if you do laser hair removal. for men. notice that my hips are off the ground. [ engine revving ] and then, i m gonna pike my hips back into downward dog. [ rhythmic tapping ] hey, the rain stopped. -a bad day on the road still beats a good one off it. -tell me about that dental procedure again! -i can still taste it in my mouth! -progressive helps keep you out there. feel like 50? how can i share new plans virtually? how can i download an e-file? virtual tours? zip-file? really big files? in seconds, not minutes. just like that. like everything. the answer is simple. i ll do what i ve always done. dream more, dream faster, and above all. now, i ll dream gig. now more businesses, in more places, can afford to dream gig. comcast, building america s largest gig-speed network. don lemon is going to join me right now. as you know cnn tonight follows cuomo primetime and as you all know don and i are friends. but objectively d. lemon you have a following and fans for a reason. and it ain t because they think you re dumb. here s what the president tweeted. lebron james was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, don lemon. he made lebron look smart which isn t easy to do. i like mike. who s the real dummy? a man who puts kids in classrooms or one who puts kids in cages. #be best, of course refers to first lady s campaign for better character. what was the point you want people to take from this? who s the real dummy? i want people to take the truth from this. who s the real dummy. lebron james is okay, chris, listen, you re sitting at home, watching the report he s not even at home in bedminster. he s watching a report on someone who happens to be black and they re doing something really great for their community and not only changing kids lives but their families as well, changing the trajectories of their future and you call me dumb and him dumb by default. if you can t say anything good don t say anything at all. why did he feel the need? i was aiming to do exactly what i said there, who is the real dummy? somebody who sits down and sees this or someone who s putting kids in classrooms. you point out material misstatements and lies by the president and his administration and he hates it, so i ve prepared something for you. listen to what was written about the president lying and the damage. and i ll tell you who wrote it afterwards. if you and i fall into bad moral habits we could harm our families our employer and our friends. the president of the united states can incinerate the planet. seriously the very idea that we ought to have at or less than the same moral demands placed on the chief executive that we place on our next door neighbor is ludicrous and dangerous. and then he went onto this, for those around the president our leaders must either act to restore the lust s and dignity of the institution of the presidency or we can be certain that this is only the beginning of an even more difficult time for our land. for the nation to move on, the president must move out. you know who said that? vice president mike pence wrote it in the 90s about bill clinton. now he is apparently immune to hypocrisy. but what does that tell yo about what you re up against? that was then, this is now. we re up against tribalism. we re up against people who will lie, steal, and cheat, lie to their own mother, lie to themselves about what s right of this country, lie about truth and facts. lie about any terrible misdeed, any awful saying they will just ignore it for their own political purpose. they will ignore the bigotry and the pettiness and the childishness about what donald trump said about me and lebron james and others just because they want to gain some political clout or they want a few more dollars in tax money. at what cost? i ll tell you as much as it would usually make me jealous and angry towards you to be mentioned in the same sentence with lebron james, it is warranted here because you both were bringing about the best in what that situation was supposed to be. here s what the president tweeted about us. the fake news hates me saying they re the enemy of the people only because they know it s true. i m providing a great service by explaining this to the american people. they purposely cause great division and distrust. they can also cause war. they are very dangerous and sick. now, this is an example of the lie. how? it s a material misstatement of the fact to deceive. we ve pushed back on propaganda before. and the president is the only person that can start a war, not the press. and it s exactly his vast power, that s why people like don lemon hold him to account. lies are dangerous. you know what projections are, and i say chris, you re projecting. you actually do say that. if you will listen to this president, what he says, what he tweets, what he writes, it s always projection. whatever he says about someone else is usually true about him. whatever he s trying to hide he usually puts that out. now, i don t know what that says about him. i m not a psychologist, but i know what projection is, and i think we all know what that is. and we know it s true because time and time again it s come to be true after the president says so. riddle me this smart guy,