we learned a lot this morning, including that the wait is almost over. exactly. he said within a week, the redacted report would be released, but he also pointedly said, kate, he would not plan, does not plan to provide the full unredacted report to capitol hill, as democrats have demanded. also, democrats have been demanding grand jury information to be provided to the hill as part of its review process. the democrats have called for that. he said flat out he did not plan to go to court to seek the release of that grand jury information. so you re seeing two major flash points bubble up here that between democrats and bill barr. barr also spent a lot of time defending his march 24th letter, outlining the top-line conclusions. he said that he did not want to release summaries that were apparently drafted by mueller s team because he didn t want to release piecemeal versions of the report. he wanted to provide simply the bottom line conclusions but not an intention to summarize the full 400-some-page mueller report. he did reveal the mueller team had an opportunity to review that four-page letter, but he said that the mueller team declined that offer. so these words were essentially his, not of mueller s team, that put out the four-page letter. now, he also, as you mentioned, side stepped a number of questions about the contents of the mueller report. he was asked about what mueller meant about did not exonerate the president on the issue of obstruction. he said those are mueller s words. he did not want to answer that. he would not say whether or not the white house has been briefed about the mueller report. he said he did not want to answer any more questions. he shut down that line of questioning. he did say the white house was not involved in the drafting of that four-page letter. and something that actually could make republicans and the president happy, he said he s reviewing the conduct of the russia investigation, what started in the summer of 2016. he also revealed that the inspector general is investigating surveillance efforts that were ongoing as well. that inspector general report from the justice department could be out by may or june. also something that republicans have been demanding. so he has revealed some new information about his process, the revelations, what he won t provide to congress, and the likely fight that is going to emerge about getting the full report and signaling, too, that he did the best he could to outline the top line conclusions because of the high public interest. nevertheless, what you re seeing here, democrats not satisfied. this could tee up a subpoena fight with the house judiciary committee if they don t get all of what they want. it s pretty clear at the moment they re not going to get all they want. at first pass, he does not seem intending at all that he s open to releasing to the committees the unredacted report. that s exactly what especially the judiciary committee is calling for. manu, thank you so much. much more to come. keeping an eye on the hearing and also, let me bring in cnn senior justice correspondent evan perez in washington. laura jarrett at the justice department for us. in new york, cnn legal analyst elie honig, and cnn legal analyst and former prosecutor jennifer rodgers here with me. a lot to weed through. laura, just to you as you have been following this so closely. the process behind the scenes and what is playing out in public. there was a big question if bill barr was going to answer any questions with regard to the report since it has not yet been put out, released in any fashion. he did answer some questions but very pointedly avoided answering just as many. yeah, that s absolutely right, kate. as he said, he s willing to discuss sort of the historical artifacts, some of the things he s put out through his letters. he s happy to walk through the process, happy to talk about the fact that he wants to put out as much as possible. and he s also sort of trying to lay the groundwork, it seems to me, at explaining to the public that it s really his call on a lot of these issues because of the way the special counsel regulations were written. and the context in which they were written. he talks about the fact it s ironic they were first developed in the clinton administration as a result, really a reaction, to the starr report and how democrats thought too much came out then. and he says now, you know, basically the bottom line is, i can do what i want here. and it s supposed to be a confidential report. i m not required to put out anything, but i thought that the public interest meant, and it was such a high-staked situation, i should put out the bottom line right away because people wouldn t be willing to wait. that s come back to bite him over the last week or two, but it s interesting he s trying to walk the public through that so they understand how little these regulations actually call for and how he doesn t really think he has any obligation to turn over any of the grand jury, the sensitive material, over to congress. he said basically, if nadler, the house judiciary committee wants that fight, he can take it to court, but he doesn t intend to put out any of that. on that exact point, did you hear him explain why he doesn t have intention to release the full unredacted report to the committees? as we have noted in the past couple weeks as this has been percolating, members of congress deal with classified information all the time, sensitive information all the time. we say congress is leaky like a sieve, sure, but they do handle sensitive information all the time. sure they do. there s been a lot of criticism of the justice department and how much was turned over during last year, really, before the house flipped, and how much was turned over on the russia investigation while it was still ongoing. remember chairman nunes demanding so much information. that was turned over. but obviously, barr s position on that is different. he actually seems to think that you take the first pass and you do the least amount possible. you don t do grand jury information. he feels confined by federal rule 6-e. he keeps invoking that. we ll hear that a lot today. his tact is you do as little as possible and don t bifurcate. you don t have a distinction between what goes to congress and the public. you do everything out in public and fight it out. if chairman nadler wants to take it to court, the justice department appears poised on what barr is saying here today, i think, to fight that. yeah, it would seem to be the clear suggestion from him right there. laura, obviously, stick with me. evan, one part of this, and i hope we have been able to turn it around because i would like to play it, one thing happened that was, i think, also interesting. the attorney general said that they tried to include as much of the special counsel s language as i could, he said. in regard to his four-page summary letter that had a lot of questions this morning in the hearing, and why he did it that way and not releasing more information from the special counsel. if we have that sound bite, let me play this for you. so now you had time to review. your team had time to review. you indicated maybe within the next week we ll get the report released. so for the committee, is there anything new you have seen since the review of the entirety of the report that would change your conclusions? no, congressman. as i have explained, my march 24th letter was meant to state the bottom line conclusions of the report. not summarize the report. and i tried to use as much of the special counsel s own language as i could. but they were just stating the bottom line conclusions. and there s nothing to suggest to me that those, you know, that those weren t no collusion, no obstruction. it s over, it s done. it s over. well, the letter speaks for itself. it does, but does it speak for the special counsel? i mean, he tried to put as much of the special counsel s wording in there as possible. really? right. we re talking about fewer than a dozen words from the special counsel were actually included in barr s four-page letter. i think that s why there s so many questions. but there was another exchange with the congressman from florida, charlie crist, in which barr says he was asked essentially about the reports that there are some members of the mueller team who are not happy with barr s sort of summary of even though he doesn t want to call it a summary, a summary of the findings. barr responded. he said i suspect they wanted more from the mueller findings to be included in his letter. so that s what he says he s working on. now, one thing, kate, i think is interesting here today, sort of like looking at the atmospherics. one of the things politically that barr has been trying to do is lock arms with robert mueller, with rod rosenstein, try to present a united front that even though this is his letter, these are his summaries, he s trying to say, you know, everybody is onboard. but a couple times in the hearing so far, he s also said that, you know, mueller was offered a chance to look at that letter, the first letter he sent, and mueller declined that opportunity. he didn t apparently look at the second letter either. we re probably seeing a little bit of daylight between not only between barr and the mueller team but perhaps with other people there, because we do know that there s a lot of sentiment in the department to not release much more information. barr may be going further than perhaps rod rosenstein would want in releasing information, kate. yeah. all right, let me bring in elie on this. so barr, he laid out process. he was clearly comfortable talking about process and the fact they re in the process of redactions. and what that would look like. i want to get to that in a second. because almost in the same breath, when he was asked about a couple times about questions regarding has the white house seen the report, has the white house been briefed on the report, he side stepped that question. he said that he s not going to answer that until the report comes out. why wouldn t he answer that? why couldn t he answer that? do you see a reason? yeah, kate. so william barr is a smart, savvy lawyer, but he s a fairly transparent witness. when he wants to answer, we have seen him lean into that mic and give a clear, decisive answer. when he s afraid of something or thinks something is not going to play well politically, we see him dodge and tap dance in a fairly obvious way. he tap dances around does the white house have this report. and someone this afternoon needs to ask him, to your knowledge, does anyone in the white house have the mueller report. he dodged the question about exoneration. somebody needs to ask him, is it accurate for the president to say he is completely and totally exonerated by this report? one thing that barr was clear about, though, was this grand jury issue. he was asked towards the end a few minutes ago, do you plan to go to court and ask for permission to release grand jury materials. barr threw down the legal gauntlet, he said no. if nadler wants to sue me, go ahead. barr is tying his own hands. he has already ability to go to the court and say i would like to turn over grand jury information. that s what ken starr did and the court said go ahead. barr is creating his own situation of i m helpless to do anything. my hands are tied but i have control of everything. exactly. when you talk about the exoneration bit, i found that fascinating as well. because on the president s statement, it s on two fronts basically he side stepped. on the president s statement that the report and what the president has seen, whatever that is, is total exoneration, and also the statement from mueller that was quoted in the memo, the summary, the letter from barr that says that he did not conclude, it was not exoneration on the question of obstruction. barr said he was not in the position to discuss itt euntil e report is out. i wonder why. right, he feels free to discuss any number of other things that are good for the president, yet when it comes to a dicy situation, a question like is it accurate for the president to say he s been exonerated on obstruction, that pretty clearly based on barr s own letter is a no. just a simple no, but barr has shown time and again a real reluctance to show any independence from the white house and this president. jennifer, part of what he did talk about at length, if you will, is the process that they re going through right now. they say they re working on still at the moment of redactions and what should be redacted. he laid out the four categories he believed are the areas of redactions, which he had laid out previously in his communications. but he also talked about a color coding system for redactions. is that something is that standard procedure? is that something you re familiar with? i don t know that i have seen a lot of color coding, but i think it s a good idea. it s important for us to know when they re blocking out chunks of text why they re blacked out. at least if we know this is 6-e material. this is material that involves an ongoing investigation, then that will be helpful. then he also said he would provide at least general reasons. i don t think he plans to go through for each actual redaction of, say, a sentence and say exactly why that particular sentence is, but he ll give a general idea of why it is that that category of redactions is being redacted. so i think it will give us some information. the real issue here, to me, is i understand all of that from the public s perspective. there is no reason to redact 3 out of those 4 categories for congress. 6-e, yes, we ll litigate that in the court. that s grand jury material. that s right, but congress should be pressing for all of those other categories, for the reasons that were discussed at the top of the segment. there s no reason they can t have sensitive information, counterintelligence information. and by the way, someone needs to ask bill barr if the counterintelligence investigation is ongoing. that is one piece of this that has not been discussed at all, whether that went to a u.s. attorney s office or whether that s still going on. a lot more to come, including we re going to talk about this after the break. bill barr was also asked about ongoing, if you will, litigation. a fight going on in the court right now about obamacare and the trump administration s position on that. you ll want to hear what he has to say. we ll be right back. it turns out they want me to start next month. she can stay with you to finish her senior year? of course she can! [ laughter ] [ groaning ] hey! want to drive? really? [ engine revs ] do you think we can do this, rob? things will be tight, but we can make this work. that s great. [ laughing ] okay. here we go. now. [ gasps ] wait. grandpa, what about your dream car? this is my dream now. [ laughs ] principle. we can help you plan for that. run with us on a john deere 1 series tractor. beacuse changing your attachments, should be as easy as. what about this? changing your plans. yeah. run with us. search john deere 1 series for more. new lower price. wow. that s a lot of asparagus. yeah, you said get a bunch of asparagus. oh, you. a bunch. i. thought you kinda. why people choose to support shriners hospitals for children. - it might be because shriners hospitals is recognized around the world as the leader in their innovative research. they re super smart! - or it could be the fact that shriners hospitals specializes in giving transformative care so kids can get home quicker and get back to the important stuff, being a kid. - or maybe it s the way shriners hospitals is helping more kids in more places through the use of telehealth technology. this gives kids around the world life changing quality care right where they are. - like i said, there are a million reasons to support shriners hospitals every month. but i bet i know the best ones. - me! - me! - me! - and me! - when you call the number on your screen right now and give as little as $19 a month, just 63 cents a day, you ll be making a life changing difference for a child just like sarah. - with your monthly gift, we ll send you this adorable love to the rescue blanket as a thank you and a reminder of all the children who make up your million reasons why you support shriners hospitals for children. because of your monthly support, - i can dance. - i can play games with my friends (laughs). - i can walk. - will today be the day you send your love to the rescue? please go online right now to loveshriners.org to give your monthly support so more kids get the care they need to be kids. - there are a million reasons to give, and i, - i, - i, - i, - i am one of them. - [group] thank you! - [narrator] please call or go online right now. if operators are busy, please call again or go to loveshriners.org right away to give. your gift shows you care. attorney general bill barr, as you re seeing there, still testifying on capitol hill as we speak. he s facing more questions about the mueller report, the special counsel s investigation, and the resulting 300, 400-page report, and what congress and the public is really going to eventually see, as he says, within a week. we re watching that, monitoring that for you. also, just moments ago, another testy exchange on another topic between the attorney general and democratic congressman matt cartwright. this was all over obamacare. and barr s boss, you ll remember, the president, has renewed his push recently to strike down the whole law entirely. that is being fought out in federal court right now. so listen to what bill barr had to say about it. if you re successful, 12 million people nationally and 750,000 people in my home state of pennsylvania who have coverage under the medicaid expansion would also likely lose that coverage. am i correct in that, sir? do you think it s likely we re going to prevail? if you prevail well, you re devoting scarce resources of your department toward that effort, are you not, attorney general? we re in litigation. we have to take a position. the answer is yes. we take position in litigation. if you succeed, that many people will lose their coverage nationally from medicaid, and 750,000 from pennsylvania alone. right? i m saying if you think it s such an outrageous position, you have nothing to worry about. let the courts do their job. that really fascinated me. let me bring back in elie honig, jennifer rodgers back with me, also dana bash. dana, shockingly, there are theatrics coming from a capitol hill hearing. i know, i know. everyone, you can t believe it. but i was do you get a sense of what bill barr was trying to say in that line in answering that line of questioning? i was really both fascinated and surprised. he was trying to be tough. and trying to do it within the lane of being a lawyer and the attorney general. and trying to kind of throw it back in the congressman s face about the courts. you know, letting the courts decide. but look, what is this all about? of course, it s all about the president s attorney general, the republicans, obviously making a decision that they have no choice on the one hand, on the other hand, they probably don t want to have a choice, but to fight obamacare in courts in a way that they were unable to do legislatively. they were unable to do legislatively when they had complete control of washington. you know, up until of course in november they had the whole entire congress, and they couldn t repeal and replace obamacare. so they have made a decision that they are going to fight it in the courts. and look, i talked to an administration official about this recently who said that when i said they don t have a choice, that that was the overriding feeling, because how do you say to your base, how do you say to your voters, to republicans who you promised for ten years that you were going to repeal obamacare, never mind we re going to go fight to save obamacare in court. it is a tough situation. the problem now is the problem we have seen over the past ten years. let s say they are the dog that catches the car. and they are able to repeal obamacare. what are they going to replace it with? there is no answer. they couldn t agree on the answer when they had control of all washington. exactly. elie, how should if you were attorney general, or if you were an attorney for the government and sitting before congress and they ask your these questions, how would you answer. i would never get confirmed. that s a given. beyond that. dana is right. there s a subtext that i think attorney general barr was trying to put out there, which is almost i m just following orders. i want to dip back into the hearing because i think he s asked about obamacare one more time. legislative response if in fact that s true. i m asking you to speculate, and if questions are proper in this room, attorney general, if you win the case, will you agree that we ought to stay the effect of that until a new plan can go in place rather than strand all the people with pre-existing conditions and all the people whose health care will lapse because of that ruling? well, from my experience, the supreme court would likely deal with that in their opinion and provide some kind of period to wind it down. you want them to do it on their own motion with no prompting from the justice department, is that it? i didn t say that. i would say whatever the administration s position is at that point, we ll carry out. from a legal standpoint. i m dismayed to hear that you re willing to drive our health care system off the cliff with no plan for replacing it. well, i think your premise that the justice department makes health care policy is simply wrong. we take legal positions in cases. i m going to follow that up. numerous reports have indicated that you, the chief lawyer for the federal government, and secretary azar, who is the lead on health care policy for our federal government, strongly argued against supporting the complete repeal of the patient protection and affordable care act. however, reports indicate you and secretary azar were overruled by acting chief of staff, mick mulvaney and the president himself. now, at any point, did you convey either to mr. mulvaney or the president any concerns about either the effects of this lawsuit prevailing if it does, or concerned about the dubious legal arguments in this lawsuit, and did secretary azar communicate concerns about the effects on our american health care system? i m not going to get into the internal deliberations of the administration on this point. i had ample opportunity to present my views. and i believe that the final decision reached is a legally defensible and reasonable legal position, it is a position that prevailed in the district court. and it is a position taken by the four dissenting justices in the f.i.b. case, which is that once you do away with the mandate, the rest of the statute cannot stand. are you citing executive privilege by declining to tell me about the discussions between you, mr. azar, mr. mulvaney? call it what you wish. i m not discussing it. you re refusing to discuss it. all right. well, it s a decision that makes more extreme and in fact even contradicts. a decision to go forward with this position contradicts the doj s june 2018 position on the case, which was so controversial then that three of the four career attorneys representing the government refused to sign on to the briefs and actually removed themselves from the case. the american people deserve to understand if you and secretary azar support this lawsuit based on sound rationale or if it was just bald politics talking. i m requesting you submit this exertion of executive privilege in writing to this committee if that is what you re doing. don t ask us to call it what it is. i m asking you if you re exercising executive privilege, we need to know it and we need to know it in writing. i yield back, mr. chairman. thank you, mr. chairman. and attorney general barr, in your testimony, you mentioned cybersecurity. and being that the fbi is the lead federal agency for investigating cyberattacks by criminals, overseas adversaries and terrorists you re hearing there bill barr taking more questions from the same congressman about the issue of obamacare. jennifer, let me bring you into this because we kind of i cut elie off, but let me bring you in. barr, for background, the congressman brings up some very interesting reporting why the questions to bill barr were very interesting here about obamacare. because the reporting is politico had this reporting that in the deliberations about are they going to take on obamacare in court, are they going to go down this road, there was basically a fight, a debate that went on within the administration, politico reporting it was the attorney general, bill barr, and alex azar, that were against going down this legal route because barr, at least, according to the reporting, said that he did not think it was going to be a successful challenge. and now bill barr is faced with this, and asked to discuss it, and he said he s not going to discuss internal deliberations. that might be the least surprising of what we re hearing about this, but what do you make of this, jennifer? very interesting because you re right, reading between the lines, it seems as if when bill barr was speaking about this with mulvaney and others, potentially the president, his position was this was not a good legal argument. that s why he would have been there. he s not a policymaker on this issue. so his point was to come in and say listen, we had this position. are we going to do a 180 and change our position and here s why that s a hard thing to do and why legally it s not the best aurnrgument to make, and h lost that fight. he said a moment ago he thinks it s a reasonable position that s legally defensible. those are code for pretty bad legal arguments. they re now stuck making, you know, really not a great legal argument that he suggested they will lose, and it sounds like something he didn t want to do in the first place. dana, really quick, in another dynamic of all this, it wasn t just an internal debate within the administration about whether or not they should go down this route of taking on obamacare again. after the fact, if you will, there was real discussion between the top republican in the senate, mitch mcconnell, and the president about if congress was going to be able to do anything about it. bottom line, mitch mcconnell says we re not doing it. exactly. mitch mcconnell, kevin mccarthy, the republican leader in the house, and almost everybody down the line, almost everybody down the line. and that is why we saw a rare pullback by the president last week after he had taken this discussion about the legal action that his administration is doing after this internal debate. and taken it a step further by putting it into the legislative political realm once again. he was forced to pull it back after they reminded him they couldn t do it, as i said before, with complete control of congress. how are they going to do it now with democrats in control? instead, the president is now saying it will be a 2020 campaign argument, which it was going to be all along. but the reality of the president as we have seen so many times just kind of going with what he feels is the right thing to do and the right thing to say based on the last person he talked to, likely, kind of smacked into a force field of you ve got to be kidding me, among fellow republicans in the congress. yeah. not necessarily sound like a man who was ready and willing to defend what they were doing on obamacare in court right now. dana, great to see you. thank you so much. elie, jennifer, thank you. see you in a bit. still ahead, treasury secretary steve mnuchin is also facing lawmakers today. different topic, talking about the president trump s tax returns. what does he say about it? would he have the final say to release them? much more on this after a quick break. pardon the interruption but this is big! now at t-mobile buy any samsung galaxy s10 and get a galaxy s10e free! attorney general bill barr isn t the only trump cabinet member facing lawmakers today. treasury secretary steve mnuchin testifying before two house committees and he s quickly facing questions about the president and his tax returns. after a house committee, you ll remember, has said it has the authority to see the tax returns and the president s chief of staff just as quickly says that s is never going to happen. christiristina alesci is followl of this for us. what did mnuchin have to say about it. not much. he tried to kick off the hearing talking about his budget request for treasury, but very quickly, the chairman of this subcommittee turned the issue to the president s tax returns, and asked mnuchin whether or not he was the right guy to even decide whether the irs should hand over tax returns and fulfill the democrats request for those documents. he also asked mnuchin whether mnuchin had spoken to anyone at the white house about this issue. listen. last week, we were well aware that the chairman of the ways and means under 6103 of the tax code requested the president s tax returns. and we can get into the issue of what that answer should be, but at first, i think it s more important we talk about who should make that decision and with respect whether or not you, mr. secretary, should be involved in that decision. i want to acknowledge that we did receive the request. and as i have said in the past, when we received the request, it would be reviewed by our legal department, and it is our intent to follow the law. and that is in the process of being reviewed. now, in regards let me just interject. i apologize. what part are they reviewing? whether or not, or whether your office should be the one that makes the ultimate decision? are they reviewing whether or not you should make that decision as well, sir? it will be premature for me to comment specifically what they are reviewing on or what they re not reviewing on. but i would highlight, okay, i think as you know, the law calls for a request to me. as you have said, there is a tradition of delegating certain responsibilities. i would just comment it is my responsibility to supervise the commissioner. again, i think it would be premature at this point to make any specific comments other than as i have been consistent before in saying it is being reviewed by the legal departments. and we look forward to responding to the letter. have you spoken to the white house chief of staff or the president about this decision? i have not spoken to the white house chief of staff or the president about this decision. has anyone from the white house talked to you about this decision? to me personally or to other people within my department? you personally first, and to other people second. i have not had any conversations with anybody in the white house about this issue. any communication. i personally have not had any communication with anybody in the white house. although i want to be specific, that relates to me and not everybody at treasury. okay. so to your knowledge, has anybody in the administration communicated with anybody in your office about this decision? our legal department has had conversations prior to receiving the letter with the white house general counsel. and did they brief you as to the contents of that communication? they have not briefed me to the contents of that communication. i believe that was purely informational. you believe what was purely informational? i believe the communication between our legal department and the white house general counsel was informational, that we had read in the press, that we were expecting this. so they communicated just to say expect this, or did they talk about their views in any way, shape, or form? i want to be clear. i personally wasn t involved in those conversations. again, i want to be very clear and not be misleading. i acknowledge there were conversations. i am not briefed on the full extent of those conversations. and i would also just comment, those have been prior to us receiving the notice. because they saw the handwriting on the wall. i think as you know, it was widely advertised in the press beforehand, so this wasn t exactly a state secret that we thought we would be getting it. so kate, mnuchin is in a very difficult position because he s been a loyal cabinet member for so long. and he s managed to keep a very good relationship with the president. now, democrats are saying they re pursuing a legal route to getting the president s tax returns, and mnuchin is saying he ll follow the law. he s in a very difficult position. in fact, the chairman of the subcommittee pressed mnuchin on whether or not there s an issue of basic transparency and whether the president in his view should just go ahead and release his tax returns in response, mnuchin said that is a personal decision for the president. kate. whether he likes it or not. steve mnuchin is now smack dab in the middle of this fight. which is going to be a fight. thank you so much. i really appreciate it. let me bring back in elie, jennifer, and dana. how do you read mnuchin s response? he s in a tough spot. interesting that he actually conceded there s been coordination, communication between his office and the white house. on some level. but mnuchin just said we re going to follow the law. i would have liked to follow that up with, well, the law says, quote, shall furnish. the irs shall furnish this information to the house ways and means committee upon request. so how do you read shall furnish other than shall furnish? it will be interesting to see if they re able to get around that, but that s a pretty straightforward piece of law, and i don t know how mnuchin can come to any other conclusion other than we shall furnish. dana, you have what you hear from mnuchin, we will follow the law. you have what you heard from mick mulvaney, the president s acting chief of staff, that democrats will never see these tax returns. how is the white house going to navigate this? those two things don t seem to be the same. they don t. first of all, that was a really fascinating exchange because it s almost like you were on the journey with him trying to avoid a mine every time he stepped on what was clearly a minefield. i had frogger in my head. you had minefield. exactly. all of the above. because he clearly has seen what happens when you don t tell the truth to congress, and he was trying to be so exact that he was tripping over himself to say that the people in his office have had the conversation. but again, it was noteworthy not since that he knows of, not since the actual letter from the house ways and means chairman was sent last week. just in anticipation of that. but look, elie is right. the law is clear. in terms of what congress can do, and it s a request to the irs, not to the president. to the irs commissioner, asking for these tax returns. but the question is, what is the opposing argument that the president s legal team is going to make when there is going to be an inevitable court challenge, which could, likely will, elie and jennifer can correct me if i m wrong, go up to the supreme court and create a brand-new fascinating precedent. yeah. that law, a 1924 law, is what is being cited by the chairman of the house ways and means committee. it s that one word, two words if you will, shall furnish, that everyone will be looking at for a long time to come. let s see what happens next, but steve mnuchin now seems to be the man, whether he likes it or not, in between congress and donald trump s tax returns. then there s some court mixed in there. great to see you. thank you so much, guys. coming up for us, the purge at the homeland security department. it now has some republicans sounding the alarm. why they say the president needs to think twice about his continuing shakeup at the department of homeland security. that s next. making my dreams a reality takes more than just investment advice. from insurance to savings to retirement, it takes someone with experience and knowledge who can help me build a complete plan. brian, my certified financial planner™ professional, is committed to working in my best interest. i call it my comfortable future plan, and it s all possible with a cfp® professional. find your certified financial planner™ professional at letsmakeaplan.org. we need a solution.ut their phones down. introducing. smartdogs. the first dogs trained to train humans. stopping drivers from: liking. selfie-ing. and whatever this is. available to the public. never. smartdogs are not the answer. but geico has a simple tip. turn on do not disturb while driving mode. brought to you by geico. and back pain made it hard to sleep and get up on time. then i found aleve pm. the only one to combine a safe sleep aid, plus the 12 hour pain relieving strength of aleve. i m back. aleve pm for a better am. it s way day! yes. it s wayfair s biggest sale of the year, and you re invited! starting april 10, score our lowest prices since black friday on best-selling furniture, decor, and way more. plus, everything ships free on way day. everything? everything. and flash deals launch all day long. hey guys, check out the flash deal i just scored! our biggest sale of the year only lasts 36 hours so shop way day starting april 10 at wayfair.com. car vending machines and buying a car 100% online.vented now we ve created a brand new way for you to sell your car. whether it s a year old or a few years old, we want to buy your car. so go to carvana and enter your license plate, answer a few questions, and our techno-wizardry calculates your car s value and gives you a real offer in seconds. when you re ready, we ll come to you, pay you on the spot, and pick up your car. that s it. so ditch the old way of selling your car, and say hello to the new way at carvana. visionworks can do more than the right pair of glassesat. can make you look amazing, too. get two complete pairs of single vision glasses for $59 or two progressives for $99. and choose from over 500 frames. visionworks. we re here to help you. near systemic purge. that is how one senior white house official is describing what s happening at the department of homeland security right now. here s a look at who s been fired, who probably will be fired, or those who didn t even a chance, because their got their nominations pulled. more pink slips could be coming, and that is raising red flags for even some top republicans. republican senator chuck grassley telling the washington post in an interview that president trump is, quote, pulling the rug out from the very people that are trying to help him accomplish his goal, especially when it comes to immigration. but wait, there is more. do you remember the widely condemned family separation policy we ve talked about so much on this show at the border, that even president trump himself had said was a bad idea and even donald trump himself put a stop to with an executive order. well, cnn has now learned that he not only wants to bring that policy back, he wants to expand it, like the old policy on steroids. let s get right to cnn s kaitlan collins at the white house right now. kaitlan, this is all coming to light, just after the homeland security secretary, kirstjen nielsen, was forced out. what are you hearing now? reporter: kate, the president is increasingly furious about record-high immigration numbers that he s seeing, and he thinks a clean sweep of dhs leadership is going to help him change that. now, one idea that s been raised in recent days in response to the president pushing people to reinstate that family separation policy is something called binary choice. that would give migrants who have been detained the options to either remain detained as family units or be separated from their children, so their children don t have to remain in those detention facilities. now, whether or not the administration can implement something like that, kate, without congressional approval, is essentially a whole another ball game. but what it really reveals is that the president is very frustrated about the immigration numbers, and that s why you ve seen so many people pushed out of dhs in recent days and maybe more to come in the coming days, if the president gets what he wants. now, something you ve heard from white house officials behind the scenes is they don t know if the leadership changes that the president is making is really going to make that much of a difference. they are unable to stop a record-high number of people crossing the border, but people say they don t know that it will be that much different with nielsen and those other leaders gone from dhs. kaitlan, thank you so much. and for everyone, it was yes, the color guard is always for kaitlan collins, but also today walking behind kaitlan as they re preparing for the president of egypt, al cici, he will be meeting with president trump today. yes, the president of egypt will be there. there s a lot of discussion to have that around that as well. let s focus here on kaitlan was talking about, what s going on with homeland security and when it comes to the border. david la pann is joining me now, the former press secretary for the department of homeland security. he and secretary nielsen worked together at the department when it was led by then secretary john kelly. he s also a retired marine colonel who spent 30 years in the military. thank you so much for being here. thank you, kate. the president, as kaitlan s laying out, the president for four months has been pushing for not only a return to that zero-tolerance policy, but also an expansion of it. do you think that s a good idea? i really don t know. you know, as kaitlan said, the president s frustrated, and i understand that frustration, but those kind of decisions and those kind of moves are counterproductive. they aren t going to help the situation. as we ve seen already, the harsh rhetoric, the harsh policies have not resulted in a decrease of migrants coming to the southwest border. the numbers have continued to rise. so it seems pretty clear that those aren t the right answers. and one other thing that we re hearing, it s basically multiple steps at this point of what the president is trying to do of recent that we re just now learning when it comes to the border. he wants to shut down ports of entry, he was talked out of that. he then wants to put a stop to letting asylum seekers in. and for months, talking about the separation policy. telling cnn s reporting, though, that he was telling border patrol agents in el paso, when he met with them, that they should stop letting migrants in, effectively telling them to break the law. they had to be told by the other superiors to not do that after he left. david, do you think at this point that the president does not care? or that he somehow still does not understand the law. one, i don t think he clearly understands. two, i don t think he understands again that what he wants to do is butbutting up against both u.s. and international law. he wants results, he wants what he wants. and whether he just doesn t understand the law or he doesn t really care, it seems, again, that he s willing to roll over all of those things. i mean, the irony here is, from the days that i was at homeland security and throughout, you know, the mantra has been, we follow the law. and i m confident that the professionals and customs and border protection and the border patrol wouldn t follow a direction that would cause them to break the law. what did you think when you learned that kirstjen nielsen was effectively pushed out? well, i m concerned not only at her dismissal, but all of the personnel changes that you ve detailed, both the ones that have occurred and the ones that might occur. so it s creating a large amount of confusion, uncertainty, at the very head of an organization, the only organization in the u.s. government, whose primary mission is securing the homeland. so if kevin mcaleenan is moved into the position, we will have an acting secretary of homeland security, an acting deputy secretary, an acting commissioner of customs and border protection yeah. an acting director of i.c.e. and oh, by the way, less than three months before the start of the atlantic hurricane season, an acting director of fema. do you think this is putting the country at more risk? i think it certainly has that potential. if we are looking at adversaries and they are watching closely, this is the exact type of situation they re looking for, to exploit, the confusion. yeah. and david, one of the people behind pushing nielsen out, we re learning, and other policies is stephen miller, the top adviser to the president. did you have a lot of interaction with him when you were there? not a lot, but i did have some interaction with him. if you were told that stephen miller is in charge of border policy and immigration policy right now, are you okay with that? not at all. why is that? well, both because the policies and the views that stephen has espoused over time, but importantly, and especially in the in this change in leadership at homeland security, puts us in a situation where you have an unelected member of the staff, somebody who is not senate confirmed, therefore, not accountable to higher authority. so, again, there have always been individuals at the staff level that are involved in decisions, but usually have senior leadership, as well. so that vacuum at the senior leadership gives more power to somebody, again, who s in an unelected and non-senate-confirmed position. i think that s a very important point to be making. david, thank you so much for your time. thank you for sticking around with all the breaking news today. appreciate it. thanks. still ahead, the attorney general, bill barr, facing lawmakers right now on capitol hill, taking questions on the mueller report, on the legal fight against obamacare that the administration has taken on anew, and much more. barr revealing a redacted report, the redacted report of the mueller investigation could be released, in his words, within a week. stay with us. a lot will happen in your life. wrinkles just won t. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair s derm-proven retinol works so fast, it takes only one week to reveal younger looking skin. neutrogena® ( ) only tylenol® rapid release gels have laser drilled holes. they release medicine fast, for fast pain relief. tylenol®. welcome to inside politics . i m john king. the attorney general tells congress a redacted version of the mueller report will be made public next week, but he dodges and refuses to answer some questions, including whether it has already been shared with the president and his lawyers. plus, the trump purge at the department of homeland security alarms republicans in congress, who worry about management of critical programs and also about the type of erratic presidential behavior that hurt the gop in the last election. the courts also push back at the president s border agenda. and remember that crowded 2016 gop presidential field? well, the 2020 democratic pack now even bigger, 18 and counting. the challenge for the latest entry, congressman eric
the report a portrait of the white house and dishonest. the mueller report finds the president lied to the public and tried to get aides to lie for him repeatedly. it did not exonerate him on obstruction of justice. the mueller team said they were unable to conclude that no criminal conduct occurred! and it gets a little thick. you re going to have to walk through it. you re going to have to read it for yourself. for instance, while the special counsel couldn t conclude whether to bring a criminal case on obstruction, they did meticulously lay out a fleet of examples of potential obstruction that showed our attorney general s quick dismissal of the case smacks of politics. mueller found the president did try to obstruction but was unsuccessful sometimes because his aides didn t obey him. the special counsel also explicitly mentioned congress s role in holding potus to account for abuses of power beyond criminal charges. we also learned that the president was bluffing when he would call the probe a hoax. when the special counsel was named, he called it the end of his presidency. while not finding a criminal conspiracy, the report lays out multiple contacts between trump associates and russia saying the campaign did expect to benefit from russia s actions but took no criminal steps to help. something doesn t have to be a crime to be unethical and just wrong. and there was a lot of that and much of it was lied about repeatedly. so there s a lot to cover. let s begin with cnn s jessica snider live in d.c. reporter: good morning, chris, this massive mueller report giving us an even closer look inside the white house, really painting a portrait of a presidency in chaos, fuelled by public lies and denials of reporting that has proved true. with mueller s inquiry wrapped and those damaging details coming fully to light now, the president s fate is in the hands of congress. though, democratic leadership is arguing against pursuing despite calls to take angst ovction ove damming details. outlining president trump s frantic efforts to thwart the counsel s investigation noting the efforts were mostly unsuccessful largely because the persons surrounding the president refused to carry out orders. he was appointed after he fired fbi director james comey, mueller writing president trump declared oh, my god, this is terrible, this tis the end of m president. mueller writes, the president pressed rod rosenstein to give a news conference suggesting firing comey was his idea. telling the president a news conference was a bad idea because if the press asked him he would tell the truth. president trump took a series of actions to curtail the probe, including directing white house counsel don mcgahn to instruct acting deputy attorney general rosenstein to have mueller removed. the special counsel writing that mcgahn did not deciding instead that he would resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential saturday night massacre. president trump saying when the new york times reported on that story last career. fake news, folks, fake news. typical new york times fake stories. the special counsel also detailing a number of other instances where the president tried to sabotage the investigation, including asking former campaign manager corey lewandowski to tell then attorney general sessions to curtail the investigation, directing the deletion of a line in a press release acknowledging that the trump tower meeting with russians had to do with information helpful to the campaign. urging attorney general jeff sessions to unrecuse himself and sending veiled or direct messages, personally or through intermediaries to former campaign chairman, paul manafort, his former lawyer, michael cohen, and former national security adviser, michael flynn, encouraging them not to cooperate. mueller noting that he did not bring charges of obstruction of justice against mr. trump due in part to a justice guideline that a sitting president cannot be indicting. if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice we would so state. mueller suggesting that congress, not the justice department should decide whether to prosecute the president. attorney general barr defending the president s conduct. there is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency. reporter: within minutes, house democrats were calling for mueller s testimony, and slamming barr. barr s words and actions suggest he has been disingenuous and misleading in saying the president is clear of wrong doing. reporter: the report also offering new detail about the extensive efforts by the russian government to interfere in the 2016 election to help elect trump including attempting to hack hillary clinton s e-mails five hours after mr. trump said this. russia, if you re listening, i hope you re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. reporter: mueller ultimately determine that while the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen by russian efforts, president trump remaining defiant. i m having a good day too. it was called no collusion, no obstruction. and notably, president trump s lawyers actually kept him from sitting down for an interview with the special counsel. mueller in his report disclosed that they did consider issuing a subpoena for the president s testimony since they found his written responses inadequate. but mueller s team ultimately decided that pursuing that path would lead to lengthy litigation. in the meantime, trump s team still has not issued any sort of written rebuttal despite getting that early access to the mueller report before the public release about a week ago. maybe they decided not to do that. rudy last night. he said he is going to do it. he says they have it, they re ready and they wanted to let this play out a little bit, because they like the way the narrative is going, and i don t know why, and we ll put it out when we need it. i think that makes sense. why continue it. putting out your rebuttal only continues the conversation. if you think you re done, if the president is taking a victory lap, why do it. with one comment. if they want to be what they say they are, all about transparency, you would put it out right now. if you re gaming the system, once again, then you play to advantage, and look, he hired people to help him do just that. they did a good job. people won t like to hear that, i know, but they were hired to protect him. if he had different lawyers, we may be telling a different story. let s discuss this. we want to bring in our guests, david gregory, cnn political analyst, joe lockhart, former clinton white house press secretary, and abby phillip, cnn white house correspondent, and bernardo, i want to start with you, i watched you poring through the dense 450 pages, now that the smoke has cleared over the past 24 hours, what is your take away? i will say on the collusion side of it, although there was no criminal experience between the russian government and the trump campaign, there s certainly an agreement on certain points, i mean, the trump campaign i think was trying to get the aid of the russian government. mueller says they welcomed the aid. expected the benefit. and at times there seemed to be great efforts to make contact with wikileaks and have coordination with them. i think what the public can learn from that portion of it is how hard it can be to prove criminal experience beyond a reasonable doubt, something i think all criminal lawyers know. i will say on the other side, on the obstruction side, an absolutely devastating case against the president, a case that i think mueller could have brought. i think there s a lot of signals that he would have brought that case if it wasn t the president of the united states, and i think it was very clear that the justice department guidance is what held him back! abby phillip, what s the word from the white house, how are they feeling it went yesterday? what do they think this means for them? well, chris, i think the one thing everybody needs to pay attention to is the fact that we haven t heard from president trump. he declined to talk to reporters on multiple occasions yesterday, other than making a very brief comment while he was at the white house with the wounded warriors event, and honestly, that tells me that this is a president who s listening to his lawyers, listening to rudy giuliani who s telling them let this marinate a little bit. he s clearly watching television, tweeting out favorable comments he has been seeing because generally i think in the places where he cares what people are saying, namely his favorite shows on fox, they are saying all the right things for him and he s letting that really play out. i think the white house is going to hang their hat as they have been for many weeks now, on the fact that there were no charges brought down in all of this. i think they re going to bank on the idea that the american public is not going to dig terribly deeply into this report. they re not going to latch on to these anecdotes and they are going to take the top line and run with it. that s why you have seen a president who s generally pretty happy with how this turned out and really probably thrilled with how bill barr did yesterday in that press conference laying it out for the american people in probably the most favorable light possible for the president and allowing that sound bite to carry the day for the next few days. i think that s where we are right now. when he s here in florida, he typically spends the day golfing. so gjoe, you being a strategist, would you let this lie now? would you ever release that rebuttal? i think giuliani signalled that they want to wait until they need it. their strategy is pretty simple. they just want to make sure that they re resassuring their base, the fox news world, the rush limbaugh world, that they were show vindicated, exonerated. it s not true. not much coming out that we found out of the president s mouth is try. but their strategy all along is to make sure that they keep their base happy and then, you know, come election time, you know, just pick up marginal voters, you know, at the edges, and if you watched, you know, if you spent time watching tv yesterday, you would think america was two different planets. on one station fox, it was vindication, every place else, it was serious questions and this now goes to congress. that s their strategy. i don t think it s a particularly good one, but it s the one they re following. david, if you don t like the information, attack the source. rudy giuliani, and jay sekulow last night, when i would present things from the probe as findings of fact, they would say who says, that was never tested in a court of law. we can t go on that. that s just what mueller says. that doesn t make it true. that s the strategy. that s the strategy, and look, the reality is they had an incredibly serious minded person with incredible credibility, high standards leading an investigation which ultimately resulted in no crimes, and no recommendation for charges of obstruction of justice and a catalog of unseemly behavior of lies, and paranoia in response to a legitimate investigation in a series of really troubling questions that i think as citizens we should be very happy that after a terrible attack on the country, a hack and attack by russia on our electoral system that the president of the united states or those close to him did not commit a crime according to the special prosecutor who took a very deep look at all of this. so i think the white house has reason to feel relieved, and there are certainly lots of questions about their judgment. they can be tested politically now, and we have a big election. democrats got very angry, and i think justifiably so when jim comey came out saying nobody would bring charges against hillary clinton, secretary of state for handling of confidential e-mail and went on to editorialize about the mistakes that she made and the poor judgment, and republicans piled on because they thought that should be a big issue. well, democrats now want to do the same thing to trump, whether there s evidence of a crime or not. not understanding that, again, if his judgment and actions that he took and others took are signals of judgment and character and fitness for office, voters can make that decision next year and congress can take a look at this and make a decision about whether they think there s high crimes and misdemeanors. it sound like they re already doing that, david. you say the democrats are piling on. i hear them backing away. from impeachment. from impeachment. i agree with you, and why because, you know, i think it s instructive, and joe has his own views about this, but a lot of the restraint in this report, a lot of the restraint by bob mueller, the restraint you re hearing from democrats who are in leadership is a response to the overreach of republicans against bill clinton. joe. well, listen, i just have to respectfully disagree with david s analysis. there is a huge difference between what jim comey did to hillary clinton, and what bob mueller was doing. jim comey could have gone to the justice department and tried to indict hillary clinton. he didn t think a case was there but he also didn t want to exonerate or, you know, bless her behavior. the critical part of this report on obstruction of justice and mueller makes it clear and i ll defer to the many legal experts is he believed the department of justice guidelines believed he could not indict a sitting president. this is no gratuitous editorializing. he actually is laying out a road map. here is a very strong case for obstruction of justice but i can t bring this. he s not saying that the president didn t commit a crime. he s saying, i can t charge him with a crime, batessed on doj guidelines. that s a very different situation. on the impeachment question, the democrats face a difficult choice. you know, i think the democratic base want this, want now someone to bring these charges and the appropriate places in the house. but, you know, nancy pelosi understands that we could go through this entire process and never convict him in the senatement i don t thisenate. i don t think there s a single republican that will vote against him. they have to wrestle with this. it s not a binary choice. they will set up a place to investigate this thoroughly, and make a decision down the road on impeachment. abby, go ahead, make a quick point, and we ll take a break. it seems to me one of the reasons the white house is so happy, in this report, it doesn t seem there s anything in it that will change the minds of republicans. that s a really high bar for this president but they don t think there is any momentum toward impeachment in the detail of the report. nothing to keep republicans up at night, and i think that s important for them because they re holding on, not just to their political coalition among the voters, but importantly lawmakers who are really the sort of fire wall between the president and an impeachment proceeding in the house and senate. i think that s within of the other reasons why they are so happy about how this all turned out for them. the thing that nobody can dispute that is all over this report is wow, did russia do us diary in that election dirty in that election, and they were so effective and we don t know how to stop it. and we will get into that in another segment. one of the kwequestions now why didn t the president successfully obstruct justice. did his aides save him, in particular the man on the screen, former white house counsel don mcgahn, did he save the presidency? next. woman 1: this is my body of proof. man 1: proof of less joint pain and clearer skin. man 2: proof that i can fight psoriatic arthritis. woman 2: .with humira. woman 3: humira targets and blocks a specific source of inflammation that contributes to both joint and skin symptoms. it s proven to help relieve pain, stop further irreversible joint damage and clear skin in many adults. humira is the number one prescribed biologic for psoriatic arthritis. announcer: humira can lower your ability to fight infections. serious and sometimes fatal infections, including tuberculosis, and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened, as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. man 3: ask your rheumatologist about humira. woman 4: go to mypsaproof.com to see proof in action. you get the price match guarantee. so if you find your room at a lower rate, hilton is like. we re gonna match that rate and give you an extra 25% off. what would travel sites do if you found a different price? that s not my problem, it s your problem. book at hilton.com and get the hilton price match guarantee. a lot will happen in your life. wrinkles just won t. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair s derm-proven retinol works so fast, it takes only one week to reveal younger looking skin. neutrogena® - [woman] with shark s duo clean, i don t just clean, i deep clean carpets and floors, so i got this. yep, this too, and this, please. even long hair and pet hair are no problem, but the one thing i won t have to clean is this because the shark s self-cleaning brush roll removes the hair wrap while i clean. - [announcer] shark, the vacuum that deep cleans now cleans itself. here s what we know, the mueller report lays out a details case of obstruction against president trump. they couldn t make a criminal case. there are lots of examples, and it reveals some key aides may have stopped the president from himself, including former white house counsel don mcgahn who refused the president s order to fire mueller. the significance to you in terms of wlrhether or not to formulata case, and mueller goes far enough to say if they had listened i could have charged them. how do we make sense of that? wow, i mean, it s frankly a very strong case. here you have all of these people, senior white house officials who thought the president was asking them to do something profoundly wrong. the white house counsel thought the president was asking him to do things that he was willing to resign over. don mcgahn thought this would be another saturday night massacre. very serious stuff. what i took away from all of this was mueller had a case to make against donald trump. he had an obstruction of justice ca case. if it wasn t for the doj guidance, he would have made it. he didn t feel like he could do much with that because trump wouldn t have a constitutional right to defend himself in court because he wouldn t be able to go to court. and by the way, that is what attorney general bill barr misrepresented. one of the many things that bill barr misrepresented in his summary of this. it was that bob mueller felt his hands tied by those rules, and we ll get into all the things that bill barr misrepresented, but that s just one of them. as a matter of fact, the first question a journalist asked at that press conference, very telling, they asked was there a role that the doj guidance played in mueller s decision not to charge, and what did he do, barr said he priveted away from the pivoted away from the report, and said i had a private conversation with muler and asked him square mueller and asked him square about it. i was thinking about what you said in the last segment, you believe that democrats have a hard decision to make about impeachment. isn t it clear that if you don t have crimes and you don t have consensus, you have to beat them at the ballot box, and to david s point, you know, you have a lot of ammunition. now you have to prove you have someone who s better than he is with a better message and you beat him at the ballot box. that s it. well, i think the reason it s a hard decision, and you can look at this purely in political terms as the base of the democratic party wants something to happen. you know, they look at the mueller report and say the president has committed crimes and he should be removed and ignoring that sentiment of the people that are for you, you do at your own peril. it is a difficult decision. i think there s a middle ground, i think you saw nancy pelosi late yesterday indicating that they re going to take a good hard look at this. they are going to continue their investigations. i don t think you ll see an answer on impeachment forthcoming very quickly. steny hoyer said he doesn t think they should do it. i think when steny hoyer says something, and nancy pelosi says something different, he should listen to the speaker and i think she did that on purpose, and wanted to make sure that democrats know out in the country that we haven t decided what we re going to do and we re going to take a hard look at this, and we re going to hold the president accountable. i think that s ultimately what democratic voters want to know, they want to know the president will be held to account and won t get a pass. they don t believe he s been exonerated and neither does bob mueller. let me say, i think again, i mostly agree with what joe is saying, but where i respectfully disagree is this portion about subjecting who we charge criminally in this country and making this by popular demand. it doesn t work that way. is there a mouse? abby, what was that? abby, what was that? a lizard was climbing on me. i thought i heard something, and i didn t know if it was joe. i didn t know what. abby, did you just stomp out a lizard on live television. sorry that just happened on live television. is that lizard okay? it was a giant lizard. i don t think it s okay, but i m fine. . it s tropical. at least it wasn t an alligator. to pick up on david s point, i don t think it s by popular demand. i actually think that, you know, the politics of this situation may preclude the democrats from going forward. if there wasn t, you know, if this was just about what s the right thing to do for the country, i think bob mueller was screaming at his report, congress, please take a look at this. that s a point where i was actually disagreeing a bit, joe, is i think i agree with you that the report is definitely a road map to say you know what, there s no evidence of a crime here that i could find and this isn t up for popular demand. prosecutors make decisions about whether to bring a case or not. bad facts don t mean that you can bring a case, but there s no question that there is a road map to follow here if you are congress doing its job saying, was there political obstruction here. is there a high crime or misdemeanor? let s examine that and move forward. now the politics of that are fraught. but david he s not making the case i don t believe he s making the case there isn t evidence to bring a criminal case. he was examining to whether to bring a criminal case. saying there s no evidence of a crime is flat out false here, and just to be clear, robert mueller, i think very clearly sets out a case as to obstruction of justice. i think joe is correct that, you know, he leaves that in the political branches because of the justice department guidance. there s no question to me that he set forth a case as to obstruction of justice. i don t think it s a fair reading to say that he did anything but and frankly,eni i k as joe said, congress would move forward, that the political ramifications are the challenge, but for right now, the democrats have to keep that option open. let s not extrapolate from the report something that is not also in the real world. there s politics in every decision, you know this, about bringing a case. you have worked as an ausa. i do not agree with that. you don t think there s discretion in politics about whether to bring a case. if i was investigating a bank robbery or a drug deal, i wasn t thinking about politics, i was thinking about whether there was enough evidence. right, but that s a discretionary decision. i didn t say it s all politics but there s politics if you re an attorney general or a u.s. attorney about whether to bring a case, how to bring it. well, look, certainly the executive branch, the legislative branch makes the laws but there was not politics about whether or not to charge a fraud or a bank robbery. the reason the president of the united states is not being charged is because he s the president of the united states. he has the office to thank for that, and let s just be very real about that. the fact of the matter is that if there were 60 votes in the senate, he would be impeached, period, because there s overwhelming evidence of obstruction of justice. we can pretend others but that s the truth. i m not making this an argument either way on this point. i m just saying that to say this absolutely takes us out of the point of where we are today which is there will be a political decision that s made by democrats on whether to move forward based on whether they think they can make the case politically, and i m not disagreeing that mueller has certainly provided a road map for democrats in congress to begin that. i m not disagreeing on that. abby, we re going to give you the last word because you just squashed a lizard. it was an alligator! now it is. the lizard is gone. but just to weigh in on this a little bit, i think what s so fascinating about this obstruction case is the president clearly knew that what he was doing was wrong because he tried to get people who had no business firing his attorney general like corey lewandowski to pass on the message to him, lou lewandowski passed it to an aide who had no business of firing the attorney general, and this is a pattern of the president trying to outsource things that he doesn t want his finger prints on, and this is in the report, where mueller thought that maybe the president thought that he was breaking the law in some cases and was trying to hide that, and maybe he wasn t actually breaking the law but the president might have thought he was. i thought that was extraordinary that he knew that this was not right, and was trying to hide it. i think it does speak in some ways to his mindset and his motivation for doing it, and i think that probably speaks to the people who think he should have been charged. if you don t think you re obstructing justice, you re not going to try to hide the activities that you re doing that seem like obstruction of justice. that was very interesting to see the various people who for whatever reason, maybe they have a moral compass, maybe it was self-pre self-preservation, didn t follow the president s orders, and we ll goet to that later in the program. thank you all very much for this debate. we ll be right back. everyone! our mission is to provide complete, balanced nutrition for strength and energy! whoo-hoo! great-tasting ensure. with nine grams of protein and twenty-six vitamins and minerals. ensure, for strength and energy. and twenty-six vitamins and minerals. with peak season berries, uniqcreamy avocado. and a dressing fit for a goddess. come taste what a salad should be. and with panera catering, there s more to go around. panera. food as it should be. ahhhh! we re here. so many of them are full of this great. acomplicated,ess ad. tricky language about their network and offers and blah blah blah blah blah blah. look sprint s gonna do things differently, and let you decide for yourself. they re offering a new 100% total satisfaction guarantee. try it out and see the savings. if you don t love it, get your money back. see? simple. now sprint s unlimited plan comes with one of the newest phones included for just $35 a month. so switch now. xfinity watchathon week has sadly come to an end. what, what, what! no! but don t let that stop you from watching the best shows and movies from showtime, hbo, epix. jesus, what happened? .and more. it s just the tip of the iceberg. upgrade now to get more into what you re into. thanks! just say watchathon into your x1 voice remote to upgrade and keep getting more of what you love. 448 pages of mueller report. now, you could say it boils down to just a few key take aways. some things that repeat themselves over and again. john avalon has that reality check. guys, the subject is daunting and the length dizzying, but after you have read through the mueller report, some damming stats off the page. this is the mueller report by the numbers. first, more than 30, that s the number of times president trump used phrases like i don t recall or i don t remember of i have no recollection in his official responses to the special counsel s questions to the russia probe. next, 36, that s how many pages all of the mueller report redactions would fill, 8% of the 448 page report. next, at least five, that s the number of times the report says president trump asked senior aides to lie either for him or for the administration. also five, that s the number of hours it took russian hackers to target hillary clinton after they heard trump say this after the trump campaign. 203. that s how many times the report mentions cnn, the new york times, the washington post, and nbc. the implication, robert mueller was leaning pretty hard on what trump likes to call the take news media for his definitive report. eleven, that s the number of instances of possible obstruction of justice allegedly perpetrated by trump and his associates, as examined by mueller, including president trump attempting to have special counsel robert mueller removed to pushing white house counsel don mcgahn to deny he tried to have mueller removed. mcgahn, the number is one, that s the number of things that saved trump from an obstruction wrap, higher minded associates refused to carry out his orders. mcgahn refused to recede from his recollections, wouldn t lie. comey didn t kill the flint investigation because trump suggested he let it go. and cory lewandowski would pass the message to jeff sessions that he should kill the russia investigation. nine, that s the number of pages mueller spent telling congress exactly how it could bring an obstruction of justice charge against the president though he determined he himself was unable to. despite this, the last number out is zero, that s the amount of specific evidence that mueller found could clear trump of an obstruction charge. i love when john does math. it s so great. it s so refreshing. it s hot. it s early in the morning. but math honest. we ll be back in the next hour, actually you ll be back in a minute. thank you very much, john. cnn legal analyst, el elie honig will join us next. - [woman] with shark s duo clean, i don t just clean, i deep clean carpets and floors, so i got this. yep, this too, and this, please. even long hair and pet hair are no problem, but the one thing i won t have to clean is this because the shark s self-cleaning brush roll removes the hair wrap while i clean. - [announcer] shark, the vacuum that deep cleans now cleans itself. rather than worry about how to pay for long-term care. brighthouse smartcare℠ is a hybrid life insurance and long-term care product. it protects your family while providing long-term care coverage, should you need it. so you can explore all the amazing things ahead. talk to your advisor about brighthouse smartcare. brighthouse financial. build for what s ahead℠ introducing the all new chevy silverado. it s the official truck of calloused hands and elbow grease. the official truck of getting to work, and getting to work. of late nights, and date nights. it s the official truck of homecoming, and coming home. the all new chevy silverado. the strongest, most advanced silverado ever. it s the official truck of real people. the mueller report paints a damming picture of the trump presidency. let s talk about the big take aways. e lee helie honig and jon avalo back. you have been great about giving your thoughts about this. it s been 24 hours, you ve digested this. let s talk about your three big take aways. number one, evidence of obstruction of justice, what s your take away. you have to start with obstruction. if this was any person other than the president of the united states, i can say as a former prosecutor, this would be a knock down case for obstruction of justice. i have charged and convicted people on obstruction of justice based on a fraction of this evidence. but of course the big sticking point was this doj policy. william barr, i think misrepresented to the american people that policy had nothing to do with robert mueller s decision not to charge it. if you look at the report, mueller wrestles with that decision and i think it s the only reason he did not charge the president and why i think what it seems like robert mueller was trying to do was send it over to congress for their consideration. i agree with that part but give some attention to the other line of potential defense which would be the president was pissed off that you were coming after him for this stuff. all of these were the product of that. he was angry. he could fire all of these people. he knew that this was wrong in his opinion, so that explains the actions. it wasn t to obstruction. it wasn t corrupt intent, it was a fit of peek. william barr tried to make an excuse, he felt anger and frustrated. boohoo, that s why people obstruct jus, they obstruct justice. i see that as evidence of motive, as to why he would obstruct justice. quickly, we want to get to your next take away, the trump campaign expected to benefit from the russian interference and there s ample evidence of that. yeah, so russia, the second big point, no crime, i get it t no conspiracy, i think mueller lays that out clearly, and i think we all should accept that, but that doesn t mean it s a straight clean bill of health for this administration, politically, security wise, his t torically and thistorically, they knew what was going on and they benefitted from it. led me add to elie s piano, that sentence is the other half of the sentence that barr kept raising in his report and the press conference. he literally had to separate the sentence to highlight the one part about the president. and omit the other part. omit the fact that not only was russia working to help trump but the trump campaign expected to benefit. barr told us they couldn t find proof to satisfy a criminal case, that they didn t coordinate. there you have it except they were trying and they liked it, and they lied about what they did to try to get the benefit again and again. and it s right at the top of the introduction. i mean, tbarr, consciously separated it because he wanted to highlight one and push down the other. explain how you think that don jr., there was so much attention if he would be in trouble. how do you think he avoided indictment? by the skin of his teeth. there s a detailed analysis in the memo, in the mueller report about the trump tower meeting, and really what it comes down to is donald trump jr. didn t have quite enough specific knowledge of the campaign finance laws. the campaign finance laws are strange. they are unusual in our criminal world in that you have to have a heightened sense of awareness of those sort of obscure laws and that really looks like the main thing that saved donald trump jr. from indictment. look, i mean, in terms of saving the president, i think what s striking about this is that the ornate game of contain the president, the way the white house staffers tried to dissuade him from giving into his impulses, ended up saving his bacon in pretty fundamental ways. his impulses were wrong, their attempts to contain his worst impulses vindicated him. the obstruction of justice any other human being would be charged. paints a picture of the president as a serial law with no respect for rule of the law but not a traitor. it s better situation than if we had to deal with the fact that our president operated as a russian agent. you ve lowered your standards. i ll take that as good news, and then we have everything else to deal with. thank you, gentleman, very much. how are voters responding to the mueller report, we re going to head to a battleground state to get reaction, next. comes miracle-gro performance organics. it s miracle-gro s next big thing. organic plant food and soil that finally work. and work. and work. and yes we did say organic. for twice the bounty, guaranteed. miracle-gro performance organics. organics finally grow up. and up, and up. itso chantix can help you quit slow turkey. along with support, chantix is proven to help you quit. with chantix you can keep smoking at first and ease into quitting. chantix reduces the urge so when the day arrives, you ll be more ready to kiss cigarettes goodbye. when you try to quit smoking, with or without chantix, you may have nicotine withdrawal symptoms. stop chantix and get help right away if you have changes in behavior or thinking, aggression, hostility, depressed mood, suicidal thoughts or actions, seizures, new or worse heart or blood vessel problems, sleepwalking, or life-threatening allergic and skin reactions. decrease alcohol use. use caution driving or operating machinery. tell your doctor if you ve had mental health problems. the most common side effect is nausea. quit smoking slow turkey. talk to your doctor about chantix. i felt i couldn t be at my best wifor my family. c, in only 8 weeks with mavyret, i was cured and left those doubts behind. i faced reminders of my hep c every day. but in only 8 weeks with mavyret, i was cured. even hanging with friends i worried about my hep c. but in only 8 weeks with mavyret, i was cured. mavyret is the only 8-week cure for all common types of hep c. before starting mavyret your doctor will test if you ve had hepatitis b which may flare up and cause serious liver problems during and after treatment. tell your doctor if you ve had hepatitis b, a liver or kidney transplant, other liver problems, hiv-1, or other medical conditions, and all medicines you take including herbal supplements. don t take mavyret with atazanavir or rifampin, or if you ve had certain liver problems. common side effects include headache and tiredness. with hep c behind me, i feel free. .fearless. .and there s no looking back, because i am cured. talk to your doctor about mavyret. to save 30% on all the medications we carry. so go directly to petmeds.com now. the mueller report is out, how are voters feeling today? cnn s miguel marquez is live in milwaukee, wisconsin, with more. miguel, what have you learned? reporter: good morning, november 3rd, 2020 feels a long way away, doesn t it. look, everyone is talking about this report but nobody i m talking to thinks that its findings are going to make much of a difference to anyone. good morning, wisconsin, 48 degrees at radio city. release of the mueller report in milwaukee, talk of the town. obviously the big story, the mueller report, the redacted version is coming out hopefully as we speak. we got it. on conservative talk radio, he says he s talked mueller, now that it s out there. for a lot of people on my side of the aisle, we re look at this as yeah, there could have been some reason to investigate this, but i think it has been hyper politicized to the point where it just went on too long. and from caller after caller after caller, the president isn t perfect but the investigation has gone too far for too long. eddie from franklin, i have about a minute, what say you? i say it s a total fishing expedition. they had a prejudgment about trump ahead of time. they don t like his character, which a lot of people don t but they just don t agree with his policies. in the milwaukee suburbs, fort washington in conservative ozaki county where in 2016, voters supported then candidate trump by nearly 19 points over hillary clinton. some republican voters here say. we re sick of hearing about it. i think washington, they want to focus on it. those people want to. but for us, my friends, we re sick of hearing about the mueller. democrats want more details but concede regardless of what s in the report, it s likely to make little difference in how voters view the president. i think i have been reading about it for a long long time, and it seems like i m not sure anything is going to change. closer to downtown in blue where voters backed clinton over trump by 22 points, some independent voters here say the entire report must now be released. the full report needs to be fully disclosed to everybody so that we can read it and see what is actually in. no redactions in the report, the full report, everything? the full report, absolutely. we have a right to see the full report. some republicans also welcoming full publication, confident there is nothing there. if this was going to have any kind of major impact on anything, they would have already brought indictment or charges or recommended further prosecution so i don t think it s really going to be the big reveal like everyone thinks. reporter: so i spoke to independents, democrats, republicans, even republicans who don t like the president, and across the board they said look, if this is still the discussion in 2020, it s going to improve the president s chances of being reelected. chris. interesting. still cold in wisconsin i see. miguel, thank you very much for soldiering for us. still cold. looking good as always. the president is claiming exoneration, again, after the report has come out. the details of the report are not great for him. now what? that s the big question, right? what will congress do. let s take that up. next. so, we re-imagined the razor with the new gillette skinguard. it has a unique guard between the blades. that s designed to reduce irritation during the shave. because we believe all men deserve a razor just for them. the best a man can get. gillette. - [woman] with shark s duo clean, i don t just clean, i deep clean carpets and floors, so i got this. yep, this too, and this, please. even long hair and pet hair are no problem, but the one thing i won t have to clean is this because the shark s self-cleaning brush roll removes the hair wrap while i clean. - [announcer] shark, the vacuum that deep cleans now cleans itself. when your flight gets in late, it s never too early for coffee. oh no no no. your new boss seems cool, but she might not be sweatpants cool. who is that ready this early? it s only 7 am. somebody help me. close call. not quite ready to face the day? that s why we re here with free hot breakfast and a warm welcome. book at hampton.com for our price match guarantee. hampton by hilton. georgand a busy day ahead. our price match guarantee. george has entresto, a heart failure pill that helped keep people alive and out of the hospital. don t take entresto if pregnant; it can cause harm or death to an unborn baby. don t take entresto with an ace inhibitor or aliskiren, or if you ve had angioedema with an ace or arb. the most serious side effects are angioedema, low blood pressure, kidney problems, or high blood potassium. ask your doctor about entresto. the beat goes on that was great! investment opportunities beyfirsthand, like biotech.ne because your investments deserve the full story. t. rowe price invest with confidence. xfinity watchathon week has sadly come to an end. what, what, what! no! but don t let that stop you from watching the best shows and movies from showtime, hbo, epix. jesus, what happened? .and more. it s just the tip of the iceberg. upgrade now to get more into what you re into. thanks! just say watchathon into your x1 voice remote to upgrade and keep getting more of what you love. . the facts established by this report are damning. the nature of trump s action is he s making nixon look good. wouldn t do stuff that the president wanted him to do. i acknowledge a slip of the tongue when i used the word countless. but it s not untrue. it s an active attempt to create a false narrative why james comey was fired. i d like to impeach the senate republicans for not having conviction. this is new day with alisyn camerota and john berman ziem welcome to our viewers around the united states. this is a special edition of new day. it is friday, april 19th. 6:00 in the east. john berman is off this week. chris cuomo joins me. good morning. that was a fun dress rehearsal. now we can get to the heart of the matter. more is better. the long awaited mueller report has been out for less than 24 hours and the headlines reveal the gravity of its finding. the wall street journal writes, mueller report lays out trump attempts to
committee. barr had been refusing to take questions on the lawyers and now he is refusing to comply with a subpoena for the full mueller report. here s chairman jerry nadler on those developments moments ago. attorney general barr informed us that he will not attend tomorrow s hearing. i understand why he wants to avoid that scrutiny, but when push comes to shove, the administration cannot dictate the terms of our hearing in our hearing room. the department of justice told us they will not comply with our subpoena for the full un redacted mueller report, a subpoena that was returnable today. compliance of congressional subpoenas is not optional and if good faith negotiations don t result in a pledge of compliance, the next step is seeking a contempt citation against the attorney general. this comes after today s hearing where in case after case barr came across, defending the president rather than as the chief official. the mueller report said trump tried to fire the special counsel. barr said trump tried to remove him as if there was any difference. barr said trump s attempt to sway testimony was really an effort to discourage them from lying. however the hearing reaches the climax barr s admission that he had not looked at the evidence that the prosecute could not be exonerated. here s the attorney general in a dramatic exchange with kamala harris. has the president or anyone at the white house ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone. yes or no, please, sir. the president or anybody else? seems you would remember something like that and be able to tell us? yeah, but i m grappling with the word suggest. there have been matters out there that they have not asked me to open an investigation. perhaps they suggested? i don t know. i wouldn t say suggested. hinted? inferred? you won t know. okay. barr was masterful in obfuscating. senator harris nailed him down. another revealing exchange, the attorney general could not or would not say if they ever asked him implicitly or otherwise to open new investigations. we just saw this tape. let s catch this one. then reaching your conclusion, did you personally review all of the underlying evidence? no, we took mr. rosenstein? we accepted the statements in the report as factual record. did anyone in your executive office review the evidence supporting the report? no. no? yet you represented to the american public that the evidence was not sufficient to support an obstruction of justice? the evidence presented in the report. i think you made it clear that woo you have not looked at the evidence. we can move on. senator harris tweeted what i just saw is unacceptable. barr must resign now. in doing so, she joined democrats calling for the attorney general to step down. senator kamala harris joins me now. she sits on the senate judiciary committee and is a canndidate fr president in 2020. you are calling now for his resignation. what was it that broke you on that conclusion? well, it s a culmination of things, chris. from the beginning, i was part of the judiciary committee hearings to decide whether or not he should be attorney general. the confirmation hearings. i vote the against him because i thought he was less of a candidate. since then we have seen an attorney general who after a comprehensive extensive two-year investigation by bob mueller and an extraordinary team of lawyers and prosecutors, after two years of around the clock work, he in 2 days, submits a four-page summary of the investigation that clearly was intended to mislead the american public about the contents of the report and does a press conference reinforcing his biased and it s clear he is biased biased interpretation of not only the evidence that now we know he did not review, but his interpretation of the meaning of what had been gathered in the report. his biased view of the intent of the actors who were the subject of the investigation. then today he admitted he did 23409 review the evidence. i m going to tell you something as a former prosecutor. when you were talking about the attorney general of the united states who ispresented with the responsibility and the duty to represent the people of the united states on a question of whether the president obstructed justice, i think it is reasonable that the american public should expect that before that attorney general speaks, he would have firsthand knowledge of the evidence before he speaks and utters a word about whether or not he is going to charge a crime. but this attorney general failed to do it. clearly it is because he thinks of himself as the attorney of the president instead of the people s attorney. i think that s disqualifying. to put a sharp point on it, it seems he overruled mueller and said basically, he can t exonerate the president. i ll do it. it seems as you point out without going into the evidence, he ash trarl made the judge evening if mueller won t do it. i agree with you. the report is a report. is if you have it in front of you, you see the cover page of that document that calls said because it is, a report. it is not a file of evidence. it is a report on an investigation. the findings of that investigation. he said it himself. after the report was filed with him, it was his baby. what he s got his baby, then you know you have to figure out what exactly it is before you start representing what it is to the american public. he failed to doe that, chris. listen, there is that piece about his testimony where he could not clearly answer it. i believe he can, but did not clearly answer whether he had been asked by the president or any member of the white house to investigate someone or anyone. if this is his baby, who is the daddy. i get the sense watching this. i mean this. this was a brilliant pr operation. it started with a two-day wait when he said the president was exonerated. i m sorry to be like this. it s a serious day. he lets it marinate or justate for four weeks and puts the spin on it that morning. do you think the president has been directing this choreography? i have no way of knowing that, but i do know what i have seen in the attorney general and i see someone who clearly does not have the people in mind as his first priority or his first or for whom heship of ultimate or important duty. he feels a sense of duty to th . president and does not feel the same sense of duty to the american people. as you mentioned, i m traveling the country and meeting a lot of people feeling a sense of distrust in our defendant and institutions and leaders. when you have the person who was responsible for being the highest official in our land certainty our system of justice, presenting himself and conducting himself in this way, it compromises the integrity in our system of justice. there are people walking into courthouses be it state or federal courthouses being prosecuted and convicted on evidence less than the evidence of this report. this is a statement of our system overall. we have seen that general barr is not contributing to anyone a confen confidence in this justice system. is he upholding the constitution. certainly we can call into question what is his primary duty in terms of of the way he thinks of his job. how far are you going to do. do you think he should be impeached? we should take it one step at a time, but i think he should resign and he intentionally mischaracterized the report. i believe he intentionally is misleading congress and the united states congress that has an empty responsibility as a coequal branch of government to have oversight and determine the integrity of the system and he failed to convince the congress that he conducted himself with integrity. let s move ahead. don mcgahn, the attorney general said he would prevent the white house counsel from testifying before the congress. here he goes. do you have any connections of why don mcgahn should not testify before this committee about his experience? um, yes. i think he is a close adviser to the president never exerted executive prejudice. we re haven t exerted executive privilege. that s a call for the president to make. once he testified before special counsel investigation, how can he now say i won t make the same testimony in president claiming executive privilege. it s like virginity. once you start talking about a matter and you say you can t do it, i understand that s how executive privilege works. once you have given it up, you can t grab it back. i m not going to go with you on that, chris. i will say this. dick durbin did an excellent job of pointing out that there is no valid reason why he being the attorney general should object to don mcgahn coming before the congress and testifying. is he definitely going to testify before your committee? i don t know, but i urge him to i hope he was watching today s testimony. i would think and i would assume that certainly the mueller team, if they watched today s testimony, would know there are clearly other versions of this report and the process of the investigation and the underlying evidence and would hope that they would make themselves available to the united states congress and the people of our country to expose the truth about the evidence and the investigation and what exactly it is that they were trying to communicate in the publication of that report. it is my interpretation and i think many of us that report waswas wassa an indication to look at the information and begin a process. most people who watch this program thought that the mueller report was going to be the first step congress would look at it. it would be a in terms of impeachment proceedings. the attorney general said no, it s in my court. it s my baby, as he said. i will decide. interestingly enough, what he failed to indicate and i think it remains a reasonable belief for us to understand that it was the office of legal counsel s opinion about the ability to indict a sitting president that may have been the one reason why the mueller investigation did not result in an indictment. i think it s very reasonable to believe. nothing that contradicts that belief. i m sorry about that metap r metaphor. i have been admonished. i heard that phrase used in this context. let me ask you about this stonewalling and your questioning of the attorney general. do you think it has something to do with the fact that he s not showing up in the house tomorrow. now he s not going to show up before the house judiciary. he doesn t like tough questions. i have a great sense of confidence in the ability of that committee and the chairman nadler to do whatever is necessary to make sure the american public has as much informs as they deserve and there is transparency and congress has the full ability to exercise the responsibility of oversight. do you think nancy pelosi, the speaker, has many people said let s not do impeachment now and let s get more information. the administration is stonewa stonewalling on all the subpoenas and all the document requests. even the very statutory right of the congress to ask for the president s tax returns under 1924 law. they are stonewalling it. is this moving towards a situation where the only weapon to use a tough term, that congress has left is impeachm t impeachment? i don t think we exhausted everything yet. each day reveals a new angle and a new concern. my perspective is let s take it one day at a time. last question. looking at the report as i m sure you have done because we haven t had a chance to look at it, the experience by the russians established by indictments, multiple indictments of russians, it happened. sweeping attempt to intervene in our election process. a reality. do you believe that the trump people played ball with the russians in the 16 campaign? it defends on how you define that. they were aware of what the russians were doing and they were fully prepared to receive the benefit of what the russians were doing. as a next step, it is incumbent on congress and this attorney general and all of us to say that any campaign that plays with a foreign government and benefit from that foreign government s interference in one of the pillars of our democracy, our open and free elections, there should be severe and grave consequence. fundamental issue which is the issue which is the strength of our democracy and anyone running for the highest office of this land and purports to be a leader should not be complicit with an adverse aerial country under mining who we are as a nation. member of the senate judiciary committee and candidate for the presidency of the united states. thank you. general barr continuing to distort and deflate the mueller report and never said the president did anything wrong. what he said mueller got wrong about the russia report. lots to talk about the way he intended the report. when are we going to hear from mueller. the plaintiff cry from president trump. where is my roy cohn. much more ahead on a very busy district attorney. stick with us. y busy district attorney. stick with us. corey is living with metastatic breast cancer, which is breast cancer that has spread to other parts of her body. she s also taking prescription ibrance with an aromatase inhibitor, which is for postmenopausal women with hormone receptor-positive her2- metastatic breast cancer as the first hormonal based therapy. ibrance plus letrozole was significantly more effective at delaying disease progression versus letrozole. patients taking ibrance can develop low white blood cell counts, which may cause serious infections that can lead to death. before taking ibrance, tell your doctor if you have fever, chills, or other signs of infection, liver or kidney problems, are pregnant, breastfeeding, or plan to become pregnant. common side effects include low red blood cell and low platelet counts, infections, tiredness, nausea, sore mouth, abnormalities in liver blood tests, diarrhea, hair thinning or loss, vomiting, rash, and loss of appetite. corey calls it her new normal because a lot has changed, but a lot hasn t. ask your doctor about ibrance. the #1 prescribed fda-approved oral combination treatment for hr+/her2- mbc. oral combination treatment - there but what are wes to get our messactually saying?ys. any message is a story. and all stories tell the tale of the times we live in right now. how do you want to be remembered? how do you want your story to play out? our own experiences make the best stories, and your words carry a lot of weight. think about what you want to say before you say it. or send it. here sshow me making it. like. oh! i got one. the best of amy poehler. amy, maybe we could use the voice remote to search for something that you re not in. show me parks and rec. from netflix to prime video to live tv, xfinity lets you find your favorites with the emmy award-winning x1 voice remote. show me the best of amy poehler, again. this time around. now that s simple, easy, awesome. experience the entertainment you love on x1. access netflix, prime video, youtube and more, all with the sound of your voice. click, call or visit a store today. attorney general william barr acted like a defense attorney and his client is president donald trump. he and not mueller was the man in charge. his work concluded when he sent his report to the attorney general. at that point it was my baby. testifies my baby. nearly six hour testimony he explained why trump had the right to do what he did. you think he fully cooperated to destruct a former aide to step down the investigation and declare the president did nothing wrong? i don t think well, obviously since i didn t find it was obstruction, i felt like the evidence could not support. i m asking is that full in cooperating? i m not asking is that obstruction. here fully cooperated. for came hours after the news that robert mueller objected to barr s representation of the report, absence the presence of mueller himself. he was free to characterize the letter. it was an extreaaordinary ac memorializing in i know of no other instance of that happening. do you? i don t consider bob a career prosecutor. the letter is a bit snitty and it was rwritten by one of his staff people. on the record of his special counsel. mazie hirono from hawaii tore into the torn general. mr. barr, now the american people know that you are no different from rudy giuliani oracle know an conway or any people who sacrifice their once decent reputation for the grifter who sits in the oval office. you said the job of attorney general is not the same as representing the president. you know the difference, but you have chosen to be the president s lawyer and side with him over the interest of the american people. you used every advantage of your office to create the impression that the president was cleared of misconduct and selectively quoted from the counsel s report, taking the most important statements out of context and ignoring the rest. you put the power and the authority behind a public relations effort to help donald trump protect himself. for his part, president trump was more than thrilled by barr s performance that the attorney general was really, really solid and did a great job. former federal prosecutor and michael schmidt and david corn, mother jones washington bureau chief. i want to go with michael schmidt. this statement by the attorney general was pretty he said it s my baby and i m in charge. mueller is finished. i guess it s a screen writer for a movie. i m the boss. is that the way it works that the special counsel has no legacy role for having the two-year long report? not when mueller is not speaking up. some critics of mueller would say the fact that he did not have a facing effort during his time as special counsel and never spoke publicly and never heard his voice, they allowed barr to move into the vacuum. barr is showing himself as incredibly capable in ways that jeff sessions was and matt whitaker, his predecessor and helping to protect the president crafting it in a way that is digestible for the average person to understand. we have not seen a cabinet member that the president has so effectively communicate and operate today in the president s effort as we did. i thought that was significant. very, very different that what we usually see. when the report came into the hands ever mueller. he saw the 10 examples of where the president obstructed justice and he saw the summary that said i can t exonerate him and he re he sled. not only did he overrule, no way could he have read that over the weekend and digested it. he didn t read any of the underlying evidence. you know what else is shock. he didn t call mueller and discuss it. if you take a case and say i m going to do x, we talk about it. what about this or how did this happen are you sure this witness is he did none of that. the conclusion, he figured out what he was going to say and it didn t matter what mueller said in the underlying report. that s what was made so clear by senator harris s questioning. i m struck that he will say mcgahn will not testify. he testified under oath to the mueller commission and saying no, we can still reach out and pull back in and tell him not to testify. they can try to do that. it may be up to don mcgahn to call and testify. we are going to have the same fight perhaps or whether robert mueller testifies. there is a lot of questions barr raised in the meeting or what was memorized. when senator blumenthal said there were notes to that meeting and he said can we get them. barr said why would i give them to you? pretty daring. very daring. a lot of things that happened, we could spend the whole night talking about. what we will see on this front, the tax returns and other things, very major constitutional clashes when congress tries to get information and will barr come and testify before the house judiciary and put it off tomorrow and come back in a week or two. they may try to turn our constitutional order upside down in which they don t cooperate with any oversight. the special counsel s report listed 10 instances where the president may have obstructed justice. he cannot indict, but they have a to play in that investigation. let s watch. i don t think bob mueller was suggesting that the next step was for him to turn this stuff over to congress to act upon. that s not why we conduct grand jury investigations. that s exactly what the report says. he goes through each of these instances and he finds substantial evidence of several things. one of which is the attempted firing of muler and the other is to try to get mcgahn to lie and the 30 is to try to get sessions to control the size and scope. from 50 ways on sunday from 19,000 footnotes, this is up for congress to decide. i cannot decide as a matter of rule. when barr says to everybody, no, that s not what he said. it s black, white, raining, not raining. it s bizarre. here took it away from the zoor and said i m going to judge. what happened is bill barr became sarah sanders with more graph tas. it was spin and saying things that were not true. trump loved it. stick around. stick with us. when we come back, more on the attorney general s sort of testimony including trying to figure out if the u.s. attorney understands the difference between surveillance and his favorite word, and trump s favorite word, spying. back after this. back after this. leave no man behind. or child. or other child. or their new friend. or your giant nephews and their giant dad. or a horse. or a horse s brother, for that matter. the room for eight, 9,000 lb towing ford expedition. featuring three new dishes that are planked-to-perfection. feast on new cedar-plank lobster & shrimp. or new colossal shrimp & salmon with a citrusy drizzle. tender, smoky, and together on one plank. .but not for long- so hurry in! i m missing out on our family outings because i can t find a bladder leakage product that fits. everything was too loose. but depend® fit-flex feels tailored to me. with a range of sizes for all body types. depend® fit-flex underwear is guaranteed to be your best fit. dad, it s fine. we have allstate. and with claimrateguard they won t raise your rates just because of a claim. that s why you re my favorite. i know. are you in good hands? do your asthma symptoms ever hold you back? about 50% of people with severe asthma have too many cells called eosinophils in their lungs. eosinophils are a key cause of severe asthma. fasenra is designed to target and remove these cells. fasenra is an add-on injection for people 12 and up with asthma driven by eosinophils. fasenra is not a rescue medicine or for other eosinophilic conditions. fasenra is proven to help prevent severe asthma attacks, improve breathing, and can lower oral steroid use. fasenra may cause allergic reactions. get help right away if you have swelling of your face, mouth, and tongue, or trouble breathing. don t stop your asthma treatments unless your doctor tells you to. tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection or your asthma worsens. headache and sore throat may occur. haven t you missed enough? ask an asthma specialist about fasenra. if you can t afford your medication, astrazeneca may be able to help. welcome back to hardball. attorney general barr has been criticized for sounding more like the president s personal lawyer. he has been called out for parroting the talking points out of the white house about no collusion and spying on the campaign trail of donald trump. today barr defended his use of the word spying to describe fbi surveillance of the people connected to the trump campaign in 2016. i don t think the word spying has any pejorative coloneltation at all. it doesn t have synonyms because it s the broadest word incorporating covert intelligence collects. i m not going to back off the word spying. the outrage is commonly used in the press to refer to authorized activity. it is not commonly used by the department. it is commonly used by me. his word choice has no negative constation. here s what he talked about in front of congress. i think spying on a political campaign is a big deal. it s a big deal. generation i grew up in is the vietnam war period, people were all concerned about spying on antiwar people by the government. back with me is michael schmidt and david corn. this use of the word spying. this talks about the deep state and the bad guys and the enemies of donald trump. he sword of strataled both sides of this. he has said he knows of no illegal spying that has gone on. he acknowledged this is something that the inspector general is looking at. he knows how to speak about it in a way that resonates with the president. he doesn t deviate too far from that and could put an end to all of this and say i understand people may interpret that word one way, i m not going to use it like that. he is someone that likes to stand where he stands and is going to defend what he does. it allows him to keep up the notion in the conservative press with the emphasis being put on this inspector general s investigation and how the fbi handled the investigation into the trump campaign. back in 2016. there is a lot of anticipation there and this stoked it. i watched the hearings and i get the feeling that there will be a turning and get the sense they are going to turn. the republicans on the committee in the senate judiciary committee have already turned am they will try to say they are successful stifling or suppression of the mueller report. they did halfway. they reduced had his firepowerm they will go back to hillary and the e-mails and how this investigation began. yes and no. they are putting their fingers in the dikes trying to keep the mueller report at bay and tax returns at bay and all this. where is the source of information here? house democrats. 3% of americans read the report. you put don mcgahn on tv and you get him talking about the story. you call don, jr. to talk about the trump tower meeting. none of the investigations we have seen on the hill had law r hearings about this. why was he setting up meeting with putin s office in august of 2016. when he was a candidate, he was told the russians were doing this. there is a lot more to come on the story. it s not just in the hands of the republicans and the jet and bill bar justice. that s great as a concept, but most of the people are not going to come and they will drag it out. what s going to happen when the house democrats try to push the subpoena. bill barr will enforce it? no. it s going to go to the d.c. courts and be tangled up until the election. in the new york times op ed, james comey calls out william barr and rosenstein s defense of the president and what it reveals about this. to stay with trump, you must be seen as on his team. you must make compromises and praise his leadership and timeout his commitment to values and then you are lost. he has eaten your soul. that s strong stuff from comey. he has eaten your soul. so maniy is someone who confronted this over the months of thing administration and did not give into the president. asking comey for his loyalty and asking comey to get out the word that he was not under investigation. holding firm on that until exactly two years ago this month where he fired him. the disclosures leading to the toilet of mueller and the obstruction. it s all coming full circle. comey has experience and was not someone that gave in. it s interesting that we don t always hear from comey speaking in this detail. they wrote about this in his book. he didn t go into the complete impact that the president can have on you when you are a subordinate and he s the president of the united states. people have chosen sides. thank you. up next, it looks like the u.s. attorney general had enough of answering questions before congress. now, he won t testify anymore. no more scheduled meeting with the house judiciary. he said no. will democrats take this lying down? don t go anywhere. ying down don t go anywhere. this is the durabed of the all-new chevy silverado. the bed is huge. it offers a built-in 120 volt outlet. man: wow. plug that in for me. various: whoa! holy smokes! and the all-new silverado has more trim levels than any other pickup. whoa! (laughter) oh wow! woman : there s something for all of us. man 2: it s time to upgrade. get 0% financing for 72 months on this all-new silverado. or get a total value of over $9,000 when you finance with gm financial. find new roads at your local chevy dealer. you wouldn t accept an incomplete job from any one else. why accept it from your allergy pills? flonase sensimist relieves all your worst symptoms, including nasal congestion, which most pills don t. and all from a gentle mist you can barely feel. flonase sensimist. it s how we care for our patients- like job. his team at ctca treated his cancer and side effects. so job can stay strong for his family. cancer treatment centers of america. appointments available now. cancer treatment centers of america. got it.r pickup order? ran out of ink and i have a big meeting today. and 2 boxes of twizzlers. yeah, uh. for the team. the team? gooo team.. order online pickup in an hour. hurry and get an extra 20% off with coupon. at office depot officemax. (gasp) (singsong) budget meeting! sweet. if you compare last quarter to this quarter. various: mmm. it s no wonder everything seems a little better with the creamy taste of philly, made with fresh milk and real cream. i m missing out on our family outings because i can t find a bladder leakage product that fits. everything was too loose. but depend® fit-flex feels tailored to me. with a range of sizes for all body types. depend® fit-flex underwear is guaranteed to be your best fit. depend® fit-flex underwear when it comes to reducing the evsugar in your family s diet,m. coke, dr pepper and pepsi hear you. we re working together to do just that. bringing you more great tasting beverages with less sugar or no sugar at all. smaller portion sizes, clear calorie labels and reminders to think balance. because we know mom wants what s best. more beverage choices, smaller portions, less sugar. balanceus.org welcome back to hardball. after his grilling today, william barr escalated disputes with congress by declining to testify before the house tomorrow. barr notes to taking questions from counsel on that committee s staff. jerry nadler said he wouldn t immediately subpoena barr if he didn t appear. the committee has the right to determine their own procedures. the attorney general has the nerve to try to tadictate our complete stonewalling of congress period. nadler said contempt proceedings. in this statement a spokes woman called the conditions unprecedented and unnecessary saying he is happy to engage with members of congress on the report. nadler was not surprised he didn t want to submit the questions by professional staffers. i can understand how given how dishonesty has been since march 24th at the latest. i understand why he is afraid of facing more effective examination. one of the fellow chair men said he should defy every option. that means impeachment, i believe. that s coming up next. , i believe. that s coming up next. s. don t stoop to their level. s. draw the line with the roundup sure shot wand. it extends with a protective shield and targets weeds more precisely. it lets you kill what s bad right down to the root while guarding the good. roundup sure shot wand. got weeds in your grass too? try roundup for lawns. kills weeds, not the lawn. roundup brand. trusted for over 40 years. it s how we care for our patients- like job. his team at ctca treated his cancer and side effects. so job can stay strong for his family. cancer treatment centers of america. appointments available now. woman: this is your wake-up call. if you have moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis, month after month, the clock is ticking on irreversible joint damage. ongoing pain and stiffness are signs of joint erosion. humira can help stop the clock. prescribed for 15 years, humira targets and blocks a source of inflammation that contributes to joint pain and irreversible damage. vo: humira can lower your ability to fight infections. serious and sometimes fatal infections including tuberculosis, and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened, as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. woman: help stop the clock on further irreversible joint damage. talk to your rheumatologist. right here. right now. humira. right here. right now. you have 4.3 minutes this time,to yourself.rn. this calls for a taste of cheesecake. philadelphia cheesecake cups. rich, creamy cheesecake with real strawberries. find them with the refrigerated desserts. with peak season berries, uniqcreamy avocado. and a dressing fit for a goddess. come taste what a salad should be. and with panera catering, there s more to go around. panera. food as it should be. welcome back to be hardball. chairman jerry nadler said he won t immediately subpoena general barr. barr said he is not coming and he joins a host of officials who stonewalled the request for do you means or testimony. in this morning oversight chair elijah cummings said it s testing the patients of house democrats who so far resisted impeachment. they don t mind investigating, but when they find they have nothing to investigate because we can t get information, why bother? i don t know what the white house is trying to push or to pressure us into. we have to use every tool we have in the tool box, whether it s impeachment or whether it s inherent contempt. i don t know. we have to. i m joined by clair mccaskill from missouri and raja krishnamoorthi from the intelligence committee. i want to start with the congressman. intmation from mr. cummings that maybe this is a at what pointing thing going on right now. maybe we are getting a bring it on, start impeachments, we will kill you in the next election or are they just being arrogant? how would you describe the motive? a little bit of all of the above. the thing from our standpoint is are we going to do nothing or something? vindidate subpoena rights and enforce foeblks in c. adherence contempt is something they can do without requiring department of justice cooperation is something that people are leaning towards right now. can they hold people in contempt and bring them before the law without the respect of the justice department? it s been done in the past and we have a holding cell in the u.s. capital. i m not saying we use that, however we can exact fines against individuals and their personal capacity and make sure that people personally feel the sting of basically not complying with the subpoena. this is a reduction that is absurd. i don t use these conversations because i assume having lived through watergate that people played by the rules. a subpoena is honored and not ignored. in contempt of congress is something to be feared. he said i will think about it and may 6th maybe. someone else will say that s premature and they admonish the congress to leave them alone. it s interesting that my republican colleagues like to weigh the constitution and talk about the constitution. our founding fathers did smart things. the coequal branches of government and the checks and balances. all the kids learn about the checks and balances. this executive branch is not paying attention. because it s really important that congress can do this. the notion that barr won t be questioned by a star member. have they forgotten the republicans brought in a staffer to question dr. ford in the kavanaugh hearings and no one complained about that. if dr. fort who is not the attorney general can sit and take questions from a staff member, surely barr can do it in front of the house judiciary. i saw the same vulnerability with the hive r five-minute rule. they were hold it a short period of questioning. the most common thing i heard from kamala harris is my time is up. what s wrong with one person grilling for maybe a half hour and get somewhere. you can get continuity. why not? because real what barr and the attorney general wants is for the public to get the information. the public needs to have the information about whether or not he is trampling on the rule of law for politics. let s go to the other thing. barr is saying i m not going to give you the un redacted document. you are not going to get the mueller report. you would say executive session, i will give it to the chairs or ranking members. no compromise here. congressman? i think the question that i asked in my mind is, what are they hiding? why aren t they coming forward with the information? we know of the thousand redactions, 80% are in volume one that goes to criminal conspiracy and contacts with russians. of the 14 cases that upper referred to other jurisdictions, 11 were blacked out in the appendices of the report. more wrong-doing is being investigated in other dur jurisdictions. they don t want us to know who the targets are and what the subject matter is. let me go back to the senator. thank you for coming on tonight. how did you like the senate s performance? do you have a sense that they are a good way to get the information or not? there were moments that were illumina illuminating. barr said i accepted the evidence in the report and didn t examine it. just accepted it as true and tried to ignore all of the damning evidence about what trump has done and how he abused the office and how he told people to lie and tried to shut down the investigation. it was really everything that is up is down and down is up. it was hard to follow. senators have a tendency to kamala is a courtroom prosecutor. you learn how to do cross examinations. this guy can wiggle. it was quite a battle and i think she won. raja krishnamoorthi and clair caskill of missouri. the guy will do what he needs to do for the boss. at he needs to do for the boss. thanks to priceline working with top airlines to turn their unsold seats into amazing deals, sports fans are seeing more away games. various: yeah-h-h! isn t that a fire hazard? uh, it s actually just a fire. priceline. every trip is a big deal. run with us on a john deere 1 series tractor. beacuse changing your attachments, should be as easy as. what about this? changing your plans. yeah. run with us. search john deere 1 series for more. what we witnessed today is a vivid come to life of what this president wants in the country s chief law enforcement official. he wants someone on sworn to protect him. there was never any doubt how much trump recented his first attorney general. what he wants in his general is what he saw in the new york lawyer roy cohen do in manhattan. he made his bones-defending shadowy defendants that entered into criminality. serving as chief counsel in the early 1950s. trump wanted a legal body guard. after learning his white house life failed to get then attorney general jeff sessions to take control of the mueller investigation. trump got what he wanted n. william barr, he a general wonderful enough to turn into trump s advantage. mueller failed to exonerate trump on obstruction of justice, did just that. never mentioning the heard of the mueller report that began the russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion. even roy cohn could not have protected the president with such lack of shame. all in with chris hayes starts right now. tonight on all in has the president or anyone at the white house asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone. yes or no, please, sir? um, the president or anybody else? big new questions for the attorney general as the man attempting to clear donald trump meets the senate. you lied to congress. you knew you lied and now we know. bill barr responds to robert mueller s stinging rebuke.
Transcripts For MSNBCW Hardball With Chris Matthews 20190415 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
is prepared to roll over and play dead. congress shouldn t be calling people s tacks ju taxes just to if they can get dirt on the person. announcer: this is new day wday with alisyn camerota and john berman. could contempt be the work of the week? no certainly seems to be the word of the morning. steve mnuchin, treasury secretary, is saying no to an official request from the ways and means committee to turn over the president s tax returns, saying it lacks a legitimate legislative purpose. for what it is worth, there is a law that says the irs shall furnish the returns on requests from congress. mnuchin s move sets the stage for a legal battle, one that could be a long legal battle over the president s taxes. justice department officials and house judiciary committee staff will meet today to try to work out a deal for a congressional access to the mueller report. this comes ahead of a planned vote tomorrow on whether to hold attorney general william barr in contempt for defying that subpoena to turn over the full, unredacted mueller report to congress. joining us to discuss this and more, we have david gregory, cnn political analyst, brianna, cnn contributor, and jeffrey toobin, chief legal analyst. jeffrey, once and for all, is congress entitled to see the full, unredacted mueller report or not? well, let s put it this way, there has never been a court, ever, that has said congress is not entitled to a tax return first, the mueller report. oh, i m sorry. the mueller report. isn t there precedent that things like the starr report i know it is different but are released to congress? are they in the right when they want to see the unredacted report? that one is a little bit of a closer question, the mueller report. grand jury material usually requires a separate court order in order to be disclosed outside of a certain numerated list of people. that court order has not been obtained. if the justice department wanted to cooperate, if the justice department wanted to share the mueller report, there s no doubt that they could. they could set the process in motion. they haven t done it. in terms of a subpoena, i think that issue is closer than the tax return issue. let s talk about the tax returns. okay. we seem to be served a feast of no this morning. right. tax returns are a separate issue. it is a law they shall be furnished to congress upon request. yes. any legal basis to withhold them? that one seems, to me, a simple issue. the law says shall furnish. they haven t furnished the tax returns. this idea that congress needs some specific legislative purpose which, by the way, i think they have anyway, but the idea that the administration can look at the motives of congress as opposed to simply the result of the voting in the ways and means committee seems to me wrong under the law. as you pointed out in your introduction, long legal fight. all these issues, once they go into cowurt, even if congress i correct on the law and wins, is likely to delay for many months. we are now, you know, a year and a half away from the election. david gregory, some of this stuff is being negotiated today, this morning, on capitol hill. if they can t work it out, and if it leads to contempt, what s the significance of some of these high-profile officials being held in contempt? we ve seen it before in the obama administration, attorney general holder held in contempt over that fast and furious controversy around border shiesh y issues. it was seen as a symbolic move. you have two sides here. you have congressional democrats and you have an administration, both thinking the other side looks really bad in this fight. they re looking at the politics of it. they re looking at, you know, the larger implications of accountability on the democrat side, versus fishing is the view on the administration s side. they both think each other looks bad. i think there is a chance the justice department would like to diffuse this a little bit and come to some kind of accommodation. to me, the larger question, too, for democrats is, what is the end game that they re driving at? do they want to initiate impeachment proceedings, or do they want to keep churning and keep elevating the idea of accountability, where there s not been a lot of accountability of this administration? accountability might be an end in and of itself. you might not need impeachment. yeah. it is a good point you re bringing up there. two numbers i want to raise. one, talking about fast and furious, where eric holder was held in contempt, ultimately, moe most of the documents congress wanted they got, but it took three years. three years. time matters. the other number i think matters a lot this morning is the president s approval rating. gallop has a new poll out this morning. 46% approval which is still underwater but it is the highest number he s been in. other polls show the same thing. the president s approval has ticked up. if you re in the white house or his political operation right now, why not fight it? people are saying, hey, people are liking what i m doing with the fight, where things are. why not keep going? especially on the heels of the good economic report we got last week. gdp growth continuing at better than expected rates. you also got a very good jobs report. the unemployment rate is at decades low. you have a president who says, on the one hand, look what the democrats are doing. they can t find any other issue to take up with me, so they re on a witch hunt. nothing is good enough for them. why do they stop at the mueller report? the president is saying, look what i ve done for the country. look at the economy. if the democrats want to impeach me, you can t because the economy is doing so well. bill clinton would have said, hey, i have something to say about the theory, too. that having been said, some may disagree with the president s rhetoric, his tweets, but if they re comfortable with where they stand economic, they may overlook it. it is difficult for democrats to figure out what the path should be. they feel justified in their oversight role, but they recognize that they may be causing the president s arrival ratings to go up. i doubt the congress is causing the approval ratings to go up. the president thinks, we re done. people have seen it all. i won. first of all, we re talking about, like, a very small change in an approval rating that has hardly changed at all since donald trump became president. the idea that the american publicwatching jerry nadler and saying, no, he s not a good chairman of the committee, i m speck spectacle of that. do you think it is economic based? yeah. the president gets credit for it. the idea this is different from what went on in the obama administration, when eric holder was held in contempt. those document requests, those oversight requests were the subject of negotiation with congress. there s been no negotiation here. there has simply been no, on everything, on security clearances, on background checks, on taxes. taxes. you know, congress either exists as a separate branch of government or it doesn t. congress is trying to assert its role. i don t think the approval ratings have anything to do with that. i agree with jeffrey to some extent. i think the big overhang is the economy being strong, the markets being strong. what people should be worried about is the brinkbrinksmanship china, the effects on the market and the broader economy. i think this is not a big macro game. i think what the judiciary committee does with regards to questions of obstruction, impeachability, and on a separate track, the tax returns, it is a fight. there are constituencies for this. the context of a primary fight on the democratic side means that there is an activatedstitu wants accountability of this president. that wants to see aggressive candidates saying, we re going to hold this president, his feet to the fire. on the other side, you have republicans who are united around trump. you know, i heard the other day that they ve got a financial operation, a bundling operation for campaign contributions, similar to what president trump did. it is a sign of the republican ranks being united behind this president. it is a very healthy, strong sign for a president who is heading into a re-election campaign. like the bush rangers. we ll talk about that with maggie mayhaberman in a bit. one last fine point on this, the democrats had been threatening contempt now for weeks. they have been threatening action for weeks. it hasn t happened yet. is there a risk, and david was mentioning there is a ground swell from democratic activists, they want to see action. do democrats have to do something? well, this puts them in a tough spot. their mind shouldn t be based around 2020 solely. they have a job to do. they are a co-equal branch of government. bill barr says, my job is to defend the office of presidency. congress says, our job is to set a precedent, as well, and uphold the law. we don t want future congresses, future presidents to have to be stuck in this same type of situation. we have a job to do. we have laws to uphold. how much pressure should we be putting on this administration to follow through versus how much should we be focusing on pressure we re getting from constituents? it is a tough line there. this administration is not helping at all by not giving them an inch at all. let s talk about the letter. now signed, at last check, by 566 former federal prosecutors. do you have the counter on your computer? it keeps going up. i keep it in my head. they felt so strongly about what they saw in the mueller report that they felt compelled to write a letter and sign it. here is just a portion of that. each of us believes that the conduct of president trump described in the special counsel s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the office of legal counsel policy against indicting a sitting president, would result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice. ellie, one of our contributors that was just on here, made the point with 566 it can t be 566 angry democrats, as the president likes to say. these are republicans. these are non-partisan people. these are law enforcement officials. not even law professors who are a liberal group. i m one of the prosecutors and spent years in the justice department. my colleagues were not angry democrats. these were basically people who devoted much of their lives to law enforcement. you know, when you sit down and read the mueller report, as i have over the past week after the sort of chaos of it just coming out, i mean, you know, what you get out of the second part is a picture of a concerted effort by the president to obstruct this investigation from even before the day he took office, throughout the period covered by there. you know, it is true that it is a unique situation because, you know, an ordinary person who is under investigation for obstruction of justice can t fire the fbi director. the president is in a unique position. certainly, if you compare it to richard nixon, if you compare it to bill clinton, both with the obstruction of justice, this is greater, i think. that s why you get the bipartisan reaction. if david gregory is asked, is this enough to indict someone who is president of the united states, would it be a simple yes or no answer? i d be inclined to say no because he didn t. he didn t perhaps out of an abundance of caution, of wanting to be fair to the president who didn t have a form to challenge his accusers, but i think the drama underneath these questions, this ultra hypothetical, because we are talking about the president, this isn t any other case, is why didn t mueller push, no matter how long it took, to get the president under oath, so he could ask questions that may have gone to the question of intent? did barr, as he said, really talk to mueller, and mueller said, well, i really wouldn t have brought these charges anyway? i mean, this is now going to be the drama and the inquest that plays out on capitol hill, to try to get underneath, you know, this big question of why not? why not pursue it? i think it goes to the point of saying, this is not a criminal case. this is an issue of potential impeachment. because it is a president, these are a question of high crimes and demeanors, not a question of whether you d brought the case criminally. it may be a more productive tactic at this point for democrats to push to hear from mueller, opposed to the ongoing battle with barr. barr said he had no problem with mueller speaking. barr is mueller s boss, until mueller decides to be a private citizen and leave the justice department. for democrats to pursue that route, to say we must hear from mueller, may be a wiser falk ti tactic. is he waiting for his paycheck? why is he still an employee? he devoted two years of his life. we thought it d clear everything up once we got the mueller report. you know, i think we were a bit too optimistic in that trauhoug process. i would imagine this is frustrating for him. we know it is because he wrote a letter. and a phone call. thank you, all, very much. she called on attorney general william barr to step down during a fiery speech for his handling of the mueller report. now, she s calling for an investigation into the attorney general s communications with the white house. senator hirono joins us next. nst me to start next month. she can stay with you to finish her senior year. things will be tight but, we can make this work. now. grandpa, what about your dream car? this is my dream now. principal we can help you plan for that . here s the story of green mountain coffee roasters costa rica paraíso. meet sergio. and his daughter, maria. sergio s coffee tastes spectacular. because costa rica is spectacular. so we support farmers who use natural compost. to help keep the soil healthy. and the coffee delicious. for future generations. all for a smoother tasting cup. green mountain coffee roasters. hmm. exactly. and doug. liberty mutual customizes your car insurance, so you only pay for what you need. nice. but, uh. what s up with your. partner? oh. well, we just spend all day telling everyone how we customize car insurance, because no two people are alike, so. limu gets a little confused when he sees another bird that looks exactly like him. [ loud crash ] yeah. he ll figure it out. only pay for what you need. liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty essential for the cactus, but maybe not for people with rheumatoid arthritis. because there are options. like an unjection™ . xeljanz xr. a once-daily pill for adults with moderate to severe ra for whom methotrexate did not work well enough. xeljanz xr can reduce pain, swelling and further joint damage, even without methotrexate. xeljanz xr can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma have happened. as have tears in the stomach or intestines, serious allergic reactions, low blood cell counts, higher liver tests and cholesterol levels. don t start xeljanz xr if you have an infection. your doctor should perform blood tests before and while taking xeljanz xr, and monitor certain liver tests. tell your doctor if you ve been somewhere fungal infections are common and if you have had tb, hepatitis b or c, or are prone to infections. needles. fine for some things. but for you, one pill a day may provide symptom relief. ask your doctor about xeljanz xr. an unjection™ . you ll remember last week when a democratic senator delivered very strong words to attorney general william barr and called for his resignation. the american people know you are no different from rudy giuliani or kellyanne conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once decent reputation for the liar who sits in the oval office. you know the difference but you d chosen to be the president s lawyer and side with him over the interest of the american people. joining us is the seb torre, mazie myrhirono. bill barr appears not to be resigning, so sounds like you re calling on the inspector general to look into bill barr s communications with the white house. what are you hoping to find out? we have concerns about the 14 referrals that mueller made to other prosecutors. we want to make sure that neither barr nor the white house will interfere with those investigations. okay. is the inspector general going to look into this? i don t know. let s hope so. somebody should be concerned about the rule of law. i have to say, alisyn, that was the most disheartening aspect of the barr testimony, that he does not adhere to the rule of law. he thinks that the president can do basically whatever he wants. if the president thinks he is innocent, he can do whatever he wants to stop an investigation. certainly, this president did. look, the attorney general, bill barr, has been on record, in fact, he was certainly on record in the 19-page unsolicited memo he wrote, about how much he believes in executive powers. now, we re seeing that play out. i just want to bounce off for you the latest gallop polls. the president reached a high water mark, 46%. still under 50%, underwater, however, this is notable because it is the highest this ehhe has reached. despite the investigations, the result of the mueller report, why do you think his number has ticked up? i don t know. there s no question that the president and all his minions continue to call this a witch hunt. they re going after mueller in a big way. you get what you get. as members of congress, we have a responsibility to oversee what this white house and this administration is doing. i can only hope that as the months go by, that the american people will wake up to the fact that our democracy is in danger. let s face it, the kind of conversation that the president recently had with putin, where the subject of russian interference with the elections doesn t even come up, why do you think? i think there is very little question that putin will continue to do everything he can to support this president in 2020. y i think it is a very sad commentary. let s hope with people worrying about health care and with all the other things that concern american people, that maybe this will also, we can only hope. i can continue to speak up. thank goodness we have some levels of checks and balances with the democrats in control of the house. i hope that they will proceed with the investigations that they need to do. let s talk about what s happening in your committee. that s the senate judiciary committee. your chairman, lindsey graham, was once a vocal trurp krmp cri but now an ardent supporter. he has said in a limited scope, he d be willing to hear from robert mueller. congress wants to hear from mueller and know why he made the choices he did. senator graham said he d be willing to have mueller testify publicly about the phone call, only the phone call, he made to bill barr about what he was hoping the findings of the mueller report would be. are you satisfied with that, or at least satisfied enough as a starter, to start there? we can start there. because during barr s testimony, he characterized the conversation he had with mueller on that telephone 15-minute telephone call. that s just from barr s standpoint, call it hearsay. we should hear from mueller as to that aspect. more importantly, as far as i think we should be concerned about the whole discussion of obstruction of justice. note that over 500 former prosecutors have signed a letter saying that based on the on mueller s report of obstruction of justice and that discussion, they believe trump should be prosecuted, but for the office of legal counsel opinion, which they should review. we have been reading portions of the letter. the number is up to 566. what are you hearing, senator, in the halls of congress? is robert mueller going to come and testify this month? well, i hope he comes and testifies, even if in a limited fashion before the senate. i am looking toward the house, doing what they need to do to have mueller come and testify before them. they ve asked for material from don mcgahn, who should also testify. as i said, this president has managed to gain control of basically the entire executive as well as half of congress. that would be the senate. i think it is a sad state of affairs. he hasn t quite gotten control of the house. therefore, you see the kind of investigations that s happening. i just want to mention one more thing, alisyn. yeah. the house is passing a lot of bills that actually help people in this country, such as let s reform our campaign spending laws. let s have some reasonable gun legislation. these measures are all coming out of the u.s. house now. mitch mcconnell pretty much is saying, none of that will pass. that s what i call obstruction. that s what i call not adhering to what the people in this country really want us to do. very quickly, should bill barr and don mcgahn wibe held i contempt if they don t turn over the documents congress is looking for? i think that jerry nadler, particularly, will take whatever actions he needs to take because you cannot just thumb your nose at the congress and you re in the clear. we shall see. i hope that the judiciary committee in the house will take appropriate actions. we have to see because don mcgahn still has some time in order to comply. yeah. they re negotiating today, but it sounds like if they don t get what they want, they re moving in that direction. you would support that? i think they have to. because there is such a thing as the rule of law. senator mazie hirono, thank you very much for being on new day. he trained the horse that won the kentucky derby. how does it feel when a big chunk of the country, including the president, now say you don t deserve it? the trainer of country house joins us next. the (new) roomba i7+ with clean base automatic dirt disposal empties the roomba bin for you. so dirt is off your hands. if it s not from irobot, it s not a roomba. this mother s day, get mom the one gift she s always wanted. get engaged. .with our diamond price match guarantee, there is no better time. dare to be devoted. jared. don t just dream book your next vacation.. be a booker at booking.com still fresh. unstopables in-wash scent booster downy unstopables you wouldn t accept an incomplete job from any one else. why accept it from your allergy pills? flonase sensimist relieves all your worst symptoms, including nasal congestion, which most pills don t. and all from a gentle mist you can barely feel. flonase sensimist. the race is over, but the debate over the winner of the kentucky derby might be headed to court. the owner of maximum security now says he will sue to overturn the disqualification after the state horse racing commission denied his appeal yesterday. what s it like to win a race with this kind of controversy swirling around it? joining me now is bill mott, trainer of the kentucky derby winner, country house. bill, thank you so much for joining us this morning. can i just say, congratulations. i know you probably haven t heard that quite as much as you thought you would when you dreamed about winning the kentucky derby. well, this isn t the way that we planned on winning it. i mean, we re really glad to be in this position, of having the winner, but on the other hand, we probably had to apologize a little bit for the way we did it. i mean, it s taken a little of the glow off the whole situation a little bit, but i believe that the stewards have made the right call. we were the recipient of the win. and you ve worked your whole life for this, to be clear. you re a first-time derby winner. you ve worked your whole life for this, right? i ve been doing this for more than 50 years, yes. you know, you look forward to it. you look forward to the opportunity of just being in the derby and having a horse that s good enough. to win it is only a dream. it s like winning the super bowl. so the president, among other people, calls this a case of political correctness. he thinks the wrong decision was made here. i have heard you say that if not for the fact this was the kentucky derby, this would have been an easy call, not even in question. why do you feel so strongly about it? exactly. we have rules and regulations in racing. most of them are due to, you know, fairness for the gamblers and the safety of the horses and riders. you know, the rules are strictly state that you cannot move out of your lane and impede the progress of another horse. you can change lanes if you re clear, but if one of those horses had gone down and caused a wreck, i mean, they could have endangered the lives of horses and riders. also the fact that, you know, three horses were dramatically taken up in the race. their progress was impeded. those three horses lost all chance of a placing or even a win in the kentucky derby. i want to read you one of the criticisms that i ve heard that s fairly common. this comes from andrew beyer, a well-known washington post horse race columnist. he said because maximum security s infraction did not affect the outcome, disqualifying the winner was a bit like deciding the nba finals on a foul away from the ball. how do you explain then what he calls a foul away from the ball? why does that infraction matter? well, i can tell you, maybe the infraction didn t involve our horse as much as it did three other horses, but you have to remember, those horses that maximum security bothered were all bet on by the public. millions of dollars. you know, you can t deny the people that bet on those horses what were impeded in this event. you can t deny them justice. again, this is a matter of safety. i men, if you watch the replays very closely and look at the photos, look, it is a miracle the horses didn t go down that were impinged there. looked like they might. what is your message to the owners of maximum security? their appeal has been overruled, and they may take it to court. i think once they cool down and look at the situation, the owners of these horses, and the owners of maximum security, are professionals. they ve been in the game a long time. obviously, there s a lot of emotion that s involved in this. i mean, it s like taking the super bowl win away from you. when they signed their license application, when mr. and mrs. west signed their license application, they waived their right to appeal a steward s decision on a disqualification. the rules clearly state in the state of kentucky that you cannot appeal. the stewards ruling is and should be final. taking country house to the preakne preakness? if he is doing very well, we will. i don t feel like we ve got any pressure to go, other than the fact that the derby winner usually goes to the preakness. i think people are looking forward to seeing him there. we re going to monitor his progress in the next week and ten days and then decide. there is a short time, you know. we only have a short rest in between the derby and the preakness. it s, you know it ll all be determined by the health and welfare of the horse. bill mott, listen, thanks for joining us this morning. i know this has been a complicated few days for you. i hope you ve had a chance to enjoy the victory. well, i m sure we will in another month, six months, in a couple years after this. i think it ll when the dust settles, i think we ll enjoy it a lot more. right. thanks, bill. take care. i m fine with stretching out a victory. much like i stretch out a birthday. six years? that s fine. celebrate it all for six months, years, whatever. meanwhile, china s trade representative is coming to washington. can he strike a deal to stop a new round of tariffs? that s next. ancestry is celebrating all the one-of-a-kind women we call mom. with an engaging new experience. .ancestrydna can help her uncover her history. .to tell a story as unique as she is. order a kit for mom (or dad) at ancestry.com a lot will happen in your life. wrinkles just won t. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair s derm-proven retinol works so fast, it takes only one week to reveal younger looking skin. neutrogena® here s the story of green mountain coffee roasters costa rica paraíso. meet sergio. and his daughter, maria. sergio s coffee tastes spectacular. because costa rica is spectacular. so we support farmers who use natural compost. to help keep the soil healthy. and the coffee delicious. for future generations. all for a smoother tasting cup. green mountain coffee roasters. you when you barely the clip a passing car. minor accident -no big deal, right? wrong. your insurance company is gonna raise your rate after the other car got a scratch so small you coulda fixed it with a pen. maybe you should take that pen and use it to sign up with a different insurance company. for drivers with accident forgiveness, liberty mutual won t raise their rates because of their first accident. liberty mutual insurance. liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. the latest inisn t just a store.ty it s a save more with a new kind of wireless network store. it s a look what your wifi can do now store. a get your questions answered by awesome experts store. it s a now there s one store that connects your life like never before store. the xfinity store is here. and it s simple, easy, awesome. when didwhen i needed ton? jumpstart sales. build attendance for an event. help people find their way. fastsigns designed new directional signage. .and got them back on track. get started at fastsigns.com. time for cnn business now. trade officials say the president s threat to hike heart riff tariffs on chinese goods is real. trade talks resume this week. christine romans is in our business center. here i am. i m here with you. the business scenter is wherever romans is. friday, the tariffs go up. mnuchin and lighthizer briefed reporters, confirming tariffs would jump to 25% on $200 billion worth of chinese goods. talking everything from car seats, bike helmets, fruit, processed fish, and thousands of other things. lighthizer blamed china for backsliding during the last rounds of negotiations, derailing progress toward ending a trade war. lighthizer said, we tried to accommodate changes in the text, but these are substantial and substantive changes. china responding to the president s threat, saying raising tariffs won t resolve issues. this morning, china s commerce minister confirmed they ll go to washington for a day of talks. a day late, but he ll be there. negotiations are more uncertain today than any other day. the dow fell 471 points on monday and then recovered to close just 66 points lower. super volatile. taking a look at markets now, futures are pointing down again, about 0.5% move. the good news, monday s losses were shallow. guys, the higher tariffs and the president s threat for more is injecting uncertainty for businesses. remember, china does not pay the tariffs. china does not pay. the customs bill goes to the american importer, who can eat the higher costs or pass it to consumers. the retail federation said tariffs from 10% to 25% will raise prices for consumers and hurt jobs. christine romans in the business center, thank you for that. the trouble with china is about to get more about trade imbalances. the nation is leading a campaign to spy against the united states and planting its assets in some of the most sensitive areas of our government. the damage is staggering. john avalon has today s reality check. that s right. as the trade war with china heats up after a trump tweet, it is a reminder of how much the politics and economy have become intertwined with china. during the campaign, trump railed against china, workers feeling their jobs had been lost to unfair competition. last week, joe biden found himself in hot water after saying this. china is going to eat our lunch. come on, man. they re not bad folks, folks. guess what? they re competition for us. this drew rebukes from republicans and democratic candidates, like sanders and ryan. biden said he wasn t dismissing the challenges of china but trying to give u.s. workers a pep talk. there is no question china son the rise as an economic giant and expansionist power. they re building a technological surveillance state at home, but it is their record of spying in america that should be getting your attention. the new york times reporting the chinese intelligence services said they gained access to hacking tools and turned them against allies and companies. last week, li pled guilty for espionage. that was after a woman was caught for a thumbdrive in mar-a-lago. this is the tip of the iceberg. the last ten years, at least 20 people very charhave been chargr sentenced for working on behalf of china against the united states, or trying to. it ranges from defense intelligence agency officers to a state department employee. president trump accused diane feinstein of once having a chinese asset for a driver. feinstein denied it but acknowledged the fbi warned her china was trying to recruit a member of her staff, who she forced out immediately. these are a handful of examples. some wacases, they facilitated e hacking of huge databases, and that may be the greater threat. 2018, the chinese government store data on submarine warfare. 2015, the obama administration blamed china for a massive hack of the office of personnel management that left some 20 million americans data compromised. ton business front, the obama doj charged the chinese military with hacking into u.s. corporations like u.s. steel. china is accused of hacking every major corporation in the united states. against this backdrop, you can see why tensions are running high. it is about much more than trade balances and soybean markets. it enplaxplains why the trump administration is taking a hard stance in building the 5g networks. history is riddled with great powers. china s model of wealth without liberty is not something we ant to define life in the 21st century. it means we need to be clear about the actions of the chinese government. here s one way to gauge the stakes. senator chuck schumer and donald trump don t agree on much. the minority democratic leader offered words of encouragement to the president tweeting, don t back down. strength is the only way to win with china. that s your reality check. that was very notable. to hear chuck schumer agreeing with what donald trump is trying to do. quote tom petty, don t back down. is that what he said? always take a good tom pretty quote. it is a night of high fashion and spectacular entrances. who wore what at the met gala? look at that. what wore whom? that dress was wearing lady gaga. yeah. - [woman] with my shark, i deep clean messes like this. this and even this. but i don t have to clean this, because the self-cleaning brush roll removes hair, while i clean. - [announcer] shark, the vacuum that deep cleans, now cleans itself. don t just dream book your next vacation.. be a booker at booking.com our new, hot, fresh breakfast will get you the readiest. (buzzer sound) holiday inn express. be the readiest. this mother s day, get mom the one gift she s always wanted. get engaged. .with our diamond price match guarantee, there is no better time. dare to be devoted. jared. georgia governor brian kemp is expected to sign a couldn t vergt anti-abortion heart bill that bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. guyan gallagher has much more. reporter: let the lawsuits begin. there are threats of boycotts from georgia s booming film industry, protests scheduled for later in the day, but republican governor brian kemp campaigned on this specifically. in fact, there are people who initially supported him who now say they don t think that this so-called heartbeat bill which oftentimes is first detected around six weeks, opponents point out sometimes a woman doesn t even know she s pregnant at that point. supporters of the bill fear that this one in georgia doesn t go far enough they say and that s because there are exceptions allowed for potential deadly issues with the fetus and the mother as well as exceptions for rape and incest, but only if they have a police report and only up until 20 weeks. that is the current limit for abortions in georgia. now, look, again, proponents of this say that this is just simply allowing for additional options, it s not preventing all of them. those who are against this say that it is draconian and is against roe v. wade and they intend to file lawsuits. i have talked to the aclu, that s what they re going to do pretty quickly after this is signed at 10:00 this morning. it s something we have seen in all of the states that have passed these so-called heartbeat bills. so, alisyn, look, seems the goal here is just to get it to the supreme court now that president trump has put two conservative justices on there. a lot of people who support these bills say that they would like the supreme court to go ahead and take another look at roe v. wade. this is a very big deal, as you re saying, diane, lots of doctors think that this will put women s lives in jeopardy. we will follow this. thank you very much. breaking overnight, two reuters journalists jailed in myanmar for more than 500 days are now free. this morning they were reunited with loved ones. the pair who received this year s pulitzer prize for international reporting have been locked up since 2017. they were charged under the colonial era official secrets act for their report on a massacre of rohingya civilians. the two men were released as part of an amnesty of 6,300 prisoners. president trump praised golfer tiger woods for his relentless will to win and honored woods with the president medical of freedom. he called him a true legend to transformed the sport and fought back through injuries. culminating in his win at last month s masters. the met gala was last night and based on all of the daring theatrical fashions this year s theme of camp was open to interpretation and it doesn t mean a tent and dinty moore stew. i know what camp is all about. if there is one superstar who knows camp it s lady gaga. look at her eyelashes, if that is what it is. she showed off not one but four different outfits starting with a bright pink dress, then she striped down to a black down, then a pink slip dress, finally black undergarments. why not? singer/actor harry styles, he turned heads with a shear gender fluid jumpsuit by gucci. i d like to see the full body picture. you really do need to see the full body to appreciate a full jumpsuit. who is the gentleman with him i m just wondering. i don t know the answer to that. a princess of some good. jared leto took himself to the event, he carried around his own head. makes sense. the idea was inspired by gucci s fall/winter 2018 show, obviously. obviously. that s where you get that kind of inspiration for carrying around a head. actor billy porter may have made the most memorable entrance. this is how john berman comes into the studio every single morning. he makes the true carry him in like this. but porter was carried in on a chase lounge by six men. bedazzled. the pair that everyone is talking about, the best dressed this year and every year and every year going forward, tom brady and gisele bundchen. they do look good. they do. they look fantastic. what s happening there with his sleeves. it s just all fantastic. but, again, i just want to see the full dress. i know that this lovey okay. when you see the full dress you are not close up on his face. and that is what you object to. is that velour? he might be he s going to bring velour back. look at that. look he brought the patriots back against the atlanta falcons from a 28-3 deficit tom brady will bring velour back. that s where you were going with that? it was. the big buzz after this week s game of thrones episode is less about what happened and more about how it happened as in how did a starbucks cup make the final cut? here is jeanne moos. the game of thrones gang was guzzling out of goblets, toasting out of horns. to the dragon queen. when suddenly a starbucks cup? see if you can catch it. most people get bloody murdered, they stay that way. sharp-eyed fans. they left a coffee cup in the were delighted to spot an icon of the modern world in the way back fantasy land. you re drinking wine but you prefer ale. no. somebody prefers lattes. twitter exploded with mockups of winter fell. a cup was labeled with the many names the dragon queen goes by, enough to make a barista wonder how do you spell that? maybe they were all chugging dragon milk caramel macchiatos. we kept waiting for president trump to tweet, after all, when he warned iran sanctions are coming he borrowed the phrase from game of thrones. winter is coming. and winter is coming. winter is coming. and he borrowed game over in the wake of the mueller report. the hub bub finally prompted this tweet from a game of thrones account. the latte that appeared in the episode was a mistake. dineras had ordered a herbal tea. i would rank it between grande and venti. the water bottle spotted on the mantel in a promo photo for downtown abby. maybe the dragon queen looked so pensive because she was figuring out how to order her skinny cinnamon dolce latte. one thing is for sure, some of these gung-ho game of thrones fans don t need any moni moany nation. jeanne moos, cnn, new york. have we ever gotten a response? was it a mistake or product placement? i m just confused by all of that. starbucks sits on the iron throne. up next, big new headlines about what is going on today at capitol hill and at the white house. new day continues right now. the house judiciary committee plans to vote on wednesday to hold barr in contempt. secretary mnuchin will not fulfill that request for six years of the president s tax returns. democrats are in great peril and they continue to go down this path. congress has a strong case here. the white house is stonewalling them at every front. having a baby boy has been the most amazing experience. it was an incredible day. harry and meghan managed to evade the paparazzi. i m over the moon. you have a new american prince. announcer: this is new day with alisyn camerota and john berman. i like our new music, our new open music. it s like dlireliverance. just saying. good afternoon and welcome to your new day, it s tuesday, may 7th, 8:00 in the east. a new battleground in the growing feud between the white house and house democrats. treasury secretary steve mnuchin refusing to hand over president trump s tax returns, insisting that the request put, quote, lacks a legitimate legislative purpose. mnuchin s refusal sets the stage for a potentially lengthy legal battle. today members of the house judiciary are set to meet with justice department officials who have refused to turn