office of president of united states and will preserve, protect and defense the constitution of the u.s. except where nobody gets killed or robbed. his point is basically that a crime is a crime is a crime, correct? exactly. i think you see through george s tweet a commonality, again, between he and i. even though we come from very different sides of the aisle, but a common belief, a core belief in the rule of law in america. and that s a belief that rudy giuliani himself shared as a prosecutor. i don t think he was only putting murderers behind bars. there are whole statute books being enforced every day. and it would turn our nation upside down to adopt giuliani s new position. thank you very much. i now hand it over to chris cuomo. thank you, i am chris cuomo. welcome to primetime. we have new information tonight. the special counsel wants more answers from the president of the united states, and he wants them in person. the president s legal team said it was open to more questioning, but they have been clearly afraid to put the president in a chair across from mueller. you know what that means. there is a showdown coming. and, does this new request by mueller have anything to do with this mystery proceeding that happened today? an entire courtroom put on lockdown. the press was cleared out. coat closets were inspected, even an elevator sealed off. a great debate on what could be coming. mueller dropped another eye-popping memo about general flynn today that gives us our best look yet at how the special counsel deals with liars. a load to break down in cuomo s court. it is friday, so let s get after it. this was always the concern with the written responses from the president, state of mind. the special counsel has said, i need to understand his state of mind during certain actions and episodes for the obstruction probe. if that s what the special counsel wants, it is the kind of questioning that really needs to be in person. you have to look at the person who is giving the answers. you have to assess them. you have to see if it works together. you want to test patterns. very tough to do in writing. this news comes as the special counsel fired back at general flynn today, showing our best example yet of how mueller will deal with lying. even though the special counsel has requested minimal punishment for the general, the special counsel went out of his way to say the man lied and that no one set him up. one of the quotes was his decision to make false statements was voluntarily and intentional. and he went out of his way to say as a former head of an intelligence agency, he should have known better. again, even though the man is working for mueller, lying will not be tolerated. very foretelling. let s bring in former acting solicitor general, walter dellinger. great to have you. welcome to primetime. thank you. the idea of state of mind and what i m laying out there, this was always my concern when i heard about the written interrogatories originally, that if they want to know why the president did what he did, it s tough to glean, as we say in the law, from just written answers. fair point? fair point. and what s more dramatic, i think, about this latest development, chris, is that if you need to probe individual 1, that is, the president s state of mind, that means your focus is on the the criminal focus is on that individual, that is the president. you don t need to know his state of mind if you are merely seeking information about the actions of others. good point. i want to know what you did. i want to know why you did it, not just what you knew about other people. that s an important distinction. now, the question becomes, so now what? we know that the president s lawyers don t want to put him in the chair. where does this go? well, i think, you know, that the special counsel could very well try to get very quickly to the supreme court on the question of whether the president is allowed to refuse to submit to questioning. and i think the precedents on that do not bode well for the president. i argued and lost in clinton versus jones that a lawsuit against the president a civil lawsuit ought to be postponed while he s in office. the supreme court rejected that 9-0, and said that even having to go through a civil trial did not meet the standard of sufficient interference with the president. that and the nixon tape case would indicate that the supreme court would say the president has no choice but to answer questions. and my guess is that whether he would have to do it through a redacted version or not, special counsel mueller could lay before the supreme court how serious are the issues that he needs to review with the president to understand the president s state of mind. now, if there is pushback, the ultimate kind of conflict goes right to what you have been writing about and what you have been practicing in this regard for so many years. if the president s argument winds up being, look, you can t indict me. you can t get me for any of this stuff criminally anyway, so let s stop this game. write your report. say whatever you want, say i wouldn t comply, but you can t indict me so don t treat me like everybody else. i m not. i m the president. where does that go? i think, and i ve said before, it is not as well settled as people think that a president cannot be indicted, at least as long as other proceedings are postponed during his term in office. but more to the point is the fact that this president s term ends in 25 months and the statute of limitations would not have run on these crimes. if he s not re-elected, no one doubts that he can be indicted and prosecuted when his term is over. that step ought to be taken reluctantly. but if the facts warrant it, that s what the president is facing when his term is over without any doubt. and that means that a president would have every incentive if a president really did engage in provable felonies of a serious order, a president would negotiate in a sense to resign from office in exchange for extreme leniency in the sentencing process. this man gives no suggestion that he would ever do anything like that. you know, president trump has shown at every turn in his life he will take the fight. i don t mean that in some false sense of bravado. i m saying he will push the situation. it takes us to what he might be facing. michael cohen, is it a big deal or not? i m not going to get into that. i want to measure the veracity. i want to play sound from both of them, and i want to ask you who you believe, but more importantly why. i never directed him to do anything wrong. whatever he did, he did on his own. he s a lawyer. he was trying to hide what you were doing, correct? correct. and he knew it was wrong? of course. whom do you believe? well, i have my own opinions. i think it s really hard to say. i mean, the president has certainly had incentives and he s changed his story several times. but i think more to the point is i think the special counsel we have every indication that the campaign finance violations are every bit as serious as neal was saying in the last hour. that may really be almost a side performance. the big issue here is what may rank as one of the greatest crimes in american history, which is the russian federation s attempt to interfere in the presidential election. and on that, i think the filing today you referenced in the flynn sentencing raises a question of why did general flynn lie when he could have told the truth about his conversation with kislyak? it s as if he was hiding something much deeper, much more expansive than that. so, i think at the end of the day we ll know what we know when we know it. but even these campaign finance matters may be relatively small. we have to ask about the lying, chris. why are people lying? yes. if they have nothing to hide, why lie? that s actually two different decisions. again, i am not getting i m not getting sideways with walter. the guy is a better lawyer than i have ever been on my best day. but just how people understand at home, you have two different avenues of thought. i know you are coming after me. i lied just to protect myself, not because i have anything to hide, but i know you are coming after me. i know you are trying to frame me and make me part of something that i m not, so i lied to protect myself. the other one goes to your suggestion, which is, there is something else there. what is more likely at this point? i think what s likely is that there is something else there. take the lie that general flynn was talking about. he actually, we now know for a fact, spoke to the russian kislyak about the sanctions issue that obama had imposed. now, technically, that might be a violation, but he was facing no jeopardy. right. but as a former head of a defense intelligence agency and a general, he knew he was under severe risk of a five-year felony to lie before the fbi recordings, as they did, of his conversations with the russian ambassador. so why would he take that enormous risk? he may know and may have told the special counsel s office about the degree of complicity with russian involvement or some similar issue that made him think at that time, at the very beginning of the administration that he did not dare tell the truth about a relatively inconsequential matter. you do have a metaphor effect here. with the federal violations with cohen and the president, the president says, i didn t direct anybody. some lawyer told him that s a meaningful distinction. it s not the best advice. he didn t have to direct the action to be exposed to the responsibility for the action. but it is instructive of when the president says, well, i didn t direct it, so therefore i m okay. does the same apply to flynn? does the same apply to manafort in his meetings with russians? does the same apply to the trump tower meeting where he says i didn t make any of this happen but i happened to have lied about what i knew. and we ll see. as we get more meat on the bones, you are one of the men i ll have to call back for more of your take on this situation. well, you re quite welcome, chris. thank you. i encourage everybody to read your piece, out this weekend. we ll give directions on the site and i will link it up as well. thank you very much. so, general flynn is sentenced to be is due to be sentenced on tuesday, all right? we know that this is weird today, what happened. that s why i m trying to spell it out for you. mueller says he s been great. he helped before others did. he helped in every way we wanted. that s why i m asking for the low end of the range of sentencing. but then he hammered him today. and it was such an interesting window into what mr. dellinger was just suggesting, which is if you lie here, it is a problem. and they hammered flynn for lying and they went out of their way to architect exactly how tied to the lie flynn was. what does that mean for the future of other people that mueller thinks is lying? cuomo s court is in session, next. we can t do it! i m telling you, it can t be done! we are doing it! it s the holidays! t-mobile is offering the awesome iphone xr, with unlimited, for just 40 bucks a month. wooooo! unlimited, with the new iphone xr included? no one else is doing that! so they get unlimited, with iphone xr included, for just 40 bucks? the new iphone xr, that s bananas! at t-mobile get unlimited with iphone xr included for just 40 dollars. before discovering nexium 24hr to treat her frequent heartburn, claire could only imagine enjoying chocolate cake. now she can have her cake and eat it too. nexium 24hr stops acid before it starts for all-day, all-night protection. can you imagine 24 hours without heartburn? so shark invented duo clean. while deep cleaning carpets, the added soft brush roll picks up large particles, gives floors a polished look, and fearlessly devours piles. duo clean technology, corded and cord-free. and fearlessly devours piles. so lionel, what does 24/5 mean to you?rade well, it means i can trade after the market closes. it s true. so all. evening long. ooh, so close. yes, but also all. night through its entirety. come on, all. the time from sunset to sunrise. right. but you can trade. from, from. from darkness to light. you re not gonna say it are you? i am all about living joyfully. the united explorer card hooks me up. getting more for getting away. traveling lighter. getting settled. rewarded. learn more at the explorer card dot com. the late development tonight is that mueller still wants to speak with the president, even after those written responses. at the same time, the special counsel is going back at general flynn. even if both sides agree, the former national security adviser shouldn t do much, if any, time. it s interesting. mueller said flynn was committed to his false story. he s saying to the court, don t buy this. that he was set up. don t buy he meant to lie. he meant to lie. he lied a lot. we caught him. that s the real deal. why is this important? because it shows how mueller and his team view lying. all right? nothing about the way the interview was arranged or conducted caused the defendant to make false statements. that s another quote from the filing. mueller s own filing shows the fbi tactics didn t sit well at the time. we know sally yates wasn t happy and some people whose names were redacted argued about the decision to interview flynn. and the fbi said he didn t feel he was being deceptive. the special counsel says they may have thought that, but it didn t change the fact that flynn was lying and admitted to it. it s all fodder for cuomo s court. thank you for being here on a friday. here s where i find it so interesting. this is the first window that we ve had where we see how mueller thinks about lying. now, i took the time to go back and read his report on the nfl and how they dealt with ray rice because i wanted to see the same thing and i saw parallels that it is all straight line reasoning. nope, you lied. i can show you lied. i don t care why you think you did it, i don t care how you think you can get around it. i may think you deserve leniency, but if you lie, i m going to call it out. he did it in the nfl report. he s doing it with flynn. combine that mueller s new request to get more out of the president about his state of mind, which almost has to be done in person, and what does that tell you? well, chris, with the flynn filing, i mean, i see more than mueller just saying that i m not going to tolerate lying. we know that from the fact that he charged him with it. i think it s the absurdity of the claims that flynn was making that he was lured into this interview and he didn t know he needed a lawyer and, you know, all of this nonsense. you know, this is somebody who was appointed to be the national security adviser. right, savvy guy. somebody who is supposed to see every threat far and wide, you know, to the united states, and he can t know he doesn t know to tell the truth to the fbi. i mean, my 9-year-old had a visit from officer friendly to her class and knows she doesn t lie to the police. this is not rocket science. and i think it is more that he thinks this is an absurd claim to be made. but it s interesting about the disposition. jims jim, i want to layer on top of it what the president s response in a tweet. he kind of poked the bear with a tweet to the president. they gave general flynn a great deal because they were embarrassed by the way he was treated. the fbi said he didn t lie and they overrode the fbi. they want to scare everybody into making up stories that are not true by catching them in the smallest of misstatements. don t you take his device and snap it in front of him and say, didn t you just hear that mueller wants to talk to you, man? don t you understand what s happening here? stop antagonizing the man with all the power! i want to say i agree 100% with asha on, why would flynn make that argument? because he wanted more leniency. right, but he already had leniency. he already had a deal. he is poking the bear. that didn t make a whole lot of sense to me. but also, in that memo they typically don t comment on credibility in those types of memos, and they did here. likely because the issue was raised. but i think that s important, and i find it more important on the issue of what are we going to see down the road and what is mueller looking at. down the road, he s going to see the president state of mind, as you guys both know, jim, i want to talk to you about why you did things and what was going through your head. we know two things, one, you are not a sidebar. i am not just asking you for information. i m looking at you. two, i can t get it in writing. you have to sit down with me. do you agree or not? the forecast is he s going to see the president and his legal team is going to attack this one. we saw the tweet today. they re going to attack the credibility of strzok and the problems he had associated with this investigation. he s no longer on the legal team. they will try to use that to their advantage once the report hits. this memo today was forecasting that mueller is going to say i supported the fbi. this guy was a liar. we charged him. i mean, all the things you said, chris, that are in line with the rice investigation are there, and i think that s the purpose of this memo, to say we re here, the mueller team is here to support the fbi and the work that was done here and that any attack from the other side on the integrity of the investigation is just nonsense. that s the argument that the mueller team is preparing to make and forecasting with this memo today. but i m just saying, we need more, and we need state of mind. they re saying they want an interview. they re saying it s got to be sat down. we took your answers. it is not enough. what are the options? you can t put the president in a chair across from mueller and his guys. you can t do it, not if you are his lawyer. not if you are his lawyer. not if you are his lawyer. if you are the fbi you know, look, i think the former solicitor general that, you know, was just speaking to you said that this could ultimately get litigated in court because i think for obstruction of justice what this gets to, the heart of that crime, is whether the president acted with corrupt intent. and i have said from the beginning that written answers are not going to cut it. you need to hear from the horse s mouth what was happening in your heart, what was going on in your head. you want to hear those off the cuff answers. you want to read somebody s body language. you want to see what they re it is harder for people to get away with things when they are talking with you in person than when they have a team of lawyers crafting a very legalese statement. yes. so, i m not surprised at all, and i think he ll challenge it and the courts will decide. i ll tell you what, if we play this michael cohen sound, this is what my concern would be for the president, that i see a pattern that he s going to have to confront. let s listen to michael cohen quickly about the reality of how the trump organization worked. nothing at the trump organization was ever done unless it was run through mr. trump. he directed me, as i said in my allocution, and i said as well in the plea. he directed me to make the payments. he directed me to become involved in these matters. now, what i would be concerned about, if i were jay sekulow and rudy giuliani and the rest of that legal team, what would have me waking up at night is the idea that you have michael cohen saying everything that happened at the trump org went through mr. trump, including the payments for the women. he knew about them. he s lying about that. alan says that, too. it s also true with the foundation stuff they re looking at with the other investigation. and so says david pecker, his longtime friend. it s true. he said all this stuff. he knew about it. so you sit down and ask the president about it and he says i never directed it. i never knew anything about it. and they say is that what you knew about michael flynn and the ambassador. meanwhile, michael flynn says yeah, he knew. doesn t expose him to criminality in terms of acts. there could be a chain of six or seven of those, jim, that all stem from this, the president not acknowledging what mueller can prove as true. regardless of what cohen said today in that interview, if i were representing the president, there is no way i would agree for the president to sit down and interview. there is no way his lawyers will allow him to do that. maybe they can limit the scope. but now that they have had this agreement of written questions and maybe there are going to be more written questions, there is still no way i would allow the president to sit down. there is no incentive to, because it is a political process at the end of the day, which is what i was getting at earlier. mueller is forecasting that fight, that he s going to support the fbi. the president is clearly forecasting that he s going to attack it and based upon the members of that team, and this is going to be a fight before congress if congress decides to take it up, and that s what s all being teed up here. there is no incentive for the president to sit down in that interview and there is no way he should do it. now, as far as the cohen interview goes, you know, you heard the president s interview where he says, i did nothing wrong and you heard michael cohen said the president knew what he was doing was wrong. so, chris, you talked about it the other night. wrong is not a technical legal term. nope. i would have loved to have you ask the questions in that interview, chris, because you would have asked the question, but did you advise him? did you advise the president about the legalities associated with the campaign finance laws? and you saw lanny davis interview. he was unable to answer that question as well. you know, we got to get more facts and we will see more facts i m sure from the southern district as well. asha, give me a quick comment. yeah. you know, there is video footage of president trump from the john edwards case commenting at the time about the case. and very knowledgeably about what edwards was being charged with and what his opinions were about it. so i don t think that he has any legitimate claim that he did not know what the law was when he is actually opining on somebody who was in, you know, the same crosshairs that he is in now. this is one of those days where it s a window into the future. and i do believe this isn t going to come down to criminal prosecution. it will come into a political question and a political debate, and i foresee many people who criticize the president by saying he didn t even have the guts to sit down and tell the truth. he wouldn t sit down because he knows he s a liar. it s going to haunt him, but maybe less than sitting down and exposing himself to a violation of law, which would then dog him on top of it. jim, asha, you re great for being here on a friday night. thank you for making us better. have a great weekend. all right. let s take a step back. i believe in this big picture analysis, because that s what it s about. i can t say that this is going to wind up in a single trial or prosecution, but look at all the different probes. the trump campaign, they re looking at where they re using shell organizations and proxies. the transition team is being looked at in terms of what they were doing and why. the trump administration is being looked at on several different levels. you have cabinet members that get in sideways on how to conduct themselves and also how people are doing business in the white house, the family business is being looked at certainly on the state level. then you have the emoluments issue, about whether or not the trump organization is benefitting from his presidency. you have the personal charity about whether or not they were commingling funds. and now the inauguration committee. these explosive new allegations with ivanka trump right in the middle. what are those? what do they mean? i have a reporter who has been breaking the news, next. .i just got my ancestrydna results: 74% italian. .and i found out that i m from the big toe of that sexy italian boot! so this holiday season it s ancestrydna per tutti! order your kit now at ancestry.com [[clap, clap]] hey, jen, which tie says, trustworthy but also fun ? gold down, oil up. oil down, gold up. this is too busy. we need to make sure people can actually use this stuff. which one says, hours of free live streaming coverage without cable or subscription fees ? aluminum, aluminum? you ready, zack? oh, we re ready. welcome to the show. let s make finance make sense. for everything that i give, i get so much in return. join our family of home instead caregivers and help make a world of difference. home instead senior care. apply today. home instead senior care. only tylenol® rapid release gels have laser drilled holes. they release medicine fast, for fast pain relief. tylenol® as i just showed you before the break, there are a lot of investigations surrounding the president. six trump-related entities are now under current investigation. but the latest one focuses on the president s inaugural committee. federal prosecutors are looking at how more than $100 million was raised for the inauguration and more importantly how it was spent. we re learning how a lot of that money went right into the pockets of trump family business. here s what we know starting from the top. investigative reporters revealed ivanka trump played a role in how hotels were booked for the inauguration and possibly inflated the price charged to the inaugural committee. all right? e-mails, what do they show? ivanka, a senior executive in the trump organization, was involved in setting the price for a presidential ballroom and other spaces at $175,000 per day. i wanted to follow up on our conversation. express my concern, stake take into consideration when this is audited it will become public knowledge. what does that mean? does that mean they wanted to make sure they did it the right way or they were trying to get around doing it the right way? that s why i want to investigate. she suggested a price of $85,000. that s less than half of the trump hotel s initial offer. why? now, we don t know what price the committee ultimately paid, but if the trump hotel was overcharging for profit, that s not just problematic in itself, but it could be violation of a tax law. all right. now, propublica also reports that rick gates, the former trump campaign aide now cooperating with mueller in connection to the manafort situation asked vendors to take payments directly from donors rather than through the committee. he wanted to reduce the publically reported sum ultimately raised, and that raised red flags. why would he do that? to erase where committee spending was going? that s also problematic. what we know for sure, the trump inaugural committee received roughly $107 million from donors, but we don t know who most of them they are. $103 million was spent. only $61 million has been publicly accounted for. that leaves us wondering where the other $42 million go. all right. president trump netted far more money than his predecessors, more than double the amount obama raised in 2009, which was a record at the time. and yet trump had far fewer events. he had just three inaugural balls versus the ten held by obama and a third of the staff and a quarter of at the events held by bush in his second inauguration. how do all these pieces connect? what do they wind up indicating about how they did the business of politics? does it lead to the president directly? remember michael cohen. nothing happens at the trump org unless mr. trump knows about it. i will talk to one of the investigators who uncovered all of this, next. you ok there, kurt? we re about to move. karate helps. relieve some of the house-buying. stress. at least you don t have to worry about homeowners insurance. call geico. geico. helps with. homeowners insurance? been doing it for years. i m calling geico right now. good idea! get to know geico. and see how easy homeowners and renters insurance can be. i m gonna let it shine.e, it s energy saving time, i m gonna reduce mine. californians all align to let our great state shine. let it shine, the power s ours to let it shine! unplug chargers - go, devices go off-line. turn thermostats down low, led s shine mighty fine. small actions quickly grow, to let our great state shine. energy upgrade california, will let us shine. $107 million, we know that s how much trump s inaugural committee raised, and we know where a lot of the money was spent, but not all of it. and to whom it was given, we don t know that, either. propublica reports that a good chunk of it went to the chunk org. is that bad? not necessarily, but it raises questions. why do i care? everybody spends a lot of money. they get it from a lot of different places. they throw their parties. what makes this different? sure, absolutely. every presidential inauguration is potentially an occasion where rich people can try to buy influence with the new incoming administration. and what previous inaugural planners have told me is they placed limits on who can give or how much they can give, maybe restricting corporate gifts or the size of gifts. this inauguration did it differently. they said we re not going to have those restrictions. we re going to raise as much money as we can and throw the best party that we can. instead, they raised certainly the most money of any inauguration. the party was actually somewhat smaller than some of the other parties. we can discuss the reasons why. but ultimately what we learned and this was actually kind of hanging out in plain sight, but until we had these e-mails we didn t know it definitively. this nonprofit, tax excempt committee founded to support and celebrate the power of the new president was in fact lining the pockets of the president. that s a stunning fact pattern. so, two ways to look at it. one is, they should have picked all hotels and venues that weren t his just to dismiss any semblance of impropriety. which is an ethical standard. the other is, he s in the hotel business. of course they would use their venues. that s not illegal. is it the right thing to do? it illustrates what s problematic about this whole pattern. not only do we have a president who owns a hotel. trump doesn t own the building. it is the u.s. government that owns the building. this is just an object lesson in the unresolved conflicts of interest. which is why you have the emoluments suits. do you see this as an extension of this? nonprofit tax experts tell us there is a potential violation of tax law here. if the hotel was paid above market rate and it might be debatable what is market rate during a presidential inauguration we made calls here. i didn t use the reporting because several hotels didn t get back to my team, and it was a pretty broad range. it is hard to know. so, how do you gauge what s right and what s market? so if a related party charged above market rate per irs determination i don t know how they determine that that could be a violation of tax law. and that s just another dimension to this that we had not thought of when we started reporting this story. concern with ivanka trump or no? well, we didn t know that ivanka trump was in the middle of this until this e-mail surfaced. i think what s quite interesting about these e-mails is the planner who is also on these e-mails, earlier this year, she became she got a lot of scrutiny for the role she played in the inauguration. she was the largest contractor. what we see here is the opposite story. we see her saying, you are charging too much. this rate should be half of that or maybe less and please keep in mind we are throwing a party to celebrate your father s becoming the president of the united states. it s going to come out at some point. what s the next step? i want to know about the other investigations. we already have one example of foreign money coming to the inauguration through a straw donor. the ukrainian member of parliament. he pleaded guilty earlier this year to facilitating that gift. that was just $50,000. per the times reporting, it seems like prosecutors believe there could be more. i want to know about it. you say ukraine, that brings you to manafort and why was he still meeting with the administration. there is a lot of questions. so, let s do this. i m not one and done on this. all right, great. so, let me know. we ll stay in contact in terms of what calls we can make, what calls you are making. let s see what truth we can get out. ilya, thank you very much. they are on this. we will be as well. so, the president is battling a ton of investigations. frankly, we have never seen anything like it. and all while this is going, he has to figure out how to do the business of government. still searching for a chief of staff, kind of, kind of. somebody got the job today, but is called acting. but the reporting it, it is his to lose. why didn t you give it to him? 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if you guessed they re tabs that turn into liquid as you chew, so you can swish and clean your whole mouth instantly, then you were correct. and that was a really good guess. nice job. our because of smoking.ital. but we still had to have a cigarette. had to. but then, we were like. what are we doing? the nicodermcq patch helps prevent your urge to smoke all day. nicodermcq. you know why, we know how. all right. mick mulvaney has accepted washington s most unwanted job, white house chief of staff. but only on a temporary basis. odd. president trump tweeted after this, making the announcement, for the record, there were many people who wanted to be the white house chief of staff. mick m. will do a great job. so why is he only acting? and isn t it sad that every time the president of the united states says something, you have to think, is this true? isn t that sad? but that s why we are where we are. it s because we have to because he s proven because he s telling things that aren t true so often. let s debate. mick mulvaney, i know him. i ve interviewed him, i ve worked around him in terms of getting a sense of who he is. smart, competent. why acting and not just go in and give it to him. he s wanted this job for some time. you let that one adjective, he s very tough. he knows the budget. he knows the budget like the back of his hand. tough, smart, fair. absolutely. and i think that mick is an outstanding choice. he s young and energetic. the president is sending a signal he s bringing in a wartime consigliere. why only acting? i think that s how the president rolls. he just said he would don t acting. he was loath to acting just a week ago. the president has the prerogative of changing his mind when he wants to. i think he wants to make sure that the chemistry is good and that things work out. i think it s mick s job if he wants it. i think he will get it permanently. and i think the signal is, he s picking a war-time guy because the president knows that most of these investigations as you talked about in the previous segment, not necessarily all of them, but most of these numerous investigations, be it private, be it the new york state government, be it the federal government, most of them are partisan in nature. they are focussed on doing one thing and one thing only, which is undermining the political strength of this president. that is speculation and your opinion, but you are welcome to it on the show. it is yours to counter. listen, i know mick mulvaney very well. in fact, we both got elected together in 2006. and his rise, as you said, he s very educated and talented. he went to georgetown. university of north carolina. he was in the house for two years, then the state senate for two years. then did something no one thought he could do, go to the united states congress in 2010. he s very capable. one of the other adjectives i would use probably to describe mick is draconian, especially when it comes to medicaid. fair point. his politics are under scrutiny. i was describing him more from a personal side. i agree with it. my democratic friends will get mad at me. but he s a great husband, a great father. he s a decent human being, and i think we need more of that in this white house and around the president. however, decency, common sense, good nature, draconian policies, we could talk about his politics all we want, i don t think it matters. you can say that he is bringing in this wartime whatever you want to call him. it don t matter. all three of us up here know that donald trump is donald trump s chief of staff. so, no one is going to manage the unmanageable. this is a job that nobody wanted. but if the choices are dennis rodman and roy moore, let s have mick mulvaney. nobody wanted this job. this is the most important staff job in the entire world and you couldn t find anybody to want it. so, mick mulvaney will do it for donald trump, but he ain t going to change nothing. if i were really going into the shazaam, i think i might want dennis rodman with me. that guy is all-in and he will go for broke. now, look, that s what the president is going to need. there is no secret as to why guys didn t want this. you can get exposed and embarrassed in this job because we just saw with general john kelly. they thought he would give structure. this man is going to say what he wants. he will tweet what he wants when he wants. not just because he is the president, because he s petulent. and you will be expected to own his mistakes. that s a tough task. look, i think general kelly did a fantastic job. i do believe that he brought a sense of order in making the trains run on time, if you will. there is no doubt that president trump is a hands-on president. i agree with my colleague here that i m debating, that he is a hands-on guy that is his own chief of staff. i think that is why it is given temporarily because he wants to make sure the chemistry works well. the difference between him and kelly, though, where kelly was somewhat ambiguous politically, i think he might have been a registered democrat at one time, mick mulvaney is a conservative republican. you could say he comes from the freedom caucus wing. my friend says that he s draconian. some of us say he is a fiscal hawk. and it is the type of battle look, what we saw recently he is going to get sideways with the president. the president knows he s put his head out there saying he was going to stay away from entitlements. mulvaney has never liked that idea. he did all he could to make it a reality to take. he worked in congress to take and now he s got problems. he s going to have problems. at the end of the day, the president is going to be the one that makes the choice, but it will be good to have mick on his shoulder. to make sure he doesn t let entitlements get out of control. let s back up a little bit. let s back this train up. mick mulvaney was not the president s first choice. that was nick ayres. he wasn t the president s first or second choice. but what mick mulvaney does have over those other individuals is he will be relatively unassuming in this white house. can you imagine a donald trump presidency with a chris christie chief of staff? you know, when you had these two alpha males, these bulls in china shops, for lack of a better term, that would have been absolutely amazing television. i m not afraid of mulvaney being able to push through his policies. i think mick is the one that wanted the acting title because right, now to be completely honest, it seems as if every job in washington, d.c., belongs to either mick mulvaney or jared kushner. they have these vast, wide-ranging portfolios. you will not read about him in the newspapers. he s very, very smart and very, very dangerous. so, i think that nancy pelosi and chuck schumer have an admirable foe on the other side because he understands the politics and fiscal concerns and constraints. i feel bad for mick mulvaney because i feel like he s going to be back in south carolina extremely quickly because i don t think anybody can succeed as donald trump s chief of staff. you either go to jail, or you get burned out. it hasn t gone well for people in this white house. the idea of saying, well, he s got his own management style, that s a very, very pleasant spin of chaos. we ve never seen attrition like this. we ve never seen the poor choices that we ve seen in staffing, that we ve seen for this. and we ve never seen the lack of discipline that s happening here. and we ve never seen the partisan unprecedented investigations that lead nowhere thus far i mean, look, we ll wait to see what s but that s not true. that s not true. mr. adam schiff that s not true. that s not true, though. which is russian collusion on the part of president trump, okay? but you have to not on the part of some staffer years ago, but on the part of president trump, nothing is there. where s the boca burger. i hear your point. if you scream, it doesn t make it correct. but the point is you had i just didn t want to be interrupted, bakari. you were wrong. all right. all right. button it up. you had the national security adviser, who has been indicted and pled guilty. you have his personal lawyer. you have the chairman of the campaign, the deputy chairman of the campaign. so to say these investigations are not worth anything is flat-out false. i will tell you this. mick mulvaney is ethically sound. i disagree with all his politics, but he s ethically sound. that s something you can not necessarily say in this white house. what chris was saying on his show is important. this is the same white house that hired omarosa. so, yes, mick mulvaney is definitely a step up. bakari, niger, well argued and appreciated. have a good weekend. i ll have you back. you know that. you too. i want to turn to a tragedy at the border. you know, tragedy is not even the right word. finding out about the death of this little girl is just as sickening as sickening gets because it s a reflection of a situation that those in power, they re all ignoring it. they re fighting battles to make you pretend they care, and this little girl s death is proof they don t. i have new information about what happened and didn t happen, and more importantly, the truth about what it means, next. - [narrator] the typical vacuum head has its limitations, so shark invented duo clean. while deep cleaning carpets, the added soft brush roll picks up large particles, gives floors a polished look, and fearlessly devours piles. duo clean technology, corded and cord-free. and fearlessly devours piles. hey uh, quick question. do you like paying for things you don t need? no. and do you want to get things you love for free? who wouldn t? exactly! right. dad, apple music. he gets it. this guy gets it. (vo) get six months free apple music, on the network you deserve. you don t need to go anywhere dad, this is your home. the best home to be in is your own. home instead offers personalized in-home services for your loved ones. home instead senior care. to us, it s personal. a 7-year-old girl named jakelin came with her father from guatemala, crossed illegally over the southern border, and she s now dead. i can tell you the following from sources close to the situation. jakelin and her father were not abused, at least not by the men and women working for the u.s. the people who organize these new massive caravans, often on false pretenses, they need to be called out and investigated. they re making false promises of an ease of entry that leads people with misconceptions into bad situations. here s what i learned. this little girl and her father were part of 163 who crossed at night, about 9:15 p.m. local time, in one of the most remote parts of the border hours from anywhere. when they were contacted, the father did not say his daughter was in distress, and by the accounts of my sources, she was not at that time. they were given food and water. i know there are reports out there that they were not. i m told that s not true. now, cbp, customs and border protection, has one 50-passenger bus for that entire area. they filled it with unaccompanied minors. jakelin and her father were on the second trip of that bus. one bus. why? because the system is over capacity. and these new larger caravans are exposing and exploiting that. on the road to processing, the father noticed she was having trouble breathing. they called for emt support. the girl was rushed to the hospital. it took time because they were still far. cbp let the father go with the daughter to the hospital. that s not what the law would suggest, right? he was under arrest. but it was the right thing to do. it is illegal to cross. we know that. but humanity is part of the job on the border. we know that, and he needed to be there, and he was. she didn t make it. she was revived more than once, and her father was with her. this is terrible. it s just terrible. it hurts. it hurts because we re allowing it to happen. don t demonize people working on the border with false allegations. don t demonize those desperate enough to do something like this father did for his daughter from guatemala. walls matter. but this stare-down between the presidents and the democrats is a deadly distraction. it s not a single-issue problem. we re not a wall away from safety. this system is killing people. the rules allow a flow that the agencies cannot handle. there is desperation on both sides of this. change is a must. we will see more of this. i hate to say that. i am not an alarmist. god forbid i m right, but there s no other reasonable conclusion. if you can t accommodate the flow and people are desperate enough to come any way they can, you re going to have more extreme situations. we can do better. you don t have to let in more people to treat those who apply with humanity and to have a system that has rules that correspond to the resources needed. judges, case workers, accommodations. if you build the wall but you don t build out the other areas, you re not going to be fixing, not really. this little girl is gone, and there is no fixing that. and you can blame it away if you want, but that s not addressing the true need. we can do things to make sure it doesn t happen this way again, and the answer isn t demonizing desperation, demonizing the cbp. they re not stormtroopers. we know the facts of the situation. and it is outrageous, but there s no reason to manufacture wrongdoing. the reality is troubling enough, and nothing s being done. shut down for a wall? that s posing. the problems are known. the crisis of large groups is only growing. our leaders won t address it. that oval office show was just that. it all rings hollow. if they don t address the need,
some breaking news here. house republicans they just voted to censure california j democrat adam schiff for, quote ,misleading the american public. that put it puts it pretty mildly i d say schiff sught russiagate lies. they have finally caught up with him u and will now face ana ethics investigation. hallelujah. democrats. they were melting down on the house floor. hous are 213 and the nays are 209, with six answering present the resolution adopt it. adopt without objection, the motion to consider, as larry laid on the tableedo lai, house wilt order. wild scene chip roy. he is a texas congressman. he joins me. welcome, congressman. good night, kaylee. hi. so i had a hill staffer text me about that scene where adam schiff gets censured. apparently, there is a staredown between mccarthy sch e and swalwell. and swalwell was saying, you re weak, you re weak a. it seems pretty wild.
Names and other people s names exposed through public sight, i can t promise any confidential source that we re going to preserve their identity moving forward. i think this is win-win, quite frankly. now they ve got a look at the document. they don t physically have it to wave it around like a prop. they ll interpret it as they see politically fit for each of them. frank, how troubling is this ongoing push to undermine the fbi and justice department including mike pence saying we need equal treatment under the laws as it relates to donald trump? yeah. well ali referenced it. this isn t likely the last time we ll see this staredown between oversight committees and the fbi. it s attempt by a thousand cuts of the fbi. they seem intent on he eroding the fbi s ability to do it s job. it s fairly transparent to most americans the ire is up because the fbi is the institution investigating their guy, donald trump, with the special counsel,
And children sent racing for shelter for their lives in ukraine, as russia launches a rare daytime attack on the capital kyiv. authorities are promising swift retaliation now, but after months of talk, anticipation of a counteroffensive is coming soon. we are following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to cnn news central. so they have a deal, but do they have the votes? president biden and speaker mccarthy may have ended their staredown over the debt ceiling but progressives and conservatives are saying their respective sides gave too much away in this compromise. if the bill passes, the u.s. avoids a default and washington won t have to deal with the debt ceiling again until january, 2025.
Latest from the front lines. plus a new search has just been announced in the missing toddler madeline mcgahn. we re following these major developing stories and more all coming in right here to cnn news central. in just a couple of hours president biden and speaker mccarthy will give it another try. they will meet face-to-face again in the ongoing staredown over the debt ceiling. so far neither leader has blinked. because of that the u.s. could default if no agreement by june 1st. running out of money for social security and military salaries. last hour speaker mccarthy told cnn a deal has to be ironed out much sooner than that deadline. reporter: do you need to have