Return to Transcripts main page

Inside Politics

NYT: Mueller Examining Trump Tweets For Evidence of Obstruction of Justice; John Kelly Nears One-Year Mark as Chief of Staff; WSJ: Trump Org. CFO Subpoenaed By Grand Jury in Cohen Probe; Stacey Abrams Faces Brian Kemp in Race for GA Governor. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired July 26, 2018 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:30:00] JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: -- ever on this planet accept.

MOLLY BALL, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, and no and to Jeff's point, the chances are clearly almost nil that he would willingly sit for an interview, but he may not have a choice. That's what the subpoena would be about.

You know, in any criminal scenario, the intent of the person who's being investigated is very important. And we have always had a very good window into the president's intentions and exactly what he's thinking because he tells us all the time. So yes, absolutely.

On the one hand, it seems a little -- seems kind of obvious that they would use the tweets as part of that narrative. But on the other hand, it does open this whole area of the way that they are going to understand what the president is thinking.

MJ LEE, CNN NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER: And this is just a very good reminder of why the people closest to Donald Trump, advisers, aides, his legal team, have always viewed Twitter as such a dangerous tool for Donald Trump. Jeff, as you were saying, this is the medium that he uses without a filter. This is where you know exactly what the president is thinking and feeling.

And as the story points out, you know, Robert Mueller and his team could be using the tweets to try to build a case to see if they can build a case using the tweets, using other information that they've gathered to see if they can make the case that there was any sort of attempt and intention for obstruction of justice. And I think the reason that people are so worried, the people close to Donald Trump, about a potential sit-down and interview with Robert Mueller is of course because this is the one setting where he cannot have people around him explaining away what he actually meant to say.

The interview, whatever he says, sort of goes. And this is not a situation where, you know, the spokesperson goes behind the podium and says, well, yes, the president tweeted this, however what his actual intention and meaning was is something else.

KING: And what we don't know is what have the dozens of officials who've been interviewed, including White House staffers at various levels, officials in the administration at various levels, what have they said. If Bob Mueller asked, you know, what was the president's mood that day, what did he say about that, when he tweeted that did somebody help him with that tweet, did he say anything about it. What did he do privately after that tweet, what did he ask you to do about this subject? That's the part we don't know.

In this, Rudy Giuliani, the president's lawyer again saying, quote, if you're going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public. I think that's true in most cases. In most cases, that is true and Mr. Giuliani is a former prosecutor. But there are exceptions to every rule.

JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, and we see this time and time again with the president's Twitter feed is, through reporting, we've learned that a lot of what he tweets publicly he has said or acted on privately. And so it is actually a very good window into his thinking, into his actions, into maybe something that he's been briefed on that's made him angry and made him want to either change the subject or obscure a fact that everybody knows is in evidence.

So as Molly said, it's sort of obvious that they would want to include the tweets in sort of the tapestry of, you know, everything that the president has tried to do and say. But I think, you know, with Giuliani says that, you know, he's a politician, he's just going to say these things, this is not a typical situation where you have a politician saying one thing to his base and a president acting very differently behind closed doors. This is all of a piece.

And I think the big question is going to be, is it that these tweets and these actions and statements that he's taken behind the scenes are pushing back when he feels threatened, or are they actually taking action that could be seen as obstructing an investigation.

KING: Right. Is he doing it to vent, to voice his opinion, or is he doing it as part of an effort to obstruct the investigation or to intimidate his own officials. Here's one tweet the president sent once. "Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a very weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes. Where are the e-mails, the DNC, the Intel leakers?"

He's also tweeted at James Comey before. He tweeted at the just -- at Jeff Sessions many times. The Times story says that after several tweets against Sessions, an aide to Sessions sent derogatory information about the FBI director. Mr. Sessions' aide said told the Capitol Hill staff they wanted one negative article a day in the news media about Mr. Comey, a person familiar with the meeting said.

So the question there for Bob Mueller is, is that the president trying to pressure using Twitter and other means, internal administration pressure as well to pressure the FBI director to do something that ends up getting in the way of the investigation. Or is it, as Rudy Giuliani would say, the president has every right to fire people who work in the administration, so what.

BALL: Really going back to the idea of an interview, it seems like there's very little he could be asked in an interview that he hasn't already come out and commented on in public, often in kind of mind- blowingly inflammatory or revealing ways. This is why every lawyer who tells a client is under investigation, shut up, right? Don't say anything. Don't comment on the case. Don't talk about it, even to your friends, much less, you know, to the world.

But that is not Donald Trump's M.O. And that clearly could come back to bite him. And to say that because he didn't do it in secret, it doesn't count. I mean, that's like the guy who turns himself into the police and says, well, if I'd done it, would I be turning myself in? Usually that doesn't fly.

KING: Right. And the question is, can you piece the public tweets and other statements together with. Remember the current controversy early on when he called Admiral Mike Rogers and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence and did he just tell them to, you know, in Comey's way or just vent to them, and that they've been interviewed by the special counsel as well.

[12:35:10] So we'll watch this one. But more breaking news. Interesting that the president's tweets are part of our every day life. It's -- now we know they're part of Bob Mueller's every day life as well.

When we come back, the story we're about to get to before the breaking news, John Kelly about to hit the one-year mark. That discipline he promised at the beginning, does it still exist now?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Here's a number to think about today, 363. As in 363 days since President Trump announced through a tweet, of course, that General John Kelly would be his new chief of staff.

[12:40:04] Our reporting today at CNN is that, as Kelly hits this one year mark, he's just a shadow of the dominant figure he once was inside the West Wing. He's been sidelined for most big decisions, and the discipline he famously brought to the White House in those early days breaking down. Many think he may be finally on his way out this summer, but of course remember, Kelly has long been rumored to be leaving or about to be fired basically since the day he took the job. Take a look at some of these headlines going back to last October.

Now President Trump is always denying those reports, like remember this?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: John Kelly is one of the best people I've ever worked with. He's doing an incredible job. And he told me for the last two months he loves it more than anything he's ever done.

He's a military man, but he loves doing this, which is chief of staff, more than anything he's ever done. He's doing a great job. He will be here in my opinion for the entire seven remaining years.

(END VIDEO CLIP) KING: Where are the Vegas odds on that?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I think pretty slim, but our reporting is showing that, you know, the time is running out at some point for John Kelly. We don't know when it will be, but we do know talking to a variety of people over the last several days and weeks that he will leave at some point. But the point of being fired is probably over. If that was going to happen, that probably would have happened by now.

One of the issues is the president always talking openly about who would be a better chief of staff. And no one has risen to the top in that sense. But in terms of John Kelly being happy on the job, he has told people privately that this is the hardest and worst job he's ever had, actually. You know, and who can blame him? We see what's happening outside.

But one of the different dynamics now is that the discipline that he imposed when he arrived, and he inherited a chaotic White House to say the very least. We have to careful about this. So he did instill discipline at the very beginning but quickly realized he cannot control the president. So he tried to control the processes around him. And that just has essentially fallen away.

A new person in the West Wing is complicating this even more, that's Bill Shine, former Fox News executive, of course fired from Fox News. He is now at the president's side nearly constantly. And John Kelly is on the periphery. He goes from being praised by the president to the subject of profanity by the president, often in the same day. So he's there for we're not sure how much longer.

KING: I want to read a little of the reporting to your point about Bill Shine. "When Trump was jetting home last week from Helsinki, the site of his maligned summit with the Russian president Vladimir Putin, it was Shine at the head of the table in Air Force One's conference room, managing discussions of how to triage the disaster. Kelly sat to his left. Quote, the president doesn't want someone telling him what to do, one White House official said. He wants someone to make him look good doing it."

That has been a constant theme in this White House. So I have one more piece from it that I find fascinating. "Kelly still doesn't read Twitter unless shown one of the president's messages. And he still doesn't watch cable television in his office, gazing instead on the Abraham Lincoln portrait he hung in place of the large T.V. screen above his fireplace."

In one way, I admire and respect that. In the other way, if you're the chief of staff to this president, can you ignore Twitter and cable T.V. and understand your job and your boss?

BALL: Well, it depends how you define -- sorry. It depends on how you define the job. And I think that as Jeff is saying, the scope of John Kelly's job has changed dramatically since he started as he has sort of strategically given up on some things that are normal chief of staff might try to decide to do. He realized he can't impose discipline on the president. He can't take Twitter away from the president. And he's increasingly not doing as good a job of being an information gatekeeper for the president who has access to his own sources of conspiracy theories and what have you. But what he -- the other thing that he was assigned to control was the rest of the White House. Because if you remember in the early days, it wasn't just Trump sort of being out of control. It was everybody else in the White House being at each other's throats, all of the staff, all these big personalities.

So with people like, you know, Bannon and Gary Cohn gone, you do see the White House still not very happy place to work, but there is a lot less of that civil warfare beneath Trump. And I think that's been Kelly's main achievement and the main thing he continues to try to do.

DAVIS: But for a White House chief of staff, you have to sort of be able to control the whole process. And so much of this White House and this president's process is around message and what people see on T.V. and what people read on Twitter. It isn't about the policy process.

And so even though you could argue that he has had more of a handle on the internal sort of orderly machinations that a normal White House would have, this White House doesn't actually use that process very much. I mean, we just saw the summit in Helsinki where the president met with Vladimir Putin, and there were no principals meetings leading up to that summit.

So, if they're not using the policy process, and in truth, all the president cares about is how he has perceived, which is what -- it appears to be -- at least for those of us who cover this White House, having that portfolio is not much of a portfolio for John Kelly.

[12:45:13] KING: 363 days.

ZELENY: Not bad though in this White House. That's pretty long.

KING: And excellent point.

Up next, he went from the man who promised to take a bullet for the president to the guy who just released that embarrassing audio tape. CNN caught up with Michael Cohen today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Questions?

MICHAEL COHEN, TRUMP'S FORMER ATTORNEY: Not right now.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Welcome back. New insight today into the mind set of President Trump's now former fixer and ally Michael Cohen. Our own MJ Lee here with us today has new reporting on how Cohen felt increasingly hung out to dry by the president, showing just how much the current situation facing the White House is, you could say, in large part of the president's own making.

Cohen, MJ reports was, quote, looking for a sign from the president or others around him that his long time boss had his back and became increasingly distraught as he realized help wasn't coming.

[12:50:08] In fact, one thing after another Trump publicly minimizing Cohen's work for him over the years, brashly predicting Cohen would never flip. Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani saying Cohen has no valuable information about Trump. Indicated to Cohen that he in fact had been left on his own.

And so you quote some friends in this and some other sources that you can't identify. Essentially saying that he was waiting and waiting and waiting and then just decided, I'm on my own, change my tactics.

LEE: That's right. And we've seen a lot of this actually take place in the public arena, right? We've seen Donald Trump go out there and, you know, try to minimize his relationship with Michael Cohen, saying that he didn't actually do that much work for him, I haven't talked to him in a very long time.

And then Michael Cohen too. You know, his signals to the public and therefore to President Trump, his former boss, those have not been so hidden either. He has been willing to tell, you know, things to friends and friends have communicated those things to reporters. Sort of trying to show his frustration, trying to show that he had expected some kind of sort of return loyalty from Donald Trump.

And at some point it became very, very clear to him that that wasn't going to come. And not that that would have necessarily helped him, given all of the legal troubles that he is in, but I think that's why we sort of saw the culmination of the recording being released by his legal team earlier this week because they felt like, look, if Trump and his legal team are willing to throw Michael Cohen under the bus, we at least want to try to set the record straight.

KING: And as part of that -- and so you have that recording about the Karen McDougal payment, or efforts to think about a payment buying essentially the rights away from the National Enquirer and bringing them in-house as Michael Cohen said. You know, he was also involved in the Stormy Daniels payment. Now we're just learning from the Wall Street Journal, Allen Weisselberg, a long-time financial gatekeeper of President Trump at the Trump Organization in New York has been subpoenaed by the southern district of New York to testify before the grand jury looking into Cohen and Cohen's financing and Cohen's business practices.

And if you're the president of the United States and somebody who knows everything about how the money was dealt with at the Trump Organization -- we're going to show you some pictures out in Iowa as we have this conversation. The president and Ivanka Trump at a workplace round table out in Dubuque, Iowa, or near Dubuque, Iowa. We'll come back to that in a minute.

So if you're the president of the United States and you read the Wall Street Journal, and a guy who knows everything about the finances of the Trump Organization is going before a grand jury, how are you thinking?

ZELENY: You're thinking that it's getting closer and closer, and there are people who know a lot of things who the president does not want to be answering those things. I mean, it's a very tight-knit, small, family organization. Michael Cohen is the closest person of course to the president non-family and this is a close second.

KING: Yes, the journal describes him as the most senior person in the organization that's not a Trump.

DAVIS: Well -- and I mean, if you think about what we know about this president's view of how people around him should operate, particularly lawyers, it's that they should defend him at all costs. He had that line of I want my Roy Cohn, I want my protector, I want someone who is going to have my back no matter what, whether I've done something inappropriate, not inappropriate, whatever the case may be.

And so to the degree that everyone in the Trump Organization was a raid in order to do that, to basically defend him at all costs, these are a bunch of people who now the southern district has access to and are going to want to question and that could be very damaging.

KING: Right. In the case of these payments, allegedly to buy silence of women who had alleged affairs with the president, then-candidate Trump or businessman Trump, it's where the money come from. Was there any corporate money involved? That would be a campaign finance violation. Was it done deliberately to influence the election? That could be a campaign finance violation.

So (INAUDIBLE) from the Wall Street Journal if that investigation continues. We're going to take a break here, we're going to continue to keep our eye on the president out in Iowa.

Coming up here, a big challenge for the candidate vying to be America's first black female governor. Can she turn a historically red state blue?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:58:20] KING: Welcome back. One of the more interesting races this midterm election year is the race for Georgia governor. Stacey Abrams, the Democrat, hoping to turn a traditional red state blue. If she can do that, she would be the nation's first female African- American governor. You see her there on the cover of Time magazine. Molly ball is the author of this great cover story.

Now we talked about the Republican candidate yesterday. He is a Trumpian conservative. Stacey Abrams says, no, that's not Georgia. What did you learn?

Well, Stacey Abrams is hoping that this race follows the model of a couple of other southern states that recently had races that pitted a Democrat, who emphasizes pocketbook issues which is her plan in her campaign, versus a Republican who is very much a Trumpian culture warrior, talking about, you know, guns and illegal immigration and all kinds of other cultural issues that a governor doesn't usually concern themselves with.

For example, the Virginia governor's race and the Alabama Senate race. In both of those you had Republican candidates using a sort of Trump echoing message. Democratic candidates running, number one, on expanding healthcare, expanding Medicaid in the case of Ralph Northam and Stacey Abrams. Restoring CHIP funding in the case of Doug Jones. That was the thing he talked about the very most.

So, you know, Georgia, historically red state. Well, it's only been -- become Republican in the -- about the past decade and a half. It's also diversified incredibly rapidly. In fact, it is more diverse than Virginia or Alabama. The voting population in Georgia only about 55 percent white, 45 percent communities of color.

So, her bet is that she can galvanize that with an effective campaign and a compelling candidacy.

KING: It's a great race to watch. Appreciate the cover story. Everybody get your Time and read that story.

Thanks for joining us today in the INSIDE POLITICS. See you back here this time tomorrow. Don't go anywhere, we have a lot more breaking news. Wolf starts right now.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington --