White House: Trump Finalizing Aid Request Ahead of Texas Visit; White House: Trump Decision On Yong Immigrants Tuesday; Longtime Trump Aide Saying He Plans To Leave White House; NYT: Mueller Has Trump Letter On Reasons' For Firing Comey
SCIUTTO: Welcome back. Our breaking news, new and dire warnings from Texas Governor Greg Abbott who says that some areas remain deadly dangerous, and flooding may affect more areas before the crisis ends. President Trump and the first lady head back to the disaster area tomorrow. Let's go to CNN's Sara Murray. She is at the White House. The White House says the President is finalizing a request for disaster aid, the region of $6 billion, is that the first ask?</s>SARA MURRAY, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Jim. The White House is trying to defend the signal that this is the top of their concerns that this $6-billion initial request is only going to be the first bite at the apple, part of a much broader, much more expensive recovery effort, one we're hoping to get more details on this evening.</s>TRUMP: We're working on emergency funding. We're doing everything we can --</s>MURRAY: President Trump preparing to ask Congress for nearly $6 billion in disaster relief funding.</s>TRUMP: The federal government is on the ground bringing in significant resources to bear, and I want to assure these organizations and the others involved that we will continue to coordinate with them and bring all of the relief and the comfort and everything else that we absolutely can to the Gulf Coast.</s>MURRAY: The initial ask, a down payment on what is sure to be a lengthy and expensive recovery process for areas ravaged by Hurricane Harvey. The President and First Lady Melania Trump are poised to get a first-hand look at the devastation when they return to Texas as well as Louisiana this weekend.</s>MELANIA TRUMP, FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES: We are going tomorrow to visit them, and I just want to tell them to be strong and everything will be OK.</s>MURRAY: Meantime, Congress could act on the disaster-funding request as early as next week. A kick-off to a hectic September, in which Congress also needs to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government. All of this, as the President weighs whether to bring to an end deferred action for childhood arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program that protects undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. and children from deportation. Today, Trump said a decision could be coming soon.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A decision on DACA?</s>TRUMP: Sometime today or over the weekend, we'll have a decision.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Should Dreamers be worried?</s>TRUMP: We love the Dreamers, we love everybody.</s>MURRAY: But Congressional Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan are urging the President to hold off on scrapping it, and allow Congress to come up with a permanent fix.</s>SEN. PAUL RYAN (R), WISCONSIN, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: I actually don't think he should do that, and I believe that this is something that Congress has to fix.</s>MURRAY: As for Trump, he's hurdling into September after a chaotic August. Trump dismissed a handful of his top aides as newly-minted Chief of Staff, retired four-star General John Kelly aimed to bring some semblance of order to the White House. Now, sources tell CNN that Trump is growing annoyed with those constraints, like his limited access to staffers and outside associates. This, as members of Congress expressed their own irritation over Trump's tumultuous style of governing. In a Washington Post column, Arizona Senator John McCain describes Trump as a President who has no experience of public office, is often poorly informed, and can be impulsive in his speech and conduct.</s>MURRAY: Now, the White House is trying to keep the focus on Hurricane Harvey clean-up efforts and the President's visit there over the weekend today, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said no decision or announcement on DACA is going to be coming until Tuesday. Back to you, Jim.</s>SCIUTTO: Sara Murray at the White House there. Let's bring in our political specialist. Dana, I want to begin with you because you have new reporting about another departure from the White House?</s>DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: A potential departure and that is, Jim, Keith Schiller, who was Donald Trump's bodyguard for decades and he now serves as the Director of Oval Office Operations. He has told people that he intends to leave the White House, that's according to three sources with knowledge of this, they told me and our colleagues Noah Gray and Jeremy Diamond. Now, the primary reason that Keith Schiller is telling people that he is going to leave is financial. But it is also noteworthy, given what Sara was reporting about General Kelly, the new Chief of Staff, and the way he has clamped down on access to the Oval Office, access to the President, we are also told that Schiller has expressed frustration with that process, especially since he is somebody who has had unfettered access to Donald Trump for decades. You know, he has been a constant presence with Trump, Jim, since he was a businessman, during the campaign, and so forth. And we, of course, remember that he is somebody who delivered perhaps the most consequential -- could end up being the most -- one of the most letters of the presidency, he hand delivered to the FBI James Comey letter, firing him. And I think that the reason why, you know, we don't normally don't talk about the White House Oval Office Director, operations director, but this is somebody who is a part of Donald Trump's posse, and if he does, in fact, end up going, which now he is telling people his plans are the end of September, beginning of October, it really could add to the President's feeling of isolation because he really yearns for people who he is close to, has known for a long time and is limited in his communications with those people. Keith Schiller is one of them.</s>SCIUTTO: Yes, the fact that he was the one chosen to deliver that letter of firing James Comey of the FBI is a measure of his closeness to the President. Ryan Lizza, I know you've been following this closely. We've been hearing particular in recent days of the President feeling perhaps pushing back against some of Chief of Staff Kelly's efforts to formalize things in the White House. To lose a long-time aide who goes back to New York days, would -- as Dana was saying, would that not make him -- would that not be likely to make him feel more isolated in the White House?</s>RYAN LIZZA, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, it's a -- it's a good point. I mean, the entire White House over the summer has essentially changed, and this would really change the character of that place. He's one of Trump's closest and longest-serving aides and protector, literally a bodyguard. And with people like Steve Bannon gone, Reince Priebus, the whole cast of characters has really changed, the only -- the only people closer to the President than Schiller are really his children and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. So, I don't know how related it is to what Kelly has been doing, but, I mean, I think some of the stories about Kelly tightening operations are -- you know, he's basically just being a traditional Chief of Staff. They had almost no structure there, previously, and he is -- you know, he's overlaid a sort of traditional Chief of Staff structure, the kind that every White House has really had.</s>SCIUTTO: Well, early administrations always have personnel movements, but this one certainly remarkable in how many departures there. And Dana, if I can just go back to you, briefly. DACA on the -- you know, very much a headline here, the President teeing up a decision today, this weekend, now we know it's going to be Tuesday. What is CNN's sense of which way the President is going to go here, and you know, with the proviso that we don't know for sure and it could change?</s>BASH: Well, the answer to that is that it's hard to know because it seems pretty clear that they don't really know inside the White House yet. And they're really trying to feel out exactly how to deal with this, given the fact that the President made a commitment over and over again during the campaign, one that was, you know, loved and cheered by his core base, to get rid of DACA, which is to get rid of the executive order that allows so-called Dreamers to stay -- to stay in this country. But now that he's President and now he has a lot of pressure and we've seen it come out in public over the past 24 hours from Republican leaders, many of them who say, don't do this, let's figure it out, you know, it seems as though it's very possible that he could take them up on that and say, OK, Congress, you want to deal with it, you deal with it. I'll give you a deadline. If you don't deal with it by X, let's say -- I don't know, two months or so, then I will deal with it by executive order. But it doesn't seem entirely clear that's how it going to go. There is a lot of pressure from Republicans again externally and some, I am told, inside the White House for him to do just that because this is such a dicey issue.</s>SCIUTTO: And just to be clear for folks at home, if they don't know for sure what a Dreamer is, a Dreamer is someone who came into the country under the age of 16, undocumented, has been here continuously for five years. Manu Raju, you, of course, cover the Hill, you've heard from Speaker Ryan as Dana mentioned, saying, we should let Congress do that. We saw the Republicans, for instance, Jeff Flake, tweeting that today. Here's a question for you, do Republicans on the Hill actually want to make this decision and have a vote on the record on this decision?</s>MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: Some do but it's a minority of Republicans both in the House Republican Conference and the Senate Republican Conference. And that's really the challenge going to be going forward if the White House does kick this decision to Capitol Hill. Certainly, there are some from states that have heavy Latino -- big Latino populations, people that worked on immigration reform like Jeff Flake, people like Paul Ryan who have spout more liberal views on immigration policy. And the President himself have called for something to do with the Dreamers, have called for things to do with undocumented immigrants, but this is a minority of both conferences. It would take a lot of -- it would be a lot of push from the White House, frankly, to get the Republicans in line behind something that a lot of members don't want to do. It would probably require some Democrats to give on some other issues like the President's border wall, which a lot of Democrats don't want to do. For that reason, I'm pretty skeptical that they could get anything through Congress this year, and if they don't get anything through Congress this year, that would put it back at the White House to figure out what they want to do. So, I don't think it's a very easy calculation for the White House to simply say, Congress will deal with it, because if that happens, they also could get sued by various states that don't think they should go forward, and that would put their own Justice Department in a tricky position of deciding we're going to have to defend this administrative action that the President has said in the past that he opposes. So, it is a tricky situation for the White House even if they decide to let Congress do it, and there's no guarantee that Congress will do anything.</s>SCIUTTO: Yes, imagine that game of legislative ping-pong in Washington. I mean, it's worth noting, too, there's a</s>BIANNA GOLODRYGA, FINANCE ANCHOR, YAHOO! NEWS: Well, it does leave open the option of intent from the President that he intended on firing his FBI Director before he actually did. It also shows that those within the White House like Steven Miller were privy of this decision as well. It was interesting because I had heard an interview months ago after Comey was fired with the former White House Counsel for President Obama, Bob Bauer, he said, listen, Don McGahn is getting a lot of pressure for the letter that he released, formally. The President and the White House formally released when they fired Comey, but he said we have no idea what the initial letter, the first letter, the first draft that McGahn had seen, that the President had given to him, what that may have looked like and McGahn may have done work on that letter, and come to find out, that appears to be what played out.</s>SCIUTTO: And to be clear, the President has made public comments about this in an interview with NBC News. He said that it was Comey's handling of the Russia investigation, so he's even telegraphed that to some degree. Susan Hennessey, you cover this very closely. As you look at this, in effect we are getting clues as to where the special counsel's investigation is headed. What does this -- does this tell you about the direction of Bob Mueller right now?</s>SUSAN HENNESSEY, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY AND LEGAL ANALYST: All right, so one of the hardest elements of sort of an obstruction charge to prove is that mental state. So sort of the revelation about this letter which, you know, allegedly sort of lays out exactly what the President was thinking, was potentially, legally problematic. And that's going to be really significant. In terms of what we might be able to sort of glean about where the special counsel investigation is going, and we also saw reporting yesterday of the Wall Street Journal about these series of memos that Trump's legal team had sent to Mueller's team sort of opened up a channel of communication, they really seemed to be focused on obstruction of justice as the primary issue. That was what they were sort of engaging in a dialogue. I mean, it was also reported that Trump's team appears to thinks that Mueller's team is sort of is focusing on the obstruction issue, first and foremost. Now, they're interpreting that as good news as a way of saying, well, we're going to get this out of the way early. The President is going to be cleared and then we'll move on. You know, there's another way to look at that, which is that usually prosecutors look at sort of the easiest issues, the issues that they think are going to be most significant in an investigation first. And so, this really is an indication that that obstruction issue is going to be, you know, front and center for the next several months.</s>SCIUTTO: No question. As Susan referenced there, Ryan Lizza, CNN has reported as well that President Trump's lawyers have met with Special Counsel Mueller to make their case already, pre-emptively, perhaps, that the President isn't guilty of obstruction of justice, and also to attack James Comey's credibility as well. But when you look at the President's own words, his own tweets on this, does that damage his case?</s>LIZZA: Well, yes, I think there's been a big conflict since the beginning between what Trump says publicly, about this case and what any, you know, someone fresh out of law school defending a President, would want him or her to say. So, his comments, you know, from saying on the record in an interview that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation just some of the other -- the other tweets attacking the investigation, he seems to have increased his legal jeopardy. And I just think this news has gotten sort of buried because of the hurricane and so much stuff that's going on, but from what we -- we're talking about here both the letter that Comey has now -- excuse me, that Mueller has now gotten and this meeting between the special counsel and Trump's lawyers, there is a serious obstruction of justice investigation going on against the President of the United States.</s>SCIUTTO: No question, yes.</s>LIZZA: He's personally being investigated. And I don't think the political system has digested that yet.</s>SCIUTTO: Right.</s>LIZZA: And, you know, up and --</s>SCIUTTO: Well, it's a story -- it's a story certainly we're going to -- we're going to follow closely and in the days and weeks ahead. But as you say there, it's a clue to how serious this investigation is proceeding. Thanks very much to our team there. Coming up, the latest forecast for Hurricane Irma, an already dangerous storm in the Atlantic expected to grow even stronger as it heads towards the U.S.