New Tell-All Threatens To Overshadow Key GOP Meetings; Other White House Officials Sought To Pressure Justice Department About Sessions Recusal
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The bomb shell book that's raising a question loud and clear, is Donald Trump fit to be president of the United States?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President, have you read the book "Fire and Fury?"</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is extraordinary that a president of the United States would try to stop the publication of a book.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He is not psychologically fit. He's not lost it as he claimed.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've got a guy in the White House that is unstable and not fit for office.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not suggesting that he's not capable of doing the job. I just hope that he'll do it.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have recused myself.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A source close to Attorney General Jeff Sessions says President Trump tried to stop Sessions from recusing himself from the Russia investigation.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think that we are in a neighborhood where I hope Mueller is looking at this very seriously for obstruction of justice. I believe it may be time for him to step aside.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The attorney general is going to continue showing up to work this week.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: After months of the president clamoring for an investigation into Hillary Clinton, CNN has now learned that one does exist.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think it's very suspicious that the closer and closer we get to President Trump or his inner circle we see all of these distractions.</s>CHRISTI PAUL, CNN ANCHOR: So glad to have you with us this morning. A scathing new tell all has threatened to overshadow a crucial weekend for President Trump. Good morning to you. I'm Christi Paul.</s>VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Victor Blackwell. Top Republican leaders head to Camp David to plan their 2018 agenda. The president has focused instead on continued attacks against this new book and its author. The president goes after "Fire and Fury" as made up, really boring and untruthful and his White House is dismissing the concerns about the president's fitness for office.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We got a guy in the White House that is unstable and not fit for office.</s>REX TILLERSON, SECRETARY OF STATE: I've never questioned his mental fitness, I have no reason to question his mental fitness.</s>BLACKWELL: Let's go now to CNN's Abby Phillip live in Washington. Abby, good morning to you and Republicans have a lot to get done this week. Plotting out the next year legislatively, but it seems like the president as late as I guess 12:15 this morning was stuck on the book.</s>ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Victor and Christi. The president waking up in Camp David where he's spending more of his time having meetings with Republican Congressional leaders and also members of his cabinet about the big year ahead in 2018. But last night, the president really had on his mind this book that has roiled his presidency, roiled his administration. He has not let this issue go. After the book was published a few days early despite his legal threats trying to shut it down. The president wrote in a tweet, let me read that to you, what you had just a moment ago, "Michael Wolff, the author of the book, is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog like almost everyone. Too bad." Sloppy Steve is that now moniker that the president has given his former chief strategist, someone who was incredibly close to the campaign and his administration. Steve Bannon was recorded in this bookmaking derogatory comments about the president and after wards the president really slammed him in a harsh statement and that anger clearly has not gone away.</s>BLACKWELL: Abby, let me also ask you about the Russia investigation and what we're learning that multiple White House officials were involved in this effort to try to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the investigation.</s>PHILLIP: That's right. This was first reported by the "New York Times." This effort on behalf of the White House to pressure Sessions to not recuse himself and CNN learned overnight according to a senior administration official that in addition to the White House Counsel Don McGahn, who reached out to Sessions on this issue. He also received pressure from two other officials from the White House -- then White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and then White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Now, this makes it three White House officials who apparently tried to talk Sessions out of the decision that he did ultimately make to recuse himself. And I just want to read the response from Sean Spicer very quickly here because I think it's important. He said, "For eight months the narrative was that I was out of the loop and now I am part of it? I don't think so." So Sean Spicer here denying that he did anything other than call Sessions about a conference call. He did not say that he was part of an effort to pressure Sessions not to recuse himself in this case.</s>BLACKWELL: All right. Abby Phillip for us in Washington. Abby, thank you.</s>PAUL: So, CNN political commentators, Errol Louis and Paris Dennard with us now as well as "Washington Examiner" reporter, Melissa Quinn, and former U.S. Attorney Michael Moore. Thank you all for being here. We appreciate it. Michael, I want to start with you on that note about what's going on with Sessions. If it's true, did President Trump cross any legal line here?</s>MICHAEL MOORE, PARTNER, POPE MCGLAMRY: You know, I think we get a lot closer to an obstruction case when we hear that the president tried to convince him not to remove himself through the normal recusal process. Things that happened before the president was in office, we can talk about those and whether or not that would amount to obstruction. But certainly, once he was sworn in, once we've had his inauguration day, we're talking about a position where he's the president of the United States and he's pressuring his subordinates to take action and to move or to not move in a certain direction in a criminal investigation. I think we're looking at a clear case at this point of obstruction.</s>PAUL: Errol, do you agree?</s>ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Not necessarily. There's sort of an unwritten kind of a code that is varied from administration to administration. And to be fair about it, you know, in the post- Watergate era, it has not been clear how much political pressure can be applied to the Justice Department. So, we've had some White Houses where only four officials were even authorized to even contact the Justice Department at any senior level. That has ranged up to the hundreds in the case of the George W. Bush administration. There are guidelines that have been set down by one attorney general after another including in the Obama administration and so, it wasn't clear and is not clear what somebody should or could have said to the attorney general to try and pressure him or convince him to take one course of action or another. He of course took the right action in my opinion because he wanted to take himself out of even a question of impropriety. The fact that there are others who didn't want him to do that, shame on them.</s>PAUL: So, you bring up something interesting, you know, "The New York Times" was reporting White House Counsel Don McGahn on orders of President Trump went to Sessions and urged him not to recuse himself. To Sessions' credit a lot of people are saying he did just what he was going to do. But on the other hand, there's this mixed message of sessions and these reports that he asked -- he was trying to dig up some sort of dirt on Comey to give an excuse or a valid excuse to fire the former FBI director. Melissa, do we know what -- what the relationship is right now between Jeff Sessions and President Trump?</s>MELISSA QUINN, REPORTER, "WASHINGTON EXAMINER": Well, it seems at this point the White House has come to the defense of the attorney general although President Trump has been vocal both publicly and in private venting his frustrations with Jeff Sessions over his recusal from the Russia investigation. But obviously, a lot of reporters picked up on the fact that the attorney general is one of just a few cabinet officials, who is absent from this weekend's retreat with congressional leaders at Camp David. The White House, of course, has sort of brushed off any speculation as to what this might mean, saying, you know, he just is not -- please don't read into this. But of course, President Trump has really not made shy the fact that he is really unhappy, frustrated, and disappointed with Sessions' recusal. But of course, we haven't seen any Twitter storms criticizing the attorney general recently as we have in the past.</s>PAUL: So, Paris, I want to ask you, Representative Jerrold Nadler said this. He's on the House Judiciary Committee about Mr. McGahn. He said, "His reported conduct is completely unacceptable. The role of the attorney general is to uphold the law including the rules prohibiting the Department of Justice officials from participating in cases in which they have a conflict of interest. Either Mr. McGahn know this is and decided to interfere with the Russia investigation anyway or he doesn't. Neither case is acceptable, and he should be removed from his post immediately." Senator Ed Markey saying essentially the same thing. Don McGahn has to go. He has to testify. How plausible that's going to happen?</s>PARIS DENNARD, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I don't know if that's going to happen and I think we also have to go back to the fact that we are living in a culture right now under the Trump administration where innuendo and unsubstantiated quotes and unnamed sources can say things and we just accept them as fact. You know, I think we have to remember, these are attorneys, and they're White House attorneys. They're very capable individuals and the political wheel of Democrat members of the House and the Senate does not trump, pardon the pun, the actual rule of law and what they know to be truthful inside of the White House. So I don't know if McGhan is going to testify, but at the end of the day, we need to be focused on trying to have an investigation that is fair, try to have an investigation that is impartial and try to have an investigation that looks at all avenues of Russia meddling and if that includes the Clintons, then so be it. If that includes the Obama administration, so be it, but we need to be sure the investigation is fair and not just focused on all these other rabbit holes which special counsels can do because of the wide net they can cast. And this is exactly why the president and others especially members of Congress have said recently, and in the past, there should have never been a special counsel to begin with because now it is outside of the original narrow scope that it was supposed to be about.</s>PAUL: All right. You lead me right into what we were -- what a lot of people have been talking about the last 24, 48 hours and this is the book by Michael Wolff. I want to listen here to Michael Wolff. He gave an interview recently here just in the last few hours with BBC. And I want to listen to what he says about the president's fitness for office. I believe it's the president's fitness for office, talking about the period that he witnessed when he was there. Let's listen.</s>MICHAEL WOLFF, AUTHOR, "FIRE AND FURY": Over this period that I witnessed the seven or eight months, they all came to the conclusion gradually at first and then faster and faster that something was unbelievably amiss here, that this was more peculiar than they ever imagined they could be. And that in the end, they had to look at Donald Trump and say no, this man can't function in this job as president. He may have been elected president, but that does not turn him into president.</s>PAUL: OK. So, Errol Louis, in the last 24 hours, we have had Secretary Tillerson saying I don't question his mental fitness. Senator Jeff flake saying the same thing from Arizona. Is this really about a mental fitness or is there a sense that it's about a mental mind set? This is a businessman who went into politics and just does not work the same way prior or previous politicians have worked.</s>LOUIS: Well, no, that last part I think is the one thing we have to avoid, which is to try and change the standard and so to say, well, anybody else would never get away with this, but let's make an exception for Donald Trump. The reality is this is a matter of opinion and conjecture. There are a lot of people who have seen a lot of strange behavior from this president and Michael Wolff, who sat there for weeks and weeks on end, remember, none of us have, he says he talked to a couple of hundred people, repeatedly, and that they all reached this conclusion. Now, you know, what does that mean? That's for the rest of us to decide, but you know, if a reporter sat there and watched week after week, month after month, a lot of people sort of form a consensus and he has reported it accurately. Well, then, you know, it's up to the rest of us to decide whether it means anything or not, but no, I don't -- I don't think it's out of bounds for people to say, I think there's something wrong here. It's a wakeup call to the rest of us.</s>PAUL: Paris, you chuckle. Why?</s>DENNARD: He said if he reported it accurately. It is bipartisan agreement that this Michael Wolff, who is a psychiatrist or a doctor, I missed him going to medical school about his diagnosis of the president or his opinion of other people. But he has not reported this accurately. There are many, many discrepancies --</s>LOUIS: Have you read the book?</s>DENNARD: I have not read all the book.</s>LOUIS: So, you don't know whether or not it's accurate. How ridiculous.</s>PAUL: There are a lot of questions right now about the accuracy of this book.</s>DENNARD: People who have read it, including Maggie Haberman, who appears on this network, who is from "New York Times" and from the pieces that I have read of the book to point it out to you, they are inaccurate and people who are quoted in the book have said these are inaccurate including Tony Blair. I believe Tony Blair before I believe this author. But back to the point of the president's mental fitness, listen, when you go back to President George W. Bush, who was a businessman, who wasn't your run of the mill politician like Bill Clinton, who was a former governor, businessmen come to this at a different angle and the president is doing the same. We can go back and look at the things that JFK did and LBJ did and question how fit they were, but were they still capable of being president because they did things differently, they had a lot of medicine shot into them, but they have had meetings in the bathtub or on the toilet, these are the idiosyncrasies of people, but they are capable, and the president is capable.</s>PAUL: I want to give Michael a chance to respond. Michael, how much credence do you give to this author?</s>MOORE: I think probably the most damning affirmation of the things in the book came from Sarah Sanders the other day when she said that the president insists that basically vets things whether or not they are true and then he pushes no facts that aren't true. She's too smart for that. I think she's basically telling us in that statement that something is amiss in this White House and the standard for competency and capability didn't depend on what you did in your previous life before being elected president. We expect a businessman to be competent and capable just like we would have a politician that they've been elected --</s>PAUL: Melissa, you have the last word.</s>QUINN: Yes, I just think that as we're reading this book and we're reading the headlines that have derived from it, it's important that we do take things with a grain of salt. There have been some excerpts that have in fact provided -- that have verified some of the stories that have been reported from the "Washington Post" and the "New York Times." For instance, that President Trump considered rescinding Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court nomination, but at the same time, there have been serious questions raised about the accuracy of this book from a number of reporters including Maggie Haberman as mentioned earlier. So, as we're reading these headlines and certainly going through this book over the weekend we just need to take what is -- what has been reported I think with a grain of salt and remember that there is some nuance to it as well.</s>PAUL: Errol Louis, Melissa Quinn, Michael Moore, Paris Dennard, thank you all so much. We appreciate it.</s>BLACKWELL: Well, President Trump has a long promised big beautiful wall coming, he says, between the U.S. and Mexico and now we're finally getting idea of just how much the government thinks that's going to cost.</s>PAUL: Yes, the administration is asking Congress for $33 billion for border security, 18 billion of that would be specifically for the wall. Now, according to a document obtained by CNN, the money would be used to cover that 700 miles of the border. This is over a ten- year period to both new fencing and to add reinforcements as well. Now the president is throwing this curveball at lawmakers. He's not going to sign a deal granting amnesty to so called dreamers unless he gets this funding for the wall. Democrats don't seem to be backing down though. Nancy Pelosi tweeting this message to the president "That border wall funding you are asking for again could do so much more good in other places," she tweets.</s>BLACKWELL: Well, the president has been calling on the Justice Department to do it and now the FBI is investigating allegations of corruption related to the Clinton Foundation.</s>PAUL: Also much of the northeast, look at that blanket of snow. It is expansive. We'll take a look at whether anything is going to thaw any time soon.