Trump, the Press Makes Me More UnCivil Than I Am; Uranium Sale To Russia.
DON LEMON, CNN TONIGHT NEWS SHOW HOST: Using's his words.</s>LANZA: So when he is out there defend, by the way, he is defending the electoral majority that brought him into the presidency and the White House.</s>LEMON: So we shouldn't put his own words on</s>TV. LANZA: You should always use his own words, use them in the proper context and understand what he is doing.</s>LEMON: What is the context BS or mocking the reporter? What's the context of that?</s>LANZA: Well, the context is the American public is frustrated with Washington, D.C., they think it's broken and the last 30 years has failed a lot of these communities in Wisconsin...</s>LEMON: I don't understand, Brian, I don't want to be rude, but I don't understand what that has to do with him saying nasty things and mocking people and coming up with nicknames. What does that have to do with that? If the press points that out, how is that getting the perception wrong? How is that portraying him in a negative light? Isn't he doing, in essence, doing that to himself? If he didn't want that perception out there, then he wouldn't do it.</s>LANZA: I think what you have is sort of two parallel tracks here. You have him manifesting the frustration of the country which is what he is doing and he is speak the language of the Americans with the frustrations with Washington, D.C. And you're trying to layer another component on here that is sort of less than sophisticated.</s>LEMON: I don't see a lot of people mocking reporters with disabilities and calling people funny names a lot, but that is just me. Scott, you don't get a chance to get in I'm sorry because we're way into the next show. I go have to say to you, happy birthday in about an hour or so. And Angela Rye as well, happy birthday to both you. I'll see you next time.</s>SCOTT JENNINGS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Thanks, Don.</s>ANGELA RYE, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Thank you.</s>LEMON: This is CNN tonight I'm Don Lemon, it's a little past 11:00. We are live in breaking news in the Russian investigation. We're learning that last summer during the campaign WikiLeaks Julian Assange was contacted by a Cambridge Analytica and company link to the Trump campaign seeking access to e-mails from Hillary Clinton's private server. That is according to four sources familiar with the outreach -- with the outreach. Also Julian Assange today confirming he was contacted by saying WikiLeaks did not cooperate. And those missing 30,000 e-mails well they have never materialized. Also tonight white NAACP is warning black passengers to be careful when they fly with American airlines. The incidents add up to a pattern of targeting African Americans. Let's get to the breaking news. Here to discuss that is CNN chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto, Bob Cusack editor in chief of the Hill and Betsy Woodruff who first break the Cambridge Analytica story for the Daily Beast. Good to have all of you on, thank you for joining us. Betsy, you first. Tell us what you've uncovered tonight about Alexander Knicks who heads Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.</s>BETSY WOODRUFF, POLITICAL REPORTER, THE DAILY BEAST: That I learned is that Alexander Knicks told associates that he reached out to Julian Assange during the campaign to ask Julian Assange, in short, to offer the services of Cambridge Analytica to Julian Assange for the purposes of publishing or distributing those 33,000 missing e-mails that Republicans so badly wanted to find. Alexander Knicks also said, according to my sources, that Julian Assange rebuffed him. After I reported that, I got a comment from Julian Assange who told me that that was correct, that he did, indeed, rebuff outreach from Cambridge Analytica. In the time since my story broke, the Trump campaign has pushed back against it in kind of an oblique way suggested they relied more on the RNC for their data needs. However, the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica up words of $5 million over the course of the election cycle. It's hard to distance yourself from a company when you've given them that much cash.</s>LEMON: So how are Trump donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon all connected to this?</s>WOODRUFF: Robert and Rebekah Mercer are basically the majority shareholders or owners of Cambridge Analytica. Steve Bannon for years was the top outside gatekeeper to the Mercers. And Alexander Knicks e-mailed according to CNN's reporting Bekah Mercer saying that he had these communications with Julian Assange. Bannon was previously on the board of Cambridge Analytica and at least at one point he had a share of the company worth between $1 million and $5 million. What you have to understand when we talk about Bannon, the Mercers, and the Trump campaign, is that these are relationships that have been in place for years. The Mercers are, it's a father-daughter duo, and they're billionaires. Robert Mercer has a health fund that is extraordinarily lucrative and he is been investigating in years in the kind of conservative causes that Steve Bannon has championed. They've developed a relationship and then when Bannon got on board with the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, the Mercers's support was right there as well. Bannon and the Mercers go hand in hand. To so to find out that Alexander Knicks who was the CEO of Cambridge Analytica a company for all purposes we can assume the Mercers control reach out to Julian Assange brings together all these relationships in a way that is kind of, it's fascinating to behold.</s>LEMON: Jim Sciutto your turn now. I want to play President Trump during a press conference. This is July 27, 2016.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Russia, if you you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That will be next.</s>LEMON: The timing of that statement raising questions tonight because just two days after the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $100,000, how much in total did the Trump campaign give to Cambridge Analytica?</s>JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, some $6 million over the course of the final weeks of the campaign. $5 million in one go, payments quarter of a billion dollars here and there and as they say sooner or later you're talking about real money. There was certainly a financial relationship there. To this point, you know, until the investigation got into pace, there was no, there was implications, there were public statements from Trump for instance going the Russians to get those e-mails. There were tweets from a Roger Stone in advance of some of the WikiLeaks releases that seemed to imply fore knowledge of those releases. Until those investigations got underway that was all you had. Now at this point have you this e-mail reaching out to Julian Assange, rebuffed apparently but at least reaching out to Julian Assange so showing something of an interest to work with Assange on those e- mails. You have the June 2016 Trump tower meeting where there was offered damaging information on Hillary Clinton and that was something that Donald Trump Jr. was aware of when he took that meeting. Whether those bits of information add up to something that begins to get you to the category of collusion or cooperation, whatever you want, it's not clear that they have that yet. But a few months ago had you nothing. At this point you at least have an e-mail here, a contact there that showed at a minimum some interest.</s>LEMON: Yes. I want to ask you, Bob, today the Trump campaign released a statement about data analytics and it reads in part here it says we, as a campaign made the choice to rely on the voter data of the Republican national committee to help elect President Donald J. Trump. Any claims that data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false. So, Bob, the statement does not address contacts between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks and contradicts what Jared Kushner the President's son-in-law told Forbes magazine in November 2016, here's what he said. He said we spent a lot of time figuring out how to build a bridge between the Trump campaign and the RNC so we can analyze the resources they are available. We found they had a pretty good ground force that we could leverage. We used some of our best practices and some of their best practices. We kept both data operations going simultaneously and a lot shared in between them. And by doing that, we could scale to a pretty good operation. So, Bob, how do you reconcile the two?</s>BOB CUSACK, EDITOR IN CHIEF, THE HILL: I think it's difficult to reconcile them, Don. I mean, I think the best he is reporting is very important. I also think that we're seeing the nastiest campaign in history and we're learning more details about it both from Hillary Clinton and the DNC, funding, the dossier report, as well as this new revelation. And I think, remember, these are foreign nationals. Now you can, you know, you can compare well British spy compared to the Russians. And that is why I think Mueller's investigation is so important to find this stuff out. And really, you know, if you think about it, all sides try to get opposition research. But the statements, the public statements from both sides suggesting kind of hiding it. That is the real problem, Don.</s>LEMON: Just own up to it.</s>CUSACK: Exactly.</s>LEMON: The Clinton campaign should own up to it, the Trump campaign should own up to. We do opposition research, we pay companies do that and that is just how it's done, right?</s>CUSACK: Bingo. That is why the cover-up is always bigger than the crime itself.</s>LEMON: Betsy, what open questions still remain tonight?</s>WOODRUFF: What will be interesting to find out is the specific day that Alexander Knicks sent this e-mail. My understanding, I don't think it's widely confirmed what day that was, it will be fascinating to get a sense of at what specific point in the month of I believe July that he sent that communication to Bekah Mercer. That could give us a hint as to what might have been motivating that. It will be fascinating to see the actual complete text of that e-mail. My understanding is that no media outlet has reported the complete text. That may provide us more clues into the way that the Mercers and Knicks were thinking about any potential relationship or work that they hope to engage in with Julian Assange. Of course, on top of this another big question is how the plethora of investigations into the Trump-Russia question respond to this new information. There's a number of investigations on and off Capitol Hill at both the state and the federal level. This piece of information, it's not likely that every investigator in every investigation has access to this information. My guess, this is a guess, but my guess is it was probably news to some of the people working on the Trump-Russia project. What they do with it, if they decide to dig in more deeply on the Cambridge Analytica question, if they decide to start looking at the work that the Mercer did for the Trump campaign, that will be a big question and something that I'll certainly be keeping an eye on in my reporting.</s>LEMON: We hope you'll come back and share it with us. Jim, before we go I have to ask you about what the President said today about Watergate in the modern age. Let's listen to it.</s>TRUMP: Well I think the uranium sale to Russia and the way it was done so underhanded with tremendous amounts of money being passed, I actually think that is Watergate modern age.</s>LEMON: What do we know about this? Tell us about that?</s>SCIUTTO: Well, this relates to a deal whereby uranium operation was sold to Russia during the time that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. And the allegation is that at the same time there were donations that went to the Clinton foundation. So the question was, was that an attempt by Russia to influence positively the then serving Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to help make that deal happen? That is what, that is what Donald Trump is referencing and, you know, the Watergate reference probably something that he'll reference because that term has been used to describe Russian interference in the election and whether there were questions about Trump campaigns ties to that interference and the election. So it's a story with still many questions that haven't been answered.</s>LEMON: Yes. Bob, is Watergate an overstatement?</s>CUSACK: I think if anything Watergate, until we know the proof, I think is an overstatement. But at the same time this gives the Republican Party and specifically President Trump the ability to muddy the waters on Russia, because of the uranium deal. And questions are ongoing and people like Senator Chuck Grassley say very respective legislator who's gone after many administrations. I think the other thing here is, these investigations are going to be going on for a long time and there's going to be a lot of fatigue. We could see investigation going well into 2018 as well as 2019.</s>LEMON: Oh boy. Joy. Thank you all. I appreciate it. When we come back, more on our breaking news. What will the revelations about the Trump campaign and the Cambridge Analytica mean for the Russia investigation?