Lawsuits Filed Against President Trump on President's Day; Finger-Pointing Between Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein; Nicolas Maduro No Empathy for Venezuelans; Sixteen States Sue To Stop Trump's National Emergency; President Trump Believed Putin Over U.S. Intelligence; America Votes 2020
ROSEMARY CHURCH, CNN ANCHOR: Challenging the president. More than a dozen states are suing to put an end to Donald Trump's controversial national emergency declaration. Meanwhile, the president is accusing top justice officials of committing illegal and treasonous acts after stunning revelations from the former acting FBI director. Plus, America's top commander in the Middle East talks to CNN and what he is saying about U.S. troop levels in Syria. Hello, and welcome to our viewers joining us here in the United States and from all around the world. I'm Rosemary Church. This is CNN Newsroom. Well, Donald Trump is back in Washington after a long President's Day weekend in Florida facing a major challenge to his national emergency declaration. Sixteen states are joining together in a lawsuit filed in U.S. district court in Northern California. They claim the president is going around Congress to reallocate money to pay for his border wall with Mexico. California's attorney-general is leading the charge.</s>XAVIER BECERRA, CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL: The president does not have the power or the purse. The president can't decide to shuffle money around once Congress has allocated it. That's only for Congress to do. Otherwise presidents over the last 240 years would have been doing the same thing when they don't like where Congress puts the money. Simply because Donald Trump fabricated a crisis and called it a national emergency doesn't mean that he can violate the separation of powers under the Constitution.</s>CHURCH: As you know, President Trump wanted $5.7 billion for the border wall but Congress approved only 1.3 billion for fencing and repairs. Well, the White House expected legal challenges to the emergency declaration but there are a host of other issues to occupy President Trump's attention. CNN's Abby Phillip has details.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Hello, Miami.</s>ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: The president may be considering firing his top intelligence official as he fires back at his former acting FBI director. Chris Ruddy, one of President Trump's closest confidants and the CEO of Newsmax telling CNN's Christiane Amanpour the president may get rid of his director of national intelligence.</s>CHRISTOPHER RUDDY, CEO, NEWSMAX: The intelligence chiefs including the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats just went before an open session of Congress. And they openly said that they believed the president's policies and efforts in North Korea are going to fail based on the intelligence. And Christiane, I'm hearing from sources around the White House there is just general disappointment of the president with Director Coats. There is a feeling that maybe there needs to be a change of leadership in that position.</s>PHILLIP: Revelations about Coats come as the president is lashing out at former FBI director Andrew McCabe following McCabe's explosive interview with 60 Minutes, Trump tweeting, "he was fired for lying and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod Rosenstein who was hired by Jeff Session, another beauty, looked like they were planning a very illegal act and got caught. There is a lot of explaining to do to the millions of people who has just elected a president who they really like. This was an illegal and treasonous insurance policy in full action." In the interview, McCabe described in detailed discussions with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about using the 25th amendment to potentially oust Trump from office. Rosenstein was actually openly talking about whether there was a majority of the cabinet who would vote to remove the president.</s>ANDREW MCCABE, FORMER DEPUTY DIRECTOR, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION: That's correct. Counting votes or possible votes.</s>PHILLIP: And possibly wearing a wire inside the White House to record conversations with the president.</s>MCCABE: He said I never get searched when I get into the White House. I could easily wear a recording device they wouldn't know it was there. Now, he was not joking. He was absolutely serious.</s>PHILLIP: The Justice Department firing back calling McCabe's account inaccurate but not specifically denying the claim that the conversations occurred. "The deputy attorney general never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references. As the deputy attorney general previously has stated based on his dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th amendment nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25 amendment." All this prompting Trump to retweet one Fox commentator who called McCabe's account an illegal coup attempts on the president of the United States. Trump adding "true." McCabe says Trump's public comments after firing Comey were cause for investigating obstruction of justice. As well as Trump's private pressure on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to include the word Russia in a memo justifying Comey's firing.</s>MCCABE: That's concerned Rod in the same way that it concerned me and the FBI investigators on the Russia case.</s>PHILLIP: All this as activist converge on the White House to protest Trump's national emergency declaration to build a wall along the southern border. One senior White House adviser not ruling out that the president might use his first veto of his presidency to override congressional attempts to stop the wall. And in addition to the drama involving Dan Coats and Andrew McCabe, the White House also experienced even more personnel turmoil over the weekend. The president's pick to be U.N. ambassador Heather Nauert withdrew her name from consideration for the post after some concerns were raised about her background. Now, Nauert's name was announced publicly before the White House had fully completed a vet of her background and like other nominees for the post she was forced to withdraw. And sources also tell CNN that the president has returned to the drawing board, searching for a permanent nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations. Abby Phillip, CNN, the White House.</s>CHURCH: Leslie Vinjamuri is the head of the U.S. and America program at Chatham House and she joins me now live from London. Good to see you.</s>LESLIE VINJAMURI, SENIOR LECTURER, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON: Thank you, Rosemary.</s>CHURCH: So, in the wake of Andrew McCabe's bomb shell revelations, President Trump is fighting back attacking McCabe and his credibility. And now we hear from a friend and confidant of the president that he may fire his national intelligence director Dan Coats over comments he made about North Korea. What would be the ramifications of just such a move, considering all the other senior advisers that Mr. Trump has dispensed with so far particularly in the intelligence community.</s>VINJAMURI: Well, I think it would be another sign of a president who values loyalty more than he values the independence and the credible information that's being given to him by those who have been appointed to oversee various parts of the government and especially on this question of intelligence in North Korea. I think it would undermine a lot of people's confidence in the run-up to that second summit, but the idea that the president doesn't trust his own intelligence agencies I think is one that's deeply disturbing. And we've been seen it for a very long time that from the very get-go the president was willing to attack the intelligence agencies.</s>CHURCH: Right. And in his 60 Minutes interview McCabe revealed that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein seriously considered invoking the 25th amendment to oust Donald Trump from office, but for whatever reason nothing came of that. And then in another revelation he said Rosenstein proposed wearing a wire inside the White House to record conservations with President Trump after he fired FBI director James Comey. What do you think will come of these bomb shell revelations?</s>VINJAMURI: Well, of course some of that information was in the public domain, but it is certainly there in a whole new way now. And the president's reaction has been unsurprisingly very negative. And so, I think, you know, one thing that we're likely to see is that this will drive the division that we're already seeing in reaction to the general investigations not only by Mueller but more generally amongst the public. The majority of people I think actually see the range of investigations, and in particular Mueller is being very independent and very credible. And I think in their eyes they conflate many of these different things. But one push back now we're seeing Lindsey Graham saying that the Senate judiciary committee is going to hold hearings to see who is telling the truth. So, again, the divisions that this will stoke I think amongst Congress on the hill are likely to be very significant. So, whether it will actually shift out to either in the public or amongst congressional leaders, it seems unlikely to me, but it does demonstrate the very uncertain environment that characterized that White House but still but especially in those first four or five months.</s>CHURCH: Right. Because late Monday night President Trump tweeted this. "Remember this, Andrew McCabe didn't go to the bathroom without the approval of leaking James Comey." And of course, we know the president has also called McCabe a liar, and says his stories are deranged. He's attacked his credibility. Will all this be enough to discredit McCabe and distract from the revelations and move it on to the next issue as we've seen so many times before?</s>VINJAMURI: Again, it's going to keep rearing its head. And the real game changer will be when Mueller finally concludes his investigation and some of that we don't know how much is released into the public domain. Separate issues but very much related and I think the question of why the president fired James Comey will be one that's very integral to that report. And it's of course what led to this question amongst those surrounding the president about allegedly or as Andrew McCabe says about whether or not there was a justification for a rethinking the role of the president. It's dramatic. It's shocking but we've now become quite accustomed to it. And I don't think it's going to go away. It will go away, it will come and go.</s>CHURCH: Yes. I think Americans are very numb to all of these events these days, but we have to be ever vigilant. Leslie Vinjamuri, thank you so much for your analysis. We appreciate it.</s>VINJAMURI: Thank you.</s>CHURCH: Well as Donald Trump sees it, the crisis in Venezuela is about much more than ending the regime of President Nicolas Maduro, it's about ending socialism once and for all in the western hemisphere. Speaking on Miami on Monday, the U.S. president called Maduro a Cuban puppet who would rather see his people starve than give them aid. Mr. Trump urged Venezuela's military leaders to allow humanitarian aid into the country and to support opposition leader and self-declared president Juan Guaido.</s>TRUMP: If you choose this path you have the opportunity to help forge a safe and prosperous future for all of the people of Venezuela. Or you can choose the second path, continuing to support Maduro.</s>TRUMP: If you choose this path, you will find no save harbor, no easy exit and no way out. You will lose everything.</s>CHURCH: And we get more now on the crisis from CNN senior international correspondent Nick Paton Walsh.</s>NICK PATON WALSH, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The aid crisis here on the border between Venezuela and Colombia mounting simply, and tension by the day. And Donald Trump's speech in Miami frankly doing what it can to amplify the sense of concern here, certainly. We'll deal with a rhetoric of it in a minute which was extraordinary in its ambition and sort of geopolitical overtone, but the nub of it really was a direct appeal to the Venezuelan military to essentially turn against the government of Nicolas Maduro and possibly through doing that get some sense of reward. The U.S. president making it absolutely clear that America knew where military leadership money was in fact hidden, essentially saying they might be potentially targeting it and saying you can have pretty much everything or you can lose everything if you continue to block this humanitarian aid. Now the speech was given of course to a large audience of Venezuelan ex pats, but Donald Trump also pointed out continually the ails of what he referred to as socialism, pointing towards it in Cuba, Nicaragua too, to trying potentially to combine there appealing to the Hispanic communities of Florida where he needs a victory in 2020, but also potentially casting those more left-leaning Democrats he is likely to face in 2020 as being potentially also allies of socialism as well. In fact, the most striking quote I remember from him speech was to say that he hopes to soon see the first free hemisphere in human history. Essentially, sounding like someone for the 1980's facing towards the Berlin Wall hoping to cast off the yoke of socialism or communism from all of South America even though really only two or three countries still have remnants of that in its administration. But the tension is building here day by day. We are seeing a deadline now next weekend set by the opposition to get humanitarian aid in. USAID has flown extra aid in here. It isn't enough to change the plight of the tens of millions of people inside Venezuela behind me. But Juan Guaido, the self-declared interim president and opposition leader, has said that aid will enter at the weekend regardless or in the days after it setting the stage for a significant standoff and showdown here. Donald Trump's rhetoric trying to tear the military away from Maduro. It may well not work. And the question will be, will that deadline pass. Many hopes so without some sense of certainly a volatility if not potential for violence. Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, on the border between Venezuela and Colombia.</s>CHURCH: Following nearly two weeks of violent anti-government protests, the Haitian government says it has arrested eight people, five of them Americans. For more, CNN's Miguel Marquez has this report from Port-au-Prince.</s>MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: There is real intrigue across the nation of Haiti right now over these eight arrests. Five of them Americans, a Russian, a Serb and a Haitian local. The police chief telling us that they were arrested when their cars were spotted by police because they were suspicious. The suspicion, they didn't have license plates on them. They've taken off the licensed plates off their cars. When they first started to talk to them, they were evasive and didn't cooperate. That's when they started to search the cars. They found automatic weapons. Those are illegal here. That's the reason that they are being held right now. They found handguns, satellite phones, drones what some Haitians refer to as weapons of war they found on these individuals. But it is not clear who they are, who they were working for and what they are doing here or were doing here. The police chief saying that there is now an investigation into those very questions.</s>CHURCH: Haiti's government remains in crisis mode. Protesters have been out in force accusing Haiti's leadership of corruption and demanding they resign. Well, he's already been to Iraq and Syria. Now the top U.S. commander for the Middle East has made another surprise stop on his farewell tour. A CNN exclusive with General Joseph Votel, that is coming up.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The army corps of engineer people came over and they said based on the map, the wall is going to be right here.</s>CHURCH: How would you feel if President Trump's border wall was going to be built through your backyard. We will hear from upset property owners who are trying to fight back.