Trump Claims Obama Wiretapped Him, Offers No Proof; Russia Questions Shadow Trump White House; From Trump's Big Speech to Twitter Attacks.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president of the United States!</s>JOHN KING, CNN HOST (voice-over): A big night.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Everything that is broken in our country can be fixed. Every problem can be solved.</s>KING: But a celebration cut short.</s>JEFF SESSION, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: I have recused myself in the matters that deal with the Trump campaign.</s>KING: Democrats are feisty.</s>REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), HOUSE MINORITY LEADER: What are the Republicans afraid of? This goes right to the Republicans in Congress to their doorstep.</s>KING: And it's crunch time for big policy fights.</s>MIKE PENCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let me make you a promise. The Obamacare nightmare is about to end.</s>KING: INSIDE POLITICS, the biggest stories sourced by the best reporters, now.</s>KING: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thanks for sharing your Sunday morning. President Trump is mad, and he is lashing out. In a stunning series of tweets Saturday morning, Mr. Trump accused his predecessor, President Obama, of wire tapping the phones at Trump Tower during last year's campaign. The president offered no evidence nor have his aides in the 24 hours since the remarkable tweet storm. The outburst is from a president described by a mix of aides, advisers and friends as angry and very frustrated after a week that started well. Remember his big speech to Congress Tuesday, but then spiraled out of control. Several aides and advisers acknowledged meetings with Russian ambassadors after months of Trump and his team denying any such contacts and, of course, there was this.</s>SESSIONS: I have now decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States. I feel like that I am -- I should not be involved in investigating a campaign I had a role in.</s>KING: That recusal happened just not long after the president said he didn't think it was necessary. With us to share their the reporting and their insights this Sunday, Julie Pace of "The Associated Press", "New York Times" reporter Jonathan Martin, Perry Bacon of FiveThirtyEight.com, and Mary Katharine Ham of "The Federalist." Let's go through the tweets from yesterday morning before the sun rose in Florida. The president was up. He started with this one, of 6:35 a.m., "Terrible. Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism." Then, 19 minutes later, 15 minutes later, 14 minutes later, sorry, new math there, "Is it legal for a sitting president to be wiretapping a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A new low." Remember the "turned down by court earlier". We'll come back to this. Then, a little bit later than that, "How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process? This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad or sick guy." Now, we have been asking his aides in the 24 hours since to explain this to us. Is the president getting this at some aides suggests, from a story on Breitbart News about a talk radio program by Mark Levin, is that where the president is getting the information? Or does the president who has access to the most sensitive intelligence than all of us, does he know about a legal wiretap during the campaign? Well, we do know the FBI is looking into alleged contacts between some Trump associates and the Russians, and it is possible -- these are not public documents -- it is possible there was an intelligence finding and they went to the court and got it. Which is it?</s>JULIE PACE, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: That is a great question and if someone from the White House could give us a call right now and answer that question, we would appreciate it. I mean, I'm not sure the president fully understood the door he was opening in doing this if he was just getting the information from Breitbart or other conservative media, because this has been one of the major questions surrounding this FBI investigation is, was the FBI, were intelligence agencies actually accessing communication that the Trump's advisers had during the campaign with Russians? If the president is the aware that happened, whether it was ordered by Obama or happened during the Obama administration, he's now essentially given the Hill, the investigative committees there and the intelligence agency I think an opening to share some of that information publicly which they have been reluctant to do so far.</s>KING: They have been reluctant so far. So, I mean, it's one of two things. Either he has access to some information that there is such a wiretap, but, again, a president cannot order that. A president cannot personally wake up in the morning and say, "I'm mad hat Jonathan. Tap his phones." It doesn't work that way. That would be illegal. He would have to have the FBI director, the attorney general and a whole lot of technical people involved in that who somehow decided not to share that information -- unlikely. But there could be a legal one. But you asked the White House and now they say, Sean Spicer says the White House counsel is "reviewing what options are available to us." Is that just spin so that they don't say the president was just winging it because they were all surprised by this? They say they found out about this from reading it on Twitter. This was not part of a plan. Is that spin, or can they actually -- can the White House counsel now go and find some documentation and then essentially -- if there is documentation, that would be a confirmation by the White House that the Obama administration Justice Department went to court and made the case that there was enough probable cause to have a wiretap?</s>JONATHAN MARTIN, THE NEW YORK TIMESD: Well, it's funny you ask that question because we actually reported yesterday that a senior White House official said that Don McGahn, who is White House counsel, was going to try and find the FISA order. Well, there was enormous blowback to that and then hours later, a second White House official said, well, no, we're going to try to figure out what is going on here, but we're not going to have McGahn go and search for some FISA warrant. Now, why is that? Because the White House counsel can't go to DOJ and demand a FISA order. That's not how it works. That would be breaking enormous precedent in terms of, you know, separation of powers. So, that is the ongoing question is, are the White House aides basically trying to clean up/make Trump feel good, by pretending that they will get to the bottom of this when actually they are just trying to figure out how to pretend like they are for his sake, or are they actually doing some kind of an internal investigation to actually figure out what happened last year in this investigation?</s>KING: A lot of conflicting information on certain information, because, again, the president went to Florida. Most of his senior staff stayed behind. We know that on Friday before he left, there were a number of very tense conversations, including I'm told the president of the United States himself venting, where are all the leaks coming from and why do we keep getting in our own way and we had a great speech to Congress and now, we have Jeff Sessions? And he said, the president said when he was on the aircraft carrier, what was supposed to be his big event on Thursday, he said he didn't think Jeff Sessions needed to recuse himself and then Jeff Sessions recused himself --</s>MARTIN: He was very angry about that.</s>KING: Yes, angry about that. And so, the question is, where is this coming from? I just want to show you a screen grab of the story that was on Breitbart, the conservative radio host Mark Levin had a program the other day where he, Levin, makes the case that there's a deep state, if you watch the show "Scandal," you'll follow along here, that there's a deep state that is obstructing Trump and Obama is in cahoots with them. I find that part interesting because this is the same crowd that spent most of eight years saying he was an illegitimate, Kenyan Muslim sleeper cell, and now apparently, he's in cahoots with a deep state to undermine Trump. Is this where the president making policy decisions from or at least tweet decisions from?</s>MARY KATHARINE HAM, THE FEDERALIST: Yes, I mean, Occam's razor says that he probably saw this story somewhere and did not have inside information that we have seen.</s>MARTIN: That's my sense, too, yeah.</s>HAM: There is sort of sketchy reporting are on the idea of some sort of FISA warrant, two different versions, one that maybe named some Trump associates and then a broader that was approved later because the first one was rejected. So, there's some -- there may be some there there, but it does not equal Obama wiretapping Trump Tower. It may not even actually be related to physically Trump Tower. But I do think we're going to because of this tweet have to ask some people, what exactly was there?</s>PERRY BACON, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT: I mean, the tweets do seem to have an obvious strategy of this is an issue he can't get past, the Russian connection. So, let me make it a political issue. Let me say it's Obama's fault and sort of blame it on Obama, pin it on him. The danger, of course, is immediately, he made a bunch of substantive claims in those tweets that as far as I can he can't really defend and there's no real -- and it's also a problem when the president of the United States is introducing facts that were not -- he basically all but accused the former president of a crime, like getting involved in DOJ investigations, and we saw the Obama staff say, no, we did not do this. So, Trump has had a claim against a former president who is very popular while Trump is not and right now, Trump has very little evidence of this point.</s>KING: It's a key point because some people roll their eyes and say it's Trump being Trump, you know, pointing out these things on Twitter. But Trump is the president of the United States now and he's accusing his predecessor of committing a crime, the way he read, turned down by court earlier, which is gets me back to what he's picking up the Breitbart reporting. But -- so this is why, as Senator Ben Sass, Republican, called this civilization warping crisis of public trust, because you have a president accusing his former president of Nixonian, McCarthyism, et cetera. Listen to Lindsey Graham, who happened to have a town hall yesterday back home in South Carolina, again, a Republican senator, frequently a critic of Trump. But listen here, he chooses his words very carefully but he says now that the current president has put this out there about the former president, raising such serious allegations, Congress better get to work.</s>SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLIAN: If it is true, illegally, it would be the biggest political scandal since Watergate. If the former president of the United States was able to obtain a warrant lawfully to monitor Trump's campaign for violating law, that would be the biggest scandal since Watergate. I'm very worried that our president is suggesting that the former president has done something illegally.</s>MARTIN: Yes, I mean, Trump was trying to sort of muddy waters here on this issue and, you know, divert attention away from Jeff Sessions and Russia and focus more on Obama. But what he's unwittingly done is give more impetus to people like Ben Sass and Lindsey Graham to say nothing of Democrats in Congress to investigate this, because now, they can say -- well, if President Trump was worried about this issue, well, now we're going to get to the bottom of this. So, it just gives them on the Hill cover to push this more aggressively.</s>PACE: And Trump has benefited so far from the fact that the FBI, James Comey in particular, has been incredibly reluctant to say anything publicly about what's happening behind the scenes with their own investigation. But where he's going to have a problem I think is when this does move to the Hill because you're going to have House and Senate committees investigating this, Democrats on those committees who are going to be far more willing to talk publicly about what comes up and he's not going to be able to control that.</s>HAM: There's a bit of a precedent for Comey coming out and giving announcement --</s>PACE: Exactly.</s>HAM: I want to say, to Sass' point, I think it's larger than the daily politics of this. I do think there is a giant public trust problem here and often in the news cycle, it feels like you're sitting at the mad hatter's table and there's nonsense coming from every single direction and we're all trying to parse it, and that's a really deeper issue than the daily politics and --</s>KING: That's absolutely right. Before we take a break, we're going to come back to the details of the Russia stuff and the investigation later on in the program. But this happens at a time when you talk to people in the last 48 hours. They say this president - I've talked to a close friend of his who says he's hot. He's hot. He thinks -- his team keeps getting in their own way and he's also mad about the leaks which he thinks are coming from career people and Obama holdovers. But he is hot, which is one of the reasons why he's lashing out. What's going on inside the White House?</s>PACE: It's really a tough environment right now. What you've seen happening with the president is every time he sees that a story is getting out of control, he turns to his team and he blames them for lose control. That's his main focus right now. He doesn't understand why they couldn't ahead why they couldn't get ahead of the Mike Flynn story. He doesn't understand why they couldn't control the Jeff Sessions story, why Sessions had to recused himself. And it leaves his team in a really uncertain position. They don't know how he's going to react. They follow directions sometimes only to find out that that's not actually what the president wanted. And in a White House where you're dealing with a lot of incoming but also trying to have a proactive agenda, I think they have basically are at a point where they are just stuck right now.</s>KING: Stuck. Sorry, quickly.</s>BACON: One point. Lindsey Graham, senior senator, used the term Watergate twice in that clip. It's important to note, this scandal -- it looks like we're in a moment where Republicans are very nervous about a burgeoning scandal.</s>KING: We'll see how that one plays out, if nothing else, now they think they have an opening from the president to ask more questions. The president put this on the table, we have a right to ask more questions. Now, we'll see. Everybody sit tight. Ahead, when it comes to election year Russia contacts, no means yes. That in a few minutes. Next, though, a Trump agenda progress report as the president nears the 50-day mark. But first, every Sunday, politicians say the darnedest thing. This Sunday was an "SNL" shout-out to Jeff Sessions ala Forrest Gump.</s>KATE MCKINNON AS JEFF SESSIONS: I wish I could go back to the White House and see Mr. Trump. I miss him. And Democrats want me to resign. I've just got to prove to everybody that I don't have any ties to the Russians whatsoever.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This meeting never happened.</s>MCKINNON: I wouldn't remember it anyway.