Interview With Rep. Katie Hill (D) California; Trump Versus Cohen; Trump Communications Director Resigns; Trump Claims Michael Cohen Directly Asked For A Pardon; Cohen Responds: Just Another Set Of Lies By The President, Trump: I Feel Very Badly For Convicted Felon Manafort; George Conway: Trump Could Push U.S. Toward "Banana Republic."
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Happening now: pardon bombshell. President Trump claims ex-lawyer Michael Cohen directly asked him for a pardon and lied under oath about it. But with that tweet, could the president have set himself up for going under oath as a witness? Shine down. Like five others before him in the Trump administration, former FOX News Executive, Bill Shine, is out as White House communications chief. The president had been down on Shine for months, and a source says he questioned Shine's judgment on a number of issues. Witch hoax. President Trump says he feels very badly for Paul Manafort after his ex-campaign chairman was sentenced to less than four years in prison. The president taking the opportunity to once again slam the Mueller investigation. He's even coined a new phrase, calling it a witch hoax. And banana republic. The husband of White House Counselor, Kellyanne Conway is no Trump fan. Lawyer George Conway is known for his scathing tweets, but today he stood up and suggested the U.S. risks becoming a banana republic under President Trump. We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Wolf Blitzer. You're in</s>THE SITUATION ROOM. ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.</s>BLITZER: Tonight, in a stunning move, President Trump is claiming his former lawyer Michael Cohen directly asked him for a pardon and lied under oath about that when testifying before Congress. But with today's tweet, the president may have opened himself up to legal scrutiny and potential testimony in any case involving Michael Cohen. For his part Cohen, tweeted back, accusing the president of -- quote -- "just another set of lies." Also tonight, former FOX News executive Bill Shine is out as White House communications adviser. One source says the president had questioned Shine's judgment on multiple issues recently, and the president has complained that Shine's presence at the White House did not result in better coverage. I will speak with Democratic Congresswoman Katie Hill of the Oversight Committee. And our correspondents and analysts are standing by with full coverage. Let's begin with our Chief White House Correspondent, Jim Acosta. Jim, Donald Trump always said he'd surround himself with the best people. But, one by one, they're ending up in a lot of trouble.</s>JIM ACOSTA, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It hasn't been the best week for those people, Wolf. That's right. President Trump is down in Florida for the weekend. He toured storm damage in Alabama today. But before he left the White House, he started a new war of words with Michael Cohen, which has the potential to drag the president into a possible perjury case against his former personal attorney. And today we heard the president start to merge some of his talking points when he referred to the Russia investigation as a witch hoax.</s>ACOSTA (voice-over): After shying away from this subject for days, President Trump took aim at his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, accusing his one-time fixer of lying to Congress.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's a stone-cold lie. And he's lied about a lot of things. But when he lied about the pardon, that was really a lie, and he knew all about pardons. His lawyers said that they went to my lawyers and asked for pardons.</s>ACOSTA: The president is referring to this comment Cohen made last week under oath, when he testified that he had not sought a pardon for Mr. Trump, even though his own attorneys had done just that.</s>MICHAEL COHEN, FORMER ATTORNEY/FIXER FOR DONALD TRUMP: And I have never asked for it, nor would I accept a pardon from President Trump.</s>ACOSTA: The president went one step further, alleging Cohen had sought a pardon personally, tweeting: "Bad lawyer and fraudster Michael Cohen said under sworn testimony that he had never asked for a pardon. His lawyers totally contradicted him. He lied. Additionally, he directly asked me for a pardon. I said no." Cohen fired back, tweeting: "Just another set of lies by the president. Mr. President, let me remind you that today is International Women's Day. You may want to use today to apologize for your own lies and dirty deeds to women like Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford," a reference to Mr. Trump's alleged mistresses. But the president's attack on Cohen could backfire, pulling Mr. Trump into a perjury investigation into his former personal attorney's remarks.</s>REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D), MARYLAND: We'd love to hear from the president about it. It does seem like one of these whimsical last-minute presidential inventions.</s>ACOSTA: Contrast Mr. Trump's war of words with Cohen with the sympathy expressed for his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who is headed to prison, but may receive a pardon of his own, as he stayed loyal to the president.</s>TRUMP: I feel very badly for Paul Manafort. I think it's been a very, very tough time for him. But if you notice, both his lawyer, a highly respected man, and a very highly respected judge, the judge, said there was no collusion with Russia. This had nothing to do with collusion. There was no collusion. It's a collusion hoax. It's a collusion witch hoax.</s>ACOSTA: Just before the president viewed storm day in Alabama, the White House announced its communications director, Bill Shine, is resigning. Sources tell CNN Mr. Trump had soured on Shine, questioning his judgment on a number of issues. Still, the president released a statement saying: "We will miss Shine in the White House, but look forward to working together on the 2020 presidential campaign, where he will be totally involved." Shine, a former FOX News executive, is the sixth person to take on the communications job, raising questions about the president's commitment to hire the best people.</s>TRUMP: We are going to get the best people in the world. We're going to use our smartest and our best. We're not using political hacks anymore.</s>ACOSTA: The president may need a new communications director to help spin the latest unemployment numbers showing the economy only added 20,000 jobs last month. Still, the president said there's nothing to worry about.</s>TRUMP: The economy is very, very strong. If you look at the stock market over the last few months, it's been great.</s>ACOSTA: The president is looking to put Democrats on the defensive, accusing them of going soft on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar after the House passed a measure condemning hate speech, a move sparked by the freshman Democrat's anti-Semitic comments.</s>TRUMP: The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They have become an anti-Jewish party.</s>ACOSTA: But the president overlooked his own record.</s>TRUMP: And you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.</s>ACOSTA: Now, as for the departure of the White House communications director, a source close to the White House said there were growing concerns about the administration's cozy relationship with FOX News, where Bill Shine was recently a top executive. Shine was partly responsible for the dramatic reduction in press briefings with reporters in recent months. Instead, we would see top officials routinely on FOX News, instead of in that Briefing Room. And the source of said it is -- quote -- "dangerous" to have Shine so close to the decision-making in the West Wing, but Shine is not going far from the president. He's going to be taking on a position advising the Trump campaign. So we will see more of Bill Shine out on the campaign trail -- Wolf.</s>BLITZER: We will see what happens next. All right, Jim Acosta at the White House, thank you. Let's bring in our senior White House Correspondent, Pamela Brown. Pamela, we're also learning the president has been obsessed with his former fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen, fuming about him constantly. What are you learning?</s>PAMELA BROWN, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right. Our reporting shows that Michael Cohen and his testimony and all the fallout surrounding it last week has really been getting under the president's skin, and he's been distracted by it. My colleagues Kevin Liptak, Kaitlan Collins reporting that, just minutes after national security meetings, President Trump has been bringing up Cohen and his testimony. After calling lawmakers, he will bring it up shortly after. It seems to be constantly on his mind. Not only that, Wolf, but our reporting shows that even in Hanoi, when he was there for the North Korea summit around the same time as the testimony, the president was bringing it up there. He was upset that a reporter asked him about Cohen. And on the way home on Air Force One, once again, the president was fixated on Cohen, bringing it up. So, clearly, this got under his skin. Cohen is one of -- the only associate of Trump charged by Robert Mueller who has really publicly gone after him in such a bold way, calling him a con, calling him a racist, and making these claims to Congress. Clearly, that's been upsetting the president. The question today is why, a week after the testimony, is he just now tweeting out that Cohen committed perjury, and that he asked for a pardon directly? That really is raising a lot of questions.</s>BLITZER: Since the president claims, Pamela, that Cohen personally asked him about a pardon, is the president now potentially a witness in a perjury case?</s>BROWN: Well, that is the big question. I actually asked Rudy Giuliani, the president's attorney, whether he would be willing to be a witness in a perjury case and be interviewed by investigators. And basically he said that the president wouldn't need to be a witness because there are so many other witnesses. He said he included himself in that. But certainly the president is opening himself up for that, saying that Cohen directly asked him and basically saying he committed perjury to Congress. Now, as we know, Cohen and his attorney say that's not true. He didn't -- he was just talking about after the joint defense agreement had ended. But, certainly, it's brought more scrutiny on to the president of whether he would be willing to be a witness in any sort of perjury investigation -- Wolf.</s>BLITZER: All right, Pamela, thank you, Pamela Brown reporting. Joining us now, Democratic Congresswoman Katie Hill of the House Oversight Committee. That's the committee that heard testimony from Michael Cohen. Congresswoman, thanks so much for joining us.</s>REP. KATIE HILL (D), CALIFORNIA: Thanks for having me.</s>BLITZER: What do you think? Is the president potentially opening himself up to becoming a witness, if there is some sort of perjury investigation of Michael Cohen, who said that he never asked the president for a pardon? The president said he directly asked him for a pardon.</s>HILL: I mean, I think it's certainly possible. The chairman, Chairman Cummings, is very deliberate in all of this. I know he's reviewing with Mr. Jordan the entire transcript of what exactly was said. And they're going through that entire process. But the reality is that, to me, it doesn't really -- what we have to focus on is that, whatever was said previously, we need to focus on what was said in that testimony, from the point that he decided that he was going to be cooperating with us and no longer covering for the president. That's what really matters. And I just think that this is yet another attempt by the president and his allies to diminish what we know could be very credible. And I think that that's really where this...</s>BLITZER: But if he did lie, Michael Cohen, before your committee under oath in open session about a possible pardon, that has undermined, further undermined his credibility. He is already a convicted liar, as we know.</s>HILL: Yes, I mean, it's certainly not ideal. That's for sure. But I also think that we have a -- we're never going to rely entirely on his testimony, for whatever ends up happening from here. We know that that's something that can set the context, it can give us different clues of where to go next. But it's not something that you can rely on, in and of itself.</s>BLITZER: Do you believe Cohen or do you believe the president?</s>HILL: Well, considering Cohen was lying previously to protect the president, I'm more inclined to believe Cohen. I can't speak to whether he had different lawyers negotiating on his behalf. When he was -- when he was trying to cover up for the president, I would imagine, yes, there's probably something that was going on. Exactly what he said in the testimony in terms of like, I have never asked for a pardon, I don't know in terms of parsing words. That's not really what I was focused on. But I think that, at the end of the day, it's -- I'm never going to rely on just his words alone to be able to kind of come to the final conclusion on this.</s>BLITZER: The chairman of your committee, Congressman Elijah Cummings, he says that President Trump is welcome to call him to discuss this. How do you think your committee is going to investigate? This is a serious, serious charge.</s>HILL: Again, Chairman Cummings is incredibly deliberate about all of this. He is going to be looking into it. He is going to be looking at the different witnesses that are -- as Giuliani mentioned, I suppose, there are other witnesses that are possible, that are possibilities around this whole perjury...</s>BLITZER: Do you think he will call the president and ask him to testify?</s>HILL: I highly doubt that the president is going to take his call. But I'm sure that he will go whatever route he can in terms of getting to the bottom of this. But at the same time, we have to continue with the rest of the investigations that are taking place, including important investigations around the high cost of prescription drugs, around the census that's coming up. And we can't stop everything that we're doing. I think there's this tendency on the other side of the aisle and among the president's allies to say that, oh, this is all that the Democrats are doing, when that is so far from the case.</s>BLITZER: And I know your committees also investigating security clearances over at the White House and the decision apparently by the president himself to grant top-secret security clearances to his son- in-law, Jared Kushner, his daughter Ivanka Trump. Axios, as you probably saw, is reporting that somebody at the White House actually leaked sensitive documents backing up the assertion that the president personally ordered the top-secret security clearances for his son-in-law and his daughter. Have you seen those documents yet? Do you know anything about those documents?</s>HILL: I actually haven't yet. We have had a big day today. So, no, I haven't seen those yet. I'm sure I'll be catching up on that pretty soon. But...</s>BLITZER: But do you know for sure that the committee does have these internal White House documents on security clearances?</s>HILL: I don't know exactly what they have. Often, we will -- they're vetting all of that stuff before we get ahold of it. So they're making sure that it's legitimate and that it's protecting whoever the whistle-blowers might be. So I think it's a good thing that I haven't seen it.</s>BLITZER: But you seem to be suggesting there must be something there?</s>HILL: Well, what I do know is that there is certainly -- there are whistle-blowers who have provided enough that it is of a decent amount of concern to the committee that we need to further investigate.</s>BLITZER: So you think that's why there hasn't yet been a subpoena for these kinds of documents, for these kinds of witnesses to show up and explain why the president decided to give top -- he has the right to do so under the law. He can grant security clearances to anyone he wants, but why they did it in an extraordinary way along these lines?</s>HILL: Well, there were requests sent by the committee to get these kinds of documents. And so there was enough time. We provided time for the president and for the White House to comply. So if the compliance is not happening, then that's when a subpoena -- a potential subpoena...</s>BLITZER: In addition to documents that may have been leaked, you're suggesting maybe there are whistle-blowers or a whistle-blower who provided additional information? Is that right?</s>HILL: Yes, that was in the initial request for documents was saying that whistle-blowers had come forward...</s>BLITZER: Plural, whistle-blowers?</s>HILL: Yes, it was more than one. I don't know exactly how many.</s>BLITZER: OK. Yes.</s>HILL: But there were more than one that had come forward, suggesting -- raising serious concerns about how this entire process had gone forward with providing those security clearances to his family members.</s>BLITZER: What happens if they don't cooperate, the White House? What do you do then?</s>HILL: That's when we have to look into the subpoenas.</s>BLITZER: And that's a real possibility if the president were to cite executive privilege, for example?</s>HILL: I would say so, absolutely. And you just have to go that -- down that entire road. And, again, whenever you see a resistance on the part of the White House to provide information, I think that has to raise concern for us. There are a lot of options in terms of redactions that would protect individuals and their privacy, while still providing information on the process and how the decisions were made, and what kind of personnel information -- how we ensure the protocols were being followed to ensure the safety of our country. And we're not asking necessarily for the exact specifics of the people involved, and we certainly don't want to disclose that to the public. So I think that, if the White House is trying to hide that information, then we have serious reason for suspicions.</s>BLITZER: Then you are ready to go to court? Because there could be a long, prolonged court battle.</s>HILL: It's possible. It's absolutely possible.</s>BLITZER: Let's talk about Paul Manafort's sentencing yesterday. He got almost four years by this federal judge in Northern Virginia. The president today said he feels very badly for his former campaign chairman. Do you worry that there's a possibility the president might grant Paul Manafort a pardon?</s>HILL: I think there's certainly a possibility he will. I think you see the difference in someone who has cooperated with the president the entire time vs. someone who hasn't. You have got Cohen, who has said that he's no longer going to be protecting the president and that he's cooperating with the special prosecutor and with the Oversight Committee and the other committees in Congress. And then you have Manafort, who blocked that progress at every single turn. And, of course, the president is sympathetic to one, not sympathetic to the other. And I think that -- certainly, I could absolutely foresee him rewarding the behavior of the person who's trying to protect him.</s>BLITZER: He has the right to do so, the president.</s>HILL: Yes.</s>BLITZER: He can grant pardons if he wants to do so. If he does that, grant him a pardon, what happens then?</s>HILL: I mean, we don't have any recourse to that. But, again, I think it starts to build more and more of this case to the American people of, like, what? Are we OK with this? Is this the America that we want to see? Is this what we're OK with, sitting in our White House? This is -- I think it really comes down to the kind of questions that we're asking ourselves. Is this who we see as reflecting us, as the American people? Is this the kind of democracy that we want to move forward and to leave to the next generation?</s>BLITZER: Where do you stand on the House of Representatives launching impeachment proceedings?</s>HILL: I think that impeachment is a political process, as much as it is anything else. So, to me, what we're doing right now is, we are in a search for the truth. We are uncovering the truth. We are trying to paint the picture for the American people of what exactly has happened, because, for two years, the Republicans in Congress have tried to shield it, to hide the truth, and to make sure that it is not exposed at all in order to protect the president. So, ultimately, we're going to reveal what we can. And it's really up to the American people at that point, through their representatives, through the people's house. I'm going to see what is reflected in my district. Each of my colleagues is going to have to do the same. But what I can tell you right now is that my district does not approve of the job that Donald Trump is doing. They don't believe that he is fit for office. They don't believe that he is someone that we can trust. And I think that as far as this investigation continues, as this whole process continues to play out, we are going to need to have a fully robust case to be able to move forward on anything like that. And we're going to have to make sure that the American people are with us.</s>BLITZER: Because you clearly have the votes, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, for the House Judiciary Committee to launch impeachment hearings, impeachment proceedings. You may have a majority vote there. But in the Senate, you need two- thirds.</s>HILL: Right.</s>BLITZER: And if you don't have two-thirds majority, even if he is impeached in the House, like Bill Clinton was, he is going to be acquitted in the Senate.</s>HILL: Exactly. That's why we -- that's why there's -- it's not helpful for us to just launch this impeachment proceeding if we don't have the buy-in of the American people that has to be reflected by the senators. I think -- again, I think this entire process needs to play out. We have to make sure that all of the facts are uncovered. We have to make sure that the Mueller report is exposed and that we don't just get this watered-down version that's reported as kind of the summary piece, and, hopefully, that we can get to the bottom of this. We need to show the security risks that are happening because of it. We know that the president's actions in terms of what is happening in the Middle East, in terms of pulling out in Syria and in Afghanistan, there are direct benefits to Russia from those actions. And so does that tie back to potential influences that he has from Vladimir Putin and from other foreign interests? Where does that tie together? And is he ultimately making decisions that benefit those actors, as opposed to the American people? And is he putting lives at risk? That's where, to me, the nexus of it all comes together.</s>BLITZER: We hope you will stay in touch with us.</s>HILL: Absolutely. Thank you.</s>BLITZER: Thanks so much, Congresswoman Katie Hill of California. Appreciate it very much.</s>HILL: Absolutely.</s>BLITZER: Just ahead: Bill Shine is out as White House communications chief. Why was the president so down on the former FOX News executive? And there's more breaking news. There are now some ominous signs that North Korea may be preparing a new missile launch, after blaming the United States for what it now admits was a failed summit.