White House Aides Narrow Search for Op-Ed Writer.
BERMAN: New this morning, Vice President Mike Pence among several top White House officials denying that they wrote the scathing "New York Times" op-ed about President Trump. Meanwhile, CNN has learned that the White House aides who have been looking believe they have narrowed the hunt the unnamed senior White House official. CNN's Abby Phillip live at the White House with the very latest. Abby, who is it?</s>ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, John. If I knew that, I think I'd have more than -- I'd not be standing in front of the White House this morning. But this controversy over this op-ed continues to consume this White House. And these denials are getting so extreme that we've had Mike -- Vice President Mike Pence agreeing to take a lie detector test to prove that it wasn't him.</s>PHILLIP (voice-over): The White House making an aggressive push to discredit the unnamed senior official that wrote that scathing "New York Times" op-ed last week. If this person thinks they are being patriotic and not pa pathetic, they should come forward, claiming to be part of an internal resistance inside the Trump administration.</s>KELLYANNE CONWAY, COUNSELOR TO DONALD TRUMP: If this person really thinks that he or she is being patriotic and not pathetic, which is the way I view it, then they should come forward. I think the motivation was to sow discord and create chaos.</s>PHILLIP: Vice President Mike Pence insisting he's 100 percent confident that no one in his office is the author.</s>CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Should all top officials take a lie detector test, and would you agree to take one?</s>PENCE: I would agree to take it in a heartbeat and would submit to any review of the administration.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One of the claims made in the op-ed is that there had been discussion of invoking the 25th Amendment to even remove the president from office. Have you ever part of a conversation about that?</s>PENCE: No, never. And why would we be?</s>PHILLIP: More than two dozen senior officials have also denied writing the op-ed, and a source tells CNN that White House aides have narrowed down the search down to a few suspects. Despite being urged to move on, the source says President Trump is still obsessing over finding the identity of the writer after calling on the attorney general to take action.</s>DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I would say Jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece was, because I really believe it's national security.</s>PHILLIP: But neither Mr. Trump nor the White House have identified a crime that has been committed.</s>JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Do you think the person broke the law?</s>CONWAY: I don't know. I have no idea.</s>TAPPER: You think that because he or she wrote the op-ed, he or she might have also broken the law? Is that the idea?</s>CONWAY: I have -- I have, really, no idea, and nor do you, what else this person has divulged.</s>PHILLIP: The White House on the defensive amid ongoing criticism.</s>SEN. DICK DURBIN (D-IL), MINORITY WHIP: This is a matter of great seriousness and gravity. We should not be dismissing it. It isn't like his blizzard of bizarre tweets. We are talking about consistent reporting over and over again about unpredictable, unprepared, unstable behavior by this president.</s>PHILLIPS: The administration also bracing itself for tomorrow's official release of Bob Woodward's book, "Fear."</s>BOB WOODWARD, AUTHOR, "FEAR: TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE": You look at the aberration of this White House, and you have to say, "Let's hope to God we don't have a crisis." This one was in the belly of the beast.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And what did you conclude about the beast?</s>WOODWARD: That people better wake up to what's going on.</s>PHILLIP: And President Trump today has no public events on his schedule, but Axios is reporting this morning that the president is considering and might, as soon as this week, declassifying some documents involving his former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page and a Justice Department lawyer he's been attacking on Twitter, Bruce Ohr. Now, this is something President Trump has been discussing for weeks and deliberating over for weeks. But the point of all of this is, John and Alisyn, to discredit the Mueller probe.</s>BERMAN: Abby Phillip, thank you very, very much. Stick around. We're also going to bring in Toluse Olorunnipa, White House reporter for Bloomberg News; and CNN senior political analyst John Avlon here, as well.</s>CAMEROTA: OK. So Toluse, it has gotten to the point that the witch hunt inside the White House has gotten to the point where the vice president is saying publicly, "Yes, please strap me up to a polygraph. I'd like to take it to prove my innocence." Have we seen something like this before?</s>TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, BLOOMBERG NEWS: No, this is a pretty unique moment in American history that you have the vice president trying so hard among this large group of cabinet officials to show his fealty to the president, to show how much he is dedicated to the president, that he's not a turncoat, that he's not this anonymous op-ed writer. It's really unique to see this happening right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, close to the Oval Office. It shows that there are many people who could be this writer. There are many people who are potentially being suspected of being the writer, that even the vice president is saying, "I'm willing to take an -- a lie detector test." And with Kellyanne Conway saying that this op-ed writer was threatening to sow chaos, it's pretty clear that there is chaos that has been sown. The spectacle of so many different cabinet officials racing to show that they're not the person who is behind this; the vice president going on various Sunday shows to say that he's willing to take a lie detector test or submit to any other review of the administration to prove that he was not the op-ed writer. It's just a clear signal that this is something that is dominating what's happening at the White House and distracting from their actual agenda, which the op-ed writer says that they wanted to frustrate, so mission accomplished there.</s>BERMAN: I like the way Toluse put it. It is clear chaos has been sown here. I will also note, again, also the irony -- not the irony, but there's something cloying about the vice president of the United States basically saying, "Yes, I can't wait. Wire me up. Let's do it. Let's do it now." This passed the soccer sideline test this weekend, John, which is to say that everywhere I went, people were saying, "Who wrote it? Who wrote it?" What's the impact of this going to be? This is one of the most read things on "The Times" site ever. I mean, people really seem to care. This seems to have broken through.</s>CAMEROTA: Yes, I like that also people where I was, as well, soccer games, et cetera, were saying, "Do you know? Tell us who wrote it." And I like that they're -- that we've just been keeping a big secret from them.</s>AVLON: Yes, no, and I think it's -- it's finally time for you to take the lie detector test, Alisyn, that the vice president has offered up. Look, there's no question this is resonating. It is a bombshell document. You know, the call is coming from within the house, as you pointed out, and this is someone speaking with real knowledge. So it is resonating. The White House is going to do a full-court press to try to find the leaker in its midst. These things tend not to end well. What's different here is this surreal vision of not only the vice president being the first to offer to strap himself up. But can you imagine lie detectors lined up in the East Room for everyone to try to outdo themselves in this effort? Look, you've seen the president and Kellyanne Conway sort of invoke national security. You know, calls for the Espionage Act. The Woodward book hasn't even dropped yet, and when it does, there are going to be a lot of former staffers who are -- seem to be sources for the book and the bad blood and distrust in the administration are going to get even more. The president will try to distract from this by releasing the Bruce Ohr documents and the Carter Page documents. Very unclear if those will show what he wants them to show. But this is a White House in chaos right now.</s>BERMAN: We'll talk more about Carter Page and Bruce Ohr in a little bit. Abby, the notion that CNN has been told, again, by White House officials that they've narrowed this search down. It seems to me that that has a lot of spin to it. I mean, if they really are down to one or two names, you would think they'd be marching these people out the door if they're suspicious of them. It's hard for me to believe they've really got an idea of who did it yet.</s>PHILLIP: That's right, and I think it's hard to know what they're going off of in terms of trying to identify this person. Are they just using the words on the page that have been edited by op-ed editors at "The New York Times"? Are they just using suspicions? I think one of the things that we've heard from sources in the White House and close to the White House is this feeling that the presence of the op-ed has caused people who already had grievances against each other to try to point fingers, to try to say this person is disloyal, that person is disloyal. That's part of the chaos of this whole thing. It isn't just the search for someone whom they can't identify. It's also that it's now being used by people within this White House to try to discredit each other. You've already seen publicly some attacks coming toward John Kelly, some people pointing the finger at Vice President Mike Pence. These are long-standing grievances that are being carried out, and the op-ed is being used to do that. And it's not clear to me that they're really, in any concrete way, getting much closer to definitively knowing who this person is. And by the way, I mean, the White House is trying to find all these reasons why this person ought to be prosecuted. But Kellyanne Conway could not even saw what law, if any, this person might have broken. I mean, They are grasping at straws to figure out a way to deal with this. It's clear the president has every right to fire whoever this person is, but prosecute them? We don't really know.</s>AVLON: I mean, the only mechanism, traditionally, is by the Espionage Act. Dates back to 1917. There is no evidence that, in the op-ed, any classified material related to national security is being released. This is a clear ethical violation from the position of the White House, but they -- they're grasping at straws for a legal remedy.</s>CAMEROTA: Here are all the people, Toluse, who have come out publicly to deny it, and it's quite a list. It gets longer every time. Here's the picture of, I mean, everybody from Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, James Mattis, Steve Mnuchin. It just goes on and on. I don't know if anybody has agreed yet to a strip search but --</s>BERMAN: I don't know why you had to go there. That's totally unnecessary.</s>CAMEROTA: Because I think that's --</s>AVLON: It's the logical next step.</s>CAMEROTA: It's the logical next step, is it not, Toluse?</s>OLORUNNIPA: Well, one thing that's very interesting is that you've had this long list of cabinet secretaries who have denied any involvement. They've put out statements saying that this is not the type of language that they would use to describe the president. But when you look at Capitol Hill, and when you look at some of the remarks from various senators, they say that they're hearing this behind the scenes all the time from White House officials. They're saying that this is commonplace that people are coming to them and saying, "I can't control what's happening at the White House. You all need to get involved, because the president is doing something that is potentially dangerous or unhinged, or he's flip-flopping on issues." So it's -- it's -- the actual content of the op-ed that is getting a lot of backup from the Woodward book and from members of Congress, even though all of these cabinet secretaries are saying, you know, "It's not me, and Vice President Mike Pence is saying, you know, "This is -- sounds nothing like what we see in the White House." People on Capitol Hill say this is exactly what they're hearing from people in the White House.</s>AVLON: So John Avlon, I want your final take on President Obama, after our air, former president Obama after air on Friday came out with this speech. Then he went campaigning again over the weekend. Where this stands right now on this new Obama v. Trump? And that's what it is. I mean, make no mistake about it. The former president has come out to make statements directly to energize Democrats to come out as a voice against the president.</s>AVLON: Well, look, President Obama is massively popular, particularly with the Democratic Party, and he can bridge the divide in the Democratic Party. It is rare that you have a former sitting president coming out and calling out the man in the Oval Office.</s>CAMEROTA: Unheard of, right?</s>AVLON: Pretty much. I mean, George W. Bush sat on the sidelines during the Obama years. You know, he was not going to get dragged into that fray. But they are the quarterbacks of the two respective political teams, and the fact that President Obama is going to be hitting the campaign trail going forward -- he was in Orange County over the weekend, trying to flip a couple of Republican House seats blue. He's going to be in Ohio later on. It really shows that he's trying to make this about a war on apathy, not a war on Trump or Republicans, per se. It's like "You've got to show up and vote, but our democracy does hang in the balance." But this is new territory, as well, for mid-term elections. It is fascinating stuff to watch these two political leaders rail against each other in public.</s>CAMEROTA: How many mornings do we say this is new territory?</s>AVLON: Every morning.</s>CAMEROTA: Every morning. Thank you all very much. So North Korea holds a large parade showing off its military might, but something was notably absent; and President Trump is taking credit for it. We have a live report from North Korea for you, next.