Trump Lawyer Rudy Giuliani Contradicts White House Again; WH Won't Apologize For Aide's Cruel McCain Joke; White House Says Justice Department, Not Trump Denied Merger Deal
CHRISTI PAUL, CNN ANCHOR: -- safari park in the Netherlands. Apparently, they didn't get the memo that you're not supposed to get out of your vehicle while visiting a park.</s>VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN ANCHOR: So, this was according to the "Huffington Post," the family got out of their vehicle to take photographs when the cheetah started moving in. Fortunately, here, no one was injured.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Rudy Giuliani at it again. Reportedly says President Trump blocked the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Trump is saying it's not me, it's the DOJ. It's the antitrust division. Rudy is saying the opposite. He's saying the president decided to do this.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Donald Trump does not like CNN. He doesn't like CNN's parent company, Time Warner, which is who AT&T is trying to buy.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not an apology for what Kelly Sadler said about Senator McCain.</s>SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I'm not going to comment on an internal staff meeting.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president put his foot down and said you will not apologize.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't understand what kind of environment you're working in where that would be acceptable, and you can come to work the next day and still have a job.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Rocks in the steep crater walls are falling into that, and that's creating gas explosions.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Should just let mother nature do its thing.</s>BLACKWELL: Good morning to you. He's a drama machine. That's how one biographer is describing the president's new lawyer this morning and drama is exactly what Rudy Giuliani is causing for the White House.</s>PAUL: Less than one month into his new role, Giuliani is now contradicting the federal government and his boss calling into question the independence of the Justice Department. Will he have to walk back these comments as he's been forced to do many times already this month. CNN's Abby Phillip is live in Washington. So, Abby, walk us through this. What exactly did Giuliani say and how does it compare to what the president has said?</s>ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, this all began when Giuliani was trying to defend the president against claims he was unduly influenced by his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by private corporations, including by AT&T, to help them with their lobbying in Washington. AT&T in particular wanted Cohen to help them -- help guide them through this process of getting approval for the acquisition of Time Warner, CNN's parent company. But Giuliani, instead of toeing the White House's line on this for months which for months had been that the president was not at all involved in this decision, he said this to "The Huffington Post." "Whatever lobbying was done didn't reach the president," Giuliani said. He added, "He did drain the swamp. The president denied the merger. They didn't get the result they wanted." Now the key phrase here is the president denied the merger. The president, we know, has been pretty vocal about this AT&T/Time Warner merger. He's also been vocal about CNN, which is a subsidiary of Time Warner, who he has called fake news. Listen to what he said at a recent rally about the issue of this merger.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: AT&T is buying Time Warner and, thus, CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.</s>PHILLIP: So, the president there seemed to claim that this was about antitrust, about reducing the amount of concentration of power in the marketplace and also back in November, Raj Shah, the principal deputy press secretary for the White House also denied in a statement categorically that the president had spoken to anyone at the Department of Justice about the merger. And he added that no one in the White House was authorized to talk about this merger with the Justice Department as well. So, the question remains right now, is Rudy Giuliani out on a limb, or did he reveal something that perhaps he wasn't supposed to, which is that the president did have a hand in the decision of the Justice Department to block this merger, which is now still in the court of law right now -- Victor and Christi.</s>PAUL: Yes, still in legal limbo to some degree. Abby Philip, thank you.</s>BLACKWELL: All right. So, Rudy Giuliani has been on the job for less than a month, but he continues to fumble here causing these controversies. Let's count them off. First, revealing the president reimbursed his lawyer for paying off an adult film actress and raising questions about when the president knew about the hush money deal. Days later he announced on live television that three Americans detained in North Korea would be released that day. Not only were they not released for almost a week, but Giuliani jumped an announcement by the officials who should have announced something like that. Last week, Giuliani hinted the president would rip up the Iran deal and call for regime change, comments that the U.S. defense secretary refused to defend and now we've got the merger comments. Either Giuliani just accidentally told the truth and contradicted the White House, or he messed up his facts and made his boss look bad again. And the president will have to, I guess, come out and say he's still getting his facts straight. Still waiting on a response from the White House.</s>PAUL: CNN political reporter, Rebecca Berg with us now. Let's pick it up there, Rebecca. Do you expect that we will hear from the president about this?</s>REBECCA BERG, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, we haven't on many of these issues. Oftentimes, we'll outsource this to Sarah Sanders at the White House press podium, but we might. I mean, we know that the president likes to talk to the press occasionally unexpectedly in some of these informal gaggles before or after events. So, we might hear directly from the president on this. But, of course, the main question here is, is he happy with Rudy Giuliani and the message that he is out there promoting, or does the president believe that Rudy is fumbling -- to use the word, the victory use, in his job? And is there some frustration there. We don't totally know the answer to that yet, but they have a really interesting relationship, Rudy Giuliani and the president. They're very simpatico in so many ways. That may give Rudy Giuliani a longer leash than some other allies of the president.</s>PAUL: Good point. We talked to Joey Jackson, former defense attorney, earlier this morning. And he said there's a real problem with this statement that he made that the president denied the merger because the president has said otherwise. And Joey said, the Department of Justice is to protect the people. It's supposed to protect the president or the president's whims. Do you think the Department of Justice has a responsibility to speak up about this?</s>BERG: That would not surprise me really because this is their reputation on the line. They are supposed to be representing this as an independent arbiter. Basically, affirm that the president didn't have a role in this process, and so I would not be surprised to hear that from the Department of Justice at some point. Just reaffirming that they operated independent of the president on this decision. But, of course, that would only be the case if that is true. And Rudy Giuliani suggesting that the president did have some role in this. Now of course, it's possible that Rudy does not know what he's talking about on this issue, that he was just riffing, but we don't know yet the full story. So, it would make sense at some point for the Department of Justice to address this.</s>PAUL: This is part of what's interesting, though. Rudy Giuliani said that he came on board specifically to help the president with the Mueller investigation. Victor just went through from everything that he has spoken on thus far, the problems it's created already. But the president has to be greenlighting these interviews that Rudy Giuliani is doing, isn't he?</s>BERG: Right. And the president when he was asked a few days ago about Rudy Giuliani and what he's been saying in some of these interviews, he was supportive. He said, you know, he's learning. He's easing into the job, and he will get the message straight. And so, you hear that support from the president for Rudy Giuliani and we know that President Trump likes to have his allies out there on cable news. He watches a lot of cable news, of course, and likes to see them out there talking about him, promoting his agenda. It's no surprise that he would want to see Rudy Giuliani on tv. What is surprising is that Rudy Giuliani is taking that leash that the president has given him and using it to talk about issues completely unrelated to the Mueller probe and of course, getting off message in the process.</s>PAUL: I want to ask you real quickly about something people are still talking about today, Kelly Sadler in the White House mentioning that John McCain, Senator John McCain is dying anyway in the middle of a conversation that they were having there. I want to listen to the president here, what he was saying earlier this week when he was in Indiana. Let's listen.</s>PRESIDENT TRUMP: They were saying, he's going to get us into a nuclear war. He's going to get us into a nuclear war, and you know what gets you into nuclear wars? And you know what gets you into other wars? Weakness. Weakness.</s>PAUL: Weakness. That's why I wanted to revisit that. Everybody, many, many people asking why is the president, the White House, somebody not apologizing for this comment that the White House is not denying? Is there a sense that the president sees an apology as a weakness and that's why we're not hearing one?</s>BERG: That would be consistent, Christi, with what we've seen from the president in the past. On the few occasions that you've had some of the press secretaries for the White House apologize or seem to apologize from the podium to the press corps, we've heard reports afterward that the president was upset about that. Because you're absolutely right, he doesn't like to show weakness. He doesn't like to suggest that he made a mistake or there was a misstep by his White House and that's likely the case here as well. But this is a situation where it just comes down to basic civility and humanity that the president and the White House would apologize in this case. But not seeing that from this president, not seeing that from this White House. and, of course, it's been an unusual White House in many ways. This is just another way, I suppose.</s>PAUL: All right. Rebecca Berg, always good to see you. Thank you.</s>BERG: Thank you.</s>BLACKWELL: White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is backtracking on the comment he made that President Trump is embarrassed by the Russia probe. Kelly later clarified that he meant to say the president was distracted by the investigation. All right. First, listen to what Kelly originally told NPR. This was an interview that aired on Thursday.</s>JOHN KELLY, WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF (via telephone): There may not be a cloud but certainly the president is somewhat embarrassed, frankly, when world leaders come in. The first couple of minutes of every conversation might revolve around that kind of thing.</s>BLACKWELL: And just hours later, Kelly dialed back the comments while speaking in the Rose Garden. He told reporters the investigation is unfair. An imminent threat to the island of Hawaii. Scientists warn that another volcanic eruption could blast ballistic rocks the size of a lawn mower into the air. CNN meteorologist, Allison Chinchar has an update for us.</s>ALLISON CHINCHAR, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yes, and Victor, if those weren't big enough concerns, you also have the concern for vog and acid rain. We'll talk about what those are, coming up.</s>BLACKWELL: Still to come -- social media and smartphones are capturing the plight of African-Americans many face on a daily basis. Now the nation is tuning in. Why my next guest says being black in America is really hard? He calls it living while black. We'll talk about that just ahead.</s>PAUL: Also -- at this time next week, you'll be watching the royal wedding. There's a lot of anticipation about the big day for Prince Harry and actress, Meghan Markle. Later this hour, we'll take a look at how they may change perceptions of the royal family.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The world's view of the British monarchy is probably going to be determined more by Harry and Meghan than by William and Kate. Certainly, by Charles and Camilla. That's a very unusual situation.