credibility continues to fade over the russia investigation. president trump's response to the collapse of the health care bill exacerbating growing tensions between senate republicans and the white house. >> we've got to get away from this attitude that you have to agree with the president and the senator should be a rubber stamp for everyone the president wants at all times. >> reporter: majority leader mitch mcconnell by passing the request to hold another repeal vote and rejecting the president's demand that the senate change their rules to pass bills by a simple majority. >> if there are not the votes in the senate, as i have said repeatedly to the president and to all of you, to change the rules of the senate. >> reporter: it comes as the senate health committee's influential republican chairman also pushes back against the president's letting obama care implode by stopping payments to insurance companies. >> our proposal is by mid

september we will see if we can agree on a way to stabilize the individual insurance market. >> senate republicans also criticizing the administration's shifting story about the president's role in crafting his son's misleading initial statement about the reason for the june 2016 meeting with a russian lawyer. >> when you put out a misleading statement, it's going to be hard to convince people to look at other things. >> reporter: the white house admitting tuesday that the president was involved. >> the president weighed in as any father would based on the limited information he had. >> reporter: contradicting repeated denials from the president's legal team. >> the president was president involved in the statement drafting. i wasn't involved in the statement drafting, nor was the president. the president didn't sign off on anything. >> sarah sanders denying that president trump personally dictated the deceptive statement and attempting to shift the narrative. >> everyone wants to try to make

this a story about misleading. the only thing i see as misleading is a year's worth of stories fueling a false narrative about this russia collusion. >> this administration continues to say vis-a-vis russia, there's nothing there, yet they don't act that way at all. >> reporter: the administration continues to try to shore up its base on the right. "the new york times" is reporting this morning that the administration is looking at suing universities for affirmative action policies that may discriminate against white students. there are also proposals for new trade policy, new trade case against china as well as introduction of legislation that would essentially introduce a skill-based immigration policy in the united states. chris and alisyn back to you. >> let's bring in our political

panel, cnn politics reporter and editor at large chris cillizza, cnn political analysts david gregory and john avlon. david, is it your sense that leading republicans in the senate have reached some sort of tipping point where even beyond lindsey graham and john mccain and jeff lake, thatthey're more willing to come out and publicly split with the president? >> clearly they are. there's no question about it. they feel emboldened to take on a president who is increasingly weak although he has his base behind him republicans who put him into office. this is a president who continues to provoke them and to challenge them from the outside, as if he's not the head of the republican party. he's a president not leveling with the american people. the white house lies about things it should not lie about.

this russia investigation is something that grows bigger because of how the president and his team handles it, period. you want to wiggle out from that? then level with the american people. it's that simple. republicans on capitol hill are increasingly paying the penalty for that as they have a president who lax credibility. if you don't tell the truth about some things, you can't be believed on other things. the president's credibility, the white house's credibility has suffered and makes it very difficult for him then to influence republicans to due what he says they ought to do. the party is increasingly moving away from him, moving away from this white house as it tries to chart its own future and face voters on its oat. >> tim scott in "the washington post," quote, we work for the american people. we do not work for the president. we should do what's good for the administration as long as that does not in any way, shape or form make it harder on the american people.

there had been these -- this patients or i'm patients for a tipping point. when will these people in the gop take back their own party? when will they own their own mandate? last night i heard one of the conservatives say it's not just about the base. it's about the president is being base, and we have to stand against that, we're real conservatives. how real do you think this is? >> i think it's real and it's going to become more defined and here is why. first of all, as you look at the president's approval numbers, it's not just the lowest approval rating in american history. yes, he's strong among the base, but that's weakening. most republicans who ran in '16 ran ahead of donald trump. he had reverse coattails. they ran ahead of him. they've got a mandate from their voters that should inspire them to straighten their civic backbone and start reasserting basic separation of powers. the other factor, of course, is

people are getting exhausted in defending the indefensible or having positions undercut by the president's actions of sta statements on any given day. if that gets people to start thinking about the national interest as opposed to special interests, that's a good thing. >> chris cillizza, they're not just thinking about it and talking about it, they're doing things. senator lamar alexander of tennessee is working in a bipartisan way with patty murray of washington to strengthen and stabilize obamacare, not the repeal and replace, as the president has wanted. they are beginning to take actual policy actions that seem to be at odds with what the president has said he wants. >> not seem to be, alisyn, but are directly at odds. donald trump's solution in the wake of the failure health care vote, essentially, let's let this fail, let's let the

obamacare collapse under its own weight and everyone will come begging to us for a solution and democrats will get blamed. he literally has said basically that. i think with lamar alexander, he's got a store read political career, ran for president twice. this is somebody who is fundamentally a problem solver, someone in public service for a very long time and someone who is not going to follow the president's lead and just let people in his state of tennessee or in any state watch as this thing totally collapses. i think the fear factor, to the extent it ever existed with donald trump is essentially gone that, yes, they know he will take shots at them, they know he may attack them by name, but no, they are no longer as afraid of him as they might have been earlier. never forget this, the lamar alexanders of the world were never donald trump allies.

they voted for him probably because they preferred him to hillary clinton. these are never people that will be deeply loyal to him. it doesn't take a lot to peel them away. he's given them more than enough over the six months to convince them that staying with him on all things is politically perilous. >> david, you have the president's reaction to it which is to do what he does best. he attacks you. the president over the weekend tweeting republicans in the senate will never win if they don't go to a 51 majority vote now. this is taking care of the filibuster rule once and for all. they look like fools and are just wasting time. so he provoked them. they now seem to be responding to say we're going to do our business. remember why it matters, david. set this up for us. september.

you have september morn coming there. you have the debt ceiling, the ability to get a budget done. those are both in september. september morn, neil diamond. >> i got that. >> how big a deal is that? >> this is something where you have democrats say let's craft something bigger with our priorities as well, forcing majority leader mcconnell to say, no, they're out of sync with republican priorities, we'll probably have to do this with reconciliation, just 51 votes. the president provokes the republicans, you have mcconnell reminding the white house, hey, we didn't have the votes on health care, period. so it doesn't matter whether we had to reach the 50-vote threshold. we didn't have it. the president knows it or should know it but still wants to cast himself outside the republican party. if you look at arizona alone, john mccain who has returned to

his maverick self with this horrible cancer diagnosis he received and the role he played on health care, he had to get closer to trump to win re-election but now has become more independent. here is jeff flake, junior senator, a real conservative out of arizona who knows that trump is going to support a primary opponent to him. he comes out with a book on reasserting conservatism against donald trump. i think this is significant on all the fights, taxes, raising the debt ceiling and ultimately the budget, that there's a conservative backlash going on against trump that we haven't seen since the campaign. >> it's about damn time and here is why. senators have been the place that cooled the civic debate, that thought about the national interest, that tried to take into account bipartisanship. that's helped lead to donald trump. but if this is what's required,

insults from the oval office is what's required to have senators start restoring their best selves, good, let's have it happen. >> september morn, we dance the dance until a brand new day. nothing? >> i need the music to hum a few bars of that. >> neil diamond? not jersey, but still. the white house finally conceding that president trump did weigh in on his son's misleading statement about that meeting with a russian lawyer. who cares. they said he had nothing to do with it. that's what his lawyer said. why do they keep changing the story next. flonase sensimist allergy relief uses unique mistpro technology and helps block 6 key inflammatory substances with a gentle mist.

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the statement that don junior issued is true. there's no inak ras see in the statement. the president weighed in as any father would based on the limited information he had. >> straight statement from sarah huckabee sanders. one problem. it completely contradicts what has been said from the white house from the beginning on this. they had their attorneys going out and saying the president had no role in crafting that initial misleading statement on don junior's meeting with russians at trump tower. now they're changing their story. let's bring back the panel, chris cillizza, david gregory, john avlon.

relevance. >> sarah huckabee sanders is trying to build back a credibility gap that she undermined yesterday. we know the statement don junior put out was fundamentally false. we also know the spin around it and the fact that the president apparently dictated it was contradicted by jay sekulow, the president's lawyer, on cnn and other outlets. there's no place to go. instead, they're trying to call anyone who is asking questions a russia phobe. >> chris cillizza, here are the repercussions according to senator lindsey graham why this matters. >> one, he put his son in jeopardy. now we have to wonder about what don junior's team will tell you about whapt he actually did. if he didn't know about the e-mail, the statement may have fooled you. if he knew about the e-mail with don jien your, then it's a misleading statement. >> so you just don't know what to trust.

>> the issue here -- there are a lot of issues. john touched on one. fundamentally sarah huckabee sanders said yesterday is a direct contradiction to what the white house has been saying. number two, remember the trump white house, jay sekulow and donald trump essentially said, look, i don't know anything about this. i was clueless about this meeting. i wasn't there, didn't know anything about it. they now say he weighed in. that's a tough term to figure out. what does weighed in mean? does it mean he looked at it, edited it, dictated it as "the washington post" reported? regardless, he had a hand in the statement. that statement was very carefully crafted in that there's nothing -- if you look at it, there is nothing that is factually definitely wrong. it was primarily about russian adoptions. we don't have evidence to suggest if it was 20 minutes, 11 of the minutes were about russian adoption.

okay. it was not a campaign issue. that's true. russian adoptions weren't a campaign issue. what's left out of it, though, is massive about why did the meeting take place? who was going to be there? if donald trump knew limited information according to sarah huckabee sanders, that's a pretty carefully worded statement for someone who doesn't know much about it. that's what really sort of got my siren up. it is not a statement you would make if somebody said, yeah, we have this meeting. it's a statement you would make if you knew there were things you weren't saying and carefully using terms to keep yourself out of any factual jeopardy there. >> i think alisyn is spot on about this, david. people rush to illegality or impeachment. it's a mistake because they're very high bars, but trust is a main measure that seems to be failing in this situation.

john dean and robert ray, the white water counsel and famous watergate counsel both agree what seems to be going on is trust on both sides, the president doesn't trust the people around him to support his innocence, that he's done nothing wrong, he has nothing to conceal and, therefore, it's okay for him to disrupt the narrative that's out there that suggests what's out there. as a result they twist the truth, misinterpret or misstate at a minimum, and that causes the media to not trust what they say. fair appraisal? >> i think that's fair. the original premise is this investigation is ridiculous. as sarah said. it's okay to -- we can parse this in our remaining time on television. they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

this was the same team and the same president who brought us the birther lie to launch himself into national politics. he weighed in as any father would. number one, this is why you don't have kids involved in your campaigns or working for you, because it's a conflict of interest. that's number one. number two, no, sorry, it doesn't pass any kind of rational test. you think donald trump was not actively involved? he didn't just weigh in. he dictated the statement and his lawyer said he didn't. that was not the truth, period. yet we're supposed to believe him on other things. he looks like he's got something to hide. there may be nothing there. but why do they keep acting like there is? >> john avlon, we need to talk now about the very strange and tragic story of seth rich. sometimes when i'm out in the real world people ask me all the time, what is fake news? what does it mean? this is exhibit a of a fake news story that took hold,

unfortunately on foxnews.com about the circumstances surrounding the murder of seth rich, dnc staffer. they, it turns out, fabricated, according to the primary source, a former d.c. homicide detective named rod wheeler who was trying to look into the murder of seth rich, it turns out to be a botched burglar. he said fox news fabricated quotes of his to make it appear that he was the leaker of the dnc e-mails, not russia. here is how the white house spun this yesterday. >> the president had no knowledge of the story and it's completely untrue that he or the white house had involvement in this story. beyond that, this is on going litigation and i refer you to the actual parties involved which aren't the white house. >> rod wheeler, the person investigating this, said he did have a meeting at the white house and got e-mails saying the

president is very trrd in how you're going to spin the story. >> sent to him by prominent republican donor who asserted himself in this. you have a collusion between apparently fox news, one of their contributors who is a private investigator, one of the reports that was subsequently deleted and a republican donor with direct access to the white house. the president is directly involved and encouraging them to go forward. the reason this is so troubling is not just the smearing of a dead dnc staffer's name and the attempt to deflect what is demonstrably true that russia influenced the election, on the dnc and this kid, it's also that we have seen the manipulation and intentional distortion of the term fake news to mean anything that the white house feels discomfort at confronting. but this, as laid out in this lawsuit, is clear evidence of

fake news, fashioned out of holed cloth that comes collapsing on itself and being coordinated with the white house. it cannot be said enough how outrageous this is. this has e-mails and texts that would appear to be a smoking gun. we'll see how it's litigated. it really pulls the curtain back. the fact the curtain is being pulled back on people who say independent journalism is fake news -- >> chris, let me cue up something from last night. >> they never talked to anybody at the white house. by the way, i've never talked to president trump in my life. neither president trump or the white house has anything to do with any of this. >> he said in a voice mail to the detective something different. he said in a text something different, that the white house was involved, the president has read it, the white house was

waiting for the article to come out. now he's in denial mode, not unusual given this is the subject of litigation. what's the point? >> it's a pending lawsuit. this is rod wheeler and this guy disagreeing. to john's point, what are you seeing here -- sorry to sigh -- but what you are seeing here is a coordinated effort to deflect and blame where there is not deflection and blame to go around. this is a murder, plain and simple. that's what the police have determined, and you're seeing it being twisted for political and partisan reasons. even if it didn't come in the midst of a long-running and what i think to be fundamentally disingenuous attack on the idea of fake news -- i put it in air quotes because that's not what it is -- this is creation out of nothing and using the death of a kid. let's not forget that. this is painful enough for seth

rich's family, but now to say, really, he was a mole within the dnc leaking all this information, i can't imagine losing a child much less having him dragged through the mud in this way where there is no real evidence here to suggest that's the case. it's a bad look broadly speaking for the white house and i think an absolute repudiation that somehow what we do on a daily basis is fake. >> and yet another meeting that the white house official took, sean spicer, he didn't know anything about the meeting, only lasted ten minutes and immediately turned from what this was about to their assurance. >> david gregory, we're out of time. we're so sorry. we owe you a response. >> this is outrageous. >> fake news. >> on that note, seth rich's family spokesperson will be here with their response to these revelations. the mooch, gone but not

forgotten. comedian mario cantone doing one dead-on impression of the fired white house chief. >> i want to say i owe the american people nothing, but they're going to get an explanation because that's how i roll. >> the rest of the story according to mario mooch next. my hygienist told me to try...

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where you do business. ♪ ♪ news from venezuela. president nicolas maduro says a special assembly will be convened soon with the power to rewrite the country's constitution. president trump warns med dur row that he holds the venezuelan leader responsible for the safety of these two opposition leader figures taken from their homes in the middle of the night and thrown into a military

president. supreme court revoking the house arrest saying they were planning to flee. na complaint from an ethics group suggests why he was continuing to work while he was -- he was arrested last week on his way to spack stan. a spokeswoman for wasserman schultz says he had been fired and called the allegation baseless. comedian mario cantone, the star of the president's show channelling his inner anthony scaramucci one last time in this video for "the new york times." >> i was a threat. the second i walked into the white house my days were numbered. look at me, i'm trim, good

looking, i dress sharp, i smell good. you're going to want to lick me like a popsicle. i smell better than anybody on trump's team. those guys smelled like canned corn and that's the first thing in the morning. >> we're going to miss him. cantone says he's not surprised scaramucci only lasted ten days in the white house. that's a sad by product of him being shown the door. >> the hope is he shows up tomorrow night on the comedy central show. that will be good to see if cantone is there. it's the first time in our lives where we've seen you don't have to exaggerate reality to create political comedy. i don't know if that's funny or sad, but that's the reality. >> why does mario cantone have to go away? maybe mario scaramucci can have a cameo every week. the kremlin is retaliating against the united states.

you're not hearing about this out of the white house, but it's happening and it raises a question. why hasn't the president signed that new russia sanctions bill we keep being told he will? why isn't he speaking out about big moves by russia? we discuss next. i'm so frustrated. i just want to find a used car without getting ripped off. you could start your search at the all-new carfax.com that might help. show me the carfax. now the car you want and the history you need are easy to find. show me used trucks with one owner. pretty cool. [laughs] ah... ahem... show me the carfax. start your used car search and get free carfax reports at the all-new carfax.com.

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we often look at the president's twitter feed as a reflection of what he cares

about most. over the last week he's weighed in on practically everyone and everything using that favorite platform. he blasted -- let's take a look. blasted china, very disappointed, foolish past leaders allowed them to make hundreds of billions a year in trade yet they do nothing with us with north korea, just talk. talked about the stock market, taking the positive. you can argue whether or not he deserves as much credit as he's giving himself. but he talked about it. he talked about it a lot. one of his favorite targets, at least in spirit if not in number is going after a free media. he takes the time to do that. so why are we pointing out what he talks about? to emphasize what he's not talking about. the russians cut the american diplomatic staff by a crippling 755 people. why? retaliation. what else is going on? russia is back in georgia. the last time they did this in

2008, hundreds of people died. not a word about this or those americans getting kicked out of russia by the president of the united states on his favorite medium? why. what else are they doing? 100,000 troops on the border with nato. sabre rattling. again, not a word by the president. it raises the question why, why has president he signed the sanctions will, against the voice of his own party telling him to sign it now. >> in a further sign of our commitment, very soon president trump will sign legislation to strengthen and codify the united states sanctions against russia. >> the president made it very clear that very soon he will sign the sanctions. >> in a sign of our commitment, very soon president trump will sign and codify sanctions against russia. >> the vice president keeps saying yes, this is going to happen. no word from the president on

when it will and no signature. white house press secretary sarah huckabee sanders says it's in some sort of legal review. given all these provocative actions from russia, why the deafening silence? we have admiral john kirby. what do you see in this? >> it could be something nefarious. it could be that he's reticent come out publicly against putin, or it could be that they're relying on the rest of the cabinet and the officials like vice president pence, secretary tillerson, secretary mattis, to carry that language forward and allow the president to be the good cop while they're the bad cops while they try to negotiate better bilateral relations with russia. it's hard to know exactly what their reasoning is behind this, chris. i agree it's troubling. i think it is concerning that

our own president simply cannot and will not and has not, frankly, over the last six months, brought himself to directly criticism president putin. >> what is the material difference when you look at potential mall factors. look how heavy handed he is with china, much bolder. north korea, all options on the table. venezuela, there are big implications there to the economic actions being considered. you cripple venezuela's economy, you are 10% of their trade ratio when it comes to us sending heavy crude versus light crude and getting the bmix back. >> yesterday called med dur row a dictator, very strong language. with the exception of north korea which i agree poses a great threat from a national security standpoint, russia in

so many ways, so many places, cyber, syria, ukraine, they are destabilizing the global order and are working constructively to try to undermine the multilateral democratic institutions we've put in place since world war ii. it is really strange of all the world leaders he just can't bring himself to criticize putin directly. i do think it's stroubling. i think it's a concern. but what i'm more interested in, chris, is what he does with this bill. i think if he signs this bill into law -- >> the sanctions bill. >> yes, the sanctions bill. i think if he signs that, that to me is more important than his rhetoric and that to me would send a strong message that he is actually willing to hold russia to account, that he is willing to face down putin with respect to their election meddling. >> to the point that you made that maybe, maybe the president is leaning on his seconds to do the work for him, here is what the secretary of state said reseptembcent

recently. >> we do not seek a regime change, do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th parallel. we're trying to convey to the north koreans, we are not your enemy, we are not a threat. but you are presenting a threat to us and we will have to respond. we would like to sit and have a dialogue with them about the future. >> so different from what we had been hearing from the president in terms of suggestions. frankly, different than the previous administration, also. what do you make of this pivot? >> i thought secretary tillerson was pretty sharp yesterday. you have to understand, chris, when you listen to him say those words, he's not just talking to pyongyang. he's talking to beijing. he talked to something called peaceful pressure. you can see and hear in his voice he's trying to take the rhetoric down, trying to take

the militarism down. i think he's trying to take a little air out of the president's tires on this and rightfully so. the only thing the chinese want less than a nuclear armed north are millions of refugees streaming out of their territory because of a violently reunified korean peninsula. they don't want american troops camped out. that's why he said not a violent reunification, not regime change. he was messaging beijing because we're losing the diplomatic trade space with beijing. the constant badgering, tweeting, the trade wars, none of that is going to work with president xi. you need to tell president xi that you're willing to find diplomatic trade space and i think, i hope that's what you were hearing out of tillerson yesterday. >> it seems that's what it is. such an interesting contrast to the tough talk about how soft

power is getting us nowhere, we had to take a different tact with north korea. tillerson is squarely back in that space, hopefully for the better. john kirby, appreciate your perspective. >> you bet. thank you. there's a new lawsuit that accuses the white house of working in tandem with fox news to concoct a fake news story about the murder of a dnc staffer. we hear from seth rich's family next.

explosives claims the white house, of a concocted news story about the murder of d nnchtsc staffer seth rich. he stands by the false report. >> fox news retracted the story as we now know. >> right. >> do you still believe there's something to this suggestion? >> i don't believe there's anything in that story that is inaccurate. >> you believe it's all accurate. >> i believe rod wheeler's saying he was misquoted is the reason they pulled it.

>> so cnn senior media correspondent and host of "reliable sources" brian stelter joins us. what a complicated and tragic story this is. basically ed buttowsky, not a journalist, hooks up with rod wheeler, not a journalist and together begin peddling this story that there's some connection between the murder of seth rich, a young dnc staffer and wikileaks and release of documents. ed butowsky admits he's trying to distract from the idea that russia was behind the leaks. >> trying to disprove all the russia theories, create a counternarrative. this is like a media literacy lesson. when you have folks on fox or other right wing media outlets talking about the dnc and

wikileaks, it's designed to distract from the main issue at hand, the issue that federal investigators are looking into. this is a very sad story, the ultimate example of fake news, no matter how involved the trump white house was or wasn't. it's so sad because of this real life family at the middle of what has become this fiction liesed and sensationalized z story. th >> mr. butowsky says he has all the supporting documentation. >> rod wheeler has launched a lawsuit against fox news because they say he fabricated quotes of his. he disavows the story now. >> he says they defamed him. so he's suing his former employer. there's text messages, voice mails, a lot of evidence to suggest unethical behavior at fox. the trump connections i think demand more reporting and more investigation. i was talking to the lawyer in this case last night. he said, look, we're going to

try to get into discovery, get e-mails, try to depose people and find out more about what connections there were to the trump white house. >> that remains to be seen. we know this family, six months into the worst kind of loss, the loss of a child, had this man come to them to pull the scab off this situation and they've been dealing with it ever since. >> we want to get right now to the spokesman for seth rich's family, brad bowman. thank you for being here. >> thank you. >> what did the family think when these revelations came to light about rod wheeler's lawsuit that he has now filed against fox news in which he claims that this story was crafted and concocted with the help of the white house? >> obviously the family can't weigh in of the specifics of either the lawsuit nor the at the time a they that you had

with butowsky. what i can say is they have been utterly devastated. since seth's passing last july, they have done nothing but try to maintain a sense of loss and to grieve the way a family is meant to grieve and that over and over again, because of conspiracy theories that have popped up, they have been deprived of the opportunity to move forward. they've been deprived the opportunity to seek some new normal and, frankly, they feel like the police have been deprived of the ability to actually prosecute this crime. >> brad, for people who did not follow this story closely, why does the family think this conspiracy theory came to settle on seth? >> they don't know. and they didn't ask for this. the truth is that all these folks want is to find the mur r murderer or murderers that did

this. they didn't ask to be in the middle of the media spotlight, and they are perplexed by the fact that anybody would use the murder of their son, a wonderful mid 20-something-year-old kid who moved to washington, d.c. in order to make a difference in this world and who was gunned down senselessly in the streets of washington. it's just ridiculous. >> i have the affidavit here from the lawsuit that rod wheeler has filed. in it he says -- he basically talks about what their motivation was and ed buttowsky, a fox news contributor, hooked up with rod wheeler, sent an e-mail to fox news anchors telling him the narrative they wanted to get out. i'll read, one of the big conclusions we need to draw is the russians did not hack our computer systems and steal e-mails and there was no

collusion like trump with the russians. that was their bottom line, if you believe rod wheeler's lawsuit. what's your response? >> you know what strikes me? you had ed butowsky on tv for about 20 minutes, and he had the opportunity to look the american people in the eye and the seth rich family in the eye and say, you know what, six months after i reached out to you, knowing what i know now, i cannot believe i put you in this position and i am so, so sorry. he didn't even take that opportunity. he didn't even look the american people or the family in the eye to apologize to them and say i had no idea i was going to heap so much more pain and anguish on you. >> in fact, you heard what he told chris last night in that exclusive interview, that he does stand by the story despite the fact that foxnews.com has restrakted it, that ed still believes it. he also seemed to want to plant

the seed of suspicion against you. let me play that moment and get your response. listen to this. >> they also said this guy brad bauman just showed up one day and said he was assigned to them from the dnc, and they asked me why. >> you want to respond to that? >> not only was i not assigned to the family and not only have i never in my life, in my career, ever taken a paycheck from the dnc, but i am a committed democrat. let's be clear, this is about something that is larger than partisanship. i think anyone with a moral compass, democrat or republican, knows that one thing you just don't do and you don't approach a grieving family at the deepest time of their need and you don't look them in the eye and you don't feed their minds with suspicion, and you don't use that suspicion on a national stage to cast doubt on what happened to their son. that is just a moral failure. >> the lawsuit says that, in

fact, ed butowsky and rod wheeler had a meeting at the white house with sean spicer. according to yahoo news, lawyers were looking to depose sean spicer and even president trump about all of this. what do you think the outcome here will be? >> well, specifically to the sean spicer meeting, i think anybody who -- i know a large portion of your audience has never actually had a meeting with the white house -- there is a large amount of security that goes into meeting with the white house. the idea that you can just show up to the white house one day with somebody else in tow and waltz in and have an unofficial meeting, hey, what's up, you have to go through secret service. everybody knows who is coming in and going out. this is not something free wheeling that you just do. they had at least a couple days to know rod wheeler was coming in. they had to at least know if rod

wheeler was coming in, this must have had something to do with this case. it just doesn't make any sense. i will tell you from the perspective of the family, regardless of the merits of the lawsuit, regardless of the merits of what's being said and regardless of the merits of whether or not the white house had any influence in this whatsoever, that all they really want at this point is for this to go away. they just want to be left alone and want to give the metropolitan police department the time and space they need in order to accomplish the goal of finding the murderer. >> brad bauman, thank you for coming in and representing the family. please give them our condolences. we pray they do get justice. >> thank you. >> thank you. chris. >> big turn of events in washington, d.c. republican senators are openly defying president trump. what are they doing and more importantly why are they doing it? we'll talk with a member of the we'll talk with a member of the trump administration ahead. your onlrr will be navigating the local traffic.

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there are not the rules as i told the president to change the rules of the senate. >> as i said, let obamacare explode. >> we will see if we can find a way to stabilize the individual insurance market. >> we've got to get away from this attitude that a senator should be a rubber stamp for everything the president wants. >> the president said he weighed in the way any father would on a statement. >>