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being seen as a reflection of who is in his ear and who is not. after a weekend at mar-a-lago with fox's sean hannity, bill shine, immigration hardliner stephen miller and oddly enough, don king, he had plenty to tweet about. attacking the news media, except for fox news, and sinclair broadcast group, the big local broadcasting chain whose anchors nationwide read a statement attacking fake stories which the president endorsed. he attacked amazon and his own justice department, putting the word justice in scare quotes. he attacked democrats for not wanting any border between the u.s. and mexico, in his opinion. he attacked mexico for not enforcing its own immigration laws and issued a string of tweets on the hundreds of thousands of children known as daca kids. back in september, he rescinded the program protecting them. since then, he's promised to deal with the so-called dreamers, with, quote, great heart, in his words, and said this back in early january about

new legislation on immigration. >> should be a bill of love, truly, should be a bill of love, and we can do that. >> well, in the three months that followed, the president has sought to tie legislation on their fate to funding the border wall and restrictions even on lawful immigration. in other words, the president has been kind of all over the map on this one. right now, it seems, he's in a very hard line place. he began with a tweet just yesterday morning. "border patrol agents are not allowed to properly do their jobs at the border because of ridiculous liberal democrat laws like catch and release. getting more dangerous. caravans coming. republicans must go to nuclear option to pass through touch laws now. no more daca deal." that one daca tweet has a lot to unravel. first, keeping them honest, catch and release is not actually a law, democrat or republican. it's a practice, a stroerps y'all one, of releasing noncriminal undocumented immigrants on their own

recognizan recognizance, due to a lack of detention facilities, due to immigration law loopholes, the white house claims. caravans are grouping of migrants fleeing who are making their way across mexico together, not separately, to avoid, they say, being preyed on. the nuclear option is getting rid of the filibuster if the senate so the minority party, democrats currently, could no longer block legislation. here's the next tweet. quote, "mexico is doing very little, if nothing at all, stopping people from flowing into mexico through their southern border. and then to the u.s. they laugh at our dumb immigration laws. they must stop the dug drug and people flows or i will stop their cash cow." the president then said this. "the big flows of people are trying to take advantage of daca." the president continued with four more tweets, and today at the easter egg roll, the president said this about daca kids. >> the democrats have really yet them down. they've really let them down.

they had this great opportunity. the democrats have really let them down. it's a shame. and now people are taking advantage of daca, and that's a shame. it should have never happened. >> keeping them honest, what the president neglects to say is that his own executive action precipitated all of this. he also neglected to mention that he has, at times, signaled he's open to any compromise on immigration. listen. >> this group comes back, hopefully with an agreement, this group, and others, from the senate, from the house, comes back with an agreement, i'm signing it. i mean, i will be signing it. i'm not going to say, oh, gee, i want this or that. i'll be signing it. i have a lot of confidence that you're going to come up with something really good. >> so, in the space of a little less than three months, the president has gone from being eager to sign just about anything to a twitter rant about just about everything and very quickly, factually inaccurate. no one single new imgrant can take advantage of daca unless

they come here by a time machine, it's of course limited to people who have lived here since june 2007. mexico is trying to control its southern border. that began four years ago. can you argue it's certainly not enough, but not that it doesn't exist. and it's hard to see what pulling out of the north american free trade agreement has to do with anything, perhaps that they either reflect the views of his harder line advisers, certain fox news anchors, his own harder line impulses or personal beefs. so sad that the department of justice and the fbi are slow walking or even not giving the unreacted documents requested by congress. an embarrassment to our country, the president tweeted. he also said this. so funny to watch fake news networks criticize sinclair broadcasting for being biased. sinclair is far superior to cnn and even more fake nbc, which is a total jock. the president also attacked amazon and mentioned what an honor it was to host the annual

easter egg roll, but surprisingly, or perhaps thankfully, had nothing to say about the bunny. more now on the president on the attack from cnn's pamela brown, who joins us from the white house tonight. so, do we know why the president is in attack mode? >> reporter: well, there could be a few reasons here, anderson. we're told by sources that he's certainly feeling the heat as it comes to immigration. he spent the three-day weekend at mar-a-lago, surrounded by a parade of allies and hardliners on immigration, who were reminding the president that, look, the midterms are coming up and told him that basically, that this could hurt his party, if he can't tout success in building the border wall. that is on top of the vocal criticism from ann coulter that the president has been acutely aware of, that he was reminded of over the weekend. we're told that the president was already frustrated that there has been sort of a lack of progress in his view on building the border wall. he felt like he was cornered in

signing the omni-bus bill with very little funding for the wall. all of this was exasperated with reports on fox news about these caravans, central americans trying to come to the u.s. and so, as we see, this is spilling out on twitter, after he was sort of reminded of all of this over the weekend by these allies, but it isn't just on the immigration issue. it's a myriad of topics the president is touching on, including amazon, nafta and mexico, his own justice department today. some may say that, look, it's because he's lost some of his moderating forces in the white house, including hope hicks, the communications, former communications director, who left last week, and this is the first week that the president is without her by his side. she was seen as sort of a daughter to the president and someone who was a moderating voice, but even when she was here, by his side, he still went through these fits of fury, so, i think that really, the bottom

line here, anderson, is, this is just the president being the president. >> it's obviously not the first time, though, that the president has gone after multiple groups in just one day. >> reporter: absolutely. i mean, if you look at his twitter feed, it appears that the primary purpose, or the way he views it primarily is to go after people, to go after groups, it's really his outlet for him, the way that he commune kapts with people in the outside world. which always makes it more curious when he doesn't go after people or groups that you think he would go after, such as vladimir putin, stormy daniels. it calls even more attention when he doesn't go after those people, because of the fact that he's so regularly using it to kind of go into attack mode on issues that are top of mind for him, anderson. >> all right. pam brown, appreciate it. thank you so much. some perspective now from cnn political come men tame or the

ryan liz za and molly ball. should anyone be surprised at this point that the president goes down to mar-a-lago, hangs out with people from fox news and goies on a hard right tear n twitter? most people on capitol hill basically just ignore this now. >> i don't think we should be surprised at all. as pamela said, this is trump being trump. this is someone who, in his 70s, is not going to -- is not going to change. and this -- the accumulation of the staffing changes at the white house have been to, you know, take off some of the guardrail, some of the restraints that he previously had. let's be honest. it's not like they were serious guardrails or restraints previously. and he loves this platform. he loves the fact that any thought that pops into his head can be immediately, you know, disseminated to his people, and he's very easily worked up on certain issues, especially

immigration. he's been very worked up about the bill that he claims he didn't want to sign, that had no funding for his number one priority, this wall. i mean, not only that, the funding that it did have said it could not be used for anything other than see-through fencing. and so, it was very easy for him to get worked up by what's on the -- circulating in conservative media right now, which is dejection about his immigration policies not passing. and so, this is -- this is classic trump. i don't -- we're going to be having this same conversation, anderson, a year from now, assuming he's still in office. this is who he is -- yeah, go ahead. >> molly, i wonder how worried do you think he is about the base? i talked to chris from newsmax, who was down in mar-a-lago, who kind of poo-pooed the notion that he's getting this message, that he needs to be fearful of being too soft on immigration, that he's not too soft on immigration, but do you think

there is truth to that, that the idea that people are delivering the message to him that, people in your base are starting to wonder about where you are on immigration? >> well, that's clearly the message he's getting from somewhere. and you do see it popping up here and there in conservative media. up to this point, conservative media has really been an amen chorus for whatever it is that trump decides to do, and if he were to decide, i thought, if he were to decide that the border wall wasn't such a good idea, they would find a way to justify that and explain it. so, it is interesting to see conservative media holding trump accountable for some of his promises, particular loin ill gr -- particular loin immigration. it's hard to blame him for being frustrated. the achievements of his first year in office were achievements for the republican congress. tax cuts and judges. those aren't the things that trump really feels in his gut and campaigned on, to his view, to the trump base. and so, you see him getting restless, wanting to do tariffs, wanting to do something about

imgragts, and, you know, as ryan said, having fewer moderating influences around him. and, you know, i think -- we in washington know that congress doesn't do anything in even numbered years, but if you are joe six pack, that doesn't make any sense, that's stupid. why can't the congress keep going even though there's an election many months from now? so, i think part of that, you can't really blame trump for being annoyed. >> yeah, ryan, i guess the bigger question is whether the president really understands things, like, what daca is. he says big flows are people are trying to get into the country to get in on the act, daca doesn't apply to people that arrived after 2007. what is he talking about there? and last week, we were reporting on, he made a speech in which he talked about, he tweeted about this, as well, even tweeted out a picture of fencing on the border that he said is the beginning of building the wall, when, in fact, we went down there and it's basically just rehabbing existing fencing that was put up under the bush administration. >> yeah, there was no money for his wall, specifically said, it

wasn't allowed to be built, and, look, his tweets were sort of a hodgepodge of facts and fiction about immigration policy, you know, sometimes he talks about mexico having this very, very tough immigration policy, which it actually does. in 2014, they changed the law in mexico because of the crisis on the southern border there, and they're fairly aggressive about deport i deporting -- something that trump sometimes points out. now he's sort of arguing that they're letting all these people through. a couple points on daca, one, of course, president trump ended the program. it doesn't exist right now. and even if it did exist, it would not necessarily mean that anyone crossing the border would be eligible for it. and then, you know, he made this point about, if you had 51 votes in the senate, he could pass what he wanted on immigration -- that's not true, either. the immigration bill that went through the senate didn't even

clear 51 votes, so, that's not quite right, either. so, a lot of errors in his tweets over the weekend and today. >> yeah, ryan, molly, thank you. perhaps no surprise, we should point out the president just tweeted again, we'll have more on that next. you'll hear from a former white house chief of staff who has got plenty to say about how this white house is operating. also later, we'll dig deeper into the sinclair broadcasting story, and that statement so many of its anchors were told to read. was it just a declaration of principles, or pro-trump propaganda. our guests debate, you can decide when we continue. ♪ with t-mobile, get the fastest network ever, now on the fasters samsung ever. because fast should be fast. ♪ now at t-mobile, buy one samsung galaxy s9 and get one free.

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-isn't that what i'm doing? well, most of us take a few days off, we try to unplug. the president on the other hand lets his tweet flag fly. especially on immigration. he just tweeted again. quote, as ridiculous as it sounds, the laws of our country do not easily allow us to send those crossing our southern border back where they came from. a whole big wasted procedure must take place. mexico and canada have tough immigration laws, where as ours are an obama joke. honduras, mexico and many other countries that the u.s. is very generous to sends many of their people to our country through weak immigration policies. caravans are heading here. must pass through laws and build the wall. democrats allow open borders, drugs and crime. we've been talking about what it might mean and what it says about who the president has been listening to and who he may not be anymore, including chief of staff john kelly.

earlier today, bill crystal told jake tapper that general kelly has little to do these days beyond calling cabinet members to warn them they're about to be fired on twitter. leon panetta, a former white house chief of staff himself and someone who has been speaking out forcefully for so-called dreamers. secretary, where do you think daca stands right now, given the president's tweets this weekend, declaring daca dead and then blaming the democrats? >> well, frankly, i don't think the president rationale is working at all with the american people, certainly with la tee knows, but more importantly, with the congress. i think the reality is that the president is the one who got rid of the daca program, and created this crisis. he has failed to be able to work out any kind of approach on capitol hill that was acceptable to him to try to fix the situation, and now he's standing back and basically blaming

everybody else for the problem. i don't think it's working. >> it is also interesting, because you now have a situation where it seems like people still read the president's tweets and reporters report on them, doesn't seem like anyone on capitol hill really pays them any attention. is that your impression, as well? >> yeah, i don't think there's any question. one of the things that has happened over the course of t s this -- these last many months of this administration is that the congress has gotten to the point where it simply doesn't take the president's tweets, in particular, with any degree of credibility. they've experienced a president who says one thing one day, then says something else the next y day. they know better than to take any action based on what he's urging, because in the end, they're not sure whether he'll stick to it. so, they basically keep quiet and do what they have to do without responding in any way to

what the president is saying. >> these tweets obviously came after, you know, he was at mar-a-lago, he was there without john kelly. you've been a white house chief of staff, obviously, before, do you think it's telling that kelly was not with the president while all of this happened? >> it's obviously not a good situation in the white house. you know, i think we've known that for awhile, but the reality is that the whole purpose of a chief of staff is to be able to work with the president, to have a trusting relationship with the president, and to be able to -- to at least provide some degree of discipline with regards to how that president presents his positions to the country. not being there in mar-a-lago and having a group of individuals visit mar-a-lago that looked like the bar scene from "star wars," and then, for him to start tweeting based on that kind of conversation is

just, i think, another reflection of the chaos that this president engages in as president. >> yeah, i mean, you talk about the bar scene in "star wars" i wasn't going to put it like that, but you did have stephen miller, very hawkish member of the president's team, sean hannity, bill shine, i mean, sort of the, you know, the bright lights of fox news, if you will. don king, you know -- who is really -- i don't even need to try to describe don king, other than he stomped somebody to death once. how unusual is it for a president to echo those around him instead of setting the agenda himself, or to surround himself -- i mean, obviously, i guess it's normal for people to want to have like minds around them, but it is interesting to me, just the extend to which he's just not only watching fox news, but actually consulting with these people from fox news. >> you know, i think what we all have to do is to kind of remind ourselves of how presidents have

always acted in the past, whether they were republicans or democrats. normally, presidents, of course, they want to meet with people that are friendly to them and most presidents have done that. but when it comes to policy, when it comes to pronouncements by the president of the united states, normally what every president i've known has done is to engage his chief of staff and the responsible staff in the white house or military leaders, depending on what the issue is, to sit down and have a policy discussion in which they arrive at a decision by the president and then they develop a process for presenting that decision to the american people. this is the only president that i've ever known who has basically thrown that whole process out the window. >> i mean, it's interesting, because i remember from the start of this administration, you raising concerns about just the -- the makeup of the white

house, how, you know, the weakness of the chief of staff, how people didn't have kind of individual lanes of authority, people could just wander in and out of the oval office. several of president trump's outside advisers have been telling him that he may not need a chief of staff or a communications director. what kind of impact would it have if president trump would eliminate those positions? >> well, in many ways, it feels like that's the case right now. even with john kelly as chief of staff, this president basically goes off and does whatever he wants to do, tweepts whatever he wants to say and conducts policy by his tweets. and so, you very much have a situation in which a president of the united states is basically out there, kind of operating on his own. now, most presidents usually have a support system. they have staff, they have a

chief of staff, they have policy individuals who have experience in the areas that they're involved with. that's normally the way it's supposed to work. we are in never never land right now with this president, not knowing from day-to-day just exactly what he's going to say, what he's going to tweet or what he's going to do. >> secretary panetta, thank you very much. >> thank you. well, coming up, the president's barrage of tweets, as we've heard, took aim at daca and mexico. just ahead, i'll talk with jorge ramos for his perspective on that. feel the clarity of non-drowsy claritin 24 hour relief when allergies occur. day after day, after day. because life should have more wishes and less worries. feel the clarity and live claritin clear.

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president trump's tweets declaring the death of daca wla landed after time the president spent with some of his allies at fox news. jorge ramos has spent much of the past year defending the so-called dreamers and is the author of "stranger: the challenge of a latino immigrant in the trump era." jorge, the president tweeted daca is dead. do you think he's right? i mean, do you think that there is the political will to actu actually get a deal done with this president? >> i don't see any political will from the president, i mean, we have to remember that the president, who killed daca, is donald trump. he did that last september. and he could have changed that. he didn't have to do it, but he was offered by the democrats to have daca approved in exchange

for a few miles of the border and he said no. so, at this point, i don't think president trump wants to do anything that might favor up to 2 million daca kids, dreamers, and the person who did it was precisely donald trump. >> i mean, he continues -- he's blaming the democrats for -- for killing daca. >> i don't think he's right. look. it was president barack obama who, in 2012, established daca, and it is president donald trump who killed daca. they want to have some kind of negotiation with the president. they offer him up to 300, 350 miles of border, of wall, and he said no. so, at this point -- look, we've been hearing all kinds of things about president trump, he said that this was going to be a bill of love, that he had the heart

to help the dreamers. if he wants to help the dreamers, he can change that immediately. he's not going to do it. i think something happened during the weekend. we are dealing with the most ant anti-immigrant president since the 1950s. not only killing daca, he wants to end legal immigration. he wants -- he has arrested 30% more people than president barack obama in his last year. so, i don't think this president is going to do anything for the dreamers, and the dreamers know that. >> a supreme court ruling back in february ensured that daca will be in place at least through the fall. do you think that if daca is in real danger of expiring, that congress would actually act? >> i don't think the congress is going to do anything about it. with a republican majority. they cannot only approve daca, they can help the dreamers. they can also have immigration reform, if they want to. they simply don't want to do it. i don't see any political will to do that. for the dreamer, they have two

options. one is to wait for the courts to rule on this. the other one is what they already call plan b, and plan b is to wait until 2020 and to see if donald trump is going to be re-elected or not, but for many of them, donald trump is not an option right now. and, you know, the real wall right now on immigration is called donald trump. trump is the wall. >> the president tweeted that, quote, these big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of daca, they want in on the act. i mean, that just -- technically, that's not true. no one can enroll in daca. what do you think is going on here? >> he has no idea what he's talking about. he precisely said that these caravans, first of all, there are no caravans. there's one group of about 1,500 central americans going from the southern part of mexico, going all the way to tijuana. this is not the first time they've done it. every year they do it. and their purpose, and we talked

to -- univision spoke to the spokesperson, they clearly say that their purpose is not to illegally come to the united states, they simply want to bring attention to the violence in central america. many of them are from honduras, so, there's no invasion, no one wants to invade the united states. and they cannot take advantage of daca. to apply for daca, to qualify for daca, you would have to have been here in this country before 2007, 11 years ago. this is completely impossible. i don't know what the president is talking about. >> the president also accused mexico of doing, in his words, very little, if not nothing, to stop illegal immigration through their border, and threatened to pull out of nafta if they don't do more. the relationship between president trump and mexico, it has been chilly. and the fate of nafta is further in doubt. >> this is not helping. even though the mexican government released also a

statement saying that mexico and the u.s. are cooperating on immigration. the fact is that since donald trump announced his candidacy on june 2015, nothing's been good in the relationship between mexico and the united states. >> jorge ramos, thank you very much. >> thank you. well, coming up ahead, if you've ever wondered what it would sound like to hear dozens of local news anchors to hear the same script across the country, wonder no more. an corps were made to read a script, railing against fake news. sound familiar? well, we'll take a look at what's behind it, next. anything. even "close claws." [driver] so, we took your shortcut, which was a bad idea. [cougar growling] [passenger] what are you doing? [driver] i can't believe that worked. i dropped the keys.

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the largest owner of local tv stations in the u.s. is defending a move. sinclair broadcast group owns and operating close to 200 stations across the country. local news anchors were forced to read a company mandated script railing against so-called false news and fake stories, a script that sounded very much like something the president would say. take a look. >> the sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. more alarming, some media outleoutlet ss publish these same fake stories, stories that aren't true, without checking facts first.

unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. this is extremely dangerous to our democracy. >> the president tweeted about the backlash, saying, and i quote, so funny to watch fake news networks, among the most dishonest groups of people i have ever dealt with, criticize sinclair broadcasting for being biased. sinclair is far superior to cnn and even more fake nbc. the compa gary tuchman goes into detail. >> the sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. >> reporter: an identical script read by local news anchors across the country at stations all controlled by one company. the sinclair broadcast group. >> more alarming, some media outlets publish the same fake stories. >> reporter: to media watchers, the setone sounded eerily

familiar. >> it is extremely dangerous to our democracy. >> this is extremely dangerous to our democracy. >> this is extremely dangerous to our democracy. >> the message mandated by sinclair to air frequently on its local news broadcast is done to, quote, reach maximum frequency. it's the latest move by a media giant that critics say is pushing pro-trump propaganda. >> former fbi director james comey testified before the u.s. senate on thursday. >> reporter: last year, former trump white house staffer and campaign senior adviser boris epstein was hired as sinclair's chief political analyst. >> as i've said, the media coverage of this administration seems to be a lot of hype and very little substance. >> reporter: his regular segment is reportedly mandated as must-run nine times a week. mandated by corporate bosses. it's rankled newsrooms for cutting into local news time. in december 2016, jared kushner

reportedly told a group of business executives that in the runup to the election, the trump campaign struck a deal with sinclair. >> you got it? you got it? >> reporter: better news coverage in return for more access to then-candidate trump. most viewers of sinclair stations likely don't even know their local news is being shaped by a national conglomerate. what started as one station in baltimore had an explosion of growth in the last 20 years. sinclair now owns or controls 193 stations and markets across the country. the biggest operator of local tv stations in america. and the company is poised to control even more, since a bid to buy tribune media would give sinclair access to 72% of every household in the nation. that deal is currently under review by the trump administration. most of sinclair's stations are cnn affiliates, meaning cnn shares content and resources with them and vice versa. ac 360 made repeated attempts to have a sinclair representative on the program with no success.

the company did, however, send us a statement that reads in part, "it is ironic that we would be attacked for messages promoting our journalistic initiative for fair and objective reporting, and for specifically asking the public to hold our newsrooms accountable." gary tuchman, cnn, new york. >> earlier, i spoke with chris ruddy, who frequently speaks with the president. here's what he said about this. >> i agree with the sentiment of the sinclair editorial. i agree with the president that the media is, should not be calling sinclair unfair. i generally think sinclair, if you look at their local news reporting, has been generally fair and not biased. i've watched a number of their stations. we have one in the local market here. that said, there is a tremendous danger when major tv networks are home moj nicing and packaging news at the local level. >> joining me, our npr media

correspondent, as well as abc news legal analyst and mediaite founder, dan abrams. dan, what do you think of what sinclair is doing? can you remember, though, anything like this before? >> no, i've never seen anything like this before, and i think the two things that are really troubling to me are, number one, is that local stations sort of pride themselves on independence, right? you ask a local station, you know, what's different about you? we're independent. and then you hear these people saying the same thing across the country, and it sort of detracts from that argument. maybe the most important thing to me is the lack of transparency. meaning, if sinclair wants to say, there's been liberal media bias for years out there, it is time to combat that. fair enough. that is absolutely their right to say it, and, you know what, a lot of people would agree with them, that the mainstream media has tended to be left of center. but to pretend that this isn't that kind of statement, to pretend this is just kind of a

statement of how good we are as local news reporters, and how we're going to go in depth and we're going to get the real story, et cetera, just feels disingenuous. and that's my bigger problem here. >> david, i mean, it seems they're -- what they're claiming they're talking about is not actually what they were talking about. i know you spoke to scott livingston. what did he have to say? >> he said two things. he said, first, this is a differentiation for us. sinclair prides itself on rig use journalism in his local markets. when i used to be a reporter for "the baltimore sun" and i would cover fox 45 there in baltimore, they did some of the best coverage locally of any in the market. but they said this is a calling card for them, they're just praising what they do, and presenting it publicly. but they're also essentially trashing much of the rest of the media. he says they're really just expressing concerns in the way which fake stories, as they put it, get circulated in social media and by some media outlets.

but the echoes of president trump's rhetoric are so very strong, and i think they have every right to present this as their corporate statement of belief. the fact they put it in the words of their anchors, they are trading on the trust that many of the local news anchors have built up over the years with their audiences. and that corrodes the standing their own anchors have, not simply by dent of what they're saying, but dent of the fact, they didn't say it at all. >> also, dan, i mean, to the point that david just made, it's not as if they were actually saying, you know, fake stories that are ginned up by somebody online, like the pizza gate story, are a real problem if they get into the news cycle. they seem to be -- they don't, in fact, use any specific examples of what they consider fake stories, and it sure sounded from the way all these -- all the things the anchors were reading, was they're talking about, you know, reporters that have a twitter account, and all these people are doing kind of one-sided reporting. >> well, of course they're

talking about the liberal media. i mean, come on. we can sit here and we can pretend like maybe that's not what they're talking about. but of course that's what they're talking about. they're talking about the liberal media. as i said, that's okay to criticize the liberal media. but i don't think it's okay to just pretend that this is just a statement by the anchors. and i think david makes a good point here is, these anchors are in a tough spot. you have people out there saying, they should all quit. they should just stand up and say, you know what, i'm done. well, you know, that's a nice theoretical thing to say and it's a nice principled point to make, but it's a lot harder for these anchors who, you know, these days, those jobs are tough to find. if they say, i won't do it, they'll be celebrated by some, they'll be lionized by many in a particular community, but they may also lose their jobs. and so, you know, you are putting them in a difficult spot to have to make that choice, and

particularly many on the left sort of demanding of them to say, don't say it, if they say you have to say it, then quit. you can understand the sentiment, but boy, that's a tough spot to put all of these anchors in. >> david, the president's tweet in support of sinclair today, it basically -- i'm not sure it helps sinclair with what it's trying to accomplish. sinclair is saying, this isn't about left or right, this is just expressing or values of being fair, i'm not sure the president weighing in on the side of sinclair while trashing, you know, cnn and nbc and others, really helps their point. >> well, and it's hard to look at this controversy over these statements being read allowoud anchors. they own 190 stations, they are looking to take over 30 more in a deal that is getting scrutinized down in washington, and the reason that matters is, they are nationalizing their coverage on their local newscasts, and a lot of that

national coverage in the story selection and in the kinds of things that are selected becomes more conservative. >> david, dan, thank you very much. >> you bet. >> my pleasure. well, there's some new reporting tonight on the mueller investigation to tell you about. "the wall street journal" says that mueller's team is investigating potential links between roger stone and a meeting he says he had with wikileaks founder julian assange. details 0en that ahead. ♪ with t-mobile, get the fastest network ever, now on the fasters samsung ever. because fast should be fast. ♪ now at t-mobile, buy one samsung galaxy s9 and get one free. ♪

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"the wall street journal" tonight reports that special counsel robert mueller is investigating possible links between longtime trump adviser roger stone and wikileaks founder julian assange. in its report, the newspaper says it has an e-mail dated august 4th, 2016, in which stone wrote he'd had dinner with assange, then as now pretty much confined to the ecuadorian embassy in london. an e-mail stone tells the paper was a joke. i'm joined now by one of the reporters who wrote the story,

shelby holliday. shelby, roger stone says this isn't true, that he never dined with assange and that, quote, it's not what you say. it's what you do. this was said in jest. that's not dissuaded mueller's team based on your reporting from actually looking into it, correct? >> correct. there's an e-mail, and it says he dined with julian assange. he says it's a joke. he did not deny that he actually wrote this e-mail. he said it was all just a big joke, claiming he had been in touch with julian assange. we do know after he wrote this e-mail, he went on to tell a crowd in florida he had been in contact with julian assange, and his statements have shifted over the past year. he told the house intelligence committee according to reports that he spoke to assange through an intermediary, but when we approached him about this story, he said he never talked to assange in 2016, especially on that day, on august 3, 2016. if you pull back and look the at the time line here, this comes a few days -- his e-mail comes a few days after president trump called on russia to find hillary

clinton's missing e-mails. and it also comes after reported contacts between paul manafort, who is facing a number of charges, and a man that the special counsel's office said hinted at is linked to russian intelligence, konstantin kilimnik. that time line leading up to this e-mail is very curious. then following the e-mail, roger stone went on twitter and praised julian assange. he went on to say liberals want wikileaks to stand down, but they won't. the payload is coming. so he predicted this e-mail release for months after the e-mail that said he'd dined with julian assange. >> do you know whether ecuadorian officials in london have been cooperating with mueller's team? obviously assange is holed up at the embassy there for years. if there actually was a dinner with roger stone, it would have had to have been at the embassy? >> that's unclear. also julian assange was not available to respond to comment. he has not had internet access

off and on recently, so it's hard to know. roger stone actually sent us a screen grab. we gave him multiple days to show -- to prove to us that he was not in london because that's where he'd have to be. all he sent uses with a screen grab of what appeared to be a flight booking with the name roger. he said he was flying from los angeles to miami on that night and couldn't possibly have been in london. but i've talked to different prosecutors, and some say dining doesn't necessarily have to mean that he was there in person. he could have called him on the phone and caught him during dinner, or maybe they had face timed. other prosecutors say that's pretty concrete language and dining would be dining. but at this point there's no -- beyond the e-mail, beyond the screen shot booking, we don't have any proof that roger stone was or was not in london. and he wouldn't -- he didn't provide any other evidence. he scoffed at me when i asked if he could put me in touch with people he had been with on that day. and he sort of just laughed the whole thing off. even when i asked, is there a 2016 on the screen shot, he said, are you kidding me? so it's hard to know.

it's hard to know, and even people close to roger stone say they aren't exactly sure when to believe him and when he's telling the truth or when he's not. >> yeah. i mean there is sort of a performance art at times to some of his statements in the past. >> right. he calls himself a political trickster, and if you watched the documentary, get me roger stone, he actually really loves this reputation, that he pulls off political tricks, and sometimes he does things -- he says he's never broken the law, but that he does things that sort of raise eyebrows and stir the pot, i guess you could say. what's unclear is if he was communicating with -- if he was communicating with wikileaks and also guccifer, if he's talking to these two groups that spread hacked e-mails, hillary clinton's e-mails before the election, did he know that they were working in tandem with russia as u.s. intelligence agencies have said, and did he know -- did he have knowledge of

a hack and still encouraged the release of these e-mails? that would be a crime under the federal election -- i'm sorry -- the computer fraud and abuse act. even if you know of the crime, you didn't commit the crime, but you helped spread or helped disseminate the e-mails, you could be in trouble. >> yeah. shelby holliday, appreciate the reporting. just ahead, president trump goes on a weekend tweet storm and declares daca dead. he's also on the attack once again against the mainstream media. no surprise there. the latest on all of that ahead. >> tech: at safelite autoglass we know that when you're spending time with the grandkids every minute counts. and you don't have time for a cracked windshield. that's why we show you exactly when we'll be there. saving you time, so you can keep saving the world. >> kids: ♪ safelite repair, safelite replace ♪

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