welcome to "inside politics." i'm nia-malika henderson. john king has the day off. two huge stories we're following for you this hour. another day, another flip. the trump organization's top money man is the latest trump insider to cooperate with federal prosecutors. and disheartening news from arizona. john mccain's family says the senator has made the decision to discontinue treatment in his long, difficult battle with cancer. more on the senator later, but we begin with breaking news. cnn confirming that trump organization cfo allen weisselberg cooperated with federal prosecutors in exchange for immunity, or as the president might say, he flipped. "the wall street journal" first broke this story. a source now tells cnn that weisselberg provided information about michael cohen and hush-money deals the president's

former fixer brokered weeks ahead of the 2016 election. c kara, what do we know about the extent of weisselberg's cooperation? >> well, sources tell evan perez and they weisselberg was interviewed weeks ago and focused on the payments made to stormy daniels. we're told that weisselberg has not been called back. at this point, it appears their interest in weisselberg and his participation with the u.s. attorney's office was very specific to michael cohen. we're still reporting this story, but it appears that weisselberg was in a few weeks ago. he did answer questions about michael cohen and payments made to him in connection with these campaign finance violations. >> thanks for that, kara.

cnn legal analyst paul callan joins me now. how potentially damaging is weisselberg's cooperation for the president? >> it could be very damaging for the president because weisselberg is someone who has been involved in the trump organization really throughout its history. as a matter of fact, he even worked for the president's father, fred trump, back in the early years of the trump organization. so he's obviously someone who is intimately familiar with how finances were handled. and if the focus initially was on the hush money payments to stormy daniels and karen mcdougal, prosecutors would want to know where did that money come from. did it come from corporate funds, or did it come from personal funds of the president? now, that of course would be important because if it's coming from organizational funds, the question is, is that taxable income when you're using it for

personal purposes. on the other hand, if it came out of a donald trump trust fund, which i understand weisselberg also manages, it might not be any kind of a financial tax crime. so he's somebody who has very, very important information which could be helpful to the prosecutors. not only in the cohen case but if they want to dig deeper into the trump organization. >> and weisselberg's cooperation seems to be limited to the cohen probe. what would prosecutors need to call weisselberg back and ask him to provide information about other potential crimes? >> well, i think -- you know, what always happens in these federal investigations, and we saw it in the manafort case, when they start looking at a particular issue, sometimes they stumble across other things that turn out to be criminal in nature. that's, i think, one of the reasons why the president is probably as upset as he has been sounding this week. once they start looking into the inner workings of the trump organization, there's a lot to look at there.

maybe it's all been above board and legal, but nobody likes federal agents and investigators poring over their financial records. so this is a door to -- and an opportunity for prosecutors to look at the trump organization if they wish to. our reporting, though, is that so far at least it's only been focused on cohen. so we'll have to see where the story goes. >> and you sort of talk about this door that has in some ways been opened. could the ekxtent of his cooperation eventually include information about the president's tax returns? >> yes, it absolutely could. i think another very interesting issue is, you know, does weisselberg just go back to work at the trump organization? given what the president has said about what he describes as flippers and how it's reprehensible and maybe should be made illegal, it looks like the chief financial officer of the trump organization is a flipper and maybe somebody who's even managing some of the president's own personal

finances. so that would be an interesting conversation, to see how weisselberg's position will be affected in the trump organization. >> yeah, certainly imagine that will be awkward going forward. thanks for that, paul. and here with me now to share their reporting and their insights, cnn's abby phillip, carl holt with "the new york times," eliana johnson with politico, and cnn's shimon prokupecz. shimmy, i'm going to start with you on this. how worried should trump be about this? >> i think he should be very worried about this. i'll tell you one of the things that's most remarkable. who benefitted out of this? in all of this, the person that benefitted out of this was the president. if he wasn't the president, if he was a private citizen, chances are we'd be facing a very different situation here. it's likely that he would have been indicted in this. when you look at the people -- this is clearly about the hush money, right? they brought in pecker, the "national enquirer" guy.

they gave him immunity. now we learn the cfo gets immunity. clearly this is about money, about these hush payments. there's one person that benefitted in all of this. clearly they wanted to bring everyone in. whoever they could get to help cooperate in this investigation. michael cohen they didn't want because he was probably the closest person to the president that was involved in this. he was in the middle of all of this. but if i was the president, i certainly would be worried about this. the other thing that can happen now that all these guys have immunity is they can go before congress and not fear any kind of prosecution. it's clear that weisselberg was concerned about being prosecuted for this, which is why his attorneys got him immunity. he probably would have been prosecuted for this. but prosecutors felt whatever information they needed from him was important enough that they were willing to give him immunity. >> we'll play this tape from september 2016. michael cohen mentioning weisselberg. >> i need to open up a company

for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend david, you know, so that -- i'm going to do that right away. i've spoken to allen weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with funding. it's all the stuff because you never know where he's going to be. >> you imagine this doesn't land well with the president, who of course is worried about flippers. weisselberg is someone the trump family has known for decades. >> absolutely. i think a lot of people wondered why the president seems to worked up about this idea of flipping earlier this week in that fox interview. he spent so much time talking about how unfair it was, how much experience he'd had with it 30 and 40 years ago. now we know two people close to him have essentially flipped. we don't know exactly why, what this is all leading up to, but

clearly the president, who had drawn a sort of bright line around his businesses, is now seeing that being the center of something that could be a pandora's box for him. i think paul made a really important point about trump. allen weisselberg is currently in a position in the trump organization. he's the person in charge when trump stepped away from his businesses and became president, he put his sons and allen in charge of his businesses. now the question is, what happens now? how does this upend trump world, an organization that's currently still, you know, chugging along without the president? i think it really raises a lot of questions going forward about the future for allen in that organization. >> right. and the president famously -- i mean, you talked about this red line and what he would do, president trump saying this would be a red line. here he is talking to "the new york times." >> mueller was looking at your finances, your family's finances unrelated to russia. is that a red line? >> would that be a breach of his

actual -- >> i would say yeah. >> but carl, it isn't up to the president to draw red lines with these investigations. >> yeah, i said earlier, we've seen this movie before, and it's the untouchables. the feds always want to get the bookkeeper. that's where the person who really knows where the money has gone. and i think that this is all part of the president's agitation this week and his pushing on jeff sessions. he knows the extent of the knowledge that the cfo of his organization has. but i do think that this is, you know, if they're really dipping into the business side, there's always been a nervousness among the trump family and the insiders that there were things they knew were there and they should be off limits. they're obviously not off limits. i do think the big question here is going forward, what is the venue for this to play out? is there more legal cases coming? i think it also elevates the

midterms. if you want to, as you said, get these people before congress, there's only one way that's going to happen, if the democrats have the house or even the senate. >> you've seen some interest from folks on the hill with getting some of those folks back there, for instance cohen. you imagine they have interest in weisselberg as well. >> yeah, michael cohen, who's testified before congress but behind closed doors once, lots of interest in having him come back again now that this case has unfolded. i think the question to me is how does robert mueller use any of the evidence and information that's come forth if he does at all, and what are the relationships between these two probes that are unfolding on parallel tracks? as a result, you know, how does that really impact the president? du does robert mueller include some of this information in a report to congress, the campaign finance violations, or does he segment it off, which he seemed

to be doing when he referred the prosecution to the southern district. that's all an open question right now, i think. i think that's what the president really should be worried about in terms of how this really impacts him. >> and shimon, could you weigh in on that? mueller, as you said, famously kind of ships stuff off to the sdny. >> from everything we know, i think the department of justice and people at the sdny that are prosecuting this understand that they cannot indict the president. that's probably why we haven't seen a cooperation agreement that was given to michael cohen. in essence, the big fish here would be the president. if you look at all this and it's clear the government feels there was some serious criminal violations and how the hush money was handled. in terms of robert mueller, whether or not he can take this, i think it's been pretty clear that he's not joining any part of this investigation. what remains to be seen is whether or not michael cohen, if eventually michael cohen does wind up meeting with those

investigators. now that he's pleaded guilty and is getting a sentence, investigators could feel essentially it's easy now to talk to him if he's willing to talk to them, and they don't have to give him anything. it's like a free for all. he'll just go in, talk to them. they don't have to give him anything. it doesn't hurt his credibility because no one can later on argue, well, you got a deal for your cooperation. really, i think in the end where all this has to wind up because it seems to me for now the federal government, the fbi and department of justice, is done with this part. it's now up to really the members of congress, which can have access to all this information from the department of justice and the fbi so that if they do decide to speak to michael cohen and the cfo and others who were involved in this, they should be able to without anyone really feeling that they're going to be prosecuted for anything. all this information will likely be made available to members of congress if they want it. >> and eventually maybe the public. who weisselberg is, incredibly important to the trump family, as you said, and he's cooperated

with feds. he's handled trump organization finances, prepared trump's tax returns, managed trump's private trust, as you said, abby, treasurer of trump's charity, and he's also a miss universe pageant board member. >> i mean, this is the person who knows pretty much everything there is to know about the financial part of donald trump's life. even also the private part of donald trump's life. there is a nexus between those two things. the fact we're talking about hush money payments, that's about alleged affairs the president had. there's a big universe of things he could know. you brought up tax returns. we haven't seen the president's tax returns. that remains one of the things that the president has held so closely. it just reveals -- i think weisselberg holds the key to a lot of that, but this breaking up of trump's inner sanctum is

where this leads. >> trump had some key employees that he treated like family, that knew everything. this is one of them. there's a couple others. there's no one really who has more potentially damaging information. >> we'll have to leave it there. coming up, we'll have an update on the health of senator john mccain. stay with us. baby boomers, here's something you should know. there's a serious virus out there that 1 in 30 boomers has, yet most don't even know it. a virus that's been almost forgotten. it's hepatitis c. hep c can hide in the body for years without symptoms. left untreated it can lead to liver damage, even liver cancer. the only way to know if you have hep c is to ask your healthcare provider for the simple blood test. if you have hep c, it can be cured. for us, it's time to get tested. it's the only way to know for sure.

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a somber update now on ailing senator john mccain. mccain's family has released a statement saying he's chosen to discontinue medical treatment for his cancer. a sign that he could be entering his final days. mccain was diagnosed last summer with an aggressive form of brain cancer, and he has spent much of the last year seeking treatment in arizona. cnn's sunlen serfaty joins me live. walk me through what we know

right now about john mccain. >> reporter: well, senator mccain has been receiving treatment for brain cancer since last july. certainly this is a very grim health update from his family coming today that he is indeed and has chosen himself to discontinue medical treatment for that cancer. notable that in a statement his family gave just an hour or so ago in announcing this decision, they give a nod in essence to the battle that he's waged over the past year, battling this aggressive form of cancer. they say that in the last year, john has surpassed expectations for his survival, but they say the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict. senator mccain has not been up here on capitol hill for quite some time. he was last seen up here in december. he has of course at times chimed

in from the sidelines from his home in arizona. he occasionally tweets out statements. his office sends out statements, even though he's unable to physically get back here to the halls of congress to cast his votes. of course, we have heard an outpouring of love and support from his colleagues up here on capitol hill. bipartisan support from senator schumer, from mitch mcconnell, from speaker of the house paul ryan, of course sending their love and support during this very hard time. of course speaking to how beloved he is up here on capitol hill. nia? >> thank you so much, sunlen, for that really sad update. we're seeing a lot of reaction online to the news from the mccain family. senate majority leader mitch mcconnell tweets he's very sad to hear this morning's update from the family of our dear friend senator john mccain. we're so fortunate to call him our friend and colleague. john, cindy, and the entire mccain family are in our prayers a the this incredibly difficult hour.

moments after the family released their statement, john mccain's wife shared this on twitter. i love my husband with all of my heart. god bless everyone who has cared for my husband along this journey. and senator mccain's daughter meghan mccain shares this poignant tweet about her father. my family is deeply appreciative of all of the love and generosity you've shown us during this past year. thank you for all of your continued support and prayers. we could not have made it this far without you. you've given us strength to carry on. joining me with their insights and their reporting and thoughts about john mccain, we've got chief medical correspondent dr. sanjay gupta, "inside politics" own john king, and cnn's meave restin. john, i'll start with you. a sad day for the mccain family and really the country. >> nia, i never thought i'd speak this sentence. john mccain is giving up the fight. but that's what he's doing today. dr. gupta can get into the medical reasons. in the family statement, they

talk about how he's fought this. he's had several seizures along the way, including a bad one last friday, i'm told. he has decided with their consultation that it is time to stop trying to fight it with medical treatment. that is a big deal if you know the life and history of john mccain. he's an american hero. he's been a republican politician through several iterations of the republican party. through all of that, he's been a fighter and survivor. you look at how he was tortured and imprisoned in vietnam. if you look at his crustiness, and i say that as a high compliment, as a challenger to george bush in the republican primary, running for president himself in 2008, as a voice before he was sidelined by this horrible disease against this president often at times. a very dysfunctional relationship, being polite, with president trump. so the arc of john mccain's life, whether you're looking at his military service, his political service, his own admission later in life that he's far from a perfect person and how he's learned from his mistakes, whether it's things he did in politics, positions he took. a remarkable american life.

sadly, we're losing a hero. not just in military service. people who have such a depth and breadth of american history in their blood, in politics, we don't have enough of that these days. >> sanjay, this is a tough, tough illness. the treatment is also quite tough on the body. >> that's basically it. i think every step of the way from the time of diagnosis through the treatment, there's a constant sort of evaluation going on, the risks and benefits. this particular tumor, a gbm, it's an aggressive brain cancer. it starts in the brain as opposed to starting somewhere else in the body and spreading to the brain. since i've been practicing neurosurgery 25 years now, since i started my training, we haven't made a lot of progress in terms of actually improving survival there. there's some potential promise out there, but senator mccain had an operation last summer, last july. he's been undergoing treatment. as john king sort of mentioned,

it's sometimes been tough on his body. he's been hospitalized for the side effects of this therapy at various points. so the risk-benefit analysis continues. at this point, they decided the risks no longer outweighed the benefits. it's tough, you know. it's tough for the family and obviously john mccain and his doctors to all arrive at this decision, but it sounds like that's where they are now. >> yeah, and meave, you covered him in 2008, traveling on the straight talk express. talk about that campaign back in 2008. >> well, you know, i think it's such an important part of this discussion that we should not overlook, that part of john mccain's legacy is just an entirely different era of politics. not just in the way that he interacted with the press but also, you know, being remembered for his civility and his humor. i was covering him back in a

cold winter in 2007 when there were just three reporters with him on the bus. he would talk for hours and hours, literally sometimes like ten hours a day, telling funny stories. you wanted to go write your story. you wanted him to stop telling his same jokes, but he loved having this band of brothers around him. he would tell stories about doing shots with hillary clinton and stories about his past. he would make fun of lindsey graham, who would ride the bus with him, remembering how he fell asleep in a meeting for taking too many sleeping pills on the plane before handing on a flight abroad. he also during the campaign just in contrast with donald trump, i remember this one moment. i think we were in pennsylvania. a woman stood up and said she was afraid of president obama being president and said he was an arab. john mccain took the microphone away from her, sternly corrected her, and said, no, ma'am,

president obama is a decent man, i admire him. he said he thought he would make a much better president, but it was just such a different level of bipartisanship and respect for others in power. i know that a lot of his friends and allies are talking about a lot of those stories today, nia. >> and certainly maeve, something we don't see very often now in this town. john, i'm going to go to you on this. i want to play a little bit of your interview you had with senator mccain in 2008. >> why do you think you still, after all this time, have to convince these people i have been with you from the beginning? >> i don't know. maybe i haven't done a good enough job. we're trying to, and we're trying to show them that i am a conservative in every way. i'm a proud conservative, but i'm not embarrassed at all about the fact that i have reached across the aisle to try to get things done for them in washington while preserving those conservative principles.

>> john, go ahead. >> think of that in the context of 2008 then close your eyes and fast forward ten years to where we are today. john mccain was considered not a reliable conservative because, as maeve noted, he thought hillary clinton was a show boat, a first lady who wanted to run for president, was stopping by the senate to punch a ticket. then he realized she's doing the work, i respect her. she travels with me to iraq and afghanistan. she's trying. he was willing to reach across the aisle because he wanted to solve problems. he opposed the george w. bush tax cut in 2000 because he said it was too big, a fiscal conservative couldn't support it because the deficit was too big. and yes, he believed and ended up working with senator ted kennedy and others on mccain/kennedy/bush, which was citizenship, a path to citizenship. he wanted to solve problems and get things done. he was willing to compromise to do that. for that, he was the nominee of his party in 2008. but for that, he became a pariah in today's republican party because he respected his opposition and because he wanted to get things done.

that tells us -- that's a terrible statement about today's politics. >> and how he had to swerve back in his re-election campaign in arizona, for example, had to take a much harder line on immigration. film ads down at the border underscoring over and over again he wanted to be tough on immigration and had a couple of tough fights there. >> yeah, build the dang fence. i remember that. >> one of the republican candidates for senate in his home state has a white nationalist on her bus tour because she says it helps her get attention on the media campaign trail. we know a lot of the things this president has done. if john mccain were not sidelined by this horrible disease, we would have a different debate in our country. i'm not saying it would change, but we would have a very loud, passionate voice that we have missed for quite some time now. >> thank you, john, maeve, and sanjay for those insights. more "inside politics" just ahead. we'll be right back. ♪

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michael cohen, the president's former fixer, committed to at least two felonies at the direction of the president, crimes prosecutors say they could prove with text messages, audio recordings, and chats sent over encrypted apps. the unprecedented level of cooperation from the president's most trusted has the white house wrangling with this very important question today. what do federal prosecutors know about their boss that they don't? i'm going to add matt here from "the boston globe." this in some ways has moved from russia to the president's sort of personal finances and personal dealings, something that must make this president very uncomfortable. >> yeah, i mean, the walls are sort of closing in from all sorts of areas among people that he has trusted for a long time. i think that puts him in an extremely vulnerable situation. but it's not dealing yet with

russia and collusion, the thing that mueller has been looking at. it's of a much more personal nature. these are things that during the presidential campaign, he didn't release his taxes. he ran a private business. so we didn't -- we're learning new things about him that we didn't know about before as an electorate when we elected him. i think that opens up a lot of new channels for investigation. >> and the president apparently at one point is asking people around him, how did this move from russia to these issues? i sort of point you to what happened with president clinton moving from one thing to something else. >> when you talk to the president's allies, this is something they beat on constantly. they say these charges have absolutely nothing to do with russia. and that is, i think, a case you'll be hearing increasingly from them. and they're frustrated that the news media is not pointing this out more often. so i think you're going to see increasingly the president's allies on television making the

case that this is a prosecution and a special counsel run amok, gone far afield from the initial case -- their initial mandate to investigation collusion in the election. >> and they'll have something else to point to. "the new york times" is reporting that the manhattan district attorney's office is considering pursuing criminal charges against the trump organization and two senior company officials in connection with michael d. cohen's hush money payment to an adult film actress, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter. >> i think that's important because these state charges trump could not pardon people. i've always thought this was really dangerous territory for trump trump, in some ways more dangerous than the russia investigation because of the women, the personal life, things people can relate to. the gender gap for the party is huge. i just think that the more attention that's focused on this, the more it causes trouble for president trump with women,

and they're going to be a huge force in this midterm election. i think it figures right into that. >> and abby, harder for the president to distance himself in many ways from people like weisselberg. >> yeah, but he's going to try. we heard him this week. michael cohen, he at least acknowledged michael cohen worked for him. >> sometimes i saw him. >> he said, i hardly ever saw him, he worked with me part-time. no one believes that's true. so the president is never going to let that get in the way of him trying to distance himself from these folks. but to your point, i mean, they have real information that they may or may not know about things that went on in the organization around trump, around his personal life. you started the segment by talking about i think a really important point, which is what does the president's own staff not know about all of this? i think the answer is a lot. >> yeah, because they've been relying on him as a narrator. >> for the most part, the people

who work for him in the white house right now are people who basically just came into trump's life in the last several years. they don't know all that much. they didn't let very many people in the campaign or around the president. i'm not even sure they vetted the president, really. i think there are probably a lot of things they're not prepared to deal with that are going to come out as a result of this whole probe. it's going to pose some challenges to them. perhaps his lawyers are doing some of that due diligence now, but i think the white house is going to be caught surprised by quite a bit that might unfold now that this is the southern district of new york and the new york state prosecutors and the mueller probe. it's a lot of things that they don't know about. >> and they weren't involved in the campaign. a lot of the people around him now weren't in the campaign. they don't know a lot of history with the president. >> they don't go back to new york. >> it's one of the reasons that the president's legal strategy kind of got in trouble with don mcgahn. the lawyers said, well, the

president said he didn't do anything wrong, so let's provide our cooperation. well, you know, that's the president's guarantee. >> and we'll see. we haven't heard yet from the president. i guess we have to sort of check our twitter feed and see if he's tweeting about this. next, congressman duncan hunter says he's innocent but suggests his wife might not be. it's the sears labor day event! ...where you can shop with confidence and convenience plus get these 4 benefits from kenmore at sears. up to fifty percent off appliances with your sears card. like this washer and dryer for $539.99 each. and this refrigerator for $899.99. hurry in to sears today.

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first lady will be in ohio tonight for a big gop fundraising dinner, which republican governor and trump critic john kasich is planning to skip. the president and the rest of us could finally get the results of that closely contested special election for the ohio's 12th congressional district while he's there. republican troy balderson, who the president backed, holds a razor-thin margin over danny o'connor. a georgia board voted down a plan to close seven of nine polling places in a majority african-american county ahead of the midterms. critics said it was an effort to suppress the black vote in georgia's governor's race where stacy abrams is running against brian kemp. abrams applauded the decision and said she would ensure all eligible georgians have access to the ballot box to cast their votes and make their voices heard. california republican congressman duncan hunter and his wife have pleaded not guilty

to charges they misused more than $250,000 in campaign funds. the allegations in the indictment are quite stunning, and some of them are truly, truly bizarre. the indictment says it's clear that hunter was aware of his wife's spending, but it appears that the congressman is trying to shift the blame to her. >> she handled my finances throughout my entire military career, and that continued on when i got into congress. i'm gone five days a week, home for two. she was also the campaign manager. so whatever she did, that'll be looked at too, i'm sure. but i didn't do it. i didn't spend any money illegally. i did not use campaign money. next, the president's campaign to bully his attorney general out of a job. got directions to the nightclub here.

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an outpouring of support this hour for senator john mccain after he announces he's decided to end treatment for brain cancer. plus, new information this hour on michael cohen's money and where it came from. the "wall street journal" reporting that part of the $4 million cohen admitted to not paying taxes on included $100,000 brokerage fee paid for by a company linked to a member of the qatari royal family. we're carefully tracking both of these stories. as we learned, another trump insider cooperated with federal prosecutors. also today, a lot of stories to get to, whatever shred of goodwill president trump had left for attorney general jeff sessions, it's gone now. president trump again making it clear over the past few days that he's out of patience with sessions. this morning, he took to twitter openingly mocking sessions. here's what he had to say. jeff, this is great, what everyone wants. so look into all of the

corruption on the other side. and, come on, jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting. and this, so unfair, jeff, double standard. the knives came out after the president told fox news on thursday that sessions, quote, never took control of the justice department. that's got to hurt. it's worth pointing out that when the president has criticized him in the past, sessions has mostly kept quiet, but not this time. he released a terse and biting statement responding directly to the president's criticism. he said, i took control of the president of justice the day i was sworn in. while i am attorney general, the actions of the department of justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. i demand the highest standards and where they are not met, i take action. wow. so matt, it's getting ugly. why do you think this time is different from what we've seen from sessions in the past? >> first, i think it's remarkable.

usually you have to wait to go to the presidential library, dig through old memos and the back room fighting that's going on. now this is just fully out. >> on twitter. >> and that's remarkable. i think there's two things that are different here. one is the context of this week. where the president is under deep legal scrutiny and there are a myriad of different ways in which he's exposed. so i think him attacking jeff sessions this week has a different tenor. the second difference is the way that republicans on the hill are reacting to this is a little different now, where in the past they sort of jumped to the defense of the attorney general. this time they're sort of saying, well, the timing isn't quite right. you know, there's an acceptance he's going to get rid of jeff sessions just after the midterms. please don't do it now. so they're not necessarily just jumping to his defense full throat.

>> there are a few who did sort of jump to his defense. we'll play this now. >> there would be concern about a domino effect. what happens then to rosenstein? is this a way to go after the mueller investigation? so it's a big concern. >> i think it would be a mistake, and i don't think it would be good for the country. >> he's a man of integrity. i've worked with him 20 years up here. you get to know people. i wish him the best. >> i wish him the best. >> those statements are what republicans -- the sentiments republicans used to be united behind. for the first time yesterday, there was a crack in the republican stone wall. those sentiments are really one of the major things that have kept the president from firing jeff sessions because republicans had said, we will not confirm a successor. that really seemed to box president trump in because if he fired sessions, he would be stuck with a member of his

cabinet or acting attorney general rod rosenstein, who might even be worse than sessions in president trump's mind. for the first time yesterday, lindsey graham came forward and said, this isn't a sustainable situation. we're open to confirming somebody else after the midterms. and chuck grassley, the current chairman of the judiciary committee who runs the schedule about confirmation hearings for new attorney generals, echoed that. bob corker said this is pretty much inevitable after the midterms. so the wall of support sessions has had among his former colleagues on capitol hill seems to be crumbling, and republicans on the hill view it as an ine inevitability. >> jeff sessions has been opposing this criminal justice reform that chuck grassley wants really badly. and chuck grassley is mad. he thinks he got sessions confirmed, he's helped protect him, and sessions is still in the way of his major legislative initiative. i think there's some of that

figuring in there and sending a message that you need to go along with what we're pushing here. >> abby, the president face to face with sessions yesterday. what did he say? >> nothing about this. this was a meeting about prison reform and by all accounts they didn't discuss this at all, which is typical of this president. he will attack you on twitter, he will attack you in interviews, but to your face, not necessarily. >> mum's the word. >> this is the pattern. these members of congress are correct. it is not sustainable for the president to be warring openly with his attorney general. at some point, that has to be resolved. and it can't happen now because they have too much on their plate before the midterms. >> we'll see how this ends. thanks for joining us on "inside politics." wolf picks up our special coverage right after a quick break. you wouldn't accept an incomplete job

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hello. i'm wolf blitzer in washington. wherever you're watching from around the world, thanks very much for joining us. we zbbegin with breaking news. the mounting legal trouble surrounding the president of the united states, donald trump. the chief financial officer for the trump organization in new york has now been granted immunity in the investigation of hush money payments to women. allen weisselberg's immunity applies to the michael cohen investigation. it was cohen who implicated the president in the payments to two women to cover up alleged affairs. peter nicolas is the white house reporter for "the wall street journal," which first reported