and that you for jonk you for j. "inside politics" with john king starts right now. have a great day. thank you, pam, and welcome to "inside politics." i'm john king. thank you for sharing your day with us. nancy pelosi says her advice is be for impeachment if that's what helps you back home but she is still in go slow mode. pelosi's advice to her members is talk more about health care. plus the former special counsel did nothing to move republicans. the president and gop leaders say it's time for congressional investigations to end, and republicans in the senate blocked votes on measures designed to protect against future foreign election interference. and the democrats prepare for debates, round two. joe biden gets more aggressive. at a national urban league

meeting, highlights the competition for african-american voters. >> it's easy to call donald trump a racist now. you get no badge of courage for that. >> today we have a president who embraces these supreme cyists ae have to defeat donald trump this time out. >> i know folk want to say the most important thing for a democratic nominee is to beat donald trump. let me tell you right now, that is a floor. it is not the ceiling. >> back to the 2020 democrats a bit later, but we begin the hour with the mueller day fallout and with democrats divided over what should happen now. no has been house speaker nancy pelosi's answer to impeachment and she has asked her caucus to wait, including last night for court fights over subpoenas and other investigations. this morning, pelosi's public message to democrats, do whatever you think you need to do. >> are you going t discourage your members at all from mounting support for impeachment inquiry? >> never have done that.

never, never have done that. they can do whatever they want. >> tomorrow the house goes on a six-week recess, but you hear little urgency this morning on the impeachment question. why, is because the drama many democrats wanted special counsel mueller to give yesterday was missing. the special counsel spent most of his confirming what you already knew. for americans who hadn't read it and tuned in for nearly seven hours of testimony, they did hear a damning portrait of the trump white house. >> so the report did not conclude that he did not commit obstruction of justice? is that correct? >> that is correct. >> and what about total exoneration, did you accidentally totally exonerate the president? >> no. >> but there was no break-through, made-for-television moment. the bulk of his answers relied on very few words, yes, correct, true, no, generally. i can't go into it. i'm not going to go into that.

when asked to read from his own report and give voice, he refused. his command of facts faltered repeatedly. he rarely strayed outside the safety of his summary. when he did suggest he would have indicted the president except for the doj guideline, he then corrected his words. >> we did not make any determination in regard to culpability in any way. we did not start the process down the road. >> let's get straight to man manu raju up on capitol hill. manu, has anything changed today? >> reporter: well, there are democrats that are calling for an impeachment inquiry but the speaker at the moment is not there. she, of course, is the person who will ultimately make that decision. this has been a subject of debate last night at a closed door caucus meeting. at that time a number of members pressed their leadership about the way forward. i'm told that's when the speaker allowed these members to air out their concerns. she made that case clear, that she wants to move forward in

courts first, but a lot of members came away thinking that she is more open to the option of moving forward with impeachment inquiry than she has been in the past. when i asked her at a press conference last night if she's still concerned about republicans controlling the senate and would effectively quash any impeachment effort, she said that is not her concern. she denied it had been her concern in the past, saying that they need to get their best, strongest case yet. but still there was discussion this morning at a meeting as well. she did mention to her members do what you need to do. if you need to support impeachment, that's fine. but she also pushed back at some critics who have said that if they don't move forward with impeachment that they are not honoring their constitutional duty saying to her colleagues, i'm told, we all have an oath that we are carrying out. even if people don't support impeachment does not mean they're honoring their constitutional duties. but nevertheless she wants to move forward one way, go through the courts. but a number of democrats i

talked to are worried that time is running out. they are heading out this week for a recess through the month of august. john, there's just not much time left in this congressional calendar afterwards. then we get into the heat of the 2020 campaign season so that's why people are getting antsy. if the mueller hearing wasn't the trigger for the impeachment inquiry, then what will be? >> appreciate that live from the hill. with you in studio, maggie haberman, ka haberman, kaitlin collins and vivian solano. before mueller spoke a lot of democrats thought that would break the dam and the number of democrats calling for impeachment would jump. only one or two after the hearing yesterday. is it fair to say that the likelihood of the democrats going forward with impeachment is significantly lower today than it was at this time yesterday? >> i would say yes. it's always been an unspoken goal of pelosi and her leadership team to get to august without launching an impeachment

inquiry. like manu said, once they get into september, they have to funding the government. then we get into the election. this morning in that closed-door meeting he was talking about, she sounded like she was in the exact same place she was two days ago. she said we have a lot to protect here, he is not worth dividing the country. her saying i'm not any closer to impeachment than i was two days ago. >> it wasn't the game-changer that the democrats had hoped for. the optics alone, really, they didn't get the sound bites. they didn't get that one big quote from mueller that says definitely there's a problem, this is a crime, anything that the democrats would have felt like they would have had enough to fuel some public sentiment to move forward with any impeachment proceedings. and so they're struggling at this point. we're really not in a different place than we were. >> were they wrong to expect that? were they wrong to build this up as some washington drama that was going to give them a break-through moment? >> i don't think anyone thought there was going to be anything explosive. there's nothing new that we

learned yesterday. that's what's interesting about even the white house declaring victory here and the president saying that he feels vindicated because the facts are still the same and the report is still pretty damning of what's going on inside the white house and how they welcomed russian interference and russian help. of course if the optics don't change, which they didn't yesterday, not only does it not seem like they're any closer to impeachment, it seems like it's been tabled even further. >> what i was struck by, and look, i understand why they wanted to have this hearing. and the report itself is a damning document. some of the heat that bob mueller took yesterday from republicans was on that front which was did you unfairly treat the president by detailing all of this because in our system you're either charged or you're innocent but you don't get to put all the evidence that wasn't used for a charge on display. essentially that is what mueller did. i think that democrats needed to do a better job of managing expectations heading into this. i certainly don't understand and maybe this wasn't -- heather, maybe you know more than i do about this, but there didn't

seem to be a whole lot of understanding that mueller was not going to be the same mueller that they had seen in congressional hearings several years ago when he last testified. i think it was about six years ago congress. they seemed surprised at how sort of stilted and halting he was at times. and the one big peeiece of newss you noted earlier, he walked back later. that's not insignificant. there were some interesting details along the way, though. there was him talking about disputing finally from his own mouth this notion that the president has perpetuated for a while that mueller was seeking the fbi director job again. he's been saying that for a long time as part of his alleged conflict that he's been maintaining mueller has that nobody else agreed with him on in his own white house, but that's not necessarily going to change minds. in the minds of the public, this had pretty much halted once the report came out and people read it for themselves. and for people who were very unhappy with the media for suggesting this might not be a durable news story going forward, we have covered mueller

for two years, all of us at this table. really almost every day. it's not like the public doesn't know the body of information there. and that's not what a lot of people are voting on. >> and to that point, if you had read the report, you didn't learn a lot yesterday. if you hadn't read the report, but it was the democrats saying it more than mueller. he would answer yes or true but refused to read the report. to maggie's point, if you watched all seven and a half hours or if you read the report, it paints a damning picture of a campaign that was more than willing to accept russian help, actually encouraging it, of a president and a candidate who told his aides stymie the investigation, get in the way, try to fire bob mueller. here's one point where mueller was talking with val demmings about was the president of the united states -- the president refused to sit down for an interview. mueller fought for months, the president refused. mueller ultimately decided not to try a subpoena fight. the president did answer some questions in writing. in this exchange mueller says a lot of those answers were

worthless. >> there were many questions that you asked the president that he simply didn't answer, isn't that correct? >> true. >> and there were many answers that contradicted other evidence that you had gathered during the investigation. isn't that correct? >> yes. >> isn't it fair to say that the president's written answers were not only inadequate and incomplete because he didn't answer many of your questions, but where he did, his answers showed that he wasn't always being truthful? >> i would say generally. >> now, if you're writing a report on that, there's the special counsel, a former fbi director, a man with more than 30 years in law enforcement saying the president of the united states lied, he didn't tell the truth, his answers were contradicted by other evidence in the investigation. he's answering questions with one word, true, yes, generally. that's where he gets you if you connect the dots yourself. the democrats wanted mueller to connect those dots staring into the camera. >> and be more forceful.

yes, the president wasn't completely honest, but just answering in the affirmative doesn't give democrats what they wanted. but it's not really a winning talking point for the white house or his allies to say the president is generally not truthful in his written answers. i think that's why you saw the president tell reporters he's glad he didn't sit down with robert mueller and didn't answer that. that was a big point of contention that didn't come up until much later on, on why they didn't subpoena president trump. >> that was a huge issue throughout this investigation. they were having this year-long back and forth about the parameters of an interview and what it would look like. what was interesting was hearing mueller say in his own words for the first time, look, it was going to become a protracted legal fight. we tried various ways. mueller, for all of trumps complaints that he was treated unfairly, it was very clear if you watched what mueller did yesterday in the hearing, he bent over backwards to be fair to trump, particularly with the question of the subpoena. we were trying to ending this

from going longer than it should have. they believed the president would challenge the legality of the -- did they not because they didn't think they would get truthful answers? we don't know. that doesn't take it to a place where democrats wanted it to go. >> as we go to break, when we come back we'll talk more about the president's response and the republican response. i want to show you these numbers. back may 29th when robert mueller made his first public statement, 38 democrats were on the record saying let's have impeachment inquiry. we are at 93 today. democrats are about to go on a six-week recess. we'll see if that number grows when we were away. when we come back, the president says he's totally vindicated. republicans in congress say shut down the investigations. noaries... ...between my skin and my foundation. true match from l'oreal. seamless, flawless coverage in 45 shades. find your true match. it truly matches my skin. true match is enriched with 80% moisturizing serum

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campaign officials telling their allies to repeat the president's over and over again. say it was a bad performance, say it hurt their democrats. say the special counsel landed few, if any, very serious blows against the president. time to move on, it's the message. moving on will deprive the president that's been an everyday target that animated him two plus years. that's an interesting question for me. this has been a rallying point almost. the president loves an enemy and sometimes needs a punching bag. if mueller is done, what does he do? >> i think that we're forgetting and i was reminded of this by a trump supporter the other half of this coin which is barr is still looking into how the investigators handled the investigation. if we think that there's not going to be something that they produce from that, we haven't been paying attention for the last couple of years. but look, i do think that there is a risk for trump in the fact that this show has moved on from mueller. that mueller has had -- there's an end point there. a lot of the investigations are still going on.

the more the focus is on trump's behavior, the more the focus is on policy and how it relates to working class voters, middle class voters, the more that the focus is on things like the president's tweets about the squad, quote unquote, i don't think that helps him. and so i do think that a lot of the noise around mueller, despite the conduct that it was describing, was beneficial to him. the other thing that the president said in mischaracterizing this really quickly, what mueller said. what mueller was the most emphatic about was russian interference in the election and the fact there is going to be interference again in 2020. possibly not only by russia. that was something he's clearly profoundly disturbed by. he said it in his only other public statement. that is something the president doesn't want to talk about at all, in part because he sees it as undermining his own victory, but that's where we're headed for 2020. >> without a doubt. that's where he was most passionate, mueller was. volume one, the second part of the day, he seemed much more

engaged and much more familiar with the body of work talking about that. the other time when he got passionate and we talked about now democrats didn't get their made-for-tv mueller looking into the camera and saying you should impeach him or i would have prosecuted him if not for the guidelines. republicans also didn't get what they were looking for, mueller to concede there was bias or any questions. he was most passionate about the russian interference, which he thinks is ongoing, said is ongoing, and also about defending. remember the president says 18 angry democrats. republicans in democrats said they gave to the clinton campaign. mueller said my team was a good team. >> i've been in this business for almost 25 years. in those 25 years i have not had occasion once to ask somebody about their political affiliation. it is not done. what i care about is the capability of the individual to do the job and do the job quickly and seriously and with integrity. >> the integrity at the end there. he has listened to this criticism for two years. again, there's a lot of questions about his performance.

a lot of people criticizing his performance and people asking questions was he not familiar with his own report. with these issues he was pretty passionate. >> and we did expect him to be passionate about it. he's given his life to public service, the fbi was there for 12 years. he'll be remembered as probably one of the best fbi directors. he was there through 9/11, the boston bombing. he's been involved in -- in the end i think him testifying yesterday, i think people around him were very concerned about his legacy, how was this going to show him. it could be the very last time we hear from him. to maggie's point, she makes a very good point about bill barr and the investigation of the investigators. i do think there's going to be things that are going to be favorable for the president. because we know that bill barr was not a fan of this investigation from the way it started to the fact -- the collusion investigation, so-called collusion investigation, the conspiracy investigation. barr was not a fan of it. so i do think there's going to be stuff there for the president that we have yet to see, which

he is going to latch onto and is probably going to be helpful to him. >> make no mistake, this subject is not going to go away for the president, even though he might have to start focusing on other things. at his rallies, he will point to this investigation every single time and say look how much i got done despite the witch hunt, despite the hoax. he called it a dark cloud yesterday when he came outside on the south lawn. he's going to continue to point to that and say i delivered on the economy, i delivered jobs, whatever he believes his successes to be, all under that cloud of the witch hunt. so it will continue to be a dominating theme in all of his rallies going forward. >> and speaking of the words, that was another issueadamant. he says you're wrong, sir. >> when donald trump called your investigation a witch hunt, that was also false, was it not? >> i'd like to think so, yes. >> well, your investigation is not a witch hunt, is it? >> it is not a witch hunt. >> when the president said the

russian interference was a hoax. that was false, wasn't it? >> true. >> again. you get one words or two words, sometimes three words. especially on the last moipoint maggie made about the russian interference, not a hoax, true? >> this is not going away for house democrats. i think pelosi's strategy is death by a thousand cuts. she has six committees investigating various aspects of trump's administration, personal life, financials, and chairman nadler announced they're going to go to court to try to enforce the don mcgahn subpoena, try to compel the grand jury information from the mueller report to be over so they are not giving up on this at all, they are not moving on. up next, joe biden promises a new strategy in round two of the debates next week. he says he'll be less polite. 'll admit. i didn't keep my place as clean as i would like 'cuz i'm way too busy. who's got the time to chase around down dirt, dust and hair? so now, i use heavy duty swiffer sweeper and dusters. for hard-to-reach places, duster makes it easy to clean.

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what did you do when you were not running for president to fight for the communities that you now want to represent? it is not enough to show up in our communities today with a promise of a better tomorrow. what were you doing five, ten, 15 or 20 years ago to fight for racial justice, to combat racial inequality and structural inquality? >> cory booker taking some veiled shots at the former vice

president joe biden over his record on criminal justice reform. vice president biden also spoke to the urban league. biden did not use that event to attack his rivals but he has been more aggressive, suggesting he'll draw sharper contrast both with senator booker and senator harris. the biden campaign taking a poke at booker today on twitter citing two polls booker well behind biden among african-american voters. so the biden campaign, no secret, they say we have to be more aggressive in the next debate. booker is a bit more surprising to me in that he was the candidate of love. he said he didn't want to have a fight with his democrats. he sees what harris did for her gain in debates round one and it's almost a copycat strategy, right? >> everyone is talking about harris since the debate because of the fact she went on the offense against joe biden on a number of important and sensitive topics. now with joe biden after his comfortable lead predebate is also having to defend himself,

he's having to get a little more aggressive with his competitors about certain issues. you're seeing him ramp up on issues like criminal justice where a lot of his competitors say that he is responsible for a lot of the mass incarcerations because of the 1994 criminal justice bill, so he's having to defend himself. but to also go their records on these issues. same thing with medicare for all. so yes, definitely starting to gear up for next week's debates but going after some of the people that he feels will target him. >> and he's also polling very poorly. he realizes that that helped give kamala a boost. this fight has also been brewing for a while between cory booker and joe biden because after joe biden talked about working with the segregationist senators, they got into that scuffle where cory booker was like you should apologize. joe biden was like you should apologize to me. they didn't get their moment because they weren't on the debate stage together and now they will be. >> the 2016 republican primary

was never nice once trump got in. sanders/clinton was not night. obama/clinton was not night. ambition ends nice even if you're really friends. >> when you were talking about sanders versus clinton, this race is wide open, it really is. that was the lesson of the last debate. booker is taking a shot because there is a path for booker. he is polling low. there is an opportunity and it doesn't mean that he'll hit it but he could. biden has similar challenges that hillary clinton had with black lives matter protesters in her 2016 race where she found herself on really the wrong side of a generational issue where there had been a civil rights issue that had changed a lot over time. biden is obviously not going to be as complacent as he was last time. i think that's been drilled into him. but that doesn't mean we know what this will look like for him. >> and the question is does it actually happen on the debate

stage. what candidates often say when it's just them, they get more aggressive. and it will be biden in the middle, haerris on one side and booker on the other. but the vice president is target one. >> i'm disappointed that it's taken joe biden years and years until he was running for president to actually say he made a mistake. there were things in that bill that were extraordinarily bad. now that he's unveiled his crime bill, for a guy who helped to be an architect of mass incarceration, this is an inadequate solution to what is a raging crisis in our country. >> and again, you can tell the vice president, former vice president is preparing. he said senator booker, you want to talk records? then let's talk records. >> if you look at the mayor's record in newark, one of the provisions i wrote in the crime bill of pattern and practice of misbehavior, his police department was stopping and frisking people, mostly african-american men.

if he wants to go back and talk about records, i'm happy to do that, but i'd rather talk about the future. i'm happy to debate with anybody the effects of the things that i did as a united states senator, as i did as a vice president. i'm anxious to have a debate with senator booker. >> he doesn't sound very anxious. you do get -- in the week before a debate when candidates talk to reporters, you get their briefing books. they talk about what they have been reading and preparing. so it's clear he was studying senator booker's record and kamala harris' record as a prosecutor out in california so that he can exchange fire. he does not seem terribly energized by the prospect of fighting his fellow democrats, but he has to given his slide in the powlls, right? >> when he first came out he acted like he was the only democratic candidate and trump was the only opponent of his. now after segregationist comments, he had to respond to booker. ever since then we've seen him

punch booker and harris on various things. i think he's realized that he can't just be the presumed front-runner and not respond to these criticisms from his fellow democratic candidates. >> a lot is also responding to the changes within the democratic party itself. president obama remains very popular, but the party is also changing. a lot of his opponents actually reflect those changes so he's having to juggle the two, where he's also trying to stay true to his roots with the obama administration but also communicate to the changing tide within the party itself. >> and you have this fierce competition for the democratic base, african-american voters. if you go back to 2008 and early on, that was all for hillary clinton. even though senator obama was in the race, because nobody thought he was ready yet or viable. once he proved he was viable, the flood gates open. that's why you have senator harris and senator booker saying look at me. that's why you have former vice president biden on the tom joyner show saying i guess i'll have to mix it up with kamala harris too. >> i thought we were friends. i hope we still will be.

she asked me to go out -- called me and asked me to go to her convention and be the guy from outside california to nominate her at her convention for the senate seat. i did. we've talked, we worked a lot together. she and my son beau were attorneys general and took on the banks. >> she did invite him for the california convention. there's no nominating piece of that, so there's a factual discrepancy there. but again, he doesn't sound enthusiastic about the challenge he faces next week, which is stand your ground, defend your past, but then pivot and don't be afraid to attack. >> it sounds like he wants to keep talking about being victimized by her and that will at some point annoy voters, specifically women voters. why would he think that she would not fight for the position she wants. >> friends and nice gives way to ambition every time. as we go to break, some insight from some of those african-american voters. this is yesterday's naacp

presidential candidate forum in detroit. >> joe biden is of my era, okay. and i think he has been second in command for quite a while. >> i am leaning more towards cory booker. i just felt like he has that determination. >> bernie sanders really -- i hear if he gets elected we won't have any more student debt so i'm cool with bernie sanders. cor dna results from ancestry. i was able to discover one cousin, reached out to him, visited ireland, met another 20 cousins. they took me to the cliffs of moher, the ancestral home, the family bar. it really gives you a sense of connection to something that's bigger than yourself. new features. greater details. richer stories. get your dna kit today at ancestry.com.

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topping our political radar today, the justice department opening the door for the federal government to resume capital punishment after a nearly 20-year lapse.

william barr saying to execute five death row inmates. senator bernie sanders promising to abolish the death penalty when, he says, he is president. senator kamala harris calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, not it's resurrection. now an exclusive report here on cnn, according to documents reviewed by cnn, hundreds of red flags were raised within the trump administration about how families were being separated at the u.s./mexico border. joining me now, diane gallagher. what do these documents tell us, diane? >> for the most part, john, these were government officials reporting hundreds of cases of family separation and it happened long before that policy was ever announced. they were reporting to the dhs office of civil rights and civil liberties. they were exclusively seen by cnn and some really excellent reporting by my colleague, priscilla alvarez. there were all sorts of allegations. a 14-year-old was separated from his father after a meal break

and told my officers that his dad would be deported. another one details an 11-year-old who says that he was called aside by an officer and then just didn't see his father again. so of the 850 referrals of family separation between january and june of 2018, the overwhelming majority are from the office of refugee resettlement. even house judiciary chairman jerry nadler cited these documents during a panel hearing today. he called them startling and noted the majority of the dozen children under the age of 1 were separated before the zero tolerance policy was officially enacted. more than a hundred of the referrals predate the announcement of that controversial policy. look, in some cases they do cite criminal history as a reason behind the separation. that could fall under a long-standing child welfare policy but the referrals don't explain how are if the case was resolved. an hhs official tells cnn that given orr was unaware of a zero

separations type policy before the announcement was made, reports were submitted as incidents of abuse in dhs custody and they were sent to the department of civil rights and liberties office, john. >> thank you for the ground-breaking reporting. important we keep our focus on this and other issues. up next for us, as democrats look to november 2020 as their best and perhaps last chance to get president trump out of the white house. when i book at hilton.com i get to select my room from the floor plan... free wi-fi... ...and the price match guarantee. so with hilton there is no catch. yeah the only catch is i'm never leaving. no i'm serious, i live here now. book at hilton.com and get the hilton price match guarantee. nooooo...tcha! noooooo... quick, the quicker picker upper! bounty picks up messes quicker and is 2x more absorbent. bounty, the quicker picker upper.

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the impeachment divide among democrats includes those looking to move into the white house come january 2021. more than half of the 2020 democratic field backs impeachment proceedings now. others like the former vice president, joe biden, have said for now they support speaker nancy pelosi's take it much more slowly approach. but even some of the candidates calling for impeachment understand the math and acknowledge whether the president stays in office is almost certainly up to the voters in 2020. >> i believe that an impeachment inquiry would bring more facts to light. i also believe that the republican senate will not act, and so i'm focusing on the best thing i can do about the trump presidency, which is to defeat it in november of 2020. >> what we ultimately must be prepared to do should congress fail, remember, the power of the people is greater than the people in power. and we need to be ready to beat

donald trump soundly in the 2020 elections, and that's why i'm running for president. >> does yesterday, mueller's testimony, change anything about the presidential race and the calculations of the 2020 candidates? >> it's too soon to say. i do think that -- look, again, i think there's a difference between whether the hearings are a durable news story past today and whether this left a lasting impression for people past today. those are two separate things. i don't think we'll know until we see whether this factors in debates, whether people start talking about it more in the fall. it certainly could. i think it is likelier that it factors in only in the sense that you have people who are trying to make the point, and you're starting to see them, cory booker did a bit of that. there has been a sense the democrats have been waiting for mueller to save them. and ultimately it is voters who are going to have to make this decision. i think that you will see more candidates start saying that more urgently. >> dan balz putting it this way in "the washington post" today

under the headline democrats are one last option toned president trump's re-election in 2020. after wednesday, the prospects for impeachment appear more remote, which means it will be left to the eventual democratic presidential nominee which the help of the party, to develop a comprehensive case against the president, one that can win 277 electoral votes. to date, this hasn't happened. mueller did not deliver what democrats had hoped he wochlt if they hope to win in 2020, it's now on them to convince the voters. there's a quinnipiac poll that shows biden meeting trump, sanders, buttigieg, warren, in a dead heat. you can say ohio is more competitive than 2016. on the other hand you can say at a very early time, the president is in play there. if you look deeply in the trump base among white ohio voters without a college degree, trump wins. that's been a key part of his base. trump leads all the democrats

among white ohio voters without a college degree. he beat hillary clinton 30 points in the state of ohio so democrats are running stronger than hillary clinton, but there is still -- if you go state by state, despite the president's polling numbers with a strong economy, he's got a map that he can win. >> and that's going to be the question here going forward. as the white house, if they do turn away from all of this impeachment talk, as you saw the president say yesterday we need to focus on other things. if they start talking about things like health care, what is that going to do? that seems something that resonates more with these supporters, or these swing voters that the president and his campaign are going after than something like what we saw play out yesterday, these hours of testimony from robert mueller which doesn't seem to be a concern when you're talking to voters on the road. >> this is interesting because nancy pelosi is getting criticized within her own caucus, but this is a talking point that all of these presidential candidates have latched onto. what he's been saying for months, if not more than a year, which is, sure, i would like to ipeach him, he's committed

impeachable offenses, but the best thing to do is beat him at the ballot box. let's do that. so i think they see -- they see the smartness of doing that even if her own caucus doesn't. >> when we come back, remember robert mueller yesterday saying the russian meddling is ongoing. well, the senate decided to bring up the question just after the hearing was over. what happened? in one of america's favorite boats! the boat for summer sales event is going on now at bass pro shops, cabela's, and other fine dealers nationwide. where you can get a gift card and more with purchase of select boats. like a $750 gift card plus boat cover and gear with purchase of a sun tracker fishin' barge 20. that's a total value of over $1800! for a limited time only, during the boat for summer sales event. moves like these need pampers cruisers 360 fit with an ultra stretchy waistband and 360 fit that adapts to every wild move

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senate democrats tried yesterday just after the mueller hearing to pass a new election

security measure to prevent future election interference by russian and other foreign actors. republicans objected. today the democratic leader of the senate tried again. the republican leader of the senate said no. >> we are asking our republican colleagues to join with us in doing everything we can to stop it. this is serious stuff. >> my friend the democratic leader is asking unanimous consent to pass is partisan legislation from the democratic house of representatives relating to american elections. it's just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about president trump and russia. therefore, i object. >> one provision of the legislation would require a campaign if a foreign actor reached out, would require you, make it the law you had to tell the feds. the republicans argue we've done enough already. have they? >> well, i think there was a briefing, a classified briefing with trump administration

officials for both the senate and the house about two weeks ago. and members left and they couldn't say much under the guise that it was classified, but they did say these officials said we have the resources that we need to protect the integrity of our elections. if we need something else we will come to you. even democrats were saying that. so i think some members left feeling comfortable that, yes, they have done enough. we'll see. >> they don't like to talk about this around the president, though. that's what's interesting. they do say and he's been mad at dan coats and others who have said yes, there's interference. yes, it's ongoing. in this new system there's a national security official who can call into the agencies and say act, right? they have created a command and control structure which they didn't have before? >> they see this as a rebuke of the president going forward with this. that's why mcconnell is acting so forcefully saying we don't need. this but you're right, this is a topic that people will go out of their way to avoid bringing it up with the president, even though there are officials who insist this is something they are working on stringently

because they know behind the scenes this is a big issue. yesterday robert mueller said yes, this is happening, russian interference, as i am sitting here in front of you today. but that's the question going forward, if they're doing enough. of course from republicans yesterday you did not see a great cause of concern about election interference and you see that echoed in kevin mccarthy's comments say they don't see a problem with the president's behavior. >> the president's responses when we just saw him with vladimir putin last month and he teased him and said don't interfere in our elections again. so people concerned that publicly he isn't taking a tougher stance but behind closed doors they are doing more. >> republicans are taking a gamble they are not going to pay a price, not just the president, but the entire party, if there is interference. that's a big unknown right now. we don't know what this might look like down the road. >> one would hope based on the

experience of 2016 we're all better at what we do in watching for it in 2020, including not just reporters, including people when you log online. thanks for joining us. hope to see you this time tomorrow. brianna keilar starts right now. have a great afternoon. i'm brianna keilar live from cnn's washington headquarters. under way right now, democrats can't decide on impeachment, and america is under attack right now by the russians. but is anybody even listening? and no more mr. polite guy. joe biden has had it with attacks from his rivals so he's changing his game plan. plus, the millionaire indicted for trafficking underage girls is found injured in his jail cell. also despite love letters and more summits, north korea fires a, quote, new kind of missile. and why the ceiling of notre dame cathedral may be on the verge of