from up above and on the ground, so thankful there weren't the injuries we normally would fear after something like this. thank you, ed lavandera on the ground in dallas. he'll be there throughout the day. thank you for joining me today "inside positive today. "inside politics" with john king starts right now. thank you, kate, and welcome to "inside politics." i'm john king. thank you for sharing your day with us. president trump is in a cabinet meeting this hour talking to reporters right now. we'll bring any news from that asap. plus many big witnesses as the impeachment inquiry gains steam. the house chief of staff is in hot water, trying now to take back what they call his ukraine corruption. and bernie sanders has a new sidekick. >> would you consider him to be

your running mate? >> i think i'm too young for that. >> would you work in a sanders white house? >> yes, she would. >> back to 2020 politics a bit later in the program. but right now the president inside a cabinet meeting at the white house. he's talking to reporters. we'll bring you the view from inside that room as soon as we have it. we begin the hour with personnel, two from the white house chief of staff, one which is a lie. friday mick mulvaney admitted quid pro quo at the center of the impeachment inquiry, a rumor in exchange for military assistance. he again said he said no such thing. >> you said a few minutes ago that i said there was quid pro quo. don't use that language. there was never a quid pro quo. reporters will use that language all the time. can i see how people took it the wrong way? absolutely. but i never said quid pro quo

because there isn't. sdp >> then he chalks up the discrepancies between the two stories as word choice. but it doesn't tell us what we know so far about testimony from state employees. john bolton reportedly referred to it as a drug deal being run by mick mulvaney. now there are corruption concerns. listen to mulvaney's repeated struggle telling the corruption story, that it had nothing to do with money flowing to ukraine. >> let's get to the heart of the matter. look at those three things. >> you said three reasons. >> i recognize that. go back to what actually happened in the real world. and by the way, go to the phone call. >> cnn's kaitlan collins live for us at the white house. i assume mick mulvaney is in

that cabinet room right now. >> he was on the list of the white house release saying he would be someone in the room if that gifves you any indication f his standing. it comes after mulvaney got a round of applause at a staff meeting today after it became what he acknowledged as a tough week for him, and that comes after cnn reporting that after nancy pelosi announced this impeachment inquiry. there were people in the west wing waiting to replace mulvaney as chief of staff. what's notable about this is it seems to have subsided as the white house is forced to face this impeachment inquiry, and it started questions of who in the world would want to take this job since they're up against capitol hill, and why mick mulvaney is so insulated given he knows so much about the scandal at the center of that impeachment inquiry. we're waiting to see what the president says. of course, a lot of indication that the president says of how things are going depends on the

news coverage, something the president has been paying to closely. right now in that cabinet meeting, he's defending his syria decision, saying he believes the cease-fire is holding, even though we know yesterday the defense secretary admitted there was some intermi intermittent firing still happening after it was brokered by mike pence. in that cabinet meeting, john, the president was saying his decision was the right one. he knows more, he says, than the news media and the pundits that are criticizing him. it is all lawmakers and republicans who are criticizing that move. >> we'll bring that to you as soon as we get it. with me in the studio, cnn's dana bash, kim with the "washington pos

"washington post". we played the statement from mick mulvaney at the top of the show. i never said quid pro quo. review more importantly what's true and what's not true. this is mick mulvaney in the briefing room just the other day saying something very different. >> this is a corrupt place, i don't want to send them a bunch of money and have them waste it, use it to line their pockets. did he also tell you about the corruption related to the dnc server? that was corruption. no doubt about that. >> you just described a quid pro quo. it is, furnding won't flow unles an investigation into the democratic server happens as well. >> we do that all the time with foreign policy. >> you can't take that back. you can't take that back. did he also mention to me the corruption related to the dnc server? absolutely, no question about that, but that's it, and that's

why we held up the money. >> look, i stand by the reporting that we were getting pre-news conference last week, which is that -- obviously mulvaney was one of the people involved -- was trying to kind of test-drive a strategy to say, okay, we want to investigate corruption. it was related to the money for ukraine but it was about the past, it was about the dnc server. it wasn't about the future because that's much more nefarious, the president trying to affect his future election by getting dirt on his opponent. does it make it right? it doesn't mean that he's not in trouble, it doesn't mean that he's not twisting himself into a million pretzels, but it seems to me that that is still where he was at the time and realized, oops, that didn't play so well because i completely undercut what the president said, and the president himself from the road, he was out campaigning, sent word to mulvaney, clean that up, please. >> undercut the president but also undercut what all the

allies on capitol hill had been saying at a time when, if you just follow the testimony, you can have a debate about whether it's an impeachable offense. but if you just follow the testimony about a rogue operation, rudy giuliani running the show, all the career people objecting to that, many of them complaining about it. some of them thinking it wasn't just bad, it broke the law. if you follow that and you're a republican, it's hard to go out and defend the president. a lot of them have said no quid pro quo, no quid pro quo, and mick mulvaney, what you described is quid pro quo. we do that all the time in foreign policy. >> there are people who want to protect the president because they look at their home districts and see the president still going strong. it puts lawmakers in a horrible position. they come out and say, yes, we don't love maybe the conversation the president had with the ukranian leader but there was no quid pro quo. clearly that was quid pro quo. so republicans are trying to figure out what they can say publicly that will not be undermined later by someone on

the staff. it's almost an impossible task for them because the story keeps changing here. >> exactly. what we ever heard from republicans over and over are a lot of the comments saying -- okay, maybe i wouldn't have done it, but we don't see this as an impeachable offense, but again, mulvaney going out there and basically admitting to it really undercut all the defenses. we talked to a lot of lawmakers early thursday and later friday morning as the repercussions of the mulvaney comments were still beginning to percolate. you couldn't find a republican who could defend it or object to it. and when reporters told her about mull vabout mick mulvaney comments, she said, that is really concerning. and the president really needs to work overtime to keep everyone he can on board. >> we're going to talk about that over the hour where the president has hurt himself about

syria. the president has hurt himself with republicans on the abandonment decision. on this one, if you're a republican on capitol hill, a, the evidence is coming, and most house republicans will stay with the president in different state districts. you have mick mulvaney saying something, then lisa murkowski, and you may get a majority for some motions coming up in the impeachment trial and the president is on shaky ground here. >> you could see these are the early cracks in the dam, and people like senator romney and like several of the representatives, you can just see that they're back on their heels as they're trying to defend the president from civil fronts. >> i just want to read from the cabinet meeting, the president saying about this cabinet meeting that the president needs to get tougher. he says, democrats are trying to hurt republicans ahead of next year's elections. the gop needs to fight those

attempts. if this is the president, though, try to keep people in their tribal corners. make it about us versus them as opposed to just about him. because if republicans come to the conclusion this is just about the president and we can't defend this conduct, he's in trouble. >> exactly. that's cannexactly what he's do but he himself is making it so much harder to keep the dynamic and have it continue. the serious situation which got such widespread -- engendered widespread condemnation, the doral decision, those are ways for republicans to channel their anger. this was actually articulated to me this weekend by a senior republican on capitol hill. waits for republicans to channel their anger and their frustration with the president on impeachment on that phone call, but it's more legitimate. it's not much of a stretch for that channelling to spill over into the actual impeachment

inquiry. >> that's the problem, right now you can keep it on the doral issue, if the president continues to handle it the way he is, which is take steps to garner more criticism, not less. it's his m.o. to stir up chaos, but doing it in this kind of environment, i think, is riskier. >> this is the gallup weekly tracking of the president's approval and disapproval. his disapproval is now ircnchin back up. it's at 57%. the high is 60%, after the midterm elections, for example. if this trend continues, and you never know, but if this trend continues and the president keeps going this way and the disapproval keeps going up, they'll say, say what you want, the president is falling in the polls. when we come back, we want to remind you the president is

still talking to reporters about impeachment, about hillary clinton, about syria and more. up next, as we just discussed, the white house changing some plans in the face of republican pushback. eosinophils are a key cause of severe asthma. fasenra is designed to target and remove these cells. fasenra is an add-on injection for people 12 and up with asthma driven by eosinophils. fasenra is not a rescue medicine or for other eosinophilic conditions. fasenra is proven to help prevent severe asthma attacks, improve breathing, and can lower oral steroid use. fasenra may cause allergic reactions. get help right away if you have swelling of your face, mouth, and tongue, or trouble breathing. don't stop your asthma treatments unless your doctor tells you to. tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection or your asthma worsens. headache and sore throat may occur.

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president knows more about syria than the pundits do. we discussed this briefly a moment ago, a change in plans for the president's troop withdrawal in syria, that after broad bipartisan criticism. he was abandoning a key ally, the kurds. the president insisted he wants to bring the troops home and get out of the middle east of t. but listen to his own defense secretary saying not everybody is coming home. not yet. >> this withdrawal will take weeks, not days. until that time, our forces will remain in the towns that are located near the oil fields. the purpose of those forces, a purpose of those forces working with the sdf is to deny access to those oil fields by isis and others who may benefit from their revenues that could be earned. >> the white house also announcing, this was on saturday night, that the president will not be hosting next year's g7 summit at his doral resort in

florida. that put republicans in a position unable to defend the president's decision. let's listen to >> chrichri chris christy who is apparently back in with the president because he spoke to him this week. he said, stop pushing your own party away. >> i've said this to the president as early as this week. we have to be in friend-making mode. there is a time to be combative and a time to be in friend-making mode vis-a-vis your own party. >> will the president listen? >> if you read chris christy's memoir, there are so many parts of him giving advice and the president just ignoring him. >> whether he thinks he's going to be removed from office or not, he is at a perilous moment

in his presidency and he does need a support system around him. if you look at the support system around him in his own administration, it's pretty small in part because so many have left and they're having a problem getting other people in. he's surrounded by mostly loyalists, mostly family at this point. he needs a party around him to back him up, to help him out through this process, and he just keeps taking steps that alienate them. the syria decision, this is not a surprise what the reaction would be, because he's heard from people like lindsey graham for months and a couple years on this front, and he continues to do t anyway. >> we'll bring you the video of this as soon as we can, but he's defen defensive about his decision to withdraw. he says the kurds never intended for us to stay there forever and now the kurds are leaving sbettle intelligently. a lot of what the president is saying is not what we get from our reporters on the ground

about the kurds who feel -- you were about to jump in. >> absolutely. that's critical, and we are also waiting to see what happens when this very tenuous, very limited cease-fire runs out, which is tomorrow, i believe. but on the whole notion of what chris christy was saying about not wanting to make people angry right now, i think what he was also reminding the president is you have it pretty good. people have been so worried about the backlash from their own constituents who are very much trump fans, especially, as you mentioned, almost all the house republicans because they're in such red districts. he hasn't had the dynamic, for the most part, for his whole presidency of having to care about what republicans think because he's called the shots, but that is going to change. >> there is a republican that gets in his face more than other republicans, but essentially

trolling the president on twitter, saying they are playing chess and then the occurred commander saying they are being betrayed on the battlefield. i don't want to put you all in the position of playing dr. freud, but you have lindsey graham saying this was the dumbest decision on syria, and then he says this on fox news. >> the president is right. they had a conflict for a couple of days. all of them saw how bad it would be. the president has a chance now to straighten this out. what trump has done is actually pretty smart. president trump has actually done something really smart. a couple hundred of us working with the kurds to keep the 10,000 from coming back is really smart. guarding the oil fields in the south so iran doesn't take them over is smart. i want to give him a lot of credit for weighing in and stopping the fighting. >> the dumbest decision of the

presidency is really smart. that's easy to follow. >> that is lindsey graham trying to speak directly to the president through television, but julie made such a good point on the support system. you do see some signs that perhaps the administration may be trying to appease republicans by keeping some number of troops in eastern syria. that was actually a move that was kind of predicted by senate republicans last week when senator graham was telling us right after the news of the cease-fire that some of them will have to remain. that's just inevitable to kind of stabilize things. and chairman of the national forces committee said, several of us had some commitments that trips wouldn't be moved so far that they wouldn't be able to isolate the situation in syria. >> now it's very hard to put everything back in the box. if you read something in

national reporting from turkey, this has really emboldened erdogan and put erdogan's position on their own heels, the fact they're feeling emboldened to resist the national community. it's going to be very difficult to reverse all this. >> trump's decisions are not made in isolation, and he maybe solved his relationship with lindsey graham, but not only is erdogan emboldened, so there are consequences beyond what happens. we should hear from the president momentarily. you can hear his own words and how he tries to explain and describe all this. up next, though, unless the president comes through to us. a lot of pressure. how she plans to pay for one of her biggest ideas.

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live pictures there. you see senator elizabeth warren doing an event in des moines, iowa. she's out with another plan today while promising a bigger policy will be available soon. they are pouring billions into the expansion of public schools while eliminating funding for charter schools. senator warren says her proposed tax will pay for this new plan. senator warren crunches numbers

central to the democratic campaign: health care. rivals say she's not being honest about the cost for medicare for all. now she promises to detail the math soon. >> right now the cost estimates on medicare for all vary by trillions and trillions of dollars. and the different revenue streams for how to fund it, there are a lot of them. so this is something i've been working on for months and months, and it's got just a little more work until it's finished. but i want to bring this out. i will not sign a bill into law that does not reduce the cost of health care for middle class families. >> i want to bring in cnn's mj lee who is out on the road with warren. mj, this is a huge decision rollout for her now that she's

saying i'm for bernie sanders' medicare for all plan, but now i'm essentially going to have my own with numbers. >> reporter: that's right, john, this is a significant announcement from senator warren. this is a candidate, as we've talked about a lot on your show, who has a plan for nearly everything, except for the issue of health care. on the issue of health care, she has said from the beginning that she is with bernie sanders when it comes to health care, that she is fully behind medicare for all, and that is why she has not put out a plan of her own on the issue of health care. but we saw her sort of run into some trouble with this strategy, right? particularly last week at the cnn "new york times" debate when she was asked over and over and over again, how are you going to pay for this plan? will middle class taxes go up for this plan? she avoided that answer and pivoted to the question of total

cost, and said the total cost will go down for the average american under medicare for all. but i think we saw this tactic became politically untenable. she had to find a different way to answer that question, and i think her answer yesterday that she is now going to put out a plan of her own, explaining how she's going to pay for medicare for all allows her to remain fully behind medicare for all but put her own twist on this. her campaign hopes she can answer this question better of how to pay for the plan, john. zpz we ju >> we just saw the senator walking offer stage. senator warren has been dogged by this question for weeks and weeks and through several democratic debates. now she says she's going to do it and soon. which means before the iowa caucuses, she will either stay very close to bernie sanders, or she will drift a little bit.

if she drifts, you'll see senator warren talking about it. >> even though she co-authored health care in 2016, it took her six months to finally come up with the "i'm with bernie" answer. then she didn't want to take the political heat it was going to get, like raising taxes. she took heat from the left and now she's taking it from the center. it will be interesting to see if they do some sort of creative counting. the team very much says they're disciplined and they want to get out their calculators. they're going to get a lot of scrutiny for this, but her opponents sort of smell blood. >> the way you framed it, is she

aggressive? the only reason this is such a big issue isn't necessarily the substance of the plan but what it signals to her viability according to many, many democratic voters? r is she going to be seen as somebody who wants to spend people's money, and will that make it hard, even more, how will she beat donald trump. she is a co-candidate with joe biden. >> she makes the point and her aides make the point, and it is a fair one, that the tax question is not the full -- is not really what you should look at. you should look at overall costs. fine. fair. but there is a real political

problem to say you are going to raise middle class taxes for any reason. that is a general election problem. her brand, though, has basically been i will take these tough decisions, i will be honest with you about why we have to do them and i will sell the plan to you. i will explain to you why you have to do something that may not look politically proper. i will win you over on this front. i think she's now finding herself a little torn fween the political rallies of doing that in a general election and this brand that has served her very well so far in a primary. >> it has served her very well. on most other issues, she pays out. on this one she has been vague, coy, pick your word for it. some thought she was going to try to win the nomination and then shift back to the center. the criticism is coming

everywhere. t senator michael bennett, a guy who is struggling to get into the debate, but they do see an opening. elizabeth warren says, i'm going to come up with a plan. michael been -- bennet says, prove it. >> i don't think she will come up with a plan. it is equivalent to the taxes that will be collected over the next ten years. it's a massive increase to the taxes and it hasn't been explained to the american people. it's a sound bite. more than that, it isn't based on common sense. >> the decision of health care, which is always a big issue. but how far left can you go, to the point you made? how far left can you take a party and hope to be competitive

in a general election? >> elizabeth warren is learning right now all the challenges, and there is a new important piece. the number of people who say they're looking for someone else, they're shopping around, has actually gone up eight points. so voters in iowa vary so much shopping around, and i think all the candidates have very cognizant of that. >> 105 days. i don't say it to be snarky in the sense that now that you're here, it gets very real. you're looking at 100 days, you better be smart about it. as we go to break, a little flashback. this is joe biden back in 2015 getting a high-profile setting for a very personal

announcement. >> mr. president, thank you for lending me the rose garden for a minute. >> it's a pretty nice place. >> unfortunately, i believe we're out of time, the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nation. but while i will not be a candidate, i will not be silent.

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nope. no thank you. geico could help you save on homeowners and renters insurance. on the radar today, the justice department taking the unusual step, highly unusual, of issuing a statement, distancing himself from the president's personal attorney, rudy giuliani. this is about a meeting giuliani had with the justice department that the justice department says shouldn't have happened? >> pretty much, john. what happened was early this summer, rudy giuliani came in to the justice department to represent some clients on a criminal matter, and he was able to meet with brian vegitowski who is the top prosecutor in the criminal division along with some other prosecutors in that section. and we now know that they wish they had not done that meeting because now, obviously, it's become more apparent that rudy giuliani is under a lot of

scrutiny in the southern district of new york in manhattan. let me read you a statement from peter carr who has a statement from the justice department. when mr. benczkowski and fraud section lawyers met with mr. giuliani, they were not aware of any investigation of mr. giuliani's associates in the southern district of new york and would not have met with him had they known. this is just an indication that everyone is trying to stay away from him because no one knows how this investigation will be. i should note earlier this year, bill barr, the attorney general, was briefed on that investigation out of new york. but i talked to someone familiar who said it's clear giuliani has become a much more central figure in this investigation. >> former federal prosecutor himself, you would think he would know better than to put

justice department folks in such a position, but there we go. ever evan perez, appreciate the reporting today. the castro campaign says it needs to raise $800,000 by the end of the month -- that's just ten days from now -- or he'll be forced to drop out. an email from supporters calling the situation dire. cory booker used such a tactic weeks ago and was successful. the question here again, 105 days to iowa. we were waiting to see when we would get a specific winnowing of the field. only eight have qualified so far for the next debate. mr. castro here essentially saying, i need money and i need it now. >> he actually needs money. i think his last campaign finance report shows he has like $600,000 left in the bank, so that's not enough to run a viable campaign. that's sort of where these candidates have to have a come to jesus moment.

you can run a campaign that's essentially you and an aide or two running around events, but do you have the infrastructure in place to win some of these states? absolutely not if you're talking about that kind of money. >> it's also a reminder of the appetite that the democratic electorate and the fundraising base does not have for candidates who attack one another very viciously, and that's what castro did to joe biden a couple days ago. the u.s. troops are leaving syria, but they're not coming straight home like president trump often suggests. with time,e that's for sure... and when those changes might help more people, especially those in retirement, i think it's worth talking about!

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so are u.s. troops in the middle east on the rise or in decline? if you aren't sure, that's acceptable. the president says he's getting them out of what he calls endless wars. but yesterday they said up to 200 troops may stay in syria to protect oil fields. and the troops that are leaving syria aren't necessarily coming home. let's take a look at the numbers. let's go back to last year in deployments. roughly 3,000 troops, just shy of that, in syria. 5200 in iraq, 300 in saudi arabia, 15,000 was the troop level in afghanistan in 2018. let's fast-forward and see where we are now.

syria, the president says the number will come down, but most of those troops going into the neighborhood in iraq. that number going up. the president has promised more troops to saudi arabia. we don't have a hard number of what number will go there, i don't think. and the number in afghanistan has actually come down a little bit. ryan at the pentagon for us. ryan, it's hard to keep track of this, but when the president says he's bringing them home, not necessarily true, is it? >> no, john, it's not necessarily true, and we've seen a tweet with the forces coming out of syria will be positioned elsewhere in the region. we can pretty much read from that it's going to be iraq. elsewhere in the region temporarily, he says, before coming home, but troops rotate in and out of the country all the time.

it's not clear if troops in the region will be impacted by this. they want to keep pressure on isis which still very much remains a threat, so you'll need those troops there. in addition, as you said, the defense department recently announced 3,000 troops to saudi arabia, part of a broader 14,000 middle east deployment that's been conducted in this year alone. the president says he wants to get down to about 8,000 or so in the near term, but no clear timeline when that's going to happen. so, again, despite a lot of political rhetoric about getting out of wars, getting out of the middle east, reducing the troop numbers, for now, for the time being, troop levels largely remain the same. john? >> i appreciate that reporting. we will follow the numbers that don't lie. ryan browne, thank you very much for that. pierre erks e erks delect.

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could the right voice, the right set of words, bring us all just a little closer? get us to open up? even push us further? it could, if we took the time to listen. the most inspiring minds, the most compelling stories. download audible and listen for a change. all right, a little fun here. words you probably didn't expect to find in the same sentence. mitt romney and secret twitter account. slate over the weekend found an account under the twitter pierre delecto. a reporter then asked romney, is this you? he said he used the secret twitter to keep tabs on the political news.

he says, pierre delecto, at your service. pierre delecto follows the adviser on twitter. remember, romney was once the massachusetts governor. touche. mitt romney, secret twitter account. >> i just love that he was using it to sort of sound off on editorials that were critical of him. he would do anonymous pliz about, just because i don't agree with you on everything doesn't mean i'm a bad guy, and soledad o'brien just saying, i'm n not being unfair. it was interesting to watch people sharing around if they were being followed by him. >> this is by far the raciest,

craziest thing mitt romney has ever done. it's fascinating, it's interesting, but the fact that's where he is and this is what it represents tells you something about mitt romney. >> to remind you that it could have been a simpler time in washington. >> to your point about how pierre delecto was using this to defend its actual owner, mitt romney, "the daily column" says mitt romney was an ally after troops were pulled from syria. some might say romney is, too. trump's loyal to principle, loyal to party, right? >> stepping back, i think there is a lot of differing opinions about what kind of candidate he would be. it shows he does enjoy having that platform. he does actually enjoy the

senate more than we thought he would. >> he'll be a different voice. >> he already is. thanks for joining us on "inside politics." see you back here this time tomorrow. don't go anywhere. brianna keilar starts right now. have a good day. i'm brianna keilar live from cnn's washington headquarters, and underway right now we begin with breaking news. president trump is now issuing a rallying cry during his first cabinet meeting during the impeachment inquiry began. just moments ago he urged republicans to stand by him and fight as backlash continues to grow within his own party, and trump admits that impeachment looks to be inevitable. i want to bring in kaitlan collins. she is live for us at the white house. kaitlan, there is a lot that came out of this cabinet meeting. we're going to turn around the tape. viewers shoul