>> and don't tweet. >> tweet. >> tweet, tweet. >> jimmy: there you go.e have a great show tonight. give it up for the roots!

, tweeted this out seems hard to imagine. >> it's highly unlikely that john dowd wrote that tweet. people who represent the -- who serve as lawyers for the leader of the free world don't do things to incriminate their client. and in focus grouping my lawyer friends today, i found out that laypeople like us use the word "pled," past tense, but lawyers do not. they say, their client pleaded. they don't use that word. so, i think he took the bullet for the president. that's fine. they worked out a deal. but it's just really hard to believe that he would do something to put president trump in more jeopardy, and it just sounds like a tweet that president trump would have written. >> and i think also from the bigger standpoint, the president has tweeted more than 3,000 times since he was president. never, ever once has anyone else said, actually, i wrote that tweet. and he's never had anyone else have to say that he did it. however, john dowd, his attorney, read that, and two words came to mind, legal jeopardy. so he went in and tried to help clean this up. i think explaining this as a w

also included in his nearly one dozen tweets and re-tweets, the justice department, the news media andnton. meantime, questions continue to circle over who wrote the initial tweet reacting to the guilty plea of the former national security adviser. that tweet set off alarms because it implied the president had lied to the fbi. well, this morning on "meet the press" california senator dianne feinstein talked about the disarray surrounding the current administration. >> the concern rises with the day. the concern about this white house rises -- >> you're concerned about this president's ability to do the job rises by the day? >> oh, yes. oh, yes. i have been here for 25 years now. there is a kind of instability unpredictability. it's one issue after the other. >> joining us now to break it all down, we have the national political reporter of bloomberg news. and amanda is here, a legal correspondent from npr. you spend an awful lot of time on capitol hill talking to members and talking to their staffs as well do. they echo what we heard there from the senior senator from california? >> pr

he's trying to clarify the contents of the tweet, the intention of the tweet. is he saying he misspoke? what exactly is he trying to clarify? >> reporter: i had a brief e-mail exchange with john dowd this morning and he appeared to suggest backtracking in fact on this tweet he claims he authored saying that the president did not know at the time michael flynn had lied to the fbi. he said at the time of the firing no one including justice had accused flynn of lying. that was the crime he was charged with and pled guilty to. but this does raise questions about why in fact either the president or the president's attorney john dowd decided to put out this statement. john dowd said he drafted the statement but pushed it over likely to social media director who physically posted the tweet on to twitter but the president's attorney would not answer whether the president himself was involved in the drafting of that tweet. the president as you know is typically very involved when it comes to his own social media presence and unless something is a public relations video

i don't think we've heard of any other tweets where donald trump hasn't written the tweets.o it's a little difficult to believe that the lawyer wrote this tweet. and if he did, then i think that was a big problem as well. >> congresswoman, we have several concurrent russia investigations, right, the house and the senate, bob mueller's special probe. are all these investigations necessary at this point? what is the house probe doing differently than the senate? >> well, you know, boris, it is very important because congress first and foremost has the authority to investigate all of these issues that are before us. and certainly collusion with russia, certainly the impact on our elections. this is something that congress has authority over. there are four committees of record, the house and senate judiciary committees and the house and senate intelligence committees. i sit on the house judiciary committee and i have to tell you we're very, very disappointed in the chairman that he has refused to hold any hearings on any of these issues. we did get a chance to question jeff ses

tweet in particular? >> reporter: yes, they're saying the tweets speak for themselves. in this case, the president's personal lawyer, john dowd, says he crafted the language for that tweet. he says he dictated the language for that tweet to dan scavino and that dowd mistakenly conflated flynn's lying to the fbi with flynn's lying to the vice president. and we should note that this is not the first time that dowd's name has emerged in the news. you'll rear a couple months ago, he and white house special counsel ty cobb were having lunch at a restaurant here in washington, and the two of them, david, were speaking so loudly about the russia case and how jared kushner figured into it that a "new york times" reporter seated nearby could hear the conversation -- ken vogel -- and ken did what any good reporter would do, took a picture, tweeted it out and i believe wrote a story about it. in this case, john dowd is telling us, because we asked him, how many other tweets have you written for president trump? because as you point out, there is no clear and concise and consistent

the most tweeted was from the 17 year old nevada man he tweeted wendys how many tweets he would need to get free chicken mack nuggets. wendys responded with 18 million re tweets. he got a little more than 3.6 million. >> second on the list of the most retweets out t ed 1.7 million times. that went out over the summer not too long after we saw everything in charlottesville. q. ronica, you talked about the supreme court cake case earlier tonight and i wanted to ul contact it pulse of the pastry. we unfortunately cannot use that here. >> i love it. go for it. jim and shawn, i love you both much let's reduce the banter when i'm standing in the rain. i'm sorry >> i didn't know it was raining, ronica. it's dry in here, sorry >> i didn't, either so i'm not dressed for it. i'm kidding. it's actually a really nice night, just a little drizzle. i'm on a different story for you now, bringing a little different insight from what people are talking about. when i saw the headline about the most retweet ed tweets i was quite surprised the president didn't make the list. i did look into the most ret

it came on the heels of the president's tweet storm, including this tweet. general flynn lies to the fbi and his life is destroyed while crooked hillary clinton on that now famous hib holiday interrogation with no swearing in and no recording lies many times and nothing happens to her? rigged system or just a double standard? joining me now, democratic congressman ted lieu, member of the house judiciary committee. always good to see you. right off the bat, does this feel different to you than when paul manafort was indicted or george papadopoulos pled guilty? >> absolutely. and thank you for that question, alex. i'm a former prosecutor. and you wouldn't do a plea agreement with someone as big as michael flynn in order to get information on lower level individuals. you do that plea agreement because michael flynn has damning information on people above him. there's only a handful of people, jared kushner, mike pence, jeff sessions, donald trump jr., or the president of the united states. >> do you have any sense as to whether mike flynn has given robert muell

a tweet from the u.s. president's account is raising troubling new questions. we'll take you behind the scenes of our exclusive cnn report, exposing slave auctions in libya. and watching and waiting in bali for a potential violent volcanic eruption. live from cnn world headquarters in atlanta, we want to welcome our viewers here in the united states and all around the world. i'm george howell. "cnn newsroom" starts right now. >>> 4:00 a.m. on the u.s. east coast. around the world. good day to you. a tweet from the u.s. president's personal account raises a stubborn and haunting question, what did the president know and when did he know it? the focus is on his fired national security adviser michael flynn. the tweet reads, i had to fire general flynn because he lied to the vice president and the fbi. he has pled guilty to those lies, it is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. there was nothing to hide, explanation point, from u.s. president donald trump. if true this tweet is explo

well then, president trump tweeted this on march 31st.flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt excuse for loss. joining us now on the phone democratic congressman ted lieu saying this is obstruction of justice. president of the united states now admits he knew michael flynn lied to the fbi yet trump tried to influence or stop the fbi investigation on flynn. so you say obstruction of justice. we're talking about there is just a day in between the resignation of flynn and then the next day was february 14, when the president met with comey and said let this go. the so that's what you're calling attention to and you say that underscores potential obstruction of justice. >> thank you. it absolutely is obstruction of justice. i'm former prosecutor. that statute is very broad. you just have to endeavor to impede an investigation. we know michael flynn has pled guilty to lying to the fbi. we now know the president knew. and when the president trying to get comey to drop this investigation, that's classic obstruction of justice

tweeting 18 times since saturday. but the most controversial tweet by far was this one.nn because he lied to the vice president and fbi. he has pled guilty to those lies. it is a shame because his actions during the transition was lawful. there was nothing to hide. trump's attorney said he drafted the tweet, but the tweet has sparked a conversation on what trump knew and when he knew it. how significant is this tweet, you think? >> well, it's very significant. and i'm very worried about the public relations advice the president's lawyers are giving him. let's go back to friday. i actually thought the attorney cobb on friday, his statement about flynn was kind of amateurish and then on saturday, my goodness, i hope they're giving the president better legal advice than communications advice. i don't think the president was being well served over the weekend. and he probably ought to be fired. and if he told the president and cleared this with the president, he should be fired for giving him bad legal advice. so this is bad all around, and it doesn't serve the president's p

this tweet if mr. dowd did write it puts the president at the center of this scandal. >> that's why it sounds so unbelievable that an attorney knowing all of that would get in the mix this this matter and inflame things. it doesn't make sense. >> it's baffling. absolutely baffling. >> the former director of the office of ethics tweeted prove it, john dowd. if this is true, there are surely e-mails you can show us corroborating your implausible story. prove it. now this controversy is now inviting this attorney to better explain. is there a way in which this attorney or the white house can explain this any better or does the president at this juncture need to come clean, so to speak, with everything he knew if this is an effort that the white house needs to dispel the responsibility of this tweet? >> it's unlikely that dowd will provide e-mails because he will be opening the door to attorney-client contacts and he doesn't want that door open in the long run. if trump tries to come clean about what he kn

>> well, the tweet is very interesting. because the president says that the reason why he fired michael flynn was because he had lied to vice president pence and the fbi. we had not previously heard that the white house was aware that flynn had lied to the fbi at the time that he was fired, because sally yates, the deputy attorney general at the time, had warned them he had misled pence. we asked the white house for clarification on this. but if, in fact, the president did know that flynn lied to fbi and he knew that before he fired jameis comey, who was the fbi director at the time, and whom he asked to lay off flynn in the investigation, that certainly raises a lot of new questions that we didn't know before, and i'm sure it's something that the mueller investigation is going to take a hard look at. >> all right, kara scannel, boris sanchez, thank you so much, to both of you, appreciate it. >>> all right, how did we get here? to start, cnn has learned that jared kushner, the president's son-in-law, directed flynn to conta

the tweets. i see it most importantly in what happened with the firing of director comey and it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to lift the cloud of the russia investigation. that's obstruction of justice. >> and for the -- she's a democrat, it would be difficult to proceed with that. she would need the help of the chairman of this committee who is senator chuck grassley, a republican and no indication that is happening right now. so i guess we should all stay tuned. but the senate judiciary committee is continuing their investigation certainly into other patterns here and other facts of the russia investigation. >> all right. thank you so much for that. >>> let's turn to the white house which is in damage control saying the tweet was written by the president's personal lawyer john dowd. jeremy, reportedly trump's tweet went out while he was in the motorcade in between events in new york. what is the white house saying about who crafted it, who may have sent it? what's

he is up and tweeting. we expect to hear more from him today, especially on his favorite medium, twitter. this stems from the february 14th meeting of president trump and fbi director, james comey. trump decided to fire comey earlier this year. he said because of his handling of the e-mail investigation into hillary clinton. but, he also told nbc news, at the time, he was considering the russian investigation, the fbi investigation into possible collusion. i want to take you back to the testimony to get to why this is a he said/he said. here is what comey said in his written testimony. the president then returned to the topic of mike flynn saying he is a good guy and has been through a lot. he repeated that flynn hadn't done anything wrong on his calls with the russians, but misled the vice president. he then said, i hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, letting flynn go. he is a good guy. i hope you can let this go. i replied only he is a good guy. i had a positive experience dealing with mik

you saw that tweet right after the bat. the president saying getting back to work the day after christmas. this was a big story and we were talking about this in the news year because this is getting a loft attention. it all has to do about a first class seat on a united flights. a district school teacher claims she was booted off a flight for congress woman sheila jackson. the tweet went viral. this is jean marie simon. she posted a fet ovechkin congress woman jackson lee in a seat she claims she was booked but was bumpedded from without her consent or knowledge . this picture was re tweeted 20,000 times. united says simon canceled the flight. she says she did not. she is still waiting for from the airline, but the airline has refunded the miles she used to book the ticket home . in over a dozen tweets shared her statement and a reaction. we're going to show you a couple of tweets here. i noted this individual came toward me and took a picture. i heard later that she might have said i know who she is. since this is not the

he started tweeting. >> the president of the united states tweeted this. james comey better hope there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press. >> that's ain't threat. he simply stated a fact. the tweet speaks for itself. >> i wonder what his explanation is going to be this morning. the odd tweet that the president put out last night. apparently it speaks for itself. president trump is criticizing the mayor of london following this weekend's terror attack. the mayor of london says there is no reason to be alarmed. here's what he actually said. >> we'll see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. no reason to be alarmed. >> quote, we need the courts to give us back our rights. we need the travel ban. >> he just basically gave the supreme court of the united states all the ammunition that they needed. >> are president trump's tweets considered official white house statements? >> the president is the president of the united states, so they are considered official statements by the president

i think the president himself has talked before that tweet and after that tweet quite a lot on the matter. we should look at the full measure of what he has said. he said he was asked -- i was standing there when he was asked on the south lawn saturday morning before we took off for new york by the press pool they asked him are you worried about yesterday and he said no, there was no collusion. we're happy about that. he keeps saying that. that is exactly what the mainstream media who has been in a lather about russia, russia, russia for a year now, that's what they've been focused on and changing their tune now to other charges. the president has also said we need an f.b.i. that is objective and he is very concerned to think that any type of investigation was compromised. the revelation that an f.b.i. agent had to be reassigned for taken out of this particular investigation because he was anti-trump in his texts and had interviewed general flynn and was working with hillary clinton when she was being questioned, that's very troubling for any american who knows justice should be blind and

so it doesn't even sound like him in the writing. >> you tweeted yesterday that in the past this tweet alone might have ended a presidency. has anything we've learned since then including what dowd has told cnn changed your opinion as to the severity of this? >> well, if it's true that dowd wrote it, and again i think there's a big question mark over that, then it's not an admission from the president of the united states as to what his mind-set was. the problem is that fact creates an incentive for someone to want to fall on their sword and falsely claim that they wrote it when the president actually wrote it. now again, i'm not saying that's what dowd did, but this is such a strange episode and i thought it was as strange as we would be seeing -- stranger than anything we could imagine when the president tweeted it out and i thought we had reached rock bottom and things got stranger this weekend with dowd making that claim. the interesting thing is if it's true that he wrote it, perhaps i think there was one report that he may have sent the wording to dan ska vino and had him post it

in this case, he's still creating chaos with his tweets. now we don't know, is trump now denying that the tweets are him speaking? previously they said, in court, in fact, some of the presidential tweets are official presidential statements. can we now get the lawyer to testify in court about which tweets he wrote, which ones he didn't. it's totally upending the notion of the president making a statement, standing behind it and then shutting up. instead, it's create more chaos around you where donald trump appears to be the only person who knows what's going on. >> caitlin, you've got the white house pretty much working overtime to try to distance itself from mike flynn, calling him an obama official, never mind the fact that he was with them for almost two years. but why is the president taking the extra steps to give the appearance that he's protecting mike flynn? >> right. as much as the administration has been trying to distance itself from mike flynn, first of all, it can't do that. michael flynn was not the so-called coffee boy that t

as we look at the tweets, the tweet to me that is the most legally problematic and the most recent tweets is the president's tweet that you put up which said that he did not ask comey to drop the flynn investigation. >> that was from today. can we pull that up. that was today. i don't know if that's an effort to clarify what he said yesterday or just to say let me set the record straight. do we have that? keep going. i will tell you what it said and you will see it. i never asked comey to stop investigating flynn. >> with an exclamation point at the end. now you have director comey, former director comey testifying under oath he was specifically asked to drop the investigation. the president now saying that's a lie. essentially that's not true. i never asked him to do that. i think there is going to come a point in time where mueller will put the president under oath. if the president repeats that which is in this tweet, the special counsel has to make a determination of who to believe. what i was saying before, the president having asked a host of other people to see if this investigatio

the tweet was so controversial? >> seems improbable. and what i understand, went back afterwards and confirmed tweet was accurate, that was president's understanding. all over both sides of this in addition to the oddness of it. >> and odd is what journalists and careful former prosecutors like yourself can do before the evidence comes in. >> but as you said, bob mueller has all the tools to figure it out. >> which again makes it odd to disemball about if one wore dissembling. broke so late in the day, what does it say to you that bob mueller is going to these lengths to potentially pull manafort's bail deal and say as we've been reporting tonight that manafort was ghost writing material, defendant's political work in ukraine as recently as thursday with person in russia with ties to intelligence services? >> going to be interesting conversations between manafort and his lawyer, either went off on a tear without telling his lawyer and did this slap in the face to both the court and the prosecution, which -- it's not

let's revisit trump's tweet. i had to fire general flynn because he lied to the vice president and the fbi. he has pled guilty to those lies. it's a shame because his actions were lawful. there was nothing to hide. this prompted a flurry of response on twitter, also from someone who tweeted this, just couldn't resist commenting on flynn. are you admitting you knew flynn lied to the fbi when you asked comey to back off flynn? i have to ask you, is this an admission of obstruction of justice? gloria? >> it can be. but, once again, it's not under oath. once again, they could hide behind, i didn'ti write it. it's a summery. i don't think we have done this with any modern president, assume he doesn't know what he's talking about, he's shooting from the hip, no credibility. it's really a sad thing to say that he is hiding behind the ability to say whatever comes off the top of his head and turn around and deny later. yes, on one hand, it's an admission. on the other hand, we don't know if he is telling the truth. we gi

with a tweet too on wednesday the u.s. president reads we did three islamophobia videos posted by the far right u.k. extremist group britain first now one claims to show muslims pushing a boy off a roof another appears to show a man destroying a statue of the virgin mary and the third allegedly shows a muslim migrant beating up a dutch boy on crutches now the dutch embassy in the u.s. has already debunked the last video is fake news tweeting facts do matter the perpetrator of the violent act in this video was born and raised in the netherlands he received them completed his sentence under dutch law what's more dutch media reporting that the attacker is not even muslim but it didn't end there the spokesman of british prime minister to resign may publicly criticize the u.s. president saying british people overwhelmingly reject the prejudice of the far right it is wrong for the president to have done this or trump immediately fired back tweeting don't focus on me focus on that a struct of radical islamic terrorism that is tak

and if they tweeted something that was incorrect, the president tweeted something incorrect and john dowd was incorrect and advising them on it, that's something investigators will be able to get to the bottom of. and it will be seen as an incorrect tweet. the president knew that michael flynn lied to the fbi and kept him at the white house beyond that point. that's a serious problem for the president. >> the point is that the questions ab obstruction have been raised now. they are raised, the horse is out of the barn, sarah, you write about the fallout from michael flynn and the fallout from the guilty plea or the plea agreement with the special counsel from friday. at this point, though, you're heading into a week when the president wants to be presumably talking about taxes when he's heading to utah for a major policy announcement to have reverberations down the road. and yet the shadow of the special counsel is at the door of the white house. >> that is why it is so surprising that president trump did go on the tweet rant over the weekend because ty cobb, the president's personal

that was his tweet.oughout the holiday weekend the president also sent out tweets, specifically aimed at fbi deputy director andrew mccabe including this one. >> mccabe has come under scrutiny from the president and republican allies because of his role in the clinton e-mail investigation and because of campaign contributions mccabe's wife received from democrats while running for office in virginia. mccabe was also james comey's two at the fbi last week. house committee spent nearly 20 hours over two days questioning him behind closed doors. and, as nbc news reported, sources say mccabe confirmed james comey's testimony that trump had asked comey for a pledge of loyalty. pressure on mccabe may be having an effect. "the washington post" reported he was planning to leave his post around march when we was eligible for retirement. here its what one republican congressman said earlier today. >> i sat in on questioning last week of andy mccabe. he can't go fast enough. anybody that has that much disrespect fo

he starts tweeting on 7:42 a.m. on sunday morning, sunday morning tweets is the title of a book at some point in the future. but he has a point when pointing out this fbi agent who bob mueller had to fire from the special council investigation who is once in dharncharge of t hillary clinton investigation, sent out anti-trump texts when bob mueller became aware of them, he fired him. how big a problem might that be as we look back at the hillary clinton e-mail investigation? >> look, i mean we've seen that the president wants to relitigate the 2018 election. mueller knows that he wants this investigation to look apolitical which is what special sicouncils supposed to do. any whiff of that needs to be stamped out especially since we have a president that wants to discredit the fbi and discredit the cia and intel officials as much as possible when he feels he's under attack by them. and so that's what we saw mueller do in that case. >> so you're a congressional reporter. you cover congress. and if we weren't talking ab

and, of course, dowd didn't write that tweet. everybody knows he didn't write the tweet. the language used in there is not the language any first-year lawyer would use. so, how damaging is it that the president just admitted that he knew that michael flynn had lied to the fbi and then he went to the fbi director and told him to back off? >> it's a consistent pattern of inconsistency. that's the only thing you see in trump tweets. when you look at this, the pattern with the timeline, they were notified by yates that something had come up. president obama before that warned incoming president trump, have you a problem. if you brought up flynn, you were pressured, fired or then fired. he seemed to have something he knew about or understood or knew about the discussions with russia. every revelation comes to this point and every time he tweets he tells a different version of this story. >> such a shocking admission against his own best interest, his own best legal interest. >> right. >> we don't know whether mueller is going to be able to prove collusion ultimately. it may be

donald trump wrote this tweet about this case or donald trump's lawyer wrote this tweet about what ishe essence of the obstruction of justice case against donald trump. is it -- i just find it inconceivable that a lawyer would have written a public statement like this for a client in a criminal investigation. >> totally sunning. first, jed is right in terms of the difficulty it places him in but what they're trying to do in getting the fingerprints off is keep it from being an admission but as jed points out it doesn't matter if the lawyer wrote it. if trump adopts it, it becomes his statement but to your point, it's just inconceivable either way. i don't care how stupid you think dowd is. to actually have written this gratuitous tweet seems impossible but the not have written it and then to fall on his sword you know mueller's going to be all over this and we're talking about actual criminal conspiracy liability for dowd. almost a certain disbarment. it is just even more inconceivable to think he would have gone ahead and done it after the fact. either way you look at it is just comp

at another tweet.me by call meg old when i don't call him short and fat. are they trying to seek something out. >> i like the passive aggressiveness of that. >> that's well formed. >> that was a good tweet. >> a lot of people were wo wondering if he was diplomat in chief and i thinkthy that was very diplomatic. >> it was olive i branch to short and fat leader of north korea. >> rocket manor -- >> think don't get twitter there. >> i was curious about that. >> when he gets criticism he said use of media is not presidential but presidential make america great again. >> can't ago uwith that. >> he said, and you know give him credit for the fact he found his way to liver range twitter in a way to get throughout media and get your message out there. all the time it's not necessarily on the plane of what you expect. >> it's not only getting through the media we cover every single one of his stupid tweets. it's mats of the media. >> your job sucks. >> but you know obama had number one tweet this year. he's not

now charges to hinge on a tweet that raise questions why the president fired james comey. >> the tweeting comment regarding an on going investigation at your own peril, i'd be carol ifeful if i were y mr. president. >> a bruising battle over taxes moves on to the next phase. the house and senate start to reconcile the two bills. we'll tell you where the gop has big gaps to close. >>> and looks like billy bush is ready to come out of the shadows in a scathing op-ed. what will bush say on the late show tonight? >> a year in the wilderness. billy bush is making an entry to society. good morning, everybody. >> interesting to see him back in the discussion. we'll talk more about this op-ed ahead in "the new york times." it's 4:00 a.m. in the east. we start this morning with the president returning to an old playbook following the newest criminal charges in the russia probe. he's lashing out at the intelligence community. this comes after former national security adviser michael flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the fbi about his discussions with the russian ambassador during the transition. >>

tweets and they are his voice. now we're getting the opposite message that anything that comes from the president's account might or might not be something that he believes in. but it's -- >> at dowd says this is my first and last time tweeting for the president. >> yes. there's a string of people of trump surrounding himself with people who don't seem up to the job. and from the impression of john dowd so far, he is one of those. we have other personal lawyers, people he put in his inner circle, frangly, like michael flynn where he's not surrounding himself with the best people. where his inexperience in politics, which was politically a virtue, is turning out in the administration to be a setback. >> so, danny, let's go the whole question of competency and the legal question in front of us. can a president obstruct justice? can he be charged with obstructing justice? >> he can. we got a preview to this back in the days of nixon when several members -- a dozen house of the house judiciary committee concluded, yes,

the tweet said mr. trump fired the former national security adviser because he lied to the vice president and the fbi. that came one day after flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the fbi in the russia investigation. with all the allegations and indictment, the russia investigation appears to be getting closer and closer to donald trump's inner circle. so who will be next on the hot seat? shim sh has the latest. >> reporter: the special counsel has two people cooperating and providing information to investigators on the russia probe. communications director hope hicks to be interviewed by the special counsel investigators. now she is key for investigators in the obstruction probe. she is said to be close to the president and was aboard air force one and helped draft a misleading statement from the president about a meeting that donald trump jr. helped put together from a russian woman claiming to have dirt on hillary clinton. now that meeting taking place at trump tower. so naturally, the special counsel ha

however, his tweets have also to critics say that these tweets also kind of present a risk when he goesff and calls kim jong-un little rocket man. to kevin's point, kim jong-un seems a bit, i guess, very trigger happy. he's very bombastic, so i think you have two men with two very strong-willed men at this point going at it. and i think these tweets really do push kim jong-un to the edge in this respect. >> hence the real world impact that he might be talking about there. >> yes. >> julia, kevin, stay with me. we will be back because we have more to talk about. stemming from the wrinkles from the president's suit and other random tales, where a new book recounts adventures on the campaign trail with candidate trump. that's up next. more people shop online for the holidays than ever before. (clapping) and the united states postal service delivers more of those purchases to homes than anyone else in the country. ( ♪ ) because we know, even the smallest things are sometimes the biggest. even the smallest things discover card. i justis this for real?match, yep. we match all the cash back ne

a solid workweek by most americans spent just on tweets. he tweeted this evening. his travels, too, are unprecedented. according to an nbc news count today marked his 111th day at a trump property as president. with me here in the studio tonight a former senior advisor on the bush, cheney campaign. and an assisting managing editor of politics. christina, let me start with you. one has to give the president credit. he has managed to use social media, twitter in particular, to work around the established media he thinks is against him. many presidents go through this, where they think the media is against him. but none of them have had an effective way of getting their message out otherwise to his credit. >> sure, he's certainly not the first politician to try to go around the media. and twitter has allowed him to have this platform far more than any other president in history, right? the thing that's interesting about this is politicians, hillary clinton, you know, government offices to some extent, like you can sort of expect some of the criticism that comes from t

tweeted her tweets if you're sitting that's for sure as always thank you very much. i want to go to washington now and bring in our correspondent there michelle michelle good evening to you are we going to see michelle that's the question there yes all right good evening to you michelle first of all let's listen to how the white house is trying to explain this reid tweeting route. whether it's it's a real video the threat is real and that is what the president is talking about that's what the president is focused on is dealing with those real threats and those are real no matter how you look at it so it doesn't matter even take. a look i'm not talking about the nature of the video you're focusing on the wrong thing the threat is real and that was the white house press secretary basically saying that it doesn't matter if the videos are real what matters is the the message there i mean is that how you understood that. basically we're hearing it doesn't matter if the videos are fake what matters is that the threat is real. that is exactly what i understood from listenin

did send that tweet out. we don't know, of course. but i do want to read this out from walter shaub. he is the former director of the office of government ethics and a cnn contributor. and he said this. i dare you to tell mueller you logged in to the president's twitter account and wrote "plead", pled and the rest of that, john dowd. i dare you. do you think president trump did? does it matter legally if it came out of the president's account? >> let's assume for a second that dowd wrote it. i don't think it comes down to whether he said plead or pleaded. i've been a criminal defense lawyer. euse pled. i don't use plead. we use pled all the time. that's not too surprising a lawyer could actually have written that does it matter? well, it matters if dowd was the one to say it. but that's not who said it. we know even if it was drafted by someone else, it went out under the president's twitter account. the president has adopted that as his statement. even if somebody else prepared it for him, helped him write i

i love prompts, tweets, just because you're going to sink his ship hfment he keeps tweeting. that will get him in trouble. people are going to be able to refer back to those tweets. host: your question to our guests sir? caller: when will we ever get back to roared? the -- regular order? with all the partisanship, with the president's rhetoric, when will we ever get back to regular order or is this the way it's always going to be? the host: thank you. guest: it's a very good question. when paul ryan and the republicans came in at the start of this term they had unified government for the first time in a dozen years. they have the white house, the house, and senate. and they promised regular order. they were critical of obama and the democrats of jamming things through. obamacare being the apex of that argument. since they have taken control they found out it's a little more difficult than just that. there are a lot of bills passed by regular order. there's a lot of bipartisan cained of run of the mill every day bills that are passed not controversial. hey go through committee

cut back on my tweeting but could not and question twelve i have tried to be more civil when tweeting but i always go back to name calling and negative comments now jim you say if you answered yes to eight or more of these statements you are addicted which surprises me because i only went five for twelve and i feel addicted as a professor you are surrounded by young people how much time are college age people spending on their devices and what's the impact on how they socialize or don't. that's a good question do remember we're talking about college students and so there's definitely an age divide we're talking about social media but you won't believe this some of the research that i've conducted myself has found that college to both men and women women more than men spend about an average of eight to eight half hours a day on their smartphones i've read and seen research that says we look at our phones one hundred fifty times a day do you tell the kids to turn it off in class. oh boy yeah that's a story right there twenty years ago my biggest task was getting students to sit back in

a specific tweet or topic? caller: i would love to say it's one thing, but it's just about most of the stuff that he says is hateful. when he talked about our government agencies, the or when or when he's talking about a congress person or the news media, something that we consider normal that these agencies and this group did their job. and it wasn't perfect but they'd did their job successfully. now everything is fake news and awful administration agencies -- with the exception of him. that's a problem. host: let's go to darlene, republican line. i like it. he should keep on doing it because the media is all liberal. plus, they're gossip columnists. they want to rule the country and they are idiots. host: specifically why do you like the tweets that the president puts out? caller: because i hear a different opinion. i hear his opinion. and i like his opinion and i voted for him, and i'm 80 years old and i would vote for him that long. do you think about what he that long. host: when the president tweets on so

and he wanted to tweet. and they were trying to take this out of his hands and let's do it together. if that's true, that tweet was still incredibly problem maddic and very surprising for a lawyer to have said, yes, he knew this at the time. that tweet as you know correctly sounds an awful lot like donald trump's voice. saying dowd did it they're clearly trying to say that these are tweets that mueller shouldn't look at but if you're mueller why would you accept that? >> they also tried to put it on ty cobb, the president's other attorney. >> it's not true at all. it was stunning the number of e-mails i got from republicans some fans. president, some not fans who saw the tweet and said did he just say he knew that flynn had lied to the fbi when he fired him? that would mean, if that had happened, that when he, according to comey, pressured comey to, you know, see it in his heart to let go of the flynn investigation, or whatever the exact language was which comey interpreted as a directive, that the president

and i do think that when you put this tweet together with the other tweets, the one where he apparently acknowledged that he knew that general flynn had lied to the fbi when he fired general flynn, and you put it all together, these tweets could be an important part of a legal case against the president. >> pamela, i actually think the president has been more effective than we're giving him credit for here. if you look at the polls for better or worse, republicans now have a much more negative view of robert mueller than they did when he was appointed. you know, the president has succeeded in politicizing this investigation. and that means that mueller is seen at least by more people than previously as someone who is sort of part of the political maelstrom in which we live instead of an independent actor. this will serve as an opportunity to attack him if he takes even more direct action against the president. i'm not saying the president was right to do that. but i think we need to acknowledge that there has been a change of perception, at least by the republican base. >> it does appea

but, yeah, we saw that tweet right there. this one from kim jong-un. he's trying to take the high road here... are they still trying to seek something out? are they gonna go on a camping trip or something? >> i like the passive-aggressiveness of that. >> that is good. that is good. >> that's well formed. that one, that's a good tweet. >> a lot of people were wondering if he was actually diplomat in chief, and i think that was very diplomatic. >> [ laughing ] it was. >> very much so. it was an olive branch to the short and fat leader of north korea. >> "rocket man," "dotard," whatever. >> they don't get twitter there. >> that's what i was curious about. this one here -- well, of course, he said -- when he gets all this criticism, he said... >> can't argue with that. >> yeah, it is now presidential. >> well, i mean, he said -- and give him credit for the fact that he found this way to leverage twitter in a way that you can get right through the media, get your message out there. i don't think, all the time, it's not necessarily

. >>> and tweeting for intel. the head of the cia says president trump's controversial tweets are actually yielding valuable intelligence as u.s. adversaries respond to the president's insults. and now mr. trump's former chief of staff says for every tweet published there are many more that aren't. is the president actually holding back? i'm wolf blitzer. you're in "the situation room." >>> this is cnn breaking news. >>> we're following multiple breaking stories this hour, including the white house all but confirming that president trump will soon officially recognize jerusalem as israel's capital. the expected announcement is raising fear of violent protests as palestinian factions call for days of rage. we just got word from pentagon that some u.s. troops are being repositioned to areas of potential unrest, including maroons who specialize in protecting u.s. embassies. >>> we're also unfolding the unfolding fire emergency in southern california where multiple blazes are burning out of control, fuelled by winds u