[Natalie Allen, Cnn Anchor:] U.S. president Donald Trump angers two of his closest allies in his speech to the biggest U.S. gun rights group and now Britain and France are hitting back and blasting the president for his remarks. Also it is Election Day in Lebanon for the first time in nearly a decade, with a record number of female candidates. Also still no relief in sight for the hundreds of people displaced by the continuing volcanic eruptions in Hawaii. We'll talk with an expert about what's going on. Welcome to our viewers here in the U.S. and around the world. We are coming to you live from Atlanta. I'm Natalie Allen. NEWSROOM starts right now.
[Allen:] U.S. President Donald Trump is angering not one but two of America's closest allies. France is upset over comments Mr. Trump made about the November 15 terror attacks in Paris. At least 130 people were killed, hundreds were wounded. Mr. Trump was speaking at a convention for the largest gun rights organization, the National Rifle Association, on Friday when he said this.
[Donald Trump , President Of The United States:] Paris, France, has the toughest gun laws in the world. And we all remember more than 130 people...they died in a restaurant and various other close proximity places. They were brutally killed by a small group of terrorists that had guns. They took their time and gunned them down one by one boom, come over here, boom, come over here, boom. If you were in those rooms, one of those people and the survivors said it just lasted forever. But, if one employee or just one patron had a gun or if one person in this room had been there with a gun, aimed at the opposite direction, the terrorists would have fled.
[Allen:] Francois Hollande, seen here with France's president at the time of the attack, he called Mr. Trump's comments, quote, "shameful." The French foreign ministry issued a statement expressing its firm disapproval and called for the respect of the memory of the victims. In the same speech, Mr. Trump angered Britain, saying it had a knife problem. At one point he compared a London hospital to a war zone, saying the floors were covered in blood from knife attack victims. Elsewhere, Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani is speaking out yet again about the hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. He created a firestorm earlier in the week when he announced President Trump had paid Michael Cohen for the $130,000 payment made to keep Daniels quiet about her alleged affair with Mr. Trump. In an interview Saturday night, Giuliani repeated his argument that the payment did not break the law.
[Rudy Giuliani, Former Mayor Of Nyc:] The President of the United States did not in any way violate the campaign finance law. Every campaign finance expert, Republican and Democrat, will tell you that if it was for another purpose other than just campaigns and even if it was for campaign purposes, if it was to save his family, to save embarrassment, it's not a campaign donation. Second, even if it was a campaign donation, the president reimbursed it fully with a payment of $35,000 a month that paid for that and other expenses. No need to go beyond that. Case over.
[Allen:] Scott Lucas is a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham, England, and the founder and editor of "EA World View." Scott, thank you for being with us. We'll talk about Giuliani in a moment. But let's begin with Mr. Trump's speech to the NRA. He has angered our closest allies, furious at comments he made regarding terror attacks on France and England. This as he supported strong gun rights in the U.S. He made no mistake about how strong he now stands with the NRA. What do you make of it?
[Scott Lucas, University Of Birmingham:] Well, we know that Donald Trump was playing domestic politics and he was feeding red meat to the NRA supporters. But what he's done is by using the examples of France and Britain is intervened in frankly what many here consider an ignorant and crass way
[Lucas:] in affairs that concern us over here. In France, there have been steps taken to prevent terror attacks. There is a great deal of concern over that. But the idea that if you just simply arm civilians with no checks and that stops terrorism, I don't think anybody will back the president up on that.
[Allen:] Let's look at Las Vegas. More than 50 people gunned down in this country; massacres happen on average every day in the United States.
[Lucas:] Absolutely. And yet he calls the country where I now live a war zone. He dares to say, in fact, that we supposedly are in no-go areas because of violence, which, on a sunny day here in Birmingham, I can tell you is the furthest thing from the truth. One statistic to eliminate this: Donald Trump is holding out against any gun control in the United States where almost 40,000 were killed by guns in 2016. In the same year, the total number of people that were killed in homicides by guns in the United Kingdom: 26. That's the core issue. But don't expect Donald Trump to address that. Expect him to try to deflect from that by even risking insulting allies at a time when he needs them over issues like the Iran nuclear deal.
[Allen:] It's almost preposterous, trying to make that kind of point when the numbers aren't even close to adding up. It just boggles the mind because just a couple of months ago, he seemed to have sympathy for the Parkland high school students and their issues over guns. And now he was full-on NRA, all about it.
[Lucas:] Yes. And this isn't just Donald Trump. That speech remember, Trump obviously put his touches on it but that speech would have been written for him by advisers. This is not just Trump. This is a group of people who now are all in. Forget the idea about any raising of the limits on owning semi-automatic weapons to 21. Forget about any system of significant checks. They're simply going to say all of this needs to go away after Parkland. And we'll see what affect it has leading up to November. I don't think you're going to see Trump get away with these comments without some type of pushback not only abroad but also at home.
[Allen:] Let's talk about Rudy Giuliani, his latest lawyer, despite being admonished by the president for erroneous comments according to the president about that payment to a porn star, Mr. Trump paying it back, Mr. Giuliani is now oddly standing by what he said, even though those comments blindsided Mr. Trump apparently and his legal team. It's very hard to keep up. What is Mr. Giuliani's role here, is this PR, is this propaganda? What?
[Lucas:] First of all, this didn't blindside Trump. Trump and Giuliani, who are friends from any, decided last week they were going to try to make the Stormy Daniels affair go away. What was distinctive is they didn't consult anyone in the White House. They didn't talk to John Kelly, the chief of staff. They didn't talk to the White House lawyer, Don McGahn. So when Rudy Giuliani came out on Wednesday and started the controversy rather than making it go away by saying Donald Trump knew about the payoff to Stormy Daniels, contradicting what the president has said for months. And then the next day on Thursday, Rudy Giuliani tied the payment to the campaign when he said, imagine if this had come up during the last debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton? What Rudy's done over the last two days and may well be doing today is issuing yet another clarification which is far from clear. Significance: the president's alleged affair with Stormy Daniels is not just simply a personal matter now. It is becoming a political matter and in combination with things like the Russia investigation and all the other controversies, it's something that's eroding his position, at least with those who are not firmly committed to the president, whatever he does or says.
[Allen:] As someone likened to the whole Stormy Daniels saga to the White House twisting itself into a pretzel and it kind of feels like that, doesn't it. But I want to talk about the president's lawyer, involved with Stormy Daniels, Mr. Cohen, the fixer at the center of this. According to "The New York Times," he has often operated in the backwaters of the financial and legal world and those worlds are connected to Ukraine and Russia. Yet again, another road kind of connected to the president that runs through Russia.
[Lucas:] I think it's important to say that the reason for the FBI raid on Michael Cohen's office, hotel, home on April 9th was not because of his legal work because that's protected by confidentiality. It is over his business affairs. And I suspect the connection between the federal prosecutors in New York and the Mueller investigation is that some of those business dealings were for the terrorist organization. One example, key example, Michael Cohen dealing with known figures who are linked with Russian officials on projects such as the Trump Tower Hotel in Moscow, did those business dealings then continue into 2016 and in some way get bound up with the campaign
[Allen:] Scott Lucas, we appreciate you joining us. Thank you.
[Lucas:] Thank you.
[Allen:] Another story we're following, polls open in Lebanon, where, for the first time in almost a decade, people are voting for their next parliament. Prime Minister Saad Hariri is expected to be able to form a new government but he faces pressure from Hezbollah. A new election law is also paving the way for independent candidates. Do they have a chance? CNN's Ben Wedeman has been following the story for us. He joins us live from Beirut. Ben, new laws and thousands of new voters. What could that mean for this election?
[Ben Wedeman, Cnn Sr. International Correspondent:] The new law is important because it gets rid of the old winner-takes-all system and replaces it with a form of proportional representation. But for Lebanese voters, the choices are mindboggling. You have almost 600 candidates running for 128 seats in parliament, divided very equally, 64 for Muslims, 64 for Christians. But given that there are so many different, there are 17 recognized religious groups or concessions in this country. It's not quite so cut and dried. So you do have for the first time 800,000 people voting. In this case, there's 77 lists in 15 different districts. So a mindboggling array of choices. But it is believed that, at the end of the day, not much will change. What's different this time is that there are more independent candidates, more people who are running on a non-sectarian program but these new faces in Lebanese politics may not really have much in terms of the actual outcome of the vote. What we have seen is that you have a variety of candidates who, in some cases, some parties are allies in one district, enemies in another. But at the end of the day, as one woman who told me inside this voting station behind me, it's a bit of a theater. And the result won't be much of a surprise Natalie.
[Allen:] That's too bad for all of the people that are running. I heard you say earlier there are more progressive issues this time. But what are the prevailing issues that are most important to people as far as polls, going to the polls?
[Wedeman:] People want basic, good services. You have had instances in Lebanon where you've had garbage piling up in the streets. They want somebody to clear it out of the street. Every day you have three hours of electricity cut. You have high unemployment. You have a 156 percent debt-to-GDP ratio. People want this country to be fixed. Now on the progressive side, yes, this year, for instance, compared to 2009, when there were 12 women running for seats in parliament, now you have 86. Almost 100 candidates are calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality. Many candidates are calling for the legalization of cannabis. But at the end of the day, these are progressive candidates who probably won't win too many seats. So what we're expecting after what you're seeing today is probably more of the same Natalie.
[Allen:] All right. Ben Wedeman covering it for us there in Beirut, thank you, Ben. Part of Hawaii's island paradise is being split apart by volcanoes. Coming up, we'll find out if there's hope in sight for homeowners being chased from their homes by molten lava. Also protesters in Russia chant, "He is not our czar," as Vladimir Putin is set to begin his fourth term as president. Chaos in the streets about that. We'll have a report.