[Lemon:] Donald Trump, Jr. reaching a deal with Senate intel. He'll appear before the committee behind closed doors next month for only a few hours. Sources saying the questions will be limited in scope but he'll be required to clear up any discrepancies in his past testimony. I want to discuss that now with Jennifer Rodgers, Patrick Healey, and John Dean. Good evening to all of you. Thank you so much for coming on. So, Jennifer, Donald Trump, Jr. going to testify, he's going to have to answer questions about discrepancies between his testimony of what other witnesses have testified to. So, what will they get to the bottom of, how will they get to the bottom of anything there?
[Jennifer Rodgers, Cnn Legal Analyst:] Well, they obviously point out what he said before. They raise what the other witnesses have said and they just ask him about it. Is there anything you want to tell us, is there anything that you want to clarify when such and such, Michael Cohen said this? And then they ask him to clarify it. And you know, as much as they want to keep that kind of confrontation of his prior testimony under wraps, there are Democrats on that committee and they're going to be pushing him hard on this prior inconsistency.
[Lemon:] So that would be perceived as a follow-up to say what do you want to is there anything you want to clarify.
[Rodgers:] Mr. Trump, let me follow up on your prior testimony.
[Lemon:] OK. So, it's that easy.
[Rodgers:] Exactly.
[Lemon:] OK. So, all right. So, we're talking semantics here. Two to yes. Two to four hours, is that enough?
[Rodgers:] I think so. If they stretch it to the four and they're good with their questions. Congress people often aren't very good with their questioning, but hopefully they'll get some questions for them should be enough time.
[Lemon:] OK, we'll see. I want to bring you in, John, real quick. John, if it turns out that Don Jr. didn't tell the truth on things like the Trump Tower meeting with Russians or Trump Tower Moscow, what could happen? I mean, Michael Cohen is going to prison because he lied to Congress.
[John Dean, Cnn Contributor:] Well, what theoretically could happen is the committee could find the discrepancy under oath and they could refer to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and ask them to investigate. Now what are the likelihood of that happening under Mr. Barr who's got a new affection for his president, I don't think much will happen with it. I think he's pretty safe at this point. He'll probably say anything he wants to. That's how the system is broken down.
[Lemon:] Yes. You know, Republicans try normally when we talk about him testifying and this was before, there was a Democratic Congress member. Republicans tried to take the pressure off of Don Jr.. In the end though, he's going to have to testify before a Republican-led committee. Do you is this the first crack, you think, in the whole Trump stonewalling everything?
[Patrick Healy, Cnn Political Analyst:] Yes, it is. And to some extent there's been so many questions around Don Jr.'s statements. The other testimony that's been given that I think even Republicans on this committee felt like, you know, at least in terms of credibility, in terms of what they've been trying to get to the bottom in the intel committee that they had to call him in. And in terms of at least the negotiations behind the scenes, you've got to think at least these Republicans and Richard Burr was pretty strong on this, that they needed to have some kind of answers coming from the Trump family in this case. So, it wasn't easy. I didn't think that this would necessarily be the first crack that would come. But again, when you have the majority party in the Senate issuing a subpoena to the president's son, that's going to get a different kind of attention, a different kind of headlines. If it just, you know, if it hung out there endlessly and they just look like, OK, they're now they're stonewalling Senate Republicans.
[Lemon:] Yes. I played the Kamala Harris question before when she was questioning Barr. If we have the video you can put it up. You don't have to roll the whole sound. But if you can. The most satisfying part for me was the lady behind Kamala Harris looking and then Senator Cory Booker looking at her. It's just amazing because they sort of sum up the whole, the absurdity of how he answered that question. The president is saying he didn't ask Barr to investigate the origins of that question, but that's kind of hard to believe considering how he couldn't answer that question, Jennifer.
[Rodgers:] Yes. Barr was under oath.
[Lemon:] There it is right there. Look, and then if you watch. Watch the woman behind her and then watch Cory Booker's face, but go on. It's hard to believe.
[Rodgers:] So, he's under oath there. It's one thing for the president to be out there in front of the cameras saying whatever he feels like saying, but Barr is under oath. He can't lie. So that's why he's dancing around, you know, what does suggest mean. What am I going to say now? And what we've learned from all of that was that, in fact, he had had conversations with the president about other investigations and he ended up being able to dance around the questions. You know, I wish that she would have been able to actually push him a little bit harder and get a final answer on that.
[Lemon:] If you look at the president's Twitter feed, Patrick, I mean, it's all right there, "investigate the investigators," and that's all in caps. And this is a new one. I mean, when Jeff Sessions said the DOJ wouldn't be improperly influenced Trump tweeted back saying, quote, "look into all the corruption on the other side." And here's what Trump said about things just last month. Watch this.
[Trump:] I hope they now go and take a look at the origins, the origins of the investigation, the beginnings of that investigation. Hopefully the attorney general is doing a great job getting started on going back to the origins of exactly where this all started.
[Lemon:] So, he got the oranges the origins right.
[Healy:] Yes, message received loud and clear, right? I mean, Trump you can say this about Trump, he doesn't mince words. I mean, he doesn't hide his feelings, he says what he wants.
[Lemon:] Oranges.
[Healy:] He beat up this origin. I mean, you know, he best up Jeff Sessions on Twitter, you know, public remarks for, you know, for basically almost the entire term that he was in office. Bill Barr new exactly what the president has wanted, you know, in this regard. And there's just a lot of evidence, you know, Bill Barr is willing to kind of parrot a lot of this language the president use like the spying language. I mean, willingly sort of saying that the American intelligence agencies were spying on Donald Trump. That is music to his ears. That is what this president expects of total loyalty even from Republicans who once were guided by evidence, were guided by their own independent judgment, were guided by their constitutional duty. Now it's what the president says and you follow in lockstep.
[Lemon:] John, you know, today Lindsey Graham, one of the president's staunchest allies said that he was going to back off his own in Russia his own Russia investigation. Do you think he would do that if he didn't think Barr was looking out for Trump?
[Dean:] I'm not sure how Lindsey Graham would come out on anything. He's a loose cannon now. But you know what's unprecedented, Don, is the fact this investigation is going forward in any way, shape or form. It started with an assistant or a U.S. attorney from Utah who was waiting for the I.G. report, Horowitz to investigate it at the Department of Justice. Now they've added another U.S. attorney to the investigation. Horowitz still not completed his investigation. And he's got impeccable credentials. Somebody whose word is taken very seriously. But the fact that they're going on and pursuing this, it's obviously a ploy of some sort to get this into the campaign, to get it into 2020. He wants this as an issue. And that's why Barr was either told and took the signal and ran and they're trying to make it a campaign issue.
[Lemon:] Yes. I just wanted to ask. We're getting we're getting some new information in here, Jennifer, I want to ask you about this. And it's about this Alabama Senate bill. Alabama, tonight Alabama, the Senate there passed a bill that essentially bans abortion and penalizes doctors harshly, up to 99 years in prison. The governor is expected to sign it setting up an epic Supreme Court battle. Is this going to lead overturning abortion rights?
[Rodgers:] Well, maybe. And this is one thing that's really dangerous. We also heard today or yesterday they came down with a decision a totally unrelated matter in a tax case, but it was the first time that a five to four majority overturned prior precedent just because they decided that they didn't like it, and Justice Breyer wrote a really scathing dissent about that. Saying, we can't just overturn our decisions because now more people they'll not feel like, you know, we didn't like the way it was done. So that was kind of a warning signal, I think from Justice Breyer that when an abortion case gets up to the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade could be in trouble, and who knows it might be this Alabama case that gets us there. But I think many anti-abortion activists thinks that their time is now.
[Lemon:] The law only allows expect exception to avoid a serious excuse me, a serious health risk to the unborn child's mother and for atopic pregnancy and if the unborn child has a lethal anomaly. The bill which makes no expectation for rape or incest, let Senator Smitherman to ask what happened to a 12-year-old with incest. Incest. And then Senator Chambliss replied, what I would what I hope is if we pass this bill all young ladies will be educated by their parents or guardians that they should go get help if a situation of rape or incest took place to audible displeasure from the panic public gallery.
[Rodgers:] Yes. I mean, these abortion cases are tough. You know, most of the anti-abortion activists would say things like it's not the fetus's fault that the rape happened and the girl should still be required to carry it to term and then kind of get on with their life from there. So, you know, we'll see what happens.
[Lemon:] Elections have
[Healy:] This is the language that the Republicans are poll testing. I mean, this is language we're starting to hear more and more from the president. I mean, they feel like it's not just a Supreme Court case but a degree to which he's alienated parts of his base and loss seats in 2018. Abortion they think is one way to energize and bring some of those voters back.
[Lemon:] As I was saying elections have consequences, and this is one. Thank you all. We'll be right back.