[Brooke Baldwin, Cnn Anchor:] He welcomed his Brazilian counterpart, a man who is clearly singing from the same hymnal, to the White House.
[Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian President:] May I say that Brazil and the United States stand side by side in their efforts to ensure liberties and respect to traditional family lifestyles, respect to God, our creator, against the gender ideology or the politically correct attitudes and against fake news.
[Donald Trump, President Of The United States:] I call it fake news. I'm very proud to hear the president use the term fake news.
[Baldwin:] President Jair Bolsonaro, who is known as the Trump of the Tropics, has come under fire for language that is anti-immigrant, language critics say has led to a surge in violence against indigenous Brazilians. And that controversy is something similar to President Trump, who has been slammed for his rather tepid responses to the New Zealand mosque shootings, to Charlottesville and to more. So, let's start at the White House with our correspondent there, Abby Phillip. And, Abby, it is notable that both leaders stood up there and they talked about fighting terror, neither of whom mentioned, you know, condemning white nationalism, the threat globally, what happened in New Zealand, none of it.
[Abby Phillip, Cnn Political Analyst:] No, none of that was mentioned at all, Brooke. But it's kind of rare sometimes to see the president really feeling like he has a partner in crime in this world leader who is so similar to him in a lot of ways. President Bolsonaro saying at the end there at the press conference that he was confident President Trump would be reelected to another four-year term. But these are two men who came into the office on the backs of this idea that they flout political correctness, that they don't care what you want them to talk about. They are going to talk about what they think is important. And the use of that term fake news obviously was not an accident. It was definitely a nod to President Trump and a way of President Bolsonaro saying, I have got your back. And President Trump essentially said the same thing. So there was no discussion of some of these thornier issues, especially the ones that President Trump has been dealing with over the weekend, his failure to say more about rising hate, rising white nationalism globally, and say more about, you know, supporting the Muslim community in the face of an attack like the one in New Zealand. But he was also in pretty friendly company, and he got at least one set of questions that was also quite friendly as well from a conservative media outlet.
[Baldwin:] Speaking of, a turn to 2020 from said outlet, the president was asked about the idea from the Democratic side of this notion of expanding the size of the U.S. Supreme Court. So here was Trump's response.
[Trump:] No, I wouldn't entertain that. The only reason is that they're doing that is they want to try and catch up. If So, They can't catch up through the ballot box by winning an election, they want to try doing it in a different way. No, we would have no interest in that whatsoever. It will never happen. It won't happen. I guarantee it won't happen for six years.
[Baldwin:] So I suppose no surprise given the Supreme Court appointments are one of his biggest achievements and one of his biggest legacies of his time in Washington.
[Phillip:] Absolutely no surprise. That's what is almost like tee ball for President Trump. It's setting up a question for him that's actually really important to his base. As you pointed out, the issue of the Supreme Court is so central to conservative voters, that was one of the reasons President Trump has said this himself that he believes he was elected, because in the campaign he said, I'm going to stick to this list of potential judges and if I'm president I promise to appoint one of these people from this list. And that list had been vetted by conservative legal scholars here in Washington. So essentially President Trump is signaling to his base here that I'm not going to change my strategy and I'm not even going to entertain the possibility that the court could be brought further to the left by a potential Democratic president or by anyone really in the future. But, of course, these ideas are a little bit more complex than simply packing the courts. If you hear at least one of the Democratic candidates, they're talking about the idea of making the court a little less political, but that's not how President Trump framed it. He made it sound as if what this was, was an attempt by Democrats to really rig the court in their favor in the future by simply adding more liberal judges to the court, Brooke.
[Baldwin:] Abby Phillip, thank you at the White House for us. And we will also talk in just a couple more minutes about the, again, president's new and harsh attack today on the late Senator John McCain. So we will talk about that coming up. But, first, it was the FBI raid that President Trump called a disgrace. And now we are learning from just released documents that the search of Michael Cohen's properties was months and months in the making. In fact, these documents show that Cohen, the president's former lawyer and fixer, was a target of Robert Mueller almost immediately after he was appointed as special counsel back in may of 2017. That raid of Cohen's office and hotel and apartment took place last April. The filings also reveal the feds almost searched the wrong hotel room, but citing the documents quote "Another law enforcement agent learned from a hotel employee that Cohen's room was eventually one floor below." Shimon Prokupecz is our CNN crime and justice reporter. And, Shimon, you have been going through all these hundreds of documents. Do they explain what it was that specifically led Mueller to want to look into Michael Cohen?
[Shimon Prokupecz, Cnn Crime And Justice Correspondent:] In very general terms, Brooke, it explains what the violations were, the crimes that they were investigating. And it's similar to what we have seen in the Paul Manafort case, bank fraud, also the fact that doing work for foreign as a foreign agent and not registering. So, it was along those lines. But exactly what specifically led them to start looking at Michael Cohen for these crimes is not clear. And keep in mind that Michael Cohen was never charged with any of the counts from the special counsel's office. Everything eventually moved over to the Southern District of New York, where he ultimately pleaded guilty and admitted to all these crimes. But it's probably a lot more involved. The reason we don't know is because the search warrants that the special counsel team obtained have not been made public. So we don't know what evidence they had to suggest that they needed these warrants. What did they tell the judge here in Washington, D.C., about why they need these search warrants to search his e-mails? That's what they were doing. They were going through tons of his e- mails. They were going through phone calls, contacts that he was having with people, so they were watching him for quite some time. And, as you said, Brooke, it was just months, about two months after the special counsel was appointed, that they went ahead and started getting these search warrants and trying to build this case against Michael Cohen.
[Baldwin:] OK. Shimon, thank you. I have got Elliot Williams and Elie Honig back with me. And let's just start by explaining what all this is. You have in your hot hands here all these documents. And I see the redactions. But, first, so, what's in those papers?
[Elie Honig, Cnn Legal Analyst:] So, this is 269 pages that a prosecutor walked over to a federal judge here in New York and said, I have probable cause to search Michael Cohen, his e-mail, his iCloud, his phone records, right? It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but what you do is, you marshal all the evidence. I have done this a bunch of times. This is 10 times more evidence than I have ever presented to a federal judge to get a search warrant.
[Baldwin:] Wow.
[Honig:] And what this shows is that, even before they did those searches in April of 2018, which I think put Michael Cohen on the map...
[Baldwin:] The very public raid.
[Honig:] Yes, that's when we all started paying attention.
[Baldwin:] Right here.
[Honig:] He's in trouble. They already had this much evidence. So all this talk about conspiracy theory by Trump and by Giuliani is complete nonsense and sort of elided by this.
[Baldwin:] Let's remind everyone what President Trump said about those raids. Roll it.
[Trump:] So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, good man, and it's a disgraceful situation.
[Baldwin:] Elliot, broke into the office and disgraceful. So doesn't this prove that ain't true?
[Elliot Williams, Former U.s. Deputy Assistant Attorney General:] Right. They called it disgraceful. They called it unlawful. But what you see here is the meticulous work of prosecutors and FBI agents to go through and establish probable cause. It's not easy to do and this is I read through it this morning too. It is done effectively and done well. And it further highlights that Michael Cohen and frankly everything that's happening in the Southern District of New York is a far greater threat to the president of the United States than anything else he's facing right now, because this is the proof of what happens when the president and his folks are investigated.
[Baldwin:] Let's get into it. I want to get into the details, because I read through a ton of this earlier as well. So, Cohen was paid more than $500,000 from this company called Columbus Nova controlled by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who was close to Putin, subject of sanctions, because Cohen was consulting, right, and it was that money that he received that he then funneled through his LLC, Essential Consultants, which is how we reported months ago how he paid the hush money to Stormy Daniels.
[Honig:] Yes, heavy air quotes on consultants, right? It's unclear on what consulting he was providing.
[Baldwin:] We don't know.
[Honig:] Yes, but this is a shell company. This is why people create shell companies, because they want to move money in a way they hope they can hide from investigators. And that led to I think what a lot of people are noticing, which is all these redactions, right, 20 pages of this. It's kind of frustrating as a reader, but I think they're talking to us through these redactions.
[Baldwin:] How do you mean?
[Honig:] So, there's 20 pages of this, first of all.
[Baldwin:] Show what that looks like.
[Honig:] This times 20, right, a little dissatisfying to the reader.
[Baldwin:] OK.
[Honig:] Before 20 pages is an awful lot before they even raided Michael Cohen's home and office and hotel. So, that shows you they were well on to the campaign finance. And there's another clue too. Judge Pauley, who is the judge in the Southern District who's presiding over this, who I have appeared in front of many times, last week, when he was ordering the release of this document, said he said this. He said that the document includes a quote "catalogs and assortment of uncharged individuals and details their involvement in the campaign finance charges to which Cohen pled guilty." So, he has seen underneath these redactions and he tells us there's other people named in here who are part of it.
[Baldwin:] Spell that out. Spell that out.
[Williams:] Well, no, but, again, we know the judge knows what's underneath the redactions. And it's not good for Michael Cohen. Other individuals. Other individuals.
[Baldwin:] Currently under investigation.
[Williams:] Currently under investigation, wink, wink. The other thing that was interesting here, though, is that they make a reference to Michael Cohen being investigated, but not charged with this foreign agent registration stuff.
[Baldwin:] Yes.
[Williams:] And so when you're talking about this, let's use the air quotes again, the consulting company, it was seeded with a lot of Russian money, right, and he wasn't reporting some of the contacts he was having with individuals overseas. I think this is the first time we have seen Cohen brought into the international game that we have sort of heard Paul Manafort and others associated with. It was just striking to see, because we have associated him with these payoffs to porn stars and so on, but not these international deals.
[Baldwin:] And it was because of the legislation that the president signed into law, the CLOUD Act, that enabled the prosecutors to go back to the court and say, hey, we need to take a closer look at this because this president just created this law that enables us to look into Michael Cohen's bits and pieces overseas. There's so much more we can get into.
[Williams:] Sweet irony.
[Baldwin:] Right. Just wanted to point that out. Guys, stay with me. Thank you. Just ahead here on CNN, a "New York Times" report that lays out in stunning detail how Donald Trump worked with Deutsche Bank to get more than $2 billion in loans over the years often by inflating his own wealth. Plus, President Trump going after the late Senator John McCain again today, saying that he was never a fan of the late senator and never will be. And Senator Elizabeth Warren during a CNN town hall becomes just the latest 2020 Democrat to call for the elimination of the Electoral College. We will debate whether that idea has any traction.