[Unidentified Female:] The president floated replacing Sessions with Pruitt. Scott Pruitt himself proposed it to the president.
[Donald Trump, President Of The United States:] I'm not happy about certain things but he's done a fantastic job running the
[Epa. Unidentified Female:] He is actively sacrificing our clean air, our clean water to line his own pockets.
[Unidentified Male:] They're running out of options.
[Unidentified Female:] We are expecting heavy rains in the next couple OF days.
[Unidentified Male:] We're not out of the woods yet. This is just the beginning of the actual rescue phase. This is a special edition of NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.
[Alisyn Camerota, Cnn Anchor:] Happy Fourth of July everyone. Welcome to a special holiday edition of NEW DAY. It is Wednesday, July 4th, 8:00 in the east on this Independence Day, America's birthday. John Avlon is here with us. We are all representing the flag right here.
[John Avlon, Cnn Political Analyst:] We are. Maggie somehow is a subterranean way
[Maggie Haberman, Cnn Political Analyst:] Red here.
[Camerota:] I see that.
[John Berman, Cnn Anchor:] Maggie represents freedom of the press which is the most American thing of all, so God bless Maggie Haberman and God bless America.
[Camerota:] We're going to get to you in a moment, Maggie.
[Berman:] Even on camera, not just the disembodied voice.
[Camerota:] That's right, because we do have big news. The Republican- led Senate intelligence Committee is now the backing the intelligence community's conclusion that Vladimir Putin meddled in the 2016 U.S. election to help Donald Trump win. President Trump, for whatever reason, continues to repeatedly reject that finding. It will make for an interesting one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin and President Trump 12 days from now.
[Berman:] The scandal surrounding embattled EPA chief Scott Pruitt read like a scroll. A senior administration official says Pruitt is, quote, inching forward toward the tipping point, perhaps gliding forward toward the tipping point now that we know he asked a security detail reportedly to go get him a certain kind of lotion. We are getting new information about his future. Sources tell CNN Pruitt personally lobbied the president to fire the attorney general Jeff Sessions and replace him with a guy named Scott Pruitt. Joining us to talk about all this, CNN political analyst, "New York Times" White House correspondent Maggie Haberman. Long time no see, Maggie.
[Haberman:] It's been at least 10 hours.
[Berman:] It's been at least 10 hours since you and I last spoke. And the Senate intelligence committee put out this finding which says their assessment is that Russia meddled in the 2016 election under the direction of Vladimir Putin. They did it to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. This is the assessment from the intelligence community that we first heard way back on January 17. Yet on July 3rd, 2018, the intelligence committee comes out and says yes, this is the case, and it does fly in the face of what we hear regularly from the president and his allies in the House Intelligence Committee.
[Haberman:] It does. And I think it's interesting, because remember, Senator Burr is a Republican who leads this committee, and there is nothing equivocal about this report. It doesn't do what the House version of this report does, which is create some seed of doubt. This goes in a very different direction. It takes issue I think with two things the intelligence community did but nothing that would have impacted the outcome was in terms of their determination on what happened. The president has sort of mouthed acknowledgment that Russia he said things like it could have been Russia, but it could have been a lot of people. A lot of people meddle. His aides will routinely point to that as an example of look, he has repeatedly said he realizes this. He has not done that and he has on his Twitter feed every day as we have seen continued to undermine the Mueller probe. The Mueller probe, again, is primarily looking at possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign. And in order for that to have happened Trump has to then acknowledge to some extent that that is real. He is doing everything he can to suggest this probe is a fake. And people can speculate as to what his reasons. It is interesting that this report is coming out shortly before he's going to meet one on one with Vladimir Putin in a meeting where he reportedly does not want notetakers or any other people in the room.
[Camerota:] What's that about?
[Haberman:] He does that with all of these meetings. It's going to raise a red flag on this one because it's Putin.
[Avlon:] This meeting is not like the others for reason the Senate intel report makes very clear. It's Independence Day. The opposite of celebrating American independence is a foreign power influencing our election outcome, and that's what clearly happened on President Trump's behalf at the behest of President Putin, who is one of the few people on earth Donald Trump refuses to criticize. All these things raise red flags as does this insistence that they meet alone without aides at the outset.
[Berman:] There's no record. There will be no record of the conversation.
[Camerota:] Why does he want to do it? So he can say whatever he wants happened in there or because why?
[Haberman:] He has done this with other leaders, and my general understanding of what the reason then is he likes to get a feel for them, he likes to understand who they are, where they are coming from, and I think there is probably something to that. But again, what most presidents would do given this fact set is say, you know what, I'm going to have some other people come in the room for this one. That is not ever where this president goes. And again, to your point about how Putin is the one person he won't challenge, he also is one of the only people who he will just take his word for it. He keeps saying, well, he says he didn't do it. Well, then that's that. This is a president who routinely disregards facts, statements, anything that don't fit with his preexisting belief. And yet this is something where he has taken his word on invasion of Crimea, he has taken his word on all manner of things that cut against what U.S. policy has been.
[Berman:] We played before in the show, Maggie, back in February when the intelligence chiefs were all asked if they had been directed by the White House to do anything to stop election meddling going forward. They all said no, no, no, not really. Not exactly. You report on the White House every day. Are there some huge organized efforts or even small, disorganized efforts right now to battle election meddling in 2018 that we're not hearing about every day?
[Haberman:] Not that I know of, and I think you've seen the same reporting I have, which is that tech leaders recently had a meeting with members of the intelligence community, and they apparently came away with a general sentiment that they're on their own for 2018, that there's not going to be some organized effort. We do know the president doesn't talk about it very much and we certainly that know a red flag has been raised internally. I don't think a whole lot has been done and it has been made clear from intelligence community officials over and over again, it's not they might meddle. It's they are meddling. We're not necessarily seeing it.
[Camerota:] And how surprising is it, Maggie, that national security adviser John Bolton also says that he doesn't that he was assured by a Russian translator that no meddling. Listen to this. It's not just the president. Listen to this moment.
[John Bolton, Former U.s. National Security Adviser:] The president has already said that he's going to raise the question of Russian meddling again with Vladimir Putin. He said it this past week.
[Unidentified Male:] Does he believe what happened?
[Bolton:] I'll tell you what President Putin said to me through the translator of course. She said there was no meddling in the 2016 election by the Russian state. So I think it still raises the question. I think the president will want to have a conversation about this and say we don't want to see meddling in the 2018 election.
[Camerota:] Is he kidding? The translator told him that? Case closed?
[Haberman:] I think John Bolton likes his job and wants to stay in it, and I think he knows this is going offend the president.
[Berman:] But it's different than what we saw in the assessment from the intelligence committee. The intelligence committee said that Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian meddling in the election, and as far as I know Vladimir Putin is part of the Russian state despite what the translator apparently told John Bolton.
[Avlon:] But we've also, and Maggie has written extensively about this, the gap between this administration and the White House is stark and perhaps never so stark at these intel committee hearings where Dan Coats, the DNI, and other have said watch out. The Russians are targeting our upcoming elections. I think we've got that tape.
[Dan Coats, Director Of National Intelligence:] There should be no doubt that Russia perceived its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations. We need to inform the American public that this is real, that this is going to be happening, and the resilience needed for us to stand up and say we're not going to allow some Russian tell us how to vote, how we ought to run our country. And I think there needs to be a national cry for that.
[Avlon:] And I will say just to add to that, though, Trump's Department of Homeland Security still has not released the names of the individual states. And the estimate is 18 and 21 that voters rolls were broken into by Russian hackers. They have still not released the names of those states publicly. That is troubling. Why?
[Haberman:] It's also worth remembering just going back to John Bolton for a second, John Bolton was a Russia hawk. It's so striking.
[Camerota:] What happened?
[Berman:] I'm old enough to remember a few months ago.
[Haberman:] I think what's happened is he wants to keep his job. I don't think it's more complicated than that. I think the president has set the tone on this front and I think that John Bolton is following along. Whether he is going to say something more definitive after the summit, but again he says the president President Trump will confront Putin and say we don't wanted meddling in the 2018 election. That's going to be very hard to confirm when no one else is witnessing this meeting.
[Berman:] Who is the biggest loser in this Senate Intelligence Committee report? It strikes me that they went out of their way well, they did dump it on July 3rd to contrast themselves with the House Intelligence Committee. It seems to me they're saying sorry Chairman Nunes over in House Intel, you got it wrong here.
[Haberman:] I think that Burr is I don't know that that was his goal. I think that Burr is actually really concerned about what happened in 2016. I think that you have a lot of members of the Senate who are genuinely concerned about what happened and don't want to see that happen again and are concerned about the fact that this administration appears to be complacent at best about trying to grapple with this going forward. And I think that is mostly what it's about. I don't think it's meant to put a thumb on the scale, and I don't even think it's meant to rebuke their colleagues in the House. I think it is just meant to offer further, laying down a marker, this is what took place.
[Berman:] This is not nearly enough Maggie Haberman.
[Camerota:] No, never enough.
[Berman:] So stick around. Stick around. There's more to talk about, including Scott Pruitt, the embattled EPA chief.
[Camerota:] We've run off the rails with this one.
[Berman:] Scott Pruitt, will he last another day?