More Children to Feed with Less Resources
CHURCH: Welcome back, everyone. Well, U.S. President Donald Trump officially laid out his spending plan for 2020 Monday. And the White House held its press briefing in more than a month for the occasion. But Kaitlan Collins reports other issues were up at most in reporter's minds.</s>KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: The first White House press briefing in 42 days was supposed to focus on President Trump's new budget proposal.</s>SANDERS: President Trump's 2020 budget, which was released today --</s>COLLINS: But it was quickly overshadowed after Sarah Sanders refused to deny a report claiming Trump told a room of Republican donors that Democrats hate Jewish people.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just say or no. Does he really believe Democrats hate Jews. I'm just trying to get the answer to that.</s>SANDERS: I think that's a question you ought to ask the Democrats.</s>COLLINS: Instead, the press secretary hitting Democrats for not going far enough to rebuke their own members.</s>SANDERS: Democrats had a number of opportunities to condemn specific comments that have refused to do that.</s>COLLINS: And pointing to Republicans calling Congressman Steve King out by name for his racist comments.</s>SANDERS: We called it out by name. We stripped him of his committee memberships and we'd like to see Democrats follow suit.</s>COLLINS: But the president never condemned King.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I haven't following it. I really haven't been following.</s>COLLINS: The back and forth distracting from the unveiling of Trump's new budget blueprint. He's renewing his demand Congress pay for his border wall, this time asking for 8.6 billion in new funding. But the White House proposal is going nowhere on Capitol Hill where Democrats have declared it dead on arrival claiming Trump hasn't learned his lesson from the government shutdown when he walked away without a single dollar in new wall funding.</s>TRUMP: We have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government.</s>COLLINS: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reminding him Congress refused to fund his wall and he was forced to admit defeat and reopen the government. The same thing will repeat itself if he tries this again. The proposal coming just weeks after Trump declared a national emergency to secure funding for his border wall, a move that rattled critics and allies alike.</s>SEN. SUSAN COLLINS, (R) MAINE: I don't believe that the president has that authority under the Constitution.</s>COLLINS: The House passed a resolution to revoke Trump's declaration and the Senate is expected to follow suit this week. Trump has promise to veto that measure, but aides are worried more than 10 Republicans could break with the president.</s>SANDERS: Let's not forget the only reason he has the authority to call a national emergency is because Congress gave them the right to do so.</s>COLLINS: Now when a reporter pointed out that President Trump himself has never publicly condemned Steve King, Sarah Sanders said she has and she speaks on his behalf. She did not deny that the president made that remark to that group of Republican donors but when the president was leaving the White House on Friday to go down to that fundraiser he said, and I'm quoting him now, "Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They become an anti-Jewish party and that's too bad." Kaitlan Collins, CNN, the White House.</s>CHURCH: In her strongest statement yet, the U.S. house speakers said she's not in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump. Nancy Pelosi spoke with the Washington Post saying this. "I'm not for impeachment. Impeachment is so divisive to the country, that unless there is something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path because it divides the country and he's just not worth it." Pelosi says she thinks the president is ethically and intellectually unfit for office. Well, the question is whether Pelosi stand will divide congressional Democrats. And I spoke with Politico's White House correspondent Gabby Orr earlier.</s>GABBY ORR, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, POLITICO: And there are already several freshman Democratic members as long -- as well as other veteran Democrats who have come out and said that we need to move forward on impeachment proceedings against this president. And they have various reasons as to why. And Nancy Pelosi is sort of trying to steer her caucus into the direction of not pursuing that strategy. And then there's several reasons for doing that. But one of which is Democrats are obviously heading into an intense reelection year in 2020. There are number of seats that were won in 2018 in the midterms that were in Republican districts that might not be as easy to hold onto this time around, and pursuing an impeachment strategy could easily backfire in some of those districts that Democrats just gained in 2018.</s>CHURCH: Interesting. So, of course, we saw the White House eventually hold a press briefing Monday after more than 40 days to talk about the president's budget plans, but instead, it turns to his comments that the Democrats hate Jewish people. Why was press secretary Sarah Sanders in capable of giving a straight answer on that, and what does it tell us about what's ahead with the campaign?</s>ORR: You know, I spoke with the White House special earlier today who said that this is something that they plan to highlight as much as possible. That being the anti-Semitic comments that make from Representative Ilhan Omar and any other comments down the road from Democratic members that may or may not be perceived as anti-Semitic. They think that this is a winning strategy heading into 2020 that they can potentially siphon off Jewish voters who would typically support a Democratic nominee and Democratic candidates at the House and Senate level to instead support President Trump and Republicans if they can continue to convey that somehow the Democratic Party is becoming more and more anti-Jewish.</s>CHURCH: And Sanders also refused to rule out a pardon for Paul Manafort. What did that signal to you?</s>ORR: You know, I think it signals that that's obviously something that could be on the table. The White House is been sort of off and on, on this question of whether they're even in talks with Manafort's legal team whether they've had discussions previously about pardoning him. They -- some people say that they haven't, that it's never been a topic that has been broached. Others say that there is, you know, it's not entirely off the table, particularly because he did not cooperate with the special counsel investigation. So, you know, I think that this is the answer that we could have expected to hear from Sarah Sanders today. And I'm sure that we'll hear it from other White House officials the more and more we probe that topic.</s>CHURCH: And our thanks to Politico White House correspondent Gabby Orr. We turn to Venezuela now. And President Nicolas Maduro is blaming the U.S. for the widespread power outage, crippling his country in a televised speech late Monday. He called it an electric coup carried out by criminal minds. Maduro says school and work will be suspended for another 48 hours, but the country will slowly recover. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he is pulling all remaining staff from the embassy in Caracas and he's blasting Maduro, Cuba, and Russia for Venezuela's economic crisis.</s>MIKE POMPEO, UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF STATE: No nation has done more to sustain the death and daily misery of ordinary Venezuelans, including Venezuela's military and their families than the communist in Havana. Cuba is the true imperialist power in Venezuela. Russia too has created this crisis. It too for its own reasons destroy the Venezuelan people's legitimate Democratic hopes and their dreams. Moscow, like Havana, continues to brag political cover to Maduro regime while pressuring countries to disregard the Democratic legitimacy of interim president Guaido.</s>CHURCH: Well, Venezuela's National Assembly has declared a state of emergency to help in the power outage. The decree will allow for international help over the next 30 days, but it can't come fast enough for Venezuela's poorest and most vulnerable, especially the children. CNN's Patrick Oppmann reports now from Caracas.</s>PATRICK OPPMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: At an orphanage on the outskirts of Caracas 25 children laugh and play unaware of their country's sliding deeper into chaos. Many of these children have special needs, children that are hard to care in the best of times. For their safety, we've been asked not to show the kids' faces. The government sends children here who have been abandoned to live or find new homes says Magdalena (Ph) who has run the orphanage for 15 years. All her funds come from private donations, she says. Last month she told the government she can't take any more kids. She can barely feed ones already here. "Before, all the groceries didn't fit in the car," she says. "Now with the same amount of money maybe you carry one or two bags." At the orphanage there is no fruits or of vegetables anymore and only meat every other day. Still, these kids don't go hungry. Other children in Venezuela are not nearly so lucky. Magdalena sends us to a kitchen she helped star in one of Caracas's most dangerous slums. There we find children lining up. There's stomach is rumbling. Many on their own. "The parents had to leave to work in other places and other countries," says an organizer. Maybe their grandparents are taking care of them. We give them what we have to give. No one here has to be told to clean their plate even if they can't reach the table. As Venezuela slowly comes undone this commodore kitchen is one of the places that's trying to make the difference however they can. When they started two years ago about 30 kids came here each day to eat free meals. Now they're up to 600. And for many it's going to be the only meal they get all they long. Venezuela's government says there is no humanitarian here. But activist like Malena (Ph) said the number of children being abandoned or going hungry is spiking. "Children don't have political alliances or color of flag," she says, "they are every color. They don't belong to anyone. They are Venezuela's. These children are too young to understand the events taking place around them or how deeply their country has failed them. Patrick Oppmann, CNN, Caracas.</s>CHURCH: Well, big questions for Boeing after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. Is its 737 MAX 8 safe to fly? We will ask an aviation expert to weigh in. Plus, ISIS is in its death rows outmanned and outgunned. Find out why U.S.-backed fighters have yet to bomb the terror group out of existence. An exclusive report when we come back.