Trump Links Shooting to Russia Probe; Trump's Media Allies in Denial.
BRIAN STELTER, CNN HOST: Hey, I'm Brian Stelter. It's time for RELIABLE SOURCES. This is our weekly look at the story behind the story, of how the media really works, how the news gets made. This hour, the Mueller investigation is tight as a drum. No leaks while the White House is leaking like a sieve. Why is that? And later, the playmate and the president. Ronan Farrow is here with this latest reporting about "The National Enquirer". But, first, I think "Wired" magazine Editor Nick Thompson summed up this week best. He wrote this. He said: America is where the high schoolers act like leaders and the leaders act like they are in high school. Unfortunately, two stories have merged this weekend. The pain that we all feel after the latest mass shooting and then the confusion we all feel about the Russia probes. These stories have come together. While these grieving students in Parkland, Florida, are asking politicians to protect them and announcing a march on Washington, the president of the United States is making it about himself. President Trump tweeting overnight: It's very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. He is right about that. But he continued by saying: they -- they at the FBI -- are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. There is no collusion. It's clear the president is feeling the heat of Robert Mueller special counsel and he is lashing out, implying that the FBI might have failed to stop the shooting because it's too obsessed with Russia. Let's be clear, the president is insulting your intelligence. Let's full up FBI.gov. It says right there, the FBI employs 35,000 people. There are a small number of FBI agents working on the Mueller probe, but they have nothing to do with the investigation of tips like the one that was missed before the Parkland shooting. So, where in the world --</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At least we know what our federal agents had been doing recently. Why they were too busy to stop school shootings. They've been chasing down bad Facebook trolls.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the FBI that spends all their time, all their manpower, and all the resources going after a failed Russian conspiracy that never existed and they should be going after bad guys.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How many agents have been taken off the duty of investigating terror and domestic terror to follow these political dead ends?</s>STELTER: Aha. So, that's where President Trump got the idea. Yes. This has been a talking point from pro-Trump media ever since Friday that there is a link between the FBI's failure and the ongoing Russia probes. Again, this is nonsensical, but I want you to see what's going on behind the scenes. Geraldo was said that on TV on Saturday morning, and then on Saturday evening, what did Geraldo do? He was at Mar-a-Lago. He had dinner with President Trump. That's according to new reporting from "The Washington Post". Now, when did Trump tweet that nonsensical claim? Eleven p.m. Saturday. You tell me there's a connection there. But the tweets have continued all weekend long. Here are just some of the tweets from the president. You look at what he is doing here. He is undercutting his own national security adviser. He is ranting and raving about the fake media. He has got tweets riddled with misspellings and profanity. I don't know, maybe down in Mar-a-Lago, maybe in person, President Trump is cool, calm and collected, but on Twitter, he sounds deeply troubled. He sounds unhinged. This is why questions about his fitness for office are so urgent. This is the biggest story that I see happening right now. So joining me to talk about this and other issues, David Gergen, CNN senior political analyst. He was an adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. And Dan Pfeiffer, CNN political commentator and former senior adviser to President Obama. Both of you at one time or another been communications directors for presidents. You have both been inside the White House, so I want to try to assess what we learned from this presidential tweet storm. David Gergen, first to you. Is this unhinged?</s>DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: It reminds me very much of the last days of President Nixon when he became deeply, deeply insecure, lashed out in all sorts of ways and didn't remain focused on the job at hand. And this I'm afraid has been President Trump's pattern now for some time. I don't know why he is so insecure. It certainly suggests as Mueller closes in more that there is he very much does not want us to know, and he is very afraid that Mueller is going to get there. But I also think, Brian, and Dan can speak to this as well, the way the White House runs and people and staff take their cues from the top, from the president. And if he is deceptive, if he is dishonest with the public, then what you find in the White House is a culture of deceit and deception. And they can't get their story straight, because there hasn't been a history of trying to be straight.</s>STELTER: Is that what you see today?</s>GERGEN: That's what I see today, yes. I think that we have an extraordinary situation where that tweet you just showed from Mr. Thompson I thought put it just right. We're under assaults in all sorts of ways as we've seen in this past week and the press has been chronicling and our nation is under -- obviously now under assault from the Russians on our elections, not just 2016, but as we head into 2018, our children are under assault in their schools. Dreamers are under assault from law enforcement officers. And there is nothing -- there is no moral leadership from Washington, from the Congress or the White House frankly, and where is the moral leadership coming from? I'm hearing Broward County as we speak just a few blocks away from where a thousand people gathered and the moral leadership came from those young 18-year-olds.</s>STELTER: Yes.</s>GERGEN: Yes, Emma Gonzalez, wonderful, compelling speech.</s>STELTER: Absolutely. So, Dan, I guess I'm left wondering, why hasn't someone taken away the president's cell phone? Why are these tweets still coming out? Why isn't there a support structure at the White House to save him from himself?</s>DAN PFEIFFER, FORMER SENIOR ADVISER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, for two reasons. One, Trump doesn't want it and he won't allow it. Even if you take General Kelly, someone who had a lifetime of experience in the military, he said his job is not to read the president's tweets, he doesn't pay to Twitter.</s>STELTER: Yes, right.</s>PFEIFFER: Which is sort of like a chief of staff saying, I don't care what the president says because this is President Trump's form of communication. And the people who -- there is a selection of bias and the people who ended up working in this White House. The top tier of best known, best experienced Republican operatives, people who worked for George W. Bush or Mitt Romney or others have chosen not to be in this White House because they don't trust Donald Trump, so the people who are there are people who have come from the Fox News set and are sort of people who are willing to risk career suicide, risk legal jeopardy for the glory, I guess, or infamy of serving Trump. And so, the president's inexperienced and incapable of the job is doing the people he surrounded himself are inexperienced and incapable of the job they've been assigned to do.</s>STELTER: In the press office, one of the deputy press secretaries, Hogan Gidley, has been on a Fox News interview kind of tour recently. This is from one of the interviews where he essentially said it's the media's fault. You all are worse than a hostile foreign government.</s>HOGAN GIDLEY, WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY: There are two groups that have created chaos more than the Russians. And that's the Democrats and the mainstream media.</s>STELTER: No surprise Russia Today ate that up. We can put on screen the tweet from Russia Today. This is the Kremlin-controlled media outlet that was promoting what Gidley said. Dan, your reaction?</s>PFEIFFER: Well, look, this is the incentive structure for Trump's staff. I'm sure Hogan Gidley who is a mid-level staffer there, got a high five from the president for saying that. And whether they are unwitting or witting, they are being tools of the Russian propaganda machine because while I think what they're essentially doing is they have an audience of one in Trump and future career prospects at Fox News, and that is what is driving this. And it is -- it all goes back to the president because this is what he wants from his staff. These are the kind of staff he wants, and -- you're doing what he wants them to do.</s>STELTER: To that point, I thought the most interesting quote that I read all week-long was in a Michael Louis piece in "Vanity Fair." Actually, yes, it was in "Vanity Fair," it was an interview with Steve Bannon, and let's put on screen what Bannon said. There's a profanity here we had to excerpt out. But he says: The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with -- you know what. David Gergen, is that what you see happening? That there's all the tweets, you know, all the messages, all the confusing counter- narratives, it's just an attempt to flood the zone like that?</s>GERGEN: Absolutely. I think they flood the zone in a way that discredits other institutions that may become critical to him, starting with Bob Mueller.</s>STELTER: Like the FBI or the media, or Mueller? Yes.</s>GERGEN: Yes, discrediting Mueller, discrediting what may come out through the Justice Department from Mueller, discrediting the press on what we're reporting on what Mueller does, so that a third of the country will believe it's all overblown or it has been made up or whatever it may be. I think there has been a very clear pattern right from the beginning that has actually in some ways worked because it has kept that base together, but it's eroding the trust in the presidency, the trust in this president around the rest of the country, and it has been extremely damaging, I think for our sense of being a single people, that we have some sense of unity about our country, and the Russians are laughing at us because they are getting away with this. They are fomenting a lot of this, and there is no sense of urgency, especially ahead. We have an election that's just around the corner later this year. What if the Democrats, you know, take the House back? Are they all -- is that all going to be blamed on fake news? What if they fall short? Are Democrats going to think, you know, it was all that meddling, and they have won a few seats that they wouldn't have otherwise won. This is what split the country apart, and it is a beginning and many other countries it's the beginning of an authoritarian rule, and that's the larger threat hanging over us now.</s>STELTER: That's a pretty frightening picture you just painted. Are you personally afraid of that, David?</s>GERGEN: I find it -- the threat is growing. There is this new book out about how democracies die written by two Harvard professors and it's quite striking, Brian, about the number of countries that were led by democratically elected leaders, but they turned more and more authoritarian. A dozen countries have flipped from democracy to authoritarianism since the end of the Cold War. We're not immune to that. I think we have strong checks and balances. Thank good we have long traditions and norms, but we have to protect those norms in a bipartisan way. We must come together. Those of us who care about the way the country has been run historically, and why it's been successful historically must rally to the kind of standards and the respect for rule of law, the respect for a free press that has made this country great.</s>STELTER: And, Dan, last word to you. You certainly have a point of view on your podcast "Pod Save America" coming from the Obama White House. You're a vocal critic of Trump. But what do you want to see journalists doing in the environment that David just described?</s>PFEIFFER: Well, I think they need to keep doing what they have been doing and aggressively hold Trump and his administration accountable. I actually think the problem here is not a failure of journalism. It is two things. One, this is not just Trump. This is the entire Republican Party has decided they are OK with Trump's behavior, the rampant corruption within the administration and doing essentially nothing about an attack on our democracy. And it's not -- the mainstream media, as we call it, CNN, "New York Times", ABC, whoever else, are out there doing their job reporting. The problem is, is there is a propaganda infrastructure led by Fox News that is a willing participant in covering up crimes and misleading the American people about a very dangerous situation. I agree with David. Our democracy is under assault and that assault is coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And we think our democracy can survive anything, but these things happen slowly, and then suddenly. I think we are in a very dangerous place, but we need both parties to step up here and do the right thing. And right now, the Republicans have decided not to do that.</s>STELTER: David and Dan, thank you for being here. After the break, we're going to look at the right wing media narrative, what Dan was just referring to. The talking points we're hearing about the new Mueller indictments and how it's all Obama's fault? Stay tuned.