Trump Distancing Himself from Cohen, Signaling a Possible Pardon for Manafort, Attacking A.G. Sessions; Sen. Lindsey Graham Comments on Whether Trump Gets Rid of A.G. Sessions; Trump Legal Storm Puts Parties in Catch 22.
NIA MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN HOST: Thanks, Erica. Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm Nia Malika Henderson. John King is off. The president clear and concise in a new interview today, Michael Cohen's only crime was flipping. And new taunts, too, for his attorney general who rewarded the president's loyalty with inaction. But he said Paul Manafort, now a convicted felon, deserves great respect for not cracking. And the president's national security adviser confronted with an uncomfortable question abroad. Do you think your boss could be compromised?</s>UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Were there ever concerns that your own president is a security risk?</s>JOHN BOLTON, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: Of course not. That's a silly question. And I just spoke to him literally a few minutes ago. Honestly, have a little faith in the American people who elected him president.</s>HENDERSON: A clarifying day today. The president, who seems to prize personal loyalty above all else, now suggests it should be a crime to cross him. The president in an interview that aired this morning on "FOX & Friends" insists that the crimes that Michael Cohen admitted to in court aren't really crimes.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He pled to two counts that aren't a crime, which nobody understands. What he did -- and they weren't taken out of campaign finance. That's a big thing. That's a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They didn't come out of the campaign. They came from me.</s>HENDERSON: Instead, the real crime that Cohen committed is telling New York prosecutors the truth as accepted by a federal court and implicating the president.</s>TRUMP: People make up stories. This whole thing about flipping, they call it. I know all about flipping. For 30, 40 years, I've been watching flippers. Everything is wonderful. Then they get 10 years and jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go. It almost ought to be outlawed.</s>HENDERSON: For the president, who made his bones in 1980s New York, there are few sins worse than becoming a cooperator. Another person guilty of disloyalty in the president's view, his own attorney general.</s>TRUMP: He took the job and then he said, I'm going to recuse myself. I said, what kind of a man is this? And by the way, he was on the campaign. You know, the only reason I gave him the job, because I felt loyalty. He was an original supporter. He was on the campaign. He knows there was no collusion.</s>HENDERSON: CNN's Abby Phillip is live at the White House. Abby, the president just had an event where he met at the White House with Republican lawmakers. Did he clarify anything today?</s>ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Nia, the president just let reporters into the room for that meeting. It was originally scheduled to have been closed, but he said nothing. He didn't respond to questions about any of these issues floating around him. He didn't expand on any of his comments or explain, you know, his view of the situation. But what he has been doing over the last day or so, specifically in a lengthy interview with FOX News that aired last night and today, is really take the lead in the administration's response to all of these problems. There's no question the White House staffers were caught by surprise by a confluence of bad news stories, Paul Manafort's verdict and also Michael Cohen's guilty plea. But President Trump has been the one left to test out various strategies for dealing with these problems, specifically also for dealing with Michael Cohen. President has gone from talking about Michael Cohen as someone who was barely involved in his business and in the campaign to saying Michael Cohen didn't commit a crime and then saying that Michael Cohen is also not to be trusted. So there's a lot that the president is trying to test out, but it's clear not a whole lot of this is really sticking. Yesterday, White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, came to the podium, didn't answer many questions. She repeated these talking points, saying there was no collusion, that President Trump didn't commit a crime. But clearly this is a White House struggling to settle on something that will work, that can get this off of their plate and turn them to something else, some other subject that will be a better story line for this White House and for this president -- Nia?</s>HENDERSON: Thanks, Abby, for that update. Here with me to share the reporting and insights, Catherine Lucey, with the Associated Press, Michael Warren, with the "Weekly Standard, Rachael Bade with "Politico," and Perry Bacon, with FiveThirtyEight. A lot to discuss today. Abby mentioned there basically the strategy of this White House. Catherine, do you sense there's a strategy that they've settled on, or is it, as Abby said, they're just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks?</s>CATHERINE LUCEY, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS: No, I think what Abby says is right. What we've been hearing from people inside and outside this White House is it's not really clear how they're trying to frame a counternarrative, a response, a way forward. Folks who go on cable news to talk about this presidency, to defend this presidency, haven't heard much in how they should be sort of explaining this, what they should be talking about. It's an issue. So right now the main person who's talking is the president. As you saw just now, he's saying a variety of different things. And it's not really clear how they're going to move this forward.</s>MICHAEL WARREN, SENIOR WRITER, WEEKLY STANDARD: I think it is clear, though, that to the extent they do have a strategy, it's sort of the old playbook, right. It's deny any wrongdoing. We heard that from Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday in her briefing, saying over and over that the president did nothing wrong. And the president, of course, sort of allying himself to those who are loyal with him and disparaging those who are disloyal. That seems to be -- again, as Abby said, he seems to be taking the lead on this strategy. The same as usual. The difference here is, is this a different moment here? Are things now different that require from the White House a new strategy or different approach to dealing with this problem?</s>HENDERSON: And on that "FOX & Friends" interview, he went on at length about Cohen. It's this strategy that we've seen before with him, essentially distancing himself from Cohen. Here he is.</s>TRUMP: Well, he was a lawyer for me for -- one of many. You know, they always say the lawyer. Then they like to add the fixer. I don't know if he was a fixer. I don't know where that term came from. But he's been a lawyer for me, didn't do big deals, did small deals. Not somebody that was with me that much. You know, they make it sound like I didn't live without him. I understood Michael Cohen very well. Turned out he wasn't a very good lawyer, frankly, but he was somebody that was probably with me for about 10 years. And I would see him sometimes.</s>HENDERSON: I would see him sometimes. Not very often.</s>PERRY BACON, SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT: It's like I talked about Manafort. Manafort was involved in the campaign. He was the chairman who helped the president win the campaign, of course. The one strategy I do see is -- Steve Bannon brought it up, so did Trump this morning -- is this idea of the Democrats are obsessed with impeachment. I think that is one strategy you're going to see. If you listen to Nancy Pelosi, she expressly keeps saying we're not going to do impeachment. She's the Democrat. That said, you are seeing this idea in terms of rallying the base, to say the Democrats will use this against me for impeachment. I think you're going to hear that more and more and we go forward.</s>HENDERSON: And this idea, Rachael, that whatever Cohen did wasn't really a crime. You heard that from Donald Trump in this interview.</s>RACHAEL BADE, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to try to speak to the legal analysis of that, but yes, obviously that's part of the talking point right now. I do think there are questions right now about Cohen going out there saying the president told me to do this. Well, lawyers are saying he's going to have to prove -- prosecutors are going to have to prove intent, and did the president know this was a crime. It probably won't be that hard to do that, given he used to tweet a bunch about John Edwards and his mistress situation and when he paid money to keep that quiet. Then he gets in trouble with the law. The president back then, you know, used to tweet about that. So clearly he knew that was not allowed. But, yes, of course that's going to be a way to deflect right now. I think privately, out front, they are obviously pushing back on this, calling it a witch hunt, but there was a great nugget in the post story this morning where the president apparently called in his top advisers and said, tell me honestly, how bad is this. That just shows the tweet in the middle of the night last night that he's worried. He's staying up and concerned.</s>HENDERSON: Yes, that tweet at 1:00 a.m., which was no collusion, rigged witch hunt, again, part of what he's been saying for many months now.</s>LUCEY: We've heard that he's upset about betrayal. You see that also with these questions of loyalty. Loyalty is so important to him. The idea that someone would flip, as he's putting it, and you heard his complaints about flipping this morning on FOX. This goes very deep.</s>HENDERSON: In this way, he very much sounds like a mob boss. This idea that snitches get stitches, a kind of petty gang member philosophy.</s>BACON: It's alarming to hear the president, the chief executive of the country, the way he's talking about flipping done by prosecutors everywhere. He's attacking that. He's attacking the attorney general. You also hear this language other places. Duncan Hunter, now under indictment, is saying, hey, they just make it up, the DOJ is full of liberals. This is now affecting other people, the way Trump is talking about it as if the prosecutors around the country are led by Jeff Sessions, a very conservative person, who's the head of the Justice Department.</s>HENDERSON: Speaking of Jeff Sessions, Lindsey Graham commented about Jeff Sessions and whether or not there will be a new attorney general at some point. Here's what he had to say.</s>SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: And I think there will come a time, sooner rather than later, where it will be time to have a new face and a fresh voice at the Department of Justice. Clearly, Attorney General Sessions doesn't have the confidence of the president and the president has a right to have an attorney general he feels comfortable with. Jeff Sessions has done a fine job. He's an honorable man. Replacing him before the election, to me, would be a nonstarter. The idea of having a new attorney general in the first term of President Trump's administration, I don't think is very likely.</s>HENDERSON: This is interesting and new from Lindsey Graham, the idea this is inevitable not before the midterms but certainly could happen after.</s>WARREN: There has been a question ever since the president started attacking Jeff Sessions over a year ago that he would fire Sessions. The question has always been, well, would the Senate, controlled by Republicans, but very narrowly, would they even confirm a new -- this was seen as a political retribution act by the president. But what's sort of tying all this together, and I think you can include the president, is nobody's really sure whether there are staff at the White House, supporters in the media and in the Republican Party -- you certainly talk to Republican Party conservatives about this as I have -- nobody is quite sure what's coming down the pike next.</s>WARREN: Everybody is kind of -- I think that is what has changed from tuesday, this sense that --</s>LUCEY: Anything could happen.</s>WARREN: Right, and we have to be careful to not overplay our hand before we know what everybody else has. Most importantly, what Mueller has.</s>HENDERSON: HENDERSON: Up next, if you're wondering whether or not the president will pardon Paul Manafort, just remind yourself he's been through hardships before, and he always does just fine.</s>TRUMP: I've always had controversy in my life, and I've always succeeded. I've always won. I've always won. I would honestly give myself an A-plus, and so would many other people.