have a great evening. break this down for us athena. i think there was a suspension this might happen. there were obviously this is an event where you have so many celebrities who go and you had a lot of them saying we re not going this year. because of president trump and there was a, i think an open question about whether this event was going to end up being completely different than it had been in the past. absolutely, brianna. i don t think this comes as a huge surprise, you talk about the celebrity saying they may not come. also some of the big parties of that weekend, the host of the parties said they were not going to be hosting the parties. we re talking about a dinner taking place, scheduled to take place the end of april. it s a scholarship and awards dinner. a dinner that the preds, whatever president, has traditionally attended. the president traditionally giving a funny speech. sometimes poking fun at himself. as well as the media. that s generally the approach. but this
narrowly congressman keith ellison for the top spot. but they perez appointed ellison as his deputy. sparking words of praise from former president obama and words of caution from senator bernie sanders. we re going to have more on that in a moment. but first we re learning more about communication between the white house and officials in charge of investigating president trump s ties to russia. cnn wars the first to reveal that the fbi and the white house reports contact between trump campaign staffers and senior russian officials and the chairman of the house intelligence committee said he had contact with the white house on this story and he engaged with reporters on it. i want to turn now to white house correspondent athena jones. i want to go through the details with you on this. before we go to that, we actually have some breaking news from president trump. this is what he just tweeted. he said i will not be attending the white house correspondents association din they are year.
they basically make all of the money that they need to run the white house correspondents association. so they are in a little bit of a catch-22, you can talk to jeff when he comes on. they need the dinner to fund what they do and what they do is very important work. and at the same time, the tradition is to have the president at that dinner. and yet this president does not have a healthy respect for what we do as journalists. so my own view is it would have been inappropriate to attend. and that trump has, has done everyone a favor by not going. the white house correspondents association fights many occasions, and for access there at the white house. and there s an accountability that really ends with the white house correspondents association speaking as this unified voice for the press there and what is such an important role. i m glad you pointed that out, ryan lizza. thank you so much to all of you and we are awaiting a moment with the white house correspondents association pres