much more preoccupied with what was happening with brett kavanaugh and the drama surrounding his nomination than he was with rod rosenstein. and that s not what rose nlstein saw coming, which is what led to so much of that chaos today. well, he s stood behind brett kavanaugh saying, you know, he s a good man. this is a smear campaign. so you set me up because we re going to talk about that when we come back. when we come back, i want to talk about the other big drama that has the white house and capitol hill in turmoil. that s what kaitlan just mentioned. judge brett kavanaugh trying to save his supreme court bid. he tried to make his case on television tonight, but was he really speaking to just one person, the president? minimums and fees.
not questioned that perhaps dr. ford at some point in her life was sexually assaulted by someone in some place. but what i know is i ve never sexually assaulted anyone. unprecedented, kaitlan, the very fact that he did this interview. i mean that s unprecedented, isn t it? it is. even when clarence thomas was aaccused of sexually harszing anita hill and there was that drama testimony on capitol hill, he never did an interview until a month after he was confirmed during that vote to supreme court. so we are seeing something totally extraordinary here. that is why so many people commented on the fact. what this shows us is just how concerned the white house and judge kavanaugh truly are about this nomination because last week when we had just this one accusation from professor ford, the white house s response was, let s hear her. let s hear what she has to say, but let s also let brett kavanaugh defend himself. today we saw that media strategy completely shift after that allegation i
the president returns to washington, d.c. convenient. you got to wonder whether team trump even wants to fire rosenstein and potentially open a whole new bunch of obstruction charges, or do they prefer to stick to their strategy of discrediting the investigation? well, so will the president fire rod rosenstein on thursday? will the kavanaugh nomination crash and burn on thursday? and are republicans about to pay a price for the bargain they made with president trump? let s discuss now. cnn s white house correspondent kaitlan collins is here as well as cnn global affairs analyst susan glasser and mark mckinnon, a former adviser to george w. bush and john mccain, who is now executive producer of the circus on showtime sunday nights good evening to one and all. susan, i m going to start with
brett kavanaugh making an extraordinary move trying to save his supreme court nomination tonight. going on fox news to deny allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct. kavanaugh cited friends and colleagues who attest to his character as evidence in his favor. joining me now is mark osler, professor of law at the university of st. thomas and a classmate of brett kavanaugh at yale law school. thank you for joining me. and i identified you as a roommate, former roommate, but you re not. you re a former classmate with the judge. so good evening. tell me, how do you know brett kavanaugh? well, we were classmates back in law school. yale law has small classes. about 160 people at that time. and so pretty much everybody knew one another. and i did run in some of the same social circles that brett did. i knew him. we were on law journal together. he was a face i saw quite a bit. yeah. the reason i had roommate on the
and that s not necessarily an insult because nixon was a very experienced politician, and he was basically a smart person. but where they re similar is president nixon, he didn t want to just beat his political opponents. he wanted to destroy them and the same way with donald trump. in that case, they are similar. but, you know, this is a different time here in the second decade of the 21st century. and the country has changed a lot. you know, in these theories of evolution, we talk about what happened to the dinosaurs. they were yesterday s animal, and they got to be extinct. if the republican party isn t careful, that s what s going to happen to them because they may be able to push through the kavanaugh railroad through the kavanaugh nomination with what is on on the known, the old bulls, the older white men that have the power. but this can t last because america is changing.