straightened out. reporter: all this as the president s legal team is preparing for the special counsel to issue his report on the russia i vest ganvestigatio. trump tweeting today that robert mueller is highly conflicted asking why he didn t interview the hundreds of people in his campaign who didn t collude with russia. even though who frequently defend the president predicting the report will be politically devastating. i think the report is going to be devastating to the president. reporter: the president departing washington for clean up duty in mississippi tonight. holding two rallies in hopes of dragging cindy hyde-smith across the finish line. i know she apologized. reporter: after the republican senator became engulfed in controversy for making this remark. a public hanging i d be on the front row. reporter: wolf, when the president was leaving the white house he was asked about that dire climate report warning of
today that robert mueller is highly conflicted. asking whyly didn t interview the why he didn t interview the hundreds of people in his campaign who didn t collude with russia. even those who frequently defend the president predicting the report will be politically devastating. i think the report is going to be devastating to the president. reporter: the president departing washington for cleanup duty in mississippi tonight. holding two rallies in hopes of dragging cindy hyde-smith across the finish line. and i know she apologized, and she misspoke. reporter: after the republican senator became engulfed in controversy for making this remark i would be on the front row reporter: wolf, president trump was asked about the dire report showing that the economic strength that will be caused by climate change. he said he s received that report, he s read part of it. but he says it s fine but he doesn t believe it will be as economically devastating as the report predicts. no
questions about it? absolutely. i would love to see don jr. come back. until recently, we were hopeful mr. cohen could come in front of our committee. do you believe that won t happen? i think given the current state of play, it will be very difficult to make him do that, especially given the amount of cooperation that seems to be going on with the special counsel. have you been told by michael cohen s team that he will not come in front of the committee? i have not been told that. has the committee reached out to don jr.? you would have to ask the chair. before i let you go, there s been this discussion, this seeming legal strategy that the president has coalesced around to say the president didn t collude, but even if he did, it doesn t matter because it s not a crime. does that strategy hold any water? none. why not? if there was collusion, there are huge implications and questions about legality. when you say collusion, you mean conspiracy? exactly. if thi
more and more consumed by it. you look at his twitter feed, constant that he is saying this. and the white house isn t answering questions about the president s mindset, instead referring us back to rudy guiliani who then in the interviews is making the allegations as he did today, now saying that collusion is not a crime. they seem to be moving the goalpost a bit. before they said the president didn t collude, there was no collusion. that s something we heard from the president on repeat essentially and now they re moving the goalpost essentially to say no, collusion is not a crime, which raises the question why would you make that argument if there s no collusion. let me play the clip from the interview he gave allison cammarata earlier today. i don t know if that s a crime, colluding about russians. you start analyzing the crime, the hacking is the crime. the hacking is the crime. that s certainly the original
president discussed a meeting with the russians. we checked with their lawyers, the ones we could check with, for four of the six. that meeting never, ever took place. it didn t happen. it s a figment of his imagination or he s lying. joining me right now is democratic senator richard blumenthal of connecticut. yammish alcindor is correspondent for pbs news-hour. robert costa national political reporter for the washington post. and brett stevens, columnist for the washington post. thank you. what just happened? they went from didn t collude with the russians, they didn t participate in this conspiracy to disrupt and discredit our electoral process, although if they did it it s no problem. what happened? is it the accumulation of that michael cohen story that s getting out that they re going to be caught so, they might as well deny the guilt of the crime because they can t deny the crime? hard to know what they re doing because from all appearances rudy giuliani is implicating h