Anderson Cooper takes viewers beyond the headlines with indepth reporting and investigations. Do it. As you said, he defended his summit with Putin In Helsinki and said the russians are unhappy hes the president of the United States when Vladamir Putin admitted at the summit he wanted donald trump to win. Theres this huge disconnect. We could all feel it in the Briefing Room earlier today and why you saw so many reporters asking that question. Yes, im sure it was very assuring to a lot of americans out there to hear the director of National Intelligence, fbi director, of Homeland Security to say theyre on the case. Looming over everything in the room is the fact the president has said all sorts of things to diminish the russian threat in the past. He just said it could be other countries, not just russia. Thats so opposite what we heard from his top officials at that briefing. And it was just yesterday sarah palin called the investigation into russia a hoax, wasnt it . Thats right. She
it s good to talk to you again. let s start with the time line on what we know happened between donald trump and ukraine. there s this phone call between trump and the ukranian president. dan coats announces his resignation. dni coats interrupts a meeting on august 8th to tell the deputy dni gordon that she should resign. deputy dni gordon does resign the next day. an august 12th this whistle blower complaint gets filed. then in late august donald trump with holds this ukraine military aid that s intended to protect them from russia. the house then launches an investigation into that and suddenly three days after that the hold on ukraine aid is lifted. what do you make of this whole series of events? and keeping if mind that this whis blower is a unknown person but this is what the media is putting together about what this complaint is about. reporter: i have to you this
leader of ukraine to investigate the son of former vice president joe biden in a call between the two leaders that is at the center of an extraordinary whistleblower complaint, according to two people familiar with the matter. trump used the july 25th conversation with the ukraine president to pressure the recently elected leader to more aggressively pursue an investigation trump believed would deliver potential political dirt against one of the president s political adversaries. what the post built on from the journal reporting is tying the request of investigating biden to the whistleblower complaint and giving us a date, a point in time, on july 25th. the significance of that is three days later, dni coats resigned, insisted sue gordon resign with him. unrelated coincidence? not likely unrelated coincidence. i think that there s so much to talk about here. just the process of this reporting, these reporters,
remain secret, understood. harry, let me give you the last word and let me put all this back on you. it would seem like this is the worst time in american history to be a whistle-blower. you ve got a president perfectly willing to turn his doj into roy cone and associates. you ve got a justice department perfectly happy to stick their hands way up into the making of an intelligence product by going in and looking at the intelligence stream as it pertains to russia in 2016. you ve got an intelligence community where some of the honest brokers have been run out of their jobs, dni coats is gone. the president sort of churning through appointees at the nation s national security agencies. yeah. look, that s exactly right. we probably have one such honest broker who is the whistle-blower here given the program. but all of this is a common theme. inspectors general, whistle-blower protections, they all exist because we recognize that the executive can t be trusted to completely police it
the mainstream hawkish view of ambassador bolton. in a conversation monday in the oval office, it came to a head and he offered his resignation and the president didn t really say i want you to say, to the ambassador spent monday night thinking it through and ultimately submitted his resignation on tuesday. frank figliuzzi, i had a conversation with a former intelligence official who said only donald trump could make you miss john bolton s presence. talk about these are policy disagreements in the classic sense that we describe policy disagreements among a president and his cabinet. this is donald trump watching tv sort of articulating the urge to be closer to write love letters to kim jong-un, a murderous dictator. this is donald trump with such a cluelessness about the role, perhaps, that the taliban played that he saw nothing wrong with hosting them at camp david two days before the anniversary of 9/11. just talk about what it s mattis leaving over syria, bolton leaving after th