that s all we want is for them to get to the bottom of this and we ll do the same on the house intelligence committee. reuters is now reporting, congressman, a grand jury has issued subpoenas in connection to the 2016 meeting with between donald trump jr., other campaign officials, with russian lawyers over at trump tower in new york. what s your reaction? i m glad they have. if that s the case. i would hope just as a former prosecutor, that that is something that they are looking at intensely and running down. as you know, president trump has warned robert mueller the special counsel against looking into his private businesses and now cnn can confirm that the special counsel s investigation is in fact focussing in on potential financial ties between donald trump and his associates, ties to russia. do you worry that the president will try to remove robert mueller after hearing about
the president has said that s a red line, mueller should not cross. cnn has also learned that investigators turned up intercepted communications of suspected russian operatives, apparently trying to coordinate with former trump campaign chairman paul manafort. sources say the russians talked about information they believed would damage hillary clinton s campaign. and the washington post is reporting that transcripts of a phone call between president trump and mexican president nieto showed mr. trump mexico would not have to pay for a border wall that is could be worked out. when he asked him to stop criticizing the wall. we re covering all of that. much more this hour with our guests. including congressman eric of the house judiciary and intelligence committees. and our correspondents and specialists are also standing by. let s get some more now on the wall street journal report that a grand jury has been
against from manafort to see what s truth and what s fiction in there. i was just going to say, phil will know this better, but i m surprised at least at the pace at which this moved. when if first, when bob mueller was first appointed, i was told by folks who allegedly knew, this is going to be a long process. it s not been short process, this is a year that the fbi has been looking into this, but the bob mueller piece of it has not been terribly long. grand jury being impanelled. it feels like it is moving into a new stage. you had a grand jury already impanelled in virginia from michael flynn. so, you know, the question is, whether this is in addition, new, they moved this because it s a different jurisdiction for technical reasons, who knows, but we did already have one grand jury. they wanted it in d.c. presumably it s closer to robert mueller s office, wherever that is. i m not sure where that office is. everybody stand by, we have a lot more reaction to all of today s
muler is doing anything other than, you know, trying to understand what these relationships were, whether they amounted to crimes and getting back to us as soon as possible. and a grand jury gets us one step closer to that. cnn learned that donald trump s former campaign manager paul manafort initially came under some scrutiny after u.s. intelligence agencies collected communications between suspected russian operatives, discussing their efforts to work with manafort to coordinate information to hurt hillary clinton during the campaign. what s your reaction to that? well, it doesn t surprise me that paul manafort was in that june 9th meeting back in 2016. he s also somebody who had worked with pro-russian forces in ukrainian politics. and so he is somebody that we would like to hear from as well. and i imagine if you re bob mueller, conducting were criminal probe, he s also a person that you want to understand just what was his relationship with the russians at the time that they w
offered his sympathies and said at some point, something about think, contemplation of resignation, though he wouldn t. phil, you agree with the idea that kelly and the chief of staff role is significant, especially as the investigation he saw. talk about a test. look at the first couple of steps he s taken. he s removed the communication s director and he s also called ef debitly the attorney general saying don t worry, your job s safe. what s the message? very simple. we have an agenda, what the white house says all the time. we have to keep our eye on the ball and we can t divert attention to conversations like the president saying trump tower was wiretapped. the next couple of days, we got a beth that the president s going to have a hissy fit about this. his lawyers, on the record, have said, we want to cooperate with mueller. his attorneys are on the record, time and time again, saying this. and so i wonder what their reaction would be. if suddenly the president of the united