and the dropping of a truly massive bomb on afghanistan. president trump, through all this, is on vacation. more on that shortly. cnn s suzanne malveaux is at mar-a-lago. matthew chance in moscow. jim acosta is at the white house tonight. let s bring in suzanne from florida. so for president trump, sort of a working golfing weekend for the president? reporter: you could call it that. they say they are ready for anything, that they are prepared. his chief of staff reince priebus was with him in the motorcade at joint base andrews but did not accompany him here in florida. so he doesn t have his top level staff in florida with him. we are told from a white house official that s very intentional. that this is supposed to be a light foot print allowing the president to have time with his wife and children, allow top advisers do the same. sit a break in protocol, having covered president obama and president bush, there s usually
out of the white house staff which some say actually is helpful to go first. he has been able to fill his cabinet without fully flushing out we know his top advisers, but not the rest of the down the level staff of the white house. then there is a lot happening behind the scenes that we don t have a camera on every day watching who comes in and who comes out. there are staff with the transition rolling out going into each agency and trying to get their arms around the bureaucracy there. the teams are trying to figure out what government looks like so they can report back to the agency heads and actually see policy plans put into place. meanwhile, you have the president-elect using his bully pulpit there to tell companies what he expects from them in terms of cost on government contracts in terms of jobs.
and figure out when it happened. you knew it happened? your senior level staff or members of it knew. let me ask you about a senior appointee of governor christie. david samson, former attorney general of new jersey, he headed up the governor s transition team when he became governor, a close political ally. the governor said yesterday, even though samson s name turned up in the first provocative 22 pages of the documents, he was helping take part in retaliation. we weren t sure what that meant. the governor sat down with him, talked to him for two hours, is confident he had nothing to do with this. how does david samson come across in the documents? the other thing this shows, which we only had in vague indications from sources was that the new york and new jersey sides basically went to war
worked for him on the ground in ft. lee didn t require some sort of corrective action, either during or after it happened. and that s a question that they still don t have an answer for. if you get a report that things are this chaotic, why don t you do something to address it and figure out why it ever happened in the first place? especially when you didn t just find about it this week. at the very least, your senior level staff or some members of it knew. let me ask you about one senior appointee of governor christie. david samson. i believe a former attorney general of new jersey. chairman of the port authority. he headed up the governor s transition team when the governor first became governor. the governor said yesterday even though chairman david samson s name turned up in the first very provocative 22 pages of leaked documents, said he was helping take part in retaliation, although we weren t sure what that meant from those documents. the governor said in his press confere
sword over republicans, the fact is if the economy goes into recession, that is going to affect the prospects for a successful second term for him and n a profound way. congressman cummings, if i still have you, i m interested in your take on this. i think some friction between even a democratic controlled white house and a democratic controlled house or a democratic controlled congress, there is some friction built in, whether it s a democrat, a democratic republican or a republican. mostly privately they said he didn t listen to us and care about the house. never searched in the house. how open are the liens of communication on the fiscal cliff between house democrats, yourself, leader pelosi, and the white house, whether it s president obama or vice president biden or senior level staff that you feel as though what you guys want and need politically and from a policy perspective is being listened to? i can tell you it s absolutely no doubt that the president is listening to us.