4 00 a. M. In the east. We begin with new reporting that suggests President Trump himself personally dictated the initial misleading statement about don jr. s meeting with the russian lawyer during the campaign. According to the washington post, the president insisted on a change in strategy after advisers planned to issue a truthful statement to get ahead of the original story before it broke in the New York Times. The post citing people with knowledge of the deliberations say the president dictate a statement saying his son and the russian lawyer discussed the program about the adoption of russian children. The statement was worked out on air force one. On the flight home from the g20 summit in germany where, mind you, the president just met with Vladimir Putin for several hours. So the adoption claims were later shown to be misleading, trump jr. Eventually acknowledged he took the meeting because he was promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton from the russian government. Pr
Days that you were here, he told it that he got out of the leakers. He drags the white house into the gutter. One said she was skeptical about kellys ability to change the way that this white house but he shot and killed mooch on day one shows that maybe things can change. The fact that he had to be shot and killed doesnt say much about his tenure. He wasnt shot and killed he was gone after six days. Hes still in the administration. Heres what people dont understand. Hes a utility player. The president uses him when needs him. Sounds like an assassin. Utility players do what the president is asking him to do. Steve schmidt, if you were asked to assassinate someone by having comments that would mortify your wife and kids, would you do that . No. General kelly spent his life in an important institution, the United States marine corps. His core values are honor, commitment and courage. The comportment of scaramucci if he was a senior officer of the marine corps he would have been courtmar
Well bring that to you live. We mentioned that long list of exits in just over six months and other highprofile departures include Reince Priebus, mike flynn as press secretary, mike duffy, james comey as fbi director, the white house now resembling the red wedding from game of thrones. Lets get to cnns jeff zeleny at the white house. Its john kellys first day on the job. He was sworn in this morning. This gifves us a little bit of insight of how kelly felt about scaramucci. Reporter it gives us a lot of insight. He didnt think he was the right fit for this new order hes going to try to impose on the west wing. But it also gives us a window into how much authority the president is going to give his new chief of staff. This is something that may not have happened, you know, a few weeks or even months ago. Its clear the president is giving john kelly, at least now in the opening days of the honeymoon phase, if you will, the full authority who goes in the oval office, who sees the preside
Clear the decks. Let me go back to the xm back and let john kelly have his clean slate to put his own team in there thats the way its coming down. We dont know if its because of the chain of command and kelly wanted to make a change there or if it had something to do with the interview that scaramucci gave last week, the profanitylaced interview that he gave with the correspondent from that one publication. Clearly john kelly likes to run a tight ship. If hes got somebody out there who he believes is a bit of a loose cannon, not to say he was, he probably will want to reign that person in. Kelly comes from a live of Combatant Commanders that includes james mattis and joe dunford. I remember in the iraq war of 2003, dunford relieved the commander of the unit that was traveling with right in the heat of battle. So this is a group of Combatant Commanders that when they see a problem, they deal with it swiftly and quickly. What is really interested about this, neil, is the fact that the pr
Cnns dan merica is there in anaheim. So what is the expectation, kind of a trunk indicated versicated we saw and heard yesterday . Reporter you can see behind me people are at the podium speaking mostly about health care at this point. President obama will speak from that podium shortly. And basically will give the distilled version of the speech he gave yesterday which really was a direct condemnation of president donald trump. Something president obama has avoided doing for much of trumps first year and a half in office. He avoided attacking his successor, something other president s have done, but he argued yesterday that this is not a normal time, so it is incumbent on all of us including himself to stand up. And that is what he told about 1300 students yesterday in illinois. Take a listen to what he said directly about the Trump Administration. It shouldnt be democratic or republican to say we dont target certain groups of people based on what they look like or how they pray. We a