marine one. our white house correspondent jeff zeleny is at the white house. you were asking questions about rod rosenstein. i hope it s not true, it might be true, kind of a scatter shot, to be kind about these allegations that there s a spy planted in the trump campaign. he says we re all using the term spygate. no, we are not. reporter: when the president says a lot of people are saying it, that is true, but that s people on one spectrum, those are many of his advisers, including those that work on fox news. sean hannity is essentially an adviser to this president. so some spectrums are calling it spygate, but that was coined by the president. as i was standing out there on the south lawn a few moments ago, it was almost a bit of deja vu. we have seen the president do this repeatedly. he operates off of a potential rumor or some factoid and turns
him to stop tweeting. we re not asking you to give up twitter entirely. but can you at the very least not tweet about the probe? not tweet about mueller, not tweet about rosenstein. for a while he did listen. as sort of scatter shot and undisciplined he was on twitter about every other subject, he rarely went after those men particularly by name. that s changed. that s changed it changed in march. it changed around the same time it is a great indication about the pressure that building now feels about this probe, one that s only grown since the cohen raid a few weeks ago. to your iceberg analogy, i wonder if mueller knows everything. i ve gotten to the point where he s omniscient. he knows everything. whether the president talks to him or not, if the president goes in and talks to him, at this point it might be a courtesy because mueller might have the evidentiary proof of what the president has done, and so that s what i m looking forward to.
it would be hard for kelly to the president certainly is often kind of scatter shot in his approach. i think scott pruitt is an example of that, as someone who has survived scandal after scandal after scandal. but pruitt also had a lot of real defenders among conservatives, among republicans on the hill. kelly certainly began this tenure with a lot of those, but he has lost some support, certainly within the building, when he was brought in and meant to sort of streamline the process, get a better handle on how the white house would run from day to day, there were a lot of staffers from a young age who said that kelly was trying to instill some discipline into this building. i think what we re seeing here is people inside the building
short-range missiles? because that s what the prime minister of japan would like to discuss. so the idea that senator corker was laying out, complimenting mike pompeo for going. i haven t talked to a lot of democrats who are upset about it, but underscoring the fact that this is going to happen in may or june, please have everything lined up so this isn t some scatter shot, reality show, let s just get everybody together and make it happen. and behind the scenes, the bureaucracy is working to do just that. the difficulty they face and the concern on capitol hill is when you have a president that doesn t operate through normal channels, that they don t have the opportunities to do what they need to do. so that point, i listened to the president yesterday with prime minister abe. a lot of people are worried this is a propaganda victory for kim jong-un, putting him in the same room as the president of the united states. but the president of the united states thinks he can do business.
feeling he s got control. he s in the cabinet he wants, he s always been a gut player. he s going to follow his gut now. this is what the gut is telling him. do you sense that from him on these decisions? yeah. i think that s probably right, and i think you know, you can t really blame him for that, i guess, if he feels like this is what made him successful and he had a campaign, obviously, that s scatter shot, organized, not clear lines of communication and became president. you see how he reached that conclusion. i think with hope hicks, he s more than a communications director, and so this is going to be something that i think he s going to definitely feel in a way that he has not felt with other people is that she s somebody who just really knows how to manage him and was really running interference all the time, and so it s going to be hard forward him and hard on the staff also because they don t have a person around who knows how to manage. we heard from the staff the post