biased, what it really seems to come down to for him is that judges are like everyone else. you are with him or against him. the courts are not helping us, i have to be honest with you. it s ridiculous. somebody said i should not criticize judges. okay. i ll criticize judges. okay. outfront now let s go to kaitlan collins outfront in west palm beach near the president s resort where he s spending the holiday. the president picking a fight with a chief justice and when the chief justice responded, the president upped the ante. why is the president choosing this fight? reporter: well, president trump doesn t often hesitate to push back after he s been criticized and white house officials will say this is classic trump. he s going to fight back whenever he s been criticized, whether it s the pope or the chief justice of the supreme court of the united states, and that s what we re watching play out before us. now, you played that clip of president trump criticizing john roberts
numbers perspective and from the oil angle. it makes no sense as he himself points out. the largest producer of oil now is the united states of america. i would like to add, erin, just one more point. you know, i ve said this before, and i ll say it here, that the intelligence community, i believe, will continue to tee up truth to power whether the power listens to the truth or not. and they ll continue to do that. i hope they do as, of course, the media tries to do as well no matter what anyone calls it. thank you so much, director clapper. i appreciate your time. thanks, erin. outfront next, trump s acting attorney general matt whitaker facing a new probe tonight into his finances. we have new reporting on how he received thousands of dollars in donations right after joining the justice department. the significance of that and the president authorizing troops on the southern border to use lethal force if necessary. could that happen? our guest, senator jeff merkley. (music th
another president had done, but not to the magnitude it was done today against president trump. and when you look at that moment, you could say president obama went too far, shouldn t have done that in that setting. president trump does it i could have picked many more sound bites than i picked in the introduction. again and again and again and makes it explicitly about politics, and that is unprecedented. i think the level at which he does it is particularly different, and i think it s important to understand here the president is the elected chief executive. it s his prerogative. he doesn t like the law. he can work to change the law. i mean i feel like this is school house rock. judiciary branch interprets the law. and even though they at times appear to interpret it from their political perspective, their judicial philosophical perspective, if the president doesn t like the law, he can send up a package of immigration reforms. i mean we said the same thing about obama tha
he s saying, you know nothing, yrn everythii know everything. there s so much context here to what chief justice roberts did. he s doing this in the context of he s as aware as the rest of us are that donald trump has waged an attack on all sorts of institutions, federal law enforcement, the media, also the way he said there aren t obama judges or clinton judges or bush judges, he s pushing back at the political tribalism of today that trump exacerbates and you can t help but flash back to where trump dismissed admiral mcraven as an obama backer, a clinton backer. everything is political. he has this view of the world that i figure out what political tribe you belong to and it s not mine, you have no validity. i think the chief justice was pushing back very specifically at that. which of course is so disingenuous because this is a guy who was a democrat and was pro choice. voted for clinton. he s a populist. he s not even saying if you re not in my tribe, he s saying, if you re
to appeal to his ego. but i want to ask you first about the saudi foreign minister, the guy who knows washington well, a guy who lived there a long time, former ambassador. seizing on trump siding with the cia. how significant is trump doing that, siding with the cia, when it comes to saudi? i mean, siding with saudi against the cia. i m sorry. misspoke. well, of course, he s grasping at any straw, and that s been the history of this whole episode with the saudis, is they progress from one lie to the next. and so, by the president s disregarding the intelligence on this, he has given the saudis a hook which the foreign minister, who s a very shrewd guy, long time in washington, seized on right away, and again, it s just regrettable that the intelligence community kind of got thrown under the bus here.