With jake tapper starts right now the man trump calls old crow, is flying the coop the leads Ich Mcconnell there with his own 2024 plants, stepping down as Senate Republican leader, though hes going to stay on as a senator from kentucky. The new era of republican politics. Now, loading as a new highstakes restate kicks into gear to replace mcconnell, odds are the winter will likely be an old white guy named John Plus A Monster Wildfire in Texas Exploding at one point burning through 150 football fields a minute charring through land 11 size 11 times the size of washington, dc. Were going to go live on the ground as this fire and wide open land prompts evacuations in its path and President Bidens date with the dr. The report, do any moments after his annual physical welcome to the lean. Im jake tapper. We start with our Politics Lead and the end of an era on capitol hill, senator Mitch Mcconnell, the longest serving Congressional Party leader in american history, announced today hes ste
special counsel jack smith is looking for in the classified documents probe. as with the $5 million defamation and sexual abuse judgment against donald trump, his own words are once again being used against him in a court of law. this time we re of course talking about that stunning february 2021 audio recording. donald trump bragging about a secret document with plans to attack iran at bedminster. to a writer working on a book, the discovery of that recording according to report from the wall street journal we discussed on this program last week, we know was a watershed moment that helped spur doj into pursuing a criminal case against the ex-president. days after his indictment on 37 felony counts, the ex-president claimed this. there was no document. that was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about iran and other things, and it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. i didn t have a document per se. there was nothing to declas
no, she d send it to anthony weiner. yeah. the pervert. please print. by the way, isn t that incredible? yeah. i was just thinking because we were talking about, and you know, he said he wanted to attack iran and what these are the papers. you did. this was done by the military given to me. i think we can probably right? i don t know. we ll have to see. yeah, we ll have to try to declassify it. figure it out, yeah. see, as president i could declassify it, now i can t. isn t that interesting? it s so cool. look, her and i have and you probably almost didn t believe me, but now you believe me. no, i believed you. it s incredible, right? they never met a war they didn t want. bring some cokes in, please. enough about anthony weiner, back to my classified papers. just wow. it also happens to be a smoking gun piece of evidence in the
that there is a smoking gun piece of evidence that the president was involved with, you know, some kind of collusion or conspiracy with respect to russia. i think the most likely answer is probably a bit subtler than that. i don t think that the fact that mueller hasn t announced it yet means it s not true but i m also i wouldn t be at all surprised if the reality were a little more complicated than da mid-february robert mueller presents the evidence of collusion. we would say oh, my god, there was all of this collusion in exactly that fashion. i think the soundest logic is to wait for the results of the investigation to be revealed although there are a lot of valid questions out there about how they are going to be revealed and how much the public is going to get to see it with who is in charge of the justice department right now. good to see you.
this committee, on judicial nominations specifically is named barbara ledine. if that name is familiar to you in the context of brett kavanaugh s nomination, you might remember from his confirmation hearings that controversy over whether or not brett kavanaugh ever received documents when he worked in the bush white house that had been sto stolen from senate democrats. you might remember in that controversy there was a sort of smoking gun piece of evidence produced during the confirmation hearings, which showed that brett kavanaugh had, in fact, received documents stolen from democrats while he worked in the bush white house and he had to have known they were stolen, despite his assertions to the contrary under oath, in part because of what we could see in the document, which was sent to him and which brett kavanaugh forwarded from his white house e-mail account in 2003. this is the document where the subject line was literally, quote, spying. and the first line was, quote, i have a fr