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Trump Pardons Reality Show Couple Convicted In $36M Tax Fraud; Trump Aggressively Using Pardon Power To Help Supporters; NYT: Trump Pardons Man Whose Mom Attended $1M MAGA Dinner; Putin Aide: "Trump Is Not Sufficiently Informed" About The War; Trump Considers New Sanctions As He Loses Patience With Putin; Freed Israeli Hostage: My Captors "Wanted Kamala To Be Elected". Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired May 28, 2025 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:00:00]

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DANA BASH, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: Today on Inside Politics, pardon power. President Trump is using it aggressively to let loyalists off the hook, especially conservatives he claims, baselessly, were pursued by the Biden Justice department for political reasons. The latest example, a reality TV couple convicted in a $30 million fraud scheme.

Plus, losing patience. President Trump is clearly getting fed up with Vladimir Putin's seemingly unwillingness to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. But will the president actually punish Russia? And they're living there in Allentown.

John King talked with Trump supporters in the crucial Pennsylvania city to get their take on the president's trade war. They long ago closed those factories down. So, do these voters really think the president will bring manufacturing back, as he's promising?

I'm Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines at Inside Politics.

Inside the White House, President Trump is about to officially swear in longtime Fox host Jeanine Pirro as the acting top prosecutor here in Washington. She's one of many close Trump allies in top jobs at the Justice Department, which the president is consistently using to help his allies and threaten his opponents.

One of the ways he's doing that is flexing the president's unchecked pardon power. As early as today, reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, known for the reality show Chrisley Knows Best could be released from prison after receiving pardons from President Trump.

(VIDEO PLAYING)

BASH: Three years ago, the reality TV stars were found guilty of conspiring to defraud banks out of more than $30 million. Many prosecutors said they spent on luxury goods, cars, clothes and real estate. Their daughter, Savannah got news of her parents' pardons straight from the president himself. He called from the Oval Office. Savannah campaigned for the president and spoke at the Republican National Convention with a not-so-subtle message about her parents.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SAVANNAH CHRISLEY, REALITY TV STAR: My family was persecuted by rogue prosecutors in Fulton County due to our public profile. I know Fulton County. They know how to do it, don't they? I'll never forget what the prosecutor said in the most heavily democrat county in the state. Before an Obama appointed judge, he called us the Trumps of the south.

Hey, it's fun. He meant it as an insult, but let me tell you, boy, do I wear it as a badge of honor. The only thing consistent about democrat justice is how they consistently punish their enemies. That's not justice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: I'm joined here by a terrific group of reporters today, CNN's John King, and CNN Kristen Holmes, Dave Weigel of Semafor, and CNN's Audie Cornish. Thank you all. So, good to see you. Thanks for staying up past whatever I am that you usually take a nap.

(CROSSTALK)

BASH: Kristen, give us the sort of big picture on what you're hearing from sources about this, this pardon, the series of pardons, and where the president's head is?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: So, I want to take us all back to 2020, when Donald Trump was leaving office, and he did a huge slate of pardons. And what we learned in the weeks and months afterwards was that it was really one of the most chaotic times at the end of the presidency.

These pardons, these requests for pardons, were not going through the traditional Department of Justice channels. They were essentially going through Jared Kushner. They were going through allies that were close anyone who could get Donald Trump on the phone was calling him to try to get a pardon for a friend.

So, what we're seeing now is not that different when it comes to Trump's allies from what we already saw. The only difference now is that he's doing it in front of everybody and a rolling kind of pardon, these untraditional. These are people who have access to him in various ways. And he's saying that it's because of the weaponized Justice Department, but it's larger than that.

[12:05:00]

He's sending a broader message through these pardons and earlier in his tenure, that if you back Trump, if you support him, whether it be fighting for him on January 6, whether it be donations, whether it just be as a vocal ally, that you will be OK and protected by this president.

BASH: And in today's edition of irony is dead, John. Listen to this quote. This is the FBI on the Chrisley's. As today's outcome shows, when you lie, cheat and steal, justice is blind as to your fame, your fortune, and your position. This, by the way, came out when they got convicted. And think about what we're seeing right now.

JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Number one, to Kristen's point. Donald Trump did this at the end of Trump 1.0. He came into Trump 2.0 determined to use his power as often as possible, power across the spectrum of government, not just his pardon power. But he has said, I'm in power this time. He remembers what happened in the midterms the first term, and so he is using it out of the gate. He has been using it every day of his presidency since he's back in the White House.

To this point here, though, this is also another part of what I think is a cynical but effective Trump tactic that works with his people. The government is weaponized. Prosecutors are bad, therefore, when you criticize Trump, right?

If they're after everybody, if you criticize Trump, we might have a conversation later in the show about the Trump family and Bitcoin and memes and investment funds with dictatorships around the world, who have business before the United States government, who give the president a $400 million plane.

But if everybody's a crook and the way -- and the Justice Department, every prosecutor is weaponized, therefore your expectations for government are low. That's the thing I find striking when you travel. People, you know -- people don't expect politicians to be ethical. They don't expect the government to work. And he feeds into that with things like this, that the whole thing is crooked.

BASH: And, you know, unlike so many other times in our nation's history, when people like us, reporters really had to dig into things and to get answers. What the president's Mo is, is just to do it loud and proud and to be really and that's part of your point, and to say, you know, that --

KING: It doesn't -- it doesn't seem secret. So, is it OK?

BASH: Right.

KING: That's one of the things, it's like, how can he keep doing this?

BASH: Right. So, on that note, let's just look at, we just talked about some of the pardons that we expect to come today. These are just some of the recent pardons. Even over the weekend, Scott Jenkins, former rural Virginia sheriff. He was convicted of accepting $75,000 in bribes as sheriff. He is a -- by the way, he was convicted after two hours of jury deliberation. He's a longtime supporter of President Trump. Got a pardon.

Michele Fiore, a former GOP city councilwoman in Las Vegas. She was convicted of soliciting donations and using it on rent plastic surgery and campaign bills. She was an early vocal supporter of President Trump, also pardoned. Devon Archer, former Hunter Biden business partner, testified in Congress that Hunter sold access to his father, and he was convicted in conspiracy to defraud a native American tribe. So, you saw all of this. And then here is the icing on the cake. This is a tweet from Ed Martin, who was supposed to be U.S. attorney, but he -- his nomination got pulled because he couldn't get approved by the Republican led Senate. Now he's in charge of pardons and the weaponization of a government working group. And you just see that. I wanted that to stay on the screen for a little bit. No MAGA left behind. That's the point. They're very brazen about it, what they're doing here.

DAVID WEIGEL, POLITICS REPORTER, SEMAFOR: And people have adjusted to this. You saw Eric Adams successfully, basically, compare his case to Donald Trump's, and get the Justice Department off his back. You saw Bob Menendez less successfully. I think it doesn't help that he voted to convict Trump twice, compare his situation to Donald Trump.

And there has been taking off. What you were saying, this lowering of expectations of the -- for the entire system. His -- the Biden example was supposed to be, I'm going to be different than Donald Trump. I'm appointing special counsels. They're going to investigate me. They're going to investigate my family. I'm sitting down with Robert Hur, the day after October 7.

And you could see at the end of his administration, this is reported in original sin, but we've all heard it. He was very frustrated. Merrick Garland did not protect him. He undermined him with his final pardons. The baseline has lowered because of what Trump is doing. Because if you're a Democrat, you look at this, and say, well, there's no downside and there's no shame in pardoning my friends. Why did our party abide by these rules?

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR, CNN THIS MORNING: Yeah. And I think there's been a lot of what about ism of like, well, Biden did self-protective pardons for members of his family. But I think the thing with this is so much of it is rewarding illegal behavior for political ends. Specifically, if you look at a pardon for like Steve Bannon, or these are people who were, as you said, convicted on very specific kinds of crimes.

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Or if you look at the Blackwater contractors who were pardoned, I mean, the U.N. was saying it was a miscarriage of justice for them to have been pardoned because they, you know, were accused of killing civilians, unarmed civilians. So, the message you're sending, sort of over and over again, is we'll reward just about anything if you're on the right side.

And part of the thing about being an American is having a government that is, at least in its bureaucracy, politically neutral. I don't want deep affification, every time a new person comes to power. I don't want to know that, oh, now it's time to prosecute everyone on this side --

BASH: Which is exactly what's happening.

CORNISH: -- and this seems to be kind of what the goal is. BASH: Yeah. And not to beat a dead horse here. But we remember a time when there was a big, big controversy with a certain president that you covered from the campaign on, putting some pardons in place and questioning whether or not he did that for political reasons. I mean, that was unheard of back then, and the controversy has -- still has ripple effects.

Now, there was an application put in with the political part written into the application. It wasn't hidden. You got to check this out. This is reporting from the New York Times. This is an application for a man named Walczak.

The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak's offenses, but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago. Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump's campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections in an effort to sabotage Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden. And that got a pardon out of Donald Trump.

KING: So, a couple of things. Number one, there's no intellectual consistency, right? They argued, without a lot of evidence. They argued the Biden Justice Department was going after its political enemies, right? That that's what the Democrats were doing, and Biden was doing it, another Democrats did it before them. So, that Ed Martin tweet, or X, whatever we call it now, essentially says, we're doing the same thing. No MAGA left behind. So, they said it was horrible, but now they're doing it.

In this case here again, to the transparency you mentioned. You're talking about Bill Clinton. I was standing, you know, waiting for George W. Bush to come down in his parade when Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, was the most egregious pardon at the very end. And it angered, infuriated a lot of Bill Clinton's staff that he did at the last minute.

But again, he did it at the last minute. It came out as breaking news. This is just fully, it's like, overly transparent. You're for Trump. You've done something wrong. We're just going to do it. We're going to flood the zone with it.

And so, to David's point, it's like -- it's as Bob Dole would say, where's the outrage, right? It's almost harder. There's so much of it and you get like, wait, he did this, he did this, he did this, he did this. And you almost get dizzy, trying to decide which this do we want to hold up and say, well, let's look more closely at this, because they just do it brazenly and publicly.

BASH: Yeah. And by the way, the man I was just referring to pleaded guilty to tax crimes, and he was accused of actually using some of paychecks that he got to buy a $2 million yacht and a Bergdorf -- oh, oh, $2 million yacht, and spend money at Bergdorf Goodman's and Cartier.

Anyway, coming up next, from friend to foe. President Trump says Vladimir Putin is playing with fire. The Kremlin responds that President Trump isn't, quote, sufficiently informed. More on that, next.

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[12:15:00]

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BASH: Quote, not sufficiently informed. That's how an aid to Russian President Vladimir Putin is describing President Trump today. After the president wrote that Putin was playing with fire by keeping up Russia's barrage of attacks in Ukraine. The aid told Russian state TV, quote, Trump says a lot of things. Naturally, we read and monitor all of this, but in many ways, we have come to the conclusion that Trump is not sufficiently informed about what is really happening in the context of the Russian-Ukraine confrontation.

CNN is also now reporting that President Trump is losing patience and considering new sanctions on Russia. It is a stunning change in tone between the White House and the Kremlin and the two presidents who once appeared to regard each other warmly. My panel is back. Audie?

CORNISH: I think that Russia, as they said themselves, they have been watching Trump cycle through praise and then the occasional criticism and then praise. And I think they've figured out, if they wait long enough, the news cycle will change but he really won't. And at a certain point, mostly what I'm wondering now is, at what point is this an embarrassment to Trump. At what point is this proving that he has more than met his match with Putin. He has met somebody who is now mocking him.

And in fact, saying the same things that Zelenskyy was saying. Do you really understand what's going on here? And Trump turned to him and basically said, you don't have all the cards, be quiet. What does he say to Putin? What does this look like? I'm going to leave it to the reporters to tell me. But it just seems to me a giant question mark, and there is no one else to blame. It's not a Biden did it. It's not anything else. Everything that happens with him and Putin now is on Trump.

WEIGEL: He's interested, and he said this many times, is winning a Nobel Peace Prize, and then the peace deals that make that possible would be nice. And what did he run on, ending the war in one day? The letter said that was sarcastic. So, if they're assessing this and saying, he seems to have a political goal here that he can't achieve and it's not that relevant because he's not running for reelection, then we can go very far in manipulating the situation.

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I think that's a good read of it. And this has really become background news politically. You don't -- you're districts -- I'm in districts. You don't hear people talking about this war every day. They were outraged. Some of them would happen in the Oval Office to Zelenskyy. But if the assumption domestically is that this is not a big voting issue for Americans and the Russians are seeing that, I think they're correct right now. You can have a lot of death going on the background.

BASH: Right. Except if it does escalate, which is something that, if you're looking at social media, and this is something that definitely caught our eye, and it should catch everybody's eye. So, Dmitry Medvedev, he went back at Trump's word about -- words about playing with fire, saying that, I only know of one really bad thing, that's World War III.

And if you look at the top of your screen there, this is from General Kellogg, who is a top aide to Donald Trump, who said stoking fears of World War III is an unfortunate, reckless comment, unfitting of a world power.

HOLMES: Well, honestly, Donald Trump has talked about World War III. He talked about it almost daily on the campaign and saying that if he came into office, he would be the only person who could stop World War III from --

BASH: These are threats happening --

HOLMES: Right, that's happening online. I do want to kind of go back to Audie's point, because I actually think that that's where we are in terms of the two world leaders, which is how long is Donald Trump willing to be embarrassed by the Kremlin or by Vladimir Putin?

What you've seen is, it's not just the escalation of attacks. Obviously, we've seen that before. It's the fact that the escalation of attacks came after Donald Trump spoke for two and a half hours on the phone with Putin, and after Donald Trump said that Putin still wants peace.

We were also told that on that phone call that Putin had committed to drafting what the -- he was calling a memorandum of peace, which was just what Russia's list of requirements would be for Ukrainian ceasefire. He said he'd have that to the U.S. and to Ukraine in a number of days. It's been over a week and nobody has that --

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HOLMES: But the fact is that Donald Trump sat on the call, Vladimir Putin said this to his face. He then regurgitated information publicly, saying that Vladimir Putin wanted peace, or still -- he still believed that. And now you're looking at over a week without any sort of movement from Putin in the direction he said he was going to go in. Instead, he's just escalated the attacks. So, it goes back to your point about embarrassment.

KING: We have lived this movie, how many times? Since George W. Bush came to his senses and realized, I looked into his soul and there was someone to do business with there. It didn't take long for that to pass and everyone to realize who Putin is. He's been the same ever since.

So, the American president, now it's Donald Trump, says I'm considering sanctions, right? That's what Obama did after Putin took Crimea. Putin still has Crimea. Putin plays a long game, and he will figure out a way to deal with sanctions. Not that they won't punish the Russian people, and they won't punish the Russian economy. They might, if they're substantial enough, but he plays it out.

But what's the -- what's the other piece of this? Trump is losing patience, right? Like Obama lost patience and just walked away and said, never mind. Like Biden couldn't get there either. So that's Putin winning. You're going to lose patience, so the Americans are going to stop and walk away from any peace negotiations, which means Putin gets to keep going. So, that's where we are here. Now Trump is getting played by Putin, like other American presidents have in the past.

My bigger question is the Trump effect on the world, when people are sitting at this table in five or 10 or 20 years, in the sense that the Germans today announcing they're going to jointly manufacture weapons in Ukraine with Ukraine. There is an adjustment happening.

Can it work? Are they strong enough? Can you do it without American leadership? I don't know the answer to that question. But the rest of the world is saying Donald Trump cannot be trusted on these issues where America used to lead, so we have to figure out another way to do it.

BASH: The premise of this whole conversation was an expectation that Donald Trump himself set in the campaign, which is, I'm going to fix all of this. And a lot of people believed it. It turns out, even the Hamas terrorists, apparently, who were holding hostages.

Our colleague Bianna Golodryga did a fantastic, really interesting interview with the now former hostage. And they talked about something that I've never heard a hostage talk about, which is discussion of politics while in captivity with the captors. Take a Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OMER SHEM TOV, FREED ISRAELI HOSTAGE: They were very scared of him. They wanted --

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN ANCHOR & SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Who?

TOV: Terrorists.

GOLODRYGA: Were afraid of Trump?

TOV: Yeah. They wanted Kamala to be chosen.

GOLODRYGA: Did you talk politics with them?

TOV: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They wanted Kamala to be elected. When Trump came into -- became president, yeah, the way they treated us changed for me personally. This is what I saw.

GOLODRYGA: I think because they anticipated that a deal would come soon.

TOV: Yeah. GOLODRYGA: And that's when they started giving you more food?

TOV: Exactly, more food. Treated me better, you know, stopped cursing me, stop spitting on me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: They fattened him up because they assumed that that meant that he would be released, and he was, unfortunately, the war is definitely not over, and not all hostages are out.

[12:25:00]

KING: Not all hostages are out. And again, another thing that Donald Trump said would end right? That Donald Trump, like Ukraine, that once he was back in power, these things would all take care of themselves because he was the leader, and it has not.

And now you're seeing, number one, it's a fascinating interview. But number two, you're also starting to see the politics in Israel. The former prime minister, Ehud Olmert coming out, who has defended Israel, defended Netanyahu for a month, saying, I can't do that anymore. I can't do that anymore. What I'm seeing, to me, looks like a war crime.

Again, there is American leadership here. It's Netanyahu do whatever you want. It's not. How do we end this? How do we let you reach your goal of fighting terrorism, a very legitimate goal. But how can we stop innocent people being killed or expansions during -- in the West Bank right now, Israel doing things.

And again, where is the American president who went to Saudi Arabia, went to Qatar, went to the United Arab Emirates, and essentially exposed what we've all known for a long time, that the rich Arab countries really don't give a damn about the Palestinians, except when it suits their political purposes. Where is an American president to try to figure this out? He just wants Gaza empty, so they can build hotels.

BASH: Well, I think it's the same idea of what we were talking about with Ukraine, is that he didn't understand why it wasn't being done before he was there. Then he got into office and realized, wow, this is really, really hard, and now he's turned his attention elsewhere, so that's what's happening.

KING: Yeah, it's complicated.

BASH: OK, up next. The crypto presidency, how the Trump administration is embracing cryptocurrency and rewarding the investors betting billions on its future.

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