Return to Transcripts main page

Inside Politics

Trump Threatens Investigation Of Chris Christie Over 2013 Scandal; Dem Senate Candidate Graham Platner "No" On Schumer For Dem Leader; DNC Chair Attempts To Navigate Internal Crisis; Trump Meets With South Korean Pres. In Oval Office. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired August 25, 2025 - 12:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:33:51]

MANU RAJU, CNN ANCHOR: Remember Bridgegate? Well, it's more than a decade-old New Jersey scandal. Staffers working for Republican Governor Chris Christie were accused of orchestrating disruptive traffic closures on the George Washington Bridge as political retribution. Now, the governor himself was never charged. But now President Trump says maybe the Justice Department should reopen the case against his former ally turned fierce critic.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And so when I listen to Chris speak his hate, I say, oh, what about the George Washington Bridge, you know? Tell me about the George Washington Bridge. He blamed other people, but he knew all about it.

So I don't know if they want to look at it. It's not for me. If they want to look at it, they can. You can ask Pam. I think we have other things to do, but I always thought he got away with murder.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

RAJU: Got away with murder? I mean, look, a lot of times we dismiss what Trump says about certain things and his opponents. He says a lot. But this comes in the aftermath of one of his other critics, John Bolton, his house being raided -- searched by the FBI on Friday.

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF: Yes --

RAJU: So do you take this seriously, a possibility of a Bridgegate investigation into Chris Christie?

[12:35:04]

CHALIAN: Well, let's see if it forms. But I do take seriously that Donald Trump thinks it is well within his purview to use the power of his office to go after the people he believes are his political opponents. That is -- he campaigned on it. He's talked about it every day. I don't think that's really new information for voters. He's just pursuing that case here. And this clearly is after, you know, Chris Christie was on television yesterday and he did not like what he had to say. I mean, Chris Christie's entire presidential campaign the last time around was an anti-Trump campaign. So he's been sort of under the skin of Donald Trump now for quite some time.

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: But in between, he became a close Donald Trump adviser, right? And so Donald Trump now says --

CHALIAN: Well, before. I meant his most recent presidential campaign.

DOVERE: Yes, sorry. In between Bridgegate and now.

CHALIAN: Yes.

DOVERE: Right? So Donald Trump was -- if he thinks that Chris Christie got away with murder, there's no murder, actually, in Bridgegate, no matter what you think happened there, but that there was all this wrongdoing, he put Chris Christie in charge of his first transition.

RAJU: Yes.

DOVERE: He had Chris Christie in the room as one of his top advisers in debate prep in 2020, right?

RAJU: Yes.

DOVERE: So --

RAJU: So if he got away with murder, why are you giving him these positions? And to that point, in May 7th, 2020, there's always a tweet, a Trump tweet on Chris Christie, "Congratulations to former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, and all the others involved, on complete and total exoneration." And what he called the Obama DOJ scam, referred to as Bridgegate.

So, did he always thought he got away with murder?

TYLER PAGER, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: I mean, I think David made the correct point here, is that Trump has talked about using the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies for a long time. The John Bolton case is the first real example of him pursuing -- someone who worked for him was his national security adviser and sending the Department of Justice, or at least knowing about it, you know, allowing this to happen against a real political rival, a former Stafford-turned-vocal critic of the President.

So I think we are in a different moment right now when Trump makes these sort of claims or makes these threats about someone like Chris Christie because we've seen the dam is broken. He's willing to do it with John Bolton, so why wouldn't he be willing to do it with Chris Christie and the whole host of other people who are in a similar camp of John Bolton and Chris Christie, former Trump staffers or supporters-turned-fierce critics. DOVERE: And there's a connective thread here between that and what we were talking about earlier with people who are looking at their own immigration status and worried about it. This is Trump making clear that he will use the powers of the presidency, of the government, to go after people that he --

TIA MITCHELL, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL- CONSTITUTION: Yes.

DOVERE: -- doesn't like.

But I do think there was a tell in what the President said. He said, I think we should be -- you know, I think we've got other things that we could be doing besides looking into Chris Christie. He knows there are other things on his plate.

Nobody, you know, the people, the voters of America are not clamoring for Chris Christie to get an investigation. They are clamoring for inflation to go down and for homes to be more affordable. And they are clamoring for Donald Trump to stop a couple of foreign wars that he promised to do on day one, and he's now in month seven.

RAJU: Yes.

MITCHELL: So that's what people are actually asking him to do. Those are the more important things that he knows people want him to talk about, but he's instead focusing on things that can be labelled a distraction, Chris Christie and Bridgegate being among those.

RAJU: And we'll see where he ultimately goes. And it's -- yes, he campaigns on one thing. Oftentimes he does what he says on the campaign trail. He did say he would go after his political opponents.

All right, coming up, a Democratic Senate hopeful casts a new line against the party's leadership. We'll discuss the party's future right after a quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:43:17]

RAJU: It may not feel like it just yet, but the 2026 midterm elections are on the horizon. I spoke with a political newcomer, oyster farmer Graham Platner, who's running as a Democrat to unseat Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins in one of the nation's marquee races. And he has a tough message for his party's leadership.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

RAJU: If you win next year, your first vote would be on choosing the next Democratic leader. That would be Chuck Schumer. Would you vote for him to be the next Democratic leader?

GRAHAM PLATNER (D), MAINE STATE CANDIDATE: No. At this point, we need leaders that have vision and, frankly, the ability to fight. The things that I've seen recently don't show me a Democratic leadership that has that.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

RAJU: This is becoming a new litmus test for Democrats here about supporting Chuck Schumer or not, or just in general. I mean, you would not have seen this in election --

MITCHELL: Yes.

RAJU: -- cycles past. Now you're seeing this pretty common response.

MITCHELL: Yes, and I think it's interesting because, you know, he's weighing in on an institution that he's not yet part of and is on the outside looking in. And you find out that a lot of things shift when you actually get into the job and learn a little bit. But I think on the populist side, there's already like a boogeyman aura around Chuck Schumer.

And quite frankly, there's already a generational divide that is really highlighting possibly the future of what the Democratic Party could look like in its future, where a new generation says, it's time for us to take over, it's time for us to move the party forward and perhaps in a direction that some of the old guard might not be as familiar.

[12:45:03]

RAJU: Yes, and he's running in this race. We'll see if he ultimately becomes the nominee. The Democratic leaders, like Chuck Schumer, they want the governor, Janet Mills, to run instead. Unclear if she'll run in that race. He said he would -- Platner told me he would still remain as a candidate even if she were to run, so potentially a messy primary there.

Isaac, you have some interesting reporting about the Democrats' institutional problems at the DNC --

DOVERE: Yes.

RAJU: -- and about Ken Martin, the chairman there of the committee, who told you that "Being the DNC chair is a political equivalent to being a fire hydrant. You get pissed on by everyone. You get none of the credit when you win. You get all the blame when you lose. And if you're doing your job right, you're saying no more than you're saying yes."

What are you hearing from inside the -- from your sources, about how bad things are among -- with the party leadership?

DOVERE: Look, the DNC is a strange place. It's the infrastructure of the party, but it's not the Democratic Party. It doesn't control everything that happens.

Ken Martin came in after the losses in the elections last year to a Democratic Party that's completely deflated. Donors don't want to give big money anywhere. They're not giving to the DNC, but there also is a lack of faith and confidence in him from a lot of top Democrats, a lot of campaign operatives, who are the ones charged with actually winning races going into next year and beyond.

That said, a lot of the state party chairs, the Democratic National Committee members, those insiders who are the ones who have the votes to elect the DNC chair, are pretty pleased with him. They think this is great. It's going like they want it to do.

Martin also made the point to me that when he ran for this job, he didn't do it to do things the way the D.C. Democrats had done it for years, and he said he doesn't care if they're mad at him. But that is a question for these people now of whether they can put together the money and the operations to actually do things differently than what led them to what happened in the elections last year.

And look, there's a lot of reporting on this piece, a lot about the debt, about the Kamala Harris campaign debt that was there, about Joe Biden's legal bills being paid by the DNC, other things here that are all on Martin's plate as he tries to figure this all out. How big of a mess are things right now? Not just in the DNC, but among the Democratic leadership.

In general, I mean, we obviously see poll after poll about how bad the brand is. You see candidates like Graham Platner saying, I can't support Chuck Schumer. You see the mess at the DNC. What's your take?

CHALIAN: Yes, I mean, things are not great for the Democratic Party, right. You saw the Times story last week on the registration statistics and how far they have fallen behind Republicans on registering new voters. There are real problems. You mentioned the brand problems.

One thing that starts to solve problems is if they win elections, right? And so, I think most Democrats I talk to don't feel there's some, like, quick way out of this moment for them. It is if they win the New Jersey and Virginia governor's race and if they move on to win the House next year in 2026, then yes, there's going to be a real internal party sorting of its path forward with the 2028 Democratic nominee.

But from here to there, if you win a bunch of elections, you tend to do better. And I'll just say something about the brand piece. The Democratic Party is suffering these doldrums right now because Democrats themselves are so down on the party. And so when you start to win elections as a party, your own partisans start, usually, tend to feel a little bit better about their own party, and that will help solve some of these numbers for them.

PAGER: Yes, I mean, I think the broader problem for the Democratic Party is not fixable just by Ken Martin or by winning elections. There is this brand issue that they have, but also there's a lack of an organizing principle. For much of the last decade, the party has been organized around opposing Donald Trump.

That was the animating principle through 2016, through the midterms, through Joe Biden's campaign and presidency was trying to oppose Donald Trump and then move beyond Donald Trump. And that is no longer a winning message for the party. There's this generational argument that we need to look forward.

We need to look -- we need to run for something, not just against something. So I think a lot of this -- the challenges the party is facing is about how to move forward in a new direction --

RAJU: Yes.

PAGER: -- and what are they moving forward to and who is that leader. I think --

RAJU: Yes.

CHALIAN: That will be the 2028 Democratic primary.

PAGER: Yes.

CHALIAN: That's what it will be all about.

RAJU: Yes.

PAGER (?): No doubt.

RAJU: No question about it. It's a debate they have not yet figured out how to resolve quite yet.

All right, you're looking at pictures right now, live pictures of President Donald Trump hosting the South Korean president in the Oval Office. More from that visit, the first visit of this new South Korean president with President Trump when we return.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:53:05]

RAJU: Right now, President Trump is meeting with new South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in the Oval Office for the first time. One of the first priorities, the details of a $350 billion trade deal. South Korea was one of the many countries to renegotiate its trade deal with the U.S. in July by pledging a significant investment in American shipbuilding and energy. The details still have to be finalized.

My panel is back. I mean, lots of issues on the table here because shipbuilding, Trump wants to catch up to China. The U.S. does about 1 percent compared to about 50 percent. That's a big thing here. But also U.S. troops that are stationed abroad as well.

And then just moments ago, the president of South Korea talked about bringing peace to the region with North Korea. He said that he hoped he could bring peace to the Korean Peninsula.

PAGER: Yes, and we heard earlier Trump talk about Kim Jong-un and his relationship with the North Korean leader. And this is -- the South Korea leader appealing to one of the things that Trump says he wants to be remembered for is being a peacemaking president.

Trump has bragged about the various conflicts he says he has solved. There is some dispute about the work he did in some of those, but he's very eager to brag about it in part because he wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize, as is well documented by his public statements.

And so this is one area where there could be some, you know, forging of a partnership there. But I think one of the big areas where there's going to be disagreement is over China. Obviously Trump has taken a much tougher stance on China, and the South Korean president has shown more willingness to work with China. So that could be, you know, a divisive issue for them.

It'll be interesting to see as this unfolds. We've seen foreign leaders have varying levels of successes, having their Oval Office moment with the President of the United States. And so it's still early for this one, but as we're monitoring we'll see, you know, how successful he is in navigating Trump. He's had a lot of examples to learn from over the past few months.

[12:55:01]

RAJU: Yes. And, obviously trade is a huge issue. This is just so you know about just -- and a -- just where things stand between the U.S. and South Korea right now. In July 2025, there was a 15 percent tariff that was imposed on South Korea, 25 percent reciprocal tariffs. That was what was threatened back in April 2025.

But look, back in 2007, there was 0 percent tariffs. So right now they have a deal about 15 percent tariffs that is not as much higher than things have been in the past. And, you know, one of the big things will be about what they can offer in terms of shipbuilding here.

Just look at the image here, Make America Shipbuilding Creative Grand Red Hats, that was brought to July trade deal negotiations by South Koreans' team. So they know how to --

MITCHELL: Yes.

RAJU: -- win over Donald Trump.

MITCHELL: Yes. I mean, again, they're courting goodwill. They're courting Donald Trump. They want those tariffs to go down. They want to renegotiate a deal. And I think like with many things with President Trump, it's what does he really want. And it's about how feasible what he's asking for really is and what can be achieved.

And again a lot goes on to how this meeting goes. And if the South Korean president less about the deal, more about the relationship is what we've seen a lot.

RAJU: Yes. And this is a really absolutely key relationship, the 8th largest trading partner with the United States. And a lot of obviously tumult within South Korea over the last several months. There was an insurrection that was charged with a South Korean predecessor who is now in jail. The new president was elected as well. But a lot to see. We'll see what the President, if he answers questions.

Thank you guys for joining. Thank you for joining Inside Politics. CNN News Central starts after a quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)