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Michigan GOP Senate Candidate On Private Call: We're In "Pretty Good Shape" If Abdul El-Sayed Wins Dem Primary; Stevens Jumps On CNN Report That GOP Hopes El-Sayed Wins Primary; House Passes Bill To Restrain Trump On Iran, With 4 GOP Votes; Poll: 34 Percent Of Voters Approve Of Trump's Handling Of Iran; Rubio: Iran "Is Begging Us" To Make A Deal; House Judiciary GOP Chair Asks DOJ To Prosecute Jack Smith. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired July 23, 2026 - 12:00   ET

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

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MANU RAJU, CNN ANCHOR, INSIDE POLITICS: Two big CNN exclusives on the race for the Senate. We have new reporting on a Maine Democrat's anti- abortion pass and a Michigan Republican's private thoughts on the Democrat he wants to run against.

I'm Manu Raju in for Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines at Inside Politics.

T minus 103 days. That's how long is left before the midterms. Today we start with two of the most pivotal races of the year. In Maine, CNN's KFile has new details on the new Democratic candidate's startling evolution on abortion rights. But let's start with Michigan. This primary between Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed is a proxy battle for the ideological fight between the center and the progressive left. The winner will face Republican former Congressman Mike Rogers, and CNN's Patrick Svitek got a hold of a private call where Rogers revealed who he'd rather run against.

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MIKE ROGERS, (R) MICHIGAN SENATE CANDIDATE: And so, what we're trying to do is let them go after each other while we're building this team up over the summer. That's why door to door has been so important. And by the way, if he wins, I think we're in good shape. I mean, I think he is so radical. I think he's going to lose, you know, big parts of the west part of the state. We think we can do well in part of the southeast part of the state. I think we'll do well if he, in fact, is the -- is the nominee.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: All right. I'm joined now by a terrific group of reporters, including the aforementioned Patrick Svitek, who got a hold of this audio of this private call with Mike Rogers really revealing on how he views his primary. There has not really been a lot of focus on Mike Rogers as this battle has been playing out between Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. This primary is going to happen in August. What did you take away from his analysis of where the Democratic race is right?

PATRICK SVITEK, CNN POLITICS REPORTER: Yeah. There's not been a lot of focus on him because he is lucky to be running unopposed in his Republican primary with President Trump's support, so he's kind of effectively wrapped up his nomination, but we have this fierce primary on the Democratic side. And the reason why Mike Rogers' words in this instance and in public too are being so closely watched about what he thinks about the Democrats is because inside the Democratic Party there is this intense debate right now about who is the most electable candidate, whether it's Haley Stevens, Congresswoman with more moderate politics. Abdul El-Sayed, who is more of the progressive in this race backed by Bernie Sanders and other national progressive figures.

And so, I mean both Stevens and El-Sayed are pitching themselves as the best candidate to take on Mike Rogers. El-Sayed, for example, would say that, you know, he is more positioned to excite the Democratic base and to maybe bring back some groups that have strayed away or drifted away from the Democratic Party. Stevens, obviously, I think her supporters would say her more moderate record, the things she's been able to accomplish in Congress, make her the more viable general election candidate.

RAJU: Yeah. And can you win over swing voters? That's obviously a big question here. And this is -- this question of electability beyond the ideological fight in this primary, which has been remarkable to see play out. It is that electability argument, and perhaps no surprise. Haley Stevens is jumping on Patrick's reporting from this morning, saying Trump's handpicked candidate just admitted he'd prefer to face Abdul in November. It's also why Republicans are meddling in our race, she says. She goes on to talk about that.

And then Abdul El-Sayed did respond to Patrick's reporting as well, saying that El-Sayed has the strongest general election coalition, talking about more than ten thousand volunteers, grassroots support. They go on to say, a spokesperson does. Mike Rogers won't be in good shape in November, but the people of Michigan will be.

Amy, how do you see? You cover these races so closely. How is this primary shaping up? Who's got the edge as we head into August?

AMY WALTER, PUBLISHER & EDITOR IN CHIEF, THE COOK POLITICAL REPORT: I know. Well, what -- some of it is the vibe, but what are the vibes telling us? And certainly, El-Sayed has been able to win on the vibe contest. What Haley Stevens is counting on is actually the on the ground feeling from voters there, which is that her brand of politics, especially in places like Detroit, is going to be much more appealing to the kinds of people who show up day in and day out in elections.

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It's going to be older voters. It's going to be a lot of African, American voters who are -- look, are already fired up to defeat Donald Trump. They're not necessarily fired up ideologically in the way that El-Sayed supporters are. But if I were Haley Stevens, I would take Patrick's reporting and I would put in an ad right now. RAJU: Yeah. And this is -- listen to a little bit more about what Mike Rogers had to say in this private phone call about how he viewed the potential of facing El-Sayed in November.

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ROGERS: For those of you who don't know who he is, he is an acclaimed socialist. He's a Democrat socialist of America. He doesn't believe in the free enterprise system. I don't think he likes America candidly. He doesn't demonstrate he does. He hung out with a guy who believed that 9/11 -- we deserve 9/11 as Americans.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: He's talking about Hasan Piker there, the controversial and inflammatory podcast, or Piker sort of cleaned up the 9/11 remark. But nevertheless, outside a dig doubled down on campaigning with them, but it gives you a sense of how Rogers would campaign against El-Sayed by those comments right there.

ALEX GANGITANO, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, POLITICO: That's right. I think President Trump has given Republicans like Rogers that kind of a playbook. He's brought up in really all of his speeches over the last month or so that the Democratic Party is turning into, quote, communists, and really leaning into some of these socialist Democrats winning in certain states.

So, if they get Sayed as the opponent to Rogers, I think we're going to see Republicans really, really double down and say that, you know, this is the exact person that we want to run against because this is a warning sign to Americans. It's, you know, the playbook that they have right now that is what they think can excite their base.

Meanwhile, Sayed and some of these other Democrats are the people that saying we can excite the base. We can actually bring turnout in this midterm race. That turnout might be a tricky one for Democrats and for Republicans. So, they're kind of in this battle of who can actually get these voters energized right now to go out.

MARIO PARKER, U.S. ECONOMY & GOVERNMENT MANAGING EDITOR, BLOOMBERG NEWS: And to that point, one of the first things that I did last night was Google Detroit fish fry, right, because Haley Stevens said that she had hung out with people at the Detroit fish fry. And that's to your point, Amy, where we see this courtship of black voters who are a little bit more centrist. We saw Jim Clyburn, speaking of fish fries. We saw Jim Clyburn traveled to Michigan as well to stomp for her.

And to your point, I mean, I called around to some Michigan strategists this morning just to get a sense of what the -- what was the temperature on the ground there. They're saying yes, El-Sayed has the energy, but will that resonate in places like Flint, Ypsilanti, right, and some of those other Kalamazoo as well. And to Haley Stevens' point, where the strategists say, yeah, there was some uproar on the internet that she acknowledged, but everyone in Michigan went to a high school -- had a high school classmate like her, she's relatable. RAJU: Right. Yeah, no question about it. All right. Let's shift to the other Democratic issue, which is how to deal with the new candidate that they have in Maine. as Troy Jackson. He's expected to formally get the nomination this weekend after Graham Platner's implosion of his campaign. Democrats in Maine scrambling to find a replacement. A new -- our colleague in a KFile, putting out new reporting about the evolution Jackson has had over the years, including on abortion, of course, a central issue here in the race.

The 2020 is what the piece says. The 2010 guide records Jackson selecting records, Jackson selecting only one of the four choices when asked when abortion should be legal. He checked abortion should never be legal. Now his campaign says that he has received 100 percent ratings from Planned Parenthood, and he now very much supports abortion rights. But of course, he's running against someone who voted for Brett Kavanaugh, who voted to kill Roe v. Wade.

WALTER: Right. Look, if I'm the Collins campaign, here's what I would be doing right now. Not a lot of people who know who Troy Jackson is, and he does not have as much money as she does. You got to sort of figure out how you're going to define this race now. She's running against a terrible political environment. She has the anvil of an unpopular president, but he's not particularly well known.

With her money advantage, she has to go now and try to define him to the key voters in the state. The women who have voted for a Democratic nominee for president and voted for Susan Collins. Those split ticket voters are key. Again, the Collins campaign is likely to try to raise doubts about how strong he is on the issues. How well do you know Troy Jackson?

RAJU: And to that point, I do want to -- I do want our listeners -- our viewers to hear how Collins is messaging her likely opponent here. I asked her about that just yesterday.

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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: You had mentioned that you think he's in line with so the socialists' wing.

SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): Well, he really is. You can tell, read his statements. He was Senator Sanders' -- lead for Senator Sanders' presidential campaign in Maine. He's a Bernie bro.

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RAJU: Very quickly, a Bernie bro.

SVITEK: Yeah. I mean Republicans are going to tie him to Bernie, and they're also going to tie him to Platner. He was very closely aligned with Platner earlier in this election cycle. So, those are two names you're going to continue to hear in the contract.

WALTER: Right. So, abortion and Platner with swing women voters again, that's I think where the key is for the Collins campaign right now.

RAJU: Yeah. We'll see. And he's got to, of course, define himself. He's not very well known in the state. He's from a northern part of the state, population center, of course, and the opposite part of the state. We'll see how that plays out. All right, coming up. A major rebuke of President Trump's war in Iran just passed the House. So, will the Senate follow suit? Plus, another one of President Trump's enemies could face prosecution. We'll discuss the GOP is targeting the former special prosecutor, Jack Smith.

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RAJU: This morning, four House Republicans teamed up with Democrats to restrict President Trump's war powers. It's another major rebuke of Trump's war in Iran. The four Republicans, Kentucky's Thomas Massie, Pennsylvania's Brian Fitzpatrick, Michigan's Tom Barrett, and Ohio's Warren Davidson. And right now, the Senate is also voting on whether to rein in the president's ability to continue the conflict.

My panel is back. It seems likely that the president will win that vote in the Senate, but he lost his vote in the House. We've seen him lash out before when he's been rebuked. This is again happening in the House. Does the White House care about this, about the fact that they're seeing a majority of the House? Yes, it was only a handful of Republicans, but it's still a majority of the House voting to say, you have to come to Congress if you want to continue this war.

GANGITANO: I think because this is largely symbolic, the president can basically ignore it. They don't care as much about what goes on here. I think the Senate they'll be watching very closely. I think these four House members the president can largely move on from. We might see a mean, Truth Social post in their direction. But in the Senate, this is the Democrats being able to put these Republican senators on the record about their feeling on the war in Iran and had their feeling about President Trump's foreign policy overall.

And so, I think the president will be watching very closely of who's on my side and who's not as we go into the midterm election. So, the real people that this creates a headache for are these Senate Republicans who are vulnerable are going to have to go back to their voters and explain why they did one thing or another.

RAJU: Speaking of vulnerable Senate Republicans, I talked to one of them yesterday, Senator Husted from Ohio. He's an appointed senator. He's running for a very -- for a full term in against Ohio -- former Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, a very contested race. I asked him about the impact that this war could have on his race.

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RAJU: Worry about backlash -- political backlash for supporting more money for the war, given how unpopular it is right now. SEN. JON HUSTED (R-OH): Well, it's not supporting. We have to protect America. We have to protect American troops. I want the war to end. I want the war to be over. I want gas prices to come down, but I also don't want to weaken our military.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: It's kind of he's playing both sides. There kind of recognizes that people don't like this war, but I can't really vote against the president.

PARKER: Exactly, because the proverbial horse is out of the barn with it, right? You don't want to be seen as abandoning the troops. That being said, and you see some members even on the floor trying to avoid even referencing the war, just mentioning the impact and the support for the troops. That being said, I mean the war is unpopular. We see some of the surveys, many surveys along those lines, but more importantly, just that $4 gasoline mark, that's the under -- excuse me, the undercurrent of all of this that Americans are feeling and voters are reeling on.

RAJU: And you know, they're going to have to vote. Trump wants them to vote on, you know, roughly $70 billion before the election. This is not what Jon Husted or Susan Collins wants --

WALTER: I mean, the ads sort of write themselves, right? $70 billion for a war nobody wants instead of $70 billion to lower the prices for you at home, right, which is --

RAJU: Right, which is why John Thune is trying to not have this vote in the Senate that just -- and this bill that, you know, part of the bill that passed the House yesterday.

WALTER: Right. But that really is the question is, if gas prices remain above $4 going into election day, this vote in and of itself will not be as problematic as what shows up on the gas price come September, October, November.

RAJU: And what was interesting? There was a Fox poll that was just out about Trump's approval of Iran, and it's interesting to see the split within the GOP. Look, overall, not good. 34 percent of all registered voters support Trump's handling of the war. But then you break it down between MAGA GOP and non-MAGA GOP. MAGA GOP overwhelmingly support 83 percent even though many of those did not support foreign wars, like Trump said as he was campaigning, that non-MAGA -- just 37 percent of non-MAGA Republicans support Trump's war.

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SVITEK: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the public opinion is very clear on this, but I think it's -- at the same time it's remarkable that you're only having four House Republicans that are splintering away on this. I mean, it shows that within the House Republican conference, I mean, Trump, despite all this public opinion to the contrary still has a very firm grasp, I think on Republicans in at least the House. We'll see obviously what happens in the Senate. Should note two of those four House Republicans, Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Barrett, are in very competitive districts. This is a very real and timely political consideration for them. In addition to the substantive concerns, I'm sure they have.

RAJU: Yeah. Thomas Massie, more libertarian, he tends to vote against these things, against war and Warren Davidson had a similar boat. But part of the issue about we're seeing this drop in support among the American public is just the messaging coming out of the administration and how they keep saying either war is over, it's going to last a couple weeks, has been a lot more than a couple weeks, or they -- Iran really wants to make a deal, they want to make a deal, and then we see hostilities continue to escalate as we have in recent days. This is what the Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, just today.

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MARCO RUBIO, SECRETARY OF STATE: Iran is begging us, OK, both directly and indirectly. Let's do a deal. Let's talk. Let's talk. Iran is begging every day. The problem with Iran is every time they make a deal, the people that are in charge there they either break it or they want to change it. So, it looks like they're not ready to make a deal. So, they're going to continue to pay a price, and they're going -- every night the price gets higher and higher and higher.

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RAJU: So, I mean, they say they want to make -- they keep saying, they want to make a deal, but then we're not seeing any evidence of that.

GANGITANO: That's right. And the president said the same thing in Georgia yesterday. Iran really wants a deal, but we don't think that they're ready because they go ahead and they change it, and that's a really tough thing for Americans to understand. One, we're losing service members abroad because of this war, where gas prices are going up here at home. Why aren't we striking a deal?

So, I think to your point, the messaging is really where they're struggling here. Of course, they can say and they do often of this is all because Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That's the reason we're doing all of this. That's what's so important about this. But having senators repeat that same point again and again in the Capitol, and then when they go home to voters, it's not quite resonating with people and we see those in the polling numbers.

RAJU: Yeah. And we see why Republicans are nervous about having to own this heading into November. We'll see if anything shifts. All right. Quote, justice at last. That's President Trump's reaction to word that one of his top self-perceived enemies may face a new criminal investigation. We'll talk about the latest stop on its political retribution tour. That's next.

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[12:25:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

RAJU: Republicans are making a new push to prosecute former special prosecutor Jack Smith. Last night, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan formally asked the Justice Department to consider charging Smith with making false statements to Congress. At issue is whether Smith misled Jordan's committee about text messages his team obtained between Trump administration officials and its allies in Congress during Smith's investigation into January 6.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JIM JORDAN (R-OH): This blanket that they threw out there and tried to scoop up every Republican in this town to go after President Trump is pretty broad. And again, we think it's pretty darn clear from his deposition, from his public testimony that he misled Congress

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: Smith's attorney released a statement that reads, quote, this referral reflects a chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice system by attacking a career nonpartisan public servant who faithfully and fearlessly performed his duties by following the facts and the law. President Trump's reaction early this morning, quote, justice at last.

My panel is back. This has been a long-running effort by Trump, his allies, to go after Jack Smith, who, of course, prosecuted Donald Trump. Of course, those indictments didn't ever lead to criminal -- didn't actually lead to any court proceedings and the like. It got wiped away when President Trump won his second term in office.

So, perhaps it's no surprise that this is happening here. And typically, you know, the Justice Department can ignore any sort of referrals. They can prosecute however they want to prosecute. But the fact that it seems not outside the realm of possibility that he could face criminal charges here just because of how much Trump wants to go after.

PARKER: You said, Jim Jordan, who is perhaps one of the president's biggest allies in Congress on one hand, and then you've got Todd Blanche, right? I'm thinking of the Arizona Cardinals coach. They are who -- we thought they were, right? So that had been the thought when Blanche was moving into this position anyway after previously serving as the president's personal attorney in many of these matters, right?

So, there's that aspect and component of it. Now the trick, of course, to your point, Manu, was the fact that did Jack Smith expect this to be coming, and how did he prepare over this last call it 24 months or so. And what will be revealed, and do you want to relitigate some of these things heading into a midterm election again, where we're talking about the 2020 election, and all of those things as well.

RAJU: And as Todd Blanche is facing a confirmation vote coming up, and including in the committee next week.

WALTER: And to that point, is this really what Republicans, I'm sorry, want to talk about going into midterm election retribution tours, the rigged election. Absolutely not. They would love for the president to talk about lowering costs, focusing on the issues that matter most to voters. We know that the president's not going to do that. That is not in his interest to do that. And so, what Republicans are constantly facing. It's a bad political environment. They are trying their best to get ahead on the issue of affordability. The president would like to focus on what the president