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Trump Calls Michael Cohen Raid a 'Disgrace'; Interview With Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired April 10, 2018 - 07:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And it's a disgraceful situation. It's a total witch hunt. I've been saying it for a long time. I've wanted to keep it down.

[07:00:13] We've given, I believe, over a million pages worth of documents to the special counsel. They continue to just go forward. And here we are talking about Syria. We're talking about a lot of serious things with the greatest fighting force ever. And I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now. And actually, much more than that. You could say it was right after I won the nomination it started.

And it's a disgrace. It's frankly a real disgrace. It's an attack on our country in a true sense. It's an attack on what we all stand for. So when I saw this and when I heard it, I heard it like you did. I said that is really now in a whole new level of unfairness.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, joining us now with CNN -- we have CNN political analyst and "New York Times" White House correspondent Maggie Haberman and CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

So Jeffrey, educate us. Tell us how unusual it is or how hard it is to search the offices of someone's lawyer.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: The Justice Department really discourages its prosecutors from searching lawyer's offices, because there are so many complicated questions arising out of attorney-client privilege and what documents are covered and what documents are not.

Usually, if a lawyer is part of an investigation, they will issue a subpoena so that the lawyer can make some choices about what's privileged and what's not.

Because there was a search warrant here, that means that the people in charge -- and it is still a little murky to me whether it was just the Mueller office, just the southern district of New York led by Jeff Berman the new U.S. attorney. But the prosecutors there and the judge who upheld and authorized the search warrant felt that the risk of Michael Cohen destroying documents was so great. The risk that he wouldn't respond accurately to a subpoena was to great that they had to go in there and take his cell phone, take his computer, take his files and then figure out what's privileged and what's not.

This is very unusual, and it's very scary to Donald Trump, quite obviously, as Maggie was saying, I mean, because this is someone who probably knows more of Donald Trump's secrets than Ivanka and Jared Kushner do.

CUOMO: Right. Let's get you some information and then let's talk about the implications. Put up the graphic of the steps, just so you understand how involved this is to kind of negate the sense that this was some kind of capricious act. OK? You have to have tried to get this already.

That raises the issue of what kind of cooperation they were getting. We've been told that Michael Cohen, through his attorney, that they had been cooperating.

CAMEROTA: They say thousands of documents, pages of documents they turned over.

CUOMO: That's right. But it has to be true that the office did not think that they had what they were supposed to getting. All right. Then you have to have the leadership involved. OK, which are all people picked by this president.

And then you have these tank teams. You have to make sure that, because it's somebody's counsel that the privilege is respected as much as it can be, but this privilege is not absolute. There are exceptions for certain criminality, and that's going to be part of this. So that's the information.

Now you have the implication, which is our president is on the verge. We have never seen him have this kind of awareness that I was right. This is about me. Not only is Mueller talking to people about me, he just went after my guy, and nobody checks that box the way Cohen does. It would be foolish to not think that we are seeing the president right now considering things in a way we haven't seen yet.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Seeing him considering things in a way we haven't seen, recognizing that what he had been told, for however long it has been since Mueller was appointed, and since this really became an issue in terms of his lawyers, wanting to keep him from acting in a consequential way nine months, ten months, believing that what his lawyers have told him, some of them anyway, was -- was not only wrong but possibly knowingly wrong, that they were doing this to try to keep him from doing something.

When he believed that he has been proven right, Chris, as you note, we get to a very, very unpredictable place. But there's -- there's one of two options. He can either order Rod Rosenstein to end this probe and get rid of Mueller, or he can continue and let this go on, even ending as it has been noted repeatedly. And you can speak more to this than I can. Getting rid of Mueller is not going to end this. This is in the southern district of New York. TOOBIN: But I'm not -- it's not going to end the Cohen part.

HABERMAN: Right. But that's not a nothing. That's like saying it's not going to end looking into Trump Tower's 26th floor doesn't affect the whole building. This gets into a very potentially consequential area.

TOOBIN: That's true. But, you know, the Saturday night massacre example is illuminating in one way, because even though Richard Nixon fired Archibald Cox, he authorized the replacement with Leon Jaworski, who continued the Watergate investigation.

HABERMAN: Right.

[07:05:14] TOOBIN: There is no sign -- and again, Maggie, you tell me -- that I don't think Donald Trump would replace Robert Mueller.

HABERMAN: I would agree with that.

TOOBIN: And so the investigation would sort of filter back to the Justice Department. Mueller's staff, maybe some would stay on, maybe some wouldn't. There would -- I mean, Donald Trump has in his ability, really to stop a lot of this investigation.

Now, he would pay some political cost. Would he get impeached? I doubt it. Not by --

HABERMAN: Not by this Congress.

TOOBIN: Not by this Congress. Although this Congress may not be around that many more months. But I mean, you know, so he has his ability -- and I'm sure he knows this -- to really foresaw a lot of what was going on here.

HABERMAN: They have certainly explained that to him, but they have also explained to him repeatedly, this does put you in huge danger. Yes, this Congress is not going to do anything. You will, at minimum likely, not definitely, but likely have a Democratic House.

I'm not sure you will have a Democratic Senate, and that's a big "if." These are chances he might be willing to take. We have seen him take all kinds of risks that no one else would. So who knows?

CAMEROTA: That's what I was going to ask you about. Reporting, do you have reporting from inside that yesterday something shifted in terms of his inclination of what he wanted to do?

HABERMAN: I mean, it's -- look, weighing his inclination is always incredibly hard, right, because there is such a tendency among a lot of his advisers to dismiss much of what he says as that's just how he talks.

That's just how he's been talking for a while. It increased extensively yesterday. It had increased even prior to yesterday. Over the weekend he was in a lather, and I'm not sure what the trigger was. I think it was probably watching stuff on FOX News. But he was in a lather about the Justice Department, again. And he gets that way. He gets into these states.

Yesterday was different. There was a note of sort of helplessness, which then translates into anger with this president.

CUOMO: That's understandable. I mean, it's one thing to talk about Paul Manafort and talk to some of his campaign staffers, people he barely even knows. Michael Cohen is everything to him in terms of his life before being president.

And even for many years. And all kinds of confidences and all kinds of activity all over the world, Michael Cohen is, because of this Stormy stuff, people are getting somewhat of a cartoonish exaggeration of him. He has been fundamental to this man for a long time. You couldn't get closer to him.

TOOBIN: He was the one who went to Russia to try to negotiate Trump Tower Moscow, which fell through again. But it was -- it was during the campaign. It was in late 2015. And just, I believe it was two weeks ago he had dinner with Michael Cohen in Mar-a-Lago. I mean, so this is not someone who is -- you know, was close to him at one point. He's still close to him today.

CAMEROTA: And so is this Stormy Daniels related? Or is this, you know, we don't know?

TOOBIN: I really, you know -- I appreciate the reporting of all our colleagues, and until we see the search warrant affidavit.

HABERMAN: That's right.

CUOMO: The affidavit.

TOOBIN: Which is the document that says to the magistrate this is what we want to search and why --

CUOMO: That schedule that's on it this is the stuff we're looking for. That could be helpful.

TOOBIN: But that's obviously been filed under sealed for now, but it won't be under seal forever. And, you know, that's the answer.

CAMEROTA: OK. That's fair.

TOOBIN: And one of us have seen that. Some people who have seen it have described it maybe. But --

CUOMO: The speculation that I can't believe that the FBI is interested in affair. That -- that's a distraction. That's not what this is about. It's not going to be about proving whether or not that happened. It will be the financing and any laws. We saw this with John Edwards. OK? John Edwards wound up in a criminal trial. He won. He won.

But the facts were different because there the finding was, well, this happened a year plus before the campaign and done to hide an affair from his family, not from any election officials. The timing here is not good. So those questions are a little bit more sensitive.

HABERMAN: Those questions are more sensitive. And I don't think it is just about Stormy Daniels. I do think that that is a severely- related piece, although to Jeffrey's point, I don't want to speculate on what they're actually looking for without knowing. But I also don't want to go to -- there's something that the president said that I think is -- is really dangerous. And I think it is actually important to focus on where he described this as an attack on our country.

CUOMO: Right. The president is not listening to you. He's tweeted twice. He said, first --

HABERMAN: I'll find a way to go on.

CUOMO: First, "Attorney-client privilege is dead." Now, once again, this is another institution he is attacking, and it also is not true. We'll explain that with Jeffrey in a second.

The second tweet is "A TOTAL WITCH HUNT," all caps.

Now a lot of people picked up on this and said, "I can't believe they did this. This is illegal. You cannot go after the attorney-client privilege. It is sacrosanct." It's nice to see the legal profession respected for a change. However, that's just not true.

[07:10:06] TOOBIN: It is not true. And this is not the first lawyer's office that's ever been searched. As I said earlier, it's unusual, but it has been done many, many times.

CUOMO: -- reports attorneys, as well.

TOOBIN: They subpoenaed, but they didn't do a search warrant, and the way this worked generally when you search an attorney's office is you establish what you call a taint team, which goes through all the documents.

A group of lawyers to determine which are covered by the attorney- client privilege and which are not. That taint team then turns over to the investigators the documents that are appropriate to look at. The taint team is not involved in the investigation. They are the ones who just determine attorney-client privilege. Then they check out of the case.

The documents that they see that are covered by the attorney-client privilege the investigators never actually see. That's how searches of attorney's offices generally work.

CAMEROTA: So who does talk the president off the ledge now in this situation? I've heard so many people behind the scenes say this is the first crisis without Hope Hicks. This would have been Hope Hicks' role. So now what?

HABERMAN: There are a bunch of people who still talk to him about what a bad idea it would be to actually try to get rid of Mueller. Chief among them are the lawyers who remain. They recognize that that would not be a good thing, according to every conversation that I have had with anybody.

There are still other people in the White House. It was not only Hope Hicks. I think that there is a habit in the reporting of zeroing in on the one person who was just, you know, putting their finger on the springing water and keeping it from going.

There are several people, but there are fewer than there were. And at a certain point, this president is -- one of the biggest misconceptions about this White House is that no one tells him no. Lots of people tell him no. He doesn't listen, and then he just goes around them. And he's angrier than we have seen him. So I don't know what that looks like yet.

CUOMO: Well, there has to be a little bit of a marriage of who's talking to him and what they mean to him.

HABERMAN: That's absolutely true.

CUOMO: This chirping from lawmakers to him in the past. And now once again that "don't put me in this position. If you make this move, you are going to make us own it. And I don't want to own you going after Mueller. I don't want to own you going after your own assistant U.S. attorney in the southern district. Don't put us in this position."

HABERMAN: Yes.

CUOMO: That could be powerful medicine.

TOOBIN: It could be.

CUOMO: And it has been so far evidently, you know, because he hasn't made a move that he has teased out several times.

TOOBIN: It could be, but he has never been in this kind of place of jeopardy before.

CUOMO: True.

TOOBIN: The Michael Cohen's proximity to him is so different from Paul Manafort's proximity to him. I mean, this is a quantum leap in personal exposure.

HABERMAN: That's right.

TOOBIN: So, yes, you know he's concerned about the fate of the Republicans in the midterm election and whether this will jeopardize him. He's more concerned about himself.

CUOMO: I'm saying impeachment is something where -- look, do they have the votes? No. It's a political process. High crimes and misdemeanors doesn't really mean anything. But it's a proposition going into the midterms where you're -- "So OK with everything he did, and now you want me to vote for him?" That's a sensitivity.

HABERMAN: I don't think he cares about that honestly. I mean, you think about the way that Donald Trump does business, and I mean of all kinds, it is always about the first order effect. It is never about, you know, what might be 1A, B and, two and to Jeffrey's point, he's going to see everything in terms of how it affects him himself. Someone asked me on Twitter last night about when I was talking about the red line that he had set, you know, about his finances and Mueller looking at them in an interview with "The Times" last year.

This person said do you think he remembers edicts like that? When they're about himself, I mean, he remembers them all the time. That's what he remembers.

CUOMO: You ever heard him talk about this about his son-in-law or even his daughter?

HABERMAN: Correct.

CUOMO: But now it's him.

HABERMAN: Now it's him, and that just changes the matrix a lot.

CAMEROTA: It was also interesting to hear him yesterday trying to say, "Look at what they're doing. They're distracting me from Syria."

We have real issues in this country. We have dangerous issues. I'm supposed to be dealing with Syria. They're doing horrible things, but I have to, you know, contend with this witch hunt.

Do you behind the scenes have a sense of how distracted he is? Is this somebody who can focus on lots of different things at once? Or does he get clouded?

HABERMAN: Not when something like this is going on, which doesn't mean there is still an entire ghost in the machine of government that is going forward, regardless of what this president does, and we have seen this repeatedly. And I suspect you will see that in Syria. Although he obviously has to be involved in whatever decision gets made.

Other people will be carrying a lot of that work out. He is consumed by this. Again, he also has an incredibly short attention span. So this sort of cools down if nothing more emerges, but that has not always been his style. And this again, I know we keep, you know, hitting this repeatedly. Cohen is just a different thing. Cohen gets it to Trump's own doorstep.

[0715:03] And the thing that this president cannot handle is anything not on his terms. None of this is on his terms.

CUOMO: Look, and Cohen is family to him also. So you know, you never want to divorce the personal. I actually look at it in reverse, which is I don't -- I question the ramping up of rhetoric about Syria once we heard about this yesterday.

You know, now it's about to happen. And now, boy, it's going to be bad and Putin, too. That is also a risk here, because as we all know if the military advisers suggestively go to the president and, all of a sudden, they decide to pull the trigger and Congress decides to go to sleep once again on military action by the executive.

You're now in a situation. And you have to ask yourself, why is that ramping up so quickly?

TOOBIN: Well, and you know, I covered the Clinton impeachment. And, you know, there was -- there were issues of military action when -- in the late '90s. And Clinton was always being asked was he wagging the dog? And that's now a very dated reference, but you know, to a movie about using foreign policy to distract from a domestic scandal. That is, you know, a risk that any president under investigation faces.

CUOMO: They created war in that movie.

TOOBIN: Yes. William Macy, famous line. There are only a few things we know. "There's no difference between good flan and bad flan." Second, "There is no war."

But it was the -- about the genius of distraction, de Niro being this kind of, you know, Axelrod-like figure, you know, who was able to do it. But look, we're dealing with something that's, like, all too real here, right? Not a movie, and we're dealing with somebody who, once they believe something --

HABERMAN: Correct.

CUOMO: They believe it, period.

HABERMAN: Yes.

CUOMO: For example, voter fraud. No proof of any widespread voter fraud. That there is no big illegals that voted in California. No proof. They put a commission together, came up with something. And you had someone who couldn't be more motivated to find something, and they found nothing. Sarah Sanders, however, said this yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SARAH SANDERS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president still strongly feels that there was a large amount of voter fraud and attempted to do a thorough review of it, but a lot of the states didn't want to cooperate and participate. We certainly know there there were a large number of incidents reported, but we can't be sure exactly how much, because we weren't able to conduct the full review the president wanted because a number of states did not want to cooperate and refused to participate.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: That would mean that the secretaries of state all across this country, many of whom are Republican, would be lying about this. But the key word, I think, is "feel." He feels it's still happened. You have to know that about this president. Is that if he feels it, that's as good as fact.

HABERMAN: Absolutely. I mean, he starts with the conclusion based on his feelings and then he looks for things to back that up. We have seen this going back to -- frankly, we've seen it for decades.

But, you know, on the national stage, it goes back to when he declared that President Obama may not have been born in this country, and his investigators were looking into it. And they couldn't believe what they were finding, according to the president. There were no investigators, but there's a whole other issue.

He -- we are seeing policies set based on the president's emotions. The president's emotions are what we are talking about in terms of Mueller. As we said repeatedly, this is not just a Mueller investigation. This is being done by the southern district of New York. The president feels it is really about Mueller. Michael Cohen feels it's really about Mueller, according to the people I've spoken to, and that is what you are going to see the reaction based on.

TOOBIN: Yes. There's nothing inherently wrong with presidents acting out of, you know, feelings. Ronald Reagan felt that the Soviet Union was a threat to this country. You know, Lyndon Johnson felt that poverty was a bad thing.

HABERMAN: What did they base those feelings on?

TOOBIN: But that's the thing. You can't feel things that are factually false.

HABERMAN: Correct.

TOOBIN: There were not millions of people voting fraudulently in California. That is not true. So feelings are appropriate, but they have to be based on reality.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

TOOBIN: And these are not.

CUOMO: That's why you have to bang the drum right now where Syria is involved in any action by us. You know, you have to bang the drum for Congress to do their job on this. They want to lay down. They lay down every time on this. They don't want to vote. They got burned by the Iraq War, and they've been punting on their duties ever since.

Now more than ever, they have to do their job. Because we're in a situation where, politically, it would be very helpful to this president to wag the dog and go into Syria, because they've got a bad guy who's doing bad things. That's not necessarily the right thing for America.

HABERMAN: They also might see as the right thing for Congress, and that has generally been what they guided their decisions on throughout this presidency. I'm not sure that I think this would be any different.

CAMEROTA: All right. Maggie Haberman, thank you very much for sharing all your reporting with us.

Jeffrey Toobin, thank you. So President Trump calling the FBI raid on the office of his personal

lawyer, Michael Cohen, an attack on our country. In a tweet moments ago, the president says attorney-client privilege is dead.

Let's discuss this and so much more with Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.

Good morning, Congressman.

REP. ADAM KINZINGER (R), ILLINOIS: Good morning. How are you?

CAMEROTA: I am well.

So do you think that the FBI looking into Michael Cohen's office is an attack our country?

[07:20:02] KINZINGER: I don't know. I don't like getting involved. And I get that you guys need to in the day to day of what's going on. I -- all I know is the FBI determined that they were going to raid. They probably have a reason for saying that. And I'll find out what that reason is, ultimately. I don't like getting in and kind of micromanaging this investigation.

What I've said from the beginning is Americans want to know the truth, and I think we're going to know the truth on everything when it's over.

CAMEROTA: But therein lies the rub, which is, if the president ends it sooner than when it is over, when Robert Mueller determines it's over, do you think that we will be able to get the truth on this?

KINZINGER: Well, I think that will be a concern if the president somehow ends the investigation without it coming to fruition. I don't have any indication that he's going to do that. So I think right now, it's an exercise in saying, well, "What if, what if?"

Again, I think we'll cross that bridge when we get there. As of now the Mueller investigation is just going forward and, hopefully, at the end of all this, we'll know what's going on.

CAMEROTA: Do you think that it is helpful or harmful to have the president weigh in on investigations like this as vociferously as he did yesterday?

KINZINGER: I don't think it's helpful at all. You know, there's -- whenever you tweet, there can be trouble, especially when it's a tweet based out of kind of what's going on at the moment. So I wish he didn't.

But at the same time, again, I think we'll get ultimate answers when this is done. There's day to day play by plays. I get that. For me, I just want to say at the end when we get answers, we'll figure it out from there.

CAMEROTA: I hear you, and I know that this is not the purview that you want to talk about, but do you -- one last question. KINZINGER: OK.

CAMEROTA: Do you consider this an attack on our country, what Robert Mueller is doing?

KINZINGER: No, no. I mean, it's -- look, there's justice. Justice needs to be served in whatever capacity. So it's not an attack on our country.

CAMEROTA: OK. Let's move on to what you know a lot about sadly, and that is conflict and war. Syria. What do you think the right answer is to do now with Syria?

KINZINGER: So ever since World War I we've held that chemical weapons have no place on a battlefield. And it's been a principle we held very strongly as a world, and it's actually done pretty well for the most part, chemical weapons on a battlefield haven't been used, because we've held strong.

I think the moment we've failed to inflict punishment for the use of chemical weapons, you basically are seeing the end, then, of the nonproliferation treaty of chemical weapons. And trust me, that would be devastating.

I think what the president did a year ago in destroying one fifth of Assad's air force was good. It was right. It basically said any use of chemical weapons, we're going to make the cost way higher. And I think we have to do that again.

And where we don't want to get trapped -- because people are going to say that any use of military force is going to be World War III, or it's going to mean 300,000 troops in Syria. It isn't. We're not talking about invading Syria to fix the whole crisis.

But we are saying that there can be no use of chemical weapons. And if you use them, the cost is going to be far exceeded by any benefit.

CAMEROTA: Does the president need to come to Congress to get authorization to do whatever that next military act is?

KINZINGER: I don't think so. Look, if he came to Congress, obviously, I'd support it. I don't think he needs to. If you actually look at the War Powers Act, he has 60 days to act and then inform Congress about what he did.

So I think on something that's limited like this, he has the authority to act, especially on an issue like enforcing the nonuse of chemical weapons. I think Congress would be supportive, though, if he does come here.

But this is what happened last time. President Obama said, "I'm going to go to Congress," when literally the fighter jets were on the runway ready to strike. He decided to come to Congress, said -- took ten days to reconvene Congress, because we were out. I was there then. Made no effort to sell Congress on it. Trust me, I was one of the few Republicans coming out and saying we need to do this. And then by the time it came to where we were going to vote for this

thing, it had fizzled, because the administration didn't seem serious about it. So we cannot repeat that mistake again.

CAMEROTA: And basically, what you're saying is that Congress can't be counted on to make the right decision so the president should act unilaterally.

KINZINGER: Congress is not commander in chief. One person who's commander in chief, and that's the president. Our job is to give financial resources to execute these kinds of missions and to declare if a state of war exists, according to the Constitution.

It doesn't mean that any time any fighter jet takes off or any action is done or anything like that, that there have to be 435 -- 535 including the Senate commanders in chief.

Our job is to support our armed forces with the tasks that the president who's elected by the Americans gave them. And I think in this case, he needs to act quickly and intensely and make it clear to the Russians and Syrians the use of chemical weapons has no place in this world; and we're going to defend that as we defended it since World War I.

CAMEROTA: Do you think that he should wait to see definitive proof that Assad used chemical weapons?

KINZINGER: I think, look, this is kind of an art form in terms of do you do it now, do you wait to see? I think we have no doubt who's done it. We have no doubt who's done it in the past. We have no doubt who possesses chemical weapons.

I think it is very clear when you have the Russians and their bots on Twitter trying to pump out this is a false flag attack, like somehow the United States actually did this chemical weapons attack.

Look, I have seen those things on Twitter. That means that the KGB, or the FSB actually it is now, is in full panic mode, and the Russians are scared; because they know who exactly was behind this. It was Bashar al-Assad.

[07:25:07] CAMEROTA: Do you think that Bashar al-Assad is a threat to U.S. national security?

KINZINGER: Yes. I think he's a war criminal, and so any time we don't prosecute war criminals it's a threat to national security.

But secondly, Bashar al-Assad's actions and his brutality is leading to a whole generation of ISIS. Look, ISIS would never have been able to thrive, had Bashar al-Assad not responded to a peaceful protest in Syria with brutality and killed 500,000 Syrians, including 50,000 children. He is an incubator for ISIS to exist, because people are basically so angry that they're willing to join these terrorist movements.

So yes, it is a threat to U.S. national security, to regional security to our allies, including Israel.

BLITZER: OK. So after whatever military strike you are suggesting, let's say it's something akin to the Tomahawk attack a year ago on the airfield, then what?

KINZINGER: Well, it's kind of the same where we've been. I think any time we can drive to the negotiating table is good. This gets us in a better position to do that, but everybody basically -- not everybody, you hear people say, "OK, if we do this strike, then what?"

The reality is there may not be a "then what," but the "then what" is basically saying, we are destroying your capacity to fly your airplanes and deliver chemical weapons.

We are inflicting harm upon you that is greater than any gain you'll get by these chemical weapons, and it sends a message to Assad, and to any other evil person that wants to use them again that the cost is going to be exceeded.

CAMEROTA: Congressman Adam Kinzinger, thank you very much for weighing in on all of this.

KINZINGER: You bet. Any time. Thanks. Chris.

CUOMO: Just a quick point. The Congressman defended this country with his life, and he deserves all of our respect and gratitude. You're going to hear a lot of politicians say the president doesn't have to come to Congress. The War Powers Act covers this. Please Google the War Powers Act. All right?

The authorization is very clear, OK? He can send the U.S. armed forces into action under the three situations, OK? Declaration of war, statutory authority obviously coming for Congress and the third one is the one they're relying on, OK? A national emergency created by attack upon the United States territories, or possessions or its armed forces.

You tell me, which one of those boxes the situation in Syria check. It's not a clear argument. They have to debate and do their job.

So the other big story of the morning, how does the raid on Michael Cohen's office and hotel room change the special counsel's investigation and Congress's view of the Russia probe? We have Democratic Congressman Jim Himes joining us next.