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New Day Saturday

Man Shot to Death at An Airport in France; President Trump Doubles Down on Claim That He Was Wiretapped; Donald Trump Meets German Chancellor Angela Merkel; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is in Beijing for Talks; FBI Director to Testify About President's Allegations That He Was Wiretapped; A Look At Some of Donald Trump's Past Baseless Claims on Twitter. Aried 7-8a ET

Aired March 18, 2017 - 07:00   ET

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

ANDY SCHOLES, THE BLEACHER REPORT: Also expect to see Bill Murray in the Xavier cheering section, his son, an assistant for the Musketeers, is taking on Florida State later on today.

And guys, in case you're wondering, there are 200 perfect brackets remaining according NCAA.com compared to last year when there were basically none. So, 200 people, still alive for that perfect bracket.

CHRISTI PAUL, CNN ANCHOR: I know that (INAUDIBLE) but thank you.

I know. Hey, the next hour of your NEW DAY starting right now.

PAUL: Glad to have you up early here on a Saturday. Good morning. I'm Christi Paul.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Martin Savidge in for Victor Blackwell. There is a lot going on in politics this morning, including President Trump still unapologetic as he stands by his claims that he was wiretapped, even though a new Justice Department report says otherwise.

But, first, we start with breaking news. It's coming out of France.

PAUL: A man at Orly Airport in Paris was killed a short time ago when he tried to grab a soldier's gun. Now, authorities are saying he was known to investigators.

CNN's Melissa Bell live for us outside the airport. Melissa, what more can you tell us about what they know about this suspect?

MELISSA BELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'd like to give you a sense, first of all, Christi, of what's going on all around us. We've now been allowed behind the security perimeter. We're now just outside the terminal where this event took place this morning, this attack.

And you can see behind me all of those security vehicles and beyond them the many hundreds of people, who have been forced out of the airport after being evacuated, after this got underway this morning. Both terminals here at Orly airport are closed, which you can imagine, is causing a fair amount of chaos. Now, a much clearer picture of what went on this morning has now emerged. We've been speaking to both France's defense minister and interior ministers, who are you here onsite to try and help us figure out precisely what went on.

It was just after 6:50 local time this morning. A man was stopped just outside of Paris by policeman in his car. He shot at them, wounding a policeman before fleeing the scene, making his way to Orly Airport where here, an hour-and-a-half later, at 8:30 this morning local time, he tried to seize the weapon of one of the soldiers who was patrolling the airport. Her two colleagues opened fire, killing the man and putting an end to the attack.

Now, so far authorities and the ministers that I mentioned a moment ago are being very careful about just how they are describing this. No mention of the word terrorist attack and nothing more for the time being, Christi, on what this man's motivations were.

PAUL: All right. Melissa Bell, thank you so much for the update. We appreciate it.

All right. Let's pivot back to some politics now this morning. President Trump waving up at his luxury resort in Florida, still sticking to his claims that President Obama wiretapped him at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, helped, they say, by a British spy agency.

SAVIDGE: This, as US officials tell CNN, that a classified DOJ report to Congress did not have any evidence to support his claim. But evidence or no, Trump is not apologizing to President Obama or to the United Kingdom.

So, let's bring in CNN's Washington correspondent Ryan Nobles. Ryan, Trump met the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and brought up the wiretap issue. What did he say?

RYAN NOBLES, CNN WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Martin. Well, the president did bring up the wiretap issue, as you say, but it was only after he was pressed on the topic by a German reporter. And not surprisingly, President Trump did not back down not only from his claim about President Obama, but from an accusation leveled by his press secretary about the role of a British intelligence agency. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: As far as wiretapping, I guess, by this past administration, at least we have something in common perhaps.

[07:05:11] And just to finish your question, we said nothing. All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind, who was the one responsible for saying that on television. I didn't make an opinion on it. That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox, and so you shouldn't be talking to me, you should be talking to Fox.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NOBLES: That's still uncomfortable after watching it several hours later. Trump awkwardly inferring to a WikiLeaks revelation that said the US had conducted surveillance on the German Chancellor during the Obama administration and then defending Sean Spicer's reference to a Fox News channel segment where commentator Andrew Napolitano suggested that Britain's GCHQ helped Obama spy on Trump.

Now, it's a claim yesterday that even Fox News Channel would not back up and it's led to tension between the British and American governments. The UK strongly denying the report, but Spicer and the administration refusing to apologize for pushing it.

Martin?

SAVIDGE: Real quick, Ryan, before I let you go. Big day, Monday, of course, the first public congressional hearings on the alleged Russian influence in the US election. Any bombshells expected?

NOBLES: Well, it remains to be seen exactly how forthcoming those that will be on the witness stand will actually be to this House Intelligence Committee and then how tough the questions are that are asked by the panel.

There are Democrats that are very skeptical as to just how revelatory these House intelligence hearings will be. We know for sure that there still remains no evidence to back up the president's claim about Obama wiretapping Trump Tower.

SAVIDGE: All right. We'll all be watching. Ryan Nobles, thanks very much.

NOBLES: Thank you.

PAUL: I want to bring in Eugene Scott, "CNN Politics" reporter, and Amber Phillips, political reporter for "The Washington Post." Thank you both for being here.

I want to ask you first, Eugene, in terms of what's happening with the UK, is there a fear that they - that that special relationship between the British government and the US government is at risk right now after the British government called the White House ridiculous and that these claims should be ignored?

EUGENE SCOTT, CNN POLITICS REPORTER: There's certainly some concern, which is why we have seen people from British legal community, their intelligence community and their political community come out very viciously, pushing back on the allegation, that they somehow were working for former President Barack Obama to spy on Donald Trump.

We saw very early that Theresa May was one of the first - if not the first foreign leader to come to the White House to visit President Donald Trump to ensure that the special relationship remain intact. And there's some concern that these types of unproven and, in fact, false allegations, they would say, could harm that. PAUL: All right. So, Amber, when we look at what happened yesterday at this press conference, is there any indication what the takeaway is from these meetings with Chancellor Merkel and President Trump?

AMBER PHILLIPS, POLITICS REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Not really. From the outside, looking in, what we saw were two world leaders somewhat awkwardly trying to get together to establish a rapport that they could carry on across oceans going forward.

But there wasn't a lot of rapport that we saw at least when the cameras were on them. The photos we saw of them, they were very stiff and awkward. Remember, Trump had tweeted back in 2015, he thought Angela Merkel was "ruining Germany" when they put her on "TIME Magazine" Person of the Year instead of him.

And then he made that joke that - absolutely right - was very awkward to watch and Angela Merkel's face did not seem pleased.

So, I think that the purpose of meeting together for two world leaders is to be able to establish a rapport visibly from the outside looking in. I don't see what rapport was established that day. In fact, I think it's quite possible Trump alienated not only Britain, but to some degree Germany, all in one day, two of the US' key allies.

PAUL: So, Eugene, when we look at that, we look ahead to Monday at what's going to happen in these hearings when it comes to Russia, when we look at the wiretapping and the fact that it seems that the White House is using some comedy as he tried to make a comedic response to the wiretapping question there, but he's still not answering the questions? Is any of this actually going to just fade away?

SCOTT: It certainly is not going to fade away. And one of those reasons is because I don't think President Trump wants it to fade away. Despite the fact that there has been a repeated lack of evidence to support his claims, we saw that he doubled down. And we could expect him to continue to reinforce his beliefs because that is the track record he has set forward in the past.

Repeatedly, there was proof presented to him that President Barack Obama was born in the United States. However, that did not keep him from continuing to push forward that conspiracy theory.

[07:10:06] So, if we're expecting evidence and facts and proof to change how he responds to an issue that he believes is true, we should focus on history and look back and see that that actually is not how he decides whether or not he's going to put forward an idea.

PAUL: All right. So, looking ahead again to Monday. We've got FBI Director James Comey testifying. We know National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers is going to be there. Some of the players here who are absent, though, Amber, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, any chance that these committees are going to demand to hear from them?

PHILLIPS: We'll see. It took this House Intelligence Committee, which is holding this hearing Monday, a lot of public wrangling and I'm sure behind-the-scenes wrangling to try to get these big national security players from the Trump administration in the chair with the cameras on to testify.

So, I think it's going to be a question then of resources and how much time and effort Congress wants to put forward to try to put the rest of Trump administration officials forward, at least in a public setting.

We do know that these intelligence communities that are investigating Russian meddling in the US election and, to some degree, some potential of Trump ally ties to Russia during that campaign tend to hold hearings behind closed doors.

But the bottom line right now is Congress is really frustrated with the FBI and, more broadly, the Trump administration for not being forthcoming on what it knows and what it's investigating. And I think that's a major question that they hope to answer Monday.

PAUL: We'll see. Eugene Scott, Amber Phillips, thank you both so much.

PHILLIPS: Thank you.

SAVIDGE: The president slammed China throughout his campaign. Now, his Secretary of State is in its capital city. He's trying to build support for reining in North Korea.

PAUL: And also, it's an interview you can't miss. We're talking to a former KGB agent as Russia, of course, takes center stage we were just talking about on Capitol Hill this coming week. The leaders of the CIA, FBI getting ready to testify about Russia's meddling in US elections.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:16:20] PAUL: 15 minutes past the hour right now and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is in Beijing this morning.

SAVIDGE: After meeting with China's foreign minister, he says that they both agreed that the tensions on the Korean Peninsula have reached a dangerous level and they are committed to preventing a conflict from breaking out.

Joining us now live from Beijing is CNN international correspondent, Matt Rivers. Matt?

MATT RIVERS, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The secretary of state will be on the ground for a little less than 24 hours here in China, but there's certainly no shortage of things to talk about.

At the top of the agenda, what you just mentioned there, will be North Korea. He had two meetings. The secretary of state had two meetings today with China's top diplomats and North Korea was widely discussed.

Things, frankly, very tense in this part of the world right now. North Korea has tested dozens of ballistic missiles and two nuclear weapons devices since the beginning of 2016 alone, but there is some tension between the United States and China about how best to deal with this issue.

They agree that there shouldn't be nuclear weapons on the peninsula, but how to get rid of them is where the differences stand. The Trump administration says that China should be doing more as North Korea's only major ally. China should be doing more to solve this problem.

President Trump, within the last 24 hours, tweeted something to that effect, echoing what we heard throughout his campaign for president. Now, there was a brief press availability with the Secretary of State. He did not address the tweet. But he did speak in general terms about what he talked about with China's foreign minister.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REX TILLERSON, SECRETARY OF STATE: Foreign Minister Wang and I had a very extensive exchange on North Korea. And Foreign Minister Wang affirmed again China's long-standing policy of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.

We also exchanged views and I think we share a common view and a sense that tensions on the peninsular are quite high right now and that things have reached a rather dangerous level. And we've committed ourselves to do everything we can talk to prevent any type of conflict from breaking out.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RIVERS: Now, the Trump administration says it wants a new policy on North Korea, but they have so far not provided any specifics on how their policy would be different and perhaps solve a crisis that no administration over the past 20 years, be it Republican or Democrat, has been able to make much progress on.

The other thing topping the agenda here for the Secretary of State is laying out the final details of a tentative plan for the presidents of China - that's Xi Jinping - and of the United States - of course Donald Trump. They are scheduled to meet for the first time in Florida next month.

We know the Secretary of State is scheduled to meet with China's president briefly tomorrow morning here local time before heading back to the United States.

SAVIDGE: It is a critical relationship. Matt Rivers, thank you very much for that.

It is the testimony that may finally bring some answers to all the questions swirling around President Trump.

PAUL: The FBI director is going to testify about the president's unfounded allegations that he was wiretapped and talk about Russia's hacking into the US elections. Just how is this all being seen, though, in Russia. Coming up, a perspective you've got to hear, a former Russian spy is with us. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:23:48] PAUL: Welcome. So glad to have your company. I'm Christi Paul.

SAVIDGE: And I'm Martin Savidge in for Victor Blackwell. The House Intelligence Committee is set to grill leaders of the nation's intelligence agencies on the investigation that's ongoing into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.

PAUL: As well as President Trump's baseless claims that his predecessor wiretapped him during Trump's campaign. Now, the first public hearing on the House on this issue is Monday. We have a team of experts, reporters, analysts on top of the story.

Jack Barsky, for one, a former Russian spy who infiltrated the US, a very unique perspective from him, and Eugene Scott, CNN Politics reporter. So, thank you both gentlemen for being here.

Eugene, we'd like to start with you. Lay it all out for us as we look ahead to what happens Monday. Any indication that Director Comey is going to drop any sort of bombshell?

SCOTT: It doesn't look like it, based on the information that was made available to CNN just Friday evening. Going forward, we saw reports suggesting that Comey had no evidence of wiretapping of Trump Tower by President Obama or intelligence agencies during that administration. And we got information pretty much confirming that just yesterday.

So, the likelihood of something being presented that will contradict that Monday is incredibly low. And quite frankly, this is what one of the leaders on the intelligence committee Rep. Adam Schiff was quite likely looking forward to because he said this data, this evidence would prove just how untruthful President Donald Trump has been about this accusation.

[07:25:16] PAUL: So, if that happens and if there is evidence to prove any sort of untruth by the president, what sort of consequence could there be?

SCOTT: Well, there is no evidence that there could be a real consequence. We had Democratic lawmakers say they will call on the president to apologize. We even have some Republican lawmakers ask him to retract his words if there is no evidence.

But the likelihood of him doing that it's really low considering how he doubled down even yesterday when we had Germany's Chancellor in the White House and it was brought up that somehow he may have been involved and - the president may have been involved in hacking in the past.

PAUL: We know that FBI Director James Comey is going to be part of this query. Do we know anything about some of the players whose names kind of standout that are absent thus far? Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn. SCOTT: Well, what we do know is that there will be some pressure on these people - on the lawmakers to bring these people before the committee to testify to ask very specific questions. People want to know what type of communication was had with Russian officials, who from the Trump campaign approved some speakers - some associates going to Russia to speak.

They'll also want to know what was involved in terms of knowledge regarding hackers and fake news and things of that nature.

PAUL: All right. Eugene Scott, thank you so much. We appreciate it.

Now, Russia's name, it keeps coming up in all this intrigue surrounding President Trump. Want to see how it's playing out in Moscow. So, we have senior international correspondent Nick Paton Walsh joining us from there.

Nick, what are you hearing? What reactions are you hearing from Russians about the conversations being had here in the US?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, the Kremlin keen to keep the same distance it's tried to have from these accusations of meddling in the US election. That persisted when the spokesman for the Kremlin Dmitry Peskov told us that they weren't actually even going to be watching the hearings on Monday.

They were too busy with work in the Kremlin. They weren't expecting to hear new statements from it and used the white colorful phrase describing the current situation as a broken record with futuristic songs, i.e. they keep hearing the same accusation against Moscow, but at this point they don't feel they've been presented any evidence to back it up.

Now, of course, James Comey will be under pressure in that meeting to provide detail about possible contacts between US officials in the Trump administration and Russian officials, perhaps the ones that we haven't seen posted on Instagram (ph) or well known in social media. And, of course too, what's been referred to as the smoke bomb of the wiretap allegation that President Trump made recently. That may obfuscate issues too.

But, certainly, I think all eyes on what new detail can emerge from there if James Comey is willing to go into specifics in a public hearing like that. Bear in mind too, there may also be private elements to the testimony he gives as well.

But this, generally, in Moscow, I think you can see it in two different ways. First, you could perhaps see that this may have allowed Russia to feel important like a global player on the world stage where, in fact, its covert actions perhaps influenced the enormous scale of the US election campaign. They may be feeling that.

But also too, bear in mind, if they were hoping for a White House that would fall slightly into line with its policy desires around the world, well, now Donald Trump is under pressure to try and seem anti- Russian because of the pro-Russian sentiment he's seen in the past and because of these accusations.

So, you may see this, in fact, has backfired on Vladimir Putin to some degree. But still all eyes on Monday's hearing. Christi?

PAUL: Alrighty. Nick Paton Walsh, we appreciate it. Thank you.

SAVIDGE: Let's bring in now Jack Barsky. He was a KGB agent. He was spying on the US for time during close to the end of the Cold War. And that was until he was caught by the FBI.

Now, he's an American citizen and he's telling his story in a new book. It's called Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America. So, you can imagine, this is going to be a pretty interesting perspective.

Jack, good to have you here this morning. Thank you very much for joining us. You became a spy, of course, for the Kremlin. You were working undercover here in the United States. You are hearing all the allegations that are now being made about the election and how Russia may have tried to influence it. Do you think it is possible that Russia has actually somehow infiltrated the White House?

JACK BARSKY, FORMER SECRET AGENT OF THE KGB: I don't want to speculate. Anything is possible in the intelligence realm. The bottom line is when it comes to intelligence matters, the real truth, if it ever comes out, may take 30, 40, 50 years to come out.

Like, for instance, what happened in the United States with regard to Soviet spying in the 40s and 50s, it is now pretty much out in the open, but it took a long time. So, today, we will not be able to really find the truth.

[07:30:00] SAVIDGE: All right. So, if we can, say, verify it or prove it right now, is it something - and you would know, is it something that Russia would want to do and has tried in the past?

BARSKY: It absolutely is, but it's exceedingly difficult. The Manchurian Candidate, that's fiction. Let's face it. It would require a grand conspiracy, which is nearly impossible to keep secret.

When I was undercover, there were about five people who knew about me. Five. And we kept it pretty secret.

SAVIDGE: Well, so if they can't have a grand conspiracy, there could be subtle ways. And what I bring up here is, of course, we know that there have been connections to various people that are connected to the president of the United States.

Now, in fact, we're going to show you a flowchart, I believe, that gives you a pretty good idea of who is connected and how. And what I'm wondering, as you look at this and you look at all the various names that are being thrown out here, does that imply some kind of subtle intrigue either by buying or connecting to these various members of the White House and the administration of getting in there?

BARSKY: I honestly don't buy into the intrigue. What I would buy into, in a big way, is the Russians trying to create chaos in this country, trying to destabilize this country. And in that matter, they pretty much succeeded because what we're doing now, we're throwing bombs at each other.

The book of Mark, 2,000 years old, a house divided against itself will not stand, famously quoted by Abraham Lincoln. And we are, right now, very busy dividing our own house. And if I'm Putin, I'm sitting back and I'm enjoying the show. I think that is quite likely and it also has - it has historic precedent. The other stuff, to me, I don't want to speculate.

SAVIDGE: So, all these sort of paid relationships or occasions where members of the administration, (INAUDIBLE) Russia or they've been paid for this or that. That, you don't think is an attempt to sort of a mole or buy somebody? It's more of just trying to raise the questions in everyone's mind and plant these seeds of -

BARSKY: Yes. And there's probably some naivete in play with it, particularly with our president who was never really in the realm of international politics. And there's things that can happen that way. But I just cannot, at this point - it would be improper for me to go down that path to speculate anymore.

SAVIDGE: Besides dividing the house, is there an ulterior motive here by Putin? In other words, there is another grand plan yet to come and be unveiled?

BARSKY: Well, I think it's not a secret that Putin and the Russians are trying to rebuild what they lost, what they for a long time never had and sort of had for a while under Stalin, which is Soviet/Russian Empire.

And as long as we're focused on each other and internally and not focus on that plan, that gives them more leeway to do things that we really don't want done.

SAVIDGE: Can you give me an idea of just the tactics that would be employed, say, today by Russian agents who, I presume, are here to cause this destabilization and questioning in the media or elsewhere?

BARSKY: Find friendly folks in the media or people who are influencers and feed them disinformation. That's been done historically as long as the KGB existed. And we now call it fake news. It's called disinformation.

SAVIDGE: So, the wiretap information, do you think that could have been somebody purposely feeding some journalist or someone?

BARSKY: Whose wiretap information?

SAVIDGE: About Donald Trump and Trump Tower.

BARSKY: Possible. Possible. Again, I don't want to join the chorus of speculators. In the realm of intelligence, there is very few people who know. And the more you start speculating about things, the more you're actually feeding into the folks that were trying to create that kind of chaos.

SAVIDGE: But you do have this, obviously, really interesting perspective and you must watch these events, either how they unfold in the media or how they're unfolding in the White House and wonder or think, I see some fingerprints here and they go back to Moscow?

BARSKY: See, I was not involved in these kinds of operations.

SAVIDGE: Understand.

BARSKY: So, I was primarily into political intelligence.

SAVIDGE: It's the mindset, I guess, I'm going for.

BARSKY: The mindset, absolutely. If you can, you will probe everywhere you can and find ways to make a little dent here and there. Absolutely, sure. And they have an army of people, not only like people who are official employees, but also collaborators and informants. And that hasn't changed.

[07:35:14] SAVIDGE: Should we be worried as a nation or just aware and alert?

BARSKY: No, what we should be worried about really is cyber warfare. Cyber warfare is the modern - this is pretty much Cold War 2.0.

SAVIDGE: And Russia would be willing to launch cyber warfare against the United States?

BARSKY: Not just Russia. Others. And the potential for damage is phenomenal. Equals, possibly exceeds, one or two nuclear bombs. You can pretty much incapacitate a whole country if you hack the right systems.

That is what I'm worried about. I have a background in information technology besides having been a spy. And I know a bit about that stuff and this is much more dangerous.

The political wrangling back and forth, I don't like it, it shouldn't be done, but that's a fact. But I think the danger is really for us to not focus on the real issue, which is cyber warfare.

SAVIDGE: Do you think we're being distracted?

BARSKY: Yes, we are.

SAVIDGE: Intentionally so.

BARSKY: Yes, we are.

SAVIDGE: A frightening thought. Jack Barsky, thank you very much for joining us.

BARSKY: Most welcome.

SAVIDGE: Welcome. Thank you. PAUL: Well, thank you, Jack. Great conversation there.

All right. Still to come, the president's credibility itself on the line after his words start to, it seem, catch up with him. We're going to follow President Trump's language in the past and how it's affecting the future of his presidency. That's ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:41:00] SAVIDGE: You know that today marks eight years since President Trump joined Twitter, but his tweets may be coming back to haunt him.

From his language about the travel ban on the campaign trail to the recent wiretapping claims, the president's words are putting him in a political bind.

PAUL: Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel inadvertently addressed this during her meeting at the White House. Look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANGELA MERKEL, CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY (via translator): I've always said it's much, much better to talk to one another and not about one another. And I think our conversation proves this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PAUL: Now, the president's credibility being questioned by some after several of his statements have been proven false. And as CNN's Victor Blackwell reports, the president has been peddling conspiracy since before the campaign.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Number eight, Election Day, 2012, then private citizen Donald Trump tweeted "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive."

Well, this is one that President Donald Trump has promoted for years. Despite offering no evidence to support the claim that Chinese created climate change, the science is clear. According to NOAA and NASA, nearly all of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.

And after his November 2016 election win, Trump conceded a human impact on climate change, telling "The New York Times," "I think there is some connectivity, some something. It depends on how much."

Coming in at number seven, the disease that killed thousands of people, Ebola. In October 2014, Trump tweeted, "Ebola is much easier to transmit than the CDC and government representatives are admitting, spreading all over Africa and fast. Stop flights."

Well, Ebola did not spread all over Africa. All, but 15, of the more than 11,000 Ebola-related deaths were confined to three countries in West Africa. Trump never gave any evidence to back up his accusation that the government was hiding the truth.

In March 2014, Trump tweeted a debunked health claim offering, again, no evidence. "Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines. Doesn't feel good and changes. Autism, many such cases."

Well, the CDC says there are no links between vaccines and autism. Actually, here's what President Trump's pick to lead the FDA said in 2015.

DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB, NOMINEE FOR THE HEAD OF FDA: I think for too long, a lot of people's public statements allowed these myths to propagate because they said things like, 'well, we don't think there's any correlation, but we need more research.' We don't need more research. At some point, enough is enough. It's fine to continue to collect data, but at some point, you have to take no for an answer.

BLACKWELL: Number five from 2012, "The economy is in terrible shape. Barack Obama is manipulating the job numbers to hide the truth," another claim candidate Trump repeated without evidence during his run for president.

TRUMP: I hear 5.3 percent unemployment. That is the biggest joke there is in this country.

BLACKWELL: But after a strong jobs report for his first full month in office, a sudden reversal from the White House press secretary.

SEAN SPICER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: They may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now.

BLACKWELL: Minutes after CNN called the 2012 election for President Obama, "He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country." Also, calling the Electoral College phony.

Actually, President Obama won the Electoral College vote and the popular vote. And as the numbers came in, Trump deleted those tweets.

Four years later, Donald Trump's own actual electoral win and popular vote loss takes us to number three. "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

TRUMP: You're going to find, and we're going to do an investigation on it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But 3 to 5 million illegal votes?

TRUMP: We're going to find out, but it could very well be that much.

BLACKWELL: Six weeks later, still no White House investigation nor any evidence to support the claim.

[07:45:00] At number two, "How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process? This is Nixon/Watergate, bad or sick guy." Well, the House Intelligence Committee launched an investigation into that claim.

REP. DEVIN NUNES (R), CALIFORNIA: We don't have any evidence that that took place. In fact, I don't believe just in the last week of time, the people we talked to, I don't think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower.

TRUMP: We will be submitting certain things, and I will be perhaps speaking about this next week, but it's right now before the committee and I think I want to leave it at that.

BLACKWELL: And the number one debunked or baseless claim.

TRUMP: You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country. He may not have been born in this country.

BLACKWELL: The relentless questioning of President Obama's birthplace, tweeting in 2012, "An extremely credible source has called my office and told me that Barack Obama's birth certificate is a fraud." Well, that was more than a year after the president released his long-form birth certificate in response to Trump's claims.

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I know that there's going to be a segment of people for which no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.

BLACKWELL: That included Donald Trump who tweeted in 2012, "I want to see Barack Obama's college records to see how he listed his place of birth in the application." Then under intense pressure during his campaign for president in 2016, Donald Trump finally acknowledged the truth.

TRUMP: President Barack Obama was born in the United States - period.

BLACKWELL: Happy Twitter-versary to @realDonaldTrump.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PAUL: And coming up, political commentator Jeffrey Lord is weighing in on President Trump's Twitter-versary and why words matter. That's after a short break. Stay close.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:51:04] PAUL: Still glad to have you with us here. Joining us to talk about the growing impact of President Trump's words, CNN's political commentator and former aide to Ronald Reagan Jeffrey Lord. Jeffrey, good to see you this morning.

JEFFREY LORD, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Hello there, Christi Paul.

PAUL: Hello. Good to see you. OK, I want to start real quickly here with some pretty strong language from Fareed Zakaria. He said this last night on CNN. Let's listen together here.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST, FAREED ZAKARIA GPS: He has spent his whole life bullshitting. He has succeeded by bullshitting. He has gotten to the presidency by bullshitting. It's very hard to tell somebody at that point that bullshitting doesn't work because look at the results, right?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PAUL: Obviously, we have the bleep on the air on big time at the moment. But what do you make of his assessment that President Trump essentially can put whatever he wants out there because there really isn't a consequence?

LORD: Well, wherever my friend, Fareed, is at this moment, if he's hearing me, I can just see him rolling his eyes. But I think he just gave a perfect description of President Obama.

Let's be candid here. What attracts with Donald Trump in a sense is the technology that he uses. It's the Twitter.

But you can be President Obama and frankly any number of other politicians and say all kinds of outlandish things right out there on the open, at rallies and from the White House, et cetera. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor; it was President Bush who caused the financial crash, etc. And nobody blinks. It's a bunch of - to borrow from Fareed, it's a bunch of BS.

PAUL: Let's talk about the wiretapping, for example. There is nothing to prove what Donald Trump tweeted a couple of weeks ago. Nothing.

LORD: Christi, there is, in fact, lots of evidence out there that the American administration under President Obama was surveilling Trump associates. I've got all these "New York Times" stories right in front of me.

Let me read you one sentence from it. American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of president-elect Donald Trump.

PAUL: OK. But he specified in his tweets -

LORD: Those people worked with President Obama. They were surveilling him.

PAUL: But he specified President Obama himself. He specified President Obama is doing this.

LORD: But, Christi, it's President Obama's administration. These people work for him.

PAUL: But why do we always have to have somebody like you, Jeffrey - and thank you because we're glad you're here. But why do we always have to have somebody come out and explain what the president meant? LORD: Well, because this is what happens all the time. And I can tell you, having worked in a White House, you get up in the morning and you're explaining what the president meant no matter who the president is.

This is what went on in the Obama, the Bush, the Reagan, the Nixon White House etc. That just comes with part of the job. That's why you have a White House press secretary.

PAUL: Alrighty. Jeffrey Lord, I'm sorry that we've run out of time. I hope that we get to talk again in the future.

LORD: I may not be.

PAUL: You may not be. Jeffrey Lord, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it.

SAVIDGE: Coming up at the top of the hour, President Trump spends another weekend in Palm Beach possibly prepping for what could be one of the most important weeks to date of his administration. But will a potentially "good week" be overshadowed by other news?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[7:58:41] PAUL: Alrighty. This week's Staying Well focuses on growing trend of health professionals taking their clients from the opposite outdoors for some walk and talk therapy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't tell you how I feel about something in 140 characters. I can kind of.

DENICE CLARK, MARRIAGE AND FAMILY THERAPIST: Walk and talk therapy is exactly what it sounds like. Rather than being enclosed in an office space, the therapy session takes place outside while we walk. You know this is how I should be approaching it, yet I'm shutting that out right now.

For some clients, coming to therapy in an office setting is intimidating. Walking side by side, clients are a little more free to express themselves.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That makes me just open up a little differently. It makes the conversation seem more natural.

CLARK: I maintain their confidentiality. If we're a little too close to others, we'll stop for a minute and let people pass.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm an outdoors guy by nature. I like the garden and I like being active. And so, this is just a natural fit for me. The park itself is really part of the therapy process. When I had therapy in the past and you go into an office, it just feels sterile.

CLARK: When we're out walking, we're moving forward and it's the exact same thing we're doing in the therapeutic process. We're moving forward.

(END VIDEO CLIP)