Pencil in a post indictment.
First today,
Donald Trump's campaign choosing
Pickens, South Carolina, as the stage
for the former president's
first rally following his arraignment.
But there are already plenty of ways
to measure the indictment.
Political impact,
7 million of them, to be precise.
That's how much the Trump campaign
claims to have raised
since the 49 page charging document
was made public on Friday.
Another measure,
what you might call fealty
in the halls of Congress.
Some Republicans in the upper chamber
say Trump's
conduct is too toxic to suburban voters.
But look at the House rank and file.
Most of them are toeing the Trump line
or saying nothing at all.
I want to start on Capitol Hill
with CNN's chief
congressional correspondent, Manu Raju,
who is probably already got his steps
in that at noon Eastern.
You've been talking to members.
What are you hearing?
Yeah, a lot of pressure on the speaker
to go
as far as members on the hard right
want in seeking retribution
and going
after the Justice Department
in the wake
of the Donald Trump indictment.
A number of these members of the House
Freedom Caucus, part of that hard right
bloc, are pushing for everything
from going after the salaries of top
officials at the FBI
and the Justice Department,
something called the home
and rule on Capitol Hill,
also trying to restrict funding,
dismantle the DOJ or FBI.
In some ways,
and others even going as far as calling
for impeachment of the attorney general
and for the FBI director, Chris Wray,
Well, we should impeach Merrick Garland.
He's clearly
abusing the power of his position,
not to impeach Director Wray as well.
FBI whole Justice Department
needs to be looked at.
Defunding.
We'll be defunding the FBI, parts of it.
We're missing the obvious.
We have somebody that has
hundreds and hundreds of top secrets
that us
house showing to unclear people.
And then he lied about it.
I'm not in the mood
for a mode for defending that.
And I don't think my colleagues
should either.
And that last comment
from Congressman
Don Bacon, a member
from a swing district in Nebraska,
underscoring the divide
within the Republican conference
in the House
and Senate over how to respond
to Donald Trump.
Bacon very much concerned
about the details
in that Trump indictment, wants the party
to move on from Trump
but that is not the way that a lot
of the most outspoken members
in the House in particular feel,
which is why you do put a lot of pressure
on Speaker McCarthy
about how exactly to move forward
and whether or not to line up with
some of those calls from the hard right.
We do know there's an effort by the House
Judiciary Committee chairman
to try to get Merrick Garland
to provide some records
to the committee
about the surge at Mar
a Lago
that retrieved
all those classified documents
that Trump initially refused to do.
But what will happen
if they don't get those records
and how far will they go?
All big questions,
Dana, is House Republicans
and some Senate Republicans
are calling for retribution,
but unclear about how far they will go.
Thank you
So fascinating,
especially the juxtaposition
with Congressman Bacon
and everybody else who it seems
and that you're talking to
who will talk at least.
Thanks, Manu, for that.
And here with me at the table
to share their reporting, CNN's Gloria
Borger, CNN's
Audie Cornish
and Jackie Kucinich of The Boston Globe.
Thanks for coming in.
Gloria,
I just want to start with you
and your reaction to what
not only Manu is hearing,
but I know
because you work your sources all day
long, what you're hearing.
Well, I think that, you know, there
is kind of this Republican Two-Step
going on
in the presidential campaign
as well as on Capitol Hill.
You have the conservatives
on the Freedom Caucus,
and they'll say what they say
and they'll threaten what they threaten.
But a large number of Republicans
are first saying, okay,
the Justice Department's been weaponized.
There's unequal justice in this country.
Republicans are treated differently
from Democrats
Hillary Clinton,
Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, etc.
But then they do a little flip part two
and they say what occurred was serious.
And we have to think about this
and this should not occur.
And you just heard
Congressman Baker saying that,
and I don't approve of it.
And then the third part of it
is, of course,
what the presidential
candidates are saying,
which is anything from
I'll give them a pardon
to Mike Pence and surprisingly saying,
I don't know what I would do.
You know,
you and I have covered these hearings
a lot. Right.
And there they can go.
Either way.
On the one hand, you get to say,
this is what we care about.
This is the problem.
On the other hand,
lawmakers who disagree with
you can also speak,
which means they can spend all that time
reintroducing the audience
to the indictment,
talking about other issues
that have happened
with the Justice Department
that maybe Democrats are upset with.
So it's not a slam
dunk to say, oh, we're going to
just put all this attention
on this idea
of weaponizing the government.
And we'll just talk about that,
especially when you're trying
not to talk about it all that much.
So even though it seemed at
first like, oh,
they were just going to do
all the dirty work
of talking about this,
there's a political cost to them as well.
But I think this just shows how oriented,
how how oriented the GOP still is around
former President Trump
and how hard it is for these contenders
to try to break through,
particularly
if they're not going to say anything
judgmental or negative about what
former President
Trump is alleged to have done.
But because of just the loyalty
on display,
both from elected officials
and from voters on the ground, Well,
that's about gerrymandering, right?
Like basically
they already lost in the midterms
or did not have the gains
they could have had, in part
because several candidates
on the Republican side
have said because of Donald Trump.
The problem is so many people
in the House
come from districts
where there is rock solid support
for Trump that they can't move it.
So. So it's not so much real loyalty.
That's fear. It's just fear of losing.
But but I see it as loyalty and loyalty.
Yeah, that's good.
Except as you continue that conversation,
I just want to put up some polling
on the screen for our viewers to
to look at a Pew poll that just came out.
I mean, look at that.
Donald Trump. 53%.
DeSantis is the closest to him at 23%.
So the fear factor
that you're talking about
is all of the above.
And it's all connected, right?
I mean, it's the fear of the electorate.
They all share
the same electorate, particularly
the House Republicans who come from ruby
red districts,
that if they don't toe the line,
they're going to get a Trump backed
primary challenge.
Right.
There is no compromising
for people in those districts
since either or.
And you're supporting Donald Trump
but people like I looked at that.
Chris Christie's moved up. He's got 4%.
I think it was 1% before
because Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson
are the two
who are really going at Donald Trump
frontally.
But it's it's this sense of we don't
we don't want to lose our seats.
We don't want to lose
the presidential primaries.
And there's kind of no way around that
for these people.
And if you look at DeSantis,
who is still considerably
behind Donald Trump, he's
kind of stayed back.
I mean, the island,
he said,
you know, oh, if I had done this,
I would have been court-Martialed
if I'd taken documents back to my room.
But that's as far as he's really gone.
We're going to talk to two Republican
strategists who worked for
2016 candidates
about what it would be like
to be
in the campaigns of his opponents now.
But we also happen to have people
who ran against him
who are still serving
in the United States Senate.
And I want to just play
what they're saying right now
about this Trump indictment.
President Trump, we have your back.
You could take the Dalai Lama
and making the Republican nominee
that try to destroy his life
with the Trump indictment,
which is utter and complete garbage.
With the Trump indictment,
there's a complete and utter
double standard.
There's no allegation that there was harm
done to the to the national security.
There's no allegation
that he sold it to a foreign power.
That's the line.
Sorry.
But seriously, I mean, that that again,
this is the fear
and loyalty
that you're hearing
from these members of Congress.
I mean, Ted Cruz,
I remember what the topic was.
He said something mildly
negative about former President Trump
during Tucker Carlson.
And wasn't he browbeat
into into a retreat?
And I think in some places,
the indictment has had the effect
of bringing voters back to Trump.
And we were
our just been very good was in Michigan
a couple of days ago.
And when the indictment came down
and there was a woman there, a voter
who said, you know,
I was actually thinking of DeSantis,
but they're going after Trump.
So I'm going to say, oh, well,
I think the victim thing is big.
I think that his as he has said
to audiences,
look, they're going after me
and they'll go after you.
At the end of the day, you know,
the party's always going to struggle
if it has no post-Trump vision, period.
They have never figured out
what the lane is for anyone else.
It's not just about what he's doing.
It's about what they're doing.
At least DeSantis has staked out
conceptually
something, even if,
as Trump points out, it's
the same word over and over again.
But for these others,
they are still defined by what he says
and what he does not say.
And there is no
I have no idea what wing of the party
there is anymore. Right.
The national security
wing is withering under
this conversation.
We know
the kind of neocon interventionalists
don't can't get a peep in
in this conversation,
even as they fight to talk about Ukraine.
There is no sense of like what
the party is like next
because it's all over the place.
I mean, when Mark
or when it does have to be,
it could be Senator Rubio, cochairman
of intelligence or vice chair.
Yeah. Yeah.
They share it.
When he said
there's no evidence
of harm to national security.
How about the fact
that he was showing these documents
to people who have no,
you know, no classification?
We're going to talk about to see it.