New book details life of first lady Barbara Bush
Author Susan Page opens up about writing 'The Matriarch' on 'The Story.'
This is a rush transcript from "The Story," April 2, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
MARTHA MACCALLUM, HOST: So, breaking tonight, new developments in this weird case of a Chinese woman arrested with malware on the grounds of Mar-a-Lago. She was trying to gain access to an event while she was there, she is in custody. We'll bring you the latest developments on that in just a few moments.
But first, the president punching back at his adversaries on Capitol Hill.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT: I guarantee, they go into a room between Nadler, Schiff, and the group, and they laugh like hell at how they've kept this thing going for two years.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: Tonight, the clock is ticking on the deadline to turn over the Mueller report. And there's going to be a vote tomorrow to force its release. Good evening, everybody. I'm Martha MacCallum, and this is “The Story” tonight.
Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler is leading the charge. But look at this, here he is when there were similar requests made to release all of the documents in the Lewinsky-Clinton case.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. JERROLD NADLER, D-N.Y., CHAIRMAN, HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: It's grand jury material. It represents statements which may or may not be true by various witnesses, salacious material, all kinds of material that it would be unfair to release.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: Now, those documents ultimately came out and there was a lot of back-and-forth and tension over that. So, will these subpoenas work? Here's the judge.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANDREW NAPOLITANO, SENIOR JUDICIAL ANALYST: There are some things in there that the Attorney General under the law, cannot legally release. And that's called, you're going to hear this all over the place the next three weeks. 6(e). What is 6(e)? 6(e) is a section of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which basically says, if the government has materials about a person who's not being charged, it can't release them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: A lot of people would fall into that category. In moments, Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe. But first, Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell joins us once again. He's demanding the unredacted Mueller report. Of course, he sits on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.
This is Jim Comey the former FBI director talking this afternoon on CNN about the release of the report and the timing of the whole thing. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAMES COMEY, FORMER DIRECTOR, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION: Bill Barr, our Attorney General, it deserves the benefit of the doubt, we'll give him a chance to show us what he feels like he can't show us. I have to imagine that former director Mueller wrote the report with an eye towards it being public someday. So, I can't imagine a lot needs to be cut out of it. But let's wait and see, the Attorney General deserves that chance.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: Do you agree with that?
REP. ERIC SWALWELL, D-CALIF., HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: Well, we want to make sure we see the full report as soon as possible. We're going to authorize subpoenas but not issue the subpoena. But Congress voted just a month ago, 420 to zero in a bipartisan fashion for us to see the full report.
Also, the public paid for this investigation. They should see the full report.
MACCALLUM: Yes.
SWALWELL: And the person who believes that he is fully exonerated should fully welcome us seeing the report.
MACCALLUM: I think -- and you know, the president has said he wants to see the full report. I think pretty much everybody has said. But I think that the full report definition is different for different people based on the grand jury testimony. And you know, some of the -- some of the parts of the report that might reflect on people who, you know, do not have any -- there's no reason for them to be sort of put out there publicly by this report. So, do you agree with those exemptions?
SWALWELL: Yes, if there's no reason for the public to know about someone's cooperation, I agree. But what I don't agree is that the grand jury information would -- should shield important relevant witnesses from having their information out there. The president from this --
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: And who are they? What -- tell me what, you know, what would you be disappointed not to get? Who do -- who do you want to read more about in terms of the background documents that I know you we want?
SWALWELL: Every person who met with the Russians at the Trump Tower meeting, every person involved in the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations, any person who knew about the WikiLeaks effort to hack and release the Hillary Clinton e-mails, and any person who knew about the actions the administration has taken to benefit from the Russians.
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: So, even -- OK, that's what I thought. So, I mean, even though it appears that there was no collusion according to the summary of the principal conclusions that we got from, from Mr. Barr, you still think that those are -- that's valid ground.
SWALWELL: Yes.
MACCALLUM: Because in the letter, he said, you know, it's obvious that there was outreach, but there was no conspiracy, and there was no coordination. But that's not enough for you?
SWALWELL: No, because that relates to criminal matter not national security counterintelligence matters. We have a responsibility, we're going to protect the ballot box in 2020 from another attack.
The public should know and that the nation's leaders should know who worked at the Russians. What the government response for them that it was adequate.
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: But they -- the reports says, that they didn't work with the Russians. That's the point that I'm making.
SWALWELL: Not it -- there would another report that the Barr opinion letter said that it didn't reach the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Without seeing the full report, I don't know if that's the case or not.
But I want relevant information out there for the public. I believe that if there is confidential -- personal identifying information about people who had nothing to do with this, we should protect their privacy. We can do that. But first, Congress should see the full report and then make that decision.
MACCALLUM: So, but then, you know in the same breath, I know you spoke with Neil Cavuto, and you said you don't have to have the Mueller report to see all the president did do. So, do you want the report, and do you need the report?
SWALWELL: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
MACCALLUM: Or is the report going to come out, and if it doesn't have the things that you're hoping for, you're going to say, "Oh, that doesn't matter anyway because I already know that there was -- you know, a lot of egregious behavior here."
SWALWELL: Well, there is what we've already seen in public and we can't -- you know, wash that away because the president wasn't criminally indicted. But I imagine that there will be additional information that will guide us as we seek to protect the ballot box. And so, I will accept every word, every period, every comma, if I'm able to see it. But I'm not going to accept that I can't see it and that the president is thereby for clear.
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: And know, you OK with him taking the time that he needs? He said, you know, for like 15 days from now or less. So why -- I don't know why there's this tomorrow date. It sounds like you're not going to issue subpoenas tomorrow, correct?
SWALWELL: We're going to authorize subpoenas tomorrow. We're going to continue to work with them. But the public should see a report that it paid for, and we should know is our nation's leaders what we can do to protect our democracy.
MACCALLUM: All right. Let me ask you a quick 2020 question before I let you go because there was a report that you were quoted as having said at an event in San Francisco, "Don't tell anybody, but I'm announcing in two weeks." So are you announcing for the presidency in two weeks to run?
SWALWELL: Yes. I did not say that. But I will tell you, I've made a decision. I will announce it soon. And the reason I care so much about what the Russians did is because they didn't do it just to benefit themselves from a transactional relationship with the president, they did it to tear down the idea of America that no matter who you are, where you're from, what you worship, who you love, you can be anything. And if that to be true in America, it could be true in Russia. They don't want it in Russia.
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: Well, you know, there's a --
SWALWELL: I want to protect it still here at America. And it benefitted me, that's why I consider.
MACCALLUM: Listen, I think you're going to do well on that because I think everybody's on the same page, nobody wants the Russians to be able to influence our election or -- you know to influence anything.
SWALWELL: Yes. Yes.
MACCALLUM: And, you know one of the people who worked at the CIA for 30 years, said that dossier looked like a classic Kremlin disinformation campaign. So, I hope you're going to pursue that side of it when you get all the documents as well, correct?
(CROSSTALK)
SWALWELL: We'll did it. I want our country to have free markets -- free markets, free ideas and a freedom to dream. The Russians don't want us to have that, I want to protect that. I benefited from that.
MACCALLUM: Do you -- OK. So, do you want to know if the dossier was a classic Kremlin disinformation campaign?
SWALWELL: Of course -- of course, absolutely.
MACCALLUM: So, you'll be digging into that when you get these documents as well. Because a lot may come out when all of this comes out.
SWALWELL: I hope we do.
MACCALLUM: That will be of interest to I think a lot of people on all sides.
SWALWELL: Absolutely, Martha.
MACCALLUM: All right, Congressman, thank you very much. Good to see you tonight.
SWALWELL: My pleasure. Thank you. You, too.
MACCALLUM: So, here to respond, Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas. He also sits on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committee. So your colleague -- you just heard your colleague. What's your reaction to what he had to say there?
REP. JOHN RATCLIFFE, R-TX: Hi, Martha. Good to be with you.
MACCALLUM: Hi.
RATCLIFFE: Well, I'm still trying to figure out what's worse. Last week, I heard Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee demand that Bill Barr released the full report without redactions for classified national security information.
This week, I'm hearing the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jerrold Nadler, demand that Bill Barr, again, violate the law with regard to 6(e) information and other information. It's the theater of the absurd.
Bill Bar isn't going to comply with the Democrats deadline because he can't comply with it because he'd have to violate the law, he'd have to commit crimes to do that. What he is complying with is the law as it's written.
He is complying with the special counsel regulation. He's fully complied with it already, and now he's going to go further and provide more information than the law requires.
MACCALLUM: I thought, you know, a couple of things were interesting and in what Congressman Swalwell said. He refers to the Barr letter as the bar opinion letter. I didn't -- you know, that was not my take away when I read it. It didn't seem like there was a lot of opinion in there. It seemed as if he was summarizing the principal conclusions.
He said it's still a work in progress, they were still going through everything. And he laid out the conclusions as I would imagine as Robert Mueller did in the report. Do you think there's concern -- are you concern that when the rest of this report does come out, which I believe it will, that there's going to be a lot of daylight between these two takes?
RATCLIFFE: I'm not concerned about that at all, because Bill Barr is not going to bet his 40-year legal career on misinforming the public. Bill Barr followed the regulation to a tee. A regulation for the special counsel that ironically, Jerry Nadler, supported.
After the Starr investigation, Jerry Nadler was one of the ones that wanted the Independent Counsel statute to expire and to be replaced with this special counsel regulation, which again, Bill Barr has complied with completely and now intends to do more.
MACCALLUM: So, do you want the report, as much as possible to come out? Or do you support that? Do you want everyone to see what they paid for?
RATCLIFFE: Well, that's a false argument about what they paid for. The American people pay for every bit of classified information that we have in this country. They don't get to see all of it. There are reasons that we protect classified information, there are reasons that we protect grand jury information. These are long --
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: But, there's certainly a lot of public interest in this matter because people have been hearing about it for two years.
RATCLIFFE: Absolutely.
MACCALLUM: And I think, they would like to see to the greatest extent possible, what all that was about.
RATCLIFFE: And I would too. To that point, that's what Bill Barr promised. And as you pointed out, Martha, that's what he's doing. He's providing everything as quickly as possible, with the only redactions, the thing -- the things that the law says he cannot provide to the American people.
MACCALLUM: Yes.
RATCLIFFE: And if he could provide them, he probably would.
MACCALLUM: You know, I just want to get your thoughts on one more thing. Because it's clear what Congressman Swalwell and others want, they want to see all the grand jury testimony with regards to Donald Trump Jr. Anybody else who was in that room, as he just said.
What does that tell you about where they are still going with this, politically?
RATCLIFFE: It tells me that it's politically motivated. They have no good faith basis to ask for that information. The law does not allow for it. The Department of Justice does not ever provide that information.
They want it for political gain. They have been promising information on collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians. Bob Mueller's conclusions, as summarized by Bill Barr, reflected that didn't take place. That should be the end of these investigations.
To the extent they want to continue them, they're underscoring, Martha, that they're simply politically motivated. That they are trying to get information that they think will be helpful to prevent Donald Trump from being reelected in 2020. That's what this is about.
MACCALLUM: All right. Congressman, thank you very much. Congressman John Ratcliffe, good to see you tonight. Thank you, sir.
RATCLIFFE: You bet, Martha. Thanks.
MACCALLUM: We are waiting for President Trump, he's going to address the National Republican Congressional Committee in Washington tonight. So, we will dip into that in a little bit.
Plus, the trouble could be just getting started for those who started the whole Russian collusion investigation. Victor Davis Hanson has written an extensive piece on where he thinks all of this goes now. He's next.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COMEY: I thought that's potentially obstruction of justice. And I hope somebody is going to look at that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MACCALLUM: We are waiting President Trump, on his way to the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., that's where he will address the National Republican Congressional Committee tonight, and at their dinner, so there's no fallout, is the background tonight from the Special Counsel Russia's investigation.
My next guest argues, in a new op-ed, that he believes the tables are starting to turn on this story, and the cast of characters who are the most vocal during the investigation into President Trump, are things like -- on things like lying, leaking, foreign collusion, obstruction of justice, conflicts of interest could soon be facing troubles of their own.
Victor Davis Hanson writes that, now that Robert Mueller's 634-day, $30 million-dollar investigation is over, and has failed to find the original goal of its mandate, and now that thousands of once-sealed government documents will likely be released in unredacted form, those who eagerly assumed that the role of the hunters may become the hunted, due to their own zealous violation of the nation's trust and its laws.
Here now, Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Author of the Case for Trump, Victor, good to see you tonight, thank you for coming back in and joining us on THE STORY. So, talk to me a little bit about who the hunters are, who you believe will now be hunted, and what will be used, what material will they have access to, to do that?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, SENIOR FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION: Well, I think we all thought that the 674-day odyssey, $30 million was going to be the holy grail that led to impeachment.
So, if James Comey or Andrew McCabe wrote memoirs, they testified under oath at various committees, or James Clapper and John Brennan, or media analyst, and they testified, that would be irrelevant because Trump was going to be impeached.
But what they didn't quite, in ironic fashion, realize, they were having a paper -- there's going to be a paper trail of things they did during the 2016 election that will come out, the released documents and their own testimonies are not going to be reconcilable.
What I mean by that, Martha, is that three or four people signed those FISA warrants, and they did not tell a judge that it was -- that their evidence was based on the Steele dossier. I don't think all four of them, Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe or James Comey are going to have the same story about who was culpable in that.
And they're going to be leverage for testimonies that are self-serving, the same way that Mueller did with Michael Flynn or his son, or I really don't think when we talk about collusion that Alexander Downer, who was instrumental in facilitating an FBI plant, maybe with some CIA cooperation from John Brennan, is a U.S. citizen. He's a foreign national, as is Christopher Steele. That is collusion.
What I'm getting at is that, we have a sense that there's a united front, we're all going to go after Trump, but now, these people are going to be testifying, Samantha Powers is going to say I didn't -- I didn't request those 260 unmasking's, that wasn't in my name, maybe Susan Rice did it.
No, you did it, I didn't do it, and we're going to have that back and forth with a larger and larger cast of characters, some of whom, like McCabe and James Baker, already under criminal referral, then the Democratic Party was, sort of, in suspended animation.
So, this was going on, they didn't feel they had to come up with an agenda, a menu, and all of a sudden, it's gone. And Trump is going to be president until 2020.
But in the process, they try to outdo each other in revolutionary fear, so we have 90 percent tax rate, wealth tax, green deal, reparations, and fantasized permissible abortion, abolish ICE, abolish college debt, abolish electoral -- all of these issues were not 51 percent issues.
And then when you add to that toxic mix, the anti-white male, sort of, narrative that you don't want a white male, and then the polls show that your three leading candidates are --
MACCALLUM: All fall into that category. That's a lot there. And, you know, there are a couple of things I want to drill down on. You mentioned John Brennan, and the possibility of his involvement in this, and I just want to point out that there are two main venues for the kind of turning of the tables that you talk about it.
One is the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, at the Department of Justice, who is looking into this. The other is Lindsey Graham, now the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who is also overseeing an investigation into this whole side of the equation.
Because if it wasn't collusion, and you look at the dossier, and you look at all of these extensive movement on all the parts of these people, the FISA applications, all of it, you know, the George Papadopoulos issue, which you just brought up, why did all of that happen? What started it, what was the catalyst to start all of that? And those are going to be the subjects of those two investigations.
But John Brennan really stuck his neck out on this story, and here's an example of what he said right before the report or the Barr letter came out, and right after. Let's play.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN BRENNAN, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: I wouldn't be surprised if, for example, this week, on Friday, not knowing anything about it, but Friday is the day that the grand jury indictments come down.
I don't know if I receive better information, but I think I suspected that there was more than there actually was.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: I mean --
HANSON: The nation's director -- former director of CIA, pontificating on his inside sources that were entirely bogus, and that draws -- it puts into question his prior statements and analysis. But what we're going to see --
I mean, he is somebody who said he didn't know anything about the dossier. He said that in May 1917 -- 2017, and we know that he talked to Harry Reid about it, and we know that he was a help in gathering foreign intelligence, people to work with the FBI, in terms of George Papadopoulos' interrogations and informant -- an informant that was put into the Trump campaign.
I think, we've kind of woken up out of a slumber, like Rip Van Winkle, and we're saying -- we said wow, we had a foreign national tampering with a U.S. campaign, and this continued, first, to abort the presidency, then the transition -- excuse me, the campaign, the transition, then the presidency. And we deceived a FISA court and lied under oath, to -- in sworn testimony to congressional --
MACCALLUM: All right. We've got to leave it there.
HANSON: -- committees and it's -- we pull over that rock, it's pretty ugly underneath.
MACCALLUM: Victor David Hanson. I encourage everybody to read this piece, The Tables Turn in the Russian Collusion Hunt. Thank you so much, great to see you again tonight, Victor.
So, coming up next, why 2020 is really still anybody's race among the Democrats, even with awkward encounters.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. CHRIS COONS, D-DEL.: I know that this gives him pause. He is listening and weighing some of these stories, but I think he also knows his heart and knows what his intentions were. In fact, I'm certain he is preparing to run for president.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MACCALLUM: Joe Biden, the Democrats' frontrunner, at this point, is under attack. He hasn't even declared his candidacy yet, but these pictures were bound to be used by somebody sooner or later, against him. At first, a spokesman for the former vice president, blamed right-wing trolls, for what we've seen the past few days, for recirculating these pictures.
But according to Axios, Biden insiders are hopping mad at the Bernie Sanders' campaign. Sanders' campaign, for their part, says it absolutely did not come from them. Biden and Sanders are locked in a tight race for first place, and those are the others, who come right after them.
But it's worth remembering that those leads may be short-lived if history is any guide. Listen to the names that were all abuzz, this same week, back in 2015.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is your new clubhouse leader in the Republican presidential sweepstakes. He tops the latest FOX News poll.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You see polling now that shows him ahead, nationally, ahead in Iowa, and it was really that first speech that caught people's attention.
MACCALLUM: Let's take a look at some of these numbers, Chris, the first one that we have here is Florida. Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, she is now, for the first time, behind a Republican candidate in the state of Florida by three percent, and it's Jeb Bush. Next one is Ohio, the top person there is Rand Paul, interestingly.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: We're down right, 75 days later, June 15th, Donald Trump comes down the escalator at Trump Tower and changes pretty much everything.
Joining me now, Antonia Ferrier, Former Staff Director for the Senate Republican Communication Center and now, Partners at Definer's Public Affairs, Ed Rendell, Former Pennsylvania Governor and Former DNC Chairman, welcome to both of you, great to have you both with us tonight.
Ed, you know, looking to the future, you think about where we were then, this board is going to be probably thrown up like a chess board into the air before this thing is through.
FORMER GOV. ED RENDELL, D-PENN.: Sure, polls at this stage of a presidential race, it is all about name recognition. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are the two best known Democrats, so they are ahead in the polls but they don't mean a thing.
MACCALLUM: But Ed, do you think Biden survives? So, you think, you know, a year from now we're still talking about Joe Biden in first place?
RENDELL: Because of the current allegations?
MACCALLUM: Yes, because of anything, you know, I mean, just because.
RENDELL: Martha, there's out of every 100 Democrats, there is not one, maybe one, who would takes this thing that he's charge with as a disqualification. You know, Laura Ingraham said the past --
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: Well, we said the same thing here last night. I mean, I'm not really talking about that.
RENDELL: Laura Ingraham said in her show last night --
MACCALLUM: What I'm talking about is the way we watch these things go. Jeb Bush was in first place, Rand Paul, you know, but then somebody comes out of nowhere, like Mayor Pete Buttigieg from South Bend, Indiana, and suddenly, you've got a whole different story on your hands. Antonia, what do you think?
RENDELL: Sure.
ANTONIA FERRIER, FORMER STAFF DIRECTOR, SENATE REPUBLICAN COMMUNICATIONS CENTER: Look, I have to say, it is a wide-open race, but if I was a Democrat, and Ed Rendell should understand, there are some real concerns right now if you are sort of a Democrat who wants to beat Donald Trump.
And the fact that Bernie Sanders has raised $18.2 million means he has staying power, and if you want to be Donald Trump, that's got to be worrying. And that matters.
And Ed Rendell is right, this is early. It is a wide-open contest, but fund-raising matters in terms of being able to make it through the Democrat convention. And the more that Bernie is there, the more he is going to push the party further to the left and the more of a challenge that's going to be for them to beat Donald Trump.
MACCALLUM: Well, with regard to the pictures that we showed, Nancy Pelosi was sort of sending a message to Joe Biden, you know, in terms of how he should handle this if he wants to hold onto to that front runner status. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF., SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: I'm a member of the straight-arm club. I mean, I'm not straight armor. I don't want this. Just pretend you have a cold and I have a cold. But I think that it's important for the vice president and others to understand this, it isn't what you intended, it's how it was received.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: Ed Rendell, what do you think?
RENDELL: the last time I saw Nancy, she kissed me.
MACCALLUM: She didn't straight-arm you. She is not a member of the straight-arm club.
RENDELL: But I have been -- I have been groped on my shoulders and hugged by Joe Biden, so let the record show that too.
MACCALLUM: Well, OK.
RENDELL: He didn't smell my hair because I don't have enough hair to smell.
MACCALLUM: You know, Antonio, when you look at some of these other folks, Pete Buttigieg, we talked earlier, and the money that's being raised which you talked about, you got Bernie Sanders 18, Kamala Harris at 12, and we're actually just about to get new numbers on all of this.
But all of this stuff about Joe Biden this week has some others, you know, saying maybe there is a lane for me, too. And Mike Bloomberg reportedly is saying, you know, if Biden doesn't work out, he might reconsider.
FERRIER: You know, I got to say that I don't think Mike Bloomberg has any real staying power here. This is the Democratic Party of 2019, where if you're a billionaire, and you are successful in business, there is no place for you.
This is the party of Bernie Sanders being pushed to the left by AOC and others. God bless Mike Bloomberg for his passion and commitment to America in a lot of ways, but I don't see that he has a lane here at all.
MACCALLUM: All right. Guys, thank you very much. We'll have you back, a long way to go in this process. Thank you very much.
FERRIER: Thanks very much.
MACCALLUM: Good to see you, Antonia, Ed Rendell, as well.
President Trump on the stage right now at the Republican congressional committee spring dinner, we're going to have more on that coming up ahead. Plus, an intimate look at the matriarch of the Bush political dynasty and the true love that led to the longest presidential marriage in American history, next.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARBARA BUSH, FORMER FIRST LADY: I must say, I feel the same way about him today as I felt then. I can breathe now, but then I couldn't breathe when I was with him, but I can breathe when I'm with him now. But he was just as fabulous as he was then.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: Barbara Bush was a force in her family and in politics, wife of a president, and a mother of a president. Only Abigail Adams could say the same. She had a razor-sharp wit and a take no prisoners loyalty, and that began with the man she loved.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You also say "I married the first man I ever kissed, when I tell this to my children, they just about throw up."
BUSH: Right. They say that couldn't be true. I say well, it is true. The first person, actually he kissed me in public, it wasn't even dramatic, exciting, but I almost fainted. I was so excited.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And that was it.
BUSH: That was it for me.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the guy.
BUSH: And still.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
BUSH: I just can't tell you how much I love him.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: I love that. Her life, the subject of "The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty" out today. Author Susan Page joins me today. She is also USA Today's Washington bureau chief, of course. And you see her all the time on Special Report. Susan, great to see you. Good to have you here.
SUSAN PAGE, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, USA TODAY: It's so good to be here.
MACCALLUM: You know, for any reporter to hear that you had all this time with her in the last six months of her life, and she really shared so many intimate details and brand-new stories that no one had ever heard before. What was that like for you?
PAGE: It was really, it was really a privilege. And when I started the book, I didn't know whether she would cooperate or not. She agreed to one interview, and then a second, then a third, and five in all. And in fact, we scheduled the sixth, I had flown to Texas for the sixth interview. She fell the night before. She went to the hospital, never recovered.
But five interviews, and access to her personal diaries, which was just an extraordinary gift to someone who wanted some insight into her life and her time.
MACCALLUM: Did she write in those diaries every day? What kind of diarist was she?
PAGE: Well, sometimes she would be writing every day, and sometimes every week, and then there would be periods where she wrote nothing at all. But the diaries had never been examined by anyone except Jon Meacham who wrote the great of George H.W. Bush.
So, they had been in archives. So, I'd open up the pages they'd be stuck together, they'd be put in the wrong order, I would open up and I find a letter she had written to herself. It was just, it was the kind of thing that you wish for when you are doing --
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: Absolutely, you just get lost digging into -- and you know, some juicy stories in there. It didn't -- there's the two of you together during one of the interviews.
She talked about her contentious relationship with Nancy Reagan, she crossed the Bushes off the list for the party, as you said, that was the event of that time. Princess Diana and Charles coming to the White House, she crossed off the Bushes?
PAGE: So I'd heard you crossed off the Bushes, and Mrs. Bush was quite clear that they had not been invited to this, but then I had a researcher go and find the guest list in the Reagan library archives where you see the president and Mrs. Reagan, the second line vice president and Mrs. Bush crossed out, and an aide to -- someone who knows said that Mike Deaver called the first lady, called Nancy Reagan and said you can't not invite the vice president of --
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: The vice president of the United States.
PAGE: And she said "watch me."
MACCALLUM: Why? Why did she dislike her so much?
PAGE: You know, I'm sure Nancy Reagan has a story about her, I'm sure she has her own point of view, but from Barbara Bush's point of view, Nancy Reagan just disliked her from the get-go. They were almost exactly the same age, they went to the same college, but they were so different in their priorities and their character.
MACCALLUM: That's it. There was a -- I mean, it's just -- I find that just incredible, you know. And that's when you think, was the root of this animosity which is --
(CROSSTALK)
PAGE: You know, they also -- there has, but they both adore their husbands, and their husbands ran against each other.
MACCALLUM: She said, "my husband is better than your husband. I love my husband more than you love yours."
PAGE: There's a little bit of that.
MACCALLUM: I bet you're right. You also talked about a deep depression that she suffered, that she was open about with you.
PAGE: In 1976, her husband went to head the CIA, a job she had said do not to take that job. That job will be political poison, and suddenly he couldn't share things with her.
She was going through menopause, she had an empty nest at home, her kids were all away at school or were young adults growing up, and she fell into a depression so dark that she told me she would have to pull off the side of the road because she had this urge to plow her car into a tree or to steer her car into the path of an oncoming car, to kill herself, and to not do that, she would stop the car and wait for the impulse to pass.
MACCALLUM: Amazing. And she gave a lot of advice to her son, and at one point he said, that's enough, mom.
PAGE: On the Iraq war. You know, President Bush -- President Bush 41 had said he wouldn't meddle in Bush 43's administration, and mostly he didn't.
Barbara Bush made no such promise to her son, and she spoke up, she spoke up about the Iraq war. She thought he was making a mistake, she thought it was a mistake to listen to the vice president and the defense secretary, and George W. Bush finally said, "look, I'm the president and you have to just trust me on what I'm doing," and she backed off some.
MACCALLUM: I got to go, but just very quickly, she said she would not consider herself a Republican at the end of her life.
PAGE: Extraordinary, a woman who had been the face of the Republican Party for decades. That's what she said. She said in --
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: Because of President Trump.
PAGE: Because of President Trump, yes.
MACCALLUM: Susan Page, fascinating book. I can't -- some went into it today in my office, I can't wait to read the rest, it's a beautiful book. A lot of great stuff in there. So, thank you so much for sharing it with us.
PAGE: Thank you.
MACCALLUM: Susan Page.
So, coming up next, breaking news, a woman with two Chinese passports and a device containing malicious malware somehow got behind the gates at Mar-a- Lago while the president was close by. Coming up next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MACCALLUM: Shocking story out of Florida tonight, a Chinese national illegally entered Mar-a-Lago and has now been arrested. Authorities say she made it in, lying to the Secret Service. When she was caught, she had several suspicious devices on her.
Trace Gallagher has been looking into this breaking news from our West Coast newsroom. Good evening, Trace.
TRACE GALLAGHER, CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Martha. The woman who is 32-year-old Yujing Chang, the criminal complaint says that she showed to Secret Service agent two Chinese passports and said she wanted to go to the pool.
A Mar-a-Lago club manager thought she was related to a member and allowed her into the main reception area, but when another Secret Service agent approached her, Zhang apparently changed her story saying she has traveled from Shanghai to attend a United Nations friendship event, and that somebody on Chinese social media told her to attend the event and speak with a member of President Trump's family about Chinese-American economic relations.
When she was told there was no such event, she apparently got verbally abusive and was escorted off the property and taken into custody. Now court documents say Zhang was carrying four cell phones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive, and a thumb drive containing computer malware, that short for malicious software, often used to steal, encrypt, or delete sensitive data.
There is no evidence she had any nefarious motives, but experts say she did have the tools to target certain electronic devices. We should point out, when Zhang was at Mar-a-Lago, the president was off property playing golf at his nearby country club.
Separately, the Miami Herald is reporting the trespasser may have been trying to attend an event that was advertised on Cindy Yang's web site. Yang, you'll recall is the owner of that South Florida massage parlor where New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft who was charged with soliciting prostitution.
Cindy Yang's web site also allegedly offered Chinese business leaders' access to Mar-a-Lago where they could with the president. So far, investigators said made zero connection between Cindy Yang and the woman who tried to get in to Mar-a-Lago. Martha?
MACCALLUM: That is unbelievable. Trace, thank you. Thank you very much.
All right. Coming up, a live look at President Trump addressing the National Republican Congressional Committee in Washington. What he just said about the crisis at the border and whether or not he is going to shut it down. Coming up next. He talked about Joe Biden, too, after this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT: I knew people have crossed, most of you, not all of you. I do.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: It helped us on the border which turned out that you are right on that one. That was when it was less involved than it is today. Now everybody is saying I told you there was an emergency.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: That's President Trump addressing the crisis at the border just moments ago. We have now learned that DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen will be visiting the El Paso area tomorrow. As even the former homeland security secretary says that it is now, quote, "a manufactured crisis." He said it's a very real crisis at the border.
The latest numbers show more than 100,000 people were apprehended coming across the border last month. In one day, they had more than 4,000 people. Putting the United States on track for one million apprehensions at the southern border by the end of the year.
That puts us back in the territory of the highest levels that we have seen in recent years. Which has my next guest asking, "is there any number of illegal border crossing into the United States that would strike Democrats as an emergency?" Writes Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner and a Fox News contributor. Byron, good to see you tonight.
BYRON YORK, CONTRIBUTOR: Good to see you, Martha.
MACCALLUM: You know, is the president right about his assessment there? That Democrats who said for so long that the president was making it all up that the caravan thing was just a big joke. That it was all to instill fear in Americans around the time of the election. Are they starting to turn the tide at all on their perspective here?
YORK: Well, they are certainly under pressure from reality here. Remember, we've had the president saying for a long time it's an emergency, it's an emergency, and Democrats saying no, it's not. It's a fake emergency. It's a phony crisis, it's a manufactured crisis.
And the reason that the Democrats gave was they say the number of people crossing illegally, people who are caught crossing illegally today is far less than it was in the mid-2000s.
Back then, as you mention, there were a million, a million, one million, two people coming being apprehended crossing the border illegally every year. The problem now for the Democratic argument is, given that number you just mentioned in March. More 100,000 apprehensions, it appears that the number of people crossing illegally is going back, it's nearly back up to where it was in those bad old days in the mid-2000s.
MACCALLUM: Yes. You know, the president has done a few things to try to stem this tide. He did the national emergency at the border. And now he's talking about shutting the border down to send a message to Mexico that if they don't help us with this situation -- I mean, you just think about -- you just think about the fact that a million people could cross in the course of a year. And that that's considered somewhat normal by historical standards, I think is pretty shocking in and of itself.
But what do you think about this move to potentially shut the border down to stem the crisis?
YORK: Well, it's very difficult. We have seen a couple of reasons given for it. One to try to pressure Mexico, you just mentioned, to do something. The other is to free up people who, border patrol staff --
MACCALLUM: Yes.
YORK: -- who are working the ports of entry to actually go out in between the ports of entry where people are crossing illegally.
But the big issue here is that the nature of the flow of illegal crossers has changed over the years. Back in those years in the Bush years when a million people were coming across every year, most of them were single adult men. They were trying to sneak across the border and avoid being caught. When they were caught, they were quickly returned to Mexico. And that was that.
Now the flow is mostly either family units, people pretending to be families or unaccompanied children. They don't try to avoid detection. They actually cross the border with the purpose of giving themselves to the border patrol because they know they cannot be held for very long. They cannot be separated and they cannot be returned. That's a huge incentive to cross illegally into the United States.
MACCALLUM: Yes. When you step foot over and then, you know, you're part of the process. Then you become a program. you become a family that is in the process to figure out whether or not you can stay. And in most cases, we know how that ends.
Beto O'Rourke his announcement rally said this about immigration. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FMR. REP. BETO O'ROURKE, D-TX: We will find security not through walls, not through militarization, we will find security by focusing on our ports of entry that connect us to the rest of the world so we have a better idea of who and what is coming in here.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: I mean, you know, your reaction to that? Given the fact that even Jeh Johnson said this is a crisis.
YORK: Well, it's half right. First of all, the ports of entry are the place where most of the drugs that are smuggled into the United States from Mexico, most of them are caught, captured at the ports of entry. So even the president, the president has proposed strengthening our detection and abilities and staffing at the ports of entry.
MACCALLUM: All right.
YORK: But all of these illegal crossings we're talking about are between the ports of entry. And Beto O'Rourke has even advocated removing some of the barriers in those areas.
MACCALLUM: All right. I'm just -- sorry. I was distracted for a second here because we're just getting word that that two more women are coming forward now to accuse Joe Biden of inappropriate touching. And the president just talked about Joe Biden a moment ago. Let's quickly play that and then I'll get your thoughts on this whole thing.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Our former vice-president, he's -- I was going to call him, I don't know him well. I was going to say, welcome to the world, Joe. You having a good time, Joe? Are you having a good time?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: Byron, what do you think?
YORK: Well, I think the president is having a good time clearly. But this is turning into kind of a classic Washington controversy with new accusers who seem to indicate a pattern of behavior on the part of the vice- president.
(CROSSTALK)
MACCALLUM: All right. I got to go.
YORK: He is going to have to address it in person.
MACCALLUM: Byron, thank you very much. Thanks for being here tonight, everybody. Tucker is up next.
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