Trump’s allies grow frustrated with White House response amid national upheaval

As President Donald Trump remains out of public view and as his aides deliberate how and whether he should address some of the worst racial unrest in decades some of his allies are growing increasingly frustrated with what has felt like silence from the White House.

Many of the President’s traditional defenders — from campaign donors to Republicans on Capitol Hill to some in the conservative media — have privately grumbled that Trump has allowed several days to pass without addressing the nation or making any formal appeals for unity.

What Trump has done publicly — tweet extensively about his grievances with Democratic state and local leaders and mention the protests in the middle of a previously scheduled event — has at best gone unnoticed and at worst fanned the flames of outrage into a second week.

Some outside allies have reached out to the White House in recent days to push for an appearance from the President in which he would confront a crisis he has largely watched unfold from behind closed doors or in his underground bunker.

One major campaign donor worried that the damage inflicted by Trump’s absence during a historic weekend of violence and pain could alone imperil his reelection.

One person familiar with the matter said there is a sense among allies that an attempt to address the situation in a speech over the weekend fell completely flat. The person said the unrelated backdrop of the Kennedy Space Center — and the fact that the speech came on a Saturday afternoon — ensured few people even registered the passages that were added at the last minute.

“We support the right of peaceful protests and we hear their pleas, but what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with the memory of George Floyd,” Trump said in his remarks after watching the first manned US space launch in nearly a decade. “The mobs are devastating the life’s work of good people and destroying their dreams.”

Trump’s measured tone stood in stark contrast to his barrage of tweets over the weekend, which included messages blaming Antifa for the unrest and vowing severe retaliation.

A growing number of congressional Republicans, even Trump’s allies, have privately said the “caps lock” tweets are not helping the situation. Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said on “Fox News Sunday” that he had spoken to Trump over the weekend about his inflammatory tweets, which he described as “not constructive.”

Over the weekend, some aides sought to convince Trump not to use violent rhetoric after he wrote on Twitter that “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” warning language like that could inflame an already combustible situation and would not appear presidential.

Inside the White House, advisers remain divided over whether a speech delivered from the Oval Office or elsewhere at the White House would help lower the national temperature.

Trump has expressed interest in delivering a speech to the nation, a person close to the White House said, but some administration officials believe that would be a mistake. A senior White House aide said governors and mayors should be the ones responding to the destruction in their respective cities and states — a view at least partially shared by Trump, who has spent days going after local leaders for not calling the National Guard fast enough or cracking down on violence aggressively enough.

In a heated phone call with governors on Monday morning, Trump placed responsibility on the governors for resolving the national crisis and said some of them appeared “weak” in their responses so far.

Other White House officials argued over the weekend against something as formal as an Oval Office address, a person familiar said, out of concern that such a speech could “inflame the situation, not make it better.”

As aides debate how and whether to confront the situation, Trump’s back-and-forth between violent rhetoric and a more measured tone has weighed in the deliberations, one official said. Some advisers wonder whether a presidential address calling for calm would be quickly erased by Trump’s own penchant for escalation and instigation.

It did not seem such a speech was imminent on Monday morning.

“A national Oval Office address is not going to stop Antifa,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in an appearance Monday on Fox News, noting that Trump had addressed the killing of George Floyd — a black Minneapolis man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck during an arrest — several times already.

“The President has addressed this repeatedly,” she said. Later, McEnany said Trump’s “focus right now is acting and keeping our streets safe.”

The naive–and reckless–rule breakers of Covid-19

Last week, a Washington, DC-based media executive who is used to attending 200 cocktail parties a year decided that he could take talking to his microwave no more.

In contravention of the city’s shelter-in-place executive order, he secretly attended two different dinner parties in Georgetown, an affluent DC-neighborhood.

When he first told me this, I assumed I had either misheard or misunderstood. “Virtual dinners right?” I asked. “No” was the reply. These were the old-fashioned, in-person sort.

Each time, he explained, the host’s instructions were the same. For both dinners, he entered through the back gate of the property, so disapproving neighbors would not see him. He was told in advance that neither he, nor any other guests, could take any photographs or talk about the party.

The first dinner was hosted by a movie producer. A group of four listened to music and sat under heated lamps six feet apart in the garden where they were served dinner. According to the executive, none had been in contact with anyone who had suffered Covid-19 — as far as they knew. All had been isolating.

The two dinners in Washington are not the only anecdotes I’ve heard of illicit gatherings that break the country’s shelter-in-place restrictions and feature varying degrees of social distance.

I’ve been told by a source about an underground hair salon in Palm Beach, Florida, that never ceased operations, despite the state’s restrictions, and which her elderly mother has insisted on patronizing.

I’ve also heard about the trio of real estate executives who get drunk together, rotating homes every night in a leafy suburb of Westchester.

And the AA group in Virginia Beach whose members sit in a circle in someone’s garden, because, they say, virtual meetings are not sufficient to prevent some from falling off the wagon.

There are the Brooklyn friends who’ve had Sunday dinner together since the pandemic began. And there is the news report this week about the cannabis users who, police said, quite brazenly gathered in Manhattan for a 4/20 Day celebration. And so on.

I even know elderly people in my native country, the United Kingdom, who’ve gone over to each other’s gardens to sit six feet apart for a glass of wine. “I’d rather die than live without seeing people,” one of them offered as justification.

Most of the people I talked to are middle class or affluent. It takes money to have a dining table in your backyard in Washington. And a lot of money to have a live-in chef.

It would appear that just as the rich are more easily able to outrun Covid-19 than the working classes, they may also be more able and willing to break the shelter in place rules.

But according to Robert Leahy, the Manhattan-based director of the American Institute of Cognitive Therapy and author of the book, “The Worry Cure,” they may be gathering under a false sense of security in the belief that Covid-19 won’t touch them. “It takes one sneeze or one case to create a cluster,” says Leahy, pointing at Fairfield County, Connecticut, which currently has 8,472 confirmed Covid cases, as an example of a wealthy enclave that’s turned into a hot spot.

An arresting new CDC graphic — highlighted by CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta — about transmission of the coronavirus among people seated at adjacent tables in a restaurant shows that the virus may be passed on in droplets much more easily than hitherto known.

Regardless, the breach of physical distancing rules is a behavioral trend that psychologists fear we are likely to see increasingly in the next few weeks, as state by state, the nation waits for an uneven legal reopening.

“I believe there will be increasing non-compliance that is simply due to human nature,” says Leahy.

“Even when there’s not a pandemic we, as a species, tend to make decisions that negatively affect our public health based on our immediate need, whether it’s smoking, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, overeating, overspending… we are wired to look for immediate gratification. Remember, we were once scavengers. That’s why this is very hard,” says Leahy. “The difficulty that people have is in the uncertainty about how long they have to wait to get back to doing what they used to do.”

But Leahy says the ultimate question for people to think about before they gather like the groups in Washington and elsewhere, is this: “What is more dangerous? Feeling anxious or risky behavior?”

Even for the AA group, the answer, Leahy says, is always risky behavior. “What I am saying to those people who gathered for whatever reason is: ‘Which, ultimately would you regret more? That you didn’t go to the AA meeting or the hair salon or the dinner? Or that you got Covid-19 or infected someone else with Covid-19 and that person died?'”

Meanwhile, he says to take solace in the government’s phasing plans to reopen, and to remember this situation is not forever.

“Focus on what you CAN do and not what you can’t. Many people can connect with friends, family, meetings.”

“Remember, socially distanced does not have to mean socially disconnected.”

In other words, you don’t have to talk only to the microwave.

How the very rich are different in the Covid-19 fight

I have spent two decades reporting on people at the nexus of money, power and culture. I’ve written books about corruption among the country’s wealthiest 1%, Wall Street greed and the ruthlessness of New York real estate titans. So these past few weeks I have been on the phone to many people who are not stuck, like me, in a New York City apartment, where we are on constant alert for the ominous sound of sirens puncturing the silence with increasing frequency.

Instead, many of those I spoke to are in places where they feel relatively safe. Many don’t realize they may be in a bubble of false security as the number of coronavirus infections spreads out into suburban and rural Long Island — including Suffolk County, home of the Hamptons — and other areas where the country’s extremely wealthy have second homes.

One hedge fund billionaire is at his ranch in Texas; another is isolating from other family members on a compound in Martha’s Vineyard; a couple is in a villa on Harbour Island, Bahamas; an individual rented a yacht on the Long Island Sound … and so on.

It would be unfair to say that these people are living without fear. If they needed any proof that Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate by pocketbook, they need look no further than some of the high-profile confirmed cases like Knicks owner James Dolan, actor Tom Hanks and Prince Charles.

“We are just trying to do our best for ourselves and our families. You can’t blame us for that,” one multimillionaire with three country homes told me.

All I spoke to did so on condition of anonymity; all felt they were better placed to outrun Covid-19 if they were not stuck in high-density areas like New York City. (I should add that those who spoke to me are not necessarily representative of the entire socio-economic group. Major Wall Street financiers have been spotted in Central Park and certainly billionaires like Bill Gates have donated significant funding to coronavirus research.)

But while the wealthy may not be immune, their affluence makes it easier for them to insulate themselves. Unlike essential workers, housekeepers or nannies who cannot survive without their weekly paychecks, publications like The New York Times have data showing how those of means were able adopt protective isolation measures earlier than lower-income workers.

The top 1% of US earners can do that even better than the rest of us. Some of those in the Hamptons seem even to be enjoying themselves. Some are playing golf while others are gardening and comparing notes about hygiene. One person I know has her family’s food driven out from New York City every day. It’s not the same experience as walking past the hospital tents in Central Park or the boarded-up stores. And it can be harshly antithetical to the experience of an essential worker who must take public transport to get to a hospital or grocery store for a day’s work.

For some of the rich I speak to, a more urgent headache than the symptom of the virus is the possible ramifications of the economic shutdown — but even that may be much less meaningful than you’d think given the tax break some are getting from the stimulus package. A clause in the bill allows commercial real estate developers to offset paper losses from the depreciation of their buildings against taxes on profits from other investments like the stock market. A New York Times report says the estimated cost of the change over 10 years is $170 billion.

One real estate mogul told me that he cracked open the champagne beside the pool the day the CARES Act was passed by Congress.

“Some people are going to get very rich out of this,” says someone else I know in the health care supplies business.

Harvard-trained epidemiologist Dr. Ashwin Vasantold me that he’s heard disturbing stories of wealthy individuals procuring their own ventilators. This at a time governors of hard-hit states say they’re about to run out of their own essential supplies.

Two people I spoke to told me that they have obtained prophylactically, their own stash of the malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, currently undergoing clinical trials as a possible therapy but not yet proven safe and effective for this use. Vasan says that whichever doctor supplied the drug behaved not only dangerously, but irresponsibly.

“Every hospital in the city is doing clinical trials of that medicine under controlled conditions so to say: I’m going to give it to someone in their home without the ability to truly monitor them … I don’t consider them to be remotely responsible,” Vasan said.

Vasan says that this is a time for health care professionals to pull together. “This is not a time for concierge medicine,” he says. And yet several in the Hamptons told me they felt safe precisely because there are private doctors who have homes there and whose private staff will pay house calls, assuming you have paid their multi-thousand-dollar subscription fee.

The self-protectionist mindset of the wealthy is not new, according to the historian Dr. Amanda Foreman. “During the Second World War, despite the rationing across the United Kingdom, those who could afford it, could have dinner in the Ritz hotel,” she says.

But the irony of an elitist approach during these times is that it may well backfire, according to Dr. William Haseltine, a biologist and former Harvard medical professor who recently chaired the ninth US-China health summit in the pandemic epicenter of Wuhan.

According to Haseltine, the people who have left the city have put themselves at greater risk than if they had stayed put and practiced careful isolation and hygiene, because they have put themselves further away from the best hospitals. His opinion was echoed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his April 3 press conference, where he talked about the spike in Nassau and Suffolk counties. “Long Island does not have as elaborate a health care system as New York City … and that has us very concerned,” he said.

Haseltine says it’s “a fundamental mistake” to think you are safer in a wide-open space.

“It’s comfortable to be in a country house … People feel they have more control,” he says. “You have more space, you think that you’re not one of many, you’re more special. But it’s all psychological.”

The risk of Covid-19, he says, is equated to how many people you meet who might be infected. It’s not like the bubonic plague of London that was spread by fleas and rats. With Covid-19 there is no reason to think that people in the countryside are any less infected than the people in New York City.

Somewhere in all this, there is a very grim morality story.

Foreman says that the social division of Covid-19 could be summarized as “The Makers and the Takers.” If you’re a Maker, you’re someone who has found a way to contribute to the community in various ways, from the student who set up a volunteer network to shop for the elderly to first responders and workers like caregivers who take daily personal risks to save others. If you’re a Taker, you’re fixated only on yourself, your survival — and what the pandemic will mean for your bottom line.

Romeo and Juliet in the age of Covid-19

I am a working single mother of twin 17-year-old boys.

One is a high-achieving junior, the sort who runs, sings and does well academically. His brother, two minutes younger, is a sophomore who is a self-proclaimed nerd. He prefers to live on his computer in isolation, even when it’s not actually mandatory.

In ordinary times, both are kind, gentle, smart kids, with whom I have a strong bond. A psychological educational evaluation found that the older twin has extraordinarily high self-sacrificing tendencies.

But that was before Covid-19.

In the past week, as each day New York State’s restrictions on socializing have gotten tighter, my boys have become more shrill, more urgent and insistent about my “overreaction” to the social distancing guidelines.

Bear in mind, the elder just had his SAT exam and college tours canceled. Like high schoolers everywhere, both have had their spring semester canceled. Online classes have not started yet. They are supposed to be in Florida on spring break. And they are restless.

In a bitter irony of timing, the elder had just gotten himself a girlfriend. No matter how often I warned that he and his new girlfriend not meet, he slipped out — and did just that. I repeatedly told him it’s not my family that’s so much at risk (my elderly mom and dad and family reside in the UK) but his girlfriend’s relatives might be endangered if he is a virus carrier. He told me they kept six feet apart — but I wonder how likely that is.

A few days ago, he went for a run in Central Park — a run that went on for four hours. I asked what had kept him and he said he’d joined in a volleyball game — exactly the sort New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said to avoid not 12 hours later.

He looked at me as if I was slightly dim when I squawked my disapproval.

My other son, the younger twin, atypically, decided this was the ideal week to break his habitual isolation. He turned his bedroom into a shelter for a not-very-good friend who was roaming New York City with a backpack and vast duffel bag in an act of rebellion against his divorcing parents. I was on a CNN conference call when this young man entered my home office and inquired if he could “explain” what was going on in his personal life, a prelude, I presumed, to asking if he could stay indefinitely.

Politely — actually, not that politely — I sent him home to his allegedly warring parents.

I’d just watched Gov. Cuomo say on TV that the new state guidelines forbade unnecessary people in our homes.

Thursday night, I pricked up my ears when psychologist Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer said on CNN’s Town Hall that the group she was most concerned about under the new social distancing guidelines were teenagers.

“Teenagers are supposed to be leaving their homes and engaging with their peers and they’re supposed to be trying new things,” she told Anderson Cooper. “And they’re to get less of that right now. And so they need to find ways to feel their impact and to stay connected to the groups that are important to them.”

I phoned Dr. Schmelzer to get deeper insight into why she’d focused on teens. What she said was reassuring to me — and, also, I suspect to other parents in a similar predicament. First, she said, teens in general just don’t have the “capacity” or “maturity” to see outside their own selves right now.

“Teenagers are a group of people for whom risk has always been an issue,” she said. “They weigh risk and this (Covid-19) doesn’t seem that big. Historically we’ve capitalized on that by sending them to war, so the problem is they are now weighing in the mind the relative risk and it doesn’t seem that big to them…Because in that kind of self-sovereign adult development state of life, it’s about me…it’s all about what I want.”

Second, she said, teenage boys would be the single worst demographic to cope with Covid-19. Yes, worse than teenage girls. “They live in their bodies,” she said. “If it doesn’t feel dangerous — (if) there’s no physical sensation like standing on the edge of a bridge or doing something physically dangerous, they can’t feel it…the idea that a grandmother might die is too abstract for them.”

What then is a mother of teen boys to do?

“Stay in the fight,” Schmelzer said. “Explain that this is for the health and safety (of the) country. That this a war like World War II was. Tell them stories about your grandparents’ sacrifices in war time. Don’t expect to get through in one conversation. Keep at it. Keep storytelling.”

She suggested that discussions in military families might be different to those in families with no direct personal experience of war. “That’s a segregation we haven’t discussed,” she pointed out.

And what should we do about our exes? Given the high US divorce rate, I’m not the only parent faced with the issue of how to best co-parent in a time that requires physical separation of households.

“Go for a walk with your ex-husband, six feet apart, and come up with a co-parenting program for the next four months” Schmelzer said. “I don’t think cutting kids off from parents or giving people the ability to say ‘Oh good I can cut my ex out now’ is a good idea.”

I showed this article to my sons. Both acknowledged that Schmelzer had tapped into exactly how they were feeling. “People keep talking about an invisible enemy and it’s really hard to understand that,” said my younger son. “If you shipped me off to war, I’d feel useful. Now with the quarantine, I just feel helpless.”

And the older? His girlfriend has now left New York City for the countryside. “I feel stuck and lonely,” he said. But then he grinned, a heartening sign that he is growing into some perspective — and maturity.

“You can write that I feel like Romeo, in ‘Romeo and Juliet,'” he said. Then he laughed.

2017 ‘hit lists’ show that team Trump has long eyed political opponents

Just months into his presidency, a small circle of senior White House advisers met with Donald Trump about a carefully curated list containing the names of dozens of perceived political opponents, particularly leakers, working inside the government.

A detailed account of the meeting was revealed for the first time to CNN by two former senior administration officials, who said that the April 2017 gathering included then senior strategist Steve Bannon and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

After being shown the list, the President told McMaster to deal with it, according to one of the officials.

McMaster and Bannon walked away from the meeting with different interpretations of Trump’s instructions, according to the two former officials and two other former senior officials in the President’s orbit who were briefed on the conversation.

Three of the officials told CNN that Bannon understood Trump wanted people fired, while the fourth said that McMaster believed the President’s direction was to deal with leaks in a systematic fashion, rather than a mass firing.

The political plotting in the early days of Trump’s presidency provides a window into a three-year effort by Trump and his loyalists to identify and expunge suspected “deep state” opponents from the White House and in some cases other parts of the government, a move that was kept at bay until recent weeks.

Removing government officials seen as disloyal to the President has unfolded in earnest since Trump was impeached but not removed from office and there are no signs the purges will let up.

The President expressed in public remarks last Saturday that he’s getting rid of bad people in government who are “not people that love our country.”

In recent weeks, Trump has expressed to aides that he wants fewer people working for him at the White House and only those identified as loyalists to hold key positions in his administration, leading to a fresh batch of lists from allies, the existence of which was first reported by Axios.

The existence of “deep state” lists in the early days of Trump’s presidency was widely talked about in the halls of the National Security Council and the State Department, according to multiple former White House officials, although several officials named on the list tell CNN they didn’t know that any such list really existed or that they were on it. The “deep state” refers to a right-wing belief that certain members of the federal bureaucracy are actively undermining the Trump presidency.

One contributor to the list that was collated and frequently updated in early 2017 was former NSC official and former Trump campaign aide Rich Higgins. He told CNN in an exclusive interview recently that from the beginning of his tenure he was convinced that leaks of minutes of highly classified meetings were from holdovers of the Obama administration and he suspected widespread resistance to some of the administration efforts.

Higgins is not involved in the current lists and does not have a current connection to the White House. The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Bannon and McMaster declined to comment for this story.

The ‘hit list’ squad

Higgins, 45, a former Pentagon official who consulted for the Trump campaign in the 2016 election as a counterterrorism adviser, joined the NSC in February 2017 as director of strategic planning.

Higgins told CNN he arrived to find two senior NSC directors and fellow Trump appointees, Col. Derek Harvey and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, regularly meeting over coffee or gathering in their offices and joined them in a mission to find alleged leakers and those perceived as resistant to the Trump administration’s policies.

Two former senior White House officials told CNN they remembered seeing Harvey and Cohen-Watnick frequently meeting with Bannon in Bannon’s office and the duo made them aware they were collating lists of people they believed were disloyal. One former senior administration official described the group as “the Hardy Boys.”

Multiple senior administration officials told CNN that in early spring of 2017, Bannon gave a list of names of suspected leakers to Trump while McMaster was traveling.

McMaster became aware that Bannon wanted them fired and, irate, phoned then-White House chief counsel Don McGahn that night to complain and ask if what they were doing was legal, according to two sources. McGahn declined to comment for this story.

Higgins says that over the course of several months, the group worked off other similar lists that were circulating and created new versions that contained roughly four dozen people who they felt were politically opposed to Trump, including Obama appointees, those detailed to the White House and “Never Trumpers.” The list shrank or expanded in the following months depending on normal staff rotation, Higgins said.

CNN has obtained three of the lists that Higgins says the group collated and discussed. One is titled “Holdovers” and is dated July 2017. Another is titled “Personnel Policy Decisions,” with a subhead “Trump Administration NSC Appointments Not supporting Potus Vision and Expressed Intent.” It has seven names on it, along with their titles and a category marked “Justification.”

A third list, dated June 2017, has 39 names on it that included Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ current Middle East adviser Robert Malley, who left the administration when Trump took office, the former special envoy on ISIS Brett McGurk, and the person the White House believes to be the Ukraine whistleblower. When asked why Malley was on the list, Higgins told CNN, “We left him on by mistake.”

Malley and McGurk declined to comment for this story. Mark Zaid, the former attorney for the whistleblower, told CNN that he’s unable to comment. Amy Jeffress, the lawyer at Arnold & Porter now representing the whistleblower, would not comment on the matter to CNN after the news organization published the article.

McMaster not having it

Higgins says the group was aware that McMaster would not approve of what they were doing.

In mid-April, Higgins says, he was asked to get the most current list to Bannon. According to Higgins, Bannon told him he showed the list to Trump on April 17, 2017, and the President had demanded McMaster take action.

When nothing happened, Higgins says, he wrote a memo that was reported on by The Atlantic titled “Potus and Political Warfare,” which Higgins says he then printed out, with the idea of having a group discussion among like-minded individuals.

“The memo was my estimate of the situation, explanatory but not certain. I wanted to generate discussion and awareness around me,” he told CNN.

The seven-page memo warned of threats from “globalist corporatists & bankers” and “Islamists,” as well as the “deep state.” It said the “narrative” that “Russia hacked the election” was “illegitimate” and was a deliberate effort to destroy Trump’s agenda.

“Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognized the threat he poses and see his destruction,” it reads.

“I didn’t write it by myself,” Higgins told CNN, adding that there were various people who were on the NSC staff then. “And I didn’t write it in one sitting. It was the product of hours of conversations.”

Higgins says he never learned if the President read his memo. But Higgins says Bannon told him that his efforts were discovered — and not appreciated by McMaster, who stood up at an NSC town hall on July 13 and told staff that “there’s no such thing as a hold-over,” Bloomberg reported.

Higgins says that on July 18, he was summoned to the NSC general counsel’s office and asked if he had written the memo. He said, “Yes.” On July 21, McMaster’s deputy, Ricky Waddell, told Higgins to resign, according to Higgins. Waddell did not respond to several requests for comment.

Two weeks later, around the end of July, CNN reported that both Harvey and Cohen-Watnick left the NSC under circumstances that were not clear. Higgins says the two were told to go. On August 18, Bannon also left the White House.

Harvey declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson for Cohen-Watnick told CNN: “At no time was Ezra involved in creating any political ‘enemies’ list within the Trump NSC, nor was he ‘fired’ from his position in the White House.”

Higgins went on to become a senior fellow at Unconstrained Analytics, a nonprofit think tank. In response to the impeachment, he recently wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal headlined, “The White House Fired Me for My Loyalty.”

Of the latest lists that have been drawn up by the President’s allies and of Trump’s vicious reaction to political enemies, Higgins told CNN, “It’s a positive development for the administration. Any president, not just this one, deserves to have people who are supportive of his general policy positions around him.”

CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to reflect the whistleblower’s current attorney.

CNN’s Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.

Exclusive photos of Giuliani in Spain show Lev Parnas has lots more to share

Stored in devices seized from Lev Parnas by law enforcement, there’s a 34-second cell phone video of Rudy Giuliani relishing a bullfight. There are also photos of Donald Trump’s personal attorney posing with two matadors, a flamenco dancer twirling her skirt and an image of the father of Venezuela’s opposition leader beside a tray of hors d’oeuvres on the lawn of a Spanish castle.

The videos and photographs of Giuliani’s trip to Spain, obtained exclusively by CNN, show the efforts Parnas went through to document and save a trove of information. They have aided a slow-drip campaign by Parnas’ legal team to keep the indicted Giuliani associate in the limelight as he builds a defense for his indictment, and could plague Giuliani—and ultimately the President—well after impeachment has passed.

Last week, Parnas and his attorney Joseph Bondy made a show of traveling to Washington and walking up to the US Senate, with cameras in tow. The two knew full well that Parnas could be turned away from the impeachment trial because he was wearing an ankle bracelet, an electronic device that violates the Senate chamber rules.

The stunt came days after Parnas’ lawyer released an 83-minute recording from an April 2018 Trump International Hotel fundraiser where President Donald Trump discusses firing former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, with Parnas and his estranged business partner Igor Fruman.

Fruman made the recording, and Parnas’ lawyer made it public. Yovanovitch was recalled from her post about a year later.

Parnas and Fruman were indicted for campaign finance violations last year by federal prosecutors in New York. They have pleaded not guilty. Parnas’ role as Giuliani’s alleged proxy in Ukraine and the information he possesses became an intriguing part of the impeachment hearings. Fruman and his legal team are not cooperating with the impeachment inquiry and declined to comment for this story.

Parnas is not done

Parnas still possesses an unseen stash of photographs and recordings, Bondy says. Those exist in addition to the notes, text messages and other evidence that is currently in the hands of Congress. The materials were seized by federal investigators in New York from Parnas’ phones and computers when he was indicted in October and shared with Congress by Parnas’ legal team after the judge in his case allowed them to do so in December.

“Over the past several months, it has been revealed that Lev Parnas is a prolific collector of photos and videos,” Bondy told CNN in an interview. “Contrary to what one might expect, Mr. Parnas has not destroyed any. Rather, he has preserved them. The universe of subject matter is yet to be publicly revealed but is of interest in matters well beyond the impeachment inquiry.”

The images obtained by CNN are of trips that provide a peek into relationships Giuliani has not been willing to discuss, specifically work he’s done for legally embattled foreign clients whose interests could intersect with his most prominent client — the President of the United States. Parnas says that the photos help show ties that Giuliani had with business and political interests in Venezuela.

Asked about the trip, Giuliani told CNN that he could not discuss details because it is a matter of “national security.” Giuliani is currently under federal investigation, but has not been charged with any crimes.

Parnas told CNN based on what he heard and saw while traveling last August, Giuliani was seeking to argue that Alejandro Betancourt Lopez, a wealthy Venezuelan client, should be treated leniently by the Department of Justice because of ties with an opposition figure of great importance to US foreign policy. This was first reported by Reuters.

The possible conflict of interests is a recurring theme with Giuliani. The effort bears striking similarity to how Parnas has described an effort to solve legal problems in the US faced by Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash

According to Parnas, (and Firtash in a November interview with the New York Times) Giuliani directed Parnas to tell Firtash that Joseph di Genova and Victoria Toensing would represent him and could get his case in front of Attorney General William Barr, if Firtash could hand over information on Joe Biden that would be helpful for the 2020 election. CNN reported last month that Di Genova and Toensing, friends of Giuliani’s, did get a face-to-face meeting with Barr to discuss Firstash, who is facing extradition on bribery charges.

Firtash told the Times he has no information on Biden or his son and did not finance any effort to unearth dirt on them. “Without my will and desire, I was sucked into this internal U.S. fight,” he told the Times. Giuliani has said he “never met” Firtash, but has given conflicting answers on seeking information from him.

Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas at a New York Yankees game in London in June 2019

Betancourt courts Giuliani

Parnas, Giuliani and Fruman met Betancourt, 40, in June at a Yankees game in London, according to both Parnas and another source with knowledge of their meeting. Two of the photos obtained by CNN show Giuliani and Parnas at the game. In one, Giuliani is seen using electronic equipment that Parnas says is for taping his podcast. In the other, they are in the Yankees’ dugout. News of Giuliani and Parnas at the game was first reported by CNN’s KFile.

In London, Parnas says Betancourt asked Giuliani to join his legal team, which already consisted of two long-time Giuliani friends: former US attorney Frank Wohl and the Miami-based former Watergate prosecutor Jon Sale. “Frank and Jon are great lawyers. The only reason Rudy was needed as well was to exert leverage with Barr,” Parnas told CNN. A separate source familiar with Betancourt’s legal strategy told CNN that Giuliani’s connections at the Justice Department, including familiarity with Barr, were considered helpful by Betancourt. Giuliani did not comment on Parnas’ assertion.

Parnas told CNN that hiring lawyers close to Barr was an idea being deployed at the same time by Firtash, who shared that thinking with him. “For both Firtash and for Betancourt, the only point of hiring these lawyers was to get to Barr,” Parnas said.

At the Yankees game and in discussions in London afterwards, Parnas says Betancourt invited Giuliani, himself and others to Spain.

A castle near Madrid

Most of the newly-released images and a video shared with CNN document a week-long trip Parnas took with Giuliani last summer to a castle outside Madrid to meet Betancourt.

According to Parnas, who spoke to CNN about the trip, no expense was spared in the effort to impress the President’s personal attorney and a large entourage traveling with him, including the families of Parnas and Fruman. The trip was first reported by the Daily Beast. Giuliani told the Daily Beast he was there for business and vacation.

Parnas told CNN that Giuliani made two videos while there, and was told by Giuliani that they would serve two purposes. First, to help Betancourt, a Venezuelan energy executive who is looking to stave off potential criminal charges connected to a billion-dollar money-laundering case filed in Florida last year.

Second, the video was intended to show that Betancourt was of value to Juan Guaido, the head of Venezuela’s opposition-controlled parliament, who has been recognized by more than 50 countries, including the U.S, as the interim president.

“The purpose of the videos was 100 percent to show Trump how helpful Betancourt was to the Guaidos,” said Parnas. The Trump administration’s support for Guaido was on display this week. Guaido was a guest at the President’s State of the Union speech and spent two days in Washington meeting with Trump at the White House and members of the State Department. He received a standing ovation from both Republicans and Democrats when Trump referred to Guaido in his address, going on to call him the “true and legitimate president of Venezuela.”

A source familiar with Giuliani’s legal strategy confirms that Giuliani made video recordings for the Justice Department, but denies Parnas’ claim that any videos were intended for the President. There is no indication Giuliani showed the videos at the Justice Department or to Trump. The Justice Department declined to comment for this story. Betancourt and his lawyers did not respond to CNN requests for comment.

When asked about the trip to Madrid and the video-recordings of Betancourt, Giuliani had this to say in a text to CNN: “Your story about the interview[s] is given to you by not just an unreliable source, but a proven liar… I can’t discuss any tape recordings or confirm or deny them.”

Parnas, who does not possess the videos, is adamant the recordings were also intended for the President. “I would swear under oath that the purpose of the Guaido recording and the Betancourt recording was to be shown to President Trump — although Betancourt’s video was designed to be shown principally to the Justice Department and Barr.”

Lev Parnas wipes Giuliani’s face in London in 2019.

August in Spain

Parnas says he was often asked to arrange logistics for Giuliani and tend to the smallest of his needs. One photograph reviewed by CNN shows Parnas wiping Giuliani’s face.

Messages from Parnas’ cell phone that were handed over to House investigators for the impeachment hearing show that details of Giuliani’s trip to Madrid were organized by Parnas, who arranged for an airport greeter. “When you arrive in Madrid their [sic] will be someone waiting for you with a sign that says ‘NUBA’ at the door of the plane. They will take you through cotumes [sic].”

The trio’s first stop in Madrid was with Andriy Yermak, the right hand of Volodymyr Zelensky, the new Ukraine president.

After that, according to Parnas, a large group descended on the castle, El Castillo del Alamín. The group included Giuliani’s girlfriend, Dr. Maria Ryan and Wohl, as well as the Parnas and Fruman families. Wohl did not respond to request for comment, but a source close to Giuliani verified Parnas’ account of the guest list. A photo shows Giuliani sitting in a chair smoking a cigar with Ryan in his lap. Another has them posing for a photo with Betancourt in the background.

Wilmer Guaido at a castle outside Madrid.

Also in attendance was Wilmer Guaido, the taxi-driving father of Venezuela’s struggling opposition leader Juan Guaido, Parnas and another source told CNN. Wilmer Guaido is pictured in one of the images grabbing an hors d’oeuvre. He did not respond to questions from CNN about his presence at the castle. That the elder Guaido was at the gathering was first reported by Reuters.

During the trip, Parnas says that Giuliani set up his recording equipment on the castle grounds and made video interviews with both Betancourt and Wilmer Guaido. He also spoke with Juan Guaido via FaceTime, according to Parnas.

“Giuliani told me that Betancourt explained in his interview that he had given secret financial support to the Guaido family and regime,” Parnas told CNN. This would clearly put Betancourt in good standing with the President, since Guaido’s position is predicated on US support.

Betancourt and his lawyer have not responded to CNN for comment. Reuters reported that Guaido has denied any financial relationship to Betancourt. Reuters was not able to determine if Betancourt helped to finance the U.S.-backed opposition.

Betancourt, who has made millions from Venezuelan government contracts, was presumed to be a supporter of the rival, oppressive regime of the socialist Nicolas Maduro. The US has recognized Guaido and not Maduro as the official Venezuelan president since early 2019.

While in Spain, Giuliani told Parnas that he was confident he could get Betancourt’s legal problems “cleared up in a couple of weeks,” according to Parnas.

A month later, in September, Giuliani met with Justice Department officials to discuss Betancourt’s case and Barr dropped in on the meeting. A source familiar with the gathering says that the videos were not shown to Barr and would not comment on whether they were shown to lawyers there. The Justice Department declined to comment on the meeting.

Afterwards, Parnas says he met up with Giuliani at the Trump International hotel in DC. According to a conversation that Parnas says the two had, Giuliani appeared to think the meeting had gone well. But that was before Parnas and Fruman were arrested on indictments in early October followed by reports that Giuliani is under federal investigation.

 

Trump captured on tape demanding firing of ambassador to Ukraine, attorney says

President Donald Trump was captured on tape at a 2018 dinner with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman demanding the firing of Marie Yovanovitch, who was then the US ambassador to Ukraine, according to an attorney for Parnas.

“Get rid of her!” a voice appearing to belong to Trump says on the recording, according to ABC News, which on Friday first reported its existence.

“Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.”

CNN has not reviewed the tape.

According to Parnas’ attorney, Joseph Bondy, the recording was made by Fruman and shared with Parnas “shortly after it was recorded.” An attorney for Fruman declined to comment.

The recording appears to substantiate accounts of the dinner Parnas has provided in interviews, at a time when he has emerged as one of the central figures of the impeachment proceedings against the President.

The conversation appears to have occurred about a year before Yovanovitch was removed from her post in April 2019.

“We do believe that contents of the conversation as portrayed by ABC News are of critical importance in the impeachment trial of the President,” Bondy said in a statement. “And would urge that it be produced to Congress.”

Asked for comment, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said: “Every President in our history has had the right to place people who support his agenda and his policies within his Administration.”

The dinner has been the subject of inquiry by New York federal prosecutors, who in October charged Parnas and Fruman with campaign-finance violations. They have pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors are also investigating Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, with whom the two Soviet-born businessmen worked to oust Yovanovitch.

Though Trump has repeatedly denied knowing Parnas or Fruman, he has been captured with the pair in interactions beyond the dinner, including in photos from Trump campaign rallies in 2015 and 2016, and at a White House Hanukkah party in 2018.

In November, federal prosecutors questioned Bondy about whether his client had been operating on behalf of Ukrainians at the dinner with Trump when Parnas said the ambassador was bad-mouthing the President, according to people familiar with the matter. On behalf of his client, Bondy rebutted that suggestion, but prosecutors told him they didn’t believe Parnas.

Bondy declined to comment on any conversations with prosecutors.

A spokesman for the Manhattan US attorney’s office, Nicholas Biase, said regarding the recording: “I cannot confirm or comment on whether the materials exist or are part of discovery in ongoing criminal litigation.”

Parnas and Fruman pledged $1 million in donations to America First Action, the pro-Trump super PAC, which gave them access to the intimate April 30, 2018, dinner at the Trump hotel in Washington. They donated $325,000 of their pledge through a company that is a subject of their indictment.

Parnas has previously described the dinner in interviews, saying he witnessed Trump telling a top aide, John DeStefano, to fire the ambassador.

“In the conversation, the subject of Ukraine was brought up,” Parnas told CNN in an interview earlier this month. “And I told the President that — our opinion — that (Ambassador Yovanovitch) is bad-mouthing him and that she said that he’s gonna get impeached — something like that. I don’t know if that’s word for word.”

Parnas said Trump reacted immediately. “He looked at me, like, got very angry,” Parnas recalled, “and basically turned around to John DeStefano, and said, ‘Fire her. Get rid of her.'”

From pot to impeachment: The high-wire legal act from Lev Parnas’ attorney

On New Year’s Eve, attorney Joseph A. Bondy hopped on a subway train headed toward the US attorney’s office in lower Manhattan to pick up a disk loaded with Lev Parnas’ cell phone contents. It was the first piece of evidence prosecutors had released to him since his client was arrested in October.

The clock was ticking.

House Democrats had voted to impeach President Donald Trump, and Bondy watched as witness upon witness testified while Parnas — an associate of Rudy Giuliani in his Ukraine political efforts — sat on the sidelines.

As Bondy spent a week struggling to access the device, which he anticipated was filled with relevant text messages and documents, he did what he could to make Parnas part of the conversation. Bondy began tweeting daily photo montages of Parnas with Giuliani, GOP lawmakers, Trump and his family members — with the hashtag #LetLevSpeak and #LevRemembers. In a tweet last week, he added music to the montage — a snippet of MC Hammer’s “You Can’t Touch This.”

“I couldn’t get him in the door at the (House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence) without these materials, I started to just raise public awareness. I thought the best friend that we have is the public — and in every case I feel that the best friend you have is the public,” Bondy told CNN.

The initial strategy paid off. About 48 hours after Bondy delivered the files to Congress, House investigators released a trove of materials from Parnas, including a letter Giuliani sent to Ukraine’s President-elect requesting a meeting with the “knowledge and consent” of the US President. There were also text messages suggesting the US ambassador who Giuliani was trying to remove was under surveillance. In a blitz of interviews which began that night, he sat down with CNN and MSNBC.

“The truth is out now, thank God,” Parnas told Anderson Cooper in an interview last week. “I thought they were going to shut me up and make me look like the scapegoat and try to blame me for stuff I haven’t done.”

The documents were released two days before articles of impeachment were delivered to the US Senate. They jolted a trial that had largely been mapped out for weeks and interjected new allegations that Democrats have used to bolster their calls for witnesses with Parnas now potentially one of them.

The legal strategy is risky and has thrust Parnas, who is facing criminal charges, into the spotlight with few legal protections or guarantees. He’s been indicted on four federal crimes relating to campaign finance laws. He has pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors have expressed no interest in signing up Parnas with a cooperation deal, have said additional charges against him are likely and tried to revoke his bail. Bondy believes prosecutors have purposefully delayed providing him evidence in order to prevent Parnas from being of value to Congress.

A spokesman for the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.

“When I started this case, Lev was a figure on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ He was the gangster with unpaid debts. Now he’s become perhaps the most pivotal witness that could be offered in a trial,” Bondy says.

Bondy, who cut his teeth defending violent criminals including Peter Gotti, the brother of Gambino crime family boss John Gotti Jr., acknowledges Parnas’ strategy is a legal high-wire act but, he says, he has faith in the truth.

“The risks are enormous and the only way that this works is by him being truthful and wanting to be helpful,” says Bondy. His objective is that “I am able to say to my judge at the end of this day, no matter what happens, he tried very hard and what he did that was so helpful transcends him.”

It’s not Bondy’s first time in the spotlight. Early in his career he represented a notorious drug dealer known as El Feo along with defendants linked to organized crime whose cases splashed across the New York tabloids.

“What I think they’re trying to do is essentially alternative route cooperation, the alternative route being Congress,” said Elie Hoenig, a former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst. He predicts Parnas will plead guilty to some charges and aim to win over the judge at sentencing.

“I think ultimately the strategy is you get in front of the judge at sentencing (and say) we tried to cooperate with SDNY but my client did cooperate with something perhaps more important, Congress — the House and Senate — on the most important matters and he should get some sentencing credit for it,” said Hoenig, who squared off against Bondy in the Gotti case.

“It’s a variant of what Michael Cohen tried to do. It didn’t work out great for Cohen,” added Hoenig.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, pleaded guilty to nine criminal charges, but didn’t sign a cooperation deal with SDNY prosecutors because he wouldn’t admit or reveal additional crimes. Cohen cooperated with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and testified before multiple congressional committees. He received some credit from the judge but was still sentenced to three years in prison.

Bondy brushes off those comparisons, saying he’s won lower sentences for multiple clients over the years. “For those who know me they know that my knowledge and interest in the sentencing guidelines runs deep,” he said.

Hoenig added that even if Parnas didn’t get into the substance of the charges in his televised interviews, he gave prosecutors something to work with at trial, such as establishing the relationships that Parnas had with Giuliani, people in the Ukraine and Trump.

“It does look like he’s putting a heck of a lot of chips on this idea of getting credit for cooperating with Congress,” Hoenig said, adding that Bondy is “a good advocate. He knows what he’s doing. He’s a smart guy.”

From the Mafia to cannabis

Bondy, 52, grew up on Manhattan’s east side, the son of a school teacher and chemical engineer.

He says his mother was the driving force behind him becoming a lawyer. When she pressed him about what he wanted to do with his life, he says he grew irritated and blurted out that he wanted to be a Mafia lawyer.

“Without skipping a beat she said the best criminal defense lawyers went to Brooklyn Law School,” Bondy recalls. Bondy applied. The rest is history.

Bondy rents a small corner office in a suite from Gerald Lefcourt, a well-known criminal defense lawyer, but he sits facing the door not the view of Midtown.(Lefcourt represents one of the men who is a co-defendant in Parnas’ case.)

He says he’s been inspired by his faith and the idea of sticking up for the underdog, sometimes against all odds.

“I wanted to be a people’s lawyer. I never wanted to represent big business. I wanted to give a voice to people who didn’t have one,” said Bondy, beginning to cry.

One inspiration comes from “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who represents an African American man accused of rape in the South. “He’s defending poor Tom Robinson and he’s saving him hopefully and fighting against this white patrician culture,” says Bondy. But when Finch leaves the courtroom after his client is convicted, Bondy says, he learned another lesson.

“For all of the beautiful things you see in Atticus, I don’t ever want to walk away from someone like that,” Bondy said.

Bondy’s career is dotted with defendants many might shy away from representing.

Early in his career, Bondy represented Jose Reyes, a New York drug dealer confined to a wheelchair known as El Feo, who was convicted of murdering seven men and running a narcotics organization. Bondy, who was still cutting his teeth as an attorney, says Reyes is the first client he had to tell that they lost the appeal and would spend the rest of his life in prison.

That led to representing other clients, including Gotti, who was convicted of plotting to murder Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano. Bondy also represented Louis Eppolitto, a New York Police Department detective turned mafia hit man. Eppolitto was convicted of helping to murder eight men.

“You can represent a big pariah. If you can represent people in high profile cases and ensure their rights are protected when everyone hates them then all the rest of us are protected,” Bondy says.

Before Parnas, Bondy had shifted into cannabis law — seeing it as a way to address social justice reform.

“This whole marijuana movement is tied to criminal justice reform, which is tied to social justice reform. You’re talking about cannabis. You’re talking about mandatory minimum sentencing. You’re talking about bail, you’re talking about criminal convictions,” Bondy explains. He is one of several lawyers who brought a 2018 lawsuit against the Department of Justice to remove marijuana as a controlled substance. The case is ongoing.

Bondy launched a weekly Facebook video talk show called “In the Know 420,” where he hosts guests to discuss the latest in cannabis news.

It was also through his work in the area — he’s a board member of the Cannabis Cultural Association — that Bondy began to see the benefits of social media, a tactic at the heart of his campaign with Parnas.

“I learned how to do things like use Instagram and use my Facebook feed, do a live stream. I learned the benefit of tweeting,” he says.

Bondy’s talk show has taken a back seat since he began representing Parnas, but he says his campaign to make Parnas more human has shifted the story. He’s also won over one of his toughest critics, his daughter, who initially didn’t like that her father was representing a political operative.

“What speaks to me about Lev is when people are in pain I cry for them. When people are hurt, I feel it. I can’t explain it in a sense more for that,” Bondy said.

Bondy began representing Parnas in late October, a few weeks after he was arrested at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C., while boarding a one-way flight to Vienna. While in jail arranging bail, Parnas learned that Trump denied knowing him.

In his jail cell, Parnas fired his lawyers, John Dowd, a lawyer who at times has represented Trump, and Kevin Downing, who represented Paul Manafort. Bondy won’t go into detail about how he came to Parnas. “It’s not important,” he adds.

He hired Bondy and they decided to reverse Dowd’s earlier legal strategy to not cooperate with Congress. Weeks later they broke from Edward MacMahon, a high-powered Washington lawyer who initially worked with Bondy.

Bondy has also clashed with prosecutors in court and behind the scenes.

In early December, prosecutors said they had seized roughly two-dozen electronic devices from Parnas and his home after he was arrested. The devices were password protected and prosecutors said they were having trouble accessing them and sent some materials to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. Bondy would not provide Parnas’ password.

When Bondy asked to amend Parnas’ bail to allow him a few hours a day outside of his Florida home, prosecutors asked the judge to have Parnas remanded to prison. They alleged Parnas misled them repeatedly on sworn financial documents, specifically about a $1 million loan from a Ukrainian oligarch with links to Trump’s lawyers.

At a court hearing, Bondy convinced the judge that the $1 million loan to Parnas’ wife was not intentionally meant to mislead prosecutors.

But he was frustrated that he still didn’t have what he wanted — the contents of Parnas’ devices. Prosecutors alerted him that they had accessed some of the materials, including a cell phone in late December, which Bondy picked up on New Year’s Eve.

He blames prosecutors for slow-walking the materials.

“I have no doubt in my mind that they deliberately tried to thwart the flow of this evidence. I have no doubt in my mind that it was a belief that if you circle the wagons with these lawyers and then put a lid on Lev and tell him to shut up that’s part of a coordinated plan to protect the President,” Bondy alleges. On Monday, Bondy asked Attorney General William Barr to recuse himself from the investigation.

Parnas’ legal fate is still in limbo. He faces the prospect of additional criminal charges and the Senate has not said if they will hear witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.

“I’m dealing with the hand that I’ve been dealt,” says Bondy. “Truth and contrition go a long, long way in securing a positive outcome.”

Trump had to persuade Dershowitz’s wife to support him representing the President

Alan Dershowitz, a member of Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team, said Sunday the President had to call his wife, Carolyn Cohen, to persuade her to support the idea of Dershowitz making the case for “the Constitution” in the Senate impeachment trial.

“My wife thought that it would be better for me to remain independent and not present the argument in the Senate. President Trump spoke to her and said how important it was for the country. And my wife is still quite ambivalent about my role, but she supports me,” he told CNN on Sunday.

The White House announced Friday that the constitutional lawyer, along with Kenneth Starr, and Robert Ray, Starr’s successor at the Office of Independent Counsel during the Clinton administration, would be part of the President’s legal impeachment defense team.

Trump was especially fixated on having controversial defense attorney Dershowitz on the legal team. But Dershowitz has been telling his own associates he didn’t want to participate in the President’s trial, a source who is familiar with these conversations told CNN. White House officials have applied a lot of pressure over the last several weeks to convince Dershowitz to join the team, sources familiar with the attorney’s appointment said.

Dershowitz has distanced himself from the Trump legal team and earlier Sunday, he told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “State of the Union” he would not be involved in the day-to-day with the legal team — noting that he will just be there to argue the specific issue of constitutional criteria for impeachment, making “what could be the most important argument on the floor.”

When pressed by ABC’s George Stephanopolous on Sunday about Trump’s legal team’s formal response to the Senate summons of the President that was filed Saturday evening, Dershowtiz, said “I did not read that brief or I didn’t sign that brief.”

“That’s not part of my mandate,” he said. “My mandate is to present the constitutional argument. And if the constitutional argument succeeds, we don’t reach that issue, because you can’t charge a president with impeachable conduct if it doesn’t fit within the criteria for the Constitution.”

CNN’s Jamie Ehrlich and Kevin Bohn contributed to this report.

Trump administration warns Congress Iran could retaliate against US ‘within weeks’

The Trump administration has warned members of Congress that Iran is expected to retaliate against the US “within weeks” for the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani even as they failed to convince some that the operation was merited due to an imminent threat against American lives.

There are also intense discussions taking place inside US military and intelligence agencies to assess whether Iran might be preparing some type of retaliatory strikes in the next few days or wait for some time, according to a US official with direct knowledge of the situation. “There are conflicting views” on whether Iran will quickly retaliate or wait, but US military defenses are ready, the official said.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley publicly addressed the issue of potential retaliation from Iran Friday. When asked whether there is now a risk to US safety in the region, Milley bluntly said, “Damn right there is risk.”

Officials from the National Security Council, State Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies echoed that concern during classified briefings Friday, making it clear that it is not a question of if Iran will respond, but when, where and how, a source with knowledge of what was discussed told CNN.

National security officials were blunt as they described a range of retaliatory possibilities inside the US and abroad. The goal, one administration official familiar with the briefing said, was to make sure lawmakers were “cleared-eyed” about the possibilities for Iranian retaliation and that nothing was sugar coated.

The official told CNN that the administration wanted to make it clear it couldn’t rule out retaliation within the next few weeks — or even months — given how Iran historically has responded to what it views as acts of aggression against the regime.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Saturday that the United States committed a “grave mistake” in killing Soleimani and that Americans “will face the consequences of this criminal act not only today, but also in the coming years.”

Administration officials confirmed the existence but not the number or locations of Iranian proxy actors in the Western Hemisphere — both inside the US and below the southern border — and warned of attacks possibly coming from Iranian-trained Lebanese Hezbollah, which has sleeper cells in US and European cities, the source familiar with the briefing said.

Iran’s options

Iran could also retaliate by hitting US regional allies inside Iraq and in the Middle East, administration officials said, noting the apparent concerns of unspecified Gulf partners.

But a source familiar with the latest intelligence told CNN that it showed vehicle mounted rockets, known as Grad trucks, and other military weaponry were moving closer to US interests, particularly the Al Asad air base in Iraq.

Other targets of concern included the US air base in Qatar and US interests in Kuwait. The source noted those threats have existed for several months but that the intelligence indicated growing urgency because of how close the trucks were getting to US interests.

There are also indications that Iran has ramped up the readiness of its short and medium range ballistic missile force inside Iran since the death of Soleimani but that does not mean a strike by Iran is imminent, the US official directly familiar with the information told CNN. They added that the US is conducting intense surveillance by satellite and other means to determine how soon missiles — which are liquid fueled — might be ready.

Earlier Friday, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien declined to provide specific details of the intelligence about the planned attacks, but suggested releasing some of the intelligence was something that might be discussed in the future.

While the administration is secretly taking steps domestically and internationally to prepare for possible retaliation, beyond public moves like sending thousands of troops to the region, officials acknowledge that there is only so much they can do given the myriad of options at Iran’s disposal.

Department of Homeland Security officials are expected to brief lawmakers in coming days on domestic threats from Iran and will be on heightened alert over the next several weeks and months in anticipation of Iranian retaliation.

At the same time, officials continue to face questions from some Democratic lawmakers who say they remain unconvinced that the order to kill Soleimani was necessary in order to prevent an imminent attack against US interests, as the administration has claimed.

One Democratic source who was briefed Friday told CNN that officials did offer evidence of a credible threat but that it was not dissimilar to what has been observed at various points over the last several months from the IRGC and the hardest line Popular Mobilization Units, a coalition of predominantly Shiite militias.

Democrats question President’s order

In an interview with CNN Friday, Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico said more than once that he does not believe an attack on the United States was imminent as President Donald Trump and other top administration officials have said.

“My staff was briefed by a number of people representing a variety of agencies in the United State Government and they came away with no feeling that there was evidence of an imminent attack,” Udall said, adding he believed the President is only saying an attack was imminent to justify killing Soleimani.

Udall also said had the US Secretary of Defense been killed by Iran while in another country, the US would consider that an act of war.

Fellow Democrat Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland also told CNN Friday that one of his representatives was at the briefing and “nothing that came out of the briefing changed my view that this was an unnecessary escalation of the situation in Iraq and Iran.”

Van Hollen went on to say: “While I can’t tell you what was said, I can tell you, I have no additional information to support the administration’s claim that this was an imminent attack on Americans.”

Milley, the top US general, pushed back hard Friday against claims that there was any impulsiveness on the part of the US by targeting Soleimani. “We fully comprehend the strategic risks and consequences,” of killing the Iranian military commander, he said. “The risk of inaction exceeded the risk of action.”

The US has not provided any evidence publicly on what the specific threats were.

CNN’s Barbara Starr contributed to this report.