00:00...who are now issuing fresh calls to officially kill the fund themselves.
00:04In fact, the unprecedented use of taxpayer money has become so politically toxic
00:09that sources say many in the GOP were glad to see the issue taken off the table by Todd Blanche.
00:15Or so they thought.
00:16A brief reminder of what we heard from the acting attorney general on Capitol Hill.
00:22Look, we're not moving forward with the fund.
00:25We are not moving forward with the fund, period.
00:27We are not moving forward with the fund.
00:29Not moving forward ever.
00:31Correct.
00:31We're not moving forward with the fund.
00:33We're not moving forward with the fund.
00:35We're not moving forward with the fund.
00:36We're not moving forward with the fund.
00:39Now, before the president's answers today inside the Oval Office,
00:42we heard from the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, who sounded upbeat and optimistic.
00:46About an hour, actually, before the president spoke to reporters today,
00:49the Senate had voted to move forward on a critical first step on immigration funding
00:54for his enforcement and crackdown.
00:56It had been held up over this exact controversy.
00:59And it's perhaps the last major legislative win that the president will get before the midterm elections,
01:04which are exactly five months from today.
01:07But what the president told me today will now seem to hang over a marathon voting session
01:12that is set to start tomorrow.
01:14Republican leaders have been spending the night trying to call members who refuse to back that plan
01:18or vote for it until they know for sure this $1.8 billion fund from the DOJ is dead.
01:25Just listen to two Republican senators today before you heard the president crack that door back open.
01:32I think even DOJ knows that this was a bad idea.
01:36And what we need to do is provide finality.
01:38We've got to either eliminate it, streamline it, guardrail it.
01:42It can't go in its current form.
01:44And if that's the only choice we should have, we should eradicate it.
01:46In general, I support what Senator Tillis is trying to do
01:49to make sure that the weaponization fund is not just mostly dead, that it's truly dead.
01:55I want to make sure it's not mostly dead.
01:57I want to make sure it's completely dead.
02:00Our CNN anchor and our chief congressional correspondent, Monty Raju, joins me now.
02:05And obviously, not having this in writing or not, they don't seem to think,
02:09these Republicans, which was the point of our questioning to the president today,
02:13they don't seem to think the administration has been definitive enough.
02:16Yeah, and this is just another example where Republicans want to pull their hair out on Capitol Hill.
02:22A perfectly laid plan, so they thought, until Trump comes out and says something else
02:27and completely cuts their legs from underneath them.
02:29I mean, remember, right before Memorial Day, before the Memorial Day recess,
02:33where Congress left town for a week, they were going to pass $70 billion in new funding
02:37for related immigration enforcement priorities for this president.
02:40And then they dropped this $1.8 billion weaponization fund.
02:45That blew everything up because Republicans wanted to rein it in.
02:48They didn't know how to rein it in.
02:49And they knew if they added language to this bill, it would completely...
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