CNN’s Jake Tapper Straight-Up Asks Maggie Haberman ‘Are The Dominoes Starting To Fall?’ After New Trump Bombshell

CNN’s Jake Tapper straight-up asked New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman “are the dominoes starting to fall?” after new reporting on a former ally spilling about ex-President Donald Trump’s election plot.

This week, CNN reporter Marshall Cohen dropped an exclusive on tapes he obtained in which Chesebro told election crimes prosecutors in Michigan about the advice Trump was given during Oval Office meetings in December of 2020. He’s cooperating with probes in Michigan and Wisconsin investigating the fake electors plot.

On Wednesday’s edition of CNN’s The Lead, Haberman and Tapper agreed Chesebro could be “very damaging” to Trump, and Tapper asked if this portends a wave of informants to come:

TAPPER: Maggie, what stands out to you most when you hear this, these tapes, Marshall’s excellent reporting?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Honest, it’s terrific reporting. And it’s actually the fact of this meeting happening in the first place is what stands out to me because when Chesebro pleaded guilty and Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty, the basic takeaway for people around Trump was, well, Chesebro didn’t really deal with Trump directly, so he doesn’t know that much but Jenna Ellis did. There’s clearly a lot more to learn about what was happening in these various interactions. And the fact, as Marshall said, he brought it up proactively, giving the desire by all of these people around Trump, not to the same degree, but to please him, to bring him —

TAPPER: Yes.

HABERMAN: — some kind of offering is what stood out to me there.

TAPPER: And Chesebro is clearly willing to talk pretty openly —

HABERMAN: Yes.

TAPPER: — in a way that could be pretty damaging to Donald Trump. What do you know about others in Trump’s circle who might also be willing to flip, I’m thinking of course of a different White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Are the dominoes starting to follow here?

HABERMAN: I think we’re going to wait a long time until we would see something like that. Look, I can’t predict whether Meadows will flip. If he does, I think it would be proud problematic for Trump just given the volume of what he knows but I think that he shared enough with investigators that they’re going to be able to paint a pretty compelling picture at this point already. I’m not sure how badly they need a plea like that as opposed to a plea like this. I just would say one other thing that stood out to me from that audio is that Reince Priebus was probably having PTSD —

TAPPER: Yes.

HABERMAN: — from trying to have, you know, a meeting not get derailed from the time when he was Chief of Staff in that White House.

TAPPER: It’s also just so odd, because here you have this president and he has all these people that he knows, the White House Counsel, his attorney general, former White House Chiefs of Staff like Reince Priebus, et cetera, all of them saying it’s over, you lost. And then this — just these stragglers are coming and people he doesn’t know, barely knows, whatever, they tell him what he likes, so he listens.

HABERMAN: So, there used to be a line that one of his senior advisors would use, which is that if Trump wants an opinion on something, he will ask 49 people and then a 50, out of that 50, it will give him the answer that he wants. And that’s literally what you saw here. It was a parade of people, as you say, telling him, this is over even if they weren’t all doing it that declaratively, there were enough people telling him, you are out of options here, and then he gets one who says, no, no, no, this is real. And he goes for that.

TAPPER: Yes, it’s just these stray dogs that he brings in and just listens to them bark as long as he likes the sound of it.

Watch above via CNN’s The Lead.