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Obama Meets with GOP Leaders; Rand Paul Filibusters; Winter Storm Brings Coastal Flooding; Interview with Sen. Rand Paul

Aired March 07, 2013 - 11:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, ANCHOR, "CNN NEWSROOM": You're fancy.

DON LEMON, ANCHOR, "CNN NEWSROOM": Prep School in Toronto, Ontario. It was a gift.

BANFIELD: Well, I know Toronto. That's for sure.

Don Lemon, nice to see you.

LEMON: Good to see you.

BANFIELD: Thank you, sir.

LEMON: Have a great show, my dear.

BANFIELD: You, too.

All right, so, hi, everybody. Ashleigh Banfield, good to have you here this hour.

President Obama has a couple of dinner dates, lunch dates and they're all congressional. Is that boring? No. The real question is it too little too late or is it coming right in the nick of time?

Plus a prestigious high school in New York slapped with a hazing scandal. Three students charged with performing a violent sexual act on a younger member of the track team.

And Jodi Arias back on the stand today. Believe it or not, she faced more than 150 questions coming straight from the jury deciding her fate.

Separation of powers is all well and good and the Founding Fathers sure thought it was a great idea, but apparently the powers can be a little bit too separate these days.

So, after standoffs and showdowns and cliffs and budget cuts that were never supposed to happen, President Obama and Republicans in Congress are finally breaking down some walls by breaking bread.

Last night, Mr. Obama treated a dozen Republican senators to a pricey dinner at a D.C. hotel, paid for it out of his own pocket, I might add.

Today about 90 minutes from now, he's having GOP congressman and former vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, to a little luncheon at the White House.

Ryan's Democratic counterpart on the House budget committee, Chris Van Hollen, is also invited to this little party.

And it all comes as the president's job approval ratings take a bit of a hit. And while Republicans still get more of the blame than he does for the meat-cleaver style spending cuts, make no mistake, this gap is narrowing.

It is food for thought. That's kind of a Don Lemon thing, isn't it? Food for thought. Sartorial choices today and also epicureal choices, food for thought, very smart thinkers, the best political team in television, Wolf Blitzer in our D.C. bureau and chief congressional correspondent Dana Bash.

So, Dana, I have not even mentioned yet the president's plans to come and visit the Republicans on the Hill next week.

This seems like a real social outreach campaign and I didn't think it was going to go over as well as it seems to have gone over.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Oh, it absolutely did. I talked to two Republican senators who were at that dinner late last night afterwards, and both of them are pretty conservative and both of them were pretty overwhelmed by how positive it was.

And the one senator who actually put this all together, Lindsey Graham, sent out a tweet today, describing what he hopes will come out of it and I want to read it to you.

He said, "Hope it serves as the beginning of a new paradigm where people in elected office actually talk to each other about meaningful issues."

You know, Ashleigh, one of the senators who I spoke with said that what struck him was the fact that the president sort of got to understand better the Republicans and the Republicans got to understand the president better.

And he said that that was even more of a shocker, I think, to Republicans that the president is actually sincere in where he's coming from.

I have a very unsophisticated but understandable word to describe this, "duh." This is called human relationships and it's something that should have been happening for years and years.

We all know it. We all have them everyday in our lives and, to understand each other, the baseline of that, that is -- has to happen before they can talk across party lines.

BANFIELD: Wolf, didn't we have this conversation in 2009 and it had to do with beer and a beer summit and it was sitting down as regular people just like the picture shows you, trying to get over an impasse by just sitting down to either a good meal or a good beer? WOLF BLITZER, ANCHOR, "THE SITUATION ROOM": Once you establish sort of direct human contact with the other side, in this case, a political battle, obviously things are going to improve because you're not just fighting from remote corners.

You're actually talking to each other. You're having a meal. You might be even having a glass of wine, although the president, we're told, had iced tea, didn't have any wine last night.

He did pick up the tab and I'm sure the Republican senators were all pretty happy about that, but it's only a matter of human nature if you start talking to each other, maybe things can improve.

They won't necessarily improve. In 2011, the president spent a lot of quality time with the House speaker, John Boehner. They got close to a deal, but in the end, they didn't work out a deal, and we all know what happened as a result of that.

They warned of that -- those forced spending cuts, the so-called sequester. No one thought it would really happen, but guess what. The sequester is now taking place even as they meet for dinner at the Jefferson Hotel here in Washington last night.

So, let's see if it moves forward. I am encouraged that the president invited Paul Ryan, Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic ranking member of the House budget committee over for lunch today. That's a nice follow up.

And, as you point out, he's going to go up to the Hill next week, meet with the Republican and Democratic leadership.

So, all this talking is good, even though the president has suggested only within the past few weeks maybe it wasn't all that significant. I think he's had a change of heart.

BANFIELD: Dana Bash, I was watching you on TV in the morning yesterday, in the afternoon and late into the evening as you were watching that dinner.

But at the same time, it was almost a split screen over on Capitol Hill. Senator Rand Paul was doing this phenomenal job of a 13-hour speech.

It's called the filibuster and this was the real McCoy. This wasn't reading a dictionary. This was real, honest-to-goodness political argument.

Tell me about it.

BASH: Absolutely. You know, he started out, frankly, surprising leaders in both parties by going to the floor at 11:47 a.m. yesterday to be exact, saying that he was going to wage a filibuster against John Brennan with a very specific reason, substantive reason, which is that he wants to have a more direct answer from the attorney general about whether or not the administration believes it is OK that they have the authority to use drones on U.S. citizens on American soil. Now, there's a difference of opinion whether or not the administration, Eric Holder in particular, has actually answered that question.

But to watch the way that this organically blew up on Twitter, blew up on the Internet and the -- his Republican colleagues who were really stand-offish in the beginning, by midnight, they were racing to the floor encouraged by conservatives and others on the Internet. It was fascinating to watch.

BANFIELD: Fascinating and lengthy. And we should just mention that John Brennan, this is the CIA directorship that he's awaiting clearance on.

So, it was good listening. It was good TV. It was just very lengthy.

Wolf and Dana, thank you very much.

Coastal flood warnings are in effect right now from the Chesapeake Bay up to Portland, Maine. Five-to-six inches of snow is expected from New York to Boston.

That same winter storm dumped enough wet snow in northern Virginia for the governor there to declare a state of emergency.

North Korea threatening a preemptive nuclear attack against the United States. That's not a joke. This warning comes as the U.N. security council is approving tough new sanctions over the North's nuclear program and two days after North Korea threatened to scrap the 1953 armistice that ended the Korea War.

Developing story in South Africa, the former lead detective in the Oscar Pistorius murder case has resigned. A police spokesman says that Hilton Botha left the police force for, quote, "private reasons."

Botha was booted off of the days when prosecutors reinstated attempted murder charges against him -- him -- the prosecutor in another case, a whole separate case.

If you have the chance, what would you ask Jodi Arias? More than likely some of the same things that the jury did because they got a chance to ask over 150 questions of this murder defendant and you are going to hear some of the greatest hits coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Three boys from a prestigious New York high school are facing hazing charges and now there are indications that staff members at Bronx High School of Science may have known something about all of this.

The boys who are members of the track team are accused of forcible touching, assault, hazing and harassment of a younger student.

The two-year-old son of a Colorado family killed in Mexico and the suspect, their babysitter's boyfriend. It's a tragic story where a family says the boyfriend entered the home, attacked the toddler and threw him in the pool to drown.

Both the sitter and the boyfriend face murder charges.

Jodi Arias seemed to have an answer for just about everything yesterday, even if the answer was, I don't remember.

The accused murderer was peppered with question, in fact, 156 of them, 156 questions, all submitted by the jury that is sitting to judge her fate. And also asked by the judge. A bit of a filter there, not every single question that they wanted to ask was asked, but 156?

All of this about the events surrounding her admitted, brutal killing of her boyfriend and their now very, very public, sordid, ugly sex life.

Here's CNN's Randi Kaye, but we warn you -- much of this testimony is extremely graphic.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RANDI KAYE, CNN INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT: They started with a zinger about the digital camera the couple used to take naked pictures of each other right before the killing.

JUDGE SHERRY STEVENS, MARICOPA COUNTY, ARIZONA: Why did you put the camera in the washer?

JODI ARIAS, MURDER DEFENDANT: I don't have memory of that. I don't know why I would do that.

KAYE: Again, Arias' memory fails her, preventing her from explaining why she put the camera in Travis Alexander's washing machine after she killed him.

The camera contained pictures of Alexander in the shower, including this one taken just two minutes before his death. Photo time-stamps put Arias at Alexander's house at the time of his death.

And what about the gun? The state says she brought it with her to kill, but Arias says it was Alexander's gun, that she grabbed it from his closet shelf.

STEVENS: How did you have time to get the gun down if he was right behind you?

ARIAS: I don't know if he was right behind me or not. I just had the sense that he was chasing after me.

KAYE: After she killed Alexander, investigators say Arias dragged his body through the house and put it in the shower.

The jury wanted to know why.

STEVENS: Why did you place Travis' body back in the shower?

ARIAS: I could only speculate because I don't remember. KAYE: Nor could Arias remember for the jury what she did with the clothes she was wearing when she killed Alexander, or what she did with the knife used to stab him nearly 30 times and practically cut his head off.

STEVENS: Why is it that you have no memory of stabbing Travis?

ARIAS: I can't really explain why my mind did what it did. Maybe because it's too horrible.

KAYE: The jury also wanted to know why Arias didn't just run for help the day of the killing.

ARIAS: It's hard to describe the fear. It was like mortal terror. It really was. I really thought he was -- had intentions to kill me.

KAYE: Arias claims Alexander physically and sexually abused her during their relationship. She says she killed him that day in self- defense.

The jury wanted to know if she ever documented past abuse she's testified about.

STEVENS: Did you ever take pictures of yourself after he hit you?

ARIAS: No, I did not.

KAYE: The jury had a lot of questions about the couple's sex life, which included recordings of their phone sex played in court.

Jurors asked about specific events, like when Alexander tied her to his bed.

Without flinching, Arias answered each and every one of those embarrassing question, never taking her eyes off the jury.

STEVENS: Did you ever voice any concerns to Travis about being uncomfortable with some of his sexual fantasy?

ARIAS: Yes, there was one fantasy which he wanted to do which was pulling off on the side of a freeway exit and having sex on the hood of a car. And I was -- I told him that that would be impossible.

KAYE: The jury also wanted to know this.

STEVENS: Why would you continue to stay with someone who had sex with you while you were sleeping?

ARIAS: I was in love with Travis. I knew I was in love with him and my only concern was that I believed from a religious and spiritual perspective that our relationship would not be blessed if we acted that way.

KAYE: Randi Kaye, CNN, phoenix, Arizona.

(END VIDEOTAPE) BANFIELD: Your relationship might not be blessed if you kill him either. Let's bring in Vinnie Politan from our sister netowrk, HLN, and also Glenda Hatchett. Judge Glenda, I love having you. It's nice to see you again.

GLENDA HATCHETT, JUDGE: Thank you.

BANFIELD: So here is my first question., 156 questions? I've never ever seen a case where there's been more than say six or eight or ten jury questions. And even that's rare.

HATCHETT: That's very rare. We're talking two other states other than Arizona. I was just saying to Vinnie, I was glued to the TV yesterday. I mean, I took all of these notes. But yeah, everybody's been debating whether it's best for the prosecution or defense. I think it's best for the prosecution on this. And I put them in three different buckets. One bucket is this doesn't seem reasonable. How could you have possibly done this. Questions like why did you run to the closet, why didn't you run out of the house, why wasn't there disruption, why can't you remember this, why was it in the washing machine in, the camera. And then another set of questions that go to the kind of immoral question, almost moral indignation. Did you read the doctrines of the church and what about your sex life with him and other people. And then a very small part of the questions I thought were we want to understand why you're like you are. Who are you, lady? Did your dad slap you? What happened?

BANFIELD: Can I throw another bucket at you? And this one is holy cow, do they know the details of this case.

VINNIE POLITAN, FORMER PROSECUTOR: Absolutely.

BANFIELD: They called a piece of evidence by its number.

POLITAN: But here's -- I call this jury JWA now. Jurors with attitude. If you read the questions, and I was practicing this a bit, I think every question has a little bit of attitude in it. Why didn't you read the Book of Mormon to see what you were allowed to do? Why is it you remember when you lent him money but not when he lent you money? Right? You testified that you heard his foot steps. Why didn't you just run out of the house? And two more I like --

HATCHETT: Especially because he was naked.

POLITAN: Naked man is chasing you. Where do you go? Outside. Naked man is not going outside. This is a great one. How is it that you are so qualm calm in those TV interviews? And the last one. Why are the laws of attraction important to follow but not the law of chastity.

BANFIELD: They were amazing. Listen I could go on about 156 questions for you about these questions but --

POLITAN: It's the attitude they're bringing in.

BANFIELD: She's back on the stand today and she'll answer more questions from the jury. HATCHETT: They're submitting more questions.

BANFIELD: I think it's the greatest part of the case, and I don't care what anyone says, I love questions from the jury. Vinnie Politan, and Judge Glenda, great stuff. Thank you very much.

Remember you can watch the Jodi Arias trial this afternoon live on HLN and also CNN.com. We stream that stuff, you know. And coming up, we have an exclusive for you, senator Rand Paul will join us live right after this break. I wonder how his voice is. Coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: I'm sure you've heard of Mr. Smith goes to Washington, it's a wonderful story about the good old fashioned filibuster. Up until now we've seen some not so good old fashioned filibusters, people reading a dictionary, just an opportunity to stretch time out.

But yesterday it was different. One Mr. Rand Paul goes to Washington did it the real thing and really did argue legitimate arguments with just some water and some candy. Trust me, this went on and on. Starting at 11:37 yesterday, he started the filibuster conversation during this program and he ended it well after we'd all gone to bed.

Joining me live now, Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky and Dana Bash, you're going to have to do the questions for me because I know the senator doesn't have an earpiece. But my first question that I would really hope could you ask is how is his voice.

BASH: Well, I can answer that question. I'll definitely ask him. I want to tell you and our viewers how this happened. I just came from talking to you on the air and I walked downstairs and just the magic of being in the Senate, I bumped into the senator and he was gracious enough to come and be on with us live. And the first question I asked you, how is your voice.

SEN. RAND PAUL, ( R) KENTUCKY: The voice is recovering. And I think I lost a few pounds. So there's some advantages to not eating all day. Though I was sneaking candy bars. There's a candy drawer and if you go to the candy drawer, you can sneak around and get a candy bar. But I see you caught me with half of the candy bar in and out of my mouth. My wife said can't you chew with your mouth closed when you're on the floor?

BASH: I want to ask you about the substance of the argument that you were making in a second, but first I want to ask more about the mechanics, because I think just on a human level, people want to know how you stood there for 12 hours plus, almost 13 hours.

PAUL: Well, it's not easy. My feet were hurting by the end of the day. You can't leave the floor and you can't sit down. So you can't use the restroom or do anything like that.

BASH: And you were told that. Did your staff or did the parliamentary say -- PAUL: It just sort of is the rule that's kind of known, and the staff snows the rules better a lot of the times than the senators do, so they gave me advice on what we can do. And there are staff in there that works for the Republican side and the Democrat's side. They inform you what you can and can't do. And then you have to ask a question, people can ask a question to you, but there's a certain protocol or you lose the floor. And Democrats will leave someone down there to see if you make a mistake on the floor to take it back from you. And it doesn't happen very often because, one, it's hard to get floor and hard to get recognized when it's not a designated time. Most times the floor is controlled by the leadership. This just happened to be a time it wasn't.

BASH: And you snuck up on both leaders, right? Is that fair to say? Did they know you were going to do this?

PAUL: No. In fact we didn't know we were going to do it that day. We had gotten a lot of information because it's an issue we're really interested in that we think it should be easy for the president to say, you know what, Americans not engaged in combat in America cannot be targeted for killing.

BASH: And again I'll get to the substance in one second, but one of the things that was so fascinating was how organic it was and how it took on a life of its own. I'm not even sure if you realized that because you were there. On the internet. I was watching it for the first two, three hours. You were alone. And then suddenly you had some of your more conservative compatriots like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee come and then by midnight, you had a lot of people there. There was a hash tag "stand with Rand" and more and more people were tweeting, even the RNC chair, get down there and help him. Were you surprised?

PAUL: It is sort of a fascinating phenomenon. And when you're on the floor, you're not allowed to use electronics and I also didn't have time because I had to keep talking. If you stop for more than a minute, they can say you no longer speaking, you don't hold the floor. So you have to keep going. I didn't have time to look at my phone which you're not supposed to do anyway.

But then when Senator Cruz came to the floor and started reading those tweets, I got a feeling that maybe this was bigger than -- all we knew is we believed in an issue, we wanted to talk about it, and that it's important that the president realize that he's restrained by the constitution, also. So we got talking about something we were interested in and you never know whether people are watching or not, but you want the issue to be big because we want the president to respond. And what we're hearing from the White House this morning is they may respond to my question. And if they do, we're willing to let the Brennan nomination to go forward.

BASH: And talk more about that. You said you heard from the White House. Who and what did they say?

PAUL: I don't have the name of who, but somebody on my staff and other Republican staff are talking to the White House. And I'm hoping there will be a response. I never really doubted that maybe the president and I are on the same page, but some things need to be explicit. And the one thing that I think needs to be explicit is that this drone killing or targeting program, that you can't target Americans who aren't engaged in combat.

We've never questioned that if you have a grenade launcher on your back and you're attacking the capital, you can be killed without due process. I'm not against that. What I'm against is that if they think maybe for my political beliefs that I might be an anti- government person and I'm having dinner with somebody or maybe I e- mail a cousin of mine who lives in the Middle East, that's not enough to be killed. That's enough to say let's make an accusation and you have a trial. That's the way our country works. I think the president believes in that, but he needs to be explicit. And we've asked the attorney general and they haven't been explicit, they have just talked about exceptions to the rule. We want to know what the rule is. Are you going to kill Americans in America who are not engaged in combat.

BASH: Right, because they have argued that they have given you an answer, but perhaps it's not the answer that you've been looking for. So when you say explicit, how explicit -- what's the answer you're looking for?

PAUL: The very specific question we're asking is does the president believe he has the authority to kill Americans who are not engaged in combat in America with targeted drone strikes? And I think the answer is no. But they haven't given us that answer. They've given us things like if planes are attacking the twin towers. We all believe that the military, Republicans and Democrats, that the military or anyone can repulse an active attack by an individual or military or plane or anything whether it's an American or not. What we're talking about is the drone program overseas now, often targets people who aren't engaged in combat. They're sitting at home in their house. And that's another debate for another day. But that's the kind of standard we're using overseas. And the president won't answer. He says, well, I might use it a standard that inside the country different than outside. Which alarms us because it means he's already thinking of a standard for killing Americans in the U.S.

BASH: One of the things about this issue is it's made for strange bedfellows. You had a Democrat, Ron Wyden, standing with you, but you also don't have all conservatives with you. "The Wall Street Journal," which is known as a very prominent conservative editorial page, really took after you this morning saying that you had great theater, but you're wrong on the issue that the U.S. government cannot randomly target American citizens on U.S. soil or anywhere else, what it can do under the laws of war is target an enemy combatant anywhere at any time including U.S. soil.

PAUL: "The Wall Street Journal" is right on a lot of issues and they're wrong on this issue. The problem is if I call you an enemy combatant, how do we know if you are or aren't? That's just me calling you and accusing you of a crime. Should there be enough power by any politician, Republican or Democrat, to just say you're an enemy combatant and a hell fire missile drops on your house? That's what they're saying. With every fiber of my body, I believe that is unjust and unconstitutional. If you're an American on our soil, people can't just accuse you and call you a name. They're just assuming the person calling your name is omniscient and knows you're guilty of that.

But the way I see it is we have a lot of Arab-Americans who live in Dearborn, Michigan. And I think the vast majority, if not almost all of them are good American people. But let's say they have a cousin in the Middle East and they e-mail them. Let's say somebody thinks their cousin in the Middle East is a terrorist. Well, for goodness sakes, would you just drop bombs on people in Dearborn and say we think he's associated with terrorism, he's an enemy combatant? That's a lot different than someone from a grenade launcher on their shoulder attacking someone. That's an enemy combatant.

But the people that they've been targeting overseas aren't always using weapons. So I don't want that standard in our country.

BASH: What do you think (ph) about imminent threat (ph)?

PAUL: Imminent threat, no problem. If you're attacking -- but it has to be an imminent threat. And this is part of the problem. The president said imminent doesn't have to mean immediate. That's very troublesome to me. If someone is attacking the Capitol with a grenade launcher, that's an imminent threat. If someone is carrying a bomb into to a building and getting ready to set it off, that's it. IF someone's assembling a bomb could be an imminent threat too. But if you're sitting in a cafe and you're e-mailing a friend in the Middle East, that's not an imminent threat.

And the other thing, in our country is, if you're not involved actively in combat, wouldn't you rather capture them and ask them questions about who they are talking to and investigate it? Really it's about the belief that justice, innocence or guilt should be determined by a jury of your peers.