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Hillary's E-Mails; State of Emergency in Ferguson; Presidential Race Heats Up. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired August 12, 2015 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:00:02]

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: I grew up with a whatchamacallit in my kitchen. And I'm blanking of course on the word, little -- little albums.

Jukebox. My goodness.

BILL WEIR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Jukebox. Oh, OK.

BALDWIN: I do know English. Jukebox, yes, so a lot of Motown growing up.

Thank you, dad, for that.

Bill Weir, thank you so much.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Make sure you watch "From Disco to Punk," CNN's original series, "The Seventies," tomorrow night at 9:00 Eastern.

All right, we're going to continue on.

Top of the hour. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Right now, something is happening in the race for the White House that probably very few had predicted. You have Donald Trump vs. Bernie Sanders. Trump, the billionaire reality TV star, leading the pack for Republicans and Bernie Sanders, king of music, this folk singing Democratic socialist from Vermont, mounting this furious challenge to Hillary Clinton among Democrats.

And when you look at the numbers, both men now sitting on top of the polls in New Hampshire, this critical first-in-the-nation primary. Bernie Sanders there at 44 percent. Look, he is surging ahead of Hillary Clinton with 37 percent. And while Trump also leads his Republican rivals in New Hampshire, he can now add Iowa to his gains as well, pushing Scott Walker out in first place in the first poll taken after last week's debate.

So, Bob Cusack is with me, the editor in chief of "The Hill."

Love having you on, Bob. Welcome.

BOB CUSACK, "THE HILL": Hey, Brooke. How are you?

BALDWIN: I'm wonderful.

So, first and foremost, did you ever think you would have, you know, these unlikely candidates, the Bernie Sanders, the Donald Trumps, shaking it up, shaking it up?

CUSACK: No, no, very unpredictable. Could be one of the most unpredictable presidential races in history.

Certainly, when Donald Trump launched, few thought he would be able to take on Jeb Bush much less surpass him. And now Bernie Sanders obviously from a neighboring state, Vermont, right next to New Hampshire, but doing very well. And the crowd sizes, Brooke, are just unbelievable for Bernie Sanders.

And actually Trump has said, well, wait a minute, my crowd sizes are bigger than Bernie Sanders. But Sanders has had the biggest crowds. And there is so much enthusiasm around him, it has to concern the Clinton camp, especially with the e-mail controversy going on.

BALDWIN: Which I will be talking about in a segment later. But on the sheer numbers, off the top of my head, it was 65,000 people all coming together for Bernie Sanders recently in both L.A., Portland and Seattle.

Here's what could throw a wrench in this. If, and this is a big if, if the vice president, if Joe Biden gets in this race, yes, maybe he comes from the old guard. But there's a lot of enthusiasm for him from young people. Do you think he would steal some of Bernie Sanders' political thunder?

CUSACK: It's hard to see at this point.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Which part is hard to see?

CUSACK: That he would take a way a lot of what Bernie Sanders -- the left loves Bernie Sanders. He is an independent. He's a self- described socialist. A lot of Democrats don't want him to become the general election nominee, because they don't think he could win a general election.

So, I think Biden would be looking if he jumps in -- and I think he gets in only if he gets a significant bump from all the buzz about whether he runs -- I think he would try to siphon off some of the Clinton backers who are getting nervous about how she has lagged in the polls and the enthusiasm is not there as much as it is for Sanders.

BALDWIN: Donald Trump just called Bernie Sanders weak. This is a jab at Sanders. I don't know if this speaks to Hillary Clinton's weakness or Bernie Sanders' strength. But he said he was weak for letting one of the activists from the Black Lives Matter movement sort of steal his microphone at an event over the weekend. Donald Trump said if they tried that with him, he would fight them.

If Sanders continues to rise here in the polls, do you think that's just the beginning of more attacks from Donald Trump?

CUSACK: Sure. I mean, I think Donald Trump goes after everybody, especially anyone who attacks him. He likes to counterpunch and he's a pretty effective counterpuncher. But he's gone after Sanders.

They're both viewed as not the establishment, even though Bernie Sanders has been in the House and in the Senate. He's viewed as a very different type of candidate and he's very, very clear about where he stands on issues such as Keystone. We don't know where Hillary Clinton is on that big issue.

So that is what the nonpolitician or the outsider, basically the underdog has now risen in the polls on both sides. It's quite a phenomenon.

BALDWIN: On the debate stage last week, it was really just Rand Paul who kept trying to come after Donald Trump. I don't know if it worked for him or not. Now there's this new ad that will air both in New Hampshire and Iowa through the weekend and he's basically, we will play some of it for you, attacking Donald Trump for praising some Democrats.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Liberal on health care. We have to take care of people that are sick.

QUESTION: Universal health coverage?

TRUMP: I love universal. Hillary Clinton I think is a terrific woman. I mean, I'm a little biased because I have known her for years. I live in New York. She lives in New York and I have known her and her husband for years and I really like them both a lot.

I think she really works hard and I think she does a good job. And I like her. She's a really good person.

[15:05:08]

BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It depends upon what the meaning of the word is...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: What do you think, Bob? Do you think this is a strategy that will work for Rand Paul?

CUSACK: Well, I think that Rand Paul needs a comeback. He's media- savvy. He knows the story is Donald Trump and it's frustrating Paul and other candidates.

BALDWIN: Yes. CUSACK: I think that ad is effective. But on one hand, it is

effective because it shows that Donald Trump has changed positions a lot. But on the other hand, Trump's 20 percent is solid.

They don't really care that much about his policies. They like him, they like his style. They like his basically going after people and not being politically correct. Whether Donald Trump can expand 20 percent that to 30 to 40 percent, that remains to be seen. And, remember, his head-to-head against Hillary Clinton not very strong. He's going to have to improve those numbers or that's something the candidates are going to go after him, because, Brooke, as you know, it's all about winning.

And the voters on both sides are going to be ultimately selecting the nominee that has the best shot of becoming the next president.

BALDWIN: Bob Cusack, thank you, editor in chief with "The Hill." Come back.

Meantime, Jeb Bush has ha plan to defeat ISIS, discussing his attack strategy while at the same time blaming Hillary Clinton for the rise in the terror group, even bringing up his brother's war to make this point.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEB BUSH (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: So why was the success of the surge followed by a withdrawal from Iraq, leaving not even a residual force the commanders and the Joint Chiefs knew was necessary?

That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating a void that ISIS moved in to fill and that Iran has exploited to the full as well. Where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this? Like the president himself, she had opposed the surge, then joined in claiming credit for its success, then stood by as that hard-won victory by American allied forces was thrown away.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: What is Jeb Bush's plan? For one, he's calling for a no-fly zone over Syria to prevent the regime from bombing civilians, number two, going after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and removing him from power.

And, three, he wants U.S. troops embedded alongside Iraqi forces. He says pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq gave ISIS an opening.

Let's go Bobby Ghosh. He's our CNN global affairs analyst and managing editor for Quartz.

Bobby, first of all, when I was ticking through some of those details, I'm just wondering how different is Jeb Bush's plan from the current Obama administration plan against ISIS?

BOBBY GHOSH, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: It's not a whole lot different. It's where the Obama administration very, very gradually is going towards.

They don't like to say it. They don't want to say that there are American boots on the ground and yet they keep sending more and more advisers. They don't like to say that these American advisers are going on patrols along with Iraqi forces into harm's way, but that's going to happen as the fighting escalates.

In that sense, what he's proposing is not a whole lot new. This no- fly zone over parts of Syria, Turkey has been asking for that for a very long time. And the Obama administration again without actually saying it is also generally gently moving in that direction.

A lot of the strategy on Syria against ISIS has been dictated by what's happening on the ground, because nobody in American politics wants to take that particular thing by its horns and shake it up.

BALDWIN: What about too the fact that Jeb Bush is bringing up his brother's war? Yes, he's attacking Hillary Clinton and President Obama. But this is a war that he admitted was a mistake. Do you think that that will backfire?

GHOSH: Well, the thing is that he's picking on Hillary Clinton because she's the one in the campaign that he can take aim at. There's not much point in blaming Bernie Sanders for ISIS and there's nobody else from the Democratic side who might be vulnerable.

Let's say Joe Biden -- if Joe Biden came into the campaign, I think you would hear Bush take potshots at him as well in connection with Iraq. The thing is, the growth of ISIS, it's that old saw about success having lots of fathers and failure being an orphan. The success of ISIS has a lot of fathers. There's a lot of blame to go around.

It starts with Bush's brother. It starts with the war in Iraq, that basically sets off the chaos into which ISIS and the predecessors of ISIS arrive and thrive. Did the ultimate withdrawal of American forces sort of strengthen that? To some degree, it did. But to say that the U.S. simply left Iraq, or the Obama administration left Iraq, as if the Iraqis didn't have a choice in this, is bizarre.

The Iraqis said, you have to go. The Obama administration wanted to keep a quite substantial force of Americans in Iraq, something like 30,000 American soldiers permanent, semi-permanently, if memory serves correctly. But the Iraqis, the independent democratically elected Iraqi government said, no, we don't want you. You have to leave.

Then that government proceeded to further antagonize the Sunnis and sort of create the atmosphere in which ISIS was able to sort of review. There are lots of different people for whom -- there's enough blame to go around here.

[15:10:15]

George Bush has to be one of them. There are some parts of the Obama administration's policies in Iraq that certainly have to carry the part of the blame. A big part of the blame is the Iraqi government itself.

BALDWIN: OK. Bobby Ghosh, thank you. Appreciate it.

Next, Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is handing over her private e- mail server. My next guest says her actions may have violated federal law and that she should be held accountable. We will explain his point next.

And a newly discovered reporting of a speech given by Dr. King. A historian now says this could be the first time he ever used the phrase "I have a dream." Hear that coming up.

And why a state of emergency is continuing in Ferguson, Missouri. You're watching CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:15:20]

BALDWIN: You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Big, big news today out of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The former secretary of state reversing course. She's now agreeing to surrender her private e-mail server which is based in her home, as well as a thumb drive. It's all going to go to the Justice Department.

But for months and months now, Clinton's e-mails have been a major source of controversy from her political rivals.

Let's discuss with CIA political commentator and former CIA counterterrorism analyst Buck Sexton. Also with me, CNN legal analyst Paul Callan.

First, just on the legal side, why is this happening now?

PAUL CALLAN, CNN LEGAL CONTRIBUTOR: Well, the inspector general of the State Department did a preliminary run-through on this e-mail of hers. They sampled the e-mail and they took 40 e-mails. Two of them had confidential security type e-mails that was a problem.

The talk is that there's as many as 35,000 e-mails out there. I did the math on it and I was a little surprised. If it works out to the same ratio as the 40 they looked at, that would come out to 1,700 problematic e-mails. And when I say problematic, I mean, e-mails that may have classified information on them and may have been stored improperly.

Why precisely it's happening now? I'm sure it's the pressure of the political campaign and a whole bunch of other things that are going on behind the scenes at the Justice Department to make sure they demonstrate it's been a thorough investigation.

BALDWIN: OK. I know I had Karen Finney on the show recently from the Hillary Clinton campaign. She said, listen, in full transparency, nothing has been criminal. She said to me essentially that Hillary Clinton, she didn't know what she was turning over was classified. You point out the fact that there's no criminal investigation and

you're saying that that's a problem?

BUCK SEXTON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: What do you mean no criminal investigation? They're actually looking at this as a criminal matter. It has to be looked at as a criminal matter.

We're talking about maybe there's this confidential information. Those are all federal felonies. If she sent top-secret information on an unclassified e-mail system, which it almost certainly seems like she did, that is a federal felony. That is punishable by 10 years in federal prison and a very large fine, each counts of that.

There are reasons why in the intelligence community and the national security agencies that exist, there are very strict procedures that everybody who has had a high enough level clearance knows about, very strict procedures to prevent this information not just from getting out to the enemy, and giving it to the enemy would be espionage, but to protect it by making sure it stays within proper channels.

You have a legal obligation to do that. Hillary Clinton using unclassified e-mail that she set up for herself to evade political transparency -- that much is pretty obvious, at least, to me.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: She would obviously argue...

(CROSSTALK)

SEXTON: She would argue that. But that doesn't even matter.

It doesn't change the legal jeopardy she would be in for sending classified e-mail on an unclassified server. Each one of these, you can ask the lawyer to my right, is a federal criminal count. And the Hillary defense is, I didn't know it was classified, which is actually not really a defense.

(CROSSTALK)

CALLAN: Yes. Well, it's got to be classified, and then the law looks at, when we're deciding if it's a misdemeanor or a felony, as to whether disclosure would be a grave risk to the security of the United States, as opposed to just some kind of a risk.

But the bottom line on it is, when I have looked at other prosecutions, criminal prosecutions, you have things ranging from General Petraeus, remember that one, he had a laptop that his mistress had access to that had classified information. He kind of got a bit of a slap on the wrist in terms of the criminal penalty. He was prosecuted. He didn't go to jail.

But there are CIA agents who are in prison for having not properly secured classified information. So you have a whole range and it's going to depend on what the information was and did its disclosure or its potential disclosure constitute a threat to the United States? And, number three, did she know this, that she was doing it?

SEXTON: I just want to say, that's absolutely true. And when we're talking about, for example, the latest reporting that there was top- secret information, that's very obviously classified to anybody who works in this area of national security.

Top secret is not well, maybe, kind of, sort of. It's very sensitive. In fact, it is graded by how much danger would be done to national security if it were to be disclosed or improperly protected, by the way. Her server is not properly protected. That is known. That is agreed to. She said there was no classified. Now there is classified.

The defenses are essentially twofold. She did not know -- now this is the secretary of state who is getting classified briefings all the time. She didn't know, which is not really a defense. And on top of that, she said that they were not even in there in the first place. They were classified after the fact, which is also not a defense because the information, not the markings at the top and bottom, is what is protected under federal law.

She would have known this. She had to know this and she just decided that she was going to do things her own way. Do I think she will be held accountable? Probably not.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: A lower-level, if you were a GS10 in some agency, you would be looking at a federal criminal prosecution. At a minimum, you would be fired and you would never hold a security clearance again.

[15:20:04]

CALLAN: You know, what I think is the interesting issue, though, here that is presented by this is with the transition to e-mail communication that's taken place in all parts of American lives how many others in Washington are taking their computers home?

(CROSSTALK)

CALLAN: How many members of Congress are doing this and communicating back and forth?

It used to be this was written stuff in files kept in file rooms and you would leave it at the office. We have the ability to take the office home. I'm betting there's a lot of Washington, D.C., that's very, very worried about what's going to be found in those e-mails.

SEXTON: Which is why Hillary should do secure e-mail and not create her own server, for all the reasons that he just laid out.

BALDWIN: We will talk about depending on what happens here with any kind of investigations, what accountability will look like, potentially.

Buck Sexton, thank you for your opinion. Paul Callan, thank you very much.

CALLAN: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Next here, this is phenomenal today, this rare reporting of a historic speech by Martin Luther King Jr., one of the first times he used the phrase "I have a dream" before he ever gave that famous, famous speech there in Washington. You will hear that decades-old recording next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:25:15]

BALDWIN: Four little words that moved the nation, "I have a dream."

Months before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered those iconic words there on the National Mall in Washington in 1963, he rehearsed his speech in front of a small group inside of a high school gym in North Carolina and that never before-heard-audio just released.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER: I have a dream tonight. It is a dream rooted deeply in the American dream.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Joining me now, the man who discovered this treasure, North Carolina State University English professor Jason Miller.

Professor, welcome.

JASON MILLER, AUTHOR, "ORIGINS OF THE DREAM: HUGHES'S POETRY AND KING'S RHETORIC": Thank you, Brooke.

BALDWIN: This is incredible. How did you stumble upon this?

MILLER: Back in 2008, I started the process of successfully documenting that Dr. King's dream had its origin in the poetry of Langston Hughes.

And though I traveled all around the country at several archives holding the actual drafts of Dr. King's speeches and the authentic handwritten drafts of Hughes' poems, the most interesting evidence I found was an hour away from where I live in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and I found this audiotape, a reel-to-reel tape about this large, seven inches in diameter.

The box it was in had rust on it. The reel was cracked and the end of the tape was frayed, but I was hopeful because the box was labeled "Dr. King's Address, November 27, 1962." And if it held that, I knew we had something very, very special.

BALDWIN: I cannot imagine even finding a box that is labeled Dr. King's address. You have this sort of piece of history in your hands. Can you tell me about when he addressed -- what was it -- it was a high school gym back in '62?

MILLER: It was. It's Booker T. Washington Gymnasium. It still stands there today and he was invited by the Rocky Mount Voters Improvement League

In this speech, Dr. King is humorous, he's serious and he ends with his three most dramatic endings. He goes into his how long, not long set piece that he made famous at the final march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Then he says eight lines of I have a dream and then he goes into let freedom ring.

It's a combination of all these amazing things that the residents of Rocky Mount knew about, but we haven't been able to hear. When you hear Dr. King rapping on the podium, the audience reaction and the way he delivers, the 20th century's, perhaps the 20th century's greatest orator, there's really no substitute.

BALDWIN: Let's listen to more.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

KING: Your life in terrible need, and all men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Why do you think he did this, so much of it verbatim in this high school gym in North Carolina before that following year? What do you make of all of this?

MILLER: Well, the thing that's most exciting for me as a scholar is this is not only a new tape, it's not only the first documented time of I have a dream, but as a scholar who was working on my book, "Origins of the Dream," which is now available, this was actually a key piece of evidence in documenting and confirming Langston Hughes' own belief that Dr. King's dreams were related to his poetry.

And so as far back as 1956, Dr. King has started rewriting lines of Hughes' poem "I Dream a World." Then, later, in 1959, he started riffing off Hughes' poem "Dream Deferred" by preaching about shattered dreams.

BALDWIN: "Dream Deferred," yes.

MILLER: Absolutely.

And then in 1960, the two actually exchanged letters where Dr. King asked for Hughes to write a personal poem and of course the centerpiece theme of that poem, which was unpublished until my book, is the subject of dreams.

So, Dr. King had long been fascinated and quoted Hughes' poems from memory. And so the development at this stage is him revisiting one more time how to combine and interrelate in his own language prophecy, the American dream and the dream poetry of Langston Hughes.

BALDWIN: "Dream Deferred," one of my favorites from my Harlem renaissance studies. Makes me think of "Raisin in the Sun."

Professor Jason Miller, thank you so much. Incredible find.

MILLER: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

BALDWIN: Next, photo going viral shows these two police officers both as you can see on their hands his life matters, pointing to one another. One of those officers will join me live coming up.

Also, we have an update on the breaking news,a blast so massive it was felt and heard from miles away in a city that is the fourth largest port city in the world. We will take you to China coming up.

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