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Discussion on November Vote; Job Report Numbers Examined; Video Released of Freddie Gray Protests. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired August 05, 2016 - 09:30   ET

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


[09:30:00] JERRY BADER, "THE JERRY BADER SHOW" HOST: I wouldn't. I get asked question a lot. I'm #NeverTrump, #NeverHillary. And that's what I'm going to do. I haven't decided yet. Gary Johnson is a possibility. I'm not going to stay home. I bought a vote down ticket. But, I can't support either one.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Is there any sense that Republicans in the state of Wisconsin, at least some of them, are considering a vote for Clinton?

BADER: You know, I certainly as far as I know, no elected officials, you know, as you're seeing and some of the other parts of the country. Have I personally in my life heard people who have always voted Republican say they would consider a possibility? Yes, I've heard that.

COSTELLO: Do you think they will?

BADER: I don't know. I am not a mind reader, and I suppose, I would have to trust them to be honest, they tell me what they did in the poll is what they did. I don't know, I can tell you this she is leading in the polls here in Wisconsin.

And still, for a large segment and by large, I mean somewhere in the 25 percent range, there are people who normally vote Republican that I don't think they're going to vote for him and what they do is, you know, I can't predict. But yes, it's critical though what happens here.

COSTELLO: All right, Jerry Bader, thanks so much. And thanks for sticking it out with us with technical problems. Thanks Jerry Bader for joining me this morning.

BADER: Thanks Carol.

COSTELLO: All right, we are following breaking news on the economy. Wall Street, looking at a strong open this morning after we learned just about an hour ago, that 255,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy last month that is the second straight month of solid gains.

The unemployment rate stays the same at 4.9 percent. We'll talk to Deputy Labor Secretary Chris Lu about this in just a few minutes. As soon he gets in front of a camera. But again, the economy added to 255,000 jobs and that's exceeded expectations. I'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:36:05] COSTELLO: We are following breaking news on the economy. The Dow jumping 100 points at the open, after hearing the news that 255,000 jobs were added last month. That's the second straight month of solid gains.

The unemployment rate stayed the same though, 4.9 percent. Here to talk about that, I'm joined by Chris Lu, he is Deputy Secretary for the U.S. Department of Labor. Welcome, sir.

CHRIS LU, DEPUTY LABOR SECRETARY: Carol, thank you for having me.

COSTELLO: First of all, congratulations on a good report.

LU: It was a great report. It shows continued strong growth across a broad base of different sectors. It's not only the longest job growth in history. We've paid 15 million jobs during the course of this recovery. So, across the board, this was a fantastic report.

COSTELLO: And of course, sometimes numbers don't tell the whole story. I was talking to our Chief Business Correspondent Christine Romans, she called this report a Goldilocks number, strong growth, but not enough to make the fed raise interest rates. Does the White House agree?

LU: Well, Carol we make a practice out of not commenting on what the fed will or won't do. We are continuing to focus on how we can keep the economic recovery going. And to the extent there is more we can do with certainly the area wages. In this month, we saw wage growth increase at 2.6 annualized rate.

That is, the best since the beginning of this recovery, but we need to realize that far too many workers at seen stagnant wages over the course of decades. So there is more we need to do on that front.

COSTELLO: And, you know, that Republicans and Donald Trump will say the number, this number that you've released isn't quite right, because there are millions of Americans who have dropped out of the labor force and our counted as unemployed. What's the real unemployment number in your mind?

LU: Well, the real unemployment rate is 4.9 percent and that's how we have been counting this for years. This idea that somehow the numbers are cooked or that there is an unemployment rate of 40 percent, it's simply ludicrous and it depends if you want to count 16-year-olds and 80-year-olds. We don't ...

COSTELLO: What about those people who have dropped out of the work force because they can't find jobs and by that I'm specifically talking about for example, people over 55?

LU: Well, you're right. We look carefully at the labor force participation rate, and it did tick up slightly this month ...

COSTELLO: My goodness, I can't hear you any more, Mr. Lu.

LU: Can you hear me?

COSTELLO: Can you fix his audio?

LU: Hello.

COSTELLO: I still apologize for that. I think little gremlins are affecting us this morning. And I apologize to Mr. Lu. But, you get the gist. The Obama administration very happy with the latest jobs report, 255,000 jobs added to the economy, the unemployment rate stays at 4.9 percent.

OK, so, for more, let's talk about this with our panel. Do we have our panel? Somebody got to talk to me. Do we have our panel?

[09:39:00] Look, I'm going to take a break. I'll be back with much more in the "Newsroom."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: OK we're back and everything's going well now, I want to bring back in the Deputy Secretary of Labor of Chris Lu, thanks for sticking around. I did want to get your answer to that final question. What is the real unemployment rate? That is, people who have simply stopped looking for jobs?

LU: Well, Carol, the unemployment rate is 4.9 percent. But I think the thrust of your question is, how do we get more people back in the labor force and that's something we're committed to. And it's not only the 55 year old factory worker whose job has been laid off. It's the 22 year old who graduates from college and can't find a full-time job. It's the mother who has taken time off to have a child and wants to get back into the labor force.

And we know the right policies. We know that paid leave policies helps more people get into the labor force. We know that sensible broad based growth policies, like infrastructure spending, create good paying jobs that help people rise into the middle class.

COSTELLO: All right, Chris Lu, thank you so much for sticking around.

LU: My pleasure.

COSTELLO: And thank you for joining me this morning. So let's talk about the economy some more with our panel.

The Director for the University of Virginia Center for Politics, Larry Sabato is here and two of our CNN Political Commentators join me, Donald Trump supporter, Kayleigh McEnany and Hillary Clinton supporter, Hilary Rosen.

Welcome to all of you. So, Larry, good morning, so, Larry that these jobs reports come out, it appears to be strong, 255,000 jobs added to the economy. How might this play?

LARRY SABATO, DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA CENTER FOR POLITICS: Well, it is good news for Hillary Clinton. It balances the bad news of that earlier report about the growth of the gross domestic product, which was only 1.2 percent in the second quarter.

[09:45:04] Carol, something I've learned over the years. There is a blizzard of numbers related to the economy. These reports come out constantly. The real question is how does the voter interpret them? And there has been a lot of research there.

Surprise, surprise the voter cares about the economy that he or she knows. That is, is he employed? Is she employed? How about the immediate family members, are they fully employed? Are they happy with their wages? If yes, they tend to vote for the incumbent party, unless their party I.D. contradicts it. If no, then they're inclined to go with the opposition.

So, the numbers are interesting, and we love chewing on them, but the real numbers that matter are the individual microscopic numbers for each individual and family.

COSTELLO: Hilary, I think Larry is right. If you don't have job, you look at that jobs report and say "He's not doing me any favors."

HILARY ROSEN, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, true and we saw in our CNN poll earlier this week that the majority of voters are feeling better, not just about the direction of the country, but about the job that President Obama is doing.

And I think, you know, as you rightly asked Deputy Secretary Lu, do we have an economy that is moving forward and the answer clearly is yes and clearly, it is not enough but not in these jobs reports are families that are feeling better because they're participating in a sharing economy, as an Uber driver, or as, you know, an Arabian bee Hollister, things like that and so, you have a very changing economic environment, and you need a candidate and a leader and a president who understands the changing nature of work.

Who understands that women make up more than half of the workforce today, and, you know, Donald Trump announces his economic counsel yesterday, and it is all white men. That is just -- it is not where we want to go as a country. It's not where we are in the current economic environment.

COSTELLO: OK, so, Kayleigh, I want you to respond to that because Mr. Trump did release the names of the members of his economic advisors. There are 15 names, lots of them are tycoons. You know, real estate experts and, you know, their business is real estate but only one economist is in the mix. No women, no minorities. Should that concern voters?

KAYLEIGH MCENANY, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I don't think so. I know that they like to look at every single issue through the prism of race and gender, but most people want an economy that works. That works for minorities, that works for millennials, that works for everyone because right now, under the Obama administration the victims of the Obama economy are minority, young men or millennials.

So the fact that Donald Trump put out a list of names that include businessmen who know how the economy work, like Harold Hamm and Tom Barrack, that is what we need. We need people who understand the economy because a politician who has never, you know, run anything in his life, which is Barack Obama, hadn't run anything in his life when he took office.

The results are devastates.1.2 percent GDP, and he is set to become the first president in American history not to have an annual 3 percent rate of growth. It is horrendous to the economy and the numbers speak for themselves.

COSTELLO: The economy is not horrendous. I just want to (inaudible) no, I don't want to go on down that line but the economy is sluggish, there's no doubt about that, but it's not horrendous.

MCENANY: Eight million more people on poverty, 11 million wants food stamps yet ...

COSTELLO: And remember, we did have a huge recession in 2008. I just wanted this to be a fair discussion. That's all. And Kayleigh, I get it. A lot of people feel -- still feel pain, and I get that. And the economy is sluggish for many people, I get that. But to say it's horrendous, I think that's going a step too far.

I did want to ask you this, Kayleigh though because, Mr. Trump agrees with Mrs. Clinton on one thing, both of them want to build infrastructure, right? And I want to get the numbers right, so I'm going to look at this. So, Hillary Clinton has proposed $275 billion for infrastructure and Mr. Trump has proposed $550 billion in infrastructure. Here is what he said in a recent interview. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We have a great plan, and we are going to rebuild our infrastructure, because without -- and by the way, her numbers is a fraction of what we're talking about. We need much more money than that to rebuild our infrastructure. A road ...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How much are you talking about for infrastructure?

TRUMP: Well, I would say, at least double her numbers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: So he wants to invest all that money into rebuilding infrastructure.

President Obama has wanted to do that forever, so some might say it's a pretty surprising that Donald Trump has the same idea, Kayleigh.

MCENANY: Well, what Obama has wanted to do is to take taxpayer money. I mean, he has already had 787 billion by the way in stimulus which clearly did not do anything. He wants to taxpayer moneys and not pay for infrastructure in any possible way.

Donald Trump went on to say in that interview, he wants to do infrastructure bonds which is rather noble way to fund something rather than just taking taxpayer dollars and revving up our debt even more.

[09:50:01] We're about to hit, you know, 20 trillion. So, he has a novel way to approach this and I think it's pretty interesting unlike Hillary Clinton who, again, wants to run up debt.

COSTELLO: OK. So, Larry, I don't know what ...

ROSEN: That's true, actually ...

COSTELLO: Go ahead, Hilary.

ROSEN: Well, Let's just characterize Hillary Clinton's plan correctly and indeed our stimulus has been working. We've had 80 months of job growth. So, but Hillary Clinton is looking at this in multiple ways, which is we do not want to run up debt the way that Donald Trump is talking about, more bonding authority, along with a multiple trillion dollar tax cut that most economists think will bankrupting the economy in a way that puts more debt on, trade barriers that end up rising prices for consumers.

Hillary Clinton's balanced approach is to say we need to invest in infrastructure but we need to pay for it. There's a couple of ways. You buy -- you use an infrastructure bank with repatriated tax funds. You use corporate investment. You close loopholes and you invest, importantly, in education, paid family leave, the kinds of policies that stimulate people going back to work.

Donald Trump is only about sort of this trickle-down economic theory, let's give all the money to sort of the rich folk and hope they spend it in a way that gives money down the line. It's just never proven that it worked. Ronald Reagan almost bankrupted the economy with it ...

COSTELLO: So, I want to get Larry in here because he's my impartial guy. So, Larry, infrastructure, lot of Americans might support that, do they?

SABATO: Well, I think it's marvelous actually that both candidates have a major infrastructure rebuilding campaign. So, maybe whoever wins will get it because Carol in 50 years, we're not going to be able to call ourselves a civilization unless we rebuild our infrastructure. It's crumbling in many regions of the country.

So, this is all good news but, you know, what this discussion is proven to be again with my very able co-panelists. The two most important letters in the English language today are "D" and "R." If you're a Democrat, you see all the good news about the economy. If you're a Republican, you see all the bad news about the economy. Maybe you put two sides of the coin together and you can actually go out like it's a dump (ph).

COSTELLO: All right, I have to leave it there, Larry Sabato, Kayleigh McEnany, Hilary Rosen and thanks to all of you. I'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [09:56:39] COSTELLO: The FBI is now releasing several hours of footage, it was captured by a surveillance Air Force plane flying above the Freddie Gray protest in Baltimore last year. As you can see from the -- you can see the crowds down there. And later you'll see the fire that started at the CVA so this is coming as Jean Casarez sat down with the attorneys of the officers charged in Freddie Gray's death. She joins me now. Good morning.

JEAN CASAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You know, it's interesting that video was just released and the defense attorneys first time we're hearing from them here on CNN, are saying that they believe these charges were politically motivated.

Now of course, there was a gag order so we couldn't hear from them before that. But they also tell me they made the decision early on that they were not going to talk, that they did not want their clients, the police officers in Baltimore, to be tried in the public spotlight.

But what we're learning now is that what they say that they heard back then that they could not talk about until now was that when these charges were about to come about, they learned there were conversations inside the prosecutor's office saying that that knife, remember, the knife that was on the person of Freddie Gray, was actually illegal and so the charges and at be arrest would have been warranted.

Marilyn Mosby publicly said the knife was a legal knife, that he able to have it, that the charges were not warranted. Listen to the defense response at this point to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARC ZAYON, ATTORNEY FOR EDWARD NERO: So from moment one, it was our position that Miss Mosby was misleading everyone. And continued to do that until she had no choice after she was caught and we inspected the knife and then she changed the focus. Because your singular goal (ph) was to -- and I charge in her mind hopefully prosecute and convict these officers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CASAREZ: Now, we reached out to the state attorney's office for a response on this. They said they do have no comment. The defense went on to tell me, and we heard this in open court, that through the discovery process, they would learn about possibly exculpatory materials that they didn't have, they would ask the prosecution for it, they couldn't get it, the judge would finally demand the prosecution hand it over, but what about the medical examiner that the lead detective said she had in her notes and she was toying with that this was all an accident.

Marilyn Mosby has said, the lead detective made that up, wrote those in the notes after the fact. Here's the defense response to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MICHAEL BEISKY, ATORNEY FOR BRIAN RICE: We'll never know. The problem with this case is that it was rushed so quickly from the beginning that no one took their time just sort of sit down with the evidenced with the medical records, with the witness statements to really figure out what happened.

The medical examiner issued her report in rapid time. The state attorney's office issued these charges in rapid time. And so there's a question of the credibility of any of these reports base on the absolute lack of investigation and time that was put into investigating and writing and drafting them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CASAREZ: Now, of course, Judge Barry Williams has dismissed all the outstanding charges. Three of the officers were acquitted by the judge in this case.

The defense wants their clients to be deemed innocent as a matter of law however, because they believe that just saying there wasn't enough evidence to prove their guilt is not enough.

[10:00:00] Marilyn Mosby stands by the charges, stands by the probable cause, that there was none to arrest them since she is not anti- police, she is anti-police brutality.

COSTELLO: All right, Jean Cazarez many thanks to you appreciate it.

The next hour CNN Newsrooms start now.