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Don Lemon Tonight

Trump Says Clinton And Obama Are "Founders Of ISIS"; Trump Scrambles To Open More Offices; Clinton Speaks On Economic Plan. Aired 11p-12a ET

Aired August 11, 2016 - 23:00   ET

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


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[23:00:49] DON LEMON, CNN HOST: Donald Trump doubling down on an accusation against president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

This is CNN TONIGHT. I'm Don Lemon.

Trump claims ISIS honors both of them and for this reason.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: I call President Obama and Hillary Clinton the founders of ISIS. They're the founders.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: He also says that both would be eligible for the terror group's most valuable player award. Clinton says those remarks showed Trump is not fit to be president.

A lot to get through, but I want to begin this hour with CNN's Ryan Lizza -- or with Ryan Lizza I should say, CNN Political Commentator and a Washington Correspondent for the New Yorkers, so I can still call you CNN's Ryan Lizza and Andre Bauer, the former Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina who is a Trump supporter.

Great to have both of you on. So, Ryan, here's Trump this morning on CNBC.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: People are complaining that I said he was the founder of ISIS?

LEMON: I'm wondering how you think that's going to play in some battleground states.

TRUMP: I don't know. I don't know. Whatever it is, it is. Look, all I do is tell the truth. I'm a truth teller. All I do is tell truth and if at the end of 90 days I fall in short because I'm somewhat politically correct, even though I'm supposed to be the smart one and even though I'm supposed to have a lot of good ideas. It's okay. You know, I go back to a very good way of life.

(END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: OK. So, a couple of significant things here first, Ryan. First, he says that he a truth teller while saying something that's completely not true, that is false. Second, he says that he lose and it does - if he does, then he's going to go back, you know, and have a good life. It'll be just fine. He's going to take a long vacation. So, tell me what you think of this.

RYAN LIZZA, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I mean, you said it. I mean, the first thing is the ridiculousness of saying he's a truth teller when he's lying. Obviously, Barrack Obama is not the founder of ISIS. I mean, if you're going to tell an untruth, at least make it like semi-plausible. Nobody thinks that Barrack Obama is the founder of ISIS. I mean, you know, if you're going to make a political point and bend the truth, it's got to be in the realm of the possible. So, I mean, I just, you know, it's just an absurdity.

On the other thing, though, he sounds like someone who is looking defeat in the face and is looking at these polls and looking at being 7 to 10 points down in most of the polls since the conventions and starting to wrap his head round the fact that things aren't working out for him and that whatever strategy he had for the general election, it's not working and he's talking about losing.

Are the bad polls getting to him, Andre Bauer?

ANDRE BAUER, FORMER LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR OF SOUTH CALIFORNIA: I don't think so. I think Donald Trump is shrewd in the way he tries to connect with people. He doesn't have a Washington dialect. He's unorthodox. We all know that.

Sometimes it's not the way I would want him as a candidate to approach things but he's come with a different angle, Don, that is appealing to a lot of people. What he's trying to do, I think, is reinforce that this is another matter where the U.S. has gotten involved and it hasn't been solved, and it's just another Washington problem that we continue to kick the can on loss of American life, loss of American dollar, but we're not solving the problem.

LEMON: That's all well and good, and that part is true that that's not exactly --

LIZZA: Yes. And, Andre, you just did it so well.

LEMON: That's not what he said. He just said something. Doesn't the truth matter, Andre?

BAUER: The truth matters. And I think he is trying to reinforce a message here. Again, not like I would do it, but, you know, with my last race I was very unsuccessful so I'm not sure I can coach anybody on how to get elected at this point in time.

LIZZA: Look, how to deal with ISIS is one of the most important issues in this presidential campaign, right? Not an easy problem. Obama has had mixed -- a mixed record on this. If you were a sophisticated republican, you could be prosecuting a case against this administration, against Hillary Clinton about how to deal with terrorism and how to deal with ISIS. And instead, Trump just goes off the deep end and says Obama founded ISIS. I mean, it just doesn't make sense.

[23:05:00] I mean, Andre, just what you said in a couple of sentences, was more articulate and made more sense than what the nominee part is. That I mean I think that's what so many republicans and so many observers of this race find puzzling that even lay-ups, even arguments even arguments and cases that he could be prosecuting against the Democrats, he just -- he can't do it. He goes off into these exaggerations and untruths.

LEMON: Hang on, hang on. I want to get in to this, I want to play this because I alluded to it earlier. This is later on in the interview.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I'll just keep doing the same thing I'm doing right now and at the end let's see if it's going to work or I'm going to, you know, I'm going to have a very, very nice, long vacation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: So that's the vacation thing. He's saying that, you know, these days it's not going to -- he's not going to change as a candidate but if it doesn't go the way that he expects it in the next 89 days or so, he's just going to have a nice long vacation. Does that sound like he's surrendering in some way or saying, yes, yes, I might lose here? I've never heard him speak that way.

LIZZA: What is your question, Don?

LEMON: Either one, either. Andre, take it if you want.

BAUER: Ryan, you're welcome to it. To me, I hope he's playing good all southern possum is what we could where's he's trying to say, "Hey, you know, don't look over. You know, I'm really out of this race." And I really think there is an undercurrent here much like Brexit, that there is a lot of folks that are distraught, so frustrated. They are looking for some type of substantive change and Donald Trump is that vehicle. Would I like to see him do some things differently? Absolutely, no question. Do I think he'd be a better candidate than Hillary Clinton? Yes.

LEMON: Yes.

LIZZA: Yes, I agree with you. This should be a change of election. It's very hard for the same party to win three terms in a row. Hillary Clinton has some very serious weaknesses and vulnerabilities and I think a slightly more gifted Republican candidate would be taking advantage of them and this would be a much closer race.

I agree with you about Brexit. I think there are some similarities on what's going on in our electorate and Great Britain's. But Trump is just, he's -- I mean, what can you say? He's not a sophisticated candidate. He doesn't know how to prosecute a case against his opponent in a way that wins him new converts rather than just doubling down on the 40 percent of the electorate that he's already got in his pocket.

I will say this, thank God he is saying I'll go off and be OK and, you know, go on vacation and, you know, take a nap rather than doing what he was doing recently and talking about how if he loses it means the election was rigged. I mean, that's frankly to me, that's the most troubling thing that Trump has said.

LEMON: Yes. I want to play something he said to Hugh Hewitt today about this founder of ISIS business. Let's play it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HUGH HEWITT, RADIO HOST: Last night, you said the president was the founder of ISIS. I know what you meant, you meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.

TRUMP: No, I think he's the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way.

HEWITT: But he's not sympathetic to them, he hates them. He's trying to kill them.

TRUMP: He was the founder --

HEWITT: By using the term founder, they're hitting with you on this again. Mistake?

TRUMP: No, it's no mistake, everyone is liking it, I think they are liking it. So let me ask you, do you not like that?

HEWITT: I don't. I think I would say they created -- they lost the peace, they created the Libyan vacuum and they created the vacuum into which ISIS came. But they didn't create ISIS.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: So. I'm wondering, Andre, if his campaign is supportive of letting him go off and say things like that because it almost sounded like a marketing strategy that he was, you know, testing this particular thing out. Don't you like it? Don't you whatever? When he's -- his supporters and he tries to make it out that, you know, it is liberals who are against him, but he has equal amounts of criticism from conservatives and from liberals. And it sounds like he's testing a marketing message rather than running for President of the United States.

BAUER: Well, Don, clearly there's a message to get you through the primary and he was masterful at it. He got through some of the most skilled elected officials at our time. But Lee Atwater years ago talked about broadening the tent. And as Republicans, after you have to get top the primary, you go tot broaden the tent and get modern Democrats, old Reagan Democrats is what they used to call him, and independents. And so, I hope his message is doing that. Again, I pivot to him and say he's found a better way to connect with voters than I did. And so I hope he's doing that because I want to see him as the next president but I want to make sure we're targeting folks that we don't have in the party now and we're bringing them in.

LEMON: Ryan the "Cincinnati Inquirer" report that Trumps campaign is scrambling to set up offices across Ohio. Politico is recording that Trump has just one field office open in Florida. And the campaign has just opened their first three offices in Pennsylvania. If they are going to be relying on Trumps PERSONA and message, how are they going to be prepared organizationally when things really start to heat up?

[23:10:07] I mean it's 89 days. The fire is coming right now.

LIZZA: Absolutely. I mean this race right now is looking like the greatest political science experiment in history comes from the persona. Because we're going to get a real laboratory view of what happens when one campaign spends hundreds of millions of dollars in ads and has a national ground game and one campaign basically has none of that. We're really going to get to see if these things adds voter targeting work because the Trump campaign hasn't invested in it.

Politico also reporting tonight that the RNC and Trump have a pretty significant meeting coming up in Florida, I believe, where, you know, some people are saying this is a meeting where the RNC is going to start to decide whether they need to start pulling the plug on the campaign and redirecting resources to the House, Senate, gubernatorial races, down ballot races and essentially give up on him. I think that's the big risk right now if he doesn't turn it around is that the party just gives up on him.

LEMON: Yes, Dana Bash was on at 10 p.m. Eastern reporting on that. But her reporting is a little bit different. She's saying it would be difficult, maybe not realistic for them to start taking money away from Trump and putting it, you know up and down ballot.

BAUER: Well, he makes a couple great points.

LEMON: Yes.

BAUER one that just interesting for fodder, Florida neck and neck most polls say right now. Imagine this, she has spent tens of millions of dollars in Florida on ads. He's dark. She has all these teams set up throughout the state and it's still neck and neck. He's raised $80 plus million. We know don't know how much he spent on raising that revenue but we know he's raising dollars. And so, once he puts that money to the pavement and starts creating this voter base and starts going up on TV, it shows there is still a serious race here and he has a great shot at winning the presidency.

LEMON: I've got to run.

LIZZA: It's getting late, though, Andre.

LEMON: Maybe he's saving it all till the final push at the end. So thank you gentlemen. I appreciate it. Still ahead, Hillary Clinton travels to Michigan to talk about her economic plans and slams Donald Trump claiming his proposals would benefit the rich at the expense of middle class Americans. We're going to talk about that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[23:15:48] LEMON: Hillary Clinton giving a speech today talking about her economic plans and blasting Donald Trump's polls. I want to bring in now Mr. Ali Velshi Global Affairs and Economic Analyst and Grover Norquist -- Mr. Grover Norquist, President of American for Tax Reform. I'm so happy to have both of you on. I'm so happy to have both of you on. So, let's see. I'm going to start with you Ali.

ALI VELSHI, GLOBAL AFFAIRS AND ECONOMIC ANALYST: Right.

LEMON: I want to get your thought. This is on -- what you thought about Hillary Clinton's economic speech. Can I please --

VELSHI: Yes, go ahead. No, I just going to say, I'm interested to hear from Grover because Grover and I have been discussing these things for years. Grover is a big, big fan of tax reductions but the Trump plan is so weird because he's got expenses going up and taxes going down. That's not something that --

LEMON: You're reading ahead in the textbook.

VELSHI: I'm just --

LEMON: Hold on.

VELSHI: Look at his expression. Just keep Grover's face on the TV.

LEMON: Among the things that Hillary Clinton talks about is that, she will implement the paid family leave.

VELSHI: Yes.

LEMON: She wants universal Pre-K, she wants debt-free collage, expand social security, raise the deferral minimum wage --

VELSHI: Yes.

LEMON: -- invest in infrastructure. She also went after Donald Trump. We'll play the sound bit and then we'll discuss.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON, (D) PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Now, it's true that both of us have proposed to cut taxes for middle class families. He's making a big promise. But his advisors have said, his own advisors have said, he may not stand by them. Instead, the tax cuts he doubled down on in his speech in Detroit on Monday offer trillions to the richest Americans and corporations. One of the differences between Donald Trump and me is I'm telling you

what I will do, I'm laying out my plans, and I will stand by them, and I want you to hold me accountable for delivering results.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: Ali, did she offer more specifics, do think?

VELSHI: Well, yes, but Hillary Clinton has a program for everything, right? As our friend Richard Quest told me earlier, she has a program for tying your shoes.

Donald Trump doesn't tend to burden himself with specifics. He speaks in broad generalities. But she still comes down. Grover and I are going to agree on one thing, it comes down to the math.

Hillary Clinton go a series of expensive proposals. Some of them might be really interesting from a financial perspective, including her infrastructure bank, which I really like. But, for instance, free college, that's a very complicated proposal that she had to adopt because Bernie Sanders basically forced her to. It's very expensive. It's not sure if it achieves the goal that you're looking for and may cause college costs to increase.

LEMON: So what --

VELSHI: But she's going to cut tax -- she's going to raise taxes on the rich. And she's going to take away carried in -- she is at least saying how she might pay for it.

LEMON: But are you saying it's not realistic? Do you think it's realistic?

Grover, what do you think of what I was saying?

GROVER NORQUIST, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN FOR TAX REFORM: Well, Hillary Clinton starts by talking about more than a trillion dollars in tax increases over the next decade. She says she's going to tax the rich but she endorsed and said she would sign the family act, which is a wage tax on everybody, under pressure from Sanders. She endorsed that soda tax in Philadelphia, taxing soda is not taxing rich people.

She has a 25 percent tax on guns which does not bother rich people. She has the 7 of the 20 taxes in Obama care directly hit middle income people. And she supports all of those. She likes to tell you, she only wants to tax rich people but that's not her plan. And even her party came out endorsed the carbon tax and her campaign said, not right away. A carbon tax is an energy tax, it's a gas tax. These are taxes, directly hitting the middle class.

And then, she turns around and says that when Trump call for taking the corporate rate from 35 to 15, she attacks this. Every economist in the United States understands that our corporate rate at 39 percent when you count the state taxes is above the European average of 25. We're above the British number, we're above Canada.

VELSHI: Oh, no, don't bring Canada into this.

NORQUIST: There are 26 percent, we're at 39. How do you compete when you have that kind of damage that we do to ourselves?

VELSHI: Grover, and even bigger issue though is that --

NORQUIST: 31 of 34 of the countries, they always see the countries have cut their corporate rate since 2000. Not the United States. And Hillary is blind to the damage she's doing to the jobs that she's -- not created.

VELSHI: Can I ask you this Grover?

NORQUIST: Yes.

[23:20:04] VELSHI: I just want to ask you because Donald Trump's best case scenario that he talked about yesterday that is he -- his plan a $3 trillion hole over ten years. No economist can get to those numbers. Most people are saying $9 to $14 trillion. It's actually -- His math is worse than Hillary Clinton's on this.

NORQUIST: Well, his plan is increasingly looking like the Paul Ryan plan. If you look at both of his comments sounded and the way it's mentioned together. And if Trump is president, Paul Ryan and Orrin Hatch will sit down and they'll come up with something very close to what was put forward.

Hillary doesn't talk about expensing, which is the most job creating thing you can do. The Democrats historically, Ronston Husky (ph) wanted that. Obama has a version of expensing which allows you to expense right away for business investment. Tremendous creator, all Hillary has done is talk about more government spending, higher taxes and then she is declared war on the sharing economy. If you are an Uber driver, she wants to make Uber illegal because it will crack down --

LEMON: Grover, let me ask you this.

NORQUIST: -- crack down on independent contracting.

LEMON: Let me ask you this. She calls it when she was in her criticism, the Trump loophole.

NORQUIST: Yes.

LEMON: She said this was only a tax break -- a tax break for the rich. Is she correct?

NORQUIST: Lower rates -- No, that's nonsense. There -- If we had grown at Reagan rates instead of Obama rates for the last seven years, there would be 14 million more Americans working.

(CROSSTALK)

VELSHI: -- Grover, this line of using Reagan is kind of weird. Why don't we compare ourselves to every other country over the last seven years as opposed to something that happened decades ago?

NORQUIST: Because we know we can grow at 4 percent a year and instead we're growing at 1 percent now. We were growing at 2 percent.

VELSHI: 2.2 annualized.

NORQUIST: 14 -- yes -- if we'd grown at reasonable rates which we can get to 4 percent, there would be 14 million people working.

VELSHI: There's no --

NORQUIST: Those are the people who don't have job. Hillary doesn't --

VELSHI: There's nobody that's comparable to the United States. With all the different policies that all the different countries have, there's no country --

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: Hold on. Hold on. And Grover, I want you to respond to this. You and Ali.

NORQUIST: Yes.

LEMON: Because I keep hearing this argument every day. Obama is the only president in history where our growth will be less than 3 percent. It's at 2 percent.

NORQUIST: Yes.

LEMON: Now, it's at 1 percent. And Ali has been saying, well, why are you comparing it to, you know, something that happened, you know, seven, eight, nine, 10 or not seven years ago -- decades ago. Why aren't we comparing it to what's happening around the world now?

NORQUIST: Because Obama's policies are not that different from France is. What they're different from is America under Reagan that there is a policy difference. Reagan cut rates, reigned in spending from what congress wanted and deregulated under Obama and Clinton we had --

VELSHI: What were the marginal taxes that Reagan started with and Reagan ended with?

NORQUIST: 70 down to 25.

VELSHI: OK, but you know what, if anybody goes from 70 down to 25, I'll grow an afro. I mean, it's going to be such a calamitous change. We're not talking about that. We're talking about 39 to 35. You brought up Canada, right? 15 percent corporate tax rate, which you endorse --

VELSHI: -- seems to be working for Canada. Canada's growth rate hasn't shot through the roof as a result of that. Nobody's has.

NORQUIST: What Trump has put forward, and as have the Republicans in the house and senate, so you can -- you're looking at a United Republican Party, full expensing for business investment, taking the corporate rate from 35 to 15, which would end inversions immediately because there would be no reason for it.

VELSHI: But you do have an example, just to the north of us they've done this year ago and it has not resulted in anywhere close to this 4 percent growth you're talking about. So the point is everything we try all around the world in countries similar to the United States doesn't get us to 4 percent in the last seven years. China, which fully controls its economy can't get it to -- can't goose it upward.

So why do we think that if we do this somehow --

NORQUIST: Running ahead at 4 percent.

VELSHI: No, but they've been decreasing every year, that's my point. That nobody seems to be able to control their economy in a way to get GDP growth higher in this global environment.

NORQUIST: I'm not comparing the United States to some other country. I'm comparing the United States to what the United States has historically been able to do, with the same labor laws.

VELSHI: Before we had -- it's a completely different world, Reagan's time till now. Why are we taking that moment and time when we took rich from a really, really unreasonably high level down to where you took them to, that everybody understands that if you cut taxes that much you'll feel the effect. You'll feel the same effect when take personal taxes down 4.6 percent?

NORQUIST: The growth and this plan come from the corporate rate coming to 15 and full expensing. That's the thing that's really going to dynamically move this forward.

VELSHI: So why didn't it work in Canada?

NORQUIST: One second, it's because Canada is not looking at doing the deregulation that we need to do and that we had -- that can be done by a Trump administration. And looking at renting and spending and -- So those efforts, we have a much better -- much more fluid labor situation, a lot more flexibility because we have independent contractors, which Hillary wants to shutdown.

She has announced she is declaring war on --

(CROSSTALK)

[23:25:11] NORQUIST: -- in the franchise, which a 12 million jobs in franchising and they want to change the rules that make franchising difficult or impossible. She's going after Uber drivers with this effort to crack down on independent contractors. If you sell on and see, all of these people, she doesn't seem to understand how the economy works. A lot of businesses small and large pay individual rates. She wants to raise those because he raised taxes on small business.

LEMON: I'm going to say to go. Thank you, Grover. And I know you have to get out of here because Grover has to get up early to take his kids to, where are you taking bush gardens tomorrow? NORQUIST: Bush gardens. Early. Bright and early.

LEMON: Bright and early. So go home and go to bed. Thank you, Grover. Thank you, Ali. I appreciate it.

NORQUIST: Thank you.

LEMON: Up next. Hillary Clinton's e-mail controversy won't go away, neither where the mystery of Trump's tax returns. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: Hillary Clinton is painting Donald Trump's tax plan as one that would help, well, Donald Trump. Ryan Lizza is back with me, and joining me now, Matt Lewis Senior Contributor to "The Daily Caller", Maria Cardona Democratic Strategist and Clinton supporter, and Trump's supporter Kayleigh McEnany. Now, here's the panel. How are you, guys?

KAYLEIGH MCENANY, TRUMP SUPPORTER: Doing well.

MARIA CARDONA, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Well. How are you?

LEMON: The regulars are here.

All right. So Hillary Clinton is upping the pressure on Trump to release his tax return.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: In his speech on Monday, he called for a new tax loophole. Let's call it "The Trump loophole", because it would allow him to pay less than half the current tax rate on income from many of his companies. He'd pay a lower rate than millions of middle-class families.

One non-Partisan expert at the tax policy center described this plan as, and I quote, "a really nice deal for Donald Trump". Of course it's hard to say how nice because he refuses to do what every other presidential candidate in decades has done and release his tax returns.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: So Kayleigh, you know this is not going to go away. They're going to keep hammering on this or hammering him on this. This is what a new Bloomberg Poll shows. It shows 68 percent of voters say that it bothers them that Trump won't release his tax returns. You aren't worried that this is going to start resonating with voters?

MCENANY: Not at all. What's relevant is that Donald Trump paid his taxes in a lawful manner. He's been under audit ten times. He passed every single audit. He's no in jail. So we know what he's doing in the way he's paying his taxes are lawful. I think it's really ironic here that Hillary Clinton call for transparency which is required by law in the Federal Record's Act to preserve for work-related e-mails, which she destroyed because she didn't want us to see what we saw come out this week about the allegation of the Clinton Foundation.

So, it's rather ironic to call for transparency when she actually violated a law that requires --

LEMON: The first part was good. You answer and then there was a good deflection about parties.

MCENANY: It's true.

CARDONA: Well, it's actually untrue, because --

MCENANY: No, it is true.

CARDONA: -- she did not erase any work related e-mails.

MCENANY: Yes, yes, yes.

CARDONA: The e-mails that she erased were all personal.

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: Let's not get into a lead here, because I think --

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: Let's not get into the lead here.

CARDONA: That's so irresponsible.

LEMON: Let me tell you why. Let's not get into lead here because we have very limited time. I think the e-mail thing stands on its own. She did something that she should not have done. It was a terrible thing to do and I think that stands on its own.

CARDONA: And she's apologized.

LEMON: Well, I just think it stands on its own. It's a bad thing that she did and I don't think it needs to be repeated for every single answer to every question.

Ryan, you say America has a right to know, but the same Bloomberg Poll shows 1/3 of all likely voters say that they're not bothered at all that Trump doesn't release them. Is it possible this is not such a big deal?

LIZZA: What I think about that is our country is basically divided 50/50, right? I mean most of you -- you ask a poll on almost any hot button issue, you've got Hillary supporters on one side, Clinton supporters on the other side.

The fact that you can ask this question and get almost 70 percent of the public to say they want them released or that they're bothered means you have a huge chunk of republicans there saying that this bothers them.

Hey, look, I take Kayleigh's points about bringing up the e-mails, like Hillary Clinton, one of her vulnerabilities in this race are transparency. And all the questions raised by the e-mail saga. And if you want to have the moral authority to prosecute that case as Donald Trump, well, then you've got to do what every other presidential candidate has done in the modern era and show us the tax returns.

LEMON: All right. Well, that's a fair point if we're talking about transparency.

(CROSSTALK)

LIZZA: Don, especially when there are legitimate questions about where his money comes from and whether there's any overseas income.

LEMON: But, you know, I think you bring up a very good point. If she's going to demand these e-mails and she then -- then he, you know, she needs to be transparent as well. And even --

LIZZA: Just politically if he wants --

MCENANY: But it's OK. For me --

LIZZA: Just politically to make that case against her, this would help him. So obviously the campaign has decided that it is better for them -- they have more to lose by releasing those tax returns because there's something in them that they don't want us to see than there is to just gut through this and have us criticize them for the next three months.

CARDONA: That's certainly what it looks like. But if we're going to talk about transparency and fairness, let's compare apples to apples, right? Hillary Clinton has released 38 years of tax returns. Tax returns have been something that presidential candidates have released.

LEMON: She's releasing more tomorrow.

CARDONA: And she's releasing more and Cain is releasing ten years worth. And this has been something presidential candidates have been releasing for the last 40 years. So of course almost 70 percent of Americans think that this is something that presidential candidates shod release because that is something that they believe that they should know about in terms of what was their tax rate. I'm not saying that he did anything illegal, but when you're a multi-billionaire and you are paying zero taxes, I think that's something that's going to rub the American people the wrong way.

LEMON: So every major party presidential candidate sense 1976 has released their taxes.

[23:35:01] To Maria's point of what about tax his tax rate? What if he has paid zero tax rates? Most people will tell you, you know, as a private citizen, they would say, "Hey, go, how do you do it? I would love to be able to do that." But does that fly when you're running for president of the United States?

MATT LEWIS, CNN NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: I don't think this matters. I know this is like breaking the Cardinal rule of debating here. I mean, not here, but just in general. But I don't think it really does matter.

Look, if you asked me, like "Do you think you should see Hillary Clinton's health records?" I would say, "Yes, of course I do." Because we're voyeuristic, we want to know stuff. But like in terms of actually being an issue that there's intensity on, I don't really think there's a big problem with Donald Trump not showing us. And if he didn't pay anything, I think he just says, "Hey, look, I'm smart, of course I didn't pay, I'm a business guy, I know how this works and that's why you need to elect me." So I don't think it matters.

LIZZA: Matt, the American public disagrees with you. Don Lemon just showed us a 68 percent poll that 68 percent of Americans are bothered by this.

LEMON: I really want to know --

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: I also want to know if my president, if someone I'm going to vote for is going to be in office for four years or eight years, I don't know if they're healthy as well. Yes, I do want to see their health records.

LIZZA: If Donald Trump was a wage earner for the last 20 years and he have like some very simple taxes, you know, who's making like a $100,000 and just took a standard deduction, I wouldn't care about his taxes too much. But the fact that he is a billionaire with extremely complicated taxes and hundreds, and we have no visibility into how he has been making his money, I think that's a big deal. I think we need to understand that.

LEWIS: I'm sure you do. I think most reporters would love.

CARDONA: Exactly.

LEWIS: It's probably a treasure trove to go through.

CARDONA: And 70 percent of the American people as well.

LIZZA: It's not a voyeuristic thing. Don't you want to know if he has any foreign income coming in?

LEWIS: I assume that Donald Trump has done all sorts of questionable things. To me it's kind of baked into the cake. And I don't think it's going to move anyway.

LIZZA: Well, Maybe he hasn't. But, in one way or the other, we want to know the fact of that.

CARDONA: I think it's something the American people deserve to know. And the other thing that we will see from there --

LEWIS: Let's make it a law then.

CARDONA: The other things that we will see from there are his foreign business dealings. There are a lot of questions about what his relationship is with people in Russia, with Russian businessmen, with Putin himself. So if he wants to put that to rest, this could be a way to do that. In addition to that, his charitable contributions, which we know he has lied about time and time again.

LEMON: All right. You've got 20 seconds, Kayleigh.

MCENANY: Yes. To Matt's point, I mean the question asked was, "Would you like to see the tax returns?" The question wasn't asked, you know, "Is this going to influence your vote?" That's an entirely different question. This isn't going to influence people's votes. People are concerned about the economy, how to fix their family and ISIS. And at the end of the day, Donald Trump's plans are better than Hillary Clinton.

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: All right. Thank you all. That's it, Ryan, sorry. I got to go.

Coming "The Hunt" is on, CNN's gripping original series returns this Sunday, and the host, John Walsh, he's here to tell us what we can expect.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[23:41:52] LEMON: CNN's "The Hunt" with John Walsh opens a new season on Sunday, and the program has a lot to brag about issues.

Well, with me now is John Walsh, the host of CNN's "The Hunt".

John, you have seek another success story this week on "The Hun", a police captured Christopher Ponce, who was featured on the first season of the show. He was wanted for DUI manslaughter and had been on the run since May of 2013.

How did they finally catch him?

JOHN WALSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Don, first, it's always great to see you. Number two, it's a great capture because they caught him in Spain, and the Spanish police saw him acting very strangely at a bus stop. And you know, our viewers over the last years or so have redirected the search by the marshals in South America or Central America or Mexico because Ponce's family has a Latin background, lived in Tampa, Florida, to Spain, where they -- someone thought that they spotted this guy. But it's a terribly sad story about how entitled spoiled kid with 10 traffic violations, DUI reckless speeding violations gets in the family car, his parent's, to let him drive and he goes out one night drunk, alcohol level twice over the legal limit and kills William Angel, a straight A student who had 10 offers and 10 scholarships to go to college. And crucially wounds in the car that he hit an afghan-veteran, an English guy, an English former soldier.

So Ponce gets house confinement and he gets an ankle bracelet. And I don't know how that ever happened because once that the test came back, it showed he had double the legal limit. So he cooked up a scheme that his back was killing him and he could take the ankle bracelet off to go see the doctor. So, it comes nine months later, comes to trial and he takes off. And so nobody sees him and this is a case that was very personal to me, effective for "The Hunt". And we -- and thank God for informing (ph) the U.S. Marshals, he got nailed on Spain this week.

LEMON: I want to ask you about another, John. It's in the news now. Two female joggers found murdered, Vanessa Marcotte in Massachusetts and Karina Vetrano in Queens New York. They were just killed just days apart, although there is nothing that points to a connection here between the two cases, investigators are ongoing saying they're not ruling anything out. How should they be approaching this investigation?

WALSH: Well, first of all, the M.O.s. So they think -- initially, they're saying could it be the same guy? Because the M.O. is kind of alike, young, single women jogging in a certain time of day, both brutally murdered, looks like both of them fought back and the girl in Massachusetts, the perpetrator burned her hands and her face because he probably figured out that she fought him so hard that there may be DNA under those nails. I don't think they're related personally. But I think they should be telling the world that there's two or one guy that's out there that have crossed that line, grabbed the girls that are out there jogging.

And NYPD has got DNA and said he's not encoded, so he doesn't have a RAP sheet, they New York telling. I don't know why Massachusetts has been talking about whether they have DNA or not.

[23:45:01] And sometimes it takes a way too long to test that DNA. The first thing I would is those two agencies talk together and say, "Do we have the same DNA?" Then we're looking for a serial killer then we got to put the alert out all over the East Coast. If it's two different guys, copycat or whatever, then we need the public.

LEMON: So, John, the father of Karina Vetrano set up a GoFundMe, an effort to boost the reward money, trying to get some help with this. You said that people always want to do the right thing. How is this going to help? Will this help?

WALSH: It will help. And for the 25 years I did "America's Most Wanted" and now with "The Hunt" we never offered rewards unless once in a while we threw in an award that the family did.

This reaffirms my belief from the charity and compassion of Americans. They're rounding out close to $200,000. It will bring people for it if they know they can collect that money without any retribution or having to be involved with the cops. People don't want to call the cops. We figured out over the years give them a way to drop that dime on that person without having a D.A. come to their house and say you're going to be in trial because you turned in crazy uncle Louis and then uncle Louis gets out on bond and kills you.

There is a way for somebody to make that call. If it's two guys, if you know one of them or it's the same guy, make the call, they will make sure you get that money and you'll never be involved in the trial, there won't be any retribution. So rewards work sometimes. And this is $200,000 for somebody to say, "I think I know something about the murder." You make the call.

LEMON: Let's take people inside of what you're doing this week. Because this week on "The Hunt," is going to take you inside the abuse in sex slave trade, when authorities learn that Texas bar doubles as a brothel for underage girls. Let's take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The owner of Las Palmas was a woman named Raquel Medeles Hortencia Arguello and she went by the nickname Tencha. That's what everybody knew her as.

Tencha had a group of about five or six girls that were minors locked up in a room on the second floor.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They were 14, 15, 16 years old.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These minors were upstairs and were only offered to certain clients that would pay a large amount of money to have sex with the minors.

UNIDENTIFEID FEMALE: They paid good money. And when I say good money, they would pay for certain girls $500 an hour.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She left them there 24/7 locked up in that room.

WALSH: The minor is the ticket to jail for the big sense. If you have an 18, 19-year-old sex slave that you've beaten and dragged and intimidated, your defense will be, "It's got consenting adults who works for me as a prostitute, so charge me for prostitution of an adult."

So, yes, they locked the underage girls away because that is the big sense. That's the big liability.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: Unbelievable. And you picked the cases for it?

WALSH: Not all of them.

LEMON: Why did you pick this? Why did you pick this?

WALSH: We're so slump because these are the ones that hit the hardest. You know, I'm the father of murdered 6-year-old child. So, anybody that exploits children is on the top of my list. And this guy, Alfonso Diaz Juarez has a RAP sheet this long. In 2010, he's a Mexican who smuggles kids, kidnaps little girls in Mexico, some are from his hometown, gets them across the border because he a coyote and he knows how do to it, and they locked them up in this canteen that's in Houston. Houston is the big port of entry for Latin sexual exploitation of children.

We are the largest offender of sex trafficking of children in the world. Everybody thinks it's Cambodia. Everybody thinks it's Vietnam, India, Thailand. Yes, those countries have it, but we're the biggest offender.

So this guy gets caught bringing in a young girl that he impregnates, raped in the United States. She doesn't want to go back to work because she's got his baby. He kidnaps the baby. He doesn't care about the baby. Forces her to go back to work, he gets caught. And guess how time he serves? And he was in jail three years. They let him out. He gets hooked up with woman, that madam that we just saw on that piece. Police estimate that from around 1999 until about 2005, she made about $9 million.

LEMON: Put his picture back up.

WALSH: Yes, please give a look.

(CROSSTALK)

WALSH: Because it wouldn't be wonderful, Don. I would do a back flip if we caught this guy. Because he's coming back and forth across the border, he knows how to get into the United States. He's done a zillion times.

So they arrested 13 people at the canteen, including the madame.

LEMON: Yes.

WALSH: Guess who got away? Poncho. So Poncho is still out there. He kidnaps girls or he talks to them saying, "I'll get you into Texas and you'll be working at the Ritz-Carlton and you'll be working at the Four Seasons." No, you'll be locked in a door upstairs and they estimate that the teen-age girls locked up there that they keep in that room had to service 30 men a day.

[23:50:00] Can you imagine that? Thirty creepy weird horrible guys coming in every single day and you're wondering, "Will I ever get back to see my family? I'm 15 years old. How can I get out of this room?"

LEMON: Let's hope they catch him.

WALSH: Yes.

LEMON: Great work.

WALSH: Thank you.

LEMON: Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations on the success and, again, we hope they catch him.

"The Hunt" with John Walsh returns to CNN this Sunday night at 9:00. We'll be right back. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: Silly signs used to be used to be a strategy reserved only for baseball, but now never Trumpers are stepping up to the plate. CNN's Jeanne Moos has more.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEANNE MOOS, CNN NEWS CORRESPONDENT: You're looking at perhaps the most endangered species of yard sign.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Four signs I had up with Donald Trump were missing.

MOOS: They tend to be drive-bys. Someone makes a beeline for the Trump sign, grabs it and then jumps in a getaway car. And check out this dinky thief, the most recent theft involved a runner in Hillsdale, New Jersey. She jogged past a house, waited a car to leave, then came back, picked up the sign and took off. When the video went public, she turned herself in but the sign owner declined to press charges.

[23:55:00] Meanwhile, the neighbors' Trump sign was plucked by a masked woman. It could be worse.

SCOTT LOBAIDO, ARTIST: Respect my opinion to vote for who I want to.

MOOS: This artist created a giant "T" for a yard in Staten Island. In the middle of the night, someone set it on fire. The Donald himself called to commiserate. What is an artist to do? Rebuild.

LOBAIDO: It is going to be huge.

MOOS: This house in Indianapolis lost a dozen Trump signs in three weeks. We found very few Hillary signs reported stolen. Either her supporters aren't posting them or they're being left alone.

In Haverhill, Massachusetts, one of Richard Early's signs was spray painted "never" over Trump. He had nine signs ripped out a tossed in the street.

RICHARD EARLY, TRUMP SUPPORTER: We're not going to take them down, the signs are staying up.

MOOS: Some bipartisan tips for protecting the yard signs, a Pennsylvania man slathers roofing tar on the edges. Hard to get off and easy to spread to clothing and car. Another person went and bought a giant jar of Vick's vapor rub and smeared it over every inch of the sign.

When "Hillary for prison" signs disappeared out in the Hamptons, the owner reinstalled them on 12 foot poles with surveillance cameras and electric fencing. It may not be easy to steal an election, but an election sign. Jeanne Moos, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: There is always a camera somewhere. Don't you know that? We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[24:00:01] LEMON: That does it for us tonight. I'm Don Lemon.

"AC 360" starts right now.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEWS HOST: Good evening, John Berman here in for Anderson. We have as big of a night as you can have without a guy using giant sucking cups to climb Trump tower.