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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

Trump Wanted DOJ to Prosecute Clinton; CNN Exclusive: Zuckerberg Not Going Anywhere; E. Coli Concerns for Romaine Lettuce; Cold Turkey. Aired 4-4:30a ET

Aired November 21, 2018 - 04:00   ET

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


[04:00:05] DAVE BRIGGS, CNN ANCHOR: Damn near Nixonian. The clearest case yet of the president misusing the Justice Department. He tried to get the DOJ officials to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAURIE SEGALL, CNN BUSINESS SENIOR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: So, you are not stepping down as chairman?

MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO, FACEBOOK: That's not the plan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KAYLEE HARTUNG, CNN ANCHOR: A defiant Mark Zuckerberg vows to stay on the job. CNN has an exclusive sit-down with the embattled Facebook chief.

BRIGGS: Keep romaine lettuce off your Thanksgiving table. An E. coli scare forcing that warning from health officials.

HARTUNG: And temperatures taking an epically cold turn. Wind chills in the single digits in New York for Thanksgiving, putting the balloons for the parade in jeopardy.

BRIGGS: There goes my Thanksgiving plans. That's all I had in store beyond football.

HARTUNG: Let's hope I packed appropriately for this trip to New York.

Hey, good morning and welcome to EARLY START. I'm Kaylee Hartung, in for Christine Romans.

BRIGGS: Good to have you here.

I'm Dave Briggs. Wednesday, November 21st, 4:00 a.m. in the East.

It turns out the president's calls to "lock her up" were not reserved for campaign rallies. They were also heard inside the White House where President Trump was taking steps to have the Justice Department actually prosecute Hillary Clinton. A source telling CNN the president pressed then-White House counsel Don McGahn to make it happen.

HARTUNG: The president had been attacking Clinton for years by that point over her emails, the Clinton Foundation and other matters. "The New York Times" reported on the president's push to have Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey prosecuted.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: This is what happens in authoritarian countries. The president orders, the president, the leader, orders the investigation and prosecution of his political enemies. Fortunately, there are people in the White House here who understood the traditions and the rules of the American legal system and said you can't do that, and it didn't happen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: McGahn fended off the president's repeated requests to have his rivals prosecuted. "The Times" reports McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo warning the president about all the consequences including possible impeachment.

McGahn has since left the White House after extensive cooperation with the Mueller investigation, including 30 hours of interviews that unnerved this president.

HARTUNG: A CNN source says the president also spoke repeatedly with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Matt Whitaker, now the acting attorney general, then chief of staff to Jeff Sessions. Mr. Trump asked them about Justice Department progress investigating Hillary Clinton. He'd been clear he intended to go after her including this remark at a presidential debate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation.

HILLARY CLINTON (D), FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

TRUMP: Because you'd be in jail.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: Just remarkable to look back on that.

Whitaker came to the meetings prepared to tell the president what justice was doing on Clinton-related matters, although our sources say Whitaker did not seem to cross any line. More broadly, the president pressing Whitaker at the time seems to prove he was lying this month when he said this --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I don't know Matt Whitaker. Matt Whitaker works for Jeff Sessions, and he was always extremely highly thought of. And he still is.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: So far, no comment from the Justice Department on all of this.

HARTUNG: And top Senate Republicans are slamming President Trump for standing behind Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the wake of the murder of "Washington Post" journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in official statement peppered with exclamation points, the president wrote, it could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of the this tragic event. Maybe he did, and maybe he didn't. That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi.

In any case, our relationship is with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

BRIGGS: That stand contradicts a CIA assessment that the crown prince did order the killing, a finding of which officials are highly confident. The president stood by his statement speaking to reporters.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REPORTER: Why are you siding with the Saudis over your own intelligence?

TRUMP: Because it's America first to me. It's all about America first. Saudi Arabia, if we broke with them, I think your oil prices would go through the roof. I've kept them down. They've helped me keep them down. We'll see how that works out. It's a very complex situation. It's a sham, but it is what it is.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: That drew swift, sharp rebuke from leading Republicans. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker tweeting, I never thought I'd see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

[04:05:01] HARTUNG: Kentucky Senator Rand Paul wrote a series of tweets, including, saying, I'm pretty sure this statement is Saudi Arabia first, not America first. I'm also pretty sure national security adviser John Bolton wrote it.

And then there was this frank comment on the crown prince known as MBS from Senator Lindsey Graham.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: Saudi Arabia needs us more than we need them. It's not too much to ask an ally not to butcher a guy in a consulate. This is not World War II. So I'm not going to look away at what MBS did. I think he did it.

(END VIDEO CLIP) HARTUNG: The Saudis at first denied any knowledge of Khashoggi's death then later pinned the murder on a group of rogue operatives.

BRIGGS: New financial disclosures filed by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker reveal more than $9,000 in payments from a conservative group he founded in 2014. The group known as FACT received almost its funding from a dark money organization that got some funding from a major Republican donor, Charles Koch.

HARTUNG: Most of Whitaker's income in the past few years came from FACT, although CNN paid him $15,000 as a legal commentator in 2015. The disclosures magnify concerns over whether the Senate would confirm Whitaker if the president nominated him as permanent attorney general. Until yesterday, government watchdog groups had repeatedly raised concern about why the request for the public documents had gone unfulfilled.

BRIGGS: President Trump has submitted his written answers to questions from special counsel Robert Mueller. This follows months of negotiations between the special counsel's office and the Trump legal team. A lawyer for the president says the questions dealt with Russia-related topics in the Mueller investigation and not obstruction of justice.

Still not clear if that will be enough for Mueller to finish his investigation. There could be additional questions. Mueller's team could still try and pursue an in-person interview though the president said he does not plan on sitting down.

HARTUNG: After a year of apologizing for Facebook's missteps, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sounding a lot more defiant these days. Last week, a "New York Times" report claimed Facebook was not transparent enough about Russian interference in the 2016 election. That report also revealed the company hired a PR firm to dig up dirt on its competition.

In an exclusive interview with, Zuckerberg dismissed questions about his own performance and the leadership of COO Sheryl Sandberg.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEGALL: There are a lot of questions about Sheryl Sandberg's role in the latest controversy. Can you definitively say Sheryl will stay in her same role?

ZUCKERBERG: Yes. Look, Sheryl is a really important part of this company and is leading a lot of the efforts to address a lot of the biggest efforts that -- the biggest issues that we have. So when you look at a lot of the progress that we've made over the last 12 to 18 months on issues around elections or content or security, Sheryl is leading a lot of that work. And she's been an important partner for me for ten years. And, you know, I'm proud of the work we've done together. I hope that we work together for decades more to come.

SEGALL: You are CEO and chairman of Facebook. That's an extraordinary amount of power given that you rule a kingdom of 2 billion people digitally. Shouldn't your power be checked?

ZUCKERBERG: Yes. I think that ultimately the issues that we're working on here, you know, things like preventing interference in elections from other countries, finding the balance between giving people a voice and keeping people safe, these are not issues that any one company can address.

SEGALL: So, you are not stepping down as chairman?

ZUCKERBERG: That's not the plan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARTUNG: Zuckerberg says Facebook has a different world view than some of the people who cover the company.

BRIGGS: Global markets and U.S. futures down sharply today, one day after the Dow lost more than 500 points, wiping out all gains for the year. It's not alone. The S&P 500 also down for the year. Investors are worried the days of record profits is near its end, with tech stocks taking the biggest hit. Tech companies have long before the darlings of Wall Street, sending stocks to record highs.

But now, Apple faces slowing demand for iPhones, Facebook is under scrutiny over data and privacy issues. As those stocks fall, so, too, does the market. In fact, these five big-tech names have lost more than $800 billion in combined market value since August.

But investors have a flurry of concerns. Higher interest rates, crashing oil prices now at a 13-month low, a U.S.-China trade war. Bottom line, after years of big profit growth, investors expect a slowdown in 2019.

And just reading "The Wall Street Journal," for example, on the way in, you hear the word "recession" throughout different articles. Now, they're tamping down any expectation for a recession, just the fact that you're hearing that word concerning for the months and weeks ahead.

HARTUNG: Yes. Absolutely.

BRIGGS: Yes.

HARTUNG: And something else concerning to learn this morning -- the number of people unaccounted for in the Camp Fire is taking another big jump.

[04:10:05] Now, potentially, damaging rain is moving in for thousands without a home for the holiday. We'll have more when we return here on EARLY START.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARTUNG: The number of people unaccounted for in California's Camp Fire jumping back up to 870, an increase of 171 for Monday, according to Butte County officials. That number rising sharply as officials warned us because detectives were finally able to get to a backlog of voice mails. The death toll now stands at 81.

The remains two of more victims were discovered on Tuesday. The Camp Fire, though, now 75 percent contained. And the next challenge could be rain as it could become heavy over northern California, lasting into Saturday. That will help with the air quality, but it could also trigger mudslides and debris flows.

BRIGGS: The estimated cost of fighting the Camp Fire and the Woolsey Fire which has claimed three lives now stands at $130 million.

[04:15:02] You're looking at the helicopter flying through thick smoke from the Woolsey Fire to rescue three people and two dogs in the hills above Malibu. The Woolsey Fire is nearly 100 percent contained after charring close to 97,000 acres.

HARTUNG: Hard to believe they're saying the camp fire may not be fully contained until November 30th.

BRIGGS: The rain will help a little bit, but also might cause mudslides. So, it's tough.

HARTUNG: Well, a major health warning that could affect millions of Thanksgiving menus. The Centers for Disease Control warning consumers not to eat romaine lettuce due to possible E. coli contamination. Thirty-two people in 11 states have been infected with the outbreak strain. In addition, 18 people in Canada have become sickened.

Officials say consumers should not eat any romaine lettuce product. That includes whole heads of romaine, hearts of romaine, and bags and boxes of precut lettuce and salad mixes. So far, the FDA has not been able to tie the outbreak to a specific grower.

BRIGGS: If you're on the East Coast for the holiday, one suggestion -- bundle up, it's going to be the coldest Thanksgiving in New York in more than a century, which could spell trouble for the Thanksgiving parade.

Here's meteorologist Ivan Cabrera.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

IVAN CABRERA, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Guys, it's a combination, good morning, of not just the arctic air but the winds as well, and that will make it feel like it's in the single digits.

Not today, balmy compared to what's coming. But the arctic air mass will be on top of us, will be easily the coldest spot in the nation. We could have the coldest Thanksgiving since we've been keeping records.

As far as the temperatures for today, 30s and 40s. But then Arctic Air will make its way in along with the wind. And look what happens here in New York, 26 for the wind chill through the early part of the morning, and then single-digit numbers for Thursday and Friday. Likewise in Boston, Philly, Syracuse won't get above zero as far as the wind chill. This is incredible stuff. And, of course, we're going to have record lows here. Upwards of 16

record lows potentially through the early part of Thursday. And then for the big parade, bundle up if you're going to be out there. Look at these temperatures staying at the lower 20s. But with the wind at 15 to 20 miles an hour, that's going to make it feel like the upper single digits.

And if that wind gets steadily above 20 miles an hour, we'll have to cancel the balloons. We'll have to watch this closely. But either way, just pack accordingly. It is going to be a frigid Thanksgiving morning -- guys.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BRIGGS: Feels like single digits. Good thing we usually watch the parade from inside.

HARTUNG: Absolutely.

BRIGGS: At the CNN building.

All right. Ahead, men making choices about women's rights is a sad irony. What that's a Mississippi judge says. He ruled against a ban on abortions at 15 weeks.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[04:22:02] HARTUNG: A Chicago police officer recovering after being shot during a traffic stop. He was hit in the back of his bulletproof vest. Police returned fire, striking the gunman in his neck. He's in critical condition.

The shooting comes just one day after three people were shot to death at Mercy Hospital in Chicago. Police officer Samuel Jimenez was among those killed along with a doctor and pharmacy resident. Another officer narrowly escaped being shot when a bullet hit his holster and embedded itself into his handgun.

BRIGGS: Strong words from a federal judge in Mississippi who blocked a state law that outlaws most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The only facility in the state that provides abortion services sued after Governor Phil Bryant signed the measure in March. Judge Carlton Reeves calling it a, quote, sad irony that men are making decisions about a woman's reproductive rights.

HARTUNG: In his ruling, he writes, the state chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades' long campaign fueled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. The judge also called the Mississippi legislature's professed concerns about women's health pure gaslighting.

BRIGGS: Former Michigan State University President Lou Anna Simon has been charged with lying to police in the Larry Nassar case. She's accused of misleading investigators about how much she knew about sex abuse allegations against Nassar, the doctor convicted of abusing young women while employed by the university and USA Gymnastics. Simon resigned in January after 13 years but has still been on the

university's payroll. Simon faces up to 12 years in prison. Her lawyer calls the charges political and untrue.

HARTUNG: Aspiring actress Mareli Miniutti granted a restraining order against lawyer Michael Avenatti. She accuses him of physical and verbal violence, including hitting her face with pillows and dragged her across the floor. Avenatti who represents Stormy Daniels was arrested by Los Angeles police on suspension of felony domestic violence last week. He has not been charged and denies the investigation. His lawyers claim Miniutti behaved in a volatile, agitated and irrational manner and did not suffer any corporal injury at the hands of Avenatti.

BRIGGS: Christmas came early for shoppers at Walmart in Derby, Vermont. A secret Santa picked up the tab for almost everyone last week. One of the lucky shoppers snapped a picture of the mystery man as he left the store. She posted about the random act of kindness on Facebook. Friends and neighbors responded saying their layaway charges were also paid off, some as high as $800.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TAMMY DESAUTELS, HAPPY SHOPPER: I really had a feeling that there's hope for mankind or whatever, you know? There's still good people out there.

JULIE GATES, HAPPY SHOPPER: Get Goosebumps thinking that that is the true magic of Christmas. That's the Christmas spirit walking amongst us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: A store employee confirmed the anonymous shopper's generosity. Walmart would not say how many people he helped or how much he spent.

[04:25:01] HARTUNG: Peas beat out Carrots, your headline of the day in a White House tradition, the annual turkey pardon. The president did the honors before jetting off to Mar-a-Lago for the Thanksgiving weekend. He said the vote was decided by a, quote, fair and open election. And Carrots refused to concede.

He added this --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Even though Peas and Carrots have received a presidential pardon, I have warned them that House Democrats are likely to issue them both subpoenas.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARTUNG: But he said Peas and Carrots will live out rest of their lives at the Virginia Tech's gobblers exhibit.

BRIGGS: Come one. Really?

All right. What's coming up?

HARTUNG: Well, imagine "lock her up" in the White House? In a gross abuse of power, President Trump tried to get DOJ officials to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)