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Russia Used All Social Media Sites; Obamacare Struck Down in Texas; Trump Names Mulvaney; Poll of Iowa Voters. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired December 17, 2018 - 08:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:33:01] JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: So, in just a couple of hours, two new reports about Russian attacks on the 2016 election will be released by the Senate Intelligence Committee. "The Washington Post" obtained a draft of one of these reports and it found that Russia used, quote, every major social media platform to help elect President Trump. But also said these efforts continued after the election.

Want to bring in CNN chief media correspondent, anchor of "Reliable Sources," Brian Stelter.

Let me just read you the highlights of this Senate report. There are two. The first one report in the post is from Oxford.

BRIAN STELTER, CNN CHIEF MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: Yes.

BERMAN: This found that Russia used every major social media outlet. All of Moscow's messaging was intended to benefit the Republicans. The campaign intensified on YouTube after Election Day and it reached 126 million people on FaceBook, 20 million on Instagram and then this headline.

What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party, specifically Donald Trump.

STELTER: Yes, this is two years of investigation into the social networks and how they were manipulated, how they were misused and abused by these Russian criminals. Now it's all been pulled into one place by these two reports that were commissioned by the Senate. And I think it's really helpful, John, to get our arms around just how big and how impressive, in some kind of twisted way, this Russian effort was. As you said, it was every platform. It wasn't just Twitter. It wasn't just FaceBook. It was Instagram and other platforms.

So these two reports that are building on some of the journalism that's been done in the last two years, some of the other investigations. But it's pulling together all in one narrative, all in one place. And I think the headline is that this is not in the past tense. This is not a past tense story. We're not talking was. we're talking about what is going on today. This is about present tense, happening now, ongoing efforts to manipulate American public opinion.

BERMAN: Even bigger than we thought for a longer time than we thought. STELTER: Yes.

BERMAN: Those appear to be the two headlines there. And, again, if you just thought it was Twitter, it's not. It's YouTube, it's everywhere online, correct?

STELTER: In fact, the investigators -- one of these two reports single out YouTube saying the Russian effort was particularly pronounced on YouTube after Election Day, meaning this continued into 2017 and there's every reason to believe this continues up until today. We saw a little bit of this activity around the midterms. But there's a lot of these accounts of these Russian trolls pretending to be Americans have, but they're kind of dormant. They're almost lying in wait for whatever next campaign, whatever next operation comes along.

[08:35:13] BERMAN: All right, so everything we were just speaking about there was mostly this one report from the Senate.

STELTER: By Oxford, yes.

BERMAN: By Oxford. "The Washington Post" had that scoop overnight.

"The New York Times" just scooped the other report, which comes from an outfit called New Knowledge. And this one I think where it differs a little bit is it focuses on voter suppression. It says that a lot of the efforts were designed to keep Democratic base-type voters at home. And let me read you one quote here. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders, Bernie Sanders' supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote Ms. Stein, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, or stay home.

STELTER: And if you think about pressing different buttons, pushing different buttons in different ways. One way you can support President Trump is by encouraging his voters. Another way you can support Trump is by discouraging voters who are not going to support him, by discouraging the Democratic vote. And that's what this report says was happening, among other things. But all of the efforts, whether you were trying to suppress some voters or encourage others, all of it was in the same direction, they're trying to support Donald Trump to get him elected and then to support him in office.

And now that we know more about that, it makes you think more about Trump's ties to Russia, his meetings with Vladimir Putin, and what has gone on in the past two years. A lot of this, though, is unknowable, right, John? How much did these trolls affect the outcome of the election? We'll never really be able to know. We can't run a new election to find out. Obviously not everybody who was voting was manipulated by Russian trolls. Sometimes there's hysteria, I think, about these hacking attacks and what it meant. But it didn't take 100 million people to be manipulated. It didn't take a million people being manipulated. What it -- what these trolls and hackers and criminals did in 2016 is they changed the media environment, they changed the online environment around our conversations about elections. They amped up the fire. They made things uglier and hotter. And according to these researchers, that's continuing as we speak. BERMAN: And I think it's so interesting because to an extent it takes

us back to the beginning of all of this.

STELTER: Yes.

BERMAN: Even as we are now in December of 2018, the Mueller report could be, you know, days or weeks away. More indictments could be days or weeks away on collusion, on obstruction, on this, that or the other thing. But let's go back to the beginning.

STELTER: And what actually happened.

BERMAN: What happened was a giant Russian effort to influence the election and these reports say help Donald Trump. And now we understand more about how vast that effort was. And that in and of itself is the glaring headline that all Americans should care about.

STELTER: And it means we need to make sure these technology companies -- this was happening right under their noses. We need to make sure these technology companies are held accountable and are taking steps to prevent this in the future because I mean that's part of this as well. We all love or love/hate Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, Instagram, and yet this behavior, this malicious behavior, was happening on those platforms.

BERMAN: In one of the reports, let me just say very quickly, I should note, points out that the social media platforms aren't actually coming clean with as much as they actually have.

STELTER: Yes. Our colleague, Antonio Sullivan (ph), reporting that New Knowledge reporters, the New Knowledge researchers found that the social networks only provided the bare minimum of what they could have provided in terms of help. Look, FaceBook and Twitter have been pretty blunt about this. They say they made mistakes and didn't do enough in their (INAUDIBLE) 2016. But what about now? What are they doing today? That's the ongoing question. This is not something you can fix, like a broken arm. It's like diabetes. It's a chronic condition of the Internet. Misinformation being spread. And that has to be managed every single day.

BERMAN: Brian Stelter, great to have you with us.

STELTER: Thanks.

BERMAN: Thank you.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, John, making fun of a tragedy. The pictures posted from the Camp Fire cleanup that cost workers their jobs.

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[08:42:38] CAMEROTA: An explosion injures more than 40 people near at a pub in Sapporo, Japan. The cause of this explosion is unknown, but witnesses reported the smell of gas and found windows shattered after the blast. Investigators say a fire, which broke out after the explosion, caused one building there to collapse. Police and firefighters are warning that more explosions in the area could happen.

BERMAN: A California crane company fired three employees after offensive photos they took in the Camp Fire wreckage surfaced online. The town of Paradise posted the photos on FaceBook Saturday, saying it is looking into criminal charges. One of the fired employees could not be reached for comment. The Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history.

CAMEROTA: All right, you have to see this. A driver escapes unscathed, believe it or not, after crashing his car into a home in Alabama. Montgomery Fire and Rescue responded to this unbelievable wreckage scene Sunday morning. That's a car crashed into a house. It is nearly vertical. Amazingly, we are happy to report, neither the homeowners nor the driver were injured. I don't know how that's possible. The cause of this accident is under investigation.

BERMAN: I will say, parallel parking is very hard. I -- you know, things can happen.

CAMEROTA: Yes, thank you. Thank you.

BERMAN: Things can happen.

CAMEROTA: Vertical parking is even harder.

BERMAN: Even harder.

CAMEROTA: But they pulled that off.

BERMAN: All right, Hillary Clinton reaching out to a third grader in Maryland after the girl lost her race for class president. Martha Morales came up one vote short to a male classmate and had to settle for being vice president. Clinton wrote, quote, while I know you may have been disappointed that you did not win, I am so proud of you for deciding to run in the first place. Adding, it's not easy when you stand up and put yourself in contention for a role that's only been sought by boys. Morales says she was really excited to have received Clinton's letter.

CAMEROTA: Losing by one vote. Again, we learn the lesson, every vote counts.

BERMAN: Every vote counts.

I will say, you know, George H.W. Bush, the passing of George H.W. Bush, these politicians who have dealt with defeat, there's something so human about it, and their ability to connect with others on that level has changed a lot of lives. George H.W. Bush did that for a whole generation.

CAMEROTA: Oh, for sure. And all of the letters that he wrote also are so special to people, as will I'm sure this one be.

[08:44:54] So, Obamacare is facing its biggest challenge yet. This federal judge has knocked it down. So a man who helped to make the Affordable Care Act happen, David Axelrod, gives us his thoughts in "The Bottom Line," next.

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CAMEROTA: A federal judge in Texas has struck down the Affordable Care Act, ruling it unconstitutional. President Trump weighed in on Twitter moments ago. He says the deductible, which comes with Obamacare is so high that it is practically not even useable. It hurts families badly. We have a chance, working with the Democrats, to deliver great health care! A confirming Supreme Court decision will lead to great health care results for Americans!

Let's bring in former Obama senior adviser and CNN's senior political commentator David Axelrod.

David, that's one take on it that the president thinks that all of this will be great for all Americans.

DAVID AXELROD, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes.

CAMEROTA: What's your take?

AXELROD: Well, my take is probably the same take as the tens of millions of Americans who got coverage through the Affordable Care Act and almost the entire medical community, which is that this would be a catastrophe if it was upheld by the courts. It would be a catastrophe for people with pre-existing conditions and it would be a catastrophe for many others who couldn't afford health care, got health care through the Affordable Care Act.

[08:50:16] He is right that deductibles are high, but they're high in part because the administration has been running a rear guard action against the Affordable Care Act since the beginning. And if there were another solution, a better alternative, certainly the Republican Party would have surfaced that in Congress over the last couple of years, and we know that they did not and that's why it failed.

We also know this, at the polls, this was really very much on the ballot in November. Health care was the number one issue for voters. Those voters voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. This is a nightmare for the Republican Party.

BERMAN: And, in fact, the president seems to be rooting in that statement on Twitter, if I'm reading it correctly, which sometimes, frankly, is hard to do. He seems to be rooting for the Supreme Court to uphold this decision. And I don't think Republicans in Congress necessarily feel the same way because then they own people losing coverage for pre-existing conditions, they own people losing coverage for essential health benefits, they own losing, you know, the extent of Medicaid, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They don't want to be in that position. In fact, many of them ran this last campaign on protecting those things.

AXELROD: Exactly. And you see senior Republicans say, well, we're going to wait and see what the courts do. They do not want to dive into this one more time knowing what a disaster it was for them before.

CAMEROTA: Let's talk about Mick Mulvaney, chief of staff, now acting chief of staff, though there's no end date. There was an interesting video that cropped up from 2016, before he knew that he would be working for Donald Trump, in which he seemed to share his true feelings. So let's listen to that for a second.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICK MULVANEY: Yes, I am supporting Donald Trump. I'm doing so as enthusiastically as I can, given the fact that I think he's a terrible human being. But the choice on the other side is just as bad.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: He think she's a terrible human being. What are you -- what are your thoughts about how this would go?

AXELROD: Well, at least he's -- at least -- at least he's going in with eyes wide open, right?

I don't know what Mick Mulvaney did to draw the short straw. So many others have turned the job down.

The problem is, chief of staff implies that you can manage the staff, but also that you can speak with the president, guide his decision making, offer him counsel and have him act on that counsel. No one has proven able to do that with Donald Trump. And that's why even someone like General Kelly had such a difficult time in the job. And Mulvaney is -- it's telling that he only took the job on an acting basis. Don't reflect much confidence that there's a long-term future in that position.

BERMAN: Well, just want one point, obviously, Mulvaney's people have since come out and said, oh, he feels differently now. He didn't even know him then. Now that he knows Trump, you know, he respects him.

CAMEROTA: I'm sure he does feel differently now, now that he's gotten to know him personally.

BERMAN: David, you highlighted a tweet sent out by your old friend Ron Claine (ph), noting that because Mick Mulvaney's not giving up his job running OMB, he could actually be called before Congress to testify before some of these hearings, which most -- is a situation that most chiefs of staff don't actually face.

AXELROD: Yes, this double-hatted -- this double-hatted quality of Mulvaney now does make him -- you know, Ron's a very good lawyer and I thought that was a really interesting point, it does make him vulnerable to congressional subpoenas, which most White House staff would not be. And the White House would resist that. They can't resist that. In the case of Mulvaney, maybe they can divide the issues and say he can talk about OMB issues but not White House issues. But it does create another layer of complication.

CAMEROTA: David, as John Berman has taught me, it's never too early to talk about 2020.

BERMAN: It's not. There -- honestly, there's all this posturing and positioning that's happening right before our eyes. They're all running right now in ways that we're barely perceiving.

CAMEROTA: Here is the latest CNN/"Des Moines Register" poll. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker. And you said it's interesting that having not visited Iowa, Beto O'Rourke still finds himself in roughly the same position that Barack Obama did 12 years ago. Obama was third in a crowded field then.

Your thoughts as you see that list?

AXELROD: Well, look, yes, look, Beto O'Rourke is a phenomenon right now. He raised $80 million in Texas from people around the country. He inspired people around the country with his campaign, particularly younger people. And that is the basis for a strong candidacy if he decides to run.

He has the ability to raise the money that's necessary. And, more importantly, in some ways, he has a kind of ready-to-go organization around the country, young people in particular ready to march behind him. He has to decide if he wants to do it. But the fact that having never set foot in Iowa that he would poll so strongly has to be encouraging to him.

[08:55:13] BERMAN: And you can already see the other candidates or potential candidates reacting or making their decisions based on Beto O'Rourke. I think that's the most interesting thing right now.

David Axelrod, great to have you with us. Thanks very much.

AXELROD: OK, guys, have a good day.

CAMEROTA: You too.

"The Good Stuff" is next.

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BERMAN: It is time now for "The Good Stuff."

A mother and son from Texas, getting a Christmas gift they won't soon forget. Misty Wolf took her six-year-old son, Matthew, to meet Santa Claus. Matthew is blind, has autism. Misty says when she told that to Santa, he got down on the floor so Matthew could see Santa in his own way.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MISTY WOLF, MATTHEW'S MOTHER: Having him feel all over his coat, and the fuzz, and the felt and the hat, and he even said, pull my beard. And is there anything else you want to feel? And Matthew said, your eyes that twinkle. So he let him feel his eyes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: That -- you know, speak to the child on his level. Santa says this is what Christmas is all about. Look at that picture. That is magnificent.

[08:59:59] CAMEROTA: That's beautiful. And what a sensitive Santa to know how to approach Matthew.

BERMAN: Let's be honest, if there's one guy who knows everything --

CAMEROTA: It's Santa.