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GOP Lawmakers Slam Trump Over Withdrawal; Trump Discards Advice; Shutdown over Border Wall; Trump Urged Not to Abandon Wall; Closing Border Tent Facility. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired December 20, 2018 - 07:00   ET

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

[07:00:00] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: John Berman is off. John Avlon joins me. We've already had a great hour.

JOHN AVLON, CNN ANCHOR: And more fun to come.

CAMEROTA: And come up with our punk rock band name.

AVLON: I thought we decided, emotional support chicken.

CAMEROTA: That's it.

AVLON: We got it.

CAMEROTA: OK, meanwhile, there's growing bipartisan outrage over President Trump's abrupt decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. The president claims ISIS is defeated, but experts beg to differ and they fear that he will create a power vacuum there.

This morning, the president is tweeting about his decision, saying it should surprise no one because he campaigned on it for years. But most of Capitol Hill say they were blindsided. Six senators sent a letter to the president asking him to reconsider, and one of those senators is his staunch ally, Lindsay Graham, who called the decision, quote, a disaster, a stain on the honor of the United States.

A senior administration official tells CNN's Jake Tapper that the president's decision is, quote, a mistake of colossal proportions and the president fails to see how it will endanger our country, end quote,

Russian President Vladimir Putin is agreeing with President Trump at his annual end of the year news conference. Putin says ISIS has been largely defeated, but adds, he is skeptical that the U.S. will withdrawal all of its troops.

AVLON: And don't forget it was Trump who took Obama to task for telegraphing military moves, even calling Obama the, quote, founder of ISIS for pulling troops out of Iraq and creating a vacuum for ISIS to come to power.

Meantime, the Senate passed a stop gap funding bill to avoid a partial government shutdown. And if passed by the House and signed by the president, it will keep the lights on and the government humming through the holidays until February 8th. Democrats ensured the measure did not include a dime for the president's border wall.

So as they prepare to regain the House, did Democrats essentially prevent the President Trump's signature campaign issue, the wall, from ever taking shape?

CAMEROTA: All right, joining us now we have a wonderful panel, congressional reporter for "Politico," Rachael Bade, CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser, and CNN political director David Chalian.

So, Rachael, let's start with this being -- Congress, the Pentagon, allies feeling blindsided. Should they have felt blindsided since the president is tweeting this morning that this is -- was a signature position of his. He is isolationist.

RACHAEL BADE, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, and they knew that. But the difference is, they didn't get a heads up here. And I think a lot of the Republicans in the Senate in particular thought that they would hear from the president first on this and that they would get a chance to sort of push back and walk him off the edge.

There was a meeting yesterday with Vice President Mike Pence, and it got really heated. They took it out on Mike Pence. Lindsay Graham said he was personally offended and he said the president needs to be held accountable, and if Obama were to do something like this, the Republican Party would be totally up in arms.

So we're hearing a lot of pushback. I'm not sure that there's a lot that they can do from The Hill because the president, quite frankly, is mad because he didn't get his border wall money from Congress. So, who knows if he's really going to listen to them. I think it's another thing entirely for his military generals to be pushing back on this. And although they're not doing so on the record, we have definitely heard that people in the military are not particularly pleased with this decision.

AVLON: And, Susan, you just published an extraordinary article in "The New Yorker" about Europe and Trump and the -- our allies were blindsided. The British putting out a fairly polite tweet -- statement indicating their displeasure. The Pentagon apparently blindsided as well. What more are you hearing?

SUSAN GLASSER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, look, I think it's absolutely true that U.S. allies in Europe and -- who are contributing to the U.S. operations in Syria were not told about this. My goodness, "The Washington Post" is reporting this morning that chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not included in the meeting and in the decision making about doing this.

So I think one of the things that's happening here is outrage inside Trump's own government, with his closest partners and up on Capitol Hill around the way in which this decision was made. President Trump has essentially declared in a fit of peak (ph), you know, a unilateral decision. It's not that the decision wasn't his to make, but there's no process here. People can't rely on the United States as a partner in the way that they have in the past. And the rift with Europe, by the way, is real and significant and

ongoing. The idea that France would announce this morning that it's going to continue its military operations in Syria, which may or may not be viable without the United States, this just is essentially unthinkable in any previous version of the alliance.

President Trump has done enormous damage to the alliance. Meanwhile, the only place that is praising his decision this morning essentially is in Moscow where Vladimir Putin is saying it was a smart and correct decision at his annual news conference this morning.

So I think it's a very significant moment where you see Trump's foreign policy and the recklessness of going it alone.

CAMEROTA: David, it was eight or nine months ago that President Trump was at a political rally, and he announced to the crowd, I mean I'll just quote it, we'll be coming out of Syria like very soon. Very, very soon we're coming out.

And back then his adviser, including, I think, Secretary Mattis, said that would be rash and unwise.

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: And he backed off.

[07:05:01] CAMEROTA: And for whatever reason that got his attention and for eight months he didn't do anything. And then what changed yesterday?

CHALIAN: And now he's citing that as he is tweeting about it this morning, you know, saying this should surprise no one because of exactly that episode.

Again, nobody here on The Hill or in his administration was surprised by his policy stance on this. They just, as Susan was saying, taken by surprise that there was zero process involved. Which, of course, also, if you've been an observer of this administration, shouldn't terribly be a -- shouldn't be a terrible surprise. This is governing by tweet. And now he's playing commander in chief by tweet, and these are the ramifications for it. And they're real world ramifications.

What I find so interesting politically about this, guys, you're talking about the Republican blowback on The Hill. Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio. We saw this a little bit over the Saudi Arabia issue and Khashoggi. And so it seems that on foreign policy, Republicans sometimes are able to sort of stand up. I don't know that it amounts to anything. We're not seeing yet the president reversing his policy. But on all of the other issues, whether it's rule of law or the damage of institutions or whatever the president may be up to on a given day, Republicans, very often on Capitol Hill, as you know, tend to bury their head in the sand and some say I don't even want to read the tweets. But on these foreign policy issues, you see his own party trying to actually have some sway with him.

AVLON: Yes, it's a fascinating point. And reading the tweets does not, in fact, make them go away.

CHALIAN: Right.

AVLON: But, Rachael, to David's point, you're starting to see fissures in the Republicans coalition. The president very popular among Republicans. But yesterday in the Senate, you saw -- you have leading senators and a lot of them really expressing their displeasure with the president, applying the same standards they would have to a Democratic president, which is refreshing. And in the House you saw House Caucus Freedom -- Freedom Caucus members criticizing, saying to the president, don't sign this CR. Stick to your guns on the wall. Presumably if they don't, they may not vote for the bill at all. Do you see those -- the beginnings of cracks in the Republican coalition with regard to Donald Trump?

BADE: Look, I mean, I think it's one thing for them to criticize the president lightly and gently and another thing to, you know, pass legislation that is actually going to get to his desk and force him in some sort of legislation that has a veto override to do something. I think that that is not likely to happen.

I think that when it comes to campaign promises, Republicans, particularly conservatives, are frustrated, and that's why you're seeing the Freedom Caucus all last night, wait -- late into the wee hours of the morning, tell the president, you need to veto this spending bill that doesn't include your wall money or else you're never going to get it and you're going to see a backlash from the base.

And I actually think that the president is very sensitive to that -- that warning, and maybe that is why you saw him make this announcement yesterday all of a sudden. I mean the president is thinking about losing potentially on the border wall. According to White House officials, he might sign this spending bill that doesn't include this border wall he campaigned on and has been talking about for two years. So perhaps he wanted to say, I checked something else off the list. You know, he campaigned on a promise to take U.S. military troops out of regions in the Middle East. And perhaps that's what he was thinking about when he made this announcement. So he's very sensitive to that notion that he's not living up to those promises. And right now he's hearing it from various parts of the party.

CAMEROTA: Let me just hop scotch back to David for a second on that.

Why did Mitch McConnell agree to this? When the president said that he was willing to shut down the government over the border wall, and he was so definitive in that meeting with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, why then did Mitch McConnell take this different tact?

CHALIAN: Because there's no Republican on Capitol Hill who thought that was a good moment for the president. I mean it was one where he was being able to message to his base and show, I'm going to fight this to the death. That may not be the case if he signs this. And so he seems to have flipped on that, perhaps.

But why Mitch McConnell, because there's no Republican, Alisyn, on Capitol Hill who thinks it's a good idea to have a Christmastime government shutdown, one that the president of their own party said already that he would fully accept blame for. That would have spillover effect on them. So Mitch McConnell is eager to get his folks out of town, enjoy the Christmas holiday and have the government funded and live to fight this fight another day.

Why the president completely flipped in a week's time, or if he does, if he actually does go through and signs this clean spending bill that looks like it possibly will be sent to him, that, to me, is the bigger question. Why did he just completely stand down from where he was a week ago?

BADE: Just to interject there, I don't know that -- we don't know yet that he will.

CHALIAN: Exactly. Correct.

BADE: I mean the president, to be clear, he has been like very eerily quiet this whole time that Mitch McConnell has been moving this spending bill without border wall money. Meanwhile you have -- meanwhile you have conservatives in the House saying, you need to do this now. If you watched Fox News last night, they were totally harping on him, saying he might be caving on the border wall.

And last time, just a few months ago, earlier this spring, they did the same thing and the president almost vetoed the spending bill at that time that didn't include his border wall money. And he said at the time, never again will I sign a spending bill that doesn't include my border wall money. Well, guess what, we're in the same exact position. Republicans promised him before the campaign -- or before the midterm elections that they would fight now, during -- before the holidays, to get his border wall. They are backing down on him. They are, you know, taking back that promise.

[07:10:18] But, you know, I don't -- I don't know what the president's going to do and I think neither do Republicans on Capitol Hill at this point.

AVLON: It's a fascinating point because he did really do that line in the sand over the last budget bill.

And, Susan, do you think this really is that kind of a jump ball moment where the last person he speaks to or the last person he sees on TV could be deciding these questions about war and peace or budget shut down or not?

GLASSER: Well, look, John, I mean you saw the tweets this morning. The president has woken up in a very plaintiff (ph) mood almost as if he's whining saying, hey, look, nobody really wants us to be in the Middle East anymore. Can I distract you with that?

I'm struck by the fact that we are leaving town, he's about to go on a long vacation at his club in Mar-a-Lago. He's leaving 2018 punched in the face by the voters, having lost the House, and yet it already seems as though the president is grasping at straws, is spiraling. This is even before the Mueller investigation reports come in. This is even before the Democratic House comes and starts to beat him up with hearings, with public accountability, with putting officials in this rapidly churning White House under oath up on Capitol Hill.

And so I -- it seems to me that the president is really flailing about here. Rachael's right, he's desperate to distract us. On the one hand, to distract his base from the fact that there's a campaign promise about to be pretty ostentatiously broken. On the other hand, about to distract us from this rapidly closing in on him investigation. And so I feel like he's ending the year on a note that really suggests he has no strategy at all. Every day, every hour seems to be a new hour for this president.

And, you know, you said it best, John, it's government by tweet that we're living with. And I hope once and for all this Syria decision will disabuse (ph) people of the notion that you don't have to pay attention to the president's tweets. You hear this an awful lot in the foreign policy world. People say, well, you know, the policy is really OK. You know, I know the rhetoric is a little out of control. Look at this decision. If you don't think you need to pay attention to the president's tweets anymore, this ought to be a real warning sign that Trump, he might temporarily agree to something advisers propose or that the wisdom of his allies or confidants, but he's not really going to change his mind and so if you want to know what he's actually going to do, you need to pay attention to this plaintiff voice in all of our heads.

AVLON: It's the, you know, Twitter trumps the real Trump, not teleprompter Trump.

CAMEROTA: Well, I'm monitoring, David --

AVLON: Yes.

CAMEROTA: "Fox and Friends" because, as we know, the president can be influenced, we've seen it before. They will say something and then he will put out a tweet that appears to represent some sort of new policy. And our friend, Brian Kilmeade, just took him to task over Syria. And so I think that these are still open questions today about whether or not the president will change his stance on troops coming out of Syria and whether or not he'll change his stance on whether he votes for this continuing resolution. I do not think we've heard the last chapter on this.

CHALIAN: No doubt about that, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

OK, panel --

AVLON: Fascinating stuff.

CAMEROTA: Thank you very much.

All right, so this is a tent facility. It is filled with underage migrants, children, who crossed the border illegally, and now one Republican congressman is calling for this tent city to be shut down. We'll tell you about the conditions there and why he feels so strongly, next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:17:39] CAMEROTA: So the Senate passed the stop gap measure bill that would fund the government, but that plan may have hit a snag in the House where some conservative Republicans are urging the president not to sign it and to take a stand to fund his border wall.

Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JIM JORDAN (R), FREEDOM CAUCUS CO-FOUNDER: You've got to be kidding me. Really? I mean February 8th, when Nancy Pelosi is speaker. Do we really -- I'm supposed to believe -- we're supposed to believe that we're then going to build the border security wall and keep our promise from the 2016 campaign? No way.

REP. MARK MEADOWS (R), FREEDOM CAUCUS CHAIRMAN: Mr. President, we're going to back you up. If you veto this bill, we'll be there. But, more importantly, the American people will be there. They'll be there to support you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Joining us now is Republican congressman from Texas, William Hurd.

Congressman, good morning. Thanks so much for being here.

REP. WILL HURD (R), TEXAS: Good morning. Always a pleasure to be on.

CAMEROTA: What do you think of what your fellow Republican Congressmen Meadows and Jordan say in terms of their warning to the president?

HURD: The American people sent us up to Washington, D.C., to actually get things done, not burn the place down. And we should be able to fund the government.

And, besides, building a 30-foot high concrete structure from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security. I represent 820 miles of border, more border than any other member of Congress. I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA chasing bad guys all over the world. In places along the border, Border Patrol's response time is measured in hours to days. So a wall is actually not a physical barrier.

We -- if we want to address root causes of illegal immigration we should be doing and working on those root causes in the northern triangle like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. We should be talking about, how do we plus up the State Department budget and USAID budget. How do we work with Mexico, who just announced $30 billion on doing -- on working on economic opportunities in Central America? There are the things that are going to address root causes of mass migration.

It is 2018, almost 2019, we don't have operational control of the border. We should be using more technology. That's what I like to see in these -- this funding of the government, and specifically the Department of Homeland Security, that we're increasing the funding for technology so that we can determine the difference between a bunny rabbit and a person and use drones. We're not using the latest and greatest technology along the border. That's going to go to help our border security personnel and it's going to make sure that we're safe.

[07:20:06] CAMEROTA: Listen, your solutions sound a lot more complicated than build a wall. I mean as you know -- I mean, you know, that's just -- you're talking about something much more comprehensive. And that's not what the president promised on the campaign trail to his voters.

HURD: Well, one of the things actually which he -- I call it the smart wall, by using technology and manpower you can do it for a fraction of the cost, you can do it under $1 billion, and you can do it within a year. And so if we want to evaluate -- you know, what matrix are we looking at? Are we looking at just miles of wall, or are we looking at, are we stopping bad people from coming into our country, are we decreasing the amount of illegal drugs that are coming into our country?

CAMEROTA: Yes.

HURD: Those are the matrix that we should be looking at and evaluating.

CAMEROTA: Well, do you think that the argument from your Freedom Caucus colleagues there will sway the president today? Do you think that he's going to sign that continuing resolution to keep the government open or not?

HURD: I think ultimately this gets signed and we get it done. Let's not make this problem worse. Our men and women in the Border Patrol are -- already have a difficult job. They're 2,000 people down. There's 2,000 positions in the Border Patrol that haven't been filled. They're dealing with the aftermath of the caravan and all that. And then we're going to introduce even more complexity into this by questioning whether or not they're going to get their salaries around Christmas and New Year's? That makes -- that makes no sense. I think ultimately we get this done and then we come back in the New Year and continue to have these debates about how we should be spending in the government and where the hard-earned taxpayer dollars should be going.

CAMEROTA: Well, therein lies the rub. Nancy Pelosi will be speaker presumably of the House in January and so --

HURD: I heard that. I've heard that before.

CAMEROTA: Yes, so have we. And so, for all intents and purposes, is the president's border wall dead?

HURD: I don't know the answer to that. I think in some places a physical barrier, you know, replacing some of the existing things. Again, if you're using miles of wall as a metric of whether you're keeping this country safe, I think that's the wrong metric to use. If you're talking about keeping bad people and bad things out of this country, then we can be -- we can be successful.

CAMEROTA: OK, next question. I know that you're very interested in this tent city.

HURD: Sure.

CAMEROTA: It is in your district in Tornio (ph). Twenty seven hundred migrant children are being kept in this tent city. You want President Trump to close it. Why?

HURD: Well, it's 2,800. And this is -- we know from the folks that monitor the mental health of children, the longer a child is in a detention facility similar to this facility in Tornio, the greater the chances of having long-term psychological and mental health issues. So we should be connecting kids to family members as they wait on to get their court case. Thirteen hundred of those kids in Tornio already have a sponsor. A majority of them family members that have already come forward and been identified, done the fingerprinting and all that. We should be able to release these kids. There's another 1,100 who's waiting on a sponsor.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

HURD: But I do have to say, HHS made a decision earlier this week that I think is going to help this problem by streamlining the administrative process of reviewing these sponsors. We still want to make sure we're putting kids in a safe environment. We can do that and reduce this throughput of kids and make sure that we close this temporary facility by the end of the year.

CAMEROTA: Do you believe that up until that move that you just talked about this week that the -- federal government was slow walking the approval process to place these kids with sponsors?

HURD: I think there was a deliberate effort to elongate this process. We know the process to adjudicate a sponsor or a family member doubled in the last couple of months prior to --

CAMEROTA: So why would they do that?

HURD: I think they were thinking this could be a -- potentially a deterrent from people coming here, just like, you know, separating children from their -- you know, their mother's arms. They thought that that was a potential deterrent.

If you're -- if you're messing with children as your strategy for border security, then you need to go back to the drawing boards. But new leadership at HHS, ORR, that's the Office of Refugee Resettlement which is managing these children, who understands child psychology and they're making tough decisions, that's better, one, for our country and it's in line with our values.

CAMEROTA: I want to ask you about the president's big decision that he announced about Syria.

HURD: Yes. CAMEROTA: He --

HURD: I know what you're going to ask. It's terrible, by the way. It is terrible. This is -- on Syria. Our allies weren't notified. Our senior leaders in our government in the military and the intelligence community wasn't notified. This is something -- I look at national -- things to do with national security. What do our allies and what do our enemies think? The fact that Russia and Iran and Bashar al Assad, the president of Syria, who caused 6.2 million refugees in his country, killed hundreds of thousands including women and children, the fact they were all excited and happy last night and that our allies were upset.

[07:25:15] And why does this matter for us? There's a little thing called ISIS There's still roughly 300,000 ISIS fighters across Iraq and Syria. There's no doubt they are on the run. My friends in the military, my friends in the intelligence community have laid the hammer down. These ISIS fighters are on the run. But they can have the ability to regroup. And when they do that, what is their target going to be? It's going to be the United States of America. And the reason ISIS was so dangerous was there ability to inspire people, even if they were 6,000 miles away. We cannot allow them to have the ability to regroup and to train, equipped and run operations unencumbered.

And, let's be honest, the real threat to Russia, Iran and Syria in that part of the world are the anti-Assad forces. They anti-Assad forces are -- is fighting ISIS. This is the coalition that we built. And we should be making sure that we are -- or we are making sure that the American people don't have to deal with ISIS in the future and that's why we should stay.

CAMEROTA: Do you think the president will change his mind on this one?

HURD: Well, the reality is, is nobody knows what this order saying that we've got to leave is, all right? You know, is that right away? Are you getting on flights tonight? There is -- there is -- there is a lack of specificity of what the order is. So is that something that can later be determined six months from now, nine months from now, a year from now, I do not know. And whether this decision is going to change, it difficult.

But this, I think, Lindsay Graham said it yesterday, this is equivalent to President Obama's decision to pull out of Iraq, which led to the creation of ISIS. There is going to be -- there's going to be thousands of people killed as soon as we pull out. These are forces that we've been training, that we said we are with you. And the reality is, is 2,000 folks on the ground, U.S. men and women in the military, it's a small footprint, especially compared to what the Russians have in the region, what the Iranians have in the region, when you look at the Syrian army as well. The fact that we are having such an impact with such a small footprint is an indication of how great our U.S. armed services are. And so this is -- has an important role in keeping our homeland, keeping Americans safe and I hope this decision is reconsidered.

CAMEROTA: We should remind people, you are a former CIA undercover officer.

Congressman Will Hurd, thank you very much for sharing your perspective with us.

HURD: Always a pleasure to be on.

CAMEROTA: John.

AVLON: Thanks.

The president's nominee for attorney general shared his thoughts on the Mueller probe in a June memo, and they are highly critical. Could that memo now threaten his chances to be confirmed? That's up next.

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