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Sanders' Supporters; Questions in Mueller Probe; Dow Roars Back; Video of Spacey. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired December 28, 2018 - 08:30   ET

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

[08:30:00] JONATHAN MARTIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: From these early states. Some of the folks who went dorstom (ph), who were in Congress. And also, yes, staffers and consultants too who were on his campaign in '16 and now are open to working for other candidates in 2020.

And, John, as you know, this is sort of the opposite of what happens when previous runners up run for president again, whether it's John McCain in 2008 or Hillary Clinton in 2016, candidates who ran a second time, typically they retained the vast majority of their previous support and immediately build on it right from the start. And instead what's happening is, Senator Sanders is struggling to retain what he even had in the first place in 2016 rather than adding to that support.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: And there is one word in some ways that explains this possible erosion, and it would be Beto.

MARTIN: That's a big part of it is the sort of curiosity about the El Paso congressman who is seen in many corners of the Democratic Party as the kind of new, bright hope. And, look, I think Beto is an immensely talented political figure, but he also represents something himself, John, which is a new beginning for the party, right? It's not just about him. Yes, he's part of the appeal. There's no question about it in the campaign he ran, but it's also him symbolizing this hunger in the party to turn the page, to find somebody new, somebody younger perhaps. I think that's what's driving some of his support early on, John.

BERMAN: Unless we think this is all negative for Bernie Sanders here, I think there are people will have followed Bernie for a long time who will notice something in the story that you wrote, which is that Bernie Sanders might be a victim of some of his own success --

MARTIN: Yes.

BERMAN: That he may have won the war of ideas.

MARTIN: Yes.

BERMAN: Although that could be a problem.

MARTIN: Well, there's no question that there's two huge up sides. First of all is the war he already won. There's no denying this. The party has moved clearly to the left. It's much more of a Bernie Sanders flavored party than it is a Clinton DLC party. So there's no question about that, that he could declare victory tomorrow in terms of the war of ideas.

The other issue, what is sort of more uncertain, John, what his advisers make a strong case, is that, look, yes, Bernie may not be as strong as he was in 2016, but because the race is going to be different this time around, you don't need 50.1 percent to win the Democratic nomination in 2020. This field is going to be so fractured and this race is going to be, you know, so up in the air that you can win with the plurality. And because Bernie does have bedrock support, you know, he should give it a go because you can sort of put together a coalition when you're running in a 17 person field and you've got a sort of 50 person -- a 50 state organization, rather, and you can sort of get a political floor of support that nobody else in the field can really achieve. That, you know, that does give him an opening going into '20. I'm not sure that that's realistic given the history of these campaign as the candidates do drop out and there is more of a coalescing as it goes, but, John, this campaign seems as uncertain as any that I can recall going into it.

BERMAN: And it's on and beginning and we will see much more of it in the coming weeks.

Jonathan Martin, thanks so much for waking up and joining us. A terrific article.

MARTIN: Thank, John.

BERMAN: Really appreciate it.

MARTIN: Happy New Year. Thank you.

BERMAN: You too.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Special Counsel Robert Mueller will issue his highly anticipated Russia report in the new year. In the last few weeks we've learned a lot about what Mueller knows from several guilty pleas from some of the president's closest allies. So what are some of the biggest questions that remain unanswered at this point?

Joining us now with his list, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig. He's a former federal prosecutor and assistant attorney general from the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice.

OK, so you put together this great list for us of the five things that we still would all like to have answered.

Number one being, who could be indicted next? Who is on your list?

ELIE HONIG, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, so 2019 is going to be an explosive year. I think it's going to make 2018 look like a brisk warmup. I would start with Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi. Both of them have said publically they expect to be indicted. I think they might be right. Both of them were conduits between WikiLeaks and to some extent the Trump campaign. So I think they could both be in trouble for that and for lying about that connection to Congress and to investigators. I also think Donald Trump Junior needs to be a little bit worried on a couple of basis. When Michael Cohen pled guilty a few weeks ago to making the hush money payments, the campaign finance violations, the papers referenced executive one and executive two within the Trump Organization. If either of those are Donald Trump Junior, he could be in trouble. He also has potential exposure for lying to Congress about the Moscow Project, which is another thing that Michael Cohen pled guilty to. So we could see indictments there.

HILL: We could also learn the fates -- or we will learn the fates, I should say, of both Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn.

HONIG: Yes. Paul Manafort had a terrible 2018. He hit for the cycle of defendant screw-ups. He got thrown into jail for violating bail. He got convicted at trial. He plead guilty to even more stuff and then he tried to cooperate but he got caught lying. So he's in a terrible position. He's about to turn 70 years old. He will be sentenced this year. I think it's very likely that his sentence will keep him behind bars for most of the rest of his life. His only out is a pardon. So, if that happens, we're going to see a whole nother convention (ph) --

[08:35:19] HILL: That will be a whole separate set of fireworks.

HONIG: Yes, yes, exactly. That will be a sideshow.

And then Michael Flynn, look, a couple weeks ago I think Michael Flynn assumed he was going to walk into court and walk out with a probationary sentence, but things went really bad for him in that sentencing. The judge totally rejected his theory that he was set up by the FBI and then even wondered aloud if he had committed treason. So the judge has given him until March and he better get his act together and he better impress Mueller with his cooperation between now and then.

HILL: There is a lot that has come out from this investigation and it's splintered. There are a lot of sort of different active roads that we're going down here. But one of the big questions is, will Robert Mueller actually close the loop in terms of Russia?

HONIG: Yes, so the Russian collusion question, I think, is the biggest political question. I think that's the one thing that has the potential to really shake loose Republican support from the president. And, look, so far we know two possible avenues. And these really came into more focus over the last month or so.

Number one is the hacked e-mails, the WikiLeaks connection, which we'll see through Stone. But the question is, how far does it go? Does it end with Roger Stone? We know Stone communicated with Steve Bannon, but does it go wider or deeper within the administration in the campaign? And the other piece is the financial connections. And we got a taste of this about a month ago when Cohen pled guilty. We learned that Donald Trump is trying to build a hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of new tower in Moscow and that people lied about that, and he was trying -- Trump had this project going well into the campaign, into June of '16. So if that builds out, you could see a real connection there. HILL: The other thing, too, which is sort of related here, but just as

we stay on this -- on this point number three for just a minute. You know our reporting through CNN's Pam Brown is that Mueller's still very interested, obviously, in interviewing the president. Rudy Giuliani has said, over my dead body. In fact, here's what he just told "The Hill." Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUDY GIULIANI, PRESIDENT TRUMP'S ATTORNEY: He's not answering any more questions from these people. Their outrageous activity, I'm -- you know, we did enough. We did everything.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: You juxtapose that with his other comments to "The Daily Beast," which contradict that and say --

HONIG: Yes.

HILL: Well, we're still negotiating. That's all fascinating, especially as we work toward what would seem to be, you know, a report coming next year.

HONIG: This is Rudy bluster. I credit his quote three quotes ago when he said, I'll only bring the president in to talk to Mueller over my dead body. That's the right approach. It would be legal malpractice to walk Donald Trump into a room to be interviewed by Robert Mueller. And I think Rudy is trying to put on a brave face. He's trying to fight, we're going to fight this. But he knows ultimately he's got nowhere to go.

The question is going to be, does Mueller issue a subpoena and can get that subpoena approved by Matthew Whitaker now or William Barr later. That's a big complication. But if he does, we're going to have a fight in the courts about executive privilege and it's going to be reminiscent of 1974 with Richard Nixon.

HILL: There could also be a fight, or there is certainly at least a lot of questions at this point, as to whether anyone will ever see Mueller's report.

HONIG: Yes.

HILL: Will the public see it. What's your gut on that?

HONIG: Another big question. I do think we will see it or see most of it.

The way it works, just on paper under the regs is fairly straightforward. Mueller has to issue his report to the AG, and then the AG can decide how much and whether to send it over to Congress.

Now, complication number one, who's going to be the AG, Whitaker or Barr? Both of them have had legitimate questions raised about their impartiality. We know Whitaker just rejected the ethics advice that he recuse himself. So what will they do with it?

Now, the big factor here is, we now have the Democrats in charge of the House and Adam Schiff has made clear, just in the last week, I'm going to fight for that report. I'm not going to let it get swept away. So we could, again, see a battle over executive privilege there.

HILL: And that really segues beautifully into your fifth unanswered question, which is what will the impact be of this Democratic controlled House?

HONIG: Yes, that's -- tat's a game changer. That's a whole nother front that Trump now has to deal with. And the House has different powers than Robert Mueller. Robert Mueller has -- ultimately he has the heaviest hit. He can bring criminal charges, arrests, indictments. But a lot of what he does is in secret. He's bound by the rules of criminal procedure, by the grand jury, and so we only learn in little drips and drabs.

The House has the ability to call public hearings on very short notice with very broad range. And we've seen Adam Schiff and Representative Nadler and Cummings already come out with their huge, very Trump centric hit list of things they want to go through. But, again, I don't think Trump's going to go down without a fight and Rudy is going to go down without a fight. I think they're going to resist those subpoenas. I think they're going to invoke executive privilege, which is sort of a buzz word that I think we should watch for in 2019. I think executive privilege is going to become a key battleground in a lot of these issues.

HILL: We will be watching for it and we'll be talking through it all with you in the new year.

Elie, always good to see you. Thank you. Happy New Year.

HONIG: Thanks, Erica, you too.

HILL: Volatility is the new normal on Wall Street. So just how will we close out the wild week? Christine Romans is here next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:43:38] BERMAN: It is time for "CNN Business Now."

Wall Street has had quite the week, from historic losses to a record single day gain. So what's going to happen today?

Our chief business correspondent Christine Romans joins us now with that.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: I mean it looks like it's going to stabilize again this morning, but it's anybody's guess. I mean I would never bet $10 on what's going to happen in the market today because the last ten days has honestly been whiplash, roller coaster. It's been all those terrible stock market cliches that usually I don't use that I am using. So, futures right now, let's take a look, you've got the Dow up, you

know, about 100 and some points. We'll see if that holds. That's not even half a percent. so that's not really very much. But that would be stabilizing from yesterday. The close yesterday was just unbelievable. Well, that doesn't look like much, but look at all that red before that little bit of green on the right of that chart there. That was -- at one point the Dow was down 611 points.

BERMAN: Way down.

ROMANS: That big reversal is, I think, the biggest sort of intraday reversal I've seen in about a decade. There haven't been very many of those. So that was a big, big move.

So where are we for December? Because we need to have a little bit of context here. This is what December looks like. That makes it the worst December since the Great Depression. Where are we for the year? Not good either. You've got the Dow, the S&P, the Nasdaq all with significant losses. And that means, if you put it in the past ten years, this will be the worst year for stock market investors in the past ten years. Look at last year. There was a 22 percent return. That was so nice. We were all complaining about 2015 and 2011 when you only had a little bit.

[08:45:05] Look at the look on your face. John's got a look on his face that is not --

HILL: Stop looking at your 401(k).

BERMAN: I was looking at my 401(k). I was just looking.

HILL: I knew it.

BERMAN: I honestly was just looking. I'm like, that stinks.

ROMANS: So, look, we had stocks up for almost ten years. We had very low interest rates and we had the Federal Reserve, you know, adding to its armory of things to keep the economy liquid. Now that is all being reversed and we are heading into a new terrain, trade war, political uncertainty, higher interest rates, welcome to 2019.

BERMAN: Thanks, Romans.

HILL: Buckle up.

ROMANS: Yes. Mercy (ph).

HILL: Don't look at your phone, John.

BERMAN: I'm down. Down big!

HILL: Yes, so am I.

BERMAN: I'm going to have to keep on working.

HILL: Well, there's that. America's oldest World War II veteran and the oldest man in the United

States, we're learning, has died. Richard Overton passed away on Thursday at the age of 112 after battling pneumonia. Overton volunteered for the Army in 1942. He served with the 188th Aviation Engineer Battalion, an all-black unit, that served on various islands in the Pacific. He was honored by former President Barack Obama back in 2013 at a Veteran's Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

BERMAN: Mr. Overton, we salute you and thank you for your service.

New details emerging in the Kevin Spacey sexual assault case. How a Snapchat video taken by his alleged accuser could affect things. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:49:59] HILL: A potential bombshell in the sex assault case against embattled actor Kevin Spacey. And a warning to our viewers at home, some of the details that you are about to hear are graphic. Spacey is facing one count of indecent assault for allegedly groping an 18-year- old at a Nantucket bar in 2016. According to a criminal complaint, Spacey unzipped the accusers pants and inappropriately touched him. This after Spacey bought the young man several drinks. Prosecutors now have a very brief, it's one second, of video, a Snapchap video, that the accuser shot of the alleged assault and sent to his girlfriend.

Joining us now, CNN legal analyst Mark Geragos and Areva Martin.

Good to have both of you with us.

There's been a lot of focus on this video. The headline certainly makes you stop in your tracks. There's a video of the assault. We are talking about one second of video. How much, Mark, could we get out of that video?

MARK GERAGOS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Depending. I -- you know, I'm always leery about videos used in a courtroom, especially a criminal courtroom. I've seen so many cases that started off kind of bombshell like when they talk about a video and then ended up in an acquittal over them. I'm always a little bit leery about it. And this case has kind of that same feeling to it, but I suppose we're going to have to wait and just see what the content is. You also tend to wonder why it was being sent immediately to the girlfriend. Those are going to be the kinds of questions that the defense are going to -- is going to ask in this case.

HILL: Areva, we're also learning more details here in that in how things played out. And part of what we learned are the number of drinks that were consumed in a 70-minute period. So reportedly four to five whiskies and five beers over the span of 70 minutes. And we're also told that the accuser, who, again, was 18 at the time, told Kevin Spacey he was 23. All of that we know will come into play.

AREVA MARTIN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, Erica. And we already see the defense attorneys using that information to try to form the defense for Kevin Spacey. They've already questioned whether this victim may have been, you know, black-out drunk because he did consume so much alcohol. They've also pointed to the fact that he lied apparently or allegedly lied to Kevin Spacey about his age as a way of questioning his credibility.

I think what's so interesting about this case is in this era of Me Too, where we've seen so many high profile men, like Kevin Spacey, lose their jobs, their careers derail, we've seen very few prosecutions of men who have been accused of sexual assault, whether it's against another male in this case or against women. Harvey Weinstein, we know, 60 plus women actually accused him of some form of sexual assault and there's only one prosecution to date that's moving forward. We know in Los Angeles the district attorney has refused to move forward with multiple cases that were brought to the district attorney's attention. So I think these cases, and to Mark's point, you know, it's still very, very difficult for defendants to be prosecuted and held accountable in these kinds of sexual assault cases.

HILL: And it will -- I mean you bring up a great point because this is the first -- there are a number of accusers involving Kevin Spacey, but this is the first time that obviously something is moving forward legally here, Mark. And so there will be a real keen focus on it.

GERAGOS: Well, that's absolutely true. And part of the problem is that the -- you run headlong into the statute of limitations on most of these cases because people are talking about incidents that happened years ago. That's what makes this one different is that it -- relatively speaking, given the complete landscape of some of these allegations that Areva refers to, the Me Too movement, these are fairly recent. They don't go back decades. And that's generally what a prosecutor wants to see.

I mean Bill Cosby's was stretching the envelope or pushing the envelope in terms of how old the case was. And I think but for in that case where you had a transcript of his testimony, that never would have been brought. Here you've got the Snapchat video, which I think gives some ammunition of the prosecution, probably gives them a little bit of wind at their back in order to proceed on this. But I don't think by any means that this is a slam dunk for the prosecution.

HILL: The defense laying out really part of the strategy too. And I just want to play a little bit of what the defense attorney had to say. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, KEVIN SPACEY'S ATTORNEY: Instead of walking away or moving away or moving back or grabbing the wrist or slapping the hand, he indicated to you during that three-minute time period that he was texting and Snapchating.

TROOPER GERALD DONOVAN: That's correct.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: So trying to set it up there, Areva, that this accuser did not walk away -- MARTIN: Yes.

HILL: Did not say stop. Which, you know, a lot of people will watch that and say, well, this is a classic line. It's also an increasingly fine line in the post Me Too era to go down that road.

MARTIN: Yes, we've seen this used multiple times by defendants, again raising questions about the victim. You know, if this was such a traumatic event, why didn't you take, you know, more aggressive actions? Why didn't you move? Why didn't you, you know, stop it? Why didn't you say no?

[08:55:02] But we now know from psychologists, you know, the trauma associated with being sexually assaulted. And what we've heard from this victim's mother is that this was a star-struck 18-year-old who wanted to get a picture with, you know, someone he deemed to be a very big, you know, superstar. So what's going through the mind of an 18- year-old that's being assaulted by, you know, someone that he revered? I think the psychologists would tell us that his actions were quite reasonable, that you wouldn't expect someone in his possession, necessarily, to take any action or to take steps different than what he took. But clearly the defense is going to use this so suggest that either, you know, there was some form of consent or, two, that maybe this whole thing was made up, that this young man was to drunk, so inebriated that he really doesn't have a solid memory of what was going on at the time of this alleged incident.

HILL: Mark, really quickly, before we let you go, this video that Kevin Spacey posed of himself in character as Frank Underwood has so many people scratching their heads. Could that come up? Could that come into play at all?

GERAGOS: You know, I've thought about that because at first, when you look at it, you wonder, are they looking for some kind of a mental defense because the -- it really is kind of breaking the mold as to what you would want your client to post given the timing of it. I suppose it allows us commentators to talk about it and shift the focus from the other video. But it is a rather bizarre and I guess some would call it a bold move. I would have any misgivings if this were my client.

HILL: Mark Geragos, Areva Martin, always good to hear from both of you. Thank you.

MARTIN: Thanks, Erica.

BERMAN: All right, aliens are not invading. The government is not shutting down. Or the government shutdown is not ending. And the president is up and commenting. Brace yourselves. We have the very latest, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:00:09] JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: A very good Friday