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Government Shutdown Enters Day 10 with No End in Sight; Outgoing Chief of Staff Defends Rocky Tenure; Thousands to Pack Times Square to Ring in New Year; Trump Blames Dems for Deaths of Migrant Children. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired December 31, 2018 - 06:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: President Trump is not going to talk away from this fight without border security funding.

[05:59:58] UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are not wasting taxpayer dollars on a ransom note.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, COUNSELOR TO DONALD TRUMP: It is a silly semantic argument. You keep saying, "Wall, wall, wall." He wants all types of border security.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our president decides to use the death of two children as a political tool. I was disgusted.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our agents did everything they could. This is a multifaceted problem that requires a multifaceted solution.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and around the world. This is NEW DAY, and it really is a new day already in Auckland, New Zealand. Look at this. The new year has just sprung there.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Happy new year.

CAMEROTA: Happy new year. I'm Alisyn Camerota. I'm here with Erica Hill. That's beautiful. I mean, look at it. Oh, my gosh. It's so exciting. And they look like they're having better weather than we will here --

HILL: They are.

CAMEROTA: -- in New York tonight. But let's just take a moment to watch their revelry and their fireworks display. Impressive.

That's cool.

HILL: Not a bad way to kick things off, Monday morning.

CAMEROTA: That is really cool. You know, I'm one of the only people on earth who does not think New Year's Eve is overrated. I love --

HILL: You are one of the only people on earth.

CAMEROTA: I know that. People think that it's, like, amateur night. I love New Year's Eve, so I'm very excited to be spending the morning of it with you.

HILL: Right. But you have a big night ahead.

CAMEROTA: I do. So we'll tell you all about our big night. Tonight in Times Square, journalists will be honored, and I am delighted to be one of them. So we'll talk all about that.

Here in the U.S., the federal government shutdown enters day ten, and there appears to be no end in sight. President Trump is dug in on his demand for billions of dollars for his border wall concept. Sources tells CNN the president is unwilling to compromise, privately telling lawmakers he will not agree to a deal with only $1.3 billion for border security. Democrats are not budging either. They take control of the House of Representatives on Thursday. And for some 800,000 federal workers who are on furlough or working without pay, they will start this new year without a paycheck.

HILL: And in an extraordinary interview with "The Los Angeles Times," outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly admits the Trump administration abandoned long ago the idea of a physical concrete wall on the border with Mexico. So then why, you may ask, is President Trump still touting a wall?

The president weighing in for the first time on the two Guatemalan children, migrant children who died while in U.S. government custody over the weekend. Weighing in on that, blaming Democrats, claiming, without proof, those tragedies have -- could have been prevented with the construction of his wall.

All of this, of course, comes as Senator Lindsey Graham says the president is reevaluating plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. To say there's a lot going on may be an understatement this morning.

Let's begin our coverage with CNN's Boris Sanchez, who is live at the White House.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, good morning, Erica. Yes, it's day ten of the government shutdown, and there is no breakthrough expected anytime soon.

The outgoing chief of staff, John Kelly, also not going out quietly. Kelly, in an interview with the "Los Angeles Times" this weekend, blasted former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, suggesting that Sessions sprung his family separation policy on the administration unexpectedly, something that left this White House in chaos and something that White House officials have denied.

Further, Kelly tried to redefine what the president means when he talks about a border wall. Look at this quote from the outgoing chief of staff. He told "The L.A. Times," quote, "To be honest, it's not a wall. The president still says 'wall' -- oftentimes, frankly, he'll say 'barrier' or 'fencing.' Now he's tending towards steel slats. But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration."

We should point out just a few days ago, President Trump tweeted out that the only way to solve the immigration crisis was through an old- fashioned wall on the border with Mexico.

We also say Senator Lindsey Graham at the White House here this weekend. He had a long lunch with President Trump, and he said that he presented a potential idea to President Trump that could end the shutdown. Listen to this from the senator from South Carolina.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GRAHAM: The president didn't commit, but I think he's very open- minded. I know there are some Democrats out there who would be willing to provide money for wall/border security if we could deal with the DACA population and TPS people. And hopefully, we can get some serious discussions started, maybe as soon as next week.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: Though Graham there says he is optimistic, it is unlikely that Democrats would pounce on this sort of deal. There's already a legal case going through the courts right now that pertains to the legal status of DREAMers that may be resolved without Congress having to act.

We should point out there are still some 800,000 federal workers that are still furloughed or without pay. And potentially adding insult to injury, President Trump on Friday signed an executive order freezing pay raises in 2019 for all federal workers -- Alisyn and Erica.

CAMEROTA: Boris, thank you very much for starting us off so well.

Here to discuss, we want to bring in our panel. We have CNN senior political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson; associate editor and columnist for RealClearPolitics, A.B. Stoddard; and "Washington Post" congressional reporter and CNN political analyst Karoun Demirjian.

[06:05:10] 2019 is the year of the woman, and we are launching it here this morning on NEW DAY. It's great to see all of you. Happy new year.

I have been off work for a week. OK? And I can't begin to tell you all how, from outside the news cycle, looking in, how different it looks and how, in some ways, absurd this shutdown looks, this impasse looks.

I have lost track of what exactly the president was asking for with his wall, so I went back in time to see what it was asking for, and the president has lost track of what he's asking for with his wall.

So A.B., here's where it started. When he was campaigning, the president, back then, Donald Trump said he wanted 1,000 miles of a concrete wall. OK? Then he said later it was going to be solid concrete from the ground to 32 feet high. Then he changed it to 700 to 800 miles. Then he changed it to, "No, actually, all we need are artistically designed steel slats, no more concrete wall." Then he said it has to be between 500 and 550 miles.

A.B., how can anyone negotiate when this wall is a moving target?

A.B. STODDARD, ASSOCIATE EDITOR/COLUMNIST, REALCLEARPOLITICS: Right. And that's the gift to the Democrats. Every statement from Senator Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, is "Oh, you know, we'll just wait to find what position the president lands on, and we'll take seriously any publicly-approved plan or consensus deal to reopen the government once we hear about it from President Trump. And until then you guys can keep flailing around." People like Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff, and Senator Graham, you know, can come out and try and speak for the president and Bob and weave and pretend there's something going on.

But actually, what it seems is that the people around President Trump are concerned about ending the shutdown and looking like they want to reopen the government and are concerned about this politically, but the president himself thinks it's a great fight; and he doesn't really care how long it goes on.

But it's true: when you listen to the people around him trying to back off a wall, he calls it steel slats. Remember a few weeks ago, when he said, "Actually, Congress doesn't even have to fund it, because we're going to sort of find some from the military and other parts of the government," like they are going to find, like, a HUD slush fund to get the steel slats going, which is hardly a wall Mexico is going to pay for.

So if you hear Kellyanne call it silly semantics, and you hear Lindsey Graham call it a metaphor for border security, you combine that with the John Kelly interview, and you know, there really is no wall. But he needs something that's face-saving that he can walk away from.

HILL: Well, and he's already started that, right? Because Alisyn's point is we look at the evolution here. We had the tweet last week, the president has said, "But this isn't about the wall; it's about border security." So you know, that can mean there is a tweet for everything.

Nia-Malika, as we look at this, though, the only thing that President Trump really needs out of this, right, for him to say OK is for him to feel like he's getting a win in his book.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I think that's right. I mean, he is obviously looking at the conservative chattering class, people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh who are very down on his first move with regard to this budget, basically agreeing to a clean C.R. and no wall funding. And then he backed off of that once there was outcry from folks in his base, prominent folks in his base who felt like he folded too quickly. So I do think he's got to figure out a way where he can sell this as a

win. What does that look like? It's really unclear, because we know this is a president who's talked already, basically saying, "Oh, the wall has already been started. A lot of it has been built already. I just don't talk about it." Obviously, none of that is really true. And you wonder if it gets this, you know, 1.3 billion, 1.6 billion, whatever it ends up being from the Democrats, likely none of that will be allocated for the wall if he just kind of sells it to his base as a win.

He at some point, I think, was planning to go down to the border. And he certainly wants that photo-op, right? This is certainly a president, I think, in his fantasy would really be able to, you know, as a reelection campaign, be able to stroll along that southern border and essentially say, "This is the wall" -- the wall border system, the steel slats or whatever -- as part of his campaign. He won't -- he'll probably get shy of that. But listen, I mean, he is a salesman, and he'll likely sell -- sell whatever is in this final deal to his base. We'll see if they buy it.

Ann Coulter has been very hawkish on wanting a wall. She has this Twitter count where she basically counts every day zero -- you know, how much wall has been built today: zero. How much wall was built yesterday: zero miles. And so he's got a real hard base that he's got to please.

CAMEROTA: Here's the other thing that's absurd from outside the news cycle, Karoun. Both sides, Republicans and Democrats, say they want more border security. Both sides say they're willing for more construction of some kind shoring up the existing fencing, or adding to it. Both sides say they're willing to spend money. Yet, they're at an impasse. You can't have more agreement -- they're starting from such a point of agreement, and yet they're at an impasse, and we're in day ten of a shutdown.

KAROUN DEMIRJIAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes. I mean, look, it's not knew that they've been at an impasse over this, because for a very long time, the GOP has wanted to do border security first. "Don't ask us for anything else until we've secured the border." And Democrats have always wanted to pair border security with some extension to the question of -- the larger question of immigration, whether that's, you know, the DACA program to give official status to the young people who came to the country as undocumented children, or it's dealing with the quotas of legal immigration, or something else. They want to have a little bit of, you know, opening, legitimation of the immigrants that are here without legal status, in exchange for or in partnership with building up these defenses along the border for inflows of people coming in.

And you kind of saw that that was what people were talking about a year ago when we were still talking about $25 billion for border security in exchange for the DACA deal, which the president didn't take that, right?

So -- so it's like we're dealing with everything now in miniature. Because the -- you're right, the gap of where they are on how much to spend on the border security situation, whether you want to call it a wall or anything else, is really narrow given how big the federal budget is.

But -- but -- this is all kind of the first step of what the negotiations are going to be between House Democrats and the president, between Senate Republicans and the president, because there's not exactly one state of mind among the Republicans right now in Washington, D.C., either.

And this is all going to set the tone for what they're going to be negotiating going forward for at least the next two years, which is going to include a lot more on immigration and border security, because this is not a full -- full funding of any sort of border security measure. And -- and it's definitely not going to be addressing the entire immigration crisis, which has been very long -- it's been dogging D.C. for a long time how to solve that.

So yes, it seems like it's not that big a deal. Why can't they just meet in the middle if they both think that this is a priority. But it represents so much more than what it is in this moment. And that's why we may be looking at this dragging on for, you know, longer than the next few days when Democrats come into power and Congress kicks off again for 2019.

HILL: And then sometimes there's that whole issue of common sense seeming to be lacking in Washington. Which kind of happens, when things look like they should be so easy and yet, here we are.

CAMEROTA: So John Kelly gave this remarkable interview. He talked to "The Los Angeles Times" for two hours on his way out. This is sort of his exit interview, but it was with "The Los Angeles Times."

And on the wall -- let's just touch on that quickly -- he says, "To be honest, it's not a wall. The president still says 'wall.' Oftentimes, frankly, he'll say 'barrier' or 'fencing.' Now he's tended towards steel slats. But we left a solid, concrete wall early on in the administration."

Well, that's good to know. Thank you, General Kelly, for explaining that to the public.

And then the other headline was that in this long phone interview, he defended his own rocky tenure, because people have been, you know, whispering that he would be out sooner than later, arguing that "it is best measured by what the president did not do when Kelly was at his side," A.B., meaning that he says that he prevented the president from doing things like a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, et cetera, et cetera.

STODDARD: Yes. This is -- it's very tough to watch the career of John Kelly come to this probable end, after the service he's given to this country, losing his son in service. He is a man who wakes up every morning thinking of his duty to the Constitution and to our country and obviously stayed in this job, which he called bone- crushing, for a long time, thinking he was doing it for the greater good. And at some point, after all the indignity and all the back-stabbing

and the family coming after him and everything, the public sort of disassociation/shaming that President Trump does with people that he turns off of, like the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and then chief of staff John Kelly, and you get sort of isolated all out in public. You know, it comes to a point where it's too much, and he's trying to regain some sort of self-respect and credibility and explain why he stayed so long.

It is very true that John Kelly prevented this president, back in February of last year, from taking everyone out of South Korea. Lots of things have happened, have almost happened behind the scenes. And what John Kelly is telling us on the record is everything we heard in the anonymous -- we read in the anonymous op-ed in "The New York Times" and from background sources in Bob Woodward's book "Fear," it's all of a piece. But the idea of him doing it a few days or hours before leaving, throwing the president under the bus on the wall and stuff, is just out of frustration and this, I think, human need to -- of self-preservation to kind of explain why he took it and why he felt he was doing the right thing.

CAMEROTA: Are you suggesting that John Kelly was the author of the anonymous op-ed?

STODDARD: I mean, really, the possibilities are endless, Alisyn, but he could be a contender.

CAMEROTA: OK. Ladies, thank you very much for all the insight. Great to talk to you all this morning.

All right. So we just showed you moments ago Auckland, New Zealand, is already ringing in 2019 with a great fireworks display. Let's listen to this for a second.

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(FIREWORKS)

(CHEERING)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: So nice. Of course, thousands of people -- well, a million, I think, are expected to pack New York City's Times Square tonight to ring in the new year. As always, security of course, is expected to be very tight. CNN's Miguel Marquez is live where I will be this evening. Really looking forward to it, Miguel. So tell me how safe I'll be.

MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You get -- you get to press the button to bring the ball down.

CAMEROTA: I know!

MARQUEZ: That is so thrilling.

CAMEROTA: I'm so excited!

MARQUEZ: That is very, very cool. I love that.

CAMEROTA: It's just --

MARQUEZ: Have a great time.

CAMEROTA: It just gets better and better. Thank you. So I'll see you out there. When do people start to get penned in and unable to leave?

MARQUEZ: Ha! Well, you know, Auckland, New Zealand, the land of tomorrow. We're in the land of yesterday, and it's about to get more interesting here.

So this is Times Square. All the way at the top of that building, on the far end, you can just see the pole where that famous ball will come down. At 11 a.m. the pens to let people in will open, and it's a little like Hotel California. You can check in anytime you want, but if you have to leave you can't get back in. So you better have your restroom strategy all figured out.

There will be magnetometers to get into here. No alcohol, no backpacks. No coolers. No large bags. No lawn chairs or no umbrellas. It doesn't sound like much of a party to me.

There's going to be over 50 agencies -- local, state and federal agencies -- hundreds of officers. They'll be in hotels. They will be -- there'll be bomb-sniffing dogs. There will be the bomb squad here. They are going to have everything. And this year they have one new thing. Drones.

HILL: Two new.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN MILLER, NYPD DEPUTY COMMISSIONER OF INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTERTERRORISM: We will be deploying NYPD drones for overwatch. We haven't done that before, but that's going to give us a visual aid and the flexibility of being able to move a camera to a certain spot with great rapidity through a tremendous crowd.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MARQUEZ: Now, even if you want to bring your drone and fly it over the Times Square here, they have anti-drone technology, as well, they'll be deploying here. So don't even consider it.

And as you might notice, I'm wearing my fashionable New Year's sweater. No jacket, no hat so far. It is warm out here, but it's going to be wet. So pick your poison: wet or cold.

Back to you guys.

CAMEROTA: Thank you. I would think your New Year's sweater would be a little bit more bedazzled. But -- MARQUEZ: I know. Well, it's morning.

CAMEROTA: OK.

HILL: By the time the sun is up, we want some bedazzling, Miguel.

CAMEROTA: Thank you.

HILL: Critics accusing President Trump of injecting politics into the deaths of two Guatemalan migrant children. They died, of course, while in U.S. custody. The president falsely blaming Democrats. What the White House is now saying, that's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:22:19] HILL: President Trump falsely blaming Democrats for the deaths of two Guatemalan migrant children while those children were in U.S. custody. The president also misrepresenting the circumstances surrounding the deaths of 8-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo and 7-year- old Jakeline Maquin to make the case for his proposed border wall.

Back with us: Nia-Malika Henderson, A.B. Stoddard, and Karoun Demirjian.

I just want to put up the president's tweet, too, in case people missed it over the weekend. So, as we pointed out, the president not only blaming Democrats here. He says it's the fault of their policies. But also, the circumstances surrounding the deaths of one of these children, saying that one hadn't had any water or food for days, according to the father, and that's what we heard from Customs and Border Protection. The parents, though, actually pushing back on that.

Still, that does not stop Kellyanne Conway from continuing to drill down. Here's what she had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CONWAY: I don't like -- I don't like some of the Democrats using these deaths as political pawns.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: But isn't that exactly what the president just did?

CONWAY: No, the president is not doing that. The president does not want these children to come on the perilous journey to begin with. They are paying now -- some of them are paying the ultimate price, but many of them, all of them, are paying these coyotes who don't give a whit about human life.

BASH: But this is not a new policy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: Karoun, any surprise that this is the message we're getting? KAROUN DEMIRJIAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, not really, given that

it is the president. However, when you're talking about the deaths of children, to take a stance that it's just kind of pointing the finger at the Democratic Party and twisting facts about what the circumstances were that led to their death, I think it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths in a way that is kind of surprising, even though Trump is prone to doing this sort of thing.

And also just because the statistics don't really support what he's saying. I mean, I think there was a decade -- in the last decade where there were no deaths of children at the border, and now two in a month. And this is at the same time as there has been very harsh criticism of the policies that the Trump administration is pursuing at the border.

So clearly, he's going to try to deflect, but to kind of deflect it and attempt to put it on the other party is only going to cause a backlash that does not look good. Again, when you're talking about little kids who shouldn't have had to die in these circumstances.

CAMEROTA: I mean, Nia, he's the president, and the Republicans controlled the House and the Senate. These children died on his watch. I mean, not to cast any blame, but the idea that he thinks that he can somehow blame the Democrats for this, it just doesn't wash.

HENDERSON: I think that's right. And remember, this is a president who, as a candidate, said what no other presidential candidates has said before. He said that he alone could fix it, and by "it" he meant virtually everything.

So this idea that now he can cast blame on Democrats, it is typical of this president. This isn't a "buck stops here" administration; it's not a "buck stops here" president. It's a president who likes to cast blame, who likes to frame Democrats -- whoever else is standing nearby, he likes to cast blame on them. He's not somebody who likes to take responsibility. So that's what we saw there.

[06:25:22] He also is somebody that likes to twist facts, as what we saw in that Twitter about what happened down at the border.

We do know that, obviously, Kirstjen Nielsen went down to the border. She was in El Paso and also in Yuma, Arizona, over the last couple of days. They're increasing medical screenings there. At least the last kid who died, the 8-year-old, he died of the flu. At least that's what the medical examiner said, that there were signs of influenza. So it's a sad situation.

And listen, I think this reframes a lot of this debate. He's obviously trying to reframe it as, like, "Oh, if there was a wall, this would stop." He's also talking about cutting off aid, which probably is the exact wrong thing to do, for those different countries where those folks are fleeing. They're obviously fleeing poverty; they're fleeing violence, as well.

This is a president who obviously is trying to talk to his base and not take any responsibility and frame the Democrats as the folks who are at fault here.

HILL: A.B., when does he need to start, though, expanding beyond the base? We've talked about this so much, and we know that the message is consistent for the base. And it's well-received. There was even a tweet the other day that "most of the furloughed workers are Democrats anyway," which was -- frankly, just leaves you speechless as to what the real intent of that was.

But at some point, the president is going to have to stop going back, right, in the cabinet and just pulling out the old things that seem to work, and may have to start actually expanding, and perhaps even better understanding what's really going on.

STODDARD: I think that was my favorite holiday treat from President Trump is that all the furloughed workers are Democrats, so they pretty much don't matter to him. But then again, they're Democrats who love the wall and called him from their furloughs -- and contracted workers who are out of work and will not get back pay -- to tell him that they actually wanted the wall. So that was definitely worth noting.

But I think that you make a good point. President Trump has no interest, actually, in expanding beyond the base. If you look at all of the experts who studied the 2016 election, and all of the data of his 77,000-point -- vote win in three states alone, where Jill Stein's margin in two of those states was material, he drew what everyone calls an inside strait. He'd have to do it again.

He has not done anything to expand beyond his coalition. And pollsters and people around him are telling him that he has to. But part of President Trump's -- the way he operates is to stay on offense.

Newt Gingrich once said of him a few years ago that Donald Trump wakes up every morning trying to figure out how to stay on offense, which is why I actually don't think he wants a wall to walk in front of with the cameras. He said it will be done by the election. He wants to continue fighting, and I doubt that he'll take whatever package comes to reopen the government, even if he signs it and says, "This is definitely a wall, and now it's done."

He wants to continue fighting, and he wants to be seen as fighting for that base. And I do not see him compromising, coming to the middle, reaching out to Democrats or independents in the next two years.

CAMEROTA: Karoun, when the president writes, "If we had wall, they wouldn't even try to bring their kids." You know, migrants wouldn't even come. I mean, if only it were that easy, you know? If only there were such a simple solution and you know, decades and administrations hadn't struggled with this.

You know, Democrats keep wanting comprehensive immigration reform, and some Republicans do, as well; but the president rarely, if ever, talks about that.

DEMIRJIAN: Right. No, he's not somebody that's a convener of some sort of solution, and that goes to what A.B. was saying, is that he's not trying to move towards the middle and find ways to kind of bring everybody together. He's appealing to his base. His base is protectionist. His base is not comfortable with the idea of other people coming to this country.

I mean, look, you can go back as many decades as you want to. Walls are not the motivating or the demotivating factor for immigrants most of the time. I mean, I think probably all of our family stories involve immigrants who came to this country for different reasons. And fear of what would happen about trying to get in is not usually as big of a motivator as fear of what you are trying to leave behind, because the circumstances are no longer livable, whether that's war or poverty or other kinds of instability.

I think that there is probably a consensus to be found between House Democrats and Senate Republicans. Remember, the Senate -- again, it was led by Democrats at the time, but the Senate did find a compromise that they could pass before. And House Democrats are inclined to try to vote for something that can have some sort of starting solution for the immigration crisis.

But with the president being the decider and the potential vetoer, I don't know if that's really something that is possible to get through, because it's going to have to be in spite of the president. He doesn't seem to be the type that is actually going to try to find that solution and push it through.

CAMEROTA: All right. Karoun, A.B., Nia, thank you very much for all of those insights.