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Trump to Give Oval Office Address on Need for Wall; TSA Senior Leaders Discuss How to Keep Screeners at Their Posts. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired January 08, 2019 - 06:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: This president is reeling. He's not winning the narrative here. He's trying to create a crisis.

[05:59:33] SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), MINORITY LEADER: People's lives are being hurt. That's real human collateral damage to President Trump's temper tantrum.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Donald Trump's a guy that like compromise. It's Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats that won't budge one inch.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm confident he could declare a national emergency. Injecting a new element into this just makes it more complicated.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Knowing you are being used as a negotiation piece is devastating.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's intercepted.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Clemson tigers rolled over Alabama. They win the college football national championship.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You just took down the Tide. How do you feel?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Great, man.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a blessing. I can't describe it.

I'm so excited for my teammates and everybody who felt this good.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: The least exciting college championship on record yields to the most interesting news day.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: I don't even know what that means, because I look forward to hearing what you're about to say.

BERMAN: Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY. It's Tuesday, January 8, 6 a.m. here in New York. And this morning, the big question is, seven minutes of what?

Tonight, the president will deliver his first Oval Office address. We're told it will be about seven of -- seven minutes long. But seven minutes of what exactly? Seven minutes to convince the American people that the government shutdown, now in its 18th day, is worth it.

Seven minutes to justify the shutdown that he promised, the president promised to own and pledged to continue unless he got funding for a border wall that is now a steel barrier that Mexico will still not pay for. Sources say the presidents' aides have told him his message is not resonating, so he will try to use those seven minutes to fix that, to argue there is a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

But this morning, critics are asking how much of these seven minutes will be based on fact. Because the last 72 hours, his case has been riddled with false claims.

CAMEROTA: So how can the American public trust what the president says tonight when the administration has repeatedly lied about the numbers and the situation at the border.

Furthermore, President Trump just claimed that some of his predecessors confided in him that they should have built the wall long ago. Every living president says that's not true. They did not talk to President Trump.

Congress is back today, but no breakthrough yet to reopen the government. The effects of the second longest government shutdown in American history are starting to be felt. We are three days away from nearly a million workers federal workers not getting their first full paycheck. TSA officials are concerned about how to keep airport security agents on the job without pay, and millions of low-income Americans could lose food assistance if the shutdown dragons on.

So we have so much to discuss this morning. Joining us now, former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart; Washington bureau chief for "The Daily Beast," Jackie Kucinich; and CNN political analyst David Gregory. Great to see all of you.

Joe, the problem is that they have repeatedly used erroneous numbers about the situation at the border. I mean, just for one example, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen in June of this past year said -- I will quote her tweet -- "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border, period."

On that day, 2,000 children had already been separated from their parents. There were more to come. We can't trust them. They've proven it time and again.

So tonight, these seven or eight minutes from the president, it's really hard to know what the point will be and what we should take away from it.

JOE LOCKHART, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Yes. And the justification for a national emergency has been built largely on the fact that terrorists have been pouring over the border, the southern border. And I think we found out last night that the number isn't 4,000, that there was as few as six people who were stopped. And we don't even know if they're terrorists. They just may have the same name as a terrorist. I mean, it's -- really is nonsense. So you have a national emergency based on fiction.

And that's the problem for putting this on the air. There are real issues about -- and I think the networks have, I hope, struggled yesterday with the decision to put this on, because he consistently hasn't told the truth. And, you know, someone's got to fact check that.

If I were a network executive, which I'm not, I wouldn't put this on live. I would let him give the address, and I'd look at it and find out, what's true, what's not. Or I'd say, "Give me the text in advance. Let us decide in advance what's true and what's not, because we shouldn't be using our public airwaves for someone to spew more of these lies. It's -- you know, it's -- you know, you have a president who's trying to create hysteria for his own political purposes, not to protect the American people.

BERMAN: To be clear, there's no precedent for that. There's no precedent for the networks getting the presidential text beforehand and then deciding whether it's true or not.

And this is the first request from this president to address the nation from the Oval Office. Thus, it has a certain weight and importance here. Ted Koppel, you know, former anchor of "Nightline," said, "Look, David Gregory, we've got to give the president the benefit of the doubt. He wants this air time."

If he blows it this time, if it's seven or eight minutes of lies this time and the next time, the networks shouldn't give it. But he is the president.

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. And he hasn't asked before. There have been debates about how presidents have used national airtime in the past, during the Iraq War, I remember notably, a lot of debates around updates on the war's progress and action taken in Iraq. So that will continue.

But I do think Joe is right. I think there's an opportunity and a responsibility -- and I know CNN will do it -- to really scrutinize what the president says in real time, as well as provide Democrats an opportunity to respond. So there can be some debate in prime time that's in the national interest about the government shutdown and about whether there is any kind of emergency at the border, which has been a case thus far made with so many falsehoods that are provably false, a situation that has not dramatically changed and that the president has not dealt with when he had an opportunity to get five times as much funding from the Democrats as he's demanding now to have a comprehensive solution.

So those are the holes that have to be exposed about the president's approach here. At the same time, he's doing what I think most presidents would do: try to command as much attention to control the narrative in this government shutdown, to force the solution his way.

CAMEROTA: You know what's so interesting, Jackie, is the public support for this. So it started at, I think, 58 percent. This was back in 2016, September 2016, 58 percent of people opposed the border wall.

Now, after all the talk, after everything that President Trump and Sarah Sanders and Kirstjen Nielsen and everybody has tried to say about this crisis, 57 percent, so statistically equal, still oppose the border wall.

JACKIE KUCINICH, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. And while some of the folks that are close to the president are concerned that his message isn't breaking through, it might be that the public just doesn't agree with him.

You could say that the midterm elections was -- was a rejection of some of the tactics that the administration used during -- during the 2018 election having to do with immigration, the caravan, the immigration hell-scape that they were painting. People didn't buy it.

So perhaps it's the message and the messenger, not how it's being said. And I mean, in order to fact this -- fact-check this in live time, we might be seeing a situation where it's basically closed captioned, because of this president's notorious -- or I guess infrequent relationship with the truth.

BERMAN: You want to pre-fact check some of the things that may come up tonight? No. 1, the idea that there's a crisis on the border. I happen to have a chart here.

CAMEROTA: Your fair chart.

BERMAN: Which shows --

CAMEROTA: I gave you this --

BERMAN: -- illegal border crossings. If you look down at the bottom there, which is covered by our banner, 2018 -- well, 2018, there were 396,000 illegal border crossings. You can see it's at a more-or-less historic low.

CAMEROTA: Let me just push back on that for a second, John. Because I think that when you have all these unaccompanied minors who are in these holding facilities, sleeping on boards or slats or whatever, clearly there is -- the U.S. government at the moment does seem overwhelmed. Two kids have died.

BERMAN: It's an apples and oranges argument.

CAMEROTA: So they do seem overwhelmed. OK?

BERMAN: It's an apples and oranges -- it's an apples and oranges argument. And when you're talking about a border wall, asylum seekers with children don't jump over a wall or run across a border. They present -- listen -- CAMEROTA: I get that.

BERMAN: They present themselves at ports of entry. So what I'm saying --

CAMEROTA: Yes.

BERMAN: What I'm saying, if the president is saying there's a national security reason to build a wall, because people are flooding over the border --

CAMEROTA: Yes.

BERMAN: -- this chart tells you that the numbers of people coming are near or at an historic low.

CAMEROTA: That's fantastic. And what I'm saying is that, clearly, there are issues. And I think Democrats are at risk of acting -- when they say a wall is immoral, let's leave it at that, I think they are at risk of sounding too soft on -- there is something going wrong at the border. And there needs to be a larger comprehensive conversation about what to fix it, not just as though a wall is going to fix it.

BERMAN: Well, I'll come back to the facts in a second. But Joe, just to answer that point, does a wall stop asylum seekers with children?

LOCKHART: No, it's not. And the family separation of policy institute, as much as Donald Trump says it's the same as Obama's. It's not.

CAMEROTA: It's not.

LOCKHART: It's not. I'll say it again, it's not.

CAMEROTA: Three thousand kids were separated from their parents, and some may never be reunited.

LOCKHART: So if there is a humanitarian crisis here, he created it; he can fix it. It is -- it is absolute fiction that there's a national emergency here.

We have national emergencies. Climate change is a national emergency. Gun violence is a national emergency. This is not. This is politics. And we're -- you know, tonight, we're -- one of two things is going to happen. We're going to find out that Donald Trump is even more cynical than we ever knew and that he used yesterday's briefing with the vice president to build this up so he could get his seven minutes. And we'll just get more lies.

Or we're going to have a constitutional crisis, where he, for no reason at all, declares a national emergency and starts violating U.S. law. Or going against.

BERMAN: It will be challenged in court, and the courts will decide. There's a case that can be made there's a national emergency. My point, though, is that if he's going to make the case that you need a wall because people are flooding over the border, again, the facts here show that they are not flooding by any means compared to that.

[06:10:06] GREGORY: And not only that, the argument -- the argument is that there is a -- a flood of migrants who are coming, illegal immigrants who are coming who are committing crimes.

BERMAN: Or terrorists.

GREGORY: Or I was going to get to terrorists. Or violent crimes, or that they're terrorists. Let's remember, our short-term history, back in 2007, when President Bush tried again to get comprehensive immigration reform, conservatives -- conservative populists, FOX News hosts, helped to tank it with this same specious argument that terrorists were going to come through the Southern border. Hasn't happened. That was 2007. And now they're using it again when the facts tell us that most people who present, who may -- might be terrorists come through airports and not the southern border.

It's really -- it's worse than cynicism that people will try to -- you know, to force people to go along with this argument, based on fear, and based on a problem that they say is a crisis.

There's no question there are real problems, that illegal crossings have spiked. There is the family separation issue which they created. But they've had an opportunity to fix this.

They've also had an opportunity to get more money from Democrats than they're even asking for now, and the president said no. So ask him why did he say no when he had a chance to solve this?

CAMEROTA: Go ahead.

KUCINICH: Airports, by the way, that are currently dealing with TSA agents who aren't getting paid --

CAMEROTA: Bingo.

KUCINICH: -- who are calling out sick --

CAMEROTA: Bingo.

KUCINICH: That actually, this whole stalemate over the border wall, the impasse over the border wall, is actually making the country less safe, because TSA -- there are fewer TSA agents on the job; because they're not being paid.

KUCINICH: Right. Right, exactly. So it is cutting off his nose to spite his face. It's also causing immigration courts to slow, and asylum claims to be processed slower. So things the president has said he wants to do in terms of speeding that up, it's not happening. And it's because of this government shutdown.

BERMAN: I will also note that if you're talking about people on the terrorist watchlist, which is either six or nine or 12, depending on whose count, it's still fewer on the southern border than it is on the Canadian border.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

BERMAN: So if that's your reason to build a wall, we should be wielding one, you know, laced with bacon and hockey games, in the north, not -- not down south.

Let me also bring up another lie that the president told, because it is fascinating, and it illustrates where we are on this argument. The president made the case that his predecessors have told him, have told him they wished they had built a wall. Let's listen to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This should have been done by all of the presidents that preceded me. And they all know it. Some of them have told me that we should have done it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: "Some of them have told me that we should have done it."

Well, representatives for each and every president and President Carter himself, they have put out statements that says, "Uh-huh." This is a clarification from President Jimmy Carter: "I have not discussed the border wall with President Trump and do not support him on this issue."

David Gregory, have you ever heard a living president invent conversations with former presidents to make a case?

GREGORY: Yes. No, and I think it's -- you know, this is another sad chapter, you know, kind of breaking up what is special about the presidents' club, to make a specious political argument.

You know, the president is really in a very weakened place. He did campaign on the idea of a border wall, something that he wanted. There were very few backers for why it made a lot of sense substantively, but symbolically, it certainly resonated with the core group of his supporters.

And again, I'll say it. He had an opportunity to get some of that funding. And he may yet still get it if he can put it outside the parameters of the shutdown fight. But this is where he has been persuaded he wants it, that it will do the most good for him. He's got to be questioning how long he can go on with the kind of pain that a government shutdown is causing to get any funding at all for this.

CAMEROTA: All right. I think it may be a little bit like President Nixon who is talking to the portraits. Those are ex-presidents, and maybe they're talking back to him.

BERMAN: Well, those conversations happened. At least President Nixon said something to the portraits. In this case, President Trump never -- there was never a conversation at all.

CAMEROTA: That would have been better.

LOCKHART: Yes.

CAMEROTA: OK. All right. Thank you very much.

BERMAN: All right. As the shutdown continues, hundreds of thousands of Americans, they are feeling the pinch. There is serious impact on some 800,000 people who will miss their first paycheck this week, and millions of Americans could soon lose food assistance. What is going to change the situation? What will stop this? That's next.

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[06:18:26] BERMAN: Happening now, airports across the nation feeling the impact of the government shutdown. Sources tell CNN that senior TSA leaders held an urgent call to determine how to keep security screeners at their posts.

CNN's Rene Marsh live at Reagan National Airport with the very latest. What have you heard?

RENE MARSH, CNN TRANSPORTATION CORRESPONDENT: Well -- well, John, according to two sources, one who was on the call. The TSA will now start tracking these TSA employee sick-out calls nationwide.

The agency also discussed incentives to essentially entice workers to show up to work. And a source on the call also said that the head of the TSA, David Pekoske, vowed that the level of security would not change and that he wants to be transparent with the American public about the sick calls and how it may impact their travel so that they know how much time that they would need to get through the security checkpoint.

But this call is happening and these topics are being discussed, they really are an indication of the fact that the sick calls really have the attention of the highest level of the TSA. That's despite public rebuttals and public statements from both DHS and TSA that this isn't really a significant issue.

Of course, this call comes after CNN broke the story on Friday that the number of sick calls among TSA employees continues to tick up under this government shutdown.

And it also comes after the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to the agency just yesterday, asking for data on how many TSA employees have called out sick, as well as what is the agency's plan if they are severely short-staffed. How will they manage to maintain security at the nation's airport?

[06:20:18] Back to you guys.

CAMEROTA: Rene, thank you very much.

Let's talk about the real-life effects of the shutdown with David Gregory, Jackie Kucinich and CNN senior political analyst, John Avlon.

John, this is -- this makes my head explode. The fictional national security crisis at the southern border is now possibly creating a real security crisis at the airports. Because of the government shutdown, because of the impasse at the southern border, really, where the most terrorists come through, airports, we may be understaffed.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: That's exactly right. Welcome to bizarro world, people.

Look, homeland security is disproportionately affected by the shutdown. Around 20 percent of those employees, TSA being the prime example. And as you know, as you just said, the vast majority of folks on the terror watch list who try to get in the country are through airports.

So this is all self-perpetuating, and it's the problem of having a non-reality argument being advanced by the president. You know, DHS and the other agencies scramble to deal with the implications. They scramble to backfill the lies. And what you've got is a real problem being developed by posturing by the president and whether or not you think there's a crisis at the border, there is now a crisis at the kitchen table for some 800,000 people and families; 800,000 people who this week will not get a paycheck.

Let's put the calendar up here so people know the dates here. January 11, the first paychecks will be missed. If you go down late January and February, tax refunds are due. We should note that now the White House is changing the rules so those tax refunds will come.

But February and March, food assistance programs will run out of funding. That's SNAP, Food Stamps. People won't get the food that they need to eat.

This is affecting people, and will very soon, real people in very real ways, David Gregory. And I get the sense -- it's becoming clearer as the morning goes on that the reason the president is giving this speech tonight is perhaps the White House is fearful that he is losing control of this argument as more and more people are beginning to feel the impacts.

GREGORY: I don't think there's any question about it. I mean, the one thing this president understands through his Twitter feed, through social media generally, is going right to the American people, at least to rally his base of support, has some impact.

But he doesn't seem to be getting any traction on the idea of a wall, whatever form it takes, because he's been talking the same way since the campaign in 2016.

The most vulnerable, when you talk about Food Stamps in our country being affected like this, those employees, like TSA employees, who may at some point have to look for another job, because they can't afford to sit back and wait for this to get resolved.

Farmers who are looking for credits from the federal government, from the Farm Bureau, who won't be able to get access to that money, this starts to accumulate and reverberate in ways that affect so many people. It's -- and the president said he would own it. He would pick up the mantle, because he thinks it's worth it. And the gamble tonight is that he's somehow going to persuade

Americans that the pain that they're feeling is worth it to solve a national emergency that is not a national emergency. That's the gamble politically.

CAMEROTA: So Jackie, Republicans are starting to splinter away from being in lock-step with the president, because of course, they hear from their constituents; and their constituents tell them all these real-life impacts.

So here's how "Politico" phrased it this morning: "Despite the White House P.R. blitz, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Minority Whip Steve Scalise and other senior Republicans believe that 'a significant bloc' of House Republicans could vote with Democrats on the funding measures, according to GOP lawmakers and aides. A senior House GOP aide said McCarthy and his top lieutenants believe 15 to 25 Republicans will vote with Democrats this week, possibly even more."

We had heard of, I guess, three, who publicly came out and said, "Let's keep the government running while we negotiate all of this," but 15-25, that's significant.

KUCINICH: It's significant if Mitch McConnell decides to bring these up on the Senate floor. And that -- I mean, he's sort of been, "Donald, take the wheel" since this began.

Now, when he's going to take that back is -- is probably when he gets pressure from his own members. He's got these blue-state Republicans: Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, Joni Ernst, who are -- are hearing from their constituents and perhaps there will be a critical mass there. We don't know yet.

But Congress could stop this. They could. And they've been happy to abdicate their responsibility up until this point. We'll see if that continues.

BERMAN: You know, it's interesting. Jackie brought up a point in the last segment which I think is overlooked. The president ran a campaign on this recently and lost. He created this caravan notion --

[06:25:08] GREGORY: That's true.

BERMAN: -- this idea that the nation was being invaded, because he thought it would drive Republicans to electoral victory. It did not. They suffered historic losses inside the House of Representatives. This is not ancient history; this is two months ago, John.

AVLON: Yes, but from the president's perspective, two months ago might as well be ancient history sometimes.

Look, this is the problem with the president who practices instinctively the politics of division rather than addition. He's not in a position to -- from an Oval Office address, to build a case for broader support.

And you're seeing the political and practical implications of this. Because he hasn't been able to move the needle on this signature issue. It didn't work in the midterms; it inflames the base. And he gets a real rush out of that in rallies.

But when it comes to actually moving the needle on a major issue, where you normally would have a president try to cobble together a broader coalition. And that's one of the lost opportunities the president's perspective. If he wanted to play big -- big ball, he would tonight say, "Look, I want to push for comprehensive immigration plan," put that out. And say, you know, "Let's get the government up and running again. Let's have three months. Let's get to the table. Everyone's going to give something. It's got to include a wall, you know, however that's defined, border security."

That's what a smart president would do to try to enlarge the conversation and put Democrats on the defense. But instead, he's obsessed with playing to his base, and that doesn't work when you're trying to pull together broader coalitions in the country.

CAMEROTA: And the problem is, David Gregory, is he might say that tonight, just as John laid it out. John was a former speechwriter. And just as he laid it out, he -- the president might say that. But then what happens is, in negotiations, the president, you know, waffles.

GREGORY: Right. Because he essentially had that on the table. You know, the last deadline pressure where this was an issue was over the DREAMers. And they got close, and then the White House balked, including as I mentioned, several times additional funding for, you know, a wall because of what they call chain migration or family migration. So that's where those talks broke down.

It it -- it does seem obvious to take this outside the context of -- of the government shutdown and find some way to force Democrats to negotiate on something broader outside of that.

But I think, you know, the president is playing from behind, saying, "I will own this thing. I will not blame you," to, "No, now I'm blaming you, and it's a national emergency; and Democrats aren't coming to the table."

But I agree with you. I think that has such limited returns. I think the people who are going to be swayed by that argument have already been swayed by that argument. And it is -- you know, it's a fraction; it's a much smaller fraction than he would want.

BERMAN: It's interesting, Jackie, because again, this morning has been a moment of clarity. I think that --

CAMEROTA: Already?

BERMAN: -- if you listen to what the White House is saying --

KUCINICH: Not until 6:30.

BERMAN: They say crisis, crisis, crisis. Crisis, crisis. I think the way out is for the president to declare a national emergency, even if the courts will overturn it, because at least it ends the shutdown over the next few days, a shutdown which may be politically unpalatable and unsupportable for him to continue. He wants to take the fight elsewhere, even at the risk of losing it.

KUCINICH: Well, right. And as we said earlier, it's going to be challenged in the courts, almost certainly.

I think Jeh Johnson, the former Department of Homeland Security cabinet secretary, said one of the risks that we have here is that people won't really trust the president when he says there is national emergencies in the future when there is actually a national emergency.

These are also powers that are mostly used -- that are meant to be used during wartime. And so will Congress go back and try to restrict this, and other presidents won't have it in the future. There are a lot of consequences that could reverberate out of this.

BERMAN: But that may be a fight he's willing to have in the future to kick this shutdown can down the road, because this is going to hurt, and soon.

CAMEROTA: Right. Thank you all very much for all that perspective.

Meanwhile, a lot is happening overseas. Turkey's president is slamming President Trump's national security advisor John Bolton over these new comments that he made about how long U.S. troops should stay in Syria. So we have all those breaking details for you next.

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