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Reporting Indicates President Trump Confiscated Notes of Meetings with Vladimir Putin and Swore Translators to Secrecy; FBI Briefed Congress as to Investigation into Trump's Ties to Russia; National Security Adviser John Bolton asked Pentagon for Military Strike Options against Iran. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired January 14, 2019 - 8:00   ET

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

[08:00:00] JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: We have breaking new details in the Russia investigation, so let's get to it.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

Good morning and welcome to your NEW DAY. It is Monday, January 14th, 8:00 in the east. And we do begin with breaking news. CNN has obtained transcripts that explain why the FBI opened an investigation into whether President Trump was working on behalf of Russia and against American interests. The transcripts are from closed door Congressional interviews with two FBI officials who testified that the FBI was looking into whether President Trump was, quote, "acting as the behest of, and somehow following directions, somehow executing their will," "they" being Russia.

This news follows a weekend of explosive headlines. "The New York Times" revealing that FBI counterintelligence investigation of the president, and "The Washington Post" reporting that President Trump went to extraordinary lengths to hide details of his meetings with Vladimir Putin even from his own administration.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: When asked on FOX whether he ever worked for Russia, President Trump dodged the question, and for some strange reason did not say, of course not. Adding to the drama, we are in day 24 of the U.S. government shutdown, now the longest in American history. A new CNN poll finds that most Americans blame President Trump for the shutdown and a majority oppose his border wall.

BERMAN: Joining us is the national security correspondent for "The Washington Post," Greg Miller. He broke that story about President Trump concealing details of that meeting with Vladimir Putin. Greg, terrific reporting. Thanks for being with us. You report the president went to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of these conversations. What lengths?

GREG MILLER, NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT, "WASHINGTON POST": Well, in one case, he comes out of a meeting with Putin and actually turns to the interpreter, the U.S. interpreter, and takes that interpreter's notes and instructs the interpreter that he's not to discuss what had just transpired with any other officials, including officials in the Trump administration. This is just, needless to say, extremely unusual. No president in our lifetime has gone into a lengthy meeting with a Russian leader without either at least one aide if not multiple aides, but Trump does this routinely.

BERMAN: Why does it matter that there be people taking notes, that there be some kind of record of these dialogues?

MILLER: Yes, that's a great question. And the answer is that there are a number of reasons why it matters. For starters, the president is supposed to be advancing U.S. interests in these meetings, and he needs his aides, his subordinates, his cabinet officials and other agencies need to know whether there are things that have been agreed to or plans made in these meetings so that they can execute those. Of course, the bigger reason that matters in this case is because this is Russia, this is the Russian leader, and because of the investigation into Trump and his campaign's entanglement with Russia and the question, the hanging question whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.

BERMAN: Who from within the administration has been trying to find out what went on in these meetings, and what road blocks did they encounter?

MILLER: Well, one of the people who was trying to find out what happens in these meetings is Trump's own top Russia adviser in the national security council at the White House. Her name is Fiona Hill. She's a highly regarded expert on Russia. She's been excluded from these meetings between Trump and Putin, which is unusual on its own. But she is among the officials who then went to the interpreter in this case after one of the meetings, trying to get at, we need to know what happened in there, we need to get a readout, and being told by the interpreter, the president swore me to secrecy.

BERMAN: The president swore me to secrecy, in another case, took the actual notes. Democrats in Congress, we've heard that Eliot Engel, who is the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee for the House, wants to get a hold of these notes, wants to get a hold of the interpreters. Where do you see this headed?

MILLER: It's going to be a difficult thing. I think that this has renewed the sense of urgency among some in Congress to try to get to the interpreters. They are the only American witnesses to some of these conversations between Trump and Putin, and so they are the only ones you can turn to aside from the president himself to figure out what happened. But there's a difficulty because interpreters are not advisers or aides, right. They are there specifically for a very narrow diplomatic function which is just to translate one leader's words to another.

BERMAN: I want to make sure people fully appreciate the context of all of this, which is that there's a counterintelligence investigation that was started in the spring of 2017 about why the president was acting in certain ways. Was he acting at the behest of Russia? So now people want to know what President Trump has said to the Russian leader about this. And one detail that your reported, sort of deep in your piece, but it jumped out to me, this is P-108 for our control room.

[08:05:00] "Though the interpreter refused to discuss the meeting, officials said, "he conceded that Putin had denied any Russian involvement in the U.S. election and that Trump responded by saying, "I believe you." So according to the scant information we have about these meetings, President Trump told Vladimir Putin he believed him that Russia didn't attack the United States.

MILLER: Right. And he's obviously said that publicly. But this was during their very first face-to-face encounter between Trump and Putin. And Trump, at that moment, is under a lot of pressure to confront the Russian leader over what had happened in 2016. Instead, based on what the U.S. officials who work for Trump were told later, Trump is essentially conceding this to Putin. Putin is denying it, which, of course, you expect him to do, but the American president is saying, OK, fine. I'm with you. I believe you.

BERMAN: And again, this is, as far as we know, unprecedented. Greg Miller of "The Washington Post," terrific reporting. Thanks so much for being with us this morning.

MILLER: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Let's bring in our CNN political analysts to talk about this and so much more. We have Josh Green, national correspondent for "Bloomberg Business Week," and Jonathan Martin, national political correspondent for the "The New York Times." OK, guys, first let's start with what CNN has broken this morning. And that is that we now can read and see these transcripts between FBI officials who appeared in front of Congressional investigators behind closed doors. And they were asked why they opened an investigation into then candidate Donald Trump. And the FBI had to justify why they would do it.

So their lawyer explained what was happening. They were starting to have conversations about all the strange things they were seeing. And he talks about how the worst-case scenario is that somehow, maybe a candidate for the president of the United States, had been turned into an asset of Russia. So here is a portion of this transcript. "That was one extreme. The other extreme was the president is completely innocent, and we discussed that, too. There's a range of things this could possibly be. We need to investigate because we don't know whether, you know, the worst-case scenario is possibly true or the president is totally innocent. And we need to get this thing over with so he can move forward with his agenda." Jonathan, interesting to hear what they were grappling with in the FBI.

JONATHAN MARTIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Just the fact that it's along the range of possibilities that the president is, in fact, a Russian asset is extraordinary in and of itself, and the fact that the FBI, which is not an organization despite the attempts to sort of brand them as some kind of a partisan outfit, it's an organization full of law enforcement professionals. And the fact that they took this serious enough to consider it does show you just how many unanswered questions there still remain about this president's connection to Russia and to the Putin regime.

And if you are a Republican, this has got to be a worrisome moment, because this is, obviously, not going away. This is the kind of thing that's going to be part of the Mueller report. And it's creating huge difficulties for the party. And, look, I think this year is going to be pretty quickly taken up with this president's position in office. And I think any policy agenda in the next few months is probably going to be subsumed by whatever Mueller comes up with.

BERMAN: And again, I just want to point out two things that we heard from FBI officials over the last 40 hours. Number one is that this type of investigation wouldn't take place unless they had other evidence to substantiate it as well, perhaps evidence that we haven't seen. And number two, it wouldn't happen without Justice Department approval. That's what Josh Campbell who worked in the FBI told me Friday night. He said, in theory, Rod Rosenstein would have had to approve the counterintelligence angle here.

Josh, to the John's bigger point, which is that this will now consume if not the rest of the year, at least a substantial part of it, where is the administration this morning? Where is President Trump this morning? Where is his position, do you think, given that now people are asking him questions about whether he's a Russian agent, and given that there are signs he absconded with interpreter's notes from his meetings with Vladimir Putin? How does that help him, say, in the shutdown negotiations.

JOSHUA GREEN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: It doesn't help him at all. This is crazy. This is like something out of a dime store novel. The idea that the U.S. government suspects the president of being a Russian agent, it's incredible. And if you go back and look at Trump's Twitter timeline, which is always the surest way into understanding what Trump is thinking, beginning last night he began tweeting all sorts of things meant to distract from the story. He tweeted about Jeff Bezos' divorce, he tweeted about an old Instagram video of Elizabeth Warren, and this morning, as you guys mentioned earlier, he erroneously tweeted that he was heading to a farm convention in Nashville. He's actually going to New Orleans. It seemed as though he's throwing out chaff to try to distract the media and Americans from focusing on this incredible story.

[08:10:03] And as incredible as the story is, it is consistent with the pieces of information that we've learned over the last 18 months. There was another "New York Times" story a few months ago that said Rod Rosenstein had actually suggested, perhaps jokingly, maybe not, about wearing a wire when he was in the president's office. So clearly there are real suspicions, there were real suspicions, and we know now, according to this reporting that they were investigated by the FBI.

CAMEROTA: I just think that that interview that John just did with "The Washington Post" reporter, I don't think that we can talk about that enough, because the public did not know that in every meeting with Vladimir Putin, or at least five, according to "The Washington Post," the president has tried to conceal from his own advisers, including the top Russia expert in his administration, what was said in there to the point of confiscating the notes from the interpreter and swearing the interpreter to secrecy. That is bizarre.

MARTIN: Yes, but I have to say, though, I do think after two years that the political class, certainly Republicans, have become somewhat desensitized to the nature of these stories. And you just don't see the kind of slack jawed reaction from lawmakers, certainly on the Republican side, that any other president would face given the scope of these two stories over the weekend.

And the big question to me looming over 2019 and potentially 2020 is, when does that change? When do more and more voters, and certainly on the Republican side, start having questions about this president? Because once that happens, if that happens, then I think you'll see the actions of their lawmakers change. You saw Senator Cruz on a different network yesterday saying, there is this gap between the D.C. conversation and what folks back home care about. Guys, that so reflects what was said in the Watergate era. And I told one of Senator Cruz's people, I said, they don't care until they do. And that's the key moment. Where is that point of inflection where it's just too much for people to handle.

And it's not just the media. It's not just the left complaining about this president, but there's too much for the Republicans themselves to handle, and they say, you know what, enough. I think the bar has gotten lower and lower because there are so many of these stories. But I think at some point it's going to hit critical mass.

BERMAN: Josh, you wanted in there?

GREEN: Yes, I think that the forcing mechanism that might cause some Trump's supporters to bail is not necessarily Russia, as incredible as these stories are, but the shutdown. If you've looked at the polling trends over the 23, 24 days we've had this shutdown, Trump is slowly bleeding approval rating, disapproval is going up. I work at Businessweek, I talk to companies all the time. This is having real impacts on the economy now. Typically, shutdowns don't if they're not tied to a debt ceiling raise, which this one isn't. But if they go on for long enough it puts a real crimp in the economy in a way that can show up in economic numbers.

Trump is already looking at a slowing economy. There are already signs a recession could be coming in 2020. All this is going to do is make things worse for people. And that's going to make them, I think, easier to push off the Trump bandwagon.

BERMAN: I've always said that the biggest threat to the president and the Russia investigation is the economy because if Republicans don't have the economy and the stock market and job numbers to glom on to, they have no reason, many will say, to keep on supporting the shutdown. The shutdown, Jonathan Martin, any closer to a solution today?

MARTIN: It doesn't seem like it. It just seems like this president is trying to find a way out that he can declare victory and not bow to the Democrats. But John, I just want to echo your last point there. That is a huge, huge factor, especially among Republican donor class. They have liked the tax cuts, liked the deregulation, and that has enabled them to say, look, I don't like the behavior, but the policies aren't so bad. I think if the economy does go south, the first people that are going to turn to the lawmakers and say, you know what, guys, enough is enough, are the donors. They will get the ear of the Republican senators and members of the House first if the economy does start turning. And that's when I think you'll start seeing some change in behavior from lawmakers on the Hill.

BERMAN: Jonathan Martin, Josh Green, always great to have you with us this morning. Thanks so much, gentlemen.

"The Wall Street Journal" reports that John Bolton, the national security adviser, asked the Pentagon to provide the White House military options to strike Iran last year. The request followed an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Our Barbara Starr is live at the Pentagon. Help us understand what went on here, Barbara?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, John. Last September it was very much a not noticed event, actually, because there was no one hurt, thankfully. Some mortars struck the diplomatic area in Baghdad that we all commonly known as the Green Zone where the U.S. embassy, U.S. military headquarters are located. Apparently, according to "The Wall Street Journal," after that, John Bolton, national security adviser, asked the Pentagon for military options to strike back at Iran.

Now, let's unpack this a little bit, what were they prepared to strike? Apparently, it was Iranian backed units in Iraq that conducted the attack. Would they have struck Iran itself inside Iran's borders? Would they have been able to find the attackers? Are we talking a proportional response? You just go after the person or the unit that attacked you at that time, or are you talking about a major attack into Iran?

There's no indication that Mr. Trump was ready to embrace this idea. The National Security Council, Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, quite hard-liners about Iran. The Pentagon, the U.S. Military, they always have options. We know that. They have options as they like to say for everything.

But when military advisers talk to any President, they ask a couple of questions. What do you want to do? What military objective are you trying to achieve, and is there an understanding of what Iran may do next if they are attacked? On deck right now is the key question - what will acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan have to say about all of this? If they continue to pursue an idea of some kind of strike against Iran down the road? Shanahan may find himself right in the middle of all of it -- Alisyn.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, ANCHOR, CNN: All right, Barbara, thank you for sharing all of your reporting with us this morning from the Pentagon. So we are learning about these extraordinary lengths that the President went to, to hide the content of his meetings with Vladimir Putin, including confiscating transcripts from an interpreter. What is going on here? We discuss with national security experts next.

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[08:20:00]

CAMEROTA: New transcripts obtained by CNN detail the internal deliberations and discussions that the FBI was having about investigating whether then-candidate Donald Trump was acting in ways that seemed to benefit Russia. This comes amid bombshell reports over the weekend, including a report about the extraordinary lengths that the President went to conceal the details and the content of his meetings with Vladimir Putin.

Joining us to discuss all of these developments are former special assistant to the FBI Director Comey, Josh Campbell. Josh was working at the Bureau during the time of these investigations being opened.

We also have former Secretary of State and Deputy National Security Adviser under President Obama, Tony Blinken. It's great to have both of you. So Josh, it's fascinating to read these transcripts that CNN has obtained about the deliberations and discussions that were going on behind the scenes where the FBI was trying to figure out why these strange set of circumstances kept happening around candidate Donald Trump.

And they were trying to figure out the gamut of what was possible was, had Russia somehow turned him into an asset, and he was doing the bidding of the Kremlin? Or was all of this innocent and he didn't know what was happening?

I mean, honestly, the debate was like between Stooge or Rube basically, we came down to. And so tell us what you know about what was happening behind the scenes there?

JOSH CAMPBELL, LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST, CNN: So there's more I can't tell you than I can, but I can - as we read the tea leaves here, obviously, you said this was fascinating. I totally agree. I'm of two minds on this. Obviously, this bombshell reporting over the weekend that came in two waves.

First we had the story about the investigation and then about the meeting in Helsinki. But I'm conflicted because I don't know what would motivate someone to release this information at this point.

Now props to the journalists, they are doing their job. Their job is to go find the facts and provide that to the American people, but I think that this makes Mueller's job a little bit harder. It makes people inside the FBI's job right now a lot harder if we have something like this out there.

CAMEROTA: Why? Why us knowing what they were considering? Why does it make their job harder in this case?

CAMPBELL: Well, because as the reporting suggested, this was folded into Mueller's ongoing investigation. If his ultimate goal is to determine whether there's obstruction, this is not something that you would want to be out there. I just want to make that point.

That said, that doesn't mean this isn't true and that doesn't mean that this isn't highly concerning and something that the American people should know. Again, if you go back and look at these reports, if you put yourself in the mind-set in the shoes of an FBI agent at the time. They would have been derelict in their duties if they had not investigated the President of the United States.

Now, I know that it is striking to say that, that the President of the United States was under counterintelligence investigation because his actions may have posed a threat, but again, they would have been derelict if you look at the past of the President where he was calling on Russia to go after Hillary Clinton's e-mails.

Obviously, the National Security adviser Michael Flynn was under investigation. The President was trying obstruct that investigation and then ultimately removed the person who was leading that investigation.

As an FBI agent, those are all clues and everyone has a presumption of evidence, but they would have been derelict if they did not dig into that further to determine whether there was a threat there.

CAMEROTA: Tony, one of the things that you hear Republicans saying, who support the President, one of their talking points today is, "A- ha, this shows that the FBI was looking into Donald Trump before he fired Comey." So they had it out for him.

But if you just read the transcript and if you look back at history, you find out, there was a whole series of events from George Papadopoulos speaking drunkenly at a bar about Russian dirt to Donald Trump's own sons talking about how much money they would get from Russia. There was a whole series of things that aroused the interest of the FBI.

TONY BLINKEN, GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST, CNN: Yes, Alisyn, that's exactly right. The problem is there's a pattern here. And the pattern is meeting after meeting, contact after contact between President Trump or then candidate Trump, the campaign, people around him and the Russians and each of these contacts was either hidden or denied or somehow pushed under the carpet.

And that certainly raises a lot of questions, it raises a lot of doubts. Now, there's smoke. Maybe there's no fire, but it's certainly credible to think that given all of that, given all of these efforts to deny any kind contact with any Russian and each of which turned out not to be true, that that raises suspicions and at least credible grounds for looking into whether there was something going on.

CAMEROTA: Okay, that leads us to "The Washington Post" reporting over the weekend. Let me just read to you their first paragraph. That is - I mean, listen, I don't believe in having our hair on fire many days. But this is so stunning that I do think it involves us shifting into a different gear, okay, to listen and to analyze this. So here it is.

"President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing that interpreter, the linguist, not to discuss ...."

[08:25:10]

CAMEROTA: "... what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said." Tony, I want to stick with you because you are somebody who would have been involved in those meetings if it were a different President in a different time.

The idea that President Trump has told the interpreter that - has sworn her to secrecy or him to secrecy, what does that - help us understand what we're seeing here from a President.

BLINKEN: Alisyn, it's extraordinary on a number of levels. Look, over 25 years, I was in dozens, if not hundreds of meetings with President Clinton, President Obama, Vice President Biden and foreign leaders. And in virtually all of them, there was at least one senior aide present to take contemporaneous notes for what went on in the meeting.

Now, there were occasions, pretty few in number when the President would just have a one-on-one meeting with his counterpart, but then he would immediately read out that conversation to his most senior aides. Now, that just didn't happen here.

We now have hours of meetings between President Trump and President Putin for which we have virtually no record and the Russians know more about what went on in those meetings than anyone in the administration, except for President Trump. And to say that's highly unusual is an understatement.

CAMEROTA: Josh, it's jaw-dropping - I mean, and particularly if we just look at publicly what we know. So let's look at Helsinki, publicly when the President of the United States came out, he blamed America for the Russian interference and the relationship with Russia being so tense.

So privately, I mean, how can we imagine what happened privately if that's what he was willing to say publicly.

CAMPBELL: Yes, this is striking on so many levels. And I agree with Secretary Blinken there, as far as giving the read outs from these meetings. If you think about it, in January 2017, the United States government, the intelligence community assessed that the person the President was meeting ordered an attack on the U.S. Election.

So if anything, that would have been an intelligence collection boon potentially to have the President of the United States go directly to CIA headquarters and give them a read out on everything that happened. We know that didn't happen.

I think it comes down to this. These notes from the interpreter are political dynamite for President Trump. There's no way that he's going to release them. In fact, may have already been shredded and burned in a barrel somewhere outside the Oval Office. The reason that they're dynamite is because if you look at maybe one two of things that could have happened in there. On one hand, perhaps the President went in there and just completely

capitulated, rolled over, didn't hold his feet to the fire. If that gets out then there goes the tough guy narrative that the President has tried to appeal to his base saying, "No one has been tougher on Russia than me."

But on the flip side, if the President did go in there and call Vladimir Putin out on the carpet and hold his feet to the fire and say, "You will not interfere in our elections again," then we know that the President is seen, at least in the eyes of the Russians as ineffectual and impotent because we know that the Russians interfered in the midterm elections.

So there is no way the President looks good on this. So if he doesn't release them, he controls the narrative. We know that he lies with reckless abandon about things big and small. So as long as there's not a transcript, as long as there aren't notes, he controls the narrative. He can explain in his own view what happened there.

CAMEROTA: Now, we'll see if Congress has any recourse to try to get the interpreter to explain what happened. Tony Blinken, Josh Campbell, thank you both very much.

CAMPBELL: Thank you.

BLINKEN: Thanks.

CAMEROTA: John?

JOHN BERMAN, ANCHOR, CNN: Her district is filled with Federal workers not getting paid because of the shutdown, so what steps is one new member of Congress taking to get the government back open? We'll ask her, next.

[08:30:00]