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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

Trump Leaves North Korea Summit With No Deal; Michael Cohen Alleges Trump Committed Crimes While in Office. Aired 5-5:30a ET

Aired February 28, 2019 - 05:00   ET

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

MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN SENIOR DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENT: -- ends up being proof that President Trump's insistence on a top down approach to this extremely complicated, decades-long problem is not always going to work out the way that he thinks it will.

[05:00:13] I mean, these two could not even agree on a basic definition of what denuclearization even means. That's how big the gap between two sides still is. I mean, they couldn't even finish the summit and have one last lunch together.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KOSINSKI (voice-over): The president traveled 8,000 miles and comes away empty-handed. The Vietnam summit with Kim Jong-un quickly turned south, leaving the president with no distraction from Michael Cohen's damaging testimony.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: They wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety and we couldn't do that. It was very productive few days, but sometimes you have to walk.

MIKE POMPEO, SECRETARY OF STATE: I wish we would have gotten a little bit further, but I'm very optimistic.

KOSINSKI: There were good signs early. Kim Jong-un keeping denuclearization on the table.

KIM JONG-UN, NORTH KOREAN LEADER (through translator): If I'm not willing to do that, I won't be here right now.

KOSINSKI: But after many pleasantries on camera, talks in private did not lead to any breakthrough. A working lunch and signing ceremony that had been on the schedule never happened, an bankrupt end to talks overnight with the White House saying no agreement was reached at this time, but their respective teams look forward to meeting in the future.

The president did make one stunning headline, letting Kim off the hook for the death of American hostage Otto Warmbier.

TRUMP: Those prisons are rough. They're rough places. But I really didn't believe that he was -- he -- I don't believe he knew about it.

KOSINSKI: The summit itself largely overshadowed by testimony back home.

MICHAEL COHEN, FORMER TRUMP ATTORNEY: Because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.

KOSINSKI: Explosive allegations by Trump's long time lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen. The president responding this morning, slamming the Democrats for holding the hearing while he was here at the summit.

TRUMP: And it was pretty shameful. He lied a lot, but it was very interesting because he didn't lie about one thing, he said no collusion with the Russian hoax.

KOSINSKI: Cohen's testimony upstaged any kind of progress, the self described dealmaker hoped to gain in his second summit with the North Korean leader. The U.S. was hoping for more concrete steps from Pyongyang towards a deal that is verifiable and forcible, only time will tell now whether the future hold more of this --

TRUMP: Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself.

KOSINSKI: -- or this.

TRUMP: I'd much rather do it right than do it fast.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KOSINSKI: The president's line from this was sometimes you just have to walk away. So good that he didn't give anything away as many felt he did at the last summit when he suddenly ended military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea. But remember, a year ago, he was also saying at one point after the last summit last year that the nuclear threat from North Korea had ended.

Now, the U.S. intelligence community thinks North Korea has only advanced its nuclear program since then. Today though, the president downplayed that during his press conference -- John and Alisyn.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Michelle Kosinski for us in Hanoi, thank you very much for being with us.

Really, this just happened. We're just beginning to understand how this all fell apart.

Joining us now from Hanoi with much more, Jim Sciutto, CNN's chief national security correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, our chief international anchor, and David Sanger, national security correspondent for "The New York Times", who did get a question to the president at the news conference today.

Christiane, just broad strokes, again, of what happened here?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Well, as the president said, we didn't get what we wanted. We couldn't sign and sometimes you have to walk.

If it is actually true that Kim Jong-un wanted, quote, the entirety of sanctions to be lifted in return for maybe closing Yongbyon, which is their main nuclear reactor processing plant, if he really wanted all sanctions lifted with an immediate target date, to me it seem like he totally misread the situation and that he doesn't understand the process of these negotiations.

People call him very wily. I must say that I noticed the body language between President Trump and Kim Jong-un yesterday, it looked to me like Kim Jong-un felt that he had the president in his hands. He knew that the president was facing this tough political drama back home. And he wasn't as smiley and as pat-on-the-backy that he was back in Singapore.

And if he went in asking for this maximum American give, it's not surprising that it didn't work. That is what we hear from the president of the United States, that that is what they asked. Also, it is important though that the president says that Kim Jong-un agreed to keep the moratorium on ballistic missile and nuclear testing.

[05:05:00] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: David Sanger, it does seem as though Secretary of State Pompeo and President Trump and the team were caught a bit unaware by this turn of events because there was a signing ceremony that had been set up that was canceled abruptly. There was a lunch table that was literally set for lunch that ended up being canceled.

So, they didn't see it coming that Kim Jong-un was going to be so dug in.

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL & NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, Alisyn, they probably should have because in the run-up negotiations done by Steve Biegun, who was the special envoy for North Korea, Mr. Biegun had a hard time getting the North Koreans to sort of give on almost anything. And they went into this negotiation believing once you got President Trump into the room with Kim Jong-un, somehow everything would fall together, that the deal could be put together by these two leaders.

And certainly, president did everything he could to go encourage that thought. I think that there was a lot of concern by Secretary Pompeo, by John Bolton who was also here, the national security adviser, that the president might give up too much.

And then they go into the room and what do we learn? We learned from the press conference, I pressed the president on what it was exactly that Kim Jong-un was willing to give up and not, and it sounded from his answer as if Mr. Kim was willing to give up the main nuclear complex at Yongbyon that Christiane referred to, but not the other sites that U.S. intelligence has identified over the years as additional production sites, including a major uranium enrichment site in the country.

And so, the president was faced with a choice of maybe relieving sanctions in return for only getting a partial halt to their production. And he simply couldn't do that.

BERMAN: And, Jim Sciutto, you've noted that this is in a way a page out of the art of the deal, sometimes you have to be willing to walk, but it is a long way to fly to take a walk, right? I mean that is what is going on here. And it does seem that to an extent, there was some surprise by the president that he wasn't able to charm his way into a deal.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yes, the disappointment, it was palpable in his voice in that press conference. And this is the second time that the president has flown to the other side of the world to meet the North Korean dictator and is leaving big picture empty-handed, and really in closer to a deal.

And listen, this is granting that speaking is better than not speaking. And little more than a year ago, these two countries were, by some accounts, at the brink, at least the possibility, of a military confrontation. That has passed for now. And that is better than where we were.

But twice now the U.S. president has come to meet the North Korean leader and they have left empty handed. And that is a problem because the positions as Christiane was saying, North Korea still left with a maximalist position. We want all of the pressure taken away for a small concession. And that has not moved North Korea and the U.S. really any closer after these two major summits. And that's a problem.

The other note I would make is that there were two Helsinki moments in this press conference for this president. One as Michelle was noting, the president taking the side of the North Korean dictator on the death of a U.S. hostage to the North Korean government, Otto Warmbier, saying that he takes President Kim -- Dictator Kim's word over the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community much as he did Vladimir Putin's word about interference in the election.

And there was a second moment in there when he was confronted, this president, by U.S. intelligence assessments that North Korea continues to expand its missile and nuclear programs and the president again use that phrasing that we've heard before saying, well, some people say that, but many are saying the opposite.

Who are these many people? Why is the president taking his own -- someone else's assessment over that of the U.S. intelligence community? That is a remarkable thing to see the U.S. president do.

CAMEROTA: Let's listen to that moment, the Otto Warmbier moment, where the president believes Kim Jong-un.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I really believe something very bad happened to him and I don't think that the top leadership knew about it. He felt badly about it. I did speak to him. He knew the case very well, but he knew it later. And you got a lot of people, a big country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: So does that pass the smell test, Christiane, that Kim Jong-un wouldn't have known about the torture that Otto Warmbier was experiencing?

AMANPOUR: No, it doesn't pass the smell test. And if you even talk to the Trump administration former chief negotiator, the special representative for North Korea, Ambassador Joseph Yun, he is helping us get through all these days of negotiations and explaining to us, he himself said, because he went and negotiate for Warmbier's release, only to find him in a state of vegetative coma, he believes that after Warmbier that the sham trial and was then sent to prison, between then and when he was in a vegetative state, obviously Kim Jong-un would have known about him being there, what was happening to him.

[05:10:28] It is impossible that leader even of a dictatorship would not know what is happening to somebody as important as an American hostage. So that does not pass the smell test. But it is very interesting because President Trump on several occasions did not want to criticize personally Kim Jong-un, whether it was over Warmbier, whether it was over sanctions.

He did not want to say in answer to a press conference question whether the United States would now up and increase the sanctions. He wouldn't say that. And he also didn't want to say that it had been an unfriendly breakup, the meeting handed on a handshake and all the rest of it.

He kept trying to preserve this personal relationship as if believing that this was the Holy Grail and only with this personal relationship would any nuclear deal be achieved. Only the experts know that this must be hammered out by hundreds if not dozens of negotiators over long, long periods of time.

BERMAN: And again, what Kim Jong-un leaves with the status company which is North Korea as a nuclear state.

And, David Sanger, very quickly, is it clear where this process goes next?

SANGER: It really isn't. I mean, they made an effort to say that there will be lower level negotiations. But let's face it, if you've had a breakdown of that size between the president of the United States and the leader of North Korea, nobody at the lower levels is really going to be willing to go step in the way of that and come to another agreement.

And President Trump did not make a commitment to see Mr. Kim again. So where could that leave us? Exactly where you said, John, where we are basically acknowledging them as a nuclear power and one that is assembling a larger arsenal while this drags on.

SCIUTTO: And it is a continuation really, when you think about it, John and Alisyn, of North Korea's long term strategy through multiple administrations, that is drag out negotiations, drag out the talks, and meanwhile maintain and even expand, as the U.S. intelligence community assessed, expand its missile and nuclear program. And on that fundamental status quo, these two face-to-face meetings have not changed that. CAMEROTA: All right. Jim, Christiane, David, thank you very much for

giving us all this context and helping us understand what happened back here.

So, the president on the world stage as his former attorney spends hours casting him as a liar who committed crimes while in office. So, we discuss the legal peril for the president, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:17:07] BERMAN: All right. So much going on, including the aftermath of the explosive testimony from the president's former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen who accused the president of repeatedly lying and being involved with crimes while in office.

Cohen will be back on Capitol Hill in just a few hours for a third day of testimony. This time behind closed doors to the House Intelligence Committee.

CNN's M.J. Lee who has been following this and Michael Cohen for so long joins us now with the very latest -- M.J.

M.J. LEE, CNN NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, such a dramatic and fiery hearing yesterday for hours, Michael Cohen taking questions from lawmakers and spilling the beans his former boss. But no doubt one of the most serious allegations to come from yesterday, Michael Cohen implicating Donald Trump in a crime related to hush payments to an adult film star.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LEE (voice-over): Michael Cohen painting an unforgiving portrait of President Trump before the House Oversight Committee.

COHEN: He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat.

LEE: For a full day, Cohen leveled explosive accusations against his former boss. Potentially, the biggest blow, Trump's former fixer detailed how the president told Cohen to lie about hush money paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

REP. KATIE HILL (D), CALIFORNIA: What did the president ask or suggest that you say about the payments or reimbursements?

COHEN: He was not knowledgeable of these reimbursements and he wasn't knowledgeable of my actions.

HILL: He asked you to say that?

COHEN: Yes, ma'am.

LEE: Cohen submitting this $35,000 personal check Trump signed as proof, the date August 2017 while President Trump was in office. Another check from March 2017 signed by Donald Trump Jr. and another man.

COHEN: Weisselberg. Weisselberg. Weisselberg.

LEE: Allen Weisselberg, the long time chief financial officer of the Trump family business.

REP. RO KHANNA (D), CALIFORNIA: Do you know if this criminal financial scheme that the president and Allen Weisselberg and Donald Trump Jr. are involved in is being investigated by the Southern District of New York?

COHEN: I'd rather not discuss that question because it could be part of an investigation that's currently ongoing.

LEE: Federal investigators gave Weisselberg limited immunity. Now, Democrats say that they could bring him and the president's son in for questioning. In the past, President Trump denied knowledge about the payments. He's also denied talking to Roger Stone about WikiLeaks.

REPORTER: Did you ever talk to him about WikiLeaks? Because that seemed to be what --

TRUMP: No.

LEE: But Michael Cohen contradicted that as well.

COHEN: It was a short conversation and he said Mr. Trump, I just want to let you know that I just got off the phone with Julian Assange and in a couple of days there is going to be a massive dump of e-mails that's going to severely hurt the Clinton campaign.

LEE: WikiLeaks and Stone both deny the call.

The hearing was at times a spectacle. Republicans taking jabs at Cohen's credibility for previously lying to Congress.

[05:20:04] REP. PAUL GOSAR (R), ARIZONA: You're a pathological liar. You don't know truth from falsehood.

COHEN: Sir, I'm sorry. Are you referring to me or the president?

LEE: Cohen seemed emotional as the hearing wrapped up. House Oversight Chair Elijah Cummings closing with these words.

REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS (D-MD), HOUSE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: I'm hoping that all of us can get back to this democracy that we want and that we should be passing on to our children so that they can do better than what we did.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN: It was a long day.

Joining us now to discuss, senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny back from Omaha, Jennifer Rodgers, former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst, Joe Lockhart, former Clinton White House press secretary, and John Avlon, CNN senior political analyst.

You know, biggest of big pictures, Joe, this morning. You know, who feels best about what happened yesterday?

JOE LOCKHART, FORMER CLINTON WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I think Michael Cohen feels good about getting it off his chest. I think that the biggest thing that happened was he made the case from beginning to end that the president participated in a felony while in the Oval Office. A lot of stuff there yesterday. But on the hush money payment, he basically said he directed it and he had intent in covering it up. And so, that case was made publicly for the first time.

CAMEROTA: So, Jennifer, is President Trump in more legal jeopardy today than he was on Tuesday?

JENNIFER RODGERS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: He is except of course that we know that DOJ says they won't indict a sitting president. But yes, it is buttoned up as Joe just said.

We had the hint of it before, but now Michael Cohen has told us not only did the president know in these vague terms. Every single time he talked to Keith Richardson, Stormy Daniels's lawyer at the time, he went and talked to Trump about it. Eventually Trump explicitly told him and Allen Weisselberg, yes, let's pay it, go ahead, get this thing done.

And then he brings the checks that were written while the president -- wants the president to pay him back for this. So, that one has buttoned up. He has committed this crime. The evidence is there. Probably won't be charged, but that one is done.

BERMAN: Conversations before the checks were being made and then conversations about how to lie about it months later while he is president of the United States.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALSYT: Yes. I think this is where Trump normalization starts to make us all a bit dim. This is as clear cut as you could possibly get. The president's personal check while president, and apparently telling him to be quiet about it.

And that's not the end of the legal jeopardy that was discussed or divulged yesterday. There was discussion of bank fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud. So that was a very consequential substantive aspect, beneath all the partisan kabuki.

I'd say my biggest takeaway and the biggest disappointment for our democracy was the utter stark divide that Republicans seemed uninterested in asking questions about the substance of these really stunning allegations. They went straight, attack, attack at Michael Cohen, and that gap with the notable exception of Justin Amash, it could have been worse --

CAMEROTA: And they took the position that Michael Cohen has sort of disqualified himself from being a legit witness to anything. I mean, that is sort of the approach and stance that they kept for seven hours.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I was struck by just at that moment, we have to step back, there have been so many twists and turns to this story, Michael Cohen sitting there again we should say it again, no one closer to the president than him. I remember getting phone calls from Michael Cohen throughout his first potential presidential bid in 2012. Mr. Trump will never talk to you again. OK. And I think seeing Michael Cohen there say all of this, get all of this off his chest was striking.

But I think that the checks, bringing the checks, we saw the president stand on Air Force One on April 5th, 2018 and say, I don't know anything about this. Ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my lawyer.

Well, of course, he knew about this because by then he had received several of them. So that I thought was very damning. And also a lot of gratuitous stuff about Vietnam while the president was in Vietnam. He talked about the first lady. So, I thought it was Michael Cohen trying to get his pound of flesh, if you will.

One thing that I think was the most, perhaps not believable saying he didn't want a job in the White House.

BERMAN: Yes.

ZELENY: Michael Cohen did want a job in the White House. He talked about it a lot. He was upset when he didn't get that job. I'm not sure why he went down that road. That didn't seem believable to me.

BERMAN: I've got to say, Michael Cohen is a liar. We know that. He's a convicted liar and an admitted liar. We heard repeated yesterday. But checks don't lie. Checks don't lie.

CMEROTA: But what they say is, how do we know that that wasn't for some retainer?

BERMAN: The only person I believe on this is Rudy Giuliani, because Rudy Giuliani told me when he was talking through Sean Hannity in that interview that Michael Cohen was paid.

CAMEROTA: They funneled it, that was the word he used. They funneled it.

BERMAN: So I don't know that there is a big ah-ha there about what this for.

There are two checks that we've now seen. Michael Cohen says there were 11 that were paid to him. And Joe Lockhart, again, the part of this that is in plain sight is not a lie -- it is not a crime, I should say to lie to the press or lie to the American people.

[05:25:04] But shouldn't it matter to the American people when they are being lied to on Air Force One when President Trump is telling them I don't know anything about this check? Shouldn't it matter when he is telling Michael Cohen to lie to Emily Jane Fox, the reporter, during an interview about this, tell them I had nothing to do with it?

LOCKHART: Well, all I can say is it used to matter because I went through two years of investigation and impeachment over whether the president lied about a relationship.

BERMAN: Which he did.

LOCKHART: Which he did.

And it is stunning that the Republicans who led that charge now don't care. They literally don't care. They did not at anytime say that I'm troubled by the president's lack of candor here. I'm troubled by his relationship with Stormy Daniels. I'm troubled that he paid her off. None of those things. It was all just about Michael Cohen.

So, it should matter. It should bother everyone. And, you know, it just goes to how our politics have divided where Trump gets a complete pass from Republicans no matter what he does. And he brags about it. He thinks that it is a sign of his strength when it is really a sign of the moral bankruptcy of the Republican leadership in Congress.

CAMEROTA: John?

AVLON: I mean, look, not that long ago the idea that candidate would have paid off a porn star before an election would have been a disqualifier for evangelicals, among many details that came to light yesterday. A degree of contempt that Donald Trump allegedly had for the electorate, telling Michael Cohen allegedly that this is the greatest infomercial in American politics. That is how he saw his campaign. We are definitely at a point where our democracy has been disfigured and there is a certain cultive personality that seeped in.

But in the end, truth does matter and that is I think what we all need to keep a certain agree of faith in, and as citizens and journalists.

BERMAN: I see your next book, "The Malformed Democracy".

(LAUGHTER)

BERMAN: All right. There are a lot most of questions that we'll dive through here, including the tantalizing clues, the bread crumbs that Michael Cohen dangled out there about the possibility of investigations into the president we don't even know about. That's next.

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