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Former Independent Counsel Ken Starr Discusses President Bill Clinton's Impeachment and Obstruction of Justices Charges against President Trump; Joe Lockhart & Ken Starr: 20 Years After Clinton Investigation. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired March 08, 2019 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00] KEN STARR, LED INDEPENDENT COUNSEL INVESTIGATION OF PRESIDENT CLINTON: -- during the Clinton years, where crimes were committed, and if we want to in fact say that the president is not above the law, should in fact be held accountable, then the real question is how do we go about it. But the president was held in contempt, Bill Clinton was held in contempt, by a United States district court judge for obstruction of justice. So this can be dismissed as moral judgments and so forth, but I think the facts will show, the record showed that President Clinton committed crimes. That's what we now, did this president commit crimes? And that's what Bob Mueller is --

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Obstruction of justice. You keep on using the phrase "obstruction of justice." We don't know how much Robert Mueller or how deeply he is going to go into that.

STARR: Right, we don't.

BERMAN: Justice Department guidelines are that you can't indict a sitting president. There are those who believe if you can't charge someone or you're not charging someone you don't put it in the report, the Mueller report, because you don't put information or you won't release publicly information about declinations. Do you think if it is a purely political matter, don't the members of Congress deserve to know, don't the American people deserve to know what evidences has been collected about obstruction of justice?

STARR: I think Bill Barr -- Bill Barr, not Bob Barr, I nearly said Bob Barr -- made it very clear that he wants to be as transparent as he can consistent with the law. So then he has to look as a very able attorney general, is what is the law, what are the procedures. And then he has said I think I need to be as transparent, I want to be as transparent as I can. And I think that's the right approach.

BERMAN: But you said you need the facts. You as an American citizen, need the facts. You're not going to answer Alisyn when she asked you if you have seen a pattern of obstruction here because you need to see the facts. You also say this is political, which means the American people through Congress are the ones who get to decide here. Don't you need to see the facts in order for the process that exists now, the only process that exists now, so it can play out? STARR: I don't doubt that the facts will eventually come out. They

may come out through the attorney general's report. We know the system. Bob Mueller sends his report to the attorney general. But that is, under the regulations, a confidential report. So the other thing that is weighing in the balance is let's don't impugn reputations without being --

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, understood.

STARR: You either indict or you don't indict. And so that's --

BERMAN: Unless the president where you can't indict. And that's where the glitch is. If you can't indict the president based on Justice Department guidelines, you need the evidence. You need the evidence so that the body that can make the judgement on it can do so with all of the information that is available.

STARR: And the House of Representatives has lots of power to seem that evidence. But what we're talking about what Bill Barr can and should do with the Mueller report. And so Congress made a decision, we do not want the independent counsel apparatus with all of the reporting requirements. That's a huge step, and the regulations have been on the books now for 20 years.

CAMEROTA: Right. But judge, I'm just talking about before we get there. I'm just talking about what Michael Cohen has testified to under oath publicly, so what we've all seen with our own eyes where he's testified under oath and said that he was pressured by President Trump to move, to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project, and that he made the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels in order for President Trump to win the election. So I'm just talking about the facts as we've heard them before we get to Mueller.

STARR: But wait, wait, Alisyn, as you well know, one witness does not a case make. We had Jim McDougal saying the president of the United States committed perjury. We had Judge Bill Watt, saying the president of the United States was involved, I'm talking about Whitewater, in the Whitewater transaction. But we chose not to bring those charges, even though we thought we could, because the evidence wasn't strong enough.

Michael Cohen has credibility issues. So allow the process to run. Allow the process to carry out so that we know, is there corroboration? Is there credibility? You have a witness who has lied to Congress, right? He's pled guilty. And you have to work on corroboration. How do we corroborate that? So don't go to the jury room and return a verdict until you have heard all the evidence.

BERMAN: You don't have to ask that in a hypothetic because the Southern District of New York already did. They already did. And Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to crimes that the Southern District laid out in detail, and the Southern District also has other evidence for this. They have AMI with a sworn affidavit saying that these payments were made in the case of Karen McDougal for the campaign, for the sole purpose of influencing the campaign. So this is no longer a hypothetical if it was done for x. This is a mater of decided law, yes?

STARR: No, I don't see it as decided law. I know that he has made what he said he did. However, the key is --

BERMAN: The Southern District said he did.

[08:05:00] STARR: OK, but that just depends -- you allow the process to in fact run out. What you're saying is, John, these are serious matters. I don't dispute that. These are serious matters. What I also say is don't rush to judgment and say we're ready to return a verdict. I think that is wrong and I think that's unfair.

JOE LOCKHART, FORMER CLINTON WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I find it a little rich to hear that we shouldn't impugn people's reputations before we know all of the facts because I lived through the president's reputation being impugned by many people, Congressmen, but also by members of the independent counsel staff.

I think there is an important comparison to make here, though, and I would be interested in Judge Starr's view, which is Donald Trump has acted way beyond the pair. President Clinton did not fire the head of the FBI. President Clinton did not want the head of the FBI in office and thought that he had a political agenda against him. He didn't fire him. President Clinton didn't go out every day and call this a witch hunt and say that there was nothing to this. The president went about doing his job. President Clinton didn't 10,000 times tell lies and mislead the American public. He did mislead the American public and lie to them in that Roosevelt room. There is no defense of that.

But to try to compare these things, and I think, getting back to the "Axios" story, that is the strength of the "Axios" stories. Donald Trump is using the full weight of the federal government and the executive branch now to protect himself and to cover up what he has done. And in the case of President Clinton, he let this thing go. And the idea that we sit here 20 years later saying the president committed crimes. The president made mistakes, he's acknowledged them, but I don't believe he has committed a crime. And the one thing we haven't seen from President Trump is any acknowledgment.

And I'll remind you, President Clinton went out and apologized for this before the report came out, before the House took up impeachment. So he wasn't saying I want to wait until the jury is totally in. He acknowledged these things as things he had done wrong, he acknowledged the pain he had caused to his family and the distraction to the country. And I think it's wholly on a different scale when you have allegations and now evidence that a foreign government influenced our election, maybe delegitimized the election of a president, and the president's team if not the president was working with them. Wholly on a different scale.

CAMEROTA: What about that, Judge?

STARR: One of the great strengths of the Special Counsel investigation is that a very important set of charges have been brought against 13 Russian individuals and two organizations. I read those indictments carefully. There's not one word that suggests collusion. The Russians behaved very badly, indeed criminally, and they should be brought to the bar justice. Let's see, was there collusion? Thus far, including in the Paul Manafort case, we have seen no evidence of collusion.

CAMEROTA: But Joe is talking about obstruction of justice that we have seen evidence of if you believe all of the tweets about a witch hunt, and the firing the head of the FBI. Do you consider that obstruction of justice about this investigation?

STARR: We did not charge President Clinton with obstruction of justice because of James Carville, Sidney Blumenthal, an entire army. And one of the things, Joe, as you know, that President Clinton was very clever, very shrewd, because others did the dirty work. We were continually attacked, constantly attacked. Our motives and so forth, our operations were attacked. And our integrity was attacked, but President Clinton was able to rise above it, let others do the dirty work.

CAMEROTA: But what about this example of President Trump?

STARR: And what President Trump refuses to do is follow the Clinton model. He wants to go on the attack himself. I do not consider that obstruction, I really don't, because when you look at what the law of obstruction -- you can have the moral view of what obstruction is, and then you can have the legal view, what in fact constitutes the crime of obstruction of justice --

LOCKHART: But --

STARR: But hold on a second. Hold on, Joe.

LOCKHART: But President Trump went on television --

STARR: There is no corrupt motive that has been defined by the Supreme Court of the United States, and in this room I have said don't be so broadminded, so to speak, in saying this constitutes obstruction of justice. It doesn't obstruct justice to do what the president has the power to do, which is to fire the head of the FBI.

[08:10:08] LOCKHART: Maybe I should have gone to law school. So let me speak for everyone in America who didn't go to law school. President Trump went on television even after -- two days leading up to that interview, he lied act where he fired Comey. He directed Rod Rosenstein to write a phony letter. But when he went on TV he felt like he had to let it all out. And he said I fired him because I wanted to stop the Russian investigation, because I think the Russian investigation is a witch hunt.

There may be in some narrow legal eagle place where that isn't obstruction of justice. To the rest of us it is obstruction of justice on the face of it.

STARR: But he didn't shut down the investigation. That's one of the key things. He could have said this investigation --

LOCKHART: He then tried to remove and fired his attorney general. What else do you need to see that it's obstruction. What else? What else do you want to see as a prosecutor here?

STARR: You need to see action that actually results in the investigation not being able to be carried forward, and Bob Mueller, as we know, has done a very thorough job from everything that we know of carrying on the investigation. No cessation of funding and the like. Should the president have said these things? Of course, he should not have said these things. It was incredibly unwise to do it. But being unwise doesn't constitute a crime.

CAMEROTA: So efforts don't either? Just the effort of firing, of change the attorney general and the chief of the FBI doesn't constitute it?

STARR: In my judgment, it doesn't. I think that is now considered the better view. Very few people are saying, and we'll see what the House of Representatives says, that firing James Comey, which he had the authority to do, somehow constitutes obstruction of justice. I view that as a huge challenge to basically --

LOCKHART: Sitting as the independent counsel 20 years ago, if Bill Clinton had fired Louis Freeh, would you have stood up and said I think he has every right to do that?

STARR: I hope I would have.

LOCKHART: I tend to doubt that.

STARR: Joe, go ahead and doubt it, but I have a very different view of presidential power, which is Article Two of our Constitution gives the president authority over the executive branch. So President Trump could in fact have said I want this investigation to stop, period, full stop. Then that to me does raise an issue of potential obstruction of justice if he shuts it down. It did not shut it down?

LOCKHART: Do you have the same view of Nixon firing Archibald Cox, that that was well within his power?

STARR: Yes, absolutely it was within his power. And that was not even a basis of the charge in the House of Representatives. And I think it is really perilous, Joe, I honestly do, to try to gainsay what the president does in the exercise of Article two power, and to say, aha, you have exercised the authority that you have, you've sacked Jeff Sessions, I think that is an obstruction of justice. I believe that is a very, very terrible intrusion into the authority of the president. Let's look for corruption. Was there bribery? Was there a sellout to a foreign power, and that sort of thing? But not just the exercise of his authority, whether it was wise or unwise.

BERMAN: He has the power to pardon. Is dangling a pardon, is that a potential obstruction of justice?

STARR: No, I think dangling a pardon -- well, it could be. It could be. But once again, here is a power that's given to the president of the United States, and absent some issue of bribery, we have seen governors, former governors go to jail for the sale of pardons and so forth. Absent that, I just think it's perilous, whoever the president is, to say that constitutes a crime. It may constitute an impeachable event, right, to use the pardon power in a way that the Congress of the United States views as an abuse of power.

CAMEROTA: Your thoughts?

LOCKHART: Again, I think speaking for Americans who don't wake up every morning reading Article Two, and I don't mean that -- we have great lawyers in the country for a reason. And there's two sides to every issue. But I believe what the president is doing, and one of the reasons why it may not feel like obstruction of justice is he does it plain sight. Obstruction of justice is normally done quietly, and you don't want people to know. And he does this in plain sight. And I will take the judge's view that the president has right to do that, but I will not release the idea that it is an abuse of power, that it is an abuse of power for the president to do everything in his power to stop an investigation of himself.

BERMAN: Can I also say because you were talking about collusion before, no evidence of collusion here. And as you well know because you are the one at the table to go to law school, there is not a crime. Collusion isn't a crime. There are other crimes around it, conspiracy could be, collusion with a small "c," not a crime here. You say no evidence.

[08:15:06] And I just go back to the Donald Trump Jr. meeting and Joe brought up what's happened in plain sight. The things that we know, the agreed upon facts are, and we have seen the e-mails that Donald Trump Jr. was offered dirt on Hillary Clinton that he was told was for the Russian government, OK? That is why he went into this meeting.

He said if that's true, that's great.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: I love it.

BERMAN: I love it, exactly.

So, that in and of itself, small C, because there's no crime here, is that small C collusion? Walking into that meeting expecting to receive dirt from the Russian government on Hillary Clinton?

KEN STARR, LED INDEPENDENT COUNSEL INVESTIGATION OF PRESIDENT CLINTON: I don't think it is a crime. You can question it and condemn it.

BERMAN: That wasn't my question. My question to you is that collusion. We know collusion is not a crime. Is that willingness to get information and work with at a certain level the Russian government to get dirt on Hillary Clinton?

STARR: I don't think -- no, I don't think that is collusion. You say, I don't admire it, the entire episode, but someone comes to you and says I have information --

BERMAN: Foreign government.

STARR: That unless there's a quid pro quo, or some kind of arrangement, I think simply receiving it, again, unwise, but I don't see that as a crime.

BERMAN: It is part of the counterintelligence investigation.

STARR: Right, absolutely.

BERMAN: Because counterintelligence value and knowing whether a government had sway over the son of a presidential candidate?

STARR: Oh, counterintelligence investigation, you want to, John, as you know, gather absolutely all of the facts in terms of the depth of the relationship and so forth. This appears to have been, from what I know in the outside, a one-off as opposed to collusion is, let's get together and we're going to, in fact, work together for a particular purpose which is to influence an American election.

Bob Mueller has had 20 months or so --

BERMAN: Yes.

STARR: -- and he has not made that allegation. So, we will see in the coming days what --

CAMEROTA: I mean, you know, there is people around the Trump orbit have pleaded guilty to lying about contacts with Russians.

STARR: Yes, they have.

CAMEROTA: So, there's more than a one-off in terms of given Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, and other people having contacts with Russians.

STARR: But many of those had nothing do with the electoral process. As far as I'm able to tell --

(CROSSTALK)

JOE LOCKHART, FORMER CLINTON WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I think they had everything to do with the electoral process. The Russians had multiple goals here. One was they -- from Putin on down did not want Hillary Clinton to be president. I think it was personal for Putin.

But I think from a policy point of view, what they wanted was they wanted the sanctions lifted on Putin's cronies. That's what they kept coming back to, that's what they brought up at the meeting in Trump Tower. That's what Kislyak wanted to talk to Flynn about. That's what Kislyak wanted to talk about when Jared Kushner tried to set up a back channel.

So, you know, again, if collusion is not a legal term, and it's just a layman's term, there's plenty of evidence here.

Here's the one thing, I kept talking about not being a lawyer and I'm not. What I am is a political hack. I have done five presidential campaigns. I've been in as many situations as you can. I can tell you without reservations that 99 percent of the people that I worked with and that I opposed, if they got a call from a Russian operative, the first thing they would do is go to the general counsel of the campaign and say, what the hell do I do with this? I'd love to have information on my opponent but I don't want to be ensnared with this.

The fact that Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner all willingly went into this meeting without consulting apparently with any lawyers, and we'll find out whether Donald Trump, the president, knew about, raises an enormous red flag about what was going on. Do we know the extent of this? We don't. Will we ever know the extent of this based on the catch-22 that we're in now, maybe not. We know the results of the counterintelligence.

But the very fact that the Department of Justice, not the Democratic Department of Justice, or the Republican Department of Justice, the Department of Justice, opened a counterintelligence investigation of a presidential campaign telling us there is something very seriously wrong going on there.

CAMEROTA: Joe Lockhart, Judge Starr, I feel like this went well.

Do you have anything to add to that?

STARR: No, I would just say, I think all of this goes, and I'm glad you put it in political terms in terms of the exercise of judgment. Was it poor judgment to go into that meeting? Should it have been reported to the general counsel? That's fair.

What I object to is the constant criminalization of conduct saying a- ha, let's bring on the grand jury and let's bring on the indictments. I think that's wrong. I think we do that over much in the American legal system, mostly American political system.

CAMEROTA: And we've all agreed, let's hope that the information comes to light from what Mueller has --

[08:20:02] STARR: Yes, absolutely, I agree with that.

BERMAN: All right. What you've just seen is the first episode of the worst buddy film series you will ever see.

Judge Starr, Joe Lockhart, thank you very much for being with us.

We have a lot to discuss after this pretty remarkable discussion. So, stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: All right. So we just wrapped up an extraordinary interview with Ken Starr and Joe Lockhart, and you're carbo loading.

BERMAN: I need some sugar --

CAMEROTA: I can see that. Two men, of course, at the center of the Clinton investigation 20 years ago and they were talking about that and the Mueller investigation, and the relevance of all of this, and interwoven-ness, including what it means for President Trump.

BERMAN: Every time we tried to talk about the Mueller investigation, it ended going back to 20 years ago.

CAMEROTA: Yes, I felt there's some unresolved business there.

BERMAN: There's so little resolved there. These men still both have a lot to get off their chest, I think.

We want to talk about this. Joining us is S.E. Cupp, host of CNN's "S.E. CUPP UNFILTERED", David Gregory, CNN political commentator, and Jeffrey Toobin, CNN chief legal analyst who joins us now.

Thank you all for being with us. I have to say that while that discussion was going on largely I think we were just watching.

CAMEROTA: Oh, yes, that was a spectator sport happening right there.

BERMAN: I got a glimpse of both of you on the couch, and your jaws were sort of like dropped as well.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: And, you know, I am old enough to have covered that. I wrote a book about the Starr investigation and whole Lewinsky case, but, you know, it is interesting to see, you know, the aggressiveness that Judge Starr reflected during his tenure as independent counsel. He's a lot more cautious about the Mueller investigation.

Now, you know, he's very -- he's a very, very good lawyer. He knows how to draw distinctions between things, but the matter of perspective did seem awfully different to me.

CAMEROTA: David Gregory, your thoughts?

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I mean, there's a couple of points. I mean, you know, Jeffrey has covered, you know, not just the impeachment scandal, going back to Iran Contra. So, you know, how partisan the independent counsel becomes and how it's viewed around the surrounding activity.

When you empower an independent counsel to investigate, chances are they're going to find something. I mean, that was true of the special prosecutor Fitzgerald looking into the Valarie Plame episode during the Bush administration as well, where the biggest crime was lying to federal agents, obstruction of justice.

[08:25:01] So, that was the case, too.

I do think this whole business of moral judgment and the political takeaway, what was not included in that conversation was the fact that if that had happened today, what Bill Clinton did today, he would not have survived. Does anybody think different that having an affair with a 21-year-old intern in the White House would be seen entirely differently and there would be moral judgment?

And liberals then looked the other way because they saw all kinds of redeeming values and qualities in President Clinton.

CAMEROTA: Well, I don't know. President Trump seems to be surviving many suggestions of infidelity today.

GREGORY: Yes, that's true, that's true.

S.E. CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: It's not --

GREGORY: But there is also similar, Alisyn, and that there's lots of people who support Trump, who have reasons for looking the other way on that.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

GREGORY: And part of that is because Bill Clinton survived it. And there is a sense of we kind of already lived through this and we're past it.

CUPP: David is 100 percent right. I was on the couch, you can't see it right now, but watching this soap opera between two really formidable old time opponents and a master class in how to talk about these two really significant historical events. My jaw was on the floor, I was taking pictures, eating it all up.

But I thought the missing piece was Monica. No one brought up the impact all of that had on Monica, and had there been a Monica in today's soap opera, I think this would be different.

I think Joe is right, Joe Lockhart is right, to compare this is apples and oranges, but for very important reasons. And I think David is absolutely right. It's not just that liberals looked the other way at that time, many of them gave Bill Clinton cover.

I mean, if you look at Gloria Steinem and some other feminists, they excused what Bill Clinton had done and because of #metoo and so many other factors, I think we would look at that very differently.

CAMEROTA: We're in a totally different era. I mean, totally, 20 years then.

CUPP: If he had been accused of doing what Trump had done, it wouldn't take one, two, three, 1,100, it would take one or two and we would be having a different conversation then as well. We would have taken it a lot more seriously.

BERMAN: And again, you're talking about what Southern District has on paper already. The agreed upon facts here, it says that Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to pay off a porn star and a playmate to cover up affairs because the release of that information would impact the election. I mean --

CAMEROTA: That was such a great point, because he was a biggest -- Ken Starr was acting as though this is all hypothetical, let's wait for the facts to come out. There is already conclusion to the Cohen stuff in the Southern District, as you were pointing out.

TOOBN: Right, and that is just one thing out of so many facts in this investigation that are widely nope. You know, I think our politics have grown more tribal since the late 1990s. The Democrats are on the Democrat side. Republicans on the Republican side.

You know, Donald -- the most honest thing that Donald Trump said in the campaign is that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn't care, because they got Neil Gorsuch, they got Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, so Donald Trump can do whatever he wants and that -- you know, that's how our politics work now. We always talk about polls, maybe Donald Trump is up to 36 or down to 38, but polls essentially haven't changed since the day he took office, you know, blips here and there. People are locked in in their views and facts are irrelevant.

GREGORY: Can I just make another point that I think Jeffrey would agree with? One of the problems with a special counsel, and this kind of investigation, is that unlike what happens mostly in the rest of the criminal justice system, you can't divorce politics from it, because all of these decisions have an element of politics to it. You know, the decision to charge Paul Manafort, the way they did, and you know, there's a political dimension to that in terms of squeezing him, which is another case as well, to get information about the core investigation.

And then we look at the sentence by Judge Ellis and say, that was too lenient. Elizabeth Warren saying that, who's also trying to score certain political points in the context of this. So, there is so much politics in this because at the end of it, especially when a president is involved, all the investigation by a prosecutor and a team of prosecutors and the FBI all funnels in to a political process, which is a question to impeach or not to impeach and if you go forward, that's an entirely political process.

BERMAN: You want to jump in, S.E., I can tell.

CUPP: No, I just -- I couldn't agree more. It's impossible to divorce politics from all of this, whether we're looking back at the Clinton saga or we're looking at this current saga, it's really it's impossible. And I think to Jeffrey's point, voters are sort of dug in, they're baked in, and whether we're looking at this very bad week for Donald Trump, or we're looking at these investigations, I think people are tribal and they've made up their minds. People like me who oppose the president, but might defend him here or there, we are irrelevant.

END