Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Reporting Indicates Mueller Report Possibly Completed Soon and Handed Over to Justice Department; White House Advisers Possibly Used Non-Government App for Government Business; Rep. Val Demings (D) Florida is Interviewed About Washington Bracing For End of Mueller Investigation. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired March 22, 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] UNIDENTIFIED MALE: -- great degree of executive privilege.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have a responsibility to oversee and to hold this administration accountable, and we're going to do it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When you're using WhatsApp with Saudi Arabia, this raises tremendous national security concerns.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This president based his whole campaign on this against Hillary Clinton.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All of my e-mails are on the White House server.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota on John Berman.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to your NEW DAY. It is Friday, March 22nd, 8:00 in the east. Alisyn is off. Erica Hill joins me. And the question on this day is it, will today be the day, right? You're looking at live pictures from Washington, D.C. Of course, on the right is the White House, what's going on behind those doors right now? And on the left, most importantly today, that's outside the Special Counsel's office. We are waiting to see if today is the day that Robert Mueller marks the end of his investigation and officially hands over his report to the attorney general. This has been almost two years in the making. It is a very important moment, important for the presidency, important for Congress as they look into what the president has done, and important for the public as well.

Now, remember, today is not the day you will get to read the Mueller report, even if it is turned over. Why not? Well, because Bill Barr, the attorney general, gets to go through it first and decide what to turn over to congress. And before that even happens, the White House may weigh in and try to exert executive privilege over all, some, much of it. We just don't know yet. Still, today is a key moment, maybe, in the process, Erica.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: The president is apparently ready, taking on the Mueller investigation once again in a new interview. Here's what the president told FOX Business just this morning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I have a deputy appoints a man to write a report on me to make a determination on my presidency? People will not stand for it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: Not exactly what it was.

BERMAN: Not at all. Not at all. Just to review, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed the Special Counsel to look into whether or not there was a level of collusion between people connected to candidate Donald Trump and the Russians, and any other crimes, that may have come to light in that process, like, say, obstruction of justice. He was not appointed to make a determination on the presidency.

Joining us now is Jeffrey Toobin, former federal prosecutor and CNN chief legal analyst, and Van Jones, former special adviser to President Obama and host of "The Van Jones Show." And, as I was saying before, today is the day many people expect Robert Mueller to announce his work is done and turn over the report to the attorney general. Van, it may just be the beginning of what is a legal and a political fight. Still, it is a significant moment still. What are you, with your highly analytical eyes, looking for?

VAN JONES, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I'm looking for the reaction of the rightwing media to this, because we're not going to know that much more. We'll know that we are at the end of the beginning, honestly, of this whole process, because his job is to go figure out what's going on, get as much information as possible, indict people who are doing bad stuff, not indict people who are doing good stuff, and then turn a report over.

And so what you're going to see is how effective has Donald Trump been at discrediting this entire process to half the country so that literally it does not even matter what this guy has done because you're going to have, I think, an orchestrated response, watch the symmetry and the response. Rightwing radio, FOX News and the blogosphere literally will be on the same page, because I think we're going to see a president who has convinced half of the media that our law enforcement system is corrupt and doesn't matter. And that is much worse, I think, for the long-term of the country than anything in that report.

HILL: And that's a message, we should point out, too, that's already started. It started months and months ago really from almost the beginning of the investigation. And it's a message that the president is saying the report goes to Bill Barr. You were saying earlier, Jeff, the president could call him up and say, hey, tell me what's in it. And then he could say at some point, I spoke to him, nothing there.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think Van raises an interesting point about how the rightwing orchestrated reaction will be. It is likely to be two things that are somewhat contradictory. One is this is a worthless witch hunt, and they were out to get us from the beginning. And b, they didn't discover anything anyway. That This is just a big nothing burger, that nothing new here, it was a waste of time. Witch hunt and nothing new I expect will be some version of the reaction, regardless of what the report actually says.

BERMAN: Legitimate question if someone in Washington presses "send" on their press release saying that the report clears the president before --

(LAUGHTER)

BERMAN: That's what they have to be careful of today.

[08:05:00] I brought this for show and tell, which is the Starr Report. This is my original piece of memorabilia of the Starr Report from 1998. This is not what we are getting today, OK? You get nothing today, first of all, the American people. Let's make that clear. This is being turned over to Bill Barr. But even then, Jeffrey, the attorney general might not get this, which is a very comprehensive, line by line, evidentiary presentation.

TOOBIN: At the end of the Clinton administration, they redid the regulations around these independent investigations. First of all, it was no longer the independent counsel law. So the judges who supervised that were out, and it was the attorney general who supervised the investigation.

In addition, the regulations call for apparently a much more limited report in terms of factual discussion. If you recall, a lot of Democrats were very upset about how much detail was in the Starr Report. So they wrote regulations that said the report should be much more narrow. Now Democrats aren't so happy with that message. Now they'd like a great big Starr Report.

So the question is, the regulations are sufficiently ambiguous that Mueller could write a very detailed report or he could write something much less detailed, and he could attach exhibits, hundreds of pages of exhibits -- or not. All of that, we don't know how Mueller resolved in his own mind, and of course we don't know how Barr will respond to that in terms of public disclosure.

HILL: It will be interesting to see, too, because the president has, and the president does this a lot, right. He will say things so that he can have it both ways. And the case this week being one of them, when he said, I want you to see -- we should make the report public. It should be out there, right, which then he can go back and say, look, I said it should be public, but the people are telling me they can't put it out there. But there is this public polling that finds an extraordinarily high number, 87 percent say there should be a public report on the findings. Van, how much do you think that could end up coming into play?

JONES: I think now we move back over to the political process with folks in Congress.

HILL: Right.

JONES: I think people in Congress are going to feel very confident demanding as much as possible. Nobody is going to really care so much if the regulations said this, the regulations said that. The problem is when Congress makes rules, they are driving, looking into the rearview mirror. They're looking at the Clinton situation, which was a minor mistake by the president that was turned into a massive, massive report that embarrassed the whole country.

I think in this situation, there are people who feel that we may have a president who is engaging in treason. And so when you have that level of public concern and the public saying we want a lot of information out there, I think Congress is going to feel very comfortable saying we want everything, we want it now, and you're going to have that dynamic going back and forth.

TOOBIN: I'm sorry, go ahead.

JONES: And the fact of the report being narrow will not stop the demand for more information.

TOOBIN: Congress will say that, and Democrats are certain to say that. The question is, what leverage do they have? If they go to court, it is by no means clear to me a judge will order the Justice Department to turn over the full report to Congress.

JONES: And that's why I say it is really the end of the beginning, because now there's going to be showdown after showdown after showdown, and brinksmanship on all sides. Still you have a public that is hungry for more information here. and that will not be satisfied today or any day soon.

BERMAN: It's a bind the Democrats have put themselves in to an extent, or let themselves be put into over time. And you warned about this, too, which is they have been saying for some time, oh, Robert Mueller, Robert Mueller, Robert Mueller. Well, Mueller is going to turn over his report today, and it's not outside the realm of possibility that there is not much in it.

JONES: It's a big shrug. And I have been saying for now almost a year and a half, the idea that Robert Mueller is somehow Harry Potter and that this report is a wand that is going to fix everything and all we have to do is wait for Mueller I think is going to prove to be ill- advised on the part of Democrats. This is going to be a long, drawn out -- it may last a decade or more to figure out exactly what did Donald Trump do, what did he know, when did he know it? And the Mueller report is one point along a very long journey for the country.

TOOBIN: And if there is anything we have learned about the Trump presidency, is that the polls don't change, is that regardless of the new factual developments, and it's our job here to say breaking news at the bottom of the screen every 15 minutes, and it doesn't change people's opinions. The opinions about Trump are locked in, it seems. And whether it's Charlottesville or Helsinki, or any major news development, the polling stays the same.

BERMAN: That doesn't mean we shouldn't know.

TOOBIN: Of course.

BERMAN: It's doesn't mean mean, though, that it's not worth learning everything we can possibly learn here.

TOOBIN: Absolutely.

HILL: In terms of learning everything we can, the other thing that stands out is this letter from Rod Rosenstein to Chuck Grassley, which has resurfaced. So thanks to Jonathan Karl for that.

[08:10:03] But a couple of the things that were pointed out, specifically involving congressional inquiries, it was noted there that you have to be careful with these, essentially, is what Rod Rosenstein was saying, and Shan Wu even saying earlier, pointing to the fact that they were being categorized as adversarial in nature. And Rod Rosenstein basically saying, listen, we are doing our job here. It doesn't mean that you're going to go down this road the way you think you are.

TOOBIN: And he went out of his way, Rosenstein, in that letter to say we don't disparage people who are not charged. The rule of the Department of Justice is put up or shut up. If you charge someone, you disclose everything. But if you don't charge someone you don't embarrass them. Well, Donald Trump cannot be charged under Department of Justice policy. Does that mean nothing should be disclosed about him either? Does that mean he win both ways, no indictment and no disclosure about him? That's one possibility.

BERMAN: The Mel Brooks moment, it's good to be the king, as he said in the "History of the World." Van, I want to ask you about this other reporting overnight. Elijah Cummings who chairs the House Oversight Committee, is not happy with the White House over the fact that it won't provide information about how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have used apparently their private e-mail server for government business. And Kushner, CNN has reported, used WhatsApp to communicate with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. That certainly seems like official business. WhatsApp, encrypted, Facebook owned, --

HILL: Encrypted not by the government.

BERMAN: Not by the government. Facebook messaging service here. And again, I'm old enough to remember when using private communications for government business was a big deal.

JONES: I'm old enough to remember the 2016 election where Hillary Clinton's use of that was the only talking point for the Republican Party, the main talking point for the Republican Party. So this is a big deal. There is this weird thing where people in government life, and not just Jared Kushner, but a lot of people want to figure out workarounds because every single e-mail that you send is a public record. Can you imagine, when you're at work, you send an e-mail to this guy, and anybody can see it. So there is a temptation to do the work-arounds. However, you can't do it. And I think Elijah Cummings is just getting started.

HILL: There may be a temptation, but there is also a reality. Even to your point, the example used, I know that anything I send to John could be read by the company and could ultimately be read by the entire world. Who knows? So that's on you as an adult, and as an employee, to know how to do your job. And when you are working in the government and you know that beyond that you are subject to the Presidential Records Act and that there needs to be an accounting, and your answer is, well, I screenshotted my WhatsApp message and then forwarded it to my government e-mail, it would seem to me that that does not really pass the smell test.

JONES: That would be a new interpretation of the law.

(LAUGHTER)

BERMAN: Also when your father-in-law ran a campaign talking about e- mail use.

JONES: The big irony here for this White House, because they made such a big deal about the e-mails, and to this day, what about the e- mails, what about the e-mails, is almost a mantra in rightwing media.

TOOBIN: To say nothing of the "Lock her up" chants that go on at these rallies to this day over alleged improper e-mail use, yes. It just shows that the whole issue was bogus from the beginning.

BERMAN: Jeffrey Toobin, Van Jones, thank you all very much. You can watch "The Van Jones Show" tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg will be Van's guest. And as we said, any show that is on tomorrow could have a ton to talk about depending on the events that play out over the next few hours.

What is the plan in Congress once the Mueller report is handed over to the attorney general? We're going to ask a key Democrat about this, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:17:32] JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: It was a unanimous vote in the House of Representatives, 420-zip -- you can't do much better than that -- to demand that the Mueller report be released to the public. So, how much could be changed by the attorney general, perhaps redacted by the White House before it gets to lawmakers and the public?

Joining us now is Democratic Congresswoman Val Demings. She serves in the House Intelligence and House Judiciary Committees, two important committees in all of this.

So, Representative, thank you so much for being with us.

First, let me ask about your anticipation of what could be the news today. We have seen the live pictures. We have the cameras set up. We believe as soon as today, maybe the next few hours, Robert Mueller will hand over his report to the attorney general of the United States which would mark the end of the Mueller phase of this investigation.

What do you see as the significance of that?

REP. VAL DEMINGS (D), FLORIDA: Well, good morning, John. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

It's been a long time coming. We are certainly waiting the special counsel's report to come out. Let me just say this. As you mentioned earlier we unanimously voted in the House to make the report public. And I am hoping that the president -- starting with the president, that he will respect the wishes of Congress. We represent the American people.

That Attorney General Barr will respect the wishes of the American people. He's in a job he's been in before. And that we can get this report behind us.

But, look, in Congress, we have been anxiously awaiting to see what's in the report. We can decide what are the best steps moving forward. We still have a lot of work to do.

BERMAN: And, of course, there may not be much in that report. We just don't know. But there is renewed speculation today because of some things Rod Rosenstein has said in the past that there may not be much information beyond those people who have been charged already because of what he says.

Let me just read you what he says about DOJ regulations. Punishing wrongdoers is only one part of the department's mission. We also have a duty to prevent the disclosure of information that would unfairly tarnish people who are not charged with crimes.

So, Rosenstein indicates if you're not charged with a crime, there may be nothing written about you in this report that a lot of people have been waiting for, for a long time.

DEMINGS: Well, we do know that Mueller's findings will be made known to the attorney general. It's up to the attorney general, I believe how much will be released or not released. But as I said, the American people, I believe, deserve to see the report.

And, look, when you're a public official and certainly when you are the president of the United States, you are subjected to extreme oversight. You are subjected to having to answer to the American people. I believe, deserve to see the report.

[08:20:01] And, look, when you're a public official and certainly when you are the president of the United States, you are subjected to extreme oversight. You are subjected to having to answer to the American people. And so, I believe that the report should be made public. And Congress will make the decisions on behalf of the American people that need to be made as it pertains to any action involving the president of the United States.

BERMAN: If the report -- and again, we expect it could be turned over as soon as today. If the report does reach a conclusion that there was no collusion between then-candidate Donald Trump or those around him and the Russian government, will you accept that conclusion? Will Democrats say, OK, thank you, we're going to move on?

DEMINGS: Well, I tell you what, I'm not going to predict what's in the report. What I can tell you is this. The president prior to his election had a hundred -- he or those around him had over a hundred contacts with the Russian dictator or Russian officials. Twenty-six Russians have been indicted for undermining our 2016 election.

The president was involved in a deal to build a tower in Moscow. So, I'm not going to predict what might not be in the report. I think it still remains to be seen.

But what I do know is that we are going to take whatever action appropriate and we are looking at abuse of power, corruption, of course, conspiring against the United States. And so, we are anxious to see the report, as you are.

BERMAN: Felix Sater, who is an individual who worked inside Trump Tower for a time and had connections in business dealings with the Russians. He will come before your committee behind closed doors. What are the key questions you want this gentleman to answer? We heard his name repeatedly I should mention to the American people who might be watching, in Michael Cohen's public testimony.

DEMINGS: Well, if we go back to the very beginning, you know, the special counsel was appointed because Russia interfered with our election. And then the question was who conspired against the United States with Russia? Up to and including the president of the United States.

We know that six people in the president's circle have been indicted, pleaded guilty and are on their way to prison. So, we have to look at that time motivation. If the president or those around him conspired with Russia, what was really the president's motivation?

And I believe that Mr. Sater is a key witness in terms of determining what the president's motivation may have been. We know the president was interested in building a Trump Tower in Moscow. And Felix Sater was working along with Michael Cohen to try to make it happen.

BERMAN: The Felix Sater issue, though, does bring up, again, what could be -- not a contradiction but a conundrum for Democrats with the Mueller report, because, look, we know that Robert Mueller's investigators looked into the Trump Tower project in Moscow. How do we know that? Because Michael Cohen was charged and pleaded guilty to lying about testimony of this.

So, this is something Mueller has investigated and we assume because of what we know of Mueller investigated thoroughly.

So what will Congress's role be beyond Robert Mueller, if Mueller doesn't charge anyone with crimes regarding this?

DEMINGS: John, let me say this. Yes, we know -- I mean, Michael Cohen has said it. The Republicans certainly reminded us that Michael Cohen lied to Congress last year. But let me say this. What was the motivation for Michael Cohen lying to Congress?

We believe it was to cover up any wrongdoing by the president to distort the timeline of the president's involvement in the Trump Tower in Moscow. Michael Cohen gave one timeline in an open setting -- or when he testified to Congress last year, but in open setting before the oversight committee he said the negotiations went well into the 2016 campaign, right up until the point -- I believe it was June of 2016.

So you have to look at why Michael Cohen lied about the timeline involving the Trump Moscow Tower deal.

BERMAN: So, the White House has not provided documents or information in regards to a congressional request for information about meetings and conversations the president has had with Vladimir Putin. I will note, I have to believe most administrations and White Houses would say no to that type of congressional request.

What do you expect or what do you think you deserve from the White House here?

DEMINGS: Well, let me just say this. This is not your usual administration. The president started out his administration with Russia undermining the election and the special counsel looking to see if the president or those around him conspired to undermine our democracy and undermine our election.

[08:25:11] That doesn't make this your usual administration. And why would the president not only keep those conversations private (AUDIO GAP) and refuse to release any documents pertaining to the conversation, but he's also kept those conversations private from those in his security team and those in the intelligence community and the American people and certainly Congress are wondering why is that.

I think when you look at the circumstances surrounding the president, the questions about his relationship with Vladimir Putin, a Russian dictator, and his unwavering efforts to shield or conceal any conversations with Putin, I think we deserve to know what's going on.

And I know the chairman of judiciary and intelligence, foreign affairs committee and oversight are not going to simply walk away because the president has refused. They will continue to work until they are able to get the documents they have requested.

BERMAN: Congresswoman Val Demings, certainly, the nature of the conversations between the president and the Russian leader, unlike anything we have seen before with no witnesses.

Val Demings, thank you so much for being with us, Congresswoman. I really appreciate it.

DEMINGS: Thank you.

BERMAN: Erica? ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Up next, we'll hear from the ex-wife of a former White House aide who lost his job amid allegations of domestic abuse. Why she says she's troubled about the way in which he's returning to the public eye. She joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

END