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House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler Demanding Justice Department Produce All Communications between Attorney General Barr and Special Counsel; Man Claiming to be Kidnapped Boy Proven an Imposter; Democratic Candidates Try to Court Black Voters. Aired 8- 8:30a ET

Aired April 05, 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] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: -- a lot about how the business works, just not who his clients are.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Interesting.

CAMEROTA: Another week, another about-face at the Trump White House. NEW DAY continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jerry Nadler sent a letter demanding all communications between the Mueller team and the Justice Department.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are very concerned. We've only seen one four- page summary.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have had 23 months of jumping to wrong conclusions. Let him do his job.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is a mechanism where forms could be reviewed in a nonpartisan basis.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's motivated by the Democrats' desire to find anything to bring this president down.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If there's nothing to hide, I don't understand why there should be push back from this administration.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Boeing is admitting its software played a role in the Ethiopian crash.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's our responsibility to eliminate this risk. We own it and we know how to do it.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is not an accident. This is something that should have been prevented.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota on John Berman. BERMAN: All right, good morning and welcome to your NEW DAY. It is

Friday, April 5th, 8:00 here in the east. The people at this table can't wait to start talking, I can tell you that right now.

CAMEROTA: They are already talking.

BERMAN: They're already talking. So I opened the show by discussing the three F's of the apocalypse -- flipping, fibbing, and fighting.

CAMEROTA: OK, if you say there are the three F's.

BERMAN: The problem is my typos and the prompter, I can't type.

CAMEROTA: Yes. I was afraid you were going to insert another F. That's what I was afraid of.

BERMAN: Flipping, fibbing, and fighting. The fourth is in my head right now. The major headlines this morning, the president is not closing the border with Mexico, he's not proposing a new healthcare plan, and his father was not born in Germany. So that explains the flipping and the fibbing.

As for the fighting, Democrats are turning up the pressure on Attorney General William Barr with House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler demanding the Justice Department produce all communications between Barr and the Special Counsel. This comes after reports that some members of the Mueller team were unhappy with Barr's four-page summary of their 400-page work.

CAMEROTA: Meanwhile, the White House is resisting Democratic demands to get six years worth of President Trump's tax returns from the IRS. "The New York Times" reports that the president urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to prioritize the confirmation vote for his nominee for IRS chief counsel. That request is raising questions about the president's timing here and his motivation.

Joining us now is Jeffrey Toobin, former federal prosecutor and CNN chief legal analyst, we also have Gloria Borger making a rare morning appearance.

(LAUGHTER)

CAMEROTA: Chief political analyst, and S.E. Cupp, CNN political commentator and host of CNN's "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered."

OK, Gloria --

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: I go first?

CAMEROTA: You go first.

BERMAN: Because we don't know when we're going to get you back.

CAMEROTA: We don't know when you're going to be back. Is Jerry Nadler jumping the gun? Bill Barr, the attorney general, said that he's going to release it by mid-April, in fact he said maybe at the latest. So next week we're going see more of the Mueller report. We don't know how many of the 400 pages we'll see. We don't know what the redactions are going to look like, but Jerry Nadler is already pressing to see more. I don't blame him given the press reports that people on Mueller's team feel that Bill Barr has mischaracterized it, but if we just all take a deep breath, it's going to happen probably next week.

BORGER: What he's doing is putting pressure on him and saying, OK, you're going to get the subpoena, and you better give us as much as you can or else. Now, he may send the subpoena before he gets the report next week, but I think he's just ratcheting up the pressure on him to say we want to see it all, we need to clear up these discrepancies between your four-page letter versus what we think might be in the report. Why didn't you use their own summaries, et cetera, et cetera? We want to see more. I'm putting you on notice. So it's just a political tactic for him, really.

BERMAN: S.E., to an extent, based on what I've seen you, you are in the let's wait to see it camp largely. But there has been this development where people from inside the Mueller team are complaining not about what will happen, but about what has happened.

S.E. CUPP, CNN HOST, S.E. CUPP UNFILTERED: Which is rare for this group of people over the past two years. They've been impressively tight lipped. I think it's important to point out, though, remember back in January, Robert Mueller issued a correction on a "Buzzfeed" story that he said was inaccurate. He did it almost immediately. So I think as we do the wait and see game it's important to sort of remember that if he thought something was being mischaracterized, I think it's safe to assume he would get out there and say this is not accurate, wait for more to come out.

BERMAN: Maybe that's what he just did.

CUPP: Maybe. We don't know. I think to Alisyn's point, the report has been promised, we don't know in what form yet, but let's see in it, and then we can complain about what has been redacted.

CAMEROTA: I think the one thing that we don't talk about that much is that Robert Mueller is helping Bill Barr with these redactions. So they are working in tandem, aren't they, Jeffrey?

[08:05:00] JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: That's a very interesting question. Barr has said that Mueller is playing some role, but how much of a role is very interesting, because if Mueller goes public and says, I agree with every redaction that Barr has made, that would be extremely helpful to Barr. However, if Mueller says, well, I just contributed in some way and Barr made all the ultimate final judgments, that's a very different story. So the question of how much political cover Mueller gives Barr is a good one, but I don't think we know the final answer to that yet.

BERMAN: Just one more point on that because Gloria jumps in is we also know that Mueller did not help in the crafting of the four-page memo. So Barr says Mueller helping now, but not then. BORGER: Right. And that's why there was some upset about it, because

these summaries were apparently written -- Mueller and his team were not born yesterday. They knew a lot of this or all of it was going to make its way into the public view. So they wrote a lot of it assuming that, and particularly these summaries. So there was a lot of upset. Why didn't you use our words? Why did you feel the need to characterize our 22 months of work?

CAMEROTA: And would they have known what was classified?

BORGER: Sure. Sure.

CAMEROTA: Did they prepare these summaries for public consumption?

BORGER: Sure.

CAMEROTA: So they would have scrubbed it of the classified --

BORGER: Sure, of course.

CAMEROTA: That does beg the question then why Bill Barr decided to summarize the summary.

BORGER: Because he said every page on the top said this contains confidential information which comes from grand jury testimony. But the summaries didn't necessarily contain that. Barr -- look, there is a difference of opinion here. And, by the way, Barr and Mueller are really good friends. And so

CAMEROTA: I think that should be interesting to see how that. They're good friends and not working at cross purposes.

CUPP: There's also plenty of reasons to want to see everything in the Mueller report. It's in the public interest to do that. It just feels like -- call me a cynic -- just feels like a lot of Democrats want to see what's in it because they believe there will be damaging material.

CAMEROTA: Of course, they do, given the past two years of everything that has come out of the indictments and the convictions.

CUPP: Sure, but to get out ahead of it, and I've heard Democrats say I think there was collusion and I think Bill Barr is guilty of a coverup already I don't think does them any favors. And if they end up overpromising and underdelivering that only helps Trump.

TOOBIN: The world is full of very difficult problems to solve, and we all know what they are. This one actually has a solution. Release the report, then we can see if somebody was mischaracterizing it. Then we can see. All this arguing about what the report says and -- just release the report, and then that problem disappears.

BORGER: Well, here is the interesting part, we've been talking about this, but which is if you can't charge the president because of Justice Department rules, how much can you say about his bad behavior publicly if he is not being charged with any crime? And so this is what everybody complained Comey did with Hillary Clinton, he didn't charge her, but he said she was reckless. So what do you do about the president?

TOOBIN: Even that has a solution.

BORGER: What solution?

TOOBIN: Well, no, the problem with what Comey said about Hillary was the way he characterized it. It was reckless, it was terrible.

BORGER: Right, and the timing.

TOOBIN: Well, the timing. But also -- but with a narrative you don't have to have Mueller saying Donald Trump is a bad person, he was reckless. Just describe what happened. Just put out the facts, then you eliminate, I think, the Comey problem, at least as I see it.

BERMAN: And S.E., to your point, this could be, this reporting this week starting with the "Times" and confirmed everyone including CNN, it could be a bit of a prebuttal from the Mueller team who is worried that some of that incriminating information that they think the American people should know might not make it in it because Barr feels that he can keep it outside, because it incriminates the president who won't be charged with a crime.

CUPP: There's probably a lot going on. There's probably some CYA from both camps. Everybody involved knows how big the story is and how influential it could be on our elections and on our politics. And so I think everyone understands the gravity and they want to make sure that the right information is getting out. I'm not sure this rollout has been perfect.

CAMEROTA: No.

CUPP: But I'm not sure what perfect would have looked like.

BERMAN: No. That's a good point.

CUPP: Because the tensions are so high and the emotions so heated over this, I don't know what a perfect rollout would have been to appease everyone.

TOOBIN: I have got an idea.

CUPP: Release it all.

TOOBIN: Release the report. Then you don't have to worry about a rollout. You don't have to worry about --

BERMAN: I get the sense, Jeffrey, from this discussion you think they should release the report.

TOOBIN: I do, actually. You must be is a psychic.

BORGER: There is precedent for releasing grand jury testimony. Just ask Bill Clinton, look at Watergate. There is precedent for that, and we haven't seen the attorney general look for that or ask for that.

[08:10:05] BERMAN: I do want to bring up one last thing, which is the fact that the president is not closing the border today. Breaking news, the boarder is not closing despite the fact that last week the president said it likely would close. And we saw that pattern on healthcare. What do you make of this, these retreats we have seen?

CUPP: I'm really relieved that finally someone got Trump to listen, because closing the border would have been economically disastrous. I think the next step is for someone to tell him the next best thing is to actually send more aid to some of these asylum countries, no cut it off.

CAMEROTA: Who is this wise voice?

CUPP: Aren't you dying to know? I am dying to know, because on two decisions -- don't chase after healthcare in the middle of an election year and --

BORGER: That was Mitch McConnell, wasn't it, who told him that?

CUPP: I think so.

CAMEROTA: That's in the reporting.

CUPP: Terrific. Terrific. And also don't close the border. I don't know, was that Newt Gingrich, he was out pretty strong on that. I'd love to know, because it was the right thing to do, and Trump, as we know, doesn't always listen in the face of --

CAMEROTA: All right. Thank you all very much. Great to see you this morning. Great to talk to you guys.

BORGER: Can I go back to sleep now?

(LAUGHTER)

CAMEROTA: Yes, you may. Yes. Be sure to watch "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. eastern.

BERMAN: We do have some breaking news to tell you about this morning. An active shooter incident at a naval base near Virginia Beach, the naval air station Oceana released a statement moments ago saying the shooter is contained and one victim has been transported to the hospital. The base has been on lockdown for the last hour while officials try to get a handle on the situation. We will bring you more information as we learn about it.

CAMEROTA: Now to this cruel and heartbreaking twist in the case of that little boy who vanished nearly eight years ago. The FBI says the DNA tests reveal that the young man who claimed to be Timmothy Pitzen is not actually him. He turned out to be a 23-year-old man with a criminal history.

Joining us now is Jonathan Rini. He is that man's younger brother. Jonathan, thank you so much for being with us this morning to try to shed some light on what your older brother did. We really appreciate you joining us on the phone. Can you tell us why would your brother do this?

JONATHAN RINI, BROTHER OF MAN WHO IMPERSONATED TIMMOTHY PITZEN: Honestly, I do not know. I do not know why he would do anything like this.

CAMEROTA: Tell us about the history because it's not the first time. It's the first time it sounds like that he has done it to this dramatic level, but he has claimed other identities, even yours, in the past.

RINI: Yes, he's used my identity to -- I don't know if he was trying to weasel his way out of the traffic stop, but it did more harm than good.

CAMEROTA: You say that he has been doing stupid stuff for as long as you can remember. Such as?

RINI: Yes. He was in and out of jail a lot while we were kids, just getting into random little bouts of trouble, fights at home. He was placed on juvenile probation, and then he just continuously violated his probation.

CAMEROTA: Is there a mental health component? Is your brother -- do you know his history with mental illness?

RINI: Yes, he has Asperger syndrome and he has bipolar disorder, but still he should have the rational thinking to not do something like this, because I don't want to group that certain group of people, like people with autism, bipolar disorder, ADHD, into a group of somebody who would do something like this, because that's just going to stigmatize that syndrome as, oh, they're going to break the law and go out and get in trouble. But that's not the case.

CAMEROTA: We totally agree. Obviously there are so many people with Asperger or who are bipolar who are high functioning people and who are obviously not criminals.

RINI: Exactly.

CAMEROTA: Of course, and I really appreciate you making that point, and I think that we need to emphasize it. But tell me where you were when you heard the news about what happened with your brother and what your thoughts were.

RINI: I was at work. I got a call from somebody who said that they would be able to deflect any media attention that I receive. And when I got the call, I didn't believe the guy at all. I was like, what do you mean media attention? He essentially told me, he said, dude, you have got a big storm coming. And I was like, what are you talking about? I almost hung up on him, but I let him talk, and he told me what happened. And I just couldn't believe it. And then five minutes after I got off the phone with him I just started receiving call after call after call. And I was at work so I just did my best to ignore it.

CAMEROTA: When is the last time you saw your brother or talked to him?

[18:15:04]

RINI: I haven't spoken to him in three, four years.

CAMEROTA: And why is that? Why has there been a rift between you?

RINI: When we were living together with my mom he was just pushing her to her breaking point. She's not in the best of health herself, mental health-wise, and he just kept pushing her to a breaking point and breaking point, and then one day he just finally walked out the door and never came back.

CAMEROTA: It's hard not to think about the Pitzen family and how heartbreaking this has been for them. They had obviously their hopes dashed because they thought that maybe somehow this was their 7-year- old relative coming back now.

Do you know why your brother would have zeroed in on this case? Was this a case he ever knew about or talked about?

RINI: Not to my knowledge. I didn't know about the case in detail until yesterday.

CAMEROTA: I mean, what does it say that he could perpetrate such a cruel hoax?

RINI: I'm sorry, can you repeat the question?

CAMEROTA: Well, I mean, what do you think it says about your brother that he could perpetrate a cruel hoax like this?

RINI: He's a terrible person.

CAMEROTA: Well, Jonathon Rini, I know it's not easy to talk about all of this. I know that you have been through an ordeal in the past 24 hours because of this. We really appreciate you giving us some insight into your brother.

RINI: Well, I mean, it's nothing that's happened to me compares to what that family has been going through right now, so I'm more than happy to talk about my brother.

CAMEROTA: Thanks. Thank you, Jonathon. It helps us understand him better. Thank you very much.

RINI: No problem.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I've got to say good on him for being crystal clear that his thoughts are with the family that had to go through this more than anything else.

CAMEROTA: Absolutely, and I think that he does paint an interesting picture of who his brother was even before this.

BERMAN: All right.

Seven Democratic candidates are here in New York today to speak to black voters. We're going to discuss the battle to win over that key voting bloc. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:20:47] CAMEROTA: The black vote will be critical to clinching the Democratic nomination in 2020. Nearly all of the Democratic candidates have been in New York this week trying to connect or win over black voters at the National Action Network Conference. Among those making their pitch today we have Senators Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, but there are many more as well.

Joining us now is Nia-Malika Henderson, CNN senior political reporter and Cornell William Brooks, former president and CEO of the NAACP and civil rights attorney.

Great to have both of you here.

Mr. Brooks --

CORNELL WILLIAM BROOKS, FORMER PRESIDENT & CEO, NAACP: Good to be here.

CAMEROTA: -- what do you want to hear some of these candidates talk about today?

BROOKS: Well, I think it's important for the candidates to speak with specificity and a poignancy. That is to say to make clear that they are connected to the issues that connect with the African-American community and with policy specificity. Meaning speaking very clearly to the issue of voter suppression and voting rights, continuing income inequality, police misconduct and criminal justice reform. These are the issues that animate and inspire not only the black vote, but to be clear here, also youth voters and the black vote being pivotal, key, decisive with respect to the Democratic primary vote.

So I think this is an early opportunity for these candidates to really drill down with respect to policy, but also connect it with their personal narrative, their biographies so that people have a sense of not just what they represent, the positions that they're taking, but also how it connects to who they are and the likelihood that this he would actually carry these policies out as the Democratic nominee or as president.

BERMAN: And, again, one of the interesting things to me is it's not just a portion of the Democratic primary what we're talking about here, in some ways we are talking about the spine of the Democratic primary vote particularly in some of the southern states as the primaries move through parts of the country.

And, Nia, Bernie Sanders, of course, who ran last time who did quite well, he came close to getting the nomination but he had less than 25 percent of the black vote according to the exit polls in some states. That's really interesting and his people know that can't happen this time.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: That's right. I think, you know, the big obstacle obviously last go round wasn't necessarily that African-American voters didn't like Bernie Sanders, it was just that they really liked Hillary Clinton. I think this go round for Bernie Sanders it's an even more crowded field, you have people like Biden who is polling very well at this point, Kamala Harris as well, Cory Booker likely to connect with those black voters in those Southern states.

In those Southern states you are talking about hundreds of delegates and you are talking about populations in terms of the Democratic primary that are going to be 50 percent to 60 percent African- American. So it's going to be quite a fight down there. If you look at the folks who are likely to appeal -- guilt in appeal from something like Biden, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker probably room to go.

And probably Bernie Sanders if there is a final four of folks who would do well with African-American voters I think Bernie Sanders would be in that final four, particularly because he does well with African-American young voters. There was a Harvard poll out just recently and showed that he basically is tied with Biden in terms of attracting those voters from 18 to 24.

So, we'll see how he does. He's sort of changed his message, including race, in a way that he didn't before. So we'll see how he does, but he certainly is aware of this in a way that he wasn't last go round.

CAMEROTA: Your thoughts, professor?

BROOKS: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.

The two issues that animate and inspire the youth vote are civil rights and healthcare. So any candidate hoping to capture the Democratic primary vote has to speak to those issues, has to speak to the issues that motivate the black community because in many ways the African-American vote is the election booth curtain to the Democratic -- to election booth curtain to the Democratic primary vote. So you've got to connect.

[08:25:01] And I think senator Sanders came to appreciate that and I think these candidates well understand that is absolutely essential.

BERMAN: And I think for some candidates, it's time to welcome to the show, as it were, you know, Pete Buttigieg who is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in 2015 he gave a speech where he ended by saying you will lives matter and that has become a statement and a sentiment that's controversial, I think, among some of the Democratic primary electorate. So he felt the need to clean that up and I want to play what he now says about that statement.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG (D), SOUTH BEND, INDIANA: What I did not understand at that time was that that phrase just early in mid especially 2015 was coming to be viewed as a sort of counter slogan to Black Lives Matter. So this statement that seems like somebody that nobody could be against actually wound up being used to devalue what the Black Lives Matter movement was telling us, it's a reason why since learning about how that phrase was being used to push back on that activism. I've stopped using it in that context.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Nia, plausible explanation, A, and, B, just the observation that he did feel that he needed to address that directly.

HENDERSON: That's right. I think what you've seen in terms of Democratic primary voters, they have moved candidates to the left on racial issues. Somebody like Bernie Sanders had to be pushed leftward on racial issues and this is because of African-American voters as well as white voters as well. So you see Pete Buttigieg who is having a bit of a boomlet I think reckoning with what that means and that language matters and what that language means to voters who he's going to be courting.

I think an audience like NAN, these are audiences that these people haven't necessarily had before. You're going to see that these audiences are very steeped in black lives matter, criminal justice reform, and you really got to be ready to this audience. So, this is an early test. Long way to go still.

CAMEROTA: Nia-Malika Henderson, Cornell William Brooks, thank you very much for all the insights. Great to talk to both of you.

BERMAN: All right. So knowing admits that a problem with its 737 MAX jets was definitely connected to these two deadly crashes. We will speak to a former Boeing engineer who has just been subpoenaed to testify in this investigation. That's next.

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