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Congresswomen Fire Back As Trump Steps Up Racist Attacks; House GOP Leaders Speak As Trump Steps Up Racist Attacks. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired July 16, 2019 - 10:00   ET

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

POPPY HARLOW, CNN NEWSROOM: Things ever said by a politician.

[10:00:01]

Well, in Tweets of her own, Ocasio-Cortez reminded the President of the time that he bragged about sexual assault. And in response to his quote, love it or leave it order, she said, we don't leave the things we love.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN NEWSROOM: We should also be clear, many of the things the President accuses these congresswomen of saying are just flat-out untrue. We're going to be fact checking that throughout the hour.

Today, Speaker Pelosi says the House will vote on condemning the President's racist Tweets and comments. So how will House republicans respond? You'll know. They're going to speak from that podium in just a few minutes. We're going to bring that to you live.

CNN Congressional Reporter Lauren Fox is live on Capitol Hill.

So, Lauren, over the last 24, 48 hours, we've seen the President double, triple, quadruple down on these statements, these accusations. To this point, the republican leader has been in lock-step with him. Do we expect them to continue that in this news conference shortly?

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER: Well, the question, of course, is what they're going to say in this news conference, but also how they vote, Jim, later this evening when they bring up that House resolution condemning the President's comments. That's going to be the official rebuke for House Democrats and we'll see how many House Republicans vote with them.

But, you know, some House Democrats are also, you know, going after the President themselves. Poppy mentioned earlier, those Tweets by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she said, quote, hey, Mr. President, remember when you bragged about sexually assaulting women, talking about feeling their breasts and genitals because, quote, when you are a star, they let you do it? And then you impose DOE policies to make it harder for sexual assault survivors to report assault.

She also Tweeted, quote, Donald Trump has decided he does not want to be President of the United States, he does not want to be a president to those who disagree and he'd rather see most Americans leave than handle our nation's enshrined traditions of dissent, but we don't leave the things we love.

And, of course, we're going to be watching for that republican reaction. Majority leader Mitch McConnell also expected to take questions later today. He did not answer about what he thought about those Tweets yesterday, you know, deflecting to the fact that he will address any questions at a press conference later this afternoon. Jim and poppy?

SCIUTTO: Lauren Fox, thanks so much.

And we should note, there are republican congressmen and lawmakers who have used the term racist about the President's Tweets as well, Tim Scott, Will Hurd, a number of others.

Let's go to Katilan Collins at the White House where we're seeing, Kaitlan, to be clear, this is a very clear strategy from the President. He is calculating, it appears, not only that he believes this to be right but that there's political benefit here. I mean, is there anybody in the White House who is pushing back against that?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. There are some aides who told the President they don't think this is the wisest strategy for him to take. But the President, for a third day in a row, is continuing his attacks and clearly paying very close attention to that vote that Lauren was just talking about.

The President just Tweeted again about all of this, and he said, quote, those Tweets were not racist. He said, I don't have a racist bone in my body. The so-called vote to be taken is a democrat con game. He said, republicans should not show weakness and fall into their trap. This should be a vote on filthy language, statements and lies told by the democrat congresswomen who I truly believe, based on their actions, hate our country. He said get a list of the horrible things they've said. Omar is polling 8 percent, Cortez at 21. He said, Nancy Pelosi tried to push them away but now they are forever wedded to the Democrat Party. See you in 2020.

Several things in that, we should point out, I'm not sure what polls the President is referencing there, but, clearly, he's making sure that he is going to be paying attention to what Lauren was laying out, which is this is not only a chance for democrats to rebuke the President, but people are also going to be watching to see what republicans say on the record about the President's Tweets.

After yesterday, they essentially spent the day with a few criticizing the President. We saw the pushback continuing to grow. But most of them were trying to avoid this issue altogether. It's something the President is paying attention to, saying that democrats should be rebuked instead of the President.

And something else we should note is the President seems to be moving away from that original statement he said, the one that drew the accusations of racism on Sunday, which when he said that these congresswomen should go back to their home countries. Now, he is simply saying, if you don't like the country, then you should leave. Of course, multiple people pointing out that three of those four congresswomen were born here in the United States.

SCIUTTO: And the President has said that, somehow, that criticism amounts to hating your country, and that's been repeated by others, including Lindsey Graham. Kaitlan Collins, thanks very much.

HARLOW: Let's talk more about this now with Congressman Ro Khanna, a democrat of California. He seats on the House Oversight Committee. Good morning, Congressman. Thank you for joining me.

And I wish we could start off on news that wasn't about, you know, racist Tweets, but we have to address this because the President just again Tweeted there's not a racist bone in my body. You have been working within the caucus to really unite it around Speaker Pelosi, and I wonder if what the President has written and said about these four congresswomen in the last few days has actually proven to unite your caucus or is it a sort of temporary truce?

[10:05:06]

REP. RO KHANNA (D-CA): Poppy, he's doing our job for us. The caucus's divisions now pale in comparison to the unanimity about condemning the President's xenophobic Tweets. And what's shocking is just President's ignorance and lack of interest in American history.

I mean, I would recommend to him as a republican he read Lincoln's speech July 4th in 1858, where Lincoln talked about Germans and Irish coming to America. And even though they couldn't trace their ancestors back to the founding, they were equally American. They were as related to the founders.

And so it's just sad that he doesn't have an understanding of basic American history or what America stands for.

HARLOW: Has it happened to you, sir? Have you been told by people go back to your country?

KHANNA: What I've said is, of course, there have been a couple of comments like that. I mean, I'm 43 years old. I was born in Philadelphia in our bicentennial year. But I've had far more people in this country believe in me, tell me about what I could achieve, encourage me.

And I think what's sad is with the President's divisiveness, what we're forgetting is this country at its core is a welcoming country, it's a decent country. And that's the narrative that's being lost. But democrats are going to tell it.

HARLOW: You have been one of those who's rallied around Speaker Pelosi and opposed moving forward with impeachment proceedings at this point. I think it's interesting that your fellow democrat, Congressman Al Green of Texas will now, for the third time, try to force a vote on impeachment by the end of the month. But his reasoning has changed because it failed by a lot of votes when he tried to do this in 2017 and 2018. Now, his argument is, look, this isn't impeaching about Mueller and evidence or no evidence, this is about impeaching the President because of his, quote, according to Al Green, bigotry.

And I'm interesting because you voted against it the last two times, how will you vote this time?

KHANNA: Well, we voted to table it. What we're going to vote for is a resolution tonight condemning the President's --

HARLOW: No, I know, and I'll get to that in a moment. But I'm really interested in this. Al Green's push for impeachment, you're going to have to vote in. Will you vote again to table it or will you vote differently this time?

KHANNA: If it's just him, I'll vote to table it. I'm going to take the leadership's recommendations and the Committee Chair's recommendations, I mean, the folks who have the authority to speak for the House. There's the Judiciary Chair. It's the House leadership. And we need to have a consensus opinion. You can't just have one member of the caucus try to drive a strategy.

HARLOW: And I know you're mentioning the vote tonight, the resolution to condemn the President's language, which, you know, republicans will have to then vote for and lay out clearly how they feel about it beyond their public comments. But you've actually brought up something interest in the past, Congressman. You've brought up censuring the President, right, really holding him to account for language.

To do that, you would only need a simple majority in the Senate and you've brought up Mitt Romney as someone whose vote you think you could get on that. What do we need to know? Are there private conversations of enough republicans in the Senate told you that they would vote in favor of censuring the President because of language like this, that you believe that you have a simple majority?

KHANNA: Poppy, you've done your homework. We were actually just discussing censure in the democratic caucus this morning. I believe it's the right way to go. There was talk of it last time when the President made those disparaging comments about African countries. And Representative Cedric Richmond had brought a motion last Congress. It didn't get enough support.

I do think now, given these latest comments and the pattern that the President has displayed that we do need to do something stronger than just condemning, we need to censure him and I think it can get some republicans voting for that. In fact, Peggy Noonan has come out for censuring the President, a close adviser to the former President Reagan.

HARLOW: Sure. But history shows us 1934 is the only time the Senate has censured the President successfully. So, I mean, it's been a long time, sir. Do you have the republican votes to do it?

KHANNA: Well, the key is, for a censure, you actually don't need the Senate. Either body can censure. And so that's why it's such a powerful vehicle for the House. We don't need the republicans on board.

HARLOW: But certainly would send a stronger message if you did have a majority in the Senate, right? And I guess I'm just trying to get at before you move on if you have those republicans. Do you?

KHANNA: I don't know if we would have a majority in the Senate. I mean, I can say that we would have some republicans in the House. I think we'd have a couple in the Senate. I can't say at this time that we would have a majority in the Senate.

HARLOW: Fair enough. Kellyanne Conway, Senior Counselor to the President, your committee, the House Oversight Committee, will vote to hold her in contempt of Congress unless she agrees to appear to testify. This is all about the Hatch Act and speaking disparagingly about other politicians of the other party while in this role in public office in the White House.

Can you just help us understand where this falls in terms of a priority for your committee? Because what can you actually do? Like how important is this for your committee versus all of the other things you're focused on right now?

[10:10:00]

KHANNA: Well, Poppy, I try to actually be reasonable when the Special Counsel was before our committee. And I said -- you know, I was part of the Obama administration. We were told we would be fired if we engaged in any political activity. I get that Kellyanne Conway may have made mistakes. Would you be okay, I said to the Special Counsel, if Kellyanne Conway just met with you and promised that she would start to hold the laws to account and follow those laws going forward? And he said, yes.

So I said, okay, let's just have a meeting and let's just get her commitment to follow the law going forward. I don't think that's a hard ask.

HARLOW: Congressman, very quickly before we go, because you're the co-chair of Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, he has all but called to break up big tech. He said we should definitely take a look at breaking up big tech. Silicon Valley is in the heart of your district. All the big tech firms have their executives on the Hill today for a grilling, no doubt, in these anti-trust hearings before the House Judiciary Committee. Should big tech be broken up? Is that the answer?

KHANNA: No, I disagree with Senator Sanders on that specific issue. I do think we need stronger anti-trust law. We need stronger privacy law. There are ways to do it without just reflexively breaking up companies. But there's a lot of the Senator's agenda I support, Medicare for all, $15 minimum wage and other issues.

HARLOW: Okay. But this is a point where, you know, you're endorsing him for President and working on his campaign, but you think he's misguided on this one. We appreciate your time, sir. Thanks very much.

KHANNA: Thank you so much, Poppy.

HARLOW: You got it.

SCIUTTO: It's a great interview. You have the sentiment, understandable, and then you have what political consequences you can get, obviously with a divided Congress. This is a point we end up so many times on these issues, yes.

HARLOW: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Still to come this hour, House GOP leaders speak any moment, this as the President digs in repeatedly on his attacks against progressive congresswomen, four of them. We're on it.

HARLOW: Plus, North Korea is sending a new warning to leaders. They are suggesting this morning they are considering restarting nuclear and missile tests. This is a big deal and we'll tell you why next.

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[10:15:00]

SCIUTTO: Welcome back. We're going to take you live, republican leadership in the White House responding to the President's Tweets and comments. Let's have a listen.

REP. LIZ CHENEY (R-WY): -- in this country, destroy Medicare and force the American people to pay for free healthcare for illegal immigrants. They are wrong when they pursue policies, like the one we're going to be voting on today that destroy 4 million jobs for low- wage earners by mandating a federal $15 minimum wage. That is not compassion. That's a callousness that's born of ignorance.

They're wrong when they say that their programs help people at the lower end of the economic spectrum. Every one of their socialist programs would create massive new government dependency and end the very economic growth we need to ensure everyone can prosper.

Our colleagues are wrong when they advocate packing the Supreme Court and abolishing the Electoral College.

And our colleagues are wrong when they tell Americans, as Congresswoman Pressley did just last weekend that, any individual seat at the table is only valuable, only legitimate if that person espouses some preapproved set of beliefs deemed appropriate based on their religion or their gender or their race, when they say that, that is racist.

So, no, our opposition to our colleagues' beliefs has absolutely nothing to do with race or gender or religion. We oppose them and their policies because their policies are dangerous and wrong and will destroy America. The issue here is the content of their policies and we will continue to stand up and fight against what we know is wrong for this nation. And with that, I'd like to turn things over to Congresswoman Foxx, who is the republican leader of the Education and Labor Committee.

REP. VIRGINIA FOXX (R-NC): Thanks, Chair Cheney. Thank you very much. We are going to be voting today on a very, very bad piece of legislation, H.R.582, which more than doubles the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2024. This is a radical and unprecedented mandate.

Over its 80-history, the average federal minimum wage has been $7.40 an hour, with a median of $7.33, both just slightly higher than the current federal standard of $7.25.

The claim that the federal minimum wage has never been lower just doesn't hold water. In fact, only --

SCIUTTO: We've been listening to the republican leadership first in responses to the President's Tweets, as well as the criticism from democratic congresswomen.

Let's let's discuss now with Toluse Olorunnipa, he is White House Reporter for The Washington Post, Jeff Mason, White House Correspondent for Reuters.

Jeff, begin with you, you listened to Liz Cheney there at the very start. It appears the republican tack here -- and we will come back when those leaders take questions on this topic. It feels the republican tack here is, listen, we are going after their positions and we have every right to do that, which is an interesting line to walk here, because they're not saying, as the President -- at least not yet, they're not saying as the President did, yes, if you hate the country, leave the country. These people hate the country. They support terrorists, et cetera. They're taking a kind of more nuanced position, are they not, saying, listen, we're disagreeing on policy here, which is actually not what the President has been suing and saying.

JEFF MASON, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, REUTERS: Well, I think that's the point, Jim. I mean, yes, of course, it's okay for people to disagree on policy. That is what the U.S. democracy is about. That is what Congress was set up for. But that's not what the President is doing with the Tweets and with the rhetoric that he has addressed for U.S. congresswomen. So it makes sense for Congresswoman Cheney to come out and say that.

It does also seem that she's using a little bit of a page out of his play book by using the inflammatory language of this will destroy America.

[10:20:00]

But she is, I think, probably trying to show, look, the two parties can disagree on policy, but she's not addressing the bigger picture in terms of what the President has said and done.

HARLOW: So, Toluse, you rightly point out this is a Republican Party where 90 percent of it backs the President, right, and that's the environment we're in. And he knows that very well and he feels like that gives him the liberty to say things like this and not pay a political price.

We just heard Democratic Congressman of California, Rep. Ro Khanna, tell us he is doing our job for us in terms of uniting the democratic caucus. Is the President politically helping himself or hurting himself?

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, it depends on who he's trying to speak to. He is helping to unify the democratic caucus and get them more unified after they had sort of a very divisive week last week, talking back and forth between different generations.

But if he's just talking to his base, there are members of his base that like this kind of talk. And if you see what the republicans are saying, they are echoing some of his language, saying that, you know, it's not the President or themselves that are engaging in racism but it's actually the targets of these attacks, the democratic congresswomen who are actually being racist.

And that's something that shows that the President does have a constituency for his type of language. We saw in his Tweets earlier today talking about how he feels like he doesn't have a racist bone in his body, he's doubling down on this language and he's getting support from his party.

So he is unifying parts of his party because there's only been a smattering of division and a pushback from this party, but he's also unifying the democrats who are going to vote to censure him later today.

SCIUTTO: And possibly independent voters today, where the President continues to be under water. It's hard to see how this wins independents. But, Jeff Mason, as you know better than me, the Electoral College map in a presidential election favors white working class voters as opposed to the coast (ph), as does the Senate Electoral map. As we get -- as we approach 2020, does that appear to be the President's strategy here and target?

MASON: Well, it's certainly true that the Trump campaign, and I'm sure the democrats, once they have a nominee, are focused very, very closely on that Electoral College. And we all know the results of the 2016 election and the emphasis that they placed on it then and the states that they picked up that many people didn't expect them to pick up, which led to his surprise victory. So, yes, that could be part of his strategy here.

It could also just be, again, typical day for President Donald Trump in terms of picking a fight and then doubling down.

HARLOW: Yes. I'm interested, Toluse, in where you think this is going to go in a few minutes when those members of republican leadership are going to have to answer these questions, right? Steve Scalise, let me read you what he said yesterday. Quote, we're going to talk about it more. So that was him sort of running past a reporter who asked the question. Now, they've talked about it more. How are they going to answer those questions in just a few minutes?

OLORUNNIPA: Well, they will answer those questions knowing that the President is watching very closely. The President Tweeted that republicans should not show weakness by agreeing with the democrats that what he said was over the line.

So you probably will expect these republicans to double down on attacking these members of Congress more so over their policies instead of, you know, embracing the more racist parts of the President's Tweets talking about they should go back to their countries. I don't expect other republicans to take that up.

But they may agree with the President that the policies, as they said earlier, they believe would destroy America and are anti-American. That kind of language seems to be where they're finding their safe space in attacking those other members of Congress, not attacking the President, not Criticizing anything the President said, and definitely not showing that they're on board with this resolution that the House Democrats are putting together condemning the President's Tweets.

HARLOW: Let me jump in, sorry. Let's listen to Steve Scalise talking about exactly that.

REP. STEVE SCALISE (R-LA): -- to help our government provide humanitarian relief for those families that are coming across the border illegally. Our Border Patrol agents were buying diapers with their own money because they had run out of money and she voted against that very funding, and they continue to call for impeachment. Pressley would not even refer to the President by the title.

Look, we disagreed with Barack Obama on a lot of things that he did, the policies. As our conference chair laid out, there are a lot of policies that we had disagreements on with Speaker Pelosi and her socialist democrats, just like we had disagreements with a lot of Barack Obama's policies, but we never disrespected the office. I called him President of the United States, as we all did. If he asked us to go meet with him at the White House, we went. We expressed our disagreements in a respectful way.

But what they continue to do is to go after him personally, to call for impeachment of the President from day one, the night they won the majority. They weren't even in office. They didn't even the Mueller report that they thought would show collusion, which it did not, and yet they still want to keep going down that road instead of working with us to improve the daily lives of hard working families.

[10:25:06]

With that now, I'll bring up the republican leader of our conference, Kevin McCarthy.

REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA): Thank you, Steve. Good morning, thank you for joining us. This new democratic socialist majority continues on their quest to destroy and erode the gains that we have made since the last election when it came to financial growth inside America.

Here's a snapshot of the current economic conditions. Just last month, there were 224,000 jobs added to the U.S. economy. That was surpassing all expectations. We're at a near 50-year low unemployment. For 16 months, the unemployment rate has been at or below 4 percent. And since January 2017, 5.6 million jobs have been created through the help --

HARLOW: All right. We're going to keep listening here to the republican leader in the house, Kevin McCarthy. When they take questions, we'll come back to this. But it is notable, Jim and I both our ears perked up when Kevin McCarthy framed this as, quote, the new democratic socialist majority. We'll keep an eye on this.

SCIUTTO: That's a plan (INAUDIBLE) stick with as we push 2020. We'll be right back.

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