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Cuomo Prime Time
NYT: Trump Personally Responsible For $421 Million In Debt, Most Of It Due In The Next Four Years; Potential National Security Risks From Trump's Tax Revelations; NYT: Top White House Officials Pressured The CDC To Downplay The Risks Of Sending Kids Back To School. Aired 9-10p ET
Aired September 28, 2020 - 21:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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CHRIS CUOMO, CNN HOST, CUOMO PRIME TIME: All right Anderson, thank you very much. I am Chris Cuomo. Welcome to PRIME TIME.
The President's dirty secrets have been exposed. Tonight, we can finally answer the question of why the President didn't want you to see his taxes. This New York Times' access to just a chunk is more than ample proof of all kinds of problems for the President.
Now, you'll see tonight that between what we have learned, and now that we have a much better understanding of what we need to know, we're on an entirely new footing, in terms of our analysis of this President and potential problems for him, OK, and for you, in particular.
You will now understand why the President has done certain things with the COVID relief bill, with his tax bill. You will understand now why he structured it the way he did, what it means to him.
What you won't understand, but we'll all be on the same page, is that we need to know who has lent this President unbelievable sums of millions that are personally guaranteed, and I'll tell you why that matters, and are due in just a few years, all right?
So, this much we know, OK? All of this time that he has been spending, trying to deal with this, and what it means, he wanted to keep this from you because he is not what he has told you, and because he doesn't have what he says, because he has money coming in from places that he didn't want you to know, and because he has money going out that is not only undercutting the idea of his wealth, but raises significant questions about who would lend him this money?
Why would he be personally guaranteed? Very unusual, in high net worth situations, like his own, with all these different corporate entities. Why would he personally guarantee? Why would he have to? Who is it to? National security issues, ideas of his policies, what his personal conflicts are.
We have John Bolton tonight, former Ambassador, Head of National Security, he didn't know about these loans. Can you imagine that? You'll hear that conversation for yourself. Now, I want to tell you that - let's set the stage with some of the sound, OK? Everything I'm about to play for you we now know was BS.
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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I'm really rich.
I built a great company, one of the best companies.
I built a great company.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CUOMO: No, he built a great brand, not a company in terms of something that makes something that sells things and takes thing in, and has managed, and grows, and has staff, and has underlying equity asset value.
What does that mean? Something you can borrow against, because if he were such a great businessman, Donald Trump would not have to be personally on the hook for $421 million, personally, OK?
When is it due? It starts coming due in the next four years, personally liable, his great company. What does that mean? Whoever was lending him the money didn't think he had a great enough company to use it as collateral. Think about that.
Now, you've grown accustomed to politicians selling you a fairy tale. I get it. And I get why you don't want politicians telling you that Donald Trump is a lying "No Good Nick" because you don't think they are either.
But this is about the facts. And Donald Trump has been lying to you in ways that you'll see matter more than we would have expected, and he's been doing it for almost a decade.
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TRUMP: I paid a lot of tax and you know, look, I don't mind. I'm proud to pay it. If I owe it, I pay it.
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CUOMO: Not true. In fact, one of the few honest things that he has said was when he didn't know he was being recorded. Listen to this.
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TRUMP: And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything.
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CUOMO: Donald Trump's celebrity pays really well. He makes a ton of money. Now, he may think that entitles him to an entirely different set of rules, because that's how he's been playing. And this is not - I know you've heard a lot today, and yesterday, and you'll hear it tomorrow, and other places tonight, "I can't believe he doesn't pay any taxes."
We all know these rich people game the system with their fancy accountants. You pay the accountants, so that he or she signs the return, so you can get away with whatever they're putting it there. We know that.
We all know that nobody wants to pay any more taxes than they absolutely have to. Why? Well you need your money and you don't trust where it's going and how they're going to use it.
But this isn't that. This isn't just another rich guy, working the system. He is in control of that same system. He was hired to blow up that system, to drain the swamp, to give you more leverage.
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What has he done? He has ensured the system continues and has even bigger loopholes in it, not for people like you, people like him.
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TRUMP: Because of our tax cuts, you can keep more of your hard-earned money.
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CUOMO: It's not true. He has helped mostly people like him.
If you work for a living, you've likely seen your tax bill go up. These are the numbers. And I know they can slice it a million different ways. Yes, some people paid less. But it was very specific.
It was not a middle-class tax cut. It was called that but it wasn't. It was $0.17 of every dollar, and that really varies depending on how much you're making, where you live. His policies make it harder for you to buy a house, but better for people like him to build them.
The most powerful man on the planet urgently needs to make money. His push to lift life-saving restrictions in the spring look a whole lot different when you realize his revenue is tied to things like golf courses, hotels, real estate, everything that's suffering in the pandemic.
So, what we don't know may be the biggest threat, absolutely, one, to our national security. Who lent him the money? Because it's personally guaranteed.
He is on the hook. There is zero chance that he cannot care about it. And it is a tremendous sum of money. $421 million, all right? That's real money. You don't pay a percentage. That's money they're looking for.
Now, remember, before the political need for silence, his son told a Reporter something in 2014. "We have all the funding we need out of Russia."
This level of outstanding debt would be reason enough to deny security clearances to any government worker, OK? You would not get one, if you had personal loan guarantees on the hook, let alone coming from abroad.
Now, what irony? How sickening is it that it doesn't apply to the person we should care about this most? The Commander-in-Chief. That much power placed in the hands of one man is why another Republican President said this.
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RICHARD NIXON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.
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CUOMO: Infamous words, right? It had nothing to do with Watergate, but rather the fact that Nixon was dramatically underpaying his income taxes.
So, here's where we are. I'm telling you, the people around this President did not know what came out in his taxes. I've been scrubbing it. A lot of other pros have been scrubbing it. They didn't know. The people keeping us safe have no idea who he owes and how much.
Now, let's get three men in here, who are intimately familiar with why Trump does his taxes this way, right?
A former attorney of his, Mitchell Zachary, OK?
Someone who I have been working on this for 15 years, for this moment to come out, Tim O'Brien, then with The New York Times, obviously with Bloomberg. You remember him from the Bloomberg campaign. He's been on MSNBC. And he's here with me tonight. He literally was a mentor of mine in understanding the structures that we were trying to identify.
And then we bring in the Professor, David Cay Johnston, to help understand what this means and what it should mean.
Thank you each and all.
Tim, I start with you. For a long time - now, you had some access, David had some access also. But you always wanted more to come out, so people could understand what you understand without you violating any of the rules of litigation that revealed the tax records to you, during your litigation against then citizen Donald Trump with The New York Times.
What jumps out for you in this chunk of stuff that The New York Times processed?
TIM O'BRIEN, AUTHOR, "TRUMPNATION," SENIOR COLUMNIST, BLOOMBERG OPINION: I think two broad issues, Chris. The first one is that Donald Trump embodies a national security
threat. He's heavily indebted. He owns businesses that are in the most vulnerable sections - sectors of the economy right now that are getting ravaged by the Coronavirus pandemic, real estate, both commercial and residential, travel and leisure.
And he has debts coming due. And Donald Trump, when he is cornered with debts, is usually - usually acts like a caged animal.
He only has two approaches to this. He either sells his assets to get his handle - get a handle on the debt. And I think he has significantly more debt than The New York Times has disclosed. I think he's got north of $1 billion. He either sells assets or he goes for a loan. The President's--
CUOMO: Why do you think he's got that much, Tim, just so people understand?
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O'BRIEN: I know it's publicly documented. It's public records on mortgages he's got, Chris. It's not speculation. I think there's a certain portion of that that comes due sooner that is probably putting more pressure on him. But it's certainly north of a $1 billion. That's--
CUOMO: All right. So Mitch--
O'BRIEN: --I think that's indisputable.
CUOMO: --hold on. Let's bring in Mitch in here for a second. Thanks, Tim.
O'BRIEN: Go ahead.
CUOMO: But we'll keep rolling it around. Don't worry. We got a lot to talk about and we got a lot of time.
Mitch, you did his taxes.
MITCHELL ZACHARY, FORMER TRUMP ACCOUNTANT: Hey, Chris?
CUOMO: You started back in the '80s. So, nobody's going to tell you anything about his practices and his predilections.
But $421 million personally guaranteed after all the money he's had come in, and all the different businesses he's been able to put together, are you surprised by that number?
ZACHARY: Of course not. When I worked on it, he was going through terrible times, the divorce with Ivana, the Taj Mahal debacle. And he actually took down some major banks.
I don't know if anybody remembers Bankers Trust. But he had a $100 million unsecured line of credit with them. He paid three-quarters of a point as a fee, and the guys at Bankers Trust were thrilled, except he paid one month's interest and then defaulted.
Well lo and behold Deutsche Bank had to take over Bankers Trust. So, it doesn't surprise me one bit. This is how he lived in the past.
CUOMO: Now, he'll say, Mitch--
ZACHARY: Which he's used so by now (ph).
CUOMO: --he'll say "Yes, I owe $400 million. Yes, that's how you do business, is you borrow money, and then you pay it back. I'm worth billions and billions in assets. I can pay this. They don't know what they're talking about."
ZACHARY: Well, listen, first of all, I want to comment on what was said before. Personal tax returns do not reveal the amount of personal debt, OK? So, I'm not sure how The New York Times came up with that number. But I agree that it's probably much higher.
CUOMO: Explain that to me. Assume I know nothing about taxes.
ZACHARY: Well on an individual tax return, all you talk about is income and expenses, not assets and liabilities. On a corporate return, you would have that.
CUOMO: Right.
ZACHARY: But if this debt is personal, then it won't be reflected in anyway on his tax return. So, I'm not sure how The New York Times came up with that number?
CUOMO: Where would it be?
O'BRIEN: I--
CUOMO: Go ahead, Tim, jump in.
O'BRIEN: It's in his personal - it's in his personal financial disclosure. These are government filings.
ZACHARY: Right.
O'BRIEN: At least $300 million disclosed in there. We've known that for 2.5 years.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, AUTHOR, "FREE LUNCH": Right.
CUOMO: All right, so let's bring the Professor in here on this.
I got to tell you, you guys are going to hear from John Bolton later in the show. I had to tape him before the show because of time constraints. And I really wanted him.
David, can you believe that no one in our national security apparatus, allegedly, knew that he had this kind of money that he owed personally to lenders that may include foreign lenders? JOHNSTON: Well, I'm not sure why they necessarily would ask. But I do want to emphasize that Tim is exactly right here that we have other records on Donald's debt, and it's much more likely in neighborhood of $1 billion.
If Donald was solid, he wouldn't be signing personal notes to secure that debt. He would be pledging the assets. And we shouldn't make the assumption that Donald Trump's enormous - reporting are actual losses.
Donald has a history of fabricating tax deductions. And if some of the losses he took are fabricated, it raises another national security question. Where did the money go?
CUOMO: And just to be clear, Mitchell Zachary has said before that this is something that can happen, and he knows New York is looking at it. He was never a part of it, he says. But if that's what he was doing, he could be in real trouble.
So, all right, so we have what this means. So, the biggest question that we're left after with this is not a fishing expedition. How Tim, does the President get around disclosing who he owes the money to?
O'BRIEN: Well again, Chris, I think some of this has been disclosed. I think a large portion of it is to Deutsche Bank.
We know from court filings that lots of money came into his Organization, from Eastern Europe, in the mid-2000s, when he went on a shopping spree. The Trump SoHo Hotel was built with a lot of money from Eastern Europe.
I do think there's stuff that we don't that isn't in those tax returns about precise countries of origin. We know that some money came - comes from Turkey. We know some comes from the Philippines. I think Russia is the big mystery in all of this.
Whatever the country is, the unifying tether in all of these is that you have a President in the Oval Office, who either is indebted to foreign powers or is going to go with his handout to foreign powers, and it's going to taint every public policy decision he makes, particularly anything involving national security or foreign policy.
CUOMO: Mitch, let's go to break on this idea.
So, what are we worried about? We're worried about the President doing something desperate to accommodate his own financial situation and forget about his fiduciary responsibility to the rest of the American people.
What do you know about the President in a situation like that that the people should know?
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ZACHARY: Well I don't want to get too political, because I don't want to make enemies. However, right now, it appears that the President's only concern is getting re-elected. And now we can see why. More importantly, Chris, we can see why he did not want these returns revealed, why he fought it so hard, all the ways up to the Supreme Court, and then going back up the courts again. Because this shows he is not who he pretends to be and never was.
CUOMO: And it's not just about puffery, you know? That's fine.
ZACHARY: No.
CUOMO: He wants to say he's really rich, he's not quite as rich.
It's what does it mean in terms of how vulnerable he is, and how much he needs cash flow, and how much he needs to do that to secure it. So, let's talk about that, all right? We're going to talk about what that means in terms of understanding what has to happen here.
Hey, Mitchell Zachary, Timothy O'Brien, David Cay Johnston, I couldn't ask for better guys than you on this.
So, we're going to keep talking about what matters, because there are a lot of questions now that are going to have to be asked. Let's get after that.
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TEXT: CUOMO PRIME TIME.
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TEXT: LET'S GET AFTER IT.
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CUOMO: I believe in Trump because he's made so much money. Well if you define your wealth by assets minus liabilities, you don't know much about Donald Trump in terms of how rich he is.
And if you say, "Well, I trust him because I know he's looking out for me. He gets how that game is played. And he's going to help me. He's going to drain the swamp," then why doesn't he pay taxes, and make sure guys like him benefit more than the rest of us, on his watch, because that's what he's doing. He's helping people like him not pay taxes and not people like you.
Now, we go from politics to real problems. $400 million personally guaranteed with his cash flow sucking wind because of the pandemic, so much so that he's showing losses, and not even paying taxes, because he's losing so much money?
The question every one of you should be asking is whom does he owe all this money? Now, some of it is in public, but not all of it. And some of it is covered with corporate institutions. It doesn't mean that there aren't people behind those businesses that he owes.
It's the question that makes him a target for foreign adversaries around the world. What do they know about what our President needs to make happen that we don't?
We discuss this and the implications with the Author of "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir," Trump's former National Security Adviser, Ambassador John Bolton.
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CUOMO: Mr. Ambassador, thank you for joining us on such an important night.
JOHN BOLTON, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER UNDER PRESIDENT TRUMP, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS, AUTHOR, "THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED": Glad to be with you. Thanks for having me.
CUOMO: So, Sir, what is your general reaction to this news of the significant debt that our President owes that is personally guaranteed? Were you aware of this before now?
BOLTON: No, I was not. I mean I've seen reporting on it, and it certainly leads to a lot more questions than we've got answers at this point.
Obviously, The New York Times has a lot of information, but it's also incomplete. I think prosecutors around the country are trying to get some of that information. They may have it more complete.
But the nature, the complexity of The Trump Organization finances, Trump's personal finances lead to a lot of questions about how many of the transactions we know about are legitimate, and how many are sham to avoid taxation or other obligations.
CUOMO: For those at home, the Ambassador has another title. He's also a lawyer. So, it's not just national security expertise. He worked with the Justice Department. He understands the law generally enough to understand this.
Who lent him the money? Because personal guarantees are different. It's not that they're going to just come after his business. It's that this is something that puts a tremendous amount of pressure on him, obviously personally.
So, from a Nat Sec perspective, what do you want to know about those loans, forget about the tax burden?
BOLTON: Sure. You need to know the sources of the loans. And you need to know the circumstances under which they were negotiated. You need to know more about the terms of the loan. You need to know whether they could be rolled over.
So, as I said, The Times - The New York Times has a lot of information. You can see that from what they've written.
CUOMO: Not that.
BOLTON: Whether they've got enough to make a convincing case, I think the jury is still out on that, honestly.
CUOMO: Yes, I don't think they do. We don't know who he owes the money to and what that means.
We do know that in the first two years, in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million. So now you have a conflation here. You have two things coming together. $73 million is a lot of money.
Just like with the loans, do you think a President of the United States should disclose the source of that kind of income from outside America?
BOLTON: Well, I'm personally opposed to a lot of the obligations that are put on all candidates to disclose things like their tax returns, their medical history. If candidates want to do it, if they think it's in their interest, I think that's fine. I'd certainly like to know.
You have to be careful here on this business of money coming from overseas. Maybe it comes from Turnberry in Scotland. Maybe it comes from Doonbeg in Ireland.
CUOMO: It very well could.
BOLTON: Maybe it come - maybe it comes from other sources that are not so benign. But these are the sorts of things that somebody with Trump's business skills and experience, I would think, would be eager to tell the American public to show what a great businessman he is.
CUOMO: Well we're not talking economics here. I would push back a little gently on that by saying, if he was such a great businessman, he wouldn't have to personally guarantee so many of these loans.
We both understand that world. It is very rare for somebody who says they have the kind of money and access and leverage that the President does, to be personally guaranteeing these types of situations.
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The reason I'm asking, though, is about - you say you don't like a lot of these disclosures. OK. But you also said that the President doesn't like to pay attention to Intelligence assessments and doesn't like to read any reports.
So, what is framing his disposition towards foreign countries where he has interests? If he's not reading the Intel, if he's not leading to - listening to you, where does he get his opinions on these people and places?
BOLTON: Well look, a lot of people have drawn the conclusion that he's making decisions based on potential personal or corporate economic gain in some of these countries, in Moscow, where he wants the Trump Tower, in Turkey, where they already have a building in Istanbul, that sort of thing. I think that's entirely possible. But I don't think we have evidence there that proves it.
And I just think - I've not been shy about criticizing Donald Trump at all. Just think, when you make the criticism, you better have the evidence to back it up. And, right now, I think we're in agreement on this, there's not enough there.
CUOMO: Yes, I'm only talking about the debt, so I agree with you. If we want to talk about his tax burden, and what he said before about what he pays, and now, those - that is all fair game. We're dealing with that elsewhere in the show.
But my biggest concern is what we don't know, and not because I like to do a fishing expedition.
I disagree with you about the disclosure requirements from candidates, especially for president, especially this sophisticated of somebody with financial transactions, because from a national security perspective, how can you keep the country safe, if you don't know where the President may have potential conflicts?
BOLTON: Well I think that's why each candidate should make the decision whether it's in their interest to put it out there. And if people don't care where the money comes from, that's a choice they can make too.
I just think from Donald Trump's perspective, his holdings are so varied, and his success has been so great, why wouldn't he want to tell people what his sources of income were.
CUOMO: Why did he hide the taxes? Why doesn't he want us to have them?
Because think about it, John, if you had personally guaranteed loans, OK, of a significant amount, you have a hard time with the government in your clearance process, would you not, especially in terms of confidentiality and what level of classification they'd give you?
BOLTON: Sure. Look, they would ask a lot of questions.
CUOMO: Right.
BOLTON: To find out the answers to whether you would be compromised because of the sources of the debt. And I think that's perfectly legitimate.
And I think when Trump refuses to give, the answer to those questions, people would be perfectly entitled to hold that against him, because if he has nothing to hide, he shouldn't hide it.
CUOMO: Right. If you were trying to hire some big-shot hedge fund guy to help you when you were on the inside of government, and you found out he had personally guaranteed loans, he says, "None of your business. I'm going to work this job for free for you. Don't worry. I'm good," would you give him a job? BOLTON: Well of course not. And that I think is why it's legitimate.
We'll see in, perhaps in the debate, tomorrow night, if Biden calls him on this. I don't think The New York Times' timing of the publication is accidental. So, it's up for grabs, tomorrow night, in the first debate.
CUOMO: True. It is right here on the eve of the big debate. And to be honest, as you know, Ambassador, we've been asking for this information for years. Ambassador John Bolton, thank you for your perspective.
BOLTON: Thanks for having me.
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CUOMO: So, there you have John Bolton saying, "You wouldn't be able to hire somebody in the kind of situation that Donald Trump is," but he can be our Commander-in-Chief, and not tell us about any of these things?
Yes, some of them are in public. Yes, some of them have been in filings. But who? What are the connections? Who are the people? You need to know. How could we not know? He just told you he couldn't hire somebody like that. But we did.
Let's bring in the former FBI Counterespionage Chief and Author of "Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump."
Perfect title for a book tonight! Pete Strzok, thank you for joining us.
PETER STRZOK, FORMER FBI CHIEF OF COUNTERESPIONAGE SECTION, AUTHOR, "COMPROMISED": Chris, it's good to be here. Thank you.
CUOMO: So, we don't have to do High Finance 101 about leverage, and how you did.
If you have a great business, you got plenty of collateral for people to lend against. You don't wind up personally guaranteeing. That is the case with Donald Trump, though, because what he says about what he owns and all that.
But that guys around him, the men and women, keeping us safe don't know the extent of who he owes money to, and what it is, and didn't ask him about it, in all likelihood, or at least it seems that way, talking to Bolton, what does that lead us to understand?
STRZOK: Chris, what it leads us to understand, is if Donald Trump applied for a job, in the U.S. Intelligence Community, he would never get a clearance. He wouldn't make it in the front door.
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Countless times, in my career, I either turned down people for clearances or recommended they be removed, for two reasons. One is income from foreign sources, and two is indebtedness, and not just indebtedness to foreign nations, but any large indebt period.
And so, when you look at Trump, when you look at the figure you just threw out, $73 million in foreign income, almost half a billion dollars of debt coming due in the next four years or five years, no one would ever get a clearance based on that.
And there's no way the president of our nation should be allowed to have that sort of undisclosed financial indebtedness or connections.
CUOMO: Do you agree with what Bolton was saying?
STRZOK: Look, I think I disagree a lot with what the Ambassador was saying. I don't think it is so much an issue of whether or not it's up to Trump to decide whether or not to disclose this information.
The problem is the President is actively concealing this information. It isn't a choice. It is the fact that as time and time again, he is saying things that not only are concealing the truth, but he's also lying about it.
So, when you hear all this money that's coming out of Russia, the $13 million that's coming out of Turkey, the money that's coming out of the Philippines, the money, nation after nation after nation, it's not so much that "Oh, it's there and he chose not to disclose it."
It's the fact that it's there. He's actively hiding it, and he's fighting tooth and nail to prevent it from becoming public. And all of that is known to all of those foreign nations.
CUOMO: Why do you think the FBI or Mueller and his team didn't pull his taxes?
STRZOK: Well I don't know what the FBI ultimately did. With Mueller, I think it's because it was outside of the scope of what he was mandated to do.
The Special Counsel regulations say that he reported to the Attorney General, and they all - so that his activities are bound by the Special Counsel regulations. So, that's inherently limiting, and he is answering to somebody in DoJ rather than doing his own independent look.
But I do think this is absolutely something that the FBI should have done. Maybe they did it, but I suspect they didn't, because I would have expected to hear about it if they had.
But it absolutely is clear now that we have to get to the bottom of his financial picture.
CUOMO: What jumps out at you from the taxes, and that we haven't discussed if anything, and what do you think the main questions are posed by what you've learned from The Times' reporting?
STRZOK: The biggest thing that worries me right now is what is coming due in the years ahead. I think back to Eric Trump's statement in 2014, "We don't rely on
American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia." Think about that. He said that in 2014.
So, if you don't need to rely on American banks, if you have nearly half a billion dollars of debt coming due, who's going to back up that debt? Who are you going to turn to, and who are you going to do that in the context of everything that you have refused to say and make known to the American public?
We have to get to the bottom of understanding this, only because we need to understand what foreign adversaries are doing to attack America and to help shore up our national security.
CUOMO: And you know who should want to tell us the most? Donald John Trump.
STRZOK: Well the President should.
CUOMO: Absolutely because--
STRZOK: That's absolutely right.
CUOMO: --if he's like, "Hey, this is not fair, OK? It's Deutsche Bank, all right? And who's giving them their money to loan to me, I don't - I don't know. That's their business."
He should want us to know, because if this is unfair, if these questions are easily satisfied, because the suggestion of the question is not a good one for the President, so he can answer it. And he should want to do it most, just to shut it up. We'll see if he does.
Peter Strzok, thank you very much.
STRZOK: Chris, great to be here. Thank you.
CUOMO: All right, now something breaking on our watch that we have to deal with. Bombshell report, again from The New York Times, Trump officials are accused of trying to pressure the CDC to downplay the risk of sending our kids back to school.
Now, I know the President just said, "Oh, we're going to ramp up testing." Yes, he's doing that right before the first debate, and as we're winding down to the election, 150 million tests. That would help.
Would have helped a hell of a lot more six weeks ago, and you and I, in different pocketed areas, may not be dealing with the suck that we're dealing with our kids when it comes to our schooling.
But up next, we're going to talk to the former White House staffer who says she played a key role in this effort, and now regrets it, the one and only Olivia Troye, former top aide to Mike Pence. That backbencher stuff is BS. She was the top aide to Mike Pence on these issues. Next.
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CUOMO: All right, we have new reporting from The New York Times tonight. No. Not about Trump's taxes. That's a different Times' report. This one just came out, and it details how top White House officials pressured the CDC, over the summer, to downplay the risk of sending kids back to school.
That efforts - that effort included Dr. Deborah Birx, but also, she's the White House's COVID Response Coordinator, but also officials working for the VP, Mike Pence, including his Chief of Staff, Marc Short.
Now, one of the sources for this reporting is former staff member Olivia Troye. Short dispatched, she says, junior members of the Vice President's staff to circumvent the CDC in search of data he thought might better support the White House's position.
The report notes one instance in late June, in which "White House officials, including Troye, spoke to top CDC officers, asking for data that could show the low risk of infection and death for school-age children, a snazzy, easy-to-read document."
Olivia Troye resigned last month as Pence's Homeland Security Advisor, not a backbencher. They're lying about that. After months, working with the Coronavirus Task Force, she left. They say she was fired. They've put out no proof that that's true.
She has been publicly speaking out since then, and has endorsed Joe Biden. But I'm not here to talk politics. I'm here to talk policy.
Welcome to PRIME TIME.
[21:40:00]
Olivia, can you hear me?
OLIVIA TROYE, FORMER SENIOR ADVISOR, CORONAVIRUS TASK FORCE, FORMER HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISER TO VP PENCE: I can. Hi, Chris, how are you?
CUOMO: Thank you for taking the opportunity.
Now, all this goes away as wrong if Marc Short, people like you and anybody else involved, all were in good faith, and saying "Well scrub the data. Maybe it's not as bad as people say it is."
Now, the suggestion in the piece is, "No, they knew damn well it wasn't asking for the truth. It was asking for some way to get around the truth." What's your take?
TROYE: I think that's an accurate statement Chris. I saw this firsthand. I lived it. It's my nightmare, to be honest, my nightmare to tell, unfortunately.
This was an effort, at times, where I would get blindsided, where there would be junior staffers being tasked to find different data for charts that would show that the virus wasn't as bad for certain populations, ages or demographics. And it was hard for me.
I was seeing what Dr. Birx was briefing early, in the early morning briefings, on a daily basis. I was seeing what the CDC was writing. They were doing the work. They were the scientists.
I mean far be it for me to spin it I don't know where I'd even begin to get the data. I'm not a scientist. I'm a Homeland Security, National Security professional working on a crisis, on this invisible enemy. So, it was - it was what was going on behind the scenes.
CUOMO: What was the motivation to deceive people about the risks our kids would face if we went back to school, especially the way we were being forced to go back to school, without the kind of tests that we need, the number of tests we need, the kind of guidance for how to trace cases and to staff it, and to fund all that.
What was the rationale for why we - you needed to do this anyway?
TROYE: Well, I think you've seen from the beginning the President's narrative has been that "Everything's fine. Everything's OK. Time to go back to normal. Let's get the economy going again." That's what he ran on. That was his platform.
He wanted states to go - like show that they were opening back up. He told the governors, "You need to open - you need to open the schools." You need to try to make it seem like everything's OK, when in reality it's not.
And I think it's because his response has been so broken along the way, that it was anything to tell anything but the truth. And fact of the matter is these are children and teachers that we're talking about.
CUOMO: And their families.
TROYE: Our future generation.
CUOMO: And everybody who they come into contact with. And yes, you're right. Everybody always loves to say, "We got to take care of the kids. We got to do the right thing by kids."
Now, on the CDC side, what was the response as far as you were aware of Birx and the other ones in terms of being asked to kind of hedge on the reality?
TROYE: I think it put these Task Force members and doctors in a very challenging position. I saw them struggle, firsthand, on a daily basis. I have spoken about the fact that I have not been critical of the Task Force because I've seen it, how hard it has been for them on a daily basis.
I've seen - I've seen Dr. Redfield try to figure out how he's going to navigate this political landscape, while representing the true evidence of what the scientists and the experts back at CDC and that all the doctors were telling him.
CUOMO: Redfield, there's reporting out that he was heard on a plane saying that Dr. Atlas who's now in favor with the President that everything he says, Atlas, isn't true. Were you aware of that animosity when you were there?
TROYE: I didn't see Scott Atlas. He got there shortly after my departure. But I certainly know that this is in keeping with the President wanting to hear from experts or people who are in line with what his truth and his own personal reality is.
And I ensure that it's got to be very challenging for people like Dr. Redfield, including Dr. Birx and others, and Dr. Fauci, who's been talking about this, who were trying to actually tell the President the facts of the reality of the situation, and you have one voice in the room who's specifically been brought in to push the other voices out, and be the loudest, and that's the one that he will hear and repeat.
And you saw that Dr. Atlas was at one of the briefings. You haven't seen the others that have been working on this from day one.
CUOMO: The VP, was he aware of the effort to pull a fast one on all the families that were going to be sending their kids back to school, give them a false sense of security?
[21:45:00]
TROYE: Chris, I'm going to be honest with you. I struggle with that morally on a daily basis, but the Vice President's wife is a schoolteacher. And I know that he had very strong feelings about making sure that we were looking out for their safety and looking out for the good of children.
I don't know what kind of information Marc shared about what he was tasking behind the scenes. That was part of my decision on why I left, to be honest with you. It was a difficult dynamic that I was navigating.
CUOMO: Did you tell the VP that it was going on when you decided to leave or at any point?
TROYE: I think I'd rather not address personal conversations with the Vice President.
CUOMO: OK. TROYE: That's just a conversation between me and him.
CUOMO: Listen, that's fine. Why am I asking, because if he was concerned about giving the straight deal to families, about their kids, because his wife is a teacher, he's certainly never said it.
He's never come out in public, and said, "Hey, going to school has got to be done the right way. We have to do better than we're doing right now. We need more money. We need more resources. This is dangerous stuff."
It seems like if that was something he really cared about, he could speak to it. He certainly hasn't. Is it just one more example of how the message is controlled in-house?
TROYE: Absolutely. Everyone has a boss. And unfortunately, for Vice President Pence, his boss is Donald Trump.
CUOMO: Olivia Troye, I appreciate you coming on, especially with the timing of this report. Thank you for giving us a look inside our government, and what's being done supposedly in our name and in our service. Thank you very much.
TROYE: Thank you, Chris for having me on. And I've been praying for you, and I hope you're feeling so much better.
CUOMO: Thank you.
(CROSSTALK)
CUOMO: Hey, listen, the more we learn about the reality, the better I feel. So, thank you very much, right? Thank you.
I mean that, by the way, why? Because we knew this stuff has to be going on. It doesn't make any sense. How can you send kids back to school, when you know you can't test them, and you know they don't have the resources, and you know we're in all these crazy - listen to my kid's schedule.
My senior is going to go one out of every four weeks in-person, the other three weeks at home.
My freshman, in high school, these great private schools, right, lots of resources, lots of big brains, innovation, he's going two days a week, every Tuesday and Thursday.
My little one, who's not that little any more, but she's in fifth grade, right? Big year, she's at the big-shot school, right? They go to one school. The son goes to the other one. She's in once every other - every other week.
So, one, every four weeks, one, every other week, and one, two days a week, are you kidding me that you - and I'm lucky, right? I got the money. I got people who can help me. My wife and I, we got full family to be able to do things. This is the best we can do for our kids? It makes perfect sense that they have been jazzing us about what the
reality is about the risk, because they don't want to control it, because they don't want to own it, because the more they own it, the more real it is.
The more this President is exposed to the reality that he ignored this pandemic, and now we know from the taxes that he has absolutely no personal interest in owning this, because every day it goes on, where he gets his money, is close down.
Where is the incentive to do the right thing by us in this Administration? The kids tell the story. We couldn't do better for schools in the United States of America? Come on.
Now, look, that's about our leadership and our politics. And there's an election coming up. But there are bigger questions raised by these taxes, OK? Law, criminality, OK? What? Where would that lead? Why is that real to look at after what we've now learned?
No one knows better than a former IRS Commissioner and a former State Attorney General and Prosecutor. And they are here next, to tell you the real deal.
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TEXT: CUOMO PRIME TIME.
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TEXT: LET'S GET AFTER IT.
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CUOMO: All right, we know now that the President has problems with the IRS.
And we know that those problems have nothing to do with his faith in the Almighty. After what you now know, about his taxes, can you believe that when I asked him why he gets audited, back in 2016, he told me this.
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TRUMP: I'm always audited by the IRS, which I think is very unfair. I don't know maybe because of religion, maybe because of something else, maybe because I'm doing this, although this is just recently.
CUOMO: What do you mean religion?
TRUMP: Well maybe because of the fact that I'm a strong Christian, and I feel strongly about it, and maybe there's a bias.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CUOMO: He thinks he gets audited because of his strong Christian faith?
Maybe he gets audited because his faith and his ability to cheat or subvert the system. Doesn't mean it's illegal. But maybe that's why they look, because he says for the entire world that he's worth a gazillion dollars, and then he doesn't pay any taxes. Maybe that's why he gets flagged.
Let's dive into the peril our President is facing with two people who know the world of tax law, former IRS Commissioner, John Koskinen, and former New Jersey A.G., Anne Milgram.
Good to see you both.
JOHN KOSKINEN, FORMER IRS COMMISSIONER: Good to be here.
CUOMO: All right, let's do this for dummies version. I'll start with you, former A.G., Professor Milgram.
What's the difference - when does evasion, when does not paying taxes because you could find a way to work it, or fudge it, become a problem legally?
ANNE MILGRAM, CNN LEGAL ANALYST, PROFESSOR, NYU LAW SCHOOL, FORMER NEW JERSEY ATTORNEY GENERAL: Yes. So that's - that's, I think, is one of the key questions here. And one of the sort of dividing lines is often about what someone intends, and what their conduct encompasses.
People make mistakes on their taxes all the time. I'm sure the Commissioner will attest to that. But there's a real difference between calculated intentional fraudulent conduct.
And the question here and, you know, remember, we only have the tax returns right now. And we don't have - there's a lot of other behind- the-scenes information about the President's net worth about who he owes this money to.
[21:55:00]
There are a ton of pieces here that we would want more, if we're thinking about a tax fraud case. But on its face, it raises a lot of questions about the President's intent to circumvent the tax laws of our country.
CUOMO: Tax avoidance is an action taken to lessen tax liability and maximize after-tax income. Tax evasion, the failure to pay or a deliberate underpayment of taxes. Obviously, the second one gets you in trouble. The first one is what all of us are trying to do.
Now, Commissioner, what we learned in here was that he finds a lot of ways to say that he doesn't make any money, so he doesn't pay tax. The problem is if you are - at what point, Commissioner, does giving a
bank one set of qualifications for lending to you, but a different one to the IRS in terms of your tax burden, when does that become a problem? You got to be lying to somebody there, no?
KOSKINEN: Well let me start by saying that no Commissioner ever sees an individual's tax returns. So, I haven't seen anybody's tax returns, including the President's.
But it's clear there are legal ramifications of misrepresenting your financial information to a bank. There are laws that surround the need to be forthcoming and fair. And then there are obvious clear rules about misrepresenting your assets, your income, and your expenses, on your tax return to the IRS.
And if there are conflicts between those, as you say, you would expect that they would be more or less similar. And if there are conflicts and you're misrepresenting in one place or another, whoever is - whomever you've been providing the wrong information to, has a legal recourse against you.
CUOMO: Commissioner, what did you see in the reporting from The New York Times that popped your eyebrows?
KOSKINEN: Well what's interesting is I have always told people there's a limited amount you learn from somebody's tax return.
And as you think of your own tax return, you have income, you get deductions, you see what the charitable contributions are. It doesn't tell you anything, as early on the program, people noted, about your assets and your liabilities, doesn't tell you who you are in business with.
So, you need to know a lot more. For instance, you wouldn't know how much you owe, and when it's due, on just a straightforward tax return. But the article talks about tax records.
So, it leads you to conclude that the writers at The New York Times have more than just the tax returns. They have tax records that would give them information such as how much money is owed and when it's coming due.
CUOMO: Anne, when you take a look at how the tax return shows the President and the Company treating the kids that Ivanka is it seems, in some way, kind of double dipping.
When is double dipping, not to use it as a nefarious term, but when is being paid as a project manager, and also a consultant, when does that get sticky? When does Don Jr. using those kinds of funds to pay money to be defended, when do those things become more than a tax event?
MILGRAM: Yes. I mean it's a great question, Chris, because there are a lot of red flags when you look at this.
There is what you first started talking about where that the kids seem to have been listed as business - as business consultants, and so there's over $20 million that appears to have been paid out to particularly Ivanka.
The New York Times did some work to link up her assets with the payment as a business consultant, while she was working at The Trump Organization.
So, if you are an employee of an organization, you are an employee of the organization, and you can be paid whether you are paid as an employee or as a consultant. But all of that is subject to payroll taxes and other things.
And it looks like that's not what the intent was here. It looks like the intent was to just have a bunch of money that they could use to write off.
And so, you're talking again about $20 million in business expenses being written and consultant expenses that are being written off. And so, we need to see more to know whether an actual crime was committed there. But it certainly looks like it's an - it looks like there's a potential effort there to avoid paying taxes.
And there are a couple other areas where I think the kids also come into play, with the Seven Springs, the residence, where the kids refer to it as a "Compound" that President Trump has taken it as an investment property.
So, there are a number of things like that that just they really don't look great. And prosecutors, I am certain, will want to look further and dig deeper into this.
CUOMO: Now look, first of all, John, Anne, thank you very much for your insight into this. I appreciate it. And we will probably have to rely on one or both of you again, and soon, as we learn more about the context of this, so thank you.
And again, in the reporting of this, it's not about accusing the President of anything, or doing anything wrong. A lots of ways to work the system. We see that all the time. But it's about the questions. And we definitely have an answer to one of them, if to nothing else, which is, you now know why he didn't want you to see his taxes.
The Biden-Trump debate tomorrow night, you can watch it right here, on CNN. Special coverage begins at--
