Return to Transcripts main page

The Lead with Jake Tapper

Biden to Issue Executive Orders on Immigration; Republicans Set to Meet With Biden to Propose Smaller COVID Relief Bill; Trump Legal Team Shakeup. Aired 4:30-5p ET

Aired February 01, 2021 - 16:30   ET

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

[16:30:00]

JIM ACOSTA, CNN CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: Another problem for Trump, his ties to GOP lawmakers who are still lying about the election, including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tweeted over the weekend: "I had a great call with my all-time favorite POTUS, President Trump."

Over at the White House, Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the new administration isn't paying much attention to the lingering Trump drama.

JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: We don't spend a lot of time talking about or thinking about President Trump here, former President Trump, to be very clear. I can't say we miss him on Twitter.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ACOSTA: Now, a Trump adviser said more attorneys may be added to the former president's legal team in the coming days.

And a GOP congressional source told me many Republicans are uneasy with Trump's apparent plan to peddle his election lies at his impeachment trial -- quote -- "especially after January 6."

And a separate Trump adviser said the ex-president still -- quote -- "wants the world to know the election was stolen from him," which is obviously false, Jake.

And with Trump's impeachment trial set for next week in the Senate, the White House says it is reviewing whether to offer intelligence briefings to the ex-president, a courtesy extended to former commanders in chiefs in the past. The press secretary said today that's still under consideration -- Jake.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: All right, Jim, thanks so much.

ACOSTA: You bet.

TAPPER: Just minutes from now, President Biden is set to meet with Republican senators, but is this bipartisan outreach and delaying the inevitable?

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:35:40]

TAPPER: And we're back with our politics lead. Let's discuss, bring in Jackie Kucinich, as well as Eugene Daniels, who's the White House correspondent for Politico and co-author of "Politico Playbook."

Welcome.

Eugene, let me start with you.

The former president, Mr. Trump, apparently wants to build a defense team -- build a defense, rather, around the lie, the big lie, that he actually won in a landslide, the election was stolen from him. What's the blowback going to be at the Senate?

EUGENE DANIELS, POLITICO: Yes, I mean, the thing is, President Trump could have taken the W., right?

Republicans are already ready to make this process argument, to say that you can't impeach and convict someone who's no longer president, though he was impeached while he was president.

And he doesn't want to do that. He is going to test their loyalty. He's going to test how far they will go to, like you said spread lies, spread conspiracy theories about the election that are categorically untrue.

And so he could have had his lawyers roll in and make that argument, keep it really simple, and then do whatever he's going to do next. So it's going to continue to rip the party apart in the ways that we have already seen. And, more importantly, it's going to be retribution. President Trump is going to use it as retribution for those who don't make that argument, who don't say that this -- talk about the election being stolen.

So it's going to -- the blowback in the Senate, we will have to see. I think that one of the things that's going to end up happening is that we are not going to hear -- we're going to hear from people like Mitt Romney that this process argument is almost bunk and that it doesn't really matter.

And that's going to, like I said, continue to rip the party apart. And President Trump seems focused only on himself here once again.

TAPPER: Yes, once again.

Jackie, let's talk about the current president. In just a few minutes, President Biden is going to meet in the Oval Office with a group of Republican senators discussing COVID relief. The White House keeps emphasizing the importance of this bill being big; $1.9 trillion is what they proposed.

The Republicans have it closer to $618 billion. What do you think ultimately is going to happen here? Is he going to go with big over bipartisan? Is there going to be any way to split the difference?

JACKIE KUCINICH, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: It seems to be trending that way, because of the way that the meeting has gone from being this important meeting to just a conversation.

And let's not forget where Biden is rooted, though. He's rooted in the Senate. He's rooted somewhere where he really wants to be able to make a deal. But that doesn't mean it's going to be a deal that he is able to make, frankly, because it's not really his decision what ends up moving through the House and the Senate.

And Democrats seem very hell-bent on keeping their number, keeping their bill intact, and no matter what the White House decides to say on this. But this is a big test for the Democratic majority and for the new president as to where they're going to draw the line with Republicans, and what, if anything, they will give them in return for perhaps some of this bipartisan outreach.

TAPPER: Eugene, President Biden has witnessed in his very long career a lot of -- quote, unquote -- "bipartisan" attempts, and that end up getting little to no Republican support. There's the Clinton budget deal, no Republican support, the 2009 Recovery Act, Obamacare.

Do you think that this experience -- I mean, Democrats really tried to have Obamacare be bipartisan, and, ultimately, it wasn't at all. I mean, do you think that he's just jaded, I guess is one word, realistic might be another, to think like, they're never going to vote for what I want anyway?

DANIELS: Yes, I think, like Jackie was saying, like, President Biden is -- the idea of bipartisanship is at the core of who he is.

But he was there when -- what happened with President Obama. He was there when Republicans obstructed President Obama and Vice President -- then Vice President Biden at every turn. And there are Democrats that are worried that they are going to get played, right? They almost have PTSD of that happening once again.

And I think something that's really interesting about this is, there's almost no blowback for President Biden and for Democrats to kind of ram this through, right? The blowback of using reconciliation, having Vice President Kamala Harris come and break that tie, the blowback is minimal, because people want this, right?

We saw the governor of West Virginia say -- kind of disagreeing with his own senators, saying, we want this money, we need this money, and trying -- and making -- Democrats can go around saying, we're the party that gave you X-amount of dollars in your pocket, we're the ones that gave state and local officials money, and the Republicans didn't.

[16:40:17]

That's a compelling argument for them to make.

TAPPER: All right, Eugene Daniels, Jackie Kucinich, thanks so much for joining us today. Appreciate it. Coming up: President Biden already facing roadblocks for an executive action he has not even taken yet. What is it?

Stick around.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: In our politics lead today: President Biden says he plans to move forward with new executive actions, these on immigration, tomorrow, even though a judge temporarily blocked his day one order to pause deportations.

CNN's Ed Lavandera now looks at the reality Biden faces, from the border wall, to citizenship for dreamers, to reuniting separated migrant children with their families.

[16:45:04]

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ED LAVANDERA, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Ilse Mendez came to Texas at the age of 2 with her parents. She's now 33. Everyone in her family, including her four children, are now U.S. citizens, except her.

Mendez is one of the hundreds of thousands of people known as Dreamers. President Biden is proposing a pathway to citizenship for these immigrants who have been able to live in the U.S. because of the Obama-era program known as DACA.

ILSE MENDEZ, DACA RECIPIENT: We have lived four years of Trump stringing us along with that fear and anxiety. So, I'm hopeful that something will -- something positive will come out of these different legislations, or these executive actions that Biden has brought.

LAVANDERA: The Trump administration rolled out four years of controversial programs that critics have often described as inhumane but that many conservatives have celebrated. There are still 611 children separated from their parents as part of the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy. The Biden administration is proposing a task force to reunify those families.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I will accomplish what I said I would do, a much more humane policy based on family unification.

LAVANDERA: On other issues, Biden will face legal challenges. The president issued a 100-day pause on deportations but a federal judge has temporarily blocked that move. And there are still about 28,000 migrants sitting in Mexican border towns, seeking asylum through the controversial "remain in Mexico" policy. Advocates have pushed for these migrants to be allowed into the country while their cases are handled in immigration courts.

Former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ronald Vitello, warns that Biden's immigration policies could create another surge of migrants at the southern border.

RONALD VITIELLO, FORMER ACTING DIRECTOR, ICE: My warning would be learn from the history you already have. When you rolled back those elements of what's in place now then you're going to -- you're going to encourage people.

LAVANDERA: And then there is the issue of the border wall.

How much do you enjoy this view?

JOSEPH HEIN, TEXAS LANDOWNER: I'm going to see this through bars. It's going to be horrible.

LAVANDERA: Last year, Joseph Hein was bracing for construction of the border wall across his ranch on the bank of the Rio Grande in Texas. We returned to see him after President Biden halted all construction.

HEIN: Along the road that they built, they put p these markers.

LAVANDERA: But now, Hein feels like he has won the border wall fight, at least for four years anyway.

HEIN: I saw it as a hostile takeover of my property and I was being treated like a second-class citizen. And they were fine and dandy with it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LAVANDERA (on camera): And, Jake, President Biden is also saying that he is going to push for a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants already in the United States and that would include an eight-year process of criminal background checks and ensuring that those immigrants are learning English. But as everyone fully, well knows, they are walking through the immigration political mine field -- Jake.

TAPPER: All right. Ed Lavandera, thank you so much.

President Biden facing his first foreign policy test involving a military coup and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:52:51]

TAPPER: In our world lead today, President Biden threatening sanctions on Myanmar, after the military coup to control the government and detain its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is overwhelmingly elected back in November, but the military is pushing forward bogus claims of fraud and biased campaigning.

Let's bring in CNN's Ivan Watson. Ivan, as this coup heads into a second day, Myanmar's military is going to great lengths to cut off public access to the outside world.

IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right. Telecommunications have been patchy. The country's TV stations were almost all cut off. The Internet curtailed dramatically, reports that even radio frequencies appeared to have been jammed.

It was only a military-owned TV station that was allowed to broadcast. And that's where they announced a one-year state of emergency and that the commander of the armed forces was now assuming leadership of the government as senior civilian officials had been rounded up before dawn by troops on Monday.

Now, the disagreement stemmed from the results of an election, a national election that was held on November 8th. And that's when the de facto prime minister, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest now, won in a landslide and absolutely clobbered the party back bid the military, winning more than 80 percent of the seats in parliament. The military immediately started crying election fraud without providing any evidence, and the coup took place hours before the new parliament was supposed to have its first session on Monday.

Now, this is the first real challenge, international challenge for the new Biden administration. He has called this an assault on Myanmar's transition to democracy. He is threatening sanctions.

But here's the deal: the new military leader was already under U.S. sanctions since 2019 for his alleged role in the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who fled to Bangladesh in 2017.

[16:55:03]

Burmese that I'm talking to are worried their country is headed into the darkness and isolation that they experienced for more than 50 years under military rule before this aborted experiment in democratic transition -- Jake.

TAPPER: All right. Ivan Watson with a successful coup attempt. Thank you so much, appreciate it.

In our national lead, the only American service member to receive the Department of Defense's sole survivor designation, is now sharing his story of brotherhood and bravery.

Beau Wise served as a marine in Afghanistan, his brother, Jeremy, was a Navy SEAL. His brother Ben was a Green Beret. Beau's brothers both died in Afghanistan. Beau is now honoring their legacies in a new book called "Three Wise Men."

And retired Marine Sergeant Beau Wise joins me now.

Sergeant, thanks so much for joining us. It's an honor to have you on.

After Ben died just two years after Jeremy, you were taken out of combat by the combatant of the Marine Corps, General James Amos, so that your family would not suffer another loss, the so-called Private Ryan kind of story. You said at the time you didn't think it was fair, and even that it was wrong. Why do you think you and your brothers felt such a strong calling to serve your country, and are you still upset by General Amos' decision?

SGT. BEAU WISE (RET.), CO-AUTHOR, "THREE WISE MEN": You know, we had it from an early age. I think I learned from them. My parents were very patriotic and wholesome upbringing.

But, no, I'm no longer upset. I don't think that there's any blame. At the time, I wasn't a father, and now I am. And as a father, that kind of lends the perspective of, you know, if it were my children, what would I want? I think the decision that General Amos made was for the sake of my family and it was a good decision.

TAPPER: At the end of the book -- it's a great book and I really recommend it. And there's a moving -- a lot of moving parts of it, but at the end, you talk about how you reveal you had contemplated taking your own life. You say, quote, Jeremy and Ben Wise saved a lot of lives during their eight combined combat deployments and more than 14 years spent defending our nation. The last life they saved was mine, unquote.

Can you elaborate on how your brothers have helped to inspire you so that you're here today, which we're so happy about?

WISE: Well, thank you. You know, I did go through a pretty dark phase. And there was a moment where I was contemplating it. And one of the things that I thought about most was Ben, in his last moments. When Jeremy passed, it was a suicide bomber and I knew nothing about what he was doing, because he was working for the Central Intelligence Agency at the time.

But with Ben, you know, he was wounded and it took him six days. He was a fighter. And, you know, after those six days, I thought about everything that he went through, fighting for every impossible breath, even when the amputations were up to the hip. And I just said, you know, Ben can fight through all of that, then I can fight. And I'm going to keep fighting.

TAPPER: What do you want people to know most about your brothers and their service to this country?

WISE: You know, I always wanted to tell a story of the preservation of life, that they died saving lives. Pulling the trigger is something you do when you have to. But they embodied ethos and the preservation of life is something that they were very, very good at.

TAPPER: Sergeant Beau Wise, author of the book, "Three Wise Men." It's a great book. Highly recommend it. After the show, I'll tweet out a link, after you send it to me, so people can get it. Thanks so much for joining us today. And thank you, of course, for your service and your brother's service.

WISE: Thank you, Jake. Thanks for having me.

TAPPER: As we remember the many victims of COVID today, one of those lives lost is sadly television writer Marc Wilmore, who died of COVID and other conditions on Saturday at age 57. Marc was a sketch writer turned cast member on "In Living Color." He went on to write for shows, including "F is for Family," "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno", and "The Simpsons."

Comedian Larry Wilmore described his little brother as, quote, the kindest, gentlest, funniest lion of an angel he's ever known. He is survived by his wife and two daughters. May his memory and the memory of all of those lost in this pandemic be a blessing.

Our deepest condolences to Larry Wilmore and his family.

Follow me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @JakeTapper. You can tweet the show @TheLeadCNN.

Our coverage continues right now.

[17:00:00]