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Ben Carson Under Fire; Interview With North Carolina Congressman Walter Jones; Republican Chaos. Aired 15-15:30p ET

Aired October 08, 2015 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:00:05]

JASON CARROLL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: As for Stone, he's in stable condition. He had significant injuries, but, again, in stable condition and expected to make a full recovery.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Wow. We wish him the best. Just incredible.

Jason, thank you, as always. Jason will stay on that story for us.

And we begin, top of the hour. I'm Poppy Harlow, in today for my friend Brooke Baldwin.

We begin with breaking news out of our nation's capital. John Boehner's retirement may have to wait as chaos and shock erupt on Capitol Hill. The man favored to become the next speaker of the House just announced he's dropping out of the race, taking himself out. California Congressman Kevin McCarthy stunned his fellow Republicans during what was supposed to be a closed-door vote to make possibly him the nominee.

Just a few hours ago, McCarthy explained why he pulled himself out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA), HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER: We have been going through this campaign talking to a lot of members, but the one thing I have always said to earn this majority, we're servants. We should put this conference first.

And I think there's something to be said, for us to unite, we probably need a fresh base. I'll stay on as majority leader, but the one thing I found in talking to everybody, if we're going to unite and be strong, we need a new face to help do that.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) comments about Benghazi last week, did they play into your decision to step aside today?

MCCARTHY: Well, that wasn't helpful.

Yes, I could have said it much better. But this Benghazi committee was only created for one purpose, to find the truth on behalf of the families for the four dead Americans. I should not be a distraction from that. And that's part of the decision as well. (END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Now the nominee race for the job that is just two heartbeats from the presidency has been postponed.

Senior political reporter Manu Raju joins us now from Capitol Hill.

I understand you're with a congressman from North Carolina getting some reaction.

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I am. It's Walter Jones. He's a 20-year veteran here. And he was one of the early critics of Kevin McCarthy who came out against him.

And one of the things that you did that really got a lot of people's attention is that you circulated a letter a couple days back basically saying that any candidate who has had any misdeeds in their past should step aside. What was the point of that letter?

REP. WALTER JONES (R), NORTH CAROLINA: Well, I was here when Newt Gingrich stepped down as speaker of the House.

We were in the process of impeaching Bill Clinton and then Newt had to acknowledge that he had an issue. Then the conference, the Republican Conference, elected Bob Livingston to follow behind Newt as speaker of the House. We were all believing that we were moving in the right direction and two days later he steps down before we even have a vote on the floor of the House.

And there have been some other things that have happened over the past few years that I think when a person has been a member of the Congress, which is a very sacred duty, quite frankly, in my opinion, and they are elevated to become a leader of a party, it could be either party, Republican or Democrat, that those in leadership must be above reproach.

And all I was doing, and not trying to single anybody out, but was to say in this makeup, whip office, the majority office and the speaker's office, all the members should be made to say I have nothing in my background that could be of embarrassment to the Republican Conference, the House of Representatives or the American people.

That's all this was about.

RAJU: Do you have any reason to believe that your letter is what prompted Mr. McCarthy to drop out?

JONES: I would think not, to be honest about it.

(CROSSTALK)

JONES: Well, I don't know. I don't know.

I always say about myself and my staff, when everybody leaves at 5:00, I don't know what anybody else does. So, my belief is that anyone running for office of leadership should be able to say to the conference, I have nothing that will come back to be of embarrassment to the conference, and I should be able to leave with integrity.

RAJU: And I should add that Mr. McCarthy, when he was speaking to reporters, was asked about your letter and he dismissed it. He said that was not one of the reasons. He really said that he didn't want to fight to get -- become elected speaker and barely surpass that 218- vote threshold.

So, now let me ask you this, Congressman. Now that we don't have a candidate, a leading candidate for speaker, what is going to happen? Who should step forward and bridge this divide within the Republican Conference?

JONES: Well, I was real disappointed that Mr. Boehner maybe would call a recess in maybe 30, 40 minutes, to tell everybody to come back and vote on the two candidates that we have. We have two good candidates, Dan Webster and Jason Chaffetz from Utah. And I that was a mistake by the speaker. We should have had a vote today.

RAJU: And would you support Webster still?

JONES: Absolutely.

RAJU: OK. All right. Well, thank you, Congressman, for joining us.

It just shows just how divided this Republican Conference is, Mr. Jones, of course, supporting Daniel Webster, who is backed by the House Freedom Caucus and one of the reasons why Kevin McCarthy did not have that support to move forward and get to that 218-vote threshold, Poppy.

[15:05:12]

HARLOW: Right. All right, important perspective to have, Manu. Thank you for bringing it to us.

Let's talk about one of those two men that the congressman just brought up, current Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who is still running for this top position. Let's listen to what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JASON CHAFFETZ (R), UTAH: Absolutely stunned. Did not see that coming. Kevin McCarthy is a very good man. And he's always been one that puts his country before everything else. And so he and I stand shoulder to shoulder with the same goal and desire and that is to unite this party and take the fight to the president, to the Senate and the American people.

I really do believe it's time for a fresh start. That was the whole genesis of my campaign. But we need to have a lot more family discussion, because we need to find somebody that our whole body can unite behind and do what we were elected to do.

So, I was absolutely stunned, surprised and shocked that this happened, but our conference is going to have to do a lot of deep soul-searching and we will see what happens. (END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: With me now, Jake Tapper, anchor of "THE LEAD" and "STATE OF THE UNION," chief Washington correspondent.

I just want your reaction to what the congressman told Manu, saying it was a mistake for Boehner not to sort of recess and bring everyone back and have them vote on Webster and Chaffetz. Do you agree?

JAKE TAPPER, CNN CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's not really my position to agree or disagree. It's just...

(CROSSTALK)

HARLOW: Would that have been expected, I should ask, that he would just have them vote on the other two?

TAPPER: I think we're kind of in the realm of the unknown. We haven't been in a place like this since the late '90s, when there was so much unrest following the resignation of Speaker Gingrich and then the brief nomination of Bob Livingston and then he stepped down. And then Denny Hastert and served the purposes of speaker.

It's a very strange period. It's not the exact same thing. What we have here is 30 to 50 members of the House Republican Caucus who are making demands on House Republican leadership who are very upset with House Republican leadership.

And the question is how do you placate those 30 to 50 Republicans so that you're able to go to the floor of the House and get the 218 votes you need to become speaker? We heard -- speaking to Dana earlier, Congressman Charlie Dent, who is a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, talking about the next speaker needs to be somebody that's elected with support from both Democrats and Republicans, which is certainly an interesting, although very unlikely idea.

I think ultimately we're going to see the Republicans sort this out, but usually this chasm between this conservative wing of the party and the rest, the majority of the House Republicans usually these fights are a little bit more secret.

HARLOW: Jake, do you think this can be the fresh start that we just heard Jason Chaffetz talk about or that Margaret Hoover last hour said, this can be hitting the reset button for Congress, for the GOP and Congress and having that fresh start and having that unity after all of this?

TAPPER: I mean, it depends what you mean by fresh start.

Certainly, somebody like Dan Webster or Jason Chaffetz becoming speaker of the House even on a temporary basis, as Congressman Tom Price floated as a possibility for the next speaker, just to do it until 2016, certainly that would be a fresh face, but the question is, what then? How then do you govern? How are you going to handle the debt ceiling? Are you going to vote to raise the debt ceiling? How are you going to vote when it comes to President Obama says no more 10-week extensions on funding the government? How are you going to come up with a funding bill? The challenge of satisfying these 30 to 50 members, these conservatives who are very ideologically driven, and I don't mean that as a pejorative, but they are very, very firm in what they want -- that problem is still going to exist and be in conflict at times with what this town operates on, which is governing and coalition building and compromise.

These are individuals who don't necessarily want to compromise.

HARLOW: What about how this plays, Jake, into the bigger picture and the race for the White House in 2016? We just heard Jeb Bush come out and say he's surprised. He also talked about those in Washington as they. He used the word they, trying to make himself an outsider, separate himself.

What does this do big picture in that race?

TAPPER: Well, it just reaffirms this dynamic we're seeing.

In the House of Representatives, this outsider idea is a minority. The House Freedom Caucus is a minority, 30 to 50 members of this 200- plus group. But when you look at polling of the Republican electorate and who they are going for right now, at this snapshot in time, when you combine the vote totals, according to polls, of Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina, three distinct outsiders who have never held political office, in a lot of those polls, that's more than 50 percent.

[15:10:20]

That's a majority of the Republican base. So, this outsider feeling that is not a majority in the House, it is right now a majority sentiment among the Republican electorate. So, that's one of the things I think that's empowering these conservatives in the House.

HARLOW: Jake Tapper, thank you, as always.

Jake will be back at the top of the hour with "THE LEAD," much more analysis on what has happened, the shakeup on Capitol Hill. Jake, thank you.

TAPPER: Thank you.

HARLOW: Next, moments ago on CNN, Ben Carson responding to backlash over his remarks about what to do in the face of a gunman. He talks about when he was held at gunpoint. He also responds to Rupert Murdoch's tweet that America needs a -- quote -- "real black president."

Also this hour, Donald Trump speaking live at a rally in Las Vegas. And he is taking credit for Kevin McCarthy dropping out. We will bring you some of what he is saying live. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [15:15:40]

HARLOW: Donald Trump still the Republican front-runner in the race for the White House speaking right now in Las Vegas at a rally inside of the Cirque du Soleil theater. Just moments ago, he applauded the breaking news that Kevin McCarthy has dropped out of the race for House speaker.

Listen to what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you very much. Thank you. So nice. Thank you.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: Thank you very much.

What a great group. They have hundreds and hundreds of people standing outside. They can't get in. They didn't get the good real estate. You got the good real estate. I feel badly. I feel badly.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: So, Phil Ruffin, Phil owns this hotel. And he's been a friend of mine and we did deals together. We had a great success at Trump International Hotel together. I hope you all know that hotel, the most beautiful building in Las Vegas, I have to say.

But it's a great thing to be involved with somebody that is so talented, so smart, such a great business person. There's Phil Ruffin, believe me. And he's a great poker player.

I always put my money on him in a game in poker and he just walks away very quietly, just takes everybody's money and goes on to the next one. Right? That's what we want.

I want to just thank you. I love you too. I love you.

I want to just start by saying Kevin McCarthy is out. You know that, right?

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: And they are giving me a lot of credit because I said you really need somebody very, very tough and very smart. Smart goes with tough, not just tough. I know tough people. They are not smart. That's the worst. OK? That's the worst. You have got to be smart.

But we need smart, we need tough, we need the whole package. And it's a positive. Yes, like me. Thank you. I like that. I like this guy over here, whoever he is.

But It's bedlam in Washington right now, bedlam. It's a mess. I have never seen anything like it. I have doing this for a long time. I have always been in politics. People said, well, he's -- for three months, I have been a politician, though. Can you believe it? It's so embarrassing, I'm a politician.

I never wanted to be a politician. But at some point, I said we're going to make our country great again. We're going to do it.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Let's talk about this and more with John Judis. He's a senior writer with "The National Journal." He joins me from Chicago.

Thank you for being here.

JOHN JUDIS, "THE NATIONAL JOURNAL": Thank you.

HARLOW: I love your sweatshirt. I just have to say.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDIS: I'm going to wear it until they lose. And, hopefully, I might not be able to take it off for a year. Right?

HARLOW: Good luck to your team.

But on a much more serious note, you wrote a fascinating article in "The National Journal" about why Donald Trump and why he is resonating. You take it all the way back to the 1970s and you talk about a group of key voters you call MARs, Middle American radicals. You say those are the supporters of Donald Trump today. Explain.

JUDIS: Well, they go back to the Wallace vote, George Wallace, in the 1970s and to some extent Richard Nixon and it's a discontented group of voters, middle class, receptive to a kind of populism.

And there's two kinds of populism. One kind is the Bernie Sanders kind, where you're rallying all the people against the billionaire class at the top. Then there's another kind where you're rallying the people, the middle class, not only against the people at the top, but against the group of parasites, drifters, illegal immigrants, black militants, what have you, who are seen as being coddled by the people at the top.

So, it's a populism that sees the middle class as besieged from both above and below. And that's one of the things about Trump. You get illegal immigration, but you also get him railing against the Ford executives who move a plant to Mexico or Nabisco that takes a plant out of Chicago.

HARLOW: Sure.

JUDIS: So, it's something that goes back to the late 1960s. You see somewhat -- some of it in Ross Perot, you see some of it in Pat Buchanan, and now we have it in Donald Trump.

[15:20:03]

HARLOW: Right.

You say that it's a mistake for people to believe that those who support Donald Trump right now are only drawn to him because of his personality. You say it's largely his ideological positions, but here's the thing. Whether it was George Wallace's campaign, Ross Perot's campaign, Pat Buchanan's campaign, they didn't succeed at that in the end.

So, what lesson, what page out of that book can Donald Trump take?

JUDIS: Well, look, let me put it this way.

It is to some extent his personality. It is his way of being able to speak to an audience, to talk to them not as if he's giving a speech. It's his reputation as a billionaire, as a deal-maker. And it's an anti-Washington sentiment, but it's a sentiment that's based on the idea, and this again goes back to Ross Perot, that he's a guy who can come to Washington, a kind of man on the white horse, and transform everything.

It's not an anti-leader. It's anti-Washington. And there's a big difference in that. He's not a libertarian in that sense. He's not somebody who is simply anti-Washington. The people there are stupid and he's smart and he's going to fix things.

His problem in the campaign, in the Republican campaign, may turn out to be that the Middle American radicals, what I call them, are let's say 25 to 30 percent of the Republican primary voters, maybe as high as 35, and much less of the general electorate. He's doing fine now because there's 10 candidates. He might not be doing fine when there's three or four, because I don't know whether he can expand that base.

To expand that base, he's going to have to capture, you know, suburban women. He's going to have to capture voters that he may be alienating by the so-called political incorrectness.

HARLOW: Well, yes, he says he's going to win the Hispanic vote. He needs to get some of that minority vote to make the numbers work here.

JUDIS: Yes, the Hispanic vote over -- we will wait and see in that. He would break all records if he ever got to the general election as far as the Hispanic voters. I would say it would be like the reverse of Obama. He would get like 10 percent maybe.

HARLOW: We will be watching. It's a fascinating read in "The National Journal."

John Judis, thank you.

JUDIS: Sure. Thank you.

Coming up next, Ben Carson responding to the backlash over his remarks after the shooting in Oregon and what he says he would have done in the face of that gunman. The Republican candidate also responding to Rupert Murdoch's tweet that America needs a -- quote -- "real black president." Wolf Blitzer takes us inside his interview with Dr. Ben Carson next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:27:12]

HARLOW: Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson on the record about some headline-grabbing comments that he made.

The retired neurosurgeon sat down with very own Wolf Blitzer to clarify some of those remarks, some of them about the Oregon mass shooting and the shooter there, what he would have gone when confronting the gunman, also what he said years ago when he was held at gunpoint he says at a fast food restaurant in Baltimore.

For the first time, he's reacting to FOX chief Rupert Murdoch's tweet that Ben Carson would be a -- quote -- "real black president." Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: All right, let's talk about some of the controversies that you have, I guess, generated over the past few days.

You have been severely criticized, as you well know, for this comment you made about the massacre at that community college in Oregon when you said this. I'll play the clip.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BEN CARSON (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Not only would I probably not cooperate with him. I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, hey, guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can't get us all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: All right, you seem to suggest the victims should have done more.

CARSON: No, not suggesting that at all.

What the original question was, was, if you were there and someone was holding a gun to you and asking you about your religion and they had shot other people, what would you do?

And knowing that you were next to be killed and that they were going to continue down the line killing people, I would much rather go down fighting. And if all of us attack the shooter, the chances are very strong that not all of us will be killed.

To me, that doesn't seem like a very controversial thing. But when you take it out of context and you try to make it look like I'm criticizing the victims, that's when it becomes controversial.

BLITZER: You spoke about a personal incident in a SiriusXM Radio interview yesterday when you were younger and you were confronted by a gunman. I will play the little clip. This is from the radio interview.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

CARSON: The guy comes in, puts the gun in my ribs and I just said, I believe that you want the guy behind the counter.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

QUESTION: That's what you said, in that calm way?

CARSON: In that calm way.

QUESTION: In that calm way, OK.

CARSON: He said, oh, OK.

QUESTION: Oh, so you just mis -- redirected him to...

CARSON: I redirected him.

QUESTION: OK.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

BLITZER: That sounds counter to what you're recommending right now.

CARSON: That's a completely different situation. This is somebody who comes into a joint to rob it, not somebody who is sequentially killing people.

BLITZER: But you didn't know he was just going to rob the joint.

CARSON: I did know that.

BLITZER: He potentially could have killed you.

CARSON: I did know that.

And the fact of the matter is maybe this is a level of sophistication that people learn from living on the streets. But I knew that that guy was not there to murder everybody.

BLITZER: How you could possibly know that? He had a gun.

CARSON: I knew he was not there to murder all the people. I knew he was there to rob the place.

BLITZER: And that's why you said, look at the guy over there, just the rob the place and then get out? CARSON: Exactly.

BLITZER: Rupert Murdoch, switching gears, tweeted this, praising you and your wife.

I will put it on the screen, clearly taking a swipe at President Obama.